by Rick Partlow
“Yeah,” Jonathan—not “Jon,” that sounds too generic—grunted. Dad had sent him a text-only message, vague and nameless for security. And yet he still remembered every word:
Son,
I know this is something you have to do, and I know your mother would be proud of you for following your heart. I confess to having my doubts, not of your ability but of the danger inherent in the path you’ve chosen. I am, above all else that I am, a parent, and I share the fears of every parent.
I trust you to take care of your people and do your job, but I implore you to take care for yourself as well. You may think we here at home can get along without you, but I assure you, we cannot.
Love,
Your father
PS: Your brother has not answered my messages. I think he feels betrayed that you have left him behind. I will make sure he knows the choice was not yours. I can’t take the chance of losing both my children.
Great. Not only would he not get the chance to say goodbye to Terrin, but his brother hadn’t even sent a message and was blaming him for not bringing him along. He’d felt like they were beginning to get along before he’d left, but now he might never get to see him again.
I might never see anyone again. I could die out here.
The thought hit him low in the gut, a sudden realization of his own mortality not even being shot at on Gateway had brought home. Even though he was surrounded by his former platoon-mates, as well as a hundred other Guard and Navy personnel, he felt alone. Before, even with just him and Lyta and Katy, he’d still been cognizant of the trip back home he’d expected to take before embarking on the mission. Then the message had come through the relay to stay with the Shakak, to wait there for the cargo ship bringing mechs and shuttles and crew and suddenly, there was no trip home, no chance for final words.
What was the last thing I said to Terrin? Something like “see you when I get back?” Did I even shake Dad’s hand?
He felt a shudder go through the hull of the ship as a transfer pod locked with the magnetic seals of the cargo bay at her belly, the first of the mech shipping over from the Spartan transport.
“I should go supervise the unloading,” he told Langella, slapping the man on the shoulder, next to his brand-spanking-new Lieutenant’s rank.
Everyone had gotten a bump up for this mission, including Lyta, who was now a Major. It fit with their back-story. Mercenaries usually promoted themselves from their last official rank. But he’d also been assured it would be official if and when they got back.
Walking with the magnetic boots was awkward, like plodding through mud. You had to work to pull your foot up from the deck plates, and it seemed to suck you down when you planted it again. The clomp-clomp sound it made was gratingly annoying, not just from his own footsteps but the other personnel working in the cargo bay. Most were Shakak crew, but there were already a dozen or so Navy technicians on board, helping to set up the cradles for the incoming mechs. They wore the same ship uniform as the others, but theirs were cleaner, their hair shorter, their general demeanor more professional.
He hoped by the time they had to interact with a potential client the differences would have smoothed out a bit. Right now, he would have been happy if he could have just bought the ship off Osceola outright and taken it over, but Lyta had assured him the Captain’s reputation was half of what they were hiring.
The cargo lock was by far the most impressive section of the ship as well as the largest, a gigantic, spherical compartment two hundred meters across, now fitted with magnetic cradles for a company’s worth of mecha as well as enough ammo and spare parts to supply and service them. At the center of the compartment, a fifty-meter-wide mechanical iris hatch was slowly and laboriously grinding open, already mated with the pressurized cargo pod, while freight-handling arms craned inward from mounts on the bulkhead like monstrous claws ready to strike.
The metallic scraping of the centimeters-thick iris vibrated through the deck, through the magnetic boots and into his marrow. Just when he thought it couldn’t get any more irritating, the chugging, grumble rumble of a huge freight elevator joined the chorus, pushing a pallet of cargo fifty meters across through the hatchway and into the bay. Most of the space was taken by up by mecha, and he spotted his own machine almost immediately, a humanoid shape with massive legs resting on heavy, rounded pads.
Colonel Anders had offered him the Scorpion he’d taken down; it had been salvaged mostly intact. It was heavier and better-armed, but his Vindicator seemed like an old friend and he hadn’t even considered parting with it. It rose from the shadows of the cargo pod, surrounded by an honor guard of shorter, squatter Golems, and as it ascended the spotlights from the bay bathed it in a golden glow. The glare lit up the cockpit at just the right angle for him to notice the human-shaped figure sprawled in the mech’s easy chair, motionless and lifeless.
“What the fuck?” he blurted.
He started to run, abruptly remembered the magnetic boots and paused to unstrap and pull them off, leaving them affixed to the deck and pushed away, sailing across to meet the pallet even before it had risen all the way into place.
“Medic!” he bellowed in mid-flight, pitching his voice to carry across the bay. “Somebody get a damn medic in here!”
He could feel the eyes on him, hear the exclamations of surprise, but he was focused on the cockpit. How the hell would someone wind up in there? The freight had been sealed in place for the duration of the voyage; except in case of emergency, no crewmembers on the cargo ship would have had any business screwing around inside the pods. And if someone had been trapped in there all the way from Sparta, with no air, no water, no heat… well, a medic wasn’t going to do them any good.
He slammed into the chest of the Vindicator shoulder-first, the breath whooshing out of him with a dull pain spreading down into his lower back. He knew it would hurt even worse in a few hours, but he shoved it aside for the moment, grabbing at the emergency external access panel and yanking the quick-release lever. The cockpit canopy swung upward with a pneumatic hiss and he was pulling himself inside before it was halfway open, already noticing the bulky, oversized outline of the occupant, understanding on a gut level before he’d even processed the information.
The man wore a vacuum suit, and there was an external feeder conduit plugged from the chest panel into a jack in the side of the cockpit to provide air from the mech’s on-board recyclers and heat from the batteries. This wasn’t some idiot cargo handler who’d tried to sneak a ride in the easy chair and died for his stupidity; this was a stowaway, someone with a plan to be here. The helmet was turned away from him, shielding the face inside from view until he grabbed the yoke and jerked the shoulder toward him, turning the head of the man inside.
It was a familiar face, soft-lined and thin with dark hair spilling out over his face, his eyes closed, but breath fogging the interior of the faceplate just slightly. It was his brother, Terrin, and he was alive.
“Oh, you fucking idiot,” he murmured. Then yelling, back out to the cargo crew, leaning out of the cockpit. “Get me a Goddamned medic!”
Light and darkness swam across Terrin’s vision in nightmare shapes and a silent terror built up inside his chest like steam pressure in a boiler, threatening to explode if it wasn’t relieved. He was sure he was dead, stuck in a nebulous afterlife so unlike the one the religion of his parents had described, with no heaven or hell, just endless, weary planes of shadow.
“Are you awake?”
Light and shadow solidified into the face of his brother.
“Holy shit,” he rasped, his throat filled with cotton. “Log…”
“Yeah,” his brother interrupted, leaning over him, eyes narrowing. “It’s me, Jonathan. Remember?”
Terrin blinked, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to piece together scattered bits of memory into a coherent thought. When he opened them, he saw Logan holding a cup of water, waiting for him to sit up and take it.
No, not Logan. Can’t
call him Logan. It’s Jonathan Slaughter for as long as this mission lasts.
“Thanks,” he said, sitting up in the bunk and taking the water.
Wait… sitting up? An open cup of water?
“Where are we?” he tried to ask, but this time his voice failed, his throat simply too dry. He gulped the water down, feeling it soothe on the way down, feeling his throat open up. He sighed in relief and tried again. “Where are we?”
“Two days’ burn out of our entry point in some system no one’s bothered to name,” Logan… no, Jonathan told him. Damn, this is going to take some getting used to. “Twelve hours out from the next jump-point toward the Periphery.” He fixed Terrin with a glare. “Now tell me why the hell you’re here.”
“Thanks for not sticking me on the freighter back to Sparta,” Terrin said, letting his head fall back against the pillow, setting the empty cup on a table next to the bed. Fear so palpable and intense it had formed a solid shape in his gut began to slowly melt away. “Mithra, I didn’t know if I was going to make it.”
“You very nearly didn’t, damn it!” Jonathan snapped. “The shit you took to put yourself out for the trip might have let you survive, but it also put you into a coma. You were so dehydrated, your organs were shutting down by the time they got you to the sick bay. You could have fucking died. Now tell me what was so fucking important you had to do this.”
“You’re going to need me,” Terrin said. It might have sounded a bit more egotistical and condescending than he’d intended, but he couldn’t think of any other way to say it. At Jonathan’s skeptical glare, he went on quickly. “How big is your science team for this mission?”
His big brother’s eyes went thoughtful at the question, and Terrin knew it wasn’t because he didn’t remember; it was because he hadn’t thought of it previously.
“We have the technical team to maintain our mechs,” he replied, the anger and intensity gone from his voice. “I think Lyta said two of them have physics degrees…”
“And she and Dad and General…” He caught himself. “And the others were afraid of putting an actual research team on the mission because they wouldn’t have military training and they might blab. Not to mention, it would look weird, a mercenary company hauling around a bunch of scientists. That’s why you need me.” He ticked his points off on his fingers, suddenly feeling energized. “I have a degree in astrophysics, a degree in hyperdimensional physics, a degree in fusion engineering, and I’ve been tinkering around the Spartan research laboratories since I was old enough for Mom to take to work with her. I am your science team, and since there’s just one of me, I won’t attract that much attention.”
He pounded a fist into the lumpy hospital mattress, anger surging through him.
“Dad doesn’t understand how badly we need this.” He fixed his brother with a stare born from years of pent-up frustration. “Do you know why we use mecha?”
His brother blinked at the non sequitur, stuttering out an answer.
“Because they’re the best, most versatile ground assault weapon we have?”
It was a line from the Academy; Terrin hadn’t even gone there and he still recognized it.
“I’ve seen some of the old records most people don’t get access to.” He shrugged his indifference. “The brass thinks some of the Empire’s military history would be destabilizing to the general public, but the government researchers can access it… Mom could.” An old twist of pain in his gut at the thought of her, of how she’d died. “Mechs are about the most inefficient, impractical and useless piece of military technology ever invented.”
“What the fuck?” This new “Jonathan” looked a lot more like the old Logan in that instant, full of righteous indignation and thoughts of honor and nobility.
“The only reason mecha work for us is we’re frozen technologically.” He was winding up now, like five minutes into a guest lecture at one of Dr. Kovalev’s university classes. “If we had the targeting AI the Empire did at one point, if we had the hyper-explosive warheads for man-portable missile launchers, if we had the autonomous weapons systems and smart mines, mecha would be useless. They’d be nothing but huge targets, a walking coffin.”
Terrin waved a hand expansively. “But.”
“But the Empire fell,” he went on, “and the mix of technology we’ve been left with has made them practical. We have Electronic Counter Measures sophisticated enough to take down self-guided missiles, so the only practical missile systems have to use laser line-of-sight guidance, with all the limitations that brings with it.
“We have fusion reactors small enough to fit inside a mech, but we barely understand how they work, we just build them according to old specs, on machines we built according to those same specs, and it’s more like chanting a spell than understanding the engineering.
“We lack the AI computer systems that could automate weapons like mecha and obviate the need for pilots, and some people believe it’s no accident, that the Empire banned them. So we have mecha and they work for our sorts of wars because of our level of technology, but that level is unnatural. It’s imposed on us by our politics, by the whole system of the Five Dominions.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” his brother countered, perhaps a bit defensively. “Mecha force us to keep war human, to keep it from being impersonal and automated. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to change that.”
“But it will change. If not by us now, then by someone like Starkad or Shang. Things can’t last as long as something like Terminus is out there, waiting for someone to find. You and I,” Terrin motioned between them with a finger, “if we find it, we can make sure it isn’t misused, doesn’t just turn into a tool for destruction. I wouldn’t count on Starkad sharing the sentiment.”
“Why didn’t you put it to Dad like that?” Jonathan demanded, throwing up his arms in frustration.
“I did,” Terrin replied. “And he told me he wasn’t going to risk seeing both his sons dead on this mission.”
Jonathan sighed, hands rubbing at his eyes as if he’d had little sleep lately.
“So damned glad he has such confidence in me.” He let his arms fall to his side, giving up on the argument. “All right, you’re staying. There’s no safe way to get you back now without diverting a significant portion of our people and resources and blowing security all to hell in the process.” A final glare, one remnant of his brother’s lingering anger. “And that’s why I didn’t send you back on the cargo ship. They’re running a long circuit before they hit Sparta again, to throw off anyone trying to trace the shipment of weapons and crew. We can’t be connected to Sparta or we’ll never get clearance through Starkad space.”
Terrin’s gut felt empty, and he wasn’t sure it was from the lack of solid food. He was totally cut off from home. It was what he thought he’d wanted, but it suddenly seemed like he hadn’t thought this through at all. He stared at the bulkhead of the Shakak’s medical bay, bare white stained a faded yellow with age and use, but didn’t see it so much as he saw his own bleak, hopeless future.
“I guess it turns out,” his brother said quietly, stepping over to the bed and putting a hand on his shoulder, “Jonathan Slaughter has a cousin named…” He shrugged, a mischievous grin taking years off his face. “…Terry. Terry Conner”
Terrin groaned, covering his face with the bedsheet. He found out he was wearing a hospital gown and it was cold in the compartment, but he was more disturbed by the choice of names. People always tried to shorten his name to “Terry,” and he’d spent most of his life fighting against the idea. Now, he had no choice. Not only would he have to live with other people calling him “Terry,” he’d have to start thinking of himself that way.
“Oh, shit,” he sighed, letting the sheet fall off of his head.
“You’re not a scientist here, though, Terry,” Jonathan warned him. “We’re a mercenary company, we don’t need scientists, remember?” He raised a finger in revelation, as if he’d just had a thought. �
�But I bet you Captain Osceola’s engineering team could always use another reactor tech.” He cocked an eyebrow in challenge. “Is that degree in fusion whatever actually good for anything practical?”
Terrin… Terry threw off the sheets and swung his bare legs off the bed.
“Give me some clothes and let’s find out.”
12
“What a shithole,” Donner Osceola murmured. “Why the hell would anyone want to live here?”
Jonathan couldn’t argue with the assessment, though he felt as if he should have. The planetary government here on Arachne was their employer, after all; as the commanding officer and President of Wholesale Slaughter LLC, he should be defending their very first client, even if it was just an anonymous listing on the Merc-Work user network.
But you couldn’t pay me enough money to live on this damned planet.
They’d passed over the eastern hemisphere during atmospheric entry and even cloaked in darkness, it was clearly a barren, wind-swept desert, nearly devoid of life and totally unsuitable for human habitation. Maybe the Empire at its height could have made something of it, but planetary engineering on so great a scale was beyond the star-nations of the Five Dominions and not even an outpost broke the sameness of the wastes.
Past the terminator, over a vast, green ocean and into the dawn light of Minerva, the system’s primary star, the western hemisphere blocked in moisture with towering, sharp-edged mountains. It was probably fairly nice and temperate near the foot of the mountains, but no one would ever know because the whole region was rocked by landslides; he’d seen one just flying over and the reports he’d read had said they were endemic.
The only habitable region of the whole planet was farther east, hundreds of kilometers past the savage peaks in a river valley stretching over half the continent. And habitable did not mean comfortable. Temperatures hovered at a miserable thirty-five degrees Celsius for the length of the valley, the humidity running near eighty percent when the whole region wasn’t being flogged by torrential rains. Everything unpaved was impassable mud and the cities were built on concrete platforms to keep them above the flooding.