Iron Legion Battlebox

by David Ryker

  We hit the transport on the near-side, missing the turret by ten meters. The speed of the thing was crazy. We landed and bounced, and then rolled like someone was ripping the ground from under us. Greg did his best to stabilize and I raked the great steel hands of my rig down the slick roof, showering the roadway with sparks as I looked for a grip that just wasn’t there. The speed of the transport flashed up in front of me — three hundred kilometers per hour.

  I dug my toes in and Greg fired the thrusters, finally getting us to a stop. I could hear the cannon fire in the air but couldn’t see it. It’d happened so fast, I didn’t know where the hell I was.

  Greg kept the thrusters burning as I forced myself to a stance, leaning forward to keep balance against the wind rush. The rain splattered the screen in front of me, blurring everything. I couldn’t feel it, but I was squinting instinctively. The droplets were like bullets at that speed, hitting the hull and ringing it like a bell.

  “The turret is behind you,” Greg announced.

  I swore and sank lower, turning. My movements felt heavy and cumbersome — everything fighting against the wind and the rain like moving against a river.

  I couldn’t tell what was making so much noise, the cannon or the weather. Thunder roared as I came around on the gun, picking Alice out at the end of the stream of fire pouring out.

  “How do we stop it?” I asked desperately, sliding toward it, barely in control.

  “The turret is very well armored,” Greg retorted as we ground into the back of it. It was almost a meter high and wider — shaped cylindrically, with a huge barrel protruding from one end. With each chugging shot, it slid back into the turret to deal with the recoil. I could feel the rounds clanging into the chamber as it fired, even through my suit.

  “Just smash the fucking thing!” I balled my hands and lifted them over my head, slamming them into it. They bounced off, and my whole rig shook.

  “The armor is too thick,” Greg said.

  I hit it again. “We have to do something. She’s getting torn apart!” It was true. Every few seconds one of the rounds would catch her and send her spinning before she regained control.

  “The barrel is the weakest component.”

  I sidled around to the other side of the cannon and reached out for it. It was hot and steam was pouring off it. The rain that hit it was vaporizing and leaving a trail. I reached out, closing my hands around it. “Can we bend this thing?”

  “I doubt it. The tensile strength appears to be very high.”

  I tried anyway. “Help me, Greg! Everything we have.”

  “We’re applying maximum force. The arms of the F-Series were not designed for this kind of heavy-duty application.”

  “What else do you suggest?” My voice was strained, and I could feel sweat dripping down my nose inside my helmet. The cabin flashed red all of a sudden as a stream of minigun fire peppered the hull of the transport and ricocheted into the night air. I let go and slid a meter or two, covering the camera dome with my arms. I twisted my arm behind my back and fired off a stream of sticky bombs that seemed to just disappear in the windrush, the transport moving too fast to aim them.

  They exploded in the distance somewhere behind us and one of the Fixed-wings soared overhead and peeled off into the sky to circle back around. They’d caught up and now realized that it wasn’t just Alice — that some dumb shit was actually on top of the transport, too — a sitting duck.

  I growled and clawed my way back to the turret. “Can we aim it?”

  “Adjust its firing path?”

  “Whatever you want to call it!” More minigun fire bathed me in sparks. It pinged off my hull and a diagnostic diagram appeared on the screen, plates flashing red where we’d been hit.

  “That may work.”

  I jumped forward and folded my arm over the barrel, ignoring the climbing heat reading for the hull. I dug my heels in for all the grip they could give me and heaved sideways. The gears in the turret groaned against the force but the barrel moved — minutely, but it did. It was pumping back and forth with each shot and jostling me as it did like I was on an oscillator pad. My teeth felt like castanets in my head.

  The fire started diverting away from Alice and she pulled out of its path and engaged her afterburners, gaining ground on us. I pulled the barrel down and sideways as it tried to follow her, directing the fire toward the group of pursuing Fixed-wings, biding their time, looking for an opportunity to strike.

  The rounds punctured the storm and flew at them before they knew what was going on, and a single shell clipped one of their wings and shattered it. They weren’t armored like our mech. Flames burst from the undercarriage and it careened toward the highway, spinning into a fireball and exploding.

  “Jesus Christ!” I yelled, the cannon fire stopping. Whoever was on the other end of it had no doubt yelled the same thing, realizing they’d gunned down one of their own escorts.

  Alice dipped and swooped down, landing on the transport ahead of me, toward the lead car. I turned, still clinging to the barrel for support, to watch her. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Finishing the mission!” she retorted, scrambling toward a hatch in the roof.

  “The mission’s over! We need to get out of here—”

  “We’ve come this far! We need to get it done—”

  “It’s a bust! My cover’s blown. These planes are going to tear us apart if we don’t—”

  “Then go!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Machine gun fire danced on the hull and I threw my hands up to protect my face, watching as more sections flashed red on the diagnostic. “Why is this so important?”

  She ignored the question and bent double, closing her fist. She struck the hatch once and as she did, all the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

  It happened in slow motion. From the front of the carriage back, the entire surface of the roof electrified. The rain glowed blue just over it as the charge arced off the metal and into the water. My hands released the turret and I kicked back instinctively. Greg hit the thrusters and the transport disappeared from underneath me. Alice wasn’t lucky enough. She had her fists pressed to the metal, she was on her knees. She couldn’t get away in time.

  The charge surged through her rig and all the circuits between the shoulders and across the back of it plumed with smoke and shot sparks into the night air. The bolts lanced through every inch of her rig and it was blasted backward. She turned in the rain, left the transport and fell to the ground with a clang, lying motionless.

  I stared at her as Greg pushed us farther back, watching as she shrank away. The highway rose up and then passed overhead, and she was gone. We hit the street below and rolled backward. I was still staring up at the highway, the transport long gone, the Fixed-wings circling like sharks. Thunder boomed and I stared up into the washing machine sky.

  More sirens blared in the distance as the Telmareen Guard converged on Alice. I swallowed and tried to fight Greg, but he was already moving us away, aiming for an alleyway between two huge apartment blocks.

  “We have to go back!” I yelled.

  “We must escape while we can.”

  “We can’t just leave her!” I pushed my toes down and tried to pump my legs but it was no use. Greg was overriding me. I didn’t even know he could. It was the first time we’d really been at odds and I felt powerless, just along for the ride.

  He turned us around and forced us forward.

  “We cannot take on the Telmareen Guard — we will die.”

  “She’ll die!”

  “That is possible, but you are my pilot, and I must protect you.” Greg’s voice was stern and unrelenting and echoed in my head as we wound through the tight streets of Telmareen, the sound of sirens slowly fading behind us as we made up ground.

  Greg had put on some music to try and satiate me, but all I could hear was thunder in my head, and all I could see was lightning coming off the hull and surging into Alice’s
rig. I remembered what Greg had said about the electricity dampeners our rigs were fitted with — about how they should protect us. But watching Alice’s circuitry blow out like that… I wondered how much of it was just to reassure me, and how much was true. I wondered what would happen to her — whether they’d arrest her, or kill her, or whether they’d just pull her burnt corpse out of the wreckage of her rig and dispose of it.

  I closed my eyes, feeling my breath hollow in my chest, the distant feeling of Greg’s churning legs beating beneath me, carrying me into the night.

  17

  Volchec looked grave. She was leaning over, hands pressed flat on a ragged old workbench.

  Outside, the storm still raged. The building creaked and the single bulb hanging off one of the rafters on a thin wire swung gently.

  Her features were carved in shadow, her eyes closed, jaw set, nostrils flaring gently as she thought.

  I was sitting on top of a wire spool, legs dangling, picking at a tag of loose skin next to my thumbnail. It was hurting, but that was okay. I didn’t stop.

  Fish was in the corner, leaning against the door next to the wall. Mac was sitting opposite Volchec, elbows on the table, head in his hands.

  Everett was next to the window. It’d been painted over with dark gray paint, but a small section had been scratched away at eye level, and she peered out, hands in pockets. The rain in the warmer parts of the city had long changed to snow this far into the night-side, and snow battered the old warehouse we’d taken refuge in.

  On the other side of the room, shrouded in darkness, I could see three shapes. Our rigs. The Tilt-wing was a little ways away. Volchec and Everett had set it down in a gully and made the trip over. They’d identified this building as one that the Federation Taxation Company, or the FTC, if you were into that sort of thing, had repossessed, and had pulled some strings to get the access codes. A phone call was all it took, and here we were.

  I watched her closely, not saying anything. They’d been here when we arrived, in the same positions. Greg and I got there just after, and Mac and Fish came in last. Fish’s rig had taken some damage, but it was nothing compared to the elephant in the room.

  “Fuck,” Volchec said quietly. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  Everett looked over her shoulder and caught my eye. She pressed her lips into a tight line, pushed a couple strands of loose blond hair off her face, and then turned back to the window. Whatever way we spun it, it wasn’t looking good.

  The mission had been a total fuck-up from start to finish. Lost for any other leads, we’d gone ahead, ill-prepared with an even worse-thought-out plan. Whether it was cockiness or just stupidity, we all looked back on what had just happened with no idea how any of us thought it would ever work.

  There’d been no contact from Kera and the other mercs. They’d given us a rendezvous point to drop the Iskcara off, but they’d have been watching, or at least would have heard. Four mechs attacking an Iskcara shipment in the city — it was big news. And four mech meant that the one who was supposed to be dead wasn’t actually dead.

  I rubbed my chest gently and went back to picking my nail.

  And if the fourth, me, wasn’t dead, that meant that we’d lied to them. And if we did that, it probably meant our intentions weren’t truthful, and neither was our story. But none of it mattered now, anyway, because we had no Iskcara, and there was no way anyone was going within a hundred clicks of that RV point.

  I guess the way we all figured it was that Telmareen was losing Iskcara anyway — and it was losing it to God-knows-who. So, with us stealing just a little more, it meant we could prevent a lot more from being taken in the long run. In actuality, all that we’d accomplished was killing two Telmareen guards and blowing up a Federation-owned Telmareen Guard Fixed-wing. Oh, and losing Alice, of course and we still didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Volchec had gotten access to the Guard database and she was watching both the arrests and the morgue arrivals. She hadn’t been scanned in to either, yet.

  Volchec shook her head. “Goddammit, Kepler,” she mumbled. “MacAlister—”

  “Yeah?” Mac grunted, not taking his head out of his hands.

  “She seem okay to you before you went in?”

  Mac shrugged and put his hands down. “No different from usual — focused, sharp, determined — a little pissed-off, but when isn’t she?”

  Volchec sucked her cheek. “Goddammit.”

  She was kicking herself — I could see that much. But it was weird. As soon as everything had gone to shit, we got out of there. Volchec and Everett got down as quickly as they could, found the warehouse, gave us the location and told us to get our asses over there pronto.

  But that wasn’t the weird thing — the weird thing was that Alice had disobeyed a direct order, which was that if Mac’s initial barrage of fire didn’t bring the transport down, and if it got out of the pines and into the central band of the city, that they were to fall back immediately and get out of there.

  And if the Telmareen Guard were scrambled, that they were to split up, ditch their steel somewhere quiet, and head to a prearranged location a few clicks from where it’d all gone down. Then, they’d let things cool off, and we’d go from there. But none of those things had happened.

  Mac had failed, Fish had been shot off the hull, and when the transport had gone into overdrive and gotten right into the middle of the city, Alice hadn’t backed off. She was supposed to, but she hadn’t. There wasn’t any gray about it — she had an order to fall back, and she disregarded it completely, and did the same with Mac’s transmissions, cutting him off when he told her to get out of there.

  Everett was heading over, walking toward me. No one took any notice. She stopped a few feet away, close enough so she didn’t have to speak above a whisper. “How you doing?”

  I nodded as well as I could. “Fine.” I wasn’t sure if she bought it.

  She smiled abjectly. “Told you it pays to be alone.” She shrugged to make a point of it and I felt my throat constrict. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, though I didn’t know if she really was that heartless and cynical, or just trying to prove a point.

  “Sure,” I said instead.

  Her smile softened a little bit and she put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “There’s nothing you can do. Volchec’s got feelers out. When Alice shows up — dead, or alive — and either is possible — we’ll know about it. Until then, sitting here isn’t going to get anything done.”

  “What do you suggest?” I mumbled, staring at the three faces of the others, all empty and in shock. Mac’s sure-footed confidence was gone. Volchec was still grappling with herself. Fish… I couldn’t figure him out without asking and I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Before you called in with the lead on those mercs, Mac and Fish were heading away from that rented garage. Seemed that Barva was making headway with his investigation before he disappeared. The garage was empty — or as good as. It was a desk, a lamp, some papers — shipping manifests, that kind of thing. Nothing that amounted to anything, but he was sharp, he knew what he was messing with,” Everett said, her voice even. She was the only one staying on-mission. “Whoever was skimming off the Federation knew how serious it was, and they were well connected. Mac and Fish found some bits — string, couple pins, a trash-can with some empty markers. The back wall had a big notice board on it — but it was totally blank. Thing is, it was full of pinholes. So what we figure is that it’s where Barva was putting all the information he amassed together, doing it the old-fashioned way. Nothing electronic — no way to trace it… Unless someone knows where your secret hideout is.” She said it casually and held up her hands. I had to admire her stoicism. Either she really didn’t give a shit, or she was holding it all together better than any of us were.

  “So?” was all I could muster.

  “So… we get back on track with our investigation. Whoever got Barva, because he was getting close to exposing them, or because he took one risk too many — w
hatever happened — they found his hideout and cleaned it out. Took everything. Destroyed it or took it back to whoever they were working for.”

  “Okay. What are you saying?”

  “What I’m saying,” she said, enunciating so there was no way I couldn’t get exactly what she was saying — I didn’t know if she thought I was in shock or something, but I tried to ignore how patronizing I thought it was. “Is that Barva was a paranoid sonofabitch and that even in his secret hideout he had secrets. And that whoever tortured him to get that information out of him was satisfied with what they found at the garage — enough so that they didn’t press for anything more.”

  “Torture?” I raised an eyebrow. “Where are you getting torture from?”

  She smirked. “Come on, Red — a Federation spy, trained for this sort of stuff — you really think he’d just give up his whole operation? If he wasn’t tortured, and they just asked him some questions, then we’d have had our report, all his findings, and we’d not even be here. The reason we are is because he went missing. The reason his garage is empty is because someone cleaned it out. The reason that they cleaned it out is because they knew where it was, and what was in it. And the reason they knew that is because they strapped him to a chair and—”

  I raised a hand and cut her off. “I get it.” I breathed deeply and rubbed my eyes. “You said something about a secret in his secret hideout?” I shook my head. It was spinning. It’d been a long day and I felt like it was about to get longer.

  “Scratched into the underside of the desk was a code — eight digits.”

  I groaned. This was feeling more like a test and less like an explanation with every second. “So?”

  “When Mac and Fish got there, they searched the whole thing. Drawers in the desk, pulled it out from the wall — anything. They even turned it over, just to see if anything was hidden under it. And there was, just not in the way they thought.”

  “So what are they? A secret code? Coordinates?” I was shaking my head now, my concentration levels about as low as they could be without just falling off the spool and banging my forehead against the ground repeatedly.