Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

His heart froze and he ceased swimming, only to hear the ping and a squelchy mechanical noise that he recognized as a droid’s demand for an identification signal.

“Watch out!” Escalas called a moment too late, and Aracai heard the grinding of massive metal beams, then something heavy hit the ground, raising clouds of mud.

Suddenly Aracai put the images together. There was a war droid ahead—a giant titanium crablike droid the size of a ship, scuttling on the river bottom, menacing them.

Aracai stopped to let the muddy tide carry him back from danger, just as a single shot seared through the water. An energy beam sent a tube of bubbling super-heated water toward Escalas, striking him just once. The old mer went limp as the cloud of muddy water engulfed them all.

Aracai froze, not daring to breathe, fearing a second shot. He squinted in order to avoid being blinded. He hoped the dark waters would shield him from the droid’s sensors.

No more shots followed; his heart pounded.

He heard a buzz and something whipped over his head. He squinted up to see a squid-like drone with a gelatinous body. Its infrared signature made it look like a fiery octopus.

Hunters!

Aracai recognized the tech. It was called a squill —an ancient assassin droid, perhaps a hundred years old.

He did not know what sensory array it might have. Motion detectors? Vision? Heat? Sound? Scent?

Could it hear his heartbeat, recognize his form?

He played dead, not daring to call out, hoping that his wife would be wise enough to do the same.

The huge war droid marched north, blocking their path, stirring up more muck, impenetrably dark.

The squill began to circle and was soon followed by dozens more.

Are they armed? he wondered. The drones often carried a sac of neurotoxin, so that their stingers could kill. He’d heard legends about squills with explosives built into them. But some, he knew, were built just for reconnaissance.

Aracai drifted downstream, and often the drones passed near in the darkness, but still he dared not move. So he floated, letting the current take him, until many kilometers later the buzzing of drones faded and he was left merely floating. As the water cleared, he peered around, but his search showed him nothing.

He caught movement: Dulce drove toward the surface, and Aracai saw a familiar form floating there.

Aracai raced upward, met them as Dulce wrapped her arms tenderly around the old mer and tried to drag him under, to safety.

When Aracai got near, the old man was a horror. Boiling water had made his skin bubble over on half of his chest and face, and skin tore away in tatters. His hair was burned off, as was his right eye. What flesh Escalas had left was red and blistered.

“Old man,” Dulce asked, “can you swim with me?”

The old man’s mouth was in ruins, and yet he spoke. “I can swim.” He gasped for several moments, gills flashing, and glanced down. “My flesh is burned. I cannot… last…”

“What can we do to help?” Dulce asked. The old mer shook his head. “My sight…” His mouth tried to work, but pieces of flesh fell from the hole where his lips had been, showing teeth. He gasped and sang in broken thoughts. “You, go on. Up Rio Negro, to the town Dos Brujas, where smokestacks rise, and open sewers dump into the river from both banks. There you will find a pylon, a black tower, with a light on top like a single red eye. That is where you must detonate…”

He lost his train of thought. “Take my implant…” he said, offering his greatest possession, the silver band around his head.

Escalas sang more, but his words became a soft slur, like wind lashing the water, until it died and went silent.

Dulce cried out, a barking sound, as if she had taken a mortal wound.

“Quiet,” Aracai warned, swimming up to put a hand over her mouth, but she twisted her head away and wailed in frustration.

He removed the band from Escalas’s head, put it on his own. The band was a silver wire, but almost as soon as he put it on, he felt a pinch at the base of his neck as nanobots began to send out probes to establish a link with his mind, one that would take days to form.

He let go of the old mer’s body and let it drift away, bouncing against the muddy bottom of the river.

Dulce made a juddering cry, more of a moan than a song, and together they clasped hands and swam toward the south bank before sneaking upriver, and thus passed the warbot unseen.

He wondered why the warbot was even posted there. It was ancient, this war crab, perhaps left by governments that had fallen a century ago, during some old war. Perhaps it was as forgotten now as Aracai and his people.

Hour after hour Aracai and Dulce pushed ahead, Dulce shaking in fear and grief. He could not get the image from his mind of Escalas floating downstream, his mouth a gaping maw. He tried to calm his wife as they swam together, her holding his shoulders so that they spooned, swimming in unison.

He drifted into a waking dream, haunted by images of squills and warbots. They swam close to shore, where water gurgled through half-submerged trees and a howler monkeys hooted overhead. The sunlight piercing the mud turned the river into a golden road.

They dared not slow or stop. Aracai’s gut suggested that the squills might still be hunting. He suspected that they had quickly used up their energy in the initial hunt, but that after recharging, they would be loosed again.

A boat plied the water overhead, and Aracai rose to the surface and searched the river as he cleared gunk from his gills.

To the south, he saw houses—built so close together that they glimmered like pebbles upon a beach. Children were out playing in the rain, two girls twirling a rope so that a small brown boy could jump.

Guilt weighed in Aracai’s stomach as he considered what his bomb would do to them.

He dove again, lugging his burden, and began to wonder. How many days would it take to reach the target? Did he really want to kill people—children?

Was it self-defense, or something more like revenge?

He imagined Escalas talking to him, in his old reassuring tones.

Have you considered the benefits of war? the old man asked in Aracai’s mind. It sweeps away toxic societies.

Aracai exercised his imagination, tried to find a rebuttal. What if the toxic society wins? he asked. For if he started a war with the humans, he knew that he personally would surely die.

Indeed, it seemed that too often the most toxic society would win the battle and thus spread.

And yet we must try, the old mer replied. We are not just trying to save ourselves, we are hoping to save uncounted billions of people in the future.

Aracai recalled the children out skipping and playing jump rope in the streets beside the river and pictured what would happen to them when the bomb blew. Even if he did manage to set it off, he would lose his soul.

Our species is dying, he thought. Soon we will all be as dead as the whales.

Does it really matter? Extinction? Every man must face his own personal extinction.

After long hours, Dulce said, “I’m hungry.”

He could feel pangs in his own belly.

But the river was dead.

Aracai had once hunted briefly in freshwater, in crystalline streams that tumbled from the Andes. Cold as ice and clearer than raindrops, thick with trout.

An idea struck, and he took Dulce’s hand and led her along the riverbank until they found a tributary, a small river that twisted through the jungle.

They swam upstream for a mile until the river came alive. Overhead, huge ferns and trees shadowed the water. Pollywogs wiggled among rushes, while frogs whistled in the trees. Water beetles buzzed in whirligig patterns and fish began to sing.