Cyrus wasn’t hard to find. It’d done exactly what it’d said and headed directly towards the Ariel ever since it’d left me and my broken suit on the ice. I was prepared. My suit had all the charge I could give it. I had only two options left. Succeed or die along with Ai. I’d never felt more determined to do anything.
But staring up at that towering, hideous colossus, I felt my resolve start to weaken.
“Suit, what kind of weapons do you have?”
“Nothing that could meaningfully affect something of that size.”
“Of course. That would be too easy,” I said, trying for bravado. But it’s hard to sound confident when your voice cracks in the middle of a sentence.“What about the nano-zombies?”
“One poses relatively little threat. You should be able to handle up to perhaps four without unacceptable risk.”
“What about more than four?”
“Retreat is your best course for survival in those circumstances.”
I took a deep breath. Cyrus had already closed the distance by a few hundred yards.
“There’s a lot more than four in there.”
“Yes. I am required to do as you wish. However, your current course of action is inadvisable.”
“You’re not wrong. But the last time I listened to my survival suit it didn’t go so well.”
Then I started running towards Cyrus. And trying not to scream.
I desperately wanted to turn on the suit’s stealth mode, but I only knew one way into the nano-kaiju and I didn’t want to go check at the opposite end to see if there was another opening. Once I started moving, it didn’t take long for Cyrus to take notice of me.
“EUCLID?” Its voice boomed out over the snow like a giant with a megaphone. “HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET AHEAD OF ME?”
My only answer came in the form of a single upraised finger.
The nano-kaiju had gone through even more changes since I’d last seen it. It looked sleeker, many of the hard edges from different ships mashed together blending now. You could still see the piecemeal way that it had been put together, but it was even harder to tell where one ship ended and the next began.
Its motions looked different too. It had lengthened its legs, or maybe just thinned them out. Instead of walking with the trundling gait of one of the giant monsters from Rip’s ancient movies, it was more balanced and less stiff. Also Cyrus’ face.
That was the really messed up part. Cyrus’ face approximated humanity but it was all wrong somehow. The angles were messed up, the feature placement and size subtly off. The eyes, shining, mad and burning red, and those gleaming sharp metal teeth. But at least it still opened its mouth to talk instead of just using a speaker embedded somewhere. I needed that opening.
As soon as I gave it that one finger salute it let out a roaring laugh and squatted down, drawing itself closer to the ground to try and get a better look at me. That was even better.
“IS THAT A NEW SUIT? WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET A NEW SUIT?”
“Your mom gave it to me,” I said, having the suit send the message.
“REALLY? A ‘YOUR MOM’ JOKE? THAT’S THE BEST YOU CAN DO? I DON’T EVEN HAVE A MOTHER. NEITHER DO YOU THOUGH, COME TO THINK OF IT.”
The distance between us had shrank to just a few hundred yards. I had to keep it talking.
“I might not have a mom but at least I know what it’s like to have a friend.”
“A FRIEND? ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOUR HOLOGRAPHIC GIRLFRIEND? THAT’S JUST FREAKING SAD. I MEAN I KNOW YOU CAN’T BE TALKING ABOUT THAT DEAD OLD MAN FROM THE RELIANT. HE WASN’T YOUR FRIEND. HE WAS JUST YOUR HOST, YOU LITTLE PARASITE.”
I ran faster. My fear was evaporating in the face of something else.
“WHAT? DID THAT TOUCH A NERVE? SEE, THAT’S WHY YOU SHOULDN’T GO UP AGAINST A COMPUTER IN AN INSULT CONTEST. I DON’T HAVE THE WEAKNESSES YOU FLESHY BAGS OF DECAYING MEAT DO. I-“
Its gigantic arm moved, whistling through the air as it tried to smash me against the ice like a bug. I flung myself to the side.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“AM.”
Its voice roared over the crash and the cracking ice. I leapt for its arm, landed, started running up.
“BETTER.”
It tried to shake me off as it rose to its full height again. I hung on and climbed higher.
“THAN.”
Its other arm tried to grab me, but I jumped again, flung myself up to its shoulder. Its titanic face turned to me and screamed.
“YOU!”
I lunged. The air rippled around me with the force of his roar, shimmering with clouds of nanobots, but it wasn’t enough to stop me. I flew into its mouth and crashed into the back of its throat before falling down into the darkness.
The suit reached out and grabbed hold of something in the dark, halting my fall before turning on its lights. I don’t know how it knew to grab onto whatever it did because even with the light, I couldn’t see a thing. The nanobots were so thick they were less like a cloud and more like a liquid. They moved the way schools of fish moved, all as one.
Which made it even creepier when they moved away from me and turned into something flat as sheet metal. Then it dimpled and bulged, turning into a face, that same eerily wrong face that was on the nano-kaiju now. It sneered at me, turning those already strange features into something truly hideous.
“Look at you. All grown up and out on your own.”
It was tempting to flip it off again but I held on instead.
“Suit, do you think you could blow this cloud away with the jets we use to fly?”
“It seems likely.”
I felt the backside of the suit rippling as it shifted form. The turbine that allowed for flight kicked on and sprayed the nanobots below me away. It was a good thing I hadn’t just dropped to the bottom like I had the first time. Cyrus had lined the bottom of its “stomach” with spikes.
“Nice,” I said. The look on Cyrus’ nanobot swarm face managed to be smug despite the way the lower half of it rippled in the air from my suit. “Suit, get me to the door.”
I relaxed and let the suit do the work of flinging me to one side of the cavernous pit, bounce off the wall and roll into the hallway. The impacts were still jarring and my stomach flipped even more than the rest of me did, but I made it all the same. The only problem was that, instead of only a couple of nano-zombies waiting for me, there were dozens. They stared with blank, unimpressed eyes. And then as one they spoke.
“You didn’t really think it would be that easy did you?”
“I mean, I kinda hoped.”
The suit projected three escape routes while we talked. One down the hallway, one up, and one back up through the mouth to the outside. It heavily suggested the last. But I took the first.
The suit forced me into a crouch and I rocketed upward, over the nano-zombies, twisting to hit the ceiling feet first. Then it flung me back towards the ground. It couldn’t get quite far enough to land completely outside the crowd but instead I crashed into a nano-zombie at the back.
Neither the suit, nor the nano-zombie hesitated for an instant. The nano-zombie tried to grab me by my arms but the suit used a circling motion to break its grasp and, before I really even had a chance to understand what it was doing, it had caught the nano-zombies arms up in some lock of its own. With a single savage thrust it broke both of the nano-zombies arms at the elbows. It didn’t sound like bones breaking. It sounded like someone hitting ice with a hammer.
Then I was moving again, the suit lunging forward away from the crowd of nano-zombies at my back. I hadn’t even gone a full step when something caught me again. The nano-zombie with the broken arms was biting onto my ankle. The suit should have been able to completely protect me from something like that but I could feel the mounting pressure as it tried to hold on, to bite through. In that moment I could see its milky, frost covered eyeballs and one its weathered nametag, I could see the smile she’d had when she was alive. Her name had been Colleen.
Then the suit pistoned down its other leg at the former Colleen’s jaw and it too snapped like an icicle. Hands brushed my back, shoulders. A few diving nano-zombies even managed to touch my calves. But then I was gone.
Behind me the horde’s feet pounded like a hundred drums in near perfect synchronization. But the way ahead was clear.
“You can’t escape, Euclid. There’s no way out now.”
Cyrus’ voice croaking out from every nano-zombies’ icebound vocal chords was a whole new layer of hideous.
“Not trying to escape,” I grunted. It was a struggle just to breathe while the suit kept me moving.
“Not trying to escape?”
That frozen chorus was bad enough in words. I didn’t need laughter added to my future nightmares’ soundtrack. Assuming I got to have any.
“You think that suit is enough to stop me, Euclid? I’m just gonna rip it to shreds like the last one and leave you out in the cold where you belong.”
I didn’t answer. I just gritted my teeth and told myself I didn’t have the air to spare for talking. I told myself I wasn’t afraid to speak my response aloud:
The suit isn’t going to stop you, Cyrus. I am.
The tunnels twisted and circled as I ran up them, always just ahead of the nano-zombies at my heels, Cyrus’ threats pouring into my ears. But, just like my own fear, I managed to keep just ahead of them.
Then I saw the top. The entrance to the control room. Two nano-zombies guarded it. They stepped in front of the doorway, a shield of once-living flesh. But that wasn’t nearly enough to stop me. At my direction the suit hit the one on the left, struck with superhuman strength and precision that shoved the nano-zombie back through the door. I followed it before the other nano-zombie could move, but something about it caught my eye. It’s frozen lips had curled up into a smile.
As I dashed into the room, I saw the one that I’d knocked down had the same expression on its face. The lips curled away from the teeth, not in a human expression but in a twisted rictus, like the cheeks were trying to pull themselves off of the face.
And then I saw what had made Cyrus’ so happy. The room was full of nano-zombies. Dozens, no, easily a hundred. Maybe more. But there was only one between me and the control center in the middle of the room. It had its back to me, a squat, bald nano-zombie. I moved to rush it, to shove it away and attack the control center. It turned around, and the strength left my legs.
Rip stood there, part of his skull burnt or frozen black, his beard heavy with frost crystals and his eyes milky white. But he was there. He was looking at me. And of all the zombies in the room, only he didn’t have that horrible smile on. Rip just looked sad and confused.
“Son, don’t do this.”