THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

DEEP BLUE

The rotunda was an extrusion of localised computing, a ganglion of the mainframe. To make room for the tallest processor stacks the rotunda thrust upward, through subfloor 18.5 - and provided an exit for the ducts of coolant carrying away excess heat.

Along the side were workstations, partially recessed into the rotunda, with curving plasglas privacy screens extruded each side. In each was an embedded screen over a convex bench that held the access peripherals. An adjustable chair rose prefabbed from the floor.

The second of these workstations was filled with blood. Blood puddled on the floor and over the desk and privacy screens and the CRT itself was smashed and streaked with blood. The blood was old, dried to blackness and flaking.

They came to a set of railings that extended halfway across the passage. Between the railings was a ramp that led down into subfloor 17.5. The cutaway made visible the memory stacks wrapped in coolant vanes that descended into this subfloor. The ramp led down to a vertically split door; each side fitted into the other like a jigsaw puzzle. The door was recessed maybe half a meter into a stack, making room for a card scanner on that adjacent wall.

The door was labelled. It had the usual decimaled designation and also a label. He set his light on it long enough to read it.

17.136
MULTIVAC BIIX
PROGRAM ROOM

The processing power of this ganglion was enormous, more than the entire output of some civilian stations that he had seen.

He was still studying this ediface of computing when the synthetic tugged on his shoulder and woke him from his communion.

There is something ahead. She said, her voice muffled and distorted by the gasmask.

He became alert immediately. He turned and brought light and gun around in a smooth motion scanning the passage ahead. The horizon of the rotunda curved away left, ten or so meters distant. Then off-white ceiling and silvered floor; unrolling between them a black featureless plain. Right was bulkhead with various doors, offices, and branching off corridors.

For a minute or so there was nothing. Even began to say something then stopped.

The first eyeless came loping out of the far corridor. It came out into the middle of the passage, it's black carapace gleaming in the light. It stayed there and turned the smooth dome of its head towards him and without opening its mouth uttered a series of high frequency clicks. That alien sound washed over him and then an echo of it returned distorted by the walls of this steel cavern.

He aimed down his needler just as two no three more eyeless loped from the same opening. As these arrived the first moved on with them.

He followed them with his aim and aimed with a meter lead in front of one and squeezed the trigger. The first needle traced out through the dark. He corrected and in quick succession fired twice more.

One of the morphs fell. It writhed on the floor making bestial shrieks. A short distance from it was its arm, a ragged mess around the elbow where it had been seperated from its body, still linked by a streamer of red mammalian blood. He panned the light left in time to see the rest of the morphs disappear behind the rotunda.

The one he had shot managed to get back to its feet. It lowered its smooth dome and clicked at him. It did not get to finish. He put a round center of mass which punched out its back in a spray of organs and bone. It dropped onto its side.

For a minute it was still. Then it's remaining arm unfurled and pushed it over onto its front and then it began to drag itself across the steel floor towards him. It left a trail of blood and some of its organs had prolapsed from the gaping hole in its back and these dragged behind it, more and more as the weight of the organs pulled on those still within its body.

He looked around for the other morphs. He could hear them, could hear the alien clicking they produced in their narrow throats, but they remained out of sight behind the rotunda.

He went to the end of the passage between rotunda and bulkhead. Here it opened up into the full complex. He looked around into a web of shadows and dark spaces then went on to the wounded morph.

He stopped a few meters from it and studied it. Now and then it lifted itself up made a plaintive cry to its fellows. Then it would haul itself another few centimetres and its organs would unravel from its body by the same distance. Organs that looked all too normal. Mammalian organs and mammalian blood.

Can you kill. He said finally.

She looked at him, expression if she had one hidden behind her faceplate.

Yes she said finally. But it depends on what and why.

That flaw has been corrected in modern robotics. 

Don't organics murder each other.

Yeah. All the time. He admitted. Now kill this creature.

She responded without any hesitation and aimed her needler and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The safety is on. There that latchkey next to your thumb.

She thumbed the latchkey and tried again.

The morph had just risen up on its arm when the needle punched into its domed head and exited in a spray of carapace and brain.

There was intimation of movement to his left. He turned and fired off a needle that sped into the darkness. It illuminated the dark for a single moment before it expired against the opposite bulkhead and there was a shuttered glimpse of shadows that writhed with alien bodies.

Weve got to go.

There was that stuttering click behind then. He twisted around and saw it hunched forward on the edge of the lighted zone. He fired a needle. It loped casually aside and the needle spent itself somewhere in the dark behind it.

Now. He said.