There was little I could do for my Achilles tendon. I could see no way to repair myself without the aid of a Nurse Nan and a replacement part. I didn’t even have the tools to remove it so that it would cause no further damage. I took hold of it with both hands and put overload pressure on my arm and leg. The fine, but extremely tough, metal strut bent back under the force of my pull. After a quick look I gave one more long pull, which straightened the tendon enough so it no longer threatened hydraulic line integrity or other mechanical works. That left only the outer casing.
I could, in theory, go without my outer shell entirely. Its loss caused only a minor pressure imbalance in my system; however, it left me open to all types of potential problems including mechanical failures to dirt contamination, potential damage from flying debris, fluid loss from leaks that would otherwise have been of no consequence. My body analysis subroutine said that if I left it open and continued near normal activity that there was a 3 percent chance of failure beyond my ability to cope with within one day. The chance went up to 19 percent within a week and almost 50 percent within three weeks. I couldn’t take those kinds of odds. I had to do something to improve them.
No matter how much I looked or manipulated the old crushed casing it would do me no good. Not only were the sizes of the pieces much too small to be of any use, the full casing now lay scattered over a 400-square-meter area where the creature had wrestled me around.
That didn’t leave much. I glanced around to see what might be in the vicinity, but I was in a desolate part of the world. The gentle rolling hills of cropped thorn grass were barren of even a stick for as far as I could see. That left only the things in my combat pack. The canvass of the pack itself wasn’t good enough to provide the kind of protection I needed. The odds with a canvas seal were still dismal out past two weeks and Humans alone knew how much longer I needed to operate independent of resources.
Looking about again, I spilled the contents of my battle pack to inventory—eight clips of ammunition, one empty plastic canteen, two sticks black and green camouflage makeup, one heavy-duty combat knife in sheath, and one gun-cleaning kit. In other words, it held nothing useful for the current crisis. In fact, the inappropriately colored camouflage paint and canteen seemed worthless for any use.
I sat for several hours thinking before I finally gave up. I would just have to hope I found replacement parts before I wore myself into uselessness. As I reloaded my pack, my hands accidentally brushed up against the basilisk’s horn that lay almost underneath me. I was about to cast it aside when my processor stopped me. I mulled over that dapple gray horn—60 centimeters long, nearly 50 centimeters in diameter at the base, and up by the rounded end, it was about 25, in a nice, gradual slope. Not quite the cylindrical shape of my calf, but it might just work.
I took the combat knife, an implement I had once thought nearly useless, out of my pack and began to work in earnest. I smoothed off the broken end of the horn before moving on to remove the blunt end. In a perfect world the knife wouldn’t have been my first choice in implements to saw through the biologic’s horn but Hobson’s choice blocked me. The tedious, repetitive work took the better part of eight hours. With the blunt tip removed, the inside needed cleaning out as there was some form of flesh still inside. The insides cleared out with my knife much more easily than cutting through the tough outer membrane. Then it needed to be fitted. I slipped it on over the damaged foot.
My new bone shell fit fairly well, but it was clear that it would slide off with nothing to hold it in place. I could bandage it up with some pieces of my backpack, but that would be marginal at best. Then it struck me. I could use my infirmity to my benefit. If I notched the bone, top and bottom, I could use my broken Achilles tendon to hold it in place. It was an excellent plan. I whittled on the bone for another six hours to get just the right notches, sliding the horn over my leg time and time again to ensure a perfect fit. Finally, I decided that it was as good as I could make it.
I slid the finished product over the bottom half of my tendon, fitting it carefully into the lower indent and then pulling the bent upper half over the top lip of the bone. The fit was almost as snug at the original. It did slide around approximately 0.3 millimeters in any direction, but I felt the risk of further contamination or injury had fallen sharply.
With my body in as good shape as I could make it, my mission called. I stood up with some caution. I realized right away that walking required some modifications. I now had what Humans call a limp. I could not use my right foot to push off with, so it just stumped along—thump, drag, thump, drag. I was only making about 40 percent of my previous speed.
By alternating strides and gaits, I had finally worked out the optimal walking algorithm. If I pushed off with 120 percent of rated power on my left foot it improved speed performance without any risk of damage to my left limb. Additionally, I learned that if I locked my right knee joint and swiveled the entire leg around the hip joint, it not only improved speed but decreased the chance that my wound would get contaminated by reducing the lower leg movement.
After about three hours of tinkering to find optimax traveling solution, I was making 73 percent of my former speed. It would have to do until I could perform more effective repairs. I decided to make one more minor change before I lit out on any long distances. The servo wires I had used as a weapon against the basilisk powered my ankle. I reconnected them just long enough to place my foot in an even better “stump” position needed for my newfound walking mode. Then I disconnected them again and ran them outside of my bone splint, fastening them down to my new “skin” with a tiny bit of thread from my backpack strap. This kept them from moving about and accidentally touching one another. More importantly, if another basilisk decided to take a bite out of my leg, he might very well get a rude electric shock in the process. If not, they were immediate and available for use if the brute would be so inconsiderate as to grab my other leg.
Speaking of that biologic, I found it lying dead just over the rise. Apparently my attack mortally wounded it. I assumed it couldn’t have been dead long as it lay sprawled, its bodily form beginning to dissolve and spread out. I watched as over the space of just a few minutes it turned into a huge puddle of gray-green-colored liquid. I probed it with my electric wires, but received no response. It didn’t move. I moved on.
All of these machinations and specimens had one other positive effect—they kept me from thinking about anything but the task at hand. These trials kept the visions of units torn asunder by violence in the tunnel from dancing before my eyes. My processor for once was mercifully clear and focused on something else. Those dead units failed to leave me completely. As soon as my sump had cleared the problem before it, they came back with a vengeance.
I walked on. My only excitement over the next days was avoiding random patrols of animals. Funny, I still thought of them as animals, but I knew, deep inside my middle, that they were like me. I just had to prove it. At first the patrols weren’t often, but they increased in intensity as I got closer to where I believed my goal to be.
On the seventh day, my sensors told me it was time to shut down. Minor repairs and preventative maintenance was needed to a wide number of systems. I found a small hillock with a natural horizontal depression, one not quite deep enough to be called a cave, and settled down for sleep.
The instant I turned off my cognitive functions, a wailing sound filled me. The mournful cry issued from a group of units moving toward me from the horizon of a hellishly blue wavering world. All the units moved with massive damage with limbs blown off, faces burned beyond recognition, and in one case a head dragging behind only by wires trailing out of the body. Elephants with eyes removed, giraffes with gaping holes in their necks, Teddy Bears without arms, Tommy Tanks with no turrets, even a treadless and bladeless tractor marched ominously toward me—all of them chanting a single word, “Traitor.”
“Traitor,” they repeated as they circled me. For some reason I sat still, frozen in
place and helpless even to move.
“Traitor.”
“Traitor.”
“Traitor.”
I started upright out of sleep, hitting my head on my improvised shelter’s overhang. My hydraulic pumps ran 150 percent rated speed and internal voltages were all in the danger-over-voltage zones. It took a few seconds to moderate my internal workings and realize no immediate crisis loomed. No damaged units stalked me claiming retribution for a failure on my part. What had I really done to my own family? I returned to rest state before I could finish the thought.
Morning arrived. Mentally, I seemed slow and groggy, not the way I usually felt after a rest. I’d managed to avoid any further nightmares of damaged, accusative units. I wondered just how far away those visions were. They couldn’t be all that far away if I kept thinking them. Just as no two pieces of matter can occupy the same space, nor could two thoughts roll through my conscious at the same time, so I decided to keep my processor busy.
I started treating the trip as a scouting expedition. This kept me busy cataloguing terrain, potential enemy locations, hostile fauna (biologic and unit) and planning train routes. It worked, keeping my own personal demons at bay, or at least to tolerable limits.
By the eighteenth day after my attack I dodged at least one patrol a day. It was starting to wear thin. Also I realized I needed to move even farther into the net territory in spite of the increased risks. All the concentrators now pointed deeper into the locus of control. Skirting the edge would not take me any closer and very well could take me farther away.
If I used Six’s disposition as a referent, a relatively solid shell of units patrolled the outer boundary of Six’s controlled space. Once inside that, the concentration of units per square kilometer dropped to a small fraction of one.
I think many would call the emotion that raced through me at the thought of plunging farther into enemy territory, fear. I did not want to go. I knew I was risking my life on nothing more than a guess, but I had already sacrificed the lives of my brethren on this guess. I couldn’t do them the disservice of not risking my own fur as well. Even if I could just turn around and go home, and be haunted by wrecked and ravaged units, it would only be to fight a losing war. I’d fight as the overwhelming number of animals overran Six and slaughtered us to the very last unit. “No, thank you,” I said aloud in disgust at the very thought. With resolution, I turned toward the locus I’d mentally plotted for the potentially mythical Factory.
No more than thirty minutes later, I saw the tall, lanky form of a spider towering 6 meters above the ground. I dropped to the earth and squirmed up behind a sizable gray rock to hide my plump form. In the open area among the spider’s long, black legs traveled a squad of Tommy Tanks and a single giraffe. Their patrol kicked up quite a cloud of dust in that flat field. In the distance, some 5 or 6 kilometers behind, I could make out another similar cloud. With the long view the spider’s height gave it, I didn’t think I could sprint across between groups without being seen and destroyed by the combined firepower of one of those patrols.
I knew no amount of walking would take me beyond them; instead, that course would just walk me around the entire perimeter of lands these animals controlled. This had been what I’d done to this point. How to penetrate the cordon? As my sump and processor rolled over possible solutions my gaze happened upon a mauve palmetto. Electrons fired in my processor.
Well after the first group passed, but before the second arrived, I crawled 63 meters over to the plant and pulled out several of its fans of sword-like leaves. Crawling back, I could sense that this would work. I wove the fans and even individual leaves into my fur. I unstoppered one of my hydraulic lines just enough to dribble a tiny amount of fluid into the dry earth. The brick red mud I scrubbed deeply into my hide in random blotches. Camouflage had worked for me once in the past. I decided to put it to the test again.
Looking up, I watched the second patrol creep by and saw the dust rising from a third off in the distance. Timing my skirmish carefully, I crawled forward with all the speed of a rock crab until the new patrol got within a kilometer. My position was well on this side of the imaginary line the patrols followed. In fact, I could see a rather significant impression in the soil where the patrols had worn it down. Assuming I was not discovered, my next move would put me just about the same distance on the other side of the line.
I lay completely motionless as they approached. My voltage ramped just a tiny bit as one of the tanks rolled out of formation in my direction. Nothing to see here, I thought loudly. It approached quickly. I’m just a bush, blast it all! I shut down everything in my body that moved except my sump. From the corner of my eye I followed its approach. Its two coaxially mounted guns trained on me. Those two weapons could turn me into nothing more than a pile of rusting scrap faster than I could’ve turned back on my servos.
While everything physical in my body wouldn’t twitch, that didn’t stop my voltages from climbing. Just then I felt the warmth of the tank’s scanning laser play across my prostrate body. Part of me waited for the bullets to explode my sump, but instead the laser snapped off. The tank turned around and trundled back to his fellows. I really was a bush. I didn’t even dare to turn my hydraulics back on for at least another five minutes.
As the inquisitive tank reached two kilometers farther along, I sprinted across the intervening distance and the patrol line. The 7 centimeter depression worn into the earth by uncountable feet delineated the patrol line. At overload speed I made it to a hiding place on the other side. The next patrol didn’t even send anyone out to check on me, even if I was on the other side of their line of travel. Just after those dwindled into the distance I scrambled into a dry wash, hidden from the casual sight of any further patrols. I plucked the fronds and leaves from my fur but no amount of scrubbing seemed to remove the red blemishes. No matter, I thought. It helped to keep me invisible to a casual observer.
The travel returned to monotony. I spotted no more patrols. While dull, the travel somehow at the same time was fascinating. Hours and sometimes days rolled by with the same mundane reds and pinks. Nothing broke the landscape with any note other than thorn grass or an unnoteworthy, 1 kilogram or less, biologic. But each time, when I had just about had my fill of the emptiness something forced me to stop and gape anew.
In one valley I found a literal cloud of thousands of 1-millimeter-long white, worm-like biologics, each suspended beneath its own palm-sized golden bladder of air and carried before the stiff breeze. The swarm of yellow itself commanded attention, like an immense exclamation point. The pale fog slowly dispersed as the tiny balloons broke at the slightest touch, sending its occupant spilling toward the ground, where it burrowed immediately upon landing. A very few of these balloonists were carried before the wind as far as I could follow them with my eyes. Such beauty.
Days later, I stopped at the top of a rather low butte to take in the terrain beyond. On a constant basis now, however, I worried about coming into contact with animals. Would my disguise hold or even that of using the CCT? I only had one way to find out, and that was risky. But even that thought became moot as I looked out over the valley below. I was on the wrong side of a river, and not just any river. Eight meters below me gushed an apparently unfordable 42-meter-wide band of unstoppable mercury. This juggernaut of fluid metal seemed to meld into the horizons in both directions and lay directly in my path with neither a train bridge, rocks, nor fallen trees to span the silver expanse.
“How can I cross that?” I said to myself. Only one thing came to mind—walk along the bottom of the river. I’d never tried, nor had any information about any unit who had. I wouldn’t even want to try experimenting with an undamaged leg. It seemed foolhardy.
I scanned the river off in the distance, in both directions, to the absolute limits of my enhancing vision. The resolution was grainy on what I saw at maximum magnification, but there seemed, downstream to the southwest, that there could possibly be a way across. All I could
see was a significant glint of silver spray, but not its cause. It was something to strive for rather than just standing there bemoaning my inability to perform. I couldn’t tell what caused the mist but that was my new intermediate goal.
Before moving out again, I needed to clean out my splint. Every day I would spend an hour or so prying tiny particles of dirt and grit from my right foot servos, wiping dust from internal surfaces, and running diagnostic tests. The seal of my skin to the horn of the beast wasn’t all I had hoped for, so I spent an almost intolerable amount of time working at keeping it serviceable. All things considered, my repaired leg was functioning well with no additional failures.
The purging operation wasn’t difficult, just tedious, like the general amount of travel. Even so I made better time than I expected—not excellent, but good.
Long before I had reached the anomaly in the river I knew there was no other place nearby for me to attempt the crossing. The constant flow seemed to have cut a shallow canyon in the soft bedrock. This would have to be the place if I wasn’t going to spend several weeks walking. Every visual scan I made farther on showed no break in the river. I couldn’t afford to delay any more. Who knew how many more attacks on Six there had been in my absence?
It took me three days to reach my destination, a huge boulder in the center of the river causing a constant and frosting rain of mercury. I didn’t know if it would suffice, but I knew it had to. From the unique break in the shoreline and matching shapes on the huge stone, it had clearly once been a married part of the bank. The way the rock had fallen showed that the erosion by the mercury had undercut it enough so the weight had yanked it from the shore. The roughly diamond-shaped rock, barely above the level of the rushing mercury at the closest edge, now had turned around and neatly cleaved the silvery white rush into two separate channels. The two horizontal liquid columns rejoined a mere meter further on in the riverbed.
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