Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(82)
Ana climbed into the passenger seat, squinted through the thinning glasstorm. Through the pale dawn haze, she could make out a skyline rising from the desert floor. Her blood ran cold, goose bumps prickling her skin. She was stricken suddenly with a barrage of memories. Sitting with her brother and sisters in pristine white rooms. A garden, full of flowers that existed nowhere else on earth. Music in the air and mechanical butterflies and a great library of books. Her father’s arm, strong about her shoulders. Her mother’s lips, warm upon her brow. A heaven in a world run to ruin.
“Babel,” she breathed.
It stretched up from the sand ahead, a spear of steel and glass trying in vain to pierce the sky. It was only in stories that irradiated objects actually glowed, but there was something in the air—the dust or glass that intertwined itself with the dawn’s light and the radiation lingering in the city’s bones—setting the metropolis aglow. It looked as if the whole city were burning with translucent flame.
Unlike Armada, atop its crumbling ruins, Babel seemed almost part of the landscape, flowing up from the ground in a vaguely organic coil. The tower was really two spires, twisting about each other like a double helix of DNA. In its day, it had been a thing of breathtaking beauty. But that was yesterday… .
The city around it was an empty shell now, all broken windows and encroaching rust. Where once the air had been filled with thopters and rotor drones, now only a single irradiated crow circled in the skies. Where once Babel had teemed with life, it now stood hollow and silent, a corroding tomb for the people who’d been murdered there. The day the machines stopped singing. The day her family died.
Ana found her eye welling with tears. She hadn’t thought it would affect her so deeply, but seeing her former home was like seeing a ghost. All the fragments of her past life, all the blood and anguish and pain, immortalized in glass and chrome and isotopes that would take ten thousand years to degrade.
“Are you all right?” Ezekiel asked.
She simply shook her head. Mute and aching. This place wasn’t her home. It was a mausoleum. The place her childhood had ended, spitting her out into a life of rust and dust. But still, that was the life that had brought her Lemon. Kaiser and Cricket. And, yes, even her grandpa. She could feel those two people inside her head again. The girl she’d been and the girl she’d become. Looking at the tower, the place one girl had died and the other had been born, she didn’t know whether to feel sorrow or relief.
Ezekiel saw the look on her face, took hold of her hand. His skin was warm and alive and real, and she entwined her fingers with his. Breathing a little easier.
“I’m with you,” he said.
“I’m glad,” she smiled.
Ana squinted through the glasstorm and the grubby windshield, making out the dim shapes of the Daedalus encampment ahead. She could see huge machina—Titans and Tarantulas and Juggernauts—glinting in the dawn light. Heavily armored, legs like pillars, microsolar cells gleaming in their desert-camo paint jobs. They stood silent vigil or walked endless patrols through the dead suburbia outside Babel’s broken walls. She wondered what the pilots inside them had done to land such a crappy detail. How bored they must get out here, praying for something to shoot at.
And, silly her, she was about to grant their wish.
Just a few days ago, a single deranged Goliath had almost ghosted her solo. Who knew how many machina were waiting for her out there? All of them fully armed, max juiced, the pilots inside just itching to put a six-foot-under hurting on anything that strayed too close.
“We’re not in WarDome anymore, Toto,” Cricket muttered.
“Yeah,” Ana whispered.
“I hope you’ve got your mojo warmed up.”
“Me too.”
Ezekiel squeezed her hand and smiled. “I believe in you, Ana.”
“Great Maker, someone kill me … ,” Cricket groaned.
The lifelike glared over his shoulder. “Not a lot of romance in your soul, is there?”
Cricket arced the cutting torch on his middle finger. “Romance this, Stumpy.”
They roared out of the glasstorm, into the swirling eddies and rolling clouds at the tempest’s edge. Thundersaurus had been stripped bare by the storm’s abrasive winds, the dawn gleaming on its buffed metal skin. Ana could see the Daedalus garrison more clearly now. It wasn’t so much an army as a police force, maybe a dozen heavy machina in total, here to ensure no looters plundered Babel’s irradiated secrets. But even if the pilots were half-asleep at the controls, a handful of those badbots were enough to deal with a motley scavver crew from Dregs with only a few popguns between them.
Unless one of them happened to be a living silver bullet, that is …
Ana closed her eyes, feeling for the closest machina. It was a Tarantula—a squat, eight-legged killing machine as big as a bus, bristling with pods of short-range missiles and twin autocannons. It swiveled its torso at the sound of oncoming engines, extended a radio aerial to transmit an alert to the rest of the Daedalus garrison.
“Attention, unidentified vehicle,” the pilot announced through his PA. “Attention, unidentified vehicle. This area is restricted by order of Daedalus Technologies. You have thirty seconds to divert course or I will open fire.”
Ezekiel gunned the accelerator. The Thundersaurus surged forward, leaving the glasstorm howling behind them. The Tarantula turned to face the oncoming truck, legs shifting in a ghastly imitation of a real spider, two pods of missiles unfurling at its back like vast, glittering wings.