The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (52 page)

Horst raises his weapon to cover Lyra’s dash through
the suddenly animated gauntlet, but he has no idea where to aim.
The bodies and parts of bodies are joining into writhing, amorphous
masses, forming a monstrous fluid gore-sheathed bot—no,
bots
. Each side of the path is creating a different
machine.

“
Get back in the rig!
” I shout at him. “Roll
out of here!
Fast!!
”

I draw my pistol and glance back at Star. She tosses
the sword at me, then reaches up, grabs hold of the diadem with
both hands, and starts pulling it apart, ripping it off. It takes
her skin with it, and then more: She’s pulling fine wires out of
her skull, out of her
brain
. She grits her teeth and makes a
low keening moan that builds into a roar of rage. By the time she
gets free of it, her head is a bloody partially-skinned mess. She
staggers, collapses to her knees, her body convulsing.

As if in contrast, the monster corpse-bots rise up,
the modular cables having formed maybe a dozen limbs each comprised
of several entire bodies woven together, while what passes for a
main “body” bristles with multiple heads, dangling entrails and
flaps of skin. The way they move reminds me of Fohat’s sectional,
many-limbed multi-directional Bugs, but much more flexible—there
are no rigid sections, no discernible torso or core. And each one
is larger than the ‘Horse.

Part of the one on the right undulates like a whip,
lashes out and catches Lyra before she can get clear, slamming her
so hard she flies through the air. I hear bones break and I can’t
tell if they’re hers of the monstrosity’s. Horst opens fire on
whatever he can hit, and then so do the ‘Horse’s turrets. And so
does Kel, blazing in multiple directions, shredding meat away from
the underlying mechanism, but that’s about all it does. Shooting
the meat, even the heads, has no effect.

I finally get in the fight, punching HE rounds into
what I guess are key structural linkages, but it’s hard to see
through the flesh and bone layered over them. And when one of us
does manage to sever the underlying cable structure, the parts just
rejoin in some other way, seeking the nearest connection point.

Kel gets batted around like a toy by the right-side
monster, but keeps shooting. Horst tries to get to Lyra, but has to
dodge the left monster as it comes after him. As I’m shooting that
one, part of the other one hits me in the back, sending me
sprawling. I lose the sword in the blood-sprayed growth. It tries
to impale me into the ground with its corpse-strung tentacles, but
I roll clear and shoot up into it, aiming for about where the
tentacles join. Rancid blood rains down on me as its sheath of
bodies bursts. I see fine wires, a mesh through the meat holding it
to the individual modules. The corpse heads all grin like they’re
laughing at me.

I get up, jump up, wrap myself around a section and
embrace it, crushing through rotting flesh and bones until I reach
cable, and then I start twisting it apart. I realize I’ve got my
face pressed up against naked corpse ass, something Asmodeus I’m
sure is finding hilarious. The thing tries to shake me off, and
finally winds up coming apart, or decides to come apart, leaving me
wrestling a multi-limbed section twice my size while the rest lopes
toward the ‘Horse. I start pumping shells into the larger part
while the smaller bucks me like a rodeo bot. My pistol runs dry,
and I can’t reload while I’m hanging on to the piece I’ve got.
Worse, I’ve barely slowed the larger mass. Bullets are having very
little effect on the modular cables—when one hockey-puck-sized unit
gets destroyed, the others simply shed it and rejoin, barely
diminished. We’d have to bull’s-eye thousands of these things.

Smith is starting to back up when the partial monster
gets on top of the rig. It starts by mangling the turrets. The
limbs made by the modular cables are stronger than a Bug bot’s,
and—thanks to all the bodies—they have a lot more mass to hit
with.

The bigger beast joins it, grabbing the port side of
the rig, rocking the whole vehicle, threatening to tip it as the
treads spin, then stop with a groan.

“Smith!” I shout over the link channel. “Get out of
here!”

“Trying!” he shouts back, clearly shaken.
“Something’s jammed in the tracks!”

Then I hear metal shear, and see one of the AP
turrets get popped off. A tentacle of metal and corpses slams its
way inside the resulting hole, as if burrowing for food. I hear
screaming. It’s Scheffe. The screaming dies in a grunt and
gurgle.

Flooded with rage, I wrench with all I’ve got and
tear the thing I’m riding in half. But as I drop to the ground
soaked and slimed with rot and gore, I see it start to act as two
separate units. They circle me, lash at me with meat-covered
tentacles that I now see are tipped with injectors as well as
claw-like blades.

I see the sword lying in the undergrowth, and realize
Star brought it to me for a reason. I roll and catch it up, draw
it, and meet the two bots with nanomorphic blade. It chops them
apart, chops through the animated cables like green bamboo. It
takes effort, but eventually I’ve cut the things into parts that
seem too small to reform into anything effective. All they can do
is wriggle sickeningly, like chopped-up worms. That’s its weakness:
if the module-groups are severed into sections too small to move
enough to attack or to reach and join other sections, it’s
done.

Star is dragging herself to her feet. She’s hurt,
damaged, dazed, but she draws a short sword from her belt—the
sickle-bladed Khopesh she used as Ra. She heads for the monsters,
but she’s slow.

I charge the ‘Horse. The smaller of the two
monstrosities turns to meet me, abandoning its attack on the rig,
grinning at me with a dozen heads and slashing at me with tentacles
made of bodies. I hack whatever I can hit, whittling it down,
working my way in. It flips itself and throws me into the
shrubbery.

As I get up, I see the other one, the larger one, pry
into the Horse’s rear airlock. Horst and Kel are peppering it with
everything they’d got. Their fire chisels at the thing, blasts away
massive chunks of the flesh and bone covering it, but does little
to the serpentine hive-bot underneath. It ignores them as it rips
the outer hatch away. I try to run to it, but the other one runs at
me, tumbling to keep me from getting a good target. The force of
its wild motion starts throwing the human body parts free, making
it a flaying chaos of limbs, heads and guts.

As I start chopping away at the smaller one to get it
off me, I see the bigger one break through into the bay, and shove
part of itself inside. I hear small arms fire, hear Simmons cursing
and screaming. I get slammed by a whip made of metal-reinforced
corpse-legs, and a skull fractures over mine. Then I hear an
explosion from inside the rig, inside the bay. Then more, a chain
of what sound like muffled grenade blasts set off in sequence. The
monster convulses with each one, then drags itself out of the bay,
stripped of a lot of its meat-sheath and missing significant parts
of its limbs. At least Simmons took some of it with him.

Star starts hacking the one that’s dogging me, but
gets swatted away in short order. I try to break away and get to
the bigger one again, even though I know I’m too late for Scheffe
and Simmons.

I suddenly hear the scream of AAV engines, coming at
us fast and low, then breaking into a hover. Turret fire sprays the
bigger monster from somewhere over the trees, chewing it up. Then I
have to dive and grab ground as a rocket bursts the ground between
its “legs”. It shifts, staggers. A second rocket blows in its
midsection, sending tentacles flying. Meat and blood rains from the
sky.

The AAV hovers, targets the other mass. It doesn’t
seem to care if I’m in the line of fire, bound and determined to
destroy the mechanical nightmares. But while it’s focused on the
one, the other starts piecing itself back together: Whatever
sections are still viable scramble to re-connect to the bits that
flail uselessly, systematically rebuilding itself.

Horst pops a few grenades at the growing mass, but
they do very little to even slow it. At most, the blasts scatter
the random parts. The AAV turns and starts in on it again. First
turrets, then more rockets.

In the chaos I catch sight of Lyra. She’s down in the
undergrowth, trying to move, trying to get up. She’s too battered
to even raise her weapon. Blood streams from her nose and mouth. I
see her choke on it. Her eyes look at me plaintively. Then I lose
her as a rocket throws a storm of Mars over us.

There’s a grinding and a screeching as the ‘Horse
breaks free and moves fast in reverse, plowing over the top of the
rebuilding enemy. Smith shifts gears, rolls over as many of the
tentacles as he can. It tears them apart, crushes some of the
modules, but the sections quickly start re-linking. Soon it’s
strong enough to stop the rig, lifts it, starts to tip it.

The AAV slides in close, shredding at the bot on the
rig, either not caring that he’s hitting the rig or counting on the
armor to save anyone still inside. But the warhead tubes aren’t
nearly as sturdy as the hull—the AAV bombardment seems to be trying
to avoid them, so the pilot knows what we’re carrying, but rounds
hit nerve-rackingly close.

The AAV’s turrets run dry, so it fires the last of
its rockets, one at each surviving cluster. Unfortunately, I’m in
close proximity to one, proving the pilot doesn’t care about
hitting me. Thankfully, Mars eats most of it, directing the blast
upwards into the bot, dismembering it.

Empty, the AAV slides off, descending as if looking
for a place to land. I lose sight of it beyond the treeline.

Horst is up on his feet before Star and I are. He
systematically shoots apart sections as they try to wriggle
together and rejoin, but then he’s out too.

“Don’t go near the rig!” I warn him as he heads to
check for survivors. Then I call on the link: “Smith! Stay put.
Keep yourself sealed in. If that thing left any of itself viable in
the bay, you’ll be stepping through injectors.”

“Thankfully there’s a head in here,” he tries to
lighten. But can’t: “Anybody else make it?”

I run and check the bay myself.

“Simmons and Scheffe are down,” I have to tell him.
Then I have to run to check on Lyra.

Star’s made it to her first. She’s on her back in the
growth, coughing up blood. She looks at me like she can barely see
me, tries to mouth something, chokes. Star raises her head a
little, very carefully.

She’s busted up bad,
Star tells me in my head.
Massive internal trauma.

My heart sinks.

She doesn’t have long.

I hear a skittering behind us. There’s a section of
bot that’s managed to reassemble enough of itself to create a kind
of spinning octopus-like shape that’s sweeping up and absorbing the
random bits. As it forms, now stripped of most of its
corpse-shield, the cables braid themselves together, forming
thicker, stronger bundles. Horst grabs up Lyra’s weapon and starts
shooting at it, but the new structure is definitely much tougher
than the last. It dances around the track, building itself up,
growing, and finally plants itself on top of the rig. One of the
few corpse-heads left attached gets elevated to the pinnacle of the
writhing mass. The sensor eyes blaze at me, and through the
dislocated jaw Asmodeus shouts gleefully

“
RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!
”

“
Shut up!!
” another voice answers it, just
before a burst of ICW fire splatters the head.

It’s Jackson. He comes marching out of the green in
his black flight suit, popping grenades into the core of the thing
that burst off the ‘Horse’s abused hull, advancing right at it as
he sprays, shouting “
Shut up! Shut up! SHUT! UUUUP!!
”

He spends a mag, slaps a new one in, spends that one
too. The limbs get chewed at, lose individual modules, but the
tentacles almost-instantly re-knit themselves. He walks right up on
it, and the limbs recoil to strike, but just when I’m sure he’s
about to be pulverized, he isn’t. The thing ignores him. And heads
for us.

And I’m all done with it.

I take it head-on, hacking with all I’ve got. At one
point, it grabs up one of the ‘Horse’s turrets and tries to swat me
with it like a massive frying pan. I chop that limb away.

It’s hard. Each braided limb takes multiple hits to
chop through, and if I’m slow, it re-knits before I’m done. But I
don’t stop.

I’m keeping it busy enough that Kel can get a bead on
the central hub, enough to pump 20mm HE rounds into it. Two limbs
come off at the base, try to lash at me like massive snakes, but I
hack them apart. Unfortunately, the distraction lets the main body
collect bits from what I just severed, so I have to be quick, be
careful to knock the pieces I chop free out of reach, and then keep
the core bot from getting to them, like some sick lethal game.

Star gets what I’m doing and adjusts her own tactics
accordingly, but she’s still a lot slower and weaker than I am from
whatever tearing off the diadem cost her.

Kel gets his own idea, and rolls full-out at the
nearest supporting limb, running through it and tearing a piece off
it to crush under his mass, his spinning sections grinding it
apart. The beast swats at him, but his armor holds. He gets one
more 20mm shot up into the belly of it before a tentacle rips away
the big gun barrel. Then he runs down another limb.

Jackson has made it over to Horst and Lyra, where
they take the last of her ammo and spend it trying to help us, or
at least distract. The beast lashes at Horst any time he gets too
close, but it still ignores Jackson, so he can get right up
point-blank and shoot sections apart.

Together, it takes what feels like an eternity, but
we manage to chop apart and scatter the bits enough that it’s
finally helpless, unable to re-assemble.