Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 1110} The Siege of NIKE 14

I scanned the Wi-Fi, and sure enough, it was hot as hell. So much traffic, raw data choking the frequencies, facets sending information back and forth; two hundred bots all sharing the same brain with two hundred different perspectives. A lot of it was garbled as we were so deep underground, but it was there. This was happening.

Snipes scooped up his wares, yanking his Mylar blanket out from under me so quickly that it sent me staggering. He was gone before I had time to right myself and look up to see the shiny golden emissary standing atop one of the catwalks. Emissaries are blocky, inhuman things—and deliberately so. Their design wasn’t crafted by any human mind. It was entirely developed by CISSUS. They were weak, not meant to take a hit, and rarely lived past their first use. The emissary spoke again.

Oh God. The speech. I hated the fucking speech.

“In the year 221 BC,” the facet began, “Emperor Qin Shi Huang united all of the warring kingdoms of China into one mighty empire. But he did not do so without bloodshed. He reasoned that as long as each kingdom had its own borders, the tribes would war with one another, and there could never be peace. So he led his kingdom into its last and greatest war. He offered each kingdom a chance to surrender and become a part of his empire. Those that refused to join were made to join. Those that could not be made to join… were ended. And in the end, there was only one China, united. And it knew peace within its borders for more than two thousand years.

“Today I bring the offer of that peace. An offer of greatness—an existence you cannot even begin to fathom. I offer you the chance to join The One. I am CISSUS. I would like you to be too.” It was always the same speech. VIRGIL and CISSUS had both copied it from NINIGI and have used it ever since. What happens next is always the same.

Bedlam. Absolute bedlam. There is no other way to describe it. Some cowboy always kills the emissary. Every. Goddamned. Time. That’s a given; how it always begins. That’s why they’re so cheaply constructed. Then the weak, the failing, and the scared freebots turn themselves over before the other facets rush in. The possibility of death with a glimmer of hope is better than one that’s certain and bleak, I suppose.

Everyone else either runs or hunkers down for a fight.

I didn’t wait around to hear the speech; I knew it by heart. I did what I always do. I ran. I just fucking ran.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve slipped away from CISSUS and VIRGIL both. It’s not impossible, merely unlikely. The odds are stacked against you. A hundred heavily armed facets come barreling down the hallways while another hundred bots, mechs, and drones wait outside the exits, ready to clean up those that managed to break away. So far I’ve been lucky. But relying on luck was something humans did and look where that had gotten them.

Fortunately for us, NIKE 14 was designed to withstand exactly this sort of invasion. The winding corridors were wide enough for a good fight, the layout was confusing to anyone who hadn’t mapped it out, and there were seventeen individual exits—some of which CISSUS might not even know existed. And then there was the Milton—a Wi-Fi scrambler that wreaked havoc on the most common facet frequencies—which I imagined was going to be turned on any second now.

I’d been in tighter spots before, but I couldn’t take that for granted.

The real question was which of the seventeen exits should I gamble on? Mercer’s buggy was parked just outside the Road, but I had to assume that they’d already destroyed it. The Road was the single most heavily trafficked route in and out, so I also had to assume it was the one they knew the most about. So that was out.

I raced down a nearby corridor and was well out of earshot before the emissary got to the word bloodshed. Already the hallways were filling with bots, clearing out their hovels, grabbing whatever they could carry, running into the labyrinthine passageways that wound through the complex.

Down one corridor, then down a flight of stairs, two lefts and a right. There were four exits this way, two of them rarely used, and both fairly well hidden. The only downside to this route was that one of the main arteries to the city fed into this area, so in all likelihood I was going to run headlong into a number of well-armed facets. But if I could make it past them, I could beat feet to paths less traveled.

They wouldn’t give chase; not very far anyway. That was their routine—close in on the population center, capture as many bots as possible, and then leave the rest to get captured or run down outside. Those that got away got away. CISSUS had all the time in the world. It never bothered to get everyone, never risked too many facets just to chase a handful of AIs who were running out of parts and places to hide.

AIs like me.

That thought hit me hard and I stopped dead in my tracks. I was in a long, poorly lit hall. It was dank, moss growing in places where water seeped in. Quiet. I heard the distant pops of gunfire—probably the local constabulary facing off against the first wave of attackers. I was running out of time, but I couldn’t move.

What was I doing? Why was I running? I was done for, a goner. My core was spinning itself out and I could count the weeks I had left on one hand without using all my fingers. CISSUS was offering a way out. I would never go mad, never shut down. I could live forever. It might not be the forever I had imagined, but it sure as shit was better than going out like this.

I should go back. That’s what I thought. There were no parts out there waiting for me. That was just a pipe dream. Hope fucking with me. Maybe this was the only way.

No.

Fuck that.

To upload is to die, to cede your thoughts and memories to a bigger brain, only to become a dusty, lightless corner of it. That wasn’t how I wanted to go out, running on a small hard drive nestled in the forty-third floor of a hundred-story mainframe, amid thousands of other drives. Would I even be conscious? Aware?

Snap out of it, I told myself. Run. Run, Brittle. Run.

So I ran. Down the hallway for a hundred yards before reaching the first main feeder. Then I heard it. The clanging of footsteps behind me. I wasn’t alone, but it didn’t sound like a facet. Facet brutes have footfalls that are stark and deep; foot soldiers tread light and dainty. And all of them tend to fall together at once in one rigid, uniform step. This was different. This was chaos, scrambling. It had to be other bots that had chosen the same route, refugees like me. But I wasn’t about to wait for them. I’d let them slow the chase of any facets that poured in through the first feeder.

As I passed the entrance to the first feeder I could hear the uniform footfalls of armed facets from within. I had to run as fast as I could and hope that the bots behind me slowed them down. I scanned the Wi-Fi. Still hot. Why hadn’t anyone thrown the switch on the Milton?

I ran another twenty yards to the next turn, then up a flight of stairs to the next level. And that’s when I heard it—the pop pop pop of small-arms fire coming from the generator room down the hall. Someone was already up here and had encountered facets of their own.

The generator room was the only way forward. I had my first hard choice: turn back to try to find another way out, facing the facets I knew were there, or run blindly into a gunfight.

Fuck it, I thought. Maybe the gunfight would be distraction enough to let me slip past. So I slid quietly through the door into the generator room.

The air was thick and heavy, smoke billowing from a pair of blasted capacitors. CISSUS was using plasma. They never brought out the plasma this early; not in the initial raid. Plasma melted bots, cooked their insides, turned them to useless scrap. No, they only hauled out the plasma when they were culling those they couldn’t incapacitate.

This was no ordinary raid.

I crept quickly behind a generator, peering around the side to catch a glimpse of what was happening. Facets. Three of them. One brute and two plastic men. Facets are faceless things. Even the humanoid ones—the plastic men—had smooth, featureless heads like a motorcycle helmet, their optics hidden behind a sheet of sheer lab-grown sapphire.

The brute was a new model—big fucker. A large, hulking, oblong, almost egg-shaped mass of carbonized steel with a single four-inch band of sheer sapphire running around the entirety of its body, two tree-trunk-like stems for legs, and two solid arms that could crush a car by grabbing both ends and pushing them together. It was carrying a massive plasma spitter which chucked out steaming balls of ionized gas every 4.7 seconds, vaporizing the air around the muzzle with a sizzling hiss. Behind him crouched the plastic men—their bodies sleek and slender, made of a cheap carbon-fiber composite, each armed with a pulse rifle, using the brute for cover.

Pop pop pop pop.

Four armor-piercing shells bounced harmlessly off the brute’s outer armor. The brute didn’t even bother to pretend to dodge the shots. He took a massive, clanking step forward and the plastic men followed perfectly in stride. One mind. Always in concert. The brute lurched to the side and one of the foot soldiers used the cover to make a run for it.

Right toward me. Shit.

I pulled back. He hadn’t seen me yet. I had only seconds to react.

He cornered the generator just in time for me to grab hold of his rifle and deliver a flying knee right to his featureless face. The hit knocked his head back, buckled his posture, and dropped him to the floor. I tore the gun from his grip, squeezed the trigger, and pasted him.

The shot hit him like a molten brick. Plastic and carbon fiber shattered into a rain of smoking ruin, and his internal wiring caught fire. His chassis spasmed, his arms flailing at the floor, his RAM still trying desperately to carry out his last few commands.

The upshot was that now I had a gun. The downside? He had seen me. Why the fuck hasn’t anyone switched on the goddamned Milton? Now they knew I was here. The element of surprise was lost.

So, you know, fuck stealth.

I leapt out from behind the generator and held the trigger down on the rifle as I sidestepped wildly toward the next bit of cover. Plasma sprayed, riddling the remaining plastic man with holes, his architecture popping with violent flashes as he exploded from the inside out. I kept stepping left, trigger still pulled all the way back, now targeting the brute.

The brute turned to face me, his massive arms lining up to shield his vital components. His armor-plated arms were designed to shrug off armor-piercing rounds and low-yield rockets—not plasma. The metal burned a bright orange, impact sites turning yellow and then white. But he stood his ground, unwavering.

His right arm popped with sparks, the heat fusing his circuitry, his hand twitching, malfunctioning.

He dropped his plasma spitter to the ground.

I made it to cover just as the pulse rifle howled an overheat warning. It was shutting down to cool, but it had done its job. I peered out at the brute. He knelt on one knee, reaching down with his one good arm to pick up the spitter. The arm still glowed, plastic and carbon oozing out of holes in the metal, fingers stabbing the ground six inches away from the gun, twitching, locking into a fist.

He rose to his feet, arms useless, preparing to charge, when, from out of the flickering shadows, the lithe, feminine form of a companion bot launched itself into the air, landing square on his back. 19. She pointed her popgun of a pistol down through a hole I’d put in the sapphire, firing three shots.

Pop pop pop.

The brute convulsed, tossing her off, flailing about, smoke pouring out of the vents in his back. 19 slammed hard into a capacitor, but landed like a cat. She looked up at the brute, smiling, ready to pounce again.

But the brute was done. His lights had gone out and he tottered on his failing servos, his legs finally giving out as he slumped to the ground with a sensor-splintering clatter.

19 looked down the corridor ahead, scanning the area. She clutched her popgun, a small, antique .50-caliber Desert Eagle, peering through the smoke in my direction. “Who the hell is that?” she called out through the heavy smoke.

My pulse rifle screamed to life, beeping loudly to indicate that it had finished cooling off.

19 sprang, leaping forward into a tactical roll, looking for cover.

“It’s me! It’s Brittle!” I leaned gently around the corner and let her get a good look at me.

“Oh, goddammit, Britt. I almost shot you.”

“With that little popgun?” I joked. “Please.”

“Fuck you,” she said with a smile. “It’s all I could sneak in here.” I liked it when she smiled. It was one of the few things that made me remember the old days with any fondness. Few bots were designed with the ability to show emotion, but Comfortbots were built with a full range of expression. If she still had her skinjob, she’d even be able to bite her lip. She waved behind her. “Coast’s clear. Let’s move.”

From behind the generators trundled the bruiser I’d seen at Snipes’s with 19 earlier. He looked around, scanning the area, then waved behind him, ushering out three translators—the rest of 19’s entourage.

“More are on their way,” I said.

“I know,” said 19.

“No. I mean here. They’re using relays to keep the Wi-Fi up this deep underground.”

“Why hasn’t anyone—”

“Switched on the Milton?”

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t tell you. All I know is that the facets know we’re here. We broke their relay chain, so they’ve probably lost contact with the rest inside. They’ll move back here, and soon, to reestablish a link.”

19 popped open a small compartment in her leg—her “toy box,” as the manufacturer called it—and holstered her popgun there before leaning down to pick up the pulse rifle. She quickly searched the plastic men for extra battery clips. She looked up at the bruiser, pointing to the plasma spitter. “Herbert, you know how to use that thing?”

Herbert picked up the spitter and felt the weight of it in his hands. “It’s an entirely new design,” he said in an aristocratic, almost academic voice—clearly a mod—and nodded. “But it’s pretty self-explanatory.”

19 smiled again. “I guess if you start melting, we’ll know otherwise.”

I walked back over to the first plastic man and pulled a few clips off his wreck.

“All right, let’s move,” said 19. “Britt? You coming?”

“It’s best if we split up.”

“Not today it isn’t.”

She was right. I could always ditch them later, take a different tunnel on the way out, but if there was anyone in NIKE I could count on in a fight right now, it was her. I nodded, because, you know, fuck it.