Robopocalypse (31 page)

Cherrah peeks around a tree trunk and motions to me. The Warden 333 leaps in front of her just as a plugger launches. The metal slug hits the Warden hard enough to spin the humanoid robot in the air. It lands in the snow, sporting a new dent in its frame but otherwise fine. The plugger projectile is now an unrecognizable hunk of smoking metal. Built to burrow into flesh, its drill proboscis is crooked and blunted from an impact with metal.

Cherrah disappears, taking better cover, and I start to breathe again.

We have to mount
Houdini
if we’re going to make it any farther. But the spider tank isn’t doing so well. A chunk of its turret has been sliced and is hanging cockeyed. The cowcatcher is covered in shining streaks of fresh metal where the mantis blades have scratched through the patina of rust and moss. Worst of all, it’s dragging a rear leg where the mantis sliced a hydraulic line. Searing hot fans of high-pressure oil shoot from the hose, melting the snow into greasy mud.

Nine Oh Two sprints out of the mist and leaps onto the mantis’s back. With methodical punches, he begins to attack the small hump that is nestled between that wicked tangle of serrated arms.

“Fall back. Consolidate the line,” comes the command from Lonnie Wayne over the army-wide radio.

From the sound of it, the spider tank squads to our right and left are in equally deep shit. Here on the ground I can hardly see anything. More plugger shots ring out, barely audible under the wheezing hydraulic whine of
Houdini
’s motors as it does battle in the clearing.

The sound paralyzes me. I remember Jack’s blood-filled eyes and I can’t move. The trees around me are iron-hard arms poking out of the snowy ground. The woods are a confusion of swirling mist and dark shapes and
Houdini
’s frantically sweeping spotlights.

I hear a grunt and a distant scream as somebody catches a plugger. Craning my neck, I can’t see anybody. The only thing I see is
Houdini
’s round red intention light streaking through the mist.

The screaming goes up an octave as the plugger starts drilling. It’s coming from all around me and from nowhere. I clutch my M4 to my chest and breathe in panting gasps and scan for my invisible enemies.

A streak of blurry light cuts through the mist thirty meters away as Cherrah pours her flamethrower into a mess of stumpers. I hear the muted crackle as they explode in the night.

“Cormac,” calls Cherrah.

My legs come unfrozen the second I hear her voice. Her safety means more to me than my own. A lot more.

I force myself to move toward Cherrah. Over my shoulder, I catch sight of Nine Oh Two clinging to the mantis’s back like a shadow as it twists and claws. Then
Houdini
’s intention light blinks to green. The mantis drops to the ground, legs quaking.

Yes!

I’ve seen it before. The lumbering machine has just been lobotomized. Its legs still work, but without commands they just lie there and shake.

“Form on
Houdini
!” I shout. “Form up!”

Houdini
crouches in the muddy clearing, surrounded by gouged-up chunks of earth and pieces of trees that have shattered like matchsticks. The spider tank’s heavy armor has been scratched and sliced everywhere. It’s like somebody dropped
Houdini
into a fucking blender.

But our comrade isn’t beaten yet.

“
Houdini,
initiate command mode. Human control. Defensive array,” I say to the machine. With a groan of overheated motors, the machine crouches and mashes its cowcatcher into the ground, digging an indentation. Then it slowly pulls its legs in together and hikes its belly up about five feet. Armored legs locked together over a crude foxhole, with the body of the spider tank now forming a portable bunker.

Leo, Cherrah, and I clamber underneath the damaged machine, and the Freeborn squad takes up positions in the snow around us. We settle our rifles on the armored leg plates and peer into the darkness.

“Carl!?” I shout to the snow. “Carl?”

No Carl.

What’s left of my squad huddles under the soft green glow of
Houdini
’s intention light, each of us realizing that this is only the beginning of a very long night.

“Fucking Carl, man,” says Leo. “Can’t believe they got Carl.”

Then a dark shape comes running from the mist. Sprinting at top speed. Rifle barrels swing to intercept it.

“Don’t fire!” I shout.

I recognize the silly humping gait. It’s Carl Lewandowski and he’s panicked. Instead of running, the guy is
skipping
. He reaches us and dives into the snow under
Houdini
. His sensory package is gone. His tall walker is gone. His pack is gone.

About the only thing Carl still has is a rifle.

“What the fuck’s going on out there, Carl? Where’s your shit, man? Where’s the reinforcements?”

Then I notice Carl is
crying
.

“I lost my shit. I’m losing my shit. Oh man. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”

“Carl. Talk to me, bud. What’s our situation?”

“Fucked. It’s fucked. Beta squad went through a plugger swarm, but it wasn’t pluggers—it’s something else and they started
getting up
, man. Oh god.”

Carl scans the snow behind us frantically.

“Here they come. Here they fucking come!”

He starts firing sporadically into the mist. Shapes appear. Human sized, walking. We begin to take incoming fire. Muzzles flash in the twilight.

Helpless with a shredded cannon,
Houdini
makes due by turning its turret and shining a spotlight into the gloom.

“Rob doesn’t carry guns, Carl,” says Leo.

“Who’s shooting at us?” shouts Cherrah.

Carl is still sobbing.

“Does it really matter?” I ask. “Light ’em up!”

All our machine guns fire up. The filthy snow around
Houdini
melts from the superheated barrels of our guns. But more and more of the dark shapes come shambling out of the mist, jerking from bullet impacts but still walking, still firing on our position.

When they get closer, I see what Archos is capable of.

The first parasite I see is riding Lark Iron Cloud, his body riddled with bullet holes and missing half his face. I can make out the glint of narrow wires buried in the meat of his arms and legs. Then a shell blasts his belly open and the thing spins like a top. It looks like he’s wearing a metal backpack—scorpion shaped.

It’s like the bug that got Tiberius, but infinitely worse.

A machine has burrowed into Lark’s corpse and forced it back up. Lark’s body is being used as a shield. The decomposing human flesh absorbs energy from incoming bullets and crumbles away, protecting the robot embedded inside.

Big Rob has learned to use our weapons and our armor and our meat against us. In death, our comrades have become weapons for the machines. Our strength turned to weakness. I pray to god that Lark was dead before that thing hit him. But he probably wasn’t.

Old Rob can be a real motherfucker.

But looking at my squad’s faces between muzzle flashes, I see no terror. Nothing but clenched teeth and focus. Destroy. Kill. Survive. Rob has pushed too far, underestimated us. We’ve all of us made friends with the horror. We’re old chums. And as I watch Lark’s body shamble toward me, I feel nothing. I only see an enemy target.

Enemy targets.

Weapons fire tears through the air, filleting bark from the trees and smacking into
Houdini
’s armor like a lead rain. Several human squads have been reanimated, maybe more. Meanwhile, a flood of stumpers pours in from the front. Cherrah focuses her juice in economical spurts on our twelve o’clock. Nine Oh Two and his friends do their best to stop the parasites coming at our flanks, darting silently between trees.

But the parasites won’t stay down. The bodies absorb our bullets and they bleed and bones shatter and meat falls but those monsters inside them keep picking them back up and bringing them back. We’ll be out of ammo soon at this rate.

Thwap
. A bullet sneaks under the tank. Cherrah takes it in the upper thigh. She screams out in pain. Carl crawls back to patch it up. I nod to Leo and leave him to cover our flank while I grab Cherrah’s flamethrower to keep the stumpers at bay.

I put a finger to my ear to activate my radio. “Mathilda. We need reinforcements. Is anybody out there?”

“You’re close,” says Mathilda. “But it gets worse from here.”

Worse than this? I speak to her between bursts of gunfire.

“We can’t make it, Mathilda. Our tank is down. We’re stuck. If we move, we’ll get … infected.”

“Not all of you are stuck.”

What does she mean? I look around, taking in the twisted, determined faces of my squad mates bathed in the red glow of
Houdini
’s intention light. Carl works on Cherrah, wrapping her leg. Looking out into the clearing, I see the smooth faces of the Arbiter and Warden and Hoplite. These machines are the only thing standing between us and certain death.

And they aren’t stuck here.

Cherrah is grunting, hurt bad. I hear more anchor blasts and know that these are parasites forming a perimeter around us. Soon, we’ll be another squad of rotting weapons fighting for Archos.

“Where is everybody?” asks Cherrah, jaw clenched. Carl has gone back to firing on the parasites with Leo. On my side, the stumpers are gaining momentum.

I shake my head at Cherrah and she understands. With my free hand I take her stiff fingers in mine and hold them tight. I’m about to sign a death warrant for all of us and I want her to know I’m sorry but it can’t be helped.

We made a promise.

“Nine Oh Two,” I call to the night. “Fuck it. We’ve got this covered. Take Freeborn squad and get your ass to Archos. And when you get there … fuck him up for me.”

When I finally have the courage to look back down to where Cherrah lies hurt and bleeding, I’m surprised: She’s
grinning
at me, tears in her eyes.

The march of Gray Horse Army was over
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

4. D
YAD

With humans, you never know
.

N
INE
O
H
T
WO

NEW WAR + 2 YEARS,
8 MONTHS

While the human army was being torn apart from within, a group of three humanoid robots pushed onward into even greater danger. Here, Nine Oh Two describes how Freeborn squad forged an unlikely alliance in the face of insurmountable odds
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

I say nothing. The request from Cormac Wallace registers as a low probability event. What humans might call a
surprise
.

Pock-pock-pock
.

Crouched beneath their spider tank, the humans fire at the parasites that jerk the limbs of their dead comrades into attack positions. Without the freeborn to protect them, the survival probability for Brightboy squad drops precipitously. I access my emotion recognition to determine if this is a joke or a threat or some other human affectation.

With humans, you never know.

Emotion recognition scans Cormac’s dirty face and comes back with multiple matches: resolution, stubbornness, courage.

“Freeborn squad, assemble on me,” I transmit in Robspeak.

I walk away into the twilight—away from the damaged spider tank and the damaged humans. My Warden and Hoplite follow. When we reach the tree line, we increase speed. The sounds and vibrations of battle recede. After two minutes, the trees thin out and end completely and we reach an open frozen plain.

Then we run.

We accelerate quickly to Warden’s top speed and spread out. Plumes of vapor rise from the ice plain behind us. The weak sunlight flickers between my legs as they pump back and forth, almost too fast to see. Our shadows stretch out across the broken white ground.

In the gloomy semidarkness, I switch to infrared. The ice glows green under my illuminated stare.

My legs rise and fall easily, methodically; arms pumping as counterweights, palms flat. Cutting the air. I keep my head perfectly still, forehead down, binocular vision trained on the terrain ahead.

When danger comes, it will be sudden and vicious.

“Spread to fifty meters. Maintain,” I say over local radio. Without slowing, Warden and Hoplite spread to my wings. We cut across the plain in three parallel lines.

Running this fast is itself dangerous. I award priority control to simple reflex avoidance. The broken surface of the ice is a blur under my feet. Low-level processes are in total control—no time to think. I leap a pile of loose rocks that no executive thought thread could have registered.

While my body is in the air, I hear the wind whistling across my chest hull and feel the cold pulling away my exhaust heat. It is a soothing sound, soon shattered by the pounding of my feet as I land at a full run. Our legs flicker like sewing machine needles, eating up the distance.

The ice is too empty. Too silent. The antenna tower emerges on the horizon, our goal visible.

Destination is two klicks away and closing fast.

“Status query,” I ask.

“Nominal,” come the abbreviated replies from Hoplite and Warden. They are concentrating on locomotion. These are the last communications I have with Freeborn squad.

The missiles come simultaneously.

Hoplite notices first. It orients its face to the sky just before it dies, half transmits a warning. I veer immediately. Warden is too slow to reroute. Hoplite’s transmission cuts off. Warden becomes engulfed in a column of flame and shrapnel. Both machines are off-line before the sound waves reach me.

Detonation.

The ice erupts around me. Inertial sensors go off-line as my body twists through the air. The centripetal force sends my limbs flailing, but low-level internal diagnostics continue collecting information: casing intact, core temperature superheated but cooling fast, right leg strut snapped at upper thigh. Spinning at fifty revolutions per second.

Recommend retract limbs for impact.

My body smashes into the ground, gouging into the icy rock and spinning out into a lopsided roll. Odometry estimates fifty meters before full stop. As quickly as it began, the attack is over.

I uncurl my body. Executive thought thread receives priority diagnostic notification: cranial sensor package damaged. My face is gone. Shredded by the explosion and then battered by the razor-sharp ice. Archos learned quickly. It knows that I am not human and it has modified its attack.

Lying here exposed on the ice, I am blind and deaf and alone. As it was in the beginning, all is darkness.

Survival probability fades to nil.

Get up
, says a voice in my mind.

“Query, identify?” I radio.

My name is Mathilda
, comes the reply.
I want to help you. There’s no time
.

I do not understand this. The communication protocol is unlike anything in my library, machine or human. It is a Robspeak-English language hybrid.

“Query, are you human?” I ask.

Listen. Concentrate
.

And my darkness ignites with information. A topographical satellite map overlays my vision, expanding to the horizon and beyond. My own internal sensors paint an estimated image of what I look like. Internals like diagnostics and proprioception are still online. Holding up my arm, I see its virtual representation—flat-shaded and without detail. Looking up, I see a dotted line creeping across the vivid blue sky.

“Query, what is the dotted—” I ask.

Incoming missile,
says the voice.

I am back on my feet and running inside 1.3 seconds. Top speed is slashed due to the snapped strut in my leg, but I am mobile.

Arbiter, accelerate to thirty kph. Activate your local sonar ranging. It’s not much, but better than being blind. Follow my lead
.

I do not know who Mathilda is, but the data she pours into my head is saving my life. My awareness has expanded beyond anything I have ever known or imagined. I hear her instructions.

And I run.

My sonar has low granularity but the pings soon detect a rock formation that is not a part of the satellite imagery supplied by Mathilda. Without vision, the rocks are nearly invisible to me. I leap the outcrop an instant before I demolish myself against it.

On landing, my stride skips a step and I nearly fall. I stagger, punching a hole into the ice with my right foot, then catch myself, settle back into my stride.

Fix that leg. Maintain stride at twenty kph
.

Legs pumping, I reach down with my right hand and pull a lipstick-sized plasma torch from the tool kit stowed in my hip. As my right knee rises with each stride, I bathe the strut with a precise burst of heat. The torch stutters on and off like Morse code. After sixty paces the strut is repaired and the fresh weld cooling.

The dotted line in the sky is homing in on my position. It curves deceptively overhead, on a collision course with my current trajectory.

Veer twenty degrees to the right. Increase speed to forty kph and maintain for six seconds. Then execute a full stop and lie on the ground
.

Boom
.

The instant I drop to the ground, my body is rocked by an explosion from a hundred meters in front of my position—consistent with my exact trajectory prior to the full stop.

Mathilda has just saved my life.

That won’t work again
, she says.

Satellite imagery shows that the plain before me will soon shatter into a maze of ravines. Thousands and thousands of these canyons—carved into the rock by long-melted glaciers—curve away into pockets of poorly mapped darkness. Beyond the ravines, the antenna looms like a tombstone.

Archos’s hiding place is in sight.

Overhead, I count three more dotted lines efficiently tracing their way toward my current position.

On your toes, Nine Oh Two
, says Mathilda.
You’ve got to take Archos’s antenna off-line. One klick to go
.

The female child commands me, and I choose to obey.

With Mathilda’s guidance, Nine Oh Two was able to negotiate the maze of ravines and avoid drone-fired missiles until he reached Archos’s bunker. Once there, the Arbiter disabled the antenna, temporarily disrupting the robot armies. Nine Oh Two survived by forming the first example of what became known as the dyad, a human-machine fighting team. This event ensured that Mathilda and Nine Oh Two would enter the history books as legends of war—the progenitors of a new and deadly form of combat
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217