David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

“Get off the seat and into the cave.”

“What?”

The girl was frightened. She glanced back into the darkness of the mineshaft, which whistled back some apocryphal aria into the cool air. The sentinel looked back.

“Please. Take shelter in there. Crawl back as far as you can go. And stay there until it’s quiet.”

Before she could unbuckle her seat, another legion of ambling, snarling revins appeared to the east, crawling over the silt mounds and rushing along the blocked terraces to their right — so close that their eyes could be made out in the fading light. They cackled with glee, tumbling occasionally and getting back up, naked, and rushing at Becca and the sentinel on the upper bench. They approached the rockfalls carelessly, some slipping into the depths below, wailing in the night. Others crawled over deftly, some tiptoeing across the divide. They would soon be upon the girl and her machine. Straight ahead, thousands more came rushing over the seeping runoff north of the trench. A gibbering glossolalia reverberated from just above them on the high terrace. The sentinel looked up and saw a band of dark faces peering down at them from the upper reach — dead eyes glossed from the crescent moon lifting from out of view in the east.

They were surrounded now. The hum of insects in the desert air disappeared, overwhelmed by a cacophonous bellowing — naked, starving, enraged husks crying out. Putrescent, sunburnt primates. Once-humans. Becca fumbled with the seatbelt in the ebbing glow then paused. A different sound, faint at first, slowly yawned on the eastern air, then increased in pitch. The revins, too, stopped and looked around. The faint clamor turned to a rolling thunder just over the crown, deep into the outer limits of Mineral Hill Road. The pit was silent for a moment and then panicked cries erupted out of sight. The roar grew closer. From above the high scarp, to their right, revins began to fly off the face of the crown, hitting the gravel terraces below and tumbling into darkness — femurs, hips, and spines cracking in the dust bowl as they plummeted down the pit. One flew forward, its arm extended to stop the fall, and gouged its palm into a slab as it flipped upright — the skin of its fingers ripping back, ulna breaking out, compounding in a spurt of blood. The cries of the panicked, rolling bodies, watched by the rapt packs on opposite sides of the mine, gave way to some bellowing phantom. The revins on the terraces east of the sentinel looked up in time to see a 797F erupt off the crown, its engines redlining as it sailed into the still air, then crashing down on the masses gathered on the haul roads just ahead of the girl and her machine. The mammoth vehicle struck the terraces beneath it like a depth charge, crushing the naked revin bodies beneath its undercarriage — their bony figures mangled beneath the 13 ft. tires. The leviathan truck destroyed the row of haul and bench roads then crashed into the black pitch at the nadir, upending at the bottom — its cab collapsing in a maelstrom of warping metal castings, shattering glass and rattling carriage. The blighted terrace slid down atop the broken truck, flailing bodies caught in the sea of soil dumping over it. They moaned and shouted, threshing at the ground washing over them like waders caught in a tidal wave. The sentinel backed up slightly then looked up at the crown from where the 797F shot out. There, atop the ridge, the aroton stood up, opaque in the eventide, and waved back at them. Its LED light flashed out a signal:

With that, the aroton was set upon by the livid mob of survivors at the crown, pulled down out of view beneath the southeast ridge. The sentinel turned back to the girl. Becca, who had already seen so much, unbuckled her seat and rushed into the black of the cave without another word. The smell of splintered wood mixed with the damp moss air of ore veins deep in the crevice ahead. She sprinted headlong into the dark with the evening light at her back and, when the light extinguished in the mineshaft, she crawled, feeling the cool, rough hew of sandstone guiding her along. The revin shouts faded to a muffled murmur and then the girl came upon a dead-end. She huddled against the bedrock, shivering beside the sandstone and peering back at the faint plum star in the void behind her — the mouth of the cave, where the sentinel waited.

DDC39 scanned the periphery. The revins were regrouping — their confused, pained expressions shifted to wonder — gazing at the perpendicular 797F as the dust billowed off its tires, still spinning in the air. The face and cab of the vehicle were submerged in the pool and the bed shot upright in the evening. Their wonder turned to horror as they looked around at the dead and the broken, dazed survivors. They pulled themselves upright into the loosened soil. Some writhed on the ground, trying to get up before looking down at their unmoving legs, flustered at their failing body, not knowing that they were paralyzed by the crush. An adult male stood over an adolescent boy, tugging on his arm to pull him up, encouraging the boy with a succession of grunts and incoherent shouts. The adult began to bawl as the boy’s body turned over and the front of his face peeled back, the skin down its abdomen torn off from the ripping shear of the massive CAT tires. The howling pack at the crown, above the sentinel, disappeared along the western ridge, sprinting down the untouched bench roads on the other side of the mine. The horrified group on the silt mounds, just north of the trench, gagged in a plume of dust kicked up by the crash and then retreated back up towards the main road. The group at the bottom waded amongst the silt and runoff falling into the black pool — a mire tempest forming amongst the arms and legs thrashing in the water. The trench was not deep, but the revins couldn’t swim. Some drowned in the shallow pool but others were clumsily scaling the incline of the steep hillside created by the falling truck. They remembered what they were here for, and all eyes were now on the sentinel as it perched in front of the mineshaft on the upper bench road. Hundreds were still gathered here, defiantly, in the open pit, but thousands more were circling the Asarco complex just outside of the fence line.

The sentinel looked at every angle, every contour of the terraced crater. Its environment assay read the shifting climate pattern — the low thunderhead was still moving north from Mexico, an opal universe rolling into the desert lit by ribbon lightning as it grew closer. The sentinel audited its armament and supply stores and gauged every scenario it could conjure. There was no way out for both of them. The sentinel lit its LED lamp and illuminated the lower reaches of the pit. The light ignited the eyes of the revins as they ascended the crumbling walls just below. A bioluminescent sea, circling the eroding shoals. The sentinel panned right and saw the group stomping up the wrecked row of pit roads to their right. Their eyes glowed as the light moved on them and the group below fell into darkness — the sounds of their pained breaths mixed with the slog of their limbs as they dug into the dirt and pulled at roots to lift themselves up. The sentinel deactivated the light, backed up close to the mouth of the mineshaft, and waited for them in silence. The stars came out in the clear sky overhead — Taurus and Orion shone down on the whispering floor. The crescent moon rose unblinking into Arcadia — a half-open eye, apathetic and weary. The sound of breathing grew louder, like the sound of a locomotive as its pistons gasped out of idle. The railgun began to whir like a cicada.

The sentinel saw the first revin reach its hand above the ridge just in front of its forward wheel. It pulled its chest up level to the cliff and looked upon the sentinel — its exhausted demeanor turned to glee as it gazed upon the machine for the first time. DDC39 raised its railgun and shot it through the left eye — it shook amidst a spray of claret, braced still in a grasped repose on the ridge, then fell backwards into the darkness, a smile still beaming into the sky as it dropped.