An hour passed before the survey drone reached minimum battery and turned back. The clambering on the door hadn’t stopped.

“Ready,” Coronel said. Saito and Eliso nodded, laser rifles ready. C4T remained in a cat-loaf position on top of a cabinet, overlooking the cockpit door.

Saito tugged on a string connected to the door. The door swung inwards, and two figures crashed through, an intense light against their backs, and dust flooding through the door.

Saito and Eliso opened fire, one target each. Lasers flashed across the cockpit; what should have been a faint line of ionized air, was instead a blazing red beam as the dispersed dust took the brunt of the laser energy and burnt up. Even so, the range was close enough that the dispersion didn’t matter. Eliso’s beam dropped his target near instantly. Saito’s beam disconnected a limb, leaving it rotating in the air before flopping down.

Still, the figure advanced. C4T rolled its eyes at typical human inaccuracy, and shone a spotlight out from its eyes to help Saito get a better shot. All Saito got was a better look.

‘They’re not people, anymore.’ He remembered Coronel’s words.

Saito shook his head. His next shot punched through its eye socket, flash-vaporizing the tissue in the center, and rupturing the edges with miniature steam explosions. It dropped, its body the only sound.

“Good work,” Coronel said. He stepped over the bodies. Saito and Eliso looked at each other before they followed.

They emerged to the aftermath of the crash site. Before them was a hundred-meter trench out of scarring the forest of concrete, rebar, and wood, and at the end of it all was a high-rise with a smoking hole in it. It was a wonder that the building was still standing.

The cockpit itself had been lodged into the side of a house. It was a stroke of luck that the cockpit door was still out in the street, whereas the house had collapsed all over the nose. It was a nicer house with a green lawn and an iron fence. The concrete was a bit crumbly, however, and it wasn’t even reinforced. What sort of people didn’t build their houses out of reinforced concrete?

The team filed out, and dog-like packbots followed them, boxes lining either side of their rectangular torsos. They dwarfed C4T, being twice the size, but C4T satisfied itself by sitting on the back of one for travel.

As soon as the last of the three packbots filed out, a charge of the cockpit’s kinetic nanites pulled together the surrounding debris, burying the door.

It was a moot disguise tactic. Anyone with half a brain would figure out that there was still something here. At the least, unaugmented survivors without heavy equipment wouldn’t bother, and if the Kartesh found the site and attempted to access the cockpit, it had a nasty surprise waiting for them.

“Where to, sir?” Eliso asked.

The drone had found a few points of interest. There were signs of human activity about ten kilometers south, in a patch of green surrounded by a sea of gray. Recon footage showed humanoids moving in patrol formation—could be people, could be Lanans, but Coronel doubted the Kartesh would’ve deployed so many of them to this area.

Eight kilometers west was a waterline. Going by global terrain data, it was a bay. There would be readily-usable water craft, or at least parts of them, which would let them go up and down the waterfront much faster than on foot.

Two kilometers north, there was a hydroelectric dam holding back an artificial lake. The dam might be damaged, or it might not. If they didn’t want the local topography changing up while they were here, they’d need to pay that place a visit, and soon.

To the east was nothing but more urban terrain. There were supposed to be mountains thirteen kilometers that way. Maybe the city claimed the mountain as well, or more sensibly, stopped at its base. Nothing interesting there, otherwise, except possible mountaintop survivors.

Between where they were and everwhere else was the most confusing urban sprawl he’d ever seen.

From the reaches of his cyber brain, he scraped up a rare historical noun to describe this place: a conurbation. A sprawl-type city had taller buildings in the middle, then fanned out to suburbs then farms towards the outskirts. If two or more sprawl-type cities grew into each other, the urbanscape turned into an undulation like the cables of a suspension bridge.

According to terrain data, there were at least thirteen peaks in the area. Unless this place had weird natural geography, then that only meant there were thirteen cities growing on top of each other here.

This was boon and bane. Given the local tech level, they could grey goo the place and turn all the steel and silicon into a division-strength automata force … if they had a proper fab unit.

It’s fuck-all wherever that chunk of the transport splashed down, though.

On the other hand, navigating the place would be a nightmare, and the potential number of bioweapons still crawling around would be a problem.

“South,” he finally said. Hopefully the locals were nice. Saito and Eliso nodded.

They left the crash site. Destruction transitioned to forgotten architecture. Vines crept up half the heights of most houses’ walls. Grass was sprouting out of asphalt cracks. Fallen leaves remained unswept from the road, crunching under their feet. Nothing was yet due to fall apart, however, and some places still had fresh, bright paint.

The disorganization of the city was apparent. Even here, in the suburban zones, hundreds of black cables looped around a single electric utility pole. It had guy wires pulling it back from tipping over under the sheer weight of it all, and even then, the guy wires’ anchors looked like they were slipping from the concrete they were supposedly bolted into.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Some roads led to dead ends, and others led to the same intersection they had just passed a minute ago. These would have been issues for them, were it not for the micro-drones they employed as scouts, mapping the urban topography around and ahead of them.

The day turned orange. It wasn’t a good idea to get caught out late.

“Sir, why? We have nightvision and 80 hours before we need sleep,” Saito said.

“They’re more active at night,” Coronel replied.

The nice, suburban neighborhood slowly gave way to more commercial establishments, crammed into little rented stalls at the ground floors of narrow, three-story apartments; stalls little more than unpainted concrete boxes with metal shutters and bannerspace measured in square feet above them. There was grafitti over most of the shutters, though some of the shutters were up, allowing them to take a peek inside; some of the stalls used to sell bread, others car batteries, and others still, assorted knick-knacks, flip-flops, and bicycle tires, all chaotically hanging from the same wire mesh on the walls.

Many of the wares, still wrapped in plastic, had been scattered throughout the road, stuck in the nooks of gutters, smelly plastic bags all crumpled up and blocking storm drains.

One store looked defensible. It was two stories high, and its windows were protected by stylized security bars, the metal twisted to form patterns from bottom to top in Spanish fashion. There was only one way in from street level, being bordered on two sides by buildings, but there was evidence of roof access from inside the building. If push came to shove, they could take to the roofs, although it would take a bit of boosting, as the surrounding roofs were even higher. Above all, however, it was resource-rich.

“All clear,” C4T messaged. It was waiting on top of the bookstore’s counter when Coronel and the others entered.

“We’re making this our staging area for two days,” Coronel started. “Every gram of carbon and silicon within a 100-meter radius of here needs to be in our fab-bot by tomorrow.”

“ ‘Fab-bot’, sir?” Saito asked. They didn’t have one.

Coronel pointed at the one of the packbots. It tilted its camera head.

“That’s going to be our fab-bot in five minutes.”

“Sir, is it advisable to immediately move to fabrication operations?” Eliso asked. “We’re not well-sited—”

“We don’t have time,” Coronel said. “If the Kartesh don’t have significant forces here, then they’re most likely to use bioweapon-control tactics.”

Saito and Eliso replied with blank looks. Coronel sighed and shook his head.

“Their Lanan,” he explained, “can control Alphas and, for some, all the way to Deltas. The Kartesh will always take the path of least cost. Tossing bodies at us is, all things considered, cheap, isn’t it?”

“Understood, sir,” Eliso said, “but I’m dumber than a marine right now, sir.”

“Capabilities, Lieutenant. We have to meet numbers with numbers, and these shitty rifles won’t do it.”

***

The next day came, and Coronel and the pilots parted ways, combing the area for places that had a lot of tech. The most obvious places were the cellphone stalls. There were so many of them, more than the area’s population density would have suggested. Saito and Eliso easily found one after a 10-second walk. The stall’s shutters had failed to close all the way down.

They sent a micro-drone to scan inside. It confirmed the presence of viable technology they could scavenge, and the absence of anything they would consider a threat.

Eliso raised the shutter halfway under human power while Saito stood guard. Saito ordered the packbot following them to stand guard and alert them for potential threats, then they went inside, bending under the shutter’s heavy foot.

It was claustrophobic. The combined display/inventory/working area occupied 80% of the space, leaving a narrow space for customers to wait by. One of the display tables had been smashed to bits, but the other remained intact. It wasn’t actually glass, but some sort of polymer with glass-like properties. His retinal HUD informed him it was called “acrylic.”

He’d kept seeing these display tables yesterday. They were an aluminum frame with caster wheels, paneled with acrylic so that the entire body was see-through, and there was an acrylic shelf inside that separated the wares into lower and upper spaces. Every single stall had the same one, with some standardization on dimensions.

He eyed the stock of SIM cards, USB thumb drives, lithium-ion batteries, and rudimentary phones behind the acrylic. There were more, scattered around the floor. He avoided the ones he could see, but there were a lot under the shattered bits of acrylic. Well, it was fine. They’d be redusting them, anyway.

“Why is technology here so … scatter-brained,” he remarked.

“What do you mean?” Eliso asked. He was shoveling whatever he could into a bag.

“This ‘acrylic’ stuff is the bottom of the tech tree. Their electronics indicate they should’ve been able to produce … I don’t know, metaluminium en masse by now?”

“You mean ‘metaluminum’ ?”

“What? No, metaluminium.”

“Focus, both of you. Bring in your haul ASAP,” Coronel’s voice invaded through their tac links.

Eliso and Saito sighed. “Yes sir,” Saito answered for them.

For the rest of the day, Saito and Eliso piled all manner of tech on the packbot. When it ran out of space, they’d send it back, and they continued to dig around, putting everything on the returning packbot once more.

The day grew short enough that Coronel called them back.

The man himself had also been busy. The bookstore was now just a store, and there was a stockpile of fifteen cylinders on one side piled up in a trapezoid like miniature artillery shells. Each cylinder measured 30 cm in length and 5 cm in diameter, filled to the brim with a standard 90/10 mix of nanites and manites.

Saito and Eliso were happy about their own contribution. A pile of silicon-based electronics was waiting in the middle of the store, waiting to be turned into fancy sand. Still, the bookstore being so incredibly void of shelves and books, and all the other things that made it feel like it was a store, sent chills down the spine. Not a single book was left behind, as if Coronel didn’t care about the cultural heritage of the people of this planet.

The situation being as it was, they didn’t say a word about it. Maybe Cyberians just didn’t have the same appreciation of hard books, especially not when they’d turned their whole planet into a massive server. What was a few deleted files when an echo of it existed somewhere in cyberspace?

The fab-bot was on standby. It had been converted from its original purpose as a packbot, its pockets replaced by canisters, and an extra battery pack hung from its underbelly.

“Good work,” Coronel told the two. “Process starting. Don’t stick your hand in.”

A miniature dust storm flew out of the fab-bot’s canisters, attracted by the allure of free silicon. They orbited the pile, walling off the onlookers, for this pile of discard and debris was theirs. Tendrils of theirs entered the cracks and ports of every device, its billions of hungry mouths nibling away at memory, wires, and processors.

Magic, it was not. Manites stopped in front of the prey material and extended their magnetic lassos to slave nearby smaller nanites into becoming their limbs. They slammed the nanites into the material, picking away it it until cracks propagated and nano-chunks were dislodged. Other manites picked up the chunks and threw them into a nanite pipeline that led out of the extraction sites, mechanically squeezing in rhythms to deliver the material.

“Why do we still need silicon, sir?” Eliso asked. “Our carbon electronics are a lot more versatile.”

“And more energy intensive,” Coronel added. “Carbon is incredibly reactive, Lieutenant. Do you know how many steps our maxites have to take, just to make sure nanotubes don’t spontaneously unfold? Don’t have to think about it with silicon. It’ll just work, and that’s what we need right now.”

Eliso nodded. “Understood, sir.”

As the last vestige of sunlight winked beyond the horizon, a ghoulish call howled through the street.