To Dream

  Eloise smiled. She explained that the youngest had been awarded citizen of the month and the older one—by a year—declared that she wanted to be a maintenance engineer when she grew up. Mata glanced at Rudolph as Eloise spoke of her children. His eyes saddened. Mata disliked encouraging her in front of him, but Eloise speaking about her children was another path to what she wanted to find out.

  “Speaking of maintenance,” Mata said. “I hear tell our GTS supply is unusually low.”

  “Really?” Rudolph leaned in. “Where’d you hear that?”

  Nowhere, but she wanted to turn the conversation in that direction. “Telmo, I think.”

  “Telmo?” Rudolph replied. “He’s too busy thumping Ina.”

  “No!” Eloise said. “Is that true?”

  Mata cringed for choosing someone who had spurred the conversation in another direction. She took a deep breath and waited for the gossip to run its course. She piped in, “Maybe it wasn’t Telmo who told me, after all. But someone said that Norma Mardeen and her platoon were sent out last week to snoop around the Earther’s warehouse for more GTS.”

  “Oh, that,” Rudolph said. “There’s no shortage. They were on a reconnaissance mission.”

  “What for?” Mata already knew the answer, but she was still guiding them to what she really wanted to hear.

  “Norma had approval from the Town Council to attack the Earther’s mining operation,” Eloise said. “She had discovered a weak spot in their protection system.”

  Mata could have told Eloise that Norma had “discovered” this because she had told Norma, and Norma had been smart—or desperate—enough to believe her.

  “Anyway,” Eloise said. “They took care of the warehouse.”

  “Ka-pow!” Rudolph smacked his hands together as the exclamation point.

  “Were there any…survivors?” This was what Mata had come to hear.

  “If you mean Earthers,” Eloise said, “happily there was none.”

  “The place was leveled,” Rudolph added. “Nothing could have made it out alive.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Rudolph and Eloise glanced at each other. “Trust us,” Rudolph said. “We’re sure.”

  Mata knew that as military personnel they were privy to information that she wasn’t. Her eyes teared. This wasn’t the news she had hoped for. The craziness pinched at her again. She felt it building; felt its presence. Mata knew that in a few moments she would no longer be able to sense its existence because it would swallow her whole until her sane side fought its way back—that is, if it did. She needed to leave before that happened. She rose, steadied herself with her cane and took a step in the direction of her apartment.

  “Except the robot,” Eloise said.

  Mata continued walking. The craziness was painting her ear canal with words.

  “That doesn’t count,” Rudolph replied. “A robot’s a thing.”

  Mata stopped. She turned back. “How do you know this?” It came out sterner than she had intended.

  Rudolph raised an eyebrow. “You okay, Captain?”

  The encroaching craziness edged her vision in purple. Mata squeezed the grip of her cane to stifle the pound, pound, pounding against her temple. She forced a smile. “Too much front-line action, Sergeant.”

  Rudolph nodded his index finger at her: Good one.

  “You mentioned a robot?”

  “That was me,” Eloise said. “It was found in the rubble. Mangled as hell.”

  “Was it functioning?”

  “Far as we know.”

  Mata felt herself rocking. Electricity soared through her spine. “What color was its skin?”

  “Skin?”

  “What about his eyes?” Her craziness seemed wonderful: bright, glowing, adrenalin-fueled.

  Eloise shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the junk man, Stringer. Last I heard he found it and disassembled it for parts.” She looked at Rudolph for confirmation. He nodded.

  “That can’t be.” Right, God? Mata added to herself.

  “The wall guards reported seeing Norma Mardeen’s platoon two nights ago,” Rudolph said. “There was no report about a robot being with them.”

  Mata laughed and tapped her forehead. She looked up, beyond the weather dome to a place inside her craziness. “You're messing with me again, aren't you God?”

  “Uh, oh, here we go,” she heard someone say.

  “Poor old dame,” Rudolph replied. “Should we call Infirmary?”

  “Mardeen's orders are to leave her alone.”

  Mata swung her cane at the sky and shouted, “To hell with you, I'm done!” She swiped it at Rudolph and Eloise. “You hear me, I'm done!” She whacked the cane across her thighs. “Done, done, done, done, done.”

  “Screw Norma. She needs help.” Rudolph pressed a button on the wall intercom and spoke into it.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Date: 2250

  Planet Truatta

  Interior, Mount Kwieetus

  J-1 knew he had survived when he saw a patch of daylight several yards above him. It seeped through a crevice in the mountain. The spot was no larger than a ping-pong ball. On his back, he sat upright. His eyes and ears adjusted to the dim illumination. He was in a cavernous, shadowy chamber. He heard a syncopated plunk, plunk, pa-plunk of water dripping into a misty, odorous pond located in the center of the chamber. He could see the outline of pale, branchy shrubs lining the pond’s bank. Something squeezed his calf. He yelped. The sound echoed. The ominous flap, flap, flap that had carried him away flared up in response from everywhere in the cavern, but quickly died down.

  “Where are we?” Prudence released his calf. She was on her side. Her voice was a dry whisper.

  “What do you know about the Dark Prey?” J-1 helped her to a sitting position.

  “They don’t like light. They sometimes circle the mountain-top at night. They live in the mountain. They burrow, and…” She took a deep, shuddered breath.

  J-1’s pulse quickened. “And what?”

  “They’re primitive, mindless creatures who cling to the shadows. We avoid them at all costs. The largest ones can easily suffocate a person inside their wings. Their teeth can gnaw through anything. They’re carnivorous.”

  “How carnivorous?”

  “To the bone,” Prudence said.

  J-1 looked harder at the chamber walls. Though it was dark, he could see they were hollowed with hundreds of hexagonal cells. Pairs of large, yellow glow-dots peered coldly out of them. The piercing circles were fixed on him and Prudence. He realized what they were: The eyes of the Dark Prey. “We have to leave, now. Can you communicate with anyone?”

  “I can try, but transmissions don’t carry far inside the mountain.” Prudence, who was nothing more than a moving silhouette in the weak light, pulled a rectangle device from her waist. “It’s going to make a noise when I send out a signal.” There was a squawky cree-cree, cree-cree.

  The flapping noise that they had heard earlier rose up like an incoming wave.

  “Turn it off,” J-1 said.

  The sound stopped. The flapping contracted into a few fluttering waves and flattened into silence.

  “Do you have your electro-rod?” J-1 whispered.

  “Yes.” She slipped it from her belt, turned the electro-rod’s knob until it hummed lightly. She gingerly stepped forward.

  J-1 shuffled onto his good leg. “Where are you going?”

  “There.” Prudence pointed to a large wall opening near the pond. “That’s got to be the exit. It’s the only place big enough for us to have come through.”

  “These things aren’t bothering us as long as we stay quiet. Let’s look around first to be sure that’s the exit.”

  “Not on your life, robot.” Prudence stepped toward the pond.

  J-1 hobbled behind her.

  They approached the opening. Prudence said, “You go in first. I’ll wait here.”

  No wonder she didn’t want to look around, J-1 thought. She
had me as bait. He wanted to protest, but his directive to never rebuke a living person unless it was to cause another human’s suffering, pushed back and prevailed. He went inside, but something had changed—he felt annoyed at the internal pre-set. This was something that had never occurred before.

  “Everything okay?” Prudence asked from the entrance.

  As much as it irritated him that he was her guinea pig, he had to admit, “So far, so good.”

  He heard Prudence step inside. While he waited for her to catch up he also had to concede that the tunnel was similar to the one they had been walking through before the Dark Prey attack and that maybe she was right about it being—

  Prudence screamed.

  The flapping noise swelled. It no longer carried an echo because it was in J-1’s face. Prudence’s electro-rod went off. In the spark he saw her two feet behind him lying on the ground. A swarm of horned, hunched, winged figures—Dark Prey—tightened around them. The tunnel went dark again. One of them shoved J-1 to the ground. A stampede of talons trampled over him as if he were dirt. A flash. Prudence had re-fired the electro-rod. The shot singed the chest of a creature bent over her. It screeched and ripped the weapon from her hand. Black again. Prudence yelled. Her hideous shriek elevated. J-1 knew the creature had lifted her.

  He crawled through the gangly limbs that were crushing him, toward her voice. It muted as if it were being smothered, and died out. A pair of talons clamped onto his face. J-1 lashed about. Searching. Hooked nails ripped through his cheeks and jaw. Pain burrowed inside him. He frantically reached through the Dark Prey’s legs and found what he had been searching for. The electro-rod. J-1 felt for the power knob and twisted it as far as it would go. He aimed the business end upward and fired. A flash. The creature flinched from the light. The ray hit the creature’s wing. It shrieked and loosened its grip on J-1. At the same time a horde of Dark Prey rushed toward him.

  The cavern went black.

  J-1 fired again. He used the flash of light to regain his bearings. The opening he and Prudence had entered was to his left. The horde approached from his right. He pushed upward into a standing position, turned left and fired twice. The electric bolts flew past the growing mass of wings, teeth and cold yellow eyes bearing down on him. Darkness.

  He tried to shoot again.

  One of the creatures tore the barrel from him and flung it against the cave. A pair of leathery hands gripped his neck and squeezed. Something with prickly-hair wrapped around his entire body—a huge set of wings. It clamped like vice grips and smothered him. No more shadows or peeps of light. Sound deadened. The world became nothing. The pulse in his temples sped up. He broke out in a cold sweat. He tried to break free but he was locked in tighter than a straitjacket. His stomach soured. His pulse continued to rush even as his senses slowed to a crawl.

  As he faded away, he knew what was occurring. His central pump was desperately attempting to inject bio-core fluid through his vascular ducts, which were rupturing from the pressure of the creature’s wings squeezing his body. Because the fluid was leaking out of the ruptures, it couldn’t travel and return to his central pump. That made the pump work harder and faster to try and make up for the loss. It was a doomsday cycle, a classic case of shock that would cause his central pump to overheat and lock up.

  J-1 grew lighter. In his head he saw red sprinkled with black. The lightning fast throb in his temples stopped. Time stilled. This is it, he thought. Back to wherever it is that non-living things come from.

  The grip on his throat loosened. The wings suffocating him spread.

  J-1 tumbled to the ground. Slowly the world returned, but it was different. The cave was bathed in bright, reddish light. The Dark Prey were no longer upon him. They were scrambling blindly in all directions, banging into each other or smacking into the stony walls. Their hands were over their eyes. Their wings were wrapped around their heads to block off the light. Prudence was lying a yard away, gasping for air. Outside the cave, in the main chamber, the shrubs lining the pond that J-1 had purposely shot the electro-rod rays at were ablaze. He crawled to the weapon and grabbed it. He hobbled over to Prudence. A swarm of Dark Prey bolted from their hexagonal cells in the main chamber toting pails in their hands. They flew toward the pond.

  J-1 lifted Prudence to her feet.

  The flock skimmed the water, scooped it in their containers and dropped it over the fire. The flame hissed and grew weaker. The light in the tunnel paled. The creatures repeated the action.

  Prudence ran. J-1 tried to follow, but his bad leg gave out and he tumbled to the ground. The electro-rod flew beyond his grasp. The flock of Dark Prey dropped more water. The light was now no brighter than a row of candles. “Wait!” he yelled to Prudence. “Help me.”

  She turned back and ran to him.

  The Dark Prey wandering blindly in the tunnel lowered their wings. They looked about, and zeroed in on J-1. In the dull light he could practically feel their anger. J-1 reached his hand up to Prudence.

  Prudence reached past him to the electro-rod, grabbed it and said, “You’re on your own, robot,” and raced away.

  J-1 heard the fire’s dying hiss as it was extinguished. Except for the scores of yellow eyes rushing toward him, the tunnel went black.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Date: 2240

  Planet Truatta

  Mt. Kwieetus

  Niyati groaned from the pain in her hip as she flung the dead animal beside the hole in the ground. She wiped falling snow from her hooded fur wrap and removed the glove of her good hand with her teeth. With her good hand, Niyati removed a knife tucked in a rope tied around her waist, and skinned the possum-like creature. She tossed the bloody meat and entrails into a metal bucket, and kicked the remains into the hole. Wiping the animal’s blood from her hand in the snow covered ground and donning her glove, she lugged the bucket up a narrow, winding path along the mountain’s edge.

  The path dead-ended in front of a small forest of branchy, dry shrubs. She weaved her way through them to a not-so-large clearing. At the back of the clearing were two openings in the mountain. One ran from the ground and was large enough to crawl through. The other opening stood two feet to the side and three feet above it. It was smaller—basketball-sized. A snow-filled metal duct stuck out of it.

  Niyati rested the meat-filled bucket on the ground. She collected an armful of the dry shrubbery, and placed it beneath the metal duct. She removed a small object from a pocket of her fur wrap, placed it next to the gathered shrubs and flicked it. An electric spark ignited the woody plants. Niyati gathered the bucket and crawled through the larger passage. Inside, it was rocky, crude. The size of a large bedroom. The snow in the outside duct—now flame-melted water—flowed inside through the duct. The duct ran to a bike-size paddle wheel. The water current caused the wheel to spin. The water continued past it to a U-turn in the duct, where it turned again and merged with the incoming water duct in a continuous loop.

  Wires running through the paddle wheel’s axle ran to another device. It resembled a car battery. More wires ran from the battery device to a thick metal rod imbedded horizontally across the top of two stone blocks. The structure resembled a miniature high-wire trapeze. It stood knee high, to one side of the room. The metal rod heated until it glowed white-hot. The cavern lit up from the radiance. The reflection caused the GTS crystals running through the walls to glisten. Niyati placed the bucket on the ground. She removed the knife from her waist rope, shaved off chunks of the crystals and tossed them in with the meat. With her shriveled hand, she slid the pail beneath the hot metal rod and walked back outside to kill time as her meal cooked.

  Niyati reworked her way through the forest to the mountain’s edge and sat. Through the drifting snowflakes she studied the landscape below. Always, her eyes ignored the desiccated woods in the near distance and focused on the crushed rubble and rising fingers of black smoke in the far away. The scorched city of Backborne. It reminded her of the ancient footage she’d seen
of London following the blitzkrieg of World War II.

  When she had first discovered her hideout in the mountain nearly a decade ago, the destruction had been confined to the outskirts of the city. Over the years as the Great War escalated, and Ameri-Inc.’s militia and weaponry had increased, the ruination had spread inward to Backborne’s center until there was nothing but wreckage.

  Niyati shook her head. “The babies, the old ones, the hundreds of thousands gone.” Then came the dark questions that shrouded her soul like the towering black smoke that shrouded the sky: Did I play a role in this? What if I hadn’t built J-1 and infused Jay’s DNA in him? What if I hadn’t discovered the potential of GTS? Would any of this have come to be?

  And why is God allowing me to remain alive?

  By her latest calculation, she was two hundred and fifty-five years old. Her stomach soured. The answer to her last question was easy. Because He’s punishing me by denying the peace that comes with death. And if that was the case, then the answer to the first question was obvious. Of course you played a role in this cataclysm.

  She laughed bitterly. “I know exactly what you’re doing by keeping me alive!” She stood and edged her toes over the ridge. “The punishment’s ending, old buddy, because I’m removing your subject.” She crept back. No. It’s the GTS playing on my mind. I was only a cog in a series of events. Rationally, she knew that was true, but emotionally it was impossible for her to reconcile. A gust winded into her back and pushed her forward. She looked up and smiled. “I hear you, God. Loud and clear.” She stepped forward and stared at the steep drop, but hesitated. The regret she felt at not being able to touch J-1 again, to be reminded of Jay, held her. She gazed out at the once thriving metropolis and understood. Her shattered heart couldn’t compare to the death she had wrought on this planet’s people. She raised her arms in surrender and stiffened her back. Before jumping over the cliff she thought, for no good reason, what about my meal—it’s still cooking.