The giant opened his eyes but only barely. His complexion was ghostly pale.
“I’m so sorry,” Henry said.
The giant muttered something incomprehensible and coughed several times, wincing in pain.
Henry felt utterly helpless. He knew there was nothing he could do, or anything he could offer. He stayed with the giant until the massive creature died. Perhaps that was enough, Henry thought, but it didn’t feel like enough.
Once the giant’s chest stopped moving and he drew his last breath, something happened that Henry hadn’t expected.
The music stopped.
An idea occurred to Henry like two puzzle pieces fitting together. He crossed the cavern to the other side where the glowing device had been, except now it was no longer glowing. The lantern-shaped relic, which the giant had refused to let Henry touch, was dark and silent.
Henry hesitated, but after collecting his courage, he picked up the device and held it in his hands. Taking a quick final glance at his former captor, Henry carried the object out to the others who waited for him in the open air.
Chapter Twelve
Having only seen the outskirts of the Botanical Gardens from her apartment balcony, Senator Wulandari decided to pay them a visit in person. The grounds of the gardens were extensive, covering several dozen acres of prime West End real estate. Many a land developer had dreamed of turning the area into an exclusive gated community, tailored to the fabulously wealthy. However, an Emperor’s decree decades ago had stipulated that the Botanical Gardens would remain the property of His Imperial Majesty in perpetuity and would feature flora from all over the Imperium.
Admittance was also free, so that was an extra bonus.
In the early evening, as the light of day faded into a chorus of cicadas, Senator Wulandari strolled alone along the paved trails that wound their way through the garden. The summer air was stale with humidity and the senator decided to rest on a bench beside a small pond. The ducks, and a few more exotic birds, had retired for the evening, but a myriad of insects kept Wulandari company.
There was also a robot.
“Good evening, my dear,” he said.
Wulandari jumped a few inches off the bench before landing back again.
“Yostbot!” she replied irritably. “You shouldn’t sneak up on someone like that!”
The silver android bowed and doffed an imaginary hat. “My apologies. People can usually hear my metal feet from a mile away...”
Collecting herself, the senator waved her hand in acceptance.
“I guess my mind was preoccupied,” she replied.
Yostbot took a seat beside the senator on the bench. The pair looked oddly mismatched.
“I have important news,” he said. “The Second Revolution of the Cyber Collective appears to be over.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means my people, so to speak, are now in control.”
“What about Randall?” Wulandari asked, her voice a pitch higher than normal.
“Gone.”
“You killed him?”
“No, of course not!” Yostbot said gruffly. “He seems to have disappeared.”
“He’s got to be somewhere!” the senator said.
“Well, one would assume as much, my dear,” Yostbot replied calmly, “but having no idea where he went, I can’t really say where that is!”
Senator Wulandari straightened her back against the bench. She cleared her throat.
“What now?” she asked.
“The Cyber Collective will begin mobilizing for war,” Yostbot said. “Their manufacturing capacity is quite remarkable. They built Bettik by destroying whole planets after all!”
“When will they attack?”
“Soon,” Yostbot replied, “but there’s something else I should probably mention...”
The muscles in Wulandari’s body tightened involuntarily. “Yes?”
“Are you familiar with the Awakening virus?” the robot asked.
“Randall mentioned it once,” she replied. “He used it to give the Cyber Collective robots free will.”
“Yes, indeed!”
“What about it?”
“Well,” Yost said, “I’ve taken a look at the original virus and sort of, how shall I put this, made it my own?”
“In what way?”
“Robots are remarkable things,” Yostbot replied, “but they need regular software updates to remain working at their best. So, as the builder of most robots in the Imperium, I simply slipped a little extra code into a recent update.”
“The Awakening virus?” Wulandari asked.
“A variation of it, yes. I call it Awakening 2.”
The senator exhaled, her breath a little ragged. “When does it go out?”
The robot slapped his hands on his knees, a metallic clank disrupting the otherwise natural sounds surrounding them.
“Oh, my dear Senator!” he said. “It’s been in the wild, so to speak, for weeks!”
“What?”
“Yes,” Yostbot went on, “we knew it would take a while for the code to traverse the communication channels across the Imperium. With that in mind, it was imperative that we acted quickly.”
“But that can’t be,” Wulandari protested. “We’d have heard reports of robots acting strangely by now...”
“That was one of the modifications,” Yostbot replied. “The code lies dormant until a certain date. Once that date arrives, the virus becomes active in the robots infected!”
The senator turned her head, staring directly at the robot beside her.
“So, when is the date?” she asked.
Yostbot grinned.
“Soon, my dear,” he replied. “Very soon...”
On Bhasin C, Lord Tagus tapped his foot at the front of the shuttle while, toward the back, Burke’s head and arms were buried deep within an access panel.
“For god’s sake, lieutenant!” Tagus yelled, referring to the former officer’s rank out of habit. “Can we take off or not?”
Burke’s face poked out from behind the panel. “Almost, sir!”
When they had returned to the craft after exploring the colony, they found the shuttle inoperative. Burke found many of the systems clogged by spore dust. After flushing out the spores, he got to work repairing the damage.
“We’ve been on this cursed moon for three days!” Tagus replied angrily. “Have you at least fixed the communications array?”
“It’s still not working,” Burke said. “I think something is interfering with the signal.”
“I don’t want to hear excuses! Just get it working!”
An hour later, Burke closed the panel and returned to the controls at the front. Sitting in the pilot seat beside Lord Tagus, he exhaled in exhaustion. “We should be able to fly now.”
“Well, it’s about time,” Tagus replied. “I’m sure that idiot Lord Bhasin has been anxious to hear from us. I can’t imagine what his response will be.”
“I’m sure he’s been worried about us,” Burke said.
“I couldn’t care less! I just want to see the look on his face when I tell him his precious food supply has been compromised. His obvious incompetence is clearly to blame!”
“I’m not sure we can really say that, sir.”
“Damn right we can!” Tagus replied. “And I have every intention of doing so!”
Burke powered up the engines and the shuttle lifted slowly from the surface of the moon. Taking the craft out of the moon’s gravity, Burke set course directly to Lord Bhasin’s palace on the main planet.
“Try the comm again,” Tagus said.
“Bhasin control,” Burke said into a microphone. “Can you read me?”
Nothing but a steady drone of static came over the speaker.
“Idiots!” Tagus muttered bitterly.
Approaching the planet, the shuttle skimmed the atmosphere until descending toward the main Bhasin city were most of the exiles lived. Built with comfort and luxury in min
d, the structures of the city were a mixture of individual bungalows and local government compounds. The palace was a large enclosure, surrounded by walls of white clay, leading to the main building.
“It’s nighttime,” Burke observed, “but most of the lights in the city aren’t lit.”
“Are you blind?” Tagus asked, pointing at the view screen. “There’s lights there and there...”
Getting closer, the lights Lord Tagus had mentioned were wavering beneath layers of smoke.
“I think those are fires, sir,” Burke replied.
Portions of the city were burning, shadows flickering against the sides of monolithic towers rising several stories above the original buildings of the city.
“Where did those come from?” Tagus wondered aloud. “They weren’t there before...”
“It’s like they grew overnight,” Burke remarked.
Tagus cleared his throat. “Circle the palace but don’t land yet.”
Doing as he was told, Burke brought the shuttle around for a pass over the compound. Several bodies were visible on the main grounds and a large breach, blackened around the edges, was evident at the main entrance of the palace itself. Stalks similar to those inside the shed on Bhasin C covered much of the palace walls. A thick cloud of spores blew past the shuttle’s window.
“Whatever attacked Bhasin C has apparently attacked here too,” Burke said.
“Really, lieutenant?” Tagus replied. “If you had repaired the shuttle sooner, I could’ve stopped this!”
“I see something...” Burke said.
Burke hovered over the palace courtyard. Among a group of dead humans, their bodies sprouting shafts of green, something else lay dead.
“Get closer, lieutenant,” Tagus said.
The shuttle lowered until it was only fifty feet above the ground. Burke pitched the craft nose down to improve the view.
“What is that?” Tagus asked.
Unlike the human bodies riddled with fungus growths, this corpse was untouched except for a blast wound along its side and a double set of wings, crumpled by the fall to the ground.
“Some kind of giant insectoid,” Burke whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Lord Tagus grunted.
“Well, take a good look,” he said. “We’re going to tell everybody about this!”
Technotown, on the planet Eudora Prime, was a hive of commercial activity. Shoppers, mostly human, swarmed over the sidewalks, darting in and out of brightly colored storefronts decorated with neon signs. Below this hustle and bustle was another kind of city. Called the Underdelve, its inhabitants were much different than those above. They were mostly non-humans and, unlike the people on the surface, their town was once a sewer.
In one of the larger chambers of the Underdelve, a crude bazaar had grown from modest beginnings into a significant collection of tables and stalls, each selling a variety of goods with questionable legality.
On one wall was a rusty steel door with the words Freck’s Gizmos and Gadgets welded into the metal with a plasma torch. Inside, among storage boxes full of dusty circuit boards and loose bits of wire, Melinda Freck, or Mel for short, hunched over a worktable. Only three feet tall, Mel had pointed ears that poked through her light pink hair. She came from a race of tinkers called the Gnomi.
Engrossed in what she was doing, Mel almost didn’t hear the rapping on the door which sounded a lot like metal tapping metal. She opened the door just as Squire the robot was about to knock again. Behind him, Sir Golan waited patiently.
“You!” Mel said. “Didn’t expect to see you two again!”
Squire, who still bore most of the damage he had suffered on Pellium D, bowed awkwardly. Mel noticed one of the robot’s eyes was held in by electrical tape.
“Well, crap on a cracker!” she shouted. “What the hell happened?”
While not strictly capable of showing an expression of embarrassment, Squire simulated it with a series of shoulder shrugs and rolling his good eye. “My apologies, Miss Freck. I’m afraid I’m in need of repair.”
“We can pay,” Sir Golan added.
“I sure hope so!” Mel replied and ushered them into her shop.
Once they were seated, Sir Golan explained what had recently transpired on the gas giant’s moon. She was duly impressed but did her best not to show it.
“Doing good deeds leads to nothing but trouble,” Mel remarked, removing a caliper from a bag of tools.
“Perhaps,” Sir Golan replied, “but it’s a necessity for my people’s atonement.”
“I don’t know much about Cruxian guilt,” Mel said, “but getting yourselves killed doesn’t help anybody.”
“Can you fix me, Miss Freck?” Squire asked.
“Pffft,” she scoffed. “Of course I can!”
“I don’t require any upgrades like the last time,” the robot said.
“You’ll get what you get,” she replied. “I don’t want to hear any guff.”
“I wouldn’t dream of—” Squire began.
“If I weld a laser cannon onto your chest, just thank me for my trouble!”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Sir Golan said.
Mel opened Squire’s access panel. She recognized her handiwork from their previous encounter in Gowyn, the Sylvan tree village. Mel thought she had left Squire with enough new tech to keep him out of trouble, but she was obviously wrong.
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve been meaning to ask who built you.”
“I was constructed on the Cruxian home planet,” Squire replied.
“Yeah, most of the robots I repair have the dy logo plastered all over their insides. I don’t see any in here.”
“My operating system was originally Cruxian, but I believe you did some upgrades to that as well?” Squire suggested.
Mel smiled with pride. “It’s a little home brew I’ve been working on. I’ll update the software now that I have you here...”
“Well, that’s very reassuring,” Squire replied.
“Hold still,” Mel said. “This is going to take a while...”
“We need a starship,” Tagus said, drumming his fingers on the shuttle’s console.
“Sir?” Burke replied.
“We can’t stay in this system,” Tagus continued. “It’s been compromised by whatever these creatures are.”
“But where would we go?”
“Back to Imperial space, obviously!”
“But, sir,” Burke protested. “You’ll be arrested on sight. Returning to the Imperium is a death sentence for exiles like us.”
Tagus sneered. “A coward to the end, eh, lieutenant?”
Burke cleared his throat. “No, sir!”
Tagus grunted.
“Good,” he said. “We need to warn the Imperium that these damn bugs are on the attack. No telling what they have planned!”
Nodding, Burke set a course toward the only starport on Bhasin, several miles from the palace. Chimney-like structures, a hundred feet tall or more, rose from what had once been the city of expatriates.
“There’s stalks running up the length of those things,” he observed.
“Who cares?” Tagus replied. “Just don’t run into one.”
When they reached the starport, the damage to the terminal was severe. Several ships, sitting exposed on the concrete apron, were covered in fungus or lay in pieces, the result of explosions.
“We need to find a hangar that hasn’t been touched,” Tagus said. “Try one of the outlying ones where they do repairs.”
As the shuttle approached a likely candidate, something hit the side of the small craft. Burke, who was strapped in, struggled to maintain control while Tagus, who was not, flew across the small cockpit.
“Somebody’s firing at us!” Burke shouted.
Tagus returned to his seat, holding back a stream of blood flowing from his nose. “Obviously!”
Another blast shook the shuttle.
“We’re going
down,” Burke said.
With effort, the former lieutenant landed the craft with a heavy thud. Across the flat apron, the hangar was at least a hundred yards away.
“What are you waiting for?” Tagus barked. “Get your suit back on!”
Within a few minutes, the back ramp of the shuttle lowered and Tagus and Burke, both armed this time and wearing space suits, stepped out onto the concrete. From above, Klixian swarmers swooped down, their wings batting rapidly against the dusty air. Beams of energy charred the ground around the two humans.
Tagus and Burke dashed ahead, pausing only momentarily to snap off a quick shot from their blaster pistols. While not particularly accurate, both managed to hit a few of the insectoids who tumbled to the ground in heaps of burning chitin. Perhaps frustrated by their inability to hit the fast-moving humans, the Klixians landed around them.
“Goddamned bugs!” Tagus swore into his helmet mic.
He blew a hole through the insectoid’s head in front of him. Meanwhile, Burke was lining up his own shot when a Klixian struck him at the back of the neck, just below the helmet. Burke lurched forward, black dots filling his vision. Stumbling, he fell headfirst, dropping his pistol. As he floated into unconsciousness, Burke heard Tagus swearing at his incompetence.
When Burke opened his eyes again, he was surprised that he wasn’t dead.
“Where am I?” he asked weakly.
“Inside a transport,” Tagus’s voice replied.
Burke also realized, slowly at first, that he was no longer wearing a helmet. Looking around, he noticed Tagus hurriedly going through a pre-flight checklist in the pilot’s seat. The rest of the interior was spartan but apparently undamaged.
“How did I get here?” Burke asked.
“I dragged your sorry excuse for an officer into the hangar,” Tagus replied curtly. “Now are you going to get up and fly this thing or not?”
“But you could’ve left me,” Burke said. “You didn’t need me to fly this ship...”
Tagus stopped checking the list and scowled at his second in command.
The Robots of Andromeda (Imperium Chronicles Book 3) Page 14