Five Stars: Five Outstanding Tales from the early days of Stupefying Stories by Aaron Starr, Guy Stewart, Rebecca Roland, David Landrum, Ryan Jones Page B

up.”
    ¤
    Azrial moved to the elevator doors and tried to pull them open, but they did not budge. Maybe part of the mechanism was fused? She subvocalized a command to the nanogland implanted in the base of her skull, felt the surge of power as nanocells throughout her body manufactured stimulants.
    This time the doors opened with a grinding noise, as Azrial strained against them. Doubtless she’d injured herself pushing that hard, but the nanocells would already be at work restoring the damage. The shaft was partly choked with rubble, but not impassable. She climbed down to the basement level and forced those doors open as well.
    She blinked in the sudden glare of artificial light. The lower level was surprisingly intact. A nurse’s desk, filled with papers and coffee mugs; a row of chairs, and a rack of old magazines. For a moment it seemed as if she had only arrived late for an appointment, and all the terror of the past fifteen years was a dream. No frantic rush to the shuttles and space elevators, coughing blood from the poisoned atmosphere that sterilized and killed. No murder over the reserves of air and food on Luna, as frantic refugees crowded into the domes. No frozen bones bleaching in the dust of Mare Serenitatis.
    As she stepped forward, the illusion of normalcy was quickly dispelled. A pair of mummified legs in stained scrubs protruded from behind the counter. She stepped over them, not looking down, and moved silently down the hall. She listened for any sound beyond that of her booming heart and the too-loud rasp of her breathing apparatus; the tread of a wheel, the hum of a photocell. But the hall was as silent as the landscape above.
    After several turns and branches of the corridors, Azrial came to a door, slightly ajar. She gently pushed it open the rest of the way with the muzzle of her rifle, looked inside, and froze. A Machine hulked in the room beyond, slouched like a drunk against a pile of smashed steel crates. It looked almost like a massive human, save for the blades and the many eyes. Withered bodies in lab coats were strewn about. Most were in pieces; the blades on the Machine’s arm would have gone through human flesh as if it was made of soft butter.
    She held still, watching for signs of activity from the razored steel giant, but it did not move. Hardly daring to hope, she edged into the room. It did not twitch. But what had brought it down?
    In a moment she had her answer. Crushed beneath the chrome trunk was a white-coated body, holding a wire-sheathed globe. When she gently lifted it from the corpse’s hand, it suddenly crackled.
    The light globe in the ceiling gave a strange buzz and went out. All she could see was the glow of her wrist com and the data imposed on her vision by her retinal implants. Before her eyes had a chance to adjust or switch to night vision, the room burst into white light again, sizzling with weird surges of static, green halos of pale fire dancing all around them. Her cochlear implant shrieked painfully and went dead. The text on her retinal display vanished. A moment later the phosphorescent glow faded, and the darkness returned with a terrible weight—this time unbroken by any source of light at all. Her comm was inert, her weapon dark, and none of the facility’s lights were on.
    Some sort of improvised EMP device or something? Crap. Crap crap crap.
    She forced herself to calm down, slowing her breathing, letting her heart rate drop. It took a very long time without the assistance of her networked nanocells.
    After what seemed an eternity, the facility lights flickered back on. The status indicators on her pulse rifle reactivated. Her breather continued to supply untainted air. But her nanogland remained inert. The stimulants, the boosted reflexes, the continual repairs to her body, all had been shut down. She felt heavy, sluggish, and blind without the retinal display, as if one of her senses had been removed.
    I’ll never get clear of the Machines like