Trophy Grove Read online

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  The mudder cot I claim for my night’s bed doesn’t stop spinning after I rest my head on my balled-up Tiki shirt I employ as my pillow. The mudder gin burns my blood too thin, and my dreams, whether they sway towards the light or the dark, are going to be powerful. I yearn for Marlena’s company, because I think her warm body, as bruised and battered as it may be, will help my sleep steer clear of the nightmares. Yet the presence of a half a dozen snoring mudders in the chamber, and the fact that Teddy sleeps on the cot right next to me, hardly provides me with the privacy I need to ask for Marlena’s company.

  Though the lack of privacy doesn’t stop a pair of mudder lovers from unabashedly moaning and panting against one another, the room eventually quiets and slows enough in its spinning to give me a chance of falling into sleep.

  But that’s when the dark mist enters the chamber like an untethered shadow.

  The darkness rolls into the room through the spaces between the wall and the crookedly hung metal door. The shadow glistens slightly as if it’s moist, and the way it swirls reminds me of an oily kind of smoke. I can’t move as I watch that darkness coil and slither upon the floor like a snake. I feel cold, and it feels like a heavy, invisible stone has been set upon my chest to keep me pinned upon my cot.

  The darkness gathers the form of an alien figure that reminds me of some kind of long, black feline hunter whose pictures are preserved in another stack of Earth’s lost wildlife archives. The feline’s legs are slender and long, and its muscles coil in pent energy as it lurks about the chamber, sniffing at the sleeping faces of the mudders sleeping upon the ground. Six long feelers of smoke reach from the creature’s back as if they’re stretching extensions of the feline’s misty spine. The feelers pull back bed sheets and sweep away whatever hair falls across the faces of those dreaming within the room. No one stirs as that feline steps among them. No one’s breathing changes. Everyone but me seems oblivious to the creature who visits us in the night.

  My heart pounds when that dark shadow creeps away from the mudders and approaches Marlena’s cot, its feelers pulling her shoulder so that the creature’s maw can regard Marlena’s bruised visage. The feelers stroke her swollen cheeks as the form’s shape softens again towards mist. I fail to scream, or even mumble, a warning to Marlena as the feline stands over her as its feelers trace the shape of her cheeks and chin. Marlena’s beauty captivates it, regardless of the bruises and gashes. The feline shimmers and gathers back into a cloud of oily smoke, which retreats from Marlena’s cot before retreating beneath the crookedly-hung door through which it first entered the room.

  A clanging, metallic rhythm suddenly thunders throughout the chamber just as my heartbeat is about to settle. The weight on my chest vanishes, and I roll off my cot and plant my face on the ground as projectiles explode through the steel walls and shriek through the chamber.

  Teddy shouts over the din. “These rounds are from a Spartan’s assault barrel! Quick, Marlena! Toss me your digital notebook!”

  Marlena pulls a glowing computer tablet from beneath her pillow as the rounds shriek throughout the chamber. I know enough about sentries to recognize that an armed robot is unloading its ordinance in an indiscriminate sweep of its surroundings, employing a pattern of fire meant to flush threats out of hiding so that a sentry’s scanners can target precise rounds onto the objective, and I know that it won’t take long before so many bullets are pumped into this chamber that neither human nor mudder have much any chance for survival. A mudder near the doors grunts as a round breaks his body and throws him across the floor. Marlena slides the tablet across the floor to her father, and Teddy’s fingers dance wildly upon the glass just as I start to feel the heat of so many bullets whizzing close to my neck. I hold a breath, and the room suddenly quiets.

  “Marlena, are you alright? Zane?”

  “We’re both fine!” Marlena squeezes my hand when she sees I’m unharmed.

  Several of the mudders are not as fortunate. A Spartan’s assault barrel works like a terrible saw, and the effects of such a weapon are unpleasant. Though I learned long ago that a mudder is less than human, even my experienced heart feels ashamed for the amount of hurt we’ve delivered to their gin joint, to the only place where a mudder might ever hope to find a bit of solace.

  “It’s got to be that Spartan I handed over to that bounty hunter,” Teddy doesn’t waste any time apologizing to the mudders as he hurries back into the narrow streets of the cardboard community.

  “Do you think that bounty hunter would’ve just unleashed such weaponry in the middle of this camp simply to flush out his prey?” Marlena asks.

  Teddy shakes his head. “I certainly doubt it. He’d have to compensate the obliterators for any mudder he might’ve accidentally struck with that sentry. There’s got to be a better reason why that Spartan unleashed its sweep.”

  “Maybe your sentry simply blew a fuse and went mad.” I suggest.

  “Impossible.” Teddy growls.

  Pain bellows in my hangover skull as I hurry to keep pace with Teddy and Marlena as they run back through the narrow streets. We’re following the mudders who are spilling out from their cardboard shelters hauling buckets of water as they run towards the orange glow of a fire hovering above the camp. We trip over many more dead clones. I doubt there were any walls within the clone community capable of stopping the rounds unleashed by that sentry, and those bullets likely shredded through plenty before finally losing momentum well beyond the work camp’s final street.

  “Stand down, Spartan!” Teddy’s voice shouts just as we enter a charred section of the camp, where a ten-foot tall, robotic sentry stands in the center of its destruction.

  Spartan sentries are designed to appear intimidating, with the thought being that a frightful appearance may avoid conflict before the robot needs to unleash its harrowing arsenal. Often, a dozen weapon appendages are affixed to the machines, so that the sentry looks a little like a spider set upon a pair of triangular treads. A crown of sensors and antennae encircle every Spartan’s head, an appendage that houses no delicate software, nor one that serves any other function other than to provide a canvas upon which Teddy Jackson’s manufacturing plant airbrushes a sneering, white skull. Thankfully, the Spartan that greets us in the center of a burned ring of cardboard shanties hasn’t been armed to the teeth. Only a pair of assault barrels have been affixed to the sentry, but those barrels would’ve been more than enough to ravage the work camp had Teddy Jackson not happened to be on planet to silence the robot’s guns with his override instructions.

  “Doesn’t look like the bounty hunter’s going to be able to tell us what happened,” Teddy raises a hand to warn us of what he’s found.

  Marlena has more sense than I do, and she retreats a few steps and turns away from the body slumped at the base of that sentry’s treads. The bounty hunter’s face is missing from the slumped corpse; it’s been ripped away as if it was some kind of scale or hide to reveal the macabre skull beneath, tinged red with the dead man’s blood.

  Teddy removes his jacket and gently settles it over the skull. “Spartan, what did your user tell you to target?”

  Lights don’t blink on the Spartan when it answers, but I can’t help but imagine the voice from the machine’s internal speaker somehow originates behind that white skull spray-painted on the sentry.

  “The user didn’t instruct me to target anything, Mr. Jackson. I initiated a tactical sweep.”

  Teddy walks around the Spartan, searching for any signs of damage. “Why did you take the initiative for such a decision?”

  “My sensors could not locate the enemy that was harming my user,” the robot replies. “My sensors recognized the injuries delivered upon my user, but my sensors could not track anything responsible for the harm. Thus, I initiated my tactical sweep in an effort to save my user from further hurt. I failed in this, Mr. Jackson.”

  Listening to that robot creeps the hell out of me. I don’t like thinking that
the sentries now rolling off of Mr. Jackson’s production line are now taking the initiative to decide when and where to unleash their furious power. I think I like even less the idea that the robots are starting to distinguish the difference between success and failure. Microchip minds like the one installed in the Spartan in front led to the disaster on Turlag asteroids.

  I flinch when Teddy climbs upon the sentry’s back. “The Spartan’s sensor array appears undamaged, and everything appears to be working at optimal ranges. Spartan, you can’t tell me anything about what attacked your user?”

  “I can only tell you that my user was in distress.”

  I was plenty terrified enough by the shadow creeping around our mudder sleeping chamber, and Teddy’s conversation with nearly two tons of armed Spartan sentry sends me shivering into a fearful, cold sweat. I’m no wilting flower. I cut my teeth covering stories about conflicts and blood grudges my rivals were too terrified to follow. And I’ve spent plenty of time with the rough and dim mudders. But all the drink, all the gore, all the shadows, and all the talking robots are finally too much for me. I walk to a corner of cardboard walls and vomit the drink and the fear that fills my belly and makes a ruin of me.

  So I’m already on my hands and knees when everything around me starts humming. The cardboard and plastic walls shake, and I look into Tybalt’s sky to see a line of grav-copter lights rushing our way. The mudders stop their efforts to extinguish the fire caused by the Spartan’s weapons sweep and run for cover as several of their cardboard walls take to the wind. We’ve finally attracted the obliterators’ attention.

  I put my head between my knees as debris flies around me. Marlena takes my lead and does the same.

  But that old fool Teddy Jackson just stands up straighter and waves.

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