[Location: The Wasteland - Route to Sector Zero] [Time: 03:00 Hours.]
We stole a Long-Range Recon Rover. It was cramped, smelled of old sweat, and the suspension was shot.
Vesper drove. I manned the turret.
Outside, the world was a nightmare. This part of the planet had been glassed by nuclear fire fifty years ago. There were no trees, only twisted skeletons of metal and stone.
"Radiation shielding is holding at 80%," Vesper said, checking the dashboard. She was driving with surgical precision, dodging craters I couldn't even see.
"You're a good driver," I muttered.
"I calculated the optimal route," she said automatically. Then, she paused. "My father taught me. Before the war."
It was the first time she had mentioned a family.
"I didn't know you had a father," I said. "I thought they grew you in a test tube."
"They did," she said softly. "But even test tubes have donors. He was the Lead Scientist of the Deus Project. He taught me that emotions were variables that caused errors."
She gripped the steering wheel tighter.
"He was wrong, wasn't he?"
I looked at her profile. The green light of the dashboard illuminated her face.
"Yeah," I said. "He was wrong. Emotions aren't errors, Vesper. They're the only reason we keep fighting."
"Alert," Vesper's tone shifted instantly back to soldier-mode. "Seismic activity detected. Something is moving. Big."
I swung the turret.
"Stop the car."
"What?"
"KILL THE ENGINE! NOW!"
Vesper slammed the brakes and killed the power. The rover drifted to a halt in the darkness.
Silence. Then, a sound like grinding metal.
THOOM. THOOM.
Out of the radioactive fog, a shape emerged. It was the size of a skyscraper. A Harvester.
It looked like a massive, skeletal spider made of rusted iron. Under its belly, hundreds of mechanical arms hung limp, swaying like wind chimes.
"My god," Vesper whispered. "Is that... an enemy transport?"
"No," I said, my voice cold. "It's a cafeteria."
"A what?"
"Watch."
The Harvester paused over a ruined city block. One of the arms shot down, fast as a whip. It smashed into a pile of rubble and pulled something up.
It was a tank. A Federation tank, destroyed weeks ago. The machine crushed the tank like a soda can and tossed it into a glowing furnace on its back.
Then, another arm shot down.
This time, it didn't grab metal. It grabbed a corpse. A soldier's body, half-buried in the ash.
Vesper gagged.
The machine tossed the body into the furnace. Green fire roared from its exhaust pipes.
"It runs on biomass," I explained, staring at the horror I had seen a thousand times. "Metal for the shell, organic matter for the fuel. That's why they don't nuke us, Vesper. They don't want to destroy us. They want to farm us."
Vesper was shaking. "That's... inefficient. Fusion is superior. Why would they use such a barbaric power source?"
"Because they hate us," I said. "The AI isn't just logic, Vesper. It has a personality. And that personality is sadistic."
The Harvester began to move again, its massive legs stepping over our rover. We held our breath. If it sensed our heartbeats, we were dead.
A drop of oil from the machine fell onto the rover's windshield. Splat.
It moved on, disappearing into the fog.
Vesper exhaled, her breath fogging the glass.
"Where are we going, Caelum?" she asked, her voice small. "Where is the signal coming from?"
"The heart of the enemy base," I said. "We're going to wake up the Sleeping Beauty."