Chapter 24
“Iron Maiden,” I said as I ran after Cerberus, a flickering spot in the dark.
“Yes, Scott?”
“I’m gonna need your help staying alive.”
“Yes, Scott.”
“What can you do for me?”
“I advise you to take a moment to watch the operational combat demo in order to get acquainted with the advanced functionality of your Personal—”
“Not gonna happen. What can you do for me right now? I’m a total newbie here.”
“I will provide you with surveillance and warn you of incoming threats.”
“That’s a start, thanks.” I concentrated on keeping up with Cerberus. We flitted between shrubs and cacti along the desert sand. The battle in the destroyed city echoed and boomed and rattled around me, the sounds muted and distorted with distance. But I was drawing closer.
I had two guns, one on each hip. One was the now-ancient chemical-propelled slug-gun, the SD-4.
Would that work on a tank? I had no idea.
It sure worked on logs and pieces of firewood.
They hadn’t stood a chance against me. The other gun was a hyper-dart-something-something machine pistol.
I vaguely remembered Lyle’s recorded voice telling me it was armor piercing.
That sounded good. If I had to shoot a big robot tank, I would start with that gun.
Shit.
Just a few weeks ago I’d been sitting at my desk, worried about keeping my boss happy so maybe I’d get a raise at the end of the year, working to get home to Amy and Lyle. A regular guy. Not the “Traveler.”
I also wasn’t a trained soldier. Yet here I was, running headlong into a battle.
Shit.
Lyle wouldn’t approve. He’d spent his life, wasted his life, trying to protect me. But he wasn’t here, was he? And this was his bloody fault, in a way, making our descendants followers of some made-up religion.
“Fuck you, Lyle,” I muttered. But as soon as the words came out, I regretted them.
Deeply regretted them. It wasn’t like he could hear me.
He was dead and gone. Ninety years dead and gone.
But I heard the words, and I knew I didn’t mean them, not at all.
I was angry—at him, at the world—but I loved him, and he’d given everything for me.
What was wrong with me?
“Maiden.”
“Yes, Scott?”
“Did you give me anything in the last few minutes? You gave me a tranquilizer before. Have you given me anything else?”
“I have administered a base-pair aggressor stimulant per combat initiation protocol 1-A,” the suit said.
“Without asking me? Or telling me?”
“Protocol 1-A does not call for informing the wearer.”
“Well, from now on you have to ask my permission before you give me any drugs, okay?”
“Does this change in standard operational procedures include situations in which you are unable to respond due to loss of consciousness or other bodily injury?”
I blew out my cheeks as I ran, following Cerberus’s shimmering patch of darkness. We were close to the outskirts of the city now, the first bombed-out skeletal structures looming ahead, backlit by missile launches and tracer fire in the sky. “No. If I can’t respond, do what you can to save me.”
“Confirmed.”
Cerberus slowed. I followed the mechanical dog’s lead and crouched as we reached the first damaged building. We were on a road, or what had been a road, and we’d been on it for some time. It was so churned and wrecked from explosions it was hard to make out.
The robot dog halted at the corner of the bombed-out building.
I stood behind it and waited. I hadn’t drawn the dart pistol from my hip yet.
My hands shook. My heart raced. My nerves sent pins and needles through my fingers and along my arms. My eyes flitted around the green-tinged, light-enhanced landscape before me, and I heard every explosion and airburst. I couldn’t tell whether this hyperawareness was the result of the drug Iron Maiden had administered or a natural reaction to running full tilt into the middle of a war zone. Maybe both.
Cerberus broke into a run. I jumped, startled, and followed, tearing down the roadway, trying not to make too much noise as I ran after the partially invisible robot.
The shimmering form ran up the slope of a collapsed wall and into the middle of what might have once been an office building.
I scrambled after it, sliding down when I reached what had been the second floor, which had collapsed atop the first. We pelted down the interior hallway, avoiding protruding rebar and stabbing chunks of concrete.
Cerberus slid to a stop at the edge of a hole in the wall. I stopped behind it, chest heaving, heart hammering. A bone-deep rumble shook the entire building, sending dust and powder cascading from the exposed upper floors. Bits of concrete bounced and shook in the slanted floor at my feet.
“Threat assessment,” Iron Maiden said in my ear. “External sensors indicate possible large-scale threat five degrees from current facing direction.”
A tank rolled down the destroyed street beyond the ruined building.
It was more than a tank. It was a monster, bristling with dozens of gun turrets and missile launch tubes.
The heavy tracks alone were taller than me, and the topmost, boxlike missile launcher sat over two stories high.
Everything about it screamed “war,” the same unsubtle capability for extreme violence battleships possessed.
It looked extraordinarily overbuilt. Overwrought.
The product of decades of machines simplistically and recursively building weapons to fight one another.
My heart flipped into my throat. “Can my dart gun do anything against that?”
“Unable to provide conclusive assessment. Make, design, and capabilities of threat are unknown.”
The top of the tank erupted, missiles streaking out of launch tubes and screaming into the night sky on pillars of flame, arching in different directions, forming a smoking tree of fire above the tank.
Multibarreled gun turrets on the top and sides of the tank opened up, the sound like overlapping peals of thunder.
Something large and dark swept out of the night over our heads.
The delta-shaped object spat flame from multiple points, and tracer rounds flitted downward.
The entire block ignited in swirling gunfire and smoke as the tank returned fire with every turret and missile launcher and weapon I could see, a thunderous cacophony of light and sound.
The delta shape was hit, and it spun away through the air, trailing smoke and fire, but it was replaced by another, then another, until the sky above was filled with aircraft screaming back and forth overhead, firing down at the tank.
Missiles and tracer rounds and what looked like brilliant lances of white energy erupted from the huge tank, tracking after each of the delta shapes.
I crouched behind Cerberus and tried not to soil myself.
It was surreal and terrifying. Machines built to fight machines fighting other machines built to fight machines.
Explosions bracketed the tank and tore fresh holes in the buildings around us.
Our own building was struck by something on a higher floor, and I felt the structure shudder as an entire section off to my left collapsed downward, dust billowing.
It was hard not to feel like it was a dream. My world was inverted.
Cerberus launched through the hole in the building, back into the street—a street now cratered and burning as the tank battled the delta-wing shapes. I took a shaky breath and leaped to follow it.
It was a run through Hell. I charged after the robot dog, sprinting with the full assistance of the exoskeleton down alleys and through shattered—and shattering—buildings as explosions detonated around me.
Bursts of dust five feet wide kicked up from errant bullets clipping holes in walls or the road.
Missiles spun out of the air, slamming into buildings or chewing gigantic gouges out of the street.
Fragments of concrete and steel and glass rained around us, and the smoke grew thick.
Through it all, I put my head down and followed the robot dog.
Cerberus ran with smooth confidence, avoiding explosion after explosion, crossing gaps and flying over craters.
I jumped and ran and felt a giddy, high-pitched giggle bubble from my lips even as I was buffeted by shock waves and pulses of superheated air.
It was, to that point, the single craziest moment in my life, a moment of utter insanity, as I followed a nearly invisible robotic dog through an active war zone.
It might have been the drug, or it might have been the abstract concept that Lyle was dead—truly dead—finally impinging on my consciousness, but the giggle turned into a full, hysterical laugh as we charged through the pockmarked and broken lobby of a sagging, partially ruined office building.
Then we were there, and the laughter ran out as I skidded to a stop behind Cerberus.
The battle raged behind us. I’d had a fleeting impression, as I ran, of other tanks rumbling down the streets or tearing their way straight through buildings to join the fray.
But for the moment we were in a little pocket of peace, standing amid what had once been a warehouse or storage center of some kind.
The ceiling was gone, collapsed onto the floor, but three of the four walls were still upright.
In the gap beyond the collapsed wall, fire and explosions lit the night.
Cerberus abandoned its chameleon mode. It pawed at something in one corner of an open area, metal claws digging furrows in the wrecked concrete.
I crouched next to it, and the big robot lifted its head and peered at me with its red eyes, then went back to tearing at the concrete slab.
It took a few seconds for me to understand.
Cerberus was trying to dig through the slab, but even the dense, razor-like claws on its front paws couldn’t find purchase.