by Gray Lanter
“When we hit the ground fan out and give our friends support. There shouldn’t be many stragglers left after our attack but if they are, kill them. I don’t think negotiations will work here.”
As we flew closer, I watched as the bombs devastated the gold soldiers, blowing them right and left. A firebomb spread intense orange flames on the ground but the robots came through, unsinged. But the explosives blew arms and legs off them.
A fireball seared past us as we dropped lower. I saw the gold guy with the Launcher. He stood next to a tree. The next second the tree cracked and exploded sending thousands of pieces of wood and bark through the air. Pieces of the gold guy spun in ten different directions too.
The shuttles dodged another ball of fire. The fire crackled as it whizzed by us. The shuttles landed behind the barricades. I jumped out onto the sand and heard the rat-a-tat-tat of weapons. The blue bolts didn’t explode with a loud bang. More like a soft plot, but they did plenty of damage. One of Belen’s security people ran up and saluted. When all that was going on I would have forgiven him if he forgot about the salute. Sweat poured down his red face and plopped into the sand. But his voice was calm.
“Good to see you, sir. I’m Lt. Bainbridge.”
“Need some help, Lt.?”
“Yes, sir, we do. We’ve been under attack for about five days. We couldn’t match them so we kept retreating.” He looked toward the ocean. “We can’t retreat anymore.”
“We shouldn’t have to. Not now. Who’s your commanding officer?”
“Captain LeMac Higgins, sir. I’ll take you to him.”
CHAPTER 5
I signaled my squad toward the barricades. By the time I looked over the damaged shuttles most of the gold robots had stopped walking, at least toward the ocean. Dozens lay on the ground. Some broken into pieces. Some without arms or legs or heads. The astonishing thing about a robot army is there is no smell of death. No blood. No cries of anguish.
If a human army had been before us, blood would have covered the ground. Dying men would be moaning. This battle was aseptic. The only sound was the odd whirling of a broken machine. The only red were the sparks coming from the blasted belly of a robot. I saw my first sergeant leading a dozen Rangers onto the battlefield.
“Rab, see if you can find a gold guy alive, so to speak. Let’s talk to him.”
“OK, we should be able to run one down.”
Higgins came over and saluted, then we shook hands.
“Fine job, captain. You got most of your people out and safe.”
“Thank you, sir. I’m glad you showed up.”
“So am I.”
We climbed over a shuttle and walked onto the field strewed with robots. I kicked a gold arm to the side.
“Know where these guys came from?” I said.
“Nope. They just showed up one day and attacked. We got a message that our ship was under attack and two minutes later we saw the robots. We knew we were outnumbered and probably outgunned so I ordered a withdrawal. I figured our only chance was to keep moving until relief came, if relief came.”
“A wise decision, captain. We’ll get your people out of here and back to Belen. She’ll be happy to see you.”
“I’ll be happy to see her. I’ll be happy to see anything except this planet.”
“Find anything of interest?”
“Not a thing, sir. And that’s what puzzles me. From all we could tell, and we were only able to do preliminary reconnaissance, there’s little here of value, if anything at all. It’s a nice place with a pleasant environment and nice temperature and some metal deposits but nothing extraordinary and nothing you couldn’t get on dozens of other planets. It’s not unique. No habitation, at least no sentient life. In other words, it’s not worth fighting for. I don’t know why these war robots are bothering.”
“An interesting question. Let’ see if we can answer it.”
As I looked around I saw Rab and Ameri with guns pointed at a gold robot. They trudged toward us. The robot had his right hand blown off. The face and eyes were totally metallic or totally whatever they were made of. I’m not an expert on alien metals or production methods. We followed them as the defenders managed to make an opening between the shuttles. Rab and Ameri stood him against one of the shuttles. I walked up to him. Thankfully, robot warriors rarely believe that old warning that you are only supposed to give your name, rank and serial number to the enemy. They have no name, no rank and no serial number and usually no reason not to answer questions.
“Who are you?”
He gave an answer but it was in a language I didn’t understand.
“Can you translate that to English?”
“We are The Destroyers,” came the answer.
Impressive. I didn’t see his non-lips move.
“That’s not a name designed to win friends and influence people. Why did you attack the people on this planet?”
“We are the Destroyers.”
“That’s getting to be repetitive. Who told you attack the humans here?”
“The Masters.”
“And, exactly, who are they?”
There was a silence. If he’d had an expression I would have gotten a baffled look.
“They are the Masters.”
I sighed. “Well, now that we have that established. Where are they located?”
“In the Hadratic quadrant of this galaxy.”
Whatever it called the Hadratic quadrant was unknown to me.
“Were your orders to take control of this planet?”
“No, the planet was irrelevant. Our orders were to kill all humans on the planet and to kill the humans in the ship above. Leave no one alive we were told.”
“I assume your Masters are not live and let live type of guys.”
Again, the baffled metallic stare.
“Why did the Masters want to kill all the humans on this planet? They were no threat to you.”
“Our orders were not explained. We were told to kill the humans on this planet first.”
“First?”
“All humans in this galaxy are to be eliminated. But this planet is where we started.”
The words stunned me.
“All humans?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a big job. How do they plan to accomplish it?”
I got only silence as a reply.
“But the Masters didn’t tell you why they ordered this genocide?”
“No.”
“Only humans. Not all carbon-based life?”
“Correct. Only humans.”
Astrid had walked up by my side. She looked at me with a startled expression. Startled is about the closest Astrid gets to fear. She put her hands on her hips.
“If that’s true, Logan, we need to get word of this to the Federation immediately.”
“And we will,” I said.
Captain Higgins had walked my way too. He looked like he had information to impart.
“Major, we estimate there are two thousand Destroyers left on this planet. They appear to be headed our way. They were milling around until your shuttles came. Now they’re marching toward us.”
“Don’t you mean walking? The gold guys didn’t seem to march or charge.”
“No, sir. Now they’re marching. They’re more than fifty miles away from us but if they start charging they could be here in no time.”
“Yes, I’m guessing they’re fast. That’s OK, we’re leaving. Get all your people into the shuttles, captain. We appreciate the hospitality here but we must be leaving.” I turned to the robot and punched him in the chest with my laser rifle. “I thought I’d leave you here. But you are going to come up with us. We’re going to show you a star map and you will point out where you were built. Then we’ll send you back down here with your buddies.”
Again, total non-expression. I’m not an expert in alien technology, much less alien robots/androids or whatever these machines were. But I guessed the gold warriors were not AIs (Artificia
l Intelligence). AIs will engage you in conversation. Als seem to have a talkative robotic DNA gene. In fact, some are darn interesting conversationalists. The gold robot before me didn’t have that type of intelligence. More like a gold drone. But he didn’t seem to object when I wanted the space address of his home planet. I turned to Rab.
“Keep a minimum of two men on him. If he tries anything, blow him apart.”
“Yes, sir.”
“OK, ladies and gentlemen, because this planet doesn’t have any spacious beach accommodations we are leaving. Into the shuttles!”
CHAPTER 6
With the expedition team members, some of whom were wounded, the shuttles were a bit jammed but we lifted off without incident. Astrid stood with me as we looked down and saw the thousands of gold bots storming toward the coastal barricades. They hadn’t gotten the word yet that we had exited.
“Where did they come from?” Astrid said. “The ship that brought the expedition team is here. Almost destroyed but here. How did they get here?”
I shook my head. “A very good question but right now I’m not going to worry about it. We’re taking the expedition team and heading home.” I yanked my thumb toward our prisoner. “With golden boy here.”
“You plan to deliver him to Federation officials? Think they might want to take a look at him?”
“No, we can show them what he looks like. He doesn’t appear to be all that intelligent and, if not, then there’s a limited amount they could learn from him. But I do want to know where he was built. That’s the info the Fed officials will want.”
“But someone had to transport the robots to this planet. Whoever it was, will come back for them, sooner or later.”
“Not necessarily. Robots are expendable. If they do come back let’s hope they return later, when we have gone.”
“But whoever comes back might have more information about the Destroyers and the Masters.”
“Possibly, but that assumes we could extract that information. I assume they will return on a military ship. Their voyage here was a military mission. We have a semi-military ship, pretty well-armed but not one that can take out a heavily armed cruiser. Besides, this is now a military mission for the Federation and we are not military any more. We’re civilians. Civilians with guns, true, but civilians. We’ll give the Federation our information and let them handle it.”
She took one last look at the fading planet. She shook her head. “I don’t know… I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“Maybe it was just the breakfast this morning. It wasn’t very good.”
She playfully slapped my shoulder. “It wasn’t breakfast.”
I walked over to Rab. He stood with two other soldiers. All held guns on our golden boy prisoner.
“Rab, when we get back to the ship, take the prisoner to the science officer. Let’s see what he can make of him. He doesn’t look unique to me although an alien technology made him. But maybe we can learn something.”
The robot’s voice was monotone. No highs, no lows. Just a matter-of-fact tone.
“You will all die. The human race is doomed. Soon the galaxy will be rid of you. That’s the plan of the Masters.”
“Well, the best laid plans of mice and men and Masters…”
The baffled expression showed again. Obviously, the golden guy was not familiar with Scottish poets.
“Or to put it another way, not everything goes as planned, even for the Masters.”
“Yes, those plans will. The Masters are invincible.”
I grinned. “Know how many times I’ve heard a statement like that since I’ve been a military man and a mercenary? A lot of people think they’re invincible. No one ever is.”
“You have never dealt with the Masters before.”
“That’s true enough. But I see no reason why they should be the exception to the rule.”
The shuttle rocked as it docked with the ship. I slammed my hand on the shuttle wall to steady myself.
“You said you don’t know why the Masters hate humans so much?”
“No, except that they are inferior.”
“Inferior to whom?”
The robot said nothing.
“If we’re inferior, so are all the other carbon-based life. Why not kill them too? You must have an odd method of selecting who you exterminate.”
Silence.
“Take him away, Rab.”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER 7
I headed for my office after making sure we hadn’t lost any men during our brief skirmish with whatever they were. Another plus about working for Belen is you don’t to write detailed reports about your mission. You don’t have to write any reports at all for that matter. But I generally scribbled a few lines down and send it off so Belen would have some light-reading material. In the military, superiors would want twenty-pages of sheer nothing. Because the colonels need to read it and then the generals need to read it and then you have to shoot it to the politicians, who never read it. The politicians give it to their staff who summarizes it and makes suggestions on what we should do. But those staff members have never been in battle and have never been in the military. They know nothing about tactics or strategies or aliens. They also, I suspect, have little courage if any, and I didn’t like those lousy sewer rats second-guessing men and women who are putting their life on the line.
Belen, of course, doesn’t have any superiors. She runs the corporations. She has a board of directors but she appoints them and can remove them at her pleasure. This is a way of cutting through the paperwork.
Belen also owns her very own planet so she doesn’t have to answer to any government. To her priest, maybe, but not to any secular officials. She can tell them to butt out, and often does.
When I typed out about three pages of green words on the black screen, I figured that was all Belen cared about hearing. So I put down a period and closed the report. It had taken less than ten minutes. In the military it would have taken three hours at least. I stretched back in the chair. I had a portable bar in the office so walked over and dropped some ice in a glass and poured in some bourbon. After a victory, I celebrate. Usually I don’t drink before five, but I figured it was after five in some place in the galaxy.
I buzzed the admiral and asked him when we’d be heading back.
“As soon as Science Officer Anson gets through with the prisoner. You said you wanted to send him back to the planet when we were through with him.”
“Yes, I did tell him that. I wonder if a promise to a metal man is valid. I should ask Belen. She enjoys moral issues like that.”
“We can always just dump him, major.”
“I did say he’d be sent down to the surface. We can wait a while. Although…”
Fifteen seconds later I realized I had left the admiral hanging. “Signing off. Will get back to you later.”