We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

It was too slow though. I sailed past easily, landing on the behemoth’s shoulder.

  Automatons grappled for me with their long, flexible arms.

  I swung with Feruiduin’s Cutlass, lopping them apart.

  The automatons trilled—

  “I said,” I shouted through gritted teeth, “to shut up!” I stabbed one, right through the automaton equivalent of its midriff. Its trilling alarm turned into a spasmodic lilt. It fell backward, off of the hawk’s massive shoulder—

  I decapitated another, then sunk the blade deep into a third.

  The hawk’s head twisted upon its shoulders to leer at me. “MIRA BRAAAAND,” it roared again.

  “Your breath smells like petrol,” I shot back—and I launched myself up, over the robot’s shoulder and up its neck.

  Where the hawk was made up of hundreds of automatons all melded together, its surface was not uniform. The shells of the merged automatons jutted out in all directions, forming a climbing wall to scale. I leapt from one to the other, free hand out to steady myself.

  Automatons detached all around me, preparing to stop my ascent.

  I buried the cutlass in any that showed signs of movement, climbing higher.

  Alarms trilled.

  Coiling cables detached from the hawk’s huge wings. They swung around—I ducked, holding the sword up above me to divert them—

  “SUBMIIIIIT,” the hawk boomed.

  “I’ve had a lifetime of being told to submit,” I growled. “I’m done with it—just like I’m done with you.”

  I ducked another swirling metal arm—buried Feruiduin’s Cutlass into the chassis of another rising automaton, one with a spherical core and two pairs of short, spider-like legs—

  I leapt higher, halfway up the hawk’s neck—

  It bucked. Suddenly I was thrown into the air, legs scrambling against nothing—

  Automaton cables fired out from the hawk’s back—

  Heidi, on the street, cried, “Mira!”

  I grasped the line launcher, firing it downward. The arrow embedded in the back of the hawk—and again I shot toward it, the cables narrowly flying over the top of my head.

  I clunked down onto the hawk’s back.

  Cutlass up, I sliced through the newest set of arms groping for me—cut through another rising automaton, detaching itself from the hawk’s body—and then I was racing up it again, onto its head—and staring down the robotic creature’s contorting body, desperately searching.

  Where was the thing it was using to cut gates? There didn’t appear to be anything remotely resembling a talisman on the outside of it. It was nothing but a three-dimensional patchwork of melded robots.

  I gripped its head as it thrashed again. This time it nearly flung me off—but my nails dug in hard, keeping me planted—

  Then the automaton I was gripping detached itself.

  I staggered sideways as it shifted—

  A pair of arms thrust at me from behind. Gripping me by the shoulders, they shoved me off—I yelped, sailing forward—

  And then I was caught, hanging upside-down—right in front of the hawk’s massive beak.

  It opened the maw wide.

  “SUBMIIIIT.”

  The spinning motors inside whirred frantically, baying for blood in their own mechanical way, bathed in hellfire—hellfire that was the color of …

  The gate.

  And I realized, hanging there upside-down, my eyes growing wide—the thing that had cut the gateway—it was in the hawk’s mouth.

  “MIRA BRAAAAND,” the hawk boomed again—

  “You’ve got me,” I wheezed through gritted teeth. “So come on—eat me, why don’t you?”

  It didn’t need asking.

  The arms clutching me, dangling me there, flexed to bring me into the hawk’s mouth. The beak opened wider, and the spinning, interlocked motors within rose, like the extendable jaws of a shark, ready to meet me—

  “MIRA!” Heidi bellowed from the street. “LET GO OF HER!”

  “I’ve got this!” I shouted back unsteadily.

  Feruiduin’s Cutlass, like me, hung wrong-way-up in my fist. Slicked with sweat, it was taking all of my strength to keep it from slipping out and landing on the street.

  I tightened my grip—

  Closer to the motors, closer still—

  The hawk boomed again—a rush of air came, stinking of gasoline, burnt, like this hawk’s innards were nothing but engines and every single one of them was toeing the line of burning out—

  The motor spun, grinding—

  Suddenly, they jerked toward me—

  And I flicked up Feruiduin’s Cutlass, burying it deep at the point where the uppermost set interlocked.

  For a second, they totally jammed up, the whole of the hawk jamming with it.

  That second was all I needed.

  Wrenching myself free from the hawk’s gripping arms, I fell hard into the bottom part of its automaton-forged beak. Righting myself with a hard shove, I twisted the cutlass, then forced it deeper, splitting the gear-like teeth of the motors apart—

  A high, manic trill sounded from somewhere far off—not just one, but a hundred, all suddenly screaming at once.

  I grinned. “Too late for that.”

  I wrenched the cutlass free—then, before the motors could get back up to speed, I jammed it in, higher this time.

  There, where I’d sheared off a section of interlocking teeth, I could see—something almost like a massive tongue. But it was not a tongue: it was a long, cylindrical gun, the length of my forearm and then some, as thick as the base of a bollard—and glowing at its tip was a crimson orb of light.

  “Found you.”

  I reached in, trusting the cutlass had the motors stopped—if it didn’t, I was about to say goodbye to my arm, a farewell that would last only a painful fraction of a second before the rest of my body was dragged into those teeth and mulched—

  My fist encircled the gate-gun.

  I tugged it—

  It was stuck fast.

  “Urgh,” I groaned, retrieving Decidian’s Spear in its glamoured form from my pocket, and bringing it to full length. “Why can this never be easy?”

  I jabbed it through the hole, taking careful aim for the fibrous cords that were flexing even now, trying to pull this device deeper into the massive construct that was the hawk—

  And I severed them.

  The gate-gun dropped down with a thunk.

  I reached in again, pulled it out—but the gap wasn’t wide enough for it.

  “Argh,” I groaned again. “Never easy. Never. Why? Do you Antecessors just chuckle madly every time I trip over some stupid obstacle like this? Ha ha, look at her now—”

  The hawk was starting to move, to shift—

  I jabbed the spear in between the motors now to keep them from ingesting me into them. Then I tugged out the cutlass, shearing off yet more teeth—and I hacked one of the motors away from the inner wall of the hawk’s gaping mouth. It detached, clanging down at my feet—

  I was already reaching through. Gate-gun in hand, I shrunk both cutlass and spear to their glamoured forms, stowing them—

  The hawk rumbled. Now I was no longer locking it up, it had full mobility available to it again.

  “MIRA BRAAAAAND!” Its electronic voice rose to a shrill pitch now. The interior began to contort, reconfiguring. I stumbled—

  It’s trying to get you from the inside.

  Time to finish this then.

  I staggered to the front of the wobbling, shaking maw that was its beak.

  Tokyo air caressed my wet skin.

  Heidi stood, staring in horror—but then, seeing me, she cried—

  “Got a void?” I yelled, cutting her off.

  “Right under you!” shouted Heidi.

  Perfect.

  I steadied myself at the front of the hawk’s open beak, now closing against me—

  Then I leapt.

  I fired the line launcher.

  I s
eemed to fly in slow-motion. My legs circled, as though positioned on the pedals of an invisible bicycle. Behind me, I was chased, smaller automatons breaking away from the larger mech, leaping at me. Their arms shot out; hooks extended; grabbers reached desperately for me—

  With my free hand, I fired the gate-cutter directly below me, drawing a long, glowing red line in the street as though it were a computer's art program and wherever I pointed the gun was the cursor. It opened under the cars and broken signs and debris, a gaping maw, glowing like a red hot bar of iron. It spilled wider, swallowing everything upon the street—

  I fell toward it, the hawk and its automatons following—

  And then the line launcher drew taut, the arrow and the elvish rope strung to the rear of it catching around a far-off neon sign. I swung up, like Spider-Man on a web—

  The hawk lurched after me—but the massive red gateway underneath it opened wider and wider, growing longer as I fired the gate-gun—and now suddenly it was tilting, tipping forward—cables and arms shot out—alarms suddenly trilled—

  I took a look backward. My eyes grew wide.

  In one last ditch effort not to be swallowed by the maw, the hawk was coming apart. Sloughing automatons off madly, it shrunk before my eyes, its hawklike form utterly disintegrating—

  But it was too late. The entire thing was carried down by gravity. It had split into parts much too late—and though the smaller automatons fired their gripping cables, their arms desperately groping through the air for something to hold—they fell, fell, as I soared away—

  And were swallowed by the red hole.

  *

  I breathed, long and deep, bowed low and sucking in lungfuls of cleansing, gasoline-tinged night air.

  The gate-gun was gone. I’d opened a new hole to a different void, and tossed it in, banished in case anyone else managed to get their hands on it.

  Somehow we’d survived.

  Somehow I’d gotten rid of it.

  In a quite immediate sort of hindsight, though, I realized now that getting rid of the automaton amalgam had been the easier thing—compared, that was, to clearing up the debris that was this street and the nearest intersection, where our final battle had gone down—a mass of chaos and destruction—and then a strangely empty stretch of road where all the cars and detritus had mysteriously vanished.

  “Soooo,” Heidi said. “Should we maybe stick around and try to explain this?”

  “Err, no.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. Back to Laknuria?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Against a backdrop of rising sirens, ignoring the distant crowds and the people staring out of windows, and the mad hangers-on who’d put themselves stupidly in harm’s way to see this all happen up close, Heidi and I shoved hands into our pockets, and rushed back down the street to the intersection, diverting around craters and crumpled cars.

  The first police car was just rounding the bend as we cut through and disappeared.

  29

  “You know,” I said, “this is really emblematic of our relationship that in order to stop me from facing a world you say is chock-full of danger, you set a giant murderbot after me.”

  We stood within the concourse, where the buildings had few lights. The storm still raged on overhead, and the rain came down in a frenzy, drumming madly on the metal streets underfoot. Nevertheless, even with the terrible weather I couldn’t help but feel lucky. The remaining automatons—those that had not merged with the massive, hawk-like beast I had banished to a void—were now firmly under my father’s control—which was to say they were lumbering away, returning to their headquarters as per his orders, where he would switch them off.

  Mum and Dad stood at odds with me. Sopping wet, and expressions drawn, I could only imagine what sort of family photo this would make. One that was very true to life, I thought. Tight looks, set off from each other, the metaphorical raincloud that they had draped over my life made real …

  And, of course, Manny missing. Him gone, and Camille back home … yes, this was the perfect representation of everything that my relationship with my parents was.

  “We didn’t mean for that to happen,” said my dad quietly. He fiddled with the remote control but didn’t touch any of its many buttons. The gem on it now flashed at a very low cadence indeed. “Once they started combining …”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “No harm intended. Just maybe take a look at how you go about trying to get your daughter to listen to you in future, hm?”

  He looked pained, but then gave a low nod. “I’m sorry, Mira.”

  “I don’t accept your apology,” I said.

  Dad stiffened.

  “But I have heard it,” I went on. “And maybe in time I’ll come to feel differently.”

  There was a long quiet between us—or rather, as long a quiet as there could be with the heavens pouring down on all of us. It was starting to get a little cooler now. I guessed Laknuria, like England, was currently experiencing the height of its summer, because much later in the year and this downpour would be freezing as well as overall unpleasant.

  Heidi and Borrick stood by awkwardly. He’d taken his jacket off again and used it to improvise a sling. The rain slicked his hair to his head, stuck his shirt to his chest.

  “Soooo,” said Heidi, as the pause dragged out. “Borrick, shall we …?”

  “Yes. The Instrumentum Aeternitatis. Of course.” And he began to hurry off with her, pausing only to give me a sympathetic look and a, “See you shortly.”

  I raised a hand, watched them go.

  When they were out of earshot, my mother finally drew a breath.

  She’d not spoken once since Heidi and I returned to Laknuria. Nor did she even seem to be able to acknowledge me. Her eyes were downcast.

  For once, she looked weary—tired.

  “Mira,” she croaked at last. Her accent came thick. But there was no anger in her voice now, like there usually was when her native accent came heavy. No, now she sounded as if she had given up, like all the energy had left her. “We didn’t mean for—any of this. Please believe that.”

  “It’s fine,” I said shortly. “I dealt with it.”

  “How?” asked Dad.

  “I ripped off its talisman and sent it into a broken world.”

  The awe on my dad’s face fled. He flinched back, as did Mum—a broken world. The same fate that had befallen Manny.

  But this time Mum didn’t bring him up again. She didn’t launch into a tirade against me, didn’t blame me for Manny’s—his death. Who knew? Maybe she’d got it out of her system. Or maybe, seeing as the three of us had saved my parents’ lives after their attempt to stop me went so horribly wrong, she finally decided not to push the issue anymore.

  Maybe they’d even come to respect me.

  Pfft. Not happening any time soon. These were my parents we were talking about, after all.

  “In all the years I’ve been doing this,” Dad said, “I have never—and I mean never—faced anything like what you did.” He shook his head, looking demurely at the remote control in his hand. “I wouldn’t have had the first clue of what to do to stop it.”

  “Yeah, well, neither did I,” I said, “especially when it followed us. Thanks for that, by the way.” I glared. My parents flinched back again. As well they should: I was not going to let them forget that this was all their fault, not any time soon. “Luckily, I’ve got a smart head on my shoulders. I’m resourceful. I do well under pressure. It’s everything that I need to be a great Seeker.”

  “A great Seeker,” Mum echoed in a whisper. She looked at me for a long moment, her expression fraught.

  “By all accounts,” said Dad after a heavy pause, “you are one already.”

  My eyes almost popped right out of my head at that. Had I heard right? Did he really say—?

  “Yeah, well,” I said, as coolly as I possibly could, “maybe you should listen once in a while. You don’t always know what’s best for me. You shouldn�
��t worry so much about me.”

  “We’re always going to worry about you,” said Mum softly. “We’re your parents.”

  I felt a pang of guilt at that, and sympathy. And suddenly, standing here, I felt my perspective shift. It wasn’t like the momentous, world-changing change that I’d experienced when the Antecessors showed me the true shape of things. This was smaller—but it nevertheless felt just as significant.

  My parents were just that: parents. They weren’t villains, really. They were just two people trying to do what they felt was right to care for a person they loved. And I think they did—love me, that is. It didn’t always feel like it growing up, especially not with Mum’s constant domineering and their near-single-minded focus on Manny’s future career. But there was love there, if not a very traditional sort.

  Otherwise, why would they have gone to this length to stop me?

  Of course, I thought, re-grounding myself before all of this got out of hand and I found myself forgiving them for eighteen years of questionable decision-making, the fact they loved me didn’t excuse them. They’d failed to respect my dreams all throughout my childhood. They’d shaped Manny into a smarmy, cocksure older brother who only made my life worse. And today’s stalking and setting the robots on me—that was borderline abusive. Probably not even borderline, actually—just flat out.

  “I understand,” I said. “But I’m not forgiving you. Not for this, and not for the way the pair of you treated me over the years. But especially not for this. I mean, really, robots? Come on.”

  Mum wrung her hands. She nodded, eyes downcast again. “Of course.”

  Dad fiddled with his remote control. “No,” he sighed. “Well, that’s … fair.”

  I frowned at him. “How’d you even get that anyway?” I pointed at the remote.

  He licked his bottom lip. “I did a favor for an old University professor. He … may have slipped me this as thanks.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Slipped you it? What does that mean?”

  Dad looked pained. “It was an object of research.”

  “Right. So your professor friend stole it, is that what you’re saying?”

  His pained expression grew grimmer. No answer—but the expression was all the answer I needed.