The Gun Golems (Approaching Infinity Book 2) Read online

  At the Emperor’s command, Kalkin was sent to aid in the evacuation and the three new Shades were released to fight. Elza Steinz invoked the Crush Box, going Dark and transforming into a forty-meter giant of pure energy. She flew skyward to meet the enemy there.

  Forbis Vays pressed the fingers of his right hand to his breast, to the place where the Titan Star lie permanently fixed to his being. In a flash he was transformed, but had one the speed of perception to observe the process, one might see the living metal burst forth in squares and sheets, meshing together, spreading, creating a matrix until the bright, gleaming armor was complete, a hermetically sealed shell, with the hilt of the Titan Saber forming the distinctive horn adorning the helmet.

  Jav Holson bent slightly, drawing his shoulders forward and hunching his back. Then, similarly hidden from the naked eye by impossible speed, a huddle of spectral shapes exploded outward from his spine, like the spilt contents of an overripe womb. As the shapes began to separate, the gravity of his being caught them, and they slowed to a momentary stop before snapping back into place variously about his body. The Kaiser Bones covered him now and Jav was like an animate skeleton, inky black where the bones were absent.

  Both Jav and Vays sprinted towards the metal figure on the ground, which was now being surrounded by other Shades and competition participants.

  Proud and confident, Somner Faiks fell upon the metal figure from behind, landing the full power of his Nine Order Diamond Palm on the back of its head with the force of over thirteen thousand kilograms. The figure jerked forward, stumbling. Though cracks had shot through its head, it righted itself almost immediately and turned. Faiks tried to catch the gun as it came around, but it broke his arms and crushed through his ribs like an I-beam. Then the face gun fired and took his head apart piece by piece.

  “Bal kom nis kar ahn! Kii soh nis kar ahn!” Lara Bester shouted. She flashed, almost impossible to see, towards Faiks’s killer, but her kicks had no effect.

  Beilan Sappertine wrapped the arm-thick psychic tentacle that sprang from his forehead about the metal attacker, but he could not crush—or even move—it. The face gun flared, tracking along the tentacle, shredding it all the way until reaching its source and destroying it.

  Unreasonably certain that they were vulnerable from behind, Raiber Haas leapt at the implacable enemy’s back with mantis claws whistling through the air. The built-up pressure blades that preceded his fingers failed to cut through the metal they struck, however, and his fingers crumpled into bloody, twisted shapes, shining with white knots of exposed bone. The big pistol swung around and disgorged its payload, making a hole of Haas’s entire torso from his lower jaw to the line of his waist.

  This was all happening in seconds, but everyone was wondering the same thing: how had Faiks done so much damage with one punch when no one else so far was able to scratch it?

  The shiny black form of Cov Merasec, Dark with the power of the Fugue Inducer, produced a sickle in each hand and stepped up beside one of his fellow retirees. Isker Vays, sheathed in the Jaaku Thorns, looked like a tough, living plant, ringed with thick spines and cabled with fibrous muscle in various dark shades of green. He held a thin, whip-like foil that had no guard and that looked like little more than a tapering reed.

  “Just like old times, eh Vays?” Merasec said.

  “I’m not sure what times you remember, but I never remember the enemy getting so close or any single one of them being so strong.” He shouted to the competitors now, “Your help is appreciated, but no one is to throw his or her life away! Retreat with the rest into the Root Palace!”

  Gast Froster had been about to engage the enemy himself, but stopped short at Isker Vays’s words. He looked with uncertainty from Vays to Merasec, and asked, “Teacher?”

  Reluctantly Merasec nodded and, using the Fugue Inducer, he began to multiply. He rose up into the air as a small but growing army and shouted down, “Help’s coming Vays, but we’re light up top!”

  “Understood!” Vays said, moving towards the silver figure.

  The remaining competitors gathered up the wounded and dead as much as was possible and retreated.

  Abanastar had found Cranden, whose Gate Crown enabled him to create nearly impregnable, interdimensional vaults. Together they worked on eliminating the danger posed by the female cannon high above, invisible to most. Abanastar produced a series of floating lenses in tandem, each of differing size and thickness, and through which both he and Cranden could clearly see the gleaming female figure. He picked up a rock the size of a hen’s egg and threw it through the telescope-like arrangement of lenses. The rock became a white streak, with its velocity and density increased many times over by the multiple lenses, and struck the alien female full in the face. Stunned by the attack, it didn’t move for a moment and with a nod from Abanaster, Cranden began to construct a prison around it, which would, at least temporarily, remove it as a threat.

  Compared to Furst, Merasec was a clumsy flier and required his Artifact to remain airborne, but he could get where he needed to go and fill the air with hundreds of independent copies of himself. There was no way those silver robots or whatever they were could stand before his Fugue Army.

  Laedra Hol was now rising into the sky, the visor of her stylized helmet flashing with data like a head-up display. She couldn’t exactly fly, but that didn’t limit her to the ground. Using the Charging Fork, which could boost any number of attributes exponentially, she supplemented her mastery of Approaching Infinity theory, singling out individual molecules of air from which to spring so that she climbed ladder-like towards the four silver figures who continued unloading their deadly firepower alternately into the Root Palace and into the crowd below. When she reached the first, she struck savagely and repeatedly and made the metal man bob and twist like a marionette. She then paused for a moment, considering the apparent ineffectiveness of her attack. She easily dodged a pistol shot, then a second as Furst came up beside her.

  “I’ve never seen anything like them,” he said.

  Hol shook her head, almost pouting. “They can’t be invulnerable.”

  A mob of Cov Merasecs had reached the level of the enemy and began to engage them. His countless sickles clanged off the gleaming metal, leaving no marks—and making no difference. The face guns flared and pistols roared and Merasec, as many of him as there were, fell again and again, almost as easily as Tia’s gene soldiers had. His Artifact provided a defense far superior to the gene soldiers’ hides, and he wasn’t torn apart bodily as they had been, but the shells were getting through and the copies were dying. Even if Merasec himself were killed, as long as one of his copies remained alive he was in no real danger. So, to the extent of his endurance, he would push the Fugue Inducer to produce more and more copies and push these invaders to their own limits.

  Isker Vays was lithe, quick, and agile, avoiding the face gun and the pistol shots, but wherever those shots went people were in danger. He began to realize on some level that the Root Palace was, too. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying, either. His Willow Sword could cut through stone—could cut through steel—and that was without the empowering Single Element Ghost Sword technique. Using the technique, he had encountered nothing that could withstand his blade—until now.

  It was perhaps too soon, but he had no choice; his strikes were having no effect. He held his Willow Sword at his chest, took a deep breath, and concentrated on the blade, which began to hum with power. He dodged more gunfire and moved into position.

  “Union Blade!” he shouted.

  His Willow Sword bent and was exactly like a reed against steel upon his opponent’s chest. Nothing. And his gamble cost him. The face gun fire blasted into his own face driving him back and drawing one streamer of blood.

  Jav and Forbis Vays arrived now. The latter cried out, too late to protect his father as a pistol shot opened up a bright red wound through the fibrous shell of the Jaaku Thorns.

  An accomplished student of both Laedra Hol
and Kimbal Furst, Jav utilized Approaching Infinity theory, or AI, to launch himself into the metal invader. But, before he could use that same AI to make his kick many times more deadly than it normally would have been, the pistol barrel swung his way with its muzzle flaring. From within the Kaiser Bones, Jav saw events with perfect clarity, and it was because he knew the lethal power of those shells that he was able to teleport out of harm’s way. Also relying on AI, this displacement was a kind of conditioned reflex he could invoke when knowingly facing life-threatening danger and it was a skill unique to Jav alone. He marveled now at the new degree of control the Kaiser Bones allowed him. He placed himself directly behind his opponent, his momentum completely unaffected, and continued through, using AI to substantially augment his kick as he originally intended. On impact more cracks shot through his target’s head, neck, and upper torso as the metal man was sent headlong and skidding into the rocky ground.

  Forbis Vays tended to his father who coughed and writhed in pain, clutching at his lost left eye and at the glaring red hole in his side.

  Elza Steinz, crackling with semi-solid energy, snatched one of the silver attackers roughly from the air in a hand that enveloped it and cast it down like a small child displeased with a toy. The metal figure struck the hard ground and bounced sickeningly. Elza rose up further and grabbed another, ignoring the disquieting—impossible?—pain of the pistol shots and face gun fire that passed through her transformed, immaterial body. This second one she took in both hands and squeezed, but, as she clamped her huge yellow-orange hands together ever tighter, her glowing outline began to shimmer, to distort—and finally to shrink. More and more effort went into the act of crushing, and her giant form continued to recede, until eventually retreating entirely back into her. A fused, uneven sphere of charred and smoking metal hung in the air before her, but as the light of her power went out, she lost consciousness, and together with the sphere, she began to fall.

  Barson was tired of watching the metal men stand against his fellow Shades as if they were nothing. Gran Kwes loomed above the one Jav had kicked away and which was already standing again. Barson jumped down from his Gran and began to beat the alien as no one had so far been able to. Each punch rang out like the tolling of a sonorous bell and sent the gleaming metal man reeling so that it could not bring its pistol to bear. Face gun fire lashed out, but wasn’t strong enough to pierce Barson’s Dark armor. Finally, he grabbed it by the face, stopping up the barrels there, and punched it savagely in the chest. The head remained in his hand, but the body flew, limbs splayed and lifeless, until it hit the courtyard wall where it sunk as if into soft, yielding clay instead of the resin-hardened, indurate wood of the Vine.

  Kalkin had been helping the civilians get safely out of the courtyard, occasionally protecting them from the rogue gene soldier who was, due to defect, made unstable by the Coordinator’s psychic network, but when the metal invader flung down by Elza Steinz crashed down a few meters in front of him his priorities changed. He had not yet transformed into his Artifact-powered state, as the sight of it would have hindered rather than helped the evacuation. But now that the enemy, stirring from its nest of rubble, was before him, he had no reason to hold back.

  “Fuhai Keshin!” he cried, summoning the power of the Contamination Pump.

  His body swelled as if he were taking a deep breath, but he grew and expanded to a thick, top-heavy height of three meters and nearly all trace of humanity abandoned him. Fully Dark now, he was a livid bruise given life, a purple and blue monstrosity shot occasionally with bright red arterial cords. His head, almost indistinguishable from his wide, fleshy shoulders, held a single, filmy white eye, like a pearl in an oyster, large and markedly off center.

  Through the power of his Artifact, Lor Kalkin was an animate, thriving cancer, lusty in its own unstoppable drive for survival, but the diametric opposite for those at whom he directed his attention.

  Kalkin reigned in his power to prevent his natural defense, a debilitating stench, from escaping into the air. It would only cause trouble for the evacuees, and besides, he wanted to gather his power, to make every cancerous cell in his body work to expunge this enemy that had come without warning.

  He walked towards the silver figure, which had gained its feet and was raising its pistol. The face gun started spilling out shells and the pistol boomed. Moving still forward, Kalkin could ignore the machine gun. The projectiles merely ripped small holes that closed soon after opening. The pistol, however, was another matter. In addition to the incredible shock of impact, Kalkin felt the same thing that Kimbal Furst and Elza Steinz had: uncomfortable pressure that hinted at oblivion. Having reached his opponent, though, he stretched out a big, powerful arm and gripped the barrel of the pistol, twisting it away from himself.

  The metal figure attempted to punch Kalkin, and, though its left arm penetrated the sick, purple flesh up to its shoulder, it threw its head back as if in a silent scream. It tried several times to yank its arm back, to free it of the poisonous hold of Kalkin’s body, and finally, Kalkin allowed it to retrieve its limb.

  Stumbling back from its sudden release, the metal figure found its pistol also freed and leveled it at Kalkin. However, the pistol was no longer whole. It was dripping with what looked like jellied rust. It bubbled and suppurated as its length bent, unable to support its own softening and rapidly decomposing mass. Great glops of wet ooze hit the ground and steamed with a rank, stomach-crushing odor.

  The figure cast the remains of its pistol away and then regarded its left hand. The fingers were falling away, one by one, sizzling and bubbling, affected just as the gun had been. Holding its ground, though certainly doomed, the figure directed its face gun at Kalkin once again and again it had no effect.

  Kalkin was through toying with it. He jumped back with agility incongruous with his size and shape and thrust his arms forward.

  “Fuhai Hadou!” he cried.

  From Kalkin’s hands shot forth visible turbulence that fouled the air and enveloped his opponent. Under this unremitting onslaught, the figure’s luster instantly dulled. Its limbs twisted and curled and shrunk as if afflicted by some supernatural wasting disease, an aggressive form of directed leprosy that didn’t care if you were alive or dead, flesh or steel, organic or inorganic.

  Kalkin had seen how strong these unknown enemies were, but he was shocked nonetheless at how much energy he was having to expend to destroy just one of them. All Shades had power, but it differed according to their gifts and further by the nature of their Artifacts. Kalkin’s power was destruction, basic and raw, and that power was being challenged as it never had been before.

  He heaved and shook in near-exhaustion, resting his grotesque hands upon his knees and regarded the puddle of indeterminate matter before him. It was still decomposing and would be reduced to nothing eventually, but he stared at it as if it might spring back whole into being and begin its attack all over again.

  Laedra Hol realized something when she saw Elza Steinz finish off one of the invaders. It was really quite simple, she thought, as she rushed down to save Elza from her fall. Putting her into the care of some of the evacuees, Hol rushed back into the air, avoiding thunderous pistol shots and raining machine gun fire.

  As she climbed, she saw that Merasec’s Fugue Army was steadily being cut down, that they were providing the enemy with nothing but targets. She shouted to the Merasec nearest her, “Cov! You’ve reached your limit! Are there any of you that haven’t been injured?” Her tone made her words like a reprimand. She wanted to say more, wanted to tell him what he should have realized already, that they needed a heavy concentration of power, not a light blanket of it.

  Though Merasec was proud, similar words from Kimbal Furst to another copy farther away were excuse enough for him to withdraw. He shouted out his apologies and began his retreat.

  Hol continued upwards toward Furst. When she got within earshot, she told him what she intended to do and suggested that he try the same.


  “It’s the only thing that’s worked, Kim,” she said. “If it takes exhausting your Artifact and it works, then it’s worth it.”

  “It’s the amount of time required that worries me, Laedra. Be careful.”

  She smiled and launched herself towards one enemy while Furst rushed towards the other.

  Hol bounded through the air, evading the pistol shots that sought her. As she got closer, though, she could not avoid the face gun entirely. Several small red blooms opened upon the dark of her body suit, but they did not stop her. She leapt and twisted and pounced upon her foe, using the Sky Fisher Claw. She landed upon the figure from behind, squatting with a foot on each shoulder and both hands clenching the silver head. The Charging Fork jutting from the brow of her helmet screamed out in sudden and furious use. Unimaginable strength flowed into Hol’s already potent fingers as the Charging Fork added more and more. AI multiplied that strength to even higher, mind-staggering degrees, working towards the long-coming but inevitable climax of closing her fingers into fists. About each hand, points of light began to trace the familiar atomic-model patterns and space became distorted. From Hol, a low growl built into a howl of determination and peaked as her fingers rent the smooth shape and shattered it with the sharp, lingering sound of tinkling metal shards.

  Furst knew that his Taikou Flash was insufficient, but that the answer remained tied to the Taikou Fire. He charged the invader, heedless of its attacks and flew into it, stopping immediately once inside. The silver figure dropped its pistol to its side, unsure of how to proceed. It looked around in confusion, and then turned around searching for Furst, certain that the Shade was very close.