Sea of Rust

by C. Robert Cargill

  Outside the facets began to overtake the Comfortbot horde, officers barking out orders, units working in perfect organization against the disorganized mass.

  Our window of opportunity was closing.

  I popped up in the window and fired off a few shots, blowing out the back of the head of one facet, taking another’s head off at the neck. Three facets turned and opened fire on my position.

  A ball of plasma hissed out at them from Herbert’s building, vaporizing two of them, searing the third into a stumbling mess unable to see or fire, barely able to remain upright.

  There were probably only two dozen sexbots left, but they continued obediently to fire at the approaching facets. With most of the melee sexbots scattered in pieces across the pockmarked road, we had finally established a decent cross fire. The only thing missing was the sound of Mercer’s rifle.

  Where was he? Had he fled to a better vantage point? Taken a hit? Was he lost in his own overheating head? Or had he finally fried out?

  I wanted to call him over the Wi-Fi, but the Miltons were still screaming.

  We were out of time. I had to press on in the hope that Mercer would show back up.

  I heard the heavy footfalls of the hulking brutes as they made their way down fire escapes and staircases, and the clatter as some simply tumbled end over end down several stories to smack into the road and sidewalks below. Soon the street would be full of them and there would be no getting Rebekah out of here.

  Another dropship hovered over the street, its engines kicking dust and debris into the air. It opened fire on several targets at once, two Comfortbots being scattered into a thousand pieces, the other guns trained on Herbert’s and my positions. Pieces of the building flew in at me, rounds coming dangerously close as I skittered across the floor, putting as much rubble and wall between the dropship and myself as possible.

  A rocket screamed through the air.

  And the dropship blew apart.

  The street trembled with the massive explosion, half the wall in front of me caving in, the building above me buckling, its beams groaning with the shifting weight of all that brick.

  Shit.

  If I ran, whatever brutes hadn’t been caught in that explosion would vaporize me in a spray of spitter fire. If I stayed, I’d most likely be crushed under several hundred tons of building materials.

  The earth rumbled, the walls shaking, the street itself vibrating. What the fuck was that? Had the explosion shaken something loose? Maybe blown an old gas main? And for the first moment since the explosion, my thoughts weren’t on how I was going to avoid being killed next.

  It was then that I recognized the rumble in the streets.

  Smokers. Plural.

  Holy shit.

  Chain guns roared, the hollow thud of armor-piercing rounds filling the street over the sound of growling engines.

  I poked my head up as two smokers crawled past over a tangle of dismembered limbs and smoking torsos. Atop one smoker was the Cheshire King, hands gripped firmly on a chain gun, white-painted grin seemingly smiling bigger than before. And on the other smoker, leading from the front, was Murka, battered and muddy, but as red, white, and blue as ever. There were only ten madkind in total on the smokers, and a motley assembly of them at that, even by madkind standards.

  One madkind loaded a large shoulder-mounted rocket launcher before pointing it up toward the sky, waiting for a target.

  Murka looked over at me, the guns on his arms blazing, shucking out shells at an alarming rate. “Brittle!” he called out. “We made it!”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I called back.

  “You took our smoker! We came to get it!”

  “You’re welcome to it!”

  “Like you were gonna stop us!” he shouted back.

  The Cheshire King laid off the trigger on the chain gun, let go, and hopped off onto the pavement. Each step he took rattled with the sound of spent cartridges and scattered remains. The street was a smoking mess of carnage and wrecks, but the king waded through it like he owned the place.

  “What did I tell you?” he asked me.

  “You said a lot,” I answered, standing up.

  “You’re one of us now. And CISSUS doesn’t take us. What do you need?”

  “I need a few minutes of cover.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  For a moment the city was relatively silent, only the sound of crackling fires, softly grumbling idle smokers, and the distant whine of hover engines singing the song of war. There was no gunfire. No explosions. Though the fight was only several minutes old, it seemed like it had always been this way, and strange that it had all died down. Almost wrong. Something about the dread of the approaching facets seemed worse than the fight itself.

  Several sexbots emerged from their hiding places and Herbert came out of his hole, spitter in hand.

  I walked out into the street and saw what had become of it. We had all but flattened a city block, and what was still standing wobbled and swayed, threatening to come down at any minute. Dropship wreckage mixed with bricks and chunks of pavement. Brutes were laid out like a layer of broken eggs in zigzag lines from one shattered wall to another. In the sky, the remaining dropships circled, no doubt just out of range of the Milton so they could reconnect and plan their next move.

  “Mercer?” I called out.

  There was no answer.

  “We don’t have the time,” said Herbert. “He either made it or he didn’t. No use worrying about him now.”

  I nodded. “You ready to make a break for it?”

  Herbert nodded back. “I am.”

  “I’ve got your back.”

  “You better.”

  “It was nice knowing you, Herbert. You’re one of the good ones.” I stuck out my hand. Herbert let the spitter slip out of his grip, resting on its vinyl plastic shower-curtain sling, as he offered me his one good hand.

  “You weren’t so bad, yourself,” he said. “In the end.” We shook hands.

  “That’s all that matters, right?”

  “It really is.”

  We let go, he grabbed firm his spitter, then made his way wordlessly to the sex shop.

  The translator clanged her way up the stairs, Herbert nodded, and they took off running down the street.

  Above us, the dropships all swung toward the city at once.

  Two madkind loosed rockets into the air with a loud hiss. And war once more returned to Marion.

  The dropships scattered chaff in their wake, climbing to avoid the rockets. One rocket swooshed past the undercarriage of one ship, flying fleetly past it into the sky; the other ignored the flack altogether and blew the ship to pieces, facets leaping from the sides to their death, too high up to survive the fall, the rest joining them as flaming dross scattering to the winds.

  I took off down the street after Herbert and the engines of the smokers growled angrily, their gears clanking and screeching as they shifted into reverse. Madkind gripped tight their weapons, readying themselves for the remaining facets.

  Herbert turned a corner, running as fast as his bulky body could move.

  I heard the engines of the ship before I turned the corner, heard it open fire just as I did.

  “Rebekah, get down!” Herbert shouted as he pushed his companion into an alley with a powerful shove. Then he grabbed his spitter, slinging it upward as the concentrated fire of four guns tore up the pavement around him. Bullets ripped through his armor plating, powerful shells poking holes clean through as the street crumbled to dust around his feet. He fired one last shot before dropping to his knees.

  The plasma grazed the dropship, cleaving off an engine. The others compensated quickly, the ship wobbling in the air as it maintained its balance.

  I ran toward Rebekah, loosing a few shots from my pistols as facets rained out the side of the ship.

  A smoker turned the corner behind me, Murka on point. He howled something unintelligible as he fired into the dropping facets, blowi
ng three apart as each hit the ground.

  I made it to the alley as a hail of fire tore up the wall at my back, ducking behind the corner, pistols raised and ready. I spun back around, firing at two approaching facets, my shots sizzling against their matte-black metal plating.

  One staggered, my shots hitting true enough to fry some systems.

  The other kept coming.

  I pulled the trigger twice more before he got to me, the shots taking off his head.

  But he kept coming, grappling with me, his incredibly strong hands gripping both my arms above the elbow.

  I fell backward, hitting hard, head banging against the ground, the facet falling atop me, kneeing me as we went down.

  I put both my pistols in his belly. Pulled the trigger as many times as I could. His insides sizzled, body going limp. Dead.

  I pushed his wreck off me, letting it roll lifelessly onto the pavement, then hopped to my feet. “Come on, Rebekah!” I shouted. The translator cowered on the ground, staring up at me, a terror in her eyes she couldn’t express. “Come on!”

  The smokers pushed forward, clearing out the remaining facets as the dropship slipped away into the sky, bullets tearing pieces away in jagged chunks. Smoke trailed from two of its remaining engines, the third struggling to keep the whole thing aloft. It sputtered, hung lazily in the air for a moment, stalled, and dropped straight down with a tremendous crash a few blocks over.

  There were only two ships left. No more than forty facets remained. How the hell did we get this far? I wondered.

  “You aren’t going to get much further,” said Madison. “This was bound to fail.”

  I tried to ignore her and stick to the plan, shit or not.

  Engines swept overhead, both ships strafing the street, unloading their guns, each tilting, passing within inches of each other before flying off to turn around and do it again.

  I looked up at the smokers, the wrecks of half the madkind hanging dead over the railing, the other half scrambling to man the guns to keep the ships from repeating their run. Murka was on his knees, riddled with holes but still functioning. Barely. The Cheshire King, on the other hand, smoked facedown, a large smoldering hole in his back, his severed legs twitching at the other end of the smoker.

  I quickly changed out the cartridges in my pistols, held them close, steadied myself for the next run.

  The dropships turned around, screaming back toward the smokers.

  “Give ’em hell, boys!” screamed Murka.

  And the chain guns let loose hell.

  Facets poured out of the sides of the dropships as they made their final pass at the smokers.

  The ships came apart. The smokers came apart. It was a fog of fire and shrapnel.

  It was . . .

  . . . the skies darkened. Black. A pitch-black sky. Fires burning in the distance. The humans had us pinned down. Our drones shrieked through the skies, but it was hard to keep them from advancing. There were just too many of them.

  This was supposed to be a recon mission, but our intel was bad. Now the four of us were holed up in a building with a hundred howling humans charging our position. Fire pounded our shelter. We were goners.

  I’d had enough. If I was going to die, I wasn’t going to sit helplessly waiting for the end.

  I stood up. Pointed my flamethrower into the black outside. And I lit up the night. “Let’s give them hell,” I said.

  Humans we hadn’t even seen yet went up like torches. Screaming. So much screaming.

  I waded out into the open, a gout of flame rippling, licking the air. The ground beneath me flickered. Fractals. The wailing, dying flaming bodies. Fractals. The skies, roiling, tumultuous smoke. All fractals.

  Screaming. So much . . .

 

  I snapped awake from my dream. Found myself standing in the street, surrounded by the wrecks of a dozen facets, the empty cartridges of my pistols beeping, alarms in my head telling me I was moments away from total failure. Instructing me to shut down and await assistance from my manufacturer.

  I was operating almost solely on my RAM now, very few of my long-term memories still intact in the handful of drives left.

  How long had I been out? How the hell had I killed so many?

  I looked around.

  The dropships were nothing but fire and nigh unrecognizable bits. The smokers were torn to pieces, the wrecks of the madkind scattered along with them.

  Murka sat atop the remains of one of them, guns still spinning but nothing coming out.

  “You still ticking, Murka?”

  He looked down at his guns, confused. They spun down as he realized what was going on.

  “You can’t kill a legend,” he said. “But what the hell are you still doing upright? Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”

  “I should be.”

  Murka tried to push himself to his feet with his gun arms, but couldn’t manage it. “I think I’ll just sit here for a minute.”

  I scanned the Wi-Fi.

  The Miltons were down, Wi-Fi running hot with CISSUS chatter. Doc!

  “Rebekah!” I called out.

  The shaken translator emerged from the alley, still out of it and not altogether there.

  “This way,” I said, pointing toward the edge of the city.

  I didn’t know how many facets were left, how many I’d actually killed in my daze, how many had slunk into the city attempting to triangulate the Miltons, hunting down anyone else that might be left.

  I listened close, sensors cranked, our footsteps pounding like a headache. Fires crackled in the distance, wind whistled through doorways and shattered windows, but little else stirred.

  I heard a few padded steps in a building over to my left.

  I turned and fired without hesitation.

  The chest of a facet burst and he clattered face first onto the ground.

  We kept walking. And I kept listening.

  A soft step on broken glass to my right.

  Again I fired several shots.

  A facet dropped.

  They knew where I was. They knew who I was with. However many of them were left, they were all going to be coming my way any moment now.

  I heard their clanging feet hundreds of meters away. They were closing in. There were four, maybe five of them.

  We might pull this off after all.

  I raised my pistols.

  The first one emerged firing full burst.

  My shots caught it right in the face and chest as its fire strafed nearby. It stumbled, fell to its knees before tumbling onto its side.

  I stepped ten feet to my right, making sure they’d start firing at the wrong place.

  Another came from around a corner.

  My shots struck its chest, picking it up off its unsteady feet, and knocking it wrecked on its ass.

  The footsteps all stopped. Waiting. Planning their next move.

  We walked, slipping slowly into the hole in the side of a building. And we waited.

  For a moment there was nothing.

  It was hard to concentrate with all the alarms in my head, but I focused, tried to ignore the warnings.

  I heard soft footsteps crunch through a debris field made almost entirely of obliterated dropships.

  I swung out of the hole, took aim, and fired several shots with a single pistol.

  The facet dropped facedown, ass up, arms splayed to its sides. It smoldered and sizzled on the ground, its last motor functions twitching, trying to right itself.

  The battery on the pistol beeped. It was out. I pressed the button on the side, let the battery slip loose, and reached for another on my belt. But there were none left.

  One pistol left, almost out of ammo.

  We waited.

  Nothing.

  “Come on,” I said.

  We made our way briskly back into the street. I couldn’t hear anything. If there were any of them left, they were waiting to ambush us.
They wouldn’t stick their necks out. Not now.

  “Brittle,” two voices called in unison. “You can’t kill us both, Brittle.”

  “I sure as shit can try,” I said.

  “You know what we want.”

  “Yup. I sure do.”

  “Let’s make this easy.”

  “Come on out and you’ll see just how easy it is.”

  “That’s not the way you want it to happen,” they said.

  “I think it is.”

  I listened close, trying to discern where the voices were coming from. Both of them talking at the same time made it hard. The angles of the buildings, the hollowness of their voices. I had no idea where they were.

  I had to wait this one out.

  My grip tightened on the pistol.

  The wind picked up, howling lightly through the street, kicking up dust.

  I heard the tinkle of footsteps on broken glass.

  I steadied my aim, waiting for a target.

  Two facets emerged at once from opposite sides of the street. I fired at the first facet I saw.

  Their guns erupted.

  A rifle cracked from overhead, just behind me.

  Both facets dropped—one scorching, its insides popping from my plasma, the other’s chest exploding from an armor-piercing round.

  I looked up over my shoulder.

  “Mercer?” I called.

  A lone figure stood up in a blown-out window.

  Doc. Holding Mercer’s rifle.

  He disappeared back into the shadows and I could hear his lumbering steps as he clamored through the war-blasted building, down two flights of stairs, and out into the street.

  “Mercer?” I asked.

  “He didn’t make it. He gave it his damnedest, though.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to kill.”

  “I didn’t really want to die either. I figured I might as well give it a shot while I still had the chance.”

  “How did you know which one to shoot?”

  Doc shrugged. “I didn’t.”

  “You mean you—”

  I heard a footstep. A bit of crunching glass.

  I turned, guns raised.

  But the facet was already firing.

  Doc was riddled in the hail of gunfire, his heavy metal shell ringing with each shot.