Chapter 4:
The Fight to Escape
A-KA HAD BEEN BROUGHT into a small fighter airship that only had a single clone as the pilot.
“Find a spot, sit down, and fasten your seatbelts! I’m in charge of taking you guys over to the mother ship!” the pilot shouted above the din.
The old man had tasked A-Ka with handing something over to the clones’ General Liber, so he quickly sat down. Through the cabin windows, he could see that the skies were filled with glowing flames, while mechanical troops swarmed like a hive of killer bees, obstructing the sky from view.
Suddenly, the aircraft’s motion shook them to their bones.
Heishi tightly gripped the grab handle above him as the pilot called, “Watch your heads!”
Flipping in midair, the fighter craft turned to one side and narrowly slipped through the gap between the metal tentacles of two giant, jellyfish-like craft.
“Are you guys going to win?” A-Ka asked.
“Can’t say for sure. I don’t know which bastard leaked the news, but the rebellion plans were pushed forward!”
A-Ka’s heart twanged with fear.
“We’re going to the central region of the Country of Machines,” the pilot continued. “You guys be careful.”
“Don’t go there! You’ll die!”
“That’s where the main forces are. General Liber is on the front lines. No turning back!”
A flash in the distance illuminated the entire world, and a ring of fire blossomed outward as some unidentified thing whistled toward them. The blinding light blotted out the entirety of the battlefield.
In that instant, all sound grew distant, and their surroundings became incredibly peaceful. Heishi seemed to have seen something, and he slowly rose and walked toward the cockpit. A-Ka grabbed him, trying to get him to sit back down. It was far too dangerous for him to be standing, but the words that A-Ka shouted were drowned out by this void of silence. He realized that the sound of the explosion had been so loud it had rendered everyone temporarily deaf.
Just as he grabbed Heishi’s hand, interlocking their fingers, he felt that the light carried a wave of energy that was faintly calling to them.
What is that?
For a moment, A-Ka forgot that he was trapped in a dangerous situation, and his eyes fixed on the thing inside the white glow.
It was then that the small fighter craft broke out of the circle of light. As sound returned to the world, A-Ka saw his surroundings clearly.
It was a truly breathtaking view: The clones’ mother ship was as large as a city. Floating in the air, it spewed millions of fighter crafts that rushed toward the Central Computer like a giant wave.
But the Central Computer, Father, stood firm against the onslaught, radiating with light as it directed dense masses of flying robots to block the forward motion of the mother ship. In the sky, black clouds roiled as they gathered into a vortex, the magnetic field splitting the world into countless little broken pieces.
This was a battle of gods. In front of such might, A-Ka couldn’t help but shudder.
Right then, Father’s defenses once again released flash bombs, one of which pierced through the mother ship’s flank. The steel body exploded apart, sending shrapnel shooting in all directions.
“Be careful!” Heishi pushed A-Ka to the ground.
A piece of high-speed shrapnel flew toward their cabin and pierced the pilot’s forehead. In the background, a sonic boom echoed. Blood spurted everywhere inside the cabin, and the fighter craft rocked wildly, spiraling toward the earth below. A-Ka slid to the tail end of the craft.
“Don’t worry about me! Go take the pilot’s seat!” A-Ka cried.
Heishi was of the same mind, and he scrambled over the chairs in a fierce headlong charge, pulling aside the pilot’s body before grabbing the joystick.
A-Ka directed him. “Keep it steady. Pull toward you!”
Heishi fiercely yanked at the joystick, and A-Ka fell forward, landing near the cockpit. He speedily took the copilot’s seat and began tapping away rapidly with his thumb, manning the antiaircraft gun. The laser turrets on the craft activated, pulverizing the meteors of debris flying at them.
“Now what?” Heishi asked.
“Do you know how to fly a ship?! Go toward that large one!”
“I don’t know!”
“Just move the joystick! Quick, we’re going to die!”
“Shut up! We can’t rush into the center of things and take bomb blasts head-on!”
The mission had trumped everything else in A-Ka’s mind, to the point where he had forgotten that they needed to survive this as well. He wanted to rethink things, but reality forced him to stay resolute.
“Hurry. Just go,” A-Ka said.
Suddenly, another piercing boom disrupted the world around them, and the small fighter airship was sent rocketing toward the Central Computer. A fiery glow bloomed outside the cockpit, and the ensuing shock wave slammed A-Ka headfirst into the bridge. His head felt like it had been split in two, and the explosions lingered like a haunting in his ears.
Through his vertigo, he felt Heishi patting his face.
“Wake up!”
A-Ka hazily lifted his head, which now bore a dripping wound, only to be struck dumb by what he saw.
The two of them were stuck at the edge of the cockpit. Beneath them was nothing but air, as they were some thousands of miles off the ground. Not too far from them, the huge mother ship was being bombarded incessantly, the defensive layer shuddering violently under the onslaught of each new blast. Any time now, it would throw them and the rest of the fighters off. The small fighter ship was tilted almost 70 degrees in its position on the turret, and it could fall at any point.
A-Ka gathered his wits about him and flipped the switch on the nearby emergency button, turning on the backup lights, which began to flash the word “Damaged.” The power was low.
“Do we leave the ship behind?” Heishi called above the ear-piercing siren.
“No way!” A-Ka said, just as loud. “There are over six hundred floors in the Central Tower. If we ran all the way down, we would die without a doubt!”
Heishi let out a frustrated, helpless sigh. “What should we do?”
“There’s no more power. We need to find a way to recharge the ship’s energy supply.”
How could they do that? A-Ka looked at the 12 percent left of the power supply bar, his face filled with consternation and his head ringing.
Heishi slowly calmed down and asked A-Ka, “Are there any transportation devices nearby?”
“That won’t work…” A-Ka lifted his gaze toward the heavens, where the fight between the mother ship and the Central Computer was entering its most chaotic stage.
In a flash, multiple thoughts passed through his head: First, abandoning the ship and running for their lives was too dangerous. Between here and the ground they would be caught in the middle of the crossfire, and if they escaped on foot, they could not run quickly—a bomb could blast them into smithereens at any point. Second, finding a new mode of transport was not possible. In the Country of Machines, Father controlled almost all of the flying ships.
“Here, there is only Father,” A-Ka explained. “We cannot break the control that it has over the flying robots.”
Heishi also lifted his head to the sky, where he saw countless humanoid mechas shuttling back and forth.
“What about those?” he asked.
“Those are the clones’ mecha suits. We have no way to use them.”
“Maybe there are broken suits?”
“There’s no time to fix them right now. We’ll have to rely on blind luck. Let’s find a way to recharge the power.”
Heishi could only nod. A-Ka’s mind was clouded with worry, but after a moment, he looked up into the depths of the tall computer tower. A daring thought had struck him: They could use Father’s energy source. There should be ports for the robots to charge themselves.
Now, A-Ka had a plan.
“Hold onto me,” he said.
Heishi grabbed A-Ka’s hand, allowing A-Ka to climb out of the ship. As he looked down, he instantly felt the metal he was braced against spin underneath his feet.
“Be careful!” Heishi warned.
Doing acrobatics on an airship that’s almost sideways is a sign of how insane I’ve become, A-Ka thought. Before, he would never have imagined that such a thing might happen. Clearly, humans could do anything when standing at the gates of life and death.
Activating the charging port on one side of the ship, he pulled out the power cable and wrapped it around his waist before looking for the closest opening.
It was only thirty feet above them. But the entire Central Computer tower was shaking, and its exterior was as smooth as a marble. There was nothing for him to grab. How would he climb up there?
Heishi saw what A-Ka was trying to do and shouted, “Come back in. I’ll figure out a way.”
“Okay, but how? Every wall is made of incredibly strong metal.”
Not answering, Heishi pulled A-Ka back into the cabin and took the cable. “How does this connect?”
“Clip the latch on and that’s it,” A-Ka said.
Heishi looked around his surroundings, then found a rubber plunger used to clean out the inner pipes of the generator. “Use this.”
It was… It was really a toilet plunger.
“I-it won’t work,” A-Ka protested. “That’s way too dangerous.”
Heishi didn’t respond. Instead, he dashed forward and leaped up toward the platform high above, toilet plunger in hand. With a sucking noise, it stuck against the side of the tall Central Computer tower. Watching this, A-Ka was dumbfounded. Below Heishi’s feet was a mile drop, and his body was shaking with the force of the explosions. The power cable was still wrapped around his waist.
A-Ka didn’t dare to breathe. He could only watch as Heishi steadily progressed upward, seeing him press one hand against the outer wall and use the friction of his palm to steady his body while with his other hand he pulled the toilet plunger off and hurried to stick it in a higher spot.
That works?!
A-Ka stared with his mouth open as Heishi used the toilet plunger to climb higher and higher up Father’s body. He was simultaneously absolutely terrified and greatly amused.
Heishi approached that opening and set up the connection. The power instantly came back to the cabin, and all of the lights came on.
“It worked!” A-Ka shouted loudly. “Heishi, come back, quick!”
But Heishi didn’t move an inch. He remained where he was, and though A-Ka’s anxious voice called to Heishi, the continuous explosions drowned him out.
Shit!
A-Ka turned and saw that the mother ship that spanned the sky was on the verge of falling. A blue light shot out of Father’s tall tower, piercing the mother ship’s abdomen. That explosion released a burst of energy, but Heishi merely held one hand against the connection point as he stared fixedly at the power cable connector.
There was a blue glow where the cable plugged in, and a voice faintly reverberated in Heishi’s mind—a man’s voice, but too indistinct to comprehend.
The airship was already fully charged, and A-Ka was shouting for him, but Heishi was still sunk into a trance. A-Ka was almost ready to fall into despair.