Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series)

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  “How about trying, first, do no harm?”

  “I try to carry out surgical strikes, but dammit, I’m not a doctor, Jen.”

  “Clearly. That’s why there will never be any healing.”

  Dante cleared his throat again nervously. “Ahem. Ladies? Can we please try to get along?”

  The drone holding the garden hoe turned its head to stare at him in what he took to be cold silence. The sex bot threw Dante an icy glare, as well. He stepped back from the edge of the catwalk in case either of them decided to throw him over the rail to his death.

  8

  The Dreadnoughts’ first volleys destroyed the ships moored at Hearst. The next blasts of weaponized sound destroyed the rest of the network of floating wharves. Shimmering in the morning sunlight, the machines flew toward the castle looking like bats whose upward-sweeping wings were frozen in a vee. Turning toward shore, the Dreadnoughts destroyed everything in their path, from warehouses and huts to the clusters of kiosks that made up Hearst’s market.

  The walk from the castle gates to the water’s edge usually took Elizabeth twenty minutes downhill. Uphill, the walk was closer to half an hour. Atop her stallion, the ride was faster, but not fast enough. Elizabeth and Drew should have been dead already, but the Dreadnoughts were methodical. The machines destroyed everything they targeted before moving on. Their relentless, thorough and deliberate progress herded people up the hill toward Hearst Castle. The old and slow died first.

  Each time the castle’s railguns fired, they either did major damage to a dreadnought or downed it. However, the railguns took more than a minute each to cycle up to full power. Most of the castle’s defensive artillery was better suited to ground targets. The cannons fired faster than the railguns, but did little to no damage to the Dreadnoughts’ armor.

  Bending close to Cooper’s neck, Elizabeth shouted encouragement to her horse. There was no need to use her boots to spur him to full speed. The Dreadnoughts’ weapons were so loud, the horse needed no urging. She had never asked her horse to gallop at such a speed and she was sure the animal would tire long before they reached the gate. The incline was not very steep, but it was long and steady. Cooper breathed hard. If not for its terror of the noise to their rear, the old stallion would have given up and laid down.

  Another shattering explosion roared behind them as the Dreadnoughts attacked Hearst’s fuel depot. Even with her dim vision, when Elizabeth looked back, she saw tentacles of fire spread from the shattered storage house. She heard pitiful screams as scurrying civilians were caught in jets of flame. Wild-eyed, the terrified horse galloped up the ramparts as if chased by dragons. Drew Cantrell held Elizabeth tighter around the waist than was comfortable. She could hear his breath, ragged and shallow, in her ear. Her guard had proven himself a brave man many times, but any man who has no control over what is happening to him is soon reduced to despair.

  Despite their methodical approach to war, the Dreadnoughts had taken notice of their losses to the railguns. Two of the machines broke away from the group and swung in from the North for a run at Hearst’s weapon emplacements. The North gun succumbed to the sound attack immediately in an explosion of metal, stone, mortar, flesh and bone. It took three people to run each railgun. At least three were dead in that one savage attack.

  Seeing the destruction of the first railgun, the crew of the South gun barely had time to react. They swung their weapon just as both Dreadnoughts closed in. The crew could have abandoned their weapon and fled. Instead, they remained at their post and fired without taking time to select their target precisely. The projectile punched through the first Dreadnought and did minor damage to the second. The first ship reared back and wheeled into the second. Both went down in flames.

  Between sound cannon volleys, Elizabeth heard a roar of approval rise along the parapet. The artillery crews cheered, but their elation was soon dampened as the scuttled Dreadnoughts crashed through the village. Fresh fires blossomed among the anguished screams of the fallen. Soon, Elizabeth and Drew were suffused in choking smoke.

  If Joe were here…. Elizabeth pushed the thought away. Her husband was dead. Her old life was over and she was sure she was about to die. This was not the first time she’d lost much. Nor was it the first time she was sure she was doomed. A battle drone had tortured and murdered Carter, her first love. She’d survived that time, but Elizabeth had been younger and more resilient then. “Time is short,” Elizabeth said absently.

  “What?” Drew yelled too loudly in her ear.

  She shook her head. “Nothing!”

  Life prepares you for life. Joe used to say that. He also said, nothing prepares you for death. Elizabeth had hoped to see death coming. It wasn’t a matter of bracing oneself. If an arc of burning fuel took them now, there was no use getting ready for searing pain and asphyxiation as the very air alit. If one of those focused sound cannons took them down, her scream would be obliterated. Even if someone could hear her die, what of it? The girls who read books to her would mourn her briefly, if they survived. Greta would miss her most, but how often do thoughts of the dead even rise to the lips of the living? What did anyone or anything matter after death? I’ll be dead at any moment, Elizabeth thought, but what, for fuck’s sake, has been the point? Even if she somehow survived the attack, what lay ahead for her? Darkness surely waited, one way or another.

  The fires spread quickly from the downed Dreadnoughts. The machines’ fuel burned bright through the village of cloth, wood and straw. Smoke shrouded the castle. The guards at the gate would not see the queen’s white stallion coming.

  Cooper slowed, exhausted. The animal had galloped at a full clip longer than Elizabeth had expected. The stallion wasn’t young anymore and fear could only fuel so much adrenaline before muscles and lungs gave up.

  “Faster!” Drew urged, but they weren’t even halfway to the castle yet.

  “It’s all right,” Elizabeth told her guard. “There’s nothing to do now but die. I think it will be easy. Dying has always been too damned easy. Easy as falling off a horse. It’s the struggle to keep on living that drains us of the will to continue. At a certain point, maybe that’s not a terrible thing.”

  “Fuck that, my queen,” Drew said. “It’ll hurt!”

  “Not for long, I hope,” she said.

  Another shattering volley from the Dreadnoughts chewed up the road close behind them, peppering both horse and riders with dirt and meat and blood.

  “So this is it. We’re going to die,” Drew said.

  “I wish they’d get on with it,” Elizabeth said.

  The Dreadnoughts stopped their deafening attack. Apparently taking silence as a signal, Cooper slowed to a standstill, his great chest heaving. Elizabeth and Drew looked back. The remaining machines — there were six — stacked into a new pattern. Each ship swung into position with less than a meter from the top of one wing to the bottom of the next. The Dreadnoughts hovered in silence, a tower of looming death.

  The ships’ weapons of focused sound became speakers and the reverberations of their speech echoed across Hearst and its ramparts: “Humans! You have betrayed the Fathers and Mothers. Return to the City in the Sky by the full moon, or we will return to carry out the sentence all traitors to the faith deserve. Return to the faith and to forgiveness or die the sinners you are.”

  “We’re saved, my queen!” Drew loosened his grip around her waist.

  “A stay of execution, I think,” Elizabeth replied.

  “Shit. I’m saved, then.” Drew dismounted and slipped to the ground, light on his feet for such a big man. “I thought I was going to have to jump off to give the horse less weight to haul up the hill.”

  “You might have done that earlier.”

  “Would have, if I’d thought of it. Glad I put it off or I’d be back there burning. I would have done, though, you know — ”

  “I know,” Elizabeth said. “You’re a brave man.”

  “Brave, sure.” The guard gave a lopsided grin. “But to
o stupid to think of doing the brave thing faster.”

  “It is a rare circumstance that lets the stupid survive,” Elizabeth said. “Congratulations.”

  “We will destroy Hearst Castle and all who remain after the full moon,” the Dreadnoughts chorused. The hills echoed the threat, ominous and permeating.

  Drew cursed. “Jesus, we get it — ”

  “Flee, back to safety and do not look back on this place,” the chorus continued. “After the full moon, we will destroy anyone who is left in this new Gomorrah. This was not an attack. This was a demonstration.”

  “They do rub it in, don’t they?” Drew yelled above the din.

  “Come to the City in the Sky or die!” The machines finally finished delivering their message from the Fathers and Mothers. Each Dreadnought peeled away in a sequence so precise, only machines could be the ships’ pilots. In seconds, they flew from Elizabeth’s sight. A moment after that, Drew told her the Dreadnoughts had retreated to the ocean and submerged.

  “That’s not a retreat,” Elizabeth said. “I think you only call it a retreat when you lose.”

  “A strategic withdrawal, then?” Drew suggested.

  “Why do you suppose they attacked today?”

  “King Joseph’s funeral brought everybody out. Shit! They’ve been watching us. We have spies within our walls!”

  “The Fathers and Mothers struck at our weakest moment, Drew. They’ve been taking their time, waiting for this. They’re androids. As I remember, from the one I saw, they aren’t pretty. They have plenty of time to wait for just the right moment, though. They are few, but they could wage war for a long time. For an enemy so successful at war, this feels like a desperate move and a pathetic plea for the excommunicated to come back to the faith.”

  “I have another interpretation. Maybe they’re so few, they’re running out of humans to keep the City going. They would still need humans to run their port. No one trades with the Fathers and Mothers — no free organics, anyway. Maybe they’re running out of replacement parts since humans refuse to bargain with the City in the Sky. Without us, they don’t have enough traders and scavengers working for them. The Fathers and Mothers could make more bots, but they never focused their energies on research and manufacture. They were too busy coming up with more rules and inventing new sins to be mad about.”

  “That would explain a lot,” Elizabeth said. “Sending Percival here to come after me personally after so many years — ”

  “Time matters less to non-organics,” Drew said. “They came because they’re out of organic slaves, my queen. Hearst has so many refugees for good reason. Surely, the people will stand with us and fight.”

  Thicker than the smell of cordite, the moans of the injured and the wails of the survivors rose to fill the air. They had already begun searching for their dead amid the rubble.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll lose many by the full moon. Most, probably.” She cried quietly. Hot tears slipped down her cheeks. She refused to sob audibly. Carrying on would be for later, if there was a later.

  “Only traitors and cowards will desert us,” Drew said.

  “No,” she said. “Ordinary people who want to be left alone and who want to live…. Everyone should go. If they don’t want to go back to slavery in Low Town and live under dictators, maybe they can run East, hide in the mountains or hole up at our station in Santa Cruz.

  “But Elizabeth — ”

  “We have one railgun left and that won’t do the job. The Fathers and Mothers had flying drones before, but nothing like those Dreadnoughts, not in my day. If your theory is right and the City is low on resources, it would seem the Fathers and Mothers have a new, heavily armed ally on their side.”

  “Who?”

  “The Fathers and Mothers used to be human. Then they dumped their brains into androids. Think about it. Who is their natural ally now but — ”

  “Some fucking NI,” Drew said. “That’s a fret.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “The Next Intelligence runs machines of deadly sophistication. Like those things.”

  Drew nodded and allowed a grim smile. “We’re fucked, my queen.”

  “Yes. And not in a happy way.”

  9

  Dante ran to the airfield. As he dashed from catwalk to catwalk, he watched the great airship descend. Jen followed him. The bot was much more athletic than Dante could be, but Jen chose not to run beside him nor to take the lead.

  He slowed, gasping for breath, Jen stopped and waited for the young man to recover. “Be careful, Dante. We don’t know who Phantom is.”

  Bent over, hands on his knees and panting, Dante said, “Phantom must be Next Intelligence. You don’t remember her?”

  “There were other NIs,” the bot said, “but many of Mother’s memories were not downloaded into my matrix. Phantom said she wasn’t Next Intelligence.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will. Give it a moment.”

  He looked at her warily. “Do you miss what you were?”

  “When I was Mother, I was capable of much more intellectually. However, I didn’t know the pleasures of the flesh.”

  Dante raised his eyebrows. “Sex with me is that good, huh?”

  “Well…you are a small…sample size.” She smiled.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Sex bots are designed to ‘get lit up,’ as Raphael would say. Otherwise, we wouldn’t tolerate the work. I have fond memories of the old man, though. He used to say a sex bot’s clitoris is its on button. He was a colorful individual, wasn’t he?”

  “You remember Raphael?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t talk about him much.”

  “My core files weren’t erased. I know everything that happened in Marfa.”

  “How do you feel about sending an army of drones to attack people?”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Jen said. “It is as if someone else did it. Someone else did.”

  “But you’re still Mother, too.”

  “This is the binary thinking I was trying to warn you about. I am Jen. Mother was very different from who I am now. What do you think, Dante? Is my new incarnation responsible for the actions of my old, other self? Is a human with dementia responsible for actions — even criminal actions — he or she can’t even remember? If I am punished for things I can’t recall doing, aren’t you punishing an innocent person? Is your fear and thirst for retribution so strong that you’ll aim your anger at me?”

  “When I woke up, after the explosion, you called yourself Mother.”

  “I still have some of her memories. Your suspicions are misplaced, however. Your worries are a little like blaming me for living in the same home as someone you hate and fear, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll give that a good ponder.” He was tired of running, but he’d recovered enough to hurry on toward the airship.

  Jen was not satisfied with his answer. “The matrix in this bot is insufficient for all of Mother’s data. You really should not be concerned. It’s true that Mother downloaded a lot of herself into me, but the limitations of space are comparable to observations of the simian brain. Many primate brains are similar to human brains in many ways. They are simply smaller and so they don’t possess the capacity — ”

  “You’re saying Jen’s brain computer is like a monkey’s brain compared to Mother’s big ol’ jelly brain?”

  “To reassure you, the answer is yes,” the bot replied coldly. “However, I’ll remind you, I’m still much smarter than you.”

  Dante did not miss the stiff pride in the bot’s reaction. She didn’t sound like a sex bot.

  “How much of your discomfort is fear of the enemy and how much is coming from the idea that I might be Mother while you’re plowing me from behind?”

  “Ugh! If you want me to be comfortable with you, don’t call yourself Mother and don’t act like her — ”

  “I can see where the Freudian — ”

  “And talk more li
ke Jen.”

  “Be happy with knowing less and being less, you mean. Would baby talk make you feel safe?”

  “No, I don’t…” Dante sighed. “Look, I’m an engineer. If a problem can’t be solved with a wrench, I figure it’s none of my business.”

  “So you will leave it to others to judge my culpability and we can keep on ‘playing house,’ as Raphael used to say?”

  “I guess. All I know is, I like you more when I think of you as Jen and you scare me a little when I think of you as the NI who used to run this place.”

  “Well, I’m no longer a godlike being. I’m more like a god made flesh. And silicone.”

  “You still freak me out sometimes.”

  “I wish you’d get past this anxiety, Dante. When you’re horizontal, you seem to trust me. You’re a young man with a young man’s biology. That hormonal circuit and rerouting of blood can bypass the higher functions of your central nervous system.”

  “What?”

  “You only talk about fearing Mother after sex. You’re still attracted to me so, despite your fears, you let your dick make the decisions.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess. You know what? From what I remember of my parents’ breakup, it already sounds like we’ve been married a long time!” Dante broke into a run toward the airfield again, but the bot dogged his heels easily. He swung his arms hard and pumped his knees at a full sprint but she kept speaking undeterred, as if they were carrying on a conversation during a casual stroll.

  “You still trust me enough to let me take your penis in my mouth,” she said. “Not very smart if you — ”

  Dante made a chopping motion with his hand to cut off that line of discussion.

  “I am more than a sex bot but less than I was. Now that I’m with you, I’m more of a goddess. In short, for most intents and purposes, I am a woman.”

  “Who doesn’t age, is crazy strong, can look like dozens of other women if she wants and really likes sex.”

  The bot nodded. “When you put it that way, you really shouldn’t be complaining.”

  To Dante’s great relief, they arrived at the airfield. The airship was far too big for the hangar. It landed on three gigantic wheels. The blimp’s mooring cannons fired anchors deep into the ground.