12: The discovery

At the site of the war-drone, Samson leapt backwards, dragging Harmony's hand as he did so. Usually he wouldn't be able to shift her, but this time she was of a similar mind, just with slower reactions, so as Samson was starting to think that he'd need to yank his hand off to escape, she followed his move and also fell back around the corner. The two then half ran, half fast crawled, down the side of the building and round another corner to its rear. Here, they stopped, listened for the sound of approach, but nothing came. Just that same incessant clanking that they'd heard since first approaching the mysterious building.

"What the drakk was that?" Harmony breathlessly enquired

"Drone" was all Samson could muster between ragged breaths.

"That I saw" she said "but what were it doing?"

Samson didn't immediately reply, attempting to process the split-second's view he'd had before retreating. He frowned, then said "Not shooting us"

"Thank drakk" Harmony effected to mop sweat from her brow, an action that lost its impact given her brow actually was very sweaty.

"But that's the odd part" Samson was still puzzled "That thing will have known we were coming, they have heat sensors, and can detect the vibration of our footfalls. They can also target and fire faster than we can blink. So why didn't it?"

"Felt sorry for us?"

"Nah, there's more to this. More to this whole weird building, let alone the drone. We need to go back round"

"Hey, what happened to Mr Self-Preservation? I vote we scoot our arses back down the cliff and pretend this never happened"

"And give up my, er, our discovery?"

"You're crazy"

"I spend my days in the Wastes throwing relics of a by-gone age at instruments of pure destruction" Samson said with a hint of the theatrical

"No, you pay other people to do that so you can stay alive and strike it rich"

"And that drone, this building, could be our treasure chest. Come on Harmony, you were meant to be the the strong brave one" he smiled his most winning smile at her, which sort of looking like he was chewing a wasp, unused to the action as he was.

"You really think that drone ain't gonna kill us?"

"I didn't quite say that. But the fact we are still here is encouraging. Certainly worth another peak"

"Ok" Harmony said doubtfully. "But you go first"

"We'll hold hands again"

Harmony smiled at this, "any excuse" she said coyly.

Samson was well aware that the pair of them holding hands to approach some unknown danger both looked ridiculous and increased the chances of something nasty happening to one or both of them, but he also had to admit that it gave him courage. Maybe some long-dormant misogynistic desire not to look weak in front of the woman, or maybe the opposite and the safety that he felt in her looming company. He wasn't sure which option was worse.

Regardless, they moved on, back down the side then to the corner. They cautiously crept round it, this time not immediately pulling back. The clanking noise continued, obvious now that it was from the drone that lay in front of the entrance to the building. Samson tilted his head, trying to make sense of the drone. It was one he hadn't seen before, multiple legs with a large gun on its back. However, it had been heavily damaged, a number of the legs ripped off in an explosion that had also gouged out a large crater in the hard ground underneath it. With legs missing on much of one side it had toppled over, exposing its underside which also appeared to have taken significant damage; armour plates had bent and melted away revealing a charred internal structure of wiring and motors.

Samson let go of Harmony's hand and took further cautious steps towards the drone. The machine was obviously aware of Samson's presence, the gun on its back attempting to rotate, but jammed into the ground and so unable to come to bare. The clanking noise made sense now to Samson, it was the empty clicking of the drone's gun, its firing control presumably jammed on amid the damage to its systems.

"What do you think happened?" Harmony had joined Samson in his approach "Other than the obvious massive explosion"

"I think this is the guard unit of a drop-factory"

"A what factory?"

"You really never did study the war, did you?"

"Study ain't so appealing when your family is half starved" Harmony rebuked him

"Ok, sorry" he held his hands up, but continued walking towards the drone. "Drop-factories were a particularly nasty feature in the end days of the war, as desperation grew. The idea was to literately drop small drone factories in from a low orbit into enemy territory. That's why the building has no windows and it is sitting in a crater in an inaccessible location, humans never worked here" he now stood by the machine. Even having slumped onto its side, the drone was a good two times his height.

"Drop a factory in?! How comes we didn't shoot em down?"

"By that stage of the war much of the detection infrastructure had been destroyed, along with the heavy weaponry. It was essentially all drone versus drone by then, the more drones you could get into enemy territory, the more they could drakk stuff up"

"I still don't get how the factory worked" Harmony carefully laid a hand on a leg of the machine that was still attached, then removed it quickly as the leg twitched.

"You ever have flat packed furniture?"

A frown, then "Yeah, Ma scavenged one of those out of town places once, before it got over-run. We got some kinda odd looking drawers"

"Well like that, but with drones. Factory drops in, worker drones assemble their big ugly cousins until the factory runs out of supplies and is left derelict"

"So this place is probably empty then?"

"Only one way to find out" Samson turned and nodded at the entrance "We go have a look"

Harmony glanced at him

"And no" Samson replied to her look "We ain't holding hands again" this with a smile.

Picking their way into and through the factory was made challenging by the fact it had never been built with humans in mind. No headroom, no walkways, no safety guards over sharp equipment. While being windowless may have ordinary been an issue (although Samson did carry flashlights with him) the light from the main doors combined with light spilling in from a jagged hole in the rood of the factory. It seemed that whatever the source of partial destruction of the drone outside had also struck the factory. This made seeing their way easier, but the lack of accommodation for human incursion now combined with the destructive force of a previous explosion to make progress even slower.

Samson, as the smaller and more agile of the two had managed to get further into the building than Harmony had. She had essentially given up, setting up a small camping stove where the epicenter of the explosion had cleared a little floor space. Soup bubbled away as Samson ventured deeper inside.

"Drakk it" he exclaimed after a few minutes shuffling around in a back corner.

"What is it?" shouted Harmony

"There's a roller door here, seems to lead to a separate area that goes down the side of the building. Can't get it open"

"Probably just more broken crap inside it anyway" Harmony had tired of their search, making her feelings on the matter perfectly clear to Samson. The scrap metal here would have some value, but probably not enough to justify the effort of getting it back to civilization. Meanwhile the electronic equipment would have, essentially, negative value, risking as it did attracting drones should they attempt to do anything with it.

"Maybe" Samson's replied "But the door, it would allow me through comfortably"

"So?" Harmony poured some soup into a canteen, then blew on it.

"This is a factory with no thought in mind for us, so why have a door I could easily get through. It would be a waste of space, unless...." the sentence was ended by a wrenching metal sound as Samson fashioned a crude lever, then a crack and a rush of metal on metal as the roller door sprang upwards.

"Unless what?" Harmony called after the noise died down

"Unless this is where the complete drones are moved to, ready for deployment" more than a note of awe in his voice "Drakk me" the expletive underlining the amazement.

It took hours of heavy lifting, crude pulleys and lots of swearing, but by the evening they had cleared some space around the doorway into the drone store. With light fading the two of them stood with flashlights, exploring the darkness of the store. The darkness that contained, by Samson's estimate, around twenty of the bi-pedal drones that they'd seen in action regularly recently.

"Spooky looking sods when they're all turned off like that" Harmony's flash light hovered over the bulbous body of one of the drones near the front of the staging bay. It's legs were folded up underneath it, leaving the drone suspended from the ceiling via an array of wiring and chains. None of them had weaponry attached, that seemed to take place in part of the factory that was destroyed by the missile strike "They definitely are turned off, aren't they?" she asked after a few seconds more.

Samson was closer to the darkened room, shining his light upwards so as to look at one of the strange beasts from underneath. "Best as I can tell, yeah. There aren't any status screens or lights to indicate what is going on, this place was never designed for us to walk around, let alone make sense of"

"So we're back to square one?"

"How'd you mean?"

"Well I'm sure these things would make a nice modernist sculpture or something, but Doddington isn't exactly crying out for that. None of this is going to make us rich"

"What if we could turn them on?"

"You just said that we can't make sense of this place. Even if we could, what you gonna do with a small army of unarmed drones?"

"These things are just like the ones we've seen out and about, right?" he'd come back out of the room and stood by Harmony, who slowly nodded at the question.

"So maybe if we could get one up and running, it'd be ok to enter the patrol zone with its brothers and sisters"

"And so we make the drone menace worse? I'm sure the council would give us medals for that" she said sarcastically.

"But if we could control it? That's our way through the wastes to Millieville."

"Never mind Millieville, you've gone to fantasy land" Harmony reproached him "How we supposed to control one of these things?"

"We need to interface with it"

Harmony paused for a couple of seconds, then exclaimed "Ah-ha, but here's where I paid attention to your history lessons" She jabbed her index finger at his nose for emphasis "You can't inter-thingy with a drone, so that they can't be interfered with by the enemy". Harmony stood back, arms folded, argument won.

Or not.

"That's via a remote link. The drones have an air gap to prevent that sort of infiltration. But a hardwired, direct link, is different. That's our way in"

"A way in no-one in the Wastes has ever thought of before. You're overestimating your intellect again" the pointy finger was back

"No-one has ever had a static drone to try it on. That's the value of our discovery here, what's going to make us rich"

"You're nuts"

He ignored her, instead declaring "We need a computer"

"Ok, more than nuts. Bonkers. We live in a town that outlaws drakking electronic musical keyboards. Where you going to get a computer from?!"

"The confiscated property section of the Doddington Department of Technology Monitoring" Samson smiled, Harmony slumped.