Transmat World: Chapter 32, Episode 2
Between the Membrane and the Rim of Harbinger in the vicinity of the arrows, Wednesday, December 8, 2145 A.D.
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“Wundee, is it possible that this Maxlux character has done the same thing, and is still out there somewhere waking up in a new body?”
Wundee looked stunned to hear this revelation because he stood there saying nothing. In reality, he was already communicating with Newlux.
Newlux, deactivate all surrendered strikemechs as soon as possible and give me a visual feed of this area from the air. Out loud he said, “You are correct, Maria. There is a possibility he acquired this technology. That is why I recommend we cut this meeting short and reconvene at — “
A sonic boom interrupted Wundee as Maxlux hurtled overhead and made a tight vertical loop. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out the loop ended where Wundee, Vince, and their respective parties were standing.
“Back to the ship!” yelled Vince, and they turned and ran. Ookie and Ferdinand, left hanging in midair, used thrusters to catch up.
Maxlux did a mid-air somersault and landed just yards from the See Lurchin’s hatch, blocking their way back. His clawed saucer-feet sank three feet into Rim soil. See Lurchin’, on her pyramid of slender quills, rocked back and forth from the impact. Ernesto, Maria, and Vince stopped so fast the hedbots overran them and had to maneuver like gnats to keep from being swatted by huge, swiping arms. Maxlux leaned forward so that the next swing would take out the three puny machines in front of him.
“Up!” roared Vince.
Maria was already in the air, but Vince and Ernesto were not far behind, their combined thrust creating a cloud of dust and detritus. They flight-trained at full Earth gravity. Now they over-throttled with the thrusters and zoomed away in the Rim’s one quarter gee.
With the humans out of the way, the freemechs were clear to fire. Missiles, projectiles and lasers converged on Maxlux. The missiles detonated against his stasis field armor, rocking him back a little in his twin landing pits but doing no damage. The projectiles and lasers bounced everywhere.
“No more lasers,” ordered Wundee, “The beams are more likely to reflect and deactivate us than Maxlux.”
Stasis cruiser 3n46 swung around to line up its rail gun on the mad machine. Maxlux leaped like a jumping spider to the tail of the cruiser, grabbed it by one of the horizontal guide fins used in atmospheric flight and began swinging the ship around faster and faster, all the time rising on his gravity generators. At a height of several yards, he turned and with a mighty wrench converted the horizontal swing of the ship to vertical and slammed it to the ground. Wundee and his crew had depleted their hard ammunition in the hope something would get through gaps in the stasis armor.
Maxlux made two more cruiser-shaped dents in the ground. A surprised crew was unprepared for those kinds of g-forces. There would be no reinforcements from the cruiser. One of the glass ingot shells for the rail gun blew. The front of the ship popped like a champagne cork, tumbling and digging furrows in the Rim topsoil until it hit a boulder and went spinning into the air with the sound of a five-ton wasp. The forward focused explosion caused the ship to gut-punch Maxlux before settling to the ground. He staggered back two steps and kicked the ship’s tail, sending it skittering and tumbling across the manufactured landscape. He turned and re-focused on the See Lurchin’.
The See Lurchin’ took flight half a second after Vince, Maria, and Ernesto took off. Besides removing See Lurchin’ from the line of fire, Enrique knew it would give him more directions to bob and weave in any three dimensional altercation. Being the perfectly safe way to travel, the See Lurchin’ had no offensive weapons. That rectification was now on several mental to-do lists. It was a precarious situation, and Enrique felt responsible for making sure it did not get worse. The hatch was open. He just needed to get them inside.
Of course, they all headed in different directions at maximum thrust. That didn’t help. Enrique could not use the ship to pick up one without leaving the others in the lurch, and Maxlux was coming up fast. Enrique waited until the last second to hit the thrusters hard. Julie was in an accelerator couch but not buckled in and lost her seat, grabbing for deck railing to hang on. Furboten and Rousseau scrambled for a purchase. They wound up hugging the rubberized deck grating with every appendage, including Furboten’s tail.
Wundee and his crew were circling the situation, but there was nothing they could do. They would just be wasting their current bodies to take on the Prime Mechanical.
“Chrome, Circuit, check the cruiser for survivors or weapons,” said Wundee. “Survivors with weapons might be too much to ask for.”
Even after such mistreatment, the cruiser looked pristine except for the gaping hole in the bow. Such was the wonder of stasis field construction. The freemechs sped toward it.
Ernesto, Vince and Maria aborted an early attempt to converge with See Lurchin’ when they realized that convergence might include Maxlux. Vince knew this frenzied, dethroned hierarch could get rid of See Lurchin’ by the simple act of slapping the end of one of its tubes. He pulled the small, alien-looking antimatter pistol from its holster on his hip and drew a bead on the monster. Like a cat looking for which way the mouse went, Maxlux stopped in mid-air when See Lurchin’ dodged his charge. Neither freemech nor See Lurchin’ was too close to Vince or each other. It was a perfect opportunity to use the weapon. He pulled the trigger. The pistol-shaped missile launcher locked onto its target. A tiny thing no bigger than a ballpoint pen with an invisible tail of carbon dioxide from Earth gave chase to a target a million times its size.
By now, Maxlux had relocated his own target and was moving steadily toward See Lurchin’. Enrique tried to maintain distance between his ship and the shiny nightmare, all the while punching in new jump codes for the shortest Transmat jumps in history. He was punching in instructions so hard and fast, the spring-loaded control consoles looked like upside down speed bags at the boxing gym.
“Watch out for the flash,” warned Vince as the missile closed in on its target.
The missile struck Maxlux on one of his arms, and there was an anti-climactic non-flash. The segment of stasis armor the antimatter missile made contact with simply vanished along with the missile, exposing hydraulics and universal joints. Maxlux stopped for a second in his charge of the See Lurchin’ to glance at the gap in his armor and then continued.
Vince once more lined up the sights of the small weapon with the image of the run-amok machine. He pulled the trigger three times in succession, emptying the small magazine. It was one of the few weapons that didn’t have a Transmat reload mechanism. He thought just one missile would be needed to settle a dispute. The other three were luxurious back-ups.
