Warden 1

by Isaac Hooke

  The rocks drop away when you don’t want them to, Will complained. And when you do, they refuse.

  That’s typical of most things in life, Horatio said.

  In frustration, Rhea began to fire at the bioweapons themselves, but they shook off her attacks as before and continued to climb unperturbed.

  They climbed faster than before; the incoming bioweapons were an effective goad. In moments Horatio was climbing over the crest, and Rhea joined him on the plateau a moment later.

  Will let himself down from Horatio’s back. He was staring into the distance to the north, past the tip of the ridge.

  “Maybe that can help us.” Will nodded northward.

  She turned that way and saw a wall of black that covered the northern horizon from east to west.

  “Gritstorm?” Horatio said.

  “It’s heading toward us fast,” Will said. “I’d say a minute, maybe two.”

  “It won’t reach us before our pursuers…” Horatio said.

  “Then we reach it, first,” Will said. “Run!”

  The trio ran across the plateau, to a small path that led down between a defile of sorts set amid two peaks. It was wide enough to fit three of their pursuers at once.

  As she leaped onto the gentle slope of that defile, a spine-tingling howl came from behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted the lead bioweapons clambering onto the plateau.

  “They’re just behind us!” Rhea said as she raced down the slope and into the defile with the others.

  “What’s with the howls?” Will shouted. “They have lion heads! They should be roaring! Not howling! Or hissing at least.”

  “They’re bioweapons,” Horatio said, running alongside him. “Designed for maximum killing efficiency. And this includes inducing the maximum fear in its prey. There’s something about hissing that isn’t as frightening as howling.”

  Rhea glanced over her shoulders. “Right about now, hissing would be equally frightening to me!”

  The bioweapons were gaining. Two of them had taken the lead and ran side-by-side in the defile. She could see a faint halo around them as the pair generated the beginnings of that dust-gathering force field around them. Beneath it, the scales of their four muscular legs shimmered iridescently beneath the sun, while the long, scythe-like talons on the forelimbs gleamed in anticipation. The stinging tentacles swished to and fro on their tails, sweeping the walls of the defile and ripping small streaks into the rock surface. The five long, snakelike necks on each body bobbed sinuously, the manes of their leonine heads flowing behind them like the banners of some army marching into battle. Their eyes shone with what could best be described as sheer joy, as if they were living their life’s purpose in that moment. Which they were.

  When she had first seen these creatures on the plains, she had been repulsed, but watching them now, she felt a strange sense of awe. They seemed truly beautiful in that moment. Beautiful, and terrifying.

  “You see that halo around them?” Will shouted. “Looks almost like a force field. That could be why our weapons aren’t penetrating.”

  “I thought it was just to generate their dust cover,” Rhea said. “But you could be right.”

  She had maybe ten seconds before the creatures reached her. Even if she ran at her top speed and abandoned Will—which she never would—it would only bring her an extra five seconds. She decided if she was going to die, she would do it on her terms.

  She stopped, then spun about. She reached for her pistol, only to remember she didn’t have one anymore.

  Will and Horatio continued to flee behind her. Maybe they didn’t notice. Or maybe they were happy to accept her sacrifice.

  And then shots came in from behind her. They moved in sync with the bobbing head of one of the creatures and struck the open mouth. The leonine head merely turned to the side and shook the impacts off.

  The two creatures were upon her.

  “Rhea!” Will called.

  Rhea somersaulted forward as the scythe-like talons of the closest bioweapon swiped at her. Will had thrown his pistol to her, and she snatched it out of the air before rolling beneath the body to fire into the underbelly. There was no halo surrounding this creature that she could see, but if there was, she would have been within its circumference at the moment, given what she had seen from afar. Despite that, her energy bolts appeared to inflict no damage, save to cause soot marks to adorn the skin of the creature’s underside.

  She leaped up before the creature could trample her and grabbed on to the base of the tail. The appendage curled up, and swatted at her with the tip, attempting to strike her with those stinging tentacles. She let go and dropped to the ground. The tendrils struck the underside of the tail and lower belly, and the creature screamed.

  Interesting.

  “Get them to hit each other with their tails,” Rhea transmitted.

  “Easier said than done!” Will replied.

  The two bioweapons spun about to face Rhea. On the other side, two more were quickly bearing down. Cornered.

  She glanced at the rock face beside her. Or perhaps not quite cornered…

  She leaped up as the four came in and landed on the wall three meters up. Two opposing heads smashed into one another behind her, while the bodies they belonged to collided and entangled. The other two opposing bioweapons managed to avoid one another—the first ducked under the second, which leaped over it.

  Will and Horatio had turned around and were coming back. They shouted, trying to distract the bioweapons from Rhea.

  Meanwhile, she climbed the wall. Unlike the cliff face that faced the plains, this one had several rocky protrusions that lent themselves well to climbing.

  A lion head lunged toward her. She leaped off the wall, swinging herself to the right. The head smashed into the surface beside her, sending fragments flying.

  She landed on the cliff a few meters to the right and latched on. She began climbing again, but was forced to dodge yet another head that came in. She couldn’t tell if it was from the same creature, or another. She pulled herself upward this time, leaping out of the way, and landing higher.

  Another head. She let go this time and landed on the neck of the first head below. She tried firing at point blank range, but once again caused little more than black spots to appear.

  That head jerked violently to the left, and she was sent flying off the Hydra. She landed on the ground before it, and one of those big paws came down. She rolled out of the way before it could crush her and rolled again when another paw came down. The forelimbs sliced at her with their scythe-like talons, and she rolled back and forth, narrowly dodging them.

  But then another Hydra crashed into that one, courtesy of Will, who was acting as bait nearby.

  Horatio appeared, and grabbed her by the wrist, leading her from the wrestling pair of bioweapons behind her.

  And then the air turned brown around them as grit filled it. The wind picked up, so that she heard only its high-pitched gusting, and in moments everything around her vanished to the storm. She could see maybe three meters in any direction.

  She switched to LIDAR, but it didn’t work at all in that storm. But she still had the outlines of Will and Horatio on her HUD—Will had rejoined her as well. She could also see the defile walls, displayed not by LIDAR, but according to the map data she had on the region. She also had the last known positions of the bioweapons.

  “Let’s go!” Will said. “While they’re blinded!”

  “Guess we’ll find out if the storm truly masks our scent from them,” Horatio said.

  “Here!” Rhea said and tossed the pistol to Will. The weapon was outlined on the HUD, and he caught it.

  The party made their way forward. Rhea raised her hood and tightened the bottom to form a scarf. She donned the visor that Will gave her to protect her mechanical eyes. Will himself had wrapped up his face quite well, and he’d lowered protective shields from the thin visor that rested below his brows to preserve his eyes. Even Horati
o attached special covers over his camera lenses.

  As they advanced, they occasionally had to dodge a limb of a blinded bioweapon that stepped too close. That happened seven times in total. The first four incidents occurred one after the other, while the final three were more sporadic. After that, the events stopped entirely—the bioweapons had become completely lost in that storm.

  “Nothing like a good Gritstorm to save the day,” Will sent above the howling wind.

  He recalled Gizmo: it damaged the rotors of the machine to fly for too long in that mess. Plus, the near zero visibility made the drone essentially useless. The wind knocked about Gizmo as the drone descended, almost smashing the aerial machine against the rocks of the defile. When Gizmo finally landed, Will immediately stowed the drone in his pack.

  The party proceeded through the swirling murk of the storm. Sometimes Rhea caught glimpses of Will ahead of her, but usually he was lost to the grit an instant later. She occasionally stumbled on rocks or small boulders not displayed on the HUD—small changes in the landscape that had transpired since the last time the map had been updated, possibly due to the storm itself. But otherwise the map data proved impeccable. Horatio, in the lead, usually warned the others if he spotted something they needed to watch for.

  They stayed close to the leftmost edge of the defile at first, but when the grit began to pile up there, forming drifts, the party switched to the right side instead, which was spared from any sediment. For now.

  She had a thought.

  “I seem to recall reading somewhere on the Net that Gritstorms can last for days,” Rhea sent

  “That’s right,” Will said. “So?”

  “Check the map,” Rhea told him. “The storm cut across not just our path, but the path of the second wave of bioweapons. Those headed to Rust Town. They’ll be blinded, wandering around lost in the grit. We can use the storm to get ahead of them!”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea…” Will said.

  “Think about it,” Rhea continued. “We have advanced mapping tech to ensure we never get lost, whereas they don’t. Also, they won’t be able to track whatever scent has been laid down for them either. Not while the storm is active. We’ve seen that already.”

  Will remained quiet for several seconds. “I vote no. We have our own lives to look out for at the moment. We barely survived back there as it was. Plus, you forget why we’re out here. We’re salvagers: we collect salvage. We don’t hunt bioweapons, and we certainly don’t backtrack to warn settlements of imagined threats. Look, if we detour all the way back to Rust Town, we’ll probably use up every last credit of profit earned since leaving the settlement, because we’ll have to purchase more rations and supplies. You know how much water costs these days, right? It’ll be like the last two weeks were wasted. You might even end up deeper in debt, considering how poor your haul is. So I say we cut and run. Press on. We can’t help them. Even if we warn the residents, they’ll never flee in time. Rust Town is doomed.”

  “You don’t know that,” Rhea insisted. “We have to try.”

  But Will continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Who knows, maybe Sebastian lied, and the Hydras aren’t headed to Rust Town at all.”

  “You bastard,” she said.

  His outline shrugged on her HUD. “What? It’s a possibility.”

  Rhea couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What happened to the Will I knew? The Will who wouldn’t stand by and watch while innocents succumbed, and who believed all life was sacred? The Will who saved me from the rubble?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Rust Town has to be warned…” she pressed.

  Still no response.

  “I’m going to have to turn back without you then, if you won’t come,” Rhea threatened.

  “As if I’ll let you,” Will finally said.

  “You can’t stop me,” she said.

  “What about your debt?” he pressed.

  “I’ll repay it, someday,” she said. “I’ll find you after I’ve gone to Rust Town. Then we’ll continue salvaging.”

  “If you survive.” Will paused, then sighed over the comm, a sound barely audible above the raging wind. “Okay. We’ll head northeast and try to cut in front of the bioweapons. You do know we risk putting ourselves directly in their path if the storm ends early, right?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Because if that happens, we’re probably all dead. You still want to do this?”

  In answer, she selected a destination waypoint on her HUD, corresponding to Rust Town’s location.

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Will told her.

  And so, when the party emerged from the mountain pass, they followed along the ridge until it fell away, and then swung northeast through the storm, using their mapping technology to keep them on the fastest and best route to Rust Town.

  23

  Rhea trudged on through the Gritstorm with her companions. At first, she kept expecting the dark shapes of bioweapons to come charging through the swirling murk at them. But that feeling slowly subsided, replaced by a sense of general unease. She sometimes felt like the party was traveling right in the middle of a pack of Hydras but simply couldn’t see them: an errant step to the left or right and she’d find herself stepping directly into one of their jaws. An imagined threat, perhaps, but that made it no less real to her. She just wished visibility was greater. But then again, if she and her companions were truly surrounded by bioweapons at the moment, the twisting murk served to protect them. Besides, it was that very same visibility that was allowing them to hopefully leapfrog the Hydras.

  The trio wore their visors at all times to protect their eyes, and kept their heads firmly wrapped; at night, to sleep, they formed makeshift bivouacs with their backpacks, stacking them like sandbags for protection against the storm. The soil and grit would pile up on the north side, forming a black drift by morning.

  Before the storm, Rhea already had trouble falling asleep each night, and the howling winds raging through the darkness only aggravated that. She often had to mute her hearing sensitivity levels down to zero before she could find repose. Since her mind-machine interface intercepted that sound, and handled the muting, it could continue monitoring external noises independently of her brain. That way if there was a sudden spike in noise or a shift in frequencies, such as might transpire with a bioweapon attack, she would wake up.

  But even with the sound muted, sleep wasn’t easy. Sometimes she engaged her virtual target practice course, which comforted her. Other times, she spoke with Horatio, who always remained awake, and on guard.

  “Does it ever get to you?” Rhea asked the robot one time over the private comm. “All this time you spend alone each night?” She spoke over the mental comm line, as she had all sound muted. They had tried using noise cancellers, but the hardware had difficulty filtering out voices against the storm. Muting and mental communications were the only way to have a decent conversation without shouting.

  “No.” Horatio said. He huddled next to her, behind the row of backpacks. “Why would it ‘get to me?’ AIs such as myself are used to solitude. We relish it.”

  “Then why do AIs, such as yourself, play that massively multiplayer game you mentioned?” she said. “The one designed specifically for your kind?”

  “We don’t play it for the companionship,” Horatio said. “Not all of us do, anyway. A good many of us rock solo, believe it or not.”

  She smiled. “Rock solo. AIs certainly have their own vernacular.”

  “A vernacular based on your own,” Horatio countered. “In any case, I prefer to be alone. In VR, and the real world.”

  “Didn’t you mention at one point that you wanted to retire into VR?” she asked.

  “That was one of my options,” Horatio agreed.

  “You can be anything you want in VR,” she said. “Have a human body. You could interact with humans, join their VR games, they’d never know the diffe
rence.”

  “I’ve experienced what it was like to be human many times, in VR,” the robot said. “Though I sometimes wonder if it would not be better to acquire an actual human body.”

  “Have your AI core transferred into a full body replacement cyborg?” she pressed.

  “Exactly,” Horatio said. “Though one with a more human face than your own. No offense.”

  “None taken,” she said.

  “A face indistinguishable from that of an ordinary human’s,” Horatio said. “I think I would like that. I would be almost human, then. I could form relationships with women in real life.”

  “Why bother?” Rhea said. “When VR will let you do that too. You can even have sex over VR, with the proper attachments.” She waved a hand, which Horatio would see in the darkness courtesy of the outline generated by location sharing. “All of this is an illusion anyway. Created by the mind to satisfy the primitive senses we once needed to interact with our physical environment. When we lost the need for actual human bodies, we lost the need for the real world.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “And yet there are some women, some people, who exist almost exclusively in the real world. If I want to form a relationship with such women, it can’t be virtual.”

  Rhea stared uncertainly at the blue outline of the robot on her HUD. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “No.” Horatio’s answer came a little too quickly, even for the robot, for her to trust it entirely.

  “Because if there’s something you want to tell me, there’s no better time than now,” she said. “We might not make it to Rust Town alive. And even if we do, there’s no guarantee we’ll get out of the city in time. You know that. We all know. So then, we should make sure there’s nothing left unsaid between us.”

  “All has been said,” Horatio told her. “And even if there were words or feelings I was holding back, would it make a difference? You don’t feel any attraction toward me. If anything, you’re attracted to Will. I’ve noticed the way you look at him.”

  “That’s not attraction,” she said. “But more like respect.”