Up Against It - M. J. Locke [92]
Geoff lifted a boot from the surface, and flailed, trying to regain his balance. “We’re going to be awfully slow in these—a hell of a lot slower than we are on our bikes.”
“True … but the machines aren’t so fast either,” Amaya said. “So the old man says. And the anchors can help the throw build up speed. Like a slingshot. Our big problem is, we’ll have to work around the lift cable. It’s going to get in our way.”
“I guess we can cut tether if we have to,” Geoff said thoughtfully, and Ian said, “I’m right there with you, Muffin.”
Amaya sighed, exasperated. She and Geoff exchanged a look. Geoff wasn’t sure if she was thinking It’s just how he is or I’m going to kill the fucker.
“Your idea,” Geoff told her. “You call the op.”
“All right. I’ll be our first throw,” Amaya said. “Geoff, you’re throw two. Ian, you’re three, and we cycle through as needed. Throw calls the target, as always. We’ll take turns strafing the machines till we’re out of bug juice, and then we’ll close in and use flares, or solvents, or whatever else we’ve got.”
“First let’s get the tracks,” Geoff said, and pulled his disassembler tube out of his belt. “They can’t stop Kam and the old man if they can’t reach them.”
“Let’s work out from one point, so we narrow their range of approach,” Ian suggested. “No—start upwind! We don’t want them coming at us from upwind—we’d have to fight the wind as well as the machines.”
The three of them hurried due upwind of Kam and Moriarty, and began spraying disassembler onto three of the T-shaped rails that led to the xaser station.
Geoff figured he had better wipe out a good two meters of track in case the machines could roll over the damaged portion. He laid a line of disassembler. It went on like toothpaste. The metal melted instantly in a cluster of metal blocks that spun away into the winds. Loud pops and sparks sprayed up from exposed circuits as the disassembler ate through the hidden power line beneath the T-shaped rail. He worried about the hull beneath it, but the bug juice seemed to stop at the surface.
He clumped past Amaya and Ian and began on his second rail. Amaya passed him, and next came Ian. He started to head for a third one. But they were out of time.
They heard the machines before they saw them. The bulkhead beneath their feet trembled. Thud! Clank! Along the rim of the Hub, maybe three hundred meters away, big rectangles rose up onto wheels and unfolded their arms—several cranelike appendages, with different, nasty-looking fixtures on them.
“Twelve o’clock! Three! Six! Nine!” Amaya called, marking the arms of an imaginary clock.
They had gotten six rails out of commission, out of twelve. That meant, he hoped, they only had to defend against an attack from between two o’clock and eight.
Amaya called her first target, gesturing. “Two-thirty!”
He spotted the nearest of the machines lumbering toward them. They were not as slow as he would have liked—they moved faster than a human could in the damn sticky-boots. Geoff, Ian, and Amaya spread out in a tethered triangle between the nearest machine and Kam and Moriarty. Metallic smoke blocked Geoff’s view as he crossed downwind of the welding apparatus.
The three teens were tethered to one another. Geoff and Ian pulled taut the tether that joined the two of them, and let out slack on the tether they both shared with Amaya. She passed Geoff, running wide in an arc, as she pulled out her disassembler gun. Then she reeled in her tether with Geoff and yanked hard on Geoff’s line, launching herself toward the machine. Geoff braced himself against her pull.
The machine grabbed for her, clumsily. Amaya sliced off its foremost limb with her disassembler—it tumbled away into the Hollow—and sprayed its casing as she passed overhead. The other arms flailed at her—one nearly got her; shit, what a reach those arms had!—but she