Every time I wake it’s like I’m opening my eyes to a continuing nightmare.
Then, remembering, I scan over my body.
The gun has been removed; only my stub and disk remains. And now a sheet is draped across my waist. I can’t see my legs.
“Well, hello stranger.”
Mills’ voice is oddly comforting, even though I’m sure I’ve just been revived again. “What happened? Where’s Dr. Brown?”
She steps from the shadowy corner of the dimly lit room. She’s wearing a bright red dress, completely inappropriate for a hospital, and her hair is pulled in a tight bun. She obviously notices my eyes and seems overwhelmed with a momentary shyness. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” she says, like she’s apologizing for looking the way she does. “I’m meeting my boyfriend—er, Mark, for dinner. Easier to wear this than worry about changing at the last moment.”
I nod, glad she decided to wear it.
“Dr. Brown has been… reassigned to another division.” She sounds hesitant.
I don’t like the thought of making her uneasy, especially since she’s dressed up and ready to have dinner with this Mark. But I need to know and it’s all so confusing. “I died,” I say, “but what happened?”
She peers over her shoulder toward the door. When she turns back she has a look like she’s about to reveal her best friend’s secrets. “He shouldn’t have given you the gun so soon. He was too excited. You accidentally shot your leg off. He was fired from the program. Last I heard, he’s overseeing an arm production factory in Ohio.”
I don’t know what to say, exactly, so I don’t say anything.
She shrugs. “I didn’t care for him. He reminded me of one of my old boyfriend’s little brothers. Smart but obnoxious. Followed us everywhere.”
I laugh, the first time I can ever remember laughing, even though I know I did in my past life.
A knock at the door, then a man in a lab coat enters. Immediately Mills’ smile ends and she backs away from the table. “Elijah, this is Dr. Grantham.” Her voice has lost all sense of humanness, of emotion. She’s returned back to normal, like when I first met her. “He’ll be handling your acclimation.”
* * *
The rocket fields span over miles of prime Florida coastline.
The Dynamo transport bus, much like the yellow Bluebirds that would take me to school in rural Central Texas, pulls up to one of many hangars, painted in drab military browns and grays.
Inside the bus are a mix of guys and gals with cybernetic arms and legs. Some even look like they’ve been chopped in half, their middles replaced with electronics.
The bus driver swings open the door and the cyborgs start to file out.
He presses another button and the rear of the bus opens and a wide ramp extends. That’s for me.
Dr. Grantham decided I should be fitted with a hot-swappable wheel base instead of legs. He thought I would be the perfect candidate to try them out.
They remind me of the wheeled tracks on early twentieth-century interplanetary explorers. The little robots would land on a planet, work for about a week, then mysteriously lose power and die.
Yeah, that’s me, a little explorer, about to go to BattleSat.
The fields are abuzz with activity, vehicles coming and going, various rockets firing in the distance, heading to the sky.
White-coated engineers scramble here and there, maintenance workers drive military tugs with trains of loaded carts behind, cyborgs clomp here and there. To me, it all looks chaotic and disjointed.
According to some of the intel briefings we received, two-thousand cyborgs are processed a week. Not including the heavy mechs and intelligent tanks.
Maybe I’m a half-empty glass guy, but to me that means cyborgs are getting chewed up on BattleSat at a terrifying rate.
All because Mexico declared war because of trade embargoes.
They always want something for nothing.
Once we’re corralled into Hangar Five, we’re processed, and we emerge out onto the fields.
I didn’t notice it initially, but clear of the hangar I see the transport ship that will take the lot of us to BattleSat.
Even from this distance, the lunar transport is massive. It looks like the dirigibles of old, but this blimp is standing on end, ringed on the backside with solid boosters. Multiple gangplanks lead up to various levels of the ship, and an endless stream of cyborgs are making their way into the transport. Forklifts and hover carts are loading cargo into other levels.
Many of the cyborgs trudging to the ship already look tired. It’s farther away than I first thought. But I guess one advantage of being mounted on rollers is the battery pack. With little effort, I roll past them, my duffel bag with my Tac laser and bottles of chaffing cream slung over my shoulder.
This is going to be a long trip.
* * *
Days later, through a tiny, round porthole, I can see our ship nearing BattleSat.
Balls of fire can be seen playing across the pockmarked surface. Darkened masses, clusters of armies, undulate across BattleSat’s surface.
The transport ship’s engines whine as power is cut, the gentle hum morphing to a dull roar. Then we pass in the shadow of one of BattleSat’s atmosphere engines.
A provision of the Accords was for Japan to fund and build the six largest machines ever known to man. Producing the engines bankrupted Japan.
The atmosphere engines are spaced at equidistant intervals around BattleSat, satellites to a satellite, and generate a weak atmosphere, one only strong enough to sustain cyborgs with augmented respiratory systems. This is meant to discourage wayward humans from joining any wars.
We enter the pseudo-atmosphere, and the ship’s comm squawks to life.
Travelers, prepare for landing.
But there isn’t much to do, since we’ve been strapped down since leaving Earth.
I sense the ship’s adjustment of trajectory as we head for Outpost Tycho, the American rally point.
A jolt rocks the ship.
Crates break from tie-down straps and bang against the hull. I didn’t think the atmosphere could cause turbulence in a ship this big. No one said anything about—
An explosion shatters the quiet.
I can’t see where it came from, but the ship responds with a dizzying roll. Glancing through my window, I see the lunar terrain whizzing by. We seem to still be in a glide path, but we’re wobbling.
Below, on the surface, large mechs scroll by, but too fast for me to tell whether they’re ours or theirs.
We’ve received enemy fire. Prepare for crash landing.
She says it so pleasantly, I almost feel at ease as I’m probably hurling to my death. Again. This one’s probably going to hurt.
A massive laser burns through the fuselage. Cyborgs caught in its path scream.
Panic ensues as many unbuckle themselves and climb over others to get away from the sizzling beam slicing through metal and tissue.
Two more lasers burst through at crisscross angles and the ship starts to tumble.
The chains used to secure my tire tracks hold, keeping me in place on my pallet. Unfortunately, most of the others aren’t so lucky. Machinery and cyborgs tumble like it’s all happening in a clothes dryer.
Please prepare for crash landing. Your seat bottom can be used as a flotation device…
That’d be nice if we were crashing into the ocean. What do you use for BattleSat?
As if in answer, the transport ship slams into BattleSat. Half the ship folds in upon itself with a scream of metal. Interior lights shudder, then die.
I think I could die a hundred times, but I don’t think I’ll ever get over the initial butterflies when I see it coming.
* * *
After four months and numerous excuses, I finally decided to introduce Mercedes to my parents.
After all, the excuses had become pretty ridiculous by then, and she’d begun to think I was stalling. I figured once I proposed five days ago and s
he said yes, there was no turning back.
Truth is, I didn’t want her to meet them, because I knew what Dad would say.
But isn’t that what love is about? Sacrifice?
I pulled into the circular drive of my boyhood home.
The lawn held its eternal green plushness, just like I remembered, and the designer topiaries flanking the entrance had been cut in wild geometric shapes. Just as Mom liked.
Mercedes couldn’t take her eyes off the mansion.
“This,” she said, eyes wide as she turned to me, “is where you grew up? I thought you said it was run-down.”
“Well, when you see it every day, it appears run-down. But yeah, I see what you mean. Kind of a big house, huh?”
Slowly, much slower than normal, I put my Infiniti in park.
I ran the windshield wipers to scrape away the couple of unlucky splattered bugs, then I set the AC to 78 degrees.
“Are we getting out?”
“Uhm, yeah. Gimme just a second,” I said, searching for something else to do to delay the inevitable. Finding nothing, I took a deep swallow, hoping it would calm me. “Okay, let’s go.”
Arm in arm, we walked to the door I’d burst through a hundred times. But this time was different.
I unhinged my arm from hers and scooted a tiny step away before knocking.
After thirty seconds, it opened, Mom on the other side.
In an instant, too quick for most to notice, but not for me, I caught Mom’s eyes scanning Mercedes. And a flash of panic streaked across her face. But just as quick it was replaced with the plastic smile she could pull from her hip pocket at a moment’s notice.
She moved to me and gave me a light peck on the cheek. “Hello, son.” Uncharacteristic for her to remain so calm, especially after not seeing me—her baby—for almost a year.
Mom turned to my fiancée and stretched her plastic smile even wider. She gave a curt nod. “You’re Mercedes.”
Not even a handshake.
So much for Mom being the reasonable one.
She stepped to the side of the doorway. “Please come in.”
We went into the foyer. The black and white marble always made me think of checkerboards. The vaulted ceiling drew all eyes to the crystal chandelier shedding soft light, casting it away in shards of brilliance. Suddenly, I felt small, five years old, insignificant in this room.
Like a stranger in a strange land.
Like Mercedes probably felt at the moment.
She’d withdrawn. I’d seen her do it a hundred times when in crowds. Shoulders hunched, her thin arms wrapped around herself in a feeble act of protection. A poor girl in a world ready to swallow her up.
Did that draw me to her? Her innocence? Her, the lost Mexican lamb cast in the world, and I, a superior white, swooping in to save her.
No.
I’m not my parents.
I’d seen a different Mercedes, not the poor Mexican girl. Like it was yesterday, I could picture us spilling to the ground when we first met. I could remember when we talked most of the night away, how in a few short hours I’d told her every secret I ever held, every dream I’d ever dreamed.
Except my parents. Them I kept from her. For good reason.
But I needed to finish this.
One down, one to go.
“Is Dad home?” I said, glancing at Mercedes from the corner of my eye. She remained silent.
Mom began busying herself with reading mail she’d picked up from the entryway table. “He’s been busy.” She idly shuffled the mail on the table, lining the edges straight. “Very busy. You know him.”
Yes, I did know him. And that was precisely why I didn’t want him to meet Mercedes. But we were here, now.
“We drove all this way,” I said. “We’re not going to stay long, just a few minutes. We’ve got other places to go. An appointment.”
“Oh,” Mom said, suddenly rejuvenated by my promise to leave.
I knew then it was time to go.
“Let me go get him.”
She hurried to the side library, leaving us—me standing in the entryway, like some unwelcome vacuum salesman.
We stood for a silent moment. I didn’t, couldn’t, say anything to Mercedes. I was too embarrassed to say anything.
The squeaky library door echoed under the vaulted ceiling, and in moments the unmistakable casual stroll of Dad echoed.
I took a breath, hoping Mom had already told him about Mercedes, so there was no surprise.
As Dad slowly, purposefully walked toward us I noticed his hair was whiter, his forehead more exposed, there was a little more stoop in his walk. I hadn’t seen him in a year, but it appeared he’d aged ten.
Mom stayed by the library door.
“Elijah,” Dad said as he came to a stop, staring at me.
I wanted to hug him, but knew not to. “Hey, Dad, I want you to—”
“Did you hear?” he said.
“Hear? Hear what?”
“The war. Those Mexicans declared war on us.”
“Dad!”
He didn’t care, just like I knew he wouldn’t.
“You know how much I’m going to lose cause of those Mexicans?”
“I wanted you to meet—”
He held up his hand, a signal I’d learned at a young age was his way of saying shut up. I hated myself because I so easily fell into the role of a child, obeying his simple hand wave.
“Millions, Elijah. Millions.” He turned to Mercedes. “Do you support your country’s attempts to undermine our sovereignty, empowering guerrilla warfare on our homeland?”
His foot tapped.
“I, uhm…” Mercedes began.
“No,” I said, reaching for her hand. “You don’t have to.”
She placed her hand on my arm and looked Dad in his eyes. “I don’t support any war. No war is worth all this.” She turned and left the house.
Dad stood there, his lips puckered, watching her leave. “That’s what I expected. Of course she won’t say Mexico is wrong. Mexicans stick together.”
I couldn’t stand there silent; I had to tell my father something, anything. “What did you expect, Dad? For her to grovel at your feet like everyone else who thinks you’ll give them a buck? She’s proud. I came here to introduce you to the woman I’m going to marry.”
He laughed. Not a funny laugh, but a laugh like what I imagined a demon would laugh as it devoured another soul. “You want to throw your life away, that’s fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
The same words. I knew then how my sister felt as he turned his back on her, but at least she got away before having to deal with him. I couldn’t stand being in the house anymore with people like them. I shouldn’t have even come.
I turned and walked from my father.
“Elijah.”
I stopped at the doorway.
“You’re choosing a Mexican over your family. You’ve made your decision, now you have to live with it. I don’t care if a Dynamo EMT scrapes you off the sidewalk. I’ll never mourn for you. You’re no son of mine.”
I got in my car, where Mercedes was already waiting.
“You’re crying,” she said. “What happened?”
I started the car. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
I cried because of how my parents were, how they thought of Mercedes as some insignificant nothing.
With my car in gear, we rolled down the driveway, never to return to my childhood home.
* * *
Rolling, spinning.
I open my eyes and notice my track wheels are spinning, but I’m not moving.
As my vision comes into focus, I realize I’m upside down, tangled in metal, half of me still strapped to my transport pallet.
Revitalization complete. Welcome back, Elijah.
After my last accidental death, Dr. Grantham installed a prototype resurrection unit in me. He told me not to rely on it, as it only has a 25% success rate.
It appears for once
I’m in the good percentage.
Among the transport ship’s wreckage, I can hear moans.
The ship rocks with muffled explosions, and the smell of burning metal and flesh saturates the air.
I reach for the buckles keeping me suspended and release them, causing me to slam into a bulkhead. After righting myself, I start to search around me for the blaster I lost during the crash.
The explosions become louder. Through the ripped open fuselage, I see flashes of light on the horizon and laser fire cutting through the air.
Time to get out of the wreckage.
Fortunately, I’d had several days of using my wheels on Earth to acquaint myself. And now, in the lighter, thinner atmosphere, I find I can maneuver even better than on Earth. I roll over cyborg bodies and distressed metal, fighting through piles of destruction to escape. The sight and smell of charred flesh makes me gag.
After what seems like hours, I finally clear the remnants of the ship. As I attempt to swallow, I get the sensation I can’t catch my breath. The moment of panic ends as my respiratory augmenters kick in.
Yards away, a group of survivors are gathering. I roll over to the group.
“What company is this? Anyone got a hot swap gun?”
They look haggard, beat up, damaged, ready to die. One of them holds something like a chain with a cross dangling from the end.
“Don’t you know? There’s no company,” one cyborg says.
He appears middle-aged, and both of his arms have been converted to Abrams lasers. His left one has been ripped off just above the elbow. “It’s everyone for himself on BattleSat. We land, we kill, then we die.”
One of the other cyborgs, a young boy, whose left side is made of glistening metal, motions behind him. “I think I saw a container of hot swaps a ways back.”
An explosion thirty feet to my left shakes the ground. Dust and dirt plume up.
“They’re coming!” the grim, hopeless cyborg yells. “The Mexicans are coming!”
The air erupts in lasers and rockets. The gathered cyborgs scatter.
Missiles sweep in from behind a jagged hill and strike the felled transport, their smoke trails hanging in the air like gnarled ghostly fingers. Large blue flames of fire bloom from the impact.
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 35
