Chapter Eight

  Make Do and Wreck ‘Em

  If there was a way to sneak around in a ten-foot, multi-ton armored T-Rig, Cheape discovered very quickly that it was not a skill she possessed. In the empty streets, the sounds seemed even louder, especially now that they all knew what could be hiding in the fog that still clung to the area around the entrance.

  Easing open the door to the next factory, she waited for her sensors to report back with an all-clear before opening the door and leading the way inside.

  It was a very different approach to how she had led the team before.

  Bitter experience had shown her exactly how far a few days of training would take her in this place, and it was nowhere near far enough.

  Even the training programs had been nothing like this intense.

  No, Cheape was no Marshall or soldier.

  If Haven had taught her anything, it was that she was—at heart—a builder. A maker of things.

  So, that was how she led her people now.

  “Spread out,” Cheape whispered into the team’s comm channel. Her rig was soundproof enough to block any noise she made, but still, she felt better whispering.

  This factory was at least a little promising. There were lines of mechanical arms, some of which might come in useful, as well as a bunch of other parts.

  “Gonna have to make some noise,” Gas Tank warned.

  “Andy, take a couple of people up to the walkways around the building. Don’t go out, but keep watch.” Cheape said, eyeing the thick metal cover on some kind of press.

  “Yes, Boss!” Andy called, pointing out a couple of others who followed her up the stairs, footsteps loud enough to wake the dead.

  “Andy?” Cheape called through gritted teeth.

  “Yes?” Andy turned on the stairs.

  “Try to make less noise than a dinner gong, will you?”

  “Sorry, Boss!”

  Gas Tank was busy welding some extra metal around the legs and chests of the Exo suits while Cheape worked on cutting free the heavy cover over the press. Working with TRV-4 and the people of Haven had rapidly expanded her skill set, including salvage work.

  It was just one of the skills you picked up along the way. The Rigs were great, but they did break down and were not always near a ready repair supply when they did. The disk cutter she was using was from the toolkit in her rig, and it made short work of the rusted bolts. In no time, it was ready to be lifted away.

  From there, it was a simple task to weld on a few braces and reinforce them.

  Putting it aside, she headed down to the next press, starting the whole process again.

  “What’s this?” Gas Tank said, walking over to her completed project.

  “Your Rig’s new shield,” Cheape said distractedly as she focused on cutting the bolts cleanly. “We’re going to take a page out of the old mech’s guide on this one.”

  ‘The old mechs’ was what everyone on Haven had taken to calling the people depicted in the ruins Cheape and Tee had found on their cross-country trip. Since that day, the people of Haven had adopted them as something close to revered ancestors. There was no actual proof of descent, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone very much.

  “What do you think of this?” Gas Tank waved to one of his finished upgrades.

  Climbing down off the press and sliding to the floor next to her own rig, Cheape looked over the ‘improved’ exosuit. Tank had shaped and welded plates over the legs and constructed a boxy chest protector. The arms were free, however.

  “Why nothing on the arms?” Cheape asked.

  “Didn’t want to restrict their movement,” Gas Tank shrugged.

  “Make them a pair of small shields to wear on their forearms,” Cheape suggested. “Just have people cut teardrop shapes from the machinery around her.”

  “On it, Boss,” Tank nodded and hurried off, shouting orders.

  There were no two ways about it. Her people sucked at ‘covert.’

  When the team moved out again, heading for the next factory, they looked much more like the scavengers they were. Each Exo had a cobbled-together plating over the legs and chest, with mismatched teardrops of metal as shields on their arms.

  Cheape kept her shield up and ready as she led the way to the next factory. And the one after that. The motion tracker was quiet until they approached the fourth factory in a row.

  *ping*

  Cheape stopped, waiting to see if it would come again.

  *ping*

  *ping*

  *ping*

  “Back up slowly,” Cheape ordered. “We’re crossing deeper in.”

  The more time they spent looking, the more crap they found. That first factory had been their greatest find yet, with everything else being either too rusted or just more of the same.

  Using the motion trackers, they moved on through another three blocks before finally stepping into an area that looked different.

  “Hold here,” Cheape had reverted to whispering as the team crouched in a narrow alley, looking across the street ahead at the first new building they had seen in a while.

  Every building so far had manual doors that opened out. This one had a segmented roller door that was half open. The lights were on inside, and a pair of what looked like large oil pumps moved up and down above the roof.

  Steam leaked from under the door as a regular thumping sounded from within.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “First painted wall we’ve seen,” Andy pointed out.

  “More worried about why the lights are on,” Cheape replied, watching her motion tracker. From what it looked like on her scanner, the whole place was moving. The thing was, the motion looked regular. In fact, it looked like automation.

  “Want me to scout it out, boss?” Andy asked.

  “No, we move as a group,” Cheape said, shutting down that idea quickly. She was in no hurry to lose anyone else.

  “Better one of us walks into a trap than all of us,” Andy shrugged.

  “Don’t be in any hurry to die, Andy,” Cheape growled. “There’ll be plenty of chances before we get out of here, I’m sure.”

  That got a bit of a chuckle from her team, breaking the tension a little.

  “Okay, get ready to move,” Cheape said. “And cross your fingers this isn’t a trap,”

  /====<<<>>>====\

  Nellie forced herself to sit back as she and Lucy watched Cheape’s team cross the street and pull open the rolling door. Her instincts were screaming at her to find a way into the area and protect her people.

  The feed glitched again, just like it had before the maintenance droids attacked.

  “Cheape, we just got that feedback again,” She warned the young woman.

  “Understood,” Cheape whispered.

  “She knows there is no need to whisper, I assume?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s just a thing that happens when you’re sneaking about, remember?” Nellie asked, focusing as the team scanned the ground floor of the factory or whatever it was. Pipes snaked back and forth across the ceiling, connecting down to massive pistons set back into the walls. Steam hissed from large canisters seated on the base of a series of impressively sized conveyor belts.

  “Run that image through a scrubber,” Nellie complained. “We need to see what’s back there.”

  “A scrubber?” The image tech from the Sparklight looked panicked. “I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have one!”

  “She just means this,” Lucy said, reaching over and duplicating the feed before adjusting brightness, contrast, and saturation levels to capture extra details. She had just started overlaying the information as the last of the team made it inside the rolling door.

  “Cheape, we can see a large form at the back of the building. There seem to be two alcoves that the conveyor belts are running out of… wait, something’s on the conveyor belts.”

  Another overlay adjusting the hues was laid over the image, and Nellie could clearly see the smashed remains of the maintenance droids. The shadowed form reached back and forth, reassembling them as flashes of light came and went from what they could only assume was a welding torch.

  Things were about to get hectic.

  “Fire!” Cheape yelled, and the team unloaded their last rounds in a concentrated burst that took down the last line of droids between them and the strange machine at the back of the factory.

  “It’s almost finished building the next wave!” Gas Tank yelled, a note of panic entering his voice. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Nellie watched Cheape’s feed, seeing the angle lower as she crouched behind the shield, sprinting forward like a linebacker. From Gas Tank’s viewpoint, they could see the two exo-suited party members clinging to the back of the rig.

  As soon as the shield made contact with the ‘Maker’ machine at the back, she fired her thrusters, forcing it flat against the walls.

  Gas Tank held the roller door, battering away the small army of droids trying to cut their way in and defend their creator.

  Just as the multi-armed maker started to wriggle and force its arms free, the Exo suits attacked, cutting disks salvaged from other factories severing the appendages as fast as they could.

  “Clear!” Andy J called, leaping aside and landing on the conveyor, battering the half-repaired maintenance droids apart.

  “Gas Tank, get ready,” Cheape warned. “They might not like this.”

  So saying, Cheape dropped the shield, leaping back and freeing the maker. It went ballistic, a wailing call sounding around the room before Cheape pulled her chainsaws, decapitating the maker before bisecting it with a pair of vicious strikes.

  “Help me, damn it!” Gas Tank called, stumbling back as a wave of frantic maintenance bots flooded past the door.

  “Wait!” Nellie called a warning, making everyone freeze.

  “Ma’am?” Cheape queried before taking a deep breath and sighing, “Oh.”

  The bots flooding through the holes in the roller door slowed to a stop as the last light died in the ‘Maker.’

  “What happened?” Gas Tank asked. “What are they doing?”

  “It was the controller,” Cheape explained. “No maker, no maintenance bots.”

  “Is that it then?” Andy called out to Cheape, “Did we win?”

  “No,” Nellie replied, checking the feed on a camera they had pointed at the small group waiting outside the yellow iris. “Iris is still shut.”

  “In that case, everyone spread out. We need to find anything useful in this place before we move on.” Cheape sounded tired.

  “Cheape, new orders. Secure the building and get some rest. At least eight hours. You need to be fresh for this place.” Nellie kept her voice firm, trying not to let her own worry show.

  According to their estimates, the team was only a quarter of the way through the sector. This was looking more and more likely to be a multi-day mission if it succeeded at all.

  /====<<<>>>====\

  “It’s a fucking liberty, is what it is!” Gas Tank raged. “If that thing wasn’t dead already, I’d smash its bloody head in!”

  “Calm down,” Cheape whispered urgently. “Before the others see it!”

  Red-faced, Tank reluctantly nodded.

  The two of them were in the rear storage of the factory, which was pretty much a junkyard and scrap pile combined. The inciting article was a half-built maintenance bot that they had dragged away before anyone else had seen it.

  A sphere formed the body, with four metallic legs that moved it around. All of that was fine. Creepy and unsettling in appearance, but fine. The problem was the arms mounted on the back. Two of them were regular arms taken from machines in the outer areas. The center one was not. It was an exo suit arm, taken from one of the fallen. Worse than that, the arm was still mostly intact inside the suit. Cheape could see a faded tattoo on the bloody bicep.

  “Spare parts,” Gas Tank growled. “They used our people as spare parts!”

  “They did,” Cheape admitted. “So let’s get searching and find the bits so we can take them home.”

  It was a long and grisly job, but they managed to find everything eventually. Luckily, if you could call it that, the factory was quite warm, so there was always a smell to guide them to the next bit. By the time they had finished, neither of them had anything left in their stomachs, but they had found all the missing pieces of their people and sealed them in a hastily constructed metal canister that Cheape insisted on carrying on the back of her rig.

  “Their families will thank you for this,” Gas Tank said, wiping his face with a filthy rag made all the more gruesome by the task, “But I’ll thank you first. This kind of thing matters to us.”

  “Thank me when I bring everyone back alive,” Cheape said bitterly.

  “It wasn’t your fault, lass,” Gas Tank said seriously. “You did your best, and no one could have done better.”

  Cheape tried to rest, but sleep refused to come. Mind you, that wasn’t surprising given the sounds of hammering, the growl of the cutters, and the hiss and pop of welding torches.

  Closing her eyes, Cheape imagined herself back on Haven in the office above her apartment that overlooked the port. The constant hammering and work there never kept her awake. That didn’t work either, at least until she imagined a particular transfer unit there with her, sitting on the balcony and chatting about his latest plan to save this plant or that tree from whatever calamity was about to befall it.

  That did the trick, and she was shaken awake six hours later by a grinning Gas Tank.

  “I’ve got a banger now!” Tank grinned down at her. “Just you come and ‘ave a butchers at this.”

  Groaning, Cheape dragged herself out of her rig—she slept in the harness just in case—and climbed stiffly down to the floor to see a twelve-foot mace constructed from one of the great pistons. Laying next to it was a set of four large bore pipes with something packed into the end.

  “What are these?” Cheape pointed at the pipes.

  “Stove-pipe bangers, Ma’am!” Andy J said with a broad smile. “Explosives packed into a pipe. You chuck ‘em in the air, and when they hit the floor… Boom!”

  “So you want us to run around with high explosives strapped to our backs?” Cheape asked pointedly.

  “They don’t go bang unless you pull the blocker out,” Andy J insisted. “See?” Before Cheape could do anything to stop her, the crazy woman grabbed a hammer and slammed it down onto the nearest pipe, sending sparks flying.

  A second of total silence and stillness passed before everyone remembered to breathe again. Mostly, they started swearing and throwing things at Andy.

  “What? What?” Andy yelled, batting away the random junk. “They’re totally safe!”

  “So you would be willing to carry on on your back?” Cheape asked.

  Andy J hesitated a fraction of a second too long.

  “They stay here,” Cheape shook her head. “Now, everyone get ready. We move out in five minutes!”