The mines would also work, we hoped, on any of the androids should they come this way.
The problem was, the mines were made using parts from the newly acquired crates of drone-repair supplies. We used about half of the extra batteries we’d collected for the land mines and almost all of some controller board, meaning the two hundred land mines we now had were all we’d get.
Behind the house, we’d built ten bunkers for people to sleep in. So far, we hadn’t had the time or resources to put anything in them other than food, water, lights, one of the medical units, and a fewblankets. Some of the older folks were trying to make the bunkers more “comfortable,” though I didn’t know what that really meant. I hadn’t gone down into one yet. Tito and Axel were both apparently a little claustrophobic and absolutely refused to go in. Lulu called them “death traps.”
Rosita had taken it upon herself to spearhead an escape-tunnel plan for the bunkers. Roger had lent her a team of seven drones that were currently carving out and shoring up a subterranean tunnel off the ranch.
One of the few out-of-box defensive units was an antiair missile system that included radar and a missile launcher, along with fifty missiles. The launcher held ten missiles at a time. The self-contained unit sat in the middle of the yard, currently “hidden” by the shell of the cistern. One of the two secondary radars sat atop the barn along with a set of anti-drone systems that were likely two hundred years out-of-date.
In addition, eight of the rhino units, all armed with newly charged Conquistador guns, patrolled the base. The other two were held in reserve in the woods south of us, just before the trees gave way to the lower valley and the hills.
And since we had an additional five of the big Conquistador guns, we put them in fixed bunkers around the ranch.
Because of the success of Lulu’s canister gun, we’d also built a dozen manual canister launchers. These were basically long-range slingshots using thick elastic bands whose original purpose was unknown to me. We had a limited supply of the real canisters for now. We were printing them as fast as we could, but the printers were all overworked already. If tomorrow’s planned raid went well, we’d have the ability to print what we needed much more quickly.
In the meantime, we set some of the older residents to work making Molotov cocktails, using canning supplies and fuel we had on hand. We had two kinds. The black-smoke-emitting smudge pots that we hoped would ruin their line-of-sight targeting and the fire-spreadingkind using roofing tar with a fuel tablet smushed inside and a rag. The recipe for those hadn’t come from Roger but from me and Sam.
All of this, along with a few other surprises, was only a fraction of what Roger wanted us to build and construct. He wanted mortars. Fire barrels that would supposedly confuse antipersonnel missiles. So much more. We had a serious lack of resources. The two printers, plus the small rapid printer—which was only good for making items such as nails and joints and shell casings—could only print so fast, and we were rapidly running out of all types of filaments.
Meanwhile, Lulu had moved to the control center and was working on PR. She was contacting reporters and anyone else who would listen about our plight. But because of the way we were forced to route our messages and because of the relatively limited outgoing bandwidth, she was having a difficult time convincing people she was legitimate. So far it wasn’t clear if Apex Command was aware someone on planet was actively communicating with Earth. Too much information and we risked the very real chance of them discovering where the leak in the information blockade was coming from.
If they figured out that the leak was coming from the secondary communications system on theForlorn, they could easily shut it down. They could just blow the abandoned shell of a generation ship out of orbit.
Both Lulu and I thought the risk was worth it. We had the video of the dead folks in Burnt Ends. We had the video of those robot assholes shooting Mr.Yanez. We had the video of the fake “insurgents” landing and then setting up shop. Surely that would make an impact.
After we had spent some time watching the live streams from the POV of the players, it was clear that the players were being fed a bunch of bullshit. Lulu forced us to watch the scene from Team Cannon Fodder’s live stream where they attacked the school.
The people had run, and Team Cannon Fodder had gleefully mowed them down. But in the video, there were three importantdistinctions. First, once a person was killed, they completely disappeared from the feed. Their body remained where they fell, but they turned into a blinking outline on the HUD. Second, they’d shown weapons hanging from the shoulders of several of the people running—weapons that hadn’t been there at all. It was a complete fabrication.
Also, strangely, the architecture of the school was different. The brand-new sign indicating it was a school was just gone from the video, and the insta-set exterior of the building was replaced with Earth-style bricks that looked old and dingy. The building didn’t look like a school anymore, but some sort of industrial complex. It was very odd.
And even more disconcerting, they hadn’t shown two-year-old Henry at all. He’d literally been erased from the feed. We could see his mother running while she carried the toddler. But it just made it look like she was running with her arms cupped oddly and holding on to open air. When one of the mechs—the one driven by a girl named Wankette—had shot the mother, the burst had clearly killed both her and the child.
“Scrub one breeder,” Wankette had said over the feed, laughing.
“It’s no wonder there’s a latency issue,” Lulu had muttered as we all watched, open-mouthed. “They gotta sanitize it all in real time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I’d said. “Those people were still running. And we heard what that Skeet guy said. He called them civvies. Civilians. Wankette called Henry’s mom a breeder. They’re not stupid. They know. Everybody knows. They just don’t want to see it. We gotta get those pictures and videos out.”
But Roger insisted that his ability to ascertain intelligence from the open net was more valuable, and it wasn’t worth the risk. He thought we might have a way to connect with a second of the generation ships still in orbit, but we didn’t have the required access codes. Still, it didn’t sit well with me. It felt wrong not to send out everything we had.
Meanwhile, thousands of videos from across the entire planet were now pouring onto the net; they portrayed New Sonora as not just a hotbed of terrorist activity, but as a base for terrorists from other systems as well. They claimed they’d found that we were supposedly building a second direct transfer gate with another system I’d never heard of—something that would allow “direct access” to Earth itself for people from this other system. The whole supposition was completely ridiculous.
We all spent a lot of time going over all the possible mech configurations and how to fight each kind.
There were four distinct types of mech chassis. Each type had multiple trim configurations. The four frame types were Light Recon, the Regulars, the Heavies, and the Snipers.
The Recon units were the cheapest to buy, and not surprisingly, they were about forty to fifty percent of all the mechs. They had two trims: the Drop Dragoon, which was the only kind we’d faced so far, and the Cheetah, which had a different leg configuration and was built for speed.
The Light Recon bots were most likely to be driven by younger children. Smaller and relatively nimble, they had limited armament. They had access to jump jets, which allowed them to basically fly for short distances. The Cheetah variation didn’t allow for shoulder-mounted weapons, but they had double jump jets, which were terrifying to watch in action. I watched a video of a bright pink Cheetah with a strange four-sided chain saw jump through the roof of a house and land amongst a group of about fifty people who’d all been hiding and sheltered. The house burst into flames, and the driver—an older man—laughed maniacally as he butchered them all in a matter of seconds.
Despite their name, the Regulars consisted of only about thirty percent of the mechs. These were clearly meant to be the most common model, but they were more expensive. They had multipleconfigurations, but the base model, the Attenuator, looked like a humanoid robot. Or a taller, more armored Peacekeeper. They traded speed for armor and added waist-mounted guns. They were only about sixty percent the speed of the Recon units and could only add jump jets at the expense of a lot of armor and weapons.
The Heavies were the most expensive units, and they were less common than the Regulars. I’d seen only a few of these from the videos. They looked like literal twentieth-century tanks with arms and two massive legs instead of treads. The things were huge, slow, and plodding and weren’t really designed for hunting down and killing people. Players didn’t like them because of their speed.
Their biggest features were their ability to stack multiple missile tubes and their two arm weapons, which had literally dozens of possible upgrades. And on top of it all was the main turret, which came standard with a gun called the Battering Ram, which terrified me. It was strong enough to put a meter-wide hole in anything on the planet. No matter how many preparations we made, an extended conflict with one of those things could have only one result.
If any of them approached our base, we’d have to focus everything we had on it before it killed us all.
