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The Dallas Morgan Chronicles
Part 2, Chapter XXVIII-When Gods Fall...

Part 2, Chapter XXVIII-When Gods Fall...

Anja’s warmech jerked and stumbled with each hit of the Zeus’ largely misguided missiles, but even though many missed their target, enough landed to make her machine begin to tip and fall once the missiles had finished flying with an almost graceful arc, as metal twisted and Anja began speaking rapid RedStar into her comlink.

House had tried moving his mech quickly in a futile attempt to catch her, calling out her name over the comlink as her voice cut out again with a burst of static, then silence as she hit the ground.

“You…” said House, turing his machine to face the battered but still formidable frame of the Zeus, “You bastard!” He ran his mech at the near hundred-ton monstrosity.

“House, no!” shouted Dallas into his comm, “He’ll-”

The Zeus took a step in House’s direction, its ponderous body fully twice the size of House’s warmachine. Still retaining some of his trained warrior’s instinct, House launched all his weapons at once, its large arms reaching out to grab and crush the next unlucky thing they could encircle.

The Zeus’ leg swept over to House’s running mech in a clumsy kick, balancing precariously on the other leg while the right leg swung in a deadly arc like a ten-ton wrecking ball.

House’s deltoid-mounted missiles found their mark at close range, just at the Zeus’ connected with House’s mech. The Full House was knocked to the side, and began reeling as well as missiles launched and blasted against the body of the Zeus, tearing open the larger warmech’s gut with a searing scream of tearing metal and macro-blooms of sparks and flame.

“You,” said House as he tried to regain control, “You, youuuu” as his mech began to tip over, “..sonofabitch!” House gasped out the last syllable as his own mech toppled and his the ground.

“Grud,” yelled Joker, “hang on, bud! I’m comin’! Dallas, you better not order me to-”

“Get ‘im! Help house! Yue, start popping this lug with whatever you got! Full strike, but hit his front!”

“Understood, Cowboy,” Yue’s voice piped up in his ear, “but isn’t that where his armor is tickets?”

“If you hit ‘im in the back, he’ll fall on House!”

“Ah, then, if I might make a suggestion…”

Suddenly, Yue’s chicken-legged ambimech popped out from behind the treeline and stood behind the Zeus. “Hello, mister god-complex-sufferer?” she said on the open channel, “would you like to take satisfying vengeance on another member of the team-”

The Zeus, still reeling from its latest assault, was already turning to face Yue, giving his back to the prone Full House, which House was already moving in an effort to rise from the ground.

Yue kept talking, “-who so humiliated you, and killed your goddess-partner on a live channel, and-”

“Sh- shud-” Zed said, his words ending with him spitting something out of his mouth. “I’ll- I’ve been, ahhhhhh!” he screamed, and his Zeus, already damaged, now began to shamble like a zombie towards the comparatively tiny mech in front.

“You will have,” said Yue, suddenly kicking her machine into gear and getting it running in a semi-circle around the Zeus, picking up speed in the clearing with no trees in her way, “to either catch me or lock-on weapons before you will be able to accomplish that!”

“Little…bitch!” Zed spluttered, raising the mech’s one working arm and aiming it at her.

“Aw, nope!” Yelled Joker, his own mech taking a running start and leaping into the air as his warmech’s jumpjets fired. The Zeus blasted two shots from the laser cannons mounted on its arms at Yue, whose mech nimbly jumped and dodged as red and green beams of pure, vaporizing death zipped and zapped in front, to the side and behind her. “Odds of being hit in a scout-class ambimech,” she said, the smallest bit of fear and stress appearing in her voice, “ moving at a full speed of sixty-miles-per-hour are- yagh!” she said as a blast landed close enough to turn her world a bright green for a second, “Close! Close! Odds are approximately twenty-five to one against being hit…”

She’d just finished her monologue when Joker’s mech began firing its own midrange blasters at the rear armor of the Zeus, which first cut and vaporized the thinner plating at the hugh mech’s back, and then tore it off in sheets and peeling, steaming strips with burning crimson edges that fell to the ground and began small fires in the tall, thick grass.

“Yeah!” yelled Joker as his mech landed behind the Zeus, its armor gone and its inner works exposed to the air and sight of the warriors around him. “Yeah, one more hit, god-boy, and you’re gonna-oof!”

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The Zeus made a move that none of them had seen before, spinning from its waist like a child’s toy, its massive functional arm smacking the Joker across the head like an abusive father backhanding a child on the side of the head.

Inside his cockpit, Joker saw everything go black and every screen go dark as the double-sized behemoth made its move. Outside, Dallas saw Joker’s mech get hit in the head by the Zeus’ spinning torso move, and tip in a deadly arc as it, too, began to fall.

“No! Joker!” Dallas yelled, “Hang on!” Dallas had only been a second behind Joker in terms of acting in this bizarre theater of destruction, but that second held so much. The Galatine surged forward as the Joker tipped towards the ground, and did something never heard of or seen in the annals of giant-warrior-machine combat.

The Galatine caught the Joker.

Dallas maneuvered the Galatine until it was within a few feet of the Joker and its sword had been quickly retracted. Once next the Joker and standing in the place that the mech was tipping towards, Dallas extended the arms of the Galatine and grabbed the midsize mech by its arms, arresting its fall and holding it in place. “Joker? Joker, you hear me?” Dallas yelled into the comm. “Joker, I gotta let you go and fight this guy. Can you stand up?”

“Agh- yeah- can you-?”

“Sure can bud,” Dallas said, pushing the mech and balancing it on its legs. “Get outta here, this crazy bastard’s just about got his own head back in the game. I need you shooting from a distance, you got me?”

“Got- got- ah, yeah, here I go-” and Joker went, his mech stomping off out of the fray, gyros still looking a little wobbly as he put tens of yards between himself and the hundred-ton hunk of metal behind him.

Dallas was watching Joker’s back, and saw the missiles from the Zeus fall on Joker’s mech in a group of five around him on the ground, with the last missile blast hitting the lightly-armored right-torso of Joker’s warmech. The impact made the already off-balance metal warrior spin to the left and topple to the ground, the comm sounding with a long cry from Joker himself that was one-third pain and two-thirds surprise and anger.

“NO!” roared Dallas, spinning his own mech and facing the Zeus. In the shattered remains of the giant mech’s cockpit, Dallas could see the bleeding, smiling, overweight visage of its remaining pilot laughing, and pausing in his movements to give Dallas a gesture of disrespect known throughout human civilization since a despotic king tried and failed to disable a generation of archers by remove a key finger from the right hand of every man who could pull a bowstring.

Dallas, in no mood to appreciate any gesture’s historical significance, snarled as he extended the Galatine’s sword once again.

“You’ll never beat me, boy,” said Zeus over his comms, “even though I’ out of missiles and power…”

Dallas ran forward, his warmech’s sword blade crackling with blue and red lightning sparks as it extended fully as long as his ‘mech’s entire forearm from the back of his ‘mech’s right wrist. “Omnes familiae,” he roared as he reached the left leg of the giant monstrosity, his words barely discernible amid the fury that colored them. “!rimum et semper!” he finished, as his mech’s left hand gripped the wrist of his right, swinging the limb and the sword that grew from it with a force unknown even during the ‘mech’s most fabled histories of conflict. The swordblad bit into the Zeus’ left leg, continuing to sink in and through the leg, taking two full seconds for the limb to be severed just below the knee.

Dallas got clear of the fall, having used his training in the sims to make sure the cut he’d made would send his gigantic opponent falling in a deadly arc away from both him and his fallen comrades. For the second time that day, the hundred-ton mech’s body gave an agonized, metallic groan as it toppled to the ground, with Zed its pilot screaming a garbled curse at Dallas as he fell. “Death to Cowboy! My followers! May they-”

Zeus fell.

Dallas ‘Cowboy’ Morgan had already gotten twenty feet away and turned to face the fallen mech. Dallas was breathing hard, swallowing. What had just happened? How could this mission have gone to flup so blasted…

“Boss?”

It was House.

“Cowboy?” it was Yue.

He took a deep breath and clicked his comm button with his thumb. “Yeah,” he said.

“You, ah,” started House, “you wanna do anything else, here, before we call salvage?”

Dallas looked through the thick window to the head of the Zeus. “Oh, hells yeah, I do.”

“Zen cud you please get me out’ve here, boss?”

Dallas blinked. “Anja? Anja?”

“Da, Boss! I’m stuck. I haff a terrible headache, and.. [grunt] my foot is asleep and hurting worse!”

“Awww,” gasped Joker over the comms next, “poor little Red Star baby! You want the boss to kiss it better?”

“Shuddup, Joker!”

Dallas whooped for joy! “Yeah clal salvage, and- medical, and anything else! XO, you getting this? XO?”

No answer greeted him.

“Um…” Dallas said, “XO, you there? Gareth? Mission successful…Palefroi? Can you hear us?”

...TO BE CONTINUED....