by Mike Kraus
As David started powering on his computer equipment and Rachel kept a close eye on their speed, Marcus kept watch out the front of the locomotive. The track they were on looked new, and as they continued forward, signs of construction became more and more common. The trees, fields and hills gave way to flat, burned land, with only the stumps of trees and ashes of vegetation remaining. The sunlight began to fade from the sky, and the group initially thought that a storm was rolling in, though the truth was somewhat more disturbing. As the single railroad track began to branch into two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then a seemingly endless number, the shadow from the tower ahead of them stretched across the fields, blotting out the sun.
Rachel felt her stomach grow sick as she thought back to her first sight of the nanobot swarm just after waking in the basement where her home once stood. The circle was nearly complete as the end approached, reaching up to the sky like a spear that threatened to pierce the very heavens themselves. Though the nexus and the AI that was very nearly finished constructing it was formidable, Rachel’s hopes of success hadn’t wavered thanks to the unassuming object that sat quietly in the boxcar, awaiting its activation. This comforting thought vanished when David’s panicked whisper echoed through the locomotive, nearly causing time itself to stop as Marcus and Rachel looked at each other, an expression of horror on their faces.
“Bertha’s not responding!”
Leonard McComb | Nancy Sims
3:39 PM, April 27, 2038
Standing on the deck of the Arkhangelsk, Commander Krylov looked up to the tall fin, shielding his eyes from the sun with a thickly gloved hand. The sudden sound of metal scraping on metal caught his attention and he turned back just in time to jump out of the way of a ten-foot section of a bridge support slipping off the side of the Arkhangelsk and plunging into the water. The two men who had been pushing on the support looked at him awkwardly as he shook his head and began to help push the next piece off.
The work to clear the Arkhangelsk’s deck was slow, primarily due to the low number of crew available to work. Having to split them between clearing the hatch and deck and pump water out of the flooded compartments didn’t help matters, but both tasks were necessary if they wanted to continue forward. In addition to jamming open the starboard stairwell hatch, the pieces of the bridge that became lodged on the deck of the submarine were also jamming two of the missile hatches. The water, thankfully, didn’t seem to have affected any important systems, but it would be a few more hours before enough of it was drained for the crew to start investigating the damage caused by it. In the meantime, the crew below deck worked pumps to clear one compartment at a time while the crew on deck continued to cut and push sections of the bridge into the water.
Though Leonard had wanted to help in some capacity, Nancy refused to let him, going so far as to take his crutches away so that he had to remain in bed and rest. Spotted bleeding combined with an overall paleness and exhausted look made Nancy nervous, and she had insisted that he spend the day resting, especially considering the situation they would be going into once the ship was repaired. After receiving a grumbled promise to remain in bed from Leonard, Nancy headed to the command deck where Andrey, the younger of the two cousins who had activated the canal locks, was sitting, keeping an eye on the ship’s systems. Sitting down at a station next to him, Nancy smiled and took a deep breath, looking at the controls spread out in front of her, all marked with symbols that were foreign to her.
“So… is there anything I can help with here?”
“Your country created these things, yes?” Andrey’s question was not one of accusation, but curiosity. Ignoring her question, he didn’t look at her as he spoke, keeping his eyes trained on the screens in front of him instead.
Nancy was somewhat taken aback at his question, and couldn’t think of an appropriate response for a moment. Andrey looked over at her, watching her struggle to come up with an answer before finally settling on the simplest one she knew. “Yes. As far as I know. I mean, who knows if we had help from others, but from everything I know, yes. We created them.”
“I see.” Andrey pushed a few buttons, changing the display on his monitors and jotted a few notes down on a pad of paper. When he was done, he looked at Nancy again. “Why?”
Nancy snorted and laughed, amused by Andrey’s pointed questions. “Who do I look like, the President?” Andrey looked her up and down and shook his head, making Nancy laugh again. She sighed deeply and pondered his question, trying to come up with an adequate answer.
“I don’t know. Power, probably. Control. The usual set of reasons.”
“But it killed your country. It killed everyone. What kind of power is that?”
Nancy thought about Mr. Doe, remembering the things Rachel had shared about the enigmatic man. “It didn’t kill everyone. Besides, I don’t think these things were ever meant to do this. The people who made them lost control of them, and they had no way of stopping them.”
Andrey nodded slowly and pushed another set of buttons. Graphs and numbers flashed across the screen and he wrote down a few more notes before looking at Nancy again.
“If the people who made this could not stop it, how can we?”
To that question, Nancy didn’t have an answer at first, until she remembered her conversations with Leonard about how much she had changed in such a short amount of time.
“If I can survive a nuclear holocaust, find my way across the country, meet up with a group of strangers and somehow manage to make my way back across the country, all while avoiding being killed by a radical cultist, then somehow find a Russian submarine off the coast of Alaska, I’m pretty sure this submarine can handle those things.” Nancy smiled as Andrey tried to process what she had just said. “Besides, we’re not the only ones out for blood. I doubt we’ll even be needed, what with Rachel and Marcus there.”
A crackle came from speakers on the command deck, and Krylov’s voice followed. “Attention all crew and guests. The surface of the ship has been cleared. Mr. Lipov, please get us underway at one-half power, maintain depth. We’ll continue to clear flooded compartments as we go. Once they’re empty, we’ll be able to submerge and return to full power again.”
Andrey jumped out of his seat and hurried to a different station while Nancy swiveled in her seat, watching him go. A few control manipulations later and Nancy felt the surge of power in the submarine as the engines engaged, propelling the mighty vessel forward in the water. As Andrey monitored their speed, he noticed Nancy watching him and pointed to the seat he had been occupying. “You want to help?” Nancy nodded eagerly and slid over into the next chair as Andrey continued. “Good. Observe the screen. When levels go over one hundred, write down time with pencil. Understand?”
Nancy looked down at the clipboard in front of her, then at the screen. Cyrillic characters raced by along with numbers at the top, with an ever-changing graph below them that had markings on it ranging from zero to one hundred and twenty-five. While she didn’t understand what she was looking at, Nancy picked up the pencil and stared at the graph, jotting down the time displayed on the wall clock each time the graph surged past the one hundred mark. Andrey nodded approvingly, his shoulders relaxing as he continued to focus on their speed, monitoring it closely along with half of the other systems on the ship.
Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | David Landry
3:56 PM, April 27, 2038
“David, if this is a joke, I will not hesitate to kick your ass up one side and down the other.”
David’s pale expression was not a reassuring response to Rachel’s forced attempt at humor. “Shit!” she mumbled, leaving the controls and hurrying to his side. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I can get a connection established, but that’s it. The systems won’t respond at all. I can’t activate it or power it on. Nothing works!” David jumped to his feet, slamming his laptop shut and throwing it in his bag as he ran for the back of the locomotive. “I’m going to check direc
tly; yell if you see something bad coming!”
Rachel reached for David, trying to stop him, but he slipped past her and threw open the door at the back of the lead locomotive. A short hop and a quick climb around to a side door was all that was required to enter the next locomotive, and he did so easily, going down the train quickly and without any signs of danger. A slight squeal from the wheels and a jerking motion evidenced Rachel’s liberal application of the brakes, though she was cautious to not put them on too hard lest they attract attention. Attention from what, though, none of them was certain, as all of the tracks and land surrounding the nexus tower were devoid of activity.
As David opened the back door of the last locomotive and started to step forward, he clung to the door and jerked his foot back in, his face pale as he realized that there wasn’t just a step and a door access into the boxcar ahead of him. Instead, a ladder was mounted on the front of the boxcar, and below it was the coupling device, rails and bare ground. David cinched the bag up on his back and kept one arm inside the locomotive, holding on while he reached out with the other to grab on to the ladder. His fingers brushed a rung and he relaxed his other arm, falling forward and grabbing the ladder at the same time. Butterflies soared in his stomach for the instant that he was falling forward, but the ladder held firm and he started to climb, reaching the top in just a few seconds.
David guessed the train was traveling at roughly twenty miles an hour, but any speed other than a full stop was nauseating from his position on the top of the train. With no other way to enter the boxcar than through a vent in the top, David pulled himself up from the ladder, rejecting the idea of standing or crouching on the top in favor of crawling on his stomach. Keeping his arms and legs spread in an attempt to keep from sliding off, David shuffled his way forward, finally reaching the vent. Sitting an inch above the top surface of the boxcar, the vent was easy to pry off, though as soon as the front portion was lifting, it caught the wind and blew away, bouncing loudly on the next few boxcars before landing with a loud clatter on the rails behind the train. David winced with each sound, hoping that there was nothing nearby to hear it. The hole in the roof of the boxcar was barely large enough for someone to squeeze through, so David unfastened his bag and dropped it through before turning around and sticking his feet in. He pushed himself backwards through the vent, grunting as his waist, chest and then finally shoulders slid through.
Instead of dropping directly to the floor of the train like he had anticipated, David’s feet hit the cold metallic surface of Bertha, just next to where his bag was sitting. He hopped off and pulled his laptop back out of his bag and turned it on, hoping that the close proximity to the device would solve the problems he had been facing in the locomotive. As he tapped key after key, scrolling through screens and changing every setting he could think of, his heartbeat became harder and more rapid. Nothing was working or changing, despite his best efforts; Bertha was still unresponsive.
Rubbing his hand across his mouth as he took a step back from the computer, David looked up at the open vent, wondering if he could get back out the way he had come in. With nothing else left to do, David climbed up on top of Bertha and jumped for the vent, bracing his hands along the edges and pulling himself upward and back onto the roof of the boxcar. Moments later, he burst in through the back door of the lead locomotive, sweat pouring down his face and neck as he gasped for breath. Rachel hurried to his side as he sat on the floor, shaking his head and muttering to himself incoherently. Rachel shook his shoulders and hissed at him, struggling not to yell. “What happened? Did you fix it?”
David looked up at Rachel, his eyes filled with a mixture of defeat and exhaustion. “I can’t get the damned thing to activate. The explosion when Doe destroyed the APC must have damaged her somehow, internally.”
Rachel sat down next to David, staring at the floor. “Shit. That’s it, then.”
“You two really going to give up that easy?” Marcus stood over Rachel and David, looking down at them like a father lecturing a pair of misbehaving children. “If so, we should probably radio the sub and let them know we don’t need them anymore.”
“How are we going to contact the submarine, Marcus?” Rachel looked up at him. “There’s no way to tell where they are, and if we just start transmitting blindly, we’ll attract the attention of whatever’s holed up in that tower.”
Marcus squatted down and looked Rachel square in the eye. “You’re probably right. And when that happens, we’ll deal with them just like we’ve dealt with them every other time. We’ll kick their asses.”
Marcus stood up and held out his hands, one for Rachel and one for David, waiting to see what they would do. Rachel looked at David and shook her head at him. “You sure Bertha’s down?”
David nodded slowly. “More sure than I’ve ever been of anything.”
“So much for the easy way out, eh?” Rachel sighed and took Marcus’s proffered hand, then David did the same. They stood to their feet and looked around the locomotive’s interior, mulling over what they were about to do. Marcus chuckled at Rachel’s remark and hefted his backpack onto his shoulders and secured it before patting his leg and calling Sam out from his hiding place.
“Last time I checked, the only easy way out of this entire excursion is the dying part, so I think I’ll stick to the hard way for just a bit longer.”
Leonard McComb | Nancy Sims
4:08 PM, April 27, 2038
“Open the hatch.”
Krylov unconsciously tightened his grip on his rifle as he spoke the order. Standing in a dark hallway with two others next to him, Krylov kept the rifle pointed at the floor, waiting for his subordinate to unlock the thick steel door in front of them. As the lock disengaged with a bang, Krylov raised his rifle and shouldered past the man, planting a boot at the base of the door and pushing it open. The room beyond was pitch black save for a few red waterproof lights that had survived the torrent of seawater. Flashing on and off in a slow, rhythmic pattern, the lights cast uneven shadows from the piles of equipment strewn across the room from the force of the water that had come rushing in. Krylov thumbed a switch on his rifle’s flashlight, illuminating the room as he checked each corner and behind each piece of equipment, watching the water flow out through the open door.
Though the Arkhangelsk had been under way for some time, the process of draining and clearing each of the flooded compartments was progressing slower than Krylov would have preferred. As they moved deeper into the compartments, opening each door one by one and moving in the heavy hoses that pulled the water up and out, a nervous feeling in the back of Krylov’s head grew more bothersome. The two men with him grunted as they struggled to move a heavy hose into position, finally letting it splash down in the center of the room, where the floor gently sloped inward. One of them spoke a few words into a radio and the hose shuddered as the pump connected to it was activated. Krylov relaxed as the water drained away, glad that they were finally reaching compartments that had only been partially flooded instead of ones that were full to the ceiling with water.
“Next.” Krylov backed out of the room and advanced down the hall to the next compartment in line, looking through the glass window in a vain attempt to see what was on the other side. With a sigh, he gestured for his crewmen to take up the same positions as before, and once again he tightened his grip on his rifle as the door was unlocked. As Krylov lifted his foot to kick the door open, though, the thick steel moved on its own, jerking inward faster than any of the three men would have expected. Water poured out over their feet, distracting them just long enough to not notice a shadow move across the entrance and leap out, pushing past them as it fell on the wet floors in its attempt to escape. The creature’s blurred motion startled Krylov, who spun, pulling his rifle up to aim at the beast as it thrashed, trying to gain its footing.
For a brief moment before he pulled the trigger, Krylov paused to look over the creature, marveling at it in both disgust and fear. Its body was riddle
d with metal and its clothes were torn nearly completely off, revealing the gaunt form of a young woman in her late twenties. Half of her hair had fallen out and her eyes were nothing more than shallow silver holes. The creature hissed and screamed at the three men standing nearby, frustrated by its inability to retreat or fight against the threat it perceived in the cold wood and metal that was pointed at its face. As inhuman and savage as the creature was, Krylov could still see the humanity that had once stood in its place.
Commander Krylov’s moment of pity came to an abrupt end as the creature finally found its balance, pushing itself off of the wall and floor to run towards them. Fire roared from his rifle, deafening him and his crew in the narrow passageway as the bullets tore into the creature, shredding its head and chest and causing it to collapse limply to the floor, face down in the ankle-deep water. The entire encounter with the creature from start to finish hadn’t taken more than a few seconds, and Krylov immediately turned back toward the open doorway, probing the dark interior with his flashlight in case there were more creatures inside. The presence of one of them inside a flooded chamber was alarming, especially since they had several more to clear. Once he was satisfied, he turned to his men and ordered them to continue the pumping process while he stepped back into the hall and spoke into his radio.
