I could only see silhouettes, but the unmistakable outlines of the two mechs were there.
“Come on, you sons of bitches,” I said weakly, “do you want to live forever?”
Everyone was silent for a moment before Rocky began laughing. A few more people began chuckling until soon everyone was laughing. The advancing soldiers stopped, spreading out and taking positions as our survivors continued their desperate laughs at the absurdity of our situation. A moment later the hums of charging railguns began reverberating through the mountain pass. I closed my eye at the sound of a thundering shot, awaiting its powerful shockwave, but only a slight wind flew past me. I opened my eye, seeing columns of smoldering debris falling to the earth where the EXO:B-128s had been standing.
I looked up, seeing at least four Brazilian made BAD-3: Guerra Drones swoop past, trying to regain speed after firing their railguns. The survivors all turned around, seeing a line of APC:B-032s and people in exoskeletons coming up the road. Vehicles sped past us, dodging around the group of survivors, their weapons opening fire on the CSA soldiers as suited people poured out of them. Railguns hummed again, the BAD-3s coming back around again for another volley.
“Get in,” a voice I vaguely recognized said as hands pushed me into one of the personnel carriers.
I stumbled into the MTVR rear carrier compartment, rolling onto my back. The sound of gunfire and shouting faded as everything went dark.
Death’s cold embrace.
Chapter 68
595 B.C.E.
Hot summer sun beat down on the Babylonian metropolis, sweat soaking the white shawl wrapped around my body. My husband, the king Nebuchadnezzar II, stood one pace behind me. Yet I could just about feel his expecting smile on my back as he presented the finished product.
I exhaled, standing in the palace, looking out at the great structure only recently completed. Grapevines reached their long fingers over the twelve glazed columns holding up the second tier of the gardens. Lemon and pear trees occupied the second level’s corners like guests at a party gathering to observe the sprawling Babylonian Empire. Around the ponds on each of the four sides grew lush flowers brought in from Media, blooming like drops of crushed lapis lazuli and madder root dropped into a still pond. The top tier was a forest of fig trees, with grape vines and brilliant flowers climbing over the small, square gazebo in the middle. Each successive tier was accessible by stairs wrapping around the far corner, the outside wall of the stairs covered in thick ivy. Clear water from the Euphrates trickled from the pond on the top tier, going in all four directions to each side of the gardens where it dropped down to the next tier.
I turned around and forced a smile. His joy was subtly shattered, seeing my displeasure remain.
“Of course,” he said, “I will call the servants. We will tour the gardens immediately. Up close its beauty almost matches your own, my love.”
“That will be wonderful,” I said, hoping he was right about my spirits being lifted.
It hadn’t always been this way. My life in Mede had been charming, being born to royalty. The Medes had even been a fairly good place to live as a woman. Aside from the usual customs that needed to be observed as daughter of king Cyaxares, I tended to be free to do what I wanted. I picked up gardening while I was there, tending to my foxgloves, milkwort, silk vines, bunias, lilies, irises, and henbanes. My childhood was spent trying to breed the most brilliant colors in each of the flowers.
It was when I had been in this life for almost seventeen years that my father called for me. I would never see my precious flowers again. My father was back from campaign in the west after several years, fighting against the Assyrians. Though life had been charming as a little girl in Media, my father had resisted Assyrian hegemony. Word of their wars of succession had prompted him to quickly marshal his forces and march west.
I walked with my husband through the palace, surrounded by our servants. A cool breeze made its way through its stone halls, capturing the wind as they were designed to do, billowing the shawl draped loosely around me. I watched my feet as I walked, pushing a thin braid of hair from my face. The king continued talking about the gardens, which he had not wanted me to step into until their completion, describing where in the Caucuses he was able to find each flower.
“I tried to get the ones you described from your childhood,” he said, “but it wasn’t always easy, so I ended up just getting every kind the servants could find.”
I wanted to tell him that just having the flowers wasn’t really the point. It was tending to them that I’d enjoyed as a girl. But I knew he wouldn’t listen. The work of a gardener was no life for the Queen of Babylon.
Getting called west by my father hadn’t bothered me too much. I would miss my flowers – my distraction for this life – but I knew it meant the Assyrians were not long for this world. It was only a few lives before that I had been on the receiving end of Assyrian ‘diplomacy.’
I had been part of an Elamite rebellion that ended with me being flayed alive. Almost my entire next life, somewhere in sub Saharan Africa, I still dreamt of blades meticulously cutting into my flesh. The sticky burning feeling of fingers probing into me and slowly peeling skin away from muscle. The image of my left hand, skin completely removed, bone and tendons exposed to hot desert sun, rampaged through my mind every time I closed my eyes. My own screams of abject terror and otherworldly pain mixed in with the thousands of others all around me. The sand became caked with blood.
Consciousness wavered until the blade found its way into my stomach, slicing up from above my genitals to the bottom of my throat. It took six men, three on each side, to tear the skin open and pull it away from my torso. Blood poured down, pooling in reddened soil. The sound of my skin ripping away from my abdomen filled my head for the life afterwards whenever silence failed to chase the memory away.
These thoughts tormented me still, another life removed from the horrors. There was no way to-
“Please, my love,” the king said, extending a hand once we arrived at the bottom of the stairs.
I looked down at my hands, remembering once again how they looked when my skin was gone. I raised my hand slowly to his, startled when he gripped me in his firm grasp, a warm smile beneath the well-groomed beard.
“Thank you,” I said reticently, following him up the long stairway.
When I had arrived at my father’s camp, he and his Scythian and Babylonian allies were still outside the walls of Nineveh. Only then did I meet my betrothed, the Babylonian prince. He was plain looking, but as fierce as any Median warrior. And he was immediately smitten with me, making him that much braver. And foolhardy.
When the allies finally entered Nineveh, the prince went in at the front of the column. I hadn’t known it at the time, standing back with the servants and other camp followers watching the great city go up in flames, but he’d been injured almost immediately, taking a missile to the head. But it had been a wonder to see the terror of Mesopotamia, the seat of the fearsome Assyrians, torn down brick by brick.
It was then, too, that an important lesson was driven home to me.
“The fruit is not yet ripened,” the king said as we reached the top of the stairs, “but I have put together a full-time staff to tend your gardens. They will know exactly when the fruits are just right to be eaten.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, trying in vain to act interested.
“Does something not please you, my love?” he asked, “I can send a party back to the mountains to find-”
“No,” I said, “it’s not that. The garden is…it’s absolutely beautiful. Stunning, even. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Then what is it?” he asked, “you have only grown more melancholy since construction began.”
“Your father…” I said, “he was Assyrian, was he not?”
Nebuchadnezzar looked at me with a raised brow. “Is that what is bothering you? I am not like them. You know this.”
“That’s not…
” I sighed, still looking around at the gardens.
They were, in fact, extremely beautiful. Yet I still felt a pallor had been pulled over my vision.
“What is it, my love?”
“Do you remember the Israelites in your service?” I asked, “the ones that interpreted your dream?”
“Are you having bad dreams?” he asked.
“No. I mean, yes,” I shook my head, “that’s not what this is about. Do you remember the dream the magi couldn’t interpret for you?”
He stood quiet, saying nothing.
“About the fall of your kingdom,” I continued, “I was thinking about the Assyrians and-”
“Perhaps a woman should not be thinking of such things,” he said in a low voice, “the mind of a woman is very delicate.”
“How long do you think your empire will last?” I asked.
“My power is absolute,” he said impatiently.
“For now,” I said, “but even as we speak, Babylon grows restless.”
“Nonsense,” he said, “how can you repay me with this talk after the gift I’ve just given you?”
“There was a time,” I said, “when the Assyrians thought themselves eternal as well. Before that the Egyptians, the Shang, the Xia. Is it possible that no kingdom can last forever?”
“What are you talking about, woman?”
“If even a kingdom is not eternal,” I said, “if even an empire’s greatness dies, then what is eternity? What of this world will still be around in sixty years? One hundred twenty years? Seven hundred twenty years?”
“Babylon will still exist,” he said, “the sons of my sons will still rule once you bear me an heir. What concern of yours is this, anyway?”
“Your father was Assyrian,” I said, “he was the vassal ruler of this kingdom.”
The king gritted his teeth angrily, “I pray Marduk forgives your blasphemous words, woman. I will forget this outrageous talk given your melancholy.”
“The only thing that makes a rightful ruler is that nobody left alive remembers that it was taken wrongfully from the previous ruler,” I said, looking up at the glazed columns covered in vines and colorful flowers.
A sharp pain spiked through the side of my face, sending me stumbling backwards into the soil. The king took a step forward, glowering, hand still raised from striking me. I rubbed my temple, turning my gaze down at my legs curled beneath me. My husband sighed.
“Please, my love,” he said, “can we not just enjoy this beautiful day sitting in the garden? Tomorrow I will need to attend to other matters. Perhaps tonight we can try again to produce an heir? Wouldn’t that be a lovelier way to celebrate this gift than speaking of things you couldn’t possibly understand?”
I looked back up to him, “yes…of course.”
He smiled, stepping closer to me, reaching his hand out for me to take it.
“Good,” he said, “then let us stroll in the shade of the garden and cool off in the pools.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling back at him as I took his hand, “that would be wonderful.”
But the lesson could not be unlearned. I knew that one day I would walk amongst the ruins of this city, long after king Nebuchadnezzar II was dead and forgotten. The lesson was that nothing was permanent. All things great and terrible would die away, lost to the sands of time. All beautiful things crumble to ruin, shattered and forgotten. It was then that the realization fully took hold in my mind that there was nothing in the world that could ever be worth fighting for. All was fleeting and vain. Only endless distraction remained.
Chapter 69
Nightmares merged with reality in a delirious concoction of fear and confusion. Faces passed in and out of consciousness, blurs of memory. The estuary of numb cold and bloodstained snow swirling into ancient memories. Flying robots with humming railguns blasting holes in rock and chariots with studded wheels slipping in gore. Machine guns and muskets. Mechanized suits and wooden siege engines. All engaged in an absurd dance through my throbbing head, blindly moving toward the edge of oblivion. Yet the pain felt as if it were happening to someone else. The beeping of medical instruments mixed with the maniacal laughter of Evita. Thoughts leaking through my unified mind.
Hatred.
But it was those thoughts that seemed to drive me at this point. A burning desire to just see it all destroyed. Nightmares of cities turned to bone and ash slowly became the best part of my delirium. I could see their faces burning, flesh melting. The smell of cinders and boiling fat teased my nostrils, just out of detection. The sounds of the medical instruments turning into faint screams as the world descends into inevitable despair.
I couldn’t tell how long I’d been in the state, but the dreams began to fade as reality won over the battle for my consciousness. The hospital room materialized over the course of several days, sometimes dim, sometimes bright. Faces were there. Strangers. Pain became more and more real. Everything hurt. My face felt as if someone had been pounding on it with a hammer. My eye sockets throbbed. The places in my shoulder, arm, and leg where I’d been shot felt as if hot pokers were being jammed into my flesh. My chest resisted every breath, the pain telling me to just give up on breathing.
More and more I longed for the fearscape of my nightmares.
An indeterminate amount of time passed, but I no longer had the catharsis of dreams. Reality slowly seeped back in through fractures in my consciousness like a fetid stream through a melting glacier. The all-too-familiar sterile stench of a hospital room. Beeps and hums from instruments monitoring my vitals. Déjà vu. All so familiar.
How often has my leadership ended with myself in the hospital? With everyone around me in the hospital?
I knew dying was the right thing to do. It would be best for everyone if I died before they were able to see me awake. Before they had a chance to speak with me. My eye continued to wander to the drawer containing epinephrine. Yet my left leg was in a cast, left arm wrapped and bandaged, and my entire body too sore to even get up.
“Just crawl your way over there,” Evita whispered, “the pain will be temporary. It doesn’t matter if you tear all of your sutures and break all of your bones. Death will free you of all those pains.”
This refrain repeated in my head every time I awoke. Occasionally an orderly would be in the room, checking vitals, changing bed sheets, fiddling with instruments. Every time they came by, I pretended to be asleep, not wanting to talk. I never wanted to talk to anyone ever again.
Another three days passed before Evita’s voice finally convinced me. It was nighttime, the room dimly lit. I slowly moved my bandaged arms, pulling the blanket covers off myself. The movement seemed to awaken the pain in my joints, but I grit my teeth and carefully swung my legs over the edge of the bed, lowering my feet to the floor and attempting to put weight on them.
Pain jolted through me. I let out a quick yelp and slid off the edge of the bed, toppling to the floor on my back. I cringed in renewed agony, breathing quickly, trying to mentally block it out.
When the throbbing subsided somewhat, I painstakingly rolled over and got onto my hands and right knee, holding the left off the floor. I started crawling toward the drawer holding my salvation. The bullet wounds in my shoulder and arm burned with agony for every inch I moved. The I.V. stand followed along, the needle pulling at the flesh in my forearm. I tore away at the other monitors, the beeping going berserk behind me. I pushed forward, trying to ignore the pain.
Nurses and a doctor rushed into my room, followed by…
The doctor barked orders as nurses and orderlies lifted me off the floor, bringing me back to the bed, reapplying monitoring instruments and checking my bandages for torn sutures. The pain had given way to anger at being thwarted.
The commotion faded as the nurses assured themselves I hadn’t re-injured myself. I passed the attempted suicide off as just an accident – I fell out of bed during a particularly bad nightmare. The nurses bought the story. Or at least pretended to.
When
the nurses left, she finally entered the room.
“You can either just do it for me or not,” I sighed, “but please spare me any lectures.”
“Is that any way to greet a friend?” Kali asked, “I will attribute your lack of manners to your present condition.”
The Indian socialite was wearing uncharacteristically drab clothes. Her long hair was braided, draped over the left shoulder of her thick winter jacket, zipper opened to reveal a plain black V-neck t-shirt. A large purse hung over the other shoulder down to her hip, appearing mostly empty. Leggings clung tightly to her legs, showcasing fitness I wasn’t aware she possessed, terminating just above feet clad in worn sneakers.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, closing my eyes.
“Just checking up on you,” she said, “I was worried you might not make it. I didn’t anticipate you would live through weeks of hell only to finish yourself off.”
“I’m sorry,” I exhaled slowly, “where is everyone else? Who lived? I need to talk to Markus or somebody. I need to tell them what happened.”
“Your friends?” Kali said, “they aren’t here.”
My eyes shot open, “they’re all dead?”
Kali chuckled, “no. Absolutely not. But they’re all back in Denver, I presume.”
“Then…where am I?”
“Of course,” Kali said, walking into the room and taking a seat next to my bed, “my apologies. We’re in Dearborn.”
“Michigan?”
“Yes.”
“Why am I in the PRA?” I asked.
“When the CSA began marching into the LoC from Nebraska and New Mexico…I had to marshal every connection I had to ensure that they were unsuccessful.”
“Connections within the PRA?”
“In a sense,” she said, looking out the barred-off window at the snowy building next to us, “the PRA already setup defenses against the CSA’s northern front. I had to…anyway, the PRA stopped the northern attack into the LoC. This saved most of the LoC north of Colorado Springs and east of the mountains.”
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