by Viola Grace
“What is all in here?”
“Projectiles, plasma blades, it all fits on my outer skin.”
She pulled off the chains and opened the parcel. “I suppose we had better get you ready for your big day.”
* * * *
Lido was relieved when her path took her toward the city but not to their inner gate. The large expanse of trees was a barrier between her and the freaky things that were calling themselves humans.
She identified the trees and eased past them so that she wouldn’t crush any that didn’t need to move.
“Why are you being so careful?”
“I spend my life trying to determine which plants will live here. Killing what doesn’t need to be killed is not my goal.”
“We could move faster if you were more direct.”
Lido smiled and knelt next to the stunted gathering of trees. “I am here. No need to move.”
With care and determination, she scooped up the trees and set them aside with their roots and dirt balls intact.
“Are you eager to return to your home?”
“I am eager to have it free and clear of the invaders. I want to get back to my plants.”
She pulled the chains, and the metal folder eased free of the ground. Lido removed the chains and flipped open the metal container that sealed the weapons.
“I hope that the memories are accurate. Getting this stuff into place is going to be tricky.”
“Let Padu’s memory guide you. He was pretty good at this.”
Lido grimaced and let the memories of the long-dead pilot swirl over her.
It was surreal to sit back and watch the memories take over, but Padu really was good at getting the weapons into place.
The plasma projectors were clipped onto the forearms, a long hollow column was clicked onto Cio’s back, small rocket launchers slid onto the wrists, and finally, the wings were carefully placed on the back. Lido could feel it as they slid into place and attached with a lock from Cio.
“You can look now, Lido. It is done.”
She looked down, and panels on the command center were now lit up. The connections from Cio to her nervous system for the new weapons were slowly coming on line, and Lido only had one thing to do.
“What are you doing?”
She smiled slightly. “I am putting the trees back. We were here, and we are about to leave our mark in other ways. Destroying the landscape isn’t one of them.”
“Aren’t you in a hurry?”
“Oh, we are going to make up the time now that I know how to run.”
Cio chuckled. “Good. I am eager to get into battle.”
Lido wasn’t eager, but when she stood Cio up and looked around, she knew that being close to the gate she would be the first to run, so she would find out if other bots were faster.
* * * *
Duel followed Myx, but when he turned northward, she continued eastward. Her memory was leading her and Kab right into the middle of a huge field of flowers.
“Aw, it is going to be a shame to mess up these flowers but better me than Lido. She’d cry her way through the dig.”
“She loves plants that much?”
Duel chuckled. “She does. We all do. Plants keep us fed, help us survive and give us oxygen and fuel.”
“You sound like you are repeating something.”
“We learn it in year one at the creche. We learn all of what we need to stay alive in that first year.”
Duel had Kab kneel, and she began to excavate the patch of flowers growing over the cache of weapons.
Between her memories, which had been donated by Aka, and the scanners telling her where to dig, she didn’t have any problem.
She put the edges of his palms together and scooped the flowers up before setting them to the side.
“Why are you being so careful with them? You aren’t the gardener.”
Duel grinned. “I know, but there is no reason to destroy what has grown on its own. Wait... what is that?”
She felt a small impact on one of Kab’s arms, and she focused her scanners to see it. A crimson bee was attacking her elbow.
“Well, that will never do. Give me a moment.” She was speaking to herself as she picked up the flowers and set them on her left instead of her right. The bee was still mad, but it returned to the particular cluster of flowers that it was seeking.
“Why did you waste time doing that?”
“The bees give us what we need, just as the flowers do. There is no reason to kill one.”
“It is a single bee.”
“Killing one will bring her sisters out of the hive when they smell her death pheromones. That will leave the brood undefended and at the mercy of the ambient temperature. They will die if their caretakers don’t return. If the hive has fought its way into the city walls and survived here, there is no reason to set their collapse in motion because I don’t want to turn left a little.” Duel continued moving the flowers, keeping the brilliant orange ones available for the bee.
As she worked, the field slowly filled with the bees from the three-story hive. She kept her focus on the dirt and pulling the weapons cache free.
Carrying it and standing up without crushing the bees was tricky, but Duel carefully managed to make it free of the flower meadow.
“Well, your mobility has certainly increased since you got the memories.” Kab seemed a little disgruntled.
“Yes, well, I will give you the history of my people and the bees one day. First, I need to get this stuff onto you so that your systems can charge the activators and run function tests.”
She set the wings on her back, and they slid up magnetic tracks before setting in place with a hard click.
Across the command deck, lights came on as the basic systems checks for the wings began. Kab was doing it automatically.
Long tubes were attached to his limbs, but they weren’t weapons. Not yet, anyway.
The blades were clicked on under his wrists, and when she looked down at the metal case again, she had it all.
“Well, I suppose we had better go.”
“The valley is under attack.”
“I know. Let’s go.”
Duel turned back toward the gates they had entered by, and she started to jog as the weapons integrated once again with Kab’s systems. She would be ready to fight in ten minutes.
Chapter Three
Hima walked with Nyvett and Xaia until the memory called her to the north. She could see the footprints of at least one other bot, but it continued far beyond where she was going.
“You are doing much better now. You are almost completely healed.”
She smiled. “Yes. They worked on me before we found out that the city folk are treacherous bastards.”
“I would say so. My nanites are working on the altered DNA that they imprinted you with.”
Hima blinked. “What?”
“There is a very strong rewriting sequence that I am battling. I am winning, do not get me wrong, but the programming was designed by someone who wasn’t on Hera.”
She looked down at her arm accusingly. “Damn. That little...”
“I doubt she wrote it. It probably goes into everything that they use if your memory is as exact as it seems. It is a primer that loosens your DNA chains.”
“I am speechless.”
“I truly doubt that.”
She snorted and looked around. The cache should have been around there somewhere.
“Look down.”
She bent forward, and the metal scans were right under their feet. “Ah. That would explain it.”
Hima backed away, had Len kneel, and she started digging. When she felt the touch of Len’s fingers on metal, she paused and carefully brushed the dirt from the wrapping that enfolded the treasure within.
“I am amazed that they didn’t destroy them.”
Hima found the chains and began to haul the mass upward.
“The city wasn’t like this at that time, and they wanted the weapons hidden from the engineers in the valley. This location was one that we never would have looked in.”
“Why not?”
“We have been raised to think of the city as a source of survival and as an elder sister. We needed to protect her because she was too busy with great matters to defend herself.”
“So, you were smaller and more agile?”
She laughed, “Yes, like that.”
The box was not alone in the hole. “What is that?”
Len’s voice was smug. “Ordinance.”
“Wait. You have live rounds here?”
“Of course. Sometimes you need a projectile of size. That is what these rounds deliver.”
She wrinkled her nose and set the first packet aside while she pulled out the second.
Her next half hour was spent trying to get everything in place. The rounds attached to clips around Len’s biceps and thighs. When it was all in place, Hima was sweating.
“That was a little more involved than I was expecting.”
Len chuckled. “The weapons systems are updating and integrating. We will be ready to fire in minutes.”
Hima grunted. “Great. I want to be back at the valley in an hour. Let’s make that happen.”
* * * *
Xaia ran Ai into the brush, and they waded through the trees until they reached an open meadow.
The scans were confusing at first until she saw the waterfall in the distance. “Damnit. They ran plumbing.”
Moving with care, she followed the memories until she was on top of the cache.
Ai asked, “Are you going to go through the waterlines?”
She grimaced and backed up a step. “No, I am going to go next to them and pull our treasure through.”
“Will that work?”
“If the hole I dig is big enough, it will work.” Xaia got digging.
When she had made a hole to match the scan results, she had Ai lie down on his front and she reached down and around to the chains on the packet, relying on his sensors to give her the right feedback. She couldn’t see a thing.
The packet fought her, but she continued to pull slowly and horizontally. It eventually came free, and she lifted it up while she rolled Ai to the side.
“That was fun. I rarely get to roll around in a meadow.”
Xaia snorted. “Right. Let’s get this in place. I want to put on your accessories and get running. I get the feeling that we are going to be behind.”
“I will attempt to make up for lost time.”
Xaia nodded and opened the packet. The items included had been in her training course and all the history of weapons and bots that she had memorized. She moved the small arms aside and put the wing blades in place first, locking them into position.
“You have... oh my.” She smiled as she attached the thick cylinder to his back.
“I enjoyed it. We all had separate weapons but few had the bow. It takes a specific type of pilot to manage it.”
Xaia grinned. “I am willing to give it a try.”
“Turo always enjoyed using it. It does leave me drained for a few minutes.”
“Understood. I will keep that in mind.”
When the blades, the wings, and the bow were all set in place, she stood and turned toward the gate with only one focus to her thoughts. They had to get home and save Bot City.
* * * *
Nyvett kept one rank of sensors aimed at the city while she walked Iff toward their dig site.
Splitting the bots from their most damaging weapons had been a decision of the city. They didn’t want to arm the bots that were sent out into the valley to eventually decay.
Keeping the bots in operational form had become more difficult over the years as supplies no longer came into the valley. Mining, refining, and extruding the metal they needed meant that the bots were actually stronger in construction now than they had been when they were first built. The minerals of Hera were far stronger than anything the Terrans had carried with them.
“Are we near the spot?” Iff spoke quietly.
“Yes, just a hundred yards to the south from here.”
“Good. You have been very quiet.”
“I am just thinking about tensile strength and hull resistance.”
He paused. “I was thinking about how nice it was to have a pilot that could walk me without thinking.”
Nyvett chuckled. “I was thinking. I just wasn’t thinking about the walk. I was letting the memories lead me.”
“It is a good thing that he knew where he buried the cache. The landscape markers are gone.”
Nyvett nodded. “The pilots were fixated on accuracy. They used the positions of the sun, the distance from the walls, and the distance from the gate. Oh, and they used the orbital satellite to position their caches.”
To her surprise, shock was running through Iff’s systems. “There is an orbital satellite?”
“Yes, it is in stationary orbit and is how we have any communication at all with the city.”
He paused. “When this is over, position me so that I look at that satellite.”
She thought it was weird, but she agreed. “Of course.”
Nyvett dug her way in to the equipment cache and grunted as it came free of the soil. The dirt here was shades darker than it was at the valley. It was richer, and based on the plants growing, it was definitely fertile and conducive to new growth.
She opened the packet and stared. “What the hell is that?”
Iff used her to reach forward, and he was humming with enjoyment. “It is my weapon.”
He pulled the heavy stick out of the parcel and lifted it, twisting his wrist slightly to trigger projecting spikes.
“It’s a mace.”
Iff’s mind was close to purring. “It certainly is.”
She blinked and reached in with his other hand. “Let’s get the rest of this on and then head back to the city.”
He sighed and let his toy go.
Nyvett clicked the blades in place, and then, she was stuck staring at another tube. “What is that?”
She followed her muscle memory and attached the tube to her spine at an angle.
Iff was smug. “It is the rocket launcher. Well, it is a rail gun with a suspension field. I can load rockets into it if we get back to the ammunition depot, but until then, I can still use it to punch a hole in a mountainside.”
“How?”
“See that last object in the case? That is the ammunition.”
She peered in and picked up a case smaller than the tip of Iff’s pinky. Picking it up was tricky, but she got it in her left hand. A slot opened in Iff’s hand and the box opened, a cascade of small metal marbles rolled out and nested inside that receptacle.
“What is that?”
“Railgun ammunition. One metal ball propelled by a cascading magnetic field can do amazing damage.”
“You have hundreds in that container.”
He chuckled. “I know. Are we ready?”
She looked at the pit she had dug, the open metal container that was now twisted and empty and the pristine woods around her in the shape of the ancient city. “Yes, we are ready.”
Nyvett got Iff to his feet, grabbed the mace, and she headed for the gate.
The city on her right remained quietly tucked into its safe, small space. It was good that they ignored what was going on in the outer area. If they needed it, the entire valley was going to come for a visit.
* * * *
Assistant Ledion knocked on the mayor’s door.
“Yes?”
She entered and winced at witnessing the mayor’s grooming routine. “Mayor Otta, there is some news of the engineers.”
He glanced over his shoulder as his esthetician worked on his chest and groin. Ledion couldn’t tell if the hair was coming on or off, but it was being done one follicle at a time.
<
br /> “What, don’t they like being around all that equipment?”
“They are gone, sir.”
He turned to face her completely, and she kept her gaze on his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“The engineers are gone. They broke out of the inner chamber, shut off the city dome, and got back into their bots.”
Mayor Otta stepped off his grooming podium and stalked toward her. “Are they gone?”
“Yes, sir.” She swallowed. It was technically true.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“The bots punched through the main gates and were last seen heading into the green spaces.”
The mayor paled, and he stepped back. “What?”
“They entered the inner green spaces. They didn’t approach the walls but were definitely sighted by a few folks on the upper levels of the habitats.”
Otta growled at her. “Assemble the guard.”
Ledion cocked her head at him. “What guard? You had them all altered and disbanded. We have no one physically capable of defending the city.”
“Raise the dome.” He turned away from her.
Ledion held onto her clipboard, and she tensed her lips. “We can’t. The engineers have disabled it. It won’t activate. The few techs we have have been trying.”
He whirled back with his fangs flashing. “Try harder! Get our defenses up. Where is the Tokkel?”
“He is in a comfort suite.”
“Take me to him. I need to speak with him.”
Ledion nodded but blinked when he headed for the door. “Mayor Otta?”
“What?”
“Perhaps clothing would be a good idea.” She kept her face impassive.
He growled at her but stalked to his wardrobe to grab his mayoral robes.
