by J. F. Holmes
Small arms fire erupted from the far side of the door as four armor-clad soldiers appeared in the doorway and brought rifles to bear. They wore Mark III armored vac suits. The suits, while motorized, were the baby cousins of the mech suit he wore. They stood only two meters tall, compared to his five.
With a jerky movement only a beginner would appreciate, Otto raised his right arm and painted the invaders with his targeting system. A continuous burst of 20 mm rounds marched from left to right, pushing the four suits of armor away down the hall as holes blossomed in each suit. With a little luck, his misses with the armor-piercing rounds wouldn’t go through enough bulkheads to cause another vacuum breach. He tried not to think about the rounds that tore through the men in front of him.
Detachment helped Otto deal with the messy truth of warfare. Detachment was a tool, and Otto knew his tools. These vac suits were only suits of armor. Something to repair, and not covering a person. Someone had to clean and repair those suits, but it wouldn’t be him. He was safe from the condemning faces inside. The faces of soldiers who wanted to kill him. The job came first, then the emotions would flow later. The faces faded as his focus returned.
With one team down, Otto had more to face. Based on the radio traffic, they had at least three squads. The one he’d seen looked to be a short squad, so they might have split up into even smaller groups. However they’d teamed up, he couldn’t count on the next fight to be easy. Coordinated fire with small arms could still take out his mech suit. If that didn’t work, they’d break out bigger guns to stop him. He’d die if the fight went on too long.
It was time to be clever instead of bold. His clever tendencies had sent him into repair instead of foot infantry, or even the mech program. Mechanics and repair techs weren’t supposed to be shot at. The worst he ever got was a tongue lashing by Sergeant Anders, who knew profanity in more languages than Otto could name. To get here, the soldiers would’ve had to go through the upper offices where Sergeant Anders and the rest of the daily staff worked. All gone. He packaged up his fear and worry and stuffed it into the back corner of his brain for later. He had important things to do, and people to save.
He reached to his shoulder, touched his mortar rack, and considered the structural integrity of the station. His plan just might work without major structural damage.
“Booboo, activate surgery mode.” It was his personal configuration, which refined the motor control and specially aimed targeting cameras so he could pick up a coin from the floor with the massive steel fingers. It also gave him crazy double-jointed flexibility with the machine’s arms, at the expense of speed.
With a deft twist, one mortar came loose from the rack on his shoulder. He unscrewed the fuse and pinched an innocent-looking white wire, then plucked it from the explosive. Once he placed the mortar on the floor beside the door, he reached for another. With one on each side of the door, he was ready.
“Booboo, cancel surgery mode. No, belay that.” He’d need fine motor control more than he’d need fast arms. Otto ducked under the four-meter-wide doorway and stooped as he made his way down the hall. The five-meter mech wasn’t meant for tight quarters or low ceilings, but he’d make it work, even if he had to belly-crawl his way into the residential level.
He closed the large bay doors behind him and said, “Booboo, activate the proximity fuse on mortars B1 and B2, and chain them together for coordinated detonation.”
“Live fire is against station policy.”
“Booboo, override station policy on all features with my voice authorization for full diagnostic access.” That might keep the reminders of the idiot AI down for a while. He’d have to come up with some better programming to make it easier to get around in his helmet’s diagnostic interfaces. If he survived, that is.
It was time to get out of the way and let things work. Twenty meters along the hall sat a closed freight elevator door. He could use the elevator, but it would show up on screens in C and C, and tip off the invaders if his unknown enemy knew what to look for. He wedged a steel finger into the sliding doors and pried the shaft entrance open.
The targeting camera on his right arm showed a ladder rung inside the shaft. It was designed for humans, but it might hold him. The repair facility wasn’t at a full gravity, sitting halfway between the hub and the full-gravity residential ring. He grabbed the ladder, shifted a foot in to land on a much lower rung, then swung in. Glad he’d left surgery mode active, he nudged the elevator doors closed as the ladder creaked under his weight.
“Team two, report.” The silence stretched, and Otto grinned.
“Team one, I’ve lost telemetry on half of team two and show severe damage to the other half. Get in there and take the objective before the enemy gets organized.”
A response came back as a frustrated soldier said, “We’re on our way back up. We can’t get into the residential level anyway. I don’t know what they did, but we’ll have to cut through the floor to get to them.”
How had they gotten past him? They must have been faster than he’d thought. At least the residential area was safe for the moment. Otto wondered how his people had managed the elevator trick. He could probably figure it out with a little thought, but there was no time. He was on the dangerous side of the barricade, and he had a job to do. He had no option but to make the invaders pay for what they’d done, to his friends and to his station.
The radio crackled again with the voice he’d flagged as their leader. “The residential level is a secondary objective. If they’re isolated, we’re still on track. Get to the repair bay.”
What nut job would set a repair bay as an objective? Everything in there was standard issue, ordered out of a catalog. Anyone with enough credits could buy the same equipment all the other tinpot dictators and rebels bought. Monotech Robotics had a great thing going, supplying all sides with the standard-issue mechanized and powered suits used by armies to settle their differences in typically violent fashion. His mech and the destroyed armored suits in the hall, too. The company had provided every last piece. The quality wasn’t anything to write home about, but everyone made up for it in quantity. Anyone who had the credits to buy armored vac suits had no business resorting to military raids to steal a stupid mech.
If it wasn’t the equipment, what was it? The people? Was someone so short of repair techs they wanted to kidnap him? That was even stupider than stealing the mechs. Any idiot with solid reading skills and a bit of HUD programming skill could learn to fix the things.
The voice on the radio had mentioned telemetry. Otto returned his attention to the blinking service icon floating on his visor, and he’d have kicked himself if he wasn’t strapped into the mech. “Booboo, inventory new hardware systems.” Fifteen icons appeared, two outlined in red.
The idiot invaders hadn’t thought to change their factory-default maintenance passwords. Most of the time he had to hit a physical system reset button on a suit before he could connect and begin repairs.
His display gave no locations, but he knew how many enemies he faced now. Knowing their numbers didn’t change much. All he had to do was stay between them and the residency ring and make sure the bad guys were the ones who left in body bags. The longer he lasted, the more chance there was of someone else coming up with an idea to save the station.
Otto shifted and lowered his left foot, searching for the next tiny rung on the ladder, as the rung in his right hand bent and squeaked. He froze. Why had he thought this was a good place to hide? If he fell, he might pick up enough momentum to punch through the outer hull of the lowest ring. The suit design worked on land and had no propulsion system. Busting through the station floor would only kill him slower than an abrupt stop at the bottom of the shaft could.
The muffled rumble of mortars shook the shaft, nearly dislodging him from the ladder. He reached out and braced against the far side of the shaft with his left hand. Four more service icons winked out, no longer providing even a maintenance signal. He remembered to practice his
detachment. It was only data and equipment, not people with families and children. His detachment skills collapsed as his anger grew at the friends he’d lost, and might still lose.
“Report!” The leader’s voice now bore a frantic edge.
Before he could help himself, Otto triggered his microphone and said in a sarcastic imitation of the default AI voice in his helmet, “Safety margins exceeded. Please return equipment for warranty repair after hosing out the remains of your soldiers.”
“All units, switch to the alternate channel now.” The frantic voice had grown icy.
Otto laughed after making sure he wasn’t still broadcasting. The noise of his laughter didn’t sound too hysterical in his own ears as it echoed inside the musty mech suit, but he was sure Felicity would call him on it.
The radio in Otto’s maintenance helmet crackled on an alternate channel. The diagnostic subroutines flagged it as properly functioning and automatically synchronized with the new signal. The infantry pukes would freak if they knew about the custom code in his repair helmet, which was why he’d never told anyone. “I don’t know how they found our main frequency. There must be a squad on board we didn’t know about. Regroup. We’ve got to find out what we’re facing here, get the data, and get out.”
They thought he was a whole squad? Otto considered his options. Generate fake radio traffic on the old combat channel? They’d figure that out too fast. Could he wait for them down at the residential level like he’d planned? Felicity and the others had locked him out when they’d locked out the invading soldiers. Wherever he was, they would come in with all they had the next time, and he would die with everyone else, never knowing what they’d wanted.
He reviewed the fire and damage stats on the station and saw the swath of destruction covering everything except the residential ring. Everything above residential had already been cleared. Everyone on shift except him had been wiped out.
The elevator below him came to life, rising from the hydroponics level. He reached one leg across to the ladder rungs on the far side of the shaft and climbed up to the next door, with one arm and one foot on each side of the shaft. The door in front of him was only three meters tall. There was no time for finesse as the elevator approached. He punched the door, knocking the crumpled steel into the hall behind. He shimmied through on the suit’s belly, scraping his way out of the shaft as the elevator rose past.
If he knew what they wanted, maybe he could give it to them, and they’d be on their way. He flailed through the mental gymnastics it would take to have a pleasant chat with an enemy strike team and realized there was no way to talk through this.
While the trick with the explosives had been handy, he had to think his way out of this one rather than try to shoot his way through the whole team. Some enemy suits reported damage; the four he’d shot up and three others showed total structural failure. Someone else had fought back. Sergeant Anders and the rest had at least hurt them.
The elevator scraped past the broken door and continued up to C and C. Time was short, and he had to act rather than react.
He rolled to his side in the hallway and pulled his arms and legs from their control harnesses. His mech would slow him down for this next step. He popped the rear hatch and eased out into the hall, scanning for a panel with a red outline. There, fifteen meters away, was a firefighting control panel.
He jacked his helmet into the panel, and the redundant control and suppression systems appeared on his visor. He connected directly into their diagnostic control systems. This just might work, depending on how fast he moved.
“Booboo, expand diagnostic menus on the Mark III equipment list.”
A list of all the options available to him appeared with the powered armor of the enemy. “There you are, my sweet. Booboo, set a timer to deactivate and lock all Mark III servo motors thirty seconds from my mark. Using fire safety protocols, override and open all airlock doors above the hydroponics levels on my mark. Authorize by my voiceprint. Mark.”
“Depressurization is against station policy.”
Otto cringed at the delay. “Override policy!”
“Overriding depressurization is disabled while station is occupied.” Otto had always hated the default computer voice and its bad attitude of not doing what he told it to do.
The timer for the servo lock counted down below fifteen seconds remaining. He had to get the two events together for his plan to work. Otto scanned the menus for another option.
In the emergency measures list he found what he was after. “Booboo, open all interior doors above hydroponics and detonate emergency explosive bolts on all exterior airlock doors above hydroponics now!”
A rippling shockwave hit the station, starting at its core and progressing through several of the inner rings. His diagnostics display showed him everything as air whistled past and out into space. The enemy vac suits had locked up as ordered. He yanked his helmet’s cable free from the panel and ran to the reclining mech suit, fumbling with the back hatch as the station’s atmosphere fled through dozens of open airlocks. His ears hurt as the pressure dropped.
He gasped for air, knowing not to hold his breath lest he burst his lungs in the dwindling pressure. With a final grab, the hatch opened. He climbed in and slammed the door home as the air pressure outside continued to drop. His lungs worked overtime, failing to deliver critical oxygen. “Booboo, pressurize mech suit.” He hadn’t thought about what would happen if pressure had dropped to where he couldn’t speak. He chalked it up to dumb luck.
“No mech suit is attached for diagnostics. Please identify the desired mech suit by serial number.”
He stared numbly at the data cable dangling from his helmet, knowing it had something to do with his blurring vision and headache. There. A jack. He reached out, grabbed the cable on his second try, and forced it into the jack as his vision played tricks on him. “Booboo,” he gasped, “pressurize attached mech suit.”
Stars sparkled in his vision as the world grew black from hypoxia.
Something hissed, making an annoying static noise as he awoke. Air flowed. He was in the mech. The pressure seals had done their job, and the tang of greasy air hit him. However it smelled, it was still blessed air. He swallowed to pop his ears several times as the pressure increased.
With the enemy suits forced into diagnostic mode and their motors locked, the invaders waited impotently. Even if they forced the reluctant limbs to move, they couldn’t get out of the suits in the hard vacuum. He monitored their cursing for a while and then muted the radio. After shimmying his mech toward the core through several shafts and halls, he found the invaders in the Command and Control center.
A quick glance at the room’s consoles showed a ship docked at a now-ruined airlock in the hub, but there was no response from the ship when he tried to contact the crew. The invaders stared daggers at him as he pushed them one by one through an open airlock to spiral out into open space. Someone from their ship would certainly track and pick them up on their way out. Otto just wanted them off the station.
An hour later he realized their ship was empty, and there was nobody to track the suits as they tumbled away on their various trajectories from the rotating station. They’d all come into the station, leaving nobody behind in their ship. Otto set aside his horror at the slow death the soldiers faced, yet he tracked their projected battery and oxygen levels until he knew it was pointless to continue.
He waited in C and C, knowing the residential level wouldn’t let him in without communication coming online first. The outer airlocks would need replacement parts before they would work again, so he satisfied himself by closing all the interior doors and pressurizing a small section in the hub. At long last, he climbed out of the mech and repaired the sabotaged communications links while he waited for the fickle finger of fate to point his way again.
The next day, a troop transport approached. Otto activated his radio and sent all his data and camera recordings documenting the entire incident. Welding a
nd repair crews brought the station back to life one section at a time, while Otto sat, confined to quarters. Felicity sat with him, scared at how it would all work out.
Finally the station came back online, with a replacement crew covering for those killed by the invaders. A knock sounded at the door to their tiny apartment, and Felicity let in Commander Caspin, dressed in a crisp white uniform with gold piping, his nearly white hair slicked back.
“A hearing has been set for tomorrow. They’re taking your recordings as your official statement, unless there’s anything you’d like to add.”
It would do no good to hide anything, and unlike his multitude of earlier disciplinary hearings, he had nothing to hide this time. “I’m good. They have everything.” Everything but the pilot’s data recorder he’d pocketed in the mech, but that had nothing to do with the attack, did it?
“That’s what they’ll debate, but I already know how it will go.” The commander stood at ease, reciting what sounded like a rehearsed message.
“Oh?” Otto wasn’t sure if he wanted to know, but it couldn’t be all bad, based on the commander’s response.
“Do you think these things aren’t scripted in advance? You have history. You’ll be charged with destruction of property, expending military ordnance without authorization, overriding safety and security protocols, and general endangerment. Any one of those incidents would normally see you court marshaled and jailed. Taken together, there’s no other option. You’ll receive a dishonorable discharge, unless you can prevail in court. I think you’re smart enough to take the discharge they’ll offer for this to all go away quietly.”
Otto’s heart sank at the news. So much of his life had been wasted in the pursuit of something now forever out of his reach. “But—”
“I’m not done, son. Let an old man have his fun. There are some unusual circumstances to be handled before the discharge will be allowed on the table. The enemy suits and disguised supply ship they came in have no registration or identification, and can’t be traced. No serial numbers on any of them, so there’ll be no claims from their side. The oddest part is, it doesn’t look like the numbers were removed. They were never there in the first place. But that’s beside the point. That means there’s the matter of prize money for single-handedly capturing their ship, and no counterclaims to worry over. There was no command staff anywhere within the inner rings of the station, so you won’t be splitting the prize with anyone.”
