by Phil Wrede
The two enemy fighters had begun to loop back around, setting up for the final pass. This afforded him a few seconds to get a good look at them. Their wings swept forward, cutting a razor-sharp slice through the air. Ludicrous guns stuck out above and below their main body, affording a nearly uninterrupted field of fire around their bodies. They complete lacked anything resembling a cockpit, so you could never tell which way they really faced. A glossy black sheen made them look like demonic stars in the moonlight. Falcon-class fighter craft had terrorized good people for long enough. If Cyber-Knife could time his maneuver just right, he'd issue a little bit of payback on their behalf.
He measured distance, speed, wind shear, accounted for known Falcon fighter maneuvers, and his on-board software popped up a target crosshair and a countdown timer on his HUD. 4... 3... 2... 1... LAUNCH! He jumped towards the target with all his might; he could feel the muscles in his legs tear as he launched clear of the ship and start to stitch themselves back together immediately. He swung his arm forward and dug Excalibur's blade into the wing of the lead fighter. The blade caught, and with a vicious yank of his arm, Cyber-Knife was aboard.
His free hand gripped the hull, crinkling the metal up around his fingertips, while the wind began to whip his hair around, tornado-like, as the enemy fighter increased its speed, beginning a series of maneuvers intended to rid it of its unwanted passenger. If Cyber-Knife still had organic eyes, he would never have managed to keep them open.
He pulled Excalibur free and swung his arm back to take a powerful hack at the fighter's structure, but it whipped around belly up and accelerated in the opposite direction. The sword wobbled in Cyber-Knife's fist, and sparks shot out from between his teeth as he struggled to maintain his grip.
The fighter's partner swooped down directly atop Cyber-Knife; he instantly saw they were hoping to make him the ground meat of a Falcon-class sandwich. Cyber-Knife tightened his grip on the ship and ripped out a chunk of its internal circuitry - hopefully vital components - before jumping away and slashing clean through the joint that connected the wing of the other fighter's to its body. It exploded behind him as he leapt clear, the shock wave forcing him clear of the debris.
Cyber-Knife found himself in free-fall, and without a parachute. Gravity: the one force against which his creators couldn’t harden him. The altimeter that had snapped into view on his HUD counted down the distance between him and the ground with a distinct, clinical speed. Just as he started to consider what it would feel like, with the poisoned earth as his only friend for the rest of eternity, the remaining revenge-minded Falcon-class fighter swept in beneath him, catching him between the pair of blades it called wings.
He retched at the impact, which would've caused a more dramatic sight if he'd ever needed food or drink in his belly. In this position, Cyber-Knife could only hack away manically at the fighter as it sped higher and higher into the sky. Whether his elevation decreased or otherwise, it seemed, he wouldn't have much time to turn the situation to his advantage.
Chips and pieces of the Falcon fighter's hull fell away every time he brought Excalibur's blade crashing into it, but he couldn't get a decent angle on his attack. At this rate, Cyber-Knife wouldn't be able to do enough to make the enemy turn back before the high altitude cold would go to work on his parts, metal and organic. With a mighty heave, he jammed his sword through the fighter's skin and felt something squishy give way as the blade penetrated down to its hilt. The fighter wobbled, beginning to lose both speed and altitude.
“I get it now,” Cyber-Knife crowed into the thin air, barely able to hear himself over the roar of the ship's engines. No, not the engines, but the sound of the fighter's cannons gearing up to fire. He was perfectly positioned in front of the both of them!
Cyber-Knife twisted and contorted as he'd never before, and finally managed to wedge himself horizontally between the wings in the same instant the weapons fired. Terrible red lasers lanced out from the ship; he could feel the excess heat from the discharge wash over him like the worst summer breeze.
He'd had enough of this, and knew he needed to take action before the fighter's artificial intelligence decided to drop him from this even more ridiculous height and be done with him. He grabbed ahold of the wing behind his head and began to flip over, but the fighter spewed another burst from its cannons just as he did so, ripping right through the muscles on his back just as his legs had swung clear.
He thudded onto the wing, his lower body smoking from his wounds and nearly useless. The chemicals his cybernetic systems deployed to counteract extreme pain responses flooded into his bloodstream, and he knew he didn't have much time to act. He had to find somewhere to hide and recuperate from this injury. So, sheathing Excalibur once again, he crawled, hand over hand.
Humanity’s fighters had ample opportunity to study downed Falcon craft over the years, and Cyber-Knife had a comprehensive schematic of the ships in his memory banks. He scanned through his tactical library, analyzing and discarding a dozen plans in less time than it took to blink an eye. A badly produced instructional video, hosted by a smiling blonde couple named Malcolm and Morris, explained that a well-targeted shot - say, Morris suggested, from a plasma pistol at close range - could penetrate through the side of the Falcon's laser cannon and cause an explosion powerful enough to scramble, or even destroy, the robot brain piloting the fighter. Cyber-Knife sidled up to the edge of the laser cannon, drew a pistol, and fired right into it.
The resulting blast took his pistol and gave him some hideous burns all along the flesh on his right arm. His biological suppressants had depleted themselves treating his earlier injury, and couldn't fight off his body's natural response a second time. So, Cyber-Knife cried out, loud enough certainly to be heard over any noise the fighter could make. Its engines cut out, and they began the terrifying, all-too-swift process of falling back to earth.
To an observer on the ground, the fighter's crash would've looked routine. They would have seen the smoke pouring from its fatal wound, but they wouldn't have seen Cyber-Knife fighting with the flaps on the wings the whole way, forcing it sometimes into a motion more resembling a glide than a streak. When the fighter did finally slam into the ground and then tumble across it, it didn’t roll quite like a stone, but like a stone carried by a paper airplane. It gouged the earth as it tumbled end over end, but when it finally came to a rest, Cyber-Knife was still on top, and he hadn't gained any new injuries to compliment his earlier ones.
Cyber-Knife took two stumbling steps down the body of the ship before his legs gave way, and he somersaulted to the ground. As the wreck of the fighter burned around him, a memorial bonfire lighting the night sky, he heaved in great gulps of the poisoned air, channeling the chemicals into the systems that desperately needed fuel. Soot caked his fair, taut skin. He struggled to get any sense of his surroundings, and finally, with tremendous effort, shook his head, signaling the sensors in his hair to loose a pulse like old-style radar.
He’d finally come to ground only a few hundred meters away from where the transport ship had wrecked. All that work had bought him barely half a kilometer more distance than hunkering down and riding out the attack would’ve. He could count several more mutilated enemy forces on his side of the ledger, and that wasn't nothing, but given the vastness of the army pitted against him, it had little actual significance.
Cyber-Knife called up a damage report, and what he saw did not encourage him. All of the communication pathways to his legs had been severed, and the linkages - biological or technological - wouldn't finish repairs for quite a while. He could shut down some systems to speed the process up, but he never ran a lot of redundant, active processes anyway. He'd just have to let the treatment run its course, though, now that he thought about it, preferably not next to the smoldering carcass of the ship, which he suspected would act like a beacon for the forces of the enemy.
So, Cyber-Knife crawled, pushing himself further into the jungle with his elbows as fast as
he dared - he didn't want to move too quickly only to find his torso separating around the wounds on his back, after all. As he dragged his still-useless lower body across the ground, he knew he was leaving the enemy the most obvious of trails to follow, but all he could do was hope he'd return to fighting trim by the time they picked it up.
He spun into a thicket, wincing as the needle-like leaves cut across the bare muscle of his back, taking a moment to look around. As he swiveled his head back, he caught a whisper of a noise that had no analogue in his training, nor his supplemental data. It sounded vaguely like a whisper, or a bunch of whispered conversations all spoken over one another. From wherever it came, it was terribly close, and Cyber-Knife found himself overwhelmed with the urge to track down its source before it found him instead.
“We need to move,” he said, slowly drawing Excalibur from its sheath. “Track down the source of that noise.”
“How do you not recognize that sound?” the sword replied.
“Don't know,” Cyber-Knife said, glaring off into the jungle. “That worries me.”
“My dear chap, I can tell you exactly what makes that noise.”
Cyber-Knife brought the sword near his face and spoke through gritted teeth. “This is a potentially hostile situation. Potentially hostile situations mean enchanted swords shut up.”
Cyber-Knife scrambled, on all fours, behind an overlarge deathwillow tree, whose vines snapped at him until he cut a pair of them apart with Excalibur. They gave him a wide berth after that, even as he raced to another deathwillow, then another, and yet another still. Could the trees speak to each other as easily as the alien robot ninjas?
The noise grew louder, and in short order, Cyber-Knife's auditory sensors told him he was nearly on top of the source. He steeled himself for battle, and leapt out from behind a massive tree, struggling to stand, and holding Excalibur close in a guarding position.
He saw only a small creek, polluted so heavily that rainbow rivulets gleamed in it no matter how he craned his head. He stared at it, silently.
Excalibur broke the quiet. “You've never heard running water before? Have you ever seen it?” Cyber-Knife stood. “All that time spent training for combat, and no one thought to prepare you for this.”
A long-dormant instinct took over, and Cyber-Knife couldn't help himself - he dropped Excalibur before tumbling forward again himself, crawled to the water's edge, and drew a handful to his lips. The same system that cleansed toxins from the air he breathed also filtered the water he drank. A deep red notification popped up on his HUD as he drank, informing him that this water was more polluted than anything he'd ever ingested before, and that his enhancements could only process one fluid ounce of it an hour without overtaxing themselves. Cyber-Knife swallowed the water in his mouth and stared at his hands; steam rolled off them. The chemicals in the water actually worked to strip the skin, and even metal, from his hands. He didn't go back for more.
He flopped on his back and looked at Excalibur, far from his hand. Already, he found himself needing to rest, to give his body a chance to turn its full attention to repair once again. It took a moment for the lining of his throat to heal enough to let him speak, and in that moment, he found a need to examine his surroundings. “You could expect to see sights like this, once?”
“Not just sights, but appellations to all five human senses. This grey, hazy world the invaders have left us; it's difficult to believe sometimes that anybody would fight for it.”
“You only have one home,” Cyber-Knife observed. In saying that, he scanned through his archives for representations of “home,” only to find that many humans associated he term as much with their biological family as a physical place. Cyber-Knife didn't have a family; the closest thing to it, he supposed, was MOM. He watched a video of a child's birthday celebration, singing people packed around a cake. and found himself wishing he could talk to MOM, or even just hear her voice. He couldn’t remember her ever singing, and wondered what it might’ve sounded like.
He turned away from the stream to stare further into the darkness; his low-light vision enhancements snapped on immediately, and the sight before him amazed him. From what he could see, the jungle’s life still lived in the blackness; small creatures he'd not noticed before skittered out from hiding places between gigantic tree roots or in little nooks and crannies in the trees themselves, and set to work eking out another day's sustenance from the harsh wilderness. Small rat-like things, with stubby tails and ears nearly as large as their bodies, chopped away at the stems of leaves with massive teeth, to swallow those leaves wholesale, one after another. Insects with wings beating impossibly fast picked beads of dew off a pair of dormant mantraps as if they were transporting the most delicate cargo. Even surrounded by the shadow of death, life had found a way to continue, to soldier on.
“Would you look at that,” Cyber-Knife whispered. His search through his databanks had taken a turn when he found a quote of a scientist, who described Earth as home to everything living on it. He saw landscapes, places of beauty long-since destroyed, animals driven to extinction long before the alien robot ninjas even came, urban centers packed with people striving to make their marks, and considered the creatures before him. His HUD, usually packed with tactical projections and on-the-fly analysis, no longer crowded his vision; he knew he could luxuriate in this moment a moment, for long experience had taught him that the amount of “stuff” on his HUD was directly proportional to the amount of danger her faced.
Excalibur sighed. “Life here is a pale, often disgusting imitation of what it could have been; this world, a hideous mockery of what it should be. I can't extract beauty from this trash heap because I know better, but you, you don't.” The sword's voice had steadily risen in exasperation as it spoke, culminating in a shrill ring that cut through the soft buzz of the jungle the way its blade had cut through countless alien robot ninjas. Some of the creatures froze in terror, while most skittered away to their hiding spots.
“You think I don't know what it used to be?” Cyber-Knife asked, tapping the side of his head. “I can see it just as well as you could. But, where you see perversion, I see fortitude. Those little things fought for their home, even after it turned against them. They carved out a place for themselves.” Cyber-Knife shook his head, and wondered if he saw a little bit of himself in this land. “I need a moment to rest my eyes, all right? Wake me if you see anything.”
“I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that your mechanical eyes don't need rest,” Excalibur said.
“Shut up,” Cyber-Knife mumbled as he drifted out of consciousness.
CHAPTER 2
Cyber-Knife had never slept, so it followed that he had never dreamed. The images that rushed through his mind did not look like any he’d seen before or would later - the enemies that he butchered inside of an endless dark hallway all had his face, and they screamed as he split them open with taloned fingers, ten-centimeter-long metal spikes protruding from each of his digits. He relished in that sense, and felt disgusted by it. He saw bloody clouds explode from his own lips, his head fall from mechanical shoulders dozens of times, heard cries in tones largely alien to him, and yet so familiar that they might hearken back to an instinctive memory, a time before language, even before humans thought as they do now.
He bolted upright, finally awake now after who knew how many hours. He gasped for air as desperately as he had after the crash, but solely because, in his panic, he didn’t know what else to do. For a moment, before the heating filaments implanted throughout his body began to warm him, he could feel a chill rippling through him, the sweat that had again collected on his skin greedily sucking his warmth away. The smoke from the wreck had mostly died down, and the oil painterly colors growing in the sky told him it was nearly dawn. Not that it mattered much - the long war had seared the sky so badly that when darkness didn't enfold it, it still looked like twilight.
“What time is it?” he asked Excalibur.
&nbs
p; “It barely matters,” the sword replied. “You didn't even sleep for an hour.”
“Fuck,” Cyber-Knife said, struggling to comprehend the knowledge that everything he'd just experienced had happened in less than sixty minutes. “Let's just hope it did the trick, then.”
Cyber-Knife stood up, giving himself the once-over. It certainly appeared as though his enhancements had performed as they should - the injuries he'd suffered had all healed, and the fabric of his uniform had replicated itself and repaired its damage. If not for the loss of one of his plasma pistols, he could've sworn he looked as good now as when he'd left to undertake the mission.
Excalibur made a throat-clearing sound; clearly, it had rehearsed something while Cyber-Knife's had slept. “Don't forget that it's my home, too, and that I've traveled thousands of years in both directions to help you fight for it right now.”
Cyber-Knife sighed, “Tell me, what was the next step in your plan, after, 'travel back in time?'”
“Save the world.”
“How?”
“Two steps. First, we kill enough alien robot ninjas that they leave the Earth in peace for the rest of time -”
“Or, we kill all of them,” Cyber-Knife said.
“- and then we get to work rebuilding. It will be hard, cleaning up the mess they'll leave behind, hard enough that humanity won't have enough energy to squabble amongst itself for decades,” Excalibur finished.
Before Cyber-Knife could reply, a series of inhuman crunching and ripping noises tore through the jungle; the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He shook his head both in disappointment and disgust - as long as he kept destroying the enemy forces he encountered, more would always arrive to investigate their predecessors' disappearance.
Grabbing Excalibur, Cyber-Knife made his way up the trunk of a particularly thick tree, muttering, “Fuck plans with too many steps. Easier to fuck up those sorts of plans.” A little reconnaissance, though - he couldn’t hope for anything simpler than that. He pressed himself against an outstretched branch and folded himself into the hideous foliage drooping toward the ground.