It raised itself up to lunge down upon her, screeching as it did so.
Kill it kill it kill it!
A gust of wind blew past them, and it seemed that the dust drew back a little, and behind its features she saw another face, one she’d known and loved all her life.
“Shiara!”
But the finger on the trigger was driven by fear. It twitched, and with a deafening boom the shotgun fired.
The roar of the weapon echoed into the silence, and with it, the illusion was dispelled. With a shivering hiss the dust fell away from Shiara, and Cassica looked up into the eyes of her friend. Shiara, half her face ribboned with blood from a cut over her eye, stared blankly at the shotgun in Cassica’s hands.
It was pointed at the sky. Jerked away at the last instant.
“I thought you were a Howler,” Shiara whispered.
“I thought …” Cassica began, but she couldn’t finish.
Shiara climbed out and helped Cassica untangle her legs from the harness. Cassica got to her feet. Neither knew what to say. They felt scoured out and bleached by what had just occurred. The realization that she’d almost killed her best friend made Cassica’s legs weak.
She didn’t know what had caused their hallucinations, whether it was gas or the insidious effect of the landscape itself, but it seemed they’d overcome them, at least for the moment. Now she understood what they’d taken on when they decided to tackle the Blight Lands. This place had seen the worst of humanity’s madness and had become mad itself. Reality itself was uncertain here.
They’d come to a halt near the crest of a rise. Cassica walked unsteadily toward it. Any direction was good, as long as it was away from the thing she’d nearly done. The sun glared down balefully as she went.
She got to the top of the rise, and the land fell away. From where she stood, she could see for miles. She gazed numbly over what was ahead.
A vast plain lay before her. The land was scarred with glassy wounds where beams from space had melted the earth. Crazed, unnatural mineral structures gathered at their edges, where stone had surged and fused and transformed in the wake of those deadly rays. Scattered among the crystal was a field of debris incredible in scope, a junkyard bigger than she’d ever seen. Vehicles smashed to shrapnel, flying machines torn to bits, gun emplacements sunk into the ground where it had turned to liquid.
Around them, a hundred thousand battle mechs, the legendary soldiers of the Omniwar, scattered like tinfoil shreds under the sun. Some with tracks like tanks, some with missile launchers for hands, some with faces, some without. Slumped here and there, Titans lay like rusted islands, great beetle-like mobile fortresses that once thundered across the face of the world like the legends of the first civilizations come to life.
A heat haze wavered over that hellish gravesite, and the air had a sinister tinge. All that destruction awed her. In the tangle it was impossible to know which were the enemy and which were not. In the end, it didn’t matter. They’d both lost.
“Hoy!”
She heard her friend’s voice and turned away gratefully. Shiara was shading her eyes and looking to the south. Cassica followed her gaze.
A cloud of dust. Vehicles, approaching fast up the rise behind them.
The Wreckers. No one else would be insane enough to follow them here. She wondered briefly if they were real or another hallucination.
“How many they send?” Cassica called.
Shiara let her hand fall away from her eyes. “All of ’em,” she replied. “They sent all of ’em.”
Pedal to the metal, engine screaming, sitting behind the wheel of a car she knew like an old friend, a car she knew exactly. Now this is racing, Cassica thought.
Piles of jagged metal shot past to their left and right. Half-buried faces peered out at her with dead mechanical eyes. She swerved past vehicles bigger than the biggest truck she’d ever seen, bristling with cannons, backs broken, hollowed out by smoke. Dust from the parched earth clouded the air behind them.
Hard on their heels came the Wreckers.
“He’s lining up for a shot!” Shiara cried. She was twisted round in her seat, trying to keep their pursuer in sight. Cassica glanced in her mirror, caught a glimpse of what Shiara was seeing.
Dr. Sin hunched over the steering wheel of a dirt-smeared white racer, its hood and flanks daubed with dried gore in a mockery of medical crosses. His eyes were bloodshot and staring, face concealed by a surgeon’s mask. Standing in a harness, his upper torso protruding through the sunroof, was the Carnasaur. Veins wrapped his swollen muscles like creepers; his skin was tattooed with yellow-green scales; his fanged mouth split in a hungry grin. Reptile eyes narrowed as he aimed down the sights of his rocket launcher, fighting to steady himself as the car jerked him about.
“Tell me when,” said Cassica.
“He’s gonna fire!” There was an edge of panic in her voice, but Shiara had never had Cassica’s calm in a race.
“Tell me when,” Cassica said again. She had her hands full weaving through the maze of wreckage. Somewhere to her left, she saw another car flash between the downed fractions of a crashed aircraft. Buzzsaw, getting ahead of them.
“Now!”
She was turning even as Shiara formed the word. Maisie lurched to the right, and the rocket hissed past. There was a flash and a detonation that shook them both in their seats. Somehow Cassica kept them from crashing as they skidded away from the bloom of oily flame, daggers of shrapnel thumping into Maisie’s flanks.
“Yeah!” Shiara screamed at the back window, wild with relief. “Yeah! Try again, why don’t ya?”
“Shiara,” said Cassica, her voice level and firm. “Stay in the game. I need you.”
Shiara sobered at that, got back in her seat, swallowed and nodded, and turned her attention to the dash. It was hard to keep their heads in this place, where the sun seemed hateful and the iron ghosts of murdered history glared from all sides, loathing these intruders in their graveyard. But they’d need to be better than they’d ever been if they hoped to live out the hour.
They broke out from among the wrecks into a wide, clear patch, where the ground glittered with petals of half-buried alloys, and the air quivered with the merciless heat. Robbed of cover, they lit out in a straight line for the far side, keen to hide themselves again. In a flat race, they’d be easy pickings.
Buzzsaw emerged into the clearing at the same time. The circular saws that ran round the edge of his car spun and whined as he angled toward them. Dr. Sin hung back, to allow the Carnasaur time to slot in a new rocket. Of Lady Scorpion and the Ghost, they saw no sign; but they likely wouldn’t see the Ghost till it was too late anyway.
Cassica’s thumb hovered over the turbo button. “Not yet,” Shiara told her.
“We can’t outrun him if we don’t!”
“If we turbo, he’ll do the same. And I’ll wager his are better. Save ’em. They’re runnin’ hot anyway.”
“So what?”
“So I used Maisie’s safety limiter to repair the Interceptor, and I must’ve knocked off the calibration when I did it. The turbos ain’t venting heat as fast as they should.” She said it angrily, but it was directed inward, at herself. “There’s no cutoff anymore. Push the turbos too hard, we’ll explode. So when I say cut ’em, you cut ’em.”
Cassica cursed under her breath.
“We didn’t get a chance to run her out with the new alterations,” Shiara said, by way of an excuse.
Cassica hated being leashed. But Shiara’s tone stopped her snapping at her, as she might have done before. Shiara had done the best she could with the time she had, and she’d hardly slept for two nights. Cassica swallowed down the anger. This wasn’t about her.
“You did a good job,” she said. “We’ll work with it.” She looked up over at Buzzsaw, closing in from the left. “Gimme alternatives.”
“We could … wait, what’s that?”
All at once, thin tendrils came bursting from the ground, tearing
free of the dry earth in powdery puffs, coiling and curling like a nest of snakes. They were all around them, all over the clearing, lashing the air, whipping this way and that.
Wire. Long strands of sharp wire, barbed with hooks and nightmarishly alive.
Cassica didn’t wait for Shiara’s say-so this time. She thumbed the turbos and held on.
The whole clearing writhed. Wires tore free from the baked soil, pulling themselves up like rip cords, rolling and reaching out with blind fury. Cassica drove Maisie toward the edge as hard as she could, desperate to escape the trap, dodging here and there as new tangles unspooled in her path.
Wires snatched at Maisie, trying to throttle her driveshaft and slash her wheels, but their attacks were sluggish, and they snapped away as soon as they got a grip. Whatever unnatural technology this was, it had been too long dormant under the earth, and its purpose had been dulled. Cassica fought to stay clear of the wires, defeating them with speed: under full turbo, Maisie was too quick to get a hold on.
The Wreckers too were caught in the wires. Buzzsaw’s blades cut them away with ease, but Dr. Sin had no such protection, and he hadn’t been quick enough on his turbos. He skidded and slid as the wires took hold of his axles in clumps, and though they were torn out they slowed him enough for more to take hold, and more and more, until his blood-daubed car was dragged to a halt in a cloud of dust. Then the wire took them, wrapping car and Carnasaur, baling them up like hay, winding thicker and thicker until the tendrils became unbreakably strong. The wire tightened suddenly, and both the car and its occupants were pulled down into the earth with atrocious force, breaking as they went.
Now Cassica knew why there was no junk left on this patch of ground.
They reached the edge of the clearing, leaving the wires behind them, a sea of insidious movement swiping at the air. And somewhere in that clouded haze they left Dr. Sin and the Carnasaur too.
Shiara sucked air in through her teeth. “Turbos,” she reminded Cassica, one eye on the temperature gauge. Cassica let the speed off as they plunged back into the field of wreckage.
They’d hoped that escaping the clearing would bring them some respite, but there was none to be had. Tripping the wire trap had caused some kind of alarm to spread. For the first time, they’d been noticed, and the graveyard was waking up.
Crushed mechs jerked into life, pawing at them from beneath a heap of fallen comrades. Colored lights scampered across the dashboards of long-dormant vehicles, blinking fitfully as ancient systems booted up. Metal shrieked as enormous machines mobilized rusted joints and broken limbs, attempting to rise and slough away the smashed warriors that covered them.
“Oh, hell,” Shiara muttered.
A rapid popping sound came to them from somewhere ahead. Cassica looked in time to see a broken mech on its back atop a heap of junk, a rectangular rack of tiny rockets mounted on its shoulder and tilted toward the sky. The last of the rockets were just popping off, straggling into the air like weak fireworks before turning nose-downward and falling.
Falling toward Maisie.
“Incoming!” Shiara cried, and Cassica threw them into a sequence of evasive maneuvers as the world began to detonate around them. Each of the tiny rockets carried a payload far out of proportion to its size, and they exploded on contact with the ground. Maisie careered between the explosions, pummeled by concussion and showered with shrapnel.
Cassica couldn’t even see the rockets coming down in the chaos: it was more luck than skill that got them through. She emerged breathless, exhilarated, bright-eyed. There was a wild joy in being abandoned to instinct and chance, and coming out alive.
“On the left!” she heard Shiara shout through the ringing in her ears.
She swerved as Buzzsaw swung in toward them. Sparks flew from Maisie’s fender as the Wrecker’s spin saws touched metal. Cassica saw a mad patchwork face through the window, crisscrossed with stitches, teeth gritted in a snarl; then the cars came apart, and she darted away.
The whole plain was astir now, as the message spread through the remnants of those once-mighty warriors. They marshaled the last dregs of stored power to inspire centuries-dead mechanisms back to life. Smashed mechs moved what parts remained to them, flexing stiffened arms, struggling to free themselves. They aimed weapons, some of which were empty and some carrying ammo that had decayed past the point of usefulness.
But some were still loaded and ready, even after centuries in the desert. Targeting systems, damaged but functional, groped after the intruders as they sped past.
The mechs opened fire.
Cassica slewed between islands of junk as the air filled with the din of weaponry. Bullets pocked the earth, raising little plumes of dust. Mechs blew themselves up trying to fire rockets from dust-clogged tubes. Listing turrets spat transparent globes that burst in sprays of acid, eating through metal and earth alike.
Cassica held her nerve. Here, with destruction raining down around them, future and past had ceased to exist. She was a creature of reaction, dodging attacks she could barely see, evading obstacles that sprang from the dust-clouded air without warning. Shiara jumped and shrieked and flinched at every impact, but Cassica was the eye of the storm, the still heart of the maelstrom.
To their left, through the cross fire, she saw Buzzsaw again. He was laughing like a maniac, the veins of his neck stark, eyes bulging. He caught her gaze and looked over at her, and just for a moment she saw fear on his face, as if he sensed what was coming, a premonition of the end.
Somewhere, a turret turned and a railgun screamed. A spear of metal hit his car faster than the speed of sound, and he was driven into a trench in the earth with a brutal squeal of ripped metal.
“We gotta get out of the firin’ line!” Shiara yelled. “Head for the glass canyons!”
“Those kind of ideas are why I keep you around,” Cassica said with a grim twitch of a smile.
Shards of crystal and melted stone towered over the junk to their right. The formations stood along the rim of an enormous scar in the earth, left by space weaponry of unimaginable power. Nothing had survived in those canyons. And that meant there were no mechs there.
She swerved, and a green ray raked the earth where they’d been, boiling the cracked soil into spume. Darting through the wreckage, chased by artillery, she raced toward the scar.
The land broke up beneath Maisie’s wheels as she neared. It was smooth and reflective in spots. What mechs had been here had been melted into piles of cold slag; nothing stirred. As they drew closer to the scar, the assault on them lessened, and the explosions and gunfire diminished behind them.
The way became cluttered with columns of fused rock and clusters of giant crystals veined with strange colors. Cassica let off the speed a little, no longer trusting her wheels, which were slipping on patches of slick metallic ground.
Still, it was better than before. Somewhere distant, the mechs were still firing at something: the other Wreckers, no doubt. Cassica hoped their aim was good.
She turned and drove alongside the scar. To her right was a slope of melted rock, scattered with strange fists of bubbled stone and great mineral spikes. At the bottom was a yawning chasm where the planet itself had been cut deep enough to bleed.
“We can ride along this edge. Should take us near the limits of the battlefield,” Shiara said.
Cassica’s forehead creased in a frown. Something was nagging her, some sound on the edge of her hearing. So hard to rely on her senses in the Blight Lands; they tricked and deceived. She’d almost killed her best friend, until she learned to see beneath the way things seemed.
But her instincts clamored. Something was wrong. Something.
She looked to her left. The junk and wreckage there made jagged, shadowed mountains. The heat haze was terrible in this area; the air wavered and blurred so much, it was hard to focus her eyes.
And yet she could hear …
Another engine.
Her brain pulled the picture together just in t
ime. The same process that made old men’s faces from gnarled trees, animals from clouds, showed her the shape of the distortion and let her see what was invisible a moment before.
A car with a masked man inside, swerving toward them.
The Ghost.
She hit the brakes an instant before the Ghost sideswiped them, hard. Shiara screamed as Maisie’s windshield exploded, throwing glass in their faces. Cassica swerved, eyes squeezed shut, and she felt Maisie’s wheels lose traction on her right side. Then they were tipping, and even as Cassica fought with the wheel a pit opened in her stomach and she knew she’d lost control.
Maisie slid sideways down the slope, wheels spinning uselessly, seeking a grip. Shiara scrambled at the dash, as if there were some adjustment she could make that would stop their progress toward the chasm at the bottom. Cassica pulled the handbrake—stop the wheels, give them a chance to get some bite—but Maisie kept slipping.
Ahead and downslope was a large knob of rock, knuckled and smooth; they’d pass behind it if they continued in their current direction. Cassica’s foot hovered over the accelerator. Shiara was making incoherent noises of fear, but Cassica shut her out. She was waiting with keen patience for the moment when her instinct would tell her to go. When it did, she popped the handbrake and pressed gently on the accelerator, resisting the urge to floor it.
Maisie’s wheels spun, half gripped, pushed against the ground, slipped, caught again, and shoved. She surged forward, changing the angle of the slide so they were heading toward the knob of rock instead of past it. Shiara cringed away and covered herself as it loomed in Maisie’s side windows. They hit it with an impact that threw them against their harnesses, jerked them like dolls.
Cassica raised her head. Shiara peeped out from between her arms. They’d stopped.
Shiara breathed out a long and elaborate curse that would have had them banned from the airwaves if anyone had been there to record it.
“Maisie alright?” Cassica asked.
Shiara looked out through her window. “Reckon so,” she said with a tone of faint surprise.