Ironshield
Page 56
If they all survived this? That would be another matter.
Judging by the Taisen's rumbling crawl from the water on its newly revealed treads, that outcome had all the probability of an opium dream. She slammed the button on her radio. "We need that fucking fuel, Renalds," she hissed. "Now." If that twit didn't deliver, Tessa swore to God and the Savior she'd gut the man, like her father should have done when he had the chance. "Renalds, do you hear me? You bring us that—"
Wrath bucked around her, shaken by something that had hit the nearby ground with an explosive retort. She looked out through her scope to see massive guns firing from all along the Taisen's body, large caliber shells booming as they sent up tall pillars of sand and debris.
As she watched, one of the guns hit Ironshield.
"JAMES!" Tessa screamed.
****
For once in his life, Aldren was at a loss for words. Not only was the Taisen landbound, the largest thing he'd ever seen crawl on solid earth, but it was shooting at them.
And it was their job to go toward it.
Or it had been. Because as it turned out, Renalds had other plans.
"Retreat!" the general called, turning the Virtue around. “God damn it, all troops, retreat!"
"Curse you, Renalds," growled Samuel Mutton. "Do as I command or I will see you hang for treason. Bring the fuel or doom us all."
If Isaac Renalds heard the threat, he didn't respond, stomping his machine away from the fight. As the towering Warsuit's earth-shaking steps passed their Krieger, Aldren looked up at it through the scopes. Whatever it was called now, whoever was in the cockpit, that was the same machine he'd seen from a not so different angle, back at Flemmingwood. Only back then, he'd been the one running. There was some poetry there somewhere, though he lacked the words to convey it.
The driver of the nearest truck took the hint. Turning his vehicle around proved difficult between the soft sand and the adjacent machines. After a few seconds he gave up and climbed out to flee on foot.
"Aldren," Mayla sighed. "Turn us around."
His seat creaked as he looked up to the gunner pit. "You wanna give up?" he asked. "Doesn't seem like your style."
Mayla closed her eyes. "I'll die fighting the good fight, when there's a point to it." Even from here, the blasts of the Taisen's artillery could be heard, each shell enough to severely damage a Kaizer. A small Warsuit like theirs would be obliterated. "There's no point to this, not now."
Aldren started to nod, but stopped, shaking his head instead. "You hate Xang," he said. "You really want to just hand them the win now? To hand them Arkenia?"
"If there's one thing my people know, Aldren Mal, it's how to wage war from under the enemy's boot. Surviving is the best way to fight. Besides," she added. "I would never forgive myself, if you died for my vendetta."
Aldren and her shared a look, then. He thought of the pain and betrayal he'd felt, learning of Yannick’s execution. Of the anger he'd harbored, all that time he was forced to continue a military career he'd never asked for. Then he imagined, just for a moment, how many hundred-fold that same rage would be in Mayla's heart. The loathing of generations, forced to live under the rule of others, forced to endure occupation in the name of promises never theirs.
Aldren thought he understood her, then, at least as well as she understood him. He saw the pain in her, the pain of looking at someone who could let go and move on when she could not. Of sacrificing her vengeance so another could live.
"Tell me, May," said Aldren. "How's that boot working out for Quar?”
“What? Wait, what are you doing?!”
Aldren had unstrapped himself from his seat and was reaching for the hatch above him. “If you’re going to spend time with Arkenians, you should know. To us, life under a boot isn’t life.” Sunlight hit his face as he pushed the hatch up. The explosive sounds of battle were now unfiltered, loud and violent as a storm. Somehow, it gave Aldren peace.
“Close that, Aldren! We need to get you out of here.”
“No, you need to cover me,” he said. “Slide your ass into this seat so you can watch mine. Those people need that fuel, and I’m bringing it to them.” Before his sense of self-preservation could take over, Aldren hoisted himself from the Warsuit and hopped down onto the sand.
The world felt unsteady, but that might have just been his legs as Aldren made his way across what looked like all too large a space. Exposed, with the gunfire and explosions so loud they could have been happening right next to him and the rumbling Taisen eating ground on its way up the beach, Aldren felt as alone as if he’d stepped onto a desolate moon. A solitary, fragile creature in a world of giants.
He knew he shouldn’t take comfort in the truck’s confines as he crawled inside. With several tons of diesel hooked to the vehicle making him part of a very large, very explosive bomb, he was in more danger now than on foot. But Aldren couldn’t help but appreciate the superficial comfort of doors and windows around him. After waking up in the middle of the ocean, alone in the black, he’d never turn his nose at the inside of a vehicle again, be it a truck or a Warsuit.
Aldren revved the engine and turned the wheel, bringing the truck moving out toward the Kaizers, toward the Taisen. Scooping up the mouthpiece to a dashboard-mounted radio, Aldren set the frequency to all channels. “Sargent Aldren Mal here from fuel truck whatever-the-fuck. I’m on my way. Anyone still in the fight who wants to give cover to my pasty rear, I’ll appreciate it.”
No sooner had Aldren made the announcement than a Krieger rumbled alongside his truck amid a cloud of its own dust and smoke. A bullet scarred Warsuit painted in reds and blacks.
“Na’Tet is here.”
“Same here, you absolute moron,” came Mayla’s voice as their equally damaged suit came up along Aldren’s other side.
When we meet again, Yanny, Aldren thought. We’ll see who has the better story.
Chapter 43
Reaching blindly beside him, James took hold of the oxygen tank clipped to the side of his seat. Turning the nozzle, he pulled the mask to his face and gasped in a breath of stale, canned air before the fumes could knock him out. His eyes watered from the sting of smoke that shrouded his cockpit.
Not this time. Taking hold of a lever on his other side, he pulled back and prayed that the upgraded ventilation system did its job. Air whooshed in from the top, carrying smog out through a set of grates built along the cockpit’s floor. A pair of panels clanged shut to block off the sources of the smoke on the left side, where that last shell had hit. James took his controls for the left side in hand and rotated the handle. The emergency lights were blinking in a frenzy along that side of the terminal, but he’d ignored worse and kept Ironshield fighting.
Engines whined and puttered, accompanied by a loud creak and squeal of metal scratching against metal. James stopped trying to move his Warsuit’s left arm. Even without testing it, he’d known the moment he recovered from the jarring blast. Ironshield no longer had a left arm. And it was only by a stroke of luck that that was all James had lost. Less fortunate was his fuel situation. Ironshield had just burned through a lot of diesel, and still more trying to move a limb that no longer existed. The needle now twitched toward empty. Ironshield was virtually running on fumes.
Hissing in frustration, James pulled his scope to his face and looked outside. The Taisen was less than a hundred meters away, rolling toward their line on its massive treads. Something else appeared in James’ periphery, casting an extra shadow upon the already smoke-darkened scene.
“Jim?!” came a radio transmission from Wrath. “Damn it, James Edstein, talk to me.”
More artillery blows were hitting the beach around them, but unless James missed his guess, still more were being levelled inland. And the Arkenian field pieces were returning fire, their shells bursting to flames against the Taisen’s armored front in an attempt to put the enemy guns out of commission.
“What now?” James asked. “What can we do now?”
“Tess, that’s a no-win scenario for you,” came Ivan’s reply from the Dread. “I can’t.”
“You have to, Uncle.” She was choking back sobs now, nearly unintelligible over the radio frequency.“This is James we’re talking about. It’s the Ironshield.”
“I won’t do it, Tess,” Ivan argued. “Not if it means leaving you here.”
“All of you, get moving.”
Redstripe had stomped on ahead of them, its bladed arms spread out to either side. Explosions erupted in bright orange bursts, silhouetting Samuel Mutton’s Warsuit.
“Go,” Mutton reiterated. “Arkenia will need its Kaizer pilots if it’s to repel this threat, whenever that day may come. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me, now GO!”
Ivan Kolms cursed. “Jim, open your cockpit. Tess, start moving.”
James didn’t respond. He didn’t know how to. Watching Samuel Mutton, Striker Crimson, put himself in the line of fire for the sake of people he’d once tried to imprison and kill brought James right back to that cell in the Edinville Senate House.
‘That was what earned your father the title, ‘Ironshield.’ The man was named before his Warsuit, because Heinrich Edstein put himself between his men and harm’s way.’
No, Mutton, James thought. You don’t get to take his place. Not while I’m around.
“Jim? Savior’s sake, boy, stop!”
With Ironshield’s remaining arm, James pushed past the Dread as it tried to get in his way. Afraid that at any moment, those last dredges of diesel would run out and grind his Warsuit to a halt, James slammed the pedals and pushed Ironshield as fast as it would go, shouldering past Redstripe and putting its remaining arm out toward the face of the Taisen while it closed in.
“Edstein, get back!” came Mutton’s surprised shout.
Another sound drowned out the cries of his comrades. Ironshield’s right arm stuck into the space between the Taisen’s tread and main body. James set his Warsuit’s feet apart and leaned the torso forward with a shove against his controls and a stomp on twin pedals, just as the overbearing weight of the enemy machine crumpled his remaining arm with an audible crunch. Gimbals and bearings groaned, gears clanked in protest, metal squealed as it was forced past the point of endurance. Ironshield’s feet crashed through wooden planks and sank into sand as the Warsuit slid back under the ineluctable force of the Taisen’s forward momentum.
James felt like his Warsuit would fall apart around him. That, or implode, crushing him within a crumpled ball of twisted steel. But he just kept pushing. Pushed until his control handles dug painfully into his palms. Pushed until his wrists screamed under the strain, until he felt his bones creak, threatening to snap. His whole body strove along with his machine, him and Ironshield acting as one, as they always were. It wasn’t only a machine that resisted the onslaught any more than James was only a man. Iron and flesh were weak.
The ideal was what stood strong.
“I don’t know what we can do against this big bastard,” James grunted, grinding his teeth, the veins in his neck popping. “But the fight’s here, today. And today’s when I’m going to bloody fight it.” Something snapped within Ironshield’s torso. James ignored it the same way he ignored the ripping sound of the Warsuit’s dying engine. “Anyone else who wants to run, run now.” Ironshield slid back another few feet as the Taisen pushed on.
James felt something. A faint shake from his right. Swiveling his scope that way, he saw the Dread, one hammer pierced between two links in the Taisen’s tread. Ivan Kolms brought the other arm back and drove its spike into the crack above the first before the massive tread could crush him. Sparks flew, and a deafening, whining squeal reverberated throughout James’ Warsuit as the tread was slowed to a grinding stop. The Dread’s damaged leg continued to spurt fluid, but Ivan set the heavy top half of his Warsuit leaning forward, allowing the Dread’s feet to dig in behind it the same as James’ machine.
“I’m here for you, Ironshield. Always.”
“Me too,” came Tessa’s voice. To James’ left, Iron Wrath pierced the Taisen with both blades and leaned in. A hundred different pleas and excuses for why his lover should take the opportunity to get away sprang to the tip of his tongue, but James held his piece and accepted things as they were. Ironshield and Iron Wrath were together, as they should be.
Meanwhile, the enemy machine’s opposite tread continued, turning the Taisen slowly to its left. Ironshield creaked at the sideways pressure, its dug-in feet dragging bit by bit under the Taisen’s push.
“You’re your father’s son, Edstein.”
Redstripe slammed into the Taisen’s other tread, driving its shoulder against the moving mechanism and leaning in as sand and debris piled around its feet. “Either we stop this thing, or it stops us.”
The shaking was ubiquitous now, a constant tremor as the Taisen struggled to move forward, sending its reverberations through the Kaizers holding it back.
So all-encompassing was the shaking and roaring of the enemy machine that James might not have noticed Ironshield die, had he been a less experienced pilot. As it was, he felt the life go out of his Warsuit as it expended its last bit of fuel, felt it turn from a living engine to a metal husk. An iron shell, creaking as it was crushed around him.
*
Aldren swerved the truck this way and that as another volley of enemy artillery burst all around. At distance, with guns that big, exact accuracy wasn’t the name of the game. But with enough of it, the fuckers were bound to get lucky. He prayed his own luck would last out longer.
Na’Tet’s machine swerved in front of him, smashing into an enemy Krieger, blades clashing with bright sparks outmatched only by the flare of their guns as each attempted to tear the other apart. Aldren had had the displeasure of being inside a Warsuit piloted by the tribesman. Na’Tet’s ferocity as a pilot scared him when he was on the man’s side. He didn’t envy anyone who had to fight him.
The enemy Krieger rolled back, split down the center. Aldren only caught a quick glance at the aftermath of the duel as he drove his truck forward through the thickening cloud of its own dust. Ever closer toward the towering metal wall of the Taisen and the sand billowing like a storm cloud around it.
A dark shape appeared in the swirling sand to Aldren’s left. A Xangese Warsuit, coming straight for his truck. And there was no one in sight to help him.
“Shit!” He couldn’t let the fuel tank get shot. Aldren spun the steering wheel, ramming the side of the truck against the Warsuit at full speed. To his shock, the suit toppled onto its side, knocked off balance. “Hah!” Aldren cried. Maybe he was cut out for this soldier stuff.
An enemy Kaizer’s foot stomped to the ground directly in front of Aldren.
Maybe not. “Guys?” he called into his radio while the massive Warsuit made its way toward him, ready to crush his truck underfoot. “May?”
A gun hit the Warsuit’s head, wreathing it in a brief cloud of smoke.
“Faster, Aldren!”
Aldren swerved around a giant foot as it landed, shaking the dirt so hard the back of the truck bucked up an inch or two. Aldren floored the gas pedal, not bothering to look back as the Kaizer’s shadow, stretched across the beach in front of him, twisted around to follow.
The fleeting shadow of something else hitting its engine block was plain to see as well. Then several somethings. Aldren risked a glance in the side mirror as the Kaizer toppled over, its engine continuing to explode in bright bursts of fire.
Na’Tet raised his voice over the radio in a ululating cry as his machine and Mayla’s came up on either side of Aldren’s fuel
truck.
“That might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Aldren said in a laughing voice, still convinced he was about to die a flaming death.
“I see something to top that,” Mayla replied. “Look at the Xangese demon.”
Aldren gazed toward the Taisen. “Still big and scary, what else is new?” Then he spotted the other shapes pressed against its base. The Arkenian Kaizers, pressed against the oversized machine like rodents straining to stop a man.
And by the Savior’s dangly bits, they were actually doing it. “How long do you think they can keep that up?” he asked as the one side of the Taisen shifted forward more than the other.
What happened next answered his question as one of the Warsuits – he was still bad at identifying most of them— crumpled in half beneath the Taisen’s tread, allowing the monster to crawl forward, sliding the remaining Arkenian machines ahead of it as it renewed its journey. What remained of the fallen Kaizer soon disappeared beneath the Xangese machine’s bulk.