by Sean Kennedy
His new body surged, spinning up his rotors and he lifted off with such force that he almost hit the ceiling, but was able to stop just in time.
I don't know my own strength! He thought.
Jacob relaxed his spin, lowering himself beside the bunk, watching saw rotor wash ruffle the blankets under his other body. The power of his tiny frame felt solid as he got used to his new abilities. The slightest expression brought a response. Hovering, he stretched out the single gripping claw from its folded position. With its triple joints letting it reach well past his rotors, it had an odd feeling like a prehensile tail.
He reached out and snatched the plastic water bottle from the bunkside crate, but the added weight was too much and it slipped from his grasp. Thankful the cap was on, he folded his new arm back against his undercarriage, feeling his center of gravity shift.
He remembered what Joni had said and about the drones fighting with each other, and the footage from Silver’s. If another drone got their grips on him, he would be at their mercy.
Built for speed, not for strength, he thought as he maneuvered around the room, growing more comfortable in his new form with each passing second. Jacob floated out the window and over the veranda’s roof with the rising excitement that only promise of flight can bring.
Throwing his weight into the rotors, Jacob fell up into the moonlit sky. He stopped to hover high above the house, shifting his balance to counter the night wind. He dropped his nose into a dive, pulling himself up just above the stacks and flew in a large square, mapping out his own racing circuit through the columns.
The salvage looked like towers on an alien world, and by his tenth lap, his mind plotted a challenging course through the synthetic forest. Lowering, Jacob began to fly his course through the stacks. Adrenaline tickled his spine as he curved through the moonlight shadows. Knowing the stacks were set a regular distance apart gave him the confidence to push faster on the next lap.
The third lap took thirty seconds; the fourth only took seventeen.
Speed kills.
By his sixth lap, he was down to twelve seconds, but swerving dangerously close to the salvage towers. He pushed into the sky with the thrill of a near hit, hearing his pulse pounding in his ears.
He flew up over the shop, and saw a long straight antenna reaching up from the peak of the barn, hidden from the ground and tying him into the network, like a fishing rod casting his consciousness line out to the drone.
Jacob wondered how much range he had, and decided to find out. Zone Town sat to the east, but in the fading moonlight, he heard the wind in the hulls calling his name.
He pumped his rotors, and the Kowazuki dropped, zipping down over the stacks, blurring the landscape as he picked up speed as sixty... eighty... hundred and twenty... displayed in Jacob's HUD.
He flew low over the tangled wire posts of abandoned chain link fences, his signal strength staying strong as he tore into the sky. In the high distance, a VTOL flyer’s lights skirted below the clouds like an autopod in the fog of an inverted world.
This is why birds must be free, he thought in his ascent to take in the expanse. White lights and brighter orange fires dotted the landscape around Zone Town’s boundary, flowing like a river of stars flowing along an ancient highway towards the Deep City’s western wall.
To the west lay the vast expanse of the hulls, and this high up, he could see the edge of the coastline barrier. In the distance there was a searchlight cluster on a glowing aircraft carrier, like a plateau fortress where the salvage canyons met the sea; the Pirate King!
Jacob resisted the urge to get closer. His signal strength was still good, but he decided to check his ambition on his first time out, dropping instead towards the vast marine graveyard. The roar of the VTOL overhead echoed like a crashing wave. Jacob approached the ships, anticipating the ship-line spider webs he knew waited to snag him.
A southern flash caught his eye, and the VTOL flyer was suddenly dropping altitude. Jacob slowed to a hover and saw a second brighter flash erupt from the craft. The sound of an explosion reached his synthetic senses as the flyer trailed lazy flames as it seared across the sky. Jacob’s HUD showed its trajectory, and he launched himself towards the impending crash site.
Closing rapidly, he saw the burning VTOL tilting back, fighting the forces of physics as turbines wailed in protest. It slowed, but not enough, and gave a slight wobble before tumbling lengthwise along the freighter’s open deck.
They had bled enough velocity to only roll twice as its screaming turbines compressed and disintegrated into flailing alloy. The VTOL slid to a burning stop near the ship’s bow; its flames casting eerie shadows amongst the hulls.
Jacob heard the second VTOL craft before he saw it. A sleek, narrow flyer with six rotor shrouds, like a shark hunting above the shipwrecks towards the billowing smoke. Jacob recognized it as a gunship. It passed over its downed prey, and Jacob caught a glimpse of someone running from the crash, their fire shadow flickering before vanishing into the deck’s wreckage.
The predator gunship eased into a hoover, blasting the smoke away from the crash site, and Jacob watched humanoid shapes drop like bombs from its gill-like sliding doors. There was no explosion when they landed, just fearsome silhouettes of humanoid cyborgs leaping along the deck.
In the firelight, Jacob saw they were heavies, twice as tall as a man with whipping prehensile tails. Their bodies illuminated for only an instant as they tore open the flyer’s hull to pull themselves inside.
A moment later, the three cyborgs burst from the fuselage bounding into the darkness at terrible speed. They came towards the stern, towards the escapee, towards Jacob.
The moon leered from behind a cloud patch and Jacob caught sight of a man in a bright white suit now smeared with blood as he hung over the rear railing, one arm clutching his chest, the other limp at his side as he gasped poison air. He had the frantic thrashing of the trapped, the next deck was too far to jump, and he had nowhere left to run.
Jacob’s small drone was only a hundred meters away, invisible against the marooned expanse. He watched the man in white lift something from around his neck, wheel his arm back and use the last of his strength to throw something into the night.
Its arc crested with golden shimmer and the something spiraled down towards the metal valleys and toxic sludge below. Like an osprey, Jacob dove to intercept it on the HUD’s projected path, and with Kowazuki velocity he closed with the falling treasure.
There was something behind it, flailing as it fell. He willed himself faster, lashing out at the last moment with his claw to catch the very tip of it's a golden tail before it could vanish into the labyrinth.
Jacob dipped low into a dangerous canyon between ships before emerging in the moonlight, the golden cord trailing in his claw. Behind him, the man in white hung limp over to the stern guardrail, blood streaming from his arm.
Jacob dropped between hulls, taking the shelter in the dark steel canyons and losing sight of the man in white as the heavy cyborgs reached him. Jacob swooped between two ships that leaned like giant cards against each other, and the memory of a symbol covered stone hallway flashed in his mind.
He emerged into the moonlight and lifted just above the last of the great angled ship decks, relying on his agility for obscurity to hide as he flew through the wreckage. The hull cliffs fell away and he dropped low swiveling the camera to look back, expecting the black shark to be waiting, but instead found only the moonlight reflecting off his golden prize.
An amulet! Jewelry cast into oblivion to keep it from synthetic claws.
He saw a light race toward him and realized he was approaching his attic window far too fast. Jacob flared his rotors, rearing back to spiral down through the cargo stacks. Another few laps, and the flying shark was still nowhere to be found.
He lifted from the stacks and circled to slide through the peaked window into his turret attic bedroom. He folded the mono claw beneath him and lowered himself to the floor, he
aring the slight rattling of the amulet’s chain in his turbine’s wash against the hardwood.
The drone touched down leaving Jacob with a floor level view of his envirosuited body still on the bunk. A thought, then confirmation, and Jacob detached from the Kowazuki to fall back into his body.
The ceiling snapped into view beyond his closed visor, and he leapt from the bunk, almost falling over from the disorientation of the ground rush. His pulse was hammering and the taste of oil was strong from the open window and he stumbled, his power-boks thumping as he half-fell towards the window. Only after closing them and locking the latch did he realize how hard he was breathing. He retracted the helmet's visor, and looked at the four-leaf shamrock of his silver bladed drone, and saw the glitter of a golden disk.
Jacob slid across the floor and crossed his legs, looking down and at the locket’s smooth finish and the tight snake scale weave of its chain. He imagined it writhing, twisting like a serpent in the Kowazuki claw.
He carefully picked it up and found it heavy. The disk wasn’t much larger than a ration cookie, but he felt something electronic scratching to escape from within. As the chain shimmered, still clutched in the drone’s claw, Jacob flipped the disk over and saw a symbol delicately carved into one side.
A combination of squares, bars, and arrows, pointing out from a square to a diamond shapes, that split the arrows to bars before bouncing them to other diamonds via symmetrical lines, until terminating in squares at the edges.
He thought his visor down with a satisfying clack, and a prompt waited in his display
‘Establish Link to EPRG Locket?’
A locket! Jacob thought, what is an EPRG Locket? His visor displayed the answer by outlining the small locket in red as he held it. The electronic scratching became a desperate clawing, but he wondered if the EPRG might have some kind of alarm system? He denied the prompt, and it vanished.
What if it’s transmitting right now and I just didn’t know it?
His HUD display changed to show the helmets built-in spectrum analyzer, confirming no transmissions coming from the strange locket. Jacob remembered the bloody man in white, throwing it into darkness. Whatever this locket was, his last living act was to cast it away.
Jacob reached under the drone looking for the chain's clasp, but found none, only the chain’s endless snake weave held by mono-claw. He pried open its tiny talons to slip the chain free and held it up, watching the lamplight play on its engraved face.
Feeling the sudden thrill of treasure, his first piece of solo salvage. Whatever it was, it had to be important. Moving back to his bunk, he checked the time. His HUD said three thirty-eight; the whole sortie had taken less than thirty minutes, but something had changed inside him. He felt suddenly weary, as though he had shifted the weight of destiny.
He hung the locket off the top of the lampshade, letting it dangle over the beige fabric It twisted to a stop, the geometric carving facing him as he lay back on his pillow. With his visor down and the locket in his HUD display, Jacob blinked once, then twice, and fell back asleep.
Chapter 16
“What do you see?” Skank hissed as he lay amongst the shattered rubble. Tavor didn't answer, not because he was ignoring him; but because he wasn’t sure.
This was too far gone for most highway smugglers, and for Hessians to be active in Vago’s territory was a call for war, but as Tavor looked through his overwatch launcher’s optics; it's not what he saw that bothered him, it’s what he didn’t.
An hour ago, a flurry of broadcast activity made this location so obvious they may as well have sent up a flare. It looked and felt like combat traffic, but after seven minutes all transmissions stopped cold.
Peering through the launcher’s scope from the top of the overpass, he expected whoever it was to be long gone. An hour after a battle, the blood would be dry and birds well fed, but this was still Vagos land and anyone still here would have to pay.
It might have been a courier running dark along the unlicensed roads, but broadcasting, even encrypted was a rookie move. They may as well have set a signal fire to guide their enemies in, and incredibly, as he looked at the enhanced targeting image, that is exactly what they did. A campfire now winked in the middle of the road.
“I think it’s a fire,” Skank’s whisper carried like a shout.
“Shut-up Skank,” Tavor whispered. As stupid as the crystal made him, Skank was smart enough to stay out of kicking range. Tavor needed a runner to keep the spectrum clear while the rest of the Vagos staged farther back under cover, so Skank was sent with him. His shaking from too much cheap crystal was damn annoying.
There was a fire, with eight figures hunched as though warming themselves in a circle around it, but nothing had moved other than the dancing flame for as long as he’d watched. The light flared in his launchers optics and Tavor was still waiting, watching for something when another loud voice, came from behind.
“What's happening? The Duke says you been up here too long!” It was Damott, the Duke’s stooge.
“Shut up Damott!’ Skank hissed.
“You shut up Skank...”
“There's a single fire between at least two transport trucks,” Tavor said to stop their snarling. “I see at least eight around the fire, but it’s weird because nothing is moving.”
Without a word, Damott scurried back down the embankment. No doubt Damott would say there was a fire and that nothing was moving, but there was something off; something wrong with this scene.
He knew the Duke did too much crystal to be cautious, and before a thirty count Tavor heard the single rumble of the Duke's Herkimer fire its hybrid engine, going loud. The other Vagos followed, switching to burner fuel, now recharging the batteries they’d used to stealth cruise to stage under the overpass.
Duke's rumble was their battle cry as spotlights shone from the Vago’s iron, and a pack of fifty power-bikers came from under the bridge’s darkness onto the abandoned highway, like spotlight cavalry charging the strange road camp.
He heard Skank shuffle to his feet.
“Stay down!” Tavor said, and Skank dropped to a crouch.
“Why?” Skank asked, laying back down on the road.
Tavor waited for a reaction from the fireside group. The sound of the bikes should have sent shockwaves through them. They should have been flying to their defenses, grabbing weapons to combat the incoming raid; but all was still.
Except... There!
A figure shifted in the firelight; a far figures head raised and turned towards the oncoming biker force. This attack had become too strange, and targeting the only figure that moved, Tavor pulled the trigger.
The primary propellant threw a drone munition from the launcher before it's solid fuel thrusters kicked in, ejecting single-use wings from the small missile. Tavor kept his breathing slow and stable as he painted the same gray fireside figure. He watched them raise as though summoned, slowly standing above the others.
In the dancing light, Tavor saw long tangles of synthetic hair patched together like spliced wire. Strings and cables weaved into the soiled strands that hung wet over the naked slender female. Too late, Tavor recognize her.
SCREEEEE!
The lock warning on his wrist howled as an alert flashed across the launcher’s optics.
“Run!” Tavor yelled, dropping the launcher and scrambling backward,
“Huh?”
“ROAD WITCH!” Tavor screamed into the jammed spectrum, but it was too late. The high explosive munition had arced back, and with the last of its solid fuel the warhead completed its circle and exploded between Tavor and Skank, swallowing them in the blast.
Tavor's body was thrown off the overpass, landing in a broken hulk on the highway, while Skanks headless torso splattered against cracked overpass railing, sliding off the metal as the explosion echoed in the distance.
Drawn to the firelight, the biker horde focused on the shapes still sitting around the hunched shambling form, trembling as she
drew heaving breaths through her tangled hair. She could feel their eyes searching the firelight, looking to consume more of the road’s resources, like jackals descending on the helpless.
The Vagos were coming too fast to notice metal rod clusters collapsed along the roadside.The polished rods unfolded, taking new forms as narrow steel and needle joints flexed, pressing the slender spike droids into service.
Spike droids were telepresence droids, the kind intended to work in meat processing plants handling food grade flesh. Their bodies were made of a stainless alloy, polished as bright as a mirror, and their wire torsos and needle fingers gave them the nickname ‘Stickmen’. Their slender bodies meant easier storage and less to clean. Working in an abattoir environment, they had to be impervious to fluids and the high temperatures of the steam showers that would sanitize them in their storage racks.
Usually, with telepresence droids, there was one pilot per droid, using their consciousness to bring the body to life. Some performers were able to control two t-droids as an entertainment feat, usually have them fight in a choreographed performance. The very best pilots would be able to pilot three droids, but the Road Witch tied fifty stickmen into her mind, channeling her subconscious will into them to control their actions.
The spike droids had laid collapsed, hidden beyond the circle of fire light. They unfolded, rising like dancers as their polished bodies sparkled in the headlights. The first bikers panicked and tried to turn away, but two in the front collided and their bikes created a tumbling metal storm through the pack. More droids boiled from the roadside, encircling the charging pack.
The Road Witch closed her eyes and the dancing flame became the light of slaughter. Her spike droids pounced, slashing onto the highway, their meat hook fingers clawing at the bikers as they tried to avoid the growing wreck.
