Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

taken refuge in the Mount years ago with his family. At the time he’d been a scrawny young man barely out of his teens and always wearing a pair of driving gloves. He’d held off revealing his superhuman abilities for almost a year after joining the Mount. Being able to merge with vehicles and control them had seemed like an all-but-worthless ability in post-apocalypse Los Angeles. Then Cesar realized he could possess the Cerberus armor and use it better than any pilot. Danielle had grudgingly accepted him onto her team.

Lieutenant Gibbs walked over with his laptop. A low whisssk, like a steel brush on oily stone, whispered up from the floor with every other step. “Still can’t keep power steady to the left hand,” he said to Danielle.

“A short?”

“Maybe.” He rattled off a bunch of technical terms St. George didn’t understand. Danielle pointed at the screen and fired back with a few terms of her own. The air between them became a swarm of electronic- and engineering-speak.

Then the swarm scattered, Gibbs nodded, and he walked away with his whispery steps. St. George glanced down. He tried not to stare, but he felt a twinge whenever he saw the man’s foot.

The lieutenant had been the last person to wear the original Cerberus armor. His mind had been under someone else’s control and he’d attacked St. George, damaging a dozen buildings across the Mount in the process. And then Zzzap had blasted off one of the battlesuit’s feet and a good part of the calf. Gibbs’s own foot had been incinerated in the process, cauterized right through the ankle. Doc Connolly had to remove what was left and an inch of the leg itself to make a clean stump.

Gibbs had hobbled around the Mount with a crutch for three months and made a point of avoiding all the heroes. It took that long for Danielle to burn through most of her anger and resentment at the loss of the battlesuit.

She built him a new foot as a peace offering. It was purely mechanical, a steampunk thing made of steel and brass and a collection of gears Cesar had found for her. The joints worked off pressure and counterweight and movement. Gibbs could walk again with a faint limp, and they’d never spoken of his part in the armor’s destruction.

St. George looked away from the foot and found Danielle watching him. “It wasn’t your fault,” she told him.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, “but maybe someday you’ll listen to one of us.”

He coughed. “So, going good, overall?”

She shook her head, then nodded. “Yeah. The original Cerberus was a prototype suit. It was made for easy use and assembly in demonstrations, not so much active duty. There’s about a dozen things we would’ve done differently, and I’m trying to implement as many of them as possible.”

“Like?”

“The Mark Two’s going to be about fifteen percent stronger, if my numbers are right. Grip strength is up almost twenty.” She tapped the torso section in front of her. “I’ve increased the range of motion in the wrists, shoulders, and hips, too.”

St. George couldn’t see the changes, but he nodded. He saw a component he recognized, one of the rotating arm mounts she’d built out at Project Krypton, and pointed at it. “Still using those?”

Danielle’s mouth curled into a tight smile. “So,” she said, “problem. At this point, both of the armor’s M2s are ruined. We’ve got replacement barrels, but one of the guns would need its threads recut to get the barrel on, and the bolt group’s ruined on the other one. We’ve got one replacement, but they’ve got it mounted on the East Gate watchtower.”

“And there’s only six hundred rounds left for it anyway,” added Gibbs.

St. George remembered the days of cheering when they’d find a box of shotgun shells. “Isn’t that a lot?”

“For a pistol or a rifle it’s not bad,” Danielle said, “but for Ma Deuce it’s about a minute of firing time. Cerberus needs a new ranged weapon.”

“Okay.”

She waved him around to one of the worktables. One of the arms was there, held up in brackets. A few cables ran from the shoulder joint across the table. “Thing is, we’re not swimming in any type of ammunition. So I’ve tried to come up with something else. I played with a few railgun models for a while, but every shot would eat up at least sixteen percent of the armor’s battery life to get anything to an even halfway decent velocity.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said St. George.

Danielle shrugged off her flannel shirt to reveal the black spandex bodysuit studded with metal contacts. It had been years since St. George had seen her without it. It wouldn’t surprise him if she slept in it. He wasn’t sure if she had more than one or if she rinsed it every other night.

She settled in next to the table and slid her right arm into the framework. It blended in with the metal and wires. “Then it struck me I was going about this all wrong,” she said. “I kept trying to solve it in a high-tech way, and that means precision ammunition or lots of power. What if I did something low-tech instead?”

She nodded over at Gibbs, and he tapped a few keys on the laptop. Several elements in the framework arm lit up. Tiny sparks danced at all the contact points along the bodysuit’s sleeve.

The battlesuit arm lifted its forearm out of the brackets. Danielle looked lopsided with the one massive arm. She flexed the fingers a few times and relaxed. Without the insulation and armor muffling it, the hum of the joints seemed closer to a squeal.

She shot a grin at St. George, then nodded across the room. “See that sheet of plywood?”

At the far end of the workshop, about twenty yards away, the oversized panel was propped up with some of the wooden jacks that had once held scenery in place. SW PLAT 2 had been stenciled on it. At least