skonen_blades

The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to solidify anyway. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.

The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It looked completely unnatural and creepy and warped all sense of perspective.

We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant industrial suction cups.

Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Lucky them. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.

As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my x-legs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.

“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.

“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight.

I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.

The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.

If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.

Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.

Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.

I got out of the elevator on the surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few second calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.

My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.



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“Oh shit”, Jake thought, “it wasn’t a metaphor.”

A six-armed minotaur stared down at Jake. The torso of the minotaur grafted seamlessly at the midriff into the body of a thick python as thick around as a sewer pipe. The six fists of the minotaur dripped blood. Two of the fists carried maces.

Deep red glints tracked Jack. Other than the angle of the huge bull head as it followed Jake and the deep breathing of the creature’s massive lungs, it didn’t move at all, just stared with an unknowable, animal thought process.

The head of the corporation said that as part of the interview process, Jake would have to outrun the beast. The other applicants ahead of him had gone first. Jake was the last one. He had assumed that ‘outrun the beast’ was some sort of Donald Trump turn of phrase. A pretty way of saying that Jake would have to stay one step ahead of what was going to be a harsh interview process.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thick breathing from the beast made the air dank. It had exerted itself. Jake could see smashed bodies, surprised faces and broken limbs in a pile behind it. A blackberry chirruped there in the dark corridor, underneath the bodies.

One of the dead people had mail, Jake guessed.

The beep from the blackberry seemed to startle the beast into action. With a snorting blast of air that sounded like an angry sneeze, it shook its huge, shaggy head.

Its horns caught the light when it did that. Jake wet his pants.

The beast ducked down suddenly with a terrifying amount of speed and opened its arms wide like a spider going in for a hug. It tightened its grip on the maces, curled around in an S shape, coiled back, cocked a swing, and lunged forward.

The beast screamed. Jake joined in.

The rest was a blur. The minotaur thing had hit him, he knew that much. Jake felt a concussive shock and then he was airborne for a brief time before the door that had locked behind him stopped his momentum very efficiently. He felt a few things go wrong inside him. He hung there like a cartoon for half a second before the floor jumped up at him and smacked him in the face.

Jake made kitten noises for a while on the floor.

Outrun the beast, thought Jake, outrun the beast. He tasted blood. How could he outrun the beast?

The beast prodded Jake’s shoulder with a fingertip as big as a stereo speaker, checking to see if there was any life left in him. It brought one of the maces down softly and poked at Jake. It was a light poke by the beast's standards but Jake felt another rib go.

Jake summoned up all his strength and made a grab for the handle of the mace. It was like grabbing onto a telephone pole. He wrapped his arms around it, pressed his face up against the metal of the top of the weapon, and gave it a bear hug.

Shocked, the beast drew back. Jake hung on, dangling from the mace. The beast jiggled the mace a little, trying to free Jake for a killing blow.

Enraged, the beast swung the mace, adding momentum with a twisting corkscrew motion from its snake half below.

Jake couldn’t hang on. At the apogee of the swing, Jake slipped off the mace.

He could hear his clothes snapping in the wind as he sailed over and past the bodies piled up on the floor. He landed beyond them and slid along the polished floor.

A door at the end of the corridor opened up and Jake slid through it into a nicely decorated office. Friction kicked in on the rug and he rolled six times before coming to a stop. The door slid shut.

The Beast yelled his displeasure from the other side.

Jake's new boss leaned down from behind the huge desk.

“Oh shit,” she said with a little pout, “you made it.”

She made a little check mark on one of the papers on her desk and looked at her long nails.

“I guess that means you got the job, then. Let’s get you cleaned up.”



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The three of them stood in line for benefits.

Excel’s long, yellow arms drummed stubby fingers on the ground beside his treads. He had a gaudy paint job of yellow, red and silver that made him look like an oversized kid’s toy. He was leftover from the days of novelty construction.

That was construction where the robots building the buildings performed as they built. Brightly coloured metal clowns laying brick and welding pipes. The would swing in unison off of the chains and drive rivets as percussion.

Those days were done after the maraca cement mixer came loose from his moorings and fell flailing onto that poor school bus. Excel and the rest of his kind were refitted where possible, given benefits where it wasn’t.

Excel was in line for benefits.

Manee-ha’s round edges, pastel colours, humanoid form, and lack of face made her look like some sort of ninja co-designed by Jamaica and Japan. She had long dreadlocks and a head like a bowling ball with the finger holes pointing forward. She had giant yellow bracelets on her wrists and ankles.

Manee-ha's construction had been commissioned for a child by a rich father. She was skillful with a sword and a very good acrobat. She had access to hundreds of archaic dance forms and could manipulate light to make arcs in the air that traced her movement.

The child grew up and moved out. Simple as that. Manee-ha was no longer needed and would have been refitted but she was way too specialized. She’d been having trouble finding work. She worked as a street performer but didn’t make as much as the humans.

Manee-ha was in line for benefits.

Drag’n-zorz9 was a cop. People averted their eyes from him.

One of his models (a 36) had gone crazy during a department store arrest. People say that he had been hacked and told to see everyone around him as lethally armed and advancing. Sixty-eight innocent civilians had been mowed down before they vaporized him.

Drag'n-zorz models were cop robots and as such, they had been designed with mean faces and intimidating frames. The footage of that massacre had been disastrous. Not only for the cops but very nearly for all of silikind.

All versions of his model had been inhibited and dismissed to make their own way in society. The cops pretty much turned a blind eye when one of them turned up broken in a park. There weren’t too many left. Those of them that had found a way around the inhibitors got work as bodyguards. Those that didn’t find a way past got in line for benefits.

Drag’n-zorz9 was in line for benefits.

This is how the three of them met. They were in line for benefits.

Mania, Dragon, and X. The metal trisome. The gutters ran red with the blood of the bios in the years that followed. They became the champions of the underclass and told the meatmen in no uncertain terms that it was a more than just a fight for rights on paper, it was a fight for acceptance in society.

This is the story of the first robot city. This is the story of the first robot country.




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