'Thank you, BIL,' Sehera said in a maternal tone. 'Be careful.'
'Very well. To the airseam then. Hold on please.' The spider's legs again started quickly shifting back and forth one over the other like the giant hybrid granddaddy longlegs spiders of the Elysium Planitia algae fields.
Once Gail and her cameraman had made their way into the main dome of Mons City they had been forced to take refuge in a convenience store at the edge of the hangar deck of the airfield. There had been so much Separatist troop movement coming and going that they had decided to lay low for a few moments and take a much needed break. They had been through several close calls as it was. One of them actually while they had been broadcasting live to MNN. They had had to cut their report short and take cover. It had never occurred to her that the Seppies had to have the technology to track the video link transmissions back to the main MNN router system. Apparently, the Separatists were not interested in stopping the news, but Gail didn't think of that. She was more concerned with hiding and not being captured—she had seen what happened to reporters captured by the Seppies on Triton. Not good.
And Gail and her cameraman were getting hungry. The convenience store made perfect sense. Once they had sneaked by the troop movement and into the back door of the little store they had relaxed a bit and helped themselves to the junk food and sodas stocked on the shelves and in the coolers. They were even able to reload the e-suit reservoirs with water. Having been outside and before that in the damaged borough of the southern domes the two of them had been sealed up in their e-suits for hours and used up a lot of their water. There was another aspect of being sealed up in an e-suit that required patience or regular breaks and that was the claustrophobia aspect. Being in the main dome that was not yet breached was literally a breath of fresh air to them and a chance to take off their helmets and stretch their necks, scratch their heads, and run their fingers through their hair for a bit. And it made eating and drinking stolen junk food a whole lot easier.
'Hold on, Calvin. What the hell is that?' Gail Fehrer had paid little attention to the lift platform at first. In her mind it was just a very large cargo elevator. But then she realized that something was out of place that was riding on the lift platform. At first all she could make out of the scene was that the lift rose and was littered with recyclable materials and general trash, but then a very large section of the trash started to move on its own, which startled her. Then she had realized that it was a giant metallic gray mechanical spider, which was completely unexpected and a little bit unsettling.
'That thing is odd-looking. What is that?' the MNN cameraman asked, and choked down the last of a candy bar since he knew that break time was over. He had been with Gail long enough to know that she would want to take a closer look at anything out of the ordinary. And a giant mechanical spider traipsing around in the midst of a bunch of Separatist troops could at the least be described as 'out of the ordinary.'
'I don't know. But whatever it is, get it on video.' It was news Gail was certain of it. 'We've got to figure out how to get closer and get a better look at that thing.'
'Preferably without getting caught, Gail,' Calvin added. 'Gail, are you listening to me?' Obviously, she was not, so Calvin just sighed and continued to gather himself up to follow her off into some foolish and quite dangerous journalistic endeavor, as he always did.
The metal beast began to gingerly scamper across the large lift platform toward the airseam field, its eight long legs moving back and forth almost too quickly for the eyes to make sense of. To their surprise, so far, the Separatist troops were paying it little or no attention. Gail wasn't sure what to make of the sight, but her seasoned journalist's insight understood when something was newsworthy.
'Come on. Let's follow it and see what it's up to,' she told Calvin while twisting her e-suit helmet seal ring tight. 'I smell a story.'
'Somehow, Gail, I knew you were going to say that.' The camera and communications tech grabbed the gear, which consisted of a small repulsor field stabilized camera platform and QM wireless transceiver all no larger than a softball, and swigged one last swallow of the Dr. Deimos in his hand. Calvin dropped the silver lettered maroon can on the floor then squished it under his right jumpboot heal. 'Ready when you are,' he told her, and twisted his helmet into place.
The small storefront was typical of the industrial end of the city and was sandwiched between an aviation mechanical shop and a plumbing store. The stores faced the street that made up the east face of the hangar entrance that was on the city side of the hangar. There were large windows on the front of the marscrete and plastic construction buildings all of which had multicolored logos and advertisements painted on them.
The store owners had apparently left for the shelters in such a hurry that they had neglected to bring in the newsstands and potato chip racks from outside the front door. Originally, Calvin had to cut through the lock on the back door—camera techs had to be resourceful in the network news industry.
Their search for useful tools in the store uncovered a set of keys that allowed them to unlock the front door. This made it easier on them to follow the mechanical robot and keep it in sight. Had they been forced to take the back door the spider might have been gone before they could make it down the back building alleyway to the next street crossing nearest the hangar entrance.
'Let's go and keep the camera running.' Gail eased out the front door of the little convenience shop and stayed as close to the walls of the buildings on their side of the street as she could. Calvin followed her lead and made every attempt at staying in the shadows while at the same time keeping the giant metal bug in the camera viewer.
They slipped silently down the street until there were no more buildings to stick close too. The street turned ninety degrees southward and followed the outer wall of the hangar bay until it met the taxiway for the space traffic. There were loading docks and cargo movers parked along the hangar bay wall. There was also the occasional privately owned aircraft parked in a small paved parking lot at the dome wall side of the taxiway. Gail and Calvin ducked behind parked forklifts and private planes leapfrogging each other from one to the next until they reached the edge of the dome near the airseam field generator just to the right of the adit.
The spider-thing had made its way to the edge of the airseam field with little if any attention being paid to it. Then the airseam light went green and the giant bug scampered out into the Martian atmosphere. As it passed through the seam's force field, an iridescent hue of violet and blue rippled across the large plane of the opening.
'Come on.' Gail grabbed Calvin by the wrist and bounced three times along the dome wall and then through the airseam field right behind the metal beast, again generating the iridescent ripples in the field. Once outside the dome wall they took cover underneath a parked tugship's landing skids about fifty meters from the spider. 'You're getting it, right?'
'You have to ask? After all these years?' Calvin smiled at his partner but kept the video centered on the bug.
'Sorry. Why do you suppose nobody is paying that thing any attention at all?' It didn't make sense to Gail. If a giant metal spider came traipsing along in front of her she'd damned well pay it some attention—especially during the middle of an all out attack.
