by Mark Harritt
----------------------------------------------------
Michelle screamed her rage. Another good man dead, taken by the monsters of this world. First, her husband Roberto, the father of her child. And now, Laura had lost her husband, Murph, who truly was one of the good ones. There were other men out there, though, who needed her help, and she was going to make sure that they didn’t meet the same fate.
“John, are you there?”
“Michelle, they fucking killed Murph.”
She replied, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. She knew that Murph was dead, but she had to refocus John and the others.
“We don’t know that, John. He might just be hurt. We’re going to go get him.”
“Kill them all, Michelle. Destroy them, every last one of them,” John’s chilling words sent a shiver up Michelle’s back, mirroring her own thoughts.
“Keep coming to me, John, we’ve got you.”
The mechs ran up the canyon, trying to get to John before anything else bad happened. Michelle had sampled some of the other channels, and she knew that this fight wasn’t going well for them. They’d been mostly triumphant on this world, but this battle was going against them. They hadn’t lost too many people since coming to this horrific future, despite the terrors they’d faced, but it was beginning to look like their luck had run out. She thought about the horror the team found in the Turinzoni compound, and she felt her heart harden and her resolve strengthen. She wasn’t going to lose more people to these monsters. One prayer for Murph, and she was ready for a fight.
Her head’s up showed John and the others running toward her. She could see them through the mist, mostly in the thermal range. Then, behind them, even though she couldn’t physically see it yet, an icon was overlaid indicating the hostile robot. As it got closer, the A.I. limned the outline of the robot in red behind the men on the ground so that she could tell where it was. She wanted to shoot, but there were friendlies in the way, and her A.I. wouldn’t release the safety on the railgun. She cursed the digital restraints, although she knew they were there for a reason. She was eager to kill the damn thing, but she wasn’t going to be able to do anything until the team got past.
“John, it’s right on your tail. Move past us so that we can engage the hostiles.”
“You got it, Michelle. We’re going to hug the walls.”
The five blue icons parted to the sides of the canyon and, to her perception, flew past her and Diane as she ran forward, though it had to do more with her acceleration that it did with theirs. Her face broke into a wide smile as soon as the safety disengaged and she could open up on the hostile robot.
Her anger grew into a white hot inferno inside her. She hadn’t been able to hit back when Rob was killed, but she had her chance to now. She screamed her rage as she triggered the railgun, shooting the robot’s torso. The chunks of superheated supersonic slugs slammed into the armor. Diane stepped up beside her and added her firepower to the assault. The double stream of iron slugs danced across the robot’s torso ripping and tearing, but the robot’s armor was able to deflect the damage.
She wasn’t satisfied with the little damage she’d inflicted on the towering robot, she needed more. A small voice in the back of her head reminded her that she needed to maintain control. She realized that she’d have to fight smarter if she wanted to kill the threat. She swallowed her rage, and pushed it back so that she could use the anger, and not let it drive her. It was her and Diane. She needed to be a leader, not a brawler. She started thinking instead of reacting. She thought about how to bring down the robot, analyzing its weaknesses like she would if it was a human. If the armor on the torso was too thick for them to make a kill, she’d have to hit it elsewhere. Then, Luis’ words about how to engage the robots came back to her, and the strategy popped into her mind, “Mech five, you shoot the knees, I’ll take the sensor packet in the head.”
“Roger Mech four, Mech five engaging.”
Michelle watched as a luminous stream of iron pellets targeted the robot’s knee joints. Diane, with the aid of the A.I. was a good shot with the railgun, but the speed and movement of the robot ensured that the majority of the slugs missed. Michelle triggered her railgun, and watched with satisfaction as the incandescent projectiles slammed into the robots face. That slowed the robot enough that Diane was able to increase her shot efficiency. Slugs pounded the knee joint. Now, the double attack did some damage. The robot’s right leg crumpled from the damage it was taking. That knocked the robot off balance, and the mass of incandescent iron hitting it in the face pitched the robot backwards. Now, in an awkward and weakened position, it didn’t have a chance against the two women. They kept up the intense fire and it toppled to the ground. With the robot on the ground, Michelle had a perfect up-skirt target to engage, and she aimed at the groin. Diane targeted the arm that was trying to lever the robot off the ground.
Michelle’s up-skirt shots broke through the groin and started streaming into the interior of the robot. Sparks arced through the air as iron pellets connected circuits that were never meant to interact. An explosion rent the air when she hit the power supply. The robot started flailing.
Michelle and Diane both yelled in celebration.
“Take that you fucking bastard,” Diane yelled. “You’re our bitch, now!”
The grin on Michelle’s face was cruel as she gloated in their victory, “Diane, coup de grace. Take the fucker out. I’ll make sure the other ones don’t sneak up on you.”
“Done.”
Diane’s pulse laser fired up. In the visible light spectrum, to normal eyes, there wasn’t anything to be seen. The A.I. showed a long dagger like appendage at the end of the mech’s arm. Diane leaped forward, momentarily passing Michelle. The feet of the mech slammed down on the one good arm the robot had. Diane started sawing at the head of the robot.
Michelle moved past Diane and the thrashing robot, clearing her field of fire, knowing that there were other hostiles out there. It didn’t take long before the two more showed up.
“Diane, you finished back there? We have more hostiles inbound.”
Michelle heard a grunt, and then Diane walked forward, holding the head of the dead robot like a bowling ball, the fingers of the mech hooked through the holes where the sensors used to be. She tossed the head forward, and it thumped into the ground and slowly rolled down the canyon toward the hostile robots.
Michelle watched it leisurely bump across the canyon floor, “So, what do you think?”
“Dunno, what do you want to do?”
“Well, there’s five of them.”
“There is now. They’re moving fast, but I think we can whittle down our odds.”
Michelle nodded, forgetting that Diane couldn’t see her, “Yep.”
Michelle brought up her railgun and started shooting. They had the advantage since the canyon funneled the robots to them. Even though this canyon was wider, the robots couldn’t spread out, and presented a massed target. The robots were moving fast, but Michelle and Diane had distance, and they used it effectively, targeting the weaker joints. The robots slowed as the pellets chewed into them, hampering their mobility. One went down as it’s leg gave out completely. Tumbling down, stability compromised, the robot crashed into another, sending that one careening into the canyon wall. The robot that slammed into the wall took seconds to recover, and started moving toward them again. The robots took damage, but they didn’t give up or retreat. Even the one with the busted knee was pulling itself toward them using the one good leg and two arms.
“I’m out,” Diane reported. They’d done a lot of damage to the towering robots, but that many targets moving that fast tended to soak up the projectiles.
Michelle stopped firing to conserve ammunition. She was getting low, also, “Well, we don’t have time to go back and get a reload. We’re going to have to get up close and personal.”
“I like up close and personal. Murph was my friend,” Diane replied. Her pulse laser flashe
d on.
Michelle turned hers on. They picked up speed as they started running toward the robots. As they drew closer, Michelle noticed that the robots were looking ragged. They’d done some damage, but not enough. At least not yet.
“Don’t go for the torso, Diane. We have to hit them at the joints. Carve them up like a turkey at thanksgiving.”
Five of them. That was a tall order for the pair of mechs. The time spent driving the mechs and interfacing with the A.I. was a major advantage now. Michelle’s mech moved fluidly, responding quickly to her thoughts and muscularity as she drove the mech. She wondered what she was going to do as she ran, but as soon as she got close, instinct and muscle memory took over. One of the robots loomed close, and she went low. She drove the pulse laser in against the knee. It wasn’t a lot of damage, but, for now, it was enough. Another one reached for her, and she grabbed the wrist and turned in a circle, close to the body of the robot, using her aikido training and its momentum against it.
The robot’s momentum drove it into another. Michelle used the pulse laser like a blade, moving like a whirling dervish between the robots, never in one place long enough for them to fix her into a position where they could do damage to her mech. She wasn’t able to track Diane, but she could only assume that Diane was doing the same thing. Michelle sliced at the elbow, and then punched the pulse laser into the shoulder of another robot. She twirled away from the two, dropping down to slice at another knee. One of the robots was reeling from the impact of another that Diane had just twisted into it. Michelle did a leg sweep, and the robot went down. As it went down, Michelle did a cut across the elbow, a back swipe with the laser across the face, then rolled forward and cut into a damaged knee. She danced away from a punch, and as the arm went over, she cut the elbow, slammed the laser into the underarm, then cut the back of the knee.
Diane was doing the same. Moves that an Aikido grand master would appreciate slammed the robots into each other and kept them off balance as the two mech masters danced and twirled through the five robots. Smoke and sparks filled the air as the damaged robots were assaulted, and as a consequence of the damage, had a harder time moving to target the mechs.
Michelle had one of the robots right where she wanted it, down on its knees. The pulse laser went into the armpit, then into the elbow. She punched it in the back of the head, and the head snapped forward. She jammed her railgun in the space between the cowl and the back of the head, and she triggered it. Whatever had kept the head in place snapped and the head lolled forward. She twirled away just in time to keep another one from wrapping her up with its arms.
That robot was the only one left that had any type of mobility. The others, with the possible exception of the one that she’d just shot in the back of the neck, were still alive, but their knees, legs and arms were barely functional. So this was the last robot at the dance. Michelle and Diane twirled around it. Pulse lasers flashed, cutting, piercing, chopping and severing.
The robot never had a chance. The two mechs danced away, and, slowly, the robot settled back on its heels. And then, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut, it crumpled into a noisy heap of dismembered steel crashing into the ground. Now, it was the coups de grace for the defeated robots. Michelle and Diane picked the first of their victims.
Michelle walked over to the one that they’d just cut to pieces. What was it they called it back on old Earth? The death of a thousand cuts? That was pretty much what they’d just inflicted on this robot. It couldn’t move, trapped in the wreckage of its own limbs. Michelle stood in front of it, grabbed the edge of the cowl that protected the neck, and hit it. She hit it over and over again until the head was loose. She maneuvered the laser into the base of the neck and started cutting until she could pull the head out completely. Then she pushed the laser in and out of the opening, cutting deep into the torso, turning the inside into slag. She let go of the cowl, and the robot crumpled into a heap at her feet. She turned away and moved to the next one.
----------------------------------------------------
Taectis stared at the digital replay of the destruction of her Cree automatons. The sensor scout packets had stayed at the back, recording and relaying information, until they, too, had been destroyed. Tons of platinum had been invested in those machines. That was going to cut deeply into her profit margin.
She slowly turned her head to look at Fancheion, “What the hell are those . . . those things?” She looked back at the screen, “I just sent in three companies of the finest combat automatons made.” She made a hacking motion at the computer with her right hand, “Anywhere else in the galaxy, I send in those machines, and the soldiers that see them abandon their post and run like hell to get away. It’s impossible to stop the Cree. Soldiers don’t have the firepower to stop them. Everybody fears the swarm of h/ks and the destructive power of the Dreadnaughts. Entire cities evacuate when they hear that the Cree destroyers are being sent in. Men, women, and children, entire families, have suicided when they heard that those machines were being sent in. I’ve never lost more than ten, fifteen percent of their combat capability. And, now, for the first time, they’ve been stopped. And not only stopped, but destroyed. Completely destroyed!”
Fancheion slowly shook his head, “This is unusual Shaedur. I’ve never seen anything like those. They don’t move like machines. They move like they’re alive. We do have a problem, though. The robots are highly mobile. That is their strength. Those canyons take away that advantage and funnel our automatons into their defenses. They don’t have a broad front to advance through. If they were in the woods, or even in a city, there would be multiple ways for them to go in. Here, they’re channeled directly into the enemy. This location was well thought out. The only thing I would have done differently is that I would have walled off these two canyons so they could concentrate their defenses in one area.”
Taectis shook her head, “If they’d done that, we would have found out immediately that where they were. They weren’t expecting us to show up here. Something like that would have screamed, ‘Here we are!’”
He grunted as he conceded her point. Then he tapped the location of Keisha’s destroyed mech, “Still, we did have one success. That one was destroyed. Its reaction was strange, though. It seemed like that one turned and ran, as if it was afraid. It saw the other machines moving in, and it ran.”
Taectis sneered, a tightening around the eyes and a thinning of the lips, an expression that was only apparent to another Sh’raithe. She waved her hand at the display, “Machines don’t have fear, Shomcuer. You are ascribing human emotion to a defect in the software, or maybe even the hardware. It had to be a bug in the programming. We’ve seen that sort of thing before. The Cree automatons are marvels of engineering, but eventually their programming fails them. Or, someone gets in a lucky shot.” She punched a finger at the display, “That’s why you don’t arm the damned automations. One of them with an energy weapon could destroy a battalion before they knew that the dreadnaught was about to kill them. That one failed. These others, though, they’re different than the one that failed.”
She ran the digital replay back, then started it again, “There, you see those two. They don’t move like robots. They move, . . . damn the Gods, gracefully, like Tanessi knife dancers.” She switched the replay to another scene, “And look at this one. That looks like hand to hand combat. Look at those moves. I have soldiers with a solid ten years of training that couldn’t break an arm that easily.”
She shook her head, “There is something here that I don’t see, that I don’t understand.” She paused, taking in the information before her, trying to think it through. “We have no choice. The automatons didn’t break through. Send in the men. Hopefully, they can find a way through.”
Fancheion didn’t say a word, didn’t move.
Taectis noticed this unusual reaction. Unused to having her commands disregarded, Taectis looked up at him, “What is it?”
He looked down at the ground, u
nwilling to challenge her directly, but wanting to make sure that she understood his position, “We should use the mortars, soften them up. We have the data from the robots. The canyons are mapped out. We know where they are. We can drop our mortars directly on top of them.”
Taectis shook her head, “No Shomcuer. I understand what you’re trying to say, but I want those bonuses. We will proceed as planned.”
He stared into her eyes, bordering on insubordination, “When our men run across that open valley, they will be seen by anyone in the canyons that is in an overwatch position. You will be sending them to their deaths. Then you won’t get any bonuses and you will have destroyed the brigade.”
Taectis snapped her beak at him, indicating her displeasure. Then, what he’d just said sank in. He was correct of course. She softened her stance by leaning her head to one side, a move that left her carotid artery exposed. In their culture, this was an invitation to intimacy. In this instance, it was her apology to him without having to say so. He accepted the apology with a flick of his eyes down to the ground and back up to look into hers.
She continued, “We’ll use the mortars to give them cover until they make it to the mouth of the canyons. There will be no high explosive ordinance used. Smoke at the mouths of the canyons and air burst shrapnel over the canyons to mask their presence and to keep the enemy’s head down.”
