I can still see it now. Some days it’s like a meme that keeps popping up everywhere I look, like the whole universe is just one massive internet troll. What do I see exactly? Picture this nightmare...
A roiling mass of canoe sized robot centipedes was washing down the main hallway toward us on a tsunami of legs, wheels, and talons. They rasped their way across the floor, walls, and even the ceiling, staring at us with thousands of beady black spy camera eyes. Each bot was bristling with scythes, nasty little mandibles, dart launchers, and these wicked whip tails that looked like razor wire.
I got goosebumps from my scalp to my toes, and I may have spontaneously remembered how to say the Hail Mary, which is really saying something. Believe me. I was one hundred percent certain my life was over, because these bots looked absolutely unstoppable. The thing is though, we’re just getting to the fun part...
Enter the Legion.
Eighty Three and Ten flashed to the door, retrieving huge transparent red energy shields and black rifles from their capes. They modified the shields to fit snugly in the doorway, and then they opened fire through them.
Capes are a strange bit of tech, and I’m no physicist. Eventually I’ll tell you what the Legion’s armorer told me, but for now just forget Newton and Einstein, forget Hawking, forget them all when it comes to the capes. Just imagine these two legionaries blasting away through their own shields, because I swear to you that’s how it was. Their rifles chattered out these angry golden bolts of plasma in full automatic, and right away bits of metal started flying. It looked like they were targeting the dart launchers first, but I saw one volley sink into something vital enough that one centipede collapsed and disappeared into the steel tsunami behind it.
All of that happened in a couple of seconds.
The surviving machines snarled and shrieked their way through the golden hail and crashed into the shield wall. Ten’s shoulders were jolted, but he recovered before losing any ground. Eighty Three didn’t look like he even felt it. The machines piled up, climbing and snapping, prying and probing relentlessly at the edges. Eventually I heard something scrape against Ten’s armor right before he swapped his rifle out and hacked a whip tail down with his light-spear.
It wasn’t long before both legionaries were in full melee mode. They hacked and hacked at a steady clip, and once in a while a scythe or a tail slipped through and swiped at their weak points, eyes and fingers especially.
I know I said this was the fun part, but at the time all I could see was that my new friends were outnumbered. They weren’t taking significant damage, but everything was moving too fast for me. I just didn’t believe they could win, so I dug my fingers into my legs to wake them up. I was planning to run, just like any good survivor should when they have nothing to contribute to a fight. Live to fight another day, preferably with a tank corps in front of you. That’s what I was thinking. Unfortunately my arms were in pathetic shape too, and the effort to wake up my legs caused my whole upper body to tremble uncontrollably.
The cryo drugs were still in my system. I wasn’t going anywhere, and things were about to get a lot worse. The kill bots aren’t exactly dumb, and this lot were already trying to flank us. “Ohh sh-” I started to say, but Ten was already on it. He spun away from the door and hurled his spear through the head of a centipede right when it tunneled it’s way up through the lab floor. As his spear came spinning back out of it with a molten spray in its wake, he yelled at me to move. I couldn’t. He got the centipede coming through the ceiling with a long burst from his his rifle, caught his boomeranging spear, then managed to sprint, dive, roll, and pull me out of the way before I was crushed.
All that was impressive, but my first thought was that Eighty Three couldn’t hold the door by himself. I started panicking, expecting to be eviscerated any second. Apparently Eighty Three had been holding back, though. I watched as he forced the entire swarm of centipedes slowly down the hallway with his shield doubled in size to make up for Ten’s absence. He was tanking the whole mob himself, what was left of it anyway.
Ten was a little busy sniping flankers while they were stuck in their tunnels and vulnerable to precision strikes, but during a lull he glanced at me and I gave him that look... Am I going to die now? Maybe you don’t know that look. I hope you don’t.
“Blackbird in five,” Ten said, ignoring me entirely.
Eighty Three responded with a cool copy before Ten finished the countdown.
“...three, two, one…”
Eighty Three flashed back into the lab to take cover behind a wall. Simultaneously, an auburn haired woman in a black cape dropped through the hole in the ceiling and emitted a long, mostly transparent, sparkly effervescent bubble of energy from her hands. With nowhere to run but back or forward thanks to Eighty Three’s tank skills, every last centipede got sucked into the bubble and started vibrating so rapidly they went blurry.
Blackbird sustained her attack for several seconds, enough to shear them all to bits, and then she stopped abruptly and stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets. What was left of the bots rained to the floor in a million molten pieces. Her long braid flicked when she turned to address me with two bright green eyes. “Who’s this?”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
The legionaries let their helmets melt back into their capes, and they both had that just another day at the office look on their faces.
“Ask your boyfriend,” Ten told her, spoiling my introduction.
“Oh great,” I blurted involuntarily. “It’s a couples outing? Just shoot me and get it over with.”
My filter breaks under the slightest pressure. Also, I admit I can be kind of a jackass.
“Hah!” Eighty Three stowed his shield and helmet and grinned at me like a proud brother. “Good one, Kev.”
Future shock was setting in, and my name seemed like the only constant and normal thing left in my life, so I corrected him. “Kevin.”
“Yea,” Eighty Three said with a sheepish nod. “Sorry Kev...in. Kevin. Sorry.”
“Levitator,” Ten said. He aimed a thumb at me.
Blackbird’s braid flicked again. “What?! Then why did you let him out!?”
Ten shook his head and scoffed. “Right, like I would.”
The braid flicked again, and Eighty Three pleaded with her. “Well he looked miserable.”
Blackbird took her hands out of the pockets of her black Harley jacket and looked me over. She was obviously worried, which didn’t make me feel very good. “Yea but you never let a levitator out of the box, you just take the box with you.”
Eighty Three sighed. I guess Ten felt vindicated enough at that point, because he wandered off and left me to handle the couples therapy.
“You didn’t see him before,” Eighty Three argued.
Blackbird shrugged and let it go. “You’re right, I didn’t.”
“He was really screaming,” Eighty Three added.
Blackbird winced sympathetically, “I bet.”
She knelt down next to me. Everyone kept kneeling next to me, and I was starting to feel like an invalid. “I’m fine now,” I grumbled. She put the back of her hand on my forehead anyway.
“Eek,” she said, pulling her hand away. She sucked one of her cheeks in a little before settling on a determined frown. “Let’s get you on a barge.”
“Sure. Yea. I was just sitting here thinking what we really need is a barge,” I said. It should be obvious by now, but sarcasm was the other normal thing I had left in life.
“Ahhh,” Blackbird said. “You’re one of those.”
I beamed at her. “No please, don’t stop, tell me more about this speedy escape barge.”
Eighty Three was looming over me again, and Blackbird talked to him like I wasn’t there. “He’s probably going into shock. And his temperature is off.”
Eighty Three thought about it for a second. “I have a couple squares.”
“That’ll help,” Blackbird said. “Just one, though.”
Eighty Three let one of his gauntlets retract and reached behind his back for something. Then he offered me what looked like a cherry cough drop with a little dancing flame in the center. You know what to say when someone tries to give you a funky cough drop… “Hell no.”
“Just take it before you black out,” Ten told me as he returned from his patrol, or whatever he was doing. I gave him my best stink eye as he circled back around in front of me.
“How about this..." I said, like I was only helping. "You all take one first, and then I get to loot all the corpses."
“Wowsers, he’s kind of a brat,” Blackbird said.
Feeling unfairly judged, I decided to look Blackbird over for some rhetorical ammo. She had a vintage Harley jacket, real true blue jeans, and a pair of black boots. But she said wowsers and eek? Yea sure, real Harley girl right here, I thought. “Whatever you say, Biker Barbie.”
I swear I’m not always like that.
Blackbird reached out and booped my big eagle nose. It was humiliating, and it left a tickle in my left nostril. While I was busy rubbing it and trying not to sneeze, she and Eighty Three agreed that it was time to go. “Think we can find him some pants first?” she asked.
Eighty Three was obviously feeling embarrassed on my behalf. “Nah, I already looked.”
Blackbird sighed. “That’s disappointing,” she said. “Oh well. Upsy daisy, Kev.” She wrapped one of her strange energy bubbles around my waist, and I jumped a little. She patted me on the head like a puppy. Instead of shredding me to bits, her energy held me like a life preserver.
She called me Kev, though. I frowned at her, and that was it, because there’s nothing you can do when a super human has you coiled up in an energy python.
Ten caught my arm and stopped us. “One second.”
“Uh…” Blackbird said, poking at his hand in protest. “Why?”
Eighty Three sounded a little alarmed. “Ten, don’t.”
Ten ignored them both. “Kevin, who was Doc Z?”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
He didn’t answer that. Instead he grabbed my face and turned my head until I was looking at Becca’s sparking corpse. “I don’t have time for questions.”
Blackbird didn’t like that any more than I did. “Ten!”
“That cyborg is why,” Ten said, cold as could be. “I cured your headache. I killed that thing. You owe me.” He let go, and Blackbird shoved his hand away from my face.
“Okaayy!!” My god that grip was strong. “Ooww, god that hurt, what the hell!?”
Eighty Three tried, entirely too gently in my opinion, to get between us. “You’re the one who said we don’t have time, bud.”
Ten refused to yield. I could see that whatever was driving him was personal, and I did kind of owe him, so I decided to tell him what he wanted to know. “Alright... Doc Z pioneered cryo sleep. Real cryo, not that deep hibernation knock off. He built the whole process. He was the greatest mind of our-”
I stopped there because of the gravity of what I was about to say. He was the greatest mind of my time, maybe not theirs. I fixated on that and immediately started feeling a little light headed.
“He had an office?” Ten asked, grabbing my face again to bring my attention back to him.
I answered quickly and pointed at the command center. “Yea. Down there.”
Ten walked over to Becca, sliced off her head without hesitation, and started toward the office.
Blackbird protested, but she was looking at Eighty Three as if he was supposed to do something about it. “Oookay, no. Ten, come on.”
“Centurion’s waiting, Ten,” Eighty Three said, and then the two of them had another one of their back and forths.
“So bring him the levitator as a distraction.”
“You really think that’ll work on Centurion?”
“I don’t care.”
“Remember when you said-”
“The bots are all fried. We’re good now.”
Everyone usually lets the two of them work through these little moments on their own, but I just couldn't do it. “Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Sure,” Blackbird said, lifting me up with her bubble. “Ten’s getting himself drummed out of the Legion, but we’re taking you up top. Right, Eighty Three?”
That question was obviously loaded, and I could hear the depressing weight of it in Eighty Three's answer. “Yea. We are. Just hurry up, okay Ten? At least give yourself a chance.”
Ten didn’t bother responding. I caught a glimpse of him just before I floated up through the ceiling, and the way he was walking made me think I would never see him again.