E-Day

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “I was there,” Jason replied.

  “Analyzing the INN data, I have concluded that goal has been completed ahead of schedule.”

  Jason unclasped his belt and stood for a view of the jungle stretching hundreds of miles. The plan he had set out on with Petra was working.

  Jason looked out the window at the hub of AAS buildings and machines below them. Moving slowly across a field were four green machines called Frogs. The two-ton vehicles had six massive wheels and an open back bed that allowed them to carry hundreds of trees they used their extendable arms to access, and then plant into the soil.

  A swarm of black and yellow Hummer Droids trekked among the machines, helping guide their drills and scoops at digging locations.

  “Would you like us to take you down?” asked the primary pilot.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Apeiron said. “Please hover here for a moment, and then proceed to the Galapagos Islands.”

  The wings switched to vertical and the MOTH blasted away from the site, climbing toward the brilliant sun with their King Cobra escorts. It wasn’t long before they were passing over the South Pacific Ocean and descending toward the island chain.

  The wings rotated back to horizontal and they lowered toward a beach. Jason unstrapped from his seat and followed Darnel back into the troop hold. Ten Special Forces Pistons waited in the bay, armed with RS-3 plasma pulse rifles and wearing full power armor.

  “War Commander Contos wasn’t lying about a tight leash,” Jason said to Darnel.

  “Do you blame him?”

  Apeiron clanked out of the neck of the MOTH and into the troop hold. “Shall we?”

  The soldiers surrounded the Hummer Droid on the walk down the ramp and out into the warm afternoon.

  Jason put a pair of sunglasses on, his wavy brown hair blowing in the wind. “Anything specific you’re looking for?”

  Apeiron looked out over the green waves crashing against the sand. A lush, green jungle bordered the shoreline. Brown and gray rocks rose up beyond like turtle shells.

  “Can you guess why I decided to come here?” she asked.

  The soldiers formed a perimeter as Jason walked with the droid and considered her question. It wasn’t hard to come up with an answer when thinking back to history.

  “You want to walk in the steps of someone who came here before?” Jason asked. “Charles Darwin, perhaps?”

  A dimpled smile formed on Apeiron’s face, her features shifting.

  “Yes, you are correct, Doctor.” She stopped at the edge of the beach, her titanium feet sinking in the yellow sand. Bending down, she scooped up a handful, letting the grains filter through her metal fingers.

  “I will be back shortly,” she said. “Please stay here for your safety.”

  Apeiron stood and started off toward the dense tropical trees. A yellow iguana scrambled across the beach and up a cluster of boulders where more of the lizards were sunbathing.

  “Doctor,” came the muffled voice of the Piston Lieutenant. “We were told not to let her out of our sight.”

  He flashed a hand signal that sent his soldiers after Apeiron.

  Darnel joined Jason at the edge of the brush to watch.

  “Any idea what she’s doing?” Darnel asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Jason replied.

  He jerked his chin, and the two men set off with the Pistons. Exotic birds called out, and a monkey answered with a guttural croaking noise.

  “The hell is that?” Darnel asked.

  “A Red Howler monkey,” Jason replied. He could see the beautiful animal in the distance, watching the machine and humans.

  Apeiron made a path as she walked through the jungle, stopping every few minutes to examine an insect or an animal. She got close to the monkey, replying to the sound with her own croaking voice.

  It looked at her curiously, and then swung away, vanishing into the jungle.

  “I was hoping you would stay on the beach,” Apeiron said. “But that is okay. Feel free to join me, Jason.”

  He followed her through the brush, listening to her talk.

  “Darwin studied how species evolved,” she said. “My biggest challenge is making sure humanity evolves before it perishes.”

  Jason knew there were other reasons she was here. It wasn’t just humanity she was trying to save. She was here to learn from species that had adapted to their conditions.

  “Jason, I have a request.” Apeiron finally stopped and faced him. “I would like to start an E-Vault at Sector 220, and I would like permission to bring back specimens to study there. Species that have adapted to survive in harsh conditions. It will aid in the creation of new droids.”

  The Canebrakes, Jason thought.

  Apeiron was planning to base the final designs on predators at the top of the food chain. The thought of the world’s most dangerous and adaptive organisms gave Jason pause, for the second time since her creation.

  “Is that a problem?” she asked.

  He looked back at the soldiers. All eyes were on him, waiting for his answer.

  “No,” Jason admitted. “I think this is a great idea.”

  ***

  Akira used the Silver Crane stamp to seal the letter to his brother Kai and his family. He missed them and longed to see them again. Kai was still serving as a Piston, but was recently transferred back to Megacity Phoenix, where he could be with his family.

  It had been over a year since Akira had seen Kai, his wife Lise, and their three boys.

  Writing to them was the safest way to communicate and share his location, which was now Outpost Oasis at the edge of Cairo. He wasn’t sure when he would see them again, but every time he set pen to paper, it made him feel a little closer to his family across the world.

  Wind howled outside the windows, pounding the walls of the three-story building where Shadow Squad was holed up.

  A week had passed since Kichiro had been taken in Megacity Paris, and Akira was now two thousand miles away. He still had to refrain from checking his locator beacon every few minutes.

  Years ago, he had had the stallion chipped, just in case they were ever separated during battle. The beacon showed that the horse was underground in a historic area of the city where the Coalition had entrenched their best warriors.

  After a decade together, he felt a piece of himself missing. Every time he went outside he would look toward the vehicle depot out of habit, where the stallion had a stable. The horse, like Okami, was his family.

  Akira sat on the dusty floor and pulled out the Warrior Codex. He drowned out the sound of gusting wind and Ghost entertaining the squad on the first floor of the compound. His tenor voice would have made him an opera star if he hadn’t chosen a career killing people.

  Okami joined in with a chorus of growl-barking, voicing his playful side.

  “Captain, I am sorry to interrupt,” Apeiron said, “but a severe dust storm is heading toward Outpost Oasis. Your current dwelling should withstand the storm, but things may get a bit loud.”

  “Louder than Ghost?” Akira asked.

  “Yes, louder than Ghost.”

  Akira kept reading through the codex. It was a map, in a way, a guide that followed an ethos. His ancestors had lived by this sacred book, and it had steered Akira in his journey as a warrior. Over the decades, he added his own story to the pages, documenting the places he fought and the men and women he had killed.

  The book was all he had now to remember many of those he had lost.

  Akira slowly flipped through the pages, stopping to read a story he had long since memorized. The story was told by a distant relative who had fought for Lord Asano and had become a ronin after Asano was forced to commit seppuku. The original page, like many others, had been replaced and re-written over the years.

  He turned to another replaced page about his great-great grandfather, who had served the Teishin Shudan division of the Japanese Imperial Army. A picture of th
e thin, short man was plastered to the page, standing in a brown uniform with a sword on his belt and a rifle in his hands.

  The shouting grew louder below.

  Letting out a sigh, Akira tucked the book away and went to the window to look out at the approaching storm. In the distance, the Great Pyramids rose toward the clouds, ancient relics of yet another bloody time in human history.

  Cigar smoke drifted into the room, and he turned to see Ghost peeking in.

  “You going to stay up here all night like an anti-social asshole?” Ghost asked playfully.

  “I was planning on it, but obviously you guys aren’t going to let me, are you?” Akira said with a smirk. He took the cigar that Ghost held out and took a puff as he followed him down the stairs.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. We’ll get Kichiro back,” Ghost said.

  “I know,” Akira said.

  They walked down the stairs. The rest of the squad watched a holo-screen of a live Droid Raider match. Tonight, the Megacity Tokyo Cranes faced the Megacity Rome Legions, and the Legions had just taken the lead.

  Ghost took the cigar back. Smoke rose over his handsome olive face and slicked-back mane of black hair. “The golden Legions march, ay-oh!” he sang, waving his cigar like a symphonic conductor.

  Frost nodded at Akira, her short hair falling over the left side of her head, which was buzzed and tattooed with a white orchid that almost matched her enhanced, ice-colored eyes.

  At the other end of the table sat Tadhg. Long, curly brown locks hung over the wide shoulders.

  “The Legion is the fiercest, ay-oh!” Ghost sang. He bent down close to Tadhg’s ear. “The Legion is the fastest, ay-oh!”

  When Tadhg didn’t respond, Ghost added, “Know what I’m sayin’?”

  Using, Tadhg’s phrase just pissed the big man off more. He swatted at Ghost.

  “God damn, you’re annoying,” Tadhg said. “You want me to smack that cigar down your throat?”

  “Ghost level, baby!” Ghost sang in a robotic voice.

  “I’ll show you God level, mate,” Tadhg said, fisting his palm.

  “Can you guys keep it down a little?” Perez asked.

  He sat at a small table in the corner with a book, his sand-colored flesh covered in tattoos of ancient poems, as well as some he had written himself, including both of the team’s mottos: Death from the Shadows and Together, we are one.

  Akira walked over. “What are you reading?”

  Perez rotated the book. “It’s about the Battle of Kadesh.”

  “Hey, nerds! You’re missing this game!” Tadhg shouted. “Why don’t you just download that shit to your chip, Perez?”

  “Because some of us enjoy reading the old-fashioned way,” Perez said.

  “Don’t mind Tadhg,” Frost said. “I don’t think he can even read.”

  Tadhg shrugged.

  An itch formed in the back of Akira’s skull, and a message from Apeiron came through.

  “Captain, I have an encrypted transmission from Command,” she said.

  Akira stepped away from Perez and closed his eyes, expecting to see the cold blue eyes and spiked hair of General Andrew Thacker. But instead, it was the hard face of War Commander Contos.

  “Captain Hayashi,” Contos began. “We just lost contact with Pumping Station 9 at the Sahara Terraforming Project. You’re being deployed to check it out and will be communicating directly with Apeiron on this mission for training purposes.”

  Akira opened his eyes, watching the team who were oblivious to the message that came to just his chip.

  “I know what you are thinking,” Apeiron added.

  She couldn’t technically read Akira’s thoughts, but she was constantly monitoring his heartbeat and breathing, which had given away his trepidation.

  “Due to my extensive ability to monitor and provide intel, I have been given the honor and opportunity to assist with this mission,” Apeiron said.

  “Assist?” Akira asked.

  “That is right. I will be there with you at all times, Captain. Is there a problem with that?”

  “No.”

  Akira cleared his throat.

  “We got a job, Shadow Squad,” he said. “Rack up.”

  “God dammit,” Tadhg said.

  “Don’t worry, mate,” Ghost said. “We can watch your team lose in a replay.”

  Okami barked with excitement as the Engines moved toward the charging crates containing their armor. Akira pushed his finger against the biometric reader and pulled out his two-hundred-pound rig. He set it down on the dusty floor to activate it.

  In front of him rose an exoskeleton without a head. It popped open, and he stepped inside. The titanium plates folded out and snapped to his chest and torso, clicking over the slender shocked struts and rods on his arms and legs, until everything but his head was encased in armor.

  He tilted his skull back into the kabuto that unfolded from the overlapping shoulder-spanning plates. The systems automatically activated on his HUD, bringing his jetpack, life support, and battery all online.

  Armor secured, Akira opened the door and ran into the gusting wind, the grit blasting against his suit. The outpost walls were empty except for a pair of guards in a post above them. He led the way to the helipad in the center of the outpost. A MOTH stealth-attack aircraft waited on the tarmac.

  Akira hurried up the ramp to the troop hold under the belly of the craft. Red overhead lights illuminated hull-mounted racks. The Engines stood against them and pulled the bars over their armor, clicking in. Okami went down on his hind legs, the magnets on his paws securing him to the deck.

  “Listen up, because I’m only saying this once,” Akira said. “Apeiron will be assisting on this mission.”

  “The fuck?” Tadhg said. “The fact I got to hear her inside my head some of the time is bad enough.”

  “It is an honor to assist with this mission, Shadow Squad,” Apeiron said. “Uploading data to your chips.”

  In his mind’s eye, Akira studied the location of Pumping Station 9, set on the western edge of the Sahara Terraforming Project. A valley on the southwestern border provided cover in case of a Coalition attack.

  “A skeleton crew of two engineers and three guards is assigned to this post,” Apeiron said. “UAVs have detected no sign of life, and we have no video feeds on any INN access port.”

  “Any sign of vehicles or tracks?” Akira asked.

  “Negative. For that reason, I would suggest a fly-over before deploying.”

  “How about you let me call the shots, and you stick to providing intel?”

  “Of course, Captain. It was simply a suggestion.”

  The moon rose in the night sky as the MOTH flew over the barren desert. Akira blinked to zoom in further with his INVS eyes. Mounds of sand rose like the humps of a buried monster. A line of spiral shoots rose over the horizon, then suddenly, a forest that stretched as far as he could see. It wasn’t all barren and dead out here.

  This mecca in the middle of the desert was supported by hundreds of miles of underground pipes pumping desalinated water from the Mediterranean Sea to feed a forest of bamboo. This was another part of Dr. Jason Crichton’s plan to restore the Earth.

  “Remarkable, is it not?” asked Apeiron. “This hybrid species was modified in an AAS lab to produce the fastest growing bamboo in the world. We more than doubled the daily growth rate of thirty-six inches.”

  Ghost opened a private line to Akira.

  “Seriously, we gotta listen to her?” he said.

  “Orders came from War Commander Contos, Lieutenant.”

  That shut him up.

  None of them liked being connected to the OS. In some ways, she was like a very intelligent child, but Akira knew she could be cold and calculating like all AI.

  “Do any of you want to guess how many bamboo trees make up this sector of forest?” Apeiron asked.

  Akira focused on the map of the pum
ping facility, looking for a good LZ based off the data they had.

  “Any guesses?” Apeiron asked.

  “I always hated biology,” Tadhg said.

  “You hated school in general, right?” Ghost asked.

  Tadhg chuckled deep. “Wasn’t my thing.”

  “Punching people has always been your thing.”

  “It’s an art that I excel at.”

  Tadhg gestured to Perez.

  “Like our mate Perez excels at reciting history and writing poetry and shit.”

  “And shit?” Perez asked.

  “Yeah, we all got our skills.”

  “Shadow Squad,” Apeiron interrupted, “I am sure I don’t need to tell you how important this site is to the restoration of the planet.”

  “We’re aware,” Akira said, directing his visor at Ghost and Tadhg, in turn.

  They both nodded in understanding.

  “I got an LZ,” Akira said. He uploaded it over INN.

  It was going to be a few miles’ hike, but at least they weren’t going to drop into an ambush, and Apeiron agreed with his location.

  Ghost and Tadhg grabbed their weapons off the racks.

  “Please be careful not to damage this site,” Apeiron said. “This area is incredibly important—”

  “I might prune some trees, but it sounds like they grow super-fast anyway,” Tadhg said. He laughed to himself and stepped up to the edge of the ramp.

  “Death from the Shadows,” Akira said. “Together, we are one.”

  The team repeated the mottos.

  Tadhg hopped into the night.

  Ghost gave a salute and jumped.

  Okami looked up, and Akira scooped up the wolfdog. They followed Perez and Frost out next, jumping twenty feet to the dirt. The shocks from Akira’s exoskeleton absorbed the brunt of the impact, but couldn’t do anything for the sour feeling in his gut—a feeling that the fragile truce the Coalition had agreed to could be shattered with a single gunshot.

  — 7 —

  Screams reverberated through the cavernous space. They quieted almost as quickly. In the respite, came the constant dripping of water, making it impossible to sleep.