Chapter XXI: Into Darkness

There the layout of these underground ruins was, surprisingly, far less labyrinthine than the storm sewers above. As Halflance and I ran, we were able to run nearly in a straight line, running into only one dead end. It was eerie, dashing as quickly as possible in dim light, down strangely carved corridors of green stone. My thoughts drifted with nothing to anchor them, thinking about what these halls might have been once. For all that they were supposedly ancient, they were in good condition. Sure, everything was dusty, but there were no collapses, the wall carvings showed little sign of wear, and the stone was still rather intact. The other thing I noticed was that we were gradually sloping downwards. 

Then all of that changed. A strange light appeared down the tunnel, dull orange and bright like a bonfire. I didn’t have much time to wonder where that light was coming from before Halflance and I burst out into an enormous open chamber. It was roughly hemispherical, at least as tall as a six-story building at the apex, and from the look of it carved directly out of the bedrock. In the center, rising out of the cold stone, was an enormous building-sized square platform made out of the same green blocks that comprised the passageways. On each of its four sides were a set of stairs leading up thirty feet to the main pavillion. Long ago it must have been some kind of temple, or possibly a public forum, but now… its purpose had changed. 

The first and most obvious sight was the collapsed and damaged body of an Archopolid. Surrounding it was a motley collection of scientific gadgetry, huge generators and arcing electric machines and racks of tools and even what I could recognize as an analytical engine clicking and whirling away. Crouched over the Archopolid, fixing something to do with its multi-lensed eyes, was a small woman in a navy blue longcoat. Standing next to her was another one of the leather-clad Mechanodrones, and at least half a dozen more were milling around at the bottom of the stairs. This, then, was Nemesis’s laboratory.

Halflance came to a stop, looking up at Nemesis. She was out of breath from the running, which made me mildly concerned for her health, considering I was feeling perfectly fine. 

“You! Where is my wife, you bastard?!” Halflance shouted. My concern evaporated.

Nemesis turned around. I couldn’t see the face of Esther Nettle. All there was was a blank steel mask with glass lenses, identical to what I had seen on the tall woman back at the workshop. “Damn it all!” she yelled at nobody in particular, her voice not muffled by the mask. “One of you minions, remind me to never take my attention off of a trapped enemy.”

The Mechanodrones remained silent.

“Regardless, it’s very good to see you, Lady Halflance. Your wife is just around the other side of the Archopolid; shame you won’t have a chance to see her before the Mechanodrones kill you and your little friend.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “You’re clearly a good engineer, why are you using your talents just trying to kill her?”

Nemesis quirked her head. “Emma—“ she said before doubling over, wracked with coughing.  “…it’s very nice to meet you. It’s a shame, I was telling the truth when I said I didn’t want you to get hurt. Unlike the Count Halflance, you actually appreciate the work I do.”

“Is this all really over me turning you down for a job?” said Halflance, throwing her arms wide. “I was looking for a doctor, and you may be an excellent mechanic but you’re no doctor. Not to mention you’ve clearly been working well under—“

“It was never about the job!” screamed Nemesis. Silence reigned over the ancient temple. Then Nemesis turned back to her work. “Kill them.”

The Mechanodrones, outnumbering us about four to one, began to close in. Thinking quickly, I backed up into Lady Halflance, pressing my back against hers. 

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked me.

“Making sure that they can’t flank us,” I said, drawing my revolver. “As long as we’re like this, they can’t fully surround us. Not to mention, it makes friendly fire much less likely.”

“Eugh.” Lady Halflance pressed herself against me in return. “You’ll be walking backwards. We need to get up to the platform.”

“Alright. That I can do.” And then the first Mechanodrone charged. 

It charged towards me as quickly as a lumbering cybernetic behemoth can, heavy axe ready to strike. I sidestepped without leaving Halflance’s back, slashing it in the arm just as it started its swing. It overextended, nearly missing Halflance as it slammed to the ground. A single blast from her revolver and it was out for the count. I glanced at the fallen Mechanodrone behind me. The receiver had been shattered, but the armor was undamaged. Halflance had actually listened to me. 

I looked up. An axe swinging towards my head. Very quickly. I sidestepped, losing balance. Throwing my sword out, I tried to push the axe aside. It didn’t work. I was about to die. I was going to die. Thank goodness that it had shitty aim and missed me by an inch.

I was on my back foot, one arm thrown out and legs too wide apart. Worse, another Mechanodrone was coming. Another strike came my way and I dodged aside. This dodge proved a mistake, as I tumbled to the ground. The Mechanodrone in front of me raised its axe, enough power behind the strike to smash through my ribcage. I kicked out at its ankles. Didn’t work, it was too heavy. Suddenly, Bang! A dent appeared in the bucket-like faceplate and the thing stumbled back.

“Get up,” growled Halflance. “We need to get moving.”

It wasn’t easy, that’s certain. Step by step, Halflance moved forward while I moved back. My sword wouldn’t stand a chance against their heavy axe swings, so I had to rely on my ability to dodge. There were a few close calls as I swayed to the side or nearly crashed into Halflance. When I wasn’t narrowly avoiding getting dismembered, I attacked as hard as I could. The old adage about the best defense generally does apply for dueling. I stabbed at the vulnerable areas, the neck and hips and the gaps between the heavy chest plates. I used the gun as well, snapping off a shot or two in an attempt to set them off-balance. 

Over the course of a few minutes, the battle slowly progressed up the side of the stone platform. I was fighting as best as I could, and barely surviving, and yet Halflance must have been in twice as much trouble as I was, advancing uphill against an enemy with the height advantage, while I was moving away from Mechanodrones that were below me.

The first one I took down was by complete accident. It swung, a heavy horizontal that could cut right through my spine. Just as the wind off the axe’s edge passed me, I swung my sword. A crash of broken metal told me that I’d hit the receiver.  It seized up and fell to the floor. Another went down when I lunged forward, driving the tip of my saber into its knee. Unable to stand, it crumpled, falling down the stairs. By the time it hit the bottom, it definitely wasn’t going to be moving around. I had just a moment to be concerned for the life of the woman that had been turned into that Mechanodrone before I went back to the fight. 

I barely noticed it when the two of us finally reached the main platform itself. There were still two Mechanodrones in front of me. I didn’t know how many Halflance was dealing with, though the sounds of heavy bodies hitting the floor told me that it was fewer than were there at the beginning. Then I heard the click of a revolver being cocked, and Halflance shouted.

“Tell your machines to stand down or I pull the trigger. I don’t miss, Esther.”

I hesitantly glanced over my shoulder without letting my guard down. Halflance was pointing her revolver out past the Mechanodrones… and directly at the head of Nemesis.

“Alright, alright. Ladies, drop your weapons.” The Mechanodrones followed her orders. The axes hit the stone with a loud clatter. I turned on my heel, aiming directly at Nemesis and trying to look as threatening as possible, which was not very threatening at all.

Nemesis stepped down from her position crouched over the Archopolid’s head. “There’s no need for violence, really. You want me to go to justice, don’t you? I can’t face justice if my brains are all over this beautiful machine.”

“I want you to give me my wife back,” scowled Halflance.

“Of course, of course.” Nemesis began walking around the side of the Archopolid, her posture slowly shrinking into itself. If I didn’t know any better I’d say she looked… ashamed. 

Halflance gestured with her gun. “Hurry up, please.”

“I’m in no rush, Count. Especially not when I have anything left to lose. Ehh, fuck it. Combat Protocol Gamma!” She leapt aside, ducking behind a cabinet full of tools just before two pistol bullets ricocheted off the ground where she had been standing. A heavy metallic groan filled the chamber… followed by the clicking sound of a mechanical brain activating. The Archopolid was more fully repaired than we had expected.

“Get down!” I screamed, before diving behind the analytical engine. 

In a moment, the machine rifle rang out, rapid-fire blasts echoing through the chamber while little puffs of dust skittered across the floor. I had to cover my face as little chips of stone scattered into me like needles. 

“I certainly love the sounds of a contingency plan in action!” Nemesis shouted over the noise, laughing her head off.

I was frozen with indecision, huddled into a ball behind the analytical engine. I glanced over at Halflance, herself crouched behind an overturned table a few yards away. The look in her eyes, resolution even when fighting against impossible odds, gave me hope as well. Margaret’s life was on the line, dammit. A heavy clunking distracted me, as one of the Mechanodrones fell to the ground between us. Its armor had been punched through in half a dozen places, and thick red liquid was starting to pool out from the ground. 

“You really don’t stand a chance, you know,” said Nemesis during a lull in the shooting. “I’ve reinforced the underbelly of this machine here, so you won’t be able to pull the same tricks twice. I swear on what honor I have that I’ll let Emma go if you give yourself up, Count.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re wasting your breath, Nemesis, seriously. You can quit it with the Bond villain monologuing crap.”

“Hmm? Then you can die. I don’t care either way.” Nemesis walked off, sitting down behind the Archopolid. Bitch.

Halflance took the opportunity to dash across the space between us, inviting a long burst of machine rifle fire. She slumped against the analytical engine and said, “Alright, what’s the plan?”

“What plan? I don’t have a plan. Why would you think I had a plan?”

Halflance looked confused. “You’ve been studying these things for the last month and a half. You must have picked up something that would tell us how to fight it.”

“I was studying how to program them!” I hissed. “I know how they walk on uneven ground without falling over, not how they can be broken.” I leaned out from behind cover, taking a quick glance at the machine. It had the same shape as before, spider-like with eight long limbs like pistons, a body bolted together with steel plates and heavy gears, a set of pipes venting thin trails of smoke into the air. Its head, a complex arrangement of metal plating and gears, complete with a mobile jaw that glowed with dull orange light and eyes made out of hundreds of tiny black and white lenses and thermal pins, slowly swiveled from side to side as if looking for someone. The most dangerous part was the machine rifle, a small silvery box bolted onto the side of the head area, ready to spit out a lethal barrage of bullets at any moment.

“Perhaps if we go for the brain?” Halflance asked.

“No, you’ll never get close. In fact I’m pretty sure the gun has line-of-sight on that part anyway.”

“The what?”

I looked at Halflance, not sure I had heard her properly. “The gun. You know, the part that kills us?”

“Is this another one of those things from Earth? Like ‘men’?”

“Apparently so,” I said. “What the hell do you call it then?”

“It’s a machine rifle,” she said, with a tone as if I had asked her what my hand was.

“Right, regardless of what it’s called, it…” I had completely forgotten what we had been talking about before. I leaned out over the top again, checking on the Archopolid. It still had no idea where we were. For a second, as I gazed at it, the fact that it was trying to kill us faded away, replaced by detached scientific examination. All fear dropped from me, and for a second I saw it like an engineering project.

“Lady Halflance, I think I have an idea,” I said. 

“I do sincerely hope it involves a way for us to get my wife back without dying,” she deadpanned, reloading her revolver.

“Normal Archopolids don’t have a machine rifle on them, right? Which means she must have added it on herself, probably just bolted it to the head. It’s a weak point in the structure, it has to be. You can’t just add a new piece of equipment to an already-existing vehicle or robot or whatever the hell this thing is and not have it be a weak point.”

Halflance stopped. “You have a point. What do we do about it?”

“So if one of us can draw its attention, make sure it’s looking at us, the other one can flank around and blow the weapons right off of it. It’ll be harmless.” I looked at her expectantly, waiting for the verdict. 

She frowned for a moment, and I could almost hear the gears turning in her head. “You’re a much smaller target than I am, as well as much faster. I have at least twenty years of firearm experience on you. It would make the most sense if you were the target and I did the shooting.”

My mouth fell open for a second, making shocked “uhhh” sounds. Eventually I managed to wrestle the controls back from the monkey part of my brain, saying, “Ye-yeah, of course.”

“Excellent.” Halflance clicked shut the revolver. “I’m ready when you are.”

I moved around her, towards the Archopolid’s right, or my left. I stood up into a crouch. Deep breath in, deep breath out. 

Halflance nodded at me. “Good luck, Emma.”

I jumped out of cover. “Hey you dumb hunk of metal, over here!” With a great loud grinding, the Archopolid’s head turned my way. I had to wait for the last possible second before it started firing if I was going to distract it properly. Suddenly, I heard the clicking sound of the mechanical brain kick up another notch. Without thinking, I ran.

Crack crack crack crack crack, right behind me. My feet slam against the stone floor. The next piece of cover rushes towards me. I skid to a halt, landing on my butt. For a few seconds, I just breathe. To my shock, there aren’t any bullet holes in me, not even one. I was behind a tool rack now… and the Archopolid’s head was starting to turn away from me, which meant if I didn’t get its attention soon, Halflance was fucked. 

I grabbed a wrench, giving a flip in my hands. A couple of pounds of steel should do the trick. 

“Still here you tinker-toy fuck!” I shouted, hurling the wrench at the Archopolid. It bounced off the side of its neck, clattering to the ground. The machine turned right back to me. This time I kept my composure, running circles around it while keeping just ahead of the ravening turret fire. I considered doing some evasive maneuvers, jumping back and forth to make me harder to hit, but the chainsaw sound of machine rifle fire dissuaded me of that notion. I could rely on pure speed.

I skidded to a halt again, this time a refined baseball slide that landed me under a steel table. A thought hit me: what if the Archopolid could see me through the side of the table? I curled up against myself, legs pressed against my chest and head down. Then I remembered that the Archopolid’s eyes were at least ten feet off the ground, if not higher, and it had no way of bending down. I was safe for now.

I was also tired. Even the short bursts of incredible adrenaline-fueled speed that I had been able to pull off left me winded and sore. I took a moment to regain my breath and scan my surroundings. 

To my amazement, I had circled almost halfway around the main platform, with Lady Halflance entirely out of sight. I hoped that she was getting into position, and I hadn’t just been left out to dry. The back half of the room looked mostly the same as the front, with a couple of exceptions. One was the enormous crack running from the wall, down across the stone floor, and even splitting the green stone of the great platform. I couldn’t see the bottom of the crevice from under my little cover, but the rough edges told me that it wasn’t intentional. Perhaps an earthquake had struck, damaging this temple or chamber or whatever it was and forcing it to be abandoned.

On the other side of me was something that made me gasp. Sir Margaret Halflance was tied to a chair, head down, probably unconscious. She wasn’t gagged or blindfolded, presumably because nobody could hear her scream down there, but her arms and face were both covered in bruises. She was still wearing a fancy dress as well, the kind with lots of frills that you might expect to get paired with a lacy umbrella. I had to get to her, somehow.

I leaned out as far as I dared, trying to get a good view of the Archopolid. It was still looking in my direction. Glancing to the side, I tried to find Lady Halflance. She was either much better at hiding than I had given her credit for, or she was behind the Archopolid’s body. I waited. Then I waited some more. The Archopolid knew I was there, and it was still scanning for my presence, giving Halflance all the time she needed. 

With a clang of breaking metal, Halflance attacked. From somewhere behind the Archopolid she fired off a shot, sending shards of broken metal blasting off the machine rifle. Another shot came a couple of seconds after the first, leaving the rifle hanging precariously off the side of the Archopolid’s head, attached by a bent plate of metal.

I took my chance. Leaping out of my crouch and into a sprint like a runner at the olympics but slower and clumsier, I dashed towards Sir Margaret while the machine spider’s attention was elsewhere. The image of Margaret rushed towards me, and I was ready to grab her and run when I slammed face-first into a steel fist. It took me a second after that to get my bearings and make the world resolve back into focus. I had just enough time to see an enormous figure standing over me before a vise wrapped around my throat and I was hauled into the air.

“You had forgotten I was still here, hadn’t you?” said Nemesis. She was standing to my left, arms crossed, a lit signal flare casting bloody red light all over the bottom of her face. “It’s a clever plan, I’ll admit; I was never able to get the machine rifle secured to my liking. But oh well, this is why I have spare parts.”

Normally this is the part where I would say something witty, but the Mechanodrone with its hand around my neck was really cutting off the windpipe, so I mostly just gasped for air. 

“Mmm, I like it when you’re quiet,” Nemesis said, smirking. “Kill her.”

At once, the grip tightened even further, sending my heart slamming against my ribcage. Slowly, darkness began to accumulate around the edges of my vision. As my limbs grew weak, I heard shots ringing out, Halflance screaming in rage. Each shot was answered by a clang of metal, and the Mechanodrone stumbled forward, its grip loosening. Then it dropped me, slumping over with sparks bursting from the receiver on the back of its neck. I fell the couple of feet to the floor… and then kept falling. The dark rock of the crevasse swallowed me, and into darkness I went.