by Mark Wandrey
With the special transporter down, and the energy pen set up, Galrath ordered his special weapons unloaded and their operators prepared. In a few hours, it would all be over. He stood outside the ramp to his ship and listened to the earth-shaking shrieks and howls reverberating through the hull of the transport. Galrath bared his teeth in anticipation. The slaughter would begin soon. The new order was about to be born. The ramp lowered on the transport, and they unleashed the nightmare just as the alarm sounded.
“No,” Galrath said as he looked at the displays. Another Raknar was striding across the lightly forested plain directly toward them. “That isn’t possible!”
* * * * *
Chapter 38
Jim was both excited and terrified in equal parts. Operating the mecha, now driven by practically unlimited fusion power, was like trying to control a hurricane. The powerful legs surged him forward with such force that the machine looked like a man running in low gravity. Each footfall was like an explosion, tearing up dirt, rocks, and small trees, sending them flying in a fan of destruction in his wake. From a distance, it looked like a high-speed snowplow crashing through drifts. The feed into Jim’s pinplants said he was running at close to forty mph.
Unfortunately, that much power and speed made controlling the contraption more complicated than the other one had been. If Jim hadn’t operated the green one, he would never have made it ten steps in Dash. Even so, his pinplant processors were all but completely overwhelmed with the volume of staggeringly complicated processor cycles needed just to make the legs churn at his torso to balance his headlong rush into battle.
“Whoa, Jimbo!” Hargrave called over the radio. “Slow the fuck down!”
“I can’t,” Jim said, but he tried to anyway. He almost fell face first at forty mph, something he knew that, regardless of how tough the mecha was, would probably rip it to pieces. He kept its feet down and torso up through sheer force of will. His speed dropped to thirty mph. Behind him, sticking to the road and the cleared sections of terrain, all the Cavalier’s APCs raced to keep up. They were fully loaded with firepower and CASPers, with even more troopers hanging off the sides and top. It looked like a scene out of Mad Max and the Psychotic Calcutta Taxicab Attack. Jim had put all their cards on the table.
The processing plant with its thick containment walls was coming into view, and as soon as it did, the missiles began to fly. Apparently, his arrival had made quite an impression. In a flash, missiles were raining down around him, and some on him. The warheads that could send a CASPer-suited trooper to the afterlife with a single hit exploded against the ancient mecha armor without any effect. He felt the impacts and expected warnings to appear on his status board for damage. Nothing happened. Now if I could just fight and run, he thought.
He felt a tugging on his haptic helmet from behind. For a moment, he didn’t know what it was. Had he caught his helmet on something? It was taking all his concentration to steer the monstrous machine with only the trio of monitors affixed with epoxy to the front of the cockpit. He finally saw the long, delicate fingers of Splunk trying to pull his haptic helmet off.
“Splunk, what the fuck?”
“You, me...
“Splunk! Stop that!” he said and shook his head, and almost tripped on a light post. A massive energy beam passed over his shoulder with a crackling “SNAAAP!” playing static electricity up the side of his Raknar like a Van de Graaff generator. “SHIT!” he barked trying to turn. The set foot dug in and he went flying.
Jim figured that was it, but he still tried to control the fall. He tucked the machine’s shoulder and landed with an earth shaking crash, taking a hundred yards to skid to a stop. Though the safety straps kept him from being smashed against the side of the cockpit, they did not prevent him from being jerked around like a yoyo on a string. His anger at Splunk dissipated immediately. If she hadn’t been messing with his helmet, that blast would have burned him like cheap toast. Splunk had just saved his life. He shook his head, and when he opened his eyes he saw the monitors were all broken loose from their mounts and shattered. He was blind. A further check with his pinplants showed the improvised haptic system was down. So, he was crippled, too.
“Well,” he said, “that’s that.” He started pulling out the haptic plugs and reaching for the reactor controls to safe it when Splunk spoke again.
“Kick, ass...
“We can’t,” he said as he started the reactor shutdown. She shook her head and took his hand.
“No, Jim...
“I don’t understand what you want,” he said and pointed to the broken computers. “Everything is broken.”
“That, junk...
“But we needed it to run this thing!” Jim tried to explain.
“No, us...
“
Jim spun into a fathomless void, his mind spread open like a spiraling galaxy. In a moment he was everywhere, and nowhere. He felt the wind of eternity on his soul, and the heartbeat of Creation. Only he wasn’t alone. A presence as strong as his own was there, sharing the same space in the universe. It was Splunk, only her name was much, much more than what he’d given her. Time stretched to the infinite as he took a thousand years to appreciate it fully, and still didn’t have the full meaning of it.
“We must fight now,” he heard.
“Why?” he asked as Creation wheeled around them.
“Because it is what we do.” In a tiny corner of the universe, he could see a battle taking place. It seemed so insignificant, so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Yet it had...something else. The battle was a moment in time that another thousand moments all depended on. Somehow that tiny battle had a billion lives balancing on a knife’s edge of annihilation. His actions in this moment controlled how the knife fell.
“Okay,” he said, and instantly he was drawn down into himself again. Only, he wasn’t himself. He was a 100 foot-tall, 1,000 ton Raknar. Not inside it, he was it, and it was him.
“
* * * * *
Chapter 39
Jim rolled sideways away from the spread of energy beams aimed where he’d been lying. The deadly energy raked the ground, vaporizing great sections of it, but he was untouched. Jim extended the roll and came to his feet, the previously retracted blades in the balls of the feet extended, chewing into the earth and bringing him to a fast stop before retracting. He came into a crouch, the power of the great Raknar coursing through him.
“Oh, yeah!” he said, his voice echoing out over the battlefield. He laughed and raised his arm, pointing at the Besquith energy cannon poking out over the top of the wall less than a half mile away. Ten tons of layered, rolled, alloy-steel barrel lined up with the target. He didn’t aim the gun; he didn’t need to. It was like pointing his finger. He knew it was going to go where he wanted. It didn’t even matter that it wasn’t a weapon ever mounted on this Raknar. It was now as much a part of him as his own hand. He triggered the firing mechanism. “Eat it,” he said.
The barrels were sixty feet long, the entire length of his arm. Mounted entirely on the forearms. When he straightened the arm, the breech locked against the upper arm into a support set there and the barrel extended ten feet past the ha
nd. It looked unwieldy, but the Raknar, through him, compensated easily. The firing mechanism ignited the charge of the 16”/50 Mark 9 gun. The final generation gun mounted on Missouri during its brief recommissioning in the early twenty-first century was much lighter than its predecessor; thanks to advanced alloys, it only weighed 20,000 pounds. The projectiles were almost a ton each. Adayn, with the other Cartwright’s mechanics, had quickly improvised casings and propellant that would have left those twenty-first-century naval armorers with their jaws hanging down. When Jim fired, the chamber pressure was the maximum the breech was capable of handling.
“BOOOM!” the gun roared, the shockwave blowing the leaves from trees for hundreds of feet. The Raknar’s entire body was required to manage the recoil, the arm rode up and back, and the blades on the feet popped out again to keep the mecha from skidding backwards.
The sixteen-inch projectile left the gun barrel traveling at just under 3,000 feet per second, or more than 2,000 mph, and reached the target in 1.6 seconds. The projectile itself was a creation of Adayn’s, crafted from pieces of armor salvaged from the other Raknar. The hybrid steel/ceramic/carbon projectile hit the energy shield protecting the enemy weapon with half a billion foot-pounds of energy. The shield integrated into the energy cannon was meant to stop energy attacks. The ballistic energy of a small family car traveling at five times the speed of sound was far beyond what it was designed to handle. It didn’t matter than the shell was harder than most known materials. It could have been made of pudding. The shield flashed off less than a picosecond after impact to avoid exploding. The shell wasn’t slowed by even 500 feet per second.
The projectile hit the gun itself as it was traversing to track the Raknar. It had a computerized detonator programmed to explode a thousandth of a second after contact with any hard surface. It correctly recognized the shield was not a hard surface. The gun, on the other hand, was made of alloys and counted. After traveling a foot or so into the energy cannon’s complicated guts, the detonator fired and 500 pounds of K2 went off. The blast amounted to a ton and a half of dynamite, in addition to the energy of the cannon’s charging coils, and it blew a sizeable chunk out of the wall’s top and turned the gun crew and power system into a crater.
Now with a better feel for how the gun interacted with the Raknar, Jim dropped to his left knee, raised the left arm, locked that barrel into place, and fired. “BOOOOM!” The second energy cannon ceased to exist just as spectacularly.
“You want some more?!” Jim laughed, and was instantly on his feet and jogging. He cocked both arms at the elbows, pointing hands at the sky and released the breeches. The empty 200-pound casings fell to the ground, still smoking. As he ran, he reached with his left to the bandolier across his chest and slid another round out, pivoted the right arm, and dropped it into the breech, which automatically rotated closed.
His awareness of the battlefield was perfect. He could see the final two energy cannons desperately trying to target him. One had a ten percent chance of scoring a hit, so he brought the right gun up and destroyed it. “BOOOM!” the cannon roared. He allowed the recoil to spin him to the right, pivoting again on his left foot to change directions. The thousand-ton mecha skidded as it turned, right through the middle of the main road between the processing plant and city. The foot tore up reinforced concrete like it was turf on a golf course.
He lowered the body and rushed toward the doors, now less than a thousand yards away. Part of his mind – the part that was neither Jim nor Splunk – lamented that the Raknar’s flight pack and energy sword were missing as both were better options for breaching a facility like this, but the guns were serviceable. He reloaded both as he fell below the arc of the only remaining energy cannon. At 200 yards from the door he did a little bunny hop, leveled both guns at the door, and fired. “KABOOOM!” they both roared. The titanic back blast of the guns’ firing canceled almost all his forward momentum, and he landed with a slight stutter step as the huge doors disappeared in a fireball.
A thousand yards behind, nearly two companies of CASPers on board their APCs came to a stop as they watched an unbelievable spectacle. Hargrave winced in anguish as Jim, super-powered by the fusion plant, went racing across the battlefield, then caught his foot on a lamp post and did a pratfall within sight of the walls. When the enemy energy cannon popped up, he knew Jim was dead. There was no time to order a strike by the dropships.
As the enemy fired, Jim’s mecha rolled easily out of the way, and to its feet. Then it went wild. He wasn’t moving with those hesitant, stumbling moves anymore. Now it was like Jim was the machine. Somehow, it was like they’d merged. Jim performed an incredible side slide, raised the damned battleship cannon that had been accidentally shipped from Earth, and fired. Even from as far back as they were, inside his CASPer, Hargrave could feel the gun blast. The energy cannon was obliterated and almost half the wall next to it!
Jim dropped the mecha to a knee and blew another cannon to hell. After that the entire line of APCs came to a stop to watch in stunned amazement as their commander fired the huge guns over and over, running up to the gates and firing both guns in midair, using the recoil like a brake to stop himself. Hargrave realized everyone had stopped as Jim strode into the processing plant defensive wall like he owned the place.
“What’s everyone sitting here for?” Hargrave asked. “Attack, attack, attack!” The force catapulted forwards.
Let’s end this, Jim thought as he walked through the shattered gates and into the processing plant. He loaded the last two rounds he had for the battleship guns as he strode. The action was smooth, as if he’d done it ten thousand times before. A part of his mind struggled to remember that he was not this machine, he was a man. But he laughed at the thought as he walked inside.
His new powerful awareness took in everything about the inside of the defensive wall as soon as he passed through it. The charred and smoking remains of the three energy cannons he’d destroyed, the ranks of Tortantula mercs waiting for him, and the dozen tanks coming around the corner of a series of huge gas separator towers a mile away. Everything seemed suspended in time as a dozen scenarios played out in his mind’s eye. As the first tank came around the corner and tracked him, the Tortantula surged into action, and Jim moved.
The left-hand gun came up and fired over the Tortantula running toward him. The shock wave of the gun killed a dozen. The projectile was aimed down the avenue at an average-looking storage tank, which Jim’s sensors showed held an incredibly volatile chemical. The round passed into the storage tank and exploded, then a secondary explosion vaporized all the chemical-filled tanks around it, and it turned the approaching tanks into burning wreckage.
The Tortantula rained fire and rushed him, climbing him rapidly to attack the cockpit. Jim sidestepped and ripped a huge beam from one of the shattered energy cannons and started crushing them wholesale. There were hundreds, not thousands this time, but they were better prepared.
He felt the sting of damage to his left knee, and several well-placed rockets scored hits in articulation points on his torso. While he was spinning away from the hits, several dozen bloodthirsty arachnids raced in and attached heavy alloy cables to his legs. That, he was not expecting! The cable was attached to the wall, and quite strong. Strong enough that he was caught completely off balance and fell against the last energy cannon tower. The Raknar was much heavier than the tower, which instantly collapsed like a house of cards, half of it coming down on him as he went to the concrete ground in a heap.
“Great, now what?” he said as he tried to roll, and the cable stopped him. He ended up lying on the mech’s front, almost spread-eagled. In a flash, the Tortantula swarmed him. “Not good! Not good at all!” He could see several carried specialized breaching charges.
The left cannon was spent, so Jim triggered the release. Explosive bolts fired and the ten-ton piece of steel fell free, enabling him use the hands. He half-rolled to the right and swung. The spiders tried to dodge, but how do you dodge
a small building being swung at you? Crushed and mangled enemy troopers flew in every direction. He noticed two Tortantula heading toward him with a demolition charge and swatted at them like flies, but ten more were rushing him from the other direction.
“This is it,” he said. At that moment, dozens of CASPers soared over the battlements on their jumpjets, weapons blazing. Missiles flew, lasers blazed, and projectiles tore into the unsuspecting Tortantula like a chainsaw. Faced with ignoring the withering attack from the suited Cavaliers or continuing their assault on Jim, the enemy turned on the Cavaliers.
Suddenly free, Jim sat up and reached down, chopping the cable tied to his leg with ease. He got back on his feet and turned to see what he could do to help his comrades. The difficulty was...given his size, he was as much a danger to them as to the enemy. He had to move forward; something was calling to him.
His new self, the one that was more combat machine than human being, saw the obviousness of it. The light-armored troopers now tagged as friendly were in just as much danger of dying from his attacks as the enemy. Still, he hesitated. Two of his troopers were felled almost immediately by the powerful lasers mounted on the Tortantulas’ assault armor. The beams simply punched three-inch holes right through the suits.
We go, a voice echoed at the edge of his consciousness. Our enemy waits!
And he was off, jogging down the main avenue. As he closed on where he’d destroyed the tank farm, the ground was still covered in pools of brightly burning liquids. Several of the Besquith tanks had turned into funeral pyres. He jogged, each step throwing up divots of concrete, and slowed to turn the corner, the retractable blades coming out again and digging great furrows in the road. With a glancing blow, his shoulder gouged a hole in an already ravaged, burning tower. Because of the sudden change in direction, only one of the particle beams hit him.
