“What do you mean?” Rosita asked.
He gestured at the screen. “I don’t know how it really got started, but if those were real pictures of the city, they wiped out Fat Landing.” He waved his arm. “Don’t you get it? They were talking before about how it was the safe place where we’re all supposed to go. It wasset up from the beginning to be the climax. There would be a big bad guy in the city, the final boss. But the gamers got in early, and now the whole city is gone. But there’re still a few days left. What’s left to fight? Where else are they going to see that much action? The game people are in deep shit now if they don’t think of something.”
“Everyone please proceed to the control room. We have three more supply crates coming in,” Roger said over the band. “And after we retrieve them, I need to update you on the status of the action north of Burnt Ends. I have located where the remaining citizens of Burnt Ends are hiding. Unfortunately, the enemy has located them as well.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure they’ve thought of something,” I said.
Chapter 22
Roger clicked. “This was captured twenty-two minutes ago. The fighting is still ongoing.”
We stood in silence in the control room as we watched the UAV video of the people scattering into the woods as the mechs stormed the encampment. Just as they attacked, a second group of RMI soldiers appeared from nowhere and started pouring fire at the mechs. The fight turned into a huge blowout.
It was just me, Lulu, Rosita, Ariceli, Sam, and the twins. We left the room’s door open, and one of the chickens had somehow managed to get in as well. It pecked around the floor by Sam’s feet.
“Did any of our honeybees engage?” I asked as we watched in horror. A pair of Heavies walked right over a group of five or six cowering people, crushing them. I recognized one of them as Terry, a man who had worked at the general store. He’d always give me licorice when I was a kid, and I’d never been brave enough to tell him I thought it was gross, so I’d always throw it into the woods on the way home.
I felt a weird, cold detachment as I watched the scene, the gross taste of licorice flooding my memories. Somewhere deep down, this was alarming. All this death was already starting to surprise me less.I looked about the room, and I could see everyone was being affected the same, except maybe Tito, who looked to be on the verge of tears.
“We have no honeybee assets in the area, nor are we able to get them there without a transport and relay equipment. This is just at the outside range of the UAVs,” Roger said. “This location is approximately fifty kilometers north of Burnt Ends. There once was a mining encampment here, but the location was abandoned after just a year. The settlement was called Scorpion Hill.”
I recognized that name. My grandfather had mentioned stopping there when they’d made their original trek to the peninsula with the group that built the grain rail. It was about the same distance from Burnt Ends as we were, just in the other direction. It was significantly farther away than I’d ever gone.
I could see now what had happened to the people of Burnt Ends. The original attack had happened in the middle of the night. It had been the five mechs from Team Cannon Fodder. They’d done their best to commit wholesale slaughter, but there were thousands of people in Burnt Ends. Most had gotten away, many fleeing to the electric boats on the Pantano. There was a small town called Stick-in-the-Mudsville about twenty kilometers upriver right where the river became unmanageable to boats. They’d likely fled to the town, commandeered every transport they could find, and kept going north until the road ended. I imagined not too many would go beyond that. Past that, the hills gave way to mountains that gave way to the desert. A lot of refugees would be in their seventies and eighties, and it had probably been a difficult trip just to get them to Scorpion Hill.
There were literally dozens of the RMI soldiers. The robots must’ve been in hiding, waiting for the mechs to appear. That realization that they’d been there hiding gave me a sudden chill.
Lulu must’ve been thinking the same thing, because she suddenly asked, “Roger, how certain are we that there aren’t hidden robots nearby?”
“Relatively certain,” Roger said. “We are in a much better position to detect them than the refugees were.”
She nodded, and we returned our attention to the fight that was still playing out on the screen. Most of the people were now scattered into the woods in all directions. Dozens of bodies littered the ground.
There werea lotof the RMI soldiers, all in uniform. They were better armed than usual, too, many having canister guns similar to what Lulu used, though these fired in a direct line. They were pretty effective.
Because it was mostly trees and there were only four UAVs in the area, it was difficult to get a handle on the chaos of the fight.
I noted there were fewer of the smaller Recon units this time. Of the fifty-plus mechs, the vast majority were Attenuators. Also, for the first time, a single Sniper sat in the hills past the encampment, picking the soldiers off one by one.
If any of them were streaming, Roger wasn’t showing us. I noted the whole Cannon Fodder team was there, minus Chode. This time, all four of their mechs were in Attenuators, though they still had the same stupid bouncing targets over their heads. Thunder Thighs was also there. The Julie Experience’s Cheetah was one of the few scouts in the fight. She had a huge “2” spray-painted on the front, indicating this was her second mech.
I looked up. “Roger, why do these guys keep coming back after getting their mechs blown up? Don’t they have to buy new ones each time?”
“Apex offers two supplemental insurance plans that must be chosen at sign-up. One offers up to two replacements for any reason for a fee equal to about seventy-five percent of the initial cost. A second plan offers unlimited replacements and mech switching for a much higher fee. It is said very few have opted for this plan, but it is likely some of the more well-known streamers have received this plan for free as an advertising expense. It is my belief that both CannonFodder and Thunder Thighs have the unlimited plan, as evidenced by the differences in their mechs each time we face them.”
“Christ,” Sam muttered. “How much does all this cost? To Apex, I mean. How much does it cost them? They’re just printing these things over and over again.”
“That’s an interesting question, Oliver friend number three. As industrial printing improves, the cost of manufacturing decreases exponentially. They are limited only by the base cost of the raw materials for production, and without going into a physics lesson, the best batteries they can print only provide enough energy to run the mechs optimally for about a month, and I suspect the power sources in these mechs are much smaller.”
My eyes returned to the body of Terry, still crunched into the ground, arms and legs splayed like he was making a face-down snow angel.
They only needed to kill us once, and we had to kill them over and over. It wasn’t fair.
Roger buzzed as the scene faded. “I will continue to monitor the skirmish. Once it is clear, I will use the UAVs to locate any survivors and instruct them to come here if they wish. In the meantime, I would like to show you the contents of the three new supply crates that landed in the same approximate location as the previous one. In addition to more explosive canisters, there were two additional fabricators, though these are the smaller units that do not come with attached recyclers. There were additional rifles as well. It appears they removed the remote switch-off on the rifles, but the built-in obsolescence remains. We are currently investigating the recyclers. But most curious was an item in the third crate. It is a communication device. On the device was a note.”
The screen switched from the battlefield of Scorpion Hill and showed a glass tablet with shock corners. The tablet was leaning up against a rock, and we were viewing it in real time from the telltalefish-eye POV of a regular honeybee drone. In the bottom corner, it listed the bee as “Unit 104. Marigold.”
On the corner of the tablet device, there was a small piece of square paper containing a note. The note read, “Message for the owner of the farm with the colony bots. Tap screen to connect.”
