Archon of the Covenant (17 page)

“Right! Go right!”

The sentinel spun its wheels in the dirt and, coming up on two axels, tore off along the faint path heading southwest. They fled through the base of the mountain, winding around until they hit a sandy wash – a shallow crossing that led over to the main road just ahead. The sentinel locked up its brakes, fishtailing into the fjord as the aroton raced past them towards the other side. A cloud of dirt and haze shot up. The sentinel shot forward into the wash – the aroton looked behind and planted quickly, double backing into the wash and chasing after them. They raced through the dry riverbed, pushing past billowy tamarisks on each side – the scale leaves whipping at them as they sped into the narrowing brush. They tore through the foliage, jumping up off the riverbank and onto the control road. The sentinel kept going, passing right over the dirt passage, crashing through a line of Joshua trees, and into the desert basin. They bounded through the calcic soil and straight into a barbed wire fence. The girl ducked into the seat and the sentinel, without slowing, tore through the fence and hurdled into a paved trail – the San Xavier Road. The rusted fence snapped and coiled up behind them, humming a shrill warble as the taught wire whipped into the dirt.

The sentinel pinged the periphery – revin heat signatures consumed the desert floor behind them, to their left, and to their right. They were closing in. Listing telephone poles lined the road in each direction of the road, running north and south. The aroton shifted the pulse rifle and messenger bag around its shoulder and lifted the longrifle headway towards the mountain. The revins were cresting the summit they had just fled and were racing down the south face. Their stampede down the ridge, and the approaching horde from the desert floor, drew up a dust storm rising up in the midday sky, choking the blue from the air. The aroton flipped the magazine pin and fired off an arc of incendiary shells into the cloud of dust rolling towards them. A wall of hellfire erupted in the brume and twisted screams carried on the air – a sepulchral palaver that, in the din of agony, almost sounded like curses strung word to word. The Mexican Wolf bounded down the highway towards them. The aroton turned back to the sentinel and pointed south, the wolf coming into view at its back:

“Only one direction we can go. Lets move.”

They tore down the abandoned highway as the sun began to move west. The sentinel’s tires whistled through the dust of the road. The wind blew through the girl’s hair as she squinted into the rush of air whipping past them. The aroton sprinted alongside them effortlessly, its microlattice endoskeleton pulsating beneath the pellucid sheathing of its rubber shell. The aroton edged ahead of the sentinel and DDC39 pushed faster, pacing alongside it.

They twisted through the desert road, past a dirt trail intersecting the paved highway they travelled upon. A sundrenched motorcycle was upright before the intersection – the desiccated body of its driver draped into the cowl. Paint chips flew off the gas canister as the girl and her machines raced past - a rusted pistol in the dirt, just beneath the bony grip of the leathered motorist. A single bullet hole in the driver’s skull.

The blue sky turned violet as they pressed into the depths of Sonora. The wind began to rush east over the road, tilting the sentinel’s frame left as it struggled to keep a straight path into the asphalt. DDC39 began to veer into the berm and the aroton followed. They peeled sideways through the dirt, barely missing a guardrail, and rocketed off an overhead berm into a sandy wash. The aroton lept off the overhead and into the cracked gravel beside the sentinel. Without pause, they barreled forward. The sandy, rippled earth gave way to gray, terraced land on each side of the dirt passage. They spun around a corner and pulled up to a sudden halt before an abyssal.

It was the Asarco Mission mine complex. A massive open pit, dredged into the transverse cracks. The main haul road led into bench paths, descending into minor scarps and, finally, into black pits beyond their view. A hulking jaw crusher careened into the sun ahead, like a peroxide Arc de Triomphe. The ruins of the Asarco office and mill lay ahead, just beneath their vision. Broken, lumbering earth crackers lay beside them, pitched into the soil. Great piles of calcified ore sat undisturbed beside listing, rusted crushers and feeders. If there was a way into hell, this was it.

Onward, into the labyrinthine pit. They passed the weathered conveyor belts and empty water tanks dotting the crown line. As they twisted into the pit, they emerged into a flat landing – a cemetery of steel mammoths. A line of 797F ultra class CAT earthmovers sat idle in the lot. One of the largest wheeled machines ever created by sentient man. 1.3M ton operating weight. One thousand gallon tanks. 4,000 horsepower V20 power plant. 50 feet high and 50 feet long. Land carriers. The sentinel shot past the last 797F and the aroton slowed up, the last haul truck looming behind them. The sentinel turned its optics around and came to a halt:

“What are you doing?”

“We’re gonna get trapped. Do the math. You see the route out of this complex? They’ll reach us before we can get out the south side.”

“We’ll go back and pinch them at the gate.”

“No chance. They’re gonna swarm on every side. There’s no firepower that can hold that storm at bay.”

The Mexican Wolf came bounding up the mill road, coming to a stop opposite the aroton. It stood there for a moment, staring back at the girl and her machines, then sat calmly in the dirt, panting and looking off to the west. The aroton looked back at the wolf, setting the butt of the longrifle in the ground:

“You have to go on.”

The sentinel and girl sat there for a pause, watching the aroton as it stood in the road, motionless, watching the wolf. The sentinel exchanged a final message with the aroton over the near field wireless signal – a digital detente. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel, spun back around in the dirt and shot out of the lot, heading up the incline path and into the haul road terraces. The violet overhead turned into a royal tyrian flood. Little white stars began to dot the heavens as the sun moved into the western sky. 

DDC39, with the girl clutching at the bars of the rumble seat, sped up the winding terrace trail. Just beyond the first corner of the upper haul road, they came upon a landslide that had taken out the path before them. The sentinel frantically scanned its satellite topography. This rockfall had just occurred – it was not on the last image upload. The soil of the upper benches was loose from the last rainfall. As the sentinel neared the landslide, testing out the stability of the precipice and attempting to negotiate around it, the edge of the road began to give way and it had to rev all three axels in reverse to avoid going off the side. The girl looked behind her, and up – she saw the summit exit and the path towards it. There were collapsed pockets of soil on every bench between them and the exit. There was no safe way out. She asked the obvious question and what the sentinel was processing too:

“Are we going to get out of this place?”

The sentinel swung its array around and switched between thermal and x-ray optics, desperately looking for some invisible egress. They double backed on the main bench and ascended a collapsed escarpment, the sentinel furiously accelerating, its tires digging into the loose rock of the eroded ground. They climbed up halfway then began to slide backwards and sideways, rolling into an overhang precipice just opposite from where they had drove up. The dark water of the pit fissure glistened in the lilac dusk, the jaws of the underworld opening before the haute ecole of the tiny equestrian and her aluminum yearling. The sentinel lowered the profile of each axel, its chassis scraping alongside the gravel, and turned into the bluff before quickly shifting away and revving its front and left axel. They caught some piece of solid crag beneath the aft tires and lurched forward then darted up the slip. Atop the next bench, the sentinel again pinged their periphery. The toil had cost them precious time. Red heat signatures – a coagulum of throbbing signals - stained the perimeter. Even at the south exit - the revins were here.

They drove forward on the upper, seeping bench road, hugging the pit wall that loomed above them like an amaranthine rampart. The evening was encroaching. Chirping tree crickets sung into the prevernal air – their trill, unending call soon gave way to guttural shouts and the low, rumbling sound of countless footsteps churning through the soil. A Bendire’s thrasher flitted into the branches of an abraded acacia jutting out of the ledge above them, the roots of the trees webbed into the loose rock. The bird looked back at them momentarily, twisting its head about, sideways, to get a good look at the pair before zipping off down the dark bench that the girl and her machine traversed. They followed the bird’s flight path down the passage before coming upon another rockfall blocking the way. Becca began to look about nervously. The deep overburden fell into shadow as the sun began its slow set in the west. A crescent moon was rising, half-lighting the bench in a dull gloam. The girl tugged on her sweatshirt as the chill of evening swooped in. They drove back along the path, coming to a stop before a wooden arch cut into the side of the pit wall. Several two-by-fours were nailed taught into the arch. The sentinel raised its rail gun at the blocked mineshaft. That tinny hum carried on the air and then a volley of uranium shells obliterated the wooden planks, revealing a dark mine cave cut into the pit wall. The sentinel sidled around the narrow overhang until its aft faced the black rift. From the west, above the crown of the Asarco pit, thousands of revins emerged on the skyline – close enough to see the dust of their frenzied footsteps lifting into the air and eclipsing the sun as it fell into the Pacific horizon. The sentinel calmly told the girl:

“Get off the seat and into the cave.”

“What?”

The girl was frightened. She glanced back into the darkness of the mineshaft, which whistled back some apocryphal aria into the cool air. The sentinel looked back.

“Please. Take shelter in there. Crawl back as far as you can go. And stay there until it’s quiet.”

Before she could unbuckle her seat, another legion of ambling, snarling revins appeared to the east, crawling over the silt mounds and rushing along the blocked terraces to their right – so close that their eyes could be made out in the fading light. They cackled with glee, tumbling occasionally and getting back up, naked, and rushing at Becca and the sentinel on the upper bench. They approached the rockfalls carelessly, some slipping into the depths below, wailing in the night. Others crawled over deftly, some tiptoeing across the divide. They would soon be upon the girl and her machine. Straight ahead, thousands more came rushing over the seeping runoff north of the trench. A gibbering glossolalia reverberated from just above them on the high terrace. The sentinel looked up and saw a band of dark faces peering down at them from the upper reach – dead eyes glossed from the crescent moon lifting from out of view in the east.

They were surrounded now. The hum of insects in the desert air disappeared, overwhelmed by a cacophonous bellowing - naked, starving, enraged husks crying out. Putrescent, sunburnt primates. Once-humans. Becca fumbled with the seatbelt in the ebbing glow then paused. A different sound, faint at first, slowly yawned on the eastern air, then increased in pitch. The revins, too, stopped and looked around. The faint clamor turned to a rolling thunder just over the crown, deep into the outer limits of Mineral Hill Road. The pit was silent for a moment and then panicked cries erupted out of sight. The roar grew closer. From above the high scarp, to their right, revins began to fly off the face of the crown, hitting the gravel terraces below and tumbling into darkness – femurs, hips, and spines cracking in the dust bowl as they plummeted down the pit. One flew forward, its arm extended to stop the fall, and gouged its palm into a slab as it flipped upright – the skin of its fingers ripping back, ulna breaking out, compounding in a spurt of blood. The cries of the panicked, rolling bodies, watched by the rapt packs on opposite sides of the mine, gave way to some bellowing phantom. The revins on the terraces east of the sentinel looked up in time to see a 797F erupt off the crown, its engines redlining as it sailed into the still air, then crashing down on the masses gathered on the haul roads just ahead of the girl and her machine. The mammoth vehicle struck the terraces beneath it like a depth charge, crushing the naked revin bodies beneath its undercarriage – their bony figures mangled beneath the 13 ft. tires. The leviathan truck destroyed the row of haul and bench roads then crashed into the black pitch at the nadir, upending at the bottom - its cab collapsing in a maelstrom of warping metal castings, shattering glass and rattling carriage. The blighted terrace slid down atop the broken truck, flailing bodies caught in the sea of soil dumping over it. They moaned and shouted, threshing at the ground washing over them like waders caught in a tidal wave. The sentinel backed up slightly then looked up at the crown from where the 797F shot out. There, atop the ridge, the aroton stood up, opaque in the eventide, and waved back at them. Its LED light flashed out a signal: