HOUND

1. Staggered

“Get up!”

I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t move.

My limbs were lead and my senses blank stone, aside from the insistent voice in my head.

“-ystem reboot coming onlin…”

Where was I? What happened? I couldn’t remember a thing.

Fuck, this fog in my head was infuriating.

“-itions overrun, falling bac..”

Who was that? I felt like I knew the voice, but it was all so hazy.

But then… Light, power, sound, feeling and understanding all rushed back to me as the reactor came back online, and Hound along with it.

I was, or rather, Hound was lying on our side.

I still couldn’t remember what happened but it must have been fucking horrendous to topple the sure-footed Hound.

“Hound, how copy? You should be back online. We’ve had to fall back to the final perimeter, but you need to get up NOW!”

Ah, the voice again. I recognized it now. Harald, old and steady, usually so calm but now he was yelling in blind panic.

I didn’t like it. I grunted and flexed. Hound flexed too, all composite metal and taut fibre bundles.

I really was stuck though, these things weren’t designed to get knocked down.

I pushed with my left arm, gently at first and then harder and harder as Hound’s chassis left the ground. The chain gun I was pushing with squealed in protest but I kept it up, drawing my legs up as I did so.

After what felt like an age Hound rocked square onto his reverse-jointed legs and I stood up properly, revelling in the stretch. Harald was still yelling in my ear. “They’re all around! Get up! Hurry! We’re running ou…”

Things sounded desperate.

I checked reactor output. 89%. That wouldn’t do. I took a deep breath, and for a second I wasn’t the metal monster, I was me.

I was still strapped into the command throne with haptic implants wired into the nightmare scuttle that was the MLU interface but, for that moment, I was fully human again.

When the breath finally fell I kicked up Hound’s reactor output till the warnings sounded in my mind, overrode them, and kicked again.

106%. Now we’re fucking talking.

I felt Hound bristle. Hound lived for this, he just wanted to run and kill and run and kill and he knew that both were in his immediate future. I ran. Hound ran. Hound fucking sprinted over what had once been the meadow in front of our stockade, now churned up by hundreds of claws and pockmarked with munitions craters.

As I ran, the augurs fed me situational data from all around me. I had been lain on the side of what was a steaming crater almost half a kilometre across, with a steaming mass of fused metal and chiten in the centre.

Ah, that had been Cossack. I remembered now. The last I had seen of that proud engine and Deren, its pilot, it was covered in those fucking bug things. I remembered watching Cossack flailing its blade, lit and crackling, behind it, trying to clear the things from its back.

Fucking hell, they must have exposed the reactor core which had in turn annihilated everything around it as it came into contact with solid matter. Poor Deren. He’d only piloted Cossack for two winters since his father retired.

I snapped out of sombre reverie as Hound’s augurs began pinging multiple contacts in front of me. First 1, then 2, then 10, then 100, then 200 and then I shut off the alert to avoid the inevitable migraine.

There was a horde of them, and that was only the ones outside the stockade. I could picture the scene inside; the wall guns on the final redoubt coughing metal death with my people either huddling and hiding or firing panicked shots over the wall.

Allow. This. These fucking things were going to die.

Hound felt my anger rise red hot and I felt the machine sing with joy in return, letting a blast out of the war horns as I closed with the rear of the wriggling mass.

The creatures behind turned and raised bone claws, but fuck all good it did them.

By then Hound’s chain gun had spooled to firing speed and I brought the thing around in a wide arc, chewing the foul things, all eyes and limbs and alien hate, into a mess of limbs and viscera.

I felt a pop from what was nominally my shoulders. Hound’s shoulders. Whatever.

I hadn’t asked for it but Hound knew what had to be done and had fired his full compliment of drop munitions. As I cannoned into the rapidly shrinking line of bug-eyed things, the mortar rounds split open midair and a savage halo of projectiles fell from the sky, detonating as they hit the rear ranks of the things between Hound and the stockade, sending parts and shattered masonry flying.

A couple of pieces bounced off Hound but I didn’t notice, or care. I was deep into the rage by then, my spirit next to Hound’s, both screaming in savage joy.

The chain gun spat fury and turned the creatures one after another into ragged flesh and steaming blood, while the disruptor cannon on Hound’s right limb fired scything blast after scything blast, leaving only charred matter in its wake.

Oh my Hound, my beautiful furious Hound.

When I had been young, the adepts had always spoken about piloting the engines like it was a dour, serious thing but, after my first time plugged into Hound, I knew that they couldn’t have been more wrong.

This was joy.

This was freedom.

I wasn’t human any more, I wasn’t frail and afraid.

I was wrath incarnate.

I was a god of war, made from bonded metals, composite fibres and pure fury. The chain gun clicked dry.

No matter. I was inside the stockade now, crushing the things underfoot, clearing space in front with the empty rotary gun and then firing the disruptor cannon over and over and over as the things came apart.

One, a brood mother larger than the rest, made a spirited attempt to jump on my back but Hound spun with a balletic grace and I backhanded it with the chain gun, feeling bone break and knocking the thing clean back over the stockade.

A reactor warning. I shut it off. I was having too much fun for that.

I was truly alive in that moment, spinning and killing without a care in the world.

But, with a jolt I felt the flow of carnage change, bringing me back to what remained of my senses.

Something was very wrong.

Cover image from Deviantart user faroldjo. Check them out here.