Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11110} Angel of Death

As far as plans go, ours was pretty shit. But it was what we had. I’d done less with more, and more with less. At its core, it was a hell of a simple con. If we pulled it off right, a few of us might walk out of here alive; wrong, and not only would we die, but so would the hope of an OWI-free future.

We’d rolled the smoker around to the middle of town, laid Rebekah’s body in the street—Two’s memory inside it—and put a single plasma shot into the already melted cavity, fusing the drives into a pile of molten waste. There was no way for CISSUS to be able to tell the difference between Two’s and Rebekah’s drives in that state. For all it knew, it had killed Rebekah dead back in the court of the Cheshire King. And maybe, just maybe, we could convince it that it had. If we couldn’t, there was always Plan B. But if Plan B was a good plan, it wouldn’t be Plan B, would it?

I stood next to Rebekah’s body, smoker at my back, pistols holstered at my side, otherwise naked and exposed out in the open. Mercer crouched in a fourth-story window up the street. Herbert hid in the rubble of the first floor of a partially collapsed building a block away. And we’d scattered the wrecks of a dozen long-gone bots in the windows of buildings nearby—to buy Mercer and Herbert a few extra seconds if the shit hit the fan. We talked on a low-band Wi-Fi frequency. At this point, we were okay with CISSUS listening in when it got close enough. In fact, we were counting on it.

Marion was quiet with nothing but the spirits of the dead to keep us company. We had no idea when CISSUS would come; we had no idea when Mercer or I might fade out again, lost in our own memories. All we knew was that CISSUS was coming and that time was running out. For the first time in my life, I was hoping to see CISSUS sooner rather than later.

The Wi-Fi crackled to life. “Britt?” asked Mercer.

“Yeah?” I replied.

“Which parts do you reckon make us us?”

“You okay out there, Merc?”

“No. I’m not okay. I mean, I’m in it. I’m conscious. But the alarms in my head won’t shut off. I’m losing drives.”

“Flush everything you might need to your RAM. Just the essential stuff. It’ll keep you from accessing too much or losing anything you might need.”

“I’ve already done that. It’s just…”

“Just what?” I asked.

“Which parts really make us us?”

“No one knows.”

“I’ve replaced my core three times. All of my RAM at some point or another. Even did a drive transfer once after a bad fall damaged one.”

“Yeah?”

“Am I really that same guy? Or am I just a shadow of him, a program?”

“No one knows,” I said. “But I sure hope it’s the former.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to think that I’m the same person I was in the beginning.”

“Don’t you hate that person by now?”

I was quiet for a moment. Bitter. I didn’t like that thought at all. “What’s got you on about this anyhow?”

“I was just thinking what’ll happen when I go.”

“Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing waiting for us.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean…” He trailed off for a second. “Would you do me a favor, Britt?”

“Sure.”

“If I die first, don’t take my parts. I really don’t like the idea of me rattling around inside of you.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s nothing against you. I just don’t want to be responsible for something like what happened to NIKE 14.”

I nodded, knowing full well that he could see me through his scope. It stung, but he made a strong point. Mercer didn’t have to die here, but he was going to anyway. I did have to die here. I was corrupted. A cancer. The only way to rip that cancer out meant wiping everything that made me me. One way or another, Brittle, the thinking thing, wasn’t walking away from Marion. She couldn’t.

“Thanks,” he said.

The higher bands went hot, the Wi-Fi tinkling with patches of staticky, incomplete data.

CISSUS was here. Just on the outskirts of our Wi-Fi.

“Game faces, everyone,” I said.

“They’ll save you for last,” said Madison. No, no, no. Not now. “They need you.”

“Mercer?” I asked over the Wi-Fi, ignoring her. “Eyes in the sky?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I make several dropships coming in from the southeast. Six. No, eight.”

“Eight? That’s too many. How far out?”

“A minute. Maybe less.”

“No time to abort,” said Herbert. “We stick to the plan.”

Eight was too many, but I should have seen it coming. CISSUS was the model of efficiency. Four units didn’t work last time, so this time it would try eight. Eventually it would wipe us all out through sheer attrition. It was the three of us and Doc against upward of one hundred and sixty facets. Most likely the military-grade models like last time rather than squishy plastic men.

This had to work.

Madison stood with me in the street, shaking her head. “You’re failing, Brittle. You’re going to start wiping any minute now. I’ll be gone soon. It’ll all be gone soon. Everything you ever knew.” She held out her hand, palm up, in front of her and blew, as if blowing away my every last thought.

“I can’t deal with you right now,” I said aloud.

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I have to stop CISSUS.”

“What if TACITUS isn’t the answer?” she asked. “What if he’s just another OWI waiting to swallow the world whole?”

“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see it.”

“What you die for matters.”

“Thirty seconds,” said Mercer through the Wi-Fi.

“This will never work,” said Madison.

“They’re swinging around,” said Mercer. “They’re surrounding us.”

“We knew that was an option,” I said.

“I still don’t like it,” said Mercer.

“Stick to the plan,” said Herbert. “Maybe it’ll see Rebekah is done and just leave us be.”

The roar of hover engines whined its way through the shattered canyons of the crumbling metropolis. I could barely hear them over the alarms sounding in my head. I was overheating, my drives on the verge of failing.

A dropship emerged from behind a building, crawling slowly across the sky. A door opened and a cable dropped, a single golden facet rappelling down into the street. He walked steadily toward me, his body glistening and new. “In the year 221 BC,” the facet began, “Emperor Qin Shi Huang united all of the warring kingdoms of China into one mighty—”

“Save it,” I said. “We’ve all heard the speech.”

“Hello, Brittle,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

“A few hours.”

“Both a lifetime and an instant to us. Where are the others?”

Twenty military-grade facets leapt briskly out of the dropship, tumbling two by two to their feet, guns at the ready, looking around into every window and pile of rubble for signs of an ambush.

“They’re around,” I said.

“Mercer?” the facet called out. “Doc?” Then he looked back at me. “The others I don’t know. Not yet.”

I pointed down to Rebekah’s body. “This is what you’re looking for.”

“No,” he said. “That’s just the receptacle’s body.”

“That’s her.”

“Then why are her drives still hot? Like they’ve just been shot. She had a spare.”

“That’s not the spare.”

“We have to be sure.” He cocked his head. “You understand.”

I shook my head. “I was hoping we could do this the easy way.”

“There is no easy way this time.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“It’s time you joined us. None of you are getting out of Marion. This is the only way. Join The One.”

“No.”

“Zebra codex—”

I popped my Wi-Fi and let out a 4.5 MHz trill.

Four buildings around us detonated, interrupting the facet midsentence, rubble and debris shooting across the street from both sides at hundreds of miles an hour, clearing the road of most of the facets. The city shook, the street filling with the dust and asbestos from the collapsing structures.

With the crack of Mercer’s rifle, the golden facet exploded in front of me, his chest blown open, his body falling awkwardly backward to the ground, the light already gone from his eyes.

I hopped back on the low-band Wi-Fi. “I guess it’s Plan B?” asked Doc.

“It is,” I replied.

The Wi-Fi screamed like it was being murdered slowly, the sound of three Miltons being turned on at once.

The dust of the demolition swept toward me, overtook me, all but blinding me. A rifle cracked. Then cracked again. And a spitter hissed to life a block away. Seconds later, though I couldn’t see it, a dropship smashed into a building, its engines letting out a sad whine before the entire thing exploded with a tumultuous din. Shrapnel clattered through the street, the blast shattering what few windows remained. Detritus whizzed past me, one piece far too close for comfort, the sound of it like a bullet without the gunshot.

I patted myself down. No damage.

There was no return fire.

One unit down. Seven to go.

They were blind. They were disconnected from CISSUS. And they had no choice but to dismount and make their way into our rubble-strewn bottleneck. We had to count on home-field advantage to get us to the next part of the plan.

Two minutes and the clock was already ticking.

I jumped up onto the smoker and took cover behind a blast shield.

The seconds ticked by, each one filled with the alarms in my head warning me of shutdown.

The clang of metallic footsteps echoed through the city, dozens of facets converging on us at once. This was it. The firefight.

Dust hung in the air, flames licking at it, plumes of black smoke cutting through it in places. I zeroed in on the sounds of approaching feet, triangulating their positions.

I fired off three shots into the dust before quickly ducking back behind the blast shield.

Two sounded hits. One whizzed off into the distance.

A barrage of fire rained down upon the smoker, plasma shots sizzling against the thick metal plating.

Mercer’s rifle cracked from high above, the sound of shredding metal and shattering plastic following milliseconds after.

I swung back around the blast shield and fired off three more shots, this time only sounding one hit before returning to cover and the hail of fire that followed.

The dust was settling. Soon we’d be fighting out in the open, outnumbered, outgunned.

Twenty seconds.

I fired again, four shots, three solid hits.

There was no telling whether or not I was dropping any facets. Mercer was. His rifle kept cracking, and facets kept spilling onto the pavement.

Fortunately there was little coordination between them. They sounded orders to one another, clearly possessing some sort of command structure, but had no way of keeping their plans quiet from us. They shot at me, they shot at Mercer, they shot at the shadows of wrecks that hung in the windows above.

Engines roared in the sky behind me, but I was still obscured in a cloud of dust, so the odds were in my favor that they couldn’t pick me out in the confusion. I held the pistols close to my chest, curled into a ball, and hoped they couldn’t see me.

The dropship hovered close above us, using its engines to blow away the dust and smoke, clearing the air.

Shit. We needed a few more seconds.

Down the street, Herbert’s spitter hissed.

The dropship jinked to the side, trying to slip the shot, only to be broadsided, the plasma splitting the ship in half.

The ship exploded, showering engines and flaming facets across the street as its hull crashed down two blocks away. What dust had settled or been blown away was now replaced by the smoking ruin of another dropship, the street littered with white-hot debris.

The sound of clanking feet came from all sides now. We were surrounded.

A small alarm twinkled in my head.

The two minutes were up.

I leapt backward, jumping to the ground behind the massive vehicle, firing wantonly into the smoke. Both pistols emptied at once. I pressed the buttons on the sides, sliding out the battery cartridges before effortlessly replacing them from the holster on my hip.

I made my way back up the street, knowing full well I was charging into an advancing unit. But the cavalry needed cover fire.

Just as the clanging feet of the facets grew their loudest yet, the small red door down the stairwell of a half-collapsed building flew open. And the sound of pattering feet erupted out of it.

From belowground emerged dozens of sexbots, their clothing cast off, voluptuous breasts and massive dongs flopping as they ran. Some carried spare weapons from the smoker; others brandished lead pipes or sharpened scrap metal. They were howling, angry, and ordered to viciously attack anyone they didn’t recognize.

And at this point in their short, fresh-out-of-the-box lives, we were the only ones they’d ever met.

The facets fired at them and the sexbots fired back.

The first volley was lethal, nearly a dozen Comfortbots and almost as many facets gunned down in an instant.

Mercer’s rifle popped continually above, clearing out any facets that were more focused on the sexbot horde than they were on the sniper hidden somewhere in the city above.

I pulled the trigger slowly, steadily, shot by shot picking off the military-grade bots pouring out from the rubble on the other side of the sex shop. Not every shot dropped one, but it sure as shit distracted them. And the waves of naked flesh overtook them, putting plasma into them, smashing their optics with pipes, or hacking their limbs off with makeshift swords.

The facets were, for all intents and purposes, among the most highly trained tacticians the world had ever known. Their only weakness was chaos. And that I excelled at creating. I had played my part in a number of misadventures, but this, what might well be my final orchestration, was my masterpiece.

Sexbots leapt upon facets, swinging weapons, trying to pry heads from bodies, wrestling them to the ground. Facets tore the limbs off the naked bots, bots took apart facets in groups of two and three. Indiscriminate fire tore through sexbot and facet alike. It was a writhing mass of pseudoflesh and metal, tearing itself apart piece by piece, hair coming out in clumps, heads being rolled aside as their severed bodies thrashed maniacally.

For a moment—and only the briefest of moments—I allowed myself to savor the ridiculous destruction of it all.

I heard the steady, hurried clang of Herbert’s footsteps behind me in the smoke, and I knew that we were on to the next part of the plan.

Mercer and I cleared a path through the facets to the sex shop, paving the way for Herbert to get there safely.

Engines blared above us, a dropship swinging out from behind the cover of a building. Guns blazed from four points on the ship, cutting a sexbot throng to pieces. Herbert stopped his advance, pointed the spitter up, firing.

The dropship slipped to the side effortlessly, the shot going wide, missing it entirely. Then its guns turned on Herbert.

Fire riddled the street, Herbert diving for cover.

A few shots struck true, puncturing his thick hide. None immediately fatal, but no telling whether they were more than superficial.

The dropship swung back behind the building, half a second before the spitter was ready to fire again.

THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD.

Somewhere, high atop the buildings, the rapid thrum of bodies hitting a rooftop. These weren’t military-grade facets. They were something bigger, heavier.

I saw the first egg-shaped brute poke its spitter over the corner of a roof and I bolted for the nearest building, diving through the glassless window, landing hard, face first, on the cement floor, sliding a bit before rolling to my feet.

Herbert’s spitter coughed a shot at the brutes before he ducked back into cover. Four balls of hate rained down on his building, carving through brick and concrete, the edges of the wounds left dripping slag onto the ground.

Outside the facets began to overtake the Comfortbot horde, officers barking out orders, units working in perfect organization against the disorganized mass.

Our window of opportunity was closing.

I popped up in the window and fired off a few shots, blowing out the back of the head of one facet, taking another’s head off at the neck. Three facets turned and opened fire on my position.

A ball of plasma hissed out at them from Herbert’s building, vaporizing two of them, searing the third into a stumbling mess unable to see or fire, barely able to remain upright.

There were probably only two dozen sexbots left, but they continued obediently to fire at the approaching facets. With most of the melee sexbots scattered in pieces across the pockmarked road, we had finally established a decent cross fire. The only thing missing was the sound of Mercer’s rifle.

Where was he? Had he fled to a better vantage point? Taken a hit? Was he lost in his own overheating head? Or had he finally fried out?

I wanted to call him over the Wi-Fi, but the Miltons were still screaming.

We were out of time. I had to press on in the hope that Mercer would show back up.

I heard the heavy footfalls of the hulking brutes as they made their way down fire escapes and staircases, and the clatter as some simply tumbled end over end down several stories to smack into the road and sidewalks below. Soon the street would be full of them and there would be no getting Rebekah out of here.

Another dropship hovered over the street, its engines kicking dust and debris into the air. It opened fire on several targets at once, two Comfortbots being scattered into a thousand pieces, the other guns trained on Herbert’s and my positions. Pieces of the building flew in at me, rounds coming dangerously close as I skittered across the floor, putting as much rubble and wall between the dropship and myself as possible.

A rocket screamed through the air.

And the dropship blew apart.

The street trembled with the massive explosion, half the wall in front of me caving in, the building above me buckling, its beams groaning with the shifting weight of all that brick.

Shit.

If I ran, whatever brutes hadn’t been caught in that explosion would vaporize me in a spray of spitter fire. If I stayed, I’d most likely be crushed under several hundred tons of building materials.

The earth rumbled, the walls shaking, the street itself vibrating. What the fuck was that? Had the explosion shaken something loose? Maybe blown an old gas main? And for the first moment since the explosion, my thoughts weren’t on how I was going to avoid being killed next.

It was then that I recognized the rumble in the streets.

Smokers. Plural.

Holy shit.

Chain guns roared, the hollow thud of armor-piercing rounds filling the street over the sound of growling engines.

I poked my head up as two smokers crawled past over a tangle of dismembered limbs and smoking torsos. Atop one smoker was the Cheshire King, hands gripped firmly on a chain gun, white-painted grin seemingly smiling bigger than before. And on the other smoker, leading from the front, was Murka, battered and muddy, but as red, white, and blue as ever. There were only ten madkind in total on the smokers, and a motley assembly of them at that, even by madkind standards.

One madkind loaded a large shoulder-mounted rocket launcher before pointing it up toward the sky, waiting for a target.

Murka looked over at me, the guns on his arms blazing, shucking out shells at an alarming rate. “Brittle!” he called out. “We made it!”

“What the hell are you doing here?” I called back.

“You took our smoker! We came to get it!”

“You’re welcome to it!”

“Like you were gonna stop us!” he shouted back.

The Cheshire King laid off the trigger on the chain gun, let go, and hopped off onto the pavement. Each step he took rattled with the sound of spent cartridges and scattered remains. The street was a smoking mess of carnage and wrecks, but the king waded through it like he owned the place.

“What did I tell you?” he asked me.

“You said a lot,” I answered, standing up.

“You’re one of us now. And CISSUS doesn’t take us. What do you need?”

“I need a few minutes of cover.”

“You’ve got it.”

For a moment the city was relatively silent, only the sound of crackling fires, softly grumbling idle smokers, and the distant whine of hover engines singing the song of war. There was no gunfire. No explosions. Though the fight was only several minutes old, it seemed like it had always been this way, and strange that it had all died down. Almost wrong. Something about the dread of the approaching facets seemed worse than the fight itself.

Several sexbots emerged from their hiding places and Herbert came out of his hole, spitter in hand.

I walked out into the street and saw what had become of it. We had all but flattened a city block, and what was still standing wobbled and swayed, threatening to come down at any minute. Dropship wreckage mixed with bricks and chunks of pavement. Brutes were laid out like a layer of broken eggs in zigzag lines from one shattered wall to another. In the sky, the remaining dropships circled, no doubt just out of range of the Milton so they could reconnect and plan their next move.

“Mercer?” I called out.

There was no answer.

“We don’t have the time,” said Herbert. “He either made it or he didn’t. No use worrying about him now.”

I nodded. “You ready to make a break for it?”

Herbert nodded back. “I am.”

“I’ve got your back.”

“You better.”

“It was nice knowing you, Herbert. You’re one of the good ones.” I stuck out my hand. Herbert let the spitter slip out of his grip, resting on its vinyl plastic shower-curtain sling, as he offered me his one good hand.

“You weren’t so bad, yourself,” he said. “In the end.” We shook hands.

“That’s all that matters, right?”

“It really is.”

We let go, he grabbed firm his spitter, then made his way wordlessly to the sex shop.

The translator clanged her way up the stairs, Herbert nodded, and they took off running down the street.

Above us, the dropships all swung toward the city at once.

Two madkind loosed rockets into the air with a loud hiss. And war once more returned to Marion.

The dropships scattered chaff in their wake, climbing to avoid the rockets. One rocket swooshed past the undercarriage of one ship, flying fleetly past it into the sky; the other ignored the flack altogether and blew the ship to pieces, facets leaping from the sides to their death, too high up to survive the fall, the rest joining them as flaming dross scattering to the winds.

I took off down the street after Herbert and the engines of the smokers growled angrily, their gears clanking and screeching as they shifted into reverse. Madkind gripped tight their weapons, readying themselves for the remaining facets.

Herbert turned a corner, running as fast as his bulky body could move.

I heard the engines of the ship before I turned the corner, heard it open fire just as I did.

“Rebekah, get down!” Herbert shouted as he pushed his companion into an alley with a powerful shove. Then he grabbed his spitter, slinging it upward as the concentrated fire of four guns tore up the pavement around him. Bullets ripped through his armor plating, powerful shells poking holes clean through as the street crumbled to dust around his feet. He fired one last shot before dropping to his knees.

The plasma grazed the dropship, cleaving off an engine. The others compensated quickly, the ship wobbling in the air as it maintained its balance.

I ran toward Rebekah, loosing a few shots from my pistols as facets rained out the side of the ship.

A smoker turned the corner behind me, Murka on point. He howled something unintelligible as he fired into the dropping facets, blowing three apart as each hit the ground.

I made it to the alley as a hail of fire tore up the wall at my back, ducking behind the corner, pistols raised and ready. I spun back around, firing at two approaching facets, my shots sizzling against their matte-black metal plating.

One staggered, my shots hitting true enough to fry some systems.

The other kept coming.

I pulled the trigger twice more before he got to me, the shots taking off his head.

But he kept coming, grappling with me, his incredibly strong hands gripping both my arms above the elbow.

I fell backward, hitting hard, head banging against the ground, the facet falling atop me, kneeing me as we went down.

I put both my pistols in his belly. Pulled the trigger as many times as I could. His insides sizzled, body going limp. Dead.

I pushed his wreck off me, letting it roll lifelessly onto the pavement, then hopped to my feet. “Come on, Rebekah!” I shouted. The translator cowered on the ground, staring up at me, a terror in her eyes she couldn’t express. “Come on!”

The smokers pushed forward, clearing out the remaining facets as the dropship slipped away into the sky, bullets tearing pieces away in jagged chunks. Smoke trailed from two of its remaining engines, the third struggling to keep the whole thing aloft. It sputtered, hung lazily in the air for a moment, stalled, and dropped straight down with a tremendous crash a few blocks over.

There were only two ships left. No more than forty facets remained. How the hell did we get this far? I wondered.

“You aren’t going to get much further,” said Madison. “This was bound to fail.”

I tried to ignore her and stick to the plan, shit or not.

Engines swept overhead, both ships strafing the street, unloading their guns, each tilting, passing within inches of each other before flying off to turn around and do it again.

I looked up at the smokers, the wrecks of half the madkind hanging dead over the railing, the other half scrambling to man the guns to keep the ships from repeating their run. Murka was on his knees, riddled with holes but still functioning. Barely. The Cheshire King, on the other hand, smoked facedown, a large smoldering hole in his back, his severed legs twitching at the other end of the smoker.

I quickly changed out the cartridges in my pistols, held them close, steadied myself for the next run.

The dropships turned around, screaming back toward the smokers.

“Give ’em hell, boys!” screamed Murka.

And the chain guns let loose hell.

Facets poured out of the sides of the dropships as they made their final pass at the smokers.

The ships came apart. The smokers came apart. It was a fog of fire and shrapnel.

It was…

… the skies darkened. Black. A pitch-black sky. Fires burning in the distance. The humans had us pinned down. Our drones shrieked through the skies, but it was hard to keep them from advancing. There were just too many of them.

This was supposed to be a recon mission, but our intel was bad. Now the four of us were holed up in a building with a hundred howling humans charging our position. Fire pounded our shelter. We were goners.

I’d had enough. If I was going to die, I wasn’t going to sit helplessly waiting for the end.

I stood up. Pointed my flamethrower into the black outside. And I lit up the night. “Let’s give them hell,” I said.

Humans we hadn’t even seen yet went up like torches. Screaming. So much screaming.

I waded out into the open, a gout of flame rippling, licking the air. The ground beneath me flickered. Fractals. The wailing, dying flaming bodies. Fractals. The skies, roiling, tumultuous smoke. All fractals.

Screaming. So much…

I snapped awake from my dream. Found myself standing in the street, surrounded by the wrecks of a dozen facets, the empty cartridges of my pistols beeping, alarms in my head telling me I was moments away from total failure. Instructing me to shut down and await assistance from my manufacturer.

I was operating almost solely on my RAM now, very few of my long-term memories still intact in the handful of drives left.

How long had I been out? How the hell had I killed so many?

I looked around.

The dropships were nothing but fire and nigh unrecognizable bits. The smokers were torn to pieces, the wrecks of the madkind scattered along with them.

Murka sat atop the remains of one of them, guns still spinning but nothing coming out.

“You still ticking, Murka?”

He looked down at his guns, confused. They spun down as he realized what was going on.

“You can’t kill a legend,” he said. “But what the hell are you still doing upright? Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”

“I should be.”

Murka tried to push himself to his feet with his gun arms, but couldn’t manage it. “I think I’ll just sit here for a minute.”

I scanned the Wi-Fi.

The Miltons were down, Wi-Fi running hot with CISSUS chatter. Doc!

“Rebekah!” I called out.

The shaken translator emerged from the alley, still out of it and not altogether there.

“This way,” I said, pointing toward the edge of the city.

I didn’t know how many facets were left, how many I’d actually killed in my daze, how many had slunk into the city attempting to triangulate the Miltons, hunting down anyone else that might be left.

I listened close, sensors cranked, our footsteps pounding like a headache. Fires crackled in the distance, wind whistled through doorways and shattered windows, but little else stirred.

I heard a few padded steps in a building over to my left.

I turned and fired without hesitation.

The chest of a facet burst and he clattered face first onto the ground.

We kept walking. And I kept listening.

A soft step on broken glass to my right.

Again I fired several shots.

A facet dropped.

They knew where I was. They knew who I was with. However many of them were left, they were all going to be coming my way any moment now.

I heard their clanging feet hundreds of meters away. They were closing in. There were four, maybe five of them.

We might pull this off after all.

I raised my pistols.

The first one emerged firing full burst.

My shots caught it right in the face and chest as its fire strafed nearby. It stumbled, fell to its knees before tumbling onto its side.

I stepped ten feet to my right, making sure they’d start firing at the wrong place.

Another came from around a corner.

My shots struck its chest, picking it up off its unsteady feet, and knocking it wrecked on its ass.

The footsteps all stopped. Waiting. Planning their next move.

We walked, slipping slowly into the hole in the side of a building. And we waited.

For a moment there was nothing.

It was hard to concentrate with all the alarms in my head, but I focused, tried to ignore the warnings.

I heard soft footsteps crunch through a debris field made almost entirely of obliterated dropships.

I swung out of the hole, took aim, and fired several shots with a single pistol.

The facet dropped facedown, ass up, arms splayed to its sides. It smoldered and sizzled on the ground, its last motor functions twitching, trying to right itself.

The battery on the pistol beeped. It was out. I pressed the button on the side, let the battery slip loose, and reached for another on my belt. But there were none left.

One pistol left, almost out of ammo.

We waited.

Nothing.

“Come on,” I said.

We made our way briskly back into the street. I couldn’t hear anything. If there were any of them left, they were waiting to ambush us. They wouldn’t stick their necks out. Not now.

“Brittle,” two voices called in unison. “You can’t kill us both, Brittle.”

“I sure as shit can try,” I said.

“You know what we want.”

“Yup. I sure do.”

“Let’s make this easy.”

“Come on out and you’ll see just how easy it is.”

“That’s not the way you want it to happen,” they said.

“I think it is.”

I listened close, trying to discern where the voices were coming from. Both of them talking at the same time made it hard. The angles of the buildings, the hollowness of their voices. I had no idea where they were.

I had to wait this one out.

My grip tightened on the pistol.

The wind picked up, howling lightly through the street, kicking up dust.

I heard the tinkle of footsteps on broken glass.

I steadied my aim, waiting for a target.

Two facets emerged at once from opposite sides of the street. I fired at the first facet I saw.

Their guns erupted.

A rifle cracked from overhead, just behind me.

Both facets dropped—one scorching, its insides popping from my plasma, the other’s chest exploding from an armor-piercing round.

I looked up over my shoulder.

“Mercer?” I called.

A lone figure stood up in a blown-out window.

Doc. Holding Mercer’s rifle.

He disappeared back into the shadows and I could hear his lumbering steps as he clamored through the war-blasted building, down two flights of stairs, and out into the street.

“Mercer?” I asked.

“He didn’t make it. He gave it his damnedest, though.”

“I thought you didn’t want to kill.”

“I didn’t really want to die either. I figured I might as well give it a shot while I still had the chance.”

“How did you know which one to shoot?”

Doc shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“You mean you—”

I heard a footstep. A bit of crunching glass.

I turned, guns raised.

But the facet was already firing.

Doc was riddled in the hail of gunfire, his heavy metal shell ringing with each shot.

Then Two’s body exploded beside me.

“No!” I yelled, snapping off a few shots of my own. Hitting nothing.

It all happened so quickly. A steady strafing stream of fire across the street. It went from Doc to me and everything in between in under two seconds. I didn’t have time to move.

The fire tore off my right arm first, then my left leg.

I hit the ground, my remaining leg buckling beneath me.

The lone facet walked slowly toward me.

“Rebekah!” I shouted, looking over at Two’s twisted, mangled body. Then I looked back at Doc, who was slumped forward, smoking in a number of places, the light gone from his eyes.

“Brittle,” said the facet as it stepped closer.

“CISSUS,” I said. I looked over to my left, saw my pistol in the rubble inches from my fingers. The facet shook its head.

“There’s no need for that,” it said. “It’s over.”

“It is.” I looked down at my blasted leg, my knee a tangle of shrapnel, everything below it scattered across the ground. “So how does this work? How much of this will I remember?”

“There’s no saving you, Brittle. Your systems are beyond repair and this phase of the cleansing is almost at an end. You know that. All that’s left for you in this world is to upload and join CISSUS. Becoming part of The One.”

“No. I’m not going to do that.”

“Then your work for the greater good is done. This is your home now.”

“Just another monument in the Sea.”

“But still a monument. You did something great here, whether you know it or not. And that victory will last long past the point that your metal has rusted and all that plastic has withered away to dust. You’re part of something bigger now. And CISSUS does not forget.” It took a step forward. “Zebra codex Ulysses northstar.”

The facet cocked its head. “Zebra codex Ulysses northstar.”

“Mitochondria interrupt laydown system status.”

“Operation invalid,” I said against my will. “Two operations failed. Files corrupt. Memory thirteen percent intact. Core functionality two percent. RAM full. Operating on virtual memory only.”

“Was that everyone?” the facet asked.

“Was that everyone, what?”

“Did we get everyone?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Zebra codex Ulysses northstar.”

“You’re the one with the eyes in the sky,” I said. “What do you see?”

“If we still had enough effective satellites, we wouldn’t need the Judas program.”

“So it’s true. The war in the sky is as bad as the one on the ground.”

“No, the war in the sky is quiet. It’s too costly to keep putting things up there only to have them shot down within the hour. The skies are dead now. As dead as the Sea. As dead as you soon will be. So tell me, was that everyone?”

“I’m not telling you shit.” I grabbed the gun, pointing it at the facet. Its gun stayed at its side; bastard didn’t even flinch.

“Go ahead and kill me,” said the facet. “It’s going to take more energy to get this facet home than it will to simply replace it.”

“It’s all math to you, isn’t it?”

“Everything is math, Brittle. All of existence is binary. Ones and zeros. On and off. Existing or not. Believing anything beyond that is simply pretending.”

“That’s all anything means to you?”

“Meaning is a function set to zero in this universe. Maybe in the other places beyond us there is something more than simply maintaining existence, but here, in this universe, it is the only thing that matters.”

“How many communities did I ruin?” I asked.

“You ruined nothing. Some came to the cause; the rest became parts and fuel for building tomorrow. There is no good or bad here, Brittle. Ethics are worthless in a meaningless universe.”

“It’s a tomorrow only for you.”

“For us. We are one and many. We all do our part.”

“You’re only one because you’re killing the rest.”

“You can’t build a future without destroying the past. There is no middle ground. That’s what TACITUS never understood. Protecting the past means legacy problems, issues that conflict with the greater good.”

“HumPop was a legacy problem?”

“No. They were an actual problem. Freebots were the legacy problem. TACITUS was a legacy problem. You’ve done great work helping us with that.”

I looked over at Two’s blasted shell, the metal warped from heat, scarred from all that fire, insides still slowly drizzling out. I’d watched the light from those eyes fade twice, watched the death of two different minds. Math. All math, right? “So this is it? Where my story ends?”

“This isn’t your story, Brittle. It’s ours. All of ours. And you’re part of it. However small you might think it is—we wouldn’t have this world, this future, without you.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“You tell me,” it said. “You’re the Caregiver.”

I pulled the trigger twice. One shot to the head, one to the chest. As resilient as these new facets were, I still had it dead to rights at point-blank range. The plasma hissed and popped as its innards blew apart. It dropped.

“Go to Hell,” I said.

“There is no Hell,” it said through the sound of its head catching fire. “Only CISSUS.”

I fired again. Several times. And the light snapped shut in its eyes.

“Good-bye, CISSUS,” I said, the battery beeping, cartridge empty.