“Hel,” said Orissa, stuffing the sleeping bag in her pack. “One el, as in the Norse god of the dead. Machines seem to take inspiration from human culture. Mythology in particular. I don’t know what they’re doing all the way out here. They should be bussing in Machines from the salt mines twenty miles north of Twilight Garrison. There are enough Machines in stasis there for the next six months. We’re twenty miles south.”
She rifled through a side pocket of her backpack and pulled out two plasma cartridges that looked as if they’d been dyed in pools of plague.
She shoved them at Leon. “Take these.”
“Wait,” said Leon. “You said most Machines are in a stasis. What’s going on here?”
Annoyed, she pushed the cartridges into Leon’s stomach. “Would you just take these? It’s plasma mixed with neuromlyx acid. Burns through the heavy nano-armor coating of Primes.”
Leon grabbed the cartridges but never took his eyes off her. “Orissa, there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“There are a lot of things I haven’t told you,” she snapped, taking out another cartridge identical to the ones she gave Leon. She loaded it into her submachine gun. “We’ve only just met. Should I tell you my favorite food? Or would you like to know my favorite way to get off?”
“Oh, sure. All those things are equatable.”
Orissa rolled her eyes. She strapped the submachine gun over her shoulder, tightened her belt, and hefted on her backpack. “Follow me.”
Leon grabbed her arm.
She ripped it away. “Do not touch me,” she growled. Regret instantly softened her face. “Just… follow me and let’s get this vehicle.”
“What makes you think it’s going to come back this way?”
“Helriders are used to transport Machines. They’ll be coming back, trust me. If we succeed, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” She paused. “Within reason.”
“Is this like a genie in the bottle type of thing? Do I only get to ask three questions before I run out of answers?”
“Don’t press your luck, Leon Imus.”
He snorted. “We’re about to go toe-to-toe with a Prime. I feel like my luck’s already being pressed.”
Best hope it’s a red-eyed Prime and not a blue one, thought Orissa.
Chapter Six
Running through a dark forest and huffing pine into his lungs, Leon ejected the standard plasma cartridge from his rifle and slammed in one mixed with neuromlyx acid.
“So, what’s the plan? Have you got a plan?”
“Of course I have a plan,” said Orissa.
He waited, but she divulged nothing more. So he pressed her, because she was just so fond of nagging.
“Which is…?”
“You really need to learn how to shut up for more than two seconds,” she snapped, adjusting her bandanna.
“And you need to learn to be more forthcoming.”
To that, Leon imagined her rolling her eyes. She’d perfected the art of eye rolling, of stinging retorts and verbal lashes. But, then, Orissa had been by her lonesome for a long time, never another soul to confide in, another voice to comfort her. Humans aren’t compatible with isolation, but they are adaptable. You grow accustomed to things, even the bad things.
So Leon understood her annoyance and agitation. He got it.
Still made her dreadfully insufferable at times.
They broke through the tree line, coming to a field of curly stalks that wrapped around their boots like snakes lying in wait. The moon was a fishhook in the sky, passing between gray clouds.
Orissa had her head down, sniffing about like a hound.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Tire tracks.” She wheeled around, looking back into the forest. There was wildness in her eyes. She was laser-focused, determined. She shouldered off her backpack and barked at Leon to come assemble a grenade launcher.
“You have a grenade launcher in your backpack?” This he had to see. He walked over and took the pack by its hook-strap, getting a feel for its weight. It nearly pulled him to the ground. “How the hell do you lug this thing around?”
“By putting one foot in front of the other,” she hollered back, jogging back to the trees. “Just get that thing together. I’ll be back.”
He looked over his shoulder to see her clambering up a tree with surprising finesse. She’s like a spider, he thought.
Leon dug through the backpack, shoving aside a sleeping bag, a utility belt, four skinning knives—who needs four knives?—a pistol, and several grenades the size and shape of eggs. Finally, at the very bottom, he found a disassembled gun, its parts bundled together by leather strapping.
He dropped it on the ground and gave it a once-over. There were four components, and it appeared they slid into one another in interlocking fashion.
Can’t be very reliable, he thought. Or durable. But if you need a grenade launcher in a snap, I guess there’s not a better alternative.
Without much difficulty, he assembled the gun, giving each component a slight tug to ensure they were properly fitted.
“Good,” said Orissa from behind him. She stole the launcher from him, zipped up her pack, and threw it over her shoulder. “Follow me.”
They came to a towering white pine, several thick branches within arm’s reach. Orissa secured her pack over both shoulders, then glanced back at Leon.
“We conceal ourselves up there until the Helrider comes back through. Then we’re going to load the launcher with an electromagnetic pulse grenade, and you’re going to shoot it.”
She reached for the lowest branch and pulled herself up.
“Two questions,” said Leon, spotting her a sizable head start before climbing up after her. “How do you know the Helrider’s coming back this way?”
“It will.”
“We’ll ignore that mysterious answer for now. Next question: I’m going to shoot it?”
Pine needles rustled from above. “Yes, you. Are you afraid?” Was that a touch of humor in her voice?
Leon tested the strength of a thin, forked branch. Seemed sturdy enough. “Unsure,” he said, hoisting himself up. “Let’s put it that way. Can’t say I’ve ever fired a grenade launcher before.”
“You’re better with guns than—” Orissa grunted, scaling higher into the tree. “Than me.”
“Flattery won’t… oh, who am I kidding. It’ll get you far.” Leon slapped his hand on the next branch and made a face as sap smooshed into his palm like syrup.
“It’s not flattery,” Orissa claimed. “Your poise, your stance, the way your fingers move on the gun… you’re a natural. Were you in the military?”
Leon spat out a mouthful of pointy needles. “Assuming I had a life before this one? How am I supposed to know that?”
“What do your dreams tell you?”
He went silent for a while. This was a topic he didn’t care to broach. His dreams were his own. Nightmares was what they really were. “Yeah, well. Dreams aren’t real accurate.”
Orissa snorted and said nothing more. Once they were both in position on a fat branch with swollen knots, they sat back against the trunk of the tree. Orissa unzipped her backpack and came out with a small grenade. She loaded it into the launcher.
“There’s only one,” she said. “So don’t miss.”
Leon went to take the launcher, but she caught him around the wrist, squeezing hard.
“You’re wrong by the way.” She stared at him. “Dreams… our dreams are the only way to know who we are.”
Our, thought Leon. She doesn’t mean humans. She means us. The Rogue Hunters. He quietly took the launcher and aimed down the iron sights. Something familiar stirred in his mind, a slumbering instinct suddenly awoken. He touched the spot between his eyes; felt like a white-hot fire was burning there.
He caught Orissa staring at him, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.
“What?”
Her eyes drifted away, toward the field. She pulled up her bin
oculars.
“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance,” said Leon, “but this electromagnetic pulse grenade. What kind of radius does it have?”
“Twelve feet. Big enough.”
“How long does it incapacitate them?”
Orissa lowered the binoculars. “Not long enough. The blast is only powerful enough to disable lesser military-class Machines for fifteen to twenty seconds. For Primes… about seven seconds. And it doesn’t interfere with their communication.”
Leon had his mouth open, readying a remark about how every Machine in the world would zero in on their location within a tenth of a second upon engagement. But he bit his tongue as Orissa sorted through her backpack. He might not know her secrets or anything about her beyond the surface level, but he knew enough that she wouldn’t go into a situation so unprepared.
She held up an egg-shaped silver grenade. “Quantum Disruptor,” she said.
“A relic of the Rise,” replied Leon, having seen Quantum Disruptors mentioned in texts about humanity’s struggle against the Machines.
“Rarer than astatine,” said Orissa. “I’ve only found two. This one’s been at my side for nearly a year. Once you fire the EMP, I’ll detonate this near the Machines. Then we unload on them and take them down as fast as we can. Spare nothing.”
Leon wouldn’t normally argue with the brutal killing of Machines, but there was an easier way. “Why not just jack the Helrider while the Machines are stunned by the EMP and unable to communicate?”
Orissa explained that Quantum Disruptors only worked for a short period of time. Upon detonation, they disrupted the Machine’s entangled quantum objects, severing their connection to the Machine Network. However, the Machine’s antivirus suite acted to scrub the disruption—usually within two to four minutes.
That wasn’t much time to take down a Prime. But it was all they had to work with.
“I’m heading down,” said Orissa, reaching for a branch with her foot.
“Wait. If that Helrider is hauling more Machines back, what’s to say we’re not going to be up against two Primes? Or three?”
Orissa fell deftly onto the branch below. “Machines that awaken seem to suffer from inertia. They don’t function properly. The ones that were taken back to Twilight Garrison were pushed through a repair and refit station before their baseline functionality returned.”
“Yeah, you’re certainly going to owe me some answers after this is all over.”
“Only three of them.”
“What?”
“Only three questions,” she said. “That’s how the genie works, right?”
Leon caught a smile as she descended, pine needles obfuscating her face.
So she does have a sense of humor.
“Here they are,” whispered Leon. A breeze gusted by, and the great conifers that curtained him in answered with a swish of their needles.
The numbers appearing in the right lens of his binoculars said the Helrider cresting the hill was .9 miles away. That number dropped by .1 every five seconds.
He holstered the binoculars in his belt and took aim with the grenade launcher. Nerves should have rattled him right down to the bone. He was sitting in the cradle of a tree, forty feet off the ground, looking out over old-fashioned iron sights. The vehicle and its occupants he was to paralyze with an electromagnetic pulse grenade were traveling far slower than the supposed maximum speed of one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Still, he had to be careful. Had to take his time.
If he missed, he and Orissa would be knee-deep in shit.
Neck deep, actually.
Despite this, a warm calmness came suddenly over him. He was prepared. It was as if he’d done this very thing a hundred times before.
I guess your trust isn’t misplaced, he thought, side-eying Orissa. He could barely make out the silhouette of her slender figure at the edge of the tree line. The Machines wouldn’t see her, unless they activated their infrared sensing. That required greater processing power, however, and generally wasn’t triggered without reasonable suspicion.
The Helrider was less than half a mile away now. It looked like a comet screaming across the field, scorching blue flames firing from twin engines.
In the passenger seat, a Machine that Leon couldn’t yet identify. The one driving, however… it made his heart thump in his chest. If the ancient Greek gods took on the form of metal, he imagined this would be what they looked like.
The Prime was a frame of titanium, chromium, and steel alloy. Lightweight and agile, yet providing fair resistance to impact—if a plasma blast managed to get through the Machine’s nano-armor, which provided extraordinary shock absorption and near impenetrable shielding.
It was said that a Prime could stand in the detonation radius of a thermal grenade and walk out the other side unharmed. That was true. Leon had seen it with his own eyes.
Hunting a Prime was the only time the Directive Machine had provided him with a weapon besides a plasma rifle. The gun in question weighed over a hundred pounds and had to be positioned on a tripod. The kickback was such that it annihilated the innards of the gun, twisting metal fragments into themselves and spewing them like lightning bolting through a tree.
The blast had knocked Leon unconscious, despite having worn Machine-provided ear protection.
The Helrider approached and Leon aimed. Two Machines lay in the rear bed, immobilized from their stasis.
“A little further,” he whispered. “Come on. Keep coming. There you are—there you go, you son of a—” He pulled the trigger.
The grenade spun through the air. Leon held his breath.
As the Helrider passed, the grenade landed near the undercarriage. A cloud of colorful electricity violently exploded. Arcing blue bolts corkscrewed with yellows and reds, the air erupting in a vibrant crackling.
The vehicle lurched forward, skidding to a stop. The momentum tossed the Machines from their seats and they rolled across the tufted field.
From the trees sprinted Orissa, fisting the Quantum Disruptor.
Leon began his speedy descent from the tree. High above the ground with nowhere to seek cover was not a place one should be when in a firefight with a Prime.
The hunks of metal were paralyzed, unable to react as the Quantum Disruptor bounced once and opened with a release of invisible energy.
Leon was hanging from the lowest branch, ready to drop when he heard plasma blasts erupt one after the other. They looked like virulent green pearls discharged from the barrel of Orissa’s submachine gun, rupturing in an explosive clap against the prone Prime’s nano-armor.
Falling to a crouch, Leon straightened himself and unshouldered his rifle. He brought the scope to his eye and centered the red dot on the smaller Machine.
With the repeated pull of the trigger, he unleashed a barrage of neuromlyx acid-infused plasma rounds into the bot. Each shot ate through the Machine’s titanium armor, exposing a webbing of cords and circuitry.
“Focus on the Prime!” cried Orissa.
Leon paid her no mind, lining up one final shot on the smaller Machine. He ignored the aim assist, which was optimized first for the most accurate shot, and then for the most lethal. The latter didn’t take into consideration the exposed electronics of Machines, however.
Centering the crosshairs over the gaping, smoking hole in the bot’s structural plating, Leon fired.
“Boom,” he whispered with a smile as bits of gold and copper showered like confetti into the air.
His smile vanished fast as the Prime began to rise. The hulking Machine had a single arm. In the place of its other hung a massive rotary gun.
A socket was centered in its face and held a blue crystal; Leon had never seen one that color before. Hadn’t seen a color except red.
Orissa was hauling ass toward him, her body twisted, gun aimed at the Prime. She held the trigger down till her plasma cartridge went click click click.
She ejected it and slammed in another from her pocket.
&n
bsp; “Shoot the fucking Prime!” she barked hoarsely.
Leon ignored her once more. Right now, he was trapped in the heat of battle. An exchange of insults didn’t matter. He knew what he did was right. You thin the herd, then unleash your full might on the essential target.
He unloaded an entire plasma cartridge into the Prime by the time it had straightened and oriented itself toward him. The neuromlyx acid chewed through a small portion of its nano-armor, but far less than he expected of two full cartridges.
Spinning around behind the white pine, Leon ejected the cartridge just as Orissa hurried in beside him, back against the trunk.
“You ever go up against a blue-eyed Prime?” asked Orissa, huffing air. A strand of silken black hair lay across her eye. She puffed it away.
“Never.”
A noise droned from the field. It sounded like the whirling of gears, a centrifuge firing up.
Orissa’s eyes widened. “Run,” she gasped.
She grabbed Leon’s hand as hell rained upon them. An unending cluster of plasma torpedoed through the forest. The bright red bursts bore through tree trunks, set fire to branches of pine needles. Chunks of dirt and debris showered across the forest.
When the calamity ended, Leon and Orissa miraculously were missing neither flesh nor bone.
She stopped dead. “Now’s our best chance.” She swung around a tree and let loose with the submachine gun at her hip.
Leon’s lungs burned so badly he could barely breathe. And for a moment, upon locking eyes with the Prime, he didn’t. The barrel of the rotary gun burned with the red of embers. It was overheated, but the cooldown wouldn’t take long.
It never did.
Leon tapped the trigger of his rifle as fast as he could, taking the cartridge from 100% to 25% before finally—finally—spotting daylight in the Prime’s armor.
“No no no,” murmured a suddenly panicked Orissa.
Was her gun jammed? Had she been shot and neither of them realized it until now? He looked to her for answers, but she was rifling through her pack.
He glanced at the Prime to see it held in its hand the blue crystal from the center of its head. The Machine dropped it on the ground and a spherical shield rose up around it in a five-foot diameter.
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 5