The Enoch ripped through the gray-green steam of the old sewage tunnels at an incredible speed leaving streaks of white-blue energy from its electromagnetic displacement engines in its wake. Its head beams barely cut through the thick mist soup twenty meters in front of the ship. Pegasus, the ship’s captain, knew she couldn’t slow down.
The Enoch came upon the wreckage of the Völund not five hours before. It had been torn to shreds by a sentinel swarm, but there were two survivors and they were in desperate need of attention that only the medics of Zion could provide. None of her crew had ever met the two survivors they now carried, but that made no difference to Peg. Risking life and limb for people was just part of her job.
That’s why she braved the sharp turns and sudden drops of the ancient sewage systems at breakneck speed. That’s why she couldn’t stop and shut down her engines to fire the E.M.P. destroying the three sentinels trailing somewhere behind her ready to rip their ship to shreds. She’d have to out-maneuver them. She wanted to believe the human mind was capable of so much more than the machines, but this is a difficult faith to hold while looking at the devastated planet and the human population still dumbly sleeping through captivity.
The search for the One continued still, to no avail. Morpheus and his superstitious followers believed in some foretold messiah asleep within in the matrix just waiting to be awakened. Peg didn’t cling to that faith. Couldn’t. God refused to help humanity after they created an intelligence whose only logical conclusion was the eradication of its parent race. Now, after mankind destroyed the planet, scorched the sky, and wiped out nearly every natural life form on earth, God is probably thinking twice about ever sending the human race a savior. But, hey, if they can find hope in blind faith, by all means, have at it.
Pegasus stood a meter and a half tall with a thin frame, jet black hair, and shimmering blue eyes. Her silky-smooth skin fooled the ignorant eye into thinking she was twenty or, at most, twenty-five. But the crow’s feet that accent her deep, knowledgeable eyes betrayed her thirty-eight years and then some.
She was ten when Morpheus freed her. She’d learned a few tricks from the Oracle, but nothing compared to what the One was said to be able to do. Despite her petite stature, Peg could command a room just by walking in. Job once said that if willpower were a weapon, Peg could end the war today. And that was long before she’d watched a sentinel cut him in half. Her will to destroy the machines only doubled after that. The Enoch has brought down more sentinels than any other in the entire fleet. Every few minutes she must remind herself of the injured crewmen in the infirmary to silence the urge to turn and gut the pursuing squiddies.
Alarms sounded and Peg hopped to her feet behind Chime, the thin blond flat-chested tomboy who was the best fighter on the ship – in the matrix that is.
“We got a bug! In front; two kilometers!” Chime screamed a little too loud for Peg to be right beside her.
“How the hell? Why didn’t sensors pick it up sooner?”
“Don’t know, but we’re coming up on it fast! And those three are still behind us five kilos and comin’ strong.”
Peg’s human brain kicked into computer mode processing her options; memorized tunnel maps, speed, trajectory, complex calculations computed in milliseconds. Compared to her, Deep Though would have been an insecure pre-teen boy in a varsity football team’s locker room.
“All stop,” Peg spoke calmly and firmly. Chime learned years ago not to question Peg’s orders. She immediately jerked the Enoch to a stop.
“Those three are closing fast. They’ll be on us in five seconds.”
“Full speed on my mark.” Peg’s eyes close as she channeled the vibration of the engines through the ship and into her body as if, together, they became one being. The tick of milliseconds metronomed through her skull. “MARK!”
No hesitation. One mind. One body. Peg the brain. Chime the hand. And the Enoch exploded forward.
“We’re closing on the squiddy ahead of us.”
“Up ahead there’s a branch off the tunnel at sixty degrees starboard, twenty-three down.”
“Don’t see it.”
“Go now!”
Again, one. The Enoch lurched starboard heading down a thin corridor. The sides of the ship scrape and grind against the close tunnel walls. Sparks fly illuminating thicker mist. Behind them, somewhere in the gloom, Chime and Peg heard the thunderous explosion of four sentinels colliding, their titanium-alloy tentacles wrapping around one another in a cold death embrace, were they but alive in the first place.
Chime slowed the Enoch to a crawl and swiped the sweat from her brow; her almost-short white-blond hair slicked to her scalp. Her gray eyes seemed to burn with a new green color making her pale skin look even paler. “Can’t go back that way.”
“I know.” Peg collapsed in her chair with a puff. Close calls never excited her. With one look at Chime navigating with a new wide smile and she knew the feeling was not mutual.
“What the hell was that?” Tobias burst into the cockpit. He sported the familiar pseudo-vomit of his amino-synthesis breakfast on his shirt. The hulk of a Latino man stood nearly two meters tall. Peg could never understand how anyone that came out of the matrix with a muscular system so beyond repair as Tobias had, could, in six short years and such a cramped living space, put on as much muscle mass as he had.
“Sentinel orgy,” Chime replied with her yet to fade smile.
“Yeah? Well, a little warning next time would be nice.”
“As soon as Uriel fixes the intercom, I’ll be able to call out a play-by-play.”
Peg stood looking past Tobias to Quan, who had also run to the cockpit. “How are our patients?”
Quan was the exact opposite of Tobias. At nineteen, he stood a mere one point seven meters and resembled a sentinel tentacle. His black hair capped his dark body. Though not much of a fighter, he was a superb strategist and knew computer programming better than anyone.
“Still stable, but the sooner we get them back to Zion the better.” Leaning over the back of Chime’s chair, “Where are we now?”
With a slight shrug of Chime’s shoulders, Peg speaks up. “Secondary solid waste chute.”
“And we’re going this slow because?”
“Because I don’t know this tunnel and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want me to plow us into a wall.” Chime communicated her loathing of backseat drivers with a sneer and an eye roll.
Quan looked to Pegasus. He was worried. The survivors need medical attention soon.
Peg’s emotionless face was all the answer Tobias would get. She had no clue if they would make Zion in time. These people were knocking on death’s door and she was powerless to save them. “If this is the tunnel I think it is, it should bring us out only five hundred kilometers from the western gates. Once we’re out, Chime, take us to full speed.” Peg left the cockpit groaning the door closed as she exited.
Peg slammed her bunk door behind her quickly spinning the wheel to lock it. Her stomach twisted with guilt. She wasn’t concerned about making it to Zion in time. Her mind reveled in the idea of the twisted heap of metal that used to be four sentinels behind her. That small piece of herself she hides in the back of her mind like a deformed child, that piece that speaks up as an immediate reaction only to have “common decency” silence it quickly, that piece of Peg couldn’t be easily silenced this time no matter how hard she tried to conquer it.
Peg’s mouth watered with bloodlust – or hydraulic fluid lust? - every time they wiped one of those filthy mechanical monsters from existence. The primitive urge to celebrate a machine’s destruction ran hot up the back of her legs and set her heart pounding. She longed for a day when the orders would come from Zion to send every man, woman, and child, every ship, every weapon, to the surface for all-out war wiping from existence every solitary machine. There was no logic in this, but her mind refused to abandon the irrational dream of a world free of them.
She sat on the thin mattress spread across the metal plank hanging from the wall that has been her bed for five years. The threadbare mattress did nothing to cushion her aching back and shoulders from the hard metal beneath it. Next to the sleep indention she had worn into the mattress was a much less defined pit. Sliding her hand into the smaller crater, her mind pulled her away from the Enoch. For two years she hadn’t disturbed that indentation. It lay silently next to her every night. Her partner. Job.
They had been making repairs to the Enoch’s hull the day it happened. They had parked somewhere in the tunnels below what had once been Moscow and were far below the machines’ radar scans. Or so they thought. To be fully protected from the tainted air, they wore gaudy bio-suits made of recycled rubber, plastics, and pretty much any metal they could find. Mankind had advanced itself so far before the war and now it was reduced to fishing for scrap to make basic things.
She and Job looked like walking rubber clouds, but she could still see his eyes through the goggles. She couldn’t count how many times that day she had gotten lost in those beautiful brown eyes. It didn't matter about the war raging around them. They had found in one another the one haven remaining in the world.
A battle with a sentinel had left deep gashes in the Enoch’s hull and she and Job were patching the cuts with spare plating. Chime was at the helm and the rest of the crew were doing minor internal repairs. Those minor repairs just happened to include resetting the E.M.P. which had been used to save the Enoch.
The warning came soon after Peg and Job had finished the final patch. Sensors picked up an incoming sentinel. It must’ve been doing mandatory sweeps of the area because it was alone, but it picked up the Enoch as soon as the Enoch picked it up.
“Go, go, go, go!” She could still hear Job behind her over the roar of the Enoch’s engines and the loud clanks of their magnetic boots against the ship’s metal hull. The hatch was on the other side of the ship and Chime, fulfilling her primary duty, was firing up the engines to take off. She was in charge of keeping the ship safe, not the two people caught outside.
They rounded the side of the ship making their way toward the hull topside. Peg let out a panicked gasp as the sentinel erupted from a tunnel above them and flailed its mechanical tentacles preparing to pounce. She was about six meters from the hatch when the sentinel locked its grips on the Enoch. Job was another nine meters behind her.
“Get to the hatch!” he cried.
From behind, she heard the welding torch Job had strapped to his back explode to life and she, with cold realization, understood what he was about to do. She turned in time to see him run full speed for the sentinel with the blue flame of the cutter out like a lance in front of him.
“Go!”
The sentinel shifted putting its underbelly lined with tiny crab claw cutters up to fend Job off. Peg had gotten to the hatch just as Job leaped into the cutters with the torch blasting into the sentinel’s belly. Layers and layers of Job’s protective suit were shredded away by the tiny claws. He cut a hole into the sentinel’s CPU despite the blood he was losing. Peg was frozen hypnotized by the sight. Her mind was blank. She didn’t breathe for what seemed an eternity.
The blue flame cut into the exposed circuits of the central processor and the red light that was the sensor laser on the sentinel’s face flickered then went out. The beast went limp and fell to one side.
Peg stared in amazement. Who needed the One when her husband had just won a hand-to-hand fight with a sentinel?
Job turned to look at Peg. He spoke with a smile, “I thought I told you to get inside.”
But Peg didn’t get a chance to respond. The slain beast’s mechanical brain had enough of a flicker deep down for one last command. A massive tentacle flinched loosening itself from the hull and whipping into the air. Time slowed as the massive arm made its huge arc high above Job and dropped catching him just under his ribs and cutting completely through his torso. The top half of his body rolled across the ship stopping only feet from Peg. His boots were still magnetized to the ship’s hull and holding his bottom half in place.
Peg’s wet eyes were locked on Job’s cold, empty ones frozen forever in her mind wide with shock as the Enoch roared to life and tore into the air. Job’s upper body slid from the ship and into the fog followed by the dead sentinel.
Peg could only stand and stare. When the sentinel’s tentacle cut through, it breached the gasses in the welding pack and ignited Job’s suit. Over the stink of the ancient tunnels, she could smell the rubber, plastic, and flesh burning. After she was able to climb through the hatch and to the safety of the ship, her crew spent more than an hour pulling her from her suit and cleaning the mess off her. She couldn’t move. And she didn’t for two months. The medics of Zion said she was in shock.
Peg pulled her thin pillow to her chest and hugged it tightly. She imagined the Job mattress indention reaching out and wrapping its arms around her and holding her tight until she drifted into a restless sleep.
A metallic knock woke Peg. She blinked her eyes open when three more knocks rapped against her bunk door. Pushing up from her pillow, she wiped away drool residue with the back of her hand before croaking, “What?”
“It’s Red,” came the soft, female voice from the other side of the door.
How long had she slept?
Groggily, she sat and pulled her boots on before staggering dumbly to her feet. She pinched her eyes squeezing away the sleep before standing long enough to unlock her bunk door.
A tall, thin woman wearing a deep burgundy robe and long, burgundy hair steps in. “How are you?”
Peg chuckled almost inaudibly. “The bigger question is how are you?” Red almost never ventured out of the room unless needed.
Red had been the subject of machine experiments before she was freed from the matrix. Zion intelligence believed that the machines were experimenting with expanding their fetal crop by using wireless connections to the system. Red was the only survivor of an entire field with these wireless implants. She was a confused child wandering a field of human corpses when the Vishnu found her.
The wireless implant at the base of her brain piped code almost constantly into Red’s mind when she was at broadcast level. The silence she experienced in Zion helped her to reclaim her sanity. The mystics of Zion helped her to focus her thoughts through meditation. Still, as she aged, her goal was to serve on a ship. This meant returning to broadcast levels and the raging storm of machine communication.
She first tried serving on the Vishnu but quickly became too much of a burden for the captain and was returned to Zion. Peg, however, saw a lot of promise in her. Aboard the Enoch, Red was given ample personal time to focus on meditation and learning to filter the code. Red proved herself repeatedly as a valuable crew member, source of intelligence about machine movement, and, most importantly, a trusted confidant for Peg.
She learned how to plug her mind wirelessly into the matrix. While there, she couldn’t take form or physically interact, but she had been able to slip into the program and perform basic recon before the rest of the crew would load in.
“You look exhausted.”
Red sat. “I am. Wherever we are going, the code is getting louder than I remember it ever being. I am having a lot of trouble separating lines of communication.”
Peg looked at Red and was concerned. “Do you think we’re in danger?”
“No more than we usually are, I suppose. I’m not picking up anything suggesting we’re being tracked. It’s just getting… overwhelming.”
Tobias’s voice came from the other side of the heavy metal door. “We’re coming out of the tunnel. Chime needs you.”
Peg looked at Red, concerned, and placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder.
“I can handle it. I’m ok.”
Peg squeezed her shoulder and then left Red alone.
In the cockpit, she realized why she was needed. “Where are we?”
“No clue. Most of that tunnel was collapsed. I got us out the first chance I saw.”
Outside was exactly where no ship of Zion wanted to be. The Enoch hovered in an ancient roadway between crumbling skyscrapers serving as the walls of a massive, subterranean cannon. They were in the open and Peg had no clue where they were.
“We can’t be here. Machines will be on us in no time,” Chime says
“Yeah. I got it.” Peg inspected the scanner screens. “The only opening anywhere nearby is the tunnel we just went through.”
“And there’s no way out of there. We have to find something else.”
“Try to boost our scanners. We need to get moving. We’re exposed.”
Chime tapped the control panel and energy reserved for onboard refrigeration was rerouted to the scan projectors boosting the field distance by twelve percent. Almost immediately, the proximity alarm ripped through the ship.
“Holy hell. Sentinel swarm west of us and coming fast.”
“East it is.”
Chime worked the controls and the Enoch spun from the closing sentinel swarm and blasted away. “We’re not going to be able to outrun them.”
Peg focused on the forward scan monitors while screaming back to her crew. “Guns! Now.”
Tobias, Uriel, Quan, and Red raced through the ship heading separately for the port and starboard gunner banks on the top and bottom of the Enoch. By the time they were there strapped in and armed, the squiddies were in visual range. The gunner banks convulsed as each crew member pressed their triggers targeting the closest sentinel. Destroyed machines rained from the sky crashing to the crumbling asphalt and ruins below. Each dead machine seemed to be replaced by two more in frantic pursuit of prey.
Chime cut her eyes to the rear scan monitors. “They’re going to be on us in minutes!”
“What about the EMP? Did Quan fix-”
“No. Need parts from Zion.”
Peg continued her search for any hope of a tunnel entrance. The Enoch rumbled as the first of the sentinels latched onto one of the aft starboard hover pods. Neither woman gave voice to the hopelessness they were feeling as the guns roared frantically against the pending storm. The ripping of metal was followed by an explosion as the first hover pod was torn from the Enoch. Chime corrected for the loss of thrust and continued.
“There!” Pegasus shouted pointing at one of the forward scan monitors. “That looks like an opening about five kilos ahead to port.” Finding the entrance, Peg leaped to her feet and raced to a locker in the back of the cockpit.
“Not sure we can make five kilos.”
Peg grabbed an oxygen tank, mag-boots, and a tech rifle from the locker. “I’ll do what I can. Get this ship there, Chime.”
“You can’t!” Chime called but Peg ignored as she raced toward the ladder leading to the hatch at the top of the ship.
Through the hatch and magnetized to the top of the ship, Peg took milliseconds to take in the horror of the small sentinel cloud closing in before raising the rifle and blasting the nearest ones. They ignored her choosing instead to bring down the ship.
With the four gunner banks blasting and Peg laying out every machine she could, Chime pushed the ship forward with a renewed hope of escape. That hope was short-lived as two more hover pods were ripped from the Enoch and they began to lose altitude.
With the pods gone, the Enoch lost enough speed for the swarm to encircle the ship. Peg screamed madly blasting every sentinel that latched onto the hull and began cutting. There was no way she would save the Enoch, but she would take as many of them with her as she could.
The Enoch scraped the rubble beneath as it struggled to stay in the air. The squiddies on the underside of the ship were shredded but quickly replaced by new ones as the Enoch bobbed up again. All was lost.
An almost invisible beam cut through the sentinel cloud dropping every machine it touched. Peg watched them fall out of the sky as if an electromagnetic pulse had been fired. Then she watched as the sky strobed with a massive barrage of gunfire from somewhere behind them. She continued blasting as sentinels rained to the ground around her. Had Zion sent a battalion? How had they known the Enoch was in trouble? How could they have possibly known where they were?
The massive ship that emerged from the thick smoke around them was not from Zion. Easily four times the size of the Enoch, this battleship eradicated every sentinel in the vicinity. The deep gray of the pill-shaped ship’s hull was peppered with gunner banks and at least four massive structures that, judging by the resulting sentinel downpour, were some sort of E.M.P. weapon unlike anything Pegasus had ever seen. The new arrival made quick work of the sentinels before training an E.M.P. cannon on the Enoch. One blast took out three more hover pods and Chime was forced to bring the ship to the ground.
As the new ship deployed gear and landed no more than ten meters from the disabled Enoch, Peg dropped through the hatch to the grating below. Chime ran from the cockpit.
“What the hell is that thing?”
The rest of the crew joined. Peg barked, “Arm yourselves and get outside.”
Peg made her way to the lower aft of the ship and punched the button that lowered the ramp. She and her crew, fully armed and ready for battle, exited the ship to the ground below. Before they could spread and find cover, they saw no fewer than twenty humans in armored atmosphere suits carrying tech rifles emerge from the other ship. Each suit was bright white with a large, red sun logo decorating the torso.
Peg raised her hand in the air signaling for her people to hold and to notify the approaching soldiers of their presence. She could see that each of the suits had a mirrored shield over the face as the new humans surrounded them. One of the soldiers stepped forward and slid his mirrored visor open. Behind the protective glass, Peg could make out the man’s deep mahogany skin, chiseled features, and amber eyes.
He inspected each of them before speaking. “Who of you is captain?” His voice was granite.
Peg took two steps toward him. “We have injured on board. Two of them.”
The mahogany man processed for a second before tapping a button on the side of his helmet and speaking. “Medics. Two stretchers.” He then touched the button again and spoke to Pegasus. “I am Peter.”
“Pegasus,” she answers.
“Pegasus. Please. Have your crew leave their weapons and you may board.”
She paused and breathed deeply. They had no choice. Any battle with these people would end with her entire crew dead. Peg turned to Tobias, nodded, and handed him her rifle. The crew returned their weapons to the Enoch and Quan lead the medics to their infirmary.
As they followed these new humans up the ramp into their enormous ship, Peg read the large name painted in white next to the same red sun icon on its hull: Grigori.