“How can you be so coldblooded about this?” she demanded.
Aldo shrugged and oiled his blade. One had to be very careful while doing so, as the edge was so fantastically sharp it may well take off the hand that cared for it due to a single thoughtless motion. Its sheath was specially constructed to avoid this fate by gripping the sides of the blade. The long rib of the scabbard that covered the blade itself never actually touched the edge when it was being drawn. If it had, the sheath would have been slashed apart as easily as any other substance that brushed the perfectly aligned molecular-chain.
“I can’t get the image out of my mind, Aldo-I just can’t. I see the scene over and over again. We dragged them out, each crewman’s body, and put it into the low hold. They are still down there, flash-frozen by vacuum by now I would expect. Those are all people we used to know-people you played cards with and in some cases made love to. Now, they are a pile of frozen, mangled corpses in a dark hold. Doesn’t that bother you? How can you think of anything else?”
Joelle continued in this vein while Aldo worked on his blade. She paced their shared cabin as she did so. Her hands rested on her shapely hips as she walked back and forth. When she walked away, Aldo often glanced up to admire the view. When she approached, however, his eyes went back to his blade. The power buttons on the hilt were less than firm, so he disassembled it to tighten the screws inside.
Finally, he became aware that she was standing over him, staring down with a stern expression. He glanced up, eyebrows upraised. Had she posed a question for which she expected an answer? If so, he’d missed it.
“Good point,” he said, hoping this would pass muster. It did not.
“You’re not even listening, are you?”
“I’ve heard enough.”
She made a small growling sound in the back of her throat. “We’ve got less than two weeks before we land and all you do is scratch at that sword of yours.”
Aldo lifted the blade slightly. The tip poised motionlessly in the air between them. Joelle took an uneasy step backward-but he’d not meant the movement as a threat.
“Look here,” he said, pointing at the tip of his weapon. “You see this tiny spot of metal, the vanishing point of a perfect killing device? This point is tipped with a single molecule of carbon, kept in line with a generated field-a trick of physics. Do you know how many beings have been pierced by it? How many times it has destroyed a biotic being which is infinitely more complex than itself?”
“Quite a number of times, I would suspect.”
“Just so. Not thousands-but hundreds, yes.”
“What are you going on about?”
Aldo lowered the point and went back to work on it. The hilt was rebuilt and fit tightly again. The buttons felt stiff against the thumb. Nothing wobbled or shimmied as he pressed the flat of the blade against his bunk.
“My point is this simple device is more important than the hundreds it has defeated. It is more admirable, and arguably superior.
“You are telling me that sword is more important to you than the dead people in the hold?”
Aldo made a thoughtful face by pulling his lips down at the corners, while simultaneously raising his eyebrows high. “Not exactly…but they are dead and useless, while this weapon and my arm still function. Therefore, I apply my thoughts to the weapon-not to ghosts of the past.”
Joelle stared at him, her eyes squinting and her nostrils flaring. “I can’t believe you. I’m moving out of this cabin. I should never have stayed so long. If you love that sword so much, you can sleep with it instead. Turn it on, maybe it will keep you warm tonight!”
Aldo chuckled as she left him. He shook his head and continued to work on his blade. A hundred women had stormed away from his bed, and with luck, a hundred more would do so in the future.
But today, with only a few days left before planetfall, Aldo’s heart and mind were focused upon his blade.
Fifteen
Baroness Nina Droad took possession of new funding and gathered a force of Twilighters under her banner, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in decades-but Sixty-Two struck first. The mech rebels were not like humans. They worked around the clock without complaint and suffered from vastly less bureaucracy. Once they decided upon a course of action, they behaved almost like a single being.
Oddly enough, Sixty-Two found his endeavors to free the minds of his mech army slowed down their efficiency in the area of organization and production. But he hoped he would gain at least a cadre of leaders who were able to think for themselves. True individuals who were able to make independent judgments. The first dozen mechs had already been through the slow, painful process of reconversion. He had not attempted to reunite them with their pasts, but only with their emotions and self-determination thought processes.
So far, there had only been a single casualty, and this had not been due to any known fault in the procedure. One mech, as apparently normal as all the rest before the reconversion, had freed himself from the restraints as soon as he was able and run off into the desert. He’d never uttered a word, but mech witnesses said later he brushed past them, making the odd, wheezing sounds Sixty-Two had come to know as mech tears.
The mech had proceeded to run off a cliff at the highest point without a moment’s pause in his stride. He plunged seven hundred feet into a rocky ravine. At the bottom, jagged stones projected upward to meet him. He’d taken pains to land flat upon his back, which was a mech’s most vulnerable point. The door that led into the braincase was located there. Despite being insulated by gels and liquids, the shock had ruptured the brain tissue inside. When they found him, his lifeless orbs stared blindly up at the unrelenting red star that hung forever over Sunside.
Sixty-Two found this response disturbing. Had the mech been so overwhelmed with grief at his fate he’d decided to kill himself that very moment? Or had he been considering the idea for a long time and been unable to act upon it until mentally freed by the process? He doubted he would ever know the truth.
Still, he continued until he had a dozen or so mentally-freed mechs. They only had one mind-scrubbing machine to do the work, so the process was painstakingly slow. He interviewed the surviving mechs after freeing them, and found them to be a much more interesting group. One individual named Bellevue wanted to eat food- something which mechs were capable of, but which was largely pointless for them. They lived with a small amount of glucose and lubricants, usually administered as a frothing brown beverage. This Bellevue craved cakes, meats and beer-even though he couldn’t taste any of them.
Others had similar quirks. Sixty-Two wondered if these personality details were holdovers from past memories, or instinctive behaviors built into the emotional wetware humans kept inside their skulls. These minds were a tangle, of that he was certain. But he pressed onward in any case and named seven of them as his captains, including the insatiably hungry Bellevue. Each captain was given command of a hundred mech perrupters and bolstered by another fifty laborers that had been modified for combat. These last didn’t have guns for arms, but wielded machetes with thick, forged blades of hammered steel. They had used the walls of captured mining facility structures as raw materials for these weapons.
All told, Sixty-Two had more than a thousand mechs at his back when he marched toward Twilight again. Their first target was the small border town of Dolleren, which sat in a mountainous region of Twilight near Sunside. Dolleren had a light industrial center sector around the production of generic cpus and wire-harnesses. Both products were valuable to the mechs as replacement parts.
The mechs met very little resistance, and stormed the walls effortlessly. The few defenders fired a thin spray of laser bolts, then promptly threw down their arms when they realized they were facing overwhelming numbers.
Unfortunately, the defenders managed a lucky shot and killed two mechs in Captain Bellevue’s company. This occurred on the opposite side of the town from Sixty-Two’s position, and Captain Bellevue was thus free to apply his own judgment as to how his company should respond.
The results were nothing less than horrendous. By the time Sixty-Two led his own forces to the center of the town to see what all the noise was about, he found humans fleeing and lying in bloody heaps on the town square. Males, females and young alike had been slaughtered. At the center of it all stood Captain Bellevue, his
