by Phil Wrede
They rushed forward, struggling to storm over one another in a crazed effort to reach him first, and he saw the electrical signals flashing in their heads like lightning storms. Clearly, their controllers were spurring them to attack. Cyber-Knife's upper lip twisted around in a snarl as he fired into the two closest of the creatures, the still-organic material of their heads exploding upon contact with the plasma bolts. Their corpses immediately formed a meat barricade in the tunnel, hundreds of pounds strong, and blocked him off from the rest of the creatures. For the moment, at any rate - the wet grunting and chopping sounds from the other side told him they'd already gone to work digging through the dead.
Cyber-Knife turned and started scrambling back down the tunnel the way he'd come. He didn't get far at all before he was treated to an all-too-familiar sound: the hissing and clanking of the Unknowns. They'd uncovered his escape route, and just kept advancing. Even the greatest single killer ever unleashed on Earth didn't know how he could ever demolish so many things in so tight a space, but Cyber-Knife was about to prove the old adage about necessity being the mother of invention true once again.
As the steam that seeped from the mouths of the Unknowns crept into his line of sight, Cyber-Knife doubled back on his path once again, figuring he maximized his odds of escape in doing that thing he didn't particularly want to do. He felt some awe at the rat-like things' efficiency, for they'd almost already dug through the corpses by the time he'd returned to them. He opened his mouth over gritted teeth and leaned down to pull Excalibur from its sheath.
Cyber-Knife fired a few quick shots from his plasma pistol; it would've been impossible for him to not rip huge chunks of fur and flesh from the creatures, they were such a huge rippling mass. Pain overrode programming for a few moments and they hesitated in their activity, giving Cyber-Knife his opening. He dove forward into the mass of muscle, slashing wildly with Excalibur, which opened up great wounds along the creatures' bodies. They roared, biting and slashing at him, but he'd moved so swiftly through their clutches that he left them behind before they could turn to attack him.
He'd made it through; all he had to do was keep moving, and eventually, the tunnel had to open up wide enough for him to run. The Unknowns had already caught up to the creatures, so he figured they'd lose more precious minutes navigating around one another. For an instant, Cyber-Knife thought he was home free again.
Then, two incredible explosions rocked the tunnel, and he was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of rotting flesh. He looked back to see that the enemy had once again outdone itself in ruthless efficiency: the Unknowns had released such powerful blasts of plasma from their jaws that they'd exploded the creatures outright, immediately liquefying them and splattering the tunnel with gallons of gore and splintered bone. The Unknowns had not stopped chasing him before, and they wouldn't stop snow, nor let anything get in their way. He pointed Excalibur towards them, figuring he'd do better to settle this fight sooner, rather than later.
Two of the Unknowns spit plasma bursts at him that nearly filled the tunnel, and Cyber-Knife braced himself for an impact that never came. The plasma got close to him, close enough that he could feel its heat cooking at his skin, but it never reached him. It just... expanded, into a wall of green fire that stretched across the entire tunnel, separating Cyber-Knife from his pursuers.
He tried to take a moment to examine it, but he didn't even have that luxury. The tunnel wall next to him fell away, and a figure the likes of which he'd never seen before stepped out of it. It was short, barely half his height, and it stretched its arm out to his shoulder. "Stay here for now," it muttered before vanishing back into the wall.
Cyber-Knife heard a loud sucking sound, followed by cries of battle over the hissing of the flame wall. Immediately, it was all overridden by the shriek of metal scraping on metal, and muffled explosions. The flames vanished, and Cyber-Knife saw three of the beings standing over the smoking, caved-in carcasses of the Unknowns. He didn't know these people, but in wartime, the enemy of an enemy could be a friend; humanity had held to this hope for generations, and even Cyber-Knife knew the engine of life ran on hope.
Two immediately disappeared into the hole in the wall, but the shortest, the one that had ordered Cyber-Knife to stay, gestured to him. He hadn't noticed it before, but though they looked mostly human, they had no eyes in their faces. “Now, come with us,” it said. “We can help.”
Cyber-Knife didn't need to hear that twice.
CHAPTER 3
Somehow, these people could dig through the ground without actually digging. Cyber-Knife loped after his rescuers as they rushed through a perfect bubble they constantly formed and reformed in the earth, leaving no trail for the enemy to follow. He opened his mouth to talk once, but decided against it, not wanting to do anything to break their concentration. Besides, the dirt repeatedly cycling over them didn't leave much of an opportunity for small talk.
Finally, they stepped out into a real tunnel, one that stretched out from them in two directions, and Cyber-Knife thought maybe now he could get some answers. They weren't alone, though, for these mysterious beings had led him into a tunnel practically choked by dozens of folk exactly like them. If their uniformly pale skin did not proclaim loudly enough that they made their home beneath the surface, then their faces certainly did. They had not a single eye among them. They looked human enough - shorter and squatter than the humans Cyber-Knife had known - but their faces gave him pause, proved he'd tumbled into some kind of society outside anything he knew. They wore the same kind of clothes, made from the fibers of some plant he didn't recognize, and the few that had hair kept it cut just barely beyond their scalp. They had him surrounded.
Cyber-Knife slowly backed away from the people, as they quietly pressed towards him. Cyber-Knife tried to bring Excalibur up to guard, but noticed too late that the sword's familiar weight had left his hands. He looked down; Excalibur had vanished.
He hadn't dropped the sword; surely, if he had, it would've given him an earful from the instant his hand had left the hilt. He couldn't see any metal glinting on the ground. Had someone taken it? Frantically, he scanned the ever-growing crowd, hoping to detect Excalibur's unique material signature among the people. Finally, it stood out like a flare among their flesh and organs, but the distance between them was growing, and steadily.
“Excalibur!” he cried out.
“Cyber-Knife!” He could barely hear the sword, so great was the mass of bodies suddenly between them. “Come and get me!”
Cyber-Knife took a deep breath and tried to wade into the sea of people that pressed against him. He tried to move between bodies, find open spaces and slide through them, use the rhythm of the horde to make his way through it, but every time he thought he'd plotted a course, the crowd would lurch, his course would be thrown off, and he'd have to reorient himself to Excalibur before he tried to move again. It was as though they coordinated their efforts, like they knew what he planned before he moved.
“Fuck this,” he muttered, striking out toward the nearest one with an open-handed swing. The being was short and slight, not the easiest target he could've selected. Maybe that excused his miss. His fingers passed so closely by its face that he could feel the air hit its cheek. Cyber-Knife couldn't believe this; he didn't miss. He could see the line of code in his programming that said so.
He threw a punch at another one, taking a moment to feel more sure of his accuracy and distance. He missed again, but this time he saw it dodge as his arm shot forward. He could barely believe the naturalness of the movement. Anyone else in the world would've thought it had happened naturally - a stumble or something - but Cyber-Knife had a whole sector of his memory banks devoted to the study of movement and body language. It took an expert to make something learned look natural, and he realized then that he found himself in the presence of a whole society of masters.
These people, no way could the extermination protocols his databanks held regarding the en
emy refer to them, as well. They were too humane, too thoughtful. The alien robot ninjas attacked on sight, assaulting their foes mercilessly and expecting no quarter in return. These people, though, they'd recognized him as an outsider, but they'd rescued him, taken no preemptive action against him. Hell, he'd attacked them and they had merely ensured his violence hadn't caused harm. They had enough confidence in both themselves and him that they could allow him to learn the difference between friend and foe, or at least neutral party and foe.
Nowhere in the infinite repository of knowledge residing in his head could Cyber-Knife find a record of these people on Earth. He set his systems to documenting everything that happened with them - if he made it through his mission alive, some researcher somewhere would love to learn about them.
All of a sudden, the people stopped moving, and turned towards him as of a single mind. A lane opened up in the throng, and at the end of it stood a particularly slender person holding its arms outstretched. It held Excalibur in its hands, gesturing for Cyber-Knife to come and take his sword. The being smiled at him peacefully, confidently.
Cyber-Knife took a few hesitant steps forward, taking great care to prepare himself for a sneak attack. Excalibur, though, had grown impatient. “Come and get me already, you bloody fucking idiot!” the sword yelled.
Cyber-Knife sighed; nothing in his training had ever prepared him for spending a goodly chunk of his time getting bossed around or mocked by a talking enchanted sword. He snatched Excalibur out of the elderly thing's hands, and his skin brushed against its for an instant. Cyber-Knife could barely believe the warmth of its skin; it exuded security, felt like a reminder of home, of family. Cyber-Knife felt a flood of emotions crash into him, ones which he did not know how to process nor for which he had any frame of reference. They tapped into the library of literature and art that he'd never before accessed, calling up images and sentences that until now had gone unseen.
He fell to his knees as his systems - both organic and electronic - starting feeding back on themselves, as he in an instant tried to comprehend this spectrum of the living experience that he'd not been prepared to. His facial muscles twitched and spasmed, pulling up the skin at the corners of his eyes and mouth so quickly and with such force that it began to rip. His neck bunched up like a bundle of wires, tearing the fabric along his shoulders. Blood trickled down his face like tears. He collapsed to the ground, foaming at the mouth.
“What's going on?” Excalibur cried.
The old one placed a hand on the sword's cold steel blade. She had six fingers - a thumb on each side of the hand - and thick, chipped nails. “Do not worry, young one; we can help him,” she said in a soft voice that had clearly not been used in a long, long time.
The old woman gestured, calling in several of her people, who crowded around Cyber-Knife and gently spread their hands above him, fingers splayed out as wide as they could stretch. They started chanting from the deepest place in their throats, making noises that neither Cyber-Knife nor Excalibur had heard living things make before. As they hummed, their voices sliding into a single unified note, they rubbed the heels of their hands into the cybernetic soldier. The flow of his bodily fluids slowed to a trickle, then stopped all together.
Cyber-Knife let out a great sigh of relief as he regained control of his facilities. “Who are you? How did you do that?”
She leaned over him, as if her eyeless face was peering into his soul. “Take some moments to rest, my young friend. You will be better able to learn when you are not so exhausted.”
Excalibur had to chime in at this. “What of me? Does spiriting me away offer rest?”
The elderly being wrapped her hand about Excalibur and hefted the sword as though it weighed nothing at all. “Believe me, if you could save us, we would have sought you out long ago.”
“You know me?”
“Everyone here knows all of the heroic legends from your homes.” She planted Excalibur back in the ground and gestured to Cyber-Knife. “Let us offer you ours, for a time.”
Cyber-Knife pushed himself back up to his feet, drew Excalibur back into his hand, and obediently followed. He caught his foot on a rise of dirt and nearly tripped. The old woman made her way down the tunnel with surprising ease; certainly, Cyber-Knife imagined she'd trekked down them more times than she could remember, but even then, he couldn't imagine navigating them without ever stumbling - they were so uneven.
The tunnel twisted and dove suddenly, and Cyber-Knife almost tumbled, it had pitched so dramatically downward. He grabbed onto the wall and optically measured its descent. None of the people around him had needed to adjust to their surroundings. As they'd reached the crest of the tunnel, they simply crouched down and slid across the dirt, moving with a graceful, practiced ease. Once Cyber-Knife got a read on the tunnel's incline, he figured out how to walk down it at a fast clip, but still couldn't move as fast as the people. He gave some serious consideration to attempting to duplicate their ground skiing.
“Don't you think for even a second about trying to ape them,” Excalibur shouted. “I categorically refuse to go tumbling down God only knows how many miles of uneven dirt!”
Cyber-Knife just shook his head and kept walking, as the crowd around them started to thin out. The walk felt like hours, though the clock assured him it only took minutes.
When they finally reached the bottom, they found the people waiting for them, patiently, like parents patiently allowing their child to explore, confident he'd catch up. The old woman once again gestured for Cyber-Knife to follow, and the crowd let him through so he could stay close.
“You live underground, then?” Cyber-Knife finally inquired.
“When the fires of the war scorched the skies and land, we retreated here,” the old woman said.
Cyber-Knife had to ask more. “Did what scorched the skies also take away your eyes?”
The old woman smiled. “The initial flash took away the sight of many, but the slow and steady poisoning of our genetics by the fallout settled the matter for us all.”
“So, you haven't always lived like this.”
“'Always' is relative, Cyber-Knife, but no, we have not always looked the way you now see us. We once lived above the earth.”
Cyber-Knife gritted his teeth so hard that it caused a muscle in his jaw to snap like a gunshot. When it knitted itself, and he could speak again, he muttered, “More folly to lay at the feet of the alien robot ninjas.”
She gently inclined her head, a little bemused, though she said nothing.
After a long moment of waiting, Cyber-Knife decided to pursue another line of conversation. “How do you know my name?”
“The radiation robbed us of our sight, but we found ways to compensate. We trained our minds, and eventually, our bodies adapted. We get few visitors, but no one comes to us unawares,” she replied.
Cyber-Knife lowered his voice, saying, “You know I can't just let your explanation sit there.”
“I could have simply said I heard Excalibur yell your name.”
“You know that's not what I mean. It sounds like you're talking about telepathy -”
Cyber-Knife's voice trailed off as the tunnel swept upwards and opened up into a cavern more vast than anything he'd expected. Squat, square buildings made from dirt, the most abundant nearby resource, clustered together in the cavern’s rear. Cyber-Knife could barely believe what he saw; they'd taken him to their home. It looked as though someone had torn a gaping wound in the earth, and in its place, a small civilization had established itself. He could rationalize his missing the tiny prison tunnel earlier - the enemy had, after all, hidden it with great deliberation - but he couldn't imagine that a space large enough to house hundreds of people had gone undetected.
“My God, you live right under their noses,” Cyber-Knife blurted.
Excalibur chimed in, “If those synthetic creatures had a need for such things.”
Cyber-Knife exhaled a long, exasperat
ed breath. “You must think you're really something,” he replied.
“Were you to look up 'exceptional' in the dictionary and find a picture of me, I'd not complain,” Excalibur said.
As they approached the subterranean city, Cyber-Knife felt it getting brighter, like little needles of light were boring into his night vision. As he looked up, he saw that it was almost literally true; somehow, the little bioluminescent tubes no longer wound through the dirt haphazardly, but bound themselves up in tight spirals above the buildings, casting perfectly visible shafts of light down upon the city.
“Developing this technique took decades, but it has proven advantageous when we have guests, welcome or otherwise,” the old woman said.
“The light?” Cyber-Knife said.
She nodded. "Let us show you." She held up a hand, and the people immediately slowed their pace to a stop. She exhaled. The others did likewise, following her every movement. Widening her stance - wider than her shoulders - she brought her hands to her face, fingers curled one atop the other, with the thumbs on each side of her hands outstretched. She filled her lungs with breath, and pulled her hands apart forcefully. As the same movement rippled through the group, Cyber-Knife felt the breeze rush past him.
The swirls of light scattered and cast the cavern into shadow. Had Cyber-Knife not possessed his low-light vision, he would've found himself as blind as his hosts, and far more handicapped than they. He whistled a low tone, and even that soft noise could echo in the darkness.
The old woman stood back up and smiled wryly. “The lights will reform themselves in due time,” she said. “The bacteria that form them now view those clusters now as their natural state.”