Engines of Empire

by Max Carver

  The cable snapped up taut, and Ellison stopped short. He'd only goosed his jet pack for some velocity; he hadn't kept its jets running.

  Simon flew onward, out toward the dark, incomplete orbital base.

  “I will see that you suffer,” Simon said, his voice calm as ever as his body flew out of sight. “It is a necessary statement in response to your treatment of me as a representative of Carthage. It is nothing personal.”

  “That's where we differ,” Ellison said. “I'm taking it personally. Every citizen of the Galapagos Coalition is taking it personally. You attacked us.”

  “Did I?” Simon asked.

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  No response came.

  “Simon? Hello?”

  “—can you hear me, Reg?” Cadia's voice crackled in his ears. “We've been trying to find your frequency.”

  “We sent that old whore-bot into the deep black, didn't we?” Kartokov's voice joined in. “Maybe there is hope for the Coalition.”

  Ellison fell silent, thinking of all the people they'd lost. The Coalition guards who'd died—nearly all of them, plus untold civilians. Ogden had died. He felt the loss of Coraline more acutely; the minister of state could have laid low with her injuries but instead had sacrificed herself to save them.

  His own family had nearly died.

  “How did you two get out?” Ellison asked. “The airlock's outer door is wrecked.”

  “Minerva pressurized another compartment for the kids to wait in,” Cadia said. “It's the pantry, so they've got food to keep them busy.”

  “They'll eat every bit in twenty minutes,” Ellison said. “Doesn't matter how much there is.”

  “And still complain about being hungry,” Cadia added.

  Ellison moved closer to his wife, reeled in by the cable. He turned off the reel's motor and took her hand, gazing into her bright green eyes through her faceplate.

  “Oh, no,” Kartokov said. “Celebration time is ended. We did not even have time to drink a toast.”

  Ellison looked over and turned cold.

  Two warships approached, armored behemoths out of hell bristling with guns. Scattered lights on their hulls burned infernal red in the abyss of space.

  The Carthaginian destroyers had arrived.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Earth

  Colt couldn't see much through the smoke. More rockets and artillery shells hammered the apartment building, blasting the front walls inward. The floor shuddered and cracked under him.

  Outside, the mob of reapers closed in on the apartment building, more of them than he'd ever seen in one place before. It was how life must have been during the war, the relentless machines rolling across the Earth, demolishing or killing whatever lay in their path.

  Colt held his fire, forcing himself to wait for the flood of deadly skeletal robots to move closer so his scarce rounds would do more damage.

  More of the mines hidden in the ruins erupted now, one after the other, blasting the reapers from below and sending pieces of them flying up into the concrete ceiling over the underground road. Colt had wired some of those himself, under Mother Braden's direction, in case their position was ever attacked.

  They weren't prepared for an army of reapers, though. Scavengers usually encountered no more than eight reapers at a time, often less. The presence of so many machines meant something abnormal was happening here. Mohini and her hacking skills had made their camp a higher priority target, he was guessing.

  The mines did some damage, but in a moment they were all detonated, and the reapers kept coming.

  Colt fired at the oncoming mob, but they kept drawing closer. Mohini released her second and final rocket, blasting a few of the reapers into smoking steel chunks. Hope let loose with her machine pistol, and Diego fired lasers from above. Mother Braden's machine gun rang out nearby.

  Their combined effort was like throwing pebbles at a mass of army ants. Individual reapers fell, but the rest of them kept coming, and the small band of human scavengers couldn't make more than a dent in them.

  Reapers fired machine guns and bolts of plasma at the apartment building. Another barrage of artillery and rockets from the machines would turn the apartments into a heap of broken ruins, with Colt and everyone he cared about buried inside.

  Plasma was probably the most effective weapon they had, but no glowing white bolts flew from the front-door area.

  “Tonio?” Colt shouted. No response came, but it was possible Tonio hadn't heard him over the din of the battle.

  “To me!” Mother Braden's voice announced, amplified by a megaphone. Some sort of radio communicators would have helped, but broadcasting radio waves was a great way to get tracked down by the machines.

  Colt found Mohini nearby, and together they waded through the debris and dust, past more than one room that had completely fallen in on itself.

  Mother Braden had parked her wheelchair at a narrow window in the ruins of a kitchen, with a sizable belt-fed machine gun mounted on her wheelchair arms. The smaller kids, Paolo and Birdie, huddled together in the broken cabinets under the old kitchen sink.

  Hope arrived soon after, followed by Diego, coated in plaster dust.

  “We can't win this,” Mother Braden said. “Take the crawlspace route. It's safest.”

  “But we can't get your chair through that,” Hope said.

  “I'm not coming. Take the kids and go.”

  “But how will we find you again?” Paolo asked.

  “You'll find me when your war is done,” Mother Braden said. “At the clearing beyond the clouds and stars. Like we talked about.”

  The building shook and dust filled the room. Unseen girders creaked and shifted. The ceiling ruptured in a corner of the kitchen, and a bathtub came crashing down into the room, pulling a tangle of rusted pipes after it. It shattered into porcelain fragments on the old linoleum.

  “But I don't want you to die!” Paolo shrieked, hugging the older lady. Birdie moved in from the other side with her own hug, the scrawny little girl making a soft cooing sound like a pigeon.

  Colt fought to keep in his feelings. Diego and Hope frowned, their eyes shining, but they had a lifetime of practice at keeping their emotions inside and staying silent. As for Tonio... where was Tonio?

  “Nothing can help that now,” Mother Braden whispered to Paolo. “They've been expecting me. My people. My mother and father, sister and brothers... my husband and children... I'm going to see them now. And I'm going the way I choose, not the way some disease chooses for me. Remember the story of Brother Rabbit, the hunter, and the lions? Those machines are the hunter. And you all are the rabbit the hunter's after.”

  “But we don't have any lions,” Paolo said.

  “That's not true. I am the lion. I'm a pride of lions.” Mother Braden set up a fresh belt of high-explosive anti-armor rounds, then patted Birdie and Paolo on the heads. “And I'm proud of you. All of you. Keep fighting for each other, and keep your humanity. Never let the machines win.”

  “No!” Paolo clung tighter. “You can't!”

  Hope put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “We have to go. Let Mother Braden protect us, one last time.”

  “That's my girl,” Mother Braden said, looking up at Hope's lanky, stringy form. “So big now. So strong.” She looked over at Diego and Colt. “You two, keep them all alive. Get moving.”

  “Where's Tonio?” Paolo asked, “Where is my brother?”

  Tonio had never arrived from the front door. Colt had a sick, sinking feeling about that.

  “I'll check.” Colt started to make his way through a shattered wall, toward the barred front door. Paolo followed after him.

  “Paolo—” Hope began.

  “Let him come,” Colt said. “Paolo, make no sound. None.”

  Paolo nodded, his dark eyes open wide.

  He and the boy continued onward, through rubble and dust.

  The front wall had been blown down. Tonio's arm protruded from the rubbl
e, leaking a rivulet of blood into the dust and ash on the floor. Twisted pieces of the barred door jutted out at odd angles from the pile of broken concrete on top of Tonio's body.

  The machines had blown down the front of the building like the wolf in the fairy tale with the pigs. The lesson of that story is that the enemy is always coming, and you must always be prepared, Mother Braden had told him many years ago. There would be no more stories, no more parables of war featuring trickster rabbits or clever wee folk from the old world. She had chosen to make her final stand, and Colt knew better than to argue. Death was their constant companion; choosing one's own path to it was sometimes the only freedom left in the world of the machines.

  Paolo took a sharp breath at the sight of his brother's arm lying in dust and blood. Colt clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle whatever cry or scream was on its way. This was a common gesture in the language of touch they all used to communicate quietly in the shadows. Paolo bit back whatever noise he'd been about to make. He was learning. He was growing up, hard and fast. He'd just lost his mother figure and his only brother, and still he knew to keep silent.

  Something clattered beyond the collapsed heap of the wall.

  The black-skull faces of three reapers rose over the rubble, staring at Colt and Paolo with their merciless, solid black eyes, like the eyes of insects.

  “Back!” Colt yelled at Paolo, while backing up and sweeping his automatic rifle across the three machines. The rounds pounded and dented their skeletal forms, but lead wasn't going to stop them.

  Paolo drew an old-time revolver from a holster on his belt. Colt hadn't realized the kid was carrying; he'd had a million other things on his mind.

  “You killed my brother!” Paolo opened fire, stepping toward the approaching reapers. He couldn't hope to do much real damage, not unless he struck one of the machines' black video-lens eyes at just the right angle... which he didn't. His best shot hit a reaper's sternum, making the robot glance down briefly at the impact.

  The reapers on either side raised rotary-style guns, the kinds of things that might have been mounted on airplanes or ships in the old world, not something unmodified humans could carry.

  The reaper in the center raised a flamethrower, a tongue of fire already dancing at the igniter, ready to go. These machines weren't bothering with the extendable bladed staffs clamped to their hips; they weren't here to play or to regulate, not this time. They were here to kill.

  Colt managed to pull Paolo out of the shattered doorway area as a long jet of flame struck the spot where the boy had been standing. The wave of heat pushed against Colt's back, and the smell of greasy fuel filled the air.

  The reapers' rotary guns let out a deadly chattering roar as they perforated the walls around Colt and Paolo, blowing out most of the studs and joists. The ceiling crashed down, nearly crushing Colt and Paolo as they ran out of the room.

  “They're here!” Colt shouted as he reached the hallway, where everyone had emerged from their apartment.

  “They killed my brother!” Paolo screamed.

  “Run!” Mother Braden commanded, swiveling her wheelchair to face him. The machine gun mounted on it looked bigger than her. She'd shrunk, losing a lot of weight in recent months.

  Hope was already on the way down the hall, clutching Birdie's hand in her own. Diego ran holding Mohini's hand, which made Mohini visibly uncomfortable, but Mother Braden had obviously paired them up for the escape run. Everyone needed to be paired up at such times.

  Colt grabbed Paolo's arm and started after them, but Paolo planted his feet and shook his head.

  “I'm gonna kill those machines,” Paolo said.

  “No, Mother is,” Colt said. “You're coming with me. And tomorrow we'll figure out how to destroy even more of them.”

  “Go, Paolo!” Mother Braden snapped, and then the wall erupted.

  Two reapers tore through, swinging rotary cannons, filling the air with rounds.

  Mother Braden fired back. Her rounds exploded on impact, designed to blast through the heaviest armor, to shred tanks and fortified positions.

  Colt dragged Paolo down the hall, and finally the boy started cooperating and ran along with him.

  They climbed through a wall panel into the narrow crawlspace of the conveyor system, where the walls were lined with rusty pipes, rat-chewed wiring, and spiderwebs, the floor thick with filth from rats and roaches.

  He saw Mohini crawling away, meters ahead. She looked back over her shoulder at him briefly, nodded as if confirming that Colt was coming behind her, then scurried onward with the others.

  Colt sent Paolo crawling ahead, then took up the group's rear, moving as fast as he could on his hands and knees, his rifle strapped across his back.

  The gunfire behind them was a constant storm, but the heavier shelling seemed to have ceased for the moment, while the robotic foot soldiers were inside the building. Colt winced at the sound, trying not to think of Mother Braden, who'd cared for him since he was five years old, getting torn apart by the steel monsters.

  The reapers' skull faces weren't just symbolic, weren't just there to frighten humans. They were the true representation of what the machines were: agents of death, forever collecting souls. And now they'd come to collect hers.

  The conveyor space twisted and turned through the guts of the building, past regularly spaced panels. He wondered whether this particular conveyor belt was one that had delivered supplies down to the apartment dwellers or one that had transported garbage away from their apartments. Judging by the thick filth, he was guessing the second.

  He'd been through these tunnels before, rehearsing evac in case of attack, in case of days like today.

  They'd never really had a day like today, though, with such a shocking number of machines coming after them at once. This wasn't scavenger life. This was rebel life. Whether they'd wanted it or not, they were now part of the rebellion, engaged in open warfare against the machines.

  Colt could live with that. He'd been at war with the machines all his life. His parents had likely been killed by them, had certainly died because of them. Mother Braden taught that every breath they took, every bite of food they ate, and every time they helped another human survive was a blow against the machines, a victory for humanity.

  And every time we kill each other, it's a victory for the machines, Colt thought, thinking of the clanker's brain hitting the wall behind him. Colt had fought off scavengers and clankers before, even to the death—it would have been impossible to survive this long otherwise. But he'd never quite gotten the drop on someone like that before, fired first on an unsuspecting person.

  He'd had little choice, and he refused to feel bad for a clanker, a human who'd allied with the machines, a person who'd clearly intended to do horrors to Colt's sister if he caught her. It was harder to think of a more justified moment to shoot a man through the head.

  Still, there it was, like every human life he'd taken, like the burly scavenger with the rotten nose he'd killed with a broken bottle when he was twelve. The machines were making humans more and more like them—more ruthless, more merciless, more destructive of life. Surely humans hadn't been like this in the old world.

  A panel ruptured open in front of him, and a black steel claw reached in and seized Paolo's ankle.

  “No!” Colt grabbed the black rod of the reaper's arm, so much narrower yet stronger than a human's. He tried to wrestle Paolo free, but the machine's industrial-strength grip wasn't budging.

  The reaper began to drag Paolo out through the broken panel, the swinging plastic door through which people of old had inserted their trash. Colt held on to the boy, trying to keep him close. With his other arm, Colt drew down his assault rifle from his back.

  He struck the barrel against the steel-rod arm. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, Deathface, look at me!”

  The skull turned toward him and the reaper's other hand reached for Colt, seizing his shoulder and digging in its steel talons.

  Colt jabbed
the tip of his rifle into the thing's black lens of an eye and let it go on fully automatic, hammering one round after another right into his skull, shooting for the CPU.

  The reaper jerked and snapped, its automated systems trying to escape the destruction, and its fingers tore sizable bloody chunks out of Colt's shoulder along the way. Colt let out a howl of pain—no point trying to be quiet right now, anyway—and ceased fire as the thing fell to the floor. If he'd had any hearing left after the previous close firefights, it was shot now. The sounds of the world had been reduced to a dull ringing.

  Someone approached him from ahead, holding a glinting metal object in one hand. He tensed, but it was only Mohini, crawling back to help.

  “We're okay,” Colt whispered. “Keep moving—”

  More reapers burst in along the panels behind them, their cutter staffs drawn and expanded, ready to hunt their human quarry down into the darkest corners and cut them to pieces.

  “Go go go!” Colt shouted, while firing another burst of his rapidly depleting ammunition. Mohini put away whatever tool she'd drawn out to try to help him.

  They crawled as fast as they could.

  “It drops off ahead!” Mohini called back.

  “Keep going! Trust me!” he said.

  He heard her cry out. Paolo hesitated, and Colt had no time to argue, so he picked the boy up and hurled him into the darkness ahead. He waited for the boy's screaming to fade before following after him.

  Colt tumbled through empty space, then slammed into a filth-encrusted steel surface. It was steep, and he went sliding down after the others.

  He landed hard in a drift of dried trash in the bed of a rusty old garbage truck that hadn't moved in decades. He hurried to get to his feet and scoop up Paolo, who was crying beside him.

  “Could have warned me.” Mohini coughed as she stood.

  “You were supposed to stay with Diego,” Colt said.

  “I was more worried about you. Diego was more worried about the other girls.”

  “So you split up?”

  “I guess it just wasn't meant to be.”