by David Ryker
The klaxon sounded and another name flashed in the air and was struck off. The light cast from it danced on her hull. My brain faltered and seized as I looked at her, unable to comprehend that it was her I was looking at. And then she moved, drawing her other pistol. She leveled them at me before I had a chance to move and put bullets into the remaining sensors on my front before I could yell, “Wait!”
She cut her thrusters as I dropped to a knee and made an effort to shield the one on my arm with my other hand. The ground shook as she landed and I staggered, her huge Alpha series cutting through the remaining smoke like an icebreaker.
Greg willed me to stand up and move backward, but I couldn’t. He tried to make me lift the rifle but it wouldn’t come up. My brain was stuttering. She lifted the revolver, close enough to see the blackness in the barrel, and held it at me. She squeezed the trigger mercilessly, and the sensor popped under my fingers, smoke pouring between them.
Greg forced me up now. I was yelling, but she couldn’t hear me. “Alice, it’s me! Stop!”
“James,” Greg urged me, keeping me facing her, my back protected. “We must retaliate, or we will lose.”
But I wasn’t listening. I pulled my hand out of the glove and flicked the switch on my console, enabling the external speakers. She would hear me. I took a breath and swallowed hard. “Alice!”
She froze.
“Alice, it’s me,” I called, fighting Greg to keep my rifle down. “It’s Red. It’s James.”
She didn’t move, but didn’t let her pistol down either.
I let myself smile, a flood of warmth pooling in my guts. I breathed a sigh of relief. She stepped closer, pistol dropping an inch at a time, but she said nothing. She wasn’t going to shoot. But, when she was almost close enough to touch, I let my hands relax, and before I could stop it, Greg rotated the rifle, aimed the muzzle at her midriff, and the trigger clacked against the stock before I could do anything about it. One of the sensors exploded on her abdomen, and in a whirl of steel, she ripped it from my grasp, and her closed fist rang on my hull like a gong. We left the ground, the force of the punch pushing us into the air, and then I felt us turn as she gripped my shoulders and pulled. The street disappeared and I was suddenly facing the wall. My view went skyward as she jammed the nose of the pistol against my back and fired. I felt the bangs of the sensors in quick succession and the shunt of the explosives. The breath left my body as my brain counted them off. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. She hit them ruthlessly, precisely, like a surgeon, and then kicked me into the dirt. I was on my hands and knees, staring at the ground when the glare of her thrusters flooded my screen.
And then she was gone.
And then the klaxon sounded, and I looked up, and saw another name hanging in the sky.
James Maddox.
And then, it was struck off.
7
The commentator was chattering again.
“... and in another stunning move she wipes out a second competitor in as many minutes. It’s the old Athena-one-two! She never disappoints. Our newest fighter is out on his very first match! But, what did he expect throwing in against the queen? I hope his rig insurance covers stupidity!”
The crowd roared with laughter and I ground my teeth hard enough to flatten them. The camera droid flying at my shoulder swung round in front of me as I lifted myself up. A projector underneath the lens floated a message in front of my eyes that said ‘Please follow this droid to the nearest exit. Thank you for playing!’
Greg was in total silence and I felt cumbersome and unsteady as I trudged after it, the light blinking so I didn’t lose track of it in the darkness. He wasn’t helping me out with the usual stabilization. It was almost like he wasn’t there at all anymore. I felt sick. Utterly sick. He’d been the one who’d fired on Alice. Not me. He’d caused this. It was his fault
A roller shutter chugged upward and accepted us back into the staging area. There were rows of vehicles all lined up ready for the next bout, but I watched them go by in a haze as we followed the drone back to our own bay. Nak was sitting on the box, legs swinging. She grinned as we approached, her nasally voice cutting through the din of engines and the sounds of power tools bouncing around the huge garage. “You win?”
I ignored her. More cheers and klaxons were bleeding through the shutters, but I couldn’t hear anything except my own voice telling me how stupid I’d been. I’d rushed headlong into another situation and this time it’d only gone and lost me the only thing that had ever been important to me. We stepped onto the ramp and turned, almost falling over as Greg did nothing to stabilize us. I sighed and waited for him to pop the hatch. He didn’t. With another one, I reached up and did it myself. He was still giving me the silent treatment.
I threw off my harness and powered down his engines, climbing out. My boots hit the floor and I tore off my helmet, smacking it against my leg in frustration. Anger welled up in me and I spun around before I could quell it. “This was you!” I hissed, pointing at him. “We were doing fine until you took a potshot at her.”
He was like a tombstone.
“But you just had to do it, didn’t you?” I scoffed and shook my head. “You know, the other guys’ rigs actually listen to them!” My voice was rising, and I couldn’t help it.
His voice came across very quiet and restrained, but with enough coldness to chill me to the core. “Your arrogance is what cost you the competition, and by extension of that, me. Most prizes are dismantled for scrap, their AI cores destroyed. You have killed me, James, and that is something that you will have to live with.”
My mouth opened to retort, but all that flooded out of it was my anger instead. It poured onto the ground like bile and ripped out my insides with it. I felt wobbly all of a sudden, and before I knew what was happening, I was on the floor, my helmet skidding across the concrete. My eyes rolled in my head and a wave of nausea struck me.
Tiny hands were at my collar as Nak rushed over, holding me up with fingers that felt like suction cups. She used one hand to fan my face and the other three to steady me.
“We are not programmed with complex emotional capabilities, James,” Greg went on, driving the stake deeper into my heart, “but I am disappointed that you did not think enough of me to read the rules before entering. In what I did, I was trying to preserve our current situation. And even if we had survived to the final two, we would have had to have attempted to beat Pilot Kepler regardless. I was making the most of a tactical advantage while it was available. She was aware of the same. Had you been cooperative, and willing to listen to reason, we might have beaten her. But you ignored my guidance and made the decision for us, and it has resulted in this outcome, and now, it is likely that we will not see each other again.”
I reached to my face and felt my cheek was wet. I stared at the droplets of water on my fingers and realized that I was crying.
Nak’s little fingers cradled my head, a soothing noise emanating from her throat. Her yellow eyes, like a frog’s, twitched and measured my face, streaks of confusion coloring them. I was getting bent out of shape over a Mech — no one got that. No one understood. To everyone else, the AI were just things, no less metal than the armor surrounding them. But they weren’t. The Federation might churn them out on a production line, but that didn’t make them any less human. I knew that. I knew that life, that genesis.
I knew what it was like to be a thing and made to do a thing, to be all what and no who. Greg was more than that. If I was a person, then so was he. It wasn’t the blood in my clenched fists or grinding teeth that made me human, and the wires in his brain weren’t what made him not. And I’d killed him.
I looked up, bleary-eyed and tried to form words. The only one that came out was “sorry,” but Greg met it with silence. He didn’t say another word for half an hour, and after that, they came for him.
Nak was just peeling off the last of the sensors when two guys trundled along with a trolley and a flatbed. One was a basic worker droid o
n treads, and the other was a human with a scruffy beard dressed in overalls. He sucked on his teeth, pushing curly hair out of his eyes, and reached for a pad on the side of the trolley. He lifted it up and looked from my red cheeks to Greg and then back, taking a quick glance at the puddle of sick I’d managed to wretch out between my feet. He grimaced and then sighed.
“You… Er… James Maddox?” he said in a gruff voice.
I nodded absently.
“And this the forfeit?” He waved the pad at Greg.
Fire sputtered inside me. “Greg.”
“What’s that?” the guy asked, not catching it.
“Greg. His name is Greg, and he’s not a forfeit,” I growled.
“You staked him in the arena — he’s a forfeit. You played, you lost, kid.” He shrugged indifferently. “It happens.”
“This isn’t fair.”
He smirked. “Whatever. Don’t be bitter about it. You knew what you were getting yourself into. If you were so afraid of losing him you should have taken out a rental — then all you’d be losing is a fat stack of credits. But you greenhorns never learn. You come in here, put your steel on the line, kick the bucket and then cry about it. If you weren’t ready to play the game then you should have stayed home with mommy.” He put the pad back on the trolley and made a cyclical motion with his finger at the droid.
It sped over to the bay and dropped a heavy duty hook affixed to a huge strap in front of Greg’s feet before zooming around him and dropping another hook next to the first so he was encircled by it. The guy with the beard went over to the bed’s control panel and activated a huge robotic arm that swung out and reached out over the hooks. It dropped a cable as thick as my arm and the droid connected them all up.
The guy pushed the button and held it and a winch started taking in the slack until the strap tightened around Greg’s heels and started riding upwards. It looped under his arms and got caught and then juddered to a halt as it started to take his weight. The guy flipped another switch and legs protruded out of the bed for support, and then he went back to the button. Greg tilted a little, scraped forward on his toes, and then swung into the air like a doll. The winch whined, but the guy didn’t let up. He knew what he was doing. He’d done it a hundred times before.
Greg swung in the air for a second before the arm pulled him around. His calves clanged on the corner of the bed and I had to stop myself from yelling out, “Careful!” It was already done, I didn’t need to make a scene. I watched abjectly instead, dying to turn away, but forcing myself to keep watching.
The guy unwound the winch and lowered him down. He sank backward until he lay on his back, and then, hatch open, the bearded guy tossed another strap across his chest. He was hidden on the other side of Greg now, but it flew over the top, and the droid caught it. It was waiting. Yeah, they’d done this a lot.
The winch slackened until the hooks scraped sideways and slid off Greg’s body, and then they were unfastened. The arm retracted, and the guy sidled out around what was now as good as a donor body. He was looking at the pad again, clicking his tongue. He approached, the stink of engine grease and sweat pouring off him. He stopped short of me, barely concealed a smile at the obvious fact that I was a little more than upset at the result, and turned the pad toward me.
“Sign here,” he said, gesturing to a white box on the screen.
I stepped forward from my spot at the corner of the bay and stared at the pad, not taking it. “What is it?”
“Receipt to say that you were here when we requisitioned the steel. You gotta sign it over to us before we can take him — makes him her property then.”
I blinked away the sheen in my eyes and read the title on the top of what I was being shown. I wasn’t about to sign two things in one day before I read them. It said ‘Requisition Order: Concession of Ownership.’ Following that was a long serial number I knew matched Greg’s. Under it was a lengthy explanation of what a fucking idiot I’d been. And just above the box he wanted me to sign in the words ‘Previous Owner: James A. Maddox’ were staring up at me.
“Just sign the damn thing, kid,” the guy sighed. “We got six more of these to do before lunch.”
I swallowed, finding my voice. “And if I don’t?”
He took a long breath and narrowed his eyes at me. He didn’t bother to open his overall, but instead just reached up and pulled it taut against his chest. It pressed against the holster hanging at his ribs and the clear outline of the butt of a pistol showed through. I stared at it blankly for a second.
“The Federation let you carry a gun?” I asked, my voice hoarse suddenly.
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and sneered. “Private establishment, kid — fully licensed.” He laughed a little and shook the pad at me. “Now sign the fucking thing.”
But I couldn’t. All I could do was look at it, with Greg swimming in my peripheral. He might as well have been on an autopsy slab. I could just imagine his guts pulled out all across a workshop floor, some maniacal mechanic ripping stuff out of him. Ooh, reinforced camshaft — nice — we’ll take that. Advanced optical sensors? Perfect. AI core? Nah. Don’t need this piece of junk. And he’d hurl it into a dumpster and that’s where Greg’s mind would live until the miniature power core keeping him alive petered out — a few months, maybe — and that would be it. He’d be dead, and gone forever.
The guy sighed loudly in front of me. “Look — I know this sucks, kid, but it’s happened, alright? I’ve got the authority to detain you, take you along with that big bastard. They’ll put you in a holding cell, report you to your higher-ups — you got higher-ups, right? People that’ll be pissed off if you screw up?”
I nodded vaguely, still envisioning Greg slowly dying in a trash can.
“What you’re doing is a crime, kid. You signed a legally binding contract. You break that, you’re committing a felony. You don’t want that, do you?”
I shook my head, swallowing hard. I didn’t. I really didn’t.
“People think they can run,” he said without warning, maybe reading my mind. I was wondering if I could have gotten to Greg and jumped inside him before it all happened. Made a break for it, hijacked a ship, maybe. He outlined his gun against his ribs again. “Happens more than you think.” He tapped the shape with his finger. “You care about this thing, sure — but you care enough to get shot over it?”
Thing. He’d said thing. And I couldn’t help but feel Greg was as far from that as could be. I felt sick, but I knew the beard was right. I reached out and pressed my thumb onto the pad, still racking my brains for some sort of way out of this, but I just couldn’t see one. It beeped happily and the guy sighed again, as though an ordeal had just passed. I looked down and felt him rolling up my sleeve. He roughly turned my arm over and read the code with the scanner on the back of the pad. It beeped again and he threw my arm back to me. I curled it numbly into my chest and cradled it with my other hand.
The guy turned away, hacking up whatever was in his throat, and then spat it on the ground. “You’ll get over it, kid.” He called, reaching the trolley. “And then you’ll be back.”
I clamped my jaw together and tried to hold back the bile clawing its way up my esophagus. I wouldn’t. I’d never be back. I’d never be back because the second that anyone got wind of this, I’d be booted out of the Mech Corps, and never let near another rig again.
I watched them wheel Greg away without saying a word, and when he’d disappeared around the corner I stared down at my hands, and found I was too weak to turn them into fists.
What could I do? Was there anything? My brain was whirling. Could I go to Alice? Could I go there and grovel? Beg? Offer to buy him with what little I had? Say I’d borrow enough credits? Threaten that I’d steal it? Offer to do anything to get Greg back? No. She’d shown no mercy in the arena, so why would she now? And as far as she’d be concerned, I’d just tried to trick her. Called her name to get her guard down, and then I’d fired on her. It wasn’t what happen
ed, but unless she’d suddenly become any less stubborn in the last year, she wouldn’t buy it, and certainly not from me. The way we’d left things, they’d still be shitty, and I doubted twelve months to think about how I stole her promotion and then got her tangled up with the mercs who sent us on a suicide mission that was always meant to come off like it did, or worse, likely wouldn’t have eased things. She’d made no attempt to get in contact with any of us, and that spoke volumes.
They’d said she’d suffered some memory loss, but how much I couldn’t be sure. I doubted that she’d forgotten how much she hated me.
My leg started vibrating and I reached down without thinking, pulling out my communicator. Before I had a chance to stop myself, Volchec’s face appeared on it.
My eyes widened and I snorted back the catch in my throat and dragged my sleeve across my face. “Volchec,” I said, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“Maddox, where the hell are you?” she near enough barked. “I’ve been calling you for the last hour!”
“Oh, I, uh — sorry — I’m, uh—”
“Jesus,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I don’t have time for your ramblings. Get your ass up here, right now. Briefing. We’ve got a mission, and we ship out in a few hours. So move it, alright.” It wasn’t a question. She was telling me. The day that I’d lost my rig, we were going on a mission. Fuck. I was about to get shit-canned. I held the communicator in shaking hands. “Maddox? Maddox?” Her voice echoed in the air around me. “Maddox? Where are you — what is that, a workshop? Maddox? Hey—”
I cut her off and lowered the communicator. This was it. I stumbled forward a step and paused. This time I couldn’t hold it back.
I hunched over and vomited bile onto the ground. There was barely anything left in my stomach after the first time, but what was left in the deepest parts of my stomach was dredged up and hurled onto the concrete floor of the staging area. It was dark and thick and I left a trail of it in footprints as I walked out of there, my mind totally blank, my communicator vibrating against my leg, and my heart beating against my ribs.