Free Archon of the Covenant by David Hanrahan Page B

bags, fast food wrappings. Some operation had come to an abrupt halt on this street – the attempts at carrying away the detritus finally realized as a pointless routine.
     
    Trash spun up into the air as the sentinel tore through the small side street. The houses were smaller - mobile and single-story homes, modestly adorned. Many of them had Halloween decorations and others had Christmas lights – the dwellers of each home caught in the grips of the disease at different times, forever gone in different seasons. The sentinel scanned ahead on Lee St. – no movement. It kept going, crossing over Palo Verde Blvd. It crossed over Jones, Howard, and Camilla. It came upon Country Club. Across the street was an elementary school and a soccer field, chain-linked. Separated from the street. The sentinel banked hard and tore down Adams St., to the south, and continued west. The sun was beginning to move into view. It was 3PM.
     
    Then the sentinel saw it, sprawled out before a multi-level stucco home at Adams and Stewart - a fellow automaton. Another tri-axel. The sentinel rolled up next to it with a hushed whirring of tires on concrete. It came to a halt and inspected the wreckage - it was the same model. It had been beaten with some blunt force. There were bloodied handprints on the trident, the optical array was torn off, and all the panels were pried open – the insides of each were ransacked. A massive dent shone through on its anterior solar armor and its weakness exposed - the recharge coupling was ripped out. This sentinel had been overrun and ripped apart from every side until its Achilles heel was discovered. Around the wreckage, dried blood had congealed in thick claret pools, draining into the gutter. This tri-axel had put up a fight. The sentinel extended its humaniform hand from the encasement and dilated a single magnetized HDMI port. The port snaked around the open banshee disk panel of the wrecked machine and jerked forward, finding its metal base inside the broken panel. The sentinel connected the depleted machine to its own power and found an uplink.
     
    A vision. This machine had also started at MMC, continuing southwest. The sentinel found the memories from its long voyage. There was a monsoon and a flash flood. There was a vista of rainswept mornings at the base of the Mogollon Rim. This machine, its own kin, had spent an evening inside Case Grande ruins, sitting peacefully before the sunset of a late Summer morning in Sonora. It had uplinked to a deep space satellite and witnessed the death of a red giant. And then, it followed a trail along Picacho Peak. And Oro Valley. And Mt. Lemmon. And down through the city of dissolution. This machine had followed, in its final weeks, the same trail as the sentinel – following signs that led it to this unsafe harbor. Its terrestrial systems, too, were blinded – its arrays disrupted by the ECM jamming from somewhere in the city. The sentinel kept watching. The last few minutes were chaos and violence. The machine had made it here, to this corner, and was surrounded. It fired shot after shot from the railgun and the revins kept coming. In the background was a howl – some horrific shrill yelp. The revins were atop the machine, attacking it in a growing frenzy. A blur of limbs and teeth. Through the cacophony and shuttering darkness, that familiar human sound. It started with huffing, panting, and then it was clear - laughter. The howling figure came into view amidst this brutal merriment - it was a spindly, pallid revin. Unburnt, with only the faintest scar across his brow. The top of its head was shorn off into a bony crown. Scalpless. Its eyes gleamed. It snarled into the camera and then bent down to rip the optical chamber off its base. The feed went dark and then there were several minutes of muffled static. And a final signal cast into the void: “OMEGA SHEPHERD = REDEMPTION DECEIVER.”
     
    The machine, when it fell, was depleted of everything else in its