MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  The wrist-guns snarled and lines of orange tracer spat through the trees, finding a pair of the wolves and ending them right there. A cheer rose out of every one of us, and suddenly our martial fire was stoked. We stopped running, started shooting back. Fighting. It’s funny how one of them can make you do that.

  Meanwhile, the Paladin had the spider’s attention. Easily as tall as the humanoid mech, the Federate machine had less mass and that made it faster. It dodged out of the way of the pulses of gunfire, hitting back with the beamer. The dazzling plasma bolts were so bright it made me flinch to see them, each one leaving a nasty purple afterimage seared on to my retina.

  One bolt splashed across the Paladin’s hull for a fraction of a second before it got the buckler around and in the way. Then the air filled with white streamers of smoke and the hot stink of burning armor laminate.

  “Back him up!” I shouted, jabbing a finger at the mech.

  My people, they knew what I meant. A couple of the troopers carried one-shot anti-armor blowpipes, unreliable things that were supposed to stop tanks in their tracks—not that this kind of ragged terrain would ever see a tank on it, of course—but they read my mind and shot them off. One went wide of the spider and felled a huge tree, but the second cost the Fed drone a leg and some of that precious agility.

  The Paladin’s iron head bobbed, and it took the opportunity we gave it, closing the distance in a bound. The heat-sword blurred into an arc of red metal and more trees were slashed down. The spider’s legs were cut clear through, and it crumpled in an untidy heap, trailing more smoke and flame. The mech pivoted away to stamp another of the wolves beneath a massive steel foot. The others broke their attack pattern and fled. I guess they must have an algorithm for knowing when to retreat.

  We didn’t let that happen. Pitched back from certain death in just the space of a minute thanks to the Paladin’s intervention, now we were salty. No enemy unit was going to leave that valley. I didn’t need to make it an order. It was just something we all instinctively decided on.

  Swarming around the wake of the mech, we turned the tables on those damned wolf drones, and that was the end of them. I heard the thrumming of the wing-frame coming back around. Its job done, the Paladin was already getting ready to leave us behind.

  The spider, though… It had other ideas.

  It was down, but oh man, it was not out. It must have had a kind of one-two punch failsafe in there because, with one final effort, it channeled whatever remained in it batteries and shot a plasma lance right through the Paladin’s torso. In the same place where you’d knife a man in the kidneys to bleed him out.

  Then the spider drone exploded, releasing a crackling web of blue lightning—an electromagnetic pulse—but the worst of the damage was already done. The Paladin lurched forward, almost flattening me, and fell to its knees. I saw fluid spurt out of the ragged burn hole in its side, watery orange liquid the color of rusty water.

  It made a deep groaning noise—I tell myself that was the motors giving out or something—and it crumpled into a sitting position, propped up unceremoniously against a massive boulder.

  I don’t know what happened to the wing-frame. Flew off, I guess. We were all too shocked to notice.

  I mean, a wounded Paladin. Five minutes earlier, none of us had even been this close to one in any kind of condition. They were things that lived in propaganda movies and battle reports from the real frontline, not out here in this stinking green meat-grinder we found ourselves in.

  The Hegemony’s overt media brigade painted the mechs in popular consciousness in the same shades you’d use to describe a force of nature. They were our ironclad war gods, the giant machine soldiers that were our weapons of last resort. Our killer angels.

  But they were supposed to be untouchable. The mechs, they didn’t get tired or wounded, or bored half to death. They were always in contact. They were the tip of the spear in every battle theater on and off the planet.

  I remember Brickton saying one time that even their name was designed to have a mythical quality to it. Paladins were invincible warriors with pure hearts who fought with unshakable codes of conduct, and they never retreated, never shrank from a fight. Well, this one had certainly lived up to the hype, coming in from out of the night like the hand of fate to save our ragged asses.

  You know the emotion that was strongest in me, in that clearing right then and there? It was fear. Not that I was going to die, not that there were more drones out there, but fear that oh gods, I’m responsible for this, and we would be in more trouble than we could handle.

  And that was absolutely right. We’ll get to why in a minute.

  I knew something was very wrong with the machine from the moment it went down. It didn’t collapse in the same way the Fed drones had, folding like a machine with the plug pulled. It slumped like it had been, I don’t know, maimed. In the way a person would have.

  It did something none of us expected. There was a shriek of compressed air and the Paladin’s chest suddenly opened, nested clamshell doors made of cera-metal alloy parting so we could actually see inside. A gush of that rusty liquid frothed out in a rush, and with it came a human form, trailing dozens of cables and hair-thin wires.

  I mean, we all knew the Paladins had pilots. But nobody had ever seen one. For all the shock and awe of the mechs in the vids, Kommand kept their drivers totally incognito. They said it was to protect the families of their best pilots from fifth columnist attacks on the home front. I suppose that’s partly true.

  The pilot was small. Doler didn’t hesitate, the good and compassionate soul that he is. He sprinted across the clearing, dragging his medical kit from his backpack. Me and Jane got there the same time he did.

  The cockpit had drained out, but hot damp air still wafted from it, heavy with scents of blood and oil. I could see light through the hole the plasma bolt had made right into the protected core of the mech’s interior.

  The pilot’s outfit gave them the look of a hi-tech mummy, all strips of metallic cloth and embedded hardware. I reached out. “Help me get her up,” I said.

  Her. See, I thought it was a woman in there. I saw a small frame, skinny but athletic, and I just assumed it was a female pilot. Like those tiny gymnast girls who are five feet nothing but all muscle and as agile as a cheetah.

  “Lieutenant,” said Jane, and it was a warning. “Regs say we’re not supposed to go anywhere near a Paladin.”

  She was right. In fact, if we’d followed the letter of the regulations, we should have turned our backs and run the moment the mech had touched down in the valley. There were all kinds of explanations, reasons to do with volatile experimental weapons, radiation effects from exotic power systems, and so on and so on.

  “Too late for that now,” I told her.

  Doler gave me a hand, and we put the pilot face up. And that’s when I saw this wasn’t any gymnast girl.

  “Madre de Dios,” said the medic. “It’s a kid!”

  He was pale, thin, and most certainly on the low side of fourteen years old, with a face that reminded me so much of my girls that I had to fight down the reflexive impulse to gather him up in my arms.

  A child.

  A damned child. Too young to have hair on his ass, too young to buy a beer or get married, but old enough for some calculating bastard to put him into a war machine and send him off into harm’s way.

  What the hell is wrong with you people?

  Suddenly all the secrecy about the Paladin pilots made perfect sense. Of course, Kommand didn’t want to show their faces to the world. Can you imagine the uproar if anyone knew?

  Damn, I’ve lived with this knowledge for weeks now, and I still can’t square it. Yeah, I understand the technical explanation. It’s just the practical absence of a moral one that sticks in my craw.

  But I’m not allowed to make a judgement like that, am I? I mean, I’m just a grunt, right? Barely even an officer by most lights. Other men and women with lots of stars and bars on thei
r shoulders are paid to consider that kind of thing and take on the moral responsibility. Or some lixo like that.

  Me? I’m just supposed to shut up and obey.

  We made camp in the valley. I told the squad to do it because I had to tell them something, and my instructor in OTC always said if in doubt, give an order. We pitched our bubble-tents around the Paladin and the first thing Doler did was get the kid up and under cover. All those cables took forever to get off him, and I swear to you, as I carried the pilot off, the mech leaned forward after him, just a little. It made me think of a parent reaching after their child as it was taken away.

  Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe I was anthropomorphizing the spasms of a misfiring robot. But what do you expect when you build a machine that looks like a giant armored human?

  The kid, he weighed nothing. Less than my battle pack and rifle. Doler put him on a collapsible cot, got an IV line in there, and dosed him with pan-spectrum antibiotics. I sent out two teams to make sure the Fed drones were completely dead, and to scout the area beyond the valley ridge, while I took it upon myself to stand watch at the entrance to the tent. Jane told me that our regular comms were still out, but we had a scheduled laser-line check-in before dawn when an AWACS flyer was due to pass over, so she set up the beam antenna and got ready.

  Every time I looked at one of my troopers, I caught them stealing glances at the Paladin. In the wake of the firefight, none of us seemed able to really process what had happened.

  To mark time, I got out my standard-issue deck of tiny, thumbsized cards and programmed them for solitaire. Eventually Doler came over to talk to me with a grim look in his eyes.

  “He’s recovering from shock. Got first and second degree burns. Don’t think there’s any internal damage, but I can’t tell for certain.” He reeled off the kid’s injuries without preamble. “The boy needs an evac, sir. There’s things about him…” The medic trailed off, and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before. Doler didn’t let anything faze him. Well, not usually.

  “Be straight about it,” I said. “What’s eating you?”

  “More like, what’s eating him.” He jerked a thumb at the kid. “Lieutenant, he’s got something in his bloodstream that I can’t account for. Tiny particles, looks like.” Doler’s frown deepened. “I don’t know.”

  But I had an idea. “Nanos?” There were training films about bio-chem, nuke and viral weapon threats from the enemy, but the one that always left me chilled was nanotech. Tiny machines little larger than blood cells, able to work at someone from the inside out like a million-fold microscopic wrecking crew. But they could also do the reverse, eating up cancers and closing wounds, or so the lab rats said. But we were told no-one could make it work. Nanotechnology remained the myth of a next-gen weapon that everyone was terrified would one day become viable.

  Apparently, it’s not as mythic as we’ve been led to believe.

  “He’s burning up,” said Doler, giving me a reluctant nod. “That’d be consistent with nanobots at work inside him, trying to fix him up. They give off a lot of heat. But he’s going to cook before he heals.”

  Later, when I had time to think about it, I figured that was why the mech had ejected him. The damage to the cockpit meant it couldn’t keep him cool. It was trying to keep its pilot alive. So, the way I saw it, that gave us a chance to pay back the debt we owed the Paladin.

  We rigged up a hammock for the kid and filled it with the icy water from the stream to chill him down. I got a rotation going, bringing in fresh buckets every hour or so. I watched him lie there, steam curling off his skin.

  I could see the orange glow of pre-dawn crawling over the ridge line up above us when he finally woke up.

  The look on his face, it was fear and surprise and interest all at once. “Aiden,” he said, “I’m Aiden. Who are you?”

  “Lieutenant DeMarco, Helios.” I nodded at Doler. “This is our doc. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”

  “You were hurt,” Doler began, but the kid was already trying to climb out of his hammock, water sloshing all around.

  “Easy!” I stopped him before he could hurt himself. “Stand down!”

  “Where is my mount?” Aiden shouted, nearly panicking. “I need to see my mount!”

  Doler and I exchanged a glance, thinking the same thing. The mech? I pulled open the tent flap so the kid could see the dormant Paladin.

  His face fell. “I have to reconnect,” he said, after a moment. “I can’t leave him out there.”

  “Him who?” said Doler. I think he was going to say something more, but then we both froze when we heard the Paladin’s motors give that grinding moan once again. Jane told me that it turned its head to stare right at the tent.

  I held up a hand. “Look, kid…Aiden. What were you doing inside that thing?” I was still trying to grasp the situation at that point.

  “I am the pilot,” he snapped, like he was talking to an idiot. “Of course.”

  “You’re just a child,” Doler replied.

  “I am the pilot,” Aiden repeated, more firmly.

  Then Jane appeared at the tent flap and beckoned me. “Sir? We got comms, but not for long. You want to talk to Kommand, it’s gotta be now.”

  “He stays put,” I told Doler, and then I followed Jane out to the antenna.

  I imagine you have a full and complete transcript of that whole conversation I had with the chair-warmers back at base. Every word of it, right? Stored somewhere in perfect detail, from my first incredulous requests for clarification to the last of it, when I crossed over the line into insubordination and disrespectful language toward a senior officer.

  I’ll give you the high points. We had no operable radio link but the high-altitude AWACS flyer passing overhead could shoot down a low-power laser that the antenna read, and send back the same in kind before the flyer went across the horizon and out of line of sight. That relayed me directly back to Kommand and to a Tac-Colonel with a serious desire to kick my brown ass up and down the whole peninsula.

  She tore me a new one about interfering with the operation of a Paladin unit, threatened to cashier me, went on and on about the insufficient security clearances of me and my squad. And for a while I took it all. You don’t get promoted up from the enlisted ranks to officer grade without understanding when to keep your mouth shut.

  But you read my record, and you’ll see that’s never been something I was real good at. I couldn’t stop thinking about my girls, whom I hadn’t seen in months. I wondered about Aiden—did he have a father out there somewhere who felt the same way?

  Without even thinking about the consequences, I let her have it. I blew my stack and ended up shouting the colonel down as she tried to justify why putting a teenager inside that war machine was anywhere near acceptable.

  In the end, she told me my career was over and threatened me with a firing squad. The colonel’s last words were the order to put the kid back in the mech and abandon the patrol. Then the laser faded and we were out of contact again.

  It was late morning when I went back into the tent. Doler had given Aiden my cards, and the kid was messing with them, grinning. For a second, he looked way younger than his age—but then that went away, and he started talking. He had a clipped, almost mechanical way of speaking. As if he’d been taught by a computer.

  “I’ve never seen any others before,” he told me.

  “Other what?”

  “Adults.” He offered me the cards, but I waved them away, let him keep them. “Aside from my instructors.”

  “The other Paladins… The pilots are like you?” I swallowed hard. “Young?”

  He looked at me strangely. “I’m the eldest, by two weeks. The youngest is Matra, he was born a whole month before me.”

  “Where’s Matra now?”

  Aiden cocked his head. “On the Ukrainian front. We have a couple of mounts up there.” He eyed me. “You’re not like them. The instructors.”

  “No?” If thes
e instructors were the ones who put him in the machine, I was okay with that. “How so?”

  “You’re disorderly.” He was matter-of-fact about it, utterly tactless in the way that only a child can be. “You clearly don’t follow uniform protocol or proper discipline codes.”

  I chuckled. “You got me there. Things like that tend to get lost out here at the sharp end. We’re more interested in staying alive.” My smile faded. “Speaking of that, I didn’t thank you for what you did. We’d be dead if not for you and your big buddy.”

  “It was on my way,” he replied. “I was heading back from the Tonkin Gulf. We neutralized an enemy sub-carrier.” Aiden told me how he’d seen the fireball from the air and come looking. Like it was no big deal for him to break off, waste a bunch of drones and carry on like it wasn’t a thing. He seemed disconnected from the act, somehow. It was a game to him, an abstract thing. I wondered how much of that was his persona, and how much had been trained into him.

  The question that had been burning in me from the start finally pushed forward until I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Why are you piloting the Paladin? Why don’t Kommand have adults do that?”

  He played with the cards some more. “Because you can’t.” Aiden tapped his temple. “Instructors say it’s to do with our brain structure. Old people can’t interface with the mech systems for more than a few hours. It drives them insane.”

  I frowned at being classified as an old person but let it pass.

  “If you’re young, you can handle the neuro-link.” He went on with a shrug. “It’s easy for us.”

  “But you understand what you’re doing in there, right?” I leaned closer, fixing him with a steady eye, measuring his reaction. “You use that heat-sword or the cannons, and those aren’t always drones you’re taking down. Sometimes it’s human beings.”

  “Enemy combatants,” Aiden corrected. “Yes. I know. I’m not stupid. But if we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us.” I saw a flicker of emotion cross his flushed face. “I’ve seen it happen. I lost my family when I was eight, in the bombings.”