Up Against It - M. J. Locke [169]
“Talk to me, Joey Spud,” he muttered, and laid his hands on the controls. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
He vaguely remembered Joey Spud talking him through the startup sequence. He visualized the old man’s hands on the controls, and followed suit, thinking: please please please work. He dashed sweat out of his eyes, activated the control panel with shaking hands. Hurry the fuck up! Stupid lag. It found his waveface and pinged him. He entered the security permissions.
—Install PlanetEater 10.5? it asked. He selected Yes. —Password? He punched in Joey Spud’s old code, an esoteric miner’s joke: 197AquaRegia. The software downloaded and the main control face activated. It gave him access to all the functions: the crane, the catapult, the bucket. Everything.
The machine was so big that he couldn’t see everything with his own eyes; instead, his wavespace filled with a three-dimensional map of his surroundings. The machine controls fitted his body’s contours like a ghostly second body. He put in the start sequence. After three tries, the machine roared to life. The entire cab began shaking, so hard it made his teeth chatter, and knocked him up out of the seat. He pulled himself back down, hung on, and pushed it into gear. It started rolling toward the ship, a palsied leviathan. He felt like a bug sitting between an elephant’s ears.
Below, Cronus’s treads crushed three of his mining bots. Two of the tiny human figures scattered, but the third instead bounded alongside the earthmover, trying to keep his balance as he shot up at the cabin. Geoff closed his visor, in case the shooter cracked the cabin portal. But the bullets only pockmarked the portal glass—they did not penetrate.
He maneuvered the digging wheel around to the side, to move it out of the way. Alarms bellowed—Cronus teetered dangerously—and Geoff remembered, belatedly: Set the pitons, idiot! He triggered the explosive cartridges that drove Chronus’s stabilizer spikes into the rock. Ouroboros rocked—dust and debris leapt high all around—the men outside dove for cover.
Geoff chose the bucket. Through the cabin window and inwave, the massive Venus flytrap bucket opened on its towering arm. Geoff reached down and, clumsily, the bucket followed suit. He scooped up his distress-call robots, who waited on the other side of the outcropping.
Four suited figures were now firing weapons at him. More projectiles pocked the cab-window glass. Cronus shuddered and tried to buck, but the pitons held. Geoff smelled the sour tang of his own fear. He swung the arm over the catapult. It took him a moment to figure out how to move his hand so as to make the bucket tip over before it released. The bots dropped into the shallow bowl on Cronus’s top. He set trajectory and velocity, and punched execute. The bots went sailing over the horizon, transmitting their distress calls.
More bullets. The glass cracked. Geoff thought, I need a plan.
First things first. He used the bucket to scoop up the explosives and cording there. It was like picking up toothpicks with a backhoe, and he ended up taking half the cliff face, too. He dropped this mess into the catapult and sent it soaring into space. Then he reached down, and the bucket descended over the shuttle. This was a much better fit for the bucket scoop: he picked it up as easily as a grown man picks up a toy, and lifted it high. As he did so, two suited men fell out of the cargo hold. Geoff caught a look at the smaller man’s surprised face as he sank slowly groundward. The larger man clutched a big box and tried to pry it open. Not one, but two, corpses fell limply out, tumbling.
Geoff batted the bodies aside and made a fist: the bucket closed on the ship, and the ship’s hull buckled. The shock of the compression carried through the earthmover’s frame. Geoff