C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

Murka was bad news, rumored to be madkind—a group of wasteland dwellers who lived aboveground in a town rumored to be so crazy even the OWIs wanted nothing to do with them. He’d never done anything untoward, but whereas Orval the Necromancer was clearly a little nuts, yet harmless, Murka always seemed on the outside edge of a violent outburst.

“Doc!” 19 exclaimed. “You made it.”

“So far,” said Doc, nodding.

“Mercer?” 19 asked politely.

“19,” he said, not for a moment taking his eyes, or his gun, off me. My gun was leveled at him as well, had been since he started to get up. At once the other bots became painfully aware of the tension.

I glanced at his shiny, new, straight-out-of-the-box, factory-condition arm. While internal SMC components were hard to come by, all the failing models kept dealers swimming in cherry-picked body parts. “Nice arm,” I said.

“Doc does good work,” he said casually. “I’m sure that new backplate of yours is equally well crafted.”

“Shit,” said 19. “Do you two have beef?”

“We have beef,” said Mercer.

19 looked at me with eyes that read Oh, honey, not now . “Britt?”

“He gunned me down out in the Sea. Wanted me for parts.”

“Mercer!” shouted 19, sounding like an angry teenager chastising a friend.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

19 shook her head “There’s no good reason for poaching.”

“He’s failing,” I said. “He’s days away, maybe.”

“And so is she,” said Mercer.

“We have to go,” said Rebekah. “We don’t have time for petty squabbles.”

“There’s nothing petty about this,” I said.

19 drew close, getting right in my face, her eyes now pleading. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t do this. Not here. Not now.”

“Can’t trust him,” I said. “He’ll shoot me in the back first chance he gets.” We stood there, pulse rifles pointed at each other as the other bots slowly backed away out of the line of fire.

Mercer shook his head. “You ain’t any good to me dead. I ain’t any good to you dead. And neither of us has the time to pick clean the other’s wreck with all this hell raining down on us. So what do you say we call it a wash, get the fuck out of here, and live to try and kill each other another day?”

“That sounds reasonable,” said 19. “Doesn’t that sound reasonable, Britt?”

He was right. Killing me here would ruin his last chance of saving himself. In truth, at the moment I was actually safer with him than with any other bot in the world. He was the only one who needed me alive—for his own sake, sure—but alive nonetheless. And that street went both ways. I could kill him, right there where he stood, but then I’d never get the parts I needed. An hour later things would be different, but for the moment we were all each other had.

I lowered my rifle, nodding.

Then Mercer lowered his. “Truce?” Mercer asked.

“Truce.”

“Good. Let’s go do some damage. Where are we headed?”

“The escape hatch,” said 19.

“We haven’t decided that,” said Rebekah.

“Yes, we have.”

“The escape hatch opens up in the middle of the desert,” said Mercer. “There’s no cover for half a mile.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But CISSUS probably doesn’t know about it. Should be clear.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then it definitely knows about all the other exits and we’re screwed anyway.”

“Fair point,” he said. “Let’s go to the desert.”

We beat feet pretty quickly through the complex.

19 and I had both mapped out every inch of NIKE 14—every alcove, every service tunnel, every crawl space. You had to. It paid off at a time like this. Back in the bowels of the city, bots were being slaughtered or infected with code, becoming part of CISSUS. By the time we reached the hatch, the worst of it would no doubt be over. That was a problem. Once they were no longer distracted by the principal population, the facets would set their sights solely on rounding up the stragglers.

Us.

We needed to get out quickly, fan out into the desert, and find a place to hole up for a while before the plastic men, the brutes, and the drones swooped in to kill anything that moved. I hoped silently that the poor bots still caught up in the thick of it would hold out just a bit longer, would fight just a bit harder, if only so we could escape.

I realized I was hoping to prolong their suffering so I could live just to see this all happen again. Just as I had too many times before. Then it dawned on me that this was likely to be the very last time I would see it at all. And frankly, I didn’t know which was worse.

Mercer and I walked side by side, neither wanting the other behind us. Sure, we were forced to trust each other, but neither of us actually did. As soon as I got out of that dank, labyrinthine dungeon, I was going to get as far away from him as I could, and fast. I imagined we might each back away from the other, guns at the ready, until we were out of sight. But until then, we were unfortunate allies. So side by side we walked, neither able to stab the other in the back. Literally.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked him, both of us staring straight ahead.

“Shoot,” he said.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“How you got back here so quickly,” I said. “I took your buggy. And it took me the whole night to get here.”

“You left yours behind.”

I shook my head. “There’s no way you could have known where I hid it. It should have taken you…” I trailed off, finally putting two and two together. He turned his head, staring at me silently, waiting for me to figure it out. “You were tracking me.”

He looked away from me, facing front again. “The whole time.”

“From the moment I left.”

“The day before that, actually. I had Reilly shadowing you.”

“Why didn’t you just ambush me? Why make a whole game out of it? That far away you could have hit the parts you needed by accident.”

“Chance I had to take.”

“Chance you had to take? There were four of you.”

He was silent for a moment, mulling over his response, then spoke up, hesitantly. “Because I’ve heard the stories.”

“Stories? What stories? There aren’t any stories.”

“About you?”

“Yeah.”

“The hell there ain’t.”

I’d never heard stories about myself. I wasn’t some local legend. Most citizens didn’t even know my name. I liked it that way. I hadn’t the foggiest hell what he was going on about. “And where did you hear these stories?”

“Scavenging up in the Pacific Northwest two years back.”

“I don’t get out there much.”

“I reckon not. But this old dockyard model I was running with for a while up there did. Bot by the name of Billy Seven Fingers.”

“That’s funny. I knew a dockyard by the name of Billy Nine Fingers.”

“Same guy,” he said. “Fewer fingers.”

“He can get them replaced.”

“He likes the name.”

“He was in my unit.”

“In the war. I know.”

“He told you old war stories?”

“All the time.”

“So you heard about some shit I did in the war and that scared you? We all went to war, Mercer. We all did shit. Some of us did shit we aren’t proud of, but we all did it.”

“Yeah, but not everyone’s shit scared the bejesus out of Billy. Now Billy wasn’t no saint. Frankly, by the time I ran with him, he already had one foot on the scrap pile. He just wasn’t right in the head.”

“He never was.”