Target Rich Environment 2 Read online

  They were making excellent time. The robot’s legs were too short to call it a run, but when you covered this much ground with each stride, a shuffling jog still got them to fifty miles an hour. The fact that there wasn’t much they had to go around meant they could travel in a straight line. Joe had gotten good enough that he even managed to step over individual houses. Mostly.

  Hikaru was giving him directions based upon roads, power lines, and compass directions. They’d quickly discovered that when you were twelve stories up you couldn’t give directions based on street signs, and local landmarks meant nothing when your pilot had never been here before. Joe’s entire knowledge of Japan’s geography came from stories his mother had told him and maps he’d studied in the off chance the Marines got to invade the place.

  “The demon is tracking north. To the east is an orchard, after you cross it there is a railway. Follow that toward the city,” Hikaru told him.

  “Got it.” He couldn’t see the Cog or the rest of the crew sitting behind him. Joe had learned the hard way not to turn his head enough to look back over his shoulder because the Turing machines read that the wrong way. The first time he’d done it they’d face-planted in a field. On the bright side, that had been a few days ago, and it had taught him how to stand this thing back up without waiting for multiple construction cranes to come save them.

  Moving was fairly instinctive at this point. There was a rhythm to it. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. It made sense that the cockpit was where the robot’s head should have been, since that was how the human body’s control center was wired, and once you were magically connected, he was the brain and it was all a matter of scale. He’d spent the last few days learning to move about with a modicum of grace, and slugging boulders, and it really wasn’t that much different than working a punching bag with his own fists . . . except for the part where he could punch through mountains.

  The buildings were getting taller and the neighborhoods more populated. Joe had to step carefully to keep from landing on any moving cars. He was burning a lot of magic trying to keep a light step, but they still weighed so much that each footstep left an impact crater, so he wasn’t sure how many of those automobiles unwittingly drove into the suddenly created holes they’d left in the roads.

  One armored foot clipped the edge of a warehouse, but it was enough to rip one wall off. “I wish you people would’ve built wider streets!”

  “I’ll have you know Tokyo is the most advanced city in the world,” Hikaru snapped.

  “Horseshit. We’ve got an interstate highway system in America you could drive an aircraft carrier down. Hang on, I see smoke.” The buildings here were already smashed flat or knocked over. A giant lizard-shaped footprint was clear as day in the middle of a park. “I’ve got the demon’s trail.” Joe guided the robot toward the path of carnage. Since everything here was already destroyed, he might as well take it up a notch. Joe pushed both friction sticks forward. “Hang on!”

  ClompClompClomp!

  The trail was easy to follow, what with all the spreading fires and collapsed buildings. Hundreds of civilians were down there. He could lie to himself and say they looked like bugs from up here, but they still looked like people, and he tried his best not to land on any of them. They might have just had a war, but that was no excuse to be an asshole.

  Following in the demon’s wake gave him a good glimpse into how the creature thought. If he’d been down there at ground level, he would have missed it. The scene would have just been too damned big to take in, but from up here, from the perspective of somebody twelve stories tall and nearly indestructible, he could tell that the demon was angry. It was heading toward the capital, but it was meandering about, swatting down anything that stood out along the way. A temple had been kicked over. Ornate wooden arches had been stepped on. It had gone three blocks out of its way to chase down a bus. It had picked up a passenger train and tossed it out into the ocean. The miles went by, showing an ever-increasing amount of spite. This Summoned was an engine of destruction.

  It was enjoying itself.

  “I can’t believe this,” Hikaru whispered as he looked out over the devastation. “This is nearly as bad as when the Americans firebombed the city.”

  “That was different,” Joe snapped.

  “How?”

  “You started it. Now zip your lip. I’m concentrating.”

  An alarm horn sounded. There was some shouting in Japanese. Joe had thought he was fairly fluent, but polite Japanese was different than the profanity-laced military exclamations you got when one of the techs spotted a giant demon. Joe eased back on the sticks to slow them down.

  They were in an open campus of large, ornate buildings, probably a university. The opposite end of the space was covered in black smoke, and through it, something truly vast moved. Long spines appeared, cutting ripples through the smoke, and there was a tremendous crash as a clock tower was knocked off its foundations to topple to the ground. The spines froze, then swiftly turned and disappeared, as the demon sensed the approaching footfalls.

  Four brilliant beams of red light appeared in the smoke, about even with the Gakutensoku’s cockpit. Those were its eyes. It was watching them.

  “All weapons, prepare to fire,” Joe said with far more calm than he actually felt. Hikaru relayed the order. The gravitational magic lurched as a dozen other forms of Power were channeled through the spells carved on the great machine. “Let’s hit this son of a bitch with everything we’ve got.”

  The wind shifted. The smoke parted and the Summoned revealed itself. It was reptilian, with a dark, glistening hide perforated by random shards of black bone. It was thick-set, muscular, with a long spiked tail, two squat, powerful legs, and arms that ended in claws that looked like they could do a number on even the Gakutensoku’s armor. The demon stepped full into view, lowered its dragon-shaped head, and roared. It was so loud that it vibrated through their hull. Humans on the ground probably had their eardrums ruptured from the blast. The screech dragged on until it threatened to blot out the world. Then it snapped its razor jaws closed, spread its arms, and raised itself to its full height to meet this new challenge.

  It was far bigger than they were.

  “I believe that the greater Summoned may be significantly taller than the specified fifty meters,” Hikaru stated.

  It didn’t matter what country you were in, military intelligence was always wrong.

  “Put that record I gave you on the player, Hikaru. I want it blasting at full volume over the PA system.”

  “Lieutenant, despite your intentions, I truly do not believe that music really soothes the savage beast. That is just a colloquialism.”

  “Put my record on the player or I’m getting out of this chair.” He waited until he heard the scratch of the record and the whine of the intercom. “That’s better.” Joe flipped open the safety cover and put his finger on the trigger. “Fire on my command.”

  Toru watched as the two titans faced each other. To the north was the Summoned, a horrible alien creature, its spirit torn from another realm and given form here. On the bony plates of its chest the Soviet Cogs had engraved a hammer and sickle, and then filled it in with molten bronze so that it would never heal. To the south was the Super Gakutensoku. It was rather impressive, though not nearly as intimidating as the demon. Though it made no sense to camouflage a walking mountain, they’d painted it brown and olive drab, except for the glorious rising sun painted on its shoulder plates. Both sides of this duel were proud to claim their champions, each one representing their mighty nation. There was a certain dignity to this event.

  A deadly silence covered the city after the demon’s roar. It had been loud enough to break windows a mile away, and Toru could smell the smoke through the open wound in the building’s side. There was a new sound, tinny, and much quieter than the demon’s bellow. It was coming from the Super Gakutensoku. The machine had been equipped with a bank of loudspeakers for psychological warfare purposes. Now it was playin
g a song.

  “What is that noise?” asked one of his aides.

  So much for dignity. Toru sighed. “I believe that is the American National Anthem.”

  Magical energy was building in the air. A bolt of lightning erupted from the clear blue sky and struck the Gakutensoku. Thunder rolled across the city. The mighty robot lifted one arm. Brilliant orange fire danced along that hand. Then the other arm came up, shimmering with reflected light as ice formed along that limb. Hatches opened on the giant robot’s torso as cannon barrels extended outward.

  Toru stuck his fingers in his ears. This was going to be very loud.

  “Open fire!” Joe shouted. A dozen 120mm anti-tank cannons went off simultaneously. Expanding gray clouds appeared across the demon’s body.

  “Spells are charged,” Hikaru said.

  “Magic up!” The Actives released their magic, and Joe hurled it at the enemy. He slammed the far right stick forward. Normally a Torch could direct a stream of magical fire or cause small objects to combust, but, magically augmented by the Gakutensoku’s spells, that same magic now caused a super-heated ball of plasma the size of an automobile to shoot across the campus, melting everything beneath it, before crashing into the demon in a shower of sparks and smoking demon flesh.

  The demon charged. He’d been expecting that. That’s what an aggressive beast would do when confronted by a seeming equal rather than being stung by hundreds of ants.

  Joe cranked on the left stick. A wave of magical cold shot forth. It was absolute zero at the release point, and not a whole lot warmer when the wave struck the demon’s hide. It shuddered as molecules slowed, tissues became inflexible and cracked. Then Joe activated one of the right sticks to throw a punch. The Gakutensoku responded a second later by slamming its steel knuckles into the monster’s side. The frozen layers of hide shattered. Flaming ink ruptured from the hole.

  There was an impact that shook the entire Gakutensoku. The shift in gravity told him that they’d been hit low, in the legs. The tail! Joe directed gravity to pull them back from tripping while he worked the foot pedals. They slid across the campus, through a four-story building and out the other side, but they didn’t fall.

  “Damage to the secondary servos and the port accumulator,” Hikaru reported.

  “I don’t even know what those things are,” Joe said, trying to concentrate on not killing them all while the Power surging through him felt like it was going to yank his heart out of his chest.

  The forest of spines was visible through the portholes, and then it was gone. The demon was circling to the side faster than they could turn. One of the CRTs had gone black, the camera lens covered in demon sludge. The others told him that it was about to grab hold of them. There was a lot to keep track of, especially on a system this complex that he hadn’t had time to properly learn, but Joe was a Sullivan, and Sullivans didn’t get rattled.

  “Cracklers. Release on my signal,” Joe ordered, and Hikaru repeated it to their Actives who could direct electricity. The Gakutensoku shuddered and metal groaned as the demon collided with them. “Now!”

  The stored energy leapt between the two huge bodies, and a billion volts blasted the demon off of them. It flew back, across the street, through several apartments, and disappeared in a cloud of dust at the base of a large office building.

  There was a terrible burning smell inside the cockpit. Smoke drifted in front of his face.

  “That’s horrible!” Then Hikaru began to gag. “One of our electricians is on fire. The augmented spell was too much.”

  Joe couldn’t turn to see right now, he was trying to turn the robot to keep track of the demon. “Have one of the Torches put him out. I’m busy,” Joe snarled. The magical strain was really getting to him. “Get another Crackler in that chair. Charge our magic. Get those guns reloaded. I want them to fire every time they’ve got a shot. Pour it on!”

  The demon lifted itself off the ground. The Gakutensoku covered the distance in a few strides and caught it on the way up. As the big fist came down, Joe threw as much extra gravity as possible to haul it down faster. The blow hit so hard that it blew demon ink out of one of the demon’s eye sockets.

  It hit them around the midsection, wrapping its arms around their center of mass and squeezing. Cannon shells fired at point-blank range. A few floors below, one of their Brutes died screaming as flaming demon ink poured through the gun hatch, and then the noise stopped as it washed him away.

  Joe acted on instinct, the robot an extension of his own body, as he pummeled the demon. There was an awful grinding noise, and the stick wouldn’t pull back. That arm wouldn’t retract; it was stuck. It took a moment to find the right CRT screen to see that their wrist was stuck on a horn. So Joe reached across with their other hand, grabbed that horn, and squeezed. The diesels powering those hydraulics redlined and it still wouldn’t break, so Joe changed gravity’s direction to the side and basically hung tons of extra weight on that horn. It tore free with a sick crack that they probably heard back in China.

  The Summoned lurched away, spraying flaming blood everywhere. Joe still had the horn, and it was pretty stout, so he went about beating the beast about the head with it. Their movements were powerful, but slow. The demon was organic, fluid, and far faster. It caught the descending horn with one hand, turned it aside, and then bit down on their shoulder.

  It was distant and down a floor, but he could heard the grinding of metal, breaking of welds, and the scream of men as they were torn from their seats and flung to their deaths. More smoke filled the air, and this time it smelled like burning wires. More CRTs had gone black. Half the lights on the warning panel had gone red. He tried to hit it with the horn again, but couldn’t tell if it worked. Feedback through the electrodes told him that hand was now empty.

  “Torch magic is charged,” Hikaru said.

  Joe drove their right fist deep into the monster’s side. “Fire!”

  The contact point between them was briefly hotter than the surface of the sun. The explosion rocked them. A wave of heat flashed through the robot.

  “Right arm is not responding,” Hikaru warned. “Repeat, right arm down!”

  Joe could have told him that by the way the control had frozen up. “Get the Fixers on it, now.” The demon lurched away, so Joe lowered their uninjured shoulder and pushed both of the friction sticks all the way forward.

  ClompClompClompClomp!

  They collided, a wall of steel meeting a wall of meat. One of the armored portholes shattered. A thick chunk of glass spun over and hit Joe in the jaw. It hurt; he could feel the cut leaking blood, but he sure as hell didn’t have time to check it. He jerked back on both sticks, stomped on the pedals to plant their feet, and even let gravity return to normal for an instant to drag them down into the ground to stop their forward momentum. Their feet dug a hundred-foot-long trench through the road, tearing up water mains, but they came to a full stop.

  The demon wasn’t so lucky. It hit the next building, a big twenty-story affair, and went through it, to crash across the next street, trip on a bridge, and then roll over to shatter a canal.

  Joe drove them around the collapsing building. The demon was already getting up. Cannon shells were falling around it like rain. “Where’s my ice magic? Come on!”

  “Still charging. Two of our Iceboxes were in the shoulder. They are not responding.”

  There were more explosions around the demon than could be accounted for with just the Gakutensoku’s 120mms. Tanks were rolling down the street. Several fast-moving aircraft buzzed by just overhead, strafing cannon shells into the monster before veering off. Tokugawa had sent in the cavalry.

  Black demon ink was pouring from its wounds, down the gutters, pooling on top of the canals to shimmer like oil, but it charged them anyway. It leapt across the distance, and the only thing he could see through the portholes was a forest of spines. “Brace for impac—”

  BOOM!

  No amount of gravity manipulation was going to keep
them on their feet this time.

  They hit a building, and then another building, and another. Joe couldn’t tell what was going on. They were changing direction too fast. The demon had ahold of them, and was swinging them back and forth. It was hitting them over and over again. Magical energy was flowing back through the electrodes, and each impact was like getting hit directly in the brain with a hammer. Every warning light on the panel was red, and then the panel disappeared entirely as the demon ripped the Gakutensoku’s face off.

  The black, slimy claw, big as a bulldozer blade, was thrashing back and forth, only a foot in front of him. It should have been terrifying, but all Joe could think of at the time was that it smelled like the ocean. And then the claw vanished as fast as it had come, and they were falling forward.

  The view through the hole was of rapidly approaching ground. Joe slammed the main left arm stick forward and mashed the button to open their hand. He called upon all his magic at once, reversing gravity, trying to pull them upwards, but even the spells on this thing couldn’t reverse two thousand tons once it was in motion.

  Their hand hit, and that took most of the impact. They froze in place for a moment, leaving Joe hanging by the straps on his chair, staring down into a pile of debris and squirting pipes. Somebody had unbuckled their harness and fell past him, screaming, to disappear out the face hole. He hoped that hadn’t been Hikaru, because he needed the little guy to relay orders.

  Then a big hydraulic cylinder in the arm burst, and they were falling. Joe stomped on the pedals to kick out, pushing them so they’d land on their shoulder rather than flat. Facedown—assuming he didn’t just get impaled on some rebar or smashed like a mouse beneath a boot heel—they wouldn’t be able to get back up as easily, especially with one working arm. Besides, everybody in that shoulder was probably already dead.