The Mechanical Sovereign Chapter 5: Extremis
Kade's guess was right. The terrorists came faster than the military, and in bigger numbers than he'd expected.
Five days after taking the camp. Fifteen desert SUVs. Over sixty armed men strung out along the horizon in a wall of dust.
Kade lay prone behind a sandbag emplacement, watching through binoculars. Tony was to his left, chest glowing faintly blue through his shirt. Yinsen to his right, hands clasped tight.
A lot had changed in five days. After Blitz's shoulder got repaired, the robot turned out to be a surprisingly good fabrication assistant. Tony had replaced the crude electromagnet with a first-generation Arc Reactor, a miniaturized power source that would've won a Nobel Prize under normal circumstances. The outer casing had been hand-shaped by Blitz's five-meter fingers, saving Tony the trouble of beating it into form with a hammer.
The three of them were the only ones left. The other captives had driven off days ago in the surviving vehicles, heading south toward the nearest town. Whether they made it was anyone's guess.
Kade's reasoning for staying was simple. Tony's beacon was already broadcasting their position. Walking blind through a desert full of hostiles was a worse bet than defending ground they knew. If they could wipe out this second wave, the military would have to respond, even if someone on the inside was dragging their feet.
"Tony." Kade still had his eye on the binoculars. "Those mines of yours. They're going to work, right?"
"You're asking ME if my work is going to function? I'm Tony Stark. I've never designed a weapon that failed." Total confidence. "The one you should be worried about is that robot of yours. I give it fifty-fifty he jumps out before..."
BOOM.
A fireball erupted from the convoy. One of the lead vehicles flipped end over end, scattering burning debris across the sand.
A sand dune two hundred meters from the convoy had just blown outward. Standing in the crater, both hands holding spent RPG launchers, was a five-meter silver-gray robot who had absolutely not been given the order to engage.
"Commander, sir! I didn't do it on purpose!" Blitz's voice boomed across the desert. "A scorpion crawled into my intake valve! It was a reflex!"
He tossed one launcher, raised the other, and fired. Another vehicle went up in flames.
"Oops."
So much for the ambush.
Tony buried his face in his hands. "My mine field was designed to catch seven vehicles in a coordinated chain detonation. SEVEN. And your oversized..."
"I know."
Blitz wasn't waiting for permission. He'd already dropped both RPG tubes, and his arms were reconfiguring. Panels slid back to reveal twin rotary cannons that Kade had salvaged from the cave's weapons cache and mounted to his forearms. The barrels spun up with a rising whine and opened fire.
Tracer rounds stitched across the convoy in sweeping arcs. Vehicles shredded under concentrated fire, windshields bursting, engines detonating, bodies thrown sideways. Return fire pinged off Blitz's plating like rain on a tin roof. He walked forward into the carnage firing with both arms. Utterly unbothered.
He was singing.
"Down Under" by Men at Work. Belting it out at stadium volume, pitch-perfect, while systematically annihilating an armed convoy.
"What song is that?" Tony asked. "It's kind of catchy."
"You don't want to know," Kade said.
An armed Cybertronian against conventional forces was a complete mismatch. As long as Blitz avoided heavy ordinance, he could steamroll them without taking real damage. And despite hauling twin Gatling guns, the robot moved with a fluidity that had no business coming from something that size. Ducking, pivoting, sidestepping return fire like he'd been doing this his whole life. Which, technically, he had. His whole life was about five days old.
In less than a minute, more than half the convoy was burning. The remaining seven vehicles broke formation and tried to circle Blitz. They didn't get far.
Metal discs shot up from beneath the sand and clamped onto the vehicles' undersides. Tony's magnetic mines, buried along the approach routes. They detonated in sequence, flipping two SUVs and shredding the axles of three more.
But the kill count should've been higher. Blitz's early charge had scattered the convoy before most of them hit the kill zone.
"Your robot's AI," Tony said flatly. "How did you design it? Did you just download a children's cartoon personality and call it a day?"
"I think he was born that way," Kade said. There wasn't a better answer.
It should have been over. Sixty men against one Cybertronian. Complete rout.
Then the last vehicle exploded. Not from a mine. Not from a bullet. From inside.
A figure walked out of the fire.
It had been a man once. Now the skin was split open along every joint and muscle line, cracks of dull red light glowing underneath like magma pushing through rock. The air around it shimmered with heat. Where its bare feet touched the sand, the grains fused into smooth glass. Dark, smoking circles marking each step.
Blitz's cannons swiveled and opened fire. The creature kicked off the ground and leapt. Forty meters in a single bound, clearing the kill zone entirely. A handful of rounds caught it in the torso mid-flight. The wounds sealed shut before it landed.
It closed on Blitz in seconds and swung its hand at his lower leg.
"DODGE!" Kade barked through the AllSpark link.
The command hit Blitz like a shock. As AllSpark master, Kade had absolute authority over every Cybertronian he created. Hardwired, non-negotiable. Blitz's body obeyed before his mind caught up, stumbling backward as the glowing hand sliced through empty air.
Blitz was confused. Why dodge? It was just a carbon-based lifeform attacking with its hand. What was the Commander worried about?
Only Kade understood.
Extremis.
A biological enhancement program, originally designed to regenerate lost limbs. But the serum had gone wrong. It rewrote the host's DNA, jacked body temperature past five thousand degrees, granted superhuman speed and strength and a healing factor that could close a bullet wound in seconds.
In Iron Man 3, an Extremis soldier had cut through Tony's powered armor with bare hands. Sliced it in half.
Blitz's armor wasn't any stronger than that.
At close range, with the Gatling guns too unwieldy to aim properly, Blitz was at a disadvantage. And with Extremis heat capable of cutting through his plating on contact, standing and fighting would get him killed.
"So much for saving the trump card," Kade muttered.
He ordered Blitz to retreat.
Blitz laid down a suppressive burst that forced the creature back, then dropped into vehicle form and ran. His speed in this mode was staggering. Wheels barely touching the ground, hundreds of meters of distance opening up in seconds, a rooster tail of sand hanging in the air behind him.
The Extremis soldier chased. It couldn't match Blitz's straight-line speed, but it didn't give up. Sprinting across the desert with that eerie fluid gait, glass footprints trailing behind.
Blitz led it straight to the cave mouth.
Where Kade was waiting.
Prone on a hidden ridge above the entrance. Both hands wrapped around the Pulse Pistol.
PLZ Throw Powerstones.