The Rising(101)

“I’m one of them.”

Raiff relented and backed off, as the elevator settled into place with a final jolt. The doors opened slowly with another soft burst of compressed air.

“My stars,” Donatti uttered.

“Exactly,” said Raiff.

*

Rathman’s team advanced on the prison and reached the front steps in assault formation with strict military precision. He wasn’t used to leading men he’d never worked with before; on missions like this, familiarity was everything. But the skill and experience of the men Rathman had brought in showed themselves now. These were seasoned operators who knew their way around combat and killing, understanding that having the back of the man on one side of you ensured that the one on the other side would have yours. It almost made Rathman smile reflectively, nostalgically, knowing combat to be the greatest of all unifying experiences. And these were men who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot and kill. Men who understood the mission parameters and were all about doing their job.

Normally that job was in service to God and country. In this case it was in service to Langston Marsh and the almighty dollar. But once the shooting started, such things wouldn’t matter to men like this.

Only the bodies dropping to their bullets would.

Hey, Rathman thought to himself with a satisfied smirk, it’s not rocket science. Just Combat 101.

*

Alex moved to the front of the elevator cab, finding himself just short of a steel catwalk that overlooked a seemingly endless sprawl of interconnected assembly stations. Essentially an entire world constructed beneath Alcatraz Island, built outward from the remains of the Civil War fort on which the prison complex had risen. His mind naturally measured things in terms of football field size and he estimated the sprawl to occupy what appeared to be five or so fields laid side by side three stories beneath the catwalk.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a factory. The reverberating sounds of heavy machinery and the grinding staccato-like din of conveyor belts reached his ears, emanating from the vast expanse of interconnected stations. The smell in the air was oddly familiar, a combination of motor oil, rubber, and superheated electrical wiring. He recalled it, painfully, from the battle against the drone things in his house before the ash man had killed his parents.

Or had he?

Raiff started to edge out of the cab, but Alex grabbed hold of his jacket and slid ahead of him.

Finding a drone thing on either side of the elevator.

Pressed tight against him, Sam dropped her mouth to gasp, maybe scream, until Alex covered it with a palm, his other finger held to his lips.

“Shhhhhhhhhhh…”

Something, some inert instinct born of his true breeding, told Alex he had nothing to fear and neither did anyone else as long as they remained tucked tight to him.

“It’s okay,” he said to Raiff and Donati over Sam’s shoulder. “Just stay close to me.”

Still, Raiff remained ready with his whip until the cyborgs failed to even acknowledge his presence. They lacked the flat, featureless faces Alex remembered from the drone things he’d destroyed back in his house, lacked any faces at all, their finish work incomplete but good enough to serve this purpose, as sentinels guarding against unwarranted entry to the facility.

“The boy’s right,” Donati whispered. “They don’t see him as a threat.”

Alex tapped his head. “Thanks to the chip. They must be sensing it. Maybe it’s communicating with them somehow.”

“What about us?” Raiff asked him.

“Just stay close, like I said.”

Alex taking charge now, the quarterback again albeit on an entirely different field. He watched Raiff pull his stick back, not entirely comfortable with Alex taking point, but knowing he had no choice.

“What is that thing?” Donati asked him.

“Hopefully you’ll never get a chance to see.”

Raiff left it there, not bothering to elaborate on the fact his stick was formed of subatomic, programmable particles based on nanotechnological principles. He wedged the stick back in his belt and continued along the catwalk in a tight pack clustered behind Alex. His breath caught in his throat at what lay before them, at the cavernous expanse that extended both out and downward, as far as the eye could see in the dim lighting.

It wasn’t a factory so much as an assembly plant responsible for building cyborgs nonstop for who knew how long. But there wasn’t a person, at least the flesh-and-blood version, in sight anywhere. The entire process looked completely automated, various stations manned only by drones sized and shaped to tasks specific to them.

“Machines building machines,” Sam noted, completely awestruck.

“Very good, Dixon,” complimented Dr. Donati. “The principle of self-replication, a core element of nanotechnology.”

“They don’t need a wormhole,” muttered Raiff, seeing it all from an entirely different perspective. “They’re building an army out of steel and wire. Or armies. Imagine a hundred of these plants, imagine a thousand.”

Sam started to do the figuring in her head, plugging in the years, locations, units produced per—She gave up. Too many variables to consider in the equation, and she was already scared enough. She realized she was clinging to Alex’s arm, realized he was letting her. The sight was mind-numbing, its very impossibility too surreal even to contemplate.