by Phil Wrede
“Did you expect some kind of bustling, underground metropolis filled with hideously malformed, misunderstood creatures?” Excalibur asked.
“One thing all on its own could not have built this network.”
“Best you keep your eyes peeled, then.”
“Count on it.”
No sooner had the words left Cyber-Knife's lips than a low rumble reverberated through the tunnel, causing a small, sustained tremor all around them. Tiny clumps of dirt, the largest barely bigger than a thumbnail, tumbled down from above, but the material was so tightly packed that it did not move more than that. However, the volume and violence of the noise just kept increasing, and that did give Cyber-Knife and Excalibur cause to worry. The source of the sound could only be getting closer.
Cyber-Knife tucked his head down, sprinting around the tunnel's bend in a search for somewhere to hide, or at least get an eye on the oncoming thing, but he found no success. As he rounded the corner, the tunnel stretched out smoothly in front of him, steadfastly refusing to offer a tactical advantage.
“Fine,” he muttered as he activated the plasma blaster in his palm, the green light glowing between his fingers. He tensed his muscles as the rumbling drew up on top of him; he couldn't even scrounge for cover and hide against the wall, as he feared the vibrations might knock some of his mechanical components loose.
A shadow more enormous than anything he'd seen before stretched across the ground and quickly covered more than half the tunnel. The thing rounded the bend, and Cyber-Knife's jaw actually dropped open as he got a good look at it. Larger than the spidery creature they'd only just dispatched, its builders had formed it from smooth, gleaming metal that reflected the glow of the tubules. Composed of five interlocking, articulated segments and propped up on stocky legs, it started to creep up the edge of the tunnel as it cleared the corner, claiming the only high ground. Its eyes shone bright green, brighter and richer than the light from Cyber-Knife's plasma blaster, and it had a hinged jaw that swung open to reveal more than two mouthfuls worth of needle-like teeth and steam.
With his other hand, Cyber-Knife swung Excalibur free of the sheath. He hissed to the sword, “Can you imagine a point to the steam?”
“Well,” Excalibur answered, “based on my extensive experience with dragons, it's either got some kind of terrible heat source concealed back there - if I had to guess, I'd say the largest blaster I've ever seen - or it belches smoke purely for dramatic effect.”
Cyber-Knife's HUD bracketed the metallic monstrosity in a flashing yellow box. Alert klaxons rang in his ears as his systems frantically scanned through their records, trying to match what he saw with something humanity had seen before. When his HUD generated the label, “Class: Unknown,” inside the bracket, he felt an ugly chill settle in the pit of his stomach.
Cyber-Knife started backing away from the Unknown, stepping further down the tunnel. “And if you had to gamble your life on one of those guesses?”
“I'd err on the side of caution,” Excalibur said.
The Unknown, pushing itself across the top of the tunnel now, tilted its head down and narrowed its eyes. Cyber-Knife slowly raised Excalibur and swung the sword from side to side; the Unknown's gaze followed it precisely. “Fuck,” he said.
Cyber-Knife swung up his free hand and loosed a super-charged plasma blast, in an effort to beat the Unknown at its own game. Rather than twist out of the way of the attack, the metal monstrosity craned its neck and actually leaned into the plasma, opening its mouth to gulp it down like a treat.
“Fuck,” Cyber-Knife said again, less defiance in his voice this time.
A low rumbling sound crept up from its nether regions; it sounded like ten thousand jet engines preparing for takeoff, the way the sound multiplied over itself again and again in a matter of moments. The little strands of bioluminescent lighting seemed to dim around them, as if the Unknown drew its energy from the environment.
“Do we know where this tunnel leads?” Excalibur inquired.
“No,” Cyber-Knife replied.
“Perhaps we should take this opportunity to learn,” the sword continued.
“You know, I think you're right,” Cyber-Knife said, as the Unknown opened its mouth in a terrible grin, green light cascading from between its teeth. He turned to run.
Faster than either Excalibur or Cyber-Knife had imagined, the Unknown burped forth not a pellet, but a stream of plasma that carved a line in the tunnel right behind them. Cyber-Knife flipped over the blast as it cut across where he had stood a moment ago, but the Unknown made no effort to track him with its attack. None of the alien robot ninjas had ever communicated with humanity's forces, but the Unknown had made its message to Cyber-Knife and Excalibur clear: go no further.
The enemy really did know jack fucking squat about Cyber-Knife if it expected him ever to stand still and die, meekly. Cyber-Knife took a moment to consider his answer. “Not likely, shithead,” he spat.
As he stepped further away from the Unknown, four little hissing noises issued forth from behind him, and Cyber-Knife fell to the ground, a pain lancing through his thighs and shoulders like he'd never felt before. He twisted to look at his arms and legs, and was horrified to see that his limbs had almost been severed from the rest of him. Plasma darts cooled in the dirt behind of him; clearly, the Unknown could use its weapon to produce as fine or as gratuitous an attack as it wanted. As the smoke cleared from around the flesh, Cyber-Knife could see the muscle already stretching back into place around the metal, could feel the painkillers dripping into his bloodstream, but he knew he wouldn't be able to escape, not without some amount of cleverness.
He turned back to the Unknown, but it just dangled there, at the top of the tunnel, its jaws opening and closing in some eerie approximation of breathing, perfectly in time with his heartbeat. Its eyes narrowed, the glow at their core brightening and dimming in time with its not-breath. As Cyber-Knife stared into its emerald abyss, he knew he had to grab onto the last tactical advantage left to him: he couldn't let it know he was able to stand.
His internal diagnostic programs beeped at him, throwing up a bright notification right in the center of his HUD, which, he realized, would not have proven helpful in the heat of battle. His self-repair systems had finished reassembling his ankles, and had also completed a scan of the plasma energy that had cut into him in the first place. He knew the Unknown's plasma blaster had a design flaw, a vulnerability to absorption harmonic shielding. If he reversed the polarity on his own weapon, set the emitter to project a conical shield rather than throw a blast, his internal systems could configure themselves to match the energy level of the Unknown's attacks. When it fired upon him again, Cyber-Knife could throw up his shield, absorb the incoming attack and redirect it with enough force to fry the Unknown, at least temporarily. His tactical programming didn't need to remind him that the upward strength of Excalibur's cutting power remained uncharted, but it did, and he couldn't help smiling a little as he thought about cutting the Unknown into five equal pieces, and then each of them into five pieces each, and those pieces again into five more, over and over again.
“Do it,” Cyber-Knife muttered.
“You know,” Excalibur interjected, “if you ignore my advice here, you'll join an august company, as my wisdom has gone unheeded by both Arthur Pendragon and Merlin, but I firmly believe that one should never egg on a gigantic metal beast.”
“I wasn't talking to it,” Cyber-Knife replied.
“Well, I certainly hope it knows that.”
Cyber-Knife could feel the muscles tightening in his legs, the machinery in his wrist and hand shifting itself around. The progress bar in the lower corner of his vision had already passed the thirty percent mark. He had to buy a little time; no predator, not even man, gloated over the sight of its crippled prey for long.
“How would you feel about going on a little expedition?”
Excalibur started a bit. “How do you mean?”
Cyber-Knife tried to sound reassuring, “Don't worry.”
Cyber-Knife took Excalibur by the blade and threw it, spinning it end over end. As the ancient, enchanted weapon flew towards the Unknown, the metal beast spat it out of the air. With a burst of plasma, Excalibur crashed to the ground, its blade cutting through the tightly packed earth and burying itself almost up to the hilt.
“Fifty percent,” Cyber-Knife breathed as he first fired off two blasts from his plasma pistol, the shots digging into the ground in front of the Unknown, kicking up dirt and smoke. The cybernetic commando pushed himself off the ground and took off at a dead run, feeling his not-yet-repaired muscles tearing with each step.
The Unknown shook itself against the top of the tunnel, roaring as Cyber-Knife approached. He threw himself on the ground, sliding through the scorch marks his weapon's fire had left and yanking Excalibur loose. He kicked frantically as the sword slid free, and as the Unknown dropped from the ceiling, it missed crushing the two of them by millimeters.
“Seventy,” Cyber-Knife told himself.
With the Unknown now blocking their path, Cyber-Knife and Excalibur had to hope they could bring it down before reinforcements arrived. It twisted itself around the tunnel, bringing that terrible, empty, jagged face around to glare at them.
The Unknown reared up on its back segment, stretching its full length almost from floor to ceiling. Its mouth dropped open, and almost instantly its face was obscured behind a cloud of steam and smoke. It would no longer chase Cyber-Knife; just as well, because Cyber-Knife had already lost interest in running. The steam glowed green. Cyber-Knife thrust out his hand, his fingers clawed.
“Ninety-five percent!”
The Unknown's plasma blast was met by a flimsy-seeming energy funnel that appeared in Cyber-Knife's grip, pulling the green energy out of the air and tunneling it right into his arm. Alarm bells went off so loudly in his head that he wondered if the Unknown could hear them, too. His systems felt so awash in power that they threatened to shut down, but he only needed a moment. “Seven thousand percent!” he cried, as the emitter reconfigured itself into its default state.
A lance of green light, surrounding a core of pure white, shot out from Cyber-Knife, nearly tearing his arm off with its force. His aim was true, though, and it crashed into the Unknown like a hammer to an anvil, overwhelming its armor and terrorizing its circuits. The Unknown's limbs wobbled and its segments shook as the light in its eyes blazed bright for a moment, then died out.
It crashed to the ground, and Cyber-Knife leapt on it in an instant. He held Excalibur in his left hand - steam rose from his right - and slashed the sword through the fibers connecting the Unknown's head to its body. He fired away at the Unknown's unarmored circuits with his blaster until he'd reduced it to smoking slag.
Cyber-Knife jammed Excalibur's blade through what remained of the Unknown's head, scrambling the sword around in case he could destroy other vital components. If he could keep this thing from getting up again, he'd do it. Hot plasma pooled underneath it and bubbled away at the dirt beneath.
Cyber-Knife sucked down air, freshly saturated in chemical poisons; he found the more he focused on one menial bodily function - ideally, breathing - the better he could ignore the pain of his body pulling itself together. He spared a look at his shoulder, and while the fabric of his suit had already restitched itself, he could tell his arm still lagged a minute or two behind it. His mechanical bits, though, told another story; riding the wave of that much energy had overwhelmed many of them, and it would take precious minutes to restore their function.
He pulled Excalibur free. “I could do without replicating that experience again,” the sword said.
Cyber-Knife exhaled just as a symphony of rumbling, orders of magnitude louder than anything they'd heard before, overtook them, and a trio of Unknowns poked their heads around the curve of the tunnel. Three of them.
“Fuck me sideways!” Cyber-Knife yelled as he scrambled down the tunnel on his still-shaky feet, sparks flying from his joints as they struggled to perform. He could not run for long; he dropped to all fours, stumbling forward and still holding Excalibur in a tight grip. He managed to stay a step ahead most of of their blistering, three-pronged assault - plumes of plasma erupted from every surface around him, above and below, ahead and behind. Some of them found their target, piercing his limbs and sides, but for every one shot that creased him, more than a dozen sailed harmlessly by. The Unknowns stormed forward in a manic, almost desperate pursuit.
If Cyber-Knife hadn't been who he was - the badass fusion of flesh and technology, the ultimate fucking killing machine - he probably would've missed it when a particularly rollicking ball of plasma sailed over his head and into the dirt, but didn't smash into the ground and scorch it. It just disappeared like it'd never existed at all. He saw it, though, the vanishing sphere of energy, and couldn't stop to wonder what it might've meant. He had to act on instinct, and wherever it'd gone, Cyber-Knife wanted to go, too. Anywhere but here sounded good to him.
He reversed course, nearly plunging headfirst into a concentrated beam of weapons fire that actually melted the dirt as it crossed by, and threw himself at the wall. One second, he saw only the tunnel wall, and the next, he stumbled into a scraggly, ill-formed offshoot tunnel, one clearly made without mechanical precision. As his face hit the ground, he felt his ears pop, like the surrounding air pressure had dramatically changed.
Cyber-Knife slid across the dirt and down a hole he hadn't expected, rolling over and over like a barrel tipped on its side, until he managed to right himself and land on his feet. Wherever he had run, he didn't know how it had kept itself hidden from his scans, but it was clearly different from the tunnels he'd been in before. The darkness was all-consuming, with no light sources of any kind to be found. He had to turn up the settings on his own low-light vision all the way to maximum to get any sense of his surroundings.
They found themselves in very different tunnels - shorter, narrower, and not machine-produced like the other ones. He ran his hand across the tunnel wall, and huge chunks of dry, chalky soil came off across his fingers. It felt to Cyber-Knife like trying to sneak through someone's secret passageway as he shuffled forward, because he sure as hell could not go back the way he came. Not until he'd had some time to recuperate and gather his wits.
Cyber-Knife flicked through the filters on his vision once he felt confident the tunnel wouldn't collapse on him outright, and while he got a odd reading many meters away on the infrared, he picked up an even stranger one on the scan for electrical systems. Someone had built an elaborate series of wires and circuits into the right-hand side of the tunnel; contrary to his initial impression, Cyber-Knife had happened upon something fairly sophisticated.
He took his remaining plasma pistol in his hand, preferring not to have to twist around and throw himself off balance attempting to loose a shot from the blaster installed in his hand. The answer to every challenge he'd ever faced, every obstacle he'd overcome was always the same: to kill more, and kill faster, so he preferred to be prepared.
Cyber-Knife accidentally dragged his foot across the tunnel floor, making a scraping sound, the rubber of his boot against the dirt. From further down the tunnel, a mournful sort of bellowing tone sounded, a noise that sounded just enough like the rat-like things he and Excalibur had encountered five or six monsters ago to put his nerves on high alert. He shuffled forward faster, for he figured he had completely lost the element of surprise.
The source of the noise also looked to be the destination of the electrical cabling he'd seen in the wall; Cyber-Knife did not feel that surprised to find a half dozen more of the rat-like creatures, but he hadn't expected to find them like this. Someone had placed the creatures in pens - cages - cut into the side of the tunnel walls, with barely enough space for them to turn around or lie down. He could seem the creatures and their accommodations quite clearly, for their captors had installed all those wire
s to power a series of invisible force fields that popped and crackled louder as Cyber-Knife walked closer. The enemy must have done this, he thought, but he couldn't figure out why.
At least, he couldn't until one of the creatures lumbered around to face him - the entire top half of its head had been stripped away and replaced with mechanical components. Presumably, they had done the same with its brains, replacing them with the most obedient sort of computer. Metal made up its eyes, and indeed, much of its snout and mouth. The creatures had even suffered that abuse to their paws: amputation and replacement with more durable, more effective components.
It took Cyber-Knife longer than he would have cared to admit to realize that the creature's machine-made eyes probably served as cameras, transmitting exactly what it saw to some kind of control center. Now that it had sighted Cyber-Knife, the enemy had, too.
He saw currents of electricity spike through the brains of all six of the creatures, so powerful and sudden that they shone like six stars against the blackness. The creatures howled in pain; apparently, whatever sort of behavior modification they had undergone was incomplete, and so they required additional incentive to do whatever the enemy required of them. As the power feed to the force fields cut out, and the reliable electrical hum died away, Cyber-Knife got a decent sense of exactly what the creatures were ordered to do.
As the creatures lumbered out of their cells, Cyber-Knife felt surprised to see that they didn't all quite look the same. They were in various stages of modification - one of them still had its original eyes, and another its muzzle, and two still possessed their own paws. Doubtless, though, the enemy had filled their heads with programming, and it wouldn't matter how much howling or drooling they did; they would never get it out of their systems.
He didn't much want to run again, not already, but he wanted to kill the cyber-monstrosities before him even less. The enemy had taken their minds from them, and what they did, they did not wish to do. These creatures had been too dramatically altered to ever have any hope of returning to their original lives; they could barely hope to half-exist in this state of slavery, near living death. When Cyber-Knife looked down at his plasma pistol, he imagined another option they might prefer even more, but even the ultimate fucking killing machine can tire of that.