MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  “This last round of therapy is going to be…different.”

  The cockpit lights came on, the main viewing walls illuminated, and Harold noticed that the mech hangar had changed. It was no longer strictly utilitarian and empty. Lights and cameras were suspended from the ceiling, and along the walls behind armor-glass windows sat hundreds of people, watching him…as if this were some sort of spectator sport.

  The biggest shock came when Harold saw he wasn’t the only Travailiant patient there.

  Five other recommissioned Decimator-class robots stood in a semi-circle around him. They pounded truck-sized fists, spun their thick mechanical arms, or just looked at him menacingly. As they thundered forward, closing in on him, Harold swallowed hard.

  TAIT said, “Welcome to group therapy, Harold.”

  Hey, Sami?” Dillon’s voice said in her ear.

  “What is it?” Samantha Veracruz asked, toggling her helmet mike with her chin, and cutting off the news report of yet another attack on a Sino-Mongolian emplacement. “I’ll be up there as soon as I get the order on board!”

  She trudged, or rather, her sixty-foot-tall blue-steel mechanical body trudged through the gigantic Make-It-Right warehouse in East Teaneck, New Jersey. Sami, at five-foot-two a fraction of her mech’s height, stood in the pilot’s capsule inside the mech’s oblong head, wearing her control suit, walking on the internal treadmill to make the gigantic bot move forward, checking the in-helm display screen that showed her where to find everything. The thin spandex suit was studded with sensors that reproduced, at temperatures and pressures safe for a human body, what the mech sensed. Everything she did, with a few notable exceptions such as eating or comfort breaks, the mech followed precisely. She called it Sami Plus.

  At twenty meters high, Sami Plus wasn’t the largest of the constructorbots moving around the warehouse. The building’s ceiling, with its recessed lights and skylights every ten meters, was high enough to allow a mech twice her height to shop, though the operator would have to be sitting at its waist to make sure that what they took off the shelves hadn’t been mislabeled. She’d already had to return two skids of cleats because they were the wrong size.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  Sami was frustrated at the delay. The whole team was frustrated. The floating hotel/resort under construction near the spaceship construction facility out at the Trojan position behind the moon was about half done, and the deadline was less than a month out. Anything that could have interfered with getting the job done on time had already happened at least twice. She hopped up and down with frustration, making her gigantic robot body clang. If she didn’t get her butt back up there in a hurry to replace the failing hydroponics shell, millions of dollars’ worth of plants were going to get frozen in absolute zero. If she had overseen the Bassani SkyHeaven project, she wouldn’t have had those damned plants shipped up until the station was operational. But everything was running late. Leave it to the growers to get the one thing done on time that was too delicate to expose to space.

  “Well, you’re kind of going to kill me…”

  “Why?” Sami asked, suspicion rising. She had known Dillon since they were both kids growing up in Queens. She turned the corner, edging out of the way of a massive girderbot painted interstellar-distress orange loading I-beams into its interior cage, and arrived at a shelf that lit up on her screen map. Five plascrates of bolts slid out on a tongue of steel. With her left hand, Sami raised her loader tines up to receive them, and lowered them into her mech’s belly cargo hatch. She turned toward the tool section, where four dozen new arc torches and sixteen dozen fuel tanks were waiting, along with the precious insulated shell segments. Sami engaged manual override and loaded those herself. It took both massive mechanical hands to move them into the storage bay. If she broke any of the shells, she’d have to pay for them and replace them.

  “Well,” Dillon said, with obvious reluctance, “we kinda got talking about things. You know what it’s like out here. We put together the sections of the station. The mechs are preprogrammed to do most of the work. We should pay attention, but there isn’t a lot to do. So, we got to talking about what people used to be. And you’re the newest on staff. I told everybody that you used to deliver pizzas. And everybody got to talking about pizza. Now everybody’s hungry for pizza.”

  The shock made Sami halt her mech right in the middle of the aisle. A school of little droids swarmed around and between its legs to get by.

  “No! Dillon, why?”

  “It just kind of came out. I’m sorry. So, the boss put in an order for 800 pizzas. You have to pick them up from Gilesano’s.”

  Sami felt her heart drop. “You actually called the place I used to work?”

  “They’re the biggest food factory on the East Canada-US Coast, Sam. They’ll have everything ready in about an hour. And,” he added playfully, “if you get the order up here thirty minutes after that, we’ll all chip in on a tip.”

  “Screw you,” Sami said, and cut the connection. She dropped her head against the operator capsule’s wall with a thud. She found herself flat on her back, looking up at the ceiling, and corrected her orientation.

  So much for dignity! It had been hard enough to convince the construction company to take her on as an engineerbot operator without years of experience in near-Earth orbit. Her previous job had been short-haul atmosphere trucking, jetting around the world with just-in-time deliveries. The only reason they had been willing to take her on was her five years of driving pizzas around to every neighborhood in the New York-Newark megaloplex, then moving up to mass food deliveries to industrial locations and schools. If she could manage to avoid getting skyjacked there, they figured she would have no trouble carrying a load to Somalia or the South China Sea. And they had been right. But, oh, God, why did Dillon have to tell the team?

  As she left the warehouse, the purchases in her mech’s hold were rung up by the door-frame computer. Sami had fifteen minutes to jet the forty miles to Gilesano’s depot. She kicked in the rockets in the soles of her mech’s feet and plunged upward into the gray clouds, one fist held skyward.

  “Eight hundred pizza pies,” her old boss, Tommy Barron, said, slapping the side of the pilot capsule. He stood on a floating riser that brought him up to her level. The thick dark hair on his big round head looked even more grizzled than it had when she last saw him. “All set and ready to bake, Sami, baby. All you have to do is hit the activation button on the boxes twenty minutes before you want to serve them. You can chain ’em from the controller ten or twenty at a time. Easiest thing in the world, right? But, hell, why am I telling you that? It was good to see you. Moving up in the world. Like, for real.”

  “Yeah,” Sami said. She felt kind of embarrassed at the way all of her former co-workers had come out to admire Sami Plus and offer shy compliments as the loaders piled freezer crates of flat boxes in her hold next to the cleats and beams. She tucked the containers into every spare nook and cranny. “Good to see you, too. Hey, I’ve got to go.”

  “Right,” Barron said. “See you again some time, Sami.”

  The cheese technicians and sauce mechanics looked up at her. All of them were capable of better things than fast food service, but none of them would ever make the jump that she had. Five years, and they were all still there.

  Speaking of jumps, she waved a final goodbye, and hit the power. Sami Plus leaped for the skies.

  The movies always made it look like Earth and the moon were right next to each other, but reality shoved that quarter of a million miles right in her face. In the early days of the space program, astronauts had the skies pretty much to themselves, except for a few little bitty satellites. Now, space in Earth’s orbit was crowded. She dodged a fleet of university vehicles leaving Halifax that were coded for the Mars run and momentarily obstructed the HBO satellite over the eastern half of North America. A glance at her scopes that the Earth’s rotation had turned her away from the moon, which was going to add c
rucial time to her flight. She’d have to loop around the northern hemisphere before she could program a direct vector. Once she was in the clear, she could kick up acceleration and blow back to the station in about four hours flat.

  “Damn!” she said aloud, and switched to her normal comm channel. “Bassani, this is Veracruz. I’m on the wrong side of the world. ETA about five hours now.”

  Even with digital transmission, there was a momentary delay until the office answered.

  “Dammit, Sami, get up here! The housing’s starting to buckle on the outside of the hydroponics bubble. We need those new shells to brace it, or Ms. Bassani’s rhododendrons are going to freeze.”

  “I know,” Sami said. She adjusted the mech’s body so it looked like Superman in flight, both arms flung skyward. “I’m getting there as fast as I can.”

  In spite of the continual “hurry-up-and-wait-now-hurry!” situation that persisted in the construction industry, working for Bassani was the best job she’d ever had. In space, no one tried to get into your delivery vehicle with you or rip off your credit box or hustle you for free pies. The mechs were just too big to mess with. On the other hand, she didn’t get tips anymore, but the pay difference made up for that.

  In the hazy blue stratosphere, Sami threaded her way through the floating space junk, some of it no more than a speck but dangerous to her shielding, along with dozens of other mechs, each going somewhere different. A few new floaters spread silver solar sails to catch the rising sun. Looked like the Japanese had launched a bunch of new satellites since the last time she had passed that way. It’d be an easy run. Plenty of time to get started on the new boxed video set she’d downloaded into the mech’s memory.

  “Head’s up!”

  A rough female voice came over the emergency frequency.

  Sami tilted her head the other way, to let the chatter come in.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, her voice joining a cacophony of other voices.

  “Stow it!” the harsh voice demanded. “Listen!”

  Sami automatically wanted to tell the stranger to shove it up her exhaust port, but no one abused the emergency channel.

  “…Chechen fighters joined in the resistance alongside Mongol forces. The bombardment is being resisted by Kashmiri flyers, with dogfights going as high as fifteen thousand klicks. All traffic over Asia is advised to choose alternate routes…”

  She glanced down at the Pacific Ocean, now quickly disappearing astern.

  Through the clouds scattered over the Earth’s surface, she could see tiny orange explosions and long plumes of smoke bloom where the fighters had dropped bombs on their enemies’ emplacements. They’d been hammering each other for months, since around the time Bassani had started building the station. Maybe she was far enough up not to be noticed.

  Wrong.

  Her proximity scope started beeping like a frog with the hiccups. Sami threw all sensors on. A dozen blips showed up in her tank, growing larger by the second. She glanced over her shoulder. Tiny bright specks hurtled toward her from a massive cloudbank. They had red flashing on their housing, showing that they were part of the Sino-Mongolian Space Force. Sami had already violated Rule One of making a safe delivery: avoid the bad neighborhoods.

  Damn it! Sami kicked in her afterburners. She didn’t want to use up her whole fuel allotment, but she didn’t want to get involved in a dogfight, either. Her mech blasted toward the dark blue edge of the thermopause, the highest stratum of the atmosphere.

  The comm started gabbling noises at her. They resolved into a man’s voice. The mech’s translation program picked it up on the third syllable.

  “…Invading our air space. You are trespassing! Identify yourself! Who do you serve?”

  “I work for Bassani Enterprises,” Sami said, scanning her scope to see where she could draw some extra boost. She vented air from her cargo bay, but she couldn’t turn off the freezer units in case the pizzas would start to thaw. No real savings. “I’m a deliverymech. I’ll be out of your space in a few seconds.”

  “Halt to be searched!”

  “I can’t!” Sami yelled at the scope. Six other bogeys, marked in Chechen white, were coming up behind her at military speeds, much faster than she could coax out of her ‘bot. “My load is time-sensitive, mister. I’ve got to get out to the SkyHeaven project ASAP! Look, here’s my manifest!” She sent the documentation out on the comm channel.

  For answer, a bolt of blistering red lightning went past her left flank. She felt the rush of heat through the sensors in her control suit. The lead red ‘bot had opened his whole chest array.

  “The next one will take off your right leg. Halt!”

  There went Rule Two: try to talk your way out of a potential conflict.

  “Now, wait, guys!” Sami said. She slammed a palm on the emergency systems button, which activated the evasive maneuvers protocol. It detected heat signatures coming from nearby combat-bots and took steps to move her mech out of their way. The enemy ’bots followed her as best they could, looking like an angry swarm of bees defending their hive. Sami’s navigational system blipped as it detected an opening in their defense. Sami tucked herself into a ball, then kicked on the foot rockets. Her movement caught the two red fighters flanking the gap by surprise. They fired at each other, causing an explosion of red fire, sparks, and swearing on the comm channel.

  She steered Sami Plus southwest as fast as she could, ducking and weaving in between bolts. The formation of white fighters arrowed after her. If she could get behind the nearest high-atmosphere satellite, it might give her cover to blast upward.

  “You are carrying contraband armaments for the enemy!” a thickly accented voice called from the lead white robot. “Surrender!”

  “I’m not carrying contraband! Read the receipt!” Sami said. She set the document file on repeat send, filling their in-boxes with thousands of copies.

  “Enemy mechs, halt!” Another voice came over the communications channel, this one with a more musical accent. “You have entered our airspace. Surrender all cargo, and you will not be destroyed!”

  “I’m not an enemy!” Sami said. “I’m delivering construction materials to Bassani Industries near the moon!”

  “If you are not an enemy craft, you will not object to being searched,” the voice said. Sami scoffed.

  “In deep space? If I lose any of this stuff, it’ll come out of my paycheck!”

  Another bolt, this one bright orange, lanced past her mech’s head, so close that the light seared Sami’s eyeballs. More blips appeared on her scope. Long-range scans showed them clad in orange plating. The first voice protested their arrival.

  “Stand down, India! She is our prisoner.”

  “Not so! She is one of your spies, trying to invade our airspace.”

  Before she knew it, she was flanked by a team of red ’bots on one side and bright, saffron-orange fighters on the other, with the white ‘bots circling like sharks. Sami felt sweat break cold under her arms and at the back of her neck. All of them started shooting at her. The evasive program did its best to help her avoid the bolts. Sami threw cartwheels, back flips and one downward-facing dog that tented her belly over a blast from an Indian mech that only just missed her. In her ears, the commanders of each wing were still fighting over who she was spying for and demanding she open her hold for searching. Sami tucked herself into a ball again, and came out of it going the opposite direction, like a swimmer hitting the wall at one end of a lap. The pair of squads parted suddenly as she exploded into their midst. Each of them sent a couple of mechs to flank her, trying to head her off, to take her prisoner. The rest of the fighters wrestled with one another.

  Suddenly, one of the red-suited mechs tore the head off an orange one. The body, directionless, hurtled onward in the direction it was flying, its arms waving wildly. Sami felt as if she was in the middle of a street brawl. She had to get out of there.

  The only free direction was down. She did a back flip that turned the
mech on its tail, dropped a thousand klicks, and burned her way downward toward the nearest low-orbit comsat.

  There was nowhere to hide in midair. The hexagonal silver blip that was GojiStar 4 floated just ahead of her. It was only a fraction of her size, but it was vital to telecommunications and computer transmissions for a wide swath of the subcontinent. Everyone who transmitted to anyone for two thousand kilometers in any direction used it. They wouldn’t dare shoot at her if there was any chance of hitting it.

  But she wasn’t there yet. She glanced over her shoulder. The reds and the oranges shoved and fought with one another as they chased her, but they were still closing in.

  “Where are you, Veracruz?” the crew chief’s gruff alto growled in her ear.

  “I’m under attack, Meadows!” Sami said. Only a few hundred klicks to go. If she looped around behind Goji, she could kick in the afterburners and scramble up into open space before the baying packs of mechs behind her could react.

  “Your cargo is crucial, Sami. We need it in a hurry.”

  The broad, blue side of Earth grew larger and brighter, filling her whole field of vision. If it wasn’t for her scopes, she wouldn’t have been able to see GojiStar 4 ahead of her.

  “I’m getting there! Can you call planetary defense? I’m being attacked by both sides over Asia.”

  “Sorry, they won’t get involved for commercial craft. If you can wait for Bassani security to get there, they’ll escort you.”

  “I’ll be floating debris by then!” Sami protested, kicking in every erg of power Sami Plus still had. “I have to get to safe territory!”

  “Surrender your cargo!” the Indian commander said.

  “Don’t you goddamn dare!” Meadows said, outraged. “Get up here!”

  Crackling bursts of both red and orange shot past her. One burst took her in the left shoulder. That arm started to flop wildly at her side.

  Sami set her jaw. She was running into Rule Three, and that one she had no intention of violating. If there was one thing she had learned from her days working for Gilesano’s it was that no cargo was worth dying for. Dozens of times, she had given up her pizza boxes and her credit clicker just to get away alive.