Die
Seelepanzer
By Valles
It
was a pretty evening. The sun was going down, a few songbirds hardy enough to
survive in an inner city park were singing, and the sky struck just the right
balance between cloud and clear. Maria Pezzini had
never been the sort of girl who spent much time appreciating natural beauty,
but with the way things had changed for her it was one of the relatively few
joys she had left.
Fucking Hellions. Fucking robot-thing.
On the other hand, if those idiots' perverted 'ritual' hadn't trapped her in this eighteenth-century abomination, she'd be completely dead by now, wouldn't she?
Maria sighed, internally - the only way she could, now, since this 'seelepanzer' thing didn't have speakers any more than it
had a face - and concluded that, therapists aside, she really wasn't one of
those people who were cut out for looking on the bright side of things.
Fucking Hellions. Fucking robot.
"You can't do this!"
"Watch your mouth, bitch!"
Oh, look, a distraction. Thank you for volunteering, asshat.
She fed some more coal into the firebox with a mental command that felt sort of
like swallowing, and waited for the boiler's pressure to rise to combat levels
with a sense of anticipation that should have had a very nasty grin on her
face.
"You think all your money's gonna protect ya? You think it gives you the right to diss
us Hellions? That what you think?!"
"Hey, man," a second voice broke in. "Ain't
that maybe a little much?"
"You backing out, man? Decided you don't want
that
Those few words - the realization of exactly what these vermin planned,
and the name of one of the few friends she'd had who'd seemed genuinely
disturbed by her apparent death - were enough to sap any fragment of humor from
the situation. Fortunately - both for the woman who'd been caught and the
Hellions themselves, given the state of her temper these days - that was when
the safety valve tripped and pressurized the rest of her system in a cloud of
steam that hissed free from pinhole clearance gaps in foot-long, pencil-thin
jets.
One step, two, and then she stepped off the roof.
For the space of one long breath she fell free, then
slammed into the pavement with a crash that impressed a pair of hobnailed
footprints half an inch deep in the pavement of the alley. The one standing
lookout she ignored - for now - in favor of lunging ahead to slam the spiked
plate carried across the 'knuckles' of her new arm into the jaw of what she
figured to be the asshole who had been doing all the talking, what with his
having stuck his hand inside the poor woman's shirt and all.
He had turned to look at the racket and was able to duck out of the way enough
to make it a glancing blow rather than a direct one, but that only meant that
he went down with a bleeding scrape along the side of his head rather than
having his skull crushed between the brick wall and a swinging fist with well
over a ton of mass behind it.
The third Hellion, the one who had been holding the woman in place, dropped his
captive as his companion crumbled, stunned if not yet unconcious,
and pulled out a knife. She almost could have laughed.
Something in her posture must have shown it, because he snarled and lunged,
completely unconcerned with the fact that he was attacking what was, for all
intents and purposes, an armored war machine more than a head taller than he
was. It skittered harmlessly off of the grimy steel that had been intended to
turn two-inch grapeshot, and then he was staggering back, clutching at the
bleeding nose he'd earned when her backhand knocked him away.
She gave him a shot with the city-issue tazer
installed in her right arm, to distract him, then turned back to the leader as
he came up off the ground with axe in hand and some caliber of pistol bullet
whined futilely off of the plating protecting her back. He was smarter than his
friend, if even more disgusting, and swung at one of her joints as her nearer
arm came up overhead.
That blow missed, but hers didn't, and hammered him to the ground, completely
senseless.
The one she'd shocked was only starting to shake it off when she had turned
back to him, and she didn't give him time to finish the process, instead
driving a fist into his stomach hard enough to lift his feet completely off the
ground. Through luck or natural surefootedness he managed to keep himself
upright, but that only set him up more easily for the relatively gentle clout
that put his lights completely out.
Her entire frame rang like a bell when the lookout caught her squarely with the
sledgehammer he had snatched up, but a sweep of her nearer arm as she spun
around to face him knocked it from his hands and snapped one wrist like a tree
branch. He screamed, of course, and then cut the sound off as she brought the
other arm down to club him unconscious.
"Maybe I was wrong about capes," the woman she'd rescued told her
stiffly, trying to shrug her expensive suit coat back into place. "Thank
you."