Chapter Fifty

Sy

When Sy gets a buzz from Clarice at the front desk, he stiffens in his seat and turns to look out the window of his office. He doesn’t quite believe what she’s told him. Rick Wise is standing out front of the building, alone. And has what appears to be a case of nice beer hanging at his side. He gives Clarice the ok to let him in and hurries to tidy up his office a little bit. With Vaun and Don still on their way back, he’s gotten away with making a little bit of a mess out of the place.

Without a second to spare, he plops back down in his chair as Rick steps up to the door, knocking before entering. The guilty look on his face alone is good enough for him. He knows better than to rub his face in it, but he’ll at least settle with an I-told-you so. They’ve both been through enough today, and now is not the time to make it any worse. Rick plops down in one of the studded leather chairs and looks about for a moment before speaking up.

“This wasn’t the ususal game of cat and mouse between contract killers this time Sy. The whole city got hurt. People died, a lot of people died. We’re not even finished counting the bodies yet. For right now, can we just put the blame game aside for a couple hours and work on the immediate damage control?”

Sy grins with incredulity and shakes his head. He knew this was coming. “Yeah, fine, but I fuckin told ya so.” He pauses only to catch the beer Rick tosses to him. He cracks the top open and holds his arms out wide. “What do you want from me Rick? My biggest truck and my goddamn jet are trashed. I’m not sure what good I am right now. I already sent out the other truck to go pick up our inbound shuttle.”

Rick sits down and puts his head in his hand while he cracks the top on his beer with the other. “I know, I know.” He still doesn’t look up, and takes a sip first. I want you to help me sweep this shit under the rug, then you can have whatever you want.”

“Sweep what under the rug, a pair of hundred foot tall fucking canary-yellow WAR MECHS? Anything else?”

Rick mumbles under his breath. “And Gerald escaped.”

He nearly starts laughing, and has to grasp his own face to pull the crazy look off of it. “You’re going to spin the hell out of this for me is what you’re gonna to do. I want SSS to get hero status out if this whole mess, and I want to keep those mech’s too. I bet I can get Quincy to sign off on it too. He’s gonna owe me that big of a favor here real soon anyway. I’ll help clean the garbage up off the street and make sure our special friend never gets the chance to open his mouth too. If that’s what you meant.”

Rick starts drinking a bit more heartily. After he finishes his first can, wipes his mouth off on his sleeve, and cracks open another, his face changes. He has that tired look officers get when they’ve had enough. “Yeah, that’s what I meant. You clean up the mess and do whatever the hell you want. Me and my boys have the rats to deal with. They’re under the impression that this is a good time for them all to all pour out into the streets like the sewer’s overflowed.” He tosses Sy a second beer and checks a message on his phone. “Hundred n seventy two they think.”

He tosses what was Gabriels battle com up onto the desk. “Hundred seventy three, by my count.”

Down in the main lab, Five stares blankly at the raw data pouring across the daya transfer projector. While each layer of his brain is being scanned, the data is being transferred to the new memory drive with his name on it. It’s just her and the big machines whirring away in the background of the lab now. It’s late into the night, and Valerie has gone to bed. Now that she’s doing the rest of the work all by herself, the weight of it starts to sink in. She finds it strange to see her friend’s complete existence being funneled into the silent black box in the big metal rack at the end of the room. If there was such a thing as a soul, she wonders if it’d be in the box too.

She never really planned on ever being Gabriels friend. It makes her wonder when she finally let go and forgave him for all he had done. She figures it was probably around the time when Aaron and Valerie’s relationship ended. Like Arma, she still sometimes thinks of herself as a machine, looking in from the outside, like she were above the rot of humanity. She wanted love like the two of them had. That trust, loyalty, and an indescribable bond worth more than the world. That’s at least how Aaron had described what love was like to her. She doesn’t understand how something like that could just, one day, be gone.

She puts the elbow of her good arm up on the countertop and rests her face in her hand. She wishes she had someone to love. It’s what she and Arma once had, but even that was somehow taken from her. She knows better than to let herself sink into despair right now, it has a way with taking her over sometimes, so she picks her head back up and returns her eyes to the projector. The loneliness still feels like heavy steel chains being draped over her though, and she can’t shake it.

Aaron never actually believed in people having a soul, or there being any kind of realm outside of the reality around them. He wouldn’t be able to believe he is truly himself if it were any other way. None of them would. It makes her wonder if love is the same, merely an arrangement of chemicals within one’s head. Like life, or memories, it can be stripped away with keyboard. He was right about a lot of things, but wrong about a lot too.

Gabriel had blamed Marco for what was done to Arma’s mind, but sometimes she wonders if he’s ever been anything but a deceitful liar. She stares at the data, with her eyebrows pinched, as if she were the authority over his existence, judging whether it’s worth the risk to grant him the power he’s about to have. She looks left, out through the door of the little scanning lab, into the main room where the barrel of his remains is. He sacrificed himself for them, and she will honor that.

She knows Gabriel designed a new body for himself. He’s been quite secretive of it lately. She’s seen him scaling the skeleton and modifying some of its electronics, but nothing more than that. She finds it annoying how nearly everyone in the damn building has seen her own naked form, yet Valerie and Gabriel have been so secretive of theirs. Whether they know it or not, the still often treat her like a machine, like company property.

When she finds the design files of what will be Gabriel’s new body, she brings the rendered version up on the projector. She subconsciously tries to cover her eyes with her hand, but her arm never raises, it’s not there anymore. She cringes at seeing Valeire has wrapped the stump end of it in vinyl tape. She’s going to need a new frame herself too. She wonders if she should do something different this time, maybe use Arma’s frame, or even try out Valerie’s, just to mess with her. She smirks at the thought of it.

From what she’s found, Gabriel was not shy about remaking himself the way he wished he could be. Even though his body is fairly lean, he took some inspiration from the musculature of Aaron’s body. Despite such a significant change, his face is still quite recognizable. It hadn’t occurred to her that he could’ve possibly been handsome underneath his hairy fleshy face. It’ll be quite something to watch him shed his old life and embrace a new one. It makes her smile to imagine him actually happy, rather than so awkward all the time. She’s sure that his new self will be quite impressive. His mind will be constantly in overdrive, and his insecurities won’t be holding him back anymore.

At about three in the morning, while she’s working away at her computer as fast as only one hand will let her, she hears the sound of the double doors gently being pushed open, and the soft sound of stealthy footsteps on the epoxy floor coming in behind her. Without looking up, she smiles cheerfully and finishes one last thing before turning her chair around.

“Hey Arma.”

It’s not Arma though. Valerie is standing there, still in her footy pajamas. She has Tom in her arms and his little fuzzy face is buried in her elbow. “I couldn’t sleep. Just wanted to come down and see how you were doin.”

Facing the reality that Arma is long gone again, she immediately breaks down into tears. When she tries to wipe the tears off her face, to only be reminded that she missing an entire arm, makes it all the worse. She proceeds to break down into utter bawling in front of Valerie.

“What did I ever do to deserve this, huh? Is it just gonna be like this forever? When can I get a fukin break? I can’t do this by myself anymore.”

Valerie sets tom down in Five’s lap and puts a hand on her shoulder, knowing what she means. Tom puts his paws on her chest and stands up in her lap, wanting to be cradled. The moment he nuzzles his face up to Five’s chin, most of her hysteria quickly subsides. She gives him a little kiss on top of his head and looks up again. Something has changed though, but she doesn’t quite know what.

“Did you turn the lights down or something?”

Valerie’s eyes dart to the doorway. She didn’t even hear anyone coming in, but yet the main room outside the lab door has nearly filled up with half the guards in the entire building. They’re all dressed in their black tactical gear, and standing at attention in two formations, yielding a path between themselves.

Sy is walking in between the two rectangular groups with the dignity of a king, but also with the humility of a mere messenger. He has something in his hand, and is holding it out in his palm at waist height. When he steps into the lab, Valerie flushes with embarrassment, having been caught off guard in her PJ’s by nearly everyone. She picks tom back up and steps aside.

Five looks on in nervous wonder while everyone outside the lab shack has their faces turned to her. Sy soothingly calls for her to come out to them. She saunters out onto the main floor, anxious about what she’s supposed to do. The moment Sy takes a knee in front of her, and holds his hands out, there is a flash from someone taking a picture.

Two small blood red metallic badges glint up at her, one for her and one for Gabriel. Each little badge has the silhouette of what looks like a mech. When she picks them up, they’re heavier than she’d expected them to be. They’ve been machined from steel, blued, and the centers inset with something clear, like ruby. She looks up and swallows. “I…”

Sy puts his hand over hers when she takes them. “You’ll never be alone Five.”

After the ceremony, honoring Five for what she had done, Sy stands at the opening of the main hanger, staring at the massive heap of destroyed robot splayed out on the pavement in front of him. It’s been a hell of a long night, and the first sharp golden lines of light from the sunrise are starting to reach across the floor. He pats at the inside pocket of suit jacket for his sunglasses and puts them on. The silver glint off his fifty caliber handgun in its shoulder holster reminds him that Gerald is still out there. Probably watching them all from a distance right now.

He hasn’t felt this tired in a very long time. It’s a struggle to merely stay standing up. He wishes he could give everybody a long deserved break, but they still have a bit of a mess to deal with. The crews have managed to drag what’s left of the flatbed truck and tilt-jet back into the hanger, but one of the mechs is still out there on the road. Out there along with it, are dozens of red and blue lights.

The battle com on his wrist flickers with a message. Vaun has just pulled off the freeway and is almost home with the main shuttle. he’s been having to take it incredibly slow. It was never meant to handle the size of the bigger shuttle. Maybe they might be able to use it to drag the other Mech back to base. He doubts the thing would budge though.

He closes his eyes and relives leaping out of the tilt-jet with Mikel a mere second before it got crushed by the titanic machine. The screaming of its engines and the crash of it stomping through the fuselage like that makes his heart start thumping. He can’t believe that after throwing everything they had at it, all they managed to do was get a single bullet in between some armor and take out the robot’s fuel pump. It was a stroke of luck in more ways than one.

His eyes open when he hears his name for the second time. Marek and Alexis are on top of Monster looking down at him. Marek is sitting on the back with what looks like one of the pendants for the mechs.

“Britney fixed the pump, and I think we’re ready to see what’s what.”

His heart starts beating even harder. “Are you sure this thing isn’t going to get up and start rampaging again?”

Marek shrugs his shoulders. “No, but she put a remote cutoff switch in there just in case.”

He wipes his face with his hand. “Alright, well, I guess we can give it a shot.”

Marek turns the pendant on while Alexis twists around to watch. When he connects to the machine, all heads around them snap in the same direction. They can hear the pair of turbine engines starting to roar to life off in the distance.

Like Aaron had explained to him from his ship, he goes through the menus, opens up a voice dialog interface with the machine, and simply talks to it. “B-one-o-eight, get up.”

On the horizon, they see the hulking yellow shoulders of the machine rise over everything around it. The mere act of it standing makes the hair on his arms stand up. The aerial drones of the local news stations who have been keeping their distance around the SSS property all race away out to the moving machine at once.

“B-one-o-eight, walk to the SSS building and stand outside on the pavement.”

Exactly as Marek asks, He watches the machine calmly starts to head in their direction, moving as if it never had a thousand rounds of military aircraft munitions fired at it, or a single bad thought about SSS either. The damn thing is a blank slate. Everyone stands as still as statues as they watch the thing casually make its way toward them, seemingly growing in size every minute. Even at a slow pace, the guards following along at its feet have to run hard to keep up with it.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sy watches the smaller flatbed with the shuttle on it round the corner entrance to the bay side of the shop. Even when going slow, the truck leans quite a way over with the heavy main shuttle on its back. The four tires on the passenger side all bulge at the bottoms as Vaun pulls it left towards the open bay. The front of the truck dips hard when Vaun suddenly slams on the brakes. Everyone in the truck bail out of the cab when the mech stomps on over across the property boundary in front of them.

Sy’s eyes nearly pop out of his head when he spots another two smaler military trucks pull in around from behind the flatbed. All the guards around him immediately take their hands off their rifles and stand at attention wherever they’re standing. General Quincy is the last one to step out of one of the trucks, but the first to strut on over for a look at what has happened.

Quincy looks up high at the big yellow berserker mech, standing twice as tall as the top of the pure black SSS hanger. “Sy, I’ve seen some shit in my day, but nothing quite like this.”

He wasn’t expecting a visit like this, not so soon. He doesn’t even know what to say, except to defend himself. “I swear I didn’t have anything to do with these things… doing what they did. One of those nutjob investigators did it after they went rogue and started working for the Lions group.”

Quincy looks at him with a kind of disappointment. “I could give a shit about that Sy. It’s not even why I’m here. We left the mechs here in Welan city for a strategic reason. Seems I never should’ve trusted the local boys with em though. It was supposed to be a show of faith. So now I’m dumping them on you for safekeeping. And they’re not your toys damnit. I want them back in tip top shape too, ya hear. You let me know what it takes, and I’ll cover it.”

He looks at Quincy blankly for a moment, contemplating what he’s actually come for, if not for today’s carnage. When it dawns on him, he feels a sudden drop in blood pressure. There’s no way he’s going to just hand over the Five-Series project to the military. It’s his.

“What then?”

Quincy gets a kick out of the clammy look on Sy’s face. He reaches out and grasps his shoulder with a chuckle. “Don’t you worry about that my boy. I’m not here for your little mind copying gig either, but I am here for what you’re new little friends are good for, you know what I mean?”

He nods his head. “Yeah. My guy is already on his way.”

Quincy looks around himself and lowers his voice. “How many more you got anyway? Things are getting a little funny out there. I think someone, or something, has been poking around out lately, and I feel we might need to be prepare for something… consequential.

His attention perks up, but at the same time, Quincy appears to pretend he didn’t just say what he did and completely changes his focus. In a much lighter mood, he smiles and pats Sy on the shoulder, releasing him. “How’s getting older these days mmh? Been what, four years since I’ve last seen you like this. Looks more like you’ve aged ten my friend. What a bitch huh?”

As they walk in through the hanger together, his mood relaxes a little more. “I only lost one guy yesterday, would you believe it? Matter of fact, he’s being remade as we speak. Only one of the… originals, are on sight right now, but I want you to meet her. Her name’s Five, and she’s quite something. Took one of those mechs down all by herself. Wait till you see her.”