Messiah (11 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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In a situation like this, that was frightening.
Fortunately, even though they both knew Kugara had overstepped her authority, Parvi decided to accept Kugara’s belated acknowledgment of her command. “Don’t take such decisions upon yourself in the future.” She turned to the other three and said, “We’re going to have to move, stay with us—”
She was interrupted by someone shouting, “Get your hands off me, you furry freak.”
Everyone turned to see Nickolai pushing one of the Wilson militia guards ahead of him. He carried the man’s weapon, and the caseless shotgun looked like a toy in his hands. He held the gun butt-first toward Kugara and said to the man, “You’re going to lead us out of here.”
“Are you crazy, don’t you hear the sirens? The PSDC will start strafing in a couple of minutes.”
“It isn’t an air raid,” Kugara said. “It’s a full-scale invasion.”
“What?”
“The PSDC is going to take this city,” Nickolai said. “We want to leave before that happens.”
“You don’t need to point that at me,” the militia guard told her as they walked single file toward the bombed-out perimeter.
“Just concentrate on where we’re going,” Kugara told him.
“Uh-huh.” He looked up at the sky. Motion was now visible past the Wilson skyline, small specks of aircraft visible in the gaps between buildings. The sirens had stopped, leaving a disturbing stillness to the air. The edge of the safe perimeter was marked by a spray of glowing orange paint that traced a line across dirt and rubble alike.
Their guide stood on the safe side of the line and said, “You’d all be safer back in the building. The PSDC shouldn’t attack it, we’re keeping—”
“We know,” Kugara said.
“If they do take the city—”
He was interrupted by the sound of roaring aircraft that shot by above them so low that Kugara could have counted rivets. The fighters banked around the skyline, headed toward the PSDC invaders. When the echoes died down enough for him to be heard, he continued, “If they take the city, that building will be the safest place in town.”
“Look, we have other concerns than the PSDC. Or our safety, for that matter. Start moving.”
He studied the rubble ahead of them, and after taking a few deep breaths, took a couple of steps over the orange warning line. He called back, “The safe corridor is only a few meters wide, so stay close behind me.” He pointed to a burned-out shell of a building about a hundred meters away. “We’re headed there.”
She followed him, with Parvi behind her, followed by Flynn, Dörner, Brody, and Nickolai bringing up the rear. Their guide led them through a series of ninety-degree turns past piles of twisted metal and broken ferrocrete. The whole area smelled of a fire not long dead, something still smoldering and toxic.
More aircraft rocketed past above them, and as the wind shifted, they started hearing pops and rumbles from the east. The noises were muffled by distance, but clearly the engagement had begun. There was a whole city between them and the battle, but Kugara was afraid it wouldn’t be enough.
It only took a few moments before that fear was realized.
A painful whine cut though the air above them, and she heard Nickolai yell, “
Incoming!
”
Kugara dived for the ground, tackling their guide under her. She glanced up and saw a twisting contrail tipped with a spiraling out-of-control missile. It seemed headed straight for her. She shoved her face into the small of their guide’s back and covered her head with her arms as an explosion ripped the air. The sound was like a spike though her skull and she felt the impact in the thrum of the ground beneath her. A burning wind scorched the hair on her neck, and dirt and gravel peppered her back, burning where it touched exposed skin.
Stray missile,
she thought,
missed us . . .
She pushed herself up from their guide, who raised his head and spat out a mouthful of dirt. “Shit!”
Parvi called out from behind her, “Everyone all right?”
A chorus of assents followed, muffled in Kugara’s shell-shocked ears. She didn’t look at the others. She was more focused on the rubble around them.
From out of nowhere it seemed, a half-dozen machines had risen from spots in the rubble. Lean, ovoid things about a meter across, hovering on small contragravs, rotary cannons dangling beneath their chassis. The hunter-killer drones, jarred awake by the explosion. The only reason they hadn’t swarmed them already was because they stood in the preprogrammed safe zone.
She stared at one, and it stared back with a single blank mechanical eye. It was the first good look she had at one of these things. They weren’t military spec, which she probably could have guessed from the improvised nature of the Wilson militia. These were commercial security drones, designed for patrolling warehouses, not war zones.
It didn’t make them less intimidating.
“That was close,” she whispered.
In front of her, their guide repeated, “Shit!”
She turned to him and asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No. We’re screwed!”
“What is it?” Parvi asked from behind her.
“Just look!” He waved ahead of them, where the missile had landed.
In front of them was a new crater blown clear of most rubble. Kugara saw the twitching remains of two more of the HK drones on the edge of the crater, one only a few meters away.
“What’s the matter?” Parvi asked
“That blast removed all the landmarks,” he told them, “I don’t know where the safe corridor is anymore.”
“The blast should have cleared the mines,” Parvi said.
“Look around,” Kugara said.
After a moment, she said, “Oh.”
“We have to go back—”
Kugara grabbed his shoulder before he walked past her. “Not so fast.”
“What do you want?” he said, “There are six of those things waiting for anything to take a step off the path.”
“We got a shotgun,” she said.
“You start firing that thing, they’ll swarm you.”
“Even in the safe zone?”
“It’d be a little useless if they allowed a hostile to randomly stroll into a safe area and start shooting.”
Kugara shook her head and looked at the floating death machines.
Parvi asked her, “Do you have an idea?”
“They won’t shoot each other,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” the guard asked.
Kugara didn’t pay attention to him. “They’re cheap commercial units, and I see two or three manufacturers. They must be relying on transponders to ID each other . . .”
“What are you thinking?” Parvi asked as Kugara handed her the shotgun.
Kugara smiled grimly at her. “I’m going to get us a transponder.” She bent down and picked up a large chunk of broken ferrocrete and hefted it in her hand. She looked at their guide and asked, “Before I go any farther, I don’t suppose they issued you with an ID chip that would get you past these things?”
“No. The supply crew gets them, but not the guards, in case the prisoners—
what are you doing?
”
Kugara chucked the chunk of ferrocrete in a lazy underhand arc in front of the nearest robot. “I’m testing a theory,” she whispered. The robot didn’t fire on the rock, or her. Whatever threat algorithms it possessed didn’t parse the rock as a problem. It did, however, follow the moving object with its sensors and track it with its cannon.
“Hopefully, that’s good enough.” She turned back to their guide, who stared after her throw as if he expected the rock to explode. “Okay, now tell me, if we were going straight, how much farther were we going to go before we turned again?”
“What?”
“How much farther—”
“I told you, the landmarks are
gone!
”
“Guess, damn it, before another stray missile lands on us!”
He shook his head and said, “Four, five meters?”
Kugara stepped out over the edge of the crater, in a straight line. She turned back to the others behind her. “I’m going to need a distraction. When I call out, all of you throw chunks of rubble past the machines, that way—” she pointed away from the crater.
Parvi glanced from her to the twitching wreckage of the nearer of the two damaged HK drones. “What makes you think the transponder is still working on that thing?”
“I’m guessing,” Kugara said as she edged farther into the crater, two, three meters, until she was as close as she was going to get to the wreck. Another ten meters to clear. She took a few deep breaths. The transponder was probably well sealed and on its own redundant power supply. It was a piece of hardware you didn’t want to fail in the field. And the way the thing was twitching, the other robots would have been paying it some attention if its transponder were dead.
But still . . .
“
Now!
” she yelled at the others.
She launched herself in a sprint to the twitching wreckage, putting everything she had in an all-out push to get to the thing in the fraction of a second the flying rubble bought her. If any of them could make it ...
Something tore though the dirt by her feet and she leaped the last two meters, landing on top of the downed machine.
She sucked in shuddering breaths as beneath her, the servo arm that used to carry a cannon kept pushing into her stomach, as if it was trying to elbow her off of it.
“Made it,” she whispered, not quite believing it.
She looked up and saw four of the HK robots surrounding her. Back by the edge of the crater she heard their one-time guide mutter, “I never saw anyone move that fast.”
No one human,
Kugara thought.
She slid off of the half-dead robot, and winced when her foot hit the ground. She glanced down and saw her right shoe was stained dark with blood. She gritted her teeth and flexed her toes. The pain was awful, but her toes moved, and she could feel them squish against the gore in her sock. Shrapnel. At least her foot seemed mechanically sound.
She grabbed the edges of the machine and lifted through the pain. Luckily, the thing weighed less than its mass. It still had partial contragravs running—just not enough for neutral buoyancy.
She walked it back to the others.
They were able to cross the blast crater by slowly walking across, all of them surrounding the near-dead machine. They carried it like a hostage through a tense standoff. The other robots watched, but didn’t get in their way.
On the other side, it only took a few moments for their guide to find the right landmark and get them back on the safe path out again. They left the dead robot, and this time Parvi led with the guide and the shotgun.
Kugara hung back and let Nickolai help her limp along on her wounded foot. Once they were back on their way out, he asked her, “Was that a smart thing to do?”
“Can’t let you take all the damn-fool risks now, can I?”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“Then you had better keep up.”
CHAPTER TEN
Atonement
“Heroism comes when all other options have been exhausted.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(1803-1882)
Date: 2526.8.5 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Vijayanagara Parvi led her people through the back alleys of Wilson. She glanced back at Kugara, limping next to the tiger, and thought,
My people?
She was appalled at herself, at her paralysis. In a sick way, it was why she was down here, and not with Mallory in what—if she was honest—had to be the most likely route to fight Adam. She had lost the ability to command. Having the responsibility over other people’s lives had become an intolerable burden, and left her nearly unable to function.

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