Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1)

by Justin DePaoli

  “Ivan,” he whispered.

  No response. Leon assumed him dead.

  The clacking of metal feet spurred the hairs on his neck to attention. I have to get out of here.

  Searching with one hand, he found the seatbelt buckle and pressed it. The belt unfastened but didn’t fully retract. Probably due to damage within the retractor housing. But it was loose enough. The head restraints, however, proved a more difficult problem.

  He clawed at the cage in silent desperation, praying his fingers would find a button. A clasp. A release.

  The march of heavy metal feet droned near, a drumming that made Leon slip ever so slowly away from the safety of calmness. His heart thrashed against his breastbone, and his fingers quivered.

  Damn the wound—he needed to mobilize every effort to get out of this forsaken ship. With both hands tugging at the cage that immobilized his neck, he gasped at what felt like splintered shards of superheated glass burrowing deeper into his forearm.

  Come on, come on, you bastard!

  He reached behind, slapping at the headrest. There, on either side of the cushion were two buckles. He pressed them at the same time and the cage disengaged.

  Gasping, he went for the rifle between his legs, then climbed out of the broken windshield. He crawled on his stomach and knees and elbows until he reached a crumbled half wall.

  Amid the approach of Machines, he heard the echoes of a familiar voice.

  “I do know how to use it. And I will.”

  Orissa, thought Leon. You never were a very good liar. He touched his waist, thankful to still have his belt that was fully equipped with grenades and four lock-on knives. Among the ordinances were two thermal grenades, one electromagnetic pulse grenade, and a single quantum disruptor.

  “I think,” said another voice—one that was weathered and frail, “if that were true, my friends here would look of smoke and smell of burnt conduit.” He paused, then announced with booming authority, “Seize her. And do not harm her.”

  Shit shit shit.

  Leon sprang up at the same time the first of many dozen Machines hopped onto the roof of the crashed Skymmer. It was, of course, a Prime. The others were also Primes, along with a couple Deadeyes and a handful of ballistics.

  Just as the rotary gun spun up, Leon pulled the pin of the electromagnetic pulse grenade and chucked it with his good hand. It hit a Prime right in its blue eye before unleashing an explosive and colorful electrical current that induced seizures into each and every Machine in view.

  Leon ran and leaped onto the top of the Skymmer, pulling himself up over fallen Machines. Blindly, he threw a thermal grenade ahead. It detonated with a ringing in his ears. He threw the second, then scrambled to his feet, aiming down the scope of his rifle.

  It was only because of the fanning flames that he could see down the hallway, and only because of the emittance of a drone’s light he could see to the very end.

  Orissa stood there, Droll at her side. She had her arm cocked back, fisting the electromagnetic pulse shield.

  Machines raced toward her.

  She’s going to throw it at them, Leon thought. That won’t do a damn thing. According to the data provided via the scope, she was .35 miles away—a small enough distance that he could swap the magnetic targeting for manual and get a good shot in if that shot was intended to hit her.

  He needed to drill a round straight into the electromagnetic pulse shield, a considerably smaller and soon-to-be moving target.

  Deadeyes. There were Deadeyes among those he’d felled with the electromagnetic pulse grenade. He clicked on the flashlight to his rifle and swept it across the top of the Skymmer. A hefty rifle with a massive barrel lay a few feet away. He dropped his own and went for it, prying it from the metal corpse of a Deadeye.

  The damn thing must have weighed forty pounds. He heaved it into position, stock against his shoulder, and peered down the scope. The information feedback was clearly intended for Machines, not men. Distance and wind and drop-off were conveyed with nonsensical numbers and symbols.

  But that was just fine. He didn’t need modern technology to know how to operate a sniper rifle. It helped, sure, but he had the training. He had the knowledge. It was the one thing that hadn’t been taken away from him.

  He stood straight, stood tall, stood unmoving like a statue. Just as Orissa reared back to chuck the shield at the Machines bearing down on her, Leon held his breath, applied the slightest pressure to the trigger.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Two shots and only one came from Leon’s gun.

  Something struck him in the head. He collapsed with a ringing in his ears and a strange absence of pain. Blackness crowded his vision and the last sounds he heard were those of thousands of Machines crumbling in unison.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The pressure around Leon’s arm continued to tighten as a series of beeps droned from nearby. The tension eased suddenly, a deflating of a cuff wrapped around his bicep.

  He struggled to open his eyes, the inertia of unconsciousness not one to quickly recede. Harsh light stabbed into his bleary vision, but with every blink it seemed to soften.

  Where am I?

  A ceiling of cold gray stone stared back at him, inset with tube lights. He was lying in a bed of white sheets, naked from the waist up. Numerous apparatuses had been connected to him, linked from Machines that showed medical jargon and data. An IV had been threaded into a vein in his right arm, and his left was heavily bandaged, covering up the injury he’d suffered.

  His head felt heavy and constricted. A cautious touch of his temple revealed another bandage.

  “Mister Imus. It has been… an experience.”

  Leon sat up with a groan. Across from him, propped up in an identical bed, was a man he hadn’t expected to see again. “I wondered if I’d gone to hell or heaven when I woke up. Clearly it’s hell.”

  Ivan Kravst managed a smirk despite the stitches holding half his face together. “Hell of a ride we took, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Where am I? Where’s Orissa? Where—”

  “We are, miraculously, safe. For now. It seems you’re a hero, Mister Imus. A hero! Imagine.”

  “The Machines are… they’re gone?”

  Ivan glanced at the blood pressure cuff around his arm as it inflated. “Within this facility they are. You’re a fine shot, from what I understand.”

  This is real, then, thought Leon. I’m not being held as a hostage by Machines, pumped full of hallucinatory drugs. My shot landed. He could’ve laughed, if he didn’t feel like he was still in the jaws of Death.

  “Thought you were dead, Ivan.”

  “As did I. Imagine my surprise when I woke up here, these monitors yelling at me if my blood pressure dropped too low. That drone friend of yours—and others like him—are responsible for fixing this place up.”

  “Clovis? You’re talking about Clovis?”

  Wagging a splinted finger, Ivan said, “That’s the one. Like I said, there are some others too. They all look the same, you know?”

  Others? He had to be mistaken. There could only be Droll and Clovis. No other haais had crossed the ocean.

  “I remember Clovis bailing before we entered this place,” said Leon. “How’d he get in here if the EMP shield’s activated?”

  “The damn thing’s not an anchor! It’s movable by design. At the moment, Miss Servoni is keeping the shield near the entrance so that the flying drones can operate in here peacefully while still keeping the Machines at bay. Did you know there is seawater pressing on these walls? Our little flying mechanical friends are quite the busybodies in keeping that water at bay. Lots of repairs to be done, anodes to replace, walls to—well, you get the point. Should the ocean not swallow us whole, I daresay we might have an opportunity here, Mister Imus! If what Miss Servoni prattles on about while standing at your beside isn’t nonsense.”

  Leon felt a warmth expand in his chest. “You’ve seen her, then?”

>   “Sure. She comes by every night. Talked to your unconscious ass till I don’t know what time in the morning. I kindly asked her to escort herself out so that I might get some sleep.”

  Leon smiled at that. She’s saved my life twice. I’m really going to owe her now.

  “I don’t say this sort of thing much, Mister Imus. But you have yourself a fine woman. Miss Servoni has all the brilliance of her mother without any of her… let us say, less redeeming qualities. Such as—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” said Leon. “Her mother is being used by the Machines. We had an encounter with her. She has a bionic eye, talks madly about Orissa, blaming her for the Rise. Whatever sins Rebecca might have committed—let them stay buried, will you? Don’t tell Orissa.”

  The line of Leon’s mouth went taut. “Well, Mister Imus, I do not despise Rebecca Servoni. I hate to hear she is now property of the Machines. No one, save perhaps Varugus, deserves that fate. I will be silent about this matter; consider it a favor paid for freeing me from the torture of a consciousness server.”

  “I wouldn’t be so thankful for that yet,” said Leon. “We still have a whole hell of a lot of Machines to take care of.”

  Ivan grinned, delight in his eyes. “And take care of them we will. I have waited a very long time for this moment.”

  Orissa sat at a ramshackle metal desk with flimsy black legs. She clacked away at her laptop, pausing intermittently to drink cold coffee from a mug she’d had to scrub for three days straight to rid the mold from.

  The room was a shade darker than she preferred, the only light coming from a lamp whose off-and-on again electricity made the bulb flicker madly every few minutes.

  It wasn’t much of an office to speak of, but it was her own space—something Orissa hadn’t had since freeing Leon from the Machines. The laptop wasn’t much, either, an old thing she’d found while living in the wilds and scouring the vestiges of humanity. It was, however, brand new, when she plucked it, still unopened in its Faraday cage.

  Letter after letter, word after word, filled the page as her fingers pounded away effortlessly. She’d found journaling helped coalesce her thoughts, made it easier to process them.

  “Doctor Servoni.” Clovis’s voice. “Major General Imus is awake. He is in good spirits.”

  Suddenly her typing ceased, and the cursor blinked on the page. Whatever word was to come next she couldn’t remember.

  She took another sip of coffee. It seemed to have no effect on her parched throat.

  “Thank you, Clovis,” Orissa said quietly.

  She’d been waiting for this moment, hoping and praying it would actually come—that she wouldn’t be sitting here one day only for Clovis to whir his way in and announce Leon had significant and irreparable brain damage.

  But now that the moment had come, she found herself immobilized by fear. Fear of what, exactly, she couldn’t say. But she knew the feeling well, and she also knew fear didn’t always have its reasons for arriving. She wouldn’t try to guess them now.

  She downed the rest of her coffee, frowning at the sludge it left behind. The beans had expired four hundred years ago, but they had been kept frozen in the embryotic chamber—along with other goods—so they were free of mold and bacteria. And they seemed to do the job of keeping her alert when she desired.

  Orissa stood, closed her laptop, and willed herself around. Leon’s face… that jaw hewn from the mountains themselves… those eyes reflecting pools of amber… oh, how she’d wanted to see that lovely face of his. So why wasn’t she running to him?

  Why was she rooted in the spot?

  What will I say to him? she wondered. He’d saved her life. Saved humanity, as it were. And sure, she helped. Without her coming here, her stalling of the apparent cloned Mattias Varugus, none of this would have been possible. She couldn’t help feel, however, that her part had been magnitudes smaller than Leon’s.

  How could she put into words how much his actions meant to her? Emotions in times like these were always so much bigger than words.

  I guess I know what I’m afraid of. She swallowed, took in a breath, and pushed herself onward. If she’d not run, she’d damn well walk to him, one foot in front of the other. That’s all it ever took.

  She walked into the openness of the main chamber and headed for the newly fashioned hospital wing that she had worked tirelessly to clear of debris and replace with beds and medical equipment scavenged from elsewhere in the facility.

  Haais fluttered about, an army of drones that never slept. For now, they were working on routing power from the RTGs buried throughout the facility. They’d done a good job so far, restoring 70% of electricity, but its consistency was flaky. Sometimes the lights would stay on, sometimes they’d flicker, and sometimes they’d go dark for hours.

  It was a work in progress. This whole place was.

  She climbed a set of stairs to the third floor. At the end of a hallway, Clovis waited for her before a set of two doors.

  “Doctor Servoni,” greeted the drone. “Would you like me to escort Mister Kravst to another location for now?”

  “If you could, that would be great.”

  “Of course. Mister Kravst is on the mend. I suspect he’ll be able to walk with minimal assistance in one week’s time.”

  Orissa waited outside while Clovis went in and fetched the dreadful Ivan Kravst—and oh how dreadful he was, if not in appearance then certainly in personality.

  A hospital bed punched through the doors, guided by Clovis’s three-fingered hand on the rear rail.

  “Doctor Servoni!” cried Ivan. “It has been a few days, hasn’t it?”

  She ignored him, having just seen him yesterday evening during her daily check-up of Leon.

  “Of course, of course! I’m nothing in your eyes.” His voice was fleeting as Clovis pushed him down the hall. “Or am I too much, I wonder?”

  Ivan had told Orissa of Leon’s daring rescue. She wasn’t sure if she believed it. He could well be another copy of a man who long ago died. Just like Mattias Varugus.

  Unlike Varugus, however, Ivan seemed to be on the side of humanity. For all of her dislike of that man, she knew without him, Leon wouldn’t be here. It was RayTech’s famed ship that brought him across the ocean.

  That returned him to her.

  And it was a Deadeye’s bullet that nearly took him away.

  Orissa washed a hand down her face. Okay, she told herself, and inhaled deeply. She entered the hospital with her eyes at her feet, a cauldron of emotions feasting on her insides.

  “Hot damn. Who is that fine woman?”

  Humor was not among those emotions, but she found herself laughing at Leon’s stupid remarks. She stopped short of his bed, chewing at her bottom lip as she took in the sight of him—bandaged head, bloodied arm and all.

  “You are a stupid, stupid man.”

  He held up a finger. “But a man nonetheless.”

  She shook her head and strode to his side. Orissa bent down and kissed his cheek. Part of her wanted more, but not now. Now wasn’t the time.

  “One more near death experience, Leon Imus, and I’ll kill you myself.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t doubt it. So… what the hell happened? I mean everything, Orissa. I want to hear it all.”

  She glanced around the room. Spotting a chair whose fabric had been stripped to the plastic backing, she pulled it over to Leon’s beside and had a seat, resting her hand atop the rail.

  He put his over hers. The spark of his touch, the warmth of his fingers, felt like bolts of electricity shooting into her heart. She hoped her gasp wasn’t as audible as it felt.

  “Everything?” she asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I guess you deserve that.” She smiled and started on what she hoped would be a succinct summary of the events that had passed.

  She told him of her arrival here, the finding of embryos and the embryotic hatchery. She told him of her and Droll’s inability to gain acc
ess to those embryos, and that, she said, was when thousands of Machines converged on her. Along with a clone of Doctor Varugus, who possessed a key granting entry to the embryonic chamber.

  “I remember hearing a man… you mean to tell me that was Varugus? Or, I guess, a clone of him? What… how…?” He snorted. “I don’t even know how to ask the question I want.”

  “I don’t think I would have many answers for you. He didn’t say much.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Orissa shook her head. “He probably wants to be. But no. He’s being held in a prison cell. They had a fully functional jail here, you know?”

  “Yeah? What do you think of this place? Horrifying, isn’t it?”

  That was one word for it. Another, although Leon might not agree, was fascinating. “The embryos are still intact. Droll said—“

  “Hold on,” interrupted Leon. “What about Droll? Where is he?”

  “The EMP blast deactivated him, but Clovis says the Vaunton cube housing of haais is surrounded by a Faraday cage, preventing their destruction. Clovis had him taken to one of the haais islands to be rebuilt. Many of the haais have already come here. The others will arrive later. They’re very helpful.”

  Leon stroked the top of her hand with his finger, pimpling the back of her neck.

  “I’m glad he’s okay, for the most part. I grew to like that little drone.” He sniffed. “Those embryos, they’re viable?”

  Orissa nodded. “The embryonic chamber was surrounded in an extremely thick Faraday cage. So too was the hatchery. Until I shattered it.”

  Leon winced. “But the Machines in there are able to be repaired?”

  “Clovis thinks so. There’s the question of how diverse the genetic material of the embryos are, but I guess that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it.”

  Leon hummed in agreement. “So there’s a way to bring humanity back from extinction after all.”

  “You were right.” She squeezed his hand.

  His eyes fell to the sheets covering his body, then swiveled back her way. “Machines are still out there. And this place isn’t protected from mylosynicide warheads.”