After hours among the Clan of the Mesh, learning their oral histories and the weight of their long isolation, the Reclaimers judged it time to climb again. The thirtieth floor waited above the nets like a closed fist.
Gorrath the Unbroken received them in his raised abode. He spoke in the short, deliberate sentences that had become familiar.
“Guardians live on the thirtieth. They let no man or creature pass. They have kept my people here for generations.”
His gaze fixed on L’Uomo Prime and did not move.
When pressed, the Leader admitted the truth he had withheld. The guardians looked exactly like the cyborg who stood before him. Indestructible. Unyielding. The Turkeyoid army that had passed weeks earlier had moved through the level as though the guardians did not exist. The Obh had given chase and been driven back with ease. How the feathered ones had managed it remained a mystery.
D’Can’Tr turned his grafted shoulder toward Cardunkle’s leathery head and asked the question none of the others wished to voice.
The professor’s reply came with dark amusement. “No one ever asked me about my other creations.” When pressed further he added, almost lightly, “Hundreds.” These lesser units lacked the enhanced autonomous mental pathways that made L’Uomo Prime unique. They were tools. Incomplete. And, Cardunkle concluded, they would need to be disposed of.
The party debated. One proposal was that L’Uomo himself should go alone and attempt negotiation with whatever shared his face. Another was that Butterball should test the defenses first. The Turkeyoids had passed unharmed; something in the avian physiology or scent might hold the key. They chose the second course.
It was the wrong choice.
Butterball packed his gear and slipped into the shadows of the thirtieth floor. His voice came over the common channel in short, careful reports: a personalized mech and EVA suit workshop, oil-slick floors treacherous in the residual low gravity, sparks from ancient grinders illuminating fungal growths that pulsed a sickly green. Hulking environment suits and derelict power armors stood silent under centuries of dust.
Then a shadow crossed the beam of his torch. Butterball spun. Three figures—powerful, brutish, mechanical—closed the distance with machine precision. Vibro-swords whispered. Wrist-mounted plasma projectors flared. The transmission ended in a wet, final squelch and then dead air.
In the settlement below, the Obh women began a low, rhythmic lament that rose and fell like a tide.
“One is soft of flesh yet hard of will, the Butterball who does not break.”
“One is soft of flesh yet hard of will, the Butterball who does not break.”
“One is soft of flesh yet hard of will, the Butterball who does not break.”
Gorrath the Unbroken would not allow the climb to continue without further aid. He selected his bravest champion—an Obh Brute the Reclaimers came to call Sponge Bob—and armed him with a massive war-maul. The warrior joined them with fierce pride.
Together they ascended the cargo-net wall to the open elevator doors of the thirtieth floor.
The workshop spread before them in cold silence. Oil gleamed on the decking. Sparks still fell somewhere in the depths, lighting the fungal colonies that clung to bulkheads. Environmental suits and power armors hung from gantries or stood under their own weight, empty and watching. The Reclaimers moved in careful pairs, checking corners that held only shadow.
Sheik found Butterball’s body near a cluster of storage crates. He reported it quietly over the link and recovered the fallen companion’s equipment so it would not remain for scavengers. The others allowed themselves a single shared breath of grief, then pressed on.
D’Can’Tr and Henry Darksky took the rear. In his haste to keep distance from the corpse, D’Can’Tr stepped onto a section of plating that depressed with a soft mechanical click. Two slender white rods uncoiled from the ceiling. For an instant they were no more than metal spines. Then the flash-cubes ignited.
White light exploded across the workshop with the force of a solar flare. D’Can’Tr and Henry reeled, hands pressed to their faces, corneas seared, the world reduced to pulsing after-images and darkness.
At that same moment L’Uomo Prime, probing the far end of the workshop, came face to face with Butterball’s killers—and with himself.
Three figures stood between the empty power-docking stations. The glass lids of the coffin-like cradles hung open. The units that had rested inside now regarded him with identical optical arrays and none of the residual humanity that still flickered in his own systems.
L’Uomo Secondus. L’Uomo Tertius. L’Uomo Quartus.
They moved as one, stalking forward with cold, merciless precision.
The fight became a desperate standoff in the half-light of the workshop.
Blinded, D’Can’Tr and Henry fired laser rifles into the gloom and struck only bulkheads. Secondus closed on Prime and drove a vibro-sword against his plating, the high-frequency edge shrieking as it sought joints and power conduits. Sheik, clear of the flash trap, lunged with his vibro-beak and scored a deep gouge across the nearest unit’s shoulder. Steve Austin’s laser found its mark a heartbeat later, the beam scoring armor and releasing a hiss of venting coolant.
Quartus flanked from the opposite side and struck Prime hard enough to collapse his personal force field in a cascade of blue sparks. Sponge Bob roared and swung his war-maul in a crushing arc that caught Tertius and staggered the unit against a derelict power-armor frame. Plasma bubbles erupted from Tertius’s wrist projector and went wide, splashing harmlessly across a gantry.
Prime answered with the Net-Caster Spear purchased from the Obh, but the net blossomed too early and collapsed empty to the deck. Somewhere overhead a new sound began—a rising whirl of servos and focusing lenses. Steve Austin heard it too.
A ceiling-mounted laser cannon unfolded from a recessed port and fired. The beam took D’Can’Tr full in the torso, the heat intense enough to blacken silicone flesh and fill the air with the stench of cooked plant tissue. Henry returned fire and tore a critical sensor cluster from Secondus. Still blind, D’Can’Tr’s next shot went wild.
Secondus pressed the attack on Prime, the two cyborgs locked in a brutal contest of strength and speed. Steve’s laser found Quartus. Quartus answered with a plasma discharge that drove Steve backward, but the exchange broke the flanking pressure on Prime. Sponge Bob continued to hammer Tertius, the maul ringing against cerametal. Plasma washed across the Obh’s mottled hide, raising welts of burned flesh.
Prime drew his stun pistol and fired at point-blank range. The charge overloaded Secondus’s remaining organic neural pathways. The unit locked rigid, systems cascading into failure.
The ceiling cannon fired again and struck Henry. Still unable to see the source, he poured fire into Quartus instead. Tertius’s plasma projector turned on Sheik and seared white feathers. Sheik’s answering stun shot went wide. Sponge Bob reached out with raw mental force and found Quartus’s hive-linked processors; the assault burned the Obh’s name into the cyborg’s limited awareness like a brand.
Tertius’s wrist unit short-circuited in a shower of sparks. The ceiling cannon tracked again and missed. Henry’s next shot grazed Quartus. D’Can’Tr, vision slowly returning in painful fragments, locked his mental paralysis on Tertius and began to crush the unit’s fragile higher functions.
Prime’s second stun charge took Tertius and dropped the unit beside its twin. The two remaining combatants—Prime and Quartus—now faced each other across a floor littered with scorched plating and the bodies of their fallen duplicates.
A second laser cannon emerged from a portside ceiling mount and opened fire. Sponge Bob turned on the first weapon and smashed it from its housing with repeated blows of the maul. The second cannon scored Steve Austin before Henry’s careful shot sent it spinning. D’Can’Tr’s beam missed. Sheik closed with Quartus and drove the vibro-beak deep. Prime’s battle-axe—loaned and already proven—sheared through the cyborg’s arm in a single brutal stroke, the severed limb still firing plasma as it fell.
Quartus staggered. Henry’s next shot locked the unit in place for a critical instant. Sheik and Prime struck together. The vibro-beak punched between the shoulder blades and severed the primary spinal bus. Quartus crumpled, systems dying in a cascade of failing lights.
Sponge Bob finished the second cannon with a final overhead blow. The weapon tore free and crashed to the deck amid a rain of sparks and molten metal.
Silence returned to the workshop, broken only by the soft hiss of cooling alloys and the ragged breathing of the survivors.
The guardians of the thirtieth floor were broken.
Yet one question remained, unanswered and heavier than the bodies on the floor: how the Turkeyoids had passed this place as though the three cold reflections of L’Uomo Prime had never existed at all.
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