by Johan Kalsi
They were coming in from both ways.
The door bar lifted, and the usually satisfying sound of expensive micros clacking like magnets to the hydraulic bar, then shattering as it thundered open was instead a cold comfort. The killers were getting in.
While leaning forward, both hands balanced in front of him, with the pistol zeroed on the brick wall, Dayna backed himself into a corner. There was no cover. The room was small. He was doomed.
It was a good place to die. With no options, there was no chance of cowardice. With no options, there was no chance of error. He wondered if he would get a carving of himself at the Morale Center, or just a name plate. He would be pleased with either.
The door swung inward. A short, heavily armored gunning cannon rolled in and Dayna nailed it with a shot before recognizing it. The shot cracked its targeting sight. Dayna was close enough to take a run at toppling it. The thing weighed as much as three men, but it was top-heavy.
It trained its turret in Dayna’s direction, but twitched back and forth, unable to lock onto its target. It cooly settled into a steady scanning pattern.
Then the octopod stepped in behind the cannon bot. The thing, which, instead of legs, stood on a stacked set of telescoping tiers called buckets, had colored stripes running along its sides, a barreled chest, and living, glowing head full of tentacles. It stared at the “soldier skull”, eye-to-eye. It did not strike its tendrils against the face, nor consume the bombs. It stood, completely frozen in place, staring at the skull of Dayna’s golem.
The trap had failed.
Dayna fired at the octopod’s head and hit. The monstrosity flinched and raised a hand – a mechanical prosthetic covered in living tissue - in defense. Dayna shot, took a step forward, and shot again. The gunning cannon huffed mechanically, locked in on Dayna, and returned a hot spray of gas. Dayna staggered back, pulling the trigger quickly now in a vain attempt to discharge everything he had.
His arms paralyzed, his head cloudy, the room spinning, Dayna fell down, helpless. His throat constricted.
The saw burst through the wall and sent a spray of of dust into the room. It worked its way up to the ceiling. The saw stopped for a moment, repositioned on the other side, and then burst through again, at the top of the new portal that was being cut.
The octopod, still mesmerized by the golem, put his hands to the wounds on his head. It stared curiously at the translucent trickle running down his fleshy fingers.
Dayna, lying on the floor, blacked out momentarily. The cannon bot approached him, and he was helpless to stop it.
The concrete cut-out of bricks crashed down into the room, filling the room with a choking cloud of dust. He still could not lift himself or even his gun from the floor.
In through the new opening strode a conventional “medic-murderer”– a bipedal scramblebot with detached weapons. With fabricated shields, joints, greaves and wrap-around optics and scanning wheels, the only two things unique about it were that in its ninth hand it held a saw instead of a dartmissile launcher, and, far more strangely, attached around its neck, a cape hung down from its shoulders.
It scanned for Dayna, found him and – completely unnecessarily, cocked its multi-faceted head to face its fallen prey.
“Hello,” it said again.
The machine’s multiple arms clacked noisily, swirling the dusty air as its utility pincers poked at the fallen man. Without a single rip in Dayna’s clothes, the scramblebot held fast to his body and lifted him up so as to rest his back against the wall. The biped softly popped its hip joints to sit with its legs crisscrossed on the floor. Dayna blanched. Murder-medics had programming and devices that allowed them to serve as the enemy’s most effective torturers of humans.
“Your respiration is returning,” said the scramblebot. It sounded as if its voice was echoing through a loose flap of waxed parchment. “Do not speak until you are comfortable.”
“Nice cape,” said Dayna, coughing.
“I’m glad you noticed. I wish to be distinguished. Thank you.”
“Kind of crazy, don’t you think? Makes backfiring against an attack a bit tricky, eh?”
“It moves with the arms. Of course I don’t feel it, so it hardly obstructs me should I ever need to fire behind me again.”
The thing’s calm conversation had the weirdest glitch he’d ever encountered.
“So,” said Dayna. “My vest. I’m not going to set it off. Just so you know.”
“Of course you won’t. You don’t even have one. Tell me, have you actually bluffed one of us into System Override that way, or is that just an old soldiers’ tale?”
Dayna winced when he attempted to move his body. The cannon’s gas hadn’t been lethal, just particularly unpleasant stuff.
“Chatty,” he said, grimacing.
The scramblebot had its surgical array exposed on its left thigh just above a class band that looked – in the odd machine code way – like it formed the letters OVRES. Hot cutters, scalpels, forceps, needles; the typical torturer’s assortment. The machines had been doing it for years, and never for information. The only reason they ever “cut” anyone and let him live was to depress human morale back home.
Dayna had no significant information to share that he could conjure. He prayed that ‘Ovres’ didn’t know that.
Ovres indicated, with an off-hand, the octopod that was still standing transfixed by the skull. “I recognized your facial expression when he didn’t take your bait. Astonishment, I believe?”
“You weren’t even in here yet.”
Ovres considered this for a second, and then said, “You are very aware of your surroundings. Oh clever man! I am linked of course, to Milton. He simply transmitted his view, of course. There. Color returns to your face. We’ll leave shortly, but allow me first to break the poor fellow’s spell. “
Ovres clacked as it rose again, and strode over to the golem that kept the octopod so enthralled. Dayna’s hearing had been suppressed by the earlier sawing but he was almost certain he heard a soft slurping coming from the monster’s head.
Milton? These things are naming each other?
The golem’s white eyes sparkled in the cloudy air. Ovres' arms moved with careful precision towards the sockets. With balance, the robot's pincers clicked quietly onto the rounded edges of each eye, and pulled them from the recesses. Just as carefully, Ovres rolled each glass ball into a damping tube inserted into its own torso.
The spell broken, the octopod launched forward quickly, its tentacles lashing at the skull. Ovres turned its entire torso toward Dayna -- as frivolous a thing as a surround-view robot could ever do -- and said, “See? --”
The octopod wrenched the skull from its trappings.
The room exploded, and Dayna lost his breath again as all went dark.
The last thing he saw was Ovres' contorted form hurtling toward him, a twist of metal and mass.
Dayna did not die. He only wished he had. He could not breathe. His muscles felt as if they were ripping from bone.
A cage of Ovres’ robotic arms surrounded him, and that cage was covered with a heavy cape. He felt like he was inside a makeshift tent. From his back, he looked up in the face of the scramblebot, but it was so covered in dust that he could see no robotic life, light or energy. The room, what he could see of it, was illuminated in dim and shadowy purple.
Long seconds later, Dayna realized that Lord Death had rumbled through the room, but had forgotten to take Dayna’s beaten husk of a body to the Terminal. Long minutes later, the pain leveled back down to a modest near-death sort of agony. It wasn't until a very long period of lying in Ovres' shadow that he realized:
Ovres had shielded him from the explosion.
He lay there for some time before he could move his head. Once he could, it was an effort just to nod on his faint emergency lamp.
It took him a long time to move his arms and legs, and each motion had pain, but he wasn’t going to die. Ovres remained motionless, its frame frozen mid-gan
gle. The cape was grimy and lightly pocked but not tattered. Shrapnel sprung from its outer side like prickles from a tine-burrower.
He coughed to clear his lungs.
There were chunks missing from the wall nearest where the golem had stood. No trace of it remained, aside from indistinguishable twists of steel. The cannonbot’s armor had kept it mostly intact, but a rupture split the surface, and aside from a component or two, it was unsalvageable as a machine: it had been blown through with dust and debris.
The octopod was an unusual mess. Bits of dripping, glowing purple trickled through dust on the floor, the walls, and a big blotch on the ceiling gave the room its strange light. Its face was gone, and its torso had split open from the stump of a neck like it had been struck with an axe.
The octopod base had survived in one piece, and Dayna assumed it had good salvage secured inside. He checked the lights at his shoulders, but they would not come on. No closer look at the materials would be possible. He’d do his ripping in the semi-dark, for as long as the dead thing’s fluids would shine.
As he began to pry around the octopod’s base, a flood of light blinded him, and the noisy clacking of a machine filled the stale air.
Dayna turned to see the blurry shadow of a backlit Ovres looming over him. He reached for a weapon that wasn’t there, and stepped into what he thought would be a coming attack.
“Ingenious!” said Ovres. “How on Whist did you think to do that?”
Dayna was shocked into civility. “Pardon?”
Ovres walked past him as if he wasn't there, its exhaust fans filtering the air and clearing it. A few surviving microbots had attached themselves to its cape, beginning the understaffed duties of textile repair. Ovres tilted its capsule-shaped head toward the remains of the octopod, scanning it from every angle.
“Remarkable. You must have secreted the bomb in the human skull casing. Did you anticipate that I had trained the octopod to resist its natural impulses? That I would remove your clever eyes only to miss the one inside? Impossible! You could not have known any of this.”
Dayna found the Movexan gun in the dust. Grabbing it from the floor, he tried to shake the grime off of it as he raised perpendicular to his shoulder. He leaned forward, praying against a backfire accident because of the dirt.
He didn't shoot. Ovres clearly didn't care that he was about to ping its transmitter cluster with a close range, potentially disrupting shot.
“Amazing,” Ovres continued. “How could you have adapted so swiftly? As you may know, this is really our first field action with a trained octopod. It really couldn't have gone worse, tactically. But still, of all the outcomes! They may name me to the Executive Council for this. They won't believe it. I hardly believe - oh, begging your pardon. You don't need to shoot at me. I assure you of this: you don't need to defend yourself from me.”
“To the contrary,” it said. “It is I who will now be protecting you.”
After sawing through a false wall, sealing it back up after slipping through, picking up the trail of Dayna's squad unit (without any help from Dayna, naturally) and marching through an old system of coal mines, Ovres asked him for the seventh time:
“Do you know that I need no information from you?”
Dayna tugged at his leash-collar but remained silent. He had thought about the question since the first time it had been asked. Although it was strange that a machine would express no desire to extract “information” from a human target, Dayna couldn’t figure out this new angle. Had Ovres’s kind adapted a new conversational interrogation method? Did the enemy now know about psychological “handling and breaking” of the human mind? Or did the robot have a glitch?
He had no idea, but he wasn’t about to feed the beast. He would keep his mouth shut tight.
“Well, I’m sure you are wondering why I don’t have you strapped to my chest to shield myself from attack by your would-be rescuers.”
Wrong. We’ve been nuking the body-snatchers first for almost a year now. Standard Operating Procedure.
“Of course, we began adapting to your new SOP systemwide, about six months ago. I’m surprised it took us so long. I decided to leash any prisoner right after the Fight at Dundaree. You are my first one since then! Can you imagine that?”
Dayna walked Ovres past a steeled pit trap without setting foot near its deceptive hologram top. It really was only effective against grinders, jangles and other tracked machines: they typically tore themselves to shreds on the inverted steel claws. A scramblebot would break its fall without much trouble, and probably had the balance to reverse out of danger upon the first hint of the trap.
“Not that I really consider you a prisoner, of course. You are free to go at any time. I mean that.”
Yeah, right. Unlock this cursed collar, then.
“Remarkable awareness on your part. You didn’t even hesitate as we passed that trap back there. Perhaps you know I wouldn’t have been harmed, but to not even try? To show no temptation at all? Remarkable reserve. It makes me wonder what more complicated hazards you may have for me ahead! Capital! Capital!”
Finally, a light source from something other than Ovres shone ahead. Descending a short ramp, they emerged from the tunnel into forest in a huge cavern. The trees were artificial, but a faithful replication of surface foliage. At least, that is what Dayna, who had never surfaced, had always believed.
There were long cold pools of water running between the trees and under the bluish mists in the air. From within some of the pools were lamps, casting refreshing ultraviolet and visible light to the ceiling. Dim lights lined some footpaths, but the natural light in the cavern ceiling that normally would be shining had been cloaked with smoke.
“Your people have a Nighttime,” said Ovres. “And they have made it so. Lead on, my friend.”
Ovres was aware. At least one of his own clocks must have been calibrated to Western Resistance Standard. It wasn’t night. Dayna’s people had just dimmed the lights. Dayna was poised to run as soon as the thump or modest whistle was incoming.
The pair entered a clearing, with Dayna, for once, pulling so slightly on the leash to trick Ovres into moving into an excellent kill zone.
Ovres stopped in between openings between three pairs of trees. It waved half of its arms.
“Hello, humans! I know that you consider me to be the ene—“
A big thump sounded, and the whistle of incoming was at once very slow and far too fast. A prismatic spray of anti-missile trackers burst from the glass in Ovres’s head and swatted the missile with a whack. It cracked open. Glass balls scattered.
The leash on Dayna’s collar had fallen limp. Dayna dove for a pool. As soon as he was submerged, he felt a great force, like a god's closed fist punching him from behind. His body rushed below water, his wind expelled. For an instant, he felt the eternal enveloping death of the water's grave. Then, he hit silt. Stricken with the energy of panic, he found himself able to right himself and push off the pool floor. He bobbed out of the water briefly and then his feet settled back to the floor. The pool was only up to his chin if he tilted his head back. Dayna gasped for air through flattened lungs. There were fallen, smoking trees on either side of him, providing him survival cover. He could see little else, and could only think small thoughts.
Tiptoes. Cough. Open Mouth. Inhale.
He heard a broadcast voice. It reminded him of the militia sergeant who used to wake him up hours before minedawn after driving to exhaustion in midnight training. He couldn't make anything out because of the noises in his own head.
He got his legs to tread water a little, and propelled himself toward the bank until he was on his knees in shallow water. He kept low and crawled over to a fallen tree. It was still warm and smouldering.
“...so by all means, go ahead and waste further resources on me. I am certain you will earn a commendation for it. But if you really want to get that rocket off this planet, you may want to reconsider.”
Chatty Ovres, still ratt
ling on, now in a firefight!
Dayna found a gap between the tree trunk and the water, and looked through. He had witnessed some surreal things in his military career, but nothing like this.
Ovres stood, cape tented, his arms defensively descended like a spider's legs around it. A circle of blasted trees lay fallen about.. Ovres had no weapons drawn save the entirely defensive prismatic spray. Bowl sized craters dotted the earth around him. The robot spoke as if the humans in the shadows trying to kill him were in fact harmless children.
“No doubt,” it continued, “you'll break my upgraded defenses soon enough and I'll be atomized and salvaged. You'll have a trophy of the great Forest Skirmish. Of course, your ammunition will be depleted, your trail here transmitted, and all sorts of grand plans for your rocket slaughtered in the crib. I'd like to propose something else entirely.”
The only tree still standing was a ceiling-to-floor, naturally occurring stone pillar. Its bark had been blasted off. The artificial husk was nowhere to be seen. The Scramblebot was fine.
“You may continue to fire at me and waste your resources,” said Ovres during a brief lull in concentrated fire.”It won't do you any good except...perhaps...to destroy me. I am sure you would prefer to spare your ammunition and take home a living prisoner.”
Ovres stood there in the smoking clearing with all arms raised. His shoulder defenses had little Energy left. Dayna's rescuers could neutralize Ovres with one more volley.
The robot continued. “But I'm sure that does not persuade you. What might persuade you is something that I have. It is the missing component you require for the rocket. Operation Crossbow, I believe you call it? I'm sorry. Perhaps that was to be classified information. In any case, with me you might be able to launch it.”
Dayna did not know how Ovres knew about the rocket, or its glaring deficiency. The realization that the enemy was fully aware of the secret project made him very uneasy.
Dayna was a trap master, so he had a sense of being on the wrong end of one. In a moment the guns would start up again and finish the job on Ovres. Whether Dayna remained in the safety of the fallen tree or stood up, he had to decide and act now.
