Hell's Maw. James Axler

it now, and this close it looked a lot like scaffolding with a box depending from the chains. The legs were part-built, all girders and tubing with great hinge joints running down the sides, two in each leg plus a whole network of smaller hinges at the ankles to better ensure stability across any terrain. The feet were wide, flat plates, each one seven feet across with a bobbled underside that could find purchase on the uneven surface of the ground.

      As Kane ran, the heat beam screamed again, sending another red line at his retreating ride, carving it almost in two. The back end of Kane’s wag tore partially away from the front and the whole wag collapsed in on itself, the wheels spinning uselessly as it sunk down in the middle. A moment later, the driver leaped from the cab, dropping the six feet to the ground where his cab had become raised. The gunner, meanwhile, lay sprawled against the turret, his flesh turned a ghastly red where the heat ray had struck him. He was dead.

      Kane continued to run, knowing that he had thirty seconds to reach their enemy before it could fire another heat burst. As he ran, he powered the Sin Eater pistol into his right hand with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons.

      All around, bullets were whizzing through the air, the high mounted railguns firing down on the last of the moving wags while Brigid and her companion fired back from the twin tripods in the back of the rig. Domi, too, was shooting, using her Detonics to take potshots at the enemy’s cab to distract them. From up there, it must have seemed that they were being attacked from all sides—the perfect distraction for what Kane had in mind.

      Kane reached the underside of their monstrous attacker, dodging and weaving as more 15 mm bullets churned up the ground in his wake, the right-hand railgun swiveling on its mount to try to get a bead on him. Kane held down his trigger, sending a trail of 9 mm bullets at the closest foot of the walker, searching for a weak spot. The bullets pinged against the armor, ricocheting in all directions but barely scratching the metal.

      “Damn,” Kane muttered, easing his finger off the Sin Eater’s trigger and scanning the underside of the towering vehicle for inspiration. There had to be a way to bring it down, had to be some way to crack that armor.

      Dancing out of the way of the moving feet, Kane activated his Commtact once again. “Baptiste? What have you got for me? How do we bring this bastard down?”

      * * *

      BRIGID WORKED THE tripod gun as she responded to Kane. “Find some way to stop the heat beam,” she said.

      “Like how?” Kane replied, the note of desperation clear in his voice.

      Brigid and her colleague were working the tripod guns mounted on the back of the wag in fits. The whole wag was warm from the effect of the heat beam, and the guns were threatening to overheat. The wag zigzagged across the field, bumping over ruts in the soil and tangled grass as a stream of bullets followed them from the high-mounted railguns, spitting sparks from the metal sides of the wag. One of the sacks of grain burst under the assault, spilling its contents in a cloud of yellow dust.

      “Overheat it,” Brigid said in a sudden moment of inspiration.

      * * *

      “OVERHEAT IT?” KANE repeated as he chased after the machine, which was striding after Brigid’s wag. “How?”

      “A weapon like that must throw out a lot of heat to operate,” Brigid reasoned.

      Kane’s eyes roved across the metal surface of the walking weapon as Brigid spoke.

      “If you can find the source and block it, you could—”

      “Got it!” Kane said, spying a dark patch on the back of the dangling cab where wispy steam was emanating. He ran after the retreating vehicle, commanding his Sin Eater back into its hidden holster, and a moment later he leaped onto the swinging left leg as it hurtled past. Clinging there, Kane reached up, using the scaffold-like leg as a ladder, finding handholds and footholds as he ascended the swaying limb of the moving vehicle.

      Bullets drummed against the cab above him as Kane scrambled up past the first knee joint, ten feet above the ground. Then he felt the whole vehicle vibrate and the heat beam fired again, cleaving the back from the remaining wag in an explosion of melted metal and tossed grain.

      Kane clung tightly to the leg as it swung forward, then came down again, stomping on the edge of the wag where it was melting. Brigid and her companion leaped from the back of the wag as the colossus took another step, crushing the back end of the vehicle. It was obvious that its occupants did not mind losing a little of their spoils if it meant getting rid of the competition.

      The cab turned as Brigid reached for the driver’s door. The door was jammed where the metal had become buckled under the assault, and Kane watched helplessly for a moment as his red-haired colleague wrenched at the door. As she did so, the boxy cab of the walker whirred on its hydraulics, drawing around to line up the railguns on the people below.

      “Hey, ugly!” The shout was harsh and it came from behind Kane and the walker.

      Kane looked down, saw Domi standing there with her Detonics pistol held in a two-handed grip and aimed high at the cab of the walker. The pistol’s silver finish glinted in the overcast light. The pistol bucked in her hands as Domi sent shot after shot into the side window of the boxy cab, firing over and over as the walking machine began to slowly react. The glass fractured, spiderwebbing in an instant but still holding in place.

      Kane was close enough to the cab that he heard the voices coming from within. “Turn us around,” a woman’s voice bellowed. “Blast that pale-skinned bitch off the face of the Earth!”

      Kane clung on to the leg as the cab swung around, but below Domi was already racing away, keeping up a circuit around her would-be killer as its pilots tried to affix her in their sights. It was a dangerous ploy, but it gave Brigid enough time to get the wounded driver out of her own wag, forcing the bent door open with six hard kicks of her heeled boot.

      Kane did what little he could to help, reaching into a pocket of his jacket and priming the device he found there. It looked like a ball bearing, perfectly spherical with a silver finish, roughly two inches in diameter. There was a hidden seam running along the device’s center, and it took Kane less than a breath to find it and twist it, setting the device to detonate. He dropped it then, not really able to throw it the way he would have preferred, and turned his face away as the sphere fell.

      The device blew seven feet above the ground, just ahead of and between the walker’s massive feet, unleashing a violent burst of light and sound as if a lightning bolt had struck the earth. The walker was unharmed but its occupants were momentarily dazzled.