Warden 2 by Isaac Hooke

Author:Isaac Hooke [Hooke, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
Published: 2020-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

14

An hour went by without much fanfare.

In the first ten minutes of the second hour, the enemy scouts, moving from structure to structure, finally explored the parking garage, and after fifteen minutes of frenetic activity, with craft seemingly coming in from all sides of the ruined city, things calmed down.

Most of the drones landed on the rooftops immediately adjacent to the parking garage, and there kept watch; the remainder vanished inside the garage itself.

Will worked on reattaching her arm the whole time. It took him the full hour and required that he utilize his pistol as a makeshift soldering iron at certain points, but he succeeded. He was a skilled salvager after all, a man capable of reviving a near-death cyborg, rebooting her mind-machine interface, and installing a new body—so reattaching an arm with substandard equipment should have been nothing to him. And indeed, it was.

Some portions of the arm near the shoulder joint were still bent out of shape, and the key servomotors there had suffered some damage, so she couldn’t move it through the usual range of motion, but it sufficed for now. At least she had the X2-59 back. That was most important to her, strangely enough.

When Will finished working on her arm, he helped her don her camo top once more. The long sleeve slid over the limb, hiding the dents and scratches in the metal. She lowered her hood and gazed out into the street once more, waiting.

A half hour passed with no further observable activity at the parking garage.

“Wonder what they’re doing in there?” Chuck sent. He was seated on the south side of a small rooftop utility box, two meters from her gooseneck vent. While he could have easily spoken to her normally from that distance, he utilized the comm in order to keep his voice volume way down. Probably wasn’t necessary, but an over-abundance of caution was never a bad thing.

“Forensics,” Horatio transmitted from another vent beside her, this one rectangular.

“Maybe they’re trying to decide if we’ve been devoured or not,” Renaldo broadcast. He was lying against the wall that enclosed the rooftop itself, near the gap that gave a clear view of the parking garage.

“Oh, they’ve already concluded we’re dead, no doubt,” Will sent. He sat beneath a gooseneck vent directly across from Rhea. “They’re just staying to recover as much tech and materials as they can from the tankers. Anything to keep it out of the hands of us honest salvagers, after all. Because there certainly won’t be any water left. Not after those Tasins finished with the tanks.”

Will looked at her, as if expecting her to add to the conversation, but she ignored him, and instead returned her gaze to the gap in the wall, and the parking garage beyond.

She found her eyes involuntarily drifting toward the distant horizon. Toward Aradne. The city that had caused her so much grief. The city that had tried to extinguish an entire settlement. She doubted justice would ever come to those responsible. The city council.

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