Mechanical-Arm Spider #73
Jake breathed.
One breath. Held it.
The sirens dropped away. The Canary Cry still ringing in his back teeth dissolved into the background. Everything that wasn't the two figures standing before him unfocused and he paid his attention to one thing.
The mechanical elbow joint on the Arm's right side.
The interface point. Where sleeve ended and biology began.
He exhaled.
Leg first.
He fired a webline at a beam behind the Leg's left shoulder, anchored and used the tension to pull himself into a low flat trajectory that skimmed the road surface. Underneath the flash-step's optimal window. The Leg's response was to step into where Jake was supposed to arrive.
Jake arrived six feet to the left of that.
He came up out of the skid already driving his right knee into the side of the mechanical leg's joint, bodyweight stacked directly behind it. The engineering took it -- force distributed up through the sleeve, no failure, exactly as designed -- but the Leg buckled sideways and went down to the intact knee and the flash-step needed both feet on the ground.
Jake's hand found the back of the helmet and drove the faceplate into the road.
Concrete held. The left eyepiece didn't.
The hands coming for his wrists reached him and then slowed and then stopped on the second impact and Jake stood and turned to find the Arm already with the palm up, the blue light gathering at the discharge port, aimed straight at his chest from across the intersection.
He jumped left.
The blast crossed where he'd been standing and hit the streaming fire hydrant, again. The water sprayed with rejuvenated pressure for a moment, then died down to a low steady stream.
Jake went at the Leg twice more. Same approach, different angles -- each time forcing the flash-step to fire into a position that pulled the Leg further from the Arm, eating into the twenty-foot spread they kept re-establishing between them, the geometry that let the Arm work freely at range without risk of Jake using one of them as a shield against the other.
Third pass he faked at the Leg, watched it step, and went right instead.
Webline off the window above the Arm's head -- pulled him in fast and high and coming down. He landed with both feet on the Arm's shoulders and drove them both into the road.
They hit the pavement together and Jake got his hands on the mechanical elbow before the Arm could push him off.
Close range was different. At close range the neuro-mech integration was faster than he'd read from distance -- the elbow joint torquing against his grip before his grip was fully set, the arm trying to rotate inward across his body in a motion that would have broken his hold if he'd been resisting it. He rode the rotation instead, let the arm swing him to the right while his feet found the Arm's chest and he pushed off hard.
Sleeper gave him the margin and the Arm's frame skidded backward six inches across the road surface.
The palm charged.
He felt the vibration build up through the metal where his hands were gripping the elbow -- the energy gathering toward the discharge threshold, the port warming at the center of the palm, and he had about one second before it released on its own terms.
He twisted the shoulder joint. Both hands working the elbow, leveraging upward, and the palm swung toward the sky just as the discharge fired.
The blast went straight up. The recoil drove back down through the Arm's frame in a direction the engineering hadn't been designed to handle and the Arm staggered, one knee dropping, the structural problem buying Jake exactly the window he needed.
He got his right forearm under the elbow from below. Braced his chest against the arm's underside. And pulled upward with everything he had left, the force directed into the interface point at the seam between sleeve and skin.
The Arm's free hand found his collar. Fingers closing hard.
He pulled anyway.
Two sounds came out together. The first was the interface separating -- mechanical, clean, over in less than a second. The second was underneath it and had no mechanics in it at all. One syllable, no language, the body's first response to losing something that had been part of it.
Then the scream. Full and sustained and loud enough that the car alarms already going seemed quieter than before.
The Arm's frame listed hard to the right, into the space where the arm had been, and went down to one knee.
Jake stepped back with the arm against his chest.
Heavy. The interface point still trailing warm filaments.
He had maybe four seconds before the Leg got back into this.
He got three.
The flash-step fired from behind him -- shorter than it had been all morning, the degraded knee joint costing real distance now, arriving two feet short of where it would have landed an hour ago. The mechanical foot caught his left side and spun him. He kept the arm clamped against his chest with his right hand and let the spin carry him into a webline that redirected the momentum, swinging him wide and back around with the Leg already mid-follow-up.
The second step passed under him.
He dropped straight down onto the back of the Leg's damaged knee from above.
His full weight, straight down, onto the joint he'd been stressing since the first approach.
The articulation folded inward. The Leg hit the road surface and stayed there and the flash-step wasn't a factor anymore.
Jake stood in the middle of the intersection.
Both of them down. The morning pressing in around the edges -- sirens, the Arm's scream fading into something lower.
He looked at the mechanical arm in his hand.
Then at his left side.
Wrong arm. Built for a right amputation. His was left -- different socket, different nerve cluster, and the interface filaments were calibrated for someone else's biology entirely. He pressed them against his stub anyway because four hours was the window before Sleeper's depletion became unmanageable, and the arm didn't run on those reserves.
The filaments found his nerve cluster.
His left side locked up from the interface point out to his shoulder, a long sustained cramp that the nerve endings produced in response to input they hadn't processed in two days. The palm sparked -- blue-white, short and uncontrolled, the discharge port firing without intent while the interface tried to find a template that didn't exist. He worked through it. Found the hand. One finger closed, then two, the grip slow and twice as strong as he asked for, the elbow lagging behind the nerve signal in a way that felt like moving through something thick.
The palm gathered charge and the discharge punched through a car forty feet out.
The port sparked at the wrist. Caught. Stalled. Caught.
Not stable. But the hand had closed.
Sleeper pulled back from his whole body at once and concentrated around his chest.
He turned.
Canary was twenty feet back, coming in from the east, one hand still at her throat. She'd been reading the arm, reading his left side, and her chest was already rising.
He webbed her before the Cry could build -- lines across her shoulders and upper arms, snapping her forward and down to one knee. Three more across her legs. She hit the road and the Cry came out anyway through the web compression, partial, aimed at nothing in particular --
It hit the arm.
All the filaments fired at once. The calibration error compounding under the frequency, the palm discharging everything it had stored in one uncontrolled burst that lit the side of a building in blue-white for two seconds and then went dark.
The hand froze at half-open. The connection at the interface -- still present, still warm -- but the arm not responding to anything.
Sleeper surged toward Canary.
Forward from the chest mass, reach extending, the teeth already forming as it covered the distance between them. She was on the road with her arms pinned and twenty feet was nothing and Sleeper understood the frequency that had just broken the connection and it was not interested in leaving the source of that frequency intact.
Jake's arm shook for two full seconds pulling it back.
The teeth folded. The reach retracted. Sleeper came back to his chest slowly, the way something comes back when it's being held rather than returning on its own.
He stood over her, and looked at her for a moment.
She was looking back at him with the eyes of someone who had already decided what came next and was waiting for him to confirm it.
The arm hung at his left side. Dark. Frozen at the half-open position the discharge had left it -- not a fist, not a reach. The shape of something interrupted before it could finish deciding. He needed to fix the connection before it could degrade past the point that could be recovered.
Needed to deal with her before she became a recurring problem. Sleeper had the right idea but ending her right away would be nothing but a waste. Not when she could bring him a percentage closer to completing the hundred percent milestone.
All he needed to do was convince her to reveal what her totem was, consume it, and then decide her fate. He had the means.
The symbiote began secreting.
Pheromones surged.
~MimicLord
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