Peace in an Age of Metal and Men

by Anthony Eichenlaub

  “Bug spray.”

  A whoosh sounded from outside and soon the steel door was so hot that wisps of smoke started coming off of it as the paint ignited.

  My breath wheezed and the thundering of my heart was the only thing I could hear. I collapsed against the wall, next to Abi. My eyes were swollen shut. Breathing got harder; each breath rasped painfully. In. Out. In. Out.

  Out.

  Out.

  I clutched my neck. Breath wouldn’t come in, hard as I tried. Something brushed against my hand. Agony. More air eked out of my lungs.

  My eyes opened. Tucker was on top of me, a knife pressed against my neck. There was rage in his eyes, but there was pain there too. A tear beaded at the corner of his eye.

  A long moment passed. Tuck locked gazes with me. One of his hands held mine down, while the other pressed the knife up against my neck.

  A high-pitched noise, like a whistle, sounded. It was several long seconds before I figured out that it was my own breath. The whistle started high, but got deeper and wheezier. Soon my breath was coming in great rasping gulps. Tucker let go of my hand and stepped back.

  The others were gasping too. Their bodies—or more likely their nannies—were fighting off whatever venom came with the bug bites. Pain slowly eased and with a great effort I forced myself into a sitting position.

  “Almost had to give you a tracheotomy,” Tucker said.

  “Thought you were going to murder me.” My voice came out in a gravelly whisper.

  “I thought you were dying.”

  “Would have been a damn shame for me to die without you having the pleasure of murdering me.”

  Tucker slapped me on the knee, sending icy hot waves of agony through my whole leg. “I’d never murder you, J.D. I’ve got too many good war stories with you in them and it’d be a damn shame to stop telling them.”

  “Why didn’t you get it?”

  “Nanny-venom,” Zane said. His voice sounded worse than mine. He winced. Angry red welts covered his face. “Targets the nanomachines in your blood. It kills them and gives you a hell of an allergic reaction at the same time.”

  Tucker smiled. His face was covered in tiny red spots, but to him they were nothing more than an annoyance. Smug son of a bitch.

  The attack left me weak, but Abi was worse. She didn’t get the swelling like I did, but nasty hives and sections of her skin had a worrisome blackened look, like it’d been kissed by flames.

  Flames. The steel door was hot to the touch. We wouldn’t be going out that way. Tucker had led us to a stairwell, and it appeared as if up and down were both viable options. Options. Options were good. The floor and stairs were smooth concrete, and the walls were undecorated cinderblock. This hadn’t been a public area of the facility, by the look of it. I struggled to remember the layout of the buildings from the diagrams on the glow cube. Would we be able to cross to the next building if we went up a level?

  “Down,” Zane said between gasping breaths. “The buildings are connected below, so we should be able to get where we need to go.”

  “Up,” Tucker said. “We don’t know the buildings are still connected down there, but I saw the skyway with my own eyes on the way in.”

  “We’re sitting ducks up there,” said Zane.

  “We’re trapped if it goes bad down there.”

  I got an arm under Abi’s shoulder and helped her up. She gasped when I touched her and gritted her teeth against the pain.

  “We do both,” I said to Tucker. “Take Zane and I’ll take Abi. You two should be able to punch through defenses below and take out those cannons. They’ll tear the flyers to shreds if they stay up.”

  Tucker narrowed his eyes at Zane. “I go alone.”

  I didn’t have it in me to argue. “Fine.”

  Tucker said, “I can slip past their defenses.”

  He was right. As the only unmodified person around, he had the best shot at sneaking around undetected.

  “You remember what to do if the situation goes bad, don’t you?”

  “Blow it up?”

  “Yup.”

  The stairwell was concrete and steel, crumbling from some unknown trauma. With my augmented eye, the glow of my cigarette was enough to see the dark outline of the way ahead, even once Tucker’s light was out of view. Abi moaned. Her head lolled to one side before snapping back upright again. Zane’s brow knit with worry.

  The light from the cigarette was only enough when I puffed hard, so I kept a steady pull on the tobacco as best I could. As we ventured farther down, the air grew sickly and dry. It had a mummified taste of death on it, and I was glad for the spice of my smoke. At the bottom of the stairs the landing opened up into an undecorated space a few meters on a side. I helped Abi sit down on the last step and squatted down to look her in the eyes.

  She met my gaze, held it for a few seconds, then blinked, unfocused. Zane handed her a flask and she took little sips from it.

  Zane pulled me to the side. “She needs rest.”

  “How long can we wait?”

  “We have some time. Tucker will draw most of the attention. If we wait here, we can sneak through.”

  It made sense. “Except that’s setting Tuck out to dry. He’ll take all of the focus if we’re not in position when he strikes.”

  “The goal is to get Abi to the main building where she can link. Tuck knows his place in this.”

  “He’d be killing himself as a distraction.”

  I glanced to Abi, but she wasn’t sitting anymore. She had a look of cold determination on her face and she stood with fists balled at her sides. She took smooth, controlled breaths through her nose.

  “We’re going,” she said, leaving no room for argument.

  The steel door at the bottom of the steps opened onto another hallway. A short distance in, the hallway opened up into a larger room, the extent of which wasn’t lit by my dim cigarette. The place had a musty feel—air heavy with silence. The darkness seemed to press in, tempting me to use the tech in my eye even more to see into it.

  The figure stood at the edge of blackness, staring at us with two pinpoints of blue light.

  Zane drew.

  Then it was gone, melted into the dark as soundlessly as if it were a shadow.

  There were only a few paces between the door and the larger room. We crossed them quickly, peering cautiously around the corner as we got there. The figure was gone, disappeared somewhere into the unknowingly large room. Despite the stuffy feel of the air, the surrounding area was polished and clean. A chemical hint of recent cleaning still lingered in the air behind the musty scent of unmoved air. Shrugging, I moved into the room, headed roughly through the middle in the direction that the main building must be.

  The room was huge, seeming to stretch on forever into the dark. The way footsteps echoed in the giant chamber made the effect sharper. After a distance, it was clear that the single underground room stretched below several, if not all, of the buildings in the Quintech complex. The structures above were tiny compared to the vastness of this room. Columns supported the roof, some crumbling but all still standing. The room seemed to be an open lab, littered with tables, computer equipment, and strange tech I couldn’t identify.

  And some that I could.

  “That’s your arm,” said Zane, standing over a duplicate of my very own prosthetic.

  From the thing’s shoulders snaked the half-dozen tendrils that I knew were identical to those rooted in my own body. They were like the tendrils on the earpiece Zane had given me. The strength from the arm needed to be supported throughout my entire body; otherwise lifting something might tear me apart. All of that was the reason my nannies had to work overtime to repair the damage that the machine constantly did to my body. They had told me that when I woke. They had told me again when it was clear that I didn’t understand. Still, looking at the arm made my stomach drop. How much of me was left?

  Hair at the back of my neck stood up. Puffing the cigarette, I expanded slightly
the ring of light around us. Abi gasped.

  Dark forms surrounded us. They were human—or human shaped, anyway. Their dull eyes stared at us with a faint blue glow. There were dozens of them.

  “We need to get out of here,” whispered Zane. He gripped my hand and we moved together, though I don’t know who was supporting whom.

  We passed tables that held consoles like the one Abi had attached to my skidder. There were diagrams of how the tech attached to a person’s brain and nervous system. It made me sick to my stomach. There were other pieces that I couldn’t identify. Guns too. Heavy ones. Fancy ones. My prosthetic hand was a universal component that fit an enormous array of weaponry. They’d made me into a tool of war. Everything was polished and clean. Every table was arranged in perfect order, like pieces were being laid out on a buffet. Every so often we passed a work in progress, with parts of a device arranged in orderly rows along a table. More often the devices were fully intact.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Zane let go and glanced back nervously. Abi leaned against a table, breathing hard. Behind us, the figures were following.

  “What do they want?” Abi whispered.

  “They’re husks,” said Zane. “They’re probably running a default program and keeping an eye on us.”

  “Why, though? Why aren’t they attacking us? It’s not like there aren’t enough weapons.”

  “I don’t know,” said Zane.

  Puffing the cigarette, I got a little closer to something that had caught my eye. It was big and heavy, but seemed useful. It was a weapon. Of course, it was a weapon. The expansion had thin plates of black metal flaring out around it in an apparently defensive shield. I slotted my arm in, feeling my power slide into its dormant form. My awareness expanded, sliding out into the black metal form. It felt good. It felt right.

  I could feel the finely articulated plates moving at the slightest effort of my will. It was like my arm had grown into a brilliantly complicated piece of machinery and instinct told me how to use it. The plates slid closed at my command, and my new arm’s attachment condensed into a manageable size.

  One of the husks stepped forward. It was a middle-aged man in a lab coat. He said, “The tech doesn’t make you bad, Sheriff. It makes you more efficient.”

  “I’m not the sheriff anymore.”

  The man’s eyes were blue embers in his skull. His face remained completely expressionless. “You’ll always be the sheriff to me.”

  The phrase seemed oddly familiar. It was clear who was talking through this husk. “Francis?”

  The man nodded stiffly. “You are getting better, Sheriff. Every piece of technology you incorporate into yourself makes you more like me. Stronger. Faster.”

  “Like you?” It was odd having this conversation with an emptied-out husk of a man, but my hackles were raised. “The way you reject what happened to your mama and wreck other people’s lives? That’s not better, that’s just insane.”

  Zane put a hand on my shoulder. “We have to go,” he whispered.

  But I wasn’t done. I jammed a finger in the husk’s chest. “Tech doesn’t make anything better, boy. It didn’t make me better and it doesn’t make you better. It sure as hell doesn’t make Texas better.”

  “No,” the man said. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” His eyes focused on my metal arm with its new attachment. “But we still upgrade.”

  Far above, something exploded. The earth shook with a shock and dust rained down from the ceiling. Tucker.

  “Time to go,” said Zane.

  The door to the next stairwell was only a short distance away, just at the range of my ember light. I shoved the husk aside and covered the distance in a few steps, kicked open the door, and vaulted up the stairs. Zane and Abi were close at my heels.

  The air was easier to breathe as soon as the door opened. Higher up, the heat hit again. There maybe wasn’t much oxygen down there, but up above, breathing seemed to cook the lungs. I tossed my cigarette aside. The stairwell continued upward, and by the artificial glow coming from the hallway I knew we must be in the right building. This was the building with the tower, and likely the one where Francis had holed up. This was the building heavily defended, with gun turrets and shielding. We had made it.

  Now all we had to do was go up.

  Chapter 37

  At first we sprinted up the stairs. This lasted most of a single flight. Almost. The outside wall was glass, and in many places the night air rushed in, mocking us with a dry wind that didn’t cool. Then, we jogged. Half a dozen stories passed at a decent pace. Once Zane started falling behind, Abi got an arm under him and helped him forward.

  “This is the toughest thing I’ve done all week,” I said.

  Zane gave a weak smile. His skin was pale and still pocked with angry sores from the bugs. “Once we get up there, it’s going to be a fight,” he said between gasping breaths. “Francis will have hell of an automated system.”

  “Should we wait for Tuck?” Abi asked.

  “No,” I said. “He’s taken out that battery. He’ll move to the next target rather than join up with us.”

  Abi checked her rifle, then checked it again. “No matter what happens, keep them off of me and get me to the console.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  Then we were there. I flexed my shield, and articulated plating spread out into a diamond shape. The steel door might have been unlocked, but for the sake of simplicity, I gave it a quick bash with the shield.

  The door flew ten meters before hitting a wall at the end of the corridor.

  A hail of gunfire ricocheted off of my shield, jerking it around and forcing me to brace it. Zane shot twice, and the incoming fire eased a bit but didn’t stop.

  Stepping forward, I pushed closer to the last turret and gave Zane the shot he needed.

  “Seems he doesn’t want us here,” Zane said. He stepped into the slot, fired again with his rifle, reducing the turret to junk parts. “Or he’s even worse at social niceties than you thought.”

  We were at the middle of a T intersection. Ahead was a short hallway at the end of which was the mangled door and another intersection. To the left and right, the corridor curved along the outer edge of the building. Windows lined the outer walls.

  The floor shook in the thump-thump rhythm of heavy fire. Outside the window, the sky lit up in blaze of activity. Energy weapons and explosions alternated in the air. The flyers had arrived.

  By the flashes of violence in the sky, I could see dozens of vehicles darting, attacking, and fleeing. It was a chaos that must have been Cinco Armas and maybe more.

  The first Kiva rounded the corner at a jog. He wore a stark white full-length lab coat, and a pair of thick goggles adorned his forehead. He was an older man, with stringy gray hair falling to his shoulders. His blue eyes flashed as he saw us, his face expressionless as he raised a battered shotgun.

  Zane dropped him with a punishing shot to his chest. Before that Kiva hit the floor, another rounded the corner.

  Shield up, I distracted the new one—a young woman with chestnut hair and a vacant expression. She held a long black knife in one hand and a small one-shot pistol in the other. She fired her shot wide and charged with the knife raised.

  She used to be a person. She used to be beautiful. Her neck was still adorned with a pearl necklace, and her wrists held matching bracelets. Her dress was old, threadbare, and obviously once quite extravagant. It’s all I could think of as she threw her body on the shield. The black-bladed knife whistled past my ear as I lifted her and tossed her backward. She used to be a person.

  But she wasn’t anymore.

  My Model 500 revolver slipped into my hand like it was meant to be. Three shots thundered in righteous mercy: one to her heart, one to her neck, and one to her head.

  Zane had two more Kivas pinned behind a door. They were big ones, armed with shotguns. These were protecting themselves, showing significantly more self-preservation than the others. Zane moved forwar
d to try to root them out.

  “Look out!” Abi shouted.

  Too late.

  The air ionized. Crisp ozone.

  Blue light—blinding—pierced the wall next to Zane and sliced through his chest. He fell back, screaming. Smoke filled the room.

  I dove forward, hoping to guess where Zane had landed. The shield covered the two. Light where the beam hit my shield sent flickering shadows dancing along the darkened window. The glass glowed where the beam had hit, highlighting edges where it had cut clean through.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He nodded but spit dust and blood. His skin, pale before, had gone white as clean sheets. I grabbed him with one hand and pulled him forward. The beam stopped.

  I pounced up and fired two shots through the wooden door, dropping the two Kivas cowering behind it. A hulking husk stepped through the gap in the wall. He hefted an arm just like mine, slotted into an enormous cannon. He aimed and the cannon started to whir.

  Abi fired two shots and the huge man dropped, his head a ruined mess. Holstering my revolver, I held out a hand to Zane.

  Zane was in a bad way. He coughed up blood and favored one of his arms. He was able to get to his feet, but there was something wrong with his ankle. It was twisted at an odd angle and there was no way he’d be standing on it if not for the tech in his body. When he moved, he had to grasp the side of his torso with one hand. He must have been suppressing his pain. The welts on his skin seemed worse.

  The hallway opened up into the room with the domed ceiling. Outside, a battle still raged. The makeshift army had taken down one of two huge energy cannons, but the other was still firing. It swiveled and fired in a rhythmic thump-thump that resonated in my chest. It didn’t hit often, but when it did, it hit hard. Smaller turrets were hitting more often, bullets piercing even the heavily armed vehicles.

  Francis stood near a half-circle console in the center of the room. Wires were strewn everywhere, snaking across the floor and up to the antenna at the back of the building. The walls were lined with flickering displays. The effect reminded me of Court’s hideout, only bigger and in worse condition. There was even an Umbilical snaking from the console to something behind the back wall.