“Copy that, Mathilda.”
Mathilda Perez started speaking to me over the radio after we met Nine Oh Two. I don’t know what Rob did to her, but I’m glad to have her on the horn. Telling us exactly how to approach our final destination. It’s nice to hear her little kid voice over my earpiece. She speaks with a soft urgency that’s out of place out here in the hard wild.
I glance at the clear blue sky. Somewhere up there satellites are watching. And so is Mathilda.
“Carl, report in,” I say, dipping my face near the radio embedded in the fur collar of my jacket.
“Roger.”
A couple of minutes later, Carl pulls up on a tall walker. He’s got a .50 caliber machine gun jerry-rigged to the pommel. He pulls his sensory package up onto his forehead, leaving pale raccoon circles around his eyes. He leans forward quizzically, resting his elbows on the massive machine gun italicized across the front of the tall walker.
“Beta group is falling behind. Go hurry them up,” I say.
“No problem, Sarge. By the way, you got stumpers on your nine. Fifty meters out.”
I don’t even bother to glance at where he’s talking about. I know the stumpers are buried in a shaft, waiting for footsteps and heat. Without a sensory package I won’t be able to see them.
“I’ll be back,” says Carl, yanking his visor back down over his face. He flashes a grin at me and wheels around and ostrich walks back out across the plain. He hunches down onto the saddle, scanning the horizon for the hell we all know is coming.
“You heard him, Cherrah,” I say. “Spurt it.”
Crouched next to me, Cherrah aims a flamethrower and sends controlled arcs of liquid fire out onto the tundra.
The day has been going this way so far. As close to uneventful as you can get. It’s summer in Alaska and the light will last another fifteen hours. The twenty or so spider tanks of Gray Horse Army form a ragged line about eight miles across. Each plodding tank trails a line of soldiers. Scavenged exoskeletons of all varieties are mixed in: sprinters, bridge spanners, supply carriers, heavy-weapon mounts, and medical units with long, curved forearms for scooping up injured troops. We’ve been slogging over this empty white plain for hours, cleaning up pockets of stumpers. But who knows what else is out here.
It kills me to think how economical Big Rob has been for this whole war. In the beginning, he took away the technology that kept us alive and turned it against us. But mostly Rob just turned off the heat and let the weather do his work. Cut off our cities and forced us to fight each other for food in the wilderness.
Shit. I haven’t seen a robot with a gun for years. These pluggers and stumpers and tanklets. Rob built all kinds of little nasties designed to cripple us. Not always kill us, sometimes just hurt us bad enough so we stay away. Big Rob’s spent the last few years building better mousetraps.
But even mice can learn new tricks.
I cock the machine gun and slap it with my palm to knock the frost off it. Our guns and flamethrowers keep us alive, but the real secret weapons are pacing thirty meters behind Houdini.
Freeborn squad is a whole different animal. Big Rob specialized its weapons to the task of killing humans. Taking chunks out of us. Burrowing into our soft skin. Making our dead meat talk. Rob found our weak spots and attacked. But I’m thinking maybe Rob specialized too much.
We’re not all of us human anymore. Out of the squad downstairs are a couple of soldiers who can’t see their breath in the wind. They’re the ones who don’t flinch when the stumpers get too close, who don’t get sluggish after five hours on the march. The ones who don’t rest or blink or talk.
Hours later, we reach the Alaskan woods—the taiga. The sun is low on the horizon, bleeding sick orange light out of every branch of every tree. We march steady and silent, save our footsteps and the guttering burn of Cherrah’s wind-battered pilot light. I squint as the weak sunlight blinks on and off through the tree branches.
We don’t know it yet, but we have reached hell—and as a matter of fact, it has frozen over.
There’s a sizzling sound in the air, like bacon frying. Then a smack reports through the woods. “Pluggers!” shouts Carl, thirty meters away, striding through the woods on his tall walker.
Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck.
Carl’s machine gun stutters, spraying bullets into the ground. I can see the long, glinting legs of his tall walker as he hops between the trees to keep moving and avoid being hit.
Psshtsht. Psshtshtsht.
I count five anchor blasts as the pluggers secure their firing pods in the ground. Carl better get the hell out of there now that the pluggers are target seeking. We all know it only takes one.
“Drop a fat one in here, Houdini,” mutters Carl over the radio. A short electronic tone whines as the target coordinates come over the air and register with the tank.
Houdini click-clocks an affirmative.
My ride lurches to a stop and the trees around me grow taller as the spider tank squats to get traction. The squad below automatically take defensive positions around it, staying behind the armored legs. Nobody wants a plugger in them, not even old Nine Oh Two.
The turret whirs a few degrees to the right. I press my gloves against my ears. Flame belches from the cannon, and a chunk of the woods up ahead explodes into a mess of black dirt and vaporized ice. The narrow trees around me shiver and send down a powder coating of snow.
“Clear,” radios Carl.
Houdini stands back up, motors groaning. The quadruped starts plodding ahead again like nothing happened. Like a pocket of screaming death wasn’t just obliterated.
Cherrah and I look at each other, bodies swaying with each step of the machine. We’re both thinking the same thing: The machines are testing us. The real battle hasn’t started yet.
Distant thuds echo through the woods like far-off thunder.
The same thing is happening for miles, up and down the line. Other spider tanks and other squads are dealing with stumper outbreaks and incoming pluggers. Rob either hasn’t figured out to concentrate the attack or doesn’t want to.
I wonder if we’re being drawn into an ambush. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We have to do this. We’ve already bought tickets for the last dance. And it’s gonna be a real gala event.
As the afternoon wears on, a creeping mist grows from the ground. Snow and dust is swept up by the driving wind and thrown into a haze that speeds along at the height of a man. Pretty soon it’s strong enough to obscure vision and even push my squad around, wearing them out, grinding them down.
“So far so good,” radios Mathilda.
“How far?” I ask.
“Archos is at some kind of old drilling site,” she says. “You should see an antenna tower in about twenty miles.”
The sun lingers low on the horizon, pushing our shadows away from us. Houdini keeps on walking as evening twilight creeps in. The spider tank stands taller than the thickening haze of wind-borne snow. With each step, its cowcatcher cuts through the gloom. Once the sun is a simmering bump on the horizon, Houdini’s external spotlights chunk on to illuminate the way.
In the distance, I can see other headlights come on from the spider tanks that form the rest of the line.
“Mathilda, what’s our status?” I ask.
“All clear,” comes her soft reply. “Wait.”
After a little while, Leo pulls himself up over Houdini’s belly rig and latches the frame of his exoskeleton to a U bar. He hangs there, leveling his weapon over the sea of dense fog. With Cherrah and me up here and Carl on the tall walker, only Freeborn squad is left on the ground.