Heavy Ballistics and Burning Diesel

A brass shell casing the length of a railway spike tumbled onto the ballast, clinking against cold slag. Damathea racked the slide of her customized .50-caliber receiver, watching thirty trackmen tumble out of the worker longhouses in gray long johns and unlaced boots. She had two minutes before the refinery's southern feeder blew and took the spur line with it. The heavy armored locomotive resting behind the locked iron grating of Track Two was the only transport in Halikarnas with enough plate steel to push through the industrial sector's burning outer ring, and the yardmaster had just bolted the access gates from his elevated perch.

Behind the shouting workers, the Tar-Stalker smashed through an empty timber storage shed.

Splintered pine and tarp paper rained over the tracks. The thing had grown since it tore through the tanker on Siding Nine. Its torso was a hulking mass of pressurized black sludge encased in jagged, bitumen-hardened plates that dripped bubbling crude over the cross-ties. It moved on six heavy limbs that moved like pistons through thick grease, sniffing the air with a snout that hissed orange vapor. The manual yard siren was shrieking from the signal tower overhead, beating out an erratic warning that only seemed to focus the monster's attention on the bottleneck between the barracks and the main line.

Damathea set her boots on the rail flange and brought the receiver to her shoulder.

The syndicate did not pay hazard premiums for industrial disasters, but they paid even less for missed evacuation windows. Her contact at the harbor depot had gone silent fifteen minutes before the catalytic plant exploded. If she did not secure Track Two and the armored engine, she would be trapped between the chemical fires and whatever else was crawling out of the refinery's shattered storage pits.

She centered the crosshairs on the monster's broad chest plate and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against her shoulder with a dull, heavy concussive bark that echoed off the steel tower legs. A match-grade tungsten-core slug struck the Tar-Stalker dead center. The impact gouged a six-inch crater in the black armor, splashing viscous fluid across the gravel.

The crater closed in three seconds.

The black fluid boiled, surged forward, and reknit the wound into a smooth, glistening scar. The beast didn't break stride. It let out a rattling exhalation that smelled of raw sulfur and scorched lubricant, its plate-covered head snapping around toward the muzzle flash.

"Center mass is water," Damathea muttered, flicking the selector switch on her magazine housing.

Standard anti-matériel ballistics meant to punch engine blocks were useless against something without organs. She reached into her combat harness and stripped a row of grooved sabot rounds—specialty hydraulic disruption slugs packed with delayed kinetic charges, normally reserved for busting syndicate vaults.

She did not aim for the torso. She aimed thirty paces ahead of the beast, where a rusted hopper car sat derailed on its side near the barracks drainage ditch.

Her first shot clipped the monster's front left stabilizer where the plate met a thick joint of shifting tar. The kinetic charge blew the joint outward, tearing the limb free in a gout of black slime. The beast stumbled, shrieking a high, bubbling whistle as its forward momentum dragged it off the main ballast line.

Damathea fired two more rounds in rapid cadence. The slugs punched clean through the supporting pins of the overturned hopper car's undercarriage.

The three-ton steel frame slid down the embankment, its heavy wheel assembly catching the Tar-Stalker mid-surge and pinning its torso against the concrete rim of the drainage trench. The beast thrashed with its remaining limbs, its claws tearing gouges into the iron frame, but the mechanical leverage held its bulk trapped in the mud.

"Private security charges triple rates for perimeter breaches," she said to the empty air, reloading on the move. "The union ought to file a grievance over nine-foot oil demons."

She sprinted across the tracks, stepping over discarded boots and dropped lanterns, and took the steel access ladder three rungs at a time.

She reached the elevated landing just as the manual siren choked off with a sharp clank inside the cabin. Behind the reinforced glass of the narrow observation slit, the yardmaster's face appeared, gray with soot and streaked with sweat. The tower's heavy pressure hatch remained locked from within, its central three-bolt wheel dogged down tight.

Stathios cracked the steel voice port on the door, his hand still gripping the four-foot pry-bar.

"Get off the landing!" Stathios yelled through the metal mesh. "The lower yard is condemned! Evacuation orders are on the wire!"

Damathea jammed the muzzle of her .50-caliber receiver straight into the voice port's slit.

"Drop the bypass on Track Two, old man," she said, her voice flat and steady above the roar of the distant refinery fires. "Or I blow the locking mechanism and take the levers myself."

Stathios glared through the armored slit at the heavy muzzle, then past her toward the pinned Tar-Stalker. The beast was already exuding thick ribbons of pressurized crude, lubricating the mud beneath the hopper car to slide out from the weight.

"That locomotive is city reserve stock," Stathios shouted back, his knuckles white against the pry-bar. "She's hooked to three cryogenic tank cars under seal. You fire that cannon in here and you'll spark the vapor pocket gathering under the platform!"

"I'm not asking for your permission to ride the train," Damathea said. She rested her finger against the guard. "I'm telling you to unlock the cab and set the switch to the harbor loop before that thing finishes eating its way through the hopper."

A loud metallic snap cracked through the switching yard.

Fifty yards away, the Tar-Stalker shattered the hopper car's iron axle with a sweep of its regenerated limb, throwing the rusted chassis aside like scrap metal. It pulled itself up onto the main line, its amber core glowing with blinding fury as it locked its gaze onto the elevated tower.

Stathios cursed violently. He spun the central locking wheel, yanked the heavy pressure hatch inward, and hauled her across the threshold by her tactical harness just as the metal landing shuddered under the monster's thunderous charge.

"Get in before it takes the support struts!" he barked, slamming the door and spinning the locking wheel until the dog-bolts engaged.

The entire structure groaned, the iron crossbeams shuddering as rivets strained against their weld points. Stathios had both hands on the pneumatic switch lever for Track Two, hauling the rusted bar downward with his full body weight. An air line hissed, and fifty paces down the switching throat, the massive iron gate guarding the armored locomotive clattered upward into its housing.

"Track's set," Stathios wheezed, wiping his brow with the back of a bloody forearm. "Now how do we get down to the cab without that thing turning us into grease?"

Damathea walked to the tower's east-facing window and looked past the thrashing monster below.

The gunfire and the tearing iron had done more than anger the beast on Siding Nine. Through the drifting black smoke of the catalytic plant, three massive silhouettes were emerging from the chemical storage yard, their amber cores glowing like furnace grates through the smog as they bounded toward the sound of the rifle shots.

"We don't," Damathea said, racking another sabot into the chamber. "We move faster."