by Phil Wrede
Cyber-Knife climbed up the cables, hand over hand, until his legs felt better. Then, he bounded up the sides with one great hop after another, until he found the door to the top floor, and the dark hallway that stretched out past it.
A monstrous robot stepped out from the shadows that engulfed the door - it looked like a Class One, but one fully on some kind of robot steroids, not just the arms. Bigger, meaner-looking, and better articulated than its forebears, this Class One-and-a-Half, walked like a stalking carnivore that had the day's meal in its sights. All the usual weak points that he exploited on Class Ones were armored up on this model. Cyber-Knife knew he and Excalibur were going to get past this thing; he just hadn't figured out the particulars yet.
Two panels on the Half's chest slid open, and the pair of plasma blasters they revealed started glowing with murderous intent immediately. It raised its arms, and its fingers slid back into its hands with long, slow clicks. The blasters encased in its hands, too, gleamed that ugly green color.
“Shit,” Cyber-Knife said, flipping up Excalibur to start blocking the incoming plasma bolts the robot started belching his way. He caught most of the first volley in a single motion, twisting them around the enchanted blade and spinning them right back towards the Half, but the blasts splattered against its edged armor plates and crashed into the walls. He had to perform his defense perfectly here, for if he mistimed a sword stroke and got hit with a plasma bolt at the wrong angle, the robot's fire could detonate a power core. The explosion might well demolish the spire, but it would for sure vaporize Cyber-Knife.
The robot advanced on him and fired again, staggering its blasts so as to split Cyber-Knife's attention, drag down the efficiency of his defense. It couldn’t fire fast enough to pull him off balance or throw off his cybernetically-perfect timing, though, at least not until a third pair of blasters slid out of its back and added their voices to the deadly chorus. Up until that moment, Cyber-Knife had seriously felt a temptation to try carving, “USA! USA!” in the walls with his expert deflections.
All it took was one shot, one little ball of superheated matter to not go exactly where his heretofore unbeatable combination of targeting software and instincts predicted, and Cyber-Knife dropped to his side with a comically large chunk taken out of his left side, the flesh above his ribcage. He immediately rolled away as a whole hailstorm of plasma immediately crashed down where he'd fallen, leaving an unhealthy, bloody smear as he moved. Any more like that, he thought as he brought Excalibur up to guard, and he'd expire here and now, no matter what stood on the other side of that door. He could smell the metal of Excalibur's blade, so close did it cut across his face.
He could only put weight on his right leg, but he could already feel the muscles in the other leg growing back over the bone, so both he and the Half knew he'd hobble around for just a few moments. It refused to let a good opportunity go to waste, so it went into some kind of overdrive mode on its blasters, a setting Cyber-Knife had never tried with his own equipment, out of a lingering and only slightly irrational fear of a catastrophic, irreparable systems failure. The Half, clearly, had no such compunctions, blaring away with what looked at first like a pure wave of plasma.
At first, the robot had clearly miscalculated - it had focused its assault too tightly, so Cyber-Knife could dodge it with ease, but that situation rapidly changed. It began to randomize, to treat its weapons as six independent projectors instead of a single one, and as the hallway around him effectively exploded with plasma and plasma-heated debris, he decided he could only fight his way through this by doing something really brash.
He'd pulled the parts for his own blaster from the remains of Class Ones, and from that hardware they could generate persistent blades of plasma. Cyber-Knife had installed that very same hardware into himself, so he had only to figure out the software to do the same as them. He set a subconscious subroutine to processing and took a deep breath, figuring he'd have to play life-and-death tag with this monster for a while longer until his system had fashioned the answer.
Almost as he exhaled, though, he received a notification on his HUD that the process had completed. Anything the enemy could do, Cyber-Knife knew he could do better. He took one hand off Excalibur and snapped that wrist back; with a sinister cracking noise, a blade of plasma erupted from his hand, a little under a meter in length.
Cyber-Knife ducked under two twisting, intertwining streams of plasma fire and put everything he had into his leg muscles, launching himself off the floor and into a propeller-like spiral towards the Half, his two blades canted out to reflect any of the enemy's attack.
Airborne, he closed the distance between them at an agonizingly slow speed; with defeat this close at hand, the Half gave Cyber-Knife everything it had, digging deep and finding an overdrive mode for its overdrive mode. Even with his defenses turning him into a plasma pinwheel, he felt the temperature about his hands getting intolerably hot, and knew that, although he couldn't hear Excalibur, the sword wouldn't put up with this situation for long. Even time traveling, enchanted, talking swords had a breaking point.
At nearly the last second, Cyber-Knife had another brainstorm, and twisted his arms around so he could funnel the Half's plasma fire up above it. The effect was apparent, and immediate - it cut through the ceiling almost immediately and spilled back down onto the robot. The Half's armor could certainly knock away less-than-perfectly-targeted weapons fire, but when it came to a bath of superheated liquid, only the best-angled energy shield in the world could fight that off.
When the rush of the plasma tapered off, and Cyber-Knife felt the air cool around him, he had to abruptly settle his feet back on the ground. He turned his eyes up to the Half, and saw mostly what he had expected to see: a lump of unrecognizable metal, the finely tuned experiment in violence reduced to slag. The floor cracked under its weight, most of it eaten away by the plasma splash, and it fell out of sight before Cyber-Knife really had a chance to appreciate what had happened. His plasma blade switched off, as if equipped with the ability to comprehend good timing.
“My word,” Excalibur said.
“Yeah,” Cyber-Knife replied.
Cyber-Knife fired a few shots from his blaster into the door and took a running leap. Since the floor leading up to the door had melted away, he had to bounce himself off the wall and crash into the door, in the hopes that brute force could substitute for a focused hack of the locking mechanism. It didn't.
Cyber-Knife whuffed as he hit the door, and clawed at the metal surface as he began to slide down it. He got a good grip, and took a swing at it with Excalibur, driving the sword's blade into the door and through it. It took some careful maneuvering, but he eventually cut a hole in the door large enough to slip through.
They'd finally made it: the massive, interlocking computer banks at the top of the spire, the nerve center for the enemy's headquarters in Vietnam. A sea of color washed across each of the dozens of computing obelisks; this room felt as alive as the jungle beyond. Thick glass windows surrounded them, looking out onto the wasteland with some sort of perverse pride.
Cyber-Knife tore open the pouches all over his uniform, and the power cores he'd harvested from the fallen swarms of Class Ones spilled out onto the floor. He daisy-chained them together with the stray wires from their connector ports and built a series of explosive wreaths, more than enough to rend the room into rubble and shut down the enemy's operation once and for all. A bunch of little improvised bombs would end this war, instead of one big one. For once, he'd turn the enemy's tactics against them. He sent off a radar pulse with a shake of his hair, and instantly mapped the area with the right spots to place his handmade explosives.
Just as Cyber-Knife had about lain the last wreath, and without any warning at all, a man stepped out from behind the obelisks. He was human, moreso than Cyber-Knife, even. Slender, athletic, and dressed in the uniform of some kind of military that didn't exist anywhere in the commando's vast store of information, the
man held out his hands, doing everything in his power to appear nonthreatening.
Cyber-Knife didn't much care; he pointed his hand blaster at the man's head anyway.
“Don't shoot! Please, don't shoot!” the man had to yell over the sounds of fire and explosions.
“Make it snappy,” Cyber-Knife said.
“You don't know what you're doing!” the man cried out. “There's no way they could've told you what you're really doing! Please, before you blow those charges, you have to listen to me!”
Cyber-Knife was throw off-balance by what the man said, for at its core, his message contained many similarities to Hnid's. One did not brush things off as mere coincidence in wartime.
“What don't I know?”
The man walked towards Cyber-Knife with a halting gait, raising his hands above his head. “Let me show you! I can call them, and they can explain!”
A desperate explosion rocked the spire, and the building's skeleton groaned as more support gave way. “Hurry!” Cyber-Knife yelled. “They better talk fast!”
The man ran to one of the computing towers, and dragged bits of light around its surface with complicated, painterly hand gestures. A crystal blue light rose up from the floor, in the exact center of the room, and burst outward in a brilliant flash. When the light finally dimmed, Cyber-Knife could see a holographic representation of three large bipeds. As they swam into focus, he realized he'd seen them before: he had dreamt of these robots in his fevered sleep!
Cyber-Knife inched forward towards them. “Who the fuck are you?”
The robot triumvirate spoke together in a monotone chorus, “We are freedom.”
Cyber-Knife laughed bitterly at this. “Freedom from what, life? In that case, you've freed billions of people across the planet!”
The robots replied immediately, “Freedom from you, and all those like you.”
Cyber-Knife hadn't expected it to get personal so quickly. “Let me share the score with you. You remember the Taykinh, the underground dwellers your machines wiped out earlier today? They befriended me, I tried to protect them from you, and now I'm going to level this fucking building in their name!”
“We did not wish them harm; they did not matter. They stood with you, and in doing so, sealed their fate,” the triumvirate said dispassionately. “The same fate as all who threaten this world.”
“Don't you understand?” the man asked Cyber-Knife, gesturing frantically at the hologram. “We built them to save us from you!”
Cyber-Knife wouldn't believe this. It had to be a trick, a ruse dreamed up by a spineless worm so sniveling that he'd say anything, do anything to squeeze a few more moments out of his pathetic existence. Cyber-Knife blasted the computing tower to pieces with a plasma shot, and the hologram winked out of existence.
“Please!” the man shouted. “You've been lied to, from the first moment somebody spoke to you! We can show you the truth! We can give you the answers to questions you never even knew you had!”
Cyber-Knife honestly considered what the man said. Too much lined up for him to just dismiss it out of hand. What if they told him the truth? What did that mean?
But, he'd seen the Class Ones flood into the tunnels. He'd tried to stop them. The Taykinh had sent him away, standing up to terrifying numbers of enemies. As much as he wanted to believe Hnid and her people had survived, he knew he only wished it. These things had dealt out death and destruction for the last time. Today, right here and now, Cyber-Knife would take revenge for every life they'd unjustly ended. If it meant he could finish a collaborator that had sold out his own people to the invading army, so much the better.
“I've heard your sales pitch,” Cyber-Knife replied, tightening his fist. “Let me make you a counter-offer.” He squeezed, and suddenly, the plasma bolt blasted into the man's suddenly-too-soft skull. Not even an instant later, it flew out the back of his head and tore through the window. spraying charred bone and brain tissue across the remaining glass. He tipped backwards and fell to the floor, the rest of his head cracking open with the impact. “Fucking die already,” Cyber-Knife hissed.
Excalibur shouted from the sheath on his back, “Let's finish this!”
Cyber-Knife depressed the flashing stud on his wrist, and the rest of his homemade explosives blasted apart the main computer core, reducing the heart of the spire to splinters. He could see across the room, to a fresh, rhino-sized hole in the wall. Now came the tricky part: getting out. He unsheathed Excalibur as he raced towards his exit.
He would fall a long way down, but Cyber-Knife had fallen farther. At least, he had in simulations. Every test they'd run on his body indicated he'd survive a fall hundreds of meters high, and take only moments to recover from it. As the chamber exploded behind him, he decided he'd put those simulations to the test. He thought for a moment about sheathing Excalibur, but he decided not. The sword was his partner, and they would face this jump together.
“Fuck it,” he muttered, turning back to take one last look at the ruins of the control room, the black smoke pouring out into the night sky and becoming almost invisible against it. He jumped out the window as a huge tongue of fire licked out after him, tracing a blister of heat across his shoulders and up his neck.
The ground raced towards him; the altimeter built into his HUD counted down the numbers that stood between him and a hideously unsafe landing. He didn't even need to look around to see the building collapsing, for the wind whipped his hair around with such force that he could detect every girder, every alien robot ninja struggling to get out, everything as it was consumed by the flames. The record would exist to his data banks for as long as they sustained themselves.
Cyber-Knife felt it as he hit the ground. His knees took most of the impact, and while needles of pain didn't shoot through his body, he could feel the ceramics and metal alloys crumple under the force at which he fell. He looked down, saw his thighs shear through his knees, then threw out his arms to arrest the rest of his fall.
Where had Excalibur gone? He should have held a sword in one hand, but both of them were free, empty. He looked around, but his vision had grown staticky around the edges, then cut out entirely. He detected a ghosted impression of the sword by throwing off one last radar pulse, but even those readings disappeared after a moment. His senses trickled away, one by one.
He flopped on his back, choosing contentment in the face of oblivion, rather than to struggle on. He'd saved the world from the alien robot ninjas, and more importantly, struck a blow in the name of the Taykinh, his only friends, save perhaps for the sword. Knowing that brought the ultimate killing machine some peace. As he lost consciousness, the last thing he heard was the horrible shriek of the tower's metal structure as it collapsed in upon itself.
CHAPTER 8
Cyber-Knife opened his eyes when he heard the sound of a hover chopper whirring overhead. He couldn't move, except for his eyes. He could see some buildings, tall and clean, and some lush trees waving in a breeze. He'd seen scenes like this before, but only in his mind. Could he be lost in another dream?
As a medic came to lift his stretched onto the chopper, Cyber-Knife caught his attention for a second. “Where am I?” Cyber-Knife pleaded through chapped lips.
“Vietnam,” the medic replied.
Before Cyber-Knife could say any more, he'd been loaded onto the chopper and the stasis field had dropped around his stretcher, forcing his systems into standby and plunging him back into unconsciousness.
When the field finally deactivated, Cyber-Knife awoke in a room he'd never seen before - a featureless, white room with a light shining directly into his face. He tried to activate the polarization filters in his eyes to cut the brightness, but they didn't respond. He tried to raise his left arm to shield his eyes, but he couldn't lift his shoulder. He tried raising his right arm; nothing responded below the elbow. Draping that right arm across his eyes, he found a few seconds to panic in the blackness. Had all his systems shorted out after
blowing up the spire? Even if they had, the self-repair protocols should've brought them back online by now. For the first time in his life, Cyber-Knife had no clue as to what was going on, and that terrified him.
A door at the side of the room whooshed open, and he heard several pairs of footsteps clop their way towards him. He thought perhaps his eyes had finally gotten enough time to adjust to the lighting, so he removed his arm from his face. That turned out to be a bad idea - as the light seared his artificial retinas, he started to worry that his software problem may have caused his pupils to fully dilate and freeze open. He squinched his eyes shut and threw his numb arm over his face once again.
The footsteps got closer and closer until they stopped right next to him. Cyber-Knife could hear the men breathing; the rhythms of their breath sounded strange to him, like they spent most of their time seated, or asleep. They stood next to him, not speaking, for an uncomfortably long period of time. Cyber-Knife prided himself on his cool under pressure, but even this began to try his patience.
Finally, he couldn't stand the awkward almost-silence any longer. “What do you want?” he snapped.
“Oh, Cyber-Knife! We weren't sure if you were awake or not,” said a voice that clearly knew differently from what it said. “We've come to debrief you.”
“And congratulate you,” another voice eagerly added.
“You get nothing out of me beyond name, rank, and serial number, until I find out who you are and where I am.”
The second voice started up again. Cyber-Knife was certain it belonged to General Sherman, the man who'd advocated for him strongest among the military brass from the beginning. “We're sorry, son. You're -”
“We do things by the book here, soldier,” the first voice broke in, “and that's not how the book reads. You report in.” That was unquestioningly General Maximilian, who'd never trusted Cyber-Knife, and had shouted terrifically loudly about it.