Dark Convergence - By Dave Gross Page 0,1

these other folks.”

“Lower your arms and surrender,” said Nemo. He activated his tempest accumulator. Lightning leaped between the weapon and the voltaic coils of his armor.

“He means you,” said the driver. He pointed a steel-clad finger at the clockwork soldiers while keeping his hands raised.

Half of the clockwork soldiers fired on the wagon.

Slender projectiles shot from the batteries on the backs of their hands. They broke apart to form dozens of tiny missiles that swarmed their targets.

The driver covered his face with both gauntlets and dropped to one knee, presenting the smallest possible target. The projectiles tugged at his cloak and spit sparks from his armor as they formed a buzzing cloud around him.

Up on the driver’s seat, the passenger’s head jerked backward. His body slid sideways onto the seat and jerked as the swarm continued to ravage his corpse.

The remaining clockwork soldiers turned toward Nemo. Before they could fire, a blue-white circle of runes flashed around his outstretched hand. Three white arcs lashed out to wrack their mechanikal bodies. Simultaneously, five more arcs lanced out from the storm glaives to shock and burn the clockwork soldiers. Their metal bodies twisted in spasms before clattering to the ground.

At the rear of the wagon, the enemy warjack turned to target Nemo, seemingly unaware of the rising light and thunder approaching from behind. As its monocular lens fixed on his eyes, Nemo felt the prickling sensation he always experienced when a fellow warcaster was near. The feeling remained faint, and his adversary remained hidden.

She may not have revealed herself, Nemo thought, but she was surely watching.

Stormblades fired lightning into the chromium-plated warjack. The white-hot arcs scarred its chassis and twisted its pincers, but the apparatus on its right shoulder continued to whine and spark as a steel saw blade clicked into launch position.

“No you don’t!” Finch ran forward, thrusting her staff like a lance. Its crackling head unleashed a wave of coruscating energy across the warjack’s body. The whine from its saw-flinger wound down.

“Get back, Adept!” bellowed Nemo.

Finch backpedalled.

The thunder arrived, and with it came twelve tons of steel and lightning.

More than twice the height of a tall man, massive arms pumping at its sides, the blue-and-gold Thunderhead charged the enemy warjack. White-hot energy surged out of its lightning chamber to cascade across the coils on its back and shoulders. From there the lightning leapt down to feed all of its power into a pair of massive steel hands.

Nemo guided the Thunderhead with his thoughts. It grabbed the enemy and heaved it up off the ground, only to turn and smash it down again. The impact deformed the warjack’s multi-jointed legs and sent a shower of dirt across the path.

Clicking and halting, the enemy reached up with its pincer hand. Before it could catch hold of the Thunderhead, the larger warjack lifted it again, smashing it down even harder than before. The saw-flinger cracked open. Steel discs, each two feet wide, spilled out onto the ground. The chromium warjack coughed, its limbs moving in short, erratic gestures.

The Stormblades stepped out to cover the fallen foe. One of them shot the twitching pincer arm a single time, watched it twitch again, and stilled it with a final arc of lightning.

“Careful with that!” barked the wagon driver. He stood and pulled back his hood to reveal the golden face of a Stormblade helm. Raising the beaver to reveal his black-bearded face, the driver turned to Nemo and said, “Sir, didn’t you want to take it intact?”

Nemo’s bushy white eyebrows leaped as he recognized the speaker. “Blackburn! I told you to put volunteers on that wagon.”

“Yes, sir,” said Blackburn. “I was my first volunteer.”

Nemo fumed. “That job was far too dangerous to risk my senior officer.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It would be one thing if I had an entire company at my disposal, but with so few—”

He fell silent and watched as another Stormblade stepped up to examine the fallen passenger. The infantryman pulled back the fallen figure’s hood to reveal a burlap sack, on which some prescient jokester had drawn a frown and large X’s for eyes. Straw spilled out from holes in the front and back, where the buzzing projectile had passed straight through the stuffed head.

“My second volunteer,” said Blackburn.

Nemo started to say something more, but he closed his mouth and let the sour twist of his mustache demonstrate his displeasure.

He didn’t want to reprimand Blackburn in front of the troops. Nemo knew the morale value of Blackburn’s willingness to assume risks he would not