Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  Traffic here is a snarl as drivers panic, reverse into each other, and get up on the sidewalk in their desperation to escape. The mecha land in the center of an intersection, and as they’re coming down they’re already firing into traffic and the surrounding buildings. Cars are shredded in seconds; the entire front of a building melts away under the punishing fire. A laser licks out and sets a newsstand ablaze. Without breaking momentum they’re up again, bounding toward the next intersection.

  I’m in shock. They just murdered a dozen people at least, and they’re moving on like it’s nothing. A blank, empty moment gives way to a molten rage the likes of which I didn’t even know was possible. It’s all just to throw anyone following them off the trail. They’re making as much chaos and carnage as they can to distract and delay anyone who comes after them.

  These guys are about to have a very bad day.

  I gather my power and explode into motion. Zero to three hundred in forty yards and then they’re snapping past me to either side and I’m spinning around and sliding to a stop on the roof of a city bus that’s slewed over to one side of the road and abandoned. I square my shoulders and try to look imposing with all five feet and six inches of me. The mecha see me, and come to a clanking, clattering halt.

  “That is ENOUGH!” I shout. “You’ve got one chance to surrender! Come out of your mecha with your hands—”

  The green one shoots me in the face with an autocannon.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In the fight’s first half second, explosions ripple up my chest, neck, and face. It is stunningly painful, and for a moment I lose hold of the lattice and get punted fifteen yards into the back of an abandoned delivery truck. The last time I was shot, it was by a submachine gun firing pistol ammo that’s about the size of two knuckles of my pinky finger. That was uncomfortable. This is an autocannon, and it fires rounds that are longer than my hand. My face has gone hot scarlet with pain. I’m still staggering to my feet when the missiles arrive. They burst like tiny suns, and a driving rain of shrapnel tears into me. Then something hits the bus from behind and drives it forward into the truck, crushing me between them. A few seconds later, one of the mecha hops over and douses the whole area in napalm.

  This is not going how I pictured it in my head.

  My ears are ringing and my skull throbs. My body screams for release from the steel pressure that’s pinching me between the truck and the bus. The flames haven’t reached me, but drips of liquid fire are starting to pour in from all over. With a great rippling effort, I peel the bus and panel truck apart, and slip out the gap to the side. Almost immediately, I’m fired on with a minigun that sounds like chainsaws against sheet metal. An almost solid stream of bullets shatters against me, a stinging, vicious assault ripping across me in lines of pain.

  With a burst of speed, I leave the street in a blur and smash through the window of a luxury clothing shop. Around me, thousands of dollars’ worth of suits and ties are ripped to tattered threads. Deep in the store, I take a sharp turn behind a wall and skid to a stop. The place is empty, everyone gone to the shelters, and I let go of a sigh of relief. It was a gamble coming in here to get away. I can’t afford to keep taking this kind of chance; sooner or later, I’ll find a group of people who weren’t able to make it to a shelter in time. Should have gone straight up. Stupid, Danny. Real stupid.

  My face feels a little funny, and I wipe it on my forearm. In one horrifying moment I learn two things. First, I’m bleeding, which I’d kind of hoped wasn’t ever going to happen again. But much, much worse, my mask and cowl have been shot away. All over my suit are little rips and burst seams, but starting around my collarbones, the suit’s outer layers been stripped away, leaving the dark gray undersuit and hypertech circuitry exposed to the air. Where the suit should climb up my neck, it’s simply fallen away in tatters. From the top of my neck up, my face is completely bare.

  There’s a sound like the breath of a hungry dragon, and then fire is pouring around the corners and splashing against the walls. This store takes up the entire ground floor of this building, so I fly for the other side, impeccably dressed mannequins pulled along in my wake. Just as I’m about to exit the other side of the building, I see something that makes me halt like I’ve hit a wall.

  A news helicopter with more nerve than sense has flown into the downtown core, weaving among the buildings as it tries to get a clear shot. It’s headed right down this street.

  With an icy twist in my guts, I back up into the shadows. Over the crackling flames, I can hear the mecha bounding away on high-pitched jump jets. They’ve left me for dead, or have decided that whatever timetable they’re on doesn’t give them time to follow me and finish me off.

  I could leave.

  I should leave.

  Let’s be honest, these guys are kicking my ass. I’m not cut out for this. And if my face gets on the news, that’s it; I’m never going to escape. There’s a subway entrance right over there. I could put a shirt over my head, go down into the tunnels, fly until I’m out of the area, get back up into open sky, and not stop ’til I’m back on the mountain.

  I can’t go out there.

  Another explosion shakes the windows.

  No.

  I can’t not go out there.

  I step out into the sunlight, and take to the air. It’s hard to push the chopper out of my mind, but this is too dangerous to let myself be distracted. Half of a steep looping spiral brings me back onto the street where the four mecha are bounding forward with their stolen boxcar, maybe three hundred feet above them and a few dozen back.

  I need a better plan of attack. I can’t afford to get up close and slug it out with them when they’re grouped up like that. They’ll just mob me again, and those weapons hurt. Maybe none of them is carrying something that can take me out in one shot, but if I let them gang up on me they’ll grind me to paste one way or the other.

  Wait a minute.

  Weren’t there supposed to be five of these things?

  The screaming of jet engines gives me a half-second warning before something big and purple and made of pain swats me out of the sky. I hit an office tower roof, bounce once in a spray of gravel, and slam most of the way through the building’s air conditioner, a big box full of metal about the size of a minivan.

  Ow.

  As I’m peeling myself out of the metal that’s bent itself around me, something heavy lands outside. It’s the fifth mecha, royal purple and crackling with energy. Eight feet tall, it looks like a fighter jet crossed with a suit of medieval plate armor. A pair of hissing beam sabers, blue-white and painful to look at, burst from its wrists. Its jets scream up power again, and it launches itself across the roof at me.

  I rip myself from the crumpled air conditioner’s grasp and flip out of the way as the beam sabers cut a yellow molten X where I’d been trapped. Even as I’m pushing for distance, the mecha boosts at me and whips its sabers toward my chest. The blades crackle and hiss and the air smells burnt when I twist clear of another attack.

  I’m half expecting to leave it behind any moment now, but it feints with its saber and then shoulder slams me like wrecking ball. This one doesn’t jump; it flies. It flies fast. Crap, very fast!

  But it flies only in one direction, which is not a problem I can relate to. I juke backwards and then fly down, feet first past and then up behind him. A pair of howling jet engines blasts my hair back, and they don’t like it at all when I ram my fist up the afterburner. The right engine coughs and barfs a hardware store’s worth of broken metal bits out the rear end. Sparks and black smoke begin to trail from the mecha and it begins a slow corkscrew to the ground. I stay with it, and rip the guts out of its second engine, too.

  The mecha screams—like, literally a speaker crackles on and then some guy is screaming in rage at me. “This doesn’t involve you; just leave us alone!” There’s something about the voice that strikes me as familiar.

  It fires its attitude jets and spins over on its bac
k to slash at me with a hissing saber. I dodge, and it sprays me with a burst from its chest-mounted machine gun.

  My fingers crunch through steel and ceramic, and I flip it back over by its legs. With a firm grip on its flaming engines, I start powering toward the ground. There’s a nice open stretch of road I’m aiming for; I don’t want this to fall on anyone. The pilot tries to wriggle out of my grip, but I stay tight against his back. Just a dozen feet up or so I let go and it plows into the ground in a shower of sparks and shattered asphalt, bounces, skids, and comes up to its feet in a fighting stance.

  Which, you know, isn’t even close to fair. It’s all dented and banged up, but I think I should have gotten a little more out of pile driving it from fifty stories up.

  “Why don’t you give up?” I ask him, from what I hope is a safe distance in the air. “It took all four of your buddies just to slow me down—you don’t think you’re really going to win here, do you?”

  “Get out of here! This has nothing to do with you!” the pilot shouts. I swear I know this voice from somewhere. “Just let me have this!”

  “Wait, Gerald? Seriously?” Wow. Um. Okay. Sure. The mecha—or really, Gerald—flares his attitude jets and lunges at me. I bounce for altitude and he sails beneath me, sabers ripping at the air and not much else. On the way down he spins and fires off another burst of his machine gun. I loop under the tracers and shoot in to hit him in the waist. We hit the ground with a clang and I plow a deep furrow with the back of his mecha. His machine gun is in a little ball turret and it swivels down to shoot me. I grab the barrel and twist it with a whine of tortured metal. He fires again and something bad happens deep inside the gun.

  Gerald slashes his beam sabers at me too fast to dodge. I get my arms up to block them, and molten pain sings out from my forearms. I bound into the air and frantically pull for distance.

  The outer edges of my forearms each have a long, narrow burn crossing them. The suit has been almost entirely burnt away, the charcoal-gray undersuit visible along the length of each burn, and a few places where I can see red, angry burns on my skin. It feels like he hit me with some white-hot rebar. Already the blisters are starting to rise. I need something to counter those swords or I won’t last long up close with him. A quick glance around, and I don’t see any other mecha sneaking up on me. I need to finish with this one fast and get back to the others before they can hurt anyone else.

  While he pulls himself from the trench we dug, I fly over to a nearby parking lot to get a weapon. Because I’m a fangirl and fangirls read too much, I know that you don’t want to hit people with cars like they’re baseball bats. A modern car is mostly made out of plastic crumple zones; it’s not going to hit the kinds of things a superhero fights very hard. But if you rip out the engine block, which is a few hundred pounds of solid metal, then you have something to work with.

  With a few sharp tugs I’m able to liberate an engine from the front of an SUV. I charge the purple mecha and use my big hunk of metal to smash its beam sabers aside, then slam it down on the mecha’s shoulder. Once, twice, three times, and it gives way just about the same time as the engine disintegrates in my hands. He slashes at me with his good arm and starts screaming about how he’s going to kill me for trying to mess up his “big chance.” I get my arms around its good arm and set my feet against the shoulder socket. With a great twisting tug, I rip the arm off, hydraulics bursting in a spray of soupy blue fluid. Gerald screams again, and before he gets a chance to think of something clever I’ve anchored myself to the mecha’s chest and I’m pounding at the release catches for the cockpit hatch. A few sharp blows and the hatch’s locks are done; I rip it and reach out to grab him by the front—

  Holy shit, what the hell is that?

  Gerald is glaring up at me with all the hate he can muster, and I can’t tell where he ends and the machine starts. Segmented metal tubes plug straight into his skin, all red and swollen where he is joined with the machine. His arms are gone, and in their place thick bundles of cables run into a pair of cavities that used to be his armpits. It’s hard to see from this angle, but I’m pretty sure his legs are gone, too. He’s nothing but a torso encased in a metal cradle that’s been slotted into the center of this thing.

  “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” he mutters.

  So I punch him, and man, it feels good. He cries out and snorts blood from a freshly broken nose.

  “What’s she planning?” I snap.

  “Go to hell.” I think it would be easier to accept if he were just angry and frustrated at being beaten. But his head is hanging, and his voice drips with self-pity. Because he’s the victim here, don’t you know?

  There is a pair of yellow handles on the cradle, one near each of his shoulders. The more I look at it, the more I think what’s left of his body is just plugged in there like a socket. With a sharp heave, I pull him straight up and out of the cockpit. The whole metal casing surrounding his body comes out cleanly, cables separating along magnetically sealed break links.

  As it turns out, all of his nerve endings were still connected to the mecha. Whoops. He doesn’t stop screaming until we’re almost up on the roof of a thirty-story building. I toss him down on the gravel next to the building’s air conditioner. He lands face-first and begins to sob.

  For the briefest moment, I feel pity and remorse. Another explosion echoes in the distance, and I remember what Calamity said. You don’t gotta feel bad about playing dirty with his kind. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m starting to understand why she would say it.

  “I don’t even want to think about how many people you’ve killed today, but whatever Utopia promised you isn’t going to happen,” I say. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about her plan, or I’m going to leave you up here and forget about you.”

  “No!” he snarls, face down, glaring at me from the corner of his eye. “She said she was going to give me a real body, one like hers! You think I’m going to screw that up?”

  “Dude, look at you! You can’t even wipe your own ass anymore! You are already so fucked we don’t even have words for how badly you’re screwed. How often do you think the maintenance guys have a reason to come out here?” I ask him. “Once a day? Twice a week?”

  He screws his eyes shut.

  “I can’t stay here long. I have to stop the others. I’m giving you until I reach the edge of the roof to start talking, and then I’m going to leave you here and see how long it takes for someone to find you.”

  I make it four slow paces before he cracks.

  “This is all she told us about! I promise!”

  “Not good enough,” I say, and keep walking. Just a few steps more.

  “Wait! Wait, there’s a submarine! We were supposed to make our way to the waterfront, and she’s got a sub waiting to meet us! That’s our escape plan.”

  “Better.” The gravel crunches under my feet. “But not enough.”

  “But that’s all I know, I swear!” There’s real panic in his voice now. “We grab the money, we fight through town, and we get in the sub and escape.”

  I pause at the edge. So maybe this is really just a big robbery? That seems so petty to go to all these lengths for. Why not just hijack the train when it got out of town? She clearly has the capabilities to pull something like that off. Gerald is pleading and sobbing now, and I’m pretty sure I won’t get anything else out of him.

  I turn back to him. “Thanks, Gerald. When this is done, I’ll tell them to come find you.” Shooting down between the skyscrapers, toward the sound of gunfire, I mutter to myself, “Eventually.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Four mecha, one of me, and last time I tried this they kicked me around like a soccer ball. I find them back in formation and bounding toward the waterfront. They land and spray another intersection down with fire. It seems like most people have cleared the area by now, but I still see a few stragglers trying to hide behind mailboxes or press themselves down under cars.

>   Anxiety clenches at me. I spent too long taking down Gerald. They keep blasting the city and I have no idea how I’m going to stop them. If I get close enough to hit them, they’re going to mob me again. I’m not good enough for this. I’m not smart enough, not brave enough. These people are all going to die because of me. I can’t think, I don’t know what to do, everything is going wrong. I need Calamity. She’d know what to—

  And then a plan just clicks into place.

  These guys need to be as scared and confused as I am, and achieve to that, I need to hit them where it hurts. I need to split them up and hunt them down one at a time.

  The wind tugs hard at me as I angle down and push for speed. The mecha notice me on the way in and fill the air with autocannon and laser fire. Ruby fingers of light lick out at me, and orange tracers crowd the air. I loop and roll under their fire. They score a few light hits but I crack the sound barrier and keep coming. Two hundred yards, one hundred, fifty—

  Impact.

  I hit the boxcar with an apocalyptic bang and punch through the other side in hurricane of cash. The boxcar rips in half like a burst piñata, spinning out of their claws and spraying millions of dollars out onto the street. I turn over on to my back and give them the finger as I pull for altitude.

  Their precious teamwork goes out the frickin’ window. The yellow one immediately turns and goes bounding away on its jets. Green and Blue just kind of stand there for a moment, and then begin firing everything they’ve got at me.