Leon wondered if he’d ever fired one of those during the Rise. It seemed probable. Unless his rank of major general meant he wore a nice suit and commanded from behind a desk. He didn’t like the thought of that. You needed people in such roles, but… Leon wasn’t fit for them. It was killing Machines when he felt his finest moments of triumph, when his troubles went away and he had a laser-focus.
Looking back at his time as a Rogue Hunter, it was obvious he’d been a fighter once. A soldier. When he was in the hills of Utah, or in the brush of Australia, or fording a river in Asia, his finest moments came not because of the temporary freedom he’d been granted, but from the hunt. The chase. The killing of a metal fiend.
“Leon,” whispered Orissa. “Two Keeneyes are approaching.”
Keeneyes. In a firefight with military-class Machines, Keeneyes were among the easiest combatants to dispatch of. Problem was, they never came alone. Keeneyes were scouts, their processing devoted primarily to sniffing out enemies. They had twelve legs, crawling about like misshapen spiders. At the end of each were sensors which could detect movement from half a mile away. Within a fraction of a second, they parsed this information and could determine the taxology of what made that movement.
To stay perfectly still didn’t guarantee safety. Keeneyes had an array of sensors embedded in their heads, ranging from LiDAR to infrared vision.
Leon gestured out silent orders. He’d take the left side and Orissa the right. They’d stay put until they made visual contact with the Keeneyes. The desk provided cover from their sensors, so to spot them the Machines would have to pass by.
Keeneyes were equipped with taser-like weapons, so Leon and Orissa would have to be quick on the draw. But the elimination of these Machines didn’t cause him much anxiety; it was the aftereffect that had him gnawing his thumbnail down to the skin.
Neither he nor Orissa had silencers on their guns. Even if they did, there was no hiding an abrupt disconnection of a Machine from the Machine Network. As soon as the Keeneyes went down, there’d be a swarm of Primes, Ballistics, Duelists—every damn hunk of walking metal that was out there would bore down on them like an unholy storm.
Even if Droll commandeered a ship right this instant, their exit would be blocked by tens or hundreds of Machines.
The clacking Keeneyes scuttling into the lobby turned his knuckles white around the grip of his rifle. He looked around, desperate for a better solution.
There had to be another way.
All that stared at him were relics of RayTech’s inventions.
Click-clack. Click-clack. The Keeneyes drew near as the filaments of an idea formed in Leon’s mind.
The connection materialized just as a slender leg explored the space behind the desk, like a bug searching with its antennas.
On three, Leon told himself. One—
He rolled out, rifle against his shoulder, sights locked on the metal arachnid. He blasted a hole through its thin armor, following up with three more shots that fried its circuitry. The Keeneye collapsed at nearly the same time as its kin.
Leon didn’t bother to look outside. He knew what was coming, and he had precious little time to bring his rather insane machination to life.
“Get me a vial of mylosynicide!”
Orissa looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Maybe he had.
“Now!”
She shouldered off her pack, and Leon scrambled to the glass shelf near the desk. He smashed the glass with the butt of his rifle and grabbed the SOL.
“Deadeye!” cried Orissa.
Leon dropped to his knees and ducked as a bullet sang past his head and tunneled into the wall. He crawled back to Orissa and lay the SOL on his lap.
“There’s about two dozen Primes coming this way,” said Orissa.
He ignored her. “Give me that mylosynicide.”
She handed him the vial. A single drop of the fuel slid down the tube like a bubble of mercury.
Payload system. Payload system. Where is this goddamn— He turned the featherlight launcher over in his hands and found a small lip on the side of the nosecone. He pinched it and pulled it out, revealing a thin glass tube secured to a tray. That’s got to be it.
From the corner of his vision, he saw Orissa pop up. She dropped almost immediately. “God. There’s a hundred of them, Leon. More, even.”
He sang to himself as he uncorked the vial of mylosynicide, hoping it’d calm his nerves.
It did not.
“Come on, come on,” he chastised himself, lining up the vial with the payload tube.
“Leon,” said Orissa impatiently, “now!”
He turned the vial upside down. The bead of mylosynicide slid perfectly into the tube. He slammed it closed, opened the sight arm, and drew a deep breath.
From ass to feet took Leon a fraction of a second, but the passage of time felt dilated, and everything seemed to move in slow motion.
Every action he took became autonomous, his brain operating at a higher level. Heaving the launcher onto his shoulder, he dialed in the sights.
A green reticle jumped from Duelist to Ballistic to Prime, finally settling on the Wharhound. The reticle turned red.
High priority target established. To operate manually, blink.
Leon blinked. The green reticle returned. He zeroed it on the mass of Primes lumbering toward the lab entrance. They were a hundred feet away.
Finger on the trigger, the next noise he heard was the hiss of ignition and the whoosh of the rocket ejected from the launcher. The recoil twisted his hips.
The rocket hit its target and exploded with a force that knocked Leon back against the wall. The launcher fell from his grasp, clonking him on the head.
Air punched from his lungs, he coughed into his shoulder and crawled to Orissa.
“You okay?” she asked.
He gave a thumb’s up. Besides the knot on the side of his head and one hell of a stabbing pain knifing through his temple, he wasn’t too worse for wear. He just hoped the plan worked, because there was no failsafe.
No Plan B.
Leon and Orissa rose from behind the table at the same time. Fire raged through a dense curtain of curling gray smoke, flames glinting off strewn metal chassis and arms and legs.
Something else appeared as well, with vulgar engine noises and four rotary guns.
A Machine Frigg landed just outside the shattered glass of RayTech Laboratory.
An open door to the ship revealed a cargo bay empty but for two inoperable Ballistics.
Droll had delivered.
Orissa and Leon exchanged smiles of disbelief—the sort that set your face aglow and make you laugh for no damn reason at all.
As they sprinted through the lobby, Leon figured he’d be wearing that smile for hours. Had it not been for that voice, he would have.
That voice. It was as unfamiliar as moondust between his toes, yet with a name it stopped him dead.
“Orissa.”
From the fiery field came a woman with brown skin and silver hair. Her tank was tattered, shoulder strap loose around her arm. She carried a rifle, but it was her face that put the fear of God into Leon.
She looked just like Orissa—just older and saggy-jowled, crow’s feet planted permanently in the corner of one of her eyes. Her other eye was covered by a patch.
“Mother?” said Orissa, the word arriving on a gasp of breath.
“They said they’d free me if you returned.”
Droll appeared in Leon’s peripheral. “Major General Imus, Doctor Servoni, we must go. The Wharhound is—”
Leon flinched as a score of trees were uprooted and flung through the air like twigs. The Wharhound was rampaging.
“Orissa, let’s go!”
She didn’t budge. Probably she didn’t even hear him.
“Mother, you’re—no. No, you’re not real.”
“Real as the day you admitted to me the monster you became,” the woman answered. “The irredeemable mistakes you made. Still I
love you. I hope you still love me as well, despite what… they’ve done to me.”
She lifted up the patch to reveal a bionic eye.
“No!” cried Orissa, sinking to her knees. Leon caught her by the elbow, tugging her arm.
“Orissa!”
She resisted, tears pouring down her reddened cheeks. “No!” she screeched.
Leon tossed his rifle into the Frigg, then grabbed Orissa by the wrist, throwing her arm over his neck. He lifted her up in a fireman’s carry and dove into the Frigg.
The ship surged forward with a scream of twin mylosynicide-powered engines.
Before the door shut, Leon watched as Rebecca Servoni fired round after round at the Frigg.
Chapter Fifteen
Leon grunted as he caught an elbow in his ribs. Orissa was writhing beneath him like a trapped animal, swinging and kicking and screaming in rage.
“Get. Off. Of. Me!” Orissa barked, raking a nail down his collarbone.
Leon rolled off and into the wall of the cargo bay. Despite her having bled and bruised him, he felt nothing but pity for her. What she’d just seen—real or not—would shake anyone’s faith and fortitude.
It wasn’t real, Leon told himself. That was not—could not be—Rebecca Servoni. It was a Machine dressed up in the flesh of Orissa’s mother, conjured by alien technology.
Orissa had sat up, face hidden between her knees. She put as much space between Leon and her as possible. Said nothing.
Leon couldn’t tell if she was sobbing or fuming. Should he say something? His immediate reaction was to tell her just what he thought: that the person—thing—she saw wasn’t her mother.
But the wounds were still too fresh and raw. She’d dismiss his reassurance as the eternal optimism she always accused him of.
She’s not a Machine, Leon told himself. It would take time for her to process her tumultuous emotions.
He gave himself a once-over. Besides superficial scrapes and minor bruises, he’d emerged from RayTech’s laboratory unharmed. That seemed like a divine act, as if God was watching over him.
He laughed to himself at the absurd thought. God. Of all the tyrants in the history of the world, if God existed he was chief among them. Leon wagered he wasn’t a religious man in his past, but if he was, he’d long abandoned his faith.
Suddenly aware the Frigg was flying to nowhere in particular, or to a destination not chosen by either Leon or Orissa, he peered through the slat opening and into the cockpit. Droll hovered there over a panel of buttons and screens.
“How the hell are you flying this thing?” Leon asked.
“I have hooked directly into the ship’s systems, Major General Imus. I possess its controls, antivirus suite, communication system, defenses, and cyber warfare suite. I have also disabled its connection to the Machine Network and have made the transponder inoperable.”
“Well… good. So we can’t be tracked?”
“Correct. Unless the Machines make visual contact or detect our passing via radar. I am currently maintaining altitude of fifty thousand feet above the state of Virginia, one hundred miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Do you have a destination in mind, Major General Imus?”
Leon glanced at Orissa. She still refused to show her face.
“The Atlas Mountains in Africa,” he answered.
“The Atlas Mountains span two thousand miles. Do you have a particular—”
Leon recited the coordinates from Doctor Varugus’s email that he’d saved on his watch.
“Understood,” said Droll. “We will arrive in approximately six hours.”
Leon’s eyes felt glazed over. Dry. Tired and heavy. Probably he should lean his head back and sleep. But he couldn’t take his attention away from Orissa. Couldn’t stop thinking of how she felt, of how he wished he could take away her pain.
When did this happen? he wondered. Orissa had gone from being a companion to… he wasn’t sure the word for it, but something a little more.
“The Machines want you,” said Leon, shattering the silence against his better judgment. “They want you bad. You’re a human who had the audacity to break free of her chains. My point is, they’ll do anything to get you. Even create a copy of your mother.”
At this, Orissa finally lifted her head. Her eyes were swollen and red. “It wasn’t a copy. It was my mother in the flesh. Organic as they come, Leon. Trust me.”
“Even if that’s true—”
“It is.”
He paused. Words matter, you dumb bastard, he thought, chastising himself. “What I’m trying to get at, Orissa, is that your mother—it wasn’t really her. Not in the way you remember her. I don’t know her, never did, but given your love for her, it doesn’t seem likely that she’d use such words as she did. Calling you a monster, blaming you for her woes.”
Orissa said nothing.
“You believe that woman was truly Rebecca Servoni, and that’s fine. I get it. But know the Machines have changed her. She’s not who you once knew.”
“You’re not helping,” she said, jaw set.
“What—”
“I don’t want your help,” she said. “Just leave me.”
Leon crawled back into the cockpit, frustrated. Partly with himself, partly with Orissa. It was the latter frustration that irked him even more. He had no right to be irritated with her. She’d just seen her mother, the pearl of her life, call her a monster, blame her for her suffering, and attempt to blast her out of the Frigg.
Maybe it wasn’t irritation with Orissa, but jealousy. A strange thing to feel in such a time, but there was some logic in it. She had the gumption to turn over stones and learn about her past, to seek answers into who she once was, who she once loved. There was bound to be pain in that, and it was fear of that pain which kept Leon from desiring his past.
To know he might have been married, had a son or daughter—it would have meant the Machines killed them all. Or took them prisoner.
That thought was too much to bear.
“I am sorry, Major General Imus,” said Droll, as if he could read Leon’s mind. Perhaps it was the troubling look on his face that gave it all away.
Leon leaned back in the seat. “Me too, Droll. Let me ask you something. What happened back there in the lab? You knew the Machines were gathering while we were in the process of getting the electromagnetic shield. And you didn’t tell us until we were leaving.”
“I do not wish to discuss this right now, Major General Imus. I meant neither of you harm. I did not intend—”
“I know. You’re on our side. I trust that now. But you’ve carried on with quite the facade, pretending to be this drone who had laws and rules you must adhere to. Like the blocks applied to your memory courtesy of Doctor Varugus. None of it was true, huh?”
Droll’s lens shuttered. “I assure you Doctor Varugus did apply those blocks. My freedom to ignore them… Major General Imus, please.”
Leon closed his eyes. “We all have our demons, I guess. I’m not eager to tell you half of mine. Keep your silence.” He popped open one eye. “For now.”
He was exhausted, but sleep he didn’t want. The dreams scared him. But the quiet hum of the Frigg’s engines and the monotony of passing clouds stole away what little willpower he had left from this day.
The Red Room. That was the last time Orissa had cried. Fingers bent back to her wrist, nails pulled off with pliers and hot thumbtacks driven into the fresh beds—she remembered it well. She cried herself to sleep that night, just as she cried herself to sleep in the Frigg.
Sucked away into a nightmare world like a ship circling a black hole, Orissa found herself in a dream she’d never before experienced.
She was in the passenger seat of a car, engine idled in the dark depths of a parking garage. Her mother had both hands wrapped around the steering wheel. She wanted to talk, warned the apartment might not be safe anymore. She needed to sweep for bugs.
Her mother hadn’t explicitly said any of this—she’d yet to speak—b
ut Orissa knew it, as if she’d been dropped into the dream mid-conversation.
She also knew of her mother’s life’s work: To preserve the human consciousness. End the concept of mortal life as it were. The body would perish, but the brain could be transferred to a new vessel.
Project Endeavor.
In Rebecca’s research, however, she encountered several obstacles and deemed the project impossible to achieve.
That didn’t stop her work from being stolen and used by the company who employed Orissa. The files Orissa had stolen from the company’s servers suggested that Project Riven was strikingly similar to Rebecca’s Project Endeavor, except human consciousness was being transferred and melded into that of Machine. Artificial intelligence mixed with organic intelligence.
“Gentry Tygus,” her mother finally said, invoking the name of the supposed CEO of Blyme Technologies, “does not exist.”
“I feared that,” said Orissa. “But someone has to run the company.”
“I’m trying to learn who that someone is. But they’ve covered their tracks well.” Rebecca’s knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. “To create a sprawling company focused on AI research and development, a company that employees thousands takes a lot of money. To stay concealed in the shadows while that company operates and is involved in dubious research—that takes contacts.”
Orissa nodded. “Powerful contacts.”
“More than you might think.”
A sleek sedan pulled in two spots up from them, its electric motor silent. A slovenly dressed man stepped out, coughing into his arm, venturing into the clinic this garage served.
“Project Endeavor was partially sponsored by the United States government,” said Rebecca. “A bone thrown my way, you could say, for all the technologies I’d helped them develop over the years. Most of which have gone exclusively to the military.”
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 15