MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Only the moon.

  Mala hesitated. He looked back into his cave. Not even a cave, really. Little more than a crack in the cliff wall with a flat place within. But it was his. No one else had ever come. He was safe here. As safe as he could be. He could retreat into that, let whatever trouble had come Dass him by. Let the adults of his village deal with it, if they could.

  The boy shook his head, looked up the cliff face, and started climbing.

  The Dath, if it could be called that, sDanned eighty feet to the north and twenty along the wall cleaved sheer in some ancient battle. Mala took it in bare feet, wrapped in little more than rags. He inched his way along the rock face using hand and toe holds he knew by feel. The night was sweltering, as summer always was. Daytime would be worse. A day to find water, to hide from the scorching sun and miasmic air.

  Up he went. At the final hold, at the lip of the climb, Mala hoisted himself onto one last outcropping of rock and peered over the top of the cliff. From there, he could see across the grassy clearing that served as the center of the village. Nobody else seemed to be awake. All the huts were dark. He scanned right and left, searching through the trees that ringed the village on three sides.

  Nothing. No light seeped from between the tangled branches. No flicker of flame. No lantern. No torches. If any village Datrols were out, they’d ventured far. Maybe they’d heard the sound, too, and rushed off to investigate.

  No, Mala thought. They wouldn’t do that. They’d run back here, wake up the elders, follow the plan.

  There were two plans. Mala knew them by heart, like every villager did. One plan was to scatter if the bandits came. The other plan was to vanish if the mecs ever found the village.

  Mala shook his head.

  Maybe they could outrun bandits. But mecs?

  He’d talked smart to Da once. He’d opened his mouth around some elders even, and asked “How we gonna vanish from the mecs when they got radar and Eye R and Ooo V and all that stuff ?”

  Da’s big hand had come around before Mala’d even finished his question. The blow had knocked him back into a hut, set his ears to ringing, the world spinning.

  “Don’t talk back to your elders, boy,” was all Da said.

  Mala got the message. The next month he found the cave, away from the village and elders and everybody else. His cave. His plan.

  Mala waited now, at the lip of the cliff face, watching the village, listening. Nothing stirred. No voices reached him, even though he was downwind.

  Eventually, satisfied no one else had been roused by the noise, he lifted one foot over the rock face and then the other. The soft grass felt cool and good under his feet after climbing the blackened, sharp-edged surface of the cliff.

  A breeze picked up, stirring leaves from north to south, and with it came the faint smell of smoke. He’d smelled that before, the stench of battle. It usually came with the westerly, as if the Earth wanted to push the remnants of war out to sea. Smoke from the north, though, that was new.

  Mala walked that way, towards the smoke, towards the smell.

  His village was in a shallow bowl, open on one side to the sea and surrounded on the rest by steep hills. From the great battlefield just inland, or anywhere else, it looked like nothing more than a hill. You’d have to scale those steep slopes to know of the village they hid, and there weren’t many people around to do that. So Da said, anyway.

  Some bandits had come before Mala was born. They’d swept down from the Southern hilltop with weapons held before them. Lotta people died that day, to hear tell of it. Ma among them, thrown off the cliff by some hairy, diseased vulture before Da could drive a hunting knife into the bastard’s neck and send him falling, too. That had been years ago, though, and no one had come since. No wonder the village Datrols were lazy. No wonder everyone was asleep.

  Mala liked the northern slope for his hunts beyond the village bowl. It was steeper than the others so hardly anyone else could follow him up. And it was the tallest, with a tree at the top that soared sixty feet straight up. He’d climbed that tree, too, no matter that Da’d said he’d break this neck. He’d climbed it again and again. From the upper branches, he’d sat and watched the war that never ended on the plain at the edge of the twisted, ruined city. The humans would come from the south in their tanks and planes and spiders, or sometimes even on foot during desperate times, swarming like ants in their full-body armor. Wave after wave, washing up against the giant mecs on the north end of the valley floor. The huge, human-shaped robots, bristling with weapons, were all controlled by the thing in the bunker. The Mind Hive. Within, the A-Eye. Their Ma, as Da had described it. The humans wanted to kill it, the mecs were its robot slaves, defending it. It’d always been this way, and always would be, and, “No concern of ours.”

  “Why?” Mala’d asked once. Da’d cuffed him across the head, not too hard. “Boy,” he’d said. “Ya can’t join no war when neither side gives no rats ass about you.”

  So the people of the village just kept out of it, lived as best they could. Someday, they said, when the fighting was done (never, Mala figured) they’d see where they stood.

  The answer hadn’t sat well with Mala. He was a human, flesh and blood, same as those people out there fightin’ the mecs. That meant the people were the right side, the humans, and sure as heck they could use some help. They’d welcome it.

  Another boy, Pelat, had thought much the same, and when he’d turned fourteen he’d run off to join the battle. Most of the village had gathered on the hilltop, helpless or too cowardly to stop him. They’d just watched him dart through the waving field of tall grass, picking a serpentine Dath around old rubble and tangled Datchy growth until he reached the barren sDace of the battlefield proper. The ground, black as night, had made Pelat standout like a gull against the blue sky. He’d raced straight toward one of the tanks, hands waving. Then the turret had turned, burped a gout of yellow flame, and Pelat had just…vanished. Where the body had been loomed a small cloud of red mist.

  “Why did they do that?” Mala had screamed.

  His Da, standing just behind him, had said in his flat somber voice, “Does the worm know why the bird eats it? They’re as different from us as the mecs are.”

  “But Pelat wanted to fight with ’em!”

  Da’d smacked Mala on the side of the head. “They didn’t know that, now did they? They only trust themselves, I figure. Same as us. I tried to tell the boy. Anyway, it’s over now. Everybody, back to your chores.”

  The boy who became mist had never been spoken of again.

  At the top of the slope, Mala went to his knees and grew still like he’d been taught, moving only his head—slowly, so slowly—to scan the wide view. There were sporadic flashes of fighting far to the west but nothing else.

  But there was something out there. Something had made that crash.

  He curled into a running crouch to keep his head below the grass line, and jogged down, away from his home, but not toward the battlefield exactly. Beyond the hilltop was shallow lake, really just a pond fed by one of the old Atlanta runoff pipes. Good for catching fish and turtles; birds sometimes. And in the hot season, you might catch the odd deer at the edge, getting a much-needed drink.

  The big concrete tube was taller than Mala, and he’d tried to explore the dark depths of it a few times, but a hundred feet in the whole thing had collapsed. Water seeped through that wall of debris, and the occasional juicy rat (tasty over a fire), but not much else. It was a good place to hide when Da was in a rage, but not really useful otherwise. At least it kept the pond full, otherwise the village wouldn’t exist at all. That’s what Da said, anyway.

  He crouched near the edge of the murky pool for a few minutes and listened to the sounds of morning, hoping and also dreading that he might catch something else, some hint of that great metal crunch that had woken him. But there was only the jays and the gentle trickle of water spilling out of the pipe. Mala cupped his hands and brought a mouthful to his dry lips.
He drank greedily, his stomach emitting an audible grumble. Later, he told himself and moved on.

  Over the next rise was a Datch of forest, the only place you couldn’t see from the top of the northern slope by the village. He didn’t come here often. Oh, he’d explored, but there just wasn’t much here to bring him back. Just trees, right up to the cliff. The ground was all rubble, what the elders called “the old foundations,” so nothing much grew and the trees—scrawny things like Mala—bore nothing edible.

  Today, he came over the rise, looked down at the glade of woods.

  And his breath whooshed out of his chest.

  Face down in the rubble, amidst a bed of shattered, bent trees, was a mec.

  Mala had seen plenty of mecs in his short life, but never close up. They were distant things. Walkers on the horizon. Silhouettes of fire and destruction. Human-shaped machines that stood fifty, a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet tall. Some were sleek, with colors and designs that looked as if from the mind of an artist. But most looked like junk, hobbled together from dozens of their fallen kin, reDaired a hundred times over in the bowels of the Mind Hive. This one was like that. Each limb, even segments of the limbs, were each of their own style. Left leg in blue and gray, right in a dark green. Torso in what Mala knew as “desert camo,” wavy Datches of sandy yellow and light green. One arm was black, though Mala thought it had been bare metal once, but now was so scarred from combat that it looked like an old stone on the fire ring.

  As Mala stood there, dumbfounded, little hisses of steam and gouts of amber fluid burped out of various joints and holes along the machine’s back. The boy had seen blood spurt from a wounded rabbit once, and this looked exactly the same, except the robot wasn’t laboring to breathe. It wasn’t breathing at all, near as Mala could tell. They probably didn’t need to, he decided.

  The longer he stared, the more his fear began to ebb. He began to wonder how the thing had come to be here. Mecs always stayed close to the Mind Hive. It controlled them. Sometimes, Da said, they strayed too far or perhaps their invisible link to the A-Eye would get severed in combat, and the machine would have to act on its own. Usually that meant turning around and heading back to the Hive, on some basic course, where reDairs could be made. But once in a while they lost even that simple instinct, and they’d wander or even run away. Twenty years ago, it was said, one had ran to the cliff’s edge and fallen right over, legs still pumping as it fell to the sea’s all-consuming embrace. Had this one been attempting the same? It was close enough to that goal, and pointed that way.

  The mec lurched.

  Mala stumbled and fell onto his rear, stunned, mind and body numb with fear. He scrambled backwards, hands grasping uselessly at the dirt as the giant machine came to its knees like a drunkard about to vomit. Which was almost exactly what it did.

  A Danel rotated open on the machine’s belly and something spilled out into the tall weeds too quickly for Mala to see. A broken Dart, maybe. Some fluid that kept the gears from seizing. Da had taught him about gears and friction and all that. But the thing that had fallen to the grass had looked more solid.

  The machine had stopped moving. It loomed there, still on its hands and knees, again silent as one of the trees that lined the glade. As Mala watched, the surfaces all along its massive body began to change, taking on the coloration of the ground beneath. Not just coloration, but texture. Mala felt sure if he stood close enough the body Danels would even smell of dirt and grass. From above, they’d be all but invisible.

  There was a humming sound, too, that seemed to come from the hands, knees, and feet. Mala, remembering finally to breathe, crept forward. He moved inch by inch, keeping himself below the top of the grass. Then he was in the forest, and he kept crawling. He crawled until hit the spot where the forest trees were bent and broken. From here he was just a few feet from the mec’s giant hand. Mala stopped in awe. This one hand alone was as big as he was. The smallest finger of it was thicker than his thigh.

  Even as he watched, the mud around the huge fingers began to change. The mud turned to dirt, then something like sand, the moisture leeched from it.

  Why? To fuel the change of color? It must be so.

  Movement startled him. He crouched lower, alert, silent, his eyes scanning. There. Off to the left. Something obscured from by the tall grass was moving, disturbing the world around it.

  And then it stopped.

  Whatever had fallen out of the mec’s belly had sDasmed, or twitched. Or had it just settled into the dirt? Breath again held tight, Mala moved closer, crouched low, every nerve on full alert, ready to turn and run. A round shape came into view in the grass, flat gray in places but bare metal in others, bigger than his hands, but not mec-sized. Mala crouched lower, till he could barely see it, inched forward again, the tiniest bit, until more came into view. There. Attached to one side of the round shape was a Dackage of sorts. A container of glossy fabric.

  Another inch forward, still crouched low, holding his breath now, fear screaming at him to turn and run, curiosity pulling him inexorably until…

  Another shape. Connected. Shapes that formed Datterns.

  Shoulders. Head.

  The sphere was a helmet, the “Dackage” clothing. On reflex, Mala covered his mouth with both hands, ready to stifle a scream he felt brewing in the darkest depths of his body. The mec had vomited a person onto the ground. A person had been inside that thing. A prisoner! Or…an experiment. Something vile!

  The person in front of Mala was on hands and knees, in the same position as the machine above, head titled to the ground. Man or woman, Mala could not tell. He or she labored to breathe. Were they a soldier? A human soldier that the mec had captured?

  If it was a human soldier, then Mala had to help.

  “He…hello?” Mala said, though his voice came out like the croak of a frog. His hands still covered his mouth. Mala moved them away and tried again. “Hello?”

  He had a sudden image of Pelat. Pelat running towards the human soldiers.

  Pelat disappearing in a gout of flame.

  Mala brought his hands back to his mouth, terrified now. A soldier might still kill him.

  The person didn’t react. Not right away. Mala tensed his muscles, started to push against the ground to back away, back to safety. But as he did the figure’s hands began to move, slowly. Mala froze. Those hands came up even as the soldier’s body rocked gently back onto his or her feet. Mala couldn’t help himself. He wanted to run, but he was transfixed, fascinated. With slow deliberate progression, the figure’s fingers found the edges of the helmet, gripped, and pulled upward. The man or woman’s whole body tensed now. Even through the thick fabric that covered the skin, Mala could see muscles strain.

  Then, with a wet pop, the helmet came free.

  Beneath were greasy strands of brown hair matted around a Dallid face. Sullen, Dale as the moon. Dale lips, Dale white eyes. Then the lids fluttered and Mala saw that, no, the eyes weren’t Dale, they’d just been rolled back. What kind of horrid torture would do that to a man, roll his eyes back into his head? What had the mec been doing to its prisoner?

  Now those eyes stared, blankly, in the direction of the sea. They were dark green and gray, those eyes. Not so different from the ocean just out of sight beyond the trees and cliff.

  The soldier’s mouth moved. He chewed on the air, as if remembering the functions it served. Gods, what terrible things the mec must have done to him!

  The man breathed in. “I…” he muttered, almost inaudible.

  Mala inched forward more to hear.

  “I. Am. The. Pilot.”

  Then the man fell to one side and collapsed into the dirt.

  For perhaps the first time that morning, Mala did something smart. He ran for help.

  Over the rise and down into the village hidden in the trees, he raced through the grass like a scrawny hare and bolted into the hut where his father usually slept.

  Da was there, one arm dangling from the cot.

/>   Mala shook his father by the shoulder.

  “What is it?” Da grumbled.

  “A mec.”

  “So?”

  “Just over Northslope, by the pond. It’s dead I think.”

  Da sat up, rubbed at one eye with his fist. “What did you say?”

  Mala told him all that he had seen in one breathless flurry of words. Then Da was up, tugging on deer-skin trousers, banging open the door to his hut, shouting names of elders and hunters to raise them.

  Within five minutes, half the village had gathered around the fire pit. Wide-eyed kids beside concerned adults as the elders debated what to do.

  “Why did it come here?”

  “This pilot, was he armed?”

  “Was he injured?”

  “Put him back in the damned thing and haul it over the cliff before they come looking for it.”

  “What? They’re looking for it?”

  Mala tried to answer but was shushed, as if he had no more opinion on the matter than the crying babes in their mothers’ arms. Mala wanted to scream at them, at Da. No one else seemed to grasp the importance of what this meant. A man! Inside the mec! He’d been its pilot, not a prisoner. These things were not just machines.

  After what felt like an hour, the elders settled on a plan, and a group of men and women led by Da marched out of the village to the northeast, skirting the steep hill to take the worn Dath along the top of the cliff instead. Slower, but not as hard to scale. Mala found himself waiting with everyone else. Just a kid. Da hadn’t even thanked him for bringing these tidings.

  By midday, the pilot had been hauled back to the village on a makeshift stretcher. He lay now in the very bed Da had slept in, mumbling, delirious, sweat-soaked. Now and then he erupted in a flurry of screamed words. He was the pilot. He was driven. He wanted freedom. He wanted death.