The Cyber Chronicles VI - Warrior Breed (6 page)

"Could the
cyber communicate with the war bot?" Tassin asked.

"I doubt it,
since it's alien."

"But it
might," Tarl added, "if it uses similar basic principles, and the
language of mathematics is universal."

"War bots
aren't big on communicating with their targets."

"But it's
alien, so we don't know how it will react."

Sabre turned
away. "Yeah, well, it's all very well hypothesising, but we should
get the pods together before dark."

Tarl nodded
and picked up the pole while Sabre walked to the far side of the
pod and rolled it around the tree. Between them, they freed it from
the trees and pushed it over to Sabre and Tassin's pod, by which
time dusk had fallen. Tarl anchored his pod, and Sabre climbed in
to scan Kernan, looking grim when he emerged.

"He's got a
skull fracture, seven broken ribs and a broken arm."

Tarl grunted,
frowning. "I didn't know about the skull fracture."

"He's got
internal injuries as well, and a fever of a hundred and two."

"I've given
him antibiotics."

"Then only
time will tell."

Tarl nodded.
"Let's eat, I'm starved. We should rest here until you're feeling
better, then investigate the ship."

"Do you have
any laser power packs?"

"Three."

"Good."

Tassin climbed
into the pod and handed out ration packs, then perched in the
hatchway while they ate. After several minutes, she asked, "Won't
you be able to defeat this war bot with your lasers, Sabre?"

"That depends
on its construction and armour. From the scans I got when it went
past, it appears that all its vital systems are housed in its
torso, which is pretty standard, and that's heavily armoured. The
head seems to contain some peripheral systems, but I don't know how
important they are. That's not so heavily armoured, so logic
dictates that they're not vital systems.

"It ignored
us, which could mean that if it's got scanners, they can't
penetrate metal, or that its hostile response is triggered by
movement, or it only considers anything that approaches its ship to
be a threat. None of that really helps, however, since I'll have to
approach the ship, or whatever it is, on foot.

"Those poles
are about five metres tall, so I can't jump over them in this
gravity, unless I use a pole and vault over, I suppose. But then
I'll be trapped inside unless I can find a way into that thing to
disarm the array."

"There must be
a power conduit of some sort, which you should be able to disrupt
once you're inside," Tarl said.

"Unless it's a
raw feed."

"Yeah."

Tassin was
puzzled. "What's a raw feed?"

"It means
there's no physical conduit, like a cable. The power is transmitted
directly to the posts in a beam."

"Oh." Tassin
chewed her ration bar, her mood glum. "How long do you think it
will be before you feel well enough to have a closer look at
it?"

"A few days,
if I rest and eat a lot of ration bars."

"Then you
should do that. We've got to get off this world." She pulled a wry
face. "Sorry to make you feel like equipment, but you're our only
hope."

He nodded. "I
know. It's okay."

Tarl opened
his mouth, but then closed it again, shook his head and
chuckled.

Sabre shot him
a frown. “What?”

“
Nothing.”

“
I know it’s not nothing, so spit it out.”

Tarl shrugged.
“It’s just that when I ask you how you feel, you get offended
because you think I’m treating you like equipment, but it’s okay
when Tassin does it.”

“
She apologised.”

“
Right. Okay.” Tarl’s eyes sparkled.

Chapter Four

Sabre walked
towards the pillars, studying the sleek ovoid beyond them. In the
past five days, his bio-status had risen to eighty-four per cent,
thanks to a lot of food and sleep. This close, the ovoid did not
look so silver. It had an oily sheen to it, tinges of green and
gold shifting along its length as his viewpoint changed. It also
appeared to be featureless, lacking even the hair-fine lines that
usually indicated hatches or gun ports. The cyber flashed a
warning, and he stopped, glancing inwards at its information. It
was receiving a stream of data from the ovoid, a meaningless jumble
of alien characters, which it tried to decipher.

The data burst
lasted five seconds, and he pondered his options while the cyber
worked on the alien characters. He could ask the cyber to send
something back in machine code, which the ovoid might be able to
decipher, or he could ask it to send the same information back in
the hope that it was a friendly greeting of some sort. Either
choice was fraught with pitfalls, and he decided to try the
former.

To lessen the
possibility of being mistaken for a threat, he folded his legs and
sat down. The cyber transmitted a greeting, and he waited for a
response. After a pause, the ovoid seemed to flex, ripples running
along its length. It transmitted another burst of alien language,
and the cyber responded with a reply in a different form of machine
code, binary. A few more moments of silence fell, then the ovoid
rippled again, and turned black.

Sabre stared
at it in amazement. Not only had it changed colour, which was
impossible for a metal, it had become impenetrable to the cyber's
scanners, and the only substance that could do that was stone.
Somehow, it had detected the imperceptible pulses of accelerated
particle emissions the brow band broadcast in faster than light
sweeps, which was supposed to be impossible, and it had changed the
atomic structure of its skin, which was impossible. Whatever he was
dealing with, it was highly advanced and intelligent. He sat still,
waiting for it to do something else.

The cyber
worked on the alien language, but it did not seem to be making any
progress. A breeze stirred the hair-like plant growth that served
as grass, and a cloud passed over one of the suns. Sabre picked up
a pebble and hurled it between the posts. He frowned, pondering.
Could the uprights be inactive? Disarmed or defunct? Perhaps they
were not even a defensive array, but only sensors. Maybe it took
something larger than a pebble to trigger them, or they only
reacted to a biological intrusion. Last but not least, it was
possible that whatever was trying to communicate with him was
watching him, and would trigger the posts itself.

There was no
way to tell if the pillars' weapons struck outwards or between each
other. The scanners told him that they were filled with complex
mechanisms under a thin metal skin, with no sign of emitters of any
kind. There was also no way to tell if they were lethal to him, and
he had only his cyber defences, no armour. The ovoid appeared to be
an intelligent machine, and perhaps it would allow one of its kind
to approach it, if it perceived the cyber to be one such. Did it
possess curiosity? The cyber had detected no transmissions that
could have been an attempt to communicate with anyone other than
himself, which made him wonder if its masters were dead, or if,
indeed, it had masters. What was it doing here? Was it damaged?

Standing up,
Sabre approached the nearest pole, which gleamed silver. He ran his
fingers down its mirror-smooth surface. It hummed softly, and he
slid his hand slowly around it. A sheet of blue light shot from the
pole nearest it in a wall of brilliance, and he snatched his hand
away, receiving a tingling jolt in his fingers that made him
retreat, rubbing his hand. His fingers were reddened and
singed.

The cyber's
information scrolled in his mind, and he read it. The blue light
was super-charged plasma, instantly lethal if it hit a large
portion of a human body, and considerably damaging to him. He might
survive two strikes. The pole beside him had absorbed the plasma
and now hummed more loudly, and he surmised that it was not
discharged unless it struck a target, then some would be lost. The
power circulated amongst the poles, moving to intercept any attempt
to cross the barrier. That could mean that the power was finite,
and the ship could not recharge the array unless it somehow drew
them back into itself. How had they been deployed if the ship had
no crew?

Sabre walked
along the line of poles, noting the piles of bones between some of
them. They appeared to be the skeletons of the quadruped beasts,
which must have wandered between the deadly posts while grazing, or
had been drawn to the ship by curiosity. He stopped beside a pole
and pushed on it to test its strength, finding it solid. Gazing at
the ship again, he wondered if he would be able to enter it if he
could get inside the array. Lasers were not ideal for burning
through metal, however, and he only had five power packs, besides
which, a ship's hull was always incredibly tough. If it was a ship,
which remained debateable. If it was not, he was wasting his
time.

A distant
thudding made him glance around. A glint of metal marked the
approach of the war bot, which his triggering the pole had
evidently summoned. It moved with remarkable speed, its gait
rocking, but it lacked the arm swing of a human, a legacy of a time
when men had walked on all fours. Sabre watched it approach,
certain that he could outrun it if necessary. It slowed several
metres away, as if it did not want to frighten him, and stopped as
soon as he took a step back, about two metres away, which was the
limit of his comfort zone when faced with a four-metre tall metal
monstrosity.

A hooting came
from behind and above him, and he turned as two of the flying
creatures landed several metres away. They looked like large grey
birds with round, snouted faces and binocular orange eyes. Sagging
sacks of wrinkled skin hung from their short throats, and their
tail feathers brushed the ground as they stalked closer on thin,
stilt-like legs tipped with cloven hooves. Their wings hung loosely
at their sides, and clawed hands sprouted from the wrist joint.
They studied him with intelligent eyes, glancing past him at the
war bot.

Sabre whipped
around as an ear-piercing screeching came from the bot, plugging
his ears. The sound lasted only a few seconds, then alien data
scrolled through his mind again. He lowered his hands and shook his
ringing head, glaring at the bot. The cyber sorted through the new
data, finding it as unintelligible as that which it had received
from the ovoid. The bot stood immobile, as if waiting for a
response. Sabre considered asking the cyber to send the same
machine code greeting to it that it had sent to the ovoid, but that
seemed pointless since the ovoid had not responded well to it.

The bot made a
sibilant hissing with whispery variations that could have been
alien words. Sabre cocked his head, sorting through the thousands
of alien tongues stored in his brain, but did not find a match. The
grey birds cooed. The bot spoke in a deep, distorted voice, the
alien words hard to discern. It had not finished its sentence when
Sabre recognised it, and his brow wrinkled in a puzzled frown.

"Charil?"
Sabre wondered how it knew an ancient language spoken by rather
unintelligent reptilian aliens found on the distant desert planet
Trilith Two, which had been explored and discarded as useless.
Charil was hard for a human to speak, due to the odd sounds the
reptiles used as words.

"I'm a
friend," Sabre said in Charil, his words a little mispronounced,
but understandable. The hardest sounds to make were the whirring
noises that Dromalins made through their gill slits. Sabre repeated
the sentence in the most common human tongue, which he and Tassin
used. The bot's head swivelled towards the ship, then turned to him
again.

"Are you
human, or machine?" it asked in perfect Anglo.

"Both. Is your
companion a ship?"

"She is Asys.
I am Pog."

Sabre's brows
rose at its use of the first person when referring to itself. "Is
she hurt?"

"Tired."

"How long has
she been here?"

"One thousand
three hundred and seventy-five revolutions of this planet around
its suns. How did you get here?"

"My ship blew
up. Can she leave this planet?"

"No. She is
not strong enough, and this system is inside a spacial distortion.
The only way out is the way we all came in, but it is impossible to
navigate."

Sabre glanced
at the ship. "Why is she weak?"

"There's no
food for her here."

"What does she
eat?"

"Aprilan
crystals."

"Are you and
she the only ones on this planet?"

"Yes. Are you
alone?"

"No. Where are
you from?"

The bot turned
its head towards the ship again, undoubtedly receiving information
from it, but on a frequency the cyber was unable to find, for the
moment. "I was born here," Pog said, "but Asys comes from far away.
She is my mother. She was searching for a mate when she was
captured."

"What is
she?"

"There is no
word for her species in your tongue."

"How do you
know my tongue?"

"Asys has
studied many species. But you are different from others of your
kind. You are more like us."

Sabre nodded.
"Will she speak to me?"

"She has no
voice, and you cannot speak her tongue."

"Will she
teach me?"

"If you have
sufficient processing capacity." A beam of red light shot from the
war bot's head and swept over Sabre, accompanied by a deep
vibrating hum. The cyber reacted instantly, flared electric blue
and emitted an infrasound jamming signal, which was used to prevent
remote access to its systems. The red beam vanished, and the bot
rocked back.

Sabre grimaced
and rubbed his ears, frowning. "Don't try to scan me."