Broken Hero (3 page)

“Would you shut the feck up and start killing that feckin’ thing!”

The robot takes a grinding step forward. Its damaged foot digs a trench through the floorboards. Its injured arm dangles. Its uninjured one smashes another important-looking support column. I could swear the ceiling is starting to sag.

“Everybody out!” I yell.

“Did I not just say—” Kayla starts, but this latest suggestion is a popular one. She is half-bowled over by a fleeing man, somehow still hanging onto his pint.

Across the room another man lets out a loud, “Ooph!” and drops to the floor with his hands buried between his thighs. It’s the man who had Tabitha in a headlock. He seems to have recovered enough of his senses to let her go. Her knee is still raised after delivering a powerful blow to his genitals.

“I said save them!” I snap. “Not engage in family planning!”

I try to move toward the man but there’s a careening robot screaming “
Da shek! Da shnek!
” between me and him so that plan has to be put on hold.

“Kayla,” Felicity snaps, “listen to Arthur and get that idiot out of here!”

“Oh, because you totally don’t feckin’ need me.” Kayla, I think, is still out of sorts after her conversation with Ephie.

“Clyde,” I say. “Hit the robot again.”

Clyde mutters. His arms fly outward. The robot staggers back, good arm pinwheeling afresh as it tries to stay on its one working foot.

“Feckin’ point taken,” Kayla grumbles, then blurs into motion, darting between staggering feet, and snatching up both the man and Tabitha.

“Hands! Remove!” Tabitha yells. Kayla ignores her as she bodily drags her toward the door.

The robot recovers itself, props its head against a thick wooden beam. “
Nell vick shnigh!
” Now it’s not worrying about the whole balance thing, it seems to be taking stock of its surroundings more. The insectile eyes flicker back and forth across the room. It lowers its head, hunches its shoulders, stalks one stumbling step forward.

“Again, Clyde!”

“Right on it.” Clyde is edging around the quivering walls of the pub, one hand wafting away clouds of plaster dust. “Totally hearing you and about to make my move. Never worry. It’s just I’m trying to get line of sight on his foot. Sort of want to make every spell count. Want to do that always, of course. Not suggesting frivolous spellcasting is my usual modus operandi. Very focused at all times. Professional at work. It’s just Elkman’s Push is hell on battery life.”

“
Nar bin gest!
” The robot snatches a length of fallen timber from the floor and starts swishing it back and forth. A table sails toward a wall, lands minus three of its legs. Pint glasses become well-batted grenades.

“How many batteries do you have left?” I duck under a tangle of fallen wiring. I want to get close enough so that I have a decent chance of shooting the robot in an eye, but not so close that I get turned into a cricket ball by that stick it’s wielding.

“There’s a slim chance that I’m down to three AAs and a nine volt.”

I pause in my approach to allow my incredulity to have its full moment. “That’s it?” That is less of a magical armament and more of a massive blow to my chances of surviving long enough to watch the six o’clock news.

“Well, in my, you know, defense… And well, hindsight benefitting from the acuity of vision that it does, in retrospect this may resemble a phrase my mother was always fond of saying: assumptions make an ass out of both you and me. Though, mostly I think she meant me. As you probably will. Not an unfair call, I suspect. But as I was saying, I was rather assuming that the afternoon would involve more of a quiet pint and less of a battle to the death, and that affected my packing plans.”

Which is about as catty as Clyde gets. What’s more he has a point. I peer back at the exposed electrical wiring I just ducked beneath. “Can that help you?”

Clyde’s eyebrows pop up and he grins.

“See,” Felicity says between potshots at the robot’s head, “that’s why I made you field lead.”

If I wasn’t busy avoiding being beaten to death it would be quite a cool moment. As it is, the robot’s bat smashes into the ground one foot to my left. Splinters stitch a path up my leg as the beam’s end impacts on the floorboards.

I snap off a shot, see it raise sparks off the robot’s bronze skull, and then I’m ducking and rolling as the robot sweeps the beam sideways, slamming it into my shoulder and making the world explode in pain.

Somewhere distant, I hear Felicity yell. The pings of ricochets. A few dull clunks as other shots land home, bury themselves in gearwork.

My shoulder feels like it took a bullet. I stumble to my feet. My hands are shaking. The white blaze of adrenaline stumbling over the abrupt agony. I can see the robot raising the beam above my head.

I kick forward, propel myself toward its legs. I haven’t much momentum, but it’s enough to dodge the blow. I fly between its splayed feet, crash to the ground, land on my injured shoulder, and bellow in pain. I roll over, staring up at the robot’s back, trying to clutch at the injury.

From beyond the robot, a roar from Clyde. A sound like a generator blowing.

“
—al kaltak!
”

And then a great rending of metal.

Clyde has hit the exposed wires. Has hit a bigger power source. So he can tear a bigger hole into another reality. The robot scrabbles to stay upright, fighting its injured foot. The sound of gears crunching, metal ripping and twisting fills the world. It’s the sound of victory. Except I’m lying beneath the thing. Or, as some might describe it, right in the spot where it will land and squash me like a particularly juicy, human-shaped grape.

I try to get my limbs all working together, try to scramble on all fours, but it’s difficult when one of the four is out of commission, and another is preoccupied with trying to keep that one safe. It is ungainly, and decidedly ineffective. The robot stumbles back a step. I feel its thigh strike my back, propel me forward. I half trip, half sprawl over a fallen chair. And then I’m down, on my back, staring as the massive machine teeters over me.

I empty a clip at it. Anything I can do to tip its balance away from me. My bullets slam into its midriff.

Maybe that’s what makes the machine take a step to the side. Maybe it’s capricious chance. I don’t particularly give a shit. The fact is, it steps back, past me, and I don’t become pâté.

Instead yet another column takes the hit. I feel like we’re running out of them. From the ceiling’s groan, it seems to agree with me.

I get my breath back long enough to expel it. “We
have
to get out of here.”

“Noted!” Felicity is hustling. Clyde is on the move too, heading to the far wall, circling around toward the door.

I scan the devastation. Wood fragments and glass shards. Exposed wiring and pipes. Plaster dust and broken picture frames. But everyone’s out. No one’s dead yet.

Oh shit.

At the bar, the one part of the pub still mostly intact: the bartender. Goddamn, Kayla. I knew she was hitting him too hard. He’s still slumped there, staring at where her sword landed near his head. His eyes aren’t focused.

“One civilian still in the building!”

I lunge forward, away from Felicity and Clyde, away from the pub’s door, and the safety of the sky not falling on my head. The ceiling groans again. Then it screams. The opposite corner of the room gives way. A great tearing crash as the contents of the room above deposit themselves on the floor. Wooden beams and brickwork spill loose. A glimpse of the sun shines through the torn-down wall, diffuse through the dust.

“Arthur!” Felicity yells.

“Almost there! Go!” I yell without looking. I make it to the bartender, grab him, heave.

He doesn’t move.

I heave again. He slides six inches down the bar, his head knocks into the flat of Kayla’s blade, still embedded there. He’s dead weight at the end of my arm. And apparently, when he’s dead, he’s going to weigh a shit-ton.

“Come on, you bastard!” Bizarrely, yelling that doesn’t make him weigh less.

To my left, there is the sound of metal doing something it shouldn’t.

I turn, look, wish I hadn’t. The robot is up. Or mostly up. The leg Kayla injured is now an ugly twisted mess. The shoulder Clyde injured now ends in a ragged stump of broken metal, hemorrhaging black oil and something blue that could be antifreeze. Its chest is horribly ravaged—the bronze sheet that covered it contorted, half buried in the gears. I hear them scraping against the tattered metal, the grinding of axles bent well out of true. Half of its bronze skull cap has been torn away exposing chittering gears behind the wide insectile eyes.

In its remaining hand, it still holds the wooden beam. And its eyes are fixed on me.

“Oh crap.”

Over the protests of my injured shoulder, I grab the bartender with both hands.

The robot lurches forward, an ugly half-hop.

I heave on the bartender. My shoulder screams. To keep it company, I do too.

The robot hops again. It raises its fist, its wooden beam.

Behind it more of the ceiling gives way. A creeping roar of descending debris, slowly filling the room.

With a bellow, I stop hauling the bartender toward the door and reverse direction. I slam into him, putting my good shoulder into his midriff. It’s like running into a cow. At least, I assume it is. I’ve done some weird stuff because of this job but never that.

My face is buried in the bartender’s side. The world around me is just noise. It doesn’t sound good.

Then the bartender starts to move, sliding. Then his shoulders and head are off the bar, and he’s falling down, collapsing onto the floor. I sit down hard. I look up.

I stare into the robot’s glass eyes.

It stands directly above me. It holds the beam up high.

And then it brings it down.

This is far from the first time I’ve been in a life-threatening position. My whole job description at MI37 seems to largely involve being more carefree with my will to live than most people consider healthy.

Actually, one time I really did die. Well, I might not have done. I got a do-over. Maybe. I’m not really sure how parallel timelines work. But it didn’t stick. Hence my being here, watching my life expectancy shorten dramatically.

And the thing about repeatedly exposing yourself to terrifying, life-threatening danger—you sort of get used to it. Once you’ve crash-landed one mangled aircraft in an irradiated ghost town, you’ve crash-landed a hundred mangled aircraft in a hundred irradiated ghost towns. I don’t think it’s really a healthy adaptation—in a very literal sense, actually—but I suppose it’s a natural one. There’s probably even a biochemical reason for it involving the desensitization of adrenaline receptors in the body, or something similar. I imagine Clyde could go on about it at great length.

So, at this point, when death is more proximal than I’d like it to be, I do sort of expect to find myself shrugging, saying “Oh bollocks, not again,” and fighting my way free.

So I fight. My legs scramble for purchase on the floor. My arms scramble for anything to hang onto, to drag myself away.

And I don’t find anything.

I’m caught completely flat-footed. My weight is wrong, and I am too slow, and the club is coming down just too fast.

I am helpless.

And sitting on my arse on the bar floor I am suddenly, horribly struck by the inevitability of my own death.

It will not be in an attempt to save the world. It will not be sacrificing myself for a noble goal. It will not have great philosophical meaning that will resonate through the lives of friends and strangers alike. It will simply be short, blunt, and very, very messy.

The club descends, adrenaline dragging the moment out in slow motion. I can see the grain of the wood, the jagged splinters. I can see the oil in the knuckles of the robot’s hand. I can see each individual lens of glass on its large eyes.

My stomach is a knot. I think I’d vomit if I had the time, but there isn’t. Maybe that’s a good thing. No one wants to be found dead in a pile of his own yak.

They say your life is meant to flash before your eyes at times like these. I wish it did. I could really use the distraction.

Instead I am acutely aware of the club. Of my fingers scrabbling at the smooth floorboards, my feet drumming up and down in a panicked, senseless frenzy. I can feel the wind of the club descending. A foot away. Six inches. Five. Four.

I am going to die.

Three.

Really, genuinely going to die.

Two.

And it’s probably going to hurt very badly.

One.

There is a sound like trains colliding. Like the world ending. And I don’t remember it being this noisy last time I died. And then I think, well, if Descartes was right… I am thinking, so I must be being. Or to put it another way, I am not being dead.

I realize I have closed my eyes. I could not quite stare death in the face. I open them.

The robot is not there. The club is not there. Not quite.

Adrenaline still has me clenched in its crushing grip. Time is ducking under the usual rules. The robot is in midair. The club is whipping sideways, sliding away from me, from the side of my ear, the distance increasing. Its ruined leg is spinning free from its body. There is a long, protracted, “
Naaaaaaa!
” echoing out of its chittering mouth.

I sit. I watch it fly away, collapse. There is an enormous, ruinous boom of sound. It slaps me like I’m a misbehaving child.

Clyde. Clyde at the very last possible moment. Pulling power out of some other reality’s proverbial arse. Clyde saving me.

And then I vomit. All over the bartender, unfortunately. He’s still not really together enough to object. And he is a bartender. This can’t be the first time it’s happened to him.

From the tangled ball of metal comes a jerking, clicking voice. “
Gooten ma ma ma.
”

And suddenly all my fear, all my terror, is sublimated. It is rage, pure and blinding. I am dragging myself to my feet, heaving myself up on the bar, with arms that feel stiff and useless, with hands and fingers that are shaking, with a shoulder that screams in pain, and goddamn this fucking piece of scrap metal. Fuck it straight to hell.