Chapter 140 The Rusty Titan
The Central Air Processor was an expression of the hubris of humanity.
Beyond the smog layer, the building was an inhumane tower consisting of blackened steel that was stuffed with dense webs of the red Ferro-fungus. It had been constructed to purify the air of a whole metropolis. It was a sick lung now, and breathing poisonous spores into the red smoke of the Iron City.
Our feet were at the foot, and we were gazing up a climb which disappeared into the sick clouds.
The interior elevators are merged, said Kaelen, it has a clipped and professional sound over the comms. He indicated a rusted piece of zig-zag of metal fastened to the exterior of the tower. We steal the exterior maintenance scaffolding. It is bare, it is structurally weak and it is a long drop.
Sounds like a typical Tuesday, Vane said to himself, tightening the strap of his Gravity Hammer.
Keep the canister locked up, Elara," Ryker said to me, his golden eyes crawling down the rusted stairs. We do not know what bred up there the fungus to defend itself.
I patted the strengthened metallic case that was on my back. It was filled with Kaelen blue fungicide--the remedy of the iron plague. "I've got it. Only keep them metal dogs away off me.
Ferrous grumbled, "Iron Flesh," and gave the signal to his armored warriors. "Take the vanguard. We are... the heaviest."
Ferrous was first, with his huge hydraulic piston-arm rattling on the rusted grating. The climb was grueling. The steel lattice blew the wind whistling, and it would have torn us off the steps. The structure moaned every hundred feet, and expressed our combined weight.
When the ambush struck we were a thousand feet up.
It did not come in either higher or lower. It came from the walls.
Pieces of rusted tower plating fell off. Scrap-Hounds--dozens of the mechanical, fungus-driven machines--pour out of the ventilation shafts. They walked up the side of the tower, on the magnetic paws, the iron jaws snapping.
"Contact right!" Jaxon shouted and sprayed his pulse rifle.
The bolts of blue energy hit the foremost hounds and burned their wire-mesh hair and hurled them in motionless ruin into the depths below. But there were too many. They had sprang at the scaffolding, which was not wide, in the hope of overpowering us by numbers.
Baron did not entirely transform into his wolfish state--the passage was too slender--but his hands turned into huge claws. He snatched a flying Scrap-Hound half-way in the air, and with the Alpha power squashed its body and threw the spurting debris to the railing.
Ryker was facing me with Star-Metal sword flashing orange fire. His movements were as perfect as possible, swings at iron fangs, and cuts at the fungi at a joint, clearing the hounds out of the metal roadway, and not losing one to his patrol.
"Keep moving up!" Ryker gave an order screeching metal. "Don't let them pin us!"
Up we struggled, rusty step by rusty step, and on the red moss. Ferrous and his warriors made a host wall of iron shields, and charged the hounds away. Kaelen covered the rear with fire, and his sniper rifle reverberated like thunder against the tower walls, and shot down the hounds that attempted to flank us.
At length we came to the top.
The Upper Deck
It was a great, round platform, which was the top of the tower. The main intake vent was the center--a hole in the wall that looked like a cavern and had turbine blades inside the size of the wings of a commercial aircraft. The green light of the emergency power of the facility dimmed through the bottom of the shaft.
At last, Kaelen said, and raised his rifle. "The primary circulation fan. Pop the canister in there and the updraft will atomize the cure and spread over the whole city.
I advanced and undone the case on my back.
The platform shuddered.
It was not a vibration by a machine. It was another localized earthquake. The red moss that covered the far side of the platform started to rip apart tearing steel cables and breaking the concrete.
"Get back!" Ryker screamed, and caught me by the arm and dragged me behind a broken generator shack.
The Guardian woke up out of the mess of the tower roof.
It was a nightmare of a hybrid Coalition technology. It was forty feet high, and the legs were fashioned out of the tracks of smashed fighting tanks. The fuselage of a crashed dropship was its torso, and its limbs a jumble of crane booms and heavy artillery guns, welded together by hefty and throbbing masses of red Ferro-fungus.
There was an interloper, it was a booming voice, a mechanized voice that was echoed out of the rusted chassis of the creature. The noise consisted of a dreadful conglomeration of mechanical gears and digital alarm clocks. DEFEND THE CORE.
"What is that?" Vane screamed and looked up at the mechanical giant.
The last adaptation, Kaelen said, with his eyes opened. The fungus did not simply eat the armor of the Coalition. It assimilated it. It built a Titan."
The Rusty Titan lifted up his right arm--one of the captured Mammoth tank guns.
"Scatter!" Ryker roared.
The cannon fired. The concussive report made a hole in the platform in which we had been a few moments before. Shrapnel dropped down and the wave struck me off my feet.
"Vane! Draw its fire!" Ryker gave orders and sprinted to the right to get into flank of the machine.
"Hey, junk-pile!" Vane shouted. He used the Gravity Hammer, which started its graviton engine. He hit the deck, which caused a localized shockwave to pass along the platform.
And the Titan gave Vane a turn of his big head, studded with sensors. It struck the deck with its left arm, a bunch of spiked wrecking balls.
Baron and Jaxon drew their guns, and their blades flashed against the impossible hardness of the armor of the Titan. The pulse bolts only slightly scalded the surface.
We can do nothing with our guns against that plating! Sato yelled over the comms. It is stratified exhausted uranium!
"Metal... bends!" Ferrous roared.
The cyborg leader charged. He did not flee away of the Titan; he simply ran under it. When the Titan lifted its cannon to shoot Vane a second time Ferrous threw his hydraulic piston-arm at the knee joint of the machine.
KA-CHUNK.
The pile-driver crashed into the rusted gears like a freight car. The Titan reled, its huge tank-tread leg out of the burden straining a little. The project of the cannon was off, and it struck a hole in the clouds overhead.
"Elara!" Ryker shouted at me on the other side of the flank. He was climbing a heap of rubble to come on even with the body of the Titan. "The vent is clear! Make the run!"
I looked at the intake crater. It was within half a hundred yards in full view.
I grabbed the canister. The glass and steel casing held a blue liquid sloshing.
I ran.
The wind whipped around me. The deck had been violently shaking as Ferrous and Baron continued to keep the Titan off balance striking its joints as Kaelen continued to shoot its optical sensors.
I had already reached half the way when the Titan caught on to my purpose.
It uttered a coded bellow, and disregarded the blows to its legs. It turned, its huge torso, so that its spiked wrecking-ball arm came down at full on me.
There was nowhere to dodge.
On my finger I took the broken Origin Stone. I did not attempt to work up a hurricane. I just needed a shield. I shoved a blast of bound together air upwards as the huge iron spikes plunged down.
This blow struck my invisible wall like a meteor. The impulse made me fall on my knees the air streaming out of my lungs. And the shield was not giving, yet the mass of the arm of the Titan was exuding, and was almost ready to stamp me to death upon the metallic deck.
"I've got you!" a voice roared.
Ryker sprang out of his position. He didn't attack the arm. He assaulted the fungus that attached the joint.
His Star-Metal sword was a beacon in the smog. He plunged the blade to the hilt into the red fleshy moss that joined the shoulder of the Titan with his chassis. The hotness of the blade burnt through the organic material, cutting off the mechanical connection.
The great arm ripped off with a screech of metal, and bounced off me, falling to harmlessly strike the platform.
"Go!" Ryker screamed and pulled his sword out and turned to meet the enraged machine.
I got to my feet, and ran the remaining ten yards to the top of the vent of the intake. The breeze of the turning turbine-blades beneath was tremendous, and attempting to drive me back.
I was holding the canister above the void.
"For Gareth," I whispered.
I threw the blue vial into the blackness.
There was a dreadful breathless moment that nothing happened. The Titan lifted his last cannon, and pointed it point-blank at Ryker and Ferrous.
Then flashed a holy blue flash of light in the intake shaft.
The vaporized fungicide was trapped by the fans. Hundreds of feet of glowing blue mist came shooting up into the air and through the red smog.
The impact was immediate.
The red Ferro-fungus screamed as the blue mist sprayed the platform through. It was found to fester away, and to become a grey dead ashes which was brittle, and no more fleshy red.
The Rusty Titan froze. Its fungal muscles that propelled its joints dried and broke. The machine squeaked and the mechanical parts were no longer united by the infection.
The Titan crumbled down, with a crushing crash, into a dead mountain of rusty scrap metal.
The blue mist was swept away by the wind, in a tidal wave of pure air across the Iron City. Wherever it came in contact the red moss withered, shedding off the skyscrapers and drifting with the snow.
The smog broke. The concrete of the Old Capital was met by sunlight, pure, unfiltered sunlight, such as had not fallen upon it in ten years.
Against the railing of the vent I sank down, in exhaustion, as the blue wave swept over the city.
Ryker came to my walk, sheathing his sword. He reached out and offered a hand and lifted me up.
The ferrous was close to the margin of the platform, and gazing down upon his arm. His armor was becoming burnt in the red moss which had cemented it to his flesh. The plates of heavy metal started knocking to the floor to expose pale scarred skin beneath.
Gone, Ferrous said, now a rasp no longer. Kaelen was lowering his rifle, and looked at him. "We are... clean."
Ryker was looking out over the vast silent city.
We have a city, said Ryker, as the gold light flashed into his eyes. "A real city. No Purists. No Rot."
He turned to the team.
"Rest up," he ordered gently. "Tomorrow, we start building."