The Spire

by Peter F Smith

  “So, what's the plan now?” she asked as an explosion rang down the hall from the direction they had just left. Automatic weapons fire followed, the sharp report of several rifles exchanging gun fire and then the dead silence that followed, signifying the destruction of the bot they had left behind.

  “Hostile forces are nearing our position, platoon strength.”

  Her stomach tightened as she asked, “Can you fight off thirty soldiers?”

  It didn't respond, instead it immediately moved to a nearby wall panel. Quickly locating four screws at the corners, it jammed the tip of its finger into one of the screws. The finger tip morphed to fill the head of the screw and began to spin removing the screw it was in contact with. Within seconds, all the screws were out and the panel was off.

  “In,” the bot stated simply.

  She stuck her head in and saw a smooth shaft with no hand holds. It ran vertically for so many flights that she couldn’t see the top or bottom. These were meant to allow certain service units to quickly move through the Spire without interfering with the flow of traffic in the halls. It was most definitely not intended to allow people to maneuver through them. In fact, the only reason the shafts were big enough for people was to give technicians access to stuck or damaged bots within them. “Uh, yeah no," Maria responded to the bot’s command.

  “This unit cannot protect you from the number of armed soldiers that are currently advancing on us. We are moments from their arrival, and if you are captured, you can expect no compassion.”

  She could hear the distant sound of dozens of boots crashing upon the floor. She took a deep breath and sat on the floor, reclining back into the vent. Once her shoulders had cleared the threshold, she unfolded her arms in the small space and pressed them firmly against the wall, bracing both palms against the sides of the shaft.

  The bot assisted her by maneuvering her legs in after. “The third intersecting shaft represents the hangar level. I suggest you rest at the first and second, but do not delay. It will not take long for the hostile forces to determine your means of escape.”

  With that, her legs slipped in, and the weight of her entire body was being borne by her arms, shoulders, and wrists. She maneuvered her feet so each was pressed against an opposite wall and felt some of the pressure being distributed. The opening in front of her was closed as the bot repositioned the service plate back in place. She could hear the quick succession of screws being refastened as she suppressed her own grunts. She ascended the smooth surface by putting her body weight on her hands, then sliding her feet up, next putting all her weight on her lower body, and finally, forcing her upper body upward until her hands could once again take up the load. Slowly she inched up the shaft, unsure how long it took her to make it to the first intersecting shaft. She couldn’t actually sit upright in the horizontally running shaft, so she settled on placing her rear on one edge and bringing her feet up to the opposite edge. She took the time to rest her weary muscles, examine the beginnings of blisters on her palms, and cool herself down to reduce the amount of sweat she was producing. The last thing she needed was for her palms to become slick on her ascent.

  “Come out to the Islands, we’ll have some fun” she muttered to her self before tilting

  her head so she could look upward. So long as Chen hadn't changed the internal workings of this Spire too much, then each of these cross sections was placed every two stories which meant she had four more to go to reach the hangar deck.

  “Crap!” she muttered as gunfire erupted below her. Suddenly her tired muscles didn't matter so much. She carefully moved her arms and legs back into position. She moved as swiftly as she dared as even a single mistake would see her plummeting to her death in the bowels of the building. Her muscles, however, appeared to want to work against her as they screamed in protest every time she shifted her weight back to them. As she neared the second intersection, she began to doubt her ability to complete the trip. Her head poked up over the edge of the connecting shaft, and she could see down its depth. She prepared to position herself for a longer rest before attempting the next ascent. She hadn't yet seated herself when a flash of light illuminated her from below.

  “She's in the shaft above us!”

  She didn't hesitate. Instead she shifted her weight and used her legs to fling her upper body into the horizontal connecting shaft. Her pelvis slammed into the edge and she desperately dragged herself into the new space scraping her thighs and shins. She felt as much as heard the sound of bullets ripping apart the shaft she had just occupied. She lay there for a second, catching her breath, and then let out a sharp laugh. The fact that they were trying to kill her was, strangely, a good sign. It meant that the battle with her father’s forces was not going well enough for Jeffery Chen to hope he could salvage victory.

  She took another breath, accepting the new reality and being both comforted and cautioned by it. Her life, very literally, was forfeit now, and her choices would be the deciding factor. She needed to avoid detection which was going to be hard since she was two levels below the hangar. She clearly couldn't go back the way she came, and she was fairly certain she could hear someone trying to move up the shaft. She started moving again. She’d have to find a way to get out of this space. As she shimmied through the confined space, her lenses translated the machine code that was printed at various points throughout the shaft, using it to determine where she was. She stopped when she found a panel directly in front of her that was meant to open to allow service units to leave the conduit she was squirming through. The code said it was access to a storage space which meant it was probably a good place to leave since it wasn't likely to be guarded. Problem was that she had absolutely no tools available to open it.

  She racked her brain thinking about the variety of ways she could use the few things she had on her to open the hatch, but nothing would work. She sighed and rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her heads-up display blinked off, assuming she was trying to rest. She opened her eyes realizing she had the only tool she needed.

  She activated her lenses ability to access the local network. She was going to assume that her father’s infiltration device had seized total control of it since he was able take over the house drones and elevators. It was risky though; even if the Chen's had lost control, their soldiers could still track the transmissions of her lenses. If they hadn't lost control, then they'd be able to pinpoint her position in the tower nearly instantly.

  A moment later, her HUD lit up with a variety of unrestricted menu options, and she smiled as she activated the code reader option. She looked at the computer code printed on the hatch and a variety of options appeared before her. Almost immediately, the mechanism for the door sprung to life, it lowered and then slide into a void that existed in the space directly below the shaft and above the ceiling of the storage space. She looked down and saw racks of boxes and equipment, one directly below but almost three meters feet down.

  She lowered herself through and hung from the edge of the opening making sure her grip was good. Her fingers ached as the metal edge bit into them. She took a deep breath and then let go. She landed on the rack and nearly lost her balance. She did, however, knock a box off and sent it crashing to the floor. She stayed there crouched in the dark atop of the rack waiting for a response to her noise. When it didn't come, she released her breath and laughed slightly, “I am the Ninja.”

  She sent the close command to the hatch so that anyone following her would have a much harder time of it and then quickly reviewed the local map to plot her escape before disconnecting her access to the Spire network. She couldn't risk her transmissions being tracked.

  She carefully climbed down and slowly moved between the racks, staying low as she made her way to where she figured the exit was. As she came around the corner, she saw the doorway out, and the body of an armored soldier laying across the threshold. She stayed there watching the form, making sure they really were dead before she moved over to it. She looked him over and
found, as much by smell as by sight, the cauterized gash that ran across his frontal armor, over where his heart was and out his armpit. This had been caused by a high powered laser weapon like those equipped in the main line combat drones of her family’s army.

  Cautiously she stuck enough of her head around the doorframe to quickly take in both parts of the hallway. What she saw was a blood bath. Both human and robotic remains littered the space. The smell of human excrement and melted plastic assaulted her senses as she eased herself around the entryway and out into the hall. She stayed along the wall whenever possible as she carefully moved around, and sometimes over, the fallen. As she moved, she could feel the small trenches and holes where bullets had grazed or impacted the wall. She was nearly to her destination, a personnel access closet that the map had promised would allow her to use an access shaft with an honest to goodness ladder. She’d be able to climb the rest of the way to the hangar and avoid groups of soldiers or more scenes of carnage like this.

  She slipped and fell face first into the corpse of a young female soldier, her eyes wide and mouth agape, a small hole burned in her right temple. Maria muttered an apology and pushed herself off the unfortunate soul. It hit her then, that young girl died because of her. Maria had allowed her father to use her loyalty to family as a tool to get her to come here, so he could Trojan horse the building’s security and command systems. If she had refused to come, that girl would still be alive. In fact, everyone here would still be alive if she had just been smarter. She took a breath; it was a dangerous line of thinking she was falling down. She began to think more analytically in order to avoid a crippling emotional breakdown. While she bore some of the blame for this bloodbath, it was likely the smallest part. After all, she was hardly to blame for being a loving daughter who would not suspect the man who raised her of treachery. If anyone was to blame, it was her father, Jeffery Chen, and the other Spire families.

  Maria noticed that her hands were red and tacky with cold blood, remorse washed over her as she vigorously rubbed her hands on her shorts. After a moment, she began to control her breathing and actions. She had gone through so many traumas lately that it was getting easier to handle them. She took another deep breath, this time for a wholly different reason. She didn’t like what her acclimation said about who she was becoming. Almost without thought, she knelt next to the young woman and located the identification tags that were secured around her neck. It was an archaic form of identification that soldiers had been using for over a hundred years, but it worked. She undid the chain and removed a tag. She would not allow her ability to adapt to all of this horror let her forget those that had perished within it.

  She covered the distance to the access door as quickly and quietly as possible. She winced as the latch to the door made a loud click. She threw the door open and jumped into the small space, closing the door with another click. She didn’t know if anyone heard her, but she wasn’t sticking around to find out. She jumped onto the rungs of the small ladder. The blisters on her hands, formed by the friction from propelling herself up the service shaft, sent jets of pain through her arms and as she climbed, she could see blood she was leaving on the rungs below her. Just as the pain was getting to her, the sounds of gunfire and explosions broke through her focus. As she progressed toward her goal and hopefully rescue, the intensity of the battle increased, and she could make out the voices of soldiers calling out targets and coordinating their weapons fire.

  Without warning, the entire building bucked violently while simultaneously a wave of blistering hot air blew down her access shaft, and she narrowly avoided being sent plunging down to an almost guaranteed death below. With one arm wrapped around a rung and a leg tucked behind another, she rode the shaking out for what felt like an eternity. Eventually, the building’s Tuned Mass Damper absorbed the energy of… well, she wasn’t sure. She imagined it had to have been large to cause such an effect. The cacophony born of the explosion dwindled to nothing and the space was filled with silence.

  Maria shook her head and whispered to herself, “Gonna make a wild guess and say that all happened in the hangar.”

  She waited to see if the gunfire or yelling picked back up. After a minute of literally hanging around, she decided to push on, hoping that the explosion and silence that followed was proof that the hangar was clear of anyone who could prevent her escape. She increased her speed up the rungs, flying past the first access way that would have taken her to machine shops and more storage. She finished ascending the rungs at the hangar access conduit which ran perpendicular to her ladder shaft. Sweat stinging her eyes, she carefully stepped off the rungs and slipped into the new hangar access shaft. The sharp smell of burning plastics filled her nostrils, and she could hear voices as she quietly crept the length. Eventually she came to a blasted-in section of the shaft, jagged metal bent inward from where a jet engine had crashed through and now blocked her path. Her only option was to enter the hangar from the wall the piece of machinery had ruptured.

  She peeked around the jagged edge that was too hot to touch and into the chaos that was the Spire’s point of entry for all aircraft. She could barely make out the shapes of heavily armored soldiers moving about. The smoke burned her eyes and flooded her sight with tears. She wiped them away in time to see the smoke blown away temporarily by a gust of wind. She went numb, what must have been a hundred corpses lay upon the floor along with several dozen of her family combat drones. She didn’t know what disturbed her more, the carnage that lay before her or the prospect that Chen had managed to destroy her rescue party.

  Jeffery’s personal guard had paid a terrible price to take back this tactically significant location. The survivors milled about. One man kneeled on the floor, his head resting against a long cylindrical weapon about half his height. Likely it was a man portable rail gun and he was probably the one who destroyed her family’s transport craft. He brought his gloved hand up to his eyes and wiped at them, slowly at first and then vigorously. Screams erupted as he began to slap himself with both hands. One of his fellow soldiers ran to him and pulled him into an embrace. He wailed into his shoulder and Maria found herself wondering what loss he had just suffered, what transgression her father had brought upon him to cause such a collapse. The friend looked toward the main entrance and then jumped to his feet. He dragged his distraught comrade up when he didn’t initially respond. Maria followed his line of sight and watched as Jeffery Chen entered the space, surrounded by dozens of his children and wives, with two of his most trusted guards leading the group into the space.

  Jeffery began to bellow commands, but in this massive space and with the sound of flames consuming spilled fuels and plastics, Maria lost the words. She knew, however, what he was doing. The remaining soldiers pulled themselves together and began to prepare his personal transport for flight. The main ramp dropped down and his family quickly ran into it, followed by their slaves carrying their most cherished possessions. As he turned to a group of ragged soldiers, Maria caught a flash of the incredibly oversized sword that looked like it had at one point simply been a single sheet of steel, a handle welded to it. No normal human being could have carried such an imposing piece of weaponry, clearly his genetic modifications had worked out well.

  The wind shifted and Maria looked toward the large gaping hole that was previously the hangar doors. Past the smoke and flames she could see flashes of light in the deep night. Explosions as her family’s forces fought their way through the city below. The flashes gave way to a vast star-filled night sky at the horizon. It was the same sky she had marveled at nearly every night from her bedroom in her own Spire. The sight gave her hope for the future and made her yearn for simpler times. The building began to vibrate, the very air seeming to come alive; she knew what was coming next. She looked at Jeffery, and he had sensed what she had as well. He drew the large sword from his back and the dozen soldiers who remained shouldered their weapons; all directed their gaze to the opening in the hangar doors.

&n
bsp; The sky came alive as one of her family’s medium transports plunged through the hole in the hangar door, missing the ragged edges by centimeters on either side. Its nose pitched upward as its massive wings used the air in the hangar to brake while its engines shifted direction to provide additional thrust to stop the craft’s advance. The smoke was blown away from the space, making it easy to see what was about to happen. The nose tipped down, and before it was parallel to the floor, drones were already lunging off the ramp located at the front of the transport, toward the soldiers and Jeffery Chen. The warriors fired without prompting, discharging their weapons into the storm of advanced ceramics and synthetic muscle that was raining down upon them. Bullets connected and missed and the hangar was once again filled with the sounds of combat. Machines landed around their human foes and in one instance on a soldier, crushing his shoulders and chest as the robot made impact. Jeffery sliced a drone in half with his sword and before its remains could reach the ground, he reached out with his free hand and captured another in mid air. The drone struck at Chen’s forearm, but in the next instance, he crushed its neck with his bare hand and then impaled it from groin to chest by thrusting his sword into it from below.

  One by one the soldiers fell. Maria watched as bursts of flame appeared on some of them as the directed energy weapons placed in the arms of the drones came to life, and in other cases, they shattered bones and broke spines. Maria watched as the man who had destroyed her family transport earlier simply stopped fighting, sat on the ground, and waited. One of the drones killed his friend and moved over to him. As the drone twisted his neck, he dropped to the ground with a look of relief upon his face. The battle was intense, but it lasted mere seconds. Chen grabbed the head of a drone, ripping it free from the mounting and then thrusting it into the chest plate of another, crushing both the armor and the processing units inside. Jeffery looked around to find himself surrounded by a ring of bots, while those not directly penning him in were standing over the fallen soldiers their hands reaching ominously for their still figures.