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Roland had not chosen his weapon out of a sense of drama, nor was it selected due to some childish attraction to heroic fantasy. A hammer, Roland knew, just happened to be the right tool for the job. Tommy Guns, the drug-addled weaponsmith to Billy McGinty’s gang, had concurred with the choice when Roland had explained it to him.
Torvald’s AutoCat 8900 was strong and durable, but it was also just a piece of industrial equipment. It had been designed for use in some very hard environments, but it was not specifically built for war. In short, it could take some positively murderous hits, but it had not been designed to take a lot of them like a tank or an assault-class armature was. This did not mean it was weak. Quite the contrary. But it simply did not have the overbuild factor and redundant systems of something designed to be specifically military.
This was an important distinction, but it was also a distinction that did not change the simple reality that any conventional weapon capable of bringing the thing down was going to be too big to use indoors, and anything safe to use in close quarters would not be able to hurt it in a tactically meaningful way.
Roland realized that he had been going about the issue all wrong. He didn’t need a weapon. He needed a tool. A tool that could deliver a lot of kinetic energy to targeted areas over and over again reliably without running out of energy or ammunition, and also without causing so much collateral damage it killed everyone on his side.
What he needed was a hammer.
Tommy had found a solid hunk of depleted uranium and cast it inside a shaped tungsten carbide ingot. The shaft was a solid piece of rolled Inconel left over from a construction vehicle. In total, the hammer was nearly six hundred pounds, most of which was at the head. With what little practice Roland had time for, he had learned that if he was not very well braced, the hammer swung him as every bit as much as he swung it. But if he planted his feet firmly and drove the mallet with all his strength there was very little in the way of industrial materials that was going to suffer the blow gladly.
Torvald, who had dismissed the tool at first, gave it some respect after Roland’s first charge. A head-on bum’s rush from Tankowicz had been too much to hope for, but for some reason this is what the man chose to open with. Giant grasping claws shot forward, hoping to end the duel in its opening seconds, but the left missed and the right was swept aside by the arcing head of the giant maul. The swing, taken while moving, dragged Roland off his attack line. But he did not fight this. Quite the opposite: he let the momentum drag him in a circle.
Torvald tried to seize this moment and close to grappling distance again, but Roland’s twirl was nearly complete and the hammer had been swept into an overhead position. As Roland’s body realigned with the charging armature, he brought the head down in a powerful overhand swing just as his giant yellow enemy was about to secure a fatal grip.
Torvald had minimal neurological upgrades, but his reflexes were somewhat better than average, and this saved him. At the last possible instant, he realized that the timing was not in his favor. He might actually grasp his opponent, but the hammer was going to fall right on the canopy as he did. Something small but insistent, deep inside his warrior’s instincts, told him not to let the hammer land on the clear dome. Torvald abandoned his attack and lurched his machine to the side.
The great gray maul threw a geyser of orange sparks off the side of his life support pod’s carapace. If Torvald’s armature was likened to an enormous praying mantis, then the hammer bounced off the side of its thorax with a gong so loud mercenaries and goons alike dropped their weapons to cover their ringing ears.
The weapon ricocheted off the thick armor, leaving a deep angry gouge and then embedded itself into the concrete of the hangar floor. The nine-thousand-pound armature clattered to the opposite side on skittering metal legs struggling to cope with the sudden and fierce lateral acceleration. Torvald righted himself and lurched upright just as Roland was tearing the hammer from the crater it had made.
The two men approached each other with more care this time, wary. Each now had some insight as to what the other could do. Roland had gambled on Torvald not having enhanced reflexes, and the old raider had nearly grabbed him with those clamps. That would have been rather unfortunate.
On the other side of the fight, Torvald had failed to recognize the threat Roland’s hammer represented, and if the hit he had just taken was any indicator, it was a serious threat after all.
Both men recognized how close the first pass had been, and neither was terribly eager to try the same strokes a second time. The ancient mercenary checked his heat levels and tried to hide his grimace. Just the one brief exchange had cost him all the gains his cooling system had made during the brief respite. He stalled, “Okay, boy. I admit it. The hammer is nice touch.”
“Come get touched again, then!” Roland snarled back and advanced with a measured jog. He hefted the mallet in two hands, with the head out to his right. Torvald sidestepped and kept turning to Roland’s left, avoiding it. The armature’s four legs imbued it with excellent linear acceleration, but lateral motion was not so easy. Roland noticed this and tried to exploit it.
With Torvald circling to his left, Roland stepped forward and spun to the right, letting the hammer swing out in a wide circle. He dug his boot hard into the floor and rotated with all the speed his body could manage, bringing the hammer to bear on the armature’s cockpit again. Roland was far faster than Torvald, but the weight of the hammer and the need for firm footing slowed him enough for the machine to step back and take the hit on one trailing yellow arm.
The strike flung the limb far off its path, and a panicking Torvald sent the other arm forward to punch or push his opponent away. The hammer had bounced back from the arm and its weight nearly dragged Roland off his feet. But he brought it in line and used a short chopping stroke to parry the clumsy blow. His defense succeeded, but it was obvious his footing was poor. Torvald gambled on a rushing charge, trying to wrap the onyx giant in a crushing hug that would keep the hammer from swinging. Roland dropped under the arms and used another short swing to put the wedge side of the maul into a yellow leg joint. With his grip choked up on the haft, the strike did not land with the full power of a hard swing, but the joint buckled with a clang and a shower of sparks. The armature sagged to the left and nearly stumbled, which was a reprieve that saved Roland from serious injury. Torvald righted himself Roland rolled away from the giant stomping feet and landed in a crouch.
From one knee, Roland heaved the hammer in a horizontal arc, twisting hard at the hips and straining his bulging deltoids. The head gathered speed and with a suitably impressive sound collided with a rear leg. To Torvald’s relief it had missed the targeted joint by a wide margin, but the impact shook the walls and staggered both fighters nonetheless. The great gray maul rebounded, dragging Roland further to the side and off his attack line, while the leg skidded out from under the armature and sent the power cell housing to the floor with a bang. Three other legs scrambled and righted the machine in less than a second, but that was more than enough time for Roland to have corrected his own imbalances. The two powerful mechanical warriors rose and turned to face each other again.
Roland charged without pause, and Torvald winced. Every second he wasn’t attacking was a chance to cool his chassis, or mount another assault of his own. But Roland came on like a thunderbolt, hammer held tight in black balled fists. The furious cyborg loomed large in his HUD and the hammer swept up as Roland leapt high. Torvald miscalculated the nature of the attack and shifted to protect the canopy from what looked to be a hit delivered with intent to shatter the dome. But Roland passed over the cockpit and brought his fury down on the power cell housing, staggering the machine again, but doing only minor damage to the heavily armored part.
He’s testing the different areas! Torvald realized. Bastard’s looking for soft spots!
Torvald hated clever opponents, and this one was turning out to be very clever, indeed. A series of powerful swipes was Torvald’s spirited response to this. Each attempt to club the darting soldier pushed Roland back and away, and the need to keep dodging prevented the man from planting his feet for another swing. The pair danced like this for several long seconds, each of them trying to force the other to play their game. The old man was using the armature’s AI to plot Roland’s positions and movements since his own reflexes were not up to the task. With a practiced eye he selected and approved attack patterns and dispatched them to his machine with the clarity of long experience. He trusted the machine to do its job as he trusted his own body. This was unsurprising, as the machine was his own body.
While the armature went on the offense, he directed his attention to managing the heating issue. Except he wasn’t managing it. Nothing the old warrior did stopped the runaway overheating and nothing in his diagnostics could tell him what was wrong. Torvald knew he had to shut this fight down quickly because he would not be able to stay in it for very long. Another hammer blow deflected off a flailing metal arm, and this time sparks flew. The AI recalculated and adjusted for the speed and angle of the attack and a new tactical tree popped up on the HUD. Torvald approved it absently while he worked with increasing agitation on how to win this fight.
The machine shuddered again as the gray metal mass of the maul was parried, and this time a counter strike sent Roland and his weapon hurtling away to bounce and skid into a wall. The man was up and moving nearly instantly, and he moved to stalk the armature again.
Okay. The AI is sorting him out now, Torvald approved silently.
It all came down to time. He could crank the armature all the way up and fight at full output for about three minutes, or he could keep pulling things back and drag this out for eleven. Nothing about the battle up to this point had led him to believe that letting it go longer was going to be a good plan. Hoping to snag the man on one of his passes had seemed like a solid strategy at the outset, but it was turning out to be a losing proposition. Torvald began to formulate a plan for a more direct assault. He was uploading it to the machine when the hammer again shook his cockpit and sent the chassis lurching to the side. I’ll give the AI another thirty seconds to read him, and then I’ll go to full power. It would be prudent to have as much data as possible before rolling the dice on an all-out attack.
Roland came in again with several feints, but the hammer was so heavy, feinting with it was proving slow and unconvincing. Torvald launched a series of strikes and followed them with a lunging charge. The looping swings of his arms were dodged, but the charge brought him within the arc of a returning hammer strike. Instead of getting hit with the unforgiving flat of the massive head, Torvald took a bash to the canopy from the haft. His HUD flickered, but without the massive weight and unflinching hardness of that head, there was naught but sound and fury to accompany it. Roland was dragged away when the glancing impact pulled him to the side. As he landed on unsteady legs, Torvald sent him back-pedaling with another flurry of windmill smashes.
Roland backed off and circled again. Torvald took a moment to glance at his readouts and sighed.
This is going to be close.