The floor of the hallway shook. A low rumble, almost too low for human ears, sounded from no direction in particular. A single robot paced through the halls, tall and wrapped in a forest green greatcoat. At her side was a crude machete, and in her arms was clutched a compact buster rifle of sorts. Her name was Penelope. She was an operative of Tin Can’s militia, and she was urgently searching for someone.
She detected movement in the corner of her eye. The robot snapped to face it, her buster leveled. It was just an abandoned backpack, sagging over. That made sense. The building was on a college campus. A student must have left it behind when the evacuation order had gone out.
With a quiet click, Penelope unhooked a small handheld device from her belt. It emanated a soft hum as its screen flickered to life. She scanned the environment with the machine. It was a shortrange signal sniffer that worked via Cyberspace, detecting the signatures and metadata of nearby machines. It was indicating a vague signature nearby, but it couldn’t get a lock onto its exact direction, nor any data about what it was.
“We must not be close enough. Aed, can you make any sense of this?”
A blue glow that had been absent a moment prior now played across Penelope’s features. A glowing sphere surrounded by a rotating broken vertical ring materialized before cohering into a tiny, floating humanoid figure. It was a cyber-elf, a sentient being that drew upon the energies of Cyberspace to materialize physically. He appeared in the form of an armored knight, held aloft on wings that resembled the glowing tubes of a fluorescent light.
Aed’s voice sounded in Penelope’s head, beamed directly in via communication frequency. It was high-pitched but quiet as he responded. “I can see the signal pretty clearly. It’s a cell phone. It’s registered to a one… Doctor Tomato Durand. Pen, it’s her.”
A wave of relief washed through Penelope’s circuits, before she remembered that human devices like phones weren’t a part of them. She could have left it behind, or worse.
“Let’s get to her. Lead the way.” A note of anxiety was in her voice,
The cyber-elf paused before responding. “…Alright. I’ve got the building schematics, it’s this way.”
Aed was an elf of the ‘Hacker’ subtype, designed with a specialty for signal intrusion and information gathering. Many cyber-elves were designed with a special ability that could do seemingly impossible things, at the cost of their own vital energies. Simply reading the data of the local Cyberspace environment, however, wasn’t any trouble, especially for a hacker elf.
Presently, Penelope set off in the direction of the signal, Aed’s directions being fed into her heads-up display. He flitted closely behind as they reached a stairwell. The clatter of the door echoed up the stairs. Quickly, they ascended. The robot’s soles clacked up each step. She felt a churning anxiety about the noise she was making, worried about alerting anything that may have been lurking in the shadows.
The building was dark, its lighting gone with the rest of the power on the campus. By contrast the stairwell had light streaming in through the windows at each landing. After only a moment or so of climbing, Penelope reached the destination floor, pushing through the door. Once more she was in the darkness of a hallway, her vision going grainy as her light amplification software kicked in.
They were close. Aed’s navigation marker indicated it was at the end of the hallway. They passed several doors. Through the windows on the doors, Penelope could spy the features of the different rooms. One was a normal classroom, full of desks and a ceiling-mounted projector. Another was a computer lab. The rows of monitors were dark. Finally, there was a long lab space with a door at either end of its length, both labelled “Cyber Elf Laboratory”. Through the glass, Penelope briefly spied some upright metal cannisters, each with faintly glowing indicator lights. They must have been some kind of storage medium or compiler device with their own backup power supply, the robot decided.
She wished she had time to go into the lab and pack up the equipment. The people back home would doubtless be thrilled to get their hands on institution-grade Cyber Elf equipment. But she didn’t have the time. The situation could come undone at any moment.
“Fuck it.” She opened the communication link to her operator, back home in the Tin Can command center.
“Field to HQ. I’ve spotted some official Elf equipment. I don’t have time to grab it, but I’m marking the location if you want to send assets after it.”
She knew it was unlikely they would retrieve the stuff. She was probably the only Tin Canner this far from home, other than her ride out. Besides, as much as any officially-designed Cyber-Elf equipment was a steal, the math simply didn’t work out. Sending someone into a hot zone just to nab whatever outdated equipment had made it into an educational environment was a high degree of risk. Best case, when the area quieted down, if the authorities were slow to move in for clean-up, Tin Can might have the chance to send someone in. Assuming, of course, that the college was still standing, and someone else didn’t get to the goods first.
Presently, Penelope’s communication link crackled. All conventional comms in the area were down- cell towers, links to underground cables, all were destroyed or unpowered. Contact with home was maintained instead by a link directly through Cyberspace. Bandwidth was terrible by the nature of the realm, but it was good enough for vocal transmission.
“Acknowledged, Field. We’ve received your coordinates.”
“Keep an ear out for my next report. We’re moments away from the objective.”
Penelope pushed through the door at the end of the hall. The room was a lounge. One wall was dominated by a panoramic window. Against the window was a long table with seats facing the glass. Through the window, she could see the ruined cityscape. Sitting on the table was a phone, its screen still lit up. There was no sign of the owner. Walking towards it, the robot held up her scanner. Now the signal was clear as day. A data node indicating the cell phone model was on the scanner’s screen. It automatically probed for metadata. She muttered to herself, “Owned by… Doctor Tomato Durand.”
Before Penelope could call out for the doctor, she heard a yell from somewhere behind her. Instinct took over. She leaped to the side, avoiding the direction of the sound and whipping around in midair. Her off-hand was still clutching the scanner, so her buster rifle was shouldered and held in one hand. Not the most stable firing position, but she would manage. The threat was identified in her vision. Humanoid shape. Melee configuration. Targeting reticles drew up beads for the head region, the chest, and the limbs. No time to be fancy- she aimed for center mass. The targeting program gave a tone indicating the buster was properly aimed. As her feet touched the floor from her leap, her finger twitched.
But she didn’t pull the trigger. In fact, she froze, as did her would-be assailant. Female, olive-skinned, nondescript clothing, neck-length brown hair, dark brown eyes. Either a human gracefully approaching her forties, or a Reploid designed to look the part. She was brandishing a folded up metal chair above her head. Penelope recognized the woman. It was the one she’d come for. It was Tomato.
The robot’s targeting routines continued to hum away, feeding more combat data. The woman had come from behind the door. A line traced her likely path. A tag popped up, identifying the chair as a low threat vector. Penelope quelled the combat program. Tomato dropped the chair to the floor with a loud clang.
“Penelope? The hell’re you doing here?”
The robot raised an eyebrow. “I could ask the same of you. The evac call was more than a day ago! We saw your distress call on the open comms, but we couldn't establish a connection. I was dispatched on a flight to get you basically as soon as I was ready to go.”
The human sauntered over to her phone, picking it up and pocketing it. She pushed in the tall chair she must have been sitting in. Under the chair was a round device with a shoulder strap. The side of the cylinder was emanating a golden light. Tomato picked up the device, hanging it from her shoulder.
“Call went out when I was on the wrong end of town. Got a call from my partner. They had our kid and were on the way to evac, but they were freakin’ out because they didn’t have their project on ‘em. Said it was back at the university lab.” She tapped the cylindrical device astride her body, indicating that it was the project in question.
“I lost contact with’em. Call dropped and I couldn’t raise them again. All I can do is hope the both of them made it out. I decided to stop by the college and grab it. It’s some important shit. New cyber elf tech they developed. Supposed to be able to deal with… y’know.” Tomato gestured at the burning city outside the window.
Penelope looked into the viewing window from which the golden light emanated. Faintly, she could see a face. It was feminine, with gaunt skin. The eyes were closed. As quickly as she spotted it, the inert Elf’s visage faded.
Tomato continued speaking. “It all went to hell so goddamn fast, Pen. The Mavs swept up the city. I saw some of the evac craft go down. Plenty made it, but… Jesus. Realized I missed my official window, so I put out a distress call for anyone that was listening. And then comms dropped out entirely. So I’ve just been holed up here for the last day. Figured it would be bad to move away from the coordinates I’d broadcasted. Besides, the campus stayed mostly quiet. Heard some fighting happen out down on the grounds, but that was it…”
Penelope had seen the tangled remains of several warped Mavericks outside as she’d approached the building’s entrance. There was no sign of Neo Arcadian enforcers. It looked like infighting that had ended badly for all involved. In the weeks since the crisis had arisen, cities had fallen one after the other, not under organized waves of assailants, but at the hands of hordes of crazed marauders.
Trouble had been brewing in the wastelands outside the cities for a while, with deadly, seemingly viral cyber elves spreading instability and madness. The Mavericks of the latest crisis had been using badly designed bootleg Cyber Elf technology to boost their capabilities at the expense of their sanity, and in many cases, the coherence of their bodies. It had likely started as one particularly clever Maverick faction or other tinkering with replication of stolen elves, but it had spread out of control. The incoherent elves roamed to and fro, splitting off into new, less stable shards at random before then being captured by different Maverick groups. It had quickly become too much for the Neo Arcadian forces to contain.
Penelope addressed Tomato. “This thing better be damn well worth it. It was reckless of you to go after it. Shit, I’m still so tense. I’m just glad I didn’t shoot you.”
Sheepishly, Tomato replied, “…Yeah. Would have been an embarrassing end. Tomato Durand, Doctor of Robotic Psychology, blown to chunks by the one lady that was there to get her away from the Mavericks. Damn. I, uh… Sorry about, y’know, trying to beat your shit in with the chair. I just… heard footsteps comin’ up the stairs, and figured it was better to be safe.”
“It’s alright. You of all people know it wouldn’t have hurt me. I’ve been hit with worse.” The robot thought about how it was an utterly futile- or foolish- thing for a human to do. Humans simply didn’t have the strength to fight most robots, even the weak ones, without special weapons. Robots were, by nature, durable and strong. Tomato was strong for a human, but still. Penelope supposed it was just in her nature. She’d always been cavalier about danger. It would be exactly like her to go down swinging.
“C’mon, we should get going. City’s not getting any safer.”
“Hold on. Gotta make sure I can see if there’s any rogue elves out and about.” Tomato fished something from her pockets. It was something like a pair of glasses. She donned them, pressing a button on the side as she did. A simple HUD flickered to life on the lenses. The device was an augmented reality display meant specifically to assist humans in perceiving cyber elves. They couldn’t normally see the beings, as they manifested their holographic presences at lower wavelengths of light than human eyes could see.
“Ah! And who are you?” She was addressing Penelope’s elf now.
His voice crackled through a small speaker in the glasses. “Hello, Doctor Durand. I am Aed. I am Miss Penelope’s traveling companion. We can be properly introduced later, but for now, we really should be moving.”
Tomato required no persuasion. The trio made for the door. Quietly, they walked through the hall. Penelope radioed to her mission operator, confirming that they had Tomato and she was okay. As they reached the end of the hallway, she spoke up, addressing the doctor. “By the way, I got a peek at the equipment in the elf lab over there. Marked it down. If we get the chance, we’re totally sending someone back in to steal the shit out of it.”
Tomato rolled her eyes. She was more than familiar with the flexible ethics Tin Can exercised when it came to government or corporate property. “Well, I’ll pretend you didn’t tell me if anyone asks. Doubt they’ll notice, though. Everything in the city is getting smashed. Obviously.”
The group descended the stairs until they reached the bottom landing. Once again, they entered a hall. Where the floor above had been dim, the ground floor was pitch black. Tomato pulled out her phone, activating its flashlight.
“Shit, right. Forgot you humans can’t do night vision…”
After only another minute or so, they exited into the afternoon light. It was dim. The sky glowed a lurid red where it wasn’t choked by clouds of smoke. In the distance, a giant, horrible machine, silhouetted black against the horizon, lurched on its four legs, bumping into skyscrapers and causing them to shudder. It was mostly quiet, but the low breeze was occasionally punctuated by distant busterfire and indistinct explosive thumps. Twenty feet from the door was a tangle of bodies. Two mechaniloids, three Reploids. A faint smoke rose from somewhere in the pile.
Tomato spoke up. “So, uh, what’s the plan? We’re definitely not making it out on foot, right?”
Penelope replied, intending to be reassuring. “It’s less than a kilo to our exit. Had the pilot put down under an overpass. Would have landed closer, but we didn’t want to draw attention while searching for you.”
A metallic crunch echoed across the campus. The trio froze. The sound echoed again, closer this time. Everyone looked around, trying to find where it was coming from.
“It's from behind those buildings over there!”
Aed was pointing towards a cluster of tall buildings at the edge of campus. As if in response, the terrible crunching sound issued again.
“I can't read any clear data from it, it must be corrupted… Pen, I think we gotta use my ability!”
Penelope gritted her teeth. Her hands clenched tight around the rifle. “That's risky! I can handle it, okay?!”
“Not for you, for her! Humans aren't durable like you! Come on!” Aed flitted towards the dead Mavericks.
Penelope rushed after him, and Tomato, hot on her heels, piped up. “You don't have to do this, you'll die if you use all your energy!”
Aed had already initiated use of his talent, the blue aura surrounding him intensifying. The pile of metal bodies started to rattle in rough synchronization with the movements of his arms, directing the metal like an orchestra conductor. “I'm not going to use it all, but if you want to save some of my reserve, help me untangle the bodies!”
Frantically, Tomato and Penelope worked to pry apart the limbs of the heap against a backdrop of approaching crunching sounds. It took them less than half a minute, but it felt like an eternity. With each chunk of robot they disentangled, Aed’s talent extricated the functional components that he needed. Components floated in the air, linked vaguely by a field of nearly intangible energy.
“Doctor, I need you to stand still.” Intense concentration was in Aed’s voice. Tomato obeyed, despite every nerve in her body telling her she had to run away from the approaching sound, whatever it was. The extracted components and plates were shifting and warping now, surrounding Tomato. Impossibly, they converged on her, morphing into a suit of combat armor not unlike the body of a military Reploid. Somehow, the suit began morphing to accommodate the cyber elf storage canister hanging from the woman's shoulder. The warping metal conveyed it to an attachment point on the small of the armor's back.
Simultaneously, the pipes of a hydraulic device formed into the haft of a spear, topped by the inert blade of an energy knife that had been clutched in the hand of one of the dead Reploids. With a hum, it shimmered to life as it placed itself into Tomato's newly armored hand.
For a brief moment, Penelope and a now-worn looking Aed admired the work. Moments ago, a woman in street clothes had been standing there, but now, she was replaced with something akin to a combat-ready robot. The suit was largely patchwork in its colors, and it had uneven greebles. Still, the woman's body was now covered by protective plates. She had large knee-length boots akin to the armored feet many humanoid Reploids sported. Her joints had rudimentary housings for large, powerful motors. Tomato's face remained visible in her new helmet. A bundle of cables had been fused to her augmented reality glasses, feeding suit data to its heads-up display. Penelope said, “Damn. You do make for a fine-looking robot after all.”
Tomato replied dryly, “This suit smells like burnt oil and the shit at the bottom of a dumpster. Still... It feels like I'm moving a lot easier. Pretty impressive.”
The admiration was cut short by the source of the noise coming into view. Lumbering around the cluster of nearby buildings was a massive, distorted abomination. It was almost two stories tall, a terrible amalgamation of machinery with the top half of a humanoid figure sticking out of the top. Most of the body had once been some kind of crab-like loader mechaniloid, and the Reploid atop it was fused to where its control circuit had likely been housed. The Reploid had an oddly peaceful expression on their face. Corrupted cyber elves zigzagged around the Reploid's body, casting an eerie crimson glow. Most of the crab’s exterior plating was missing or in shambles. Its legs had been warped into bizarre, sharp spikes. With each step, they speared into the concrete, making the crunching sounds the group had heard.
Immediately, the Maverick spotted the group, its Reploid half staring in their direction as the crab half started to gallop towards them. Its terrible legs kicked up chunks of ground as it went. It was only a few hundred feet away and it was closing fast. A series of buster cannons that had been melted to the crab's frame began to wildly fire, sending a torrent of badly aimed death at the trio.
“Inside, now!” Penelope shoved Tomato back towards the door of the building they had emerged from. Aed dematerialized, his aura flitting back into Penelope's coat. Tomato found herself moving faster than she expected, her legs jerkily coming up higher than she meant with each step as she failed to compensate for the enhancement the suit was providing to her strength and speed. Awkwardly, she crashed through the door. Penelope followed closely behind, firing off bursts of energy at the approaching abomination.
Back in the lobby, Penelope yelled again. “Cover! Behind the desk!”
She dragged the human behind her, diving behind the reception desk. Peeking out from the cover, she saw a hole get blasted in the wall beside the door, scattering hot shrapnel and embers through where Tomato had been standing a moment prior.
“Shit! Pen, what do we do?” Tomato clutched her spear as she spoke, both hands white-knuckled inside of their gauntlets.
Several blasts rocked the wall of the building. A window shattered. The feminine robot snapped in response, “I don't know! It shrugged off several direct shots!”
Aed's disembodied voice spoke up. “I ran an analysis on the model of loader mechaniloid that the bottom half used to be. There should be a central power conduit along the back side of its body. If you cut that, it'll be immobilized, but- I don't know how you're gonna get around those cannons!”
A grim look settled on Penelope’s face. “I'll draw its fire. Tomato, you gotta go around back. Use your spear to cut the conduit.”
Tomato protested, “That's a really bad idea! You'll definitely get shot!”
“Just be fast. I can remain evasive long enough for you to do it as long as you don't fuck around. I'll draw its attention by shooting at it and I'll lead it to the left. You take the right flank.”
The double doors they had entered through were blasted off their hinges, clattering to the ground. A follow-up shot melted a hole in the carpet and smashed the underlying concrete. Aed spoke back up. “Can you do it, Doctor?”
Tomato grimaced. “I can try. How many hits can this suit take?”
“I don't know.”
Penelope interjected, “Never rely on being able to take hits, ‘Mato. Bad idea even as a robot, and you're still meat under that plate. C'mon, let's do this.”
Without waiting for a reply, she stood up, sprinting for the door, already shooting her rifle. Tomato swore, getting up and following her. Penelope was already off to the left, sprinting and blasting parts off the lumbering Maverick. Most of its cannons were trained on her, sending inaccurate fire back in her direction. Deftly, each bolt was dodged, but at the same time, whenever Penelope shot at the Reploid atop the machine, it dodged with surprising agility. With the pair locked in a gunfight, Tomato's window was open.
A lone cannon on the beast tracked the woman as she sprinted towards it. It fired a few bolts, but they were all poorly aimed, falling behind her. Its aim was further thrown off as the entire misshapen robot lurched from a well-placed shot from Penelope. Tomato got in behind the thing and immediately spotted the long bulge of the conduit running up the crab's back. She raised her spear to slash it.
A bright light flooded her vision. Something smashed into her chest. Disoriented, she was knocked flat on her back. Her armor sprayed sparks as she skidded several feet. She felt intense heat across her entire body.
“Fuck! Tomato!”
The woman saw what had shot her. It was a small buster on a detached arm, messily welded to the back of the Maverick. She rolled to the side, avoiding its follow-up shot. Hot fragments of blasted concrete clanked harmlessly off the back of her armor. Leaping to her feet, she lunged back towards the crab. Her spear came up, charging forth. Its energy blade perfectly skewered the conduit. Immediately, a large hole ruptured in it. A hot cloud of Energen in gasseous form sprayed into the air. Tomato leapt back again, trying not to get caught by the scalding, corrosive gas. The robot faltered, shuddering and stumbling to a halt. The buster that had shot Tomato stopped holding itself up, its emitter going dim.
With the crab half of the amalgam dead in the water, there was nothing to keep Reploid half on top evasive. Immediately, a volley of shots punched a chunk through its chest. A coup-de-grace from Penelope's buster blasted the head apart. The abomination fell silent. Its swarm of cyber elves dispersed up and away. The legs fully gave out and the infernal machine crashed to the ground.
“Tomato! Tomato! Are you alright?!” Penelope rushed around the giant corpse to check on the human. Somehow, despite all odds, she was still standing. The chestplate of the armor was intact, albeit dented and glowing red. Already, the glow was fading, as was the heat. The adrenaline started to pass, and Tomato doubled over, clutching at her chest and coughing. The robot was about to call her name as she gripped her by the shoulders, when she realized that between coughs, the human was laughing.
“Holy- holy shit. That was pretty bad.” More coughing and laughter.
“Dude. Dude. I almost died. Haha oh my god. Oh my god.”
Her coughing subsided, replaced mostly by laughing, before she composed herself. “God. I'm definitely gonna bruise up tomorrow.”
“But you're okay, right?”
“Yeah. It didn't even get through the armor. Aed did a good job.”
Though he didn't manifest, Aed's voice sounded, both in Penelope's head and Tomato's glasses. “Good. Good. I was worried. I wasn't exactly working with quality parts.”
Penelope made to walk away, but Tomato held up a hand to stop her. “Wait, Pen. I need a sec.”
The robot turned around, sporting a quizzical expression. “I thought you were okay?”
“I just need to catch my breath.” The human stepped over to the curb, slowly lowering herself into a sitting position. She looked up at Penelope, expectantly. Penelope hesitated, staring down with her resting stern expression. Tomato patted the concrete beside her with the palm of her gauntlet. Reluctantly, the robot sat down, resting her buster rifle in her lap.
The adrenaline of combat was fully gone now. Tomato's shoulders sagged, and she felt suddenly quite conscious of the group she was in. Her, a human wearing odd armor made of mismatched Maverick parts. Penelope, a long-obsolete Robot Master in a combat uniform. Aed, the invisible presence between the two of them. They were an odd bunch. A long exhale rattled from Tomato’s lips. She leaned back, propping herself up on her hands. Her neck relaxed and her head rolled back, looking up into the dismal sky. Her eyes lazily traced the plumes of a cloud of black smoke.
“D’you remember when we first met, Pen?”
“Yeah. Windup to the Second Invasion. We were prepping everything. Officially we were attached to the backbone of Wily’s supply lines. We weren’t even directly coordinated with the UN side of the coalition- it all went through his logistical scheme. Made more sense that way, and it’s how we liked it.” Tin Can had been right in the middle of the route between Arcadia and the once-imposing Wily Tower. It made sense as a node in the supply network being built in anticipation of the onslaught.
Penelope continued. “I was about to run some last-minute range training. And I got a call from the boss. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A UN jeep was daring to approach, given the official go-ahead, carrying some idiot human that wanted to rubberneck. And, sure enough, as it pulled up to the wall, there you were, in the back, grinning like an idiot at the opportunity.”
Tomato laughed. Tin Can had always been, by nature, wary of humans. Its population was almost entirely robots that had, in some way or another, been burned by humanity or its laws, and sought to go their own ways.
“I was still in school at the time. I’d been moved into one of the underground shelters, but… you know how I get. I climb the walls if I have to stay still for too long. And I’d heard of this town full of pissed robots that had all run off. Sort of thing I could write papers on for the rest of my degree if I got close to it.”
Penelope scoffed. “Humans, always butting in.” Her tone was its usual harsh register, but Tomato had known her long enough to understand it as a lighthearted jab.
“Couldn’t help myself. Too novel. In those days, everyone figured robots were a part of society or were of Wily’s kids. No in-between… no Mavericks, either. So I bugged the guy I knew up high in the UN command. Made contact with ol’ Tanuki Man. Soon enough, I was in a UN camp, getting supplies- and then I was outside the walls. Jeep was rolling away. Tanuki was polite, but you looked pissed, more than your usual.”
It was Penelope’s turn to laugh. “I was pissed! It was a huge deal! If you died or got hurt under our watch, the news would have run with it! ‘Terrorist cell of murder robots kills innocent girl during invasion’ or some bullshit headline like that! And I couldn’t babysit you, I was going to be in the field! Not that I wanted anything to do with you… still, I couldn’t refuse the boss.”
Tanuki Man had never implemented any sort of political mechanism within Tin Can. No punitive or administrative measure to keep people obeying his orders. In his own eyes, the robot wasn’t even really a leader- he was just the guy who was balancing the books and figuring out what had to happen to keep the lights on. But his dedication had bought the loyalty of many, and Penelope was among them. Despite her misgivings about the once-young human, she’d trusted Tanuki Man’s judgement.
Tomato smiled. “You dragged me to the range. Made me train with your handmade busters. God, the stocks on those things were a pain. Nothing like Dad’s old varmint rifle.”
“It was the best I could do on short notice to make sure you could take care of yourself and minimally burden whoever got stuck keeping an eye on you. Besides, those stocks are plenty comfortable. You really don’t need more than bent wire if your body is covered in plating.” Another chuckle from Penelope. Tomato followed suit.
For another moment, the pair reminisced on Tomato’s first visit to the town. She’d been eager to interview different residents, and some were even receptive to it.
“But, y’know, I bring up that first time because that monster we just fought, the state of the city…” Tomato’s expression had gone stony. “This shit reminds me of the invasion, and it reminds me of when I came back to the ruins of Arcadia after it was over. The shelter I’d been in… Pen, it was gone. Peeled open like a can of tuna. No survivors. Stupid as it was for me to leave shelter, it saved me. And all those feet of concrete and dirt didn’t save the poor bastards inside.”
Penelope looked into the middle distance, troubled by the conversation’s grim turn. “Did you know anybody there?”
“Nah. But there were families. Y’know, it was probably inevitable that we would have beaten those alien bastards? We got a lot of military hardware stationed all over the globe, and a lot of bodies to use it. The question was just… intervening before they could kill too many people. It was the best we could do. Probably not much comfort for the people in shelters that got breached.”
“Damn. It was a fucked up time.”
“Yeah.”
Tomato stretched and stood up.
“I’m good now. Chest’s a little sore but I’ve caught my breath.”
Instantly, Penelope was on her feet, and instantly, she was alert, her eyes focusing on a thousand little details in the ruins around them all at once. “Transport’s this way, c’mon.”
The robot lead the human off the college campus, towards the major highway that snaked through the city. The journey was a scant fifteen minutes, interrupted only briefly when they happened upon a crashed truck that had been carrying bags of chips, the contents now scattered across the road. Tomato stopped to grab a few bags as Penelope rolled her eyes and Aed complained about the delay.
After that, they were in the home stretch, approaching the particular section of overpass under which their transport was waiting. As they walked around the corner of a building, the craft came into view.
It was an ugly box with four large thrusters, one at each corner. The thing was utterly un-aerodynamic, flying only by angling its engines. Its rear hatch was facing the trio, and the pilot was standing in the open doorway. He was a short, thin, masculine Reploid with white hair and a sour expression. When he saw them, he waved urgently for the trio to get aboard. They hurried over to the craft. Tomato noticed the Tin Can emblem painted on the side- a black silhouette of a hyacinth flower. It was very obviously painted over a Neo Arcadian flag.
“Jesus. Even for you guys, this is audacious.”
Penelope replied, “Nobody was gonna miss it. We pulled it out of the last city that got hit by the Mavericks. C’mon, get in! Hit it, Crisis!”
The human stepped into the back of the aircraft and the door closed behind her. The interior of the craft was lined with seats on either side of an otherwise bare interior. There was a doorway to the cockpit. Crisis, already jogging to the door, looked back to size the woman up. “This it?”
As Penelope took a seat, she simply answered, “Yup. Let’s get a move on.”
Tomato also sat, staring out the window on the rear hatch. After only a moment, the aircraft’s engines all roared to life. With abruptness, it rose a few feet into the air and began to move forward. The shade from the overpass disappeared, replaced once again by the red sky. Tomato felt her stomach sink as the craft ascended harshly. After only a moment, she was able to spot the highway the craft had parked under, quickly receding below them. In the distance she could see raging fires. In the city’s downtown lumbered massive amalgamate beasts. A quadruped with six beady optics appeared to stare sullenly in their direction.
“Field to HQ. Reporting mission complete. We’re in the air.”
Tomato couldn’t hear the response to Penelope’s report, but it started to really hit her- Tin Can had chosen to send someone after her. “Shit. Uh, thanks, Pen. You saved my ass back there.”
“Psh. Couldn’t just leave ya’ out there. You’re one of us, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Heh.”
Suddenly, the armor encasing Tomato fell to pieces, loudly clattering to the floor of the stolen aircraft. “Fuck! Shit! Fuck!”
Crisis yelled, “The hell is going on back there?!”
Penelope yelled back, “Nothing, don’t worry about it! Doctor Durand’s equipment just took a beating, I guess!”
Aed materialized, his projected persona looking exhausted and fuzzy. “Ah, I’m sorry… I would have warned you, but we were caught up in the moment with the problem of that beast . The boons I can grant are hardly permanent. I essentially used Cyberspace trickery to mess with still-functional circuitry to form that armor. It’s not the sort of thing that can last forever. Eventually, it has to give out…”
Tomato examined herself. Her clothing was still intact. The augmented reality device was still on her face, but now there were cracks in the plastic frame where some of the freshly inserted wires were hanging. Most importantly- the Cyber Elf container was still at her side, once again swinging freely from its strap. She peered in just to be sure that the sleeping face was still there. Finally, she responded to Aed. “Well, it was good while it lasted. Thank you, Aed. I hope I didn’t expend too much of your energy.”
“I’ll be fine. We just need to get me home so I can be rejuvenated.”
Tomato breathed a sigh of relief. Cyber Elves were powerful beings, but they were equally frail. If they ever expended their reserves, they were simply gone- much more human-like in that regard than robots, who could simply be refueled from empty.
The cabin lapsed into silence. Aed once again dematerialized. Penelope rested her eyes, leaning back as far as she could in the cramped seat. Tomato stared out the window, watching the landscape travel beneath them. Eventually, she noticed a peculiar, utterly inexplicable detail. Two giant strands of black hair stretched across the landscape, entangled and stretching as far as she could see in either direction.
“What… is that?”
Penelope joined her at the window, wincing in recognition. “That? That’s the ruin of two space elevators coming down. The New Worcester Municipal Tether System was knocked out of orbit. Thing fell to Earth. Space elevators’re long as hell. Long enough that as it fell, it reached the Neo BosNYWash Memorial Lifter. Tangled in it. Brought them both down. Don’t think anyone survived in their paths…”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be really bad where their top stations hit. Most of it burned on reentry, but bits of orbital lattice made it to the surface along with anything still docked to ‘em.”
“It’s like all the Wily Wars and the Second Invasion are happening all over again…”
Tomato didn’t dare invoke the tragedy of the First Invasion. As dire as it was, at least coastlines weren’t getting erased.
“Penelope? Be real with me.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think my family made it?”
“Fuck, Tomato. I don’t know. I don’t know the evac stats for this city, but the numbers were bad for all the prior ones. Most of the Neo Arcadian forces sent in to contain it end up dead. Lot of the humans don’t make it, either. The Mavericks are just too unstable and strong. I hope your folks made it, but I’m not gonna lie to you.”
Tomato sighed. “Shit. Thanks for being honest.”
A moment passed. The doctor stared again at the Elf carrier. It could be the last thing she had of her partner. She tried to banish the thought- she would know when she knew. Grim determination crossed her features.
“Crisis, right? I know this is a slight deviation, but I need you to get me directly to Neo Arcadia!”
“The hell, why?”
“This package! It needs to get to the right hands! My partner, they said this could fix all of this! The Mavericks, the corrupted elves… all of it!”
The pilot spoke again, this time to Penelope. “What do I do?”
Penelope responded after a pause, raising an eyebrow at Tomato. “…Do what she says.”
The pilot responded with frustration in his voice. “Dammit… you owe me, lady!”
More quietly, Penelope intoned, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Tomato responded, “I hope so too.”