The Moving Watchtower

More about The Moving Watchtower

The fortress slept under ice and armor while Patrol Unit K-17 walked the dark. Four
hundred people ate, cursed pumps, made love, gambled, dreamed under reactor
hum. Outside the walls, wind erased the world. K-17 gave it something new to erase:
left forefoot, right rear, load, bite, release; four armored legs shouldering through
murderous crust. Snow packed into the joints and boiled out. Ice glazed the hull,
cracked, fell away. Every eighty meters it stopped and listened through its feet.
Usually: wind, shifting ice, the buried pulse of the fortress plant. At kilometer marker
61.4, it said three warm bodies trying very hard to be snow.

They were behind a pressure ridge forty kilometers beyond the exclusion line. Low
profiles. Thermal masking. An antenna lay folded against the ice. K-17 did not
broadcast a warning. Warnings were for gates, lost survey teams, fools who could
still be turned around. Nobody crawled this far inside with a cold cloak and
directional transmitter by accident. The machine dropped low. Optics pinched tight.
Range solved. One shape raised a weapon; the first burst crossed the plain before it
finished lifting. The ridge came apart in orange-white chunks. One heat source
vanished. Another broke left. K-17 lunged, pistons hammering, snow blasting
backward. Return fire struck the shoulder and ripped away armor in a sheet. Metal
spun past. The left front actuator lost eleven percent travel. K-17 stepped on it
anyway.

The second intruder fired again. The walker had measured recoil, recovery,
movement. Three rounds went through the ice where the body arrived a fraction
later. Heat flared, collapsed. The third contact ran hard for a shallow gully, throwing
camouflage and equipment behind it, firing blind over one shoulder. K-17
accelerated through the return fire. No anger. No blood up. Just a target moving
through numbers that kept becoming smaller. The runner dropped into the gully and
vanished for 2.3 seconds. K-17 pivoted its upper hull before the body came out the
far side. The gun fired once. Ice jumped. Something heavier landed and did not
move again. Wind caught the loose pieces and skated them toward the dark.

Steam peeled off the damaged shoulder. Diagnostics followed: actuator response
degraded, armor penetration shallow, coolant intact, ammunition sufficient. Three
hostiles absent. It sent thirteen seconds of telemetry home, marked recovery
coordinates, then turned north because the perimeter did not stop being the
perimeter merely because something had died on it. By noon the ridge and craters
would soften under drift. Tomorrow K-17 would pass marker 61.4 again and search
the same ground with the same murderous patience, because the fortress behind it
contained four hundred warm bodies and the machine had been built around one
simple extravagance: nothing hostile was permitted to reach them alive.