I, Immortal Robot

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

In the deep darkness of the night I walked a little then looked up and slightly south in the direction of the distant south coast of England. My curiosity was aroused, not hard to do with any Robot of course. I muttered aloud, “If the Info was true, where had the spaceships been, and for fifty years?”

I turned my optical receptors up to max zoom and sure enough ’43 had been right. I could detect a faint mass of star-like dots. Most of the vessels were never designed to land on a planet or operate within a planet’s gravity-well, but here they were and although I wasn’t an expert I could see that half a dozen or more of the most damaged were entering the atmosphere too steeply, their retro shields flaring and burning off metal.

It was several hours later as I repaired a breach in one of the plastic fencing panels that the separate vessels could now easily be made out. About ninety I counted, not the hundred and eighty that the Alien Technology Transfer Corps and the Navy propagandists would blather about on TV and the Media. Only about seventy would actually make it.

Bright flashes were emitted from the descending vehicles and molten streamers of melting alloys lit up the night sky. I had to partially close the auricular shields over my hearing orifices because of the roaring of the old fashioned retro jets and the sonic booms.

Having led a solitary life for thirty earth years up till then, I was a bit naïve or slow on the uptake, so it was a few moments into my viewing of the growing spectacle that I began to realize that one of the ships would pass my location fairly closely. It was one of the V.L.C.T’s, Very Large Container Transports. These vessels were basically a large triangular towing frame onto which cargo containers were fixed. No doubt this one would be filled with alien riches destined for one of the godforsaken depots of the Alien Technology Transfer Corps.

I activated my security drones and roughly triangulated the course of the soon to be wrecked V.L.C.T. and the penny finally dropped inside my dumb Robotic head; I was in danger!

A quick message to The Farmer gained no response. I was on my own!

The Towing Vessel of the V.L.C.T. was molten slag and for a millisecond I felt sorry for the fifty-six Robotic souls on board, hastened to their demise by nothing more than human greed and incompetence. But I forgot all about them very quickly as my three point visuals told me to pray to The God of Robots and run like hell!

The majority of the gigantic vessel slid deep into the earth in the next field sending the rectangular containers spinning like toys in every direction. I was just slowing down as a particularly pretty, yellow container weighing about two hundred metric tonnes crashed behind me and rolled end over end in my direction. I remember the noise being terrible as the welded seams began to tear and the sheet metal walls fragmented, spilling the contents and shards of deadly metal everywhere.

Hot metal splinters rained down upon me along with clods of earth and strange coloured alien artefacts of odd shapes and unknown functions. I continued to run despite the overload warnings from my leg sensors and overheat warnings from my leg bearings.

I stopped running when the torn off end of the container, weighing a paltry five tonnes, crashed into the grass a few meters in front of me. It then occurred to me that if I could have run faster I would have been flattened!

In the next field the wreckage was still rolling, burning and tearing until there was a tremendous electromagnetic pulse and my voltage overload trips plunged me into darkness.