"Get me a corridor to the roof of that thing," I said.
Photovolt didn't speak, he just went to work. The line of shade on the ground reached out towards Firegod. More ambient light leaked into the shadow as it stretched outward. I wasn't sure if it was because the corridor of darkness was angled up, or if it was getting weaker the further it got from Photovolt. A patch of green on the lightning shield went dim as the corridor hit it. Photovolt visibly flinched when it made contact. I don't think he could maintain it for long against both the lightning shield and the sunlight. I launched myself at the dim spot, praying there was enough shadow to cover me.
I crashed into a wall of pain.
The green cascade diverted towards the offending mote trying to force its way through. Being that mote, I wasn't in good shape. Shadow boiled off of me in green light as every nerve lit up in agony. Without any momentum, I didn't know how to push forward with nothing to push against. I couldn't think through the pain. The only thing going through my mind was getting away from the torment. If I had control of my lungs, I would have screamed. As I passed the midpoint, the repulsive effect of the lightning shield hurtled me forward. I splatted like a bug on the windshield.
Smoke or shadowstuff roiled off of my wracked frame, boiling off into the sky. Choking and gasping, I couldn't do much beyond shudder as the agony subsided. My right eye blinked 'System Error' and went dead.
I was brought back to the fact that the surface I was laying on was a massive walking tank when it tilted and I began to slide. I fired my line launcher into the surface, halting my fall. I'd landed on the front of the cockpit. Arclight peered up at me. His green goggles hid most of his expression, though signs of the contemptuous look still showed through. I was just a bug on his windshield. He had the seat set as far back as it would go to accommodate the rig on his back. Its six spindly arms raised up, aiming their weapons at me. For a moment I wondered what he was thinking given the thick layer of armored glass separating us.
A laser in the visible spectrum would only be partly stopped by the canopy. Most of its energy would continue on. I spooled out more line, sliding below the edge of the canopy moments before six green splotches danced over the glass. My line snapped as the lasers burned through it. My skid became a fall as I plunged towards the ground. I snagged the first protrusion I could get and hung on for dear life, my legs dangling over empty space.
My heart leapt into my throat as it dawned on me that I was hugging the muzzle of a fifty caliber machine gun to my chest. I immediately dropped down so I was hanging from the barrels instead of in front of them. Standing behind a rifle when it went off required ear protection, having one go off near your head hurt. Having four half-inch bore mini-cannons repeatedly go off near my head felt like a jackhammer to the skull from the sound alone. It wouldn't surprise me if my ears were bleeding. They were certainly ringing. Being shaken around by the reciprocating barrels certainly didn't help any.
Moving down the barrels like a child on a jungle gym, I made it to the base of the turret. With a swift kick at the latch, the access hatch popped open. Hanging by my left hand from the barrels, I reached inside and began disconnecting the ammo feeds. I probably left one or two rounds connected to each weapon. Dangling by one arm several stories in the air, it was still a decent showing. Having brought my attention to my height, I made the mistake of looking down. Pavement glided under us as Firegod took a thunderous footstep. The entire frame shuddered as the footfall landed, sending me swinging.
Looking about, my eye fell on what might be a foothold off to my right. Had my eye been working, I'd have seen it earlier. It was a bar between two struts. I wasn't sure what it's purpose was, but I reached out with my foot and tried to get my toe on it. I must have kicked a latch that I couldn't see, because the bar fell. Actually, the struts slid down, bringing several more rungs into view. It was a ladder on the side of the machine. Now that it hung lower, it was easier to get my foot on it. I hooked an ankle about one of the lower rungs and set my other foot on it. Letting go of the machine guns, I swung towards the ladder.
I slipped.
Snatching hold of the first thing to come within reach, I ended up hanging by one hand and the crook of one knee. Looking again at the precipitous drop below me, I breathed hard. The air was choked with smoke and ozone. The stench of burning asphalt assailed my nostrils. Getting my other hand on the ladder, I pulled myself upright and let some of the extra blood drain from my head. Firegod shook with another footstep.
In a wash of ruby light and hellfire, I was transported to the surface of the sun. Arclight sliced the beam through the garage, splitting the hardened concrete like a plow through soft loam. Mere pavement disintegrated and cars popped like little bags of gasoline. A line of molten slag was left in its wake, much of the surface of the parking lot ablaze from the backwash. The hair on the back of my head had been singed off, and my exposed skin reddened by mere proximity. Almost in unison, every pore on my body opened up and spilled out sweat.
Swinging around to the correct side of the ladder, I started to climb. The hanging rungs led up to footholds cut into the side of the cockpit to allow access to the canopy. Drawing Icerazor's sword, I sliced through the lock. I marveled at how readily the blue tinged diamond blade carved through steel. I had little time to admire it, as Arclight couldn't miss the sight of his canopy popping open. As I tried to climb into the cockpit, Arclight pressed a gun to my torso and fired. The slug from the large bore semiautomatic ripped through my gut and erupted out my back. I stumbled back, a lance of pain driving through my midsection.
To arrest my fall, I sank Icerazor's blade into the armor plate of Firegod's torso. The absurdly sharp blade carved through the metal too easily and I continued to slide. I twisted the sword to the side so that I was no longer pressing edge-on into the steel. Dangling from a sword handle and a toehold in the crook between the cockpit and the front of the torso, I was leaking bad. Arclight had taken the first shot he'd gotten rather than risk letting me disarm him while lining up a lethal hit. It was close to my side, but it had to have caught at least a loop of intestine. Luckily, all of my guts had stayed inside. Now, if only my blood would do the same. That was running rather freely between my fingers.
Above me, I saw a tethered lightning shield emitter. It hung high in the air, straining against the cable that fed it power. It was the biggest thing keeping me from getting reinforcements. I looked at the hole in my middle and back up again. The gently sloping face of Firegod's torso looked like an impossible climb with me leaking as bad as I was. I let go of my midsection and wedged my blood-drenched fingers into the slot I'd cut into the armor. Drawing the sword out of the metal, I raised it as high as I could and sank it in again. Pulling myself up, I raised my chin to the pommel.
Firegod's left arm began to spin. As it began to hum, pops sounded from the ground as tufts of gas erupted in a line along the unburnt section of the parking lot. My analytical part chimed in and said it looked like a laser flash-vaporizing the pavement. This suspicion was confirmed when a waft of smoke passed in front of the arm and a white line of re-burnt particles marked the path of the pulses. Why spin a laser? Was it to help air cooling, or because the designers felt all Gatling guns should spin, even Gatling lasers? I shoved the question aside as I realized Arclight was chasing someone across the lot with his shots. Photovolt was bolting as fast as his nerd legs could carry him, and it wasn't that fast.
Getting a new grip in the gash down the armor, I moved the sword higher. Hauling myself up the front of the mecha, I left a red smear on the battleship gray paint. Taking hold of the angle where the front became the top, I pulled my weakening body onto the flat roof. I lay there, sucking down foul air as my lifeblood continued to leech from the hole in my gut.
A new flare of ruby light and a wash of hellfire swept past me as Firegod carved the main TNT office in two. A fireball burst from the
back of the building as the propane tank ruptured, the heated fuel igniting as soon as it mixed with air. What was left of the building was ablaze, a roiling inferno in a quickly disintegrating glass shell.
Firegod shuddered with another footstep as it crushed the remnants of the garage underfoot. My eye returned to the cables tethering the lighting emitters to the roof. They were anchored at the center of a ring of rectangular lenses in small casements. If I had to bet, I'd say those were the anti-missile lasers. Stumbling inside the ring, I sliced through all three cables in a single stroke. A regular blade probably would have bounced off the high tensile cables.
Repelling each other and the ground, the three emitters hurtled off into the sky, their green auras fading as the residue of their power supply faded. The cascade of green lighting sank into the Earth with a crump.
"The lightning shield is down," Donny said. His voice was the first thing to come from my earpiece since I'd hit the field. I slashed the blade through the laser boxes, disabling as many as I could cut into.
"I could use a hand up here," I said.
"Couldn't you have stopped him from stepping on my car?" Jennifer asked.
"Firegod first, blame later," I said.
"I told you the lightning shield was blocking his radio," Photovolt said.
"Don't make me repeat myself," I said, staggering towards the left arm. I sprawled on the roof as Firegod took another shuddering footstep. "And I haven't seen any decoys."
"Irvin's having a hard time with all the fear from the evacuees. Leave him be," Jennifer said. Her protective tone caught me off-guard.
"Stamp," I said.
"Yes?"
"Time to kick some ass."
"Got it." I could almost hear her smile over the radio. A bright blue figure with translucent, flesh tone, bat-like wings leapt skyward from behind the flames. This caught Arclight's attention, as the ponderous bulk of Firegod's torso began turning in her direction. She crashed into the roof with a loud clang. Flashing me a grin, she ripped the cockpit canopy from its hinges and threw it aside. It bounced off Firegod's main gun.
Scree-bam, scree-bam, scree-bam. The pulses of energy pounded Pam back, knocking her flat on her ass. Arclight hovered out of the cockpit, draped in a fully functional lightning shield of his own. his mechanical arms had changed weapons, holding the metal-smashing pulse guns he'd chased Pax Carnifex with at the Leyden Regency. Seeing Pam and I rise together, he split his fire, three at me, three at her. I wrapped myself in a force bubble that skidded closer to the edge with each hit. Pam had only her own toughness to go by, and the pummeling punted Pam over the missile rack.
In my own distraction, I forgot what happened when Nick's blade met Omicron's shield. With a tearing sound, I popped my own force bubble. I had to throw myself over the side to avoid being pulped by pulses from Arclight's guns. Again, I found myself clinging to a weapon barrel. This time, it was the Gatling laser. Each of its three barrels were as thick as my arms. They were hot enough to cause the blood on the outside of my suit to sizzle.
Firegod's foot crushed the prefab steel hanger by the helipad. There was nothing inside, so it wasn't as big a loss as the other buildings. But it had been the last structure standing on the site. Hauling myself onto a cooler part of the weapon arm, I got my feet onto solid metal. The world spun as Arclight rotated the torso to face backwards. In the middle of a half-molten parking lot, surrounded by shattered cars and noisome smoke, Donny was trying to help Pam up. She was at least conscious enough to wrap her wings around them when he got her upright.
As the Gatling laser began to spin up, I sank Icerazor's sword into the base of the weapon arm, severing its power feed. The motor lurched to a halt. Arclight waved the arm up and down, wrenching the blade from my grip. The translucent blue blade spun through the air, bounced off the remains of the hanger and landed in the drainage ditch.
"Son of a Bitch!" Arclight shouted. He said something unintelligible, then resumed shouting. "These goddamn children are making this a clusterfuck. How about a cluster bomb?" The hatches on the missile tubes popped open and launched rockets skyward on columns of flame. Almost immediately, the engines cut out and the missiles split open, scattering little yellow bomblets like seeds of death. There was ample fuel for a longer shot, but he was firing them like a shotgun at the compound.
"Oh, crap," Donny said as thousands of shadows fell over the area. There was no cover, nowhere he could get to, even if he abandoned Pam to the cluster bombs. I inched along the Gatling laser, my arm outstretched. The gauntlet kept failing to kick in. Even without my eye, I knew it was complaining that they were too far away. Perched on the end of the barrels, my arm stretched as far forward as I could get it, a bubble of red static wrapped around the pair as the area was engulfed in a wave of steel rail. Hundreds, no, thousands of explosions shredded what little was left of the TNT Research compound. The thundering shockwaves sounded like an abyssal drum roll as white-hot shrapnel ripped through the air. The brutal pounding drained what energy was left in the gauntlet, and as it ended, the bubble stuttered out.
Arclight glared at me from the open cockpit. Then he shook the weapon arm. I started to fall forward, but my right arm caught on something. It was the cable from my line launcher. There was only about four feet of it dangling from the device, but that was enough for Xiv to catch it. I gave a weak smile as he pulled and tipped me back onto the weapon barrels.
"You look hurt," Xiv said.
"What the fuck are you?" Arclight shouted. "Screw it, you're dead anyway." He opened fire from the cockpit, snapping off shots from the semiautomatic. Xiv scrambled to the far side of the weapon arm, crawling along the surface as easily as if it were a floor. I had a bit more trouble shimmying towards the base of the arm. It didn't help that I was dragging a gunshot wound along a hot barrel. This wasn't the worst pain I'd been in, but the more I bled, the more my strength ebbed. I wasn't sure I had any weapons left.
My laugh must have sounded deranged and out of place amid the devastation.
I was low on weapons, but so was Firegod. We'd wrecked or expended most of its firepower. It only had the main gun, which looked to have a monstrous recharge time. That, and the launcher slung under the Gatling laser. "Xiv, break that thing," I said, pointing to the device.
"On it," the dragon boy said, scrambling to find something that looked important enough to wreck. I pulled myself back onto Firegod's roof as Arclight appeared in a thunderclap above me. I ran my fingers through my hair to disguise bringing my hand to my ear. I gave Arclight my most obnoxious grin as I keyed on my earpiece.
"We've wrecked your toy, Arroyo," I said. "Firegod is disarmed."
Arclight loaded a new magazine into his pistol as all six mechanical arms took aim at me. "I don't need big guns to break you," he said. I let my hand drop. The city shield flickered out. Arclight looked over his shoulder, confusion soon wiped away by dread. A streak of green crashed into Arroyo, causing his lightning shield to flare up and burn out. They shot sideways, Jack ripping the mechanical arms out of Arclight's rig. Wrapping his thick arms about the rig, Jack crushed it. Arroyo slipped from his harness and fell to the mud with a wet splat. His only weapon left was a pistol, which Jack swatted aside contemptuously.
Looking for a safe place to sit, I fell into the cockpit. The chair was actually quite comfortable, though the mass of indicator lights, dials, switches and gauges surrounding me made little sense. A small display near the front showed a front and a side wireframe of Firegod, with large sections filled in with blinking red. A list of error codes scrolled continuously past on the right. One message in green stood out from the others 'Fusion Gun Ready'.
"Shadowdemon," Torquespiral's voice said in my earpiece.
"I'm here."
"We need to shut that thing down."
"There isn't exactly a nice big off switch," I said.
"I've got the manual here, I'll talk you through it."
"Okay," I said, trying to hide the weakness in my voice.
"On the center console, by the display, there should be a switch labeled 'FOS status'. Push it to 'Standby' and release it. That will initiate a software shutdown. After that finishes, we can move on to the hardware shutdown."
"This isn't going to be easy is it?" I asked, finding the switch. Flipping open the molly guard, I pressed it towards standby. When I let go, it snapped back to the middle position. The display blanked out and a string of status messages began crawling up it as the main computers shut down. A good chunk of the lights went dark. "All right, the computer is down."
"To your left, high up, there should be a section of control panel marked 'Fusion Generator'."
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 95
