Delayed, Detained, Dispersed

Buddy sat arms crossed, long spindly legs in sharp angles, on a box by the quay. A long gray slab of laser carved granite, hauled by whatever unknown means, stretched far into the black waters of the Mediterranean Gulf. Bollards peppered each side of the it, carved from the same stone, but no ropes were around them.

They’d arrived at first light, just as the Protocollum noctis was being lifted. Instead of a warm welcome, the party had been subjected to searches, interrogations, and document verifications. The good Father Robert had evidently foreseen as much and had scribed temporary See credentials for both Buddy and Hound. Jean needed no such thing. His strangely full biological nature was proof enough of his identity. The See soldiers at the gates had been more than disappointed when, instead of a great monster or a hyper-mutated humanoid, the Grower they received was a simple man in green robes. Only on the surface, that is.

After hours of processing, though Buddy wasn’t sure if it truly had been hours, they had finally been let inside the tall concrete walls of the outpost, Decimum Iuxta Mari. Unlike the no name town from where they’d come, See outposts, be they inland, mountainous, aerial, or by the sea, were fortress towns anywhere from tiny to massive with varying ratios of soldier to civilian. Decimum Iuxta Mari was like several inland and coastal outposts, housing a healthy mix, bordering on sixty-forty. There were even some faux-animalia house pets, though the felines looked scrawny and unwell, scampering off when one got too near, while the scant canines Hound had tried to communicate with were dumb bots with simple command/obey programming.

In the center of the outpost was a boxy gray tower, twice as tall as the electro-thornwire topped concrete walls that formed an octagon around the town. On the tower’s four sides, long and wide banners of the See and the personal heraldry of whichever governor ruled here, hung starkly colored over the drab quick-fabricated buildings.

The people themselves, like most under the See’s benevolent protection, tended to favor prostheses and bionics that didn’t take away from their original humanoid form. Though they more closely resembled Buddy in many cases rather than Jean, they seemed more human compared to the ramshackle rust-jointed almost-robot people of the badlands and uncontested territories. Far more human than what the Conclave were. Tom had been a brilliant example. So too was Buddy for that matter.

“What are you brooding on now?” Hound’s calm voice said from right beside him.

Buddy expelled a puff of pressure from his armpit vents and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lucia said we’d be chartering a ship. There ain’t no ship.”

“Yes, that is strange. Usually, the See keeps to their word. Maybe there was a mix up in communications,” Hound said. He kept his neon eyes out toward the town, ever vigilant.

Civilians and soldiery mulled about, kicking up dust and sand. Some faux-animalia stopped and glanced at Hound, then moved on. Buddy thought he spied one purist in the throng near the sea. There wasn’t much else to look at, so both contented themselves in watching the central tower’s doors.

Soon, Lucia and Jean appeared from them. They looked around, then spotted the two.

“The Governor told me that the ship from Roma Prima is delayed,” Lucia said once she was near. Jean followed, jogging slightly to keep up with the surprisingly quick pace of the short squire mechanic.

“How delayed?” Hound asked.

“Hasn’t left port yet, delayed.”

Buddy pinched his nose again. “So, are we just going to sit around here and do nothing?” he asked.

“I share your frustration,” Lucia said, “but there’s nothing we can do.”

“What options do we have?” Hound asked.

Lucia giggled. “None, really. The nearest outpost is the border fortress between Neo-Ur and the Desert Territories.”

“How is that funny?” Buddy snapped.

Lucia frowned. She made to speak, but Hound interrupted. “Though I don’t share Buddy’s irritation, I’m likewise bothered that we have no other option than to wait. Doesn’t it seem, well, suspicious?”

Everyone looked at Hound, who went on, “think about it: back at the town, the branch manager seemed rather confident. Not in the rabble he’d hired, but in something else.”

“He was probably expecting the kill-bot to come back him up,” Buddy said and kicked at the gravel beneath his feet.

“I don’t think so,” said Hound.

Buddy raised an eyebrow.

“Then what do you think?” Jean asked.

“Didn’t Jaques tell the priest that he overheard Tom communicating with the Conclave?” Hound asked.

“I thought we agreed that it was the kill-bot he was talking to,” said Buddy.

“No,” Hound chuffed, “he specifically mentioned that Tom was in contact with the Conclave and the kill-bot.”

“Are you saying he called in reinforcements?” Lucia asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. But the Conclave are thorough. I’ve seen it. When I fled from Neo-Ur, they chased me. They stopped at every hut, every halfway house, every shack. Every ditch and every pothole. They scanned everything. I saw one soldier get executed when he lied about checking a dumpster.

“Now, say it was you who gave Tom orders; wouldn’t you grow suspicious if suddenly contact were severed? When reports stopped coming through? Wouldn’t you send someone to check if everything is in order?” Hound asked.

“Say, Lucia,” Buddy began, chilled by Hound’s abrupt gravity, “when’s the last you were in touch with Sandra?”

Lucia’s pale face became almost translucent; her bluish lips lost a little color. She raised her wrist, flipping through her long-range comms unit. After a tense stretch of silence, broken by a steady choir of crunching gravel as townsfolk went about, the squire mechanic looked up at the party.

“The connection is severed,” She whispered.

“Maybe they’re out of range,” Jean offered.

“No. The crawler has a radio station capable of reaching across the Atlantic. Something is wrong.”

Buddy felt a strange twinge spike up his spine. Before he could analyze what it might’ve been, he saw Hound’s hackles rise. The canine’s ears and tails snapped to attention; his neon eyes locked to the outpost gates.

“What’s wrong?” Buddy asked, rising to his lanky height, his hand hesitantly caressing the atomizer’s grip.

“The soldiers are speaking…” Hound’s ears twitched as the auditory receptors within, enmeshed with their silicone musculature, calculated optimal angles for pickup. Then his head snapped up to regard Buddy. “Someone is at the gates.”

---

Jaques rubbed his cloudy eye, then scratched the seams around the socket of his prosthesis. Sand had gotten everywhere during the long non-stop drive. He hated sand. It was coarse, and rough, and tasted like shit. Being irradiated in various degrees, it also felt like licking the end of a lithium ion power cell. Not to mention it gummed up more delicate replacements, such as his eye, such as Justinia’s leg.

The soldier had been a champion, keeping awake the entire drive, with the help of stimulants of course. For almost four hundred kilometers they’d driven up and down black dunes, over rocky outcrops, and around and below the shadows of crooked monolithic buildings of ancient civilizations. Jaques counted thrice that they’d had to turn on the high beams of the vehicle when it had seemed there was no way to continue, otherwise they went by night vision, until the sun rose, and morning came.

Throughout the long drive, under the sufferance of being a passenger to a student driver, it had been a miracle that never once had Justinia spoken a word in complaint. She’d remained cool and collected, guiding Jaques with the steering and the use of the throttle, giving directions when needed.

When the two had finally come to a halting stop before the gates, she had collapsed in exhaustion. The gate guards had recognized her uniform and promptly had her strapped to a stretcher and carried off to the infirmary. After that, they’d aimed guns at Jaques, shouting him down and cuffing him.

Now he was in a holding cell within the gatehouse, eyes itchy, throat scratchy, smelling like shit, piss, blood and engine oil. He’d just wanted to go to Venetia, that’s all. Hell, he’d saved a See soldier, and this is what he got as thanks. Detained, locked away, his eye removed for ‘inspection.’

Footsteps clanked outside in the corridor. They stopped in front of his door, which promptly opened on rusted hinges.

“Alright, out you come,” the gruff voice of a guard barked.

Jaques could only make out the murky outlines of the man. “May I have my eye returned to me?”

“Come along then,” the guard said and smacked the doorframe with his baton.

The clang sent shivers up Jaques’s spine. He sighed and complied.

He was led into a windowless room, where he dubiously signed a stack of documents that were offered him, then into another room, in which he nervously waited for three quarters of an hour before someone came in, led him out into the courtyard of the outpost, placed his eye in his palm, then slammed the door shut behind him.

Jaques plopped the orb back where it belonged, and the world became less blurry, and he could see again.

“What happened to you? The guards wouldn’t let us in?”

Jaques turned to regard the speaker. It was Jean. The rest stood a few steps behind. The former tellers eyes widened.

“You’re still here?”

“Ship’s late,” Buddy explained, “the hell are you here for? And how come you’re covered in blood and smell like shit?”

Jaques grimaced, then grabbed Jean by the shoulders. “It was the damn Conclave; they attacked the crawler. They are after you!”

Lucia stepped forward. “You informed the guards?”

“Well, no. They just threw me in a cell and took my eye. I told them we were attacked, but I suppose Justinia, a See soldier I rescued, is telling them presently. But that’s beside the point, we need to—”

Buddy lurched toward the small man, pushing aside Jean and a suddenly pensive Lucia, grabbing Jaques by the collar of his robe, the other hand on the atomizer’s grip.

“You’re telling me you forgot to mention that the God damned Conclave attacked you? The hell is wrong with you?” he hissed.

“I’m telling you now,” Jaques whimpered, balancing on his toes as Buddy held him up with one arm.

“Let him down Buddy,” Hound said softly.

“For all we know they followed him here.”

Jean grabbed Buddy’s arm by the bicep, applying pressure. “Please let him down, Mr. Limbo, he’s done nothing wrong.”

Buddy felt the hand, and the surprisingly strong power it exerted on his arm. Begrudgingly he lowered the dirty bald man. When his feet touched the ground, Lucia whispered something.

Buddy turned to regard her. “What?”

Lucia held her chin between thumb and forefinger. “What?” she said, shaking out of her thoughts.

“What did you say?”

“I said nothing.”

“No, you were whispering something.” Buddy looked to Hound for support.

The dog cocked its head. “She wasn’t.”

Before more attention could be directed toward the strange scene, Jaques spoke up again. “I thought I was doing the right thing! I come all the way here, after surviving a Conclave attack, just to warn you, to help you! Like I tried warning and helping back in town. What do I get for it? Detention, suspicion, and mistrust.”

The outburst caused more than one civilian to glance over in their direction. Not that the strange gathering hadn’t already attracted some attention.

“Jaques…” Jean began, his voice lowered.

“No! I hid in sewage for hours, then drove nonstop just to come here. I’ve not bathed, I’ve not refueled, I’ve not hibernated, I’m locked up then thrown out without a word, then this clanker Roughhouses me for no reason.”

Buddy’s grip tightened around the atomizer. “Say that again.”

Jaques was too worked up to see the threat. He raised a trembling finger and pointed at the bounty hunter, about to repeat the slur, when Jean stepped between the two, arms stretched out to his sides.

“Let go of the gun, Mr. Limbo.”

Buddy blinked. He hadn’t even realized that he’d grabbed it. Though still angry, he let go, and as he did, he thought he heard the whisper again. He brought his hand up to his copper jaw and worked the fresh dent that he’d received from Tom with both primary and secondary index fingers, making a show of thinking, though in truth, he was scanning his auditory software for malfunctions. There were none.

“Look, Mr. teller—”

“Jaques.”

“Apologies. Look, Mr. Jaques, we got off on the wrong foot here. Sorry for being so heavy handed, but,” he bent down to whisper, looking past Jean who still stood between them, “if the Conclave really did attack you, and you survived, in my experience that means they let you.”

“I told you I hid,” Jaques said indignantly.

“I believe you,” said Buddy, “but I also know the Conclave have real good, and I mean real good, scanning tech. I bet my right eye they knew you were there.”

Jaques, though very pasty to begin with, paled further, his hoary eye jiggled in its socket. He began to stammer a reply, but Lucia beat him to it.

With a single curse, she turned on her heel, and started toward the barracks, eyes down, deep in thought, pace quick.

“Where’re you off to?” Buddy called after her.

“I need to check something.”

“Check what?”

She giggled. “Nothing serious, I think, but I have to make sure.”

Buddy raised an eyebrow and flailed his arms in an exaggerated shrug. Then he looked to Hound. “Go with her,” he said.

Hound chuffed and galloped after the squire.

Buddy watched the two-tailed canine catch up, then slow down. He turned back to the two men, but they were gone too. He pivoted, and saw Jean and Jaques, the former with an arm around the shoulders of the latter, walking toward a cluster of dinky gray stacked buildings constituting a market.

“Oh yes, amazing idea! Lets just split up at a time like this.”

The sarcastic comment earned him a few crooked glances from the native townsfolk and guards that passed by. Buddy smiled to some, tipped his hat to others, then, after grave deliberations, he decided on the saloon. He needed something to dull his nerves.

As he began toward the first place he could find with a hanging sign denoting intoxicants, the figure that had gone unseen, that had spied on the group from behind a market stall, exited its hiding place and gracefully integrated itself into the mulling civilian populace and followed the unsuspecting bounty hunter.

---

It growled. It hated. It awoke.

Someone was speaking above it. Their tone denoted surprise. They hadn’t believed it would survive.

It tried opening its eyes, but the command was met by an error message; ‘hardware not installed.’

“Eyes/vision…” it hissed.

“Are being repaired, don’t worry,” a man’s voice finished for it.

“Master/Creator/Father?”

“Correct, Five-One. It is I. I downloaded the video feed from your fight. Did you recognize the weapon that strange man used?”

“Rhetorical. You expect me to know/understand.”

A strong biological hand caressed Unit Five-One’s translucent cheek. “I do. For a fact I know that you do. That, my dear child, was a Neptune. I am updating your task. In addition to retrieving the Grower, you must retrieve that weapon. It is very special. It was stolen from us a long time ago.”

“Yes, father. How long until I hunt/track/kill?”

“Not long. You’ll be whole once more very shortly.”

It growled. It purred. The fluid that pumped through its systems, something that could hardly be called blood, was hot in its veins.

Soon it could once again kill.

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