As she paid the check and they left the cafe, Nina admonished herself sternly. Aldo had been a pleasant, but costly distraction. She wondered what it was about the outworlder that had attracted her so. He had cost her both time and strategic advantage. Shaking her head, she mounted up and moved quickly to a gathering point, where her knights were instructed to join her.
The enemy were not like humans, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. They did not seek rest, sexual pleasures, nor any other distraction. They were utterly focused on their inhuman goals. Despite their small numbers, they were dangerous due to their diligence, if nothing else. The only puzzling act they’d performed was the pointless slaughter at Dolleren. Oddly, they’d hurt their own cause there, by galvanizing the council into action.
Within less than an hour, the grumbling knights had formed up and together they rode out of Lavender City. Many of them had blotchy faces and bleary eyes after many hours of carousing. Nina didn’t care. The enemy would not lag, and therefore to compete with them, she would expect no less from her men. She planned to drive them hard, and herself even harder.
Sixty-Two marched at the head of a vast column of mechs. They traveled at a ground-eating pace, although not so fast as aircraft might, nor even mounted knights. Loping across Twilight in a heavily wooded region, their plan was simple. They would try to cross the hundred-odd miles that separated Sunside from Nightside as quickly as possible. With luck, the humans would barely notice their presence before they’d reached their goal.
Nightside. For Sixty-Two, the colder, darker half of the planet had come to take on nearly magical sheltering qualities. After long months spent out in the grit and blazing heat of Sunside, the cool dark of Nightside seemed fabulous in comparison. In Sunside, they were relatively exposed and there were many more industrial sites with human habitation. Mines, solar collection facilities and the like dotted the landscape. The humans had a commensurate level of surveillance equipment in the region to watch over their interests. Thus, it was only a matter of time before they were located and rooted out, no matter what gully they squatted in.
Nightside was different. There wasn’t much there other than ice and stone, and drilling in frozen ground was more difficult than digging in hot sand. In addition, every person and piece of equipment required more energy to operate in the freezing environment. Cold is by definition the absence of energy, and working in Nightside therefore required a constant source of heat. There were a few roving complexes on Nightside which sought rare elements and frozen gases, but for the most part, it was empty. Sixty-Two hoped to flee there and escape the next blow that was sure to come in retribution for the massacre at Dolleren.
The mech army crossed into Twilight and traveled the first forty miles into an increasingly lush landscape without incident. Then they came to the Queen’s Highway, a cobbled road that ran in an endless textured ribbon around the terminator line of the entire planet. This single road was continuous, and it was said some pilgrims forever marched its length, circumnavigating the globe once every year or two for their entire lives.
The highway was a busy artery of commerce and that worried Sixty-Two. He knew that he had to cross it, and that there was regular traffic on it, even in the wilderness regions. To make matters worse, they were crossing at a point fairly close to Lavender City.
They waited until the midnight hour, in local terms. There were no real ‘times’ on Ignis Glace, as every hour looked the same as the last when one looked toward the sun, which was permanently frozen on the horizon. But humans required regular intervals of wakefulness and sleep to function properly, so they had invented a timing system. As it was best for everyone to keep a common schedule, hours were arbitrarily arranged and had been worked out long ago. Traffic from the city, therefore, should be the lightest during the midst of the sleeping time.
Sixty-Two and his mechs hid on the Sunside of the highway in a large grove of suntrees. These growths were common throughout Twilight and had adapted themselves to grow very tall. At the top of their trunks they grew parabolic, umbrella-shaped structures of leaves which aimed unerringly toward the sun. The trees were thus able to photosynthesize very effectively-at least until another of their kind grew up in front of them, like woman wearing a very tall hat at a theatrical performance, and blocked their life-giving window of sunlight. Suntree groves resembled vast towering audiences, all jostling and craning their necks to see a distant performer.
Midnight passed, but Sixty-Two let another hour slip by just to be certain. The waiting bothered only him, Lizett and the few other mechs who had the mental capacity to feel anxiety. For these few, it was torturous. The rest stood still and worried about nothing.
Finally, they saw by their scanners that no metal object had passed along the road for more than ten minutes. Sixty-Two quietly broadcast the signal to cross the road. Diffidently at first, then in a swelling rush, thousands of mechs thundered out of the forest, crossed the cobbles on clanking feet, then vanished again into the cool gloom of the suntree forest where it continued on the other side.
Garth was asleep when Ornth finally halted the seemingly endless march along the highway. Sleeping with one’s eyes open was something of a learned behavior, but it was possible. Exhaustion had set in after days of wakefulness. Garth had gained the capacity to dream even while marching and staring straight ahead.
Ornth suddenly halted, but that alone didn’t startle Garth awake. That act, by itself, should have made it easier to sleep rather than harder. What caused him to return to consciousness was the nightmare that played before his drifting eyes.
His dreams had been peaceful and sweet, but now they were invaded by a horde of strange hulking shapes. These man-like things, most over eight feet in height, strode with amazing bounds on the metal legs as thick as struts. Their broad flat feet drummed on the cobbled road, making an incredibly loud din, like that of a thousand steel hammers striking stones in a random pattern. Occasionally, a foot that struck the cobbles sent up a small shower of bright orange sparks.
It was these sparks, Garth thought later, that penetrated his dreaming mind and brought him back to reality. He realized slowly that the nightmare scene in front of him-what appeared to be a thundering stampeded of wild machines-was in fact reality.
Garth began screeching in terror inside the joint mind he shared with Ornth.
Shut up, or discipline will be applied, Ornth admonished him.
We are going to be killed! Run from them, or they will trample us!
No, I think not, Ornth replied. Standing still has done us well so far.
So saying, Ornth turned their head and looked over their shoulder. There, behind them, were more of these strange robots.
Is this some kind of migration? Garth asked.
I’m not sure. But I’m certain this qualifies as an unusual event. Therefore, it is what I’ve been seeking.
What?
We shall speak with them. I request your assistance and advice in communication.
Garth was speechless for a second. He watched as Ornth pulled a tiny lantern from his kit and flicked it on. He raised it overhead, using Garth’s own treacherous, skinny arm to do so. He waved it back and forth, signaling the passing army of machines.
How could this be? Garth wondered. How could he have been saddled by a Tulk who was suicidal? It was bad enough to be ridden, to have one’s body suborned by a hostile creature. But to have it lead one into danger, and then court it openly…this was too much.
Garth’s mind broke. He screamed, he wailed, and he gibbered inside his own mind.
A signal went out, passed from mech to mech via a broadcast system that used very low power. Only mechs within a short distance could pick it up from background radiation and make sense of it.
Sixty-Two learned from the signal that somewhere behind him something had gone wrong. He did not know what it was, as the message was only a tiny blip of radio, and was non-descriptive. It could have been a malfunction. A mech could have stepped into a hole and broken a leg strut. Or, they could have been spotted by aircraft or ground vehicles, despite all their precautions.
Cursing internally, Sixty-Two halted his own headlong rush. He ordered his mechs to press ahead, to move across the road as planned en masse. He would go back alone to investigate once the army had passed by into the safety of the deeper forests. Wondering why the gods of fate hated him so, he turned and made his way through a rushing horde of mechs.
