by Drew Avera
Servo motors whined in protest at the strain, joints grinding at each hard turn, data and images scrolling across his sensor screens and his HUD faster than he could follow. He abandoned hope of trying to follow the lidar and radar and thermal readings and just concentrated on his Mk-I eyeballs
What they showed him, just past the line of railcars, just over the rise of the railroad track, was a drydock. Basically a huge pit dug into the ground and lined with concrete, the front end abutted the river and could be flooded to let ships float in, then drained to allow work on the lower hull. It was dozens of meters down and even a mech wouldn’t survive a fall to the bottom of it. Maybe if he could draw the Tagan after him, get it on the other side of the drydock, Dix would have time to get out.
He was still debating the idea one second later when a missile from the Russian mech speared through the end of the cargo container he’d just ducked behind, the force of the blast from the warhead ripping half the railcar into metal shrapnel and sending the rest spinning into the air, trailing a halo of black smoke. The concussion slammed into the Hellfire and sent it and him flying and ending the debate. He jammed his thruster control pedals to the floor, trying to keep his mech upright, and shot over the top of the cargo container, taking off at a sharp angle just a few meters off the ground.
The railroad tracks flashed by just beneath his canopy and he came within a meter of colliding with an old power pole. The Tagan didn’t miss it, didn’t seem to care it was there. The pole shattered in creosote-coated wood splinters at the impact with the Russian mech’s shoulder and then Nate was facing forward, lining his mech’s body up with the thrusters, aiming for the far side of the drydock.
A missile flashed by him, narrowly missing as he dodged, began to curve back toward him. This time, though, his Hellfire’s automated anti-missile systems had time to detect it and the 6.5mm machine guns in his chest swiveled to open fire on the warhead as it corrected its course. The missile went out of control, its guidance system damaged, heading off straight into the sky and self-destructing over a kilometer away.
It can’t have many more of the damn things, can it? Nate thought, more a hope than an estimate.
At least it didn’t fire another missile before he reached the far side of the drydock and had to touch down before the jets overheated. The Hellfire stomped onto hard concrete, running almost out of control the first few steps before Nate was able to dig the footpads in and turn to meet the oncoming Tagan. He finally had a clear shot and opened fire with his 20mm Vulcan, but the Tagan was head-on, presenting very little cross-section, and twisting and rolling as it flew and he had to hope no innocents were in the path of the heavy slugs for the next few kilometers or they were screwed.
The Vulcan ran dry with a flash of yellow and an awful silence and the Tagan touched down only ten meters in front of him. He had the terrible realization he had seconds to live, and suddenly the six or seven years more of life he’d lamented as too short seemed like an unrealized eternity.
“Hey Boss!” Roach yelled in his ear. “Heads up!”
The Marx-Ex didn’t quite hit the Tagan square; the Russian mech had seen it coming and tried to take off to avoid it, but it detonated a meter behind the enemy machine, close enough to Nate to send his Hellfire stumbling backwards under the bombardment of a hail of shrapnel. The Tagan landed hard on its feet, its knees bending nearly to the snapping point, black smoke pouring from its thrusters.
They’re skragged, Nate realized, hope and inspiration surging neck to neck in his chest. He can’t fly. But he can fucking well fall.
The 40mm cannons fired in tandem at his left shoulder, pounding round after round into the Tagan, none of the HE rounds quite enough to pierce its heavy armor, but certainly enough to distract it as he ran forward. He slammed his Hellfire’s clawed left fist into the center of the Tagan’s chest and grabbed hold, pushing forward with everything his reactor had to give. The Tagan slid backwards, arms flailing, weapons firing at nothing, too close to him to aim.
He couldn’t see the edge of the pit below his feet when he gave the final push.
The Tagan looked eerily like a human as it catapulted off the side of the drydock, arms and legs twisting, body rolling, trying to do something, anything to arrest its fall. Nothing would. Years of built up sand and dirt did little to cushion the impact, but it did make an impressive dust cloud when the mech struck the concrete bottom of the pit. The metallic crash echoed back and forth between the walls and then died away. Smoke drifted up from the motionless machine like a soul leaving a body.
And if there’s a body in there, it’s just as dead.
Nate settled back into his seat, finally able to take a full breath again after what had seemed like hours, and the Hellfire seemed to relax around him, straightening and stepping back from the edge. Beside him, Roach Mata’s mech touched down on twin jets from her thrusters, throwing up a spray of dust billowing around them.
“You okay, Boss?” she asked him. She was close enough he could see her worried frown through the mech’s canopy.
“Yeah, I’m just fucking peachy,” he rasped, mouth suddenly feeling dry. He leaned over to the spout end of a water bladder and took a long swallow. “How’s Dix?”
“Ramirez is checking on him now, but he seemed okay. His mech’s going to need some work.”
“Then let’s you and I take a look at that thing,” he suggested pointing a mechanical finger down at what was left of the Tagan, “and see who might be inside it.”
“Gotcha,” she said, her Hellfire lifting slowly off the ground, thrusters roaring.
Nate took a moment longer to steady himself. Violence was his profession, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to death, even in the memories borrowed from his Prime. He sucked down a deep, shuddering breath and descended into the pit beside his teammate. The Tagan didn’t move at their approach, not so much as a last, galvanic twitch of its servos, but Roach still kept her Vulcan aimed at the thing’s cockpit.
“You want the honors, Boss?” she asked him, gesturing toward the canopy. It was opaque, unlike the version on their Hellfires, cracked but still basically intact. Nate thought of the deformed, bloody mush of a crushed human body and wanted to order her to open it, but he was out of ammo and she wasn’t.
“Right,” he grunted. “Don’t shoot me.”
“Of course not,” Roach replied, sounding as if she was scandalized by the notion. “I need this job.”
Nate shook his head, wondering what it was like to be that young, then leaned over the Tagan, working the Hellfire’s claw hand into the edge of the cockpit canopy. Smoke still hissed upward from the wreckage of the machine’s turbines, but it hadn’t caught fire. Yet. He strained his core muscles instinctively, even though the Hellfire’s servos were doing all the work. The canopy peeled away from the front of the Tagan like the skin off a banana, bits of high-impact plastic flaking away as he yanked the cockpit hatch off its moorings with one final, powerful pull, then tossed it aside.
The cockpit was empty.
Well, no, that wasn’t exactly accurate. The cockpit was unoccupied by a human pilot, but it was jammed with remote control communications gear and what looked to him like a fairly sophisticated computer system.
“It was a U-mech?” Roach blurted. “How the hell…I mean…” She stood straight and rotated her mech’s torso back and forth, scanning their surroundings. “Where’s the master unit? Wouldn’t we have noticed another mech flying around here?”
“They didn’t use a mech,” Nate guessed. He wanted to spit in disgust, but the helmet and the close walls of the cockpit made it problematic. “They probably had a truck with commo gear and a remote-control setup on one of the nearby access roads, or maybe even in a boat.”
“Well, fuck,” the young woman muttered. “Now what?”
“Contact our support teams and get a barge out here to haul it back to base,” he told her. Then he paused, paranoia gnawing at the frayed edge o
f his nerves. “But yank the GPS tracker first.”
He was close enough to see her squinting at him curiously through her canopy.
“Okay, but why bother?”
He did his best not to snap the response back at her, trying to remind himself of her youth and inexperience.
Youth, hell. She was in High School the day I woke up with a migraine that first time.
“Because I don’t want whoever planted this thing tracing it back to our base,” he explained, grabbing at patience with both hands. “It’s bad enough they tracked us here.” He let loose of the waldos long enough to run a hand over his face, wiping away the collected sweat. “No one should have known we were here.”
Something struck him, like the feeling you’ve forgotten something but can’t remember what it is. Then it hit him and he began searching the sky above the pit.
“And where the hell is Patty, anyway?”
Chapter Four
Yorktown beach hadn’t been that popular even before the war, but back home in Kentucky, Geoff Patterson had never thought he’d ever have a beach to himself. Even a river beach, littered with garbage. The George P Coleman Memorial Bridge stretched highway 17 out over the York River, then gave up on the whole thing halfway across and sank into the wreckage the military had left behind as a deterrent for invaders during the war.
Well, technically, the war ain’t over. Except it is and we’re just too damned stupid to realize it.
He dropped to the sand, his combat boots sinking into it a couple centimeters. No, a couple inches. Fuck you, metric system. I’m from Kentucky, I ain’t using that shit.
He pulled off his helmet and let it drop to the sand with casual negligence. It was cooler here than it had been in Norfolk, trapped inside that damned warehouse at the docks, sweating his ass off every day, banging their heads against a wall chasing phantom Russian saboteurs.
“Do I gotta go back?” he wondered aloud.
“For now,” came the answer from over his left shoulder. He looked back, unsurprised. She was why he’d come.
Her voice was low and sultry and she had a face to match, high cheekbones and high forehead, her blond hair pulled back tightly against her scalp only to cut loose in a wild mane across her shoulders. Her tan sweater and matching skirt hugged her slender figure as if she’d been poured into them, and she seemed as if she gave no thought to the dirt and sand coating her designer boots.
“This is an interesting place,” she said, her hand brushing against his shoulder as she passed him, a touch of fire even through his Nomex flight suit. “So much of your history began here.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet here?” He stepped up just behind her, close enough to feel the warmth, for strands of hair blown on the breeze to tease at his face. “I thought it was ‘cause there was no surveillance drone coverage in this area.”
“That too,” she admitted. She waved a hand around them and he admired the perfect manicure, the spotless skin. She wasn’t exactly young, had to be somewhere in her thirties at least, but damned if he could spot any sign of her age even from this close. “This is where the British forces surrendered to the Colonials during your War for Independence, you know?”
He shrugged.
“I s’pose. I ain’t much of a history buff. Back home, I had more important things to learn just to stay alive.” Like how to hijack a truck and get the load squirreled away and then torch the rig before the police drones spotted you.
“Your people call it the Revolutionary War,” she said, and she leaned back into him. The feel of her body against his was an electric surge straight to his heart and then lower. “It is a misnomer. A revolution is the overthrow of an existing government in favor of a new one. Yours was a colonial war for independence from the mother country. Do you know why this matters, Geoffrey?”
“I can’t say as I do, Svetlana,” he admitted. “But if you say it’s important, then it is.”
She laughed, rich and throaty and enough to make his belly turn backflips.
“It is because revolutions come at times when things are bad and make them worse. Violent revolutions never lead to more freedom, to better conditions, to better rulers. They only lead to death and destruction and tyranny. In Russia, we revolted against the Czars in 1917 because we were desperate, because things seemed as if they could not get any worse. And yet they did. Once the Bolsheviks gained power, they began to kill off those they deemed not pure enough in their beliefs, and in the end, hundreds of millions died and things were so much worse and lasted so much longer than it should have. And we were not able to free ourselves of the Communists for decades.”
She turned, her hands going to his chest, her breath warm against his cheek. “The same was true of the French Revolution. They overthrew their king and thought they would be instituting a new sort of republic that gave power to the average person, but in reality, it was the start of a purge where those not considered pure enough were killed by the tens of thousands, and a new military dictator rose up, Napoleon, to plunge the world into war.”
“That’s all nice and depressing,” he said, hands at the small of her back, daring, pressing her against him. “But that ain’t why I’m here.”
“You are here because of this,” she said, and she kissed him.
She tasted like cherries and cigarette smoke and he started thinking about the buildings still standing on the beach, wondering if any of them was clean enough inside to suit.
“Easy, my Geoffrey,” she cautioned pushing a hand against his chest when he began to grind against her. “We are not beasts to rut in the dirt. We will meet again for that, when the time and place are right.”
He tried to get his breathing under control, tried to cap the rising flood inside his chest, but it wasn’t easy. And once he’d stopped thinking with his little head, the big one had far too much on its mind.
“What’s gonna happen to them?” he wanted to know.
“You need not concern yourself,” she said, something cold in her voice rather than the reassurance he’d sought. She seemed to notice the effect her words had and she sighed, almost in disappointment. “The orders were to try to avoid killing them. Accidents may happen, but harming them is not our intent.”
“I didn’t want it to come to this,” he insisted, tilting his head back into the sun and closing his eyes. “They can be assholes sometimes, but they’re still my friends. I just…my family…”
“They are deceiving themselves. They believe they can save something that has already been lost. The world that was will never come back, just as the days of the Czars and the Communists and the world of the British Empire are all lost to the tides of history.”
She nodded toward the broken bridge, the abandoned buildings crumbling in the sun.
“All this will be swept away and replaced by something new, and this new thing will not be the America they wish to save. The time of countries is past. Now the world is controlled by those who know how to exploit its resources at maximum efficiency.”
“So, you don’t work for the Russians, then?” It was a verbal jab. She was incredibly hot, but she could get so damned full of herself sometimes. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded her skeptically. “You don’t want to take control of the Eastern Seaboard so they can have an uncontested port for their ships to unload?”
“I didn’t say it was only on your side that men misread history,” she admitted, chuckling. “What the Federation government believes I do here and what I actually do are two different things. The man who I truly work for does not wish a revolution, Geoffrey. He wishes a war for independence, not merely from a country, but from all countries.”
She took his hand and turned him back to the beach. “The men who fought the British were considered traitors, you know. But they were on the right side of history.”
He blew out a heavy sigh and shook his head.
“Then maybe there’s hope for me, yet.”
Nate wasn’t sure wher
e Dix had gotten the cigar, but he sure as hell seemed to be enjoying it. The former Naval officer sat on the chest of his mech as if it were a bull elephant he’d taken down on safari, prone and strapped down to tie-downs on the flat deck of the remotely-sailed barge. Dix leaned back and blew out an aromatic cloud of smoke, then watched the ocean breeze carry it away before he clambered to his feet and hopped off the barge and up onto the dock beside their warehouse just as the rubber fender scraped up against the pilings.
Nate cut thrusters and felt a jolt as his Hellfire lowered the last two centimeters to the surface of the pier. He cracked open his canopy and pushed it upward, letting in the breeze. Dark clouds were swelling shoreward from the ocean, the brisk, fresh air carrying away the stink of the bay but promising the storm to come.
“Ramirez,” he called into his throat mic. “Go get the crane and get the Hellfire and what’s left of the Tagan inside the warehouse before they start attracting attention.”
“Got it,” the young man responded, perhaps just a bit of sullen resentment in his tone. Nate grinned, since the boy couldn’t see it. Being the team “mule” was a bitch, but they’d all had to do it when they were the junior man. Well, he hadn’t done it, but rank had its privileges.
“Hey Dix,” he called down to the man, “I thought celebratory cigars were meant for when you win a fight, not when you get your ass kicked and your mech trashed.”
“Any fight you walk away from is a win,” Dix replied with a phlegmatic shrug, then shot him a bird before tossing the cigar stub away and heading into the warehouse.
It felt odd walking in the mech with the canopy open, the difference between operating a convincing simulator and flying an open-cockpit biplane at low altitude. The swaying, rocking gait of the mech felt precarious, like walking on stilts, and he nearly pulled the canopy shut again but forced himself not to. Fears got faced, not avoided. His life was too short to let fear run it.