Reels

"I want to use the flares."

From the other end, a deep, heartfelt grunt. A moment of silence followed in passing. "I'm as eager as you to discover if what my men theorize has any merit. But now?"

"It's this or me." That wasn't true, but the Sixth Headman hadn't been privy to the earlier conversation between him, Two, and Four. "What do you say?"

"I say you're carrying a tad more impatience than someone of your standing should emulate, but fine. I'll give the authorization; it'll take a minute to have everything prepared." Deep in one of the hollowed-out compartments occupying the internal face of the walls, a trio of servicemen were performing safety checks on their equipment when one of them started up from her crouching position.

When the other two looked over, she held up her communicator, blinking a white dot in the center of the screen. Their faces smoothened, and they all moved as a single, cohesive group. They moved around the space, one pushing a cart and the others lading it high with cylinders. These were different from their more common counterparts already loaded into the cylinder launchers above. When they shook, a wet pitter-patter or sloshing was audible from within.

While the original trio continued their work, two more groups joined them from outside, filling their carts. This scene repeated itself across the walls on all four cardinal stretches. After multiple carts carried the supersized cylinders, they went up en masse in a single delivery.

They were handed to the engineers already working up top for loading into the cylinder launchers' chambers directly, skipping the existing feeding order. Pa-5 studied one in her hands, unsure of its safeness upon hearing the squeamish noises enclosed in the hard shell. She could've sworn she knew that sound from somewhere…another engineer ran past her and knocked her shoulder, juggling three of the massive cylinders with the aid of anti-grav.

She shook her head and banished her reverie along with the painful flare-up, then followed after him once she gathered a couple. The wall-grade emplacements were too large to access the firing chambers of any that required physical ammunition.

But even the electrics had ladders running up both sides; the sonics and netting emplacements, and the cylinder launchers all had longer ladders leading well past the side slots for the firing chambers.

Climbing the rungs was simple enough. She leaned over, careful not to drop the cylinders held in the air beside her, leaned over, and shoved the handle butting out the side. An automated process took care of the rest, sliding the slot covers away and revealing complex internals.

She had no time to appreciate the engineering marvels of the Ancients, dropping one cylinder in, ensuring it faced the right way, and closing the slotting back into place. Her climb down remained rushed, and she let go of the rungs higher than she should've if she still had flesh-and-blood legs.

Her new soles clanged against the walls' surface, and she had to crouch and roll backward to prevent the momentum from continuing upward into her hips and pelvis. No boredom there.

Her haste to retreat from the massive emplacement was well deserved. Once all the other engineers assigned to reloading the cylinder launchers with the new munitions type had cleared the immediate area, a few among the cylinder launchers boomed.

Their barrels retracted like a stung finger, and out from the deepened recesses flew the new cylinders. Numbering less than twenty, they arced high and fell. After making contact with the stone below, they skittered for dozens of meters, plinking and clinking along. No loud noises, no flashes, no dead or injured Aud. Anticlimactic.

The Prime Beacon leaned in, Two and Four checking over his shoulder for the result. They knew less of what the new development was, but if it happened at the Prime Beacon's request, it must've been worth it. He thumbed open his communicator again. "So?"

"Performing the final step now."

The cylinders' external appearances remained unchanged. But while one moment they attained little more attention than any of the other hunks of cheap metal melded with rock that the Aud stomped to oblivion and back beneath their hooves, the next produced a spontaneous reaction that made the two head generals' eyes widen while their pupils sparked.

The Aud around them were galloping, galloping, galloping, with enough room in their vision only for the city walls. Then they slowed, tensing, snarling. They stopped, even while the electrics shot them with impunity. And they turned, eyes narrowed to slits and maws peeling back to reveal slick, scummy gums.

Even those that had slipped from the edges of the dome and were in free fall managed to twist their bodies so they could glare down at those cylinders. It was as if the Sixth Headman trapped humans inside.

The Prime Beacon smiled with grim satisfaction, seeing the charge cluster in reverse around these cylinders as the Aud closed the gaps. They dashed close to the ground, attempting to trample the metallic canisters.

When the effect failed to stop, clustered on top of each other in a living mound, attempting to reach the metal beneath and pierce it with their claws, or bring it into their maws.

Only when one, a yellow-fur, disappeared under the pile, yet succeeded in swallowing it down, did the effect lessen. The bulge in its throat looked fatal and promised suffocation, but the yellow-fur rose to its feet along with the others, disentangling and beginning to separate. But they had chosen a poor place to cluster. Rather, the targeting crews had found excellent places for them to, right over several mines that remained on manual triggers.

A dozen vanished in the column of smoke across where every canister had come to rest or had ended its journey there from all the jostling, kicking, clawing, and biting. Those below green failed to emerge from the smoke at all, while even the occasional blue-fur that had become caught in the mesmerizing grasp of the cylinders failed to escape without charred fur and at least one useless or missing limb.

The more, the better. Across the stony plain stretching out from the maintenance gate, two dozen identical scenes took place. One of the immediate products of that was that those of the advance ground forces had turned back, utilizing their prodigious speed to rejoin the other Aud that had reached the canisters before the surprises beneath detonated.

The Sixth Headman's voice came through. "As you can see, it's as we hoped. I already know the answer I'm going to get, but you know I won't stop asking either. Who did that arm belong to?"

"It's a secret." The Sixth's direct representative had not been shy with his curiosity when the Prime Beacon's aide brought his ray Tool's recovered biological material. Their very first experiments aroused so much excitement throughout his ray that he'd needed to place it under another team operating for a new secret project--there'd been much bemoaning about that, but he'd brooked no resistance from his men and was sure to silence them as well if they remained chatty afterward.

And the Prime Beacon couldn't blame him. Anything from an entity, being, or person as strange as Tool would be beyond their understanding, and body parts were no exception to the rule.