He ignored the nagging doubts in his mind at whether he would have been able to come up with a plan even this useful on his own. The door at the other side of the hall had been opened by one of his soldiers, now, and filing into the hall, were the humans, though now their number was double, when the babies and toddlers being carried by some of the adults, the ragged, scared looking children trailing behind, and the women with their swollen, pregnant bellies were added to the ones who had been party to the scenes here before.
He could suddenly see these people how he had expected to see them before. Now the debauchery and savagery wasn't all there was to them. The women, not long ago being pounded by his men, looked so fragile now, standing there with their bony arms wrapped around children who may or may not have been their own - perhaps they didn't know or care, because every baby born here was just destined to be part of this amorphous mass of humans either way, so they protected and comforted them regardless of who had birthed them. The men, they weren't just about satisfying their basic urges, either, he saw, now, as they tried to calm the others and usher them to wait in the main hall without fuss. Maybe they weren't that different from him, after all. Maybe what he'd seen before was the side of them Janice and her cronies had been afraid of inside him, and now he was seeing some of the other parts of what they were. He felt a renewed need to help them, and a renewed hope that he could make a new humanity worth saving, even with just these guys to work with.
"Soldiers - we've encountered an issue leaving the city. A trap left by the Aerquan. We're working on a way to get everyone out of Brightvale as planned, but I need you guys to stay here and protect the humans, for now - also, to just keep them informed about what's going on, and answer any questions they may have about us, and about Newtown. Just... well, sit tight and chat with them. I'll call you when there are further instructions."
And with that, he sealed himself into his mecha, gave Osiris his next instructions for her and her group of androids, and he, along with Maddy, Lena, Sarge and the other bodyguards who'd accompanied Maddy, moved to leave the school.
Chapter 8
What followed was a manic flurry of activity, that when Curtis would look back on it later, felt like it only lasted a few minutes, even though it was a couple of hours in reality. Everything felt like it was being done at high speed, with each action flowing into the next without pause, and with him somehow keeping it all coordinated, even though when pressed, he wouldn't have been able to say how he did it.
Osiris had been tasked with using the few drones she had been using to monitor the battlefield during the fight to find points where the ditch was narrowest, and to give them measurements on how long their walkways needed to be, and where would be best to place them. They needed to make fast decisions on this. A narrower spot would be easier to find a way to cross, but if it was on the wrong side of the city for the androids to quickly get to the cars, meaning they had to walk the circumference of Brightvale to get there, then it may not be worth it. Curtis had also told her his preference was to find a suitable crossing spot in the old quarter of Brightvale, where he was, than in the destroyed Aerquan quarter. This was mainly because he felt like he and Maddy would understand the materials they could find better in the ruins of a pre-invasion human city than in a freshly destroyed alien one. Carrying things across the city would slow them down, and weigh heavier on the power cells of their mechas, and so it was best to cross close to where they were hunting for things to make walkways out of.
By the time Osiris came through with a few options for him, calling him this time inside his mecha, and sending images from her drones through to his and Maddy's monitors, the two mechas had already laid a number of poles they had pulled down - formerly things that had once supported cables and public lighting, and signposts to places long uninhabited - in the middle of a ruined street close to the school. They had worked fast, with the idea being to simply grab anything that might be useful, tear it from where they found it, and pile it in one place to assess afterwards. The android men and Lena had helped carry some of the things, and Lena had been able to advise Curtis and Maddy on what they should and should not attempt to do with their mechas, when it came to ripping out bits of this old city.
"What do you think, Maddy? I reckon that slightly thinner spot just south west of the hospital looks best - it's not too far off course to make a beeline for the cars, and it's a good ten feet narrower than the average width of the ditch, according to Osiris' calculations. Is this fairly close to where you have the hybrids and your other androids waiting?" Curtis asked her through the mecha comms system after a few seconds looking at Osiris' images.
"Yeah, not far at all. Let's go. I'll call my guys there and get them to head for that spot too, they might be able to help us, and even if they can't, it's probably better not to have everyone we have to worry about in too many different places..."
He figured out the best route to take from where they were to the crossing spot without having to turn any sharp corners - given they'd be carrying a bunch of long things. Then he and Maddy made the somewhat awkward journey with bundles of poles under their mecha-arms, the androids with them carrying other things they'd found that they'd thought could be useful, like some cables and wires that they thought they might use to bind poles together, making a longer or thicker walkway. For this part of the situation at least, it was actually fortunate that there was no live electricity flowing around the city - all of the wires and poles they'd found were safe to fuck with.
By the time they reached what was now to all intents and purposes a riverbank, the hybrids and their android protectors had already made it to the same spot, and Curtis got to see them for the first time. There were perhaps two hundred of them aranged in smaller groups by the water, and unlike the humans in the school, they were of all different ages, with a few particularly elderly people among them. It was possible to see different horrible experiments that the Aerquan had tried with different generations of them. At all ages, there were people like Sky - mostly human, just with the telltale alien blueness to their hair and skin. He couldn't, of course, tell if they were like Sky in other ways, though - whether like her, they could sense humans close by, but didn't have any of the other psychic abilities associated with the Aerquan. But then there were a few younger people who had strange, leathery looking wings on their backs - which he could only assume were vestigial and flightless, otherwise Maddy would have mentioned that she had some people who could fly across. Others had horns, or tails, or skin that was scaly as well as blue, and it seemed as though each new experiment had been done in a 'batch', because for each peculiar mutation there were a few people of ostensibly about the same age. There didn't seem to be the same savagery about them as the humans in the school, though. They were for the most part waiting patiently, their eyes showing intelligence and trust, and not least a glimpse of happiness. Despite this setback, they had been saved.
Curtis wanted to talk to them, to introduce himself and find out more about their lives in the old hospital that Sky had had to tell him and the others about in such grueling detail as they'd prepared for the attack. But it wasn't the time for that. Those moments of victory, of uniting these people with the humans, of setting up places where they could all live together at Newtown's university, of learning more of the Aerquan and planning next moves, those could not be enjoyed until this hurdle had been cleared.
And clear it, he vowed, he would.
He needed to save these people. Not just because they were people, not just because it was the right thing to do, or because he needed people other than androids so that there would be some hope for a future where Aerquan no longer held dominion over the Earth, but because of Sky, and her baby. His baby. He had tried not to think of it too much so far through her pregnancy, because it frightened him to imagine that he'd be a father, and that this kid would be the first of probably many, given the circumstances. He cared about Sky, and he knew she was thrilled to be having his baby, tha
t all she had ever wanted was to be a mother to a child that was closer to human than she was, but he had been almost happy that Mercy had been keen to keep such a close watch over her pregnancy that he hadn't had to play too much of a role. But even though he'd been feeling perhaps a little in denial about the whole thing, and hoping that nothing much would change, that the baby would be raised by his whole community of androids who knew more about this shit than him, he also felt like this was something that had to be done right, to prove that any of the rest of it had a chance to succeed. If he could free all the captive humans and hybrids in the world, if he could kill every last Aerquan, then what would it mean if he couldn't competently raise one quarter-alien baby to be a decent person? His whole vision of how humanity could be relied on there being a next generation. A good one. And yeah, there were human babies now, if he could get them out of this damn city, and there were more people to have more children, but his child with Sky, well, it would be the first person born in his world, outside of captivity, with no goals for its existence other than for it to live and be human. And that was a major proof of concept. Having other hybrids like these people - good people, according to Sky - would make things a whole lot easier when that little blue kid needed to know where they came from.
He realized he had paused and zoned out thinking there, looking at the throng of blue people, when he was snapped out of it by Maddy's voice.
"It seems like we can just bind these longer poles together with the cables to make a long enough pole to cross the ditch, shall we get on with doing that while you organize which androids you want going across it?"
She was asking him gently, whether he wanted to give an order. He loved that about her - she never drew attention to it when he didn't know what to do next and she did.
"Yeah, if you and Lena can manage building the thing, I'll call all the various teams and have everybody head over here. I'll leave the guys in the school there for now, with the humans, no sense in getting them out here until we have a plan for them to get across, and I won't be sending those androids over anyway. I think the guys you have here with the hybrids should stay here too. I'll send people who were in the Aerquan quarter and who worked on the first assault over - they are most likely the most in need of charging, since they went in first, and I think we can largely abandon what they were supposed to be doing in terms of trying to recover Aerquan materials or whatever to study. If they can't fit it in their pockets, we won't be able to get it out of Brightvale anyway."
It wasn't long before he'd contacted every team leader, and the androids were told to get to the ditch as fast as they could. The only other order he had given was for a few heavily armed android soldiers to take up positions around the perimeter of the city, so they could at least be aware of any Aerquan sighted approaching from any direction, and could have a reasonable chance of taking them out before they could get in to Brightvale proper.
The pole, which was actually an ugly mash-up of rusted metal lengths tethered together at various points along the way, was coming along nicely, as the sound of androids running to reach them could be heard in the background. Curtis felt optimistic about this part of the plan, but inside him gnawed the anxiety that once they had finished working on this, and the androids were making their way across, he'd have to come up with a way to get the refugees out, and so far, he had no clue how that was going to work at all.
Chapter 9
The android soldiers may not have shown any fear as they cautiously moved along the thin, creaking pole, over the toxic water below, but Curtis could tell that the hybrids watching were terrified for them, by the way little gasps would rise up in unison from them whenever someone wobbled a little, or the pole gave an especially noticeable groan under their weight. There really was no way he could get them, or the humans, to cross this way - it was not especially safe for the androids, but at least if they did fall in and have their skin painfully attacked by the corrosives in the water, there'd be a chance to fix them after, or even to recover their mother chips somehow and put them into new bodies. For humans, well, there would be no such second chances, and a slip into the water would mean at best permanent, painful disability, and at worst a traumatic and agonizing death. They knew this because some of Maddy's androids had done some experiments when they had first found the ditch full of water. It was just as well they had.
Nonetheless, a good half of the one hundred androids Curtis was sending across were already on the other side, now, and the first of them had already reached the site where the cars were parked. He'd reported that there were no Aerquan to be seen, yet.
"Maddy, I'm going to see if I can find a way to the top of that building, so I can get a better view of them crossing, and what there is on the other side," Curtis said, meaning a four storey, ruined building behind them, that was the tallest structure he could see. He could probably climb it with his mecha, using the old window frames as footholds, and as well as the view from the high ground over what was going on here, he also wanted to get away for a moment to think on his own. Now there was nothing for him to do but give encouraging words to androids as they moved off to cross the world's shittiest bridge, the anxiety around his lack of a plan was becoming more and more intense. He knew Maddy would be thinking about it, too, as well as Lena, and Osiris, who had joined Lena on the bank now, but he wanted to mull it over by himself, from a distance, before trying to discuss their options. His biggest fear was that when they did come to have that conversation, everybody would still be drawing a blank. Somehow that was a more troubling threat than the idea of the sky around them suddenly filling with hostile Aerquan.
He tried to imagine it was his own body doing the climbing, even though he was just sitting in the cockpit of the mecha and controlling its arms and legs as it hauled itself upwards and reached for the ledges of windows that had long since lost their panes. It felt like if he was really moving, really struggling to pull himself up to the roof, then some of the nervous energy in him might get burnt off, and he might be able to think more clearly. But the climb was over in under a minute, and he felt as jittery as ever. He tried to recapture the moment when he'd been fucking Lena, before everything had turned into a massive problem, and remember that feeling of release, but of course, things had already gone crazy right as he came, and the memory just made him feel more stressed.
When this shit is over, I'm going to hole up in my room at the hotel with Lena, Osiris and Maddy, for as long as it takes for all of us to fuck all of this pressure away. I just need to get through the next... However many hours. I just need a plan.
He paced around the flat roof of the building, even though it was the mecha doing the pacing, and so it didn't really make him feel any less agitated. He wondered if the roof could really support the mecha stomping around on it, but what did it matter - he'd be safe inside it if he crashed through. That made him wonder how far he could fall in this thing without breaking it, or injuring himself. Could he jump off the roof? Possibly. He looked over the edge, seeing Lena's platinum blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight, as she stood beside Maddy's mecha, thinking that he'd have to ask her about that someday. It wouldn't be useful now, unless there was some crazy way he could catapult the mecha suits across the ditch - then it might matter how well they could fall.
Now, that idea had no merit at all - there was no way even with an engineer like Lena here that they could build something like that out of random stuff they found in the ruins. But as he idly imagined mechas flying through the air over the water, watching androids nimbly dashing across the pole, he couldn't help but think that a way of crossing over in the air might just be a better solution than anything bridge based.
From up here, to over there, doesn't feel so far, if you could travel in a straight line.
He looked at the spot across the ditch where, in the distance, a female android soldier was stepping off of the pole onto land, not breaking her pace for a second, racing straight off toward the parking site (which he couldn
't see from here).
If I could fasten something strong here, one of those thick cables, maybe, and then have one of the androids going across somehow make an anchored landing spot on the other side of the ditch, could we somehow just sort of lower people across?
The idea he was picturing was a kind of zipline - perhaps allowing the more able bodied people to just slide across, suspended from ropes or whatever, and the children, or weaker people, or people who were just too scared, to be sent across on something that could hang down. It didn't seem like it would be too hard to construct, or require materials they wouldn't be able to find - there were sure to be bits of fabric like old rugs and curtains in these former homes, or in the hospital nearby, which could be used to make stuff people could hang from, and they already had plenty of cables. Some were sure to be long enough.
So what problems would we need to solve to make that work?
He was focused now, looking down at the people he was now thinking of sending over the ditch this way.
They'd need to get up here, first. I'll need to find out if there's a way up on foot, either inside or outside the building, otherwise we'll need to find another point with a high enough building and cross there. I suppose I could get people to come from the parking site to collect the hybrids and humans as they cross, so it isn't strictly necessary for them to walk to the site like the androids - they can head straight for the charge point and then Newtown as soon as each car is full. As long as each car has an armed android in it and they travel in a convoy, they'll be able to deal with any Aerquan if they appear while they're on the road. That means if we have to find a different crossing point it isn't a dealbreaker, although, it'll be easier if we can just do it here.
Re-Think Page 4