Chapter 4 Fallen World
Pretty much everything on Rubicon seemed designed to remind everyone how utterly tiny and insignificant they were. Even the garbage was super-sized.
They'd landed in the middle of a vast wasteland. The wrecked hulks of vast war machines they'd never imagined dotted an ancient battlefield. Walking gun turrets a few meters tall, humanoid mechs ten meters tall, titans of steel twenty meters tall, and thousand-ton tank hulls all dwarfed the four relatively short Jenson model androids.
At the very least, it was impossible to get lost in the wasteland. The towering forms of distant industrial megastructure platforms surrounded them in every direction, rising above the horizon even hundreds of miles away.
The main problem, initially, was that Uzi was surrounded by the three beings she feared the most. N was amiable enough, but J and V made no effort to hide their insatiable hunger, their agonizing want to tear her apart and feast on her internal metal bits. The only thing distracting them was the general sense of having no idea what to do next, and the apprehension at being exposed to sunlight and not dying.
"Right…" J tried to sound confident, but was obviously forcing it. "We need to find a Jenson office or facility on this planet, and find out what our orders are."
"Is that really all you can think about?" Uzi criticized. "It's obvious we don't know anything about this world. We need to try and learn all we can, and gather resources to survive."
"Oh…surviving won't be a problem for us…little lunch bag." J purred dangerously. She changed out her hand from the four fingered variant to one with three bladed claws each a foot long, holding them dangerously close to Uzi's throat.
"Hey! You-! You need me!" Uzi argued back. "I can fix stuff if it comes to it! O-Or carry stuff…!" She begged for her life.
"J…she is a worker model…they are pretty good at building and fixing things. She built a gun that blew my head off, after all." N tried to reason with his leader.
"Hmmm…very well. She can live…for now. V watch the toaster." J acquiesced.
"W-Wait! Why her!?" Uzi shivered. V smiled uncomfortably wide, electric eyes twitching in anticipation.
"Because if I do decide to make a meal out of you, V won't hesitate to carry out my order. Now, come on. Let's see what we can find." J declared, spreading her wings and taking flight.
With V clutching onto Uzi in a threatening embrace, the drones flew for hours…and found nothing along the way. Such was the vast and desolate nothing filling the empty space between the megastructures of Rubicon.
Nearing one of the towering, kilometer wide pillars holding up an expansive complex of industry, Uzi had to appreciate a fascinating and terrible fact. That this single megastructure, towering above the mountains it was built over, had more infrastructure and more industry than the entirety of her home planet of Copper IX, and Rubicon had hundreds of these towering pillars.
And much like Copper IX, it seemed desolate, void of life, biological and artificial. Ancient decrepit metal groaned a resonate chorus that hung heavy in the air. Utterly silent and long dead.
Almost entirely dead.
"Yes!" J cheered. "I'm detecting heat! Maybe we'll find something!"
Following the heat spike through several long, imposingly cold metal halls of industry and conduit, they found a tiny, unassuming shanty camp, a single trashcan fire warming a husk in the shape of a man.
Landing close to the camp, V let Uzi go, and N approached with his usual friendly demeaner.
"Uh…Hello there, stranger!" N greeted cheerfully.
"…" The man refused to look up with his glazed over, unnaturally bright red eyes. He was not dead, probably, as he seemed to be breathing, and still warm under drab grey robes.
"O…kay…creepy…" Uzi whispered to her captors.
"Um, excuse me good sir…?" J approached amiably to the human.
"…" The man seemed to stir with life, but made no motion to acknowledge the four androids on the other side of the fire. He smiled, with unsettling glee, as he pulled a red cylinder from his robes with slow, lethargic energy. "We must…take Rubicon's blessing…raw…"
Then, much to the horror of the androids watching, the man raised the cylinder up, and three soft padded legs braced themselves to his face. Then a long needle extended from the cylinder and pierced him in the upper corner of his eye. The man's mouth opened uncomfortably wide, clearly in pain but used to it. Then the needle depressed, and the man howled.
"Yaaahoooo!" The man leaned his head back, begging gravity to sink more of the red fluid into his head. "Pop! And…!" The man then sunk into himself, half laying on the floor and the crate he was braced against. "…Sizzle…!"
"What the frack?!" V screamed. N, J, and Uzi feeling much the same, and instinctually drew back and away from the unnatural and unsettling sight. They even grabbed at each other, trying to assure themselves and each other that they did not just watch a human stick a needle in their brain and inject…something…that caused the man to writhe in euphoric bliss. He was also sweating profusely, as though he had been running for miles, in spite of the frigid air.
"Okay this was a mistake!" N declared, shivering at the sight.
"Yeah…yeah…maybe you're right." J reluctantly agreed. Before they'd had a chance to run and get away, the man spoke again.
"Jenson model androids. Have to say, it's been a long, long while…since I've seen your kind around here." The man sounded…comparatively normal, considering his earlier lethargic and recent euphoric states. He still smiled a bit too wide, staring at them with unnatural eyes.
"Y-Yeah…uh…we just got here." Uzi braved the uncertainty this man eluded, approaching apprehensively. "So…who are you?"
"Me…uh…heh. Nobody. Just your friendly neighborhood nomadic Doser." The Doser answered.
"Doser…?" Uzi wondered. "Is that what that was? What you…injected?"
"Oh, yes!" The man answered with uncomfortable enthusiasm. "The blessings of Rubicon, Coral!"
"Coral?" The drones questioned out loud.
"Abide with Rubicon!" The man chanted back enthusiastically, invoking some spell of words to which he bound himself.
"R-Right…" J hesitantly stepped forward as well. "Say uh, Mr. Doser sir…we were wondering if you might know where any JCJenson offices or facilities on the planet might be…? If you could point us in the right direction…that would be great."
"JCJenson facilities?…Right…okay." The man nodded. "You'll find what you're looking for near the old ship breaking yards under Grid 009. It's all ground facilities, so no need to search up a pillar."
"Got it…uh…where is Grid 009?" J questioned.
"That's uh, bout…two hundred kilometers west of here."
"Welp! Thanks so much for the help!" Uzi hurriedly urged her captors to move on, anything to get away from the strange man.
"Hey, droids." The man called out, smiling still too wide. "Remember, when they say 'Coral, abide with Rubicon', you answer back…" The man gestured towards them, urging them to answer.
"…Abide with Rubicon?" The drones reluctantly answered, knowing not the implication of the strange mantra.
"Abide with Rubicon!" The man waved, dismissing them.
Stepping out of sight from the nomad's camp, the drones tried to process what they had just seen and learned. Uzi tried to get over the fact that the first time she had ever seen a living human, they stabbed themselves in the eye and injected some kind of drug into their brain, then howled euphorically.
J turned around to address her squad, then stared at the three other drones oddly, not with malice, but an understanding kind of confusion. Uzi looked down at herself, and realized why J was looking at her weirdly. In her apprehensive fear of the human, she had reached out and grabbed N and V's hands, looking for any kind of comfort in the face of such hideous sights. She quickly let go, hiding her hands behind her back.
N and V, who had also been unsettled and unaware of the state of their hands, felt Uzi let go, then stared down at her in understanding, surprise, and embarrassment.
"Uh…" V had lost that murderous, glutenous gaze she had been giving Uzi for the last few hours. She settled for staring down at the floor while hugging her own shoulders.
"That was…freaky…" N spoke up, rubbing his arm.
"…Yeah." J decided she understood. Everyone was extremely uncomfortable after encountering the Doser. "Okay…we know where we are going at least…let's just find that Jenson office."
They hadn't made it to Grid 009 when they found a new mystery.
"Hey…what the heck is that?" Uzi pointed out.
Looking in the direction she was gesturing towards, there was something unusual about the ground.
"It looks like…glass?" N realized.
"An entire desert, made of glass?" V questioned.
"…Okay, it's not too far off, let's take a look." J agreed.
Flying down to the surface, the obsidian like surface of the ground reflected back at them. There were small pools of sand in the uneven surface, implying some other truth.
"Guys…I'm not sure but…I am betting most of the surface is like this," Uzi suspected. "Glass deserts with shallow seas of sand. Something bad happened…at most a few decades ago."
"Something that could turn half a planet into glass…no…that's crazy." J tried to deny it. "That would take an enormous effort…something beyond measure or understanding."
"Still…this much glass shouldn't form naturally." N spoke up. "Something had to have happened."
"So that's the question. What happened that turned whole deserts to glass?" V agreed.
"…" Uzi noticed a structure, a valley formed by the uneven cooling to these glass fields that left a deep fissure in the ground. Looking down into the deep, glass valley…
Uzi screamed.
"Uzi?!" N shouted back, quickly flying over to her, with J and V close behind. "What is…oh…"
The four drones stared down into the deep valley, and gazed upon the lifeless forms of millions of bodies, human and Worker Drone alike. The humans had long been reduced to skeletal remains, while the Worker Drones still had their faces twisted in terror and pain.
"What!? What happened here?!" V flinched back. N turned Uzi away and held her close.
"…" J stared down apprehensively, uncertain and confused. Using her optical suite, she zoomed into the valley, looking for what clues she could ascertain. "Okay…two things. One, everyone has their hands bound behind their backs. Two, everyone died the same way, stabbed through the back and tossed into this…hole."
"Why would they kill humans and Workers though? Why toss them into a hole?" N questioned.
"I think it's…like a way to show disrespect." V voiced her opinion. "We built a spire of Worker corpses to inspire fear into the other Workers. Whoever did this did not want it to be an easily remembered event…but neither did they try and hide it, meaning they had no shame in killing them. Whoever these humans and drones were…someone truly hated them."
"It's a freaking mass grave is what it is! Executed and discarded with no care of who they were!" Uzi shouted. "Everything on this cursed world is dead! This world is a graveyard, and we need to leave!"
"L-Let's just get to the ship breaking yards. Maybe we'll find more clues there." N suggested.
Grid 009 – Ship Breaking Yards / Western Belius
In the long shadow of the Grid 009 pillar, it was relatively easy to find the kilometers long, sunken pit in the ground, the long forms of spaceships of all shapes and sizes gutted and sprawled out across the yards, and the rust turned mud under their abandoned and decrepit forms.
"Okay…so that's the ship breaking yard. Now we just need to find the offices." J pointed out. "Let's split up, cover more ground. If you find the office, fire off a missile."
Her orders given, the three Murder Drones split up, with Uzi still being carried by V.
"This world…is so vast." Uzi looked down, too tired to be afraid of the deadly creature she was held by. "I've never felt so…insignificant in my life."
"…Yeah." V reluctantly agreed. "I never knew how…vast…how large humans could build."
"I've…just been trying to think." Uzi winced. "KA-31 mentioned a war, some event he thought we should know. The Doser said he knew of our kind, but had not seen them for some time. Then we found the mass grave…something happened, a long time ago. Something us Jenson model drones were a part of. Do you know anything?"
"…" V sighed, in spite of the fact that she didn't have lungs. "I remember…something, a long time ago. Some vague mention of a war my masters fought. We were winning. Or we were losing. My memory is…unreliable…but…I don't think I could say even if it was whole."
"Whatever it was…I think it ended, here on Rubicon." Uzi realized.
"…Yeah…" V silently agreed. One of her sensors felt something, some ping of information she had hoped to find. "I think we found the office."
Flying down to the ground, V dropped Uzi off and started scanning more intensely. "There's definitely a complex down here. Best guess is it's office spaces. I'm going to call the other two." Changing one of her hands into a missile launcher, V fired a missile straight up into the air, where it exploded after several seconds.
"…" Uzi considered V. The taller android was pretty terrifying, and had definitely killed countless members of her species. Still…after having been traumatized twice together in so many hours, the Murder Drone had let slip that mask of casual insanity and seemed much more somber…sober and quiet. "If we're going to be stuck together for a while, it'll be inconvenient if we constantly hate each other."
"…" V turned her back to Uzi, hiding her expression from the smaller drone. "If I have to kill you, I'll regret it more if you're trying to be my friend."
"Then maybe don't kill me?" Uzi suggested sarcastically.
"Ha." V laughed with no humor. She stared up at the looming megastructure nearby, feeling tiny and helpless inside.
J and N quickly returned, and together the four drones entered the underground complex. Coming into the main lobby, it was clear that this was a JCJenson facility, with a great big sign on the back wall.
And that the four of them were the only living things for miles.
The way that furniture had been rearranged, how bullet holes were lined up…there had been a desperate defensive battle fought in these halls.
And the corpses.
It was clear that none of the attackers had left their own corpses. But there were human and Worker Drone corpses lining the halls in increasingly twisted and demented ways. At first, it was simply the wounds inflicted in battle, combatants who had been killed or executed where they stood. Then the attackers moved on.
So many of the corpses left beyond the lobby…V was right. It was clear someone had taken their time killing them. It was clear someone had hated them. Bludgeoned and stabbed and torn apart with sadistic care, cruelty beyond even what the murderous drones had ever imagined. They had even…the non-combatants…
J stared at this carnage with quiet but growing despair. Her hopes of finding her masters dashed, left with only this legacy of ash and hopelessness. Perhaps…Uzi was right. This world was a graveyard. It was foolish and wrong to hope for salvation in the ruins of Rubicon.
Amongst the brutality of the carnage, Uzi found something…interesting. A tortured Worker Drone, it's head caved in with terrible force, clutching a large blue flag. The flag had been trampled repeatedly, leaving bloodied boot prints across it's design. The symbol on the flag was of a blank planet, within a ring, with white angel wings spread from it's back.
"Have…you guys seen a flag like this before?" Uzi wondered.
"No…never." N replied.
"Sorry." V shrugged.
"…" J just shook her head.
"There…is still more to this facility. Let's keep looking." Uzi advised, seeing as J was too distraught to speak.
The long halls eventually led to an underground section of the ship breaking yards, another vast and empty expanse of stale dead air. The broken and butchered hulls of ships long forgotten and abandoned. But there was one mostly intact ship.
Compared to the megastructures they'd been seeing all day, the half kilometer tall block sitting on four large drive cones seemed manageably massive. It's enormous block shaped body tapered off to a square bow pointed up at the ceiling. Arranged around it, on it's port and starboard, ventral and dorsal faces, were four turrets of two designs, two long railguns, and two of some unknown, flat faced weapon, possibly a laser of some kind.
"That's…something." Uzi suggested, prompting the tired and traumatized group forward.
The ship was obviously old, with it's outer hull being filthy, but surprisingly, not very rusty. It appeared to have only started the preliminary stages of it's breaking, with small outer panels missing and small voids for smaller turrets that had already been removed. In faded blue paint along the bow of the ship, was the symbol of that blue flag again. The world with wings.
Inside the ship told a similar story. Preliminary work to break the ship down had only just begun, with paneling missing and conduit exposed. It only took a few minutes to find the bridge. Or, three of them. It was a void space some twenty meters across, with three heavily armored rooms spaced out within the area. In the main bridge, there were several chairs with touch screen control panels left in place. Then they found the plaque, stating the name of the ship.
LIN Odysseus
2389
Donnager Class
Klein Naval Shipyards, Ganymede Station
"Odysseus, huh?" Uzi wondered about the significance of that. What was most interesting about the plaque with the ship's name, other than the fact that the ship was nearly 800 years old and had come from the Sol system, was the prefix. It appeared as though the prefix had once been four letters, but had been scraped off and replaced with "LIN". The "N" in this case stood for "Navy", that was obvious. But what of the "LI"?
"So…what did we actually find today?" N questioned.
"I think it's safe to say…we won't be finding anyone alive with JCJenson." V stated truthfully but harshly. "Someone took their time to wipe them out."
"…You're right." J admitted in defeat, sliding down against a wall, hugging her legs. "It's all gone. They're gone. She's gone."
"…" Uzi didn't want to push her luck and question J what she meant by that. "We found…something. We found out that JCJenson was allied with a group…or nation…the blue flag with the world with wings. We also found this ship. That's something."
"Uzi…can you fix this ship?" N asked hopefully.
"…Fixing it isn't going to be a problem. The problem is the scale. This is a huge ship. Something this big, this complex, is going to need more than four little drones to control. Plus the fuel and the man-hours…if we don't get help…it could take years before this ship can fly again."
"It's something." V nodded supportively. "Right, J?"
"…Yeah…" J nodded, sadly. "Let's just…take it easy, for tonight. We've been going hard for a couple of hours. We can do everything else tomorrow."
"Okay…" N sat down, taking a rest.
"…Alright." V agreed, taking a seat as well.
"…" Uzi stayed quiet, apprehensive to get the attention of these dangerous creatures. Still, she knew if she tried to run, she couldn't escape anyway. She took a seat between N and V, and put herself into sleep mode.
She tried not to think about the horrors. The Doser poking holes in his eye and his brain. The dead piled high in a glass-stained wasteland. The unbelievable cruelty inflicted upon her people on this world. This massive, ashen and cold world, soaked in blood and oil.
Rubicon.
Author's Note: And that concludes day 1 on Rubicon. From here on out, 621 and the Murder Drones cast will find their place on this world, and the secrets it holds. It should also be apparent that I've changed a lot of things regarding the lore of Murder Drones, and that will come into play as things develop.
Now, as for my upload schedule...I have to try and finish DBB still, but I am also addicted to working on this story. So what I'll do is finish working on chapter 16 of DBB, upload chapter 11, then work on chapter 11 of this story, so that I can release chapter 5 of this story. It will take some time, but since there will only be 21 chapters of DBB, it won't take forever. After that I'll figure a new schedule for uploading this story, considering how much fun I am having writing it. Just...have to finish DBB.
Anyhow, stay tuned, and abide with Rubicon!