by Isaac Hooke
She realized that there was something more she could do, if she couldn’t directly help those fleeing around her.
“There are weapons in my backpack!” she said. “Give them out!”
The men ignored her.
“Wart Nose!” she hissed.
The old man glanced at her, confused.
“My pack!” she said. “There are weapons! Give them out to the people! One at a time!”
Wart Nose blinked at her, then finally comprehension dawned in those terrified eyes; he twisted in her grasp to unlatch the backpack, and then removed a pistol.
“Hey, moron!” Wart Nose yelled at a young man Rhea was racing past.
When the man looked at him, Wart Nose tossed him the pistol.
Wart Nose continued to dole out insults alongside weapons as Rhea raced through the square.
She wasn’t sure it was the greatest idea to give the denizens of Rust Town these weapons, considering how useless energy attacks were, not to mention how inexperienced the average citizen was with firearms. But there was at least a tiny chance someone would find a weakness while engaging the Hydras. Without weapons, the chance dropped to zero. That was more than enough reason to distribute them, in her mind.
She emerged from the square and into the road beyond. She was on the final stretch to Aradne: only six blocks remained between her and that towering wall.
However, when two of the Hydras stampeded onto the main street directly behind her, trampling and swallowing everything in sight while continuing forward at breakneck speed, she realized this route wasn’t as safe as she’d thought. She wouldn’t be able to outrun the creatures, not while she carried the two men.
And so she took the first available byway. She ran south a block, then swerved east once more when an intersection presented itself.
The Hydras passed by to the north, their multiple heads bobbing up and down beyond the rooftops of the cargo containers and lean-tos that separated them from her.
She continued running as fast as she was able and headed toward the walls of Aradne. She could see the gates at the base. Closed.
Not surprising.
“We have to get to Aradne!” Wart Nose said.
She nodded. “I’m trying.”
“The gates are closed!” the other man said.
“I know,” Rhea told him. “We’re going to have to climb the wall.”
“I’m not very good at climbing!” Wart Nose said.
“Neither am I,” the other man added.
“We’ll figure something out,” she said.
She reached the gates at the base. Other citizens were already there, banging on the sealed doors, begging to be let inside. She proceeded past them, into the small aisle formed by the closest lean-tos and the wall and halted when she could advance no more—the way was blocked by the remaining lean-tos, which directly abutted against the metal wall.
She lowered the two men to the ground.
To the north, she could see Hydras ripping through the surrounding homes, now that they’d reached Aradne’s wall. They didn’t touch the wall itself, she noted. Probably hadn’t even tried.
“Grab onto my pack,” she said, beckoning toward the straps.
“I don’t think I can hang on,” Wart Nose said. He pinched his pencil thin biceps. “I’m a bit weak. Too many years spent gaming online. Best to abandon us here and save yourself.”
“Then get inside it,” she told him, shucking off the backpack. “Both of you.”
The two men exchanged bewildered glances. Then Wart Nose shrugged and stepped in while she held open the lip.
“Not sure I’m going to like this,” the second man said, but he, too, obeyed.
The backpack was big enough to fit both of them all the way to the hips. Rhea secured them in place with the drawstring at the lip, and closed the top of the pack, squeezing the canopy between them and buckling it to the clasp on the other side.
“Hang on.” She slid her shoulders beneath the straps and stood. Their weight forced her backward a pace before she could compensate, and she banged someone’s head on the lean-to.
“Ugh!” Wart Nose said. “Wrong way!”
“Sorry,” Rhea told him.
She went to the wall and glanced one last time at the sealed gates to her left, and the crowd gathered before them. She scanned for children or infants among them, looking for someone else who would fit inside the pack without seriously impacting the weight, but saw only adults.
She took a deep breath, then reached up. The wall’s surface was coated in long strips of metal, some of which had partially peeled away. She felt along the top of a mildly flaking area and found a fingerhold. She pressed her fingertips in, hard, enlarging the crevice, and pulled herself up.
She continued that way, using the indentations in the metal strips for handholds and footholds, enlarging them as necessary, and proceeded upward.
“Look!” someone said. “She’s climbing!”
She glanced down after a moment, and saw other citizens following her lead, climbing the wall. She hoped they knew what they were doing.
When she was about fifteen meters high, she picked a hold on a strip that was peeling away too much, and it ripped off entirely when she applied her weight. She nearly fell.
She repositioned her hand and swore to be more careful with choosing holds going forward.
The turrets that lined the walls of Aradne finally began to open fire, and Hunter Killer drones also appeared overhead. The rulers had to at least pretend they were trying to protect Rust Town and its residents.
Those big energy bolts struck the closest Hydras, but the impacts only darkened their scales, and did nothing to bring down the Hydras: the creatures absorbed the attacks just as easily as they did the bolts from the smaller weapons.
She glanced at the streets farther back, closer to the edges of Rust Town, and from her vantage she was able to see the rapid inroads the bioweapons were making. They kept mostly to the streets but weren’t averse to tearing apart any cargo containers and lean-tos in their paths, devouring and trampling people at will. The rulers of Aradne must have been very proud of themselves. Rust Town, and everyone who lived in it, would very soon be no more.
The bioweapons continued to flow into the settlement from the ruins beyond. They were shrouded in dust until entering Rust Town, at which point the cloud dissipated, probably because the penetrating Hydras dispersed so far apart. Those that entered the city had shimmering halos surrounding their bodies that lasted several seconds before fading entirely; Rhea supposed those were the last remnants of whatever field was generating the cloud.
Rhea looked away and forced herself to continue climbing. Her arm and leg servos hummed, struggling against the combined weight of the two men; the load on those motors was translated into pain by her mind-machine interface, which she felt as a dull ache in her “joints.” It was her interface’s way of reminding her that she was straining herself, and that she better not keep this up for too long, unless she wanted one—or all—of those servos to fail.
She recorded the path she took, highlighting the handholds and footholds on her HUD, so that when the time came to descend, she would have a route already marked out.
Some of the handholds were sharp, and her fingers got scratched occasionally, but otherwise held up well against the metal.
She soon passed beyond the reach of the bioweapons—it would take a mighty leap on their part to rip her from the wall at this point. Then again, maybe they didn’t have to leap, necessarily: they could probably scale it just as readily as Rhea. It would be even easier for them, with those metal-piercing talons of theirs. But she suspected climbing Aradne's wall was off limits to the creatures, because at least so far, they were ignoring the tall metal surface and everyone on it.
Speaking of the latter… below, more and more people from the growing crowd continued to follow her lead; in fact, citizens were climbing all along the base of the wall now. She stopped glancing down at
them when she witnessed a young woman lose her grip and plummet to her doom.
It took her another minute to reach the top. When she arrived, she pulled herself onto the rail between two large turrets, only to spot a pair of security robots waiting on the walkway below. They were blue and black polycarbonate things, with wicked-looking barrels built into their forearms like Horatio. Small grenade launchers were deployed on their shoulders.
Keeping one hand securely on the rail, with the other Rhea reached for the pistol at her hips. She was careful not to touch the weapon, however, as the walkway robots had so far made no aggressive movements: their arms, and the barrels they carried, remained pointed downward, as did the grenade launchers.
“Help us!” Wart Nose told them. “Rust Town is under attack!”
“Do you wish to claim asylum?” one of the robots said.
“Yes!” Wart Nose said. “I claim asylum!”
“Granted,” the robot replied.
“Me too!” the second man said.
“Granted,” the robot repeated in the same tone.
“You’re going to let them in?” Rhea asked in surprise. “Just like that?” She kept her fingers close to the pistol.
The robot bobbed that featureless head up and down. “We’ve been instructed to allow entry to any Rust Town residents who scale the wall.”
“Noble of you,” Rhea said. “And yet you’re not going to open your gates…”
The robot nodded again. “We cannot risk the lives of our own citizens.”
“I see, and why is it that these bioweapons aren’t climbing the walls of Aradne, do you think?” she asked sweetly.
“Our weapon turrets and Hunter Killers are keeping them at bay,” the robot explained.
Rhea started as both turrets on either side flashed a bright blue at the same time. An audible crackling filled the air, and all her synthetic hair stood on end. She glanced over her shoulder in time to witness a pair of azure smears descending from the turrets toward the streets below.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “These weapons that can’t even penetrate their scales are keeping them at bay…”
The robot didn’t answer.
Rhea hauled herself over the rail and landed on the walkway below. She lowered her backpack to the metal grating that served as floor and let her human cargo debark. She flexed her robotic shoulders, glad to be free of the burden, not just physically but mentally.
“Thank you,” Wart Nose told her. “I won’t forget this.”
“Nor I,” the other man said.
She nodded brusquely, then slid the empty pack back onto her shoulders. It felt so light.
She gazed out across Aradne City, whose towers stretched before her. She stared at those skyscrapers so longingly; some appeared to be covered in crystals, glinting beneath the sun. Perhaps it was simply the way the sunlight caught upon their exteriors. Then again, she’d heard some buildings had windows made from sapphires polished and cut to an incredible thinness, and that it was these sapphires that were responsible for the assortment of interesting geometric shapes bedecking the city, engineering marvels that wouldn’t have been possible with ordinary glass.
Everything was calm and peaceful out there. Delivery drones went about their business uninterrupted. Flyers carried citizens to their local destinations. Parents lounged in parks while their kids played on the grass. It was… utopian.
“Do you wish to claim asylum?” the robot asked her.
She blinked, instantly brought back to the present moment.
The streets between Aradne’s beautiful skyscrapers remained entirely unsullied by bioweapons. This while she could hear the screams coming from Rust Town behind her. And the roars. None of the people she saw in Aradne seemed to notice, which made her wonder if the citizens even knew Rust Town was under attack. The walls likely prevented any sound from passing into the city. And it would be relatively easy to suppress live streams sourced from the settlement. Private drones that attempted to cross the wall could be shot down…
Then again, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference if the citizens of Aradne did know. They might have protested, but there wasn’t much they could do, not while they were locked inside those towering walls and serving entirely at the whim of the city’s rulers.
She sighed, then glanced at the robot and smiled faintly. “Not yet. I plan to save at least a few more people. Something you robots should seriously consider, if you have any sort of conscience in those polycarbonate brains of yours.”
The two robots exchanged glances, and though they had no faces, she had the distinct impression her comment confused them.
Rhea pulled herself over the rail of the walkway.
Once more unto the breach…
She leaped off before the robots could stop her.
29
Rhea had spun her body as she leaped, so that she was facing the wall as she fell. After dropping four meters, she grabbed onto a protruding strip of metal. Her weight and momentum peeled it away, nearly tearing the strip from the wall. The upper portion clung by only a small corner that threatened to detach at any moment.
Probably should have chosen a less dramatic exit…
She activated the HUD markings she had recorded previously, then glanced at the vertical surface below and rested the tip of her foot on the labeled hold. She gently released the torn strip with one hand and grabbed onto the indicated handhold for her right arm next.
She proceeded quickly using those markings and climbed down almost as fast as she had ascended.
Halfway down she paused to gaze out across Rust Town. All of the bioweapons had entered the settlement by then—there was no cloud of dust blotting the ruins and plains beyond. Instead, the creatures rampaged through the slums unchecked. She saw trampled and dismembered bodies amid the crushed lean-tos and cargo containers. Most of the streets and avenues were no longer discernible, not with all the debris from the surrounding structures strewn about the roads.
The Hunter Killers fired at the Hydras indiscriminately, as did the energy turrets that topped Aradne’s walls, but the attacks seemed mostly perfunctory, because at best they only momentarily stunned their targets. One Hunter Killer swooped too low and was knocked out of the air by a Hydra; the craft created a fireball when it struck the ground. To Rhea, even that seemed for show, so that when news and videos finally leaked to the citizens of Aradne, the rulers could claim they had tried their utmost to save the slums. “We sacrificed some of our own units!” they would say.
Rhea shook her head.
Someone is going to pay for this.
She let go of the wall to unholster her pistol and fired a few times into the fray. As usual, she caused no damage. The Hydra she targeted didn’t even seem to notice the impacts at that range, and it didn’t even bother to look up at her, intent as it was on destroying one particularly sturdy set of cargo containers. According to the map, those containers belonged to the sheriff’s office.
She holstered the weapon and continued descending the wall. She occasionally passed other residents who were climbing up. Usually they were Robos, or otherwise had cybernetic enhancements of some kind to increase their strength. Some appeared steroid-enhanced.
“Why are you going down?” a man asked her as she passed near. He was one of the few not augmented by machines or drugs, driven mostly by fear, and the will to survive. His lean build certainly helped as well. He wore thin gloves to prevent his fingers from getting cut up by the metal. It seemed to be working, though several tears had developed in the fabric.
“I want to save more,” she answered. She considered throwing him into her pack and carrying him the rest of the way to the top, as there was no guarantee the man would make it, especially without enhancements of any kind. But she decided instead to continue descending.
More and more people were climbing the wall below. Another person fell to his death as she watched, and she looked away, wondering if she should aid the man above her after all. But
when she looked up, she saw that rescue flyers had begun to arrive from Aradne; they helped some of the climbers higher up, loading them aboard, including the man she had passed. There were so few of them it seemed a token effort to Rhea—a mere public relations show meant to soothe the coming citizen outrage.
She continued descending, unsure of what she was going to do. Perhaps she’d try to help some of the climbers below, by choosing two more of them to take with her.
The wall traffic increased the closer she came to the bottom, so that by the time she was ten meters from the ground, she had to pick her way through a literal mass of climbing people. Her handholds were all taken, so she was forced to improvise a new path, feeling out new recesses and crevices between the climbers with the tips of her feet.
She kept an eye out for someone to help. She wanted to find a climber who didn’t have gloves, and thus whose hands would get cut up along the way, making it difficult for them to maintain a grip when their fingers became covered in blood. While some wore gloves, or had wrapped ripped cloths around their hands, there were actually quite a few people who didn’t have any hand protection at all, so now it was simply a matter of choosing someone.
But before she could do that, a group of Hydras suddenly surged forward. Their roars drew Rhea’s gaze, and she watched them rake the walls with their mouths and talons, ripping away people in clumps. Those men and women who were crowded around the base of the wall scattered away in all directions, screaming as they scrambled over the broken lean-tos and bodies.
Apparently, now that the majority of the buildings in Rust Town had been crushed, along with much of the population, the bioweapons had turned to the next most obvious targets: the people who had fled to Aradne’s walls.
Whatever instinctual programming or inherited memory prevented the Hydras from climbing the city’s walls certainly didn’t stop them from stomping the people cowering at its base, nor from swiping climbers from its surface. A single Hydra could cause whole clusters of men and women to fall away with one swat of a taloned paw.
