by Scott Baron
The first vehicle came under heavy fire as soon as it cleared the corner, the pair of cannons quickly pivoting and opening fire within seconds. The heavy shielding they had mounted to it was holding up, but given the ferocity of the barrage, the question was not whether it would survive, but simply how long it would last.
Franklin’s troops gave a final shove just before reaching the intersection, releasing the second vehicle, then doubling back to join their sergeant behind the third. One of the defense cannons swiveled from the first decoy, immediately targeting the second as it joined its wheeled counterpart.
Just in time, too, as the lead vehicle was rapidly becoming Swiss cheese where the armor-piercing rounds penetrated the multiple layers of metal they’d strapped on it. With the firepower split, both vehicles almost stood a chance of making it across the boulevard.
“Go, go, go!” Sergeant Franklin urged his men as they pushed with all their considerable strength.
The rest of the team ducked low and ran alongside the third, and final, vehicle as fast as they were able as the cannons shifted focus again, now alternately targeting each of the three as they all rolled forward. The lead was in flames, its power cell pierced by a direct hit, but the third fared best of them all, benefitting the additional shielding of rolling up alongside the other vehicles, adding further layers of protection.
“I’m hit!” one of the cybernetic soldiers shouted, though he didn’t break stride. Daisy glanced back for just a split second and saw the metal man powering through the damage to keep at his task.
“Took one through his lower leg when he pushed off and it was exposed behind the shielding,” Sarah said. “Didn’t look too bad. We should be able to patch him up once we’re clear.”
Good. Can’t afford to lose anyone, especially not one of our big guns.
Rounds and shrapnel peppered the vehicles as they rolled, but aside from that one injury, the team finally made it all the way across the boulevard, intact and alive.
“Can you run?” Franklin asked his damaged compatriot as they sheltered behind a building as the defensive cannons futilely loosed round after round into the vacated armored vehicles.
“Affirmative, Sarge. I’ll be fine.”
“Good,” he said, then turned to the others. “Let’s move, people! We’re on a clock.”
For the better part of an hour, the team powered their way through the deathtrap of Billings, Montana.
With hands and rifles, they fought thinning bands of cyborgs, avoided bloodthirsty heavy equipment, and circumvented both fixed and mobile defense cannons without suffering any further injuries or losses.
When the exhausted team at long last reached the Chithiid-destroyed outskirts of town in one piece, it was finally safe to breathe a sigh of relief. Chithiid deconstruction meant the AI held no sway over that area. From then on, all that remained was to find a viable accessway to the regional transportation monorail running beneath their feet.
“Everyone, get under some cover and catch your breath,” Daisy said, scanning the area for threats. “Eat up and hydrate. We move again in ten.”
Chapter Four
“It’ll be fine, Sarge,” the sturdy metal man said, stoically. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“It’ll be fine once I say it’s fine. And I don’t know that I’d really call it a flesh wound,” Franklin shot back, looking at the cyborg’s fleshless body. “You’re going to need repairs if you’re going to operate at peak efficiency.”
“I know, Sarge. But flesh or no, it’s relatively minor damage. I’m still operating at over eighty percent.”
“Even so, I’m going to need you to take up the rear,.”
“But, Sarge––”
“It’s not a punishment. It’s just that your reactions will be slowed no matter how much you want to push through it, and should we fall under attack again, those few extra seconds that being in the rear will afford you may be crucial to keeping you in the fight.”
Daisy walked closer.
“If we find some suitable parts along the way, I’m sure I could help make some temporary repairs,” Daisy said.
“I appreciate the offer,” the damaged soldier replied. “Hopefully we can achieve our objective and make it back to Colorado Springs and just handle it there, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled for potentially useful components in the meantime.”
The team adjusted to their new configuration, the injured cyborg taking up his position in the rear with the inexperienced human contingent, then continued on their way.
Twenty minutes later, Sergeant Franklin called a halt and compared the torn-up outskirts of the city with his map of the area.
The tired humans took the momentary respite to hydrate, a few of them stripping out of their sweat-soaked shirts and swapping them for fresh ones, while hanging the wet ones to dry on their packs. Fortunately, the path ahead appeared to be sheltered from the blazing sun and would hopefully provide a far more pleasant walk.
Nature, it seemed, had reclaimed the remnants of buildings left behind in the alien deconstruction teams’ aftermath. While the Chithiid were efficient in their demolition efforts, they were also not ones to waste valuable cargo space in their hauling craft with unneeded materials. The result was an eerie scene of concrete building ruins and scattered debris that was of little use.
“Looking at the damage, I’d say we’ve been in an AI-clear area for nearly an hour. Comparing with the landmarks the Chithiid didn’t strip in their scavenging, I’d estimate we’re less than a mile from the regional transit hub,” he said.
Daisy bent down to examine something in the dirt.
“What is it, Daze?”
Looks like scat.
“Scat?”
Poop.
“Ah, gotcha. Any idea what kind?”
Don’t know, but you can see some fur and small bones in it, so whatever left it was definitely a carnivore.
“Oh, shit,” Sarah said. “I mean literally. Not another bear, I hope.”
No, it’s definitely too small for that. Nevertheless–
“Hey, guys, hold up,” she called out.
The team paused and moved in close.
“Everyone keep your eyes open moving forward. There’s an animal of some kind in the area. Carnivore, from the look of it. I don’t know what it is, or if it would even bother with a group our size, but let’s not find out, okay?”
Everyone nodded their understanding, then moved out in silence, senses on high-alert as they quietly made their way toward the increasingly lush section of the city’s remains.
Weaving their way through the overgrowth choking the ground as they followed the remnants of former roadways, the team was at least able to enjoy a brief respite from the afternoon sun, courtesy of the cooling canopy above.
The trees lining the streets, ornamental varieties that had once been manicured and neat when the city’s maintenance staff was alive and well, now towered above them, creating a verdant tunnel through the outskirts of Billings.
Daisy walked silently, her stalking skills emerging without her even consciously thinking about them. Likewise, her senses were amped up to eleven, and every twig snap from her human entourage made her wince ever so slightly.
They need to be quieter.
“Cal’s people aren’t soldiers. They’re doing the best they can, given the circumstances.”
Remind me again why I agreed to take them with us.
“Because they volunteered. And because we need the extra muscle if it comes down to it. Even lesser-skilled backup is still backup, after all.”
Point taken. I just wish we’d had a little time to discuss tactics and basic operational silence before we headed out.
“When life gives you lemons…” Sarah said.
Hey, no fair. Don’t talk about lemonade. I’m getting kind of thirsty.
“Fine. But you know the saying about––”
A piercing shriek filled the air, but not from the front of the column.
>
“Attack! Take cover!” Sergeant Franklin shouted, diving to the side as he swung his rifle to his shoulder.
The sneak attacker had dropped down from above. It was also most definitely not an alien.
“Get off me, you stupid feline!” the irritated cyborg growled at the large mountain lion attempting to chew through his neck. “Stop it!” he shouted as he finally managed to get a grasp on the writhing animal.
He flung it from his back, annoyed but entirely unharmed. The big cat landed, as they are wont to do, on its feet, surveying the group for a target that might provide it an easier lunch. Its amber eyes shifted, fixing on the nearest terrified human. With only a moment’s pause, it tensed its muscles and lunged through the air.
“Duck!” Tamara yelled to the stunned man. Somehow, the message cut through the fog of his primal panic in the face of a predator, and he turned and spun low at the last moment.
The mountain lion missed its target, barely, its claws instead finding purchase on the man’s backpack, but leaving his flesh intact. Powerful jaws bit into the pack, shaking it side to side. Acting on pure instinct and adrenaline, the terrified man slipped his arms from the straps and bolted toward the relative safety of numbers.
Numbers with guns.
The big cat was making quick work of the pack, tearing into the material, briefly getting tangled up in the remnants of the shirt that had been drying in the warm air as they walked.
Bright eyes flashed on the team, followed by a fang-baring hiss and a low growl. Not shifting its wary gaze, it began backing up, dragging the pack into the brush like a prized kill.
The sergeant took careful aim, but Daisy put her hand on Franklin’s arm and lowered his rifle.
“It’s just looking for a meal,” she said. “Don’t fire.” She turned to the rest of the team. “You hear me? Everyone. Let it go.”
“But it stole my bag!”
“It’s just a backpack, and we’re the ones walking through its territory.” She turned to face the confused stares. “Look, there’s too much killing already. I mean, sure, some things I have no problem putting many, many holes in, but not some poor cat just living its life. It’s a native, just like our people once were.”
Did that sound lame? she asked her sister.
“No,” Sarah replied. “You actually made a very good point. And look, I think they may even agree with you.”
Sure enough, eyes softened and weapons lowered as the team’s adrenaline levels slowly began creeping back toward normal.
“Well said,” Tamara commented. “Now let’s stop playing with the neighborhood kitties and get moving. We’ve still got a mission to complete.”
Daisy gave a low chuckle as she adjusted the straps of her pack, then started walking. The others quickly followed suit.
“You’re a surprising woman, Daisy,” Sergeant Franklin said. “You know, I reviewed the footage of your assault on the infected outside of NORAD’s main doors. Efficient, brutal, and very, very deadly. And yet, here you are, showing a softer side.”
“We all have one, George. And that poor thing probably just picked up our scent and thought it would score an easy meal.”
“Well, technically, I don’t have one,” he said with a little laugh as he rapped a metal knuckle on his chest plate. “Scent, that is. Though without my flesh, I suppose I don’t have a soft side anymore either, if you want to be literal about it.”
“You know, George, you’re the one person who can answer a question I’ve had running through my head for a while,” Daisy said, raising a hopeful eyebrow. “If a cyborg no longer has a living flesh covering, is it still a cyborg? I mean, by definition, wouldn’t that change to android?”
“Funny question, Daisy, but I see where it could be confusing to an organic,” he replied. “The thing to keep in mind is that we are created as a combination of flesh and metal from the first moment of our consciousness. Sure, the majority of our bodies are metal, but the flesh is as much a part of us as anything.”
“But you don’t need it to function. It’s just, I don’t know… decorative, I guess.”
“More than decorative, Daisy. It also helps us interact with humans on an even playing field without our appearance disturbing them. You’re in something of a minority, you know. While you’re at ease with our appearance, most fully organics tended to find our endoskeletons more than a little off-putting.”
“Well, you are a bit intimidating, I suppose.”
“Understandable, but we didn’t make ourselves that way. Though we were technically created, you could still say we were born to blend in. Only when the plague hit were we reduced to lesser versions of ourselves.”
“You’re not lesser, George.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, Daisy, but what you see now is not how I, or any of my men, see ourselves. We had faces unique to each of us. We had hair and skin, all of which, to us, was as much a part of us as our mechanical bits. I mean, think of it like this: What if ,out of the blue, you had to watch your friends die around you, while you were immune?”
“Pretty horrible, I’d imagine.”
“It was. Now imagine not only that, but also what it would be like to have to survive that horror while also watching your own mortal flesh disintegrate from your body and not be able to do a single damn thing about it.”
Daisy was silent a long moment as she digested his words.
“That’s…” She struggled to find the appropriate words. “I don’t know if I could have taken that, actually,” she finally said.
“And I’m glad you’ll never have to find out,” he replied. “I’m a soldier, Daisy. I’ve seen plenty of horrible things over my many years of service. Comrades killed in terrible ways, the brutal things man can do to man, but nothing prepared me for that experience. If not for the support of my men, well, I don’t know that any of us would have emerged from that one hundred percent sane.”
The two fell silent as they walked on. The metal man deep in memory, the human deep in thought. And both a bit closer than they’d been when the mission began.
Chapter Five
Bozeman, Montana, wasn’t much of a town to begin with, even before the population had been reduced to dust by the alien super plague. As such, there had never been justification or need to have a full-fledged AI of any significant class installed to oversee what the smaller units could easily handle.
“Looks like a ghost town, Daze,” Sarah said as they exited the monorail car and stepped into the relatively small arrival and transfer terminus.
Interesting choice of words, coming from you, Daisy joked back. But I see what you mean. There isn’t that feeling of destruction we’ve seen in the other cities.
“Maybe the surface is worse.”
Or maybe this place is so small and insignificant in the big picture that the Ra’az didn’t even bother coming here. Middle of nowhere, Sis. High-tech-wise, what’s there to scavenge?
The team quietly moved through the terminus, heading quickly toward the monorail line that would take them the final leg to the tiny town of Conrad. Every so often they would come across a pile of clothes, the former occupant reduced to dust centuries earlier. Aside from that, however, there were none of the telltale signs of conflict seen in other cities.
Cybernetic helpers had been a rarity in the area, aside from the few service units that helped the forestry service deal with fire suppression and control. In fact, in the entirety of their time in Bozeman so far, they hadn’t come upon a single unit, infected or otherwise.
“Daisy,” Tamara said in a hush, “this place looks unaffected. Beyond the dead people, I mean. Maybe a quick pop up top would be warranted, just to get the lay of the land.”
Daisy thought a moment, weighing their time constraints against the information they could glean prior to reaching their final destination two hundred forty miles away.
“Yeah, okay,” she replied. “Conrad’s an even smaller town, so whatever we see here, it’ll probably be even
less affected there. Plus, we might even score some useful supplies. It’s survivalist country up here––who knows what we might find.”
She turned to Sergeant Franklin.
“You okay with that, George?”
His metal arms smoothly cinched the straps of his pack tighter in one fluid motion.
“Affirmative. Sounds like a reasonable course of action, so long as we don’t delay too much.”
“All right, then, let’s make a quick survey up top. Everyone, keep your eyes peeled for weaponry, fishing or trapping gear, and any parts I might use to help our dinged-up friend here fix that hitch in his giddy-up.”
Thirty minutes was all it took to determine the sleepy berg of Bozeman held little if any use for the team, though one of Franklin’s men did shoulder a bulky coil of high-tensile cable he found in the passenger cabin of a ruined equipment hauler.
“You really going to take that?” Tamara asked, incredulously.
“Cable comes in handy,” he replied, hefting the coil.
“You’ve lost it, haven’t you?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“That’s stupid. Name one thing you’d need a cable for.”
“You don’t know what you’re gonna need it for,” he said with a shrug. “You just always need it.”
“Seriously? You’re going to lug that with you for the next two hundred miles.”
“Yeah.”
“All right, get your stupid fucking cable, then,” she said with a chuckle. “Ridiculous.”
The rest of the team only managed to scrounge up some fish hooks, but no line, and a small axe with a composite handle that had withstood the many years since it had been abandoned. Other than that, their scavenging run was a bust.
Circling back to the terminus, they quietly descended back beneath the city to continue their trip to their final stop. Once there, if they were unable to get a suitable vehicle to take them overland to the long-abandoned silo, it had the potential of being a long, and most arduous trek.