MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Through the dust and smoke, he spotted Lieutenant Edwards and Philips. The dull steel of their armor was undamaged but covered in mud as they marched toward his flanks sweeping the field of enemy strong points.

  Clive’s rig lay face down behind them, near a smoking crater. The steel legs had been blown off and the rear chassis was crushed like a tin of biscuits struck with a hammer. Clive was done for. The shock left Cameron stunned until staccato machinegun fire raked across his forward armor. He split his focus on what lay ahead with trying to see what had happened to the fifth member of their squad, Lieutenant Rawlinson. He finally spotted the wreckage covered in reddish Punjab dirt. Geysers of steam escaped from the seams in the frame. If his friend had not died in the initial explosions, the ruptured boiler housing fused like a backpack onto the Juggernaut had surely burned him alive.

  Cameron slammed his fists against the instrument board as the pain of losing Clive and Rawlinson made his eyes blur and his chest ache. He wiped his face and searched for the location of the heavy artillery thought to have been knocked out the previous day. If he could find the enemy guns he would fire on them with everything he had. Another thunderous bombardment informed him the Sikh cannons were hidden far to the rear of the enemy lines in the jungle beside Gujrat.

  Cameron quickly signaled with his Juggernaut’s arms for Edwards and Phillips to take cover in the shell craters. He steered into a pool of rainwater and blood at the bottom of large crater. He bent low, hoping his friends would do the same. Explosions rocked the battlefield and guilt filled his soul. His friends would have been alive if he had not boldly volunteered them during the General’s war council.

  “Gentlemen,” General Gough had said, “we shall attack again after another artillery barrage.” His aristocratic Irish accent colored every word.

  Want to read more of this bonus story by Paul Genesse? Go to the MECH page at ragnarokpub.com, click on the link to “Bonus Stories,” and download your copy using the code MECHBONUS.

  A Sequel to “Of the Earth, of the Sky, of the Sea” in Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters and “Of the Fire” in Mech: Age of Steel

  November 14th, 1882

  Occupied Liverpool, England

  The 12th Year of German Occupation

  I took but little pleasure in killing the Kaiser’s men. It was just kicking at vultures after the battle had long since been lost. Still, every Hun I sent screaming into the afterlife was one fewer obstacle between me and the vengeance I’d sworn.

  Japan would fall.

  Their monstrous gods would fail them. They would pay for killing my parents. For destroying London and Amsterdam, they would come to know pain such as they had never imagined. They had brought twilight upon the British Empire and, for that, I would bring the long night down upon their rising sun. I’d spent almost twenty years with that vow on my lips.

  I needed only to fight my way to the dockside, through the ghetto walls and concertina wire. Only that, to overcome hundreds of hardened German infantry, heavy machine gun emplacements, and however many Type IV Benz-Bavaria Juggernauts they could bring to bear against me. There were a hundred easier ways out of the city, but it wasn’t enough for me to slip away. No, my exit would have to shake the pillars of the earth.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  By the time the night was over, everyone would know what my warmachines were capable of. The whole strength of the Kaiser’s detachment in Liverpool would fall before me, one woman in an untested prototype. I would have no trouble finding a patron after that. Every war-hungry army, every oppressed multitude, would want Vivian Meadors as their designer.

  The resistance would hate me for what I did, but it didn’t matter now. I had lost patience with them, with their cowardice, with their inability to affect real change after years of oppression under the combined banners of the Kaiser and the Tsar. Tonight was the night. The Kaiser’s navy was away on maneuvers, bristling against Iceland, the only remaining freehold east of The Americas. Their garrison was depleted, ripe for attack. It was only a matter of time before the resistance found out how much of their resources I’d funneled into my own project over the years.

  I’d certainly made better use of it than they could. Unlike them, I saw the clear line of progress. The old world was dying, trampled underfoot by the implacable power of fire and metal. The new paradigm, powered by gears and pistons, arose from the wreckage. The true magic lived inside machines now. The power lived inside me, passed down from my parents.

  The witch and the warrior.

  My power was the one thing the Japanese couldn’t take away. With England beneath the German boot heel, I had been no threat to them. That would change. Tonight, I would fight my way free of the homeland that Japan’s fearsome gods had ruined. The way forward would at last be open. One day, there would be time to fight the Kaiser and his empire, but my business was in the east, and I had no illusions there would be a road back.

  I closed my fists within the driving crucible of my Steel Goliath. The fuel stacks charged as I pumped the levers. With the throttles pinned, I engaged the spinner coils. A high, shrill whine pierced the dark, soon to be erased as the alcohol-burning engines flared. Even with my ear canals packed with felt, the terrible noise of spinning camshafts and gnashing gears was akin to the damnation of an evil spirit. I tilted my head forward, engaging the twelve-phase hydraulic drive. The metallic clatter grew even louder. The Goliath burst through the side of the abandoned brewery building, the whole structure caving in behind it. Breaching the wall held no more resistance than a cobweb before a charging bull.

  I reached out into the machine and felt with its armored skin, saw with its crystal eyes. The night sky turned from black to bruised purple above me as the flames bellowed out the Goliath’s exhaust stacks. Hydraulic pressure reached optimal levels, every ram, pushrod, and pivot alive, known to me as present and controlled as my own flesh. The Juggernaut models had never been capable of anything more than a lumbering march. The Goliath could run, and run I did, each giant step leaving powdered cobblestones as markers of my passing.

  It was after curfew. All the natives of Liverpool had long since scuttled into what remained of their homes. The German troops in the square had only a moment to look at the gleaming alloy steel of my creation and cower before I engaged the shoulder cannons, launching fragmentary bombs into their midst.

  Want to read more of this bonus story by Patrick Tracy? Go to the MECH page at ragnarokpub.com, click on the link to “Bonus Stories,” and download your copy using the code MECHBONUS.

  For the record, I don’t care how many training drills the government’s Colossi program puts you through,” I said, the words echoing within the domed crustacean head of my Lobster biometric exosuit. “Whether you’re falling through the air or deep diving like this, your stomach still drops out on you.”

  The Lobster’s metal-halide lights shot into the aquatic blackness of the vast oceanic fissure, its rays barely able to penetrate the darkness to reveal the ever-narrowing walls rushing by.

  “This is the exact same training program you failed out of, yes, Finn?” The female voice chopped through the static of the interior speakers, its tone as cold as the water outside the Lobster itself. No amount of tinkering with her programming had proven effective in killing the machinelike hollowness, but my mind had no problem filling in the missing sarcasm in her question.

  “Roger that,” I said, trying not to feel too much shame in it. I failed. “Drink is the curse of the Colossi class. Stronger willed men than I have shit the program, and in far worse ways. Government says you can’t belly up with the big boys unless you can pilot clean.”

  “Do I detect optimism in your voice?” Julia Two prompted, her algorithms working their magic as they computed a million variables per second in my tone and cadence.

  Illustration by ROBERT ELROD

  “Heh,” I said. “I suppose you do.”

  “That does not compute.”

  �
�There are worse things than scrubbing out of program,” I said, adjusting jets of air to push away from the fissure wall. “The drinking was a cure for those worse things, not the symptom.”

  “Explain.”

  “Booze dulled this throbbing at my temples,” I said. “Kept it from becoming something more, stopped it from drilling into my brain. It held the dreams back. Well, nightmares really. Hard not to have them after the creatures came. Especially the crazy shit my brain comes up with.”

  I held the claws of the Lobster up, not at all surprised to see them shaking in time with my own unsteady rhythm. I wanted to blame the pressure or depth, but with the HUD showing all systems nominal on the Lobster, I was S-O-L on that front.

  “Shit,” I said. “You didn’t log that, did you, Julia Two? We’re not up and recording yet, are we?”

  “We are indeed, Finn.”

  I sighed, and triggered the suit’s bio-feed unit with a bolus of pure Kentucky white lighting. Hopefully that would calm my nerves. For now, I kicked in the air jets to course correct away from the jags and crags of my rocky descent into the fissure.

  “Great,” I muttered. “Wouldn’t want to die down here without recording it for posterity’s sake.”

  “I can assure you that if you die, it will be well documented,” she said, as calm and nonchalant as I had tweaked her to be.

  Nervous laughter escaped my lips. “Good to know, Jules.”

  The built-in speakers of the Lobster whispered with the tell-tale sound of Julia Two’s computations several leagues above in the monohull crane ship.

  “Jules…?” she asked.

  “Short for Julia,” I said. “Sorry. I forget the more idiomatic limits of your language processing. Do yourself a favor and run a script to accept Jules as a known moniker.”

  “Noted,” she said, then after another pause. “Further query.”

  “Hit me, Jules.” A school of luminescent fish danced past, their light reflecting the dome of the exosuit.

  “Regarding my actual moniker,” she said. “Julia Two. There is an implication in that naming that there was at one time a Julia One, yes?”

  “You are correct.”

  “May I inquire what happened to my predecessor?”

  “You may,” I said, enjoying the silent semantics that followed her question and my answer.

  Computation whirred in my ear for a moment as she parsed our exchange.

  “Very well,” she said. “What did happen to my predecessor?”

  The fish passed, their light fading, and I turned my attention to avoiding scrapes along the fissure wall. While taunting a machinelike Julia Two wasn’t as much fun as ribbing an actual person, it was nonetheless welcome humor to distract from my precarious position at such a dangerous depth.

  “Salvage is a tricky business,” I said. “Especially when you’re talking deep sea recovery. The government pays well for it, though. The more dangerous the conditions, the better the pay grade. Especially if I can recover a multi-million credit Colossi with minimum damage to it.”

  “Can they not retrieve it themselves?” she asked.

  My laughter echoed within the dome. “You think the government is going to foot salvaging costs for a Colossi this deep?” I asked. “Have you seen what they pay for just part for the modern ones, for something as simple as heat sink filtration cartridges? Trust me: The Federation of States is happy to take on freelance salvagers. If they were to dive for something like the Dakkar, the recovery by governmental billing standards would run more than the old Colossi tech they’d dredge to the surface anyway.” I killed the thrusters and went back into freefall, like a slow-motion dream of skydiving into the darkness below. “As to your predecessor, Julia One—or simply Julia as I called her—she was lost on land when my last salvage vessel went tits up in the Rockies. Lost ole Jules and, on top of that, completely scrapped the Colossi I was trying to salvage.”

  “So, when she ceased to function, you replaced her with me,” she said.

  “You almost sound sad,” I said. “That is, if you could sound sad.”

  “As you say, I am not capable of sadness or other emotions,” she replied, “although I am programmed to simulate them during assessed times of need. I am noting Julia One’s loss in my records.”

  “I suppose I noted her loss in my own personal database too,” I said. My stomach tightened at the memory of that day, and I quickly turned my attention back to the depths of my descent. “Make sure you have enough memory left over to record my demise as well.”

  The soft whirr of her computation filled my ears again. “You are not optimistic about today’s objective, Finn?”

  “Let’s just say optimism doesn’t come with the treacherous terrain of salvage.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Julia One wasn’t the first casualty of my endeavors,” I said. “And it’s probably best you don’t ask me about Jennifers One through Eight.”

  “Yet you persist even now,” she said. “Despite the limitations of a Lobster class Mark XVIII-9J diving exoskeleton at these depths?”

  “Just Lobster is fine, Jules,” I said, the old Kentucky finally kicking in, relaxing me. “And yes, despite the risk, there are some things you just have to do.”

  “But why?”

  “This is a special occasion, Jules,” I said. “Special to me, anyway. You’re a smart machine. You should have enough information to figure it out. Service records of the Dakkar before she was lost should give you enough.”

  “The Dakkar,” Julia Two said. “One of the first generation of Colossi class mechs. Designed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Deployed from Norfolk Colossi Yard in 2242. Runs on an atomic core. First captain—Donald Reick—died onboard due to faulty radiation shielding. The Dakkar’s replacement captain Stewart Lawlor, known affectionately to his fellow pilots as “Stew” was lost in combat at sea.”

  Julia Two’s computational whisper sounded in my ear.

  “Lawlor,” she repeated. “This is your father’s Colossi, is it not, Finn Lawlor?”

  “I hope it is, anyway,” I said, checking my HUD, thankful to see everything was still all systems go. I noted several pressure monitoring gauges moving dangerously close to redline territory.

  “Factoring this into your psychological profile,” Julia Two said. “Is it possible that your failure to complete the pilot’s training program stemmed from issues with your father and his loss at sea?”

  I hated these latest-and-greatest-newer-personality system features that were constantly evaluating your fitness. I made a mental note to take it down a notch or two in Julia Two’s programming after this salvage run.

  “A lot of people fail out of the program,” I said. “Can’t take the pressure. But when I scrubbed out, it was more than that. I was expected to do well, being the son of a legendary Colossi pilot, after all. We’re talking a hero, one of the first wave decades ago. And as you said, he was sadly lost at sea, along with the Dakkar. Dreams of him and his demise have haunted me all my life. Him valiantly fighting the awakened monstrosities that rose from the ocean. My dreams have always been riddled by these tentacled aquatic horrors. When I joined the program… I don’t know, I thought if I became a Colossi pilot myself I’d somehow be able to honor his memory. Instead, my haunted dreams became a madness, a sickness I couldn’t shake. Drinking helped dull the dreams and they constant headaches they brought on, but that didn’t exactly endear me to the piloting program, you know? So, yeah…I’m a salvager instead.”

  Dammit if these newer models of Julia Two’s generation didn’t get you to spill your guts. While I was reticent to let a machine play therapist, I had to admit talking things out was a distraction that had me feeling better. Of course, that also might have been the Old Kentucky talking.

  Klaxon alarms sounded throughout the dome of the Lobster exosuit, the depth counter rolling on and on to a higher number.

  “You are compromising the Lobster, Finn. If you persist on go any deeper, the
suit will fail. I am afraid I cannot allow you to endanger yourself in such a manner. Access Lobster exoskeleton override. Please stand by.”

  “No, don’t, it’s down here,” I said, ignoring her along with the red light that now flooded more and more of the dive suit’s cranial shell. “Just a little deeper.”

  “The Lobster is only rated for four thousand two hundred feet,” she said. “You have now exceeded five thousand feet and counting. Any deeper and you risk being crushed to death within it. Please, Finn, stop fucking around and let me take control.”

  I flinched in my suit, then straightened. “Profanity, Jules? Why, I had no idea you were wired for such vulgarity!”

  “As I mentioned, to better improve and work off human friendly and social language cues, I have been programmed in times of imminent destruction to engage one of our model’s latest features from our Colorful Communications catalog.”

  “I’ll have to thank the manufacturer for that,” I said, and bumped the exterior lights thirty percent to counter the crimson warnings reflecting inside the Lobster’s dome. “If I survive, that is. As far as being crushed, I am already well aware of the operational parameters of the Crustacea Class mini-mechs, Jules.”

  “Then pull up to a reasonable pressure, please,” she said. “We do not need to add another Lawlor and a Lobster to the lost at sea casualty list next to the Dakkar. Please pull up.”

  “Afraid I can’t do that, Jules,” I said. “You see, you’re operating on a false assumption. Can’t blame you, being a machine and all, but you are.”

  “Am I?” she asked. “Perhaps you can tell me about it when you return to the surface and I get that that exosuit off of you?”

  “Like I said, can’t do that.” Jagged formations rose up all around as I drifted deeper, walls of sharp stone threatening as I maneuvered with decaying response on jetted bursts of air. “You’re assuming I give a shit about the Lobster, that this recon is meant so we can lower cables and ‘poons to grapple the salvage.”