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Ayma’s shoulder’s shook with her grief. She glared at Haiden with tears streaming down her face “What…what have you d…done,” she managed to force out between sobs.
Haiden, bewildered, was unable to reply; a cold feeling of dread seemed to have pierced his belly, paralyzing everything except his racing thoughts. He was staring at the woman lying semi-prone beside him. Haiden remembered attacking her, remembered the strange unity before he seemed to blackout. Had he done something to her, something to make her like him, empty and alone—outcast? It seemed as if she was experiencing the onset of the raw upheaval of buried emotions that he had experienced when… but that was impossible! Yet, he knew the answer even as he wrestled with the unspoken questions: her geas was gone. He could not explain how he had come to this conclusion, however inadvertently, but for some reason he new it to be a certainty. Whatever had happened to him had, through his enraged attack, somehow been transposed onto Ayma. Watching her body being wracked by emotion—emotionflux—he understood how she felt, the fear and misery. It was going to be difficult for her to think rationally, at least for some time. Through some aspect of his emotion-propelled attack he had transferred something of himself to Ayma, some facet of himself that, like a disease, had bereft him of the geas. For a brief instant he considered that maybe now he was safely back under the guidance of a geas, that his flaw had been successfully removed during the attack. He knew that was false, though; even this line of thought would have been curtailed. He was still wrong in the world, and now she, like him, was an outcast of society, unfit for anything except reprocessing. Or escape.
“You can’t stay here now,” Haiden whispered, barely audibly.
Without warning, like an enraged viper she spit at his face. He turned quickly, which prevented the wet projectile from going in his eye, but the warm fluid splattered against his cheek and flowed down in a slow gob. He tried to think of something to say to her as he wiped the spittle from his face, but he found words difficult to assemble.
“You’re the Entia condition,” she snarled venomously, now lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows as she fought to control her emotions. “You’re a vulgar anomaly…a cancer. You’re….”
“Just like you,” Haiden interrupted her. She fell silent, undoubtedly realizing he was right. By now, she would be completely aware that she was no longer under the command of her geas. Ayma was, like him, isolated—alone.
The last few minutes were still a blur to Haiden, but the implications were beginning to dawn on him. Somehow he had removed Ayma’s geas, during his own attack of emotionflux. How? He remembered trying to prevent Ayma from contacting authorities, and he remembered becoming extremely frightened, and then...
He closed his eyes: A woman, but it wasn’t Ayma.
The images, which had quickly formed like condensing clouds, just as quickly evaporated in the pockets of his mind.
“I’ll turn you in,” she interrupted his thinking, exasperated. “I’ll turn us both in.”
“You could try,” Haiden responded, implying in his tone that he would make it difficult for her to complete that task. “And if you succeeded, we would both be terminated. They would return us to the vats and reprocess our resources into something new.”
Her sobbing had stopped, and she pushed herself into a sitting position on the cold floor. “Why have you done this to me? I need to continue my work here. I…” she hesitated, looking momentarily like she was going to cry again.
Ayma stood up suddenly, surprising Haiden. She moved slowly, seemingly without purpose, and avoided his gaze.
He stood cautiously in response, and followed her from a respectful distance. Her state made her dangerous; it would be difficult to predict or influence what she would do. With a twinge of fear, he recalled his hands around the throat of the man in the woods. Murder facilitated by emotion: he watched Ayma very carefully.
“I didn’t ask for this either,” he said slowly. “But…”
She turned towards him, watching him from the corner of her eye. He continued.
“…during the time that I’ve been free of my geas, it’s made me realize some things.”
Her eyes lifted to meet his, and her lips curled in anger. “What is your real name?”
As she waited for his response, she made several steps across the room in front of a small console, stroking it with her fingers to bring it to life. It bathed her face in blue; the specular highlights on the smooth skin on her cheeks were haunting, and for some strange reason he didn’t feel the urge to attempt to prevent her from whatever she was doing.
She hesitated at the console, thinking. He could feel her anguish, the feeling of absolute helplessness. Like him, she had been set down a path from which there was no return.
“Max Haiden,” he responded, “Facilitator class.” As he spoke, she stroked her fingers across the translucent display, scrolling through information.
“Well, Max Haiden, we have a problem.” Her eyes shifted up to meet his. “When we requested parts for the humbike, we submitted the stat code. Hertig, my chief repair mech, noticed the missing geostat—I assume you removed it?—and reported in immediately.”
She motioned towards the display, beckoning him forward. He obliged, and looked at the message imprinted on the screen, addressed to Ayma.
…He is considered extremely dangerous. Avoid contact. Assign a nonsent probe to monitor him. Help is on the way…
As Haiden finished reading the message, before the implication even had time to set in, she had opened a comm channel and spoke quickly.
“Hertig. I need you to perform a retrofit of a Higgs drive from one of the mining transports to the humbike. It needs to be done as quickly as possible; it is extremely urgent that Watch Leader Amon be on his way,” she glanced nervously at Haiden, clenching her lips in mental anguish of lying to her subordinates.
“Certainly Ayma,” came the obedient response.
“How long will it take, Hertig?”
“I estimate no more than five minutes.”
Haiden watched the mech get to work through the flexion glass panels separating him from the repair chamber. He turned towards Ayma, and gave her a silent and appreciative nod of approval.
“We don’t have much time,” she responded, without acknowledging his gratitude. “They will arrive soon. Stay here,” she exclaimed firmly, and walked briskly out of the small comm room. The doors slid shut and sealed.
Through the observation glass, he watched her jog across the repair chamber past Hertig who continued working diligently, removing the Higgs drive from a small platform transport. A set of doors on the far side of the chamber opened as Ayma entered, and she disappeared into the darkness. The doors closed behind her.
The silence in the room was torturous; and he continued to watch the repair mech work on the small transport. It had to be taking more than five minutes.
Where had she gone?
A low rumble slowly became audible; at first he felt it in his stomach, and then there was a slight vibration in the floor. The sound was deep and somehow ominous, and too pervasive to be coming from the repair chamber. Confused, he looked around the room. The metallic cabinets were rattling as the sound swelled.
The source of the sound revealed itself in a small rectangular portal on the console he had been reading moments before. It was a video stream being broadcast from a security camera on the outside, framing a huge military transport hovering ominously in the air.
Objects were being deployed from the transport, which he soon realized were praetorian class mechs; it gave a sudden scale to the huge vehicle hovering outside. It had to be two hundred meters long! The transport was divided into three sections like a huge metallic insect; its abdomen flexed as it hovered, and he saw the praetorians landing firmly on the ground and approaching the front door of the compound. There were hundreds of them.
He suddenly realized why Ayma had disappeared—this was a trap. She knew she was in danger, and she had tricked him into believing she was going to help!
In desperation, he ran at the sealed doors and hit them with his good shoulder using his full weight. The doors were solid, throwing him back partially stunned. He dropped to one knee, his mind still reeling. She had sealed him in here. No! Why had he trusted her?
He lurched back to his feet and approached the console. Fortunately she hadn’t thought to lock it; he was able to access some of the menus. He scrolled through the various controls as quickly as he could, looking for something to open the doors to give him some kind of chance of escape.
He fumbled through, finding dead-ends, forcing him to backtrack through the myriad of interfaces on the display.
A huge bang startled him, and he realized the praetorians were trying to penetrate the walls of the compound. Ayma had sealed the entire facility, undoubtedly to keep him inside. There! A group titled “Facilities”…
A sudden sound caused him to look up, and he saw Ayma running back across the repair bay. Behind her, large doors revealed a second bay; following her, a large drilling mech lumbered into the near chamber. It stood about seven meters high, and was adorned with huge cryfuse drills able to cut through solid bedrock, small scramjet thrusters—likely for fast short range transport to drilling sites—and a cabin that could seat at least two. It was heavily armored, patently able to withstand a great deal of punishment.
As Ayma approached the comm room, the doors opened obediently. “Come quickly!” she yelled over the deafening hum of the transport that hovered outside. The pounding on the front gates was becoming more desperate, and he knew the praetorians would breach the door any minute.
The drilling mech stopped in the middle of the bay. “What is that for?” Haiden yelled, but Ayma was dragging him across the huge to where Hertig was mounting the new Higgs drive to the humbike. She obviously did not mean to arrest him. Was she trying to help him escape?
“Hertig?” she screamed.
“There!” the mech responded proudly, barely audibly above the rumbling and pounding.
“Thank you Hertig…I’m sorry.”
The mech, confused by her apology, turned to look at her. As he met her gaze, a violent blast from a charge pistol in Ayma’s hand hit the mech square in the chest. The nonsent exploded into various parts, which rolled and scraped across the floor of the bay.
She holstered the weapon and jumped on the humbike. “Get on!” she screamed. Haiden jumped on the bike, which bounced on its landing pads with the weight of the two androids.
He heard her scream a series of commands at the drilling mech. It immediately charged across the repair bay; the large bay doors, the only thing holding back the praetorians outside, opened. The huge mech knocked over a dozen of them before they could respond, and launched itself into the air with its scramjets and disappeared rapidly over the trees.
The praetorian warriors—all of them—returned to the transport, which disappeared chasing the rogue drilling mech.
In the confusion, none had noticed the humbike speeding out from one of the auxiliary access bays and disappearing into the trees.
Copyright © 2004-2005 Jay and David Steele. All rights reserved.
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