“You were paying attention, weren't you? I'm clearly very interesting, so you must have been. Anyway – on the off-chance you weren't, that large man is probably going to beat us both to death, and I'm very much against that,” Sebastian said. The sun dipped behind the clouds and the wind picked up to shift Autumnal leaves about in balletic swirls that he regrettably had no time to appreciate. He hadn't seen such a thing or felt a chill Autumn wind under a blue sky for years and months and days. Sometimes he closed his eyes and would struggle to remember what the trees looked like or how clean the water was, yet here he was, trying his damnedest to leave it all behind again. The wind, simply by its existence, was lovely, but Sebastian started to wish that he’d wrestled with a jacket for a little bit longer.

  Peter turned to look at Sebastian in a conventional way. He decided that no-one else could twist their own heads and faces around without significant risk of death – and that was generally considered normal – so neither would he. Regrettably, there was nothing he could do to normalise the next part. Peter slipped back into a familiar cadence of bells and whistles, tweets and buzzes, as he communicated the next part of the plan to his fellow Pilot Fish.

  “Right, then, let's be off,” said Sebastian. He surprised himself with how upbeat his tone was. Things had been gradually going south for a number of years now, though he couldn't quite remember how many. He had started keeping an exact count – very logical, very reasonable – but afternoons bled into afternoons and days into days, and all semblance of time had escaped him. It reached the point where years were slowly gave way to years that all felt the same and looked the same but mostly managed to smell worse. That was until Sykes dribbled his way into fixing the Gate, despite his own not insubstantial attempts to delay things. This was immediately followed by Sykes using it to turn several volunteers inside out in a failed calibration attempt; human life, and a mop and bucket, were cheaper to Sykes than a handful of automatons. The Pilot Fish were a last ditch attempt for him to avoid doing anything different.

  Peter pulled his pants up and tightened the belt around his lower chest, and marched into the woods with the self-assurance of somebody with new pants and a promise of shoes. Sebastian jogged on behind him with the self-assurance of somebody with old pants and skin that wasn’t semi-bulletproof. He doubted Bracknell had left his post to go for a constitutional, or that anyone else had ventured through the Gate, but that didn't mean he was going to take any chances. Bracknell could charitably be described as a bit of a thicko, so Sebastian held every belief that he'd be able to convince him to get out of the way or go make sure the trees didn't run off, but he accepted the possibility of failure. And that was what the Pilot Fish were for.

  He brushed his hand against his collarbone as he thought about how had it been Bracknell, he'd have probably been bisected rather than painfully inconvenienced. The wind whistled through the trees, barely disguising the bird-like whistling from Peter as he coordinated with the few metal brethren that bothered to return his calls. He was probably a little more human than most humans he'd been around for the last few years – and that was brilliant, it really was. Sebastian just hoped that the rest of the Pilot Fish weren't so uniquely broken. He had no idea where he'd get all the shoes from for a start.

  As they approached the clearing, the ethereal glow of the Gate was there to greet them and surround them in a way that always proved disconcerting. He couldn't place why exactly, just that it felt wrong. He knew it wasn't a very scientific thing to say, but he didn't think there was a scientific way to say it. The warm light of the Gate chilled him in a way that the wind didn't, and he was afraid that if he stopped to think about why, he'd start making all sorts of excuses as to why he shouldn't go.

  “You know the signal, don't you, Peter?”

  “Peter says Peter knows the signal.”

  “Sebastian says you might want to stop talking in the third-person, because he thinks it's just weird.”

  “What is weird?”

  “Now there's a question,” he said with absolutely no intention of answering it. “Hop into the bushes and let's see how wrong this can go.” Sebastian walked into the clearing. He wasn't wearing his helmet or his armoured vest, but was more or less identifiable as one of Edevane's men, below the waist at least.

  “Halt!” challenged Bracknell. He brandished his rifle, his massive hands made it more or less look like a pistol.

  “Lieutenant Bracknell, sir!” Sebastian adopted a tone an octave or so higher than his own and added a nervous stutter to match what he'd observed of Mason best he could. “Private Mason reporting, sir.” It occurred to Sebastian a second or so too late that he wasn't totally sure if Bracknell had seen Mason without his helmet on. The gap between him having said it and Bracknell replying felt like a long, cold Winter.

  “Private, where is your uniform?” he finally asked. “Explain yourself.” Bracknell made a point of not lowering his weapon, which meant he either didn't believe him or he'd just forgotten he had it. From Sebastian's experience of the man, either was equally likely.

  “Sir,” Sebastian said, and carefully raised his hand to point at his wound. He smoothly followed the pointing motion through and stopped in a salute. “We were attacked. There was a, I don't know, animal thing. It jumped out and stuck a bloody blade in me. Cut right through me armour, it did. Lucky to be alive, sir. Colonel Edevane neutralised the threat and sent me back here while him and Private Fenton secured the area.”

  “And your current orders, Private?” Bracknell didn't usually ask many questions or make many astute observations, but here he was firing them off with startling precision. He also hadn't lowered his gun in the slightest – in fact, he'd adjusted his aim slightly closer to centre of mass.

  “Sir,” Sebastian stuttered, this time not an affectation. “My orders were to-to-to bring these artefacts back to the Hubert Gate.” He held up the toolbox. “And assist you in your duty of guarding it, sir.” A long-extinct animal turned on a wheel inside Bracknell's head as he tried to process what he just heard. After several long puffs on an inhaler, Bracknell's brain-hamster reached its conclusion.

  “The what Gate?” he asked. This question wasn't aimed at Sebastian, though his gun still was, this question was directly addressed to his brain-hamster. The answer to which being ‘shoot him,’ so he squeezed the trigger. An object raced towards him, it shone dully as the light of the Gate reflected off the more polished parts of its rusted surface. The Pilot Fish impacted his right leg above the knee with a force far greater than its small size implied. Bracknell caught his stagger and stayed vertical, though his aim was thrown wide and the bullet struck Sebastian’s toolbox. The hard plastic box split open in an explosion of green paint, and spilled its guts out onto the ground.

  Bracknell turned towards the interloper, but kept the fraud fixed firmly in his periphery. Ferociously and almost animalistically, he brought his boot stomping down on it. The head of the Pilot Fish buckled and spread outwards, each rotating ring detaching and flying loose like coiled springs, shooting off into the undergrowth. The innumerable cogs and gears and diodes inside crumbled to unidentifiable fragments of glass and metal, and those that didn't were pressed into the soft, earthy floor of the forest, lost inside the print of Bracknell's enormous boot. The Pilot Fish's pipe-cleaner limbs flailed dutifully – and finally – as the signal from its mechanical brain reached its actuators and ordered them to react. The limbs wrapped around Bracknell's leg like ivy around the base of a mighty tree and the signal went back towards its electronic brain to confirm its success. The signal never arrived at its destination, and its limbs again flopped down into the leaves and the dirt as the last of its life-giving oil trickled out and stained the ground around it.

  Bracknell turned towards Sebastian without contemplating what just happened or whether or not it had a deeper or more significant meaning; if there were three things he didn't do, they were deeper, significant, and meaning. Three more Pilot Fish emerged from the undergrowth and bodily hurled themselves towards his legs, each one hit the same leg in succession, each hitting as soon as he’d begun to catch his balance. Bracknell twirled like an oversized ballerina as he stumbled desperately to regain his balance. He fell backwards, his arms instinctively outstretched to grab hold of something, anything, though he knew there was nothing there. He landed with a crunch atop the shattered remains of the first Pilot Fish, the metallic corpse crumbled out of existence, and all that remained of it were strands of metal and a collection of salvageable components. The three Pilot Fish pressed across Bracknell's legs, their combined weight an impossible obstacle to overcome, even for a man that clearly treated every day as leg day. They were joined in short order by the remaining three. Two each took an arm and pinned it to the ground, while the last one joined the other at Bracknell’s legs.

  Peter emerged from the foliage behind Sebastian and barged past him. His eyes glowed blood red; they were the kind of eyes that could have stared into the abyss, made it blink first and then apologise and send flowers to make up for the misunderstanding. He held the speaker-box in one arm while his free hand rotated at as many revs per minute as his rusting, obsolete body could physically withstand, then a few more on top. The whooshing of the blades slicing the air filled the otherwise silent scene as he approached Bracknell. “Peter!” Sebastian snapped. He wasn't quite sure when exactly it was his brain told his limbs to put the rest of his body between Peter and the restrained Bracknell, but there he was, hands raised placatingly. “Peter, stop. This isn't what you're trying to be.” Peter considered for a moment what he was trying to be, and concluded that what he was trying to be, in fact, was very angry. Satisfied with how he managed to rise to the occasion and achieve his goal, he continued to walk.

  Now that Sebastian was close enough to the other Pilot Fish, he knew he had the option of overriding their autonomy and bypassing Peter altogether. He also knew that if he used them to stop Peter, Bracknell would get up and they'd be back where they started. Peter was old and rusted, and had existed far longer than he had ever been intended to, but all the same, the blades presented quite a deterrent. He could physically bundle Peter to the ground but not without considerable harm to himself, and he'd already been stabbed quite enough for one lifetime.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  A horribly dark thought ran through his head like a train at a crossing he was stood at. He could just ignore Bracknell; it's not like it was any of his business, not really. Eye for an eye and all that. It would be horrible, but there'd be one less threat waiting for him when he came home. The last train carriage clattered past his vision and he stood back in the woods. He twisted his heels into the dirt and extended his arms as wide as they'd go. As plans went, he couldn't say he was enthusiastic. “Peter! If you want to get to him, you'll have to come through me!” His regrets tended to take years to manifest, so it felt like a nice change of pace for one to be immediate. Peter inclined his head at a sharp angle, but stopped just short of what would be anatomically impossible for a human. He hadn't stopped his laborious plodding, or the blades, but he was paying attention.

  “You have a name, they don't. You have clothes, they don't.” Sebastian backed up to keep himself between the two. “And why are you doing any of this? For the most stupid, nonsensical, ridiculous – absolutely brilliantly human reason imaginable. You're not supposed to be alive, Peter. You’re broken and complex, and oh so very alive. You have grief, but you have no guilt, no regret. Don't throw that away on a prick like Bracknell.” The blades whirred to a gradual halt, Peter stopped and looked at his feet. He didn't quite know what he was feeling at that moment or why it felt like a hundred different things at once all wrapped up in that single feeling, but he didn't like it.

  “Can you fix him?” he asked.

  “That's complicated.” Sebastian sighed and expelled every last ounce of air from his lungs. He approached Peter and placed his hands on his shoulders. “I could rebuild him, maybe, but your friend wasn't like you, I think you know that.” Peter nodded, but he didn’t look up at Sebastian. “He wasn't unique like you, Peter. I couldn't rebuild you. And I can't fix you if-” he tapped Peter on the head with a single finger. “-You go and break.”

  “Justice?”

  “He'll get his. Sooner or later, he’ll get his.”

  “Get a room,” Bracknell snarked from under the writhing pile of metal.

  “What is the meaning of that statement?”

  “It means he's a dickhead.”

  Sebastian raked through the dropped contents of his defiled toolbox and came away with a small screwdriver. The rest, as much as he’d like to have it, would have to stay where it was. He walked across to the Gate, being careful to pick his way through the remains of the Pilot Fish without stepping on anything. He barely convinced Peter to do the right thing, he didn't need to be going about desecrating the remains of his friend. He knelt next to one of the small, glowing orbs situated at either side of the Gate – the Anchor. He’d designed it and overseen the prototyping, but he'd never gotten the chance to get his hands on the finished device.

  He placed the tip of the screwdriver into a small groove in the middle and pulled it upwards, separating the two parts. The top part of the orb, rather than being just a protective cover, contained almost as much electronics as the lower half did, which it was connected to by a ribbon cable. He carefully unfurled the cable and placed the top half of the orb on the ground, the crystalline image of Trinity Park faded into yellow static. The lower half of the orb was comprised of three brass rings, and each ring rotated counter to one below it. They were each inscribed with an almost runic shorthand that, depending on where each symbol was, would tell you something significant, relevant or very likely above the pay grade of everyone within one-hundred miles of it.

  In the centre of the middle ring were two rows of five click-wheels, like the kind you might find on a padlock – these signified the Gate's current target. There was a similar, albeit far larger, device on the opposite side of the Gate that would synchronise and stabilise the pathway. Sebastian recognised the co-ordinates, he'd seen them enough times and he had, after all, just travelled from there himself – Trinity Park. But that wasn't what he was interested in. The girls passed through the Gate but they hadn't ended up in Trinity or he'd have seen – or at least heard about – them.

  He placed a finger lightly on the outer ring and rotated it counter clockwise until a symbol that somewhat resembled a pocket-watch was aligned with the small sundial-like needle on the outer edge of the orb. He moved onto the second dial and repeated the process, then onto the third. Sebastian had no idea what the second and third symbols were supposed to be, and he wasn't sure anyone really did, but he knew from their relative positioning to more legible symbols that they were the ones he needed.

  The dials rotated back to their starting positions and clicked into place, and the wheels in the middle began to spin of their own accord until they ended on a completely different set of numbers from before. The device didn't posses a significant storage capacity and sacrificed a lot of functionality to be as compact as it was, but what it was able to do was remember the last set of co-ordinates, and those co-ordinates related exactly to, well, he didn't really know. The first three numbers were the same as Trinity Park's, so he knew it had to be local, but the rest were a mystery. Mystery was a term stupid people used to avoid saying 'I don't know.' Was this the kind of man he was now, the kind that called things mysteries?

  “You been juggling this, Brackers?”

  “Lieutenant David Bracknell, 057869, Royal Expeditionary Force.”

  “Oh, come on, you're not a prisoner of war. Who even has prisoners of war nowadays anyway? Not you lot, you shoot them all. And Royal Expeditionary Force?” Sebastian scoffed. “Bet that wasn't a thing last week.”

  “Was too!” Bracknell realised he sounded like a child in the playground, but he was far too large to feel socially awkward about it.

  “A month?”

  “Fortnight. Sod off.”

  “Okay, listen.” Sebastian shuffled around on one knee to face Bracknell even though he knew he couldn't actually see him because of his robot quilt. “You don't need to tell me anything confidential, I just need to know if you destabilised the Anchor. If I wanted to go to Trinity Park, I'd have hopped right in the Gate already. I just need a ride.”

  Bracknell let out a low rumbling growl that made the Pilot Fish reconsider their very linear existence. “Fine. Just keep the reject away from me, order it to stay away.”

  “Deal,” Sebastian agreed knowing full well he actually couldn't.

  “Two brats came by earlier, got through the Gate. Knocked the Anchor out of alignment, spent an hour trying to reset it,” Bracknell said.

  “Those brats were my daughters.”

  “Figures – you've got the same stupid face.”

  Sebastian ran his finger along the third row of wheels and gave them a spin, then clicked in the centre wheel. The static slowly changed to a large expanse strewn with debris. Hills and mountains dotted the landscape, some so tall that they reached the burnt-orange, and each made from metal and plastic and concrete. Bilious black smoke trickled down them like rivers and coated the ground to ankle height. Pilot Fish sure-footedly patrolled the slopes and peaks as they went about their business of sorting the materials and sometimes pushing each other off them because it was funny.

  “This is where you get off, Bracknell,” Sebastian said. “Peter, throw him in.” Peter enthusiastically traded boops and beeps with the Pilot Fish. The swearing, protesting form of Bracknell was hefted from the ground and dragged into the Gate.

  “You told them to go with him?”

  “They are home,” Peter replied.

  “And you, what about you?”

  “I am home, too.”

  Sebastian returned to the Anchor, retraced his steps and brought up the coordinates from earlier, then clicked the centre wheel again. The flailing forms of Bracknell and the Pilot Fish drifted out of existence and, in their place, a dimly-lit alleyway phased into view. “Peter,” he said. “Be good. I was going to say be human – terrible idea, really. Just be you; it's better that way, trust me. It won’t take long for them to fix this little hijack, not with working Anchors. I need you to give me five minutes, then I want you to turn them off.”

  “How will Sebastian get back with shoes?”

  “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible now, I’m sorry. I need to find my girls. Turn the Anchors back on again this time tomorrow. If you can’t see us at the other side, I want you to turn them back off and forget about us. Sykes has the coordinates now, so it won’t be too long before another wave of Pilot Fish arrive to Anchor the Gate. Three days, two if you’re unlucky. That’ll be your job, Peter.”

  “Sebastian will be missed.”

  Sebastian closed his eyes and walked into the Gate. He’d left his helmet back in the Tirren's basement, and while it was fundamentally useless for its main purpose, it was good eye protection that he really wished he'd brought with him. This was his fourth time travelling through the Gate and, if all went to plan, there'd be a fifth. He wasn't looking forward to that either. Travel time tended to differ wildly, in a subjective sense that is – the actual travel time was never more than a few minutes. The first time he travelled through the Gate, he could have sworn it took hours, but Helena insisted it was only a couple of seconds. He never quite understood why it was the way it was, and suspected even a basic understanding of it was beyond his grasp.

  He felt tired yet awake, hungry but full, heavy but light as a feather; everything about the experience was contradictory, and harking back to his previous feeling – just plain wrong. The bright glow of the Gate faded to black, then the blackness into the half-light of the burnt-orange as it spilled into a decrepit alleyway, and he appeared ankle-deep in unidentifiable filth. He was home, in the loosest possible sense.