By David C. Daoust
Clover spent more nights in the library than he ever had before. Knee deep in the Histories of Mars, he finally found his answer. He was sure of it. Impenetrable shields! The very thing the Venusborn used to hold the Galliants at bay.
The idea took root in his mind, and blossomed. He could just seal them all out. The invaders could not touch the Wards, if they could not reach them. He pictured all the young with smiling faces again. The stern serious faces of the Agents, gone just as easily. Most of all, Clover could stop worrying about all those babies sleeping in their cribs. More than that, he pictured the giants pounding on the shields- foiled for sure.
That is– before he realized, he didn’t actually have impenetrable shields.
His research shifted from ‘Histories of the Galliants of Mars’- to trying to figure out how to acquire the shields; to build them. It was all incredibly frustrating. Clover couldn’t tell heads from tales, blue prints and endless lists of endless devices, all with their own instructions. Some of it, in languages he had never seen!
Fact was, Ergos was behind all their technology- designed by the Great Mind- and built by droids.
Ergos was still absent and the Wards didn’t know how to issue orders to the Droids. Droids just went about their tasks, just as they did every day, Ergos or no.
All those smiling faces faded from Clover’s mind, and the angry giants in his mind marched through Hearth, taking their food- or whatever it was they were after.
Clover was at a loss, again. His plan, put simply, was not practical in the least.
His time in the library, was how he spent his nights- the day, he still spent trying assuage the other Wards worries. Trying to maintain order, of some grand design, that simply wasn’t there. Reports were endless, the invaders had branched out, throughout the city, as though they had free reign.
The Agents in their Scions were forced back, and locked out.
Tales of the monstrous metal monster, that scurried through the underbelly of the city spread throughout Hearth. The young were waking with nightmares, and the older had very few words to put them at ease.
Clover didn’t know what the monster was, or what it was doing crawling beneath them through the pipes and the waterworks, then back up over the towers, to the enemy’s headquarters.
Volunteers stepped forward to seek the monster out, try and figure out what it was, and what it was doing, while Clover returned to the library, to try and find a plan, preferably, not born of fantastic ideas…
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