Mech 3: The Empress (2 page)

By the third day, the mech had come to understand he’d been abandoned. He had not thought his despair at awakening to find himself clothed in a metal body and consigned to a thoughtless life of servitude could be so quickly trumped by a new, worse fate—but it had. He realized that he was going to lie here indefinitely, slowly going mad.

Mechs did not die easily, but they did require some sustenance. In his case, as he was a rugged model designed for labor in a harsh landscape, he was equipped with a fusion core generator that would keep his metal body operating for decades. The flesh that was his mind, however, required more than electricity. It required a source of glucose. Theoretically, a mech
could
starve to death after a long enough period. He did not know how long it would take, but it would take a very long time, of that he was sure.

Unfortunately, he didn’t even have starvation to look forward to. He had been given a drip-line, which ran from the instrumentation in the ceiling to his chassis. It was feeding him the same boring, tasteless clear liquid in measured, hourly amounts. He didn’t know how big the storage tanks were, but it was very likely he was going to spend a very long time lying here on this table.

It was not the hours or the days that the mech on the metal table feared, however. It was the
ten-days
, which consisted of ten, ten-hour days, and the
months
, which on this world were each ten ten-days long. The years on Ignis Glace were the only measurement of time that corresponded to a celestial event: the circling of the planet around its dim red star. It did so at a sedate pace, taking seventy-nine Earth years to do so. Years were made up of a hundred months. Therefore, it was not the hours or days that the captive feared. It was the months—and the terrifyingly long years.

He tried to sleep, but there were no nights, and the orb-shields over his optic orbs did not shut out all the light. Besides, mechs didn’t need sleep often. Normally, they didn’t need to dream the way humans did. That part of their psyche was routinely deleted as part of the process of creating them. In his case, however, he had not undergone that final step. He found himself dozing and dreaming.

He tried to weep, but only strange warbling sounds came from his speakers. His orbs were not structured to produce tears.

#

After the seventh day had passed he grew desperate. Whoever was running this place, they’d forgotten about him at the very least. He had tried to break his bonds, and failed despite many raging attempts.

He had a new thought at the end of the eighth, long day. If he could not free himself or get anyone’s attention, perhaps terminating his own life was for the best. At least there would be an ending to this boring existence. He developed a plan, and carefully began to execute it.

The drip-line that led down to his chassis could be touched by that portion of his metal anatomy that mostly closely resembled a chin. It was the bottom of his head section, to be precise, where his head met the neck. By extending this corner of metal to its fullest, he was able to brush the drip-line, and with careful contortions of his body, he managed to get the tube to catch there.

Time and time again, as the more long days passed by, he worked to hook the drip-line with his chin and sever it. Always, it slipped away. Being made of plastic, however, it eventually lengthened, allowing him to catch it more firmly. When he finally did so—he tore it loose.

He allowed his head to sag back down onto the table again, and an odd sound came from his speakers. He was not sure if he was laughing or crying.

Yellow, oily glucose dribbled onto his casing, but he ignored it, unconcerned. Either an alarm would be sent to an operator who might remember the forgotten soul in this chamber—or no one would come, and he would eventually starve to death. Either way, an eventual end to his torment was assured.

He’d finally gotten his grippers onto this tiny corner of his own fate, and he’d ripped it loose on his own terms. He’d altered his destiny significantly, turning onto a course of his own devising. Somehow, this tiny victory was immensely satisfying.

#

Two days later the glucose finally ran out. It had dried into a sticky puddle that coated his chestplate, the table, and the dark metal grid that formed the floor below. No one had ever come to check on the ruptured line. The mech on the table did not care, however. He’d won, as far as he was concerned. He’d ended his miserable existence. All he had to do was wait it out. He hoped fervently that whatever junior operator was responsible for this situation would have to explain the mess on the table at some point. The operator would probably receive nothing more than a reprimand, but at least it was something. With luck, the man in charge would curse this crazy mech that had drained an entire tank of feed to starve itself.

During this hours-long period of self-satisfaction, a new thought slowly formed. The mech came to wonder if he could apply the same approach he’d used with the drip-line to another endeavor. Brittle substances tended to break when flexed repeatedly—perhaps he could attempt a new depredation to further inconvenience his thoughtless masters. Like an angry abandoned pet that soils a fine carpet to avenge itself, he set about to do exactly that.

He could not break his bonds, of that he was certain. They’d been built to hold a mech in place, and they were successful in this regard. However, damaging the bonds themselves was not his goal.

He decided to break his own arm. He considered each in turn, and selected the right arm in the end. The left seemed more important to him somehow—possibly, he’d been born left-handed in his prior life. He broke his right by flexing it to its extremes, back and forth, through countless repetitions. Eventually, the temperature gauges from the arm structure signaled him they were hot with friction. He ignored the alarms, continuing the process.

It took hours, but eventually, as a second sandstorm in as many ten-days raged outside, the arm broke. Cackling and exulting, the mech raised his right stump up and flapped it in front of his face. A thick, gray spring spiraled up from the square struts like a finger. This struck him as amusing.

When he’d tired of pointless celebration, he suddenly realized he was light-headed. He supposed his internal reservoirs of glucose and oils must be running very low, and perhaps he’d begun to starve. It seemed a pity not to enjoy this new triumph, so he used the broken arm to catch the drip-line and push it into his mouth. Perhaps due to tradition, mechs could feed by drinking or masticating sustenance through a mechanical orifice located beneath the sensory equipment—approximately where the human mouth was located. Their chemical stomachs were poor at digesting anything other than liquids, but they could leech out enough sugars to keep the three-pound organic mass of their brains alive fairly easily.

He sucked on the drip-line and found the last driblets of sticky material that came out oddly satisfying. Finished with his first meal in a long time, he turned his head and looked at his other arm. Should he flex it ten thousand times until that one broke, too? It seemed less bold and interesting than it had the first time. Studying his good arm and its working gripper, his orbs fell upon something else.

There was a wing nut on the screw that held down the clamp over his good gripper. He’d never really noticed it before, but now he could see it clearly as he was able to sit up higher with one arm free.

Could the wing nut be reached? He set about trying immediately. Now that his torso could rise up from the table, and with the help of that thick, gray spring, he was able to reach the wing nut. Hope bubbled up within him—real hope, something he hadn’t felt in a ten-day. He tangled the wing nut with the broken spring that protruded from his right stump, winding it around to get a grip on it. Then he pulled.

Slowly, the screw began to creak and twist before pulling loose. He worked at it patiently for another long hour. When he’d managed to free his good arm, he worked the gripper in the air experimentally. He couldn’t believe it. He’d long since given himself up for dead. He’d made his peace with the termination of this life and embraced whatever was to come thereafter days ago.

Now, however, things were very different. For long minutes, he clacked together his single gripper, holding it up to his face to study the motion with trembling orbs. As if coming awake, he set himself into purposeful motion once more. The truth was, he’d left a part of his sanity behind over recent days. He wondered dispassionately if a slice of one’s mind could ever be recovered after such as experience. He supposed he would learn the answer in time.

Bending at the waist, he heard motors whir. They were his own motivators, moving in accordance with his will as a man’s body of flesh responded to a flash of thought. At least his artificial nervous system was hooked up and operating. At his feet, he found the last two clamps. Working with relative ease, he twisted open the locking screws and swung his broad metal feet to the floor.

Mechs built to work on the Sunside were equipped with feet like snowshoes. Each foot was designed with a flat bottom and a sloping top-section, so that they would not sink into the infinite sifting sands, and so that sand accumulating on the tops of their feet would slide away with each step they took. They looked like two, flat-bottomed pyramids of burnished metal.

Wobbling, he took his first step forward. He nearly fell. Getting used to a new body with different sensory input and nerve-transmitters to control motion wasn’t easy. He had no trainer, no one to offer suggestions or punishment with each failure. Still, he progressed rapidly. He was motivated, and found himself exulting in his newfound freedom of motion.

Within an hour he was able to cruise around his cubicle and even jump up onto the table without a qualm. Jumping on the table gave him a rush of excitement. His broad flat steel feet
clanged
with a resounding explosion of sound when he performed the motion. He began making a strange sound that came from his speakers. The sound reminded him of nails spilling from a great height to fall onto a metal floor. The sound, he realized after a time, was his new body’s approximation of laughter.

When he felt comfortable with his systems, he approached the exit. It was a metal affair, built of imposingly heavy struts and plates like a bulkhead in a battleship. He didn’t know if he could open it, and up until now he hadn’t bothered to try. Why ruin the joy of this moment? He’d reasoned that he could easily be trapped here, in this small room. Being imprisoned in this place was certainly better than being strapped to a table, but it was still an unenviable fate.

Outside, the blizzard of super-heated sands continued. He could close his orb-shields, but they were opaque and he would not be able to see. He didn’t have goggles in evidence, and didn’t want to damage his new metal orbs, so he wrapped a dirty red rag onto his head, winding it around several times. He left the cloth thin enough over his orbs to allow some level of vision through the material. As an afterthought, he picked up his broken arm. Perhaps there was a workshop somewhere in this place where he could repair it. That was a thin hope, but somehow he didn’t want to abandon the appendage, even though it was only an artificial one.

He tried the door at last. The keypad didn’t respond, but the emergency valves twisted with the squealing protests of sun-warped metal.

The door opened. An alarming gush of heat, light, wind and most of all,
sand
forced its way inside. Bending forward into the whipping blasts and gusts, feeling his way in near blindness, the prisoner at last escaped his prison.

#

Megwit Gaston was the sole indentured operator of Starshine Mining Facility #4. The installation, like many others in the radiation-blasted half of the planet known as Sunside, leeched metals from the sands. The mining complex sat upon a particularly rich vein of fine metals that were oddly refined. Like so many spots on Ignis Glace’s hot side, the metals were close to the surface, and metallurgists suspected they’d been fantastically large structures built by someone in the distant past. Unknown entities had constructed them for unknown purposes, long ago. These speculations were routinely suppressed by the local officials. The Nexus representatives would have been forced to outlaw the lucrative mining contracts, if they’d acknowledged the truth. Any contact with alien technology from the past was forbidden by Nexus Law.

Megwit Gaston had spent a long time working contracts in godforsaken pits like Starshine Mining Facility #4. From his point of view, his life had been mostly wasted, as all he’d managed to do was make some faceless landed nobleman rich.

His great grandfather had come to Ignis Glace with plans of rising to the rank of an earl, or perhaps that of a duke. Such fantasies had ended like those of a thousand others before him: in utter failure. Megwit’s rank was that of an unskilled serf. Like most serfs who were assigned to labor in the grimmest of conditions, his character was predictably surly and self-indulgent. In Megwit’s case, however, these traits had grown extreme.

Sitting in his office with runnels of bluish liquid spirits dribbling down his chin, he became dimly aware of an alarm chime. He tapped at a screen irritably until it went away. He knew it would return eventually, but right now, he couldn’t be bothered. He was far too busy with the consumption of his daily cocktail of alcohol, heavily-laced with caffeine and blur-dust. The concoction wisped with tendrils of blue vapor which drifted in a lazy spiral toward the exhaust vents in the walls.

Megwit sipped the beverage periodically and tried not to think about anything at all. His eyes were puffed red and two-thirds closed. He sipped his beverage each day because few men were capable of gulping such a harsh mixture straight from the thermos. If he’d been strong-stomached enough, however, he’d have guzzled it all right down.

It had been a ten-day or more since Megwit had done any actual work. He’d given up on such niceties after he’d received his termination notice. The company had cheerfully informed him his contract would not be renewed after the close of the season, and once the sandstorms let up sufficiently, his replacement would be shipped out to this hellhole, which was generously referred to in the official termination email as ‘the operation’.