by C H Gideon
“Chief…” He blinked hard before seemingly noticing Xi. “Lieutenant. You’re still working?”
“No rest for the wicked.” Styles smirked before handing the commander a slate with a rough outline of Xi’s idea. “We’re still not done improving the takeover program, but it looks like we’re going to need at least five hundred Arh’Kel within fifty meters of Roy’s transceiver, and only Roy’s transceiver,” he added sourly, “before it can work.”
“Five hundred within fifty meters?” Jenkins blinked again, and at seeing the dark semicircles beneath his eyes, Xi felt the irresistible urge to yawn. “They’ll carve into us with plasma torches before…” He trailed off before his eyes settled on some of the images Xi had shown Styles. As he flipped through the images, his expression went from disbelieving, to skeptical, to sour, to grudging acceptance before he finally muttered, “This has got to be the stupidest-looking mod proposal I’ve ever seen.” He handed the slate back to Styles and deadpanned, “This is the best you two can come up with?”
Xi was surprised that the commander, who had always been sagacious and flexible in his thinking as far as she could tell, was so quick to dismiss the plan. She opened her mouth to plead their case, but Styles beat her to the punch.
“It is, sir,” Styles said confidently.
Jenkins looked back and forth between them several times before sighing. “Well…by any objective measure, you’re the two smartest people in this battalion.” He then affixed his signature to the slate. “I asked you for a solution and you’ve given me one. Good work. Now go tell Koch to start modifying Roy, Elvira, and Flaming Rose per these…” His lips twisted into a smirk. “…designs, and then hit your racks for at least four hours. That’s an order.”
He closed the hatch, leaving Xi thoroughly confused.
“Good work, Elvira,” Styles said with a grin.
“Don’t call me that,” she grunted, but she suspected that there was no escaping the moniker.
After relaying the commander’s orders to Lieutenant Koch, she found her bunk aboard Elvira II and was out before she remembered to take her boots off.
14
Command & Control
Work on Elvira’s modifications was proceeding well, with the job over half done. Xi had enlisted the aid of every mech crewman in her platoon, including Ensign Ford, who was fraying every last nerve she had.
“Ford,” she said through gritted teeth, “I told you already that the angle needs to be greater than that.”
“You go with a steep angle and these things are going to come right off the hull,” he retorted. “If you want these things to last more than a few seconds, we have to bolt the motors flush to the plate.”
“If they’re flush to the plate, they’ll only be half as effective,” she fired back. “Which is clearly good enough for you but is not good enough for me.”
The heat was bad and the tension unhealthy, but the bigger problem was the fact that the entire battalion had been forced to start drinking recycled dark water due to the supply of clear water having been exhausted when shrapnel had punctured the tanks during the fight.
“Everything you do,” Ford sneered, stopping the work and throwing his arc welder onto the ground, “is against convention. You don’t follow orders, you don’t listen to advice, and you don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not you’re doing the right thing. All you care about is being in charge. You’re a danger to the unit, Lieutenant,” he spat, turning to leave his assigned duty as he started walking toward the command center, “and I think it’s time I spoke with the commander about that.”
“Get back on task, Ensign Ford,” she growled, dropping her own tools and jumping down from Elvira’s stern, sticking the three-meter-drop’s landing before stomping toward him. “That’s an order!”
“What are you going to do about it?” Ford turned defiantly. “I outweigh you by fifteen kilos, and my mama raised me better than to hit a woman.”
“I may be a woman—” Xi stomped up to him, looking up into his eyes while he wore a condescending smirk. “—but judging by the smell of you, those fifteen kilos you’re so proud of are pure cat piss, and from that pathetic ‘bulge’ in your pants, it’s clear I’m more man than you’ll ever be!”
A chorus of jeers and hoots erupted from nearby crews as all eyes fell on the pair of them, but Xi wasn’t about to back down. Ford was bigger than her, that was certain, and in spite of her training, she gave herself no better than a one-in-three chance of beating him in a bare-knuckle fight.
But she was through dealing with his bullshit. One way or another, it ended right there.
Ford smirked down at her. “Your corpse-fucker’s not here to protect you this time.”
“Careful.” She balled her hands into fists at her sides, causing her raw fingertips to scream in pain. “That’s my Wrench you’re talking about.”
“How do you two do it, anyway?” Ford’s lip curled venomously. “Do you strip and turn the AC down real low so you’re cold as a corpse before he f...”
Xi delivered a knee to Ford’s groin, cutting him off mid-sentence. He bore the blow well, but it still bought her enough time to launch an uppercut into his jaw and slip free of his clumsy grappling attempt.
“You bitch,” he growled, quickly recovering from the near-miss nut-shot. She crouched low, prepared for the counterattack he soon launched. She easily avoided the first two punches, both wild haymakers, but was caught by the crisp jab that followed.
Snapping a low leg kick, she buried her shin into his knee, buckling it just as he swung a brutal overhand right. He missed with the punch and staggered over his briefly-buckling leg, giving Xi time to once again slip away.
“What’s the matter, Ford?” She smirked. “Your mama teach you how to fight, too?”
“Don’t talk about my mom,” he snarled, raising his fists and firing a series of quick, accurate jabs that she slipped and blocked until he sent a surprise left kick into her side. She trapped the kick and, acting purely on long-trained reflex, executed a flying kneebar. Leaving her feet and wrapping both of her legs around his left one, she locked his ankle into the crook of her elbow and torqued her hips over, dragging him to the ground while a growing chorus hoots and cheers surrounded the combatants.
She didn’t want to break his knee, but she was acutely aware that his mech’s neural interface still worked perfectly fine. He didn’t need his leg to operate his mech, and in the heat of the moment, she decided to go for the joint lock with everything she had.
Unfortunately, as they fell to the ground, he managed to pop his ankle loose just enough to prevent her from getting the necessary leverage.
Now she was in trouble.
Ford’s superior length and his superior strength proved decisive as a brief scramble saw him emerge in top position. Once there, he rained down a flurry of punches, most of which missed as she twisted and fought to a full-guard position with her legs wrapped around his torso.
“Yeah,” he leered, reaching and gripping her left wrist in his sweaty hand. “That’s more like it...”
She bucked her hips hard enough to create some distance, then ‘shrimped’ onto her left side and kicked down with her right foot against his thigh. She bought just enough space with the move to use his own grip against him, pivoting and spinning on her back while isolating the arm he had gripped her wrist with.
He quickly let go of her wrist, but it was too late. She’d reversed the position, and now had his arm between her legs in a classic omoplata position. From there, it would be little trouble for her to rip his rotator cuff apart, but she knew that would be imprudent. A torn knee was a smaller problem than a wrecked arm, and no matter how much she wanted to do it, she decided not to down-check one of her platoon’s Jocks.
Snarling in irritation, she released the grip and drove a pair of hard knees into his right side. He grunted in pain when the second landed right over his kidney, and once again, he used his superior size and strength to
grapple and put her on her back.
“Big mistake,” he growled, rearing back for another punch, but this time when he brought his fist down, she timed her counter perfectly. Swinging her legs up, she pivoted to one side and let his fist strike the granite beside her head. Isolating that arm, she snaked her right leg up over his shoulder and locked in a ‘figure four’ triangle choke.
He reared back, gripping his wrist with his free hand and, for a brief moment, it seemed like he would pick her up and spike her on her head in a potentially fatal move.
But to her surprise, he deigned to do so. A few seconds later, she was pulling his face down, unfortunately, toward her crotch, and squeezing both sides of his neck to cut off blood-flow to his brain.
He struggled for a few seconds, but it was clear he had no idea how to extricate himself, and he soon went limp. She rolled him over without relinquishing the position, and once she was there, she cocked a fist and released the pressure with her legs.
He soon came to, and though it took him a few seconds, his eyes eventually fixed on her. When she had his undivided attention, she growled, “Do we need to tell the commander about this, or are we ready to get back to work?”
Ford looked up at her angrily, but mixed with that anger was something else. Something deeper, and considerably less confrontational.
If she didn’t know better, she would have called it a glimmer of respect.
“Work,” he muttered.
She nodded, standing and offering him a hand up, only realizing as she did so that her nose was bleeding profusely and had already ruined her undershirt.
He accepted the hand, and after he had regained his feet, the crowd, which had been silent for the last few seconds, erupted into approving applause.
“Did you have to cheap shot me to start?” Ford muttered bitterly, wincing as he adjusted his trousers.
“Come on,” she replied with a withering look, ready to throw down again if he so much as flinched. “I’m not stupid. You may be full of cat piss, but you have fifteen kilos on me and greater reach. I’d have a hard time beating you straight-up.”
He grinned, showing a mouthful of bloody teeth as he offered his hand. “Good fight, Lieutenant.”
She was momentarily caught off-guard by the gesture, but eventually accepted his hand and gave it a firm shake while he made sure to let her know his grip was stronger. “Good fight, Ensign,” she agreed, more than a little confused at just how quickly and severely his attitude toward her had changed.
The applause intensified before a booming voice called out from the rear of the crowd. “All right, you knuckle-draggers,” Sergeant Major Trapper barked. “Playtime’s over, back to work!”
The crowd dispersed, and as it did so, the sergeant major met Xi’s gaze, flashed a knowing grin, and tipped his helmet before turning and arrowing to the far side of the parking lot where a Pounder drew his attention and ire.
“What the hell just happened?” Podsy asked, staggering out of Elvira and coming to stand at her side. He was bleary-eyed after being interrupted from his well-earned bunk-time and appeared every bit as confused as she was, though clearly for different reasons.
“Honestly?” Xi boggled as Ensign Ford began directing crews to install the new mod components on Elvira, this time doing so at the more extreme angle, like she had initially ordered. “I don’t have a clue.”
15
Target Acquisition
“This is a lot harder than it looks,” Podsy muttered as he guided their Owl-class drone across the glass-field in an ever-widening search grid.
“Tell me about it,” Xi mocked, resting comfortably in her pilot’s chair with a bottle of fresh water. It wasn’t that recycled garbage, but direct-from-Fleet-sanitizers, honest-to-God mineral water which had mysteriously appeared beneath her bunk. Podsy had his suspicions about who had given it to her, and if those suspicions were correct, then he was ambivalent about what the gesture likely foretold.
“You’re just lucky Strange Bed gave you twenty-four hours of strict bedrest.” Podsy smirked. “Otherwise, you’d have to do some actual work.” The truth was that she had been pushing herself too hard, and Podsy had surreptitiously gone to Doc Fellows seeking precisely such an order on her behalf. Her fingers bled from unbroken hours of manually controlling Elvira. She needed downtime, and there was no other way to get her to take it.
“I think he probably meant for me to serve the sentence under his watchful eye, not yours,” Xi quipped.
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Podsy played along, “especially since the drugs make you forget pretty much everything.”
“Sometimes a girl wishes all you clowns would be so considerate.”
He laughed, losing this particular round of their ongoing game of one-up-man-ship. “Dammit, Xi, have you no shame?”
“None.”
“Or mercy,” he added, knowing that would get a rise out of her.
“What do you mean by that?” She sat bolt upright as he gently turned the Owl drone and guided it into another leg of its high-altitude search.
“A knee to the ghoulies right off the bat?” he explained. “That’s low, even for a chick. And I saw you try to hit that leg-lock—you were going to break his leg.”
She paused before knocking back another mouthful of water. “Maybe I was.”
“That wouldn’t have done anyone any good,” Podsy explained. “Least of all you.”
“He’s a loudmouth asshole who had it coming and then some!” she protested before slinking back into her chair. “Besides…all that sexual threat crap was uncalled for.”
“Probably,” he admitted, “but the truth is men and women don’t mix seamlessly in combat situations. He probably didn’t know how else to express his insecurity.”
“Insecurity?!” she blurted. “The asshole threatened to rape me.”
“He didn’t threaten to rape you any more than you actually like the idea of being drugged unconscious and sexually assaulted,” he said dismissively. “Ford didn’t know who you really were until you two threw down. After you did, he finally saw you as more than a shapely figure with a chip on her shoulder and he’s accepted you as a warrior and his superior officer.”
She was silent for a moment before sighing. “I’m trying to understand, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like machismo run amok.”
Podsednik chuckled. “Maybe it is, but it’s how we’ve done it since cave-times. Until you showed him you knew the difference between a real fight and a power struggle, and that you were capable of winning either, he couldn’t trust you enough to follow you into battle.”
“What makes you think I know the difference between a fight and a power struggle?” she asked challengingly.
“It looked that way, toward the end at least.” He shrugged as the Owl finally picked up something which caused him to focus its sensors on the patch of ground in question. “You didn’t rip his shoulder out when you easily could have, and to return the favor, he didn’t smash your skull on the rock.”
She seemed unconvinced. “I didn’t want my platoon to be down a Jock. He could pilot Forktail without his leg, but he needs both arms for manual controls if his neural link goes down.”
Podsy whistled appreciatively at what he found on the scanners, forwarding the feed to Styles in Roy before replying, “Well…I wouldn’t go telling him that was your reasoning. Because from the crowd’s perspective, you earned a lot of much-needed respect.”
Styles’ reply came back with confirmation: Podsy had found what they were looking for.
“Looks like we’ve got a target,” Podsy declared as he guided the Owl back to the barn.
“Really?” she asked in surprise, hopping up from her seat and moving to his side where she could see the monitors. Nodding in approval, she handed him the half-full bottle. “What would I do without you, Podsy?”
He knocked back the bottle’s whole contents in a single go before sighing contentedly and replying, “Power tools
?”
She slugged him in the shoulder, signifying that he had won that round.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found our hole,” Jenkins declared, sweeping the battalion’s assembled Jocks who had crammed into Roy’s main cabin. As he spoke, Styles threw the Owl’s recon images onto the viewers flanking him. “Surface characteristics, thermals, EM interference—it paints the picture of a near-surface nexus.”
“Why don’t we just follow one of the attack tunnels down after the biters, sir?” Ford asked.
Sergeant Major Trapper scoffed. “Son, the rock-biters know more about tunneling when they hatch than you’ll ever learn in a lifetime. They collapse those passages as soon as they retreat down ‘em. My last time on this rock, we wasted days chasing after them on their terms and lost a lot of people doing it.”
“And even if we wanted to, we don’t have the resources to repeat that mistake,” Jenkins agreed. He brought up a video log of the last engagement, when the rock-biters fell under Styles’ spell and ceased their relentless assault. Hoots and cheers filled the cabin as the assemblage made their appreciation of Chief Styles’ efforts clear, and Jenkins allowed the moment to stretch on before continuing. “Chief Styles, our de facto intelligence officer, discovered a way to temporarily sleep the rock-biters. He used the drones to relay a signal that, put simply, knocked them out long enough for us to elbow ourselves some breathing room. When they came to, they retreated en masse to their spider-holes.”
“How many of these fuckers are down here, Commander?” asked Nakamura, one of 5th Platoon’s Jocks.
“We have no idea,” Jenkins replied heavily, sweeping the room with his gaze before deciding to relay what Trapper had told him, “but this rock is important to the Arh’Kel offensive—important enough that, six days ago, they came through the wormhole in force and took down five of our dreadnoughts trying to reach this rock.”
