E-Day

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  All across the platform, bodies were dismembered, their skulls crushed, and brains mush.

  “My God, this can’t be real…” Frost said.

  “We could have stopped this,” Tadhg said. “We should have…”

  Ghost grabbed Tadhg. “Stop living in the past, you egotistical asshole. This is our reality now. We have to face that.”

  “Get your hands off me,” Tadhg said. He tried to yank away, but Ghost held on.

  “Sergeant, you’re an Engine, start acting like one,” Akira said. “Lieutenant, let him go.”

  Ghost loosened his grip, and Tadhg stomped away. They all turned back to the stairs at the sound of gunfire, this time from plasma rifles.

  “Shit, that must be the Pistons,” Frost said. She rushed back up the steps to the surface.

  As they got to the top, the Engines halted at another horrifying sight. Hummer Droids climbed over the walls and ran down the street. More units slipped through an opening in the gate.

  From Blue Jay’s mirrored view, Akira saw an entire army of droids storming toward their location: companion models, worker units, and service droids, in all shapes and sizes, and all with the same orders.

  To kill humans.

  Tadhg slotted his cannon and drew his sword. “Let me show you how this is done.”

  The other Engines fired into the machines as Tadhg charged, helmet down, shoulder plates up. He slammed into a four-hundred-pound Hummer Droid that went down so hard, the facial screen shattered and the head cracked open.

  Tadhg cut another unit in half with his sword, then kicked it into a wall.

  “Make a line!” Akira yelled. “Stay with me!”

  He drew both of his swords and ran toward Tadhg, hacking and cutting down the machines with his energy blades. Crunching and cracking echoed through the night as the battle drew more and more of the units from the surrounding area. The ground rumbled from the stampede, drowning out Okami’s growl-barking.

  “Get into the shelter!” Akira yelled over his shoulder to the Pistons. “And take that damn wolfdog!” He slowly advanced, whirling and thrusting his blades. Metal fingers scraped over his metal plates.

  Powering through them, he fought to get closer to Tadhg, who was twenty feet ahead, swinging his energy sword in wide arcs. Two Hummer Worker Droids dragged from his legs, while three more piled onto his back.

  “Frost, help Tadhg,” Akira ordered.

  As he swung his katanas, two suppressed shots cracked, picking off the droids hanging from Tadhg’s legs, and then a third that was trying to pull off his helmet.

  “Those were mine!” Tadhg yelled.

  “You’re welcome!” Frost shouted back.

  All around them, the droids clambered like ravenous zombies. They slammed into Tadhg and punched his armor, leaving dents. Others climbed up his back and hung from his shoulder plates. And still Tadhg fought, swinging his sword, whirling, and bucking like a wild animal, but ten Hummer Droids piled on until he finally folded under their weight with an enraged scream.

  Akira lost sight of Tadhg under the swarm of machines.

  “Tadhg!” he shouted. “Tadhg, get out of there!”

  Frost, Ghost, and Akira stayed side by side, cutting their way toward their comrade. More of the machines rushed toward the pile, forming a mountain of yellow and black.

  Akira knew Tadhg would let his ego get in the way of orders someday. This time it could mean his life, but Akira wasn’t about to lose another Engine. He thrust his sword and used his shoulder plates to slam into the droids, his stomach muscles burning.

  “Stay with me!” he shouted.

  They fought together through the army of droids, hacking and slicing with their energy blades and firing their plasma rifles. A sudden geyser of mechanical parts burst into the air, followed by Tadhg blasting into the air with his jetpack.

  The droids and parts rained back down with the sergeant, his armor dented and scraped, but still intact. He dropped with the rest of the squad and together, they became one—a single Engine powering through the machines.

  By the time the fight was over, the entire street was littered with parts.

  Tadhg continued to thrust his sword into the machines, even when they were clearly disabled and posed no harm.

  “Enough,” Akira said.

  Tadhg crushed a head, then kicked a torso.

  “Tadhg,” Akira growled.

  Chest heaving, Tadhg looked over, then stomped another helmet.

  Akira grabbed Tadhg by the arm. “Do you understand, Sergeant?”

  Tadhg hesitated a moment, but then nodded. “Yes, Captain, I’m sorry.”

  “Captain,” came a soft voice. “Captain, we found something.”

  Akira turned back to the subway entrance, where Bella stood with her rifle cradled.

  “You’d better come see this,” she said.

  “Everyone but Ghost, stay here and hold security,” Akira said. He ran down the stairs, passing through a graveyard of dead bodies to the platform, where Allen stood guard with Toretto. Okami was there too, wagging his tail as Akira approached.

  “I picked up some heartbeats on the other side of this door,” Toretto said.

  Akira checked his HUD, and sure enough, he saw the escalated heart rates of over twenty contacts. Aiming his rifle, he fired at the lock and then kicked the door in. Ghost followed him inside, their targeting system flitting over fifty-one contacts.

  A man in a black sweatshirt and blue pants walked forward, hands in the air.

  “Help us,” he said.

  Children, women, and people of all ages huddled together, frightened but uninjured. The sight gave Akira hope that there were others out there, perhaps his own family.

  “Go get the others,” he said to Ghost.

  Minutes later, the other Engines arrived.

  “Oh damn,” Frost said.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Tadhg said quietly.

  Akira knew there was no way they could move these people. They would be safer here, and so would his squad.

  “Stay here with them,” Akira said. “I’ll head to the base to look for my family and Kichiro.”

  “No way. There could be other survivors there, and you’ll need our help,” Frost said.

  “Yeah, and I’m not hiding down here,” Tadhg said.

  “Together, we are one,” Ghost said. He put a hand on Akira’s shoulder. “We’re coming, Captain.”

  Akira took a moment to think and decided to split up.

  “Toretto, Bella, you stay here with Okami,” Akira said. “We’ll head to the base and come back for you later. Allen, you come with us.”

  “Stay here?” Toretto said. “You got to be fuckin’—”

  “We’ll protect them,” Bella said.

  Toretto snorted. “Yeah, sure, we got this, but you better come back for us.”

  “Don’t worry, he won’t leave his wolfdog,” Ghost said.

  “We will come back, you have my word,” Akira said.

  As he ran back to the surface, he tapped into Blue Jay, skimming through the aerial view and current data. Right before they reached the graveyard of destroyed droids, he stopped to check the mission clock.

  Two hours and twenty-one minutes remained until Hros-1 arrived.

  Tadhg tapped the blade of his sword against one hand like a baseball bat. “AI ain’t salvation anymore, Akira. Shadow Squad is salvation.”

  — 32 —

  Chloe tried to connect to INN again, but the network was still down.

  “Apeiron,” she whispered. “Apeiron, can you hear me?”

  The AI wasn’t in charge of Kepler Station, but up until now, Chloe had been able to speak to the AI. She desperately missed talking to Apeiron.

  Once again, Chloe felt the dark despair brought on by being alone, reminding her of her time in the catacombs and in Megacity Paris.

  She sat at her workstation in the droid s
hop that she had gotten a job, trying to figure out how to fix a custom dog droid designed to look like a poodle. It was thirty years old, with an OS that was obsolete and a processor that needed to be replaced.

  The other five employees were all off to watch Hros-1 arrive, but Chloe wasn’t exactly alone. Radar perched on a pole by her desk, watching her work.

  “Do you know what’s going on yet?” she asked.

  “Nope, nope,” Radar replied.

  Chloe sighed and put her tools down. She had decided to stay down here and work while the rest of the colony watched the Poseidon cannons destroy Hros-1. Work kept her mind off what could happen.

  Two months had passed since she had left Earth for a new life here at Kepler Station, and every day, she found herself wondering if coming here had been the right decision. She had spoken to Cyrus the day before, and he still didn’t have a pass to come to the Moon. Their last conversation played in her mind.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be together soon, one way or another,” he had said.

  But she had picked up a slight hesitation in his voice, and she wasn’t sure if it was the transmission lag.

  Now she was worried. Really worried. Not just about the asteroid, but about INN. How could it go down just two hours before Hros-1 arrived? A chill ran up her spine as theories echoed through her mind.

  “Let’s go find out what’s going on,” she said. “Uncle Keanu will know.”

  She locked up the shop and headed into the dull white street of commercial buildings.

  “Ready for some fresh air, Radar?” she asked.

  “I want to fly, I do. I want to fly, I do.”

  “Not today, pal. You’re going to have to stick to my shoulder.”

  The bird extended its white wings and flapped up to its perch on her shoulder.

  “And try not to say anything stupid in front of anyone today, okay?”

  “No problem, no problem,” Radar chirped.

  They looked up at the glass dome holding in the manufactured oxygen and heat. The engineering was remarkable, but it still felt more like a glass prison.

  Humans aren’t supposed to live like this.

  Chloe walked down the alley between the five and six-story row-house-style buildings packed together like the apartments she had grown up around in Megacity Paris. The banging of noisy hydraulics stopped her as she rounded a corner.

  A platoon of black and yellow Hummer Droids filed out of an underground tunnel entrance across the street. The machines marched in two single file lines toward a pair of giant mining rovers blocking the road ahead.

  Two Lunar Defense Corps (LDC) Pistons stood guard. The men wore gray vacuum-rated suits and held energy swords. They followed the droids, herding them like livestock into the rovers.

  It wasn’t unusual to see the droids, but she didn’t understand the need for guards. The droids were harmless, no more dangerous than Radar. Many were a decade or older, having worked on the megacities and then shipped off to the Moon to build the mining colonies.

  One of the units looked at Chloe and raised a hand. A smile formed on the oval screen it had for a face.

  “Hello I-45, hello I-45,” Radar said.

  The Hummer unit acknowledged Radar like friends might do on the street.

  Chloe had always felt sad for these droids. They were kind, not much different than the companion or service droids that many people on Earth had added to their families to do chores and educate their children.

  She cut through another alley. Mining offices and lunar companies occupied most of the dull windowless buildings, but the lower levels contained bars, eateries, and fancy lounges that the miners frequented after months in the darkness of the craters. Chloe couldn’t imagine living in the darkness of the craters for that long, mining for helium-3 and hydrogen, or boring deep into the lunar rock to build new tunnels and habitats for future colonists.

  Today there were a handful of miners on the sidewalks and streets, but they weren’t losing their minds from psychedelic drugs or getting shitfaced. Groups clustered together under holo-screens on the sides of the buildings.

  The same message displayed on all of them: No signal.

  Chloe continued to the underground train entrance, loping down the stairs and into the next train. She sat in silence, stroking Radar and trying to make sense of what was happening.

  The train stopped at the western edge of the colony, and the doors whisked open. Chloe rushed out. Wide stairs led to the elevator shafts along the vertical edge of the crater. A Lunar Defense Piston stood guard inside the vestibule. He held up a hand as Chloe pulled out her ID.

  “Rigs are shut down to non-essential business,” he said.

  “My uncle is Keanu Cotter,” Chloe said. “He’s expecting me.”

  The man looked at her ID, double-checked her face, then jerked his helmet toward the doors. He nodded at a wall-mounted camera, and the glass doors opened.

  “Do you know why INN is down?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Asshole,” she whispered.

  “Asshole, asshole!” Radar chirped.

  The doors closed, and the elevator rose before the guard could respond. Chloe couldn’t help but chuckle. As the car rose, she got a view of the entire lunar colony. City blocks that had been empty a month ago were now packed with civilians that had fled Earth.

  She zoomed in on the holo-screens, which still displayed the same message.

  The elevator stopped at the top of the dome, the glow of the city below fading to just a faint light that melted to darkness. Chloe hated this part of the long journey to the top of the crater. It was so black she couldn’t see, even with her INVS eyes, until she was halfway up.

  Red lights in the distance illuminated the shadow of a shuttle. Chloe blinked, zooming in. Two MOTH shuttles flew with tilted thrusters, Hummer Droids on its sides.

  “Radar, I think those are the droids we saw earlier,” she said. “Why would they be leaving the colony?”

  The MOTHs were out of view a moment later. Chloe finally saw the first sign of light from the surface. Fifteen minutes later the elevator docked, and the doors opened to a scene of chaos at the spaceport.

  She looked outside, trying to get a glimpse of the Earth, but all she could see was the rocky horizon and the winking blue plasma lamps that guided shuttles over the regolith. This part of the base was normally reserved for commercial spaceplanes, but today it was filled with military transports being loaded by Pistons and Lunar Defense Corps soldiers in heavy suits and exoskeletons to help them move in the low gravity.

  Chloe took an escalator to the third floor, squeezing past workers rushing down the hallway. When she arrived at her uncle’s office, he was staring out his window, hands cupped behind his back. Boxes she had helped him unload two weeks ago were full again.

  “Uncle Keanu,” she said.

  He wore a blue suit with a silver pin on the breast that matched the color of his perfectly trimmed beard.

  “Chloe,” he said with a surprised tone.

  “Want to tell me what the hell is going on? Because no one who knows is talking.”

  He motioned for her to close the door.

  She stepped inside, her mind overwhelmed with worry.

  A pair of MOTHs took off in the distance. Chloe zoomed in with her INVS eyes and realized they were the same two she had seen with the Hummer Droids.

  “Where are they going with those droids?” she asked.

  A knock came on the door, and a woman with a red scarf stepped into the room.

  “Sir, I need to talk to you.”

  “Can it wait?” Keanu said.

  “The order was given.”

  Keanu stared at the woman. “I don’t believe it…”

  “Believe what? What’s going on?” Chloe asked.

  Another pair of MOTHs landed outside, disgorging Pistons down a ramp. Three King Cobra Spaceplanes lifted off with tilted
rotors, then fired off into the black.

  “Thank you, Shelly,” Keanu said.

  The woman nodded and left.

  Chloe stepped up to the window. “Uncle Keanu, what’s the—”

  “The order to abandon Earth and to flee Kepler Station,” he interrupted. “Apeiron turned on humanity… we still don’t know exactly what happened, but the Titan Space Elevator was destroyed. There are ongoing attacks at every megacity by the Canebrakes. There are even rumors the Hummer Droids have been reprogrammed to kill humans.”

  “No.” Chloe shook her head. “That can’t be possible. Apeiron would never do that.”

  Keanu stroked his beard, and she could see in his eyes that this was no lie.

  “Those Hummer Droids have been scheduled for extermination, haven’t they?” Chloe said.

  “Extermination why, extermination why?” Radar asked.

  Keanu tucked his hands in his pockets and let out a sigh. “All AI units were officially banned through an executive order by the Lunar Defense Corps approximately one hour ago.”

  Chloe put her hand to her chest. This couldn’t be true. None of this could be true.

  “Please, go and pack our things and wait for me at the apartment,” Keanu said.

  “Pack our things? Where are we going now?” Chloe asked.

  When he didn’t respond, she asked again, firmer this time.

  “I’m not leaving this room until you tell me where I’m going.”

  “Chloe, stop asking questions, and just do as I say!”

  Chloe backed away from her uncle, not recognizing the anger in his voice. He softened and reached out to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I promised your parents that I would look after you, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “All civilians have been ordered to leave Kepler Station and head to the Shackleton Crater.”

  “To a mining colony? How can they fit one hundred thousand civilians?”

  “Because it’s not just a mining colony.”

  Chloe raised a brow as he turned back to the viewport.