The Doomsday Protocol

A Horizon Fan Fiction

by

E. E. Nalley

March 15^th , 3040

Travis carefully picked up the canteen cup he'd had by the fire to set into the sand next to it so he could have both hands to open the little pack of freeze dried powder and spoon a judicious amount into the steaming water. It was a 'three in one' mixture the chief dietitian had come up with that proved shelf stable thanks to his packaging and storage, 'coffee' powder along with sugar and a 'creamer' that had no dairy elements to go rancid. It gave the coffee a somewhat artificial flavor, but it was close enough, and hot enough this early in the morning to go unnoticed.

Nakoa handed him the canteen cup they'd scrounged for her and poured half the mixture into her cup and returned it to her, then stood and looked up to admire the amazing star field over head. “This view never gets old,” he whispered after his first sip of the welcome brew to get his thoughts moving. The Nora brave smiled at him as she held her cup in both hands for the warmth.

She looked up and tried to imagine what it was like for him, then shook her head. “I can't imagine a place being so bright so that the stars are dimmed,” she told him. Cocking her head, she pointed off to the southwest. “Look at that.”

He turned to find a dim, reddish yellow glow on the horizon. “What in the world could that be?” he muttered to himself. “There's no smoke, it can't be a brush fire..” The bad lands of what had been Utah were considerably greener than they had been in his day, thanks to unaltered watersheds. With no cities to divert the streams for water, the 'desert' was merely empty and somewhat arid. “Isn't that where Meridian is?” he asked her and she nodded.

“Can a human dwelling be so bright?” she wondered aloud.

He shrugged his own ignorance. “The bakers should be getting up, guards and watchmen changing shift, maybe...” he trailed off. “Not knowing how big the city is, it's impossible to say.” She leaned against him and took a long sip of her coffee.

“I shall be glad when this adventure is over,” she declared softly. “I have been traveling for almost two years, but our night together in your office makes me think of nice things.” She looked up at him, curiosity on her face. “Will we always live in the mountain?”

Travis shook his head and took a sip himself, gazing off in the direction of Fort Carson. “No, the plan was to make a village out side the mountain. Something defensible, in case it was needed, and be able to retreat into the mountain if pressed.”

“I like that,” she whispered.

He picked out the faintest beginnings of dawn over the Rockies to the East. “It will be dawn soon.”

“Yes,” she declared with a little bitterness. “I hate that our only time alone is standing watch.”

“Why?”

She looked up at his innocent question and arched an eyebrow at him. Even in the predawn gloom she could see his blush. “That's why,” she told him salaciously. “I've dreamed of our nights together. It's not every day a woman finds a man who is such a gifted lover.”

He chuckled darkly. “Now I'll never get my ego back in it's box.”

She laughed and playfully grabbed his crotch. “As skilled as you are with this weapon, you'd be forgiven a fair amount of swagger. I've never met a warrior as skilled andhumble as you.”

He shrugged as he drank his coffee and allowed himself a little smile. “Professionals do,” he declared, “The insecure brag.” That caused her to stand on her tip toes to kiss his cheek. Her breath smelled of coffee and lust.

“You certainlydo,” she whispered.

“That's what she said,” he chuckled, turning his head to check on the Striders. They were finishing their grazing and ambling over, preparing for the coming day. Following his gaze, she reached up and patted the face of her own mount with some affection.

“Could we decorate them, do you suppose?”

“Once we're home?” he asked and shrugged. “I don't see why not.” The Strider gave it's electronic whinny as if adding it's thoughts to the discussion. “I think I'm going to rename Twenty One. In fact, Twenty One Twenty One your new designation is Black Jack.” The machine gave an exaggerated equine nod to acknowledge the order.

“Black Jack?” she asked, cocking her head to one side.

“It was a card game in my time. The object of the game was to get as close to twenty one without going over as possible.”

“Ah.” She took another sip of the coffee and sighed in contentment. “Perhaps you can teach me some time.” She sighed again and became serious, reaching up to touch her Focus and a map appeared between them. “How long do you think before we get to this King's Peak?”

“Hard to say for sure,” he hedged as he indicated their position on the hologram. “We're about here. We made good time yesterday after leaving Lone Light, I'd guess about sixty miles.”

“A day and a half's walk in four hours?” she asked, amazed. “I knew the Striders were fast, but...” He winked at her.

“The speed limit on I70, the Carja road? Was seventy miles an hour.”

Her eyes opened in shock. “Those metal carts we passed could go so fast?”

“When the road was well maintained? Yes. Considerably faster, actually, but seventy was the limit. Now, I'd never try to take anything other than something with tracks or a reallyrugged four by four anywhere near that speed.”

She shook her head in amazement, then was all seriousness again as she looked at the map. “How long is this distance remaining then?”

“About another sixty miles, give or take.”

“So, we should arrive by lunch time.”

“Hard riding? Yes,” he agreed. “You up for another half day of gallop?”

She turned off her Focus and looked east as the horizon began to brighten and the first rays of the new day lit up her face. Once more, Travis was struck by how someone could look so young and innocent, and yet so hardened and determined. Her eyes returned to him and narrowed just a bit. “Lets start on breakfast so we can rouse them,” she declared. “The sooner this is done, the sooner I can do more than sleep with you.”

“You are incorrigible,” he accused, and she smiled an impish smile back.

“And you are not complaining, are you?” She smirked at his silence as she reached down to begin removing the meal kit from their gear. “I thought not. After all, I have a new dance to learn.”

Travis took a calming gulp of his coffee and sighed. “I am going to die a very happy man,” he told himself.

* * *

After breakfast, the party set out at a trot, letting the sun rise to give better illumination to their wilderness. Then, once the land could be better seen, the Striders began to gallop, thundering through the wilderness with surprising grace and speed. By mid morning, tired and a bit sore they forded Antelope Creek and paused to refill the water bottles to be boiled later when they made camp. To their surprise, the Striders actually 'drank' from the stream, likely to give fluid to the process by which they were fermenting the grass they'd 'eaten' into blaze. The water was quite clear, but even this far from anything that had been, there were rusting Chariot robots of the Faro Swarm.

The cold mountain runoff cooled everyone as the sun was arching high and the heat of the bad lands was beginning to mount. They didn't tarry long, but once humans were refreshed and water bottles filled, the set off again as quickly as could be tolerated in hopes of catching the mysterious Seeker, Aloy.

They passed over what had been the Unitah Reservation, and began to climb out of the badlands and into the now much greener Ashley National Forest. It was here they got their first taste of what had occurred twenty years before. The trees were all new growth, coming up around the fallen logs of their fore bares, all pointing like dead fingers to Kings Peak and a fusion reactor explosion like a modern day Tunguska. “What happened here?” Yan whispered in amazement as their pace was slowed, picking through the felled forest.

“The Goddess told us in her message she destroyed herself,” Nakoa told him as they were forced to slow through a particularly dense thicket.

“A fusion explosion,” Buck rumbled, looking back over at Doc. “Should we be worried about radiation?”

“I wouldn't have wanted to be standing here when Gaia checked herself out,” Doc replied, “but no. I'm not sure how she managed to get a fusion reactor to overload and explode, but other than the initial blast, all that's released is helium. There are small amounts of Tritium, but it's only a beta emitter and has a short half life. You'll get more radiation from eating a banana.”

The crested a ridge and stopped in shock.

“Mother of God,” whispered Buck. The entire peak of the mountainside was gone, leaving a massive crater with the skeletal remains of catwalks, reinforcement and wrecked machinery. It was obvious something had been inside the mountain, but large amounts of it were scattered about the crater and there were even doors and hallways opening out into the void that had been underground but where now exposed to the air.

“By the Goddess,” Olara answered, then pointed off to one side. “Look! Is that...?”

“It's a Stormbird carcass!” Yan affirmed. Without waiting for leave, he kicked his Strider into motion and led the group over to the robot. It was a massive thing, something like fifty feet from wing tip to wing tip, with three small jet thrusters on each wing vaguely shaped like feathers. In appearance, it seemed to have been designed after a massive bird of prey, like an eagle, but taken to strange extremes. It's height was hard to guess as it's legs and body were crushed under it from when it had crashed, but twenty five feet high likely wasn't a bad guess.

There were arrows sticking out of the carcass.

“Someone fought this thing?” demanded Doc.

Nakoa slipped off her Strider and pulled an arrow loose from the damaged machine to examine the fletching. “Aloy,” she declared confidently.

“She didn't just fight it,” Olara declared from where she was squatting looking at the ground. “She won. Her tracks go that way, towards the crater.”

Travis touched his Focus as he swung a leg over his Strider and dismounted. “ENID?”

The bust of the AI's avatar appeared in the air next to him. “Good morning, Colonel. How may I assist you?”

“We're at the Kings Peak facility,” he said as he walked over to the downed robot's head and began to examine it. “Would you connect me with Ian, please? I think he'll want to see this.”

“Certainly. I'll connect you now.”

The avatar vanished to be replaced by the company's computer genius. “Hey Colonel! Whoa! What's that?” he demanded, his bust expanding into to a full body hologram for tele-presence.

“The Nora call it a Stormbird,” Travis told him. “I thought you might want it's brain?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” the other shot back. He bent over the carcass, actually stepping into the the debris for a better look at the head. “Yes! There's an access panel here.” Travis got out his multi-tool and with a bit of cursing under his breath, got the damaged cover off, revealing the brain within. He released some kind of shock absorbing assembly that held the robot brain in place and removed it. It seemed completely intact.

“You want me to strap this to the drone and send it back to you?”

“No need,” Ian assured him, walking with the bigger man over to the pack Strider that had the rotor drone strapped to it. “I figured we might get lucky like this, so I wired in a connector on the drone. It's under this access panel. Just plug the brain in and I'll download it through the Focus Network.”

Travis got the cover open and removed a cable stored within it which plugged neatly into the robot's brain. A few lights on the device lit up and a hologram assured him the brain was being down loaded. “I'm not sure I want you to test your over ride like you did on the Striders,” he told Ian. “I'd rather be there in case something goes wrong.”

“We've only got so many drones,” Ian replied. “Or the capacity to make more. A flock of these Stormbirds could help.”

“The Nora are amazed Aloy brought this thing down, Ian,” Travis told him quietly. “I don't know if you get the scale of this thing. It's big. Like the size of a light plane big. And it's armed.”

“Understood, Colonel. Once I have it checked, I'll run some simulations with ENID and we'll have a conference call with Frank and decide.” Travis nodded grimly, steeling himself it was Frank's call, not his. “Ok, I've got it. Put it aside and bring it with you, I'd like to study it when you get back.”

“Will do.” Ian's image winked out, to be replaced by ENID's avatar.

“One moment, Colonel. I wanted to make you aware I am detecting residual power readings from the King's Peak wreck.”

Travis' face pulled into a frown. “Power?” he demanded.

“It would seem the emergency power systems in several isolated pockets are still functioning,” the program told him. “It is likely there are data centers still with power and containing usable information.”

“I'll keep an eye out,” he assured her, then clicked the Focus off and followed Olara from her tracking of Aloy's trail.

Nakoa raised a hand to touch his arm and pointed. “Look.” He followed her gesture to find a dubious looking wooden scaffold system had been erected along side the open cliff face to get access to some of the exposed rooms and corridors.

“Aloy didn't build those,” he muttered. “Someone is in here looting. Maybe a lotof someones.” He unslung the rifle into a patrol carry and checked that it was loaded. “Eyes on a swivel,” he ordered, seeing Buck and Doc copy him. “Somebody built that, and they may not be friendly.”

* * *

Cautiously, the group followed Aloy's tracks towards the crater and the improvised scaffold. It was a rough thing, downed trees, stripped of limbs, lashed together. There was none of the Carja talent evident here, it was, in fact, even more crude than the Nora dwellings he'd seen in the Embrace. They reached a rope ladder with slats made of arm thick branches, probably hacked from the structural members that made the scaffold and there was fresh mud on them. Olara stood and faced Travis somberly. “She went up here,” she declared. “Do we follow?”

Travis looked up, but the scaffold was piled with a mishmash of, chests and boxes of supplies, along with stretched animal hides hung between the poles to provide shelter and plenty of places for ambush. “I'll go first,” he declared, but a heavy hand fell on his shoulder that when he turned to face it, found it attached to Buck.

“No, sir,” Buck informed him with the certainty of a mountain. “We need you, Colonel. You're the best military mind of our group and we're in a quagmire of warlords and strong men. I'm just a grunt. I'll go first.”

“Buck...”

The big man's face split into his toothy grin. “Boss, you already got me for insubordination. Don't make roughing up my supervisor part of it.” The grip on his shoulder tightened, stopping short of pain, but it's threat was apparent. Travis allowed himself to be gently pushed aside and Buck slung his rifle over his shoulders and took out his pistol. As he went to step onto the ladder, Olara collected a handful of his shirt and used it to leverage herself up into his face where she laid a kiss that would make a porn star blush.

“Don't be stupid!” she commanded.

Buck smiled and winked at her. “Too late for that,” he quipped then with surprising agility for his bulk, ascended the ladder like a cat. “Clear,” he called softly and this time, no one made the mistake of coming between Travis and the ladder.

The two men crept forward, pistols at the ready as the rest of the party advanced behind them. All were relieved the scaffold seemed stronger than it had looked until at last they came into an anteroom whose door had been forced open. Here were more primitive tools and cached supplies and at the back of the room, a blast door that stood open. “Come into my parlor,” muttered Doc from the rear of the group. Buck walked over and knelt beside the blast door.

“That's interesting,” Buck rumbled from his examination of the door.

“What did you find?” asked Travis.

The big man pointed out discolorations and scratches on the seam of the blast door. “Somebody wanted in here pretty bad. And for a longtime. Some of these scratches have rust in them where the coating was damaged. But look at the diagnostic on the holo lock. Somebody with permission opened the door.”

“The Goddess told Aloy she would be allowed entry,” Nakoa thought aloud.

“Let's see if we can catch up,” Travis said with an encouraging clap on Buck's shoulder. The proceeded in, their way lit by ghostly, static filled holograms, their own Focus's and the lights mounted to Buck and Travis' pistols.

“Look,” Olara declared, pointing at the dust on the floor and a pair of foot prints visible in them. “Aloy has been through here. That's a Nora boot print.”

Travis grinned up at Buck. “Lead the way, big guy.”

The tracks went deeper into the complex, sometimes back out into the cavernous crater to get around obstructions by climbing over the rock face, but with very little back tracking on the Seeker's part. Until, at last, they came to a dark room, filled with a large, circular table and chairs, with ghostly holograms on the places that lit up the mummified remains of seven bodies in or around eight chairs. “What in God's Name happened here?” demanded Doc, a horrified expression on her face.

She walked forward and kneeled down to look at one of the mummies that was on the floor. The body was desiccated, but there was still skin and hair on the remains and it...his...clothing was still mostly intact. “Doc?”

“I...I don't understand,” the medic replied. “Sure, it's cold up here, but these bodies shouldn't have mummified. The bacteria in the air...unless.” She looked up and pointed at the control on the conference table. “The meeting recorder still has power. See if there's a play back.”

Buck approached the console, which was thankfully at the chair that was empty. He touched it and suddenly the holograms of living people were superimposed over the mummies. One, a man with a British accent was fighting with his controls at the table. “I'm locked out of Core Control,” he declared, worry in his voice. “Alpha clearance overridden.” He looked up, his confusion apparent. “What the hell is Omega Clearance?”

Next to him, a dark complected woman in a hijab looked up and face went pale. “Oh, no,” she whispered, then, in the center of the table, a new hologram appeared. He was a tall, trim man with close brown hair somewhere between thirty five and forty five; the very image of the late Twenty First Century Corporate Billionaire.

“Ted Faro,” hissed Buck.

“Alpha Personnel,” Faro greeted, an odd hesitance in his otherwise movie star baritone voice. “Sorry to alarm you, but I need you to listen, ok? To what I'm about to say.” He paused and his manner became that of a child, admitting to some transgression with his hands clasped before him. “This isn't easy. See, I've, uh...”

From his chair, the Brit petulantly continued to try and access his panel and the denial beeps finally drew Ted's attention. “Please, stop trying to access the system, okay?” He took a deep breath and began again. “See, what this is about, is...” The Brit continued his tapping at the keys and Faro whirled on him, striding across the table, angry. “I said, stop trying to access the goddamn system!”

The people at the table glanced at each other, nervously. Ted rubbed his hands together and continued. “What I'm trying to say is, I can't stop thinking about the ones who'll come after us. Those innocents! Those blameless men....and, and women...!” His manner became incredulous. “We're going to give them knowledge? Like it's a gift?!”

The woman in the hijab shook her head and her voice showed this was an old argument. “Ted, Ted, we've talked about this before...! APOLLO has three thousand plus fail safe conditions...!”

She bit off her retort at his angry gesture. “It's not a 'gift' it's a disease! They're the cure and we're going to give them the disease? Our disease?!” He shook his head. “No. We can't. And it's not too late! If...if we're willing to sacrifice...”

Her voice became more stern, but also pleading, as if something she feared was coming true right before her eyes. “Ted, it's doesn't need to be like this...”

Faro's face became stern. Now he was back on familiar ground, back in control. “It already is, Samina,” he declared, walking over to her. “I did it three minutes ago. I've purged APOLLO, it's gone! All of it! Every copy!”

Samina wailed and buried her face in her hands as if Ted had just announced he'd murdered her child. The Brit leapt to his feet, enraged himself. “A sacrifice?” he shouted. “That's not a sacrifice! That's cultural obliteration, you crazy bastard! Millennia of culture, history...!”

Ted was dismissive as two of the others stood and tried to comfort Samina who was inconsolable, shaking and wailing with her grief. “I'm sorry,” the billionaire declared blithely. “I really am. But...sometimes...to protect innocents...innocents have...to...die...”

An alarm blared in the recording as an AI declared, “Emergency alert. Venting atmosphere.” The clothing on the people in the chairs whipped as a small hurricane sucked the air from the room. They grasped at their throats, eyes, bulging, as Ted Faro paced in holographic form, watching them die. The holograms collapsed to cover the mummies in the forms they still sat or lay in and, with a final shake of his head, as if he had not just murdered seven people, the hologram of Ted Faro vanished and the recording ended.

“That...bastard...” hissed Doc.

Olara blinked, confused by what she'd seen and turned to face Travis. “I...I don't understand. What is APOLLO? What did I just see?”

Travis took a deep breath to master his own anger at a thousand year old atrocity. “I can't be sure, but APOLLO seems to have been a...collection...the collected history and knowledge of humanity. It's what your forebears were supposed to be taught and weren't. Why we are so far advanced of you. He...Ted...erased it.”

Bucks fist fell like a gun shot on the table in outrage. “All to hide his crimes! That He was the reason humanity almost went extinct!”

Nakoa looked around the room, and then back up at Travis. “But, where is Aloy?”

* * *

Travis and Buck sat around the small fire they'd built to boil the water taken from Antelope Creek and warm up their rations for lunch. Olara had been able to track Aloy's footsteps back out of the room by another door and eventually, back to the scaffold outside. A closer look at the room with the blast door showed she had lingered at a work bench in it for some time based on the overlapping foot prints, then left.

The tracks intersected the hoof prints of a Strider and stopped, the Strider moving away to the south. They had missed her again.

Nakoa and Olara had wanted to give chase, but Travis had halted them. As they waited, he had carefully gone to the edge of the crater at a high point. Using his binoculars Travis found she was already out of sight. More to the point, the Striders were giving warnings they had used most of their blaze in the gallop here and needed to refuel. Loss of the Striders would make for a dangerous survival situation, so they were turned out to graze. Survival also dictated the humans would need energy and water. That meant a meal and a fire was needed to purify the water. So the two men worked, one, keeping an eye on the open stainless steel bottles where the water was just starting to boil while the other was seasoning steaks cut off the carcass of a small wild pig Olara had taken from the forest and quickly butchered.

“I do not understand this delay,” Yan groused as he busied himself chopping up some greens Buck had gathered along the way for a seasoning. “Shouldn't we go quickly?”

“We don't need to chase her,” Travis told him from watching the stopwatch timer app his Focus was running for him. “We know where she's going.” With a stick he'd carved a notch into he picked up the carry wire of the first bottle and moved it away from the fire. “We tried to catch up to her here, to assist with getting the Master Over Ride, which evidently she acquired on her own.”

Buck laid the steaks on a little foldable grill screen he'd had in his kit and they began to sizzle nicely. “Yep, she's headed to Meridian. Which gives us time to wonder how the hell we're going to take on a Horus.”

Nakoa joined them at the fire and sank down next to Travis. “Do we know it is a Horus?”

“No,” Buck admitted. “But, do you want to bet on those odds the way our luck is running?”

“I am more interested in knowing who was scavenging this place,” Olara declared as she joined the group around the fire. “Aloy couldn't have built anything this extensive so quickly.”

Buck chuckled darkly. “Whoever they were, they spent a lot of time trying to get past that blast door. The question there, is why?”

“Isn't that obvious?” Yan asked. “There is a great deal of metal here...”

“Yes,” Buck agreed. “Funny how none of it is boxed up in all those chests, nothing piled up for shipment, no signs of carts coming or going. For a salvage operation, there ain't a lot of salvage going on.”

Olara cocked her head to one side. “What are you getting at?” The big man shrugged his broad shoulders expressively.

“Dunno that I have a point,” he hedged. “Just observing. So, if they weren't after metal or other salvage, what were they after?”

Travis took another bottle off the fire and carefully set it on a rock to cool. “This was Gaia Prime, the central core of the terraforming effort,” he thought aloud to himself. “Is it possible someone besides us knows that?”

“What do you mean?” demanded Doc.

The Colonel took the final bottle out of the fire and put it with the others. “Think about it,” he encouraged her. Imagine you've grown up here. There's people, other tribes, but still human. There's animals, and they're like people. They bleed, they're made of meat and so on. Then there's machines. What are they? They're not like people, and they act like animals, but they're not. They're made of the same things in these ruins that are everywhere. Where did they come from? Was someone here before? So you start looking and digging. There are things that are sized and shaped for humans, but they're in the ruins. Why are they ruins? Why don't we live in the ruins any more? What happened?”

“The Matriarchs told us the Chant of the Proving,” Olara replied. “We knew what happened. Or, we thought we did.”

“Sure,” Travis agreed. “Lots of people, maybe most would take that and be satisfied. But we've all known somebody who just had to figure it out for themselves, right?” He looked up and the faces around him that were nodding. “I think Buck is onto something. Whoever built this scaffold, they want to know. And it's likely eating them up they couldn't get in here.”

Yan loudly hocked something up from his throat and spat out into the grass. “So, where is this mad scholar? Where's he gone? Did Aloy kill him?”

“No body,” Nakoa replied quickly.

“Nothing in the tracks to indicate a struggle,” Olara added. “Just Aloy entering and finding her way to that...tomb...and back out. Looking at the things, I would say no one has been here for a while.”

“People that want into a door that badly don't just give up,” Doc mused.

“Someone freed HADES,” Travis said darkly. “Someone put together that Focus network ENID found. And now the Shadow Carja are marching on Meridian.”

“You think this was their base?” Yan asked.

Travis shrugged. “It's a theory that fits the facts. Doesn't make it what happened, just an educated guess. Still, we probably should get to Meridian quickly.”

* * *

By mid afternoon, the Striders reported their tanks replenished, the humans had eaten and the water bottles cooled in a small snow melt stream while sealed so the water was actually cold. They followed this stream, picking their way back down the little range around King's Peak and the blasted forest, until the stream emptied into a larger river. At a trot, they found a path that ran the right direction beside the river and followed it until they came around a bend to behold a settlement on the bank of the River, nestled up against the first hills of the range.

There was a water wheel in the river, out side of a ramshackle wall of both wood and stone. Smoke billowed up in the sky from several sources and there was a hot, metallic smell on the air from the place. Not long after they rounded the corner, a bell began to ring and suddenly there were men on the walls, all looking at them.

The gates, which had stood open, where shut and an arrow whizzed into the dirt ten feet in front of the party. Travis stood up on Black Jack as well as he could and shouted, “Hold your fire! We're friends!”

“You have no friends here, Shadow Carja!” someone shouted back.

“We are not Shadow Carja! We come in peace, to the aid of the Sun King! We have safe passage!” Travis and Nakoa exchanged a glance as the people on the wall had an impromptu conference. “Free Heap?” he asked her.

Nakoa shrugged her ignorance. “It would seem so.”

Finally a strident, and strangely enough, female voice shouted from the wall. “If you're not Shadow Carja, who are you?”

Murray let Black Jack go forward a few steps to judge the reaction, and when no further arrows were forth coming, let him get to a more conversational distance, gesturing for the rest of the group to stay out of bow shot. Now he could see a short, zaftig woman with an ample bosom set on display by the leather corset she was wearing peering down at him. She had black hair that was peaking out from under a brown bandanna and a wide, honest face that put him in mind of some of the House Frau he'd seen at a posting in Germany in his youth. Her previously pale skin was deeply tanned under the Carja sun which gave her a dusty appearance. “My name is Travis Murray. My...tribe...are called AmSci. We live over the mountains to the east.”

“Petra Forgewoman,” the brunette replied, propping her arms on the wall to lay her chin on as she looked down. This showed she was wearing thick leather gloves that had metal attached to the gauntlets that ran up to her elbows. “I am Oseram and First Woman of this Oseram freehold; Free Heap. How do you ride machines like a Shadow Carja, Travis Murray of the AmSci?”

“My tribe is very skilled with dealing with machines,” he replied. “But we're not in any way allied with the Shadow Carja. My party are riding to Meridian to aid the Sun King.”

“I see Nora riding with you,” Petra replied. “Do you know the Seeker Aloy?”

“We've been chasing her for several days, trying to catch up to give her help,” Travis admitted, and saw her smile when he used Aloy's sex which she'd deliberately withheld.

“She came through here two days ago,” Petra admitted. “Told us about the Sun King's dilemma. I have a deal for you, AmSci. Come inside and I'll tell you.” She paused, then added, “You swear the Peace?”

“My people and I will only defend ourselves. We're not looking for trouble.”

Her grin returned and she gestured to the gate while her followers on the wall relaxed their weapons. “Come in and be welcome and we'll haggle.” Travis waved to his group and they joined him as the gate was unbarred` and thrown open. Petra came striding out, a grin across her wide face. She had the fullest of full figures, but how much was muscle was hard to judge. She walked right up to Travis as he swung off Black Jack and extended a beefy hand to be shook. “Well met, Travis Murray.”

“Pleased to meet you, Petra,” the Colonel replied. “We weren't looking to stop, just passing through.”

“Stay a while, and I'll fill your purse with Shards,” she promised him.

Travis sighed. “I don't know how the machines are pacified, so I can't sell that knowledge to you.” She tisked through her teeth and made a dismissive gesture.

“Fire and forge, son, I wasn't made yesterday!” she declared with another of her frequent grins. “Ask a smith to give up the biggest secret ever? Fools forgings! I'm a tinker myself, so I know better! But what I need is help getting my cannons to Meridian.”

“Cannons?”

The big woman nodded. “Six of 'em,” she told him. “All ordered by the Sun King himself. You hitch your Striders to my Cannon and pull them and I'll pay you well. Say, five hundred shards?” Travis had a gut feeling and decided to go with it.

“Six Striders, six cannon, seems to me six hundred should be the price.” Petra's grin went wider.

“Five fifty!”

“Five eighty,” Travis shot back.

“Five seventy!”

Travis made a point of rubbing his chin. “I suppose the Sun King would appreciate his weapons sooner rather than later. Five seventy five?” Petra pulled the glove off her right hand and spat into it.

“You drive a hard one, big man. Say, you aren't somebody's husband are you?”

Nakoa brought her Strider along side Black Jack. “No ideas, Oseram! Seal your trade then keep your hands off my man.”

Petra turned to look up at the Nora and back at Travis. “Like 'em skinny, do you? Ya don't know what you're missing, AmSci, but no sense upsetting your Nora! Deal?”

Murray spat into his palm and shook Petra's hand. “Deal.”

The Forgewoman turned and hollered at the gate. “Kaeluf , get out here and measure up these Striders so we can make a hitch!” She turned back to Nakoa and noted the blaze bombs on her harness. She took what looked like an industrial sling shot from her belt and held it up. “Peace, Nora? No hard feelings about your man?”

Nakoa took the slingshot with obvious delight. “Peace, Oseram. Even still, an Oseram Blast Sling is an expensive gift for so small a slight. What price will set us square?”

Petra's grin was earthy. “Nothing you'd be willing to part with,” she said with a wink in Travis' direction. “Call it a wedding present and if you tire of him, your word to send him my way.”

“Done,” Nakoa agreed, holding out her hand flat with her palm up. Petra slapped it softly as Travis cleared his throat.

“Do I get a say in this, ladies?”

The two women turned to him and in chorus declared, “No.”

“Tough luck, boss,” Buck chuckled, until Olara slapped his shoulder.

“Mind your own,” she told him, causing everyone to laugh at the shocked look on his face.

* * *

It was interesting to compare the differences to these Oseram and the wayward rapist they had encountered their first day in freeing Nakoa. The people were all quick to get working, dressed in leather aprons and what looked like loom woven textiles with remarkably tight weaves. They seemed friendly enough, even as they quickly set about connecting the Striders to the cannon. Petra even had a tray of ale brought out and passed around the party. While a noticeable improvement over the Carja Beer, and markedly larger heads, it was still warm and flatter than either Travis or Buck would have liked.

The cannon were wheeled out on wooden carriages but unlike nineteenth century muzzle loaders, these were mounted to the carriage by a complex pintle arrangement, that immediately caught Travis' eye. That he went right to it was not lost on Petra. “Are you a tinkerer, Travis?” she asked as he looked over the arrangement.

“A soldier by trade,” he replied as he worked out the latch and tested the range of motion, finding it impressive. “What do they fire?”

The smith woman opened a chest hard mounted to the carriage and lifted out something she handed to him. “Thunderjaw teeth,” she declared proudly. “Took forever to figure out what set them off, finally figured out...”

“They're electrically detonated,” he finished.

Her eyes narrowed. “You're a quick study for a soldier,” she accused. “Once I got the Sparker going, the rest fell into place.”

“I'll be dipped in shit!” Buck exclaimed when he saw what was in Travis' hands. “That's a twenty millimeter cannon shell!”

The shell looked like a comically large rifle cartridge, one hundred and two millimeters or slightly larger than four inches long. “You said you got this off a Thunderjaw?” Travis demanded.

“Yes, their mandibular cannon,” she replied. “This can't fire as fast, but, it fires as fast as you can crank the sparker. I was able to trade a Carja scrapper for a pair of them. They were beyond fixing, but, once I worked out how they worked, then it was just a matter of building it.”

Travis nodded. “Seeing something done is halfway to doing it yourself.”

Petra beamed at him. “Say, that's catchy! The crank also works this cog in the feed system and the recoil extracts the spent shell and spits it out the front.”

“This will over heat,” Travis warned her, and this made her clap him on the shoulder with enough force he dropped the shell.

She bent over and picked it up, casually tossing it back into the box. “You're a lot more than a soldier, Travis Murray! I haven't worked out that rotating barrel yet on the Thunderjaw. I can't figure out how it feeds, and the ones I got from the Carja were broken there so I couldn't piece it together.”

“You said the Thunderjaws have this thing?”

“Two,” she corrected him. “One on either side of the chin what that long chain that hangs below feeding them from hoppers on their back. Five thousand shells for each.”

Buck's grin was feral. “Maybe we do have a chance against HADES.”

Travis locked the mount of the canon he'd been admiring and gave a glance to the south. “Depends on if we can get to the party before we're no longer fashionably late.”