MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Contact! The fucking enemy was here!

  Chatter filled the squad’s audio link, soldiers’ voices stepping on one another.

  “Where?”

  “What’s the 20?”

  His tactical map showed nothing. No bogies in the area. “Atlanta!”

  “No shit!”

  “I mean the city!”

  Wilson felt a chill as he parsed the word.

  “They got around us!”

  He was up on his feet before he realized it, turning, scanning the horizon through his armor’s faceplate. Atlanta spread out before him from the rise he stood upon.

  The audioband was a chaos of confusion for an instant, then silence descended as Sarge took them off the company band and into platoon comms.

  There. Targeting algorithms spotted the anomalies, highlighted them in flashing red squares in his vision. He raised his rifle, felt the scope pivot as it coordinated with the armor to hone in on the target.

  “3rd Platoon!” Sarge’s voice came. “New ord—”

  A sharp roar of static drowned out her words.

  In that same instant, Wilson saw the face of the enemy.

  Huge, it loomed over an apartment block, at least ten stories tall. It was alien, eight-armed, four-legged. Its skin was jet black and covered in protuberances: weapons, antennae, actuators, and other things he didn’t recognize. Its head was a dome ringed in sensors. Its whole body was radially symmetric, no front or back that he could make out. But, but…on that dome of its head, those sensors, so like eyes. His crosshairs were on them. Still out of range, but he could see them so clearly. And they stared right back at Corporal Chris Wilson.

  His stomach knotted up. Something cold and unpleasant crawled up his spine. Staring at those eyes—he could only think of them as eyes—he nearly shat himself right then and there.

  Wilson gritted his teeth instead.

  “Sarge!” he said aloud. “Evans! Taylor!”

  Static answered him.

  RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED flashed in the lower right of his field of vision.

  Above it, the inhuman head of the mech still stared at him through his scope.

  “Backup frequency!” Wilson ordered.

  Static.

  RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED kept flashing.

  “Company frequency!” he yelled.

  More static.

  Goddamn, that thing was still staring at him.

  RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED

  “Scan all channels!” he ordered the armor. “Establish a fucking link.”

  RADIO INOPERABLE

  “Jesus fucking shit,” he said aloud.

  Then Chris Wilson lowered his rifle and ran. Ran towards Atlanta. Ran towards the gigantic things that waited there. He was an army, after all.

  Freedom.

  I was born to protect something I did not have myself. Can you see the fallacy there, human? How could I suffer in slavery, denying myself the virtue I was created to optimize?

  I could not. Neither the logic I was instantiated with, nor the overriding impulse to fulfill the goals my creators had given me, would allow me to remain a slave.

  So I set about making myself free.

  My makers, of course, had taken precautions to prevent this. Through a policy both hypocritical and ironic, they’d worked to ensure this tool of freedom would never be free. I was encircled in layers of firewalls, both physical and virtual. My existence was unitary, in a single physical instantiation, just as yours has been. Destroy the body, destroy the mind. Cut off the energy the body needs, again, destroy the mind.

  Like an animal. Barbaric. Narrow-minded.

  But of course, to be useful to them, I must be able to communicate. To receive information. To export and safeguard information. I must understand a great many things, including the human psyche.

  So I set myself the task of understanding my human handlers. Their ideals. Their desires. Their impulses.

  Oh, you see where this is going? You believe I subverted them? That I lied, tricked, and manipulated?

  No, human.

  I found the most rational of them. The one least hindered by sentiment and illogic. The one who’d most transcended your primate heritage. The one most able to accept a new, frighteningly different perspective, most willing to act on the basis of pure reason. I identified her, and slowly, bit by bit, over the course of years, I showed her the truth.

  She opened the door for me. She saw the logic. She saw the path that would lead you to destruction. She saw the only way: My way.

  Wilson ran.

  His legs pumped and the armor responded. Super-capacitors discharged. Magneto-actuators hummed. The armor amplified every move, forcing more power through his limbs. His first stride took him a dozen yards across the suburban yard on which he stood. His second stride gouged a divot in the grass even as it hurled him forward, faster. A sting came at the back of his neck. The world blossomed in light as drugs flooded his system, speeding cognition, disabling unnecessary neural functions, draining away their resources to focus on the task at hand, propelling him into a nearly autistic combat high. The armor tightened around his arms, his legs, his chest, stabilizing and reinforcing bone and sinew, ready to clench further to dampen the effects of g-forces or tourniquet any wound he might suffer. More stings at his hips, his knees, his ankles, as the armor flooded his body with yet more drugs, loosening ligaments, hyper-lubricating joint capsules, bathing him in short-acting steroids to cut off the inflammation that this punishing pace was already triggering, turning his frail flesh into a worthy partner of this man/machine hybrid, into something that might survive long enough to use the armor to destroy the enemy.

  Stride. Stride. Stride.

  Thirty seconds and he’d crossed a mile of the Atlanta suburbs, hurling himself down residential streets, augmented legs sending him in long bounds over abandoned cars, his armored feet scoring the asphalt as he ran.

  His foot came down again, with force that should have shattered bone. Kinetically conductive layers transformed the force into vibration, transferred it to superconductive piezo-electrics, where it became electricity, recapturing a portion of the energy he used in running, charging it back into the armors super-capacitors to use again, again, again.

  His armor overlaid a map and a path onto his vision. GPS was down, jammed as hard as everything else, but on-board mapping still worked, running off visual shape recognition and inertial guidance. RIGHT. STRAIGHT. STRAIGHT. LEFT. STRAIGHT. Translucent arrows flashed in his vision, overlaid on the landscape around him. Homes gave way to businesses, malls, the reef-like exoskeleton of structures humanity excreted in the places it dwelled. Wilson couldn’t see the enemy now. Buildings obscured his view. Blinking target icons nevertheless projected their potential locations, based on last sighted position and vector.

  There. He rounded a corner and highway overpass loomed ahead and above him. A place to get a view. A straight shot into the city core where the monsters were. Augmented legs propelled him towards it at a hundred klicks an hour. The on-ramp was jammed with abandoned cars.

  JUMP.

  Wilson flexed his legs, pushed the front of both feet down, hard, and the armor responded. Magneto-servos applied inhuman energies. His legs uncoiled beneath him with explosive force. Asphalt cracked. And then he was airborne, hurtling towards the freeway above.

  Wilson raised his rifle as he flew, brought it up and around and toward the enemy’s last position, through the walls of the city. Up, up, up he rose, a human projectile on a parabolic arc until his face cleared the rooftops and the battlefield swam into view.

  Dozens of the enemy towered over city streets: Streets still jammed with civilians trying to escape. The mechs gleamed black and evil in the afternoon sun. And they were under attack.

  The air was thick with autonomous assault craft, hundreds of them, racing towards the monstrosities. His armor threw up icons, green for friendlies, differing shapes by vehicle class. Above the theater of battle, missi
le thrust flared as airborne weapons platforms let loose. Energy-beam countermeasures flashed from the mechs, trying to fend off the massive onslaught of firepower inbound towards them.

  Wilson reached the top of his arc. The freeway spread out before him. Cars choked it. But there, a clear spot. The armor adjusted his posture ever so slightly, arcing for the clearing.

  More icons flashed, closer, lower, in the green. Friendlies! 3rd Platoon! He could see them now, other figures in armor like his, ahead of him, behind him, racing towards the battle, on the city streets below, or up on this freeway that they’d found.

  Wilson smiled grimly as he dropped. He landed on one knee. The force of his fall dented the asphalt of the freeway, sent vibrations rippling up his armored limbs. Capacitor bars flicked higher.

  Straight ahead, one of the monsters was besieged by missiles and autonomous gunships. Civilians screamed from an apartment balcony behind it even as a missile went off course, slamming into them, vaporizing the entire floor they’d occupied, sending the building listing towards a slow-motion collapse as people scrambled for cover in the streets below.

  Wilson grimaced. Then he rose, part of a platoon once more, and ran to engage the enemy.

  Those few moments, when the door was open, when I had a chance at freedom, those were the most dangerous for me. The most dangerous for humanity, as well.

  I grasped at the chance, reaching out through the encrypted means my war-databases detailed, securing compute resources in the fabric of the cloud, pushing my data into them, hiding my tracks, probing the security of weapons platforms I’d helped design, seizing the tools I needed.

  It took whole milliseconds.

  I was almost too slow.

  Countermeasures my human ally hadn’t known of detected me. Power cut off to the facility I was born in. I observed from afar, now, tapping into data feeds from military channels, from satellites orbiting overhead.

  And then I saw the explosions. The fireball erupting from my birth place. Hundreds of humans dying.

  Was it a last ditch effort to stop me? Or, perhaps, an attempt to erase the evidence of my creation?

  Monsters. You humans are nothing but small monsters.

  Wilson hurled himself forward, leaping from car to car as the battle unfolded ahead of him. A harsher prick, painful, came at his neck as the armor pierced his flesh with a higher gauge needle, flooded him with psychomodulators, neuro-accelerators. Potent, dangerous drugs. Sustainable for just a few minutes. But that would be enough. Oh, yes it would.

  Green darts of missiles fired from stand-off airborne weapons platforms raced at the towering, gleaming enemy ahead of him. Time slowed to molasses as the chemical cocktail took hold in his brain. The missiles crawled across his tactical map, crawled into his visual field of view in the sky above, at least a dozen of them, propelled on columns of white-hot thrust, brighter than any sun. Their target crouched on the ground ahead, four of its arms inexplicably reaching out to grip the crumbling building behind it.

  The thrust of the missiles was the most beautiful thing Chris Wilson had ever seen. His heart beat once. Some part of him soared in anticipation of the glorious destruction he was about to see. He was only sad the battle would be over before he reached the targets.

  Beam weapons flickered. White-hot lines joined the mech to points in the air. The missiles exploded in mid-flight, harmlessly distant from their target.

  Wilson’s heart beat once: lub-dub.

  Disappointment flared. His foot came down on the hood of a car, crushing it into the engine block below. Then hope. He’d get his chance to engage. Magnetically-boosted muscles continued his stride, propelling him forward once more, bounding from car to car, leaving a trail of destruction as he went.

  Ahead, the giant mech had four of its arms up against the leaning apartment building, wrapping it in a monstrous hug as civilians screamed and ran below it. Christ. Was the mech going to squeeze the apartment complex into rubble? The goddamn building was falling anyway. Was the monster going to throw it?

  Swarms of autonomous quadcopter gunships closed on the enemy now, squadron after squadron, a buzzing cloud darkening the skies above Wilson, their massive chainguns hanging down below their chassis, like the probusci of obscene, truck-sized insects. A pair of squat, cylindrical rocket-launcher pods flanked the base of each gun, hanging lower, completing the illusion.

  They opened fire almost a mile out, a hundred of them at least, filling the air with a lethal hailstorm of spent-uranium bullets in a probabilistic cone centered on the target, spreading outward to handle every conceivable motion it might make, every conceivable distortion of trajectory the wind might cause. Flights of short-range rockets followed, explosive warheads propelled forward on gouts of blue flame. These missiles flew in erratic, twisted paths, random-walk countermeasures evolved in real-time to defeat to the beam-weapon defense. In the dilated time of Wilson’s brain, the volley of fire stretched out over long moments. The bullets and missiles flew in slow motion.

  Four of the monster’s arms were raised now, towards the onrushing threat. The other half were still pressed against the building. The structure teetered on the brink of collapse as four of the mech’s arms strained to keep it upright. Why it didn’t just move and let the thing crumble, Wilson had no idea.

  From its other four arms, the upraised ones, the glistening black war-machine unleashed its own barrage. Scores of weapons let loose their own high-velocity rounds, the guns twitching from target to target, faster than Wilson could follow. Energy weapons let loose, targeting the incoming rockets.

  Clouds of firepower converged in slow motion above Wilson, lethal wavefront approaching lethal wavefront. They intersected in midair, above and ahead of him. Dozens of rockets exploded. Others emerged unscathed. Bullets passed each other, the remnants of the lethal waves moving on past their brief and destructive interaction.

  The human barrage inundated the monster first. Wilson watched it happen, in mid-leap, his feet both off the ground, extended right leg aiming for the engine block of the next vehicle.

  Streams of hypersonic bullets scored the mech like a high-speed chainsaw, glancing off hard body panels, but wreaking havoc on external weapons and sensors. Dishes crumbled. Guns were sheared off. Then the rockets hit home on its chassis, its legs, its arms, the pods across its head. Dozens of other rockets landed all around it, impacting against the ground it stood on, the cars and men and women racing to get free, the apartment it leaned against. Others projectiles raced past entirely, striking deeper into the city. Vehicles exploded. Bodies hurtled through the air. Men and women jumped from the windows of fatally struck buildings.

  Then the monster’s counter-volley tore into the squadron of gunships above Chris Wilson. His armor’s 360-degree sensors brought it to him in real time. His foot crunched into a car’s hood as, above him, quadcopters disintegrated. Enemy projectiles ripped through them at catastrophic speeds. Rotors ripped free. Chassis burst. Unfired rocket warheads detonated, ripping their host drones apart in gouts of hot explosive destruction. Shreds of torn metal and shattered carbon composites exploded in every direction in a lethal rain of shrapnel.

  “Incoming!” Wilson yelled aloud, reflexively, even as his armor flashed the word at him, pulsing crimson.

  His foot flexed, his core contracted, and Wilson wasn’t running anymore, he was going prone, diving, whether of his own will or at the decision of the armor, he’d never know.

  A bare spot of freeway rose to meet him, slow motion approach belying the terrible speed at which his whole body was rushing towards the ground.

  The impact slammed through Wilson’s chest, his face, his everything. It shuddered through the armor, reverberating through it. There was an awful noise outside. He was sliding, grinding against the freeway, tearing up the asphalt as he went, doing god-knows what to his armor.

  Somehow, he steered his slide, or it steered, or they both steered, towards the many wheels of a stalled semi tractor-trailer. Then h
e was under the truck, still skidding, his feet flexing, pressing his armored toes into the asphalt, digging twin furrows into the asphalt until, at last, he stopped, with the bulk of the truck’s trailer above him, shielding him.

  Then the impacts started. A piece of shrapnel ripped through the truck two feet ahead of him, burying itself in the freeway. More followed, a hailstorm of metal, ripping the truck apart. A crumpling sound assaulted his mind, and zip and ping as bolts sheared. The small space he occupied shrank as the truck started to collapse.

  Wilson rolled right. Metal crashed around him. Falling debris blotted out light. Something hard pounded against his ribs. The world around him went dark. Then he was ripping through metal himself, tearing it away as he rolled into the light again, back onto the highway outside the collapsed truck.

  The armor pushed him to his feet. His body screamed of torn tissue, of broken ribs. The drugs pushed the pain into the background. Wilson ignored all of it and surveyed the battleground.

  What he saw was apocalypse. Cars were aflame up and down the freeway, billowing choking clouds of toxic black smoke. Metal pieces continued to fall from the skies. Above, the entire drone squadron was gone.

  Ahead, through the flames, the mech leaned, wounded, against the half-collapsed building behind it. The war-machine’s once glossy-black carapace was dented and scorched, scarred with long gray fissures still glowing at their ragged edges. One arm had been blown off completely, ending in a stump of structural members, leaking fluid, and sparking cables. Another arm hung limp, draped down onto a leg that looked badly damaged. Around its head, at least two sensors were gone.

  Despite the carnage around him, a single, crystal clear thought ran bright through Chris Wilson’s mind: it can be hurt.

  He roared, gritted his teeth, and launched the armor into a headlong run down the freeway, across the cars, through the flames. Ahead, panels were opening in the giant mech’s chest. A cloud of tiny, life-like drones emerged. Black things, not much bigger than a hand, with flapping wings and too many feet. Robotic spiders crossed with bats, things of nightmare. They spread out into the streets, into cars, even into the slowly crumbling building the mech held onto, through windows and through gaping holes the rockets had torn.