by B. V. Larson
The journey up north to the methane lake took hours, and it was a strange experience. Our light dragons could run at about fifty kilometers an hour, double that for short bursts. They could spring over obstacles, climb steep hills and even ford streams. But when traveling at high speeds, we were running blind. The mist and precipitation caked up on our visors and external camera pickups. Even under the best of conditions, we couldn’t see far into the soupy air.
We reached the lake and turned east. After about an hour of running along the lakeshore, we ran into our first serious obstacle. I pulled up short and called it in.
“Leeson? This is 1st Squad. We’ve hit a big river, sir.”
“How big?”
“I don’t know—I can’t see the far side.”
He cursed for a few seconds then relayed my unwelcome news up the chain of command. When he finally got back to me, he had new orders.
“We’ll be up to you pretty soon. 2nd Platoon just reported in from further south—same thing. We want you to scout the river for depth, McGill. Don’t let that methane get up past your legs to the core of your chassis.”
“Uh…right sir.”
I wheeled my dragon to face the others who had gathered up and were letting their cells recharge off their fusion generators while they waited for new orders.
“We’re going to find out just how deep this river is,” I announced.
“Oh really?” asked Carlos. “Let me guess—it’s my turn to die already, is it?”
“It would be, but I need your dragon,” I told him. “Anyone feel like going for a swim?”
Dragons roamed along the shoreline, looking at the silvery surface of rippling methane. No one said anything. This must be why Harris had never asked for volunteers, I realized.
“Gorman, Roark—you’re on,” I ordered.
They groaned and cursed but wandered down to the edge of the flowing liquid. They both put in that first metal foot like they could feel the cold.
I goaded my machine up behind them. “Spread out!” I boomed. “I don’t want you both going into the same hole. Kivi, Carlos, attach a tow cable to each of these brave souls.”
With a steel cable taut on each machine, we watched them step out into the moving liquid.
“Ever seen a methane-drinking shark before?” Carlos called out to Gorman, who he had on his tether. “I hear they like shiny objects.”
“Shut up, Ortiz,” I heard myself saying. I had to admit, each day I spent as a veteran made me feel more sympathy for Harris. Could it be that this job shaped the man as much as the other way around?
I didn’t get much more time for introspection, unfortunately. Roark ran into trouble about ten meters out. His machine went down on one leg, even though the river hadn’t looked to be that deep. One minute he’d been in about a meter of water, and the next he was floundering.
“What’s got you, Roark?” I demanded.
“Not sure, Vet. One foot must have stepped into a deep hole.”
“Shark! Shark!” shouted Carlos unhelpfully.
“Kivi, haul on that cable,” I said. “Take the slack out of it.”
She did as I asked, backing her machine up the bank. She pulled, but Roark’s dragon wasn’t budging.
Inside my machine, I clenched my teeth. This wasn’t the sort of problem I could afford to kick up the chain of command. I should be able to handle it myself.
Gorman had retreated out of the river and joined the group looking out toward Roark with concern. Instead of ordering Gorman back into harm’s way, I marched out into the river after Roark myself.
“Careful Vet,” Gorman said, eyeing my rescue attempt. “I got a feeling there might be more holes out here.”
I moved warily. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. The machine didn’t have sensors in the bottom of its feet. I had to feel my way like a man driving a car over uneven ground, hoping he didn’t get stuck.
As a precaution, I had my tow-line hooked up to my troops on the shoreline.
When at last I made it to Roark, I managed to use my arm segments to latch onto him. Bending my legs into a crouch then standing erect, I hauled him straight up.
There was resistance, that much I was sure of. Whatever he’d found, it wasn’t just a simple hole. Something was trying to keep him down.
When we were both mobile again, I noticed that Roark still had trouble. His dragon tottered to the shore. I accompanied him in case he went down again, figuring his leg actuator might have gone bad.
“What is that thing?” Kivi asked.
I stopped and rotated my chassis to get a good look.
Kivi was right. There was something attached to Roark’s machine. It was like a cylinder wrapped around the lower leg section, and there was a glowing amber light on top of it, too.
“What the…could that be a mine?” Kivi asked.
“Back up! He’s gonna blow!” Carlos shouted.
The group scattered like hens. I stood there with Roark, who was trying to escape his fate. He had his grippers on the top of the cylinder, pushing down.
I reached out, seeing a group of wires on top. They were crude, thick wires. I snipped them with my grippers, and the amber light died. Using my dragon’s powerful arms, I ripped the thing loose and dropped it on the rocks with a clang.
“Well,” I said, “if that was a mine, it was a pretty piss-poor one.”
The squad wandered back to us, looking paranoid. I decided it was time to report in.
“Adjunct Leeson, sir? The river is a problem. There seem to be devices in it, buried in the water. I don’t know their function or who put them there, but they seem to be traps. They might disable anyone who tries to cross.”
“Roger that, McGill. We’ve had other reports of a similar nature. Like that battery you found yesterday. Lots of discarded hardware. Command is suspecting that this planet was once inhabited, or maybe still is, by a technologically savvy species.”
Who could it be? I thought of the squids right off, but it just didn’t seem to be their style. This whole planet wouldn’t have been appealing to them for colonization, just for resources. Who else might be living down here on this cold, mist-covered rock?
We were ordered to abandon our attempts to ford the river. It was too deep, too treacherous and too wide. Instead, we angled south off course and ran along the shoreline. Behind us, the main mass of troops arrived. I left the artifact we’d found on the beach for them to examine.
About a half-hour’s run southward, we ran into something new. There was a cluster of low metal domes near the river. Don’t get me wrong, the domes didn’t have the fresh-forged look of our ships and machines. Instead, they were dirty and corroded. Everything about the place looked unfinished and crude. The domes were close to the methane, arranged in a semi-circle. We didn’t march right into the middle of them as we were wary by now.
“What the hell is this?” Carlos asked. “Some kind of fishing village?”
When he said that, it struck me that he was right. That was exactly what it looked like. A fishing village.
“Carlos, check that hut up there on the hill.”
“ Shit…” he said then trotted his machine to the structure I’d indicated. There was a door of sorts, consisting of two heavy metal plates piled over one another. He levered it open, and it clanged and clattered to the ground.
“I didn’t say to tear it up!” I shouted after him. “If natives live here, you’ll scare the living—”
That was as far as I got. A figure sprang up out of the door of the shack and scuttled away. Now, when I say figure, you have to understand I’m not talking about a humanoid. I’m talking about something that looked like a centipede built out of rusty garbage cans with churning metal struts for legs.
“Holy crap!” Carlos shouted. “Did you see that guy? Did you see that?”
“Yeah, we sure did.”
Carlos took off after the thing. It wasn’t small, but it was a lot smaller than he was. Lengthwise, it was prob
ably two meters long and a half-meter or so wide. Carlos caught up to it and launched himself up into the air, coming down on its back. He forced it down into the dirt, where it squirmed and kicked.
“Why’s he killing it?” Kivi demanded.
“Carlos, she’s right. Don’t harm it. That thing must be part of the native population.”
Carlos came back to us, holding the thing in his grippers. It squirmed and twisted but couldn’t get away. It didn’t make any sound other than desperate scrabbling noises.
“If this is a native, this is one weird place,” Carlos said. “This—listen people—this is a machine.”
We examined it, and we quickly realized he was right. The creature was all metal with cameras for eyes and jointed struts for legs. It looked like it had been assembled out of spare parts. There had to be some level of AI inside the brain-pan, however, as it was clearly pitiful and distressed.
“We should take this back to Natasha,” Carlos suggested. “She’d get a kick out of dissecting it.”
“I think we should let it go,” Kivi said.
Something in her voice made me turn to look at her. She was staring back behind us. I turned around and followed her gaze.
There, looming out of the mist beyond the shacks, was a massive figure. It came up out of the methane river and moved like a rolling mass of interconnected plates. Shaped like a slug, it undulated to and fro as if uncertain. It seemed to be studying us.
“Carlos, put the caterpillar-thing down,” I ordered. “Gently.”
“Aw, I wanna keep him.”
“Do as I order, or I’ll fire on you!”
“Sheesh, all right. What’s the—oh…”
He’d finally caught sight of the thing we were all staring at. He put the small machine down on the ground, and it scuttled off toward the bigger one.
-14-
We quickly retreated uphill, away from the village along the river. The mountain of metal plates shifted around the domes and followed us, matching our pace. As a measured response, we moved slowly and gently away from the village—or nursery, or whatever the hell it was.
“You think that’s mama, Kivi?” I asked, whispering for some reason.
“I bet it is. If that little one is hurt, I suggest we offer up Carlos as a sacrifice.”
“Hardly seems like a fair trade,” I said. “We don’t want to piss off the locals further by giving them our most irritating trooper.”
“I didn’t know!” Carlos complained. “How the hell was I supposed to know this world is inhabited by freaking machines? That’s weird, man. Really weird. Who built them in the first place? How do they reproduce? What do they—?”
“Could you shut up for nine seconds, Ortiz?” I demanded. “I’m trying to report this in. Don’t run, anyone. If it’s like an animal, it’s best to move slowly and confidently. Backward.”
As we backed away from the village, the big machine eventually stopped following us and returned home. The bulk of it vanished into the white mists, and we were very happy to see the last of it.
“Uh…Adjunct Leeson? I’ve got an unexpected contact to report.”
I gave him the story, and he kicked me up to Graves before I finished the third sentence.
“Have you got video?” Graves asked.
“Relaying and transmitting the file now, sir.”
Fortunately, Kivi had had the presence of mind to flip on her suit recorders when we first met up with the village. The Centurion reviewed the file and let out a long breath.
“We’ve been suspecting something like this. A dozen reports have hinted around, but you’re the first to encounter an actual organized habitation. Good scouting, McGill.”
“Thanks. What are they, sir?”
“Native life, after a fashion. We’ve theorized about this, and the Galactics have hinted that some of the inhabitants of the Core Systems resemble these beings. They’re electromechanical creatures. Robots, essentially.”
“Some of the Galactics are robots?”
“That’s what we understand,” Graves said. “It’s a miracle, when you think about it, that the various species from the Core Worlds were able to cooperate long enough to build an empire at all.”
“I’m out in the field, sir. What should I do?”
“Be friendly with the locals. Get used to them. Maybe they’ll get used to you. Machine life, McGill. Just think about them as flesh and blood. Wait a second—you didn’t damage any of them, did you?”
“Not intentionally, sir.”
“What does that mean?”
I explained about Carlos running one down and catching it, and Graves seemed tense.
“You have to keep a tight rein on your people, McGill,” he said sternly. “We aren’t marauders. Natives are key to any attempt we make to defeat the squids on this planet. We can’t afford bad blood between us now.”
I assured him I wouldn’t harm any machines that didn’t attack us directly.
“Good, good,” he said. “We’re working on this. Every tech we have on the surface is stretching their brains around it. Did you catch any transmissions?”
“Any what, sir?”
“Listen, machine life doesn’t talk with a voice box. They send radio waves at one another. Did you record anything of that nature?”
“Uh…no sir. We’ll give it a shot if you want us to.”
“All right. I’m going to send a tech out there to your position to help with the investigation. Go back into the vicinity of the village and watch the aliens. Don’t get too close, however. From the sounds of it, you encountered a mother machine and her brood. You can’t threaten her young, do you understand?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
He closed the channel, and I relayed his instructions to my nervous squad.
“Go back there?” Carlos demanded. “Are you nuts? Did you see the size of that thing? It was made out of metal, through and through. We couldn’t stop it with these grenade launchers. It’s as big as a building!”
“That’s why we’re going in slowly and staying well back. If it comes at us aggressively, we’ll run. The mother-machine—whatever it was—it didn’t seem very fast.”
“Maybe that’s because she hadn’t charged us yet.”
Despite Carlos’ grumbling, we backtracked and came up over a rise to where we could see the village again. The moment our dragons showed their noses, the inhabitants clammed up. We had time to see a few of the small ones rushing to their little huts and slamming them closed. I figured they were probably already bleating for mama.
“Any signals on your scanners?”
“I’ve got something down in the kilocycle range,” Kivi said.
We tuned in and saw a spray of jagged waveforms. The machines were communicating, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and neither could our dragons’ computers.
“Let’s back off,” I said, and we retreated again. Once we were out of sight, I dismounted from my machine and walked up to the ridge again.
Specialist Sargon was heading up one of my two maniples. I put him in charge of the mounted troops with orders to rush to my rescue if I ran into trouble. I took Kivi with me as she was doing pretty well today in the absence of a real tech. I knew she’d been studying hard for that rank and saw this as her way to get a specialist’s patch. There was no harm in giving her some field experience.
I felt exposed out on the surface outside of my dragon. We got down low and crawled when we got to the top of the hill. On our bellies in the cold mud, hearing our respirators hiss in our helmets, we crept up on the village and looked down at it curiously.
The village was alive. A half-dozen machines frolicked about, crawling over the landscape with what seemed like random, energetic patterns.
“Are you getting this?” I asked Kivi.
When I spoke, the machines halted and lifted up, looking around. Kivi put her helmet close to mine, and I heard her muffled voice.
“Don’t use radio. They can hear it
.”
“Roger that. Voice only.”
After lifting up the front part of their bodies and briefly cranking their forms this way and that, the machines went back to whatever they were doing.
They seemed to be excited. They had something inside one of the huts. Something large and metallic. They hauled it out together, working like a swarm of ants.
“You know,” I said, “I bet those clamps buried in holes in the river were some kind of trap. They didn’t blow up, so they aren’t mines. Maybe these machines trap other machines.”
“Everyone has to eat, I guess,” Kivi agreed. “They must be running on methane for fuel, and they need metal to rebuild themselves and to grow larger. I’ve read about some forms of machine life in my studies. I think that the big one might smelt metal and have a construction system inside to build smaller units. It’s all very strange, but not unprecedented.”
“Right,” I said thoughtfully, “they get energy from methane, and raw materials from the ground. This is a highly metallic planet with high quality ore outcroppings everywhere. I hadn’t thought about it before, but this world is a paradise for a machine race.”
“It might be more sophisticated than that,” Kivi said. “These could be predatory machines that consume the less sophisticated types that graze on ore directly.”
I nodded. “A food-chain. The techs will love this place.”
The thing they were hauling up out of the ground was finally in the open. The little caterpillar guys swarmed all over it. We watched in growing concern.
“That metal they’re chewing on—that’s fresh and straight,” I said. “I think it’s manufactured.”
“Yes. Don’t you recognize it, James?” Kivi asked.
“Uh…can you give me a hint?”
“That’s a dragon leg. You see the claw-like foot? It’s been torn loose.”
Staring at it, I right off I knew she was correct. “You’ll make a fine tech someday, Kivi. Let’s get back to the others and report this.”
We retreated from the hilltop, backing down the way we’d come. We had time to stand up on our hind legs—but that was about it.
