War Machine (The Combat-K Series) (62 page)

Read War Machine (The Combat-K Series) Online

Authors: Andy Remic

Tags: #Science Fiction

“Keenan,” he heard Pippa cry. There was a
crack,
and she was quiet.

He tried to focus on direction, but it was impossible in the gloom, weaving and bumping through an insane tangle of branches and trunks, through intense brutal metal scenery that added up to nothing less than total confusion. The air grew strong with the stench of hot oil. Keenan found it hard to breathe.

They came to another clearing, larger but more tangled, and filled with perhaps a thousand spidery machines. Their eyes glowed, and they scuttled about purposefully, wiry legs bending and stretching, tiny teeth chattering and filling the air with a sound not unlike rainfall.

Grimly, Keenan realised there was no escape, no way out. Even if he managed to throw off the thin razor wires, which bound him and converted him to an unmoving block of flesh, what then? How could he fight a thousand of the things?

The machines had realised, understood, what Emerald was. The threat she represented, carried in her soul like a disease: the unleashed, unrealised power of a returning, regenerating Kahirrim.

For whatever reason, they had neutralised her.

Keenan shuddered as three of the machines stalked towards him with rhythmical steps, and with glittering eyes, without remorse, without understanding, without empathy, they looked down at him, paused, watching him, and delivered a devastating blow that spun his head and sent him reeling down into darkness, and a world where he would drown in blood and oil.

Chapter 19

 

Factory Floor

 

He snuggled under a fresh duvet, inhaling lavender and the musk of sleep and last night’s sex. He turned, cuddling into the welcoming flesh of Freya’s back. She mumbled a purr, a growl of awakening necessity, and turned to him, nuzzling him, and rubbing him. Her tongue slid into his mouth, her legs lifting, encircling him, toes teasing down his calf as their bodies pressed hard together and the tease lingered with a tantalising agony. Then the bedroom door burst open in a whirlwind of young girls slamming in, screaming and giggling, “It’s Christmas mummy. Daddy it’s Christmas get up get up get up!”

 

Keenan blinked and tasted blood. His mind clattered like an aged machine. Memories drifted idly as he lay, face down, staring at shards of shattered steel.
Shattered. Just like my past,
he thought.
Just like my life.

“Keenan.”

The voice was a gentle whisper, the tickle of a blade on a victim’s neck. Keenan blinked and felt a great and terrible fury rise within him. He would not roll over and die. He would not suffer this indignity, this punishment, this fucking pathetic weakness.

“Keenan!”

He grunted an acknowledgement, eyes burning fire, and strength flooded him. He turned his head. Cam was there, dull black and unmoving. “I thought they’d eaten you.”

“Listen very carefully,” said Cam. Grey lights flickered. He was silent for a while. Keenan stared at the PopBot. “There is some sort of war raging down here, between the machines, the sentinels: a civil war, a split, a divide; and the others, those hunting you, are about to arrive.”

“Cam, I...”

“Wait! We have only seconds. I have spoken to Emerald and Pippa; they are ready. When the avalanche falls, I will cut through your bonds, but the wires are deep, slicing your flesh Keenan. I’ll be honest, my friend, it’s going to hurt, and hurt bad.”

Keenan nodded. “We lost our weapons, but we still have our packs under this... web, wire, whatever: more guns... bombs.” He smiled darkly. “I’m feeling the need for some fucking payback.”

“Not a time to fight.” Cam was agitated. “This is a time to run. Keenan, trust me; if you had seen what I’ve seen...”

“And what have you seen?”

“This place is huge
.
It is big, vast, and filled with thousands upon thousands of these damn machines, these sentinels. The creators of this place did not want infiltration.”

“It seems an elaborate way to go about stopping unwanted visitors.”

“No, Keenan. It’s an equilibrium, a balance of metal and machines. It was designed to last a billion years... machines feeding on machines, a constant rejuvenation, fed by the most incredible power source I have ever come across.”

“What’s at the core?” whispered Keenan.

“Here they come. Brace yourself!”

Gleaming stalks of metal roared through the silence making a sound like a tidal wave hissing and surging. The horizon became a vista filled with charging buzzing chittering metal monsters, insects and lizards. The iron woodland around Keenan teemed with thousands of spider-machines, screeching and clattering, and came alive as the two hosts rushed one another, clashing with a sonic steel boom that reverberated through the ground. Keenan squinted, but saw only a blur of moving metal, as if he was staring down into a whirling turbine. Everything was too fast for him to see; he could only hear and feel a vast ocean flowing over him with a brutal caress.

There was a
buzz.
Keenan bit his tongue on a yelp. Wire glowed and fell away. More buzzessparked from Cam, and within a few seconds Keenan was rubbing at his wrists, his throat, and his scored and punctured face, hands coming away with flakes of dried blood. Then, Cam was gone, and Keenan crawled after him. Twenty feet away a battle raged. Something hot scythed over Keenan’s head making him duck, and rattled off among the trees. Screeches hurt his ears. Metal raped metal, bars hammered bars, gears ground and cogs whirred, and Pippa and Emerald crouched beside him, their faces a hideous criss-cross of wounds. Cam led them, bobbing ahead like a tiny silent ghost, away from the flurry and insanity of battle, down a narrow slope filled with grease, and under exposed metal tree roots as thick as a man’s waist. They clambered over serrated knife branches, cursing, and slipping and sliding through a mire of metal waste.

It took them long, long minutes to pick up their previous pathway, but Cam took them through the tangled woodland, his direction unerring, and only when they stepped onto what they perceived as their immediate salvation did they halt, Keenan and Pippa sweating and panting heavily. Emerald was cool, controlled, her eyes fixed with a bright but furious focus.

Keenan un-shouldered his pack, and pulled free a variety of guns and bombs. He also checked his MPK for damage; despite a battering and scratching and scuffing, the weapon was still true. Pippa, however, had lost her automatic weapon. She consoled herself by grasping two powerful Makarov pistols.

“It’s not far to the Shrine,” said Emerald. “There we can perform the Shift
,
and the machines won’t be able to pursue. They are not designed to enter The Factory.”

“Will I be able to follow?” said Cam.

Emerald gave a short shake of her head. “No sentient machines are permitted there; the Shift is an impossibility.” Cam remained silent, but Keenan could sense the PopBot’s frustration.

“Come on,” he growled, then glanced over his shoulder. The cacophony of the warring creatures had dimmed; the metal screeches and bangs had diminished. “When they realise we’ve escaped—”

“They’ll come after us,” finished Pippa.

They started to run, sweat pouring down their faces. Emerald and Cam took the lead, and Keenan and Pippa ran side by side, metal trees flashing past them, the air hot, humid, and stinking of hot metal and oil, filling their senses with a cloying perfume of dead machinery. Behind them, the fighting seemed to have ceased; several deafening
booms
echoed across the Woods of Mekkra. Then, at the edge of hearing, a skittering chattering noise could be heard, like the gnashing of billions of teeth, the spinning of heavy gears, and the grinding of metal into paste. The noise increased in pace, growing louder and louder.

Pippa glanced behind, but Keenan grabbed her, forcing her on. “Don’t look back,” he barked, and they increased their pace down the weaving metal pathway. Suddenly the trees ended and there was a hill, a perfect hummock from a single cast of steel. It rose before them like a giant teardrop from the eye of a metal god, shining softly: a beacon, a promise, a tease.

Emerald bounded easily up the steep incline, and Keenan and Pippa followed, hands and feet scrabbling at the slippery, burnished steel slope. Behind, the noise of the pursuing machines had risen to a crescendo, a clashing jarring mash of metal music... which stopped.

Keenan glanced back. They were at the foot of the hill: thousands upon thousands of sentinels, metal bodies, metal claws, gnashing metal teeth. They bled oil, and salivated grease. Copper smeared their joints, and silver paste glittered on scaled metal tongues. The machines charged as one host. With a scream that built and echoed and boomed, they leapt from the Woods of Mekkra to the foot of the steel hillside. Keenan fired wildly behind him, the MPK spitting fire and glowing bullets. Machines went down, tumbling, trampled by allies. Hot oil spurted into the air. Severed pipes hung like severed arteries, but it made no difference to the mass. They came on with a roar so loud it drowned out Creation.

“I can’t go on,” wept Pippa, her mad uphill sprint dying.

Keenan dragged her roughly along. Ahead, Emerald and Cam had reached a square, black platform. Keenan glanced back, grunted, and emptied twenty bullets into the face of a reptilian metal cat. Shards of alloy twisted back, peeling open like a flower and the beast tumbled back down the metal hillside, and rolled away, to be trampled under claws.

Pippa stumbled. Keenan whirled, hurling grenades into their midst. Then they were running, and explosions rocked the metal world. Creatures were flung upwards and outwards, living shrapnel, limbs torn and bodies shred. Jaws snapped at heels. Pippa powered alongside Keenan with grim determination, sword in hand, the blade a single gleaming molecule.

Keenan felt the weight of mass behind him, and imagined more than felt hot breath down his collar, knowing that death was a microsecond away. He opened fire again until the MPK clicked with a dead man’s bone rattle.
A few more steps,
he thought,
a few more pain-filled steps to sanctuary and haven and...

Something slammed his back. He went down and rolled, coming up and lashing out to crush metal with hard bone knuckles. He lashed out left and right, smashing fists into metal faces. Beside him, Pippa was hammering her sword in a glittering arc, slicing heads from torsos and limbs from trunks, and for a split second the beasts halted their charge in the face of this joint ferocity. Then, together they sprinted for the platform. New jagged cuts and fresh blood streaked Keenan’s face, from razor claws. The two remaining members of Combat K slumped at Emerald’s feet, defeated.

The metal beasts spread out, silently, surrounding the platform. Keenan could smell their hot oil stink like fetid breath. He blinked a lazy blink, reached into a pocket, and with shaking fingers lit a bedraggled home-rolled cigarette. Smoke plumed. He laughed a manic laugh. “Shit,” he said.

The creatures bunched, tensed, and Keenan continued to laugh his crazy laugh as Emerald raised pulsing hands above her head.

Electric lightning flickered and discharged in thundering bursts around them, smashing creatures into puddles of molten metal. Keenan and Pippa stared at Emerald, and in the blue flickers and white flashes, beyond the cracks and thumps of raw energy flowing from dark vaults above her tensed body, her frame flickered skeletal and she was, without a shadow of a doubt, inhuman.

With a gathering roar, the sentinels charged.

 

Everything spun in great, lazy circles. Colours wafted gently in and out of focus, concentric rings of pastel shades overlapping, interloping, criss-crossing and mixing like smoke. Pain came, pulsing in parallel to the rings of colour, the bands of shade and the cacophony of beauty and agony. He felt his fingers twitch, like the first jolts of electric shock therapy. Spasms made his fingers dance, although he couldn’t see them. He felt them, though, jerking and twitching, the tendons in the backs of his hands pulsating and writhing agonisingly like eels in grease. These uncontrollable rhythms moved up his arms and he wanted to scream but couldn’t control his lungs. He felt his heartbeat quicken, drumming like thunderous applause in his inner mind, and soon—he had no concept of time, so it could have been seconds, could have been a thousand years—every muscle and tendon in his body was twitching, writhing and coiling, and he was sure his body must be spastically jerking, an epileptic fit without the epilepsy.

His eyes flared open, body shooting up into a sitting position.

Betezh coughed up a ball of phlegm the size of his fist, and watched it roll and nestle greasily in his lap. “Ugh,” he muttered, and wriggled from under his own organic produce until it slopped into the footwell of the Buggy. He looked around, head muggy, wondering where he was, what he’d been doing, and... and...

Events flooded back, from the distant drifting memory of Franco’s escape from Mount Pleasant, right up to the ejaculation of his mind by the Proton Lake. A wooden tongue probed lead-lined walls, and Betezh spat a few times on the rocky ground outside the Buggy. Then he crawled around until he located a bottle of water. He took one long, long drink, and then another. He emptied the bottle, and tossed it aside.
Where is everybody?
he wondered idly.

Betezh climbed tentatively from the vehicle, his limbs like elastic. He placed his hand on the bonnet, and the engine was still warm, but not hot. So, how long had he been out? And why had they left him? Then he saw the answer, his eye catching the narrow pathway worming its way around the Lake of...

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