Toy Wars (19 page)

Speaking of that biologic, I found it lying dead just over the rise.
Apparently my attack mortally wounded it.
I assumed it couldn’t have been dead long as it lay sprawled, its bodily form beginning to dissolve and spread out.
I watched as
over the space of just a few minutes it turned
into a huge puddle of gray-green
-
colored liquid.
I probed it with my electric wires, but received no response.
It didn’t move.
I moved on.

All of these machinations and specimens had
one other positive effect
—
they
kept me from thinking about anything but the task at hand.
These trials kept the visions of units torn asunder by violence in the tunnel from dancing before my eyes.
My processor for once was mercifully clear and focused on something else.
Th
ose dead units failed to leave me completely.
As soon as my sump had cleared the problem before it, they came back with a vengeance.

I walked on.
My only excitement over the next days was avoiding random patrols of animals.
Funny
,
I still thought of them as animals, but I knew, deep inside my middle, that they were like me.
I just had to prove it.
At first the patrols weren’t often, but they increased in intensity as I got closer to where I believed my goal to be.

On the seventh day, my sensors told me it was time to shut down.
Minor repairs and preventative maintenance was needed to a wide number of systems.
I found a small hillock with a natural
horizontal
depression, one not quite deep enough to be called a cave, and settled down for sleep.

T
he instant I turned off my cognitive functions, a wailing sound filled me.
The m
ournful cry
issued
from a group of units moving toward me from the horizon of a hellishly blue wavering world.
All the units
moved with massive damage with
limbs blown off, faces burned beyond recognition,
and in one case
a head dragging behind only by wires trailing out of the body.
Elephants with eyes removed, giraffes with gaping holes in their necks,
T
eddy
B
ears without arms,
Tommy Tank
s with no turrets, even a treadless and bladeless tractor march
ed
ominously toward me
—
all of them chanting a single word, “Traitor.”

“Traitor,” they repeated as they circled me.
For some reason I sat still,
frozen in place and
helpless even to move.

“Traitor.”

“Traitor.”

“Traitor.”

I started upright out of sleep, hitting my head on
my improvised
shelter’s overhang.
My
hydraulic pump
s ran
150
percent
rated speed and internal voltages were all in the danger
-
over
-
voltage
zones.
It took a few seconds to moderate my internal workings and realize
no immediate crisis loomed. No
damaged units stalked me claiming retribution for a failure on my part.
What had I really done to my own family?
I returned to rest state before I could finish the thought.

Morning arrived. Mentally
,
I seemed slow and groggy, not the way I usually felt after a rest. I’d managed to avoid any further nightmares of damaged, accusative units. I wondered just how far away those visions were. They couldn’t be all that far away if I kept thinking them.
Just as no two pieces of matter can occupy the same space, nor c
ould
two thoughts roll through my conscious at the same time, so I decided to keep my processor busy.

I started treating the trip as a scouting expedition.
This kept me busy cataloguing terrain, potential enemy locations, hostile fauna (biologic and unit) and planning train routes.
It worked, keeping my own personal demons at bay, or at least to tolerable limits.

By the eighteenth day after my attack I
dodged
at least one patrol a day.
It was starting to wear thin.
Also I realized I
needed to
move even farther into the net territory
in spite of the increased risks
.
All the concentrators now point
ed
deeper
into the locus of control
.
Skirting the edge would not take me any closer and very well could take me farther away.

If I used Six’s disposition as a referent, a relatively solid shell of units
patrolled
the outer boundary of Six’s
controlled space.
On
ce inside that
,
the concentration of units per square kilometer dropped to a small fraction of
one
.

I think many would call the emo
tion
that
raced through me at t
he thought of plunging farther into enemy territory, fear.
I did not want to go.
I knew I was risking my life on nothing more than a guess, but I had already sacrificed the lives of my brethren on this guess.
I couldn’t do them the disservice of not risking my own
fur
as well.
Even if I could just turn around and go home,
and
be haunted by wrecked and ravaged units, it would only be to fight a losing war
. I’d fight as the overwhelming number of animals overran Six
and slaughter
ed
us to the very last unit.
“No
,
thank you,” I said aloud in disgust at the very thought.
W
ith resolution
,
I turned toward the locus I’d mentally plotted for the potentially mythical
F
actory.

No more than thirty minute
s
later
,
I saw the tall, lanky form of a spider towering
6
meters above the
ground
. I dropped to the earth and squirmed up behind a sizable gray rock to hide my plump form.
In the open area among the spider’s long, black legs traveled
a squad of Tommy Tanks and a single giraffe
. Th
ei
r patrol kicked up quite a cloud of dust in that flat field. In the distance, some
5
or
6
kilometers behind
,
I could make out another similar cloud
. With the long view the spider’s height gave it
,
I didn’t think I
could
sprint across between groups without being seen and destroyed by the combined firepower of one of those patrols.

I knew no amount of walking would take me beyond them
;
instead
,
that course would
just walk me around the entire perimeter of
lands these animals controlled. This had been what I’d done to this point. How to penetrate the cordon? As my sump and processor rolled over possible solutions my gaze happened upon a mauve palmetto. Electrons fired in my processor.

Well after the first group passed, but before the second arrived, I crawled 63 meters over to the plant and pulled out several of its fans of sword-like leaves. Crawling back
,
I could sense that this would work. I
wove the
fans and even individual
leaves
into
my fur. I unstoppered one of my hydraulic lines
just enough to
dribble
a tiny
amount of fluid into the dry earth. The brick red mud I scrubbed deeply into my hide
in random blotches
. Camouflage had worked for me once in the past. I decided to put it to the test again.

Looking up
,
I watched the second patrol creep by and
saw
the dust rising from a third off in the distance.
Timing my
skirmish
carefully, I crawled forward with all the speed of a
rock crab
until the new patrol got within a kilometer.
My position was
well on this side of the imaginary line the patrols followed. In fact
,
I
could see a rather significant impression in the soil where the patrols had worn it down. Assuming I
was not
discovered
,
my next move would put me just about the same distance on the other side of the line.

I lay completely motionless as they approached. My voltage ramped just a tiny bit as one of the tanks rolled out of formation in my direction. Nothing to see here, I thought loudly. It approached quickly. I’m just a bush, blast it all! I shut down everything in my body that moved except my sump. From the corner of my eye I followed its approach. Its two coaxially mounted guns trained on me.
Those t
wo weapons could turn me into nothing more than a pile of rusting scrap faster than I could’ve turned back on my servos.

While everything physical in my body wouldn’t twitch, that didn’t stop my voltages from climbing.
Just then I felt the warmth of the tank’s
scanning laser play across my
prostrate body. Part of me waited for the bullets to explode my sump, but instead the laser snapped off. The tank turned around and trundled back to his fellows. I really
was
a bush.
I didn’t even dare to turn my hydraulics back on for at least another five minutes.

As the inquisitive tank reached two kilometers farther along, I sprinted across the intervening distance and the patrol line. The 7 centimeter depression worn into the earth by uncountable feet delineated the patrol line. At overload speed I made it to a hiding place on the other side.
The next patrol didn’t even send anyone out to check on me, even if I was on the other side of their line of travel. Just a
fter those dwindled into the distance
I
scrambled
in
to
a dry wash, hidd
en from the casual sight of any further patrols. I plucked the fronds and leaves from my fur but no amount of scrubbing seemed to remove the red b
lemishes. No matter, I thought. It helped to keep me invisible to a casual observer.

The travel returned to monotony
. I spotted no more patrols. While dull, the travel som
ehow at the same time was fascinating.
Hours and sometimes days rolled by with the same mundane reds and pinks.
Nothing broke the landscape with any note other than thorn grass or an unnoteworthy,
1
kilogram or less
,
biologic.
But each time, when I had just about had my fill of the emptiness something
forced me to stop and gape anew.

In one valley I found a literal cloud of thousands of 1
-
m
illimeter
-
long white, worm-like biologics, each suspended beneath its own palm-sized golden bladder of air and carried before the stiff breeze.
The swarm of yellow itself commanded attention, like an immense exclamation point.
The pale fog slowly dispersed as the tiny balloons broke at the slightest touch, sending its occupant spilling toward the ground, where it burrowed immediately upon landing.
A very few of these balloonists were carried before the wind as far as I could follow them with my eyes.
Such beauty.

Days later, I stopped at the top of a rather low butte to take in the terrain beyond.
On a constant basis now, however, I worried about coming into contact with animals.
Would my disguise hold
or even that of using the CCT
?
I only had one way to find out, and that was risky.
But
even that thought became
m
oot
as I looked out over the valley below.
I was on the wrong side of a river, and not just any river.
Eight meters below me gushed an apparently unfordable
42
-
meter
-
wide band of unstoppable
mercury
.
This juggernaut of fluid
metal
seemed to meld into the horizons in both directions and lay directly in my path with neither a train bridge, rocks, nor fallen trees to span the silver expanse.