by Isaac Hooke
Will and Horatio dropped from comm range, their blue icons freezing on the overhead map as they entered an alleyway in the green zone.
The tense minutes passed.
“We have to back them up,” she told Chuck. “Cover them.”
Chuck shook the blue silhouette of his head. “Let them work, Warden.”
She clenched her jaw and spun away.
The seconds turned into minutes, and Rhea’s worry only grew with each moment.
Finally, at the fifteen-minute mark, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was about to go looking for them when their blue dots updated on the overhead map. And then the blue outlines of Will and Horatio stepped in to view from the alleyway ahead.
“And that’s one less hunter killer to haunt these parts,” Will transmitted. She noticed his backpack had a much larger silhouette than before he’d left.
“You paused to salvage parts?” she said. “I was worried sick!”
“Of course we paused,” Will said. “I’m a salvager. I’m not going to leave behind perfectly good components. It’s just too bad that Horatio fried so many of them.”
“Hey, we both agreed we wanted to take it down in a single shot,” Horatio said. “And that’s what I did.”
“No, I did it,” Will said. “You just added unnecessary collateral damage.”
“You’re using the phrase incorrectly,” Horatio said. “Besides, my damage was necessary.”
“If you say so,” Will said.
“Can we go?” Rhea glanced at Chuck, who nodded and took the lead once more.
Gizmo reported no further thermal signatures along the route, and neither Rhea nor any of the others spotted anything on the infrared band. It was completely quiet out there, as far as they could tell.
The drone did report a street full of sleeping Tasins at one point, and the team was careful to take a roundabout route past them. They plotted a course that kept them within the green zone of course.
Finally, they reached the partially collapsed overpass that was their target. Perfectly shielded from the view of the spy satellites, the third and final SUV squatted underneath the intact corner portion of that concrete bridge.
They hadn’t come to ride the vehicle, or to use it as bait like the second one. No, they came here only because it served as a waypoint for the advance team.
They had three hours before said team was scheduled to pass through the ruins on the return trip to Rust Town.
They hunkered down underneath that overpass, hiding in the corner near the SUV, hidden from the spy satellites, and hopefully other watchers.
They ate their food pills and sipped from their canteens. They were all too weary to talk and spent the remaining three hours resting further. Rhea had been unable to sleep earlier, but now it came quickly, and her mind shut off. Will, Chuck and Renaldo also probably slept, she didn’t know. It was up to them. She knew Horatio and Gizmo would be standing guard, either way.
And so it was that she awoke at the three-hour mark, courtesy of the internal alarm she’d set, and was greeted by the sight of seven SUVs driving into view across the rubble. She saw them on the thermal band in the darkness. The fact their headlamps remained inactive wouldn’t be considered suspicious to the satellites, not with the profusion of bioweapons roaming these lands.
“Good timing,” Horatio said. “I was just going to wake you.”
Rhea nodded. Beside her, the silhouettes of Will, Chuck and Renaldo were rubbing their eyes.
The SUVs were indicated in blue on her overhead map. When she zoomed in on that map, she could see the individual dots of the friendly occupants, who had positional sharing active. Because Rhea and her companions had the intensity of their comm nodes dialed way back, the newcomers wouldn’t detect her own position until they were much closer.
A moment later, she knew they had when she received a join request for the encrypted comm channel. She accepted.
“Warden,” a voice said. “It’s good to see you guys. Glad everyone on your team made it through intact. Any problems?” She recognized the voice of one of the original Rust Town Wardenites.
“None we couldn’t handle, McGraw,” Rhea replied. “Any news from Miles yet?”
“Yes,” McGraw replied.
Rhea tensed, hoping against hope that all of this hadn’t been for nothing.
“His team made it to Rust Town intact,” McGraw finished. “No casualties. Every last drop of water was delivered, and safely stored.”
She slumped in relief and gave Will a hug.
“So it wasn’t all for nothing,” she murmured against his shoulder.
“We’ve bought the residents of the slums another week,” Will agreed.
“Nothing like seeing a plan successfully come to fruition,” Horatio commented. “Yay.”
Rhea let go of Will and glared at the robot’s silhouette. “Why does it sound like you’re being sarcastic?”
“I suppose I am, to a degree,” Horatio replied. “My innate response to most things human is sarcasm, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
The seven SUVs parked under the intact section of the overpass, and men armed with rifles emerged from each of them. They were outlined in blue on her HUD, and surrounded Rhea and the others, keeping their backs to them and scanning the surroundings with their weapons.
“Look at these guys,” Will commented softly. “Think they’re a crack military team or something.”
“Well, I for one appreciate the effort,” Rhea said, knowing that her words would make at least some of those men beam.
Two of the Wardenites parted near Rhea, and McGraw’s silhouette stepped between them to address her.
“So, what are you orders?” McGraw asked.
“We go with you,” she replied. “And then continue to Rust Town. The settlement isn’t in the clear just yet.”
“What about this SUV?” McGraw nodded at the abandoned SUV parked beneath the overpass. “Do we take it with us?”
“No,” Rhea said. “The spy satellites will be paying far closer attention to you this time out, than they did on your initial drive here.”
“Assuming they realize we’re the same convoy,” McGraw said. “Which is doubtful.”
“True enough,” Rhea told him. “But they’ll still be paying attention. So we leave the SUV.”
“Another sacrifice for the cause,” McGraw said approvingly.
“Not really,” Rhea told him. “We’ll send a team back to retrieve it at some point.” She glanced at Renaldo.
“I’ll see that it gets done,” Renaldo said, falling smoothly back into his leadership role among the Wardenites.
McGraw led her to the SUV parked in the middle of the convoy and opened the sliding door.
“I assume your team would like to stay together?” He beckoned at the two rows of empty double seats, which was easily enough to fit six team members.
“Appreciate it,” Rhea said, piling inside. She slid all the way to the window. Horatio piled in next to her, followed by Will. Chuck and Renaldo took the back seat.
McGraw sat behind the wheel, and another Wardenite took the passenger seat.
The other men loaded into their SUVs, and then the convoy set out once more, traveling in single file through the streets. McGraw wasn’t driving, Rhea noted. Not that she expected him to.
She kept an eye on the overhead map and quickly realized the convoy was traveling mostly on the sidewalks to the north of the buildings, staying within the green zone for as long as possible. She held her breath when the vehicles finally moved out into the open, exposing themselves to the watching spy satellites—and the predator circling far overhead.
She remembered it had taken several seconds before the predator had terminated the self-driving SUV she’d sent into the streets earlier, so she didn’t rest easy when nothing happened. Everyone in the vehicle remained absolutely silent: she could feel the palpable tension in the air. She wondered if she should have ordered one of the SUVs to tentatively
travel outside the green zone first, but that would have been viewed as suspicious by the satellites, and the predator. After all, the occupants of these vehicles weren’t supposed to know that an SUV had been destroyed here only a short while earlier, and any behavior that suggested otherwise would’ve been considered suspect.
Gizmo followed along dutifully, keeping pace in the dark.
“I want Gizmo to hold off on sending out any LIDAR bursts,” Rhea told Will. “Let’s keep the drone on the down-low for the time being. Observe for thermal signatures.”
“You got it,” Will said.
The SUVs kept their headlights turned off, again mostly to avoid attracting the attention of bioweapons. It would have no effect on the satellites’ ability to see them, considering the vehicles were readily visible on the thermal band.
The seconds turned into minutes, and still nothing happened. Even so, that did nothing to mitigate the tension she felt. Even when they had left the ruins behind, and were well into the Outlands, Rhea still didn’t feel entirely at ease. Although admittedly, she did feel better with each passing moment.
The vehicle had gimbaled wheels, but they weren’t super-gimbaled, so she still experienced the occasional jolt as the SUV hit a depression or bounced off a small hump.
“Gizmo is reporting a series of drones coming from the direction of the ruins,” Will announced, ratcheting up the tension once more.
She glanced at her overhead map and saw seven red dots emerging from random locations among the crumbled skyscrapers. They were all converging on the convoy.
“Hunter killers?” Rhea asked.
“Some of them,” Will replied.
“What do we do?” McGraw said.
“Have the drones made any demands?” Rhea told him. “Or any communication requests at all?”
“Negative,” he said.
“Then keep driving,” she told him. She glanced at her companions. “Turn on your public profiles.”
“What about yours?” Renaldo said.
“Mine stays off.” Rhea’s public profile would be recognized as belonging to the Warden. So instead, she unbuckled her seatbelt and slid into the small alcove between her seat and the seat in front of it and ducked below the window. She turned off her comm node completely. “I hide.”
“Horatio, what are the chances these drones will be able to penetrate the walls of the SUV with their scanners, and detect her hiding there?” Will asked.
“Moderate to high,” Horatio said. “Unless…”
Horatio repositioned himself, as did Rhea.
“I hope that works…” Chuck said.
The drones reached the convey and adjusted their speeds so that they followed along on either side of the trailing SUV. Then they moved forward as a group, one vehicle at a time, no doubt scanning the occupants as they did so, and recording the identities of every passenger via the public profiles and IDs.
The drones flew alongside Rhea’s SUV. Horatio was seated above her; she’d positioned herself so that her torso and arms rested on his thighs, while her own thighs blended with his lower legs. Her knees were bent, so that her calves flowed away from his feet. To an external scan, it would look like Horatio was a single robot with really thick legs and extra-long feet.
The drones hovered outside for longer than they had any of the previous SUVs. Rhea held her breath, certain she’d been discovered.
But then the drones moved on a moment later.
The flying machines reached the front of the convoy shortly, made their last scan, and then departed toward the city.
Everyone remained quiet inside the SUV. If she was human, she would have been sweating bullets.
Rhea waited for the predator attack, but it never came.
After five minutes had passed, she finally let out a sigh of relief, then she slid off of Horatio, who pushed over. She hauled herself back into her seat and reactivated her comm node.
“We did it,” Renaldo said, laughing and breaking out into tears of joy. She couldn’t see those tears in the dark, but she heard them—there was a tremble in his voice, one that could’ve only been caused by a quivering lip. “We did it.”
Yes, they had.
She flopped back into her seat and reached across Horatio to hold Will’s hand. He held her hand right back and squeezed.
16
Rhea kept an eye out for bioweapons but saw nothing on the dark horizons. Gizmo would have seen any incoming creatures before she did, of course, but she liked the certainty that watching with her own eyes gave her.
Beside her, Will had swapped seats with Horatio. Under the light of a small lamp he wore strapped to his head, he worked on hammering the dents out of her arm with a diminutive mallet. He’d replaced some of the damaged servomotors with parts salvaged from the hunter killer, and he was attempting to restore the limb’s normal range of motion. A portion of her upper arm was still catching on the overhanging rim of the shoulder socket when she tried to rotate it, and Will was concentrating on that section now.
“You know, there are some who say the universe is a grand experiment,” Renaldo said while Will worked. “The rules for atoms assigned arbitrarily by the creators, to see what would happen. These creators prepared a vast tapestry of atomic building blocks, a stew of protons and electrons, which joined with one another to form hydrogen atoms strewn throughout space. Despite the vastness, these hydrogen atoms still gathered, because of the gravity that had also been assigned arbitrarily, and formed large masses called suns.
“The creators sat back and watched as the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in these suns produced helium as a byproduct, making the latter the second most abundant element in the universe. Other elements were created by that same fusion, the so-called heavy metals, and these in turn were spat out when the stars swelled to the supermassive and exhausted their fuel sources—without thermonuclear fusion to sustain them, they collapsed under their own weight. New stars formed from the resultant expelled gasses, but so did planets, courtesy of these heavy metals, and hence we have the universe as we see it today. The grand experiment is still running, of which that accident known as life is merely a small part. The creators must be thoroughly enjoying themselves.”
“What’s your point?” Will said, still gently hammering his mallet into her shoulder.
“No point,” Renaldo said. “Other than to prove the absurdity of existence. Everything we perceive as reality would change drastically with only the merest revision to physical law. A tweak to the gravitational constant. Dropping a few decimal places in Plank’s constant. Adjusting the speed of light.”
“Yeah well, that’s fairly obvious,” Will said. “Reality is based on the physical laws that undermine it. Change those, and you forge a completely new reality, one inhabited by vastly different forms of life. Assuming life forms at all. Try playing some of the more out-there MMORPGs, like Machine World, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Can you imagine if those who created reality grew bored?” Renaldo said, ignoring Will’s comments. “They need merely wave their hands, or whatever equivalents they might have, and the particles that form all of us would fall apart, rearranging into new lattices, as dictated by the changed physical laws. We would become… less than dust.”
“Yeah, you go ahead and imagine that, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. “Meanwhile, I’ll keep my mind fixed on the real world, and what’s possible, rather than the ludicrously impossible. We’re not some frail, flimsy creatures subject to the whims of all-powerful creators.”
“Aren’t we?” Renaldo said.
Will hammered a few more times, then withdrew the small mallet. “Try now.” He slid away, as did Horatio, giving her room.
Keeping her arm bent at the elbow, Rhea held it out to one side and experimentally rotated it. She was able to bring the arm through its entire previous range of motion. She straightened the arm and repeated the revolutions: the range remained the same.
She lowered her arm and smiled at Will. “You
did it. Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” Will said. “Told you these extra spare parts would come in handy.”
He shoved his tools back into his pack and slipped the lamp from his head.
He paused.
The lamp was still on, the cone of light reflecting from the ceiling, allowing her to see the shock that registered on his face.
“What is it?” she said.
He immediately deactivated the lamp.
“Gizmo is picking up a low flying aircraft on fast approach,” Will said.
“It’s registering on the SUV LIDAR,” McGraw confirmed. “It’s on a direct intercept course. We have about a minute until it reaches us.”
“A bomber?” Rhea asked.
“Negative,” McGraw said. “It’s small. I’d say a personal flyer. Might be equipped with some plasma turrets, or maybe a laser.”
Rhea heard a sonic boom as the vessel passed only a few meters above them. Dust and rock lifted from the landscape and pebbled the windows and hull of the SUV.
The craft continued away toward the west, according to the red dot on the overhead map, as recorded by Gizmo and the SUVs.
“Something’s on the vehicle in front of us!” McGraw said.
Rhea withdrew her pistol. Beside her, Will likewise retrieved his weapon, and the rifle barrels attached to the underside of Horatio’s forearms also deployed. Everyone else in the vehicle similarly armed themselves.
McGraw activated the headlamps, illuminating what looked like a man punching into the roof of the vehicle directly in front of them. Rhea thought it was the Scorpion at first, but this man had no tail. Assuming it was a man: she could see only the sheen of a metallic body and limbs at the moment. The face wasn’t visible at all, because of the angle. It could have been a combat robot, but then again, what combat robots had four arms? There was also a large pack on the back with two nozzles protruding from its underside.