Day Seven

“What should we do?” Dash said. “Did we just kill them? Shouldn’t we see if they’re OK?”

“They just tried to kill us,” Rory said. “I think we should count our blessings that they were stupid enough to fall for a very old trick, and I think we should run.”

The dust cloud around the fallen ground car shifted. It can’t be, Rory thought .That thing flipped over on top of them. They’re vacuum-packed pancake. They’re spam in a can.

The ground car twitched. Rory felt rather than heard a groan of tortured metal and carbon fibre.

“You know what I said about run?” Rory said. “I think we’re too late.”

Slowly, deliberately, the ground car lifted, coming off the ground like an old, fat guy getting out of his favourite chair. It came up nose-end first, and Rory found herself less surprised than she ought to see that the motive force behind the lift was the tall, armour clad driver.

“Oh,” she said as the realisation hit. “It’s an offense-defence mobile support unit. Wearing an eye patch and a bandana.”

Behind the robot, two of the three passengers got groggily to their feet. One, the guy that had slid across the bench seat at the back and helped to flip the car, lay still. He had been tossed half out of the car as it had turned around, and the weight of it had come down solidly on his stomach. He had burst in his suit, and his helmet visor was a bright red screen. Rory tried not to think about what was behind it.

The robot straightened, lifting the entire car above it’s domed head in a smooth bench press. It sank slightly into the soft dirt as it took the weight. Then it bent it’s knees, and with no apparent effort threw the ground car at Rory and Dash.

Dash moved first. He lunged at Rory, knocking her sideways. He was small and short, but compact and solid, and he could hit if he had too.

He saved her life at that moment. Rory, dumbstruck by the idea of a pirate robot throwing a car at her, was rooted to the spot with astonishment. It didn’t take much effort for Dash to knock her off her feet, and inertia and the low lunar gravity did the rest. The car sailed over their heads, and smashed into the ground ten feet past them.

But they were both on the floor now, and winded. Dash struggled to his feet. Not thinking about anything but putting up a bit of a fight.

He was badly out of his league. The robot had moved as soon as the car had left it’s hands. Rory’s plan had put it solidly into offensive mode. It now saw the two of them as targets. They had played their move, and now it was BOS-N’s turn.

It strode up to Dash, giving him just enough time to get upright. Then it picked him up, grabbing him by the ring that attached his helmet to his chest piece. He lifted him, putting his visor in a direct line with the one uncovered lens array. It thought for a moment, then found a patch into Dash’s audio feed. A squall of feedback made the boy yelp, and struggle weakly.

“+++A WORTHY FOE. WE BOTH SHOULD WALK AWAY WITH HONOUR. A SHAME THAT YER JOURNEY ENDS HERE+++”

Rory, gasping for air, got up to a low kneel. There was nothing she could do against this towering machine that would make any difference. But it had her brother. She batted at it, weakly, with one gauntleted hand. It was still so hard to breathe. It was still so hard to think.

A shadow fell over her. Like Dash, she was grabbed by the neckseal and hauled to her feet. The taller of the two surviving back seat drivers had her. He was grinning like a skull, and his pupils widened when he caught sight of her face, gasping and desperate. The other one, the shorter fatter one with a face so pock-marked that it looked like pale orange peel, tapped at the keypad set into his right forearm. The speakers in her helmet fizzed and rattled, and then a voice came on. The shorter guy. She could see his lips flapping, so it had to be him.

“See, that was silly. We’d have run you down, but it would have been clean and quick. So now, you’ve got us riled. And the last thing you want to do is rile up a pair of mean, ruthless moon pirates like us. It’s just not smart.”

The tall guy swung her around a bit, rattling her in the ungiving confines of the suit like a dry pea in a pod. His grin stretched out, becoming even more inhuman.

“So here’s what happens. Your boy here, he goes first. You get to watch. Then…” The shorter guy looked at her, and his eyes shone with an ugly, corrupt light. “Then we’ll see.”

She strained her neck about, as far left as it would go. She could just see Dash out of the corner of the visor, trying to throw punches at the robot. It was holding him with one arm outstretched, and the blows were swinging at least a foot wide.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the shorter guy said. “You need to see this.” He motioned to the taller guy, who obligingly swung her round so that she could clearly see Dash swinging at the robot. She couldn’t hear him, but she could lipread well enough to get the gist of what he was yelling at the impassive machine. You tell him, baby brother. You tell that thing.

“Robot,” the shorter guy said. “Punch out his visor.”

NO. Now Rory really started struggling, half to get away, half just not to see. Opening the suit to vacuum was a quick and ugly way to kill someone. You froze and boiled at the same time. In the couple of minutes that it took to die, the air would rush out of you, your skin would crack and break, the soft and gelid parts of you would burst. You would scream your life away into a soundless void.

The taller guy shook her again, and the shorter one grabbed her hands. To stop her covering the view of what was about to happen, she supposed. But they were stupid. All she had to do was close her eyes. That was all she had to do.

So why, she wondered abstractly, did it seem to be an utterly impossible task?

The creature shifted. It saw the children. It saw the others, that held them fast. It understood how fragile these inheritors of the land were, how easily they spoiled when exposed to the open skies. It saw how the children struggled. And it heard the cries they made. The creature had been on the moon for a very long time. It did not understand the gutteral language that they spoke. But it could easily detect the sounds of distress. It came to a conclusion as to it’s next move.

The robot cocked it’s free hand back, and made a fist. “+++A SHAME, BUT A BATTLE HAS A WINNER AND A LOSER, ME HEARTIE. TAKE YER REWARD WITH PRIDE+++”

It punched.

ENOUGH.

Thinking about it later, Rory could reconstruct the events with a reasonable amount of clarity, but that was with the benefit of hindsight, and the knowledge of the capabilities of their newest friend. But at the time it seemed as if a miracle had appeared from the rocks around them.

Everything happened incredibly slowly, time slurring to a near halt in front of her. She saw the robot draw back it’s fist, and start to bring it forward. In real time it was an action that would have taken a slim fraction of a second to complete, but to her it seemed to be happening underwater. She could see the glimmer of earthlight on the polished surfaces of the robot’s arm, the flexing of the cables and carbon sinews that drove it’s metal fist closer, ever closer to the fragile visor that was Dash’s only protection from the cruel vacuum. If you have any heart, she thought wildly, you won’t pull the punch. You’ll just keep on going until your fist hits the back of his helmet and end him in an instant. But of course, she reminded herself. It doesn’t have a heart. It’s a machine. It’s like pleading for mercy to the gun as opposed to the gunman.

She thought all this in the tiny decimal of time that it took the fist to get halfway to Dash. So what happened next happened in the flick of an atom for it to take her by surprise.

The robot’s arm vanished at the elbow. The machine didn’t even have time to register what had occurred. It carried the movement through to it’s conclusion, and was interested to note that not only had the punch not connected with the boy’s helmet, but that it was no longer getting feedback from the lateral portion of that limb.

Everything tableaued for a moment, as they all realised that something had changed.

There was movement to the left. A fluid, inhuman disturbance slid into view out of the dust cloud it had created from the impact when it landed.

It was like a cat, in the same way that a cat is like a dog. It was like a dog, in the same way that a dog is like a crocodile. It was like a crocodile, in the same way that a crocodile is like a switchblade. It moved in smooth, flowing stages, slinking and strutting all at once. It had four legs, each of which ended in delicate five-fingered hands. It had spines, ranged in rows across an arched, equine back. It had a tail, which curled and twitched and bit at the air.

It had jaws, and in those jaws it had the robot’s right forearm.

It made a kind of shrug with it’s pointed shoulders, and ejected the piece of machinery onto the ground in front of it. It looked at it’s prize for a moment, then batted it away. Then it looked up, and fixed every one of it’s twenty eyes on the robot. It tilted it’s fine, pointed muzzle in a clear challenge. There were many things that it did not understand about this vulnerable species. But the language of violence crossed boundaries of millennia and biology without any need for translation.

The robot took a while to consider what to do next. At least a second, which in the compacted timeframe of the machine’s thought processes was like spending a month on deciding which pants to pull on in the morning. It considered the facts. A new element had entered the scenario. It was aggressive, powerful and very, very fast. Furthermore. It’s capabilities were unknown and unpredictable. There were too many unknown factors at play for the robot to continue along it’s current event decision list.

A relay clicked, deep in it’s chest. It shifted from offensive to defensive mode.

It let Dash go. First things first. The child no longer figured in it’s primary objective tree. Besides which it was tying up resources that it needed. That is, it’s one free hand. Dash fell, flipped over backwards and lay, waggling his arms and legs frantically, unable to get up from the prone position.

Then the robot executed the central part of it’s new defensive strategy.

It turned and ran, as fast as it’s legs could carry it.

Smeaton and Broderick watched it go, expressionless as the robot galloped past them. It’s shorn right arm pumped furiously as it adopted a sprinter’s profile. It was a dot in the distance before they had quite realised what had happened.

The creature also watched the machine hurtle away. It felt no malice towards the thing it had just disarmed. It recognised that the robot was simply a tool. Slowly, now, it turned its vast alien attention towards the two figures that held the shorter one in the same threatening manner that the machine had held it’s companion. These were a different matter. They had free will, and chose to exercise it in a manner for which the creature had very little patience. It showed the two creatures it’s teeth, to make absolutely sure that they understood the way it felt about their behaviour.

The taller of the two yelped, and dropped his prey. She dropped bonelessly, and fell into a crumpled heap on the ground.

“N…nice… doggy?” the other one said. The creature did not understand the language, but it heard the gut-tearing terror it was stimulating well enough. Time to end this.

It twitched forward half a step, and snapped at the air with it’s strong sharp teeth.

The two strangers screamed. They, like their machine, flapped around and ran, banging comically into each other in their haste to get away from the alien threat.

You’re the aliens, the creature thought. To this place. To civilised behaviour. To common decency.

It watched them go. Poor, clumsy, frail objects. So unsuited to the harsh terrain of this place. So sweetly unaware of all the dangers that faced them here. Thinking that all that was required for ownership was to arrive and plant a flag.

A flag could be just as easily torn down as it could be put up. The same went for houses, and lives, and civilisations. The creature understood that harsh truth very well indeed.

Now for these others. These children.

Dash wriggled wildly, unable to get enough leverage to roll himself onto his side and thence to his feet. This was really frustrating. He hated the fact that he always seemed to end up in these comedy positions, with his legs or bum in the air, helpless until someone with a bit more patience came and pulled him free. It wasn’t really his fault that he was so eager to get to places and do things that stuff often couldn’t get out of his way quickly enough. He was built for a speedier, more accomodating world than this one.

At the moment, though, the world was moving too quickly for him. A minute ago, the tall robot that had thrown the car at them had been about to punch him in the mouth. Then it had stopped, because his fist had fallen off. Then he had dropped Dash, and ran away. It was all very confusing, and Dash was certain that he had missed something pretty important.

A soft pressure on his left side nudged him over, and he found that he could roll onto his front. He pushed up with his arms in a kind of press-up, which swung him into a sitting position. He had a telling off ready for Rory for just nudging him instead of helping him up.

The thing squatting on it’s haunches, gravely regarding him as he flipped around and sat looked nothing like his sister. Like nothing he had ever seen before.