Звезда Пандоры

“Full record, all senses,” he told his e-butler. He started running to the end of the long building. As he rounded the corner he got a view out over a wide section of the marshaling yard. First impression was that a lengthy train of covered wagons parked behind the cargo handling sheds was breaking apart. Two of the wagons were already reduced to scraps of junk. As he watched, a third burst open. Huge dark metal shapes were rising out of the debris on vivid columns of violet flame. They looked like armored rectangular dinosaurs, with blunt wedge-shaped heads. Thick cannon barrels jutted out from where their eyes should have been, while smaller guns protruded from the front of the head, like lethal mandibles. Three stumpy legs were folded back against each side of their flanks as they went airborne. The air shimmered around them as force fields came on.

Lennie didn’t dare blink. He kept his eyes wide, holding them steady, absorbing the glorious sight. His e-butler was sending out a multitude of pings, searching out a cybersphere node clear of contamination.

“Let us in!” Lennie screamed at the collapsing cybersphere. “I command you in Allah’s name, for fuck’s sake. Let us in!”

Then the kaos contamination suddenly vanished, emptying out of the cybersphere like water draining down a pipe. Everything was on-line, and Lennie’s images were shooting into his office array back on Kabul.

“The SI has cleaned the local network,” his e-butler told him; there might have been a small note of awe in the program construct’s artificial voice. Lennie didn’t care if it was the glorious Prophet Himself who’d returned to work the electronic miracle. It was him who was channeling the images, and the sound, and the terror out across the Commonwealth—he: Lennie Al Husan. This was his show.

The three horrific machines swung around in unison; their exhaust jets vectored horizontal and they accelerated away over the station’s wilderness yard. “They’re Alamo Avengers,” Lennie shouted into the howl of the rockets, praying his audience would be able to hear. “You’re seeing real-live Alamo Avengers in action.” He just managed to fight down the impulse to cheer them on.

The two guards left sitting in the gatehouse were just starting to wonder where Rob had got to when their standard cybersphere connections went down. They weren’t unduly concerned, they still had their secure links to the sensors and perimeter systems. Two alerts came in on the line from the security command center. Before they even looked at them properly, an explosion behind them sent a fireball roiling up into the sky from the far side of the complex. Red circles were springing up all across their security status display.

“God, that was a generator,” one managed to say as flames billowed up after the expanding fireball. “Looks like the whole fuel storage section went up with it.”

Three floors of windows in one of the towers erupted, a million spinning splinters of glass surfing out on huge gouts of flame.

“Security command center not responding,” the gatehouse array reported. “You now have autonomous control of perimeter security.”

“Seal it!” the senior guard shouted. He loaded his pattern code into the gatehouse array, watching the protective systems come to life. The guardbots halted where they were; hatches opened down the sides of their bodywork, and weapons deployed, locking into ready positions. More reassuringly, the force field generators came on; triplicated and self-powered, they erected a huge dome-shape shield over the entire complex. Air molecules trapped inside the bonding effect sparkled as they absorbed the energy input, aligning themselves into a rigid lattice.

A further two explosions went off inside the complex. The senior guard tried to work out what was being destroyed. His status display was almost devoid of information.

“What do we do?” his partner demanded.

“Just sit tight. We can’t turn off the force field, we don’t have that authority. We’re safe in here.”

“No we’re bloody not.” The guard pointed frantically at the huge flames and black smoke rising over the complex’s buildings. “We’re locked in with a bunch of goddamn terrorists.”

“Don’t panic. They just caught us by surprise. The whole place is going to seal up tighter than a lagoon onna’s ass now. Look.” He pointed at one of the towers. Its outer surface was cloaked in the telltale sparkle of a force field. “Isolate them and bring in the big guns to mop them up: standard procedure.” He turned around to see his partner was completely ignoring the complex, instead he was squinting out across the barren expanse of the station yard.

“What the hell are those?”

It had gone down right to the wire, but the maintenance tech had interfaced all his arrays into the gateway control room network. The RI had been locked out.

“They can’t alter the gateway coordinate,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve isolated the command network, so the system’s fallen back on its internal arrays. Everything will just keep ticking over nicely.”