Sorry for the lack of updates. Hope this is better than the last few chapters.
Chapter 13
"Firefly"
It was like the sewers had been illuminated by a million blue candle flames, dancing and swarming like the waves rolling onto a deserted beach. Ever square inch of available space was covered in another blue flame, the air filled with winged fire that darted and looped from wall to wall. The tunnel floor was carpeted by a tide of living light that ebbed and surged around each of Artemis's steps.
The light came from the millions of cockroaches, each one filled to bursting with a little piece of the beast's flesh. It was a swarm of unimaginable proportions, every single insect living in the sewer system drawn to the corpse. The air was filled with the buzz of wings, and there was a chirping chorus of warnings. At times the cockroaches would swarm and rise up past Artemis's elbows and knees. Every step yielded another crunch as innumerable insects disappeared beneath its claws, leaving behind patches of crushed exoskeletons, some legs still twitching madly.
The swarms were getting progressively worse the closer the robot got to the Square. It could smell the rot beginning to set it, the scent carried on the miniature breeze created by the motion of a million insect wings. As Artemis took another step, the resulting sound was a like a ripe tomato being smashed inside a paper bag. Artemis inspected the floor of the tunnel more closely.
There was a layer of blue muscle across the floor, compressed and smashed by hundreds of passing feet. There were the faint feathering steps of legions of roaches and other insects, the trails of paw prints from the rats and the drag marks of several massive creatures. Rags of chewed and clawed skin hung like sets of ancient drapes, blue blood dripping from ruptured blood vessels. The robot could see the glittering eyes of packs of rats crouching in the dying light. Artemis set off into the corpse
Tentacles thrashed weakly as Artemis wended its way through the passages and chambers of the beast, still sensing prey. Organs the size of dumpsters pulsed weakly, beating to the tune of the dying nervous system. Rats and roaches swarmed the innards of the beast, gnawing at the still warm flesh, gorging like it was the first time they'd ever eaten. Here and there a rat would lay dead, stomach burst open. Blue blood dripped from the tunnel ceiling with a gentle patter. Each of Artemis's steps tore the skin from the tunnel floor, cutting through it like old leather before a razor blade.
Croaks echoed through the tunnels, the croaks of frogs that had lived in eras long past and more than likely had been able to swallow the first dinosaurs to creep to the edge of fresh water ponds in toothed maws. The croaks spoke of the last warning; those that froze that froze the blood of an unlucky grazer and informed it of its coming doom. Above the gnawing of the packs of rats the clear sound of gobs of flesh being ripped apart and disappearing into gullets wider than was reasonable.
Artemis didn't care, for fear required a certain amount of sanity, and sanity in return requires what some might call a soul. There was a mission firmly set in the robot's mind, one with an important reward and whose failure would result in a far messier future. Either was an acceptable outcome in the long run, but that did not mean failure was the preferable option. It was just the nagging percentage that drifted amongst the seas of targeting data and environmental factors.
The warren of tunnels eventually opened into the grand chamber that had once been the beast's lair. The tunnel mouth opened into nothingness, a thirty meter drop into the bone pits. In the center of the chamber, there were the remains of the beast's internal organs. The beast had been moored to the center pedestal of the chamber by bonds made of ligaments that were like steel cables. Each one had snapped as the beast had ripped itself from the concrete and into the world above. Massive blood vessels hung in the air, arteries and veins as thick as barrels. Unidentifiable organs hung like strange fruit from tangle of muscle and fat, and more tentacles thrashed weakly.
Artemis noticed the chamber had other occupants. They were the creatures that GOBLY-N had seen earlier, the great reptilian monsters, frog gators. They had begun to feast, teeth ripping through exposed organs with ease. Dozens wrestled around the ragged remains of a heart that had once been the size of a dump truck. The sound of croaking required Artemis to strain out that layer of noise through its audio receptors. Artemis dropped from the tunnel mouth and into the bone pit.
It fell the thirty meters into the bone pit silently, the only sound was air rushing by Artemis's steel shell. The robot's landing was like a heavy stone hitting as stack of fine china. Rotted bones went flying through the air, smacking wetly against the fungus covered walls. More landed back amongst the other piles of bone with a sound that sounded like the biggest dice tumbler in the world. Artemis pulled itself out of its crater in the bones, grasping at the remains of a titanic rib cage. The robot rose to face a roomful of glaring eyes. Every single one of the frog gators had stopped devouring the carcass and was staring with a bloodshot gaze. As one the beasts they flared their nostrils and breathed deeply. Artemis very quietly extended her arm blade, the four foot length sliding out of the hidden compartment in its right arm.
Then with a mass exhalation of croaks, the frog gators turned away from Artemis, and resumed feasting. Artemis re-sheathed the blade with a snick of a safety catch. The robot began to search amongst the bone pits for the missing humans. Which did not, admittedly take very long.
The first man had not died pleasantly. He had fallen through the whole in the chamber's roof, a fall of a good sixty meters. He had landed on his back; right on the point of an age worn rib of a frog gator that had been jammed into the eye socket of a lumpy, misshapen skull whose shape echoed that of some great ape yet the second set of sockets higher up in the forehead set it away from the natural. The man had been bled out slowly. But that hadn't killed him.
The frog gators had found him, and had fed. The man's hands and arms had been broken, scratched and chewed, damage as he had slapped frantically at the feeding gators. His eyes had rolled into the back of his head, probably when one of his killers had taken the final mercy of grabbing him by the neck and shaking him to stillness. There wasn't much left, just the ragged remains of clothes wrapped around a chewed skeleton, the extremities and head still wrapped in skin. Artemis took several still frames of his corpse, and matched his face to one of the still frames 60 had given the robot.
Artemis reached down, and with a gentleness that should have been impossible, closed his eye lids. The robot turned away and began to search for the rest of the missing colonists.
The ninth colonist was still alive, barely clinging to life. The woman had managed to climb up onto a service platform that jutted from the wall a few meters up, from the top of the bone pit. She had crawled and lain against the wall. She sat in front of a pipe mouth, which was no more than a meter wide. She was dressed in what was the most common garb of the colonists, a so called sand suit. It amounted to several layers of robes and a shawl wrapped around the head. The woman was missing most of her right arm, and blood dripped slowly from the tattered stump of her shoulder. A claw had ripped the front of her robes open, spilling her guts out, which she held in with her left hand. Her breathing was ragged; her eyes were wide open with tiny pupils. Artemis's diagnostic noted the lowered body temperature and irregular heartbeat.
The woman seemed to be aware of Artemis, yet her gaze stared away into nothing. She smiled when the robot kneeled right next to her, a hulking eight foot tall robot that was smeared with blue blood. She spoke, her words surprisingly clear and strong.
"Thank you for coming, angel" she said, wincing slightly as she spoke.
"Are there any other survivors?"
"Just my daughter. Just her, but you already you know about that. That's why you came," the woman said, gesturing weakly with her head to the pipe behind her.
"Status?"
"She's sleeping, angel. Please save her."
"Understood. Can I assist you in any fashion?"
The woman sighed, blood dripping slowly from her mouth.
"End my suffering, angel. Let me leave this world."
"Understood."
Artemis put her hands on both sides of the woman's head.
"Hold still, there should be little pain."
"Thank you, angel."
With a twist of Artemis's arms, the woman went limp, hand falling against her side. Artemis picked her up, and laid her out on the edge of the platform. The robot turned back to the pipe, knelt down and looked inside. It was pitch black inside, the blue fungus of the corpse not reaching here. Artemis changed the viewing mode of her eyes to low light amplification and again peered into the dark of the pipe.
A little girl, no more than eight, was curled up against a grate six feet away from the mouth of the pipe. She was wearing a sand suit much like her mothers. Dark stains spotted her clothes. Artemis noted her breathing and temperature seemed fine. The robot put her hand down the pipe to grab the girl.
Something butted against the robot's legs. Artemis pulled her hand back and turned in its crouch. It was a frog gator, its front legs holding onto the platform. It was staring past Artemis into the pipe. Its nostrils flared, and a second later released a long low croak. It surged forward, trying to get past Artemis.
Artemis grabbed the gator by the head and squeezed. The skull cracked like an egg shell under the robot's strength. The corpse started to thrash wildly, blood spots flicking across Artemis's armored shell. Artemis heaved the dead gator off the platform with a kick. It landed back among the bone piles with a crunch.
But the damage was already done. Every single frog gator had heard the croak, and could smell the blood of their dead kin. Artemis's targeting computer went into overdrive. It counted the reptiles, their relative positions, their probable masses and sizes, the speed at which they moved across the bones. It even studied the number of teeth in a single frog gator's jaws. The average was 500 pounds and twelve feet in length, and then easily half their length wide and tall. A simple fact appeared: there were seventy creatures, plus or minus a few, bearing down on Artemis, the nearest attacker less than ten meters and closing. The chamber echoed with croaks.
Artemis raised her arms, and fired her bolt launchers. The air filled with silver flashes, and the first frog gators started to die. Bolts cut through scaled skin, ripping into vital organs or went through eye sockets into the soft brains beneath. The first rank of frog gators faltered, ten of their number reduced to feebly twitching corpses. But the survivors kept coming, charging over the corpses. Artemis let one more volley of bolts, resulting in another two twitching corpses. The arm blade slid out from its compartment again. Artemis had it moving before it had even extended fully.
The blade glowed with the same odd light that it had had in the nano bot chamber. With a clean swing, the blade bisected a gator's skull from top of the head to bottom jaw, the halves pealing back like some obscene flower. Even as the gator fell from the edge of the platform, Artemis brought the blade around in an arc that severed the front legs from the bodies of four gators. They thrashed wildly as they fell back into the bone pit, the claws on the paws of their legs still clutching the edge of the platform.
A gator locked its jaws around Artemis left knee joint, shaking its head back and forth with a frantic motion, teeth scraping against metal. Artemis decapitated it with a single downwards stroke, lashing out with the claws of its left hand to rip the flesh from the side of a frog gator. Blood was now thick on the platform, coagulating around Artemis's feet. The woman's eyes, strong and clear, flashed across the robot's mind.
Artemis screamed a cry of rage at the frog gators. It was something that echoed from beyond the psychological combat protocols. Artemis had no reason for it, but the rage was there. It bubbled beneath the cold precision of the targeting computer, a lava lake hidden beneath a glacier, Artemis screamed again as it stamped down with its/her foot to smash the spine of thrashing frog gator.
Images, feelings and sounds came fast and heavy now. There was a memory of a night sky, the squeal of tires, a voice screaming a meaningless word, pain that never ended burning across each nerve, and three white lights burning deep into her eye sockets. Words slipped past her mind like rain, whispered and screamed at the same time. She only caught part of it.
"I'm so sorr-."
Artemis blacked out.
Artemis opened her eyes. There was a gentle dripping sound, like one might get after a drizzle. Artemis surveyed the chamber. She was standing on a pile of dead frog gators, stacked six deep and five tall. She was perched on what had been the alpha male of the group. The corpses had been hacked and slashed apart, most held together by the barest of skin and flesh. More gators lay dead around the piles. Some lay halfway in tunnels, backs turned in flight. One had been pinned to the wall by a profusion of bolts.
Artemis stumbled her way down the pile. It was vaguely aware of the blood that crusted its armored carapace, the pieces of meat that hung from its claws like garlands from a grotesque party. The arm blade was coated with a thick layer of gore, the light still shining through in pin pricks that danced along the walls. Artemis sheathed the blade, coagulated blood falling away in a shower of red flakes. She made her way over to the concrete platform. With a single leap she jumped to the edge of the platform, and crawled up.
She noticed the little girl now, who was clutching her mother's robes, tiny fists balled around the fabric. The girl seemed oblivious to the world around her, to the carnage and corpses, to the pool of blood spread around her mother, to the robot that sat no more than two meters away. Tears ran freely down her face .
"Mommy? Please get up! Mommy?" the girl said between sobs, the voice rising with an edge of hysteria. She shook her mother every time she sobbed.
Artemis scraped the coagulated the blood from her arms and chest. Then, very gently, she reached over the girl and grabbed her hands. With a near impossible delicacy, she took the girl's hand from her mother's robes. Artemis then picked the girl up from under the shoulders, somehow not cutting the girl with her claws.
Artemis cradled the girl in her long metal arms and let the sobs ring out in the silent chamber. She rocked the girl back and forth and started to sing. It was a song that had no meaning to Artemis, yet she remembered the words nonetheless. It came from the same place as the rage, and somehow the robotic voice box that normally stripped emotions from words, softened somehow. The song came with no trouble, even though Artemis could have sworn (a new concept to consider) she had never heard it before.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word, mama's gonna buy you a mocking bird, and if that mockingbird don't sing…"