Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (15 page)

That told me a
lot, so I slipped back into my hiding place (Beside and behind a
large bookcase and trophy case affair) and suppressed all
scannables.

Since that one
kept coming it was programmed, and was somewhat more sophisticated
than the standard servo types around. That could mean trouble, as
it could react without waiting for other instructions. It would be
directed to protect the brain at all costs, and might even be on a
separate antenna system or even be direct. It was either going to
move into a position to protect the brain or it was going to find
me. If it searched for me it was being directed by some method I
wasn't detecting, but if it went past to protect the brain there
was only simple-form programming with ability to operate on various
paths.

It went right
past me and down the stairs. I went into the room and looked down
the stairwell to see the robot righting the damaged servo.

So I was wrong.
It was getting to be a habit. I still had no idea whether it was
fully independent with directives or whether it was fully
programmed.

The weight of
the repair and defense servo was such that it would take something
besides that robot to sit it back upright and it would need
repairs. Several of the repair arms were badly damaged. It had
fallen "face" first and had landed with the arms extended to break
the fall, which they did. The damage was a cost of not having the
whole thing ruined.

I had a bit of
time, so I went out to the standing robots. I found the only way
they were particularly vulnerable was a direct laser shot into the
ear, eye, or mouth orifices. They had been armored since my little
encounter with them on the road, so I was wrong there, too. The
brain detected that I used a laser.

It must really
be wondering who and what I was or whether the Tlesson people had
put someone here to protect against such an eventuality as its
appearance on the scene. It was perfectly well aware the Tlesson
worlds were part of the empire, so it must be ... scared?

Wary, at
least.

I hated to do
it, but I destroyed those robots.

I went to the
main gate and looked out to see several people hauling what must
have been a couple of other robots to the cliff edge. They simply
dumped them over and watched as the power packs split and exploded.
The woman from earlier came over carrying a torch and stared at
me.

"If'n yer a
golem, yer goin' over with tha rest of 'em!" she said in my
face.

"I'm Lith! You
know me. I stopped the starker from telling the golems what to do,
so they stopped where they was."

"Yer looks like
Lith. Yer could be a copy. A golem.

"We kin find
out!"

She yelled and
four men came running with heavy iron spikes.

"See if'n 'e
bleeds!" she ordered.

"Hey!" I
yelled. "You old fool! Ain't nobody gonna stick Lith ta see if I
bleed! Ain't no ten uh ya man enough! No sir! Ain't no TWENTY uh
you man enough!

"C'mon! Let's
jist see if ya got tha courage ta make old Liht bleed!"

"Ut's really
Lith!" the woman said. "No golem'ud say that!

"What yer been
doin' in thar, Lith? Tha golems all done went crazy'n worse! Did
yer git tha starker?"

"No. He's down
in some underbasement er cave er somethin'. There's some hellacious
big golems in there what have the lightnin' things and more. I
think I kin keep 'em in tha house fer awhile. Git the people into
Stormlee and find all the other golems that're down there'n git rid
of 'em! I'll handle things here at Overlook House. I got to find
some way to git to tha starker down there. If I kin git tha
starker, tha golems will all shut down permanent-like. No golem can
do anythin' without the starker orders it direct ta do!"

The whole bunch
of them soon headed for Stormlee and I headed back to the house.
The robot should have the servo upright about now – or maybe I
should slow down to think before I ended up letting that thing
out-clever me, which could prove fatal as all hell.

That's not much
of a way to win any battles with the thing!

Little
Trickeries

Back in the
house I made my way to the antenna room, then into the staircase
room. The servo was on its treads and the robot was working on one
of the flex arms. There was a new laser focus on an arm and a box
of spare pieces to one side. I could sense the servo's scanners
making sweeps across the stairs and into the area where I was
looking over the rail, so I stepped back before they reached me. I
wouldn't leave a heat trail, so it wouldn't detect I was there.

If that thing
was repaired I would have a hard time getting into the passage
behind it, where the brain was. I couldn't very well attack the
servo's armor directly with anything I had and certainly couldn't
hope to fight off both the robot and the servo at one time. I
couldn't hope to get past the armor on the thing with what I was
carrying, and it wasn't time yet for TR to send a floater with
something heavy enough to handle the job.

I still wanted
to make the brain leave this populated area somehow. I was far too
limited in the ways I could act or the things I could use.

I withdrew back
into the room where I used my interiors to locate all the power
trails below me. I could get feeble readings on the radio ranges,
so I knew the brain was making antennae on its own to reach the
other robots. I could only hope the people got all of the servos in
Stormlee, but doubted they could find them all. A select few would
have programs like the robot working down there right now and would
stay out of sight.

I felt a radio
transmission at some distance to the west. It wasn't enough to
reach into Stormlee yet, but.... I ran for the door and out onto
the cliff face, where I used sensors to find the wire slowly
feeding out of a small cleft in the rock face a few meters below
me. The brain was making a stiff tube that was still flexible
enough to snake through a crack in the cliff face and was feeding a
wire through it to use as an antenna.

I climbed down
to mark the crack, then pushed the end of the wire into another
crack slightly farther down the cliff. It would never work as an
antenna in there and it saved cutting it, which would show the
brain it had been found.

A sensor probe
of the hole it was feeding into showed it could be extended for
about twelve meters before it would come to the end of the hole,
then would back-coil as many meters before it would begin to fall
outside again.

I made a small
plastic shield to stop the wire from falling out at all. It would
simply suddenly stop moving. At the rate it was going when I
checked it I had almost four hours before the brain would have to
decide it wasn't working. I could hope it would then begin trying
something new, but maybe the time would be enough.

I still had the
problem of isolating that robot and servo from each other so I
could attack them one at the time. That wasn't going to be any easy
task.

If the
programmed robots that hadn't been detected yet were still in the
area and had a timer circuit they may all come back to the brain
after "X" number of hours. I could be trapped if there were very
many or if they were armed with anything more than lasers.

Back inside the
house I thought to check the Noobish robot and her father and
servant, but they hadn't been reconnected and were totally
uncharged. They wouldn't be a problem. I could be certain they
wouldn't ever be charged.

I wasn't sure
whether or not there was some detector antenna somewhere, so didn't
want to risk calling the floater to see if it had returned as
instructed yet, but it had plenty of time, so I was sure it was out
there if needed. It would almost certainly be needed, sooner or
later.

Looking over
the rail again I saw the robot wasn't with the servo at the moment
and that there were some very heavy energy carriers in cartons to
one side, so there would almost certainly be some added heavy
weapons. That was proof enough to me that the brain knew it was
fighting a much stronger force than the natives it found on this
planet.

Then I had
nothing to lose if I did something serious to the servo!

I studied the
machine, moving back each time the scanners came around. There was
a large panel to the staircase side hanging open, but I couldn't
get a direct shot into it from where I was, so I waited, dodged
down the stairs a few steps, and fired my pencil laser into the
opening. It started a fire inside of the servo and the scanners
stopped, so I used half a minute to do some fine carving on three
steps of the stairway, then dodged back out the door above.

I waited until
I heard the robot's hiss as it fought the fire in the servo and
went to the rail, where I fired at its head with the laser. It was,
of course, shielded. I couldn't hope to hit an ear or eye that fast
at that distance, but didn't need to.

The robot
snapped a shot back at me as I dodged for the door and raced for
the stairs. I lay on the floor and fired at its head as it started
up, not to do damage, which was most unlikely, but to distract its
sensors.

The heavy
machine hit those three partially severed steps and pitched
sideways and outward. It caught the rail with both hands, reacting
much faster than I thought it could. I lasered the rail and it
fell, landing on the left leg. The leg collapsed and was snapped
backward with a loud ringing sound, and the robot's head was
pitched into the side of the servo with another loud bonging sound.
A drive cable snapped (or something such) and the head was freely
swinging to the side.

The servo was
still burning inside, so I was sure the damage there wouldn't be
easily repaired. The robot had a useless leg and its sensors were
mostly in the head, which it couldn't turn at will.

It wasn't
enough and I damned well knew it, but I'd bought some time and
planned to use it well.

I raced into
the house, got the strongest of the antennae wires, and ran back to
the stairs and down to the three missing steps, dropped the cables,
tied them around the rail and supports, and slid to the floor.

The robot was
going down a passage on two hands and one foot, head and sensors
directed directly at the floor.

I almost made
the fatal mistake of running into that passage, but thought about
that clever brain and backed off to fire at it from a distance,
then to fall and roll to one side as the flash directly back along
the passage roared out.

I was
learning.

I went to the
servo, checked it over carefully, removed two other panels,
destroyed the user circuits and motors and drained the powerpacks,
then slagged the brain area and the radio inputs and modem
inputs.

I was now a lot
closer to being able to control the situation. The servo was
permanently out of the picture.

What I must now
find was some way to reach that brain, and I didn't doubt for one
second that entering that access passage was destruction. There was
no possibility I could shield the types of weapons the brain could
use there.

I sat on a
lower step of the staircase to think, then went back up my cables
and severed the staircase at the top to drop the whole thing into
the basement area. I could isolate the brain from its servos and
could keep the really heavy armaments from getting up to attack the
people or something equally ridiculous but certainly possible from
what we knew about the brain's former actions. It would do anything
it could to divide our forces – so it was a good thing it couldn't
know I was the whole enemy force at the moment.

I knew the
floater would be watching with all sensors and TR would be
monitoring it, so I could communicate by a very indirect method:
static pulses that would be nondirectional. I had used the old
Morse code Z taught us several times, so TR would know what was
happening.

Then I thought
of a much better way and went outside the house and to the cliff
edge. I used the static charges very sparingly to call the floater
to me and took a small viewing laser and a small calculator off of
it and sent it back up.

I hooked the
laser to the calculator and used a straight two number code for the
information to TR and flashed it as a direct beam through the
calculator with a lead from under my arm. There would be no answer,
but I could now spend a few minutes to bring TR up to the moment on
what I knew. I wanted a way to get to the brain, but TR couldn't
help there unless the floater came up with something.

It would then
send the floater to directly input the data to me.

I sat at the
cliff top to think. It had been almost half an hour since I came
out when I heard a growing tumult from the road to Stormlee, so I
went around to the front of the house.

There were
eight robots coming up the road with a large crowd behind them
throwing rocks and anything else they could get their hands on.
They were staying a certain distance from the robots, which
occasionally turned to fire a laser at them.

The people had
polished metal plates and shields they would quickly swing up in
front of themselves to reflect the worst of the beams. They had
found the distance where they would be safe behind such a barrier,
and were harassing the robots every step. The robots were sending
radio pulses at the house constantly, but were receiving no
answers.

It had been
about three hours since I'd severed the antennae leads, so this was
the result of internal timers. The robots were returning to the
house to protect the brain and wouldn't have a very complicated
program. They would have no free will.

I suddenly
wished those stairs were still in place. I could have waited until
they were all down there, then cut the stairs to trap them. Now I
would have to find a way to get them one at the time.