“Affirmative,” I said, turning back toward the train. Tommy Tanks rolled up ramps onto the flat cars. I watched a spider straddle the train, lowering itself until its body touched and then wrapping its legs behind it. Gophers, Nurse Nans, elephants, and multicolored fair of many, many more units loaded themselves as part of the train’s consists.
Strictly a military job, this train’s contents included scores of flat cars holding a pair of tanks, a Nurse Nan, a Teddy Bear infantry, elephant “mobile” infantry, three rabbits bearing flame throwers, and on, and on. The train’s lengthy presence disappeared around the curve of the Factory. From Six’s comments the line needed this large shipment desperately. Literally hundreds of units crammed on a single mover. I briefly doubted the wisdom of Six, but he spoke the word of the Humans. I was only a unit.
As I myself embarked, I caught sight of the weeping-fly tree. Nearly a third of it lay severed on the ground like an ax had cleaved it vertically. A small fire crackled right at the base of the trunk. I thought I would miss this place even though I had only been there a few minutes.
“I shall return!” I said aloud, borrowing a quote from MacArthur. This was a place I would fight for, and a way of life I might be called upon to give my own life for.
I wiggled my ample rear quarters down into the barely 65-centimeter-wide well-car I’d been assigned, seven back from the three engines. My hips hung off at least 2 centimeters on either side. I hoped Factory Six accounted for this when it designed the track bed. I would not like to go through a tunnel and get wedged in. Not a comfortable thought.
A roadrunner, 26 centimeters high and wearing a conductor’s cap, flashed by me toward the front of the train. I heard a quick “Beep! Beep!” and the train lurched as the three engines took the slack out of the couplings. I’ll give the trains credit. While the start was a bit slow and jerky, they mounted the velocity quickly in a very short time with the countryside flickering by us. I’d have to guess they got us up to nearly 100 kilometers per hour. An impressive feat given the engines’ diminutive size compared to their load.
The tracks kept pretty much to the same course as the Central River, but jumping from side to side like a psychotic fox hunted by English hounds. As some of the flora and fauna appeared and disappeared, I tried to catalog those I knew by my grafted memories—red square shapes of box trees; inorganic porcupine bushes with crystalline “leaves” which would pierce even my tough hide; the 10-meter-a-year speed demon known as the rock crab; and the ubiquitous finger spider, just to name a few of the newly filled-in memory locations in my sump.
A light silver rain of mercury fell across the countryside, raising gentle puffs of dust and initiating a general scramble of life forms for shelter. A moderate number of the drops fell on me and beaded off my coarse fur and down to the ground. An intricate vein-work of silver-colored metal lit up the ground as the raindrops merged together to form tiny rivulets and then in turn attempted to join the main fluid-way’s current. Even after the short shower’s end, the tiny streams remained, taking the last few drops to the now swollen river, leaving only isolated shimmering puddles.
After all too short a time the bright flashes of standing mercury weren’t even enough to keep my interest. The scenery blurred into sameness—rocks, sparse vegetation, and the occupants of the car in front of me.
An interrupt kept hitting my processor no matter how many times I rejected it. How could fauna have beaten Six’s forces so thoroughly that they threatened his physical self? I needed to form myself into the weapon and shield that would keep the danger from my creator and the plans of the Humans.
I spent hours going over plans, strategies, and available resources to meet possible threats. Even with the optimism generated as I mentally defeated eight varying war games I programmed, I couldn’t not think about the multiple attacks on Six. The impact on my body had been profound. I remembered the voltage and pressure fluctuations. They revolted me. Had I been afraid? Six programmed me without emotions but fear was the only word that described my state. I resolved to never let it impact me again.
My mental state suddenly cleared, with a strong feeling of foreboding. Although my programming says nothing of feelings, it was an acute pain I couldn’t hide from. This emotion equated to functions that normally would not be tolerated within my systems—my hydraulic pressure dropped, my main servomotor force fluctuated, and the voltage on my main neural pathways ramped up alarmingly. I possessed no programmed response for these stimuli. Additionally, everything in my mental user’s manual said these were impossible conditions—in fact the manual only listed them as “not applicable.” Only the mandatory tie-downs across my waist kept me on the train’s flat car as I bolted upright.
The nearby volcano, which my internal map dubbed as Mauna Loa Prime, painted the entire valley in a dull orange glow. I tried to ascertain what malfunction gripped my body. Nothing specific showed itself to my sensors. I spent several seconds trying to write off the entire bodily unease as a phantom equipment failure. Instead, 17.4 milliseconds before a shrill warning from the automatic grid, I saw the dark swooping shapes diving out of the sky—flyers. As they were airplane-shaped, they weren’t units. Six produced only balloon- or dirigible-shaped flyers. It probably meant this was an ambush of some kind. The terrain was a perfect layout for one.
On one side of the tracks rushed the mercury of the Central River, now reflecting the orange hue of the distant volcano and on the other a steeply sloping terrain that wheeled and tracked units couldn’t traverse well. As a team our options were limited—stand and fight or travel on the train bed, forward or back. If this wasn’t a trap then I would replace my hands with buckets and dig ore for the next four years. I knew it as surely as if it were a fact preprogrammed in me by Six.
I set up a SAN to use me as the director of operations. I would command in place of Six, just as I had been designed to do. As soon as I started acting, my mysterious symptoms, my feeling, went away. It was something that would merit study later—if I survived.
“Engines, stop this transport as quickly as possible.” I received no verbal response but my internal gyros fought to maintain balance against the sudden deceleration. I felt I might have been a bit hasty. I reminded myself to think before I acted. I accessed the net to pass more orders. “All units with manipulative members, detach and move to the nearest non-manipulative member. As soon as the train stops, unstrap them so they can engage.”
“Affirmative,” came an echo 1403 strong across my network. No imagination, these military units. I heard the first bombs just before they struck. The sound, pitched almost intolerably high, whistled just before a magnificent flash of light, then both were gone as quickly as they appeared. Suddenly, 300 meters in front of the lead engine the first blast of the flyer’s bombs erupted in a fountain of dirt, which looked like the needles of a verish plant and left a hole that would swallow...well, the entire train and anything upon it, to be exact! The crater was directly on the tracks ahead and the locos weren’t going to stop in time, even with the brilliant white sparks shooting from their multiple wheels. The train looked like a miniature shower of southern lights along its significant length. The noise abused my aural sensors enough that I brought their signals down by twenty decibels. It helped me concentrate on my tasks.
More explosions rocked along the length of our snake-like chain, tossing us side to side, but not quite hitting any of our defenseless units nor derailing any of the bouncing cars from the tracks, though not by more than the thickness of a fiber optic connector in some cases.
The train had slowed to about 5 kilometers per hour as the first locomotive began to fall into the largish pit made by the first bomb. I quickly untied myself and rolled off to the side away from the river and into a ditch. My body automatically tucked into a tight ball as I bounced twice and wheeled at an odd angle away from the tracks in a long arc. My autonomic control systems would not let me out of my rolled position until I had come to a bruising halt agains
t an old lava flow with sharp edges. I ignored my minor malfunctions and jumped up to once again gauge the situation. The train lurched to its final abrupt stop, with two of the engines, each arcing with electrical fires, in a heap at the bottom of the hole.
“Nurse Nan 4, once all the combat units are free I want you to tend to the injured locos. They have to be ready to move as soon as possible.” Not waiting for the short ramps to be erected, tanks already rolled off their flatbeds with jarring drops to the ground. This might cost some repair efforts later, but none would be caught without at least a chance to maneuver and return fire. Further explosions caught some of the flatbed trailers empty, turning them into shreds of fiberglass, plastic, and metal. A lucky flyer caught one of our tanks in the center of the turret, flipping it up about 3 meters in the air. There it hung aloft like a balloon for a pregnant moment before crashing to earth with the finality of terminal deactivation. Tanks carried impressive firepower. While their plastic skins shredded with even a single non-explosive round at only 50 centimeters in height, they were much smaller and difficult to hit than any of the other infantry—except from the air.
“I want all noncombatants over the hill as quickly as possible. Tank Platoon Five, set up a barrage of anti-flyer fire using tracers. Run maximum strength on both radar and ladar. I want them to see what is coming their way. I don’t want you to fire to kill, merely to drive off. This has the look of an ambush and we have to deal with one thing at a time.” I was thinking the engineer corps would be our savior. They weren’t quite as good as regular infantry but they could put up a defensive position in half a clock cycle, figuratively speaking, of course.
“Elephants, I want a defensive fence pulled across the river side of the train. Gophers, dig two anti-unit ditches on the opposite side about 600 meters out. Curl them around our positions. I want Teddy Bear squads one through eight covering the trench with local foliage.” The gophers were unmatched as ditch-diggers. Fortunately, Six’s net still covered us so I relayed everything back as it happened. I sent all the commands through the SAN that I’d created, not verbally. It would have been impossible to be heard with the ruckus that covered the battlefield. I saw the anti-aircraft fire ripple off to my left and right; the valley above our heads was alive with twin line pairs of bright blue streams of bullets. Each enemy aircraft now had a choice—be cut off from our position or be in a fire-sack. All but one chose to run and that one fell to a hail of three hundred white-hot slugs.
I caught a brief view of Nan Four busily putting out a fire and tending to the damaged engines. Chaos reigned supreme. I either needed to organize that entropy or be its next victim. Damage reports came in from all squads, terminal deactivation notifications, and even calls for Nurse Nans. Putting that information aside I ordered, “All spider units split into two teams, each covering a flank.”
“Definition request: ‘flank.’”
“Each end of our line,” I ordered with some terseness in my command. “And don’t use your shooting webs unless they try to outflank…get around the side of us.” I also would have given the orders for Tank Platoons One through Four to take a defensive position, with one unit facing across the river and the other three away, but they did it automatically. The 1.5-meter-tall gray and brown gophers dug the trenches in the brick-colored ground away from our position with great speed and precision. I hoped the four gophers would be successful in completing the defenses before the enemy overran their positions. They were almost too valuable to lose, but my memory banks emphasized that no one unit or even squad was indispensable.
“What to do next?” I asked softly to myself. The question hadn’t gone away. I watched patiently from the bottom of a handy bomb crater when an inspiration hit me. As the other side was fighting outside their own net, if the flyers didn’t get a verbal command to the ground forces of what damage had been done, we could reverse the ambush.
I sent quick commands to move our injured out into the field in front of us. Once that was completed and a minimal concealing screen put over the trenches, the area looked, even to me, as if the train and its entire complement had been destroyed. We were ready. With any luck the animals would fall into the nearly invisible trenches before they even discovered a single effective. I sent only one order. “Don’t fire until the first group has fallen into the trenches. Fire at the second rank as they try to bridge over their fallen units.” Anti-aircraft fire stopped. I hoped the flyers would think twice about entering deadly airspace.
Even with my intentionally dimmed sense of hearing, the sound of the enemy’s ground units signaled their arrival before any were sighted. I could hear them rolling and marching in. They were on the same side of the river and they were coming at us at an angle of incidence to the river of about 75 degrees to the right of normal, or north-north-west magnetic plus 6 degrees. I repeated my command to hold fire across the net. I wanted to make certain there were no slip-ups.
To my left, teddies of the Fourteenth Motorized Squad lay on their bellies in a ragged arc, which matched the contours of the terrain—automatic weapons at the ready. The elephants and tanks held positions directly behind the railroad cars. I passed one more command to the gophers. They were to dig trenches behind the enemy before they could retreat. It was silently acknowledged over the net. The jaws of my trap waited patiently.
I wished I could be so patient. I gripped tighter on my side arm. I knew I was not supposed to actively engage in hostilities unless it became necessary. My job was to direct. An electric chill ran just under my fur at the first sight of the enemy ground troops. My first command stood before me to win or lose.
I saw 1,075 tanks, 80 mortar-equipped toy trucks, 203 teddy-like, and a handful of other miscellaneous units marching along in a skirmish line toward our apparently dead location. They moved quickly with no hesitation. My ploy had worked.
As opponents reached the edge of the pit, one of them, which looked like a teddy, flailed its arms to regain balance but eventually pitched into the concealed trap along with 233 other assorted war bringers. Minor damage and a small delay was all I could hope for on the teddy troops, but it ensnared tracked and wheeled vehicles until their comrades could dig a ramp to release them, or until we could deliver the coupe-de-grace.
The second line of the animals started to drive right over their fallen troops—using them as a living bridge. It would have been effective save for the balance of my troops. I received my first glimpse of hell when the first enemy reached our side of the ditch. Machine guns, bazookas, mortars, and gopher-planted land mines erupted. With it came the electronic and mechanical screams of death. The enemy units didn’t react decisively to our surprise attack. Their return fire was relatively ineffective. Masses of the animals, in a mocking shape that mirrored our own, died abruptly, in an avalanche of firepower.
“Gophers, dig that second trench. I want 16 percent more firepower to the left flank.” One of my elephants let out an electronic shriek and perished in a flash of flyer-born explosives as the enemy air units returned. “Anti-aircraft weapons free. Fire for effect.”
Two of the Fourteenth Teddies took critical unit hits, one losing his left arm and the other having half his head blown away, and each crawled at its best speed back to the Nurse Nans whose remanufacturing facilities behind two of the tipped railroad cars worked their miracles of mercy.
The enemy propeller-driven airplanes retreated quickly again, after taking 42 percent casualties. My troops quickly winnowed out the ground animals. The creatures fought to the last, not retreating, merely dying in place as we sought them out one by one with concentrated fire.
Those units left in the trenches tried valiantly to remove themselves from their predicament. However, I ordered the trenches filled (carefully, as there were still combat effectives in those trenches) with vetra bushes and set alight by the bunny units. I watched as the rabbits hopped along the edge of the trench, waving gouts of fire from their flame-throwers at the trench edge. It was like something out of
Dante’s Inferno.
I heard the noises of death within—pops of hydraulic lines, the race of flames blazing across teddy fur, the report of ammunition cooking off inside elephant mortar units. It was a grisly sound and sight. I hoped I would never hear its like again.
Adult
The dead or dying covered the field. Fortunately, few of my troops numbered among them. Survivors of both sides ambled about mindlessly, unable to function properly with the damage they had sustained. I ordered a squad of teddies to move around and dispatch the remaining indigenous life forms. It was a pure victory—nothing less. I felt elation in fulfilling my objectives already. Future units built upon my mold would win the surface of this world for Six. Even as I thought this, I received acknowledgment of my accomplishments from Six. The commendation was short and to the point.
“Well done, Teddy 1499.” There were no lengthy congratulations, but the sparse words filled me with pride, an emotion I wasn’t sure I understood. It did things to my system it wasn’t meant for, but it felt good. A new era in robotics was being manufactured as I lived it.
Our soldiers marked the field of battle for salvage with our own dead to be parted out to other damaged units of like make or perhaps to be repaired and reprogrammed as new. We mined the bodies of our fallen enemies. We would smelt their raw materials into their separate components for use in new units. Everything to forward the mission of Six. The battlefield cleared quickly. I turned my attention to the only two tasks remaining.
Nan long ago coordinated the removal of the locomotives from the blast craters, so I ordered the gophers and the elephants to work on filling the bomb holes under the track. The tanks and Tonka trucks brought new, unbent rails that each train carried for just such emergencies, to the blast site. Teddy units would install them as soon as the ground was leveled.
The final task I dreaded. I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t even sure what the emotion dread was supposed to be. I just knew I didn’t wish to repeat it. I toured the field remanufacturing facility, looking at all the partially functional units with some missing arms, legs, tracks, or optical sensors. One even shared the processor of another unit to keep the memory sump of the first alive.
Toy Wars Page 3