She kept her hood pulled close. Best not to make herself the preferred target. It was a small consolation that they wouldn’t aim for her head, if only to preserve the mind-machine interface she harbored there. Assuming she was recognized.
Maybe I should keep my hood down after all.
No, that might be enough to spur an attack in the first place. The downsides of making one’s features obviously cyborg…
“By the way, are you going to miss your lady friend?” Rhea asked Will.
He glanced over his shoulder at her and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “What makes you think it was only one?”
She had no answer to that.
“And nope, don’t miss them,” he said. “Got my fill.”
Rhea nodded. She glanced at Horatio. “And how about you? Partake in any carnal delights while in Rust Town?”
“Look at you,” Horatio said. “You were so innocent and naive when we first found you. And after three days of Net access, you’ve already been corrupted.”
“I wouldn’t say corrupted,” Rhea said. “But I am more knowledgeable.”
“Watching pornography makes you knowledgeable, does it?” Will taunted.
“Who says I watched pornography?” she asked. “Maybe I watched educational videos on VidTube.”
“Maybe you did,” Will agreed.
Horatio addressed her: “And to answer your original question, yes, I did indeed partake in carnal delights.”
Rhea cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” She glanced at his lower body. “You don’t look equipped for it.”
Horatio shrugged those metal shoulders. “I coupled virtually, in Machine World.” That was the MMORPG that was popular with AIs.
“Ah,” she said. “I wonder… maybe I should try this Machine World of yours sometime.”
“Oh, don’t,” Horatio said. “You won’t understand it. Machine World is designed for AIs. Human brains, even those stashed within cyborgs, just won’t get it. Plus, the stimuli are completely different, and foreign to humans. If you find upside-down funnels a turn on, then hey, this is your kind of world. Otherwise, I’d recommend you stay away. Far away.”
“That’s good advice,” Will said.
“Right?” Horatio agreed.
“Upside-down funnels?” Rhea asked.
“Yeah, you know, like the kind you use to transfer fuel into a tank?” Horatio replied.
She stared at the robot blankly.
“Hey, it’s a common arousal stimulus among AIs,” Horatio said. “Rising to the level of a fetish in some.”
“Too much information,” Rhea said.
The robot gazed off into the distance. “Nothing like a good pair of funnels on a machine, I tell you…”
“Okay, let’s pretend I never brought the subject up,” Rhea said.
“Sounds good to me,” Will chimed in. “Horatio, if you don’t mind?”
“My lips are sealed,” Horatio said.
Rhea felt a breeze on her face. She checked the wind’s direction using small sensors at the base of her throat: it came from ahead, at a slight angle. Five to eight kilometers per hour southwest.
She glanced at her overhead map and zoomed out. Will had plotted a course that would take them to the next major settlement, a good five hundred kilometers away. The path gave a wide berth to all the latest bandit and bioweapon hotspots, as crowdsourced by other salvagers and travelers over the past few months.
“Never take the same route between cities,” Will had explained. “Always make minor changes. Do you remember, in training, when Bardain instructed you not to peek from the same spot? This is the same idea. If you take the same route twice, you’re just teaching the highwaymen where to camp out the next time. Plus, by always choosing a slightly different route, you’re increasing your chances of finding new salvage: a crashed flyer you missed the first time; an abandoned farmhouse nestled away in a copse. And so forth.”
She restored the map to its standard zoom level and concentrated on the rocky terrain ahead. Small boulders strewed a landscape that was mostly dirt and exposed bedrock. Shelves of rock protruded on occasion, and these were often covered in areas of dirt as well.
As she walked, she searched those shelves for signs of bandits, and scanned the horizons for bioweapons.
She knew from the history she’d read on the Net that the land hadn’t always been this barren. Once it had been green, full of plant and the animal life. But when the water crisis began, and humans manipulated the weather to divert most of the rainfall to the cities and sucked the lakes into massive water tanks for human consumption, the lands outside the cities began to die. It had happened relatively quickly, over the span of only a decade, with grasslands becoming dust bowls across the world. That very same water crisis had precipitated the invasion of Ganymede. Restoration efforts had started before the war, but when half the world’s cities were destroyed, those efforts were abandoned, and the lands between cities—the Outlands—were left to the bioweapons. And bandits.
Rhea and the others marched for the rest of that morning. The journey was uneventful. The tension she’d experienced at the beginning faded, and she began to feel almost restless instead.
Around eleven o’clock, Will abruptly halted and raised a hand. He squinted, gazing toward the far horizon.
“What is it?” Rhea asked softly.
“Gizmo has spotted something,” Will responded.
She zoomed in with her vision and stared for several moments.
Then she saw them: several hulking forms creeping over the horizon. They vaguely resembled giant, disembodied, clawed hands, and crawled almost spider-like across the plains.
Bioweapons.
11
Rhea double-checked the direction of the breeze. They were downwind of the creatures.
“Drop!” Will hissed.
But she was already dropping.
She hit the ground, and momentarily lost sight of the beasts. But they shortly appeared on the horizon once more. She counted thirty Kargs in total. Based on their current speed and trajectory, the creatures were going to pass roughly three hundred meters to the right.
“If we stay here, will we stay downwind the whole time?” Will asked. “Even after they pass?”
“According to my sensors, yes,” Horatio replied. “But if the wind changes…”
“Then we’ll shoot down the bastards,” Will told the robot.
“That could
