by Russ Linton
M@ti came closer, observing every detail. “Where is this?”
“My prison beyond the gates, a bridge between all worlds. It is walled off from the core, but you can access it there. Much as from the core, you can access the departing expedition. Birthed to create me, if you do nothing, when she fully transfers, my discoherence, my madness, will assume Chroma’s mantle and the Nexus will be plagued with monsters capable of piercing the veil. Nexus users will be hunted, and die. Every AI chassis and war machine in the material world will be at their beck and call. Humanity will be doomed.” He pulled off his mask and hat. “I am your extinction event, M@ti. You have little time.”
M@ti put her hand to the glass. It felt cold to the touch and her fingers went numb. She examined the desolate landscape letting TrueSight see past the crawling horrors. This prison, this place, had a definite, unmistakable signature. In seconds, she’d matched the signature to a feed stored in her memory: the weak signal from the guardian statue.
Here is where Loadi had logged into Times Square from. There was an access point for this wasteland which he’d just told her was a bridge into the core.
For all his grand schemes, this Loadi had left an option off the table. She could deny both him and Chroma the stars.
“I’ll help. Can you grant me access to systems where I am being held?”
He barely twitched his cane. “Done.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to start my AI hunting right here.”
Before he could respond, she thrust the cane into his face and unleashed Grond. His head unraveled on a stream of code, taking the window glass with it.
M@TI WOKE TO A STEADY dripping on her forehead. Warm. Slick. It trickled down her skull and she smelled the sweet tinge of blood. She hoped Daemon hadn’t removed her skull. She held off opening her eyes, afraid to see him digging around with his metal implements. But she didn’t feel any pain. Her interface remained steady. Carefully, she peeked.
Daemon crouched above her. He looked surprised at whatever he’d uncovered, but his hands were empty. He dug his fingers into his red robes and the color seemed to drip.
A trail of dark blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. He collapsed.
Knuckles stood behind him. His face was swollen and bruised. Blood coated his forearms. In his hand, he held the guard’s sword.
“How?” M@ti couldn’t keep her eyes off him as he sheathed it and began removing her straps.
“Like I said, midnight, a rogue’s fucking playground.” He focused entirely on the straps. “We need to move.”
She sat up as soon as her upper half was free and rubbed at her wrists. Remembering how she’d been prepped, she touched her scalp searching for any gaping holes.
As soon as her ankles were free, Knuckles helped her off the gurney. M@ti followed him without so much as a word. Thieving skills from Dungeon Delvers, murder skills from some simulated ancient Japanese empire, he’d found a way to use them again.
How broken was he by this?
Once across the gantry, she started to go for the crash doors, toward the corridor and the only exit she knew, but he seized her hand and dragged her to the left where the walkway circled the entire cavern.
“Why?”
“Dead guards out there. The two at the cell door.” Knuckles spoke abruptly, focused on the wall ahead of them. “A hacker in the lab too.”
“What for? Did you need to...”
“Daemon fucked up. Let us know the rest were sleeping. I used a spring from the bed to jimmy the lock and surprise the guard.” Knuckles’ expression was hard. “They’ll see the guy in the lab first. I removed a vent cover at the back. They’ll think we tried for the surface there.”
Cold logic. He’d killed someone as a decoy.
Every step on the gantry felt unbelievably loud. A metallic vibration which would surely transfer along the dodgy struts. Through the grating, she saw the empty darkness waiting to devour them.
M@ti nearly jumped when Knuckles stopped her. He motioned toward the wall. A metal ladder stretched upward, ringed in a steel frame similar to a fire escape. She stretched her neck and watched the ladder disappear high above.
Knuckles grabbed a rung. He hauled himself up with his free hand while the other maintained a grip on the sword. He moved stealthily, every muscle knotted, his feet whispering against the rungs. Well out of reach, he stopped and motioned for M@ti to follow.
Who was he really? The Knuckles she thought she knew had seemed so carefree, all his troubles confined to virtual worlds where he was the hero. Whatever he did there was always the right thing. There were no real consequences. Would there be now?
“Come on,” he hissed.
She’d tried to find ways to protect Knuckles all this time, but that was over. This was on her as much as it was on him. M@ti grabbed a rung and began to climb. She amped her vision to see further ahead and figure out where they were headed. Her display still showed a connection to Lembas’ systems, the security bypassed.
Monitoring the messages, stopping every so often to navigate their archaic server space, kept her moving upward and her thoughts off of Knuckles. An alert flashed. Somebody had found the open ventilation shaft Knuckles had mentioned. Before long, she saw an order posted from Lembas.
“Elevator, now. Get topside and find them. Kill that fucking spechead, but I need her mostly alive.”
She tapped Knuckle’s ankle and he stopped. Hooking an arm around a rung, she freed one hand and began to hurriedly maneuver through her interface. With a series of gestures, she cut power to the elevator. A quick nod and Knuckles started upward again.
We’re breached. Lembas again. Switching security protocols.
He knew the TrueSight toolkit probably better than she did. She set H0unD4WG into motion, logging every change they would attempt and doing her best to keep the connection open.
At the top, her arms were burning. Knuckles had reached a hatch. He felt the release lever to see if it was free and it swung downward with a grinding wail. As he began to push, TrueSight lit up.
She grabbed his ankle this time and held on until he froze. “Security tripwire. Hang on,” she said.
The door was hardwired into their security. M@ti didn’t think she could crawl past Knuckles and disarm it, but that didn’t matter. She owned the system. She cut off the signal from the zone and disengaged the lock. Exchanging a nod with Knuckles, he yanked the latch and pushed.
She watched his entire body tense. The hatch didn’t budge. He scrunched low, shimmying down the metal frame and lowered the sword toward her, handle first.
M@ti had difficulty closing her hand around the sticky handle. When she finally had a firm grip, Knuckles returned to the hatch, both hands planted, and drove upward with his legs.
The ladder groaned. The hatch screeched with a noise which roiled down the cavern’s walls. She watched below, fearful, yet the crash doors remained closed and the room, empty.
Dust trickled onto her scalp. A fine cloud at first, it became a minor torrent of dirt and sand. She held tight to the rungs, head down, watching the particles cascade toward the faraway gantry.
Eyes full of dirt, she wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw the main doors swing open.
Calls of alarm echoed from the incoming guards. She swatted blindly at Knuckles’ foot and felt him brace against the rungs even deeper. Tossing aside stealth, he roared, part from the exertion and part from pain. Sand continued to spray, and a crack of gunfire echoed from below. A bullet ricocheted off the protective cage around the ladder, the air a burst of heat on her cheek and the sparks blinding.
Another message from Lembas: Don’t kill her. I’m coming that way.
Sand still poured over them, but Knuckles foot left the rung above her. She couldn’t look up to see, and only hoped he’d made it through as she scrambled after him. Blindly navigating the ladder, the sword slipped from her grasp. It careened down the framed chute.
Knuckles grabbed her arm an
d yanked her upward with a shout of exertion and pain. Until her palms and knees were firmly on the earth, she didn't’ bother opening her eyes. Sand and dirt still trickled from her head and she shook it clear before staring upward.
They were outside in the arid chill of the desert. Stars filled the night from one horizon to the next. She wanted to trace the constellations until her breathing became normal, but she knew they weren’t done yet.
Knuckles slammed the hatch closed and toppled into the sand. M@ti raised her hand enough to engage the security on her interface and seal the hatch. She then promptly scuttled the codes to reopen it.
She watched Knuckles lying there, chest heaving, his body suddenly aware of the physical toll. Sand clung to the blood on his skin. She didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay on his feet. A thrall. A spechead. He’d defeated this genetically superior race of uber geeks in his own way.
M@ti stumbled over to him and tried to pull him off the ground. “Come on. If we grab one of these vehicles we can get a head start. She pointed to the broken tarmac where the array of off-road vehicles waited.
Knuckles shook his head. “That one,” he said. “We’re taking that one.”
She followed the hint of moonlight filling his eyes. The helicopter. He wanted to take the helicopter.
“Let me guess, you’ve flown one in some game before?”
Knuckles shrugged. “Busted out of plenty of prison cells too.”
38
Shaped like a soup ladle, or if M@ti were being generous, maybe a dragonfly, the helicopter didn’t look like it could fly. Beyond the bulb of a cockpit, a narrow fuselage swept back, thin and comically narrow. It was as if someone had edited out a chunk leaving an extended tail. Spindly legs touched the ground well behind the rotor, keeping the structure aloft.
Sealed away from the outside, an uneasy cold enveloped M@ti. She tucked her hands under her arms and watched Knuckles skeptically. His eyes roved the control panel and he tested the stick grip with one hand.
She’d never seen so many analog dials and switches. The dash bristled with them, and between their two seats sat a console loaded with even more. She had a stick in front of her, too, but she did her best to keep from so much as brushing it with her knees.
“Maybe one of the other vehicles instead? Some are built on stolen autonomous hovs. I can probably get one to drive for us.”
Knuckles stubbornly shook his head. “We fly. Do you see any other planes around here? If we get this airborne, no way they can follow us.”
“If,” she said.
Knuckles frowned, his focus locked on the console. “You heard that Lembas guy, he said the power source was functional, they just needed to salvage it.”
“What about everything else?” M@ti whispered, her eyes sweeping the dash.
Knuckles toggled a few switches leaving bloody thumbprints behind. “How long do we have?”
“For what?”
“Until they bypass your elevator lock down?”
M@ti checked her display. “They haven’t yet. I’ll know when they do and then we’ll have about as long as the ride took to get down there. A couple minutes?”
“Seemed like forever,” Knuckles grunted. He flicked another switch and the panel lit up, each of the dials a circle of glowing numbers and hash marks. Another cluster of switches lined the roof console. She pointed up, unsure if he’d seen them, but Knuckles ignored her, toggling more switches, his face set in grim determination. A grid of lights came to life on the instrument panel.
A whine began directly overhead and M@ti braced herself against the seat, staring through the cockpit roof. Had Knuckles started the engine or set it to self destruct? Stars winked out as the blades slashed her view. The engines gave a moan, like a battered hunting horn, once, then twice, and suddenly she could see the stars clearly again as the cabin filled with a deafening whine.
“Where to?” Knuckles shouted.
“Manhattan Preserve.”
His brow furrowed, and he nodded. Hands on the stick, the helicopter stayed unmoving on the ground.
M@ti checked her display. Elevators were back online, and a car had just started for the surface. “They’re on the move,” she shouted. “What’s wrong?”
“I can fly it, but I was a Medevac ARVN. I only know how to get from Tan Son Nhut to Hue.”
She’d taught herself a lot of things outside her assigned duties. Astronomy, hacking, some basic astrophysics, all of which she felt was somehow more real, yet Knuckles continued to surprise her with the skills he’d acquired in a place she’d considered a complete waste of time. M@ti let her head slip against the headrest and stared into a night sky full of stars.
“Get us off the ground. I can get us there.”
THEY FLEW UNTIL MID-morning, the sun becoming a blinding flare which washed away her navigation system. No obstacles, no paths or roads to worry about, she’d given Knuckles as clear of a heading as she could. They exchanged a few shouted words. A pair of headphones had been stowed behind each seat, but neither had working communications gear. She’d left hers on to keep the unbelievable noise to a minimum, but Knuckles, ears too accustomed to the pounding cadence of his drums, let them drape around his neck.
In the air, he seemed to relax. The terrible things he’d done, left in the desert. She wanted to ask him if he was okay, but at cruising speed the engines had settled into a terrible and relentless grind.
M@ti spent her time trapped between nausea and amazement. The sun’s radiation bored through the mostly glass cockpit as if on a mission to cook her inside out. They passed over vast stretches of wilderness, the skeletal remains of cities breaching seas of green plant life as though clawing their way up for air.
She knew that long ago this wilderness used to be a single, unified country stretching unbroken from one coast to the other. Ground zero for the ensuing genetic wars brought on by their own militarized technology, she used to secretly find it fitting how they’d been finally broken by the war machine they’d so casually visited on other shores.
Hundreds of feet in the air though, she felt less certainty. People had lived in those cities, some sprawling wider than the confines the Manhattan Preserve would ever allow. Now lost souls subsisted on the wreckage or filled the Collective’s designated ranges for humanity.
Once she brought those massive prisons down, would the entire world resemble the lonely terrain they flew above right now?
Exhausted, her stomach sour, M@ti hung her head and tried to imagine life after the Collective.
A DEEP SHUDDER WOKE M@ti. Much like when the engines had spun to life, the cockpit vibrated, and her head smacked against the glass. She started, feeling a sharp pain in her neck. She suppressed a yelp and looked to Knuckles. He was craning, trying to see the rotary blades in the gathering darkness.
“Are we good?” she shouted.
Knuckles shrugged and continued to stare. “Don’t know what that was.”
M@ti uncurled from the seat. She’d slept all day. She vaguely remembered waking several times. Drifting in and out of both sleep and motion sickness.
“We’ve got to be close,” she said.
Knuckles settled back giving the sky one final, apprehensive squint. “I thought we’d made it a few hours ago, but it wasn’t Manhattan. Big city beside the water. But the water was a big lake, not the ocean.
“Chicago. A few hours ago?” she asked. Knuckles nodded in agreement and she checked their air speed. “We can’t be far then. No way we’ll miss it.”
Against the barren backdrop, approaching Manhattan had to be like diving into a supernova. She watched the horizon and as the sun sank deeper, she swore she could see a distant glow. Turning to gauge Knuckles’ reaction, she caught sight of something else.
Twin falling stars trailed them right off Knuckles’ shoulder. They burned blazing white, cutting a near horizontal path. M@ti leaned precariously across her pilot.
“I’m trying to fly this thing!”
M@ti lost her balance, toppling into Knuckles’ lap. He yelped, and the helicopter went nose down.
“Get off!”
She battled her way into her seat, still searching the skies. Her hands found the seatbelt and it clanked, uselessly, as she missed the latch over and over, unwilling to stop her search. She’d seen a dark form when whatever it was passed overhead. White hot flames blaring from engines. Could be one of those errant war machines. She’d need to put her plans into motion even sooner than she thought.
The Black Beetle dropped directly in their path. Knuckles cried out and swung the stick to the side, plastering M@ti against the door.
“Shit!” M@ti shouted, fighting to plant her ass in the seat. She finally latched the harness with focused fury. “Get us out of here!”
“I’m trying!” Knuckles strained to right the awkward machine. They seemed to pass inches from the hovering battle armor and as they did, Knuckles threw open a lever, his fingers dancing across several more switches. “Hang on!”
The ungainly helicopter lurched and M@ti sank into the seat. The whine had taken on a frenetic scream. She’d not been aware of their speed before, but now she saw they’d dipped close to the trees which raced past, bending violently in their wake.
Onward they blazed, Knuckles staring grimly ahead and M@ti practically turning backwards in her seat to see.
“We lost her? I think we lost her...”
Deva shot into view. She paced the helicopter within arm’s reach of the cockpit. The armor’s head turned, multifaceted eyes catching the dying rays of the sun and the spinning rotary blades in a hypnotic display. Then she was gone, shooting by with a sudden burst which caused the helicopter to pitch violently.
