Force-field wings sprouted from Darwin’s shoulders, pushing them higher into the air, slowing their descent to a point where they wouldn’t be a splatter on the ground when they landed. It also had the added benefit of allowing them to dodge a few explosives. That benefit didn’t last long—a red-hot projectile punctured the left force-field wing.
But they were going to make it. He couldn’t believe it. They were close enough to the ground now that most of the deadly varieties of attacks weren’t able to target them. He could see a giant landing pad, with hundreds of what looked like metal humans, below them. They were in the heart of the mountains now, and the trees around the platform burned from the falling embers.
“I’ll have to cut through the closure,” Darwin said. “It will take a few minutes.”
“What about all of those things?” Jeff said. He was surprised his mind had settled enough to speak coherently.
Two force-field swords, each fifteen feet long, appeared in Darwin’s hands, even though one of its arms hung limp, with huge portions of armor failing to heal itself.
“We’ll have to take care of Bud’s mine workers quickly. Other Apostles are already on their way.”
Jeff could see Bud’s humanlike leeches swarming below them near the opening to the mine, with more of them appearing from around the mountain every second. His brain wasn’t working clearly, so he worked by instinct now. He pressed in some specialized force fields that covered his fists. Deadly force-field spikes sprouted from his knuckles. Darwin oriented its feet for landing, causing Jeff’s back to be parallel with the horizontal mine door.
Jeff unlocked from Darwin’s body and used his suit to launch him away from the Apostle as it spun around, swinging its massive swords to cut through a dozen mine robots. Jeff flipped through the air, clearing Darwin’s swords and landing on one knee between a group of mine workers.
They moved at once, desperate to tear him apart. Jeff expected to dodge the first one with ease, but his reaction was slow. The robot locked onto his metal arm, holding it in place. Jeff used his other force-field-covered fist to smash through the worker’s metal arm, freeing himself, just as another robot grabbed him from behind and tossed him backward.
He bounced off robot parts until he came skidding to a stop. He punched the leg of the closest mine worker, sending the robot to the ground, but he wasn’t able to roll out of the way before another miner landed on top of him.
His armor protected his ribs, but the robot knocked the breath out of him. Jeff managed to throw the robot off with his force-field fists, but another kicked him backward into another that locked Jeff’s arms behind his back. Everywhere he looked, there was another identical opponent ready to kill him.
He wasn’t used to fighting so many opponents at once. He’d been able to fight two or three men with relative ease back in Fifth Springs, but these robots were bigger, faster, and stronger, and they were many more of them. He was still trying to clear his mind of the realities he had connected with to save them during their fall. Carlee and Stefani had been right about the costs of pressing, and he was feeling them all right now, as his usual fighting instincts were absent.
Jeff head-butted the mining robot holding him, smashing his helmet through the worker’s inferior chest. But before the miner could fall, another one took its place. He wished his mentor and friend were there to help him now. The pang of regret he felt at missing them hurt worse than the robot’s punch that connected with his face.
Another robot ripped a boulder from the ground and hurled it at Jeff’s chest. His armor held, but he wasn’t sure his ribs did this time. But he couldn’t focus on the fight. All he could think about was Stefani and her sister-in-law. No matter how horrible his reality was and the crimes he had committed, they were good. He didn’t deserve them, but they had been kind to him. He cracked a smile thinking of them as two different robots snared his arms and started to pull him apart.
If he was going to die, he didn’t want it to happen while he was thinking about time lines where he had never existed. This was his reality, his time line, and he owed it a debt. He focused on it—on Stefani, on Carlee, on the vagrants—every detail he could remember.
A third mine worker closed in on him; this one held a force-field mining tool. It would be enough to pierce his armor, and he knew exactly what that meant. But he also knew how to dodge it.
Jeff cranked his neck to the side, dodging the deadly pick. He then pulled on his right arm and shifted his weight, throwing the robots holding him off-balance. In all his years of fighting, he had learned one thing: if he could get someone off-balance, then he was going to win.
He twisted and freed himself from the robots. He jabbed at the nearest miner, punching its neck, severing the head of the mining robot from its body. Without hesitating, he spun around and smashed through another leech, his force-field gloves meeting little resistance.
The other mining leeches around him seemed to back away as if they were seeing their opponent truly for the first time. The fight was over; they just didn’t know it yet.
“You pile of bolts should have gone after Darwin instead.”
He dodged forward, catching glimpses of other time lines where the miners were able to hit him; he used that to alter his course. Jeff swirled around them, smashing mechanical workers with almost no resistance. Their brittle metal bodies were no match for Jeff’s abilities. Never in his life had he felt so overpowered in a battle—they couldn’t slow him down as he broke through them. Every punch, swipe, and kick destroyed the mindless slaves of Bud.
They had been created to mine the most precious material in existence from deep within the mountain, but he had been created for this moment. His path had led him here, and he fulfilled his destiny with a heartless precision. Severed limbs of robots were strewn across the ground, filling the gaps between their smoking bodies. Horus had slaughtered humans with pleasure and ease, and now Jeff repaid the favor with hundreds of leeches.
He was panting when he realized there weren’t any more mine workers around for him to destroy. He glanced down at his armor and saw that barely any white remained. Gashes and burn marks covered his body, but he could already see the suit healing itself. Apparently, the leeches had hit him more than he realized. But they were all dead now, and he was very much alive.
Darwin was pulling the last mine worker from its back, where it had been trying to drive its force-field pick into Darwin’s armor. The Apostle crushed the robot in its hand and tossed the flattened metal away from him. The landing pad was entirely covered in robot remains, and Jeff picked his way across them to where Darwin was standing on top of the giant metal door in the ground.
“We did it,” Jeff said. “We made it.”
He couldn’t believe it—in all of the stories he’d heard from the piners and the legends from the vagrants, he’d never heard a story as unbelievable as what he had just accomplished. Jeff wanted to bask in the moment, to breathe it in and treasure it like he had always wanted to when he won his boxing matches, but there was no time for that.
“Not exactly. The mine is a few thousand feet beneath our feet, at the heart of the mountain. That’s where my invention must go.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Darwin smiled—it tried to, at least. Its body was horribly disfigured. Even with the healing armor, Jeff wasn’t sure it would be able to fully recover. It had taken the brunt of the attack while they had descended from above.
It swung its translucent blue sword high into the air before smashing it down into the metal gate beneath its feet.
45 FORGIVENESS
A LEECH WHIPPED THROUGH THE air above them, peppering the ground with gunfire that bounced off Jeff’s armor. Jeff glared at it, deciding it wasn’t worth pressing to kill. He needed his mind clear for what came next.
“I think they’re onto us,” Jeff said. He was trying to be patient as Darwin cut through the mine door, but it was a difficult proposition. His suit benefited
from Darwin’s more advanced scanners, and in the distance, he could see two indicators marked as Apostles coming their way.
“The greatest prayer is patience,” Darwin said as it continued to cut through the thick metal at its feet. “I can only imagine the difficulty of such a principle for a mortal.”
The leech circled around and began a second run at them. This time, a small ball of energy shot out from Darwin’s shoulder and hit the leech in the underbelly, causing to crash into the already-burning forest. The smoke from the battle would have been enough to announce to the world they were here if all the Apostles hadn’t known already.
“We’re both going to find out how mortal we are if you don’t hurry.” Occasionally, half a mine worker would try to crawl away from the others and make a sad attempt at killing Jeff. At another time, not long ago, it might have been successful.
Darwin sawed through another section of the metal door, and this time it creaked and sank beneath his feet.
“Into the belly of the beast we go.” The metal door beneath it collapsed, falling away into the pit below, and Darwin disappeared into the mine. Jeff glanced up to where the sun was red behind the thick plumes of smoke and took a deep breath.
He walked to the edge of the pit and hopped into the mineshaft.
After a couple of seconds, the filtered light above him faded away, and there was only darkness as he plunged into the mountain. It felt like an eternity as he dropped through the pitch-black space headfirst. His suit told him that the walls of the mine were nearly a hundred yards apart and that Darwin was seven hundred feet ahead of him and still hadn’t reached the mine floor.
Darwin’s wings appeared a moment later, and Jeff mentally slammed his thrusters to life. It was a jarring change in speed, but it was nothing worse than his previous dive. Jeff floated to the floor, coming to rest next to Darwin’s feet. The Apostle could walk down the shafts, which led in five different directions, with a few feet to spare from the top of its head. The humming and scraping noises of mining came from all directions. Apparently, Bud had not ceased operations during their assault.
Jeff jumped as he heard Darwin move. He whipped around to see that the Apostle had sunken to its knees. Seeing the Apostle praying was a relief. Jeff had harbored the thought that once they had made it to their destination, it might reveal its true self and kill him. He didn’t trust Apostles, and he never would, no matter what he and Darwin had been through.
“It is time,” Darwin said. It projected a wireframe of the bomb in front of him. It was big, far bigger than he had expected it to be. It was at least ten feet tall and a dozen feet wide. It was larger than anything he had ever pressed before. But the rendering of it was low quality; apparently, Darwin’s capabilities for high-grade holograms had been destroyed in the fighting. The picture flickered in and out of existence, almost like it was from another reality.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the incoming Apostles to get closer?” Jeff said. “We could pick a few of them up in the explosion.”
“They won’t come down here. They know we are trapped in Bud’s mine. And they will outrun any explosion from this distance. If we hope to escape from this alive, it must be now.”
“Here? Won’t we be buried alive?”
“There will be nothing but a crater left when we are finished.”
“And these shields of yours . . . they can survive something like that?”
“We’ll have ten seconds while the bomb arms itself to outrun the incineration zone. After that, it will be up to us to survive. Have faith, my brother.”
“My brother is dead.”
Jeff stepped in close to the hologram and closed his eyes. He refused to let the sentiments of doubt reach his mind; he’d turned hundreds of missiles into flowers at a high speed. He knew he could press this bomb.
Jeff already knew the reality he was looking for. He had thought about it nearly nonstop since he had killed his best friend. The paths diverged at that moment: instead of killing Dane, he had decided on mercy, granting his friend his life. There would have been no reason for him to call Darwin, no reason for him to be here with the Apostle as it tried to destroy the future of its own species. He could feel part of his mind leaving this reality and latching onto another.
In the reality he connected to, Darwin had decided not to spend time tracking down another band of vagrants and trying to convince them to join in on his holy war. Instead, the pious Apostle had done what the religious men of the past who it idealized had done; it had decided to become a martyr.
He felt like he was drowning in the other time line, so deep was his connection. But he gasped as he came up for air. He knew what was about to happen. At death’s door, part of his brain fought against his will. Stefani was worth living for. She was tough, fiery, and completely more than anyone he had ever dreamed about. He could help to arm humanity, teach them how to live peaceably among themselves and fight back against leeches. Someday, maybe he could even find Everett again and beg his forgiveness, maybe even give the young man a better life than his father had.
The thought of Everett sent him back into the other time line, finding more details to pull the bomb into this reality. The only way that Everett and his future children were ever going to have a truly better life was if they were free of the Apostles. He owed Everett that future. He had survived Horus’s slaughter for this purpose; he would kill the bullies that had murdered countless helpless people.
The world needed to be free from the Apostles.
All of the Apostles. Carlee had believed the best outcome would have been life with the Apostles but without war, but he had always believed the opposite. That’s why this task was his. If even one of them survived, humanity would never be truly free. They would look to the robotic god for guidance rather than making their own path, and their freedom would be dependent on the whims of another species. Everett deserved a future that was dependent on nothing but himself, where dreaming wasn’t a painful disappointment. Jeff would do what he could now, leaving Horus and possibly future vagrants to accomplish the rest.
In the other timeline, where Darwin was on its own as it attacked the mine, it knew that it wasn’t going to make it out alive. Instead, it had taken steps to ensure that the temurim-destroying bomb wouldn’t be separated from it. The device required a physical stream of energy from its creator to be activated for detonation. It was Darwin’s gift to his God and to the humanity it loved. A gift it would have no choice but to give in their true reality.
Jeff opened his eyes and saw the Apostle praying next to him as the air swirled around them. It would know what Jeff had done as soon as the device was created. If it cared about its mission, it would sacrifice itself, like it did in another reality. But Jeff knew the Apostle wouldn’t let him survive. He couldn’t press in a shield that would both save him from the giant robot and finish the bomb. He would join Darwin in martyrdom.
He shut his eyes one last time and pressed the massive bomb into existence, next to Darwin, with a connector as strong as Darwin’s armor tying it to the Apostle’s leg.
When he opened his eyes a second later, his brain swirled, confused as to what was real and what was a shadow from another reality. But a thread of conciseness made it through, giving him clarity among the intertwined time lines.
Jeff knew what he had done.
Darwin looked to the bomb and then to Jeff. His eyes glowed sorrowfully, and Jeff stared back at the Apostle that had given the vagrants hope, that had made a future with no Apostles a potential reality, that had done nothing to deserve the end that Jeff had forced upon it. Jeff didn’t look away. This was this calling, to do what was required for humanity’s future that no one else could.
Another second ticked away as the limitlessly powerful Apostle realized what Jeff had done. Jeff had turned them both into martyrs, whether Darwin wanted to be or not.
A force-field sword appeared in Darwin’s hand a second later. The massive blade glowed, filling the dark cavern wi
th an added bluish light. Jeff had expected this, to die before the bomb even went off. He wouldn’t fight it; Darwin deserved to take Jeff’s life. He took his final breath and stood unapologetically tall, waiting for the Apostle to cut him down. It wouldn’t matter anyway. The bomb would go off in a few seconds, and they were too close to the device, which would rip the entire mountain to pieces.
Darwin slashed out with the sword in its left hand, whipping it violently forward. It cut off its right hand, severing it from its body. The fingers still moved as it landed on the ground next to Jeff. Jeff eyed it as it clenched onto his legs, with two of the massive fingers wrapping around him, locking him in place. At the same time, he felt himself lose control of his suit as he received notifications that the flight system was engaging.
“This was the end for which we were destined,” Darwin said. “I forgive you, my brother.”
A shield appeared around him, coming from the severed hand, surrounding him in a protective orb of energy. It glowed the same blue as Darwin’s eyes.
Jeff’s suit took off at full speed, launching him straight up into the entrance of the cave, putting him hundreds of feet above the bomb, which glowed beneath him before exploding into blinding white light.
He shot upward, fighting gravity with all of the suit’s might, but he could see the wave of unstoppable energy rushing toward him, reducing rock into nothing. He wasn’t going to make it, but all he could think of was Darwin.
He wasn’t even halfway up the mineshaft when the light from the explosion washed over his protective orb. It accelerated him even faster as it surrounded him in an incredible amount of energy that was desperately seeking space to expand. His orb trembled, and his body shook uncontrollably.
It was hard to be certain what was happening, but he thought he saw Darwin’s hand disintegrating along with his armor. He had a hard time breathing, like he was being crushed on all sides. His vision went dark as the force of the blast overwhelmed his specialized shield and hit his armor, knocking it offline.
Vagrants (Vagrants Series Book 1) Page 29