As they slowed, Jake stepped forward and delivered a haymaker to the base of Roach’s throat, causing him to stagger backward, clutching at it with his right hand.
He seemed surprised by the force Jake was capable of bringing to bear—equivalent to the power Roach himself wielded.
“Not used to that, are you?” Jake asked.
“Who…who are you?”
“I’m the one who gave you that mech, you asshole.”
Jake strode forward, converting his left hand into a heavy machine gun and firing at Roach’s head over and over at point-blank range.
His former chief’s response was to sidestep rapidly, clearly angling himself to strike Jake’s back.
Jake let him complete the maneuver—and the moment Roach was in position, he repeated the trick he’d discovered in the Belt, inverting so that he faced backward without having to turn around.
The maneuver appeared to shock Roach, and the instant of hesitation made the hook Jake landed on his jaw all the more effective.
Roach stumbled backward once again. “Price,” he spat, as though the name was a flea that had flown into his mouth.
“Good guess. You know, when I picked you up from your sickbed and carried you across Valhalla like a baby, to be born again inside that mech, I didn’t expect this.”
The other mech shook its head slowly. “You…” Roach said, trailing off for a moment. “You truly don’t understand what’s happening here?”
Ignoring the question, Jake took the fact that they’d stopped to chat as an opportunity to turn his left arm into an energy cannon and blast Roach’s head off.
At least, he tried. Roach sidestepped once again, and the energy glanced off his head, causing it to jerk violently but doing no significant damage.
Either way, it seemed to piss him off, since next, Roach tried to tackle him. Jake met the charge head-on, and they grappled for several moments without either one of them making any headway. They were virtually matched in strength.
But perhaps not in skill.
“The whispers…don’t they call to you?” Roach asked.
That took Jake aback, and his shock was the window Roach needed to alter their engagement. He twisted forward, breaking Jake’s grasp in order to deliver a savage headbutt.
This time, it was Jake’s turn to stagger backward as he struggled to keep his feet under him. Roach ran forward to try to capitalize on the loss of balance, but Jake’s arms became twin autocannons to send fragments of himself screaming toward Roach.
That, it seemed, was a mistake, as Roach merely absorbed the fragments, adding their mass to his own. Jake quickly stopped firing.
“The whispers should have explained to you the truth,” Roach said as he took one inexorable step after another, his fists clenched, fingers writhing against each other. “They must call to you. The suit must whisper to you.”
“It does,” Jake said. “I’m just not stupid enough to actually listen.”
It wasn’t nearly that simple, of course, but the taunt had the desired effect of enraging Roach further, causing him to lose all restraint and charge at Jake with abandon.
Jake ran to meet him, but he dropped to the ground at the last second, sliding feet-first in an attempt to trip his enemy. To supplement the effort, he shifted his mass to make the alien mech more wedge-shaped, hoping to send Roach flying through the air so he could shoot him on the way down.
But Roach was transforming too—into a wheel with serrated edges, which ran over Jake, severing his right arm from his torso.
Flipping onto his stomach, Jake scrambled toward the limb, desperate to rejoin it with the rest of his body.
But Roach had assumed a humanoid form once more, and his foot connected with Jake’s chin, sending him flipping backward, recoiling in pain.
He recovered just in time to watch Roach pick up the arm and hold it against his chest, where tendrils snaked out to embrace it. Within seconds, it had been absorbed into the alien mech.
Chapter 52
Full Potential
After Roach absorbed Jake’s right arm into his chest, the battle became more challenging for him.
His actual arm was fine, of course—it was still attached to his body, anyway, inside the torso of his massive mech. But that wouldn’t mean much if Roach killed him.
I don’t see why I can’t simply regrow the arm.
Indeed, as he focused on the jagged stump where his mech’s arm had been, he felt an itching sensation within the mech dream.
But Roach wasn’t about to wait around while Jake regenerated a limb. He was that much larger, now, and he swung a fist at Jake that was shaped like a hammer.
Dancing backward neutered the attack somewhat, but Roach still struck a glancing blow on Jake’s chest.
His arm continued to sprout from his shoulder, though it was a thin, weak-looking thing, and it seemed it would take forever for it to regain its musculature.
How was Roach able to incorporate my arm so quickly? Jake commanded his left arm to become an autocannon, afraid that an energy gun would detract too much from the regeneration process. The autocannon should hold him off for a bit…
The dream flashed scarlet—just before one of the quads tackled him from behind, knocking him onto the ground and pinning him there.
The insects that had haunted Jake back in Hub returned, then, digging into his flesh with more vigor than ever before. The single, grating violin note returned as well.
Let us join as one, the alien mech whispered to him. Only then will you be granted full command of your abilities.
“No,” Jake grunted, and four pillars shot out of his body and into the ground, jostling the Quatro mech enough to allow him to roll onto his back and place his autocannon against its underside.
He fired, and the rounds sank into the quad’s belly.
The Quatro spun away, emitting a strangled roar. It seemed Jake might have actually gotten a shot through to the beast inside. He didn’t know how he’d managed it, but the thing certainly seemed rattled.
His arm had continued to grow, and now he told his other arm to become a long, thin blade, with which he was determined to lay open the quad who’d attacked him.
The other quad charged, then—but this time, Jake was ready. He sidestepped the alien, jamming his left arm backward as he went so that it tore through the thing’s armor.
Rapidly, he reformed the autocannon, intent on sending high-velocity rounds into the rift he’d made—
Roach tackled him, then, and they flew through the air to land on the ground. Straddling Jake, Roach gripped him by the neck, pulled him upward, then punched him so that his head slammed back into the hard-packed dirt. Roach repeated the act once. Twice.
I can’t take on all three of them at once.
The whispers answered immediately, this time: You can. You are better than them, and once you are on equal footing, you will tear them apart. Let us join as one.
This time, Roach’s fist sprouted spikes before crashing into Jake’s face. Metal fragments flew, reminding him of the Ravagers who’d torn apart his face back in the Belt.
He couldn’t find the purchase to throw Roach off, or to wriggle out from under him. His adversary was larger than him, now, and it seemed absorbing the arm had lent him more power, too.
Let us join as one, the alien mech whispered.
Almost, Jake did it. The only alternative seemed to be death, for him and his friends.
Okay. I’ll…
The dream seemed to sing in anticipation, and a second note joined the lone violin note, to create a hauntingly beautiful harmony. Roach’s fist slammed into Jake’s head again.
But then he remembered Sue Anne’s gaunt face, staring up at him from her deathbed, holding his gaze riveted.
Remember me, Jake. Remember me, fighting to live despite how badly I wanted to die. I want you to remember how much you owe me. How deeply in debt you are to me—a debt you can never, ever repay, except by continuing to resist t
hat voice, forever.
“I deny you!” Jake yelled, and his voice boomed over the battlefield. “I deny you!”
With that, his right arm surged from his shoulder, metal sinews and tendons wrapping around it to lend it the mass it once had.
Jake used the regrown arm to grip Roach by the neck, and with a titanic effort, he slammed his adversary to the ground beside him, flipping over to become the one straddling Roach.
His left hand morphed, becoming an energy cannon, and he allowed the energy to build up for several seconds while Roach attempted to buck him off. Almost, the former chief succeeded.
Too late.
The cannon unleashed a broad, white-hot bar at point-blank range, taking Roach’s head clean off. Where it had been remained only a melted stump.
One of the Quatro charged Jake, then, trying to take advantage of his diverted attention, but his newly formed right arm became a lance, which flickered like lightning toward the quad’s chest, biting through the metal.
Judging from the way the enemy mech slumped to the ground, the lance had found the Quatro inside. Jake rose to his full height to face the remaining quad, but it turned to sprint toward the horizon as fast as it could.
A ragged cheer rose up from what beleaguered Darkstream soldiers were left over from the battle.
The cheer abruptly fell off into shocked silence, and Jake turned to find Roach’s headless mech rising to its feet, both arms rapidly becoming energy cannons.
Incredible.
Jake turned his own energy gun into an autocannon, which took less time than forming weapons from scratch, as Roach was doing.
That done, he fired into Roach’s right cannon, generating an explosion that took out the weapon.
As Roach staggered back from that attack, Jake surged forward to drive his lance into his enemy’s remaining energy cannon.
There was a colossal detonation of heat and light that threw Jake back several meters to crash to the earth, his ears ringing, the violin note reaching a crescendo.
Blindly, he staggered to his feet, stumbling toward where he thought he would find Roach, though he couldn’t see a thing.
He located Roach’s mech by feel, and he realized through touch alone that both his adversary’s arms now ended at the elbows.
He seized Roach’s neck once more with his left hand and turned his right into a short sword, which he used to stab Roach over and over until the man’s mech was a perforated wreck and he’d stopped moving altogether.
Only then did Jake allow his vanquished enemy to fall to the ground.
Chapter 53
Surge Forward
Lisa ran from shallow cliff to hollow to boulder, taking as little time as she could behind each hide before checking to ensure the way forward was clear and darting out again.
There’s no way Rug and the others can hold out against three Amblers for long.
She knew that, and her friend would know it, too. But Rug and the others with her fought on, with ferocity and bravery. It would amount to a terrible betrayal for Lisa to squander the short window they’d granted her.
“How long till you engage?” she subvocalized to Planter, the Quatro she’d put in charge of the combat shuttles.
“Minutes, Lisa Sato. We will arrive in time to strike together.”
That was the best she could have hoped for. With Rug engaging the Amblers who’d been firing on her force from the cliffs, Lisa would get a tiny window to strike the robot army within the canyon, and during that time they would be on more or less equal footing.
Other than the machines they have positioned partway up the cliffs, of course.
Those would likely pose a problem, but hopefully the combat shuttles could manage to pick most of them off.
Once the Amblers finish off Rug’s force, though…
It tore her apart to consider the fact of Rug’s impending death, but she had to consider it, because it would leave the Amblers free once again to fire down from the cliffs with their vast arsenals. Quite likely, they’d be able to take down the shuttles as well.
Lisa and her Quatro force, along with the four surviving humans under her command...together, they advanced forward under cover for as long as they could. Without the Amblers firing down on them, that ended up being a fair distance, since the Gatherers in the canyon didn’t have long-range weapons.
Lisa had also spotted humanoid robots, a little shorter than an average person, though those didn’t seem to have long-range weapons either.
There were two more Amblers inside the canyon, however, and they were picking off Quatro careless enough to expose themselves at an alarming rate.
At last, Lisa’s force reached the canyon, and the swarm of Gatherers and bipedal robots chose that moment to surge forward as one, rapidly closing the distance.
The unarmed Quatro surged forward to meet them, and from behind, the armed soldiers fired on the robot host.
There are too many of them.
Even with the combat shuttles about to arrive, Lisa simply couldn’t see how they’d pull a victory out of this situation.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t intend to try.
From atop a shallow rise, she took aim at one of the Gatherers about to close with a Quatro, then fired.
An Ambler spotted her, sending a rocket her way, and she dove off the hill, sprinting toward a nearby hollow for cover.
Chapter 54
Torn Asunder
A line of armor-piercing rounds hit Rug’s rear-right leg, shearing through flesh and bone.
The pain made her roar in agony, but she continued moving toward the boulder she’d chosen for cover, the leg dragging uselessly across the ground.
More bullets tore up the boulder as she dove behind it. But she couldn’t let herself rest.
Instead, she wended around the massive rock to fire at her attacker from the other side, blasts of energy forcing the Ambler back momentarily.
It recovered, answering Rug’s efforts with a rocket. That forced her to scamper back, abandoning the rock but keeping it between her and the Ambler, her leg sending shockwaves of pain through her all the while.
The other Quatro on the cliff were in states similar to hers—the ones that survived, anyway. Most of the unarmed Quatro had been killed during the first minutes of battle, and now it was everything the armed Quatro could do to keep the three giant mechs occupied while remaining alive themselves.
“Rug, how’s it going up there?”
“Not very well, Lisa Sato,” she answered, glad that subvocalization allowed her to keep the agony out of her voice.
“Actually, you’re doing amazingly, Rug. I never expected to have this much time to fight the battle on the lower ground.”
“Thank you…but I do not think you will have much longer. I apologize. It has…been good to be your friend.”
Part of her expected Lisa to tell her not to talk like that, but she only said, “I’ve cherished our time together too, Rug.”
She also expects me to die this day.
Rug decided that if she was going to die, then it would be a good death.
She limped from the boulder she’d taken cover behind, pelting the nearest Ambler with bolt after bolt of energy.
It turned toward her, taking its attention from the pair of Alex Quatro it had been pinning down.
Those Quatro now emerged from cover too, joining their fire with Rug’s.
Perhaps if we can take down just one Ambler, it might make a difference…
But the Ambler who’d nearly shot off her leg turned its rockets on her once more, and Rug knew it was over.
Suddenly, a streak of dark metal charged past her from the direction of the mountain pass they’d taken to get here. It leapt into the air, connecting with the Ambler, and the enemy’s rockets were diverted to the mountainside beyond Rug.
“My soul?” she said, disbelieving.
The Quatro mech pushed off the Ambler, sending it tottering toward the cliff, and her mate hamme
red it with high-velocity rounds until it toppled, careening over the side to crash down to the battle below.
He turned on the next Ambler, which was already peppering him with its heavy guns.
Rug rushed forward to join her mate, sending bolt after bolt to slam into the Ambler’s dome.
Her mate turned, and her eyes locked onto his robotic, glowing ones.
“Goodbye, my love,” he said.
“My soul—no!”
With that, her mate rocketed up into the Ambler, knocking it off the cliff and sending them both flying from it.
Her heart torn asunder, Rug nevertheless banded together with the Quatro that remained on the cliff, and together they managed to neutralize the third Ambler. Their concentrated energy fire sent it to its knees, and then to the ground, where it slumped sideways and did not rise.
She and the other Quatro sprinted to the cliff side, then, to pelt the enemy robots in the canyon below.
“Rug!” Lisa said, excitement filling her voice. “The battle’s turning in our favor. How did you manage to take out those Amblers?”
“We received some unexpected assistance,” Rug said, and Lisa did not request clarification.
Perhaps she had been engaged by an enemy robot.
Or, perhaps, she’d heard the unbearable sadness in Rug’s voice, and knew it was best not to question further.
Epilogue
The Demands of War
“That’s no dust storm,” Billy Overton said, his thumbs tucked behind his belt.
Jake glanced over at the old man, who squinted out over the Barrens, studying the oncoming formation. “You don’t think so?”
“Nah. Dust storms come in like giant, puffy clouds rising up from the ground. This dust-up’s narrower—high, and sharp. Reminds me of the day those Quatro mechs came, and another mech like the one you drive fought them. You might want to get in yours, boy.”
Jake nodded. “I have time.”
Meltdown (Mech Wars Book 3) Page 18