Adam Christopher - The Age Atomic

The sounds from the alley increased.

“We gotta get out of here.”

“Here we go,” said Kane, and his wrist panel began emitting a faint pulsing sound that Rad thought was more than a little ominous. “No,” said Kane. “Wait a minute-”

“That thing going to blow up now?” said Rad, not sure if he was joking.

“No, it’s the communicator. Hold on…”

Rad turned back to the street. As he watched, the shadows cast by the robots came to a halt and stood swaying in the streetlight. Then they resumed their march, changing direction. They were heading straight for them.

“Dammit, Kane, those things are homing in on the signal.” Rad spun around, scanning the alleyway. “Hey, where’s Jennifer?”

The alley was filled with a roaring sound, so loud Rad ducked instinctively. From the other end of the alley, a brilliant green light flooded the road. Rad stumbled in surprise and turned towards it, but could see nothing except a green light speeding closer. He shielded his eyes from the glare and saw two lights, mounted on the front of something.

The King’s car.

Rad and Kane jumped to opposite sides of the alley as the huge machine came to a halt between them, the rear end snaking on the icy roadway. The passenger door was flung open, Jennifer leaning over the wheel.

“Get in!”

Rad didn’t argue. He practically fell into the passenger seat and scrambled to close the door behind him, while Kane did the same in the rear.

Jennifer released the brake and the car fishtailed again. Then it propelled forward fast enough to push Rad back into his seat.

“What the hell? How did you find the car?” he managed, glancing sideways at Jennifer. She had one hand on the wheel, one hand on the shifter, and her golden mask was staring dead ahead, tinged green by the car’s headlamps.

“Found my way back to the garage when I was looking around the theater,” she said as the car cleared the alleyway and she pulled a sharp right. “It opens into the alley just back there. Now shut up, and let me drive.”

Jennifer pulled around another corner, and swore.

Dead ahead was the robot gang, so large it filled the street as far as Rad could see. The robots in front recoiled from the green light, and Rad was sure they were screaming in pain and in fright, but he couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the engine.

“Hold onto something,” said Jennifer as she floored the accelerator and aimed the car directly for the center of the group.

In the ruins of the King’s workshop, the Corsair lay unmoving, his body bloody and broken, partially covered by twisted metal still hot from the explosion of energy and movement that was Kane Fortuna.

Something clattered to the floor; the Corsair groaned, but the sound didn’t carry past the ruin of his mouth. He coughed, and nearly choked on the blood and broken teeth, and then felt a slicing sensation of pain travel along his jawline, where the bone beneath was fractured in seven places.

He blinked, then realized his eyes had been open all along; they were just filled with viscous dark blood. He blinked again and some of it cleared, leaving his view of the workshop floor fuzzy and dark but unobstructed enough to see the carnage.

The slab on which Kane’s machine had lain was split in two, collapsed in the middle of the room. The slab behind had been shifted out of position, but the third, which had so recently housed Jennifer Jones, was intact and untouched, save for half of a new robot’s torso shell, the metal bright and unblemished, lying on its top.

More movement, out of the corner of his eye. The Corsair tried to move his head but the sudden pain was too much and when he opened his eyes again he was moving, sliding along the floor, leaving a trail of debris and thick blood.

“Master, I, Master, I…” said a metallic voice from somewhere above him. The Corsair let himself be dragged across the floor. Then he was pulled into a sitting position, his back to the wall.

There was a man above him, a short man in a blue suit that was torn and smoking. The man was standing by the intact machine, but was fumbling, moving his hands over the slab and the box on it like he couldn’t see. As the Corsair watched, the hands finally found the lid and lifted.

The Corsair blinked, and when he opened his eyes he was inside the machine. He was in pain now, his whole body alive with it, brilliant and sharp and fiery. He looked up, seeing the blackened walls of the workshop. There was a fire, somewhere, lighting the otherwise dark room in a flickering light that threw long shadows. Then the Corsair realized the light was not orange and yellow but white and blue, and was coming from the door that led to the power room.

The Corsair cried out in pain, screamed as loud as he could.

The man who had saved him — why couldn’t he remember who that was? He knew him, he was sure of it — was busy at the controls. The Corsair could just see the dark blue velvet over the lip of the machine. The man was hunched over, like he was in pain, like there was something wrong, like-

He turned around, and the Corsair screamed again. The man was the King of 125th Street, he remembered now, his faithful robot, the first one he’d made from a homeless person who had stumbled from the naval robot yard, not yet converted into an Ironclad sailor but put through the mental processing and then left, abandoned as Wartime ended suddenly.

The man’s face was hanging in strips from a silver skull, the artificial flesh quivering as the machine man rocked slightly on its heels, the scalp peeled over to the left. The robot’s eyes were two blackened, burnt-out holes, a liquid, thick and black and oozing, streaming out like syrup. The robot’s jaw, still clad in fake skin, moved up and down as the blind machine struggled to help its master.

“Master, I, master, I…” said the robot. It shuddered as it spoke, its hands moving over the edge of the machine, fingers flexing, searching.

The Corsair tried to shake his head, but there was a thick leather strap over his forehead. He tried to move his body, but he couldn’t even feel it. It was like it wasn’t there at all or it didn’t belong to him.

“Master, I, master, I… I will get them back. They. Can. Not. Escape.” Each forced syllable made the King rock. “Master, I, master, I… I will repair you save you make you well. Army the army the army has been activated. They. Can. Not. Escape.”

The Corsair screamed until his mouth filled with blood and his throat felt like it was being flayed with knives, as the blind robot King of 125th Street threw a lever and the lid of the machine slammed shut.

The man stirred in his bunk. How long he’d been asleep, he wasn’t sure. Time passed strangely where he was, although maybe that was his imagination. Years of solitude, years of travel had taken their toll.

The signal was a constant pulsing tone, not loud enough to have woken him, just loud enough to have entered his dreams, the signal becoming a flashing blue light, the light of the gap between one universe and the next.

The man rubbed his good eye and pulled thick fingers through his white beard, and then he lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling of the ship as the tone continued.

Maybe this was a dream too. Maybe the signal was his imagination, an auditory hallucination. Maybe it was the outside tricking him. It had a habit of doing that; he’d discovered many places on his travels, some of which were cities, whole countries where life went on. Others were places that seemed to be alive themselves.

And they liked to trick him, make him see things, make him hear things. After years of this the man wasn’t sure what was real, not anymore. Maybe he’d died a long time ago, on that day when the ice was thick and the fog was deep, the day he’d stepped into it and left the world.