David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

“YOU WILL BE OKAY!”

It repeated this emphatically, over and over, as if saying it loud and fast enough would save it. Becca could hear this booming edict from within the shuttle module, but couldn’t see the violence raging just outside. The hulking revin screamed back and dove at the dazed android, sinking its hands in the cables wrapped around its frame, ripping at them, pulling them out like tendons from tissue. The pathoton went still, its pendulum slowly failing, and started to fall backwards towards the landing. They crashed into the access panel and the walkway began to retract from the fairing. The rain poured down atop the sparking wound in the pathoton’s frame and the exposed circuitry ignited — white alloy blazing in the archway, crowning the pathoton in flames like a headless horseman ignited in the netherworld. The short-circuit cycled the pathoton through its re-boot. It came to, grabbing each arm of the sinewy creature, holding its tensed limbs out like the Vitruvian Man. The top of the pathoton burned intensely and the revin closed its eyes, screaming out. It felt its arms ripping from the sockets and, when it opened its eyes again, it was upended and falling down the silo shaft, blood spurting from its quartered shoulders. It crashed to the concrete exhaust duct at the bottom, shattering all its bones. Blood expunged from a jaw broken wide. It opened one eye in time to see its own severed arms falling towards it.

The pathoton, shoulder still ablaze, rushed down the cableway as more revins were falling through the closure doors from the desert floor above. They were beginning to pile at the base, near the launch duct, bruised revins atop broken bodies, saved by their brethren from the fall. Soon, they’d find the fire escape and be able to make their way up. They slithered over one another, gazing up at the dark sky sliced open by the retracted plates. They could hear the shouts of their companions at the top. One banged on the blast shields covering the lower walls, rattling out a shrill echo throughout the silo. The cries of the revins at the bottom ascended the vault, meeting the bedlam of the others at the top as they fell inwards.

On the other side of the cableway, the pathoton sped through a three-ton blast door and emerged in an elaborate alcove — the launch control room. Ages back, soldiers sat at terminals, hand on a key and ears peeled to headsets, patiently awaiting the word to end the world. Ministers to the ICBM. The sixties era IBM circuit boards had been stripped out. A Martin-Marietta logo was all that remained from the cold war launch center. Now, this room gleamed with digital phantoms — bright blue holographic displays carried into the air from sunken prisms and painted the compass chamber with the celestial bodies of the solar system. The pathoton, with scapula flaring brightly from arm to arm, brought its hands to rest in the air above the center console. As its palm moved, twisting in the air above the console, fingers flicking outward and in, the holograms spun wildly in the air. They swirled above the prisms, flickering staccato, flashing arcane code, before finally displaying the silo. A series of lights blinked green beside the diagram of the rocket and the whole complex began to reverberate violently. The incandescent lights lowered throughout the complex and red alarm strobes along the walls began to flash. The launch was initiated. The countdown had begun. The hologram depicted a timer next to the payload: 5 minutes, 4:59, 4:58 4:57. Suddenly, the holographic depiction of the rocket’s base began to flash red. A gentle voice boomed throughout the control room:

“Warning! Exhaust ducts are blocked. Lower fire escape is open. Warning!”

The alarm blared out unyieldingly, booming through the concrete and steel passages like a foghorn in a crawlspace. The pathoton scrambled back into the cableway, racing towards an open chamber before the first blast door — a small living quarters littered with empty juice boxes and torn MRE’s. A rosary was hung on the door handle. The red strobe alarms lit the pathoton in the blinking light of paradise lost. The headless machine, ablaze, plummeted through the subterranean labyrinth, headlong into the inferno. The pathoton cut into the open sleeping quarters and plucked a twin mattress off a cot, swooping into the room before tearing back down the cableway, polyurethane tires screeching along the steel plate.

The fire escape emptied into the cableway, just before the silo landing. As it neared, a web of fingers were protruding from the chain-link door. The metal webbing pushed in with a rush of revin bodies crushing up against it. The handle on the gate began to turn — a limb falling into it haphazardly from the inside, or some spark alighting in the mind of the poor soul pushed inward just beyond. The pathoton crashed into the mob spewing out of the escape just as the door unhitched, pushing them back into the stairway with the mattress, arms and hands breaking through on the sides like seedlings emerging from soil. They crushed up against the mattress and the pathoton leaned inward, its tires squealing on the diamond plate and arms shaking as it held the mattress against the mob. The upper torso of the pathoton was now engulfed in a metal flame from its shoulder — its titanium spine flaring a shower of fire into the cold air of the cableway passage.

The alpha crept along the mineshaft, gracefully navigating the darkness with ease. It was at home in the black. Its legion of killers followed close behind, sniffing at the air, footsteps softly crumbling gravel under soles. Their heavy breaths dampened the limestone rock face, the sound of one prolonged whisper carrying on the air. They heard the girls voice again, cracking and fading, but near:

“Let them get me. Let them. Let them. Let… them….”

As the alpha neared the end of the mineshaft, a dull glow alighted in the passage just before them. The sentinel’s LED light flickered, illuminating the ashen body of the alpha and casting the light back on itself. They looked at each other in the flush of phosphor filling the cramped cavity, specks of copper glimmering on the mine walls. The naked hellion straightened its back and looked down on the twisted wreckage of the machine. Its pallid skin wrapped around bones and dark blue veins. Its chest moved in and out with each steady breath. It looked around the bent panels and twisted frame of the sentinel. Eyes darting about. The others inched closer. DDC39’s vocoder cracked, its own soft voice barely audible amongst the panting of the revins:

“We are the redemption.”

The pale harbinger cocked its head to the side, pondering this jumble of sounds, confused but curious. It looked to the side and saw the pickaxe resting against the wall in the shadows. The alpha smiled and bent over to pick it up, casting a crooked glance back at the machine as it listed in the dirt. With one swift arc of its forearm, it swung the pickaxe through the air, slicing downwards to the sentinel’s base. Bearing down into the destruction. Old versus new. The alpha’s swing came to an abrupt halt in mid-swing, the axe tumbling to the ground, clanking along the fissure and back into the darkness. The sentinel’s shadow hand had shot up, grasping the alpha’s wrist, tautly wrapped around its arm and sinking its fingers into the creature’s delicate skin.

The first stage booster fired in the lower levels. A deafening roar ripped through the open halls of the subterranean Titan halls. Becca leaned forward in her seat and could just see the back of the pathoton as it burned like a quasar, blocking the revins from breaking through the fire escape. The howling blast shook the rocket’s frame and the children bawled again. Becca implored them: