Damnation Robot

by Aaron Crash

  “Cut the chatter.”

  They moved past the quarters to the bridge, where Trina and her boss waited. The wide windows showed the twin stars and a smattering of other planets in various orbits. Their moons were like pebbles and rocks around the boulders of their worlds.

  There were two main seats and various other couches and chairs with five-point restraints. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to indicate it was the bridge of a ship—they used their implants to control everything, so there was no need for physical equipment. Elle had strewn decorative crap everywhere—plants, end tables, random knickknacks and gee-gaws, and books. Every goddamn surface on the ship had a book, though most of the time they were magnetized to stay in place. Most things had similar technology so during a fight, they didn’t have to dodge novels and knickknacks.

  Still, when Blaze was in the Astral Corp, they didn’t have clutter everywhere. And they were forced to pick up after themselves. A couple of Ling’s sais lay next to a book on Confucianism. Bill had a mound of wires and circuit boards next to antique tablets he’d been dicking with. Fernando’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy and a pile of equally antique Playboy magazines were stuffed into a bookcase.

  Other starships had a bridge built for battle. Lizzie’s bridge looked like a living room at a frat house.

  Denning didn’t comment on the mess, which added to the strangeness.

  “So, Denning, did we pass?” Blaze asked.

  Ling sat down on a seat and initiated the workstation through his implants. Around him, the air glowed blue, triggering the holographic science and scanning controls. “Scanning for Onyx, Gunny,” the Shaolin sloth said.

  “Thhhat will not be necessary,” the P13rce unit said. Streams of crimson luminescence erupted from the walls around them to be sucked into the P13rce unit’s central eye. The screen on the slender cylindrical head turned from blue to an eerie red. The red energy seemed to have come from the Lizzie Borden herself.

  “No, Gunny,” a completely different voice broke through the robot’s speakers. The shifting fleas on the robot stopped, shuddering, and the smooth metal of their bodies transformed into spikes with wickedly sharp points. The voice continued. “You hhhave, in the end, failed hhhorribly to adequately protect yourselves from my evil.”

  Whatever had possessed the robot sounded amused, supremely intelligent, and slightly arrogant. It sure as hell wasn’t Denning. The thing hit its Hs with a spectral wheeze.

  Elle fished the broken piece of mirror from a pouch at her side. The glass glowed with the same color as the P13rce unit’s eye. “Onyx,” Elle whispered.

  “Denning?” Trina asked in a frightened voice.

  The P13rce unit turned on her. Instead of that diabolical voice, a recording of the spider demon they’d fought in the cargo bay echoed through the bridge. “One is coming. One is coming more powerful than me. One is coming that will end you all! All hail Xerxes. All hail the Necrotechnical—”

  Trina stumbled backward and fell on her ass.

  “Xerxes,” Blaze said.

  “In the flesh,” the demon said. “Or in the metal…if you will.”

  FIVE_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Blaze and the Clickers yanked their plasma pistols out and fired at the demon, but it had cast a shield spell. Its fleas had yanked aragonite crystals out of hidden compartments in the arm to trigger the physical spell components.

  The Onyx speak of the robot slashed through their ears. Blaze winced.

  Ling ran and leapt off a couch to bash metal bits off Xerxes’s robot head with his staff. The Shaolin sloth dove aside as red lightning crackled from the mechanical nightmare’s long hands. Ling ducked, rolled, bounded off the wall, and dodged every finger of the magical electricity.

  “For not hhhaving a soul, the Meelah truly are remarkable,” Xerxes chattered.

  “Meelah don’t need souls of our own. We are Meelah, children of the universe. We are the children of now,” Ling said, cranking his staff up a notch. The thing glowed from the energy coursing through it. When he hit Xerxes again, it would give the demon a concussive blast.

  Elle wasn’t using her fusion pistol. Instead, she was readying a sphere for a snare spell. She tossed the ball of magnetized metal, and it struck the floor near the robot’s foot. Immediately, the sphere sprouted into a cone and began to whine. Elle had spiderwebs in her hand, the components for the snare spell.

  Blaze wished he had his ax. The demon’s shields protected him from the plasma pistols. “Cover me!” the gunnery sergeant shouted at the Clickers as he charged forward.

  In close combat with the robot, Ling was more effective. He slammed his energized staff into the robot, knocking out a leg, but Xerxes didn’t go down. The demon-possessed automaton reached out both arms, and circuitry from the starship’s walls cascaded and spiraled around the robot. The spiked fleas covering the P13rce unit took the spare parts and immediately repaired the leg.

  The restored metallic foot came crashing down on Elle’s snare sphere, ruining her spell.

  At the same time, the robot pulled tech from the ceiling, lights, piping, and wires, piecing together a Frankensteinish creature. In no time, a shambling monster, man-shaped, punched a wire-wrapped fist into Elle, knocking her back across the chairs. A ragged piece of metal in the monster’s hand gashed her neck, and blood gushed out. She was out, unconscious, seriously bleeding. Her VHI dropped like a stone plunked into shit soup.

  Standing victorious, the mechanical shamble pulled two long pieces of conduit out of the wall, and they became whips at the end of his piecemeal arms.

  Trina huddled near where Elle lay unmoving, face white, tears brimming in her terrified eyes. Not only had her boss disappeared from the screen of the P13rce, but a creature, like a living junkyard, stood over her, with pipes for a head and wires for fingers woven into conduit whips.

  Blaze’s plasma pistol blasted bits off the mechanical shamble Xerxes had created from parts of theship. And yeah, the Lizzie was offline. Not that big of a surprise there. Blaze glanced at Elle’s VHI on his combat display. Down fifty percent and dropping. His sister was bleeding out. She needed to heal herself.

  But crossing the room to protect her long enough for her to cast the spell …that was going to be a chore.

  Even though Blaze had shot off big pieces of the shamble, it too had spiked fleas repairing it, reconnecting limbs and rewiring. And they still had the damned demon-possessed robot to deal with. Not only could the thing fix itself, not only did it seem invulnerable, but it could cast powerful spells and use Onyx energy as well as Elle, who had been trained by the best.

  Bill, watching his ship be ripped apart by Xerxes’s magic, went apeshit. The Clicker clacked in fury and rushed Xerxes. The robot suddenly held a glowing fusion wakizashi, a Japanese short sword, in his left fist. The demon must’ve grabbed it from somewhere, since it looked like one of Elle’s.

  The robot snatched Bill up in his huge right hand and held him even while the Clicker writhed in fury. Bill was helpless.

  Blaze watched in horror as Xerxes cut off the Clicker’s main left arm. The energy sword cauterized the wound. The limb fell to the floor with a wet thud.

  Bill used his last moments of consciousness to shove his plasma pistol into the robot’s main screen. The Clicker engineer pulled the trigger and blew a hole through the robot’s head. It had no effect.

  Blaze charged Xerxes to make the demon pay for hurting Bill. Before he could get to the robot, the mechanical shamble lashed out with a conduit whip. The cable circled Blaze’s leg. The shamble yanked and sent Blaze careening into Ling. Both smacked into the wall, but Blaze was careful not to crush the Meelah under his weight.

  Xerxes tossed Bill aside. The Clicker slammed into the floor and rolled against the wall. His VHI stats were below twenty percent but holding steady. He was out, but alive.

  Fernando was the only one standing. One hand held an electrical syringe, full of adrenaline for Elle. Another hand gripped a plasma
pistol. The Clicker clicked in a mad rush, and the translator paused, as it sometimes did because Fernando was speaking too fast.

  The shamble swung both whips at Fernando, but the Clicker doctor shot one whip to pieces and dodged the other. Blaze leapt to his feet until red lightning from Xerxes’s long metal fingers hit him, shocking his system and filling him with a critical agony that wiped away all thought.

  Being electrocuted was downright awful. The energy erupted out of his shoulder, spraying blood down his chest. Right where the spider had pierced him.

  Blaze was reduced to a lump of pain, clawing at the floor.

  The gunny took the main assault, which allowed Ling to engage the demonic P13rce unit. The Meelah slammed the concussive staff into the robot’s knee, sending debris flying. Xerxes swung an arm, but Ling blocked it with his glowing weapon, drove one end into the robot’s belly, then pole vaulted up and over the robot. He turned in midair to bring the bo down onto its head in a full-on assault that might’ve decapitated Xerxes.

  Too bad the demon robot wasn’t alone. The mechanical shamble’s whirling whip caught Ling around his middle and he went flying. The Shaolin sloth hit the wall with a crunch of broken bone. His VHI plummeted. Ling was out of the fight, maybe permanently.

  And then Xerxes turned on Fernando and hit him with the Onyx lightning just as the translator came online. “Bill! No, my friend. No, please, your arm, we have to—”

  The lightning zapped Fernando to the floor. His wings came halfway undone as his body shook from the electrical onslaught. Both Fernando’s plasma pistol and the syringe tumbled to the floor, within Blaze’s reach.

  The gunny’s nervous system was still fried, so moving was hard, but he managed to snatch up Fernando’s fallen pistol as well as the syringe. The pain was exquisite, but it also pissed him right the hell off. He pocketed the syringe. Standing with a pistol in each hand, blood leaking from the sizzling wound on his chest, Blaze shouted, “If you hit a marine, cabron, you best put him down for good. Or all you’ll get is a pissed-off jarhead.”

  Blaze blasted the limbs off the mechanical shamble—legs, arms, that goddamn whip—until the junk was molten metal and burning plastic. Spiked fleas started repairs, but Blaze picked them each off with a shot.

  He heard Xerxes cast a spell, and Blaze recognized the syllables, however mechanized and guttural, and he instinctively ducked as a fireball blasted through the air above him to strike the wall in an inferno of green hellfire.

  Blaze rolled across the floor, dropped both plasma pistols, and plucked Elle’s fusion pistol from her inert body. His combat display synced with the weapon, and he saw the hydrogen shell was at a hundred percent. His shotgun took all of the energy in a single blast, but Elle’s pistol divided the fuel into six devastating, if smaller, shots.

  Before he could fire it, though, Xerxes blinked out of existence only to reappear over Blaze. He went cross-eyed, watching as the energy sword inched toward his eyes.

  Great, the demonic P13rce unit could teleport. Blaze hoped it was only line of sight because once they figured a way out of their predicament, they would need to catch this hellish son of a bitch and put him down.

  If they got the chance. His entire crew was incapacitated. Bill had lost an arm, for God’s sake. Everyone’s VHI was well below thirty percent, and Elle’s continued to drop dangerously close to death.

  And there was the demon robot and his red sword about to skewer Blaze through his brain.

  “I can’t believe you all will die so very easily. My lord and master said it would be difficult. He said Granny and Arlo trained you well. Hhhow wrong he was.”

  Blaze gasped in disbelief. Shivers tickled his neck. No one knew about Granny and Arlo and what they’d done to Blaze and his sister. And both Granny and Arlo had disappeared completely. What was this thing, and how did it know so much about them?

  Spiked fleas repaired the P13rce unit’s screen. In a flash of crimson light, the hologram emitters gave the P13rce unit a head of sorts. Painted in translucent light, semi-visible, a jackal’s head surrounded the cylindrical one. Short pointed horns rose on either side of the smiling jackal’s face. Next to the goat horns, donkey ears drooped down. “Arachnarax was to be the distraction whhhile I infiltrated your Lizzie’s computers. And thhhen thhhis P13rce unit, we hhhad to wait until it was on the bridge. All to kill you.”

  “So, do it,” Blaze spit. “If you launch into a demon monologue, I swear I’ll shoot myself.”

  Trina was shaking, sweat dripping from her face and plinking down on her business suit. He caught her eye. He set the fusion pistol down on the floor slowly, casually.

  The sword was now just a half-inch away from his eye. If he slid the fusion pistol to Trina, would she have the courage to use it? She had to. Or they were royally screwed.

  “Kill you, yes, but I hhhave some time yet. And I so enjoy the hhhorror in the room. Hhhere we hhhave the big bad demon hhhunters, Blaze and Elle Ramirez, defeated. You were there at the beginning, when the Onyx singularity opened and flooded the universe with our deliciously evil blood.” The scarlet ghostly dog face barked amplified laughter.

  The sound pierced Blaze’s eardrums, making him wince.

  Xerxes continued. “And you were destined to close the gates of hhhell. My lord and master, he saw you at the Onyx Gate, on March 16, 3696. You were going to sacrifice all of your lives to close it. But not now. Now you will die, though I expected more of a fight. Such a disappointment. I did get to hhhack off the Clicker’s arm. That was so much fun.”

  “You’re doing it,” Blaze said. “Monologuing. So, Xerxes, I have a whole bunch of questions, so you best just stick that sword into my skull before I start asking them.”

  Blaze shoved the pistol to Trina. He ducked as the robot stabbed at him, then rolled across the floor to Elle. He jerked the electrical syringe from his pocket and slammed it into Elle. His sister jolted awake.

  The robot drove the wakizashi through Blaze’s side, pinning him to the floor. His blood sizzled as it struck the plasma. But only for a second.

  “I don’t know what you are!” Trina gasped. “But take this!”

  The fusion pistol whined and fired a blast of star-energy into Xerxes, sending half of him flying off in a clattering scatter of broken parts. The smell of the robot sizzling reminded Blaze of the welding they did on the ship, that same hot metal odor.

  The spiked fleas working on the shamble clicked across the floor and swept up and around the P13rce unit, adding parts, welding, working on fixing the damage.

  Elle growled out Onyx speak, pressed honeycomb against her skin, and healed herself in seconds. She tossed another baseball-sized snare sphere across the floor, and it rolled to a stop in front of the swaying demonic robot. Again, metal plates fanned around the ball, and the device lit up with red light.

  “I will not be captured by the likes of you apes. I will not be forced to betray my master, hhhowever much the idea appeals to me.” The robot gestured toward the snare sphere. Broken pieces of the mechanical shamble screeched across the floor and struck the orb, adding, reconfiguring, until a dog-shaped thing made of scrapyard filth rose, wire tail wagging. The creature lunged at Elle.

  Trina worked her fusion pistol. Her first shot went wide, her second missed again, but her third shot reduced the dog to dust. Her misses struck the wall, eating through it in two-foot molten circles.

  The auditor turned her pistol on Xerxes and struck him a glancing blow off his shoulder. Clinging spiked fleas continued to repair him, but it was clear if he stayed, Trina was going to blast every bit of hell out of the P13rce unit. The demon-possessed robot fled out of the bridge and into the corridor. He was making for the hatch at the top of the ship.

  Elle removed the wakizashi, deactivated the weapon, and clipped it to her belt. She then stuck honeycomb to Blaze’s skin and muttered her healing spell. He felt the Onyx energy flow into him, repairing his cells. He never liked being healed by Elle. He couldn’t get over th
e idea that the evil power knitting his torn flesh together might somehow turn him into a monster. It hadn’t. So far.

  “We go after him?” Elle asked.

  Blaze checked the VHI stats of his crew. Unconscious but stable. They’d live.

  But that demon robot? It knew all about them and the Lizzie. It knew about Granny and Arlo. And it had talked about future crap, some kind of prophecy it sounded like. March 16 was three months away. If Xerxes knew the location of the Onyx Gate, the entrance to hell and the source of Onyx energy, they had to get that information. Had to. Closing the Onyx Gate would end their hunting forever. The universe would be saved from demons, ghosts, vampires, ghouls, and all sorts of evil crap.

  “We go after him,” Blaze affirmed. He bent and shoved the two plasma pistols into his belt. “And we go now.”

  “What about her?” Elle gestured to Trina.

  The auditor gazed at both of them, swallowed hard, then turned to vomit on the floor.

  Blaze found himself grinning. “I think Trina is gonna need a minute. We can’t wait. Let’s go.”

  SIX_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Blaze hurried to the door. Elle scooped up her fusion pistol and squeezed Trina’s shoulder, and then they both sped down the corridor. His ax, shotgun, and bandolier of hydrogen shells were back at the hotel room.

  Up the spiral staircase they went, but at the top, to the right, Blaze slammed a fist into a wall section, and it spun around, revealing their secret weapons locker. First, armor. He was tired of his skin taking all the damage.

  He knifed his hand into a nanotech gauntlet and tossed his sister another glove. She slipped it on. Their combat implants paired with the armor. Using their displays, both activated their armor. The nanotech, billions of tiny robots, wove the suits around them until they were standing there, ready for battle. Custom-fitted nanofiber plates covered them from heels to head. Helmets covered their skulls, and the nanotech turned transparent so they could see out the visors. The armor would also work as spacesuits if the fight took them outside of the impound tower.