Archon of the Covenant (22 page)

“YOU WILL BE OKAY!”

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The alpha’s eyes widened and it gazed down at the trembling frame of the machine. The sentinel had the alpha’s wrist gripped firmly. The others saw their herald held still by the sentinel and they tumbled forward, pushing past each other at the chance to tear the thing apart. The light began to fade and a faint clicking sound radiated beneath the revin, like an igniter on a gas range. The alpha’s expression turned dour and it looked helplessly at the mess of bent panels and stripped cables adorning the sentinel’s trident frame. DDC39 could no longer see, but it heard some sound coming from the anemic being wriggling in its grasp. The alpha saw the spark flickering beneath the base of the machine and it mouthed out some recognizable sound. Its lips pursed and it sounded like a familiar objection. Its lips drew back, almost as if it was saying:

“Stop!”

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ARCHON V lifted off the base, pulling upwards through the silo and out of the closure doors. The blast incinerated the naked bodies squirming upwards through the egress and tore through the anodized wire wrapped around the pathoton, fiber optic cables peeling backwards and evaporating in the inferno. Becca pressed her hand against the oval windows and peered outwards. Raindrops rolled down the aluminum silicate panes. The silo vanes spewed rocket blast aloft, pouring upwards, igniting a sea of flesh on the desert floor. The charred remains of the pathoton fell to the plank in the blackened landing, which went dark save for bone embers swirling in the air.

*              *              *              *              *

A searing tide of napalm coursed through the mineshaft, obliterating every creature slinking in the dark. The alpha saw its flesh melting, falling slack off tissue and bone, dripping into the hard base of the mine as everything went white. The heat sucked the air in ahead of those gathered outside, the rain briefly bending into the dim fissure. The revins looking into the mine from the bench road felt the draft pulling them inwards. It was quiet for a moment, and then the cries of the incinerated sailed outward. Unhinged echoes of the dead. The blaze ripped out of the mineshaft and washed over those outside, whipping into the caldera like a solar flare. Tissue and blood spit from the cleft, cast into the pit with fire and rain. The sentinel lost sentience. A torpor washed over everything.

• Solar power cell – 0%. Solar armor – breached
  
• Drivetrain – non-operational
  
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – unresponsive
  
• HD/
  Comms – compromised; non-operational
  
• Water – 0%. Napalm – 0%
  
• Railgun – 0% capacity
  
• JE
  – (scrambled)
  
• Forced shutdown; entering hibernation
  

12.
Farewell, Sonora

Becca and the others slunk into their seats, pinned back by the velocity of the rocket lifting into the troposphere. The main engine roared with 500,000 pounds of thrust. T+10. Becca’s eyesight began to constrict into a tunnel vision. The ship oscillated violently. She looked around and saw the other passengers – children - close their eyes. A small digital display on the ceiling showed a human diagram beeping, depicting passengers going to sleep. Becca turned her head and felt the arc of the rocket begin to twist, its trajectory tilting. She pressed her head to the side, straining with all her might, to peer outside of the small oval window. She looked down and saw the contrails of the rocket falling backwards and there, close enough to touch, was the wisp of storms rolling over Sonora. The first stage booster decoupled, tumbling into the blue like a barrel into Niagara. Sheet lighting cracked through the dark maelstrom they had just passed through. T+30. They were above it all. Becca wondered what was happening and if she was ascending into heaven. The expanse of the Earth’s lithosphere stretched out like a dream, encircled by green aurorae flaring in soft tufts like apparitions wandering through the sea. A solar wind, wailing in the void of the magnetic field. The rocket passed through a noctilucent cloud on the edge of times cessation. They entered the thermosphere and the massive vehicle gradually softened, the violent rattle subsiding to a hum. Becca felt her eyes grow heavy. Her heartbeat slowed down. A nozzle near the display whistled, discharging a vapor into the thin air of the cramped module. The cylinder emanated the acrid smell of anthracite and the human diagram blinked red with worry. Becca felt herself blacking out. As her eyes closed, she heard the promise, again:

“You are a survivor.”

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EPILOGUE

End and beginning and end.
The world without man went on. One epoch passed and another emerged from the cold depths. The cracked glaciers reformed, pulling salt water into crevasses and seracs, freezing into silver tusks that pierced the low clouds of the Arctic Circle. Ice flow pushed into the polar plains, drumlins disappearing into the abyssal sediment. And so with it, the anthropogenic mass extinction was halted. The anthropocence was over. The fallow lands of slash-and-burn were reborn. Forests thrived and saw blades rusted. Cities eroded into the firmament and asphalt roads dissipated like veins wilting with age.

The summers grew short in Sonora, deluged in rainfall and sparked by intermittent sun. The winters crept down from the Catalinas, lingering for most of the year and blanketing the lowlands in snow. The saguaros and palo verdes disappeared, giving way to ponderosa and fir. The desert plains vanished. Dust turned to sorrel leaves and conical detritus. A thick canopy enveloped the ruins of Old Main, Hotel Congress, and the broken dome of Bio3. Bison thundered south across the Baja Peninsula. Condors made their homes in the shattered penthouses of abandoned skyscrapers. And machete fish glimmered along rushing tributaries that sprang from dry washes along the alluvial fan. A new wilderness flourished amidst the cemetery of post-history.

But while one mass extinction was averted, another still loomed. Revins spread across the warmer climates. Those that had huddled in the caves and ruins of the north fled south, congregating in great masses along the Sonoran badlands. While they still couldn’t wield tools, nor could they stitch clothing, they grew in girth, adding heavy layers of fat and skin that kept them warm in the changing seasons. While they didn’t hunt larger animals – elk, bear, ram – they were vicious in their predation of smaller creatures that they would trap in crude ways. Gophers, rabbits, and, in the vast sewers of remnant cities, rats. Populations would swell when food was discovered, and dwindle when depleted. The chain was disrupted. Smaller species were disappearing. The larger mammals had to migrate to survive, or prey on the revins. And they did both. Revins were killed in sporadic numbers by mountain lions, which grew more vicious with each kill. They had to adapt to survive. They would hunt in packs, move in packs, and reproduce in packs. The inbreeding compounded their feral behavior. Their cognitive ability remained unevolved. Their prefrontal cortex was irrevocably destroyed. But their bodies conformed to the environment encroaching upon them. Deep claws, sharp incisors, concave skulls, sloping spines, and calcified kneecaps that protruded from their skin. They moved quickly but stayed close to the ground, sliding along their knees when frightened by some sudden sound. Their nasal cavity elongated, better suited to sniff out predator and prey. Their eyes widened, limbs shortened, body hair thickened. They were almost unrecognizable from their ancient kin. They were distorted relics of bygone times. Wallowing wights of the foreverwinter.

In the frozen melancholy of the hunger moon, a low thundering would roll through the perihelion sky, rattling the tall pines and shaking snow from needles. Just as soon as the storm arrived, it would vanish in the dark. This went on through countless nights. As a sudden burst reverberated in the dusk, the living skittered along the icy soil, ducking under the brush as the echo of abnegation cracked through flurries gusting in the ether. Something was changing in the air, and the revins sensed it. They were nervous.

For weeks, the storm would appear in the evening, materializing from the smallest tufts of vapor in the night sky and blooming into a massive, black anticyclone. The air was consumed by the fury, lights streaking through the opaque veil from a fulmination rocketing through the shelf of the tempest, blankets of snow wafting down in violent winds. The revins huddled in their holes, sheltered in caves, and crammed into ruins, waiting out the wrath of the lost torrent.

Finally, one warm evening, as the revins began to brace themselves for the return of storm, they were surprised to see something else in the sky - the bright, full, lenten moon. It shone down on them like a lantern, illuminating the white sheet of frost and snow in the open ground. They came out of their hovels and gawked at the magnificent glow, basking in the calm which had returned to the high desert at last. They breathed in and smiled wide, rotten teeth and dry sockets gleaming in the warm light.

The next morning, as wisps of snow blew off the high canopies, as the twisted, gnarled bodies of the revins awoke from their slumber, a strange light appeared in the clear blue sky. A white contrail, splitting the empyrean. The feral minds were puzzled by this faint vapor high in the heavens. As the line stretched downwards, arcing into the distance, it picked up speed. The streak in the sky stretched out a great distance and, as the fore descended through a smattering of high clouds, it smoldered red like a flare falling through water. A laceration ripping downwards from heaven.

As the fireball careened towards the earth, it began to arc parallel to the horizon, leveling off and searing across the Sonoran dreamland. Other revins, huddling in their burrows or standing amidst the frost, looked up and were rapt with the ember burning across the sky. The oval-like cinder suddenly broke in two, each fiery piece of debris spinning wildly in different directions, and from the burning shell emerged a gray and white object that continued overhead in a straight vector.

The revins traced this thing as it raced across the sky. It looked to them like some sort of massive, pale vulture - but its wings didn’t beat. As it descended above the Coronado Forest, it came into view. It was a craft. The revin mind alighted with some recognition of its outline. They recalled the rusting hulks of A-10s that lay in heaps at AMARG, the Davis-Monthan plane graveyard nearby. The craft’s underside was gray but its topside was white. Four exterior engines – two aft and two forward, encased in cylinders like the old Fairchild-Republic Thunderbolt – carried the craft through the cold air above Apache Peak. From there, it began to circle and further descend. Strange black markings were painted on the stabilizers and, as it banked, the revins could see some sort of red, circular symbol on each wing. Dark smears streaked out of imperfect panel lines. As it nosed down, they could see the front of the craft had a protrusion, like a cockpit but opaque with a steely luster.

After circling in the midday sun for some time, it slowed, all four engines craning upwards. As it continued its descent, coming fully into view with the handful of revins just underneath, still no sound could be heard from the craft. It skimmed over the ponderosa canopy, heading east, until it came upon a clearing. Ahead was the flat, cracked foundation of a building that had disappeared in the harsh elements, the withered blacktop of a parking lot that had faded into the dirt, and a sign that was black with the soot of brush fire and years of soil blowing across the desert. As the craft hovered forward, it stopped just ahead of the weathered sign, which could just be made out:

Kartchner Caverns State Park

An open chasm in the ground loomed in the distance, facing the nose of the craft as it quietly floated above the ground lightly dusted with snow.  At first, the shuttle was alone in its vigil over the abandoned park. As the night crept forward, and the clear sky was bedecked with stars, a melancholy wail began to pierce the air, emanating from someplace within the mysterious contraption. Not unlike a whale song. A siren in Sonora. This echolocation blared out loudly across the expanse. For the first hour, it repeated a simple aria that rose and fell in a few notes. Like a car alarm slowed down and lowered in pitch, echoing across the hillsides. As the night grew dark, the frequency shifted. The song changed, but went on in perpetuity through the darkness. As this lamentation filled the woods, revins began to approach. Cautiously at first, but full of curiosity. They looked on at the strange trespasser floating before them, glimmering ashen in the moonlight.

Over the next several days, more revins came to gaze at this thing that had broken into their lives. Soon, there were hundreds of Sonoran revins gathered in the ruins of the park. They made makeshift hovels in the ground. They lined up against the crumbling walls of the amphitheater. They huddled together under piles of pine needles. They sank their jaws into cottontail ripped from nearby warrens. But no living soul approached the chasm. They woke up at dawn and cocked their heads, listening to this magnificent sound pouring out of the machine.

Among them emerged one that drew the craft in the ground with its bony digits. All gray hair and sagging skin. This proselytizer chided anyone who got too close, revering the arrival with wonder. The gathering turned into a cult. They looked to it for something. With each change of its song, they grew animated, expecting something to happen that so far did not come to pass. They drew in closer as the frequency halted then sighed, drooling, as the wail resumed and shifted slightly. A low, looping gospel.  The naked, hairy revins shivered in the frost, beating their hands in the wet soil, pulling up clumps and shaking their fists at the metal craft. But they dared not smear it with their curses nor their handfuls of shit and sod.

Westerly winds blew into the cold mornings but hushed in the overhead sun. Days and nights passed by without the revins noticing. The snow melted into the shale and limestone, unveiling the red basin and range. The white-capped spire of the Whetstone Mountains hung over them, cropping the sunset in the west. A cold creek rushed past in the north, spilling off Apache Peak and colliding with the tributaries of the massive San Pedro River in the east. Ages before, Wyatt Earp shot and killed Curly Bill Brocius in this pass, ending a blood vendetta against the cowboys responsible for his brother’s death. Revins walked over the sunken bones and spent shells, unaware of the ancient vengeance that had unfolded before them.

One evening, the craft’s song ended and the whisper of the still night breathed through the thistle and sedge. Those gathered nearby hushed, their attention turned to the gray and white shuttle hovering silently in their midst. Their heavy eyelids drew back, pupils wide in the dark. They inched closer, jostling with each other to peer at what might transpire next. Hands shaking, steam rising from sweaty brows in the algid gloom. High clouds moved under the moon and the black veil lowered on the spectral wild. Everything was black. Everything was quiet save for the breeze in the reeds and the clattering of teeth. Naked feet teetering on sharp rock.

A series of small, circular portals – like small glass plates – emerged from retracting panels all along the shuttle’s fuselage. Sparks of light appeared behind each glass circle – little lanterns dotting the darkness. The revins moved closer, gasps of glee piercing the air. The lights got brighter and brighter. The brush and fir were illuminated on the periphery of the open range. The faraway oak and pine on Apache Peak lit like faint stars dotting the universe. The bare skin of the gathered crowd radiated, gleaming pale like the frost they stood upon. They squinted in the glowing flood, holding their hands up to shield the light. And with that, a blinding torrent filled the eyes of every being standing near. Even with their eyelids closed, they were consumed with the lambent. Their pupils burned.