| |
EVEN IN FULL MANUAL control, Drake's requests for weapons power up, and tactical maneuvers still ghost across the HUD. They look tempting. I wanted to go into this all kumbaya, but I hadn't expected to stumble across this.
"Are you seeing what I'm..." I don't finish due to Jackie's horrified stare. I know exactly what she's wondering—at what point did this guy grow extra faces and when will she get hers.
"You're in restricted airspace, attacking United States assets." I'm on script this time. Words aren't forming otherwise. "I am at least going to ask you to stop throwing heaters at the base."
"Negatory, cowboy," he says, affecting a decent southern accent and off-handedly releasing a bolt which burns through the clouds leaving a swirling dervish behind. "I told you, we are Marut." He parades forward, and I half expect him to disappear through the spongy cloud, but he stays aloft. "Who conquers mighty strength with strength more mighty! The very earth shakes in terror at their wars, O Agni!" he cries out the name and his visage swaps to another. Head now bowed, he stomps in a half circle, calling out with his fist raised. "Bright like the flashing flames of sacrifices!" His arm flares, sheathed in storm and the third mouth takes up the chant. "Like tongues of fire impetuous in their onset, chanting their psalm, singing aloud, like heroes, splendid from birth, invincible!" He shouts, swinging the charged fist.
He pauses for a reaction. His eyes are hard, and there are the lines of a permanent scowl around his mouth and cheeks. Storm light plays through his poof of hair, and it sways in a single, sculpted wave. Continued bewilderment is the best I got.
"So... You're a god, huh?" At this point, stalling seems logical. But damn, Augments rarely look too different from anybody else. Aurora had been an extreme case, but she at least maintained a humanoid form. Three Face here, well, he's almost a copyright violation.
"You daft? I'm a god, yo. Like tongues of fire." More dramatic taser hand displays accompany his monologue. I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't baked too. Augmented under the influence. "Splendid from birth."
"It's hard to argue divine splendor with a guy who's cloud surfing, but seriously, I'm leaning toward Augment. No offense to your people's gods or whatever."
"My people? My people?" He stops the recitation and sneers. "I'm British, you racist fuck."
"Look, I've seen the news. I know you got screwed over," I say, trying to mollify him. "You're...Arnav Kuswawa." I fumble the rest of his name, and Jackie smacks my helmet. "You're here because of the Salarium the U.S. seized.
"That's pronounced Kushwaha, you racist twat. But no longer am I constrained to mortal realms. I am here for divine justice!" He proclaims, eyeing the sky. A separate, more quiet voice adds, "And for twenty billion dollars."
"Twenty billion?" Jackie shouts. She seems to have finally come to terms with Marut's deformity. "The U.S. seized a quarter million, tops of your coin."
"Nicked!" The voice demands. It isn't so much quiet as pointed off in another direction. "You do math? Oh, of course not, you sound like an American twat too. With the explosion in Salarium prices and the burial of your dead presidents you bitches owe me twenty billion."
"He's got a point," I say. Jackie's face has turned a virulent red since the twat comment, and she looks like she's about to explode. "Let's talk this over. I know Sayrafi, you know, the guy who invented Salarium. I can hook you up."
A total bluff. I killed the guy who invented Salarium. And I doubt Eric is going to rob his own coffers to buy this guy off.
"Talk? You best listen!" he says, and the current face glowers, launching into his sermon. "Bright like the flashing flames of sacrifices! KNOW MY DIVINE SKILLS!"
"Jackie! Bail!"
Lightning quick isn't a bullshit phrase. A flick of Marut's finger and the screen goes white. I feel the suit propelled downward. Jackie's leapt free at incredible speeds even as several million joules blot out the screen.
Drake fought high-velocity weaponry and charged particles long before I suited up. The easy answer was just to design ways to take the hit. Trouble is, Augments routinely defy normal physics. Battle robots don't. And this 'bot has seen better days.
The systems flicker but don't drop offline. Lightning is a common enough hazard. Humanity has been finding ways to redirect the onslaught for centuries. If this is Marut's only trick, wrapping up my end of the deal will be easy. Maybe if he sees I'm still standing, he'll think twice or be distracted.
"You will surrender!"
Marut, the Storm god, declines the offer and comes at Wormfood with a full-on Raiden fatality assault. In the fury, I almost ignore Drake's alert at the far corner of the HUD.. The target I asked him to track earlier? She's plummeting through the clouds.
It's almost cartoonish how her legs churn in a blur, burrowing through the clouds before she can gain purchase. When you're high, you make some stupid calls. Still, after seeing her on the open ocean, I wanted to believe she could pull it off. I angle to intercept and kick on the rockets.
Wind speed measurements go off the charts, and the stabilizers fire sporadic, angry bursts, barely able to maintain position. Wormfood loses Jackie on the HUD. Alarms blare as my path takes something more like a deflating balloon and the HUD spins wildly. As useless as the lightning seemed in damaging the grounded armor, Marut's continued blasts are overloading all visuals.
If I can't escape quick, Jackie's toast. She's already disappeared off the radar.
"Load the tranq!"
Weapons control outlines a violently shifting trajectory path which has me turning nearly three hundred and sixty degrees to hit him. Predicted accuracy rates hover in the low thirties. How the hell Ayana would know I'd be caught in the same situation—a lightweight projectile against the freaking wind... Wait. She could've anticipated this.
I fire the damn thing.
Outside, the lightning swarm has begun to multiply, one atop another like blankets of lead. Joules continue to climb, and his one-time trick is starting to feel more like an actual threat. The HUD shivers with static. I go full throttle aiming, I hope, down.
We're at major altitude. Jackie could be falling for half a minute, tops. Find her, match speed, mid-air snatch, pray to somebody other than Marut we don't both pancake on the ocean.
Five seconds in, an ominous creak resounds throughout the armor followed by a spectacular shearing of metal and a frigid blast of air near my feet. Drake blurts out a new warning.
"Stabilizers, lost."
A few years ago, if somebody had said I was going to die while piloting a high-tech weapon into the ocean at tremendous speeds with zero control, I would've said hell yeah! Now? My biological evac systems are getting a workout.
"FUUUUUUCCKK!!!"
I'm either shooting into space or into the ground. The prototype has a London moment gyroscope accurate on a fucking quantum level. It could at least tell me how bad I'm going to die. Wormfood seems overloaded, unresponsive. Sheets of blinding white and the occasional glimpse of cloud fill the HUD. Then there's the red reticle which just blipped.
"Target reacquired."
Jackie! She's above? Below? I thrash inside the armor just to keep my eyes on her. She's running a tight spiral, and I don't know where until the golden dot makes his appearance.
She's actually doing it. Feet on the clouds, she's climbing pockets of vapor like they're stairs. Marut blinks away with a charge of lightning. He's spotted her somehow, swirling up through the clouds. I wonder...
I kill the engines and go into a freefall.
He's not aiming his powers at me anymore, she's got his full focus. Without adding more speed, no more wind, the ruined stabilizers don't matter. I'm punching through clouds like a final curtain call. My own stage to die on.
Here I am, not trying to kill anyone, trying to make things right, but I've got another Augment intent on fighting, killing. It's a sickness, has to be. Even those who stay peaceful get mixed up in world-ending conspiracies. Marut here is maybe the most honest of them all with his proud assumption that he is, in fact, a god.
"Warning! Low altitude! Impact imminent!" He's got a sense of self-preservation, that Wormfood. Do I?
This could be for the best. A cosmic karma where justice is finally served and a balance restored.
Suddenly the sky clears completely. I'm staring into an endless blue with a foam-capped sapphire racing toward me on the rear screens. Air whistles through the shattered armor. Wormfood relays commands which just might save him a second death. I'm trapped, thinking about my first.
I see Jackie's red blip hurtling toward the ocean. Clouds gone, her altitude is crashing as fast as mine. I can't make her out, but she's tangled with a secondary target. They're both plummeting. She's far off with no hummingbird miracle in the works.
Our threat? It looks neutralized.
That's when you save people.
Even the bad guys. Because, really, who the fuck are they?
"Engines full thrust!" I shout.
The jets kick in as the waves diminish, no longer a rolling landscape but a single white cap stretched across the HUD. Sudden forward momentum sends the blood in my face draining to my chest. Water sprays behind us in great gouts. Wormfood's adjustments are useless without the stabilizers, and I cut off his frantic attempts to keep us skimming above the water. Focused on their falling blips, I go full arcade style on the controls. I am nothing but an extension of the suit. Saving them is saving myself—I get it now. Where I screwed up. Where Dad did too. They're coming up fast, and I can see her. She's cradling Marut against her as they fall, his faces dimmed and drooling. She could let go like I almost did, but she won't. She won't, and I'm beginning to understand why. Why his life matters to her and why it should to me. Distance between us down to a handful of yards, I throttle down. Got to match their speed, pluck them out of the air, or they're better off smashing into the ocean at terminal velocity. It's close. Too close. I recall the theater when Dad scooped us up and launched. His flight powers drained, he became an uncontrolled missile, a weapon used to carry us from danger and absorb the blow. That's when he was a hero. That's when he was being the Crimson Mask.
They impact my outstretched arms with a whisper, speed still fast enough, the trough of water shedding off the armor is the only reason they aren't wet. I pull them both close and shoot unsteadily into the sky.
Jackie’s breathing fast, her eyes squeezed shut. Her hand clenches around an object pressed to Marut's neck.
The fucking dart.