12 Miles Below

By the time I was reaching the foot of the first large hill, not even five minutes of light jogging into the ash wasteland before me, I already had Odin on my visual.

“That was fast.” I said under my breath.

“Deary, I believe they’d been watching you for some time now.” Cathida hummed, hands folded over her virtual avatar while a finger tapped the side. “After all, you were walking up and down the area, likely looking quite suspicious if I had to guess.”

“What, me? Suspicious?” I tutted, “Do I look out of place? Wait, wait, don’t tell me - I should have worn green, right? Gods damn it, I knew the red just wasn’t complimenting my features today. Cathida, why didn’t you tell me?”

She, predictably, rose to the bait without a second of hesitation. “Don’t ask questions you can’t handle the answers for, I’m not here to crush and trample all over your feelings.”

“I suspect that’s a lie.” I said.

“And I suspect you don’t have an invitation to the neighborhood here.” She answered, clearly avoiding the accusation with aplomb.

I gave the formation of Odin a quick glance. Flying in a full V formation, even taking banking turns all as one. They passed over far above me, and that’s when I heard the sounds of a whistle.

That’s as close as I could identify. Like the sound of a small old human firework, that I’d seen in films and media. Only instead of going upwards into the sky, it felt like the sound was coming downwards. Shrill, spinning madly a little behind my position, and then going blonk and silent.

My helmet turned to look at the source of the sound. I didn’t need to look too closely to find my target: A small tube-like wooden object with what looked to be a cracked rock at the base. That hadn’t been here a moment before. Incidentally, that stone weight had been the first thing to slam into the ground, so it likely had been in one piece on the way down.

Another whistling sound came from further off behind me, and my HUD zoomed in on the object being dropped by one of the Odin. It was clearly made to fall like a missile, spinning rapidly and causing wind to force a shrill whistle out of the tube. The rock at the end was exactly that - just weight made to keep the missile going down at its target.

It slammed into the ground with a plink, split apart into splinters and nothing else.

“Do you have any idea what these are?” I asked.

She shrugged. “What do I look like to you? Some bird scholar?”

“Let me rephrase: Does Journey recognize anything about what these things are?”

She gave another tut, “Not a clue there either. What it can tell you is that they’re made of wood and rock, nothing explosive. Very primitive, but the shape is aerodynamic and clearly made to manipulate the wind as they go down.”

“You mean the whistle noise?”

“You try making a whistle that uses gravity. It’s not as easy as it looks. Journey's pulling up a bunch of physics books and I don't want to get anywhere near that.”

I took a slight detour in my jog to go check up on one of the two whistles. The second had splintered into a bunch of broken wood, but the first only had the center rock weight take the real damage and one large crack down the center wooden rod, but not enough to cause it to break into pieces.

It looked absurdly tiny in my hands, and felt fragile. Frankly, without the little stone at the end, I think the wind itself would have picked up and thrown the wooden tube around.

A third sound came even further behind. Cathida had the helmet camera catch the moment the Odin threw it down. One had flown over another, grabbed something from the backpack, then flown at an angle and released the payload. Eyeballing the landing zone as far as I could tell.

“What are they even doing? Some kind of bird communication ritual?” Cathida muttered, head tilted up to look at their direction. Of course, what the Odin would see is just me. The old crusader was just a virtual display on my HUD.

I gave the wooden whistle one last look before I let it fall on the ground. “I know what they’re doing.” And the idea seemed a little absurd, but for all they knew, I might as well be some odd machine walking around. “See how I stopped to go check on what the whistle was? That’s what they’re doing. They’re leading me away. Like throwing candy on a trail and thinking I’ll go after each piece.”

The distances between each whistle toss was growing, and heading further off to the side of the mountains. Likely where there would be tunnels, or other valleys that might distract a potential machine wandering around aimlessly.

“Jokes on them, I’m not easily distracted.” I huffed, watching as they threw a fourth whistle even further off.

“If they threw, why, let’s say a power cell somewhere behind us, it would certainly work.” Cathida said.

“Oh, now there’s an idea. Think they’re in yelling range?”

Unfortunately, that answer was a no. They were very high up in the air, likely to avoid Bob at all costs. And they were already flying off trying to bait me with more whistles.

When I clearly didn’t rise to their bait and kept walking straight forward, I could see they changed their plan. The flying formation turned on itself, and one grabbed a red tube with a string from their central pack-carrier, while another took out some metal thing in their talons.

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“They’re going to send a rocket into my face or something?” I muttered, watching the odd tactics.

The answer was yes, but more festive. They launched fireworks at me. Well, not directly at me, but clearly back into Bob’s territory.

It made a lot of noise, a lot of lights, and the explosion was quite impressive. I stopped in my tracks just to check out the show, then got right back onto my track forward across the deadlands.

They didn’t like that. A flare was launched from their group, this one pointed at the outpost they’d come from. And another flew over to a third pack carrier, taking out some kind of metal box-thing with four arms.

My helmet helped me zoom in the vision and track the birds. “Is that a godsdamned drone?”

“Journey puts it at ninety three confidence it is one.” Cathida said as we both watched.

They dropped it. It flew like a cheap heater. Which is to say directly downwards. If Journey hadn’t put a giant orange square over the unidentified target, I don’t think I’d have been able to track the tiny thing at all from this distance.

A humming noise came next, and the little silver box redressed itself from the flight, turned slightly to look down on me and then executed some kind of flight plan, zipping closer to the ground until it was hovering a few feet upwards.

A moment later, I was watching a two dimensional hologram of some kind being displayed from the drone. Crude, and stilted, but the image itself looked recognizable enough.

It was a human. Not in armor, or anything, wearing some odd thin cloth material. Bright red upper chest, that changed immediately to black once it hit where the pants should have been. Even had a silver triangle pin of some kind on his chest. Features were fuzzy, but I could tell there was a patch of black hair on his head, and a beard of some kind that matched the hair.

The image turned with what looked to be a sidearm of some kind that I didn’t recognize. Then spoke out in a language I equally didn’t understand. Then it ran.

When I mean the figure ran, I mean there was an attempt to make it look like he was running.

The drone projecting the image was clearly a little too high, leaving the feet of the projection dangling a little in the air. The speed was also mismatched, with the drone moving faster than the two feet should have accomplished, making the figure look like it was sliding around in the air.

“Am I supposed to follow the image?” I asked, looking over to her.

She gave me a shrug, her own projection looking far more real and in-world than the two-dimensional mock projection that actually existed in the world. “Well deary, if they think you’re some kind of human-shaped machine, then the best way to bait a machine is…?”

“Ah. Are the machines not very smart on this level? That’s a little obvious. No offense to their craftsman and all that.”

“If you were a death-dealing robot just aimlessly wandering around, any distraction is better than none. I’m more surprised your little bird friends could even make drones with projectors on them.”

The projection had looked static-y, and the frames per second were on such a low end the animations looked more like a flickering slide show. So not the highest tech there was, but it did need to fit on a drone. “Probably the Icon of Stars making these things for them?”

“Very likely.” She said.

“I’m thinking we should keep our eyes out. The Odin seem to have a bit more resources to call in, and right now we’re only seeing their non-violent methods of turning a possible threat.”

I was growing a little more cautious, considering I didn’t know exactly what kind of weapons the Odin had on hand to deal with machines. Kres had been a scout who didn’t carry much on him at all, these would be stationed soldiers keeping Bob away from them with more than a big stick.

And they clearly had the Icon helping them out or access to some old human tech. “Whatever the danger comes from, it’s likely not going to be the Odin themselves flying above me.” I muttered, calculating. “They wouldn’t want any lone machine thinking they were the enemy if hostile actions were taken.”

“Good point. They’re likely scouts bringing closer eyes here.” Cathida said. “Though they might have one or two last resorts carried.”

When I refused to follow behind the decoy image, that drone flew away back to the Odin flight above, the projector turning off. The birds launched another bright flare to communicate with home base.

That’s when the antics climbed up. More drones appeared zooming directly for me, moving fast from the distance ahead. This time four. I think they’d been there for some time, just waiting for the signal.

“They’re coming directly at us.” Cathida said, looking at the approaching menace. My HUD lit up and four orange outlines superimposed on the tiny black specs. A zoomed in screen showing more details about them popped up to my far right. I don’t know how Journey was able to compensate for the zoom dynamically because those four drones were going fast across the dead grounds.

They each had a small black brick of some kind, while the four propellers were straining hard to keep the thing in flight.

Top of my HUD showed my shields at one hundred percent. So anything coming from the drones here would be handled. That still didn’t stop me from feeling nervous. “Shields good?”

“Nominal.” Cathida confirmed. “But I’d get to aiming at the drones in case they’re hostile.”

I drew out my sidearm, clicking the safety off with a practiced flick. Non-occult bullets were loaded. Range showed my accuracy would be under twenty percent, but it was steadily climbing up as the formation of drones got closer.

“I’d start shooting now, Deary.” Cathida warned.

“I don’t want to appear hostile immediately. Let’s wait to see what these drones do. Might be a communication attempt?”

I didn’t really believe that, why send four drones for a communication attempt?

They entered my range, and continued forward without interruption. Not slowing down either. I knew drones could stop on a coin flip, or take turns that would sheared an airspeeder in half, but these ones looked loaded up to max capacity.

“I think they plan to ram into you.” Cathida said.

“I’m thinking the same.” I agreed.

The drones equally agreed.

They raced directly at me, breaking their prior formation to all collide against my armor at near the same time, in a scattered pattern that would have been near impossible to dodge.

Near impossible.

But not quite impossible for a supercomputer’s calculation capacity, and I had exactly such a thing to pilot my armor. Cathida vanished from my view as I sent the administration codes in for her to take over just as the four flying menaces got into ramming range.

Without pausing a beat, she twisted and moved to avoid all four. The actual movements we made were rather small, just a lifted hand, a footslide to the right, and twisting my torso to the left, but that particular pose avoided each drone by a small fraction of an inch, and none of them could react fast enough to course correct.

I was wondering what their plan was about all this, and found out a moment later. One of the drones had been angling slightly downwards, but the speed and weight meant it couldn’t recover its height after the full miss. So it slammed into the ground.

And promptly exploded.

Shields lit up across my back as the armor compensated for the hit. The explosion was defused enough it hardly caused any percentage, with the shrapnel likely being the worst of the damage. The shockwave was enough to force me to take a step forwards to keep my balance up.

Which meant that was some extremely potent explosive power. Armor weighed an incredible amount. And I was a good few feet beyond the centerpoint.

Cathida and I both turned our heads to stare at the explosion behind us. "Well, that escalated rapidly." She muttered. "Didn't think the birds had it in them."

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