Redeemed (Bolt Eaters Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  Now that he was away from his mech, he no longer had an infinite power supply, and had to watch his battery levels again. He’d recharge once he returned to the Devastator, of course, but until then he had to be careful not to exhaust his power cell. Without sunlight, he was losing power just walking in here. Well, and from keeping his headlamp active. Altogether, it was a relatively small amount, true, but enough that he was already at ninety-eight percent.

  He was also worried about the light from his headlamp giving away his position, and thus considered deactivating it. He decided that it didn’t matter. That whatever death awaited him in here would find him regardless. That the Essential in charge of the mothership was already watching and aware of his every move, and would continue to be aware even in complete darkness. It could track him using the sound of his servomotors, or the soft clang as his feet touched the deck. Pressure plates might exist everywhere in the floor. Motion sensors in the walls.

  And in addition to the myriad of sensors, the Essential had far more processing power at its disposal than Eric did: with the countless cloud computing resources available, it could calculate its next moves hundreds of steps ahead of him. He was definitely outclassed, and at a strong disadvantage. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still prevail.

  Still, it probably hadn’t been the best idea for Bambi to come here. She would be a distraction, and if she was in danger, in an attempt to save her life he might do something that could end them both.

  But it was best not to think about that. There was nothing he could do now but press on.

  And hope that luck was on his side.

  Because he didn’t see himself winning this with brute strength, or even his wits alone.

  After he placed the latest charge, he had a sudden image in his head of several turrets lying in wait, built into the surrounding walls and hidden by the darkness, aligned at just the right angles so that the weapons wouldn’t shoot down their opposites in the crossfire.

  “Down!” he transmitted, and slammed his body to the deck.

  Bambi’s blue outline similarly dropped behind him.

  “You know, energy turrets wouldn’t produce the wreckages of the Devastators we witnessed,” Bambi said, hitting on the exact reason he had ducked. “It’s almost like this room is a grinder of some kind. I’m more expecting the walls to come crashing down on us than anything else. That, or blades to emerge from the floor and ceiling.”

  Eric was about to answer her when the deck underneath him began to shift, as if alive. He switched to Bullet Time.

  The sack of demolition bricks was snatched from his grip.

  The deck seemed to dissolve into hundreds of granules underneath him, swallowing him, and Eric had to pull free—it was like escaping from sand after being buried on a beach. His hull sensors mistook the granules for termites, and electrified the surface of his skin, part of a built-in defense mechanism. Draining his battery…

  Around and ahead of him, the deck curved upward on either side, becoming a half-pipe that crunched inward as he watched, like a giant trash compactor. Grinding, notched wheels formed in the surface, along with jagged, rotating saw blades.

  He quickly calculated a trajectory through that compactor and its deadly contraptions.

  “Roll!” He brought his legs into his upper body as he broke free of the ever-changing deck granules, amped up his servomotor power levels, and hurled himself forward with his arms. He folded his body into a tight ball, like he would have done when entering the cockpit of his mech, and detonated the furthest charges he had laid.

  Flashes of bright light filled the compartment, and the air rattled with the intensity of the explosion. Eric’s momentum carried his spherical form through the lethal blades and grinding wheels. He’d miscalculated slightly when he yanked himself forward, placing his hands at a touch less than the ideal angle and pulling with a tad too much force, so that his route didn’t exactly match his planned trajectory: he passed a little too close to one of the saw blades, and glanced off the sharp rotating edge, shaving away a portion of his thigh. It wasn’t enough to impede him in any way, but it was certainly a chink in his armor.

  Because of the way he had launched himself, his body possessed a tumbling motion that rotated him three hundred and sixty degrees every second from top to bottom. He upped his time sense even further so that as he revolved in the backward direction he caught sight of another rotating sphere following behind him—that would be Bambi. He was relieved to see her escaping the trash compactor on a trajectory similar to his own.

  Bambi also detonated her own charges then, but apparently she decided to explode all of them, including those that were closest, because in addition to a flash, a fireball instantly overwhelmed his position; he felt the shockwave of hot gases impact and send him hurtling forward even faster. Maybe that was for the best, because it helped him escape the ever-shrinking trash compactor sooner.

  He landed on the deck several paces away, and bounced several times before he decided to unfold and grind to a halt. At least the surface was solid here, unlike the loose granules he’d left behind. He noted it was made of hexagonal tiles, too, rather than the smooth, seamless metal he had passed over before. The area was still just as dark, with the light from his headlamp struggling to pierce the murk.

  Bambi landed beside him and also unfolded.

  He turned around. From the darkness he had just left, a formless mass lurched forward.

  Eric saw a small, red outline near the rear of that mass, and realized that it was carrying one of his unexploded demolition blocks with it.

  Smiling inwardly, he detonated it.

  A firewall erupted at the rear of the mass, and the front section careened toward Eric and Bambi.

  He grabbed Bambi by the wrist and yanked her aside; the explosion swept over them, knocking them backward. He hit the deck on his back first: beside him, past Bambi, he caught a glimpse of the black mass as it swept past, its constituent granules scattering across the deck.

  As he and Bambi scrambled to their feet, he activated the weapons in his forearms—the panels folded back on either arm to reveal the P-21 and the L-52.

  Beside him, the mass reformed, becoming a black, slithering mechanical boa. A forked tongue momentarily darted out—nice touch.

  Eric was still operating in Bullet Time so that when Bambi tried to shove him out of the way, he dodged and sidestepped her, instead putting himself between her and the boa.

  He raised his plasma and laser rifles, but before he could fire the huge snake was already on him.

  It struck, and immediately wrapped around his body, squeezing his hands against his sides and pinning his feet together. Once again his hull electrified, and he had to manually shut it off because it wasn’t doing anything other than wasting his battery power.

  The metal boa hoisted him into the air as another lump formed below his feet. He realized it had trapped Bambi, too, and had similarly constrained her just underneath him.

  “You weren’t supposed to get caught,” he pinged her.

  “Yeah well, next time let me push you out of the way,” Bambi retorted.

  Eric’s metal and polycarbonate body groaned as his arms and legs were crushed, along with his internals. His damage report screen showed servomotors across his body flashing yellow, indicating physical stress that would soon lead to permanent damage. He amped up his time sense to max so that he could buy himself a few extra moments. Reality froze around him.

  “Well, guess we know what happened to the mechs of Brontosaurus and Dunnigan,” Bambi said. “It was nice knowing you, Babe. I love you.”

  16

  “I love you, too,” Eric said. “But I’m not giving up yet.”

  “All right,” Bambi said. “As far as I can tell, we have about half a second before the boa crushes us completely. That’s about ten minutes at our current time sense. Why don’t we switch to VR, and have sex one last time? It would mean the world to me. I want to die holding you in my
arms.”

  Eric was tempted to do as she asked. Ever the romantic, he wanted to die the same way.

  But a part of him wasn’t ready to give up.

  “Not yet,” Eric said.

  There was something he was missing. Something obvious that he had overlooked.

  What the hell is it?

  And then he remembered.

  The sack of demolition blocks.

  It was still somewhere out there, dragged away by the entity when he had dropped to the floor, before the trash compactor had formed.

  There was no way to see where it was at the moment, because the bricks weren’t armed.

  He accessed the remote interface, and was relieved to find that the devices were still in range. He remotely activated the arming mechanisms.

  There. The sack appeared on his overhead map. It was close to the boa, about two meters to the right and behind it. Obviously the bricks had been dragged along by the entity before it had taken this latest form, and then they were abandoned, forgotten. The boa’s body would shield Eric and Bambi from the explosion, but it was possible shrapnel from the machine would strike them.

  So be it.

  He detonated the entire lot of them.

  At this current time sense, he was able to watch the explosion form. The fireball engulfed the entity, and wrapped around it, until he could no longer see. Then he felt a hail of particles along his sides, and shrapnel broke away from the boa and embedded along the peripheries of his body.

  The snake began to collapse, and Eric and Bambi fell away. He altered his time sense so that he was operating closer to normal human speeds, and as the fireball receded, he watched the granules that had formed the snake fan out across the deck.

  Behind it, a blast crater a meter and a half in diameter marred the deck where Eric had detonated the sack.

  The granules on the floor around him began crawling. They moved away from his body, and Bambi’s, giving them room. He realized in that moment that they were micro machines. They gave Eric and Bambi room because of the termite repellers installed in their Cicadas. He wondered vaguely why the boa and trash compactor formed by those machines hadn’t been repelled, but that was probably because the termites became different entities when linked.

  That it was made of micro machines also explained why his hull kept electrifying whenever the entity struck. It wasn’t a malfunction after all: the tech had been developed during the first invasion specifically to defend against machines of this kind. In fact, he had a hand in its creation.

  He stared at the termites for a few moments.

  This was the Curator.

  He watched as the swarm members scrambled away from him. They began to clamber one atop the other, and he realized they were forming something new.

  “Don’t let them finish!” Eric raised his hands, but noticed the muzzles of his plasma and laser rifles had been physically rammed back inside the panels in his forearms, thanks to the boa’s crushing embrace, and they wouldn’t deploy again. At least on their own.

  He manually jerked the muzzles free—Bambi was forced to do the same beside him—and then tried to shoot. Thankfully, the weapons fired.

  It didn’t help. He was able to break away portions of the micro machines, but they continued forming, faster than he could stop them.

  He and Bambi began backing away as an insect-like creature took shape. His back touched a bulkhead; he could run no further.

  By then, the termite mass had formed into a giant scorpion. It blocked off the retreat to the entrance membrane on the far side of the room—which wasn’t currently visible—and slowly stalked toward him. A wicked-looking stinger hung from the tail.

  “Definitely don’t want to get hit by that,” Bambi said.

  Eric and Bambi continued firing as the scorpion closed. They tried to shoot off the stinger, but the scorpion began to randomly wag its tail, avoiding the blows. So Eric focused on the machine’s center of mass instead. As his blows began to impact once more, he thought: This is why it’s best not to ignore my training.

  He glanced at his battery levels. Thirty percent. Getting low. They wouldn’t be able to keep this up for much longer.

  “I like how it chose a shape after your namesake,” Bambi said.

  “Don’t think it knows,” Eric said.

  In moments the insect machine was standing before them, its pincers ready to grab him, its stinger raised to strike.

  He upped his time sense as the stinger-tipped tail swung forward, and he dodged out of the way.

  “I’m starting to wish we had some of those alien spheres along!” Bambi said.

  “Wouldn’t help all that much with this guy,” Eric said. “Any damage we caused would just reform! Distract it while I run underneath!”

  Bambi dashed to the right, closing slightly, and those pincers snapped at her, attempting to snatch her up. She continued firing the whole time.

  Eric used the diversion to dash underneath the metal scorpion, and he unleashed his weapons at point blank range into the ventral portion of its jointed thorax. He carved small blast craters into the surface, but the scorpion seemed unaffected—the holes quickly filled in as other termites shifted to take their places.

  The machine slammed its body downward, crushing Eric into the floor. Its legs began to fold inward, and he upped his time sense, along with his servomotor output, and squeezed out before those legs could snatch and crush him. He dodged the tail as he emerged, and the stinger slammed into the deck behind him.

  “Supposed to be softer underneath, aren’t they?” Eric commented.

  “Sure, except it’s a machine!” Bambi exclaimed.

  “Yeah, so much for that.” He glanced at his power levels.

  Ten percent.

  The stinger came down at him again, and Eric leaped backwards. He felt like one of those plastic moles in those Whac-A-Mole games at the fair, thrust into the air and exposed for the soft mallet to strike, except this mallet was anything but soft.

  “I’m detecting high energy photons, coming from this part of the floor!” Bambi said from her position next to the wall.

  “Has to be the Curator’s command and control!” Eric said. “Shoot the entire area!”

  Bambi began firing into the deck with her plasma and laser rifles.

  The scorpion turned toward her, but instead of striking, the termites composing it transformed into a big fist. She tried to dodge out of the way, but the fist smashed Bambi’s Cicada into the wall.

  Aiming at the small blast holes she’d formed already, Eric fired at the deck next to the wall.

  “Eric!” She only used his name in their most intimate moments.

  Or when her life was in mortal danger.

  He looked up. She was spreadeagled: the termites had transformed again, this time into ropes, and they were tugging at each of her four limbs. Intending to rip them apart. One of her servomotors shifted, breaking in half as he watched.

  A strand broke away those “ropes,” forming a spear that plunged toward her chest assembly—headed directly toward her AI core.

  As he feared, he had to make a choice. Try to save her, and risk killing them both. Or let her die, and destroy the micro machines while she distracted them.

  He made his choice.

  He lifted his arms and opened fire at the “rope” binding her right arm as he ran. It broke, and free of its exertion, she leaned to the left slightly, her loose arm beginning to flop to her side.

  The incoming spear adjusted so that it was still plunging toward the new location of her AI core.

  Eric leaped toward the spear and struck it just as the tip impacted her body. The spear swerved to the right, scraping across her chest assembly, and carving a deep groove before slamming into the wall beside her.

  The micro machines broke apart around him, and began to reform, becoming tentacles that wrapped around them.

  Eric upped his time sense.

  Power levels were at three percent.

 
“Fire at the deck!” Eric said.

  He swept his hands down in slow motion, through the swarming micro machines—which caused them to disperse—and toward the deck. He unleashed both weapons, firing at the blast craters Bambi had marked the photon source with. She, too, fired her weapons, but straight down, well away from the target—she’d lost motor control of her arms, and couldn’t lift them.

  Tentacles continued to form around him, and one wrapped around his left arm, which yanked the laser rifle off target.

  He continued firing with his plasma rifle, unleashing hell at the floor, and making new craters. Another tentacle formed, and slammed against his right arm. He resisted, wanting to fight to the very end, but then that arm, too, was pulled away, and Eric was firing into empty air. So he stopped.

  He tugged at the tentacles that bound him, but he couldn’t break free. Those tentacles were squeezing tighter. Ever tighter. On his damage report screen, his servomotor indicators had gone from yellow to orange.

  Eric sent what he knew would be his last transmission. “Goodbye, Bambi. I tried to save you. I really tried. But I couldn’t. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Bambi said.

  Eric sensed motion beside him.

  Though her shoulder and elbow servomotors were too damaged to move her arms, Bambi had managed to lift her wrists instead, and was using her hands to shove the protruding muzzles of the rifles toward the command and control hidden beneath the deck. She released several shots before the micro machines could react, and formed fresh blast holes in the floor.

  Just like that it was over.

  The tentacles that bound the pair broke apart like sand from a cracked hourglass; the constituent termites slumped to the floor in black piles.

  Eric slumped against the wall, and grabbed Bambi before she could topple.

  He reverted his time sense to normal and glanced at his battery levels.

  Zero.

  That meant he had switched over to backup power, and had five minutes left—assuming he didn’t change his time sense, fire any weapons, or electrify his hull.