“I guess that’s it,” Antares’s voice was more distorted. Range concerns, and a tinker with Stonewall was using more of their Haywire Band to try and get messages through. She was done her back-and-forth with her team. “I just need a sign, a signal.”

The feed crackled, the response garbled, a flood of code he didn’t have the equipment to interpret.

“What was that?” he asked.

“A yes,” Dragon said.

He set his jaw.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t trust Antares to be the one doing it. They had given her some slack and she’d abused it. She’d used her power against a civilian Warden staffer. She wasn’t level-headed.

Now they were putting thousands of lives on the line.

“She’s moving.”

“I noticed.”

The Machine Army lurched out of chasms. They’d traveled across the crystal landscape, and now they rose up, flooding out onto the ruined cityscape around them. As they got their footing, they oriented, then opened fire. His Marduk’s sensors tracked the lasers, even though they were invisible to the naked eye. His naked eye, singular, could see the damage each of those lasers was doing.

The Simurgh used the opportunity to soar, rising up above the buildings she had been perched behind.

Defiant brought the Marduk around, aimed, and switched the channels on the power core. For this weapon, he could only hover while the weapon primed. There was a countdown.

Dragon moved in sync with him. Her crafts protected him, there were forcefields erected to keep him from being knocked off course.

The Marduk wasn’t as effective as the Uther when it came to conflict, especially conflicts where he had to adapt to new threats, or where those threats could adapt to him. It was a very simple, straightforward weapon.

In a way, it was why he liked it. The irony of his power was that it gave him control over details, nuance, the little aspects of a piece of technology that could work alongside another piece of technology. At the same time, he was someone who liked things to be straightforward, even going so far as to discard anything his instincts considered extraneous.

“What do you think?” Dragon’s tone was almost conversational.

“I think you’re experiencing a rare moment of insecurity, Mrs. Wallis. Which is entirely allowed, considering the circumstances.” He kept his sights trained on the Simurgh. The countdown hit the tens. Ten seconds, nine, eight—

“You’re deflecting.”

“I hate it,” he said.

As if to punctuate the statement, the Marduk was hit from the side. An attack that bypassed the forcefields. It knocked his shot off course—brought his nose around toward Dragon’s craft.

He steered hard, compensating. He’d anticipated this.

The benefit of using this weapon was that it didn’t require exceptionally good aim.