Chapter Text
***
In the ruins of a Walgreens somewhere in what had once been central Georgia, Mikaela found Snickers bars and ibuprofen.
She ate three of the former, and swallowed a handful of the later dry, while watching Epps sort through the clothing he’d found. Protected under entire walls of fallen concrete, most of the stuff looked practically new once the dust was blown away, the clear plastic packaging just starting to yellow.
“Fabulous,” sighed Epps, scooping another handful of rubble away. “We now have enough fluffy slippers to last us the rest of our lives.” However long that was going to be.
“Hey, and some nice pants. Gotta admire the bling.” Not too many men could pull off purple parachute pants with gold sparkles -- Epps was clearly one of the few, the proud, the mighty. Kinda too bad, though -- the view before the pants had been a nice one. Epps really did have a fantastic ass.
“Bite me. Hey, can we get a little light down here?” Epps addressed the latter to the aliens, calling up to their towering shapes, black against the sunset. They’d brought Mikaela and Epps here willingly enough -- once Mikaela had made it clear that she wasn’t going to give them any information while hungry, exhausted, and being clutched like a doll. It was a risky bit of grandstanding on her part to be sure, but it’d paid off. The big mech had carried Epps and Mikaela both here, then peeled away a sheet of this fallen wall, exposing rich pickings even in this bombed out shell of a nameless small town.
The smaller alien had told them to ‘fuel’ and stay close -- and then the robots had gone back to their arguing, interspersed with long periods of silent staring at eachother. Creepy fuckers.
The larger of the shadowy mechs moved a little, where it towered over them. It flicked on some kind of a spotlamp, then turned back to its smaller companion.
Epps plucked a plastic bottle from the wreckage and the tattered plastic sack he’d filled with food packets. Most of the bottle’s bright red label had rotted off, but the cap was intact and the brown liquid inside hissed with carbonation. Epps sat down beside Mikaela, took a swig, and passed her the bottle. It was pleasantly chilly from its burial and maybe ten years under crumbled concrete. Mikaela let the bubbles linger on her tongue, rolled them so that they snapped against the roof of her mouth. “So. What are we going to do about them?” she asked, passing the bottle back and accepting one of the foil packets from Epps. Cheezits, mainly powdered, and smelling faintly off. So much for the inviolate power of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
“Not sure we got a lot of choices,” Epps said. The next packet contained jerky, brittle with age. But it smelled fine, and nothing was green. He passed her a piece. “We could lay camp here, see if they’re still around in the morning.” His fingers flashed in the gesture for two moving quietly. Under the cover of darkness, two healthy operatives could move a remarkably long way.
Two *healthy* operatives. Mikaela bent her knee a little, felt the tendons click. The pain was not quite as bad, if she stayed still, and at least it had quit swelling. But she wasn’t going anywhere very fast. “Maybe,” she said, repeating his gesture with just one finger.
Epps shook his head in a firm negative, then dug around in his sack. The next foil packet was almost pristine -- a family of hikers strode happily across a cheery yellow landscape. The raisins and chocolate inside were still good, though the peanuts smelled rancid. She wondered why the peanuts in the snickers were still fine, but these were bad. Oxygen? Epps emptied the package into his hand. “With luck, they just want information from us,” he said.
“Yeah, and once we’re useless to them, after all we’ve seen? Dust,” Mikaela said quietly, picking M&Ms from Epps’s palm. She shivered a little. Only because of the evening cold, of course. Not at the memory of those hollow, powdery screams....
“They let the other three run off,” Epps interjected. “And the volunteers saw just as much as we did.”
Mikaela bit at her lip. “I don’t think you, or they, saw all of it. The first aliens did a lot more to most of the other men there. The thing they did to you -- are you alright?” She looked him over, as if she could scan through bright purple parachute pants.
“Yeah. A little sore.” Epps grimaced. "If I don't think about it, it never happened, right?" he said, giving a hollow laugh. "Do I want to know what they did to the others?"
"Not if you want to sleep at night," Mikaela said, her eyes getting glassy. She shivered again, then grabbed Epp's tattered bag to see what other treasures he'd found. Her eyes widened, and she plucked out a long strip of foil. Most of the little squares still felt squishy. “You found condoms?”
Epps grinned. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Distract you from your misery, if we make it through this?”
Mikaela took a closer look. "Expired," she said, not doing a very good job of hiding her disappointment. How she could even think about sex right now, after what she'd seen in the compound... and with the two monsters still looming overhead? She liked what the condoms represented, though -- at least Epps was laying odds that they’d survive to get to use them.
“Name something here that isn’t,” Epps began weakly. "They might possibly be okay."
"I don't take chances with 'might' and 'possibly'. Not even if we do make it through this alive," Mikaela snapped back, sounding way more pissed off than she meant to. Yeah right. Just like poor Raoul was sterile. Uh huh.
It made her think about the fact that the aliens had collected his and some of the others' sperm... and the fact that none of their intelligence ever showed any women in transit to that final training and sorting center. She did not like where those thoughts led. Especially when there was absolutely nothing she could do about it in their current situation. Fuck.
The base in Colorado was gonna think they were dead. Travelling was getting harder of late -- fewer abandoned vehicles to hotwire or siphon fuel from. They didn’t have anything to trade to an Enclave convoy in exchange for a hitch. Maybe they could stay in this part of the country for a while -- but they’d need a shortwave radio and a whole lotta fast talking in order to hook up with another cell. All of this, of course, presuming the aliens didn’t decide to dust them on a whim. Double fuck.
God damn, she was tired.
And Epps had his own misery he was trying to forget.
"Hey," he said, touching her arm as though slightly afraid his hand would get chewed off. "You okay?"
"No," Mikaela said, glancing up again. "This is all so fucked up." What was going to happen to all those guys? What had happened to her dad? And those two dweebs from her town who'd volunteered and had never been heard from again? What were their names again? Idiots. “Tell you what, Epps. We get through this, I’ll go to the commissary myself, steal or barter a whole box of damned condoms. Fresh ones.”
"Deal," he said, rising to gather up the heap of clothing and pile it on the cracked and grimy tiles near her. “There’s a zippo in the bag. Wanna try to get a fire started? Won’t give away our position any more than they will,” he said, nodding at the two towering mechs, still arguing it out overhead, like a modem in the next room shouting at a blender down the hallway. "We can get some sleep. I'll even let you use me as a god damn pillow."
Mikaela pulled the cracked lighter out of the bag. There were only a few drops of fuel inside, but it sparked and emitted a brief glimmer of flame. Might work -- baby Jesus knew a fire would be nice. Georgia’s sultry summers had quickly rotted most of the already-scanty burnables in the store, unless they wanted to burn squashed plastic cartridges of do-it-yourself hair dye. At least the abundant cellophane plastic from their meal would do for tinder. “Sure,” she said, “gonna need some larger pieces of wood, though. Don’t go far.”
Epps nodded. “I won’t.”
-----
"Fuck," Mikaela cursed a few minutes later, throwing the lighter into the dirt. Looked like a fire was not in the cards, after all. Epps was off in the bushes, supposedly doing the manly wood-gathering thing, but likely taking care of some business. He'd apparently not had enough of the weird-ass spongy cube food to have the same effect as the other guys, to judge by the whole roll of toilet paper he’d taken with him, tucked under one arm. Real TP -- yet another precious and rare commodity, saved from decomposition by the miracle of plastic. Thankfully she'd found plenty of other tinder, so she didn’t have to use the precious stuff to start the fire... which wasn't going to start.
"Human, what can you possibly be attempting to accomplish?" the smaller alien suddenly interrupted, making her jerk. The thing’s red eyes seemed to bore straight into her, like the evil eyes that lurked behind the hero in the dark corners of children’s books, so threatening that they couldn’t possibly be real. Except these were.
"I was going to start a fire," Mikaela said, looking up nervously. She cupped her palm over her knee, ready to compensate for the joint if she had to move fast. "Gonna be cold tonight," she added for no particular reason. Like it cared.
"And you thought a brief exothermic reaction that could, at best, result in the conflagration of this pitiable structure would remedy matters?" it asked, as though this was the most pathetically stupid idea it had ever come across in the entire universe.
"Yes, actually. It's easier to fall asleep if you're warm." Was she really having this conversation with an alien robot? On the other hand, that gave her an idea. One that she might regret, considering what that thug-tank’s weapons had done. "Don't suppose you could start it for me?"
The thing glared at her, for what felt like forever. Then the larger one said something in its slightly softer, less-shrill chaos of electronic noises.
The smaller robot’s glare shifted to its companion, and for a brief moment Mikaela could have sworn she saw something like 'oh puh-lease' in its expression as it screeched some sort of response.
"Stand aside, human," the smaller one then ordered sharply. Mikaela pulled herself to her feet with difficulty, and limped to the side.
"Nothing too big," she warned. "We just need something small that we can feed more wood into."
The thing again shot her a look as though her dearth of intelligence positively pained it, and then one of its fingers shifted into some sort of tube, and it shot a single bright blue spark of energy at the teepee of plastic, pine needles, and cardboard she'd made, igniting it.
"Epps, you better hurry with that wood!" she called into the brush, hobbling back over and carefully lowering herself to the ground so she could feed bits of plastic and cardboard to the small fire. The fumes were going to be horrible, but at least it would keep the campfire going. The smaller alien was already turning back toward its companion. "Hey, domo arigato, Mister Roboto," she called to it.
It whipped its head back her direction, as though it wanted to shoot laser beams out of its creepy eyes at her. “My designation,” the robot hissed, “is not Mister Roboto.”
“Fine then, Killr-”
“Nor Killroy!”
Mikaela paused, looked up. “Yeah?” The alien was already turning away, intent on its larger partner. “So what do I call you?”
The scarlet eyes spiraled down into pinpoints, in what Mikaela was pretty sure was annoyance. “My *name*, human, is --” The alien made an absurdly complicated sound, an inhuman layering of what sounded like radio static and a rising, multitonal screech.
“Yeah … so not going to be able to say that anytime soon,” she told it. “You have an English translation of that? Or should I just make something up?”
The alien stiffened even further, if that was possible. Those folded wings on its back swivelled outwards slightly in an obvious threat display, alien weaponry glinting in the firelight. The bigger one clicked in the darkness, making some kind of observation; those smoldering eyes turned to glare at it, before focussing down on her once more.
“Your language is pitifully inadequate, human. Any translation would be an approximation only. You may call me ‘White Star’s Glorious Scream in Death and Nuclear Resurrection’, however.”
“Wow. Your parents really didn’t like you, did they?” On some level, Mikaela still couldn’t believe she was lipping off to an alien. But after a day like she’d had, sometimes you just had to snark. “But hey, I can work with that. Starscream it is.”
“My name is NOT--” the alien snarled, taking a step forward, those barbed talons curling. Only to be brought up short by the bigger one’s hand on its shoulder-guard-wing-armor thing. It rounded on the bigger one, spitting out a crackle of irate-sounding sounds. The larger one clicked again, oddly-soothing metallic ‘tocks’ in different patterns. After a moment, the smaller one abruptly deflated. “Fine,” it said huffily.
“So...” Mikaela stretched her leg out beside the smokey little fire, wincing as the joint just refused to move at first. “Does that one have a name?”
“*His* name is far too lofty to be uttered by an organic’s foulsome lip plat--”
“Skyfire.” The huge one bent down, each of its main eyes the size of her entire head. The second, smaller pair of eyes were somewhat greenish, and set wide in its strange, blocky face. Its voice was deeper, a rumbling baritone. “You may call me Skyfire.”
The smaller alien, Starscream, shifted and practically stamped a foot in irritation. It was a great deal more active than the larger one, like a dancer on meth, high-strung -- an arabian yearling next to a clydesdale. Not that most people knew what either of those were, these days. “If you are sufficiently fuelled and rested to bleat your questions, organic, then you can answer them as well,” the alien said, its voice grating, cruel-sounding. “What were you doing at Iacon’s processing facility?”
For a moment, Mikaela considered lying--but somehow she didn’t think ‘I took a wrong turn in Albuquerque’ was going to cut it, and she was too damn tired to figure out anything more plausible. Plus, it was pretty obvious that she’d been snooping around where she wasn’t wanted. These aliens, however, seemed to have some kind of rivalry with the ones who ran the ‘processing facility’. Maybe she could use that.
“Trying to figure out exactly what they were ‘processing’,” she said, shrugging tiredly. “And why no one ever comes back. Guess I found out, huh?” She gave a brief, humorless chuckle.
“Such facilities--do not the humans volunteer to go into them?” the bigger alien--Skyfire--asked. “I do not understand what has happened. On our last survey, Earth was a thriving organic world, and the humans had a budding proto-civilization. It was nothing like this. Did the Towers do this? Did they disrupt your planet’s ecosystems, so that they might enslave your people?” Mikaela had to admit, watching something that size bristle indignantly was rather impressive. And more than a little terrifying, to be honest.
"I'm not sure what towers you're talking about, but... I think we did a pretty damn good job of doing most of this ourselves, unless there was something going on I wasn’t aware of. Your kind didn't show up until things were already pretty fucked up," she began, feeding more of the pine needles into the smouldering fire to counteract some of the stench of the plastic. The aliens’ timing, Mikaela had to admit, was one hell of a coincidence. Maybe they did have something to do with the collapse... but she didn’t have any proof that they did. Mikaela craned her neck a bit to see if she could spot Epps in the darkness, then glanced up again at the large alien who was staring at her intently, waiting for her to continue. She might as well, Mikaela figured. Wasn’t like they couldn’t get this information from any enclave, or anybody old enough to have lived through it all.
"Umm. So yeah. At least in this part of the world it started with things going to hell with the economy -- some kind of a bubble, or something. Around the same time, we had a huge drought; we’re still in one, kinda. Most scientists agreed that it was our own doing -- too many greenhouse gasses and fossil fuels and all that shit making the earth get warmer. The ice caps started melting fast, sea levels went up, a lot of the big fish stocks vanished, weather changed pretty much everywhere, and not for the better. Stuff like that."
"Then one year, everything just went to hell with our food supply. Part of central California, the most productive agricultural region in this area of the world, just collapsed into a giant sinkhole. Something about the water table getting completely depleted -- ended up causing a lot of earthquakes, too. Between that and the drought, crops were failing everywhere.
“That’s when the genejump happened. We’d inserted a pesticide gene into soybean leaves, but then the gene started showing up in other things too, like corn pollen. Which blows everywhere, gets into everything. Only took about two years to kill off pollinators, like the bees, bats, even a lot of songbirds and the like. Didn’t kill off the mosquitoes, though.” Mikaela snorted. Malaria and yellow fever had both showed up in the ‘States about that time. They’d managed to keep the spread under control for a while--until most of the government collapsed, and the CDC with it. They didn’t call yellow fever ‘breakbone fever’ for nothing, she’d found. “With most of that year's harvest lost to the drought, there just wasn't enough food, and things... well. Things got rough, around the time I would’ve graduated from high school. Your kind showed up several years after that."
“You left out the wars,” said Epps, stepping into light of the aliens’ headlamps. He’d found more than just wood -- nice thick pieces of plank that looked like they’d been splintered from the frame of a dilapidated building. He also had a hatchet balanced atop the armload of wood, and a long kitchen knife in his belt. A cleaver wasn’t an ideal weapon, but it was certainly a good find in a place as picked-over as this. Epps always managed to scavenge the best stuff -- it was like the man could see in the damned dark. “We were involved in... eight of them, I guess, in the years before the other robots arrived. Mostly smaller engagements in the middle east and South America -- the drug wars. But I think it was the battles in Taiwan that really broke the army’s back. Our soldiers were worn out, recruitment had been flat for years, and any money coming in was going to defense contractors and shiny new weapons. So, when the oil-producing nations decided to shut off the spigot... there was nothin’ in place to make up for the energy shortfall.”
“Didn’t have much of an economy by that point, either, to get people jobs outside of the army,” added Mikaela, as Epps dumped the wood beside her. She went for the axe first. Rusty, but in remarkably good shape, all things considered. “Four fifths of the country was out of work, probably. Maybe more. Had all these young guys coming back without legs or whatever, needing medical care, nothing for them to do. Transport for anything was crazy expensive. Not enough food. People were dying of starvation - not in some place like North Korea or Somalia, but right here in the USA. I think we’d have overcome any one of the problems -- but everything just seemed to happen together.” She shrugged, splintering off wood chips to feed to the fire, stacking the larger pieces around the flickering blaze to dry. “The rich parts of cities threw up walls and became the enclaves, mostly. I think we still have a central government, or someone who claims to be the central government -- don’t know for sure.” Didn’t much care, either.
Mikaela glanced up at the larger robot again. She couldn't really read its strange face, but she had a sense that it was horrified. The smaller one spat something out at it, and it rumbled something back, one set of its glowing eyes never leaving her. "And how did Iacon come to occupy this continent?” the bigger alien -- Skyfire -- asked. “And when did they start exporting humans from here to other parts of the empire?"
“And more to the point -- why bother?” added Starscream, crossly. “Local waxes are admittedly of some interest, but drones could tend those plantations. We’ve seen the centers where your kindred are taught basic maintenance skills, but keeping organics off world is no small matter. Why employ a human to perform a drone’s function?”
"I don't know. Do you robots regularly rape and torture drones?" Mikaela shot back, suddenly furious. Epps put a calming hand on her arm, and she shook it off. She couldn't get the screams out of her head. "Because that's what they were doing in that processing facility, or whatever the hell you called it."
Starscream bristled at her comment, his side wings flaring out, the glow of his red eyes narrowing to pinpricks. “Whatever they are doing, you can be certain it is not ‘rape,’” the robot sneered. “You have no sparks, no firewalls to breach, hardly any processors and nothing worth hacking."
“You fucking piece of -- wadded up tin can!” Fisting the handle of the hatchet, Mikaela used it to lever herself to her feet. “You talking pile of rusted bolts! Let’s see how much you think it’s rape when I cram this axe up your ass!”
The robot looked more confused than threatened or insulted. “They were penetrating -- human, you must have mistaken a medical procedure for something it wasn’t. No mech would care to touch an -- one of your species in such a manner.”
“You fucking--!”
"Easy," Epps materialized, catching the axe behind the head, wrapping an arm around her waist before she could lurch into a charge.
“They were fucking collecting semen as well -- tell me how that’s not sexual, huh? Made a bunch of those men come into tubes, then put those things in them and injected them, marked them --” Mikaela squirmed, kicked with her good leg, but Epps was stronger and knew her well enough to avoid her better blows. Part of her was aware that she was ranting, most of her just didn’t care. “--just labeled them like meat. You’re telling me that wasn’t fucking rape?!”
Before Mikaela could get her elbow far enough around to really whack Epps in the head, Skyfire approached, tocking and clicking at Starscream. The thing knelt, as if in an attempt to bring its massive bulk more to Mikaela and Epp's level. Hunched down, the robot was still the size of a rather large two-story house.
It was somehow even more terrifying than him standing.
"Whatever is happening in those facilities, and on this planet, is an affront to the honor of any sparked being," Skyfire said, his voice quiet and sad. "I am certain that when the Lord High Protector and Prime are informed of what is truly taking place, they will intervene. Please do not judge my companion too harshly -- we have travelled far, and are still struggling to understand your world and what has happened here. Please, seat yourselves, and let us determine how best to move forward, all of us. For the good of your species, and your planet."
Kinda hard to argue with something like that. And while Mikaela was pissed enough to lay odds on herself and her axe against the fighter jet robot -- at least she could do some amount of denting -- she’d almost certainly need something larger to take on this one. Unhappily, she let Epps take the axe, and help her limp back to the crackling fire.
Starscream, unsurprisingly, was screeching away in some kind of protest to Skyfire’s little speech -- or at least, it sounded like a protest. Though for all she knew he could be commenting on the weather or telling the bigger alien he had a nice ass... or whatever the robot equivalent was. Except for that one, all-too-recognizable sequence of sounds that Starscream seemed so fond of saying.
"He disagrees?" Epps asked as he spread out some of the scavenged clothing and helped Mikaela down, directing his question to Skyfire.
"Starscream... has less faith in the honor of our ruling dyad, and our kind in general, than I do," Skyfire said carefully.
"That isn't all he said," Mikaela cut in, suspiciously. The idea that maybe, just maybe these aliens were going to try to help... it was too good to be true. It had to be. "I thought I told you not to call us ::fragging organics::."
"What I said, human, was that you fragging organics have already done quite well at destroying yourselves. Why bother trying to assist you? With or without the intervention of our so-honorable and esteemed leaders, your kind will likely go extinct in less than a vorn, as most of the other species on this mudball already have."
Mikaela snarled. “That’s *our* mudball, not yours. And they’re our lives, not yours to play with, like fucking metal toasters playing gods. And I’m Mikaela, not ‘human’ -- you want me to call you anything other than ‘pile of rust,’ you’d better fucking learn my name.”
Epps arched a brow, but shrugged. “I’m Epps,” he added. “And if you really wanna help -- we need to find out more about what’s goin’ on in there, too. The enclaves hoard the technology they get for selling people to your kind, and we’re still not sure what most of that stuff even is. Or what its really worth, or how to use it.”
“Sell?” Skyfire asked, and even the screechy jetfighter fell silent. The two robots exchanged looks. “Indentured servitude is legal, in some situations, when it is adequately compensated. But slavery is not.”
The corner of Epps’ mouth moved up, that telltale little smirk usually reserved for the moment he drew a bead on a particularly hapless transport convoy through the scope of his favorite rifle. “Then maybe you can help us find out if that stuff is, in fact, adequate compensation.”
Mikaela blinked at him. “You gotta be out of your freakin’ mind,” she whispered, while the aliens broke into more chitter-yowling. The resistance had always plucked at the edges of the enclaves and their exploitation, stealing a crate here, a shipment there. The enclaves had almost all the power, all the resources. And yet... when you got right down to it, there wasn’t an enclave in the ‘States that could stop one of the aliens from taking what it wanted.
“Maybe,” Epps agreed, but there was something dark and satisfied in his eyes. It was, Mikaela realized, the expression of a soldier who finally saw a chance to strike. “But those are some damn big guns. Seems a shame not to put them to use.”