Archon of the Covenant (10 page)

The soil softened and the dug out burrows filled with shallow puddles. Trash and raw sewage streamed down University. The storm swept past, and the campus quieted. Slowly, the revins emerged from the buildings, looking up at the sky, scanning the horizon for the trails of fulmination and terror. The air was clear and smelled sweetly of creosote and palm fronds. A gust blew off the steep bulwark of the Gittings and Kuiper building and crossed the ripped main lawn. The revins paused, sniffing at the air. A realization was sweeping across their faces. One, then two, then many. Some intruder was amongst them. They shouted and rasped, frantically looking around them. Hysteria. A number came out from right underneath the sentinel, out of the lobby of the Kuiper building. The sky began to break, midday sun casting along the mall, shadows moving with the westerly clouds overhead. The sentinel knew - some scent from its frame was giving it away. Its claret cloak had dissipated in the rain. The organ was reacting to the foreign body.

A tall, sinewy female revin held her hands to her brow, shielding the intermittent sun from her gaze. She stared up at the Kuiper roof where the sentinel sat motionless in the guard tower. She choked on a breath and gasped. She began to motion wildly in its direction, gesticulating some hysterical curse. The other revins looked at her and then up at the roof. The sentinel began to slowly move backwards out of view but it was too late - they had spotted it. In the seconds after, a low rumble carried on the air behind the sentinel, getting louder in the already shrill din of the cries below. They were coming up the exterior ramp. The sentinel panned around the province of fallow minds. The revins ascended the nearby structures – the Eller Theater, the Solar Observatory, the Sonnet Space Sciences Buildings – and surrounded the sentinel on every side of the sky. Across the mall, in the reaches of the stadium summit, the sallow, scarred revin fixated on the rising entropy of the Kuiper rooftop far away. It perched on the concrete stands, one leg off the side, dangling in the ether, eyes widening.

The sentinel paused before the entryway of the corrugated exterior ramp. The revins were on the roof of the library across the mall now. They emerged on the Psychology building to the west. The sentinel heard their cries on the roof of the Solar Observatory just to the north. And they were on the Gittings roof to the east. The sentinel was surrounded. It scanned for escape routes – there was no safe way off the roof without getting through the teeming crowd coming up the ramp. The sentinel was in trouble. It could release a periphery current, decimating one wave, then initiate its final stage defense, and then it would be over. It loaded a flash drive into a hollow rubber casing from its magazine and positioned its turret bearing southwest. It fired the single shot into the sky, the memory chip screaming into heaven. A record in the dirt for someone to find later. It turned back to the exterior ramp. They were there. They had on their face a look of hatred. They were afraid - much like they were with the sound of thunder earlier, but this look was one of rage. They walked carefully out onto the roof and fanned out slowly, nervously looking around, searching for other intruders. But there was just the sentinel. They turned their attention back to DDC39, who had locked its tri-axel in place and fixed its railgun on them from the small inclined level just a short distance in front of them.

A tinny hum carried on the air and the roof exploded in a spray of blood, cartilage, and marrow. The sentinel fired on them in a turbulent cacophony of annihilation. The railgun sang like a thrush whistling in the spring. The first wave was slaughtered, falling in heaps of liquefied fat and sinews. A fourth of the sentinel’s railgun stores were depleted. It shuttled its magazine trays and reloaded. A second wave of revins emerged at the ramp entrance, peering into the daylight and the carnage on the roof. They were infuriated. Any semblance of fear and tension was lost now in the frenzy alighting in their eyes. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and moved back towards the western wall, crossing over a narrow ramp spanning a skylight beneath. They rushed out of the ramp bridge, leaping past the corpses and extending their festering extremities towards DDC39.

The skies broke overhead and the sunlight fell fully on the sentinel’s frame. It came to a stop at a small parapet above the skylight. A different cry rang out – a bark. The sentinel panned behind it, towards the ground. The white, half-dome of the Flandrau building glimmered beneath the sentinel’s position. The theater of heaven. The planetarium. The sentinel recalled the aroton and the last thing it flickered back: PLANETARIUM.

The sentinel decided that if it was going to perish, it would do so where its magnalium kin, the unknown herald, had whispered in the dusk. It turned its optics and railgun at the rushing horde. The panel on its center frame clicked open and the banshee disk rattled in the din. A piercing scream shot through the crowd and the revins buckled over in pain, their hands and fingers plugging their ears. Some shot right back up, their faces distorted in pain but committed, nonetheless, to reaching the sentinel. Perhaps some of them had experience with this wail before. As they stumbled, disoriented, on the rooftop, the sentinel lit them up with a rapid left-to-right stream of uranium shells from the railgun – a blurred half-wing angel ripping through their bodies. The sentinel revved its drivetrain and rushed back at them, knocking the still-standing eidolons crashing beneath the ramp and down through the glass skylight, their bloodied, torn bodies shattering through the glass as they sailed the 6 floors down and into the lobby. Crash crash crash. The sentinel spun around on the other side of the roof and gunned it, speeding through the revins who were gathering again near the bridge ramp – another wave appearing.

DDC39 sailed off the roof of the Kuiper Space Sciences building, crashing into the Flandrau Planetarium below like a satellite dropping from the mesosphere. It landed, all axels fanned out cat-like, distributing the impact. The roof, wet and soft from rain collected in its clogged drains, gave way and the sentinel barreled through the upper layer, spinning through insulation, rotten Douglas Fir beams, and soaked sheetrock.

It came to rest on its side inside the upper level seating of the darkened star chamber. The soft glow from the hole ripped open overhead lit the spot where the sentinel landed. Condensation and insulation dropped intermittently from the opening, the shouts of the revins dampened now by the heavily paneled room. The revin righted itself and then heard it again, clearly now - barking. Inside the star chamber, near the massive Vector projector, was a group of sickly dogs covered in mange, barking at where the sentinel stood upright. The room was filled with animals of every kind. Tanagers and sparrows, perched in the ceiling fixtures and acoustics, fluttered into the darkness in a frenzy and darted for the light, disappearing in the chasm from where the sentinel fell. A chuckwalla scurried past the sentinel’s frame and a family of jackrabbits stirred on the adjacent steps, loping off into the darkness. A pair of eyes glowed on the opposite side of the room. And from the southwest side, a series of shouts and bleats croaked in the dark. There were revins on the other side of a large obstruction near the theater entrance. This was some sort of prison. The revins were hurriedly removing the beams and nets that were serving as the chamber door. They’d be rushing in soon.

The sentinel lit its LED spotlight and scanned around the room. A pack of malnourished javelinas caught the sentinel’s glare and scurried in different directions. The light came to rest on the pair of eyes glowing in the dark. It was a lone Mexican Wolf sitting atop a pile of rags and blankets. The wolf stood upright as the sentinel rolled over towards its direction, traversing the narrow walkway connecting the two sides. As it got closer, the wolf snarled at DDC39 and then slowly backed away, its haunch fur standing straight up. The blanket pile moved. There was something burrowed underneath. The sentinel unfurled its mechanical hand and reached down, pulling one layer off the other until finally its light rested on the blinking eyes of a young girl. She looked up at the sentinel’s light, shielding her eyes. A sudden stillness caught the air as the two looked upon each other in the dark of the blank universe of the abandoned planetarium. She, looking into the white light and unable to discern who, or what, was before her. The sentinel, looking down at the motionless girl, unable to tell if she was cognitive. A look of hope crossed her face as she stared into the light and saw the shadow of a hand, the sentinel’s synthetic grip, pass through. Her eyes followed the motion and she finally spoke:

“Mom? Is that you?”

The sentinel had found a cognitive child. Her eyes widened and pupils constricted in the light. A future had been opened for man’s rebirth.  A boulder moved from the tomb of Homo sapiens. The sentinel scrolled through its dialects, searching for a vocalization as she spoke again:

“Terrence? Berto?”

A soft, low inflection filled the air. An American argot of unknown gender – some mild provincialism at home in the dry, slow air of the desert. The sentinel spoke:

“I’m sorry, that is not me. But I’m here to get you out. Are you ready to go?”

The sentinel extended its hand down towards the child, who wriggled up and out of the pile of towels and rags. She stood up, her face level to the sentinel’s LED light, which now softened to a dull glow. She saw its tri-axel and trident frame construction for the first time, illuminated from behind by the column of light shining through the punctured ceiling. This glimmering leviathan in the aphotic space held its hand aloft. The child stood there, looking up at the machine, an expression of skepticism across her face.

“What about him?”

She looked over her shoulder at the Mexican Wolf who had backed into a corner, casting a glance back at the barricade that was being frantically torn down by the revins just outside.

“We have to get him out too.”

The sentinel couldn’t process what it was being asked to do, and so it responded with default logic:

“Okay. But we have to go now.”

The child put her palm in the humaniform grasp of its black, rubberized shadow hand. The sentinel led her, turning its trident frame, to the rear of its base platform. A series of panels slid open and an array of padded metal plates and prongs rolled out, clicking into the other, forming a small rumble seat. The seat sat elevated off the base like a sand yacht on the salt flats.

“Sit down and put the seatbelt on.”

She approached the small bench, moving awkwardly with the one shoe larger than the other, and stepped up on the sentinel’s axel, falling into the seat with a thud. She looked around her and found the 2-point harness, clasping it into the small lock at the base of the seat. As she clicked it shut, she looked up and the sentinel’s hand was before her, two earplugs in its open fist.

“Put these in your ear. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“That’s good. One more thing. Keep your eyes shut until I say you can open them.”

She nodded her head knowingly at the sentinel’s optical array, and then its big trident frame turned around and the hitch of the tri-axel unlocked. DDC39 sprang forth in the room, turning around in a tight radius. The Mexican Wolf skittered in the corner. The dogs kept barking and the other animals were whipped into a frenzy as the barricade came down. The two revins just behind it began to whoop and shout their babble - a distorted Wernickes Aphasia. One called behind it, motioning to some unknown audience. The other stepped into the dark from the sunlighted lobby. The sentinel leveled its railgun and fired two quick shots. The revins stood, silent, for a beat – frozen in the air – and then fell to the tiled floor. A single hole through their skulls. The sentinel sped into the light, the child clutching at the rumble seat handles. DDC39 paused, looking backwards at the Mexican Wolf, which stared back nervously and then dashed towards the girl and the machine.

They drove over the shattered glass of the lobby, past the fallen revin guards, and into the sunlight of the Flandrau courtyard. To the left, a large crowd of jostling revin men and women - naked, weathered, and jittery - were staring up at the Kuiper roof from where the sentinel had fallen earlier. Their vapid eyes turned from the roof and towards the sentinel and girl. The animals, trapped in the astral prison behind them, spilled out and disappeared in different directions. The revin’s faces twisted from confusion to anger as they comprehended this scene beside them – their livestock pens, emptied, and this intruder was the cause. They screamed and rushed at the sentinel. The girl clasped her hands over her eyes. The sentinel’s railgun traced on each of them. Too many. DDC39 backed up and escaped along the westward sidewalk, darting past fallen palo verde trees and into the rear parking lot of the Flandrau building. Across the street, in the dusty lot of the National Solar Observatory, was a mammoth, mobilized structure – a camouflaged military vehicle. It was an ECM jammer. A Russian-era Kvant SPN-12. Its expanded disruptor cluster nearly filled the entire lot, held aloft by stabilizers that tethered into the cracked asphalt. A thick power cord ran from its side and up the southern wall of the NSO building, carried to the roof and connected to a field of solar panels, just out of view.