Olivia considered Leon’s words for a moment, and they gave her pause. “Has anything been taken? The copper tubing, the controlling AI boxes?”
“No, mama. Nothing.”
The aging Baroness sat thinking about bandits on a dingy throne inside Droad House. The throne was upholstered by sun-scorched reptilian leather made from Sunsider venox skins. Olivia hated the throne, and yearned to replace it. Unfortunately, she had neither the funding nor the willpower to do so. Everyone in her family would be howling to depose her yet again if she dared to do so much as put a blanket over the rough, wart-encrusted hides.
“Is there anything else, mama?” Leon asked.
“Call me Baroness, Leon.”
“Yes, mama.”
Olivia rolled her eyes, but did not press the point. He was a good boy, if not the most brilliant of souls. “I don’t like the sound of this, Leon. If they are not stealing, they might be baiting you into a trap.”
“For what purpose? What profit?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t trust bandits that aren’t stealing things of value.”
“All right mama-uh, Baroness. I’ll be careful.”
“See that you do. There’s a good boy. Call me when you find them.”
“Hello mama!” said another, higher-pitched voice. For a moment, a second face interposed itself between Leon and the vid pickup. It was Knightrix Nina, a small creature with eyes and hair as dark as Leon’s were light. Olivia flinched at the vision of her daughter. She was perky and cute, and smiled at her mother with waggling fingers.
Olivia struggled to keep the corners of her mouth from twitching downward. She nodded to her daughter in recognition, but said nothing. It was all she could do.
The connection was broken a moment later, and Olivia reflected briefly why she hated her daughter so. She amended the thought immediately: she didn’t hate the girl. She just-didn’t like to look at her. It had to be her appearance. She was the holo-image of Lucas Droad, her probable father.
In that sense, the girl was a reproductive oddity. Olivia wondered how she could have had twins, with one resembling her husband and the other her consort. Could the twins really have been sired by two different men? Biology was strange and faintly disgusting, when one really pondered it.
Olivia shook her head, trying to clear it of unwanted thoughts. She shifted her buttocks, trying vainly to locate a comfortable spot on the abominable, bumpy throne. Oh, how she hated Lucas Droad’s throne. If she dared, someday she’d burn it and build a new one that was thickly padded with fur-covered gels.
Leon and Nina were mounted. They rode one-man skimmers that glided ahead of a trotting squadron of mech perrupters. Unlike mech laborers, these mechs were designed for combat and were assembled with light cannons in place of their right grippers. The cannons fired explosive rocket-propelled shells at high velocities. The perrupters were specialized for combat duty, but except for a slightly thicker chassis, they resembled labor mechs in most other respects. In order to keep up with the mounted twins, the perrupters had to run at a churning, ground-eating pace.
Nina was the first to spot the dust cloud sunward on the wastes.
“There,” she said, pointing. “What do you make of that, Leon?”
“A train of vehicles, perhaps? Men mounted on skimmers shouldn’t produce so much dust.”
Nina bit her lower lip and frowned. “I think we should call mother. Let’s report this and call for backup.”
Leon’s mouth drew into a line. “I don’t think we need help. We can handle this for ourselves. Must we call an uncle every time there is a leak in a processor? They will never stop thinking of us as children, Nina.”
Leon charged off and the mechs followed him dutifully, two abreast. Nina considered calling mother on her own-but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to see her mother’s lips twist in annoyance upon seeing her own daughter’s face. Watching her brother move ahead at full speed, she finally twisted the throttle and charged after him.
They chased the phantom dust cloud into the open wastes where the sun was painfully bright. Despite goggles and air-conditioned riding suits, Nina still felt the heat seep through. She’d almost caught up with her brother when the dust cloud slowed and dissipated. She saw Leon and his perrupters ahead, cruising over a ridge as if looking for something. She zoomed after them, following the rise and fall of the hot dunes.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Leon said, looking all around them from atop a hump of hard stone. “There was something out here, making that dust cloud.”
“Backtracking from here, it seems as if they’ve just come from damaging the pumping station at the shadowline,” Nina said thoughtfully. “I don’t like it. Let’s get out of here.”
“Where did they go?” he asked. “Tell me that.”
“I don’t know, but they aren’t here now. We’d best move out of Sunside until they appear again.”
Leon shook his head. “Mother put me in charge. You can run home if you wish, sister. You have my permission to cower at home.”
Nina glared at him. “I’ll do no such thing. If you insist on combing the sands, I’ll lead the way.”
Determinedly, Nina goaded her mount and charged down the rocky outcropping toward the open sands. She saw the sand here was unsettled, as if passed over by a group of men or vehicles, but there was no one here now.
She did not make it far. As soon as she was out in the open sands, the mechs rose up in ambush. She realized with a shock that these metal laborers had hidden themselves purposefully, digging down into the sands and lying in wait. How was this possible? Who had set them to such a strange task?
She had little time for pondering the oddness of the situation, however, as she was caught up in the middle of it. A mech rose up directly in front of her and swung a dark metal arm at her head. The gripper flashed by as she ducked. Sand dribbled from it, spraying her with a shower that trickled down her back.
There were dozens of them! She dodged this way and that, avoiding the rising bodies. It was like dodging fast-growing trees in a forest. Behind her, she heard her brother’s bugle call. This was followed by a blaze of cannon-fire. The mech that had first accosted her blew apart in a spray of shrapnel. Nina ducked down, wrapping herself around the oblong shape of her mount, leaning side-to-side to guide it at full throttle. She’d always been a gifted rider and enjoyed slalom runs that sickened lesser girls.
Another mech stepped to block her path to freedom, however. This one was different from the rest. He wore-clothing? A cape fluttered from his back and a scarf was wound twice around his neck struts. His grippers flashed, but they did not strike for her, as had the others. Instead, he struck down her mount, causing the nose of the small craft to dip into the sands.
Nina flew over the forward steering grips and did a cartwheel in the reddish sands. She could feel the heat of the grit through her riding suit. She lay there, stunned, barely moving while a battle raged around her. Her body responded to her desperate urging to flee sluggishly. She wondered if she’d broken her neck.
Suddenly, as she blinked behind her goggles, the cannon fire stopped. She managed to turn her head enough to see the scene as the smoke was swept away by the ceaseless desert winds. A dozen mechs were smoking ruins of jagged metal. The perrupters had clearly been winning, however. They were armed and organized. Only three of their number had fallen. The rest of the perrupters stood still, identifiable by the green wedge on their chassis, which was the unmistakable mark of Droad House.
That was the odd thing-her mechs were frozen in place. They stood stock-still, as if switched off in mid action. Their weapons were uplifted, aiming at the advancing ranks of the enemy. But they were no longer active.