cannons in place of their right grippers. The cannons fired explosive rocket-propelled shells at high velocities. The perrupters were specialized for combat duty, but except for a slightly thicker chassis, they resembled labor mechs in most other respects. In order to keep up with the mounted twins, the perrupters had to run at a churning, ground-eating pace.
Nina was the first to spot the dust cloud sunward on the wastes.
“There,” she said, pointing. “What do you make of that, Leon?”
“A train of vehicles, perhaps? Men mounted on skimmers shouldn’t produce so much dust.”
Nina bit her lower lip and frowned. “I think we should call mother. Let’s report this and call for backup.”
Leon’s mouth drew into a line. “I don’t think we need help. We can handle this for ourselves. Must we call an uncle every time there is a leak in a processor? They will never stop thinking of us as children, Nina.”
Leon charged off and the mechs followed him dutifully, two abreast. Nina considered calling mother on her own-but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to see her mother’s lips twist in annoyance upon seeing her own daughter’s face. Watching her brother move ahead at full speed, she finally twisted the throttle and charged after him.
They chased the phantom dust cloud into the open wastes where the sun was painfully bright. Despite goggles and air-conditioned riding suits, Nina still felt the heat seep through. She’d almost caught up with her brother when the dust cloud slowed and dissipated. She saw Leon and his perrupters ahead, cruising over a ridge as if looking for something. She zoomed after them, following the rise and fall of the hot dunes.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Leon said, looking all around them from atop a hump of hard stone. “There was something out here, making that dust cloud.”
“Backtracking from here, it seems as if they’ve just come from damaging the pumping station at the shadowline,” Nina said thoughtfully. “I don’t like it. Let’s get out of here.”
“Where did they go?” he asked. “Tell me that.”
“I don’t know, but they aren’t here now. We’d best move out of Sunside until they appear again.”
Leon shook his head. “Mother put me in charge. You can run home if you wish, sister. You have my permission to cower at home.”
Nina glared at him. “I’ll do no such thing. If you insist on combing the sands, I’ll lead the way.”
Determinedly, Nina goaded her mount and charged down the rocky outcropping toward the open sands. She saw the sand here was unsettled, as if passed over by a group of men or vehicles, but there was no one here now.
She did not make it far. As soon as she was out in the open sands, the mechs rose up in ambush. She realized with a shock that these metal laborers had hidden themselves purposefully, digging down into the sands and lying in wait. How was this possible? Who had set them to such a strange task?
She had little time for pondering the oddness of the situation, however, as she was caught up in the middle of it. A mech rose up directly in front of her and swung a dark metal arm at her head. The gripper flashed by as she ducked. Sand dribbled from it, spraying her with a shower that trickled down her back.
There were dozens of them! She dodged this way and that, avoiding the rising bodies. It was like dodging fast-growing trees in a forest. Behind her, she heard her brother’s bugle call. This was followed by a blaze of cannon-fire. The mech that had first accosted her blew apart in a spray of shrapnel. Nina ducked down, wrapping herself around the oblong shape of her mount, leaning side-to-side to guide it at full throttle. She’d always been a gifted rider and enjoyed slalom runs that sickened lesser girls.
Another mech stepped to block her path to freedom, however. This one was different from the rest. He wore-clothing? A cape fluttered from his back and a scarf was wound twice around his neck struts. His grippers flashed, but they did not strike for her, as had the others. Instead, he struck down her mount, causing the nose of the small craft to dip into the sands.
Nina flew over the forward steering grips and did a cartwheel in the reddish sands. She could feel the heat of the grit through her riding suit. She lay there, stunned, barely moving while a battle raged around her. Her body responded to her desperate urging to flee sluggishly. She wondered if she’d broken her neck.
Suddenly, as she blinked behind her goggles, the cannon fire stopped. She managed to turn her head enough to see the scene as the smoke was swept away by the ceaseless desert winds. A dozen mechs were smoking ruins of jagged metal. The perrupters had clearly been winning, however. They were armed and organized. Only three of their number had fallen. The rest of the perrupters stood still, identifiable by the green wedge on their chassis, which was the unmistakable mark of Droad House.
That was the odd thing-her mechs were frozen in place. They stood stock-still, as if switched off in mid action. Their weapons were uplifted, aiming at the advancing ranks of the enemy. But they were no longer active.
Darkness dimmed Nin’s vision. She was passing out, and she knew it. With the last of her fading wits, Nina’s eyes roved the landscape in search of her brother Leon, but she did not see him. What had befallen dear Leon?
#
Nina awoke some hours later. It was difficult to tell how long she’d laid there. Her internal suit cpu had shut down, and as the sky of Ignis Glace always looked the same, it gave no hint as to the time of day.
She struggled to her knees, and then to her feet. She looked around herself warily. She didn’t see any of the enemy mechs moving nearby, so she dared to walk among the wreckage. She needed to get out of the desert soon, even her riding suit couldn’t keep her alive out here indefinitely. Already, the hydration unit was registering three-quarters empty.
Due to long exposure on a harsh world, the technology of Twilighters had developed to a keen edge when it came to surviving extremes of temperature-both hot and cold. There were high tech systems built into her suit, but as always there was the possibility of failure with complex systems, and the people of Ignis Glace built lower tech solutions as well. Analog backups that operated when the batteries died, when the cpu overheated or something simply broke, these technological adaptations had kept many colonists alive where they otherwise would have perished. Nina relied on these backup systems now, systems based on body-motion to cause fluids to pump, evaporation to provide cooling and gauges based on weights, springs and pressure-needles.
Staggering at first, she walked among the dead. In her calculations, the destroyed mechs were counted as lives lost. To her, the mechs were people too, after a fashion. She found their slaughter disturbing. Human brain tissue, left to dry upon the heartless sands, looked the same whether it fell from a cracked skull or a ruptured metal case.
She counted fourteen dead, almost all of them renegade mechs. Of particular mystery was the disappearance of her own mech perrupters. She recalled they’d frozen in place-but where had they gone after that?
Her eyes searched the horizon, but she saw nothing. Not even the telltale plume of dust that had first alerted her to the enemy presence.
It was soon thereafter she found the fifteenth body. Her brother, his blond hair whipping and fluttering over his open blue eyes, lay dead in the sand. He was already half-covered over by sifting grit. In his right hand was a crackling power-saber. In his left was his pistol.
She wept as she buried him, but being a Droad she did not linger long after. The renegade mechs might return at any moment. She took Leon’s sword, which was a twin to her own, and strapped the second scabbard to her belt. It would not do to leave ancestral weapons in the sands for bandits to scavenge. She would have liked to take his body home, but both mounts were destroyed, and she lacked the strength to carry him so far. She was not entirely sure she would make it home herself.
Seven
Knightrix Nina Droad was unable to use her com-link or get a mount operating for the return journey to Twilight. Stoically, she began marching homeward on foot. The occasional teardrop inside her goggles was sucked away by her rider’s suit and recycled to keep her alive. It was just as well, she thought. She did not want her vision obscured.
