Peace Keeper Read online

  Friedrich unintentionally gasped at the horrifying sight before him. The peacekeeper looked almost demonic and completely invulnerable. Stepping slowly and methodically, it walked purposefully with an implicit consciousness of its awful power. The black polished tungsten dome atop the monster shined in the sunlight that filtered in through the glass roof of the atrium. Looking like Janus, the many-faced god, it seemed to look everywhere at once. William analyzed its appearance through the reflection of a storefront as his hands trembled. Then, he heard it. The pot crashed at the opposite arc of the throw.

  The topside of the machine rotated on a turret-like torso that William didn’t even know existed on them. It twisted its body like an owl’s head as its two front legs lurched forward in the direction of the crash. As unthinkably loud and stamping steps filled the mall, Mieke stabbed her elbow downward into the crack of the metal-framed doors. The panels buckled and snapped at the lock and the entrance flew open. Mieke took a breath in terrified suspense as a single long crack formed in the glass of the left door.

  “C’mon, c’mon. Don’t do this,” she mouthed as the peacekeeper slowed to examine the point of impact and scattered soil at the opposite end of the hall.

  She waved at William and Friedrich harshly to urge haste as the crack split off and rapidly approached the corner of the door. The panel recoiled as it reached its most open point and began to close.

  “Fuck, fuck!” she whispered, openly sprinting. She winced with every long stride but was only mildly slowed by her injury. She was designed to withstand impressive amounts of punishment.

  She shut her eyes tightly as the broken deadbolt met the opposite door with a light clink. Her eyes watched in horror as the top triangle formed by the split crack fell from its nesting and dropped to the ground. She saw the whole thing happen in slow motion. She watched as the men made their way toward the elevated dining area. They would need time. She stopped mid-stride and prepared to face her demon head on.

  “I can do this,” she whispered to herself, staring at the doorway in anticipation of the two-story bastard that was about to crash through the doors. She jogged in place. The gatling would take point-seven-five seconds to spin up. She could make the leap. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  The legs of the peacekeeper hammered like an approaching Tyrannosaurus Rex as it came close to the entrance of the food court. She saw it move at ludicrous speed. She would have a very hard time outrunning it in open terrain. Mieke was able to sprint at almost sixty-five kilometers per hour on uninjured legs, but it wouldn’t have been enough.

  The peacekeeper didn’t even slow down as it crashed through the wall above the doors. It led with the armor cap on its head that seemed to function as a ram for physical blockages. Mieke knew in theory how tall seven meters was, but watching it dissolve the drywall and glass as though they weren’t even there was horrifying. Drywall dust cascaded down the monstrosity as its torso rotated to face Mieke.

  Four separate hexagonal missile racks adorned the top of the machine. A trapezoid-shaped silver protrusion pushed out from the jet-black tungsten body. Six red eyes dotted each surface of the uneven pyramidal shape. What truly disturbed Mieke was the number of ocular sensors that covered the rest of the body. There would be no hiding behind its back. The peacekeeper was always looking for its victims.

  The two main guns were each twice as long as she was. The gatling, which began to spin in slow motion as she pushed off her right foot, had six massive barrels. Rounds which looked to be twenty millimeter ran up a steel channel from the main chassis of the robot. The plasma caster on the opposite arm looked almost like a gigantic broadsword with a charred triangular tip. She was sure the metal was something super-hardened to withstand the unreal heat being expelled at the tip. The rail gun was unmistakable. It was mounted just above the plasma caster. Segmented rectangular blocks looked to be cooling along the four-meter barrel, but Mieke knew they were capacitors, though, designed to hold unthinkable amounts of energy before the shot was summoned with all the rage of the underworld from the barrel.

  She was already flying through the air toward the storefront as the first two shots rang out. She watched a tracer round approach her rapidly and find its mark just a half meter above her head. Two more lead shells followed closely behind the first two as she bounded a second time toward the kitchen of the pita hut.

  William and Friedrich were frozen as the peacekeeper unleashed a hail of gunfire into the storefront. White-hot tracers lit the facade ablaze, and the remainder of the shells seemed to dissolve the metal and plastic across the once-delicious establishment. Friedrich hardly noticed it charging forward toward Mieke’s previous position as William tugged hard at his sleeve.

  She was buying time for a reason. They kept low to the ground and traveled behind the particle-board countertops that stood between them and certain death. Mr. Fisher followed as quickly as he could, trying to keep pace with the younger men. Even William’s hardened sensibility faltered as he watched the peacekeeper ram the restaurant like a hulking menace. It pressed through into the mall maintenance halls. Over the crashing bangs and shredding of fixtures, William found his way to the edge of the outdoor dining area. He was halfway over the railing when he noticed the twenty-meter drop on the opposite side.

  “Good lord!” he exclaimed, looking down over Treptower Park. “Now I understand.”

  “That there’s nowhere to hide out here?” Friedrich asked.

  “That we’re on an overlook, which means—” William began. He paused as Mieke shot from one of the service doors just over fifty meters from their position. She ran with vigor toward the edge of the dining area. A moment later, a shattering smash echoed across the open area as the peacekeeper charged through the wall behind her. Covered with debris and dust, William could have sworn he saw rage flow across the robot’s expressionless body. It let out low roar from plates across its body as it emerged and shook the dust from its sensors in a cloud. William clapped his hands over his ears, but the foghorn-like blast was louder than he could have imagined. The terrace whined as the creature moved farther forward. Mieke vaulted the railing and jumped.

  “Mieke!” Friedrich called by instinct, knowing what was on the other side.

  The peacekeeper slowed halfway out and rotated to face the origin of the noise.

  “Bloody hell,” William groaned as he watched the cannon spin up. There was no cover for them to hide behind. William knew he’d failed his mission.

  Just before the first shot rang out, a submachine gun fired from the edge of the dining area and tiny bullets pattered like raindrops on the colossal titan’s armor. As the gun began firing, the machine rotated back to face the larger threat. Mieke ducked back behind the railing on the outside of the terrace and disappeared.

  The peacekeeper continued forward on its previous path as shells ripped through the steel and cement of the flooring. Friedrich felt obscene amounts of worry for the woman he’d truly come to love as a daughter as the Vulcan cannon melted the floor ahead of it.

  Clearly detecting something before the humans could, the peacekeeper began to step back toward the mall, but it seemed that the burst of fire had prematurely weakened the terrace. The two front legs dipped downward through the collapsing metal as the rest of its body tried to retreat.

  Luckily, the monster, as fast as it was, couldn’t outrun Isaac Newton’s laws. Its mass was descending with more force than the motors could match. The peacekeeper fell through the terrace and ripped an enormous hole downward in the superstructure.

  Friedrich called out in joy as it fell out of view but shuddered as a shockwave cracked the flooring all around them.

  “Fuck,” he grumbled, observing the structure as it tore away from the elevated wall. A second wave brushed past them and knocked the scientist on his ass. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  They began to scramble back toward the mall, staggering with every loud scream of metal. Friedrich leapt toward the stairs which led up to the dining ar
ea and watched in dismay as they seemed to climb upward away from him. His hands caught the edge of the first stair alongside William, but they could only look back as Mr. Fisher began to slide away from them.

  His eyes seemed sad, but content as he fell downward at an increasing rate of speed. He was almost sure Mieke had survived. That was, after all, his only goal: to save his beloved Deutschland. He looked forward to seeing his wife again.

  He closed his eyes and felt a thunderous weight impact his left side. He knew it was the end.

  “Klettere, Vater!” Mieke screamed out as she held onto the man-made cliff that had sat beside the dining area. She shouted again as he failed to respond. “Climb, now!”

  He managed to wrestle his left arm from her iron grip as the three-armed family unit began to scramble up the rock face. Mieke’s bloodied hands seemed to hold the majority of the weight but were aided by Mr. Fisher’s as they looked for the scarce handholds. He fought against the howling pain in his shoulder as he reached higher with each grasp of stone. As the pair reached the top of the jagged rock face, Mieke wrenched her right arm skyward and shoved the older man up and onto the dirt. She looked down at her mangled left leg and felt woozy even as she pushed herself up and over the edge.

  Mieke breathed heavily as she looked up at the crystalline tan-colored sky. The sun was beginning to set. It was a beautiful day. She could feel the cold breeze lapping at her blood-drenched hair. Her leg felt hot as blood oozed freely from her body. She knew her body could take it. Her elephant-sized dosage of adrenaline kept the wounds from inflicting the full extent of their pain, but she felt the damage, nonetheless.

  She looked at her father and began to weep as he stared back. She knew that it might be the last time she was truly able to picture him as something he really wasn’t. She clung to those memories as he looked upon her face, brushing her hair from her eyes.

  “Danke Mieke. Segne dich, du unglaubliches Mädchen,” he blubbered, looking at the woman he truly wished was his own flesh and blood. Barren from the earliest days of their marriage, Mr. Fisher was more than content to host the woman he’d come to know as Mieke when Dr. Schmidt asked. He knew she was much more than she’d been presented as, but that hardly mattered.

  Thank you, Mieke. Bless you, my girl.

  Mieke was his daughter. For whatever that was worth, he looked down at the shattered woman with all the adoration and care of a father. With Amelie gone, Dieter had only the woman laying before him for family. Whether or not she would soon remember him as such, Mieke would forever have residence in his heart. He leaned close to the trembling, bleeding woman and whispered in her ear.

  “I love you, my Mieke,” he muttered in sharply accented English. “You stay here. Ja?”

  “Ja, Papa,” Mieke nodded voraciously as tears flowed down her face.

  “Yes. I love you too.”

  6

  Evac

  When Mieke came to, she was being dragged on a stretcher by William and Friedrich. She knew her body weighed far more than a typical human’s. They surely were unable to carry her. Mr. Fisher nursed a fresh wound dressing on his shoulder. He’d surely torn more than a few stitches in the climb.

  She looked down at her bandaged hands and arms and noted the recent suture in her leg. She felt a bandage wrapped tightly around her head and a new piece of gauze sticking into her side. One of the shells had come close enough that it dragged shrapnel through from above as she’d climbed her way to safety after drawing the peacekeeper’s fire. She began to more closely resemble a patchwork quilt than a person.

  “I can—” she hissed as she sat up. Apparently, the shrapnel had done more damage to her abdomen than she’d thought. “I can walk. Stop dragging me like a sack of potatoes.”

  “No, Mieke!” Mr. Fisher insisted as he walked alongside the stretcher in the grass. “We would not drag potato.”

  He actually managed to elicit a chuckle from her as she lay back onto the medical implement. Friedrich laughed along with them. Even if the man wasn’t her real father, he had certainly perfected the art of the dad joke.

  “Your nanites will fix the injuries in time, Mieke,” Friedrich replied. “You must rest, or risk doing damage that the tiny machines cannot fix.”

  William turned to Friedrich as they walked side by side.

  “Machines in her bloodstream?” William wondered. “That explains why she isn’t already dead.”

  “Like I said,” Friedrich shrugged. “She’s one of a kind.”

  William watched as Dr. Schmidt looked down on Mieke as she spoke rapid German with her surrogate father. The scientist smiled, but it seemed disingenuous. William leaned in close to him as the father and daughter joked behind them, breaking into laughter.

  “It can’t be easy, I’m sure,” William whispered. “She will eventually come around. You must know that. Now she may think of you as the man who tried to take her father, but you said yourself—her mind will adjust.”

  Friedrich nodded absentmindedly as he looked forward, focusing on traveling the last hundred meters to the evac point.

  “It’s ridiculous. She’s a test subject,” he muttered. “Why would she have any loyalty to me, or I to her?”

  Friedrich continued marching, though his mind was elsewhere.

  “I threw away everything because I wanted to save her from those corporate dogs,” he said. “I was rich. I made millions developing the agent protocol. I designed them from the ground up. I’ve been with Mieke for ten years. Almost ten years, anyway. She was patient even when we had to tear down muscular knots that formed because of their scaled-up density. She didn’t say a word when we extracted tissue samples from her body to reconstruct other clones.”

  Friedrich shook his head.

  “She was always kind. It was like—she forgot to flip the switch and become a hardened killer. Not that she couldn’t. You saw her exceptional skill. She was able to so effectively disconnect those two portions of her mind. Mieke is good. Mr. Fox didn’t like that.”

  “You don’t mean…Alexis Fox?” William replied in shock. The missing piece fell into place. Friedrich was emotional. He revealed a bit more of his hand than he’d intended.

  “The agents are built by—” William paused mid-stride. “The peacekeeper hunting us wasn’t Russian, was it?

  “There’s no way to know who is or isn’t—” Friedrich replied before being cut off.

  “It was Jones. The bloody bastards at JCN sent that thing. That’s why it’s killing everyone. It’s not a machine of war, it’s an assassin!” William roared, setting down his half of the stretcher. “They don’t want her to get into enemy hands. It’s not a bloody case of national defense, it’s intellectual property theft!”

  “William, let’s discuss more on the transport,” Friedrich urged, pushing his hands downward in a calming motion.

  “Hundreds are dead because of stolen fucking merchandise!” the doctor swore.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Friedrich barked back. “The final test, after order delivery, was an endurance physical. JCN wanted to know exactly how much punishment agents could take. They were going to hurt her in ways I can’t even mention for the sole purpose of data generation! They planned to grind away limbs to see if her nanites could rebuild the missing tissue. I told them it didn’t work like that, but they refused to listen. They said they’d continue hurting her until I found a way to keep her alive. They said—”

  Friedrich paused to cough. He tucked his elbow to his mouth as he began to hyperventilate at the thought.

  “They said she was their property and I was to do it or be out of a job. They said if I didn’t find a way to save her, they’d simply find another engineer who could build better nanites. She would never escape the unending torture they’d planned for her. So I took her, and we ran!”

  Friedrich’s chest heaved as he shouted down the British doctor.

  “I suppressed her memories and combat ability so we could move more stealthily. A woma
n of her particular talents doesn’t exactly go unnoticed. I found a kind husband and wife. I gave them what they could never have. I said I’d help provide any supplies they needed in exchange for asylum. I ran all the way back to fucking Germany, but they found us anyway. It took years, but we couldn’t escape my own creations. How the hell do you think that made me feel as someone who loves her?”

  Mieke looked on at Friedrich as the emotionally torn man stared at the tan-uniformed Brit before him.

  “I didn’t know what they were planning to do to me,” Mieke whispered, suddenly understanding the haste with which they had to leave the JCN compound.

  “I lost my wife for her!” Friedrich howled. “We would never have been in this country if I hadn’t—”

  Friedrich brought a hand to his face and wiped away the unintentional tears that had welled in his eyes.

  “Fucking inhuman weapons. Faceless assassins, stealing entire city blocks indiscriminately.”

  “It was agents who took the nuclear weapons from the UK, wasn’t it?” William asked.

  Friedrich stared at the ground. He refused to make eye contact.

  “Even I don’t know that,” he moaned. “But war is good business. It’s a terrible, booming business.”

  William exhaled as he looked around in the midst of the lush field. The sun was below the horizon and the crickets had begun to chirp. Despite the horror surrounding the situation, the natural elements surrounding Berlin were hardly affected. He marveled at the splendor and realized they’d arrived. The actual pickup point was another forty meters north of their position, but the dropship would surely pick them up when it saw them. The struggle was finally over.