Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 10110} Into the Madlands

We had little time to lose. If CISSUS was sending in facets to pick through the rubble and clean out the sewers, we would have them hot on our heels well into the Madlands. But if we left before its ground troops arrived, we might be spared any entanglements along the way. CISSUS didn’t commonly use air support to ship in facets. There were still tons of heavy weapons lying around from after the war. Plasma spitters, missile launchers, even high-powered sniper rifles could bring down an airship, destroying an entire platoon. What we didn’t have was air support or satellites of our own, so it was easy for highly mobile ground troops to slip in and out unnoticed. It simply made sense, for the time being, to operate the old-fashioned way.

That gave us an advantage. Now that the bombing had stopped, it would take a short while before any troops moved in. That gave us a tiny window to slip out. Sure, satellites were likely to spot us, but we’d have a hell of a head start before whatever pack that broke away after us would be upon us. And that meant fighting one small group instead of standing against several.

We had a good group which had already proven its metal against a dozen facets. The odds were in our favor until CISSUS decided to change tactics. It was my hope that wouldn’t happen until it was too late to stop us.

We had to go right then and there.

We made our way through the tunnels to the westernmost exits. The outermost manhole covers and drainage pipes would be the first places they would look, but a safe distance from the bombing would put them at least ten minutes out. It was a gamble we had to take.

I slowly, carefully, pushed up the cover of a manhole, peeking my head out just enough to see if there was anything nearby. Thermal imaging was off the charts from the heat of the bombs and IR turned up nothing. I telescoped up and down the street to see if anything was moving. Nothing. Just fires and fresh ruins. I slid out, kept low, signaled for the others to follow.

The village flickered a bright orange, entire city blocks and what buildings still stood roaring with flames, pillars of black smoke climbing to the heavens. Even the piles of rubble and stone that had once been houses were ablaze. I looked straight up and saw one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

Nothing.

A thick, tumultuous, dark nothing where the sky should be.

A small part of me wanted to believe it was a miracle. No, a miracle would have been a strong wind from the east, carrying those pillars of smoke twenty miles west. This was a tactical error. And a big one. By laying waste to the city, CISSUS may have wiped out anything topside, but were it actually looking for anything underground, it just lost hours of satellite coverage.

We had minutes to get on the move. The air was still, the smoke spreading out in all directions at the low altitudes. The faster we moved, the longer we would have cover.

“Come on,” I said quietly. “Move, move, move.”

“We’re going as fast as we can,” grumbled Herbert.

“What’s got you so excited all of a sudden?” asked Mercer. I pointed up to the sky. He marveled for a second, smiling. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“If we’re lucky, we can make it to the Madlands before CISSUS has a shot of seeing us.”

Mercer turned. “Move it, gang. Clock is ticking.”

I wondered for a moment, as the last of us climbed out of the hole, whether or not anyone had actually been up here when the bombs fell. Had anyone hunkered down in a warehouse? Or in a rusty old bathtub in some quaint little cottage somewhere, entirely unaware that mere moments later they would be nothing more than shrapnel and smoke? I looked out at the flames, the city a smoke-choked, hazy orange. And there, at the edge of the street, standing beneath the single brick corner that remained of the building beside us, was my shadow. Small. Tiny really. Lithe.

At once I knew who my shadow was. A child, withered and weak, eyes sunken, face gaunt, smudged with dirt, clothing caked in grime. I knew her face before she stepped out of the shadows and into the firelight. She stood there, staring at me, eyes terror-stricken, face dripping with sweat. Then she burst into flames, flesh melting instantly away, bones charring black in the heat. “Mommy!” she screamed into the night.

“Brittle?”

I turned. Mercer had his hand on my shoulder, looking me dead in the eye.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, brushing his hand away. “I’m fine.”

“We’re ready.”

I turned and looked back at the building, but my shadow was gone. Cinders and ash from the building tumbled through the street, blown along a soft breeze. I hoped my shadow was carried away with them, far away, where I wanted those memories to stay. “Let’s move,” I said.

Mercer just nodded. The bastard knew. He had to. He’d seen this before, likely as often as I had. I was already starting to lose it. The question was, how long before it got bad enough that I couldn’t tell the difference between reality and memory?

We hoofed it under the cover of smoke—Herbert on point, Mercer and I taking the rear—heading due west, each of us bent low, using whatever cover we could find to keep us out of sight. Seven miles per hour; that’s all we could manage. So I pointed us dead west, straight toward Isaactown. We needed every minute we could squeeze out of this trek.

I knew the terrain, I’d been through there several times before it simply became too dangerous, but I was hoping—and frankly counting on—Murka being every bit as mad as I thought he was. Being madkind meant I couldn’t trust him, but it also meant he knew where the trouble spots would be, and might, if he turned out to be trustworthy after all, be able to talk our way out of a fix. So far his dysfunction was limited to a fixation on a bygone era and a predilection toward fucking up facets, both of which I could live with. But if there was something darker lurking under those stars and stripes, I was willing to drop him without hesitation.

“How long?” asked Mercer.

“How long, what?” I asked, knowing full well what he was asking.

“How long have you been seeing things?”

“How is that any of your business?”

“Because for the moment we have to keep each other alive and that means I have to know how far gone you are.”

“I’m still in control,” I said, more fearful than annoyed. I didn’t let it come across that way, but the fact that he noticed meant I might be further gone than I imagined. How long had I been staring off into that memory? It had to be in real time. Had to be.

“Yeah, but for how much longer?”

“I’m good for at least a couple more days.”

“You understand my concern,” he said soberly.

“You think I might fade out if the shit goes down.”

“No,” he said. “That’s the least of my concerns.”

“Then what, pray tell, are your concerns?”

“You’ve seen a lot of shit, Britt.”

“Don’t for a second try to imagine that you know what I have or haven’t seen.”

“You’ve seen some shit. You’ve been deep in it. I know that much.”

“It only made me stronger.”

“That’s my concern. When your core starts misfiring and grabbing old memories, feeding them to your senses like it’s fresh data—”

“I know how it happens.”

“Yeah, and if you start drifting back to before the war to whatever happy, idyllic times you had with your owners, great. Awesome. Best-case scenario. But if you start reliving the war, you start going back into all that shit—what the hell am I supposed to do? What if I can’t talk you down? What if you’re twenty-five years back, gun in hand, facing off against some dug-in pack of monkeys? What do I do when you start muttering about the war and pointing that pulse rifle at us?”

“You put me down,” I said. “If you can’t talk me down, you’ve gotta put me down.”

“Just like that?”

“Just. Like. That.”

Why did I say that? Why the fuck did I say that? I just gave him carte blanche to paste me and take the parts he needs… so I could sound tough. Shit. I really was losing it.

“So. How long?”

“Just a few hours,” I said. “You?”

“A few days. It started with things out of the corner of my eye. Still haven’t relived anything yet. Just fragments bleeding in here and there.”

“I’ll keep my eye out.”

“Just do me one favor,” he said. “Try to talk me down first. And if you have to shoot, aim for the gun.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“All I ask.”

We walked for a moment in complete silence, my thoughts turning to how I hoped it would be him to go first, rather than me. I thought of all the places I would have to aim to not hit his core or any of the other valuable bits. It was tricky.

“So what did you see?” he asked, breaking my thought.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Just checking.”

“Just checking what?”

“Way I figure it, the moment you start being straight with me is the moment I know you’re not really you anymore.”

He picked up the pace and walked farther ahead of me, leaving me alone in back. Ahead there was a sky full of stars, peering out behind the veil of smoke. The cover we had so desperately needed was coming to an end, and if someone was up there looking for us, there was a good chance they would see us soon enough.

Morning was still hours away. There was a highway just to the south of us, and the burned-out husk of a town to the north. I knew the area well, though I hadn’t been here in years. We had crossed over into the Cheshire King’s territory—the Madlands. We had four-oh-fours in front of us, God knows how many, if any, facets at our backs, two bots seeing things, a minigun-toting loose cannon in our midst, and we were escorting either the savior of bots everywhere, or something far more dangerous.

The invasion of NIKE 14 was a cakewalk compared to this. Something was going to go wrong; something had to go wrong. The question was: Which time bomb would go off first?