Battleborn

by Andrew Beery

  “What do you think,” one of the guards said. I’m not sure which one. “Did he figure it out yet?”

  ***

  The next several days were a blur. Not because I was juiced beyond caring but because my mind was still numb from being drummed out of the corps. The Queen’s guard or MPs or whatever you wanted to call them; were the only people we saw.

  My associate in this calamitous chapter of my life was the former Stallion, a guy named Eugene Thomas Brown. He was almost my size. I couldn’t force myself to call him Eugene and since he had taken to calling me ‘Doggy’, I gave him the nickname ‘Horse’ with an optional three letter possessive extension that started with an ‘A’ and ended with a couple of ‘S’s.

  I had always been a bit snarky. I was told it ran in my blood clear back to the time of the Founders. Sarcasm was simply a Riker family trait.

  The interesting thing about my big friend was Horse hadn’t really done anything to get red-marked. This had been the first time he’d ever been in lockup. It was quite possible that close association with me was the only reason he had been canned. It seemed a piss poor reason, but then the universe was filled with piss poor reasons and it seemed the Azul Monarchy was a special repository.

  In truth – and I’ll deny it if anybody asks – I felt bad for the guy. What does it say about me that I feel guilty about feeling guilty?

  As I said, the next few days were a blur. What you have to understand is a red-mark is not technically the end of the road for a Battleborn. Any corps can recruit you and you are back into the land of milk and honey. The reality is no corps will give you the time of day without a darn good reason. The lion pit is one of those good reasons. Most times it’s the only reason a corps may take a chance on a red-mark.

  Horse and I spent our time in the lion pit getting ready for our big day. By tradition, a red-mark received one opportunity to fight in the lion pit exactly seven days after being drummed out. If he or she prevailed and did so in a decisive fashion, then it was possible one of the five corps would recruit said red-mark and rebrand the victor.

  The lion pit was a 100-meter-long and wide Mech Armor pit with colosseum style seating.

  The contest itself was fairly simple. Two combatants would be dumped into the pit. One, the red-mark, would be wearing little more than what their momma brought them into the world wearing. The other would be fully kitted out with battle armor.

  The idea was for the red-mark to race to one of the dozen or so mech suits scattered about the arena. He would then don the suit in question and proceed to engage his opponent. The one who survived was declared the winner. There was one catch, however.

  Each mech suit had something wrong with it. It could be a short in the servos for a leg or an arm. It could be an inop environmental control system meaning you’d need to fight without a helmet on… or forgo breathing… your choice. It could even be a nearly dead power cell meaning you just wasted your time getting into the suit.

  Horse and I spent our days beating the tar out of each other in the pit. We practiced with run down crappy armor that had seen better days long before the time the first ones colonized this hunk of rock floating in space.

  I slowly began to develop a sense of respect for the former Stallion. He knew his armor and he knew how to fight. Even more than that, on those rare opportunities when he had me at a disadvantage he stepped back and allow me to recover. At one point he even fixed my armor so we could continue sparring on equal footing.

  For my part, I taught him how to use more advanced fighting techniques. My mother had taught me a style of Brazilian martial arts called Capoeira. If we hadn’t been wearing armor, learning an art like Capoeira would have been impossible for anyone… at least in the week we had to practice.

  The advantage of armor was it could be programed. Once I had recorded the basic techniques while wearing my armor, I was able to download the recording onto a memory module. Horse would simply plug the module into whatever suit he was crawling into and presto… he would be able to stand on his hands and throw foot punches with the best of them… or almost.

  I wouldn’t say Horse and I became friends, but it was fair to say we developed a respect for one another.

  I’d never heard of two red-marks fighting on the same day, so I had no idea how it was going to be handled. I guess I assumed one of us would fight and then the other. I hoped it would be me that got to go first. I had been cut off from the booze for a week now and I was paying the price.

  There were very few things in the world I wanted more right now than a bottle of Sharo Rum or Tragen Beer. Hell, I’d even settle for some of that paint thinner Chief Shem distilled behind the secondary fusion core of the Nautilus. The Colonel accused me of being an alcoholic, but I knew he was wrong because I knew I could quit anytime… I just hadn’t chosen to do so.

  Day seven rolled around and Horse and I were escorted to the lion pit. I still wasn’t sure how they were going to work the logistics of having two combatants. The mystery was solved when we were both invited… at the point of a shock-rod to enter the arena. Were we fighting each other?

  I looked up at the viewing stands. I had expected to see each of the five corps represented. After all, we were fighting to earn our place back in the world. The stands were empty. The sole spectator was a young woman in the Queen’s booth.

  I looked back at Horse. He shrugged. Across the arena a massive gate slid open. Ten men, two each from the Tiger, Stallion, Wolf, Snake and Hawk corps stepped onto the pitch. Jets of fire erupted above them to announce their entry. I hardly noticed the fire in the air. Each of our opponents was in full battle armor.

  Confusion. Darkness. A sense of loss. Slowly the ship’s AI pulled together the threads of its consciousness. There had been a crash. Much had been lost.

  Chapter 2: All’s Fair in Love and War

  Neither Horse nor I knew the rules of engagement yet, but we had a good idea that being in skivvies when there was armor available for the taking was not a winning strategy.

  Horse raced towards the nearest piece of armor. It looked like it was straight out of the factory. My spidey-sense told me it was a bad choice. I’d learned over the course of my life that too-good-to-be-true typically was.

  There was a moderately trashed suit of armor about fifty feet away. I might just be able to reach it and get it activated before clobbering time began. Our ten friends in the brand-new shiny armor were walking slowly in our direction. Keep in mind, slowly in powered armor is a relative term.

  As I was getting the last of my Mark-II armor buckled up, I saw Horse’s Mark-IV suit auto-initialize. He took a few steps forward and swung his arms experimentally.

  I was beginning to think maybe he had made the better choice when suddenly his suit froze in place. The problem with a Mark-IV was that if you allowed their power cells to run dry you locked-up tighter than a ghost clam during a cold winter night, which, trust me, is pretty darn tight.

  I activated my suit. It seemed to be in reasonable working order. The only issue was it was a Mark-II facing ten Mark-IVs. Translation: it was slower, less powerful, had inferior armor, and ran out of juice in about one third the time.

  I had about thirty seconds before the bad guys reached me and started making my bad day worse. I looked around. There was another Mark-IV off to the left about twenty feet away. It was in two pieces and short of some quality time in a machine shop. Its poor condition was not going to factor into this little melee.

  I ran over to the suit anyway. I had an idea. For me, ideas were always dangerous things, but I figured I was already in a world of caca so what did it matter?

  I tossed the lower section of the armor away so I could get to the torso. Bingo. There was a power cell plugged into the front looking all shiny and pretty… just like the suit Horse was wearing. I had about fifteen seconds before the others reached me. I grabbed the entire upper portion of the Mark-IV and instructed the antiquated suit’s dim-witted AI to override the safety pr
otocols and over-juiced the leg muscles.

  I jumped a good thirty feet and landed next to my frozen friend. As I landed, I pulled the power cell off the wreaked Mark-IV. With replacement in hand, I kicked Horse over, so he fell face-first into the dirt. I’m sure it banged him around a bit, incased as he was in a metal coffin, but I was operating under some real time constraints. I turned him over so I could get to his dead power pack.

  The others were looking to join the party in about six or seven seconds. As fast as I could, I swapped the power packs. Of course, I had no way of knowing if this one had anything even resembling a full charge, but I figured the worst case scenario was Horse stayed royally screwed. The best-case scenario was my odds improved from up a crap creek without a paddle to just up a crap creek. It still smelled bad but at least I didn’t have to swim in it.

  About the same time Horse’s suit went thru its activation sequence, I felt a Mark-IV-sized ‘how the heck you doin’ buddy’ love tap slam into the side of my helmet. Had I not been wearing the helmet my head would have resembled a watermelon dropped from the roof of a building.

  As it was, I found myself flying sideways about ten feet… right into the embrace of another shiny Mark-IV. No doubt about it. I was feeling the love.

  As my newest, ‘best-est’ buddy attempted to bear hug me to death, I got a chance to see directly through his transparent aluminum visor. There was a certain degree of glee in the smirk that dominated his face. There are times you can look into a man’s eyes and know that he intends to kill you. There are other times you can see he just wants to eliminate you as a threat. This was clearly a case of the first and not the second.

  I slammed my hands into each side of his visor and again told my suit to ignore the safety protocols. I could smell burning insulation as I did my best to imitate a nutcracker.

  The helmet of a Mark-IV is one of the weakest points of the suit. This was a design limitation shared by all generations of combat armor. Something about immutable laws of physics and fundamental engineering constraints… I don’t know… I think I took a nap during that part of the class. At any rate, my buddy’s helmet began to warp.

  Now the interesting thing about transparent aluminum is that it is essentially sapphire. Sapphire is one of the hardest substances known to human science, but it is not nearly as flexible as it is hard. What made this especially relevant to my current situation was that just about the same time as my suit began to generate structural integrity alarms, my opponent’s visor shattered.

  I had a choice at this point, I could probably kill the man before he killed me, or I could simply render him a non-threat. I decided to go with option two. There was my whole ethical mindset getting in the way again.

  I reached up and broke his nose with a single thwap of my armored finger through his shattered faceplate. As he dropped me, I used my hands to hook the tips of my fingers into two sides of the faceplate and twist, applying counter-lateral force. His helmet wasn’t designed to resist this type of abuse and torn free.

  A soldier without head protection, even if otherwise fully armored, would typically back out of a fight. It turns out my buddy was a typical soldier.

  Three of the remaining bad guys were circling the two of us, looking for a way to join the fun without getting in the way. That meant Horse was taking on six opponents at once. As they say in the old country, it didn’t look good for the home team.

  I decided in a moment of weakness that maybe I should help him. Now, I will admit there was a modicum of self-interest here. It was the same thing that had motivated me to replace his power pack: I needed him. Two against ten (or rather nine now) were marginally better odds than just me against them.

  For the moment, none of the guys in their pretty, shiny Mark-IVs were paying attention to my lowly, scuffed-up Mark-II. I was about to change that. I casually walked over to the nearest of the six giving Horse a bit of grief.

  With seven armored combatants in close quarters, proximity alarms were useless. This meant the individual I approached from behind really wasn’t aware I was there. Even if he was, a Mark-II was not going to win a fist fight with a Mark-IV. I knew this and he knew this. Unfortunately for him, the most powerful tool of war is never the weapon but the mind behind the weapon.

  I rapped my gauntleted hand on the back of my target’s head. Even a Mark-II can produce a serious attention-getting noise when knocking on a metal shell inches from a man’s ear. My newly selected opponent quickly swung around attempting to land a quick blow so he could back to the main battle. Fortunately, I chose that moment to hop backward.

  The thing about armored combat is that hand-to-hand slugfests is not typically the way things go. In point of fact, they are virtually unheard of. Normally combatants are firing kinetics or energy weapons at one another from a distance. There are a number of ramifications associated with this reality.

  First, modern armor is optimized for repelling weapon attacks. Second, modern armor is not optimized for close quarters combat. Third, the various corps do not spend nearly enough time teaching their soldiers how to defeat armor when faced with a mano a mano scenario.

  My plan, such as it was, was to leverage this oversight.

  My opponent was faster and stronger than I was. That was a simple technological advantage. That meant I had to fight smarter. This is where Capoeira came into play. In a slugfest, a longer reach was often more important than raw power.

  I dove to the side as the bad guy started to advance in my direction. I landed on my outstretched arms and did a scissor kick connecting with my opponent’s head. The result was a very satisfying thump.

  My hapless victim was knocked sideways a good ten feet. Given the strength of his armor, he was not seriously hurt, but he was thoroughly pissed off. I spent the next few minutes teaching the man the meaning of humility. On a side note, it was gratifying to see Horse had switched to Capoeira as well.

  My goal was not to beat my opponent senseless but rather to enrage him. A person in such a state tends to make mistakes. This was what I meant when I said I needed to fight smarter. When I judged the time was right, I pretended to stumble and fall to one knee.

  As predicted, my friend in the now not so shiny Mark-IV rushed in for what he assumed would be an easy kill. I love it when a plan comes together. Since I was already on the ground the bad guy attempted to treat me to a massive Mark-IV powered kick. Had I allowed said kick to connect it would have very likely overloaded my structural integrity and resulted in a very dead Doggy.

  Sadly for my opponent, my day planner didn’t have an entry for my personal demise. As I was a stickler for such things, that meant I had to decline his enthusiastic offer to end me. As his leg moved forward, I rolled ever so slightly to the side to allow the leg to miss me. This exposed the back of his knee.

  At this point, I instructed my AI to begin to rapidly piledrive my armored fist into the back of the aforementioned knee. This was one of the weak points in any armor. It was also where control wiring was routed. After three or four hits in a fraction of a second, I managed to deform the armor and destroy the wiring. This meant from the knee down my opponent was crippled.

  Did I mention one of my goals had been to enrage my opponent? At this point he was well and truly pissed. It only took me a couple more minutes to disable a shoulder and get a groin kick in that took out both legs below the waist. This last probably would not earn me any style points but I’m betting it hurt like hell.

  Horse had gotten a lucky shot in and managed to knock the power cell loose on one of his opponents. I don’t mean to brag… scratch that… I most certainly intended to brag, but so far it was my two to his one. And he had the better armor. Just say’n.

  I was somewhat concerned that three of the party goers continued to watch from the edges of the melee but for the moment I couldn’t devote too many brain cells to analyzing the how and whys.

  I took advantage of an opening and jumped on the back of one of Horse’s opponents, locking my
legs around his back. From this somewhat protected vantage point I grabbed the guy’s helmet and twisted sideways… just like I had with my first opponent. There was a satisfying pop and the helmet came off.

  The head of the person inside that helmet was not one I was expecting to see. It was a brunette of my acquaintance. Her name was Master Gunny Pamela Porterfield. A word of warning… try calling her Pamela at your own peril. She had been known to break bones with her stare alone. If you weren’t calling her Master Gunny and you outranked her you could occasionally get away with calling her Mel.

  I had dated her younger sister Amber for a while. Amber and I had been a hot item back in the day… before I discovered I found more comfort in a bottle than in people.

  It’s not that I didn’t like people, quite the opposite in fact. It was just that I enjoyed killing bottles more than I enjoyed killing people… and I was terribly good at both.

  The Master Gunny and I had our own history. Technically, I outranked her, but only an idiot would cross a Master Gunny. Sadly, when I got into the bottle, I would become an idiot.

  She had the same look on her face that she would get when I said something especially insensitive, irritating, or just plain stupid. Based on the number of times I had seen that look from both the Master Gunny and her sister, I suspected that insensitive, irritating, and stupid were areas in which I excelled.

  She twisted sideways and in my moment of distraction she managed to dislodge me. As I landed awkwardly on my feet, she planted a right hook that sent me flying. I landed and rolled up on my extended arms to use my legs for a wide sweeping kick.

  I had to be careful because the Master Gunny was fighting without protective head gear and it would have been painfully easy to kill her. As I currently had zero access to alcohol, this was something I was trying to avoid.

  The Master Gunny was obviously aware of her vulnerability, so she took extra care to protect her upper torso. This meant I was able to get a couple of debilitating knee kicks in. With no helmet and no functioning servos beneath the knees she reluctantly bowed out of the fight. That scathing look I talked about before… well, it was back… harsher than ever.