Ancestral Machines

by Michael Cobley

  However, reason dictates that relying on such a clever and effective intervention may be the merest folly–this is a bunch of blood-chemistry-driven organics we’re talking about after all!

  As a failsafe, in case no one at all was coming, the minidrone’s secondary mission was to locate and sabotage any control systems that helped the Shuskar maintain their power and dominance. And after that, create as much chaos and disruption as possible.

  As the last metamodule was despatched, the cart reached a point on the concourse where the floor above curved off to the side, allowing the perspective to widen and open out. The Shadow Bastion was suddenly revealed in almost all its entirety, a massive circular tower faced in a coppery material, rising in stepped levels, stippled with windows both lit and dark. Balconies jutted here and there, as did a few landing platforms from whose glowing entrances infrequent small craft came and went. It was an image of solidity and strength but it was negated by what the cart passed by along its way.

  The concourse was littered with all kinds of detritus, the desiccated husks of long-abandoned luggage mingled with skeletal remains. Every surface bore the evidence of centuries-old firefights, bullet holes, explosive round craters, blast flares, charred areas sweeping from floor to ceiling. Rusty, burnt-out shells of vehicles shoved to the side and at one place there was a big, ragged-edged bite out of the concourse where a bomb or a missile must have struck.

  From files leached here and there, the Construct drone knew that the Shadow Bastion had once been known as the Pillar of Endeavour, back when the Warcage was called the Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony, when this planetoid was the seat of the Builders, the place from which they planned and created and ordered this entire immense, astounding piece of macro-engineering. The state of decrepitude of the docks and concourse levels and the degraded purposes to which that great tower had been turned was an authentic tragedy, despite it being the end point of centuries of abuse at the hands of clueless organics.

  And now he could see a wide glowing entrance on the same level as their concourse, clearly the cart’s destination. Signs of life were visible there, figures moving about, small loader units carrying containers into the tower but if anything this emphasised how vacant and desolate the rest of the citadel was.

  This place is a corpse of the past, still animated into a semblance of life by the Shuskar, just as their cruel and ruthless regime–which should have either fallen or collapsed long before now–is being kept in its position of dominance by the parasitic Gun-Lords. Usually, a rotten tyranny like this would only need a strong determined shove to bring it to its knees but this… this one is going to need something a bit more brutal and relentless.

  In the murky gloom of the repair dock Pyke was hanging next to the immense angled shape of an ancient Shuskar spacegoing vessel, suspended in one of the Scarabus’s antigrav work harnesses as he tried to scrape away layers of filth caked onto the hull by dark underground decades. Somehow he had to uncover enough clean metal for the penetrating scanner to clamp onto, then maybe this decaying old hulk would give up its secrets. And just then, over his headset, he heard Ancil say, “Holy humping cyberdemons! Can’t tell him that; he’ll not be pleased!”

  Pyke exhaled noisily. “I can hear you, ya divot–left it switched to send. So, tell me what, exactly?”

  There was a click on the channel and the voice of Toolbearer Hechec spoke. “There may be a situation, Captain–we are still gathering data–but two of those weak energy sources that we detected before have started moving. One is moving towards G’Brozen Mav’s team and the other is heading for you and Lt Brock.”

  Why can’t it be easy in, easy out? he thought. Just for once…

  Pyke’s suggestion that they salvage an authorisation beacon from the old hulks down in the abandoned repair facility had gained acceptance from Mav and Lt Brock, after which they settled on a two-team approach. While G’Brozen Mav and one of his guards descended to a vessel on one of the lower docks, Pyke and Brock would investigate the ship brought in by the doomed lifter. Emergency impact barriers had been raised to block the main access at the time but the plummeting lifter had punched right through. The lifter and its cargo came to rest halfway down the five main docking levels, its load-bearing supports buckled and wedged into the workshop plaza columns, embedded in concrete. The hull-grips had not failed, though, and now the ship hung amid a web of lifted superstructure and impact barrier framework, its prow angled downwards and tilted slightly. Handheld trackers led Pyke and Brock to the rough location of the weak energy source but only deep-burst scanning would reveal its nature.

  Pyke fingered the control studs on his earpiece. “Did you get that, Lieutenant? Seems that something is creeping around down below. I’m sure it’s nothing to get freaked about, probably just cleanerbots sweeping up some of the skag I’ve been scraping off here, but if you want to take off back upstairs…”

  “How considerate of you to worry about me, Captain,” came the lieutenant’s voice over the set. “But, please, don’t fret over my safety. In fact, if you run into any difficulties you can be sure that I’ll be on hand to lay down some suppressing fire for you.”

  Pyke smiled at the dark. “That does give me a nice warm feeling, to be sure, as well as a tweak to the curiosity–you don’t sound much like a regular kind of spook to me.”

  “I’ve not always been an intelligence officer, you know.”

  “Aha! Active service, combat duty, the sky-blue line! Wonder which operations you been in—”

  “Not a subject that is or will ever be up for discussion,” Brock came back abruptly. “Now, are you just about finished scraping a clean spot on the hull? Mine’s been ready for a good two minutes.”

  Pyke delivered a snappy salute with his free hand, the one that wasn’t digging at centuries of accumulated dirt and dead roots with a metal trowel. Over the headset Brock gave an audible sigh.

  “You know that I can see you.”

  Pyke waved at the lieutenant’s helmet beam, shining in the darkness over on the other side of the ship’s upper hull. “Always happy to act out for an audience, Lieutenant, that’s my problem, as me dear ould ma was happy to point out on many an occasion. Right, that should be enough of the crap removed. Fixing the scanner in place now.”

  He dug a small domelike device out of a thigh pouch, positioned it on the scored, scraped hull plate, then pressed a side button–bonding feet clamped it in place and Pyke chuckled.

  “Ready when you are, Hechec!”

  “Scanning now, Captain… I hope you and the lieutenant are keeping an eye on your harness charge levels.”

  “Mine are still at 31 per cent,” said Brock.

  Pyke eyed the metre tab at his waist, which read 26. “Yeah, about what I’m at too.”

  There was an extended moment of hissy channel silence, then the Toolbearer spoke. “Sorry to relate more bad news but it appears that the beacon we need has been removed from this vessel–the energy source is vestigial leakage from a stack of cells.”

  Pyke grimaced in annoyance and struck the filthy hull with his trowel. “Are you sure that there was one to begin with?… How can you tell?”

  “The penetrating scan revealed an armoured blister housing about eight metres from your position. The recess it protects would have contained a bulbous unit about the size of a Human torso, but it is empty. I now surmise that the beacon units have an integral power source, while the nearby cell stack is an emergency backup. If it’s any consolation, G’Brozen Mav’s investigation of the ship down on the first level has revealed the same set of circumstances.”

  “Not really consoled, Hechec, sorry.” Pyke frowned. “So they went to the trouble of yanking out the beacon from this one, same as they did with the one downstairs…”

  “Looks like standard operating procedure,” Brock said over the channel. “In which case…”

  Pyke snapped his fingers. “They’d have to store them somewhere!”

  “Well done, Capt
ain,” said Hechec. “G’Brozen Mav reached that same conclusion only twenty-three seconds ago.”

  Pyke sneered. “Well, ain’t he just a great big smart-pants!” Trying to ignore Brock’s sniggering on the open channel, he went on. “Any more news on those mobile energy contacts?”

  “Yours appear to have come to a halt directly below you, Captain.”

  And we’re up here which is fine, was what he was about to say when a cold tingling wave swept through his hands. He gazed down and in the light of his helmet beam he saw a word repeating itself across the backs of his hands–above above above…

  Quickly he looked up, in time to see a shadowy, multilegged form run along a long, twisted crossbar and leap off the jutting end. He could make out a knot of clustered limbs as it fell in a smooth arc… and landed on Lt Sam Brock!

  She yelled in panic over the channel, along with gasps and cursing as she struggled with her attacker. Pyke was aghast–the creature was hanging on with maniacal determination but the antigrav harness could not cope with the extra weight. From the moment the thing landed on her, Brock spun away in a falling trajectory, the beam of her helmet lamp resembling a pirouetting lighthouse.

  Hechec was anxiously demanding to know what was happening as Pyke grabbed his own harness grav control, a glorified pistol grip attached to the waistband on the left, switched it to manual and leaned forward as he swept down after her. Then he updated the Toolbearer, said hell, no, he wasn’t going to return to the surface with the harness charge he had left and if Mav didn’t like it he could stick it in his pipe and smoke it!

  Pyke would have tried to get a response out of Brock but only a weird cyclic buzzing was coming down the channel. It was difficult to discern what was happening but he got the impression that she was still fighting the thing.

  Her descent seemed to be slowing and he was on a good intercept course. He glanced at his own harness charge metre–17 per cent–and guffawed. Easy in, easy out? Who was he kidding?

  As Pyke swept in closer and closer he tried to keep his headlamp fixed on her, and grim details came into focus. With one gloved hand she was holding at arm’s length a tentacled horror, a six-armed bot whose flailing segmented limbs seemed to be of different lengths and tipped with a variety of nasty tools, spikes, hooks, pincers and blades. Its longest tentacle had hooked into Brock’s harness at the shoulder, making it too risky for her to simply release the thing. Also, her other arm’s jacket was slashed and smeared with blood, as was the hand which she was holding at midriff level.

  With only seconds to spare, Pyke decided not to use the heavy beamer strapped to his thigh. Instead he swooped in close and snatched one of the bot’s other lashing arms, thinking that between him and Brock they could perhaps snap bits off it and turn it into junk that way. But the machine had other ideas–as he swept past and grabbed the loose limb, the machine released its hold on Brock’s harness. Without that connection there was nothing to stop Pyke’s momentum wrenching the bot out of Brock’s grasp. To his horror, Pyke suddenly found himself grappling with a spidery thrashing machine-monster as his own antigrav harness began to lose height.

  Brock’s on the other hand began to gain altitude again, and he could just hear her yelling from overhead, “You moron! Why didn’t you shoot it?”

  Falling through darkness while wrestling with a demented chunk of machinery hell-bent on poking out his eyeballs, Pyke could only utter a string of incandescent profanities. He had managed–St Symeon only knew how–to get two of the spider-thing’s longest tentacles in his right fist while his left hand was wrapped around the innermost segment of another tentacle, right where it joined onto the central unit. But the former was the hand that could most easily get to the beamer pistol on his thigh while the other was out of the question. He tried calling Brock’s name but the channel was full of hiss and buzzing.

  Bastarding hell! Is this how I’m going to die? In the pitch-black bowels of a crapheap planet in the foulest armpit of the galaxy?

  The spider-thing’s central unit was an armoured hoop with a slow-turning iris which periodically opened up to reveal contra-rotating bands of razor-bright teeth. Its tentacles writhed and strained as its iris maw and the spinning grinder made a zzrrr-zzrrr-zzrrr noise that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He knew that he had to act. Off in the distance he could see the light from two headlamps moving around close to each other–G’Brozen Mav and his guard, it had to be. He yelled at them, panicking now, knowing that he couldn’t be far from the actual floor of the vast repair facility.

  Gotta do it, he thought. No time left for bottling it, boy–do it!

  So, seconds later when the bot opened its iris once more to bare those spinning fangs he rammed the pair of tentacles he was still holding straight into its razor maw.

  “Chew on that, ya skag-munching pusbucket!” he bellowed.

  Metal screamed on metal, underpinned by a rough, brutal grinding sound. The tentacles tugged frantically in his hand but he doggedly held them to it, mouth snarling with the effort. The machine writhed and jerked, its free arms trying to push him away, then one of its bladed tooltips finally got through the heavy material of his right sleeve and lanced into his arm. Uttering a curse he reflexively let go of the tentacles and they whipped away. Fuelled by rage he tried to reach for the beamer pistol but the tentacle blade was still embedded in his arm, twisting spikes of agony along his nerves. Only his grip on that other tentacle was now keeping the thing’s grinding mouth from devouring his face.

  But, laughing madly, he raised his right knee up against his chest, bringing the back of his boot within reach of his fingers…

  Next thing he knew there was a bright flash, something that struck the spider machine’s central housing. Jagged sparks crawled all over the iris mouth as the circular grinders slowed. There was a second flash, the machine spasmed once, went limp, and the tooltip blade withdrew from Pyke’s arms as the bot fell away into the darkness. The sound of its impact came back only a few seconds later.

  Headlamp angled upwards, Lt Sam Brock floated down in front of him, a faintly amused smile on her lips.

  “So, not too badly wounded, then,” she said.

  Pyke gave a rascal’s grin, despite the throb of pain from his slashed arm. “Nice shooting, thanks. But y’know… I had him, he was done for and I was just on the point of putting him down and dancing on his junkpile grave!”

  Brock, head tilted slightly, nodded thoughtfully. “That’ll be why you’re holding that boot, I imagine.”

  “Totally rational explanation for that, I swear—”

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” came Hechec’s voice on the headset, abruptly. “We have a serious emergency–G’Brozen Mav and his companion have retrieved a beacon from a storage locker but they have been waylaid by several sentry machines like the one you encountered.”

  “Are their harnesses—?” Brock began.

  “Exhausted, yes. I have reconfigured your trackers to lead you to their position–please hurry and keep them alive while we organise a rescue. We shall be observing radio silence from now, I am sorry to say.”

  And the channel went silent. Pyke nodded–Figures, he thought as he tugged his boot back on, then dug out a field medpatch. As he pulled back his sleeve and applied the patch to his wound, he ground his teeth as its edges heatbonded with the surrounding skin and chemically cauterised the injury. Brock, meanwhile, was holding out her wrist tracker and orientating herself.

  “Got it,” she said. “You ready?”

  “Always,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Though my harness must be about ready to give up its engineered ghost.” He glanced at the meter–it was in single figures, but he shrugged. “Ah, it’ll be a breeze. Let’s go bash some trash!”

  Brock’s harness gave out less than two minutes later, but as she was already less than ten feet up she was able to make a rolling landing on the dusty, detritus-strewn floor. For Pyke, the twenty-second cut-off alarm beeped at him about a minute after t
hat, but then his harness failed almost immediately. He knew he was still more than thirty feet up and felt the panic mushrooming in his chest, choking his throat–until he landed on something like a broad tarpaulin caked with dust, which swirled around him as he burst through and hit another cloth surface which encased some kind of resilience whose solidity knocked the wind out of him. He was coughing and struggling to figure out where he was when hands pulled him to his feet and pushed him through a narrow gap in what looked in the lamp-lit haze like huge pleats of cracked, mouldering cloth.

  “We’re nearly there,” said Brock. “Come on, run, and watch out for the sentry bots–they’re everywhere!”

  As she was talking a three-legged buzzing machine came galloping out of the gloom and leaped at her from behind. But Pyke’s burst-fire from his beamer pistol caught it in mid-air, converting it into scrap. Before he could even give a victory whoop, Brock was hauling him off in the direction shown on the tracker.

  “Not far,” Brock said over the channel. “Mav, we’re close.”

  “We could really use the help,” was the reply. “This blaster is almost spent.”

  Running through the darkness, swerving around the corroded remains of massive, indeterminate machinery, burning down the occasional feral bot that showed too much interest, at last they caught sight of a weak headlamp beam, wavering in the gloom up ahead.

  “We can see you,” Pyke said, breathing heavily. “Be there soon.”

  “Hurry… you’ll have to climb the scaffolding, careful where you put your feet… hah, take that!”

  There was a sudden flash, an energy-weapon burst which for a moment revealed G’Brozen Mav near the apex of a sloping latticed pylon, outstretched hand pointing a blaster into the gaping jaws of a grotesque toad-like horror on three stilt legs. Then the murk closed in again. Second later, the shape of a sloping framework appeared and without breaking stride Pyke vaulted up onto the tilted metalwork, regained his feet and hurried up an incline of rusty struts. He could already hear sounds of fighting, G’Brozen Mav’s cryptic curses, and the buzzsaw snarl of the sentry bots. And there they were, a dozen or more multi-limbed machines crawling and converging on the high jutting end of the pylon where the Chainer leader stood, lengths of heavy piping in his hands. The blaster must have given out. Pyke was about to aim his beamer pistol at the machine nearest to Mav when Brock spoke.