“WE NEED TO MOVE!” I shrieked.
The other mechs ran forward as I started counting down: five seconds, four second, three seconds, two seconds—
BOOM!
A thunderclap-like explosion echoed off the cockpit, causing some of the control panel to spark, cutting off the holographic image of Richter.
The sound was so startling that my hand slipped from the controls and the Spence mech slowed to stop. There was so much ice and snow-shrapnel in the sky that I thought we’d been caught up in the middle of an avalanche.
I wheeled the Spence mech around, reckoning that we’d tripped another explosive left by the aliens, but the truth was worse.
Much worse.
An entire section of the ice sheet, all of the ground we’d just been standing on, had fallen away.
There was nothing fifteen feet out in front of us except utter blackness. For a moment it looked like we were standing on the edge of the world and then something appeared.
A misshapen form.
A monstrous thing that scuttled over the lip of the ice and stared at us.
It was an albino-white, biomechanical monstrosity of some kind.
With a thick, bloated abdomen and a mass of metal legs and jaws, the thing looked like the bastard spawn of an ape and a spider. Its red eyes rotated around and fixed on me.
“What in the name of sweet fancy Jesus is that?” Billy asked.
“The junkyard dog,” I replied.
The thing reared up on two of its eight legs and then another one like it appeared, then five more. It was like we’d kicked over an anthill there were so many of the ugly suckers. The things ran at us, but their movement caused the ice to begin to break apart.
“GET MOVING!” Simeon shouted.
In seconds, the ice began toppling out under the attacking machines like dominoes. I grabbed the controls and juiced the Spence mech’s engine as we galloped forward, fighting to catch up with the other mechs who were scurrying ahead of us.
Along the way, I rotated our arms around and Jezzy opened fire on the pack of marauding biomechanical monsters.
Whatever element of surprise we’d hoped to have when attacking the alien base was long gone. Survival was the only thing on our minds.
“Fifty yards to the wall!” Jezzy shouted.
Every piston, servo motor, and actuator on the Spence mech seemed to fire at once, propelling us up an incline toward a gap in the fjord wall where the other mechs had taken up defensive positions. They were firing down and past us, giving us cover, lighting up our pursuers.
As we entered the space between the mighty stone walls, I threw out a leg and did a kind of drift-slide with our Spence that allowed me to pivot the machine and come back up to face the other direction.
I stood side-by-side with the other mechs, looking down. There were hundreds of the machines surging toward us up the incline.
“DON’T FIRE UNTIL YOU SEE THE RED OF THEIR EYES!” Billy shouted. “WHICH IS NOW, ‘CAUSE I SEE THEM!”
“LIGHT ‘EM UP!” Simeon bellowed.
We did, raining down death on our attackers, who were blown back down into the gap where the glacier had shattered, a chasm that was hundreds of feet deep.
It was obvious at that point that we had inadvertently tripped a buried explosive that was wired to wake the machines that had been left behind by the aliens to guard the site. Not only had the blast unearthed the albino monsters, it had also compromised the stability of an enormous stretch of the ice sheet, sending it crashing down into the nothingness.
Our Spence mech moved sideways, Jezzy targeting the red eyes of our attackers. Fire spewed from our cannons and rocket pods.
I pumped a fist and cheered. “We’re going for the high score!” I shouted, watching our EKIA counter soar.
The rockets we fired detonated down below us, the resulting blast and fireball whipsawing the metal beasts back down into the chasm. One of the things sprung into the air and Jezzy fired a rocket that hit the machine dead-center, hurling it back up into the air where—
BOOM!
It disintegrated in a wicked explosion.
Another of the machines latched onto the cockpit, its arms wrapping around the metal. I looked up to see that the thing had a kind of crude beak, almost like that on an octopus. The beak ratcheted out and slammed against the cockpit glass.
I monkeyed the controls, struggling to dislodge the creature, but I couldn’t.
“Steady the controls!” I shouted to Jezzy, reaching down for the Fusion rifle that was secured on the floor.
“What are you doing, Danny?!”
“Taking a little target practice!”
I’d fired a Fusion rifle (a weapon favored by the Marines and resistance during the alien occupation) back at Buddha Blade’s hideout on more than one occasion, so I was familiar with how to lock and load the weapon. I slapped a magazine of ammunition in the rifle and pulled the firing bolt back.
Then I undid the cockpit latch and leaned back. I booted the latch open and the albino attacker monster reflexively lunged for me. The thing’s legs were all atangle, and yet it sprung through the opening and—
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
I squeezed off three shots that hammered the machine in the abdomen, knocking it off our mech. Cheering, I turned to Jezzy who was rubbing her ears.
“Great, I’m deaf now,” she said.
“Better deaf than dead!”
I secured the latch and dropped behind the controls, crabbing our mech back. We continued to fire point-blank at the rampaging metal creatures, but there were so many of them.
My eyes swung back to the viewscreen. I could just make out the rock ledges in front of the fjord walls, out in front of us, heavy with packed snow and ice. I rotated the Spence mech’s right arm and pointed at the ledges.
“I’m on it!” Jezzy shouted.
“GET BACK!” I screamed to the other operators. “EVERYONE GET BACK AND TAKE COVER!”
“What the hell are you doing, Danny?!” Simeon asked.
“I’m trying to break the EKIA counter with a little sump’n sump’n!”
The Spence mech’s arm came up and—
BAROOM!
We fired our Sump’n Sump’n weapon, unleashing an explosive round that vaporized the rock ledge, creating a deluge of snow and ice that rolled down over the attacking machines like a great wave. In seconds, the albino monsters had vanished from sight, covered under twenty feet of heavy debris. Our EKIA counter responded by spinning, counting up the eighty-eight scuds we’re apparently put down.
“Danny D bringing the hammer down!” Billy exclaimed, firing off a few rounds from his mech in celebration.
“Level up, troop! Level up!” Dru added, referencing a practice in older vidgames where the heroes could acqure more weapons and cool gear by destroying more of the enemy, thereby “leveling up.”
“Cease fire,” Simeon said. “Cease fire.”
“We got bigger problems anyway,” Jezzy whispered.
The Spence mech rotated and from our vantage point, high up on the rock wall, we looked down into the valley beneath us. A pillar of golden light issued up from the middle of the frozen lake we’d originally come to attack. I had no idea what was going on down there, but it didn’t look good.
“Looks like we’re a little late,” Dru said.
“Better late than never,” Simeon said. “Follow me!”
Simeon charged forward and then vanished from sight and that’s when I realized that in following after him, we too were running down over the reverse of the ridgeline.
The ground suddenly dropped out from under us and before I knew what was happening, the Spence mech was falling through the air—
Before landing with a terrific THUD! on our side.
The sound of metal grinding against metal filled the cockpit.
There was a burst of friction sparks and then something detached from our right arm.
“We lost the Sump’n Sump’n weapon!�
�� Jezzy shouted.
I cursed under my breath, fighting to right our machine as the impact tripped the power on our boombox, blaring a popular electronica song from when I was a kid, a period when everyone (for a year or two) was loving A.I.-created EDM tunes. I wasn’t a big fan of the “bot trance” subgenre of music, but it seemed appropriate given that we were sliding down the hillside at an alarming rate of speed.
If you’ve ever seen one of those lunatics at the Olympics bombing down a mountainside track on a luge, you know what we were experiencing at that moment. I couldn’t see a friggin’ thing, just the sky, as we flew down the hillside like a cruise missile and then our descent slowed and I powered up the night-vision to see that we were slowly skidding to a stop at the edge of the frozen lake.
The Spence mech slid to a stop and I gaped back at Jezzy.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “I’m pretty sure I crapped my pants, but otherwise I’m cool.”
“Up!” Simeon shouted over the commlink. “EVERYONE GET UP!”
I fumbled with the controls, but managed to lever the Spence mech up into a standing position as WONK! WONK! WONK! a battery of lights flashed in the distance. It was like being in the middle of a sporting arena with the lights on … times a thousand. It was so damn bright that I had to squint. The aliens sure as shit knew we were coming. And by the look of things, they were ready to rumble.
28
I shielded my eyes with my arm and powered off the night-vision, which was no longer necessary. The lake’s black ice stretched out before us, dotted with berms of ice and snow, and then, two-hundred yards beyond that, the façade of a multi-tiered metallic structure that was several stories tall, half-buried in the side of a range of rocky outcroppings that overlooked the lake.
“Is that … the outpost?” I asked.
“Outpost my ass,” Dru replied. “That’s a small city.”
“Further proof that ‘military intelligence’ is a goddamn oxymoron,” Billy hissed.
Hovering over the structure was a large alien glider. Apparently, Timbo and his posse had appropriated the machine somewhere during their voyage from the desert in New Mexico to Greenland.
Hundreds of snake-like, flex cords had dropped down from the belly of the glider. I zoomed in on the viewscreen to see that at the bottom of each cord was a piece of translucent material that was providing the white light that splashed the frozen lake.
Suddenly, objects dropped from the sides of the glider, what looked like black telephone poles that speared into the ice. As soon as the poles rammed into the ice, sparks flew and I could feel the ice tremble and quake. The black ice spiderwebbed under our feet, but didn’t shatter.
“What the hell is going on?” Jezzy asked.
BOOM!
A geyser of water shot into the air directly beneath the glider. Then another, then three more. Even from our distance, I could see things slowly toiling under the ice. Dark shadowy machines that within minutes, had pulled themselves up from the lake.
Alien mechs!
In seconds, the entire section of ice directly in front of the structure was filled with a dozen alien mechs of the super-size variety. These weren’t the two-legged jobbers we’d dealt with back in the desert and during the attack on The Hermitage. Oh no, these were the 128-ounce Big Gulp of mechs, battle constructs built out of what looked like two tank turrets grafted onto eight metal legs which is why the resistance called them—
“Ochos!” Billy shouted, using the resistance slang term for the eight-legged behemoths. “Those homies went out and got them some Ochos to bring to the fight!”
I’d seen the Ochos in action once before, maybe five years back during a contraband run in Northeast Baltimore. The aliens had been laying siege to a neighborhood a little north of Washington Hill, trying to pacify it, and in the process literally turning it into dust. The bloated killing machines were more heavily armed (and armored) then the Reaper mechs which meant one thing: we were going to be in for a serious fight.
“So … big,” Jezzy said.
“Gotta be … twenty-feet tall,” Baila added.
“Twenty-five,” I said, correcting her.
Several seconds of silence ensued and I knew the other operators were worried. I could sense that they were wondering how the hell we were going to take down the alien giants and so I said: “Russian front, 1943.”
“Now is not the time for a history lesson, Deus,” Simeon said.
“I watched a documentary on it. The Germans were caught by a wave of heavy Russian armor,” I replied, ignoring Simeon’s remark. “T-34 tanks, a shitload of them. Guess what they did?”
“Lost, Danny,” Sato said. “The Germans, the Axis Powers lost the war. I should know.”
I shook my head. “They lost the war, but won that battle. They attacked with satchel
charges, grenades, and mines. They played ‘small ball’ and ran right between the tanks.”
“So you’re saying there’s a way we can win this battle?” Billy asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I replied, thinking back on what Richter had said. “They’re bigger and badder than us, so we should do the opposite of what they’re expecting us to do. We make ourselves small and cause a little chaos. We screw with their decision cycle.”
“I love it,” Billy said. “Chaos is my middle name.”
“Looks like they’ve invited a few more guests to the party,” Dru remarked. I peered into the viewscreen to see dozens of alien soldiers, clad in white armor, riding leaders down from the glider. They hit the ice and took up positions between the Ochos.
The final thing we saw was the Strike Sled, the one we’d witnessed back in the desert, drop down from the back of the glider. I could see Alpha Timbo onboard with three alien soldiers, the trio wrapped in bone-white armor, riding the Sled down into the structure, disappearing from sight.
“They’re going for the bomb!” I shouted.
I pushed the red button on my viewscreen, but was unable to hail Richter. We were indeed “triple-o,” officially on our own.
“Get fierce,” Simeon said. “We’re taking a page out of your book, Deus, so this is all on you. We separate and crouch-run and take those big bastards out. Then we find the bomb and destroy the whole complex!”
Simeon rampaged forward, leading the way, firing out his cannons and rocket pods. I watched rockets from his mech scythe forward and slam into the alien structure. The Ochos and the alien soldiers returned fire and soon the ice was being split apart by energized sabots and rocket-fire. Next came a flurry of smoke munitions that, along with an icy mist, obscured visibility.
Jezzy commenced firing as we shot through the plumes of smoke, searching for targets when—
BOOM!
A rocket detonated fifteen-feet in front of us, the blast wave knocking the Spence mech off its feet. My world spun a few times, our operating suits inflating and then—
WHAM!
We hit the ice and skidded like a hockey puck for several seconds. My head rocked back against my seat and I bit the edge of my tongue.
“SOUND OFF, DEUS!” Dru shouted.
“We are down, but definitely not out!” I yelled back, trying to get my bearings.
There were stars in my eyes, blood in my mouth, and my brain was momentarily pain-fogged. I worked the controls and looked back to Jezzy who was woozy, but ready to roll.
I brought the Spence back up on its feet and juiced the engine as we took off on a shaky run across the ice. The mech slid forward and then found its feet, metal toes digging into the lake’s surface. We galloped ahead as rockets came down to our right and left, carving trenches in the ice, opening up sections of the lake.
Thumbing the controls, I was able to bob and weave, as we thundered forward. Out of the gloom, an immense silhouette began pulling itself up.
“Three o’clock!” Baila shouted. “That means to your right, dumbass!”
“I know what it means!” I screamed
back.
“OCHO!” she screamed.
I slotted the controls and dropped the Spence mech into a half-crouch behind a snow berm. Out in front of us, a massive Ocho mech rose up out of the mist to its full and terrible height, its engines and pistons shrieking, casting off what sounded like a metallic roar.
The thing stood there in front of us, maybe thirty feet away, steam rising off its turrets. The machine’s exterior changed colors, appearing matte-black only to change an icy-blue, its active camouflage engaging. For a moment it almost appeared invisible against the snowy backdrop.
The machine moved laterally, visible for an instant, flashing its armored body. I could tell that it was searching for targets … searching for us. Unlike the Reaper mechs we’d faced before, the Ocho moved with greater precision and its bulky turrets appeared to be grafted onto organic protrusions. I studied the machine’s exterior which I’d heard was sheathed with alien meta-material armor that protected an internal, A.I.-infused brain stem that allowed it to reason and hunt and fight like an intelligent animal. The Ocho dropped down onto its haunches and pawed at the ice. Then four arms telescoped from its sides which held numerous cannons and rocket launchers.
I suddenly wished like hell that we still had the Sump’n Sump’n weapon. We’d have to make do with what we had as two yellow lights beaconed from the Ocho’s turrets like a pair of beady eyes.
“I don’t think it sees us,” I whispered to Jezzy.
“How do you know?”
“Instinct. My instincts are honed like the edge on a—”
BOOM! BOOM!
The Ocho fired a burst of rounds from its cannons that knocked us back to the ground.
“What are your instincts telling you now?!” Jezzy asked.
“That I’m not taking this bullshit lying down!”
I slammed my palms into the controls and forced the Spence mech sideways, evading several rounds from the Ocho mech. We crawled forward and then shot up from behind the berm, surprising the Ocho.
We fired out our cannons and rockets at the mech, blasting off two of its arms, startling the machine that fumbled back.
World of Hurt: Mech Command Book 2 Page 19
