Toy Wars (33 page)

Time froze.
The cat sprung.
My thumb switched full auto.
A
yellow-
black streak raced in the air.
My finger pulled the trigger.
Several seconds later my M16 opened on the then empty clip.

The leopard
’
s trajectory, modified by the dozen or so 5.56
millimeter
slugs
that
tore open its right side, landed
heavily onto its chest, just short
of Sancho.
Hydraulic fluid gushed across the earth
from the rents in its body
at a tremendous rate.
The beast twitched hard on the ground but couldn’t gain its feet. It rolled onto its side in the growing puddle.

I dropped my M16. I
drew my .45
. I walked up to within
an
arm
’
s reach. I put one slug
into its brain case with a loud report.
No more
motion. No more
cat.

A
fter several moments of silently standing over the dead unit,
m
y
own hydraulic
pump
slowed its racing to something more resembling a normal rate.
My mind also switched from combat speed to something more regular, now interpreting those interrupts my body wished to have dealt with.
I absently scanned the trees in the area, but could not see any additional feline death projectiles.
But the forest was dense enough that there could have been fifty of the great cats within springing distance.
I decided I could do nothing about it anyway, so I went to see
to
my friend
and savior
.

Sancho’s body writhed on the ground
with
massive rends across his chest.
He
pumped vital fluids out across the ground, albeit in a much slower rate than his attacker had.
I deactivated him before I examined his wounds
more closely
.

His entire right side was torn
to
shreds by the beast’s claws.
With
the damage
Sancho’s stronger internal framework
had taken
I could only imagine what the same attack would have done to me.
He was leaking hydraulic fluid across the ground from eight or nine different holes in main pressure lines.
For the second time, Sancho had saved my life and now I didn’t know if I could save his.
I had to try.

I pulled out my abbreviated
Nurse Nan
pack and slapped clamps on all the
injured
hoses, including two large ones
on his face
where
once he sported a trunk
.
The leaks slowed to the occasional drip.
That accomplished, I now had to replace or patch those lines.
I had but three
hose
patches in the
Nurse Nan
kit.
It took me only a second to decide
—
replacements.
I
tore
open the leopard’s belly and looked at the pump arrangement.
Nothing doctrinaire, just a hugely oversized pump and long lever arms on the hydraulic pistons to give the thing its lightning speed.
Fortunately for my friend,
it had been constructed with standardized
fluid lines.

First I drained
the hydraulic lines into a vessel I’d once thought worthless
,
my plastic expandable canteen. I cut similar length lines for each of Sancho’s damaged ones, making sure to keep them as clean as possible. One by one I replaced them, working as fast as my paws would move to limit Sancho’s loss of fluid. Each one clamped on expertly like factory
-
new.

Draining the leopard dry like some vampire of Human legend, I emptied several canteens full of liquid into Sancho’s hydraulic reservoir.
As I expected
,
Sancho’s fluid levels
sat woefully beneath even danger low operation levels.
My next decision wasn’t as difficult as it would have been any other time.

I slit open the fur and protective shell my own left wrist.
There was the drain stopcock of my
liquid
system.
I ripped it open and poured my own
motive blood
into Sancho’s tank. Monitoring it carefully,
I transfused enough of my hydraulics to bring Sancho barely into operational levels and not to dip me into the danger zone. I felt smug as I closed up the damage I’d done to myself.

I looked at Sancho’s prehensile
trunk
lying on the ground. A 12
-
centimeter
-
wide portion, right at the base, was crushed beyond any of my own skills
to mitigate
. I had no facilities or replacement parts
for
the severed limb
.
I sealed the end.
Sancho’s trunk had been reduced from a magnificent
2
-meter length to less than
2
0
centimeters.
I guess
the disfigurement was a small price
to pay for my life and his as well.

Only one thing remained to be fixed
—
the hole in his hide.
I had no elephant fur, but I had square meters of leopard
skin
.
So I used it.
By the time I was done, Sancho looked like a production building
gone wild
—
leopard
print
across his right side, with his normal mauve and pink fur over the rest of him, and a miniature trun
k with a bright green cap on it
.

As I waited for Sancho’s hydraulic pump to spin up to full speed, I thought about the attack.
I could now see how the cat could have taken on an entire group of unenhanced units and defeated them.
The speed of the attack would have been enough for all but the largest groups of units
. Factories
did have a thing for
not
throwing good units after bad.

The quiet notification beep on Sancho’s pump informed me of its readiness, so I activated him.
As he got up,
I watched closely.
Neither my repairs nor any lingering damage impaired his functions.

“Sancho,
y
ou may be the orneriest unit that I’ve ever met, but a good friend in a pinch.
I once again owe you my life.
Thank you.”

I don’t think I quite heard a purr, but Sancho did butt me gently with his head.
Something pleased me about the act. We didn’t have time for me to analyze. We still needed to move along.

I continued our cautious pace.
I just hoped that
one leopard
was all that stalked here because we were in no shape to tangle with another one.
We both flirted with
minimal fluid levels and Sancho had no trunk to defend
us
with.
Every twitch of the golden leaves caused Sancho and
me
to jerk
weapons
toward
it,
expecting
to see
a black and yellow blur racing at us.
Each case turned out to be a false alarm, but it didn’t stop us from reacting exactly the same the next time.

Smack in
the middle of the forest
the
rail line
s end
ed
at the
edge of a
large
standing body of mercury
nearly
750
meters across and several dozen kilometers long in a very irregular shape
. The standing liquid probably
explained the density of growths here.

Because
of
little wave motion and no current
, I felt certain I could
swim
across
. Sancho, with his greater density, would sink and remain submerged for the entire width.

“Sancho, I want you to walk straight across to the other side.
Don’t stop unless I tell you to or your power runs too low,” I said as I put his tether on him.
As long as
it wasn’t too deep
I should be able to retain control
.
I didn’t want to lose him now, especially with all the
new
mellow feelings I had toward him.
Equipped and prepared, Sancho waded out in front.
I prepared to turn over my body to my swimming subroutine.

But we continued to wade and continued to wade. Before long we’d reached the center of the
lake
with the mercury only up to my knees
.
On the other side I removed the tether feeling extremely paranoid and foolish
.

The forest edge should have taken only another hour to reach, but
the vegetation had other ideas
.
With no cut for the train tracks
,
the forest closed in tightly making it difficult to traverse through the underbrush.
Sancho’s greater mass broke
our
trail with me following in his wake
,
trying to keep on guard for another attack from more of the black and yellow creatures.
This
method
resulted in becoming intimate with liters of
mercury and
tiny biologics
spilling down
from the leaves
. The
biologics, at least, scampered away on multiple pairs of legs. The undergrowth whipped and cut at us for ever
y
meter of forward progress.

Every time
we gained a small clearing and
I thought
the rest of our travels would be easy, we would move away a giant frond and find
another wall of saffron and vegetation to overcome.

This was a place I had no longing to return to.

By daybreak
, we had shoved out to the edge of the forest.
It ended abruptly, as if someone had drawn a line in the red, chalk-like earth and commanded segregation.
The golden menagerie parted to show a much more normal and pleasing fiery red and umber landscape of a huge open plain with only silver-veined thorn grass covering the soil
—
a
welcome sight and relief from the yellows of the softwoods and ferns.
Also, the strain on my systems at moving through the thick over and underbrush
was telling
on
at least
my low fluid levels.

The sun cresting over the mountain ranges provided another relief
.
I’d never expected that a few kilometers of biological vegetation could be
such a drain on battery power
.
We sat soaking up the sun all day.

“Well we are well shut of that place,” I said, looking back at the optic straining yellows.
“Let’s move just a few hundred meters away from here so we don’t have to worry about any more of those cat units.”

While we rested
and recharged I noticed anomalies in Sancho’s fur. Sidling up to him I dug my fingers into his short tufts. With a good deal of force, and not a few strands of fur, I removed a spiked seed pod. At only 5 m
illimeters
across the kernel decided to cling to my purple fur instead. I removed it from the back of my paw only to find that it somehow found its way into the long fur on the back of the other paw.

“No
simple, inanimate seed
will
stymie me.
”
Using a smooth portion of my tattered backpack over my hand, I managed to discard the unwanted
stowaway.

My optics did an analysis of Sancho’s fur and extrapolated one hour
and
fourteen minutes to remove the approximately
880
foreign objects. Then
,
examining my longer fur
,
I found
1200
more
on the front where I could reach
.
B
iologics can be far tougher than I had ever expected.
Over the next three hours, sixteen minutes
,
and forty-three seconds, I decided that
the
Humans
’
cursing had some validity.