by Paul Kidd
“Keep it. We’re not all highly evolved lab rats.” Xoota had found a wristwatch on the left arm of the seated body. It had some sort of mutant mouse on it. “One of your lab rats here, I think?”
Shaani took the watch. She frowned at it. “Perhaps. It’s rather oddly drawn.”
“Artistic license.” Xoota held up the scavenged armor vest. “Do you think this armor is usable?”
“Might be. I’ll look at it later.”
“Cool.” Xoota folded it up and put it in the swag bag. “Hey, Benek. Found anything?”
Benek had found another fruit tree and was collecting big, yellow fruit. He shook his head. “I fear not. But there are supplies here.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Benek threw a fruit over to Xoota.
Shaani walked away from the bodies, still deep in thought. She put the watch carefully in a sample bag; she would inspect that later too. She walked a little ways and found yet another corpse beneath a white palm tree.
It lay on its back wearing armor and a helmet, grass growing up through its bones. The corpse gave an absurd impression of being totally blissed out, arms spread beneath the trees.
Xoota came to Shaani’s side. The body was more interesting than the others and far more intact. Its wristband was blue with two stripes. Perhaps showing he had a higher rank? Things that had the look of weaponry were threaded through its belt.
There were two clubs of the same design. Each had a short, plastic handle topped by a smooth sphere slightly larger than a fist. On the end of the haft there was a sealed cap that covered some sort of simple controls. Xoota removed the items from the corpse’s belt, turning them eagerly over in her hands.
Shaani sat on the grass and looked thoughtfully at the ancient, desiccated corpse. “What killed this one?”
“Might have had a wound. Maybe it was exhaustion.” Xoota was utterly intrigued by the hi-tech clubs. There was writing along one side. “What does this say?”
“It’s in an omega dialect …” The rat licked her finger and wiped dirt away from the runes. “It says ‘Mark five photonic.’ ”
“What’s a photonic?”
“Light. Well, a sort of light energy.”
“Light energy.” Xoota held up one of the objects and beamed. “An energy mace.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Look at the shape of it. I’ve heard of these. They’re legendary.” The quoll made some experimental swipe through the air. “Short—for really close combat.”
“Why was he carrying two?”
“Must have had a cool, two-handed fighting style,” Xoota remarked as she removed the cap from the bottom of one. It seemed simple enough. There was a switch with two positions, and apparently it could twist like a dial. Xoota flicked the switch and was rewarded by having the item start ticking softly in her hand.
She experimentally hit it at a tree. Nothing happened. “No energy emission.”
Shaani looked over from the body. “What is it doing?”
“Just ticking.”
Shaani looked at Xoota, utterly appalled. The rat dived to the ground. “Throw it!”
Xoota froze in panic then threw the club as far as she could. It sailed through the air, hit the ground, and exploded in a savage blast of light. Everything around the explosion simply vaporized. A wave of heat set fire to bushes, grass, and trees. Xoota stood, looking foolish, with the fur of her snout scorched by the blast. She blinked, standing quite stunned, then looked at the second “club” thrust through her belt. “Okay …”
Shaani’s face appeared above the smoldering grass. “Let’s take it as read that these are not energy maces.”
“Sure.” Xoota very carefully pushed the second weapon to the back of her belt. “I second that.” She swallowed. “What would you call these, exactly?”
“Well, it’s a stick that makes things go away.” Shaani emerged from hiding. “How about ‘magical go-away sticks’?”
Benek came over, holding a belt he had “rescued” from one of the other ancient corpses. “What was that?” he asked casually.
“That was almost the sound of Xoota turning into a cloud of fluorescing gas.” Shaani was honestly angered. “Now look. From this point on, none of you lot are to touch anything. You are being irresponsible. All artifacts are to be vetted by a trained scientific mind before being set to any sort of use.”
“What trained scientific mind?” Benek asked.
“Mine.” Shaani gathered other artifacts from the body: a holster, what might be an energy cell, the helmet. She then laid the bones carefully back in some semblance of order. “Right. We’re ready. Now where is Wig-wig?”
Benek and Xoota looked at each other. They both suddenly frowned. Shaani rubbed at her eyes.
“Oh, for Oppenheimer’s sake.” She signaled the other two. “Fan out and find him, please.”
They spread out to search the woods. Overhead, the strange, white palm trees swayed in the breeze. The fig trees had carpeted the ground with fallen fruit, leaving the air heavy with the scent of decay.
The scavenger mentality of her companions was wearing Shaani’s patience down. They were acting decidedly off color. The whole lot of them deserved smacked bottoms—even the earwigs.
She kept a sharp eye out for both Wig-wig and potential danger—the wilderness was no place for an untrained mind—but there was no immediate sign of him in the surrounding trees.
After carefully searching the local groves, Xoota scratched beneath her scarf in puzzlement. “Maybe he went to investigate the tower?”
“That would be silly.” Shaani scowled, feeling that something was strangely wrong. “All right. Let’s head for the tower. At least he knows that’s where we were headed.”
She was worried about him. Wig-wig was at times perhaps a little too trusting—not sensible like a rat. Shaani let the two warriors lead. She had to hasten to catch up with them, anyway, after she stopped to look for Wig-wig beneath some likely bits of fallen tree.
Should she shout? Call out for him? It might be dangerous; a forest was a rich environment for predators. Slowed down by her bags of salvage, Shaani struggled to catch up with the others, her senses prickling to a sudden feeling that something had gone wrong.
They came out onto a broad expanse of weirdly short and level grass. The meadow ran down to the shores of the lake. Beside the lake, there stood a ragged, old tower. It was an abstract shape, almost an arrow head in cross section with the top few floors collapsed into rubble all around its base.
Something whirred along the grass some distance away across the meadow. It looked like a flat disk made of gleaming, dark green metal and topped with several strange-looking arms equipped with scoops, shears, and saws. It was bigger than a plate but smaller than a dinner table.
In front of it, the grass was slightly ragged. Behind it, the grass was universally short. It stopped to pluck a weed out of the grass, using a little tool to dig the thing out, roots and all. The scar in the soil was smoothed over, and the strange object moved on.
All around the shattered, overgrown ruin of the tower, there were immaculate flowerbeds and well-manicured trees and hedges. Could it all be the work of that one solitary being? Whatever it was, the thing was well placed to have seen Wig-wig had he gone past. Shaani rose from hiding, covered by the crossbows of Benek and Xoota.
“Is it a foe?” asked Benek, who was breathing slightly heavily.
“No … more like a resident.” Shaani was intrigued. She had never seen anything quite like it before. “I say, it’s a jolly good gardener. I believe I should go over and try talking to it.”
“Careful. That thing has a lot of blades and trowels and things,” said Xoota as she scanned the trees and bushes for targets.
“Well, so do we. And we’re all nice folk.” Shaani strode forth. “No, no, hands across the sea. Great souls meeting in the wilderness, and all that sort of thing. All it takes is a firm grasp of diplomacy.”
&nb
sp; Girded by a deep-seated belief in politeness, good diction, and the purity of science, Shaani walked up to the strange, mechanical thing and doffed her straw hat. Her rat face was wreathed in smiles. “Greetings.”
The disk kept right on carefully watering the plants from a little hose. It seemed rather preoccupied. Shaani cleared her throat again. “Hello there. Yes, do you mind awfully if we just disturb you for a bit? We are travelers, come seeking a lost friend. Have you seen a rather polite horde of earwigs hereabout?”
The disk delicately plucked a weed from the flowerbeds, backed away to contemplate its work, then swiveled around and drifted away across the grass, apparently floating on a cushion of air.
Shaani hastened to cut it off. “I say. Hello?”
The disk maneuvered around her and headed toward a neat, little shed. The rat blinked in astonishment, wondering what she had done wrong.
“I don’t think it’s listening,” Xoota called out from across the grass.
“Well, perhaps it’s not allowed to talk when on duty?” Shaani hesitated then followed the disk over to its natty shed. She knew several nonorganic folk back at the sand villages; one chap was all skin growing over a metal skeleton, and the mayor of Palm Tree village was a rather talkative brain in a jar that was mounted inside a oversized metal spider. She had no idea why that particular person was refusing to communicate. Careful lest she be intruding on someone’s territory, Shaani knocked on the shed door and peered inside.
The place smelled of cut grass and clippings, which was a rich, weird smell to the nostrils of a desert rat. There were several gardening tools clipped into racks on the walls. The light fittings had stopped functioning a hundred years earlier, but there were no cobwebs, weeds, or dirt. The disk thing sat in a little booth that hummed away at a painful pitch. Dirt and grass clippings seemed to be shaken free to fall into a hopper and be blown off into a garden compost heap.
Once it had finished, the disk folded itself up neatly, putting its many arms away.
Shaani decided to approach it again. It seemed to see her, and some lights winked on. Shaani took that as an encouraging sign.
“Hello there. Couldn’t help but notice you doing the gardening.” The rat waved a hand in front of the machine. Was it a simpleton? Or possibly nonsentient? A sort of gardening idiot-savant? “Hello? Do you understand me?”
A red light blinked on the wall with a row of symbols on the screen below. The words read, “Please fill seed hopper. See manual.”
It needed an offering?
Shaani carefully reached a hand out to touch the screen. The image on the screen suddenly changed to show a picture of a human woman in her underwear lounging by a blue pool of water. The screen read: “Welcome to Bliss Meadows … Pick Menu.”
A series of small boxes at the side of the screen came with little labels. They were all to do with garden maintenance machinery. Shaani chose an information box and started reading. The text was odd, different than normal English. It seemed to be an omega dialect.
Xoota and Benek appeared. Xoota cast a careful eye about the shed. “Did it talk?” asked Xoota.
“No.” Shaani was fascinated, reading through an instruction manual. “It seems to be an automated mechanism. A robot. All it does it tend the garden.”
“So it’s not smart?”
“It’s just a high-tech gardening machine.” Shaani tried to give the robot an instruction simply to report. She was asked for a password, some secret phrase she could only hope to guess at. She tried tapping a few entries, but the screen blanked and went back to the original menu. The gardening robot remained stubbornly in its niche.
“Ah well …”
The computer terminal was interesting, though. Shaani adjusted her glasses and took a look through her screen. “Interesting. The computer seems to be intact. It might be connected to a larger network.”
“Oh, those things are useless. They always are,” said Xoota. Salvage value on electronics was usually negligible. “There might be some good finds in the tower, though.”
Shaani flicked a frowning glance at her friend.
Benek was kneeling in cover; his heavy armor was scarcely the best choice for either desert or forest. The man held up a hand to silence the other two.
He aimed his crossbow and quite suddenly fired.
“Razorbacks … mutants!” he shouted before charging into the bushes with his sword aloft. He leaped over greenery and swung his blade in an arc that terminated on something in the ferns. Benek’s war cries thundered in the gloom. “Mutant scum! All will be cleansed!”
Xoota and Shaani instantly dived for cover. Shaani pulled out the salvaged pistol and held it in possibly the right way. She stared into the bushes. “What’s out there?”
Xoota half rose, crossbow at the ready. “Let’s get after him. Cover me.” Xoota charged, moving hard and fast. She reached bushes and hit the dirt, aiming her crossbow at the trees.
Shaani scuttled after her, one hand on her hat, the other waving the rather dubious pistol. She knelt in cover, looking for razorbacks. She saw nothing but heard Benek exulting among the trees.
He sounded like he was in deep combat, his sword hacking and ringing, clanking and crashing through the bushes far ahead.
Xoota swore and bellowed in his general direction. “Benek! Hold your position. Wait for us.”
He wasn’t listening. The damned man had gone. Confused, Shaani watched the flanks and rear. The tower nearby was sitting still and empty, its blank windows dark and brooding. Benek was in the woods. Wig-wig was missing. Xoota raced forward into the trees, crossbow at the ready, and simply disappeared. Shaani ran after her, getting a little tangled in the bushes.
The damned bushes were thick and snarled. Shaani waded along awkwardly, her feet tangling. A second later she fell over on her ratty backside, landing with a thump. Dazed, she felt something grab her by the ankle and drag her through the trees.
A big, green tree loomed over her. It hauled her up by one leg, gaping wide with a great maw split vertically into its trunk. Shaani made a squeak of panic. She leveled the pistol in the general direction of the monster and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
“Damned omega rubbish.”
Shaani shook the pistol. She cursed it and hammered it against her palm, which was enough to make it fire. It gave her the fright of her life, making a purple blast that left her eyes dazzled with horrid blobs of light.
The tree seemed to have caved in on itself, a hole longer than Shaani’s boot was punched through right above its mouth. The tendrils released Shaani’s leg and began thrashing madly around. The rat made herself scarce, running and ducking as a tentacle lunged for her and almost took her head clean off her shoulders.
“Xoota?” Shaani yelled.
There were no sounds in the forest, no sign of Xoota, Benek, or Wig-wig.
What the hell was happening?
Shaani went no further forward into the forest. She called again for Xoota and yelled for Benek. There was no sign of any marauding razorbacks. The rat searched the local bushes, but there was no indication that her friends had been engulfed by carnivorous plants.
Shaani was alone in the forest. She called out for the others time and time again to no avail then fell back to the open grass.
Something suddenly blurred past her in the air. Chainsaw in one hand, pistol in the other, Shaani whirled in fright.
“Wig-wig.”
Her heart leaped with joy. But the bugs seemed to ignore her. They raced past, heading for the ruins. Shaani gave chase.
“Wig-wig. Please. It’s me.”
“Gleeeeee.” The bugs were zooming through the air, wings glittering in the sun. “Chasing.”
“Wig-wig?”
“Fun.” Bugs were clinging to the walls, chittering happily. They watched a patch of empty air then jumped happily away. “Can’t catch I.” The bugs raced up into the ruins and disappeared.
Shaani sagged. Something was go
ing on. Shaani sat, dazed, and tried to think.
The last sentient beings known to have visited there were dead. And they had died in very strange ways: murder, suicide … possible insanity.
Something was affecting everybody’s minds.
Could it be the fruit? The others had been gorging themselves on it. But then why wasn’t she affected as well? Perhaps her superior nature as a purpose-bred embodiment of science somehow kept her immune?
The ruined tower seemed largely gutted, although the shadows sometimes moved, playing tricks with Shaani’s eyes. Jungle plants had moved in; one of the fragrant white palms jutted up out of what had once been an ornamental pool of some kind. The overgrown holes of windows and doors showed occasional flashes of decaying furniture and broken TV screens. One section of the ruins had collapsed onto trees and apparently burned, making a deep mound of rubble over a pile of charcoal. There were no animals, nothing but the flying fish out in the lake, who took brief forays into the forest then plunged back underwater, apparently to breathe. There was no sign of Wig-wig again or Xoota or Benek.
Shaani despaired, wondering what to do, when a flash of white suddenly caught her eye.
The bottom layer of the ruins had an extension. A crack in a wall showed a glimpse of white tile and gleaming steel. Shaani worked her way cautiously forward and felt her ears and tail stiffen in excitement.
It was a laboratory.
Almost totally intact, it had been sheltered by the falling floors above. Shaani clambered excitedly in through the crack in the wall and looked around, absolutely beside herself with joy.
The equipment looked intact and unblemished. Some sort of computer screens, glassware, heating pads, dials, and more …
The computer blinked a screen. A human face looked out at her and smiled. “Greetings, fellow scientist.”
Fellow scientist? Shaani was utterly thrilled. “You can understand me?”
The computer image looked benignly at Shaani and bowed. “I am programmed to respond to all authorized science personnel. Human scientists and, of course, laboratory rats.”