Think about a world the place people stay, however giant alien robots rule. A world the place you discover a mysterious map. A map that leads you to an ancient weapon. A weapon that could be the one factor that may destroy the alien overlords and restore freedom to humanity. Would you utilize the weapon to save lots of the world?
That stunning mix of want success and hero’s journey is the setup for Gundog, the new novel by Gary Whitta. Whitta is greatest identified for writing main Hollywood screenplays like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Book of Eli, and After Earth. However, lately, he’s taken a few of his largest, greatest, most authentic concepts and filtered them through other mediums. Principally as a result of he is aware of large, authentic concepts don’t actually fly as films anymore.
Gundog is the most recent a type of. It first entered the world through Whitta’s Twitch, then a podcast, and now for the previous of us, it’s an actual book out on September 12. To rejoice, Whitta has solely supplied io9 with the whole first chapter so you may test it out and see if you’re taken with studying in regards to the hero who may need an opportunity to save lots of humanity in a mysterious, misplaced prototype known as a Gundog.
Right here’s Chapter Considered one of Gundog, by Gary Whitta, which is offered here.
The morning alarm sounded earlier than sunup, because it did each day with out fail. That was one factor you would say in regards to the Mek: they have been dependable, like clockwork—probably the most superior clockwork anybody had ever seen. Their machine composition was so intricate that the army scientists charged with figuring it out throughout the ten-year warfare had barely begun to scratch the floor of what made them tick earlier than it was too late. And now these valuable secrets and techniques, obtained at such nice price and as soon as thought the one hope of turning the tide, have been misplaced perpetually. Obliterated by the Mek within the days after the warfare, together with the remainder of human historical past and studying.
The alarm was a shrill, modulated tone, designed by the Mek to trigger the best potential discomfort to the human ear. That they had studied human anatomy and neurology properly, each throughout the warfare and after, to maximise their each benefit over their enemy, and people efforts paid off in each element, together with this one. The alarm was primarily a sonic weapon that instantly introduced on piercing complications and nausea and didn’t stop till everybody in each barracks hut was off the bed and dressed and lined up outdoors for the morning head rely. From the alarm’s first sounding to the time it was shut off was often lower than a minute. Few might tolerate it any longer than that. So there was no dawdling, even on the a part of these too sick or infirm to be off the bed at such an hour. Others would haul them to their ft, costume them, and carry them outdoors in the event that they needed to. Something to cease that sickening sound.
The alarm roused everybody besides Dakota, who was already awake. She woke early each morning and dressed forward of the alarm, then lay on her bunk, her eyes adapting to the darkish, staring on the slats on the ceiling above. She had memorized each splinter and gnarl within the wooden by now. What else was there to do? She wished she might sleep by way of the night time, however some perpetual, indefinable itch in the back of her thoughts would inevitably wake her within the pre-dawn hours and hold her awake whereas she listened to the loud night breathing of the others, or typically the cawing of a distant hen outdoors.
And now the alarm drove a steel spike by way of her cranium and twisted her abdomen into an agonizing knot, and she or he was instantly on her ft and shifting shortly throughout the barracks to her brother Sam’s bunk. He was sitting up, groggy from waking and wincing in ache from the excruciating sound. Most others within the barracks have been by now already off the bed and hurriedly dressing, however Sam was slower than most. Weaker.
“Sam, come on. Let’s go.” Dakota put her arm round him and lifted him off the bed. He swayed unsteadily on his ft as she helped him costume; Sam was lacking his proper arm under the elbow and it wasn’t simple for him to do it alone. Anybody who held up the top rely and the cessation of the alarm can be in for a tough time by the hands of their barracks mates for the remainder of the day, so Dakota at all times made positive that by no means occurred. He was just a few years older than her, and for years he’d protected her, saved her alive, operating and hiding collectively earlier than the Mek lastly captured them and introduced them right here. Now, collectively on this township, she did the identical for him. She was all he had.
Some fared higher than others in captivity. The sturdy ones survived, and the weak ones, who have been shortly recognized by the Mek as a waste of rations, have been “recycled”—that’s what they known as it—for gas. Sam was someplace in between. He had as soon as been so sturdy—a tower of power and resilience that Dakota had come to admire and had tried to emulate. For so long as she might bear in mind, she had appeared as much as him. However these previous few years within the Mek township… they’d taken one thing important out of him. Hollowed him out.
People weren’t constructed to be prisoners, Dak, he had instructed her time and again, after they have been nonetheless residing in deserted farmhouses and sewers and half-destroyed house blocks, always shifting from place to position, making an attempt to remain hidden. If it involves it, I’ll maintain us each. Higher to die free than stay in a cage. Again then, he at all times carried a pistol with two rounds in it that he’d saved for simply that function. However when that point lastly got here, when the Mek drones surrounded them in an open subject with no hope of escape, he couldn’t convey “himself to place a bullet in his little sister. As an alternative he simply fell to his knees and sobbed. They usually have been each taken and introduced right here.
Within the years that adopted, Sam grew to become a residing monument to what he had at all times instructed her. People weren’t constructed to be prisoners. Dakota’s coronary heart broke for him as she watched, every day lowering him to rather less than he was the day earlier than. He had misplaced a lot weight that Dakota scarcely acknowledged him because the sturdy, match man he as soon as was. His uniform coveralls hung dishevelled and shapeless on his skeletal body. His eyes had grown sunken, his pores and skin pallid. At night time, she would usually sit by the aspect of his mattress and watch him sleep, and at instances he appeared to her like a useless man prepared for burial.
When Sam misplaced his proper arm a 12 months in the past, in an accident with a metal press whereas working in one of many township factories, which may properly have been the top. However Dakota, who was lucky to have been working simply outdoors on the time and heard the cries, rushed in and saved him. Tied off the wound and cauterized it utilizing the manufacturing facility instruments at hand, then carried him again to the barracks to take care of him. She frightened he was already pretty much as good as useless—the Mek thought of a one-armed employee an inefficient expenditure of rations, and usually they might have recycled him the identical day—however Dakota pleaded with the Mek supervisor to spare him, providing to separate her rations with him till he was properly sufficient to be productive once more. Coming from anybody else, such a plea would have fallen on deaf ears, however Dakota had confirmed her price to the township as an engineer and problem-solver many instances over, and so—in a uncommon and in the end pragmatic present of mercy—they allowed her brother to stay.
Sam by no means once more returned to full work. Within the Mek’s eyes, he was a cripple, able to solely menial chores and unworthy of a full ration of meals. So to maintain him alive, Dakota continued to separate her rations with him—to today.
However the toll that these previous years as a slave laborer had taken on his physique wasn’t the worst of it. It was what it had achieved to his spirit that crushed Dakota probably the most. All of the battle had gone out of him. His quick-minded improvisation, which had saved them from Mek detection repeatedly throughout their years as fugitives, and the gleam in his eye as they sat by night time round makeshift fires and he instructed her tales of humanity’s valiant final stand in opposition to the Mek… all that was gone. Solely this emaciated shell remained.
Twice she had caught him near ending his personal life, as soon as with a sharpened piece of steel he’d snuck from the manufacturing facility, and later with a bottle of some dire Mek chemical stolen from a upkeep shed. Each instances she managed to speak him down, persuade him to maintain residing, if not for himself then for her, as a result of he was all she had on this entire depressing world, and if he left her, who knew how lengthy she would final earlier than following him. However she knew that regardless of his guarantees, the best risk to his life was not a Mek or one other accident, however his personal deliberate hand. So she continued to maintain a detailed eye on him. Usually, whereas he was speculated to be working the gardening plot or ferrying provides, she’d catch him simply staring on the horizon, or at nothing, and she or he’d know what he was considering. She’d make her method over as shortly as she might—earlier than a Mek watcher might get to him first, to provide him a low-voltage jolt to spur him again to work—and provides him a smile or a contact of her hand, some reminder that he hadn’t but misplaced every thing.
Now she completed serving to him costume, and collectively they joined the road of staff shortly submitting out of the barracks into the floodlit night time. Dakota hadn’t seen the true darkish of night time, the celebrities within the sky, for years, blotted out as they have been by the Mek gentle towers that blazed from nightfall to daybreak, protecting the whole township awash in stark fluorescent gentle that made every thing on the earth look synthetic, antiseptic, alien. There have been shutters on the barracks doorways to maintain the sunshine out so staff might sleep, however out right here within the open, it barely appeared like night time in any respect, not less than not the type Dakota remembered. Nonetheless, it will be sunup quickly, after which the lights would shut down and cease buzzing, and there the blue sky of day can be, the solar and the clouds.
Not even the Mek might take that away.
She stood nonetheless beside her brother, ready because the Mek drone moved from one finish of the road to the opposite, scanning every face, ensuring everybody who checked into the barracks hut the night time earlier than was nonetheless current and accounted for. Solely when each drone surveying each hut was glad did the morning alarm fall silent. Everybody exhaled in aid, their complications and abdomen pains abating, then on the sound of one other alarm, this one a brief however disagreeable digital squawk, they made their strategy to the canteen huts for his or her breakfast ration, the Mek drones registering and recording their each transfer.
* * *
By the point breakfast was over and everybody was reporting to their work assignments, the solar had simply began developing, respiratory gentle and life into the day. There was a cool breeze, and Dakota took a second to cease and shut her eyes and really feel it waft over her, the briefest sense-memory of freedom. Then she heard the telltale clik-clik-clik of a Mek drone approaching and acquired shifting once more earlier than it might jolt her.
Most everybody within the township labored to serve the Mek. They toiled in factories and foundries and on meeting strains, turning the steel ore and different uncooked parts that arrived by automated convoy from different townships into the refined supplies and elements the Mek used to construct extra of their cities, construct extra of themselves. However Dakota was totally different. She labored to maintain the township itself. Her specialty commerce was every thing. She fastened the plumbing when the pipes froze in winter or the bogs backed up; she patched fried electrical panels to maintain the hut lights on; she decontaminated the water provide when it grew to become undrinkable, because it so usually did from the Mek’s poisonous exhaust chemical compounds leaching into the groundwater; she saved the barracks huts’ dilapidated heating and air flow techniques operating; she repaired damaged home windows and leaking roofs… principally every thing that wanted to be achieved to maintain the Mek’s slave labor drive from freezing to dying or dying from poisoning or dehydration.
Nonetheless, many did die. There was no township physician, nobody sufficiently old to have that sort of coaching or expertise, and other people continuously succumbed to diseases and accidents that will have been routinely treatable earlier than the warfare. The Mek might simply have supplied medical services primarily based on their huge data of human physiology, however someplace alongside the best way one in every of their impenetrable algorithms had calculated that it was extra environment friendly to tolerate the mortality price than to expend sources to curb it. There was, in any case, a unending provide of individuals to interchange those that have been misplaced. New staff arrived within the township through Mek jail automobiles frequently.
Dakota was an exception in that regard. Although no human was really invaluable, she was thought of much less expendable by the Mek than most, as she had come to know each quirk and foible of the township’s run-down utilities, higher even than the Mek themselves, and if she have been to die, many extra may comply with earlier than she could possibly be changed. Greater than the algorithm deemed acceptable.
As she went about her day, she was at all times cautious to not let Sam out of her sight for too lengthy. He’d not too long ago been moved to an out of doors gardening element, tilling crops that helped complement the employee meals provide, so she too tried to remain outdoors as a lot as potential, making busywork for herself if mandatory. The Mek watchers would jolt her in the event that they thought she was procrastinating, however right this moment was simple. A barracks hut roof had sprung a nasty leak, letting the rains in. Dakota may need wanted solely the work of a morning to patch the leak, however she had satisfied a Mek supervisor that it will be extra environment friendly to re-shingle the entire roof, additional convincing the Mek that it will take her not less than two weeks—twice her “precise estimate. She needed to be up there so long as potential, not solely as a result of it gave her a very good view of Sam and his backyard plot, but in addition as a result of she preferred it up there. Being up off the bottom, nearer to the sky above, felt to her like a form of freedom, although the roof of the hut wasn’t at the same time as tall because the township’s perimeter fence, which could possibly be seen within the distance, towering over every thing, an ever-present reminder that even the briefest feeling of freedom was an phantasm.
“Want a hand?”
Startled, Dakota nearly hit her thumb together with her hammer. She turned to see Runyon standing on the ladder she’d used to climb up right here, peering over the sting of the roof at her. He was one of many youngest staff within the township, eighteen or nineteen she guessed, though she’d by no means actually given it—or him—very a lot thought.
“Thanks, I’m good,” she mentioned, turning again to the shingle she was engaged on. After hammering just a few extra instances, she acquired the sensation she was nonetheless being watched and turned once more to see Runyon nonetheless there on the ladder, her. She glared at him, and this time he appeared embarrassed and appeared away.
“Do you want one thing?” she requested curtly.
“Completed with my element early, thought I would assist.” There was a quaver in his voice, like he was nervous, although Dakota couldn’t think about why. All she knew was, the very last thing she needed was somebody to assist her make this work go sooner.
She turned again to her work once more. “Go ask a supervisor. I’m positive they’ll discover one thing so that you can do. Or simply wait there—they’ll discover you.” And true sufficient, she heard a Mek observer approaching at roof peak, closing on Runyon. Its sensors had detected him misplaced and inactive, and even now, Dakota had little question it was charging its electrified prod to jolt him.
She was stunned by what Runyon did subsequent. He ought to have raced again down the ladder, however as a substitute, he stayed a second longer even because the drone drew nearer.
He spoke shortly. “There’s story time on the rec hut tonight, proper after dinner ration. It’s best to come. I’ll be there. Will you come?”
Earlier than Dakota might reply, the drone moved inside only a few ft of Runyon, a second from jolting him, and he slid down the ladder and raced again to his assigned space. She shook her head, took one other roof nail from the field, and went again to work because the drone turned and moved away.
What occurs subsequent? Discover out in Gundog, which comes out September 12.
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