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Please, please; hold your applause. 
I'd like to warn you all that this chapter is longer than Chapter 6. I don't think I dragged this chapter out too long, though; after all, there was an awful lot of material to include.
I'd like to warn you all that this chapter is longer than Chapter 6. I don't think I dragged this chapter out too long, though; after all, there was an awful lot of material to include.
- Spoiler:
- The Grand Creation
Chapter 8
Invidior was mad.
Osavus was a killer, and so he ran for retribution.
He climbed up a dune, over, and down the other side. There he stopped, welcoming the chance to catch his breath, and looked back. No being appeared over the rise of sand; no weapons glimmered in the midday sun.
Yes, Invidior was insane, all right, if he thought an escaped Osavus was no threat.
Osavus took deep breaths to calm himself down. Yet some unidentifiable emotion hovered over him, like a rain cloud. Why couldn’t he shake the feeling that here ended the easy part?
Ignoring the thought as best he could, he formed a picture in his mind: a large fence, metal, barred; a bunker-esque structure nearby a gate; far behind, a gigantic robot being that reached up to the sky.
The launch area. He had to get there. I must redeem myself.
A mental push—
A moment of disorientation and he found himself standing by the same gate he had called to mind. From a long ways away, in the Fire Tribe village, came the sounds of cheering and celebrating. It seemed the launch was already underway.
Desperation mounted.
He ran forward. The three guards positioned at the gate started, drawing blades on Osavus in obvious recognition. But they didn’t attack; perhaps it was the Great Being’s expression that stopped them: haunted, perhaps a bit frantic, but not guilty. Not entirely.
One of the guards, a familiar-looking young Fire Tribe Glatorian, opened his mouth—
“I know I’ve done wrong,” Osavus interrupted, “I know I should be arrested, but for the sake of the Great Beings, hurry — I know where Invidior is!”
The Fire Glatorian closed it.
“Go round the mountains,” continued the Great Being, the words flowing out of him like a river, grateful to be undammed, “and by the foot of the southernmost you’ll find the abandoned Magma Complex Invidior is hiding in.”
“Ackar?” asked the female Ice Glatorian.
The Fire Glatorian shook his head, his hand resting on his helmet in concentration, eyes staring hard at the ground. Finally he looked up and fixed Osavus with his best death-glare. “Rohkea,” he said, “you and Galintin go where Osavus says to — where was that, again, exactly—?”
“Abandoned Magma Complex, round the mountains, by the summit of the southernmost! Hurry, he might be getting—”
“Yeah, sure,” Ackar cut him off. “Go to that abandoned Magma Complex, Rohkea.”
“And you?”
Rohkea seemed to be one for asking questions. Ackar seemed to notice, too, because his bottom lip twitched a bit. “I’m gonna stay with him” — on him, his sword point came up from the ground to line up with Osavus’s heart — “seeing as we don’t know if we can trust him.”
The Great Being’s fists clenched. They still saw him as an enemy. But... he couldn’t say he hadn’t expected it. “Fine, whatever,” he said; “but hurry—!”
“We know.” Ackar glanced to Rohkea and Galintin, still standing there questioningly. “What’re you waiting for? Go!”
They complied, racing across the sands to where Osavus knew Sand Stalker mounts were held. A minute later they were riding toward the mountains in the distance, riding hard.
Ackar turned then to Osavus, grimacing like the very sight of the Great Being disgusted him. It probably did. Osavus couldn’t say he didn’t deserve that.
* * *
The incessant thud-thud of the Sand Stalker’s racing footsteps had already imprinted itself onto Rohkea’s subconscious; she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d be hearing it in her sleep for the next couple decades. Perhaps the next couple centuries.
The range was perhaps a kilometer and a half to the north of the Fire Tribe city. The Sand Stalkers were going maybe six, seven kilometers an hour, so they ought to reach the Magma Complex within the next ten minutes.
“It’s darned hot,” Galintin remarked, glancing up at the sun.
She nodded, but the movement was lost in her Sand Stalker’s bounding. The mountains loomed before them now; the southernmost was also the smallest, really no more than a very, very large rocky hill.
They veered south to go around the edge of the range. With forceful flicks of the reins, they urged their Sand Stalkers onward.
* * *
“I swear,” protested Osavus, “Invidior went crazy — I didn’t know what got into him... And I — I just fell apart. All those deaths I caused...”
The two stood behind the shadow of a rock, Ackar pinning Osavus against it with his glare. Ackar’s left hand was planted on the boulder, so he leaned casually beside Osavus; at least, it would have looked casual, save for the sword held threateningly in his right hand. Clearly the Fire Glatorian didn’t believe the Great Being’s story.
Osavus hadn’t been good at telling stories to begin with.
“Suuure.” Ackar’s blade twirled idly. “Of course you did. But” — and here he raised the blade so it caught the sun, as if he were appraising its craftsmanship — “it seems an awful lot like a typical sob story. A spur-of-the-moment decision to join the side of justice? Please.”
At that, something broke somewhere within Osavus’s mind. “Justice!? Glatorian, I may be a sinner, but the Elder? — he knows nothing about justice!”
A silence settled down then, silence tainted with fury. Osavus’s. At the Elder, at Invidior, at death — at himself.
Ackar’s mouth opened, began to form a rebuttal.
Silence seemed to shove his words back into his mouth. His throat muscles moved in protest, but he made no sound.
“See?” Osavus pressed. “You can’t even defend your employer!”
At this Ackar’s eyes lit up again (briefly, Osavus wondered when they had dimmed); as he pulled his hand from the rock and stood straight, his sword jerked upright in a clear threat; free from the rock’s shadow, it caught the sunlight, its sharp blade gleaming in sharp contrast to the darkness around Great Being and Glatorian.
“The Elder may not have the best morals,” he said. “But that doesn’t excuse you from killing so many.”
“I said—”
“I know you apologized!” Ackar cut him off, his own voice building in anger. “Can apologizing bring the dead back to life? No!”
His gaze fell, and Osavus realized now the full impact of his actions. They had not merely backfired on him. They had torn apart families, tortured the minds of others. Including, it seemed, the mind of the Fire Glatorian before him.
“And as long as life works that way” — Ackar’s eyes were smoldering now — “I won’t forgive you.”
“Sir! — Ackar!”
Another Glatorian was running to the two, another guard most likely; his eyes were wide, in either shock or fear, Osavus couldn’t tell which. Ackar turned to the guard and away from Osavus, as if the Great Being was a lost cause... which, Osavus reflected, he probably was.
“What in Bara Magna are you yelling about?”
“Um, sir — in the robot — Great Being—”
“Spit it out!” Ackar ordered.
The Glatorian guard swallowed and, with visible effort, said, “Invidior entered the robot.”
A split-second passed before Ackar’s face twisted in rage: average reaction time for a Glatorian.
Into the sky rose a series of oaths as, in the distance, an echoing voice boomed out of speakers, redoubling the crowd’s cheers.
“HOW?”
The other flinched. “Well, ah, he teleported inside the perimeter of the gate and got to the robot’s foot before he was stopped. I — sir, I warned him, but he, he just laughed and... I don’t know how he did it, suddenly we were on the ground and he was inside.” His report finished, a visible relief entered his expression.
Relief not evident in Ackar’s expression at all. Mutterings — probably more swears — rolled off his tongue. He looked up, to the building beside the gate. “Go back to your post,” said Ackar, and grabbed Osavus’s arm and pulled him around the rock and inside the bunker.
“Ah — Ackar,” said the Elder, turning from the window facing the robot. He was alone; probably, Osavus thought icily, because he didn’t want anyone around when he celebrated his cheap victory. “We’re about to launch our Grand Creation. I made the announcement a minute ago.”
The Grand Creation, he called it. Osavus gritted his teeth. More lies.
The Elder’s lip only curled a bit at the sight of Osavus. He said nothing, only shook his head in a sort of condescending pity, and turned back to Ackar. “Why did you—?”
Ackar didn’t just yell. He screamed.
“Invidior is in the robot! Cancel the launch or we’re all dead!”
* * *
“I wonder what Ackar’s doing back at the launch site,” Rohkea wondered aloud.
She and Galintin had come around the southernmost mountain and were now traversing its lower slope, looking for any signs of construction. Thus far there had been nothing except a few abandoned ruins of homes that were obviously not Magma Complexes. Rohkea suspected this was the site of a now-long-gone village, perhaps the former incarnation of the Fire Tribe’s village.
Galintin shrugged. “Probably something boring. Standing by during the ceremony or something like that. You know what they say about Great Beings: They’re brilliant as heck and just as self-absorbed.”
“I guess. Hey, what’s that?”
The Ice Glatorian pointed straight ahead of the two Glatorian, leveling her finger at an iron-gray building that sat perhaps fifty meters ahead, its dark walls helping it blend into the mountains’ shadows. Galintin nodded. “I bet that’s the place.”
In a minute they had ridden up, left their Sand Stalkers outside and entered through the building’s outer door. The inner door was locked. Galintin introduced it to a piece of technology called the Thornax launcher. He took point, leaping into the room and aiming his launcher around at the deep shadows. Behind him Rohkea, holding her sword before her like a talisman, flicked a switch.
The lights came on, illuminating a room empty of other beings. Unless they were invisible. Rohkea shuddered at the thought but nevertheless said to Galintin, “Looks like no one is home.”
“Then let’s get searching.” Placing his Thornax launcher back in its waist holster, Galintin ran to a circular table in the center of the room, slid into a chair, and began leafing through the papers there.
Rohkea looked around more carefully. There, she noted, were the large pipes that had at one point ferried magma through a village-wide heating system; and there was the control panel that had adjusted the lava’s flow. Some of the pipes, she noted, were partially disassembled. There were some half-finished jumbles of mechanical parts on a table nearby; perhaps those contained some of the missing pipe parts.
She glanced around more. On a table against the far wall were two computers. On an impulse she went to those, pressed the startup button on one, noticed the screen lit up after only several seconds as if someone had been on already.
“Let’s see what you were doing...” With her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, she clicked the onscreen button for recently-opened programs.
A schematics management program was on the list, at the very top.
Rohkea selected it.
“Galintin! Could you come over here?”
He was over in a few seconds, a couple papers grasped in his hands. “What is it?”
Rohkea pointed. “See for yourself.”
A series of bright white lines ran over a dark blue background, forming various details of what was surely a blueprint design for the Great Beings’ robot. And near the power source and several large rectangles was:
Artificial gravity generators run on same molecules the power source uses. Redirecting power to one generator would—
Impact.
Pain exploded through Rohkea’s skull. She slumped forward onto the desk.
Darkness.
* * *
It was some time before the Elder spoke.
“Invidior... he thinks he can stop the launch?”
Ackar nodded, furiously wondering why the Elder wasn’t more worried. “He tried to kill you, Elder, and in the robot he could very well do that!”
A thoughtful light entered the Elder’s eyes as he placed a finger underneath his lower lip, thinking.
“What’re you—!?”
“Shut up.”
The order was so sudden and so blunt that Ackar blinked twice, anger giving way to confusion. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” returned the Elder, his voice going icy. Shooting one last death-glare at Osavus, he looked out the window, ignoring Ackar entirely now.
Fury returned.
“What are you doing? We’re all going to die, Elder, and it’ll be your fault!”
“No. We won’t.” The Elder ran his fingers along the control board, tracing around buttons’ edges, like he was attempting to appease his impatience. Still he avoided Ackar’s and Osavus’s gazes. “You see, I know Invidior. He’s far too unstable for his own good. I bet his only plan is to bash as many buttons as possible, hoping something goes wrong.” He gestured to the control board before him. “Luckily, only I can give the robot direct orders.”
“And the power source?”
“He wasn’t around when we determined where to place the power source. Varonis wasn’t, either.”
“But didn’t Varonis have access to your databases? Couldn’t they have—”
“Ackar, I told you to shut up.” The Elder’s voice carried an annoyed edge. Finally: a reaction from the filthy scarabax. It pleased Ackar somehow that he had touched a nerve. “The Agori and Glatorian outside are waiting for us to launch. We told them we would. A delay would weaken their impression of us.”
“So would an explosion.”
“Even so they would know us as determined. I’ll launch that robot even with you two inside. Now get out.”
“Elder,” growled Ackar, moving toward the exit, finally allowing his rage to take control, “you’re as blind as a Sand Bat. I will get you back for this. You can freaking count on it.”
Suddenly he was stumbling backwards, pushed by some unseen hand. He fell out — Osavus fell to the sands behind him — the door slid shut before them.
That was that.
“C’mon,” said Ackar, grabbing Osavus and bodily hauling him up. “Let’s go.”
Osavus opened his mouth to ask a question. Then his gaze darted to the robot, and the supports beginning to fall away in preparation for the launch. The cheers continued. Another announcement echoed in the distance. Both beings recognized it as belonging to the Elder. Protasious. Also known as That Power-Hungry Scarabax.
Osavus’s mouth closed.
* * *
Into the access door on the robot’s sole, up the curving floor, and straight ahead. Osavus shouted directions. Ackar followed them without thinking. The rumbling was getting louder; that was on Ackar’s mind, the idea that the robot might fly into space with him still inside. The idea of being cut off from Spherus Magna, his home... it scared him more than he would admit.
That is, if he had time, which he didn’t, and thus with an effort he yanked his focus to running. One foot in front of the other. One quick step — more a leap for Ackar — at a time.
“Right!”
Ackar missed the door. Behind him Osavus grabbed it and pulled him back, nearly tearing the Fire Glatorian’s arm from its socket. The Great Being yanked open the door and they were through, running underneath the bright yellow lights. Tunnel vision set in. Ackar’s lungs strained for air.
Can’t stop now. Go, darn it!
“Left!” Osavus was in the lead now; he jabbed the keypad beside the door with such ferocity Ackar was surprised it wasn’t torn off the wall. The door slid open. They were through, into a dimmer hallway. Ahead Ackar could see a faint yellow light.
The two stumbled as a tremor shook the robot. A flashback: Ackar inside the control complex, the self-destruct timer counting down...
Focus! he roared at himself.
There was another door ahead, this one on the “floor” — except, it was already open. Ackar didn’t stop to think of what that meant.
Glatorian and Great Being clambered down the ladder and finally reached the light, entering a large room as they did so. There sat a ginormous cylinder, covered with pipes and bumps and recesses, a convoluted mesh of metal and circuitry. A humming sound emanated from the generator — for that was all it could be.
At its base stood Invidior.
He was fiddling with a control panel and didn’t see the two at first. Under cover of another tremor, this one exponentially larger than before, they ran forward.
Invidior saw them anyway.
He glanced back. Froze. The tension in the air was surely tangible: Ackar could feel it holding him back, like a veil, except more solid. Osavus’s hand slid off the Fire Glatorian’s shoulder. The Great Being didn’t seem to notice; he had eyes for one person and one person alone. And that one person stared back with just as much intensity.
A pause. The metal beneath Ackar’s feet shook uncomfortably. The Glatorian gritted his teeth.
Finally, Invidior spoke, loud enough for him to be heard above the ceaseless rumbling.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
That voice jolted Osavus into action. “You... you became a monster. You dragged me into this!”
“Your sense of justice always was stunted, Osavus.”
“I TRUSTED YOU!”
“You’re on the wrong side, Osavus!”
“I TRUSTED YOU AND YOU MADE ME INTO A KILLER!” Osavus’s fists clenched in pure anger. His eyes flashed like a million diamonds amidst flame. “I’LL KILL YOU!”
“You don’t have the guts—”
“YOU DON’T HAVE A BRAIN—”
It was so sudden Ackar nearly missed it. One moment Osavus was standing beside him; the next the Great Being was flying across the room toward Invidior, striking the large device in the center of the room, falling to the ground in a daze. Invidior grabbed Osavus around the neck with his right arm and lifted him to his feet. A glint of silver, scarily familiar, showed in front of Osavus’s neck.
A dagger.
Ackar started forward, only to be stopped by Invidior’s voice. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Ackar.”
Another tremor. Ackar’s lips compressed, but he stayed put. There was no telling what an insane Great Being would do when under stress.
Invidior nodded, a quick smile flashing across his features. “Excellent.” His eyes glinted a fiery orange in the light as he turned back to the control board, now hitting various buttons and dials and switches with only his left arm. A small screen above the board came to life. ACCEPT NEW PROGRAMMING? it asked.
Invidior hit a button.
INPUT PASSWORD.
His left hand’s fingers flew. Another quake — his hand slipped.
WRONG PASSWORD.
Grimacing in obvious anger he began pressing the series of buttons again. And stopped. Glancing back at Ackar, he moved his body between the Glatorian and the control board, as if carrying out an afterthought, before typing in the rest of the password.
The screen flashed. PASSWORD ACCEPTED. NEW PROGRAMMING INITIALIZING. The display faded to black, and Invidior turned back to Ackar, a little smile on his face. Every bit as insane as his actions.
An urge awakened somewhere within Ackar, an urge to run his blade through the insane scarabax. A pity he’d probably be dead before he got in range.
“I might as well tell you how you’re going to die,” Invidior remarked at length, circling round Ackar toward the exit. He stumbled as another tremor, the largest yet, rocked the room. Ackar nearly fell to his knees but managed to stay on his feet, sword pointed warningly at the Great Being.
Stalemate. “I’m sure it’s a nice story,” Ackar replied evenly, for that was all he could do: talk, figure out what Invidior’s plan was, why it made him seem so... happy.
“Oh, it is. You see, Varonis having access to the Great Beings’ central databases meant the world to me. He nicked some up-to-date schematics — well, up-to-date at the time, but they were recent enough. What the Elder didn’t know was that his gravity generator setup was obviously awry.”
“Obviously.”
“I see you understand technicalities.” Ackar didn’t, not really, but not replying would finish Invidior’s story faster. “Translating into layman’s terms is so frustrating sometimes, so I’ll give you the story in a nutshell. See, there are several independent gravity generators scattered throughout the robot — we’re in one of the gravity generator chambers now.” Another shake, another pause. “The generators attract gravitational particles using specially-shaped ionized molecules, accelerated through a series of chambers within the generator. Since acceleration equals gravity, gravitational particles come into play; and because of the ionized molecules’ special structures, the particles are captured in their centers.
“Those molecules are then sent through the robot to wherever they are needed. The catch is that these molecules are very unstable; if they aren’t kept in temperatures below minus three hundred degrees, their structures will collapse into unusable shapes. Coincidentally, the unusable structures are very reactive... as the control center’s explosion proved. As the robot’s power source proves, for these molecules are also used as an energy source.”
“Get on with it,” Ackar growled.
Invidior was almost to the ladder that led to the door. But now he stopped. He wanted Ackar to know what he was doing, didn’t he? Was he that proud of it?
If the answer to both questions was yes, then Ackar was right on the mark with his earlier observation: Invidior was insane.
“All I had to do,” the Great Being continued, “was adjust the alignment of one generator’s magnetic fields. Spinning the magnetic field would cause the gravitational force to spin, as well. Such an unstable arrangement of gravitational fields would crumple the robot, which would damage circuitry, which would bring the power source’s molecules to a temperature most certainly above minus three hundred degrees. And — well, I’m sure you get the picture.”
Another rumble came; but this time it was accompanied by a sudden humming of the gravitational generator. Invidior’s grin widened. Ackar swore to whatever gods existed, plus a few who didn’t, just in case.
“I’d love to stay and chat, but” — he dumped Osavus roughly on the floor and flew up the ladder like a bird — “I’d rather appreciate not dying!”
The last word was shouted as Invidior disappeared through the doorway. Ackar yelled in rage and ran across the room, through the background rumbling and the increasingly large tremors, to the ladder—
—and something grabbed his leg.
He spun, instinctively swinging his sword. Osavus jerked his hand away from Ackar’s leg; not quickly enough, for a deep cut was torn in the Great Being’s upper right arm, near the shoulder. A glint of red shone from the recess.
“Get away from me,” Ackar said.
Osavus shook his head, not in reply to Ackar, but in thought. “I think... I think I can stop the destruction,” he said.
“...What?”
“I said I think—”
“I know! But how?”
Osavus glanced to the control board, slowly making his way to his feet. Uneasily Ackar noticed the ladder didn’t seem so hard to hang onto any more, and the floor seemed to be tilting, slowly but steadily.
“If I can draw power to the generator,” he said slowly, as if unsure, “I could increase the magnetic fields here and weaken those elsewhere. If I draw most of the gravitational force here, it’ll cause warping but not as serious as otherwise. And there’s a slight chance I could overload the system and thus shut it down.”
The Great Being’s reasoning seemed solid; at least, as solid as reasoning could be within a shaking room, with death surely imminent. Ackar opened his mouth to warn Osavus he probably wouldn’t make it out, realized he hated the Great Being, anyway, closed it again and nodded.
“Right.” He hesitated; pushed out, “And good luck,” with an effort; and continued up the ladder.
By the time he was out the floor was tilting at least ten degrees. It’s downhill from here, he thought, running down the hallway.
Right at the intersection, left at another, through a mazelike series of hallways into the foot. Every step Ackar took felt like his last; every beat of his heart resounded in his ears like a drum, every bit as loud as the robot’s quaking; every stumble felt like a message from Death: I want you.
Then — light! Up ahead.
The Fire Glatorian raced toward it.
There was a rumbling—
The floor tilted.
Ackar slid.
In the wrong direction.
No!
He clawed at the unyielding metal, but in vain. There were no handholds. No resting places for his feet.
This was it; this was surely death, if not now then later, in space, alone—
The floor abruptly tilted in the opposite direction. Ackar was flung headfirst round a bend, shooting out from a blur of silver into a bright world of gold and blue—
He hit the sand.
And thanked the gods as he ran the blazes away from the newly-activated robot.
* * *
The Elder was standing right where Ackar had left him: at the window, staring out at the robot like that was all his life depended on. He didn’t look away as Ackar came in; after all, was a living, breathing Glatorian more important than his ego?
“Hello,” said Ackar.
Surprisingly, the Elder turned toward the Fire Glatorian’s voice.
Ackar took an involuntary step back.
The Elder’s face was contorted in pure rage.
“What is this!?” he sputtered, waving a hand at the window.
Looking at the robot from far away was far more comfortable than looking at it from directly below. So Ackar looked. He blanched.
The robot was dying.
Not in the way a Glatorian or Agori would die. The robot was still walking, moving, testing its capabilities; it was “alive” in that respect. But its upper right leg was oddly warped, cracks appearing around it as high as the robot’s midsection; and as Ackar watched, energy began pouring out of the robot, burning a brilliant golden-white, brighter even than the sun.
The Fire Glatorian looked away lest he be blinded. The Elder stared at the spectacle in silent shock... or was that twisted expression the Elder’s version of awe?
Either way, Ackar had an opening.
He dove for the control board, his hand reaching out for the button that he knew would activate the comm. Froze mid-leap. Strained. He had no headway on the Elder’s mind-grip.
“No,” whispered the Elder. “This was your fault. And you will share in the punishment.”
Ackar shouted a very nasty name. The Elder laughed in reply. “What do you, a mere Glatorian, expect to do? Take down the Great Beings? By our very name we are deemed invincible! We are creators! — gods! — in the eyes of our inferiors! And if you seek to take away that status—”
In midsentence Ackar spun, let the Elder’s mind-grip pull him backwards, swung his sword at the Elder. There was a flash of silver. The cut in the Elder’s midsection bled profusely.
The power-crazy Great Being never saw it coming. Ackar certainly hadn’t.
There was a thump as the Elder hit the floor, still awake but surely in horrible pain. His arms were wrapped around his abdomen; he rolled side to side, eyes closed in agony.
Ackar felt no remorse. The Elder deserved it.
The Fire Glatorian leapt for the comm button, struck it with all his might, and yelled in the same fashion:
“THE ROBOT’S GOING TO EXPLODE! RUN!”
* * *
And the crowd heard, and saw the robot self-destructing, and panicked. Some ran, screaming at the tops of their lungs like that would do them good. Others stayed put, yelling obscenities at the Great Beings and their crazy experiments. Still others stood and stared, unable to comprehend the awesome sight that greeted their eyes.
A flash.
The upper right leg’s gravity generator was torn apart by the metal warping around it. The molecules within flew outwards, colliding with the air, interacting violently. It was a slow-motion explosion, steadily being renewed even as it died down. Several onlookers fell to their knees, yelling about their eyes, so bright was the glow. The sun, still burning freely, unhindered by clouds, went unnoticed.
A crash.
With the gravity generator gone, the delicate balance of forces on the gigantic robot’s body fell apart. Explosions rocked its exterior and interior alike. The power weakened; Spherus Magna’s gravity took charge, pulling the robot down.
Yet the mechanoid’s motors and pistons, designed painstakingly after years and years of blueprinting, experimentation, and redesigning, held it upright. It would not — could not — go down without a fight.
A bang.
Not just a small bang; one that deafened everyone within the surrounding mile, leaving their ears ringing painfully as they wondered where the Great Beings were and if they could stop the horror. Metal was flung into the air, coming up far short of the Fire Tribe’s village but jolting the remaining onlookers into action all the same.
Their homes forgotten, they ran.
The first gravity generator had gone. The robot was in its death throes, convulsing within the push and pull of gravity gone awry.
Yet this was merely the beginning.
