by Mel Odom
“The trail’s getting more fresh.” Hella pointed at the parallel tracks cut through the soft loam. They were close enough that the exposed earth hadn’t had time to dry out. When she put her finger into the earth, black and red granules stuck to her skin. “We’re gaining.”
Stampede glanced around. “Because we’re faster than they are? Or because we’re getting close to where these things are currently calling home?”
Due to their nomadic nature, the ’Chine didn’t stay in any one area long, but they haunted the trade routes to seize goods and machines. Thankfully their numbers were limited by the fact that everyone—traders as well as brigands—hunted them to extinction along the trade roads when they could. The ’Chine were dangerous.
Riley gazed down at the damp earth on Hella’s finger. He didn’t look happy. “We should wait.”
“If we wait for the expedition to catch up, we’re letting the ’Chine get ahead again.” Stampede sipped water from his canteen and replaced the cap. He gazed around at the sky. “It’ll be getting dark in another couple hours. If we don’t catch them before then, they’ll get away.”
“Why? Won’t they be stopping too?”
“Maybe. They don’t have to. ’Chine can walk for days. It’s what makes them so hard to kill. With their eyesight, it doesn’t matter if it’s night or day. And if you follow them too far into the wilderness, use up too much of your ammunition and reserves, they’ll dog you all the way back to safety. If you don’t have enough to make it back, or if they have time, they’ll kill you and pick your bones clean.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“Let the caravan keep rolling for now while we forge on ahead. That way when we make camp, we’ll know if the ’Chine are around.”
“All right.”
While Riley radioed back to his people, Hella took the lead again.
Almost two hours later, when the sun was sinking into the west and had already gone into hiding behind the thick forest, the ground gave way under Hella’s foot and she knew she’d stepped into a trap. She morphed her hands into weapons as she yanked her foot back. “Spider-hole!”
Before she’d had time to complete the warning, the ground erupted all around them and the ’Chine burst out of the hiding places. The half human–half cybernetic creatures attacked without a word. They kept in constant communication by their ApZeroes, and they functioned like a hive mind during joint operations. There was some speculation that the ApZero near-AI had hit an event horizon and become a functioning entity, but none of the ’Chine questioned had ever verified that.
Hella threw her hands out in front of her and fired at the ’Chine clawing out of the hole at her side. The thing had once been a man. Or at least, it had been most of a man. Both flesh and blood legs had either been too deformed to remain or they’d never been there at all. The ’Chine sat on a flat surface with three metal legs with knees that articulated a full three hundred sixty degrees. A prosthesis ending in a flamethrower took the place of its right arm. Its right eye was a targeting sensor that glowed red in the fading light.
Living in caves and a steady diet of human flesh had turned the ’Chine’s skin color yellow. There was little muscle tone because the external servos that instantly reminded Hella of Pardot did most of the work. The cruel mouth, cupped by a metal brace under the jaw that tied into the one encircling its head, grinned. Saliva dripped down the malformed chin.
A line of fire jetted from the flamethrower straight at Hella.
CHAPTER 15
Hella dodged to one side while furnace heat blasted into her and left her feeling as though she’d been parboiled. Her burst of .50-caliber bullets smashed into the ’Chine’s face, turning it into an instant ruin of blood, flesh, and cybernetic garbage. Incredibly the mechanical humanoid swayed unsteadily then balanced on its legs. The meat body above it was dead, though. Hella had no doubt about that. But she was astonished to see the flamethrower start tracking her again.
A woman, or at least something that had at one time been feminine, ran forward with two buzz saw arms extended. Before the creature covered half the distance to Hella, the thing exploded. Hella recognized the detonation of Stampede’s rifle and knew he’d saved her. She stared at the monstrosity with the flamethrower, looking for the recognizable lump of its ApZero, finally spotting it on the dead thing’s left shoulder. She fired again, taking more deliberate aim.
The bullets slammed through the thin flesh and ripped into the fist-sized cluster of cybernetic parts, scattering them in all directions in a spray of blood. To her left, Daisy reared back and brought both forepaws crashing down on another ’Chine. When she took her paws back, only bloody meat paste, mechanical parts, and hydraulic fluid remained. She reached down and caught another in her jaws then lifted it from its feet and slammed it against the nearest boulder. A leg and an arm fell off the lizard’s opponent.
“They’ve formed a hive mind.” Hella jumped and rolled away as one of the ’Chine leveled an autopistol at her and opened up. Rounds cut the air and ripped into the earth where she’d been only a moment before. She came up on one knee, hands in front of her, willing her rounds to go as big as she could make them.
The large-caliber bullets smashed into the face of a ’Chine armed, literally, with a rocket launcher and drove it four stuttering steps backward. The thing continued fighting against the damage until Hella’s next round plowed through the ApZero and rendered it inert.
Two ’Chine clawed at Riley, overpowering him with their strength but unable to penetrate the hardshell with their projectile weapons. Riley buttstroked one of them in the face with his rifle, twisting the creature’s head around at least one hundred eighty degrees. The ’Chine stood transfixed, its eyes blank. Then a green glow relit the pupils, and it twisted its head the rest of the way around to face Riley again. It raised its left arm, which opened and exposed a long drill.
Hella took aim and fired into the ApZero node that occupied a space to the right of its spine. The node shattered and the creature stumbled back before sinking down into a bloody heap.
Fighting panic, Riley thrust his rifle barrel into the next ’Chine’s open mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullets instantly killed the flesh-and-blood body, but the hive mind kept all systems operational till the following burst destroyed the ApZero.
Daisy pounced on another prey, trapping it with one forepaw then grabbing its upper body in her jaws. She tore the creature in half with a spray of blood and amber hydraulic fluid. As she tossed the top half away, both mechanical arms struggled to bring the rifle in line to shoot her while flying through the air.
Hella pointed her left hand at the torso as it sailed by and hammered the ApZero with a flurry of shots. She scrambled to another position, staying constantly in motion while trying to keep Stampede, Riley, and Daisy all in sight.
The second wave of attackers took her by surprise. Low and lean, the mutated prairie dogs launched themselves into the fray with ear-splitting squeals. The animals probably weighed about twenty kilos and were all wiry strength and speed. Metal collars glinted at their necks. She’d heard that the ’Chine could slave some animals to them.
Hella fell back immediately and carved out space with her guns blazing. If she’d been a regular person with normal weapons, she would have gotten overrun during the time she’d have needed to reload. Instead the line of furry, dead bodies in front of her grew.
Light suddenly blossomed around her, turning the darkening world into a series of garish yellow, white, and black images that flickered movement. When the acrid stink filled the air, sharper even than the stench of burning meat, Hella guessed that Stampede had fired a phosphorus grenade into one of their attackers. She ran and vaulted to the top of a boulder during the brief respite and took stock of the battlefield.
Half of the ’Chine were down, sprawled out powerless or scattered in body parts or mechanical parts. Flames danced in the lower tree branches, leaping across the area as it sought out
ropes of hydraulic fluid that had spread through the trees and brush. More fires pooled across the ground.
Hella morphed one of her hands back to normal, and she plucked an HE grenade from her belt. She pulled the pin with her teeth, slipped the spoon, and heaved the high-explosive sphere into the mass of ’Chine. “Grenade!”
Stampede threw an arm up over his eyes. Riley’s face shield would automatically darken to protect him from the flash.
Turning, Hella dropped over the side of the boulder to take the protection it offered. She morphed her hand back into a weapon, closed her eyes tightly, and ducked her face into her right elbow.
The grenade detonated and filled the immediate vicinity with bits and pieces of ’Chine and roasted prairie dog. When she dropped her arm and blinked her eyes open, a slavering prairie dog with its back sheathed in flames lunged at her. Hella fell to the side, and the creature crashed into the boulder. Before the fear-enraged animal could recover, she shoved a hand to the base of its skull and fired a round that emptied its head.
She got to her feet and fired into the flaming mass of ’Chine at ground zero. Despite the flames clinging to them and the fact that many of them were burning down, the survivors continued the attack. Most of the prairie dogs lay in smoldering heaps.
“Ready, Red?” Stampede sounded calm, but his voice was hoarse with the smoke.
“Yeah.” Hella knew her system was still processing firepower just fine, but the backpack she carried and siphoned raw materials from was running low. If she didn’t get another backpack from Daisy, she’d have to rely on her rifle.
Stampede lifted his foot and stomped the ground. A quiver ran through the earth and buckled the ground where the surviving ’Chine stood. They flew in all directions as the ground betrayed them.
Blinded by the HE grenade, Daisy pressed back against the tree line with her forepaws raised in front of her. Anything that neared her would get crushed.
Hella took a breath and focused. Before the ground had completely stopped quivering, she ran forward. As she let the nanobots flood her mind with information, push away her human senses, and rewrite her reflexes and responses, she grew afraid. All her life, all of it she could remember at least, that programming lay on the fringes of her mind, ready, willing, and able to take over. Allowing the nanobots to interact with her on that level was easy. Pulling back from them seemed to get harder each time.
Fleet as a deer, she ran across the buckled earth and the dead bodies. Totally locked into the nanobots in her body, she was a flitting gun sight. Ranges and cross hairs burned into her vision, and she reacted with precision and speed that nothing human could ever equate. When she fired, ’Chine died or ApZeroes shattered.
A ’Chine caught her left foot. Before the dying thing could lock its hand, Hella threw herself into the air and flipped, arms thrown wide as the nanobots filled her head with target acquisitions. As soon as she fired, she flicked her wrists and found the next target, blasting away as soon as she’d locked on. When she landed on her feet on a bare patch of ground, she’d killed the ’Chine that had seized her and blasted three prairie dogs that closed in on her like heat-seeking missiles.
When she stood finally, shaky with the adrenaline that filled her and warred against the control demanded by the nanobots, Hella was the only thing left alive in the fire zone. The burning trees and grass lit up the gruesome scene. The stench of burned flesh and cooking hydraulic fluid filled her nose with acrid smoke that made her sneeze. She forced the nanobots’ control back from her mind and body, and that was the hardest thing she could ever remember doing.
Pistols at the ready, the rifle slung over his back, Stampede walked forward slowly. He kicked one of the ’Chine, but the dead thing flopped over on its back without response.
Flames reflected from Riley’s face shield when he stopped in front of her. “How did you do that?”
“It’s what I do.” Hella kept her voice level even though she wanted to scream. She felt the nanobots buzzing around her thoughts, demanding to have more control again. “All part of the service.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Ignoring the man, wanting to be away from the questions and the fears, Hella went to Daisy. She talked to the mountain boomer in a soothing tone and got past the panic the sudden blindness had caused in her. She morphed her hands back to human and stroked Daisy’s hide, taking as much comfort from the lizard as she gave.
“You all right?” Stampede spoke low and gentle as he stood behind Hella.
“I’m fine.” Outside the perimeter of the camp, in the privacy afforded by the darkness, Hella took off her blouse then unfastened the chain-mail shirt. She wet a towel from her pack with water and cleaned as much of the blood, smoke, and machine fluids as she could from the armor.
“You went pretty far into it, Red. Maybe Riley was really surprised by what he saw, but I’ve never seen you move like that.” He paused and she dried the chain mail.
“I know. I was me but I was more than me.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”
“If you hadn’t, I’d have told you I was going to do it.”
Stampede growled angrily. “I was thinking.”
“Bad things happen when you do that.”
“These people are scientists. They know more about things than we’ve ever seen. Maybe they could—”
Hella pulled the cold chain mail back on and turned to face Stampede, interrupting him. “What? Lie to us some more? They’ve lied to us about everything so far. Or kept us in the dark. We’re supposed to suddenly start trusting these people?”
Stampede looked at her with his liquid brown eyes. Tenderly he drew her to him and hugged her. His massive heart beat deeply within his body, and he felt warm and reassuring.
“I don’t want to lose you, Red. Not to anything out here in the wilderness, and not to anything that’s lurking around inside your mind.”
“You won’t.” Hella curled her fingers in his fur and wished she were that little girl Stampede had found years before. Back then she hadn’t known much about the nanobots, hadn’t realized they had different thoughts than she did, and hadn’t known that they wanted to control her. “It surprised me tonight.”
“What?”
“How easy it was to let them slip into me. I was still in control. I was still me. But I felt like I was standing at the precipice of being someone else.”
“Who?”
Hella didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know.”
“You’re going to be okay, Red. I promise.”
“You can’t make that promise.”
“I just did.”
“You can’t keep it.”
“Try me.”
Hella pushed back from him and looked him in the eye. “I do want you to make me a promise.”
“Sure.”
“Remember how those ’Chine died? The way their flesh died but the hive mind kept their bodies running?”
Stampede’s face hardened and from the sadness in his eyes, she knew he suspected what she was going to ask. “Don’t.” His whisper was almost lost in the darkness.
“If something happens to me.” Hella could barely get the words out of her mouth, but she had let them go too long unsaid. “If something happens and I’m not me anymore … don’t let the nanobots take what’s left of me.”
Stampede looked away from her. “That’s never going to happen.”
“You know it could. So did Faust. I think that’s one of the reasons that Faust didn’t stay with us.”
“Faust was looking for an easy job. He was a slacker.”
Hella managed a laugh, but her vision was blurry with tears. “Faust works hard. He’s chief of security at Blossom Heat, and trade camps come with their own dangers. He just didn’t want to be around to see me slip away.” She knew that was true. “He made his decision to leave us only a few weeks after the first time I linked with the nanobots.”
That time s
he’d managed to save their lives as well, and the merging had been necessary if they were going to live. At times when the nanobots felt threatened, it was even harder to stay out of the link.
“I need you to promise me that, Stampede. Tonight was harder to get back than it has been before. And I just can’t stop thinking about the hive mind controlling those dead ’Chine. So promise me.”
Instead Stampede wrapped her in his arms again, and she felt swallowed up in parental love. She didn’t know who her parents were or if she’d even had them, but she knew who’d loved her and raised her.
“You got my promise, Red, but I promise you this too: there’ll be a lot of dead people before I let that happen.”
By the time Hella finished changing into fresh clothing and returned to the camp, Stampede stood bathed in firelight from the cook fire. Pardot paced angrily in front of him, shaking his head vociferously.
Hella had taken time to clean her other clothes as best as she was able, soaking the jeans, blouse, and underthings with cold water so the blood wouldn’t set into the fabric, and finally washing them with hydrogen peroxide that she and Stampede carried for that purpose. There were too many things in the Redblight that could track potential prey even by the scent of old bloodstains.
“—and letting them get away with it is out of the question.” Pardot stared at Riley as if everything were his fault.
“Dr. Pardot, those …” Riley’s voice failed him. “Those ’Chine are incredibly dangerous. We were lucky to escape with our lives.”
“They ambushed you, Captain Riley. I understand that. But I—we—didn’t come all this way to lose that device now.” Pardot swiveled his attention back to Stampede. “There were only three of you.”
“And all of us lucky to be alive now.” Stampede stood relaxed, one hand wrapped around the barrel of his rifle while the butt rested on the ground.
