by Foxx Ballard
“Target has been assimilated. Do you want me to fire?” Buck asked.
“No, Buck! We talking,” Rusty replied. “What be… you?” he asked as he looked at Lais.
“Funny, no one else has doubted what I am before you. You must be very observant.” She slowly put her hands down when it didn’t appear that anyone was actually going to shoot. “I am a human AI in a Technoid body that was made to look human. That’s about as simple as I can put it. And you are?”
“Me Rusty, that Jack Possfofect Hammer.” Jack held up his hand for a second and looked at Rusty, then changed his mind and said nothing. “That Synth-E-Uh.”
“Pleased to meet you all,” said Lais, putting her hands on her hips. “So you came this far and crash-landed on this world to leave me a message? Should I be flattered?”
“Actually, Miss,” Jack rolled toward her, ignoring all the pointing guns. She didn’t appear threatened by him approaching. “We are ambassadors of CompsoStar… err… Rusty Incorporated, from Earth. We departed in the year 2419…”
“Woah, hold on,” Lais interrupted. “You’re from 2419? You know it’s 3420 now, right?” Lais put her hand to her head and looked up at the sky as if she were thinking. “Bah! I didn’t keep the memories. Was Incarcerata IV even a prison colony back then? Why are you just showing up on the planet now?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t a prison colony. We didn’t know if Alpha Centauri had sapient life. CompsoStar tasked us to increase awareness and clientele for CompsoStar products on the only planet that could hold life in this system. Ideally one that might appreciate our wares, if life had developed here, which it looks like it has. Our ship traveled at the fastest speed it could at that time to get here. I guess technology has literally passed us by. But that doesn’t make our wares any less valuable. Master Rusty here purchased the lot,” Jack said triumphantly.
Synth-E-Uh spoke up now that Jack had said his spiel. “That still doesn’t tell us what your purpose is here. What is a Technoid?”
Rusty lowered his weapon, though Synth-E-Uh kept hers trained on Lais.
“Long story, but summarized, they are another advanced AI/Android type race that I happened to inherit a body from. My purpose is to get back my sister, Chais, and my friends Hirk, Keena and Drak from their Chakran captors, if they are all still alive. Now I know Chais at least is alive, thanks to you, so I have hope for the others. I was brought to this world by my creator, Connor, but he has passed. Ultimately, since I have to live here, I would like to make this world a better place. I’m aware of human slavery here. I’d like to deal with that to honor Connor’s memory, but I’m not entirely sure of its extent, and what I can do about it, yet.”
Synth-E-Uh lowered her arms, finally seeming satisfied that Lais didn’t pose any threat.
“Me sorry, lost family too,” Rusty piped in. “Twice,” he added, now that he thought about it. The attack had lost him his second family. A particular scent on the clothing of Lais reminded him of something. The blood of the ant-men!
Rusty walked around Lais, sniffing the air. “Much ant-man blood on clothes. You attacked too? Big worm in sky?”
“Oh, that’s how you knew I wasn’t human! Your sense of smell is amazing! And yes, I just came from Cassiden, to the west. Last night we were attacked there by a Chakran floating worm ship.”
“Chakran?”
“The ant-men, as you call them.”
And then Rusty smelled it, just the tiniest scent amidst the vicious ant-man blood on Lais that he recognized, and it inflamed him. The scent brought deep-rooted rage at all the loss he had endured, and all the others on the prison ship. He gritted his teeth and his lips curled back in a silent snarl.
“You know Thuboss! How this be? Me smell him on you…” He leveled his gun at her again.
Lais seemed genuinely taken aback. “All I can tell you is, I know of no boss, but I did come from a town recently and was around many people, including the attackers. Could it have been one of them?”
Rusty’s rage dissipated almost as quickly as it had risen within him. He nodded, satisfied, lowering Buck. It was quite possible she had just met Thuboss in passing.
“You can still shoot the planet,” Buck offered. “You haven’t succeeded in killing it yet…accuracy is one hundred percent so far…”
“I sorry, Thuboss is why me here… why first family is gone,” said Rusty, ignoring the gun. “Maybe second too.”
“And he followed you here? Are you sure it’s him?” Lais asked.
Rusty nodded. He could feel some of the anger still burning in his chest. His hearts were beating faster. He stepped up to Lais and walked around her, sniffing the air again.
“You have friend, second sled close, smell strong on you. Friend bird? Have feathers… No, that not it… Thuboss smell still faint. And lizard…”
“You are truly remarkable!” Lais said as Rusty walked around her. “I have a friend nearby, with wings, that has her own sled, and she guides a gorlon pulled wagon. The lizard.”
“Yes,” said Rusty simply. It was weird that others couldn’t smell with the same level of sensitivity.
Jack was closing up the crates and stacking them on Synth-E-Uh’s back, pressing the button to activate the magnetic clamps for travel.
Lais appeared thoughtful for a moment with her fingertips touching her lips. “Well Rusty, it was nice meeting you. I am going to continue on. I am returning a wagon to Holbrook with my—” There was a split second of hesitation and a smile before she continued. “—girlfriend. The town of Cassiden can easily be reached by heading west for a half day by beetle on this road that eventually follows the coastline. The road also heads north from here to Holbrook in the mountains, we’ll be heading that way… Unless you have any more messages for me?” She looked with raised eyebrows at Synth-E-Uh, but the robot just shook her head.
“Map of area?” Rusty asked.
“I do know the area. I could draw you one, but I have nothing to write on.”
Jack perked up suddenly, whirring over and handing Lais a stylus that he had pulled from behind his chest monitor. “You can draw it on here,” he said, pointing at his chest.
“Great! I’d be happy to,” Lais responded, and faster than a human hand, she quickly drew a map and labeled the local landmarks. Rusty was able to follow her hand movements. They were quick, rivaling a Goblin’s agility and speed. He was impressed. Few creatures could. Several seconds later, she handed the stylus back to Jack, and he had a crude map on his chest of the area, complete with labels. The scale seemed to cover a couple day’s travel in any direction.
“Good luck!” Lais hopped back in her sled and shoved the long stick out in front of the beetle and immediately a stream of sand sprayed behind the creature causing the sled to inch forward, slowly picking up speed until it was moving smoothly at a good clip, faster than a jog.
Rusty never did ask what the building was for.
Synth-E-Uh had a larger base than Jack and it would be easy to sit behind the grill of the cowcatcher and hang on. “You mind ride you?” Rusty asked.
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything.”
Rusty hopped up onto Synth-E-Uh’s base and grabbed onto the sloped grill in front of him. He crossed his legs and looked out between the bars in the direction Synth-E-Uh was facing. So long as he was sitting, her arms could easily swing over his head if she needed to aim at something.
Jack quickly checked the crates to be sure they were all magnetically attached and, with a lurch, they took off, Jack following beside them. They headed in the same direction Lais had gone, towards the road she had mentioned.
Through a break in the trees, the road came into view, just in time to see Lais and her friend heading over a rise, northward. Rusty waved as Synth-E-Uh turned east. The synthetic woman waved back.
The two bots made good time, traveling far faster than Rusty could run, which was saying something, and they didn’t appear to tire.
When Rusty yawned, Synth-E
-Uh stopped and surrounded him with a row of the magnetic crates and then made a bed out of t-shirts for him to lie on.
Rusty thanked her and turned on Buck’s safety, and then curled up on the t-shirts, the weapon still in his hands.
Rusty napped until Synth-E-Uh nudged him awake.
“We’ve arrived at Cassiden. Just passed a sign that said so. Looks like there’s a couple hours of daylight left if you want to have a look in town.”
“Go town, me point where smell lead.”
They sped off down the road, passing onlookers that just stood and stared at the strange sight of the two robots trundling through town. Rusty directed them past two and three story white-washed stone buildings, with sloped roofs, much like the little building Lais had been pulling on her sled. So it was likely from here. Strange. Some of the city walls were only partially built, and those that were completed had parapets that were unmanned. They came to the town center, where a fountain and numerous empty rings of stalls stood. It looked like the place was near abandoned. Some stalls still had silk walls up, but no one tended them, and though the occasional person wandered amongst them, there were no calls to sell wares. Fire pits sat empty. And then it hit him when the wind changed direction. Like hitting a wall, the smell of defecation and death struck his nostrils. Many people had died here. Recently. Then he caught the other scent, Thuboss. Rusty pointed them around the merchant stalls until he settled on one in particular.
“Thuboss here,” growled Rusty, pointing at the stall. It had been dismantled. He could still smell the lingering scents, though. “And Lais, and friend.” The feathered one.
Rusty hopped down with Buck in his hands and walked around, sniffing everything, memorizing the scents. Besides those he already recognized, there were more: a bony, thick-skinned creature that reminded him slightly of a bat, a human girl, and a third clean, yet synthetic smell that reminded him of Lais. Likely her sister.
“Lais know Thuboss. Maybe not know things he do?” Rusty said out loud, trying to organize his thoughts. “She seem honest, but no smell lie, she synthetic…” Rusty was used to relying on his nose to determine the truth about what people were saying, but synthetics made it impossible. Well, unless they were bad at lying.
“You smell your boss here?” asked Jack.
“Not me boss, Thuboss, it his name. Well…” For the first time, it dawned on Rusty that maybe Thuboss was just ‘the boss’. It wasn’t a name, it was a title. That’s why no one recognized him when Rusty asked.
Rusty jogged through the town, following his nose with the robots close behind him until the scent just faded away. Likely taken into the sky like Zondra was. There were many dead Chakran scents. He recognized them in the large pile of burned insect-man bodies nearby. They had been much more effective here at killing Chakran than in his village, and they had still lost badly, judging from the row of dead covered in sheets and running the length of the block.
He wondered how Lais planned on rescuing her friends from the Chakran. “We find Lais. She knew the boss and want find Chakran too,” he said to Synth-E-Uh, as he climbed back on, between the crates. “Think catch up with her?”
“If we cut directly towards her heading straight northeast across the desert and travel during the night, we might catch her.” Synth-E-Uh suggested.
“Okay.”
“Say, Master Rusty, would it bother you if I sold some of your things? With your permission, of course, I would do it at a profit,” asked Jack.
“That not hard,” Rusty muttered, climbing up into the hole between the crates to lie on the pile of t-shirts.
Jack continued. “My whole purpose for coming here was to sell everything to further the name of CompsoStar, which no longer exists. You bought everything, I’d be happy to sell under your name…” Jack put on a hopeful emoji.
“Ask first, if me say okay, then you sell.”
Jack put on a big smile emoji. “Absolutely! You can count on me, Master Rusty! Can I start here?”
“No. We go find Lais, maybe then.”
Jack seemed satisfied with this as he stretched an enormous t-shirt over Rusty as a blanket, likely meant to be worn by a Ramogran, and tucked the edges under the crates so he wouldn’t bounce out of the bed.
“Nighty night! Don’t let the fission-powered bugs bite!” Jack said happily. “Or the non-fission-powered ones…”
Rusty was just happy to be leaving this place as he closed his eyes, trying to relax through the noise of the robots’ tank treads steadily whirring and the smell of burnt death in the air.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rusty: Central Desert
Rusty was thankful when he woke that he had been able to sleep through the bouncing over the dunes.
He could hear Jack’s voice a short distance away over the noise of the whirring treads as they bounced over the top of another dune and sped down the other side.
“Is it getting closer?”
“Yes, it’s catching up,” replied Synth-E-Uh. Her Gatling lasers started to wind up.
Rusty sat up, curious, and noticed that Synth-E-Uh’s torso was facing more to the rear, but her lower body continued to speed in the direction they were heading.
“Please designate target,” Buck said beside Rusty.
The Goblin sighed. His life seemed to be run now by robots. He grabbed the laser shotgun and stood up, bracing his feet against the crates, so he could lean out and look around Synth-E-Uh’s torso and point Buck in the same direction that Synth-E-Uh was looking. The stars were providing more light than he needed to see clearly, so he watched and as they rode over the top of the next dune, he saw it surface. A giant worm, with a ring of lashing tentacles around its mouth, surfacing and then diving under the sand immediately after. It was definitely heading in their direction.
“I’m going to stop,” Synth-E-Uh said to Jack. “I want you to keep going Jack, make it follow you.”
“Okay,” said Jack, speeding off even as Synth-E-Uh slowed to a stop on the top of a dune.
Jack was driving around drunkenly and yelling. “Oh, if only there wasn’t a worm chasing me! There are so many things I would have liked to do… I would ask Master Rusty twice as often what he needed…”
“Maybe let him be eaten…” suggested Rusty.
When Synth-E-Uh glanced back at him, he just said, “Me kidding! Me kidding! Maybe…”
And then the worm surfaced again.
“Ahoy!” yelled Buck, and there was a loud VRAMP as a thick and bright searing light flashed from the weapon, blinding Rusty momentarily. This beam was far stronger than before. A hiss of steam issued from vents on the side of the gun and then a soothing woman’s voice spoke from a speaker at the rear. “Cooling… Cooling…”
“What in Gobknob’s green groin hairs that?!” Rusty yelled at the weapon in his hands. “Me not finished aiming yet, didn’t even take off safety, you hit sand!”
“Weapon set to maximum,” said Buck. “Target injury severe. You’re welcome.”
As his vision returned, Rusty, slightly perplexed, looked back through Buck’s scope and focused on where he could see the worm in the sand. Buck was right. The worm was thrashing as if it had been badly hurt, despite it looking like the shot had gone part way through a dune to hit it.
Then there was a brrrup of laser fire from Synth-E-Uh, followed by hissing steam from her arm vents. Three tentacles were separated from the body within a fraction of a second and a long line of holes punched through several segments. There was a deep rumbling vibration within the sand, and then the worm retreated beneath the surface and didn’t appear again.
“Target injury critical, estimated chance of survival, forty-two percent,” said Buck in his electronic monotone.
“Oh, woe is me!” yelled Jack, still driving around aimlessly, not realizing the worm had been taken care of.
“Jack! It’s over!” shouted Synth-E-Uh.
“Oh,” he said, and drove back to them with a smile.
They cont
inued on their trek. Rusty couldn’t sleep as the adrenaline was still coursing through him, so he resigned himself to staring out through the bars in front of him, watching the rolling dunes pass, like the waves of a great sand ocean.
Within an hour, the sun was peeking over the horizon and Rusty was just starting to nod off when he saw the sleds and wagon ahead. The road was close.
The sleds stopped once Rusty and the robots were in clear sight over the dunes. Lais waved at them through the window, so Synth-E-Uh drove straight up to them and stopped beside Lais as she stepped out of her sled. She was joined by a beautiful winged woman with bronze skin, long wavy hair and white-spotted brown wings who stepped up beside Lais and took her hand. There was some sort of plastic brace on the women’s wing, likely broken, Rusty surmised.
“I didn’t expect to see you again, at least not so soon. Rusty, this is Angel. Angel, Rusty. And the other two, Synth-E-Uh, and Jack… Hammer?”
There were smiles and nods of acknowledgment.
Rusty put Buck down in his bed and hopped down from Synth-E-Uh.
“Leaving weapon unattended, not recommended,” said Buck from the bed of t-shirts.
Rusty smelled Thu… the boss again, a lingering scent coming from the direction of Angel’s sled. Rusty approached it and when there was no protest, he hopped onboard, sniffing all the while.
“The boss here,” he said as he hopped off the sled.
“That can’t be,” said Lais. “Maybe when it was the Tigran’s sled? A couple months ago…”
“No, it recent,” said Rusty. “One, two days.”
“He would have had to have been one of our regular companions then, arrived from Earth, with us. The only one in our group from Earth, besides Angel and myself, is… Drak. Drak would never have hurt you or your family, he’s been nothing but kind.”
“Drak smell like ash?” Rusty asked.
“Well, yes, he likely would, but…” Lais started to answer, but Angel interrupted her.
“He’s not lying, Lais. He truly believes this… can I browse through your thoughts, Rusty?”
