Chapter 12 #2
She didn’t.
That was enough.
I saw Andrea, a woman rescued from the Shima, frozen and unable to move. I tried calling to her, telling her to run, but the cat had spotted her too.
“I’m here!” I cried out, waving my arms as I ran, hoping it would forget her and come to me.
I ran, waving my arms, and tried to make myself the brightest, loudest, and most delicious target in the universe. The panther’s eyes flicked, its ears tracked, and it saw me. I was thirty yards out, maybe less, when it made up its mind. It turned from the crumpled Ci Dyn and bounded my way.
I stopped. Drew the 1911 from my holster.
It was stupid, but there was nothing else I could do at that range, not even with my tricks.
I squeezed the trigger twice, feeling the heavy recoil in my arm and the way the report banged off the Casino’s white walls.
The .45 rounds stitched a line up the cat’s left shoulder, boring neat, round holes in the black fur, but nothing that would stop a beast that big.
I kept firing, emptying the magazine in four more rapid pulls.
The shots chewed up the fur and hide, spitting tufts of black in the air.
The panther didn’t slow, but it focused on me, eyes wide and wild.
Ten yards now. I didn’t reload. I dropped the empty and looked for cover.
The only thing between me and the panther was a short stone wall, part of the old landscaping.
I dove behind it, landing hard on the gravel, rolled, and pressed my back against the rock.
Over the top, the beast’s shadow blotted out the sun.
It hit the wall and crushed the top two layers of stone in a shower of grit, then reared up, front paws landing with a double impact that made my eardrums pop.
I heard a deep, barbaric yell.
Gorek came charging out of the Casino, fire axe raised over his head. His bare feet thudded on the asphalt. He covered the distance in a dozen long, heavy steps, then launched himself up the cat’s rear flank and brought the axe down, full force, into the panther’s haunch.
I expected a crunch, maybe a splash of blood.
Instead, the axe hit, sank into fur and flesh with a metallic ring, and the blade bounced two feet up, flinging Gorek backward.
He landed on the hood of a beached Subaru, bounced off, and rolled, arms windmilling, into the gutter.
He groaned once, but I saw him pull himself upright a second later.
The cat twisted, trying to catch Gorek on the way down.
It missed, claws scraping deep gouges into the car roof.
The Subaru collapsed under the hit, metal folding like a soda can.
The panther lashed its tail, destroying the Subaru’s windshield and sending glass everywhere. Then it looked at me again.
I felt the heat building under my skin, the fire waiting for me to let it go.
I’d been holding back. It wasn’t my first move.
I’d meant to test it properly, find the edges, learn what I could push and what would push back.
Taylor had given me the Mega Earth books.
The Inferno class was in there, almost word for word what I could do, plus some.
The numbers and level charts looked clean on the page.
Whether any of it meant a damn thing in the real world, I still didn’t know.
I’d kept putting off the testing. Now there wasn’t time left to wait.
I let it come.
The heat rolled up through my chest and arms in one hard wave. The air around me shimmered, then the flames took. Full sheath, bright and tight against my skin. My clothes stayed where they were, unburned underneath the fire. The world narrowed to heat and the target in front of me.
A rifle cracked from the ground floor of the Casino.
Stuart. He was crouched in the back doorway, working the bolt on a thirty-aught-six like he was born to it.
He fired, paused, then fired again. Every round hit the panther’s face or jaw and did nothing.
The impacts left no mark that the machine cared about.
I waved an arm at him. “Back inside! Keep the others safe!”
He nodded, ducked, and vanished into the dark. Good man.
The cat’s head snapped toward the doorway, then back to me.
The tail moved low and fast. I never saw it clearly.
It swept the base of the wall I had been using for cover.
Concrete exploded. The force caught me full across the side and chest and lifted me clean off the ground.
I hit the parking lot hard, slid across the asphalt, and slammed into the fender of an abandoned sedan.
The impact rang through my ribs and spine, but the fire held.
But, so far as I could tell, I hadn’t been seriously injured.
But there was a moment of pain on impact and the solid, ugly force of the throw.
I rolled to my knees and pushed myself upright, feeling my joints crack and pop.
The black pelt was gone in several places.
Underneath was metal laced with fiber, glowing with faint traces of heat around the wounds.
There wasn’t an ounce of blood, and what looked like bone wasn’t bone at all. It shone like polished steel.
I laughed once under my breath. The thing was a goddamned robot. I should have guessed.
The ground vibrated. Horizon’s engines spun up. The VTOL nozzles rotated, and the ship lifted a foot off its landing legs. Its shadow fell across both of us. The side turret pivoted and locked on.
Taylor’s voice came over the wrist-com, flat and clear. “James. I’ve reached the Horizon. Proceeding to the bridge. I will provide fire support from here.”
“Copy.”
The cat paced forward, claws clicking on the broken tarmac.
Ten feet. Five. I closed the last of the distance at a dead sprint and drove my left fist into the joint behind its front leg.
Flame burst from the impact. Metal scored and bent under the heat, but the plate held.
The machine answered with its right paw.
The blow caught me square and threw me across the lot again.
I hit the hood of a pickup, bounced, and skidded.
The fire kept me moving. I came up still burning and ran straight back at it.
I ducked under the next swing and jammed my fists up into its gut.
Heat flared along my arms as I burned through fake hide, but my knuckles hit solid plating.
The armor only took scratches and a slight, fist-shaped dent.
I ripped at the hide, blue liquid spitting and hissing where it touched the fire, then drove my fist up again.
The plating scored deeper this time, and more of the blue fluid leaked out, but the armor still held.
The panther howled. A real cat’s scream, only far louder, raw and high, rolling across the valley.
Horizon’s lasers stabbed down. White-hot lines cut across the machine’s back, burning synthetic fur away in long strips and scoring the steel underneath. The metal glowed but did not fail. The robot stayed on its feet, fully mobile, and came for me again.
I circled through the wrecks, staying close enough to keep its attention, far enough to force it to turn. The fight was still open. The outer layers were beginning to peel under the combined heat, but the armor beneath held, and the machine had not slowed.
The fight got ugly.
The robot panther’s bulk closed in fast, and I kept it between the torn-up Casino and the blast-shadow of the Horizon’s landing gear.
The thing moved as smoothly as a real cat, so much so that it actually tripped my brain every time it changed direction, as if my eyes had to catch up to what physics had done.
Gorek was back on his feet, but limping badly.
The bat from the robot had thrown him into a car hard enough that his leg didn’t want to hold his weight.
He’d tried to circle around to the left.
When the Inferno flared up around me again, he stopped, eyes locked on the flames.
He’d seen it once before, during the Shima escape, but the second time still hit him hard.
I locked eyes with him. “Stay back, Gorek. I’ll take this.” I pitched it in a command tone that left no room for argument.
He hesitated a second, then nodded and half-collapsed onto the hood of a parked car. Both hands braced on the metal, still watching the fire. I didn’t blame him.
The cat-robot pivoted with zero wasted motion and tried to pin me with a full-body leap.
I dodged, rolled, and came up firing a burst of white-hot flame from both hands, angling for the sensor cluster in its left eye.
The blast hit the surface, peeled back layers of synthetic fur and transparent armor, and cooked the underlying lens to slag.
The cat jerked and went briefly blind in that eye, but instead of recoiling, it ramped up the violence.
It swept a paw at me. I tried to take the hit on a roll, but there was no rolling, only a full-body slam that sent me through the hull of a capsized boat that had washed up during a previous flood.
For a second, I saw nothing but a white-hot spray of splintered wood and fiberglass.
Then my body hit a solid surface and stopped.
I bounced and fell through the far side, finally coming to a halt in a puddle of mud and broken planks.
I staggered to my feet, coughing up heat and flecks of blood. I was still burning, and that was the only thing that kept my ribs from giving out. I felt the pain, but it slid right off the fire, like getting punched in a dream where nothing is real except the rules you make.
I ran straight back into the sunlight and squared up to the thing again.
By now, the panther had started to leak its blue hydraulic fluid from several places—each shot and burn I landed in the last ten minutes was starting to add up.
Horizon’s VTOL jets whined, and the ship inched lower, its chin turret tracking the robot as if it were a giant pest. I heard Taylor’s voice ping in my left ear, the wrist-com vibrating against my skin.