Broken Hero (42 page)

I duck between the legs of one of the Uhrwerkmänner and hear my pursuer go crashing into it. I keep moving before one or both of them take it into their head to collapse on top of me.

I take a moment, try to get my bearings. The effort is truncated by an Uhrwerkmänn’s head landing next to my feet. Kayla follows shortly after it.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks me. She’s not even out of breath. She flicks her fringe from obscuring one eye to obscuring the other. “Let’s go get that one.”

She points at the largest of the visible Uhrwerkmänner, a beast about two-thirds the height of Friedrich. Fighting near one wall he gleams silver among all the muck and rust.

“That one?” I check. “He’s huge.”

“That’s why it’s the most fun.” She darts toward him.

Fun
. Not exactly the word I would have gone for. Suicidal seems a more suitable replacement.

And yet, I’m following in Kayla’s wake. Adrenaline screams its battle cry into my veins. The heft of the steel rod feels good in my hand.

I see Kayla, already fifty yards ahead of me, launch herself into the air, a sword-pointed arrow flying toward the Uhrwerkmänn’s torso. It catches sight of her almost too late, twists. She scores a hit on its shoulder, glances off, up and away, but she bends at the waist, like she’s hinged there, and her feet slam into its head. The angle of her flight abruptly changes by ninety degrees. She whips around its head, curling her body, her sword completing a circle of torso, leg, and steel that spins around its head scoring deep gashes in the armor plates.

The Uhrwerkmänn claws at her with a hand. She twists but he snags her, flings her away.

She’s back on her feet when I get there, ready to launch.

She goes high and I go low. I hear her blade strike steel but then my own dance of death distracts me. My rod wedges in a knee joint and I’m dragged along as it stumbles back under Kayla’s ferocious onslaught.

It stops and I slam into the leg. Still I hang on, dragging, pivoting, searching for leverage. I brace my feet against what passes for its shin, heave. Something gives beneath my body weight. A spray of black fluid. A stumbling step. The knee gives, and my feet hit the ground.

I wrench my rod free as the Uhrwerkmänn comes down. The point glistens in the flickering firelight of the battle. I upend it, shove it up with all my might.

The point snags in a crack in the tumbling torso. Whether it’s a natural seam or one Kayla hacked into its body I don’t know. I don’t have time to find out. I dance back, out of the reach of descending death, and watch as the thing’s bulk drives the rod to the floor and then deep into its chest cavity like a nail coming home. The Uhrwerkmänn twitches once, twice, lies still.

Kayla slides off its back, lands, follows my gaze to where the tip of the rod is still visible poking from a crack in its chest.

“Fine,” she says. “We’ll call that one feckin’ fifty-fifty all right. You were lucky.”

“This is a competition?” Kayla’s enthusiasm for violence never quite sits right with me.

A roar cuts off her answer. The felled Uhrwerkmänn spasms once more. It lurches up onto its hands and knees, scrabbling toward us. A flailing arm swats at us, close enough that even as I jump back I feel the wind of it sweep across my face. I land awkwardly, half-sprawl.

Kayla lands like a cat, looks down at me. “Not feckin’ dead yet. Game’s still on.” And then she’s off, bounding toward it, sword held high.

It swipes at her once; she rolls; a second time; she leaps, lands on its elbow for a fraction of a second, hits its back. Her sword spears down. She buries it to the hilt in the Uhrwerkmänn’s back.

She’s adopting my tactic, I realize, trying to spear its inner workings. I’ll take some time to be proud of that later. Right now, I decide to worry about the way my weapon is stuck in its midriff with no way for me to retrieve it.

Around us, Uhrwerkmänner roar and bellow. Something massive crashes to the floor not far behind me. Rogue shots boom overhead, stitch a series of craters in the cavern’s wall. Cracks spider out around them.

What is this place? What is it buried under? And how bloody sturdy is it?

Kayla stabs into the Uhrwerkmänn’s back again. It roars out a howl of grating metal, flings itself upwards. Kayla scrabbles for purchase, fails to find it and goes down. I scrabble for my pistol. With Kayla out of the firing line I open up at the hole I’ve punched in its chest. The armor is weak there, I know. And I get more than ricochets. I see ragged holes open up.

Bellowing, almost screaming, the Uhrwerkmänn stands. In defiance of my onslaught, in defiance of its knee, which buckles sickeningly under its weight, but which does not give.

I keep firing, empty my magazine, reload and keep on.

Behind it I see Kayla stand. In the shadow of the curving cavern wall, the Uhrwerkmänner have dumped their trash. Mashed cardboard and wood chips are matted in her hair. She flicks something greasy and sodden from the blade of her sword.

Another magazine down. The Uhrwerkmänn lunges toward me.

Fire arcs overhead. Another crater, high above us this time. Dust and concrete chips rain down on us.

I reload.

Kayla lunges, slashing at the back of the Uhrwerkmänn’s legs. It screams again.

Adrenaline makes my hands shake. Screw grouping my shots at any particular weak point. Bullet holes pepper the chest of the Uhrwerkmänn. If Kayla was sensible she’d duck. But, hell, if she was sensible she’d never have been recruited to MI37. Maybe that’s the problem with Hannah. She’s just too sane for this job.

Time would cure her of that. If we had any.

God, what am I doing here? Risking my life here? When I know what that means?

But it’s too late. I can feel the end of my clip coming. Five shots left. Four. Three.

A bullet hole opens up in the Uhrwerkmänn’s head.

Its roar abruptly shuts off. It gapes, soundlessly. I swear I can even hear Kayla grunting as she hacks at the legs, somehow audible over the scream of battle around me.

The Uhrwerkmänn steps backwards. Kayla dances out of the way. It takes another stumbling step. The last sporadic jerks of life as gravity takes hold. It slams into the cavern wall. The largest crater so far. Collapses. Dead.

I stand beside Kayla. We watch it sag. Finally she nods. “Feckin’ fine then. Sixty-forty yours.”

Flame explodes overhead. We both duck, heat roiling over us. A ceiling of flame.

Something massive and flaming lands in the lap of the Uhrwerkmänn we just killed. Maybe one of his kin. It’s so ruined I can’t tell. Flames obscure our kill.

I think of the bullet holes, the ruined knee, the vast quantity of oil leaking from that bastard.

I am throwing myself at Kayla, screaming “DOWN!” as it detonates.

Too slow again.

The shockwave punches me. Like being slapped by God. We fly through the air. A tangle of legs, and arms, and yells of “Get the feck off me.”

My landing is bony, but softer than expected. Probably because it’s on top of Kayla. It saves me a number of broken ribs, but earns me a backhand that’ll leave me a bruise I’ll still be seeing next month.

“Ow,” I say to her when I sit up, as pointedly as I can manage.

“Not over yet.” She points.

There is a charred ruin where the Uhrwerkmänn used to be. Behind it a black circle, blast marks radiating out like a sun shown in negative.

And cracks.

Great big, spreading cracks. Wider, and wider, and wider. Joining the craters of the guns like some catastrophic dot-to-dot puzzle, the solution to which is several tons of concrete pouring down on my head.

“Run!” I yell just in case Kayla has become completely brain dead in the half second since she pointed out the collapse to me, and then I get on with following my own advice.

I get further with this than I did with avoiding the exploding Uhrwerkmänn, though admittedly, it’s not very far.

I have a good three paces between me and my starting place when the walls start to roar. A deep bass grunt of collapsing rock. Sound that becomes the world, that becomes physical substance I am running through, the air vibrating so much it fights my passage.

Rocks and boulders bounce past me. I’m screaming something I can’t hear or understand. Waiting for the rocky rearrangement of my body from 3D idiot to 2D bloody smear.

A fist of concrete zooms past me with enough speed to punch through one robot’s chest cavity. He dies in a glistening burst of gears and bronze spindles. To my right a boulder the size of Felicity’s minivan casually crushes a pair of Uhrwerkmänner still locked in combat, oblivious to the oncoming death. It carries on unimpeded, takes out a crawling Uhrwerkmänn that’s missing everything from the waist down, comes to rest as the gravemarker for another group of three. Around it, other boulders provide variations on the theme.

After the rocks comes the cloud. Thick, gray, boiling, slowing me as I hack and cough. It rises, fills the cavern. I can’t see more than a few yards, a yard, I just plain can’t see. I am running in total blackness. A blackness I can feel, gritty and cloying, staining my skin and lungs. I cough harder, but I keep running. Keep pushing myself, until I hit my limit like a wall. My knees buckle, my arms flail, no strength left in them. The floor comes up to meet me.

Deep underground, something like dawn comes. It is gradual at first, nothing more than a realization that pitch black has become dark gray. Then the gray lightens. Shadows begin to move, size and distance still only vague suggestions, and then suddenly I am in defined known space. The lizard brain rejoices; another night survived.

Except this space is in complete chaos. Uhrwerkmänner stumble looking for… friends, limbs, purpose? I never really understood these robots and I still don’t.

I sit up, the last dregs of adrenaline still swilling in my system. I feel exhausted and stupid. And yet, beneath that some fundamental tension has unknotted slightly. We came, we saw, we kicked something’s arse at last. I’ll take that, I suppose.

I cough, spit out a wadge of brown phlegm.

“Tasty.” Kayla slaps me on the back, knocks another spray of brown out of me. “Gonna be tasting that for a feckin’ week.” For some reason she smiles when she says this. Her teeth are white in her gray-stained face.

“Now, why did we even feckin’ come here again?” Kayla asks. “I honestly don’t remember.” She’s grinning.

She’s right. We’re here for a reason. And it wasn’t to beat on anyone. It wasn’t to work through my ridiculous issues. “We came for answers,” I say.

“Right.” Kayla nods, sheathes her sword. “So who do—”

“You!”

The single word cuts in. A lightning strike of accusation, rage, and humorless German inflection.

“We talk to Hermann,” I say to Kayla.

And then he is upon us.

“This… This…” He spits the word out, as if trying to clear it from the cloying mess of the air. One of his arms is still mangled from our last encounter with Friedrich here. He sweeps his good one around the space, trying to convey the enormity of the destruction. “You did this,” he manages through his sputtering rage.

“Yeah,” Kayla nods. “We were forty-nine heavily feckin’ armed Uhrwerkmänner who came in here and attacked you and set off a whole bunch of high-explosive bullshit. That was totally us.”

Wait, Kayla actually counted the number of combatants on one side? Or did she make that number up?

“We walked into the middle of this,” I try to say, while Hermann is still busy dealing with his rage issues. “We couldn’t abandon you. Of course we helped.”

I have no real idea if we helped or not, but it seems a good idea to suggest we did.

“I told you never to come back. Never.”

A crowd of Uhrwerkmänner are gathering about us now. I may have underestimated how unwelcome we’d be. Why did Lang have to build the bastards so big?

Kayla beckons to Hermann. “I’ve taken down bigger fecks than you. Want a feckin’ turn?”

Well that’s not helping…

I step between Kayla and Hermann. Wait until his attention is on me. All their attention.

I sweep my arm around, echo his movement. “This is why we’re here.”

“I—” Hermann starts, but I cut him off.

“Not to cause it. Because this is just the beginning. Friedrich needs to build the Uhrwerkgerät bigger. And he’s going to use you to do it. He’s not going to use his own people. He’s going to use you. He’s going to kill you. Before your minds can rot away. He’s going to come in and take you and make you part of his bomb. And he can call that living forever, or he can call it evolution, but you and I both know it by its real name: murder.”

I turn. A performer in the round, trying to address them all. “Look,” I say, “I know MI37 fucked up. I get that. But we were fighting for you when we did. And we haven’t stopped. We’re still going. Except we need your help. If we’re going to finish this fight, we’re going to need someone on our side. Friedrich’s forces are too big, and too much for us. We can’t even find them.”

This doesn’t exactly sound like me selling our expertise, I realize. Time to change tack.

“But you can,” I say. “It’s within your power. With us. Together. A whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A gestalt. That’s a German concept, right? You get that. We could be that. Together we find him. Together we stop him.”

Hermann hulks before me. And I almost think he’s going to pulp me right there and then.

“So we can do what?” It’s another of the Uhrwerkmänner, not Hermann. Someone in the ring surrounding him and us. “Risk our lives so we can go mad and die?”

It’s a fair question, I suppose. Bit defeatist for my tastes.

“You were built to conquer this world,” I say. “To be the ultimate army. But you saw the hand that guided you was evil. And you stood up and refused to do simply as you were told. You chose to fight evil. You chose to matter.”

“We ran away,” says another voice. “We were hunted until we found a hiding spot they could not.”

Man, these guys really aren’t into the whole optimism thing at all.

“Look around you,” I say. Giant metallic corpses litter the room. “You fought back today. You won some of these fights.”