by Brett Patton
Elize and Jie faltered, swimming in amplified emotion. The Merge sputtered like a flame starved of oxygen.
DeMerge, Matt thought.
The six Demons lay, separate once more, under the leaden sky.
* * *
The next day, the adepts stumbled out to the field, more hungover than ever. They looked as if they hadn’t slept in a week: hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, with the dull stare of people who only wanted the nightmare to end.
But when they got in their Demons’ cockpits, not one of them had less than seventy-seven percent Mesh Effectiveness. Matt watched them, fluid and smooth, as they wrestled and fought mock battles, ran endless rounds through the targeting bull’s-eyes, and flashed through the sky like lightning.
Maybe that was all they needed. A challenge.
Or maybe, just maybe, some of his skill had rubbed off on them in the Merge.
When they were done for the day, Dr. Roth made an appearance. He was dressed in a rumpled lab coat, and he blinked at the setting sun as if suspicious of its light.
“You and your team leave tomorrow,” Roth told Matt.
4
UNCHARTED
Most Displacement Drive ships were little more than converted asteroids, but UUS Helios was the jewel of the Union fleet.
Completely encased in meter-thick steel armor and shock-absorbent scaffolding, with giant fusion engines and reaction pits for maneuvering, it was ready to go into battle anywhere, against the heaviest fire. Matt, Michelle, and Soto had ridden the still-incomplete Helios to do battle with Rayder. Now its list of victories were longer than any other Union ship.
Now Matt lay outside on UUS Helios’s smooth steel surface, watching the stars change with every Displacement. But the cold steel beneath him was unsettling. Without the crunch of asteroid rock underneath him, without shards to throw and to watch spin out into infinite space . . . something was missing. He couldn’t even feel the Displacement Drive charging and discharging. When they Displaced, there were only the shifting stars to note their passage.
But the stars were spectacular. They were far beyond the edge of the Union, in a thick part of an arm of the Milky Way. Stars clustered together in brilliant arrays, like precious gems on black velvet. So close they had color—young blue-white stars, middle-of-the-road white-and-yellow suns, bloated orange-and-red giants. It was an amazing view, one he was happy to see directly, rather than piped down to the bridge’s screens.
But it also meant they were far past the edge of the Union. The last time he’d gone this far was out to Jotunheim, the hidden capital planet of the HuMax. Where was this assignment taking them?
Matt didn’t know. He didn’t know much at all, other than that they were shipping out for “a developing situation, with input to be given regarding objectives at key points.”
That wasn’t like his previous missions. There was always a brief. This was empty, all data redacted. Colonel Cruz had stopped answering his questions about the mission. He just stared through Matt, as if looking at something far away.
Echoes of those questions pattered in his mind.
“Are we going up against the Corsairs?” he’d asked.
“It’s possible,” Cruz had said. “Not enough information at present.”
“Is this another HuMax mission?”
A pause. Then a strange sigh. Cruz’s eyes were hard, determined.
In the end, all Matt knew was that they were going far out—maybe farther out than Mecha Base, set in the middle of a protoplanet eight thousand light-years from Earth—and that they expected trouble. A lot of it.
“Isn’t it dangerous to be out here?” a voice grated through Matt’s comms as a space-suited figure came to lean over him. In the dim starlight, he caught the hint of a face. Elize.
“Get down!” Matt said, sweeping her feet. Elize yelped as she fell slowly in the microgravity toward the deck. She whirled her arms, trying to get her balance.
“Let yourself fall,” Matt told her. “Staying near the surface is safest.”
Elize stopped struggling and fell toward the armor plating of UUS Helios.
Smart, Matt thought. She didn’t need a dozen explanations. “The Displacement field is probably ten or twenty meters off the surface, but it’s best not to take chances.”
Elize came to rest beside him. “Then why are you out here?”
Because there weren’t any NO EGRESS AT DISPLACEMENT signs, Matt thought. But he didn’t tell her that. He just pointed up and said, “Look.”
Elize drew in her breath as she saw the stars for the first time. Really saw them. Not on a screen, not through a tiny window. Right there, the grand panorama of the universe.
A Displacement happened just at that moment, and the stars shifted fractionally in the sky.
“Wow,” she said, after a time.
Matt let her watch for a while in silence. Elize was an interesting person. She’d been pestering him the entire time about how he learned to use a Mecha so well, asking for more tips on how to use hers, bugging him about the real ramifications of their Merge, peppering him with ten thousand technical questions about biomechanical tech he couldn’t answer.
“I . . . I can’t analyze this,” she said, after a long time. “I have to just look.”
“Sometimes looking is enough.”
“You say the most profound things.”
Matt laughed. She was clearly interested in him, but he never got any kind of sexual vibe off her. More like a disciple.
Great, he thought.
“Look,” Matt said. “It’s not profound. It’s just, well, hell, I don’t think I’m half as smart as you. You’d give Jahl a run for his money.”
“‘A run for his money’?” Elize sounded confused.
“Old Earth expression.” Something else he’d picked up from Michelle. His Perfect Record turned back to her. That last night. His stupid explosion about Kyle. What if he could turn the clock back and redo that one moment in time? Would he be here, on the UUS Helios, again, heading for a mission on the edge of nowhere?
“Where are we going?” Elize asked, after a time.
“I don’t know,” Matt said.
“You’re mission leader. You should know.”
Matt shook his head.
“I didn’t think the Union extended this far out.”
“It doesn’t. Not even . . .” Matt trailed off.
“Not even what?”
Matt sighed. Why not tell her? She was Mecha Corps, as of today. “Not even Mecha Base.”
He told her about Mecha Base, buried deep in the heart of a forming planetary system, the perfect hiding place for the Union’s most advanced technology. Perfect until Rayder figured out where they were.
Had they moved Mecha Base? Matt wondered. He realized he had no idea. He’d been moving so fast, for so long.
“You really don’t know anything about the mission?” Elize pressed.
“I know that I’m expected to follow orders, and you’re expected to follow my lead.”
Elize didn’t say anything for a while. Matt imagined her frown. She didn’t like to follow orders blindly. Nor did he. He wondered if she would challenge his authority.
“What will it be like?” Elize asked, finally.
Matt shook his head. If it was anything like their time on Jotunheim, battling Rayder and the HuMax . . .
But that was insane. Nothing was like that. Nothing could be like that, ever again. And even Matt could see they weren’t heading to Jotunheim again.
But Elize wasn’t asking about that. She was asking about fighting in the Demons. In space. She’d never done that. She’d never been to Mecha Base. He was taking a totally raw team into a totally unknown place, for a completely unspecified mission.
Matt laughed.
“It seems like we’re always doing the impossible.”
Matt felt a hand grasp his own. Through the thick space suit fabric, it was as cold as the steel beneath him. “You helped me, and I’ll help you,” Elize told him.
“Do the impossible?” Matt asked, turning to look at her.
Elize was already looking at him. In the dim starlight, her dark blue eyes glittered like black diamonds.
“Of course,” she said, as if she did it every day.
* * *
“Don’t think you know me,” Norah said, later that day. Matt looked up from his Insta-Pak rations in the UUS Helios’s mess hall and regarded her. Norah’s brow was drawn down in deep furrows, beneath her close-cropped black hair. Her eyes narrowed in anger.
“Haven’t you told me that before?” Matt asked.
“I just want you to know, after that mind fuck of yours, that Merge or whatever you call it, you still don’t know me. You think you know me, because you were a ref too. Yeah, boo-hoo, that and five units will get you a nice coffee. You don’t know what I had to go through to get to training camp, and don’t think you ever will.”
Matt’s Perfect Record dredged up instants of time that had passed while they were in Merge. Norah gripping an antique gunpowder pistol as a hulking man bent over her, grinning. The blinding report. Tribunal. Thousands of hours of digging time while everyone congratulated her actions. The simple mind equation of weapons equals power, and the most powerful weapon is Mecha.
But those were fleeting glimpses. She was right. It was easy to take that and weave a whole story from it. It would be a lot harder to get to know her.
She knew the story of Matt’s father. He could tell her the rest. But she’d dismiss that. Norah was a core of anger, surrounded by purpose.
“I don’t care,” Matt told her.
“What?” Norah rocked back. She’d expected him to be conciliatory.
“I don’t care if you don’t like me.”
“I never said—”
Matt raised a hand. “I don’t care if you have issues. I don’t really even care what your agenda is. What I care about, Sergeant, is two things.”
Norah glared at him, her slit eyes still furious, her mouth working angrily.
“First, that you’ll do what I say, when I say it, without hesitation.”
Norah squared her shoulders. “Of course. You’re my commanding officer!”
Matt held back a smile. She was reacting exactly the way he figured she would.
“Second, don’t assume you know me. You don’t know me, or enough of me, even though you’re a ref, and even though you’ve had a tough life. You have no idea what I went through after training camp.”
Norah blinked. She hadn’t expected her own words to be thrown back at her. Her expression cycled from rage to hard assessment. Eventually she nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Matt nodded. Norah studied him awhile longer.
“Is there anything else?” Matt asked.
“No, sir,” Norah said, and double-timed away.
Matt sighed. He could have handled that better. But what was he supposed to do? Coddle them?
“She really likes you,” said a familiar voice.
Matt looked up. Jie Teng stood at the edge of Matt’s table, holding a just-opened Insta-Pak. His piercing violet eyes reminded Matt of Mecha Auxiliary sergeant Lena Stoll, whom he’d worked with in Mecha Training Camp and on Mecha Base. She’d been the first open genemod Matt had met. It had been a shock back then.
“You’re not antigenemod, are you?” Jie continued as Matt studied him.
Matt laughed again. How could he be, when he was genemod himself? He still didn’t know the extent of his father’s gifts. But Jie knew that, through Merge.
“Is that a yes or a no?” Jie asked.
“No,” Matt said, motioning for the other man to sit. He seemed so harmless, in a chubby and happy kind of way. It was hard to take Jie seriously, mostly because of the way he looked.
And yet he was the son of a major Geos tech entrepreneur. He’d been genemodded for a reason. What advantage had Jie’s father given him?
“No, you’re not antigenemod or no, you don’t like genemods that much?”
Matt shook his head. “Your parents chose to make you that way. It wasn’t your choice.”
Jie looked down at his Insta-Pak and didn’t answer for a while. When he did, his voice was low. “I wouldn’t change anything,” he said.
“You must have been bullied. Cut out.”
A nod. “And worse.”
“And you’d still choose to be genemod?” Matt pressed.
Another nod. “We can’t move forward, just as we are.”
Matt clenched his fists. That’s what the HuMax had thought. Dangerous thinking that had almost destroyed all of humanity.
“What’s your gift?” Matt asked.
“Longevity,” Xie said.
Matt sucked in his breath. The holy grail of HuMax tech, the stuff people dreamed about—and would pay any amount of money for.
“How long will you live for?” Matt asked.
Xie shook his head. “Nobody knows. Some say the HuMax could do a hundred and fifty, two hundred years. But they were cut short, weren’t they?”
Matt nodded. On the surface, it seemed like such a trivial thing, to live longer than normal. But if it enabled Xie to continue actively learning over decades, or even hundreds of years, that was an amazing advantage. Over the long term, Xie could set himself up very, very nicely.
Over the long term.
“Why’d you join Mecha Corps?” Matt asked.
Xie looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“You might get killed!”
Xie laughed. “Of course!”
“I don’t get it.”
Xie leaned forward conspiratorially. “Major, can you imagine how exciting it is to potentially snuff out a couple hundred years of life?”
Matt shook his head. No. No, he didn’t. He didn’t even know what it meant to look forward to a few decades. Of any kind of life.
* * *
Matt found Marjan and Mikey in the Demon Docks, going through drills. Beneath their hulking Demons, Jahl Khoury watched readouts on a slate.
“Restless?” Jahl asked as Matt walked up. The two Demons were running through simple weapons checks.
“Is it safe to run the Mecha in here?” Matt asked.
Jahl pursed his lips. “We have permission from Colonel Cruz.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Nor did you answer mine.”
Matt bent over the slate and studied the colorful readouts. Marjan’s and Mikey’s Mesh Effectiveness hovered in the high eighties, solid and stable.
“At least they have good control,” Matt said.
“Yeah, they have a synergy that almost rivals yours. Since the Merge, that is. What did you do to them back on Earth?”
“Just Merged,” Matt told Jahl.
Both Demons suddenly turned toward Matt and Jahl, hunkering down in an aggressive stance. Matt’s heart skipped a beat. From this perspective, Demons were things of nightmares.
“He did nothing,” Marjan’s voice grated from the slate. “We do this by our own hands, not this so-called Mecha superman’s.”
“He didn’t do a damn thing except ambush us,” said Mikey.
The Demons took a step forward, their Fusion Handshake ports glowing with deadly blue power. Matt’s guts twisted in fear. Even if Mikey and Marjan’s Mesh was stable, they couldn’t control their emotions in Mesh. They might spool up, out of control.
“May I remind you that you’re addressing your commanding officer?” Jahl barked.
“An officer earns respect. He doesn’t simply command it. Isn’t that so, Major?” Marjan asked, through the comms. His Demon reached out as if to grab Matt.
Colonel Cruz’s voice bellowed over the comms. His PERSONAL/CONFIDENTIAL icon flared on the slate. “That’s enough, Adepts! Stand down!”
“That’s not fair, we’re just having some fun!” Mikey said.
“You’ve now earned the right to sit on the bench for our upcoming exercise,” Cruz told them. “Major Lowell, I recommend you send them in only if you need assistance.”
“But, sir!” Marjan protested.
“Sir, we didn’t mean nothing, sir,” Mikey chimed in.
“Ah, so I’m ‘sir’ now. Your attitude is unbecoming Mecha Corps. I repeat, I am recommending you sit out the upcoming mission.”
“Sir, please!” Marjan cried.
“It is up to Major Lowell to decide on my recommendation, or to determine if you should have any additional disciplinary actions,” Colonel Cruz added. “However, my recommendation will go on record.”
Marjan’s Demon stood and saluted Matt. Both of the giant Mechas looked down at Matt expectantly. Matt licked his lips. Could he safely leave them behind on this mission? He didn’t have enough information, beyond the enigmatic deploy-and-wait-for-more-orders instructions. But he wasn’t going to say that in front of his adepts, or in front of Cruz.
If Cruz recommended it, he must know what to expect, Matt thought. Or at least I hope so.
“Agreed with your recommendation, Colonel,” Matt said. “As long as I can have the assurance they will be ready to back us up if needed.”
“We will hold all Mecha at readiness on final Displacement,” Cruz said. “They will be ready.”
Matt nodded. “Agreed.”
The two Demons stiffened, but no sound came from Peal’s slate. Their Mesh Effectiveness readings wavered, but never fell out of the eighties, as their emotions ran wild.
“Acknowledge your orders, Adepts,” Cruz told them.
“Acknowledged,” Mikey said.
Several beats later, Marjan’s rough voice added his own “Acknowledged.”
* * *
Matt waited in his Demon, deep in the rush of Mesh. Deeper perhaps than he’d ever been before. The imaginary talons of the thing inside the Mecha scratched at the surface of his mind as the smell of dust and the prickle of static came sharply to his senses. At this point, he almost welcomed it. He had it under control.