Useless. He wouldn’t be pushed: he’d just suck the energy off the shove and shoot it back at him.
Snotman gave a signal, and Detroit Steel stopped hitting. Snotman bent and, as effortlessly as if he were picking up an inflated punching bag, lifted Detroit Steel from the ground.
The android stared.
Snotman held Detroit Steel over his head as if the armored giant were a medicine ball.
And threw him.
Detroit Steel arrowed through the fog like the heaviest, clumsiest flying ace in history. He landed with a clang in the middle of the roadway ten feet beyond the gap.
Detroit Steel had been providing Snotman’s energy. The two were now apart.
Modular Man took instant advantage.
He dove on Detroit Steel, both weapons firing, before the giant could rise to his feet. A blizzard of sparks flew from Detroit Steel’s armor as bullets and the maser struck home. The android kept his attention on Snotman and calculated the ace’s response — when the timing seemed right Modular Man added lateral power and commenced evasive maneuvers. Bolts of energy sizzled close to him.
The android arced up into the fog, swept around to a new quarter, descended on Detroit Steel again. The giant had risen to one knee. Bullets flailed the roadway around him, precise bursts of microwave energy scorched the reflective armor. Snotman fired another blast, failed to hit his fast-moving target.
Snotman was powerful, but he was firing by eye, without any advanced targeting systems.
Shooter or shootee, the android thought.
He rose up, rolled, came again. His fire hammered Detroit Steel to the ground. Some part of the giant exploded in a burst of vaporized hydraulic fluid.
Snotman didn’t bother to fire; instead he trotted back a distance down the causeway, sprinted to the gap, and flung himself across.
His aim wasn’t as good this time: he dropped too fast and slammed into a bridge abutment beneath the broken causeway. He dug fingers into the stonework, the gray rock crumbling away under his energy-charged fingers, then began hauling himself up to the causeway.
Danny Shepherd was left behind, on the wrong side of the gap.
During that time the android continued a rain of fire on Detroit Steel. Danny tried a few shots with her rifle, but Modular Man easily evaded them.
When Snotman’s head appeared above the edge of the broken causeway, Modular Man rose into the air and disappeared.
He hadn’t hurt Snotman at all. Even trying to hurt him would be a bad idea.
The last time they had met, Modular Man fought him with the exact same tactics, ignoring Snotman as much as possible and concentrating his attack on Croyd. But at that time Mr. Gravemold had been available to fight Snotman, and with a power that was effective against Snotman’s ability to absorb and convert energy.
Somehow Modular Man was going to have to come up with an equivalent of Mr. Gravemold. He was going to have to stop Snotman nonviolently.
He pictured joker commandos rushing Snotman and smothering him in a pile of mattresses. The picture did not convince.
Smothering wasn’t a bad idea, though. Especially when you considered that the alternative was to become a shootee.
The Turtle came hurtling up out of the fog, and almost ran into the flying elephant.
The green steel curve of his shell broke the surface of Bloat’s pea soup like a submarine breaking surface, and Elephant Girl was careening down at him, gray ears flapping wildly. She loomed up like an oncoming bus in his forward screens, and Tom had to bank the shell hard to avoid the collision. Up on top, he heard Danny yelp, but the safety net held her securely in place. The elephant vanished into the fog below him.
The demons were hot on Radha’s tail.
There must have twenty of them. Tom didn’t have the time to count. A dozen armored mermen rode on giant carp, the tips of their swordfish lances red with blood. Other monstrosities out of Bosch flew with them: a toad with long clawed legs, a cat-demon, a thing half dinosaur and half unicorn, a naked featherless bird. They cried out to each other in high, thin, inhuman voices.
They’re not real, Tom told himself. They’re not human. It made all the difference.
He thought of a hand, reached out, grabbed the foremost merman, and squeezed. The creature seemed to implode. Scales, fish guts, and black ichor oozed between Tom’s imaginary fingers. Green fire flared, and suddenly the thing was gone, as if it had never been. He grabbed another.
Danny was firing. Torn heard the steady chatter of her M-16, saw the head of the cat-demon explode. But there were too damn many of the things, closing in from all sides now. Tom felt panic stirring in his guts.
Then Elephant Girl burst up out of the sea of fog, right among the demons.
A lance was embedded in her throat, and blood ran sluggishly from a dozen deep slashes in her thick gray skin. The wounds just seemed to make her mad. On her back, Corporal Danny blazed away freely with a side arm.
Radha crashed through the charging mermen. A toss of her head sent a tusk right through the featherless bird. Her charge unseated two fish-knights. As they fell, she lifted her trunk and trumpeted her rage.
The toad-man leapt off his carp onto the elephant’s head, but no sooner did he land than Radha had him with her trunk. She flung him down into the fog, and Tom heard his high, shrill scream for long seconds after he was lost to sight.
After that, he was too busy with his own demons to pay attention. They came to him from all sides, but inside his shell he was untouchable. He crushed them with his teke, knocked them off their fish, ripped them in half. It was the Swarm War all over again. Their lances shattered harmlessly against his armor; their necks snapped like twigs between his invisible fingers.
It was over in seconds. All of a sudden they were alone in the morning sky, the fog churning restlessly beneath them. He hovered, breathing hard. His hands were shaking. Elephant Girl circled the shell, huge ears flapping slowly. Corporal Danny was bent over, holding her shoulder, but Tom couldn’t see a wound. He glanced at the overhead screen, at his own Danny.
Her face was drawn and tight, one hand grasping her shoulder. Blood trickled out between her fingers. She forced a pained smile. “Lanced by a fish,” she said. “How humiliating.”
“I’m taking you back,” Tom announced. “Tell Radha to follow us in.”
Danny nodded, biting her lip against the pain.
Elephant Girl came around, heading north.
“Leaving so soon?” a woman’s voice shouted down from above them. “The party’s just started.”
Startled, Tom pushed his chair around in a hard circle, scanning screens, looking for a new enemy.
She was directly overhead, blue and white against the sky, her cape rippling with the wind. Relief swept over him. He turned his speakers up, zoomed in. “MISTRAL,” he called out.
She smiled. “Guess again,” she called lightly.
The wind hit the shell like a giant’s fist.
Ray took a deep breath at the threshold of the next chamber and paused, more in annoyance than anything else. He was getting tired of this shit. He waited, listening, and from faintly inside the room he heard odd little noises, the tinkle of metal scraping across metal, like he had never heard before.
Fuck it, he thought, and went in.
He glanced at the stalactites hanging from the ceiling, but they seemed inclined to stay in place. He moved forward, using the columnar masses of stalagmites surging up from the floor as cover. Tongues of flame were dancing in a cleared area in the center of the room, casting shifting patterns of shadow upon the rock formations and the men sitting in a circle around the campfire.