Of Salt and Sand

by Barnes, Michael

  Eight-of-Ten instantly responded. He whirled and bolted for the station’s damaged entry. He flipped, rolled and hurled himself around and in between flaying arms and cutting swaths of energy. He bounced off their ugly heads and slid around their wide frames, causing several of the Goliath’s to inadvertently fire on each other, destroying both in one blow.

  Colonel Briggs cursed at the mishap—there had been others. He and his men remained aloof, watching the carnage. There was no question that the Goliaths would be victorious, but precious time was ticking away—he never dreamed that this small group of androids could put up such a resistance—they fought like dragons to protect their human companions.

  Briggs had ordered the Goliaths to engage the enemy only within the Omega-seven tunnel. He could not risk unintentional damage to the MU1 station, nor injury to the Four. Besides, he had known full well that the Four’s companion systems would easily be drawn out into the tunnel once the Goliaths had arrived. And he was right.

  The pounding explosions shook the floor and rattled Three-of-Ten’s frame, but he would not be daunted. He drew an even tighter hold on Jacob, and timed the waves of exploding energy flying past the exit. Then, with a sudden bolt, he leaped out the exit and into the passageway, landing directly in the line of fire. He just touched ground, then exploded like a mad cheetah, bounding down the corridor.

  Briggs’ jumped and his eyes went wide! He swelled in a dumb gaze. “Cease Fire!” he shouted, waving his hands. “Stand down!” He gawked, open mouthed as the android disappeared down the corridor with the boy tucked under its arm, and flapping like a rag doll.

  This was not supposed to happen! Briggs and his advisors had meticulously studied Reitman’s documentation on the algorithms of every companion android. The darn things were programmed to defend at all costs, but where did this grab-and-go logic come from! Briggs was beginning to understand Jimmy Reitman’s unusual hatred for the android called, Three-of-Ten.

  The Goliaths instantly halted and geared down to passive mode. That is . . . all but one. One did not stand down, its large fiery eye still aglow in a killing red hue.

  “Disengage and stand down!” Briggs shouted again. But the bulky frame simply turned and let out an artificial noise, deafening and furious!

  “It’s been damaged, sir!” cried another of the men, pointing to a crushed section on the Goliath’s huge domed head.

  Briggs yanked out his emergency override module. He punched in halting command after command, but it too, seemed ineffective. Then the metal behemoth simply turned, glared a final refute, and shot off after Three-of-Ten, its EMR weapon poised and ready.

  Briggs’ stomach dropped. His mind could only recall Tanner’s orders as the words returned like a hammer pounding in his head: . . . the boy Jacob is your most valuable target. He is not to be harmed. Use every means possible to insure his safe apprehension! Now there was a Goliath after him! And it would neither care nor differentiate between android and human; both were targets to be eliminated.

  “All of you! Move!” barked Briggs. “The tunnel is sealed. They can’t get far. We’ve got to get to that android before the Goliath does!”

  The men rushed ahead, leaving the other Goliaths behind in a dormant, ticking grid. It was simply too dangerous sending them in until the boy had been safely procured. But the bulky hunter-killers would certainly get their moment to shine. This small skirmish was simply a bump in the road compared to the real prize: the underground complex, Avalon and Sandcastle. In these areas, the Goliaths would show their real prowess, as wave after wave of sentinel drones would be waiting for them.

  Three-of-Ten was in full sprint. His sensors had immediately picked up on multiple alien entities—all hostile. Some were human, and registered in his processor as minimal threat. But as the android dashed to put distance between he and the intruders, his sensors told him that something else was in hot pursuit. Something mechanical, and eerily similar to their own sentinel drones, but modified . . . modified to be far more deadly. He tried to access several conduits into other connecting passageways—he needed to get back into the main complex—but every exchange was sealed and would not respond to his command interface. With his own EMR now completely discharged, he would have to find another place to try and administer to Jacob. But the android needed to act fast. The enemy’s signature was approaching with ever more ferocity. He scanned every nook and cranny of the corridor until finally, he located a standard maintenance work area. It would be small and filled with equipment used for the upkeep and repair of the sentinel systems, but it would also have a tool used to replicate parts . . . and this tool would contain a tiny—yet operational—EMR interface, one which could be reprogrammed to create the aggregate molecules necessary for Jacob’s counteractive anecdotal treatment.

  In seconds, Three-of-Ten had entered the small shop and carefully placed Jacob down on a workbench. He could have attached his own depleted EMR to the regenerating system, giving him enough energy for at least one more offensive attack. But Jacob was his prime directive now, and so he went to work, moving at superhuman speeds. In less than a minute, he had disassembled the EMR from the tool, accessed the atomic properties of the chemicals needed, and in even less time than that, had energized the device and generated a syringe and the dosage necessary to revive the boy. But it would take time for the medication to reverse the effects once in the boy’s bloodstream—time which Three-of-Ten, nor Jacob, had.

  Three-of-Ten had just administered the drug, when a terrible explosion rattled the small workshop in a powerful blow. All equipment, tools, supplies—everything not attached—went flying. The android crouched his metal body. He would do whatever he could to repel the monster Goliath . . . and he would have to, for there it now stood in the smoldering entryway!

  The thing’s eye rolled and scanned like a mantis for its prey. It pushed its massive frame further through the broken entry, knocking more of the structure to the ground. Then, in a terrible instant, the eye found its mark as both Three-of-Ten and Jacob became engulfed in a ghostly illumination the color of blood.

  Three-of-Ten knew he could not challenge this enemy, his programming confirmed this deadly fact. Multiple solutions now poured through his processor, all suggesting evasive maneuvers which might allow for his escape. But when Jacob was assimilated into the equations, the probable results were a resounding obliteration. The android would stay and defend his human charge at all costs.

  Three-of-Ten prepped for a leap, attach, and self-destruct option. If he could hit the Goliath with enough force to knock it momentarily backward, then cling tightly enough to it, the pressure wave of his power source detonating might just be enough for Jacob to escape. But even as the android input the calculations and commands into his processor, the Goliath’s arm rose in a killing stance, its EMR weapon whining as it sucked in energy.

  Suddenly, there was movement! Then a bang! bang! bang! loud and forceful, followed. The Goliath’s head, now crushed, was smoking and spitting fire. Its eye went black. Its arms dropped. It stammered and rattled, then let out a strange hissing grunt, and fell in a resounding crash to the ground.

  Emma Sue stood just in the entrance. Her odd, unattractive characteristics never looked so beautiful! In one hand, she held a large, cast-iron pan; the heaviest one she was able to find in the estate’s kitchen.

  Through the silent network of communication, she had been made aware of the attack. Her artificial intelligence, although void of any defensive algorithms, was an autonomous logic. The robotic domestic engineer had once heard Gracie threaten to . . . beat Hank over the head with a fry pan. In her subsequent queries to Jacob, the boy had clarified the statement as a figure of speech—to mean frustration only. But the word-for-word definition of Gracie’s declaration had also been explained. From there, Emma Sue had extrapolated on this connotation. Eventually, her logic had determined that there was a defensive undertone. Emma Sue’s programming contained the same fail-safe directive as all of the Sand
castle androids; she could never intentionally harm a human. But she could defend one, and from a simple sentence, had self-learned how. Since she had not been listed as a threat in the Goliath’s database, she had literally walked up behind the metal killer and smashed it on the head, using the only item her program deemed defensible: a fry pan.

  As Emma Sue stood, scanning with her own sensors for more Goliaths, she suddenly pinged an alert to Three-of-Ten: human signatures were approaching up the passageway.

  But Three-of-Ten was already aware of the march, and in addition, knew that these were hostile humans.

  As if on cue, Jacob finally began to respond by making a slight moaning sound. His eyes fluttered, then ever-so-slowly, he managed to open them just a bit.

  His android companion quickly leaned in and brooded over him, scanning the boy’s life-signs. Jacob’s stats were starting to return to normal, but he would be too weak to move very far, or very fast.

  Jacob rubbed his eyes and tried to sit up, but his head spun and the nausea returned, forcing him back down.

  Three-of-Ten reached a gentle hand and helped the boy raise his head.

  “Three-of-Ten?” Jacob managed, weakly. It didn’t take long for Jacob’s memory to return—marked by the change of expression on his face—sickening him as much as the effects of the gas. He turned his head and looked around in a confused stupor. “How did we get here?” Then Jacob saw the crushed, smoldering Goliath; the shattered entryway; and, with a shocked raise of his eyebrows, Emma Sue . . . pan still in hand.

  A flash of light suddenly crashed past the entrance, and Emma Sue rushed defensively out into the passageway, her pan raised threateningly.

  “No! Don’t go out —!” Jacob cried. But even as his voice carried over hazy air, Emma Sue exploded in a pulse of blinding energy, and was gone. A red-hot portion of the fry-pan flew high into the air, then came down hard in a loud crashing boom. Other debris—tiny fragments of the gutsy maid—rained down in trails of smoking lines. Jacob knew that his Three-of-Ten was next. There would be no escape; the android would fight until the bitter end in a vain attempt to protect him.

  Now Jacob could hear the shouts and footsteps of the approaching soldiers. There was only one thing left to do.

  Three-of-Ten had begun throwing tables and supplies in front of the entryway.

  “Three-of-Ten!” Jacob shouted, forcing a raspy voice of authority. “Access BC77-Alpha-911 and execute . . . now!”

  But Three-of-Ten did not respond. In fact, if ever he had exhibited any real human expressions, it was in that awful moment. He stared back at Jacob with such shock and sorrow, that if tears had been part of his design, they would have come. Then, the android did something he had never done before. He told Jacob, no . . . well, as near to it as he knew how. “Unable to comply,” he toned, then shook his metal head as firmly as he ever had. “Unable to comply, Jacob!” he repeated louder.

  Jacob forced himself upright. “Three-of-Ten!” he ordered. “You will comply! You are programmed to comply! You must do as Jacob requests!”

  Again the android shook his head, adamantly. “Unable to comply!”

  The sound of the enemy’s approach rattled in the tunnel-way, and Jacob became desperate. “Please, Three-of-Ten,” the boy spoke, now too weak to shout, too hopeless to demand.

  Three-of-Ten’s face warped in an internal battle, an obvious and terrible struggle between the android’s sheer logic, and . . . something else he could not understand.

  “Please comply, dear friend,” Jacob whispered. Then he closed his eyes.

  Three-of-Ten’s head suddenly dropped in a capitulating thrust. The android knew exactly what uploading the file would do. It would override his current objective and force him into another task; one which would require that he leave Jacob. He looked up at the boy one last time, then acquiesced with a silent nod.

  The upload commenced.

  A rapid change came across the android’s carriage, signaling that the new directive was complete. Three-of-Ten’s head shot up, his new purpose clear and purposeful, his binding resolve inexorably focused. Without another hint of emotional exchange, he turned and shot like a bullet from the room.

  The soldiers spotted him in the passageway, like a streaking missile across their view. They opened fire with everything they had, but the android moved like nothing the Fire Ants had ever seen before—right toward them!

  “Shoot it! Shoot it!” ordered Briggs in a desperate shout. And he kept shouting, even as Three-of-Ten flew over his head, careened off and around the walls; twisted and spun past his men and back in the direction of the MU1 umbilical station.

  Three-of-Ten was getting out of the Omega-seven tunnel. He roared past the inactive Goliaths; past the station and the shattered pieces of his comrade androids. He leaped through the very hole and tunnel system which the human aggressors had created; bolted past other soldiers who, in desperate panic, fired their weapons in a useless barrage to stop him. Then finally, Three-of-Ten burst out onto the desert surface and into the night air. Now, he would loop back around and enter the HOPE underground through Jacob’s secret cavern. Once inside, he would commandeer the Sandray, and take the sleek little craft on the ride of his life . . . right downtown to Salt Lake City, to the only person in the world that might help him now: Jessie Goodwin.

  Chapter 48:

  The Ernsteeds—Ronald Cole and Jacqueline Francis—lived in Federal Heights, an affluent section of the Salt Lake City Avenues. Their home, a stately colonial, sat nestled into the low-lying Wasatch benches as contentedly as the juniper, oak and sage which surrounded it. From her wide, multi-gabled face, the elegant residence looked west, where the entire valley—as though subject unto her—could be viewed below in a great metropolis of skyline buildings, bustling industries, tangled interstates, and street-striped urban.

  The story went like this: Mr. Ernsteed was a broker, his wife, a marketing consultant. Their successful careers dictated an itinerant, demanding lifestyle too dynamic for raising a family. But over the years, as their lives slowed to a more established speed, a void had begun to encroach where the career-oriented energy had once been. The middle-aged, cosmopolitan couple awoke one morning to find that they were lonely; an emptiness which neither their possessions, hobbies or even their money could fill.

  When the couple contacted the DCFS, Teresa had been endeared by their sincerely. Things had checked out and the adoption process begun. The Ernsteeds were starting a family, and Jessie and Sam Goodwin fit their expectations like a glove.

  Indeed, on the first day of the kids’ pilot visit, it had been an impressive sight for Jessie and Sam, what with the valley panorama, the regel home, the impressive neighborhood, and most importantly: the prospect of this kind couple becoming their own family. But now, just two days later, it was raining, and as the children sat in the home’s opulent guest room—shocked, numb and as emotionless as the dripping rain pouring down the gutters and tapping at the windows—their world, like the misty cityscape below, had just become a ghostly mirage.

  Teresa sat in a large formal chair across from Ernsteeds, her petite frame nearly swallowed up in lavish cushion. She held herself rigid, her slender legs tucked professionally under a stylish gray pencil-skirt. Her scarlet blouse—nearly luminous in the wash of recessed lighting—was adorned in dainty silver buttons and a fashionable necklace. Her dark thick hair fell loosely around her shoulders and seemed to emphasize an already grave expression on a normally lovely face. “I’m sorry to be so direct,” she repeated to the couch near the window, where Jessie and Sam sat, now as frozen as shadows. Her announcement had come to all in the room like a paralyzing blast.

  “Mr. Reitman indicated that his mother will likely not survive the day,” Teresa continued in a whisper, then swallowed back her emotion—ever the professional. “And even if she somehow does pull through, well,”— she reflected a moment—“she will be an invalid, unable to speak and care for herself. That is no life for anyone, and cer
tainly not for our Gracie.” Now Teresa’s eyes glistened with the emotion she fought so hard to keep at bay.

  Sam also wrestled back the tears. But the sudden and terrible news seemed to stimulate their flow, and even against his will, they soon drew into his eyes and splashed down florid cheeks. He kept looking up at his sister, but Jessie’s face was strangely stoic, like black ink in the darkness. Her gaze, transfixed in a hopeless vigilance, continued out the front-bay window as if waiting for someone to appear—a deliverer to walk up the hazy lane and say: It is all a mistake. Gracie has sent me to take you home, back to your Sandcastle where everyone is anxiously waiting for you. Come. Let’s get out of here. But no one came, and Teresa’s words weren’t the only ones to start up again in that terrible emptiness.

  “We feel really awful to add to this unhappy news,” began Mr. Ernsteed, his voice coming in that same performing tone which he and his wife had used since Jessie and Sam arrived. “But this is a career opportunity of a lifetime; one which I simply cannot turn down.”

  Teresa returned a subtle nod, but she was not empathetic. In fact, she was still furious.

  She had just arrived at the gym that very morning when her boss, Sara, had called. A call that early from Sara could only mean one thing: trouble. And was it ever.

  . . . there’s a problem . . . Gracie Reitman had suffered a stroke . . . her son, Jimmy Reitman is expecting your call . . . the woman had rhapsodized in expelled, broken sentences just as she always did. But this time, she hadn’t been exaggerating.

  That subsequent phone call Teresa had made to Jimmy Reitman from a quiet locker-room at the gym, was one which she would never forget. Right from the first hello, Reitman had been unbelievably cold. He had completely sidestepped Teresa’s first words of concern and sympathy regarding Gracie, and instead, turned on her like a bite from a trusted pet. He had announced—among other things—that Jessie and Sam’s belongings had been, . . .removed from the estate, and would be delivered, by courier, to the DCFS office in Salt Lake City. Reitman had also declared, with some unpleasantness, that he had revoked all access to the estate, both from the kids and from Teresa. The man’s abrupt manner had shocked Teresa to the core, especially given the tragic circumstances regarding his mother. Teresa had hung up the phone in a wounded daze.