We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

  An arm whipped out for me. I brought the spear up, and metal rang with a whine. The arm rebounded. Decidian’s Spear vibrated in my hands.

  The automaton pivoted—and came right at me.

  Okay, well at least that answered the question of whether or not its focus was on me.

  I jabbed forward with Decidian’s Spear, aiming at the new arm sailing right for me—

  It pinged off, with so much force it wrenched my whole body round with it.

  That whine again, like something metal, dragging …

  I spun, not so much sourcing the sound as preparing to defend myself against another blow—if this thing could just get itself organized enough to attack me with all of its arms in quick succession, it would easily win this fight—and clamped down a gasp. Climbing down the skyscrapers, dragged by their own metal legs, or hooks, or propelled by forces unknown—came more automatons.

  “Look out!” I shouted—

  Heidi and Borrick whirled as the first of them landed upon the street. They rose up, looming figures, peering at us out of the stormy dark—

  “Aw, crap,” Heidi muttered. “Why can’t this ever just be easy?”

  22

  Hard to say what my first instinct was: throwing myself directly into the path of the dozens-strong army of automatons, in all their specialized configurations, lurching down at us; or to turn on my heel and run, forget the whole damned thing.

  At least, this decision was hard for all of about half a second.

  “Run,” I said, backtracking to avoid another deadly swing of the first automaton’s massive arms.

  Heidi nodded. She turned on her heel to make after me—

  The first automaton slapped down both pairs of its huge arms, clanging the metal street—and forming a hurdle between me, and Heidi and Borrick on the other side.

  Borrick’s eyes drew wide. “Mira—!”

  And then one of those arms slapped him in the midriff. His cry was turned into a gust of painfully exhaled breath as he soared back, his knife pirouetting in the air out of his hand, jacket flying—

  Another arm swept out for me.

  I blocked it with the spear, just, backtracking another step—another step that kept me from Heidi and Borrick.

  Three of the machines had landed in the street now, descending from the skyscrapers they clambered down, like frightful mechanized bugs. They lumbered toward Heidi. A fourth clanked onto the street too, dragging itself on hooked arms, and set off for Borrick.

  “Get back,” Heidi warned, Feruiduin’s Cutlass poised. She edged around, eyes on the automatons pushing for her, pupils darting back and forth.

  One of them lunged. Its body was like an upended triangle. The arms it possessed were not as thick, nor as long, as the first one we’d seemingly inadvertently awoken; they were more like cables, a deep, matte black like carbon fiber rather than the muted obduridium/steel mix I believed the largest automaton, and the rest of the city, was built from.

  Heidi jerked out with the cutlass. It swung in a clean arc, slicing one of the bot’s cable-arms off.

  It reeled backward, the stumpy remainder of its arm flapping. A shrieking sort of pulse noise came from it, rising into the sky and cutting through the drumbeat of the rain.

  Another automaton, this one blocky and dragging itself using a single gripping arm, turned from its pursuit of Borrick. It pulled itself over, reaching the shrieking, triangular unit Heidi had just split asunder—

  An aperture opened upon its hull. A set of fibrous cables spewed out, crawling, like a horrifying body snatcher from some gritty sci-fi flick … and then they found the severed end of the automaton’s cable arm. They wrapped around it, swallowing first the arm’s end … and then it dragged the stump into itself, pulling the triangular body up, raising it upon itself …

  New apertures opened, more fibers spilling out, from both automatons this time. They meshed and blurred together, tightening into plaited coils.

  And then the whole unit, now one single, larger automaton, turned. The high-pitched shrieking died.

  The dragging arm of the former unit repositioned itself. It split, at the end, into hooks.

  “No,” I breathed.

  And it launched itself at Heidi.

  She was quick. Throwing herself to the ground, she didn’t even try to bring Feruiduin’s Cutlass about, just flung herself aside before it could gore her. The automaton sailed right overhead—and then another unit latched onto it as it was in mid-flight, securing itself to the bot’s base—and from that erupted four cables, like the elvish rope from my line launcher, ejected across the street in four perfect straight lines. They anchored to the skyscrapers by no means I could see—and then the bot pivoted, turning on its axis, the cables realigning themselves so it could swivel.

  The hooked hand aimed itself right at Heidi’s head.

  It leapt again—

  “HEIDI!” I shouted.

  She looked up—

  And then Borrick swung in, his knife reclaimed. He sliced the groping hand clean off, sending it sailing away. The automaton flew past, emitting a brand new shriek—heralding others to come join it—

  Borrick was already helping Heidi up, dodging blows from the large automaton separating us. “Go,” he called to me. “Get clear! We’ll meet you.”

  “Meet me where?” I shouted back.

  He looked pained. “No idea,” I thought the answer would be—but then the first automaton, the six-legged one, was rampaging at me like a rhinoceros spying its escape from a zoo enclosure. I shrieked, turned on my tail, and ran like hell.

  My feet slipped on the floor. Too slick. I had half a mind to write an angry letter to the idiots who’d built this place right under a storm. Signs of life were purely mechanized though, so I figured whoever built this place had long since been usurped by their creations. Also, ain’t no one out there who can shut off a storm.

  My feet almost slipped from under me as I turned a corner, forking to the left. That way, I’d at least be heading in roughly the same direction Heidi had originally pointed us, so meeting back up with them would be easier.

  If there was anything of them left to meet up with.

  Stop it, Mira. That type of thinking doesn’t help.

  It helps prepare me, another version of my voice shot back, slightly hysterical, for inevitably finding the piles of pulpy gore they’ve been converted into!

  The automaton raged behind me, keeping quick pace. I dared only one look over my shoulder as I rounded the corner. It was just far enough that it couldn’t reach me with its arms, couldn’t bat me down—or flick me like Saltlick on Erbridge’s quest, in the first chamber with all the waterworks.

  Stop thinking and focus on surviving, damn it!

  I pounded feet, frantic. Boulevard quickly swallowed, I forked to the left again, expecting to come out somewhere near the place where Heidi, Borrick and I had become separated. I didn’t, nor at the next junction. All the roads were arranged at odd angles though, not ninety degrees, compounding the labyrinthine nature of the city.

  How did anyone even get where they wanted to go in this place?

  A CRASH behind me split my thoughts apart. Sparing a glance backward, my frenetic heart skipped. The distance between me and this raging metal contraption had halved. And with eight, nine feet of arm available to itself to reach out with, I only had a couple of feet of space on it.

  I pursed myself faster, lower—but was that my breath burning in my chest?

  How had I become so unfit after just five weeks?

  By sitting around on your backside, moping about like an emo?

  I gritted my teeth, and rounded another bend—

  An arm slapped me low, just above the ankles. I yelped, spinning, flipping end over end as the world blurred. My grip tightened on Decidian’s Spear—one-handed, because the force of the fall had caused me to give it an accidental flick to turn it back into an umbrella—

  I landed against a wall, dazed.

 
; Can’t stay here.

  Right. Forcing myself into action, I pushed myself up before taking stock of my surroundings.

  The automaton approached, its pace somewhat slowed. The way it moved was so wrong. With six arms, it should’ve planted them all on the ground, shifting like some sort of robotic spider, possibly one whose front legs had been pulled off. Yet it used only two, flexing them so as to plant them beneath it. They didn’t move like human legs, but rather pooled into low coils, one extending forward for its next step, the other affixing itself in place until it, too, needed to move.

  We were on the edge of a concourse. Wide, and utterly empty, it at least had some small new features: white lights illuminated several of the skyscrapers in streaks. The ground had panels for lights too, an orange-white glow leaking out of them.

  “You robots need to get some décor for this place,” I grunted. “Because I can tell you: as far as worlds go, this is one of the most positively dull ones I have ever set foot in.”

  The automaton pulled itself closer.

  “We’re fighting still? Fine.” I flicked the umbrella, converting it back into Decidian’s Spear. “I’ll tell you this though: I’ve had a rotten damned day. And if you really want for me to take it out on you …”

  “CEASE,” the automaton bleated, very suddenly, in a voice that resembled a human talking in to a fan.

  I stopped. Stared. “Err …”

  “TERMINATE RESISTING.”

  “Um. Since when can you talk?”

  One of its arms struck out, hitting the wall next to me.

  I flinched back. Six inches to the left, and I’d be leaving here with a crushed head.

  As it was, I now had a nasty ringing in my left ear.

  “You hunk of trash,” I growled. “Way to burst my eardrum.”

  “SUBMIT, MIRA BRAND.”

  I froze—it knew my name? But how …? The Antecessors? Surely not. I was just a COMPETITOR to them. So who …?

  I didn’t think it through any longer. Another smash of the automaton’s arms, this time on the other side of me, nice and loud, to counterbalance my very recently acquired tinnitus.

  On one hand, it wasn’t trying to pulverize me.

  On the other, it wanted me for something.

  Well, something wasn’t having me.

  I stabbed out with Decidian’s Spear, driving it against the automaton’s metal hull. It scrambled backward, bringing its arms in to block the blow—

  And I dove, throwing myself under its arms and pounding along the concourse.

  “CEASE!” it barked, surging afterward—

  I leapt over the arm it swung low, trying to trip me. Spinning on my heel, I thrust out at it again—

  “CEASE,” boomed the automaton.

  The spear rebounded with a furious metal clang, sending a new round of reverberations up my arms. The automaton drew backward—

  I swung again. The bladed tip of Decidian’s Spear screeched across the automaton’s body.

  Didn’t even leave a scratch.

  “Where am I supposed to stab you?”

  I ducked a pair of flung arms, coming at me from opposite directions—tripped on my own feet—and then turned the stagger into a sprint, flying down the concourse as fast as my legs could carry me.

  And then the street lifted.

  The roadway entirely detached from the skyscrapers running to either side of it. As though it existed on its own track, a set of runners beneath the city’s floor, it tilted and rose, my end moving higher and higher into the air. Panic filled my chest, my heart skipping—the automaton waited at the bottom, below the ‘hinge’—and then I was falling, the angle of the street and the slickness the rain had left here forcing me down, down—

  I was at least smart enough to point the spear straight down. It ripped through the metal carapace at last, momentum more than my own strength doing that.

  It jammed—a motor, I thought, frozen but still trying to push, to keep turning—

  “Take that,” I growled.

  Arms frozen, it shrieked wildly—its alarm, trilling for help.

  No, I thought. I was not going to be dealing with any more of these. It could shriek for help, but it’d be dead by the time other automatons got here to affix onto it, repairing its damage, modifying it to combat me in other, more deadly ways.

  I twisted the spear, to shred the internal workings—

  But the motor just unjammed.

  The frozen automaton lurched into motion again. It grappled for me, arms spinning.

  I shouted, something that would’ve made even Heidi take pause, and then threw myself aside.

  I sprinted down the concourse, in the opposite direction to the risen street—

  But that began to move too. Rising in sections, like the bars of a graph, it split on invisible seams ahead of me, surging up to narrow the wide, open boulevard into an alley terminating in a very solid wall.

  I battered it, stabbed with the spear—rounded—

  The automaton lumbered to me. It was slower now, more careful, watching my every move with eyes I could not see.

  The motor inside of it whined, the noise amplified as it came from the tear I’d made in its hull with Decidian’s Spear.

  “SUBMIT, MIRA BRAND.”

  “How about, 'No'?”

  Impasse—

  Then it lunged for me.

  I brought Decidian’s Spear up to block it—

  And it went pinging away.

  I gasped—

  An arm slammed the wall beside me, closer than ever to crushing my head—

  And that was when Heidi showed up.

  “Thought you could use a bit of help,” she said, when two of the automaton’s arms had been lopped off.

  I staggered at a half run to Decidian’s Spear, where it lay—

  Then I was flying through the air again, all the air forced out of my chest—

  The automaton screeched. Its arms whirled in a blur, Heidi sailing underneath them. They clashed—she danced, Feruiduin’s Cutlass carving through the air like it was an extension of her body—and then, finally, she buried the blade right into the hole I’d made, destroying the internal components and forcing the automaton to finally still, falling in a tired, broken heap of sparking metal stumps.

  The raised concourse unfolded, returning the street to its usual barren self—

  And revealing:

  “Guuuuuys!”

  Borrick came hurtling round a bend, pursued by—a dozen or more automatons. Even more of them crawled along the skyscrapers, dragging themselves down to earth.

  He bellowed, mad as I’d ever seen him: “RUN!”

  Neither of us needed telling twice. Heidi pivoted on her heel and sprinted away, apparently facing none of the difficulty I had been in combatting the slick water pooling underfoot as the heavens continued to pour; she moved with her usual finesse, almost frustrating.

  Borrick was a bit more duck-footed. I waited for him, because—well, I didn’t exactly have an answer for that, because I certainly didn’t owe him anything, and especially not dying with him under a seething mass of murderbots—either way, I had a few seconds to admire the awkward lurch of his run. That and the way he was no longer brandishing his club-shaped knife, but rather clutching his arm, suggested he’d taken at least a couple of sharp raps. Bruises, if he were lucky—though judging by the pain in his face, the way he clenched his teeth and made the cords of his neck stick out, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d broken something too.

  “Thanks for waiting,” he panted as I fell into step with him, the pair of us running to catch up Heidi.

  “No problem. You okay?”

  “Took a little bit of a beating,” he said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “I primed you well for this,” I said, sidelong.

  He looked as though he was not sure whether to feel indignation or to laugh.

  He didn’t have to make a choice.

  Up in front of Heidi, the skyscrapers
themselves suddenly shifted. As though they were on tracks of their own, they suddenly wheeled about—and the concourse narrowed and narrowed, closing in tighter—

  “Quicker!” she cried, pumping her arms madly in a desperate, last ditch attempt to outpace it—

  The roadway closed.

  We were, once again, trapped.

  She skidded to a stop. Slamming fists against the steely black metal of the scrapers, she bellowed an agonized moan.

  Borrick and I jogged up behind her.

  “What now?” I asked, panic rising.

  Heidi gritted her teeth. Clutching her soaking hair in her hands, she squeezed, wringing water out and tugging at the same time.

  “We have to fight,” said Borrick.

  “How?” asked Heidi. “Just taking down one of them is bad enough, let alone when they keep rebuilding themselves.”

  “We have to do something!”

  The army of automatons was closing. Their vast mass hurtled in one long battle line at us, a twisting mess of robotic arms and claws and grabbers and hooks, bodies of all shapes and sizes, some with gleaming metal hulls and others with lights and apertures and external sensors pointed out at the world.

  For the first time, I could hear thunder. But it was not the storm: it was our adversary.

  Stupidly, I planted my feet. Gripping Decidian’s Spear, I gritted my teeth, the bladed tip pointed forward, ready to thrust—

  Just as the automatons closed to within ten feet—the street lurched again. Our section, right at the end, broke away. It lifted, soaring high above the army of automatons now down below—they reached out for us, and there were suddenly dozens of voices in the air, motors whirring to enunciate, “SUBMIT!” all overlapping each other.

  I jerked, hardly keeping my footing.

  “What in the—?”

  The street platform rose and rose, up toward the storm, climbing the skyscrapers—

  And then it stopped—right beside the combined roofs of the rearranged mass of towering blot-like buildings that had shifted to pause our escape. A rail ran around it, looking like a picket fence cast in metal, the only real, distinct feature of this exercise in ultra-utilitarian design.

  And there, stood waiting for us—