Warriors

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “How can that be Ada?” Magnolia asked. “Is this some sort of a trick?”

  “Ada, do you copy?” X said.

  “Copy, sir.”

  “It’s really you?”

  “Yes, sir. I returned to help you.”

  X paused, his graying brows coming together in confusion.

  “We’re on our way, aboard Raven’s Claw,” he said. “How long can you hold off the machines?”

  There was no reply. The radio had cut out again.

  Magnolia felt her chest warm.

  “Ada,” X said. “Ada, do you copy?”

  He pounded the radio with his hand.

  “This piece of shit,” he growled.

  Lightning flashed outside the portholes. The warship was sailing toward another electrical storm—probably the cause of all the static.

  They stood there for several minutes trying to get Ada back. Rolling thunder followed another barrage of lightning.

  After the rattling stopped, the radio came to life.

  “King Xavier, do you copy?” Ada said.

  “Copy!” X almost shouted.

  “Sir, I don’t know what you heard last, but we held the capitol tower and the Hive long enough for the divers you sent to Mount Kilimanjaro to complete their mission. The virus worked, sir. The defectors were shut down—worldwide.”

  Rodger looked over at Magnolia, his swollen eyes widening behind his glasses.

  This couldn’t be real, could it?

  “We won the war,” Ada said. “The Hell Divers defeated the machines!”

  For a moment, no one said a word except for Imulah, who interpreted for Forge.

  Then X stomped the ground and reared his head back, letting out a howl of glee. He got down and hugged Miles, who also began to howl.

  Magnolia remained frozen in place, unable to fathom what she had just heard. Over two hundred fifty years after the apocalypse, the Hell Divers had defeated the ancient enemy that started the war.

  She was aware of Rodger pulling on her arm, and Imulah laughing with Forge in a rare display of emotion. But she couldn’t quite grasp that this was real.

  It wasn’t until X kissed her on the cheek that she snapped out of it.

  “They did it, kid,” he said. “They really fucking did it. Giraffe and Tin saved our home.”

  “They saved the world,” Magnolia mumbled in disbelief.

  * * * * *

  Michael stood at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, blasted by windblown sand. Over three weeks had passed since Les uploaded the virus that shut down the machines, and Timothy had sealed the deal by ramming Discovery into the tower. The defectors could never come back online.

  Michael had never felt such a conflicted wash of emotions. But why now, after saving humanity from extinction? On the way back from a supply run into the destroyed base, he stopped at the graveyard. He knelt at the rows of mounds covering the remains of his friends and the prisoners killed during the battle. Hector, Ted, and Lena were all buried here. Nothing remained of Samson or Les, but Michael had dug a grave for them anyway.

  Behind him stood Kade, Captain Rolo, and the surviving crew of Discovery.

  Eevi, Pedro, and Alfred and his team, along with Sofia, Edgar, and Arlo had joined Michael on the supply mission. Captain Rolo had also brought a small team of men carrying crates from the machine base—mostly medicine, but some weapons, too.

  Arlo limped over and knelt beside Michael. Edgar had a limp as well, but he had lucked out when the drones hammered his sniping position. Sofia was also lucky to be alive.

  Lena hadn’t been so lucky. Losing her had hit Edgar hard, and while he hadn’t spoken much about it, Michael knew he felt guilty for not saving her. Arlo showed the same guilt over losing Ted, one of his best friends.

  The dry wind swept over the ground, whipping up dust off the mounds in front of the four divers.

  Four left.

  A tear rolled down his face. They had lost much, but they had completed their mission, and the fallen divers’ sacrifice would never be forgotten.

  They had won a monumental victory, yet they might never know how X had fared in Aruba, or whether the Vanguard Islands had survived. He and the other survivors were stranded here with no way home.

  A tear fell from the other eye.

  His home and his family were almost half a world away. Somehow, he would get back there even if he had to walk and swim the whole way. Nothing would stop him from seeing his wife and their son.

  He got to his feet as another dust storm swept across the plains outside the walls. Kade led the crew behind the factories, to a road strewn with destroyed defectors. All had gaping holes in their skulls, where Kade and his people had shot them after the virus shut them down—a precaution.

  That day had been a celebration of freedom and the end of an enemy that had all but wiped humanity out.

  The fight against extinction wasn’t over yet, though, and Michael had a feeling it was going to be a long road ahead. Especially for these people.

  At first, he didn’t understand why the machines had even kept them alive, but it was obvious now that they all had worked in the factories.

  They were slaves—labor to help build more machines.

  And some of them had been subjected to worse horrors, turned into machines with human brains and awareness. Michael had blown the factories sky high after the battle, ending the suffering of the tortured beings inside the macabre laboratories.

  Gusting grit buffeted the group as they walked toward the massive blast doors built into the mountain. Timothy and Les had supposed this was the entrance to their command center and mainframe, but it was actually an entrance to a base built here before World War Three.

  The doors screeched apart to reveal a long concrete passage. Several old-world vehicles sat on rusted hubs.

  The group walked over a mile before reaching the secondary entrance. Kade used a key to open the steel door, and Michael helped him push it open.

  The passage narrowed considerably, allowing just enough room for Michael to walk with Kade. He respected the old Hell Diver greatly for keeping his people alive all these years.

  Behind the final door, he saw what they had been promised in the radio intercepts from the machines. A massive vault with high ceilings sprawled out before them. The bunker had its own water supply, farm, and everything else they had on the airships, but without the risk of crashing to the wastes. It was big enough to house two thousand people—about four times the current population.

  Only 510 survivors remained. Many were in such poor health, Michael wasn’t sure they would make it. They needed medicine—the purpose of this scavenging mission.

  Kade directed the men carrying the crates to a packed medical ward.

  Michael slung his laser rifle and took off his helmet as he walked into the open chamber. All ten metal tables were occupied with people eating dinner. Everyone wore dark-blue uniforms from the bunker, with the flag of some old-world government.

  Most of them turned, eyes flitting toward the divers.

  For the first few weeks of living here, the former prisoners had shied away from Michael and his team, but now they were more curious, especially the children.

  Alton, the boy Michael had first seen when breaking through the window of the warehouse, had become his shadow. He was behind Michael now, walking with his tattered stuffed elephant.

  “Commander Everhart,” Alton said politely. “Where are you going?”

  Michael nodded at Edgar to keep going with the others. Then he crouched in front of Alton.

  “I have to go to an important meeting,” he said.

  “Can I come?”

  “No, I’m sorry, bud, but this is about our future—grown-ups only.”

  The boy’s brown eyes swept the high ceilings and then the rooms a
cross the chamber.

  “Are we going to live down here forever?” Alton asked.

  “No,” Michael said. “I’m going to take you someplace where you will see something you’ve never seen before.”

  “The sun?”

  “And the ocean.”

  The kid’s eyebrows rose. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Alton smiled and ran off toward his smiling mother. Michael waved at her, feeling a sense of dread. He was a long way from the Vanguard Islands, and he had promised Layla that he would someday hold their son just as Alton’s mother held him now.

  Michael went through the chamber and took a stairwell two levels down. Another hallway led him to a room that had been designed as a command center. There was radio equipment, computers—everything that generals and high officials needed to monitor a war.

  Alfred and his team were working on several of the computers, but they hadn’t been able to get any of the comms to work.

  Michael went to a conference room and opened the door. Edgar, Arlo, Sofia, Pedro, and Eevi were already seated at an oval table with Kade, Captain Rolo, and several leaders from the other two airships. This was their second planning meeting, and Michael hoped it would go better than the first.

  Across the table sat Captain Linda Fina of the ITC Requiem. The old woman’s wispy hair and wrinkled face reminded Michael of Janga. Fina was the descendent of French ITC soldiers, and she spoke several languages.

  “Commander Everhart,” she said in a croaking voice. “Please have a seat.”

  Anderson Links, a bald man with dark skin and a long beard, had served as a lieutenant under Captain Rolo.

  The other two attendees, a man named Dmitri Vasilev and a woman named Olga Novak, were the only remaining officers of a third airship, the ITC Malenkov. The Russian ship was the third lured here with the promise of the bunker.

  “Let’s get started,” Rolo said. “Commander Everhart, you and your divers have the floor first.”

  Instead of sitting, Michael moved over to a wall of maps. They all had seen them. Everyone in the room knew how far they were from the Vanguard Islands. That was why half the group had argued to stay here.

  After all, this was better than their former living conditions, and they had supplies to last for years.

  But the other half of the group, Michael included, wanted to leave. The question was, would they be allowed to leave with supplies that his opponents thought would be wasted on a doomed endeavor?

  “I know it sounds impossible to reach the Vanguard Islands on foot,” Michael said. “But even if it takes years, I’m willing to take the risk out there in the wastes.”

  Edgar chimed in. “For me, seeing the sun and living somewhere on the surface, the way it used to be, was worth diving for. It was worth dying for, and many of us did die to make it here.”

  “This place isn’t exactly safe,” Arlo said. “And I, for one, would rather spend a few years trying to get home and see the ocean again, than stay in this rabbit hole.”

  Everyone listened while an interpreter explained what the divers were saying. When they finished making their case, Captain Fina spoke.

  “We are grateful you and your team came here to destroy the machines and, ultimately, to save us,” she croaked. “But traveling to the Vanguard Islands on foot is a death sentence.”

  “A poor deployment of resources,” said Lieutenant Links.

  Olga Novak spoke through a translator. “If we believed we could make it to the Vanguard Islands, or knew of places to find vehicles and then boats, we would try, but until then, we agree that staying here is the best course of action.”

  Michael was beginning to lose patience with these people.

  “I say if they want to go, we give them supplies to go,” Kade said. “Also, they have their own from their airship, which was destroyed, mind you, while saving us.”

  The others hashed it out while Michael stood with Sofia, Arlo, and Edgar.

  A rap came on the door, and Alfred stepped inside.

  “Commander, we’re picking something up on the radar,” he said. “You’d better come out here.”

  Michael joined Alfred and his technicians around a radar screen in the adjoining room. A dot pulsed on the green screen, inching closer to the mountain.

  “What is it?” Michael asked.

  “No idea, sir, but it’s definitely heading for the base.”

  “Keep me updated on the internal comms,” Michael said, referring to their headsets that still worked. He motioned for Pedro, Kade, Sofia, Arlo, and Edgar to follow him.

  They met back in the main chamber, trying to avoid scaring any of the people still eating their meal. Several looked up as they passed.

  Michael couldn’t help rushing across the room. This could be some machine that they hadn’t been able to shut down—an aircraft come from across the globe to exterminate them, or a swarm of drones moving as one. If so, they were already dead.

  Thirty minutes later, the team arrived at the blast doors. A thin guard with a buzzed head snored in a chair.

  “Don, wake up!” Kade said.

  The man nearly shot out of his seat. “What?”

  Michael secured his helmet. “Open it,” he said. “I’m going to check this out.”

  Kade gave the guard the order, and the man pushed a lever. The doors screeched open, and sand blew in.

  Michael told Pedro and Arlo to stay behind while Sofia, Kade, and Edgar followed him into the storm. He set off down the road, NVGs on to guide him in the darkness.

  “Alfred, do you copy?” Michael said.

  Static hissed in his helmet.

  “Copy, sir.”

  “You got a location on this aircraft?”

  “Currently at two thousand feet and lowering,” Alfred said. “Looks like it’s about a mile outside the main gates. I’m uploading the coordinates to your HUD.”

  Michael held up a hand, trying to see through the swirling grit that pecked his visor.

  “Come with me,” Kade said.

  Michael and Edgar followed the diver deeper into the base, carefully maneuvering around the debris from Discovery and the demolished tower that had housed the machines’ mainframe.

  Michael looked away from the rubble pile. Les had given his life to stop the machines. But now Michael had a gut feeling this was some sort of machine they didn’t know about.

  The team stopped at a three-story building with a ladder on the backside. Kade went up first, Michael next. The top gave a better view of the skyline above the dust storm.

  Michael finally saw a dot emerge on the minimap in the corner of his HUD subscreen. The aircraft was half a mile away, at a thousand feet.

  The divers crouched and raised their laser rifles, scanning the dark clouds. Whatever was out there was lowering slowly.

  A shape emerged in the cloud cover, then vanished. Michael moved his finger to the trigger.

  Lights suddenly blazed through the darkness. Michael raised his hand to hold fire. That whir sounded familiar.

  Rising from his hunched position, he stared in disbelief at the beetle shape descending over the base. It couldn’t be . . .

  There in the whipping grit, spinning up whirlwinds with its turbofans, hovered the airship he had spent most of his life on. The hull was patched, and fresh paint marked the bow.

  Vanguard.

  The turbofans slowed and shut off as legs extended downward and connected with the dirt.

  “Come on!” Michael yelled.

  He nearly slid down the ladder.

  When his boots hit the ground, he took off running. By the time he reached the launch bay, it had already opened. A platform lowered.

  A figure in a Hell Diver suit emerged on crutches. A more slender Hell Diver followed.

  Michael had stopped a fe
w feet from the platform, his heart about to burst.

  A woman emerged in the launch bay wearing a hazard suit, one hand on her swollen belly.

  “Tin!” she called out.

  Miles, Ton, and Victor all emerged with her, but they parted to allow another diver out of the launch bay. This one was missing an arm.

  Dressed in full armor, the legendary king of the Vanguard Islands was the first to walk down the ramp and set foot on African soil. Michael stared in disbelief.

  After all the horror they had experienced, this seemed too good to be true. In his years as a Hell Diver, he rarely saw happy endings.

  “Is it really you?” Michael asked.

  “You just going to stand there all teary-eyed?” X asked. “I figured you’d be a little happier to see us and this bucket of rust!”

  Epilogue

  Two months after the machines invaded the Vanguard Islands, the rigs were starting to look like home. Not the old version of home on the Hive, or when the sky people first landed and lived with the Cazadores. Repairing the rigs had allowed the people to build a new home. A home inspired by the diverse survivors ferried in on the airship from Mount Kilimanjaro, as well as the survivors from Rio de Janeiro, and all the sky people and Cazadores.

  X stood on the rooftop of the capitol tower with his dog, looking out over the kingdom he was in charge of rebuilding, and all the people whose lives were his responsibility.

  To help the transition with all the new citizens of the islands, each group had been granted its own rig, a place they could make their own. The Cazadores and the sky people had lost significant portions of their populations in the attack from the defectors and in the battles with the skinwalkers.

  With the survivors from multiple locations, the sky people had reached their highest numbers in the past two decades. And while several of the rigs had been damaged beyond repair, there was plenty of room on the others.

  He trained his binoculars on the trading-post rig, still under construction. Scaffolding and ladders clung to the exterior, where a small army of workers helped rebuild the place that brought all these cultures together to share traditional foods, clothing, goods, and ideas handed down from generation to generation since the great war.