Shadow Army: A Shadows Rising Novella

10. Bargain

Cress

I leaned over and slapped the valve shut on the fuel canister, and the bright white flame of the torch petered out. Then I shoved my welding visor up onto the top of my head and straightened.

Beckett bent closer, his brown hair flopping over his face as he peered at what I had been working on.

"What do you think?" I asked, swiping at my sweaty forehead with the back of my hand. "Will it hold?"

Beckett cast a critical squint over the rivet I had just set. Then he nodded. "Yup. It'll do. Nice clean edges, good color."

I hid a grin.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

I glanced up, caught off guard yet again by that awful grinding metallic voice that still somehow managed to sound human. The Mech had been quiet for so long, silently watching me work on a makeshift replacement leg, that I had almost succeeded in ignoring the little warning that tickled the back of my brain, insisting there was no way in the blue this thing could be following a reel of presets. All of the Mechs I had ever come across in Nim K were designed to perform some repetitive basic function until they reached the end of their command reel. A few of the fancier Mechanical Butlers I had seen at the Nimkoruguithu Grand Fair could answer simple questions, but this thing was asking questions of its own. Now it was looking at me with those freakish glowing orange eyes, and I could have sworn the expression on its face was real curiosity.

I realized I was staring at it like a dazed hare and looked away. "I sorta just picked it up because I had to," I said, then closed my mouth because I had just answered a machine. Shaking my head, I stripped off my welding mask and my heavy gloves, grabbed my carbonic steel grinder, and went back to work honing the connection between the thing's severed knee-joint and the piece of steel railing I had cut off the combine ladder.

"So... Where are your parents?"

"Dead," Beckett provided.

I shot him a warning glance.

"It's just you three, then?" the Mech asked, its voice a deep rumble.

"Yeah," Becket said. He brought his head up and turned his blue-eyed squint on the metal man's face. "How about you? You got a family?"

The Mech raised an eyebrow – or, it raised the complicated line of knots that stood in for an eyebrow. Either way, it was a very human expression that set that little warning off again. "No. Not that I know of."

"So you're just like us, then," Beckett said, nodding sagelike. Then, typical fearless Becks, he leaned forward and held out his hand. "My name is Beckett. Beckett Montgomercy."

I watched the machine reach across and give my brother a handshake just like a regular person, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It had been prickling away since that thing started talking, and that handshake was the last straw. "Beckett, I think there's a bag of lemon chew in my left jacket pocket. Why don't you go see if it's still there?"

Becks didn't even hesitate. He was up off the ferrying block he'd been sitting on and heading for the house quick as a grassfire.

I shut the workshop door behind him and locked it. Then I rounded on that thing on my workbench. "What are you?"

The Mech met my eyes for a moment, then it let out a raspy chuckle. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

I crossed my arms over my chest. "Try me."

The thing gave me a sidelong glance, obviously reluctant. A chill ran down my spine. The first time I saw a chaghara, I felt that same chill. My head knew I was looking at something real, but at the same time every instinct I had was screaming that it wasn't natural, or normal, or right. Like the skull of the two-headed tiktik Jimmy found up in the hills once. Whatever this machine was, something unnatural had made it that way. It wasn't answering my question because it didn't want to.

"Fine," I said. I had brothers. I could play this game all day. "I'm not gonna fix your bilateral valve if you don't start talking. You'll get maybe five miles out of it before it starts leaking sulfuric acid all over your insides, and you'll lose all your motor functions. You won't even be able to crawl for help when those fancy respirators in your chest start melting 'cause they're made out of octelane —"

The Mech's eyes had gone wide as I spoke, and then it held up a hand. "You had me at melting." It took a breath and then heaved a very human-sounding sigh. "I'm the newest version of a cutting edge intuitive Mech series made by Calcar Inc. I belong to Reis Asgeran. We were traveling to Nimkoruguithu through the mountains on Asgeran's private rail line, but there was a wreck. Asgeran is dead. Before he died, he tasked me with taking important information to his family in Perigard. I have to complete that request."

I narrowed my eyes. It was impossible to tell if the Mech was rattling off some pre-coded response to a trigger question, but that would have been much more reassuring than the alternative: it was lying. "You got any proof?"

It held out its hand, palm up. The metal mesh of its skin parted in a neat oval over the inside of its forearm, and a plaque became visible, etched with the words: Property of Calcar Incorporated. Manufactured in Arritagne for Calcar, Inc. Model No. 46. Series: 05o87. Version: Z4. Command Name: Nox. "Will this do?"

I studied the plaque for a moment. It looked real enough. Something still wasn't adding up about any of this, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what. I pursed my lips in thought, then gave in and nodded. I needed the help too much to stick up my nose at where it came from.

"So what's your command spool? Fetch and carry? Nursemaid?" I asked, moving to my odds and ends scrap bin, where I began looking for the reticulator coupling I had thrown in there the last time the combine went down. The reticulator's gears were shot, but the gear housing was roughly the same size and shape as the cracked bilateral pump chamber currently in the Mech's chest. It would do in a pinch. I had to dig for it, but I finally found it, and carried it to my worktable.

"Security," the Mech said, watching as I began tearing the reticulator down to the basics, stripping out wiring and gear pins. "Do you have a map?"

I gave him a shrewd side-glance. "I just might... You give me another decent day's work on that south field, and I'll let you have it. And enough fuel to get you down to the city."

Both of its eyebrows shot up that time. Then its lips parted in a slow smile, revealing shiny steel teeth and a set of creases bracketing its mouth. On a human, that would have been a rather good-looking smile.

I was bargaining with a machine. And I was staring again. With a start, I yanked my gaze back to what I was doing.