was.
One man with a sword, intent on facing down a Battle Titan.
Before I could reach the door, I heard the scream of down-jets and the chatter of cannon-fire.
I didn't have to look out to know it was my gun-cutter. Damn Medea.
'Thorn to Aegis, the spite of justice! Belay! Belay!'
'Thorn requires Aegis, the shades of Eternity, Razor Delphus Pathway! Pattern Ivory!'
'Thorn denies! The cover of stillness! Belay!
Aegis responds to Verveuk. The matter, quite done.'
'No!' I bellowed. 'Nooo!' Medea's response had told me that she was following Bastian Verveuk's orders now. He had commanded her to take the gun-cutter up. He had ordered her to attack the Titan.
I honestly believe that he thought he was helping me. That he could do some good.
Damn Verveuk. Damn Verveuk all to hell.
I ran outside in time to see the majestic raptor-shape of my gun-cutter burning in low across the PDF station, blazing its guns at the slowly turning Titan. The streams of hi-cal shells were just pinging off the giant's thick, armoured skin.
The cutter bucked and lurched as the first rounds struck it. It tried to evade, but the air was air was too thick with pelting bolts.
The ferocious salvo ripped the belly out of my beloved gun-cutter and tore off a tail-wing. Spewing flames and smoke, the cutter veered off, debris cascading away from its shredded hull. It tried to climb.
Its main engines stalled out.
Leaving a wide streak of smoke behind it in the air, the cutter banked violently to the left, ripped a wing strut through the edge of the ancient, rusted dish, and dropped. It hit the shore of the lake, burying itself in the beach mud and shingle, leaving a smouldering groove thirty metres long behind it.
I stumbled forward, trying to see, but the main bulk of the downed cutter was obscured by buildings. It was ablaze, I could tell that much.
I had a sudden mental image of a hunter walking to his wounded quarry, preparing to fire a final, point-blank kill-shot.
Around the corner of the next longhouse, I could see down the glinting shingle of the icy lakeshore. The Titan was crunching away from me, its vast treads leaving perfect indentations of pulverised pebbles behind it. The cutter was half on its side, a mangled, truncated wreck, driven down into the scree and hard, cold mud of the shoreline. Wretched black fumes were boiling out of its innards, and curls of steam were rising where the lake water was in contact with flaming debris.
There was a little, tinny bang, and an exit hatch blew out of the cutter's flank, fired off by explosive bolts. A figure, clearly injured, fell out of the hatch, and began to struggle up the beach.
It looked like Verveuk.
The Titan was only about fifty metres from the crashed vessel now, its feet lifting sprays of water as it strode through the beachline shallows.
I became aware of movement beside me. It was Haar, his long-las raised and aimed at the Titan, a defiant gesture so full of courage it quite eclipsed its own basic stupidity. Kara Swole was close behind him, anxiously accompanying Rassi, who had dragged himself out to join me. He looked half-dead from his trials in the mind-link, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips tight and bloodless.
I wonder how the hell I looked.
Begundi followed after them. He'd holstered his pistols again. He knew firepower like that was pointless. Fischig and Nayl had stayed by Alize-beth's side in the chapel.
Rassi had my runestaff, and was using it to stay upright.
'Get back/ I said to them all. 'Just get back… there's nothing we can do.'
4Ve fight…' gasped Rassi. We fight… the arch-enemy… in the name of the God- Emperor of Mankind… until we drop…'
He raised my runestaff and used it to amplify his weary mind. Psycho-thermic energy, manifesting far more powerfully than it had done through his cane, spat at the towering back of the great Titan. I don't know if he hoped to hurt it. I don't know if he was so far gone by that stage to believe he could. I think he was simply trying to distract it from the cutter.
Rassi's scorching arc of flame seemed so devastating as it swirled out of the runestaff beside me, so bright it hurt my eyes, so hot it singed my hair. But by the time it struck the Titan, its true scale was woefully revealed. It flared uselessly off the Titan's rear torso cowling.
But still he kept it going. The psychothermic fire turned green and then blue white. Haar started to fire his weapon. I think Kara did too.
Like kisses into the whirlwind, my old master Hapshant would have said.
The cutter seemed to writhe, as if it was trying to escape the bombardment. In truth, it was simply being shifted and jolted as the hurricane of shots hammered it from end to end and shredded it.
Then it exploded. A big, bright flash, a cudgelling boom and a rush of Shockwave. The blast ripped a hole in the beach and sent a significant tidal wave back across the lake towards the far side.
Where the cutter had been – where Medea, Aemos and Dahault had been – was just a pit of leaping flame. Debris, water and pebbles rained down painfully like an apocalyptic cloudburst. The Titan virtually disappeared in a sudden outrash of steam.
Verveuk had been fifty metres from the wreck, stumbling inland, the last I had seen him. When I dared raise my head from the rain of shingle, there was no sign of him.
Its murder done, the Battle Titan turned on us.
I was knocked flat, and I struck my head so hard on a prefab wall I blacked out for a second. I discovered later that Begundi had taken me down into what little cover was available with a desperate flying tackle.
The cold island air was full of mineral dust from the pebbles and rock mat had been atomised by its blaster fire. Rassi and Haar simply didn't exist any more. They had been vaporised by the mega-grade military weapon. My runestaff, blackened but intact, lay on a wide patch of ground that had been transmuted to furrowed glass by the hideous alchemy of blaster fire. The only other trace of them was a small, broken section of Haar's lasrifle.
Kara Swole lay twenty metres away where the blast had thrown her. She was covered in blood, and I was sure she was dead.
And 1 was sure we were dead too. Thuring had won. He had killed my friends and allies in front of my eyes and now he had won.
I had nothing to left to fight him with. I had nothing that could take on the power of a Titan. I'd had nothing when this one-sided duel began, and I sure as hell had nothing left now.
I…
An idea came upon me, insidious and foul, wrenched into the light by the
