Chapter 50: Goodbye, World

Hassan was seated on the floor, slouched against the wall of the narrow tunnel. Standing around him were the members of Unit 19:a2, unflinching in their duty to protect him. He couldn’t see them. It was too dark. It unnerved him. He only knew they were there because of the flashing IR strobe lights they each had, but even those would be turned off in combat. Even a little LED lamp would’ve upped his spirits, but it was better to conserve batteries down here.

Captain Kobayashi had been kind enough to refill his oxygen supply for him; the fact that they had a functioning oxygen generator slapped together from bits and pieces of salvage, tapped power lines, and siphoned chemicals was mind-boggling, but that was the power of A-rank Asians for you.

Well, that was impressive, but he had an inkling the whole place used to look a lot better. Kobayashi hadn’t taken them to any of the main areas, but a sneak peek into a storage room was depressing enough: a huge space of hundreds of racks arranged into a grid, but now, only a few racks, closest to the door, had any canned food left.

That whole space should have been enough to supply the caloric requirements of at least 200 troops for several months. Kobayashi now only led 19 men. Some of them were teenagers—boys.

They’d been protecting civilians here. The young and elderly together numbered 53, and other adults, 39. Kobayashi didn’t want Unit 19:a2 anywhere near them, and that was understandable. It was clear he didn’t completely trust them, and he made the right point that if that was where he stood, then the civilians wouldn’t regard them any better; he had trained the civilians how to use weapons, and it wasn’t out of the realm of imagination that one of them would start a shoot-out with 19:a2 out of pure contempt.

There were bobbing flashlights approaching from down the tunnel. One of them almost stumbled, seeing the androids. It was like seeing a mannequin in the dark where mannequins shouldn’t be.

Hassan got up just as Kobayashi and his squad approached. “We must continue down this tunnel,” Kobayashi said. “We will enter the old subway network, and then enter into another set of tunnels to get to the Black Castle.”

“ ‘Black Castle’ ? Is that what you call it?” Hassan asked.

“There will likely be spider-like enemies on the way. They use low-caliber firearms, but they will ruthlessly advance and swarm us if we let them.”

Hassan tensed, shifting his rifle in front of him. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“I have lost many men to them, but this time, we are ready.”

Behind him, a team caught up, followed by the sound of clacking feet. It was, for all intents and purposes, a spider bot with a top-mounted 50-caliber machine gun.

“You hacked one of these things?” Hassan asked. He didn’t miss the smug grin on one of the younger soldiers’ faces.

“When soldiers are bored, they discover new things.” Kobayashi and Hassan shared a chuckle at that. It was just one of those things.

“Now, Lieutenant, as discussed,” Kobayashi said. Hassan nodded. Kobayashi turned around, addressing his men. “One last rundown of the mission! First, sweep the line for enemies and clear the way for civilian evacuation. Team One will move east, and Team Two with me to the west!

“Second, Team Two will collapse the tunnel at Point Two-Alpha and cut off enemy reinforcements. Team One will assist in civilian evacuation and follow them out!

“Third, Team Two will assist Lieutenant Hassan in the infiltration of the Black Castle. Any questions!”

“Yes, sir!” One of the soldiers raised his hand. “Does Team Two get overtime pay?” Low laughter accompanied Kobayashi’s slap across the man’s helmet. It was a bitter reprieve for them—for Team One chose to live, and Team Two chose to die. On this, they had agreed.

***

The subway line they entered was vacant. The humans’ flashlights lit everything up. There was no sign of damage or decay. Every now and then, Kobayashi would order one of the soldiers to kneel and feel the rails, paranoid that maybe the enemy was using the line. If they were, it would have been a prime opportunity to sabotage it, even if just to spite them—even if AI didn’t understand the concept of spite. There were no vibrations whatsoever, however, and there never had been in any of the times they’d crossed this place.

There was a splotch of old, brown blood on one of the rails. They’d been here before.

Kobayashi signaled his men to be on alert. They moved in formation, with the spider bot in the center. The machine gun it carried also had a gun shield, protecting the operator that pushed the bot along like the eight-legged shopping cart that it was.

None of Unit 19:a2 understood human non-verbals … with the exception of tactical hand signs and formation shifts. Zero slowed her pace to be beside Hassan. “Why are the humans in a two-column formation?” she asked.

“We’ve entered enemy territory,” Hassan said.

“Proposal,” Zero hurriedly said. “Unit 19:a2 will be the vanguard.”

That would mean placing them in danger—Hassan thought, but why did he care? They were machines … but also potent combat assets. If, as Kobayashi said, the enemy down here used low-caliber arms, then wouldn’t the androids just shrug off incoming fire anyway? Wait, so it’s fine, right? It should be fine.

“Give me a moment,” Hassan said. He hastened his pace, moving ahead and coming up beside Kobayashi. “The androids,” he explained, “they want to take point.”

There was a flash of suspicion in Kobayashi’s eyes, but there wasn’t any tactical disadvantage to it. The enemy could intercept and pinpoint RF signals, so if the androids were to betray them, they should have betrayed them earlier, as close to the civilians as possible.

He nodded. Hassan looked back, and made a gesture like scooping up air from behind him, then he pointed to the very spearhead of the formation. Zero took the cue. As she and her team moved forwards, she pointed San to take the left, Nii to take the right beside her, then Juu to support San.

The soldiers behind them were confused. They looked to each other, then to their commander. Kobayashi pointed two fingers to his eyes, then forwards with stern and exaggerated movement. Eyes forward, idiots.

They were coming up to a curve in the tunnel, curving left. Nii, being the rightmost, had a wider view than the others. As she moved, she aimed her scope at the edge of the tunnel’s left wall, scanning up and down for enemies clinging to the floor or ceiling.

She abruptly stopped, and there was an explosion of dust and debris on the wall beside her, leaving a basketball-sized crater in solid concrete just an inch before she should’ve caught that bullet. The humans behind her had just barely registered the fact that a shot had been fired, when she fired back, unleashing white, 10-foot-long muzzle flash. The shock of the bullet exiting the barrel thumped at the closest soldier’s chest.

The bullet found its mark in the dark, and a yellow explosion ignited the air. A fireball fell from the ceiling to the floor, and a secondary explosion from hitting the floor spread the fire around even more, but soon dying down, leaving bits of scrap and puddles of sodium hydroxide.

Kobayashi shined a light at the crater in the wall. That would have been one of my soldiers, he thought. Nii’s superhuman reaction saved her, and her counter-fire saved everyone else. “Everyone! A new sniper enemy has been encountered! Stay on your toes!” he shouted. There was a collective shout of acknowledgment, but he knew his order was for nothing. No human can evade the first shot of a sniper … and the enemy had more units than they had bullets. They all marched forward, knowing hell was that way.

He thought bitterly about how the androids in front of them would survive longer than them, but it wouldn’t bode well for him to wish ill on someone else’s forces, and no less, someone who was trying to help them. Once the civilians make their escape, they will emerge unto a different Japan, one ruled by AI, one of which was actively attempting to arrest the one trying to kill them. They were no longer the dominant species in this world, and they must show deference if they were to survive.

They reached Point Two-Alpha, marked by the entrance of another maintenance tunnel. “Sir,” one of the soldiers said. He was kneeling down and feeling the rails. “Vibrations.”

“A train?” Kobayashi asked.

“No, sir.”

Imaginations ran wild. “Set up defenses!” Kobayashi ordered. He faced Hassan. “The Black Castle is through that tunnel. It is collapsed at the end, but there is a crawlspace you can fit through.”

Hassan stared at him. “I thought you were going to collapse this part of the tunnel.”

“There’s no time.” In truth, this was expected. They knew they’d be detected before arriving at Point 2-A. They always were. This time, a sniper bot had spotted them. Of course it would signal for reinforcements, and they marched on knowing that.

“Do you have ten minutes?” Juu, of all people, asked. Hassan and Kobayashi were both struck by how she interrupted them at all.

“Maybe,” Kobayashi replied. Juu pulled out several blocks of explosives. “I can collapse the tunnel in ten minutes,” she said.

“Override,” Zero said. “The mission comes first.”

“But, the Directive,” Juu argued. “We must protect humans.”

“Do not misunderstand,” Zero said. She wanted to protect these humans, too. “The Directive is the survival of humanity. What human soldiers do is the same. We die for the same cause.”

Zero was right. Kobayashi had had enough. “You”—he pointed at Juu—“me and my men have settled on this. If we do not form a defense here, you will never reach the Black Castle, and the battle above will be lost. This is final.”

“But”—

Kobayashi sighed. He snatched the explosives from Juu’s hands. “These will partly collapse the tunnel and form a bottleneck. Happy? Now, go!”

There was no sadness in the android’s mind, only confusion. For what reason do humans choose to die? Glory? Melancholy? For their fellows? There were more logical ways to do that here. With the aid of Unit 19:a2, they could have held off any swarm and successfully collapsed the tunnel ahead, ensuring the survival of at least some of Team Two.

In the first place, she measured the ammunition stocks of Team Two, and they didn’t have enough to mount an effective defense. There just wasn’t going to be any point to their deaths.

They had already traversed the side tunnel and reached the collapsed space that Kobayashi mentioned. One by one, Hassan and the rest of her team went under the crawlspace, until finally it was just herself and Nii. She waited until Nii was through—then she axe-kicked a concrete slab and blocked off the whole thing. “Juu!” She heard Zero’s shout.

She ran back to the defense line. Already, there was an impossible amount of gunfire. The tunnel ahead had collapsed partway, as promised, but it was a horror show of metal spiders, each as big as a human being, each firing a tiny gun that swiveled on their bodies. Individually underwhelming, there were hundreds of them swarming the entire circumference of the tunnel.

The resistance’s 50-caliber machine gun took the brunt of the incoming fire, but the heavy gun shield protected the operator more than adequately. He fired in bursts, making damn sure he didn’t waste any ammo.

Other soldiers fired at the spiders’ weakpoints: the head, mostly, but taking out their legs was good enough, and taking out the gun was a plus. Their shells weren’t particularly armored, but they were always angled in some way, and shots at them tended to get deflected.

Emerging from the tunnel, Juu took aim at one of the spiders aiming for Kobayashi, who was lying prone, taking cover behind the dead body of one his men. She fired a quick burst, each bullet breaking out at Mach 3, whipping at the air so loudly that it turned heads just by the sound of it. The bullets penetrated the spider’s body easily, and it, along with the spider behind it, slumped offline.

“You!” Kobayashi shouted over the gunfire. “You make no sense! Return to your squad!”

Instead, Juu homed in on the problem: the remaining opening in the partial collapse. She steadily advanced, bullets pelting her and ripping away her clothes and synthetic skin, bouncing off and sending sparks. She shot back at incredible speed, acquiring targets five in a row and sweeping her rifle left to right, squeezing the trigger five times, downing all five, and then some.

The sight was incredible to the squishy humans, still pinned down behind the bodies of their comrades. The machine gunner did his best to support Juu, but he could already see the end of the ammo belt flailing around as he fired. When that ran out, he ripped a rifle from his buddy’s cold fingers, offering a small prayer for the lad, and he continued firing through the slit in the gun shield.

Juu managed to kill damn near everything from the machine gun until the hole in the rubble. Kobayashi ordered the machine gunner to push the gun shield, and the hacked spider legs crawled forwards. Kobayashi got up and hid behind the shield with the gunner, and he ordered each of his men up to join him. They had to support Juu, because their demo expert was dead, and this was the only opportunity they had to fully close the breach and make sure their sacrifices came to something.

A spider poked its head through, and it was met near-immediately by a dozen bullets to the face. Juu was surprised. “Do what you have to do!” Kobayashi shouted. “We’ll cover you!”

She got to work climbing the hill of rubble and setting charges around the remaining hole. It was just a crawlspace, but it was enough for spiders to get through. Blowing up the ceiling wouldn’t be enough to seal the cylindrical tunnel; she had to go for the side walls, too. She worked as fast as she could, even as humans scaled the hill of rubble to find cover, trading shots with spiders that tried so desperately to swarm, pushing out the deactivated corpses of the last bot that tried to escape the breach.

Juu was setting the final charge when a specialist bot broke the stalemate. Its forelegs carried heavy shielding, and it easily left the breach and barreled down the hill of rubble, mauling one of the humans. Juu quickly turned around with her rifle and gunned down the shield spider, but the damage had been done. More and more spiders flooded out of the breach, and it was all that they could do to just kill as many of them as possible.

“Blow the charges!” Kobayashi shouted. Juu was still holding onto the detonator, holding onto hope that they would have a chance to properly retreat. “Blow the damn charges!” Kobayashi shouted once more.

She smacked the detonator thrice. Nothing happened. She raised her rifle again and resumed firing, but also scanning the wire for any breaks. There was one right beside Kobayashi.

“Captain! The wire is broken beside you!” she shouted. “I’ll cover you!”

She waded through the carnage—true carnage, as spiders used their arms to impale and tear apart the last of the resistance. Perhaps this was a calculated tactic, a ploy of psychological warfare to be used against humans, because it was working: Kobayashi’s hands shook as he tried so fucking hard to tie a fucking knot with slippery hands he couldn’t fucking feel. Juu shot another spider that approached him. It slid past him, down the slope, but he didn’t fucking care, because holy shit, why did everything depend on him tying a proper-fucking-knot?

A wave of spiders crawled for him. Juu dispatched them as best as she could, but there were too many. They picked the captain up and tore him apart like stringy bacon. They raised his upper torso in the air, a sharp leg impaling him through the heart, but Juu saw it: the man himself was biting down on the two ends of the wire, eyes bloodshot and his throat gurgling for death to come quicker.

—He felt fear; Juu didn’t. Despite that, they were both soldiers. They both got the job done. 

Kobayashi completed the circuit. Juu complied with his wish. She smacked the detonator two times. It worked the first time.

  Goodbye, world.