Nanobot Warriors

by Keith Robinson

  Hammer halted and swung around, all but glowering from within his orange faceplate.

  Liam slowed, suddenly aware he’d just back-talked a bully.

  “I hope you can run fast,” Hammer growled, his deep voice reverberating softly. “Because when this mission is over, I’ll be turning my fists on you. You might survive to old age, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy living with your legs torn off.”

  “Noted,” Liam murmured, eyeing the gleaming, mechanical digits as they curled and uncurled. “But it’s true what I said. These time grubs will see us coming. Shouldn’t we wait until it’s dark or something?”

  “And leave my date waiting?” Hammer shook his head and leaned toward Liam, towering over him. “We keep moving. Unless you got a better plan that doesn’t involve waiting until night?”

  Liam didn’t.

  But Stealth did. She had snuck up on them from the trees, and now she turned her shiny, domed head toward them and spoke in a nasally, whispery voice. “Let Runner go check the place out in advance. He can be there in no time.”

  “Whoa,” Liam protested.

  Armory let out a guffaw. “Stealth is right. Go on, Runner, let’s see what you can do. Move it! And if a swarm of time grubs comes tearing after you, lead ’em off in another direction. Okay?”

  Not okay at all, Liam thought. “Uh, right.”

  It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he hadn’t even had a chance to test his assumed ability. So he was a Runner? Well, running should be pretty simple. He was more concerned about what he would be running toward.

  “What are you waiting for?” Stealth demanded.

  Liam decided he didn’t like her. Three out of five of his teammates were downright unfriendly. Four including Optics, who had also been a little terse. At least he had Medic on his side.

  She sidled closer as he dithered. “From what I know about Gorvian time grubs, they’ll never catch up to you. Just stay out of their reach. See if you can locate the king. You probably won’t see him, but his den will be easy to spot, heavily guarded.”

  He nodded and whispered his thanks before marching past her and between the two giants, Hammer and Armory, who stared impassively at him. Once all five robots were behind him, he felt their collective stares on his back.

  “Looks like he’s gonna walk the whole way,” Hammer said, his deep voice loud and clear. “My dearly departed great-great-grandfather could move at a faster clip.”

  The jab forced Liam to start jogging without thinking about it. He immediately sped up and broke into a sprint, oddly distracted by Hammer’s comment. Did that mean the meathead had actually known his great-great-grandfather? How long did his people typically live?

  When Liam glanced back over his shoulder, his teammates had receded so far into the distance that Liam almost halted in surprise. He really was moving, and he became keenly aware of the servomechanisms and actuators that worked his artificial limbs to maximum performance, their readouts filling the screen before his eyes in a dizzying stream of techno jargon and statistics that he couldn’t hope to understand.

  How fast was he going? At least twice his usual sprint, maybe three times. What amazed him the most wasn’t his speed but his endurance. Running had never been his strong point, yet here he was covering a substantial distance without the slightest hint of being winded. He could go on forever! He wished he could bypass the small town and keep going toward the horizon just for the heck of it.

  Focus, he told himself. The sooner we complete this mission, the sooner we can all go home.

  But as he neared the cluster of rundown buildings, about twenty of them in all, he wondered again about the task ahead. Behead the king? The danger of such a mission seemed irrelevant now. Murdering an unsuspecting, harmless creature was just plain wrong.

  Chapter 3

  Liam faltered when he saw the first sign of movement. He ducked behind one of a few lonesome gnarled trees and scanned the town, wary of the seething mass of black bodies in the wide streets near the center.

  “What can you see?” a voice squawked in his ear.

  He spun around in shock, batting at the side of his head. “Whoa! Who—where—?”

  “Quit jumping around and tell us what you see,” the voice snapped.

  It sounded like Hammer. His unmistakable voice reverberated around inside Liam’s head, and it dawned on him that he had a built-in communication link with his team. Makes sense, he thought, feeling a little foolish.

  “Uh,” he said in a whisper, “can you hear me?”

  When there was no answer, he lifted his hand to tap around on his helmet. Maybe there was a switch or something . . .

  To his surprise, he suddenly heard his own heavy breathing as though he were blowing into the mouthpiece of a telephone. “Am I on?” he said, still keeping his voice low. “Can you hear me okay?”

  “Loud and clear,” Medic said. “What’s going on down there?”

  A little perturbed that he could switch on his microphone so easily—with the power of his mind!—he vowed to be very careful in the future in case he allowed the others to eavesdrop without his say-so. He’d have to check around later for a privacy setting.

  “There are twenty-one buildings,” he said, not sure where else to begin. “Three of them are fairly big, a few floors high, a bit like hotels or something. The rest are . . . stores? Everything’s old and abandoned. This place is like a . . . like a . . .”

  “A way station,” Hammer said, sounding impatient. “We get it. See the road? We’re halfway between cities.”

  For the first time, Liam noticed the road—if it could be called that. More of a dirt track than anything, all grown over with disuse, barely visible. He was reminded of the Wild West and some of its more remote shanty towns. Had people once lived here? Maybe store owners and hotel staff, but that was all. There were no houses. Nobody had ever called this place home.

  “Hey, moron!” Hammer yelled in his head, making him wince. He mentally turned down the volume. “We haven’t got all day. What else do you see?”

  Gritting his teeth, Liam described it all in detail. “Hundreds of those Gorvian time grubs, maybe thousands, I don’t know exactly. The streets are full of them, and there are probably hundreds more inside the hotels. Why are they here? What’s so special about this place?”

  “It’s a shelter,” Medic said. “There’s nothing else around. The king’s not here for a luxurious hotel experience. It needs the walls and roof to stay warm and safe while it recuperates.”

  Liam shrugged inwardly. “Well, all the grubs are looking toward one building, ignoring the others. It’s pretty obvious where the king is. I can see more of them inside on the first and second floors. None on the third floor, though. So the king’s either on the second floor surrounded by guards, or he’s on the third floor on his own, with his guards downstairs.”

  “Access points?” Armory butted in. “How’s the roof?”

  “Why? None of us can fly. What does it matter—”

  “Describe the roof,” Armory growled.

  Liam sighed. “Flat. Empty. There’s a shed thing made of brick with a door in it. I guess that’s the top of stairs. I don’t see any time grubs anywhere. If we could get onto the roof, we could maybe head down the stairs and avoid most of the grubs, but that’s if we can get on the roof—which we can’t.”

  “We shoulda got us a replacement Flyer for the one we lost,” Hammer said. “You’d think a flying robot would have been a priority. Instead we have a useless Medic and an even more useless Runner.”

  “Like your fists are going to get us anywhere,” Medic goaded him. “Now stop moaning. Runner, is it safe for us to approach?”

  Looking around carefully, Liam saw no sentries posted on the outer perimeter or in elevated positions. And judging by the way these time grubs clamored to surge inward, it seemed they crowded their king with no real thought to the notion of external danger. The Ark Lord had assumed they were guarding their lea
der, but it was possible they just loved him like sappy puppy dogs and wanted to be close.

  “It’s safe,” he muttered. “Come on.”

  Looking back the way he’d come, he saw the distant specks of his teammates rising from the brow of the hill. It would be ages before they arrived. And then what?

  Behead the king, he thought with a shudder. Decapitate him. Cut his noggin off.

  He knew he couldn’t be part of it. In fact, now that he thought about it, he had to wonder how invested Medic was in this barbaric plot. She was a medic! She was supposed to heal, not harm. Okay, so in real life she taught people how to swim, but still, he was pretty sure execution and murder didn’t sit right with the majority of most humans on Earth. What about people on other planets? Were they generally more savage?

  “I can’t do it,” Liam whispered, a sense of absolute certainty settling over him like a warm blanket.

  “You can’t do what?” Hammer barked in his head.

  Liam winced and mentally kicked himself. What had he vowed earlier about finding a privacy setting? “I, uh . . . I was just saying I can’t do it on my own. Otherwise I’d rush in there right now.”

  “Sure you would,” Hammer chuckled in a way that made feel Liam very small. “You’re a Runner. How about you leave the heavy stuff to the big boys?”

  I will, Liam thought with a wave of relief.

  But that wasn’t enough. He couldn’t stand by and let this poor alien king be murdered. On the other hand, what could he do about it? Warn the grubs? Tell them to move on now while they had a chance? He considered it for a moment, his heart—if indeed he had one in his current mechanical body—pounding at the idea of doing something so dangerous. Not only would he have to approach the time grubs and risk being zapped into dust, he’d also have to face his teammates afterward, not to mention the Ark Lord.

  Maybe something’ll come up to stop it happening, he thought miserably.

  He watched the time grubs in silence. The sheer number of spindly arms unnerved him. At eight pairs each, they seemed almost like porcupine quills bristling down the sides of their fat, eel-like bodies. The grubs stood upright, waddling about on short, thin legs that Liam couldn’t see among the mass of bodies. They pushed and jostled in their efforts to close in on their king, and those around the hotel’s large entrance doors seemed to be in grave danger of being squashed flat, apparently jammed solid in the doorway. What must the stairs be like leading up two more stories? What about the third floor where the king probably rested? The whole level had to be packed.

  “Where are they swarming from?” he said aloud, wondering if any of his teammates knew.

  Hammer answered, “Didn’t you listen to a word the Ark Lord said?”

  “I came late to the party. He added me to the team yesterday. I guess I didn’t get the memos.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, not even Hammer.

  It was Medic who eventually answered. “Do you mean to say you only met the Ark Lord yesterday?”

  “Well, he stopped by my house last weekend and dumped some monsters on me—” Liam began.

  Armory barked a laugh. “Ha! He did that to me as well.”

  Intrigued, Liam wanted to ask him all about the experience, but Medic continued before he could say anything. “So did he inject you with nanobots last weekend?”

  “No, yesterday.”

  Another pause.

  “No wonder you’re clueless,” someone muttered. Stealth had finally chimed in.

  Medic said, “The Ark Lord’s been building this team for months. We were all injected ages ago, and we’ve all changed a few times and back again. We’ve had time to acclimatize.”

  “And your parents didn’t notice?” Liam blurted.

  “My parents?” she said.

  He still had no idea how old she was. Maybe she was married with a family of her own. “Uh, well, your husband then.”

  It was Hammer who answered. “Are you saying you hid this mission from everyone? Nobody knows you’re a robot right now?”

  “He’s from Earth,” Medic told him in a low voice. “They’re a little behind the times there. Nanotechnology is in its infancy. Transforming into a robot would be seen as a major event.” Her voice rose in volume as she directed her attention back to Liam. “So you were injected yesterday, Runner? The Ark Lord fed us information as we went along, and we’ve been ready for action the whole time. We just didn’t know when it would be.”

  Liam felt marginally better that he had a good reason to be as clueless as Stealth had accused. “And you went along with it? You’ve been infected for months and didn’t try to get the nanobots out?”

  “There were more of us initially,” Medic said. “When we met the Ark Lord for the first time as a group, there were seven of us. The Ark Lord explained the mission and showed us the time grub he has in captivity, then sent us home to wait for a rare break in the migration. Two recruits—a Flyer and a Digger—immediately tried to escape the mission and nullified their nanobots. The moment he lost their signals, the Ark Lord bombarded one with monsters and obliterated the other.”

  Liam clicked his tongue. “Didn’t you call the intergalactic police?”

  The resounding laughter over the intercom annoyed him.

  “All right, dumb idea,” he said. “But couldn’t one of you send a bomb to his Ark and blow him out of space? You all have wormhole wands, right? What makes the Ark Lord so powerful that you can’t all get together and defeat him?”

  “We don’t all have wormhole wands,” Medic said. “They’re expensive, and you need a license, which takes ages to get approval for.”

  Optics broke in. “Anyway, the Ark Lord is a master of wormhole technology. Nobody can manipulate them like him. He invented wormhole wands and made a fortune, and he can override them in the blink of an eye, switch them off and leave you floating in space. Nobody boards his ships without his permission. The only other way to reach him is through actual space travel, which would take more than a few lifetimes . . . and that’s only if ordinary people like us had the funds to hire an interstellar craft in the first place.”

  “Or do you think we all have spaceships parked in our driveways?” Stealth sneered.

  A silence fell as Liam chewed on that.

  “Like I said,” Hammer mumbled as though talking sideways to his teammates instead of directly into the intercom, “this Runner’s utterly worthless, a danger to us all. When we reach the town, we’ll take over and make him sit this one out.”

  “I can still hear you,” Liam said, unable to prevent the rising indignation.

  The group had to be walking fast, but they still seemed miles away, just dots on the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun blazed down on them, probably glinting off their helmets just as Liam had surmised.

  He realized he had no idea what the temperature was. Correction—a readout confirmed it was 128°F with 82% humidity. He gasped. Really? It didn’t feel hot at all. In fact, he felt nothing. Being a robot had its advantages.

  Was the air in this place even breathable by humans? Again, the readout provided him with an answer, though he didn’t fully understand it. From what he could tell, no human could survive on this planet without a respirator even if they could cope with the unbearably sticky heat. So being a robot wasn’t just useful, it was arguably essential to the cause. Either that or stumble around in heat-resistant spacesuits.

  “They’re migrating from the mountains in the south,” Medic said, answering his question at last. “They do this every year to escape the icy front that sweeps in and blankets half the planet. A year is short here—about eight Earth months—and the temperatures are extreme, ranging from 170 down to -80 on your Fahrenheit scale.”

  “Wow!”

  “Gorvia is a brutal place. The locals don’t seem to mind, though.”

  Hammer scoffed noisily at her. “It’s not like they have a choice! They’ve barely invented the wheel here, never mind space travel. They’re only a few years behin
d Runner and his Earth people. I’ll be surprised if those hotels ever had working air-conditioning.”

  “The grubs prefer a moderate temperature range,” Medic went on. “They swarm constantly from place to place, sometimes for thousands of miles, protecting their king the whole time.”

  “Why?” Liam asked. “I mean, what’s so special about him?”

  Another of those knowing pauses that Liam was beginning to loathe. “He really doesn’t know,” Hammer murmured.

  “Know what?”

  Again, Medic came to his aid. “Without their king, the time grubs are just grubs. It’s the king they draw their power from. That’s why they’re clustering around the building he’s in. The closer they are to him, the more dangerous they are. Those who lag behind will have enough tongue-lashings to last a while, but their power will fade eventually.”

  “The one I saw had plenty,” Liam pointed out. “It zapped a whole bunch of robots before they subdued it.”

  “Yes, well, that one was probably about to run dry,” Medic said. “The ones we’re facing here won’t be. They’ll keep zapping away at us when we get close, and every time they lash out, they’ll step back in time a few seconds and give themselves an advantage.”

  Liam shook his head as he peered down at the teeming mass of jet-black bodies. “Then it’s a good thing we’re invincible.”

  Chapter 4

  “Ready?” Hammer said, pounding his giant iron fists together for the umpteenth time. “Or do we need to go over the plan again?”

  The six of them stood together, perilously close to the small town now, two hundred yards away at most. It lay at the base of a very shallow valley, the roofs of the three-story buildings at eye level. Optics had confirmed a small cluster of heat signatures on the third floor, with one particularly bright reading in the center. The first and second floors were jammed with grubs, so access through the main entrance looked impossible. And without a way to fly up to the roof, only one idea seemed feasible.