Mage Against the Machine

by Shaun Barger

  Blue turned her head, meeting Jem’s eyes, and they got quiet. Jem closed her eyes, and leaned in . . .

  “Jem!” Dr. Blackwell hissed, urgent.

  Biting back a swear, Jem yanked them out of VR, back to the hideous gloom of the real world.

  Outside the window, the flashing blue and red of peacekeeper drones. Down the hall, arguing. Pounding. A scream. Jem tore off the pads from behind hers and Blue’s ears, frantically reapplying the dummy mods as she led them to the bathroom in a rush.

  They huddled uncomfortably on the damp floor against the thick glass of the shower door, which Jem explained would hide their infrared signature from the hallway on the other side of the wall.

  An hour passed, the shouting and screams down the hall going quiet. The peacekeepers left, and the anxious trio went back to the room to try and get some sleep.

  They left early the next day, after Jem finished recalibrating their dummy mods and face nets. The streets were populated with scattered groups of the increasingly few people who still had jobs on their way to work. Though employment was optional, having a job gave citizens various little perks and more luxurious living quarters, even though at this point most didn’t care, so long as they had their VR beds.

  They moved slowly, sticking to side streets until they climbed back down into the tunnels below. After a short trek, they climbed out of a sewer grate into one of Armitage’s gorgeously lush garden parks, which was right beside the cathedral Jem had been instructed to use as a secondary drop point, should the first be compromised.

  Jem eyed the great old church, her stomach boiling with paranoid dread. Faith was in rare supply. Those who were still religious generally attended VR worship, kneeling within immense glass palaces soaring through watercolor cosmos, angelic choruses emanating through their virtual bodies as they surfed upon synthetically induced euphoria.

  The old incense-scented stone of churches like this simply couldn’t compare. Still, despite Jem’s disdain for the outdated religions of old, she found something comforting about cathedrals like this one. The cool, smoky air. The shadowy figures of forgotten saints glowing with the soft light of electric candles in the alcoves along darkened walls. The dusty shafts of colorful light cast down across the center aisle from old stained glass windows.

  Their appointed backup contact sat among the pews, head bowed. A tall, muscular Middle Eastern man with a thick mustache and lustrous black hair. Ezra, according to her coded intel. Though who knew if that was his real name.

  Jem had never met him before—she wasn’t sure if he was a Runner, or one of those mysterious higher-ups in the clandestine cell structure of their Resistance that she sometimes heard about and almost never spoke directly to. But the description matched, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else there. She approached him cautiously, hand hovering by the shielded holster of her pistol.

  He looked up sharply and let out a heavy breath of relief.

  “Wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” he said, shouldering the strap of a large duffel bag as he stood. He looked at Blue, eyes casting down to her stomach, though its bulge was hidden by layers of loose clothing. “We found Thomas. Feared the worst.”

  Ezra slid a heavy iron-bar lock across the immense double doors leading into the cathedral, then led them past the high altar. He lifted a large slab of stone from the floor, revealing a secret hole and a soft-edged ladder seemingly carved into the wall, leading downward.

  His fingers began to glow, a beam shooting from the palm of his hand to paint the smooth-walled little cavern below with gentle light, revealing a slender tunnel leading off to the east.

  He had a prosthetic hand—advanced, final generation stuff. Another military-grade Colladi-Tech relic from before the fall, like Jem’s rare and powerful mods.

  She thought of Eva once more, the horrific images flashing across her mind, unbidden. The last of the Colladi family. Long dead by now.

  “I’ll be taking you through a mouse hole,” he said to Blue and Dr. Blackwell. “You’re safe now. No more scurrying through sewers and parks.”

  “A what?” Blue asked, paling with nervous dread as she stared into the hole.

  “Programmable tunnels,” Ezra explained. “We use a nano-machine substance called smart cement that eats and repurposes stone, building and collapsing tunnels without making any seismic activity that would give away our positions. Rising up to the surface where needed, then sealed back up behind us.”

  He tapped the back of his robotic hand like he was punching in a code, and a series of small ceramic discs lit up against the walls of the chamber below. “Timer’s set. In exactly three minutes those charges will liquefy and expand the earth to seal the tunnel up, like it was never here. So let’s—”

  Neon blue flashed across Ezra’s pupils. He trailed off, words dying on his lips as he turned to Jem, horrified.

  “You were followed.”

  Jem went cold, his words taking a moment to register. She’d been so careful. How? How had they found her?

  Heavy metal fists pounded against the immense double doors, dust from the old wood shaking off in clouds. The gate groaned on its hinges, the combined mechanical strength of multiple Synth droids making the wood creak and strain.

  “Get down there now!” Ezra barked at Blue and the doctor. He dropped the duffel bag and frantically tore it open, revealing a compact battle rifle. “We’ll hold them off, you just—”

  Jem grabbed his wrist. “No. You get them out of here. I’ll hold the point.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, then stopped, nodding.

  Dr. Blackwell had taken Blue’s hand and was trying to pull her away, but Blue yanked her hand from her grasp, resisting.

  “There’s no time!” Ezra said to her. “You need to go now!”

  Blue looked at him, and then at Jem, wide-eyed. “But what about—”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Jem assured her, and it was a lie, and it was obvious that Blue knew it was a lie, but before she could argue Jem grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into a kiss.

  Jem pulled away from the stunned woman and forced herself to smile. “Now go.”

  Eyes glittering with tears, Blue could only nod.

  “Thank you, Jem,” Dr. Blackwell said. “For everything.”

  Jem gave the doctor one final salute, then turned to face the Synth.

  It had always been inevitable, she supposed. An ending like this. She’d do what she had to.

  But they’d never take her alive.

  As Ezra, Blue, and the doctor descended behind her, Jem took stock of the provided weaponry with urgent mechanical efficiency: A compact battle rifle, two shock grenades, three multispectrum blocking smoke canisters, and a dozen plastic explosives with timers and a single remote detonator.

  Jem crouched behind the pews farthest from the doors, rifle and duffel straps slung across her shoulders. She put in a pair of acoustic filtering earplugs, took a deep breath, and propped the barrel of her rifle on the pew.

  The pounding on the door ceased, going silent.

  A deadly calm settled over her. Only two more minutes till the mouse hole sealing charges detonated.

  The stained glass over the doors exploded into a thousand colorful shards as a flock of drones the size of small dogs flooded into the cathedral.

  She fired off five shots in quick succession, bracing herself against the painful recoil as she destroyed four drones and winged the fifth. She ducked for cover behind the pew and tossed a smoke canister down the center aisle as they retaliated with crackling electric slugs.

  Half of the remaining drones hovered before the shattered window, firing a cascade of suppressing fire down at her while the others zipped down to the locked doors to pull at the heavy bolts with slender segmented tentacles.

  Jem sprinted low to the side, letting the rifle hang loose from its shoulder strap as she took a shock grenade in hand and twisted it to set the timer. She calculated the trajectory and exact time f
or delay faster and more accurately than any normal human ever could, then flung it toward the distant suppressing drones.

  It exploded in their midst with a black cloud crackling with webs of jagged electric blue like a miniature thundercloud, and the now disabled drones plummeted like stones to smash down below.

  In that instant Jem rose up from cover and shot the remaining drones that were pulling at the locks before they could open the door or return fire.

  She tossed out another smoke canister to shield her path as she ran along the western wall past the antique wooden saints, pressing plastic explosives against columns and other quickly calculated structural weak points.

  The explosives were timed, set to go off right after Ezra’s charges in exactly one more minute.

  There was a series of small, crackling explosions, and with a groan, the immense double doors collapsed.

  She tossed her final smoke canister and shock grenade out into the squad of tactical peacekeeper droids rushing in with pulsing laser spheres held out at the end of slender black arms.

  Jem dove across the aisle into a set of pews as the shock grenade detonated, frying the PKs that scattered too slowly to avoid the blast zone.

  Those that hadn’t been fried fired laser blasts at her shadowy silhouette amid the smoke in the instant she crossed, the heat of one shot passing over her head so close that she could feel her curls smoldering.

  Though Jem was just as blind in the smoke as the droids were, an augmented reality overlay allowed her to see everything clearly, as it had been before the smoke screen—the briefly viewed PKs noted and marked in neon green with position of origin and estimated movement trajectory giving her a much-needed advantage.

  She sprinted low through choking smoke to go place the final explosives across the eastern side of the cathedral, but they were closing in on her fast, blind sweeps of laser fire crisscrossing methodically in her approximate direction, invisible lines boiling gaps through the smoke in angled cuts and tracing lines of ember across the wooden saints and pews.

  Jem peered around a column and cracked off another shot, destroying another of the PKs, but then a superheated pulse split her rifle in half, blistering her arms as she dropped it and fell back with a muffled scream.

  She ducked out from the column with her pistol drawn from the hidden holster and aimed at the pulsing spheres of laser cannons that give away the droid’s positions in the smoke.

  Two shots fired, two spheres disabled, and then Jem disappeared back into the smoke, moving along the wall amid methodical lancing patterns of murderous heat she could only just barely dodge for their mechanical predictability.

  The smoke was thinning, and she could make out four figures closing in on her, only two of which still had functioning laser spheres. She fired two shots into the CPU of the first, then she and the other PK fired at the same time. Fluid and circuitry exploded from the side of its face as an agonizing needle of invisible light seared through her shoulder, sending out a spray of blood against the wooden saint behind her.

  Jem screamed, clutching her wound as the final two droids chased after her with eerily silent grace, clawed robotic hands reaching out to take her.

  Thirty more seconds.

  She unloaded the last of her pistol’s bullets into the first, but her shots were messy, and the droid took her by the wounded arm with crushing strength. She pulled out her EMP blaster with a snarl and fired one shot into its face. It crackled, twitching, but remained functional as it closed its hand, crushing the bone. She howled with agony and fired another blast, frying it completely this time.

  Sobbing, she rolled away before it could collapse on her, kicking at it. Scrambling to her feet she limped, arm hanging crooked and bloody as she fled from the last approaching PK.

  “I see you, Jemma Burton,” came a sophisticated, melodic voice that gripped her with icy tendrils of paralyzing fear. “Your primitive little mask doesn’t fool me.”

  Armitage.

  It approached with sadistic slowness as she placed the final explosive. She sobbed, limping away, too injured to run to the mouse hole as she struggled to flee from that horrible voice.

  “Where are you going, Jemma?” Armitage said through the final Synth peacekeeper. “Why all the fuss? We’ve heard so much about you—I just want to talk. Come on, don’t run. We have a special room in Torment saved just for you. Don’t you want to see it?”

  Fifteen seconds.

  She gripped the altar with bloody hands as she pulled past it. Cold metal fingers brushed against her neck as Armitage grabbed her by the back of her collar, but she pulled free of the coat and tumbled into the hole.

  Ten.

  She landed hard on the stone below, her ankle turning sideways with a horrible crunch and she couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, and the PK was peering down at her with that blank plastic face and—

  Its head exploded as two flashes of muzzle fire erupted from the darkness of the tunnel, and the disabled Synth slumped down, tumbling into the hole to land beside her.

  The ceramic discs began to whine.

  “I’ve got you!” Ezra shouted over the piercing noise as he slung the wounded Jem over his shoulders. “Came back once I showed the others where to go, but we—”

  The walls of the cavern boiled, closing in fast, and Ezra lunged sideways into the tunnel to pass through the damp crevice the instant before it sealed up.

  He ran, panting, as the tunnel collapsed with a foam that thickened to slurry, pouring after them in a sickly gray wave, too fast, and then the earth shook as the plastic explosives detonated overhead, the church caving in on itself, and Ezra stumbled, almost dropping her, and the earth was closing in, the earth was closing in!

  Wet clay mist choked Jem’s lungs, and she could no longer see, no longer feel, and—

  III.

  THE DOOR IN THE LIBRARY

  Nikolai sat in a corner booth of the shittiest bar in New Damascus, where he tried desperately not to think about how complicated every aspect of his life had suddenly become.

  Hazeal, and the newly mysterious circumstances of his mother’s death.

  The Moonwatch insignia, and the ugly secrets it would supposedly unveil.

  The woman in the revolver and the spell she’d given him with a touch of her red-gloved hand. Even now, it pulsed seductively at the threshold of casting. But Nikolai had no way to know if the spell would work as promised, of if he’d even be able to control such an advanced weave.

  Most of all, though, Nikolai couldn’t stop thinking about Ilyana.

  She was late, as usual. Ilyana was always late when it came to anything social, if she didn’t just flake entirely.

  Normally Nik just shrugged off the pang of disappointment he always felt when he realized she would be a no-show. But suddenly he found it difficult to be so cavalier about her absence.

  Two years of slow-building friendship and flirtation. Two years of countless mess hall meals and sparring sessions and tutoring hangs that always ended up being more hang than tutorial.

  All the drunken nights out dancing till the witching hour, followed by exhausted early-morning shifts partnering up on the daily grunt work of scanning sectors of the New Damascus Dome for thinning in the Veil.

  An otherwise monotonous job made into the highlight of Nikolai’s day by their stolen moments sharing coffee and cigarettes, feet dangling over the sides of their hovering skyhorns as they watched the illusory sun rise over the capitol city. Their impromptu races, invisibly cutting through the clouds at certifiably illegal speeds while they howled like maniacs.

  Now were they on the verge of becoming something more?

  Smothering a sigh, Nikolai took a long draw from the particularly mediocre honeybrew he’d made the mistake of ordering—his eyes unable to resist drifting over the foamy lip of the glass to check the hideous antique cuckoo clock behind the bar for the millionth or so time.

  A hand grabbed Nikolai’s shoulder—strong, slender fingers digging
painfully through the cloth of his shirt.

  “Boo.”

  Nikolai managed not to flinch, hiding his surprise as he turned to find Ilyana, pursing her lips wide-eyed in a playful show of false innocence.

  She moved with a deadly grace, her steps absolutely silent. Nikolai could never hear her coming. She wasn’t wearing her uniform tonight. Instead she was dressed in elaborate, luminescent motley—like some sort of electric harlequin.

  He watched her as she slid into the booth opposite.

  “One day somebody’s going to sneak up on me with actual violent intent,” he said. “And I’m just going to smile at them like a dumbass, thinking it’s you.”

  “Maybe it will be me,” Ilyana said, lounging in her booth. “Maybe this is an elaborate, long-game ruse to put you at ease until . . .” She drew her ruby blade with a flourish, face pulled back into a parody of murderous rage as she pantomimed stabbing him.

  Ilyana was always lounging. Before, Nikolai had seen it as a show of confidence. Now he looked deeper and noticed the subtle tightness around her eyes, the frequency with which she shifted around, readjusting.

  It wasn’t that she was comfortable in any setting, he realized. She was never comfortable at all.

  Ilyana stopped midstab and squinted at him, leaning forward. “Wow, wow, wow,” she said, searching the empty space directly over Nikolai’s head. “Why the long face? Did the little storm cloud that follows you around finally ditch you for being too much of a bummer?”

  Nikolai took a swig of his drink in an attempt to wash away the tension in his chest. “Just thinking about what happened. Everything feels so . . . complicated, all of a sudden. You know?”

  He watched her face, trying to appear casual as he searched for any sign that the specific complication he was referring to might be weighing on her mind as well.

  Ilyana lit up a black-papered cigarette at the end of a long-stemmed holder. She took a deep draw and exhaled a stream of pale smoke, features smooth with casual indifference.

  “You worry too much,” she said.

  Nikolai frowned, flooded with a fresh rush of anxiety as the waiter approached. Though already a few drinks in, Nik ordered another honeybrew. Ilyana asked for a rocks glass, full of ice.