Robogenesis (43 page)

Chowchowchowchow—release, let the barrel cool. Chowchowchowchow
.

My focus narrows to the nose of my gun. Rain spits off the hot barrel. The world collapses to the invisible extension of force extending from the tip of my weapon to that bend in the road. Reaching out and dinging the vicious running quadrupeds that are tumbling, diving, and lunging between abandoned cars to close on our position.

“Cor”
—chow chow chow
—“mac.”

I stop. Pull my trembling finger out of the trigger well and tap my collar mike. On the road, silver and black blurs are stuttering toward me, staying behind cover. And some of the machines I’ve hit still move, dragging themselves forward on twisted limbs and shattered joints. Cherrah is done screaming. Now I hear only her short panicked breaths and occasional muttered curses.

“Mathilda?” I shout into my mike.

Shrugging my ear against the collar speaker, I hold still and listen. Static. Fucking static. Runners advance. I’m missing them, giving them too much time.

“Cormac,” says the voice again.

It’s not coming from the radio. It’s coming from behind me.

I spin around, reaching for my sidearm. Stop when I see a girl, barely a teenager, standing silhouetted between Houdini’s armor-plated hind legs. She’s wet and bedraggled, wearing a hoodie, hair hanging over her chest, fuzzed with humidity. Her head is bowed and her face is in shadow, but even so I can tell that something is very seriously wrong with her eyes.

“How many times have I told you to watch your six, Bright Boy?” the girl asks quietly. She sounds angry.

“Mathilda?” I ask as the near-perimeter machine gun activates up top. Houdini strafes the road with bullets that ping and spark. “Is that you?”

Something big and black moves behind her, blocking the light. I yank out my pistol and put it on the high ready, but Mathilda doesn’t move out of my way. The big shape leans down to peer inside, between the two sheaths of bunker armor hanging from Houdini’s rear legs. I break into a smile.

My old friend and comrade. Nine Oh Two.

“Arbiter,” I say, lowering my gun. “You lived.”

“Little help?” asks Cherrah, between pants.

Mathilda throws back her hood. The metal embedded in her face makes it impossible to determine what she is looking at or what she is seeing. I smile at her and try not to stare at the deformity. Mathilda simply ignores me, speaks quickly and just loud enough to be heard over the spitting machine gun mounted on Houdini’s upper front shoulder.

“Forward scouting party incoming,” she says. “Twelve quadrupeds. Seven remaining. Four are taking cover out front. Just a distraction for the three who are flanking.”

“Why didn’t you respond to my calls?” I ask.

“Couldn’t. R-8 jams comm traffic in a kilometer radius around its units. I had to get close to you. And you need to take care of those quads. Now.”

She points at my gun, tilted up in its leg mount, barrel steaming in the rain.

I glance down at Cherrah. She flashes a smile up at me, chest heaving. Blood is pooling on the ground between her legs. Bright and glistening and too much of it.

“Better listen,” she says. “Kid sounds like she knows what she’s doing.”

I nod.

“Help her,” I say, turning to the machine gun. “She’s giving birth. I’ll take care of these quads. And Nine Oh Two, watch our flank.”

I sight the abandoned cars on the sloped road. Four quads are milling between them. Leaving parts exposed to bait me into wasting ammo.

“No,” says Mathilda.

“No?” I ask, eye still squinted. I drop a couple of rounds into the plastic bumper of a faded, sun-bleached car. It shatters into blue shards, and a quad stumbles into the open. I erase it with another barrage. “Why the hell not?”

“Because,” she says, “Niner is delivering your son.”

Between muzzle flashes and flickers of lightning, I glance back to watch the long-limbed humanoid kneeling before Cherrah. The brown skin of her legs is pale now. The blankets damp with blood. As they work, a trickle of crimson rolls downhill, past my feet and out to where it’s battered by raindrops and diluted into a pink puddle.

The sight of the Arbiter is comforting. And terrifying. My vision swims with the vibration of the gun, with Cherrah’s screams echoing in the claustrophobic space under Houdini’s bunkered legs.

In glances, I see the little girl standing silently behind the Arbiter unit as the machine helps deliver my son. She has one palm flat on his shoulder and her head cocked to the side. In profile, I see that those dark pools of metal where her eyes should be are reflecting Houdini’s red intention light. She’s thinking.

“They’re finished flanking, Cormac,” she says quietly. “Toss a smoker to the east. Over the guardrail. Wait thirty seconds. Then fire into the mist.”

She’s not even looking at me while she speaks.

“How do you know that?” I whisper.

“Houdini is sharing his sensor stream. But right now, I’m more interested
in Niner’s sensor stream. I’ve done a lot of surgery, Cormac. Let me take care of this.”

I pull a smoker from my satchel.

Like all storms, this one eventually breaks. The clouds have thinned out and skated on to the horizon, where the sun is settling down through their ghosts.

Quadruped machinery lies around our position in fragments. A few pieces still actuate on instinct, offering no threat. The mud glints, carpeted with spent shells. And in the dim light, a war machine is cradling a small pink bundle in its metal arms. Silently, the Arbiter hands me the squirming baby. I take the warm swaddle and hold it to my gunpowder-stained chest. Mathilda’s hand is still on Niner’s shoulder. He turns back to finish attending to Cherrah.

My boy is so light in my arms. Dark hair is plastered to his skull. His mouth is curled into a jowly pink line and his eyes are squeezed closed into slits. Swaddled in a scrap of rough army blanket, he waves tiny fists and mewls.

“Jack.” I say the word, trying it out.

Cherrah nods, her eyes half closed, leaning against one of Houdini’s massive legs. She smiles and takes a deep breath, her chest buried under warm blankets as the evening breeze sighs over us. I pull my newborn son closer to my face. Feel the heat coming off his skin through my stubbled beard.

“Your name is Jack Wallace,” I whisper. “You are named after the only brother I ever had. You are named after a hero.”

When my brother died it hurt me so much that I tried to stop feeling. Decided it was best to try to emulate my enemy. So I shut down my emotions and let a cold illusion of control settle over me. I thought I was sweeping the cobwebs out of my gears, but I was wrong.

Cradling his head in my rough hand, I can hardly feel my son. His hair is soft as moonlight. Holding on to Jack, I don’t feel vulnerable or weak. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever felt stronger in my life. While he lives and breathes … I can’t break.

I put my pinky finger next to his hand. By reflex, he curls his damp starfish fingers around it. It’s a tight grip. Even as he drifts off to sleep, I can see his mother’s determination in his face. Dark skin and wisps of black hair. I can feel the strength inside him. Someday, I think the rest of the world will feel it.

The machine is finished working. Its hands and chest are coated in Cherrah’s drying blood. Sprinkles of rain are diffracted in pinkish gleaming puddles.

It’s a gory scene that feels familiar and new at the same time.

“Thank you, Nine Oh Two,” I say, sitting down next to Cherrah. I put an arm around her and give a light squeeze. The boy rests on both our laps, falling asleep. Exhausted, Cherrah manages to grin at me, face-to-face.

“Don’t say I told you so,” I say.

“I told you so,” she says. “Everything is all right.”

Then Nine Oh Two croaks at us. “Enemy force en route. Suggest overnight retreat to recombine with Gray Horse Army.”

“How far to rendezvous?” I ask.

“Our soldiers are preparing to defend the plains south of Freeborn City. Those who cannot fight are moving to the entrance of the city,” says Nine Oh Two.

“Will the freeborn help them?”

“Maxprob indicates negative. Not as long as they follow the unit called Adjudicator Alpha Zero.”

“Then why don’t we just keep running?”

“Cotton’s troops are faster,” says Mathilda. “Either we defend our people at the tunnel that leads into Freeborn City or they’ll chase us down in the open. The tunnel itself is a defensive structure. A good last resort.”

I do not see a way to survive, but I don’t let the knowledge infect my voice.

“Then we’ll defend the tunnel mouth,” I say.

Archos R-14 once said that each of us creates our own reality. The machine said that each of those realities is valuable beyond measure. It was right. Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

I kiss Jack on his forehead and hand the boy to his mother. I pick up an assault rifle lying half in a mud puddle and stand up. Smear dirt and grease off the barrel and yank back the slide to clear the chamber, blow into it. Wipe the bloody grime out with a finger still wet from my son’s tiny grasp.

“You okay riding with Houdini?” I ask Cherrah.

She nods, exhausted, black hair splayed out, tears drying on her cheeks. Both of her arms are wrapped around the baby. Swaddled, he rests against her chest armor.

“Then let’s go,” I say without hesitation.

As Houdini stands up and retracts his upper leg armor, Cherrah and I share an exhausted smile. All the angst is gone now. There won’t be any more questions about leaving each other behind. The answer is pretty clear.

Our babies are the roots we dig into the world.

Mathilda is running her fingers lightly over Houdini’s armored front legs. She pushes her face close to the cold metal and her forehead bunches up in concentration. Her pursed lips relax into a wide smile.

“Help me tear off this bunker armor,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I have an idea,” she says.

NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ

Boom. Creak. Boom. Creak
.

The war room creaks like a ship around me. The wooden room is the size of a big closet. I’m sitting cross-legged on a threadbare Chinese rug that Cormac scavenged from an abandoned house. With this box attached to his belly, Houdini walks cocky and proud, tall without any bunker armor, his muscled legs like black marble columns. His giant footsteps boom just outside my shell.

Boom. Creak. Boom. Creak
.

With every step, the wooden slats shiver. The thin steel plates hanging on the outside of the room clap against the walls in a steady metallic rhythm. Occasionally, I can feel high grass dragging against the boards under me. In here, the world is small and dusty and dim. Out there, a battle is about to begin.

Cotton Army has arrived.

Thousands of us were on the run from Gray Horse, camping out under jammed satellites with plenty of buffalo to eat and boiled river water to drink. But yesterday afternoon Cotton Army mobilized on an intercept trajectory. This morning we have no choice but to muster our forces and fight it out here on the southern plains.

“You okay, Mathilda?” shouts Cormac from a tall walker alongside us.

I shake my head.

“Radio, please,” I transmit.

“We’re not close enough yet for it to matter!” comes a shout.

“It’s called professionalism, Bright Boy,” I transmit.

Faintly, I hear his laughter.

“Fair enough,” comes the transmission. “I admire your warcraft, over.”

I know he sounds braver than he feels. We are here to protect survivors who are too old or young or injured to fight. From my eyes in orbit, the refugees look like a straggling line of ants winding toward the tunneled road that leads into Freeborn City. It’s the only defensible structure within five hundred miles. And if we don’t defend it, our people will be cut down—men, women … and children.

Strange to think that Cherrah and her new baby are among that trail of dots. Two people so small, yet so important.

“Any luck reaching the freeborn?” Cormac transmits.

My silence says everything.

“I’ve got targets,” he adds, urgently.

I sense Cormac’s tall walker speeding up. Houdini’s gait transitions to a trot to keep pace. My cheeks tremble with each step. I bring a military-ops manual to my mind. Superior strategy is our only chance to survive. We don’t have much firepower, but we’ve got plenty of brainpower.

“Bringing the command structure online,” I transmit.

Timmy and I have been training the other sighted children. Nolan and his friend Sherman took Tiberius and went back to rescue them. For the last few weeks, I’ve been sending them research and conducting exercises. These kids are new and they’ve never been tested like I have, but Nolan is sure they’re the only ones who can save us.

“Battle command, online,” I say, transmitting my words. “This is EXCON—executive decision-making and maneuver-control systems. Subordinate command systems, acknowledge. Over.”

Stripes of daylight push silently through narrow wall slats and rake back and forth over the carpet.

“Platoon leader beta, checking in,” says a voice in my head.

I nod and look to my right. There, sitting cross-legged and grinning, is a projected image of Timmy. He is young, about the same age as Nolan was when the world ended. Just a little boy with a band of metal rooted into his face where his eyes used to be.