Harvest Time

20 - The Harvester Attack

I awoke to the sound of bells clanging and the confused shouting of men and the screaming of women and children.

"Toquin," I heard Emla yell above the din. "Get up – Harvesters!"

We had been in Newhold for more than four months. During that period, our time had been taken up with several goals.

One of those tasks had been the copying of the pattern sheets onto proper paper and showing what the various rows of the pattern represented. We also tried to explain the symbols though, as some of them were still a mystery to us, we left it to the elders to attempt to decipher them further.

In addition, we had been training a small army of volunteers, mainly boys and girls whose ages ranged from just below to well over our own. We were attempting to turn mirror polishers, roof gardeners and the like into an attack force ready to tackle Harvesters directly in various ways. The speed and energy of children were deemed their best assets, especially those who were already expert at navigating the mirror light tunnels.

Over one hundred volunteers applied but some were clearly too young, too old or not suitable for the various tasks we and the elders proposed. Those tasks were Harvester controllers, which suited those of higher intelligence; various fighting roles including those skilled with bows and arrows; and, for those who already had journeyman skills, explorers.

Once the elders understood how access to a Harvester could be made via the hatch in its top panel, they ordered modifications to the ceilings of all the main breeder halls. Multiple entry points were added which connected to the mirror tubes above the halls. The idea was that a small force travelling through the mirror tubes could drop down on top of a Harvester, gain access and switch off the attack mode before the Harvester caused too much damage or took too many lives. The other thing that they implemented was the moving of all breeders out of the existing halls into other areas of the citadel. Then, all the larger doors to the halls were blocked up in the hope that any incursion of Harvesters would be limited to smaller areas.

However, I had seen the damage these machines could do to walls constructed from mud bricks. I knew such precautions would only slow the invasion of the rest of the citadel by a fraction. But, that fraction might be enough to give us the edge.

Kelsonna was already up and ordering people about. I saw two of the attack forces we had trained, boys of no more than twelve years of age, run off in threes to their designated spots. They carried knives, hammers along with bows and specially adapted arrows.

Emla and I had been forbidden to join them – we were told that both of us, along with our knowledge, even though we had already shared as much as we could, were considered indispensable. Instead, guards hurried us away from all of the five known Harvester incursions and led us to one of the small meeting rooms reserved for the elite.

We waited half an hour – which crawled past as slowly as sap running from a tree – and then the reports came in.

One Harvester had managed to escape but the other four had been boarded and disabled. No breeders had been taken, so our tactic of moving them elsewhere had been a success.

However, it was not all good news. Four of the volunteers had been killed and seven more had been maimed in the course of the attacks. Of those injured, only three were expected to live. But, there had been more than fifty of our barely trained troops and we had four captured Harvesters to add to our new metallic army. Harvesters were, apparently, not equipped to handle attacks from directly above them. It was something we should have realised from the mirror mount attack performed by Ronnack and myself.