The Tin Soldiers (Final Dawn, Book 5)

by T W M Ashford

  Jack poked his head above the planter. The janitorial automata was wheeling its way around the LX-14s towards them.

  “What the hell does it think it’s doing?”

  Unnoticed by their enemy, the janitor patiently rumbled to a stop beside the hangar door. Jack wasn’t sure it even knew they were hiding close by – it certainly didn’t show any sign it had noticed them. After a moment spent studying the scanner Tuner had been tampering with, and seemingly unaware of the chaos unfolding around it, the janitor extended a circular key from the front of its floor-cleaner chassis and jammed it into an adjacent port.

  The hangar door started to shudder open.

  “Please be quick,” it said, rotating its head to face them.

  “Go!” yelled Jack, ushering Klik and Dev towards the opening door. “Keep your heads down and don’t stop until you’re safe on the other side!”

  Klik slipped through the gap easily. A laser bolt fizzled against the thick metal, missing Dev’s head by inches. He staggered backwards against the door in shock, providing the LX-14s with an easy target. Klik reached back through and yanked him into the hangar before the advancing automata had a chance to gun him down.

  Jack grabbed one of the circular metal trays littering the floor by his feet – now he knew where Tuner had got his from – held it up beside his head, and sprinted towards the gap as well. One of the LX-14s’ shots ricocheted off the rim and blew out a ceiling panel, showering him with sparks. He dropped the tray a second before he dived through the doorway, the tips of his gloved fingertips still sizzling.

  “Come on, Rogan,” he shouted, blindly firing his revolver at the mechanical soldiers. With Tuner now waddling through after him, she was the only one still outside the hangar. Another incoming laser bolt sent a crackle of electricity up the inside of the security door and came close to frying Tuner’s circuits.

  “Just one moment,” she said, standing in the middle of the firefight as if shell-shocked. “I’ve had an idea.”

  “Is it as good an idea as getting the hell out of here?” Jack screamed. “Because I bloody well doubt it!”

  The LX-14s continued their steady march towards the doors. The janitor paused them on their tracks a couple of metres apart and waited patiently while half a dozen laser bolts screamed past it into the hangar.

  “Maybe our trip here doesn’t need to be completely worthless,” Rogan shouted. She grabbed the deactivated LX-14 on the floor by its arms and started dragging it through the gap. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  “What? You want to bring one of those killing machines on board with us?”

  “Just help me, Jack!”

  He hesitated, then grabbed the dismembered robot’s midriff once Rogan had fully dragged it through the gap in the doors. The metal was sharp where it had been sheered in half, and black oil still seeped from its severed cables. The copper torso was even heavier than it looked.

  Jack paused and turned back to the janitorial automata.

  “You can come with us, you know. Get out of this place. There’s a whole world where you can be free.”

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t,” said the janitor. “The station is such a mess. Somebody has to clean it.”

  The stomping of the LX-14s grew deafening. They were just around the corner now, only metres from the hangar. The janitor swivelled its head as if to warn Jack of their approach.

  “Okay, bye.”

  It pulled its key from the port and the security doors slammed shut again. Through a small sliver of a window, Jack watched as the janitor rumbled off towards an overturned waste receptacle… and the LX-14s stopped sharp a few feet away from the other side of the door. Jack instinctively jumped back from the glass even though he knew it could withstand their attack. It was designed to survive an explosive depressurisation, after all.

  “I doubt they’re smart enough to figure out a way through,” said Rogan, shifting the inert LX-14’s weight rather pointedly, “but I’d prefer to not stick around all the same.”

  They hurried across the deserted hangar to the Adeona. Klik and Tuner stood waiting for them at the top of her loading ramp. As soon as he and Rogan reached them, Jack dropped his half of the LX-14 to the floor. The muscles in his arms were burning.

  “You took your time,” said Adi. “My thrusters and skip drive are primed, as promised. Ready whenever you are.”

  “Don’t wait for me,” Jack yelled as the loading ramp rose noisily behind them. “Just do whatever you need to do!”

  The Adeona lurched upwards from her bay and drifted towards the forcefield on the other side of the hangar. Jack pushed past a bemused Dev on his way up to the cockpit.

  “Erm, hello,” said Dev, holding out his hand for Silo to shake. “How do you do?”

  The Ghuk, who had wisely elected to remain on the ship once all the shooting started, scowled at the human’s digits and chittered in disgust.

  Jack arrived in the cockpit just as the Adeona passed through the green grid protecting the atmosphere of the hangar from the vacuum of space. The damage caused to the station was immediately apparent. Twice as many shards of glass twinkled in the black sky as stars.

  They were no more than fifty metres away from the hangar forcefield when an angry Krolak voice grunted through their comm system.

  “This is Krag of Station Security,” it said. “Kagna One has been attacked. Emergency protocols demand that you remain—”

  “Punch it,” said Jack, out of breath by the time he reached his seat. “We can’t afford to get arrested now.”

  “Punching right through space and back again,” said the Adeona, gleefully preparing to skip into subspace. “To those still down in the cargo bay, you may wish to hold onto something.”

  With a sudden burst of speed, Adi tore away from the station. If the Krolak attack ships launched anything after them in retaliation for disobeying a direct order, Jack never found out. Adi jumped to subspace the second they were out of gravitational range.

  As to where they needed to come out again, none of them had the slightest clue.

  Well, maybe one of them did.

  The trouble was getting it to talk.

  18

  Default Directives

  The Adeona hurtled through subspace towards nowhere in particular. Presumably she had some rough destination in mind. It wasn’t good to go skipping dimensions without first setting a proper route.

  Jack was sitting on a bench and nursing a cold drink when Rogan entered the galley. She spotted him in the corner and sat down beside him.

  “Having much luck down there?” Jack asked.

  “Tuner’s just getting the LX-14 wired up now,” she replied, inspecting an open tin of vegetables Jack left out the night before. “Presuming its data core wasn’t compromised, we should have it online in no time.”

  “You aren’t worried that it’ll try to carry out its orders?” Jack raised an eyebrow. “No offence, but its model doesn’t come across as smart enough to change tack according to circumstance.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Rogan replied, which Jack noted wasn’t much of a rebuttal. “Still, Tuner has temporarily disabled its motor functions. It wouldn’t be going anywhere even if it still had legs.”

  “I’m not happy about having it on the ship, but fine. I trust that you know what you’re doing.”

  “Thank you. Even if we can’t get anything useful out of it, the technicians at the Ministry surely will.”

  The two of them fell silent as Jack took a long swig of water blended with a strong anti-inflammatory painkiller. His head still throbbed from almost being sucked out of the stadium.

  “So, do you want to talk about it?” Rogan asked.

  Jack furrowed his brow.

  “Talk about what?”

  “What happened back on the station.”

  “Ah.” Jack lowered his mug to his lap and sighed. “Yeah, about that. I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t think the Krolak would actually fire…”

  “W
hat? I’m not talking about that!” All the same, Rogan studied the intricate lattice of wires, levers and ratchets through the hole in her shoulder as she flexed her arm. “I mean what happened inside the stadium when everyone was running for cover – when you went out there looking for Klik. You froze. You gave up.”

  “Gave up?” Jack shook his head. “No, that’s not true. My body just… it just kinda shut down, for some reason.” He tried explaining it in a way somebody without an organic body might understand. “It was like somebody else had overridden my controls. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All of a sudden, the only thing I wanted to do was stop. Oh, I don’t know. That probably doesn’t make much sense.”

  “It sounds like you had a panic attack,” Rogan replied. She laughed at Jack’s surprised expression. “Be serious. Did you really think mental health was a problem exclusive to humans?”

  “But a panic attack?” Jack scoffed. “No, I hardly think…”

  He stopped and stared at the stack of crates directly opposite him. Rogan waited without saying anything.

  “Yeah,” he eventually concluded. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “What changed, Jack?” She turned on the bench to face him. “It wasn’t so long ago you were leaping from one speeding starship to another, escaping from a Mansa prison and leading an assault on the Iris to stop a madman from igniting a black hole. After all that, it’s a crowd that almost kills you?”

  Jack barked out a laugh in surprise.

  “When you put it like that, it almost sounds silly. I don’t know. I guess… I guess I’ve grown accustomed to the quiet recently. It’s just been the four of us for the past twelve months, besides the few people I ever bumped into when I headed out for supplies. The rest of Kagna One wasn’t too bad, but the stadium… When tens of thousands of people started running…”

  He paused before the panic could take hold again. Rogan gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  “It was a lot all at once,” he continued. “And all I could think while it was happening was, ‘This is it. This is how we get ourselves killed.’ I’ve tried keeping everyone safe, and…”

  Jack shrugged. He didn’t know what he was trying to say anymore. That he constantly felt as if they were on the verge of something terrible happening? That he felt no more in control of his destiny than a nickel tumbling down the pins of a penny slot machine? Nothing seemed to adequately encompass the maelstrom wreaking havoc inside his head. Maybe it was too personal, too unique; maybe it wasn’t something that could be expressed through anything so simple and limiting as words.

  “It’s not your job to save us,” said Rogan, kindly. “And you know we can’t spend the time we do have hiding away from everything worth fighting for. That’s no way to live.”

  “I know,” he sighed, staring down into the watery dregs of his cup. “But it’s not just that. Nor is it the fear that I’m going to somehow mess everything up again like we did on New Eden, either. I think the worst thing is…”

  Rogan leaned in closer.

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “I think the worst thing is feeling so pointless.” The words spilled out before he could think too hard about them. He buried his head in his hands. “So utterly, bloody pointless! No direction. No purpose. No… no anything! I used to know what I was fighting for. Amber. Humanity. Survival. Now I’m… I’m like a stick being swept downstream, or something. I don’t know what comes next.”

  He clawed his fingers through his hair and sighed. Rogan squeezed his shoulder again.

  “Oh, Jack. You don’t need to be going anywhere. You don’t need to be doing anything. Nobody has everything figured out all of the time. Do you think Tuner has a NavMap route plotted out for his life? Or Klik? We might be a bunch of broken misfits from opposite ends of the galaxy, but at least we’ve got each other. That’s what counts. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?”

  Klik poked her head around the galley door.

  “Erm, you guys all right in here?”

  “Everything’s fine,” said Rogan. “Jack’s just working through some head-stuff, that’s all.”

  “Whatever. Tuner says to come down. He’s got the attack-bot juiced up, or something.”

  “Thanks, Klik.” Rogan nodded to her. “We’ll be with you in just a moment.”

  Klik shrugged, lingered just long enough to give Jack a curious once-over, and then left.

  “Weirdos.”

  “We heard that,” Jack shouted after her, cracking a smile.

  “Best we don’t keep Tuner waiting,” said Rogan, standing up from the bench. “Are you coming, or do you need a moment longer?”

  “No, I’m ready.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I might still be feeling a bit lost, but that shouldn’t stop us from finding out where we’re heading next.”

  The LX-14 was suspended above the floor of the dark cargo bay by a pair of chains hung from the girders. At first glance, Jack thought this was rather cruel. Then he caught himself for thinking too much like a human instead of an automata. Tuner had raised the disembowelled robot so that its head was approximately where it would have been had it still sported legs.

  A power cable ran from the back of the LX-14’s head into a socket at the base of the Adeona’s fuselage. It hadn’t been brought online yet. Jack hoped Rogan was right about Tuner disabling its motor functions; he wouldn’t be getting within grabbing distance all the same.

  Everyone on board had come to watch. Silo had helped Tuner set the LX-14 up for interrogation, in fact – though Cyclone Manufacturing didn’t produce the data cores installed in their models, the Ghuk knew enough about LX-14 anatomy to ensure it couldn’t lash out on a murderous rampage. Even Dev was present, though Jack didn’t think it was possible for anyone to observe from further away without climbing into the airlock.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about having my power used to bring back someone responsible for so much death and destruction,” said the Adeona.

  “I know it’s not ideal, Adi,” Rogan replied, “but it’s the only way we might help stop further bloodshed.”

  “And it’s unlikely this one personally did any of the ‘death and destruction’ anyway,” said Tuner. “We found it cut in half before it even got through the hangar doors.”

  “Are we ready to do this?” Silo asked testily. “Or do you bolt-buckets need to talk about it some more?”

  Rogan nodded, though Jack could tell she wanted to put her metal fist through the ignorant Ghuk’s face. Silo triggered something on the back of the automata’s head and then quickly stepped back. It wasn’t particularly reassuring when even he didn’t have faith in his own safeguards.

  A light electrical hum filled the cargo bay. Otherwise inert, the LX-14 lifted its head almost imperceptibly.

  “Greetings,” it said in a dark and authoritative tone. “I am an LX-14, unit number 3759824. My sensors indicate that I am defective. Please return me to my place of manufacture for a discount on your next order.”

  “Nobody ever does, by the way.” Silo crossed his mantis-like arms. “Always cheaper to crush them than pay for shipping.”

  “Do you know who we are?” Rogan asked the automata, ignoring the Ghuk. “Do you recognise any of us?”

  The LX-14 slowly turned its featureless head from left to right. Jack shivered. It had no cameras he could see. Perhaps it scanned its environments with a different set of sensors altogether.

  “No,” it bluntly replied.

  “Well that’s good,” sighed Klik, who was sitting on the stairs.

  “Do you remember what your orders were?” Rogan continued.

  “My orders were to eliminate all organic life forms present on the Krolak space station designated Kagna One,” the LX-14 replied.

  “But you’re not trying to kill us,” said Jack.

  “Why would I? You are not on Kagna One. This ship was not listed on the Kagna One schematics. Eliminating you would not correlate with my given orders.”

  “And what if
I told you we were on Kagna One when you attacked?” Rogan asked cautiously.

  The LX-14 computed this for a split-second.

  “Then you are not currently present on Kagna One, and I am therefore not tasked with eliminating you.”

  “You weren’t kidding when you said these automata are dumb,” Jack whispered to Tuner.

  “Right?” Tuner shook his head in disappointment. “They’re so dumb, I think they might be on the verge of swinging all the way back around to smart again.”

  Jack had to admit there was some wisdom in the LX-14s’ hard sense of logic. Though he also couldn’t help noticing that even with nothing but a sense of direction and purpose driving them, they weren’t exactly any better off for it. Maybe there was something he could learn from that.

  “Were you told why you needed to attack Kagna One?” Rogan asked. “What was the mission’s purpose?”

  Another pause for computation.

  “Unknown,” it replied. “It is not my duty to question or understand. It is only my duty to follow directives.”

  “And who gave you your orders, your directives?”

  “Unknown. Those who brought us online. Those who knew the activation codes.”

  Everybody in the cargo bay sighed. They weren’t getting anywhere. Klik let out an exaggerated groan.

  “Why don’t you try asking it a question we don’t already know the answer to?”

  “You’re welcome to have a go,” Rogan replied, turning back to the LX-14. “There were two battalions sent out. Your group was sent to wipe out Kagna One. What was the other group’s mission?”

  “Unknown,” the automata replied, much to everyone’s frustration. “I was not issued with the secondary team’s directives. This unit’s orders were to—”

  “Yes, we know.” Even Rogan was getting frustrated now. “Eradicate all organic life on board Kagna One, etcetera, etcetera. Well done. Good job. It’s the other battalion we care about now.”

  “I detect that you take issue with my directives,” the LX-14 continued without the slightest emotion. “It is not this unit’s task to question the morality of an order, only to follow it. If it were, I suspect this unit would not be given many orders. As such, I would not be given life. This would be an undesirable outcome.”