Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  I loop around the block in a climbing spiral and come screaming down the road that Yellow has taken off on. At the last moment it seems to become aware of me, too late to do anything. Dragging my fingers across its back as I pass, I catch a solid handhold on an ammo rack and jerk the mecha off the ground. My shoulders feel like they want to come out of my sockets but with a heave I set it spinning, and it does a few cartwheels down the road before crashing down on a parked truck. I loop up and back to drive down on Yellow from above. The pilot manages to bring his flamethrower around fast enough to spatter me with napalm on the way in. Feet first, I crunch it down through the truck and into the pavement. The locks on the hatch snap off when I kick at them, and I’ve ripped the mecha open in a single smooth attack.

  This one is another plug-type, and the pilot is screaming at me in horror. Yellow’s arms come up to try and bat me off, but I rip the pilot out of his socket and drop him on the sidewalk. His screams go up a few octaves when I do, and I feel dirty. I really hate these guys, but I don’t like to think about what it must feel like to have live nerve connections severed like that. But what can I do? They’re killing people.

  Just as I’m thinking this, something flashes off to my left. I whirl, ready to fight. It’s a photographer standing not fifteen feet from me. He snaps another picture of me standing atop the destroyed mecha.

  “Get inside, idiot!” I shout at him.

  “No way, this is gonna make my Pulitzer,” he says from behind the viewfinder.

  In the time it takes him to blink I’ve crossed the distance between us and shattered his camera all over the ground. “There, now you don’t have any reason to stay out here.”

  He shouts some truly inventive profanity at me, but I’m already leaving him behind and approaching Mach 1. There are three mecha remaining. I come around the corner at about thirty feet off the ground, and almost instantly a laser beam melts the windows next to me and punches clear through the corner of the building. The beam tracks toward me to correct, dragging a line of fire and destruction behind me, and but I’m across the street and out of sight in less than a second. A second is all I need. I get a glance at them and figure out my next step.

  The last three have decided to stick together and make the best of it. The red one is trying to tip half the torn boxcar up on its end and use it like a bucket to hold as much cash as it can. Green is the one that shot at me, so I figure it must have some advanced sensors to be able to track me through these buildings. Blue is standing back-to-back with Green, covering the other approach.

  So. Destroy Green.

  I dig as deep into the lattice as I can and pop the sound barrier like a soap bubble. The world goes green and black around the edges as I take a turn at forty Gs. My shock wave bounces cars and shatters windows. At almost two thousand miles an hour I circle the block and tear back up the street toward them. At these speeds, the air itself is trying to burn me as the friction flash boils my sweat away into steam.

  Blue is waiting and throws a blizzard of tracers my way. Some I roll around, others I batter through. Ruby lasers lick out from Green’s shoulder turrets as it tries to turn around in time to bring its main weapons to bear on me. Too slow. Far, far too slow.

  My fingers clamp down as I pass Green, getting me a hold of a solid, shoulder-jerking grip as I angle my flight down. My feet hit pavement and I pivot my momentum through my ankles and knees. My back and arms straining, I whip Green up and over, slam it down so hard that cars leap into the air all around us. Even as tires are still hitting the shattered pavement, I’m up on the front of Green, machine-gunning punches into the armor around its hatch to bust it open like the other ones. The hatch pops off and I fling it away. The pilot is dazed, her eyes unfocused and glassy.

  Blue’s claw seizes me around the chest and whips me away from Green. Dammit. The ground comes up to smash me once, twice, three times until I’m able to get an arm free from Blue’s fat, stubby claw, rip one of its fingers off, and squirm from its grasp. Blue hoses me down with stinging rivers of bullets that tear and pull at me. The pilot is still leaning on the trigger when I rush in and crunch the barrels of its machine guns; I can hear them jam and backfire deep inside the machine. Scrambling up the front of Blue, I start jackhammering my fist against the lip of its hatch.

  Blue’s jump jets fire and it body slams me against a concrete pillar next to the entrance to an office tower. My ribs creak and the breath explodes out of me. Blue reverses thrust; I slide down the pillar in a daze and just manage to flit out of there before the whole area explodes in dust and stone chips from a burst of autocannon fire. Orange tracers fall away behind me as I boost for speed to come around the block again.

  But no. I hang in midair on the other side of the tower. The air is flat and acrid with smoke. The air raid sirens wail in the distance. The fear and the anger urge me on, tell me to attack, attack, attack, but I have to pause. I need to think.

  I can’t keep coming straight at them down the road. They’ll be expecting that, and these three seem to be sticking together enough that getting in and ripping off hatches isn’t a real good idea. I need to pull their teeth first, and I need to approach them from an angle they’re not watching. A thought occurs to me, and I decide to do it at the same moment I realize how dangerous it will be. I’m gonna go through the building. It’s a risk—they might start shooting into the upper floors of towers in response, but I have the advantage now and I need to keep it. I need to keep them off balance.

  A wall-sized window shatters into turquoise gravel as I punch through. Office furniture and a few huddled workers whip by me. Idiots! What are they still doing out on the office floor? At a time like this, they should be hiding in a stairwell where the concrete walls will keep them safe. Haven’t they ever lived in a city before? A vortex of shredded paperwork is sucked up in my wake, and I explode out the side of the building in a cloak of shattered glass. My attack comes from almost directly above the mecha, and Blue barely registers my presence before I land on its shoulders and begin tugging at the barrels of its autocannons. These are powerful weapons, but they’re not designed to resist someone like me torqueing on them. With a shriek they bend upward, useless and twisted. I dart away with a snap-flutter of my cape. Red is raising its grenade launcher as I charge. Just as it starts coughing rounds at me, I get in close and rip the ammo feed out. Slipping around to Red’s back, I pop up into the air and give each of its shoulder-mounted missile racks a solid kick. They burst open like wet grocery bags, dented and split missiles spilling out and clattering to the ground.

  With a few heavy stomps I crack Red’s hatch open and rip the pilot out. Tossing him screaming into the upturned half of the boxcar he was dragging—a loose pile of cash is like a pillow, right?—I charge Blue before it can get any ideas.

  Blue gets its arms up in time to parry my first blow, and we trade punches for a moment, a real titanic slugfest with echoing bangs like sledgehammers on cast iron. It manages to force me to the ground and I’m stuck dodging blows and punching shins. My boots gouge divots in asphalt as I land punches, and Blue’s fist makes my cheek pop and sing with pain. Finally I catch its fist, a huge clawed finger in each hand, and twist it to the outside. I leave the ground, and rotate in place so I can keep twisting. The arm seizes up, strains, and rips off in a spurting fountain of hydraulics. Blue staggers and its good arm goes to grasp at its stump. While the pilot is distracted by the pain of losing an arm linked to his nerves, I get the hatch off and pull him out. The blue mecha falls over, and I set its pilot down gently in the crook of its arm. His face is pale, and his eyes are distant.

  Green is on her feet again, and by the fury in her eyes I’m guessing getting her hatch torn off isn’t enough to stop her. We stare at each other across thirty yards of broken asphalt and destroyed cars. She flexes her mecha’s fingers, clenches them into fists bigger than my head. “I am going to kill you, kid. I’m gonna pull you apart and pop your skull!”

  She’s got guts,
I’ll say that much for her. The world goes streaky for a moment and then we’re nose to nose.

  “Nope.”

  Her hands are coming up to smash me even as I rip the last pilot from her socket and twist up and away.

  The green mecha falls over with a clatter and bang. I set the pilot down—she’s about as thrilled as the rest of them, hissing and grunting in helpless agony—and wobble on over to sit on the leg of a fallen mecha. Aside from the moans of the pilots, there is a sudden quiet on the scene, far quieter than I ever expected to hear downtown.

  So that’s it, then.

  My first big fight.

  Combat is not what I thought it would be.

  My cape is tattered with autocannon holes. My gloves are cracked, my knuckles split and bleeding. My burns sting, my head throbs, and my ribs ache. There are bruises everywhere.

  And I’m starving.

  Slowly, the rest of the world begins to intrude. I hear choppers overhead, and look up. The news helicopters have decided to get up over the downtown core and stare down with their zoom lenses. Crap.

  My throat clenches and I zip off the street, through the shattered windows of a bank, and get far enough in to be out of sight from anything in the sky. Something is wrong. I feel anxious and tight, and my guts are churning. The shakes start at my hands, a tremble moving inward toward my core. My knees are knocking and I sit down heavily in a plush chair in the waiting area. There might be vomit soon. I begin to sob, and I couldn’t explain why if you asked. I’m not scared, and the pain isn’t so bad, but all I can do is hug myself and shudder through it.

  There’s footsteps on broken glass, and I look up. A cop noses around the corner, face pressed down behind the sights of a carbine. When she sees me, she straightens up in surprise and lowers the weapon. “Are you okay?” she asks. “Is it over?”

  I take a shaking breath to steady myself long enough to speak. “Yeah, that’s all of them, I think, and now I’m crying for no reason.”

  The cop smiles faintly. “That’s the adrenaline. It happens to everyone.” She squeezes the mic on her shoulder and mutters some code words back to the other police officers.

  “Oh, good.” I gesture at the destroyed mecha with my thumb. “For a moment there I was scared they were going to think I was a wimp.”

  She snorts. “Breathe deep and slow. It will pass.” I follow her advice, and when I’m a little steadier she says, “So you’re the new Dreadnought?”

  “That’s me,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Officer Phạm,” she says.

  “You shouldn’t have been so close,” I say. “I was having a hard time with them. They could have killed you.”

  “It’s been silent for about ten minutes.” Officer Phạm crosses the lobby and pokes her head out the other shattered window to get a look at the downed mecha. “The sarge sent me in to get a look.”

  Ten minutes? No, it hasn’t been that long. I look up at her, confused.

  “Time will get away from you,” she says. “Good work, by the way.”

  “Thanks.” I sit up straight. There’s something I need to check. My hand goes for my cell phone, but it’s just a fistful of shattered plastic in a belt case now. “Are the news choppers gone yet?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Dammit.” I stand up and take a tentative step toward the window to try to see where the choppers are focused. “My mask got shot away. I really don’t want them to get a close-up of my face.”

  Officer Phạm grimaces. “We can have a cruiser brought up and drive you out of here. Throw a jacket over your head and nobody will ever know.”

  Tempting. Very tempting. But with the stress crash fading, I’m starting to think clearly again. Now is not the time to be running away.

  “No. There’s something else I have to do. In fact, get the word out that people should stay in their shelters—I don’t think this is over. Get someone to call the Navy and tell them these guys might have had a submarine in Puget Sound, too.” I walk toward the window she came in through. The choppers are all filming the downed mecha, it looks like. Going out the other side of this building should be safe-ish. “Oh, and you’re going to find one of these pilots up on a roof somewhere; I forget which building, sorry.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to find out what the hell’s happened to the Legion.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Up through the air like a shot, through the sound barrier, and across the skyline. I’m barely at cruising speed before I have to pull back and decelerate to come to a jogging touchdown on the landing pad at Legion Tower. Something’s off. It takes me a moment to place what’s wrong, but then I notice the landing lights are all dead. Wind tugs at my cape, and the tower is silent and dark. For maybe three or four seconds.

  Then the machine guns start up. Art deco moldings clack open, miniguns unfold, and scarlet streams of tracers break themselves against me. One gun smashes apart under my fist, the other my foot, and it’s done almost before it started. No more guns pop open to shoot me. It’s amazing how fast this kind of thing becomes second nature.

  The door I kicked in last night still hasn’t been replaced. When I tap an elevator button, nothing happens, as if the machine gun welcome mat wasn’t enough to tell me I’m not a guest of honor. The elevator doors resist me when I try to slide them open. A few solid kicks crumple them inward with a screech and crunch. The shaft is black and silent. This is starting to creep me out now. As I’m falling down the elevator shaft, a white beacon flares to life above the doors to the thirty-fourth floor. I grab the lattice to stop my fall, and watch it carefully.

  “Danny, get in here,” says Doc Impossible over a speaker. The doors slide open, and I’m drenched with relief. The airlock is waiting for me, and I try not to let the anxiety get to me as I wait for the sterilization beams to work.

  “Doc, what’s going on? How come you guys haven’t answered anyone’s call?”

  “We’re under attack. The Legion is out of action.” Doc Impossible’s voice is low, resigned. “I think I’ve got her contained, but…oh. Damn. Well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

  The happy anime face pings its approval at me, and the airlock’s inner door cracks open with a thunk and hiss. A trail of scarlet blinkers in the floor leads through the halls of Impossible’s lab, first down this hall, then that one. The walls are drab and dark, and the gloom is only partially held back by harsh emergency lights every dozen yards or so. Doc Impossible’s pug sticks its head around a corner, sees me, and scuttles back into the darkness.

  “What do you mean, ‘out of action’? Where are you?” My footsteps tap dully against the ground. I didn’t notice before, but the ground is plastic. It was softly glowing, making everything underlit like some technoglossy wonderland. But now it’s just flat, off-white panels that my boots tup-tup against as I walk. Except for the little trail of blinkers, the floor is dead. Like the walls, like everything in the building.

  “Busy. Follow the trail. Calamity has been asking for you.”

  “You said we were under attack.”

  “It’s bad,” says Doc Impossible. Her voice is coming from everywhere, nowhere. “Utopia has fortified herself in the main computer core. It won’t be long now.”

  “Won’t be long until what?” I ask as I get to the door the scarlet blinkers are leading me to. It whooshes open, and Calamity shoots me directly between the eyes.

  “Ow!” My hand shoots up to rub the bridge of my poor, battered nose. It’s still tender from the walloping I got from those autocannons. “The hell was that for?”

  Calamity’s arm drops back down to her side like the gun is suddenly too heavy for her. “Sorry, Danny,” she says in the Sarah voice. She’s lying in a hospital bed, shirt removed but her whole chest wrapped in soft white bandages. Her arm is gone at the shoulder—no stump, no nothing, just gone. A square of gauze is taped over her left eye, and her face hangs slack with we
ariness. “Thought you were another one of those things. Nice colors.”

  “Thanks. What things?”

  “There, that.” She gestures with her gun, to something near the foot of the bed. It’s Doctor Impossible, sprawled out like a corpse, except—a jolt goes through me, all the way down to my fingertips. It’s Doc Impossible except her head is missing from the lower jaw on up, and there are fiber-optic wires and smashed circuitry where there should be blood and skull. Her body lies in a puddle of its own white circulatory fluid. “That thing came in, pointed a gun at me, and then, bang, ate its own bullet. Explosive-tipped, by the looks of it. Didn’t think I’d get lucky twice, thus the hollowpoint hello. Did you know she was a robot?”

  “Why would a robot be a nicotine addict?” I look at the ceiling. “Doc, what’s going on?”

  Her voice floats down from nowhere. She’s quiet, and sounds dazed, like the effort to guide me here was one last grasp at lucidity and now she’s sliding, sliding down into the black. “I thought I’d removed all the back doors, but now I wonder if that was only a memory I was meant to have.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” asks Sarah. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “It’s Thursday, maybe eleven in the morning.” I tell her briefly about the fight downtown, about how the Legion wasn’t answering its calls, how other than the miniguns on the roof, the tower seems completely dead, and about the attack Doc mentioned when she was still making sense.

  “Clever bitch must have lied to everyone,” says Sarah. “She told her goons it was going down next week in case one of them squealed, so we all thought we had more time.”

  “Doc!” I shout at the ceiling. “I need you!”

  “How much of me is a lie?” she says.

  “Please, come in here!”

  Her voice seems to notice me for the first time a long while. “I can’t. My new body isn’t done yet.”