Bitterly, Bruno makes an executive decision, and allows the robots to carry the three Dolceti away. He must concentrate on clearing that doorway, and holding it, or all these people will be lost, and their world along with them.
“Mathy!” someone shouts in tones of pained helplessness. And then, on the heels of that, “Stupid sow. Keep your feet!”
But the flood has taken them; they’re out of sight now, out of mind, and Bruno is using every milligram of martial skill he can summon, to drive Bordi and the four remaining Dolceti forward through the impervium swarm, which gleams and flickers in the light of sunset.
Another Dolceti goes down and is swept away. Then another, and then two, and finally it’s just Bruno and Bordi in the doorway, with shattered robots piling higher and higher around them, threatening to block the way. Bruno shouts, “Go! Quickly!”
The diamond crown is knocked off his head and spins away into the heaving robot stream. As Bordi falls back into the tower room, fighting his way through the robots still inside, Bruno is forced to acknowledge that he has never, in fact, faced a battle as dire as this. The attackers are not well armed or armored, but in such numbers there’s little he can do to stop them. Soon enough his suit charge will be zero again, and like so many voracious termites they’ll be carrying him away.
He’s out of time, and he can’t spare a glance to see whether Bordi has gotten through safely or not. To the walls he shouts, “Fax! Royal Lockout! Pass no objects save myself! Walls! Release all fields and power down permanently!”
“Acknowledged,” the fax replies calmly, unaware of His Majesty’s peril and possibly incapable of understanding it. “Immediately, Sire,” say the walls, which go dark, reverting to blank wellstone. And then the sides of the sand pit slide inward, carrying live robots down with them and burying several. Bruno retreats inside.
And that’s that: no one but he will ever use this place again, for travel or medicine or resupply. The Royal Lockouts and Overrides were built into the Queendom’s wellstone at the deepest levels. Subverting them had always been possible, but insanely difficult. The sands will reclaim this place in minutes or hours, and since Bruno does not expect to pass this way again, the sands and the lockouts will remain. One more treasure of Lune consumed for the sake of this stupid war.
Along with the two human patterns still stored within it. He thinks of them suddenly: the final victims of the Queendom’s demise. Should he wake them amid all this clamor? To die afresh, without the least understanding of why? No. Better to let them sleep. Better to worry about his own skin for a little while longer!
The trick, now, is to battle the rushing tide of sand and robots, to protect his front and his back without actually whacking the fax machine with his blitterstaff. Because that would kill it even for him.
There’s a bad moment when the robots team up to high-low him again, tumbling him off his feet. He feels strong hands on his ankles, preparing to lift him, to carry him away! But with the wellcloth of his suit still active, he manages to call up a slippery exterior and wriggle free, leaping and sliding for the fax plate ahead of him. His momentum is sufficient—just barely!—to carry him through.
The plate crackles blue for a moment and then falls forever silent.
Chapter Twenty-Four
in which the fortress of a traveler is breached
Once through the gate, the first thing Bruno notices is absolute silence. There’s no battle on this side, no scream and crash. The second thing is the trio of bright yellow Dolceti crowded in front of him: Bordi and Natan and Zuq. And since he’s still slipping along the floor on his hands and knees, the third thing he notices is the tussle of bodies falling all around him like tenpins, their blindsight reflexes lacking the time or the space to operate.
“Oof,” says Zuq.
But the Olders, crowded just ahead in this narrow passageway, are still on their feet, poised at a corner and looking out.
“They don’t see us,” Sidney Lyman is murmuring.
“They see,” Radmer corrects. “They don’t react.”
“Excuse me,” Bruno says to the Dolceti. He wipes away the suit’s slippery skin program and staggers to his feet, pleased to find himself still alive. Successfully teleported, yes, for the first time in millennia, and under circumstances far from ideal. He steps over the men while they’re attempting, in the unfamiliar bulk of their armor, to rise. At the corner he taps Nick and Brian out of his way, and has a look.
The room is full of robots.
Specifically, it’s full of unarmed robots, engaged in the task of filling buckets with sand. And filling smaller vials with measured amounts of other substances: black carbon and white, shiny metals, poured from the sort of long-beaked glass orbs. Finally, the vials are emptied into the buckets, which are placed on a slow-moving conveyor. The light is a sickly yellow-green, from phosphor-coated electric bulbs set in sconces along the walls. Like many on this world, the walls are interlocking blocks of cut stone. The whole scene looks like nothing so much as an ancient alchemist’s workshop.
Presently, a pair of robots fetch one heavy bucket each, and begin walking toward the fax machine. With his staff at the ready, Bruno sidles out of the way, while Radmer and Sidney press themselves against the wall, turning their suits to full inviz. But indeed, these robots take no notice of their workshop’s invaders, simply crowding around them on their way to the fax.
Then the buckets are hurled right through the print plate, which crackles and sputters in accepting them. From the ozone smell alone, Bruno can tell this machine is on its last legs, relying heavily on error correction to smooth over its many burned-out faxels. Under other circumstances, this might be disturbing; how much damage and drift did they all incur, in printing themselves through that used-up old plate? But under these circumstances, it hardly matters.
Presently, the plate crackles again and a shiny new robot emerges, carrying perfect copies of the hurled-in buckets. It isn’t gleaming mirror-bright, though, or anyway most of it isn’t. Instead, its impervium hull is surrounded—except on the joints and sensory pits—by an outer layer of glassy ceramic painted in green and brown camouflage spots. Once free of the fax, it steps around the Dolceti and follows its shinier brothers out into the workshop, where another robot hands it a rifle—not a sword but a rifle, with a bayonet fixed at the business end. And then it walks out through an open archway and vanishes down a corridor.
“Well,” says Radmer, “here, as promised, is the source of all our trouble. They seem to be printing one every three minutes. That’s what, twenty-four hundred robots per Luner day? More than enough for the task at hand.”
“It’s not the source,” says Bordi, eyeing the print plate with superstitious awe. “This is just a clever tool. The source is the Glimmer King himself.”
“True,” Radmer admits.
To which Bruno says, “We shall deal with him soon enough.”
He pulls a wellstone sketchplate—a proper one this time!—out of his pocket, and begins programming sensor algorithms. He can’t simply interrogate the walls, for the walls are merely stone. But he can analyze the sound waves reflecting and refracting through the building’s corridors. He can measure cosmic radiation and its secondary cascades to gauge the amount and type of material between floor and sky. He can measure heat and vibration, light and magnetic fields. He can even, given enough time, image the neutrino absorption of the structure and build a literal image in three dimensions. That process could take months, though, so he leaves it running in the background and forgets about it. Even without it, a crude sketch of the building begins, slowly, to emerge.