I faced an ongoing attack from foes I couldn’t clearly see, and behind me, the Simurgh fought her way free of the giants. Sections of damaged land were lifted up, and people evacuated, leaping to cover or forming ground to jump onto—Byron’s conch glacier, Gibbet’s fences, a solid-gold bit of ruined building.

My retreat was a fighting one, as I scrambled to tear away the grappling claws. Machines that had latched on were reeling in, emerging from the smoke and floating debris.

Fucking fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

A white cube rose up out of the smoke, about fifteen feet across on each face, with six black spider legs and three green lights on the front ‘face’.

The lights flared, and a laser beam drilled into the child-flesh of the Mother Giant, parting that wave.

I pulled away more of the grappling lines and rose up higher. Once I’d achieved enough height to not be constantly bound down, I shot the big cube, aiming at the glowing lenses until the power cell behind them detonated.

Ten different drones rose up out of the mist. C-shaped, with rigid propellers on mounts. They were followed by five more.

I’d read the files on Eagleton, Tennessee. I knew the basics about the Machine Army. A tinker experiment gone awry, the original master gone or forgotten. They were slow, inexorable.

This wasn’t slow.

At the quarantine site, Protectorate capes and the rare Ward who couldn’t be put in front of the public would be given the busywork of keeping tabs on the site. Capes who had problematic powers that would hurt the PRT’s place in the world. Capes who had broken too many rules or succumbed to their problems. Machines would plant seeds for future machine growth in any solid surface, set up traps, and refine resources.

Maybe once every year or two, they pulled out a new trick, a new piece of research. The big cannon-drone was one such trick, serious destructive power that the people on the perimeter would have to be wary of. There were slave-drones, that captured people, and tried to borrow their powers. There were meat lockers, named by one of the perimeter officers, that ran computers that were organic, not technology, and acted with fervor and unpredictability.

There were protocols for if they developed flying. People to call, tinkertech that was held in reserve, to bring a hellish lightning storm down on Eagleton. There were protocols for shielding and intelligence and whatever else.

They were pulling out new cards, new deployments, and they were doing it fast, like they had been storing it up in the background and they were releasing it all now.

“Byron!” I called out.

Byron was working with Vista and Clockblocker. Trying to create fixtures that latched onto the Simurgh and limited her movements. Shaping them, then freezing them. He turned to look.

“Cover this! They want it!”

“Give it here!”