by Max Carver
Then Ellison led his ministers and the six guards away up the trashed residential corridor with the broken furniture and broken robo-hooker. He was on edge on the whole time, looking over his shoulder, expecting an ambush.
They made it to the passenger elevator, though, with the Hammers' celebratory shouting and stomping still booming behind them.
As the elevator doors opened, Simon and his six reapers emerged from the residential corridor, following behind Ellison's party.
“Sorry, it doesn't look there's much room in here,” Ellison said, crowding in with his ministers and soldiers.
“We'll catch the next one,” Simon said, watching impassively as the doors closed.
“Keep the door closed and stay low to the floor,” Ellison texted his son. “You and Jiemba both.”
“We can't let them get away with mass murder on the spaceport,” Coraline said.
“How could you retreat like that?” Kartokov asked. “The people of Galapagos are not cowards!”
“They weren't attacking us, so it wasn't a retreat,” Ellison said. “They were attacking each other.” He texted Loomis to update him.
“It seems like some response would have been appropriate, though,” Ogden said. “Something other than, 'Oh, General Prazca, you got a little blood on your boot there. Let me lick it off for you.'”
“You mean Premier Prazca,” Ellison said. “And I'm not getting Coalition people killed over the Iron Hammers' internal politics. Don't worry, though, Minister Ogden. We might have other opportunities to die today.”
That quieted Ogden and made him go a little pale.
They rode the elevator to the medical center, located on the administrative level just below the executive level where the ambassador had arrived. Ellison and the ministers stepped out into chaos, with nurses and even custodians rushing patients to the elevators as part of the spaceport evacuation.
Ellison hurried to the short hallway of patient rooms. He didn't have to ask which room was hers; a pair of reapers in Carthaginian honor guard uniforms flanked the door.
Footsteps sounded softly as the rest of the machines approached Ellison from behind. True to his word, Simon had taken another elevator, along with his six reapers, and they were coming up the hall behind Ellison's party.
Ellison didn't like being surrounded by the machines, but there wasn't much he could do except keep moving. He approached his wife's room, hoping his boys had gotten low to the floor like he'd told them.
“R-KK1418991,” Simon said, following a couple of meters behind Ellison. “We have detected abnormalities. Open your CPU access panel and initiate shutdown.”
One of the skull-faced infantry turned its head a little. If the Simon was giving it commands verbally rather than wirelessly, then the reaper unit must have really been out of control, or at least the Simon was doing a thorough job of pretending it was.
The reaper removed the short steel staff, tipped with blades at either end, from the clamp at its hip.
The staff instantly doubled in length. As it telescoped, its triple-bladed tip drove deep into the torso of the other reaper flanking the patient room door; the robot was stabbing its fellow guard in the side. Metal crunched and sparks showered from the second reaper as it toppled to the floor with the staff buried deep inside it, its limbs thrashing randomly, ripping up its honor guard uniform and revealing the plain steel beneath.
Coalition guards and reapers alike raised their rifles.
“Hold your fire!” Ellison barked. A barrage of lasers could cut down the rogue reaper, but also burn through the wall and kill his entire family on the other side. “Simon, hold it!” he added, hoping that the android wouldn't direct his own reapers to fire.
Simon nodded, very slightly, then repeated his previous order: “R-KK1418991, open your CPU access panel and initiate shutdown.”
Instead of complying, the rogue reaper pointed its steel index finger at Ellison. It was an eerie moment, like the character of Death had arisen from some ancient painting or story, pointing its bony finger to silently indicate who the reapers would claim next.
Then the index finger curled back in, and the reaper pointed its steel thumb at the door behind it. This second movement was less medieval Death painting and more There ya go, bub.
Cautiously, Ellison approached the door, wary as he walked between the rogue reaper and the one lying on the floor with the bladed staff deep in its vitals.
Cold fear knotted his stomach as he turned the doorknob. Had the reaper harmed Ellison's family?
If so, Ellison would destroy all the machines, even if he had to do it with his bare hands. He would tear open Simon Zorn's head, pull out the CPU, and grind it to crystalline dust under his shoe.
He opened the door on a dim room that smelled of antiseptic.
“Dad!” Jiemba, the younger one, jumped up from the floor under the hospital bed. Ellison ruffled Jiemba's stiff, curly red hair while the boy embraced him.
“Nobody said you could get up!” said Djalu, reaching for his little brother from the floor.
Ellison hurried to close the door behind him. “Cadia?”
His wife was in the bed, hooked to fluids and monitors, unresponsive. The beeping of her heart rate sounded slow to him.
“She's still out,” Djalu said, standing to join them.
“You're all heading down to the shuttles.” Ellison adjusted the bed, bringing the head of it up and the foot down, forming a thickly padded wheelchair. “You're going home.”
“What about you?” Jiemba asked.
“I'll join you as soon as I can.” He moved the wheelchair closer to the door and put up a hand for his sons to wait while he opened it and checked the corridor outside.
He tensed—an attack from the supposedly rogue reaper wouldn't have surprised him, but he was just as worried about the other six reapers, who had spread across the main corridor like a wall. Simon stood in front of them, along with the Coalition ministers and guards.
Cautiously, Ellison wheeled his wife out. No attack came, so he motioned for his sons to follow. He turned and started down the smaller side hallway where the patient rooms were located. He planned to go around the side halls, which was not the quickest way to the elevators and stairs, but he didn't want to march his whole family right into the barrier of reapers.
“The whole happy ruling family,” Simon said, in a tone that dripped with a surprising amount of derision for a machine.
The sound of boots thundered down the corridor. The Iron Hammers emerged from the elevator area and marched down the corridor, toward the row of reapers. The reapers kept their backs to the approaching Hammers, not responding at all. The Coalition guards readied themselves, weapons in hand.
Ellison looked at Simon; the android ambassador seemed to have made covert arrangements with General Prazca. Maybe those were still playing out.
“Take your mother and brother,” Ellison said quietly to Djalu. He pointed to the corner at the far end of the side corridor they'd already started down. “Hurry.”
“I don't want to leave you again, Dad,” Jiemba said, his voice fragile.
“Go with your brother,” Ellison told him, trying to be firm when he wanted to embrace the younger boy and hold him close. That was not the way to safety, though. “Move fast and keep quiet.”
The boys hurried down the side hall with the wheelchair as the Hammers approached down the main corridor.
“We had a quick little war council,” Prazca announced, leading his troop of enormous armored men. Even the Crosshammers had joined his new regime. “And we decided it would be fun to decapitate two governments on the same day. Could be some kind of record.”
The Iron Hammers opened fire, pointing their barrels between the reapers or over their shoulders, using the Carthaginian machines as shields, the way Ellison had earlier considered doing.
Ellison drew his pistol and returned fire, as did all the guards along with Kartokov and Coraline, but it was hard to shoot the armo
red men anywhere vital as they took cover behind the immobile reapers.
The Coalition took heavy losses right away—half the guards went down, along with a few hospital staff and other civilians who hadn't cleared out yet. Coraline screamed and hit the floor as something struck her, and Ogden's skull shattered in a burst of red, taken out by some kind of high-caliber round.
“This way!” Ellison shouted, continuing to fire while backing down the hallway. A laser passed close enough to his shoulder to scald his armor. A guard beside him fell under a rain of bullets.
The rogue reaper stepped to the middle of the hallway, between the retreating Coalition members and the attacking Hammers. The rogue staggered under the barrage of fire, but that didn't stop it from sweeping the hallway with its automatic laser rifle, hitting the reapers and the Hammers with a shower of burning blue streaks.
Ellison didn't stop to reflect on gift horses and their mouths; the rogue reaper was covering their retreat and drawing the Hammers' fire.
By the time Ellison's group finally rounded the corner, though they were down to a pair of soldiers and Kartokov, who'd taken a laser hit that left a cauterized hole in his forearm.
“You okay?” Ellison asked him.
“It's nothing,” Kartokov grunted. “They hit no bone. Amateurs.” Then he leaned back around the corner and squeezed off a couple more shots with his laser pistol, using his good arm.
“Dad?” Djalu was farther up the hall, with his mother in the wheelchair in front of him and his brother beside him.
“Head for the elevators,” Ellison said. “That goes for everyone.” He expected the Hammers to pursue him, and he wanted to draw the battle away from the medical center. His plan was to drop off his family on docking level 1, at the public concourse for most passenger shuttles and other small craft, and then maneuver the enemy down to the cargo-storage level where there wouldn't be many people to die in the crossfire.
All of them hurried up the side hallway, back toward the center of the administrative level where the elevators and stairs were located.
Heavy boots thundered in pursuit.
Ellison was disheartened to see a knot of people crowded at the elevators, civilians waiting for the elevator to arrive.
“All of you need to go!” he shouted. “Get out of here now—”
“Minister-General Ellison,” said a flat voice. Simon approached up the main corridor, trailed by four reapers with their rapid-fire laser rifles trained on Ellison and his companions. “Perhaps you would like to reconsider your response to my earlier offer.”
Ellison looked from Simon and the reapers coming up the main corridor, to the Hammers rounding the corner of the side hallway with their weapons high, to his unconscious wife and his frightened boys flanking her wheelchair. Djalu was old enough to put on a brave face, but Jiemba was openly crying.
Ellison saw it all in an instant. The Simon unit had arranged all of this to bring things to a head.
When Ellison had refused Simon's offer to position Ellison as a global dictator and insisted on democratic processes, he had essentially refused an alliance with Carthage. Public opinion polls within the Galapagos Coalition opposed any alliance with Carthage by more than ninety percent. Their world was made up of many kinds of people, but all of them were fiercely independent, all of them had traveled far and fought hard to be free. And all of them knew Carthage would reduce them to a minor province rather than a free world.
So Simon had initiated some of those “alternative protocols” he'd mentioned earlier.
That was how Ellison had ended up standing here with his kids and his injured wife, while the Iron Hammers approached from one direction, the reapers from another.
Ellison's only hope was in accepting Carthage's offer. Simon had put him in a position where he had no choice.
Simon smiled thinly, as if he enjoyed watching Ellison realize the hopelessness of his position.
Ellison looked Simon in the eyes and smiled back.
Then he raised his laser pistol and fired right at the android ambassador's face, and he kept firing.
Chapter Fourteen
Earth
Colt led Mohini through deep tunnels, ones he knew so well he often needed no flashlight. He held her hand to guide her, trying not to think about how warm and unusually soft her hand felt in his.
Chicago, in the old world, had been an immense forest of skyscrapers, and its roots had stretched deep underground. The underworld was a labyrinth of train tunnels, underground roads, sewer pipes as wide as boulevards, and cramped commercial and residential areas that looked miserable, with level after level of small, grubby old shops and apartments with no access to sunlight or fresh air. Ventilation systems large enough to climb inside connected the deep areas to the surface, but these no longer functioned.
He clicked on his flashlight when they reached a barred door in a thick concrete wall. He unlocked it with an old key and led her through, closing and locking it again behind him. They passed through another barred door, propped open with a chunk of concrete, and down a dim, narrow concrete hallway.
“Where are we?”
“An old subterranean prison. Chicago kept its worst criminals here.”
“This is where you live?”
“No. We're just cutting through. We've tried to block off all the direct approaches to where we live. Like this one.” He led her out into a large prison block. Long tables and hard plastic chairs were scattered around an open space at the middle. Three stories of cells surrounded them on three sides. “Don't look into the cells,” he warned her.
“Why not?” She immediately did the opposite of what he'd said, stepping close to the nearest barred door and pointing her flashlight inside.
A skull grinned back at her, pressed against the bars only centimeters away. She drew in a sharp breath, and Colt hurried to cover her mouth before she could scream. These weren't reapers—just actual dead human bodies.
Two skeletons were inside the cell. One of them had its arm pulled off, and its bones had been visibly gnawed on. The other skeleton sat on the floor, leaning forward against the bars, its empty eye sockets looking out at them; this was the one that had frightened Mohini.
“Oh,” she breathed against his fingers, trembling. “Oh.”
“When the bombs fell,” Colt whispered, dropping his hand from her mouth. “They were left here. The guards abandoned the prison, and they didn't want to let the prisoners out. So they left them.”
“Are there more?” She looked along the row of dark cells ahead.
“Every cell,” Colt said. “Usually two in each. Usually one of them is broken into pieces, like the other one ate him before starving to death.”
“Do we have to come through here?” she whispered.
“It's a long way around to the next approach.” He turned off his light and took her hand to lead her forward “Just don't look. And turn out your light.”
“It seems like darkness would make it worse,” she whispered. Her light fell on a skeletal arm, several cells ahead, that was stretched out of its cell across the floor, as if the prisoner had died while desperately trying to reach something, or maybe in a crazed attempt to crawl out between the bars. “What is that?”
“We call him Old Grabby,” Colt said, which was true. “But for you, he'll probably keep still. As long as you don't step on him or call him names.”
“Oh, come on,” she whispered, shivering and moving closer to him. “When we get out of here, I am going to kill you.”
“Just bury me down here with Old Grabby,” Colt said. “So I'll have someone to talk to.”
They passed the skeletal arm. She pointed her light at the attached skeleton, lying facedown in its cell. The remains of its cellmate were piled in a heap in the back corner of the cell, except for the skull. That had been mounted on the stubby metal poster of the top bunk bed like a war trophy.
“Enough.” Mohini clicked off her light, plunging them into solid darkness, and gri
pped his hand extra tight.
The darkness was cold and oppressive. The prison had been filled with violent criminals, murderous convicts who'd died here by the thousands. Perhaps some had been innocent, but that meant another flavor of torment and misery. They'd all died together in the dark of slow deprivation, listening to those around them die just as slowly, which had to be the most agonizing way to go.
Colt wasn't superstitious—there was enough real horror in his life that he didn't have to go searching for signs of evil in rat entrails and smoke, like a crazed girl he'd once met on a scavenging expedition. Still, walking through the place at night, it was hard not to believe the prison was haunted.
“If you feel any chains or ropes, avoid them,” Colt said. “They're traps, set by us.”
“Are you serious?”
“If I was kidding, I'd tell you about the time Old Grabby came crawling after me and grabbed my ankle—”
Mohini's elbow landed hard in his gut; fortunately he was layered up with stolen clothing and it didn't hurt much. The move also brought her even closer to him, and she didn't back off as they resumed walking.
More barred doors led the way out through the other end of the prison. Some doors had been secured by electromagnetic locks and now hung useless. Others were propped open.
Beyond the prison, they followed narrow, debris-filled corridors that eventually took them to the ruins of an underground market that looked like it had been seedy and dirty even its heyday, the narrow windows barred and tinted black, set in gray concrete adorned with heavy graffiti. Bail bonds seemed to have been a major business this close to the prison, along with pawn shops, a fried-sandwich place, and a couple of bars with faded beer posters in the windows.
Trash was everywhere, ankle-deep. More than one of the underground structures had been reduced to a slag heap of broken concrete and twisted steel by bombs from above, from the sky and the space beyond.