by Phoenix Ward
“Why?” Tera asked. “Why did you do this?”
The man scoffed a little. “You were about to kick us out of the only shelter we had, and you want to know why we attacked you?” He looked around at some of the other humans in his group and laughed.
“You had the E.M.P. from the beginning,” Tera observed. “This was your plan all along.”
“Ha, you got me,” the man replied. “You’re right — we were always going to blow you up.”
“You aren’t exiles,” Tera said matter-of-factly.
The man nodded. “You’re pretty bright for a Council hound, you know?” he said. “Truck sent us himself. Wanted to send Shell City his best regards.”
“By killing two cops?”
“Nah,” the man replied. “That’s just the first phase of the plan. Gotta lay foundations, you know?”
Tera looked around as much as her restraints would allow her. They had pulled her into one of the abandoned structures that made up the ruins. At one point, it might have been a parking center, but Tera couldn’t be sure. While the man had been talking with his prisoner, another man started picking at the remains of Abenayo’s bodyshell. He plugged some sort of tablet-looking device into her empty head, gazing at the information through a pair of green-lensed goggles. Behind him, a pair of bodyshells were watching his work.
Tera’s face must have conveyed her confusion because the man talking to her turned and followed her eyes.
“You’re surprised to see I.I.s with us?” he asked.
“I thought you hated us,” Tera said.
“Not the I.I.s,” the man explained. “Just the Council. I.I.s are just like us — there’re good folks and bad folks. We’ve got some of the good folks with us here, and we welcome them. As long as they hate those fascists ruling things from their ivory Pavilion, we consider them friends. Some are even old urbanites, you know. Defectors, your bosses would call them.”
The man working on Abenayo’s corpse made a disappointed grunt. The big man turned to lock eyes with him.
“I don’t think any of this is gonna be usable, boss,” the man with the goggles said. “If there were any static charge left in her, it would have dissipated by now. Everything here is dead.”
The big man sighed. “Damn,” he said. Then he looked back into Tera’s face. “At least we have her.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Tera said. “The Council will be coming for you now.”
“That’s what we’re counting on, actually,” the man in charge replied. “It would have been nice if one of our I.I. boys could use some decent police hardware, but we’ll get some when they send people after you.”
“Abenayo will be coming, too,” Tera said. “In a different bodyshell.”
“You’re wrong there, officer,” the man sneered. “The frequency we used in the E.M.P. bomb deleted your friend, wherever she may be stored.”
“That’s impossible,” Tera said.
“Not at all. A bit of code gets injected into her hardware, which is transmitted to every instance of her brain. A virus. There’s no coming back from that. You’re on equal ground with us now.”
Tera refused to believe him. She tried to turn away, to turn her ocular receptors away from the man and his grinning face. Then, something caught her attention. A little alert in the corner of her vision she hadn’t noticed until now.
Her distress beacon had been activated. They must have accessed it while she was out cold. The Council would be coming out here, and there was no way for her to tell them it was a trap.
Afterbirth
With a pounding in her metal and plastic head, Tera started to come to. The world around her was a blur of colors and motion. She lifted her head and tried to make out up from down, but everything in her ocular receptors was swirling. A bit of static disruption lingered on the edge of her vision.
She tried to stand, but her extremities weren’t responding. Looking down, as things around her started to become clear, she realized she was tied up. Her legs were bound together and her arms were secured to her sides. Whoever did this to her had attached her to a nearby boulder with a short length of rope and a stake. She tried to pry herself loose, but couldn’t get any leverage with her arms and legs incapacitated.
Looking up, she saw Abenayo. Or at least, her bodyshell. All the subtle lights that usually glowed to indicate life within the machine were dead. The police-issued bodyshell that belonged to her partner and mentor lay dormant. Empty.
There was some movement off to the side that drew Tera’s gaze. The man who had pleaded with them mere moments ago to let them stay in the ruins approached her.
“Ah, she’s awake,” he said. Once he was within arm’s reach he knelt down so he could stare into her synthetic face. “If that’s what you call it, that is.”
“What the hell happened?” Tera asked. Her tone was seeped with venom. “What did you do to Abenayo?”
“We deleted her,” the man replied, a smirk on his lips. “The E.M.P. was supposed to erase you as well, but I guess you were just out of fatal range. Still, it was powerful enough to shut your systems down for a little bit. Might work out for the better, in the end.”
“Why?” Tera asked. “Why did you do this?”
The man scoffed a little. “You were about to kick us out of the only shelter we had, and you want to know why we attacked you?” He looked around at some of the other humans in his group and laughed.
“You had the E.M.P. from the beginning,” Tera observed. “This was your plan all along.”
“Ha, you got me,” the man replied. “You’re right — we were always going to blow you up.”
“You aren’t exiles,” Tera said matter-of-factly.
The man nodded. “You’re pretty bright for a Council hound, you know?” he said. “Truck sent us himself. Wanted to send Shell City his best regards.”
“By killing two cops?”
“Nah,” the man replied. “That’s just the first phase of the plan. Gotta lay foundations, you know?”
Tera looked around as much as her restraints would allow her. They had pulled her into one of the abandoned structures that made up the ruins. At one point, it might have been a parking center, but Tera couldn’t be sure. While the man had been talking with his prisoner, another man started picking at the remains of Abenayo’s bodyshell. He plugged some sort of tablet-looking device into her empty head, gazing at the information through a pair of green-lensed goggles. Behind him, a pair of bodyshells were watching his work.
Tera’s face must have conveyed her confusion because the man talking to her turned and followed her eyes.
“You’re surprised to see I.I.s with us?” he asked.
“I thought you hated us,” Tera said.
“Not the I.I.s,” the man explained. “Just the Council. I.I.s are just like us — there’re good folks and bad folks. We’ve got some of the good folks with us here, and we welcome them. As long as they hate those fascists ruling things from their ivory Pavilion, we consider them friends. Some are even old urbanites, you know. Defectors, your bosses would call them.”
The man working on Abenayo’s corpse made a disappointed grunt. The big man turned to lock eyes with him.
“I don’t think any of this is gonna be usable, boss,” the man with the goggles said. “If there were any static charge left in her, it would have dissipated by now. Everything here is dead.”
The big man sighed. “Damn,” he said. Then he looked back into Tera’s face. “At least we have her.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Tera said. “The Council will be coming for you now.”
“That’s what we’re counting on, actually,” the man in charge replied. “It would have been nice if one of our I.I. boys could use some decent police hardware, but we’ll get some when they send people after you.”
“Abenayo will be coming, too,” Tera said. “In a different bodyshell.”
“You’re wrong there, officer,” the m
an sneered. “The frequency we used in the E.M.P. bomb deleted your friend, wherever she may be stored.”
“That’s impossible,” Tera said.
“Not at all. A bit of code gets injected into her hardware, which is transmitted to every instance of her brain. A virus. There’s no coming back from that. You’re on equal ground with us now.”
Tera refused to believe him. She tried to turn away, to turn her ocular receptors away from the man and his grinning face. Then, something caught her attention. A little alert in the corner of her vision she hadn’t noticed until now.
Her distress beacon had been activated. They must have accessed it while she was out cold. The Council would be coming out here, and there was no way for her to tell them it was a trap.
Calvary
A whole day passed since the group of Truck’s Raiders deleted Abenayo and took Tera captive. The bandits kept her tied up the whole time, ignoring her for the most part. There was nothing for her to do — they cut off any kind of network access she normally had access to.
The only form of entertainment available to her was to watch the bandits prepare for the ambush on whatever Council troops would be responding. Where she thought they only had huts and tents set up, they actually had stored weapon caches. They unloaded what seemed like hundreds of magna-rifles and so many boxes of E.M.P. bullets that they could have erected a little fort for the children to play in with them. Some of the I.I.s in the group used bodyshells with built-in weapons, but most did not. Most were the old civilian models, the same kind one might see in Slumside.
They converted some of the tents and fake housing to make cover and pockets that bandits could conceal themselves. The part of the ruins they chose for this ambush was perfect — a nice clearing surrounded on all edges by tall, ruined buildings. There were a few people on each roof — if the building had a roof, that is — and several in the interior.
More and more, she started to doubt if the Council would win the fight when they got there. She had been so certain at first, but looking around at all the people and the position they were in, she wasn’t so sure anymore.
If only I could warn them, she thought. If only I could send some kind of message to the Council.
Everyone was alert and content at first, but after a few hours passed and there was still no Council response, they started to get restless.
“Come on, how long’s this gonna take,” she heard one complain.
“Shut up,” the man in charge of the party barked. “It’ll take however long it takes.”
“It’s starting to get late. Are we going to take shifts while some of the people rest? What about food?”
“I said shut up!”
But once the first day transitioned into night, then into the second day, even the boss guy was starting to moan about fatigue and hunger. Some people took watch for over eight hours at a time. Just sitting in one position, with their guns in their laps or on the ledges in front of them, eyes peeled for any kind of motion. She could see it was getting to them. They would shake their heads, trying to keep themselves awake. On the second day, Tera started to understand the Council’s tactic.
They’re deliberately delaying response, she thought, looking at the exhausted raiders around her. They knew the bandits would be prepared for them, so they wanted to wait them out until they were tired and hungry. Until their guard was down.
She was sure she was right. It was exactly something she could see the Council doing. It was cold and calculated, taking only the logical approach. They didn’t care if the raiders deleted her in the meantime.
It made sense.
Then, when so much time had passed that she started to doubt herself and the second night was beginning to fall, the raiders stirred.
“On the ridge!” one of the lookouts shouted.
Everyone went into action. The listless eyes and bored faces became intense with concentration. There was a commotion of plastic and metal as guns were moved, loaded, and aimed. Magazines were clicked into place and sights were raised. They all seemed to know where the lookout saw the incoming party and faced in that direction.
Then she spotted them. A dark line of bodyshells marched on the ruins in formation, their weapon attachments already deployed. The metal components caught the sun and glinted at her. Even she had to be impressed at the look of them.
Even if I had a whole army on my side, I wouldn’t want those Council soldiers after me, she thought.
A gunshot rang out in the air, splitting the tense silence that was gathering. It rang off the ruin walls and the nearby cliffsides before reverberating back to them.
Only a second of quiet followed the initial pop before the atmosphere was torn by a staccato of gunfire. Electrified bullets and tracer rounds zipped through the evening sky like a violent fireworks display.
From where she was tied up, Tera could see two bodyshells drop on the ridge as the E.M.P. rounds crashed through their armor. Once the Council soldiers fell to the dirt, the others turned to the source of the bullets and opened fire themselves. There was no panic in the mob of bodyshells like there would be if they were human. Instead, they stayed rooted to the spot, only strafing out of the way to avoid incoming rounds.
They must be built with combat enhancers, Tera thought. Security measures that kept them from panicking but allowed them to use the emotional surge of battle to drive them.
She ducked as a stray round ricocheted off one of the boulders near her. The last thing she wanted was a hole in her head courtesy of the people sent to rescue her.
An explosion shook the ground. Tera couldn’t discern if it was triggered by the raiders or the Council soldiers. Another one followed it.
They must have set traps, Tera realized.
The bodyshells started to circle the clearing in a wide, slow berth. They walked around the buildings where all the snipers were posted, keeping a persistent barrage of fire on their ambushers. Truck’s Raiders spun around to compensate with the movement, but they were at a disadvantage. There were too many things for the Council soldiers to hide behind as they made their advance.
Tera was watching one of the raider snipers try to trace the bodyshells with his rifle when a small shape was flung from below, landing beside the human. He noticed it and panicked. He threw down his weapon and tried to leap away from the object, but it was too late. The grenade exploded with a concussive shockwave and the shower of shrapnel tore the sniper to shreds. His mutilated body tumbled off the roof and down into the clearing.
Shouts echoed off the walls as Truck’s Raiders tried to figure out where the soldiers had gone. Somehow, in the thick debris of the ruins, they lost track of them. But the same was not true of the soldiers. Tera heard two more explosions ring out, the bodies of more snipers flying off the buildings or tumbling to the concrete in bloody heaps.
“They’re surrounding us!” Tera heard the boss man shout. She couldn’t see him, but it sounded like he was behind a rock down in the clearing, just ahead of her. “They’ve got us on all sides!”
Looking around, Tera could see it was true. The bodyshells from the city started to emerge from behind heaps of rubble and cracked walls to reveal the ring they had formed around the encampment. The gunshots from their wrist-and-shoulder-mounted weapons never let up. They never gave the raiders a moment to recuperate.
“Fall back!” she heard the guy in charge cry. “They’ve got the upper hand! Fall back, you bastards, if you wanna live!”
Panicked shrieks and pounding feet came from all around Tera. The humans and I.I.s that made up the group of Truck’s Raiders rushed past her line of sight. In the blur of everything, she could see the fear in their faces. The pure terror.
The Council bodyshells started to close in. One step at a time, they tightened the ring, shooting down frantic bandits as they tried to break out of the clearing. Their pace was slow, almost like something out of a horror movie.
“Turn back! There’s more this way!” she heard someone s
hout from the left.
“We can’t! They’re all around us!” another person yelled on her right.
“Break on through!” the boss man ordered, his voice tense with strain. “It’s the only way.”
More gunshots. Tera could hear agonized shrieks coming from all around her. Even in the cacophony of the firefight, she could hear the soft thuds of bodies hitting the earth.
Then it was quiet.
Tera strained to peek, but she couldn’t see anything. The wind blew a bit of dust in the air, which drifted on down the ruined street like a puff of smoke.
“You are under arrest,” she heard a voice in the distance say. “Do not resist.”
“You are under arrest,” another voice said, this time closer. She heard the phrase once or twice more, accompanied by the clicking of handcuffs.
Footsteps started to approach the rock Tera was bolted to. It came from behind her, so she couldn’t see who it was, but she knew the feet were heavy and mechanical.
A bodyshell appeared from around the corner, staring down at her. It was a man who had forgone the standard synthetic hairdo most bodyshells sported for a clean scalp. The police emblem on his chassis was unmistakable.
“Thank God,” Tera said when it finally became clear that the Council soldiers had won.
“You are under arrest,” the male bodyshell said, bending down to secure a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. “Do not resist.”
Tera’s brow furrowed in incomprehension as the officer cut her from the rock and lifted her to her feet.
“There’s a mistake,” she said. “I’m not one of them. I’m a police officer.”
“Be quiet while we gather up the rest of your friends,” the bald I.I. commanded. “You don’t want to make this any more difficult for yourself.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said as he grabbed her upper arm and led her with him. “My name is Tera Alvarez. I’m a Human Liaison Officer in Slumside. You can check your database.”