Running - The Alien in the Mirror

by Lazlo Ferran

  “Sorry. I am tense. It’s not your fault. But while you can still get in, can you find out more? Keep scanning it as long as you can. Perhaps they will let something slip. I have to get the commanders ready. We go in two hours.”

  “One would be better,” Mira suggested.

  “Yes, she is correct,” Ishmael added.

  “We can’t! Not possible!” Jonr protested.

  “It’s possible,” Mira told him.

  “Right.” He kissed her and called the sentries.

  ***

  Jonr lined up at the front of his own squad of eight men on the scaffold. A few hundred metres in front, reached through the maze of duckboards and biomet sheets, lay the fan duct. To save time, only those first into the tunnel had been gathered. Their lasers looked crude, compared with Ishmael’s and some of them had not had time to paint their fatigue black and white so had instead put on contrasting black or white trousers and shirts.

  Ishmael stood next to Jonr and looked at the men’s faces. They grinned and joked but the android felt confused by their expressions. The grins, which indicated humour, hid another emotion, perhaps fear.

  Clone, no, human, emotions have always confused me!

  He had begun to accept that his personality had been built on a chassis of steel and synthetic compounds; this didn’t seem as bad as he had expected. So now he could allow himself to consciously access his own data banks instead of pretending he ‘remembered.’ His memory banks told him that the correct term for the human expression was a ‘grimace.’

  “Right men,” Jonr whispered. “You all have a copy of the map Ishmael drew, so you know where to meet up if you make it that far. The second intersection. You all know the route so stick to it. They have 40,000, we have 140,000, but they have better equipment than us and communications! Two critical things have to happen if we are to get enough of our people in to win; taking out those two guns and fortifying the approach. If any of you drop your sheet, you will have to go back for a second. Is that understood?”

  “Yessir!”

  “I am taking ten men to take out the guns and Ishmael will lead five more to secure the first intersection. Remember: it’s okay to use telepathic links up to 50 metres but only when you need to, only use your team name and only use location codenames. And keep your signal strength to the absolute minimum. There will be a lot of static and reflections but that will confuse them. Beyond that, one runner has been assigned to each squad and we hope the soldiers will be less inclined to shoot an unarmed child. We regroup at the second intersection in precisely … .”

  Ishmael glanced at Chance, who smiled back at him, and understood just how desperate this attack would be. At last he understood the horror of subjugation that the androids in Supercity had wrought and felt glad to be at the spearhead of the attack.

  “… one hour,” whispered Jonr. “Go!”

  Jonr’s hobnailed boot clattered along the duckboards as he carried his thick sheet of biomet to the jumping-off point. The Supercity guns opened fire an instant after he leaped into space but he kept the sheet in front of him and landed with a crunch on the sloping exit of the duct.

  Ishmael landed behind him, carrying two sheets and both held these in front of them while the third man, Kris, bore three large holes, simultaneously, in the hard surface beneath them with a specially designed drill. The fourth man landed holding a small pylon fashioned beforehand, which he placed over the drilled holes before getting stunned and slumping over. The fifth man used a mechanical jack to bolt the pylon to the ground and the sheets slotted into holders on the pylon. The first barrier had been placed and all five men clambered up the slope, towards the duct, out of the gun’s field of fire. A single shot from one of the guns caught Jonr’s foot, making him scream, but Ishmael moved ahead and dragged him up the rest of the slope and safely into the duct. One of the men who followed got hit in mid-air and fell forty feet to the scaffolding below.

  “Can you walk?” Kris asked, coming up behind.

  “No. But I can limp. Let’s go. You two, drag Jownes. Can you hear anything on the network Ish?”

  “I can hear a beep from above; probably an alert on the guns. That’s all. I still don’t know how to get to them.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find the way.”

  Jonr stopped and waited for his son to make it to safety. He clutched the grinning Chance briefly and they ran down the half-mile, sloping tunnel.

  ***

  After negotiating the scaffolding, they continued down the slope to the first intersection. Again the alarms blared and bathed the tunnels in red light. It seemed to hurt the humans’ eyes so Ishmael led them into the transverse, and larger tunnel.

  “Kris, to the second intersection!” ordered Jonr. “Hold it until you’re relieved.”

  Kris took four men and crossed into the tunnel opposite, quickly vanishing into the shadows.

  “Now we just have to find this entrance.”

  “It will be up a few levels,” Ishmael suggested. He had walked further down the larger tunnel and suddenly came across a recess, containing a ladder.

  “Here!” he shouted.

  The others came running.

  “What’s down there?” Jonr asked, pointing at a cover at the base of the ladder.

  “I can check,” Chance offered.

  “No Chance. We need you here. Check later. Up we go. We have to leave Jownes here.”

  “Let me go first,” Ishmael suggested. “They are less likely to shoot me.”

  His last two words were cut off by the screaming of the laser guns as the second team came in. Before they had reached an aperture, thirty feet up the ladder, half of the second squad arrived at the intersection and turned to the right in a predesignated move, to take and hold the next intersection.

  Ishmael put his hand on the grab rail of a tunnel and immediately withdrew it when a laser pulse hit the metal, inches to the right. The laser pulses sounded more like the bullets Ishmael had read about, so concentrated was the ball of energy. If his head had been above the parapet, it would have been holed. He decided to try something.

  “Citizen C199989!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Have you entered Clonecity?” a mechanical voice replied after an instant’s checking of protocols.

  “No,” Ishmael yelled, at the same time as he stuck his head over the parapet and fired a short burst into the grunt’s head. The hits only served to spin the Bot around, sending it sprawling into the narrow tunnel’s wall. But it gave Ishmael enough time to jump into the tunnel and get closer. The grunt turned over with its laser pointing directly at Ishmael’s head but it never fired the shot because a shot passed through the joint in its neck, just below where a human’s larynx would be. Its laser-arm went limp and the laser fell to the floor.

  “I have to have one of those!” Ishmael said, before pumping another charge into the soldier’s neck and slicing off the Bot’s arm. He picked up the arm which still gripped the laser’s trigger.

  “Well done Ishmael!” Jonr exclaimed, coming up behind. “The third squad just passed, to the left intersection.”

  “I don’t think I will get away with that again,” Ishmael declared. “Let’s see what’s ahead.”

  The eight remaining Rebels split into team to the right and one to the left and ran along the flat tunnel for several hundred metres. Ahead of them, they could hear the continual rattling of the laser guns above the fan duct so they knew they were on the right track. Ishmael’s superior vision spotted a heavily armoured bulkhead ahead and he raised his hand. They crept on, trying not to make a sound.

  Ishmael suddenly heard the words, “Squad Three. We’ve taken Intersection Left!” come into his head. He had early connected telepathically to Jonr and Chance so he knew where it had come from. He heard Jonr think, “Shit. Not now!”

  Jonr looked at Ishmael. Both thought the same thing; whoever stood on the opposite side of the door probably knew they were there. Ishmael stepped forward and
tried the handle of the hatch in the bulkhead. It had been locked tight. Jonr pointed his laser at the control panel and burned it off. Ishmael still couldn’t move the hatch so he held up his laser, still in the grip of the grunt’s arm. Jonr nodded so Ishmael turned the laser’s power up to maximum steady beam and began to bore a hole through the door. The hole became a slit and then a slot, around the control panel section of the door. Before long, the section broke loose, fell to the floor with a metallic clang and the door sprung open.

  Instantly, a hot rain of laser pulses poured through the hole forcing Ishmael and the others to charge through the door so that they could escape the killing ground. Two grunts with yellow flashes on their shoulders stood with their backs to the laser guns and blasted a hot laser hellfire at them.

  We’re finished!

  But something small and black flew past Ishmael’s shoulder and landed at the feet of the Supercity Bots. An instant later, a bright white light overloaded Ishmael’s vision sensors and something hard smashed into his face. He put his arms up to defend himself and other hard objects hit his arms, flinging him back against somebody behind him.

  ***

  Silence replaced the concussion that accompanied the flash and Ishmael found himself lying in a pile of bodies. Immediately concerned for his friends, he knelt and turned. Jonr’s grinning face met his gaze. Beside the leader, his son shook his head and helped haul a man with a badly sliced arm to stand. Even Chance and Jonr had many small cuts to their faces and hands and Jonr nursed a deep wound to his arm but both still smiled. The dust settled and they inspected the scene. They could hear a roar of cheers from other Rebels outside the fan duct.

  “Sorry about that Ishmael. We have one grenade per squad. They are our secret weapon and I didn’t want to tell you until I felt sure about you. I’m not as trusting as Chance or perhaps not as gifted with insight.”

  “Felt sure?” For the first time in his life, Ishmael felt as if somebody has hurt him deep inside his body somewhere, so deep that he couldn’t reach it and scratch it.

  They removed some vital components from the two big laser guns, picked up the two grunts’ lasers and ran back to the ladder, near the intersection.

  At the bottom, they found Jownes, who had begun to come round. Two men picked him up and the squad crossed to the opposite tunnel, a little smaller than the tunnel to the fan. After four hundred metres, Ishmael found what he wanted; a ladder to the side of the track way. They climbed down four levels and Ishmael led them further to the south.

  “We should be at the next intersection soon. There is a large cooling duct near here. I can hear it.”

  Soon the others could hear the roar of hot air, coming up from some place far below Supercity. They felt the heat by the time they reached the biggest intersection yet, where Ishmael had first seen the soldiers.

  “Hey!” yelled a familiar voice. Kris’s red bush of hair poked over the edge of a ledge, on one side of the vast tunnel. “They’re not here yet! This seemed the best vantage point. Got the guns?”

  “Yeah. They will be here soon!” Jonr replied. “We got these!” He held up the latest Supercity Army lasers. “Latest RA issue. Sounds more like the bullets of ancient times when they fire!”

  “Nice. We will have some soon. Have you hacked in already?”

  “No. Ishmael used a workaround!”

  “Ishmael held up his laser, still attached to the Bot arm.”

  “Coming down!” Kris yelled.

  He set to work, forcing a way to activate the lasers.

  “Well, this is as far as we go as far as known layout is concerned. They will be here in minutes. Ishmael, what can you pick up on the Presisent’s network?”

  Ismael’s secondary thought patterns had been completely absorbed in trying to interpret the feeling of inner hurt he had sustained, and he suddenly became aware of it.

  “Oh. Let me see. I am picking up … almost nothing. It has been secured. I can tell that Armande is on the south side of the City and Frank is in the Operations room of the Government Head Office; I got the schematics from the databases.”

  “Great! So we know practically nothing!”

  Jonr thought out loud:

  “All we do know is that these Type 45s are very large calibre super lasers; that is they can cut through anything or fire pulses of almost nuclear sized explosive power, if only once per hour. But they drain half of Supercity’s reserve power to do so. We also know the Army has 40,000 Bots, arranged with a supercommander and four adjutants or backups, who wear white flashes, and he commands forty Generals, each wearing a green flash, who command ten Colonels, wearing blue flashes, who command sixteen sergeants, wearing red flashes, who command six grunts, wearing yellow flashes. According to Ish, take a sergeant out and a grunt will replace him, the flash changing colour but I would guess this is not the case for the supercommander and his backups; take them out and the Army will cease to function. If we can find them! I bet the real command protocols are held in a database; there’s no way they would be able to cram, say, a General’s functions into a grunt. If only you had found that and taken it out Ishmael!”

  “Sorry Jonr.”

  “It’s okay, you have proved your loyalty and that’s all I ask from any of my men.”

  Somehow, this sounded like an insult to Ishmael but some network traffic suddenly sounded off in his head and he exclaimed:

  “Wait! I can hear the maintenance network. There is a lot of activity. All Bots are being recalled. But at least it’s still open. Maybe I can contact Fourteen!”

  “Fourteen?” Jonr asked.

  “A Bot, a friend.”

  Ishmael reached out and inserted himself into the network using a fake address and ID. Within a fraction of a second, he had located Bot Number Fourteen. The other Rebels could hear the conversation using their telepathic links:

  “Fourteen! It’s Ishmael; C199989. Do you remember me?”

  “Hello C199989. Welcome. Are you safe?”

  “Yes. I won’t bother you for long. I just wanted to say hello!”

  The Janitor Bot became aware that Ishmael actually wanted access to its internal memory banks and granted permission. Ishmael homed in on schematics for the maintenance system and asked for a plastic from Jonr, on which he drew a precise map.

  “Okay,” Jonr said, slapping Ishmael’s chest. The leader studied the map while Ishmael considered the strange feeling of elation he had experienced when Jonr slapped his chest; a feeling that exactly counterbalanced the feeling of hurt earlier. “Nice work. It even has a scale! So the main layout is a big circle, like an expressway, with four spokes running north to south and east to west. We are at the northern end of the north to south spoke, on the rim of the wheel. It looks like this railway runs right round and has exits to Municipal Blocks in each quadrant of the City. Does that make sense Ishmael?”

  “Yes. Responsibility for services is divided into Municipal Quarters.”

  “Great, so they will have to bring the Type 45s down these ramps; there is one only half a mile from here. Problem is that they only have three and I bet they will keep one back, to protect the President. So which ramps?”

  ***

  Kris had connected a little black box to the laser but even this would take time to break the encryption.

  “Let’s go north, along the expressway.”

  “The ramp is opposite the north spoke of the maintenance system,” Ishmael suggested as they jogged along the tracks. “And they know we are here so they will put one here and one on the west side, since that is where I came from; they will realise that’s the only part of the system that I am familiar with.”

  “Yes. I will deploy most of my forces in these two locations. Chance! Where are you?”

  His daughter jogged up behind Jonr and the leader briefed the girl, who turned and set off south.

  The squad didn’t get far before they heard an ominous sound; that of metallic wheels on metallic tracks.

  “To the sides!
Take cover!” Jonr ordered.

  A silver-coloured car came into sight a moment later, and stopped. From a hatch at the rear, three squads of Supercity Army soldiers deployed and spread to the entrances of two side-tunnels in classic fireteams of three men. One grunt in each time held a large calibre weapon.

  “We haven’t seen those before!” Jonr whispered to his men.

  The car’s doors closed and it accelerated south with more grunts inside.

  “Advanced party,” Kris whispered to Jonr. “More will be coming soon. Best to take them out now.”

  “Right. Ishmael, you have the only working laser right now. Can you get a good vantage point above us and take out that weapon; I’m betting it’s a grenade launcher or bazooka.”

  “I’ll try Jonr. I am guessing this laser will deactivate itself pretty soon. They must have built in some security contingencies.”

  “We move on Ishmael’s first shot. Let’s hope they’re confused; they outnumber us already.”

  Ishmael found a set of pipes that rose, through brackets, to a point three levels above, where they turned over the lip and disappeared. The brackets made good footholds so he could easily climb to a small shelf, which supported smaller pipes. Crawling along this, Ishmael found himself peering over the edge of the shelf and down at the fireteam with the large weapon. He had chosen a viewpoint high enough to put him beyond their normal field of view and this choice proved correct. None of them looked up though they seemed to know danger drew close. Ishmael heard the sergeant with the red flash give a verbal command:

  “Move back into cover.”

  They think I might have penetrated their network!

  The two grunts with laser carbines backed into the tunnel and the grunt with the large calibre weapon began to move.

  I have to do it now! I am not cut out for killing in cold blood!

  Not faced with an immediate threat, Ishmael found it very hard to pull the trigger. As he pressed the alien finger onto the ceramic lever, he felt himself begin to tremble.

  Citizens don’t tremble! There is something wrong with me. I must do it!