Fighting Iron 2: Perdition Plains

by Jake Bible

  He had one shot and it was a long one.

  Clay raced the flesh mech across the prairie, closing the distance between him and the rocket in the blink of an eye. If he’d had the time to think about it, Clay would have marveled at the speed the flesh mech possessed. It rivaled, perhaps surpassed, his own.

  But he didn’t have the time to think about it. He only had time to act and react.

  Clay snatched the rocket out of the air and threw it at the one racing towards the Vernacht. It was a move that he’d used a hundred times before in one form or another, but never with the need for perfect accuracy. The rocket that was aimed at the Vernacht was only a couple seconds from impact. Clay needed to destroy it before it was close enough that the explosion from the two rockets would damage the Vernacht more than it already was.

  The explosion was blinding. The flesh mech’s sensors tried to dim the intensity, but even with that assistance, Clay was too dialed in and integrated not to wince with pain as his eyes were overloaded.

  But wince was all Clay did as he pushed the flesh mech faster, placing it directly between Mr. Bell and the Vernacht.

  “Back off, power down, and get the hell out of my mech!” Clay yelled. He wasn’t surprised that his voice echoed out across the prairie. “I’m not going to tell you again, Bell!”

  There was no response. Mr. Bell did not slow the battle mech. He plowed on, rushing right at Clay and the flesh mech, plasma cannons coming up, ready to fire.

  “How much damage can this thing take?” Clay asked.

  “How much damage can any body take?” Morley replied.

  “That isn’t helping!” Clay snapped.

  “As long as the integration matrix is intact, this mech can keep fighting,” Morley said. “Barring any mortal damage you may take.”

  “Shields?” Clay asked.

  “No,” Morley said. “Only the flesh it is made of. Which, if I do say so myself, is quite remarkable. I was able to harden the materials I took from the bison, as well as—”

  “Don’t care!” Clay yelled as he sent the flesh mech into a dive, rolling under the first wave of plasma that came flying at him. “You can give me specs later!”

  Clay came up and sent a hard right jab into the battle mech’s midsection. He knew his machine, so he didn’t expect the blow to do much damage, but it threw off the plasma cannons’ aim, sending the second wave of blasts well off target.

  “Oh, please be careful with the Prometheus,” Morley whined.

  “Trying to,” Clay snapped.

  “I will need to be on the Vernacht to begin the transfer of Mr. Gibbons into the automaton,” Morley said.

  “Busy right now,” Clay said as he tried to sweep the battle mech’s legs. Mr. Bell leaped the machine over the flesh mech’s leg, landing several meters back. “Dammit!”

  “When Mr. Bell came to the area, he was an overconfident braggart,” Morley said with some venom. “He insisted on negotiating terms with the Perditions. As I well know, one does not negotiate terms with the Perditions.”

  “No matter where you’re from,” Clay said. “The folks in charge aren’t fond of negotiating. That’s fairly universal.”

  The belt guns on the battle mech came to life, and Clay swore under his breath. He prepared for the onslaught of slugs, but nothing happened after several seconds. No one had reloaded the belt guns, and Mr. Bell was using them purely out of either habit, instinct, or whatever programming his warped brain had. Clay knew he could use that against the bastard.

  The flesh mech’s left fist dug into the soft earth of the prairie, scooping up a massive handful which Clay immediately threw at the battle mech. The thick, loamy dirt collided with the belt guns, instantly gumming them up. White then black smoke poured from the belt guns, then they burst into flame as the motors melted.

  The battle mech plucked the burning belt guns from their moorings and threw them at Clay and the flesh mech. Clay easily dodged the attack, but was off balance enough that he couldn’t compensate when the battle mech came at him full speed. There was a crunch and sickening squish as the battle mech ducked its shoulder and slammed into the flesh mech’s chest.

  “The sooner you can get me to the Vernacht, the sooner we can leave this battle and return to my home,” Morley said.

  Even though he didn’t have the time to spare, since the flesh mech was currently falling onto its ass with the battle mech squarely on top of it, Clay shot a look of death at the man to his side.

  “Back off, asshole,” Clay growled. “I’ll get you there when I get you there.”

  He twisted the flesh mech and rolled the two machines across the ground, using the battle mech’s metal weight to propel them across the prairie, crushing and flattening the grasses to nothing.

  A flash of lightning, followed by a crash of thunder only a second later, came close to blinding and deafening Clay.

  “Adjust the goddamn sensors so that doesn’t happen again!” Clay yelled. His vision and hearing instantly dimmed to less intrusive levels.

  The mechs rolled a few more meters before the battle mech was able to get the advantage and wrap an arm around the flesh mech’s arm and bring them to a halt. There was a horrible sucking sound as the battle mech used its weight as leverage to pull and tear the flesh mech’s arm out of the socket.

  “SHIT!” Clay screamed as his right shoulder exploded with searing pain.

  “Oh, dear,” Morley muttered as he hurried over to Clay and disconnected the flesh harness from Clay’s shoulder. “I may have dialed in the pain receptors a little too accurately.”

  “Pain receptors?” Clay shouted. “Why the hell would you even have pain receptors?”

  “It allows for more complete integration,” Morley said in a tone that conveyed his feelings on Clay’s intellect.

  “Pilots shouldn’t feel pain unless they personally are in pain!” Clay yelled. “That’s the advantage of having a mech! It gets damaged, not the pilot!”

  “Yes, well, I am a scientist, not a mech expert, so please excuse my misunderstanding of how the pilot and mech relationship operates,” Morley said, sounding wounded.

  “Just shut up,” Clay said.

  “Hey? Anyone coming or what?” Gibbons asked.

  “You had better be joking!” Clay shouted.

  Gibbons chuckled. “I am. I thought you should know that my sensors are picking up overheated servos in our mech’s knees. Both joints are not able to take much more pressure. Holcomb may have tried to repair the damage we did earlier with fleshy bits, but those bits aren’t holding up to the job.”

  “Good to know,” Clay replied as he watched the battle mech toss the flesh mech’s arm out over the prairie. The limb flew across the plains until it was lost from sight. “Its arm strength doesn’t seem to be a problem.”

  “No, those servos are fully functional,” Gibbons said. “Good luck.”

  The battle mech brought a heavy fist down, and Clay gasped as the flesh mech shuddered under the attack. A status report streamed directly into his brain, and he saw that several muscle groups in the flesh mech’s torso had just been pulverized. Luckily, they were on the right side, which no longer had a limb, so Clay ignored the damage and swung out as hard and fast as he could with the flesh mech’s left arm.

  The battle mech crumpled over onto its right side as Clay demolished the right knee joint. Sparks erupted from the destroyed servos, and the fleshy bits used to repair the battle mech began to smoke and smolder right away. Clay set the flesh mech’s knees into the battle mech’s midsection, knocking it completely off, sending it tumbling to the side.

  Clay pumped his legs out and down, flipping the flesh mech up onto its feet. He spun about, raised a foot, then brought it down into the middle of the battle mech’s back. Armor plating crumpled and the struts underneath bent then snapped as Clay repeated the motion again and again.

  “Hey, Clay?” Gibbons called. “That’s still our mech, pal. Maybe go a little easier on it?”

&n
bsp; “To hell with that,” Clay said.

  He tucked a fleshy toe under the battle mech and flipped it onto its damaged back then stomped hard into the machine’s waist, cracking the hip joints. The battle mech’s legs shot out straight then went limp as they lost power. Clay laughed hard and reached for the battle mech’s cockpit hatch.

  A metal fist collided with the flesh mech’s left knee. Clay snarled as the leg went out from under him. He managed to keep the flesh mech from fully collapsing and steadied the machine with its one arm. The battle mech went in for another attack, but Clay ducked backwards and the metal fist whooshed by, missing its mark.

  Clay brought the flesh mech back up onto its feet, its left knee having sustained only minimal damage from the previous blow.

  “You! Are! Sitting! In! My! Seat!” Clay roared as he snapped the hatch off, tossed it aside, and reached inside the cockpit to pluck Mr. Bell free of the machine. “MY SEAT!”

  The man, or whatever he was, became nothing but pulp as Clay squished him in the flesh mech’s fist. Fluids and hunks of Mr. Bell fell to the ground just as the sky opened up and rain came down in a torrent that turned visibility into a theory. Clay lifted his one bloody fist high into the air, the motion punctuated by a flash of lightning and simultaneous crash of thunder.

  “Dude,” Gibbons said. “You won. Chill.”

  Clay took several deep breaths then shook his head. He looked about the landscape that was quickly turning to mud. It had a surreal quality to it, and Clay almost felt as if the fight had been nothing but a dream. An intense, overpowering dream, bordering on nightmare.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Clay said then threw up all over the cockpit floor.

  “Yes, that would be the added endorphins pumping through you,” Morley said. “A side effect of integration, I am afraid. In order for my organic machine to work, I had to install an endocrine system to keep the muscles and flesh from atrophying. Stabilizing the rot was simple, I had perfected that long ago, but muscles must still be driven to perform and synthetic adrenaline, noradrenaline, and even dopamine circulate throughout the tissues. I may look into including enkephalin to regulate the pain response. I see that is obviously needed now.”

  Lightning struck the downed battle mech and more smoke began to pour from the broken machine.

  “Hello? I think we’re on a time table now,” Gibbons said. “The pilot in here is sort of freaking out.”

  “Ah, yes, that would be because of the storm,” Morley said. “The automatons have always been wary of electrical storms. Understandable considering their creation.”

  “I don’t want to know what that means,” Gibbons said. “What I want is out of the Vernacht. Can we make that happen?”

  “In this storm? Oh, heavens no,” Morley said. “But we can bring the Vernacht back to my home and process the transfer there. It will be much safer using my equipment than trying to rig a hookup out in the field like this.”

  “Then let’s get going,” Gibbons said then paused. “Uh…how?”

  “I will drag you back to the cave,” Morley said. “I can manage that easily enough if Mr. MacAulay will relinquish the controls.”

  “Gladly,” Clay gasped as he undid the harness and fell onto his hands and knees. He vomited a couple more times then struggled to his feet. “All yours, bud.”

  Clay managed to crawl to the side of the cockpit and rest his back against the unfortunately moist wall. He ignored the slickness and closed his eyes, his body completely drained of all energy.

  “Gibbons?” he whispered. “Gibbons?”

  There was a quiet squawk in Clay’s ear.

  “Coms back online,” Gibbons said. “You good, Clay?”

  “I’m good, just exhausted,” Clay said. “I think I understand what full integration with a mech does to a person.”

  “Now you know how I feel,” Gibbons said, “and I don’t have a body.”

  “Not yet, Mr. Gibbons,” Morley said. “Not yet, but soon. Very soon.”

  “I’m gonna rest my eyes for a minute or two, okay?” Clay sighed.

  “You do that,” Gibbons said. “I’ll wake you if things get weird.”

  Clay chuckled for half a second then was out.

  Seventeen

  The cool, wet rag felt so good across Clay’s forehead. He sighed and smiled before opening his eyes. He wasn’t disoriented. He knew he was in the Barneses’ cavern system. The smell of damp mixed with earth and also partially rotted flesh was a dead giveaway. There was also the sound of Morley whistling some tuneless song in some other part of the cavern that added to the obvious.

  So Clay was perfectly prepared for Paige to be the one wetting the cloth and applying it to his forehead and cheeks. What he wasn’t prepared for was the blank face of the Vernacht’s automaton pilot hovering over him instead. The sallow skin and sunken cheeks, dead eyes and blueish lips. Not the sight Clay expected when his tired eyes cracked open.

  “What the hell?” Clay exclaimed as he bolted upright and shoved the automaton away. “Get the hell away from me!”

  “Calm down, pal,” the automaton said in a flat voice. “It’s me. Gibbons. I’m stuck inside this rotting meat bag.”

  Clay eyed the thing cautiously. Yes, that had been the plan, to put Gibbons in the pilot, but the automaton didn’t look like it had a consciousness inside it; it looked just as dead as it had the first time Clay had laid eyes upon it.

  “Tell me something only Gibbons would know,” Clay said.

  “When you fart in your sleep, you giggle then tell yourself you’re a bad, bad boy,” the automaton replied.

  “What? I don’t do that!” Clay snapped.

  “Yeah, pal, you do,” the automaton responded. “But that’s a bad example since you’re asleep when you do it and I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it to you when you’re awake.”

  “Then why use that as something only Gibbons would know?” Clay snapped.

  “Because I’m the only one that knows it,” the automaton said. The “duh” was implied despite the tone of voice being flat and void of any personality or inflection. “You said to say something only Gibbons would know. Only I know that.”

  “Something only we’d both know, asshole,” Clay growled.

  The automaton paused. For a very long time.

  “You still in there?” Clay asked.

  “Hold on, hold on,” the automaton said. “I’m thinking. This brain doesn’t process as fast as my AI matrix.”

  “Okay, fine, feel free to take your time,” Clay said. “It’s not like we have a town of weirdos to deal with or a mech to fetch and repair.”

  “Oh, I already fetched our mech,” the automaton said. “You’ve been asleep all night. Totally missed the storm.”

  “All night?” Clay asked. “No one came looking?”

  “It was a bitch of a storm,” the automaton said. “Paige says that the folks in charge must have called off their dogs. Literally. Electrical storms that size will fry the tweener hounds. It can fry me too. Won’t fry the flesh mech. Something about the flow of the current and how the mech is naturally insulated. Which doesn’t make a lick of sense, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you that,” Clay insisted. “I asked you to tell me something only Gibbons and I would know. Do it now or I get up from this cot and kick your ass.”

  “Oh, don’t even try, pal,” the automaton laughed. It sounded like a person coughing and choking at the same time. “This body would break you. Trust me.”

  He stuck his finger in the air, looked at it for a moment, then set it back down.

  “That time on the southern border of Southwest MexiCali,” he exclaimed. “You know, where that cantina was? We came stumbling out of that jungle, only fumes left in the power cells, and nearly crushed the place. Had no idea it was there until the sun came up and we saw how close we’d come to smashing it flat. You remember what you did first thing?”

  “Man, that was the time I’d been drinking that jungle ho
och, wasn’t it?” Clay replied. “I pissed all over the cantina’s roof, laughing the whole time until the bartender sleeping inside came out and started shooting his scatter gun up at me.”

  “And you yelled that your pecker had better aim than he did with that gun,” the automaton said. “That was hilarious until he went back inside and called the local militia that just happened to have a dozen mini-mechs at their disposal. We ran until we lost them then had to bury the mech in foliage until we could drill deep enough and siphon off some geothermal.”

  “I didn’t sleep for three days as I waited for the militia to catch up to us,” Clay said. He smiled and stood up, offering his hand. “It’s good to see you, Gibbons.”

  “You aren’t seeing me,” Gibbons said and shook the offered hand. “This is just a temporary meat bag, pal. I’m a mech AI, and I need to get back into our mech as soon as possible.”

  There was a massive crash from deep inside the cave then a string of curses that almost made Gibbons’ dead flesh blush. Almost.

  “Yeah, we better go help,” Gibbons said. “Paige tends to break things when she gets frustrated. Follow me.”

  Clay looked around and saw he was in an actual room. Wooden floor, wooden walls, a wooden door right in front of him. Not cave. At least not until they left the room, and he found it was a simple hut built inside the gigantic main cavern. There were a couple dozen more huts set about the place, some looking ancient and some looking fairly new. All of them were covered in dirt and streaked with God knew what.

  Clay quickly found out why as a stream of putrid liquid squirted down from a huge scaffolding and splatted between his boots.

  “Sweet bloody hell,” Clay cursed as he put his hand over his nose. “What the hell is that?”

  “Grease made from congealed bison fat,” Gibbons said. “Not rendered down, but left to rot and congeal. Paige says it works better. That’s why it smells so bad.”

  “Nothing works on this damned thing!” Paige yelled down from the top of the scaffolding which reached about to the battle mech’s chest. Bracing was shoved against the mech on all sides, keeping it from toppling over. “I don’t know how Holcomb was able to get his crew to retrofit this machine with organic parts! Nothing I try is compatible!”