Birthright: Book I of the Temujin Saga (24 page)

“Who
are
you people?” asked a boy in a red and white football jersey.

Alex tried to think of some response — any response — that didn’t sound like a bad comic book cliché.

“I could use some help over here!” Moe was struggling to push the damaged Death Walker out the door as two others attempted to force their way inside.

One of the girls pointed at the mechs and screeched, “What are those things?”

“Get back inside!” Alex pushed his classmates back through the door and slammed it behind them.

Sam ran to Moe’s side and grabbed the wounded mech by one foot. “Take the other leg!”

Moe grabbed it, digging his armored fingers deep into a joint.

“To the left,” Sam grunted. “Swing!”

The Replodians spun around and swung the flailing mech in a long arc, releasing it in the direction of the entrance. The robot collided with its fellows in a cacophony of grinding metal. Another Death Walker appeared behind the pileup and loaded a rocket into one of its shoulder launchers.

“Down!” yelled Robert.

The rocket fired and, without thinking, Alex raised his right arm, bracing his elbow with his left hand. The armor along the forearm split open, and a flat, rectangular cannon slid out over his wrist. A burst of green energy exploded from the weapon and detonated the projectile mere feet from the entrance, loosening more bricks from the structure. Alex stood motionless for a moment, dumbstruck.

Sam cheered and gave him a thumbs up. “Nice shot, kid!”

Alex stared at the smoking barrel protruding from his forearm. “H-how did I do that?” The cannon retracted, and the mechanism folded itself flat against his arm.

“The suit knows what to do,” Sam explained. “Just go with the flow.”

“Guys,” said Rene, “we’re getting popular.”

Outside, another Death Walker lumbered up to join the others, who were slowly regaining their footing.

“We have to lure them away from the building,” Sam said. “The structure can’t take much more pounding.”

Lamont nodded. “All right, team, let’s take out the trash!”

“Yeah!” Moe shouted as he leapt through the demolished doorway at “Lucky,” who had just gotten to its feet.

Moe engaged his thrusters and crashed into the robot, sending them both tumbling across the parking lot and throwing sparks as their metal skins scraped across the cracked pavement. When they came to a rocking stop, Moe was on top, driving his fists into the robot’s face until a gaping hole appeared in the armor.

“Say goodnight, Lucky!” Moe shoved his arms into the cavity and fired both arm cannons simultaneously.

Bright green light reflected off Moe’s silver armor. Something deep inside the robot exploded, and it gave a final pathetic shudder before lying completely still.

“Let’s see you get back up from
that
,” Moe taunted, cracking his metallic knuckles.

Thick, black smoke billowed from the silent Death Walker. Lucky’s luck had finally run out.

*****

Robert stepped out into the sunlight and a red flash on the right side of his heads-up display drew his attention. He turned as the Death Walker raised its arm and prepared to fire one of its Gatling guns, the barrels spinning. Robert ducked underneath the arm and pushed it skyward, riddling the front of the building with a vertical line of bullets. The mech jerked its arm away, carrying Robert with it. As the robot tried to shake him off, Robert felt the contents of his stomach beginning to rise.

“Hold on, Robert!” Rene aimed his arm cannon at the robot’s shoulder joint. “I’ll get you down.”

Robert watched as the other mech reached a clawed hand for the Cajun. “Rene, look out!”

Rene turned just as the claws clamped down around his waist and picked him up. He wailed in surprise as the robot’s other arm cannon pointed at his face.

“Hey!” Cherry delivered a crushing kick between the robot’s legs, leaving a small dent.

The mech stared down at her.

“If anyone’s going to kill him,” Cherry snarled, “it’s going to be
me
!”

Unimpressed, the Death Walker lowered its arm cannon to aim at her head.

“Hey,” said Rene. “Look at me, you ugly bastard! We’re not finished yet!”

The mech turned to look down the barrel of the Cajun’s right arm cannon. The blast struck just above the sensor eye, and it staggered back. The mech released its prisoner to paw at the new hole in its face. Rene fell clumsily to the ground and turned around to find himself faceplate to faceplate with Cherry.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For saving my life.”

Cherry shrugged. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Guys,” Robert called as his Death Walker, now with a firm grip on his leg, swung him through the air behind them. “I could use a little help here!”

The two Methuselans ran forward to aid their comrade, but the mech swung Robert’s body at them like a club. Cherry ducked, but Rene took the full brunt of the impact. Robert’s armor struck his with a resounding, spark-throwing
clang
. Rene sailed through the air and landed on top of a relatively undamaged highway patrol car, shattering the windows and caving in the roof.

*****

Across the lot, Sam led Lamont and Alex in a charge against another Death Walker. The mech opened fire and Sam cartwheeled out of the way, barely avoiding being pelted with bullets.

Sam bounded off toward the last mech. “I’ll take the next one.”

“We’ll handle this one,” Lamont called. “Alex, go low.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Alex ducked another volley from the cannon. “Bite its ankles?”

“Try to knock it down,” said Lamont, jumping into the air.

The mech swatted him out of the air like an insect and swung at Alex with the other arm, but narrowly missed the teenager as he slid between the birdlike legs, throwing sparks on the pavement. The mech brought its hand down over Lamont’s helmet, embedding its claws into the asphalt around his head. The Replodian snatched the flexing claws in his hands and fought against them as they tried to close around his helmet.

“Now, Alex!” he yelled. “Take it down!”

Alex kicked the robot’s knee, but the mech only growled and kicked at him, unwilling to release its prey. He opened fire on the joint with his arm cannon in a continuous stream. His visor dimmed to protect his vision as the ion cannon cut into the armor like a torch. The metal soon began to drip away in great molten globs. The leg wobbled and the mech awkwardly looked between its own legs.

Alex kicked the lower half of the leg once, twice, and on the third blow, the limb broke apart in a splash of molten metal. “Timber!”

The claws released their hold on Lamont’s helmet as the Death Walker toppled onto its side. Lamont scrambled away to join Alex. The robot thrashed and kicked the smoking stump of its leg in a futile attempt to right itself.

Alex examined his smoking forearm. “I love this thing. Sam’s a genius.”

“Speaking of which…” Lamont scanned the parking lot. “Where is the ‘genius,’ anyway?”

*****

Sam ran toward a Death Walker as it fired on a group of retreating police officers. The Replodian came to a skidding halt behind the mech, looked up at the maintenance hatch on the robot’s backside, and punched through the armor. The mech took a step back and turned, looking for Sam as he inserted his arm into the crude opening and began to root around.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he said, shoving his arm in almost to the armpit. “I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

The mech took another step back, but stopped dead as Sam’s hand found the machine’s central processing unit.

“Oh, you like that, do you?” he grunted, blindly interfacing with the CPU. “Let’s see what happens when I do
this
!”

The Death Walker jerked to attention and turned toward the school. It raised both arm cannons and trained them on the mech still fighting with Cherry and Rene.

Sam opened the suit’s comm channel and shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

Rene and Cherry looked over their shoulders and dove out of the way as Sam flexed his fingers. The shanghaied Death Walker unloaded both barrels at the other, turning it into Swiss cheese. Sam laughed as the bullets found the rocket launchers and blew the robot’s torso into flaming shrapnel.

“Ha ha! Go boom!” Sam laughed as he directed his mech at the one still fighting with Robert, who was trying vainly to fire off a clean shot while the robot swung him like a rag doll.

Sam fired a series of controlled bursts at the shoulder joint, and the flailing arm was shorn off. Robert fell to the ground with the robot’s claws still clenched around his ankle. He wrenched on the claws until one of them snapped at the joint. Freed, Robert scurried out of the line of fire after Cherry and Rene, who were taking refuge inside the school entrance. Sam’s mech fired another burst, this time from both barrels, before finally launching a rocket at the one-armed robot. The Death Walker exploded as both Sam’s rocket and those stored in its launcher detonated simultaneously.

Sam laughed. “Oh, baby, I
love
it when you get aggressive! You know how Daddy likes it.”

“Sam!”

He looked over his left shoulder. Lamont waved his arms and pointed to a one-legged mech attempting to pursue and fire on him and Alex at the same time.

“Take it out,” Lamont shouted.

Sam sneered as he brought the Death Walker’s guns to bear on its crippled brother.

“Come on, baby,” he whispered breathlessly to his captive weapon. “Almost there. Don’t stop. Don’t stop!”

The Death Walker loaded a fresh rocket into each of its launchers, and Sam flexed his fingers one final time, giving the order to fire. The dual projectiles exploded from the mech’s shoulders in twin trails of smoke and sailed over Lamont and Alex’s heads as they dove to the pavement. The wounded mech ceased its desperate barrage against its fleeing prey and looked up as the rockets flew toward it. It raised an arm to cover its eye an instant before the rockets connected and vaporized it, leaving only one kicking leg intact.

“Ha,” yelled Sam. “Money shot!”

For a few moments, the only sound in the devastated lot came from the crackling fires consuming the demolished mechs and cars. Slowly, the cops and TDC agents got to their feet and ventured from their respective hiding places to inspect the damage.

Rene stuck his head out from the school’s demolished doorway. “Is that all of them?”

“That’s it,” Lamont called back. “They’re all dead.”

Cherry stepped out and — upon getting a good look at Sam and the remaining mech — said, “Does he have his hand up that robot’s
butt
?”

Sam slowly pulled his arm out of the jagged opening and grimaced at the hydraulic fluid dripping from his armor. He shook as much as he could away, and then slapped the lifeless mech hard on the rear end with an open palm.

“Call me, sweet cheeks,” he said.

The Death Walker teetered precariously for a moment before crashing forward onto its nose. Black smoke billowed from the hole in its backside.

“Well,” Sam said as the others assembled around him, “I’m spent. What’s next?”

“We have to rescue Quintin and Crystal,” Alex said.

“Who?”

“My brother and my girlfriend!”

Sam turned to Lamont. “The kid has a brother?”

“It’s a long story,” said Lamont. “We’ll explain later. Right now we have to figure out how to rescue them.”

“If Temujin took prisoners, he probably took them back to the
Ragnarok
,” Sam said.

“The what?” asked Cherry.

“It’s a ship,” Sam explained. “A really
big
ship.”

“If it’s so big, then where is it?” asked Robert.

Sam looked up and scanned the sky. “The
Ragnarok
has a cloaking field. It’s undetectable to the human eye and most surveillance technology.”

“Great,” said Moe. “Another one of
your
great inventions.”

“It still casts a shadow,” said Sam. “We can track it from the ground. Once we’re underneath it, I can locate one of the emergency escape hatches and get us inside.”

Sam scanned the parking lot but failed to see any shadows on the ground large enough to be cast by the
Ragnarok
. His eyes fell on a flipped, but otherwise relatively undamaged, blue Chevy pickup.

“Help me flip that truck,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Four

While the
Ragnarok
climbed past one thousand feet, the Khan stood in front of the full-length mirror in his quarters. The gleaming armor he had worn inside the school was gone, replaced with a red silk shirt and brown fur cloak. As he poured himself a drink, there was a knock on the chamber door.

“Enter,” he called.

The door opened, and two guards, accompanied by Chuluun, ushered the captive teenagers into the room. Crystal struggled against her escort, kicking, bucking, and squealing wildly. The boy, on the other hand, simply walked ahead of his escort with his eyes directed at the floor, surely ashamed by his humiliating defeat. Temujin smiled as he finished pouring his drink.

“Welcome, children,” he said. “That will be all, gentlemen. Chuluun, if you would please remain?”

Chuluun nodded. He closed the door behind the departing troopers and stood with his hands folded in front of him.

Temujin gestured toward the porcelain jug in front of him and addressed Quintin, “Sake?”

Still looking at the floor, Quintin shook his head despondently.

“My dear?” Temujin smiled sweetly at Crystal, looking every bit the part of the generous host.

Crystal scowled and fought the urge to spit on the plush furs beneath her skinned knees. The Khan shrugged and corked the jug with a sigh as he walked around the table to more closely scrutinize his prisoners.

“Shame.” He swirled the clear liquid in his glass. “On the whole, I abhor the Japanese culture, but I must say their taste in spirits is superb. Wouldn’t you agree, Chuluun?”

The general smiled. “I prefer their weaponry, my Khan.”

“Ah, yes. Magnificent.” Temujin leaned in close to Quintin. “But nothing compared to
Replodian
weaponry, is it, Alexander?”