Assault or Attrition (27 page)

“That is up to
you...although this situation is drawing to a close, and there is
no need to keep up appearances. I know – and the world knows – what
you desire, and it is not financial gain.” Valeriya’s crystal-blue
eyes flicked towards me, and back to Brynja. “He does not care for
you. Not the way you want him to.”

“What is she
talking about?” Peyton whispered.

I shot her a
glance and her eyes caught mine. My mouth opened, though I couldn’t
produce a word. It was too much to explain, and this wasn’t the
time. I shrugged and shook my head slowly, as if I was as confused
by Valeriya’s statement as she was.

Peyton frosted
over, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

“The Red Army
will welcome you with open arms,” Valeriya said warmly. “Defect,
Brynja. Join us, and you will have a chance to avoid The Nightmare.
Avoid the pain and suffering of a slow, agonizing death.” She
motioned dismissively towards Peyton and I. “You are not a part of
this group, and never will be. There is no need to die with
them.”

Brynja,
surprisingly, remained silent. She stood and stepped back, gazing
off into the middle distance.

“We’re not for
sale,” McGarrity interjected, drawing Valeriya’s attention. “And
there’s
nothing
you can throw at me that I can’t crush.”

Valeriya
actually smiled. “You seem amused, Steven McGarrity – as if this is
a game. This ‘Spiral’ of Cameron Frost’s...it has been too easy for
your liking?”

He barked out a
caustic laugh. “This shit has been a walk in the park. I’d actually
appreciate a real challenge; something to give the home viewers a
little thrill.” He motioned to nowhere in particular, playing to
the simulcast audience that was watching. We had no idea where the
micro-cameras were located, though we assumed they could be almost
anywhere. He was likely gesturing towards at least one of them.

“The Spiral,”
Valeriya explained, “is locked into a set of pre-programmed events,
or so I am told. I cannot stop the pods from arriving.” Her
expression darkened, and the tiny smile vanished from her lips.
“But I can add some more ‘excitement’, since that is what you
desire.”

He nodded,
waving her forward with both hands. “Bring it on, bitch.”

I stomped
towards McGarrity and thrust my palm into his shoulder, knocking
him off balance. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” I screamed. “She’s
not fucking around here!”

“No,” Valeriya
said flatly. “I truly am not.”

His smile only
widened. McGarrity opened his hands, and with a flash of light the
broadsword burst back to life, extending six feet into the air. He
tightened his grip around the hilt and swung it in a figure-eight
pattern. “Ready when you are.”

Valeriya’s
hologram reached forward, and her hand mimed the motion of
adjusting a dial and pressing a keypad. Her body was being mapped,
and projected in front of us as if she was standing just a few feet
away, though her surroundings were effectively invisible. Whatever
she was doing in The Spiral’s control room was a mystery to us. At
least for a moment.

The ceiling –
which was essentially one enormous blue light bulb that stretched
the length of the entire level – transformed from a brilliant
powder blue to a deep, velvety black. We were immersed in a
time-lapse video, where the day drifted into night in a matter of
seconds; twinkling stars emerged from the darkness of space, and a
crescent moon floated into the cloudless sky. From noon to midnight
with the touch of a button.

McGarrity’s
sword flickered and dimmed. It remained intact but lost its
brilliant shine. His smile, and his cocky demeanor, lost their
shimmer just as quickly.

Valeriya turned
and spoke to someone we were unable to see – possibly a technician
assisting her in the Spiral’s control room. She instructed that she
would like to release the remaining units, and to ensure the facial
recognition scanners were operational. She had to ensure that I was
accurately mapped – she didn’t want me killed during the
operation.

“Take the
offer,” I said to Brynja. “Take it and get out of here now, before
it’s too late.”

“And leave you
here to die?” she shouted. “You’re smarter than this. Her offer is
bullshit and you know it. She’ll just torture and kill me the
second I hit the surface.”

Valeriya’s
hologram stepped between us, gazing up at Brynja. Her eyes
reflected an innocence that reminded me for a brief moment that she
was still just a child. “Whatever you plan on doing, Brynja, you
should do it now. My offer stands for only a few more seconds.”
Something in her tone almost made me believe her. Or in the moment,
my brain ignored the ‘tells’ that I’d memorized, and used to read
people’s intentions – because I
wanted
to believe her. To
believe that I could save Brynja by sending her up to the
surface.

“Matty,” Peyton
said in a thin, panicked voice. “You
need
to see this.”

I spun to see
her pointing off into the distance. Her index finger was extended
towards the darkness just beyond the castle walls. It was a pair of
luminous red lights, rapidly approaching.

“It is too
late,” Valeriya said, shaking her head slowly. “For all of you. I
know that you are a non-believer, Matthew Moxon. But if anyone else
believes in a higher power, this would be the time to make your
peace.” And with those words her hologram winked off, further
darkening the area around us. Her projection had been emitting a
soft light that illuminated the grassy knoll, and now I stood in
relative darkness with Peyton, Brynja, McGarrity and Melvin, who
was bearing his considerable incisors at the approaching
lights.

The glowing
orbs brightened, and were joined by another pair in the distance.
And another. And then another. And then dozens more appeared, and
began to approach from behind us, and on either side.

The artificial
moon that cast a pale glow on the courtyard began to reveal the
origins of the lights as they drew closer. They were the eyes of
Fudō units. A hundred of them, hovering over the castle walls,
closing in on every side.

In unison, each
one of them drew their swords.

The pods
hadn’t even begun to surface.
Registering each of us and
climbing aboard would take minutes – three, maybe four.
Optimistically, we had ninety seconds before the Fudō bots were on
the ground, slicing away at everything that moved.

I loaded a
shell into my grenade launcher and saw Peyton crossing herself,
slowly moving her hand from her forehead to her navel, then from
one shoulder to the other.

“Is this a good
time to start praying?” McGarrity asked.

“Feel free,” I
shrugged. “It can’t hurt.” It couldn’t help either, but I chose to
keep that sentiment to myself.

People can
believe whatever they want – Heaven, Hell, angels, gods – if it
gives you a reason to get up in the morning or helps you sleep at
night, then it’s energy well spent. But if someone wants to wax
intellectual about a divine creator who is by all accounts
infallible, I always had the same response: the universe’s one and
only absolute is math. Which, coincidentally, was the only
all-powerful force that could help us escape our current
situation.

“How many of
these things can we take out with only two rockets?” Brynja asked,
her eyes flicking anxiously between my grenade launcher and the
approaching bots.

She was asking
the wrong question. “You should be asking how many rockets it’ll
take to blast a hole in the roof above us.”

“We’re at the
center of this level,” Peyton said, craning her neck towards the
artificial constellations clustered overhead. “Above us is a
lake
.”

I tilted the
launcher into the air. “Not for long.”

“You can’t be
serious,” McGarrity shouted.

“These things
are first gen,” I explained. “Which means they’re not waterproof.
It’s why there’s barely a drop of water on this level.” I had spent
days poring over every single page of research on the Fudō armor;
from hand-written notes to post-launch reports. Frost’s ambitions
to make the exoskeletons underwater and deep-space compatible were
well documented, and he was preparing for a second-generation
manufacturing run next year. Saturating these units with enough
water – a few hundred million gallons, give or take – could be
enough to short-circuit them. It was insane, even by the standard
set by my previous plans, but at the moment it was our best shot at
survival.

“Okay, we drown
them.” Peyton said breathlessly. “Then what?”

“We swim to the
pods. Register
now.
”

As everyone
pressed their palms into the obelisk and identified themselves, I
extracted the breathing devices I’d found in the rainforest level.
“We stick close and take turns so we always have enough
oxygen.”

“Twenty
seconds,” McGarrity shouted, motioning at the horde of approaching
Fudō units that had touched down on the edge of the Zen garden.
They were now marching lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder, forming a
nearly seven-foot wall of armored mechanical terror. “Without light
I’ve only got a handful of swipes left with this thing,” he
added.

As the pods
slowly emerged from the grass I aimed towards the heavens,
carefully calculating the center-most point of the level (the spot
where the most weight would be concentrated from the enormous body
of water.) I fired. An explosive round burst from the launcher and
whistled towards the sky, connecting with the center of the roof.
Glass shattered and mortar fell.

“Ten seconds,”
McGarrity shouted, stepping to the perimeter of the knoll with his
sword drawn back.

Melvin roared
out a stream of flames that did nothing to halt the marching
phalanx.

My second shell
hit its mark, blasting an even larger crater into the ceiling; it
had blasted away significant amounts of the reinforcement, allowing
a mild drizzle to rain down through a crack. The ceiling was
audibly moaning, buckling as if on the verge of collapse, but it
remained intact.

This was it. My
calculations were off – I’d overestimated how many gallons of water
were in the lake above, or the ceiling was reinforced more heavily
that I’d anticipated...a hundred possibilities blistered through my
synapses, but in the end it didn’t matter. I was dead. Most of us
were. The way to minimize our losses was to get as many people
aboard the pods as possible, and hope the Fudō bots didn’t finish
us all amidst the chaos.

The first of
the pods burst through the grass, and I pushed Peyton towards it,
shouting for her to go. She clasped my hand, squeezing it tight,
and her wide, panic-stricken eyes locked onto mine. There was
nothing I could say that would have given her comfort in that
moment – I’d lied to her enough, and adding one more to the list
wasn’t going to calm her nerves. I nodded reassuringly before she
turned and boarded the cylindrical transport.

The robots were
just beyond striking distance when a sudden rush of wind pressed at
my back, nearly toppling me over. It was the force of Melvin taking
flight. The manticore’s dark wings expanded and flapped, pushing
him directly towards the source of the spattering rain – with
McGarrity riding his back.

The Fudō units
followed them like moths to a flame. Plumes of smoke burst from
their heels and they ascended as one, swarming close behind.

McGarrity never
looked back. Once he reached the ceiling he leaped from Melvin’s
back, using the final swipe of his broadsword to open the
precarious fissure. The slice was surgical. A violent tidal wave
exploded from the opening, raining down like a broken water
main.

When the
ceiling burst the Manticore went into a steep dive, riding the
crest of the wave. McGarrity gripped his mane with both fists,
barely maintaining control during the descent.

Melvin landed
just a fraction before the impact. His dragon wings expanded and
acted as a canopy, shielding the pods and everyone beneath from the
torrents of water and debris. He bellowed in pain when his head,
back and wings bore the brunt of the shower.

The brutal
downpour was over in a heartbeat; I blinked, and when my eyes
snapped open there was darkness. The water flooded in on every
side, and suddenly I was thrashed into a powerful undertow, flipped
and tossed, bouncing along the floor of the rock garden.

Struggling
against the current, I reached for my breathing unit and cupped it
over my nose and mouth, sucking in the oxygen. For a while longer –
ten seconds, a minute...it was impossible to tell – I watched
helplessly through the darkness, unaware of my proximity to the
grassy knoll and the remaining pods. In the absence of light my
armor illuminated: its angular blue lines glowed brightly,
providing me a measure of visibility. In the surrounding area I
spotted pairs of red lights flickering and fading; the Fudō units
were sinking, hitting the Zen garden like anchors tumbling to the
ocean floor.

The faint
outline of a handprint on the obelisk was glowing in the distance,
and two remaining pods gave off a dim light just beyond it. The
light indicated that there was still power; hopefully the units
hadn’t been damaged from the flooding, and were still fit to
transport me to the third level. Peyton and Brynja’s pods were
already gone, the air-tight covers having sealed back over their
pneumatic tubes.

I swam towards
the pods with every remaining ounce of strength. Each stroke
against the current was agony. As I approached the knoll, I was
jolted by a heavy object slamming into my shoulder, knocking me
into the obelisk. It was McGarrity’s body, floating face down,
being tossed by the swirling current.