Coven's Rebellion Chapter 17

Tami

Dawn, still carrying the huge mounted machine-gun, braced herself and began to blast the visible cockpit of the Ferdinand mech that was thumping its way towards the battle with Rosa, Amelia, and the Italian mechs. The two mechanised behemoths lashed out with titanic lances of fire. The air trembled, the night woke from its slumber into brief, confused daylight.

“I assume you're going to need help getting into range with that thing, so—” Dawn began to say, but I laughed and took her metal hand. It felt soft and warm, like it normally did when we weren't piloting robotic death machines.

“Nope, we're just going to run fast!” I said, and began to drag her forward.

She caught on, and together we put our robot bodies to the test. We got within three hundred metres when the mech’s little guns saw us and startled rattling. Bullets tore chunks of the road up like driving rain splashing off water, but we jinked this way and that, dodging as hard and fast as we could manage.

Frustrated, put my gauntleted fist out and tore a fire hydrant out of the ground as I passed. It didn't come easily, and I was yanked back a step before the rusted bolts gave way. I lost several plates of armour as a stream of bullets briefly got me in its sights, but luckily the fabric of the bullet resistant cape caught any before they hit anything important.

With my prize in hand, I began to dash and zigzag again until I was a hundred or so metres away, then tossed the hydrant into the air like a tennis player making an opening serve. Except, of course, the tennis ball was a large, vaguely phallic hunk of metal.

“Alley-oop!” I called, and with a full body swing, I punched that sucker as hard as I could manage. In the moment of action, two things happened. First, warning lights flashed as I overstressed the metal of my robotic frame, and second, the onboard AI took what I was doing and made several fine adjustments to my targeting.

Clong. The sound rang in my ears, and I slid several inches back from the recoil of my mechanised gauntlets.

The fire hydrant flew fast and true, to my utter shock, and the only thing that saved my dumb ass from getting perforated was the fact that the mech’s guns tried to shoot my improvised projectile out of the air. It felt like a whole minute passed as it sailed over the distance to the mech, and the whole way, sparks pinged off it as bullets hammered the cast iron hunk of metal.

I wasn't frozen for too long, thankfully, and I bolted forward. Dawn was ahead of me, firing her gunblade up at one of the many little automated guns on the mech. She actually managed to damage one, and its stream of bullets suddenly became a blur of failing mechanicals.

Seeing this, she slid to a stop and sheathed the gunblade with one hand. The other pulled the massive minigun from where she'd stowed it on her back, and she swung it around. Bullets hosed out, tearing another turret away with its hail of lead.

“Fuck yeah!” I laughed, dashing past her at a dead sprint.

She was laughing over comms as gunfire made the whole street echo with its cracking, ripping sound. “Gonna have to stop. No reload! Cover me!”

Oh, in that case… I wonder how strong this robot frame really was…

We were perhaps seventy five metres away now, but if Dawn was about to run dry, then we needed a way to make the remaining distance. Inspiration struck when I saw a small car — one of the modern ones where they try to put big wheels way out in front so they stick out a bit.

My thick metal fingers snuck under it and I hefted it up onto the front wheels. New, moving barricade acquired, I continued rushing forward. Dawn reached me a second later and joined in — minigun abandoned behind us.

“Is this the craziest thing we've ever done?” Dawn asked loudly, wild disbelief in her voice.

I tilted my head quizzically at her. “What, use a car as moving cover?”

“No, babe — rush a giant fucking mech while using someone's street cruiser as cover!” She shot back.

The car, pavement, and air erupted in a storm of twisted metal, dust, and whip-crack howls as the remaining little gun turrets trained their collective ire on us. Too late, though, because we reached it a second or so later.

Unfortunately for our cover, it had high capacity vehicle batteries, so it immediately became a gorgeous inferno. Dawn abandoned our efforts to push it, activated the glowing edge of her gunblade, and leapt up towards the massive Ferdinand mech. I, however, hefted the fiery remains of the car and hucked it at a leg before I joined her in scaling the war machine.

A turret fell past as I used one hand on a ladder rung to fling myself further upwards — its jagged, severed base glowing faintly. By the time I was at the hip, another one was gone, and Dawn was swinging like a monkey for the last remaining turret on this side of the mech.

Leaving my girlfriend to defang the angry death machine, I went up towards its waist, where huge and armoured bearings allowed the torso to swivel. If I knew anything about mechanical constructs like this, it was that parts like that really hated being punched until they weren't perfectly circular anymore.

When I got there, I had to yank and tear at a heavy armoured skirt-thing, but with such close access, it didn't take long to twist them out so I could get underneath. One look at the joint made me realise that the engineers had preempted me, but I gave it one hard punch anyway. Nothing happened, so I leapt back and continued to scale the titan.

It wasn't more than a couple of seconds before I saw a real opportunity — a hatch. Hello there, friend…

With fists clenched and a cry of exuberant defiance, I hammered at its centre once, twice, three times. Come on, come on asshole, open fucking sesame.

It didn't open, but it did buckle enough that I could slip my fingers under one side. Bracing myself sideways with both feet against the frame, I began to heave. For a second, I thought my frame would be the one to lose this contest of engineering strength. Then, metal squealed, powerful motors whirred, and slowly, agonisingly, the hatch began to give.

It broke suddenly, and I almost flew off the mech entirely from the sudden release of energy. Thankfully, the hatch only tore open, rather than failing entirely, so I managed to just barely hold on. My body still swung around to ring against the armour like a pathetic, battered gong.

Laughing, I flipped up and through the open hole. “I'm inside!” I called to Dawn.

“Rip and Tear, my love,” she said, amusement humming warmly in her voice.

“I was planning on it,” I replied, and began to rush in, grabbing, ripping, and as she'd commanded, tearing. No cable, conduit, or any other mechanical thingy was safe. I was a chaotic unsupervised toddler in a toy shop — just grabbing everything that looked fun.

Eventually, purely by accident, I stumbled out into a sort of command deck place. The terrified faces of four crew members stared back at me as the hatch slammed back.

“Hi folks, don't mind me!” I said happily, and with absolute glee I began to smash every console I could see.

The crew scrambled to get out of my way, flattening themselves to the walls while I did my best impression of a tornado going through a balsa-wood house. When I was done, the Austrian mech was completely inoperable, but in my infinite mercy, it would only take a fairly minor refurbishment to get it moving again.

I was just hopping out when I heard Desmonia call over the comms, “Okay folks, time to leave. Last mech is down. The train is warming up. The Eyes will plot a least resistance course for you two to intercept the train.”

Hitting the ground next to Dawn, we nodded, then began to bolt along the indicated holographic line that showed up. Our legs whirred, and I almost hit a wall before I activated my limited clock speed increase. 

Immediately, I heard May’s voice in my head. “Tami, that’s dangerous. Your brain can’t handle that increase. Let the Eyes do minor course corrections, okay?”

Frustrated, I dropped the clock speed again. Fuckin’, the digital folks tried to pretend they were just like us flesh and blood people, but it was becoming pretty clear that they had some significant advantages.

Shit, imagine if I could run my brain as fast as my CORA character could move? I’d be horrifyingly powerful in the best, most delicious way. But also…

“May, the next time we do this, I want a frame that does what I know better. I want big rocket punchies and thrusters built into my back, legs, and elbows, or whatever,” I told my sister, feeling very sulky. Reality was stupid and it deserved to be broken like VR game reality.

The streets, as we ran for the train, began to fill with Austrian army support staff as the front lines were pushed further back into the city. As we rounded the final stretch, where we could see the train station down a very long, straight road, a truck rolled into an intersection right smack bang in front of us. I almost hit it like some sort of ancient cartoon character before I slid to a stop.

As I came to a halt, I found myself staring at a wild-eyed young man wearing fatigues and a combat tech harness as he, basically, fell out of a side door. With a terrified yelp, he scrambled for the only weapon he had on him, his sidearm.

My hand flashed forward and caught his wrist, and I slowly shook my head. He gave a terrified squeak while I carefully pulled the gun out, made sure the safety was on, then tossed it behind him into the truck. He continued to stand there frozen, unmoving with fear, so with a shrug I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, dimmed one glowing eye in a wink, then continued around the truck and off towards the train.

Dawn and I burst into the train yard right as the massive, gunmetal grey, brutalist looking engine began to tug at its small load of cars. The others in the crew had unhitched it from all but three cars, so its speed began to pick up rapidly. Not fast enough that Dawn and I couldn’t hop up onto it as it turned onto the main track, though.

“Welcome to the show, sisters!” The overly excitable space marine sounding dude said, stepping forward in the car to offer his hand. Unsure what to do, I just kinda held mine out too, and then with a tug, I was pulled into one of those bro-clasps, but with awkward grinding metal instead of hairy arms. God, I did not miss my hairy arms. Like, it was for sure an ordeal to get that particular issue fixed, but so worth it.

“Thanks, dude,” I said, releasing him. “Now what?”

He laughed, hearty and boisterous. “Now, we defend this train til our joints clog with the blood and grease of our enemies!”