West of Nothing

57. Caged Bird

Mason tried to control his nerves as the guard at the exit station compared his face to the picture on the passport-like leave register. Stay cool, he told himself. Finally satisfied, the guard handed it back. "This pass is good for one hour. If you're a minute late, you'll be treated as an enemy combatant. I've radioed ahead to the guards on post so I suggest you not dally."

It was a ten-minute walk down a dusty road to the Hab, which was the ninth in a line and the most distant, of course. There was no shade and it felt like he was being cooked from both above and below as the hard-packed ground radiated back the punishing heat of the afternoon sun. The landscape was spare and sun-bleached, the scrawny, dun-colored shrubs growing no higher than knee-height. A Humvee rumbled past, raising a cloud of dust that coated his skin and set him coughing. Thanks for the lift, asshole.

Though he no longer required an armed escort, Mason wasn't allowed to take his phone. If he passed out from heat stroke, it was even odds the vultures would find him before the guards did.

The two guards at the entrance to the Hab looked miserable, their faces dripping beneath the lowered rims of their hats. The sight of an out-of-shape college student in ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt did not surprise them. These trips were becoming routine. Two or three times a day Mason had to venture out to the Hab to fiddle with something.

One of the guards handed him a beekeeper outfit. Their mood improved as they watched him struggle into it. The X-Bots must be laughing their asses off every time he walked into the Hab looking like a giant yellow condom. Why a beekeeper outfit? There had been some concern over the spiderbots' sting, and by the time it was shown to be harmless, the beekeeper outfit was already enshrined in FN Security protocol, which meant that, a million years hence when the first Earth ambassador set foot on the X-Bots' home planet, he would certainly be wearing a canary yellow beekeeper suit.

Once safely zipped up in his alien-prophylactic sheath, Mason showed them the zip-lock bag of webcams he was here to install. They gave it a close inspection, even rolling the handful of acorns over with their fingers. The acorns were for the Hab's only mammalian resident, a spunky squirrel they had named Chester. No one knew how Chester had gotten there; the plans didn't call for any lifeform larger than a garden snake. Maybe he'd hitched a ride in on a shrub. Satisfied, the guards waved him through into the airlock.

In spite of the misters and day spectrum bulbs, the ecology of the Hab was in visible decline. Many of the plants were limp and brown as if someone had gone through and randomly sprayed Roundup. He caught a strong whiff of rot. At least the moss and mushrooms were thriving. The drainage was spotty and the ground was slick as a wet tarp in places. He had to carefully watch his step. Chester was nowhere to be seen; Mason hoped he hadn't croaked.

The X-Bots could be difficult to find. They were spider-sized, after all, and even without camouflage had a knack for hiding and blending in. They could slip into cracks of bark or tuck underneath leaves. But this time was much easier than before. They hadn't moved since he'd last seen them on camera, a result of the mysterious torpor that was afflicting all spiderbots everywhere.

He swapped out a couple malfunctioning cameras and installed three more to provide coverage of blind spots. Here goes, he thought as he came to the final one, which had Alpha in its sights. The unmoving spiderbot blended in with the dirt, but he knew exactly where to look. Now came the tricky part. While replacing the first camera, he had to position himself just so in order to block a second while staying within easy reach of the X-Bot which, at some point, he would have to reach down and grab. This complex yoga contortion had to be done as naturally as possible to avoid drawing attention on video. It was like trying to play offense and defense at the same time.