"It's me," Jessica13 said and stood quietly with the Minato's hands up to make sure they posed no threat. "Do you want me to come out so you can see me?"
The two looked at each other for a moment.
"Why don't you go ahead and do that?" Windchime said but sounded a little embarrassed by his paranoia.
She pushed the hatch out and stepped into view with her hands up, anxious that neither of them would accidentally shoot her while she tried to calm them. Thankfully, their weapons lowered when they saw her and she climbed into Mini once again.
"So, what did you find out?" Windchime asked once she was situated once more. "You took most of the damn day to get here, so it had better be good."
"Well, most of my time was spent establishing my cover as a peddler," she explained. "They needed a ton of work done all around the town and while I worked, I was able to find out what's been happening there. Mini also made an illustration of Auburn's inner workings, so we won't be lost."
It took only a short-burst transmission to send the map to the other two mechs, which meant it was unlikely that anyone would even realize something had happened.
"What about Athena?" Tinker asked. "Did you find out what she was doing in the area?"
"As it turned out, yes." Jessica13 paused to make sure no one had picked up on the transmission before she continued. "She goes by Lady Hoot among the folks of Auburn, and she rules over them with an iron fist that has become disturbingly more aggressive."
"Is she there now?" Windchime asked.
"From what I learned, she comes and goes and takes a tax on their supplies and food whenever she visits. That tax grew a little too overbearing, and that is why they wanted help and called us."
"I'll assume the folks who called us are the ones who ended up burned in that building?" the younger Knight asked.
"You are very astute. They called the building a church but I'm not sure what that means. Maybe where Athena or Lady Hoot passed judgment?"
"A church is a place to worship invisible deities," Mini said and displayed pictures of other churches on the HUD. Most of them had the same sign that had been on top of the burned building.
"It sounds like the kind of thing Athena would do," Tinker said. "So, she rules over these people? Why don't they simply arm themselves? They could get weapons for those mechs in the fields and fight back. I know Athena's Excalibur is no small enemy, but even then—"
"She has left agents behind," Jessica13 interrupted. "A group of them man checkpoints all around the town to make sure those mechs that come in and out of the farms and into the town itself are no threat. They keep the people in line too. I was also able to see that the three Cinders we saw before were left behind when Lady Hoot went about her business. They were beyond the checkpoints so I wasn't able to get a good look at them, but from what I saw, they were well-built. You'd have to be crazy to run a badly built Cinder but then again, crazy is not really out of the question for these people."
"Athena has good mechanics—or at least she did when we knew her. I think she'll be able to keep her mechs in good order," Tinker said. "What do you think, then? Should we be able to knock them out of position and take control of the place?"
"I don't know." Windchime sounded worried. "With only three of us and if we had the element of surprise, we could possibly gain the upper hand. But if they had sufficient warning and managed to get a message to Athena before we could consolidate our position, we wouldn't be able to hold the town even if we managed to take control, which isn't a foregone conclusion. She would be able to come back and knock us out before Hammerhand gets here. On the other hand, if we don't give them some kind of landing ground, the Knights Mechanica won’t be able to push into the town without alerting them. There are too many of them to remain unnoticed and if she only left three Mechs to hold it, she obviously believes it’s easy to defend."
"There's something else too," she said. "The folks I spoke to talked about how Lady Hoot was able to control the water they use to grow their crops and even to drink. They get most of it from underground using wells and the like that run dry when she tells them to—when they haven't paid the tax, obviously—but they said she could control the rain too. I can see how she would be able to control underwater streams from that bunker over there, but how would she control the weather?"
Tinker studied the bunker in question and pointed a finger at the balloons tethered to the top that drifted lazily in the clouds. "Electrical impulses are sent to those balloons, I think. It was tech they researched in Cities-That-Were when they had problems with waters rising to swamp the cities. It meant they were able to control the rainfall and bring it to the locations that needed it and avoid flooding in some areas while watering the crops in others. It is a little beyond my expertise, but they did manage to do it. Maybe this bunker is one of those that was set up to bring about change in the world after the war to generate rain and water so folks could start to grow crops and live outside again."
"And Athena took control of it and is using it to leverage a position of power with the locals and set herself up as a ruler over her little domain." Windchime shook his head in disgust. "I wish I could say I was surprised, but it actually does seem precisely like
