by Hayley Stone
After a few, tense minutes of combat, John says, “They’re out of commission for now, but the area’s still hot. More incoming, or else my radar’s having itself a little party. I’m going to put down just south of base entrance four and then hightail it out of here until the situation’s cooled down. If you need me, call me. I’ll be here soon as I can. But don’t expect immediate drive-through service. It might take me a few minutes. Make sure you give me a heads-up. Understood?”
“Got it,” I say, having to speak loudly over the roar of the chopper’s wings.
He lands the chopper in a patch of dirty snow, where it’s clear some machine bled. Lefevre throws back the cabin doors, letting in a white flurry of powder. “Good luck,” John says to us all, with as proper a salute as he can give sitting down. “Take care.”
“You, too,” I reply, giving him a quick squeeze on the shoulder before exiting the craft.
We move quickly. Uncovering the hatch will first take us down into some service tunnels and from there into the main base. Ideally. The layout we all memorized was a loose construction of Churchill base, courtesy of Clarence, remembered from the last time he’d visited. He helped build it before the Machinations, when it was a lab used primarily for geological study.
“Mount Churchill is a dormant volcano,” I remember him saying, as casually as if he’d remarked on the sky being gray. “I mentioned that, didn’t I?”
The base has grown and expanded since then, adapting to a different purpose, but much of the original structure is still here.
My fingers ache from the cold and a lack of circulation. I flex them a couple of times before gripping the rungs of the ladder. I’m not the first one down, nor the second, nor even the third. The order goes: Lefevre, Rankin, Ortega, me, Samuel, Kennedy, and Zelda, who brings up the rear. It’ll change and shift once we’re inside, although I anticipate some overprotectiveness from my teammates.
Well. Not from Zelda, but the rest.
I’m not stupid. I know the council gave them additional orders to watch me closely and keep me alive. As long as that doesn’t conflict with rescuing Camus or the others, I’m fine with it. The current degree of caution is almost reassuring, like being pressed between the bread of a sandwich. A sweaty, heavily armed sandwich.
With visors lowered, we communicate through comms when we need to. The descent is quiet and my world shrinks to the space of my combat suit, the only sound being my breathing and boots hitting metal rungs. The tunnel is narrow and pitch-black. I keep waiting for my night-vision sensors to kick in, but they don’t. Just my luck. I continue to breathe, slow and steady, to avoid the feeling of being trapped, buried alive. Both are real possibilities, for once, and not just claustrophobic mania.
“Well, this is nice,” I murmur, concentrating on breathing.
In, hold it, out. In, hold it, out…
The comm must be automatically activated by my voice, because Samuel replies, “Yeah. You always take us to the nicest places, Commander.”
I smile.
I don’t know how long it takes to reach the bottom, but soon I’m touching solid ground and hands grip my waist to help me safely off the last slippery rung. Ortega, I assume, since he was the one ahead of me. But I don’t know for sure, because, to my disappointment, there’s still no freaking light.
“Hey, guys, I’m blind as a bat.” I tap my helmet. “My night vision’s not working. Is there a backup generator we can switch on?”
“As long as Prince Engineer isn’t wrong, and provided it’s not broken, we should pass it on our way to the command room,” Zelda says. “You can always hold someone’s hand until then.”
I find my rifle and flick on its scope, shining the red beam on her. “Thanks for the offer,” I reply, “but I think I’ll be fine.” It’s not much to see by, but at least it’ll let me keep my dignity for a little while longer.
Darkness drags at our heels as we travel deeper into the bowels of the earth. It presses in from all sides, like a living thing. The red dot dances on ahead of our sortie, the first to find dead ends. Since the corridors are so cramped here, our shoulders continually bump against one another’s. It’s less of an inconvenience than it seems, making it easier for me to keep pace alongside Samuel and the gang. Instead of sight, I operate on what I feel, going with the flow. Still, I’m forced to rely on their instincts more than my own, knowing my reaction time will be slowed without the benefit of night vision. If anything, all this black does is give the machines the advantage, since they’re equipped with heat sensors. The sooner we shed some light on the situation—literally and figuratively—the better chance we’ll have of making it out alive.
Which is why I’m relieved when Zelda says, “Here.”
Without electricity, the door’s locking mechanism is deactivated. It still takes the combined strength of Lefevre and Rankin to push it open enough for us to squeeze through, and it protests with a screech on its track. Ortega and Kennedy keep watch at the threshold, while the rest of us follow Zelda to the generator. It’s hard to judge by a little flash of red light, but the vaulted ceiling attests to the size of the beast. I hear the gentle hum of a heating or cooling system, possibly a fan to maintain the generator’s temperature.
“Well?” I say. No one’s talking and it’s eating at my nerves. “Is there damage?”
“Some,” Zelda answers.
“Can you fix it?”
She’s silent for a while longer, then says, “Yes. I’ve worked with less. But it’ll take me a few minutes to get it up and running again.”
I try watching her work, but she complains about the light in her face. I switch it off, plunging myself back into the darkness. My other senses rush to fill in the void left by blindness. Every noise after that startles me, each a cause for suspicion. At one point, I mistake the hum-hum-hum of the rotary fan for the whir-whir-whir of a machine and raise my weapon, flicking the scope back on. The red beam shoots through the black in an instant, poking Kennedy on the forehead of his helmet.
“Hey!” he objects.
“Just trying to keep you on your toes,” I lie.
“Done,” Zelda announces a short while later. “You should know, the moment this generator goes on, it’ll be a beacon for the machines. They’ll know we’re here.”
“Judging by our welcome party, I’d say there’s a good chance they already know,” Rankin points out. “Everyone—save the Commander, of course—switch off your night vision. Once those lights go up, it won’t be a pretty sight for anyone with theirs still on.”
Zelda works whatever technological witchcraft she does and the generator lights up like a Christmas tree, all blinking blue lights on a gray metal trunk. It sounds like distant thunder as it powers on, a low growl building in volume. Within a minute, the ceiling lights begin flickering to life, like eyelids fluttering open after a deep sleep. From the door, Ortega informs us the guide-rail lights in the hallway have also come back. It’ll take time for the generator to repower the entire base, but for now the lights in the general vicinity will hopefully serve.
“Let there be light,” Zelda announces, her dark face smirking in the pale glow. Lefevre doesn’t look impressed with his sister’s irreverence.
“Company!” Kennedy cries, pulling his head inside. “I don’t think they saw me, but they’re headed this way. Three, probably more. Scouts.”
“Seal the doors,” I order. Ortega’s way ahead of me; the door squeals shut over my words. “Clarence told me there were two exits built into this room, should one be blocked by a collapse or whatever else. Look around. It has to be here somewhere. That’s our way out.”
Kennedy objects. “Why don’t we stand and fight? We can defend from here, and we outnumber them.”
“We outnumber the trio out there now,” Rankin says. “But a few brawls with them and theirs, and they’ll even the odds right quick.”
“If we stay on the move, we stay alive,” I add. “Remember, we’re not here to pick fights. We
have to find out what happened to the evac teams.”
Zelda claps a hand on her gun. “No reason we can’t do both, though.”
Most scout models aren’t nearly as dangerous as their predator cousins, but it’s easy to forget when they’re buzzing just beyond a steel door like angry wasps defending a nest. I don’t know how many inches of metal separate us from the machines, or whether it’s enough to hold them back or not, but I’m not eager to stick around and find out, either.
“The door’s here,” Samuel calls from the eastern corner of the room, partially concealed behind a fence of wires and other electronic equipment.
The sound outside intensifies.
Time to go.
Chapter 23
A second before Samuel palms the access panel, I notice what looks like a water stain at the base of the door, dark and ominous.
“Wait, Sam—” I start to say, too late.
The door opens. A body falls toward him, collapsing at his ankles. He staggers backward, but Lefevre’s there to steady him at the last moment.
Machines train their optics on us from several yards away.
There’s no mistaking that they’ve seen us, and closing the door will only trap us inside, almost certainly putting an end to the mission and ultimately our lives. That’s if we could even get the door closed in time, which seems unlikely as they acquire their targets.
I acquire mine faster, shoving into Samuel and Lefevre to fire a few shots from my EMP-G. The trio burst with static blue, but not before getting off some shots of their own. Bullets fly past me, forcing the team behind cover. One digs into the material of my suit, singeing my skin and drawing blood, but is just off course enough to avoid piercing flesh.
Rankin, Ortega, and Zelda dash past me, moving in for the kill, using more traditional weaponry to destroy the cores.
“Everyone okay?” I ask and receive the right number of affirmations.
Kennedy hasn’t moved from his spot—just a few feet away from where the corpse lies, still twitching. Newly deceased, then. Maybe there are other survivors…
The fresh horror in Kennedy’s eyes pulls me away from my cold, comfortable logic. He looks so young, I think. And afraid. I wish I could tell him I remember what it was like, the first time I confronted death. But I can’t. That part of my life is lost to me. All I know is that somewhere along the road, I learned how to handle trauma. Given enough time, I hope the kid will, too. Nothing like throwing someone into the deep end of the pool to teach them how to swim.
“Hey, Kennedy,” I say, disrupting his line of sight to the dead body by stepping in front of him. “Staying or coming?” He accepts the distraction, carefully skirting the disfigured man, an obvious victim of multiple gunshot wounds.
“I think he was trying to reach the generator room,” Kennedy says. “He almost made it. Look. He was so close.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, kiddo,” Zelda says.
“Lucky for us, we’ve got a few of the latter on hand,” Rankin adds with a grin, giving Kennedy a good-natured thump on the shoulder. “Let’s keep ’er moving.”
The dead man outside the generator room isn’t the only corpse we come across, nor are the machines we encountered outside the generator room the last we have to dispatch. Churchill consists of one massive level, as opposed to McKinley’s smaller five, resulting in a concentration of its population—and now the remnants of those who drew the short straws when it came time to evacuate. Or else those who were brave enough to stay behind to give others a chance.
The bodies are impossible to miss, lying where they were gunned down or slouched against the wall where they decided to die. Mostly men, but some women, too, all growing cold, along with my hope of encountering other survivors. After a while, we stop checking pulses. And through all this, I keep expecting to see Camus’s face in the permanently frozen features of the dead, making it especially hard to stay focused. Thankfully, he isn’t among the ones we pass.
There are other carcasses whose skeletons are metal instead of bone. Machines with their hearts cut out, gutted and broken. Seems the residents of Churchill gave as good as they got.
“Good for them,” Ortega remarks with quiet appreciation.
All the same, it’s increasingly clear to us that rescue came too late for Churchill.
We press farther in, our progress slow and cautious. The machines are more hindrance than threat as long as we catch them off guard, and most times we do. The few times we don’t leave us worse for wear, but we suffer no casualties. Not yet.
“Anyone else feeling warmer?” Rankin inquires as we near Churchill’s equivalent of our war room. He runs a finger around his collar, separating it from his sweating neck. “Someone’s turned the heaters on.” He gives Zelda a look.
“It wasn’t me,” she says, nondefensively. “The machines were in a kind of sleep mode, conserving energy. Now they’re awake and heating up the place. Standard operating procedure, since the cold slows them down.”
“How hot are we talking now?”
“They’ll run optimally anywhere between forty and one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but they can withstand up to a hundred and eighty degrees, some models even more. Thankfully, the heaters here won’t go above ninety.”
“I don’t even remember what ninety degrees feels like,” I remark.
“Texas in July,” Rankin says with a certain fondness, and a smile that speaks of summer barbeques, pool parties, fireworks. “Can’t say I’ll be too comfortable in this getup, though.”
Oh. It suddenly dawns on me. Clever robots.
“That’s the point,” I say. “They want us as uncomfortable as possible. Edgy, so we slip up.”
Zelda looks impressed with my deduction, which is as close to respect as I’m likely to get from her.
My prediction proves correct, much to our misfortune. In under an hour, the temperature manages to climb to what feels like at least seventy-five degrees, and doesn’t stop there. We start roasting in our suits, overheated by the layers beneath. They’re no longer necessary inside the Churchill sauna, but if we’re forced to make a quick exit onto the freezing tundra above, we’ll need every bit of clothing we have to survive. It’s a double-edged sword, carving pounds from our flesh in the form of sweat. I can’t speak to the discomfort of the others, but I find it increasingly difficult to breathe, pressed down by the heat.
“New Mexico,” I grumble, remembering what Camus told me. “Right. What was I thinking? I miss the cold already.”
“Can we hack into the thermostat controls from Command?” Samuel asks, pushing some of his hair back from his eyes. The strands lay flat on his forehead, matted and dark with sweat from his helmet, his cheeks flushed from the heat and exertion.
“Maybe,” Zelda replies. “But I won’t know until we get there.”
We get there soon enough. However, the doors are sealed from the inside, making getting in another matter entirely. After Zelda fails to hack the door panel, Rankin and Lefevre try brute force, but none of the three are successful. Samuel uses his head, suggesting another room to try, a military command center of sorts in the diagrams Clarence drew up. Before we can put it to a vote, something shuts off the hall lights.
I hear the clack of visors slipping down—everyone switching their night vision back on. Everyone but me. I close my eyes, once again counting on my other senses instead.
Like something out of my nightmares, the whir-whir-whir of a machine reaches my ears. Not a machine, but machines, plural. Four or five or ten; I have no way of knowing the exact number. I clutch my EMP-G, its grip and trigger greased by perspiration.
“Here they come,” Rankin murmurs. I hear his gun power on—a sound more reassuring than it has any right to be, given what it means is coming.
There’s a fraction of a second where the sound of grinding metal halts—I’m guessing the moment when the machines turn the corner and spot us.
I inhale and open my eyes a mere s
econd before the corridor shatters into a prism of light and noise.
The flashes from the machines’ muzzles give the corridor the aspect of an old black-and-white film, movement stilted and stuttering in the brief moments when a visual is made possible. There’s also the blue glow whenever an electromagnetic pulse finds its target, shocking the hall with color. Darkness waits in between, swallowing most of the action.
Are we winning?
Losing?
It’s impossible to tell.
I take cover behind an overturned trash receptacle and squeeze the trigger again. Again. Again.
As far as places to make a stand go, I soon realize this isn’t a very good one. We’re in the middle of one hall, bisected by another, with very little in the way of cover. The machines seem to understand this fatal miscalculation, and begin infiltrating our huddled mass from both the left and the right. Just to maintain our quota of consistently bad luck, we’ve walked right into a well-coordinated trap, or else stumbled into an indefensible location by mistake. The expression “like shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind.
Some of the predators, with all the innate wisdom of their programming, tire of the inefficient back and forth and decide to go in for the kill the old-fashioned way. While several up ahead keep us pinned down near the war-room door, others attempt to flank us. Some of the team shelter in the alcove of the door to avoid the maneuver. I don’t have that luxury.
I hear Samuel shout my name—
Then something slams into me with enough force to knock the gun from my hand and the air from my lungs. I twist violently, trying to break away from the metal monster, but its strength is at least twice my own. I only succeed in ripping my combat suit and worse. A painful jolt shoots through my arm and neck, telling me all I need to know about the wound.
My world shrinks to a pair of red optics and a few feet of wrestling space. The machine’s predatory features are made up of too many jagged angles to ever look friendly. And as it bears down on me, I have the terrible thought This may be the last thing I ever see. A definite downgrade from last time, and Camus’s handsome face. Even as I thrash and fumble for my weapon lying some feet away, I try to hold an image of him in my mind. I don’t want to go to the grave taking the machine’s ugly visage with me.