The Owners

by Tara Basi

  “Synchronise, in one, two, three,” Mina said over the radio.

  Battery Boy executed their much rehearsed time synchronisation. They were all now in lockstep, a crucial component of their plan.

  “Tally-ho chaps, chocks away, toodle-pip, and cheerio.”

  Battery Boy had very little idea what Nurse Trinity was talking about though he guessed it was meant to be funny. He didn’t feel like laughing and neither did he acknowledge Trinity’s farewell, if that’s what it was. Mina answered and he could tell that she was even less amused.

  “Christ Trinity, stop talking bollocks. Have you figured out how you’re going to keep Tippese distracted?”

  “Language Mina, there’s a child present. I don’t think it’s a good idea to over think these things. I shall improvise. Something extemporaneous should catch the blaggard Tippese off guard and keep his attention away from your derring-do, no?”

  If Battery Boy had the least idea what Trinity was talking about he might have said something, but Mina’s long sigh seemed to say it all. A buzzer alerted him. It was seconds to take-off.

  His giant machine joined the other two and lumbered into the air very, very slowly. Battery Boy began to have doubts they would achieve flight despite everything the simulations had said. He’d never flown one fully laden. The three transports were packed to bursting. The roar of the straining engines shook the craft so hard he was sure bits would start raining down on Nurse Trinity, who was wildly waving up at them from the Park. Finally, the transports broke free of their inertia and turned inland, progressively accelerating away from New York and towards their destination squatting in the tall grass of Iowa.

  Battery Boy slotted into formation behind Mina, with Tress to his left. Together they flew on like a leftover band of tardy geese heading the wrong way. They travelled without lights, skimming low through the rain and under dark clouds, over broken towns, decaying cities and farmland long since gone native. All too soon the Iowa Block appeared over the horizon illuminated only by the lightning that permanently haloed the impossibly sized, inhuman structure. He shivered. He was still afraid of the sight of a Block. Its vastness and inscrutability forcefully reminded him of his insignificance. All of mankind, in their prime, could not defeat the Blocks and yet he, Mina and Tress were trying to do just that, and they were less than the runt of his species. It was a comfort and an inspiration that a few had achieved something. Enough to make the Owners take notice. Grain and Sara and the rest of the Small Business crew had done that. Maybe he could too. What he worried about was whether getting noticed would be better or worse than being ignored. Mina was betting on the former. Hopefully more of what Grain and Sara had done would scare the Owners into leaving them alone forever.

  He didn’t chatter with the others. Battery Boy couldn’t think of anything to say and they didn’t know who might be listening. Every movement had been choreographed on the basis of a synchronised countdown, and the next major waypoint was coming up fast. On the beat of the clock, Mina and Tress peeled away and flew off to take up their own approach paths to the Block. He slowed his airspeed and carried straight on, keeping time with his companions. Another tick announced the closing proximity of the Block field and the abrupt death of all things of any electronic sophistication that the Block didn’t like the look of. Trinity’s worm had once fooled the Block into accepting their little ship, Piglet, as friendly, allowing Sara and then Mina to fly under the Block. Ever since the Small Business attack, the Blocks weren’t so easy to fool. Trinity’s worm was dead. There was no chance of repeating that trick.

  Battery Boy brought his craft to a hover and started descending towards the undulating grasslands directly below. Infrared scans revealed vast herds of buffalo scattering in all directions as his noisy machine dropped down. Stuff would have been fascinated and overjoyed to see the stampeding herd in flight. Battery Boy’s only thought was that they were one more thing that might give away his presence. The transport touched down lightly. It was a landing that pleased him, particularly given the weight of his payload. Though its subtlety was wasted. His engines had roared with the strain of the landing and the scattering buffalo had made enough noise to drown out the sound. It wasn’t a stealthy arrival. He comforted himself with the thought that he was still a hundred kilometres away. Yet that was only a Block length. Everything was small compared to the scale of the Blocks.

  The unloading in the dark took time though only as much time as they had planned. Machines were marched out of the belly of the transport and formed up into ranks. Checks were run. Everything was good. There was no reason to delay. He mounted his Crusher and set off into the night rain. While he could, he kept his lights off and marched forward at a fast pace. The ground was flat; the going was good. The horrendous noise of his troop made a mockery of any pretence that they were creeping up on the Iowa Block. He wished Jugger was with him. Their hunter. He was the real warrior. But Battery Boy could be equally ruthless. He’d shot dead every one of Jugger’s pack under Block Seven. His weakness, what set him apart from Jugger, was his willingness to fight the impossible fight. Jugger calculated odds. He wasn’t suicidal and he’d grown even more cautious since Pinkie had become part of his life. And now there was the imminent arrival of their baby to consider. Ominously, Battery Boy felt they might miss his instincts for survival before the night was over.

  Too soon his machines arrived on the edge of the Block’s wasteland. He was early. Time to wait for the others and the next tick.

  Battery Boy concentrated on the flashing numerals as they counted down to zero: less than sixty seconds to go. His Crusher stood in withered grass, only a few metres from the start of the dead earth, east of the Block. At exactly this moment Nurse Trinity would be contacting Tippese in the hope of distracting him, Reference and maybe, the Owners. If they’d arrived, that was. Battery Boy thought back on their conversations about contacting Tippese at this particular moment. A critical moment. Would it distract or alert him? He, Tress and Mina were about to find out.

  So far the Block was taking no more notice than it had only four weeks earlier when he had scouted out the underneath. This time he was not alone. Behind him, a twenty strong force of Crushers waited, engines throbbing away to a reassuringly menacing bass rhythm. Two identical forces, led by Tress and Mina, waited to the west and south of the Block for their synchronised timers to hit zero. When the numerals flashed down to nothing, Battery Boy pushed the left joystick, the Crusher lumbered forward and quickly picked up speed as its powerful legs ripped across the ground. Mina and Tress would have started off at the same instant, as fast as they could stand, all heading towards the centre of the Block.

  The war had begun.

  Battery Boy’s squad of Crushers would mimic his every move, unable to do anything else. Where he went, they went. Battery Boy had some limited control over his soldiers. He could communicate with them only by line-of-sight laser. They couldn’t risk using radio commands in case the Block intercepted the orders and turned the Crushers against them. His line-of-sight laser could give basic instructions, to attack a position, to stay and hold, to passively follow or, follow and destroy the enemy. ‘Enemy’ was loosely defined as anything that was not another Crusher; that was the setting he would be using when they got under the Block. For now, the priority was not to fight but simply to get that far, so his troop was following passively. Protected at the centre of each Crusher group was a trailer carrying a launching platform and two simple but powerful missiles tipped with multiple nuclear warheads. As soon as they reached the right coordinates, the Crushers were programmed to unload the trailer and set up the missile platform so that it protruded out over the pit. Guarding the missiles was more important than anything else.

  He raced on, pushing his speed up to sixty kilometres an hour, the most he could risk over rough terrain. Behind him the ground shook as twenty other Crushers accelerated forward, matching his speed. The plan was to fight through any defence and get at least one of
the nuclear missiles set up over the pit and launched up into the Block. Without any way to communicate, Battery Boy had no idea how Tress or Mina were faring. All he could do was thunder on across the dead earth making directly for the Block. The rain was falling ever faster and the feet of his Crushers were turning the ground to sludge. His nostrils were filled with the smell of straining engines and smoking oil. Even the rain couldn’t wash that away.

  Nothing was happening, nothing at all. Someone or something must know they were coming. It couldn’t have been difficult detecting the giant transports bringing the Crushers to the three staging areas around the Block. The massive thunder of the Crushers stampeding across the prairie must have triggered some alarm somewhere. But Battery Boy passed without incident under the Block. Twenty-and-one pairs of Crusher headlights burst into life, cutting a broad grey-white avenue through the darkness. He stopped. At the edge of what was human and the inhuman. From everything he had studied since Mina and her friends had taken them to New York it was impossible for a structure as vast as the Block to exist. It was unimaginable that it could float like some surreal cubist balloon. Yet here he was again. On the borders of sanity, on the edge of what mankind thought it knew and the realisation of how much it didn’t. It was the same as when he and Stuff had first run under Block Seven. It couldn’t be and yet it was. The Block mocked their ignorance.

  He pushed the joy stick further forward, accelerating up to seventy kilometres per hour; it was about the maximum speed that was bearable. Despite the thick padding and the restraining harness, he was being thrown painfully around the inside of his tiny compartment. The massive metal machine cut through the darkness like a laser. Far ahead, his painfully vibrating eyeballs could just begin to make out the jagged flickering headlights of Mina and Tress’s troops converging on the solitary Block pit. He was relieved that they had made it safely, but Battery Boy fretted that it shouldn’t be this easy. Something wasn’t right. Since passing under the Block the opening over the pit had already dilated once, precisely on cue, discharged and disappeared.

  The three groups came to a bone juddering halt amongst mountainous clouds of grey dust kicked up by powerful Crusher feet. They occupied the east, west and south pit edges. Powerful beams from a multitude of lights lit up the tiny particles of glistening motes hanging in the air. Worryingly, Battery Boy remembered how safe they’d felt last time he, Stuff and Jugger were carelessly navigating the mosaic of pits under Block Seven. It was so easy. And it remained easy right up until Worry’s crazy gang quietly bagged them. He silenced his mount and strained every sense. Nothing, not a hint of a threat. Battery Boy relented and ordered his troop to carry on.

  The machines unloaded and bolted down the launch platform so that it extended three metres out over the pit abyss. With everything secure, the two armed missiles’ tubes were rolled to the very end of the platform and locked in place. Battery Boy used his laser to signal Mina that he would join her on the west side of the pit. Tress signalled the same message. He started up his Crusher and set off around the edge, leaving his platoon behind to defend the missiles. The missiles would fire automatically as soon as sensors in the tips detected the green light directly above.

  Shortly after Battery Boy met up with Mina, Tress arrived. With nothing left to do the three captains had plenty of time to get back to their aircraft and escape the blast.

  “This is too easy,” Tress said, echoing exactly what Battery Boy was thinking. They dismounted and stood together in a bright pool of light provided by their personal Crushers. Everybody was uneasy about claiming victory but they were unable to find any flaw in their success. There was a pair of armed missiles at the end of each of the three platforms, safely suspended over the pit, each guarded by twenty motionless Crushers poised to blast anything that threatened the launch.

  “It’s time we left, everything is set, there’s nothing more we can do,” Battery Boy concluded. Mina nodded and Tress shrugged. Each turned around and prepared to climb up onto the thighs of their Crushers and then back into their compartments.

  Perhaps there was an odd, almost imperceptible, flutter in the air which made him pause. He froze in an awkward pose, half-on, half-off his Crusher. A movement out of the corner of his eye drew Battery Boy’s gaze to his left foot, still firmly planted on the ground. The other was already positioned on the leg of the Crusher, braced to pull him up onto the metal thigh, his hands above his head firmly gripping the crude ladder welded to the machines back. Particles of dirt were dancing chaotically all around his grounded foot. Now he could feel a faint vibration that grew stronger as he stared at the jumping soil. And something else. Battery Boy felt a strong down-draught on his neck, rapidly increasing in strength, kicking up more clouds of blinding grit that filled his mouth and eyes. He coughed and wiped his face, struggling to understand what was happening. His only thought was that the dilation was starting early but there was no telltale emerald light. He stared straight up though there was nothing to see but the dark. He pulled out his torch and shone its wide beam at the underside of the Block. Still nothing, no opening appearing, just a circle of dusty light illuminating a smooth blank surface. By now the unruly breeze was turning into the beginnings of a gale and the ground was vibrating more intensely. Infuriatingly, Battery Boy could find no obvious cause. With his heart beating faster he turned to check the missiles, fearful the vibrations and the wind might have thrown them into the pit. While they swayed slightly they looked secure. The platforms were designed to withstand direct hits from heavy ordinance and the missiles’ launch tubes were firmly fastened to the ends of the platforms. He looked back towards Mina and Tress who were similarly frozen half way up their Crushers, frantically looking from side to side trying to identify the cause of the disturbance. Battery Boy shone his torch back on the Block overhead, nothing, then… something… the circle of light seemed bigger.

  “It’s coming down,” Battery Boy yelled.

  Did Tippese think this was funny or just efficient? Probably both. They had been lured into a trap that was slowly springing. Vaulting up onto his metal golem he flashed every slave Crusher to disperse at full speed away from the pit. If they were going to get squashed and start exploding and firing crazily, it was better they were as far away from them as possible. There was no time to use their individual Crushers to escape, the Block was descending too quickly. They’d never make it out from under the Block in time if they started to run for the edge.

  The Block floor was already only seconds away from touching the ugly heads of the fleeing mechanicals. Battery Boy had raised his Crusher to its maximum height to be sure the slave machines saw his laser signal. Now the descending Block was forcing his upright iron dinosaur into a squat.

  It would be at least another forty minutes before the area over the pit dilated, if it ever did, and by then everything would already be flattened. He barely managed to clamber down from his squealing machine before his compartment was crushed. He stumbled away from his dying metal companion towards Tress and Mina. Battery Boy didn’t bother to look back, there was no time and no need. The horrible sounds of thick armour plate snapping and the crack of ineffective defensive gunfire told him exactly what was happening to his mount. All around the slightly lower running machines were being arrested in full flight, suddenly held fast between the roof and the unyielding earth. Trapped, the simple robots responded in the only way they could by firing every weapon they had. Some exploded in balls of flame after being struck by ricochets from their own ordinance. Or, when their weapons were forced into the dirt and backfired. Others fell suddenly silent except for the groans of twisting metal as they were irresistibly pulverised. The Crushers’ funeral fires, while they lasted, provided plenty of illumination.

  Battery Boy joined Tress and Mina who were holding onto each other and crouching low. They were shaking and look petrified. There was nowhere to run. Battery Boy’s only thought was to get out onto the ramp over the pit. Maybe it would give them a chance though
who knew what that chance might be. When the Block pressed down on the launch tubes he hoped that the platform would bend without sheering, without being ripped from its moorings, without setting the weapons off. It was a desperate plan, but it was the only one he had.

  He grabbed hold of the two trembling women and pointed urgently towards the nearby missile platform. He didn’t know if Mina and Tress had understood. Their wildly darting eyes only displayed mounting terror. Nevertheless, they scrambled away in the direction he’d indicated. It was their only hope. Ahead a low moan escaped from the stressed platform as the Block gently but irresistibly pressed down on the launch tubes, forcing them down into the pit. It was not a reassuring sound.

  Battery Boy had to crawl on all fours. The base of the Block was less than a metre above the ground. He wriggled frantically after Mina and Tress who were already out on the missile platform. He wasn’t moving fast enough. The Block was only centimetres above his hips. In another moment he would be pinned and flattened. Tress and Mina reached out and each grasped one of his hands and dragged him out onto the platform. Just when he thought he had made it his trailing boot was trapped by the Block and he was held fast. With the women’s help he desperately tore his foot out of the boot and scrambled backwards onto the thin tongue of metal. He watched as his tough boot was slowly ground down. Another second and his foot would have been amputated. The near miss and inky emptiness of the pit below was sickening.

  With unstoppable brutality the Block floated smoothly downward as unimpeded by the mighty Crushers as a hot iron pressing snowflakes. Battery Boy could do nothing but watch and crouch lower and lower as the platform squealed and creaked. Its bend angle increased. At any moment it might snap and fling them into the abyss. Battery Boy grabbed for any hand hold the platform offered. Tress and Mina turned towards the launch tubes and hung on.