Iron Legion Battlebox

by David Ryker

  My hands hit steel and rebounded back, spinning away from him.

  I came in again, this time slower, looking for a handhold.

  My fingers grazed his flank and I let him pass by a little, circling around him and climbing upward toward the hatch, my hands spidering over his hull until I reached it.

  In a swift motion, I pulled myself over the edge and twisted down into the cockpit. The inside was soaked, the footwells ankle-deep with water. The force of the fall was holding the water up.

  I pressed my feet against the front of the cabin, holding myself into the seat and strapping myself in.

  My feet sloshed into the cages and I pumped the thrusters, shoving my hands into the gloves and hitting the hatch release.

  It swung closed and locked, the screen in front lighting up, displaying that familiar fish-eyed view of the world I’d become so accustomed to.

  “Greg — altitude reading, now! Barometric pressure. Atmospheric makeup. Infrared view!”

  Without a word of doubt or question, Greg complied.

  An altimeter and pressure reading appeared on the left. Thirty-seven hundred meters and falling fast. Pressure was about where it should be — not high enough to burst eardrums at ground level, at least. On the right was a series of readings — atmospheric makeup — oxygen-rich, nitrogen-based — just about breathable.

  The screen blinked and turned a deep sea-green, the undulating waves of blue and purple an endless canvas, and on it, two tiny splotches. One yellow — a trio of little dots, Alice’s face and exposed hands, flattened out and falling fast. And Fish’s green domed skull, his skin and body colder than Alice’s, but still hot against the backdrop of frigid cloud.

  I twisted Greg’s arms, directing the flaps and laying into the thrusters.

  We turned, still inverted, and soared across towards Fish, the closer of the two, and homed in. The howling wind was enough to toss them around — it had with me — but Greg’s heavy body was unaffected, his wide reach and tracking systems enough to close in on Fish and make a grab.

  He saw me coming and did his best to accommodate, but his lightweight frame as good as made him a leaf in the storm.

  A dull thunk sent his sinewed body rolling over his arm and flipping sideways.

  I kicked my legs and turned us, boosting the thrusters to reduce our speed, and putting my back to the earth, letting Fish splash down onto my chest with a painful gurgle. His long nails scraped at my hull, looking for purchase.

  He caught it on the shoulder pad and held fast, hitting the plate with his balled fist to let me know he was secure. I couldn’t see him on my side, but as soon as I heard the clang I was on the thrusters again, chasing down Alice. She was a few hundred meters below and ahead and we were down to twenty-five hundred. The cloud was still thick, but I knew the ground was looming somewhere below, just out of sight. It was going to be close.

  I tucked my arms in and pushed my toes down into the footwells, the thrusters pushing me towards the ground at breakneck speed.

  The altitude reading was a blur now, the two turning to a one, the numbers after plunging.

  Alice was holding herself steady, controlling her fall, not screaming or crying out. She was stoic, facing the fall and what came after with the same stony confidence she faced everything else with.

  I hurtled forward, the rain rattling off the hull like bullets. I could hear the wind whistling behind me — the damage from the rocket in the cavern had compromised the integrity of the hull — a crack, or split, maybe just a hairline, but it was there. The pressure change from inside to out was trying to equalize as we fell. I could feel it squeezing against my ears, but it didn’t matter, I couldn’t focus on that now. The ground was coming up on us and we’d only have time for one shot.

  Fish held on for dear life, hissing and squealing, screwing his eyes up against the onslaught of rain.

  Alice’s yellow specks grew and brightened as the distance closed, the one disappearing, the altitude reading falling intro triple figures. Our speed reading was way up over terminal velocity, the thrusters straining at their limits.

  “Alice!” I yelled, Greg’s speakers broadcasting it across the sky.

  She tweaked and turned. I could make out the dark dots of her eyes, the blue pool of her mouth, stark against the throbbing fire of her yellow skin.

  “Red!” she called out, her voice snatched away on the storm.

  “We’re coming in too fast,” Greg said in my ear.

  But we couldn’t slow down. This couldn’t be a measured thing. We were at eight hundred meters and the cloud was finally starting to thin, blinding arms of lightning punching the ground around us, the bellowing cracks of thunder roaring around us.

  “Keep going!” I growled, teeth gritted, hands outstretched and fingers spread.

  She came up fast.

  I saw her between my hands.

  She turned toward me as the clouds gave out, the crunch of the storm replaced by the crunch of a sea in turmoil. Cresting and diving waves. An onyx blue ocean for as far as the eye could see in every direction.

  Alice’s face filled the screen for a split second and I threw my arms around her, holding fast.

  Greg maxed the thrusters and pumped the flaps, flipping us over and decelerating hard as the altitude meter sank into double digits.

  Alice screamed, hitting the hull like a hammer on an anvil.

  Fish’s body clapped against the back, his grip failing, and tumbled into the ocean below. He hissed and howled as he fell, hitting the water and disappearing beneath the roiling waves.

  We were going too fast and hit a second later, the thrusters vaporizing the liquid beneath us.

  It split and parted as we sank beneath the surface, and then enveloped us and folded us into its grasp. I could hear Alice’s fingers clawing at the steel above my head, trying to get free, stuck in my iron grasp, the water rushing in on her.

  It poured in around my shoulders, filling the cabin.

  I let her go and she struggled free, a stream of bubbles pouring from her mouth as she scrambled upward.

  The thrusters kept firing and we leveled, ten meters below the surface. Above I could make out Alice kicking in the darkness, powering toward the surface, arms flailing.

  I gulped down air, pumping my arms to try and move upward, but it was no good. We were too heavy. I tapped on the pads under my hands, flipping through options and screens until I found the one I wanted. All Federation mech came with built-in parachutes to prevent fall damage, and buoyancy aids to stop sinking. I hoped that the Aelock protoypes did too.

  I selected the option and hit the button.

  Nothing happened.

  I hit it again, a warning message flashing up on the half covered screen, the icy water sloshing up to my ribs.

  The message read:

  BUOYANCY AID FAILURE - CRITICAL DAMAGE DETECTED

  “Greg, what the hell’s going on?” I kept jabbing it, kept pressing, but the message never moved.

  “It appears that the blast on Aerra has caused severe damage to my rear components.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I kept jabbing it, furiously, watching the altitude meter continue to sink. The pressure continued to build, the water pouring in. It filled up past the crack and stabilized, an air bell in a sinking ship.

  “It means that we will not be able to surface. We will continue to sink,” he said, serious and quiet. “There is nothing that we can do. The thrusters will fail soon, and then we will be too far from the surface for you to swim.”

  “Wait — what?” I froze, the weight of the water pressing in on me, the hull groaning in the growing pressure. “Don’t you dare—”

  “You must eject immediately and swim to the surface, or you will drown.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “I am unable to ascend, and with each passing moment your chances of survival are falling.”

  “You can’t be serious. I’m not just going to—”

/>   “If you do not want Pilot Kepler to die then you must—”

  “Alice?”

  “With the current sea temperature and the strength of the current, she will not be able to sustain herself on the surface for very long. I estimate that it will take both you and Pilot Sesstis to keep her afloat until rescue arrives.”

  “Rescue?” I was tapping everything, frantically jabbing at buttons with the hope that something would work. It didn’t.

  “I have sent out a long-range distress call, though it is impossible to say how long it will take for help to arrive, if it does at all. There is a tracking beacon fitted in your weapons belt. In all of your belts. Rhona will—”

  “She’s as good as dead!” I was shouting now, beating on the controls as the water sloshed, the thrusters sputtering and choking in the deepening water, boiling it around us. My breath was fogging in front of my eyes now, my muscles shivering.

  “The nanites will improve your muscle oxygenation. You should be able to tread water for a considerable amount of time. Alice needs you, James.”

  “Shut up, Greg! I’m trying to—”

  “She will die if you do not eject immediately.”

  “Just give me a second to think!”

  “Ejection sequence initiated.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  “Goodbye, James. It has been an honor fighting alongside you.”

  “Greg!”

  The seat kicked me in the back and the hatch blew open. Water gushed in and filled my mouth, blinding me.

  I surged upwards, my head pressed against my chest under the force.

  Air flooded from the cabin and the thrusters chugged in the distance, now far away. The sound of bubbling faded, the groaning of pressed metal a final siren song as Greg was swallowed by the depths.

  The chair turned over and my sense of equilibrium told me I was sinking again. Instinctively I hit the harness release and the chair pulled itself free from my back, diving after Greg.

  My arms churned in long, powerful strokes, following the line of bubbles crawling out of my nose and up my forehead. The surface. I had to get up. Greg was gone now. Sacrificed. Lost. Unreachable. I had no idea how deep this ocean or was, or where it was, or what fucking planet this even was. But he was right. Alice was up there, fighting to stay afloat, and Fish was somewhere — maybe alive, maybe dead. I didn’t know. I had to find her first.

  My muscles rolled over each other as I moved upward, swimming and scissoring toward the waves. I could hear them overhead, feel them pushing and pulling through my hair and fingers.

  The surface loomed, the strobe of lightning beckoning me toward it. My head broke through and my lungs tasted air, dragging it down into my body in great ragged breaths.

  I sloshed back up to my chest and kicked hard, staying up. The waves crested and troughed all around, the wind driving an icy spray across the surface. Above, lightning forked and battled with the sky.

  “Alice!” My voice was swallowed by the sea, my mouth filled with salt water as a churn of foam grabbed my head and shoved it beneath the surface.

  I kicked back up and looked around again. “Alice!”

  Distantly a voice echoed back — mine, or hers, I couldn’t tell. And from where?

  “Alice?”

  “Red!”

  I started kicking, hard, my eyes stinging in the salt, my face aching in the cold. I ducked beneath the waves, sick of fighting them. Alice! I yelled as loud as I could in my head.

  Red! The reply came back, grainy and distant.

  I kept kicking, pulling swathes of water to my hips.

  Alice! Where are you?

  Here! Here! Red! Quieter this time, like she was speaking to me through a straw — her voice tiny and shattered like broken glass in my head. No, not this way. Back, turn around. Kick. Kick. Pull. Pull.

  Alice!

  Red! Louder this time. I was going in the right direction.

  Keep talking! Go under. Call out. I’m coming!

  Red! Red! I’m here! Red! Red!

  My eyes stung against the sea, the darkness filling my vision, the lightning blinding in sporadic flashes, silhouetting the peaks of the waves like a moving mountain range.

  And there in the middle of it, a pair of flailing legs. Spindly and black against the indigo canvas, white for a moment in the strike before sliding back into darkness.

  Alice!

  Red!

  I kicked hard, my muscles straining, lungs squeezing the last shreds of air into my veins. My hands hit her and clamped down. One around the holster on her thigh and the other on the fabric on her midriff.

  We shot upward together and erupted out of the waves, gasping for air, our arms locked on like frozen pincers. We kept kicking, our toes and heels scuffing together as we tried desperately to stay afloat.

  “Fish!” Our voices meshed together, twisting into a deathly shriek.”Fish! Fish!”

  A surge to our left in the waves, a wide trail of split water, a wake. Something was coming toward us, a domed blue head rising from the ocean, eyes like black splots of ink. He’d shed his jacket and shirt, his bare chest sinewed and lithe, narrow and sided by long arms, webbed hands, bobbing between fierce strokes.

  He took us in his arms, and we stayed there, the three of us, fighting the storm and the depths, the cold and the salt. The urge to stop. The urge to give up.

  Night was gripping the planet, a storm gripping the ocean, and the unrelenting sense of dread that the end was near gripping us.

  We were alive, for now, but it was a long night ahead. Morning was very far off, and rescue was even further.

  With each frozen lungful of air and each weakening kick, death grew closer and tightened its hands around our necks.

  We clung to each other like our lives depended on it, a tangle of legs and breath, all of us praying to whatever powers were out there for rescue or death. After a few minutes, we didn’t care which.

  But none of us stopped kicking.

  Not until we had nothing left to give.

  And then a little bit after.

  23

  Alice stopped kicking first.

  We were arm in arm, keeping each other up.

  She grew heavy and limp, falling into an exhausted stupor, every last ounce of her energy spent.

  My bones shuddered and knocked together with the cold, and a few hours after Alice stopped swimming, so did I. My legs slowed, my breath heavy, eyes closed, swinging feebly. And then they stopped, my muscles seizing and grinding to a stop.

  I felt Fish’s hands under my arms, his wide grip holding both Alice and me above the surface. I promised I’d just rest for a moment, but who knows how long had passed before I felt Fish’s kicks start to slow and fail.

  We bobbed, him giving the last of his strength, and then stopped.

  We sank beneath the churning waves and water sloshed up my nose, snapping me awake. My legs spread and then spooled back to life, treading the water beneath us on auto-pilot, my mind blank and dark, my body working reflexively, running on reserve fuel.

  We took it in turns. My legs would pump for a while and then stop responding. Fish would take over and keep us up. And then, when he was spent, it would be me. Alice’s head lolled around on her shoulders. Fish’s eyes looked glassy under the waning storm.

  It seemed to dissipate and then return, like a planetary breath. The inhale was respite, and we could near enough float. The exhale was a resurgence, and it took everything we had not to drown.

  There was no sign of morning, though a long time had passed. There was no light on the horizon — the planet must be rotating slowly. It didn’t matter, either way. In the odd flashes of lightning, there was no bulbous growth of land on the horizon. There was no warmth in the air. I didn’t know if we were in a sea between continents, or on a planet that had no land at all.

  We were at the mercy of the storm, and the only hope of escape was going to come from above — if it came at all.

  I was
asleep when a harsh light burned at my eyelids and forced them open. The sky was ablaze, the clouds veined with yellow and white.

  The storm bulged and grew like an overinflated balloon. The rain turned in circled and folded on itself, and then the cloud blanket split and seethed.

  It curled into corkscrews and burned away, thrusting a blanket of stars down on us. There was no moon, but the sky was alight and the waves illuminated and glittering under the light above.

  In the distance — the next solar system, or the next galaxy, an explosion rocked the sky. It was like a pinprick at first, but then it erupted and grew, flashing nuclear and then spreading outward in a speeding haze until it shattered like a bubble and threw jagged and hot lines into space.

  It felt warm on my cheeks as I stared up at it. At an explosion that had destroyed a planet, and probably all the ones around it.

  It had taken hours to reach us, but there was no mistaking what it was or where it was coming from. “Aerra…” I whispered quietly, my voice tiny inside my head.

  The light faded and the stars returned and glittered, the sea suddenly quelled and calm around us, the feeling of death hanging in the air.

  The surface settled and the waves drifted away and let us be. We sank into a trough and stayed there, not rising or floating over another crest.

  My heels rose and my lungs filled with air. I wasn’t treading water anymore, just floating on my back, staring up into the endless ocean of stars. They played on the surface of the tranquil sea and shimmered a reflection back into the sky.

  I turned my head, feeling the cold water in my ears and looked at the surface, a perfect and flawless sheet of glass that doubled the heavens.

  We were still arm in arm, linked and holding, frozen in place, but not swimming anymore. Just floating.

  I let my mind wander, my heart slow in my ears. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs anymore. The cold had taken them from me. What little warm blood was being willed into my extremities while I was kicking had now surged back to my core and was circulating in my organs, trying to keep me going.

  I slipped into unconsciousness under the stars and time carried on without us.