Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [138]
She yelled into the comm pickup, wanting nothing more than to be there herself to take charge. “Then go through your mining equipment, find something that’ll help you defend yourselves. Get some people suited up and launch them to orbit in cargo pods if you don’t have any available ships.”
“Without life support and no way to get back down?” Purcell said beside her. “Speaker, they’ll die in hours!”
“It could be sooner than that if they don’t do something.” She frowned. “Isn’t there some way they could rig the power reactor to start a runaway supercriticality? Blow it up in the face of the oncoming robots?”
The engineer’s eyes went so wide he looked like a child who had just awakened from a nightmare. “Sure, but the meltdown and flash would wipe out the whole base! What good would that do? We’d all die.”
Cesca met his gaze, and her voice was as hard and cold as one of Jonah 12’s ice outcroppings. “At least it would stop the robots from leaving this planetoid.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, then swallowed hard again. “Yeah, it would do that.”
“They’re already coming!” the woman at the base shouted, turning away from the imager. “Five robots just appeared behind the reactor. I see ten—no, at least twenty-five coming over the crater rim. It’s an invasion!”
“And we’re stranded here,” Cesca whispered in dismay.
“At least we’re safe...”
“Forget that!” She was far more concerned about the Roamers trapped in the base domes, completely vulnerable to the Klikiss robots. She didn’t have visions of being a foolish hero charging in for a dramatic yet pointless end, but as Speaker she needed to be available for her people, to help them dredge up impossible solutions. “Isn’t there any way to get moving?”
“If I could figure out how to do that, we’d be long gone from here already.”
“Mayday!” the base comm operator shouted to anyone listening. “Emergency! We need assistance here.”
“Tell us what’s going on!” Cesca shouted.
The harried woman on the screen touched her headphone and received a scatter of responses. “All right. Two people are going to run excavation equipment into the robots, drive them like military tanks. One man is using the canister launchers, but they’re aimed toward orbit. I don’t think he can deflect the trajectory enough to operate them as cannons. We—” Her words cut off as the loud krrump of a decompression explosion rang through the domes.
Now a flurry of other transmissions, all on the same frequency, came in, overlapping in a garbled chaos. Purcell used the grazer’s dying comm system to cycle through images that showed black robots outside the base domes, pushing themselves against the reinforced structures, dismantling power conduits and life-support generators. Six robots knocked down a sealed equipment hut.
Two people rushed out wearing environment suits; one carried a small projectile launcher, the other nothing more than a long metal club. The launcher’s projectile exploded against an oncoming robot, knocking the machine backward; its exoskeleton was scarred, but the robot itself was not harmed. The two suited men threw themselves upon the mechanical attackers. In moments, both were slaughtered.
Cesca squeezed her eyes shut, not to hide but to focus on any possible threads of hope. She found none. Purcell moaned and began muttering a litany of names in a quiet, hollow voice. She didn’t know if the engineer had family members here on Jonah 12, but all Roamers considered themselves part of an extended clan. These were men and women beside whom he had worked, people who relied on each other, held each other’s lives in their hands.
And now they were all being slaughtered.
Inside the main dome, the comm operator had fled her post, but the unattended imagers continued transmitting. Sparks geysered from multiple explosions; smoke and steam gushed into the room. The interior lights flickered.
“They’re indestructible!” someone shouted on another band.
“Life support’s completely destroyed. No way we’ll ever get this running again.”
“They’re into the first dome! Explosive decompression