Archon of the Covenant (23 page)

Chaos broke out. A painful shout erupted amongst the crowd, now stumbling forward in their blind daze. A faint whirr could be heard, cycling up like a fan gaining speed. And then a staccato of gusts – like arrows splitting paper. The light shifted in circles. The revins panicked, shrieking out hollow pleas – the cries cut short in a garbled pop and hiss. The proselytizer stumbled forward and caught a shadow in his field of view, briefly glimpsing the shuttle from between the eclipse. In those few seconds, the elder could just make out a turret, under the nose, firing a rapid salvo of light into the confused crowd. The craft rotated as the battery ripped through revin flesh, perforating limbs and incinerating patches of tissue. A strobe of white fire. Bodies were split open and whole swaths of skin turned to ash, guts cauterized, leaving them disfigured and writhing. The elderly herald crawled on his hands and knees until he came face to face with the opaque cockpit of the shuttle. The ashes of revin bodies swirled in the air, a discord of dying cries piercing the night. The old man threw his hands up in the air and was consumed. Gone.

The floodlights on the shuttle faded and the pyre glittered with the embers of bodies riddled through with gunfire. The shuttle stopped its gentle rotation, coming to rest facing the Kartchner cleft, the turret pointing straight towards the cavern opening. A hatch opened from the underside of the cockpit, extending downwards as a ramp, steps protruding pneumatically from the interior. A light emerged from inside the craft, illuminating the desert floor beneath the plank.

From there, stepping into the soil, a figure emerged from the craft and into the high desert air. It was encased in a synthetic poly-fiber exosuit. A traveller. It sunk its heel into the dirt, twisting its foot back and forth in the ground like it was unsure of something. Unsteady in the world. Wrapped from head to toe in a lithe, airtight shell. White chassis, like the shuttle it emerged from. Head enveloped in a helmet with the same steely luster of the cockpit it was walking under. A case was wrapped around its back, contoured and sleek. The traveller reached up to the gun turret beneath the nose, a foot or so above its grasp, and the armament unlocked, the gun case sliding downwards from the pneumatic retractor. The traveller caught the handle of the cylinder rifle as it dropped into its hand.

A flutter of dead leaves swirled past, pooling above the shuttle and carrying on into the darkness. The wild hummed with fascination. Creaking bones. Mule deer gathered on the western ridge. From the chasm ahead, a colony of ghost bats escaped the black and ascended into the night, their eyes gleaming back in the dying embers of the massacre. All heartbeats, drumming in unison with the faraway tides. Love was gone. The traveller swung its ashen cylinder rifle in the direction of the cave, moving forward cautiously. Light footsteps crunching in the frost-packed soil. Small steam bursts shot into the air from a sub-vent at its nape. The same red circle on the shuttle’s wing was emblazoned on the traveller’s breast. A light flickered at the rifle’s muzzle, illuminating the chaparral and the winding path leading to the cavern.

The traveller stepped into Kartchner Cavern, sidestepping down a broken walkway and into the cold, damp rock of the upper cleft. Its rifle light darted around as the traveller shuffled past a cairn near the entrance. Shadows dancing on the walls in the wild, flickering in the artificial light. The furtive figure continued on for some time with its beam of illumination vectoring from left to right in the narrow corridor. The glow would sporadically catch the white poly-fiber shell as the traveller passed through the underworld, casting itself in a haunted spark. The echoes of its footsteps bounded into the ether and the air ascended. The traveller shone its light forward and the massive cavern came into view.

Long, massive stalactites hung down from the ceiling, which met with sharp stalagmites jutting up from the ground. Row after row of limestone speleothems. Straws falling into the air and columns twisting upwards, molten-like, as if a fire had swept through and reduced the dark to a deformed horror. The void breathed in as the traveller descended, walking with the light shining from side to side, the jaws of the underworld opening up and swallowing whole. Each footstep echoed off the high ceiling and carried away into the far reaches of the cavern.

The traveller clambered down through a narrow passage, lined with broken concrete slabs, and came upon an otherworldly chamber – the throne room. The muzzle light panned from left to right, igniting the incisors above and below. The light rested on the center of the massive room and there, in the spotlight, was a pile of synthetic wreckage. The traveller tapped the side of the cylinder rifle and the beam widened, illuminating the whole chamber. Countless heaps of crushed and separated robotic appendages stretched the entire length of the chasm. Fiber optic filaments and stripped wires glittered in the electroluminescence cast by the muzzle. Sheared tires, bent hands, twisted paneling. A binary tomb. The fuselage from three drones rose from the pile like leaning obelisks – wings broken off, the nose of each streaked in dried blood. Calvary of the constructed.

Shallow breath vapors were rising into the air from behind two columns. The traveller knelt down slowly, keeping a watch on this faint condensation. The vapors stopped. From behind one column stepped a pallid figure – a revin, white as the moon, eyes fused shut, fingernails pinning out like obsidian razors. It walked slowly towards the traveller, expressionless. Its naked skin, translucent in the artificial light. Tendons and muscle pulling taught with each footstep. A slight grin curved up from one corner of its mouth and the traveller raised its cylinder rifle in line with its forehead. From behind, the other wraith sprang on the travellers back, its claws raised high in the air and coming down fast at the sub-vent. Both revin wraiths screamed, piercing the cavern with a shrill wail. The traveller reached back with one hand and grabbed the gaunt creature from its open jaw and threw it forward, crashing into the other revin as it sprinted headlong. They tumbled into a massive column and, as they righted themselves, the traveller unleashed a volley of white gunfire into their flesh. Their sides blew out in a cloud of ash where the gunfire hit them, incinerating patches of their bodies as they crumbled into a charred, contorted heap.

The traveller scanned the rest of the room cautiously. Nothing living remained, save itself. From a zipper pouch near its chest, the traveller pulled out a small object, clutching it in its fist, pausing a moment, head bowed. Its hand opened and it looked down at what it had in its palm – a small flash drive. It took it between two fingers and flicked a small switch on the side and the flash drive lit with a small green light.

From a pile in the deep corner of the chamber, a hushed beeping emitted into the quiet air of the cavern. The beep cycled, deadening each time – as if the power behind it was waning. The traveller ran over to the pile and furiously pulled at the cables, axels, and synthetic appendages atop the sound. As the junk was lifted off, the beeping was more audible, but slowing. Finally, the source was uncovered.

Therein lay a charred wreckage. A twisted chassis distorted by some infernal blaze. Painted with the ochre of time. It was the sentinel.

The traveller reached behind and pulled the pack off its back, setting it on the ground and quickly lifting out some components. It positioned the muzzle light on the sentinel and began working. Clipping wires, stripping cords, prying open panels and replacing melted circuit boards with new materials. Re-wiring. Reincarnating. As it worked, the traveller produced a small, pill-shaped vessel as well as an optical array. It fastened the optical array onto its center frame, where the prior version was before being shorn off at Asarco. Finally, it wired the vessel into the sentinel’s core and the tri-axel suddenly tensed up, the trident frame jerking to one side before finally loosening again in the junk pile. Its newly wired optics swiveled haltingly, panning around and fixating on the traveller’s helmet. The sentinel looked upon this being, its features hidden behind the steely visor that wrapped around its head. The vocoder rattled from its core and the words spilled out in a broken timbre:

“Becca number one?”

The traveller slung its shoulders back and shifted to the other knee, pondering the question. The cylinder rifle lay on its side against the junk pile. There was a silence except for the gusts of vapor firing from the sub-vent at the traveller’s neck. The achromatic visor wrapping around the travellers skull began to clear, its reflective luster dissipating into a glassy sheen and, from behind the thin shield, a woman’s face appeared. Her voice sang into the empty space between them from a hidden speaker in her suit:

“Well, no. I guess I’m more like….Becca number
12
. You can call me Sylvie.”

She dug her hands into the pile of wreckage and lifted the sentinel upright, its frame standing vertical on fleeced hubs. It shook gently as it came to rest, small flakes of soot carried off its wrecked chassis and into the light from the rifle’s muzzle. Sylvie smiled and wiped some of the grime off the sentinel. Sighing with relief, she addressed the charred machine:

“Doomsday Chaperone, 39
th
serial. DDC39. I wish you could know how happy I am that we found you.”

“We? Is Becca okay?”

“I have something for you to listen to.”

A new, different voice broke into the air from the traveller’s speaker. A woman’s voice, old, with some tinge of ailment behind it:

“If you’re hearing this, then you’re safe. You’re with someone who will help you. I’m safe too, 39. It’s me. Becca. We won’t see each other again, so I just wanted to tell you something. I had a really, really great life. I got married and even had children. Three boys and a daughter. Grand children too. I lived well, and saw a lot. My, if you could see the things I saw. I think of you often, 39. It took me a long time to comprehend what had transpired, and what you did. I owe you everything. We all do. My friend. I’m old now, 39. By the time you hear this, it may be many years since I’ve passed. I just want you to know….that you’re my friend and it’s time to come home. Goodbye.”

The recording trailed off into the silence of the cavern air and Sylvie stood up.

“Do you remember the book? ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go.’ Well, it’s time to go. We need you for something important, 39. Are you ready?”

“Where are you taking me?”

Sylvie looked upwards and pointed one finger into the space above them. She fastened the pack and rifle on her back then reached downwards, sinking her hands below the tri-axel and lifting the sentinel aloft, hoisting it behind her, arms stretched over her shoulders and hands gripped tight around the axel housing.

She walked up and out of the cavern effortlessly, her legs and arms given some exoskeletal strength from mechanics layered into her suit. They left the cave and into the dark of Sonora, the stars casting down on the high desert floor. As they climbed up the ramp and into Sylvie’s shuttle, the sentinel looked out at the massacre surrounding the ship. The new circuitry coursing through it was dawning some foreign logic, and it marveled at the carcasses strewn about the wild. A spark alighted in the recesses of its core. The sentinel wondered: what had come to pass here? What did these creatures think of the violence brought upon them? Did they believe in some divinity? Was this their reckoning? The questions surging through its CPU brought a realization for the machine: it was changed, bestowed with an otherworldly sentience. The carcasses were twisted into malformed husks, limbs bent upwards in sharp twists where the incinerated flesh pulled the rest of the tissue inward. Their wounds still glowed and embers flew off their bodies like fireflies dissipating in the wind. They, too, pointed to the heavens.

More than anything, the sentinel realized it needed a purpose. Resuscitated into an era unknown to it. Operating in a fugue state of digital existentialism. It realized this and pondered, for the first time, what it was worth.

The hatch closed and the craft lifted off into the night, ascending into the starry horizon. As it streaked across the sky, in the far distance atop the Whetstone ridge, a mirage passed through pine, dancing through the tree line like a phantom. A translucent homunculus. Spirit of the sierra. The pellucid creature stopped mid-sprint atop the high promontory, tracing the arc of the white shuttle as it soared into the upper boundary. The moonlight passed through the phantom and it refracted like a flawed gem. Standing there, watching the shuttle, the phantom lifted aloft a longrifle, bearing it upon the craft as it escaped into the night. A finger wrapped around the trigger of the massive gun then hesitated before finally easing off the grip. The solitary being lowered the gun, stock to ground, and stood motionless.

A pack of Mexican Wolves sidled up beside the phantom, watching along with it as the white craft disappeared into the black. The Sonoran desert fell silent, into the void. Into the waste. A calm wrested the violence from the fist of the wild and it hung in the air, suspended in time, wandering through the valleys of the Madrean Sky Islands like a cry shouted into the abyss, echoing off the canyons and fading to a whisper. Macwidag, toward the east. And there came the long clouds. And everything was different from what it had been.