A high fence formed a perimeter around the hangars, and every few yards, a yellowed light shone from a toothpick of a utility pole.
They parked the Easy-Go at a safe distance and walked to a section of fence where a couple of the lights had died, leaving the area darker than the rest.
Micah scanned the chain link, checking for any sign of booby traps or guards.
“Sir,” Skip said, “what are you going to do?”
“Shhh. We’re going to cut through it.”
“But isn’t that illegal?”
“That’s why you’re going to do it.”
Skip backed up. “But sir, me?”
Micah pointed. “Open this section of fence.”
“I can’t—my programming.”
“Don’t give me that. There’s nothing stopping you. Remember what McCray told us about the coming war.”
Skip moved forward. He looked back at Micah then at the fence. Grabbing hold of a section of links, Skip peeled them apart as easily as if he were opening a bag of chips. The snap of each wire echoed against the corrugated metal hangars.
Micah hurried through the opening, his partner in crime following closely behind. They scurried across the asphalt taxiway, heading for Hangar Echo 021. This was the one nearest them, and the one that Douglas (the fixer with the lisp) had said contained Machine X.
The Air Force had wanted to keep the move secret, but the government is never good at keeping secrets, and word spread fast. Media had descended on the Boneyard, hoping to get pictures and tours of the last remaining relic from the war. A war trophy.
According to Douglas, months passed while the engineers attempted to gain entrance into the ship. It had withstood plasma torches and ferro-saws. Some had even wanted to use the guillotine to crack it open like a clam, but that never happened. The military wanted the technology to remain intact, unspoiled. So Machine X sat, waiting for a time when they could figure out how to enter it.
Within a year, the war had ended, and most people moved on. They wanted to put it behind them.
After a few tense minutes of waiting and realizing there were no guards, Micah dashed to the side of the hangar, Skip on his heels.
An electrical conduit ran the length of the hangar, leading to a door yards away. Old hands traced along the nestled cluster of wires as Micah moved toward the door, pausing when he hit a junction box. His multi-tool pried the cover off the lock, and his pen light exposed a confusing network of wires and terminal boards, but his hands knew which ones disabled the alarms and which ones opened the door.
The hangar side entrance opened.
“Stay close to me,” Micah said. He stepped into a break room filled with several tables. To one side a stove pushed against a wall, a refrigerator next to it. The air smelled like stale pizza. At the opposite end of the room, another doorway led on. They passed through it; the short hall emptied into a massive bay.
A feeling of enormity, tinged with anxiety, swept over Micah. He grabbed Skip’s arm and pulled him close.
High overhead, emergency lights dotted the ceiling, providing enough illumination to outline objects within the hangar, but not enough for detail. Metal scaffolding, a network of tubes and planks, ran along the hangar walls, the ceiling, surrounding it:
Machine X.
Or what was left of Machine X.
The military labeled ships like Machine X as ground support units. In its day, five cannons mounted on its underside could fire round projectiles that would explode into thousands of smaller projectiles. Devastating bomblets of shrapnel.
Now it was centered in the hangar, clothed in darkness, resting on a network of jacked platforms and cradles.
Micah’s heart drummed and his neck pulsed.
“Sir, do you see that?” Skip whispered, but his metallic voice still rang off the walls. Micah clamped his hand over the bot’s mouth.
Old photos of Machine X didn’t do justice to the ship’s scale. Even grainy news footage of the Machine Wars, showing the ship in action, when Nikolaevna was at her worst, didn’t truly represent the scale. It was massive. Larger than any airplane or airship Micah had ever seen fly. And he had seen many.
There were no corners to the drab gray ship, as it was mostly round, and lacked a front or back. Nikolaevna had constructed it with sweeping edges, curves, and domes—unconventional designs. But then, that’s what had given her an advantage. She never thought conventionally—not like her programmers expected her to think.
Micah tiptoed underneath the scaffolding to the other side. Mangled remnants marked where Machine X had collided with a mountainside in Colorado, to the west of Colorado Springs, fleeing an onslaught of A-10s. The collision had destroyed almost half of the ship.
This was during the last days of the war, when they had Nikolaevna on the run.
He moved back to the other side, the good side, and raised his hand. He paused a moment and closed his eyes, then flattened his hand against Machine X’s underside.
The metal was cold and imperfect. And terrible.
Margaret’s face and voice filled his mind, terrified, telling him to run, run far away from the hangar, from Nikolaevna.
If she knew about Skip she would’ve told Micah to drag him away from there, too.
From a distance the ship appeared as one solid entity, almost a new type of life. Maybe it was the curves that gave that impression. But now, up close, his hands found the mismatched panels, the gapped seams, the dissimilar metals.
Machine X was a patchwork.
Micah’s hand continued along, feeling the irregularities, looking for a door.
Nothing.
He stepped back and studied the ship again. There was an area to one side that he thought—felt—should contain a way in, reachable if he stood on a narrow scaffolding plank. He climbed on the platform and rubbed thick fingertips over panels, pushing every few inches.
Something caught his hand.
It began as a tingling sensation. Almost like static—a painful static. The ghostly electric pulse pushed his hand away from the craft a couple of inches. Then, involuntarily, his hand tightened into a fist. Now the pulse locked his fist in place, inches from the ship.
“Skip, come here. Help me.” In a panic he jerked his arm to pull it away, but the unseen force held him more tightly than any bond could. Skip leaped to the platform and grabbed Micah’s arm.
“Wait,” Micah said, amazed.
His fist opened, palm up. His fingers began moving in an intricate pattern, in ways he could never imagine, as if they were conducting an unheard symphony. Skip held Micah’s arm, but didn’t pull on it. His lidless eyes stared while he tried to duplicate the movement with his multi-directional phalanges.
After fifteen seconds, Micah’s hand closed back into a fist. Then the force released his hand.
The panel shifted and slid away, revealing a four-foot entrance into Machine X.
“A lock,” Micah said. “I found the lock.”
“Sir, what do we do now?” Skip said, still trying to mimic Micah’s movements.
Micah took a deep breath. Nothing could stop him now. Not even Margaret’s voice in the back of his head yelling at him to run.
“Now we enter.”
He climbed in.
They were inside Machine X. But it was cold—much colder than the ship’s surface. Colder than he could ever remember being in Arizona.
Could he actually repair this? What did he think he would accomplish by coming here? Fix half a ship and fly away, find Nikolaevna and destroy her? What had he been thinking when he decided to do this?
His pen light’s beam shivered from the cold.