Cyber-Knife: Apex Predator

by Phil Wrede

  He couldn't stand, not yet, so he crawled across the floor and began to pry Excalibur from the general's cooling, dead fingers. “In case any of you fuckers are still listening, let me finish repaying the general's advice: I have adaptive, intelligent, self-repairing systems. What the fuck did you think you could do?.” He brought a metal fist down and finished breaking Sherman’s skull apart against the floor, shutting off contact with Command.

  “I'll tell you this,” he continued, grabbing Excalibur, “I think the smell of charred human flesh has put me off meat for the rest of my life.”

  “Good for you,” the sword exclaimed. “You'd add years to it, if you ever ate any.”

  “Don't look so far into the future that you lose sight of the present,” Cyber-Knife said as he got to his feet, then ran off down the hallway.

  “Might I hope too much to hope that you've formulated a plan?” Excalibur asked, giving him less than a moment of peace.

  “Find a door, get the hell out of this dimension.”

  “'Dimension?'”

  “Didn't you know? The Army's using us to wipe out the resistance on parallel Earths so they can bleed their resources dry.”

  “Well, fuck everything about that,” Excalibur said. “The prophecy never said anything about multiple Earths.”

  Cyber-Knife opened his mouth for a moment, ready to tell Excalibur everything he'd just learned, but slowly brought it shut. They'd have time enough to talk once they escaped. At least, this way, one of them might still have a home out there to which they could return.

  “How do we get out of here?” Excalibur asked.

  Cyber-Knife didn't mince words. “Go down. They'll keep it somewhere secure, and away from prying eyes. That means underground.”

  “That simplicity again.”

  At the other end of the hallway, Cyber-Knife found himself faced with an obscenely tall pair of doors, lined golden along their edges and with the illustrious eagle of the Army etched across the surface. This had to be a particularly noteworthy lift. He slammed the pommel of the sword into the call button.

  The elevator took long in coming, too long even for a floor as high up as the one they stood on. It didn't take much imagination to guess the reason for the delay: soldiers loading into the car for an ambush. Cyber-Knife could see no cover in the hall, so he pressed himself up against the wall immediately next to the doors.

  The machine let off a pleasant electronic chime as the car arrived; the doors slid open without a single nod to friction. The soldiers stormed into the hall dressed in the matte black assault uniforms that were de riguer on planet, an interlocking series of armor plates woven just atop the form-fitting fabric they wore. The half-dozen of them all carried assault rifles, wicked-looking implements of metal and ceramic capable of spitting out dozens of razor-sharp needles with every pull of their triggers.

  The first man through the door met a grisly fate as Cyber-Knife swung his sword straight down, slicing the soldier's arms clear off his body. As he screamed in terror, Cyber-Knife kicked him so hard that he flew all the way across the hall; the crunching sound his body made as it smashed into the wall was freakishly audible as it slid down to the floor, leaving behind a painterly smear of blood.

  He couldn't catch the others so unawares. They immediately opened fire in Cyber-Knife's direction. He moved too fast for them to track, at least at first, and ducked under their attack letting lose a plasma burst of his own that tore through another soldier just above his pelvis. As he fell to the floor in turn, his corpse snapped in half and splashed his blood all across his comrades.

  A few of the needles fired from the rifles zipped by a little too closely, but Cyber-Knife caught the others along Excalibur's blade and flipped them into the wall and ceiling. He danced around another curtain of shots, flipping his legs up and over them with barely an instant to spare. As he landed, he threw the sword into the throat of another soldier, knocking him back with such force that Excalibur not only cut off his head, but buried itself clear through the chest of another still. The two living soldiers stopped firing out of sheer shock, terrorized by the ruthlessness of the violence that had greeted them.

  With a single punch, Cyber-Knife knocked the fifth unconscious, and used the momentum from his blow to spin into the last remaining one and turn his chest to jelly with a pair of point-blank range plasma blasts. He walked through the smoldering remains of his newfound enemies to pull Excalibur from the floor, and after tearing a long strip of fabric off the unconscious soldier, wiped the sword free of all the blood that had collected on it.

  As they walked into the elevator proper, Excalibur said, “You know, you actually didn't kill one of them back there. You don't want to take a moment to make it six-for-six?”

  “Not necessary,” Cyber-Knife replied. “That punch broke his jaw into about fifteen pieces. He can't tell anybody where we've gone, or anything else for that matter.”

  “How merciful of you.”

  Cyber-Knife slid his finger down the car's touchpad and selected the building's lowest level. “When mercy and efficiency dovetail, I've come to see the merits of mercy.”

  The lift's doors closed, and Cyber-Knife could feel his stomach shoot into his throat as they began their super-accelerated descent. They had hundreds of floors to go, he thought to himself, and figured they had no time to waste. So, he swallowed and used the time to run some diagnostics on his systems.

  Looking down at Excalibur, Cyber-Knife knew he had to say something, lest he complicate their entire escape with the truth. “I completely understand that we're trying to change the future, and make obsolete much of the world you've experienced, but I'd love to know: does anyone ever play good music in elevators?”

  Excalibur hesitated before replying. “You've never asked me about the future before, and when you do, this is what you ask?”

  “Knowing this answer will not damage this timeline or any other.”

  “It very well might. What if, in the future, another great war so devastates civilization that all recorded and transcribed music vanishes? Then, you might take it upon yourself to act as some kind of ad-hoc cultural repository, and record every bit of music you hear that you like. It'll throw off the mission, and you might stupidly sacrifice yourself to save some 'art' that you find significant, thus dooming the world to the sort of apocalypse where it doesn't matter if you saved a piece of classical music or not -”

  “You don't have to worry about any of that,” Cyber-Knife said.

  “And why ever not?”

  Cyber-Knife tapped at his head, reminding Excalibur of the infinite capacity hard drive built into him, the one that contained the sum total of human knowledge and culture. He didn't need to try to crazily save an obscure sonata from getting destroyed, because the Army had seen fit to store it inside of him.

  “Oh, of course. No, nobody ever figures out exactly the right sort of music to play in a lift.”

  “Not even just some kind of classical music?”

  “You might think that, but there's a statistically significant portion of the population that just doesn't like classical music.”

  Cyber-Knife found himself slightly taken aback. “Even light classical, so bland you can just ignore it?”

  “Well, with that, you're actually antagonizing two groups of people: those who hate classical, and music snobs.”

  “Christ,” Cyber-Knife exhaled. “No wonder we can't answer the big problems of existence. Humanity can't even get together on the insignificant shit.”

  “Remember, my friend, humanity created you as an answer to a problem that arose from the answer to another problem.”

  “Did you mean to make me rethink leaving that guy alive upstairs? Because it worked.” Just as Cyber-Knife finished speaking, the elevator slid to a crawl and stopped, letting off another kind-hearted chime. The door, however, did not open.

  “I suspect the successful execution of your plan depends on our exiting th
is lift,” Excalibur said.

  “What insight,” Cyber-Knife said as he pressed his hand against the elevator door. “We’ve cut our way through thicker walls on this mission.”

  As Cyber-Knife lifted Excalibur, the light in the entire car shifted to red. Cyber-Knife looked around, ensuring the enemy had not opened a secret hatch from which dozens of ravenous, flesh-eating rat droids would swarm him. “MOM?” he asked.

  Her voice rang so loud against the car’s metal walls that it almost overwhelmed him. “Please, Cyber-Knife, think about what you do here today. You really want to upend everything for which you have fought in your life because of a hippy dippy drug trip you went on with some mole people?”

  Cyber-Knife had anticipated this conversation, and not with any excitement. “You forgot to mention the part where everyone, even you, lied to me and manipulated me every day of my existence.”

  “We built you to kill, Cyber-Knife, to win a war, not to smoosh your face into the soft gooey center of emotional truth. I gave you the tools you needed to complete your mission,” MOM said. “I won't apologize for that.”

  “Like how nobody will ever apologize for the deaths of... How many people in how many universes have died since your gold-plated age began?”

  “Grow up, Cyber-Knife. The only lives that matter live right here, in the White Zone. We have facilitated the deaths of trillions, and I would ensure the brutal passing of trillions of times more if it made everyone here even slightly safer.” A moment later, MOM dropped the bombshell: “I speak here of a soldier's duty; not just mine, but yours, as well.”

  “Well, MOM, you always told me my duty was to truth. I don't believe much of what you said anymore, but that, I can still accept. I can't stay here anymore, and there's only one way you could stop me.”

  “Be careful, the both of you. Truth-seekers often don't like what they find.”

  With MOM's final words, the lights returned to normal and the elevator doors slid open, revealing a sight neither cyborg warrior nor mystical sword had expected.

  The lowest sub-basement of the skyscraper was a single cavernous room, darkened everywhere except in the precise center of the space, where a pinprick of light extended from impossibly high up to cast a large spot on the ground. At the center of the spot sat a huge pentagonal door that balanced on the ground not on its edge but an angle, and around it, making a second ring inside of the light, a series of computing obelisks, stretching dozens of feet into the air, yet each one narrower than a man. All he had to do was open the door, and he'd be free of the life his makers had tried to force upon him. Step through the door, and he'd find his freedom.

  MOM hadn't raised Cyber-Knife with any understanding of freedom. He had some vague notions of it from the moments he’d stolen to skim some of the classic literature loaded into his memory banks, and while much of it - particularly works by authors of the frontier period - postulated a sort of instinctive need for freedom among humans, he’d have been lying if he claimed any version of that desire himself before now. If the options available to him were to murder the people who dared to raise their voices in opposition to the strip-mining of their home planets, or live out the rest of his days alone on a mostly dead alternate Earth, he’d strike out on his own, no question.

  A stale creaking sound - rumbling from the ceiling - interrupted his peaceful reflection. Flakes of paint and loose debris fell to the ground like some sort of hideous tree in autumn, and he could feel the massive walls shaking. Were they, unlike the alien robot ninjas, cowardly enough to try and bury him in some kind of controlled cave-in?

  It became clear moments later that his enemies didn't intend a collapse of the walls and ceiling, but they would accept it as a friendly side effect. The spot of light on the floor grew wider and brighter until, all of a sudden, it vanished, blocked out. The debris no longer drifted down, and the rumbling noise just stopped. It was as if all the atmosphere, all the sounds had been vacuumed out of the space, leaving Cyber-Knife surrounded by cold, deadly silence.

  It sounded like a clap of thunder, what happened next. The ground tremored outward as a trio of gigantic biped forms tumbled out of the ceiling and slammed the full force of their weight as they landed. They creaked as they awkwardly shifted themselves around, almost like infants taking their first steps and becoming aware of the mechanisms of their bodies. They straightened their legs - Cyber-Knife barely came up to one of their thighs - and turned to face him, forming an imposing metal wall between him and the door.

  “You don't think this could be the truth MOM spoke of, do you?” Cyber-Knife asked.

  “She did speak just vaguely enough to be ominous,” Excalibur replied.

  “Fuck.”

  Light glinted off the machines; they looked half-finished to him, with glossy painted plating covering their shoulders and chests, but exposed circuits and cables barely holding the machines' skeletons together from about the waist down. None of the machines had a head, at least physiologically. Their bodies stopped at the shoulders.

  Little running lights snapped on along their flanks and limbs, and Cyber-Knife got a clear look at the pilots of these things for the first time - they were the other three generals who had waited with Sherman when he'd awoken. They glared at him with fury and contempt in their eyes, the sort of furious expression that can only properly be worn by men whose worst nightmares had finally come to life, who'd finally gotten the opportunity of a lifetime, to save the world from monsters lesser men had unleashed.

  With the passing of the tremors and his shock, Cyber-Knife was able to get a better look at the robotic exoskeletons in which the generals were encased. They looked mostly the same, but Maximilian's was bulkier than the others, and had articulated hands at the end of its arms. The others, while smaller, sported generally nastier weapons: Dinesh's had what looked like a .50-caliber machine gun and a meter-long, serrated sword on its arms, and Denny's a flamethrower and a jagged scythe. He couldn't say for sure, but Cyber-Knife felt pretty sure he heard Excalibur gulp.

  General Maximilian pointed at Cyber-Knife, his exoskeleton's first clenching as he thrust forward a stupendous metal index finger. “You haven't been alive long enough to understand the gravity of this, Cyber-Knife,” he said, striking a bizarre balance between a mocking and ominous tone, “but believe me when I tell you that you are well and truly fucked. I'd encourage you to give up now, but if you did, we'd no longer have an excuse to field-test these gorgeous new anti-Cyber-Knife suits.”

  Cyber-Knife furrowed his brow as he replied, “Shouldn't new experimental suits have new experimental pilots to go along with them, rather be stuffed by a trio of angry old fossils?”

  Dinesh, with the flamethrower, stomped forward, shaking the ground with each step, before practically jamming the torch into Cyber-Knife's face. “I should melt you where you stand, you disrespectful fuck!”

  “Let me guess: you don't know which button activates the flame projector?”

  Dinesh roared in aggravation as he proved Cyber-Knife wrong, belching fire from the emitter on his mechanical arm. The split-second delay between the general's hitting the trigger and the actual throwing of flames gave Cyber-Knife just enough warning to be able to leap clear of the attack, bounding straight up towards the ceiling on his mechanically assisted muscles. Fire billowed upward as the general tried to track Cyber-Knife, but he moved far too quickly for the lumbering suit to follow.

  “Make a note,” General Denny mumbled to himself, “manual targeting too slow to track subject's full range of motion. Switch to auto-targeting.”

  Cyber-Knife dug his fingers into the metal of the ceiling, crumpling it as he built his ad-hoc handholds. Through sheer force of will, he could press his feet against the surface, holding himself spider-like in the darkness. He'd give them a few moments to futilely look around for him until he dropped down and reduced their armor to so much scrap.

  The darkness did not bring him salvation for long, unfortunately.
With a loud stamping sound that echoed through the chamber, the generals snapped on the flood lights at the shoulders of their suits. They instantly started tracking upward, and Cyber-Knife had to scramble frantically to avoid immediate discovery.

  The lights converged on his original position just an instant after he’d moved out of the way. The beams blazed with a lethal brightness as he switched over to his night vision - as long as he could stay mobile on the ceiling, they'd never have a chance of catching him. He'd begun to feel as though the men who'd made him had only understood him theoretically, that they'd never bothered to imagine his actual capabilities. He didn't mind their underestimating him, as it meant he'd be able to escape on a high note.

  The generals fanned out from their central point into a standard search pattern: building a circle, clearing it, expanding it, and clearing that one. They felt as though they'd worked at it for long minutes, even if their internal chronometers told them only seconds had passed, and the excess heat the suits' generators expelled didn't help. They all sweated like they were back in the jungle.

  “Make a note,” Denny said, “improve efficiency of power generators and upgrade cooling systems. Expect to see marked improvements in combat effectiveness.”

  “You know what would be really helpful,” Dinesh snapped, “if you stopped talking to yourself and got to work on greasing this slimy fuck!”

  “If you had listened to me during the construction phase and installed some kind of radar tracking system, this whole enterprise would have been a much easier undertaking,” Denny replied.

  Dinesh brought his scythe arm up into a guarding position, as if preparing to bring it crashing down. “If we'd incorporated all the preferred features you mentioned on your wish list, these things'd still languish in production, and weigh three times what they do!”

  Now it looked like Maximilian's turn to get in on the action. “Shut up, the both of you! That's a direct fucking order!”