Alarms immediately blared. The Clockwork released the bindings that held Orion and the Gearmaster, and Orion grabbed hold of the Clockwork. He wasn’t prepared for it to show up, but for once, he was glad it did. The Gearmaster, however, moved in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” Orion asked, incredulous.

“We have to get that stone,” he said, leaving through the door and into the hallway.

“You can’t be serious.” Orion hopped off his steambot and raced after the aging man. Running right into the mess was the last thing that he had wanted to do today, especially when their escape was right there.

The Clockwork got the memo and continued smashing through walls and doorways to keep pace until it caught up to Orion. He once again hopped on its back, and the machine charged towards the Gearmaster, who wasn’t much further ahead.

When a small wall of armed enemies rounded the corner, guns aimed, the Gearmaster finally shrunk down, hoping to get out of the way before the firing happened. He did at the last moment, and the bullets all pinged off of the Clockwork. Some went right back into the crowd, but most dug into walls.

It was a wonder they hadn’t figured out that shooting the machine was a hopeless cause, but for the moment, they used the opportunity. The Clockwork lunged forward and swatted the remaining men, who hit the floor and walls so hard that a few cracks could be heard. With that, the area was quiet, minus the alarm still blaring.

“What is so important about this stone?” Orion asked.

“You heard the general talking about it. If they can use that thing to supercharge a steambot, they can take over the world without contest. It would effectively become a nuclear option, but Syndra is insane enough to try it.”

“I have so many questions that you need to answer when we get back to base. Any idea where this thing is?”

“Back down in the armory.”

Orion reached down to pick up the Gearmaster, who graciously accepted a ride on his own creation. He pointed the way for the Clockwork, who struggled on the sloped section because of his height.

Once they were back at the bottom, another group was waiting for them. This time, instead of guns, they had flamethrowers hooked up to tanks on their backs. Even if the Clockwork was somehow resistant to flames, its two human passengers were not.

It must have recognized this as well, because it raised its arm and fired some sort of blue laser blast that bounced between all five of them and dropped them to the floor. The Gearmaster watched with some sort of sick awe.

“What was that?!” Orion yelled. “And where was that before?”

“Was the Clockwork struck by lightning at any point, perchance?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Built-in plasma storage tank. Allows for a lightning blast. I just didn’t have the chance to charge it before the ceremony.”

The Gearmaster hopped off and entered the armory, which was now empty. The smell of burned skin wafted through the barely circulating air, and Orion felt sick, but followed him inside.

The old mechanic approached the back wall where Orion had grabbed the soldier’s outfit and flipped a hidden switch. A panel in the wall revealed itself, and from it, he pulled the stone. It was no different-looking than any other stone from a distance, but up close, a signature ‘S’ symbol was emblazoned on it. Must have been the Syndra branding.

“I have an idea,” Orion said, grabbing the stone from his pants pocket and placing it in the panel. He then took the stone from the Gearmaster for safe-keeping.

“Now we can get out of here.”

They once again rode on the back of the Clockwork, and were met with no resistance until they reached the spot where it had originally broken through. General William McIntosh was no longer buried underneath the rubble, but there were a significant number of people around them, lying in wait. At long last choosing the pacifist option, the Clockwork backed out of the room and picked another wall on the opposite end of the building to burst through. Then, while everyone was still confused, it flew off. Orion and the Gearmaster grasped firmly to its back.

-◦=[ ]=◦-

The flight back to base was short and uneventful. Orion didn’t hardly have the energy to keep up a conversation at the moment, especially since he’d have to yell against the wind, but the Gearmaster was talking about how excited he was about the scene they’d escaped from.

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Once the Clockwork had landed, Orion finally felt relief. They had made it out, and while his original mission of completely taking the general out of the equation wasn’t successful, he’d achieved so much more.

“This is where you’re staying?” the inventor asked, wiping a layer of dust off of a wall. “Kind of abysmal.”

“So it is when you’re living a life on the run.”

“And why are you living a life on the run and not heading up some sort of resistance against Syndra and his goons?”

“That is a very great question that I would absolutely love to discuss with you. I will add it to the list. But for now, I have a ton for you.”

“About?”

“I don’t think you really have to ask that.”

“Do you have a place to sit? My legs are tired from that running.”

“Not really. If you’re comfortable with it, take a seat on one of the mattresses. I wouldn’t recommend it, though.”

He took one good look at the mattresses and decided it wasn’t for him, so he leaned against a wall and sat on the hard concrete floor. “Alright. Let’s start our question game.”

“Well, the most obvious for me right now is why the Clockwork came to rescue us, and how it even knew where we were.”

“Ah. Well, that’s a question easily answered if you knew enough about the steambots. I don’t blame you, though. It’s not like this is talked about all that often. Once a steambot who has chosen you has had a few days to sync with you, it knows all your brain patterns. It can detect that sort of thing from a pretty significant distance. So he likely knew you were in some sort of trouble and booked it for my workshop.”

“It can sense that sort of thing?”

“I promise, he knows a lot more than you probably think he does. There is a working, thinking brain inside of all that hardware. I wish I could take credit for a lot of it, but they really take on a life of their own after a certain point. I just build their bodies.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. Most don’t. It’s proprietary, after all. What other questions did you have?”

“I guess what else can it do?”

“Scan radio waves, translate languages, understand directions, detect sarcasm, conduct electricity, shoot plasma beams, produce heat, and apparently treat a group of men like bowling pins. Of course, this all depends on what you want to happen.”

“Sarcasm? Languages? What?”

“You’ll figure it out in time. There’s always some learning to do when you get a steambot.”

“Then how do I get it to protect everyone?”

“What do you mean?”

“It only protects me. It lets other people get shot and hurt and does nothing to help them. Only me.”

“And why do you think it does that?”

“Because that’s how it’s programmed. I need you to change that. I need a way to switch it to protect everyone, not just me.”

The Gearmaster sat for a while, running his fingers through his hair. Orion, who had been pacing, also sat down, leaning against some sort of old machine which had been totally scavenged.

“Why did it choose me?” he asked the inventor.

“What?”

“The Clockwork. Why did it choose me?”

“Well, I think we need to talk about something first, Orion. You keep referring to the Clockwork as ‘it.’ But he is very much a ‘he.’ And he wants you to respect that.”

The two looked over at the Clockwork. It whirred quietly.

“Okay. Why did he choose me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s what I said. As I announced to the crowd, the Clockwork, as with any other steambot I made, aside from a few commissioned ones, selected the person who needed him the most. Whatever that meant to the Clockwork, however he calculated that, he decided it was you.”

“But everyone needs him.”

“Maybe in a very literal way, yes. We all need the Clockwork to stop Syndra. But that’s a gross oversimplification of what that determination is. Maybe, and bear with me on this, he chose you because you were the person who could make sure that happened. That everyone got the access they needed.”

“I still don’t understand.”

The Gearmaster sighed. “Okay. Here’s the deal. The Clockwork has a thing called a microchip in him that determines what mode he’s on. In this specific case, he is on protection mode. I never built a separate chip for mass protection, so he cannot do that sort of thing.”

“Is that something we can change?”

“Yes, technically. I’d need some raw metals, as well as tools to work with them, but that would be technically doable.”

“What sort of raw materials?”

-◦=[ ]=◦-

The next morning, when the Gearmaster slowly blinked awake, he was staring at an incredibly large pile of different metals. Orion was leaning against them, still asleep, when the Gearmaster shook him awake.

“Where did you get all of this?” he asked, grabbing a few of the pieces.

“Well, let’s just say that there’s a scrapyard that is going to have a simple day of work today.”

“You stole all of this?”

“Look, I’m not proud of it, and anything that you don’t use I will gladly have the Clockwork put back. But right now we have more pressing issues than figuring out the morality of this sort of thing. Besides, they literally paid a girl a dollar for a day of work. It’s a scummy business that probably deserves to have more than this happen to them.”

“I will also look past the morality of this for now. All I need is some time to get this thing figured out for us. It might take a while.”

“No worries. I’m fine with laying here and sleeping as it is.”

“I would also recommend you put the Syndra Stone in the Clockwork.”

“What? Do you think he’ll power up, too?”

“I know he won’t. But he has a compartment for storage, and that’s about the safest place we could put that thing for the moment.”

The inventor lifted one of the Clockwork’s chest plates, and sure enough, there was a compartment inside. It was much larger than needed for the stone, but he placed it in delicately, in case the thing was volatile. He still didn’t quite understand how a stone could supposedly hold that much power, but he wasn’t about to play games and find out.

Then, right as Orion was content to drift back off to sleep, the radio buzzed to life, the host talking with a sense of urgency.

“This just in, it seems a large swath of the apartments north of the capitol are being evacuated in the Housing District. Syndra’s government has declared that anyone remaining in the area by the end of the day risks imprisonment or worse. This also means that we at the station are being evicted, and will no longer have a home. For those of you who have listened to our station for the past few decades, we wish you well on trying to survive this awful chapter in Carmsborough’s history.”

Orion snapped to attention, all feelings of grogginess leaving his body.

That was half the Housing District being evicted.

That was his family being evicted.