Arcfire of Antiquity by Eric N. Lard

Author:Eric N. Lard [Lard, Eric N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 4 Horsemen Publications, Inc.
Published: 2024-04-25T16:47:47+00:00

Chapter 8

Coexistium

Pain pulsed through Overseer Naar’s body. It knotted the muscles in his neck into cords. It crowded his mind and gnawed at his vision.

“Make it stop,” he hissed through gritted teeth as the newly acquired mech forged on downriver, coming to the swath of forest that had been chewed up and burned away by the Deathhounds’ passing the day prior.

“Make it stop,” he hissed again, ragged breath panting out in short bursts.

“MAKE IT STOP!!!” he cried out loud, his screams echoing through the empty spaces inside the mech. Slowly, frost crept onto metallic surfaces, and Naar’s panting breath came out in plumes of vapor. His eyes squinted with the bizarre change in temperature. Outside the mech, through the shattered canopy, the air had been humid and warm.

“I can make it stop,” a voice said calmly from behind him.

Naar spun from the pilot’s seat, sawed-off blaster in one hand, and a chewed-up chunk of sharpened steel in the other. But there was no one there.

The voices in his head cried out in alarm, mimicking his thoughts:

What was that?

Who’s there?!?

Who could be here?

They’ve come to kill us!

Finally!

The voices clamored.

“I can make it stop,” the voice, the other voice, assured him again. But still, there was no one there.

“Show yourself!” Naar snarled, shaking with rage and pain and, what was it… humiliation? The shame of suffering. Of being made to suffer.

Silence followed, at least as much silence as could be found within a mech that was in full operation, traveling down a river and quickly approaching shore.

Suddenly the mech lurched as it hit something underwater.

Naar spun back to the pilot’s seat, looked again over his shoulder, and then was thrust into the chair by another unseen obstacle in the water. He holstered his weapons and returned to the chair to strap in and pilot the floundering machine.

Cords and wires flowed from the chair and from above like serpents until they nestled into wounds in the overseer’s head and hands and body. The mech righted itself and ascended the rising floor of the river, and then the shore beyond it.

Crisp, new peels of anguish coursed through him again as the adrenaline of shock faded away.

The muscles in his jaws grew striated with the strain. Still, the silence remained.

“What do you want?” he growled into the empty space.

“I want what you want?”

Naar’s head jerked, but he kept his eyes on the still-smoldering swath of destroyed jungle before him.

“What is that?”

“You know what it is.”

“Enough! I won’t play your games. Whoever you are,” he spat on the floor, bloodshot, jaundiced eyes focused ahead, a strand of fetid saliva hanging from his lips.

The silence hung on for a moment and then was broken by just a whisper.

“Freedom.”

The word grated on Naar’s mind like a chainsword on duracite. He drove forward but when one of the smaller mechs got too close, even stepped ahead, his large, mechanized hand came down and crushed the smaller mech’s cockpit and reactor with a fiery, orange explosion. The smaller mech, headless,

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