The Pyrrianaut, Page 2

would most likely need to engage the pterodactyl over the lake before it hit the village.

  Edward had spent the entire flight pushing down the worry that came from the memory that Bill’s Lake was where Mari’s parents lived and that she was planning to visit them after her shift, and he couldn’t quite remember whether her shift was over yet, or still going. For sure, most houses in the colony had pretty well protected basements—almost definitely enough to stop a pterodactyl—and the villagers would have already been alerted by Control, but that didn’t stop him from worrying.

  As he speed over a rise he could suddenly see the pterodactyl rather than having to watch it on the HUD, though the missile was still outside of his field of vision. The pterodactyl was only just airborne, and zig-zagging across the water, and as Edward watched the missile suddenly swept down from the sky, and slammed into the water—20 meters from the pterodactyl.

  The underwater detonation shot a fountain of water fifty meters into the air, and threw the pterodactyl off balance. For a moment, as it’s wing-tip clipped the water, Edward thought it might have been going down, but it recovered and started regaining height, to his disappointment. Sure it most likely would have survived a crash into the water without any real harm, but he’d never heard of one managing to take off from in the water before, which would have made finishing it off a bit easier.

  “Looks like I’m going in. Preparing to disengage the Wing.” He started dropping down the couple of hundred meters he needed to lose before his suit’s on board ground-effect system could safely take over.

  As soon as he dropped down to the official safe altitude—235 meters—he disengaged the clamps holding him into the wing and started dropping like a rock. At this altitude he couldn’t fly, but he could manage a controlled fall.

  As he fell the sense of scale of the beast became more obvious, and as it did he realised that it must be nearly half again as big as the last one he fought. He decided then and there to give the outlanders a bit more credit when the told their tall tales about the big “terries” they saw up in the North.

  Edward considered firing a burst from one of his wrist-mounted needle guns to draw the beast’s attention so it didn’t just ignore him and keep flying towards the community, but it turned towards him all on it’s own, so that wasn’t necessary. Now all he had to do was kill it.

  The weapons built into the suit would be of limited effect against such a large creature unless Edward managed to hit a vulnerable spot, so he closed in to under 100 meters before firing his first volley.

  He willed his shoulder-mounted micro-missile pods to lock onto the pterodactyl’s head, and then willed them to fire a third of their missiles, and the neural link passed his orders on to the suit and six tiny little missiles darted between him and the pterodactyl. The beast twisted it’s head away from the buzzing darts, but several impacted across it’s neck and shoulder, sending up small fountains of gore and broken scales as they exploded.

  Edward grinned as the pterodactyl roared in anger and pain.

  The beast twisted it’s whole body before Edward could lock a second volley of missiles on and whipped it’s tail out towards him. Edward didn’t even have time to consciously think about it before he’d reflexively sent the mental order to the suit to dodge to the side. Unfortunately even that wasn’t fast enough to avoid the stinger, which slammed into his leg.

  Of course it wasn’t tough enough to penetrate the armour, but it still dented the shin plate, and threw the human wildly off course. Edward felt the distortion of the armour through the neural link; a less experienced Pyrrianaut would have felt a discomfort in his leg, but Edward was so used to the suit he could tell, purely by feel, that it was his suit, not his leg that was damaged.

  That thought flashed through Edward’s mind as he stabilised himself moments before splashing down into the water. He spun himself back towards the beast, and looked straight down into it’s open jaws.

  He just managed to swing his right arm up and fire a short burst from his needle gun before the pterodactyl’s jaws closed over him, and both man and beast slammed into the water with a thunderous splash.

  A wave of sensation rushed across the neural link from the suit to Edward, and suddenly what should have just been discomfort turned to pain, and then agony, and then blackness. Edward’s body and suit started spasming, and then stopped after a couple of seconds as he returned to consciousness.

  As he faded back into consciousness he absent mindedly noticed that the beast was still shaking him around under the water and trying to crack open his suit, and doing quite well, a small puncture had already been made in the weak armour around his elbow, and water was slowly leaking in. He also noticed that there was a familiar voice trying to ask him something, who was that? Ah, Control, that’s right; I should pay attention to what they have to say.

  “… conscious? You need to get back in the game. Looks like you suffered an NFC according to the suit sensors.”

  That brought Edward fully back around; NFCs, Neural Feedback Cascades, were one of the reasons why mostly only teenagers used neural links. Even a single NFC nearly always did permanent nervous system damage, if they didn’t kill right away.

  Edward sighed and shoved down his worry about what the long-term consequences of this might be. If he let this pterodactyl chew on him for much longer he wasn’t going to live long enough for there to be any long-term consequences.

  Edward twisted his whole body in the jaws of the pterodactyl and swung his free left arm up towards where he believed the beast’s eye should be, and started sweeping bursts of needle gun fire around in the hope of making it let go.

  Suddenly the pterodactyl jerked it’s head—and Edward—up out of the water and threw him away across the lake.

  Edward tried to use his ground-effect systems to compensate for the throw, but they had been damaged by the bite and he smashed back into the water. It took a few seconds, but he stopped himself sinking using the damaged ground-effect system just in time to see the pterodactyl start swimming away from him. With it’s long tail sweeping back and forth and it’s wings folded in against it’s body it more closely resembled a serpent than the dinosaur it was named after.

  Edward shook off his disorientation and pulled the suit up out of the water using on the failing ground-effect system, and started following after the pterodactyl. As he flew over the top of the beast he locked his micro-missiles on again, and fired off the remaining 12 missiles in single volley of flaming darts which tore away from him towards the water.

  The already injured pterodactyl twisted it’s body downwards and tried to dive away from the incoming missiles, but only managed to avoid a handful of them, with the rest striking it across the back and wings.

  Edward dived down into the water after the beast, and slammed into it’s back between the two wings. He activated the gripping bolts built into his suit’s hands, knees and feet to hold on as the pterodactyl twisted it’s body under the water in an attempt to knock him loose.

  Edward started dragging himself up towards the reptile’s neck. Some of the other Pyrrianauts had suggested strangling pterodactyls before, but he doubted he could reach his arms around it’s neck; he instead hoped he could finish it off with his needle guns or wrist-mounted blades.

  The pterodactyl kicked its body up out of the water as high as it could go, and turned itself over so that fell back into the water back first—directly onto Edward. The shock was communicated from the suit to Edward through the neural link in what should have been simply discomfort, but instead was pain. Edward gritted his teeth and concentrated on not blacking out again as he continued to pull himself towards the monster’s neck.

  Edward’s needle guns wouldn’t be able to punch through the scales, but, if he shot through one of the wounds already torn open by the micro-missiles, the needles would hopefully penetrate far enough to do some damage, so he kept moving towards a jagged gash he had chosen on the side of the pterodactyl’s neck.

  J
ust willing the suit to move turned the dull background pain into a sudden flare of fire, but he clawed himself up the last couple of meters and punched his right fist into the wound as hard as he could. He willed the needle gun to fire, and just kept firing until his HUD started flashing up alerts that it was empty. As he started to pay attention again he realised that the pterodactyl had stopped moving and that the two of them where sinking towards the bottom of the lake.

  Edward released the gripping bolts, and watched as the body of the beast, now freed from his much denser suit, started to float towards the surface. After a couple of seconds he shook his head and activated the ground-effect system and started towards the surface of the lake himself.

  Edward sat on the shore of the lake with his helmet and gloves removed, watching the pterodactyl’s carcass floating a couple of hundred meters from shore. He didn’t trust the suit’s ground-effect system, so there was a team on their way to pick him up, but for now he just had to wait.

  He turned his head towards the sound of a ground-effect vehicle flying in over the trees behind him. He momentarily scrunched his eyebrows in confusion; it wasn’t a ColAdmin vehicle, but one of the civilian air trucks, but then he recognised the woman driving the truck,