Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Ronin crouched, pressing his back to the overturned bus. Its shadow stretched long in the evening sun. The dirt that had accumulated around and inside it would stop the bullets fired by the two reavers, but it was only a matter of time before they advanced and flanked around his cover.
“Your salvage, dustwalker!” one of the reavers called, his voice underrun with a digital crackle. “It’s ours whether we end you or not!”
At least one robot, then. Yet even if both reavers were bots, their first shots had missed, which meant they weren’t operating at peak performance. Ronin wasn’t either after so many years in the Dust, but his optics were still fully functional.
The reavers only had three main avenues of approach if they chose to press the attack—around either side of the bus, or over the top.
Ronin’s processors ran simulations on all three.
There were countless potential variations, despite the limited paths, and all were likely to result in him taking damage.
Wind swept over the wasteland, rustling the tufts of brown grass on the dunes and spattering Ronin with grit. Adjusting his audio receptors, he picked out the quiet crunch of dirt beneath the reavers’ boots as they approached. He estimated their positions based on the sound.
Diverting additional power into his actuators, he leapt atop the bus.
The old, rusty metal bent and flaked beneath him, but it held his weight as he aimed at his first target.
The reaver was only seven meters away, well within range for the armor-piercing rounds to do their work.
Ronin’s first burst of gunfire caught the reaver square in the chest and punched through the casing beneath his synthetic skin.
Limbs spasming, the reaver fell, his weapon discharging into the sky.
In the hundred milliseconds it took to eliminate the first reaver, the other fired.
Bullets struck Ronin’s abdomen as he pivoted. He shook with the impact, but he kept his arms steady as he squeezed the trigger of his rifle.
The second reaver’s gun bucked wildly as Ronin’s shots pierced the bot’s casing and hit its power cell. Licks of blue fire erupted from the holes for a fraction of an instant. With smoke curling out of its body, the reaver’s arms and torso went limp, its legs locking it in an upright position.
Ronin held his weapon at the ready and approached the first bot. It twitched on the ground, kicking up dust. Motor functions compromised; it had likely sustained damage to its CPU. Standing over it, he fired two more shots into its back. Its power cell flared in overload.
The bot’s thrashing ceased.
He swept his optics over the area, detecting no further movement apart from that caused by the wind. If the reavers had any other companions, they’d decided this fight was too risky.
He looked down to assess the damage he’d taken. Three rounds had penetrated his synthetic skin, but his casing had deflected them. A diagnostic check indicated no damage to any of his systems.
Ronin slung his rifle over his shoulder and checked the fallen reavers for anything of value.
Their rifles were pieced together from ancient parts—just like everything was, these days—and were in such poor condition that he was surprised they’d fired at all.
He doubted they’d hold together over the short trip back to town.
But the reavers’ ammunition looked reliable enough.
He put all fourteen rounds into a coat pocket.
His rifle wasn’t chambered for the same caliber, but they’d have value in Cheyenne.
The bots had nothing else worth taking. The undamaged parts in their casings would sell for good credit in Cheyenne or any other town, but Ronin left them be.
Something about pilfering a deactivated bot for parts seemed wrong, however illogical the notion was.
He followed the skeletal, mostly buried remains of automobiles back to the road.
Patches of cracked asphalt were visible through the dirt, which was ever moving thanks to the constant wind.
More scrubby grass grew through the gaps.
Soon, he left the old four-lane freeway and its dead vehicles behind, turning onto a side road leading directly to Cheyenne.
Locals called it Camp Road, though its name had once been longer and less relevant.
Here on the edge of the Dust, any path to shelter was one worth walking.
In the eight months he’d spent based out of Cheyenne, Ronin had never encountered reavers so close to the town.
He halted and turned to look at the massive building to the north.
Its walls had been battered by two hundred years of harsh weather, which had worn away the paint and scratched the metal beneath.
Twisted, rusty steel beams jutted from the partially collapsed roof like the ribs of a decomposing pronghorn.
Dozens of semi-trailers lay all around the structure—two hundred and fourteen of them.
Thirty-seven were still hitched to the ancient machines that had once dragged them from one corner of the land to another.
Decades of windstorms had deposited mounds of sediment around both the building and the trailers.
There was little left to salvage from the place.
Ronin had searched each trailer at least twice, and he’d combed through the accessible portions of the building four times.
It was exactly fifteen hundred feet from end to end.
Despite his thoroughness, he’d occasionally discovered small objects that held some value on subsequent searches.
He turned his optics westward, allowing them a moment to adjust to the glare of the sun.
Five miles away, Cheyenne’s bot district stood largely untouched by the ravages of time, quiet beneath the heat-shimmering air.
Even at an easy pace, he could be there within an hour, surrounded by a sound roof and four sturdy walls instead of hundreds of miles of nothingness.
Yet Cheyenne wouldn’t go anywhere. It had stood since before the Blackout, since before his circuits were scrambled and the world was undone.
With or without Ronin, the bots and humans calling it home would continue their lives.
And the sky, though perpetually gray and hazy, bore no sign of a storm.
There was time enough for another brief search.
Dirt crunched beneath his boots as he walked toward the building. Stopping at one of the battered doors, he grasped the latch with a bare-metal hand, its synthetic skin having long since been claimed by the Dust, and pulled. The door swung open with little resistance, creaking on its hinges.
The interior was dark and quiet. Most of the remaining materials were too large or impractical to remove—bundles of long, precisely cut wood boards now gray with age, sheets of crumbling drywall, countless bricks and stones, and heavy sacks of dust that hardened over the long years.
Cement, his memory said, though the writing on the bags had faded beyond legibility.
Sometimes, there were heavy tread marks in the dirt outside.
Ronin guessed that Warlord, the leader of Cheyenne, had a heavy-lifter or hauler of some sort to transport the heavier materials back to town when they were needed for repairs.
Easy enough to do with the right tools and the settlement’s relative nearness.
But most of the bots in Cheyenne had been sheltered, and they possessed little understanding of how to scavenge, of how to extract treasures from the Dust.
Ronin adjusted the lay of his pack and swung his rifle into his hands.
His thumb brushed over the smooth spot that had been worn into the grip over the fifty-seven years, four months, and twelve days the weapon had been in his possession.
He stepped forward slowly to keep his scrap from clanking, adjusting his optics to compensate for the limited light.
A distant, damaged memory told him this was a reception area, but he could not recall what its true purpose had been.
Shafts of sunlight pierced the ceiling in spots, illuminating floating motes of dust. The stuff was everywhere, in everything. That was reason enough to return to Cheyenne; he needed repairs before his insides filled with grit that would, eventually, finish what the bullets had begun.
Most everything here was in the same condition it had been in during his last visit, down to the undisturbed dirt on the floor. He moved around the broad, broken desk directly ahead of the entrance and continued through the door marked Associates Only.
As he walked down the long hallway, the building groaned in the wind.
Ronin kept his advance slow, sweeping his optics from side to side, his boots silent on the concrete floor.
The small rooms along the hall had been pilfered, and the desks, chairs, and shelves inside were battered and broken like most everything else in this world.
One of the doors, removed from its hinges, lay in the hallway.
That was different.
He paused before crossing the open doorway, easing himself against the wall.
The coating of dust was undisturbed, save for where it had been kicked up by the door falling, but that didn’t mean the place was empty.
Numbers and walls did not always equal security, and there were many people, bots and humans alike, who would favor a place like this over the lights of Cheyenne.
The remains of a few of them were in some of the trailers outside, their lives claimed years ago by the unforgiving wasteland.
Leaning forward, he peered past the jamb. His processors rapidly compared the room to the last reference in his memory. Nothing had changed, save for the fallen door. Satisfied, Ronin continued down the hall.