“There it is. There’s your drone.” Kalla was standing beside Big Crunch and looked up to where he was pointing. The round silver drone hovered against a broken section of the flat wall above them. Above a heavy steel door. Across its locking bars and hatch was the star cluster of silver locking gears. On the door painted in old before times colours was the number one.
“What is it doing?”
“Sending a signal. Like how machines talk to each other. I don’t know what type of signal, but I think it’s like the way a light or a song can travel through the air.”
She glanced around the floor, the floor of the “Control Room,” as it was called. It was written on the outside of the twin steel doors Big Crunch had pushed through. Around them, sloped benches covered with dust and fitted with the glass square eyes of tech ran off into the darkness. The floor was scattered with broken and rusted drones, along with parts from the shattered and stripped consoles. Most of the drones looked like they had lain there for a long time. A scattering of large metal spheres, their silver tarnished dull, some broken and cracked open like oversized round eggs. Piles of dry seed husks littered the floor, along with dead power cells and chemical packets that Kalla didn’t know anything about. She asked Big Crunch about them.
“Lots of drones have come here. They have delivered packets of different sorts of things. They were sent from the towers. I don’t know where else they would come from. The Sisters may have drones, but I doubt it. It has been too long. Some of these are old. The Brothers may have had drones, too, but the Brothers are long gone. But yes, I think the towers sent them. Some type of clockwork thing.”
“But why?”
“I think they’re feeding something in there and trying to take care of it. Seeds would indicate bird brains. It could be a massive vault. Especially from what I’ve learned about this mine, there are miles and miles of corridors in there. Engines with the yellow and black flower that can give energy forever. Underground water. Old light panels like I have seen in other vaults that used to grow plants. But the things in there can’t get out.”
“Why?”
“Because this vault has smart locks.”
“What are they?”
“The most complex tech. They decide and do what they want. I don’t know why, but they always look like little lizards. So, vault raiders started calling them geckos. They can lock or open anything.” The Beast, Big Crunch, tapped a thick claw against the vault door at the center of the crossing star-shaped bars. “The people from the before times made it that way. It’s a special vault. There is something special inside. You don’t ever see gecko locks.”
“Punx,” the little metal lizard beside her said.
“They have always guarded this door. Intelligent liquid metal.”
“So Punx locks this door? And there is no way in?”
“That’s right. All I know is they have sent drones to this inner vault docking station, and they can’t open the doors. Punx stops it.”
“Punx.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know for sure, but my guess is there is something in there that is very important.”
“Punx”.
The walk across the canyon floor had been through a snowy path in a scrap yard of metal machines—none of them as sleek or fine or lethal as the one that had attacked her. The canyon rose up around them, not in sheer cliff walls but in giant steps. The steps were of exact even distances and level—"man-made” Big Crunch had said. It made Kalla think of what a mountain might look like after a pyramid was cut out of it. Crunch called it an open pit mine. In the before times the old ones would cut into the rock like this and take out metal.
As they walked by a massive half-round sphere covered with snow, he stopped and brushed the snow away, revealing a giant face. Dead glass eyes stared at them at an angle. The skull was canted, resting on a broken jaw. A single eye was larger than Kalla.
“And now this is the machines’ graveyard,” he said.
She looked across the canyon floor, looked around where they stood. In the growing light, she could now see the shapes, the metal arms, smaller-sized torsos. Broken connecting rods jutting up out of the snow. She could see now why he wanted to wait until it was light enough for them to see to try the path.
“There are so many of them? They look like recent clockworks. Not that old. They used all of these to make the mine?”
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“No, no. These have come here not so long ago. Well, before you were born, most of them anyway, but the machines come here to die. They come on borrowed power if they need it. I think someone or something sends them or sent them. I don’t know how they know of this place, but they come here, they work until they die. Until their power runs out.”
“What do they do? To work at what?”
“They bring seeds, energy packs, pure ore of different types. They shovel it down into the mine. Smaller clockworks down there carry it deeper. Some of them helped me make my track. It was like they were preparing for something, just like I was.”
Her gaze ran across the graveyard of metal skeletons around her. All these machines, all this effort, they come on their own to work… until they expire.
“Come. Come.” He beckoned with a swing of his arm. “Not a place to dwell. The ghost of the machines, you can feel them here. I have more to show you…” He turned and strode away through the deep snow. She trudged through the path that he was breaking for her.
“Punx.”
The little lizard scurried across the top of the snow beside her with feet that he had grown into wide, flat flippers.
As they made their way around one hill of boulders, a large machine was revealed. Larger than any of the clockworks, this one stood nearly as tall as the pyramid of the Western City. A square block sat canted on one long beam that looked to her like a centipede. She could make out hundreds of individual metal plates, each the size of a barge. Out of the metal box jutted a tower much like the docking tower of the ambassador’s airship, but far taller. It stood out on an angle like a giant’s fishing pole. A huge, sloped pile of boulders lay on the far side of it, between a pair of towering steel doors in the face of the canyon and a leaning metal tower like they had built for the ambassador’s ship.
“This was from the before times. Part of the mine.” The big lizard man reached a hand up and dusted away a coating of grime. Sand dust mixed with mud and snow. He revealed a painting, hand painted in faded colours of red, yellow, and black. It showed a stylized cartoon woman in a dress and yellow hair. Below the image had been painted the name “Mary Anne.”
“They called it a crane, and I think they used to give big machines like this a name. I like this painting. Still here after all this time.” Kalla peered up at the pretty woman who had hair like her own. Her dress was beautiful. A red dress that clung to her as she crouched on the hull of the machine with her legs drawn up underneath her. A delicate hand lay on her shin, and painted fingernails brushed her slip-on shoes with bows. Kalla couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have clothes like that.
“I took one of the tracks off of it, dragged it through the doors.” He pointed to a deep track in the rubble of the floor that contained puddles of black ichor. “I had to clear all the stones away and make it smooth. All of this black goo leaked out of it. It’s slippery. It was made to allow metal to slide when in contact and not heat up. I’ve found it in most of the machines here. It can also burn.”
Kalla turned and took at the destruction of metal and parts and stone around her in the snowy wasteland.
“I’ve never seen so many things. So many machines or clockworks. Those from the before times created so much. They must have known things that the gods only know.”
“And they destroyed the land. Want to see a machine that runs? I have one that gives power and cleans water. I have flat disks that will play you songs. And in the outer room, I have the track I built. A vehicle. Come on, I haven’t had a friend visit for years.”
He took her inside the mine, and she stood with him, looking out of the open windows that the wind and snow drifted through. Below them lay the clockwork graveyard on the canyon floor. To the far side of the canyon, directly across from the bank of high windows they peered from was an opening in the round canyon, a deep cleft that revealed the flat rocky plains to the north beyond.
“And that is where the one who attacked me came from?”
“Yes. The machines that come here don’t come to help anymore; they come to kill. Zern sends them from across there.” He raised an arm to point through the opening in the far rock wall. “The glass city is not far away out there. You can see it when the sky is clear, and the sun is bright. It gleams there like a giant seashell, laying on the stone and sand at a strange angle.”
“And it’s the top of one of the towers?”
“Yes. The Central Tower that the ambassador and the counsellor pulled down years ago. Zern protects it now. I think, in some way, he controls the storms. Though the world’s edge has moved closer, Zern makes the storms worse. I think he surrounds the city of glass with his storms and his bad machines like the one that found you. But come, enough dark, depressing talk. I restored power here long ago. I tell ya, you’re in for a treat.”
The cavernous room behind them sloped up and away into the darkness, and there was a series of zigzagging stone stairs that they climbed, a lot like the pyramid. As they climbed, a massive shape loomed beside them, a long wall in the darkness. She quickly recognized the shape.
“This is the other side of Mary Anne from outside. You called it the track.”
“It is. I used pulleys and cables to drag it up here. A clockwork that used to come helped me. We built the ramp out of stone that you saw on the other side of those massive doors. Once I got the track up here, I covered the sides with steel plates.”
Kalla studied the giant vehicle. It sat nestled at the rearmost top of the cavern that they were in. It looked like a giant armoured ram. “That must have taken a long time.”
They had climbed to the top of the stone-cut stairs and now stood in front of a set of doors. A sign above them read “Control Room.”
“All I have is time.”
“Why? Why are you here? Why did you do all this?”
“Because I was told to come here and to be ready. Whoever comes, whenever they come, will want to get to the top of that tower, and I built that track and that ramp to do it. Once those pins are pulled, I think it will have enough momentum and protection to get through that storm. Now let me show you the Control Room. It is where Punx and I take our shelter. I have sensors set up to alert for intruders. I have a motor, a clockwork I converted to run off water I found in one of the tunnels. I have a lot of stuff hooked up to it, including the player. I’ll show you. Once I power up the motor, you’ll see how Punx got his name. We’ll be safe in here. No droids will get you. You’ll be safe.”
“Punx.”