Lavie Tidhar - The Apex Book of World SF 2

A blast blew out the door. A mechanical hand pinched the coils inside Fritz’s guts.

Fritz opened fire, but Emilio hesitated. The doctor barely had the reflexes to dodge the door flying across the room. It smashed the analytical engine’s glass walls. A man in black uniform raided the room with a rifle, but was blown away by three shots from Fritz, who was trying to get rid of the wires tangled with his body. The man fell to the floor still shooting his automatic gun, hitting lamps and steam tubes. “Wake up, Chaya,” he cried, pulling his wife to the floor, to a space between the stretcher and the multicoloured glass pyramid.

The golem opened her eyes to the dark fog and screamed as soon as she hit the ground. Immediately, she understood the situation. She grabbed the stretcher-table’s feet and lifted it, improvising a shield with its hardened wood. She dragged the table to the door while Fritz covered her, exposing his own body to shoot the guards at the door. She’d managed to block the entrance, but it’d take only a few shots to tear down the already splintering barrier.

“Emilio,” Fritz yelled.

The human had his back to the ground and was chewing off the cables from his mechanical arm. His left hand held the experiment’s samples and his pistol was tucked inside his trousers. A big piece of wood landed close to his head and splinters forced him to shut his eyes. He cleared them from wood, tears and condensed steam. A spray of bullets flew inside the room.

Chaya used the dead soldier’s gun to shoot the guards through a tiny hole in the barrier. “We have to leave, Fritz. The barrier won’t stand much longer.” She reloaded the machine gun with her last ammo clip. “Emilio, is there any other way out?”

He had stood up and was dodging the bullets, trying to stand in front of the control panel. “This is a basement, Chaya. There’s no way out.”

Fritz shot two more times through the crack, then stopped to reload. It was only then that he noticed the guards had stopped shooting back. He signalled to Chaya, who was prepared to spray another set of bullets. Then he looked at Emilio, who in a single movement opened the mixer, threw the samples in and locked it as fast as he could.

The only recognisable sound was that post-gunfight humming. Not even Fritz, nor the analytical engine, dared to break the silence. Maybe because they were both broken machines, afraid and with their guts exposed. “What happened?”

“I can’t see anything,” Chaya said, her eyes hunting for black uniforms on the staircase beyond the half-destroyed barrier. “It’s as though they’ve disappeared. Just stopped shooting.” She still heard some lonely shots beyond the layers of concrete, brass and asphalt above them. Other than that, there was only silence. But it wasn’t like the silence one heard after surviving a gunfight. It was much more like the silence before passing away. A calm, serene death that took its time before taking away its burden.

“Hey, Fritz, help me out.” Emilio was pulling a crank that apparently pumped up the fluids from the mixer to the glass vial atop the ziggurat.

Both non-humans exchanged looks. He slowly moved away from the door, counting on his wife for cover. “What do I do?”

“The mechanical arms are gone. Climb onto the table, and I’ll give you the tank. I need you to fill up the uterus on top.”

The automaton put his gun back in his trousers. He found an empty spot on the table and stood on it, trying to keep his balance. He stepped to one side and grabbed the mixer with one hand. A pale-bright whirlwind moved inside it with roots and gears dancing about. He grappled his way to a place from which to pour the liquid into the machine and finally bent his body towards the uterus, the sharp metal of his opened-up belly scratching the glass vials. He poured the tank’s contents into the uterus, already full with some kind of repulsive solvent.

Almost immediately, the mixture became transparent.

“Now, step down,” Emilio commanded.

“What?” Fritz was hypnotised. The two floating corpuscles were attracted to each other and, he could swear it, were blending together. But at the same time, they were multiplying. “Oh, Chaya! I think it’s working.” He turned smiling to wife, but her face was as hard as stone. She had her hands behind her head.

The low click as the gun was triggered woke the motolang from his dream.

“Down, Fritz.” Emilio was pointing his pistol at him.

The troops of the Committee had forced the barrier and entered the basement. A dozen or more, he wasn’t able to count. One of the soldiers walked around the table and grabbed the wooden box lying on the brown tarp. “What’s happening? I- I don’t understand.” Fritz was experiencing something like reverse omniscience. He could see that Chaya had surrendered, that the soldiers were receiving orders from Emilio, and that a wood-and-metal embryo grew inside the glass uterus. He felt diluted, ephemeral in his confusion. Inexorably incapable.

“It doesn’t matter. Come on, man, step down. Do what I say.” The soldier put the opened box at Emilio’s feet. There was a brass barrel mounted inside it. It was the same size as the uterus.

“You can’t do this, Emilio. Please.”

“Fritz—” he paused “—if you won’t step down, I swear, my friend, I’ll fire this shit off into your fucking head.”

Tick-tock.

“No! Dear, no!”

Fritz grabbed the uterus as hard as he could and threw himself to the back of the room. There was a sound of gunshots blasting and he felt two stabs in his back. Something heavy and metallic bounced on the floor. There were glass cutting cables and jamming gears inside his joints. Tick-tock .

He hit the ground, the impact deflating the balloons inside his chest. Oh, no. God, please no. The uterus is broken. He could feel the liquid spilled over him, flowing inside his open wounds. He embraced the vial with all the strength he had left. Tick-tock, tick-tock . He lay between the wall and the two fallen aetherfoam cylinders. He saw Chaya being shot four times in the back while trying to run to him. He saw the seeds in her eyes wither and die before she fell. Emilio and his soldiers were almost on him.

He made his decision.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

He drew his gun and fired it off at the cylinders. There was a blast and a glaring radiance like a star.

Silence.

Tick.

On occasion, a mortar. A dull machine gun talking in the distance was his only companion. Fritz climbed the stairs of an abandoned building at the heart of a deserted neighbourhood. The carbine had been turned into a crutch to keep his body straight. Each step needed more than the strength he had left in him. It was martyrdom. His body cracked, his joints creaked and he limped. His body was bent to one side, the cables that served as tendons were shattered. He could barely reach the crank in his back to wind himself up. He missed Chaya so badly. He had no clue as to what to think of Emilio.

The motolang dragged himself across the corridor to the room, his new home since the explosion back in the lab. The war was very distant now and would soon be over. He had turned from militiamen to refugee in the space of just two months, hiding as he could amongst the ruins of the revolution. It’ll have to do for now. He felt bad.

There was a rocking chair close to the window. The reactor was framed in it, and high above, he could see an aethership docking at the station. He still had no way of escaping. He had no money for the tickets and the bribes. Besides, the trip was too dangerous these days. Maybe in a few more months.

He tried to relax, rocking on the chair, the carbine over his lap. Roots and wires sprouted up from the cracks in his carcass. The place wasn’t exactly home , but he felt somewhat happy. Now there was another tick-tock inside him, a seed. In a glass vial embedded in his belly, he and Chaya shone together the way only impossible things are likely to shine.