Slick Dave and I Leave a Gift
The humanoid combat drones are big-budget, and we try to recover them at all costs.
The First Lieutenant was fast and loose with his orders, as many of the incoming Academy graduates tended to be as our Cleansing Campaign ramped up. He looked sixteen, peeking out of his force-field helmet at the messy landscape, concealing his anxiety under a liberal coat of pomposity.
The city had been levelled by our tactical nukes with ostensible pin-point accuracy that was supposed to keep intact the sections of neighbourhoods where we suspected they were keeping the hostages.
War is, of course, the bastard offspring of Happenstance and Foresight, so the combination of our delivery malfunctions and their electronic countermeasures guaranteed that the place was uniformly pancaked in a jumble of twisted steel and crumbled concrete, overhung by a morose fog of dust and absence of life.
Which was, I suspected, our unpublished strategic goal anyway.
LT had ordered EM-stealth, so we were on point-to-point pulsed maser-comms although no sane person would expect the souls around us to be tuning in on this side of eternity. And yet, as we stumbled onward in our armoured exosuits with CBRN-filtered air, guarded by a swarm of micro droids above our heads, our mikes picked up singing. It was high-pitched and artificial, even screechy, but the tune was still recognisable as a popular children’s song.
LT barked his order, and Slick Dave and I peeled off from the group towards the acoustic source, now monitored by a pair of droids a hundred meters west.
The humanoid combat drone, reclining against the undercarriage remains of a bus, was missing a leg, but its functional arms were clasped about the headless torso of a preschool child in stained pyjamas imprinted with tiny spaceships.
These fully-sentient machines are expensive, and LT wanted this one to be secured for later retrieval by Engineering. Slick Dave bent forward to open the plastisteel panel under its armpit, but I pushed him aside, offering the drone a hand grenade.
It took it from my palm with tender precision, focusing on my face with its scintillating compound eyes for a fleeting moment without breaking its crooning.
I dragged my sidekick away, back the way we came.
“He’s going to be really pissed off, you know that?” he narrow-banded me.
“I guess. But he already thinks I’m flaky because I am female,” I replied.
“And it’s time LT gets a little traumatised, too.”
We both smiled thinly.
The boom behind us was surprisingly comforting.
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