Chapter Text
The Hunt Goes On
Prologue
If Copper-9 had been a dead world ever since its core had collapsed, the arrival of the Absolute Solver had made things even more inhospitable for most forms of organic life.
Debris that had been thrown out of the atmosphere was slowly pulled back down by the gravitational field, resulting it them either burning up in the atmosphere or crashing back down to the ground with destructive power akin to weapons of mass destruction. A network of canyons and deep crevices had been formed in the planet's crust, making an area the size of a small continent tectonically unstable and practically unusable for the worker drone population to build anything large. Earthquakes were still frequent in the area as loose material collapsed into itself or into the depths of the underground. And in its epicenter laid the place where it had all gone downhill for this planet.
There wasn't really much left of Cabin Fever. The Solver's arrival on Copper-9 had completely torn the place apart being at the epicenter right above where it had originally destroyed the planet's core. Yet somehow, some of the laboratory's structure had remained intact and survived both of these events. Even if buried beneath tons of debris and rock and multiple sections having collapsed entirely under its weight. One of the still intact sections had been an office area with many cubicles housing the standard set up of desks and computer with large and boxy monitors. Following the event that almost destroyed the planet as a whole though, most of this place was in a state of complete disrepair. Walls and ceiling had collapsed partially collapsed, leaving exposed wiring and concrete to hang down from it like vines. Most of the cubicle walls and desks had been broken and office chairs and computers shattered into little more than scrap metal and splintered wood.
On one side of the office was an adjacent room, previously having been hidden behind a sealed door and a wall, both of which having collapsed until then and formed a loose wall of debris between them. Inside the room was a makeshift operating room/laboratory of sorts, though now in ruins. Containers with broken drone body parts littered the ground alongside broken shelves and monitors. There were two metal bedframes in the room with leather straps to fix their previous occupants to their mattresses. The rooms were mostly pitch black with only very few lamps still slightly flickering due to the secret laboratory's generators that still somewhat provided power to some parts of the complex where the powerlines had not been destroyed. Other than that, the whole place was cast into darkness with the only light being occasional sparks from exposed wiring.
Then a sound reverberated through the lab and the office. A metallic noise of something pushing against something else again and again, coming from an oven that had been toppled over and now laid on the ground. The door shook slightly as something on the inside tried to make its way out, before it finally slammed open with a loud thud. Tumbling out came a horrible looking thing. A strange looking amalgamation of metal and flesh. The biomechanical core akin to a heart managed to right itself as it crawled out. Sparks of damaged circuitry flew from its body and one of its three bladed limbs was missing its foot, dragging behind itself as a sparking wire. In the center of its front, a single yellow eye light flickered on, before turning on fully. Turning back to the oven it had come out of, it could see the shattered remains of the jar it had been put in as well as other jars with more cores like itself tapping against the glass with their bladed limbs. These were the cores of disassembly drones. And up until now, the generators of this lab had provided power to these ovens which kept them inactive. But now that the temperatures had begun to cool down, they were stirring once more.
The core turned around once more, taking in the destruction around it as it carried itself over to the remains of a worker drone laying in the entryway of the room. Her body was mostly intact, though her head had been stomped on by a sentinel, shattering her visor and revealing the broken circuitry beneath. It regarded the body for a moment, before rolling its single eye. This one would not do or at least not for what it needed to do right now.
Turning around, it then crawled into the office space, dragging itself over concrete, broken wood and metal like an insect, when it heard a familiar and haunting noise. Turning towards the noise with a panicked expression on its eye, it spotted the source of the noise. One of the dromaeosaur-like anti-drone automatons known as sentinels, autonomous machines built in the image of dinosaurs like Utahraptor for the sole purpose of hunting down worker drones for their human masters. Though this particular sentinel was not in the best of conditions. It was still alive or as 'alive' as a robot could be, though only barely so. A large piece of rebar had pierced its body and now trapped it pinned against a wall of concrete. Furthermore, one of its arms was crushed beneath a block of concrete and the sides of the head were also buried under rubble, making The core's singular yellow eye narrowed at the sight of the mechanical dromaeosaur. Making its way over by dragging itself with hurried steps of its two remaining limbs, the core's presence was noticed by the sentinel, causing it to struggle even harder to free itself as if it knew what the core had in store for it. However, with one arm crushed, its body speared to the wall like some insect pinned down for a museum exhibition and its head trapped beneath blocks of concrete, it could do little more than struggle in vain to break free.
The core took note this and began to skitter towards the immobilized sentinel. Warnings flashed in its HUD, but there was little choice that it had. Instead of approaching the fallen sentinel directly, it climbed with some effort onto the fallen debris around it. Like a jumping spider sneaking up on its prey, the core carefully maneuvered itself into a position, so that the sentinel could not defend itself by swiping at it with its tail or crushing it beneath its talons. The creature struggled harder, shaking the concrete around it as if trying to throw the core off and towards its snapping jaws. The core merely glared at it as it assessed the best location to do its work.
The sentinel was not ideal, but it would do.
With that the core jumped at the midsection of the sentinel where the rebar had pierced its chassis. Lodging its claws into the weakened material, it began digging into it's body, making the sentinel howl and snarl in pain. The core merely turned off its audio receptors as it worked on widening the wound for it to access the insides of the anti-drone weapon.
For a while, the sentinel's cries of pain echoed through the empty and destroyed lab as the core did its work, growing more intense as time passed. The sounds of synthetic muscles being ripped apart and oil splattering mixed with the already agonised cries. And then it the cries stopped and there was only the wet noises of tearing through muscles and bones before all fell silent.
After a while, the sentinel's limp body was starting to struggle again, this time harder than ever. Its previously blue glowing eyes were deactivated as it now struggled with all its might against the debris that had trapped it. The sound of metal breaking and synthetic fibers ripping could be heard as the ruined limb was slowly coming off, while more and more dust fell down from the cracking concrete around it. With an outcry of pain, it finally tore itself off the piece of metal that had trapped it, ripping off its crushed arm in the process and smashing through the concrete that had its head trapped in place. In doing so, it lost its balance and crashed onto the ground, oil and other fluids from within the mechanical being oozed to the ground below before it began to move again.
Its movements were jerky and awkward, akin to the first attempts to stand of a newborn wildebeest calf. The legs were shaking and shifting, trying to find a sense of balance as they were used for the first time. It was panting loudly, snarls and hisses mixing into the shallow exhales of the beast. It made a first step, knocking away the remains of an office chair. Then another. And another. Dragging its body towards the lab, its eyes remained turned off and the fluids from its body left a trail on the ground. Once there its eyes flashed blue, before it turned its attention onto the remains of the worker drone, that had been living inside this secret lab. It craned its neck back a bit and tilted the head sideways like a bird observing something new or interesting. As it regarded the damages on the body for a moment.
It mattered not. Even broken as it was, it would suffice and serve its purpose.
The sound of approaching stomping footsteps made it turn its head to face an incoming sentinel. Apparently curious at the commotion earlier it had come to investigate. Once setting its blue eyes on the other sentinel, the newcomer let out a threatening hiss at the damaged sentinel before trying to bootloop the being before it, seeing it as an enemy.
There was just one issue with that: Sentinels couldn't bootloop one another, because they were meant to counter drones. And the being before it was not a drone.
The lights in the office shut down for a second, bating the room in only the light of the two sentinels' blue eyes. Then the eye lights of the damaged sentinel began to flicker as it shuddered and convulsed, before the lights of its optics changed color to a haunting neon yellow. It the let out a loud screech and lunged at the blue-eyed sentinel, tackling it to the ground.
Soon enough the room's lights flickered on again with only the yellow-eyed sentinel still standing as it dragged the other's lifeless body into the darkness of the room, leaving behind only a small trail of oil. It would not be enough, but it would suffice for the moment. There was more material to be acquired.
Had to rewatch Episode 6 of Murder Drones to get this one right. Even though I know V is fine, my poor heart was not watching that scene again :(
But yeah, the sentinels did in fact not eat the disassembly drones' cores as I previously thought in the scene where Beau was killed nor did they eat Alice. And considering all the other disassembly drone's bodies at the entryway, there's a lot of those still down there, assuming that they didn't starve/overheated and they were somehow kept alive in that oven.
In any case, I hope I got you interested, because I don't know when I'll be able to write this story down in earnest.
Anyway, have a nice day, stay safe out there and I'll hopefully see you next time.