by Jake Bible
Fighting Iron
A Far-Future Mech Western
Jake Bible
Copyright 2016 by Jake Bible
One
With the sun to his back, setting slowly on what had been only one of a string of long days of travel across the cracked and broken landscape of Northeast MexiCali, the pilot powered down his machine, set the proper locks, and popped the hatch to the cockpit.
“Hold steady,” Clay MacAulay said, his eyes scanning the rocky ground fifty feet below.
He hooked a leg over the lip of the cockpit, grabbed his pack, and began to descend the face of the machine, his feet instinctively finding the recessed holds that made up the route down the battle-scarred metal.
“You hear me, Gibbons?” Clay asked. “Hold steady.”
“Holding steady, Clay,” Gibbons responded, a disembodied voice that echoed tinny and small from a set of warped speakers set into the roof of the cockpit.
“You know what that means?” Clay asked.
“I know what that means, man,” Gibbons responded. “Hold steady. Dump back into the stealth decks if anyone comes snooping with scanners.”
“This won’t be like El Buquerque,” Clay said. “No fall backs here, brother. We’re in the middle of scrub range and cattle lands.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Gibbons said. “I’m staying put and keeping quiet.”
“You better,” Clay said. “Funds are low. I can’t buy you out of a situation if we get into one.”
“Then try not to get into one this time,” Gibbons said. “El Buquerque wasn’t only my fault.”
Clay thought about that for a second as a strong wind came along and grabbed for his hat. It was wide-brimmed and had seen plenty of use. A symbol of an era most would like to forget, a symbol of a time when blood flowed more plentiful than water.
Clay flattened the hat against his skull, the stained sweat band mashing together with his long, brown hair that hadn’t seen a wash in weeks. The oils from his hair melded with the sweat in the hat and became a familiar glue that Clay could rely on. One of the few things he could rely on, other than Gibbons, and even that AI was temperamental and moody at best. So Clay made sure the hat didn’t go anywhere, waiting until the breeze was settled down before continuing his climb to the red dirt ground below.
“You hear me, Clay?” Gibbons called from above, their com system links off in case anyone was listening. Neither Clay nor Gibbons had figured out how to fix the scramblers. “El Buquerque wasn’t just my fault.”
Clay didn’t respond as he set a well-worn leather boot down onto the hard and unforgiving ground. The wind started to kick up again, but Clay gave it a harsh look and it left his hat alone. He smiled at that. The wind listened. That was something.
Gibbons’ voice filtered down to him from the cockpit, but Clay could no longer make out the words. He was more than sure they were just a string of profanities anyway. Gibbons got colorful when he was ignored.
Clay looked up at the cockpit that loomed fifty feet above. He pulled a pocket watch from his vest, giving it a firm tug to make sure the chain held as it was supposed to, and clicked open the cover. Instead of telling him the time, it told him the status of the battle mech he stood next to. Power cells almost completely drained and no viable geothermal source within miles. He sighed and pressed his thumb to the open face and the cockpit hatch above closed noisily, its hinges grinding and squeaking in the evening air.
When he heard the locks engage, he double checked the watch, turned to face the direction it indicated was his best hope, and set out across the barren ground that looked to be his only companion for the next several hours.
“Back soon,” he whispered into the wind, a cautious wind, and glanced one last time over his shoulder at the machine that was his transportation and his home. “Hold steady.”
Two
The chill hit him as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, lighting up the Correalis Mountains like a set of shadowed dragon’s teeth. Clay stopped and took a look at the mountains, an angry frown deepening the crags and fissures that already made up his weathered face. He took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his brow, and flipped off the mountains.
He had wasted most of his mech’s power clambering over the sons of bitches due to the fact that one side or the other that was fighting the never-ending range skirmishes had destroyed the public pass. He’d watched stranded families in their cheap roller wagons and truckers in their long-haul rollers just stand there and stare at the wall of rocks and boulders that blocked them from getting through. He’d watched them glare as he set his mech about climbing the wall.
Having a fifty-foot battle mech with fully articulated limbs came in handy sometimes. Most times it just drew attention, the wrong attention, and was a pain in his ass. But not at that moment. At that moment, it had done what it was designed to do and kept moving, following a course that had been plotted in its navigational system decades before.
But the Correalis were not a forgiving range even for the battle mech. They drained Clay’s machine almost dry and offered no chance at a quick drill for geothermal energy to top off the power cells.
Clay flipped them off again, put his hat back on as he felt the night’s chill start to creep down from the sky, pushing back the heat that radiated up from the sun-baked rocks and dirt, and got back to walking. His boots didn’t make a sound, their leather well cared for and worn soft by years of heavy use. The soles of the boots were hard and as unforgiving as the landscape around them, but the insides were soft and padded, used to hard work and long hours.
As the last light winked out behind Clay, he came to a small ridge and was shocked at the sight that lay below him. He had to blink a few times to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, a common occurrence for travelers out in the hard lands of Northeast MexiCali. He withdrew his pocket watch again and clicked it open, confirming with the embedded scanners that he was indeed seeing what he thought he was seeing.
It wasn’t the valley of hemp that surprised him even though it was a massive field that waved in the wind for as far as his eyes could see. But hemp was everywhere. It was the lifeblood of MexiCali life, offering itself up for fiber, food, and fuel. A pang of exasperation blinked in and out as he thought how easy his life would be if his mech could run on hemp diesel. But there were only two things that would power his machine and what he stared at, the truly surprising sight, held the key to one of them.
Not that he expected it to yield much. Nothing out in a desert range like the one he found himself in ever did. Just a ghostly tease of hope, is all. Still, it was surprising to see one so intact.
Clay shook off his surprise and chose his path down the dark ridge carefully, not wanting to take a hard spill and end up dying of a broken leg in the middle of nowhere. Although, the sight before him, the cultivated hemp and the cracked tower, told him he wasn’t as deep into nowhere as he had thought when he parked his mech and told Gibbons to hold steady.
His right foot sank into the soft earth of the valley floor and Clay paused. He knelt slowly, his eyes studying the rows and rows of hemp as his left hand dug into the earth. Soft and wet. Recently watered and often. Someone had serious means to maintain a valley of that size. Clay tried to remember what river or lake was close enough to provide the moisture needed to maintain a wet valley the size of the one before him, but he couldn’t recall having learned of any from his quick glances at the geographic scanners as he’d come down out of the mountains or from the vague memories of the teachings of his youth.
Not that he’d paid much attention when he was young and forced to sit still in a creaky, drafty schoolhouse. His attention had been on the single window smack dab in the center of the schoolhouse’s wall. His eyes had strayed that dir
ection every chance they got and his body had followed the second the teacher rang the end of day bells.
Clay stood up, wiping the damp earth on his trousers, and looked for a path through the sea of hemp. The rows were neat and uniform, but narrow enough that if he walked straight through, his wide shoulders would create a wake that anyone with a set of night goggles could see. People got jumpy at night out on the range and if the owner of the valley field was like the rest, he or she would have hired some of those jumpy people to watch the crops and make sure scavengers weren’t doing any midnight poaching.
But there was no path that Clay could see, just the narrow rows between the thick stalks and wide, nine-pointed leaves of the eight-foot-tall hemp plants. Clay sighed heavily, unhappy with the situation he found himself in. He didn’t make it as far as he had in life to be shot by some nervous drunk or village idiot with a scatter gun.
Two options faced Clay and he didn’t like either.
Go through the crop at night and risk losing a significant portion of his flesh when the inevitable squeeze of a scatter gun trigger happened.
Or walk the short distance to the tower, put his back up against it, plop down onto the ground, and get some shut eye until the sun came up the next day.
The latter option would be a waste of hours that he couldn’t afford to waste, but it would mean he could traverse the hemp field in the morning with a white bandana held high for day sentries to see. They’d be the professionals, the day sentries. They were the ones hired that kept their trigger fingers on the guards and not on the triggers. They’d hassle him, ask him a ton of questions, probably kick him around a bit, but eventually they’d let him through and he’d be on his way to the small town his pocket watch told him was just beyond the valley by a few kilometers.
Clay chose the latter option and changed course, his boots taking him towards the dull grey tower that stood like a ghostly specter in the middle of the valley. He had to push through the rows for several minutes before he got to the path that led straight to the old tower. A century ago, the tower would have been painted bright white with even whiter plumes of steam issuing out of its huge chimney. But there in the still of the night, it was a cracked shell of its former self, quiet and crumbling amongst the rows of hemp that surrounded it.
As he grew closer to the tower, which was a deceptively far distance from the valley’s edge, Clay withdrew his pocket watch once more and flicked it open. He pressed his thumb in the center and dialed about until he found the correct setting. The intense clicking that came from the pocket watch made him freeze in his tracks.
The tower wasn’t empty. Not by a long shot. That was no ghost of hope. In fact, it was full of exactly what he needed. The rads his watch picked up told him that. The rads also told him that the tower was full of more grey than he’d ever witnessed before.
Which was a major problem. That much grey wasn’t there by accident. It had been collected, stored, hoarded for a purpose. And the only purpose Clay knew of was to juice up mech power cells. Which meant that whoever owned the field, owned the tower, owned the grey inside the tower, also could easily own at least one mech. Or an army of mechs considering the amount of grey that must be in that ancient cooling tower.
Clay stopped walking and turned in a slow circle. He pulled his dusty poncho aside and undid the clasp on his hip holster, making sure the .45 revolver was ready if he needed it.When he needed it. A field of hemp that size with a tower full of grey meant there weren’t drunks or idiots standing guard. Professionals would be there all night as well as all day. They weren’t as jumpy as amateurs, but they weren’t as forgiving either. Nothing in the night was forgiving. Hard lesson learned over the years.
More options presented themselves and Clay didn’t like the choices he’d have to make.
Go back? Tell Gibbons that the maps were wrong and there was no town on the other side of the valley?
Keep pushing on and hope he didn’t take a bullet to the temple or a scatter gun blast to the chest when the guards found him in their field?
Stay right where he was and wait for morning? Raise a white flag and hope the owner of the field had an ask questions first policy?
Going closer to the tower was not an option. Not with the rads it was putting out.
At least it explained the dampness of the soil. A cooling tower like that would fill up quickly with rain water, even with the scarce few storms that came through Northeast MexiCali. That excess water had to be drained and put somewhere or the old tower would crack under its weight and pressure. Hemp was an incredible plant, able to nourish and fuel most of the continent, especially the rural areas. It was more incredible because it could take grey runoff and filter out the rads, leaving nothing but safe stalks of fiber.
A miracle of nature.
Clay thought about his options for approximately eighteen seconds. That was how long it took for the two men that had been watching him since he left the ridge to sneak up behind him and send a barrage of stun darts into his back. If it hadn’t been for the shock of what the tower held, they wouldn’t have gotten close enough to spit, let alone punch a dozen darts through the back of Clay’s poncho, leather vest, and hemp shirt.
But he had been distracted and that was why he ended up flopping on the moist soil, his body bucking between the rows of hemp plants, as a couple thousand volts were pumped through his body.
Stars danced in the sky and in front of Clay’s eyes. Then the sky stars were blocked as the men stood over him. The eye stars remained, though, bright and flashing as his body twitched and jerked. One of the men let loose with a glob of mucous and tobacco spit and it splattered on Clay’s cheek. Then the darts did their job, sending Clay into a painful blackness, and all the stars went away.
Three
It wasn’t the constant nudging, hard and insistent, of the toe of the work boot that woke Clay up. It wasn’t the threats of skinning him alive of he didn’t get his scrawny ass up on his feet. It wasn’t the bite of metal into his wrists as the chained manacles were pulled tight and he was yanked into an upright position. Clay had already been awake for hours. As soon as he felt the first heavy footfalls and heard the sound of gears and pistons going to work.
There were mechs. A lot of them by the sound and feel of things.
By the time the guard was sent into the shack to rouse him, he’d mentally counted out six separate mechs outside. By many standards, six of anything would not be considered a lot. But for mechs, at least all in one place, that was a gargantuan horde. When the war had ended and each side had disarmed, as per the treaty, the cavalry mechs had been some of the first to be decommissioned and disassembled. Their parts were worth more as raw materials than their effectiveness in battle.
But some had been saved from the salvage piles and smelter pits. More than were officially supposed to. They worked fields, built bridges, demolished old buildings, carried heavy loads across terrain that roller wagons couldn’t traverse. Mechs were handy for those that had the skill to operate them. And they took a lot of skill. That fact had been drilled into Clay’s head from the time he was born.
“Get the hell up, scavenger!” the guard shouted as he yanked on Clay’s chained manacles for the hundredth time.
Tired of the pain, and worried that the cuts wouldn’t be treated properly and he’d end up with festering wounds ringing his wrists, Clay finally complied. He opened his eyes, tensed his muscles, and shot to his feet with a speed and agility that the guard hadn’t expected. The unwashed man stumbled back a couple of paces then went for the pistol on his hip. His hand floundered a moment and he actually looked down at the empty holster before realization lit up his eyes.
“Left it with Snicks,” the guard said. “Didn’t want you to try to make a move and go for my gun.”
Clay kept his face blank, acted like he either hadn’t heard or didn’t understand what the guard said. He stood and waited. Nothing else to do until he understood his situation fully.
�
��Taking you to the Captain,” the guard said. “He wants to know who you are and what you were doing in General Hansen’s hemp fields. You best have some answers ready. The Captain don’t like it when he don’t get answers.”
The guard waited. Clay didn’t respond.
“You hear me, scavenger?” the guard snapped, giving Clay’s chains a hard yank. “You listening to what I’m saying to ya?”
Clay still didn’t respond.
“You deaf or something? Or you one of them foreign invaders from down south ways?” the guard asked, his lip curling up when he said “south ways.”
Clay still didn’t respond. No shrug, no blink of an eye, no twitch of the mouth. A blank slate. The guard grunted and shrugged.
“Suit yerself, scavenger scum,” the guard said and pulled Clay from the shack and out into the bright sunlight of the Northeast MexiCali day.
The heat hit Clay like a hard blow from an old mule. He’d been used to traveling the day inside a cooled cockpit and hadn’t acclimated to the high temperatures of the region like he should have. He’d known better, been taught better. Always adjust to new regions with the cockpit open. Let your body get used to any extremes that you may be in store for. Hot, cold, wet, dry. Anything.
Clay felt like a fool and heard more than one ancestor’s cackles in the back of his head as his hemp shirt instantly stuck to his chest by the sweat that started pouring out of him. He squinted in the bright light and took a couple of deep breaths, letting the heated air fill his lungs again and again until he knew he wasn’t going to pass out.
“It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the guard said and sneered back at Clay. “You don’t never get used to it, believe you me. Guess what?”
The guard stopped talking, actually waiting for Clay to guess what. Clay didn’t respond, but that didn’t stop the guard from continuing on after a few seconds of silence.
