The Battle of Broken Moon

by Michael E. Gonzales

  Nearly ten minutes passed in absolute silence. The message light illuminated on the RT-135. Susan pressed the acknowledge button, and the RT unit went dark.

  The cold was now making itself felt, and in minutes, the temperature had plummeted to one hundred six degrees below zero, Celsius.

  After forty minutes, we began to hear a hissing; then in the distance, the sound of the alarm. Warm air was being rocketed into the dome. Warmth began to return to our bodies. Susan had lay down next to me during this time as we tried to share our body heat, which was artificially maintained at 37 degrees Celsius.

  When we had, at last, warmed to a point where we could make our limbs move, Susan tried to rise to assist me.

  "Matt, when Mamat stabbed me, he severed several command links to servos in my right leg. I can't make it respond at all. What's your condition, baby?"

  I noted several red indicators in my field of vision, but the one that caught my attention was the one with the flashing red letters: "POWER LEVELS CRITICAL!"

  I just shook my head and smiled at her.

  "Honey? Talk to me!" she pleaded.

  Just then, the RT-135 alerted us to another message. Susan answered it and put it on speaker. Again, the voice was broken and distorted. "Susan, is that you?"

  "Yes, who is this?"

  "Are...still on top the hosp—" The signal was weak and breaking up.

  "Yes, who are you?"

  "This is...and we...coming for you. Remain...almost—"

  "Hello, hello?" We had lost the signal.

  I looked up at Susan and smiled best I could. With my left hand, I stroked her cheek. She took my hand and I heard her say, "Stay with me darling, stay with me."

  The warning "POWER LEVELS CRITICAL!" continued to flash in my vision.

  The alarms had all silenced. A new sound filled our ears, the steady drumming sound of metal against metal, faster, louder, and closer. It was coming from the direction of the fire escape. I looked over, and there, striding toward us, was a fearsome sight. A metal skeleton with what appeared to be tattered bits of flesh and clothing clinging to it. It was heading right for us.

  "POWER LEVELS CRITICAL!"

  My vision started to go tunnel on me, my eyes closed. I forced them open just in time see the metal monster reaching out for me, then my world went black.

  Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I heard Susan's voice scream, "Matt!" Then, as if from the back side of the Moon, I heard her voice one last time, "Stay with me darling, I love you!"

  Chapter 21

  A Glimpse Beyond

  Darkness swirled all around me like a thick, inky cloud. I must have been dreaming though, because I saw Sanyo coming at me with all his various arms extended; he was charging me with a bayonet in each claw-like hand. I saw Pegram killing Colonel Wayne with a wallet he had gotten from McGregor. I was in an LPC watching a nuclear missile rocket toward JILL when behind me, Freya—or Hella—was firing at me with an AK. I jumped at her and as we hit the floor of the LPC, she kissed me—it was Susan. She looked up at me, smiling. "I fell in love with you," she said.

  "Just one more time I want to look into your eyes and say I love you."

  "Mathew, you just did. Mathew, Matt, can you hear me darling?"

  I opened my eyes and looked about. I was in the RMB in sector nine—again. Doc was in the room, busy at a table. Holding my left hand was Susan, and she was standing on both legs. Beside her, stood a wounded and bandaged man I did not immediately recognize.

  "Dolph?" the word sort of squeaked out of my throat.

  "Hallo mein Freund," he said. His head, right arm, and both hands were heavily bandaged. There was no hair on his face; his eyebrows, eye lashes, and his mustache were gone. It was clear he'd been badly burned.

  Behind him in a computerized wheel chair, his right leg in a brace and pneumatic cast was Walker. He rolled up and took my other hand. "Hey buddy, would ya look at me? I'm gettin' more like Sanyo and Oscar every day.

  "Where is San—"

  "Be quiet, Matt," Doc said rolling up. "We have you on a remote power supply that, itself, is not at a hundred percent. Matt, you have been critically damaged. I am about to perform a procedure that should really only be attempted at the JPL where they have the equipment. Regardless, you and I are going to make history here at our little maintenance bay on the Moon. You should know, this is a very risky procedure, there is a chance you might not make it."

  "I...trust...you," I managed.

  "Shhh. I'll give you a minute with your friends here, then we'll get started. Try not to speak or move too much." He rolled back to his work table.

  Susan leaned down and said, "Look, Matt." She stepped aside. Behind her were the surviving bots from the battle at the hospital, and all six of the other SUBs: Marc, Emily, Jan, Mitch, Juan, and Cassie. All showed signs of various wounds. Also present were eighty-four Bios. Jim Hartly stepped forward and looked down at me. "I'm sorry," he said, "that all of us couldn't be here, but there are forty-six still in the hospital. They all wanted to be here. You—all of you—saved us. Thank you. And ah, I'm sorry, too. I didn't know you were a ro—I mean, a Cyberneticly Enhanced and Uploaded Human Being." He rubbed his finger under his nose, and then stepped back.

  On my other side, I heard that metal-against-metal drumming again, much slower this time. I turned my head and there was the metal skeleton. But now I saw above his skull an identifier, "LCDD - CYB - 873 - E4 Nare, William C." It was the SUB who had shouted at us to run when the defenses at sector nine fell.

  He saluted me, an odd thing to see this metal skeleton, whose "bones" encased all his cybernetic components, saluting.

  I smiled up at him and said, "Thank...you...William."

  He leaned in and said, "Just call me Bill, Skipper."

  Doc rolled back up. "That's enough. I have to start now."

  Susan leaned down and kissed me. "I'll be waiting for you, darling." I watched as she headed for the door where she stopped, and looked over her shoulder at me and presented me with a brave smile, but I knew she was greatly worried.

  The door closed. Only Doc and three other SUB tech bots remained to assist him.

  "Matt, I am going to replace your G-Buc. This will take about eighteen hours, if everything goes right. After which you'll go directly into a recharge stasis tube to receive a full recharge. This, as you know will take about twenty-four hours. If I fail, you'll awaken in a better place much farther from Earth than the Moon. If I succeed, you'll find yourself back here in this crumbling lunar ruin, in the bosom of your friends. Good luck to us both."

  With that, I again slid into darkness. A deeper darkness than I have ever known. There were no dimensions, no up or down. There existed no time nor a measurement for it, and no feeling of the passage of time. There was, however, pain; the pain of unresolved issues. The pain that comes with knowing those you love are in danger and you are powerless. And the pain of longing that comes from loving someone far away and knowing you might never see them again.

  My consciousness seemed not to be my own. I wanted to call up pictures of Susan, but could not. Then my ability to want left me, all desire and hope fled from me. I felt all that was me slipping away, and what had seemed dark became bright, compared to the black pit I now plummeted into.

  A frosty shadow sank into my soul like a corpse had reached into my chest and wrapped its cold, dead fingers around my heart. But I had no heart. I felt as if I was moving—not in any specific direction—just that I was moving.

  A light appeared in the distance, a tiny pinpoint of light. I was fascinated by it, as a kitten is by a laser light or, perhaps more appropriately, a moth to a flame. I felt drawn to it, and I'm sure I was headed toward it at an unearthly rate of speed. It was growing larger and brighter and as it did, I felt warmth radiate from it. This warmth was not like that from a fire, it was the same warmth I received from Susan. It was the warmth of love, an intense, all-consuming love.

  The light began to spiral, like water
going down a drain. I rushed eagerly toward it, in breathless anticipation of joining with it.

  Then I heard a voice…the one voice that had any chance of halting my progress toward this pinnacle of love and peace.

  "Mathew, please come back to me. I'm waiting for you." It was Susan.

  In my mind, there came an illumination, and from it, I understood that it was all right, that I could go back. I knew the light would be there for me, sometime in the future.

  As I looked toward the warm, inviting brilliance in front of me, a beam, a glowing white-hot rod of light shot toward me like a bolt of lightning and struck me square in the chest. I suddenly got a feeling as if I'd held my breath for a very long time, and then gasped and felt the cool, sweet air fill my lungs.

  My eyes popped open. On my right, Susan was holding my hand and on my left, Doc had a manipulator on my shoulder. Susan's eyes were again over-lubricating as she threw her arms around my neck. "Thank God," she said.

  "Yes, indeed," I responded.

  I was lying on one of those gurneys in a recharge chamber, the glass tube at my feet.

  Susan helped me sit up. Again, I felt like I'd been on a six day drunk and a five day hangover. "Oh, damn," I said, holding my head.

  Nearby, stood a familiar CYB-tech robot, who said, "I warned you last time, did I not?"

  "Yeah Louie, you warned me," I replied.

  He turned and slowly rolled toward Susan and me saying, "I was on the right flank of the second wave. Fighting was rather light there. Inside the hospital, I didn't even see one of the terrorists until we made our stand at the shelter, and then they ended their brutal attack for no sound reason. I was sure they were about to walk over us, when suddenly they withdrew. I only just learned they left us to go attend to you two. I also just learned what you two accomplished and endured for us. Thank you." And he rolled away.

  ○O○

  An hour later, I was sitting at a table in a conference room with walls cracked from the quake and three bullet holes in the door from the battle for sector nine. I was just starting to feel better, slowly recovering from the effects of the operation and recharge.

  At the table sat Dolph, whose bandages made him look like a partially unwrapped mummy, Walker in his wheelchair, Marc, Emily, Jan, Mitch, Juan, Cassie, and of course Susan, holding my hand. Doc was present as was Bill, who was no longer a skeleton. The bots at the RMB had restored to him a near human-like, if hairless, appearance.

  "You'll have to trust me, but I was a much better looking guy before," Bill said. "But it looks better than ‘Mister Bones’, eh?"

  "I have assured William," Doc said, "that when we get him back to the JPL in California, they will restore his original visage to him."

  I pulled up my shirt and looked where I had been stabbed.

  "You'll see no scars, Matt," Doc said. "Repairing skin is a simple matter. What lay beneath that skin was the problem."

  "What happened, Doc?"

  "Suffice it to say that you had damage for which I had no replacement parts. All the other SUBs ran back to sector zero and retrieved the required parts from Samuel Bixby."

  I looked up at the ceiling then back at everyone else. "So I had Guō Han's clothes on my back, Sam's parts inside, and the blood of hundreds of Bios, bots, and SUBs on my hands."

  "Darling, don't do that. We, all of us, fought for each other just as we had done in Oceania. No difference."

  "One difference," I said. "One that Colonel Wayne warned me of. This time, I was giving the orders."

  Everyone was quiet a moment.

  "Dolph, I assume that was you on the RT-135?"

  "Ja, it was me."

  "What the hell happened to you? How did you—"

  "It was all Willie, here," Dolph said, referring to Bill. "We were standing by the barricade, and when the missiles started to explode all around us, he grabbed me and pushed me under something. As you saw, he had all his epidermis blown off, so when the enemy overran us, he just played dead. When they had passed, and moved into dome one, he came and got me. I had been burned and was in great pain. He took me to the RMB where he rubbed some thick milky substance on me that deadened my pain."

  "Cybernetic packing grease," Bill said. "It has a nano-robotic neurotransmitter for the shipment of Bio-tech."

  "It killed the pain," Dolph continued, "though it made me look, ah...entsetzlich?"

  "You looked appalling," I translated.

  "Ja, danke. Anyway, it permitted me to proceed. We needed a method to stop all of them at once. Willie came up with this plan after reviewing some blueprints. We discovered a secondary control room near the top of the dome. We learned that each dome has one. Mostly, it is for the control of minor systems like lights, air quality sensors, and monitoring things like airlock doors. These systems are completely automated; the little chambers are for maintenance and calibration. But Willie, here, hacked into the system and caused both airlock doors to become open at once. I would not have believed it possible."

  "Well, it worked, Bill," I said. "We owe our lives and our success to you two."

  "Please, Skipper, it was a team effort. The whole crew contributed."

  "You're a Navy man, aren't you?" Susan asked.

  "Yes, ma'am!" he said emphatically.

  She smiled back. "Anchors aweigh," she said, and they fist-bumped.

  "Well, thank God it's over," I said. That's when I noticed the shifting eyes and turning heads. "What?" I asked.

  "I'll tell him," Bill volunteered.

  "Tell me what?"

  "We haven't found Pegram. Being a SUB, he most likely survived the decompression, but we can't locate him."

  "Oh, crap. He's been running around out there for twenty-four hours?"

  "Forty-two, actually," Doc corrected.

  "Forty-two hours? What the hell has he been doing all this time?"

  "Whatever it is, it can't be good," Walker voiced what we were all thinking.

  "We’ve had patrols out looking for him, and we posted a guard at sector zero," Susan said. "After many hours of searching, we now know where he is not; he is not in any of the remaining habitable domes. He must be in the BSC. And that search could take a month or more, even with my knowledge of the place."

  "What the hell is he up to?" I asked. "What vulnerabilities is he aware of? Where might he go to affect the most damage on us?"

  "One of the nuclear plants?" Mitch suggested.

  "Some place along the power grid, surely," Emily offered.

  The guesses went on fast and furious when Susan spoke. "Wait. He's not looking to destroy the facility."

  "What's his objective, then?" I asked.

  "Matt, when you informed Pegram that his big plan would fail because the bunker was self-sustaining—not entirely true by the way—he responded by telling us that our deaths would be a great victory for him. He doesn't want to destroy JILL; he would if he could, of course. No, what he wants is to kill you and me. That he knows is within his capabilities."

  There was silence in the room. I'd been looking at Susan throughout her entire explanation. "You're right," I said softly. "You have to be right. There's all kinds of mischief he could have been doing over these past two days, but no, he's waiting on us. He can't get through all the bots and SUBs that are around us, so he's waiting."

  "And now, we have over half our strength out looking for him, leaving you two at risk," Doc said.

  "No, that's okay. If we call everyone back, he will become aware that we're on to him. We have to figure out where he's hiding and get to him before he can act on whatever plan he's been cooking up for two days.

  "Matt," Walker said, "we've been patrolling all over looking for him."

  "He's waiting for word Susan and I are out of the RMB, then he'll try to get us in a position where he can attack us. He sure as hell ain't gonna come here."

  "So you think he knows where you've been these last forty plus hours?"

  "Sure. Where else do you take a damaged SUB? Repair an
d recharge."

  "And what about him? Doesn't he need a recharge?" Walker asked.

  We all looked at one another blankly.

  "Yup," Walker said, puffing out his chest, "the guy shackled with a regular, old-fashioned meat brain does it again."

  Susan pressed a button on the table and a keyboard illuminated on the table top. In front of her, a holographic screen appeared. Her fingers flew over the keys with amazing speed.

  "I should have guessed!" she said. "There’s been one SUB recharge outside the RMB. He recharged thirty hours ago inside the LCDD barracks dome."

  "Wait, isn't that dome in a vacuum?" I asked.

  "No, it seems the file was altered to make it look like the dome was compromised. I'll wager Pegram himself made the alteration."

  "Wait. Where is Sanyo?" I asked.

  "He's one of the guards at sector zero," Juan said.

  "I think we'd better get to sector zero."

  "Mathew?" Susan was puzzled.

  "Do you remember what Pegram said—that he still had a spy, a little bot that enjoys a great deal of affection?"

  "Sanyo? I can't believe that," Susan said.

  "He was just telling me how he would be lost if you didn't pull through that procedure," Jan said.