DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3)

by Andrew Seiple

  “You mind telling me what the fuck’s going on?” Martin asked.

  “Martin! It's been so long. We missed you.”

  Martin drew in a sharp breath. “Okay, that bodes.”

  “She’ll cut to the chase. When Dire sent the time machine back to Dire, she embedded the seed of a smartframe into the machine’s operating system. Think of it as a limited artificial intelligence. An interactive program that can only act in pre-programmed ways with the information available.”

  “So okay, you’re Dire’s downloaded brain in a box. What's your deal?”

  “She’s trying to set up her future,” Vorpal said, as things fell into place. “She’s trying to make sure that her future comes about. The bad future.”

  An electronic snort, and Dire’s face turned on the monitor. “Please. The bad future is what happens if you fail.”

  “Fail at what?” Martin asked.

  “You’ve got two tasks. One easy, the other hard. The first one is building a chronal beacon, to get Dire and Timetripper back to the current day. Relax, this is the easy one. This smartframe has the blueprints and can talk you through putting it together once you get the parts together.”

  “Why do we need this thing?” Minna asked.

  The face sighed. “Let’s just say that Timetripper’s past has come back to haunt him at the worst possible time.”

  “And the second task?” Vorpal asked.

  “Surviving the next twenty-four hours, for a start. It’s not just the heroes after you.”

  The base shuddered, as a distant explosion rumbled. The lights flickered, and emergency alarms pealed out, klaxons screaming and red lights flashing.

  Dire’s image continued, oblivious. “By now Arachne’s finally managed to put two and two together. WEB’s coming for Dire, and they’re not taking prisoners.”

  “Fuck me running. What do we do?” Bunny whispered.

  The face on the monitors was quiet, and Vorpal found herself answering, as she pulled the saber from her back, setting it alight with flame.

  “We fight.”

  CHAPTER 3: DIRE – HEAVY METAL THROWDOWN

  “Ah yes, the Eisenjötun. Quadrupedal tanks, with the heaviest of armaments. They drank diesel fuel like thirsty gasoline-powered elephants, so most of them were only deployed during the first part of the war, before the rolling shortages limited their practicality. Still, the shock and awe they inspired in the enemies of the Reich pleased Hitler, and led him to elevate their inventor, a hitherto eccentric mad scientist who had taken the alias of Heinrich von Katzen...”

  --1982 interview with Herr Carstein, former Nazi engineer repatriated after Operation Paperclip

  Darkness surrounded me, and for a second I despaired. But in a heartbeat the Direnaut’s readouts flickered and came alive around me. LOW POWER one declared. INTERRUPTED BROADCAST FEED screamed another.

  “Well, shit,” I cursed, and started shutting down nonessential systems. While I was at it, I fired up the scanners, and started looking for another feed. If he’d dropped me in a twentieth or twenty-first century time, I had a chance. If he’d dropped me in Pangaea, or something equivalent back before the human species existed, then I was pretty well boned.

  Still, I was far from unprepared. The idiot had been pursuing me for a year, jumping in at random moments and forcing me to retreat. I’d always managed to dodge him before, but I knew that all it would take was one moment of misfortune to send me to someplace horrible. So I’d prepared, and I’d built every suit that I wore on public outings to have a few redundancies that were useful in the event I found myself in a weird spot. One of those redundancies was life support, so wherever I was, I’d have time to look around.

  Luck was with me as the scanners found a broadcast channel. A powerful one, in a band I hadn’t seen in use before. I set up the filters, reconfiguring the collector circuits on the fly to adapt to it. Within seconds the batteries were charged up, and I flicked on the visual feeds. The surviving external cameras, the ones not destroyed by Crusader’s assault, flickered to life and I took a good look around.

  I was in a city. The Direnaut stood frozen, down to one arm and listing, in a square between several buildings. They were all white stucco and orange-tiled roofs, with tiers of windows rising three or four high. Broadcast collectors rose among them, and a few emitters stood high above the city. On the skyline, perhaps a mile or two away, the twin spires of what looked like a cathedral rose out of a walled enclosure.

  Okay. I could work with this. The distribution pattern suggested sometime between the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-fifties, depending on just where I was. Probably not the United States, going by the distribution. Europe? The Cathedral was a good argument for somewhere in Europe.

  Distant noise and reverberations against the Direnaut. The red and yellow damage icons flared, indicating minor trauma. Bullets? That could have been gunfire. I lowered the cameras, looked to the ground around me.

  At street level the square was strewn with bodies and the walls were riddled with bullet holes. Antique cars were flaming or wrecked, with what looked like two old military vehicles cutting off one of the streets out of the square. Men in black coats wearing gray helmets moving with the precision of trained soldiers were taking cover near the vehicles, and shooting in my general direction with small machine guns. They sure as hell weren’t hitting much for the amount of bullets they were putting in the air. What was this?

  I flicked through the cameras, and saw that I wasn’t the target.

  I was cover.

  A nattily-dressed handsome man with plenty of gray in his hair and mustache broke from behind one of the burning cars and darted behind the Direnaut’s legs. He glanced up at me, scrutinizing my mecha’s wrecked and half-destroyed mask for a long moment. Then he glanced around my leg at the men in black, pulled lightning out of thin air, and threw it at them with a contemptuous flick. I watched bullets sheet off of him, throwing up flashes from what I recognized as the field from a Mark Three Tesla Deflector—

  Wait. Hold on just one cotton-pickin’ minute...

  One of the benefits of my superpower was a mostly-eidetic memory. I knew that face. I’d seen it online time and again. “Tesla!” I gasped as the crackling bolt of lightning struck down a row of soldiers.

  That was Nikola Tesla himself taking cover behind my mecha’s battered legs and using his powers to mow down men like wheat.

  To the side, something in the burning car stirred. I watched it, then turned my attention back to the battle. Three dozen on one didn’t seem fair, especially when it was against one of the fathers of the modern age. I brought my weapons systems online, fired up the targeting system—

  And paused, with my thumbs on the buttons.

  Just how much would I fuck up the future with one volley of missiles, here? My eyes flicked among the lines of soldiers, as they drew back their twitching wounded and hopped from cover to cover, moving to flank the errant inventor. I was the errant variable in this little play here, and any of my actions had the potential to butterfly into a whole big mess in the future. I had no idea which model of time travel I was dealing with here, or any of the physics involved. Causality was a bitch at the best of times, and my luck was usually sour.

  Furthermore, the situation didn’t hold up when I gave it a few microseconds of consideration. Why had Timetripper sent me to a potentially troublesome moment? Why had he gotten me within one errant footfall of squishing Nikola Tesla himself? This made no sense. True, the man was a fool in every sense of the word, but I doubted that even he would be this careless.

  Though it went against my grain, I eased my thumbs away from the weapons array, and flicked through the sensors, looking for Timetripper. I found him at the far edge of the square, looking frantic. His hands were up in surrender and he was backing away from a group of shouting soldiers, One of them, an officer with a peaked cap pointed a gloved hand at him in a clear threat.

  I figured he’d use his powers, ‘bip�
�� on out of there, but he didn’t. He stood there, cowering, and looking more hopeless than usual.

  Something was wrong.

  I saw the officer’s lips move, and he jerked his hand back. His squad raised guns, pointed them at Timetripper. That decided me. Whatever the risk of changing the future, whatever the situation was here exactly, the only thing I was pretty certain about was that I’d need Timetripper to get back to my own time.

  The entire plaza froze as I swiveled the Direnaut’s torso, and pointed its remaining hand at the squad menacing Timetripper. Well-trained, they took cover immediately, but cover didn’t matter so much against the concussion missile I lobbed their way. Even with the audio feed off, even through the levels of armor that made up the Direnaut, I heard the glorious CRUMP as it detonated against the wall of the building behind the soldiers, sending them sprawling. They’d be dazed or out, barring superpowers or unforeseen defenses.

  It sent Timetripper flying back into a pile of garbage. I grinned, to see him holding his head and vomiting. Inner ear trauma, always a crowd-pleaser. “Whoops! Her bad.” I chuckled to myself, as I swiveled back around—

  Just in time to catch the first volley of rockets straight to the Direnaut’s upper torso.

  It didn’t do much. I’d built this thing to go toe-to-toe with Crusader, after all. Even damaged and at somewhere around half-functionality, it still had enough layers of armor to handle this sort of thing.

  When the smoke cleared I focused the cameras back on the frontal assault squad, saw half-a-dozen of them reloading crude man-portable rocket launchers. They must have broken them out in the minute I was turned away. I glanced backwards, worried. Mark Three Tesla Deflectors couldn’t handle explosives, bullets were about their limit... I needn’t have worried. They’d aimed high, and the man had taken cover.

  It occurred to me that if they were trying to kill him, they would have used the rockets earlier and they would have aimed lower just now.

  They weren’t trying to kill him. The bullets were just to keep him busy. Keep him from fleeing. Did he know that? Hard to tell. He was supposed to be a genius, but genius was never an indicator of common sense. Logic ground on, cold and clear within my mind. If they were trying to keep him busy, then time was on their side. Time was on their side because sooner or later something would show up to tip the balance...

  Another volley of rockets. One of them managed to turn a yellow breach warning red. I wasn’t invulnerable in here, just a pretty hard target now that my forcefields were down. Much as I hated to introduce the butterflies of altered time into the mix, well, time had already been borked thanks to the dork at the other end of the square. I’d act as I saw fit, and after I’d collected Timetripper we could sort this all out. Maybe use him to fix things.

  The thought didn’t fill me with confidence. But the alternative was to sit here and let them blow up my sole defensive measure around me, so it was what it was.

  I moved the Direnaut’s legs slowly, carefully, giving Tesla time to get out of accidental squishing distance as I jogged to the side, sending the flankers on my right scrambling back, teeth flashing as they shouted in alarm. Pity about the audio feeds, the shockwaves from Crusader’s attack had pretty well done for them. Still, I didn’t need to hear them to get the gist of what they were saying.

  “That’s right!” I whooped. “Big freaking mecha, coming to squish you all!” A spray of concussion missiles from my left torso array knocked the main group of them around like bowling pins and flipped over one of their trucks. Lightning flared and danced as Tesla took the offensive, jogging the opposite way back towards the burning cars and whatever was causing that wreckage to shift around. Did he have an invention in there or something? I was clueless.

  Clueless in more ways than one, really. Hindsight told me I should have read up more on twentieth-century history. That would have let me know how far I could push something like this. For example, a history book might have mentioned “oh hey, a giant robot turned up out of nowhere and saved Tesla’s ass, lucky it didn’t kill Bob Secretgoodguy who later on saved the world,” then I’d know to keep it nonlethal against Bob, and it was open season on everyone else. But no, my education in matters historical was lacking. I’d fix that if— no, when I got back to my own time. Wouldn’t take long, really. Not with my powers.

  And then something struck the Direnaut like the fist of an angry god. I fought with the damaged gyros, ignored the blaring alarms, and managed to bring it stumbling backward, catching the nearest building for balance. White bricks crumbled under its massive steel fingers, but I ignored the collateral, scanning for the new threat.

  Threats, I amended, as three shambling gray forms stomped toward me on massive, pistoning feet. Three things which looked for all the world like walking tanks, with two massive backward-jointed legs, chunky main bodies, and guns like artillery pieces perched atop them. They were adorned with swastikas, and that was the final clue I needed.

  I’d studied these things, briefly, back when I was designing the Direnaut. These were Eisenjötuns. Which meant that I was somewhere in the nineteen-forties, and fighting Nazis. I didn't know much about the Nazis, beyond the fact that history had painted them as bad people. I hadn't read those parts, just looked over some of their war machines. But here they were, and here I was, so I figured I'd get a good lesson up close and personal.

  Just as I got the Direnaut straightened up, the gun on the second-closest one boomed, and bricks sprayed the Direnaut as a chunk of the building’s wall ceased to be. Not a hit, but close enough that the shockwave staggered me. Normally these things would be a joke. I had them outclassed in tech, armor, and armament. But three of them, in my current damaged state... this could be tricky.

  Best to end it quickly, then.

  I brought the particle beam online, only to get a large POWER INSUFFICIENT message flickering across my HUD. Right, right, the current broadcast infrastructure for this era couldn’t handle that large a draw.

  Fortunately, I had other options.

  Bringing the head around to glare directly at the first Eisenjötun, I spun up the remaining mass driver in the right eye socket, and put a hand-sized slug of iron into the bulky machine’s body. Molten steel sprayed as it shuddered—

  And kept on stomping towards me, trails of smoke rising from its port side.

  What the hell? I used my memory to flicker through the thing’s schematics. Ah, right, they were built to take this kind of abuse. Compartmentalized. I’d probably killed three or four of the crew and wrecked some of its systems, but it’d take more than that to put it down.

  The main gun swiveled toward me, fired. At this range I couldn’t dodge it, and the impact knocked the Direnaut on its ass, pushing it through the wall. Bricks sprayed, household furnishings went flying from the apartments I’d just plowed through, and screaming people fled or died in the collapse. I watched with an open and gaping mouth as an elderly woman scrabbled to keep her hold on a doorknob, before the door itself fell from the frame and she dropped screaming into the dust three stories below.

  There were people in here? These Nazi jerks were deploying military hardware in an inhabited urban area?

  I closed my mouth with a snap, and felt the cold rage fill me. This is how they wanted to play it? Very well, then. “Dire shall deliver,” I growled. “And Hell shall be full of fools tonight!”

  A quick glance through the cameras showed dust and smoke everywhere. Good, I could use that. I punched the Direnaut’s thermal sight overlays up, measured my distance to the targets, and rolled the battered, sparking Direnaut into a sprinter’s crouch. Shots whistled overhead, and I winced to see them go. More buildings exploded, behind me, but no help for it. They were shooting blind.

  I wasn’t.

  Two quick mass driver shots took out the knee of the foremost Eisenjötun. It listed, started to topple, but by then I was already in motion. Mobility was my big advantage here; even with a torn-up mecha I had speed that these bulky ma
chines couldn’t match. It must have been a sight, the Direnaut’s twenty-foot-tall hulk charging from the dust cloud and closing with the second Eisenjötun before it could do more than turn. I slammed into it, heard the CLANG through the hulls as the Direnaut creaked and groaned. But the Nazi mecha didn’t fall.

  Unexpected, that. Also problematic. I needed it down quickly, by any means possible.

  Well, sometimes the simplest ways were best; I brought my working arm around as the Eisenjötun started to step back, and jackhammered the Direnaut’s fist into it again and again, until the main turret hung loose and shattered, and the mighty legs finally collapsed, sending it sprawling to the ground.

  I turned, trying to orient on the remaining Eisenjötun—

  And every one of my rear camera viewscreens turned to fire.

  Heat alarms went off instantly, and I swore a blue streak. Flamethrowers! The last one must have had a flamethrower-based loadout! No wonder it hadn’t taken a shot at me. It was designed for close-up work, probably protecting its brothers from saboteurs or close-range threats.

  Well, the thermal sight was useless, now. I punched it back to regular view, started to spin around—

  CLONG!

  My world went horizontal, as the tormented gyros failed and the Direnaut fell. The big mecha was on its right side, and I shifted the view around... just as the surviving Eisenjötun’s massive foot came down on the Direnaut’s head.

  Eighty tons of Solingen steel did its job. I heard crunching, groaning of abused and heated steel giving way, and I winced as damage readouts went straight to red.

  It really made me glad I’d put the cockpit in the torso. Seriously, who puts a cockpit in the head of a humanoid mecha? That turns it into an obvious weak point. The torso’s easier to armor, and there’s more space to utilize.

  I shifted the arm, tried to get it around the Eisenjötun’s leg, and my front viewscreens filled with flames as the enemy mecha rained jellied petroleum down on me like it was cooking the world’s largest knockwurst.