* * *
In the conference center of the Star Port Hotel, the three-dimensional screen covering one whole wall showed Lieutenant Tomeral in his personal mech land perfectly, without even having to bend knees and compensate for the drop at all. The big ugly mech just strolled off. His name and unit were displayed on the bottom of the screen. The High Command and their staff were watching the competition and enjoying a few drinks.
“What the hell was that? Was that the Inactive Reservist you mentioned, Fritz?” Admiral Timerton demanded. He was livid.
“Yes, sir. That’s Lieutenant Tomeral. There’s nothing we can do about it. Per the regulations, he had the right to enter the competition. When Lieutenant General Wilton told me about it, I had the legal guys look into it. That lieutenant found a loophole.”
Wilton chimed in, “Colonel Keithel should have sent his ass packing, anyway.” He was pissed off that someone that should not even be in the competition had shown up his Marines.
Major General Alturn, the ground defense commander, said, “Treval, you know that technically, Tomeral is a Marine. He’s just on inactive status.”
“Screw that noise, he isn’t one of us,” General Wilton fired back. “He couldn’t cut it and got put in the Inactive Reserves straight out of the academy.”
“Actually, he got bumped…all the way out. He is from Joth and was on a scholarship for Warball. He didn’t know it, but he had a slim shot at commissioning active, anyway. We have never had an academy officer commission active from the planet Joth. When I received a call from Mr. Yatarward about his son, well, that sealed it beyond just the tradition,” Colonel Yato said. He was the current commandant of the Tretrayon System Academy. “He actually finished in the top ten percent,” he said.
He didn’t have to add that the alumni from the academy held a prejudiced attitude about the tradition. It was the reason that no officer from Joth was ever promoted beyond an O4—a major in the Marines or a lieutenant commander in the Fleet. They never received command beyond company level or of a frigate. This system’s fleet would be commanded by Tretrayons, and specifically, academy alumni. Period. End of story.
“He’s that Tomeral? I made a few credits off him, betting on the games. Still, he’s not active, and I don’t like him embarrassing my Corps,” Wilton said.
“We have the whole damn system watching this thing, and a monstrosity out there is doing better, so far, than our newest mechs? Maybe I should give Mr. Yatarward a call myself; his damn machines can’t match a simple drop that a home-made piece of crap can do,” Admiral Timerton said.
Yatarward Corporation was the biggest name in military contracts in the entire system. The company developed and built the mech systems in current use. They had held the contract for the last one hundred and fifty years. If the commander for the entire system called him, he would answer without his personal assistant giving the caller the usual runaround.
* * *
Harmon waited near the ready line with the other mech pilots who hadn’t gone through the range yet, although he had parked his mech a little distance away from the others. Twiggy walked over to chat.
“What’s up buddy? How ya been on this hot ball of dust?” he asked, reaching out to shake Harmon’s hand.
“Good, man. It’s hot, but it’s home,” Harmon said.
“I hear ya, but I ain’t listenin’. It’s too hot for my taste; I’ll tell ya right now,” Twiggy said, wiping his brow. “How in tarnation do y’all grow anything to eat here? The desert is full of them, but you sure can’t eat all these cactuses and scrub brush.”
Harmon laughed. “We grow it in cool houses.”
“Cool houses? What in the world is a cool house?” Twiggy asked. The farmer in him had to know.
“Well, you know how on your planet, hot houses are for growing things off season?” Harmon asked.
“Yeah, we start seedlings in them. Wait, you mean you have clear-steel houses that are cooler inside than outside so y’all can grow crops? Well, I’ll be. That’s purty smart. I wonder if my pa would be interested in setting up a farm here. Then we could hang out sometime, and I can get away from Zwella Kinwell. I swear that gal won’t leave me alone. I ain’t ready to get hitched, ya know?” he said.
Harmon laughed. Twiggy had been dodging Zwella for years. She was from the same farming community he was from. His family raised crops while her family raised chinto, a six-legged riding beast native to their planet. It was like the horses of Earth, just longer in body, with small knobs like horns on its head. Their coloring was always unique, a light brown and green-striped pattern. It was a natural camouflage for the tall grass plains that were native to the area the chinto came from.
“How’d you do on the drop?” Twiggy asked.
The scoring from the drop started at one hundred and lost a point for every meter off the center. None of the pilots had received the points deduction for the timing of the drop, which wasn’t surprising since they were the best mech pilots in the system.
“Ah, you know. I scored a one hundred,” Harmon said.
Twiggy whistled. “Then you’re the only one to get it. I know you were a good mech operator in training. But dang, dead-on target after falling from ten miles is more than good; it’s really good. Bet the brass ain’t none too happy right about now,” he said, with a laugh.
Harmon climbed into his mech a little later to get ready for his run downrange. The range was a movement-to-contact, live fire range. It was a simulated town, and the goal was to eliminate the threats as you pass through the town. Scoring was based on time completion. It took about ten minutes on average to get through the range.
The targets were tanks, armored personnel carriers, mechs, and crew-served weapons. All were computer-controlled and on tracks. Several times during the morning, they had been replaced due to damage. The missiles they had been issued were exactly like the real ones, except they didn’t have explosives in the warhead; there were paint markers in them, instead. Still, the targets had to be replaced periodically because of the damage caused by the impacts of the missiles and railgun rounds.
The threats could fire back, but they fired blanks, or light, in the case of simulated lasers. If the aiming reticle from a target locked in with enough time to hit a mech, the computer took note. It relayed damage reports to the range controllers. Right before each pilot entered the range, the range control cadre placed ten override markers on their mechs. The shock plugs, if activated, would lock up that limb or weapon if it received enough damage. For too many mistakes, it would lock the entire mech down with a temporary electrical surge. This could be painful to a pilot, but it beat the alternative of real combat.
The scoring started at one hundred after eight minutes on the range. Every twenty seconds beyond that time would cause competitors to lose a point. One point was also lost every time a mech was hit. Five points were lost if something had to be locked down. Ten points were given up if there was a total lockdown. This could happen after a mech fired its final shots and eliminated all threats, so it wasn’t a total loss of points. Failure to eliminate all threats, however, was a total loss of points.
The actual town itself was not visible to the pilots until it was time to step up to the wall surrounding the town. To start the range, the pilot had to get his mech over the eighteen-foot wall and clear the town. He had the option of climbing over the wall, jumping over with rocket assists, or finding the entrance. Harmon went last, but had no idea how the other pilots had scored.
Right before he let the controller know that he was ready, Clip called him. “Hey man, those little shock plugs they stuck on you won’t have any effect on the mech. Me and Zee have it hard wired against a magnetic pulse, so what they use sure isn’t going to work. You might just want to avoid getting hit so they don’t find out.”
“Great,” Harmon answered back. “You’re going to get me kicked out of the competition before we can win the prize money.”
“Nah, fire off all the mi
ssiles on your jump over that wall, and then just hunt down the last two. You got this. Oh yeah, Zee says for you to not worry about fuel consumption. You have larger fuel tanks to go with the more efficient thrust nozzles on that thing. A lot more than a normal mech does. The tanks go up above the normal location in those legs. Come to think of it, that might not be so safe in a real hostile environment. Hey Zee, we gotta…” Harmon heard him talking away from his comm before he cut the call.
He stepped across the ready line and fired his thrusters. He angled up over the wall to the left, looking for a spot to land behind something. There were buildings on both sides of the street. They could provide good cover. He took in everything in an instant, added thrust, and commanded all of his missiles to launch at once. They shot almost straight up into the air. He angled back to the right, going higher than he probably should have. He cut the thrusters to land quickly behind a building. He felt that landing like the one he felt back in the warehouse.
He checked all his warning lights and saw no issues. His radar showed his missiles in flight. No! Something happened to their guidance, they are supposed to head toward a target not up into the air. This is not good, he thought. He checked his ordinance screen to ensure all eighteen missiles had fired. They had. Radar now showed them angled back toward the ground and gaining speed. He turned up his outside sensors, and he heard the missiles striking targets. Alright, Clip!
Harmon armed his railgun and sprinted down the middle of the street, cutting back and forth with no set pattern. He passed several of the targets with fresh paint on them, with flares burning beside them, showing his rockets had hit them. He saw a flash from a window up ahead, and he jumped. He used his thrusters a touch on landing and shot a ten-round burst into the window. The quad gun stopped firing. As far as he could tell, it had not hit him. He fired his jets and flew to the roof of the same building. It was the tallest one in the mock town. From there, he could see the last quad gun attempting to engage him. It couldn’t get a lock on him with the top of the window stopping the upward movement of the barrels. He took it out with a ten-round burst. From there, he sprinted to the other end of the town and strolled over the finish line like he attacked towns every day of his life.
* * *
The admiral and his commanders were still watching the competition on the three-dimensional screen as the mech pilots maneuvered their war machines through the live fire range. A mech would come over the wall and maneuver through the town, engaging targets with the missiles or railgun. Sometimes a pilot would fire several missiles at once if they thought that they could destroy more than one target within sight. All were cautious, and only two of them became completely immobilized. The average time to complete the range was about ten minutes. The pilots were good, and it showed.
Lieutenant General Wilton was pleased with the results his Marines were showing. “That’s what I’m talking about, right there! The only mechs destroyed were ground defense forces. I believe you owe me a drink, Rupert,” he said to Major General Alturn, smiling.
Alturn wasn’t going to just take the ribbing, he was going to get a shot in of his own, even if it wasn’t one of his soldiers involved. “Tomeral is up next; don’t forget about him. Double or nothing he doesn’t get immobilized,” he said.
“I’m in on this,” Admiral Timerton cut in, still ticked off about the drop results. “There is no way his pile of scrap repeats what it did on the drop. Hell, it’s a bigger target than the rest of them were. Besides, he doesn’t have the same amount of training time as Wilton’s Marines. Yato here says he works at a scrap yard, so there’s just no way. If he does, that call is being made. I’ll tell you right now.”
Rear Admiral Flynn Cothco, sitting with the rest of the officers, didn’t add to the conversation. He was the third ranking officer in the fleet. He also oversaw the weapons procurement department, and he knew he was probably going to have to be the one to make that call. He just continued to watch.
“What the…” Lieutenant General Wilton said and was on his feet. He, with the rest of the assembled officers, watched Lieutenant Tomeral light off all his missiles at the apex of a rocket-assisted jump, cut back faster than he should have been able to in midair, and land behind a building. The missiles shot up into the air instead of directly at a target. They rose five hundred feet and then came angling in, spreading apart to strike the top of…eighteen separate targets. Eighteen. And each officer there knew every hit would have been a killing blow. All tanks, armored personnel carriers, and mechs are most vulnerable at their weakest point: the thin top armor. It was where entry hatches were located.
“How, in the all-fired hell, did he just do that? A mech doesn’t have that type of missile guidance capabilities. And those rockets…who designed those missiles?” he asked, looking around, his eyes landing on Rear Admiral Cothco.
“The missiles just go where the guidance programming tells them to go. It appears that Lieutenant Tomeral has some custom programming in the operation system of that mech to go with the custom build,” Cothco said, clearly intrigued.
They watched as Tomeral ran down the street, jumped, destroyed a crew-served gun, and then flew to the top of the tallest building in the town to destroy the last target. All eyes turned toward the admiral.
“He just completed the range in three minutes. Three. Get me a comm,” he said, visibly reddening.
* * *
Tomeral dismounted from his mech and turned to see every mech pilot in the competition watching him, even Yatarward. None of them had ever seen a war machine complete a live fire range in that kind of time. Ever. Twiggy threw him a double thumbs-up, and Evelyn smiled at him, so he winked at her and turned to watch the sergeant and his assistant remove the plugs from his mech.
“Craziest thing I ever saw, Sarge. Three minutes. That must be some kind of record. None of the plugs have been tripped. ‘Puter says he didn’t get hit once,” Harmon overheard the private say. He owed Clip and Zerith a cold one for sure.
The next event was a ten-kilometer, cross country road march. They were given the coordinates for the dropship pick up, which they locked into their map overlay. It showed where the pickup point was. It was over some rough terrain, ending at what appeared to be a small mountain.
The mechs bunched up at the starting line like a group of marathon runners. It wasn’t a marathon, but it wouldn’t be easy. To go that kind of distance in a mech quickly took considerable effort. Not near as much as running it themselves, though. The starting flare flew into the air, and the mechs were off.
Harmon had started at the back of the group. He didn’t want his machine jostled. As the pack spread out, he could see that Evelyn and other scout mechs like hers were pulling ahead as they maneuvered around boulders and into and out of ravines and gullies. The smaller mechs were designed to be fast, but his machine’s longer strides started making up ground as he went.
He watched a few of the pilots up ahead opt to use the remainder of their rocket fuel to assist them in jumping across some of the deeper ravines. This worked out well for them until they burned up the last of their fuel. Most of them had already used all of it on the drop and in the town. He looked at his gauge. He still had a quarter of his fuel left. He decided to hold it in reserve, just in case.
He continued to gain ground on the mechs ahead of him and began passing them with his longer stride. In the ravines, he took advantage of the extra two feet in height. He used his claws while digging in the mech feet and was able to quickly scramble out of them. This let him catch and pass even more of the mechs. All that time in the grappler was paying off in his climbing technique.
As he got closer to the finish line, he could see that it was not at the base of the mountain. It was, actually, one hundred and fifty feet up on a cliff side. The cliff was large enough to have the dropship sitting on top, waiting. Nice, a little wrinkle at the end of this event.
There were only four mechs ahead of him as he was approaching the vertical wall two hun
dred yards away, and one had already begun climbing. He thought it was Evelyn, but he wasn’t sure. He called Clip.
“Hey Clip, you there?” he asked over the comms, between breaths.
“No, he iss not. He went to get a beer. I have his sslate and commss,” Harmon heard Zerith say.
“I’ve got a quarter tank…left for the rockets…is that enough to go…say one hundred and fifty feet…straight up?” Harmon asked, breathing deep between phrases, figuring if anyone knew, Zerith would.
“Yess, I designed the thrusterss myself. They are fuel-efficient and powerful. When I make ssomething, it iss made right,” Harmon heard him say, as if his feelings were hurt.
“Well, alright then…my friend…I’m about to take this event…too,” he said, breathing even harder.
Harmon jumped from about fifty feet in front of the cliff wall, fired his thrusters at their maximum output, and flew past the climbers. He went up the cliff wall, eased over, and landed as if it was just another step, to the astonishment of the graders and the pilots standing outside the ship. The crew chief gave him the double pump signal with a balled fist from within the open ramp of the dropship. He had stayed in the shade under a vent to stay cool. Harmon was panting and sweating heavily despite the cool air circulating through the war machine. He strode over and into the dropship like the jump was nothing special.
* * *
There was silence at the table in the conference center. All assembled had just watched the ugly mech with Lieutenant Tomeral piloting it, run down every mech in the race, fly past the ones he didn’t catch, and land softly on the cliff. Tomeral strode into the dropship out of sight.
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