The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Read online

  Four times In succession, Raohan La heard the terrible cry which had signaled the end of his people on present-day Stolom. Each of the Godsorts entered into the High Formation and Hostur Kossigou’s machine looked undamaged now, as if it had somehow healed during the transformation. Raohan La shook his head at this. The Godsorts’ power was a boon he welcomed, but he still couldn’t help but be disgusted. As this thought passed through his head, he was quite sure that the getnium rays were affecting his brain in any number of other ways besides just fouling his mood in spite of the positive turn.

  The Godsorts handled the alien monstrosities with relative ease now. The composite man had been reduced to his constituent parts and the ground now teemed with thousands of polished, faceless dolls of fake wood. These swarmed over those of the La clan still standing and in control of their own faculties. Many were broken or dashed to splinters. There was one among them that appeared to be far stronger, their leader most likely, and from his back issued countless spectral lines connecting him to the others, which were obviously his puppets. Some of these lines waved freely, seeking out members of the La clan. Occasionally, lines would stick but each time they did, Raohan La lost another of his dwindling number of fellows. It was as if contact with the spectral lines allowed an inrush of getnium poisoning.

  Hostur Kossigou had hollowed out the tusked charger with a Getnium Flare, but its master proved to be more difficult to eliminate. He was extraordinarily large for a human and seemed to be possessed of a sickness that actually enhanced him physically. Raohan La knew that these humans were girded by the alien plant, having taken a portion of it into their bodies, but was constantly amazed by the variety of powers they displayed. This one brought lightning down, and with each strike, the ground shook and disgorged animate corpses. More puppets.

  The shining silver knight had returned as well, but he appeared to have his sword and his durability as his only resources, though neither of these were meager.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, the Godsorts dealt just as effectively with those of the La clan afflicted by the unseen psychic woman’s compulsion. They used their Getnium Flares without hesitation, blowing holes in Suhim La and Koros La, liquefying Dacan La.

  This saddened Raohan La, and angered him as well. He couldn’t help but feel that these offshoots of the Kossig line were enjoying the slaughter they brought to his fellows. The cracked kernel of his hatred for humanity grew a little more, but he forced his thoughts into order. He renewed his efforts upon the Vine, happy at least that Siskus La remained alive and able to aid him. They’d established a grip upon the base, but further compression was proving difficult because of fatigue, or the getnium interference, or active and unidentifiable resistance from the plant itself. Nerve twinges began to erupt variously, signaling his body’s failing ability to support his mind. It couldn’t end like this. It just couldn’t.

  • • •

  Black. Cramped and everywhere sharp. That beautiful face suddenly expanding and—

  The jolting image brought an involuntary spasm and fresh, raw pain lanced severally from uniform confinement. Blue-white light began to shine with returning consciousness. The image of the girl wouldn’t go away, but it was jumbled with another image now, that of a girl having a knife driven through her temple.

  Hope was dead, murdered for the last time, leaving a vast chasm filled with nothing but boundless anger. The anger raged and seethed and rose and fell, but mostly rose, swelling to the limits of consciousness and sometimes spilling out. A singular outlet presented itself: the possibility of revenge.

  Jav stirred in the close casket of the Godsort’s forearm. He didn’t know how or why he’d survived. The gas jet sphere should have killed him as it had the girl, but animal survival instincts had prompted him to grip the delivery antenna and ride it back inside the machine. His skin had been raked and nearly ripped from him wholly when the antenna returned to its primary housing. The peeling action squeezed him into a space barely able to occupy his mass.

  Countless gashes wept blood endlessly, but despite the loss, strength suffused him. Perhaps it was the anger or some other unknown resource girding his muscles. He didn’t care. Through the rage and constant, recurring image of the exploding girl, one thought persisted: revenge. That and the occasional recollection of a promise to destroy the source of the green light. He remembered the promise first when he realized that he was the source of the blue-white light filling the tight space. He didn’t know what the blue-white light was and didn’t care. The light flared with his will and he pushed forward through metal plates and cables, bending or snapping them, and finding nothing strong enough to bar his way.

  He worked his way up the arm, squirming like an eel through the elbow joint and making his way to the radial spindle that connected the shoulder to the torso. He left a wet trail of blood as he went, suffering countless more cuts, but his initial gashes had begun to heal already. Of this he was not consciously aware. He only knew that he was going to bend this machine to his will and use it to kill as many people as possible, to destroy as much as his endurance allowed.

  Through wires, plates, and support struts his prey finally became visible. Occupying a cavity in the Godsort’s chest was the pilot. He wore a tank-top which exposed his reddened shoulders and upper arms. His arms were inserted up to the elbows into sleeve-sockets which were connected to a track that encircled the cockpit by a complex but spindly articulated assembly. The pilot stood in the middle of this and wore boots similar to the arm sockets, but the articulation armatures were somehow confined to directly below him. The pilot had his helmeted head bowed and was panting.

  Slippery with blood, Jav pressed and pulled himself through the machinery, careful not to disturb the track and its surrounding mechanisms as he neared them. The pilot looked up, conscious of movement behind the myriad, interwoven layers of mechanization, and flinched in surprise when he actually saw the ragged apparition Jav had become.

  The Godsort responded exactly as the pilot had, jostling Jav from his position. Jav gripped a strut to steady himself and left a perfect impression of the inside of his closed fist. He pulled himself from the last veil of metal and cables, lunged forward, and took the pilot’s head in his hands.

  The pilot was not weak. He was in peak physical condition, used to the rigors of combat, but not under more than, at most, ten standard gravities. His machine did most of the work for him. Even without the aid of the Kaiser Bones, Jav had been regularly training under thirty standard gravities for a century now.

  • • •

  “Stol! Stol! You got him,” Enzo said. “He’s dead. Now help me with this giant snake. My initialization system’s offline and I’m having a little trouble with just the one arm.”

  Stol’s Godsort stirred, turned towards Enzo’s. With this simple movement, the skeleton snake became docile and unwound itself from its prey, retreating just far enough away to continue to be a threat.

  “What the. . . Stol? Are you okay?” But nothing could have prepared Enzo for the response he received.

  Stol’s Godsort moved with greater speed than Enzo had ever seen or thought possible. Its clawed hands struck in rapid succession, like a volley of missiles, but he only saw the first and the last of it.

  The Godsort’s two hands together darted forth to catch, twist, and remove Enzo’s Godsort’s head, eliminating all the sensory data collection and processing systems. Everything but the useless Kossig engine at Enzo’s back went dark. Next he felt the left arm connection go slack and he knew that his Godsort’s remaining arm now decorated the lawn below. Several strikes to the chest area pulled away steel to expose the pilot’s nest. The last things Enzo saw were giant fingers driving through the cockpit, pressing him back, and closing around him and the Kossig engine.

  • • •

  Green fire erupted spectacularly, squeezing out from the inside of Jav’s closed fist, or what now doubled for it. He released his grip and pulled his hand from the Godsort�
��s chest and watched in fascination as the green fire raged to gut the machine in seconds, leaving only the bottom half, its torn, ragged waist smoldering feverishly.

  Jav occupied the pilot rig. Everything was draped thick with gore. Congealed blood wormed down machinery to pool in unseen recesses. Chunks of meat of varying size, some with glaring white centers, clung to almost every accessible surface surrounding him, but nothing larger than a handful of the original occupant remained. The green light of the Godsort’s power source was steady and took most of the color out of the blood. Despite the light, the cockpit was relatively dark, and only the whites of Jav’s wild eyes stood out upon his painted form.

  He turned to the Godsort stilled in the act of killing the girl. The image flashed in his head. It came like thunder each time, like a hammer striking his forehead. He banished the urge to vomit again, and lashed out with a high roundhouse kick to take the inert machine’s head clean off its shoulders. The head rocketed towards the fortress, impacting into wall and sinking to half its thickness into the heavy concrete before loosing from its place and crashing to the ground below. Human soldiers were pouring out of the building now. Some were crushed by the head or the crumbled concrete that rained down from the crater, but Jav ignored them. The green light that shone through the hole the head had made intrigued him. What had the girl said? Destroy the source of the green light? There would be time for that, but there were better sources of vengeful solace at hand.

  He focused on the other Godsorts. . . and the dyna sores. He grinned through the sticky glaze that covered his face—and every bit of his naked body—at the red-tinted screen before him. So many wonderful things upon which to vent his rage.

  Despite the endless replay of the exploding girl in his head and the fresh toll it took on him with each intrusion, he decided to walk, rather than run, towards the remaining skirmishes. In this machine, he knew he could not lose, but even if his adrenalin was providing him with a false sense of assurance, the pilot’s final words—attempted final words—had shown him the way to further resources. He didn’t know if the words actually would have benefited the pilot or if their utterance was just a reflexive response to danger. In any case, resources abounded. They were all around him, just waiting to be tapped.

  He’d forced himself to walk, but as he approached and saw the ease with which the Godsorts were dealing with. . . What were they? His friends? Is that what he considered them? Part of him embraced this notion. Another part of him was outraged by it. Either way, his ego and bloodlust both were asserting themselves, overshadowing all else. He broke into a run, sprang surprisingly lightly into the air for a machine so massive, and reflexively performed the calculations for the Kaiser Kick, which translated seamlessly through his Godsort’s perceptions.

  One of them chanced to see the approach and the strange flash of motion, calling out sharply, “Hostur!”

  The kick landed upon the target machine’s chest, exactly where Jav knew the pilot’s compartment to be. The Godsort’s torso exploded into a cloud of obsidian glitter, its legs, no longer connected to anything, fell back and away from each other, spinning from the residual force, and sinking thunk-thunk into the ground.

  “Mother Stolom! Stol, what have you done?” Barlo Kossigan cried.

  “I don’t think that’s Stol,” Samas Kossigus replied with cold detachment. “Check his readings. They’re off the scale and don’t resemble Stol’s in the slightest. Besides, no readings at all from Enzo or Temmus. Somehow, I think we’re dealing with a hijacker.”

  “We must be,” Karstus Kossigan said, turning away from having pounded Forbis Vays into the ground with a Getnium Flare, the silver armor of the Titan Star, running like hot wax in places to expose the man within. “That’s how we must treat this.”

  “What about the La clan?” Samas said.

  Karstus’s Godsort glanced briefly to the giant reptiles, most of which were were either fighting amongst themselves or succumbing to getnium poisoning. “They can wait. Who knows, they may be finished with each other by the time we’re done.”

  The three Godsorts regrouped and approached Jav in his. Jav stood stock-still over the ruin of Hostur’s machine, somehow radiating cool anticipation if a machine could be said to do so.

  “Check your blood levels,” Karstus said. “It wouldn’t do to pass out at the critical moment.”

  “Fine here,” said Samas.

  “Check,” called Barlo.

  “Right. With me, now,” Karstus said. “High Formation!” And the three Godsorts were like three gods.

  But Jav Holson had mastered the Eighteen Heavenly Claws, perhaps better than style’s originator, and now employed it on a scale never before seen. The Godsorts were strong and their pilots seasoned, but Jav was a man obsessed with vengeance. His reflexes were lightning fast under thirty standard gravities. Here on Stolom, where the gravity was roughly one and a half times the standard, he had a decided advantage as those reflexes, along with his prodigious strength, translated proportionally through his Godsort. So he laughed as the three came at him with their continent-shaking strikes.

  Getnium Flares went unused. They were essentially harmless to Godsorts, unless the internal recycling system was damaged or somehow overloaded. No, this would be a physical fight, and Jav had no intention of losing. Nor did he show signs of doing so. He managed to defend himself against all three assailants, but had to concede to stalemate under the current conditions—they, like Stol, were accustomed to roughly ten standard gravities due to their combat training and experience. He could easily last the three minutes it would take for the other Godsorts’ systems to power down, but he had no intention of doing that either. He started to laugh again and the sound unnerved his opponents. What undid them wholly, however, was what they heard next and the resulting effect.

  Jav’s laughter rolled to a halt and a terrible silence prevailed, but only momentarily. He cried out, “High Formation!” and the suspended pumps went to work, drawing the thick, half-dried blood from wherever it came most easily.

  The others saw the change and each knew the significance of a man with this strength, this skill, in a Godsort in High Formation. Barlo simply stopped what he was doing. What could be done that hadn’t already been tried against a lesser opponent? Calling out for Barlo to keep fighting, Karstus drove forward, but was raked with steel fingers from countless blows unseen for their speed and which shredded the outer skin of his Godsort, leaving the internal machinery exposed and sparks showering. Jav took hold of the Godsort’s head, and shot a short, rising roundhouse to cut a diagonal clean through from left hip to right armpit. Karstus, visible through the latticework, was crushed and run through variously, as the metal compressed, bent, and shattered. Several thin streams of blood arced out under pressure, even as the majority of what he had left poured from a wound strikingly similar to the one delivered to his Godsort. The two halves of his machine ground together as the upper attempted to slide down the inclined plane of the lower. The Godsort stumbled back a step, purely due to gravity, then fell to the ground in pieces.

  Barlo still hadn’t moved. Samas joined him in his stillness but screamed. It was a high pitched shriek born of terror and dread and came to an abrupt halt as Jav drove his hands into Samas’s chest, one over the cockpit and one below as if to tear the machine’s heart out. But rather than tear it out, Jav initiated the Kaiser Claw, calculating almost instantly, torquing his hands, and reducing what lay between them with a dull, squelching pop that nevertheless shattered every intact window in a five kilometer radius. Brilliant green light flared from between his hands, but Samas and his Kossig Engine were gone. The crippled Godsort followed the motion of his hands as he freed them, but Jav stepped aside casually to allow the dead hulk to crash to the ground.

  “Raohan La!” Barlo cried, finding his voice. “You must help us!”

  Jav watched the dyna sore turn from what must have been some mental exertion upon the Palace. He grinned. “Yes, Raohan La,”
he mocked, his voice booming out across the battlefield. “You must.”

  Jav bent his knees slightly and leapt back diagonally, doing a tight flip and landing to put Barlo between him and Raohan La before planting a solid front kick in the former’s midsection. Barlo bent double and streaked like a projectile for Raohan La.

  Raohan La, however, was having none of it. His proportionally small eyes narrowed malevolently and lines of visible force crisscrossed before him to batter, cut, and grind the giant machine to shrapnel, none of which was much larger than what Jav had left with his Kaiser Kick.

  “Raohan La!” cried another of the dyna sores, one who seemed similarly engaged in a mindborne assault on the Palace. Its head jerked at the end of its long neck. Blood misted under high pressure from its eyes. “I cannot. . . It is too much!” Its head burst then, but the gray of its brain, exposed and awash with blood, began to expand and take on a fleshy pink hue. Several creases opened up, as if the mass were about to split severally, but these closed and opened again, snapping with long, sharp bone-shard teeth.

  Jav watched the dyna sore turn and regard its fellow with rage and heartsickness—a combination he could appreciate perhaps better than any—and then with resolve. Something joined the two giant reptiles for an instant, some tether of psychic turbulence, and then the other’s head burst a second time, more spectacularly than the first, and the reptile fell over dead, making the ground shake with its mass.

  The green light power lines upon Jav’s Godsort were beginning to darken. It had been three minutes, and while there were several systems within the cockpit to alert him to this, he had no need of their warning. The fading sense of all was sufficient. As he acknowledged this, he saw a glimmer of hope spark in Raohan La’s tiny eyes, but this only made him grin again.