Ironhide Thornpaw's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Ironhide Thornpaw crouched under the roots of a giant redwood and waited for the drone to lose him. It did not. The metal plates grafted to his back and shoulders still glowed faint red on the drone's scanner. He heard the tiny motor buzzing above the leaves. Somewhere south, the scientist who welded this armor onto his body was moving farther away, and the drone kept telling him exactly where the bear stood. He could not hunt his enemy while his enemy could watch every step. The grizzly reached back and pried a loose plate from his forearm. He remembered the crash site he'd passed at dawn. A wrecked patrol carrier lay in a ravine, its guts spilled across the rocks. Broken antennas. Torn wire. Ironhide had ignored it then. Now he needed it. He climbed down to the ravine and dug through the wreckage. His claws bent metal aside like paper. He found a shattered transmitter, three antennas, and a coil of copper wire. For an hour he worked in silence, twisting wire around his shoulder plate. He built a crude device, a nest of antennas sprouting from a scavenged box. He clamped it to the armor above his spine. His paws were too big for the small parts, so he bit the last wire into place. The drone found him again. It dropped low, red eye scanning. Ironhide flipped a switch on the box. The antennas hummed. The device flooded the air with noise, drowning the signal the drone used to read his armor. The drone's eye flickered. It circled, confused, searching for a bear that its sensors could no longer see. Then it drifted off over the trees and vanished. Ironhide stood still and breathed. For the first time in weeks, nothing tracked him. He could finally move unseen toward the scientist who did this to him. A sound stopped him. Not the drone. Something small scrabbling in the wreckage behind him. He turned. A squirrel climbed out of the broken carrier, but it was wrong. Half its body was rebuilt in metal. Its tail was a chain of steel links. One eye glowed cold blue, the same blue as the scanner that had hunted him. It fixed that eye on Ironhide and did not run. The bear's stomach tightened. He knew that work. The same hand that had bolted armor to his flesh had rebuilt this animal. The squirrel had been watching him from the wreck the whole time. Its metal jaw opened, and a thin signal chirped out, high and sharp, punching straight through his new jammer. The drone had been the scientist's eyes. This was something worse. The squirrel turned and darted up the redwood toward a sprawling home built in the branches, ropes and huts strung through the canopy far above. It was going to warn someone. Ironhide bared his teeth and started to climb.