Machinations (30 page)

“His distraction worked a little too well,” Rankin puts in, playing the role of field medic in Ortega's absence. He starts to change Kennedy's bandages, which are soaked with pus and blood. “Our boy here nearly blew himself to kingdom come and back again.”

“I'll say. We've got a regular soldier on our team.” I ruffle his ginger hair playfully, or what's left of it. One side's been singed black, burned off to the roots.

“These burns will become scars, huh?” Kennedy asks.

I look at Rankin briefly. He nods.

“Probably, yeah,” I answer honestly.

“Then I'll wear them proudly,” Kennedy declares.

“Yeah, well, let's try not to add any more to that collection, all right?”

He nods, then winces as Rankin applies some sort of salve to his arm.

A couple of hours later I get my first glimpse of Juneau, but it's not the city that captures my attention. It's Juneau the
mountain.

I know Mount Juneau can't be bigger than Mount McKinley, but to use a word like smaller to describe her seems inadequate. In the shadow of the great, white massif lurks the cold, hollowed out husk of what used to be a lively port city. All the buildings look gray and starved of people.

“Even before the Machinations, there was a constant threat of avalanches, and not only during the winter months,” Samuel informs me as John brings us in. I can see why. While spring is starting to show some skin at the lower elevations, the summit is still white with snow.

“Without routine grooming of the mountain, it's probably gotten worse,” Samuel goes on, watching the heights uneasily. “A lot of melting snowpack up there, and all it takes is a little provocation.” At this, I feel a shiver go up my spine, like someone's walked over my grave. For all I know, maybe someone has. Maybe this is my new Anchorage.

Our entry is the epitome of stealth, if you ignore the noise and the fact that we're a big, black bird in the sky. Okay, so maybe not
so
stealthy, but since we aren't attacked on sight, I have to assume John's doing something right.

He sets us down in what used to be a main street in downtown Juneau. “I'm going to make a few aerial passes of the city,” he tells me. “See what I can see.”

I nod. “Sounds good. Hit me up on the comm if you spot any survivors.”

“Machines seem more likely, but I'll let you know either way. Good luck. Keep safe now.”

“Right back at'cha, John.”

I watch the chopper pull away in a windy swirl. John waves from the cockpit, and I return the gesture. Lefevre and Rankin help Kennedy toward the nearest building.

I'm watching them when it happens.

There's a loud sound like a clap of thunder, impossibly close, and I'm swept off my feet by a sudden wash of heat. Shards of metal rain down silently around me, fire streaking behind them like comet tails. I try to get up but the world tips dangerously to one side, then the other, and I fall back to my hands and knees. A surreal quiet gives way to a violent ringing in my ears. I can't hear myself yelling, but I know that I am.

“Samuel! Rankin! Lefevre!”

Once I'm finally on my feet again, I turn toward the origin of the explosion.

The chopper is engulfed in flames, black smoke pouring from a mighty wound in its side. “No.” I feel my mouth form around the word, my breath escaping in a panic. “No. No. No.” Real sound is starting to come back into the world—fire crackles beyond the ringing in my ears. I shout again for help even as I stumble toward the wreckage.

A long, sharp whistle presages a secondary explosion.

I don't know what direction it comes from, but the antiaircraft missile finds its mark. I'm thrown to the ground again, this time onto the flat of my back, the air knocked right out of me. I lay panting for breath while the chopper burns.
Get up,
I tell myself.
Get up. Get moving. Run. RUN.

John's gone. A single look at the twisted, melting aircraft breaks through the pain and shock. There's nothing I can do for him now. There's nothing more the machines can do to him, either. There won't be a body.

The chopper blades, weakened from the damage, collapse into the cockpit, and I can't watch any longer. My eyes water, stung by smoke or tears or both.

I rejoin my team—what's left of it—just as machines crawl out from the surrounding buildings. They're like rats, carriers of death, and they're everywhere.

We're surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. That doesn't stop Zelda from firing the first couple of shots in anger, sure as hell not waiting to be fired upon. Before I know it, my own weapon is in my hands, warmed by several shots at the enemy. They return fire, but poorly—like the white-armored guys in those movies Samuel really likes. No bullets get anywhere close to me. Time their targeting sensors were upgraded or given a tune-up. Too bad I don't plan on giving them that opportunity.

“My charge is dead,” Zelda growls, throwing her EMP-G to the ground. She pulls out a regular old handgun. Rankin's the second to run dry, followed by Kennedy, whose aim is terrible to begin with and who wastes a good deal of his ammo on bad shots. Lefevre and I are left with the job of disabling shields.

More machines emerge, appearing on rooftops and slinking out of alleys.

And then, behind them, men in masks and body armor.

They eliminate the machines nearest themselves in rapid succession, one right after the other, and then spread out to dispatch the rest with equal success. Soon, the machines cycle to their self-preservation subroutine and beat a haphazard retreat. My team picks some of them off as they run away.

Of course, that still leaves us the problem of a dozen armed strangers to deal with.

No one makes any sudden moves, which I think is probably for the best. We're all a little trigger-happy here. Finally, one of our masked saviors steps forward, and keeps moving until he's standing right in front of me. Rankin places a hand on his chest when he's gotten close enough for his liking.

The stranger looks down at the hand, then at me. “This is how we greet old friends now?” says the man, hard eyes smiling through the slits in his ski mask.

I know that accent. But it can't be. I feel my expression slide into disbelief.

“Take off your mask,” I order, and he obeys.

His face is red from the cold and bearded, but not beyond recognition.

“Ulrich!” I exclaim, forgetting myself long enough to wrestle him into a hug. Time seems to have mended whatever friction existed between us before, when I was seen only as Rhona 2.0—and not necessarily an improved version. Near-death experiences tend to have a way of sorting out petty differences.

I feel him wrap an arm around my back.
“Es ist gut du zu sehen.”
He gives me a friendly squeeze.

“Yeah. Still don't know German, though.”

Laughing, he says, “
Ja.
You should work on that. Now, we must go.”

He turns around…into a right hook from Zelda's fist. The men with him react, but don't make any attempt to intervene, making me wonder whether they're really
his
men at all. They could belong to Churchill or McKinley, for all I know. On our side, Samuel makes a motion toward stepping in, but Lefevre prevents it, his arm dropping down like a bar in front of him. The message is clear. This is between Ulrich and Zelda.

Ulrich touches his bloodied lip with a wry smile and starts to rise. She kicks him to keep him down. Well, that's another way to greet an old friend, I guess.

“Don't you move,” she warns him. I'm not ready to get involved just yet. Both Ulrich and Zelda are headstrong personalities. For all I know, this might just be foreplay in their book. It's only when she pulls out her gun that I decide some actual diplomacy might be needed.

“Zelda, what are you doing?” I ask her. “Put that thing away.”

“They killed him,” Zelda says brokenly, waving her gun dangerously at him. “They killed him and sent this doppelgänger in his place!”

I suddenly understand, and wonder why I didn't get it straightaway. The situation seems obvious now. Zelda's not like me. She doesn't believe in miracles because she's never been on the receiving end of one. I don't know what I can possibly say to change her mind at this point.

Thankfully, as it turns out,
I
don't have to say anything.

Considering everything he's been through, Ulrich is surprisingly quick. He's up in an instant, catching her wrist and wrenching the weapon free from her grip. She snarls at him in fractured German, rabid with emotion. He replies in kind, but continues to hold her tight. I don't know what they're saying—they're talking too fast and I'm pretty sure I took Spanish in high school—but eventually it breaks down to one phrase, repeated over and over again.

“Es tut mir Leid,”
he whispers to her.
“Mir Leid. Mir Leid.”
I guess its meaning by the way they're both crying.

“It does me sorrow,” Samuel says.

“What does?” I ask.

“No. It's what he's saying. He's sorry. I picked up a little Deutsch in my time with him, but that's a statement I heard rarely.” He frowns thoughtfully. “What do you think he's apologizing for?”

“If I had to guess? The last three years.”

“Ah.”

Ulrich and Zelda conclude their messy reunion, sparing me the miserable awkwardness of interrupting. Zelda continues to stand next to him, looking fierce and proud and more herself, her eyes daring the shadows to produce more machines.

“There is much to discuss,” Ulrich tells me.

“Funny. I was just thinking the exact same thing,” I reply with a half smile. “I have a
lot
of questions, as you can imagine.”

Ulrich gives gestures to his men to move out, adding, “Not here.”

“One quick one: Are these your men?” He shakes his head. “Then whose?”

“Guess,” he says with gruff humor, and I know.

“Take me to him.”

Traveling through the gray, dilapidated city has the uneasy quality of a dream, where I recognize the place as somewhere familiar, though it looks nothing like the place I'm thinking of.

I've never been to Juneau before, as far as I recall, but I have been to the graves of other great cities: Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage—the last where my own fate was later sealed. But not quite tightly enough, apparently. It leads me to wonder about the people who weren't blessed with foresight, technology, and a genius best friend, the ones who lived and died here.

“Stop that,” Samuel tells me.

“What?” I say.

“I know that look. That's your I'm-feeling-guilty-about-something-I-have-no-control-over look.”

“My what?”

“Survivor's guilt,” he explains. I give him my best You've-got-to-be-kidding look. He should be familiar with that one, too. “It's not uncommon for people who have experienced the kind of emotional trauma you've lived through to feel a sense of wrongdoing, regardless of responsibility. In fact, it used to be called concentration-camp syndrome, after the responses of those who had survived the Holocaust of the Second World War. I think it's safe to say we've all survived a sort of holocaust in recent years.”

“Please, Samuel,” I say, and I'm surprised by the desperation in my own voice. I wanted to sound careless. Mostly, I just sound broken. “Don't try and get me to talk about my feelings right now.”

“Better to get them out in the open where they can breathe than keep them trapped inside your head where they can fester.”

“They're thoughts, Samuel, not gangrene.”

“I don't know. Thinking is the most virulent disease in the history of the world. Thoughts are powerful, Rhona, and it's not always healthy to leave them to their own devices. Trust me. Bad ones will poison every aspect of your life, if you let them. So
don't
let them.”

“So you're my shrink now, too?”

“No, just your friend. Like I've always been.”

Samuel falls back to the rear of our group, to speak with Lefevre in quiet tones. My words to him were more defensive than I'd have liked, and I wish I had a better excuse for them. But my shoulder still hurts from when I dislocated it, and my heart aches with the loss of three good men. I shake off a lot of things, but the trauma of the past few days is beyond even my superhuman abilities to cope, apparently.
Keep it together, Rhona
.
Just a little longer, at least.

But I can't help stewing over Samuel's words. Survivor's guilt. Can you have survivor's guilt for surviving yourself? That thought feels like a step in the wrong direction, emotionally, so I leave it alone. I don't pick at it, like I might've done a couple of months ago.

The men and women with Ulrich, most McKinlians, give us a wide berth, keeping an invisible perimeter against the machines about half a mile out. As a consequence, our little group encounters very few enemies. Apart from the machines, the only squatters we find on the street are derelict tanks—relics from the war, back when it could legitimately be called one. They keep company with a downed commercial airliner, probably on its way to safety, and the wreckage of what appears to have been a fighter jet, although it's mangled almost beyond recognition.

“We are almost there now,” Ulrich announces. “Keep your guard up.”

Looking around, I start to notice faces in the shattered windows and behind crumbling facades decimated by mortar fire. “Ulrich,” I start to say, not taking my eyes off the half-hidden souls.

“Friendlies,” he assures me. “Churchill and…others. Refugees, all. Ignore them. They are no danger to us.”

“They look terrified.”

“They are. But not of us.”

It's difficult to be surrounded by these peering faces, each one a mask of suffering. I focus on being a leader instead of a person. A leader can be sympathetic, but also detached. I need to be able to think, and I can't do that if my heart is hemorrhaging into my head.

“How has everyone been surviving here?” I ask. “Did the evac teams bring enough supplies with them? Why haven't the machines pressed the attack yet?”

Ulrich looks at me over his wild man's beard, a hint of grumpiness in his manner. Just like old times. “Which of those questions do you want me to answer?”

“All of them?”

“There were reserves, before they arrived. They brought only what was necessary with them. Food, water, the clothing on their backs. Not much. Not enough.” He shakes his head, snuffling from what sounds like the vestiges of a long illness. Some kind of cold, maybe. “It is not a matter of machines, but of time.
Immer mit der Unfreundlichkeit der Zeit.
” I give the German and his German a blank stare. “Always with the unkindness of time,” he translates.

I think I understand what he means. Time always has the final say in who lives and who dies, and time, right now, is allied against us. “Folksy,” I reply, dry mouthed.

He snuffles again, or maybe he's just snorting at me.

“But that still doesn't explain why the machines aren't taking advantage of our weak defenses. We're prime pickings here, and they're doing—what? Taking potshots at us in the street? It makes no sense.” His silence is a soliloquy unto itself. “Unless…it does. Because they're waiting for something.” I move in front of Ulrich, stopping him. “I'm right, aren't I? So, what aren't you telling me?”

Our group halts, but Ulrich orders them to keep going. One of his subordinates knows the way. Rankin and Kennedy continue on while Lefevre and Samuel hang back, as does Zelda, who doesn't even bother to pretend she isn't listening in.

We stand there, in the heart of a dead city, until I finally ask the question I really want the answer to. “Tell me, Ulrich, how are you even alive? How are you
here
?” I know there's a connection, even if I can't understand the threads themselves.

“We are wasting time.” But I don't budge and Ulrich breathes deeply, relaxes his rifle against his shoulder. “If you must know, I was true to my word. I said I would not let the machines take me alive, and they did not.”

“You're looking pretty good for a dead man,” I say.

He grunts. “The pot mocking the kettle.” He motions in the same direction the others headed in. “Come. Walk. It is not safe to stand around. It invites trouble.” By now, the distance between our groups is enough to afford some privacy for this conversation. I wait for him to say more.

“When I pulled the pin of one of my grenades, nothing happened. I fumbled for another, but by that time, the machines were on me. They rushed me, blitzkrieg, just as I pulled the pin. I remember little else after that moment, save the taste of blood in my mouth.” He spits for good measure. “I was proud to die there, for you, for the war effort. And I am tired. The truth is there was a part of me glad to be done with it.”

Zelda looks away sharply. I think the words hurt her, because she was the one left behind. At the same time, I know how Ulrich feels. The struggle of living in this mechanical world, of endlessly fighting, is enough to wear down even the hardiest soul.

“But the machines,” Ulrich finally goes on, “they brought me back. I must have been dead for minutes, and they would not let me rest even then.”

My stomach drops. “Why would they do that? Why would they save you? I mean, not that I'm complaining, but the machines are programmed killers…”

“Not all of them, not always. Some were programmed as field medics, surgeons. The knowledge of medicine is still there. I don't know how, but they restarted my heart and kept me alive long enough to…Long enough.” Ulrich grimaces, breathing fog into the chilled air. Zelda steps closer, placing a hand on his arm.

Ulrich waves off her concern, but I have to ask, “Long enough for what, Ulrich?”

“What do you think?” Zelda snaps. “They tortured him.”

“They asked me questions—about you, about the resistance, its bases and facilities, its weapons and resources. I would give them nothing, of course, and so they tried to break me the old-fashioned way.” He rolls up a sleeve to reveal electrical burns along his arm, only partially healed and still painful looking. “But I was no songbird. I would not sing. So, they tried alternate means.” I don't ask what those were. I have some idea of the horrors the machines can inflict on a body made of flesh and blood.

“Ich werde sie alle brechen,”
Zelda promises him, and I notice how that last word sounds oddly like “break.” She's swearing vengeance for his pains, destruction of the ones responsible. In a twisted kind of way, suited to them, it's romantic. I feel a pang of loneliness. Did Camus try to avenge me, I wonder? But the musing travels like a clean shot, passing through my heart quickly without collateral damage. It's in the past. I just need to find him—alive and safe.

“Obviously you didn't give up McKinley's location,” I continue, watching my step among some debris, “and now you're here, so how did you escape?”

“Pah.” He scratches his beard. “It was not escape. I was released.”

“Come again?”

“They let me go. I didn't realize this at the time, as they did not make it easy; I had to fight my way free. But it was all a setup. I ended up here, in time, and they have been monitoring me since. Put the pieces together yourself.”

The light bulb comes on like the damn sun. “Oh, God, Ulrich. They were using you as bait?”

“
Ja, richtig.
They thought I would send for help, or try and make my way back to base. Either way would have gotten them what they wanted. I said I was not a songbird. I am not a homing pigeon either. I knew something was not right.”

All this time,
I think.
He has been alone all this time, to protect everyone else.
And here I thought I knew what it meant to be strong.

“But it does not matter now,” he says, brows drooping over tired eyes. “You are here. Churchill is here. The machines are here. It was for nothing.”

“No,” I tell him, firmly grabbing him by the shoulder. He looks at me. “Not for nothing.”

And I intend to prove it to him.

The last leg—more of an ankle really—of the journey to Juneau's makeshift base of operations brings us to a seven-story structure that served as an apartment complex before the Machinations. Its top two floors have been blown away, naked rebar and other infrastructure jutting out like exposed bones. The rest of the building appears to be mostly intact, though. A tough, sturdy old thing by the looks of it, with a concrete foundation in the form of an underground parking level. In three days, it's amazing how many defenses they've managed to lay. A lot of it looks like leftovers from previous resistance factions. The surface level of the entire garage area is boarded all the way around with wood and chunks of plaster, possibly salvaged from the upper floors. They've gotten creative, too, using furniture, vehicles, and machine carcasses for further protection—the latter maybe as a visual aid, warning the machines away, like heads on pikes. Not that it'll have any effect on the machines, but it's the thought that counts.

So maybe they're not
great
defenses, but they're something—and with machines prowling about, it's certainly better than nothing.

We stop short of the original entrance. On the ground, you can just make out an arrow pointing inside, faded by the elements, still trying to direct traffic that no longer exists. Several well-armed soldiers spy on us from behind their fortifications, as though our identities matter at this point. We're all human. That should be enough. Together, they push the barrier aside, letting us pass.

“Good to see you, Commander Long,” one says to me, his breath misting the air as he gives a salute. “Thought we were going to be left for dead out here.”

“Yeah,” agrees the other, a lanky, skittish-looking man who seems ill-suited for military business. “So, uh, where are the rest of our reinforcements?”

“Get out of the way,” Ulrich grumbles. “You're holding us up.”

He pushes inside and drags the rest of us with him. It's probably for the best they don't know about our unfortunate state of affairs. Primarily the fact that there
are
no reinforcements. In all likelihood, no one's coming. “You're doing great. Keep up the good work,” I say to the pair of guards over my shoulder, some drive-by morale boosting. I don't know if it'll help, but it can't hurt.

Ulrich leads us one level down into the underbelly of the parking garage. The elevator's long since stopped working. A scrap of paper flutters as we pass.
OUT OF ORDER,
it reads, hastily written by a person who probably knew no greater inconvenience than having to take the stairs.

We continue our descent down the car ramp, where many vehicles are still parked, orphaned by their owners, forever waiting. It's sadder than it has any right to be. They're just cars, for pity's sake. But they carried people once, to work, to home, to family and friends, and now they sit decaying and purposeless.

I don't realize I'm staring so intently at them until a face pops up in the window of a van, making me nearly jump out of my skin. The face, which belongs to a boy, smiles. A woman is with him—his mother, I'd guess, by the way she reprimands him and forces him back onto the seat to sleep. “They're using the cars for beds?” I say to Ulrich.

“Homes,” he corrects.

We continue walking, and I pay no more attention to the cars, wanting to give their inhabitants some privacy.

The basement parking area is dimly lit, illuminated only by the electric lamps the evac teams brought with them, and some fires started in a couple of barrels for warmth. It's hard but not impossible to make out the features of the men and women gathered together for survival, hunched around the fires like our first ancestors millennia ago, when there were other things to fear in the dark.