Read Ebook: The Hoplite by Sheridan Richard

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Ebook has 98 lines and 6931 words, and 2 pages

"As you can see, a large and heavily armed contingent of the enemy has breached the dome of number seven surface-farm."

The scout obligingly swiveled his television optic to show the fused gap in the huge plastic dome through which the natives were hauling incendiary materials to destroy the crop. The motionless bulk of a warrior lay close beside the opening. He had been downed by artillery, while above the force-field the ever present aircraft of the natives circled watchfully. Somewhere, the ancient generators had shorted long enough for the raiders to slip through.

"A detachment has already been sent out," the voice continued. "The natives are to be forced back beyond the northern defense perimeter. Intelligence estimates eight hundred of the enemy and thirty field-pieces. The fortress depends on you. You will not fail the fortress."

On that note, the loudspeaker was silent.

"It seems to me," the warrior on Jord's right murmured as they moved towards the opening bulkhead at the far side of the room, "that we almost always fail." He wasn't contradicting, only remarking.

Two hundred years ago the planet had been a peaceful colony. Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted.

He went through the bulkhead into the immenseness of the cavern where the machines stood waiting in the shadowless light.

Down the iron catwalks the silver warriors ran. Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio.

Jord felt the familiar horror.

When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned.

Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes--

His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.

"Check motion!"

He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.

The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man.

A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain.

"Check respirators."

"Check."

The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor.

His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors. Joyous, thankful voices--the horror had passed and they were alive again.

On the surface it was winter. The methane-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and stone.

Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, in the long vistas of unwalled space, in the curve of a far away horizon. He exulted in his machine body, so human in its parts, so more than human in its size and capabilities. The column of the neck, the steel sinews; every muscle, every ligament, every nerve of the human body had its counterpart in the machine. What man could do, the machine did. What affected man, in proportion, affected the machine.

Even to pain, the machine was complete.

He withdrew his optics and sent his telescope rising ten feet above his head, searching the gray land for the other detachment. A dozen miles away he could see the dome of the ravished farm. The little specks were scurrying to complete their destruction before the dreaded warriors should appear. They had blocked the entrance of the shallow valley in which the farm lay with their artillery. Behind it the gunners would try to hold off the warriors and give the rest time to escape. Not that it mattered. The enemy cared little for his losses.

His telescope swiveled, found the scarp of an ancient bomb, ringed with what was probably fission produced obsidian, and rested on the bodies of the machines who had beaten his detachment to the scene and now came streaming out to join them.

The two detachments merged, hesitated as each warrior assumed his position and began the attack.

They would charge straight at the guns, so much a warrior cared for the marksmanship of former slaves--so much a warrior cared for the power of native shells.

Ar eight miles the snouts of the cannons began to belch. The gunnery was high. The barrage passed harmlessly overhead.

The first strike was for him. The armor-piercing shell clanged and flattened out against his chest, staggering him back. He rallied, caught his balance, sped on. He almost pitied the limited inventiveness of the natives, whose genius ended when they drove man into the fortresses.

Another shell. A warrior whirled and stumbled. Jord crashed into him, steadied him. The explosions blended into an endless sound.

He felt a shell bounce from his shoulder, taking six optics with it and leaving the smell of scorched steel. They were too thick now to dodge, too close to bear. Earth and stone sprayed up from a sudden crater before him. He wheeled. Now they were in a range where the shells could disable an arm or leg.

An arm! A stiff-hung, motionless limb of steel.

The rush had brought them to the artillery. Their feet trampled the ancient guns. They smashed at belching muzzles with hammer fists. They had breached the defenses. The natives had fled. In minutes they would be trampling the fleeing enemy.

Then the earth erupted....

Jord had only one leg still functioning when he regained consciousness. One leg and perhaps eight of his optics. His audio was dead and there was something wrong with his respirator. He had to fight to keep down the panic.

A warrior who had been trapped inside his machine once told him what it was like inside a Galbth II when you couldn't move, or help yourself. If you but closed your eyes you imagined yourself inside a shell, and that shell inside a larger shell, and that inside a still larger shell until, after a hundred shells, you could imagine your machine, still true to your form, lying helpless and twisted on the ground.

There was no way you could get out of your machine without the help of the mechanics. Even if there were it was impossible to exist on the surface. You had to lie where you fell. Or, if possible, make your way back as best you could to your lock.

He tried moving. His good leg sawed the air like a giant flail. There was some motion in his chest, but that was all. He erected all the optics he could control and found himself lying on his stomach, dismembered. About twenty yards to the right he saw the other leg of his machine lying across a warrior who seemed to have no motion at all. As far as he could see, no one had escaped. Warriors and parts of warriors were strewn all about him. He swiveled his optics in anxiety. If he were to be rescued, it must be soon. Already the air was foul and he was having trouble focusing his optics.

He wanted to get out of the machine. He never wanted anything as much as he wanted this. The smell of metal and the taste of metal strangled him. He wanted to get out. Worse than he wanted faces, worse than he wanted identity, worse than he wanted to be able to live on the surface. He could feel all the weight of the machine on his body. The vocalizer was still on and he moaned into the dirt.

He tried to raise his optics again, but the power had somehow failed. Many-faced, congealing darkness drew near. He rushed into it.

The Genocide Squad was the first to go into the crater.

The last warrior had ceased moving. Later the salvagers would come to collect the precious metals. They drilled Jord's machine open but, luckily, by this time he was dead.

"Which one next?" he asked, clambering awkwardly from the hole in the machine's back. He was a native and, except for certain functional differences in his construction, was little distinguished from other natives. But normalcy is relative. The normalcy of a native may be radically different from that of a fortress dweller.

"We are fortunate the bomb didn't destroy more of these bodies," he said, rejoining his partner at the side of the warrior.

"What is it like, inside?" his partner asked curiously.

The Genocide Monitor stopped for a moment and appraised the vast bulk. He had long ago ceased to be either fascinated or repelled by the soft, unfunctional bodies of fortress dwellers.

"Just another human," the android said.

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