Broken Hero Read Free Page A

hammer.
    “
Meshrat al kaltak
,” Clyde gibbers as nonsensically as the robot. Then he flings his arms forward. One of the robot’s vast, round shoulders abruptly becomes its vast, crumpled, and vaguely rectangular shoulder.
    Technically, I believe, Clyde is summoning the kinetic energy from a reality where a lot of things are traveling very fast all the time, but it still definitely looks like he’s hitting things with a large invisible hammer.
    “
Da ga ba!
” the robot howls and starts to accelerate again. The arm below its injured shoulder hangs limp. The other one whirls around in perfect circles, for all the world like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Assuming, of course, that the toddler in question is ten feet tall and made of metal.
    I keep firing. My bullets keep cracking off the metal plates down the robot’s flanks. The ricochets are barely audible over the destruction wrought by its titanic footsteps.
    Kayla flings herself over the pub’s bar, slides across the floor toward the robot’s wildly flying legs. She ducks smoothly beneath its dangling arm. Her sword lances out, smashes into a seam between two metal plates on its leg. She leaps, heaves on the sword. The blade bends violently. Then with an enormous crack, two rivets fly across the room like bullets. They smash through the bar, shred bottles, embed themselves in the wall. A metal plate catapults out from the leg at a forty-five degree angle to the rivets. It skims past the nose of one of the men from the bar, embeds itself in the ceiling with a concussive blast of plaster dust.
    Kayla flies free, curled up on herself, an angry Scottish pinball. She smashes into a wall, but somehow has her feet beneath her, even if beneath her is at a distinct right angle to its usual position. Her legs bunch, and she springs back into the fray, executing another perfect tumble in midair, landing with a grace that would make Olympic gymnasts proud.
    For all this finesse, the robot continues to blunder on in much the same way a steam roller would if someone hit it with a pea shooter. Another important-looking column is turned to matchsticks. Men dive left and right. The robot buries itself into a second wall with a scream of “
Shna ka vich!
”
    I pivot around, try to angle a shot at the exposed mechanics of its foot. I find myself abruptly shoulder to shoulder with Felicity. Our guns point out in parallel.
    “I’m going to go with: what the fuck?” I tell her.
    She shrugs and lets off five shots in rapid succession. They ping off the metal plating.
    “No clue,” she says. “Shoot first. Questions later.”
    As much as that is the tactic of movie villains since 1945, it does seem like sound advice. I keep firing while the robot extracts its head from the wall and shakes it free of debris. Above it the ceiling creaks ominously. I do a quick tally of beams and internal walls.
    “We’ve got to get it outside!” I shout.
    “Yeah,” Kayla says. She’s holding her sword like a javelin. “You feckin’ do that.”
    She launches her sword. It sails across the room, a steel lightning bolt, smashes into the mechanics she exposed in the robot’s leg.
    The robot goes to take a step. There is a hideous grinding sound. It strains. And then the sword flies free with a burst of bronze cogs, tumbling end over end, until it too is buried in the bar. It lands about an inch from the head of the dazed bartender.
    “We’ve got to clear the civilians!” That thought probably should have occurred to me before one of them was almost forced into doing a unicorn impression.
    “Would you shut the feck up and start killing that feckin’ thing!”
    The robot takes a grinding step forward. Its damaged foot digs a trench through the floorboards. Its injured arm dangles. Its uninjured one smashes another important-looking support column. I could swear the ceiling is starting to sag.
    “Everybody out!” I yell.
    “Did I not just say—” Kayla starts, but this latest suggestion