Iron Empire

Twenty-Five: Unexpected Allies

The mighty Apollo advanced on me, each thunderous footstep sending spiderweb cracks through the asphalt.

With the street choked with debris from Harlow's demise, navigating the boulder-sized fragments was difficult. I made little progress, and every step brought the Apollo that much closer.

I was about to be crushed.

But just as soon as they had begun, the thumping footsteps stopped. The Apollo turned its cockpit to face the other direction, now focused on a new target.

Taewi Park.

Taewi's Lynx barreled down a side street a few hundred meters away and collided with the yellow mech, shoving it nearly a block away.

The sound of colliding metal was cacophonous, only drowned out by the ringing in my right ear.

The Apollo lurched backwards and struck the side of a nearby building, unleashing a torrent of sparks and rubble that tore up the pavement of a nearby intersection.

The Apollo lurched away from the building, dragging a mess of shattered glass and stone with it. The side of its cockpit had been dented inward, and something was clearly wrong inside. A moment later the mech's floodlights went dim and it slumped backwards.

To say that the Apollo mech fell through the side of the building was an understatement. The four-storey, three-hundred-ton mech punched through the nearest building like a wrecking ball through a house of cards, collapsing backwards through it. The upper remainder of the building pitched forward, burying the broken yellow mech for good. Fortunately for me, this meant that the Apollo didn't explode.

Taewi's Lynx turned its blocky body my way and I felt a bolt of excitement.

If the Apollo had seen me, surely Taewi had, too.

A sharp flash of light from somewhere above me told me all I needed to know.

He'd seen me.

The pill-shaped form of a command capsule landed a few yards away from me, beating itself into the shattered street. The capsule was hooked into a squat metal frame, a pair of hydraulic pistons intended to allow it to survive the landing and quickly return to a dropship.

This bizarre, mech-less capsule was known as a rescue capsule, and it was my ticket out of Stalnoy.

I picked my way through the rubble towards where the rescue capsule had touched down.

The capsule's metal door sat open and waiting for me, and its bare-bones interior looked welcoming.

I slid into the waiting seat without a second of hesitation, sealing the capsule's sliding door behind me. Pulling a seatbelt down from the bare wall, I strapped myself in, tucking the hard drive beneath my legs for safekeeping. Sensing my presence, the capsule hummed to life, automatically returning to the dropship. My dropship.

Nuclear-powered fire scorched the pavement beneath me as the capsule lifted off from the ground, its hydraulic frame now pointing it towards its destination.

Just like a regular command capsule, a small, circular window adorned the rescue capsule's folding door, allowing me to gaze at the battlefield below me.

There had clearly been more Apollo than I had expected. I counted at least four in the mining district and three more darting around the riverbed. The Apollo weren't easy to miss, and neither was their lack of strategy—as I'd expected, without Harlow to guide them their pilots were panicking.

Meanwhile, my allies were making short work of our foes.

Since being blasted by the Legion, Alyx had returned to battle in a rotund Grendel armed with her trademark modified howitzer. Alyx's sharpshooting cut into Axion's ranks from a distance, catching the enemy off guard while also distracting the enemy Legion on the dam.