Like every other kid on Shiloh, Jim had seen vids of the huge twelve-foot-tall walkers standing guard outside the Council headquarters on Tarsonis, marching through the streets in parades, and trudging through storms of lethal fire as their arm cannons dealt death to the Confederacy’s enemies.

But Raynor had never seen a goliath marching across the countryside before and felt a sudden stab of fear. Property taxes had been rising steeply for the last few years—and some farmers had been thrown off their land. Was that why the machine had been sent? To take possession of the farm? Maybe, but Jim couldn’t see any sign of the ground troops that would normally accompany a walker. What, then?

He took the mic off its clip, and was about to alert his father to the goliath’s presence, when Trace Raynor’s voice came over the cab’s speaker. “I can see it, Jim… . I’m on my way.”

Raynor looked back over his right shoulder, saw the column of dust his father’s beat-up truck was throwing up, and felt a sense of relief. Because even though he was good at schoolwork and could run every piece of equipment on the farm, there were a whole lot of things he didn’t know how to do. And dealing with the government was one of them.

But he was curious, so as the brightly painted goliath splashed through the river and lurched up onto the field, Raynor brought the robo-harvester to a halt and switched the engine off to save fuel. He could hear the tinny sound of the Confederacy’s anthem by then as the walker grew larger, and flags flew from dual antennas.

As his father arrived, the teenager took a swig of tepid water from the bottle on the floor before he exited the cab. The wheat crop was so sparse that his boots produced puffs of dust when his feet hit the ground. By that time the goliath had come to a halt, and stood not fifty feet away. As Jim entered the machine’s elongated shadow, he was aware of the subtle vibration that the machine transmitted through the soles of his heavy work boots. There was something else, too, an acrid odor that he recognized as the smell of ozone, which hung heavy in the air.