“Do you have his signal, Jane?”
She was safely high above in the Tar Heel, feeding him paths through the city to avoid getting shot out of the sky. “I do, Cap. Ten klicks north of you. He’s reaching out again.”
“Are you sure it’s not a fake?”
“It’s the Shockwave. The pilot’s transmitting his vitals for confirmation. They match what’s in Rook’s personnel file. I don’t think it’s a spoof.”
He’d come to trust her on tech and comms. If Jane said it was Jackson, it was him.
“But that doesn’t mean he’s not still mind-controlled and trying to draw more rebels out of hiding to shoot at.”
“Maybe.” Holloway suspected the boy was in hell. After all, he’d just been forced to murder bunches of his own people. He liked the boy, and so that filled him with a simmering rage. He slowed the striker and hovered a few meters above an abandoned street. “Put him on.”
“This is Shockwave One calling for Pilling Defense Battery. I am at grid two-six-niner.” It was Jackson all right, and he sounded like death warmed over. Strung out and exhausted. “Requesting heavy fire on my position.”
“Rook, this is Captain Holloway from the Tar Heel. I’m inbound to you so quit asking for artillery to bombard us. They’re busy retreating anyway.”
“Captain? You’re alive?”
“What can I do for you, son?”
“I need this thing out of my mind.” Jackson’s voice was shaky, raspy. “I can’t unlink from the machine. I can’t move my limbs. I tried to fight it, but the voices wouldn’t stop. I’m so sorry. It locked me out of every system I could think of to kill myself or disable the mech with. It won’t even let me crash it or get it stuck. They missed one system though. When medical came online to keep me awake I pumped myself full of thrillers. It shut down before I could overdose though.”
Thrillers. The powerful stimulants would screw with his brain chemistry and make it harder for the wetware implants to function. It was a plausible story. But it was possibly a lie.
“Why not call one of your mech trooper buddies to shoot you?”
“I think they’re all dead…You said your specter was tops. If I shoved the voices to the back of my mind for a minute, I might be able to temporarily power down the Shockwave’s firewalls briefly. She could overheat the reactor, or set off some onboard munitions, or something, anything. I’ve got to stop this.”
Holloway was torn. He had flown down here hoping he could get Jackson out, but this could be a trap. He should just fly away, but damn the Collectivists. They didn’t deserve the satisfaction. He contacted Jane.
“He’s alive, but he’s in hell.”
“I listened in. If he throws the Shockwave’s comms wide open for a few seconds, I can launch a cyberattack and sabotage one of his systems. But it still could be some kind of trick to draw you in.”
The Collectivists had surely ransacked all of Rook’s contacts. What a splendid show it would be to make an example of the man who had provided the Union with upgraded weaponry, including the mech Sergeant Jack had used to stand up to them. His better judgment told him to forget it. People died in war. That’s just how it was. But the boy’s damn voice was pulling at him.
“Honest assessment time, Jane. If I got him out, could you save him?”
“He just killed his own people!”
“No. He didn’t.” It may have been Jackson holding the gun, but he wasn’t the one who had pulled the trigger. “Can you save him?”
“I can try.”
“Try isn’t worth the risk.”
“Okay. I have cleared slaveware before.”
“This hack? You’ve repaired this specific kind of attack?”
“An early variation. On rats. And a beetle once.”
“A beetle?” he asked in disbelief. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t much older than Jackson…and that he was too old for this. “Can you do it or not?”
Jane took a deep breath. “I can do it, Captain.”
Prudence said to leave Rook to his fate. But if Nicholas Holloway had been a prudent man, he wouldn’t have ended up a gun runner.
“That’ll do. The Shockwave has a pilot ejection system. When Jackson gives you an opening, that’s the system I want you to activate. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. Configuring now.”
There were warnings flashing on his screen. Collective drones must have sensed the striker and were moving this way to investigate. He switched back to the Shockwave’s channel. “Alright, Jackson. Give Jane a window and she’ll do the rest. I’m on my way.”
“No. Stay back. I’m too dangerous.”
“Too late. Get to work, kid.” He fired the thrusters and the striker took off like a bullet down the street. The Collective drones were much slower, but they were relentless machines, and once they had a target they’d pursue until he broke atmo.
Holloway was putting a lot of faith in two very young people to come through for him right then. He needed Jackson to fight off the slaveware enough to open a window for Jane, and for Jane to crack the mech’s system before Jackson’s mind control forced him to blast the striker out of the air.
“Captain. Rook made a hole. Virus away.”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t know. The Shockwave’s got good defenses. My program will only work if Jackson lets it.”
Drones behind, killer mech dead ahead. The safest route was up and away…But Jackson Rook didn’t strike him as a quitter. Holloway pressed on.
This part of Pilling had been a recreational area once. There had been streams, lakes, and nature trails. Now it was a blasted wasteland of trenches and bomb craters.
Right in the middle was the Shockwave.
It was a sleek mech. Man shaped, but nearly five meters tall, with integrated weapon systems covering every centimeter of the thing, and when it was driven by someone like Jackson, mind linked directly to the machine, it could move with insane speed and grace. Manufactured by Durendal, the Shockwave was one of the nicer mechs Holloway had ever stolen.
In combat on open ground, bipedal mechs usually lost to lower-slung vehicles like tanks. The less you stuck up, the less likely you were to be seen or shot. Mechs were tall, but they really shone in terrain where other vehicles couldn’t maneuver, like urban ruins or the steep canyons of Gloss. When you had a pilot who could plug in and become one with the machine, a mech turned from a clumsy walker into something absolutely terrifying. It could low crawl to avoid incoming fire or scale skyscrapers and bound from roof to roof. It could stealthily stalk prey and then run it down like an apex predator.
At that moment though, the mech was on one knee. Massive hands clenched into fists in the mud. And somehow, Holloway could tell that Jackson was doing everything in his power to keep that mech anchored there. It was perfectly still, but the pilot inside was fighting a life-or-death battle against the monsters in his head.
And then the mech exploded.
Or at least that was what it looked like at first. Shrapnel flew and smoke spread, but it had only been from the ejection system. The armored pod the pilot rode in was launched out the Shockwave’s back. It flew ten meters before hitting the ground and sliding through the mud.
Now missing the center of its torso, the massive mech toppled face forward and splashed into a stream. That had been smooth. Jane was an artist.
Holloway aimed the striker right for the pod, full burn. He’d left the drones behind, but they’d be catching up soon. He had a very narrow window. When he was almost on top of the pod, he flared the directional thrusters hard, coming to a dead stop directly above where Jackson had landed.
The pod was about the size of a coffin. Thankfully, the design had several external points set at different angles to fast-hook a grapple to for high-speed extraction by combat search and rescue. Luckily one of them was oriented so that he would be able to grab hold without landing.
Except as Holloway carefully maneuvered the striker into place,
he saw people running toward him. They must have been hiding in a ditch. At first, he thought they were Collective soldiers, but then he realized they were waving their arms overhead, trying to get his attention. They were just poor terrified Glossians, desperate to catch a ride before the death squads got here. He checked the scope, and saw the drones were getting uncomfortably close, and would be in gun range in less than a minute.
The grapple attached to the escape pod and the magnets engaged with a clunk that he could feel through the soles of his boots. He gave it a bit of power and the striker hoisted the pod out of the muck. Alarms sounded as the Collective drones scanned his craft.
“Captain, you’ve got bogies incoming,” Jane warned. “You need to dust off now!”
Instead Holloway turned the Striker’s nose in the direction of the civilians and sped toward them. “I’ve got one more thing to do first, Jane.” Wind whistled through the crew compartment as the door slid open. He’d save every one of them he could.
Today might be the day he died, but he’d do it with a clean conscience.
He slewed the striker to a stop, so close to the ground that the directional thruster threw up a mud plume.
“Get in now! Move!” he shouted at the Glossians. “Hurry! Collectives almost here!” They clambered in, and just kept coming, more and more of them, desperate and shaking. The strongest lifted the weak. They filled the seats, filled the cargo area, crammed against him. He moved his seat all the way forward to make more room. They appeared to be women and children mostly, dressed in filthy rags. The striker only had six seats. He had at least twenty people inside by time the drones opened fire.
The refugees outside screamed as bullets ripped through their bodies. The striker shuddered as it took a hit. Holloway could barely hear all the alarms over the sound of children wailing. He lifted off. A Glossian hanging from the landing skid plummeted to his doom. Holloway hit the door override and shouted, “Get your arms and feet out of the way before they get cut off!”
Green tracers flashed past the striker’s nose as he flung it hard to the side. His passengers were all crushed against each other or the hull by the force as he launched the striker down a street. He got some ruins between him and the drones, made some distance, and then pointed the craft upward and went to maximum thrust. The new few minutes would surely be the worst ride of these people’s lives, but it was better than being massacred.
“Shanks,” he muttered when he checked his readouts. Between the bodies and the escape pod, the striker was massively overweight. “Come on, baby. We’ve got this.”
The striker was so packed with humanity he could barely move his arms enough to steer. It stunk of sweat and fear. Some of his passengers were crying, but most of them were just holding on to whatever they could with white knuckle terror as they were squashed with extra Gs. The engine was getting dangerously hot. One of the drones must have hit a line because they were leaking coolant. If the engine blew they would drop like a rock, but hitting the ground in a fireball would be a far more merciful way to go than ending up in Collective hands.
Other dropships were rising around him, cumbersome Union shuttles and cargo haulers, but Holloway watched, horrified, as one exploded, lanced from the sky by Collective fire. A few seconds later, another was obliterated by a projectile that had been too fast to see. The Collective wasn’t supposed to have any railguns, but they did.
Holloway put the striker into an erratic, climbing corkscrew, further tormenting the already damaged engine. “Jane! Do whatever you can to screw with their AA targeting. Scramble everything.”
“Already working on it, sir.”
“Good girl.”
As more ships were swatted out of the air around them, Holloway said a prayer. It wasn’t until a couple of the Glossians closest to him said amen that he realized that he’d been saying it aloud.
The next few minutes were agony, but they made it past the range of the Collective’s guns.
Holloway had ordered the Tar Heel to get as close to the planet as she could without endangering her, so that the smaller ships performing the evacuation could make more trips back and forth in the time allotted. His great big beautiful lady was tantalizingly close, straight ahead, camping at the edge of space.
The escape pod slung beneath the striker had been radio silent. All he could do was hope that a bullet hadn’t punched Jackson’s pod, because that would have been a lot of effort wasted. Holloway looked around to see just how many other transports had made it through but saw none. He scanned back toward the planet, hoping for stragglers. There weren’t any.
He, and those he carried on the striker, were the last to escape Gloss.
* * *
The Tar Heel cargo bay was nearly as chaotic as the port. His overwhelmed crew was herding refugees out of the way as fast as they could. Most of these people had never been in zero G before, so they were flailing and crashing about, endangering each other, while his men were trying to get them tethered for their safety so they could be towed someplace safer.
The striker had been cycled through the Tar Heel lock, guided into place with a cargo hauler, and mag-locked to the wall. As soon as the hauler was safely away, he popped the doors. An absurd number of people spilled out of the little striker, as if it was one of those old-Earth clown cars.
The Glossians—at least those who weren’t panicking or vomiting due to weightlessness—tried to thank him for saving them, but he hadn’t gone down there for them. He’d been trying to save a friend. So he unstrapped from his seat and smoothly floated outside.
Jane was already there, boots locked to the hull, waiting nervously as two of the cargo crew unhooked the escape pod. “I’m so glad you made it,” she said when she saw him.
“Me too, kid.” Then Holloway looked over at all the suffering wretches and realized that once word spread that their beloved Sergeant Jack had betrayed the Union, and that he was here, among them, alive but helpless, somebody was bound to try and murder the boy. He pinged his security chief and requested a few guards be sent to protect the pod, posthaste. “Let’s get him to sick bay.”
“There’s no time,” Jane stated. “I’ve got a reading on his vitals here. The slaveware’s programmed to not let anyone escape. It’s killing him. I’ve got to work on him now.”
“Medbay’s got better—”
“He’s going to crash and die before we get him there.”
The captain took a deep breath. “Do it.”
The cargo hands popped the locks on the pod and moved the hatch out of her way. The mind-controlled mech pilot lay in the open coffin, hooked to all manner of machines, so still and deathly pale that at first Holloway thought he was dead. It was only the weak and erratic readings on Jane’s med display that suggested otherwise.
Jane launched herself from the wall, landed at Jackson’s side, and went to work. A few of her little bots flitted around, helping by placing probes on Jackson’s skull. A 3D holographic image appeared, floating over the probes. “This is bad. Very bad.” Jane turned the image. “He’s dying.”
The moment struck Holloway. Here she was, barely a woman, frantically trying to save the life of someone who was barely a man. War was a hell of a thing.
“This slaveware infection is far worse than I thought. It’s evolved beyond anything I’ve seen before.” She unslung her pack and pulled out her tool kit. “I need to get inside his skull and manually install a block.”
“Here?” Holloway asked, but his incredulity was just wasting her time. “Fine. Do what you’ve got to do.” Every member of the crew that had any medical training was already in the cargo bay helping with the many injured evacuees, so Holloway signaled for one of them to grab their kit and come assist Jane.
She hesitated, seemed genuinely terrified, knowing that the life of someone she’d never even met before was in her hands. “I’ve never done anything like this before, sir.”
“Try your best, Jane. It’s all any of us can do.”
&
nbsp; Chapter 1
Three Years Later
Jackson Rook was a liberator. Others might use the word “thief,” but thief couldn’t begin to describe the good work he did. Like how he was about to liberate a Citadel M750 from its rightful owners to sell for an obscene sum to someone else the law said couldn’t have one.
The Citadel was a top-of-the-line personal strike platform, a mech suit that stood over five meters tall. It was made by Raycor and had been built to operate in the worst environments imaginable and included a modular chassis which allowed various loadouts. Depending on which package you went with, you could suit it up with tools and bots for a scientific exploration, or to construct an outpost, but the model he was after today was intended for all-out war. The battle suite Citadel carried a full platoon of warbots inside its housing, like a mother scorpion carrying her babies to war. But these babies had a teensy bit more bite.
The Citadel was really a lovely piece of engineering. A very expensive—and highly regulated—piece. Jackson had memorized both the official stats from the company sales literature and the actual end user stats from the defense blogs. Either way the Citadel was an impressive beast. And Jackson couldn’t wait to drive her.
The only thing standing in his way was Dwight, one of the morons from the Splendid Ventures corporation.
Jackson adjusted his cap and said, “I’m locking Dwight in my visual now.”
“Got him.” The response came from a ship which was sitting in the orbital queue. Jane was now watching.
Dwight was on a wide sidewalk in the market district of the Sharmala terraformed zone on the planet Nivaas. The market was a lively place with lots of brightly colored awnings and street vendors hawking everything from custom hats, built on the spot, to the weird red beer the settlers here loved.
Dwight was wearing a white shirt that was open at the collar, a shiny blue suit, and alligator-skin cowboy boots. Real alligator, from Earth. He had dark hair that was raked over to one side and a megawatt smile. He was the supremely satisfied hotshot mech pilot for a bunch of real-estate men who had just landed a big money deal for their investors. Dwight purchased a steaming sausage on a stick from a street bot and took a big bite.
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