Survival Machines

by Ste Sharp

  ‘John?’ he whispered.

  Yarcha turned the Korax over, who jolted a couple of times before rising.

  ‘Are you injured?’ Samas asked.

  John shook his head and rubbed his throat.

  ‘Let’s get him back,’ Samas said.

  ‘And I must return my soldiers,’ the Korax said, apparently healthy again. ‘We have much to discuss.’ It scuttled off to join a cluster of Korax.

  Samas put John’s arm over his shoulder and Yarcha helped to carry him into the main cave, to the strip of floor the humans occupied in the evenings.

  ‘Keep back,’ Samas whispered at the soldiers crowding in as he gave John a drink. ‘Give him air.’

  ‘John!’ Crossley was first by his side. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Samas hushed.

  Crossley’s voice had some effect on John, who blinked and came round. He squinted, smiled and coughed.

  ‘Don’t speak,’ Samas said, eyeing the red marks at John’s throat.

  ‘What’s happened to his arm?’ Crossley said. ‘I mean the gun was useful and all, but–’ he twisted his head as he stared at John’s metal arm.

  Samas looked too. He’d always felt an affinity with John, seeing as their enhancements were similar, but had thought the changes were the endpoint, yet John’s gun-arm had completely transformed into what looked like a small, metal Lutamek hand.

  ‘It’s changed again?’ Samas asked.

  ‘Well I like it,’ Crossley said, ‘very handy.’

  John coughed in response, or was it a laugh? This was good, Samas thought. Good for morale. Another soldier in the group, adding to their numbers, and it meant there could be more out there. Soldiers who had escaped.

  ‘You’ve arrived at the right time,’ Samas said, patting the young Englishman on the shoulder. ‘Rest now and get your energy back up.’

  Samas looked up to meet the eyes of Crossley, Yarcha and the other human soldiers watching and whispered, ‘Tomorrow we escape!’

  *

  Praahs had considered not returning to the army, but knew her own Cirratus would be sent after her if she did that. She would make a good go of it – return to the lake if she had to – but that was weakness talking. As much as her survival instincts told her to hide and wait, she would have to face ’Xit, ’Brin or ’Kno-lib eventually and explain how the enemy had got away.

  They had been fast. They had been clever. They had known Praahs and her army were coming.

  Five Cirratus dead and two injured. Praahs thought about what she would tell the leaders. Images of the Brakari rebel leader ran through Praahs’ mind: the speed and agility; the flashes of lightning; the piercing calls coordinating the army, who cracked the shells of the Cirratus with vicious smashes of their hammer claws.

  Praahs and her unit ambled back to the rendezvous point at the pace of the weakest, allowing them to maintain their defensive formation at all times. They had been harried from the rear twice but repelled the enemy and expected no more attacks now they were close to the full army. The map flashed in Praahs’ mind as they climbed a long rise in the featureless landscape. Beyond, the clouds were thick, but Praahs was sure they would see the Tathon army from the summit. In her mind, she imagined the circle-shaped conclaves of soldiers resting or sleeping off the effects of their rapid enhancements. Red Comglo worms, white loping Frarex and humanoid bipeds mixed by ability rather than species.

  ‘If I come within ten strides of a human,’ Praahs remembered Panzicosta saying, ‘I won’t be responsible for my actions.’

  Praahs wondered what it felt like to have an enemy like that. That level of pure hatred. The power from that emotion would feel amazing, she thought, its strength intoxicating.

  The cap of the shallow hill curled to reveal the land beyond. The furthest stretch of desert was coated in a thick, wavering mist, but the nearer land was clear and dotted with the circular formations Praahs had expected. The sight of the huge structure in the centre of the army was not anticipated though and caused her to stop.

  ‘Leader?’ a Cirratus asked, sending a vibration through Praahs’ abdomen.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘A shell,’ the nearest Cirratus replied.

  The Cirratus had been in direct contact with the Tathon leaders all along, Praahs realised. She felt dread constrict her muscles – the leaders already knew she had failed. Her muscles relaxed – they knew but hadn’t punished her. Not for the first time, the power the Tathon had over her, and the feeling of always being an outsider, irked her.

  ‘A shell for what?’ she asked, staring at the large, clear structure which curved up from the ground.

  ‘Defence,’ came the obvious answer. ‘And a place to strike from within.’

  The shell was an immense, curved shield constructed of a clear glass which rose to over ten times Praahs’ height, resting on an array of wheels. Behind it, at its centre, stood an enormous ramming device: a huge slab of metal hanging from six hefty arms. The sharpened end of the ram protruded through a hole in the shield’s centre.

  ‘And what is that for?’ Praahs asked, staring into the mist for answers.

  ‘The leaders have found a weak point,’ the Cirratus replied.

  Praahs had no idea what it was talking about until a map flashed in her head showing their current position. It zoomed out, allowing the curve of mist to expand. Praahs recognised landmarks as it zoomed out further – the fort where she had found Panzicosta, the battle plain and her lake, surrounded by red cliffs, which proved to be at the centre of a perfect circle. The whole land was hemmed in by the circle. A border. A net.

  They had been trapped the entire time!

  ’Kno-lib’s voice filled her head. ‘And now we will break free.’

  Chapter 15

  Dakaniha stood to stretch his back. He and the rest of his farming crew had been plucking crops for half a day now and deserved a rest. Looking across the field, he could see they had a handful of rows left, so he knew the guards would work them until they were finished.

  The sound of an electric whip charging up drifted across the silent field and Dakaniha got back to work, pulling the large red tubers from the sandy ground. Each one needed leaves stripping into the sack on his back, before the swollen root itself was placed in the box he dragged along the row.

  Surely there was a better way to do this? Dakaniha thought. What with all the technology the Lutamek and countless other species within the Ascent had at their disposal.

  Today will pass, he told himself, and carried on plucking and stripping.

  He was close to the edge of the field, on the outskirts of the farm, facing the open desert. He pulled his headband down to dangle around his neck and opened his second pair of eyes. He tried not to do it often in front of the guards because, although his adaptation was nothing special, they punished anyone using their new skills.

  Dakaniha slowly plucked leaves as he scanned the horizon, his new eyes searching for life signs, when he noticed patchy nuances of colour in the soil by his feet. Nothing lived underground here, so any soil disturbance had to have been made by the farmers. He checked the nearest workers weren’t close enough to notice. Dakaniha looked down and scraped the sandy soil with his foot but couldn’t see anything. He picked the nearest tuber and stripped it, while still digging in the soil with his toe. He could tell by the colour something was hidden – there! A corner of fabric poked out. Bending down for the next tuber, Dakaniha pulled the piece of cloth free and folded it into a handful of leaves.

  Dakaniha breathed in deeply and felt his heart pick up speed. He bent down again and opened the material to see two clear words: Free Mata. He pictured the large Maori warrior who, rumour had it, was held on the other side of the farm. He’d seen guards carted off to the city bearing slash marks identical to those he’d seen on Brakari shells during the battle in the dome. When the number of injured guards slowed and eventually stopped, he had assumed Mata was dead.


  Dakaniha stuffed the cloth into a pocket and continued to pluck and strip. His mind was racing. Someone from their army had survived! They were not abandoned, as he had feared. Not only that but they were mounting some kind of resistance. But did they have a way to counter the neck pins? He pulled his headband up, tight around his head, then picked up his box and returned to the pile of crates for a rest.

  That evening, with another field harvested and the farmers finally allowed to rest, Dakaniha sat leaning on the brittle wall of his crew’s mud hut, sipping from his metal canteen. He was safe here with his back to the wall, staring up at the kaleidoscope of alien stars. His birth eyes were amazed by the clarity of the bizarre constellations and patches of colour, but his new eyes peeled back layers and created a whole new picture for him. Up there, as close as the moon back home, he saw scores of objects. Metal, if the colour match with the Lutamek was to be accepted. They each took strange orbits while others remained still and could have been mistaken for distant stars with his normal eyes.

  Talking was prohibited, yet the darkness allowed some clumps of soldiers to form and spread news or barter with their meagre rations. Sounds were magnified in the desert night. He could hear the distant laughs of the guards, the solemn whispers and moans of his fellow captives, and he could see all around him, which was why he didn’t jump when the silhouette appeared.

  ‘You have something of mine,’ the shadow said with a distorted voice.

  Dakaniha focussed and unfocussed his eyes, reading various wavelengths in the low light, until, with a flicker, he recognised the true shape and relaxed. Here was one of the most proficient warriors Dakaniha had ever seen in battle. Forget Gal-qadan, he thought, this man was one to learn from.

  ‘Free Mata,’ Dakaniha said, still looking at the stars.

  ‘When?’ the shape asked.

  Dakaniha scanned the wide fields of the farm, noting every guard’s position, and turned to face his ally. ‘With you by my side, Delta-Six, the best time is right now.’

  *

  Euryleia waited in the dark, listening to the chorus of soft breathing that surrounded her, human and tocka.

  ‘What if he doesn’t know where Mata is being held?’ Lavalle whispered, close to Euryleia’s ear.

  ‘He’ll know,’ she replied.

  They were ready to attack, to start the uprising. There was no going back. No food or water.

  Sancha had watched Dakaniha find the message and one of Cheng’s scouts was adamant he’d made contact with Delta-Six. Once freed, Mata could occupy the farm’s guards on his own, and Euryleia was confident the farmers would join their guerrilla group. It was what came next that worried her.

  A shuffling sound behind signalled the return of Cheng, who had been with the bulk of their troops beyond the nearest rocky outcrop.

  ‘My last scout has returned,’ he addressed Lavalle.

  Normally, that would have irked Euryleia but she had grown used to it.

  ‘The tocka station has been located,’ he continued, ‘in the strip between the farm and city.’

  ‘Then we can pick them up on the way,’ Lavalle said.

  They hadn’t confirmed their exact course of action after winning the farms, but Lavalle clearly had his mind set on pushing on to attack the city and free more slaves.

  ‘What is their state?’ Euryleia asked.

  ‘Many tocka are dead and the survivors are weak.’

  ‘They will need food before we fight,’ she replied.

  ‘Which they will have in surplus when we attack!’ Lavalle said with a smile, reminding Euryleia that, despite their domestic nature, the tocka were carnivorous beasts.

  She patted her tocka and asked, ‘Any sign of Althorn?’

  Lavalle breathed in before answering, ‘No. As ever, he’s scouting ahead.’

  He was clearly still perturbed by Althorn’s interaction with the British soldiers who had stalked away from the city in their steam-driven Lutamek. They needed every soldier, he reminded her on an almost-hourly basis.

  ‘Good,’ she replied, not wanting to bring up the event. ‘We should move closer to see what has been happening–’

  She was stopped by Lavalle’s hand on her arm.

  ‘Look,’ he said with a nod at the far edge of the farm.

  She squinted at the distant light, which radiated a steady glow, followed by the echo of small-scale explosions.

  ‘It has to be Delta-Six,’ Euryleia said with a smile.

  ‘He’ll draw every guard to him if he’s doing that!’ Cheng said and Lavalle nodded.

  ‘Then we must act now,’ Euryleia replied. ‘Mount up!’

  She looked at Lavalle, who seemed transfixed by the lights.

  ‘Even after all of this,’ he murmured, ‘such a vision I never thought I’d see.’

  Euryleia turned and, in the distance, saw the white, glowing shape of a man ascending into the sky. With his arms outstretched and legs straight, his body formed a cross.

  *

  Althorn ran for his life. His legs burned and his stomach tore at itself, but Althorn was running on pure adrenaline. More pain would come later, but now he just had to stay alive.

  He hadn’t meant to travel this far into Firstborn territory, where their defences grew denser as their territory tapered into the thin end of their wedge of land by the tower. The closer he got, the narrower his options for escape. He’d been spotted and managed to avoid the first watchtower, but they were all on the alert now, so he pushed on towards the tower at breakneck speed.

  His surroundings blurred as he rushed past, right up to the building he’d heard about. He slowed down to make two circuits, making sure it was empty, and then he was inside. From the outside, it looked like a rough, metal-walled shack identical to the hundreds that made up the Ascent city, only this shack stood completely on its own in the shadow of the tower. Inside, dusty steps lined with relics and rudely carved statues descended. Althorn followed them down into a cool cave that dog-legged right to where a rope hung across at waist height, designed to keep visitors – or pilgrims, Althorn imagined – from touching the main shrine. A large scoop in the rock wall was lit by a handful of orange lights, glowing like tiny setting suns around the main sculpture of two figures, hand in hand. Althorn stared at them and at the offerings of weapons and ammunition which lay about the statue’s feet. A sign above them read:

  Revere the Firstborn.

  These two? Althorn shook his head.

  A scuffling sound at the cave entrance startled him and he ducked under the rope and slipped into the shadows behind the shrine. Out of the light, Althorn controlled his breathing as he listened to the footsteps, the murmured prayers and the clatter of metal. More offerings.

  By the time the pilgrims had scuttled back up the steps, Althorn’s eyes had adjusted to the dark enough for him to see a low passage in the shadows which bent around the shrine, deeper underground. He crawled through, hoping to find a water source or discarded rations, but was greeted with another set of roughly hewn stone steps. A light further down gave shape to Althorn’s surroundings as he descended deeper, the path twisting down to yet more steps – less rough, with straight edges and a solid feel – then finally levelling off and leading him through a series of rooms to a sight that took him completely by surprise.

  ‘So that’s who you really are,’ he said and stroked the shiny metal.

  *

  Delta-Six felt nausea rise in his stomach and signalled his system to inject a 5mg medistrone burst into his bloodstream. He glanced at Dakaniha, who had all four eyes wide open and was almost panting as his pulse rate rose rapidly.

  ‘Relax,’ Delta-Six whispered. ‘We will fix this.’

  Dakaniha didn’t turn, but nodded.

  They were hidden behind a pile of crates full of the slender, protein-rich stems the Ascent farmers grew on the far side of the farm, where the soil was stonier. The smell reminded Delta-Six of the porridge they used to serve as breakfast in the Himalayan tr
aining camp, and he thought of his old unit. No time for nostalgia, he told himself, the smell would conceal their odour from alien senses, he hoped. The guards here were no different to those across the farm, but who knew what adaptations these individuals had gained since arriving here?

  Dakaniha signalled and Delta-Six watched one of the three guards stroll away, only to be replaced by a fresh guard – this one a stocky, four-legged beast. A Graifar according to the dome’s databanks, which he had been slowly digesting through his time in isolation on the farm. He’d taken his time, knowing the real reason the Lutamek had sent One-eight-seven to the dome cap with him was to limit any data he found on them. They had been clever, sending well-camouflaged mining worms into his systems to remove the knowledge, but Delta-Six’s systems had retained shadow data.

  ‘We must attack,’ Dakaniha mouthed.

  He was right, but Delta-Six wasn’t ready yet, so held up a hand. He looked at Mata’s prostrate body again: a sprawling mess of vines and roots stretched out over a ten-metre-wide circle, trapped in a series of metal straps and vices. It could have been just a bizarre plant experiment, but the tortured face at one end and the rough shape of a humanoid body at the centre proved it was Mata. Bottles of liquids bubbled beneath roots, encouraging hundreds of yellow growths, while scores of flowers and an array of bizarre fruit hung from the myriad vines.

  Mata was being harvested.

  ‘Right,’ Delta-Six whispered and projected his plan of action on the side of the nearest crate for Dakaniha to check.

  The warrior’s eyes widened.

  ‘We must fight,’ Delta-Six said, ‘and this is where the rebellion starts.’

  ‘But…’ Dakaniha gestured at the metal disc at the back of his neck.

  Delta-Six hadn’t been captured so had no explosive device nestling under his brainstem. He had given the issue a great deal of thought and created an ingenious solution.

  ‘All taken care of,’ he whispered but could see anxiety written in the Aniyunwiya’s expression.