CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
King Glok walked slowly around the shape of the newly-built Snoozer, nodding slowly in approval. He admired the way the machine looked – its sleek cylindrical body, its three backward-bent legs, the rapid-fire stun gun hanging from its underside, the rotating laser rifle mounted atop the huge robot. It stood a full twelve feet high, much taller than any Glukkon or even BigBro Sligs, who were dwarfed by the huge machine.
“This looks good,” he remarked to Humphrey, who was standing nervously to one side. “Have you run tests on it?”
“The armor is excellent,” the Vykker stated. “We fired ten laser bolts at one point on the armor, and we hardly got a dent.”
“Its accuracy?”
Humphrey licked the edges of his mouth. “It, ah, uses an enhanced targeting system and personal scanner to aim for the, er, weakest point on a being’s body, and pacifying it quicker.”
Glok raised both brows. “That sounds interesting…but, of course, I’ll need a demonstration.”
He turned to one of his BigBro attendants. “You, bring me three Mudokon slaves.”
“Right away, sir!”
The Glukkon turned to Humphrey again. “From everything I’ve seen so far, this Snoozer looks as if it could be a good guard for my palace.”
Humphrey smiled – a disgusting expression on his thin face. “I’m sure it will be, my lord.”
Glok waited impatiently for the Slig to arrive with their test subjects. He was all too eager to get the Snoozer into action with this one simple field test. He had thousands of slaves, and Lord Fragg’s line from MeechCo were coming right into his grasp sometime today; why couldn’t he spare a few slaves from work duty and send them straight to their Nature’s Paradise?
He smiled as he saw the BigBro and three uneasy slaves returning down one of the laboratory’s side passages. Glok nodded his head toward the wall. “Line them up over there.”
As the Slig rapped out the orders to the slaves, Glok turned to the short Vykker at his side. “I assume this Snoozer will take orders from me alone?”
Humphrey frowned, but he nodded. “Yes, my lord.”
Glok smiled wider, and turned to the Snoozer. “Laser turret, fire on those Mudokons.”
Immediately the laser gun atop the Snoozer’s trash-can frame opened up in a blaze of laser energy. As Humphrey had said, its combat algorithms were targeting the Mudokons’ weakest points, their heads. It only took a single shot through the brain for each of the slaves to fall to the ground, and then the turret silenced.
Glok nodded, his smile growing wider still. “Excellent! Attendant, take this down: I want these mass-produced for the palace guard. Send all my BigBro Sligs to the barracks; they can rest or smoke or do whatever it is they do in their off-time.”
Humphrey said, “I take it you like the Snoozer.”
“It’s a good killing machine,” Glok said simply. “And we need more killing machines these days.”
* * *
|