Allegiance

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  It came back clear, and Michael motioned for the divers to follow him to the top. They crouched, and he raised binoculars to his visor.

  The prison’s exterior walls were still in fairly good shape. Above them rose multiple guard towers, their glass windows broken out and the paint long since stripped off. Only one section of barbed-wire fencing remained on the perimeter; the rest lay in tangled heaps on the ground.

  Michael considered radioing Discovery to see if its AI, Timothy Pepper, had detected any exhaust plumes from the defectors. But he quickly decided it was too great a risk, and the airship was likely too high to pick up anything on the surface.

  “Radio silence, everyone,” he said.

  If there were hostiles down here, Michael didn’t want to give them a heads-up that Team Raptor had landed. The three divers and their drone were on their own now, without aerial support from Discovery.

  He gave the signal to advance, and the team moved down the other side of the hill, weapons shouldered and pointed at the prison. Cricket kept behind them, moving apace and scanning for signs of life.

  The three divers fanned out into combat intervals as they closed the gap between the hill and the former prison’s outer concrete walls.

  Michael felt the terrain change underfoot and stopped to brush dirt off the cracked asphalt of a road. It led to the front of the compound and a closed steel door covered in rust and pocked with bullet holes.

  He checked the digital map on his HUD and this time managed to match it with another road coming from the east—the same direction as the ocean.

  Michael gave more hand signals.

  The team continued to the outer wall of the prison while he went to check this second road. His gut told him the best evidence of life would be any tracks he might find.

  So far, he didn’t see any footprints, hoofprints, or vehicle tracks. Nothing to indicate that anything bigger than a bug lived in this toxic wasteland. Cricket wasn’t coming back with anything conclusive, either.

  Magnolia and Trey took up position against the wall. He gave a nod to their mirrored visors before running out into the open with Cricket hovering after him.

  Keeping low, he didn’t stop until he got to the intersection. A crooked pole jutted up beside the road, two and a half centuries after the nuclear blast that should have blown it down. The directional sign, however, was long since reduced to flakes of rust.

  Michael checked the ground and quickly found something that could be recent. Bending down, he studied the dirt and dust that had covered what looked like tire tracks.

  He looked east, back toward the bay where they had flown in over the ships. The vessels could have belonged to Cazador pirates under el Pulpo’s command, but there was no record of their coming here—which was part of the reason he had decided to check it out. More likely, the tracks and the ships had been left by someone else.

  But they could not possibly have been here when the bombs fell.

  A chill ran through him when a whistle of the wind sounded eerily like a Siren’s wail. The noise passed, and again the landscape fell into silence.

  He scanned the road for heat signatures and found nothing but small creatures that lived in the toxic dirt. Lightning forked over the western horizon. He faced south, where explosions of light inside a towering mass of cumulus looked like bombs going off. The storm was moving toward their position.

  He hurried back to the wall, where Trey waited.

  “Where’s Mags?” Michael whispered.

  Trey started moving along the side of the wall to the next corner. Around the edge, Magnolia stood behind a hunk of broken wall, looking inside the former prison yard. She was frozen like a statue.

  “I’ve got a reading,” she said without turning.

  Michael considered sending Cricket in but decided to keep the robot back for now. He brought up his rifle and took a position on the left side of the wall. Then he glanced inside the rectangular prison compound.

  A guard tower rose in the middle of the facility, its empty window frames overlooking concrete courts covered with the dirt and dust of centuries. Several basketball hoops remained, but where there had once been nets, Michael spotted something that looked almost like flags.

  Movement at the base of the poles flickered across his night vision, but he couldn’t make it out. He switched to infrared to see dozens … no, hundreds of small creatures on the courts.

  “What are we looking at?” Trey asked, moving next to Michael.

  “Rats,” Magnolia replied.

  “But what are they doing?”

  Michael brought his scope back up to his visor but still couldn’t see much.

  “Hold here,” he said. “I’ll check this out.”

  Michael moved through the opening in the wall, careful not to snag his suit on a curl of rebar sticking out of the broken concrete.

  Keeping low, he ran toward the guard tower, not stopping until he got there. He inched around the corner for a better view of the courts. The sound of thousands of clicking teeth grew louder as he closed in.

  For a moment, he felt the sensation of something watching him, and he froze, scanning the buildings in the rectangular compound. The few windows and doors were broken and leading into darkness, where eyes could watch his team from the shadows.

  Michael spotted a promising entrance that might lead to the guts of the prison, and the source of the signal. He looked back to the hole in the wall, where Trey and Magnolia were still waiting.

  His hands told the story without a word spoken. Then he took off running, past the concrete fields, not slowing his pace even when he saw what the rats were feasting on.

  Heart pounding, Michael took cover inside an open door, trying to keep from panting. But that was nearly impossible, and he found himself sucking in air.

  When he looked back out the door, he saw skeletal remains of several humans in the courtyard. The rats meant they had to be recent kills.

  He tried to slow his heartbeat. You’ve got this, Tin. He had told himself the same thing when he got scared as a kid.

  He turned down the hallway to peer into the inky darkness. Switching from infrared to night vision, he made out the old passage. Ceiling panels hung loose, and sections of tile floor had sheared off.

  But what the hell was the cylinder on the floor?

  He brought the scope up to his visor and zoomed in on what looked an awful lot like a cryo chamber. Several were scattered in the hallway, with skirts of glass surrounding the vats.

  There was no use going inside or sending Cricket in. Someone, or something, had beat Team Raptor here.

  But that still didn’t make any sense. If these chambers were holding survivors for 250 years, it was one hell of a coincidence their being raided within days of the team’s arrival. More puzzling still, what on earth were cryo chambers doing in a prison?

  Michael pushed aside the questions and moved back out into the yard. He ran past the rats, not looking at the remains they were feeding on. This time, a new sound replaced the din of nails and teeth—a screech reminiscent of baby Sirens.

  Before he could react, a wave of black swooped away from the broken windows of the guard tower and slammed into him. A pair of wings wrapped around his visor, and he peered out at the deformed eyes of a bat the size of his head.

  He flailed his arms, screaming as the creatures covered his body like an adhesive that he couldn’t get off.

  “Hold on, and don’t move!” Magnolia yelled.

  Michael froze, knowing just what she was about to do. He felt the pressure lighten on his natural arm as she used one of her two crescent blades to cut through the flesh of several bats.

  The hissing made him flinch.

  “Don’t move!” she shouted again.

  Cricket hovered over their heads, using a blowtorch to burn the bats off Michael’s armor.<
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  The screeching rose into a strident cacophony around him as she went to work with her blades, hacking the beasts from the air and off his body.

  “Run!” she yelled.

  Michael didn’t miss a beat. As soon as he had his bearings, he took off for the wall, where Trey opened fire. Rounds cut the air.

  “Hold your fire!” Michael shouted.

  But Trey kept shooting burst after burst.

  Michael glanced over his shoulder at the same entrance he had hidden inside earlier. Orange eyes glowed from the open doorway, and a figure covered in bones and hide stepped outside.

  “Get down!” Magnolia shouted.

  Michael hit the dirt as a flurry of bolts singed the air.

  Cricket chirped and moved for cover as bullets and laser bolts lanced through the air all around it.

  Over the crack of gunfire came the shrieks of the bats and rats. Even the rodents were abandoning their meal to escape the killer machines. Not one but three defectors emerged from the interior of the prison, the skins of their recent kills still dripping blood.

  “Run!” Michael shouted.

  A flurry of laser bolts shot outward. Magnolia helped Michael up, firing her rifle at the same time. He turned and got off several bolts. Return fire hit Cricket, blowing off a mechanical arm at the joint.

  Michael tapped his wrist monitor, ordering the drone to retreat as he ran for the exit. Trey had already escaped behind the wall, providing an opening that Magnolia leaped through.

  Bolts pounded the concrete as Michael followed. Some broke through, streaking into the ground. He hit the dirt and Cricket sailed overhead, another arm hanging loosely from its socket.

  Getting to his knees, Michael turned over to see Trey lying prone.

  “Get up!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get into the sky!”

  Michael grabbed the young diver and pulled. Trey rolled over, revealing a simmering hole in the center of his visor and his crushed booster pack, hissing out pressurized helium.

  “No …” Michael choked. He pulled on Trey again. “Get up!”

  The limp body didn’t respond to his screams.

  Michael stared for a moment, barely able to move. Trey wasn’t getting up now or ever. Nothing they could do would change that.

  A hand grabbed Michael and yanked him down as more bolts sizzled through the concrete wall, streaking away into the desert.

  “He’s gone!” Magnolia shouted. “We have to move!”

  She pulled an EMP grenade from her vest and lobbed it over the wall. Grabbing Michael, she leaned her face shield against his until they clacked together.

  “We have to get in the air as soon as those machines are down,” she yelled. “You got that, Commander?”

  He fought free of her grip, bending back down to Trey. They couldn’t leave him for the machines to parade around wearing his bones and skin.

  “No, we take him with us!”

  Cricket hovered over Trey and tried to lift the body with his remaining arm, but the weight just snapped it out of socket. Then the robot crashed to the ground, red hover nodes suddenly winking off. It took Michael a moment for the realization to set in.

  The EMP grenade had fried the damn systems.

  Before Michael could react, Magnolia punched the booster in his pack, and the balloon exploded out of the canister, filling with helium and hauling him skyward.

  “no-o-o!” Michael wailed, reaching down.

  He kicked his feet to no avail, looking down at Trey’s limp body and the machines that had killed him. They jerked in the prison yard and then lay still, their systems fried just like Cricket’s.

  Magnolia bent down beside the drone and punched the booster they had mounted to it. The balloon pulled the limp machine into the sky, and she followed right behind.

  Clenching his jaw, Michael held back tears as he was pulled higher. Their maiden dive from Discovery had dropped Team Raptor into a trap, right into the hands of the defectors.

  But the machines didn’t have a ship to escape on, and as soon as Michael got back to Discovery, he would urge Les to drop a bomb directly on the prison. It would mean obliterating his son’s body, but it had to be done. They couldn’t risk leaving the machines behind to repair one another and return to their mission of exterminating humanity.

  ONE

  Two months later

  Xavier Rodriguez clove-hitched the fishing boat to a pier piling and pulled the rope tight. He felt refreshed this morning, and strong. Over the past few months, he had recovered from his injuries and put on muscle mass by taking long daily swims and working in the sun.

  Nearing a half century of age, he found it ironic that he should be in the best shape of his adult life. But he wasn’t complaining. Age, after all, was just a number.

  With the rope secure, he reached back into the boat for his backpack and motioned for Miles to hop out. The dog hesitated at the gap between the gunwale and the pier. He was wary of the depths ever since a snake pulled him under back in Florida.

  “It’s okay, boy,” X said. “Come on.”

  Miles backed up, then ran and leaped onto the pier. He slid a foot before turning and wagging his tail.

  X took an apple out of the bag and bit into it as he slung the pack over his shoulders. The fruit here was unlike anything they ever had on the Hive, and with fish added to his diet, X had added twenty pounds of lean muscle to his scarred frame. But he still wasn’t used to the sun and had to protect his skin with lotion he bought from an old woman on the trading-post rig.

  He bit off another chunk of apple and tossed it to Miles, and they set off down the long pier, past other boats bobbing gently in the afternoon sun. A light breeze ruffled his button-down shirt and shorts. He had traded in his Hell Diver gear for the loose-fitting clothing and sandals.

  It sure beat the leather outfit Imulah had given him to wear.

  “You are a king now,” the scribe had said. “You must dress like one.”

  “You want me to dress like a court jester,” X had replied. “Fuck that.”

  If it were up to him, he would have worn what was left of his old Hell Diver armor, but he had stowed it away in a locker, where it waited should he ever need it again.

  Gazing out at the balmy skies, it was hard to imagine, but he knew there would always be a need for Hell Divers—and, more specifically, him.

  He finished the apple and rested his hand on the pommel of the captain’s sword from the Hive. He thought of all those who had carried the iconic sword before him. Their sacrifices had allowed him and so many others to experience life as it was meant to be lived.

  But before he could truly enjoy the sunshine today, he had to get something out of the way that he hated: talking.

  Today, it wasn’t just a talk. He was practically giving a speech, and the gathering of boats told him a lot of people had come to hear him. If that weren’t bad enough, he had a council meeting later in the afternoon.

  X halted at the sight of dark canopies sailing across the western sky.

  The new Hell Divers deployed their chutes as they broke through the cloud cover on their training runs. Normally, they jumped at night to better approximate conditions in the wastes, but today the rookies were doing it in the sunlight.

  He paused to watch as several veterans led the new recruits and volunteers. Many of the greenhorns, surprisingly, had come from the Cazador military. Who would have thought so many of them wanted to join the “sky gods,” as they referred to his people.

  His heart thumped with longing to be up there again.

  But he was just a retired, grumpy old man now, and he had business to attend to this afternoon. Miles nudged up against him as if to say, Keep moving, boss.

  “We’re late, I know,” X said.

  Miles wagged his tail, and his crystal-blue eyes seemed to brighten
in the mat of graying fur. The dog was only about twelve years old, but even with the genetic modifications, he was aging and, like any other creature, starting to slow down.

  He wasn’t the only one. Despite feeling great, X couldn’t run quite as fast or jump quite as far.

  “You and I are starting to geeze, old buddy,” X murmured.

  He reached down, and Miles lapped at his scarred wrist. There was nothing in the world like the love of a dog. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing Miles like so many others he had grown close to over the years.

  The clank of boots sounded ahead, snapping him out of his melancholy train of thought.

  Several militia guards patrolled the docks ahead, keeping an eye on the boats. Two more guards stood in front of the elevator that would take X to the top of the capitol oil rig, from which el Pulpo had ruled his people. It was now under the militia’s command, but Cazadores still lived here—mostly accountants, scribes, and wealthier merchants who kept the economy humming.

  X continued toward the platform. The militia guards there wore black armor, but instead of the batons they had carried on the Hive, they had automatic rifles.

  Red airship symbols with a “V” through the middle marked their helmet crests and their chests.

  “Coming down,” one of soldiers said.

  The cage at the top of the lift rattled its way down to the marina while X waited. He turned back to watch the divers in the western sky.

  A moment later, the elevator clanked and the door opened. Freshly promoted Lieutenant Lauren Sloan, leader of the militia, stood there with her arms folded across her armored chest, clearly annoyed.

  “King Rodriguez,” she said gruffly. “You’re late.”

  “No, you’re late,” X replied. “I’ve been here thirty minutes waiting for a ride up.” He grinned and looked at the two guards. “Right, fellas?”

  They exchanged a glance, then nodded unconvincingly.

  “Whatever you say, King Xavier,” Sloan said. “Now, can we get going?”

  “When you stop calling me ‘King,’ sure,” X replied.

  “You are indeed a king,” boomed another voice.