by C. Gockel
“Make the medic a corpse, too, and reload the nets,” someone ordered.
Ghost’s voice screamed over the shared channel. “Commander, we have to leave.”
Static flared on every inch of James’s skin, and then Noa’s thoughts hit him like a balm. “No, we wait for the remaining civilians, and we give James a chance to get down here.”
Another voice said aloud, “Where is he?”
He heard something that sounded like metal clicking on tile getting closer. “It, we’re looking for an it, do not forget it,” said a voice—the same one who ordered the murder of the doctor.
His hand found his rifle. Noa’s voice entered his mind again. “James, can you hear me?”
His thoughts slipped into the ether, to tell her yes, but before the thought had even been transmitted, the voice he’d connected to the regular metal clicking sound and the murder of the medic said, “Ethernet augmenters have picked someone up … beneath the grav bed.”
The reason for the weight on top of him connected in an instant. He lifted his hand and felt a depression above him. The bottom of the grav bed. He felt the safety straps that were used to secure patients, but the patient was gone. The lightly padded mattress that normally covered the cold metal was gone too. He didn’t hear a single beep from the life support equipment. His hand trembled, and for a moment, he had a memory of a long beep cutting short in a white hallway that lasted forever.
“Be careful, it’s dangerous,” said the voice connected to the clicking, snapping James back into the present. But he kept his eyes closed. Behind his eyelids was just black and gray—that observation connected a moment later in his mind, too. They were using flashing lights to disorient him. They knew it was a weakness.
In the ether, he heard shouts of, “Where is James?” from Manuel and Chavez. Eliza’s voice sang out, “Get out of there, young man!” And from Ghost there came a, “Damn you, get out of there!” Which was oddly touching in its own way. And Noa’s thoughts, “James, get down here now!” The thoughts of the crew filled him and made him feel oddly complete, even as the voices around him were getting closer. The footsteps, heartbeats, and breathing of his attackers were moving to his left and his right. He lifted his hand from Oliver’s heart and found the controls of the grav bed. With his other hand he found the trigger of the rifle. He stretched his shoulder enough to feel the strap of the satchel there. And then he let his fingers fly over the controls of the bed. He heard the motor, grabbed onto the safety straps and held on with one hand, and held his rifle with the other.
The bed rose from the ground, the engine roaring to overcome its upside down position, and the gravity of Atlantia that had so recently increased. James fired at the feet of his foes, and as they fell, their bodies. He heard screams and smelled charred flesh and hair just before the bed shot forward and up, crashing through an as yet unbroken window, sinking, hitting the railing of the balcony and crashing to a halt. James nearly lost his hold with the force of the impact. His teeth rattled, and his bones screamed in protest. Pinned by the bed and the railing, he heard phaser fire on the grav bed’s underside, but the machine’s still-operating grav bands were playing havoc with the phaser beams, propelling them away.
Noa’s voice rang in his mind. “James, are you alright?”
“I’m on my way down,” James replied, even as he struggled to right himself.
“We’re waiting for you,” Noa said.
A chorus rose over the ether. “Hurry!”
Readjusting his hold on the safety straps, James managed to stand up and fire on the one remaining attacker to his right. Which left three on his left. With a grunt of exertion, he swung the bed left, flipping it over on top of two of them. The bed landed on the railing at an angle. Still strapped to it, James flung himself onto it and hit the controls. The bed shot over the railing and hovered for a moment, the engine roar becoming a high-pitched scream. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” James murmured and spoke into the ether. The bed plummeted. All of which James expected. What he didn’t expect was the bed’s descent to be stopped by a skywalk just a few stories below, or the shadow that jumped over the railing after him. The shock of the impact loosened his grip on the rifle, and it clattered onto the roof of the walkway. Hand tangled in the safety straps, James saw a flash of metal rising in an arch and drew his legs up just before the source of the flash landed on his kneecaps. There was another bright flash and James could only roll his head away as whatever it was streaked toward him. Pain shot through his cheek, he heard metal connect with metal and plastic, and a shadow danced on the bed above him. Yanking hard, James finally broke the safety straps. He saw a glint of light and rolled backward over the edge of the bed onto the roof of the skywalk. A light flashed on the walkway, and James saw who—or what he was up against for the first time. A man with a skull that was half metal stood on the bed. His mouth was covered by a breathing mask, his eyes were covered by night vision goggles that glowed faintly. He looked like a 20th century vision of a robotic nightmare. He wasn’t bearing any weapons that James could see, but his limbs were weapons. He had metal plates on his knuckles, and where he should have feet, there were sharp blades of steel. James’s eyes went to his own rifle on the edge of the roof. He threw himself toward it, but his foe was there first, kicking it off the roof with his left foot, catching his weight on his right, and then leaping up and over James with inhuman speed. James saw the rifle fall and discharge when it landed on another skylight twenty meters down and two meters to the left. James rolled over, jumped up, and leapt. He landed in a crouch on the lower skylight, just meters from his rifle. Before he could bolt for it, the other man landed, bounced on his metal blades, and a second later aimed one of them at James’s head. James barely managed to dodge.
“James, where are you?” Noa cried over the ether. James eyes flicked below. He was on the street that was perpendicular to the Ark, about a block away.
A glint of light and the scrape of metal on glass was all the warning he got. He spun away from the kick that came too fast, heard his enviro suit rip and felt pain in his shoulder.
“What are you?” James murmured.
Bouncing on his limbs, James’s assailant said, “A man. And I will defeat you … humans will always defeat you.” His voice was muffled and distorted by his filtration mask. He launched at James again, aiming the metal blades on his legs at James’s face. James’s breathing mask went flying. Scampering backward, James saw another skywalk a few stories down in the direction of the Ark. He leaped for it, dropping and rolling on impact.
His foe landed in front of him, bouncing lightly.
James looked up, and behind the man he saw S8O5 … and the shadows of warships. His vision went black, and he saw Noa, her head on a metal table, her port yanked out in a tangle of copper wire as thin as spider silk. “Run, Noa,” he cried over the ether.
“No! Get down here!” she replied. She wouldn’t leave, of course she wouldn’t leave. Every nano in James’s body went white. He saw the Ark—it couldn’t sail down the canal James was above; the ship was too long. It couldn’t go up, the air was too cluttered with skywalks. It had to sail back down the canal it came into the dome on.
James’s foe went from a bounce into a roundhouse kick. James ducked, ran to a nearby skylight in the walkway's roof, and dove in headfirst, crashing through the glass in a shower of clinking shards, landing in a roll. He heard metal on tile behind him but didn’t pause to look back. He ran, the map of the buildings around him that he’d only glimpsed briefly spilling out in his mind with mapmaker’s precision. He threw his weight at a floor-to-ceiling window to his side. It cracked but didn’t give. His assailant was on him an instant later. The metal man couldn’t bounce in the enclosed space; the ceiling was too low. But he pirouetted too fast for a normal human and kicked. James evaded, the kick hit the glass, and this time the glass gave. James aimed a punch at the man’s chest. His fist connected with some sort of body armor, but the impact was enough to s
end the man flying against the window on the opposite side of the walkway. James heard a crack, spun around, hopped up onto a railing, and then jumped as far as he could, landing on the metal beams of another skywalk. He dashed across it, carefully avoiding the skylights. He heard the scrape of metal behind him but didn’t look back. Ahead was the wall of a balcony of a short building that abutted the canal the Ark floated upon. James leaped up, caught the edge, and pulled himself up with shaky arms. The wall was partially obstructed by sunlight magnifiers. Mounted on columns that could rotate to follow the sun, the magnifiers were rectangular blocks of polyglass that concentrated the distant sunlight for the garden's plants. He had to crawl on his hands and knees beneath the glass, but there was no other obstacle between him and the rooftop garden beyond. Vision darkening at the edges, he slid down and stumbled in an area of rooftop garden that was like a dying young forest. The branches of dead trees laden with brown withered leaves arched just above his head, the branches of bushes lower to the ground seemed to grab him, and his feet crunched over dead-crusted vegetation. He was vaguely aware of the roar of antigrav getting closer, and the sound of fast thuds in sod behind him, keeping pace. The rip in his enviro suit was making him cold. Feet pounding, he ran as fast as he could toward the edge of the building that would be above the Ark. A spotlight from the hover scoured the ground to his left, and he altered his path to avoid being caught in its glow. His apps told him the new path would put him at the far corner of the building, thirty meters from the Ark. It would have to be close enough. He could still feel Noa in his mind. He had to get to her because damn it, she wouldn't leave without him.
The rooftop forest opened up to dead gardens sprinkled with snow. James’s vision tunneled; he kept his focus straight in front of him on the sunlight magnifiers that edged the garden along the wall of the building that ran beside the canal the Ark was on. “I’m above you, Noa, be down in a minute,” he whispered into the ether.
“Where?” Noa said.
“The roof,” James said.
“Of the hospital?” Noa asked.
James didn’t reply, his vision was constricted to his escape route. He heard the sound of antigrav getting closer, saw the spotlight in the periphery of his vision, and heard footsteps on the gravel paths and flower boxes he leaped over. He was within two body lengths of the corner of the wall … once there he could hop down, from walkway to walkway … He heard a boom, and a whoosh. He pulled the satchel with Oliver’s heart closer to his body and kept running. James collided with the low wall that marked the edge of the building and something collided with him. He fell against one of the magnifiers, his legs hobbled, his arms wrapped tight to his sides. He looked down and saw he was caught in a net of some sort that wrapped him in a mesh cocoon from his knees to his shoulders.
He felt a tug on the netting and was abruptly yanked around, the force of the tug pulling his feet out from under him. He fell to the ground with jaw-rattling force. He heard footsteps but the spotlight blinded him.
“Anything a machine can do, a man can do better,” his pursuer said. “Your kind will never take over Luddeccea. Your plans to destroy the human race will fail.”
The madness made James sick; the hypocrisy made his skin burn. “I’m not a machine,” James ground out. “I’m augmented, just like you.”
He felt cold steel under his chin, and his face was yanked upward. His pursuer was silhouetted against the spotlights, his face bathed in shadow, but James could make out the glint of the metal on his forehead above his night vision goggles.
“You’re more metal than I am,” James spat.
One of the foot blades landed on his abdomen, pinning him to the spot.
“I am etherless,” the man hissed. “My neural interface has been completely disabled. I am not like you.” He laughed cold and hard. “A mechanical puppet of the time gates, pretending to be a dead man.”
“Augments allowed me to live,” James hissed. “Only in your sick, perverted religion would they be seen as evil.”
The man's head jerked back. “I think it really thinks its human,” he shouted, and James could hear the leer behind his breathing mask.
Behind him a shadow spit. “It’s just playing with you.”
“‘Bots can’t play,” said another shadow. “Too dumb.”
“I am a man,” James said, struggling against the bonds. “Not a …” He couldn’t finish. His struggling ceased. He heard a cannon fire, probably from the Ark. The building trembled.
“Are you now?” said James’s captor, leaning close so that his night vision goggles were just a few inches from James’s face. “Who are you, Mr. Man?”
“I am Professor James Hiro Sinclair,” James said, but the words felt wrong, a jumble of discordant syllables that had no inherent meaning. The man released his chin, and James screamed, “I think, I dream.” He wasn't sure if he was protesting to his assailant, to himself, or to the universe at large.
“You don’t have a face mask on,” said his pursuer.
James’s eyes widened. It had been gone too long … for a human with body cells to feed. His hand trembled … Even if he had no organic matter in his body, he should have some in his mind.
“I thought it was supposed to be smart,” said one of the shadows.
“I have memories of a mother and father.” In his bonds his hand trembled against the satchel, remembering his father, leaning over him in that long white hallway. He felt a shiver run through his body. He didn't feel love thinking of his father, he only had a memory of feeling love. He had no memories of his mother or father after that moment …
Monica’s words came back to him. I thought you died.
He had died, hadn’t he?
“I bleed,” he said.
“To fool us,” one of the men said.
“So do sex bots,” said another.
A radio crackled, and one of the men said, “They’re preparing a drone drop.”
“They use drones?” someone asked.
James blinked and pulled up a memory of a drone he’d had as a boy. It was hazy, like a memory of a memory remembered later … He felt a fizzle of static along his skin. A memory of a memory, dumped later into a time capsule.
“It’s etherless,” said another. “Got simple programming. Fire on the Ark, return to base.”
Fire on the Ark. “Noa, you have to leave,” James said into the ether. Somewhere an alarm went off.
“It’s talking to someone,” said one of his captors. “Or something.”
The man who was standing on his chest pulled the metal blade of his foot away. He motioned to his guards.
“Go, Noa, go,” James whispered.
Gravity shifted, so it was slightly more than Earth’s, and James's captors hauled him up.
He heard a cannon and this time a beam of fire arched over the roof and landed just half a meter from the vessel still casting the blinding spotlights.
“We’ll get your throwback bitch soon enough,” his captor hissed.
James’s mind supplied a gruesome image of all her fingers being gone.
There was more cannon fire. The building rocked, the hands on James’s upper arms briefly loosened, and his eidetic memory played the features of the wall behind him as clearly as though he was looking at them. James dropped, bent his knees, and dived backward. Cement scraped at the back of his head, the netting, and the weights. James plunged, headfirst, and knew he was too high. The fall would break his body and tear him apart. He knew it like he knew how to breathe, and like he knew he could not be just a puppet or a machine intent on destroying the human race. In his bindings, he put his hand on the satchel. Aloud and into the ether he said, “I have Oliver’s heart.”
And gravity shifted again.
* * *
Noa looked up at the building that rose beside the Ark. She could see lights above and hear the whir of antigrav at the far corner of its roof.
One of Sterling’s men jogged around a group of struggling refugee
s across the deck of the Ark to Noa and Sterling. “Commander,” he said. “That is the last of them.”
“James said he would be right down,” Noa said.
Sterling turned toward her. He said nothing, and his face was shadowed within his mask, but she knew what he was thinking. They couldn’t stay here long. The warships would be in atmosphere soon, and as soon as they were, the drones would come.
“He'll be right down,” Noa whispered. She looked up at the lights she could see glowing on the building above.
“James is up there, on that roof,” she said, lifting her cannon to her shoulder in the punishing gravity.
“That’s impossible!” said Sterling. “He couldn't make it over there—he's got to be still at the hospital.”
Ignoring him, she bent to one knee, raised the cannon, and fired. Normally, the plasma fire would have cleared the roof, but gravity was against it. The charge hit the side of the building instead, loosening cement, bricks, and glass and sending it tumbling into the water beside the ship.
“Commander, you can’t help him,” Sterling said. “Even if that was him.”
He was right. Gravity shifted, slightly. Noa squeezed her eyes shut and fired again.
“Civilians are in,” said one of Sterling’s men.
“Commander, I’m sorry,” said Sterling. “I know …”
He knew how it hurt to leave men behind.
“Go, Noa, go!’ James spoke the words across the ether, over the public channel that everyone could hear.
Noa gritted her jaw. Sterling put a hand on her shoulder. She fired the cannon one more time.
Chavez’s voice came over the ether. “Three minutes until drone drop.”
“Damn it,” Wren grunted, helmeted head tilted up toward the roof, cannon by his side.
“Commander,” Sterling said. “He doesn’t want you to die. Listen to him. Live for him now … and for all those people below,” Sterling said.
With a cry of despair and rage, Noa raced toward the airlock, Sterling hot on her heels. She’d get the survivors of this nightmare out of here.