Hammers and Nails

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  He’s testing the different areas! Torvald realized. Bastard’s looking for soft spots!

  Torvald hated clever opponents, and this one was turning out to be very clever, indeed. A series of powerful swipes was Torvald’s spirited response to this. Each attempt to club the darting soldier pushed Roland back and away, and the need to keep dodging prevented the man from planting his feet for another swing. The pair danced like this for several long seconds, each of them trying to force the other to play their game. The old man was using the armature’s AI to plot Roland’s positions and movements since his own reflexes were not up to the task. With a practiced eye he selected and approved attack patterns and dispatched them to his machine with the clarity of long experience. He trusted the machine to do its job as he trusted his own body. This was unsurprising, as the machine was his own body.

  While the armature went on the offense, he directed his attention to managing the heating issue. Except he wasn’t managing it. Nothing the old warrior did stopped the runaway overheating and nothing in his diagnostics could tell him what was wrong. Torvald knew he had to shut this fight down quickly because he would not be able to stay in it for very long. Another hammer blow deflected off a flailing metal arm, and this time sparks flew. The AI recalculated and adjusted for the speed and angle of the attack and a new tactical tree popped up on the HUD. Torvald approved it absently while he worked with increasing agitation on how to win this fight.

  The machine shuddered again as the gray metal mass of the maul was parried, and this time a counter strike sent Roland and his weapon hurtling away to bounce and skid into a wall. The man was up and moving nearly instantly, and he moved to stalk the armature again.

  Okay. The AI is sorting him out now, Torvald approved silently.

  It all came down to time. He could crank the armature all the way up and fight at full output for about three minutes, or he could keep pulling things back and drag this out for eleven. Nothing about the battle up to this point had led him to believe that letting it go longer was going to be a good plan. Hoping to snag the man on one of his passes had seemed like a solid strategy at the outset, but it was turning out to be a losing proposition. Torvald began to formulate a plan for a more direct assault. He was uploading it to the machine when the hammer again shook his cockpit and sent the chassis lurching to the side. I’ll give the AI another thirty seconds to read him, and then I’ll go to full power. It would be prudent to have as much data as possible before rolling the dice on an all-out attack.

  Roland came in again with several feints, but the hammer was so heavy, feinting with it was proving slow and unconvincing. Torvald launched a series of strikes and followed them with a lunging charge. The looping swings of his arms were dodged, but the charge brought him within the arc of a returning hammer strike. Instead of getting hit with the unforgiving flat of the massive head, Torvald took a bash to the canopy from the haft. His HUD flickered, but without the massive weight and unflinching hardness of that head, there was naught but sound and fury to accompany it. Roland was dragged away when the glancing impact pulled him to the side. As he landed on unsteady legs, Torvald sent him back-pedaling with another flurry of windmill smashes.

  Roland backed off and circled again. Torvald took a moment to glance at his readouts and sighed.

  This is going to be close.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Roland was pleased with how his hammer was working out, but learning to use it effectively was an ongoing process. Not that Roland found it heavy. Six-hundred pounds may as well have been a feather to him. But six-hundred pounds was almost two-thirds of his total mass, and every time he swung weapon with force, it threatened to yank him from his feet. The inertia made changing directions difficult and swinging it quickly was as dangerous for him as it was his opponent. But when it landed, Roland conceded, it absolutely did the job as advertised. He knew no individual hit would break the AutoCat. It was too well-made a machine to go down so easily. But Roland could keep this up all day, and he felt the armor deforming and displacing with every shoulder-wrenching impact. Soon it would provide no protection at all.

  Furthermore, he also knew Torvald was working with limited time. The FireWire would be pumping a lot of heat into the cooling system by now, and that had to be slowing things down for the big yellow armature. He could see the mercenary holding back, missing opportunities because he was not running his rig at full output. If it had been using either its full speed or its full power, there would be far more carnage and Roland would have been much harder pressed to stay alive. This was an unsurprising choice, Roland was too small and too weak to require such measures. They both understood that all Torvald needed to do was get good solid grip on Roland, and the AutoCat could tear him limb from limb with only a cursory effort.

  Roland Tankowicz had been in a lot of fights. Furthermore, he was very good at fighting. If he was the one driving that big yellow monstrosity, he would also be hanging back and waiting for the opportunity to grapple. He had developed this hit-and-run strategy with just such a plan in mind. The soldier tempted the old merc to increase his output by charging in when he really should run away. Every pass he made was chance for Torvald to grab him, and he wanted the old codger to keep trying. Every second the mercenary spent scrambling after him, was another second for the armature to overheat.

  When Torvald switched gears and cranked his mech to full output, Roland was startled but not surprised. He had always suspected that at some point in the fight Torvald would get fed up with being picked apart and overheating and take his chances with a full-on blitz. With his cooling system compromised, the old merc had very limited options, and burning the candle hard to finish the fight early was as good a trick as any. At full output, his armature was far too powerful for most things to handle. The tricky part lived in Roland’s need to not be ‘most things.’

  When the armature surged forward, far faster than previous lunges, it almost achieved its goal of ensnaring the soldier. But Roland possessed some the fastest reflexes modern science could provide, and he hurled himself backward and out of reach with mere inches to spare. The clamps snapped closed on empty air, but the yellow monster kept coming all the same. Roland rolled to the side, dragging his hammer with him as massive yellow feet stomped holes in the concrete where he had stumbled. He ducked another swipe from an enormous arm and chopped diagonally with his hammer at whichever piece of the machine was closest. The head clanged off something solid and unyielding, but Roland had no time to evaluate what he had struck or if he had done any damage.

  The other claw was descending upon him, and it was all Roland could do to knock it aside with his hammer. He spun and dove through the machine’s two front legs and under the life-support pod. As he rolled past a hind leg, Roland planted a foot and smashed an overhand hammer blow into the massive foot. He struck with the wedge side, and the narrow edge sank to a satisfying depth into the metal of the foot. Hydraulic fluid spayed in a hissing gout, but Roland could not assess his handiwork as the foot rose immediately to thrust him away.

  The kick sent a white flash though his HUD and caused it to flicker and reboot. Roland felt his ribs compress as he accelerated into a flat airborne vector of disconcerting speed. He was lifted from the floor and sent as a nine-hundred-pound projectile tumbling through the air to skip like a stone off the concrete. The haft slipped from his grip when he struck the floor and the hammer slammed to a stop several yards away. Despite a thousand screaming protests from his damaged chassis, Roland lunged for it. But Torvald got there first on four galloping legs. One claw flicked the weapon further into the shadowed edges of the hangar while the other streaked downward to capture his prey.

  Roland saw the two-fingered clamp descending, and he knew he could not escape it. He had no other option but to grab the claw with his own hands, one pincer clasped in each of his giant fists. Torvald’s arm plowed into Roland, driving him downward into the floor while the grasping fingers tried to close over his thro
at. With his own prodigious strength, Roland took the pincer in each mitt and forced them apart while the enemy hoisted him into the air and slammed his body back down to the concrete over and over again like man shaking a determined crab off his hand. When that didn’t work to dislodge the black cyborg’s unrelenting grip, the old mercenary brought the other clamp into play. But it was too late. Roland had forced the fingers back and given them a sharp twist, bending them off their tracks and warping the actuators. He dropped from the claw to the floor just as the other yellow clamp was about to snag him.

  Another kick, this time from a front leg, blasted Roland’s torso like an explosion and catapulted him back across the hangar until a large piece of material handling equipment arrested his flight with a sickening crunch. Roland silenced the beeping alarms in his helmet with a snarl of pain and frustration. He needed no audible reminders of the damage he was enduring, and at this point it was more important to focus on the fight in front of him. Torvald, followed immediately and swiftly, covering the intervening hundred yards in two seconds and hurling himself into the wreckage of Roland’s landing. The mercenary savaged about, smashing and crushing without restraint while he tried to mince his determined foe before he rose again to renew the battle.

  But Roland had recovered after a fashion. The kick and the impact of his crash had been some of the hardest Roland could remember taking, but his body still responded to his mental commands and the scrolling list of damages in his HUD were inconsequential compared to what awaited him if he let Torvald find him on his back. He rose quickly, ignoring the muted versions of various agonies from his injured parts, and dove to the side just as the yellow monster landed where he had been lying. Roland’s black skin, the huge mess of wreckage, and the deep shadows so far from the central string of lights must have confused Torvald, because he seemed not to have noticed Roland’s maneuver.

  His hands fell across something large and heavy, and a wry thought occurred to Roland.

  When all you have is a nail, everything looks like a hammer...

  Roland was far stronger than any light cyborg in the galaxy. There were medium armatures that did not have the strength he did, for that matter. It was easy to forget this, considering how small he was compared to his bulkier brethren. Torvald had likely forgotten that Roland’s chassis was strong enough to lift sixty tons from the floor, or more apropos to the current situation, press twenty tons over his head. Roland stood and sank his fingers into the metal hulk next to him and yanked the ten-thousand-pound forklift from the floor to hoist it high over his head. Torvald turned at this unexpected movement and had just enough time to register what was happening before the heavy piece of machinery was brought down across his back in a slam that echoed from the rafters and rattled the hangar walls with a thundering concussion.

  The AutoCat flattened like a squashed bug under the impact as its legs automatically compensated for the extra weight. The damaged foot threw sparks and there was the scream of malfunctioning electronics while Torvald knocked the hulk away and lunged again. But Roland was gone, sprinting across the hangar to disappear into the shadows of the other side.

  “Where are you running to, little one?” Torvald belted out through the PA system. “This is holmganga! You cannot run away!” A quick glance down at his readouts told Torvald he had less than a minute of fighting left before his machine began to shut down. He recognized Roland was hurt, but he did not know how badly and he needed to finish this quickly.

  “Who’s running away?” Roland boomed though his own helmet speakers. Torvald surged toward the sound and Roland came streaking from the shadows. They met in the middle and Torvald realized where Roland had run off to and why.

  Roland had his hammer again.

  Torvald smiled.

  “Good boy,” the old man mumbled, and leapt back to the fray.

  Roland made no pretext to defense or danger avoidance. He ran directly at the giant yellow machine with his maul poised for an overhand smash. Torvald, too, charged straight in. Both men knew, by unspoken agreement, that their duel was coming to a close.

  A clamp snaked out to grab the hurtling Fixer, but a subtle juke to the side made it miss by just a few inches. The hammer fell with the full weight and strength at Roland’s disposal. A matching shift from Torvald kept the strike from crushing his canopy, but it fell on the left shoulder with such force the joint housing crumpled like a tin can. Hydraulic lines ruptured, and a gout of hissing coolant sprayed out in a fine green mist. The arm jerked and spasmed as its control systems failed. But Torvald was beyond caring about damage to his armature, so he ignored this and swatted Roland with his other arm, driving the man down to the floor hard enough to crack the concrete. He tried to follow this with a stomping foot, but Roland rolled out of the way and back to his feet.

  Roland’s attacks came in unrelenting clanging fervor now. His fury was a merciless thing, unforgiving and unconcerned with the danger of being caught and pulled apart. There was no more hit and run. Now it was just hit after hit after hit. With one arm useless and the other unable to grab anything, Torvald could only parry on one side and try to stomp on his little foe, and Roland was far too fast for that.

  A dozen crushing thunderclap hammer strikes came in the next five seconds, each twisting or denting some piece of the giant yellow machine. Torvald sacrificed his remaining arm to spare the canopy, and then the wedge nearly severed a foreleg at the hip joint. The powerful mech leaned and stumbled sideways while a dozen mechanical actuators screamed like a pack of wounded animals.

  Then at last, the end came.

  The first system to fail under the escalating heat load was the hydraulics. Hard lines and seals capitulated under the increasing pressure as the incompressible fluid tried to boil off. The machine gave a great twisting heave as the main actuators ruptured and died, transferring the full weight of the thing to smaller electronic back-ups. Bubbling fluid wept like blood from the joints in Torvald’s chassis as it shuddered and slowed. Viscous puddles of steaming dark purple liquid formed on the bare concrete of the hangar floor, yet the machine staggered forward in dogged pursuit of victory or glory.

  Roland saw this, approved, and kept hitting.

  More systems failed, but Torvald never stopped coming. The main power cells gave up the ghost next. Without cooling they soon lost containment and exploded in loud pops accompanied by dazzling blue and white arcs. Torvald lost his HUD and all his readouts at this point, but it did not matter anymore. He was fighting for the honor of his crew and for the glory of the holmgang. Dying in battle with an opponent like Roland suited him, and it was without fear he renewed his assault. He had lived for a hundred years with the philosophy of victory or death, and today would not differ from any other.

  Twenty seconds later, yielding to the unceasing rain of clanging hammer blows, his machine ceased its obedient pursuit and collapsed in a whirring hissing heap. Bleeping the panicked screams of various alarms, Torvald’s life support pod also chose that moment to shut down. Torvald gasped with relief, as the endless thunder of the horrible hammer stopped at this point. The old mercenary then looked up through the canopy with eyes rapidly dimming.

  Roland stood over the fallen armature, the ominous skull face of his helmet staring down with death’s own indifference. Then the looming cyborg leaned over and pressed his hand to the bubble and spoke.

  “I’ll see you in Valhalla, old man.”

  “Count on it,” Torvald whispered back, his voice hoarse and weak without the mechanical assistance of his pod. Then his eyes closed, and with a final sigh Torvald Haraldson died as he had lived.

  Roland straightened and suppressed a groan. His damage reports were still scrolling down the side of his HUD, and while nothing was life-threatening, sitting in the chair looked as if it would feature prominently in his plans for the rest of the week. Wisely showing no pain or injury, Roland raised the hammer above his head with one hand and held it silently.

  Then cheers from the Docksi
ders began, and rapidly grew into a chorus of thunderous approval. When they calmed, he turned to face the mercenary crew.

  “Send him down, Mindy,” Roland boomed flatly.

  Sven Paulsen descended like a trapped animal from the catwalk, twisting in lazy circles on a thin cable. He had been stripped to his base layer, an unadorned gray undergarment worn beneath his armor and tac harness. He looked defeated, with his hands tied behind his back, and Roland could see the twisted injury to his elbow. The gruff commander ground his teeth in a tight-lipped rictus of pain, likely because his damaged arm was secured so tightly. When his feet at last touched the deck, he sagged but refused to fall. Dark defiant eyes tilted up and the look he gave Roland seethed with the kind of hatred only the truly aggrieved could muster.

  Mindy slid down another cable to alight next to him and gave him a rough shove forward. Paulie staggered awkwardly and nearly fell before a collision with Roland’s bulk stopped his momentum.

  Roland loomed over the broken man and thunked the head of his hammer down at Paulie’s feet with a boom. The commander did not flinch.

  “Do you accept this holmgang, Paulsen?” It was not so much a question but a challenge. Without Torvald, Roland and his ragtag Dockside army could kill them all with little trouble. If Paulie gave any answer other than ‘yes,’ he was condemning himself and his people to death. Everyone knew this, but Roland was going to make the man say it, anyway.