by James Axler
The wag swerved left and right behind him as Kane rose from the ground and began to sprint across the terrain toward their towering assailant. Kane was thirty feet away from it now, and this close it looked a lot like scaffolding with a box depending from the chains. The legs were part-built, all girders and tubing with great hinge joints running down the sides, two in each leg plus a whole network of smaller hinges at the ankles to better ensure stability across any terrain. The feet were wide, flat plates, each one seven feet across with a bobbled underside that could find purchase on the uneven surface of the ground.
As Kane ran, the heat beam screamed again, sending another red line at his retreating ride, carving it almost in two. The back end of Kane’s wag tore partially away from the front and the whole wag collapsed in on itself, the wheels spinning uselessly as it sunk down in the middle. A moment later, the driver leaped from the cab, dropping the six feet to the ground where his cab had become raised. The gunner, meanwhile, lay sprawled against the turret, his flesh turned a ghastly red where the heat ray had struck him. He was dead.
Kane continued to run, knowing that he had thirty seconds to reach their enemy before it could fire another heat burst. As he ran, he powered the Sin Eater pistol into his right hand with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons.
All around, bullets were whizzing through the air, the high mounted railguns firing down on the last of the moving wags while Brigid and her companion fired back from the twin tripods in the back of the rig. Domi, too, was shooting, using her Detonics to take potshots at the enemy’s cab to distract them. From up there, it must have seemed that they were being attacked from all sides—the perfect distraction for what Kane had in mind.
Kane reached the underside of their monstrous attacker, dodging and weaving as more 15 mm bullets churned up the ground in his wake, the right-hand railgun swiveling on its mount to try to get a bead on him. Kane held down his trigger, sending a trail of 9 mm bullets at the closest foot of the walker, searching for a weak spot. The bullets pinged against the armor, ricocheting in all directions but barely scratching the metal.
“Damn,” Kane muttered, easing his finger off the Sin Eater’s trigger and scanning the underside of the towering vehicle for inspiration. There had to be a way to bring it down, had to be some way to crack that armor.
Dancing out of the way of the moving feet, Kane activated his Commtact once again. “Baptiste? What have you got for me? How do we bring this bastard down?”
* * *
BRIGID WORKED THE tripod gun as she responded to Kane. “Find some way to stop the heat beam,” she said.
“Like how?” Kane replied, the note of desperation clear in his voice.
Brigid and her colleague were working the tripod guns mounted on the back of the wag in fits. The whole wag was warm from the effect of the heat beam, and the guns were threatening to overheat. The wag zigzagged across the field, bumping over ruts in the soil and tangled grass as a stream of bullets followed them from the high-mounted railguns, spitting sparks from the metal sides of the wag. One of the sacks of grain burst under the assault, spilling its contents in a cloud of yellow dust.
“Overheat it,” Brigid said in a sudden moment of inspiration.
* * *
“OVERHEAT IT?” KANE repeated as he chased after the machine, which was striding after Brigid’s wag. “How?”
“A weapon like that must throw out a lot of heat to operate,” Brigid reasoned.
Kane’s eyes roved across the metal surface of the walking weapon as Brigid spoke.
“If you can find the source and block it, you could—”
“Got it!” Kane said, spying a dark patch on the back of the dangling cab where wispy steam was emanating. He ran after the retreating vehicle, commanding his Sin Eater back into its hidden holster, and a moment later he leaped onto the swinging left leg as it hurtled past. Clinging there, Kane reached up, using the scaffold-like leg as a ladder, finding handholds and footholds as he ascended the swaying limb of the moving vehicle.
Bullets drummed against the cab above him as Kane scrambled up past the first knee joint, ten feet above the ground. Then he felt the whole vehicle vibrate and the heat beam fired again, cleaving the back from the remaining wag in an explosion of melted metal and tossed grain.
Kane clung tightly to the leg as it swung forward, then came down again, stomping on the edge of the wag where it was melting. Brigid and her companion leaped from the back of the wag as the colossus took another step, crushing the back end of the vehicle. It was obvious that its occupants did not mind losing a little of their spoils if it meant getting rid of the competition.
The cab turned as Brigid reached for the driver’s door. The door was jammed where the metal had become buckled under the assault, and Kane watched helplessly for a moment as his red-haired colleague wrenched at the door. As she did so, the boxy cab of the walker whirred on its hydraulics, drawing around to line up the railguns on the people below.
“Hey, ugly!” The shout was harsh and it came from behind Kane and the walker.
Kane looked down, saw Domi standing there with her Detonics pistol held in a two-handed grip and aimed high at the cab of the walker. The pistol’s silver finish glinted in the overcast light. The pistol bucked in her hands as Domi sent shot after shot into the side window of the boxy cab, firing over and over as the walking machine began to slowly react. The glass fractured, spiderwebbing in an instant but still holding in place.
Kane was close enough to the cab that he heard the voices coming from within. “Turn us around,” a woman’s voice bellowed. “Blast that pale-skinned bitch off the face of the Earth!”
Kane clung on to the leg as the cab swung around, but below Domi was already racing away, keeping up a circuit around her would-be killer as its pilots tried to affix her in their sights. It was a dangerous ploy, but it gave Brigid enough time to get the wounded driver out of her own wag, forcing the bent door open with six hard kicks of her heeled boot.
Kane did what little he could to help, reaching into a pocket of his jacket and priming the device he found there. It looked like a ball bearing, perfectly spherical with a silver finish, roughly two inches in diameter. There was a hidden seam running along the device’s center, and it took Kane less than a breath to find it and twist it, setting the device to detonate. He dropped it then, not really able to throw it the way he would have preferred, and turned his face away as the sphere fell.
The device blew seven feet above the ground, just ahead of and between the walker’s massive feet, unleashing a violent burst of light and sound as if a lightning bolt had struck the earth. The walker was unharmed but its occupants were momentarily dazzled.
The device was known as a flash-bang, and it was standard kit for all Cerberus field teams. It was not really a weapon so much as a tool, designed as a nonlethal part of their arsenal. Once detonated, the device exploded in an almighty flash of light and noise, similar to a grenade being set off. However, the flash-bang did no damage, and as such was used by the Cerberus personnel merely to confuse and disorient opponents.
Inside the walker’s cab, confusion had taken hold. “What the hell wazzat?” a woman’s voice howled from within.
“I can’t see right, Ma,” a male voice responded.
“Gimme that,” the woman yelled. “Look where you’re aiming.”
The heat ray blasted again—but it was yards away from where Domi was scrambling across the dirt. The flash-bang had not done much, but it had disoriented the walker’s crew enough to lose track of Domi—and that had kept her alive for another few seconds.
The nature of the battle had changed subtly, Kane realized as he reached across to grab the underside of the blocky cab. Initially, their attackers had hoped to cripple the vehicles and steal the goods, collateral damage be damned. Now it seemed that they were pissed—the fight back had caught them by surprise, used as they were to the wavering loyalties and easy pickings of the usual travelers on these roads.
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Kane swung beneath the underside of the cab, his legs swinging freely as he grasped for purchase. Nearby, he could hear the whir of the heat ray as it cycled up for another blast. He was by the vent in an instant. It was located at the rear of the cab, two feet square, and this close it looked more like a gaping hole than anything technical, the kind of funnel outlet you might find on a cruise ship. He needed something to block it—but what? What could he use?
Brigid’s voice drilled through Kane’s Commtact as he clung there, looking into the blackness of the exhaust port. “Thirty seconds, Kane,” she shouted. “It’s going to—”
Her words were cut off as the heat ray screamed again, slapping against the ground.
Chapter 7
Domi leaped aside as the beam struck, rolling out of its path with just a couple of feet to spare. The wide beam tracked across the ground for three long seconds, leaving a trail of char-black soil in its wake. Domi felt her skin warm where she had gotten too close, and her exposed face and hand began to redden as she scrambled across the soil.
The exhaust vent hissed with a blast of steam as the heat ray fired, a sudden jet of hot mist blowing toward Kane’s face even as he turned his head aside. It missed him by inches, tussling the hair on his head and flipping the collar of his jacket up against the side of his face.
The jacket, Kane thought as the heat ray winked off again, its scarlet glow ceased.
Kane clambered up the rear of the boxy cab, passing a two-foot-high metal door that must have acted as some kind of service hatch, he realized, before reaching the roof. He clung on, thirty feet above the ground, and shrugged out of his jacket, counting the seconds down in his head. All around, bullets were zipping through the air as each group fired on the other.
Once Kane had his jacket off, he reached down again, unnoticed, clambering back to the ventilation duct a few feet below.
“Baptiste,” he demanded over the Commtact, “how long do I have?”
“Ten seconds,” Brigid replied from where she was hiding behind the melted wag with the driver, blasting at the circling walker with her TP-9 pistol. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top, finished in molded, matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, creating a lopsided square in the user’s hand, their hand and wrist making the final side and corner.
Kane counted the seconds in his head while he bunched up the gray jacket and shoved it into the vent, pushing it down with his arm as far as he could. On two, he was done, and he drew his hand out just as the heat beam fired again, its scream like a bird of prey cawing right into his ear.
Trails of steam slipped around the edges of the gray denim, but most of the exhaust was trapped within. The ray generated incredible amounts of heat with each use, so much so that without the exhaust vent open, the underside of the cab began to glow pink as the beam continued its cruel assault.
* * *
DOWN ON THE GROUND, Domi was sprinting away from the towering mechanical beast, its heat beam cutting across the field behind her in a thick, red line. She kept running, sweat pouring from her skin, which had taken on a pinkish hue from her proximity to the heat.
“Come on, Kane,” she muttered. “I can’t keep this up forever.”
* * *
KANE WATCHED AS steam continued to trail from the vent. He could barely see the jacket, he had pushed it in so deep, but he could see that it was turning darker, sodden with condensing water from the steam that was unable to escape.
Kane activated his Commtact again. “Baptiste, how long do they have before they can blast again?”
“Twenty…twenty-two seconds,” Brigid estimated.
“Plenty of time,” Kane muttered, easing himself from the cab and preparing to swing across to one scaffold-like leg as the vehicle swung around to smother the area with more bullets from its railguns. But as he reached down, a side door swung open on the metal box of the cab and a man’s voice rang out.
“You’re right, Umbra! There is someone up here!”
Kane cursed as a blaster followed up the shout, four bullets fired in quick succession at his swinging form where he dangled from the rear of the cab. There was a man in the doorway, just five feet tall but stocky as a prison door, with broad shoulders and muscular arms showing under the sleeves of his striped T-shirt. He held a Ruger MP9 in his hand, a compact and boxy little submachine gun with a clip that rammed up into the handle, giving the maximum balance in the minimum of space. The Ruger fired again, unleashing a stream of 19 mm parabellum bullets at Kane’s swaying form.
Hanging on to the cab one-handed, Kane commanded his Sin Eater back into his right hand—its holster now visible where he had shed his jacket. The Sin Eater struck Kane’s palm an instant later, even as a 19 mm slug from the MP9 skittered against the metal rung he was hanging on to, clipping against his skin so that his grip eased for a fraction of a second. Then Kane was falling, dropping backward from his handhold on the rear of the boxy cab, even as his right index finger squeezed down the trigger of the Sin Eater and sent retaliatory fire at his attacker. Kane’s bullets struck the stocky man square in the center of his chest, and the man went stumbling back under their impact, screaming blue murder.
But Kane was falling now, plummeting down toward the ground between the two scaffold-like legs.
* * *
DOMI AND BRIGID stopped to watch as Kane fell. It was a high fall, thirty feet in total, and Kane was falling backward, down between those towering legs.
“Oh, Kane,” Brigid muttered, while a rain of 15 mm bullets peppered the ground all around her.
* * *
KANE TWISTED IN the air as he fell, reaching for the nearest scaffold-like leg as he dropped the first fifteen feet. Above him, the stocky thug who had shot at him had dropped back inside the depending cab, his chest blooming with a red stain where Kane’s bullets had ended his life, the unlatched metal door swinging back and forth.
Kane’s left hand glanced against one scaffold-like leg but he was falling too fast—grabbing it was like trying to grab a bullet from the air. It was fifteen feet to the ground and he was falling fast now, the ground rushing up to meet him.
Kane shifted his body as best as he could, sending the Sin Eater back to its sheath and holding his arms and legs loosely out before him. He had to judge this just right, let his limbs absorb the impact without breaking anything. Sounds easy, Kane told himself sourly as the ground rushed toward him.
And then—bang! He struck the ground with more force than he could have prepared for, rolled automatically as his arms took the brunt of the impact, his breath forced out of his chest in a painful “woof!”
Above him, the cruel walking vehicle cycled around its heat blast again. It fired a moment later, sending another wide beam of red-hot heat at the smoldering wag where Brigid and her wounded driver were still crouched, setting fire to the retreating gunner.
* * *
BRIGID WATCHED AS the beam blazed toward her, unable to get out of its path. The beam slapped against the side of the wag that she had used as cover, pushing forward to sear the rear windows of the cab. But as she watched, the iris-like aperture at the front of the boxy walker started billowing thick black smoke where it was overheating, and a moment later the whole thing went up in a fireball, heat ray and cabin bursting into flame. Kane had done it—she only hoped he had managed to save himself.
* * *
ABOARD THE WALKING MACHINE, the woman called Umbra saw a sudden rush of flames writhe across the cracked windshield. The walking machine had been her late husband’s dream. He had designed it to pick off unarmed transports traveling these forgotten roads, figuring out the nuances of clambering over the uneven ground in the most efficient way possible. He had died before the vehicle had been completed, so Umbra had named it Errol after him. The heat ray could be recharged thirty times before it needed to be restoked, and today was the first day in four years that she had ever come close to reaching that limit. N
ow Errol Number 2 was about to die on her, this one consumed by fire generated by its own heat ray.
Umbra, a stocky woman in her midforties, whose hair had a tendency toward “disarray” as a style, turned to Errol’s driver—her own twenty-four-year-old son, albeit by a different coupling—and told him the bad news. “Time to evacuate, Junior.”
Junior—dyed-red hair, gap-toothed smile, shirt and shorts—looked at his mother with furrowed brow as the flames played across the broken windshield. “You sure you don’t wanna go down with the ship, Ma?”
“Going down with ships is for oldie time ship’s captains and putzes,” she chastised him as she reached for the metal handle of the side door, which had been swinging to and fro after Carlos had come stumbling back inside under the influence of the man’s perfectly placed shot. As she touched it, the door bit back, intense heat searing her hand and causing her to squeal in pain. The next thing she knew, Umbra was tumbling out the open door, plummeting to the ground thirty feet below, flames rushing up to meet her.
* * *
SPRAWLED ON THE GROUND, Kane watched as the towering death machine stumbled unsteadily, its boxy cab consumed with fire. Suddenly, a figure came dropping through the flames, on fire and falling like a dead weight. The figure struck the ground a moment later, a line of black smoke following it like the tail of a comet, scream echoing across the field.
“Damn,” Kane spat, pushing himself up on aching limbs. He had been responsible for the inferno, but he couldn’t just let its crew member die like that—not without at least trying to help. But even as he reached the screaming human torch that had once been Umbra, he knew already that he was too late.
