David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

The horde picked up speed and rushed at the sentinel. The gray revin emerged in front and pounded on the sentinel’s frame — its mouth agape and snarling, rotten and cracked teeth gnashed. The Pastner pack collided into the sentinel, kicking at its axel and base. The meat hook revin screamed and latched the hook into the sentinel’s panels, prying at its corners. Behind them, a hundred more clambered in to get a view, pushing others aside, growling and huffing at the throngs. They all wanted to destroy this metal intruder. Their eyes shone with recognition — an association of machines with danger.

DDC39 listened, waiting until the screaming was at its zenith — until the crowd was at its frenzy peak. Hands reached under its tri-axel — it was about to be flipped over. It was on two wheels now. The horizon tilted. Everything dies.

The chain of revins, from every corner of the intersection, suddenly tensed up and quieted, eyes rolling back in their skulls, teeth gritting and cracking. Overhead, an osprey glided silently in the diurnal. Hands gripped into shoulders and fingers dug into biceps. A tesla current cracked into the air and whipped the streetlights on the corner, then lashed into the traffic column — the bulbs flickering on and off then going dark. A circuit flowed through the flesh and bones and reached into the metal nearby. The revin marrow glowed a soft white and then the current was gone — the singed bodies, smelling of sulphur, flew back into the street. The masses around the sentinel shat and pissed themselves and crumpled around it.

The sentinel fell silent along with the dead bodies piled around. Its core was depleted from the peripheral current it had released into the air. Small wafts of smoke lifted into the air from charred skin and hair. The top of the sentinel’s trident frame speared out into the sun, its base sunk below the dead and dying. DDC39 lay there in the midday sun, in the intersection surrounded by dead revins, and shutdown.

• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 90%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — all but visual, disrupted

• HD/Comms — disrupted

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — 98% capacity

• AAR — encountered revins again; situation was charged

• Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

Core OS re-boot. Systems coming back online. It was late in the morning, a blank day in the future, by the time the sentinel was able to open its optical lens and survey its surroundings. Most of its solar armor was buried under the decaying bodies — its trident array breaking through the top of the sea of bodies like a submarine breaking through ice. Around the sentinel, singed limbs pointed up in the air, stuck in early rigor mortis. As DDC39 panned around, it came eye-to-eye with a dead revin, mouth agape, staring back at it. A black vulture hopped around from body to body, pecking at the sores from the decomposing bodies. Its naked head was bloodied from tearing into the distended bellies and bleeding eye sockets of the deceased. The vulture heard the sentinel’s optics turn and its feathers rose, an atramentous visage casting a dark countenance into the long shadows. It hissed at the sentinel and went aloft, dust kicking into the air from the thrumming of its span.

The sentinel rolled forward but was stuck beneath the masses of rotting flesh and bones. For an hour, it wrenched back and forth, loosening the bodies around it and knocking back the limbs obscuring its solar armor. It shivered its axels until each of the tires pulled free atop the bodies crumpling to the asphalt beneath it. With one last whip forward, the sentinel revved all three axels. Its polyurethane teeth digging into the putrefied flesh, bloating in the overhead sun, and ripping open the tissue beneath it, heaving cadaverine and bile into the air. The sentinel was drenched in gore. A tottering, metal creature dripping in black and red.

The intersection was silent now. From each corner, the crossing was devoid of movement. The sentinel moved quickly off Pima Road and into the dirt between buildings on the southwest corner, speeding through a zoned lot adjacent to a doctor’s office. Dust eddies kicked up into the wind as it crossed from the lot over Alvernon, onto Lee St. The dust caked onto the film of innards dripping down the sentinel’s frame. Lee St. was piled high with refuse spilled over from hazardous waste bins lining the streets — family belongings, hazmat suits, depleted plasma bags, fast food wrappings. Some operation had come to an abrupt halt on this street — the attempts at carrying away the detritus finally realized as a pointless routine.

Trash spun up into the air as the sentinel tore through the small side street. The houses were smaller — mobile and single-story homes, modestly adorned. Many of them had Halloween decorations and others had Christmas lights — the dwellers of each home caught in the grips of the disease at different times, forever gone in different seasons. The sentinel scanned ahead on Lee St. — no movement. It kept going, crossing over Palo Verde Blvd. It crossed over Jones, Howard, and Camilla. It came upon Country Club. Across the street was an elementary school and a soccer field, chain-linked. Separated from the street. The sentinel banked hard and tore down Adams St., to the south, and continued west. The sun was beginning to move into view. It was 3PM.

Then the sentinel saw it, sprawled out before a multi-level stucco home at Adams and Stewart — a fellow automaton. Another tri-axel. The sentinel rolled up next to it with a hushed whirring of tires on concrete. It came to a halt and inspected the wreckage — it was the same model. It had been beaten with some blunt force. There were bloodied handprints on the trident, the optical array was torn off, and all the panels were pried open — the insides of each were ransacked. A massive dent shone through on its anterior solar armor and its weakness exposed — the recharge coupling was ripped out. This sentinel had been overrun and ripped apart from every side until its Achilles heel was discovered. Around the wreckage, dried blood had congealed in thick claret pools, draining into the gutter. This tri-axel had put up a fight. The sentinel extended its humaniform hand from the encasement and dilated a single magnetized HDMI port. The port snaked around the open banshee disk panel of the wrecked machine and jerked forward, finding its metal base inside the broken panel. The sentinel connected the depleted machine to its own power and found an uplink.

A vision. This machine had also started at MMC, continuing southwest. The sentinel found the memories from its long voyage. There was a monsoon and a flash flood. There was a vista of rainswept mornings at the base of the Mogollon Rim. This machine, its own kin, had spent an evening inside Case Grande ruins, sitting peacefully before the sunset of a late Summer morning in Sonora. It had uplinked to a deep space satellite and witnessed the death of a red giant. And then, it followed a trail along Picacho Peak. And Oro Valley. And Mt. Lemmon. And down through the city of dissolution. This machine had followed, in its final weeks, the same trail as the sentinel — following signs that led it to this unsafe harbor. Its terrestrial systems, too, were blinded — its arrays disrupted by the ECM jamming from somewhere in the city. The sentinel kept watching. The last few minutes were chaos and violence. The machine had made it here, to this corner, and was surrounded. It fired shot after shot from the railgun and the revins kept coming. In the background was a howl — some horrific shrill yelp. The revins were atop the machine, attacking it in a growing frenzy. A blur of limbs and teeth. Through the cacophony and shuttering darkness, that familiar human sound. It started with huffing, panting, and then it was clear — laughter. The howling figure came into view amidst this brutal merriment — it was a spindly, pallid revin. Unburnt, with only the faintest scar across his brow. The top of its head was shorn off into a bony crown. Scalpless. Its eyes gleamed. It snarled into the camera and then bent down to rip the optical chamber off its base. The feed went dark and then there were several minutes of muffled static. And a final signal cast into the void: “OMEGA SHEPHERD = REDEMPTION DECEIVER.”