Feed the Machine (41 page)

She connected to Frederick, an old man living alone in a shack in Variko. He was doddering around his ruin of a kitchen, hands trembling. Test subject #1130. Ella seized the nanites in his brain and
pushed
. A complex cascade of cells firing, electrical impulses rerouted into a new pattern.

Frederick stopped in the middle of the room.

“Hello,” Ella said aloud.

“Hello,” Frederick said, his voice but her accent.

Then the push rippled back and the intricate web of chemicals and machines crashed out of alignment. Frederick’s nose started bleeding and he fell to his knees. Ella let go of him. On the tablet she watched what was akin to a mental storm raging in his brain. The chaos washed back and forth, threatening to kill him. His lips trembled and his fingers twitched.

Then it was over. A tiny segment of order appeared and flourished, spreading rapidly. Frederick stood, dazed but alive. He wiped his bloody nose, looked at the stain and wandered off to find some water.

“First successful human trial,” Ella told Bug.

“Okay,” he said and went back to sleeping.

Chapter 64

Nola

She shot the hazel down where it stood. It collapsed to the ground in a smoking heap. The sun had been up for hours but for some reason the hazels weren’t fleeing before it. They were still flooding in over the hills, hiding in any shadow they could find, attacking anyone they could see.

There was no time, no more motherfucking time!

Twenty minutes until the countdown ended and they were no closer to Fat Man’s palace. The streets were too narrow for them to rush en masse. Fat Man’s guards had the higher ground.

It was a war of attrition and they were hemorrhaging people.

Worse still, some of the guards now had grenades. Not old dug-whole-from-the-Scour grenades liable to explode any moment. Shiny new just-printed-oh-fuck grenades. They’d appeared about two hours ago.

“Should have burned the fucking city down,” Nola told Jarrah. She’d tried to, sometime in the night but everything was too wet from the storm. Even fires set inside died out.

“We can go under the buildings down the left side, closest to the fence. At least four of them connect, no gap.”

Nola looked where Jarrah was pointing but no thought followed. She was too tired. She’d had a reviving sip of black heal near dawn (someone found a bottle) but it had worn off. Nola stared dumbly at the buildings and then agreed for no good reason.

Silver had said the EMP would destroy every electrical thing in the city unless it was extremely well shielded. They couldn’t wait for this though—Fat Man’s guards were relentless and seemingly without limit. They’d lost two hours in the early hours of the morning when a group of them got into position covering the warehouse. They’d taken them out and the looting resumed but they’d lost valuable time. They couldn’t wait, they had to fight.

They crept out of their hiding places, staying in cover. Behind them the warehouse was still being looted but at a much slower pace. Fat Man’s guards had shot holes through the walls with repeated bursts. The structure was creaking, ready to topple over. Nola had heard Ash shouting about an hour ago but didn’t know where he was now.

Jarrah led the way, getting down on his hands and knees and sliding under the building, his gun on his back. Nola followed along with six others. One she vaguely recognized as a girl who worked at the Golden Door. Emi?

Under the buildings it was surprisingly dry given the heavy rain overnight. They crawled between the stumps and wooden joists. Soon they passed a thin line that demarked one building from the next. They kept moving.

They were under building three when Jarrah froze and held up his hand. They all dropped to their stomachs, pulling their guns around in front of them. Over the sound of her thudding heart, voices from above.

Three women talking.

“… unlimited ammunition. Down to the end before we release.”

“Yes boss.”

A mechanical noise—a whirr—and tread moving across the floor above them. The wood creaked.

“Fucking thing is heavy,” one of the women said.

Nola looked across at Jarrah. He pointed up at the floor and shrugged. A complex movement that said what the fuck is that? Should we do something or keep moving?

Nola pointed her hand at the floor in the shape of a gun and pulled an imaginary trigger. She rolled over onto her back and waved to everyone following her. Fire on my command. It took a few hand waves and mouthed words for everyone to get it. In the meantime the heavy tread continued to move, the floor protesting.

Three. Two. One.

Jarrah fired first then Nola and down the line. Their guns fired once every three seconds. They had eight guns so by the time the fourth in line fired, Jarrah was ready again. The lasers burned through the wooden floor like it was nothing.

Frantic yelling from above and a scream told Nola they’d hit someone. Her laser had punched a hole the size of a fist through the floor. She saw someone running and fired at an angle. The laser burned another hole, kept going and sliced into her leg. She dropped and a moment later another laser shot up under her body, burning a hole straight through her.

Nola burned two more holes and kicked, smashing a space large enough for her. She didn’t stand though—they all kept firing on their pattern, peppering the floor and burning holes in the roof.

“Make holes!” Nola shouted. Soon it was done.

“One at a time!”

Jarrah leapt up first, gun at the ready.

“Clear,” he yelled.

Nola next and then it ran down the line. They weren’t trained soldiers by any stretch but overnight they’d learned about friendly fire.

The three women were dead.

They clambered out of the holes and into the room. It was an empty warehouse.

“What the fuck is that?”

Some sort of robotic man but with treads instead of legs. Connected to its back was a thick electrical cord that ended in a square control panel. It stood taller than any of them. It was shiny silver but had been smeared with mud as a sort of camouflage. The robot’s face was serene and smooth, its eyes unblinking. Its hands were clasped in front of its body as though it were praying.

Nola picked up the controller. It had a digital screen that shimmered to life when she touched it. The view from the robot’s eyes appeared showing Emi standing in front of it. A red outline appeared around her.

Kill?

Y/N

Mark hostile/friendly

Nola tapped mark friendly. The outline turned green.

She pressed a directional arrow and the robot whirred and moved forward.

“We can’t fight things like that. We have to leave Cago.”

One of the men, his face pale. Others shared his worried expression. Nola didn’t answer but used the controller to turn the robot around and move it towards the door leading to building four. She had to avoid the holes they’d burned in the floor.

She stopped at the door and turned around.

“This is just the latest weapon Fat Man has. Imagine what he’ll find by tomorrow? Leave if you want but it won’t be long before some terrible thing comes to get you.”

No one answered. In the distance something started humming, a low unsettling tone.

“What is that?” Jarrah asked.

“Who knows? We need to keep going.”

Jarrah opened the door to the final warehouse, the others covering the entrance. The fourth building was empty too. The floor was thick with dust and marked only by a thick line of tread and footprints where the robot and guards had passed. Nola kept down below the windows and drove the robot over to the exit. Everyone crept behind it.

“I’m going to open the door and roll the robot out. See if we can use it to kill some guards. They’ll shoot straight through the walls of this place so we need to hide back, get on the ground.”

The others nodded assent and crawled away from the robot. Jarrah shook his head and lay down beside Nola.

“Get back,” she hissed at him.

“I’m opening the door,” he whispered back.

He crawled forward and reached up to the door handle. He softly pushed it down and the door unlatched. It must have been poorly weighted through—it swung open and a gun cracked outside. Jarrah fell, crashing to the floor and scrambled out of the way. His law uniform was smoking across the shoulder. A narrow miss.

The screen in Nola’s hand lit with outlines. She rolled the robot forward and out the doorway.

Someone out there yelled to cease fire.

Six outlines. Nola tapped mark hostile and they started throbbing. A new button appeared beneath the image.

KILL ALL

She pressed it.

From her position on the ground hiding she couldn’t see much at all. On the screen she saw the robot’s hands come up and there was a soft hissing sound. A moment later the screen flashed a message: HOSTILES DEAD.

She rolled the robot out as far as she could go without exposing herself. No more guards appeared on the screen. The dead ones were slumped on the ground, no apparent injuries.

The robot looked up at the roof of the palace. Two more outlines appeared. Nola pressed yes to kill them both. This time she looked out the door. The robot lifted its hands and she heard the soft whisper. The guards on the roof died.

HOSTILES DEAD.

Someone in the building shouted in alarm.

Nola tried to shrink herself into a ball behind the warehouse wall so no part of her could be seen. If the guards had another robot like this one she was dead.

“We can’t fucking move,” she whispered to Jarrah.

The robot jerked its arm up. There was a soft hiss and a grenade thudded to the ground beside it. It spun to a stop, dead.

But what if
this
was the only one? Maybe the first one off the line, being sent out to kill them.

Nola looked at the dead guards on the tablet. Collapsed in piles, unmarked. If there was another one of these… the last thing she might hear would be a hiss.

“Ah, fuck it. I’m going in, who’s coming?”

They lost two—the scared man and another. They were down to Jarrah, Nola and four women. They were terrified but laced through it was fury. Fury at the stolen collars, fury at Fat Man exploding children’s heads off their bodies, fury at the world itself.

“I’m in,” Emi said. The others agreed.

The distant humming increased in pitch and volume.

They moved out of the warehouse—for a frantic moment exposed—and closer to Fat Man’s palace. It had many doors and entrances and most of them had stairs. There was a long winding smooth pathway on their side.

Nola drove the robot up the pathway, trying to keep her head down, fearing a crack of a gun at any moment. On the roof she could hear talking. There were guards there but none of them wanted to stick so much as a finger out. No use dropping grenades either—the robot shot them out of the air.

They reached the door. It was locked but Jarrah burned through it. The door swung open to reveal a dim corridor. It led to a luxurious room. The walls were covered with art, the floor thick carpet. The robot knocked over a green vase as Nola drove it through the room. It thudded to the floor and cracked, splitting neatly in half.

There were three doors exiting the room. Nola picked one at random and drove the robot through into a vast hall with a massive staircase. An outline of a guard appeared on a balcony but the man ducked down before Nola could kill him.

Nola waited, her finger twitching over the controller, watching the screen.

A door on the second floor swung open and an outline appeared. Nola pressed kill, heard the soft whisper but then the screen flashed HOSTILE ALIVE.

The outline stepped to the edge of the balcony. It was a man shaped of liquid gold. It had no features and rippled like water. Nola pressed kill again and the robot raised its hands. The gold man’s skin shimmered in time with the whisper.

It stepped over the balcony and jumped to the ground, landing easily.

Nola signaled her team to get their weapons ready and pressed the button again.

HOSTILE ALIVE

The gold man reached out its arm and flicked a finger towards the robot, spraying it with gold droplets. They landed and burrowed through the silver metal. The controller went dead in Nola’s hand.

She dropped it, stepped out into the doorway and shot the gold man in the head. Tiny rivulets of gold were running back across the floor towards it, seeping out of the dead robot.

The gun cracked and the gold man rippled but it was unharmed. He raised his arm.

Nola ducked back behind the door.

“RUN!” she shouted.

A mad scramble to the exit. Before they reached it, the door swung open.

Silver standing there, a bag slung over her shoulder.