D. MacHale - The Pilgrims of Rayne

“We’ll never get past them,” Siry sighed.

I glanced around looking for… I didn’t know what. Anything. Looking back inside the room with the jump tubes, I saw a few pieces of clothing were folded neatly in the corner.

“There’s a start,” I declared, and jumped back into the room. Lying in the corner neatly folded were a couple pairs of dark pants and some light-colored shirts. There were shoes, too. They looked every bit like the kinds of clothing people wore on Veelox… three hundred years before. When I picked them up, they shredded in my hands. The sick thought hit me that these clothes belonged to the two people who were probably still in the jump tubes wearing the green coveralls that all jumpers wore. There wouldn’t be anything left of those coveralls. Or the people for that matter. The only thing left of them were the clothes they wore before their jump.

“Put ‘em on,” I ordered, taking off my own colorful Ibara clothes. “They might think we’re Flighters, and we can blend in.”

We both quickly changed out of our Ibara clothes and slipped on the ancient clothing of Veelox. We had to be careful, because the fabric crumbled in our hands. But good too. The raggier we were, the more we’d look like Flighters. Siry’s clothes were too big for him and mine were too small, but that was okay.

“What do you think?” Siry asked, standing up for me to see.

“You’re a mess,” I said. “Perfect.”

The clothes were as uncomfortable as hell. Not just because they felt like sandpaper, but the idea of wearing dead people’s clothing was kind of creepy. The only thing we kept of our own clothes were our sandals. The crumbling shoes were no good, and we might have needed to run. Our hair wasn’t very ratty-Flighter-looking either. Still, it was the best we could do.

“There’s gotta be another way down besides that central elevator,” I said.

“Let’s find it,” Siry answered.

We slipped out of the room and out onto the balcony. Most of the dados had left the balcony and were walking along the catwalks toward the elevator. More interesting were the dados that walked toward either end of the balcony.

“I’ll bet that’s our way down,” I declared.

I stepped forward and looked over the edge. What I saw made my gut clutch, and not just because we were so high up. Far down below, on the floor, the dados were gathering. They streamed out of the elevator and the four corners of the pyramid.

“Look where they’re coming from,” Siry exclaimed. “There must be a way down at each corner.”

He was right. We would find our way down. But that’s not what struck me. More and more dados were arriving on the floor and stepping into military-like formation. They were falling in to precise groups of twenty across and forty deep. In between each of these groups, another dado marched, making sure the formation was perfectly correct. The robots stood at attention, as if waiting for orders.

“It’s an army,” I said quietly. “An organized army. They’re getting ready.”

“For what?”

“To attack Ibara.”

“Pendragon, even if we get out of here, how are we going to get back to Ibara to warn them?” “That’s the easy part,” I answered. Siry gave me a confused look.

“I can get us to Ibara,” I said with confidence. “All we have to do is figure out how to get past a swarm of killer bees.”

(CONTINUED)

It was all about getting back to Ibara.

The people had to know an attack was coming that would be like nothing they’d seen before. Heck, like nobody had seen before. Fighting off a handful of grungy Flighters was one thing. Protecting the island from thousands of killer dados was another ball game. I remembered those automatic guns that blew the Flighters’ gunboat out of the water. I hoped there were more of those bad boys around Ibara. Fighting the dados with poison blow darts was going to be worse than useless.

Siry and I ran along the balcony until we reached the first corner. Sure enough, there was a doorway that led to a staircase. We quickly charged down. Did I say quickly? It took forever to get down those stairs, because we weren’t going straight down. It was a pyramid. The stairs were on a flatter angle than normal stairs. We were moving away from the center of the pyramid as thought we were Flighters. Or maybe they weren’t thinking. They were robots after all. They reminded me of the mindless security goons of Quillan, with their square heads and oversize bodies. Their eyes were just as dead as the dados from Quillan, too. For all I knew, these were the dados from Quillan. Saint Dane had gotten these dados from somewhere. From what I’d seen of Veelox, they weren’t able to manufacture clothes, let alone sophisticated robots. The walls between the territories were nearly down.

I was too busy running to worry much about the larger implications. I’m guessing it took us about half an hour to finally hit the bottom of the pyramid.

“This is where it gets tricky,” I said to Siry, as if everything up to this point hadn’t been tricky at all.

As we got closer to ground level, we started seeing Flighters mixed in with the dados. They may have all worn the same raggy clothing, but there was no mistaking the two. The dados were tall and powerful looking with scary-big square heads. The Flighters were much smaller than me, probably a result of centuries of lousy food. Or no food. I don’t think any of them had cut their hair. Ever. And they smelled. At least the dados didn’t have that foul odor. That would have been gruesome, times many thousand.

Strangely, none of them gave us a second look. I was beginning to think the Flighters didn’t have much more brainpower than the robotic dados. If all it took to fool them was a change of clothing, then three hundred years of evolution didn’t do much for improving intelligence. Dopes. When we entered the central area of the pyramid, I saw signs that the Flighters had made the Lifelight monolith home. Several slept along the walls. Garbage was everywhere. Smelly, rotten rags were piled up in random areas. It was probably their laundry.

Their clean laundry. The smell was pretty rank. There wasn’t a whole lot of hygiene going on around there.

“Look,” Siry whispered, pointing toward the center of the large area.

It was Saint Dane. He was walking in front of a line of dados with his hands clasped behind his back, like a general inspecting his troops. I’m not sure whether to describe the army of dados as pathetic or frightening. They weren’t dressed like an army. There were no uniforms. They all wore threadbare rags, like the Flighters. Many of them wore shredded coveralls that were red, or dark blue, or dark green-the coveralls that had once belonged to the vedders, phaders, and jumpers of Lifelight. They had no weapons, either.

But they were dados. They couldn’t be killed. Each one was an exact duplicate of the other. They stood over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and big hands. They looked like muscle guys, though I guess robots don’t really have muscles, technically. And those big, square heads made them look like an army of Frankenstein monsters. More intimidating than anything was that there were so many of them. They could throw a thousand dados at Ibara, lose every one, and have thousands more to take their place. They didn’t have to be good or experienced or have any great tactical plan. All they had to do was keep coming.

I guess the best word to describe the sight was… “overwhelming.”

“Why isn’t Saint Dane looking for us?” Siry asked.

“He probably thinks we’re trapped up in the pyramid. He’d never think we’d be crazy enough to slide down the outside.”

Siry added, “I can’t believe we were that crazy either.” We ducked down, waiting for enough away so he wouldn’t catch sight of us. We quickly moved along the wall, headed for the glass corridor of the core, and the exit. We dodged in and out of Flighters who were sleeping or gnawing on bones (I didn’t want to know where the bones were from), or watching the spectacle of the dados being assembled. They didn’t care about two semiclean Flighters who had no interest in anything other than getting the heck out of there. We made it around the perimeter and back into the core with no problem. Quickly we moved through the glass-walled control rooms of Lifelight. The monitors were still lit. It was amazing that after three hundred years they still had power in the pyramid. I didn’t stop to try and figure out why or how.