Then it strikes. As I access the GPS, a cunningly constructed assault program invades my systems. It crashes through my standard defensive barrier. I am compromised, fighting instantly for survival in my core programs. Shock strikes me physically and mentally. The program is beyond anything I expected from the creatures of this time. Then I recognize Infestor code in the attack program, modified in some fashion I cannot understand. How did it get there? Who has such knowledge?
I am in trouble.
***
For a second I stared in shock at the hideously juddering mechanism. Then I lunged forward, ripping the lead out of the console. Maauro emitted a screech and toppled into the bottom of the skimmer.
Simultaneously I heard the sound of engines starting around us in the early morning fog.
“Jaelle,” I shouted. “Gun the engine. Get us out of here.”
A skimmer cut out of the fog a hundred meters ahead. I whipped out my SMG, firing off the clip. The range was long for the machine pistol, but the skimmer veered back into the fog. I slammed another magazine in as Jaelle fired at something on the other side.
I spotted a shape in the fog and fired again. At this rate my ammo would exhaust quickly.
I knelt by Maauro and turned the heavy android over with difficulty. “We have to get her operational again, or we’re dead,” I yelled to Jaelle.
For a crazy second, I consider slapping Maauro’s face or shaking her. I pulled her half upright and fired a quick burst at a glimpse of a skimmer. Lostra’s folks were holding back, doubtless trying to figure out if Maauro was disabled. I looked longingly at the heavy gun on Maauro’s back but knew I had neither the skill nor strength to use it.
“Wrrrrriikkkkk.” There was a mechanical resonance and slurring to Maauro’s voice. “Iiii’mm dammmagged. Selffff- repair iniiiitiated.”
“We underestimated Lostra,” I said. “They were out here in the other skimmers. They’re herding us back now. Brilliant. She figured you’d be too dangerous to handle on land.”
I fired again and my SMG clicked empty. This time return fire flew over our heads. The skimmers disappeared into the fog.
I swore under my breath. My eyes strained to pierce the mist.
“You were right, Wrik. I have underestimated Lostra,” Maauro said. “I did not realize that she had the sophistication to arrange such a cybernetic trap. She has knocked my eyes off-line. There is too much clutter for me to reliably fire by radar alone.”
Maauro knelt shakily, drawing her weapon and leveling the huge device. “Wrik, if there a piece of solid ground you could leave me on, Lostra wants me. Perhaps I can delay her.”
I knelt by Maauro, placing my arms around her shoulders and grasping her forearms. “There’s no place to stand and Lostra wants the rest of us as well. My bet is that the fuel gauge is rigged as well and this skimmer’s going to run dry any second. We have to fight. I’ll be your eyes.”
“Very well,” she said. “We shall stand or fall together.”
“Get down, Jaelle,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Kill the engine and don’t block our field of fire.”
She gave me a mutinous look but dropped to the bottom of the skimmer.
“Hold the skimmer steady,” Maauro said. “We must eliminate variables.”
I stared into the low-hanging mist. I could feel Maauro’s cheek, clean and cold against my skin. Her upper body was near weightless in my arms, ready to turn in any direction at my lead. Insects shrilled in our ears. The rank smell of the Tar Sea filled my nose, broken only by a slight ginger cookie scent of Maauro. If we lived, I meant to ask her why she smelled like a cookie.
“Engines,” Maauro said, spinning to face the sound. “Be ready.”
Skimmers burst into view, four of them, cutting back and forth. I pointed Maauro at the first and we fired. Maauro’s monster gun ruptured the skimmer, which turned over, cartwheeling across the swamp. I tried not to imagine the fate of its occupants, thrown into the stinking Tar Sea.
Our next two shots fountained the surface of water and tar. Then we were in range of Lostra’s force. Shots peppered the water. They may have wanted Jaelle alive, but not enough to face fire from Maauro.
A laser struck Maauro: the heat of it scorched me. I yelled and fell over, beating at my clothes. Maauro whipped around and fired back, but her shots trailed Lostra’s skimmer.
Before I could scramble back to aim Maauro, two more shots struck the android. Both glanced off her, puncturing the skimmer’s side and bottom. I’d forgotten for a second that what looked like a jumpsuit was simply a differently textured part of her armored body.
Maauro stood, turning in the direction of the shots and leaning out to aim past the fan when it happened. She moved, but her right leg didn’t follow the movement. She dropped her weapon. Her arms reached out, far too slowly, as if she were a toy running down. Maauro toppled over the side, sinking out of sight instantly
She was gone. I stood numb, an easy target, but the weapons fire ceased. Jaelle crawled toward Maauro’s fallen weapon.
“Don’t bother,” I heard my voice say, as if it came from somewhere far away. “Firing it would pulverize your arm.”
Lostra pulled alongside, her skimmer full of Guild: Dua-Denlenn, city-Kandalorians and a few humans. Her face pulled into a wolfish snarl, and I expected death.
“Well, well,” she said, “What a pretty brace of birds we have here. I think we’ll have them for dinner, slow–roasted.
Chapter 10
I sink into the tar, leaving Wrik and the world of light behind. My intermittent failure has doomed me and the others. In my enervated state I’ll never regain the surface. I’ve never been defeated before in battle, never failed my comrades-in-arms. Worse, my failure is from the classic mistake of underestimating my enemy. It is a unique and bitter sensation that I will take to my destruction.
Perhaps it is despair that makes me slip into a lassitude. I do not know for how many hours I slowly sink in the pitch-darkness. System after system fails in me. Finally, I have only a slight flickering consciousness…
REBOOT.
I am aware again and more. The system cascade failure has stopped and indeed been reversed as some failsafe of my Creators cuts in. I am not fully restored, but I have control of my damage repair systems. With this realization, I begin to repair and reroute my systems. I take stock of my surroundings. I send out a deep-radar pulse into the sea of tar…and suffer a complete shock. I am suspended in material a thousand meters below the surface, three hundred meters above a rocky bottom. This is not what rivets my attention.
The tar ocean floor is littered with fighting machines. Many I cannot identify, but below and to the east of me is an Infestor assault barge. The six hundred-meter vessel is torn and crumpled, totally dead. Had any system been active, it would have attacked me instantly.
My tactical computer analyzes the situation. The Infestors must have been damaged and landed on the planet to escape, or at least deploy armored fighting vehicles and battle it out. In the millennia since then, the Tar Sea buried the battlefield. I do not detect any Creator machines nearby, but I cannot rule it out.
I alter the direction of my descent, swimming through the gooey mass toward the assault barge. Within an hour, I settle on its crumpled bow. My scanner paints a clearer picture. The barge has been ripped up by beam fire. It must have been destroyed in the early days of the war or perhaps been part of a reserve unit – it would have been quite obsolete in my day.
Still the technology aboard is far in advance of anything I have found in this modern age and more, the Infestors use similar exotic metal and fuels to the Creators’, one reason this system was so bitterly disputed. I enter through a great rent in the barge’s side and begin my search. Even with such systems as I have restored, I cannot regain the surface. My only chance lies within. I push through the ooze, exploring level after l
evel.
I find my prize near the engineering level, a storeroom full of exotic radioactive materials. The electronics and mechanisms of the ship have not survived the ages, not even in the insulation of the tar. I had it far easier in the clean hard vacuum. But 50,000 years is only a small fraction of the life of this fuel. I press bar after bar of it against the permeable surface of my body, admitting the fuel and filtering out the tar.
Glorious power surges through my systems. Reactors and factories that have been dormant for millennia operate again. Nanorepairbots now have special materials with which to make repairs and fabricate replacement parts. The fuel is crudely refined, low grade and partially spent, but it is nectar to me.
I quickly examine the rest of the vessel, making an inventory of useful materials; there is more here than I can process or use presently. I foolishly wish for my old maintenance crew or that this was a ship of the Creators. Might as well wish my Creators had never abandoned me.
The thought of abandonment brings Wrik and the expedition to mind. Perhaps they are already dead. But I have adopted Wrik as a comrade-at-arms, having declared him so; I must rescue him or at least retrieve his body. It is an imperative my Creators programmed into me, “We do not leave our own.” They have failed me in that regard and perhaps it is for that reason that I feel I must better them.
I turn my face to the unseen sky and plot my course. My outer layer heats, softening the tar as my legs begin to vibrate at supersonic speeds. I move upward.
***
The next few hours were anything but pleasant. Lostra had us bound and thrown into a hut, only to show up later with a whip. She amused herself by having a pair of Dua-Denlenn string Jaelle to an overhead beam. She cracked the whip on the squalling Nekoan.
“Tell me, pretty kitty,” she said, rubbing the whiphandle over Jaelle’s body. “Tell me where to find the will o’ wisps. Tell me where to find all those pretty ancient artifacts.”
Jaelle’s teeth snapped, but Lostra merely laughed and used her whip. I felt that she didn’t want Jaelle to talk; the whipping was what she wanted. But she was careful not to overdo it, toying with the Nekoan.
She didn’t forget me either. “What did she tell you, Wrik?” Crack, crack.
I screamed that she hadn’t told me anything. The whip bit again, but not because she didn’t believe me. Her brilliant eyes, swollen lips, her nipples poking through her shirt in arousal said it didn’t matter.
“I believe you, Wrik,” Lostra said, biting me on the ear. “I wouldn’t tell you anything either. You’re not so tough without your little robot slut.”
She struck me on the temple with the whip handle and I faded out, Jaelle’s screams sounding in my ears.
When I came to, it was to find Jaelle face down on the hut floor next to me. Lostra sat astride her.
“Have a nice nap, Wrik?” Lostra said. “Jaelle and I have been having fun without you. But naughty kitty won’t tell me anything.”
“I will tell you,” Jaelle managed to get the hoarse words out, “to get your fat ass off mine.”
“I like that,” Lostra said running her hand through Jaelle’s thick hair. “Still has spirit.”
“When I get free,” Jaelle growled like a jungle cat. “I am going to eat pieces of you while you’re still alive.”
That seemed to give even Lostra pause.
“I think it’s about time for another sacrifice to the God of the Tar Sea,” Lostra said, “since you are of no other use to me. Jonka!”
A Dua-Denlenn leaned in, its elfin face impassive as it stared at us.
“Have the catapult readied. Get the priests. We want to make quite the example of these two.”
“What about a deal?” Jaelle said, staring around at the horde of tribesmen beyond Jonka.
She stood and shrugged. “You couldn’t offer me enough to cross Dusko and the Guild.”
“Just a matter of price, huh?” I shot.
“What else?” She turned and shot a few words over her shoulder. Tribesmen hustled in to drag us upright.
Jaelle squalled and launched herself at Lostra despite her bonds, teeth bared. Lostra contemptuously checked her with a thrust kick that slammed her onto her back. Tribesmen pulled her upright before she could regain her feet.
A feeling of numb unreality gripped me. I was going to die, my mouth filling with tar, my eyes and nose blocked up in pitch darkness. I began to feel disassociated from things around me as if it were a holo I was watching. Yet the sandy ground I was dragged over was real. The rank odor of both the swamp and the tribesman stuck me sharply, as did the heat of the sun on my face. I looked at Jaelle, who was snarling still, her hair all raised and roughed out. That’s how I should be, I thought, not mute and numb like a sheep.
Shouts filled the air. The natives dragged us toward the edge to the rock face where who knew how many unknowns had been flung in before. Those unknowns waited below, ready to draw us into their silent company.
The native ahead of me stopped short with a hoarse cry and pointed into the morass. Something stirred in the ocean of black tar. Something rose in it, stepping toward the shore. It was a mass of tar, dripping off substance as it walked onto the shore before the stunned and silent mob. It stood before us, a nightmare figure of blackness.
Then, before anyone could react, it burst into flame from head to toe and raced forward almost too quickly for the eye to follow.
The tribesmen shrieked in fear before those nearest the apparition literally exploded in a shower of blood and bone. There was no thought of resistance. Survivors flung weapons aside and fled screaming for the tree line.
Lostra and her men were made of sterner stuff and opened fire on the flaming figure. But the apparition raised both arms and it seemed that something flew from those hands. The Guilders near Jaelle and me were torn up as if machine-gunned.
This broke the fugue that had gripped me. I leapt on the nearest dead Guilder and fumbled for his knife.
“Stay still,” Jaelle said, her face pressed against my low back. I felt a tug and realized that she’d bitten through the ropes. Freed, I grabbed out the dagger and cut the bonds off my feet, then freed her. I grabbed at a weapon as dirt kicked up near me. A native Guilder was firing at us. Before it could get off a second shot, the flame creature struck it from behind, cutting it in two.
A Dua-Denlenn Guilder surged out from behind a burning hut, her beautiful face distorted in a snarl of hatred as she leveled an RPG at the fiery form.
I didn’t have time to aim. I pulled the trigger and held it down, hosing her and the hut. The RPG fired and the round ricocheted off the ground before detonating among some huts full of cowering natives. I turned my face from shredded bodies and tried not to vomit. We had to flee while we had the chance. I scrambled to my feet, but hours of being bound had made my legs unsteady. When I looked up, a crackling, smoking figure stood in my way.
“Wrik, look out,” Jaelle screamed.
But the figure didn’t move and the flames faded as the last of the tar burned off. Furious heat beat at my face. I hardly noticed it.
“Maauro,” I breathed.
She stood in front of me looking as she had the morning before, her long hair and jumpsuit intact and free of soil and tar. Large, solemn eyes looked up at me. Only the yellow silk bow was gone.
Of course, I thought, the bow was the only thing that wasn’t actually part of her. Even the filament hair was merely another part of her nearly indestructible body.
“You lost your bow,” I said, surprised to find my voice unsteady and tears in the back of my eyes.
“Will you buy me another?” Maauro said, her voice gentle and a small smile on her face.
“I’ll buy you yards of it,” I promised.
Jaelle found her voice. “Your cousin must come from a very special branch of the family.”
“Le
t’s get out of here,” I said.
Maauro raised her eyes to the shattered, burning village. A few natives, women, children and the elderly were fleeing to the forest, joining the warriors who’d abandoned them.
“I will finish reducing the native forces,” she replied, eyeing the escapees and bringing up her arms. Her fingers seemed to uncap and I realized that she now possessed some form of projectile weapon.
I heard a sound like compressed air and realized she was firing at the women and children.
“No,” I screamed. “Stop! Let them go.”
Maauro cocked her hands up and looked at me. I didn’t look at the forest edge. I wanted to believe she’d missed.
“What?” she demanded. “Enemy forces are escaping.”
“Noncombatants,” I managed.
“They have seen me and know what I am.”
“They saw a burning monster or god,” I improvised. “They won’t stop running for days. They’re no threat.”
“Then the warriors in the treeline—”
“Will be busy trying to find their families. Maauro, leave them, please.”
“You seem pretty concerned about a group of savages that were going to drop us in a tar sea,” Jaelle noted, her expression unreadable.
“The Guild is responsible for this.”
“I do not understand,” Maauro said. “However, as enemy forces are in retreat and any intel they gained is not likely to be used against me, I will honor your wishes. You do not mind if I continue to eliminate the Guild?”
I reached down a hand to help Jaelle to her feet. She regarded it with slight amusement and bounced to her feet in a lithe roll. “No. You can reduce them to a fine mist as far as I’m concerned.”
“Very well,” Maauro said. “Remain here as I finish my work.”
***
I look at Wrik. He is clearly distressed by my actions and a concession is necessary.
My Outcast State (The Maauro Chronicles Book 1) Page 8