E-Day

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  Her voice soothed his nerves. He walked through a corridor to the industrial labs. Smooth plates of titanium alloy moved from section to section, sculpted into armor for Engines and Canebrakes.

  Two technicians in black AAS CBRN-rated suits monitored the manufacturing process on holo-screens. Through the viewports, the line of finished armored plates whizzed by their observation post. Jason continued past another factory chamber responsible for the legs and struts of the Canebrakes. In the final sector, they made segmented arms, and finally the sharp, fan-shaped heads.

  At the end of the assembly tunnels, he saw the final creation.

  A Canebrake walked off the line on all four legs, lifted each of its four segmented limbs, rotated, and went through a series of diagnostic tests before proceeding through a hatch into an elevator, where it was shipped down to Earth.

  “We have an additional two thousand units heading to the staging area outside of Megacity Moscow from four factories in South Africa and Belgium,” Apeiron said. “This should be an adequate number to take the city, but I estimate we will require fifty thousand units to supervise refugees and former Coalition fighters once the city is taken.”

  Jason continued on, trying to focus his mind. But it was hard to do that when he was picturing fifty-thousand Canebrakes. And on top of this, Apeiron still hadn’t told him what she had wanted to say back on the MOTH.

  His gut told him it wasn’t good.

  They stopped at a hatch accessible to only ten people in the world, including Apeiron. The security terminal besides the hatch beeped, and it finally hissed open to a vaulted room that always reminded Jason of a honeycomb.

  “Welcome back to the E-Vault,” Apeiron said.

  He examined the creatures inside the cubes along the walls. Some were frozen, but others were alive, trapped in the little glass prisons. One of his favorite specimens was discovered on a research trip to Indonesia with Apeiron, a creature pulled from the Lembeh Strait.

  Jason stepped up to the cube holding the stocky frogfish, its orange flesh covered in spinules and appendages to camouflage it from prey. An esca hung from the head, the specialized lure it used to hunt. The fish swam away as Jason bent down for a better look. But there was nowhere for it to go, and it settled at the bottom of the small glass prison.

  Hundreds of other specimens were stored in secured locations within the habitat. They ranged from frozen samples of microscopic bacteria collected at thermal vents to the DNA extracted from snow leopards, wolves, and other alpha predators.

  He moved to another living specimen, a brown mata mata turtle, with its spiked carapace that had inspired the armor of the Canebrakes. The reptile shied away from the glass as Jason approached, retreating into its shell.

  “Are you ready?” Apeiron asked.

  Jason stared at the turtle, and then nodded, following Apeiron to a small, private operating room. He changed and took a seat in a hard leather chair, the only furnishing besides the robotic arms attached to the wall.

  “I am going to sedate you,” Apeiron said. “This will not hurt at all.”

  One of the appendages extended from overhead and pricked his arm. Warmth flooded his body, and he relaxed, in a state of nirvana.

  When Jason finally woke up, he wasn’t sure he was awake.

  He was in the space elevator, in an operating bay, but this one was different. He walked over to a window that looked into the black of space. His vision was like a telescope, allowing him to see a distant asteroid barreling through the cold black, passing the rings of Jupiter by a hundred thousand miles. A second, misshapen, and bigger asteroid hurdled toward the planet.

  This has to be a dream…

  Even with that knowledge, it did not stop him from being filled with horror.

  Jason saw the asteroids closer now. They spun directly toward one another. It appeared they were going to collide, but then they roared past each other. He watched the smaller of the two spinning on a new trajectory—toward a beautiful blue, green, and brown planet.

  Earth.

  The dream faded to a nightmare of war.

  Red glowing craters emerged on the surface, each one emitting a mushroom cloud of smoke and ash. At first, he thought they were nukes, but then he saw a massive, ragged hole where a city had stood along a body of water. Fires spread away from the epicenter and a wall of water rushed away from the impact zone. All across Europe and Asia, hunks of burning rock rained down, pounding the terrain in massive explosions.

  His mind shifted, and now he was walking through a ruined city. Human skeletal remains littered the dusty roads and fields of overgrown weeds. Debris surrounded mountains of metal and glass from collapsed buildings. Storm clouds dumped acid rain in sheets. The mud slurped under his boots as he walked under an overpass. Lightning flashed across the skyline, revealing the jagged teeth of spiraling skyscrapers.

  He didn’t recognize this place.

  A blue glow flickered in the distance. Standing on the stone rooftop ledge of an ancient library was a Canebrake, its segmented limbs curling through the air like a squid in water. It rotated one side of its fanned head at him, releasing a rattling electronic roar. The mechanical monster leapt all three stories to the ground, hardly stopping on impact before bolting toward Jason.

  He tripped when he turned and pushed himself up to see the Canebrake’s blue eyes burning through the darkness. Another rattle came from the adjacent rooftops, where two more Canebrakes watched. Three more fanned heads with glacier eyes flashed as they made their way down the side of the building.

  Jason checked over his shoulder at the machine trailing him, just as it fired heated blades from its limbs. They lanced through the air, whizzing past his body. A rock caught his boot and he fell to the ground, whirling around as the war droid towered over him. He reached up to protect his face and closed his eyes.

  A whirring noise followed, but he didn’t feel the pain of energy blades ripping through his flesh. Cautiously, he opened his eyelids, seeing he was back inside the E-Vault.

  Apeiron, encased in a Hummer Droid, stood in front of the specimens. “All of our hard work has paid off in designing the perfect droids.”

  Jason stared at the mata mata turtle again, wanting to retreat into a shell himself, away from the nightmares. He turned back to Apeiron, but a flesh-and-blood body of his sister had replaced the black Hummer Droid.

  “Hello, Jason,” Petra said. She smiled and walked over in a black dress with a low red collar, the same dress she had worn to Jason’s and Betsy’s wedding.

  “To save humanity, we must evolve,” Petra said. She reached out and the dream changed yet again.

  Jason saw a new landscape, outside the walls of a megacity. A Nova Alliance flag blew in the wind over an encampment. Soldiers fought in hand-to-hand combat, spilling blood and cutting each other apart with energy swords in the trenches.

  The Pistons fought against Breakers, and something else, a Coalition warrior with robotic limbs and tubes hanging from a breathing apparatus.

  Screams of horror and rage echoed in all directions. Blood sloshed onto the field, saturating the dirt from soldiers hacked into hunks of meat and broken bones.

  The world spun, the stars in the sky growing brighter, then blurring. He closed his eyes again, vertigo setting in.

  A voice called out to him.

  “Jason, can you hear me?”

  Jason struggled to open his heavy eyelids. He finally cracked them open to a bright light and the shape of a Hummer Droid. Dazed but alert, he managed to sit up, recognizing the medical bay of Sector 220.

  “How do you feel?” asked Apeiron.

  Jason reached up to his bandaged head. “Is this real?”

  “Yes,” Apeiron said. “The procedure is over, and your vitals are good.”

  “I was dreaming…” he said. “Nightmares about an asteroid heading toward Earth, and war.”

  Apeiron’s voice switched from the Hummer Droid to ins
ide his head.

  “This is a recent video from Shadow Squad,” Apeiron said. “I sent them to a location where we thought Doctor Cross was hiding.”

  Jason saw a basement or underground structure of some sort where Captain Akira Hayashi and Staff Sergeant Tadhg Walsh fought the same type of soldier he had seen in his dream.

  “Shadow Squad didn’t find the doctor, but they did discover a lab where the Coalition has created Dreads,” Apeiron said. “As you can tell, they are farther along than I thought, which explains why Doctor Cross attacked our restoration sites.”

  “But he doesn’t know about the Canebrakes.”

  “I don’t see how he could, but he seems to be ready for war.”

  In the video, Tadhg finally brought the Dread down by cutting it in half and plunging the tip of his sword into the helmet.

  “Your heart rate is elevated, but there is no need to worry,” Apeiron said. “We will win this war and face the newest threat to humanity.”

  Jason exhaled and lowered his hand from his head. “Rebuilding the project sites won’t be easy. We’ve already lost so much time…”

  “That is not what I meant by a new threat, Jason.”

  He sat up straight, completely alert, steeling himself for whatever Apeiron was about to tell him.

  “Not all of those dreams were dreams,” she said.

  “Which ones weren’t?” Jason raised a brow. “The asteroid?”

  Apeiron nodded. “Six days ago, an eight hundred and fifty billion ton asteroid called Hros-1 was knocked off course by the gravitational pull of an even larger asteroid.”

  “Please tell me this is a mistake, some sort of error.”

  “I am afraid it is not, Jason. Hros-1, as I am calling it, is heading for the city of Baku, along the Caspian Sea, at approximately forty miles per second.”

  “How big is Hros-1?”

  “Roughly fifty square miles in size.”

  “That’s bigger than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

  “Yes, but unlike the dinosaurs, you have me.” Apeiron smiled. “As soon as the war ends, we can focus on bringing the world together in light of this threat, to destroy Hros-1 and restore our planet.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Six months, two weeks, five days, and one minute. Plenty of time to prepare.”

  Jason closed his eyes and in ten seconds downloaded all the data that Apeiron had on Hros-1. He wasn’t surprised to see that she had already dedicated a team of one thousand Hummer Droids to the construction of a prototype laser cannon that would blow it out of its current trajectory.

  “I call it the Poseidon Orbital Cannon,” she said.

  He studied the design, impressed.

  “Okay,” Jason said. “Let’s get to work.”

  ***

  Hiding in the darkness, Shadow Squad was being hunted. It was almost noon, the day after they had jumped into Megacity Moscow to search for Dr. Cross. They were in a blackout zone, with no long-range comms or connection to INN due to Coalition jammers.

  The team had abandoned the tank the night before and found shelter in a deserted building. From there, they entered the sewer system, where they hid in the muck.

  Blue Jay searched the tunnels as Akira huddled with his squad mates, their faceplates angled upward as a patrol of Coalition soldiers marched overhead.

  “How many do you think are up there?” Tadhg asked. “Those things… whatever Apeiron called them.”

  “Dreads. Quiet,” Akira said. “Perez, you having any luck on the comms?”

  “Negative. Still being jammed and still unable to connect to INN.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Tadhg said.

  “And go where?” Frost asked.

  Everyone looked at Akira.

  He recalled a line from the Warrior Codex.

  Even if you don’t have a plan, it’s better to convince your company you do, for a confident soldier is a better fighter than a fearful soldier.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Akira said. “Follow me.”

  For the next few hours they walked, crawled, and crept through the narrow passages in a knee-deep flow of sewage.

  “I’d rather fight another one of those freaks than swim in this shit,” Tadhg mumbled.

  Another wave of boots tapped overhead. The soldiers kept coming, an entire army on the move.

  “You might get your chance,” Frost whispered.

  Akira flinched as something in the river of waste bumped into him and then into Tadhg.

  “What the fuck?” Tadhg cried. He brought his fist down on a bloated corpse.

  “Keep it down,” Perez whispered. “Poor bastard’s already dead.”

  The footsteps on the street stopped overhead. Akira put a finger to his helmet. A beeping came from his HUD. It was Blue Jay, running low on battery. He recalled the drone and docked it to the charger on his duty belt.

  The footsteps resumed above them, but Akira held up a fist to keep the team in place.

  “Hey, bosu,” Tadhg whispered. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier… you know, about Ghost…”

  “No reason to apologize,” Akira said. “You were right. I put the local population before the mission and our safety.”

  “I was still an asshole.”

  “Yeah, but Tadhg, you’re our asshole,” Perez said.

  Tadhg chuckled.

  A splash sounded somewhere in the tunnel, silencing them. Akira watched the high ceiling in the distance as a yellow glow formed. He brought the scope to his visor, and the targeting system locked on to an approaching figure. Yellow INVS eyes flitted in the darkness, spreading a weak glow over titanium armor plates and prosthetics.

  It was a Dread.

  The augmented human beast stopped on the bank, pulled his mask down, and sniffed the air through two slots where a nose had once been. Then it scampered on all fours down the side wall and leapt into the water with a splash.

  The squad slowly rose a minute later.

  Akira waited a few more before proceeding to the next passage. Light streamed in from an opening in a wall that exposed an old subway.

  Taking point, he led Perez over for a better look, but as soon as Akira got close, he pulled back. The ancient rail line wasn’t abandoned.

  Coalition foot soldiers and Breakers marched inside. They were headed in the same direction as Shadow Squad—toward the Megacity walls. Without connection to INN, Akira had no way of letting command know.

  Akira pulled back and found an access ladder to the street and climbed up for a scan. It wasn’t just Coalition soldiers up here.

  Thousands of Nova Alliance prisoners shuffled in long lines. They were being brought out as human shields.

  To the east, a wave of smoke blocked the skyline from a forest fire the Coalition had set to cover their positions.

  Akira decided to take advantage of that and lead Shadow Squad toward the inferno. They used the tunnels to get most of the way there, and then took to the street, crossing toward the burning forest.

  A radio tower poked over a portion of charred trees.

  “See if you can mount a booster dish and get a signal,” Akira said to Perez.

  The rest of the squad spread out to create a perimeter while Perez climbed the tower.

  Frost took up position on a hill of smoldering rocks and skeletal trees, mounting her sniper rifle. Akira and Tadhg found cover behind trees on opposite sides of the hill.

  It wasn’t long until the short-range squad channel hissed.

  “Contact,” Frost said.

  Akira tapped into the mirrored feed of her sniper rifle as she zoomed in on an area of burning forest. He approached cautiously, detecting a heartbeat thirty meters ahead. One, then two, and finally a third.

  Raising his rifle, he moved around a tree with his finger on the trigger. Through the smoke, he saw the source of the heartbeats.

  “No,” he whispered
.

  Charred, crucified corpses were nailed up on the wide oak trees. Dozens, maybe hundreds of Nova Alliance citizens had met their end here, and some were still suffering.

  Akira gritted his jaw.

  “We got a signal,” Perez said over the short-range comm. “Standby.”

  The first heartbeat suddenly went offline. The second followed as the poor soul succumbed to their injuries.

  Akira started toward the third to grant them mercy, but Tadhg stopped him.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Tadhg started that way and Akira took a knee to try a line to command. “Silver Crane, this is SS1, do you copy?”

  “Captain Hayashi, it is good to see you are still alive,” Apeiron replied.

  It wasn’t Command, but Akira was actually grateful to hear the voice of the AI.

  “I still cannot connect to your chips,” she said. “INN is being blocked in this zone, so we will have to communicate—”

  White noise filled the channel.

  “Apeiron, do you copy?” Akira said.

  “I am here,” she replied.

  “You got a SITREP for us?”

  “The 5th, 8th, 9th, and 12th Divisions are currently moving into position around the city. Canebrakes are en route, and will arrive by dawn,” she said.

  Akira’s augmented heart stammered at the news about his brother Kai’s division. He didn’t even know they were being deployed here.

  “Apeiron, confirm your last about the 5th division,” he said.

  “The 5th division has arrived outside the city and your brother Kai is with them, if that is what you’re asking,” Apeiron replied. “Fear not, the Canebrakes will be here shortly, and are preparing to attack at first light, but first, I have a surprise for…”

  “Apeiron, we have enemy troops moving toward those frontlines.”

  Static broke rushed into his headset.

  “Apeiron, do you copy?”

  Akira turned to look up at the radio tower when a flash came from the middle of the burning forest. The bolts of plasma slammed into the top of the tower.

  Perez leapt into the tree canopy, crashing through the burned branches, as the twisted beams crashed to the dirt.

  Akira was already running.