Rupture (19 page)

Hutto sat on the roof of the main campus building, watching a line of vehicles waiting to exit through security at the gate. There was a hold-up for some reason. He couldn’t tell why. But all those who’d come for the announcement wanted out, as fast as possible.

A few of the football players had shown him how to get up there, and he’d climbed up to get away from everyone. No need to be himself on the roof. He had hoped his parents, or maybe just his mom, might come to see him when he’d sent the message last night that the Consortium was going to make their big announcement. His mom had sent a sorry note, and he knew she wanted to come, but not without his father.

Everyone was too busy, he thought. Always too busy.

Hutto saw the first flashes of light out in the countryside where the Ag Farm dairy and cattle fields and the orchards stretched to the mountains in the distance. He turned, no longer interested in watching the winding road full of cars. To the north, as if a block-sized camera kept triggering its flash, a series of unexplainable lights erupted along the horizon, just over the treetops where the mountains turned to retreating blue and gray ridges.

“What the hell?”

It was like nothing he’d ever seen, and for a moment, Hutto Toth was scared. The closest thing he could think of to describe it was like seeing heat lightning during a cloudless, clear sunny day.

He hurried down the drainpipe and rushed to the Gladial Club behind the gymnasium. The Glad Club was an old converted machine shed of vinyl siding and a corrugated tin roof. The place was so hot in the summer that they had to keep the huge garage doors open and run big industrial fans in the doorways. A line of hickories provided some shade, but only in the late afternoon.

Coach Buzz’s soaked Rejuv robe hung from him like a wet beach towel. He was sweeping the mats that occupied one side, and sweating heavily. The other floor was hard-packed dirt sprinkled with sand and mulch. Heavy bags had been hung along the walls, as well as wood dummies and posts. All manner of wooden practice weapons, as well as padded gear, hung from racks.

“What is it?” Coach Buzz asked when he saw Hutto.
 

“Flashing lights,” Hutto said, then pointed north. Coach Buzz rushed to his office. Hutto watched him, through the window, talking on his tablet. When he came out, he looked even paler than before. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah, oh shit.”

“You going to be sick?” Hutto asked.

Coach grabbed a beat-up metal chair and sat down. “I just might.”

“What are those lights?”

“An RAI incursion, right here at Sterling. Another fabricator has activated somewhere in the mountains and is summoning the bad guys.”

“No shit!”

“No shit.”

“Fuck, yeah!”

“Hey,” Coach said, finally realizing both their mouths were running wild.

But Hutto was already stomping through the club, as if it were under attack by ants and his boots the only weapon. He threw a series of kicks, shadowboxed, and did some fancy footwork as well. His imaginary opponent would have taken a beating. “We’re not leaving, are we?”

“Not for some time.”

“Damn, now that sucks. But Sterling is going to be the bomb. I can’t wait to see what the authorities bring. Maybe a Megamech.”

“A what?” Wally rounded the corner. He’d been out back with his mech. Hutto had seen it for the first time yesterday. The mech was as big as a large man and comprised of a brushed-metal alloy frame covered in ceramic plating. It was light, fast, and—most importantly—responsive. The federal license they had was for everyday use. No firepower, of course. And Wally was small enough to climb inside its chest cavity and operate it. “Did you say Megamech?”

“Who knows what else? My brother says the Consortium has more weapons than we can imagine. Real black-ops stuff.”

“You’re happy about this?” Coach asked.

“Of course,” Hutto said. “My brother Almont fought for the SAIs as a gladiator for years before the Consortium recruited him and they bought out his contract. He says I have what it takes, but this could be my direct ticket to the big leagues.”

“It’s dangerous challenging AIs, Hutto.”

“Life is dangerous.”

Beasley drove up on an ATV with a small lawnmower trailer attached. “Did you hear?”

Coach nodded.

Hutto said, “I saw it from on the roof—”

“You were on the roof?” Coach asked.

Beasley said, “Any second, now, the klaxons—” They heard the first sounding of the blaring alerts. “There they are.”

Wally moved a step closer to Beasley, and she lifted him to her shoulder.

Hutto threw a jumping front-kick that would have crushed a regular man’s chest cavity. “Here comes the fuckin’ cavalry.”

Beasley and Wally watched Hutto perform another series of martial displays, each one more acrobatic than the last.

“Show off,” Beasley said.

“I wish I could do that,” Wally said. “I wonder what they’ll look like.”

No one responded, and even Hutto calmed for a stretch. All three of them considered what they knew about incursions and realized it was very little beyond rumor. But everyone knew that when RAIs took form, it wasn’t pretty. The photos leaked from incursion hot zones showed all sorts of demented things from crushing machinery to monsters from your worst nightmare. Most people believed it was all made up—the stuff of comics, movies, and video games.

“I wish my mech was fitted with weaponry,” Wally said.

“Too bad,” Hutto said.

“Wally, I have to show you something,” Beasley said. “We need to hurry.”

“Show what?” Hutto asked. “I’m going too.” He grabbed Wally and jumped in the small trailer behind the ATV. “Something tells me this is will be good.”

Coach looked like he might interfere. Beasley turned around and sped off before he could.

* * *

They hurried over the wooded ridge, along a trail, past the big horse barn, through the pastures and orchards, and into the hills south of a large cattle field. Beasley took a winding route, so that Hutto wouldn’t learn how she got there, and eventually found a dry creek bed. She sped along it, now deep in the hills, the branches of hardwoods reaching high into the sky and forming a canopy. She turned off at a shallow berm and hurried through a portion of woods recently burned by brush fire.

On the other side, where the trees where green again, the head of a five-story mech rose above the tallest branch. The head was as big as house. It was fire-engine red, lined with gold war stripes, and formed so that it protruded forward like the angry maw of a wolf.

All of them (except Beasley) were seeing a real Megamech for the first time.

“Look at that!” Wally yelled, his high-pitched voice barely rising above the whine of the antiquated combustion engine. “I can’t believe it! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He made me promise,” Beasley said. “He’s been waiting for the right time to meet you. This seems like the right time.”

“Meet me?”

Hutto smiled, as they followed a footpath through the trees and brush. “I can guess why.”

She pulled into a clearing before a simple, cedar, slat-boarded, slant-roofed cabin with two glass windows and a door. A covered porch ran along the front. The area in the clearing was full of old, but useful, pieces of machinery: a cast-iron vat here, a rusted hoe there, even an old John Deere green-and-yellow tractor. Rusting but useable tools of all types hung on the outside of the cabin. There was even a small flower patch nearby. And behind the cabin ran rows sprouting bright red tomatoes.

Crazy Mac rounded the corner of his cabin, carrying a burlap sack on his shoulder. He was a skinny old man with a healthy beard and a wrinkled face who had spent way too much time outdoors. He looked fit enough and dropped the sack at his feet.

“I had a feeling you’d be coming,” he said. Beasley killed the engine. “Just in time. Is that him?” He screwed up his face. “Dumb question. Who else would it be?” He stopped before Wally. “Well, I’ll be cooked in a kettle. You’re as small as she said.” He smiled and revealed a mouth of perfect teeth for a man his age, which could have been fifty or a hundred or more. “You just might make my day, son.” He offered his hand. “Let me help you down, and introduce you to her.”

He set Wally on the ground.

Hutto jumped out and gave the old man a dirty look for not saying hello.

“Don’t take it personal,” Beasley said to Hutto. “He’s single-minded.”

They followed Crazy Mac beyond his well-tended vegetable garden to where it abutted the woods. A footpath led them to a wild poison-ivy hedge and beyond that to another clearing, this one with thick field grass that wet their ankles. They saw the two tower-like legs of the mech in the center of the clearing.

“Oh my god!” Wally yelled, now back on Beasley’s shoulder. “Oh my god!”

Hutto ran into the clearing. “A real Megamech, right here at Sterling.”

Wally jumped up and down on Beasley’s shoulder.

Each of the legs of the humungous Megamech was nearly as thick as a grain silo and reached up into the encroaching trees. These had been painted crimson and gold years ago, but the flaking paint had chipped away to reveal the alloy-armor gray beneath.

The students all ran forward to a break in the forest.

“It’s so big!” Wally exclaimed when he saw her entirely.

The torso section reached above the treetops. Buried deep in the hills and woods, the Megamech had gone undetected by everyone for years, even though it was as big as a large house and still held armament batteries along its chest. The arms jutted from huge, prominent shoulder sections and hung at its sides, each one ending in some horrible weapon of destruction. Each arm was as long as an eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer. The head with the flaring horns and extended wolf maw contained the command center. The great machine looked east, toward the school, like some fossilized guardian waiting for an ancient enemy.

“Isn’t she a beauty?” Crazy Mac asked.

Hutto stared up, as if he were daydreaming. “How do you get to the top?”

“Without a gantry? You climb, son. You climb.” He waved. “Come on, let me introduce you before the critters come.”

“Critters?” Hutto looked at Beasley like he’d just gone to heaven. “My brothers are going to have to sit and listen to my stories and not say a damn word. Sterling’s a gold mine.”

As they approached a great splayed foot that had been covered by soil and grass years ago, Crazy Mac turned to Wally. “You made some headway with your mech?”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said. “Putty in my hands.”

“You gave her a name yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, hell, boy, you gotta give her a name. The Association bought you that mech for a reason.”

“I figured it was for something important.”

“You figured right. Let’s see what you can do with MacEllen. She’s been waiting for a good psy-pilot.” He turned a recessed handle in the armor and pulled open a man-sized hatch. “After you.”

* * *

The Megamech mind stands sentinel as she has for thirty years. She now feels the humans tunneling up, rung-by-rung. She feels them pause in the cramped space of her knee-joint architecture, chatting, the little one already beginning to understand what he has discovered.

She is a World Walker Megamech Destroyer Class USC-Kraken, built by Consortium engineers to battle the monstrous forms that began manifesting themselves in Realspace after the Rupture. Her last pilot called her MacEllen until he blew his mind out in their last battle following the orders of her captain.

Retirement has never sat well with her, here in the quiet foothills of the Blue Ridge where she was sent to wait.

But like so many years ago, the battle happened in the year 2080 high up on the Asian steppe, amid the dry places. Daily, she relives facing the Great Enemies of Mankind: the Haters, the Bashers, the Bent Monkey-wrenches. The battle begins in the morning, with the Consortium Defense Force forming a line as far as the eye can see. Seven other Megamechs line up a klick apart, with multinational Consortium infantry mechs, foot soldiers, and mobile armor units providing support at their feet.

The Void Armies of Darkness and Heat-Death swarm forward in the distance. The First Great Incursion of the Cyber Wars begins. “The Battle of the Steppe,” they will come to call it
.
The Enemies emerge in every form imaginable from the kilometer-wide wall of Rogue Makers that has been forming for a decade. Inside her, she feels her crew ready, alarms sounding, her pilot and captain in the control center working through their battle solutions.

She hears Captain Picham say, “Forward.”

But she doesn’t move until her pilot makes her move. His presence fills her and gives her alloy life. And she lifts her great, armored limbs, and hears the troops at her feet cheer. The smaller mechs surge forward. Then she sees the Enemies rise up from behind their shielding. And the artificial but living mind within the USC-Kraken knows fear.

She knows that Captain Picham sees what awaits them: chitinous things that scamper forward, mechanized things that rumble, and unreal things that flash into being. Then the real horror appears behind the first wave: the Rogue Technowizards in their Dread Walker tanks leading mountain-sized abyss pets on leashes of lightning.

Three semi-solid, semi-real, but very deadly colossal manifestations of inhuman minds rear up to conquer the world. They are beasts of the void invaders with no thought but destruction. These colossi are ten stories tall, larger than even she is. They look like titans sent from the heavens to stomp the life out of humanity. Each one is partially manifested but solid enough to smash a building to bits.

The energized leashes wielded by cyborg Interfacer Technowizards in their Dread Walkers keep the colossi in check. Then the first of them takes a giant step, long enough that it would cross half a football field, and begin to walk. Her pilot calms her, with reassuring words, urging restraint. He sits in his psy-harness, a diamond of light in the control center in her head. Her captain sees them through the wall-sized video screen as he stands before the pilot in his harness, and MacEllen feels him tremble, though no one else sees it.