I am Automaton 3: Shadow of the Automaton

by Edward P. Cardillo

  Steady hands, he thought. He forced himself to take a deep breath.

  The runners charged again.

  Bringing the SX-90 up to bear, Conor trusted his instincts and pulled the trigger. Again, his hands didn’t fail him. He had just enough time to realize that the two Kalak runners didn’t have breathing masks before their skulls imploded beneath the concussive force of his assault rifle spray.

  Blood splashed the surface of his helmet, covering the glass.

  How are they breathing?

  He kept shooting until they stopped tearing at the fence. It took a lot longer than he thought it would, even for a couple of angry Kalak soldiers.

  As soon as they hit the ground, he turned his rifle toward the gaping hangar door and backed into the shadow of the canyon wall. He expected to see a full complement of pissed-off lizards rushing out with their massive assault rifles ready to tear him to shreds, but the doorway was quiet on all fronts and he didn’t hear any alarms or approaching footsteps.

  They weren’t wearing masks, he thought again.

  How the hell were they breathing?

  For some reason, that mystery was much more chilling than the number of bullets it had taken for him to take down the two crazed runners, and that was forgetting the tower watchman’s contributions. The climber hadn’t taken nearly as many, but it had also been wearing the thin oxygen apparatus the Kalak strapped over their snouts. No real mystery there, or in the watchman’s fall from the guard tower.

  But why were they attacking each other?

  What the hell is going on?

  He supposed he’d find out soon enough, so he made sure there weren’t any other guards in the watchtowers and turned back the way he came. He might have been able to climb the fence and save himself some work finding an alternate route into the facility, but he didn’t trust the emptiness at all. Or the fact that the hangar door was still open to the merciless elements.

  Strange. Very strange.

  Things didn’t add up at all. But at least his combat training hadn’t failed him in the heat of battle. Yet. That was something to be grateful for, he supposed. Two hours earlier, he would have put his chances for taking down a quartet of Kalak troops, even with three of them unarmed, at slim to none. And he hadn’t had the high ground, either. It was a good thing his SX was up to the task. At six feet tall, one hundred ninety-five pounds, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of overpowering even one of them in hand to hand combat.

  Come to think of it, even that asshole Sergeant Wilkins would be damned proud.

  He guessed there was a reason Commander Chalmers had recruited him straight into the Aidric Ground Team, after all.

  ORIGINS I

  Dorothy.

  An explosion rocked the city street. Detroit was under attack.

  That’s the wall. They’re heading straight for the plant.

  Conor was pinned down in the potato chip aisle of a rundown liquor store. The power had gone out in the blast. The room was completely dark. From the sound of it, an army, at least a small one, was just outside the building and was liable to bust in any second with weapons blaring. But that worry was far from Conor’s mind. He was more concerned with where their road ended.

  Specifically, the Midwest Academy of Scientific Research.

  Dorothy.

  He couldn’t let them get to her.

  Someone screamed from the dry-cleaners next door. The sound made him wince. He’d heard how brutal the Kalak could be.

  From where he crouched with his back against a row of candy bars, he heard the clerk breathing all too heavily, fighting back sobs that were determined to break through. There were a handful of other customers in the store, maybe more. He hadn’t paid close attention to numbers when he’d walked in. The first blast had followed almost immediately.

  Another explosion now, answered by the sound of breaking glass across the street.

  And all Conor could do was thank God it hadn’t come from the MASR building next to the Renaissance Center. MASR was another block away, and Dorothy’s research lab was on the fifteenth floor. She hadn’t been hit yet. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be soon, or that the fifteenth floor was any less vulnerable to the powerful Kalak explosives.

  Do something.

  But what?

  He took a quick look around. The power was still out but there were lights in the street illuminating the store even through the explosion cloud. An old woman cradled her purse in her lap with her cheek pressed against the beer fridge. A teenaged boy wearing the orange and green belt of one of the more lethal neighborhood gangs squatted between Conor and the exit, trying to peek out into the action.

  That was all he could see from his vantage point aside from the pudgy right hand of the clerk stuck beneath the bulletproof glass divider where he was reaching for a twenty dollar bill.

  The clerk…

  Dorothy.

  An idea struck him. Every halfwit liquor store owner in Detroit kept at least one firearm behind the cash register in case of an attempted robbery, which meant the blubbering sack of shit with his hairy wrist stuck beneath his own glass was probably packing heat, so to speak. He also probably wouldn’t be able to reach the gun as long as he was stuck.

  Creeping down the aisle as swiftly and silently as he could, Conor stepped to the employee door beside the counter.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said, crouched beneath the handle.

  A few feet away, the clerk stopped squirming for a moment to listen.

  “Hey,” Conor said again. “You need some help back there?”

  “Fuck off,” the store owner snapped.

  Conor didn’t blame him for being cautious, especially given the opportunistic looting that inevitably broke out within moments of every major tragedy in America since the plague.

  Dorothy.

  But he didn’t have time for bullshit. Not even to explain himself.

  Instead, he stood up, walked over to the window where the clerk’s hand was red and swelling more and more with each attempt at retrieval, and grabbed the man’s fingers.

  “Open the door,” he said, giving a light squeeze.

  Another bomb went off out in the street but all eyes in the liquor store were on the cash register. On Conor.

  The clerk tried to rip free of his grip, so he squeezed harder. The clerk yelped.

  “Open the door,” Conor said again. “I want to help you.”

  “Let go of me or I’m calling the police,” the clerk snapped.

  Conor squeezed tighter and now he could tell the man was in pain by the way the muscles in his arm tensed and attempted retreat, even though Conor couldn’t see the man’s face in the shadows.

  Dorothy.

  Alarm bells rang in his head. It took all his self-control not to cry out or run aimlessly into the street to try to reach her in time.

  In time for what?

  He didn’t know. What he did know was that he needed to play his cards very quickly and very carefully if she was going to live.

  “I don’t think you can reach the phone,” he said. “Besides, I think the cops have their hands full right now.” He eased his grip and the clerk quit squirming. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I need your gun. Now.”

  “I’m not giving you my gun,” the clerk whined.

  “Hey!” the old woman at the beer fridge shouted.

  Oh great. Here come the civilian heroes, he thought. Of course, they would see what he was doing as looting, bullying. He’d been afraid of that. They didn’t understand, and they wouldn’t be able to in the amount of time he had to save her.

  Another explosion.

  Conor bit his lip. “I’m not trying to hurt him,” he told the others.

  He could hear the passing army outside the window. Thin shapes moved in the clouds of debris.

  No time.

  But the old woman shook her head emphatically. “I know,” she said. “Someone needs to do something out there.” She rushed over, her forgotten purse bangin
g against her hip. “Give him your gun,” she told the clerk.

  Conor dropped his hand and stepped aside to make room for her.

  He looked back at the customers dotting the aisles of groceries and junk food and pornographic holocards. None of them looked threatening or outraged. None of them looked like they thought he was the Devil incarnate. But they all looked scared. Even the rough and tumble gangster crouching near the door.

  “Go on,” the old woman urged. “He looks like he can fight, and those damn lizards will be in here any second.”

  Conor frowned but kept quiet, afraid anything he said would only make the clerk more indignant.

  Dorothy.

  Seconds passed like days. Another explosion, this one farther off.

  Dorothy.

  Screw the gun. It’s time to go.

  “Fine,” the clerk relented.

  The battery-powered door unlocked with a click. Conor had it open in a heartbeat and didn’t waste any time with apologies or pleasantries. “Where is it?”

  “Beneath the register.”

  “Is it locked in or coded?”

  “Not with the power out.”

  “I thought everything here ran on back-up.”

  The clerk didn’t say anything. He didn’t really have to.

  Conor hustled over to the cash register and felt around in the darkness beneath the counter.

  There.

  An assault rifle.

  Another explosion in the streets. Shouting.

  Dorothy.

  He’d never fired an assault rifle before and wasn’t sure why a liquor store owner would have one, even though crime had escalated in the city and it was easier than ever to slip things under the noses of the over-worked and under-staffed Detroit Police Department with the war going on.

  No time.

  “Thanks,” he told the man over his shoulder. He was halfway out the door by the time he got a response. Not from the clerk or the old woman, but the terrified teenaged gangster.

  “Good luck out there,” the boy told him.

  Conor stepped into the cloud of smoke and paused just long enough to make sure the rifle was loaded and the safety was off.

  SX-90, he thought. I’ll bet this son of a bitch can do some damage.

  Another explosion, this one from the vicinity of the Midwest Academy of Scientific Research.

  “Damn it,” he muttered.

  There were dozens of ghost shapes moving in the cloud, probably armed Kalak, but he ran toward them anyway. Toward the MASR Building.

  Toward Dorothy.

  Sprays of gunfire rattled out ahead, followed by a much smoother surge of…blaster bolts.

  Blaster bolts?

  That couldn’t be.

  The Kalak didn’t use blasters. They used their own brand of assault rifle. Powerful, yes. More powerful than the ordinary human weapon. More advanced, too. But not blasters.

  What the hell is happening?

  And then, he rounded the corner toward the riverfront and he saw it.

  “No…”

  The top two-thirds of the MASR Building were engulfed in flames.

  He had enough composure or incomprehension to recognize how strange it was for the explosions to trigger so high up rather than at the base where the whole building would have crumbled. Then he saw that the flames still began well below Dorothy’s floor.

  Please, no…

  Unless she’d found a way out before the blasts, she was trapped up there somewhere. Burning to death in her office because she’d wanted to wait for him to go down to her laboratory in the lower levels.

  Burning.

  A blaster bolt whizzed by his head and Conor ducked instinctively.

  Blasters? he thought again.

  He didn’t wait for another close call. Instead, he came up firing in the direction of the shot and the ghost-shapes moving through the city streets. It only took a few reports before

  (Dorothy)

  rage overwhelmed him and he charged toward the MASR Building, still firing. He took out four of the ghosts in his wild spray of rifle bursts before the clip ran out, and by then he’d drawn enough panicked attention that he knew he was going to have to either find another weapon or find cover in a hurry.

  Momentarily altering his course from the building, he crouched over the corpse of one of his victims and grabbed its blaster.

  What the hell? he thought as soon as he saw the creature’s face.

  It wasn’t a Kalak. That much was certain. This bastard was almost as white as the cloud of smoke billowing through the streets.

  Tsoul?

  Probably. But there wasn’t any time and it didn’t matter.

  Bringing the long, slender blaster up to bear, Conor yelled

  (Dorothy)

  and didn’t stop killing the ghosts until he’d reached the entrance to the MASR Building. By then, they were all either dead or gone.

  And so was Dorothy.

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