Down the tunnel of dripping gore, past the screaming wounded and ravaged dead, the goliath stood framed in the promenade lights. Its chrome shoulders gleamed. Its eyeless faceplate leered. The juggernaut raised the steaming emitter of its century laser, rested it on its armored hip like a cavalry spear, and took stock of its ruinous work.
Like water rushing to fill a crater, the crowd surged back into the hall. They bleated like animals, faces terror-twisted beyond recognition. This corridor was death, but the only escape lay through it. Firenze tried to fend them off, raised one numbed arm in protest. Through the gaps in the onrushing wave, he saw the titan lower its laser, preparing for another blast.
Despite himself, he began to laugh.
Hill snatched him from the crush, slammed him face-first into the wall. He couldn't stop cackling, not when he saw the soldier's gore-slicked and flash-burned face, not when the pain rode him like a broken mare, nor even when the next thunder-crash washed over them.
Cast in the armor of madness, he paid no mind to the horror. Hill grabbed him by the handle and shove-ran him down the corridor, fleeing the blasts of the devil's trumpet. Screams and wails blended in the ringing tinnitus. Pain and flash-shadows merged in blindness. Firenze couldn't stop laughing.
A final doorway passed, and he crashed into the far wall. He slumped to the floor, slicked by gore. For some goddamn reason, all he could think about was the spaghetti his mom used to make, and that just made him cackle harder.
Hill was screaming something, pointing to the floor in some caricature of 'stay down'. The soldier had stopped inside the lifeboat to give that order, and that saved his life. Two steps past him, Hayes had one foot through the threshold when it lit ruby-red. Hayes vanished into the light.
Something punched through Firenze's unarmored chest, a javelin cast from human bone. Blood and shit rained around him, and the ceiling was on fire. His undersuit hissed, painkillers flooded, and he couldn't stop laughing.
Hill was howling, his mouth frozen in a silent curse. The soldier whirled back into the hall, tried to raise his gun, but the tide was on him, pushing, shoving, and jostling him out of position. Hill shoved one, two, three broken people into the raft. Every time he tried to get the long-gun off his sling, another came, and he hurled them towards safety. Then, too many came at once. The human wave crashed into him, and he toppled into the boat-
Crimson thunder cleft the tide. Hill fell to the deck, pinned under the upper-half of a severed torso, its pain-frozen mouth silently working out a final scream.
The doorframe darkened, and Firenze saw his end, once more.
The goliath loomed like a statue, its faceless helmet surveying the carnage. Steam hissed from its pack, a parody of a weary sigh, and it raised its weapon once more, to burn them down like rats in a hole.
Kawalski slammed into it from the flank, like a monkey trying to tackle an elephant. Her combat knife flashed, jammed between the servos on its right arm. The behemoth froze, one arm immobilized. Then it pivoted towards her, more piston than human. She ducked, dodged-
Its left arm came forward. Something burst around its wrist, coughed like a stormcloud. A whistle split through Firenze's tinnitus like a torch through jello. A tornado of monofilament carved the air, carried by magneto-bolas from an electric slingshot.
Kawalski was gone. Bits and pieces painted across the walls. The juggernaut lowered its arm, then ripped the knife from its servos. Ponderously, it turned towards the survivors.
A scorching wind roared from Firenze's left. Hill had worked free from the corpse-pile, and his machinegun ran white-hot. Spark cascades danced over the titan's armor, but it did not flinch. Almost lazily, it raised its cannon.
Hill's gun clattered empty, and he hurled it aside. Deprived of his weapon, cornered, and outgunned, Hill drew his knife and charged. Just like his sergeant, he would go down fighting.
In the far corner of the boat, tattered remains of families huddled. Firenze couldn't hear their sobs over the ringing, but he could read the terror on their ravaged faces. Firenze turned from them to Hill's futile charge, to the implacable horror which blocked the exit. The goliath stood astride the door, leveled its cannon, and prepared its final testament.
In one last, miraculous burst of sanity, Firenze slapped the emergency release.
The floor dropped away. The airship vanished.
The wind howled through an open door. The goliath was gone, sucked into the void.
The door closed. The lights came up.
Hill was on his knees, bloody, sobbing, and pounding at the floor.
Firenze stared through the moon-roof and watched the airship plunge away. It was aflame on all sides, its whipped-creme spires kissed by a funeral pyre. As he watched, one of the magnificent towers snapped clean like a dead twig. It ground across the city-scape like a rolling-pin, shedding bodies and debris as it smashed the lesser towers flat. When it reached the aft, it broke away and fell in parallel, two blazing sky-dancers on their final descent. More and more burst free, as the falling star became a falling cloud, filled with whirling chaff and crackling lightning.
Lifeboats popped free, seeds from a blazing pinecone.
One of the outriggers burst, like an angel, shorn its wing.
Firenze couldn't look away. He tracked the descent until the wreckage-cloud slammed into the ocean and boiled the sea. There, the tide churned red and drowned the lightning in her depths.
By the time the rescue-medics cracked the lifeboat doors, he was near-catatonic, unaware of the meaning of the lights and sirens around him. Time and place transposed as he floated from beach to gurney to bed to cell.
When he found himself again, he was dressed in a paper robe and chained to a jailhouse cot. That was when he understood the joke: they'd charged him with treason, after all.
His journey had ended where it started, in a concrete cell, a failure unmourned by the world, damned by his own hands.
He fell back to laughter, then, and did not stop.
Base Metal (The Sword Book 2) Page 16
