The Mothership (26 page)

The battloid fired, creating another
firestorm at the forest’s edge, while it slowly rotated its shield disks back
and forth, sharing the drain from their attacks. The system of rotating shields
didn’t provide the uniform cover the tracker type machines had, but the
battloid’s shields were individually much stronger and could be constantly
rotated, giving them time to regenerate.

Markus jumped to his feet, sprinted a short
distance toward the trees, then dived to ground again, rolling to a firing
position. He didn’t fire, but waited for a clear shot at the next weapon to pop
up.

He’s a cool one
, Beckman thought. Markus fought like a sniper, with
the patience to wait for a kill shot no matter what chaos was occurring around
him. A chilling thought came to him as he watched the CIA agent sighting
carefully on his target:
No, not sniper. Assassin!

A weapon arm shot out between the shields
at waist height and fired at the trees left of Tucker’s last position, where it
had detected movement in the shadows. After letting off a single burst, it
darted back behind two shields that moved together. The battloid feigned a
weapon arm rising, but stopped short of moving above shield coverage. Xeno fell
for it and shot at empty air while another weapon dropped to ground level and
fired. Beckman couldn’t get his aim down fast enough, but Tucker unleashed
another tongue of LSAT tracer from the trees, raking the battloid’s weapon,
forcing it back behind the shields. The LSAT couldn’t match Conan’s firepower,
but it fired faster, enabling it to disrupt the battloid’s attacks.

The tracer stopped as Tucker’s burly shadow
appeared deep in the woods, leaping away into the darkness, changing position
again before the battloid returned fire. A weapon arm shot out between the
shields facing Tucker, and fired continuously into the darkness. It cut a fiery
swath through the forest, felling trees amidst a sea of flames. Markus sighted
precisely on the joint connecting the particle weapon to the flexible arm and
fired a single controlled burst. The bullets severed the unarmored joint,
sending the weapon spinning uselessly away. Before the severed cannon hit the
ground, Markus was on his feet, sprinting to a new firing position.

Another weapon arm shot up, aiming at
Markus. Before it fired, there was the familiar click of a grenade pin being
pulled, then Xeno hurled the small explosive at the machine. The high weapon
immediately spun towards the grenade fired, catching it in mid air. Instead of
exploding, a thick orange cloud appeared.

Beckman blinked, surprised.
A smoke
grenade?

The battloid’s sensors immediately detected
the orange cloud glowing in the glare of the energy transmission beam above.
The strange spectral readings resembled a corrosive nano swarm weapon
particularly effective against armor, which caused the battloid to elevate the
orange smoke to the top of its target priority list. It began backing away
slowly as it raised three more weapon arms and fired a concentrated barrage in
a desperate attempt to avoid being consumed by the corrosive cloud. It laced
the smoke harmlessly with streams of radiant hot plasma, which flashed
harmlessly off into the sky.

It’s confused!
Beckman realized, unaware that the battloid was not
programmed to fight a force that relied on something as primitive as smoke for
signaling.

They all started firing through the smoke
at the flexible arms, not the cannons, having learned the lesson from Markus,
while Tucker opened up again with the LSAT from a new position deep in the
forest.

When Beckman’s gun emptied, he reach for a
replacement clip, glancing back at the tower, still belching steam and heat,
knowing they were out of tricks.

Why hasn’t it blown?

* * * *

Timer was almost
to the subway entrance when he heard metallic footsteps on the fused rock floor
as the first seeker stepped off the elevator plate. Ahead in the tunnel, he
could see dim outlines of Vamp and Dr McInness, racing into the darkness. He
measured the distance to them, certain they’d survive the blast. He’d hoped to
be inside the tunnel when he’d triggered the explosives, but the runners were
fast. Too fast!

Behind him, the metallic footsteps
clattered on the rock floor as the seeker accelerated, followed by silence as
it launched itself into the air towards him.

“Fire in the hole” Timer yelled without
looking back.

He dived towards the entrance, pressing the
remote’s detonation button while still airborne, then the Earth shook, and
everything went black.

* * * *

One seeker had
remained in the control room, to identify the purpose of the off-white material
placed around the floor and ceiling. It didn’t recognize the substance as an
explosive, because no advanced civilization used chemicals for such a purpose.
It was only when the seeker had almost finished studying the package in the
center of the floor window that it realized the material relied on combustion,
rather than particle annihilation, to generate a limited shockwave. Before it
could compute the size of the shockwave the material could produce, the
explosives detonated. The window shattered beneath its metal feet, releasing a
wave of searing heat from the drill chamber which detonated the C4 in its
hands, blowing off both its lower arms and ripping open its multilayered torso.
The seeker fell into the drill chamber amid fragments of the collapsing roof
and window as heat buckled its metal skin. It crashed onto the drill head,
cracking its sensor disk and finding the heat had jammed one of its hip joints.

The seeker struggled to stand on crippled
legs as falling debris rained down around it, smashing the laser positioning
sensors that kept the massive drill head aligned with the energy transmission
beams. The impact of tons of falling debris knocked the drill out of position,
letting the energy beams scour deep gashes in the drill’s hull. The glowing
blue gravity plates holding the mining machine aloft flickered, starved off
energy, and winked out. A moment later, the drill’s excavation beam blinked
off, instantly reducing the temperature by thousands of degrees, and immersing
the massive bore hole in darkness.

The seeker leapt off the doomed drill head
toward the jagged edge of the floor above, but a large section of falling roof
swatted it like a bug in mid air. The roof section careened off the side of the
drill, then carried the seeker down into the black steaming cloud toward the
bowels of the Earth. Starved of power, the drill fell, allowing all five
transmission beams to intersect in the center of the chamber. Instantly,
feedback flashed at the speed of light, back along the beams to the five power
plants outside, overloading the delicately balanced magnetic fields that
contained reactions hotter than any metal could withstand.

Outside, the five power plants exploded as
one.

* * * *

The flash was
blinding as shockwaves rolled over Beckman’s squad. The battloid took the full
force of the blast on its already overloaded shield emitters and was swept
across the smooth ground on anti-g sleds struggling to prevent it toppling
over. It spun with arms flailing as it fought to steady itself, then a section
of the power plant’s wall, travelling faster than a bullet, sliced through its
back like a sword. The battloid cart wheeled between Beckman and Markus, coming
to rest on its side, its heavily armored torso peeled open as if by a can
opener.

Beckman’s ears rang with a solitary tone as
his vision cleared of spots from the flash. Overhead, a dirty white cloud
boiled skyward from the tower’s shattered roof like an erupting volcano. He
turned back to the battloid, surprised to see it was still functioning. Its
weapon arms snaked around the wall segment embedded in its back, cutting
through the metal while its shield arms pushed against the ground as it tried
to right itself.

“It’s still alive!” Xeno yelled, horrified.

“It’s not alive!” Beckman growled through
gritted teeth. “It’s a God damned machine!”

When the weapon arms finished cutting, the
metal wall segment crashed to the ground, reducing the weight pinning the
battloid. Its weapon arms blasted holes in the smaller wall fragment still
embedded in its torso, then the weaponless arms threaded the holes and tried
pulling it free. On the third attempt, metal groaned as the jagged wall
fragment scraped free of the battloid’s torso, revealing a gaping wound
sparking with short circuits. It tossed the metal slab away, pushed on the
ground with its arms in an effort to right itself.

“No you don’t!” Beckman declared angrily,
jumping to his feet and racing toward the crippled monster.

The battloid swung a shield arm at him, but
he rolled under the blow and back to his feet. Holstering his special, he leapt
onto the battloid and hurled two grenades into its open wound. A weapon arm
struck him in the chest, swatting him away like a fly. He hit the ground hard,
stunned as a weapon arm snaked toward him, rising up like a viper about to
strike, then both grenades exploded inside the machine’s torso. The weapon arm
swayed dizzily above him before it collapsed, slamming into the ground at his
feet. All around the battloid, its arms wavered and fell, then its massive
torso crashed to the ground.

Beckman climbed slowly to his feet,
wheezing from the battloid’s last blow. “Now it’s dead!”

He stared at the shattered tower and the
five wrecked power plants burning furiously down to their foundations. The
extent of the devastation surprised him, as he’d intended only to disable the
mine, not obliterate it. With the mineral extraction system destroyed, the
tower was no longer releasing pure steam into the air, but an acrid mix of
steam and vaporized minerals pouring up from the deepest mineshaft ever sunk
into the Earth.

They won’t fix that in hurry!
he thought, then thumbed his mike. “Timer,
Vamp, acknowledge.” He waited a few seconds, wondering if they could possibly
have survived the blast below ground, then repeated his call, but no response
came.

“Steamer’s dead,” Hooper radioed weakly.

Damn!
Beckman thought, relieved to hear the sergeant’s
voice, but shocked that the man mountain was gone. He started for the tree
line, spotting Hooper’s profile against the fires. The sergeant was limping,
with one arm hanging lifelessly by his side. Nearby, Tucker emerged from the
shadows, incredibly carrying both his machine gun and Conan.

“Steamer took one full in the face,” Tucker
said bitterly. “Never had a chance.” The SEAL’s eyes were glassy and his jaw
was clenched shut as he fought to contain his grief at the loss of his friend.

Hooper pushed through waist-high ferns,
then rested his good shoulder against a tree. He’d narrowly avoided taking a
blast from the battloid in the chest. The right side of his face was blackened
and the skin on his right arm was badly blistered. He still held his fatboy
special, although his carbine was missing. The right side of his uniform had
been burned away, exposing the partially melted Kevlar plate underneath. He
pulled the melted plate out, examined its twisted shape then dropped it on the
ground, deciding it was now useless. Hooper met Beckman’s eyes, then nodded
towards a fire burning furiously a short distance away.

“Steamer’s over there,” Hooper said. “Or he
was. There’s nothing left.”

At least it was quick
, Beckman thought sadly, glad the big man
had not suffered.

Markus ran his eye over the survivors, then
glanced back towards the ruined structures, now illuminated only by the
flickering light of fires. “Sergeant, you saw one of their vehicles land on the
other side, right?”

“Yeah, behind the main building.”

Markus gave Beckman a meaningful look. “We
need to move. There could be more of those things on the way, and we’re in no
shape for another fight.”

“Timer, Vamp, do you read, over!” Beckman
signaled again, but still there was no response.

“They’re gone,” Markus said.

Beckman glared at the CIA agent, even
though he knew if Timer and Vamp were trapped below ground, he couldn’t help
them. It wasn’t Markus being right that irritated him, it was that he took
their loss so easily. Silently, he cursed Dr McInness for being a fool, and
costing him the lives of two of his team. It was exactly the reason why he
hadn’t wanted the civilian scientist along in the first place.

Hooper wiped his ash smeared face. “If they
hadn’t blown that place, we’d all be dead.”

“Yeah, that mother owned us,” Tucker said
staring at the burning trees where Steamer’s ashes lay smoldering. His grief
had already hardened into a rage that demanded revenge.

Xeno sat on the ground, head down, her face
white with shock. “We are so screwed. No way we can stop machines like that.”

“Hey!” Hooper barked angrily, summoning up
what little strength he had left. “It’s dead! You’re not! Remember that!”

The rebuke surprised her. She saw the
determination in his eyes and realized she really wasn’t a soldier. She was a
scientist in khaki, not meant for this.