Toy Wars (28 page)

After another sleep,
I realized
my concerns
about
sunlight had not been paranoia.

“I don’t know about you, my friend, but my batteries are beginning to lose charge. What would you say to dropping our travel time to eight hours?
...
As I thought…a capital idea.”

We
did have a
choice.
We could have traveled two days in three or we could opt to only travel eight of the twelve hours available to us each night.
I chose the latter.
I never really wanted to stay in one place any longer than necessary.
Too many things could jump out at you when you least expected it.
I brushed my paw against my lower leg
,
remembering that
even biologics
that
seem harmless could be as dangerous
as
a loaded gun pointed at your head.

Even slowed as we were
,
it wasn’t the worst.
Huge cloudbanks
continued to break
free from the main mass and sp
i
n out to torture the weather of other regions.
The vapor would eventually fall out in other places as rain as soon as the concentration was high enough, or the air got cold enough.
Because of the heat of this planet, the clouds drifted for great distances, blotting out the sun as they traveled.
It made for nights where Sancho and I couldn’t travel at all for the daylight charge hadn’t
sufficed
.

During the third such night
we
sat
as I discussed
our progress.
Boredom during these times provided our most significant problem. But tonight wouldn’t be one of those.

“I
think we have another three weeks or so before we will be close to the next
F
actory. It
’
ll probably take another
—
”

The granddad of all basilisks,
12
meters long and nearly
3
high at the shoulder
,
wriggled
over a dune
20
meters away
with a quickness
that
belied its bulk.

“Ferweet!” Sancho trumpeted as he bolted.
I didn’t have Sancho’s ignorance. I
knew I couldn’t outrun this beast.
Unfortunately
,
I didn’t process the correct action until it was too late.

The basilisk lunged forward
. It b
it sand as I rolled to one side. One of its claws gouged a
furrow in my
fur but didn’t penetrate
. My M16
now
lay
3
meters
on the other side of the creature
.

The reptile turned toward me and
pounced
again.
S
till
lying
down
,
I had only one choice. I rolled the other direction,
even farther
away from my weapon.
At
20
meters, with the fastest biologic I’d ever seen in between, the assault weapon might as well
have
been at the bottom of the ocean.

I didn’t
recover from my roll in time to
react
fully
to the next
attack. In
stead of ending up in the creature’s maw, it butted me
in the chest
with its horn, tossing me
5
meters.
Several acceleration sensors sent priority interrupts.
Ignoring
any
potential damage I’d taken, I
took the advantage by
scrambl
ing
to my feet.

The basilisk turned rapidly again and charged. This time I would act rather than react.
Time dilated now so that every millisecond seemed weeks long.

I could watch the flow of its muscles in the wriggling gait it used so effectively. Not a single spec of sand or dirt marred the aged skin except around its drooling muzzle. Shark-like rectangular teeth framed its open maw
, an opening large enough to fit several teddies
.

As
its hot breath
closed enough to
ruffle my fur
, I
vaulted
straight up. The lizard’s forward momentum carried me
over its horn
, my
crotch clear
ing
the shining peak with only 6 centimeters
’
clearance. The massive force of the creature’s jaws closed on air.
Landing on the reptile’s back
in a crouch,
I could feel the coarse
skin
under my pads
. Without pausing I bolted down its length.

Unhappy with its loss of prey, the lizard thrashed first one way and then the other
.
I fought
to maintain my balance
. At the end of its torso I leaped.
The creature rolled
onto its back at just the same moment.
My left foot twisted badly beneath me as it landed on the
ground
.

No time to worry about minor damage. I turned off all my safeties and ran at emergency speed.

The basilisk rolled back onto its six legs and turned around
within a cloud of crimson dust. Like lighting it shot out at me.
In spite of its speed, my processor assured me I’d reach my weapon fifty-six milliseconds before
the
basilisk could reach me. Scant margins didn’t stop my overheating hydraulics from trying to pump faster.

I executed a running scoop
of the assault rifle. I
didn’t bother wasting
any of my 5.56
-
millimeter
ammunition
on it
by
even flipping off the safety.

As the saw-like teeth closed in on me, I bounced up enough to put my feet on the creature’s snout and pushed. This sent me flying through the air, just in front of the bear-trap mouth. Fumbling just a moment for the swit
ch, I turned on the untested shock-prod. As I landed, I let the creature
’
s own movement shove the entire thing, my arms and shoulders included, down its own gullet.

The creature executed one bone-crushing body convulsion as it slid to a halt. With my arms still well inside, I stopped as well, envisioning my arms being snapped off. The mouth never closed, at least not in an organized sheering motion. Then in several seconds of highly animated spasms, the basilisk threw itself about, flailing first to one side and then the other with no coordination before it finally came to a complete rest.

As my processor slowed down
and time came to its correct speed, I withdrew my limbs. I inspected them in disbelief as they remained intact.
Tremors ran through all of my hydraulics. It took several seconds to bring them under control enough to stand. As I did, a puff of
earth
shook from my
bright red
–
coated
fur.
I
made
a half-hearted attempt to dust myself off.

With a good deal of
righteous
indignation I tore the beast’s barrel
-
thick horn from its corpse.
I envisioned a chest plate like that Don Quixote wore in the illustrations by de
Cervantes in his original works, but how I would carry such a burden I couldn’t process.

Stabbing the body with my knife or even bludgeoning it with the butt of my M16 and the body reformed, e
ven after
its
death
.
I felt that nothing short of a grenade in the gullet would stop the beast and I had my doubts about that.
Maybe it
s
mercury-based
chemistry allowed it to take on some of the silver metal’s properties
?
I already had a very effective method to dispose of it, so there was no reason to worry.
I’m not a scientist.
The body b
egan to decompose and dissolve even as I watched.

It seemed such a waste.

Searcher

Most of my injuries were low priority, not even worth spending processing power on. In the fight with this basilisk I’d once again lost a small amount of motive power. My ankle, while sustaining only minor damage, would slow my travel speed by
8
percent.
Time was not on my side as I had a Factory to
find
and my errant squire
to chase.
All of this before I could even hope to go to the aid of my fair Dulcenia
…
I mean Six.

While Sancho’s departure probably had been the wise thing for him to do, it left me in a lurch. I couldn’t abandon my friend, but I couldn’t exactly waste time on him either. All of this would be more than useless if I
arrive
d
too late to help Six.

Putting it off never got anything done.
I dropped the basilisk horn on the grayed out portion of the sand where the body had once laid.
With a quiet prayer to the Humans, I set off after my charge.

It pleased me that once again, through dumb luck, Sancho’s path of flight took him only
8
degrees off my current planned course.

“I’ll tear
his
batteries out, one by one,” I muttered under my breath after th
ree days of following his obvious tracks
.
“I’m already
16.2
kilometers off course and I still haven’t found him.
”

“I’m going to deactivate him. Humans strike me down if I won’t.
Maybe after I short out his main bus bar.”

As much as I cursed him, I couldn’t leave him to his fate. I created him and I was responsible.
Every night I’d put up a
l
ocal
a
rea
n
et and try to capture him by a command. Night after night it failed.

A week later I cursed him even more as I traveled into the foothills. His tracks became harder to follow on the broken stone ground. At one point the imprints stopped entirely over a solid granite
slab 156.3 meters across. It took three hours on the other side to pick up his trail again. Had his course deviated significantly over the rock, I’d have never found
it
.

I feared a rainstorm. The pounding of mercury on the soil would wash away all sign of his movements. Again
,
dumb luck seemed to serve us as eight more frustrating days later
my
LAN
caught his
IFF
beacon.

“I’m coming for you, Sancho. Better protect your deactivation switch!” The track took me to the base of a 706
-
meter cliff sheered ominously over
a
vertical
rock
.
In the dark shadow of that structure, Sancho leaned against the rock, motionless.

“You stupid ghit! You need sunlight, n
ot the protection of some rocks. Get out here now.
”

Sancho remained still.

“We don’t have time for this. Come here!”

Sancho didn’t respond.

With some trepidation, I moved under the ponderous weight of the stone. One eye watched above me and the other watched Sancho’s catatonic form. From the outside he didn’t look any the worse for wear.

“You better be deactivated, you pathetic pachyderm, or you will be!” Even as I
neared
I couldn’t hear his hydraulic pump.
This worried me. If he fully lost all power
,
his
sump would have stopped processing fluid and he would
have nothing more than
a brain
case full of black goo.

Recklessly
,
I rushed in the rest of the way and tore open his access panel. While at dangerously low levels, his batteries still kept his sump and processor active.

I took one of the spare batteries
out of
my backpack and made an emergency swap with one of his.
They weren’t the same
physical
size, but I knew the voltages were compatible.
It would give him enough power until I could get him charged.
He looked silly with the black battery dangling out of one ear, but function vastly outweighed form in this case.

It took me the rest of the
night
to drag his heavy carcass out of the cave.
I think I overstressed every one of my joints hauling him over the rocks and sand.
I got him clear of the
overhang
just as the morning sun began to warm the crimson sands.
I collapsed right next to my patient.
It had been a close thing, I knew.
Had it taken even another few hours for me to find him, or if I hadn’t been carrying spare batteries
, Sancho might not have survived.

I was glad, and somehow warmed, that I had found him in time.
I was beginning to realize just how much I cared for the addled critter.
And while he never got any more intelligent, nor did he ever talk, he became symbiotic.
I trusted his footing, when there was any doubt, more than my own.
But why
he took
refuge under an overhang
, I hadn’t a clue.
I would have to make it clear that he was only to sleep in the sun.

That night Sancho acted normal again
. He sat
up
pointing toward our objective, now a full
61
kilometers
from where we should be had there been no detour
.

“Not tonight, Sancho. We need to charge you up. Your design will hold about three days
’
worth of charge.”

Sancho flopped back to the ground.

“O
K
. There are a couple of rules we need to discuss.

“First, no matter what, you should stop in the sun. We don’t have a net concentrator we can suck power from.

“Second,
if we ever get separated again, travel no more t
han one day before you stop. Stay stopped for at least one week. If I don’t show up, come looking for me. If you can’t find me within a week, you are on your own.”

I never knew if Sancho actually understood the things I told him. At least I said it. If he didn’t follow the instructions
,
I knew I could leave him as damaged property.

Sancho proved over the next few weeks that even without olfactory senses he could almost smell a basilisk
—
we
avoided four of the aggressive predators
. I don’t know whether we’d stumbled upon
a breeding ground of the creatures or they were just thick on the ground. In three of the cases Sancho just pulled me bodily to the ground, effectively hiding behind a dune. Only catching a glimpse of the creature in the distance as Sancho released me let me know what we had been up against.

At t
he fourth basilisk incident
,
Sancho trumpeted a warning. We were able to scramble up on top of a rock spire
,
which forced the creature to us. A quick jab with my basilisk prod finished it off. We barely broke stride.

We surmounted
physical challenges aplenty
—
like the time we negotiated another river, me being drug along the surface by Sancho’s walking steadily along the bottom
,
or the cliff I climbed
while
I lifted Sancho with a block and tackle
,
or an even more powerful rainstorm than the last where we sat huddled under a convenient slab of slate lying on top of a large boulder giving us shelter.

All of these and more could be
surmounted with a bit of elephant power or something called elbow grease, which didn’t process as grease wasn’t used in the elbow joint.
But then that brought up another problem
—
my
lube needed changing.

The one little spit and dribble I
’d
got from that
Nurse Nan
about ten lifetimes ago
was long gone
,
and I
worried over the state of all my fluids. Only joint lubricant, of all my solutions, maintained a satisfactory rating. I’d shut off the critical interrupts and alarms long ago. I could only imagine the cumulative damage. So desperate was I that I wondered about rending some of the local fauna over a fire to collect their fats.
If pressed, I might try it but I didn’t relish the thought.
We kept moving.
Maybe we would get lucky.

On the
205th
day since the inception of my journey, the day commemorating the second anniversary of my activation,
Sancho stumbled over a train track half buried in the sand.

“So, are we there yet?”