The hairs stood up on the back of Brutus' neck and he felt his stomach drop as if the metallic taste of dread in his mouth were a river of cold liquid metal. A huge, primeval shape pressed through the distant forest, a shadow of death, and for a moment it was too incongruous to actually see the thing for what it was. All he could see was a lethal bulk, a form that triggered ancient, long-forgotten fears, smashing through the wooded reality in the distance, hurtling towards his Thug with murderous intent.
Gorgorax burst into the full light of the killing fields and was at a dead run almost instantly, huge muscles rippling beneath its ornately tattooed hide, thick sheets of armor plating glowing where sun touched neon paint. Dragon-like head level with his cockpit, the creature barreled towards him, mouth hung wide and filled with enormous teeth that glittered like slick, naked bone, or polished steel, or serrated gold.
God, why didn't it roar? These damn monsters always made a point to roar in the movies, to announce their arrival with a theatrical trumpeting and a ridiculous pose. Sitting ducks, he always thought. Setting themselves up for a beautiful shot to the face. But no. This was no spectacularized work of fiction. The megasaur's huge strides were eating up the space between them, and it had already covered almost a hundred meters before Brutus' particle cannons were brought to bear.
His twin guns belched and he watched with a familiar dreadful satisfaction as two plasmatic bolts of blinding light instantaneously arced downrange.
To say that Brutus "missed" would itself be an inaccurate measure of the shot. "Missing" is a relative term, after all. Its the difference between what you want and what you get. In darts, for example, you can miss the bullseye and still win points, and while it is technically true that his twin particle cannons failed to gouge the glowing tunnel through the beast's sternum and vital organs that he envisioned in his minds eye as he depressed the firing stud, he was at least on the board.
As the lumbering megasaur lifted its rear foot to advance, he watched the bolt rip into it like a comet, the shin evaporating in a spray of charred bone fragments and tattered, cauterized flesh. Momentum carried the stump forward where it pounded into the dirt and spilled the roaring creature onto its side. Watching Gorgorax thrash, Brutus' guts uncoiled and he drew in a hot breath. This was the craziest ******'-
A thought perched suddenly upon his mind, quick and ominous as a black dragonfly.
Didn’t Gorgorax have a twin?
Crystalline panic burst in Brutus’ chest as gravity seemed to reverse and the ground beneath his ‘mech lurched. His status display flashed as his alarms erupted in an urgent chorus indicating catastrophic damage to his left arm. He fought the controls to stay upright, doom flashing dimly in the back of his mind, fighting the savage strength of the creature crushing his arm in its jaws.
Turning, he clumsily swung two brutal chops with his free arm, smashing down onto Khaine’s armored head and neck with a force that would have easily shattered concrete, flattened cars, or staggered an enemy war machine. The beast could not have been less impressed, however, and rather than letting go with its reinforced teeth and talons, it set its feet and pulled.
There followed three sharp jerks, each longer and more horrifying than the last, that seemed to pass within a boundless, eternal bubble of time, separate from the surrounding universe, a pocket dimension containing only violence and wide-eyed helplessness.
He felt his prized machine growing lighter, more empty with each tug, as bolts popped, plating separated, myomer bundles were torn free from their housings and cable harnesses unspooled. He watched in shock as the left arm was torn from its socket, trailing long cables and twisted metal in a spectacle too close to biological dismemberment to not make Brutus’ stomach turn.
As the limb fell away, Brutus let his SRM launchers roar his dissatisfaction, flinging a swarm of javelins with smoking plumes and glowing points of thrust marking erratic trajectories. A metallic blister on the creatures armored back spun and spat flames, stitching the air with lines of tracer fire that intersected with clouds of shrapnel and exploding warheads. The rapid tattoo of detonated warheads barked in the air, but ultimately the anti-missile system failed to protect its hulking charge, for for every missile intercepted, two found their mark.
Brutus watched with executioners’ satisfaction as his missiles punched ragged holes in Khaine’s ornate armor plates and blasted bloody craters into his thick flesh and hide. He would die for sure, despite his cyclopean bulk, but in his Vulcan rage he had no notion of mortality. He had no interest in death. Though the blood ran in rivers that soaked the earth beneath him, turning it into dark, vital mud, the saurian devil showed no sign of faltering.
He watched with a growing chill as the megasaur’s eyes seemed to spark and splutter like molten iron running from a crucible. Its muscles tensed, gathering beneath it like gigantic coiling springs.
"Where the ****** are you, Tick?" Brutus grated into his comm channel, staring unflinchingly into Khaine’s murderous eyes. He smoothly disengaged the field inhibitors; no time for half measures or Hail Mary’s. If his cannon swallowed its own feedback like a ruinous Ourbouros, so be it.
His grip tightened on his controls…and then there was laughter.
Howls of derisive laughter.
“Whats the matter, MechWarrior?” Came a disembodied voice through his earpiece, with an accent that rolled and pitched and sprayed like a Viking longship on a frigid sea. "Lizards too much for you?"
"To your right", came the voice again an instant later, syllables buoyed upon a rolling sea of mirth.
Brutus’ reflexes kicked him to the right just in time. The wrathful monopedal monster was closer. Much closer. Animal instinct and a cubic meter of experimental drugs coursed through the behemoth’s blood stream, a toxic cocktail of street gosh and hate whipping its brain and body into rage-numbed horizontal velocity.
Brutus leveled his PPC and lashed the wounded creature again.
Closed loops of vivid current spun and danced, devouring one another in an orgy of creation and destruction, the Big Bang played simultaneously forward and in reverse, his weapon threatening implosion with each flicker of his status readout.
From this chaotic storm emerged a fulgurant bolt that ripped a blazing line down the Gorgorax’s flank, gouging a furrow of liquefied armor and snapping its head around from the sheer kinetic force of the blow.
“Stay down, you ******!”
He felt the vibration of massive footfalls rising up through his Thug as Khaine lunged again, but as he spun back to face his mortal foe he watched a tiny point of light, trailing a tiny tail of smoke, arc through the air and deposit a single armored...Tick...just over the crest of the nape of the rushing creature's neck.
“From hell's heart I stab at thee!" came the madman’s lusty roar, and at once a ruby glow appeared in the short space between the barrel of the Tick's small laser and the thick armor plating covering the megasaur's spine.
In the moment before Khaine was aware of his passenger, the gigantic saurian, as massive as any number of medium-class ‘mechs, barreled forward, the heavy, spiny plates welded onto the tip of its snout smashing into his Thug like a battering ram, spilling it onto its back.
Brutus lay there, dazed, the brown Circinian sky filled with a million little remote flying machines, to let the moneyed and impoverished alike gorge their appetites for carnage and spectacle. Would the fat bastards in penthouse suites, screaming at the top of their lungs, food spraying as they demanded he rise and fight, lose money on him? Would the stick-skinny little boys watch him die, crushed into the filth, and suffer the same fate in thrashing nightmares tonight? Would anyone remember his name?
Moments bled into moments, and he worked his controls as if time were standing still. The universe seemed to hold its breath, seemed to be watching with relish as, no doubt, the ancient devil drew nearer, licking its jagged maw, slavering in anticipation of a feast of Starslab and myomer and fusion and Brutus.
Time unraveled slowly, peacefully. With one remaining arm Brutus dragged his Thug back to its feet, fighting his traumatized gyroscope as it leapt and bucked in its chest. He expected to be smashed to pieces at any moment, to see the world darken as the jaws clamped tight around his cockpit and the fangs punched through.
But no.
Death did not come.
He stood swaying as the scene before him resolved and he understood what the Tick had done.
The mythical beast Khaine lay on his belly, head cocked to the side and silent, struggling to breathe as his one visible eye darted desperately from side to side, a flaming orb or wrath, once providing guidance to a vast and terrible being, now as ineffectual as a eunuch in a brothel. A faintly smoking black mark on the side of the creatures neck, highlighted by a small rivulet of red-hot steel, glowered beside the power armor trooper’s boot.
"Hey buddy" came a voice over the intercom, as the armored soldier gestured to Brutus' right.
The taste of metal sprang back to his mouth, and the hairs on the back of his neck leapt to attention as he swung his particle cannon back to the right.
If Brutus would taste metal, so would Gorgorax. He jammed his PPC into the thing’s mouth as it roared, and as he pulled the trigger with a snarl, his PPC winked out of existence.
The blast at this range was enough to vaporize everything inside of the creature's head with a hellish discharge of kinetic lightning. A flash of blinding light erupted from its now vacant eye sockets as if God himself had suddenly taken up residence in the creature's cranial vault.
And in a way, this is precisely what had happened, for power unimaginable in the form of an electrokinetic maelstrom had instantaneously ablated and fluoresced bone and brain matter alike, and in the luminous process, Gorgorax was transcended beyond the veil of baryonic existence.
It’s uninhabited carcass collapsed to the ground, greasy smoke reaching up for the heavens from a man-sized hole at the back of its head.
The fans would eat well tonight.
___
Later that night, Brutus stood in the heart of the sprawl, rain falling in a neon spray past the varicolored lights ringing the buildings. The huge arching gate of the Temple of the Meshugge, home of the Seventeen and their harem of groupies, yawned open before him, a dark invitation. Chains ran from high up the walls to the raised path before him which seemed to be a draw bridge, dropped open onto the street, a jaw no doubt eager to snap up the unworthy as he himself had nearly been devoured earlier in the day.
He walked down the short path, flanked by a gallery of ballistacrylic statues of armored soldiers and lithe forms, skin glittering, innards glowing, copulating in supernaturally athletic poses.
As he approached the portal, the world spattered with a million little scintillations of light-catching moisture, he flinched, felt his hand start reflexively for the needler pistol in his shoulder holster. One of the massive statues near the door had disengaged from the tangled limbs of the lecherous arcade and stood before him, arms crossed over a massive weapon he clearly knew he wouldn’t have to use.
Brutus had been wrong about them. Had been wrong about the Tick. Had been wrong about the Meshugge as a whole, perhaps. Certainly their reputation as, pound-for-pound, the most lethal combatants in all the Electrodrome, was at least partially deserved. the Tick had, after all, brought a 40-ton monster to the gates of hell with little more than a power claw and a small laser. God help any MechWarrior doomed to face the Tick in an unfair fight.
Better to eat crow than to feed it.
"I'm here to speak with the Tick."
(Posted originally on my blog at
www.godspargames.com)
