Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

Or I could chop off its leg with a pair of those hydraulic jaws they use to cut people out of wreckage. I looked around. There were two sets of doors painted red and marked ‘Fire Control’ – one on each side of the hangar. The one closest to me lay within sprinting distance. Just about. There wasn’t much margin for error. If that fire equipment storage room was locked, I’d be sliced into cutlets by robo-butcher.

Deep rapid breaths to get oxygen into my blood – then I set off. I was aware of the twinge in my thigh where the wound had been knitted together, but I ignored it. Arms pumping, boots slamming against the deck – this was all about speed not stealth.

I felt the deck vibrating. The robot in pursuit. And now it had decided that it too should run. I didn’t dare look back, knowing its massive stride would quickly eat up the distance between us. I concentrated on my target. Twenty yards ahead of me. When I was within twenty feet of it, I glanced at the lock beside the storage room door. The tiny red light was bad news. Locked. Why would anyone lock up fire safety equipment? Why should I need to be authorised personnel to grab a fire extinguisher? Not slacking my pace, I fumbled for the ID tag that Trixie had made for me. If this didn’t open the lock, I was dead meat.

I didn’t slow until the very last second and I didn’t stop at all. I slammed into the red door and slapped the ID tag against the lock. It seemed an age before the red light blinked and turned green. I pushed the door open and ducked inside, banging it shut behind me. I hit the button to relock the door and then smashed the control box with the butt of my pistol. The robot wouldn’t be able to unlock it from outside and that would slow it down – for a little while. But I was under no illusions – I had only bought myself a couple of minutes. The storage room door was airtight, but it didn’t have the strength of an external airlock. Who knew how long it could withstand an attack by a giant cleaver. I had to move fast.

It was a small room, part closet and part changing room. Racks of equipment were neatly stacked and labelled. Rubbery-looking suits hung on pegs, looking like deflated and decapitated corpses. And there were shiny yellow fireman’s helmets. I grabbed one and jammed it on my head. It wouldn’t provide much protection against the cleaver, but it looked great.

Behind me, the robot was hammering on the locked door, first with its massive metal fist and then with the cleaver. A spiderweb crack appeared in the thick glass window, but it didn’t shatter. Dents started to show in the steel plate as blow after blow struck the door close to the frame. It wouldn’t withstand this onslaught for long.

There were two sizes of fire axe. I tucked the handle of one of the smaller ones into my belt as a spare and took one of the bigger ones as my primary. If I was cornered, a well-aimed chop at the robot’s neck might be enough to slow it down. But I wanted to avoid getting that close if I could. There were coils of hose – the big flat ones and ordinary plastic pipe – but they weren’t connected to anything. You evidently had to attach them to some kind of faucet outside in the hangar. Pity – a high-pressure hose might have knocked the robot back and maybe sent fluid far enough inside it to cause a short circuit.

There were more heavy blows and then a nasty ripping sound as the edge of the blade tore through the metal. I glanced back. It was only a narrow cut, but it meant the door would soon give way.

I found a large metal toolbox – almost too heavy to lift. I couldn’t take it with me but maybe I could swing it at the robot and knock it off its feet. Or maybe not. There were also a couple of rolls containing smaller tools and I stuffed one of these into the leg pocket of my khakis. For balance, I shoved a roll of duct tape and a larger hammer into the pocket on the other side.

As I had expected, there were several sets of hydraulically operated jaws. The largest of them would take off the robot’s head – but only if it lay still long enough for me to use them on its neck. I didn’t think there was any chance of that happening. I needed something I could deploy more rapidly.

Fire extinguishers. A whole row of them. Carbon dioxide ones for electrical fires and wet foam ones for other types of flames, all clearly marked. I could use foam to blind the robot’s visual systems and CO2 to confuse its heat sensors. That might be enough for me to dodge around it, but I still needed to travel the length of the hangar at something close to light speed.

If this had been a movie, the hero would have found a fireman’s motorcycle conveniently stashed in a corner. But I couldn’t see anything with wheels – except the hand trucks the larger fire extinguishers were on, and these only had two wheels. I couldn’t really see myself scooting across the hangar on one of them. Not on one of them. But perhaps two?

A crash. The glass in the door finally exploded inwards in a shower of fragments. Time was running out for our hero as he frantically bound two of the hand trucks together with duct tape to form a sort of go-kart.

The door split down the middle and the robot’s giant hand tore out the remaining pieces of metal.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I had the fire extinguishers lined up ready. There’d been no time to test-fire them, so