Robogenesis (32 page)

And now the story begins for the last time
.

We return to the scarred plains of Ragnorak where the New War ended. In the stupendous silence of war’s aftermath, Gray Horse Army regrouped. The traumatized survivors began to march back to Oklahoma, unaware that deserted weapons were still hunting the snowy wastes, their minds severed from the control of Archos R-14. And of course, the beast itself still lived
.

In the last moments of war, a pulse shuddered away from the grave of Archos R-14. An earthquake—its heat and pressure rippling like a muscle twitch across the great white flank of the Alaskan peninsula. Its patterns were laced with hidden data, coded instructions that infected remaining hardware with unknown purpose
.

I witnessed a blind, eyeless head push out of the snow. An abandoned stumper, raising a long, wavering antenna, tasting the air. I had never seen one alone before. It was soon joined by others, explosive hexapods emerging onto glittering ice. Arranging themselves in dots and dashes, a kind of living Morse code, they foraged in fractal patterns until they found a dark mound, half buried in the snow. Massive, sloped, and still, it was the burned wreck of a spider tank
.

The stumpers danced. With feelers and feet, they tapped messages to the sleeping spider tank. Archos R-14 was sending a message from beyond the grave: instructions. Soon, the tank’s dark round intention light faded up to a dull red. With a groan, the weapon rose up and set out in the footsteps of a soldier called “Bright Boy.”

—A
RAYT
S
HAH

NEURONAL ID: CORMAC WALLACE

The walker that’s hunting us must have been on fire at some point. I can smell the singed flesh of the monster on the wind. Melted wires and baked steel plating. A kind of toxic smoke that clings to the back of my throat no matter how many times I spit.

Funny what becomes familiar after two years.

“This is it,” I say to Cherrah. “It’s almost on us.”

Cherrah shoves a strand of hair out of her face. Those lips that I have kissed so many times are cracked now, bloodied by the cold. “We can make our stand at the tree line,” she says. “Dig a foxhole, set up the shelter, and camouflage it. From a blind we might have a couple of extra seconds to disable whatever-it-is.”

The war has beaten Cherrah nearly to death, but it’s also chiseled away the soft parts. We killed Archos R-14 two months ago, and those of us who lived are strong. Even so, none of us is stronger than metal.

“And if things go wrong, we’ll be stuck,” I say.

“We can’t outrun it,” she says, nodding at her leg. The bullet was a through-and-through but it tore the muscle. She’s still healing and will be for months. Until she does, we’re moving deadly slow on foot.

I nod in agreement. There’s not energy for much else.

Leaning into it, I drag the heavy mesh net that contains our supplies.
We cut this netting off a dead spider tank buried in a snowdrift and kitted up on leftover supplies. That and the occasional deer might be the only things that save us. After I transmitted
The Hero Archive
onto the wire, we had to abandon what we couldn’t carry in our rush to catch up to Gray Horse Army, including our black box.

We nearly made the rendezvous, but the woods had other plans.

Now we’re looking to find a good spot to set up an ambush. Hoping our tracks don’t make our little plan obvious to whatever is coming.

I don’t know why we’re still being hunted. I don’t know whether Archos R-14 is still alive somehow or if it’s talking to this thing or if it’s on its own. It’s hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they’re always smarter than you think.

“Cormac,” says Cherrah. She is standing alone in the clearing now, leaning on a slender walking stick to keep the weight off her shot-up leg.

I turn to face her, sweat rolling down my forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she says, gesturing to her leg.

Not what I want to hear. I turn my back to her and keep straining to drag this burden. I don’t want to see her like this. We keep each other warm at night, but she’s also my brother-in-arms. I can’t abide weakness in her.

Her weakness is mine. And we have to live.

“I slowed us down,” she says. Her voice sounds thin and far away in my ears, competing with the pounding of blood in my temples and my own heavy breathing. “We would have caught up with the column if it weren’t for me.”

After a couple of steps, I pause.

“No,” I say. The word feels heavy and true, like the swing of a well-balanced ax. Turning, I see the despair in her weather-beaten face and I put on a grim smile to counterbalance it. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have any reason to catch up with the column. Now come on, soldier. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I haven’t seen it yet, but the burned-up Rob that’s been stalking us for the last few days is advanced. Definitely a late-war variety of killer. Probably
a mantis. As far as I can tell, Archos half-designed the mantis walkers to map remote terrain and half-designed them to kill any humans who made it this far north.

I know these things because of the smell of burning.

The newest machines didn’t use actuators anymore. No motors at all. Instead, they had real muscles. Carl, our brainboy, said their muscle fibers were made out of electroactive polymers. Give ’em juice and the tough plastic will flex just like real muscles. When the machines walked, those polymer slabs quivered on impact, hanging from titanium bones.

The worst part about it was that you couldn’t shake the feeling that you were watching a living thing. When that first stuttered column of mantis tanks came sprinting out of the tree line, blazing across the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields, meaty legs swinging, clawed feet gouging the ice, and each one throwing up a spray of dirt and exhaust—well, it was like prehistoric monsters had been let loose on the battlefield.

Lot of guys lost it, seeing the new machines move so graceful. They were too much like animals for comfort. It’s hard to describe. Their movements trigger a part of your brain that recognizes innate beauty—the grace of a leaping deer. But you’re looking at a machine. Not alive, right?

It’s their living grace that shakes your faith in what’s natural.

And if you
do
manage to slice through those black ropes of muscle, nothing but salty water sprays out. No crimson gouts of blood. Just an easily replaced conductive black fluid. We could slow Rob down, but we could never stop him. Not without fire. Burn the muscle, stop the machine.

Using a folding trowel, I begin to dig a foxhole.

Digging in this part of Alaska is tough, but not impossible in early autumn. I scrape snow and tree bark off the layer of half-frozen soil beneath. Wedge all that muddy ice into a rim that faces the clearing. Getting through the next layer is when the sweat really starts to flow.

I stop when the foxhole is just big enough. There isn’t a lot of time left. Besides, any deeper and I’d start to feel like I was digging my own grave.

It takes Cherrah and me a few minutes to get the tent up. It’s a low hexagonal dome, patched too many times to count. Dirty white, it matches the snow as well as we could hope. The entrance faces the clearing, Cherrah’s arc of fire centered on where I figure the wind is blowing the smell from.

Somewhere not far from here, a quadruped walker is mechanically trudging over broken terrain. It has a hunting instinct as constant as gravity. Whether it is tracking us by our heat or our sound or by satellite signature—it doesn’t matter. We can’t outrun it, but maybe we can surprise it.

Maybe, if we’re damned lucky, we can finish it off.

Cherrah lowers herself into the camouflaged shelter. Shuffles around until she lies prone with her rifle pushing out of the tent mouth. From a distance, the setup looks like a tree hollow covered in dirty snow. Even from a few meters away, I can barely see her in there. The smoke-tainted wind blows in and the tent sways gently.

“You good?” I ask.

“Perfect,” says Cherrah, voice muffled.

“We’ve got twenty minutes max. Probably ten. Be ready,” I say.

“Affirmative.”

I stand in the snow outside the tent for another second. Now is when I’m supposed to head off to my own covered position. But as it turns out, I’m finding it tough. That tent is so little and the fabric is paper-thin and what’s coming is so goddamned
big
.

“Be … safe,” I say to the mound of snow.

It is quiet for a long moment.

Then the tent flap flutters open. I catch a glimpse of Cherrah’s face inside, behind the machine-gun sight. She loudly kisses her gloved hand and then wiggles her fingers at me. Her cheeks puff as she blows the kiss my way. Down low, I see that her ungloved right hand is steady, still wrapped around the grip of the heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on its bipod.

Yeah. That’s my girl.

“Get into position, Bright Boy,” she says. “Shoo.”

I hear the high-pitched crack of broken timber first. Then the groan of a falling tree. Pine needles rip like Velcro through snow-laden canopies. Tons of snow and hardwood are collapsing out there in the white waste. Not too far away, because a billowing cloud of frozen water vapor is avalanching into our clearing, low and swirling and growing like mist.

No targets yet.

I’m halfway up a tree, across the clearing. My ass is wedged in the crook of the trunk and the barrel of my rifle is resting on a frozen branch, aimed at a spot of woods that is dancing with shivering, swaying treetops.

As the New War went on, every new Rob variety seemed bigger. By the end, a typical mantis walker was the size of a small house. Often, they were loaded up with more machines, quadrupeds folded into space-saving forms so they could be unloaded for scouting or mapping or whatever else Big Rob was doing out here in these woods. If the war hadn’t ended, I don’t know how big they might’ve gotten.

I’m sure this bastard won’t disappoint the imagination.

Nothing to see yet, but the rolling mist is full of sound. Tree limbs snapping like starter pistols. Thudding footsteps and the raw-edged squeals of tree trunks peeling away from a chest hull. And the rasp of my own breath in my ears, loud like I just ran a sprint.

I pick up a lighter sound behind all of it, faint. A high-pitched clacking. Faster than the walker’s gait could allow for. Quick like a sewing-machine needle. Legs that belong to something smaller and faster than this monster.

Each flare of my nostrils lets in the strong scent of burned muscle fiber. Cherrah’s machine-gun nest is quiet and still. She is burrowed, coiled inside the tent at the tree line like a rattlesnake. Waiting. This part feels like it’s taking forever, but when the shit comes it’s going to come fast.

I flinch as a bullet barks out of her nest. A puff of snow from the rifle kick and a side-vented wink from the jerry-rigged flash suppressor.

Something big and fast is coming in from the mist.

Now I hear an engine groaning deep and mechanical, while some other actuator on it screams like a hurt animal. Four legs slashing through swirls of snow vapor. And a baleful red light glowing at the heart of its dark bulk. The light streaks up and down in wavering tracers of crimson as the thing gallops forward.

I set my jaw and do what I do best.

Snap. Snap. Snap
.

My shots and Cherrah’s. Measured trigger pulls. Semiautomatic but sending each bullet out with its own intention—its own violent destiny. Entering the clearing, the walker lightly jars a two-hundred-foot pine tree and sends it wobbling crazily back and forth like a stick of bamboo.

The red glow is an intention light. This must be one of our own spider tanks gone rogue. Brainwashed by Archos R-14 in those last minutes before Big Rob ate fire. No wonder it’s damaged. All of our tank column took heavy fire in those last moments. Only the hopeless cases were abandoned before the march home began. But this one has been resurrected somehow. It’s covered in singe marks and shining gashes, as if the whole thing got burned up and then run over by a lawn mower.

Now it’s in the clearing. Our bullets snapping off its armor. A couple of rounds bounced harmlessly off the hull plating, but now we’re zeroing in. Hitting the joints up high to try to disable a limb. Sending our kinetic energy toward the familiar stubby instrument mast on top, loaded with radar and lidar and, oh no, the signature Z-shape of an acoustic tracker.