Heinrich was being difficult again, and it wasn’t a good day for it, either. A demi-sac had just started pushing over the edge of the Keep; you could hear the faint sound of ooze over the laser cannons and the general hubbub down below. Demis were flitting behind the translucent red skin of the massive blob, batting against it, threatening to bust it open and spill multi-limbed stabbing hell over the foremost two platoons clustered at the wall reinforcements. I was on the tube, screaming at the jets and anybody else in the air who might hear me to fire at the sac from behind the wall rather than in front and for-the-love-of-GOD was I the only senior officer awake with a brain? I didn’t get a response (and wasn’t sure I wanted one, lest my suspicions be confirmed), but the jets did veer around to a more useful heading. Heinrich, his arms whirling in what I’m sure he thought was a useful fashion, took that moment to seize me by the shoulder with one pincer and say, “Today’s the day, Colonel Hmallo! Today I will sacrifice myself for the good of Mos Venus!”
I sighed heavily, reached behind his ear and shorted him out. I snatched a canteen from his forward tray as he settled into a heap on the turret, leaving him so I could scramble up to a better vantage point on the rubble above me, and I picked up the tube again. “Christ people, can we please have somebody else deliver the coffee next time?”
Even in the midst of bloody hell, there was a scattering of laughter from the speaker. I raised my scope and checked the jets; at that precise second, they tore through the back of the demi-sac and I was able to watch it wither and deflate, quickly pushed back over the wall by several dozen gloved hands. The demis would fall harmlessly down two thousand helpful meters of jagged cliff face. I took a sip from my canteen and nearly spit it out. It was actually tasty! Strawberry mocha latte… Heinrich had really outdone himself. I looked down at his hunkered and lightly steaming frame, and had to smile.
The Keep wasn’t much to speak of, and the station wasn’t anything fancy either. We were really more of an outpost. Homeworld didn’t particularly like the logistical inconvenience of maintaining the colony on Kethua; the planet had fallen off the main supply routes ever since one of the binary stars of Gartik 1245 had shifted enough to vary the gate. Now that our gate was unsafe, carriers had to re-route from New Triton which was a three week loss. Kethua didn’t have any natural resources to tempt the Empire, so here we sat, catching the dribbles from whatever they saw fit to send us whenever they saw fit to send it. The settlement of Mos Venus itself wasn’t much more than a pittance of families and lone frontier scientists poking at the red dust of Kethua. You couldn’t call our several hundred thousand wilderness explorers a city, not compared to the facility-rich metropoli of Homeworld, but Mos Venus was ours, and I for one didn’t intend to let the neighbors ooze in. We had our settlement, they had the rest of the planet, I thought that was fair enough. The native Kethuans disagreed, they wanted our valley. We told them they couldn’t have it. They made the excellent argument that colonists were both tasty and protein-rich. The colonists retorted that they did not wish to be eaten. Diplomacy was a bit strained.
I could have defended a far larger area with far less effort had Homeworld given us a dome shield generator, but they hadn’t, and they weren’t going to, so we manned the Keep like old-fashioned soldiers with patrols and short-range jets and hand-fired cannons and lots of sweat, not to mention location, location, location. Mos Venus was tucked into a tidy little valley; the Keep bridged the single pass into it. If we fell, they fell, but as long as we held, so did they. Most of us had a vested interest in keeping the pass tight. I had a husband back in the valley, trying to grow potatoes and his own private stand of hemp while enthusiastically studying the mandible-clicking sequence of the local sand beetles. Each of us had someone to protect.
In the meantime, we would occasionally (just for the fun of it, really) send requests back to HQ for things like socks and radar trackers. Sometimes we even got the supplies we requested, but most of the time we got a strange assortment of what appeared to be bargain-basement equipment and scrap metal. I’m pretty sure that Heinrich 347-A was intended as a joke. He arrived in one of our infrequent shipments of supplies and tools; he wasn’t new, there was a tell-tale stain of oxidation along the lines of his torso welding, but he certainly was different. I had not seen a dinerbot in over five years, and this was the last place I would have expected it. His torso casing was painted with lavender and pink waves, happy dancing cups of coffee and tea, and the occasional pastry appliqué (cupcakes, doughnuts, baklava) emphasizing his particular skills. When we charged him up and turned him on, he took a modest twenty minutes to reboot and then flashed a bright chrome smile at us. “Greetings I am Heinrich 347-A! How would you like your coffee today?”
He popped up and spun around, and it was then that I saw he’d had the phrase FOR THE GOOD OF MOS VENUS graffitied across his back like a strangely jingoistic kick-me sign.
For all his ridiculousness, Heinrich was a handy guy. We fed him amaranth and yechti (a nearly disgusting native grain) as well as some of the local plant sugars, seeds and tubers, with a few of the beetles for spice, and he actually turned out a decent menu. His cupcakes were excellent and surprisingly protein-rich. His coffee was inevitably experimental and often unpalatable, but after a while, you get used to anything off Homeworld. He did at least get a few real coffee beans a week; Sergeant Li’s wife had her own miniature greenhouse and coffee was a pet project of hers.
I have no idea where the self-sacrificing nature came from. We all knew he’d been tampered with (dinerbots at home didn’t try to serve you mango espresso), but not to what extent, and it wasn’t until he saw his first skirmish that we realized some cute hacker somewhere along the line had tried their hand at suicidal circuitry.
It hadn’t been a demi-sac that time, it had been a few dozen rolls of sand worms, and really, they were the worst. When the worms attacked, you pretty much just held on and hoped that the walls held up. Fortunately worms were stupid (or perhaps smart); they only banged their big blunt heads at the mountain for so long before heading elsewhere for easier game. But whenever we shored up the walls and checked for chinks, it was worms we were thinking of.
Well, Heinrich was moving easily through the debris falling from the walls; he ambulated on a set of rolling wobble tubes that could get him over any number of surfaces, and he rolled back and forth among the troups and distributed ice cold and piping hot coffee drinks, all of them contaminated with unusual flavors like lemon or ginger, as well as the occasional morale-boosting bearclaw or coffeecake. Then he approached the area of the fortifications where the worms were banging away at the outside. Heinrich seemed to feel the vibrations, and he promptly dropped his usual litany of Does that satisfy the tummy? and Would you like some more? and immediately turned to the nearest soldier and said, “I must sacrifice myself… for the good of Mos Venus!”
All of the surrounding humans turned and stared at him, but Heinrich appeared to eschew his normal responsiveness to human nonverbal cues and launched himself directly at the wall, trying to get up it. His tubes grasped and flexed at the rough bricks and tumbled stone, and his whirling squid-like arms, so useful when juggling steaming canteens of soldier-grade rocket fuel, were now being used as grappling hooks. He actually scaled half the wall before someone finally noticed and said, “Heinrich, what are you doing?”
“The day has come to sacrifice myself for the good of Mos Venus!”
Some bright young grunt dangling halfway down the wall reached out and hit his reset switch. Heinrich let go and fell thirty feet, but fortunately he was a damned sturdy piece of equipment, and he bounced a couple of times before landing on his metaphorical feet, no longer gleaming, but barely more than scratched. When we cranked him back up later, he appeared to show no ill effects from his malfunction or his ensuing drop, and after a few self-diagnostics, was soon offering us all orange chai and scones. The scones were really pretty good. Random jarring impacts seemed to agree with Heinrich.
We didn’t have a bot programmer. If Heinrich’s battery ran dry, we could rig him up an alternate power source, we could replace his nutrient redirection circuits and iron out any dents in his wobble tubes, we could even shine his teeth for him. But Heinrich needed the equivalent of brain surgery, and we had nobody qualified for that kind of deep tinkering. So we kept an eye on him for future incidents, and scratched our heads, and went back to work.
The second incident was a swarm of death ingots. They rose up from the rivers below on a seasonal basis, which was handy; you always knew when you needed to be well-stocked on incendiaries. We were spraying the sky with fire, ensuring that no more than a couple of ingots managed to make it into our own fields — they didn’t attack humans, but a good-sized swarm could devour a wheat field in less than a minute — when Heinrich suddenly forgot that he was serving flavored caffeine and became the Robot Warrior again. “Today is a delightful day to sacrifice myself for the good of Mos Venus!” he chirped, rollicking his pastel-enameled body through the flame cannons and heading for the wall. This time nobody had the luxury of standing around staring at him, we were all occupied with burning the menace from the sky. He made it all the way to the brim of the wall and was just about to fly over the top when an errant stream of jet flame caught him, lighting up his carapace like a firefly. Heinrich’s self-defense circuitry must have kicked in, because his appendages and his head all slammed into his body like limbs pulling into the shell of a turtle, and with nothing to grip the wall, he bounced right back down into the camp, nearly injuring one soldier who was busy pointing and laughing.
His cupcakes were faintly flavored with char for a week or so, but otherwise Heinrich seemed ship-shape.
After a while, it became commonplace, as things do when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and accustomed to making do. The troops knew that if the natives were trying to breach the Keep and Heinrich was on duty, he’d probably spout his little battle cry and go willy-nilly up the wall, and if you were the closest person on duty, it was your responsibility to go and knock him off again. He became rather scraped and biffed by the repeated falls, but Heinrich was a tough little guy, and we came to admire him. I would sometimes hold him up to my trainees as an inspiration to us all, “Just look at Heinrich! Even he wants to fight!”
He became our mascot, in a way. To the point where some soldiers got the willies if Heinrich didn’t do something idiotic within the first five hours of battle. I tried to quell that impulse, but it was difficult; superstitions breed like rabbits among young, stressed-out fighters.
We did eventually learn that Heinrich’s suicidal impulses ran on a kind of a schedule. Most of the battles we had with the natives lasted no more than six to eight hours. If they lasted longer, we found that Heinrich had an “episode” once in every five hour period. Battle can afflict the time-sense, so some of the soldiers were particularly grateful for it. You knew that if you saw Heinrich trying his best to roll up the wall for the second time that night, that it wasn’t just your own personal lack of fortitude; it really had been a more than usually long, hard night.
Some of the men, concerned for Heinrich’s welfare and bothered by the close calls we had when he made it nearly to the top of the wall with few hands at the ready to help him, rigged up a weapon that I would ordinarily never have approved. But these were not ordinary times, and clearly Heinrich was not an ordinary mascot. I did little more than roll my eyes at the new contraption. The “Heinrich Cannon” was an ingenious device; it fired a grappling net at a target roughly Heinrich-sized, and once the net made contact, the catapult-like arm would jerk back. It took some practice to learn to aim the thing. When the grunts were bored, they would hold contests to see who could capture the most rocks with the Heinrich Cannon. I considered discouraging this, since it had the effect of yanking our fortifications right out of the wall and jerking them in wide arcs over our heads, frequently to the detriment of anybody standing behind us; but the fact is, we were subject to a never-ending siege, and boredom was a far more insidious enemy than the native Kethuans. I took advantage of the opportunity and set half the troops to practicing with the Cannon in shifts, and set the rest of them to collecting and re-cementing the wall bases, and everybody stayed too busy to go insane during the dry spells.
The first time the Heinrich Cannon was used for its intended purpose, we had been hard pressed for four hours by the demis. A sac had burst just at the rim of the wall and spilled a few of them inside, and the men were trying to get them out. Imagine trying to round up a flock of flying multi-bladed scissor-tangles that spun as they flung themselves at you, and you have a decent idea of what the demis were like. Almost everybody lost a finger or a pint of blood that night, and there were two fatalities. It was hard. But Heinrich was immune to fear or disaster, and at some point after the first wave, when we were all huddled up trying to erase the horror from our minds, he chirruped his usual cry at us… “For the good of Mos Venuuuuus…” and we spotted him rolling right up the wall.
Ensign Ginniver manned the Heinrich Cannon and slung the net perfectly; it snagged Heinrich right off the wall, neatly as a chameleon picking a bug off a branch with his long, sticky tongue. We heard Heinrich sputtering a series of electronic protests as he shot backwards over our heads and hit the deck. When we went to recover him, he was tangled up in the net and needed our help to get out of it. It was impossible not to laugh, really. We surrounded him and tried to move his wobble feet out of the way while avoiding his flailing arms, and Heinrich kept chirping such helpful pieces of advice as, “I’m afraid I can not offer you a tasty treat, for my forward serving tray has been obstructed. Obstructed. Can I offer you some more coffee? Today we have the pineapple marshmallow flavor. It’s a favorite of the Wulkers of planet Vowvee! Try some, you’ll like it. My altitude was at above normal levels just now, but has been corrected. I assure you this malfunction will be repaired momentarily, and your satisfaction is my foremost concern…”
I wasn’t as ignorant to the culture of the lower ranks as I pretended to be; I knew perfecty well that Ensign Ginniver’s pleased flush meant that he’d won a considerable amount of coin from the multiple wagers placed upon the first successful use of the Heinrich Cannon. I patted him on the shoulder on my way up to the birds nest tower and said, “Good job, son.” Heinrich was our morale, after all. Saving him was tantamount to taking up the standard from a fallen comrade in days of old.
I guess we nabbed Heinrich off the wall about a hundred times, all told, with that makeshift slingshot. Ginniver remained the champion at fifty-seven perfect grabs, a record that never came close to being challenged. The sport never got old. Sometimes, to this day, when I see a shooting star at night, I feel my ears perk up, straining to hear whether it’s trying to offer me sprinkles on my mocha as it flies over my head.
In the end, it was a combination of obsolescence and his own self-destructive proclivities that got him, and I suspect the same legend could be put on many a headstone.
We were having a truly rough time with the worms one night. Not only were the fortifications shaking, the very ground beneath us was shifting and we were subject to miniature avalanches from the embankments of the pass. I suspected we had a larger pack of worms than usual butting away at the soil at the base of the mountain, and that worried me, because it lent itself to the suspicion that the natives were massing themselves as time went on. That happens a lot on hostile planets, and it’s understandable when you think about it. Your own body masses white blood cells and swells up at the site of an attack by foreign bodies, because your body knows that foreign bodies tend to reproduce and try to take over the place. We couldn’t very well explain to the Kethuans that we were under contract to keep our population within certain limits.
I had been, let us say, emphasizing my requests to HQ lately that we get a real defense dome mounted over Mos Venus, but I didn’t expect them to listen.
That night, when Heinrich chirruped his self-sacrificial song and headed for the wall, coffee jets at the ready, the nearest grunt manning the Heinrich Cannon nabbed him with a lucky shot. But the worms bounced us just as the arm swung back, knocking the Cannon sideways. Heinrich, instead of flying to a safe location on the ground well behind us, flew high and wide, to the side of the cliff. We all watched in horror as he was impaled nearly perfectly on a jutting point of stone, his pincers waving crazily. He was stuck so far up I had to put my lenses on to get a good look at him. “He appears to be okay, but his service lights are blinking and I don’t think he can get himself down.”
Once the worms let the Keep settle, we considered sending someone up to fetch him down. Ginniver immediately volunteered, and we rigged him up as safely as we could. He shot up a grappling hook and walked gamely up the wall, a determined look on his face.
We waited as he dwindled into an indistinct blur. I kept my lenses on, so I could see the way Ginniver tugged and pulled at Heinrich, occasionally exchanging what seemed to be encouraging words with the tough little robot. I saw him fail. “He can’t loosen him.” A murmur of dismay arose as Ginniver started back down, rappelling quickly this time. He bounced down among us in seconds, and when he turned to me, I could tell how difficult it was for him to speak.
“Corporal, he’s stuck fast on a lance of borch crystal. I couldn’t so much as shift him. He gave me this and said… he said, ‘Please don’t let my current displacement inconvenience you.’” Ginniver was digging in his satchel, and held something out to me. I took it, watching a tear fall from his eye. It was a cupcake.
Well, that was all we could really do. We couldn’t get a real excavator up that rock face, and anything that would blast out a borch vein from this distance would not only destroy Heinrich, but like bring half the mountain down on our heads. I could feel the mood swell to frantic concern, and I spoke before anybody started trying anything stupid. “People, I don’t like it any better than you do, but…” I sighed. “Man down.”
“Man up,” someone murmured, but nobody laughed.
Two days later, we got a bulky package drop from HQ, and I got the shock of my life: they had finally sent us a dome shield. I looked around at the other officers and we all knew what it meant. Yes, we would finally be able to really secure the colony. Yes, our way of life at the Keep was officially over, after thirty years of constant battering. To have this follow on the heels of what had happened to Heinrich almost felt like a slap in the face, but we tightened our britches and lifted our chins and tried not to sulk, because if our final concern wasn’t the safety of the colonists, well then, we weren’t very good soldiers.
Packing up the Keep took a couple of weeks, steadily interrupted by skirmishes with the natives. It was as if they sensed we were getting away. But we finally cleared everything out, and all I can remember to this day of that bleak, strange time was the way everybody looked up the cliff face on the last evening at the winking glare of the setting sun, reflecting against Heinrich’s carapace. I knew his fuel cells would keep him going for years more with that much solar exposure, and I hated it. Leaving a fighter dead is one thing; leaving a fighter trapped alive is a real nightmare. But Heinrich’s real gift had always been his spirit. I suppose he was keeping himself in good cheer up there somehow.
We installed the dome shield generator just behind the rear of the Keep, knowing that the dome itself would bulge its way nearly out to the wall; I suppose we all liked the symmetry of setting our boundary where it always had been, that the Keep might always remain in our grasp. We trenched it in, and set the switch.
A dome shield is a nearly transparent sphere that encircles a colony, letting in air, sunlight, helpful microbes, and anything else we programmed it to ignore, and filtering out just about everything else. It would expand deep down into the ground to keep the worms away just as well as keeping the demis out of our air, and it would last a hundred years with the proper upkeep. I watched the faint glimmer against the air forming its way up the mountain and pushing out, finding the boundary we’d set for it.
And then, with horror, we all watched as the curve of the wall intercepted Heinrich’s perch. There were several curses, and I was in fervent agreement with them; we had programmed the dome to ignore the rock, but not Heinrich. He was going to stay on the outside of the curve no matter what.
The bulge seemed to catch him from behind, edging him along the spear of crystal he was clinging to, and you could see how the flexure of his springy torso casing fought with the inexorable push of the sphere until something finally had to give; and for a wonder, it was the rock crystal. It had to have been riddled with flaws in order to collapse without Heinrich merely being torn through, or else he really was just that tough; the outcropping broke with a crack you could hear clear down to the ground. Heinrich, released suddenly from the tension between that rock and that hard place, shot through the air like a meteor, a glimmering speck that flew in a glorious, perfectly curved arc down the side of the cliff face and out somewhere, deep into native Kethua territory.
It was almost a fitting end, considering how much of his existence he’d spent flying through the air, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one rendered speechless by shock and grief in that moment. At any rate, nobody ever saw him again after that.
Heinrich gave us nine years of service. I challenge you to find a coffeemaker that lasts that long and turns beetles and barley grass into chocolate cupcakes into the bargain.
Oh, we soon had other foodbots delivered to us, but none with his peculiarities, and therefore none that were loved the way he was. One day I was patrolling the dome, checking for wear, and I saw the following engraved carefully into a rock just beside the old Keep wall:
IN MEMORIAM HEINRICH 347-A FOR THE GOOD OF MOS VENUS
I admit it: I doffed my helmet and stood for a moment in silence.
Some days, safe at home, trying to occupy myself with the study of the local constellations and content myself with normal coffee, I wonder if Heinrich survived the plummet down the mountainside. He was always such a tough little guy.
I’m forced to smile now as I wonder that again. The Kethuans have left us alone for the past twenty years or more. Perhaps he was our ambassador, finally convincing them that we meant them no real harm. I hope whatever happened to him, he’s happy in his little digital mind.
And I hope those natives know how to appreciate a good mango espresso.
The Home of Forgotten Stories 