C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

He took a step forward, peering closer, eyeing my damage. “You got the crazy yet?”

“No. I do not have the crazy.”

“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”

“More than a few.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”

“I told you, I’ve seen it.”

“No. Not yet you haven’t.” He turned back to the work of coiling his steel rod without looking up again. “I’d get that looked at if I were you. Or you and I will be seeing eye to eye sooner than you think.”

I nodded and turned, intent on getting down to Doc as soon as I could. An entire bar of my battery had ticked down while I’d been talking, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t just excuse myself.

“Whoa,” said Orval, sighting for the first time the damage to my back. “You need a new battery. Better get to Doc.”

“Yeah,” I said as I continued down the hall. “I’ll get on that.” Then down through two more cold concrete corridors, the second terminating at another staircase and down another four levels before I finally reached the Square.

Three bars left. I had only minutes before the alarms started telling me just how fucked I really was.

The Square was bustling, though for the life of me I didn’t know why. There were a number of bots I didn’t recognize moving from stall to stall, filing in and out of the small concrete shops along the walls or slowly making their way over the wrought-iron and sheet-metal scaffolds. Doc’s shop was a rusted vermilion shipping container three levels up the scaffolds with big green letters on the side. drydock shipping, it had originally read. But sometime in the distant past someone had taken a swath of red paint through the letters, leaving it reading: drydoc ks hipping.

Doc Witherspoon was an ancient machinist model originally designed to work on freighters. Bots like him had all started out a gleaming chrome color, which over time charred black from the intense heat of their environs. Their architecture was old, clunky, but they were built like the battleships they were often assigned to—so they ticked well beyond the life span of most bots from their era. He was solid steel, his insides designed to endure explosions and the pressures of underwater salvage. One arm was fully functional and dexterous, the other a large arc welder with a series of different rods that could sew massive seams or scale down to delicate surgical work.

There was a reason most of the machinists you still ran into found work as sawbones. And Doc Witherspoon was the best in the Sea.

His shop was a tangle of wires behind an array of metal plates. Arms and legs hung from hooks, batteries covered shelves, jars and bins full of bits from almost every model imaginable rested on every available surface. In each of the back corners hummed a pair of dehumidifiers, keeping the place as dry as the deep desert. Doc nodded his bulky black steel head as I came through the single open door—the other having been welded shut ages ago.

“Brittle,” he said, his single red eye glowing, scanning me as he spoke.

“Doc.” No one called him Witherspoon. No one was even sure whether the vandalism on the side of his container had come first or the nickname had.

Doc was working on a late-series service bot. It was shut down on the table as he pulled burned-out RAM by the stick from slots in its innards. In almost any other container this would look like salvage, but Doc was one of only three sawbones in the Sea I would trust to shut me down.

“You’ll have to wait your turn,” he said. “I just shut him down.”

“Afraid I don’t have that kind of time,” I said, turning my back to him to show him the blast damage.

He stopped working, tossing aside a bad bit of RAM. “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“You running off your backup?”

“Running it down, more like it.”

“How many bars you got left?”

“Two.”

“Hop on the other table. Your main battery is common as dirt. I’ve got a few good ones lying around.” He brushed aside a collection of bad bits from a dented chrome operating table—the only other table in the container—and I lay facedown on it, head turned to the side to watch him work.

“You got the salvage to pay for this?”

“We’ve done a lot of business, Doc,” I said, wary that he might try to take advantage of my dire circumstances.

“Yeah. And I’d like to continue to, which is why I’m not going to gouge you. But you need a battery—”

“And you’ve got a battery—”

“And you need that back patched up to hold it in.”

I tapped my leather satchel. “Good haul. I imagine you’ll find something you like in there.”

Doc opened the top of the satchel and peered in, gently picking through it with his good hand. He nodded, plucking a coolant core from the bag. He held it up. It was the best bit in there, worth a pretty penny. I’d hoped to score something really choice with it.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to gouge me.”

“You limped in here and I can tell before looking too close that you’ve got a few busted servos in that foot. And the battery blast melted half the power wiring to your systems. The fact that you’re still here means either you’re the luckiest sonovabitch I’ve ever known, or the most tenacious. This oughta cover the battery, the foot, the wirework, and welding you a new backplate. Labor and all.”

He was right. It was a fair price. “Do it.” Dammit, I was really hoping that coolant core would make the whole boondoggle worth it. I could kill Mercer for that.

Doc unplugged the bad battery while unhooking it from its moorings, then started scraping away the melted plastics. “He put up a fight before you got to him?” Doc’s tone wasn’t pleasant. He wasn’t joking.

“No. He was gone when I got to him.”

“Of course he was.” Doc didn’t like poachers. He and I still did business because he knew that wasn’t my line. But when you wander in from a salvage all busted up, it didn’t look good.

“No. This was Mercer.”

Doc stopped for a moment, surprised. “No shit?”

“No shit. Had a crew with him too.”

“Had?”

“Had.”

He cut a few wires, trimming away the damage. “He came through a few weeks back. Looking for some expensive ware. Deep-core stuff.”

“CPU?”

“Yep. RAM. And new drives.”

The pieces were beginning to fall into place. “You have any?”

“Not a stitch. You Caregivers are going out like the dinosaurs. Nobody is trading that stuff. If you didn’t need it all so badly, I’d try hitting you up for whatever you’ve been hoarding. That stash could buy me a decent shop on the ground floor.”

“Yeah, by trading it all back to me and Mercer.”

“Refugees. More coming in every day. A Caregiver or two is bound to stagger into my shop any day now.”

“Not if Mercer keeps it up.”

Doc plugged in a new battery, soldering a few wires into place. My systems shot to life, my primary battery now at a solid 78 percent. The battery was a good one, with a good amount of juice left in it to boot. “He really came at you?” he asked.

“He sure did.” And now I had a good idea why.

“You guys have beef?”

“We didn’t . He’s never come at me like that before. Truth be told, I don’t really know him. I just know of him .”

Doc pulled a flat-black metal plate off the wall and began shaping it in one hand while trimming it with the other. Sparks showered across the floor, embers spitting in an array of blues and yellows and reds. “Well, I’d steer clear of him for a few weeks if I were you. No telling how far gone he may be.”