The Grigori quickly gained on the Enoch. Even if she found an opening, Peg knew that they wouldn’t be able to slow enough to enter the tunnels safely without the massive pursuing ship destroying them.
A new proximity alert sounded. A sentinel swarm closed in from ahead of them. Chime rolled the Enoch at full speed through the swarm. Some smashed against and bounced off the Enoch’s hull as the ship tore through the crowd.
EM cannons ripped through the sentinels dropping as many as they could. Sentinels spun and pursued the Enoch. Others latched onto the Grigori tearing away at the hull before being blasted away.
“Chime. Give Red the ship.” The two women turned shocked to Peg. “The Grigori are broadcasting. That means they’re going into the matrix. Red can’t help in there. If we can’t stop the Grigori, the human race ends with the war.”
Chime slid out of the pilot’s chair and Red leaped in. “Keep swerving, Red,” Chime said before leaving the cockpit.
“I’ve set a mayday to repeat. Here’s hoping a ship is somewhere in range and picks it up. We need to give Zion a heads up just in case we fail. Keep us in the air as long as possible, Red. Nothing is more important.” Peg left the cockpit ordering everyone off the guns and to the main deck.
Despite the frantic movements of the ship, they all strapped into the neb chairs.
“Remember what Red said. Their code is different. Leaves a trail,” Peg barks to the others as she settles into her seat. Tobias hovered the coaxial spear over the jack at the base of his skull and listed to Peg’s orders. “For maximum damage, they’re going hit population centers Heavy casualties. The radiation and resulting nuclear winter will wipe out rural populations before the machines can recover from the massive power failure. Pick a city. Find the Grigori. Take them out.” She paused and then released one more order. “If you come across any of our people inside, warn them.”
Uriel, Tobias, Quan, Chime, and Peg slid the spears into their jacks, punched in load coordinates, and entered the matrix.
Tobias loaded through a hard line in an abandoned, subbasement apartment a block off Times Square in New York City. New York was the obvious choice and he hoped he had chosen the right entry point.
Inside the matrix, Tobias sported a short mohawk, a leather biker’s jacket, a white t-shirt, and black jeans. His shin-protecting biker’s boots were great for hand-to-hand combat but weren’t great for running – something he would quickly regret. By the time he bolted from the apartment building and sprinted the block to the busy Times Square, he was forced to hobble his way toward the giant LED display that was the tourist destination’s signature attraction. He knew, the second that he approached, that he’d chosen a good load point.
Even without the foreign code wafting like smoke from the three Grigori standing there, he would have recognized them. Each of them wore the usual white Grigori scrubs. One wore a large, black duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
When he sat the duffel back down, all three of them knelt around it. He unzipped it and Tobias could see the warhead inside. Without hesitation, he pulled two .243 Winchesters from their holsters hidden beneath his jacket. The three were so focused on arming the warhead they didn’t notice him walk up. The crowd screamed and parted as Tobias fired both guns killing all three.
He grabbed the duffel, slung it over his shoulder, and ran back toward the abandoned apartment.
Quan loaded into Hong Kong’s city center. His hair fell halfway down the back of his residual self image. Wearing a bright green leather BMX jacket complete with padding and jeans, Quan would have blended effortlessly into the crowded Hong Kong streets if it wasn’t for the sword strapped to his hip.
He scanned the code looking for anything amiss but was nearly lost in the normalcy. Every part of downtown Hong Kong was filled with people still trapped within the matrix. After ten minutes of searching, he assumed he’d loaded into the wrong place. He decided to double back and return to his load point to jump to a new city but stopped when he saw the foreign code wafting up from a point in the crowd about ten meters ahead of him. He followed the code steam down to a woman in white scrubs kneeling over a black duffel bag.
Quan reached into his coat and pulled out the uzi hidden there. The crowd screamed and parted.
“Get away from that!” he screamed as he ran toward the woman.
She scrambled back and ran. When Quan reached down to zip the duffel closed, the brick wall behind him exploded from the three bullets that hit it and ricocheted. He rolled. Getting to a crouched position closer to an alley, he searched around until he saw the woman running madly toward him with a pistol in hand. People scrambled for cover as the screaming madwoman fired wildly in his direction.
He returned fire and she dove into a nearby alley. They traded bullets until they each ran out of ammo. Quan drew his sword and sprinted toward the woman. She ran deeper into her alley and he pursued. He was faster but was not going to catch her before she reached the end of the alley and the street beyond, so Quan grabbed a hard piece of trash littering the alley and pitched it striking the woman in the back. She tumbled to the ground. Before she could stand, he was standing over her with the tip of the sword pointed at her chest.
“Don’t move,” he panted. “Why in the hell would you do something like this?”
But Quan’s question would go unanswered. The woman’s face grimaced and she screamed in pain as she was erased and replaced by an agent. The almost too-smooth, pasty skin and empty eyes hidden behind opaque sunglasses sent terror rippling through Quan’s core. The generic black suit was an abyss from which emerged a Glock Gen 5 9mm. Shock froze on Quan’s face as the shots burst through him.
Pegasus stood in front of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster scanning the crowd for any sign of the Grigori code she had found in the previous two cities she raided. The three groups of Grigori she encountered in St. Petersburg had given her a hard time, but their nukes were acquired and deleted as she transitioned to London through the load program.
She wasn’t seeing any sign of Grigori activity. She pulled out her phone and punched in the code that called the group. Chime and Uriel picked up on the first ring. Tobias jumped in a few seconds later.
“How are we doing?”
“Apart from losing Quan?” Uriel snarked.
“I’m in my second load, but can’t find any of them here,” Chime volunteered. “Wait… I think I see them.” She hung up.
“Yep. I gotta go, too. They just jumped onto the Eiffel Tower elevator.” Uriel’s line went silent as he hung up also.
“Tobias, where are you?”
“Toronto. Fourth load,” he answered. Then, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
Peg thought for a second. “We’re not making a dent. There are thousands of them. We need help.”
“Have you noticed the string?”
“The what?” Peg noticed the foreign code about one hundred meters away from her. She began a quick walk in that direction.
“These warheads have a thin string of code connected to them. Trails into the sky.”
Peg stopped. The Grigori had been setting the bombs but not detonating them. This hadn't been a suicide mission for them. “Digital fuses!” Peg stopped walking. “Samyaza is going to detonate them all at the same time from the ship. They’re just placing them and jumping out. Tobias, I need you to do something absolutely insane.”
Peg turned back toward her exit point and explained Tobias’s new mission.
Tobias waited until there was enough of a break in traffic to stroll out into the center of the intersection near Yong-Dundas Square in Toronto’s downtown core. It was evening and the square was full of pedestrian traffic and the streets were full of cars with drivers completely enraged at the man blocking the intersection. The chorus of horn chords screamed in his ears until he pulled two uzis from his coat and spun firing blindly in every direction.
A nearby cop pulled his weapon and returned fire, but was cut down almost immediately.
It didn’t take long before Tobias saw the familiar shape of a suited figure emerge from the crowd in the square. Another stepped from a car in the intersection. Agents.
He dropped his guns and raised his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! We need to talk!”
The agent approaching from the square spoke monotonously while aiming his gun at Tobias, “You have nothing of interest to say. You will die, as your kind always does.”
“The matrix is under attack!” Tobias answered.
The agents exchanged a look between themselves before focusing again on Tobias. “Speak.”
Peg pulled the coaxial spear from the port on the back of her neck and sat up waking in a turbulent Enoch. She looked around the main deck. Quan’s eyes were open and staring blankly. Blood trickled from Uriel’s mouth. Chime struggled in an unseen fight.
She stood from her Neb chair and walked to Tobias’s side. As if on cue, he screamed out in pain and the monitor beside him flatlined. She had sent him to die. All she could hope was that he was successful. But hope wasn’t enough. She needed to make sure the matrix survived.
The Enoch roared as it scraped against the asphalt beneath them and then bounced back into the air. Peg gripped Tobias’s body to stay on her feet. She could hear sentinels on the hull cutting away. She could hear the Grigori gunfire tearing into her ship. It was just short of a miracle that they were still alive. Peg ran for the bridge.
Red was there weaving the ship up and down and side-to-side while racing forward dodging as many cannons as she could. She wasn’t half the pilot Chime was, but she was holding her own and giving them a fighting chance.
Inspecting the readouts, Peg saw that the Enoch was barely still aloft. Several hover pods, including one of the ones replaced by the Grigori, were destroyed or barely operating. The scanners still picked up no entry back into the tunnels.
“Good?” Red asked without taking her eyes off the road ahead.
“Chime is still fighting. She’s the only one left. I sent Tobias to find agents.”
“Agents?!”
“Even if all of Zion loaded into the matrix, I doubt there would be enough time to locate all of the warheads before the Grigori detonated them. The agents are the only ones who can use the code and locate the digital fuses in time.” Peg ignored the hot tear that burned her eye and the crippling guilt that would destroy her the first chance it got. She saddled into her chair.
“How long until those squiddies on our hull are inside?”
“There’s one already in the armory tearing us apart from the inside. We have minutes left.”
Peg thought a mosaic of thoughts at a speed only possible under the influence of high levels of adrenaline.
She remembered meeting Tobias the first time she arrived in Zion. He had not been long out of the matrix and was serving intake. After getting her registered and assigned to quarters, Tobias quickly became one of her first friends. He was the one who introduced her to Job, the crewman on the Enoch responsible for freeing him.
She remembered her time as second on the Enoch. Married to Job. Chime was the pilot. Tobias and Uriel had just been assigned to the ship when they found a young Quan trying to break into the car they were using inside the matrix. The pain of losing Quan hit her. He had been the first she freed from captivity. He became Job and Peg’s unofficial and only child.
The vitals monitor above her head already showed three of the four jacked-in figures in red signaling an absence of life. Chime’s icon shifted from green to red. Peg could only hope she took as many Grigori as possible with her when she went.
Peg looked to Red. That woman had survived beyond all odds joining the Enoch only a few weeks before Job’s death. Over the two years since then, she became Peg’s closest friend and counselor. She would repeatedly tell Peg that the burning machinery-focused hatred she clung to would destroy her from within.
Pegasus chuckled as she pulled her navigation panel close and hit a few buttons taking control of the Enoch. “Guess I won’t see the end of the machines after all.”
Red realized she was no longer controlling the ship and leaned back in the pilot’s seat with an exhale.
“Ironic isn’t it?” Peg asked Red.
“A bit. We spend years trying to save humanity from the matrix only to have to save the matrix to save humanity.” She smiled.
“Humanity is so much bigger than the Grigori’s tiny little god.”
Peg heard sentinels tearing through the hull and entering her ship. She pulled up on the controls and the Enoch angled straight up. When she felt she gained enough altitude, Peg tamped down the hover pods and the Enoch shifted into freefall. As soon as she had managed to rotate the Enoch so that its nose pointed straight toward the Grigori ship and the ground beneath.
“I love you, Peg.” Red reached for her friend.
“I love you, Red.” Peg took Red’s hand and held tight.
A sentinel tore into the cockpit as the Enoch connected with the Grigori lighting the city-ruin cannon in an all-consuming fireball. The barely standing buildings collapse sealing both ships and the remaining sentinel swarm in a makeshift mass grave.