by Curtis Hox
“Who knows what else? My brother says the Consortium has more weapons than we can imagine. Real black-ops stuff.”
“You’re happy about this?” Coach asked.
“Of course,” Hutto said. “My brother Almont fought for the SAIs as a gladiator for years before the Consortium recruited him and they bought out his contract. He says I have what it takes, but this could be my direct ticket to the big leagues.”
“It’s dangerous challenging AIs, Hutto.”
“Life is dangerous.”
Beasley drove up on an ATV with a small lawnmower trailer attached. “Did you hear?”
Coach nodded.
Hutto said, “I saw it from on the roof—”
“You were on the roof?” Coach asked.
Beasley said, “Any second, now, the klaxons—” They heard the first sounding of the blaring alerts. “There they are.”
Wally moved a step closer to Beasley, and she lifted him to her shoulder.
Hutto threw a jumping front-kick that would have crushed a regular man’s chest cavity. “Here comes the fuckin’ cavalry.”
Beasley and Wally watched Hutto perform another series of martial displays, each one more acrobatic than the last.
“Show off,” Beasley said.
“I wish I could do that,” Wally said. “I wonder what they’ll look like.”
No one responded, and even Hutto calmed for a stretch. All three of them considered what they knew about incursions and realized it was very little beyond rumor. But everyone knew that when RAIs took form, it wasn’t pretty. The photos leaked from incursion hot zones showed all sorts of demented things from crushing machinery to monsters from your worst nightmare. Most people believed it was all made up—the stuff of comics, movies, and video games.
“I wish my mech was fitted with weaponry,” Wally said.
“Too bad,” Hutto said.
“Wally, I have to show you something,” Beasley said. “We need to hurry.”
“Show what?” Hutto asked. “I’m going too.” He grabbed Wally and jumped in the small trailer behind the ATV. “Something tells me this is will be good.”
Coach looked like he might interfere. Beasley turned around and sped off before he could.
* * *
They hurried over the wooded ridge, along a trail, past the big horse barn, through the pastures and orchards, and into the hills south of a large cattle field. Beasley took a winding route, so that Hutto wouldn’t learn how she got there, and eventually found a dry creek bed. She sped along it, now deep in the hills, the branches of hardwoods reaching high into the sky and forming a canopy. She turned off at a shallow berm and hurried through a portion of woods recently burned by brush fire.
On the other side, where the trees where green again, the head of a five-story mech rose above the tallest branch. The head was as big as house. It was fire-engine red, lined with gold war stripes, and formed so that it protruded forward like the angry maw of a wolf.
All of them (except Beasley) were seeing a real Megamech for the first time.
“Look at that!” Wally yelled, his high-pitched voice barely rising above the whine of the antiquated combustion engine. “I can’t believe it! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“He made me promise,” Beasley said. “He’s been waiting for the right time to meet you. This seems like the right time.”
“Meet me?”
Hutto smiled, as they followed a footpath through the trees and brush. “I can guess why.”
She pulled into a clearing before a simple, cedar, slat-boarded, slant-roofed cabin with two glass windows and a door. A covered porch ran along the front. The area in the clearing was full of old, but useful, pieces of machinery: a cast-iron vat here, a rusted hoe there, even an old John Deere green-and-yellow tractor. Rusting but useable tools of all types hung on the outside of the cabin. There was even a small flower patch nearby. And behind the cabin ran rows sprouting bright red tomatoes.
Crazy Mac rounded the corner of his cabin, carrying a burlap sack on his shoulder. He was a skinny old man with a healthy beard and a wrinkled face who had spent way too much time outdoors. He looked fit enough and dropped the sack at his feet.
“I had a feeling you’d be coming,” he said. Beasley killed the engine. “Just in time. Is that him?” He screwed up his face. “Dumb question. Who else would it be?” He stopped before Wally. “Well, I’ll be cooked in a kettle. You’re as small as she said.” He smiled and revealed a mouth of perfect teeth for a man his age, which could have been fifty or a hundred or more. “You just might make my day, son.” He offered his hand. “Let me help you down, and introduce you to her.”
He set Wally on the ground.
Hutto jumped out and gave the old man a dirty look for not saying hello.
“Don’t take it personal,” Beasley said to Hutto. “He’s single-minded.”
They followed Crazy Mac beyond his well-tended vegetable garden to where it abutted the woods. A footpath led them to a wild poison-ivy hedge and beyond that to another clearing, this one with thick field grass that wet their ankles. They saw the two tower-like legs of the mech in the center of the clearing.
“Oh my god!” Wally yelled, now back on Beasley’s shoulder. “Oh my god!”
Hutto ran into the clearing. “A real Megamech, right here at Sterling.”
Wally jumped up and down on Beasley’s shoulder.
Each of the legs of the humungous Megamech was nearly as thick as a grain silo and reached up into the encroaching trees. These had been painted crimson and gold years ago, but the flaking paint had chipped away to reveal the alloy-armor gray beneath.
The students all ran forward to a break in the forest.
“It’s so big!” Wally exclaimed when he saw her entirely.
The torso section reached above the treetops. Buried deep in the hills and woods, the Megamech had gone undetected by everyone for years, even though it was as big as a large house and still held armament batteries along its chest. The arms jutted from huge, prominent shoulder sections and hung at its sides, each one ending in some horrible weapon of destruction. Each arm was as long as an eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer. The head with the flaring horns and extended wolf maw contained the command center. The great machine looked east, toward the school, like some fossilized guardian waiting for an ancient enemy.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” Crazy Mac asked.
Hutto stared up, as if he were daydreaming. “How do you get to the top?”
“Without a gantry? You climb, son. You climb.” He waved. “Come on, let me introduce you before the critters come.”
“Critters?” Hutto looked at Beasley like he’d just gone to heaven. “My brothers are going to have to sit and listen to my stories and not say a damn word. Sterling’s a gold mine.”
As they approached a great splayed foot that had been covered by soil and grass years ago, Crazy Mac turned to Wally. “You made some headway with your mech?”
“Yes, sir,” Wally said. “Putty in my hands.”
“You gave her a name yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, hell, boy, you gotta give her a name. The Association bought you that mech for a reason.”
“I figured it was for something important.”
“You figured right. Let’s see what you can do with MacEllen. She’s been waiting for a good psy-pilot.” He turned a recessed handle in the armor and pulled open a man-sized hatch. “After you.”
* * *
The Megamech mind stands sentinel as she has for thirty years. She now feels the humans tunneling up, rung-by-rung. She feels them pause in the cramped space of her knee-joint architecture, chatting, the little one already beginning to understand what he has discovered.
She is a World Walker Megamech Destroyer Class USC-Kraken, built by Consortium engineers to battle the monstrous forms that began manifesting themselves in Realspace after the Rupture. Her last pilot called her MacEllen until he blew his mind out in their last battle following the
orders of her captain.
Retirement has never sat well with her, here in the quiet foothills of the Blue Ridge where she was sent to wait.
But like so many years ago, the battle happened in the year 2080 high up on the Asian steppe, amid the dry places. Daily, she relives facing the Great Enemies of Mankind: the Haters, the Bashers, the Bent Monkey-wrenches. The battle begins in the morning, with the Consortium Defense Force forming a line as far as the eye can see. Seven other Megamechs line up a klick apart, with multinational Consortium infantry mechs, foot soldiers, and mobile armor units providing support at their feet.
The Void Armies of Darkness and Heat-Death swarm forward in the distance. The First Great Incursion of the Cyber Wars begins. “The Battle of the Steppe,” they will come to call it. The Enemies emerge in every form imaginable from the kilometer-wide wall of Rogue Makers that has been forming for a decade. Inside her, she feels her crew ready, alarms sounding, her pilot and captain in the control center working through their battle solutions.
She hears Captain Picham say, “Forward.”
But she doesn’t move until her pilot makes her move. His presence fills her and gives her alloy life. And she lifts her great, armored limbs, and hears the troops at her feet cheer. The smaller mechs surge forward. Then she sees the Enemies rise up from behind their shielding. And the artificial but living mind within the USC-Kraken knows fear.
She knows that Captain Picham sees what awaits them: chitinous things that scamper forward, mechanized things that rumble, and unreal things that flash into being. Then the real horror appears behind the first wave: the Rogue Technowizards in their Dread Walker tanks leading mountain-sized abyss pets on leashes of lightning.
Three semi-solid, semi-real, but very deadly colossal manifestations of inhuman minds rear up to conquer the world. They are beasts of the void invaders with no thought but destruction. These colossi are ten stories tall, larger than even she is. They look like titans sent from the heavens to stomp the life out of humanity. Each one is partially manifested but solid enough to smash a building to bits.
The energized leashes wielded by cyborg Interfacer Technowizards in their Dread Walkers keep the colossi in check. Then the first of them takes a giant step, long enough that it would cross half a football field, and begin to walk. Her pilot calms her, with reassuring words, urging restraint. He sits in his psy-harness, a diamond of light in the control center in her head. Her captain sees them through the wall-sized video screen as he stands before the pilot in his harness, and MacEllen feels him tremble, though no one else sees it.
The battle begins and will not end through twelve straight days of carnage.
She and her captain will break the backs of the Enemies but will lose her pilot in the process; she will be forced to retire, the only Megamech still able to move.
She returns to the present, leaving the memory of the horrible battle. The Enemies have returned. Not in force, yet, no, but she can sense them coming. And the large mind in the tiny, human body working his way to her may be her only chance at redemption.
Her Consortium builders put her here for a reason. She once believed it was to rust and die. She now believes it is to awaken for one last mission. She is but one side of two minds; she needs another to move.
* * *
Getting to the top of the Megamech took longer than expected. Hutto went first, listening to instructions but mostly putting one hand in front of the other, the smell of grease and metal in his nostrils. It was a hell of a long climb through a tube with rung after rung in it. Beasley and Wally followed, with Crazy Mac in the rear. They paused halfway up in a cramped chamber with berthing cots embedded in the walls for a crew of ten.
The rest of the climb was easier. Their feet rang on grating steps as they walked up a spiral staircase to the command center in the mech’s head.
Once inside, the internal lighting system triggered. They stood in a chamber the size of a small classroom. A single gel harness seat sat in the center of a platform. Other gel harnesses hung in niches at the foot of the platform in a circular trench. At the front of the platform a plank with a banister around it and a workstation faced the smooth and molded inside of the mech’s face.
“That’s where I stand,” Crazy Mac said, and walked over to the plank. It was wide enough for one person. He ran his hands over an antiquated workstation. Everything was industrial and economic, as if the mech itself had chosen the rough aesthetic.
“Man, my mech is so much nicer inside,” Wally said. He kicked up a patch of dust on the floor. “This thing needs a cleaning.”
“How does it have power after all these years?” Hutto asked.
“Never stopped,” Crazy Mac replied. “Just been deactivated. But the fusion-burner still burns, and will for a century, if we leave her standing alone.” He tapped the workstation and it lit up like the dash of an old automobile. A whine somewhere deep in the belly began. “She’ll take a little time to warm up. But I think we got time.”
“Time for what?” Wally asked.
Beasley was looking around at the niches in the trenches, as if she wanted to try one of the harnesses. Crazy Mac said, “Systems’ officers work down there.”
“Why’d you bring us up here?” Wally asked.
“I told him about your progress, Wally,” Beasley said, “and he wants you to try ... ”
“What?”
“My name is Captain Picham Wellborn,” Crazy Mac said.
“Wellborn?” Hutto asked.
“I captained this beauty in the Battle of the Steppe during the Great Incursion, many years ago.”
“You’re one of the Wellborns?” Beasley asked.
“I am. I haven’t seen Rigon or Yancey in years. Haven’t seen much of anybody. Been waiting on today, ever since we beat them back.” The young students who stood gawking at his machine had no idea of its history or the fine operators who’d taken her to victory, and defeat. He walked up to Wally, and knelt before him. “How would you like to try to get her moving?”
The young tough named Hutto, who stared about with reverence but abandon, looked like he wanted to try.
“Sorry, son,” Captain Wellborn said. “Only one possible pilot in this room.”
“Why now?” Wally asked in his little voice. “I just learned how to make my mech run.”
“Those flashing lights mean they’ve finally come to Sterling. We were put here as a precaution, thinking they’d steer clear of MacEllen, and Sterling.” The whining had stopped but now another rumble began. He tapped a few controls on his workstation. “I don’t expect much, but if you can get her moving, we can drop her in the right spot. It’ll be a big howdy-do to the Enemies.”
“For what?” Hutto asked.
“Why else? To make ‘em run from our guns.”
“Will she fire?”
Captain Wellborn waved that away. “She’ll always fire. The question is, will she move?”
Everyone looked at Wally, waiting. “You guys think I can do it?”
“Only one way to find out.” Captain Wellborn pointed to the gel seat in the center of the platform. “Let me help you there—”
Beasley stepped forward. “I got it.”
She set him in the oversized bucket seat with all the straps and the gel cells. Wally crossed his arms and squeezed his legs together. The gel reacted and soon covered his torso, arms, and legs in a protective shell. The oversized helmet was too big. But she set it on his head. It rested on top of the gel at his shoulders.
“You good?” she asked.
From inside, she heard him say, “I hope this works.”
“My job is to command,” Captain Wellborn said. “Your job is to pilot. It’s simple. You do what I tell you, and I don’t have to shut her down.”
The old man with enough wrinkles to intimidate a Chinese Shar Pei stood straighter and smiled. His voice sounded fuller. Even Hutto seemed to notice. Beasley had never known that Crazy Mac was related to the Sterling School’s most prest
igious family. She also had no idea that when he’d referred to Crazy Mac, he’d been using the pet-name for the mech. She’d visited him a handful of times but had never suspected he was anything other than an old hermit in the woods with fantasies about getting the mech moving.
“You been waiting for me to bring someone like him since we met,” she said.
“I figured it was time when I heard they let you types in.”
Hutto asked, “Types?”
“Types, son. The dangerous kind.” He stared at the two of them as if they must have heard all this before. “What have they told you? That you’re special? Or in need of treatment? I hope it’s not that. That’ll just piss you off in the end.” He punched a few buttons, and the sound of airlocks venting registered.
“Hey,” Wally said. “I can feel those changes.”
“Sure you can. She’s waking up. Keep that helmet on, and you’ll do just fine.” To Hutto and Beasley, he said, “No? So they’re being honest. Good. From the looks of you two, my bet is that you both have rage issues. You, son, are about as perfect a specimen as they come, so your entity is proof the sins of the fathers weigh heavy on the heads of their children. If we had done it right, you’d have lived your life in perfection with no demons. You can tell me some other time what they are.” Then to Beasley. “And you, miss, by the looks of you, you suffer from a typical hormonal reaction that didn’t sit well with your parents. They wanted a female athlete, I bet. Maybe a tennis pro? But I guess they got something else.”
Beasley ground her teeth and refused any show of emotion. He’d never once spoken so directly to her.
He continued. “So, pretty-boy here gets to look perfect, while you look like a man. Everything else works great, I bet, except all the genetic engineering caught the interest of your entities. And I bet yours bothers you much more than his. Boy, those reckless bastards sure know how to trample the innocent.” He looked like he might walk over to her and give her a hug but thought better of it. “Whatever you got inside you, we can use it. The entities, I believe, are pain-in-the-ass tools we can use to fuck with the sky gods. And fuck with them we shall.”
“Sky gods?” Hutto asked. “You one of those religious nuts?”