Chapter 6

"A New Day"

The repair ward had become something of a curiosity over the last three days. People kept trying to see what was going on inside.

Senior was elbow deep in GOBLY-N's guts with all eight of his arms. He carefully resealed a hydraulic cable, used a laser saw to remove damaged interior plating, while two more hands were carefully reconnecting an auxiliary cable, all the while focusing on removing a bolt that had shorn through the back armor plating. Other repair bots were sealing gaps, hammering out dents, stripping and replacing circuits, and running diagnostics on the relatively few undamaged systems. A holo screen stood nearby, showing several cutaways of the robot's interior. The repairs were nearly finished.

The repair ward was finally quiet again, the security team ushered out, and the doors blocked by a few stewards. Silence had taken over, as each repair bot did their duty without speaking, or acknowledging the others. It was how they worked best, undisturbed and in a communal isolation. There was one disturbance however. Senior felt something tug on his lower torso, pulling him back slightly. He deactivated the laser saw and finished reattaching another power coupling. The unseen hand tugged again, somewhat more urgently.

Senior turned at the waist, and bent down slightly. Wall-e stared up at him, eyes like those of a rather sad puppy. The trash compactor spoke.

"Eva," it said simply. Senior checked his internal clock. A little counter had been slowly been ticking away, counting off hours. Wall-e had beaten the alarm by ten seconds.

"It is that time, isn't it," Senior said. He called another repair bot over to take his place. He placed the laser saw carefully on the table and turned away from GOBLY-N. Wall-e had already begun to head back to the nano room. Senior moved to follow, but a voice in machine code. Senior turned his head slightly, and then altered course.

It was Mo, who had just been placed into recovery. There were still areas of melted plastic on his outer casing from the electrical shocks from the hunter. It taken a few days of repair work, but he up and moving again, and in the end, that was all that mattered. The repair droid was inside of a repair cage, rolling up against the force fields. Senior deactivated the force fields, and the little droid rolled out. They both went into the robot morgue, and through the shattered door of the nano room. Wall-E was already by Eve's nano tank, rubbing his hands together. Mo rolled over to him.

Senior moved over to the central console which had remained remarkably undisturbed during the fight. One of his arms folded out and he began to type the access codes. After a few moments, the nano tank started to hiss like a tea kettle. The nano bots were being siphoned from the tank, entering into secondary containment tanks. Eve very slowly began to be revealed as the tank emptied. She seemed fine, the repairs finished. Wall-e placed his hand on the tank, humming a song that Senior had a vague memory of hearing once. Mo started to hum along too.

Senior activated the second phase of the procedure as the final few nano bots disappeared. The top of the tank then folded open, and a robotic arm descended from the ceiling. It reached through the opening and gently clasped the probe in its grip. The arm pulled Eve out of the tank like an egg from a basket.

The arm then moved along a track and deposited Eve onto a recovery table. An anti grav field activated, letting the probe float a few inches above the table. Senior set the arm away, and it folded up. Wall-e and Mo were already waiting by the table.

Senior wheeled himself over the table. He picked one of his smaller manipulators and positioned it over Eve's command section. He typed in the restart command, and backed away.

There was whir and a click, and then a low hum. Eve opened her eyes and floated into an upright position.

"Ev-a!" Wall-E yelled happily, almost pulling himself onto the table in a burst of motion. Eve spun around and reached down and pulled him up. They clasped hands, and they touched faces, goggle eyes to face screen. A spark kiss passed between them Wall-e sighed, and the two robots embraced for a few moments. Eve whispered something to Wall-E, who then laughed. Senior imitated a cough.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but we just need to run a diagnostic to make sure everything is okay."

The two robots broke their embrace. Eve lowered Wall-e to the ground and then she also hovered down to the ground. They followed Senior through the shattered doors of the nano room. Eve gave a questioning look to Wall-e. Mo started to explain in machine code what he had heard, but this was competing with Wall-e's shouted explanation and wide hand gestures. This did not get through very well, but Eve got a confused explanation about a fight. She sighed as they entered the main repair ward.

This was, in the truest sense, the worst possible time. The repair bots had just reactivated GOBLY-N. The robot was slowly powering up, servos shuddering. It unfolded its legs and stepped off the large repair table it had been set on.

What happened next was one of those things no one ever clearly remembers seeing. They remember a flash of blue anti grav light, a white blur, and a click of steel tapping on glass. Eve had her ion cannon pressed very firmly against the faceplate of GOBLY-N. If there had been human's in the room, they probably would have forgotten to breathe for a few moments. Instead, every single robot was frozen, very carefully craning their heads around to se what had just happened.

Senior moved first. He began to move his way between the stunned repair bots. Within a few moments, he was near the pair, GOBLY-N completely rigid, Eve slowly trying to press the other robot's head up. He very carefully tried to push the probe away, but it was trying to push a wall over. The probe was rooted to the spot in the air.

"Eva?" Wall-e asked, confused and not a little bit worried. He was ignored by Eve, whose face plate showed nothing but a pair of narrowed blue eyes. She pressed harder with the ion cannon.

'Listen, Eve, we all know what he did, but the situation has changed," Senior said carefully in machine code. The probe nearly spat its response.

"It's a murderer, a monster, and yet you're fixing it? What's wrong with you?"

"It's hard to explain, but it's on our side now."

Eve threw an angry glance at Senior.

"Our side? After all those robots it has killed, do you think it cares?" she said almost yelling at Senior and the rest of the room. She turned away for a fraction of a second too long. There was a click.

GOBLY-N had raised his arm and was very slowly pushing Eve's arm up with a pair of claws. After a few moments the gun was aimed more or less at the ceiling. Eve was trying to push back, but al that did was scratch her arm slightly.

"Get him out of here now," Senior desperately whispered to a pair of nearby repair bots. They moved to either side of GOBLY-N. One tapped the hulking robot on the leg. The robot turned slightly and peered down at the repair bot, which seemed like a small child by comparison.

"Time to go," the repair bot said, ushering GOBLY-N to follow him. The robot very carefully let go of Eve's arm and turned around towards the exit of the repair ward. Its feet clanked on the floor as it passed between the shattered doors after the repair bots. The security bots parted to let it through. Eve still tracked his every move till he disappeared down another corridor. Everyone I the repair ward unfroze as Eve folded her arm back into place. Senior sighed.

"Let's get that diagnostic done."

The day was slightly cloudy, brown clouds obscuring the sun. There was a chance of rain in the next few days, but of course with Auto down no one was getting quite as accurate reports from the weather monitoring systems. McCrea had found the small conference room a comfortable place out of the way. No one needed to know about this meeting outside of a few. STU-ARD's 60 and 23 were quietely reviewing several data files, talking quietely in machine code. A medical bot, an almost exact copy of Senior, except its hands had been replaced by arrays of scalpels and other surgical tools. It was standing quietely by the conference table with nothing to say. A few humans were sitting around the conference table, each the head of a department of the reconstruction, looking uncomfortable to be back on the Axiom.

60 flashed one of his lights quickly. That was the signal to start the briefing McCrea straightened himself in his seat. The lights dimmed and the room was quiet.

"I'm sure you're all very aware that we've had some visitors to the colony recently," McCrea began, "and you're also aware that one of them destroyed several stewards along with an EVE probe. I'm also going to confirm the rumor that another one snuck onto the Axiom and attempted to neutralize the first robot."

It would have been easier if they had gasped, maybe panicked or gotten angry. But they just stared at the captain. It wasn't out of shock or fear, but rather just acceptance. Life had been hard the last decade, and they'd worked through some of the toughest conditions and doing the hardest tasks possible. This was just another challenge.

John, an old friend of McCrea's, raised his hand and asked a question.

"So what happened to them?"

"One is currently deactivated and under heavy guard, the other…" McCrea gathered his thoughts for a moment. He had to sell this right.

"… The other is on our side now. We're hoping to ease him into colony life, and make a productive member of society out of him."

He got a look from everyone that essentially said: "Not in my department."

"I know this will take a while to get us-"

"We heard what happened to Jakes," John said quietly.

"Well that was our infiltrator."

"Yeah, fine, but what's the chance it won't just go crazy and kill someone? What if a kid said something that just sets of some personality engram? And the infiltrator wasn't even trying, and it got past everybody into the Axiom. It hurt Jakes, and we're not even sure it was trying."

The medical robot whirred back to life, its knowledge needed.

"Patient Jakes Varnan received an injury from an unidentified unit, which used a magnetic accelerator bolt launcher. The bolt hit him in the thigh in an area regarded as non life threatening, with no damage recorded on any major vein or artery. The femur was missed by a margin of two centimeters. Wound placement and damage: Non life threatening. Minor nerve system damage possible," it aid n a matter of fact tone, voice buzzing slightly.

"Okay, so it wasn't trying to kill him. That's still hardly a recommendation," John said, thumping his hand on the table for emphasis. The other people nodded.

"Trust me I know that, but the other one seems friendly for now. I say we give him a chance. We gave Auto a chance."

"I'll admit that was fair, but there's a massive difference between a robot with a taser and a robot that can cut people to shreds."

"Could we just give him a chance? One week, and if stays friendly, maybe then we can consider what we should do with it."

The department heads looked at one another, and quietely whispered amongst themselves for a few minutes. John spoke first.

"That sounds fair but if it goes psycho or betrays us, you'll have t deal with it yourself."

"Agreed."

'Just one question. What are we going to do with the other one?"