Machines of Eden by Shad Callister Page A

over.
    The mist shifted, sinking
into the lower-lying parts of the landscape, and one of the gun
bots moved forward a few meters. Its scanners were the only live
system at the moment, but it would take mere milliseconds to bring
arms to bear.
    The long plant stalks with
the clusters at the top stood in orderly rows between the bot and a
tall fence, serenely oblivious to the impending conflict. Beneath
the soil, their shallow roots pressed against little plastic walls
that shielded them from the weapons buried within the earth.
Chain-mines ran between every few rows, set at random intervals.
Along the outside borders, pressure-sensitive gas canisters lay in
wait, ready to blow their tops and spew forth thick clouds at the
slightest footstep above.
    The mist curled, sank, and
rose, growing a little brighter each minute.
    A siren rang out on the
west side of the fields, against the trees. None of the bots on the
east side moved, trusting implicitly in their cohorts assigned to
the west. Two of the men with the dark visors ran to that side,
however, eager to get the first glimpse of the action. They were
not disappointed; the explosion of a small rocket shook the fencing
to the west, and some blind return fire from a long-range gun
emplacement, calculated along the estimated rocket trajectory, left
trails of smoke hanging in the trees.
    No one would still be
standing where the rocket had been launched from. They knew better
than that now. They also knew better than to attack from the
obvious direction. They knew better than to trust to cover to hide
themselves from the bots.
    On the east side, right at
the fence line, forty blurry shapes suddenly rose from the ground.
Covered in thick layers of black mud to hide their heat signatures,
fronds of vegetation planted all over themselves to break up their
outlines, the figures looked more like piles of swamp debris than
men. But men they had to be.
    They must have been
incredibly patient to steal up so painstakingly. Patient, and
practiced. These were the professionals, the advance party that
knew what they were doing. Later there would come howling mobs of
rabble, mindless legions bent on scrabbling and tearing what they
could with bare hands and sticks. But these had weapons, and a
plan.
    The bots opened fire,
supported by static emplacements behind them along the estate
border. They laid it on thick, unconcerned at the expenditure of
ammunition, content with their orders to spray death at anything
that moved, human or otherwise. The mud men blasted apart, flinging
gobs of themselves in all directions. The huge caliber rounds from
the emplacements even vaporized some.
    The firing stopped
precisely on cue when the last shape fell to the ground and broke
apart. One of the visored men, returning to the east line, felt
uneasy in his gut as he realized that the shapes had all gone down
without firing anything back at the bots. Surely they were the
advance party? How could anything else have hidden so close, right
under the surveillance units’ noses?
    A faint shrieking noise
came from overhead. The man ran for his life. The bots stood their
ground, unafraid. The rockets began raining down from the sky,
impacting with great orange globes of shrapnel-laced flame, frying
circuitry, melting joints and sensors, and blasting apart
carapaces. The ruse had worked perfectly against the predictable
bots and their masters, and the rockets had zeroed in flawlessly on
the movement and flashes of the bots’ gunfire.
    Several of the chain-mines,
too close to the explosions, triggered and unleashed destruction on
the innocent sorghum crop. As it all died down, the man with the
visored helmet poked his head out of a bunker to take a look. That
was when the true advance party appeared-- behind him. A bullet to
the back of the neck sent him tumbling back down his bunker hole,
and then the men were inside and all around, shutting down system,
switching off power grids, shorting out emplacements and