by M. D. Cooper
“Seriously, Ralph? They were just plants. I fought on Boston, too,” Chase said.
“Don’t change the subject again,” Ralph shot back. “The girl. Who is she? Is she on the Romany?”
Chase sighed and shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen. She’s not on the roster, and no one knows anything about her; before I enlisted, though…well, let’s just say that I have it on very good authority that she’s in the Marauders.”
“Name,” Ralph said.
“Yeah, tell him,” Casey said around a mouthful of eggs. “Ralph knows everyone, and if he doesn’t know ‘em, he knows someone who does.”
“Rika,” Chase said. “Her name’s Rika.”
“What’s her specialization—if she has one?” Ralph asked.
“She’s a mech,” Chase replied, his tone guarded.
“Really?” Casey sat up.
“What model?” Ralph asked with a look of concentration on his face as he reached out across the Link.
Chase hated that people thought of mechs—well, Rika mostly—as models. Even if it was a good way to identify them.
“She’s an SMI-2,” Chase replied.
“Ohhh yeah,” Ralph grinned. “SMI-2s were all chicks; they were some hot meat.”
Chase felt the blood rise in his face once more. “Ralph, you seem like a good guy, but if you call Rika ‘meat’ one more time, I’ll cave your teeth in, got it?”
“Dude—” Ralph began to say, but Casey put a hand on his shoulder.
“Cool it. Both of you. Ralph, apologize. Chase, ease up on the macho reactions, ‘kay?” Casey said.
Ralph sank back in his chair and stared at Chase—who returned the expression. Suddenly Ralph smiled and nodded.
“Sorry, man. You’re right. I picked up a lot of bad habits in the war. We were all meat to the brass. Mechs saved my life more than once, too. You’ll never hear that word pass my lips again, unless I’m talking about our delicious victuals, here.”
Chase was surprised by Ralph’s words—the man’s recognition of his misstep shaming Chase for having such a visceral reaction.
“Me too. I just really want to find her. I’m worried we’re going to get into some crazy action here and one of us won’t make it out.”
“No chance,” Casey said. “Marauders do the fucking-up of shit, not the other way around.”
Ralph let out a sound that was half snort, half laugh. “Casey, that has to be the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard.”
“We turn the enemy into shit fuckers?” Casey asked.
“I vote that we abandon all analogies combining fucking and shit,” Chase said. “How’s about ‘we rub their faces in shit’?”
“For fuck’s sake!” a woman said from a few seats down. “People are trying to eat, here!”
“Sorry,” Chase muttered.
“Either way,” Casey said. “Now that Ralph’s on the case, he’ll ferret her out. Not a lot of mechs in the Marauders. People will have seen her.”
Ralph grinned and nodded. “Sergeant Ralph is on the case. I’ll find your smecksy mech girl in no time! I might have to extract payment with some leering, and maybe a bit of drooling, mind you.”
“Way to own your misogyny, Ralph,” Casey said.
Chase couldn’t help but smile at Ralph’s enthusiastic grin. “You’re a class act, Ralph. Seriously, though, I appreciate it. Finding Rika is…well…I just have to do it.”
RESCUE
STELLAR DATE: 12.16.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Northeast Berlin
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Theban Alliance
The fireworks had been amazing. Rika had stared out the truck’s window at them for a full five minutes before fire drones finally arrived and began putting them out.
She imagined that they must be even more impressive in the sky than on the ground.
News feeds on the local nets had been abuzz about the fire, but there was no mention of anything suspicious about it—though it was far too soon to tell. Rika doubted that inspectors would be able to start crawling through the mess until the next day.
Barne drove the truck several kilometers and then parked it in a garage next to another, equally nondescript truck—though this one was black. Together, he and Rika swapped all their cargo over and swept the truck clean. Barne had informed her that it was long-term storage parking, and that he’d rented the space till the end of the month.
They would be long gone by then.
The drive to the next location was short, just ten minutes, and they pulled into another warehouse area before reaching a self-storage lot.
“We going to set up shop here?” Rika asked.
“No,” Barne replied as he opened the storage unit’s door, revealing a smaller car.
By the time he had driven the car out, and she had parked the truck in the storage unit—which it just barely fit into—Howe was beginning to rise in the eastern sky.
“I haven’t asked, because I assumed you had a plan, but how are we going to get to wherever Cheri is?” Rika asked. “Jerry said it was halfway around the world.”
“He was exaggerating,” Barne replied as he leaned against the car. “It’s near Jersey City—about seventeen hundred klicks up the coast. They have high-speed highways here, and this baby can do four hundred an hour. We’ll be there by lunchtime.”
Rika nodded and opened the back of the truck, and then she jumped up and opened a crate. She tossed two rifles down to Barne, followed by a duffel bag full of ammunition. She turned to another case and opened it up, pulling out her gun-arm and helmet.
“You think you’ll need that?” Barne asked as she jumped out and pulled down the truck’s overhead door.
“Maybe. I’d like to keep them close.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Barne replied with a shrug.
Five minutes later, they were pulling onto the highway, the car sliding onto a high-speed maglev ridge and accelerating to top speed.
Rika opened up a panel on her leg and pulled out her charge cord, sliding it into one of the power sockets in the car.
“Glad it has that,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to go into our big rescue with only half a charge.”
Barne gave a soft laugh. “I know what you mean…I don’t have to plug in—not modded enough for that—but I do need to eat a ton to keep going.”
“Speaking of which,” Rika reached into the back and grabbed a fistful of protein bars, dumping half in Barne’s lap.
“Thanks…” he said, a pregnant pause hanging between them.
Rika didn’t want to spend the next four hours in an uncomfortable silence, so she asked, “What is it?”
“Well,” Barne began. “What’s it like? I mean, I’ll be honest—you were kinda sour and mopey at first. But in a fight…I’ve never seen anything like it. You just charged them like their guns were shooting spitwads.”
“Well, in my defense, I woke up in that warehouse only minutes after being sold at auction—by my reckoning,” Rika replied. “I was feeling just a bit down. Shit…that was still just over two days ago for me.”
“At auction?” Barne shook his head. “I had no idea…”
“Is one form of selling a slave somehow more dignified than another?” Rika asked, her tone acidic.
“I guess not,” Barne said. “But I hadn’t really thought about how the regiment got you. I figured they had you in a warehouse at HQ or something.”
“Yeah, back to miniscule differentiations of humiliation.”
“Sorry…you don’t have to be such a bitch to me about it. I didn’t chop you up and sell you off after the war.” Barne’s face took on a pouty frown, and Rika realized that she was punishing Barne for what others had done to her.
“Gah. I’m not good at this, Barne. Personal interaction and I are not close friends.”
“You too, eh?” Barne said, and then laughed. “Look at the two of us—both shithead messes after the war, barely able to talk to anyone, and stuck together in here.”
Barne continued laughing, and Rika joined in, letting the cathartic release calm her down. Eventually, when they were silent once more, Barne glanced over at her.
“You didn’t really answer the question.”
“Which question?” Rika asked, knowing full well what he was referring to.
“About what it’s like. What they did to you.”
Rika looked down at herself, at her steel limbs, at her three-fingered hands.
“I won’t lie,” she said. “There are times when it’s wonderful. The power, the speed—they’re intoxicating.”
“You like killing,” Barne said quietly. “I saw it in your eyes. Don’t try to bullshit me. I know the look; it stares back at me in the mirror every day.”
Rika didn’t respond for a minute. Then two. Then five. She wondered if Barne was going to let it drop, but knew he wouldn’t. She knew she shouldn’t.
“There are two Rikas,” she said at last. “There’s a Rika who just stopped that night when they took me, when they made me into this…machine. That Rika would give anything to go back to how things were—hell, she’s still just a nineteen-year-old girl. I can’t stop her from wanting to go back to before—she craves it constantly. But there’s this other Rika. The one that came out on the battlefield, the one that survived the war, when so many others didn’t…”
Rika closed her eyes, and the vision of Kelly—her friend laying before her on the deck of the shuttle with a hole blown clear through her torso—came back to her.
“I know that guilt,” Barne said.
“Yeah, all the psych programs go on about survivor’s guilt,” Rika said. “But they don’t tell you what to do with the other feeling…”
“The joy you get from killing,” Barne said.
“Is it joy?” Rika asked. “For me it’s just rage; I want to make them all pay for what they did to me—for what they took. But maybe…maybe you’re right, Barne.” Rika let out a long sigh. “Maybe there is joy mixed with that rage.”
Barne nodded, silent for a minute. “I don’t know if it’s wrong or not, Rika. But it’s what we are now. We’re killers, you and me. Why don’t you rest a bit? We’ll be killing again soon enough.”
Rika closed her eyes and leaned her head back. A killer. That’s all Barne saw when he looked at her; it was all he had ever seen. The only difference was that now, she had killed to save him.
Maybe he was right. She was on Pyra to kill. Though she had spent her day enjoying a lovely walk, its purpose had been to help her kill more effectively. Even the rescue they were about to undertake—even if it was bloodless—was just so they could kill once more.
Killer….
* * * * *
The sun was beginning to set as she and Barne settled behind a rock to survey Cheri’s ‘hideout’. Though it only took a few hours to reach Jersey City, it had taken several more to get deep into the nearby mountains and make their way up the steep valley without being seen.
“How come this Cheri person gets a nice villa at the foot of a mountain, and we had to hang out in a dusty warehouse?” Rika asked.
“Covert mission,” Barne said. “Cheri doesn’t seem to be doing the ‘covert’ thing, here.”
“Barne, I was kidding,” Rika said.
“Huh, musta been your robot voice.”
Rika opened her mouth to give Barne a tongue-lashing he would never forget, when she saw the twinkle in his eye.
“Asshole,” she said, and gave him a mock punch on the arm.
“Ow! Shit, Rika, even your pretend punches hurt like balls. Ease up, OK?”
“Sorry-not-sorry,” Rika replied in a robotic voice.
Barne chuckled. “Now who’s the asshole?”
Rika shook her head and allowed a small smile to grace her lips. If someone had told her that two days after being sold at auction she would be smiling—with the people who had bought her, no less—she would have slapped them upside the head. And not in a nice way.
Is this Stockholm Syndrome? she wondered. I never felt this way about the GAF…I hated them. Well, most of them.
She made a note to have her internal psych-eval program check for Stockholm the next time she ran it. For now, getting Jerry and Leslie out of that rather nice-looking villa was all that mattered.
The question Barne had asked echoed in her mind once more. Why had she saved him? Sure, there were all the issues with getting offworld, and where she would go without the help of Basilisk. That was all logical and fine; but Rika knew she hadn’t thought of any of that when she saw his warning in the window.
She’d had a teammate in trouble, and she had to rescue that teammate. Was that some sort of leftover conditioning from the military, or was she just so desperate to belong somewhere that she’d side with her owners?
“Hey, Rika, you with me?” Barne asked.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Enough dicking around. Time to get frosty. I can see seven sentries, what’s your count?”
“I see eleven—make that twelve.”
Barne and Rika had parked the car further down the valley, and hiked the last few kilometers to the villa. Since it was rather secluded, they decided to go in packing. Rika had spent the last two hours of the car ride adjusting the socket and mount on her gun-arm, so that she was able to place it on her right arm. It felt good to have it there. Even better, since it was the GNR-41C, and not the old B she used to have.
A JE78 multifunction rifle was on her back, and two pistols were slid into the clips on her thighs.
But the icing on the cake was her helmet. It was an older model, the one used by SMI-1 mechs. It only had two-seventy vision; not the three-sixty of her SMI-2 helmet from the war, but it fit. That helmet had only fit so long as the wearer didn’t possess a nose or ears.
Given the fact that she had spent a lot of credit getting those features back, she was glad not to have to sacrifice them again.
Her hair, however, had been a different matter. It had taken several tries to get the helmet on and sealed without blonde strands sticking out around her neck, causing the seal-leak warning to flash.
In the end, she had lain down on a log with her head hanging off, while Barne carefully placed her hair in the helmet, and then raised it up to her head.
That was, of course, after joking that they should just shave it all off. He had almost called her ‘mech-meat’ at the time, but stopped himself, a look of apology on his face.
She hadn’t made a big deal about it. He wasn’t swearing at her, and calling her military hardware anymore, so she’d take what progress she could get.
Now as she watched the sentries through her helmet’s enhanced sensors, she remembered how good it felt to have the extra senses it provided. She could hear animals in the brush two hundred paces away, see through haze and fog clear to the edge of the horizon, and even see through some of the walls in the villa.
“What’s our plan, then?” Rika asked.
“Not sure,” Barne replied. “I estimate we could take out five or six of those sentries before they figured out what was going on. But then they’ll be on high alert. I bet there are at least forty or fifty of them in there, and they probably have no small number of automated defense systems, as well.”
“Want to do something crazy?” Rika asked with a sly grin.
“How crazy?’ Barne asked.
* * * * *
An hour later, Rika stood with Barne on the mountain slope, a kilometer above the villa.
“Let me get this straight, you want me to get on your back?” Barne asked.
“Yeah. You get on, and I’ll run down the mountain. There’s an escarpment sixty meters from the villa. Running downhill, I can probably hit one-fifty before we get there. Then I jump, we sail over everything, and—if I aim well—we smash right through that glass ceiling in the back.”
“So your plan is to run down the mountain and jump into the villa,” Barne said. “That’s crazy.”
Rika nodded. “Yes, I sai
d that before we climbed up here. What did you think we were going to do?”
“I don’t know, I figured you saw a secret door with your fancy helmet.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Rika laughed. “OK, climb on.”
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” Barne complained, as he clambered up onto her back and wrapped his arms around her neck.
“I really doubt that this is the dumbest thing you’ve done,” Rika said.
“At least you’re sexy,” he said morosely. “If you were a guy mech, I’d never live this down.”
Rika wanted to tell Barne to shove his backhanded compliments up his asshole, but he might like that too much, so she let it drop.
“Hold on tight!” Rika said instead, and began her run down the mountain. She wove around rocks and trees, careful not to jostle Barne overmuch. Her speed crossed over a hundred, and then a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. The edge of the escarpment rushed toward her, and Rika leapt off it at nearly one hundred and seventy kilometers per hour.
She gauged her trajectory and saw that her aim was true. The glass ceiling on a rear room of the villa’s main structure rushed up to meet them, and they smashed through it and slammed into the room’s floor.
Barne leapt off her the instant they broke through the glass and landed nearby, rolling to his feet, the medium armor he wore helping to absorb the shock.
The sensors in Rika’s helmet, coupled with her neural augments, gave her a full layout of the room by the time she landed—and smashed a rather expensive-looking table.
Two men were standing near one of the doors, both looking surprised, though still raising their rifles.
Rika shot one with a ballistic round from her GNR-41C, while Barne took out the other.
Rika swept her active scan across the room and saw a cluster of people sixty meters to their right.