The Cyber Chronicles VI - Warrior Breed

by T C Southwell

  "How many?"

  "A dozen... thirteen. No, fifteen. They're just coming into range." He drew a laser and held it ready.

  A series of booming hoots rang through the trees, making Tassin shiver, and a distant thudding became audible, growing louder. She peered over Sabre's shoulder as the thudding came closer. Flitting shapes sprinted through the trees, impossible to see clearly. The hooting came again, from above, and a shadow passed over the trees.

  "Quadrupeds, between seventy and a hundred kilograms. And one that can fly," Sabre muttered.

  "Quad-whats?"

  "Four-legged."

  "What's chasing them?"

  "Something large and heavy." He frowned, looking puzzled. "It's mechanical."

  "Then there must be civilisation!"

  "Don't jump to conclusions."

  "What else -?"

  He held up a hand. "Shush."

  Something silver flashed amongst the trees, moving with a rocking gait. Tassin peered at it, and for a moment it was visible. A squat, sleek machine strode on two legs, its torso streaked with dirt and lichen, its pale head flashing silver. Two long, curved arms sprouted from its torso, tipped with pincer-like hands, and it moved with remarkable speed.

  Sabre said, "A war bot."

  "What's that?" she whispered.

  "A robot; a machine built to fight like a man. But what the hell is one doing here?"

  "I thought no one made those things because cybers are better fighters."

  "They're rare, but I've never seen one like that before. It's alien."

  "Oh, wonderful; there's an alien civilisation on this world."

  "That's not necessarily a bad thing." Sabre gazed after the war bot, which had vanished amongst the trees.

  "They don't seem very friendly."

  "Perhaps those beasts are vermin. It can't catch them, anyway."

  "So it's slow?"

  "They always are, but that one's faster than most."

  Tassin sat back. "Well, at least it's gone."

  "For now. But we're drifting in the direction it came from."

  "Is the pod armed?"

  He glanced at her with a wry smile. "Of course not."

  "But you've got your lasers."

  "Yeah. But only two spare power packs."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "Hope it doesn't come back this way."

  "Right."

  ****

  Tassin sat on the padded bench and studied the valley ahead of the pod, which was negotiating its way through a last belt of trees. Fortunately, the slope levelled off considerably, so they would not gain too much speed. During the past two days Sabre had had to free the pod several times when it got stuck. The craft rolled around a tree, and she lost sight of the view ahead, then it completed its turn and drifted towards another trunk. Sabre sat across from her on the other side of the bench. She squinted across the valley, then pointed.

  "What's that?"

  His eyes followed her finger, looking vague as he consulted the scanners. "It's mechanical, but only partially in range."

  "Another robot?"

  He shook his head. "Too big."

  "There's a ring of posts. Do you see it?"

  "Yeah. It looks like some sort of defensive array."

  "Alien?"

  "Yeah." He frowned. "That thing is a flattened ovoid. It could be a -"

  The pod rolled around another tree, and Tassin grabbed his shoulder. "Look!"

  Sabre glanced to the side as she pointed, and smiled. Another pod was caught amongst the trees some distance away, and a figure stood beside it, trying to pry it loose with a pole.

  "Tarl!" Tassin bellowed.

  "He's too far away to hear you."

  "Let's go and help him!"

  Sabre turned to the panel beside him and pushed a button. "I'm anchoring the pod. It will take a while to get there and back. You should stay here; it's safer. I'll bring him back."

  "No! I'm coming with you."

  "How did I know you were going to say that?"

  "You know me too well?"

  Sabre nodded and checked his weapons, then jumped out and helped her to the ground. They set off through the forest, Sabre leading. Drifting spores and pollen filled the warm, muggy air, swarming in shafts of sunlight like golden smoke. A breeze stirred the calmness, but the silence made their footsteps seem loud even on the spongy ground.

  "Strange that there doesn't seem to be any weather on this planet," Sabre commented, breaking the hush.

  "We've only been here four days."

  "And every day's been exactly the same. No more or less clouds, no difference in temperature, wind velocity or humidity."

  "What would cause that?"

  He glanced back at her. "In addition to the two suns on the tropics? No oceans and no moons."

  "Then it's not strange. There's a logical explanation."

  "It is strange. Most habitable planets have weather. Without it, there's no rain, and without rain nothing grows."

  "Then there must be rain."

  He held a bush aside for her. "Yeah. The ground is damp, but it may have a high water table, so it never dries out."

  "Wouldn't it stagnate?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe the ground water circulates?"

  "Underground streams?" He smiled. "If there's no rain, the water would pool in the valleys, but the soil's damp even on the top of the hills. That's really weird. It must rain. The suns are evaporating water, forming clouds, so sooner or later it's got to come down."

  "So it just doesn't happen very often."

  "Maybe. Something's odd about this planet. There must be a geological reason why the soil doesn't dry out on the hills, and no pools form in hollows."

  As they emerged from a clump of trees, Tassin shouted and waved to Tarl, who glanced around in alarm, then grinned and hurried towards them.

  "Am I ever glad to see you guys! I'd almost given up hope!" He embraced Tassin and looked like he was going to hug Sabre too, but then thought better of it. "What happened to you?"

  "The explosion ruptured our oxygen tanks. We only just made it," Sabre explained with his usual brevity.

  "Wow, days of suffering and terror summed up in two sentences," Tarl said, nodding and smiling.

  "Is Kernan still alive?"

  Tarl's smile faded. "Just barely. He's really sick. I've done all I can for him. He might make it. He's sedated; otherwise he'd be in a lot of pain."

  "We have more painkillers in our pod," Tassin said.

  "Good. At least our oxygen tanks didn't rupture, so we had enough air." He studied Sabre, looking concerned. "You don't look so good, bud. How are you feeling?"

  "Fifty-seven per cent."

  "I didn't ask for your bio-status. A simple 'fine' or 'not too bad' would have done the trick."

  Sabre cocked his head. "How about ‘bloody awful’?"

  "That would about sum it up, I suppose."

  "Would you two stop carping at each other?" Tassin glared at them.

  Tarl said, "Let me guess, you survived in a low oxygen environment for a few hours?"

  "Almost twelve."

  "Well then you've metabolised some of your liver and muscle mass. I hope you've been eating."

  "No, I've been on a hunger strike."

  "Very funny. Why didn't you use a suit?"

  "Tassin needed them."

  Tarl nodded. "Of course. You'll need to eat ration packs, so I hope there's something edible on this planet for the rest of us."

  "Not that I've found."

  "Great." The ex-technician sighed and shook his head. "Then I hope there isn't anything dangerous around here."

  "Why, because the weapon's defective?"

  "Stop it!" Tassin glared at Sabre. "You're being obnoxious. Why can't you just accept that Tarl's concerned about your welfare because he's your friend."

  "Because he's not."

  "Your friend, or concerned about your welfare?"

  "Is he your friend
?"

  "Of course."

  "Then why hasn't he asked how you are?"

  Tarl ran a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration, or perhaps embarrassment. "He's right. I'm concerned for our safety, which might rely on his abilities. Unfortunately, that's the way of it in this situation. But I tell you what, Sabre, when we're safe on Omega Five, I won't give a rat's arse about your bio-status, okay?"

  "That will be refreshing."

  Tarl turned to Tassin. "Are you okay?"

  "She's got three broken ribs," Sabre said.

  "How did that happen?"

  Tassin opened her mouth, but Sabre was faster. "She took on a cyber trying to protect me, then got banged up in the explosions."

  Tarl looked shocked. "You took on a cyber?"

  "I was only trying to distract him," she explained, shooting Sabre a frown.

  "Yeah, well, I’m sure you didn’t think you could beat him. I can strap those for you."

  "That was done on Fairen's ship."

  "Good." Tarl turned to Sabre again, studying the fading bruises on his arms and neck. "I assume you took on a cyber, too?"

  "Two of them," Tassin said.

  "You didn't mention this when you told us what happened before."

  Sabre shrugged. "It wasn't important."

  "Right. Well, any suggestions on how we're going to get off this planet?"

  "Nope."

  "There's something in the valley ahead, surrounded by a ring of posts," Tassin said.

  Sabre nodded. "It looks like a ship on the scanners. A metal ovoid with what could be engines and compartments inside."

  "Life forms?" Tarl asked.

  "No, but we did see a war bot a few days ago, and the ring of poles looks like a defensive array."

  "You don't sound very certain. You should know the model, manufacturer and date of production of every ship ever built, and the same for defensive arrays and war bots."

  "Perhaps it's a new model," Tassin suggested.

  Tarl shot her a wry smile. "The cyber receives updates on all new models and complete instructions on how to operate them."

  "But now that Sabre's free -"

  "It doesn't matter. The information is broadcast to every cyber on an encrypted frequency."

  "Encrypted?"

  "It's sort of scrambled, so only a cyber can understand it."

  "Oh."

  Tarl turned to Sabre. "So it's alien."

  "Yeah," he agreed. "Maybe abandoned, maybe just waiting for its owners to return."

  "Abandoned seems unlikely, but its owners could be dead. Which raises the question, if its owners are dead, what, or who, killed them?"

  Sabre nodded. "The bot concerns me more. It was chasing some beasts, so it's hostile; probably set to guard the ship."

  "So if the ship's owners are away they've probably got more bots."

  "Maybe."

  "Are you sure it is a ship, Sabre?" Tassin enquired.

  "No. It could be a prefabricated portable base camp. The engines could be generators."

  "Then we should go and have a look at it," Tarl suggested.

  Sabre snorted. "You mean I should go and have a look at it, and I'm not doing that until I'm feeling better. Anyone who triggers that thing's defences had better be in top form, and that's if the war bot doesn't show up, which I'm sure it will. That thing's probably rigged with motion sensors and alarms that will bring that bot running."

  "Could the cyber communicate with the war bot?" Tassin asked.

  "I doubt it, since it's alien."

  "But it might," Tarl added, "if it uses similar basic principles, and the language of mathematics is universal."

  "War bots aren't big on communicating with their targets."

  "But it's alien, so we don't know how it will react."

  Sabre turned away. "Yeah, well, it's all very well hypothesising, but we should get the pods together before dark."

  Tarl nodded and picked up the pole while Sabre walked to the far side of the pod and rolled it around the tree. Between them, they freed it from the trees and pushed it over to Sabre and Tassin's pod, by which time dusk had fallen. Tarl anchored his pod, and Sabre climbed in to scan Kernan, looking grim when he emerged.

  "He's got a skull fracture, seven broken ribs and a broken arm."

  Tarl grunted, frowning. "I didn't know about the skull fracture."

  "He's got internal injuries as well, and a fever of a hundred and two."

  "I've given him antibiotics."

  "Then only time will tell."

  Tarl nodded. "Let's eat, I'm starved. We should rest here until you're feeling better, then investigate the ship."

  "Do you have any laser power packs?"

  "Three."

  "Good."

  Tassin climbed into the pod and handed out ration packs, then perched in the hatchway while they ate. After several minutes, she asked, "Won't you be able to defeat this war bot with your lasers, Sabre?"

  "That depends on its construction and armour. From the scans I got when it went past, it appears that all its vital systems are housed in its torso, which is pretty standard, and that's heavily armoured. The head seems to contain some peripheral systems, but I don't know how important they are. That's not so heavily armoured, so logic dictates that they're not vital systems.

  "It ignored us, which could mean that if it's got scanners, they can't penetrate metal, or that its hostile response is triggered by movement, or it only considers anything that approaches its ship to be a threat. None of that really helps, however, since I'll have to approach the ship, or whatever it is, on foot.

  "Those poles are about five metres tall, so I can't jump over them in this gravity, unless I use a pole and vault over, I suppose. But then I'll be trapped inside unless I can find a way into that thing to disarm the array."

  "There must be a power conduit of some sort, which you should be able to disrupt once you're inside," Tarl said.

  "Unless it's a raw feed."

  "Yeah."

  Tassin was puzzled. "What's a raw feed?"

  "It means there's no physical conduit, like a cable. The power is transmitted directly to the posts in a beam."

  "Oh." Tassin chewed her ration bar, her mood glum. "How long do you think it will be before you feel well enough to have a closer look at it?"

  "A few days, if I rest and eat a lot of ration bars."

  "Then you should do that. We've got to get off this world." She pulled a wry face. "Sorry to make you feel like equipment, but you're our only hope."

  He nodded. "I know. It's okay."

  Tarl opened his mouth, but then closed it again, shook his head and chuckled.

  Sabre shot him a frown. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I know it’s not nothing, so spit it out.”

  Tarl shrugged. “It’s just that when I ask you how you feel, you get offended because you think I’m treating you like equipment, but it’s okay when Tassin does it.”

  “She apologised.”

  “Right. Okay.” Tarl’s eyes sparkled.

  Chapter Four

  Sabre walked towards the pillars, studying the sleek ovoid beyond them. In the past five days, his bio-status had risen to eighty-four per cent, thanks to a lot of food and sleep. This close, the ovoid did not look so silver. It had an oily sheen to it, tinges of green and gold shifting along its length as his viewpoint changed. It also appeared to be featureless, lacking even the hair-fine lines that usually indicated hatches or gun ports. The cyber flashed a warning, and he stopped, glancing inwards at its information. It was receiving a stream of data from the ovoid, a meaningless jumble of alien characters, which it tried to decipher.

  The data burst lasted five seconds, and he pondered his options while the cyber worked on the alien characters. He could ask the cyber to send something back in machine code, which the ovoid might be able to decipher, or he could ask it to send the same information back in the hope that it was a friendly greeting of some sort. Eithe
r choice was fraught with pitfalls, and he decided to try the former.

  To lessen the possibility of being mistaken for a threat, he folded his legs and sat down. The cyber transmitted a greeting, and he waited for a response. After a pause, the ovoid seemed to flex, ripples running along its length. It transmitted another burst of alien language, and the cyber responded with a reply in a different form of machine code, binary. A few more moments of silence fell, then the ovoid rippled again, and turned black.

  Sabre stared at it in amazement. Not only had it changed colour, which was impossible for a metal, it had become impenetrable to the cyber's scanners, and the only substance that could do that was stone. Somehow, it had detected the imperceptible pulses of accelerated particle emissions the brow band broadcast in faster than light sweeps, which was supposed to be impossible, and it had changed the atomic structure of its skin, which was impossible. Whatever he was dealing with, it was highly advanced and intelligent. He sat still, waiting for it to do something else.

  The cyber worked on the alien language, but it did not seem to be making any progress. A breeze stirred the hair-like plant growth that served as grass, and a cloud passed over one of the suns. Sabre picked up a pebble and hurled it between the posts. He frowned, pondering. Could the uprights be inactive? Disarmed or defunct? Perhaps they were not even a defensive array, but only sensors. Maybe it took something larger than a pebble to trigger them, or they only reacted to a biological intrusion. Last but not least, it was possible that whatever was trying to communicate with him was watching him, and would trigger the posts itself.

  There was no way to tell if the pillars' weapons struck outwards or between each other. The scanners told him that they were filled with complex mechanisms under a thin metal skin, with no sign of emitters of any kind. There was also no way to tell if they were lethal to him, and he had only his cyber defences, no armour. The ovoid appeared to be an intelligent machine, and perhaps it would allow one of its kind to approach it, if it perceived the cyber to be one such. Did it possess curiosity? The cyber had detected no transmissions that could have been an attempt to communicate with anyone other than himself, which made him wonder if its masters were dead, or if, indeed, it had masters. What was it doing here? Was it damaged?

  Standing up, Sabre approached the nearest pole, which gleamed silver. He ran his fingers down its mirror-smooth surface. It hummed softly, and he slid his hand slowly around it. A sheet of blue light shot from the pole nearest it in a wall of brilliance, and he snatched his hand away, receiving a tingling jolt in his fingers that made him retreat, rubbing his hand. His fingers were reddened and singed.