Free Archon of the Covenant by David Hanrahan Page A

peak. Hands reached under its tri-axel - it was about to be flipped over. It was on two wheels now. The horizon tilted. Everything dies.
     
    The chain of revins, from every corner of the intersection, suddenly tensed up and quieted, eyes rolling back in their skulls, teeth gritting and cracking. Overhead, an osprey glided silently in the diurnal. Hands gripped into shoulders and fingers dug into biceps. A tesla current cracked into the air and whipped the streetlights on the corner, then lashed into the traffic column – the bulbs flickering on and off then going dark. A circuit flowed through the flesh and bones and reached into the metal nearby. The revin marrow glowed a soft white and then the current was gone – the singed bodies, smelling of sulphur, flew back into the street. The masses around the sentinel shat and pissed themselves and crumpled around it.
     
    The sentinel fell silent along with the dead bodies piled around. Its core was depleted from the peripheral current it had released into the air. Small wafts of smoke lifted into the air from charred skin and hair. The top of the sentinel’s trident frame speared out into the sun, its base sunk below the dead and dying. DDC39 lay there in the midday sun, in the intersection surrounded by dead revins, and shutdown.
     
Solar power cell – 1%. Solar armor – 90%.
Drivetrain – operational
Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – all but visual, disrupted
HD/ Comms – disrupted
Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%
Railgun – 98% capacity
AAR – encountered revins again; situation was charged
Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    8. Auriga and the Aroton
     
    Core OS re-boot. Systems coming back online. It was late in the morning, a blank day in the future, by the time the sentinel was able to open its optical lens and survey its surroundings. Most of its solar armor was buried under the decaying bodies – its trident array breaking through the top of the sea of bodies like a submarine breaking through ice. Around the sentinel, singed limbs pointed up in the air, stuck in early rigor mortis. As DDC39 panned around, it came eye-to-eye with a dead revin, mouth agape, staring back at it. A black vulture hopped around from body to body, pecking at the sores from the decomposing bodies. Its naked head was bloodied from tearing into the distended bellies and bleeding eye sockets of the deceased. The vulture heard the sentinel’s optics turn and its feathers rose, an atramentous visage casting a dark countenance into the long shadows. It hissed at the sentinel and went aloft, dust kicking into the air from the thrumming of its span.
     
    The sentinel rolled forward but was stuck beneath the masses of rotting flesh and bones. For an hour, it wrenched back and forth, loosening the bodies around it and knocking back the limbs obscuring its solar armor. It shivered its axels until each of the tires pulled free atop the bodies crumpling to the asphalt beneath it. With one last whip forward, the sentinel revved all three axels. Its polyurethane teeth digging into the putrefied flesh, bloating in the overhead sun, and ripping open the tissue beneath it, heaving cadaverine and bile into the air. The sentinel was drenched in gore. A tottering, metal creature dripping in black and red.
     
    The intersection was silent now. From each corner, the crossing was devoid of movement. The sentinel moved quickly off Pima Road and into the dirt between buildings on the southwest corner, speeding through a zoned lot adjacent to a doctor’s office. Dust eddies kicked up into the wind as it crossed from the lot over Alvernon, onto Lee St. The dust caked onto the film of innards dripping down the sentinel’s frame. Lee St. was piled high with refuse spilled over from hazardous waste bins lining the streets – family belongings, hazmat suits, depleted plasma