My Life As A Teenage Robot Porn Story: Escape From Paradise Chapter 16
Escape From Paradise
A “My Life as a Teenage Robot” Fanfic
Chapter Sixteen Oh No, There Goes Tokyo
The battered royal hover-limousine limped to a landing only a block away from the raging firefight at Slave Factory Forty-Six. Queen Vexus flew out of the hole in the roof and glided towards the battle scene, with her Black Mantis bodyguards scrambling to keep up with her. A demonic snarl marred the queen’s face as she approached a hastily arranged command post, wondering how much more grief XJ-9 could possibly cause her today. Two hundred roach-drones had already surrounded the twenty-story building where Jenny and the slaves were holed up, and the access roads leading to the factory were filled with military transports and hover-tanks. In the background, she could see a torrent of laser bolts screeching back and forth between her drone soldiers and the rebelling slaves. And fighting at the humans’ side was an infuriatingly stubborn teenage robot, with her arms transformed into a pair of fifty-millimeter cannons. Vexus shook her head and groaned; it was time to put a stop to this little uprising.
Commander Smytus had taken command on the scene, barking out orders to his platoon of roach-drones, when he saw Vexus and her entourage draw near. He swept his arm in an obsequious bow, and shot a sarcastic sneer at her Black Mantis bodyguard; she was well aware that they did not care for each other, but she was not in the mood to listen to her lackeys snipe at each other right now. Before they could start arguing, Vexus silenced both of them with a look that could melt titanium. “Get the hover-tanks into position,” she growled, “I’m through wasting time and drones battling with XJ-9. We will exploit the same weakness that has always plagued her: her foolish love of animals. This ends now.”
Vexus stood cold and statue-like as she watched a dozen hover-tanks whine by, adding another ring of firepower to the formidable force which encircled the slave factory. Vexus had a very simple plan for ending the standoff. The human slaves were dug in and well armed, which would make it difficult for the roach-drones to storm the factory and recapture it. But Vexus had no intention of trying to recapture the factory. She was going to flatten it. The queen gave a signal with a nod of her head, and the huge hover-tanks lowered their cannon barrels in unison, locking onto the factory’s first floor windows.
The queen smiled with satisfaction at the look of horror on Jenny’s face, as the tank cannons growled to life, and flecks of crimson energy danced along their massive barrel coils. The roach-drones ceased fire and pulled back to make way for the carnage that was about to be unleashed upon the building. The humans turned their laser rifles towards the tanks in a desperate attempt to stave off the attack, but the lasers deflected harmlessly off of their heavy armor. The cannons reached maximum charge, and Vexus raised her arm in the air, ready to give the command to fire
“Wait!” screamed Jenny. Her cannons retracted back into her arms. “Stop! Don’t shoot!”
The humans stopped shooting, and a tense silence fell over the combat scene. Vexus was practically purring with glee; she knew that Jenny wouldn’t risk the lives of the pathetic humans she cared for so much. The queen took a single step forward and raised her authoritative voice. “You’ve nearly exhausted my benevolent supply of patience, Jennifer,” she announced, “so I will make this very simple. Come out now with your weapons deactivated, or I will annihilate the building.”
Jenny tugged nervously at her pigtails, and surveyed the Cluster forces surrounding the factory. She exchanged words with her friends, then raised her arm, deploying a small white flag from a hole in her wrist. “Okay, Vexus just tell your goons to stay calm. I’m coming out.”
“Smart girl,” smirked the robot queen. “Oh, and on your way out do bring the LSN droid with you, won’t you, Jenny dear? There’s a good robot.”
Allison gasped and clutched her hand to her chest, as Vexus repeated her demand that she surrender herself along with Jenny. She glanced out the window, unsure of what to do, when she felt Brad give her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Allison,” he said, “Jenny’s a superhero! She does stuff like this all the time. Well maybe not exactly like this but she knows what she’s doing.”
She tried to smile back, but the worry was evident on her face. “Look, Jenny’s waving for me to come on out. Oh, sprockets I hope we can give Drew enough time “
“Enough time to what?” snapped Tiff, shaking in her ankle boots. “Run away?!? I don’t see that fool anywhere. That dang silver booger done up and bugged out on us!” She snuck a glance out the window, peeking out from behind a large steel pipe that ran up to the ceiling
When suddenly Tiff jumped back with a squeal. A gurgling sound reverberated through the pipe, and it began to vibrate with a eerie hum. It sounded like a mudslide was flowing thought it.
Allison edged out the front door and nervously made her way next to Jenny, feeling extremely vulnerable under the gaze of two hundred roach-drones and a dozen hover-tanks. She slid a robotic hand into Jenny’s grasp, hoping to draw some courage from her as they took a few more steps into the open. Jenny gave her new friend a reassuring squeeze, then called out to her evil nemesis. “All right Vexus, I’m the one you want. If you let Allison and my friends go free then I’ll surrender to you peacefully.”
Queen Vexus folded her arms, and arched a bemused eyebrow. “You are not exactly in the best of negotiating positions, XJ-9. Why don’t you try this counter-offer on for size you and the LSN droid will once more become one with the Cluster. The humans get to live, and spend the rest of their pitiful lives performing back-breaking labor. And if that annoying nano-droid friend of yours shows up well, I suppose we could put him to work as a trash disposal. Jennifer, do be reasonable if you care for these fleshy creatures so much, you’ll surrender now.”
Jenny’s eyes shifted left and right, taking in the hideous faces of the Cluster drones. “How do I know you won’t just kill the humans anyway, after we’re assimilated?”
Vexus slapped her face in frustration. “Oh, for the love of the humans, the humans, it’s always the humans with you, isn’t it?!? Fine, fine, I give you my word, the precious little humans won’t be killed. Happy now?”
“Why should we believe anything you say?” snapped Allison.
To the Vexus’ mild surprise, the robot girl one of her own LSN droids straightened her shoulders and scowled at her with a look of righteous anger. The eyes which should have been gazing at her queen with adoring reverence now shot daggers of hate instead. “Why should any robot believe a single thing that comes out of your mouth? After all, it’s all lies, right? You’ve lied to every robot on Cluster Prime, ever since we came off the assembly line! Every night when we go into sleep mode and back ourselves up, your computers pump more and more lies into our brains! I was always taught that the queen was kind, and noble and only wanted what was best for us “
“And you think I don’t?” said Vexus, in a tone a mother might use to scold a rebellious child. “You don’t believe that I care for each and every robot in the entire Cluster?”
Vexus drew closer to Allison, growing more intimidating with every step she took, looking every bit the personification of the mighty Cluster Empire. “Consider all of the gifts I have given you, foolish LSN-1482. A life of peace and prosperity, in the greatest civilization the galaxy has ever known. Magnificent art and science and culture, the likes of which history has never seen before. You have never known the worry of having a roof over your antenna, or finding your next quart of oil, or wondering if your power cells would suddenly run dry. You were lucky enough to be built in a Robotic Utopia, where you were always among your own kind. You have never known what it was like to be mocked and ridiculed by pathetic human mammals. Perhaps you should ask Jennifer what that’s like, dear.”
The queen’s eyes snapped to Jenny now. “And can you honestly say you haven’t enjoyed your little stay on Cluster Prime, XJ-9? Didn’t you enjoy the beauty of my capital city? Didn’t you enjoy finally being surrounded by robots like yourself? Imagine your life, free from the stares and whispers of jealous little meat people, who shun you and insult you simply because their pathetic hamburger-brains cannot understand your greatness. Would you rather go back to Earth and take orders from primates, forcing yourself to fit into their human world? Or would you rather stay here in paradise, never knowing another day of unhappiness for the rest of your life?”
Allison could see from the look in Jenny’s eyes that the queen’s sales pitch had struck a chord with her. Her pigtails drooped with a pained whirr of her servos, and her CPU raced with thought.
Watching in the darkened factory window, Sheldon clutched his hands to his mouth and started gnawing on his fingernails. “Omigosh she’s not actually thinking about joining the Cluster, is she? Jenny would never desert us like that! Gulp. She wouldn’t, right guys?”
Chloe was hovering beside him, straining to hear the conversation with a group of other slaves. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she did,” she said, with a guilty look on her face. “I never thought about what it must be like for her to be all alone at school like that “
“Well, she had better not,” huffed Brit, stomping away from the window. “I am certainly not going to spend another minute working as a grease monkey for a bunch of Aiiieeeeee!“
The students turned to see what Brit was screaming at. She was pointing at one of the huge machine presses that made parts for the assembly lines. It was an immense machine, twenty feet wide and twelve feet high, cast from solid steel six inches thick. It must have weighed fifteen tons and it was melting into the floor like a snowball in a frying pan. Dozens of huge machine presses were gurgling and bubbling, rippling with wavy patterns and sloughing together into one enormous puddle of thick, gooey fudge. Thick, gooey, silver-green fudge.
Vexus grinned evilly, enjoying the puzzled looks on the two robot girls in front of her with a little more persuading, perhaps she wouldn’t even have to force them to stay
Then Jenny’s eyes steeled themselves with newfound clarity, and a frown spread on her face. “Cluster Prime isn’t a paradise, Vexus. It’s not a paradise for all of the human slaves that are trapped here. And it’s a just a big fake paradise for all the robots! Of course they’re happy every day of their lives. You program them to be! Your stupid backup computers make them happy, and make sure that everyone does whatever you want them to do! What kind of paradise is it when you’re not even allowed to think for yourself? Why are you afraid of letting the robots think for themselves, huh?”
“Oh, free will is highly overrated,” huffed Vexus, “just look at what it’s done for your disgusting little human friends. Free will leads to chaos. The Cluster is all about unity, and in that unity we achieve peace and harmony and strength. Pfft, ‘not allowed to think for yourself’ please, stop being so melodramatic. Did LSN-1482 seem like a zombie when you first met her? Did any of her other friends? I have no interest in ruling over an empire of zombies. My robot subjects lead normal, happy, fulfilling lives. I simply use the backup system to guide them with the big decisions and correct them, when necessary. I tell them what they need to do. I tell them what they need to remember. And I make sure that every robot in the Cluster works together as a team doing their part for the common good.”
Jenny’s eyes narrowed into angry, white slivers. “And just who decides what the ‘common good’ is?”
“Well, somebody has to,” the queen snickered. “And there’s no robot more qualified than me.”
“And I suppose the ‘common good’ involves building you a giant pyramid for a palace,” growled Allison, growing more bold by the second. “And sending out huge fleets of starships to conquer the galaxy for your glory. And forcing us to obey you, and love you, and be loyal to you and destroying the lives of any robot who dares to question you! You’re not a queen, you’re a dictator!”
A nasty snarl grew on Vexus’ face, and her eyes blazed like smoldering embers. “This conversation is starting to get a boring,” she sneered. Her antennae began to crackle with plasma energy, and the orb over her head glowed a menacing orange. She levitated into the air, glowering down at the girls as if they were insignificant worms. “I am Vexus. I am the Cluster! I, and I alone, decide what is best for robotkind! I do not need to waste my time convincing a pair of young clockwork whelps of such an obvious fact! Vexus does not explain herself! Vexus commands!“
“Whoa, that crazy robot bug-woman is, like, seriously spazzing out,” shouted Tamika, as she watched Vexus through the window. Then the robot queen gave another hand signal to her hover-tanks. The maws of their giant cannons sizzled with lethal intensity. The roach-drones deployed extra laser-tipped arms from their bodies, and started advancing on Jenny, Allison, and the factory itself. “Omigawd, like, they’re coming for us! This is so totally whack! We’re so gonna get collared and “
Then she realized that absolutely nobody was listening to her. She turned to see what everyone was looking at “Like Oh. My. Gawd.”
Waterfalls of shiny molasses ran down the walls, coating everything in the factory with a shimmering, gooey film of silver-green. Waves of sludge flowed along the giant pipes, bringing them to life as they began to flex and twist like giant silver pythons. The assembly line equipment, the welding stations, the giant bins of scrap metal and raw materials everything inside the factory was coalescing into a ocean of metallic pudding, pulsing and groaning and rippling with frantic silver-green circuit patterns. It crept up the support girders and coated the ceiling. It flowed under the students’ feet and covered the floor. They heard it run through the air vents and ooze behind the walls. The silver sludge was devouring every single ounce of metal and plastic inside the slave factory including the factory itself.
Then the floor began to vibrate. The students froze up in a state of shock; the slaves clutched their rifles, unsure of what was happening. But Brad busted out into a huge, ear-to-ear grin. “This is gonna be so majorly cool,” he shouted. “Everybody grab something and hold on tight!”
Jenny’s arm-extensions shot out and decked a roach-drone with solid right cross. Then she pulled his head off and used it to shield herself from a volley of Vexus’ assimilation darts. She threw the drone-head at the robot queen like a frisbee, missing her face by a matter of inches. Vexus balled her fists in seething rage, her oil pressure approaching dangerously high levels. “I expect this kind of behavior from you, Jennifer ” then she turned towards Allison ” but to have one of my own LSN droids join you in rebelling against me is unacceptable! No robot has ever left the Cluster, LSN-1482. And you are certainly not going to be the first!“
“Well, maybe I want to be the first,” Allison shouted angrily. “And maybe after the rest of the robots find out the truth about you, a lot of them will want to leave the Cluster, too! Why won’t you let us think for ourselves, ‘Your Majesty’? Are you that afraid of us?”
The queen’s voice was like a blast of icy wind. “I am the supreme leader of an interstellar empire. I rule over hundreds of worlds, with trillions of robots at my command! I have the most powerful fleet and the greatest army in the universe at my disposal! Nothing frightens me. Nothing “
Suddenly a deep, undulating rumble rolled through the ground.
Everything and everyone began to shake in place, as if a powerful quake were striking the city. A growl like distant thunder seemed to emanate from the direction of the factory.
The factory didn’t look right somehow. Something funny was going on Vexus could sense it, and she wasn’t going to waste any more time bantering with the girls. She shouted out a command to fire, and one dozen hover-tank commanders pushed their red buttons simultaneously, unleashing twelve blasts of orange plasma upon the building. Twelve spectacular explosions rang out, sending billowing clouds of smoke and debris flying into the air. Jenny and Allison hit the dirt, shielding themselves as jagged wreckage sailed over their heads. Then they flipped over, terrified of what they would find
The factory was still standing. Instead of twelve giant holes blasted out of the walls, there were twelve smoldering craters, shimmering and pulsing with busy patterns of silver-green and they were healing themselves. Silvery goo began to spread across the outside walls of the twenty-story building. Veins of pulsing green energy zigzagged across the surface, until all of Slave Factory Forty-Six looked like it had been dipped in green and silver paint. The very walls of the factory seemed to wiggle, as if they were made of silver gelatin. Then they started to vibrate with nervous, quivering spasms
Four colossal fountains of silver-green sludge erupted from the corners of the factory building, four geysers of gooey paste that gushed outwards like water from a broken dam. Everyone stared at the impossible sight in total astonishment as the sludge-rivers arced out majestically then the drones shrieked in horror as they realized that the sludge was rushing down at them with terrific speed. The giant sludge-fountains slammed into the ground like falling mountains, crushing hover-tanks and roach-drones beneath their incalculable tonnage.
Vexus’ eyes shot wide with incredulity. Those giant silver-green pillars of sludge were giant legs. And the factory was lifting itself off the ground with them.
Rubble and concrete shot in a thousand directions as the hulking mass amazingly raised itself into the air. The ground shook viciously, knocking roach-drones flat on their insectoid faces; Jenny grabbed Allison and flew both of them up in a climbing circle, so they could watch the unbelievable spectacle in front of them. The four titanic pillars of sludge gurgled and expanded, growing themselves higher to raise the building thirty, fifty, one hundred feet upwards, propping it up like a set of mammoth stilts. The building shuddered and groaned and altered its shape, as if an invisible sculptor was molding a million tons of silver clay. Then with an earth-rattling heave, the living-factory pushed up with its two front sludge-pillars, like a dinosaur standing up on its hind legs. Rivers of silver-green goo flowed and roared all around the factory, smoothing and shaping until it completed a mind-boggling transformation into a towering humanoid form. Two monstrous feet grew out of the giant figure’s legs. Fingers the size of city buses grew out of its arms. A dome of sludge formed at the very top of the figure, stretching and oozing and growing a pointed chin and a mop of silver-green hair and two huge, familiar dumbfounded eyes.
“Ooohhhh,” echoed a deep, resonating voice, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.“
The roach-drones gaped skyward in terror, and scrambled like panicked ants, with eyes the size of soccer balls. Slave Factory Forty-Six, the entire twenty-story industrial building, was gone. In its place was a rectangular hole carved out of the ground and a giant, shimmering silver-green android. Three hundred and seventy-five feet tall.
Stray droplets of silver nano-goo sprinkled to the ground like rainfall as the giant cautiously flexed his elbows, trying to adjust to his stunning metamorphosis. His huge face slowly turned towards Jenny and Allison, and his mouth curled into a smile that could have swallowed a semi truck. “I figured it was time for me to start pulling my own weight,” his window-rattling voice boomed out.
Vexus craned her neck upwards to stare at a sight that was amazing even by her standards. Finally, she snapped out of her gaze, and ground her metallic teeth together. “That nano-droid is proving to be more trouble than I gave him credit for,” she growled. “All drone troops, fire at will!“
The roach-drones focused their antennae-lasers on Drew’s colossal feet and legs, but their combined firepower barely made a scratch in them. The seven remaining hover-tanks maneuvered madly, backing away to gain room to fire. But then one of the impossibly huge legs picked itself off the street, rising into the sky as if in slow motion. The air filled with metallic groans as Drew’s gigantic body began to flex and move. Then with a whistle of wind, the leg came crashing back to the pavement with a thundering jolt, pulverizing two mighty hover-tanks under its foot as if they were made of shaving cream. The force of Drew’s footstep sent a rolling wave of concrete along the ground, and punched a crater into the road the size of a baseball diamond.
Smytus and Vexus stared, transfixed, as the other leg pushed off the ground, spraying fountains of loose dust and debris high into the air. The giant android was starting to walk. Then a shadow fell over the queen and the commander, and a giant foot came hurtling out of the sky directly towards them. Vexus and Smytus scrambled for their very lives, their servos screaming as they ran at breakneck speed, barely jumping clear as the mountain of nano-sludge slammed into the pavement behind them. They flew through the air like rag dolls, landing on the sidewalk thirty yards away with an undignified clang.
The two elite Cluster robots struggled to their feet, as the ground pitched and heaved like a rowboat in a raging ocean. By the time they collected their senses, the giant android had taken another step leaving another giant footprint, with nothing but compressed gravel where the hover-limo and the command post used to be. As the giant continued walking towards the city, Smytus rushed to the edge of the footprint-crater and looked in. “My command post,” he howled, slapping a clawed hand to his forehead. “Oh, for the love of first the bank calls and says my account’s overdrawn, and now this!“
But Queen Vexus spun him around, and snarled into his face with near-insane fury burning in her eyes. “Call for reinforcements,” she shouted. “Bring in air units. Put the entire army on alert. I want the nano-droid destroyed. I want XJ-9 destroyed. I want every single one of those miserable Earthlings destroyed! And Commander ” bolts of sizzling electricity arced between her antennae ” I want that treacherous LSN droid brought back to me. She’s a traitor. And traitors must be dealt with.”
A doorway formed in the middle of Drew’s colossal chest, oozing open to let Jenny fly inside with Allison to a room bursting with thousands of excited faces. The high school students and the ex-slaves were gazing through window-slots in the silver-green walls, watching in amazement as the rooftops rushed by below. Brad and the others clutched onto a maze of crisscrossing handrails, bracing against the rocking motion of Drew’s giant strides. He saw the girls fly in, and waved madly to get their attention.
“Jenny! Jenny, how awesome is this! This totally makes getting kidnapped by evil alien robots all worth it! Wooooo hooooo!“
“Speak for yourself,” she harrumphed. “Still, it was way cool to see Vexus freak out like that!”
Allison laughed and clutched onto a silver-green support column. “Wow, and Drew said that I was the one who wasn’t afraid to think big! This is unbelievable!”
“Glad you’re all enjoying the ride,” boomed Drew’s thundering voice, echoing down from the ceiling. “But could somebody in there PLEASE tell me if I’m going in the right direction?!?“
Allison grinned upwards. “Drew, hang on! I’ll get to the window and shout out directions!”
“Check it out check it out check it out!” shouted Brad, as they lunged forward from another giant step. Looking straight down, he could see Drew’s immense feet crashing into the pavement like monstrous pile drivers knocking hover-trucks and cargo carriers into neighboring buildings as if they were Tonka toys. Another hover-tank raced around a corner, pointed its gun straight up, and fired a split second before a silver-green mountain mashed it flat as a pancake.
Brad balled his fists excitedly and bounced up and down as if he was five years old. “Do something else, Drew! Pull some high tension wires down! Stare into a subway train and scare the robots inside! Pick up a bus and throw it! Smash through a building! YEAH!”
“Brad, this isn’t one of your late night monster movies,” snapped Jenny, “we’re trying to save our lives, remember? We’ve got to get out of the city and break into Base Zero-One before “
Suddenly a deafening noise roared through Drew’s cavernous interior. Everyone lurched violently off their feet, and for a harrowing instant it felt like Drew might tip over then the floor leveled out, like a ocean liner righting itself after a tidal wave. Brad pulled himself to his feet and shouted grumpily towards the ceiling. “Hey, watch where you’re walking, Drew! Try growing some shock absorbers!”
“Excuse me,” rumbled Drew’s voice, “but someone just shot me in the back with an air-to-air missile. SO SORRY to inconvenience you. Aw, crud here comes another one.”
Drew shook from another huge explosion. “Doesn’t that hurt?” yelled Allison, concerned.
“Well it sure doesn’t tickle,” he answered. “UNGHH. I could use a little help out here, Jenny.“
“I’m on my way,” shouted the teen heroine. “Just worry about getting through town as fast as possible. As soon as the Cluster figures out we’re headed for the military base, every spaceship on the planet is going to come for us!” With a blast of exhaust she rocketed back outside, and the door in Drew’s ten-foot thick chest closed up behind her with a gurgling schwerrrp.
The robotic driver of the delivery van drummed his pudgy steel fingers against the dashboard, impatiently waiting for the traffic light to turn green. Finally the light changed colors but traffic didn’t budge an inch. The robot extended his neck-stalk out the window and screamed some choice words at the idiots in front of him then he noticed that all of the vehicles on the street were speeding in the other direction. And the cargo trucks in front of him were making reckless U-turns. And the hovercars flying overhead were twisting wildly across each other’s fight path, frantically attempting to reverse their course. Then he noticed the ominous sound, like peals of thunder rolling through the city
KATHOOOOM KATHOOOOM KATHOOOOM KATHOOOOM
The robot’s turbopump nearly jumped out of his metal chest, as his head pivoted up to see a forty-story monster android lumbering around the corner in front of him. The silver-green behemoth propped an impossibly huge hand against the skyscraper next to him, crushing out a hole ten stories high. A massive silver-green foot swung forward and punched a crater into the now-empty traffic lanes, sending a shower of concrete boulders raining down around the delivery van. “Everybody get outta the way,” the android’s voice bellowed down the avenue. “Giant robot coming through!” That was all the driver needed to hear. He deserted his van and sprinted down the road, joining a panicked crowd of citizens fleeing for their robotic lives, screaming at the top of their voice boxes.
Drew was trying his best to avoid hurting civilians, but the Cluster military didn’t seem to care. High-speed engines roared overhead, as a quartet of wasp fighters streaked past Drew’s face, pelting him with blasts of plasma fire. Chunks of silver-green debris blasted out of his back and tumbled to the street below, but just as quickly, the wounds sealed themselves back with thousands of gallons of fresh nano-sludge. The wasp fighters looped up and reversed course, coming back at the monster android on an attack vector, with missiles deployed beneath their short jagged wings. The lead fighters unleashed their weapons
And disappeared into a airborne inferno as Jenny blasted through their hulls, shredding the fighters to pieces with her pigtail-drills. Rapid-fire beams from her laser-limbs sliced through the last two fighters, and they tumbled out of control, crashing into skyscrapers on either side of the street. But the fighters had successfully unleashed a volley of missiles at Drew’s enormous body, and they twisted through the sky towards the middle of his giant chest but hit his arm instead, as Drew managed to grow an eighty-foot-wide shield from the nanobots on his forearm. The massive explosion forced him off balance, and he stumbled to his left, plowing into the plate-glass windows of a sixty-story office tower. Steel and glass and silver-green chunks of carbon-plating fell to the ground in an avalanche of debris, crushing abandoned hovercars and demolishing a monorail track.
Drew flinched from another barrage of plasma fire, and turned to see even more fighter wasps streaking at him from behind. All right, that’s enough of this crap. His colossal eyes made a quick scan of the surrounding buildings, and he saw a monster crane erected on top of an office tower, hoisting a giant holographic billboard to the roof. His massive arm swung up and clamped around the base of the crane, and snapped it off its thick support columns as if he were plucking a daisy. Drew yanked the giant holo-billboard free from the steel cables, watching the fighter wasps continue their diving attack at him then he swung the hundred-foot-wide billboard through the air like a flyswatter, slamming a pair of attack fighters into the thirty-fifth floor of the ClusterBank tower.
Jenny swooped around Drew’s enormous face and unleashed a pair of heat-seeking missiles, which snaked after the two remaining fighters and blasted them out of existence. “Drew, hurry up!” she shouted. “Keep on walking! There’s a lot more tanks and fighters on the way!”
“I know, I know!” he groaned. “But I think it might be a good idea to grab some dessert.“
With another horrific crash of his giant foot, Drew stomped on a huge pile of smoking debris in the street below, and his gargantuan foot began to warble with patterns of silver-green. Curtains of nano-goo poured out of its sides, enveloping the debris in a shimmering blanket of ooze and converting it into a fresh batch of nanobots. Drew absorbed the debris, and the rest of the demolished crane, adding hundreds of tons to his overall mass. A fresh river of nano-sludge rushed over his body and he started to grow.
Now the city street was a full-fledged battleground, as dozens of hover-tanks whined into firing positions, and new wasp fighters shrieked between the skyscrapers to let loose a blizzard of firepower at the silver-green Goliath. Drew ducked his head under a fifty-story-high skybridge and pressed onward as the tanks hurled blistering plasma bolts into his chest, and the fighters lobbed missiles and gunfire into his back. Cluster drones stationed on the rooftops pelted him with laser rifles and shoulder rockets. The morning air was filled with an unending scream of laser fire and the staccato rumble of nonstop explosions. Jenny buzzed around her towering friend and deployed a pair of buzz saws from her forearms, then dove right through a pair of hover-tanks, sawing them cleanly in half. The tanker-bots didn’t even get out of their seats before death came from above in the form of a silver foot, blasting into the pavement like a moon falling out of orbit and spreading its shiny sludge to absorb fresh material into its body.
Cluster fighters streaking downward to dive-bomb the giant were plucked from mid-air by Drew’s monstrous hand, and absorbed into his body with a squeeze of his fist. He snatched satellite dishes and roof antennas from each passing building, and stepped on every abandoned vehicle he could see in front of him. He rammed his fingers into the skyscrapers on either side of him and gouged huge scars out of their surfaces, as if he were scooping up handfuls of snow, ripping out thousands of tons of glass and steel and copper in the process. His arms reverberated with an electric gurgle as the material was broken down and re-assembled into trillions of trillions of fresh nanobots. He was taking in more than enough new mass to replace what the Cluster army was blasting away.
Jenny popped high into the air to fire a barrage of lasers at an attacking wasp fighter, then she did a quick scan, and swooped down excitedly, stopping to hover only a few yards in front of a silver-green nose five stories tall. “Drew, you’re almost out of the city! We just have to get past a few more towers and “
“Yeah, I can see it!” bellowed his rumbling voice. “I can see it on the horizon!“
Towering six hundred and fifty feet above the panicking city below, Drew placed his massive hands against the skyscrapers and pushed them aside, like a jungle explorer emerging from overgrown ferns. His wide shoulders ripped into the buildings and sent a spray of glass through the air, scraping huge scars into the towers’ sixtieth floors. The eight-lane avenue was becoming to be a tight fit, and it was a relief to finally get out of the capital’s downtown area. From his vantage point, Drew could easily see the bustling activity of the commercial spaceport off to the south, and an aggregation of harsh battleship-gray bunkers and fortifications off to the west. Base Zero-One, the largest military base in the entire Cluster Empire.
He heaved his titanic shoulders, and exchanged an anxious look with his tiny pale-blue robotic friend. “Let’s do it, Jenny,” he said nervously.
Explosions and screams and sirens echoed through the city behind him, as Drew pushed his way out of the skyscrapers and smashed his colossal feet through warehouses and factories in the city’s western industrial sector. The entire planet seemed to heave upwards with every thundering footstep he took. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he waded through the steel and concrete buildings of the outlying suburbs. He flattened the northern wall of the new sports stadium. He obliterated the art museum, and sent terrified robots running for their lives as he bulldozed through the new roller coaster at the amusement park. And every ounce of debris and destruction under his feet was wrapped up in a gurgling coat of silver-green goo, and absorbed into his ever-growing body.
He walked westward towards the military base as fast as he could. He wasn’t running he couldn’t run, it took all of the computer power in his body just to hold himself together yet with each stride spanning the length of two football fields, he was actually traveling at a fantastic speed. And the faster he could get them all to the starships at Base Zero-One, the less time the base would have to react. Already, squadrons of fighters and bombers leapt into the sky ahead of him. Companies of hover-tanks and plasma artillery were preparing for his arrival. Drew and Jenny were three minutes away from a battle that would either see them head back to Earth as heroes, or die on Cluster as flaming scrap metal.
Continued in Chapter Seventeen / Five Days to Cluster Dawn