Ponder This World

The order of the Titans was random, little more than a first-come-first-to-go format. After the Dervish of Palm came the Ephemeral Palisade, a stocky, lumbering behemoth of scutumsteel. Smooth and contoured in every place, the previous Titan had been rigid and pointed, but this one looked like a collection of smoothed pebbles drilled into each other, from the torso to the limbs.

Its trio of glowing eyes launched beans against the maintenance gate as the Ephemeral Palisade waited for the gate to finish opening. More than three times the width of the Dervish, there was no way it would've squeezed through the opening as it were.

Part of the blame for that lay in its shoulders, which were by far the heaviest and thickest part of the entire construct. The Titan's main weapons system resided within them, and only in fiction did Titan-grade generators require a small space to reside. He traced the outline of the Titan's silhouette with a finger, noting each difference between it and the heads of those still behind it.

"Are they that interesting?" Eighth Headman's voice piped up by his shoulder. The twitch of his eye betrayed his surprise, though he had gotten better at masking his responses to her ambushes.

Her last attempt failed only because Ni-6 had been there to warn him. Where did the women get off on being so horrible to him? He had feelings too! She moved into his periphery. "This must be the thousandth time you've laid eyes on them."

"More interesting than you," he jabbed. She shrugged.

"It's true. Most of my exoticism is within. Outside, I'm as ordinary as they come."

"Is that what your medical staff said?"

"No, they were far more frustrated than you." She bit back a string of laughter. "You should have seen how red in the face my surgeon was when the anesthetics never kicked in after several overdoses. She told me she filled my bloodstream with enough to kill a normal human!"

He scratched the nape of his neck. "Is there something humorous there I'm missing, or are you finding merriment with nonsense again?"

"I'm guessing you wouldn't know funny if it danced naked in front of your eyes."

"I didn't need that image."

"And yet you now have it. You're welcome. For this, too." She grabbed one of his hands and shoved a mug into it before he could withdraw.

The nearest lighting was too dim to determine the color, and the various scents of the walls overpowered his nostrils to the point where he couldn't catch any aroma. Scutumsteel, plasteel, sweat, ozone. He raised an eyebrow.

"Drink it. If I wanted to deliver unto your bowels a terrific experience, there'd be more convenient ways and better times for it."

"Thanks for that," he muttered with bitterness, bringing the mug to his lips. "Water?"

Her teeth flashed as she lifted her own mug. "Water."

"What's the occasion? You have a greater addiction to syrup than even I."

"There's no better time to change routine than the end of the world!"

"There is no end of the world. We don't even know what the surface looks like." She scoffed, and with practiced decorum, he ignored her bout of playfulness. "And there's bound to have been plenty of species that went extinct before us. Now, it may be our turn. No greater significance than that, as far as I know."

She slipped down and dropped her legs off the edge of the wall, allowing them to dangle unsuspended. He joined her after a second, sure to place himself a few centimeters further back. For comfort's sake. "So, you don't mind it?"

"Of course I mind it." The directness of her inquiry troubled him. Such behavior remained very unlike her. "I'm not one to wish for the end of the human race. You know that. This is only the objective viewpoint of things."

"What a boring man you are. 'Objective'. I know objectivity isn't the only mode of thought you rely upon, but sometimes you do make me wonder."

"Feel free to wonder." He drowned his next words in a pull of water. She didn't need to hear them yet.

They traded no further words, electing to instead observe the rest of the Titans pass through the maintenance gate. No matter whether they were tall, taller, or scraping the top of the maintenance gate, or bipedal or quadrupedal, each of their steps launched tremors that traversed the ground and up the wall, reaching them shortly.

When the Anthill, marking the end of the line, disappeared under the wall's arch, their attention shifted to the activity on the walls themselves.

As per Ch-4's recommendation, additional infrastructure was being installed into the walls around the already present surface modules and machinery. Teams of engineers maneuvered suspended scaffolds staying afloat under the power of anti-grav modules to pre-marked locations and installed interfacing mounts.

They relied on magnetic forces to affix the turret bases, and it was quite convenient for the developments that scutumsteel was a strong, magnetic alloy.

Once they were stress-tested and the initial team moved on to the next marked location, a follow-up crew came in, and, by manipulating miniaturized anti-grav generators, carried the emplacements themselves into place. They were thicker, with obvious external bulges denoting where their munitions fed into the firing chambers.

Since the emplacements strapped to the vertical face of the walls, they remained isolated from the supply systems present on the top of the walls for the preexisting wall-grade turrets. After they exhausted their initial payloads, that would be their entire contribution for the first attack. If they survived, the expectation was that they would receive restocking and upward relocation.

Eighth Headman stretched beside him, her back arching and arms twisting behind her head. "Your head generals were busy while you were under the knife. Did your aide tell you anything?"

"Nothing specific, no. Why? Did they do something I should know about?"

"Yes, but not for the reasons you're thinking. I agree with their sentiments." She emptied the contents of her mug and let it dangle from a single finger over the edge. She waited until the scaffold beneath them had moved to another position, then let the handle slip from her fingertip.

It tumbled and tumbled, becoming smaller and smaller until it was little more than a dot, and then somehow less than that too. When its descent halted at the base of the walls, they couldn't hear the impact.

"They changed standard vernacular concerning the Aud. Since we're now operating under the assumption that the whole bunch of them, or at least elements of their ranks have reasoning and logic capabilities equal to our own, they think we should treat them as a human opponent. 'Hordes' have become 'armies', 'creatures' or 'beasts' have become 'soldiers', words like that. The rest of the militarists followed suit. Even the Ninth is going through their archives to relabel every incorrect instance."