The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (31 page)

There’s no time to appreciate the design. Bly charges
to meet it as it knocks aside the heavy barricade, but it leaps
over him. He chops one of the legs, but another hits him in the
back hard enough to send him flying face-first into the collapsing
hole it just came through. I don’t wait for it to switch targets,
but it’s already seen me (two heads), flips, and I’m hacking at
multiple arms at once, trying to get a body cut in, trying to take
away one of the heads. But it’s fast, and moves like nothing I’ve
ever seen.

I do some damage (I hope) to the joints of one or two
of the limbs, but then I get my legs swept out from under me, and
have to roll as other arms try to pin me to the floor. I drive my
sword into a joint between the torso segments, but it does little.
Then I lose my sword when my arm gets swatted hard enough to break
my reinforced bones.

“Stay down!” Paul yells, and I feel the familiar wave
of a Rod blast. Above me, Bug shudders, gets pushed back, but stays
intact. It flips, tumbles, starts scrambling for Paul. I get to my
knees, reset my arm with a blinding crack, make my fingers work.
Draw my gun. Too late. The thing has forced itself through Paul’s
defensive fields, proving its materials are just as resistant to
ETE tech as Brimstone and Bly. It swats him with a heavy arm,
throwing him back into the escape tunnel as he loses his tools.
It’s advancing on him when I manage to get off my first shots. I
hit a “shoulder”, a torso joint, one of the heads. My rounds
penetrate and explode, do damage, and then I watch the thing start
repairing itself.

“Ya need to amputate!” Bly shouts, having dug himself
out, charging the monster before it can restore full mobility. This
allows him to get a good swing, take off one of the limbs.

I make my sword jump back to my hand and join
him.

The trick to fighting a multi-armed opponent is to
not get between weapons. Stay to the side, so only one arm can
reach at a time. Disarm, disable. Bly knows this, too, and we keep
the thing between us, fencing with it, hacking at the limbs.

But it’s smart. It flips, throws itself at Bly,
expects I’ll move in after it, then bounces itself back at me. It
feints, then flips as I go for a tempting limb. The next thing I
know is I’ve got four arms wrapped around me, crushing me in a
super-human embrace. I’ve got my sword between my torso and its
torso. I find a place to get my edge and push, one hand on the back
of my blade. Bly sees what I’m doing and hacks the thing’s body
from the opposite side. I feel it start to come apart. (I also feel
my ribs give way as my spine threatens to sever.) Then Bly starts
hacking off one of the heads.

I push for all I’ve got, hard enough that I almost
dislocate my own limbs, and finally cut through. I drive my sword
inside the opening of one half as Bly goes for leverage, tosses his
sword and uses a stout dagger to cut and pry the head he’s been
working at. He succeeds in a blaze of sparks, and that half of the
robot goes dead.

That still leaves the larger half (actually
two-thirds) and three functional arms, one of which decides to
forgo crushing me in favor of trying to stab through my armor,
right between my shoulder blades. I can barely hold on to my
sword.

Then I’m face-to-face with Paul, his mask knocked
away, face still repairing a nasty cheekbone gash. He sees what I’m
trying to do, shoves one of his Rods down into the exposed innards
of the bisected robot, discharges a cutting beam…

The thing weakens enough to let me get out of its
pincer grip. I weakly hack at the limb that tried to impale me,
feeling like everything from neck to pelvis is broken and crushed
inside me. Bly jumps in and finishes the job. I fall back onto the
packed ground. Coughing on blood. Seeing spots. Getting flashes of
warning graphics behind my eyes: Damage reports. Depleted
resources. Crashing energy levels.

Bly is hacking apart the other half of the monster
now, like he needs to be thorough. I see Paul staggering away from
the mess we’ve made of Chang’s “toy”. He’s also hurt, needs
time…

“Ya need to move!” Bly prods us. “Half done!” But
he’s staggering as he runs for the exit tunnel. “Move yer lazy
asses!”

Just need to lay down here for awhile…

Fuck…

Somewhere far down the tunnel, I hear gunfire.
Explosions.

Paul and I don’t speak as we limp and drag down the
exit tunnel. I’m sure he’s thinking what I am: Chang’s toy was very
effective at defeating his defensive technology, and could have
done him severe physical damage—maybe torn him apart—if Bly and I
weren’t armed with nanostructure swords. Even then, I doubt we
could have handled more than one of them. Chang, or whoever Janeway
is now, is putting some serious thought into beating us. Maybe it’s
a good thing that the Guardians have withdrawn, whatever the
reason, at least for now.

More explosions bring me back to the immediate. We
manage to catch up with the bulk of one of Straker’s groups—a
hundred or so men, women and children—huddled into a cave space
barely large enough to fit them and what little they’re carrying.
They start when they hear us coming, then relax—barely—when they
realize it’s us and not Bug.

A large explosion shakes us from somewhere close
above, and bits of the packed and sealed roof come down.

“Everybody seal up! Now!” It’s Straker, warning her
people to get their masks on, either expecting the need for a
prompt evacuation or a loss of atmospheric integrity. But she’s
shouting. She’s not using her Link. I realize no one is—all
channels are static. Jammed.

I also realize I don’t see

“Bly? Where’s Bly?” I ask Straker when I get through
the crowd to her. She’s standing at what must pass for airlocks in
their hidden sally ports: Seal-fabric “hatches” ingeniously
repurposed from emergency shelters, gooped into narrow
passages.

“Already outside. With your friend and three of my
fire teams. But we’ve lost Links…”

Another big blast rains debris down on us. The
refugees do an impressive job not panicking.

“Box?” I guess. She nods, also trying not to
panic.

“Mobile gun platform,” she describes. “Damn near
indestructible.”

“You ready?” I ask Paul.

“Not really.” But he gives me a weary grin, gets his
still-dented mask reset.

“Try to wait for my signal before you move these
people out,” I tell Straker. She looks at me like I’m being overly
optimistic, but doesn’t argue. She unzips the inner seal, and air
rushes to fill the space between the two fabric “hatches”. Paul and
I duck in, wait for her to seal up behind us, then unzip the outer
hatch, feel the rush of depressurization, the chill of outside. I
put my helmet back on as an afterthought.

We scramble up the narrow exit tunnel, immediately
come up on two bodies. UNMAC H-As. Penetrated by something big
enough to leave fist-sized holes through the hardshell. One is
missing an arm. The other’s helmet is completely ripped apart,
leaving nothing inside but blood and shredded tissue. The wounds
steam in the cold. Paul puts a defensive field around us.

There’s a barrage of heavy weapons fire: chain gun
bursts punctuated by some kind of cannon, and the impacts feel like
they’re creeping up on us. Dirt gets thrown over us. I wait for a
brief pause, then poke my head up. I see another body, or at least
most of one. Then movement.

Bel. He’s running, not very gracefully scrambling
over the uneven terrain, trying to keep his head low. He’s coming
our way. Almost gets taken out by a blast that leaves a two-meter
crater in the regolith just behind him, the concussion throwing him
forward. He manages to roll, dive into a depression a few meters
from us, then ducks as another blast erupts just above him. A spray
of chain gun fire follows, raking his cover and keeping him
down.

He’s a mess. His surcoat is shredded, the reptilian
armor underneath pocked and dented like he’s been used for target
practice, his face bleeding. He sees us, makes a weak wave with his
sword, sighs out

“…just coming to check on you… yeah… and by the way…
turns out… I don’t got this…”

I hear a familiar whirring scream. Look up. Two Disc
drones fly over our heads, taking what seem like random potshots at
the ground with their turret guns. I track and lock them, draw my
pistol, and before Bel can warn me not to, I pop a shell at each
one.

I get the brief satisfaction of scoring crippling
hits, but then I can feel the big shell coming at…

I barely manage to throw myself back down the
tunnel—and on top of Paul—before where I was blows up. We get
buried in rubble like someone is trying to fill in our graves. I
start struggling, flailing, digging. Then Paul pushes the dirt away
with his Sphere.

“This is exciting,” he snarks as I get off of him.
Crawl. Try to keep out of sight of whatever just shot at us. Cloak
my armor. Another Disc flies past our position, circles. Doesn’t
seem to see me. Bel is still down behind his poor cover. I don’t
see Bly.

Since there’s a lull in the bombardment, I crawl up,
poke my helmeted head over the tunnel exit. There’s a lot of dust
in my way, but I can see heat: a tight cluster of glowing blips,
like hot weapons, moving as a unit. I hear the ground crunching
under what sounds like heavy treads. Paul climbs up close to me,
but stays out of sight.

“Some kind of tank?” I whisper a guess. But then I
hear a grinding that reminds me of a construction trencher, and the
heat cluster starts moving fast over the ground. Tumbling.
Spinning. It goes several dozen meters, stops, changes course.
Searching for targets. When I finally see it, it initially looks
vaguely like a stumpy child’s jack, only the sections spin
independently to propel it. When it settles for a moment, I see
better: The main body is very box-like, in sections very much like
an old puzzle—a Rubik’s Cube. Except there are large metal
spherical wheels on each corner, turning on universal joints, and
cylindrical treads on the middle edges. It rolls slowly on the
round wheels, then the outer sides stay put while the center slab
spins, propelling it wildly. When it hits an obstacle or loses
traction, it simply tumbles until it can get traction again.

It settles again. I can see an armored dome—much like
one of Bug’s heads—pop up from the center of the upper face, its
scanning eyes sweeping around. On the centers of two opposite sides
are the turrets for what look like short-barreled chain guns. On a
third side is the maw of a cannon that looks like it might run
through the axis of the thing. The surfaces are all dull metal,
scarred by its scuttling spinning motion, pocked by small-arms
fire. There are hack-marks that may have come from either Bel’s or
Bly’s swords.

I do a quick inventory: My broken and cracked bones
have mostly re-knitted, and my dislocated joints have popped back
in place. But my left lung is still being drained of fluid and
re-inflated, and my spleen is “offline”. My graphics flash on
something under me, and I realize I’m lying on the half-buried body
of one of the fallen PK. I start getting “resource assessments,” as
my mods try to convince me to cannibalize the corpse (and probably
what it’s wearing).

I shift to my weapons: I still have three full mags
of shells, and most of a fourth in the gun, preset for
armor-piercing high explosive. But the best they did was wound Bug.
Box looks a lot sturdier.

I see Box spin its horizontal center, just as a
rocket comes flying in at it. It catches the projectile on one of
its edges, and the blast looks like it dislocated one of the tread
cylinders. But the section pivots back and the main gun lobs a
shell back at its attackers, blowing away a rise about fifty meters
off. It starts moving that way, and gets about halfway there when
another rocket comes at it from the right flank. It pivots again,
using its already damaged section as a kind of shield. The blast
barely moves it, but the tread is mostly broken off. The big gun
pivots to answer back…

And then a figure in black bursts up out of the sand
just to its left, leaps on the cube. It’s Bly. He plants a demo
charge, wedges it into the scanner array before the head can
retract, and then gets thrown off when the sections spin. It’s
shooting at him before he hits the ground, but his charge blows. I
see the head dome fly.

The sections rotate, bringing up another head on the
opposite side, and the big gun starts turning toward Bly. Small
arms start pinging off the thing, and it ignores Bly to turn a
chain gun back into the incoming fire.

It can be distracted.

I pop up, lock, and fire. Two shells hit the barrel
of the chain gun that rotates toward me as the opposite one starts
firing on the PK. The head—and then the gun section—spins back on
me, and I fire again. Do damage to the sensor array before it can
retract. I duck down to avoid the cannon as it turns on me, but the
shell goes high, misses (but still close enough that I can feel it
pass overhead). Then the remaining chain gun is spraying my
position.

I barely hear a roar over the gunfire, and get enough
of a reprieve to look. Bly has managed to get back on top of the
thing and is digging between the sections with his sword like a
wrecking bar. The sections spin, try to knock him off. Then the
whole thing tries to roll over on him when he hangs on. He has to
tumble clear, but leaves his sword stuck in the monster.

Bel is up and running at it. It turns the chain gun
on him and starts spraying. It’s sloppy now, possibly blinded, but
Bel takes a hammering despite his charged armor, staggers.

“Shoot!” Paul yells at me, scrambling up out of our
hole. I take the shot I’ve got, try to hurt the gun that’s
hammering Bel, try to shoot into the gaps between the sections. I
get its attention back. Paul gets a field up, but it barely stops
the incoming fire. I fire back into the chain gun. It spins away,
and the big cannon locks on us…