Mech 3: The Empress (11 page)

“Backtracking from here, it seems as if they’ve just come from damaging the pumping station at the shadowline,” Nina said thoughtfully. “I don’t like it. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where did they go?” he asked. “Tell me that.”

“I don’t know, but they aren’t here now. We’d best move out of Sunside until they appear again.”

Leon shook his head. “Mother put me in charge. You can run home if you wish, sister. You have my permission to cower at home.”

Nina glared at him. “I’ll do no such thing. If you insist on combing the sands, I’ll lead the way.”

Determinedly, Nina goaded her mount and charged down the rocky outcropping toward the open sands. She saw the sand here was unsettled, as if passed over by a group of men or vehicles, but there was no one here now.

She did not make it far. As soon as she was out in the open sands, the mechs rose up in ambush. She realized with a shock that these metal laborers had hidden themselves
purposefully
, digging down into the sands and lying in wait. How was this possible? Who had set them to such a strange task?

She had little time for pondering the oddness of the situation, however, as she was caught up in the middle of it. A mech rose up directly in front of her and swung a dark metal arm at her head. The gripper flashed by as she ducked. Sand dribbled from it, spraying her with a shower that trickled down her back.

There were dozens of them! She dodged this way and that, avoiding the rising bodies. It was like dodging fast-growing trees in a forest. Behind her, she heard her brother’s bugle call. This was followed by a blaze of cannon-fire. The mech that had first accosted her blew apart in a spray of shrapnel. Nina ducked down, wrapping herself around the oblong shape of her mount, leaning side-to-side to guide it at full throttle. She’d always been a gifted rider and enjoyed slalom runs that sickened lesser girls.

Another mech stepped to block her path to freedom, however. This one was different from the rest. He wore—clothing? A cape fluttered from his back and a scarf was wound twice around his neck struts. His grippers flashed, but they did not strike for her, as had the others. Instead, he struck down her mount, causing the nose of the small craft to dip into the sands.

Nina flew over the forward steering grips and did a cartwheel in the reddish sands. She could feel the heat of the grit through her riding suit. She lay there, stunned, barely moving while a battle raged around her. Her body responded to her desperate urging to flee sluggishly. She wondered if she’d broken her neck.

Suddenly, as she blinked behind her goggles, the cannon fire stopped. She managed to turn her head enough to see the scene as the smoke was swept away by the ceaseless desert winds. A dozen mechs were smoking ruins of jagged metal. The perrupters had clearly been winning, however. They were armed and organized. Only three of their number had fallen. The rest of the perrupters stood still, identifiable by the green wedge on their chassis, which was the unmistakable mark of Droad House.

That was the odd thing—her mechs were frozen in place. They stood stock-still, as if switched off in mid action. Their weapons were uplifted, aiming at the advancing ranks of the enemy. But they were no longer active.

Darkness dimmed Nin’s vision. She was passing out, and she knew it. With the last of her fading wits, Nina’s eyes roved the landscape in search of her brother Leon, but she did not see him. What had befallen dear Leon?

#

Nina awoke some hours later. It was difficult to tell how long she’d laid there. Her internal suit cpu had shut down, and as the sky of Ignis Glace always looked the same, it gave no hint as to the time of day.

She struggled to her knees, and then to her feet. She looked around herself warily. She didn’t see any of the enemy mechs moving nearby, so she dared to walk among the wreckage. She needed to get out of the desert soon, even her riding suit couldn’t keep her alive out here indefinitely. Already, the hydration unit was registering three-quarters empty.

Due to long exposure on a harsh world, the technology of Twilighters had developed to a keen edge when it came to surviving extremes of temperature—both hot and cold. There were high tech systems built into her suit, but as always there was the possibility of failure with complex systems, and the people of Ignis Glace built lower tech solutions as well. Analog backups that operated when the batteries died, when the cpu overheated or something simply broke, these technological adaptations had kept many colonists alive where they otherwise would have perished. Nina relied on these backup systems now, systems based on body-motion to cause fluids to pump, evaporation to provide cooling and gauges based on weights, springs and pressure-needles.

Staggering at first, she walked among the dead. In her calculations, the destroyed mechs were counted as lives lost. To her, the mechs were people too, after a fashion. She found their slaughter disturbing. Human brain tissue, left to dry upon the heartless sands, looked the same whether it fell from a cracked skull or a ruptured metal case.

She counted fourteen dead, almost all of them renegade mechs. Of particular mystery was the disappearance of her own mech perrupters. She recalled they’d frozen in place—but where had they gone after that?

Her eyes searched the horizon, but she saw nothing. Not even the telltale plume of dust that had first alerted her to the enemy presence.

It was soon thereafter she found the fifteenth body. Her brother, his blond hair whipping and fluttering over his open blue eyes, lay dead in the sand. He was already half-covered over by sifting grit. In his right hand was a crackling power-saber. In his left was his pistol.

She wept as she buried him, but being a Droad she did not linger long after. The renegade mechs might return at any moment. She took Leon’s sword, which was a twin to her own, and strapped the second scabbard to her belt. It would not do to leave ancestral weapons in the sands for bandits to scavenge. She would have liked to take his body home, but both mounts were destroyed, and she lacked the strength to carry him so far. She was not entirely sure she would make it home herself.

Seven

Knightrix Nina Droad was unable to use her com-link or get a mount operating for the return journey to Twilight. Stoically, she began marching homeward on foot. The occasional teardrop inside her goggles was sucked away by her rider’s suit and recycled to keep her alive. It was just as well, she thought. She did not want her vision obscured.

She had allowed herself a few moments to grieve for her fallen brother, but did not shed so many tears that the process would endanger her water supply. Ignis Glace was an unforgiving world. The first colonists had been idle dreamers, but their surviving descendants were hard-bitten realists. They were inured to danger and always considered their own survival in every equation. They still had room for honorable conduct in that mindset, however, unlike the peoples of other similarly harsh worlds. Where some colonies had descended into barbarism, the people here had become tough-minded and self-reliant, but were still mindful of chivalry. Only those sentenced to existence as a servile mech might have disagreed.

As Nina marched over the rising and falling dunes, leaning into winds and staggering as gusts buffeted her body, she wondered how she would tell her mother of the day’s fateful events. She would have done so already, but her suit’s cpu had mysteriously failed. Could this be related to the disabling of her mech perrupters? Could the renegade mechs have a weapon that disabled technological systems? If so, why had the renegades themselves been unaffected?

That was another thing that bothered her intensely. Were these mechs
actual
rebels? If that was the case, her entire society was endangered. Only mechs were capable of doing the hard labor required out here in Sunside, and if they’d managed to regain their individual powers of decision-making and cognition—the humans were doomed. The mechs numbered something close to a third of the population of Ignis Glace, but numbers weren’t the only determiner of victory in a struggle. The truth was any mech was more than a match for a human being in combat. They were stronger, faster and more durable.

Perhaps, she told herself, the mechs weren’t
true
rebels. Perhaps they were under the direction of a group of knight-errants who had somehow figured out how to reprogram them and suborn their loyalty. Even that was a grim thought, but it was less alarming than the idea of a mech uprising.

As she tried to weigh these possibilities, she could not erase from her mind the strange sight of a mech dressed up like a man. Why would a mech don a cape and scarf? Of what possible use might these articles be to him? He had no need of a blanket to wrap up in while sleeping upon the ground at night, which the primary purpose of a nobleman’s cape. Even more unimaginable was any conceivable requirement for a
scarf
.

Nina trudged for hours before reaching the safety of the shadow cast by Droad Mountain. Almost immediately after she passed into the cool shadowlands, she found herself surrounded by greenery. She relished the sensation as the lavender gloom of her Droad Fief close over her. It was an odd thing, living one’s life in the shadow of a single mountain, but to Nina it seemed like home. The lack of sunlight was not total, of course. The sky and the surrounding lands provided enough ambient light to keep plants alive and was sufficient to read by. The air was warm, but not hot. It was always breezy, especially at the borders where the heat of the desert perpetually met the wetter, cooler air of the shadowlands. There were updrafts and downdrafts. Frequently, swirls of sparkling dust formed dust-devils to wander and dance over the landscape.

As she walked into deepening shadow, the plants swiftly changed in nature. She left behind scrubby, spiky growths such as witch-wort and skitterweed. The interior was lush with first grasses then full-fledged trees. Earthly palms ruled much of the landscape, being well-suited to the steamy heat this close to Sunside. Deeper still in the shadowlands, the growth became pervasive and the palms gave way to true jungle trees such as bezzel, korkholz and huge, hoary mangroves.

The central region was less stormy and more suitable to farming. Nina reached the first huddled village after an hour’s walk through the forest. The town was named Brienz, and squatted at the edge of a still, glassy lake. She followed a path along the rocky shoreline toward town. The lake itself teemed with fish. Unlike earthly aquatic creatures, the fish on Ignis Glace were more intelligent, interactive creatures. As she passed the lake, schools of them poked their bulbous eyes above the surface to observe her. Some varieties cooed at her in greeting. On a better day, Nina might have waved back at them. Today, her brother had died and she wasn’t in the most pleasant of moods. She tossed a small stone in the midst of the watching fish. They hooted in alarm and darted away to the cool depths of their watery home, where they no doubt huddled in fear.

Brienz had ragged steel walls, varying in height from ten feet to thirty. The rivets ran with rust stains down the metal sides and cameras followed her progress as she approached. Before she’d come closer than a hundred yards, the town watchman peeped over the top of the wall and called for her identify herself.

Once the villagers were certain who she was, they gathered around to walk with her. They wailed at the news her brother was dead and embraced her. Nina knew their grief was genuine. She and her twin were popular with the common folk—unlike her mother.

Nina was offered a cart, which she refused. She did take a mount, however, an old model which squeaked, shivered and farted fumes as she rode upon it. She did not complain, knowing it was the best the villagers could provide. She promised to return it, and rode the beastly thing all the way upslope to the castle.

This final leg of the journey filled her with a growing sense of dread. Her mother must have heard by now of her brother’s death. It was no secret among the folk of Droad fief that Leon was her favorite and that Nina was despised. Nina had never understood her mother’s irritation with her. She’d done her best since puberty to avoid the witch, a feat she found was easily done. Mother seemed content to stay at Droad House forever while Nina preferred to roam the borderlands in search of what adventure there was to be had.

Droad House, once a simple affair, was now clad in walls of dark stone. The castle looked far better than Brienz with its rusty metal defenses, but it was also less inviting. Squatting at the top of the slope in the center of the deepest mountain shadows, the light here was forever muted, and the air was forever cool and wet. Birds sat quietly along the crenulated wall-tops, watching her with curiosity. The much noisier fish in the moat cooed or growled up at her as she crossed the drawbridge, depending on their dispositions.

It had been months since she’d dared walk through these gates. As she passed the stone gatehouse, she noted the smooth surfaces looked blue in the dim light, rather than gray. The waters of the moat were likewise inky-black and utterly still, except for the burbling fish. They poked their heads up to sniff for her scent and filled the air with new odd cries when the recognized her.

Inside the gatehouse, the human retainers were nowhere to be seen. There were only perrupters here, one on each side. They were armed as usual, with a cannon and a single gripper free to grab a peasant’s throat or the power-sword that was strapped to their midsections. The mechs made no attempt to greet her. Olivia Droad had ordered them to stay quiet, saying she found their silence preferable to false human voices. Nina found them much more threatening when they did not speak. Perhaps that was her mother’s true intent.

As Nina passed to the inner keep, the gates closed behind her with a rattle of chain-drives and squealing metal. She glanced back in surprise. She could not recall the last time she’d seen the drawbridge pulled up and the gates closed.

Her mother waited for her, sitting stiffly on her throne of reptile skins. She said nothing as Nina approached, but instead stared with burning dark eyes. There was little light in this place, only the flicker of electric wall-torches in the four corners served to illuminate it.