As I ran over, I idly wondered if Sklisk had driven all the way back with the hanging bucket. I hadn't realized he had started work already this morning.
"Hold on," I shouted as I waved at him, trying to catch his attention.
Finally seeing me, he stopped the machine and blessed quiet returned to the warehouse.
"I have ruined it," he said. "How will we ever survive if I break these machines that work so hard?"
"When did this happen?" I asked. My AI showed there was considerable heat buildup in the drive motors.
"After our evening meal, I returned to work on the weapon. There is so much material to move," he explained. "It was just after moon rise when the bucket became lodged. Tskir attempted to help free me, but the bucket cracked when I reversed too quickly."
"And you spent all night dragging it back?" I asked.
"I had hoped you would have capacity to heal it, as you did Jaelisk," he said, nervously looking at the medical tank.
"You're right, the dirt mover isn't going to fit in the tank," I said. "Besides, the medical tank is for people like you and me. We need something heavy-duty to fix a large machine like this. You should have called me. I'd have told you we could fix it on-site instead of having you drive back here. You must be exhausted."
"We are having so much trouble, Liam," Sklisk said. "The rocks are connected together with metal and are very difficult for the machines to break. There is no time to waste."
"I was worried about that," I admitted. "Your ancestors reinforced the structure so it could stand up to attack. It's just going to take more time and we'll break a few more buckets."
"But we only have ten such machines," he said.
"We'll just have to get good at fixing them," I said. "Tskir said she'd located your ancestor's industrial replicators. Once we get the weapon up and running, we'll see about digging up the replicators. When you can make the parts you need, it won’t matter if you break a few dirt movers."
"I do not wish to break these machines," Sklisk answered.
"Reasonable. Now go grab one of those long bucket machines like Tskir drives and bring it over here."
"If your medical tank cannot repair the bucket. I do not see what use you will have with another machine." Having said his piece, Sklisk scampered out of his chair and over to a machine that had a heavy steel bucket on the end of an articulating arm.
"What's going on?" Tabby asked, handing me a bladder of water and a meal bar.
"Sklisk needs a repair," I said, accepting the makeshift breakfast. "You mind packing supplies for our trip this morning?"
"Nope, but do you really need to repair it right now? There are ten more over there just like it," Tabby said.
"Sklisk is kind of freaked out," I said. "I figure if I show him how easy it is to fix, he'll calm down about it. Give me an hour."
"Can do," Tabby said. She shuffled through the supplies we'd brought from Gaylon Brighton and piled them against the warehouse wall.
"Locate chain." In the list of supplies left behind by Piscivoru, steel chain had caught my attention. Before meeting other advanced sentients, I'd have expected chain to be more of a human thing. In reality, I'd discovered many other species had invented chain links in exactly the same way we had. Like the wheel, rope, glass and beer – chain was a basic building block for an advanced society. Okay, so beer might not be a basic building block, but the fact that most societies invented it kind of makes my point for me.
If you think that piling supplies on the floor of a warehouse makes things easier to find, you'd be wrong. I finally had to use my AI to locate the portable plasma cutter/welding head. It ended up being stuck under a bag of silicate replicator material. Securing the head and a slender bag of fuel to my belt, I jogged through the stacks until I came to where the piles of chain rested.
"Sklisk, can you bring a truck back here?" I called over comms.
"Where have you gone to, Liam?" Sklisk answered.
"We need supplies. Bring a truck. Your HUD will display arrows for you," I answered.
"Oh," His AI had overheard my prompt. "That is very useful."
"You can just ask your AI for it," I said. "But you can't use tongue-flicks, you need to use your words."
"I see," he responded.
While he worked on locating one of the narrow trucks that fit easily between the tall shelving stacks, I floated up and inspected the various piles of chain that lay in great coils.
"I need chain sufficiently strong to hold the bucket of Sklisk's dozer," I said. My AI, always listening, immediately highlighted each thickness that would be up to the task. "Ten meters, lightest chain and I'll need hooks," I further modified.
I was looking on the wrong shelf and a blinking light in my peripheral vision caused me to shift positions to a lower shelf. While the Piscivoru didn't have any ten-meter lengths, the AI had located a fifteen-meter chain already equipped with rugged hooks on each end. That particular chain weighed in at sixty kilograms, so I waited for Sklisk to arrive with the truck.
"What supplies do you need?" Sklisk asked, arriving a few minutes later.
"Help me get this onto the truck," I answered, ignoring his question. "I'll show you how to repair the machine so maybe you could do it next time."
"I would like that."
After the chain, we located and loaded welding rods and drove back to where his bulldozer sat.
"Lift your small bucket so it sits in the air above this broken one," I directed. It took Sklisk a few minutes to figure out what I was looking for, but he finally got the scoop in the right place. I wrapped the chain around the end of his bucket and then around the broken one, directing Sklisk to lift until the broken piece was back in position.
"You will reattach these pieces?" he asked, stating what felt fairly obvious to me.
"We'll need extra material," I said, holding up the welding rods. "It won't look pretty when we're done, but it'll hold together. Put on the mask so you don't hurt your eyes." I'd guessed at the right level of darkening for the small Piscivoru. I worried that a normal setting wouldn’t be enough protection from the welding light for their glowing eyes and directed the masks to start with a darker setting.
As with most jobs, preparing for a task takes more time than actually performing it. I'd spent the better part of my youth welding mining machines back together and had no trouble with this one.
"Good as new," I said, detaching the welding head from my belt and setting it in a more prominent location. I suspected we'd be spending more time on repairs in the future if Jaelisk were successful in bringing back more rookie workers.
"When you leave, how will we learn to do these things?" Sklisk asked, suddenly worried.
"Engirisk has access to all of your ancestors' knowledge," I said. "The chain and welding material was something they were thoughtful enough to leave behind. I'd bet anything that if you had asked your AI to search for a solution, it would have shown you what I just did."
"Is that so?" He seemed astounded.
"Yes. And you're about to have a new problem that I'm not going to solve for you," I said. "You'll have to figure it out on your own."
"What is that?"
"Soon your bucket won’t reach far enough into the ground to remove the rocks. What will you do then?"
He flicked his tongue. "I saw this problem but did not mention it. I did not want to seem ungrateful for the help of Jonathan and Sendrei."
"It is not ungrateful to ask your AI for help. Let me know what you come up with." I turned to where Tabby awaited. She was holding a smaller pack out to me, which I accepted, albeit a bit confused by the light weight of it.
"You ready?" Tabby asked.
"Where's the drill and all the bits?" I asked. The mining hammer drill we'd manufactured weighed in at thirty kilograms and came with its own grav-sled. The rods were each three meters long. Neither would fit in the packs.
"Jaelisk and I loaded up a truck while you were off screwing around in the stacks w
ith Sklisk," Tabby said. "She's already halfway to the mountain by now."
"She knows how to get there?"
"I showed her how to navigate with her AI and HUD," Tabby said. "Seriously, who'd teach someone to use a vehicle without showing them basic navigation? You'd have to be an idiot to do that."
I looked at her suspiciously and when she didn't break, I finally said something. "You overheard me talking to Sklisk, didn’t you?"
Tabby waggled her eyebrows. "Doesn't change that you should have shown him how to navigate."
Fifteen kilometers out of the city of Dskirnss, we caught sight of Jaelisk's grav-truck bouncing through the rugged, semi-forested terrain.
"Didn't take her long to learn how to drive that," I observed.
"The trucks have AIs," Tabby answered. "All she has to do is talk to it."
"Right."
"Seriously? You didn't tell Tskir or Sklisk about either the AI or how to use navigation?"
She had me. I'd underestimated the Piscivoru technology a number of times and it hadn't crossed my mind that the ancient vehicles would have an internal AI. That said, I wasn't prepared to discuss my shortcomings, either. The repairs to the bulldozer had taken more time than I'd estimated and it was midday before we arrived at the base of the mountain.
"You're in a mood," Tabby said as the two of us set down on the granite slope. We walked toward the heavy forest and the tunnel's well-hidden entrance.
"If Kroerak show up right now, we're all screwed," I said. "There's no way two ground-mounted turrets from Gaylon Brighton will hold off an entire Kroerak fleet. All they'd have to do is crash-land a cruiser within a few hundred meters and the wave of destruction would take care of the rest."
"Frak, Hoffen, no shite," Tabby answered. "So, you're saying that a thousand Piscivoru – the majority of whom are hiding in a mountain – three humans, two turrets and a colony of silicate-based intelligences can't stand up to a whole fleet and tens of thousands of alien bugs that will suicide themselves for their species’ evil purposes?"
"Nice pep talk," I muttered, pushing aside the dense foliage that blocked the tunnel's entrance. Kneeling down, I looked at the small slit in the earth that sat beneath a rocky outcropping. My AI had calculated that we'd need to remove four meters of material from the entrance before we'd be able to even get the hammer drill into the tunnel, much less remove the wider portions of the disassembled Popeyes.
"You get like this and it's not productive," she continued to push. "Get in the moment. Our personal survivability goes way up if we recover these Popeyes and you keep your head a fair distance from your butt."
I thought about what she was saying and chuckled, despite my so-called mood. "Nice," I said.
"What's going on in there, Liam?" Tabby tapped the side of my head with her finger. "I've been trying to stay cool about this whole glowy-eye thing, but you're starting to worry me."
"It's like I can feel the Kroerak coming, Tabbs," I said.
The sound of branches snapping drew our attention to Jaelisk's approach. Part of me wanted to explain, but it was just a couple of dreams. While it had kind of freaked me out, I wasn't ready to admit having fallen into that particular rabbit hole.
"Well, a person doesn't need to have drown in the Iskstar grotto to know that," Tabby said. "Now let's get this stuff unloaded."
"Any problems on the ride?" I asked Jaelisk as she exited the truck.
"I do not understand the difficulty of operating these machines," she answered. "This truck did just as I requested and even informed me when my decisions would cause danger. It feels that you are like the males of my tribe who exaggerate difficulty of certain tasks."
"You tell him, sister," Tabby said.
I took two vibrating shovels from the truck’s open bed and threw one to Tabby. "You're all alike." I muttered. I was doing a lot of that lately.
With a pinch, I tossed the AI's projection of the opening to Tabby and jammed the shovel into the side of the mountain. Vibra-shovels came in several varieties and the ones I'd manufactured were close cousins to those I'd used back on our mining operations in Sol.
At first, things moved along quickly. The loam and small rocks inside the entrance easily gave way to our shovels. Sooner than expected, we'd moved a meter and a half of material out of the way.
"I'm stuck." Tabby pulled her shovel out and plunged it back into the loose rock to show me. Her shovel stopped after only penetrating a few centimeters.
"Don’t push it too hard," I said. "You'll break the shovel. We're up against this rock right here," I said, gesturing at a long, horizontal boulder beneath the entrance. I'd spent so much time mining, I didn't have difficulty identifying the structures of the stone that were often hidden from view. This rock would continue far below where she stood.
I stood my shovel up in the loose ground and went back for the hammer drill. I liked laser drills for their efficiency, but nothing beat a good old hammer drill for raw power. The drill had three parts: the actual drill, the extension rods, and a cutting head. To the uninitiated, the cutting head looked like a standard drill bit tip, but that isn’t where the strength of the machine came from. An extremely hard v-shaped point made to be rammed quickly, repeatedly, and with substantial power into the rock was at the tip of the cutting head. The head's grooves – which do look like a drill bits –channel the broken material away so the next hammer cycle can break the next piece of rock it runs into.
With familiarity given only by considerable repetition, I twisted a square rod into the matching sleeve within the drill, attached the cutting head, and slid the entire mechanism onto a grav-plate and into position. I grinned as Jaelisk, who'd been more than curious, jumped away when I started the machine and satisfyingly sank the rod into the boulder. I love simple machines and was soon lost in the operation of it all.
Having reached the bottom of the first hole, I pulled the drill out and repeated the process, spacing the holes about ten centimeters apart. My deceased father, Big Pete, would have been annoyed at my sloppy spacing, but they'd do the job.
"Liam, would you hold please?" Jaelisk asked as I set the machine aside, having drilled all the holes I needed for the first sluff – which is a mining term we used when cracking the material from the face of rock.
"Sure, I'm done for the moment." I dragged the narrow gas bags from the truck. I hadn't seen Jaelisk for a while and wondered where she'd gotten off to. "What's up?"
"You have attracted a group of kroo ack."
I dropped the bags and ran for my blaster rifle lying against a nearby tree. Spinning around, I tried to locate them and soon became aware of Tabby's laughter.
"What's so funny?"
"If it weren't for Jaelisk, you'd have been bug food. She's already taken care of them," Tabby said. "And I think she has a present for you."
"Is that right?" I looked to Jaelisk, who was holding the severed head of a Kroerak warrior.
"I offer to you the fresh head as an apology for questioning the difficulty of your labor. I would have no idea how to operate machines such as these," she said.
"Um."
"Don't be rude, Hoffen. Take the head," Tabby needled.
I grinned. Tabby was trying to get me to eat bug, and no matter what, that wasn't happening again. "Honestly, Jaelisk, I don't care for them. How many were there?"
"A pair," Jaelisk said. "I felt them approach. I am certain they were drawn by the noise of your machine. There are at least five more who still approach."
"Frak," I said. "That's too many."
"It is not so," Jaelisk said. "Your drilling has also drawn the attention of my people who labor to bring your machine skins into the tunnels. If you will cease for a few moments, I am certain they would exit and receive the nourishment of the kroo ack."
"Take as long as you need," I agreed.
A group of Piscivoru exited the tunnel, dragging smaller pieces of the Popeyes out with them. I felt bad as I watched the small, reptilian people struggle to m
ove the armored parts, many of which out-massed them. Particularly comical were two small juveniles pulling at a glove which had been detached at the wrist. Unwilling to give up, the two chattered at each other as they labored. Tabby, seeing their plight, stepped over, picked up the glove and moved it to the growing pile of parts.
With their work done, the two ran to Jaelisk and chattered at her, flicking their tongues as they danced around. They seemed most interested in her restored arm. We’d talked about her boys and I was pleased when she introduced Tabby and me to her sons, Baelisk and Boerisk.
"They want to see your machine break the earth," Jaelisk said.
"That's not hard," I crouched down to be closer to their height. "See those bags? We're going to push them into those holes. Want to help?"
The young Piscivoru needed no additional encouragement to help with that project. Once the gas bags were within the holes, we placed a heavy blanket across the rocks to eliminate shrapnel.
"How can something that soft break the ground?" Boerisk asked excitedly. Without my HUD, I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart, but names floating above their heads was a dead giveaway.
"Physics. I've filled the bags with explosive gas. The explosion won't have anywhere to go and will direct the energy into the rock," I said. "Now make sure everyone is clear. We don't want someone to get hurt."
With a few blinks from Jaelisk, which I recognized as assent, I ignited the gas bags. A low rumble beneath our feet was all we felt.
"Did it work?" Boerisk was quick to ask.
"Pull back the blanket," I said, helping the boys remove the heavy covering to expose the broken rock.
"The kroo ack are here," Jaelisk warned as Tabby and I worked to scoop the scree from the tunnel's entrance.
"Frak."
Grabbing our blaster rifles, Tabby and I lifted off the ground so we could see the group that approached. By ourselves, the five warriors would have been more than we could have dealt with. We watched, mesmerized, as the same small reptiles who had such difficulty moving the pieces of our Popeyes, quickly dispatched the Kroerak.
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