by Foxx Ballard
I can’t speak in her mind, Angel said to him mentally, surprising him. Nor can she hear my thoughts. I wish she could… I miss having a mind-twin. On Tallus, our whole lives we spent comparing our thoughts to each other. Here, I haven’t felt that connection with anyone other than you, Rusty. And you already know how I felt about the others I have met. I liked them, but no great mental connection. I’d be honored if you would be willing to share thoughts whenever we are close to each other.
Rusty considered it carefully. What would it be like having someone that could read his mind? In the end, he decided he didn’t have anything to hide. I would be honored too, he thought back to her. He knew he could trust Angel, and she knew she could trust him. It was a gift he was thankful for. Few ever really knew who they could trust.
After unloading the personal items from the lavatory onto Angel’s sled, Lais and Angel took the mobile outhouse into the village to give it to them as a gift and to say goodbye. They might not return for a long time, if ever. Best to say it now before it was too late to.
“So many things we could sell…” Jack said out loud, edging closer to Rusty every few seconds as if being closer would somehow encourage him to let Jack go sell something in the village.
“You get chance some day. We need materials, build skyship. Most already on sled, rest at dropship, and maybe silk factory…” After having been through Angel’s mind, he perused the memories of the silk factory in the desert, but wasn’t sure if it would have been looted by this time. Guess they would find out once they got there.
Rusty walked to Angel’s sled to check out the cage at the rear. It was full of items. There were stacks of silk fabric and metal ingots of varying types. Even ingots of glass. Some others he didn’t recognize. Obsidian pieces, which could be used to make cutting weapons, if they ever needed them. Hard to imagine him ever needing more than Buck. He didn’t think Mogul would need anything either, although the thought of a Ramogran carrying a weapon was awesome to contemplate.
The front cabin of the sled Rusty didn’t need to examine, he could smell the piles of dried fruits and meats. Though he couldn’t smell the water, he could detect the slightest dampness on the waterskins, the humidity that took on the scent of the leather as the water seeped through seams that weren’t tight.
Lais and Angel walked back from Holbrook across the bridge and up the road to where the sleds were. Rusty climbed onto Synth-E-Uh, and they stepped into the cabin of their sand sled. The long goad wasn’t needed to direct the beetle, Treasure, because Angel mentally encouraged it to head in a specific direction. That was interesting, so she could direct animals as well. Rusty found it strange, just knowing things that Angel had experienced. They were almost like his own memories, though he actually had to go looking for them, as if he were fast-forwarding and rewinding a movie. He was sure he would get used to it. When he sifted back through them, he gained a better understanding of the rock-ogre that had just joined them. Mogul had been kind and helpful.
The trip to the dropship was uneventful, it simply required journeying south on the road. They passed a few others traveling on the road as well, heading in the opposite direction, north towards Holbrook, likely refugees from Cassiden, no longer feeling safe in the harbor town. Rusty noted the strange looks people gave them as the robots passed and they made a wide berth around the slow-jogging Ramogran.
When they arrived, Mogul had already eaten the entire goat haunch.
The dropship was untouched, just as it had been when they left it, probably because it wasn’t in sight of the road.
The robots and Lais started gathering the loose parts from the landing. Rusty just hung out with Angel on the sled, watching. The strength of the robots was not really surprising, although Jack did look thin for what he was capable of, but Lais was as strong as Synth-E-Uh, and even though he already knew it through Angel, it was still amazing to see. She picked up parts until she was carrying so much weight that her feet were sinking in the sand and she was laughing because she had difficulty walking. Mogul’s wider feet better supported his bulk and whatever he carried.
Some of the loose pieces were stacked on the sled, but the beetle was already near capacity with all the other materials, so they piled the rest on Synth-E-Uh aside from the door that had torn off the drop pod. It must have weighed half a ton, but Mogul carried it over one shoulder with ease.
Synth-E-Uh could barely see or move her torso, but her treads were thick and wide, so she didn’t sink much in the sand. Rusty held onto Buck and accompanied Lais and Angel on their sled. Jack’s job, which he seemed to thoroughly enjoy, was to roll the dropship to the silk factory.
“Wheee!” Jack yelled as he pushed the droppod, which was four times taller than he was, down one side of a dune. He had to chase after it to catch it and roll it over the next. It wasn’t going to be fast going, but there was a lot of material in the structure of the dropship, including some electronics built in that they might be able to salvage, and the rest of the materials would be at the silk factory, if it hadn’t been plundered.
That gave them time to talk. Rusty, no longer interested in seeing where they were going, sat down and leaned against a few silk sacks of dried meat. Angel stood, looking out the window, directing Treasure. Lais stood as well, but she leaned back with crossed arms against the frame where she could see out the window and see Rusty at the same time. Mogul was outside, walking beside the sled, currently out of earshot. Unless his hearing was really acute. Rusty didn’t know much about Ramograns.
“Angel seems to know you quite well,” she said, facing Rusty with her arms crossed, balancing on her feet easily despite the tilting sled as it traveled over the dunes. “I’m a little jealous.”
“No jealous, she like… nails on chalkboard…”
Lais laughed, and Angel turned with a smile and gave him a light kick.
“So you AI? What you made for?”
“Why did Connor make me?” Lais pondered for a moment. “Well, sex, a masturbatory tool. I could only present as a hologram, so no direct interaction. Companionship, he had me educate myself on social media to grow and interact as a human so I could learn to tailor my responses and anticipate his needs better. I took care of his finances where I was permitted. Cleaning. Basically, he used me as a tool to make his life easier, but in doing so, he gave me life. I don’t think he ever fully appreciated the gift that he gave me. I am as aware of myself as you are, and I am forever thankful for it. Had I been made for any other purpose, I may not have been afforded the same freedom that he gave me to grow and evolve to be myself.”
Rusty nodded, understanding. “You fear death?”
“I have instincts that emulate human ones. My brain emulates a human brain, but I have more control over where I allocate power to different sections. So yes, I fear death, but as soon as that fear interferes with something I’m trying to accomplish, I can turn it off. I have the odd conundrum of logic, like does my desire to reproduce come from my instincts or is it just the logical progression of me feeling joy and wanting to create another being so it can have the same joy?”
“Both, me think,” offered Rusty. “Just like rest of us.”
Lais nodded. “I see why Angel likes you, you are quite perceptive. And thanks for lumping me in with the rest of you.”
Rusty smiled up at her. He had to admit it was easy to do. She interacted as if she were a living person. The line between machine and animal was becoming so close as to not matter anymore.
They were silent for the rest of the trip, except Jack, who kept shouting excitedly each time the dropship rolled away from him. Occasionally when he reached a dune that was too steep, Mogul would step up and with his free hand he would give it the final push it needed, sending the excited Jack chasing after it.
When they arrived at the silk factory, Rusty marveled at the giant rib bones with silk sheets hanging from them, forming a large long tunnel. He had seen it from Angel’s point of view, but seeing it briefly through an
other’s eyes was similar to watching a movie. It wasn’t the same as actually being there. He noted it was mostly still intact, just missing some silk pieces that were lower and easier to take down.
When they left the sled, Angel tossed a fovea round to Treasure as a reward for faithful service, and they entered the silk palace that Afir and Attacana had created. Rusty regretted that the two tigrans had to be killed. They had been so inventive.
People had been and gone. There wasn’t a lot left to take that wasn’t large and heavy, like bricks and lumber. The rock-spider that made the silk was still in its cage, but silk production had stopped because the machine was all jammed up. No one had been there to clear it. The silk strand, untended for so long, had pulled off the side of the guide that ran it through the fovea plant. Without its dissolving juices to remove the spider’s natural stickiness, everything was gummed up. It would be a nightmare to fix. It was a shame, really. Such an intricate setup to gather all the silk in usable spools was amazing. The tower windmills outside were only spinning intermittently when the wind was enough to overcome the friction of the belts that no longer moved. Rusty noticed that Mogul kept his distance from the rock-spider, even though it hadn’t budged, still happily eating the errant baby sand beetles that scurried within its grasp, so he decided to close the cage to make Mogul more comfortable, receiving a polite ‘thanks’ from the rock-ogre. The spider hadn’t wandered free even though the cage had been open for months, so either it was conditioned to think it couldn’t move, or it just hadn’t had the desire to search out another spider to mate with yet. Couldn’t risk it suddenly realizing it was free while they were working around it, though, so he didn’t really have much of a choice other than to lock it in.
He joined the rest of them that had gathered in the main foyer, coming and noticed they were in the middle of a conversation.
“It defiled his grave,” Lais was saying to Angel.
Angel sighed. “We can gather more rocks to put over him—”
“No, there’s a big hole there now, the worm probably swallowed what was left of him. It doesn’t matter. We should have buried him closer to the facility. The sand beetles would have kept it away.”
When Rusty stepped into the foyer, Synth-E-Uh spoke up.
“Now that we’re all here, we should discuss plans for the skyship, based on what materials we have here and what are also easily available should we need them.”
Jack was standing still, and they were using his chest and stylus to draw up the plans on. He was only distracting in so far as he would make a giggling emoji every time they touched him, but he stayed still.
Synth-E-Uh, and Lais took turns writing down a list of all the materials that were available, and then they discussed aerodynamic designs and propeller controls. Nothing that Rusty had dealt with before. He listened, and even took in most of it, but he wasn’t familiar with it, so didn’t have much to offer. Mogul looked disinterested as well.
Jack retrieved several of fission-powered hand tools from the crates, which made Rusty’s job a lot easier removing the wireless radio and other monitoring electronics from the drop pod. It didn’t help that the ion cutter had to keep cooling after a few seconds of use when he was trying to separate the plates of the drop pod itself. Until Buck offered.
“Drop pod target assimilated. Target dissection confirmed.”
His cooling system was far more effective, and Buck adjusted the strength of the thin laser beam as was needed. When the components were out, though, most of the boards and chips looked cracked or broken. The impact of the landing had been worse for them than the inhabitants of the pod.
Rusty worked through the night and part way through the next day while the others were discussing designs, and finally, when he was so tired he could barely stand anymore, Lais noticed and took over for him.
“Incorrect user.” Buck refused to fire for Lais.
“It okay, she use you,” said Rusty.
“Authorized user confirmed.”
“And Angel,” Rusty added as an afterthought, you never knew when someone else might need a weapon. He was going to add Jack as well, and then changed his mind. And Mogul would likely never need him.
“Authorized user confirmed.”
Lais smiled and started cutting more plates from the droppod, and Rusty dragged himself to the bed inside the silk-covered ribcage. There was a fovea plant there, so he used it and then flopped down on the bed and was asleep within seconds.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chais: Sub-Queen's Quarters, Mobile Breeding Hive
They’d been floating above the clouds for days. The gargantuan sky worms were amazing. Chais had paced out their rough size, at least the one they were currently on, and it was roughly two hundred paces long and forty paces wide, and likely the same high. A quick calculation in her head meant that three hundred and twenty thousand cubic meters of air would weigh roughly four hundred tons. So the hive they were in had to weigh less than ninety-three percent of that if the worm was full of helium, even more if hydrogen, including the keel. The worms must have an internal compressor to allow losing or gaining altitude. And were they compartmentalized? Would make sense. Or hardened sponge? And some sort of natural pump or bellows to pump air in one side and out the other for propulsion. When she was close to a wall, she could hear the hundreds of vents sucking in air and expelling it in different directions as they flowed slowly through the sky. And how did the Chakran control them? Pheromones? Inducing pain in a certain direction? Could their scent-speech with each other also work on the sky-worms? It was all very curious. Chais accessed the technoid files that she had from other worlds, but nothing came close to this particular creature. She would have to pick the brains of one of the engineering Chakran, though she couldn’t tell the difference between them. They differentiated each other by scent. Chais stared out through the transparent crystallized wax wall to watch the long procession of other worms floating above the clouds ahead of them, marveling at how high in the sky they all were. It was like a long sky-train of worms with hives on their backs, although many were built with battle-decks, flat constructs a couple of stories high, that could hold prisoners, and a spine of thick poles that twenty or more rock-spiders were attached to, constantly attended by Chakran handlers. All of them had a large waxen keel, or a smaller metal one to keep the buildings upright, and the battle-decks were armored underneath. She tapped her white, tubular, slightly conical head in thought.
“My Queen, it is your humble servant, Dacnil.” The Chakran with one prosthetic crystalline-wax leg below the knee had entered her chamber and was bowing and holding his arms spread while wiggling his hand-claws.
“I told you not to call me that,” Chais replied, as she turned to face the ant-man, her technoid joints buzzing as she moved.
“Yes my Queen, but to do so would be to undervalue your importance to us, and dishonor you. You are the Queen of Knowledge. We have never had such a thing before. The title was created just for you.”
“On with it then,” Chais demanded. “What do you want from me this time?”
“You had mentioned the mus-ket?” Dacnil asked, still bowing low with his arms out. Chais sighed, emulating the human expression through her speaker. She was so used to pretending to express emotion as a human, that she did the same as a Technoid.
“If it will quicken the resolution of this war of yours, but first you must prove your honesty to me by freeing the slaves of West Wingtip.”
“If it please My Queen, we can do this as you command, of course, but there would be many deaths with our current weapons,” Dacnil admitted.
“You told me…” and Chais pointed one of her three white fingers at him as she spoke. “That you would abolish slavery, that was your purpose for taking over, to us working with you.”
“Yes, Eminence, but not by killing them.” Dacnil bowed even lower, if that was possible. “With the mus-kets we could prioritize targets, just the enemies that resist. With the wasps
and antidote darts, we have to be amongst the populace, and there are far too many slaves in West Wingtip to administer antidotes to save them all. Very many would die. The wasps do not discriminate, and without something to allow us to prioritize targets…”
“All right, you’ve made your case,” Chais conceded, walking to a nearby hardened wax shelf and grabbing a sheet of papyrus and a sharpened charcoal stylus. Other shelves nearby held ingots and containers of materials she would use for manufacture. She started to write down instructions and then stopped. “But I’ll only show you what to make and how to make it. You’ll have to manufacture the weapons, gunpowder, and ammo yourself. I’m not making everything for you.”
“It is as you wish, Your Greatness.” He replied.
She handed him the list when she was finished and Dacnil tried to back away smoothly while still bowing, but his prosthetic leg wasn’t cooperating and it kept getting caught.
“Dacnil, you don’t need to bow in my presence,” Chais said as she watched the Chakran hopping backwards on one leg and dragging the other while still in the bowed, spread-armed position.
“Of course, Your Greatness,” he agreed, but still didn’t straighten up.
“Oh, and Dacnil,” said Chais. “One more thing, I’ve been studying your sky worms. Did you know if you built your hives and battle-decks beneath them instead of on top of them, you wouldn’t need a keel to keep them upright, which is wasting over half your mass that you could be using for building? They just need to be strong enough structurally to carry the weight of the structure and what is inside it.”
He looked up and his hand-claws wiggled excitedly, breaking protocol for the first time. “We have always built this way. It is how you build above ground. I must speak with the builders,” he said as he lowered his head again. “Thank you, My Queen.”
Finally he had backed up enough that the wax portal slid open like an iris and he allowed himself to walk upright again down the large hexagonal hallway.
