Chapter 50.1: Unshielded
Jinkke didn’t feel the shot from Kikka’s energy rifle as much as she heard it, knowing that it had happened. She felt around the point in her chest where it should have struck. The ammunition bandolier was there, her layered tunic was there, and most importantly all the parts of her intact torso were there. What was not there was any evidence of the blast that should have seared a hole through her—or some equally gruesome outcome.
Lifting her eyes above the still steaming barrel of the weapon, Jinkke met Kikka’s icy, unbelieving gaze. it seemed neither of them knew how she was still alive. There was a gunshot somewhere, and the sound of something like an overloading power transformer spilling gigawatts of energy, but meeting eyes with the psychopathic lab director held everything else at bay.
She could see Kikka asking the same question she herself was pondering, with equally slow results: how had Jinkke dispersed the blast? Though she hadn’t felt the shot itself, Jinkke realized she had felt something like a puff of air rush across the surface of her body and blow off her back. Yes, that was right. And with that single piece of information, she knew exactly what had happened. Alchemy bless her brother; despite her complaints, he’d worked to gain control of that shielding magic of his, and it had just kept her alive. She would not let that go to waste.
Jinkke wasn’t a fighter. She knew that. But from the looks of Kikka’s scant frame and frozen shock, neither was she. A dozen different attack ideas flooded Jinkke’s mind, but Kikka saw her calculations and wandering eyes, and a swirl of fury and fear painted the krewe leader’s face. She raised the rifle back to her shoulder.
With a faint scream, Jinkke threw out her plans and lunged, smacking Kikka’s weapon aside before barreling into her middle. Kikka’s eyes went encouragingly wide as Jinkke lifted her off the ground and slammed her back down with a fat thud that stunned them both.
The energy rifle clattered away across the stones, and Jinkke rolled off, wheezing and shaking the sparks of color out of her vision. She didn’t like fighting—she certainly wasn’t competent at it—but she’d told Minkus he wouldn’t be fighting alone, and she’d meant it.
She kicked the other asura a couple of times for good measure, then clawed her way back to her own weapon, snatched it up, and turned on her opponent, who’d started to move.
“Smoke and sparks,” she gawked. “That worked?”
Feeling a moment of pride, Jinkke spared a glance to check on the others. Clearly Minkus had managed to protect them all, giving each one at least a fighting chance to…
Every thought in Jinkke’s head stopped dead as she scanned from Penny to Minkus. Every thought but one. Minkus, the golem, and that sound of crackling energy all aligned suddenly and horrifically into a single point of data. The weapon that had driven people and beasts to utter madness was funneling all its violet fury directly into her brother. The golem had parked over top of Minkus and opened it up, unleashing a seemingly endless stream over his unshielded body—far longer than it had been employed against the norn.
Jinkke paused. Why was Minkus unshielded?
The field projector, Jinkke knew, had been damaged by its first defensive use; it would have been worthless to him now. But Minkus’ magic? That should have done for him what it had done for… her.
She knew the answer before she’d formulated the question. Minkus hadn’t been able to protect everyone after all. For whatever reason, sharing and keeping his defensive power hadn’t worked, and Minkus—being Minkus—had made the only decision he ever would.
Lacking any defense at all, her brother lay there, convulsing beneath the flow of magic.
Distracted by the scene her brain could hardly grasp, let alone rectify, Jinkke didn’t recognize when Kikka moved. The other asura slammed into her side, returning the untrained blow she’d received and driving them both to the ground again. Jinkke took several strikes to the back of the head before managing to roll over beneath the smaller figure’s weight, swinging the butt of her rifle up into Kikka’s chin and knocking her off her perch.
Jinkke tried to scramble for her brother, but Kikka grabbed hold of her ankle, drawing her back with a rabid howl of frustration. However she’d tried to paint herself before, Kikka had devolved into a raging animal, little different than the creatures from her experiments.
Something similar flared to life in Jinkke, though.
With a cry of her own, Jinkke spun back toward the krewe leader latched to her leg, raised the rifle overhead, and smashed the weapon down on Kikka’s arm. She swung the weapon repeatedly. Even as the other female released her grip with a wail of pain, Jinkke’s wild swings pursued her, chipping and splintering the butt of the rifle with strikes that hit stone as often as flesh. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Jinkke knew her method of attack was illogical, certainly inefficient, but the raging animal at the fore of her mind didn’t care. She swung, hitting with butt and trigger and stock as many times as it took. And she screamed.
She couldn’t have said how much time had passed when Kikka’s arms stopped blocking and her legs went limp—it probably wasn’t half as long as it felt. Blood ran thick from Kikka’s lip and brow, and Jinkke felt her own face swelling, but the empty glare in Kikka’s eye made Jinkke confident the mad female wasn’t going anywhere for at least a few minutes.
“Minkus.” Jinkke rasped, wobbling to her feet. “Minkus, I’m coming.”
***
Across the room, Penny glared hard at the asura who held her at gunpoint. The little jerk had snuck up on her when Minkus had jumped between her and the golem. Penny was fuming, not just at the fact that she’d listened to Minkus instead of putting an end to Kikka when she had the chance, but now even more so at being surprised by the same, damned guard she’d dropped just moments before. He’d received a nod from his boss, which meant he was just toying with her before pulling the trigger. He grimaced arrogantly, and she snarled right back. He wouldn’t get any satisfaction, not out of her.
All at once, sounds erupted elsewhere in the room: the shot of an energy rifle and the angry thrum of that golem’s agony weapon bursting into deadly, fluorescent life. Penny held her angry grimace, but her heart sank.
With a crack and flash, the guard’s gun went off, and Penny closed her eyes.
There was a rushing sensation across her body, and an odd burst of air shot off her back, opposite the point of the gun. The pistol round clattered to the ground at her feet, and Penny knew what had happened. Gods, Minkus had saved her ass again.
She snapped her eyes back open to find the squat guard gawking out into the room. Without even looking at her, he turned toward the steps behind him and lurched off into a sad, half-hobbling run. Where in Torment was he going?
Penny looked out into the testing chamber and quickly spotted what he must have been running for— gods, the sight even took her by surprise. Jinkke took Kikka by the torso and slammed her porcelain rear back into the ground. A strange pride hit Penny.
There wasn’t any time for that, though. She had thrown her trick-loaded pistol to the floor at the guard’s command, but the one with the run-of-the-mill, kill-people ammunition was still in the holster at her hip. She snatched it out and cracked off a couple of shots at the fleeing asura, missing both times—gods, what was wrong with her? He glanced back over his shoulder, shocked that she wasn’t dead, but kept on his way, down around the railing at the end of stairs and toward the brawling females in the middle of the room. She didn’t know what was happening down there, but she couldn’t let help reach Kikka.
Vaulting over the rail and nearly stumbling, Penny bisected the guard’s course and fired two more shots. One went wide behind him, and the other ahead. She spat a curse at how rattled she’d let herself get.
Frustrated and furious, she unbuckled her toolbelt and heaved it at the running asura as he raised his gun to sight on Jinkke. It hit him in the chest, its contents scattering through the air as it knocked him off step and delayed his shot, but it didn’t stop him.
That was, not until it fell to his feet and got tangled in his stride. His legs cinched together, and his momentum slammed him to the stones.
Penny slowed her pace, lining up an unmissable shot, and the damned fool flipped to aim a shot of his own back at her. That was all the excuse she needed. Her final shot didn’t miss. He dropped and didn’t move again.
With a sigh of relief, she spun to the scrabbling females, who were now several yards from where they’d been before. Penny hoped Kikka would give her a similar excuse. After all, Minkus couldn’t argue with her if she shot to defend his sister.
When Penny turned, though, Jinkke had finished the job. Kikka was still breathing, she thought, but the asura didn’t look like she was getting up anytime soon. Jinkke was already moving again. Only her direction was away from Kikka.
“Hey, where are you—” Penny started. She stopped, though, looking farther and finally recognizing what Minkus’ sister already had.
Her head felt suddenly light, almost insubstantial. “My gods.”
Screaming Minkus’ name now, Jinkke ran for her brother. Or maybe for the golem? Penny really couldn’t tell what her objective was—gods, what was she going to do? Where would Jinkke even start? Penny had seen the madness weapon charging in the golem’s chest. She’d even heard the thing fire. But somehow the impact of that, the importance of it had eluded her until right now—and gods, it was still happening. The thing was still firing, driving an endless flow of energy straight into Minkus’ writhing body. The bright torrent raged down at him, around him, through him—she didn’t even know how to describe what she was seeing, except to say that it didn’t end. It just didn’t end. What the hell was Jinkke going to do?
She watched Jinkke reach the construct, coming up almost to its knee, and she seemed to run immediately into the same conundrum. She stopped, searching the thing frantically but stupidly for a solution she couldn’t find. Penny had no wit to do anything but watch.
Taking hold of the very end of her rifle, Jinkke inched toward the crackling funnel of magic, extending the weapon butt-first at Minkus, attempting to push him out of the flow. She couldn’t get close enough, though, and the gun just brushed his foot.
She spun then on the golem, flipping the weapon and unloading her remaining rounds into its armored chest, yelling at it, “Cease! Desist attack!”
“Invalid vocal pattern,” the golem responded, still pumping magical energy into its victim.
Jinkke’s efforts devolved into battering the rifle into the construct’s armored leg. “Stop it,” she cried. “Please. Just stop!”
“Invalid command,” it replied.
The next moments seemed to extend for hours. Jinkke stopped. Not far away, Penny stopped. And the two could do nothing but watch.
Minkus’ spasms stopped, and the beam started to dwindle out, first at the edges and then reaching into the center. Before it faded, though, the golem took the rest of Kikka’s all-weapons command to heart, cocking back its good arm.
Kikka’s cracking voice suddenly rose from the mess of a person on the ground. “No, you imbecilic machine! The device!” Penny saw her get an elbow beneath her and scrabble weakly toward the construct. She too must have given a wrong command.
Servos in the golem’s cocked arm whined, and the steel-and-stone limb pistoned down through the fading energy flow and into the armored asura. Something cracked, and the golem drew back and did it again. And then again. The flow of magic finally cut out, the golem rested on its good arm and deactivated as its power systems began to cycle. Minkus lay there unmoving, his armor bent in and blood pooling beneath him.
Penny’s head spun, and sound seemed to elude her. Movement too. She fell still as both Jinkke and Kikka screamed, the former falling beside her brother, and the latter struggling to get to her knees.
Gods, what had— just, gods. There was so little going through Penny’s mind beside the flurry of observations that didn’t make any united sense.
She watched Jinkke shake her brother, getting little more than a jiggle out of limp limbs. She put an ear to his mouth, eyes searching empty space as she listened, then popped up and yelled at him again, fumbling at the clasps of his breastplate. The projector pack leaked sour, blue seer essence in a small puddle on the floor. The edges of it swirled with Minkus’ blood, and the asura didn’t move. His magnet, that thing he called a focus, lay a yard from his grip now, alongside… the remaining killswitch.
Penny’s eyes widened. Her attention snapped from the device to the powerless golem hunched over her friends, and instincts moved her to action before her cognition could catch up.
She sprinted to the small, steel contraption, all but falling as she dropped to grab it and flip her momentum back toward the big, sleeping golem, racing for it. Jinkke didn’t notice anything, though Penny heard Kikka’s raging calls redirected at her.
Dropping to a knee, Penny sought the gap in the pelvic armor that she’d blown wide with that explosive. Unable to fully see around the golem’s hunched body, Penny felt and found the gap, and remnants of glue.
“No. Shit, no!” she barked, tugging at the adhesive angrily as her mind counted down the inevitable seconds until the golem’s reactivation. Gods, she was stuck in the very hole she needed, by her own, damned glue!
Something inside the golem’s pelvic casing hummed to life—somehow Jinkke must have been right about the power core. Lights began to flicker on.
“Grenth,” Penny breathed. The damned thing was already activating.
She collected herself, pressing her feet against the golem’s side. With a thrust of her whole body, Penny rent herself free of the adhesive and stumbled back a few paces.
Ignoring the fact that the fingers of her left hand were still stuck together in places, she slid back beneath the bent construct and spotted the gap. Penny dropped her gun and activated the killswitch with a flick of one glue-less fingertip and started the countdown somewhere in the back of her mind.
10, 9…
She rammed the device into the glue-lined gap, and it almost fit—almost!
8, 7…
Penny snatched up her pistol again, hammering the grip against the killswitch to work it past the sticky, twisted armor and into the whining, inner workings of the golem. It wasn’t the best way to handle either tool, but if this didn’t work, what the hell did that matter?
6, 5…
With a final whack of the pistol, the now dented device popped past the last tacky wad and clanged against something inside the casing.
5, 4…
Gears groaned, and the golem began to right itself.
“Move!” Penny snapped, lunging back for Jinkke and Minkus and doing what she could to push them clear of the killswitch’s blast.
3, 2, 1…
Penny threw herself over Jinkke’s back, pressing her down into Minkus, and the killswitch activated.
The ground around them lit up like the Melandru High Road under noonday sun, and Penny felt her back seize as tendrils of electricity lashed at her from the gaps in the golem’s armor. The sounds of moving parts ceased behind the fading crackles of electricity, there was a massive crash that rumbled the ground beneath her, and all sight and sound went dark.
