40. Courage and Cowardice

San Teodoro Peninsula, Vidako

Imperium Stellarum
November 1, 2847

Arc was only half-aware of the first spiked terror staggering backward from the force of Vijay Iyer’s assault. Ten tons of sophisticated alloy in a very unsophisticated form sent the xenobeast careening through a second tent, tearing the polyvinyl walls and sealing down around it as it fell onto its back.

But Arc’s lasers weren’t kinetic weapons, and they carried no weight at all. They burned through the left shoulder of the second cornibus, leaving a blackened, cauterized wound in their wake once they’d flickered out, but they didn’t knock the monster off its feet.

I might have picked the wrong weapon, Arc realized, as the monster threw its head back and let out a roar, then charged directly at his Tyro.

I’m not confident the autocannon rounds will pierce that thing’s hide, Iceni told him.

“Time to find out,” Arc muttered. He turned his mech to the left and began to circle, so that the charging predator’s back would be to the jungle, and not the tents where the drug runners were still trying to take shelter. The cornibus was coming too quickly for him to wait for his targeting systems to lock on, so he simply dropped his targeting reticule right at the monster’s center of mass, selected full automatic fire, and squeezed his trigger.

Tracer rounds burned through the air, drawing twin converging lines from the shoulders of the Tyro to the torso of the cornibus, but the succession of rapid impacts didn’t slow the monster’s approach in the slightest. One of its enormous, backward curving back spikes was blown clean off, leaving a jagged, broken stump, and then it slammed into Arc’s mech, bearing him backward and down to the ground. The wire-frame outline of his mech flashed between green and yellow at the torso, indicating damage to the rear ceramic armor which had taken the brunt of the impact.

The cornibus followed Arc’s mech down, pinning him there, then lowered its head and sunk its massive snout-horn into the bicep of his mech’s right arm—the same arm which held his rifle. With a toss of the head, the spiked terror tore the entire limb off the Tyro, flinging it high overhead.

I hope it doesn’t hit anyone we were trying to save when it lands. Arc realized that kind of thought, and the urge to laugh, were probably signs of panic or hysteria. That horn would be coming for his cockpit next, he was certain, and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot that he could do about it. He’d promised Cassie that he wasn’t going to end up like Blake Van Camp, pulled out of a ruined mech and loaded onto a stretcher. Now it looked like he might actually be in even worse condition, when they got him to the academy. Maybe even in a body bag.

Was this what Phoebe felt like, right before she died? Arc wondered. Did she even have time to know it was coming? He felt, in that moment, very foolish for ever promising Cassie that he would come back to her. It was a promise made out of the illusion of control.

The cornibus reared up, then lowered its head, but before it could gore his mech again, a beam of cerulean light shot right across its face from off to one side, leaving a blackened scar and the smoking ruin of an empty eye socket once the light had faded. The creature shook its head, maddened by pain, and roared again.

“Get up, Sandhurst,” Christina Fortin said, her voice coming through clear over Arc’s comms with only a hint of crackling static. “Khan’s pulled a runner and Iyer’s busy with the other one. We’ve got to take this thing out ourselves.”

Options. Arc sorted and discarded them one after the other, in the space between heartbeats. It was clear his autocannons didn’t have the force behind them that would be necessary to blow the spiked terror back off his mech. His shoulder mounted lasers would be even worse. He’d lost one arm and his rifle, which meant he was missing his best weapon and half the grasp he might use to wrestle the thing. That seemed like a suicidal tactic even with two fully-functioning arms. What did he have left? He could always head-butt the monster.

The plasma sword.

It came to him in a moment of clarity so sharp, so distinct that it was like a lightning bolt to the skull. The only reason Arc could think that he hadn’t considered it before was that he’d only had Ramírez attach one to the mech’s back to keep Cassie happy, and that he’d never actually intended to use it.

Arc reached back with the Tyro’s left arm, grasped the handle of the plasma blade, and felt Iceni release the magnetic lock that secured it to the mech’s chassis. Above him, the cornibus shook its head once more, then looked down, focusing its one remaining eye on the mech pinned beneath its front claws. It wasn’t hard to imagine what was going through the predator’s head: something had wounded it badly, and it was going to rip and tear and batter at its enemy until there was nothing left to hurt it again.

Arc brought the left hand of his mech right up beneath the beast’s chin and activated the plasma blade. A line of brilliant white light, edged in purplish-blue at the edges, pierced the cornibus’s throat and extended up through the crown of its skull, humming and smoking as the flesh and blood of the beast burned away. For a moment, the body remained upright, stiff and unmoving. Then, Arc drew up one leg of his Tyro, set his foot against its bulk, and managed to roll the enormous carcass aside.

You realize that you’re going to need to tell your girlfriend that her insistence on adding a plasma blade to your loadout just saved your life, Iceni pointed out.

“Our lives,” Arc grumbled. He rolled the mech onto its feet and stood, keeping the lit plasma blade in his left hand. The balance of the training mech was all off, with the right side, where it was now missing an arm, so much lighter than the left that he had to pay careful attention to how he moved. “Remember, your hardware occupies the same real estate as my brain. This head gets cracked open, and you’re going with me.”

Trust me, I am well aware.

“Sound off,” Vijay Iyer’s voice came over the comms. Arc saw, through the visual feed from his mech’s head-mounted sensors, that the older cadet’s club was sunk so deep into the skull of the beast he’d been fighting that the handle jutted up into the air at an angle, like a half-fallen tree. Iyer’s Janissary had acquired a few claw-rents in the torso armor, but overall he seemed to have come through the fight in much better shape than Arc had.

“Fortin here. No damage. Ran my battery down to seventy-six percent, though,” the other pilot reported. “That’s one battery just about entirely drained.” Arc hadn’t fully considered just how quickly using adaptive camouflage armor in combat burned through an Outrider’s reserves, until just that moment.

“We’ll hot swap one of mine,” Iyer said. While the smaller mechs only carried four solid state batteries each, his fifty-five ton Janissary was loaded with six. “Sandhurst? You alright there?”

“Lost my right arm and took some damage to my armor when I fell,” Arc said, surprised at just how calm his voice sounded. “Other than that, I’m fine—just down a rifle.”

“You seem to have made up for it with the sword, though.” Iyer sighed. “Khan’s probably halfway back to Academy Hill by now. Fortin, I need you to get up to some high ground—the best elevation you can find—and call back. We’re going to need Sakers loaded with medical teams and salvage crews out here, as soon as they can get in the air. And someone’s going to have to round up Khan before he gets himself lost in the jungle.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Affirmative,” Christina said, and turned her Outrider about, guiding it out of the clearing at a fast jog. “I’ll be back once I’ve made contact.”

“Sandhurst, I want you to cover me while I get out and talk to the survivors,” Iyer ordered. “I don’t expect any trouble after all that, but you never know. A warning shot from your autocannons should settle down anyone who gets out of line but do not, I repeat, do not actually shoot anyone without my express order. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Arc said. He turned off the plasma blade in his mech’s right hand, secured it to the back of the chassis by engaging the magnetic locks, and shifted his machine around so that he could keep the entire clearing in view, with his back to the jungle. Once he’d moved, he actually noticed the severed arm of his Tyro, still clutching the rifle, where it had fallen on one of the parked grav-trucks, crushing the vehicle.

Vijay Iyer’s cockpit opened, plates of ceramic armor withdrawing like spreading ribs, and a moment later Arc saw the rope ladder descend, unrolling as it went. Iyer climbed down easily, and made his way over to where the survivors huddled around the dead and the wounded. Arc wasn’t certain he could have done the same—at least, not so confidently.

All of a sudden, he felt very, very tired. His heartbeat was so loud that he couldn’t hear anything happening down on the ground, and Arc’s hands shook so violently that he had to let go of his control sticks because he was afraid that otherwise he’d accidentally squeeze a trigger. He realized that his uniform was soaked through with sweat, and he felt like he couldn’t get his breath.