“He deprives the kings of the earth of reason;

he sends them wandering trackless wastes.”

-Job 12:24

“Glass!” hissed Caan, “Browne is down. Drex wants you to lead off east, then south—there are three of them!”

Caan was emerging from the juniper, sliding down clay and sand wash littered with pottery shards, breathing the hard breath of fear. Sean checked his shoulders, “Now?”

“ASAP, Drex is covering, Chuck is bringing the A-Team.”

Bronson appeared in a crouch under the moon, next to Saxon who simply strolled down away from the inferno growing on the copse above. The sound of a crane crashing, of the fire roaring up a juniper, and of some air-blowing device, like an intake fan for a Mars town, offered him an excuse to take a knee and take stock:

‘My team, Bronson, Saxon—no Brenner—Caan. Shoot, I can’t just lose a man!’

He steeled himself, rose, looked across the moonlit meadow to the tree-lined ridge of boulder and block a quarter mile off, and hissed, “Low, on me, three pace intervals, stop when I stop. Saxon rear guard. On three: one, two, three,” and he jogged off in an east to south C, crossed the old clay-pack road, looked right to the west and saw the nightmare along the outcropping.

Three oddly built bots, scrapped together one from a backhoe, one from a dump truck and another from a derrick crane or lineman truck, [1] assaulted the men still on the copse: The near one, Backhoe Joe, belched flame, right at the boulder gate, the center west bot, Dumptruck Chuck, fanned the flames with an air blower, driving the flickering flames to a roar up among the dry evergreen Ponderosa, Juniper and pinion. Drex was standing over a figure, presumably Browne, facing the third mechanical monster, on the western copse of the canyon wall. The man was down under a railroad tie that had crushed his legs, he trying to shove off the tie in seated agony, his ebony skin glistening in the moonlight. Drex stood over him, his shield across his back, a boulder held over his head, heaving it down at the gearbox of the crane. The arm of that crane [a modified bucket lift], a full 18 feet, swung out at Drex.

The men were backed up behind him across the road, looking on at the spectacle, when the boulder Drex hurled smashed into the gear box, causing the arm to stall and not swat him off the 30 foot boulder. They cheered, “Drex!” in their Cube-Iron mode, and were undone by their sense of celebrity sportsmanship.

Backhoe Joe stopped belching flame and pivoted on his tracks, then came on towards them. As this happened and Sean motioned to make for the ridge line the sound of ATVs came to them from the dark gloom under a pole barn built into the last great boulder of the canyon wall.

“Shit, Saxon, on me, delaying. The rest of you to the ridge, due south! Arne, lead off!”

Caan, Bronson, Arne and Coyote Billy bounded off over the sage and rabbit brush as Sean unslung his bow and knocked one of his five arrows. Two ATVs came ripping through the brush right at them as he let fly, an arrows sticking in the seat. Another arrow zinging off towards Backhoe Joe—useless, and he reslung his bow across the back and drew his tomahawk and knife. The left ATV with the arrow in it was veering towards his team, so he made off at it, yelling. The damned thing heard him and came about, gearing down and coming at him like a mechanical bull with rubber hooves. He stopped, spread his arms and yelled, “Come on!”

It revved up, came right at him, hitting a clump of rabbit grass, and jumped at his face and chest. Side-stepping, Sean sank the tomahawk [an 1804 naval issue] spike into the seat frame and swung on. The thing had half a brain and tried to make a sharp handlebar cross to dump him over the front end. He left the ax in the seat, grabbed the throttle, held it steady, and, using the knife in his left hand, shot his right hand down off the throttle and turned the damned thing off with the key. A control panel between the handlebars lit up, and the key began to turn itself. That is when the knife and ax both came into use, cleaving and stabbing that coppery control panel.

His eyes were better adjusted now after stupidly looking into the fire. Saxon was bashing the other ATV with his shield and stabbing at the tires with his sword as it reared in a wheelie and tried to smash him. Saxon dived to the side as the thing came down on four wheel, only to be bulled over by Sean, who did an old steer-tilting push tackle on the thing, having left his weapons in the other control panel. The thing revved, gearing down, the tires looking for traction, Sean held it on its side as it spun in a circle, dragging him through the sage and brush, “between the handlebars!”

Saxon’s sword cleaved into the space between the handle bars, sending sun-like sparks and a silicon hiss through the air.

“Damn, Glass—this is nuts! Thanks…”

Backhoe Joe at four o’clock, John—on me!”

They ran, Sean yanking his weapons from the dead ATV, which, if he was not mistaken, or hallucinating, whined, a whine that combined the static hiss of an out-of-frequency radio, and the gasp of, an air hose?

Backhoe Joe was trundling along behind them, belching fire. Dumptruck Chuck was fanning the inferno that now engulfed the A-Team position. Thanks to Drex, Bucketclaw Paul was grinding gears, rocking back and forth between reverse and neutral, its arm waggling as if damaged against the massive boulder wall it had been assaulting.

Within seconds, Sean and Saxon were across the meadow and up in the shadow of the rocks and the pines.

All accounted for, with the coyote sticking close to him and whining, Arne unfurling something—a leather sling and a fishing sinker. “Boss,” he said, “‘fore dat transcrit eagle calls in da dogs, please stan’ clear.”

Not far above the tallest ponderosa, the eagle was gliding, spying with those red eyes, assessing the damage to the ATVs. The leather sling twirled three times, then with a slight cutting of the air, Arne half spun in a falling pivot, like a shot putter would. In one second, above the sound of the now distant flames, a thud sang softly and with authority up ahead, and that winged menace that had been the coordinator of this terrible attack folded wing and fell. Billy Coyote was off like a dart in the face of the belching Backhoe Joe, now firing the meadow at random, the sagebrush smoking blackly. In five seconds, no more no less, because time mattered in Cube-Iron, Billy was back with the head of a great bald eagle, a platinum plate dented, and blinking like amber in the moonlight, surgically affixed to that raptor head. Two goggles hinged to the plate, which had some kind of control panel, all smashed to heck, were likewise implanted over the eyes, hard-wired to the control panel.

“The Osage Arm, aye,” said Bronson. “God bless you kid.”

They all said, “Amen,” with Arne adding, “Let us all beat the devil to heaven’s door.”

Sean grinned, and nodded, cautious about challenging such powers, which, though seemingly absent to weak on Mars, waxed wroth on this man-forsaken planet.

Something sounded, grounded, as in rolled on heavy knobby, wheels, up out of the arroyo along the old clay-pack gravel road to the east. Sean spotted a silouette to the east, something like, “A unicycle?” wondered, Bronson, following Sean’s gaze.

“Too big,” remarked Sean.

“Way too big,” amplified Caan.

They all looked at Arne, Billy too, the coyote looking up in an asking way.

Arne mumbled, “We called ‘em water wights at first, a well drill really, but mounted on two wheels, equipped with a telescopic sight, for what I don’t know. All they ever done is drill for water, usually haulin’ a trailer with extra pipe.”

The thing stopped, and a sharp ping, the ringing of steel, sounded from the weird unicycle, which he figured was 15 feet tall and 300 yards out, with a head that looked like a drill press mounted with scope. For a second they wondered. Then Arne spoke no more, ripped off his feet and nailed to the base of the great ponderosa they stood under like boys, rather than soldiers.

‘Sorry, Arne, my lack of discipline,’ regretted Sean within as he barked, “Up the ridge! Behind the boulders, then along the back end.”

Sean went to the ponderosa, got behind it, and tried to yank out that foot long steel bolt that had Arne nailed gagging in shock to the tree. ‘The least we can do is a decent burial,’ then a terrible thunk pinned Arne’s head to the tree, splashing his hand and arm. Realizing he was sighted in now, Sean let go, “Sorry, Buddy,” and traced his way up the bank in the shadow of the great trunk, Billy whining along at his heels, reminding him that Pyreon was the gift that kept giving—because this was nothing at all like his model’s memory of Earth. [1]

Notes

-1. Many a chill afflicted Glass, as he recalled things, equipment, not just faces, but jobs, that he had never known, never met, and never done. The deja vu of being a clone of a man from another word was strange on Mars, but a subdued, background of a haunting. Here, back on Earth, what those pricks had turned into Pyreon, a temporary world to cleanse the lesser portions of humanity that yet clung to the world of their birth, the hauntings came forward a lot. If not for his responsibility to his men, the deja vu induced musings might have gotten him killed.