by B. V. Larson
There were machines behind us. They’d moved between us and our dragon-driving squad mates.
Seeing just one of these critters at a time from the inside of a dragon cockpit, they hadn’t looked all that threatening. But standing out here in the open, wearing nothing but smart-cloth skivvies, I felt seriously exposed. The machines had all manner of pincers and scoops around their front sections which seemed to operate like an intake or mouth. They stared at us with their whining little cameras while their mouth-pincers worked the air hungrily.
“I see them, Vet,” Sargon said in my earpiece. “We’re ready to charge in and take them out. Just give the word.”
“No, no,” I said over my helmet radio. “Just sit tight. Graves didn’t want us to hurt them.”
“That’s crazy. They’re just machines.”
“You have your orders, Specialist,” I told Sargon. “If I die, you can take command and do whatever you want.”
This radio conversation seemed to make the machines nervous. I was sure they could hear it but probably didn’t understand it. Maybe it sounded like shouting or like a foreign language to them.
I put my hands up and stepped toward the group. There were seven machine creatures all lined up. Two of them were humped up, resting their fore-claws nervously on the backs of the others.
“They look like a nervous pack of animals,” Kivi said, using her voice rather than her radio.
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, I’m feeling a little nervous too.”
I walked slowly toward them and squatted. This caused a response. The machines rushed closer.
Automatically, I stood up again. “Whoa, whoa!” I told the excited little robots.
When I stood up, they stopped approaching and went back to squirming on top of one another again.
“I’m getting the feeling these guys are young,” Kivi said. “Young and not too bright. They’re responding to your physical posture. Some animals are like that. If you stand up, they think you’re bigger. If you get down and small, they figure you’re food.”
“Good observation,” I said. “I’ll make a point of standing tall. Can you fetch me a stick or something?”
There weren’t any sticks, of course, as there were no plants on this planet—at least not ones we’d found yet. She came up and gave me something that looked like a length of steel tubing, about a meter long.
“There’s trash like this all around their village,” Kivi said. “For all we know, it’s a bone to them.”
“Yeah…I hope they don’t take offense.”
Using my metal stick, I drew a circle in the frosty mud at my feet. Then I backed away from it.
The largest of the creatures scuttled forward to examine the circle with his cameras. After about thirty seconds, he used a stubby leg to draw another circle inside the one I’d drawn. His was better than mine, more uniform.
“And that’s what we call communication!” I said.
The machines looked at us expectantly. They rustled and churned their feet. Cameras craned to look at the circle, then at me.
“I think they want you to draw something else.”
“Yeah, just like a pack of bored kids.”
I proceeded to draw all kinds of geometric shapes. Each time, the robots imitated me. At last, my helmet buzzed.
“McGill, what are you doing out there?” Leeson asked me. “You were supposed to report in and return to base half an hour ago.”
“Sorry Adjunct,” I said. “I’ve made contact with the aliens, and they can’t seem to get enough of me.”
“That’s just grand. Figure out a way to pat them on the head and leave. It’s getting dark soon, and I want every dragon inspected and recharged for morning.”
As I’d hesitated for a long time, the lead machine took the initiative. He—I’d started thinking of him as a “he” without being sure why—drew something new. Instead of a simple geometric shape, he drew a circle on top of an oval, with four longer ovals dangling from the central one.
“Ah,” Kivi said. “You see that? He’s drawn a picture of you, James!”
I examined the drawing and laughed. “So he has. You’re a better artist than I am, robot!”
-15-
We got back to camp after dark. Returning late turned out to be a bad move. Trotting our dragons over the icy crust of this planet was hazardous in the foggy light of day. In darkness, it was downright dangerous. Two of us broke through the crust of frozen methane and had to be dragged out with tow cables. The group was weary and irritable by the time we reached camp.
When we did finally get back to our unit, I immediately regretted the fact the expedition had left the relative comfort of the lifter behind. Our new encampment wasn’t much to look at without the sheltering roof of the lifter’s belly above our heads. Our tents were soft, not much more than smart cloth bubbles. They never stopped whipping and flapping in the winds. The mist got inside, no matter how hard we worked to make the tents airtight.
“I didn’t know a planet could smell this bad,” Carlos complained. “Fart World, that’s what we should call it.”
“No,” I said. “They’ve already got a name, haven’t you heard? They’re calling it Machine World.”
“Well, I guess that will work. It’s full of wacky machines. Did you ever figure out who the lucky trooper was who got eaten by your little friends?”
“No one got eaten. Just the dragon did. It was part of Harris’ squad. One of the dragons broke down and they left it. When they came back for it hours later, it was gone.”
“Scavengers. Jackals. That’s what those little bastards are. You were crazy to go right up to them and start a drawing contest. What would you have done if they had torn off your helmet for a snack and burned off your face with acid?”
“I’m pretty sure I’d have died,” I admitted. “But we’ve made contact. Maybe it will do some good in time. If people who’ve got more training with this than I do can continue the work, maybe we’ll be able to communicate with these machines someday.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Carlos. “I’ve been talking it over with Kivi because I need a tech in order to try it out.”
I frowned and stared at him. Carlos often got ideas, but they were rarely good ones.
“What are you up to?” I asked. “Why Kivi? She’s not a real tech—at least, not yet.”
“Hold on!” Carlos said loudly, lifting his hands up in front of his face. “Don’t take a swing at me! I know you and Kivi are doing the nasty again, but that’s no reason to—”
I almost hit him. I controlled myself with difficulty. “Listen, quit screwing around and tell me your plan. That’s an order.”
“Okay, okay. Here it is: we’ll build a little box, see, just like the one you built with Claver back on Tech World.”
“A box? What kind of box?”
“A comm box, retard—oh, sorry. I mean Vet.”
When dealing with Carlos, a man had to have a thick skin. There just wasn’t any other way to get through a conversation.
“Keep talking,” I said through gritted teeth.
Carlos seemed honestly surprised I hadn’t hit him yet. I was a little surprised, too. But I wanted to hear what kind of cockamamie plan he’d hatched.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “These are machines, right? They have to communicate with codes and protocols of some kind. That means we might be able to hack them, to take them over. Wouldn’t that be cool? What if you could just give this army of robots a command and have them all obey you?”
“What kind of orders?”
“You know. Stuff like ‘kill that squid’ or ‘rip off Kivi’s suit.’”
I nodded thoughtfully. It wasn’t as insane as it sounded. But I knew it wouldn’t be easy to do, and it might not even be possible. These machines were wild. They weren’t slaves like our drones from Earth. They weren’t built to take orders and obey them without question.
“So, why Kivi?” I asked. “You never said
.”
“Isn’t it obvious? First off, none of the real techs would listen to me. But she did, and she needs rank as badly as I do. If we did something cool like this, we could be specialists within hours.”
I’d often told him to go do something useful to prove himself, and I had to admit that this sounded like he was at least trying. It also sounded like Kivi would be doing all the work.
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with your regular duties, I’ve got no objection.” I heard myself say that. Then I wondered if I’d live to regret my words.
“Cool! Thanks James.” He left to work on his little scheme.
I went to the dragon corral and cared for my machine personally. I’d taught my troops to perform minor repairs on their dragons rather than depend totally on the techs. Out here on a wild planet, your kit wasn’t someone else’s job, it was your life.
In the corral, I met up with Della for the first time since she’d dropped the baby-bomb on me up on Cyclops. We’d been placed in different platoons, and I’d been too busy coming up to speed on being a veteran in a brand new cavalry cohort to talk much with her. The truth was, I reflected, I’d been avoiding this moment.
“Hi Della,” I said cheerily.
She gave me a thin smile and a nod. I’m not the best at reading feminine responses, but to me she looked a little put out.
“Hey,” I said, walking up to her and wiping my fingers with a dirty rag. “I hope you didn’t take things the wrong way up there on Cyclops. I’ve been so busy learning how to command a squadron of these dragons, I didn’t have much time—”
“It’s okay, James,” she said. “Like I said, I’ve moved on.”
“Yeah, sure. The marriage thing. Who’d you marry, anyway? I hope it wasn’t that dickhead named Stott.”
She smiled at me then, and it was the real thing this time. “No, not him. It’s a man you don’t know. A good man.”
“Great, great,” I said, turning away to go. I’d left things in an unclear state up on the ship, and I’d wanted her to know I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I felt a little relieved I’d accomplished my mission. It was disturbing that some other guy I’d never met was taking care of my kid—but the whole thing was mind-boggling to me anyway.
“James,” she said before I’d gone one step. “Don’t you want to know more about your child?”
“Uh…I am curious. But I kind of figured that with you being married and all, I should bow out of the picture, if you know what I mean.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Her face hardened. She was unhappy all over again. Damn.
I knew I was out of my element on this one. Sure, I could write a book on how a man should talk to a girl who’d caught him hanging around with a rival woman, or how to explain to a lover he might have forgotten to text for a couple of days—but this? I was without clue.
Whatever my feelings, I could tell by the look in her eye that the ball was in my court. I took a random stab at serving it back.
“Why don’t you tell me about her?” I asked brightly. “About Etta, I mean.”
That broke the dam. I was treated to about an hour’s worth of pictures and video and even a lock of the girl’s hair to wrap around my fingers. I smiled at that last part.
“Blonde hair,” I mused. “Real gold-colored, like mine used to be when I was young. Flaxen, my grandma used to call it.”
“Do you feel better now?” Della asked, her eyes searching mine. She was trying to look cool—hell, Della was the ultimate cool-as-cucumber woman. But I knew she was gauging my responses carefully.
“Yeah!” I said, giving her a big grin. “Can I keep some of the hair?”
“Yes, certainly. I’ll transfer the pictures and recordings to your tapper, too.”
“Great.”
We touched tappers, and it was all over in a second. I had a full dump of my daughter’s pictures and videos on my arm—permanently. Right at the moment I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a good thing for my mental health or not, but I could tell it made Della happy.
“Hey, when did you get a tapper?” I asked her.
“After you left Happy Valley, we absorbed as much of your technology as we could. We duplicated most of the simple things like your tappers.”
I didn’t consider tappers to be simple tech, but I nodded. They were complex machines embedded in the flesh of every full-grown human from Earth. They were powered by our bodies and symbiotic with our flesh. The screens even grew hairs sometimes, and you had to pluck them out.
“You guys are wizards,” I said. “I’ve never been so impressed with a group of humans in my life. Stuck out there on Dust World with squids hunting you every so often—I never could figure out how you managed to build up a technological society under those conditions. Maybe we did send our best and brightest out into space a century back.”
She was beaming now. I was proud of myself as well. I’d turned a cold-shoulder situation into a happy family reunion. That was quite an accomplishment for a rube like me.
“Well,” she said, “we had help.”
“You mean from the Galactics? Did they contact you after we left?”
“No, they didn’t. They barely pay any attention to our part of space. From what I understand, that’s a good thing.”
“Yeah…” I thought about the Galactic I’d shot the other day. It was a very good thing the Empire was looking the other direction on that one. All my bullshit might get me past a Mogwa, but I’d never have managed to pull a fast one like that on the Nairbs or the Empire’s Battle Fleet commanders. “If not the Empire, who helped you?”
She gave me an odd, almost shy look. “I’m not supposed to talk about that, James.”
Frowning, I shrugged. “Okay…but who told you not to talk? You can trust me, you know. I’m in more trouble with the Empire than you could ever hope to be in your lifetime.”
This cracked her up. I couldn’t recall ever having seen her laugh much before, and it was a nice change today.
“I believe you,” she said. “So I will speak of a mutual friend. But no one else must know.”
“Uh…okay.”
“Natasha taught me. She taught all of us. She took tappers from the dead—bodies you didn’t recycle before you left—and she rebuilt new ones for us. She’s quite talented, you know.”
“She sure is,” I said, looking as confused as I felt. “But when did she have time to do all that?”
Della stared at me for a second. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
She winced, put her hand on my arm, and shook her pretty head. “Forget what I said. Erase it from your mind. It doesn’t matter.”
She walked away then, and I stared after her in bafflement. It took a full twenty seconds for the light bulb to go off in my dim brain. Sometimes, I’m pretty slow on the uptake. When I did get it, the bulb was like a flash of lightning in my skull.
“Oh shit,” I whispered, eyes wide.
I ran after Della. She ducked me, walking into the tent with her squaddies. I chased after her and threw open the flaps. This pissed off everyone inside as it let the stinky air from the outer mechanical bay into the living quarters.
“Hey, close that!”
I did. Then I moved to loom over Della.
“We’ve got to talk,” I said.
She was looking away from me, changing her clothes. She’d been in her grease-monkey suit, a coverall with nanofiber surfactants that shed any liquid that came in contact with it. She stripped this off and dropped her clothes in a heap on the floor, never even looking at me while she pulled a normal combat suit out of a locker.
Dropping one’s drawers in a tent full of people wasn’t all that unusual in Legion Varus. We had to live pretty close, especially on a planet with an atmosphere that wasn’t quite human-flavored. Still, Della always had been even less shy than your typical trooper, due to her upbringing on a harsh colony world.
For just a second, I was distracted. Della’
s bare butt was as fine as the first day I’d laid eyes on it back on Dust World in an underground hot spring. Possibly, it looked a shade better than it had back then, as the cavern we made love in had been pretty dark.
A big hand laid itself on my forearm, interrupting my staring session. I knew that hand and that firm grip—I’d know them anywhere. I turned to look at the face glowering at me. It was none other than Veteran Harris.
“Look, McGill,” he said. “The lady has made it pretty clear she doesn’t want to talk to you. I think you should show a little tact, and move the fuck on.”
It was an awkward moment. I looked around and realized the whole squad was watching me. I outranked them all except for Harris, but that didn’t make this situation any more acceptable. From their point of view, I was harassing a female soldier who was trying to get away from me.
“I’m sorry Vet,” I said. “But Della and I need to talk for a moment. Do you mind?”
Harris shook his head. “You don’t give up, do you? Quit chasing tail in my squad! Get on back to your own squad if you want to pull that shit!”
“What? No—hold on, Harris. That’s not how it is. Della and I have a history. She had my baby, back on Dust World.”
Harris did everything but cross his eyes at that statement. I could tell he didn’t know what to make of it.
“Are you shitting me, boy? You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
“Yes sir. Everyone tells me so.”
Shaking his head, Harris turned away. The rest of his squad melted as well. He ushered them out of the flapping, imperfect airlock. When they were all gone, he poked his head back in for one last statement.
“If she screams or something, I’m putting you down. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
He left then, and Della turned to face me. She had her arms crossed and her clothes on. I was vaguely disappointed, but at least she couldn’t get away.
“You shouldn’t press this,” she said. “For the sake of our mutual friend.”
“Natasha?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You know her—really know her. Don’t you?”