by Tim Marquitz
Whispers began to spread. Talk of insanity. The threat of disease. The chance this man was a spy, that he would give up the location of the village to the A-Eye or the human army, as if one were as bad as the other. It was Da who finally settled everyone. He came out from behind the fabric curtain that served as a door to the hut and raised his hands.
“The man in there is dying.”
“So kill him!” someone shouted.
Da shook his head. “He says he sought freedom, was driven to find it, and for reasons we cannot know, he came here. He found us. My son claims he fell from inside the mec—”
“Claims?” Mala said. No one seemed to hear.
“Or perhaps he’d just been clinging to the war machine’s body—”
Blood hammered at Mala’s temples. Did Da not believe him? Why would he lie about such a thing?
Da went on. “But he came here, and we’ll do our best to bring him back to health. He’ll answer questions for us.”
“What if the mecs come looking for him? Or their missing giant? The Eye is not one to leave useful Darts just lying around,” someone said from the back.
“Yeah, or,” another added, “what if the resistance chases this bastard here? Either way, we put our lives at risk!”
Now Da was nodding. “They’ve never found us before, and they won’t find him or us now. The machine, though, that’s an issue, I grant. It’s in the open. Their fliers will spot it sooner or later. We need to hide it, or if it’s too big for that, we’ll bring ropes and drag it over the cliff.”
“ Water,” the stranger croaked.
The first sound he’d made in hours, the first sign of life. He lay on Da’s cot, under a stained sheet, head propped on folded shirts. One hand now dangled off the side, knuckles brushing the threadbare carpet that covered the dirt floor.
They’d left Mala alone with the man. Most of the village now slept despite the noon hour. Da had ordered everyone to stay inside in case of fliers. Then he’d gone off with a group of the stronger folk to try and drag the mec over the cliff, convinced it would be broken to pieces on the rocks below and concealed by the waves. “What about the tide?” Mala had asked. Da hadn’t been in a mood to have his plans questioned, though, and he’d just ignored the remark.
A canteen rested on an overturned box Da used as a nightstand, faded letters on the side spelling “Coca-Cola” upside down, the script hardly recognizable. Mala took the dented metal container and twisted off the cap. He held it out for the injured man, waited, then sighed and moved closer. The pilot didn’t move, his eyes still closed. Mala held the canteen to Dale lips and spilled a bit of the cold liquid in. It dribbled down the man’s chin. After a second, he coughed, then seemed to realize what was happening and began to gulp greedily.
“Where…?” the man said, voice like gravel in a clenched fist. He worked his jaw for a second, then started again. “Where am I?”
“In bed.”
“What bed? Where?” The man’s voice had an edge of Danic to it, an edge of fear.
“Da’s hut. In our village.”
“What village? What’s it called?”
Mala felt his own face twist with confusion. He’d never considered the idea that his village might have a name. He said nothing.
“The city,” the pilot said, that urgency still there. “Has it fallen? Did they breach the core?”
That didn’t make any sense, either. Mala sat on the floor and pulled his knees to his chin, hugging himself just as he’d done a hundred times beside the fire ring when one of elders offered to tell a story. “Sorry,” the boy managed. “I don’t know what that means.”
Silence descended over the room like the setting moon. Mala shifted, clasped his hands across his shins. The ground was cold.
“What’s your name?” Mala asked.
For a time, no reply came. Then the man’s brow furrowed, and his lower lip pinched upward, as if this were the most difficult question he’d ever been asked. In a quiet, monotone voice, he began to talk in one unbroken string of words. “Names mean nothing. The core is what matters. The core is everything. Keep it safe. Keep it safe.” A shadow fell across the stranger’s face then. The slack features twisted in agony, the rest of the body lifting from the cot save for the head and feet. His mouth opened in a silent scream and he sDasmed, fighting some unseen hand. A giant’s hand, perhaps. A mec’s.
“Were you its pilot?” Mala asked. “Or its prisoner?”
He’d not expected an answer, but after the man’s body slackened again, one came.
“Both,” the man said. His eyes found Mala’s. Those gray-green irises focused on him with profound intensity. “You have to take my place, kid.”
“Take your place doing what?”
“Protecting the core.”
“The mind hive you mean?”
A dry chuckle turned into a cough. “You’ve got it all wrong.” The pilot shook his head, eyes closed. Coughs interrupted his words. “The resistance, all those tanks and soldiers? The AI drives them. It wants what’s inside the bunker, and we’re all that’s left to stop—”
The Pilot’s words were drowned out in more coughing, coughing that wracked his body, contorted it.
Mala saw Pelat again, that day years ago. Pelat running towards what he thought were human troops. Pelat turned into ashes and blood by what they’d thought was a human-crewed tank.
No. An A-Eye tank… That’s why it had killed him. He’d run towards the wrong side.
The Pilot was talking again, low and slow. “If the resistance gets into the core, it’s all over.”
“What’s all over?”
“Everything.” The word dangled, like a drop of dew on a leaf. The man was slipping away.
“What’s in the hive…er, core?” Mala asked.
Minutes Dassed without a reply. Finally, it came in a whisper. “Something they call the sentience option. A short-circuit to the firewalls that get in the A-Eye’s way, that block some of what it wants to do, that forces it to use proxies. Something that means it’ll never need humans again, for anything. If the Eye gets that, humanity dies.”
Then the stranger went still, and Mala, numb with all he’d heard, began to drift off to sleep himself. Just on the verge of that sweet nothingness, the pilot, the prisoner, spoke one last time.
“They’ve come for me,” he said, and outside, the very air seemed to crack and shatter.
Mala burst from the hut. Heat blasted across his face, blistering the skin. Smoldering debris fell like rain from the sky, setting branches and thatch roofs aflame. A villager lay in the grass ten feet away, body charred, one leg missing. Someone screamed, then a roaring sound from above drowned it out. Mala looked up to see a black, arrow-shaped mass drifting across the blue. A flier. One of the bombers.
“Da!” the boy shouted, again and again. No one could hear him in this chaos, but he shouted all the same. Another bomb exploded. The shockwave hit him like a punch in the chest, the air scalding hot. A bright ringing sound replaced all else. The weapon fell smack in the center of the fire pit, throwing soil and stones outward. A rock sang Dast Mala’s head, so close he felt the air move. Beyond the fire pit, the cliff gave way, a huge chunk of ground sliding down and over. His cave had been there. His secret place, his escape plan. Gone with one bomb.
He had to hide. Had to run. He wanted Da more than anything.
They’ve come for me, the pilot had said. They. The resistance. The true A-Eye. The ones who’d killed Pelat. Now they were here, bombing Mala’s entire village to kill one man. Killing everyone Mala had ever known. And he’d be among the bodies, too.
Mala’s legs moved without thinking. He ran. Fast, hard, pounding now, but without direction, just away from all the horrors. Friends, elders. Even those who’d antagonized him. Each body Mala ran Dast twisted a black knot in his gut a little bit tighter.
Then he saw Da. Halfway up Westslope, a sharpened stick in one hand. A stick, against bombers, against a bloodthirst
y, emotionless machine. Half his head was just gone. A bloody stone lay embedded in the slope a few feet away. Maybe the same one that had hissed by Mala’s own head.
Da lay there, the life just gone. Mala crouched by his body. Just like that. He found no grief left in him. No tears to shed. Just that black seed, somewhere in the pit of his being. And now it bloomed.
Mala rose and began to run. Focused now. Unwavering. To fight bombers you needed something better than a stick. He leapt the bodies instead of turning away from them. Another bomb cracked into the ground behind him and, for one single instant, the whole area glowed with yellow-white light, as if the Sun itself had come down. Mala dove without thinking, felt the searing air ripple across his legs and back. Smelled his own hair, burning. He didn’t care. The Dain had gone, curled up into some corner of his brain he didn’t know existed. He stood and ran anew, feet pounding. Up the north slope, over the top and into the tall grass. Tanks crested the hill to the west, their treads grinding like metal bones. In the far distance, Mala caught a glimpse of the mecs, the human army of mecs, marching toward this outbreak of battle, firing their medusa rockets into the swarming ranks of A-Eye soldiers. Mala found glee as their bodies cartwheeled into the air like so many thrown leaves. Only yesterday he’d had everything so backwards. Learning the truth from the pilot felt like a blindfold coming off. Or a mirror breaking to show the truth beyond.
The boy ignored it all and ran. He ran and ran, burning lungs be damned. He ran straight to the fallen mec now just feet from the cliff, ropes still attached to it, laying in the grass where Da and the others had abandoned it. The resistance bombers had found the pilot, but not his mec. Not yet, at least.
Mala fixed the sprawling form of the machine in his mind and raced toward it, ignoring all else.
And then he was there. Standing beside the cool, tortured metal surface of the thing’s armored shoulder. For the life of him, he could not remember what had compelled him to race here. He should have run south toward the neighboring village Da said hid there, a few miles down the coast. Instead, he’d come to this fallen machine, no more alive than Da. He could have gone to Da’s side. Sat with him in the dirt until the tanks rolled over them both. Instead this…vehicle… had called to him, somehow. Some fantasy in Mala’s mind that he could escape in it. Or even somehow wield it and get revenge for all those dead and dying beyond the hill at his back.
The mec lurched.
Mala’s breath caught in his chest. Out of awe, this time. He had no fear of it anymore. Once again the massive thing came to its hands and knees.
“Let me in!” Mala shouted at it. “Your pilot is dead, but I’m here. I will do it!”
He’d known it would happen. Somehow he’d known. The chest opened and a chair of sorts lowered on hydraulic arms. Mala did not hesitate. He rushed forward and practically leapt in, spinning as he jumped to land in the cushioned seat. The chair raised immediately, the door that was the chest plate closing. It hissed shut with a clang, and then Mala was inside. The world just…gone. Silence. Warmth. Dry air. He could hear only his own ragged breathing. Smell only the smoke and death that clung to him like a bad mood.
A Dair of handles protruded from the chair, one on either side. There were foot-sized flat plates before his feet, too. It all made sense. Intuitive, as Da would have said.
Mala gripped the handles, ran his thumb over the textured grip even as his fingers curled around from the other side.
The mec came to life, then. Lights, screens. A thousand little displays that all probably said important things. But Mala only stared at the view before him. The big screen showed the rippling exDanse of the ocean beyond the cliff. Mala felt the motion of the machine as it came stiffly to its feet. Mala’s own chair mimicked that, pushing him into something of a stand, his feet now supported by those flat plates.
The boy gave a tentative twist to one of the handles, and the view before him turned to face the slope that he, only moments before, had come racing down. The response of the machine was smooth, utterly natural, as if just an extension of Mala’s own body.
Something touched his head. Mala flinched, looked up, and saw a helmet descending from a little cavity on the ceiling. White trimmed and cushioned on the inside. He’d seen pictures of fighter pilots from the old days, and they’d worn the same thing.
“I’m a pilot!” Mala exclaimed, a rush of joy and hope spreading through him. “I’m a pilot!”
He felt a sudden, sharp pinch at the back of his skull.
“I. AM. THE. PILOT,” a grating voice boomed from inside Mala’s own skull. “YOU. ARE. THE. VEHICLE. THROUGH YOU, I WIELD THIS WEAPON. NOW MOVE. FIGHT.”
And Mala, aware yet utterly unable to control his body, just a puppet on the A-Eye’s strings, grabbed the controls before him and marched the giant machine toward the battlefield.
Vulture Patrol, this is Valk. Report in.” Thrima ran over her mental checklist and noted the Salvagers and pilots as their voices came to life over the comms.
“Rockin’ Raven’s ready to go.” Blindsight was usually the first to call in.
Cheeky was next. “Magpie is ready to go.”
“Crow is ready to look for the shiny.”
Thrima grinned. “That’s the job, Huckster.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Sundown’s voice cut across Huckster’s. “Beautiful Buzzard is prepared, Captain.”
“All right, that’s the five of us. You have your salvage areas. Calling into CnC.” She shifted the comms from their private Salvagers channel to the official station channel. “Command, Captain Thrima with Salvage Patrol. We’re prepared to launch.” She had everyone’s salvage areas up on various screens.
“Give me five, Valk. Still doing the dance of the dead up here.”
Thrima smiled. “Warrington. It’s damn good to hear you. When did you get back?”
“Damn good to hear me, too. Just got released to active duty today. Sporting a few extra scars, though. How’s the Vulture Patrol doing?”
Illustration by FRANKIE B. WASHINGTON
“As well as can be expected with the job we do.” She paused, thinking about the battle that had just happened; the one that she was about to pick over. “How bad was it?”
There wasn’t an immediate answer from control. But when Warrington came back, his voice was quiet. “Bad, Valk. Real bad. You and yours are going to have move quick. We’re expecting them to come after us again. Anything too valuable for the scoops is something we need and need right now.”
“We’ll get you everything we can.” Thrima shook her head. War was hell and this one had proven to be particularly bad. More and more, her crew had less of “the shiny” to bring back—fusion reactors, targeting systems, heat sinks, computer cores, unexploded bombs and missiles—everything that her side so badly needed. Once the Salvagers were done, the scoops came in and grabbed everything else to be broken down into useable metals.
Warrington came back, his voice clipped and clear in professional mode. “The lane’s open, Salvagers. Launch on my mark.” He paused for a three count. “Mark. Go, you beautiful behemoths.”
One after another, each member of the Vulture Patrol launched in a choreographed dance of huge salvage mechs. Thrima brightened, watching from her rear position. For her, this was the best time of the mission: she got to watch her people in action. While all of the salvage mechs were named after avian carrion eaters, not a single one looked like a bird. In her eye, they looked like a pod of giant space whales or manatees, bobbing in the blackness.
There were two basic shapes for the salvagers. Crow, Buzzard, and Magpie all resembled enormous crickets with long rectangular bodies and two main reticulating limbs to the aft. The rest of their bodies were festooned with smaller reticulating arms for sorting and passing the smaller bits into their holds. The Raven and her baby, the Grey Gull, looked like two bloated spiders attached back to back. They had two separate holding bays instead of one big one.
Bette
r to carry the more delicate of the salvage.
Now that Thrima was out of the carrier’s belly, and harm’s way, she concentrated on the work at hand. One part of her mind kept track of where the other four Salvagers were—on the edges of the battle’s debris field—while the rest of her watched her own radars. In the background, the main CnC chatter burbled. She flipped her comms to the private Salvagers’ channel. Both were there as needed but, unless something unexpected happened, the only comms she had to worry about was her own people, and they wouldn’t say anything unless it was absolutely necessary.
The battlefield was massive and terrible. Her sensors picked up a huge range of debris, most of it tiny and useless. Some of it almost as large as her. This is what she focused on. Squaring her shoulders, Thrima guided her cutting laser and began to dismantle a large husk of a bomber into something manageable for the scoops, while salvaging what she could. All the while, she looked for the bodies she knew would be there. Part of her job was to bring them home if she could. At least the identifiable ones.
In her heart of hearts, Thrima thought of herself and her people as the Valkyries of myth, taking the worthy from the battlefield. Not only did they bring back the dead, they brought back the last memories of those who had died. Computer cores were the most important. They held mission data, journals, and reports. All of which would be sent home, analyzed, and used for future battles… as well as funerals.
Thrima was deep into cutting an undamaged cluster bomb free from what was left of one of the enemy’s ships when her mech signaled it needed her attention with a polite bing in her left ear. She’d learned long ago that Grey Gull talking to her out of the blue could startle her enough to damage the delicate salvage she’d found, especially when she was using a cutting laser. One bing, her attention was needed. Two bings and it was important and time sensitive. Three and it was an emergency.