Lara saw ten, twenty, too many black bodies to count rush at Max on the tight landing. Teeth snatched and dripped, the shrieks deafening, hellish.
The Max stepped into them, pulse rifle roaring. The armored limb swung back and forth, razing the wall of springing creatures in a furious blaze.
Jess was screaming in a fury all his own, blasting at the ones that had made it past before Max had blocked their way. Drones screeched and fell, clattered to the smoking deck in spraying mists of hissing blood.
The Berserker moved forward, still firing. Lara saw brittle dead limbs snap beneath its enormous feet, crushed into smoking powder against the steps.
A bug scampered toward Jess from his blind side, arms reaching—
“Jess!” Lara cried.
He spun, weapon still firing, but there wasn’t enough time. The drone latched one claw into his arm, pushed its grinning skull in for the kill—
—and was brought down in a pulse of weapon fire from Max, left arm turned back toward Jess as the flamethrower unleashed searing flames against the bugs in the stairwell. Acid spattered against Jess’s suit, missing his wide-eyed face by scant millimeters. The drone’s talon was still embedded in his arm, the rest of its body splashed across the bay floor. Jess knocked the claw away with a cry of disgust.
Jesus, that was close! Lara gripped the edges of the console in front of her, hardly breathing.
Max took another thundering step forward, low fire sputtering uselessly against its armored legs. The flamethrower had dropped a dozen of the monsters; Lara could hear the sizzle of boiling fluids beneath their exoskeletal plates as the rifles paused, the threat temporarily halted.
Jess followed, choking in the billows of smoke that rose up from the blasted steps. He jumped and danced through the guttering fire, avoiding the worst of it as he tried to keep up with the Berserker.
They reached the bottom of the first flight, and Lara realized that the next surveillance cam wasn’t working. She looked back at the options she had, swallowing heavily. Max’s suit, front and back; Jess’s helmet. The next operational view she had was at the corridor outside the stairwell, where hissing shapes capered through the thick red shadows.
“No visuals rest of the way down, go—right at the bottom hatch,” she said. “Hostiles incoming.”
“Copy,” Jess coughed out. Ellis didn’t answer.
The Max’s front screen showed more dark bodies piling into the stairwell. Ellis raised the arms of the suit and started to fire again.
* * *
Jess’s eyes burned from the noxious smoke that billowed through the passage, his lungs straining for air as Ellis opened up on the next wave of attackers. The howling screams of the creatures echoed against the exploding rounds of Max’s rifle, creating a deafening clamor in the murky haze.
Blood dribbled down his arm from where the bug had grabbed him, but it wasn’t bad, not as bad as the dizzying waves of smoke and intense, radiating heat. Jess stayed on the landing as Max moved down, and the bugs screeched and fell before the power of the Max’s deadly grasp.
Jess kept his rifle trained on the climbing bugs but didn’t need to fire; Max took them out easily, sprayed the rising tide with a rapid patter of bullets more effectively than Jess could ever manage. Drones fell and bled, hissed and died—
—and two of them made it through the line of fire, actually reaching the mammoth suit and gouging uselessly at solid metal before Max smashed them with its right arm. Both were slammed into the wall, crushed to death by the heavy limb—
—but how did they make it that far?
Jess blinked against the sting of smoke, trying to see past the firing Berserker in the shrieking gloom. Ellis carried the giant body down another step, and Jess saw the tons of metal come down on drones that weren’t dead— wounded, but still reaching up to clutch at their destroyer before breaking into pieces beneath the massive legs.
Something is wrong, they shoulda been dead already—
The Max made it to the base of the stairs and Jess swept his rifle across the heap of smoking bodies before following, a knot of dread deep in the pit of his stomach unfurling, rising to grasp at his heart with cold and clutching fingers. He could hear the nightmare breed clattering through the corridor ahead, racing to meet them.
No matter how close they were to the bay’s airlock, they weren’t going to have an easy time of it—and if Ellis was having problems, they might not make it at all.
“Hold on kid, gonna be there soon!” He called, but Ellis didn’t reply—
—and Jess felt his hope plummet away as he reached the base of the stairs and saw drones rushing at them from both directions—and the Max pivoting uncertainly in the pulsing red light.
* * *
—use the torch, kid—
Ellis forced the arm of the suit up and turned to the left, his thoughts stuttering against the tracking system in wavering lines of foreign code. Information still flowed in but something was different; the crossover to the weapon monitors was fluctuating, sending signals he didn’t understand—
Flame burst out of the mighty fist in brilliant digital green, and the tide of enemies was stopped, flickering bodies collapsing beneath the ignited napthal fuel that blew across them. Behind him, Jess fired at the onslaught that came from the opposite direction—
—36 shots/grouped in three—
—and Ellis turned, struggling to reconnect to the faltering program as the Max used the pulse rifle to blast the shrieking animals into acid-soaked debris. He had to override the system to do it, and waves of exhaustion crashed over him, the effort taking every ounce of will he had.
Ellis was starting to feel the real pain in his head, the soothing talk of the computer no longer blocking it out. He felt the sweat of his aching body now, hot streams of it pouring down his limbs as he moved the Max forward, still firing.
Can’t find the anomaly—
He could feel the division between Brian Ellis and Max, no longer one and the same; the pain and weariness were growing even as the tracking computations wavered. He was becoming himself again, a flesh-and-bone human inside an armed and armored shell—and seconds slipped by as Ellis was forced to recheck variability in the azimuth bearing, as Jess had to waste his dwindling ammo against the screaming drones that poured through the wide corridor.
“Jess, Ellis—bay one-seven is half a kick straight ahead, to your left—”
I can hear her, Lara said that!
He was losing the connection. And without it, he didn’t know if he could control the Max to lead them to safety—or if the suit would continue to function at all.
Ellis bit his lip until blood spurted out and forced the giant machine to do what it had to do.