The Jammer and the Blade

by Edwardson, DJ

  Sun li stared at the silent hulk of metal. “I’ll be ready for it next time. There are more ways to win a battle than with blades.”

  “Let me guess—that’s from the Code?” Brit leered at her and she found herself liking him even less than usual. She opened her mouth, a cutting reply on her lips, but then she checked herself. The very Code he was mocking instructed her to treat him with dignity whether he deserved it or not. Besides, he had just saved her life.

  “I hope you will not have to defend me the next time. But thank you for saving my life,” she said, bowing before him.

  Brit did not even seem to notice her gesture or if he did he ignored it. He was busy once again rummaging around the insides of the automaton.

  “Hmm, this thing doesn’t have a translocator so we won’t be able to track where it came from. I’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way, I suppose.”

  He shoved his arm in up to his shoulder and grimaced, straining for something deep inside the machine. A moment later he yanked out a thin metal band with golden studs dotting the edges. He held it up with a flourish like a street magician working a crowd.

  “Now that’s what I was looking for,” he said, his eyes glinting. He stood up and slipped it on his wrist, the one without the mantid gun.

  “I didn’t know you wore jewelry,” Sun li remarked, dryly.

  “Nice one,” he sneered. “I didn’t think Chayans had a sense of humor. I thought it might be against the Code.”

  “So what is it?” she asked, ignoring his remark.

  “It’s our ticket inside Factor Ten’s base,” said Brit. “This transducer ring contains a frequency emitter. Normally, when it loses power it wipes the codes and becomes useless. But I have a regenerator.”

  He reached into his satchel and pulled out a short baton with ridges running up and down its length. He inserted it into the ring and pressed a button on top. The ridges began to glow blue and several nubs sprang out inside the ring and connected themselves to it.

  Brit watched it eagerly, his mouth twitching. After a few moments the ridges flashed green several times and then went dark. The nubs retracted and the ring dropped into Brit’s hand.

  “There,” he said, “New codes, new emitter. Now it will allow us access inside the Factor Ten base—provided we can find it.”

  “That’s great,” Sun li replied. “But we still don’t know where it is.”

  A smirk squiggled onto Brit’s face. “Minor detail,” he said. “Which I will take care of directly.”

  Then, without explaining what he meant, he trudged off back in the direction the automaton had come from.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Finding Things

  Four slices later, Brit kicked the side of one of the crystals jutting out of the ground in frustration and immediately shrank back, uttering a curse and hopping on one leg in obvious pain. The translucent crystal was apparently not as fragile as it looked.

  “This makes no sense,” Brit complained, “That automaton had to come from somewhere, but the tracks start at the base of this butte. There’s nothing else nearby and I’m sure it didn’t have flight capabilities.”

  Sun li ran her hands across her vambraces and stared at the endless rock formations. She didn’t see how this was getting them anywhere and the longer they stayed out here, the more chance they had of getting spotted by a drone or something worse. The conflict with the Delegation could only last so long. The Factor Ten forces would have to return eventually.

  A slight hiss in the air off in the distance interrupted her thoughts. It was so subtle that had she not been still she might not have noticed it. Brit, who was still wrapped up in looking for the automaton’s tracks, seemed to have missed it.

  Sun li turned in time to see a black shape moving amongst the rock formations, hovering just above the ground. She raised her arms and the shimmering blades burst from them just as the automaton fired its locus pulsers. Half a dozen blue beams streaked across the canyon towards her. Brit caught sight of them just in time to scream.

  But the beams sank into her blades, attracted by the locus energy where they dissipated harmlessly. Her weapons flared with the influx of energy but she remained unhurt. If a single beam had hit her, it would have ripped through her flesh like the paper from a tea bag. Six beams would have killed just about anyone. But her blades were not only for attacking. As long as she was facing in the direction of the incoming attack, her blades would absorb almost any energy-based weapon fire.

  She took off running towards the automaton, keeping one arm out in front of her and horizontal across her body. It let fly another volley which her blade easily absorbed. The machine was racing towards her faster than she could run, making her job that much easier. Automatons had such limited decision-making abilities, it was no wonder Factor Ten was being slowly crushed by the Delegation.

  The construct only got off one more volley before they met beneath the shadow of one of the buttes. This mechanical warrior looked nothing like the previous one. It was a metal sphere with a glowing red slit near the top and two long locus pulsers jutting out from either side. As she closed to within striking distance, the barrels folded themselves into the sphere and disappeared, in their place a series of three saw-toothed discs popped out and whirred into motion. They spun around the outer edge of the sphere so that it looked like electrons orbiting a giant nucleus.

  The automaton was probably close to five feet in diameter with its whirring blades extending out another couple of feet beyond that. It came in so fast that Sun li didn’t have time to swerve to avoid it. She had no choice but to dive to the ground head first. As the automaton zipped through the air, she raised her arms and it flew into the outstretched blades. No doubt it had intended to shred her arms with its spinning weapons but instead, the discs went flying off in every direction, carved up by Sun li’s energy blades. The machine hurtled on past her and went crashing to the ground. The construct bounced a few times and then rolled to a stop several dozen feet behind her.

  Sun li turned and doubled back for it. The machine shook violently several times, but failed to lift itself back up off the ground. Once she reached it, Sun li made quick work of the remains, slicing it up into shreds of metal.

  “Wait, stop,” Brit huffed, panting hard as he ran up to her. “I won’t be able to salvage anything if you turn it into metal sushi.”

  She flicked her wrists so that the blades evaporated. “I was just making sure it was completely disabled. That’s what you’re paying me for, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you might have done your job a little too well,” Brit replied. “I still want to see if I can salvage anything from it so that we can tell where it came from. It should have an emitter as well.”

  “I thought we already had one of those.”

  “We can always use another.”

  The machine was so torn up that it didn’t take long for Brit to find what he was looking for. He pulled out another transducer ring first. It was similar to the first one they’d found, only thicker and with silver studs instead of gold. He rebooted the device with his metal rod as he’d done with the previous one and then continued rifling through what remained of the machine’s insides.

  His eyes danced with excitement when he pulled the next object from it, a shimmering steel wafer covered in grooves and indentations, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

  “Finally,” he said. “A translocator. Now we’ll have no problem finding the base this thing came from.”

  He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a white plastic frame with blue fiber channel running around the outer edge. Brit snapped the wafer into the frame and the channel lit up. A topographical map shimmered into existence above the frame, obscuring the translocator. Sun li could see a red curved line tracing itself across the rendered terrain as it scrolled by. Then the line stopped at the representation of a large rock formation that rose from the surrounding terrain.

  “So they’re holed up in
one of the buttes,” Brit remarked. “All right then. We’ve got it this time. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  They followed the path laid out by the translocator to an enormous crested butte. The striations of orange which ran vertically through the jet black rock were no different on this one than they were from the countless other rock formations surrounding it.

  A light breeze blew through the canyon, but it did little to choke back the oppressive heat.

  Brit and Sun li were wearing down again so they took another few lumps of jaunt cream. Sun li had gotten used to the awful taste and the buzzing sensation so that it hardly bothered her anymore, though it still made her stomach feel unsettled. She tried not to focus on that, however, as Brit went over their plan.

  “Our contact inside is under heavy guard, somewhere on the top floor. With the Delegation attack to the north, the base will be undermanned and most of those remaining will be occupied with monitoring the battle and coordinating the Factor Ten attack.”

  “Are you finally going to tell me what we’re after?” Sun li inquired.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” he assured her. “It’s a piece of technology. A very important piece of technology that Deliverance wants badly. That’s all you need to know.”

  Sun li clenched her jaw and said nothing. Most of the time it was like this working as a blade. The people who hired you never told you much more than what to kill and what not to. Her theory was that they were afraid the blade might turn on them if it was to their advantage and with many blades that was probably the case. She wasn’t like that, but if Brit wanted to keep her in the dark, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  “I’m sure the surrounding area is monitored by proximity sensors,” he said, “but that’s the trouble when you make everything automated. All you have to do is find the loophole in the system and then you’re set. As long as we carry these emitters, we shouldn’t set them off. The hangar door isn’t far. We’ll find a way to get to the upper floors once we get inside.” He rose and shoved the translocator into his jacket. “Now stick close.”

  Sun li grabbed him by the shoulder before he could go anywhere. “You’re sure you know where the entrance is?”

  “Never you worry your pretty little head, Sunny,” he assured her. “Factor Ten uses synth pretty heavily in everything they make. You can turn that into anything. The door is about halfway up the side of that cliff face.”

  “You’re telling me that butte is made out of synth?” Sun li stared up at it in disbelief. Such a structure would have taken half the synth in Tredici to build.

  “No, just the gateway,” Brit snickered. “They probably carved out a cavern inside the butte for their mobile base to dock in and covered up the entrance with a synth door. But it will open automatically once the emitters get close enough to it.”

  Sun li shook her head and fell in behind him as he set out towards the butte. She was fascinated by technology but had never had much time to learn about it. She was always so busy training or running errands in the barrios she had little opportunity to learn about all of the advances made by the Delegation or their enemies. She had heard that synth had been used to construct a great deal of the city of Nilar, but she had never been there and so she had no idea whether or not that was true.

  The butte loomed larger and larger above them as they drew near, like a giant orange storm cloud. She clenched her fists and held her arms in the ready position, still not convinced that the emitters would allow them to simply saunter into the Factor Ten base of operations so easily.

  But if anyone noticed them, she had no indication. When they came within a hundred feet of the butte, two sections of the rock face pushed themselves outward and parted to either side, revealing a spacious metal hangar carved into the massive formation about halfway up, just as Brit had predicted. It looked empty from where they stood and for a moment Sun li wondered if the base had been abandoned. But to find out, they would first have to enter and at the moment there seemed to be no way of doing that. The opening to the hangar was at least two hundred feet off the ground.

  “Blades can do many things,” she remarked, squinting up at the opening, “but flying isn’t one of them.”

  “You’re forgetting about the altitude capsule,” Brit reminded her, pulling his out of his satchel. Sun li produced hers as well. “Swipe up to float.” He twisted the device and then swiped it as he had described. A red light flickered inside. He bent his stubby legs and pushed off the ground. Instead of falling immediately back down, he started to drift upwards towards the opening on the side of the butte.

  Sun li powered her canister on and then swiped it as well. She pushed off the ground and floated up after him. They skimmed their way up the cliff face and within a few moments they had reached the opening. They pulled themselves inside using the lip of the hangar and then twisted their canisters back to the off position, landing on the metal floor with a muted thump.

  She realized at once that the hangar was not empty.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Contact

  Twelve automatons were lined up at the back of the hangar, six on either side of a narrow exit at the back. They looked like the one Sun li had just destroyed in the canyon, smooth spherical constructs with a horizontal slit near the top. But the slit wasn’t glowing this time and the weapons on the sides were not there. They rested on top of what looked like cylindrical charging stations.

  None of the automatons made a move to engage the intruders, and, after a few tense moments, Sun li began to think that they weren’t going to.

  “Good,” Brit said under his breath. “The emitter worked. They think we’re part of Factor Ten.”

  Sun li kept quiet. Even though she was fairly sure Brit was right, she didn’t want to do anything that might set them off or alert anyone in Factor Ten to their presence. She had no idea how automatons perceived things or what sorts of security systems were in place here, but she had no desire to test her skills against twelve automatons at the same time.

  Brit led the way as they marched up to the two rows of automatons. Several of them were dust-covered, likely having come back recently from patrolling the canyon. Sun li watched carefully to see if they would move, but Brit forged ahead as if he’d passed this way a hundred times before. He stopped at the opening which lead into a hallway beyond. Pulling out two silvery balls from his satchel, he tossed them up and into the hallway so that they hit the ceiling and then rolled to either side, stopping where the ceiling met the wall.

  Transparent strips ran along the tops of both walls. They looked like the slit on the robots. Sun li guessed that it must be some form of surveillance. At a gesture from Brit the balls rolled ahead of them along the strips, spraying a misty film on the surface as they went. The film dried clear, but when Sun li gave Brit a questioning glance he merely nodded and confidently set off down the hallway.

  The passage branched off in three directions shortly after they exited the hangar. To the left and right the hallway looked the same, but up ahead it turned into a ramp.

  At another gesture from Brit, the balls rolled into the passage with the ramp and Sun li and Brit followed behind. The ramp soon began to curve as it wound its way upwards, spiraling towards the upper floors. There were black metal doors every hundred paces or so, but they passed these without a second glance, pressing on towards the top. At one point Sun li thought she heard one of the doors slide open below, but she heard no footsteps or sounds of movement, so she wasn’t entirely sure what it had been.

  They reached the top and with another wave of his hand, the balls floated down and into Brit’s satchel. The passage ended in a single black door. As Brit approached, it slid silently open.

  On the other side was a hallway lined with windows on the left side. They ran the length of the wall and slanted slightly outwards. The windows were completely dark but the passage was lit by yellow track lighting running along the edges of the floor. Just inside the door two mo
re automatons floated in the air. Once again, they made no move to intercept them and gave no indication that they were aware of their presence.

  Brit launched one of his balls back into the air. There was only a single strip along the wall this time. Again they followed the ball, staying a few steps behind, but this time they did not go far before they stopped in front of another door, slightly recessed from the hall.

  He leaned in close and whispered in Sun li’s ear, “This is the top floor. But we don’t know which room he’s in. We’ll have to check them one by one. Be ready for anything.”

  Sun li nodded and Brit stepped towards the door. It opened as the other one had, sliding into the wall and revealing a long rectangular room with a magnetic table floating above the floor and floating seat pads as well. There were some storage compartments at the far end but it looked otherwise empty. Brit stepped back into the hallway and they continued on.

  The next door opened into a small room filled with metal crates and so they moved on to the third door. That one opened into a repair center of some sort. There were a few partially assembled automatons and several workbenches, but again, it was unoccupied.

  The hallway had a slight curve to it so that by the time they got to the fourth doorway, they could no longer see the automatons or the entrance to the ramp. However, just past this door the hallway ended at another black door guarded by two more automatons.

  The opening along the wall was recessed like the others, however this one was different. In fact, it wasn’t a door in the traditional sense at all, but a field of energy blocking their way. Locus energy was semi-transparent, but they could not make out many details of the room beyond. The barrier made everything blurry and jumbled.