“Valorax”
By Jonathan St. Ives
Raven stood up slowly from the vein of quartz he had been digging and leaned heavily on the ancient, rusted pickaxe he was using. He took off his battered wide-brimmed hat and wiped his face on his sleeve. He was well over two meters tall and barrel chested, forcing him to lean over a bit to fit in the mineshaft. His large arms were notched with scars and brown from dirt and stains. His craggy face had a scar running straight across it, right under his amber-glowing eyes which squinted out through a fan of lines at the sides. The thick shock of blonde hair that cascaded to his shoulders and the thick bushy eyebrows that shaded those deeply recessed eyes completed the image of a not-too-civilized prospector.
He picked up a large chunk of the white quartz he had just broken off the vein that was showing in the side of the granite mineshaft. There were small traces of wire gold, like tiny threads woven through a tapestry, wrapping through and around it.
He squinted at it in the hot sunshine for a moment, then threw it on the large pile next to him. He sighed heavily. It wasn’t enough to justify the amount of energy he had expended mining it and it certainly wasn’t enough to pay for his lodging, deuterium, and living expenses for the next month.
He stretched his arms up into the air, and then pressed his hands to his lower back. He needed to see a doctor about the pains he had there, but things like that were far down the list of priorities until he found lode. He was positive it was around here. He had been drifting down this vein for quite a while now, but he was seeing more and more traces all the time.
He blinked and his eyes changed his view to a hyperspectral image of the rock vein. The generated data cube was added to the previous ones to update the mineral map he had been creating for the past two years.
Yes, he thought, there’s gold here somewhere. Somewhere close now. Maybe Uranium too.
He didn’t need to check the time, he was always aware of it. It was still an hour before he usually quit digging, but he decided that he had had enough disappointment for one day and it was time to head back to town.
He emerged from the dark tunnel into the hot, fading sunlight of the High Plateau. His eyes darkened automatically. He was just at the edge of the San Juan mountains, the lower end of the Rockies. From the high ledge his mine was on, he could zoom in to look south and see the green pine forests of the mountains turn to sparse Pinon and Spruce plains and arroyos. There, nestled in a Y-shaped, steeply-sided river valley, was Valorax, a green scar in the tan, semi-arid sandstone mesas.
It wasn’t much of a settlement. Long ago, before the Great Excision, the town had been an oil town, and then later when the climate was destroyed, a mecca for stragglers from the submerged coasts. It had never really grown very big, and, thanks to its isolation and lack of strategic importance, had avoided most of the destruction of the final war.
Now, the androids had moved in. The town still attracted those with a pioneer spirit and and aversion to the large arcologies where everyone lived connected and structured lives. With mankind a fading memory, he and the other androids who felt the call of the frontier were filling in the old forgotten spaces.
It was the only settlement in a thousand kilometer radius from one the big arcologies, so it had to be self-sufficient to a certain degree. Some of the residents catered to prospectors like himself and there was a small plant that was once a missile factory that had been redesigned to create quantum chips as well as repair facilities and an decent hospital. Thanks to some old solar fields and an aging power station at the bottom of a large reservoir to the north, Valorax also had a surplus supply of steady power.
Best of all, 85% of the free-flowing water in the entire southwest of the continent flowed through the valley in the form of three rivers whose names were lost to time. Most of the residents worked at the large Girdler sulfide deuterium extraction plants down by the river.
It wasn’t a rich town, it was a working town, but it was a going concern and looked to have some kind of future, unlike many of the towns in more devastated areas.
The people of Valorax reflected that work character. They liked their freedom and considered the lack of reliable communication with the archologies a good thing. It might take a good month to get help from across the Shattered Lands, but that was OK by them. Raven agreed with them. It was a single greatest reason he lived out here. He liked the solitude and avoided people as much as possible. He had good reasons for that. He understood only too well that the good citizens of Valorax wouldn’t let him stay if they knew too much about him. He’d learned that the hard way many times in other towns, and he was tired of wandering. He liked it here.
He piled his ancient gear onto Martha, his antiquated gravsled and sent a signal to it to follow. With a large flat bed, blinking sidelights, and a boxy head with exposed wiring, Martha looked like a cross between an old pickup and a refrigerator. She was battered and needed a new fuel cell, but he kept patching her up and had grown quite fond of the old wreck. Martha gave a low whine and lifted off the ground unevenly, then leveled out. They moved down the steep trail towards the valley as the blazing, hazy sun sank slowly behind the mountains.
Raven trudged into town, and headed for the Deetwo, the town’s watering hole and social hub. The faded, peeling structure had once been a school cafeteria, but now was the only part of that complex still standing. A large crater of debris stood next to it.
He plugged Martha in to the charging station out front and admonished her, “Now you just stay here this time and don’t wander off. If you get stuck down by the river again, I’m not chopping you out of the brush next time.” Martha gave a low rumble for an answer. Raven squinted at her for a moment, then decided that he was too tired to argue and turned towards the open doors.
As he stepped into the low-ceiling, poorly lighted dive, he noticed that the sand had drifted in the door and had not been swept out for the day. Inside, there was no one but the watertender, Murk. The place would fill as soon as the sun went down, but now it was deserted.
Raven rambled over to Murk. Murk was time-worn and antique, showing sun-bleached skin, scarred hands, and a shaggy head of hair. He was tall, short of three meters, but not by much. And he was thin, his arms and legs nothing much more than straight pipes covered in frayed flannel. Even though his eyes glowed a dull green in the bad light, he looked anything but intimidating.
“How goes the digs, Raven?” he asked, looking up from the glass he was polishing with a hole-shot towel. “You find the big lode you’ve been looking for today? Your tab is getting’ bigger than the New York crater these days. I’m gonna have ta cut ya off if you don’t settle up soon.”
This was just a ritual between them. Raven knew that Murk would never cut off a local, no matter how big their tab was. Especially since he and Murk were two of the original settlers.
“You should be paying me to drink that crude oil you call a libation. The last bottle I drank had so much mineral in it I had to grind the calcium from my joints for a week!”
“The hell you say! My DHO is as clean as a river trout’s tailfin! Better tastin’ too!” Murk replied with a look of indignation.
Raven collapsed onto one of the barstools, and gave Murk a tired look. “Yeah, well give me one of those fishy joint-throttlers, will ya? I’m tired all the way to my power core.”
Murk’s face softened a little as he looked at Raven’s dusty, dirt-smeared patched clothes and notched scars. He reached behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of clear Deuterium Protium Oxide and poured a glass for Raven, leaving the bottle of heavy water standing on the bar.
Raven drank the first glass at a gulp, then poured a second one and sat, head down, looking at it. “What’s the news today? Anythin’ happening?” He asked, not really caring about the answer but just trying to fill the silence.
Murk, put down the glass he was polishing again and hesitated before replying. “There’s a group of drifters in town right now. I don’t like the look of them. There may be…trouble.”
Raven, looked up slowly. Trouble wasn’t a word you heard in Valorax. People who lived there worked together, lived together, and, since survival depended on everyone’s effort, weren’t known to have many problems with each other. There was an occasional scuffle over sports competitions or someone’s lack of tact, but that was about it.
“What kind of trouble?” Raven asked, his eyes narrowing.
“I heard them drifters gave Julie a hard time down by the factory. Roughed her up a bit for mouthing off to them. That’s why she ain’t in today.”
“You seen these drifters before?”
“Nope. But I seen their kind before. Especially after the war. Combat vets. I’m sure of it.”
That was bad. It was bad enough someone picking on a sweet, inoffensive girl like Julie, who never said a bad word about anyone that didn’t deserve it and took care of her elderly, malfunctioning mother, but worst still, combat vets never went anywhere without being armed to the hilt.
Most of them were augmented with warfare engagement nervous systems and processors, able to move at lightning speeds. They usually had infrared sight and lidar scanners. The worst ones had built-in e-beam weapons, shielded cores, and a complete lack of empathic programming.
“Just plain evil,” Raven thought. “Relics from a time when sympathy and emotion weren’t needed, just androids that could kill efficiently and without mercy. Warriors of the Great Excision. Exterminators of Mankind.”
Raven hoped that these were just some local augmented units that had gone bad. You rarely saw any of the original combat androids anymore. Most had not been designed to self-repair, and many others had either been killed in the war, or exterminated for their excesses afterward by the Lords of the Arcologies.
Any that were left were probably the toughest and most desperate. And that was bad news indeed for Valorax’s citizens. They still had some weapons, but in a small community, they never carried them or even maintained them. They relied on their protector, Seth, a war-damaged berserker unit over 200 years old, to protect the town. Raven knew he was no longer any match for a disciplined combat squad.
Raven put down his drink and stood up. He looked at Murk steadily. “I’m going to head for home and check on Julie on the way. You still got that piece of crap HE-Laser under the bar?”
“Yeah, right here.” Murk pulled a pitted, tarnished high energy laser rifle from beneath the counter. It was so old, it looked like it had been made in the last century.
“Make sure that it’s charged up, will ya? And keep your eyes open. I got a bad feeling.”
Raven strolled out to the street. Martha emitted a low squeak at the sight of him and drifted over, unplugging herself and reeling in her charger cord.
“Come on, old girl. Let’s head for home. We’re stopping by Julie’s on the way.” Martha flowed in behind and followed his lead down the street towards the river.
Havoc sat in the hotel lobby, thinking of his plans. One of the last remaining android soldiers of the final war, almost as wide as he was tall and weighing over 300 kilos, he looked like a tank and was sheathed with armor. Most of his body was chrome plated to reflect energy beams. His glittering eyes peered out from thin slits in his faceplate. His thick arms bulged with embedded weapons and countermeasures. He had been designed to kill and destroy and there was not much that could stand up to him when he got fired up. In the Great Excision, he had personally eradicated over 16,000 humans.
Havoc watched his men lounging around in the hotel. They were bored. Waze, his sharpshooter, was cleaning his z-pinch plasma rifle and Tory and Mac, the explosives and breach team, were using a particle beam to carve designs on the lobby walls. Sic and Gabson, nothing but dumb muscle and programmed violence, were toying with the hotel desk clerk, making him crawl around on the floor and shooting microwave braids at his extremities, burning his circuits, to make it harder. He was crying in pain and fear.
Havoc needed repairs, he needed a new power core, he needed recruits for his squad and he needed quantum chips to sell to other towns, but most of all he needed to keep his squad happy. Sic was easy to keep happy as long as there were victims to terrorize, and but the others were only happy when they were in action.
“Everyone get over here.” Havoc said quietly, because Havoc didn’t have to shout, ever.
The mood in the room changed instantly. The boss was calling and that meant action. Everyone quickly gathered around, except for Sic who paused to slice the poor hotel clerk into two parts lengthwise. Sparks flew as his power supply fried.
“ Get over here Sic, and knock that off!” Havoc, said with a growl. “There’ll be time for all of that later.”
“First things first. This town is making some serious cash with the quantum chip factory and I intend to get my cut.” The crew laughed because they knew that Havoc’s cut was usually all of it. “Power up your weapons and shields and stow that loose equipment. Were going over there and empty that place out. Flatten it. After that, the rest of the town should be easy money.”
“Waze, there’s no high ground up there on the mesa, it’s all flat, just try to get a line on the main door and wait for Tory to break the front shields and doors.
Sic, you take the rear of the complex and cut through a back wall. Don’t worry about fire damage, the chips are stored in a cryovault that protects them. Just blaze through and take out anything that moves.”
“You got it, Colonel.” Sic smiled. This was his kind of assignment. The colonel had said to take them out, but he didn’t say how fast. He thought longingly of shooting the workers inside to pieces slowly.
“Mac, you mine the front door. After tory clears the defense grid, you blow it. Gabson and I will take out anything that puts up a fight.” Havoc drew his short filament sword, the molecule thin edge glowing red with nuclear force. It would slice through any material from steel to stone as if it were gauze.
“Once in, we clear the vault and meet back here. Any questions?” He looked around the room.
“What if that decrepit excuse for a town protector shows up?” Mac asked.
“He’s going to.” Havoc replied.
Surprised, Mac asked, “How do you know?”
Havoc grinned for the first time that day, “Because I invited him.”
The gang piled outside and deployed into a V-formation behind Havoc. The citizens quickly began to empty the street. Some going inside buildings and others fading into the sides of the buildings. The factory was up on the top of the bluffs, near where an old irrigation project had been. The gang marched down to the end of town and up the bluff road.