Cultwick: The Sweeper Bot Plague (11 page)

“Not far now, Newton,” she declared. “We’ll find that
jewel soon.”

Chapter 11. Ryn the Rebel

Rowland, Pearl, Germ and even Tern had been knocked to the ground in what seemed an instant. The man who subsequently attacked her had vomited blood and then passed out, apparently suffering from the Sweeper Bot Plague. Her hand still trembled at the butt of her gun, as she reran the scene through her head.

Tern shook violently a few feet away. A
mechanical dart was lodged into his gears and appeared to be short-circuiting his system. Erynn leaned down, and grabbed the dart by the tail end, pulling it out after a couple tugs.

With the dart removed, Tern began to reboot himself almost instantaneously.
Internal fans whirled and cogs spun. Erynn changed her focus to the others. Each had a dart stuck in them with a green liquid seeping from the wound, and she removed them successively.

All the commotion caused by the bounty hunter, however, had attracted some attention. A mechanized halftrack packed with a fire team of Cultwick
Corpsmen arrived. Four men unloaded from the vehicle, guns drawn, and began to surround Erynn and her fallen companions.

One
corpsman shouted to her, “Drop your weapons to the ground and put your hands up, or we will fire!”

Erynn looked back to Tern who was still only midway through his boot up process, so she grudgingly
dropped her pistol and put her hands up in the air.

One of the other men stepped forward and said to the others, “Can’t believe we caught the heretic ourselves. We weren’t even looking for her.”

“Commendations for sure,” another said.

The corpsman in charge
issued an order to one of his men, “Place her in restraints and check the others. The empress wants them alive. If that bounty hunter has killed any of them, he better hope he doesn’t wake back up.”

The
corpsman approached Erynn to place cuffs around her, managing to get the first around her left wrist.

Tern finished his reboot
process and stood up, saying, “Priority: Protect the debugger.”

His blade extended out from his arm, steam
shot out his back, and he swung around slicing open the neck of the guard with the cuffs. Erynn took this moment to draw her pistol and took two quick shots at another of the guards. Tern rushed toward the other two, who fired off several shots at the automaton before he kicked one back into the vehicle and stabbed the other through the chest.

Erynn stood up, a
s a bullet whizzed by her head. In the distance, she could see another automobile full of soldiers heading towards them, firing shots.

“Tern, we need to get out of town,” she began. “
Throw my rifle to me and then get everyone on that halftrack!”

“Clarify request, debugger
,” Tern said pulling the rifle off from around his shoulder. “Where out of town?”

“Head in the direction of Chrome City,” she answered.

“Clarify request. Who is everyone?” the automaton asked tossing her the rifle.

“
Rusty cogs!” she exclaimed, as she caught the rifle. “Everyone who isn’t a soldier. I’m going to try and get rid of the others.”

Erynn turned to face the new vehicle full of corpsmen and raised her rifle, pointing it toward the halftrack. She lined the rifle’s sights onto
one of the vehicle’s wheels and slowly squeezed the trigger. The gun made a clicking sound but jammed instead of firing the shot.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” she exclaimed to herself.

Irritated she dropped the rifle to the ground and, in a knee-jerk reaction, removed the pistol from its holster and fired the gun at the halftrack. It too jammed, as she pulled the trigger.

“
Why is this all so damn unreliable?” she asked herself, while Tern continued to pile bodies into the halftrack behind her.

Erynn placed her pistol back into the holster and knelt down to the body of a corpsman at her feet, prying the rifle from his hands. She removed several parts from the gun, while the halftrack full of soldiers continued to fire at her. Having collected the pieces she was interested in, she picked up her rifle, pulled a series of pieces from the gun, and haphazardly threw them to the side. She placed the new pieces into her rifle and cocked it back, eyeing the parts as they worked together.

Standing up, she carefully aimed the gun at one of the vehicle’s wheels and fired. The bullet found its target in the front left wheel of the halftrack, destroying the wheel as it passed through it. With one of its two wheels missing, the vehicle veered to the side and slowed down slightly, but the tracks in the back allowed it to continue forward on its trajectory with a concentrated effort from the driver.

Erynn again aimed the rifle and fired another shot at the halftrack. This time, however, she
didn’t hit the tire and instead shattered the glass and struck the driver. The transport veered off the wide path of the city into the local barber’s shop.

“Whoops,” she said to herself.

She leaned down, grabbed a key off the corpsman’s body and unlocked the handcuff still hanging from her left arm.
Erynn turned back to Tern and the others, where she found the halftrack that Tern had loaded the others onto, and it began to move forward at a slow pace. As the vehicle sputtered forward, she jumped in the back. It was then that she noticed that not only Rowland, Germ, and Pearl were piled in their transport, but the bounty hunter, Vincent, was also lying in in the vehicle.

“What is he doing here?” she asked
. Behind them, the bounty hunter’s horse trailed on after the vehicle.

“The
debugger instructed me to,” he replied.

“I never said anything about getting him too,” she said.

Tern began making a scratching noise, soon followed by a recorded message of Erynn saying, “Rusty cogs! Everyone who isn’t a soldier.”

Erynn sighed and said, “Yeah, fine. Fair enough. I suppose we couldn’t have left him there anyway. Who knows what
those corps goons would have done with him.”

They traveled
for several minutes before the others started to rouse themselves awake up from the sleep darts Vincent had injected into them. Rowland was the first to regain consciousness. Erynn attributed this to him building a tolerance to various sedating chemicals from his ‘experiments’ in the lab.

“I had the most excellent dream,” he said.

“Trust you to have a good time on a sleep dart,” Erynn replied.

“You were there!” he continued happily. “Though you had a different face somehow.
It was like a cat’s face or something. I was flying in one of those magnificent skyships they build in the north. The pilot even let me steer,” he gave a sly smile. “But a sleep dart, you say?”

“Yeah, this guy,” she lightly kicked at the bounty hunter
’s unconscious body, “shot you all full of some sedative. He even managed to knock Tern offline.”

“Oh? However did you survive? Give him a taste of his own medicine? He appears to be quite out of it,” Rowland said, poking the man in the face
with a finger inside the gauntlet.

“Nope,” she answered. “I didn’t even draw my pistol until after he passed out. He vomited up blood and then just fainted.
It was pretty lucky actually.”

“Hmm, it sounds like he
has the primary strain of the Sweeper Bot Plague,” Rowland hypothesized. “Without treatment he will probably die within a couple hours.”

Erynn reluctantly said, “Well, he
doesn’t seem like he’s worth it, but I don’t particularly want his death on my hands. Can you cook something up for him?”

Rowland looked around for his bag and found it lying between Pearl’s legs. He pointed to it and asked Erynn, “Could you get that for me, my dear?”

Erynn giggled a bit to herself and replied, “Oh, I think you should grab it.”

Flustered, the professor responded, “You know how I feel about physical contact!”

Smiling, Erynn grabbed the bag from between Pearl’s legs and handed it to the Rowland, “Here ya go, Max.”

As Erynn lifted the bag off Pearl, a small tube fell from the dancer’s jacket pocket. It made a rattling noise, as she picked up the object from the floor of the halftrack. Scribbled on the side of the cylinder was a single word,
‘Amizance.’ She popped the lid off the top of the tube to find a collection of small white pills with the letter ‘A’ carved into them. Erynn furrowed her brow, while she wondered what they were and why Pearl had them.

She placed them back into Pearl’s pocket and decided instead to look
through the bounty hunter’s belongings. He had a plethora of mechanical gadgets hanging from his belt, ranging from the sleep and shock darts, they had already seen, to explosive pellets, a revolver, a handheld communication device, restraints, a respirator similar to the professors, and varying other devices she didn’t recognize.

On his face, he also had a mechanical eye patch, and his nose appeared to be recently broken.
She took the restraints and tied the bounty hunter’s hands together, while the professor worked toward the treatment. Erynn also unfastened his belt and threw it in the corner of the halftrack away from Vincent’s grasp. It was then that both Germ and Pearl started to wake from the dart’s tranquilizer.

Pearl moaned and said to Erynn, “Wakin
’ up with ya in my bed was much better, kitten. What happened?”

Erynn looked to the rat and asked, “You
awake, Germ? Don’t want to have to say this yet again.”

“
I’m listening to you, ma’am,” he replied, scratching at the area the dart had hit him.

“Bounty hunter,” she pointed to Vincent. “Sleep darts,” she pulled out a
fresh dart from his belt and displayed it for them. “He collapsed after that though. Seems he has the plague, Max over there is working on a treatment for him.”

“If you’ll pardon the interruption,
Madam Clover,” Germ began. “Why are we taking him with us? Also where are we going?” After looking at his current surrounding, he added, “Also what are we driving in?”

“Lot of questions there, but, uh, let’s start with the why he’s here,” she started. “After he collapsed, a group of soldiers showed up in town. Naturally
, as is their only purpose, they attacked us, so we took their ride out of town. I asked Tern to load everyone up in the halftrack, and he took me at my word quite literally.

“I think that just leaves the where part of your question. Chrome City
. I hope that we can meet with the rebellion there. It wasn’t safe anymore in Dust Grove, so that seems like a good place to go for now.”

“And we’re curing his plague too?” Germ asked.

“Treating,” Rowland interjected without looking up from his work. “There is no cure.”

“If we don’t treat it, he’ll die,” Erynn said. “I’m okay with a few dead Cultwick
Corpsmen, but this guy is just doing a... mostly... honest job. Don’t want him to die because of us.”

Abruptly, Rowland looked up and shouted, “Gerald!”

“Yeah, we’re not going back for a potato, Max,” Erynn told him.

T
he professor sadly replied, “Well, perhaps the cleaning staff will take care of him.”

Pearl looked back in the distance
toward the city, which was nothing more than a speck on the horizon.

“Sorry, Pearl, but I couldn’t have just left you behind either,” Erynn explained.

“Yeah, I understand,” Pearl said continuing to look back.

Abruptly, the professor jammed a syringe into the man's leg and injected him with what Erynn
hoped was the treatment. The man immediately jerked up, gasping for breath.

"What just happened?" he demanded.

"You passed out after attacking us, and we saved your life. You're welcome," Erynn said.

"What do you mean I passed
-- Oh," he stopped, seeming to have recalled something.

"You remember now?"
she inquired.

"What I remember is that I need to kill a couple of no good thugs down in
Gulch Hollow," he explained. "Did you say you saved my life?"

"That needle still sticking in your leg, yeah, that's a plague treatment," she said.

"Now why would you go and do a thing like that?" he asked.

"Didn't seem right not to do it," she told him.

"Hmm, you're not like most people I meet, darling,” he said. “They usually at least have the good sense to not save the man trying to turn them into the authorities. Also, they tend not to tie me up with my own tools."

He pulled both hands
from around his back, but before he could do anything else, Erynn jammed the sleep dart she still had in her hand into his other thigh.

"Oh, come on!" he said before passing out again.

Erynn rummaged through a toolbox in the halftrack, finding some rope inside. She used that to tie up the bounty hunter again.

They drove for some time, and when the group finally arrived in Chrome City, it was almost dusk. In some
ways, the city reminded Erynn of being back in the slums of Cultwick City. There was dark smog in the air, the people looked disheveled and impoverished, and no one was talking.