by Erik Hyrkas
Chapter 14. Miranda
The jungle was teeming with small chitinous creatures, most no bigger than a chipmunk. None of them approached us, and most we only barely saw because they scampered away when they heard us coming. John was uneasy all the same and kept his stick ready.
The jury-rigged tracking device kept shutting down unexpectedly, and we had to stop each time while I fixed it. Medical bandages are not the best substitute for electrical tape, and the trouble was always a short. The trick was finding which connection was the culprit.
“If this thing is working, the ship should be up ahead less than a hundred yards away,” I said after putting the device back together for the umpteenth time.
“Shh!” John had his finger to his lips and the stick extended in front of him with his other hand.
Then I heard, or rather felt, what John was warning me about. The ground trembled as if giant feet were marching, and as the trembling came closer, I could hear growls and snorts. The smaller critters of the forest went silent and invisible now. The true masters of the jungle were coming, and the lesser creatures knew it.
There was a massive stampede of beasts we could hear but not see somewhere to our left. The noise of snapping branches and trembling ground as they passed was deafening.
John crept forward through the undergrowth, and I followed. When we came to the edge of the thick foliage, we found a rocky hill jutting out. At the peak was the goose-shaped Phoenix 5000 perched on a massive flat rock.
The edges of the hill climbed steeply, and John navigated his way between the sharp boulders slowly. I could have made my way to the top in a few quick jumps, but I thought it best if we stuck together. My training in martial arts notwithstanding, I was unarmed and at least John had a sharp stick. I assumed the ship was guarded by more of Tyler’s robots. I knew we were just lucky John managed to take out the one robot earlier, and so I needed to figure a way to disable not only a single robot but multiple machines, which I assumed to be what we would find waiting for us.
As we climbed, I picked up small rocks. They wouldn’t do any serious damage, but I reasoned that the robots’ defense mechanisms might be distracted by them and a split second advantage might make all the difference. In the academy, there wasn’t a fighting-robots-while-unarmed symposium. Maybe I could go back as a guest lecturer if I managed to figure this out, I thought. I’d call my presentation “Rock, Cannon, Fist,” the premise being that rock beats fist, proton pulse cannon beats rock, and fist always loses.
We stopped near the top of the hill and peered around a large outcropping of rocks. The bay doors were open, and there were no robot guards in sight. I glanced to my right and felt a knot tighten in my gut. A forty-foot tall creature with bone-white skin and bluish tufts of hair was standing at the base of the hill. Below him and tied to a stake was Max. Tyler, accompanied by two of his robots, was talking to the beast.
I started toward them, but John grabbed my arm. “If you want to help your partner, you’re going to need a weapon, and only the proton cannons on that ship will even make one of those creatures wince,” he said.
John was right. I leapt into the ship in a single bound and found four robots waiting for me. I threw a wad of small rocks at one of the robots, but it simply ignored them and shot at me. I honestly thought that trick would have at least made the thing blink.
“Focus fire,” one of the robots ordered.
I knew that I couldn’t stop moving or I’d be blasted to bits, and so I jumped and dodged, trying to get behind one of the robots to use as a body shield or to rip out its circuitry if I could get close enough. The machines moved so fast that I had to focus on staying alive amidst the barrage of blasts and so could not get near enough to pull the plug. I wanted to huddle down behind a pile of crates or something, but I feared they would pin me down if I stopped moving. Proton cannon blasts ricocheted around the bay as I moved as quickly as I could, hoping something would come to me in the process that would give me the upper hand.
“Oh!” a robot said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a robot short circuit as a stick erupted from between its head and neck plates. John had joined the fight. The three remaining robots turned on him and blasted. John used the robot he had deactivated as a body shield, but the machine was quickly getting shredded. This was the opportunity I needed, though. I landed behind one of the robots and, using Aikido, I tossed the machine at its partner.
The target robot’s defense mechanisms were triggered by the huge hunk of metal about to smash into it, and it blasted with impunity. I was forced to jump again as the remaining two robots targeted me. The walls of the bay were badly scorched and the fire retardation systems were spraying foam everywhere, making every surface slippery.
I tumbled and slid between the legs of one of the robots, and as I passed under it, both robots turned to fire on me. John took advantage of the opening and leapt forward with a crowbar, an upgrade from the stick he had been using. I had no idea where he had found it, but he used the hunk of iron to knock the head off the nearest robot with Babe Ruth-like pizzazz.
My skid ended against the wall, and I exhaled hard with the impact. A proton blast plinked off the alloy wall above my head, and I rolled behind some crates to my right. The fire retardant systems had stopped spraying, The foam was still a hazard, but it was already dissipating.
On the floor next to me was an Intergalactic Standard screwdriver. I picked it up, leaped into the air, and threw it end over end. When the robot spun to target me, the screwdriver blade drove into one of his dozen eyes. The machine missed as it fired repeatedly at me while I fell back toward the floor, but I knew it would zero in on me in the next few seconds.
Then John tackled the robot and ripped the wires from its throat.