Mecha Rogue (29 page)

Roth's thoughts clamped down tight on that. His voice grated over the comms: “If we are to survive, I suggest we act now.”

Matt jumped. The heat of the Monument-Mecha's fusion mouth was hot on the Mecha's skin. They were moments away from being consumed.

Complete Merge,
Matt thought.

Matt's and Roth's Demons flowed together like molten steel, forming biometallic cuffs around the Monument-Mecha's arms. Matt's power levels shot up as the Merge continued, peaking at 1.7x, 2.5x, 3.3x what he'd had before. His
REGENERATION
warnings disappeared, and new strength flooded through his body.

The Monument-Mecha beat the Demon cuffs against its mouth, unable to ingest it.

Zap Gun,
Matt thought.

Gone,
Dr. Roth corrected.

Not mine,
Matt shot back.

The Demon cuffs extruded arms and swiftly unfolded the shining silver gun out of its biometallic body. The Monument-Mecha keened again, its tiny eyes swiveling in fear. Its arms pushed them away now, desperate to fling them away.

Too late. The Zap Gun was aimed and ready.

Fire,
Matt/Roth thought.

Pure light shot down the Monument-Mecha's throat. Molten biometal erupted out of its gullet. Its scream of pain shattered the few remaining panes of glass in the Capitol Complex.

The giant thing reeled backward as its head split in half, erupting hot plasma. Slowly, the five-hundred-meter-tall Expansion Monument started to topple toward the ground.

Matt/Roth flowed out of its slack fingers and reformed in a humanoid shape: a super-Demon twenty-five meters tall. Thrusters on its back flared to hold it in midair. For long moments, the two men could do nothing but watch the show.

The Expansion Monument fell across the pristine park of the Capitol Mound. A noise like distant thunder rolled across the still-transforming city.

Matt/Roth's enhanced senses zoomed in on Newhome, now little more than a tangled jungle of biometallic sinew.

Complete conversion, and with such speed,
Roth thought. His dark mind fed Matt feelings of awe and wonder. Not a single thought for the inhabitants of the city, or what might have become of them. No sympathy at all. Roth dreamed only of what he could do with such power. But his dreams were blurry, indistinct. His ultimate motive was well shadowed.

What would you do with that power?
Matt thought.

Roth's mental barriers clamped down tight.
You are such a simple man, for all your abilities,
Roth told Matt.
Would you be content to leave the Union in charge of our destiny?

As opposed to you?
Matt thought. Out loud, he said, “What's happening to the city?”

Roth sent deep amusement to Matt. For one moment, his barriers were down. Matt shivered in revulsion. He was here, Merged in Mecha, sharing his mind with Dr. Roth.

“Simple mind, simple answers,” Roth said. On Matt's viewmask, the map to Arcadia came to the fore. The location vector pointed straight down to Platform 100. “We inspect the installation.”

Matt nodded. “Let's do it.”

Matt/Roth shot down to Platform 100. The vector pointed solidly at the center of the fused black granite plinth. There was no obvious entrance, not even using the Demon's enhanced sensor array.

Matt shivered. It was as if the early settlers had buried something here, something they wanted to stay hidden for all eternity.

Stop being dramatic,
Roth thought. But beneath that, he was unsettled. Whatever he had expected Arcadia to be, he hadn't expected this.

“No time for subtlety,” Matt said. Matt/Roth drew their Zap Gun in one smooth motion. They aimed it straight down at the platform and pulled the trigger. Antimatter power slammed down their Mecha arm. Fused stone flared red and ran like water while clouds of black smoke shot skyward.

Matt's viewmask lit with new tags. Far above Newhome, three Mecha were descending. Each was tagged
DEMON
.

“Yours?” Matt asked, out loud.

No,
Roth thought.

Great. Even if they broke through to Arcadia, those Demons would follow them in. And that would be the end. And that could surely be their end. Two crippled Demons against three shiny new ones, in close-quarter combat. It was a simple equation to solve. Just like so many of Matt's gifts, it was a blessing and a curse to have the ability to deduct with extreme scrutiny every possible future. Matt/Roth's Zap Gun beam flickered in uncertainty.

This is too fascinating not to follow to the end,
Roth thought.

Matt ground his teeth. “Even if the end is our end?”

Roth's amusement poured through the mental link. “Are you scared, prodigy?” he said, out loud.

Matt's anger flared. “Hell no!”

Suddenly their Zap Gun beam went pure white as the barrier in front of it disappeared. They were through. In front of Matt/Roth was a deep shaft. Its walls still glowed faintly red from the antimatter beam. Matt's sensors pegged the depth of the hole as over a hundred meters.

Behind them, the Demons streaked closer.

No time for subtlety, Matt thought again, and jumped.

Matt/Roth fell through the just-cut shaft, thrusters lighting the vitrified walls. They descended into a large chamber, easily three hundred meters around and fifty tall. Along the walls were fantastic frescoes carved into the naked stone. But they weren't like the work on Esplandian or
El Dorado
—or anything like Matt had ever seen before. They didn't show anything recognizable at all. The frescoes were repeated geometric patterns, so complex as to be almost fractal.

Below the frescoes, several tunnels pierced the stone, dark thresholds that revealed nothing beyond.

Matt checked his coordinates. According to the viewmask, they were inside Arcadia. Arcadia was all around them, extending in a diffuse cloud outward.

This is it?
Matt thought, confused.

Deeper perhaps,
Roth thought, indicating the tunnels.

But the tunnels were too small for their Merged Demon.
We'll have to deMerge,
Matt thought.

Leaving me without a Zap Gun,
Roth thought.

“And me without an arm or Fusion Handshake,” Matt said, out loud.

Still, waves of distrust emanated from Roth.

Matt laughed. “
You
don't trust
me
?”

Only silence from Roth. What was he calculating? Matt wondered.
How to get the Zap Gun and overcome me too?

From the shaft above, three flickering lights appeared. Matt's viewmask tagged them all as
DEMON.
The new Union Mecha had caught up with them.

“No choice,” Matt said.
DeMerge
.

The two Demons flowed apart. Roth's shattered Demon staggered to the side as its biometallic skin flowed to reintegrate. Matt grimaced in pain as the
REGENERATION
counters for his arm and
CQFA
reappeared in his viewmask.

“After you,” Roth said, over the comms.

Matt shook his head. He didn't like the idea of Roth being at his back. But what choice did he have? Matt picked a corridor and ran down it, propelled by his thrusters toward their goal.

* * *

Matt and Roth descended, circling a shining vector that led down into the heart of the Arcadian cloud. There was no elevator; the corridor simply corkscrewed down for ten thousand meters into the planet.

That was so
wrong
. Why wouldn't they simply sink a shaft and drop a cage down to the bottom? And where did all the other corridors lead?

The walls themselves were ancient, pure Eridani stone and dirt. They'd once been polished to a high gloss; now cracks radiated over their surfaces, and fragments of rock, some the size of boulders, lay in the middle of the floor. It was like some incredibly ancient ruin.

But how could it be more than two hundred and fifty years old? Matt thought. The walls weren't scarred from battle or use. They were eroded away, as if over a great amount of geologic time.

Plink. Clink
. Stones fell from the ceiling above Matt and Roth. He looked up. Biomechanical tendrils waved down at his Mecha. Matt yelled and crouched. But the tendrils extended no farther. They seemed content to announce their presence, nothing more.

Deeper,
the dusty-static voice told Matt.

Matt shivered. This was beginning to feel like a tomb. Whether the Mecha behind them sliced their Demons to shreds, or the tendrils caught them in their web of destruction, it looked as though everything ended here today, one way or another.

Come closer,
the voice said.

Down they went, at fifty, a hundred, two hundred kilometers an hour. The tags of their Demon pursuers inched closer as they descended. Matt's sensors showed nothing ahead of him. Dodging the boulders became automatic, reflexive.

Suddenly a black opening appeared before Matt. Matt skidded on his heels, sliding into another vast, open chamber far too big for his Mecha lighting to illuminate. The only thing he could see was a vaguely curving roof in the distance, and glittering crystals lining pale, faraway walls. The crystals reflected outward seemingly to infinity, making the chamber seem almost endless.

No. Wait. Matt's viewmask overlaid an enhanced-sensor reconstruction of the chamber. It didn't just seem big. It was huge. The area extended beyond the sensors' resolution range, which meant it was kilometers wide. Maybe tens of kilometers.

Or more,
the dusty-static voice of the ghost in the machine came, closer than ever before.

Light rose throughout the giant underground cavern, and Matt gasped. The cavern was bigger than any enclosed space he had ever seen. It was supported throughout its length by massive columns of pale, vitrified stone and earth. Nodules glowed dull green in the columns, the ceiling, and the floor. In some places, large polished black spheres were embedded in the planet's rock. Biometallic tendrils emerged, almost tentatively, from every surface, to wave at Matt like Aurora's plains grass in the wind.

And it wasn't just one endless chamber. Ahead of him, a large hole in the floor opened on deeper darkness, where more green embers glowed.

“What is this?” Roth asked. His voice was hushed, awestruck.

Matt shook his head in mute answer. This wasn't a lab. This wasn't a hidden military base. This wasn't an abandoned colony. This was something fundamentally inhuman.

This was alien.

Yes,
the scratchy-dusty voice said.

But that wasn't possible. They'd never found a single alien race, even after almost three hundred years of Expansion. There were no aliens. Only humans. And HuMax. Only people.

ANTIMATTER WEAPON TARGETING
, Matt's viewmask flashed. Tags showed that the three pursuing Demons had just arrived.

Matt collapsed to the floor. Above him passed a single beam of perfect brilliance, sizzling the air centimeters away from his Demon's back. Kilometers away, the chamber walls flared red and melted.

A Zap Gun. Shit!

Matt scrambled across the floor as another bolt came his way. It seared a hundred-meter-long scar in the floor, leaving behind a line of red lava. Roth fired thrusters, heading for one of the nearby stone columns. He was trying to hide.

Too late. Another Zap Gun bolt clipped Roth's Mecha. He went crashing down to the rough floor, out of sight. Matt fired his thrusters to get away, but he knew it was pointless. The Mecha with the Zap Gun would pick him off just like Roth.

Matt's comms snapped on. “Mr. Lowell, surrender now!”

A familiar voice. A familiar icon:
MICHELLE KIND.

They'd sent her. Of course.

Matt fought back manic laughter as she continued. “Mr. Lowell, we are authorized to use deadly force.”

Was it him, or did her voice break a little on those last words?

Matt came back to ground and faced the three Demons. They burned ember-red in his thermal imagery, against the cool dark tunnel they'd emerged from. The ridiculousness of the situation suddenly struck him: their capital city was being consumed by alien ropes, but the Union had sent three Demons to arrest him.

Matt laughed, snapping on his own comms. “You think I did this?”

“It doesn't matter!” another voice spat. Marjan's voice. One Mecha raised his Zap Gun and aimed it straight at Matt. “You're under arrest. Come with us now.”

“What about Newhome? Your Union? Don't you have other things to think about?”

“We'll sort that out later!” Marjan cried, twitching the Zap Gun barrel back toward the tunnel. From his tone and posture, Matt knew Marjan would much rather fire than have him comply.

“Who else is there with you?” Matt asked. “Mikey? Norah?”

“Captain Posada,” snapped another voice. Norah.

Matt frowned. Michelle, Marjan, and Norah against his half-crippled Demon. Roth seemed out of the fight. Matt had no Fusion Handshake, and there was no way he'd be able to aim and fire his Zap Gun before they blew him to pieces.

“Enough!” Michelle snapped. “Stand down, hand over your Zap Gun, and jettison all missile weapons. Now!”

But there was something in her tone, something that said,
I don't want to do this. I don't know about all of this anymore
.

One Mecha kept stealing glances beyond Matt, looking at the vast chamber beyond. Michelle. Michelle knew there was something very wrong here.

“Aren't you even a little curious?” Matt asked, nodding over his shoulder at the cavern. “Don't you want to know what's really going on here?”

“The Union . . . always has its reasons,” Michelle said, her voice breaking.

“You think the Union built this?” Matt prodded. “Do you think any human did?”

“Enough of this shit!” Marjan yelled back, his Zap Gun twitching up toward Matt. “The Union wants you arrested. Major Kind, I will relieve you of command if you disobey this order.”