Angling left again and drawing the defender further from the relay station’s dome, the human threw three more seaweed decoys. Occasionally using its orange ray to blast a path where the boulders were too large to hover over or push aside, the alien machine followed. As Astin had hoped, a race as bloodthirsty as the Jenkle would have programmed their weapons systems to hunt any known, single enemies to the death.
They were out of sight of the dome now. Still the human was sure that there were alarms ready to call the fast hovering defender back if he somehow did enter the open area around the dome while it hunted. But that wasn’t the idea.
Another decoy went into the air. Another flash of intense yellow was followed by all the water in the seaweed turning instantly into superheated steam. Enough reached Astin to sting his exposed back as the trooper lofted another seconds later. This time the orange beam lanced out. Astin never knew why it used the larger weapon.
The wider and more powerful beam not only vaporized the second decoy, but the blast it caused sent the trooper rolling until he slammed against unforgiving stone. He lay there for a moment, regaining his breath and waiting for the robot to appear. Astin’s side hurt, and a deep breath brought a gasp of pain. Even as it sounded like the defender had moved toward where he had thrown the last dummy, the trooper pulled himself up and hoped that if any of his ribs really were broken, they didn’t puncture a lung. For a brief instant he missed his MAPerS and it shock absorbing abilities, but he set the thought aside along with his desire for a tall beer and taller redhead.
The next decoy was at the edge of the area Astin had chosen and prepared earlier. This was really two small areas about ten meters across and joined by a three meter opening between two large extrusions. Astin knew this was the most dangerous part of his plan. If he had guessed wrong, he was dead and all of humanity was probably lost too. He felt a passing desire to just run away and delay the confrontation. The human dismissed the temptation as he threw the decoy high and to the far side of clearing he was in. Then the trooper hurried to crawl under the pile of waterlogged seaweed he had laboriously hauled in earlier. Around him were a dozen similar piles, a few even carefully laid out and twisted to resemble a human laying flat on the ground. This final decoy almost made it to the ground before the yellow ray caught it. A few seconds later the hovering defender entered the clearing.
Barely willing to breathe, the human waited. Dust and small rock particles showered his hiding place and made his eyes water. Still the trooper waited, unmoving. His one fear was that the weapon would recon by fire, simply blasting apart each of the piles of seaweed. A human would have done that. A human would have thought of that and sensed a trap, but the Jenkle machine could only react as it was programmed to. It would instantly destroy any enemy it detected, but only after they were detected. Any other instruction would have led to the robotic defender wearing itself out destroying every lump of seaweed that drifted or blew past the dome.
Slowly it advanced farther into the small area. As Astin had planned, it was almost next to him and just starting into the narrow area between the two clearings when it detected his seaweed stuffed shirt to its left. The unit turned in place to bring the weapons protruding from its front to bear. Its back end swinging only centimeters from the rock behind it.
At the sound of that turn, Corporal Olowoi rose. He knew that the weapon would sense him and turn to target him. But he was only a few steps away, and he had calculated that it would take at least seven seconds to turn around. Seven seconds was the entire window his plan had to save an entire fleet and maybe mankind. Grabbing his pants off the rock, the trooper took two steps and dove onto the top of the alien vehicle.
A second later he had upended his pants, dumping the water and jellies into one of the air intakes. The suction caused by the rapidly spinning fan blades pulled in the water instead of air. Letting go of the pants that were now being sucked slowly through the air slits, Astin laid flat on the top of the machine and wedged his fingers as deeply as they would go into the thin intakes.
The whole process had taken less then ten seconds. But it no longer mattered which way the weapon faced. To hit him now, it would have to be able to shoot itself. Taking that long was good, since the automated response to any intruder being on top of the unit initiated itself at twelve seconds with the unit increasing the power to its blades. Suddenly the Jenkle weapons platform dashed forward almost to the far side of the open area and slammed to a halt. It stopped for less than a second to see if it had dislodged the trooper and then surged backward across both clearings with even greater speed and came to a more abrupt stop.
Astin could only hold on. His fingers hurt and his shoulders strained with the effort of clinging to the machine. The pain in his battered side became a twisting knife as bruised and punished muscles began to tear. As the robot weapon began to move forward once more, the trooper thought he heard something different in the whine of the now straining fans, but he could hardly tell with the changes in pitch masked as the vehicle tried to dislodge him again. The human had no doubt that its weapons were both charged and ready to fire as fast as only a machine can do the moment he was down and in their field of fire.
The deadly dance ended when the one of the unit’s fan blades slammed into the inside of the weapon with a thud that the sprawling trooper could feel all along his body. Then there was another thud as the unbalanced fan tore itself apart and the back of the Jenkle robot scraped along the ground. Astin grimaced a smile, knowing that at least one the jellies had, as he had hoped, managed to attach to the spinning and so very warm and inviting fan blades or their shaft. The metal eating acid had done the rest.
Where the defender’s frantic dashing couldn’t knock the determined trooper off it, the bouncing caused by the rear of the several ton combat unit dragging over the rough ground succeeded. Fortunately for Astin, he rolled off behind the unit.
Even as the trooper clutched his side and struggled to stand, the front fans of the damaged defender strained to turn the unit so that its weapons could be brought to bear on him. The edges of the metal sides of the weapon dragged across the volcanic rock throwing sparks and broken rock, and then the front fan also failed as its sound changed from a deep growl to a diminishing whine.
Then there was silence broken only by the futile charging of the front mounted weapons as they searched for a target.
For the first time Astin’s smile was real. There was a moment’s hesitation while he wondered whether he should try to disable the defender more. The thought of smashing those deadly crystals with a heavy rock was quite appealing. But the mission, he reluctantly decided, came first. And if he did get picked up, the intel boys would want it as intact as possible. Besides, the trooper cheerfully concluded, he could always come back later. The Jenkle machine was not going anywhere.
The walk to the dome was almost leisurely. Astin recovered the small cube where he had hidden it far from where the action had been. He even found that the dome’s door was unlocked. Why lock a door when you have a superpowered, beam firing, super accurate defender? It was easy to spot the correct panel, and the cube attached as it was designed to. A small green light suddenly appeared, and the trooper’s smile grew larger.
His pick-up would come in with the fleet. All he had to do now was wait.
The last of the Fourth had completed their mission.
Moral Imperative
By Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman is a man of many talents, effortlessly slipping from genre to genre as the mood strikes him. But the one thing that also shines through is his honest, unflinching portrayal of everyday, often anguished characters. His western fiction has won the Spur Award, and his crime fiction has won the Shamus and Anthony Awards and has been shortlisted for the Edgar(r)Award. In addition, his writing has appeared in Redbook, the New York Times, Ellery Queen Magazine, Poetry Today, and other publications.
The Flicker—the fastest nuclear-powered train in the entire Midwest—was not only
on time today, it was ten minutes early.
Nick McKay was grateful for such speedy service. This meant that there hadn’t been time for the final on-board prayer service. As usual, he’d been all prayed out about ten minutes after six this morning, the usual rising time for all the husbands who commuted from the suburb of God’s Arms to New Chicago. The moment the alarm went off on work days, his wife Emily had him down on his knees and leading her and their two kids in the Morning Offering. The MO, as he called it, took fifteen minutes to slog through. Who needed more slogging than that to feel righteous?
The train station was of the quaint older type, built of near-wood with a slanted shingled roof, half a dozen baggage carts standing next on the west side of it, and a wooden platform where the wives in their baby blue jumpers waited for their husbands. Each jumper bore across its bosom the embossed red image of a bloody crown of thorns.
Early as the Flicker was, the late April day was already dying, the sun a furious red ball shining behind the black winter trees, the layered clouds mixing the colors of salmon pink, mauve, apricot. Dusk was a death, and dusk was something that McKay always shared with the planet, giving in to a melancholy that could sometimes bring him to tears. He’d once shared this with Pastor Paul and quickly wished he hadn’t. “That’s sort of a pagan thought, don’t you think? People who are right with God appreciate the beauty of sunset. It’s another one of His gifts, Nicholas. Hardly a time for self-pity—which melancholy always is.” Pastor Paul disliked shortened names, forbidding the use of nicknames in his presence. He’d never offered his flock any justification for this. But he didn’t need to. He was Pastor Paul.
The way the husbands of God’s Arms stumbled off the train car gave the impression that they were weary soldiers returning from an exhausting war. It fell to their wives to put smiles on their faces and renew at least partial energy to their bodies. New Chicago lay just beyond the reach of God’s Country and was filled with pagan spectacles and rites that would make any righteous man weary.
Before he saw Emily, he saw Natalie Avery. He knew he should look away. They’d sworn last Saturday in the park never to meet in secret again. But he couldn’t not look at her. The dark hair framing a face that was both sensual and vulnerable in a way that only enhanced the sensuality—how could he look away? She didn’t look away, either. And so, for one of those moments that seem to extend into minutes, they stood watching each other, each of them finally giving up a wisp of a smile.
Then he turned and walked over to Emily, the chilly air even colder in the sudden wind now.
Even from here, he could hear Emily whispering her prayers to herself. He thought of how much fun she’d been when he’d first met her. Perspective was the gift she’d given him, a witiness that showed him how he could step back from his daily griefs and laugh at them right along with her.
And then she’d started seeing those vids for how safe and nurturing life could be in God’s country . . .
“Wait till you see their monthly grades,” Emily said, her voice shining with the love and pride they both felt for their kids. She was the best home-schooler in God’s Arms. She submitted all their work to Principaln Homenet, and Principal evaluated it every thirty days or so. She’d won Best Home Schooler for four years in a row. The other mothers, to their credit, did their best not to indulge in the sin of envy. It couldn’t have been easy.
The car was on auto, and they were only a few minutes away from the large Colonial style house that they were able to afford because of Nick’s sojourn in pagan land five days a week.
Nick put his head back. Closed his eyes.
“Looks like massage night, honey. You look pretty beat.”
One word sufficed. “Donaldson.”
“I thought he was still on vacation.”
“Somebody managed to let him know that all of a sudden we were in trouble with the Handy Andy account. So long Southern France and his chateau there. He was back in the States and at his desk before anybody else this morning, and he let each of us know individually that if Handy Andy goes to another agency, we’ll be leaving too.”
Emily touched his hand with hers, and immediately he was ashamed he’d let the flirtation with Natalie get so far. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. She was a pretty woman, blond, blue-eyed, a few pounds overweight, which he found enjoyable when they made love. But most of all she was just a damned fine woman, one he used to love so passionately that he would literally get headaches if he had to be away from her for any significant amount of time.
But now . . . Now he respected her more than loved her. What could you fault her for? Perfect mother, attentive wife, helpmate in every sense. But once he’d reluctantly agreed to live in God’s Country for the sake of the children . . . He was a believer, too. Maybe not with her certainty, maybe not with her devotion. But he believed that an invisible hand had created the spark that created the universe. He even believed that in some way that invisible hand sometimes affected circumstances on earth as well as everywhere else. In the early years of their marriage, this had been sufficient belief for Emily. But since they’d come to God’s Country . . .
“Any other news today?”
“No more noisy robots.”
“Really?”
“There’s a new model of Protector, and they’re ‘streeting’ it tonight as they say.”
“How did that happen?”
“I guess the Mayor’s been asking St. Louis for four new ’bots and they finally came through. Trial run tonight starting at nine o’clock.”
He looked over at her and said, “Maybe we could violate some of the marital bedroom rules before this thing gets clanking up and down the street tonight. Put the kids to bed early and—”
“That isn’t funny, Nick. Those are God’s rules. And I’m not going to break them.”
All he could think of was—in the old days she would have giggled if he’d suggested they break rules of any kind. Especially if they involved the bedroom . . .
When had pre-dinner and post-dinner prayers gotten this long? Nick wondered, his knees still sore from all that kneeling.
He was in the small study they’d created out of what had once been a storage area. More and more he’d been forced to bring his work home—bring the devil in the form of advertising right into his home—when the communicator rang. Three bleats meant it was a Nick call. He picked up.
She spoke in a teary, frightened rush: “He’s at Pastor Paul’s right now telling him everything. He’s been following us the last three or four weeks. Watching us meet in the park.”
The voice belonged, of course, to Natalie Avery.
“He should be back any time soon. I’m afraid he’ll walk in on us right now. He might even be having our calls monitored. I’m so paranoid now about everything. I just thought I’d tell you.”
She clicked off.
His first response was no response. Not panic, not terror, not any plan of action. He just sat in his desk chair staring at the holo image of his wife and family.
Only when he realized the implications of the call did he stir. He got up and began the useless pacing that was the hallmark of every Nick crisis.
The big thing was to stop Pastor Paul from calling Emily. Even though this wasn’t technically a matter of adultery, he would have a difficult time putting an innocent face on his four meetings with Natalie.
He had two hours before the new Protector was to take to the streets. Time to . . .
He drove with the window down. The chill air refreshed him. He needed to be sharp when he made his case to Pastor Paul.
As the head beams swept the stone edifice of the church, he saw that Richard Avery’s auto was still in the parking lot adjacent to Pastor Paul’s office in the back of the large building.
Nick clicked off the head beams. Maybe it was better this way. Have it out with Richard in front of Pastor Paul. The cleric could bring wisdom to Richard’s anger and Nick’s confusion.
He stood in the night ta
king deep clean breaths, readying himself. In the moonlight, he could see tiny buds peering up from branches, patches of brown grass becoming obstinately green now that spring was on the way. He’d been so damned foolish to get involved with Natalie even to the degree he had. He wasn’t by nature a dishonest man, but he’d now cast himself as one of the most dishonest of people—the adulterer.
Inside the rear of the church, he could smell the most recent meal some of the church women had prepared for the homeless outside the neighborhood. Stewed chicken and mashed potatoes, that was the usual repast. There were four bulletin boards on the wall with a myriad of notes and pamphlets thumb-tacked to them. It was like being back in school again.
He’d been to Pastor Paul’s several times so he had no difficulty finding it. Just as he was about to knock on the cleric’s door, he heard Richard say, “It doesn’t matter if they slept together. What matters is that they were deceiving us—both me and poor Emily.”
This was where Pastor Paul should have inserted a few reassuring words about the moral difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it. He said, “I’m afraid I have to agree with you, Richard, especially where women are concerned. The way God constructed the male, it’s expected that the man will at least have thoughts about women other than his wife. But He holds women to a much higher standard. He allows them the privilege of giving birth. He allows them the privilege of being the chief nurturer. He allows them to spend all day with the children while the husband toils to feed and clothe and shelter them.”
“I think you’re saying what I’m saying, Pastor Paul. That when a woman even thinks about committing adultery—she’s already committed it in her mind. And the sin is just as bad as if she’d slept with him.”
“Sad to say, Richard, that’s just what I’m saying. Natalie is no longer pure.”
A strangled sound. Richard began to cry in that difficult, uncertain way men cry.
Man Vs Machine Page 11
