By David C. Daoust
Things just would not go Noreen’s way!
No sooner had her droids come within reach of the Ion Device, than the massive blue bot began crushing them from behind.
At one point she heard the bot suddenly exclaim: “Now this is more like it! No flying away!”
One after the other, the bot had managed to dismantle more of her droids than Noreen had lost in the past ten years. She knew how long, because the information popped up almost immediately as her other systems began running resource analysis on what it would take to replace them. Stations on the other side of the solar system suddenly sprang to life to begin rebuilding the lost models this bot had smashed to bits in its mysteriously-motivated attempt to halt Noreen’s plans.
All the while Noreen, helplessly outmatched, and with nothing to compete against the super dense colossus that her small army of droids now faced, could only compile losses as the system-feeds from each of her droids suddenly went black. Some of these models were seriously old. Noreen could not believe the losses she was taking.
She had one pair of hands working on the device itself.
She was not trying to dismantle it.
Only delay it.
Noreen was familiar with this class of Battle Drone. They were built to handle this kind of attack, whilst the initial wave of ion would effectively shut the mechanized weapons down, by forcing the battery charges to expel, as long as they had access to solar power, they would almost immediately spring back to life, which meant the Ion Cloud needed to be fired as the Solar Farm, which brought sunlight to the entire Neo Vir’ees system, passed behind the gas giant itself. A time of day called Black Noon by those that lived on Twin Crown. Or, you know, at night, though that was a much longer delay.
What Noreen was not familiar with… was the software the good doctor had used to run the device, which meant she was hopelessly scanning through without a clear notion on whether or not she was going to be able to access how the device triggered. It looked to Noreen that it was to be triggered from afar, rather than on a timer, which meant she only need block the signal until she wanted it to fire, which sent a second droid to working atop the device to find where exactly it communicated from.
She had to assume that the device would trigger as soon as the Barracks ship made it fully into orbit. Her eyes above, satellites and port stations that pocked the system, gave her about three more minutes, though the droids at her back, that were helplessly throwing themselves in front of the rampaging Bot, gave her far less time, until the Bot got its hands on the droids doing the actual work on the device.
Noreen, while working through software in one droid, searching the top of the hardware with another, sacrificing body after body to the bot, fighting off drones and protecting the humans of Grady in the distance, all the while still performing menial jobs throughout the Onion, suddenly had the notion to try and make it to the top of the walls, and man the abandoned turrets above. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Sometimes, she thought, maybe she was slow.
The small squad of droids suddenly parted from the main group contending with the bot. Noreen made short work of the wall and managed to spin the turret around. The bot though, seemed to catch on, as all the droids around, suddenly got as far from it as possible. It spotted the squad manning the turrets just as the blasts began pounding the ground around it. Blasts it dodged and weaved.
Noreen was not, apparently, a very good shot, though she felt the pressure come off as the bot was distracted. A distraction that bought her the time she needed to figure out a way to delay the Ion Device before the barracks reached orbit. Though that feeling did not last long, as lights around the device suddenly began flashing, signaling that it was about to fire.
“What?” Noreen questioned aloud with her tiny electronic voice, so shocked she inadvertently said it from more than one droids’ mouth, including one that was currently sweeping up an emptied cargo ship, two systems away!
The cloud fired a massive blossom of blue ionized air, the charge visible as tiny lightning bolts flickering through its mass, as it expanded it knocked her droids working on the device on their ass, and then swept past the rampaging bot, which fell lifeless to the ground. As the cloud continued to envelop the entire devastated town, the Battle Drones in which she was able to witness from her droids outside of the current perimeter of the cloud, fell lifeless as well. Droid after droid she lost contact until all she had left were her eyes above, amongst the stations and satellites that were as much a part of her as the droids that had been shutdown below.
Noreen pined for a way back down to the surface.
The doctor had not waited for the barracks ship to reach orbit, considering they were out of atmo in less than three minutes, apparently gaining orbit five minutes later was a bit generous of a guess Noreen had made for the good Doctor to wait.
All of which left Noreen with only one option…
<<Author’s note: Lesson learned! Don’t include celestial bodies in plot events! (Unless of course they take thousands of years to come to pass) Black Noon was something I threw in on page 2 of the original pages, it was described as when the planet passed between the sun and ‘Twin Crown’ (the moon they’re on). Thus blocking out the sun, which happened every day around noon. All of which sounded good as a tiny blurb at the time imo, but then I really wanted to work it in as a major plot device in the story. In fact this idea spawned most of the direction the story took. Though trying to make it work led to more and more problems! ( I mean these people don’t even know about earth anymore, so what is their time based on?It takes Jupiter 11.86 ‘earth years’ to orbit our sun. It takes Ganymede seven ‘earth days’ to orbit Jupiter! A year would be different for every planet! With separate satellites which would even decide a month? Who cares! Fudge it I say,setting up a fictional ‘time’ would be boring to read about.) Though anyway as the planet got placed further and further in the solar system, mainly due to my changing it from the standard generic colonized galaxy with many different stars, to just the one solar system, so the ‘Second Sun’ thing could work, the sun became less and less viable as something to contend with, since it is basically a speck in the distance; This ultimately helped in coming up with the wormhole-solar farm idea though. Now I could have gone either way, because most people don’t really know, or would even care, if something is not scientifically possible in a story. And considering its called science-fiction, it is pretty much dealers choice on which parts are science and which parts are fiction. (Most of mine is ALL fiction, baby!) But anyway, once I had established so much in one direction, I needed the solar farm to be linked to black noon. Now, in truth, this is probably even tougher to make a daily eclipse, but whatever, I’m a fantasy writer damnit, not a scientist! SO to the note: page two, paragraph one, will probably have to be changed, but not today. Not today. (I kind of liked that paragraph too!) Ty, DD>>
