by Sara King
“Anna says there’s interesting equipment in the Lockbox she’d like me to bring back,” Doberman said.
“Then take the muskies out with those fancy Kelthari cannons I gave you. A few hundred terawatts of sheer awesomeness would make those beasties sit down and think about what they’ve done, even if they are Aashaanti-base tech.”
In Doberman’s mind, a few hundred terawatts would be more likely to blow a hole through the side of the building, as well as the neighboring hangar, the forest, the mountain, and eventually incinerate the atmosphere itself and deflate the Orbital beyond, but he didn’t bother mentioning it. The Kelthari cannon was simply going to be a last resort. Quad had done other…interesting…things to him in the last six hours, and he was itching to try them out.
So, apparently, was Quad. “But look on the bright side,” Quad said. “They’re letting you go first!”
At the same time, Milar said, “All right, robot, you’ve got ten minutes to try and get us a foothold inside Rath, then the rest of us are going to get in there and start the assault.”
Both Magali and Jersey looked uncomfortable—neither had had a chance to tell their friend that Doberman knew full well that they were trying to get him killed.
“Ten minutes,” Doberman said, immediately starting a clock. “And if I pacify the compound in that time?”
Milar glanced at his two friends and snorted. “Yeah, right. You pacify the compound in ten minutes, I’ll get down on my knees and give you Penny.”
Doberman frowned. “Penny?”
“Penny’s his gun,” Magali said, gesturing at the laser pistol on Milar’s hip. “Best one on Fortune.”
“Oooooooh, sweet!” Quad cried. “One of the original Laserats! I haven’t seen one of those up close before! Can you get a better look?”
“Can I see it?” Doberman asked, holding out a hand.
“Blow off, robot,” Milar said. He jerked a thumb to the compound quickly coming into view below them. “Go make an impression for us. We’ll be sitting right here, guarding the ship, waiting for your signal.” Already, anti-spacecraft armaments were firing at them, their explosions peppering the hull.
As soon as the craft dropped under the cloud cover, Milar came up behind him, planted a boot in his back, and said, “Sweet dreams, robot.” A moment later, the colonist kicked, giving Doberman the option of jumping from the plane, countering the momentum by hurling Milar from the plane, or taking the man’s leg off at the knee. Deciding to play along, Doberman let Milar shove him from the plane. He dropped several hundred feet to land in a crouched position, shattering the tarmac on impact.
Instead of continuing its descent to wait for him, as promised, the craft maintained a hover for a few moments, then lifted back out of sight.
“Well, that’s kind of crappy,” Quad noted. Then, as if the abandonment of their comrades was nothing new, Quad’s excitement immediately came back. “Hey! There’s your first target! Looks like a Gryphon. Try the metraload omnibeams! Be sure you get the movement right or it won’t fire!”
Doberman, who had never heard of a metraload omnibeam, had to take a moment to consult the manual that Quad had thoughtfully uploaded with his installations. Finding the proper weapon, he extruded the tiny, two-millimeter-wide muzzle from under his wrist, pointed while lifting his other arm up in an arc, and fired.
The Gryphon exploded in a thousand tiny fragments that drove themselves into the concrete walls on all sides, while those particles not caught by something solid launched several miles in all directions. Doberman grunted as a piece of Gryphon shrapnel lodged in his neck, but was stopped by the armored plating Quad had introduced that night.
“Yeehaw!” Quad screamed in his ear. “I thought that would work!”
“Wait,” Doberman hesitated, frowning. “Thought?” He yanked the piece of shrapnel free and immediately his skin healed over it, much faster than his previous nanocomps had done before.
“Well, technically, you’re the first one to test it in real life,” Quad said, “but I tested it in my head already, so it should be good.”
Doberman would have made his qualms with that particular setup known, but a moment later, a pack of seven Gryphons sped around the corner at approximately a hundred and fifteen miles an hour.
“Give them the Uncle pulse!” Quad cried.
Again, Doberman took a nanosecond to consult the manual, then extended a tiny, rigid transmitter the size of a human hair from his forefinger. He pointed it and fired.
Nothing happened.
“The pose!” Quad cried. “Strike the pose!”
“Is spinning really necessary?” Doberman demanded. He didn’t like the fact that it put his back to his enemies.
“It’s part of the move!” Quad shrieked. “You have to spin, spin!”
Wondering at the technological elements that made spinning necessary, Dobie made an elegant dual swipe with his arms according to the diagrams included in his manual, ending with both flat palms perpendicular to the ground, facing his opponents.
The six-foot-wide arc of ultraviolet light that followed blew Doberman off his feet and onto his back, leaving him blinking up at the dawn-streaked sky.
“Huh,” Quad said.
Collecting himself, Doberman sat up, having to switch to a sonic view because the blast had fried both of his artificial retinas.
Doberman’s would-be opponents were nowhere to be seen. Instead, a burning, three-foot ditch ran the distance between Doberman and where he had last seen them, with a massive, blackened crater where seven robots had once been.
“That was supposed to be bigger,” Quad said, sounding disappointed. “Oh well, the Akithuri Quadrino will be more impressive.”
On a hunch, Doberman cut power to all of his new installations by a magnitude of ten.
“Heeey, what’d ya do that for?” Quad whined. “You haven’t tried the Quadrocity yet.”
“I think perhaps we need to redefine the parameters for ‘close quarters combat,’” Doberman offered.
“Huh? Why? They were close enough.”
“I will be indoors, and I want to keep as much of the building intact as possible,” Dobie told him. “The rebels plan to use it once they’ve removed the Coalition forces.”
“Oh,” Quad said. “Well, you didn’t mention that part. Okay. Reset energy allowances to one six-thousandth. That should bring it to closer to what you’re looking for.”
Doberman complied. He fired a test-blast into the concrete bunker beside him, this time leaving only a blackened two-foot hole bored through the solid rock. He dialed the energy down again by half.
Four more patrols of Gryphons came racing from around the closest two buildings. Immediately following them were another eight.
“Power the cuttlesilk, Quadratine field and light claws!” Quad cried. “And crank up the speed! I didn’t give you that planadium-carbide lacing and those microtec shock absorbers for nothing!”
Bracing himself, Doberman activated the foot-long blue energy claws, which became three scythes of light shooting from between his knuckles on each hand, then charged into the fray.
“Think it’s dead yet?” Milar asked the silent cargo bay. “It’s been two minutes.”
“It was just a Ferris,” Jersey said.
“It didn’t act like a Ferris,” Magali said.
“There were at least six hundred battle robots guarding that station,” Milar said, popping the safety off his gun. “Call in the troops for the attack. It’s dead.”
“Give it another three minutes,” Panner insisted. “There are four attack-grade altrameter muskers in there that went on auto-alert when Anna killed off most of their base personnel. It’ll probably take him at least six minutes to get that far into the compound.”
“It’s not getting into the compound,” Milar snorted. “It’s a Ferris.”
“That’s Anna Landborn’s Ferris,” Panner replied calmly. “And it knows we planned to kill it. I’d rather not take any ch
ances on it surviving.”
“He’s right,” Jersey said. “Anna’s dangerous. It’ll be bad enough the bot died under our watch. It’d be even worse if it survives.”
“Oh, can it, Glitter,” Milar snapped. “I’ll strangle the little shit myself if she opens her mouth.”
“We wait,” Magali said.
Milar sighed deeply, but leaned his head back against the wall of the cargo bay and closed his eyes.
A moment later, on the overhead speakers, Drogire said, “Uh, guys? You need to see what Peter just hacked his way into. Like, right now. Right fucking now.”
Frowning at the panic in the man’s voice, Milar lunged up the stairs and led them at a jog into the cockpit, where Drogire Myr and Peter Green were watching the viewscreen, its image hijacked from a ground-based camera that had zoomed in on a frothing mass of rioting figures on the tarmac of the base airfield. It took Milar a startled second to realize it wasn’t a riot—it was a battle, and one side had only one fighter.
“Oh my God,” Magali whispered. She seemed to be the only one who hadn’t lost the ability to speak. Milar himself could only stare.
A mass of robots—several hundred, at least—were ringing what looked like a cross between a young children’s classic version of a Jedi Wolverine and an ancient Predator Apocalypso, who, with glowing claws of eye-searing blue light, was cleanly slicing his way through the sea of knives, armaments, and explosives around it, creating a pile of bodies for those on the outside to climb in order to get to it. Every once in a while, it would strike a pose and point a finger, and a violet arc of energy would blast a pathway through the surrounding robots, leaving a swath of total nothingness in its wake.
A couple times, the robot pushed his fists outward at shoulder-height and a massive concussive blast threw everything backward in a four hundred foot radius, leaving those who had stood closest to Anna’s pet to fall back to earth as crystalized scraps of metal to pelt rooftops or to shatter like ice against concrete walls. And then, as if standing upon a pile of its dead foes wasn’t enough, the robot began to levitate in what looked like some sort of enormous electrical storm and lifted his arms to the sky as lightning slammed down on his enemies from all around.
“Uh.” Milar wasn’t sure who said it. All of their mouths were hanging open.
“That’s fake,” Jersey said finally.
Peter, whose mouth was open, just slowly shook his head in silence. He didn’t look capable of speech.
Then, like some demon from the Pit, the robot began breathing balls of fire that melted swaths of his opponents into bubbling orange puddles.
“That’s fake,” Jersey repeated. “C’mon, guys.”
Peter just shook his head again. Pan was agape.
A few moments later, the robot struck a final, epic pose, and its last opponent succumbed to what looked like an internal explosion that turned every single piece of its foe’s body into raw blue-white light that arced in eye-searing comets across the dawn sky, setting nearby shrubs on fire when they landed. Then the mysterious electrical storm dispersed and Anna’s robot drifted back down to gently come to rest upon the smoking pile of robot bodies. There was a moment of contemplative silence, in which the robot calmly and fastidiously straightened its black silk suit—which was totally unharmed by the combat—then carefully began picking its way down the slopes of the slain, its desert combat boots standing out as pale splotches against the charred and blackened bodies. As Milar and the others continued to gawk, Anna’s robot leisurely strolled into the Coalition compound unmolested.
“This,” Magali whispered, “doesn’t leave this ship.”
Milar nodded dumbly with the rest of them.
“I still don’t see what the purpose of the levitation was,” Dobie said, once the other robots were dead. “It left me trapped in the air, unable to maneuver.”
“It looks cool,” Quad replied.
“But it was useless,” Dobie reiterated. He flicked a few metal particles from his impenetrable cuttlesilk suit and straightened his cuffs. “It left me unable to position myself for further attacks.”
“But that was the point. That was the attack. You turned yourself into a superconductor connecting us to another dimension—I used an interesting one I found that seems to contain nothing but massive cosmic clouds of electricity—and all around you, your enemies were becoming nodes to shunt that voltage into our own dimension. Only works on metal or biologicals with impure water components, though. If we ever face one of Apocalypso’s stone golems, we might be in trouble. That’s what the Quadinator was for.”
Doberman frowned as he manually entered the codes to gain access to the first wing of the compound. “You connected me to another dimension in order to electrocute a few robots?”
“I was actually trying to recreate the legendary powers of the great Storm,” Quad said. “It was this human back on Earth who could control the weather and fly around with lightning at her beck and call. Oh, and Zeus. There was a guy called Zeus who did it, too.”
Doberman cocked his head. “Storm and Zeus were both mythological figures created by human storytellers to entertain the public.”
Quad laughed like he didn’t believe him. “Yeah, and Jedi Wolverine isn’t real, either.”
Recognizing a children’s ultrasim program currently run by the Coalition entertainment corporation, Doberman frowned. “No, Jedi Wolverine is a children’s holobook conception.”
“Nooooo,” Quad said sarcastically, “I’ve seen him. He does all sorts of cool stuff, mostly on Sunday mornings, though sometimes late on Thursday nights. Did you know he regenerates even when his flesh has been cauterized by Triton Jedi light-sabers?”
“Jedi Wolverine,” Dobie argued, “doesn’t exist. His powers are imposs—” It was then that Doberman realized he had to explain the difference between truth and fiction to a child who had made the fiction truth. As that circular logic began tumbling through his head, Dobie had to quickly reallocate processes before something collapsed.
“Jedi Wolverine once punched a hole in a sun,” Quad enthusiastically went on. “I’ve been thinking about how he did that, and I think if I can turn your arm into a self-contained mesatonic blast with a directional orientation and hooked you up to forty-seven Aashaanti power crystals, it might manage to punch through the plasma of an average yellow dwarf, and its own inherent antigravity field should neutralize the sun’s gravitational pull so it can burst out the other side. Though I can’t figure out how to contain the explosion so you don’t lose an arm and most of your face in another dimension. Still trying to work out that part. Forty-seven crystals isn’t enough power to punch through if I contain it, but forty-eight would tip the scales and rip the fabric of Time in a three light-year radius, so can’t do that either.”
Doberman stopped in the hallway, frowning. “Jedi Wolverine is a character in a holobook.”
“Yeah,” Quad said. “Somebody had to write down everything he does.”
“A fictional character in a holobook,” Dobie insisted.
“No he’s not,” Quad said stubbornly. “I see him every Sunday.”
“On the holovid,” Doberman insisted. He glanced around him at the exceedingly empty halls. It was almost as if Quad’s beacon had drawn every robot in the area, not just the closest ones. He did a quick scan through the computer to confirm he was totally alone, then frowned. “You could’ve simply fried all those robots, rather than drawing them to me and making them fight me, couldn’t you?”
“Sure I could’ve,” Quad said, sounding confused. “Why?”
They were definitely going to have to work on their pre-op communication. “No reason,” Doberman said. “What about the altrameter muskers? Can you simply disable those?”
Quad giggled in his ear. “Are you kidding? That’s gonna be the most fun yet! Those things are huge! And when they activate, they make this really cool roaring sound as their blades start spinning. It’s sweet! Did you know that they carry monomolecula
r tovlar katanas made for AlphaGen special forces against the Tritons, during the war? They’re the only swords in the world that can cut through anything and never break, and they’re actually repurposed Aashaanti bots running them!”
Doberman had known that, and thinking about it was making him uncomfortable.
“I see,” Doberman said, pausing at the entrance to the next—ultra secure—wing. He wasn’t exactly relishing the idea of going up against four of the most fearsome sentry robots the Coalition had to offer. Perhaps they could simply avoid them altogether. “So what are they guarding? Anything important?”
“Just some jail cells and some below-average Aashaanti salvage,” Quad said. “They’re real proud of it, though.” Doberman could almost feel the kid’s shrug. “But hey, you gotta promise to bring me back a musker katana. Those things are atom-locked monomolecular razors—you can hack at a platinum beam all day and just take chunks out of the beam. Mom would love it! She could use it to cut watermelons. Would slice through the cutting board, too, though, so she’ll have to be careful.”
“None of this cool tech you installed will last very long if it gets cut in half,” Dobie reminded his patron.
“Why would it get sliced in half?” Quad asked curiously.
Dobie sighed inwardly and entered the entrance code. As the door slid open and two huge altrameter muskers powered up with a mechanical roar on the other side, Quad cried out in glee, “There they are! Claws! Claws!!” Dobie followed their rise with his gaze, their twelve ton bodies towering nine feet into the air, eight tovlar swords beginning their whirring dance in the narrow hall while explosive armaments deployed from the sides of their blocky ‘heads.’
“You are not authorized to access this facility, Unit Ferris,” the lead musker rumbled. “You will now be terminated in accordance with Section 4, Part 23, Paragraph 11 of the Triton Initiative.”
“Bring it on, you clunky twenty-ninth century scrap heaps!” Quad shrieked in delight. “Dobie, get them!”
Sighing, Dobie activated his claws.
