Page 163 of Dustwalker

Newton touched her arm as he came up beside her. “We must go, Lara.”

Swallowing thickly, she nodded and called out to the crowd. “The fight just started, and the choice is yours. Will you battle for your freedom, or will you die in the dirt under Warlord’s boot?”

CHAPTER FIFTY

The lights of Cheyenne, which were so out of place in the pitch-black wasteland that had once been Wyoming, illuminated a swath of the overcast night sky. Ronin recognized the truth of the town now. Cheyenne wasn’t a beacon of hope and security, but a monument to Warlord’s power and prejudice. Its light was visible from kilometers around, projecting a challenge—I have what you do not. Try to take it from me so I may destroy you and claim what was yours, too.

Outwardly, it was an imposing fortress, a stronghold no one could stand against. Ronin had single-handedly ended scores of reavers out in the Dust. Surely Warlord’s gearheads should’ve been able to repel even greater numbers from so defensible a position.

Yet despite its imposing appearance, Warlord’s wall was ineffective. Alpha Team, led by Ronin and Sergeant Maul, had crossed the nothingness between the base and Cheyenne and walked directly into the wall’s shadow unopposed. The irregularly placed guard towers on the north wall were empty. Ronin couldn’t know whether it was arrogance or incompetence that drove Warlord to leave security so lax, but it didn’t matter.

If everything went as planned, all the gearheads would be drawn out soon enough.

As Ronin stood beside Maul in the darkness beneath the wall, his optics strayed toward the southwest. Somewhere, just under two and a half kilometers away, Lara and Bravo Team were arriving on theoutskirts of the slums. Though Alpha Team was larger, Captain Cooper and some of his most experienced soldiers accompanied her.

That didn’t assuage Ronin’s fear of losing Lara.

“Time to get our sorry asses over this wall,” Maul said, slinging his rifle across his back. His was amongst the first faces Ronin had seen after arriving at the base. The sergeant had been one of the soldiers who’d escorted Ronin and Newton inside.

The other bots, Ronin included, stowed their weapons and stepped up to the wall. The human soldiers formed a perimeter, some of them equipped with old night vision goggles.

“Land gracefully, boys,” one of the humans whispered. A quiet snicker spread through the team.

“Break a leg, fellas,” a bot replied.

“Shut up.” Maul swept his optics over the group until they were silent. “I’m not in the mood for any new ventilation ports.” Turning back to the wall, he directed one of the synths to boost him up. Most of the bots could jump high enough to haul themselves over the ten-foot-tall barrier, but doing so would’ve been too noisy.

The last time Ronin crossed the wall, he’d been running. He thought he’d known true fear that day, had thought his concern for Lara had reached its peak, but the panic of their flight seemed so insignificant compared to what they’d faced afterward. Her death had always been a possibility, but he’d never acknowledged it. Not really.

Before they left Cheyenne, he’d promised to keep her safe, fully confident in his ability to do so. It had only taken a few days to fail.

With the assistance of another bot, Ronin pulled himself up onto the wall, passing out of the shadows and into the artificial light. The clinic loomed ahead, only made darker by the inadequate glows of the streetlamps on the nearby roads. The surrounding land was covered in neatly cropped grass. A line of fir trees separated the grounds from the rest of the bot district, though slivers of the houses beyond were visible through the boughs.

He swung his gaze southwest again, longing for even a glimpse of the ramshackle settlement beyond the wall. If he ran, he could reach Lara in minutes, could hold her and know she was safe.

Instead, he picked his way down through the bent lengths of steel, splintered boards, and cracked chunks of concrete protruding from the wall’s inner face. Perhaps it was meant as much to keep people in as it was to keep them out.

Ronin swung his rifle into his hands, still unaccustomed to the unfamiliar weapon’s feel, and joined the soldiers who’d already crossed the wall. They knelt along the rear of the clinic, expanding their perimeter as more men trickled over.

Within two minutes, the entirety of Alpha Team was crouched in the grass beside the building.

“Place is quiet,” someone remarked.

“Shh. Listen.”

The wind sighed through the trees and grass, and, farther away, howled over the vast, indifferent Dust. Closer, the clinic’s electric lights hummed. Nearly lost amidst those sounds were two distinct voices engaged in conversation. Ronin’s audio receptors isolated them, picking the words out from the background noise.

“My processors keep going around in circles. Going to wind up with a critical error at some point,” said the first.

Ronin recognized it as Reg, the synth who normally guarded the east road.

“I don’t understand why,” replied the other, voice crackling faintly with static that had nothing to do with the wind. “We’ve seen people come in from the Dust. Logic dictates that there are more settlements out there.”

“Logic dictates that even this place shouldn’t exist.”

“That logic is flawed. Have you run diagnostics lately? Your data might be corrupted.”

“That’s the whole problem. Logic dictates this place should not exist, yet here it is. If it’s here, there must be other places. But none of those places should exist, either. It’s going to fry my damned CPU if I don’t break the logic chain.”