by Phil Wrede
His feet moved so fast that he actually scorched the ground beneath his stride, while the cybernetics in his brain and eyes, fully energized, actually slowed down the way he perceived time, so the world wouldn't just streak by in one big blur, only for him to miss his intended destination by a few degrees of latitude. Even so, he could barely spot any of the enemy's forces; he refused to take his attention off his battery monitor, which dropped at a rate faster than anticipated.
Alien robot ninjas turned towards him and fired with their plasma blasters, only to see Cyber-Knife speed past, stretching away from the green fire faster than it could approach him.
Before Cyber-Knife knew it, he'd cleared the entire kill zone, and was rushing up a gantry that led into the spire. Now, that went okay, he thought, until he tried to slow down.
Flames burst up among the soles of his boots, slowly melting down the dense rubber. Not knowing what else to do, Cyber-Knife leapt off his feet and crashed into a wall just inside the spire; he flipped around sideways, bouncing off cold surfaces that felt like some bizarre cross between stone and metal, spinning around like a top until he slowed down enough and smashed into another wall, leaving a huge dent in it, and it leaving ones in the ribs on the right side of his body.
He fell to the floor, coughing and racked with hundreds of little pains from strained and shredded leg muscles struggling to repair themselves. “So much for subtlety,” he could barely hear Excalibur say.
“I don't,” he tried to spit out between coughing fits, “know.” Cough. “What.” Cough. “You mean.”
“Clearly.”
Cyber-Knife struggled into a crouch and shook his head over and over. He had never subjected his systems to such a whiplash of stresses before, and he tried desperately to clear the fuzziness from his vision. He pried off his melted boots, used Excalibur to help himself to his feet, and walked into the spire proper, mentally preparing himself for the mystery awaiting him.
The interior of the spire formed an enormous archway - it had to, Cyber-Knife thought, because otherwise it wouldn’t allow the most monstrous of the enemy's creations to enter or exit the building. The alien robot ninjas had constructed it out of some kind of material for which he had no reference, for it had the texture of stone, yet gleamed like oil. Rivulets of every color of light rippled across the surface, and changed depending even on how he tilted his head at them. It pulsed, too. Every 5.43 seconds, like clockwork, the light inside the spire glowed a little brighter, accentuating the shadows from the weird, curvy pillars that didn't reach all the way up to the ceiling, or stretch all the way down to the floor. It gave off a humming noise, too, that ramped up and down in pitch slightly out of sync with the rhythm of the light.
“For the home of a bunch of blank murder drones, this architecture has a lot of personality,” Cyber-Knife said, tearing into the metal skin of the Class One's arm and extracting the parts he needed to make repairs on himself.
“One could say similarly about you,” Excalibur said.
As Cyber-Knife extracted the broken mechanism from his hand and replaced it with fresh and working parts, they passed through the arch and into a large open room broken up into distinct sections by more of those oddly-unfinished pillars. What they indicated, Cyber-Knife had no idea; he could detect a method to the alien robot ninjas' madness, though. He swung Excalibur up to point at a balcony seemingly hundreds of feet overhead - a gallery that looked like it watched over the whole room.
“Do you see that?” he asked.
“You need to ask, how do you get up there? These things don't seem to believe in escalators.”
“I think we’ll climb,” Cyber-Knife said.
As Cyber-Knife looked around one of the stalagmite-like pillars, hoping to find a surface imperfection akin to a rudimentary handhold, he saw a Class Two thump around a different pillar at the far end of the room. The enemy had stocked the spire with robots on the hunt; coming across a solitary one certainly put them in the least amount of danger.
“If you want to climb, do it fast. I'd rather disappear before that one notices us and alerts its friends,” Excalibur said, right before Cyber-Knife tossed it back in the sheath.
“Copy that,” Cyber-Knife muttered, deciding that even an ill-considered action had more upsides than none at all. He launched himself at the nearby pillar. On leg strength alone he cleared more than sixty feet, and found out the weird pseudo-rock material of the pillar had a little more malleability than he'd expected - it cracked a little under the pressure of his hands, allowing him to create his own grip points fairly easily.
Unfortunately, the pseudo-rock also transmitted sound particularly well. As it cracked, the sound of the material splintering echoed through the room, and as it bounced off every other surface, the sound only got louder.
The alien robot spider skittered around the room, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. Cyber-Knife stayed still, deciding not to make any more stupid noises if he could help it, at least right away.
That plan failed almost instantly, as the Class Two drew its gaze up to him with uncomfortable speed and, with a taunting deliberation, picked half of its eight legs off the ground to fire lasers at him.
Cyber-Knife took off up the length of the pillar, moving more like he pulled it down than pushed himself up it. The Class Two's lasers hit the pillar around him, but the deadly light just glanced off the material and cascaded around the room, losing its cohesion in the shadows and corners. Cyber-Knife tried to vary his climbing speed, and the rhythm with which he swung his limbs, so as not to give the robot's targeting computer any more help than it already had. For a little while, he lucked out.
He didn't expect to see the Class Two tighten its targeting, lancing out its lasers not as four separate beams but as one. It cut into the pseudo-rock right above his head, scoring the pillar with a hideous burn mark. He looked back down at it, now well more than a hundred feet below, and felt his heart sank as he saw more Class Twos coming to join their counterpart.
More than a dozen lasers converged on his position, and Cyber-Knife threw himself away from the pillar, grabbing another one across the way in a death grip. The lasers cut right through the pseudo-rock at an upward angle; the top half of that pillar started to slide towards the ground, toppling over with an inevitable-sounding groan as it split from the base. The huge slab thudded into the floor, cracking into hundreds of pieces big and small, and kicking up a cloud of dust with the impact.
A quick flicking-on of his visual filters revealed the bad news: the falling pillar hadn't taken any of the robots with it. They scrambled around the rubble and continued blasting at him, chipping away at the surface of the pillar around him, trying to entrap him before delivering the finishing blow.
Cyber-Knife refused to have any of this. He heaved himself away from the surface, taking handfuls of the pseudo-rock with him, and flung them towards the Class Twos as he sailed towards one more pillar. His improvised weapons found their targets, knocking the legs out from under a few of the robots, their lasers blasting into the floor and chipping up more material to clog their sensors a little longer.
His body slammed full-speed into the pillar, knocking the wind from his lungs with the impact. He had a few precious seconds of cover from their lasers. Cyber-Knife hung on with one hand, pulling that last remaining plasma pistol from his holster. He flipped open the latch under the barrel and pressed the hidden switch until it glowed red, the same color red as the pair of beams that cut through his cover, right above his head. The lasers burst through the pseudo-rock so close that he could feel the heat wash over his hair.
As the pillar exploded around him, Cyber-Knife swung himself around and pitched the pistol at the cluster of Class Twos; it had already begun to pulse with that intense red glow, the one that meant it neared overload. He twisted in midair, so he couldn't exactly see the effect of his improvised grenade, but he'd flung the pistol with enough force that the lasers couldn't track it. It
landed just about in the center of the swarm, and when it detonated, it flung the freshly seared-apart bits of the alien robot spiders into the air, where they dropped to the ground like the debris from some hideous hurricane.
The explosion didn't just demolish the Class Twos - it also seemed to be the last straw for the antechamber's structural integrity. Pillars began to pitch forward from their foundations, crashing into one another in a small display of doomsday dominoes. Cyber-Knife hadn't quite thrown himself hard enough to reach the gallery, and caught the edge of the wall as he flew. He grabbed with one hand, then the other, and used his momentum to throw himself upwards, barely escaping some jagged pseudo-stone fragments as he did. He caught the gallery railing, and flipped head over heels, cracking the floor underneath him as he landed on the upper level.
He lost his balance in the landing, and fell to the floor. He had no idea what had happened until he looked down at his left leg, to see that his thigh had been pierced straight through by a shard as wide around as his forearm, and as long again as his leg itself. Alert sirens started going off in his head an instant later; red warning tracers started flashing in the corner of his vision, meant to guide his gaze down towards his injury.
Cyber-Knife rarely spoke when he suffered a wound, for he knew what sort of medical miracles his internal machinery could accomplish, and how quickly they worked. He only had to remove the foreign object and hold his leg straight for a time; soon enough, the bone and muscle tissue would rebuild themselves. It required him to play a waiting game, and Cyber-Knife didn't even have to wait very long to win.
Today, though, told a different story. As the chamber finished disintegrating beneath him, Cyber-Knife grabbed ahold of his wounded leg, and as blood gushed both upwards and below, he screamed the cry of an orphaned animal. He screamed loudly enough that it could be heard over the sounds of material destruction below.
A great shake shuddered the building, even the gallery, rousing Cyber-Knife from his grief and pain. He scrambled over on his one good leg and two hands to look down, and saw that everything that could've fallen over finally had. A fire burned in the middle of the great scorch mark left from his plasma blaster's self-destruction. He hadn't really intended to try and bring down the building from the bottom floor up, but looking at the damage he'd already caused, he had to admit to himself that it didn't seem like a half-bad plan. If only he had a few dozen more plasma pistols.
He looked down at his leg, and as his gaze passed over the blood still oozing out of the wound, he felt a vise of logic clamp down on his emotions, bringing things back under control. The cold efficiency of the machine had just as much value as the heart of the man. He knew what he had to do, and he had the resolve to get it done.
Cyber-Knife grabbed the shard with both hands and pulled about half a meter of it from his leg. The blood stained the psuedo-stone, filtering every color that rippled across its surface through a crimson sheen. It might've looked beautiful, he thought, if it wasn't threatening to paralyze him. He felt his vision get fuzzy at the edges for a second, until more artificial stimulants rushed into his bloodstream. Just another half a meter to go. He steeled himself for what he knew was upon him.
He yanked the rest of the shard clean from his leg, and a fountain of blood followed right behind it. He clamped his hands down on the wound, though arterial spray had already covered his face. Blood rushed out from between his fingers, and a digital countdown clock started flashing in the middle of his HUD - it promised him that he only had to hold out for 45 seconds, that in three-quarters of a minute, his body would be knit together tightly enough so that he could continue the mission. It promised him enough chemicals to make those seconds pass almost instantly, but he refused them. He didn't want them.
Cyber-Knife didn't want the pain to go away. He wanted to feel it, to hold onto it and hone it, so close to blind from grief he felt, and he needed something to cut through the fog that threatened to descend on him. It wouldn't matter to his masters why he destroyed the spire, but Cyber-Knife would know that he had not completed his mission so much as he exacted revenge. No one would care why he set out to do the impossible and inflict immeasurable pain on creatures totally incapable of feeling it, but for every one of the alien robot ninjas he was able to cut, blast, or rip apart, he would feel a small measure of peace for the people who had accepted him into their community, only to see the life they'd struggled to build for themselves crushed beneath the heels of unfeeling, unthinking invaders. 30 seconds.
Cyber-Knife wondered what sort of world he'd return to, if he survived his mission, and whether he cared enough to live through it, anyway. Surely, he would never meet any other people in the world like Hnid's; but, what if there were more like himself, living weapons brought into the world only to find themselves condemned to lifetimes of destruction and murder? How would they find their enlightenment, seek their redemption, if everything he had struggled to understand vanished forever in the silence of death? 20 seconds.
What if he did survive, if he could tell his creators what he'd become? Would they applaud him for passing out of their shadows and claiming his life for himself, or would they sedate him, strap him down, cut into his brain and rewrite the programming in that computer inside his head, ensuring that this "glitch" was an unrepeatable, one-time-only event? 10 seconds.
In the crucible of pain, Cyber-Knife forged his new mission. Not only would he survive, but he would share what he'd learned with the people of America, make them understand. He owed a debt to the past and the future. He had his own purpose now.
As the clock ticked down to zero, Cyber-Knife stood. He couldn't balance perfectly, but he could stand, and soon, he could run. He didn't need to run to fight, though. He just needed Excalibur. As he drew the sword from his back, the ringing sound its blade made against the sheath cut through the cacophony of terrible disaster like a beacon. Hope in the darkness.
“My Lord, Cyber-Knife,” Excalibur said, “you think you'd want to take another moment to rest up. It's not as though we can draw much more attention to ourselves.”
“No,” Cyber-Knife growled. “No more delays. This ends today.” He stomped off with a halting stride, towards a beam of light, and a hallway that led off the gallery.
CHAPTER 7
For a facility designed and occupied by emotionless war robots, the spire had surprisingly decent aesthetics throughout. The pseudo-stone that had made up the exclusive building material and decoration of the lower level had receded until it only lined the upper portion of the hallway as an accent; someone had painted the rest of the hall in a bright, off-white color. The two materials played off of one another so well that Cyber-Knife actually found himself appreciating the enemy's design sense. Your foe, he thought to himself, is always more complex than it appears.
Cyber-Knife found a thick door with markings above unlike anything he'd ever seen from the enemy before. A swift kick and two heavy punches broke it down, and he found himself in front of an open, unexpected treasure trove. Hanging from the ceiling on large racks were inactive Class Ones, ready to get switched on and sent to kill, or meet their demise at Cyber-Knife's hand. As things stood now, though, he could only see three dozen power cores ripe for the plucking. Cyber-Knife knew he'd never get an opportunity like this again, so he'd have to work quickly.
It took some time to find his rhythm at first, but by the time he'd stripped the core out of the chest of the fifth robot, he had the process down to an art. Cyber-Knife punched a Class One right below its sternum, grabbed up about seven centimeters, and extracted the fist-sized device out without any resistance. He stuffed every pouch on his uniform with every core he could grab, and left just one behind, setting it to overload. The entire room exploded behind him as he walked back into the hallway, scattering flaming debris and alien robot ninja limbs everywhere.
An elevator shaft greeted him at the hall's end, and he knew he'd found the one that would lead him all the way to the top of the sp
ire, to his ultimate destination: the command center. He forced open the doors and opened the access hatch with only a little effort.
As he climbed on top of the elevator car, he looked up the shaft, only to be greeted by a cascade of sparks. Cyber-Knife swung up his arm to shield his eyes and as he did, he got knocked to the ground by a type of Class One he'd never seen before. It had slid down the cables along which the elevator ran, and had hands twice as big as his head, with arms of a similar bulk. It wound up for a punch, and its fist knocked a hole right through the car as Cyber-Knife ducked underneath the blow.
He kicked out and knocked the Class One's head back; it clanged against the metal cabling and Cyber-Knife knew he had only one chance to make save himself. Pushing himself up from the ground, he punched the robot's head and immediately opened his fist, firing into the robot a plasma blast from his palm. He knocked the robot into the massive bundle of elevator cables.
Cyber-Knife twisted the cabling around the Class One's head, and though it crackled at the neck a few times, he couldn't sever its head from its body. He jumped up above it, grabbing onto the cables, and fired another shot from his blaster, tearing through the tightly-wound metal and dropping the car down the shaft. Just as it had nearly fallen away, the Class One's hands thrashed out, getting a grip around Cyber-Knife's ankles.
He frantically swung against the remaining length of cable, smashing the robot against one side of the elevator shaft, and then the other, but the Class One refused to let go, and just increased the pressure around Cyber-Knife's feet. It was only thanks to the strength lent to him by sheer terror that Cyber-Knife held onto the cable one-handed as he let a hand go to grab onto Excalibur. He swung the sword and cut through the robot's wrists; it hung in midair for a second before it, like the elevator car, fell away. It took a few more sharp jabs with Excalibur at the robot hands before they finally let go.