by Max Carver
Sirens wailed all through the spaceport. There was shouting, screaming, and the clomping of boots as Coalition guards approached to restore order.
Ellison ignored all of it, focusing on the search for his wife. Soon the demands of duty would overtake him, and he would have to seize control of the situation and figure out what the hell was happening. For the moment, though, all he could think of was her.
He heaved aside the burning, toppled headboard, but she wasn't underneath that, either. Had she left the room while he was beating the fluff off that mechanical rabbit? It had taken a while to bash the chatty, creepy thing to bits.
Then he remembered: he'd told her to pack up and leave on the next shuttle. She'd been exercising, so before walking out in public, she'd want a quick—
Ellison ran back into the bathroom. The beige hotel shower curtain covered the small tub. Water was all over the floor.
He grabbed the shower curtain and pulled it off.
His wife lay on her side, unmoving, in a shallow, soapy puddle in the hard plastic tub. Most of the water had run out through a crack in the tub's ruptured side.
“Cadia?” He touched her cheek, her shoulder, and checked her pulse.
Alive. But her pulse was weak.
“Dad?” Djalu entered the room, leading his Jiemba by the hand. The younger boy was dazed, barely keeping his balance, reminding Ellison of when he had been a toddler.
“Get a medic.” Ellison moved the shower curtain to cover his wife like a damp plastic blanket. “Leave your brother here and go find one. Ask the soldiers that are coming. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Djalu said, turning and hurrying out. His little brother stood in the doorway to the small bathroom, blinking and confused.
“Jiemba?” Ellison said. “Can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me.”
After a moment, Jiemba nodded. Ellison turned back to his wife, touching her gently.
“Cadia?” he said, though it seemed unlikely she would hear him over the emergency sirens and the screaming voices in the corridor. He took her hand, but she didn't stir.
“Yes, sir, right over here. Jiemba, move over.” Djalu returned to the bathroom, took his younger brother by the shoulder, and steered him into their destroyed, smoldering hotel room.
“Djalu, I told you to find a doc—” Ellison began.
“Hello.” The voice was the only tranquil one Ellison had heard since the explosion, the only voice not screaming or hoarse from smoke or numbed by shock.
Simon Zorn stood in the doorway, accompanied by one of his robotic infantry, both of them coated in dust. The crystal-blue faceplate had been raised, perhaps because of the dust, revealing the reaper's steel face, which strongly suggested a skull. Its black lens eyes seemed to stare at Ellison, making him shiver.
“Your son says you need a medic.” Simon advanced into the bathroom. “I can carry out emergency treatment, as well as many forms of surgery.”
“Really?” Ellison said. “They stuck that in there too, huh? Along with the ability to flatter and threaten?” He knew it was unwise to challenge the robot, but he couldn't help himself.
“It is part of the standard package for a Class A service android,” Simon said. “I can do nothing without your consent, of course. I am sure there are other humans who could use assistance, if you prefer me to leave.”
Ellison looked at Cadia, thinking how soft her breathing was, how weak her heartbeat.
“Go ahead,” he finally said, moving back against the leaking sink and cracked mirror. “Check her for injuries.”
Simon knelt by the tub, the dust on his suit melting into a thin gray mud where it touched the wet floor.
Ellison looked over at Simon's nameless robot infantry companion. The machine held a first aid kit and emergency oxygen bottle, likely raided from the emergency cabinet down the corridor.
“Palpating,” Simon said, his fingers sliding under the shower curtain to explore Cadia's chest and abdomen.
Ellison tensed, but managed to resist the urge to shout at the Simon unit to get away from his wife. He didn't trust the machine, but he wanted to do all he could for Cadia.
While Simon probed her, voices shouted in the hall. They were shouting Ellison's name, maybe just checking his condition, but soon they'd be looking to him for leadership. Well, he'd asked for it, though he hadn't quite expected this.
“Your public awaits,” Simon said, reaching deeper under the shower curtain to check Cadia's hips and legs. The last thing Ellison wanted was to leave his wife alone and vulnerable with the Simon and its infantry bots. On the other hand, it was his responsibility to deal with the larger emergency on behalf of all the citizens on the spaceport and to restore order.
“I detect no major breakages, but there could be smaller fractures beneath my ability to sense,” Simon Zorn said. He accepted the emergency oxygen bottle from the robotic soldier, which stepped forward to deliver it even though Simon had made no word or gesture about it. Wireless communication gave the machines a silent telepathic link that was eerie for Ellison to watch. “She should be scanned in the spaceport's medical center.”
“I'd bet the medical center's about to get slammed with business,” Ellison said. He watched Simon strap the mask in place to give Cadia oxygen. “When you're finished here, I hope you'll help all the other injured.” And get the hell away from my family.
“Of course,” Simon said.
“Djalu,” Ellison said to his older son. “Stay here with your mother and brother.”
Djalu nodded as Ellison ran toward the door to the corridor and the gathering crowd outside.
“Daddy!” gasped Jiemba, who'd barely made a sound since the explosion. His older brother was supporting him where he stood, and he coughed. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go to work,” he said. “I have to make sure everyone's safe.”
“Please don't leave us again,” Jiemba said. “Okay?”
Ellison stood there at the door, torn. He did not want to leave his sons like this, and he certainly didn't want to leave his wife in the care of the Simon unit, even if it did know what it was doing.
But he'd never turned down his larger responsibilities before. There was nobody else to play the role he now had to play.
Reluctantly, he turned his back on his sons and stepped out into the corridor.
“Daddy! Don't go! Please, Daddy!” Jiemba shouted, until Ellison closed the door and didn't hear him again.
He'll be fine, Ellison told himself. They'll all be fine.
Outside, Ellison stepped into the crowd of Galapagos guards in ocean-blue body armor and helmets. Dazed officials had wandered out from their rooms, including Minister of State Navra Coraline, her loose teal robe revealing that her octopus tattoo's tentacles extended far down her side. Coraline looked dazed but unharmed.
Ellison needed a damage and casualty report, and at the same time, he needed to know who or what had caused the explosion and whether there was a threat of more.
He took a deep breath, looked out at his people, and got to work.
Chapter Five
Earth
Colt hurried up and around the concrete stairs, grimacing at the echoing sound of his footsteps. There were at least three more floors to this medical building, it looked like, before the stairwell ended in a rubble-strewn opening to the sky above. Perhaps Carthage had bombed the building into ruin, or maybe there had been a later fight here between survivors and reapers.
He pushed open the door to the second floor, where he'd last seen the girl who'd somehow hacked a reaper and saved his life.
“Hello?” he called out, running down a winding hallway. He found the room with the hole in the floor. The room also had a hospital bed, which had been thrown aside against the wall.
The girl wasn't there anymore, though.
“Hey, it's me!” he called out, continuing down the hallway. “From downstairs. Just wanted to say hi, see if maybe you want to go somewhere and lie low, avoid deat
h for a while—”
“Shh!” She stepped out of a dark doorway ahead, glaring at him. “What is your problem? I told you to go home. Go home, boy!” She pointed back at the stairs. “We can't stay here.”
“You have a way out?” Colt asked.
She glared at him another moment, then returned to the room from which she'd emerged.
He followed her into a shattered office, where she climbed onto the ledge of a large window.
“This is your plan?” he asked.
“Can't you keep quiet? How have you survived this long?” she asked, though they'd both been speaking in whispers. Any amount of talking sounded too loud, though. Especially when the metalheads were expected to arrive at any moment, drawn by the earlier gunfire.
Colt followed her out the window and onto a wobbly elevated train track, which had once been elevated much higher. It was on broken supports now. Not the safest pick for an escape, but it had the virtue of heading straight into a rubble tower of a skyscraper that had been blasted in half long ago. They could take some cover there, hide in the shadows.
He stayed close behind her, watching his step on the broken tracks, and soon they were in the gloom of the old skyscraper. It was so damaged they had to squeeze through crevices and narrow passes in the broken concrete and twisted steel supports just to get into the building, but that meant it would be harder for machines to follow. The metalheads ruled the upper world with their drones and tanks, but scavengers learned to survive down in the deep rubble where the old city had extended itself kilometers under the earth.
Through a shattered window, they saw the metalheads arrive. A tank rolled up first, essentially just a platform of rotating weapons and sensors mounted on treads, and searched the area immediately around the clinic, the red lights of its scanners sweeping the ruins. The tank was battle scarred but looked fully operational.
A reaper wagon arrived next. This was a cheaply built self-driving truck made of local scrap with eight reapers hanging two by two along a rack in the back, bony and limp as rotten sides of beef.
The truck parked, and the skeletal robots sprang to life. They dropped off the truck and marched into the clinic.
“That's right, little bugs,” the girl whispered, and she raised the black sphere with the constellations of colored symbols spinning around the surface. “Go sniff the bait.”
“What are you doing?” Colt asked.
“I left the reapers something that'll blow their minds. Literally. You should cover your ears.”
“No!” He grabbed her hand. “You can't destroy that clinic.”
“And you can't touch me!” She slapped his hand away. “I'm a human, not a serv-bot.”
“A... what? If I thought you were a metalhead, I'd cave in your face right now.” He tensed, making a fist. “Are you a metalhead?”
“Me? You're the one trying to save the reapers.”
“No, I'd love to blast those things to pieces. But they might leave the old medical supplies alone. I know you're not from around here, but nothing new gets made anymore. Except really, really bad moonshine. Somebody 's going to need those meds someday, and there won't be any new supplies coming in. Probably ever.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “What do you mean, I'm not from around here?”
“Obviously,” he whispered. “Your voice is... weird. And you move differently from the scavengers around here. And your face is kind of... soft.”
“Are you calling me soft?” She looked serious, but Colt thought he saw the hint of a smile there.
“I might as well, since I don't know your name.”
“You can call me... Mohini.”
“I'm Colt,” he said.
“What? Like a horse?” Now she really did smile.
“So what's a Mohini?”
“We'd better get moving,” she said. “And we'll let all those reapers live to kill us another day, in order to protect all those medical supplies. As you requested.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That stuff could save somebody's life. Maybe lots of lives. We have to protect the living.”
They moved deeper into the rubble, walking carefully over broken floors and avalanche-ready heaps of broken concrete.
Colt felt something like sharp fingers poke into his ankle. He looked down to see a skeletal arm jutting out of the rubble, and he felt an instant panic, thinking a reaper was grabbing him.
But it was just the remains of a long-dead human, mostly buried. Colt drew his foot back, stepped over it, and kept moving.
He kept his eyes on the mysterious girl ahead, her dark hair swaying across her shoulders with each step. She was on the short side, even for a scavenger. He thought her age was close to his own, but she was definitely from somewhere else. Even the way she walked was more upright, less low and skulky than a typical scavenger.
They spoke little as they moved. She didn't speak the same detailed language of gestures and touches—in fact, touching her seemed to bother her, though it was critical for silent communication in the dark. They got by with lots of pointing, nodding, and head-shaking.
When they reached a stairwell, though, they got into a pointing argument.
Colt pointed down the stairs and nodded. Mohini shook her head and pointed ahead, through the rubble. He shook his head and pointed emphatically down the stairs again. She shook her head, bared her teeth, and pointed ahead through the rubble again.
“I've mapped it out,” she finally whispered. “We can go through the ruins this way, one building after the next, and we'll be mostly covered.”
“Mostly,” he whispered back. “Down is always safer.”
“What if we get trapped in the basement and have to double back?”
“Everything connects underneath. It might be pedestrian tunnels and apartment blocks, or an underground roadway, or even just a sewer pipe, but there will always be a way. Trust me. I'm the one who lives here. And you're from... where are you from?”
“Shh. All right. We'll go your way. But if we die down there, I'm going to kill you.”
Colt started down the stairs. She stayed close and pulled out an unbelievably advanced-looking pistol, its green-and-black surface blazing with “danger” symbols and injury warnings. Tiny indicator lights glowed on the butt of the pistol.
“Is that a plasma weapon?” he whispered. “Where the hell—”
“Just a lucky find,” she said.
“Ultra-lucky. And you have cells for it?”
“Just a few.”
“I don't suppose you have an extra plasma pistol for me?”
“Sorry,” she whispered. “You've got that automatic rifle.”
“It's empty. Not very accurate, anyway. I think it's from a museum or something. Though I've gotten a few lucky shots with it.” He remembered the nasal-voiced clanker's confused look as the round entered his cheek and the wave of brains and blood splattered the wall behind him.
Colt had killed people before, a few clankers, a few aggressive scavengers that had attacked him or his sister. That was just life as a scavenger, kill or be killed. Some scavengers were cannibals, not content to live on a diet of spiders and rats and the occasional snared pigeon. Human beings were the meatiest creatures to be found in the city.
That was why he knew the kill would linger in his mind for days, or weeks, and the memory would swim up unexpectedly for the rest of his life. He didn't feel guilty about doing it, but something about taking life in general just seemed unfortunate. The world was full of rubble and machines. Actual life, with heartbeat and blood, was rare, and getting rarer by the day.
The stairwell twisted deep underground, past floors of subterranean offices, letting out at an underground retail concourse that had been thoroughly looted and vandalized long ago. A quick glance into the convenience store and café told him there wouldn't be much food or other essentials remaining, but they could have all the greeting cards and art supplies they wanted.
A clothing shop had also been looted, b
ut Colt stopped to pick up a few pairs of thick woolen socks from the floor. They had bears on them. The bear had once been some kind of sacred totem to the city of Chicago, Colt understood. He often saw them on clothing and other artifacts of the old world.
“Stopping for socks?” Mohini asked, looking mildly annoyed.
“Hunger and cold are the enemy as much as the machines,” Colt said. “You must be from someplace warm.”
“Not at all.”
“Where are you from?” He struggled to cram the thick socks into his backpack, which was already full of small tools and freshly plundered bandages and disinfectant.
She hesitated a long moment before answering. “Far away.”
“New York? I heard there are still people alive there. Other scavengers. Didn't know if it was just a rumor.”
“Across the ocean,” she said. “England.”
“Oh, England,” Colt said, nodding. Trying to sound knowledgeable, he added, “Over near Japan.”
“Japan?”
“That's across the ocean too.”
“How... do you not know your way around your own planet?” she asked.
“Sorry I don't sit around memorizing random facts about the old world,” he said. Embarrassed, he hurried to change the subject. “So how did you cross the ocean? Did you have a boat? Why didn't the machines catch you?”
“I hitched a ride on a prison ship,” Mohini said. “It's easier to hide among live humans.”
“But... how?”
“I just had to convince the ship's AI to ignore me.”
“You hacked it? You can take over their ocean ships?” He reached to grab her arm, just a gesture of excitement, but she jerked away and scowled. He'd forgotten how she hated him to touch her. Among the scavengers Colt knew, touch was important for silent communication, but apparently things were different where she was from.
England. A vague image of knights and castles drifted through his mind, maybe from one of the old, water-damaged storybooks he'd seen as a kid. King Arthur. Robin Hood. Sumo wrestlers. Samurai.
