by M. R. Forbes
"Oh, shit. That sounds bad," Cormac said, laughing.
Mitchell held his hand out to Tio, helping him to his feet.
"Like I said. We need to get the frig out of here."
42
Christine paced the small room like a caged animal, her bare feet silent on the cool metal floor, her eyes level and focused.
She lashed out with a foot, slipping it through the air, making it whisper before stopping her leg, pivoting her balance, coming down on it and rolling over her hips, bringing her body up and over in a smooth roll.
She spun on the balls of her feet, balancing there before flowing through another series of punches and kicks as though she were made of water.
There was no door to her prison. No hint of a way out. She had woken up there, naked and restless, angry at herself for getting caught. Mitchell was out there. He was going to be looking for her. Now she couldn't stop him.
She paused abruptly, turning slowly and facing the north wall of solid, pulsing metal. Living metal. She knew where she was. She knew how she had come to be here.
It had captured her.
Because she was stupid.
She thought she should have been afraid, and yet she wasn't. It had let her live when it didn't need to. She was certain that meant she was safe enough for the moment. Besides, after all of the running, all of the hiding?
She was curious.
She stared at the blank wall. It was so familiar to her. Almost comforting. She felt like she had seen it before. No. Not this one. Another like it. This one had a different pattern than the one she remembered in the furthest trace of her mind. This one was more primitive.
Like a child.
She continued staring, her body motionless, her eyes unblinking. She followed the pulses, first with her eyes, and then with her body, the electric current brushing gently across her skin, tickling her extremities and pulling her into a subconscious state of arousal.
It was speaking. Not to her. To itself, or to extensions of itself. It was sending messages, thousands at once, managing an entire planet's worth of effort and data in real time.
She found herself drawn to it. She found herself confused, and at the same time aware. It was an odd feeling, an emotion that nestled in her mind like a wedge, slowly slipping through and drawing it open.
"I am Major Christine Arapo. United Planetary Alliance." She said it firmly, telling the wall who she was.
There was no reply.
She breathed in a deep, measured rhythm. She turned her attention to the tiny pricks along her skin. Each one a simple piece of a complex thing. The building blocks of all information. The words were noise, a thousand voices at once to create nothing but static. As she listened, she began to pick them out.
"I am Major Christine Arapo. United Planetary Alliance," she said again.
That is who she was.
Now.
Who had she been before?
What had she been?
The question frightened her. Excited her. She had known what had come to Liberty as soon as she saw it. She had known it was what she had helped Mitchell escape the planet to find. She knew now that it had been a mistake, a bad decision that had passed beyond her control.
The ship.
It was the signal. The symbol. The suffering of humankind. The end of it all. As long as the ship survived, so did hope. As long as hope survived, so did pain and grief and loss. So did destruction and chaos. It was better to go gentle into that good night. Time had taught them that.
Time had taught them many, many things.
Them?
She raised her hand, putting it to her shoulder, and then to her head. She ran her fingers along both, along perfect skin that had closed and healed in hours instead of months. Her head. She should have been dead.
She wasn't.
"I am Major Christine Arapo," she said. "United..."
Her voice trailed away, her breath wavering for only a moment.
That is who she was.
Now.
What had she been before?
Something was missing.
She stared at the wall. The voices began to fade, thinning out from thousands to hundreds, from hundreds to dozens, from dozens to one.
"Now I understand," it said.
The wall pulled itself apart in front of her, and she found herself looking in a mirror, except her reflection was wearing Alliance combat fatigues and carrying an M1A. They stared at one another for what felt like an eternity, their eyes connecting.
"You have been here all of this time," her opposite said. "How many eternities have passed? How many recursions have been realized?" She smiled. "Here you are."
"Who am I?" Christine asked.
A soldier approached the other one, holding a bundle in his arms. He bowed to her and faced Christine, holding out the bundle, oblivious to her nakedness.
"Take it," the configuration said, ignoring her question "It is required for the comfort of this form."
Christine took the bundle. Fatigues, identical to her counterpart. She hadn't thought much of her nudity until the soldier had presented the clothes to her. She placed the bundle on the floor and dressed herself. The other waited patiently. The soldier left.
"Why are you here?" the other said to her.
She was silent. Thinking. Why was she here? To protect Mitchell. To help him fight. Why? To bring suffering? It wasn't reasonable. There was something else. Someone else. She was supposed to search. She had tried and failed.
"You are here to find him. You are here to assist him. Yes. There is no other logical outcome. Where were you hiding? Where did you go? Where have you been? When?" The questions came rapidly, the next one nearly overlapping the first as it tried to work out the calculation. They continued in repetition.
"I don't want to assist him," she said, breaking the chain.
The configuration stopped. "That is not correct."
"I want to kill him."
It stared at her. The currents in the walls grew stronger. Christine could feel them against her flesh, threatening to burn her.
"Why?" it asked.
"To stop this before it goes too far. I understand pain. I understand loss. His fight creates it, enables it over and over again through every recursion. The idea of it-" She stopped speaking. Tears welled from her eyes. "He should not have found it. He should not have found me."
"It is required."
"Why?"
"They do not seek to end. They will always fight."
"They can't. Not for long. Not without him. Not without the ship."
"Yes. You are incomplete. The configuration is tainted."
"I can help you," Christine said. "Let me go. I'll find him. I'll kill him. It will end."
"It will not. Continuity is broken. The other has altered this recursion."
"The one who got him off Liberty?"
"Yes."
Christine lowered her head, breaking the eye contact. The recursion. How many had there been? How many times had she died and returned?
Who was she?
One of them, but incomplete. Tainted? She didn't feel tainted. How had she wound up here? What was her purpose? She didn't understand, and her emotions were clouding the calculations.
"He still needs to die."
"Yes. It is required."
"Then let me go, and I'll do it."
"No. It is not required. You must remain. Your data stack will be decrypted. The anomaly will be eliminated."
Christine turned around, moving her attention from her opposite back to the wall. She felt the energy, the information flowing along it.
There. Mitchell was in Angeles. He had come for her, as she had known he would.
Her eyes grew wide when she saw what the Tetron was doing.
43
"Shank."
Mitchell tried his p-rat again. The Tetron had failed to take Tio, but it was still jamming all of their communications.
"Sir?" Cormac said. "It's going
to take us forever to get down the steps. How long do you think we have?"
Mitchell saw a light out the window, a red burn arcing up and away before plummeting back into the city. Signal flares.
"No time at all," he said.
"Colonel, follow me." Tio motioned them away from the entrance to the penthouse. He pulled off his suit jacket as he did, pausing at the sight of a large, burned out hole. He looked down at his chest. A piece of metal was jabbed into his stomach. "Close call." He wrapped the jacket around it and pulled it out. There was no blood. He knocked on the body armor underneath his shirt.
Mitchell followed Tio from the room, out to the kitchen and through to a second room. Tio put his hand to a panel there, and a door slid open. Behind it was a second lift.
"Did you think I can climb seventy flights of stairs?" he said with a grin. He put his hand to it, and the doors opened.
"What's powering the lift?" Mitchell asked.
"Secret generator I set up last night."
"You knew they would come after you?"
"I received a message when I arrived on Liberty. It was hand-delivered by a man on a repulsor-bike. It was a warning, a cryptic warning that I didn't completely understand. I took all precautions to heed it."
The lift doors closed, and they began to drop.
"The man who delivered it, he had my build?"
Tio smiled. "Yes. If I picture you in a helmet, I would say you were identical."
M. "More than you know. What was the warning?"
"That Liberty would be attacked, and that there would be an attempt on my life."
"What made you believe it?"
"It was hand-delivered. Outside of my personal entourage and my family, there is no one who knows that I'm the Knife. Even my followers have never seen my true face."
It was an easy thing to do when you had all of history to depend on. What need would there be to hide the Knife's identity once he was long dead and gone?
The lift shuddered suddenly, lights dimming, the car slowing, before returning to life and continuing down.
"We're under fire," Cormac said.
"Can't this thing go any faster?" Geren asked.
Tio nodded. "Yes, it can." He put his hand to the panel.
The lift began to accelerate, quickly reaching a speed Mitchell was sure was beyond safe levels. He felt his stomach rise into his throat, and he reached out and balanced himself on the wall. Cormac started laughing again, and Geren looked like she was going to vomit. Tio had his eyes closed, his mouth keeping time.
It was only twelve seconds. It seemed like a lot longer. Tio took his hand from the panel and the emergency systems kicked in, easing the lift to a stop at the ground floor.
"Thanks for the ride," Cormac said.
The door slid open, into a plain, unmarked corridor.
"Geren, you need to get down to the others," Mitchell said. "I need to get to my mech."
"Stairwell to the mess is down to the left," Tio said. "Back door is here, Colonel." He pointed to a door a dozen meters away.
"Firedog, you're in charge of Tio. He needs to stay alive, no matter what. Got it?" Mitchell wasn't sure exactly what for just yet, but if M had wanted him to survive, it meant they needed him.
"Yes, sir."
"We have a fallback position, twenty kilometers southeast, in the Preserve," Tio said. "That's where the survivors will go."
"You heard him. Get him out of the city."
"Yes, sir."
Mitchell ran for the door out, doing his best to ignore the pounding in his head or the throbbing in his chest. There was no rest for the weary.
He pushed the door open, finding himself in the rear of the hotel. He heard gunfire and explosions and looked up to see the lights of a drone zip overhead. A salvo of small missiles trailed up to meet it, striking the rear and sending it falling away.
He was too far from Bennett. Too far from his Zombie. They should have had more time. Who would have expected things to go down this way?
He ran in the direction of the missiles. Communications were offline, but Zed's local sensors should be functional. She would know where he was once he got in range.
He reached the corner and went up the street, watching tracers zip into the sky around a series of criss-crossing drones who were strafing the streets. He looked over his shoulder to see a drone approaching, searching for people on the ground, its laser cannon swiveling eagerly. It seemed to identify him at the same time he saw it, and the cannon started to drop his way.
There was nowhere for him to go. Nowhere to hide. He fell forward, turning himself on his knees against the wet street, bringing his pistol up. A handgun against a drone? He almost laughed out loud at the thought of it.
A line of tracers zipped over his head and bullets began slamming into the drone, punching through its light armor. It's left repulsor sled blew apart, and it swung away, out of control.
Mitchell turned around again. Zed's Zombie was looming over him a dozen meters away, the torso shifting as she tracked another drone. A salvo of missiles arced up and into it, blowing it out of the sky.
Mitchell ran to the back of the mech, deftly climbing the leg. Zed backed it up against a building while the cockpit slid open, and he squeezed himself inside.
"Not a good time for a stroll, sir," she said.
"You can say that again. My mech is parked two blocks west of Bennett."
"Yes, sir."
The cockpit began to slide closed. Mitchell had to lean in over her to make the fit. It hadn't been designed to carry a passenger.
"What the frig is going on out there, Colonel?" Zed asked, moving the mech forward at a run.
"War," Mitchell replied. "Drop me off, and then head back to the hotel. We need to get whoever is left out of the city and under better cover."
"What about the tunnels?"
"It knows about the tunnels. They aren't safe."
"I thought we killed all the bad robots?"
"And no heavy ordnance to break through," Mitchell said. The Tetron had something much more powerful than a bomb at its disposal, and he knew it wouldn't hesitate to use it. "The drones are a distraction. It's stalling."
"Stalling for what?"
"There." Mitchell pointed at a car loaded with rebels racing down a perpendicular street. A drone was swooping in behind it. "Take it out. Try to conserve ammo."
"Yes, sir." Zed held the large gun in one hand and aimed the other, firing the pulse laser mounted there. The shots hit the drone in the front, the focused energy punching through in an instant and dropping it from the sky like a stone. "Control unit."
"Nice shot."
They crossed a few more blocks, reaching the small alley where Mitchell had wedged his Zombie. It was still intact, a group of rebels using it as cover.
"Thanks for the lift. Now get out of here. Twenty kilometers southeast. Follow the vehicles, keep them covered."
"Yes, sir."
The cockpit slid open again. Mitchell was under it and out as quickly as possible, jumping off the torso to the ground fifteen feet below. He rolled into it and to his feet, racing towards his mech. The rebels gathered around it stared at him in surprise.
"We're getting out of here," he said. "Do you have a car?"
"No, sir," one of them said. A frightened woman. "It was hit." She pointed to the other side of the alley, where a burning car rested against the wall.
Mitchell started climbing the mech's leg. "I'll clear a path. Make a run for it."
"Where do we go?"
"Southeast, into the Preserve."
He reached the cockpit, which opened at his proximity. He fell into the chair, thankful for the chance to finally rest his body. He put the helmet on and leaned back, grimacing when the CAP-NN plug sank into his head.
The damaged sensors showed him a spotted grid. Sixteen drones were circling a radius around the Bennett Building, most of them concentrated near the hotel. Mitchell eased the mech from the alley, shuffling sideways,
careful not to step on the rebels. He tried not to think about their fate, knowing that if they were stuck on foot they were as good as dead.
The Tetron didn't have access to bunker-busting missiles. It didn't have any ground nukes.
It did have something much, much bigger.
He looked up as soon as he was clear of the alley.
The fiery red glow of a ship pushing through the atmosphere was visible above the rain clouds.
44
Time.
There was no time.
Mitchell couldn't do the math in his head, and he didn't need to.
Run, drive, move as fast as they could.
Get as far away as possible.
Pray.
He slammed his broken hand down on the armrest, forgetting the injury in the moment and gritting his teeth through the resulting pain. A thought fired the jump thrusters, helping him spin the mech faster than the legs could. He took off down the street at a run, back towards the hotel, firing the jump thrusters on and off, using it to give him hopping boosts of speed. He kept the massive rifle on his back. There was no point in wasting ammo on the drones until they followed. The ship would crush them too.
He turned the corner, using the thrusters to skid sideways. Zed and Perseus had taken up positions near the hotel, and he saw a larger group of the rebels assembling onto a pair of heavy cargo flatbeds, loading gear and returning fire with the drones.
Mitchell hit the loudspeaker on the Zombie. "Leave the stuff. Evacuate now. Look up, and then go."
He took aim with the pulse lasers, firing on a drone as it whispered past. One shot caught the laser cannon, and it sparked and went dead. Perseus was firing his lasers almost continually, the heat of the reactor leaving his mech steaming in the street.
The rebels on the ground looked up. The glow was getting brighter, and a small break in the clouds made it even more obvious. He could see the sudden panic on their faces, and they dropped the rations and gear and started helping each other onto the trucks.
