Robot Wasteland, Chapter 4 - Fighting

Here is Chapter 4 of Robot Wasteland. This week it is actually on time for Fiction Friday! If you have not had a chance, you can read chapters One, Two and Three, first.

Robot Wasteland is a serial that I wrote a while back, based on an RPG I developed of the same name (did not get sold or anything, I just ran it for a bit - so if anybody wants to publish it, you let me know), in which humanity was all but wiped out by a DARPA experiment to create Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robots (An actual real-world DARPA submission, and Yes, the acronym for that is E.A.T.R.) gone completely wild.

A couple of decades after the fall of mankind, surviving humanity has to hide, and survive, in the wasteland left by the rampaging robots who consume any organic material they can find, avoiding the metal monstrosities referred to variously as devourers, eaters, metal, etc.

But maybe there is hope.

Fewer devourers are active as time goes by, their processors fried, or their conversion chambers empty for too long.The Factories, giant moving fortresses that churned out devourers, are a thing of the past.

Maybe it is time for Mankind to stop hiding and reclaim the Robot Wasteland.

In chapter Four, we find Kaz in the middle of a scrape, a massive human figure ready to smash her to a pulp. She just saw this guy survive a bolt of lightning form a tiny figure now cowering in the dirt a short distance away. But she soon has other problems.

Chapter 4 - Fighting

            The beamer was in her hands. Kaz sighted on the charging berserker holding aloft a lethal-looking, hooked hammer with a haft longer than she was tall. Her thumb flicked the safety off, her finger tightened on the trigger, ready to loose a blazing fireball sure to seriously mess up any plans the brute might have for the rest of his evening.

            A louder, more savage roar, from behind her, changed everything. She rolled forward, across the madman’s path, hopefully beneath the sweep of that terrible weapon, unsafetied beamer tucked closer to her abdomen. She came up kicking dirt with her trailing leg, but there was no killing stroke, nor any target for the sand she had thrown. The berserker had not turned toward her. She saw the broad armored back, trailing a tail of braided stainless hoses from the back of a metal helmet.

            Then she saw the reaver, her reaver, she was sure, stalk from behind the shed at the end of the way.

            So that was why no one had scrapped this town.

            The machine went from slow advance to a leaping charge in a heartbeat, closing with the howling madman who didn’t seem to realize he was already dead.

            Nearly as tall as Kaz, the reaver was as lithe as a Glow-Cat but four times the size and easily eight times the mass. The beamer tail spewed no fiery doom, perhaps it didn’t want to waste precious energy on an easy kill.  The dagger-lined mouth was wide in anticipation of fresh fuel.

            Kaz was the span of one somersault to the side and rear, as she leveled Fritz‘s beamer. The would-be combatants, only a few strides apart, would clash in easy reach of her. She waited another stride as the steel feline filled the pistol’s ocular, when another, far more devastating roar, poured from the reaver’s mouth. A wave of force ripped across her body. Screaming, she saw the maniac catch the brunt of the attack, stumbling as his upper body seemed to momentarily compress, as if smashed by an invisible fist.

            A devastating spike of sound drove its way through Kaz’s head. Her muscles clenched in a hundred cramps. She tottered, her body refusing to answer, the beamer cycling as her fingers spasmed, pulled the trigger. Plasma melted sand on contact. She began to fall toward the glowing spot at her feet.

            Kaz willed herself to move, to push through the agony, as she had during hours upon hours of rolling, leaping, acrobatics, pain and fatigue in Jules compound. The locked muscles loosened as quickly as they had cramped. She arched her back, changing its point of balance. Her body fell back instead of into the pool of artificial lava at her feet. She hit hard. Twisting again to take the brunt on her shoulder – the beamer flew from her fingers to skid away into the gathering shadows. Head against the ground as she struggled to regain control of her body, she felt the thud of steel paws overwhelm her hammering pulse. She wanted to run. Instead, she rolled to face the horror of the machine’s gaping jaws. Within the maw, churning mascerators sparkled as they caught the wan light of the setting sun. The ravager’s catlike form was almost upon her as she rocked away a few futile inches.

            An armored boot stomped the earth in front of her, to be joined by another. She looked up in time to see the bulk of the maniac, forgotten in her panic to get away from the machine, towering over her. The cruel beak of the hammerhead was already swinging down as the ravager leapt.

                                                            *

Roark’s brother had not wanted to fight its kin. But Roark ruled. His brother would do as it was told. Right then, Roark told it to cease its wailing and grant him all the power it possessed. His roar, meant for the monster, shook the thin figure between them as well. He cared not, his spirit soaring with the rush of the killing rage, carried high by the machine spirit. His howl continued as he charged.

            The hammer whirled around his head. Had his brother done that? No matter. The distance was closing swiftly. The hammer head would descend like a skybolt, crushing the skull of this machine instead of glancing from its surface like it had when he had taken his brother.

            He had no need for another voice in his head. His howling turned to something like laughter at the thoughts, which flowed rapidly at such times. His brother kept the time, tracked the others’ movements, calculated the perfect moment for his strike. Soon.

            The renewed roar from the other machine slammed him, driving the air from his lungs. He felt things crack inside, saw the thin figure, a girl not much bigger than his prisoner, fall like a tent-post. He slowed, a searing pain spreading from his chest, taking his strength. His knees began to shake as his mouth gasped for air that would not come.

            He was falling.

            His brother saved him, chose him over its ownkin. It flooded him with fresh strength through their bond. Roark’s mind cleared under the sparks of pain, conducted through his Deed Marks, to chase away that which the other metal beast had given him. He threw a foot forward, arresting his fall. Another stride and he was standing over the fallen girl. His brother screamed, triumphant over the taking of more meat. Roark did nothing to dissuade it. Instead he swung the hammer, with all the power of his augmented frame, the might of a Head-Taker backed that lethal arc.

            The hammer head caught the reaver on the side of its eyeless skull, crushed a shiny blister of steel there, and bounced to one side as the predatory head swung away to the other. The lethal machine regained its equilibrium by planting a deadly forepaw and whirling around that point to attack its foe from the side. Dagger-lined jaws tore away a patch of Roark’s armor as the giant leapt away, left behind a bloody track from the merest contact with several fangs.

            Spitting the inedible mouthful out, the catlike machine circled, coughing and tossing its head. Roark recovered stepped away, then reversed to stand once again between the fallen girl and his foe. His machine-brother howled for the fight. A short rush and Roark was within the hammer’s reach. He struck, a short chop aiming for the damaged side of the machine’s head.

            The reaver sidestepped, an instant later than it should, distracted as it raised its tail to fire. The hammer clipped the tip of the metal snout, the sounding ringing from the walls on either side of the road. Again the reaver staggered at the strike, but the tail’s targeting laser played across the thick slab chest of its prey. A blast of blue light, crackling like lightning, burned a line through the dusk, from the tail tip to its target.

            Only Roark’s machine-brother saved him. Before the little fire shot from the tail of their foe, Roark knew that he must leap or die. He dove out of its line, struck the ground heavily and came up rolling, hammer swinging over his head to smack the earth with a crack. He scrambled to his feet as the beast turned to face him.

            But there was too much distance between them now. Another blast, or two, as he closed the gap, one would surely catch him. Yet the reaver hesitated, its deadly spade head pivoting form him to one side – where it tracked the fallen girl crawling away.

            Obeying laws far older than the rise of the Devourers, it fixated on fleeing, injured prey, gathered itself to leap, and hurled itself at the living fuel it craved. The berserker leapt too, only slightly afterward, reversing the maul to bring the butt-spike forward in a powerful thrust.

            The spike had been fashioned from part of the hind leg of his machine-brother, by the ancient artificer of the Head-Takers. It was the hardest piece of metal any of them had ever known; made so, the artificer said, to make possible the incredible leaps and powerful attacks of the reaver. Backed by all of Roark’s mass, momentum and strength, the butt-spike clove the thin plates behind the reaching foreleg into the chest cavity of the great metal beast.

            The reaver roared again – not the punishing roar of its charge, but a call to others of its kind, a summons to the feast it perhaps had hoped to keep for itself. Kaz, her had closing on the grip of the beamer, her body wreathed still in coils of pain that seized and released her muscles in time to her quickened pulse, knew then that metal could feel something like desperation. She rolled to her back, ignoring the pain for the moment, raised herself up and, beamer in one shuddering hand, fired down the metal monster’s throat.

            The effect was instantaneous. The ball of energy lit the interior of the reaver’s mouth for a split second, then disappeared, melting its way into its innards. The berserker withdrew his spear-hammer with a wrench of his powerful arms, even as the reaver began to glow orange at its joints, along its spine, and from its gaping mouth. It fell, roar stilled, limbs shuddering as smoke, then fire, burst from the same spots.

            Roark clawed back from his frenzy, so welcome in the throws of battle, but a danger to all around now. He had no wish to kill his prisoner, or the girl lying prostrate and panting before him. He noted the deathspitter in her shaking hand, pointed in his direction, raised his own hand in response as he breathed carefully and not too deeply.

            “Peace,” he gasped.

            She did not fire. He could not evade her like he did the reaver. His brother held few insights regarding the minds of meat. He risked a glance beyond the circle of illumination that surrounded the dead machine. Unaided by the soul-sight, he saw the flare of white hair that marked Linnie, still where she had been when she destroyed the swarm with her skybolt. She could have run, he knew.

            He wished that she had.

            Instead, he called to her, “It is safe now.”

            He hated to use her name; to think of her as anything but his way back to Yenna and Shonn. She approached, slowly, hovering on the edge of the firelight, circled upwind of the noxious smoke. She was very small, and very frightened. Roark bit his lip savagely.

            Kaz shot to her feet with a yelp, eyes searching frantically.

            “Shit!” She was back down in the dirt, scraping after something beyond the firelight. A moment and she brought forth a large bag, emptied the content in the firelight, retrieved a scratch-covered cylinder with a triumphant cry. She did something to one end, pointed it at the corpse of the reaver, and white foam shot out, covering the body, smothering the flames in a matter of seconds.

            The berserker took a step back, fear written in his posture, his brutal features. Kaz just smiled, “My kill. I claim first right of Scrap.”

End of Chapter Four