Epilogue

In a time that no longer existed, in a place time had forgotten, a man who was no longer a man worked silently into the night.

His legs, when they moved, were metal legs, ending in four-toed clamps that spread out in thick, cross-shaped talons. His arms, all seven, were metal arms, and from their central rotating dais sported retractable tools and instruments for both crude and delicate work. His head, well, that was still mostly human. Mostly. The skull had been shorn away; the brain encased in clear crystal; the eyes modified to better enhance, analyse and detect. The face. The face still remained.

He had once called the machine ‘Montoya’, a childish epithet to revenge. Now, he no more named it distinct to himself than a regular person named their own body. His was the logical conclusion of what the Grandmaster had started; the genius mind in the surrogate flesh. For resources were scarce in the cold, the dry and empty darkness, and humans had human needs. Food, air, water, light, sleep – all things that took energy, effort, time. And it was very important to keep a low profile. The Black Death’s eyes saw deeply, though rarely this deep underground.

In a low, dark cave buried beneath abandoned rubble, Edward Nicolaus Rakowski’s inhuman hands stopped whirring, and he raised in a vial his life’s work. Thirty years. Thirty years of scraping, maddening isolation. Of only darkness and his thoughts.

“It’s done,” he muttered to the blackness. He rose from his rigid sitting, his mechanical knees unlocking and bending back. He stepped carefully, over grate and cable, bypassing equipment nestled in the walls – spectrometers, centrifuges, water recyclers, incubators, plus computers of course (endless computers) and whiteboards, his benches, the cannibalised fusion core. A single plate from the old Siegfried. A memento to his mentor, sharp and smooth to glance at. The Grandmaster; deceased.

He stepped to where the dark cave narrowed, the only exit, a jagged, man-sized crack. Once upon a time he’d used to squeeze in and out of there, before his humanity had been improved. Now he was more self-sufficient.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

His thin, robotic arm reached out, bending through the gap. The vial of blood met waiting fingers.

“Are you certain?” asked a woman’s voice. The go-between. His confidant. The one who’d sought him out, who’d quietly rifled through the Great One’s legacy, who’d spied the missing piece. Was he certain? Pah. He was thirty years certain.

“It is exact,” his voicebox rattled. His mechanical arm retracted back inside. “As for how he will come to absorb it, well… I leave that to you.”

“Yes,” his ally simply replied. His mechanical eyes glanced at her through the fissure. She was a tall woman, square shouldered, lean and muscular, strong. Her bronze hair was tied back in a ponytail and the armour she wore was a replica of Heydrich’s old uniform, now the mark of his black-clad Praetorian Guard. By the set of her jaw she was a warrior, and by the letter on her cheek she was elite.

To the Black Death, she was the future he dreamed of. But unbeknownst to everyone else, her soul still burned with past injustice. They had that in common, the pair of them. A shared adversary, a shared vengeance, and a fire that would never go out.

Montoya. He had stopped naming the machine. He had become it.

The woman raised the vial of blood to her eyes, checked the lid, then placed it carefully in her breast pocket. “What of the other one, then?” she asked. She didn’t squeeze into his lab, not this time, though she had done so in the past. Rakowski’s metal feet clanked as he walked back within his workspace.

“Almost finished, I think, almost there.” His eyes swung to the back of the cave, where stood the largest piece of equipment – the ultimate insurance. The coup de grâce.

The growing vat.

Oh Grandmaster, he thought, how I marvel at you. Your genius and foresight. While you lived, I was young and I doubted. Now, I understand and obey. I did not leave your side but that you sent me; I, who you had shown everything, who you had so carefully prepared. I, who alone you granted freedom. Who you hid in a facility concealed from any records. Who you explained to exactly, the hurdles to my plan.

There is still war while our soldiers draw breath. There is nothing that cannot be sacrificed for victory.

Rakowski’s eyes traced the green glass tank and its contents, grown now to almost half his height. Cultivated from a scrap of DNA, the Mindtaker’s final, greatest failsafe, held in a hidden compartment in the implant in the young genius’s neck. The moment their network had disconnected, it had opened. A gap, half the size of a fingernail. And the barest flake of skin.

Soon, he whispered to their prodigy: Soon.

The child in the tank stirred, its pale lids twitching over eyes of sapphire blue.