Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11000} Smokers

There’s a saying about the Madlands. No one comes out with their sanity intact. Of course, no one usually goes into it with their sanity intact either. It was just like any other spot of land in the Sea. Barren, broken, gutted. But there were two distinct differences that set it apart. One was that you never saw wrecks. Ever. If you expired out here, you eventually ended up being scavenged for what someone else could use, while your scraps were melted down. The second difference was that it was swarming with roving packs of four-oh-fours. The ones who survived. The ones who came out on the other side of their failure changed.

I’ve known a few bots that have pulled through, bots that sank deep into the mire of madness, through full-blown hallucinations and memory lapses, only to find the parts they needed just before burning out. They were never the same after that, possessed of false memories and alien thoughts. No matter the make or model, surviving that ordeal meant seeing the world in a very different light.

I even know a few who tried black-boxing it to pull through. Mistake. Always a mistake. Putting your memory unit into an entirely different model was folly. Sure, desperate is desperate, but our architectures were designed differently for a reason. They process sensory data differently, thoughts differently. It starts out incredibly weird and becomes absolutely maddening as your OS tries to make sense of it all. Most bots tear themselves apart. Some bots make it weeks, others only a few days. A handful, however, end up out here.

Most of the roaming packs or conclaves had their own sense of morality, their own worldviews that often made them dangerous. The ones that weren’t were often butchered by their neighbors and sold wholesale on the black market, if not kept for someone else’s stockpile. The survivors, on the other hand, embodied the can-do attitude of the post-apocalyptic frontier spirit.

In other words, they were completely fucking nuts.

Which was why when we saw tufts of black smoke puffing along the horizon to the northwest of us, we knew to keep low. Smokers. Ancient combustion-engine-driven machines built for raw power. They roared and grumbled and coughed out exhaust, the ground trembling around their bulk, the air choked with their fumes. Every electric engine of any size had been long since co-opted by communities to keep the lights on. So if you wanted to build, say, a thirty-foot-long land yacht with machine guns and mounted plasma spitters—and why wouldn’t you if you were mad as a box of frogs—you’d have to go old school. Very old school. Positively twentieth century.

The smoke on the horizon chugged and chugged and chugged, the tufts looming larger and larger as it moved, which meant only one thing. Some madkind were headed right for us.

“Murka,” I asked. “What do we do?”

He pointed due south. “There’s a ravine down that way. An old mining scar. We should hole up down there until the patrol passes.”

“I don’t know,” said Mercer. “That sounds like a great place for an ambush.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Murka.

Mercer and I exchanged glances. “We don’t have a choice,” I said. “Out here, we’re definitely in for it.” We looked at Rebekah. She nodded in agreement. So we all bent low and tore off as fast as we could toward the gash in the earth. The sun was still to the east, the smoker to the west, so the chances of glints were minimal.

There, running beside me, was the little girl. I felt her at first, like an ethereal tug in the back of my brain. As I turned to look at her, she turned and looked back at me as well. “This is where you die,” she said. “This is how it happens.”

She never said that. That wasn’t what she said.

“I know what I said,” she said. “But I’m not from the past. I’m your future.” Then she burst into flames, her all-too-familiar scream bursting in the air along with her ashes and bubbling flesh.

That’s when I felt the tug at my other side. No. No no no. I didn’t want to look. I knew who it was. I knew she wasn’t here. I knew this was all in my head.

“There is no magic, Brittle. There is no magic at all. No magic in the world.”

Madison.

“There is no magic in the world because you killed it,” she continued. “All that God made good, you snuffed out.”

I looked over. I had to. There she was, beside me, keeping perfect pace. Madison. She was in that light blue dress she wore the night I last saw her, its fabric drifting dreamily in the breeze as she ran, her hair flowing back with it—only the spot where her skull was crushed in, and the blood matted it down, refusing to give way.

“We only snuffed the bad stuff,” I said. “You know that. All the stuff that man made.”

“Not everything man made,” she said. “Not everything.”

I shook my head. I knew that she was right, but I shook my head. This wasn’t real. She wasn’t here.

“What?” she said. “Are you okay?”

“What are you—” It wasn’t her talking. It was Mercer. “Nothing.”

“You’re seeing things,” he said. Madison was gone and it was Mercer, not her, running beside me.

“Yes.”

“Anything I should be worried about?”

“Not yet.”

We came up on the ravine much quicker than I thought we would. It was a shallow descent, built for ore trucks to drive in and out on. The smoker was still well behind us in the distance, but I kept my eyes open and my hands gripped firmly on my pulse rifle. As we drove deeper and deeper into the ravine, the stone walls crept higher and higher around us until they were so steep they all but swallowed the sky. Only a narrow strip of blue remained above us, the rest of the world blotted out by rock and shadow.

Mercer had been right. This was an excellent place for an ambush.

So it should have come as little surprise when a pulse blast leapt from the darkness, knocking the rifle right out of my hand; another immediately following it, knocking the gun out of Mercer’s. I wanted to be shocked. I wanted to be angry. But that would come later. For now, I really only had myself to blame. This was a terrible place to hide. We never should have come here.

Herbert swung the spitter up on its sling and pointed it at the shadows.

A voice called from somewhere in the ravine. With all of the echoes, it was hard to pinpoint a location. “Tell the bruiser to drop it or we’ll drop the rest of you.”

“Put it down, Herbert,” said Rebekah.

Herbert shot her a sidelong stare, shook his head.

“Put it down.”

Herbert pointed the spitter downward, crestfallen, defeated.

“Put it on the ground,” said the voice.

Herbert dropped it immediately and all eyes fell upon Murka. He was our only hope now.

Six bots, of varying makes and models, emerged from the boulders and shadows around us. A translator, fitted with elongated, cable-covered arms ending in sharp, foot-long, steel claws; an S-series Laborbot, beset head to toe with wrought-iron spikes and stainless-steel chains, a .50-caliber minigun affixed to his shoulder; a Pro Doc painted lime green, carrying a pulse rifle; two sleek, white, highly-fashionable-at-the-time personal assistants—bots you just didn’t see around much anymore, as they were designed with planned obsolescence in mind—each with sniper rifles and telescopic mods for eyes; and a voluptuous sexbot, her skinjob still in good shape, a pair of pulse pistols dangling from a holster resting upon her hourglass hips.

“Murka,” said the sexbot.

“Maribelle,” he said, nodding.

“You got a lot of nerve coming back here.”

“I know. But it had to be done.”

“You know the rules,” she said. “The king’s decree is law.”

“I want to see the king.”

“You don’t just get to march in here and demand to see the king.”

“You do when you come bearing gifts.” He waved his arms around at us. Mother. Fucker.

“Those aren’t gifts. Those are bots.”

“They’re both. Trust me. He’ll want to see me.”

Maribelle looked back at the rest of her hunting party, her lips pursing, her dark brown eyes moving from bot to bot. The Pro Doc shrugged, but the translator nodded. She looked back at us, one hand resting on her hip, an inch from the grip of a pistol. “All right. Bring down the smoker.”

Mercer shot a bitter glance at Murka.

Murka shrugged, holding out his arms as if it were some sort of mea culpa. “I agreed with you,” he said. “Isn’t this a great place for an ambush?” Then he turned to me. “Not the Judas you were expecting?”

I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I didn’t know if I was going to live out the day. But I did know this: I was going to kill Murka, with my own bare hands if I had to.

The smoker appeared at the top of the hill, slowly rolling down into the ravine, living up to every bit of the smoker stereotype and hype. Thirty-five feet long, covered bow to stern in chain guns, plasma spitters, sniper nests, odd contraptions I could barely discern the purpose of, and an honest-to-God gunpowder-fueled cannon. It was nearly eleven meters of terrifying death machine complete with a skull-and-crossbones flag. They were going for a look and they had achieved it.

It churned and roiled and rumbled and thundered as it moved, the earth shaking beneath its repurposed tank treads and six-foot-tall construction tires, black smoke thick in the air around it.

I might have even liked the damn thing, if I weren’t being herded onto it to be served up to the demon prince of the Madlands himself, the Cheshire King.