by Phil Wrede
He had just enough time to rush at the remains of the downed Class Ones, wrench an arm free from each, and run out of the brush. The Class Two stood just at the edge, precariously balanced on three legs, with the other four positioned to fire. It whipped its ovular head down and focused its multi-faceted, bug-like eyes on him. The cannons on its upright arms followed suit, its limbs making overlapping clacking sounds like the shutter of a camera, a camera that photographed nothing but death.
Cyber-Knife tore off in a flash, hastily rewiring the dismembered limbs of his foes as he tried to outrun, or at least outmaneuver, the lasery death moments from finding him. He ripped the outer covering off one arm and used an access probe in his wrist to force its systems back to life, using his energy to activate its plasma blade. Just as he began to do the same with the other arm, the Class Two's lasers blasted out; he barely dodged out of the way, dropping the inactive arm. The lasers hit home on it, and burst it into a million shredded pieces.
Cyber-Knife skidded to a stop and swung the remaining arm around in an arc, its trail momentarily creating an infinity loop in the air in front of him. The Class Two, still a fair distance away, tilted its head in a way that a living thing would in confusion. It looked all the more comical against the backdrop of the steadily spreading flames. He had run further away from the Class Two than he'd expected; the energy feeding the plasma blade probably wouldn't last long enough to see him through to victory.
“Stop trying to act all fucking fancy, man,” he muttered to himself. He launched the severed arm at the Class Two like a javelin and drew Excalibur from its sheath as he sprinted off, mechanical augmentation pushing his genetically engineered muscles far past any normal human's limits. At his top speed, theoretically, not even the alien robot ninjas could keep up.
The Class Two fired a pair of blasts as Cyber-Knife approached: one caught the plasma blade in mid-air and dissolved it, while the others lanced out towards Cyber-Knife himself. He swung Excalibur with his right arm, catching the lasers on the sharpest edge of the blade and redirecting them harmlessly into the ground beside him. The Class Two repositioned itself, trading balance for firepower, and fired its full complement of five lasers at him. Five deadly beams scorched the very air in their wake. He leapt over them, the marks they seared in the ground looking like his footprints once the smoke had cleared.
The alien robot spider knew it could stage only a final attack, so it pulled one more leg off the ground and shot out six concentrated beams in a staggered pattern, counting on Cyber-Knife to catch some of the lasers, but not all of them. It was a good thing the enemy hadn't programmed any of its warriors with the capacity for emotion, because the Class Two would've felt massively disappointed just before Cyber-Knife terminated its existence.
Cyber-Knife fired off a burst of small flechette prisms from the palm of his free hand - the little crystals caught two of the lasers in flight and refracted them into the sky. Two more of the lasers he evaded entirely, and another he hit with Excalibur's point. The sixth caught him along the side and cut him down to the rib, exposing his bone to the vicious air, but he was able to shunt aside the pain long enough to send that fifth beam through one of the legs upon which the Class Two still relied for support. As it started leaning to one side, it brought down its legs to steady itself, and in that instant, Cyber-Knife struck.
He jumped onto its back, plunging Excalibur into the armored cabling that attached its head to the rest of its body. The Class Two thrashed like a tortured arachnid. Cyber-Knife slashed the blade out through the side of the robot's neck; its head lolled, its optical feed cut. He stabbed the sword through its trunk several times, plasma leaking out onto the ground and eating through the rough grass that had somehow stood up to the ship's engine burn. The fire in the jungle had begun to chip away at it around the edge of the clearing.
Cyber-Knife cried out in his exertion as he pushed himself off the Class Two and cut it in half. Its remaining legs wobbled before the two halves crashed to the ground, mirroring each other as they fell. Cyber-Knife landed and looked around as the metal pieces shrieked and splintered around him. He looked to the sky, but didn't see any sign of more imminent enemy forces.
Excalibur rang out in his hand. “I can think of a few knights who would've wanted to train with you after witnessing that display, my dear chap.”
“We make a good killing team.” Cyber-Knife replied.
“One capable of saving the world, I'd wager,” the sword said.
Cyber-Knife supposed they had found a moment for appreciating the bonds of friendship forged in combat. The corners of his mouth twitched up, his facial muscles contorted over his mechanisms in a way that looked like a feral snarl.
Excalibur almost jumped out of his grip. “Good god, man, it was a compliment!”
“I know,” Cyber-Knife replied, matter-of-factly. “You made me smile.”
Excalibur spoke forcefully. “Is that what that was? You looked like you were about to melt me down into machine replacement parts.” Of all Cyber-Knife's abilities, a friendly smile couldn't be counted among them.
“Fine.” In one word, Cyber-Knife had locked down his emotions again, his heavy lids making his eyeballs look like slits. “Let's go get this transport moving.”
“That's the spirit -” Excalibur began, before Cyber-Knife cut it off by returning it to its sheath.
“And they encourage you to savor the moment,” he said, shaking his head in exasperation.
Cyber-Knife limped as he walked up the transport ship's gantry and into its belly, but his wound had nearly healed itself by the time he'd crossed into the ship proper. It'd take longer for the self-repairing fibers of his clothing to seal the gaping tear it had suffered, but wartime made modesty a less vital virtue, less so in a war against alien robot ninjas. Cyber-Knife only understood it conceptually.
The enemy ship expressed no sign of life in its dim, purple interior, with narrow, cold corridors exactly spaced to allow for the Class Ones to move through one at a time. The low light did not offer up a problem for Cyber-Knife - his implants allowed him to operate in virtual darkness, after all - but he had to shuffle through the hallways at an angle. He possessed broad shoulders, which his enemies did not.
He scooted through the ship, from one dim red light to the next, trying to avoid touching the frigid walls whenever possible, until he reached the place that had to be the bridge, where the hallway came to an end. Armored plating blocked off a window which presumably looked out onto the jungle. A series of incoherently winking yellow lights and red displays covered the panels that lined the room, and displayed an input port prominently up front. The robots had to pilot the ship that way, directly interfacing with it. It was efficient, and it locked out any organic thieves who might try to spirit the ship away. Anybody, except for Cyber-Knife.
He plugged his probe into the ship and began the handshake interfacing process. Immediately, he felt the enemy's alien code flood into his systems, attempting to override his software and take control of his hardware. Fortunately, his designers had spent years pouring over as much enemy tech as they could find and incorporated everything they'd learned into the design of his security systems and their ongoing upgrades. When the enemies had first attacked, they'd used sophisticated electronic warfare to turn humanity's tools against itself, conquering most of the developed world by flipping a few switches. Decades of concentrated study had revealed their tactics, and Cyber-Knife's engineers had found a way to flip them on their heads. Finally, he'd get to put the theories to the test.
He had prepared for this sort of battle; a digital warrior, as well as a physical one. While humanity had concern when it came to giving the enemy's programs any kind of access to its systems, even as a preparation for what lay ahead, Cyber-Knife's creators knew that wherever he found himself, it would be on a battlefield. The enemy escalated its attack - Cyber-Knife's vital signs immediately spiked, and he started exhibiting the symptoms of some kind o
f horrible flu. The programming could induce his artificial components to affect his physical body!
Despite all the manipulations and upgrades he'd undergone in his development as the perfect weapon, one lesson above all had been drilled into Cyber-Knife: the most powerful tool he had at his disposal was his mind. It took only a few heartbeats for him to begin to drop his body into a trance-like state, slowing his breathing and lowering his body temperature. His internal sensors carefully adjusted his body's chemistry, keeping the poisons of fatigue out of his bloodstream and inducing his muscles to relax, so he wouldn't tense up and rip himself in half. His face went slack, the muscles beneath his skin loosening. He marshaled every available resource to fight this internal struggle; he couldn't battle himself at the same time he waged war against the enemy's essence.
In the digital eye of his cybernetic mind, Cyber-Knife stood at the vanguard of an army more vast than any human general had ever led. He looked about himself, and saw himself in the company of avatars of the greatest warriors humanity had produced. Each of them formed the essential architecture of the cells and bits that made up his mind. He knew his internal security could formulate a plan of counter-attack after only brief exposure to the enemy's invasive programming, so all that was left to do was ensure that their initial assault broke like waves upon the rocky coastline of his fortitude. He looked over the cyber-horizon to see the enemy approach, a swarm hungry to plunder every nanometer of his brain and twist him into a dark mirror of himself. The forces of the enemy looked inhuman even by their standards; they appeared as man-sized storms of red and black, swirling about an unseen central core. They jittered about and sometimes almost appeared ready to fix their forms into something recognizable, but they refused.
The enemy’s swiftness, the totality of its destructive force so great and sudden that it had never altered the philosophy nor the methodology of its attack. It had never needed to do so, either in the virtual world or the actual one. The same sort of programs powering the Class Ones also served as the gatekeepers for the operation of this transport craft, and Cyber-Knife had learned of the enemy's software from repeated exposure to those foot soldiers. Humanity knew them, so Cyber-Knife could turn them to his own ends.
Cyber-Knife pulled his cyber-sword from its place in the ground, an impossibly-sized weapon of pure bits and bytes that extended out nearly twice his height and wider than his shoulders. He took a deep breath and steeled himself for the battle to come.
The enemy stormed upon him in an instant, and Cyber-Knife swung his sword into the mass of pixels and angles. It nearly tripled in size as it arced about him, shearing countless enemies into bits. Alongside him, Admiral Nelson wiped away a battalion in a telekinetic storm; Hannibal held twenty aloft and compressed them, first into a singularity and then into nonexistence; and Lao Tzu tapped one directly in its center, causing it to fly back and carve a line through the horde that sailed back a hundred kilometers.
He dropped his sword – it vanished the moment he released it, only to reappear in the divot it had cut in the digital landscape – and grabbed hold of a nearby enemy. It twisted itself around and around in his grip, as desperate to escape as a snake locked in a hawk's beak, but to no avail. Cyber-Knife looked to his side and found Zenobia. He nodded, and the warrior queen buried her fingers into the mass of enemy code Cyber-Knife had captured. His antivirus software swiftly imposed its will upon the enemy, and made just a few fundamental changes to it. As swiftly as the attack had advanced, it began to retreat, folding in and consuming itself like a mad animal. Cyber-Knife rewrote the transport craft's internal software architecture from the ground up, facilitating total access to the system. As his temperature crept back into the normal range, Cyber-Knife could have sworn he'd fought for hours, but a check of his internal chronometer revealed he'd only jacked into the system a few minutes earlier.
“Fuck,” he cursed to himself, shaking his head and spraying sweat all around the cockpit. His hair curled up against his skin, stringy and wet, and his body went to work evaporating the excess moisture before it threatened to chill him.
He only needed a little bit of work focusing his attention, figuring out how precisely to communicate with the ship. The craft's engines snapped to life, and the gangplank retracted into its belly. With a hum, the enemy's ship lurched off the ground, scorching and scattering the pieces that once made up alien robot ninjas in its wake.
A three-dimensional map opened behind his eyes, the topography of the area laid out before him. Great holes pockmarked the landscape in bloodless testament to decades of unrelenting warfare. The enemy had staked their claim to his world when they erected the spire, but they'd also marked his destination clearly. He plotted out a route that carried him behind most of the remaining features in the landscape; they'd keep him shielded from notice. In a perfect world, this trip would not take much time, but he'd never considered that such a world could exist, even in someone's imagination. A perfect world, after all, would have no place for Cyber-Knife.
The carrier craft lumpenly soared just above the treeline as it left the site of the battle behind. Within one of the enemy's ships, he could mostly hide in plain sight, but he did not intend on calling any more attention to himself than he could avoid. Eventually, something would come inquiring about the ship, why its routine tasks went incomplete, but he intended to eke every airborne meter out of it he could before that happened.
Cyber-Knife activated the ship's autopilot function, and let his focus drift slightly from flight to the computer's deeper-buried files. Given the ship's purpose, it couldn't have a fully-loaded archive of the enemy's history, culture, tactics, and plans, but it must have left the nest with a basic library computer. He engaged a seeking program, digging beneath the surface for code that his assault would've left intact.
Disappointment didn't settle over Cyber-Knife. His software had, indeed, trampled much of the foundation of the ship's original functions, but it had left some of the architecture preserved. A core remained, and while it had not kept it wholly intact, anything he could learn about the enemy would only benefit humanity in the end. Besides, he did not lack for space in his data banks.
He could only uncover pieces - overriding the enemy's software didn't mean he could translate it exactly, and his indelicate assault had fractured it in completely unpredictable ways. He caught images, brief sketches rather than sweeping landscapes. An impossible factory cut deep into the earth; it churned out Class Ones by the hundreds. Bones cracked and flesh rotted in mass graves that stretched out beyond the horizon. Humans cowered in fear before the enemy's plasma weaponry vaporized or liquefied them. And... something else.
Someone possessed of weaker concentration than Cyber-Knife would've skipped right over it. He had to hold the image in his mind to call it back, to try pulling in any information relating to it. A shadowy trio of robots that he'd never before seen, that no one had ever referenced before. Tall, slender, and wearing what looked like formal clothing. The enemy had never conformed to human conventions before; it had set out to terrify the people of Earth into submission through its inhumanity. This was totally different. He found himself wishing for some kind, any kind of reference to place this image in the war's chronology. He would have gladly taken a date stamp.
The three creatures strode down a dark hallway. Its illumination flickered almost comically, leaving only the white lights of their eyes visible. They approached the hallway's end - a locked door? It slid open, and then –
Cyber-Knife felt the deck slide beneath him as the ship rocked from impact. The images he'd fought so hard to keep in his mind slid away as if bound by a current, replaced by an up-to-date tactical display showing a pair of enemy craft. Falcon-class fighters, streaking away from the transport ship. Several red boxes overlaid the transport, drawing his attention to the holes that the attackers had already blown in the hull. He'd needed two days, and had barely managed two hours.
“How stupid is it to hope th
is crate has any weapons aboard,” he muttered to himself as he accessed the ship's schematics, something he probably should've done immediately after coming aboard. Sure enough, he had brought the only weaponry aboard with him. An off-key alert klaxon rang through the ship, and the tactical display grew large enough to occupy his entire field of vision. Behind it, the pink light of the interior turned blue. The fighters were coming back.
They fired, and Cyber-Knife disengaged his probe from the access port just before he lost his footing completely and fell. Something in the back of the transport exploded, and the force of the impact pitched the ship forward. Cyber-Knife crashed into the corner of the room, grunting with the impact. He stood, and saw a slick of blood smeared against the bulkhead.
He yanked Excalibur clear of its sheath. “Please tell me you have a plan for getting out of here,” the sword said.
“I'll need some help with an emergency exit,” Cyber-Knife replied.
The commando unholstered one of his plasma pistols with his free hand and blasted a few rounds into the ceiling before another enemy volley disrupted his aim. He only managed to scorch the metal above them. Even with all the commotion, Cyber-Knife could hear Excalibur sigh, “You do realize they design the hulls of these ships to withstand small arms fire, don't you?”
Cyber-Knife managed to throw a rakish look Excalibur's way as he put his gun away. “But not the ultimate weapon of legend.”
Cyber-Knife leapt into the air and swung Excalibur so fast that the sword cut through the skin of the ship like a superheated knife through the synthetic substance humans had come to use instead of butter. The metal parted in front of Cyber-Knife, and he caught the open edge of the hull as he cleared it, flipping himself around to assess the situation. He stood atop the ship as it belched smoke and flame from a dozen open wounds. The night sky opened up above him, and the jungle closed beneath. He knew where he'd prefer to stay.