Androids gone wild

I knew it was only a matter of time before the Machines came back. They'd been too quiet for too long, and the hope that they'd spontaneously shut themselves off was optimistic at best, laughable at worst. No, mother bot was still down there, somewhere, biding her time or running her program, or whatever she was doing, until it was time to come back up topside and try and kill us all.

What I hadn't counted on, was them adapting their designs to co-opt units we had in use already on the surface here. Sneaky little Chou san ba. Copy one of our designs, and she can do recon without anyone being the wiser or launch an attack and make it look like something went wrong with our own kit. Curry aji no unko ka unko aji no curry ka docchi ga ii? We are so humped.

Krenshar'd put some target drones together from spare parts and scraps he'd found in the yard. Since he is a thinking machine, he put them together so our militia would have something better to train against than static targets and the occasional pop-up. While we had been getting a lot of practice with Reavers of late, Reavers were pretty limited as far as combat training went. They screamed at you and tried to grapple, then tried to eat you. Kren's drones were pretty limited, but they could imitate various tactics to give the militia something to train against. Unarmed, they were essentially harmless.

Unfortunately, they were also apparently easy for mother bot to replicate.

Zaogao.

While many on the Town Council know about Mother Bot and her carnivorous Baby Bots, we hadn't made it general knowledge. In all honesty, we didn't have enough conclusive evidence to say for sure there was a von Neumann warbot under Hale's Moon. We thought there was, and there was a lot of secondary evidence. But no one had actually seen the thing. Except maybe Aurora and, in this context, she didn't count. That, and we didn't want to get the population in a panic.

Unfortunately, swarms of cheaply made knock-off's of Krenshar's target drone, itself a cheaply made copy of a KM Series mechanoid, were going to panic the town. There had to have been over 50 of the damn things. We had most anyone who could shoot pouring fire into the waves of walking robots that were trying to beat people, buildings, vehicles, and anything else they could reach, into submission. I went through five or six mags of .50 ammunition, and another couple boxes in the long gun myself, pouring supporting fire in on the rampaging machines.

Only problem was they looked a lot like the target drones people were used to seeing, which themselves looked a good deal like Krenshar. Before the fight was even over, I was getting rumors that some of the townsfolk, mostly new arrivals, were saying they thought Kren was behind the attack.

They didn't know about mother bot, of course. And they didn't know about the history of Kren being manipulated in the past, or the precautions we had in place to keep it from happening again. They were just citizens voicing their concerns. Problem was though, the Herald picked up those concerns and ran with it. That gave some of the otherwise neutral citizens cause to doubt the decision, after the Replicant Revolt, to live in peace with Krenshar and his now-departed brethren.

Watashi no hobākurafuto wa unagi de ippai desu.

When I asked him directly about the bots, he said "Yes, Miss Seana, I designed the target drones. But I did not attack the town. Those were not my drones." Pulling apart some of the wrecks showed they weren't built quite like the ones he'd designed. Close, but a copy, not the original.

It gave credence to his words, not that I needed it. Krenshar wasn't in the habit of lieing to me. If he had attacked the town, he'd have said so. Probably something like "I'm sorry, Miss Seana. But I am going to kill all the organics now." Fact was, Kren wasn't behind the attack.

Which left Mother bot. Which meant we might be in for some very interesting times in the very near future.

Only up side was the knock-off target drones weren't actually combat machines. Most of the damage they'd done was from brute force pummeling things, and they'd done at least as much damage to themselves as they had to the town. No real consolation to the injured, and with Belize off-world we were a bit limited on medical expertise.

The structural damage we'd be able to fix easy enough. But how long would we have before Mother sent her next wave our way?