Black

(Starspeak)

The biggest concern was air.

Rava was small as far as moons went, but there were still probably a million people living on this rock. A city this large—even half-sunken into the lunar surface—needed air barriers overhead to keep their air from leaking away into space.

Those barriers' generators required power.

Plumes of smoke and a hellish orange glow in the distance did not inspire confidence.

Contacting emergency services was the first move. Jordan made the first overture with the tiny team responding to the escape pod, but an exploding power-plant needed something more pointed.

Peudra really had been a good person to add to our ranks.

They'd been talking with the municipal authorities of Rava within minutes of the Jack launching, and they'd been on the line when the power plant exploded.

But last year we'd field-tested wide-range emergency psionic networks under literal storm conditions.

Turns out the Vorak were pretty good about spreading good ideas.

Ninety-seconds after the fireball flew toward the sky, several dozen psionic nodes came online and began broadcasting. Civilian psionics would all receive the boilerplate emergency message: stay indoors, seek shelter, find first aid-kits and fire extinguishers. Emergency service personnel would be equipped with special receiving constructs that let them pick up on more specific instructions.

We didn't have their specific special receivers, but we didn't need them. Our default transceivers could pick up and decrypt everything on their network.

Fire rescue crews began their response within two minutes of the explosion. They'd arrive on scene within ten.

But it was law enforcement we needed to talk to. There was delicate order to this. It might actually add to the chaos if we just abruptly inserted ourselves into the response.

Peudra was working on looping us in as we spoke, Jordan too.

But our target here was HUNGRY.

That bothered me as we rode the tram into town.

SPARK had been the one driving the space station to be downed—or so it seemed. And now HUNGRY had all but led us to the moon's surface just before the attack actually unfolded.

Was HUNGRY trying to meddle in the attack? Or had SPARK been responsible for the station coming down, while CENSOR was orchestrating the chaos on the ground?

There were too many unknowns.

HUNGRY seemed like it was acting on CENSOR's direction.

SPARK seemed to be the one directing the attack on the station.

CENSOR and SPARK seemed to be at odds with each other.

But now there were moments like this where a possible interpretation existed where they aligned.

Madeline was high overhead and feeding us information about what to expect, but she crucially couldn't arrive at the city faster than the tram on the line parallel to ours—the one HUNGRY rode.

This was bad. HUNGRY could go in almost any direction, and we were far enough behind that we could only gamble which way to pursue. As if that wasn't enough, we had absolutely no way of knowing who was being targeting amidst the chaos.

Would it be a squad of robots storming an office building? Some unassuming agent of SPARK's delivering a bomb? Poison?

There were too many possibilities, so much ground to cover, and absolutely no time at all. So, I had to make a decision.

<Madeline, try to get inside the colony and follow HUNGRY. Everyone else split up. Find hard targets: banks, police buildings, courthouses. Any fortified location that's hard to access ordinarily.>

Whether it was SPARK or CENSOR, someone had gone through a lot of trouble. We needed to cover our bases.

<Acknowledged.>

Our squad burst out of the tram doors as soon as it arrived in the station, and we all resorted to different Adept tricks to move as quickly as we could toward various high-profile locations in the colony.

Kangaroo stilts were a surprisingly useful tool to keep in one's Adept arsenal. Bicycles too—though those required modifications to work well in low gravity. Madeline was still overhead, strapped into metal wings and flight rotors.

I turned on my jets and leapt toward the nearest rooftop.

The powerplant explosion had knocked out most of the colony's lights in a blackout, but backups kicked on, and little by little the colony reilluminated before our eyes.

Casti colonies occasionally resembled European towns. Lots of cobble roads and brick—if still alien—masonry. Vorak colonies resembled Asia more—but only the densest, most modern sections. Tokyo. Hong Kong. Seoul. Singapore. Neon, steel, and glass dominated the architecture here.

Colonies like this one could easily discombobulate anyone who wasn't prepared for how deep they went. The tram we'd ridden had stayed on the moon's surface, even as we'd arrived to the station. But if you looked at a cross section of the city, we were within the top third of the vertical space.

This lunar colony was the crater-canopy-type. The bottom of a big meteor impact had been deepened, and towering buildings had filled the space. Then a color shifting membrane had been stretched across five or ten square miles in a dome above, regulating the sunlight and helping the air-barriers keep the place pressurized too.

A high ceiling and a floor that had been carved dozens and hundreds of feet into the lunar rock below left us with a shocking airy space to move through.

We'd be able to reach high profile spots quickly, hopefully talk with people in charge sooner than expected. But it left me feeling more and more lost about where we needed to be.

Nai chimed in, still far above us, aiming a message just for me.

<I doubt the AIs would go this far just to access such a conventional target.>

<I know,> I said grimly. <I just don't know what more we can do without knowing more about what's being targeted.>

<…We make assumptions based on what we can prevent,> Nai suggested. <If the target is going to be killed covertly by some quiet Vorak in an alley, then we're too late anyway. We're only going to be able to intervene if the threat is something big-ticket.>

<Given the level of collateral damage the station falling would have caused…'big ticket' does sound more likely,> I admitted.

My and Nai's conversation was kept from the prying ears of our other troops in a vain attempt to inspire confidence. It hardly mattered though. The sharpest of our squad would realize the exact same problems.

But Nai wasn't the only one who regularly used these private lines.

<Jordan, say that again to Caleb.>

Tasser cut in.

<The threat isn't on the ground yet—or it hasn't been very long,> she said.

<Why?>

<I'm talking with the first responders by the escape pod, and they told me some of the emergency protocols that would trigger if a big disaster happened like the station falling. Help would get brought in from the outside, and clearances would be expedited in the short-term,> Jordan explained. <I don't think it's just about the chaos from collateral damage. With the right preparation, a ship could get inside otherwise secure perimeters.>

I fired messages toward Peudra and our support up in orbit. A list of ships that recently landed. Better yet, a ship that had been turned away precisely for lacking clearances.

<It's both,> Sid chimed in. He was up on the Siegfried. <If they're trying to sneak a ship past existing security, it's because an assassin is probably on board.>

He was right, I realized.

The chaos and collateral damage cut both ways.

<Whoever or whatever is going to actually hit the target, they can't have been on the moon's surface before the station would have crashed down. For the same reason the station's crash isn't a reliable weapon: they have no guarantee it wouldn't fall right on their head.>

That gave me some clarity.

It meant we might not be too late already.

Enemies' locations gave me a point to start making real deductions from.

<There's a squad of bots at the power plant!> Maddie reported. <SPARK's colors, but no guarantees.>

With her signal were vivid images of her dropping out of the sky, mechanized fists grabbing the nearest machines and mashing them into balls of scrap.

So they didn't have someone to take out the power plant beforehand, I realized. This was improv, because the station hadn't come crashing down.

I headed that direction.

I didn't call anyone else yet. There were still too many unknowns. But Nai and the Artemis would land any second, and we'd more than double our manpower.

Nora ended up following me.

While I jetted between rooftops, she leapt and swung from fleshy black tendrils branching from her torso and arms.

I didn't think of her as a fighter, but she didn't move like she was untested in a crisis. I scowled. Whatever her faults were, being indecisive in a pinch wasn't one of them.

Madeline was already at the far side of the power plant, where a fire raged and a plume of smoke rose upward. She was breaking through walls, giving safer routes to evacuate, and preventing several robots from reaching what might have been a substation of some kind.

My first instinct was to back her up, but more alarming prey caught my eye.

HUNGRY.

Pale white armor stood atop the entrance to a freight tunnel that ran underneath the power plant: the delivery point for raw materials, probably.

The white-clad robot simply stared skyward, almost imperceptibly scanning the skyline for—

<Crap,> I swore.

Scanning for me.

Nora followed my lead when I halted, but it was too late. HUNGRY saw us coming…and didn't move a muscle.

<What do we do?> Nora asked.

<Not sure,> I said. <I want to capture that robot, but…>

<But it led us here?>

<Pretty transparently too,> I grumbled.

Nora got a pensive look on her face.

<…I know we picked SPARK, but could it be more worthwhile to go for CENSOR? Through HUNGRY there?>

<…My gut says no,> I said. <All the reasons to prioritize SPARK still apply.>

<Still…> Nora said.

<Yeah. If HUNGRY is putting itself out there, we're taking a shot.>

I took a moment to update everyone about HUNGRY, but it changed little.

Nora and I leapt off our rooftop and hurtled toward the robot…only for a new one to appear first.

We heard it before we saw it. Heavy footfalls coming from the tunnel HUNGRY stood atop. Mechanical servos whining under heavy load, even in this moon's paltry gravity.

A metal hulk emerged from the tunnel, already covered in scorch marks and scuffs.

It was massive.

My first thought was the chess pieces that CENSOR had guarded the Diving Bell with, especially the most humanoid of them, about nine-feet tall. HUNGRY stood slightly smaller than them at about eight feet.

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This newcomer—clad head-to-toe in midnight black armor—stood every bit of ten.

My second thought was Madeline's trump card: the Cyclops, as well as all earth's fictional power armors that inspired it.

This machine diverged from HUNGRY's more humanoid proportions in favor of exaggerated width and bulk, with the weight of a nuclear-powered elephant behind it. Its footprints crushed gravel into fine powder behind it.

Clad in black and white, the two machines couldn't have looked more opposite. The black-clad robot paused at the tunnel mouth and slowly looked above and behind it to find HUNGRY.

HUNGRY's featureless mask turned from the black robot, to us, and back.

A chill went through me.

It had been luring us. This thing was why.

The black robot noticed us, only giving the barest turn of its torso in our direction.

The same millisecond, the black-clad robot thrust its arm toward HUNGRY, and a spray of bullets roared from a weapon mounted on its wrist. But HUNGRY ducked out of sight just a hair too quickly, so the newcomer swung the gun around toward Nora and me.

The spray of tight-spray buckshot shattered the glass windows I'd been standing in front of just a moment earlier.

Nora, wisely, threw herself sideways too.

Thank you, lunar gravity.

My regulator psionics ran piping hot, and my jets flared on full blast…because I could hear a freight train rumbling after me.

Nora recovered from where she'd fallen further down the building, and she was a moment away from attacking.

<No!> I warned. <It's after me. Get clear!>

I needed to get low.

The power plant sat relatively high up in the colony—likely to combat heat accumulation—so we were still relatively high up. Rooftops and balconies were the most immediate ground to find, and none of them would give me an ideal chance to keep away from this borg brute.

I jetted down, getting as much building as I could between me and the black robot. It was a bad idea to run toward a higher concentration of people, but it was the only way I wasn't going to die in ten seconds.

<Nai, get to me now,> I called. <New heavy unit in play. We need damage control.>

The sounds of concrete, aluminum, and steel being torn to shreds thundered somewhere behind me, and I realized the black-clad robot was tearing straight through the skyscraper while I fell.

A machine's invisibility on psionic radar had proved to be a liability in the past, but this took it to another level. I had to guess what line it was following.

Switching my jets, I screeched my fall to a stop by clinging to the building. Then I threw myself laterally, trying to radically change my momentum and jet still toward the ground level, but now at a new angle.

I heard the black robot burst out the other side of the skyscraper before resuming its own freefall.

Nora was somewhere above me, trying to follow without putting herself in the way.

Keeping myself from smearing against the asphalt meant firing my jets on full blast for an extended burst, and I stumbled when my feet finally touched down.

I was going to get lightheaded if I kept this up.

Thankfully, few Vorak were still out on the streets. An explosion at a power plant created the kind of panic that saw everyone take shelter quicker rather than slower.

Still, there were still a few stragglers nearby.

<Get away!> I warned. <There's—!>

My jaw snapped shut when I heard the robot impact the ground. How high had it fallen from? Had it arrested its fall at all? Could it be damaged?

The whir of its servos and thundering footsteps informed me that it was barreling my way again.

We'd paid in blood and bones to learn the biggest threats fighting robots: breath. Flesh and blood needed oxygen, while metal was inexhaustible. I needed to pace myself or else I'd be run down before Nai could back me up.

Of course, if I didn't step on the gas enough, I'd have other problems.

Five tons of murder machine exploded around the corner, arm raised at me, and gunfire erupted again.

I wasn't alone in having used psionics to condition new reflexes. In theory, materializing a shield in response to a gun being just pointed at us meant getting some protection in place before a trigger actually got pulled.

In this case, it worked against me. Twice.

The black-clad robot's gun was built into its arm. Worse, no small amount of psionic conditioning reacted to the tiniest detectable changes in a consciousness before they tried to shoot you.

Machines didn't have those.

My shield was sloppy, and only barely in time.

It exploded and shattered where the buckshot hit. I was blown back across the street.

Crap! The blast threw me far in the low gravity, and I kept just enough of my wits to roll where I landed and jet around the corner. Still, panic welled up in me from my shield breaking, and I had to

Was I hit? Nai hadn't gotten armor on me beforehand.

I furiously patted myself, looking for blood. My heart was pounding so fast, I didn't feel any pain yet. If I had been shot, I didn't have any time to properly check.

Fleeing downward had been a good call. Because now I stood a chance to gain some ground. This robot was a tank, and it had survived a massive fall without even slowing its roll.

But weight meant it probably couldn't climb as freely as I could.

I jetted upward this time.

Below me, the robot rumbled into line of sight again and tried spraying more buckshot.

This time, I was quicker. Madeline wasn't the only one who could fly. In low gravity like this, my pressure jet trick was just as good. In fact, in low G, my jets were actually better.

I could erratically shift my momentum more than Madeline could with just the lift from her wings.

Windows shattered where I flew past them, and the machine was just barely too slow to correct its aim quick enough at this range.

Going all the way up would take too long. But plenty of the lower buildings' rooftops were less 'roof' and more 'top floor'. Stairways and footbridges formed a spiderweb of solid ground spanning most of the colony.

Normally those spaces would be filled with people, small vendors, park spaces, and all sorts of activity. But they'd be empty right now. That would be my best arena. Maximum three-dimensional mobility, minimum bystanders.

There was one small problem: the automatic shotgun in the black robot's arm…was not its only ranged weapon.

I jetted toward the nearest skybridge, and I heard the shrill howl of something burning after me.

Rockets .

I shifted direction again, only for the pair of rockets to follow the change, curving their flight path.

Heat-seeking?

Deploying smoke took mass away from my jets, but it was the best way I had to avoid them. The missiles crashed into the bridge and exploded in a bright red shower of plasma. The fiery explosions melted steel and made concrete glow molten where they impacted. Those were not ordinary weaponry!

The black machine made slow and deliberate jumps from lower rooftops, making its way up to the skyway. Small glowing vents on its torso and legs marked thrusters of its own, helping it struggle against gravity.

It was slow to rise. Good. I could buy time with that—or I could have, if for the four, five, six more rockets coming my way now.

They were fired in staggered arcs, arriving in sequence rather than simultaneously. It knew I'd avoid them in bursts, so it was spreading out the attack.

The first two I avoided the first one the same way: a burst of thermo-dark smoke, and jetting to safe ground.

Hot gravel and slag exploded from the impact point, far too closely than I'd have liked. This salve had been fired from closer range, and I had less time to evade.

Three of the remaining four, I blasted off course with a kinetic bomb at the very edge of my range—thirty meters. That was still close enough to feel the explosions' heat searing the hair on my arms.

The last one, I only had time to throw myself behind the nearest solid piece of cover and hope it held.

Each explosion gave an alien screech when it detonated, and the ground shuddered from every blast. It made my teeth rattle.

<Caleb!>

Nora was overhead, plummeting down toward me, trying to reach the seventh rocket I'd missed. It howled toward me, coming well within thirty meters. But in the nick of time before it detonated, Nora's black tendril wrapped around it, engulfing the missile in inky flesh.

She whipped it aside, flinging it into open air before it exploded.

<Get clear!> I warned.

<You need help!> she protested.

<True,> I said, turning toward the black robot, <but she arrived sooner than I thought.>

Nai struck fast as lightning, directly from overhead.

Crystal lances the size of telephone poles rained down, impaling the open rooftop and slowing the machine's advance. More than one impacted the robot directly. But its armor and chassis were too dense; each spear deflected shallowly.

Nai landed opposite me on the rooftop. We could pen it in.

The robot turned its gun arm on her without missing a beat, but instead of keeping her distance Nai charged right in.

Glass pillars erupted in its line of fire, each new one appearing exactly between Nai and her route to the enemy. This was her forte: controlling space. Not ten feet away, and the robot couldn't shoot her.

She was too quick creating cover. Even more important, she was cutting off the black-clad robot's room to evade. It might be able to charge through buildings, but even it couldn't destroy her hardest crystal on a whim.

Maybe given time, but that was something Nai wasn't offering.

Two more pillars erupted behind the machine, and it stumbled into them as it backpedaled from Nai's threatening advance.

More crystal spikes immobilized the gun arm, and Nai got a hand onto the dark armor covering the robot.

CENSOR was capable of manufacturing armor that could resist Nai's signature trick, if briefly. It stood to reason SPARK might have the same recipe, assuming this machine even belonged to him.

But whatever Nai cascaded in the armor, she was satisfied, because she vaulted off the robot's shoulder before it could grab her, and teal fire broke out.

It was over in a flash.

Vorpal flames melted through the robot's shoulder in the blink of an eye—and its body separated from its gun arm—still trapped in the crystal.

And its other mechanical hand clamped down on Nai's torso as she began moving the flames toward the other limbs.

The robot beat her out.

It had turned around.

Too quick. It looked wrong. How?

My brain raced to try making sense of what I saw. The robot had lost its arm only to spin and grab Nai with the other…its hips had swiveled all the way around, the back way.

It's not limited to humanoid range of motion.

Quicker than Nai could react, the robot spun and slammed her into her own crystal pillar. The robot's hand smashed against the heavy glass, but Nai's body actually phased through the solid briefly.

The motion was so forceful and rapid, that Nai was helpless to resist as it swung her around like a ragdoll. But if it couldn't bash her into her own crystal, it could squeeze her like a grape.

Being violently thrashed about had seen her lose her focus on her fire, but just the pause as it began crushing her was enough for her to regain composure. Crystal materialized around her, growing outward from her own invisible armor.

It was a defensive move at a moment when she was rattled from being caught. But unlike her crystal pillars, this crystal physically interacted with her. It protected her from being crushed, but…

The machine elected to smash her against the ground quicker than the crystal could grow.

I saw her head smash against the concrete, a large crack appearing in her invisible helmet. Then again. And again.

The machine slammed Nai into the ground again, hammering her against the ground even as crystal grew to ensconce her. I saw navy Farnata blood spill somewhere in the mess of robot, crystal, and rubble.

After a dozen attempts to pulp her skull against the ground, the robot rose.

Nai was bloody and motionless, encased in solid crystal so thick that the machine couldn't grip the huge mass with its fingers.

My heart went cold.

Was she dead?

The answer came to me automatically, on instinct and psionic senses: no. She was alive. The last thing she'd done before losing consciousness was tying off the growth of her crystal, making it continue even after she passed out.

It had cocooned her faster than the machine could finish her off.

But she was still in bad shape, bleeding and maybe even suffocating.

And we were somehow in even worse shape.

I beamed Nai a psionic reassurance, and I connected with the last thought that had gone through her head before fainting.

One night, the Flotilla had screened Monty Python from someone's laptop.

'Tis but a scratch!'

'A scratch? Your arm's off!'

But I wasn't laughing. This Black Knight had lost an arm one heartbeat only to knock the Warlock out cold the next.

The Black Knight looked down at Nai, giving her crystal cocoon a few experimental stomps to probe for weaknesses. It didn't like its odds in penetrating the crystal, and scanned around instead, looking for what next.

I took a deep breath and tried to reassure myself that it was missing an arm. It wasn't invincible.

<Nai's down,> I reported. <All points converge on me. Designate maximum priority threat: the Black Knight.>

I beamed an image of our foe to everyone within a million miles, warning absolutely everyone to steer clear unless they were ready to tangle with certain death.

There were no words in response. Just stunned silences that oozed even through psionic communications.

I glanced at Nora. Her face was slack with shock.

<We're engaging,> I warned. <Backup? Come quick.>

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