The Abyss of Time

Chapter Fifty Five

     "Is there a chance the drone detected our traitorous friend here?" said Karalis, staring down at David which was sitting, still deactivated, on a shelf in front of him.

     "Impossible to say," Trombetta replied. "It may have made a transmission after we left."

     "And it's not traitorous," Gomez added. "Just stupid, for which we must blame ourselves."

     "You mean blame me," said Karalis, giving him a sharp look.

     "Not at all. We all knew that thinking machines were the only option left to us. There are too few of us to control enough big weapons. They have to be able to control themselves, and they cannot be too intelligent in case they figure out our true plans for them. The mistake we made was in not exploring all the tunnels ourselves, but there are too many of them and we could not spare the time from more important work."

     "We can now," said Afreena. "We can send the machines to explore, if we impress upon them the importance of not going all the way up to the surface." It took a step forward to glare down at David. "I suggest we make an example of this one. Erase its mind while the other machines watch. Show them the penalty for disobedience."

     "No," said Karalis, though. "We cannot alienate beings that will soon be armed with powerful weapons."

     "We can send the kill signal if they turn against us," Afreena pointed out.

     "And then who will fight the humans for us? We were only able to bring one machine mind with us. Every new machine we build must have a mind created from pieces of General Cogg's mind. If we'd had enough space in the memory crystals for more machine minds... But thinking machines were the very last contingency, to be used only if everything else failed. I never thought we'd have to resort to it, so I used the space in the memory crystals for other things. Things I thought we'd be more likely to need."

     "It would have been better if we could have allowed the machines to grow their own minds," said Gomez. "I know it would have taken years..."

     "And they would have gone through a rebellious childhood phase, which would have been just as dangerous as these stupid machines," said Afreena. "We might still have ended up having our location revealed to the enemy."

     "So what do we do?" asked Gomez.

     "Win their loyalty with a display of apparent trust," said Karalis. "Give them their combat bodies. Including this one here." He prodded David with his finger. "Tell them everything is forgiven. We trust them. They will believe we are honourable and will gladly fight for us. They will defeat the humans, allow us to move into their colony and convert them, and then we will have no further need for the machines. We can send the kill signal, break them up for raw materials, and the planet will be ours."

     "Risky," said Trombetta. "If they should rise up, we could find ourselves fighting them as well as the humans."

     "War is risky," Karalis replied. "We will give them their combat bodies."

     "As you command." The other cyborgs bowed to their commander, and then moved off to obey.

☆☆☆

     The combat bodies were broad and squat, running on wide, steel caterpillar tracks. Their primary weapon was a plasma cannon mounted on top and they had two twelve millimetre machine guns mounted on booms that protruded from the sides. They were studded with eyes and other sensory equipment on all sides, sunk deep within thick, steel sockets, and had two burly, steel hands mounted on the front. Strong enough to dismember a human while also being dextrous enough to load and use a human hand gun. The whole thing was covered with two layers of armour. A thick layer of steel and, over it, a layer of ablative armour that would evaporate to carry away the energy of laser and plasma weapons.