by M. D. Cooper
The ship could have fit in one of the larger bays, but Piper had balked at the idea of being underground, and Rika hadn’t pushed the matter.
I suppose if I had spent hundreds of years trapped inside a moon, I might feel the same way.
A light flashed on the Asora’s hull, and the airlock cycled open, revealing Crunch and a group of mechs from M Company’s First Platoon.
They marched down the ramp and formed up at its base. More mechs followed, until the entire platoon was present. Once they were assembled, Lieutenant Chris and Staff Sergeant Kristian walked down the ramp and stood in front of their four squads, looking them over before turning to face Rika.
“Colonel Rika! First Platoon M Company reporting for duty!” Lieutenant Chris announced enthusiastically.
His statement was followed by the mechs’ now-standard cry of ‘Ree-kah’.
She prayed that she wasn’t blushing too furiously and glanced up to the top of the ramp where Chase stood, smiling proudly at the mechs below him.
Rika squared her shoulders and walked toward Chris, lifting her left hand to salute him, which he and Staff Sergeant Kristian returned.
“Lieutenant.” Rika lowered her hand, keeping her eyes locked on his. “Did you kick ass?”
“Yes, ma’am!” he shouted. “Asses were kicked!”
She nodded and walked to the end of the line of mechs, meeting Crunch’s steady gaze as he stood before first squad. He didn’t move a millimeter as she swept her gaze across the mechs arrayed behind him, a smile grazing her lips as she caught Kelly’s saucy wink.
“Very good, Sergeant,” she said to Crunch before walking to the other squads, fronted by Corin, CJ, and Kara. She gave a word of approval to each before returning to stand before the platoon leader and sergeant.
“Looks like your mechs are tip top and combat ready. Good work, Lieutenant.”
A smile graced Chris’s lips and he gave a curt nod. “Thank you, Colonel.”
She returned the gesture a grin splitting her lips before calling out, “OK, you mangy dogs! Enough of this nonsense. Everyone knows Rika’s Marauders aren’t whole without M’s First and we’re glad to have you back! Now get out of here before you make me red as Barne’s ass when Leslie’s done with him. You have the rest of the day to yourselves. Come back and unload the Asora next shift.”
A cheer broke out from the mechs, and they turned in a much less orderly fashion and followed the squad sergeants across the bay.
“You alllllmost got her, Chris,” Chase said as he walked down the ramp. “Cheeks got a little flushed, but she didn’t go full tomato.”
“Was that the goal?” Rika asked, turning her gaze to Chris who was grinning ear to ear.
“No, ma’am,” Lieutenant Chris said. “Though there may have been a pool on it. Honestly, we’re just frickin’ glad to be back with the battalion. Especially since we’re the ones that got the intel to hit Genevia. The ‘toon was worried you’d start the fun without us.”
“No chance,” Rika replied, nodding to Lieutenant Vargo as he descended the ramp with the Asora’s crew.
“Stars!” Vargo cried out. “Intresting digs you got down here, Colonel. Felt like I was flying the Asora into a black hole!”
“That’s sort of the idea, Lieutenant. All the better to hide in.”
“Hope we’re not hiding for long,” Sergeant Kristian said. “We’ve been cooped up. The mechs are itching for action.”
Rika turned and gestured toward the bay’s exit. “Plenty of that to come. Barne will show you around. We’ll worry about debriefing tomorrow.”
Vargo snorted and glanced at Chase. “Right, because first you need to debrief the captain here.”
“He’s got your number,” Silva said. “Best let these two get somewhere private.”
Chase reached out and grabbed Rika’s arm, pulling her close, his armored chest pressing against hers. “There’s a whole empty starship right behind us, and I didn’t grab my rucksack yet.”
Rika glanced at the other mechs. “What are you all standing around for? Go. Shoo!”
Following that pronouncement, she banished them from her thoughts and turned back to face Chase, taking in the sight of him before pressing her lips to his.
“I’m never sending you off like that again,” she whispered.
Chase pulled her more tightly against himself, trailing a hand down her gun-arm. “Good, because I wouldn’t want to have to disobey orders.”
“So, are we going to your cabin aboard the Asora, or what?” she asked.
“Oh? I wasn’t—”
Rika was already striding toward the ship’s ramp, pulling Chase after her.
They didn’t make it to his cabin.
DIVISION
STELLAR DATE: 04.30.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Refuge, Faneuil
REGION: Genevia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Quite the find you made with this place,” Chase said several hours later, when they’d finally made it to Rika’s quarters.
She nodded absently, nuzzling her check against his chest while enjoying the sound of his heartbeat. “Less a ‘find’, and more a benefit of Gloria’s data hoarding. She knew pretty much exactly where Faneuil would be.”
“Good thing,” Chase replied. “Even knowing this place was here, it was nerve-wracking to make the approach.”
Rika turned her head, resting her chin on Chase’s sternum, gazing into his eyes.
He stretched out a hand and stroked her hair. “One of the best things about being a mech is that it doesn’t hurt when you do that anymore.”
“Oh? I kinda liked making you suffer,” she said with a mischievous grin, pushing down with her chin.
Chase laughed. “Vixen.”
Rika’s head snapped up, her eyes wide as she stared into Chase’s.
Rika pulled up the message from Leslie, reading through her report on the plan that the drive technician, a Genevian man named Jeremy, had come up with. It seemed like a solid strategy, barring the part where they needed to load an NSAI into some non-critical system on every ship.
“Still seems like a pretty big ‘if’,” she said aloud.
“Seems clever, though,” Chase said. “Granted, a lot of what he’s talking about is beyond me. I’m impressed that you can follow it, Rika.”
She pushed herself upright and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I’ve been studying a lot. Every time I turn around, someone in the battalion is sending me a report about a subject I barely grasp. Niki’s been helping me grok it all.”
Chase disentangled himself from the sheets and settled on the edge of the bed next to her, causing it to groan in protest.
“Shoot, they don’t really design these for a pair of mechs, do they?”
“Not much gets designed for a pair of mechs,” Rika said, laughing as she rose before the bed gave out. “I’m a bit surprised it survived our antics thus far.”
Rika groaned and pushed herself up. “Yay. My favorite person.”
“He a pain in the ass?” Chase asked as he rose as well.
“Sorta,” Rika said as she placed her arm into her GNR mount, triggering the rack to slot in the rods and fasten it in place. “He�
��s passionate about protecting his people, but over the years, his goals and focus have narrowed to only pursue operations with almost no risk. I don’t really blame him—he suffered a lot of losses early on—but now’s not the time to play it safe.”
“If he wants to keep people safe, then running ops out of your civilians’ hidey hole isn’t the best idea.”
“Right.” Rika nodded as she lifted her arm and inspected it before stepping onto the pad for armoring. “That’s part of his problem. Any civvies on Faneuil should have been shipped off to another system years ago. Heck, they could all have been sent to Septhia a dozen times over by now. Anyway, he’s what we have to work with. At least that Lareese woman’s influence was short-lived.”
“Lareese?” Chase asked as he stepped onto his armoring pad. “That name rings a bell.”
“She was a GAF admiral,” Rika said. “Now she’s admiral-ing in the Lance’s brig.”
“Whoa! You don’t pull punches.”
“She’s a war criminal, she…. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Chase nodded, and they finished getting dressed in silence.
Rika was done first and waited next to the door for Chase, watching as he visually inspected his armor before latching his helmet onto his hip.
“You know…” she said, the words trailing off.
He cocked an eyebrow, a half-smile on his lips. “I know what?”
She took a step toward him, hooking a finger on one of his armor’s hardmounts. “I thought you were hot as a squishie, but you’re way better as a mech.”
Their lips met, and she wondered if maybe they could put off Oda’s meeting a bit longer.
* * * * *
“Damn, this is a long shaft,” Chase said as he peered over the edge. “And these lift platforms…what’s their max load rating?”
“You’re a mech,” Rika reminded him. “You have a-grav systems, and this planet barely has any pull to it.”
“Sure, yeah,” he nodded while continuing to look at the drop. “And that’s what I keep telling my brain, but it just says, ‘big down is down’.”
“You’ve scaled towers a lot taller than this,” Rika said as she walked to the edge and looked over with him.
“Sure, yeah, but when you do that, there’s a landscape spread around you. Somehow that’s better. This is just a dark hole that seems to go on forever.”
“Well, they try to conserve energy here. Faneuil doesn’t work too well as a hidden base if they run reactors hot to keep it all bright and shiny inside.”
Chase glanced at his arm and blew off some of the ever-present black dust. “I don’t think anything is shiny in this place.”
The lift stopped after another minute—though there was still plenty of shaft below them.
Rika turned and squared her shoulders. “OK, let’s go have some fun.”
They walked off the lift platform and down a broad corridor that led to the residential section that the resistance occupied. The doors at the end opened to admit them, and Rika blinked in surprise at the bright light within.
Her eyes only took a second to adjust to the luminescence, and she gazed in wonder at a vast atrium with a holodome overhead, showing a cloud-dotted sky.
“You were saying about resource usage?” Chase asked.
“OK…I’ve never been down this far before. Oda had been prickly about not alarming his people, and I didn’t feel like pushing the matter…. Now I can see the reason for his hesitation; this isn’t a military resistance at all.”
Directly in front of them stretched a grassy field dotted with children playing and adults chatting idly in small groups. Further back was a small lake, and beyond that was more greenspace.
“Huh,” a voice said from behind them, and Rika turned to see Captains Ron and Scarcliff approaching.
“This is not what I expected,” Scarcliff said. “I’d envisioned some sort of refugee camp with people huddled in corridors, grim-faced soldiers moving amongst them.”
“Yeah. I guess I’d kinda forgotten that this place was made for government officials,” Rika said. “They like to have their creature comforts. I guess this is why Oda is so prickly…he’s made a little place where they can pretend things haven’t gone to shit.”
“Colonel Rika!” a voice called out from their left, and she turned to see Lieutenant Gary striding up a ramp. “Glad you’re here. Oda’s getting impatient.”
Rika resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Well, he should work on that. Not everyone is at his beck and call.”
The lieutenant pursed his lips, nodding slightly. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Sorry,” Rika shook her head. “That was uncalled for. I assume you’re here to lead us?”
Gary nodded. “Yes, it’s a bit of a warren down here.”
“I can see that,” Scarcliff said, his eyes still on the park and the children playing under the blue sky above. “I can’t imagine being those kids.”
“What do you mean?” Rika asked as they followed Gary down the ramp, skirting the edge of the park.
“I bet most of them have lived their whole lives down here.”
Rika allowed that to sink in, shaking her head in disbelief. “Damn…well, it’s our job to make that not be a necessity anymore. Who knows, they might see real starlight in just a few months.”
“Now that’s something worth fighting for,” Ron said.
Rika wondered if Lieutenant Gary resented their comments. He didn’t say anything one way or another as he led them down a side passage, and then through something that did indeed deserve the name ‘warren’.
Eventually they came to a room that Rika suspected was intended to function as a legislative assembly space. It was a classical half-bowl shape with a large table at the bottom. Seated at the head of the table was Oda.
Several of his aides and ministers were also seated at the table, along with Tremon, Silva, Borden, Heather, and the other Marauder company commanders: Meagan, Gytra, Crispin, and Penelope.
It didn’t escape Rika’s attention that, on the resistance side, Gary appeared to be the only military officer—though there was a man she’d never seen before sitting on Oda’s right. His bearing suggested that he’d seen combat in the past.
When they reached the bottom of the steps, Oda rose and gestured to the empty seats at the table. “Please sit. Let’s not worry about introductions, we can access one another’s basic information over the Link.”
“I have to say,” Rika began as she settled at the far end of the table from Oda. “I was not expecting things to be quite so nice down here. I suppose I’d gotten used to the utilitarian décor at the top of the Shaft.”
“Thank you,” Oda said, not acknowledging what was clearly a deliberate omission on his part. “I felt it would be more efficacious to meet down in The Refuge with the rest of the Genevian leadership so that we can discuss our next steps in the sabotage operation.”
“Works for me,” Rika replied, wondering if ‘Genevian Leadership’ referred to The Refuge or the entire system. “It seems like Jeremy has a solid plan for getting the drive control NSAI updates in place. We just need to help with getting a trigger system installed—which I think we can do without too much trouble.”
“Oh?” the man next to Oda replied.
Rika looked up his name and learned it to be ‘Wieck’. The Link data on the Refuge’s network didn’t carry any information about his responsibilities, but something in his eyes told Rika that Wieck was the sort of man who got his hands dirty…frequently.
Niki announced to the group over the room’s network.
“How can you be so sure that this will work?” Oda asked. “Our operative’s report said that it needs to be in a low-level system that won’t have a lot of security review for new updates.”
Rika was surprised to see Oda respond so skeptically. The drive sabotage plan was something his people had initiated before the Marauders had even arrived. She would have thought that he’d be elated to pull off such a coup.
“You’re referring to the Fury Lance’s ship AI?” Wieck asked, and Rika inferred from the question itself that he didn’t approve.
“That’s correct,” she replied.
“And you trust a Nietzschean AI?” Oda asked.
Wieck’s brow lowered. “I thought you acquired him from Epsilon before you destroyed the Nietzschean shipyards there.
<‘Acquired’,> Chase said on the Marauders’ private channel.
“Yes,” Rika replied. “Piper joined us at Epsilon, but he predated the Nietzscheans. He was present during the period when Genevia held that system. In fact, he was there when the Asmovians built it.”
A few surprised looks were shared around the table, but Rika ignored them and pressed on. “If Piper believes this can be done, then there’s no reason to doubt him.”
“I suppose that will have to do,” Oda replied, nodding seriously.
Rika stared at the resistance leader in consternation for a moment before shaking her head. “OK, I’m just going to put it out there. I don’t get you people. This is amazing! There are tens of thousands of Nietzschean ships out there, and you’ve figured out a way to take them out of play without a fight. Why the hell do you all look like we’re at a funeral?”