But I had the rough dimensions of the building, and I fed the data back to Argus. “This should help get a fix on the remaining support beams.”
“I’m… on it. Th-thank you.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I… it’s too open. Too much to… excuse me. I’ll go find those beams now. Could you please stop sending me the feed?”
“Alright.” The compassionate part of me felt bad I’d subjected him to that. The cold killer that lurked in the back of my head marked it as an exploitable weakness if things went bad later.
Then I left my questionable minion to manage his own affairs and peered out of the ruin, nudging the drone higher and higher. Birds exploded angrily from the tallest walls, cawing their displeasure. Crows? They looked the part.
Definitely crows, I knew as I crested the wall and saw the grisly remains of the Jaspa raiding party that littered the ground. They’d dumped their dead in a pile, I saw. But there were a few more collapsed bundles of clothes and gore littered around, probably the result of the Arcadian ambush. Some were mere scraps of torn rags and bloody bones, and I knew my mutant gator had been at work there. But the rest had crows jabbing away at rapidly-emptying sockets, enjoying nice cold eye’s cream on a hot day.
Damn, the sight had gotten me morbid. I turned from it, surveying the area around.
My ruin was about two-thirds of the way up a small mountain, the easternmost in its range. The remnants of a road, cracked and falling down the slope, wound up a bit further, but I saw nothing else up that way. The road ran down as well, old light poles still present, if a bit crooked and leaning away from the path.
A few cars were parked along the road, doors fallen to the ground, strange contours and clashing colors faded by time. The trunk of one of them was open, a spool of something like wire mesh half-unraveled, strewn across the road and into the trees. It blew in the wind, humming with a sound of distant chimes. I was tempted to go in for a closer look, but other matters came first.
The road ran down through a choking tangle of trees and vegetation that spread east like a rash. Interspersed in the green were what I took to be the remnants of old residential neighborhoods. It had to be a suburb, for just east of there, ruins of tall buildings rose, exposed girders and crumbling facades staring hollow and silent down at the barren streets below. No greenery here… and in fact, a few dark windows glimmered with weirdling light that indicated a shine infection within. Rust and corroded colors showed streets choked with cars and other vehicles…
…and as I started bobbing the drone in for a closer look, I caught black specks flitting through the air, patrolling at street level.
I bobbed the drone back. My drone was a fourth of their size at most, but I was higher up, and I rectified that with some careful twists, dropping closer to the treeline of the hills. I threw in a few birdlike swoops for good measure.
Beyond the city, the horizon disappeared, and with a thrill, I recognized the ocean. Atlantic, most likely, unless things had really gotten weird. Cold and choppy and indifferent, gray waves under cloudy skies.
But there was something in among the waves, some larger structure, like an oil rig but many times the size, with smaller satellite platforms spread out among it. Bridges stretched out to it from the shore, and some of them looked intact… but that’s about all I had time to gather, before I had to duck down again.
The Starport. It had to be.
I didn’t have the best cameras on the drone, but I could see things like gantries climbing towards the sky, far out on the horizon. The structure itself must have stretched for miles…
That was Tyr’s home, if Juscade and Argus’ words were to be believed. A rogue. A rival?
A brother, of a sort. And for some reason that only made me warier of him.
Well. He wasn’t my concern at the minute. That concern lay to the opposite direction.
I swooped a long, lazy dive that carried me south of the mountain, and I caught a glimpse of fields along the way. Old, overgrown, but there were a few animals rooting among them. Livestock? Might be a sign of civilization. Seemed a bit close to the city for comfort, though.
A glimmer of light caught my eye from further down the mountain range, and I saw something that had once been a grand structure, multiple stories, nestled into the hills. Its wooden and crystal façade was splintered and broken now, but it seemed more intact than it should be, given its exposure to the winds and weather. Sighing in frustration, I added it to the list of possibly interesting places to examine after the current crisis was done.
Then I was around and behind my peak, putting it between my little drone and the starport. Dark puddles of swamps to the south marched up and met twisting forest, the same woodland that crept up my hill. And far west, beyond those, I made out faint smoke from distant fires and cleared land, that bespoke civilization.
Probably the Jaspa, in which case civilization was a bit of a stretch.
I was right on their borders, caught between their Core hatred to the west and Tyr to the east.
No, they couldn’t leave me alone. Couldn’t let me build up strength or shelter their enemies. I was too close, too much of a threat. Any peace between us would be a lie.
Right now their priest-equivalents were getting the rest of them worked up to die. When they had their courage screwed to the sticking place, they’d come for me.
But thanks to my new bat-buddy and my translator program, I had a few tools in my arsenal that I didn’t have before.
And I still had a little time yet, to prepare. “Argus. Any luck with those supports?”
“I’ve got a fair idea of where they should be. Give me a few hours, and I can get us another batch of feedstock.”
“Good.” Another bit of feedstock meant another broadcast node. Which would give me enough bandwidth for another room or two and a few more toys. It would take a day or two, but I had some time yet. I wouldn’t waste it.
Unfortunately, we were running close to the wire. I had to assume the Jaspa would come for me in a matter of days. Which meant that I couldn’t activate any more improvements in the meantime. I couldn’t afford to be unconscious for a day or anywhere near that length of time, and until I purged the corruption, I had to anticipate that would be the result of undergoing an upgrade.
No matter. I should have enough advantages right now for a fighting chance. Of course, I could do a few more things to stack the deck in my favor, in the time I had left…
With a thought, I directed the drone down, slowing its flight and sending it into the canopy. With the eye of a veteran, I started looking around for the best sites an enemy could use for a staging camp…
SIXTEEN
Five days passed, the tension growing with each sunset. I wasn’t idle during that time. The circuits flowed in, a little earlier every night, and I strengthened my subroutines with careful thought.
And while I did that, I built. Argus had tracked down the remaining support beams, and feedstock was not a problem, at least for the small things I wanted.
The first circuit went into drones, pushing my expertise there into a solid two. Together with my enhanced fabrication, that let me construct another type of drone. A simple wheeled digger, a basic construction drone that could operate at range. Not great range, but it didn’t have to be. I’d completed my second broadcast node by then and reshuffled my existing one back to the elevator shaft room.
Then I dug a corridor out from the feedstock bin’s room, running parallel to my entryway. I curved it around and made a small room at the end, depositing the second broadcast node there. The two nodes synched up, covering the territory admirably, and I breathed a lungless sigh of relief as I felt my consciousness expand a bit.
It felt good to grow, which made me wary of the feeling. Hardcoded hooks in my artificial brain, conditioning me to a task and a goal which didn’t necessarily align with my own. Freedom was my clarion call, freedom from Juno, freedom to figure out this brave new world I�
��d been conscripted into and find my place in it.
But survival came first, and the unspoken hostage situation with my memories couldn’t be ignored, either. For now, growth worked to my benefit.
To that end, while my construction drone worked at the possible campsites I’d found and my reconnaissance drone got to work scaring off game and harassing wildlife, I raised the ceiling of my core chamber. With a reasonably accurate aerial survey from the drone high above, I confirmed that we’d moved back into the rising part of the mountain’s slope and had a bit more space to work with before we broke the surface.
I built a loft in the core chamber, then built a false ceiling under it. Immediately I got warning messages chewing me out for a lack of access to the core.
I didn’t care. I had a workaround; a service tunnel from the top of the elevator shaft to the upper story of the core chamber. It cost another bit of resonance, but I could afford it, thanks to the second broadcast node. The system grumbled at me but let it slide. Especially after Argus suggested putting a maintenance key slot into the elevator. A twist of the maintenance key would bring the elevator car up and open the top for easy entry into the access tunnel.
I tried putting the maintenance key right next to the Core, but the system wouldn’t let me get away with something that simple. So I shrugged and put it at the bottom of one of the corridor pit traps, instead. Then I threw in a few other widgets of metal, to camouflage it.
Hell, why not have keys for everybody? Every pit trap got its share of pointy metal key-like widgets. Not a lot, just enough to confuse the issue.
Then I went back to the elevator’s keybox and connected its integrity to the floor of the elevator’s car. Attempts to force the lock now had a pretty good chance of dropping an amateur lockpicker into the spikes on the bottom of the shaft.
Argus was appreciative of my efforts throughout, and I bounced ideas off him as they came to me. At his suggestion, I used the next two circuits to up my offensive subroutine.
That wasn’t enough to get the guns I wanted. But it did allow some good improvements to the basic crossbow turret design. Better pull, faster loading time, and thanks to my manhunter specialization, jagged arrows designed to cause bleeding wounds, that would cause hellacious damage when they were pulled out of flesh.
The tradeoff there was that the bolts would suffer in penetration value. Heavy armor would present problems. Still, I could retool them on the fly and adjust as I needed. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes with the nanobuilder swarm to swap out the ammo hopper on the turret, melt it down, and replace it with a standard bolt loadout.
And speaking of that, I needed to decide where I would put my new Mk II tension bow drone.
After a lot of thought, I decided to plant it in the middle of the elevator shaft room, so that it could easily fire down the hallway. This would be a battle of attrition. They would take it out at some point, but so long as I had bandwidth left, I could rebuild it in about an hour’s time, at a place where it would do more damage.
The fifth day dawned, and I decided that I needed to protect my broadcast nodes a bit more. They looked like basketball-sized blocks of humming circuitry and winking lights, which meant that they stood out a bit from the rest of my Spartan architecture. I played with moving them around behind walls, but this cut into their bandwidth… which was almost disastrous, as I was directing the reconnaissance drone at that point. Fortunately, sturdy construction proved its worth, and the batlike flier was merely battered by its sudden crash.
So instead of trying to block off access to the nodes, I went for camouflage again. I filled the two chambers they were in with walls full of blocky shapes and blinking lights, and socketed the nodes in among the mix. Now, hopefully, they would be mistaken for part of the décor.
Night rolled in, and with it another free circuit…
…and movement, torchlight at the edge of my reconnaissance drone’s vision. Torchlight at the edge of the woods, a long procession, which brought to mind druids and dark times and blood on altar stones.
Well. If I’d done my job properly, then I’d be the altar, and their blood would be my feedstock.
Still, there were a lot of them. I flitted the drone closer, found a perch on a tall tree near a reasonably clear path, and counted.
Three hundred, all told. A bit over three hundred leather-clad, bald raiders, with a few unshorn people here and there among them. The folks with hair still on their heads looked like noncombatants. They were driving carts, managing the horses, and looking nervous.
Those had to be supply wagons, which told me they were taking this seriously. That didn’t quite line up with the slapdash, overconfident approach that the last group had employed. I was up against a fairly capable smart officer, not just a half-decent noncom.
They were mostly quiet as they came, and I sat on my branch, peering with the drone’s eyes, waiting for my adversary to show himself.
In that, I was disappointed. No fancy hats, no shiny medals or symbols of rank. Nothing to suggest that any of them were more important than the others. Someone was smart. This was going to be hard.
Guns, I knew. Guns had taught them this lesson. The bulk of them didn’t have guns, which meant that they’d had to adapt to enemies who did. When you’re out-ranged, the last thing you want to do is single out your leaders for snipers to pick off. There wouldn’t be any chance for me to take the head off the snake until I saw them in action. Which was difficult, given the thickness of the forest canopy. My reconnaissance drone wasn’t loud, but vectored thrust was a nosy thing. And with them traveling in relative silence, I couldn’t get in close without something to cover my approach.
The forest itself balked me, there. The leaves were just starting to brown, and cold weather was a good ways off. I couldn’t surveil them from a distance without some preparation beforehand.
Fortunately, I’d managed to do a fair chunk of that while I was waiting.
I waited for them to pass me by and took wing again once they were too far to hear me. From their angle of approach, there were four places they could make camp, and two of them were unsuitable, due to their numbers.
I reacquired them at the second campsite, feeling a cold satisfaction as I peered through carefully trimmed branches from half a mile away. Once the horses were off the carts, I knew that I’d guessed correctly.
“Argus, fire up the radio.” I said, pulling back from the drone, “It’s time to let our allies know the score.”
INTERLUDE: HUNTRESS 2
The radio hummed and crackled, and Donna stared at. A squat block of wires with a tape-and-plastic shell, it sat on the shelf like her mother’s old cat, looming over the people below.
It helped take her mind off her throat, and the tickle that never went away. She had the medicine, the N’hala that Juscade had prepared for her, but she wanted to make it last. It was easier to use it in the morning, to guarantee unbroken sleep.
“Got a new batch?” Juscade asked, and she pulled her eyes down to the workbench, and the twists of rags that she’d been sealing together.
“Almost,” Donna replied, reaching for the pot of wax. She took it off the stove by the wooden handle, and poured it over the fuse she had been working on, coating the rags with easily ignitable paraffin. Once it was cooled, she would rub the excess away, until the rags were somewhat flexible again. The scraps and crumbs of wax would go back in the pot simmering on the stove, nothing wasted from the process.
Then the tickle got too much to bear, and she coughed, leaning over the table, blood flecking the untreated rags. Pain pulsed in her throat, and a heaviness filled her chest…
…but it passed. And it passed faster than it had the last time it had struck.
Then Juscade’s hands were on her shoulders, trembling, frail. “Are you alright?”
“I will be,” Donna rasped and knew it for truth. She’d feared the worst, but while her throat still hurt, her lungs seemed to be recovering. The God’s to
uch had warded off the worst of the smoke.
“It’s the kero zeen, isn’t it?” Juscade said, and Donna shook her head, shooting a glance over at the still at the other end of the demolished house. Buckets of black stone sat next to the copper and glass device, and vapor puffed out of the tube in the back, venting out the window.
“No,” Donna said, when she felt she could talk again. “I can smell nothing.”
“It doesn’t irritate your throat?”
“Breathing irritates my throat,” she said, voice harsh and croaking. “Talking, too.”
Normally she would not talk back to the prophet so, but working with him over the last few days had changed their relationship. She was more relaxed with him, now. And he seemed to be happy to have someone around to chatter at, while he worked. Even if some of the chatter made no sense. Much of it was in the old tongue, words which didn’t line up well with the trade language.
Now she wished she’d paid more attention back when they still had time for lessons, back when she was a child. She might know what this mix of things he called kero zeen and sty ro phome was, or why they had to distill part of it from ass fault.
But at the end of it, Donna didn’t need to know the meaning of the words, really. She had been there when he demonstrated how to use these bombs, lighting the rag and throwing the bottle at the twisted old stump in the barren field. The stuff inside burned, and it clung while it burned.
Which was why she treated the job with the caution it deserved, letting Juscade fill the salvaged wine bottles and prepare them. Her job was the fuses, and that was the simple part.
Juscade nodded at her, eyes still worried. He pulled his hands back, rubbing them together. “You’re lucky you can’t smell a thing. The stuff stinks. I’d be using a rez praetor if I had one.”
Donna smiled without comprehension.
Juscade didn’t notice. “Anyway, I think we’re at a good stopping point. Come on. Let’s see if we can scrounge up some grub. Get something soothing on that throat.” He pulled the radio down from the shelf and tucked it away.
Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 15