Archon of the Covenant (16 page)

A faint clicking sound emanated from the sentinel’s base frame as it listened to the aroton, which cut short its soliloquy and locked in on the sound of the sentinel’s munition tray being switched. DDC39’s railgun slowly angled upwards. The aroton delicately reached down for the barrel of the longrifle and spoke aloud:

“Woah, woah, woah. Let’s not get jumpy.”

It held its other hand up in a sign of contrition while it placed a firm grasp around the muzzle of its gun.

“I think we misunderstood each other. Chalk it up to your elementary comprehension level.”

The girl stirred from the blanket and let out a big yawn before rubbing her eyes and gazing into the fading firelight. She looked over at the sentinel, which began to back into the corner of the outcropping. The girl wondered aloud to her protector:

“What’s going on?”

“I have to shut down for the evening. Watch this one closely.”

With that, the sentinel straightened its optical array on the aroton as it reclined on the ridge, legs swaying back and forth. With its tri-axel locked in place, it deactivated all of its non-core systems and shut down for the evening. The girl turned her attention to the aroton and asked:

“What was it that you were talking about?”

“Random things. Metaphysics. Ontology. Nihilism.”

The girl raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to one side, skeptically.

“I didn’t hear anything like that.”

“I was telling him that I was in charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I can hack any machine’s program.”

“You can’t hack my program.”

“Girl, you don’t have a program.”

“Bingo.”

“Tell me child, you’ve experienced great trauma, yes? You had family? I presume they died? This wretched machine you’re with has probably not even counseled you. Obsolete relic that it is. I have an understanding of human emotion. I can help you, child. Tell me what sort of tragedy you witnessed.”

A light wind blew over the escarpment and the remaining embers faded to a soft red glow in the coal pit. Further down the hillside, the shrill echo of tree crickets drifted upwards into the cool air. She looked at the aroton, whose kaleidoscope silhouette emptied the dark inside it - an event horizon crowning the sediment. She looked at the nothingness before her and recalled, for the first time since they left the university, what faded memories still belonged to her.

“My mother wasn’t a tragedy. My mom loved me. Have you been loved? I still remember the feeling of being loved. I still remember my mom holding my hand. She was funny. We would play games with the others and she would walk around like a duck. She would make these funny bird sounds when she put me to bed. I still remember her hair. And the mole on her cheek. My mother was....”

She stopped, wiping a tear away that had fallen on her wrist. Her skin, salty and auburn from the days in the open, shone clear as she brushed the saline away. She looked up at the aroton’s face, which glimmered in a wan universe of beryl and cerulean. She looked for understanding and, unsure of herself, kept on.

“So if you want to know about my mother, I’ll tell you. But I don’t care how she died because that’s not my mother.”

“So she did die then? How did she die? Tell me girl. I can help.”

Becca grew flustered and finally broke down.

“Yes, okay? She died! They came and she fought them, okay? And Gilberto, and Terrence too. They tore at them! They went crazy. There was so much blood. And they just left me alone as my mom died.”

“Hmm. Yes. Pour your heart out girl. I have the gift of empathy. She probably died in quite a bit of pain, yes? She probably was torn apart, limb from limb, knowing revins. Got eviscerated I imagine. Nasty. But that would mean she bled out in the first few minutes and was likely unconscious for a good deal of it. So there is some consolation in that, yes? Oh, it had to be gruesome. Just sickening. Thankfully that’s all in the past. Really gross, though. Ugh.”

The girl buried her face in her blanket and sobbed uncontrollably. She gripped at the soil in front of her, clenching and unclenching her hands as she let it go. She bawled, muting her cries with the ends of her tattered sweatshirt. She cried to rid herself of what she carried, and when she realized it was leaving her, she cried again because she knew she was forgetting. The aroton looked down at her, raising both hands as if to settle the air between them:

“Uh. Let’s just – let’s maybe call it a night. No more consolation this evening, okay?”

The sentinel kept a faint audio channel open, eavesdropping on the campground as it sat dormant in the darkness, its tri-axel locked in place. The wind picked up, rolling over the summit and moving eastward. The girl, exhausted from her outpouring, fell asleep beside the sentinel, curling up between its wheels. That solitary pair of eyes – the vision of the wolf – loomed at them from the distance of a twin peak. The wind drew up late and a welcome calm carried over the boundary of the volcanic ridge.

• Solar power cell – 1%. Solar armor – 80%.
  
• Drivetrain – operational
  
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – operational
  
• HD/
  Comms – compromised; operational
  
• Water – 50%. Napalm – 100%
  
• Railgun – 22% capacity
  
• AAR –
  rescued and escorted by aroton; is annoying
  
• Shutting down core operation
  and initiating battery recharge
  

11.
Archon

The dawn tore open with a cacophonous roar, a tectonic drumfire howling through the tranquility of the mountaintop. DDC39 rushed through its re-boot cycle and brought its optics and peripheral array to bear. The aroton slowly came into view directly ahead – its back to the sentinel and standing over the girl, who cowered under the android as it ejected a cartridge from its longrifle. The sentinel screamed out - an unsteady and roaring plea:

“No!”

The sentinel drew its railgun upon the aroton, that tinny hum of its circuit filling the air as the scene unfolded. Becca fell to her side, cupping her ears with both hands and grimacing. The android reached a closed fist downward to her. With the smoking longrifle grasped by the breech in one hand, two earplugs fell from the open palm of the other and into the girls lap. She took them and dug them into her ear cavities, before standing upright and crawling up on the outcropping – eyelevel with the aroton. Together, they looked out onto the valley floor before them. The aroton swung the heavy rifle upwards and drew a line of sight out to some target in the distance beyond as the girl watched. She cupped her ears again and the aroton pulled the trigger - another thunderbolt ripped the sky, deafening the air around them. The aroton shook its head and talked softly, its doubt barely audible above the echo rolling through the hillside:

“There’s too many.”

It was firing into the distance, not at the girl. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and rolled upwards through an incline beside them, swiftly coming to the crest of the summit. The bright morning sun illuminated the vast desert floor in every direction. A giant thunderhead was moving up from the south. The desolate city limits of Tucson loomed in the north – the downtown skyline jutting upwards in the distance. The cracked I-19 snaking north and south, Mt. Lemmon in the northeast, the Rincon in the east, Mt. Wrightson in the south, and the great basin of alluvium on all sides. The lithified shoals of diagenesis. From almost every angle, thousands of revins were moving upon their location, closer and closer to the small mountain they perched atop. The aroton lifted the longrifle and aimed it into the overgrown brier of desert broom in the abandoned farmlands north of the mission. It fired and a sharp crack pierced the sky. The sentinel zoomed into the brier and saw a hobbling revin emerge from the thicket and explode in a palette of ribcage and innards. A number of others dashed away from the smoking corpse, but kept onwards – their faces a mix of fear and rage. The sentinel, alarmed, raised its concern to the aroton:

“They’re not scattering.”

“I know. We’re in trouble.”

“They’re surrounding us.”

“I know. Calm down. Watch
this
.”

The aroton held the receiver of the longrifle and turned it sideways, twisting the magazine pin three clicks forward. It swung the barrel wide from its right and out towards a division of dilapidated homes - the San Xavier Estates - in the far distance to the north. The hammer flew back and the rifle erupted. A pause. The sentinel zoomed in to the row of homes. There, about a mile away, an incendiary round ripped into the asphalt of the Avenida San Saba near the base of the mountain, just before a group of revins emerging from a line of palo verdes along the street corners. The round burst into the road and an inferno engulfed the pack of teetering creatures. They flailed into the intersection, swatting at their back and chests – their faces twisted into a confused glee and terror. A male, its skin burned off and muscle tissue dripping onto the ground, walked slowly to the sidewalk, kneeled, curled into a ball, and immolated. Others darted out of the backyards of the old shanties, screamed at those dying in the blaze, and kept running – up and over the fence at the base, and rising through the hillside. The dark mountain sanctuary was soon enveloped by more than
one hundred thousand
revins. The deep well of souls from the old cities on the arid plain. All of the infected from the southwestern ruins, coming towards them, all at once. The sentinel spoke, calmly:

“Are we still watching?”

“We have to get out of here. Now.”

As the smoke from the empty rounds cleared around them, and the sentinel and girl peeled off the outcropping, the aroton leveled the longrifle out towards Interstate-19 miles away to the east. An exodus was moving south along the highway – countless revins, snarling and shuffling along the hot pavement. The android reeled off a series of gunshots into the faraway crowd as they neared the San Xavier off-ramp. The battery echo wallowed through the valley floor and the horde, from each point, looked skyward, briefly cackling at the prospect of their absurd predicament. It bought the girl and her machines some time. Those struck by the cannonade lay writhing in the blacktop as the others spilled past, splashing through the pools of blood and shit that filled the cracks, slipping through the potholes littering the interstate. The sentinel rolled over to the southern side of the ledge and the girl climbed up behind it, forgetting her blanket and cup in the outcropping. From across the divide, on the other summit, the wolf paced nervously. The aroton glanced at the wolf quickly as it pulled open the disguised container. The sentinel scanned down through the southern path, along the Mission Road, as the girl plopped into the rumble seat. The revins were closing in from Star Valley, to the northwest, from the San Xavier Estates to the north, and from the I-19 to the east – but the southern pass was still open. The aroton stuffed the messenger bag full of ammunition, clutched a pulse rifle from the container, and sprang up on the ledge next to Becca and the sentinel. It strapped the pulse rifle and messenger pack around its back and signaled to the DDC39:

“Alright, your show. Lead on.”

“We’re heading south.”

They shot down through the south face – the sentinel’s tires spinning through the granite and basalt. The aroton bounded after them from crag to slab and down the summit. Behind them, out of view, the Mexican Wolf loped off the opposite peak and followed them from afar. The girl looked behind her, jarring from right to left in the rumble seat. She held her palm to her forehead, blocking out the midday sun, trying to find the wolf in the panorama but couldn’t spot it. The sentinel pinged the periphery as they descended. The whole of the southwestern population was closing on them, fast. They sped through a tangle of bursage and came off the mountain and onto a dusty control road.