She paid close attention to the network situation. As long as Slicer had control of the station infrastructure, she could never hide. Every door, wall console, and trash bin were equipped with cyblocs and attached to the network, potentially reporting her pa.s.sage to the spinner.

She saw Slicer had followed her again, if the previous pattern could be trusted. She couldn"t decide if she should move faster or keep an even pace. It depended on how the spinner was tracking her, and what it was doing.

She increased her pace a bit. Speeding up made her feel as if she were caving to a sense of panic, but quickening her pace made sense. If the spinner knew her exact location, then it would be able to outrun her easily. Otherwise, speeding up would make her harder to find. If the spinner were simply toying with her then it would be pleased to see her fleeing.

That might make Slicer take longer to move in, might make it want to extend its fun for a while longer.

She walked into a hangar below the s.p.a.ceport where her ship waited. She noticed a security robot ahead of her moving at a tangent to her course. She could handle this kind of danger in her sleep. The machine represented such a tiny threat to her well-being compared to the alien that shadowed her.

She closed to within ten meters of Silvado. Accessing her ship through her link, she set in a return course and set the ship to request a flight plan for disembarkment. She logged herself as a pa.s.senger and reported her imminent departure to the station administration program.

As soon as she lost sight of the security robot, she turned her civilian link off.

Her Cascavel had to cover for her now. She didn"t know how long it could masquerade as a legitimate person. It had to interact with the environment, or else public cameras and services would flag her on security scans. Aldriena knew if a person showed up on a camera and that person didn"t have a link signature, security would be notified.

She left the hangar quickly. She had to find somewhere to hide-somewhere she could go and quit moving so that her fake ident.i.ty wouldn"t be noticed. She selected the nearest section of living quarters and headed in. Either she"d be able to hide there, or she"d be trapped.

The interior corridor of the living area was much quieter than the outer walkways. A tan carpet covered the floor. No one else walked the hallway. She stopped in front of the nearest door to think. Should she attempt to invite herself into a random room? Make small talk with the inhabitants? And if the main occupant was gone, what then? Overcome the servant and sit tight?

Aldriena noticed some unusual network traffic. This time it wasn"t an activity spike, but transmissions outside the parameters of the universal link protocols. It came from a room on her section and level. Aldriena wasn"t sure what kinds of things might use such packets, other than illegal links like her Cascavel.

Maybe another person with a special link was in the room. Another spy like herself? Or it could be a spinner, she thought. But she didn"t have time to think it over.

She zeroed in on the source of the unusual network packets. Three personal quarters sat on the corridor where she stood. Aldriena brought up a map of the section. She gave the three suites better than an eighty percent chance of being the source.

The door wasn"t particularly secure. Her Cascavel was able to get it to open for her by masquerading as an automated delivery service. She stepped in quietly and removed her helmet. She much preferred being able to hear properly when sneaking around.

An Asian man met her at the entrance. He had short-cropped hair and dark skin.

"Ni zuo shenme?" he asked. What are you doing?

Aldriena smiled. She stepped forward.

"Ni zuo shenme?" he repeated in his own voice. Aldriena slammed her elbow into his chin. The man dropped to his knees. She gave him another knockout pill with her knee, driving it into his chin with her hands wrapped behind his head.

She took C4B out and loaded a glue round. She pointed the weapon enjoying the moment.

Snap!

A golf-ball sized wad of foamed glue attached itself to his shoulder. Tendrils slid out to attach to the wall, his face, and his chest, like a fast motion movie of a plant growing. The glue didn"t cover his mouth or nose.

Aldriena smiled. This time I"ll be in personal quarters like a good little girl when the UNSF breaches the station. And I have my own member of the Chinese bloc to chat with while I wait.

Sixteen.

A new set of hardware, a new AI core, and a mission information module that had been designated "Meridian" stepped through the breach first. Lieutenant Hoffman handled the latest Meridian. They"d almost changed the name as well, giving it one of the new names set aside for the latest replacements, but Hoffman had complained: the machine hadn"t fallen in battle, and so it was still Meridian. Only the name remained of the original a.s.sAIL that had gone in first at Thermopylae.

Bren had seen to that. He"d feared some kind of AI Easter egg hidden somewhere, in a hardware buffer or a file or ... anything. Anything to explain why Meridian had been so much stronger and faster than the others were, or how it had survived all the missions where the others had failed.

The horrible part was Bren knew they might need the original Meridian more than ever. But he had no choice. He had to take precautions to make sure he didn"t unleash a rogue AI that could mean the extinction of humanity.

The rest of the Synchronicity a.s.sAIL team strode into the station: Oblivion, Pandora, Panzer, Patton, Plato, and Pythagoras. Bren could see the inside of a repair hangar through the cameras. The Vigilant lay attached directly below where it had sat for the twenty minutes it took to drill a hole into the station.

The cores were fairly mature again. They"d come straight at Synchronicity without any attempt at hiding the UNSF fleet. There wasn"t time with a Chinese task force headed their way under heavy acceleration. In fact, the approach was so direct that Synchronicity might have mistaken the fleet for decoy signals.

The machines fanned out into a semicircle scanning for Reds. Their intelligence on Synchronicity indicated they faced not one, but two Reds, and this time the station would see them coming. What would the two aliens come up with to stop them? Or had they fled into their ship and gone back to ... wherever they came from?

The heavy a.s.sAIL units strode farther from the breach point taking up positions in the hangar. Bren took a deep breath and resigned himself to the familiar agony of waiting and watching. Smaller robots and a handful of marine scouts entered the station searching for danger.

"The hangar is ours. No sign of resistance. Marines, prepare to enter the breach," came Henley"s orders.

"Armed humans are approaching," said the synthetic voice of Meridian. Bren noted it had been transmitted across the marine"s channel as well as the a.s.sAIL team"s channel.

"Get in there!" Henley ordered. "Get in there behind those machines!"

Bren couldn"t see the marines coming in from Meridian"s camera. His view was focused on an airlock next to a metal walkway on the level above. The portal opened.

Boom. Brrrooom.

Bren heard the a.s.sAIL guns start to fire. A form in black gear staggered through the opening and then fell flat. Blood splattered at the far wall. After a couple of seconds, the reports of small arms fire started up.

"Fractures in Pythagoras," Bren heard in the Guts.

No one else spoke up.

"Pythagoras is being hit from two angles," said the handler. "Both of the Reds must be in there somewhere!"

Bren tensed and waited. There was nothing he could do to help. He watched Meridian swing its head about rapidly, firing at targets that Bren couldn"t catch in the view. He couldn"t make out any Reds, either.

Bren heard an explosion and then smoke and debris filled the view. Then there was another explosion. He nervously watched the a.s.sAIL data. None of the machines went down. Bren realized he had stopped breathing, so he drew in a deep breath.

The shooting continued for long seconds while smoke billowed by the camera. It looked as though Meridian moved rapidly. Bren confirmed the movement through the tactical pane of his PV. Navigating through the smoke was easy for the AI core.

"Pythagoras is down," someone announced aloud in the Guts.

The smoke had cleared a little. Bren saw a walkway littered with the bulky p.r.o.ne forms of the attackers. Meridian arrived at the airlock Bren had seen earlier and looked through it.

More dead bodies. Or dying ones, at least. The corridor was blackened. Bren caught sight of a silvery bug rolling on the floor. A grenade. The grenade rolled away ahead of Meridian, so Bren decided it must belong to the marines.

"We were lucky. The locals weren"t firing their weapons very well," Henley noted. "But we ate two fragmentation grenades. We have men down."

Fragmentation grenades, Bren echoed in his mind. The UNSF seldom used weapons like that. He"d feared such tactics. The spinners had little interest in limiting themselves to humane weapons. Even the marine"s rifles could accommodate a wide range of nonlethal rounds.

"The operative crippled some of their firearms," Meridian transmitted.

"Niachi? Really?" Bren found himself saying. "Is she nearby?"

"Her current whereabouts are unknown."

Bren took stock of their losses. Pythagoras sat still at the edge of the hangar. The machine had crumpled forward onto its folded front legs. Smoke and sparks flickered out from three small holes in its chest. Six marines shared its fate, bleeding out on the hangar floor. Bren forced himself to look at the mess of blood that ill.u.s.trated the vulnerability of human bodies. Medics were working on clearing away the first group of dead and wounded.

Bren checked the mission chronometer in his tactical pane. They"d been in Synchronicity for less than an hour.

"How did the Reds get in there? I didn"t see one come in," Bren said. He began searching through the visual feeds of other machines trying to spot one.

"There are holes in the hangar that weren"t there when we first got in," Henley said. "I think they may have used the molecule cutters to create murder holes in the walls."

Bren hadn"t heard of a murder hole before, but the name spoke for itself. The Reds must have cut openings in the metal wall so they could attack from cover.

Bren watched a fresh team of engineers open a simple plastic crate on the bloodied deck. It held dozens of round metal spheres. More grenades, Bren thought. They dumped the weapons onto the floor. Bren guessed there were a hundred or more of the devices.

"This is a surprise some of our guys whipped up since we"re low on mines," Henley said. "We"ve targeted these grenades for a spinner. All we have to do is give the order and those things will roll out looking for a spinner to glue down. We have five incendiary grenades, as well."

"Why didn"t we do that when we arrived?" Bren asked.

"Those things can"t go far, and we didn"t know if the Reds would be waiting. They"re mostly payload, without much battery power. I think they could travel maybe three or four hundred meters to a target. We"ll use them to secure the bridgehead."

"Unless they get hacked by a Red and reprogrammed," Bren said.

"All our weapons are hackable, but it would be hard. They each have their own set of one-use codes."

"I hope so. These creatures are advanced. We have to store and deploy those codes without tampering."

Bren browsed through data in his PV for fifteen minutes while the marines tried to clean up the bay and secure it. He thought the job could easily take half an hour, but no one wanted to wait around and give the enemy any longer to figure out how to counter the UNSF incursion.

He found a camera feed from a small reconnaissance robot that Henley sent out toward the main concourse. The concourse served as a transportation artery that ran the circ.u.mference of Synchronicity. The tracked vehicle stood lower than an average human, with several visual sensors and a pair of thin graspers that each had four fingers and a thumb. Bren was struck by how humanlike the movements of its hands were as it manually actuated a door handle. The robot pushed the door open and went inside.

The camera view peeked around a corner. Bren got the feeling that the robot could look around corners without moving its body into the open. It crept through an empty machine shop and a locker room before coming to an exit out onto the main station concourse. Bren hadn"t seen any people or machines. He hoped all the people had gone to hide in their quarters as the UNSF broadcast order had instructed, but he doubted they all had, since they seemed controlled by the Reds.

Bren watched as the scout rolled out onto an open walkway in front of a Pho restaurant. All the food must be takeout under the new station rules, he thought. The machine panned its camera to peer inside, but no one was visible through the front windows.

The scout rounded the edge of the store entrance and looked farther down the concourse. Bren spotted a round robot with two short arms bearing weapons. Bren recognized it as a Circle Four. The security machine rolled closer on wide treads, traveling straight down the main walkway. He didn"t have a good enough view to tell exactly how it was armed.

The feed went dead. Apparently, the Circle Four didn"t take kindly to visitors.

"Stop! We"re not ready to move on!" Henley transmitted. Bren shifted his attention back to the a.s.sAILs. He saw from a tactical viewpane in his PV that the a.s.sault machines headed toward the concourse.

"We should engage now before the enemy reaches full concentration on the concourse," Meridian said. Bren didn"t object. It made sense that the Reds had organized a response using the concourse, since it was the quickest way around the circ.u.mference of the station.

"If you have information about the enemy disposition, then why haven"t you shared it with us?" Henley demanded.

"The situation is fluid and complex," Meridian said on the marine and a.s.sAIL channels. The machines were still moving as it talked. "We have data that would appear fragmented and unrelated under a shallow a.n.a.lysis, but we can act with some degree of confidence. I suggest you remain here and prepare your defenses in case we have to fall back."

Bren sighed. The a.s.sAILs were less than a minute from the concourse.

"I guess we"ve lost control of them," Henley said to Bren on a private channel.

"Probably not. At least not yet. But I didn"t bother trying to stop them because if I did, it would cost us ... I think it would solidify an impression of human weakness to the AI cores. Let"s let them do their job. We may yet be able to issue a couple of orders if it becomes critical."

"Have you ever thought about it the other way? If we keep them on a tight leash, they may think we know better. Now I complained to them, they explained themselves, and we accepted it. Showing them that we aren"t on top of what"s going on."

"I think the tight leash would work a short time," Bren said. "But then it could get worse fast when we forced them into a snafu. Then they"d see how bad we are at warfare without them."

Bren watched Meridian approach the concourse entrance. A couple of humans in gear sniped at the machines from the opening. They scrambled when a glue grenade shot out past them onto the rubberized roadway beyond.

Bren lost sight of the people. The a.s.sAILs charged out into the concourse and immediately started to fire.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Bren couldn"t see the targets from the camera feed. A tactical view of the machines indicated that three machines were facing in each direction and firing.

"Circle Fours coming in from both sides," Bren noted.

Boom. Boom.

Meridian fired and dodged behind a support column. A person in gear darted out from the other side of the column and shot Meridian with a projectile rifle then rolled back behind the cover. Meridian responded by launching another glue grenade, banking it off the wall so it went hurtling around the column.

"Plato is heating up," said its handler. "Some of its optics went out."

Bren accessed the base schematics looking for the nearest laser emplacement. Sure enough, there was a security hardpoint sixty meters down the concourse equipped with a heavy laser.

The tactical showed Plato had retreated into a travel store to remove itself from the line of fire. Bren a.s.sumed that one of the a.s.sAILs would knock out the laser any moment with their 12mm cannons.

"Fractures," two handlers said in unison.

"Patton," one continued.

"Pandora," said the other.

Bren heard the kah-wump of glue grenades going off. Glue tendrils whipped past the view on Meridian, but he couldn"t tell who tried to glue whom.

Boom. Boom.

Bren sighed and watched the tactical. He"d lost track of the sniper that had engaged Meridian, but he a.s.sumed the person wasn"t a major threat to the a.s.sAILs.

Nothing I can do but watch, he told himself again.

"Pandora"s down," a handler said. "I"m putting in for a transfer."

Bren wasn"t too concerned. The handlers could screw up and cause trouble for a mission, but trouble in a mission didn"t mean they had screwed up. Still, the handlers were serious about their jobs and often took it personally when their machine was killed. Much as Hoffman exhibited the opposite reaction-pride-when Meridian survived time and again.

Boom.