Absolutely right. I was shaking in my boots, hearing that sound chuckling in the darkness — and it didn’t help that I knew how Laughing Larries worked. Each of those whistly slit openings could shoot a hundred razor-sharp flechettes, tiny boomerang-shaped darts that could slice through skin like an ax through jelly. They could even pierce a Mandasar warrior’s carapace, spiking through the shell and deep into the flesh beneath. If this Larry opened fire, it would spray out a full 360 degrees of shrapnel, cutting us open like a hail of knives.
The golden ball whirled to the Bumbler where the little machine still lay in the grass. More hyena laughing. The Larry circled the Bumbler like a cat that’s found a dying mouse and wants to poke at it a bit. Or maybe it was more like a dog: a bloodhound that’s been following a trail and has sniffed out something that smells like prey.
Around and around the Larry hummed, prowling near the Bumbler as if trying to pick up someone’s scent.
"What is it?" a voice whispered. The warrior had lifted his head off the dirt and was staring at the spinning ball. His ear antennas had. flattened straight back against his skull; he didn’t like the hyena cackle either.
"It’s a weapon," I answered softly. "It shoots sharp things that can hurt even you."
"Run, Teelu" he said immediately. "Hold it I, whilst you escape."
"Stay still!" Festina snapped. "Maybe it’s looking for someone else."
At that moment, the thin whistly sound coming from the ball shaped itself into a single word.
"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss."
"Okay," Admiral Ramos muttered, "maybe it’s not looking for someone else."
"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss…"
The whispery sound whistled through the clearing as the ball continued to spin. Fifty revolutions a second… I remembered that was their top speed. Then again, that was twenty years ago; they were probably better now.
I held my breath for almost a minute… and still the Larry didn’t attack. "Maybe it’s just trying to scare you," I whispered to the admiral.
"Or maybe it isn’t sure who I am," she whispered back. "I’ll bet it was tracking my Mayday. Now that I’ve shut down the signal, it can’t identify me."
"I thought Laughing Larrys had visual sensors too."
"They do," the admiral replied, "but Larries aren’t smart, and it’s hard to recognize people in the dark. In the normal visual range we’re just black blobs; on IR, we’re still blobs, only brighter. So it’s straining its tiny computer brain, trying to figure out who we are. It doesn’t want to waste a thousand rounds of ammunition killing us if we aren’t its programmed target."
"Ramosss… osss… osss…"
The ghostly voice was getting on my nerves. "Why is it after you?" I whispered. There was no harm talking — when a Larry’s making noise, it can’t hear anything else.
"It must have been sent by the recruiters," Festina said. The warrior’s ears perked up and he turned, as if seeing her for the first time. "They know I’m investigating them," Festina continued, "and I’ve already had threats to stay out of their business. One of them must have followed me here… and decided this was the perfect time to take me out of the picture. All alone on Mandasar territory. If people find my body sliced to ribbons, they’ll blame it on local warriors, not the recruiters."
"Villains they," the warrior growled. "Black black villains…"
The smell of burning wood poured off his hide.
"Stay still," Festina warned. "It looks like Friend Larry is stuck in a decision loop. Let confused dogs lie."
"But if it’s confused," I said, "won’t it radio its controller for further instructions?"
Suddenly, the laughter increased to deafening volume and the Larry whizzed toward us.
All three of us jumped. Festina and I leapt toward the woods, hoping we could get behind a good solid tree trunk before the Larry opened fire. The only reason we succeeded was because the warrior jumped the other direction — straight on top of the golden ball, like throwing himself on a grenade.
The next two seconds weren’t pretty. It took that long for the barrage of flechettes to flense the carapace off him and slash his insides to pulp. The Larry’s laughter was overridden with a scream, then a gooey slurp of organs getting splattered in every direction. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the gold ball at all; just the warrior’s shell lying over the ball like a lid, and underneath, the whirling butcher-thing was still as loud as hyenas, spinning inside the warrior’s husk. The Larry had completely cored its way into the warrior’s belly… and soon enough, the occasional flechette was able to pierce out the warrior’s side, blowing away little chips of armor. I ducked my head behind my tree trunk just as the Larry giggled into view again, carving out through the last bits of shell like a buzz saw.
My heart was pounding as I listened to the Larry laughing just a few paces away. If it wanted to come after us, there was nothing to stop it from chopping the admiral and me to gobbets; Larries could fly upward of eighty kilometers an hour, way faster than a human could run. I decided if it started toward us, I’d hit my Mayday implant and take to my heels, hoping the signal would draw the Larry after me. It might give the admiral a chance to get away.
But when I looked over at Festina, propped up behind another tree, she had her fingers resting lightly on her own wrist implant. Planning exactly the same thing, to sacrifice herself for me.
I didn’t want to think what my dad would say if I let an admiral die in my place. When I was little, Dad called me "Jetsam," saying I’d be the first thing he threw out if he ever had to lighten his ship. It made me mad, how something like that flashed through my mind at a time like this. But I really had no choice — given the trade-off between Admiral Ramos and me, I had to trigger my Mayday first. So I did.
A high-pitched squeal filled the air: my Mayday sounding on the admiral’s implant. Except that my implant was squealing too — Festina must have set off her own Mayday at the same instant.
Both of us playing the self-sacrifice sweepstakes. It would have made me smile… if I wasn’t sure I was going to be sliced to ribbons.
But the Larry wasn’t moving. Maydays or not, it remained out in the clearing, spinning in place on top of the warrior’s pureed carcass. Why wasn’t it coming after our signals? Had it used all its ammunition digging out through the poor warrior’s body? Or was it confused because it had two separate Maydays, and didn’t know whether to come after Festina or me?
I held my breath and started to count the seconds. As I reached twenty-three, the Larry suddenly lifted into the air and swooshed away above the trees, heading back toward the canal. A trick to draw us out? I counted another thirty as the hyena laughter receded… and then only let myself move because the admiral called, "Edward, are you all right?"
"Sure."
We both turned off our Maydays and eased out of our hiding places — where we’d cowered while a brave warrior gave his life for people he didn’t know. Looking at the blood-spattered grass, I told myself the poor kid might have died happy, knowing it was a warrior’s most honorable death: killed in righteous battle, protecting others. In the last millisecond before he was shredded, he might have felt… what, fulfilled? Validated? Triumphant?
But he was still dead. And I’d never even learned his name.
Admiral Ramos walked stiffly into the clearing. She paused over the remains of her Bumbler… but the little machine looked like it had been whacked a thousand times with a meat cleaver. Another casualty of the flechette barrage. Festina nudged the mechanical remains with her toe, then ground the debris angrily under her heel.