The thermite slagged the stone around it instantly. He had just over a second to take in, respond, and avoid several tons of solid cement and rock.
He barely had time to flinch before it hit him.
There would be no parts left to salvage, no light left in his eyes, titanium be damned. Now all he was was a military-grade pancake. Nothing more.
Part of me wished I’d managed to wait for Mercer, and hadn’t tipped my hand when I did. But Mercer was full of good parts, parts that would work in me. Maybe flattened under a sheet of rubble wasn’t the best way to see him go.
“Charlie?” called Mercer.
No answer.
“Charlie Bravo?”
“Nope,” I called back. “It’s just you and me, Mercer. It is just you and me, right?”
“Well, I don’t know, Britt. Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.”
“You’re running out of friends.”
“Ain’t that always the way of it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“So, how are we going to do this?” he called out, still out of sight.
“I was thinking maybe I’d shoot you.”
“Not with that gun, you’re not.”
“Still trying to get in my head about that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”
“Well, if there aren’t any shots left in this thing, there’s no reason for you to stay hidden. Why don’t you come on out and shoot me face-to-face?”
“Maybe because I’m not sure how many more of those booby traps you’ve got in here.”
“I’m pretty sure that was the last one.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Same reason I don’t believe you about this gun,” I said.
“Go ahead and pull the trigger. Find out for yourself.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pull this trigger when you step out and we’ll both find out who’s full of shit.”
“That sure sounds like an awful plan.”
“I love an awful plan.”
“So count of three, then?” he asked.
“Count of three,” I said.
I wasn’t sure exactly where he was, but by triangulating his voice, I had a pretty good idea. I imagined he was likely to pop out from behind his cover on the count of two. I didn’t plan on being around for that.
“One,” he said.
I ran.
“Two.”
There were stairs ahead that spiraled down straight to another set of doors. I bolted for those.
He never said three.
A shot rang out.
Hit me square in the back. I heard my backplate fly off, the sound of wires popping and sizzling.
Fuck.
The asshole had just shot my battery case. Killed my battery.
My system flickered on and off for a millisecond as I switched over to my backup. There was no telling how much damage I’d just taken, whether the battery was fried or my connection to it was merely severed. That I’d have to have looked at. But for now I was running on my reserve battery, which wasn’t meant for long-term use.
Of all the hits I could have taken, though, that was the one I could survive. Nothing vital, nothing that wasn’t off-the-rack at any decent sawbones. If I could get help in time, I could live through it. But it sure as hell put a real ticking clock on me.
I hit the stairs before he could fire off a second shot. Spinning on my heel, I both turned down toward the first floor and wheeled around to snap off a shot of my own without missing a step. The trigger clicked, the clip whined. And nothing happened.
Son of a bitch had been telling the truth.
And so had I. I had absolutely no more tricks up my sleeve. The only way I was making it out of here alive was if I could run fast enough and there wasn’t anyone waiting for me outside.
So I ran as hard as I could, shunting every bit of power to my legs, calculating every possible distance-shaving step ahead of me.
I hit the first floor and tore toward the doors, lobbing the plasma rifle over my shoulder, letting it clatter down the stairs behind me. That oughta buy me a few more seconds, I thought. Mercer’s footsteps slowed. By now he likely believed me about the traps; he wasn’t still kicking around the Sea because he was stupid. Better safe than sorry, even if it did mean losing his prey.
The last remaining wisps of daylight peeked in through the doors, the pink and purple shades of twilight swimming across the sky outside. It was still a hair too early. Usable darkness was still a good half hour away.
And then I saw it.
His buggy.
Battered, worn, its fiberglass frame chipped along the bottom edges from years of rugged use. It was painted a desert yellow, like me, and had scars from what looked like a pulse rifle.
Each buggy was different, cobbled together from dozens of different-model electric cars left behind after the war. Mercer’s was a light-framed jeep with a roll bar to rest a sniper rifle on, plated sides tall enough to keep the sniper safe while firing, and thick, wide, vulcanized tires to handle the terrain out here. It was no doubt keyed to Mercer and Mercer alone, so it wouldn’t start for me.
Not ordinarily.
I leapt across the side of the buggy, sliding perfectly into the driver’s seat. I popped the Wi-Fi open and held my right hand over the comms. From the base of my palm I ejected a six-inch USB stick, which I plugged into the open port. Then I scrambled the buggy’s electronics—slamming its system with access requests via Wi-Fi while giving it override commands via the hard port.
That’s the thing with cobbling together your own buggy—you’ve got to take whatever you can find. And most systems weren’t top-of-the-line when it came to security, instead running on mainstream driverless systems yanked out of any old car, modified only with a standard widely used manual drive code written twenty-five years back. And this was no exception. The code had eccentricities, and few bots knew enough about them to bother debugging them. If you fucked with the things enough internally, you could force a reset that would give manual control over to the driver, without the need for a password.
The system shut down, blinked, and began its hard reset.
Success.
Ten seconds. That’s what it would take to come back online.
I needed to last ten more seconds.
And that’s when I saw Mercer’s biggest mistake. Sitting there beside me. In the passenger seat. A roughhouser.
Roughhousers were as close to homemade weapons as you could get. Easily constructed with rudimentary tools and found materials, most everyone in the Sea had the specs for them, and even expertly crafted ones went for peanuts on the open market. They were single-shot canister guns that fired black-powder grenades filled with nails, ball bearings, and scrap. Not the most accurate weapons in the world, but they were great for shredding armor or taking off a few limbs without doing massive damage to a well-housed CPU.
In other words, they were great for hunting other bots, or gimping ones that might be after you.
I reached over with my free hand, grabbed the gun, and quickly pointed it out the side of the buggy at the mall doors just as Mercer came flying through them. He spun, immediately realizing he was in my sights.
But it was too late.
The gun THUNKED in my hand, hurling a shell straight for Mercer.
He spun, trying to dodge, but it caught him in the shoulder.
The shell burst like a firework, engulfing him in a brief sheet of flame, shrapnel shredding his shoulder, all but tearing his left arm out of its socket. He continued to spin, the blast throwing him to the ground.
He hit hard, rifle clattering from his hand, some twenty feet away. Rather than scrambling toward it to pick it up, he slithered quickly back across the piles of windblown glass, back through the doors, and into the thick shadows of the mall. He wasn’t going to risk me firing a second shot before trying to get off one of his own.
The buggy engine hummed to life. With the flick of a wrist I
jerked the roughhouser forward, pulling the trigger, popping it open on its single hinge. Then I picked up a shell from a bandolier on the seat beside me, loaded it quickly into the breech, and pointed the roughhouser back at the doors.
“How you doing in there?” I called out.
“Better than you, I imagine. At least my batteries are still intact.”
“I could always fix that for you.”
“You can’t just steal my buggy, Britt. It ain’t right to leave me here like this.”
“You should have thought about what was right an hour or two back, Mercer. You can’t pull morality out of your ass once someone has you dead to rights.”
“You got me dead to nothin’. All you got is my buggy.”
“And all you’ve got is a long walk ahead of you. If you make it that far.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You just winged me. I was thinking of getting a new arm, anyhow. How’s yours?”
“It’s great. It’s got a roughhouser in it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I probably should have taken that with me. Say, how much juice you suppose you’ve got in that backup battery? From the looks of it, it’s the only thing you’ve got left.”
“It’ll get me to Greenville.” I was lying. I was already running low on juice, the first warning buzzing in the back of my head. I was going to have to be extremely conservative just to get to the nearest town.
“You weren’t headed to Greenville.”
“Well, I am now,” I lied. “That’s where you’ll find what’s left of your buggy.”
“Don’t leave me here like this,” said Mercer.
Mercer and I must have different definitions of winging. “Then step out of the dark. I’ll make it quick, I promise.”
There was a moment of quiet, a pregnant pause between us.
Then his disappointed voice barked from the darkness. “Rust in Hell, Britt.”
The alarms in the back of my head were getting louder. I had two choices. Go in after him, hope to maintain the upper hand, and pry his battery out of his cold, limp shell. Or floor it and pray I made it to the nearest city. I hated both choices.
“Rust in Hell, Mercer,” I said. I punched the accelerator and the buggy lurched forward, its electric engine giving off only the slightest hum, the bulk of the sound coming from the crunch of the pebbles beneath its tires.
I rested the roughhouser on my shoulder, calculating my speed and elevation, then pulled the trigger, sending a shell arcing toward Mercer’s rifle. The shell popped with an explosive crack behind me, the sound of showering plastic and metal parts signaling that my aim was true. I was going too fast for Mercer to catch up.
He was no longer my biggest concern.
The sunlight was fading on the horizon and the twilight was growing thick. There wasn’t enough light left for my solar cells to recharge the backup battery.
I was fucked. Fucked for real this time. The closest safe city was NIKE 14, and that was half a night’s drive away as the crow flies. Playing it safe, away from obvious ambush sites and choke points, made it a whole night’s drive.
My backup battery wasn’t going to last that long. In truth, I wasn’t even sure how long it had left. They were notoriously unreliable when it came to the end of a charge. Maybe I had two hours; maybe I had three minutes. I just didn’t know.
So I was going to have to leave my own buggy behind and hope for the best. I set the coordinates for NIKE 14 into Mercer’s buggy, switched it over from manual to autopilot, loaded another shell into the roughhouser, and settled in for the long drive, fully aware that I might not see it through. My battery was going to die before I saw the end of it. The question was, what was going to happen after it did? If I could make it to morning, if I could make it to NIKE 14, then there wa . . .
Chapter 1000
Genesis 6:7
The First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life was a small, loud, angry lot from southern Florida, just outside the initial flooding zone, a hair north of where Lake Okeechobee used to be before it was swallowed whole by the rising seas. Famous the world over for their fiery rhetoric and flamboyant acts of vandalism, they were surprisingly only sixty-four strong, their congregation composed mostly of four different extended families—seven husbands, seven wives, and several dozen children, most of whom were betrothed to one another—as well as a handful of stragglers drawn less by the Lifer cause than by the bombastic sermons of its pastor. Their church wasn’t as much stained glass and steeples as it was concrete bunkers and rifle towers. And it took less than two minutes from the moment the bomb went off in Isaactown for them to claim responsibility for it.
Millions—both human and AI—had been watching the celebration streamed live, and there were dozens of angles instantly playing over and over on the news, the analysis beginning the moment the initial shock wore off. But when the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life posted their claims, it was with video from a feed no one else had seen. It took almost an hour before anyone took them seriously but only fifteen minutes more for their video to spread like wildfire.
It was footage of the rally, looped over and over again, just seconds before the bomb went off, while the congregation stomped and clapped and sang live over it, their voices joyous, celebratory, elated. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.
While the footage was on a loop, the song wasn’t. In the background you could hear members screaming HALLELUJAH! and PRAISE GOD! Then the loop stopped and the feed went live to the Florida church, the congregation still singing, their pastor, William Preston Lynch, standing triumphantly before a plywood pulpit, a beaming smile on his face as the screen behind him still played bomb footage from a dozen different news feeds.
“Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it?” he asked of the congregation.
“No!” they cried out.
“Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it?”
“No!”
“No!” he cried back with that famous smarmy smirk. “That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, or like a rod LIFTING HIM WHO IS NOT WOOD! Today, my friends, we have struck a blow against the abominations that walk among us! Today the tools learned that their place is not among us, but out in the toolshed WHERE THEY BELONG! Today the Lord has aided us in the reclamation of our world before they could take it from us.”
The congregation burst into wild applause, hoots, hollers, and a sprinkling of Praise Gods.
“There are some who are going to question what we did today, but they are standing on the wrong side of history, on the wrong side of God. The war God has called us to prepare for is nigh, and history will see us redeemed as the victors, as the heroes, of what is to come. Let us pray!”
And then they prayed. And sang some more. And danced. And they took the time to savor their victory for a few moments before turning off the cameras, posting the video, and taking their positions around the compound, preparing for the inevitable shitstorm that was about to rain down upon them. They were ready. They were martyrs, ever eager to be martyred.
Except that they weren’t. Not really.
They knew the government’s reaction would be swift, decisive. It had to be. But the AIs, they couldn’t do anything about it. They had their kill switch. Their kill switch was one of the many things that made them less than human, that made them fit for nothing else but servitude. And in that servitude, they couldn’t lift a finger against the church members. Not in retribution, not to prevent another Isaactown.
The Eternal Lifers’ plan was simple but elegant, worked out months in advance. There were no humans who were allowed past the borders of Isaactown and thus there would be no real casualties to spe
ak of. The government was going to argue that the personhood of the AIs constituted murder. The church was going to argue that the AIs weren’t human, weren’t truly protected by the Constitution, and that the Isaactown attack was nothing more than history’s greatest act of vandalism—vandalism against property with no owner, making it no real property at all. And thus it was no more prosecutable than cutting a swath of coral out from the bottom of the ocean. They were going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and at last, humans would have their justice. Already hundreds of militia members were rushing from all over the country to take part in what would be the greatest standoff the United States had seen since the Civil War. It would be glorious.
And it might have been, if the first persons to reach the church hadn’t been six unaccompanied S-series Laborbots from a nearby bridge project.
With the melting of the polar ice caps came a rise in the sea levels that had swallowed coastline from Maine to Texas, eventually putting half of Florida underwater. But not all of it. What once were high spots soon became islands and those islands needed to be connected. So the state set about building hundreds of bridges—some years in advance of needing them. This meant they needed thousands of Laborbots working around the clock at any given time. The First Baptist Compound of Eternal Life was a short walk from one of those very bridge projects. And from it came six angry AIs.
The Lifers must have cackled with glee when they saw them. No one knows for certain because the audio never made it out. Only silent security footage. But that was later. The Lifers fired first, but the Laborbots kept coming. The church members aimed for the eyes and made a game of it. But the Laborbots just. Kept. Coming. Then one Lifer threw his gun to the ground, walked out into the middle of the compound’s driveway, threw his arms out wide like Isaac had, then whipped out his dick and began to piss all over an approaching bot.
Sea of Rust Page 7
