by Tim Marquitz
“What?” I hadn’t expected that. “You’re…a war orphan?”
“We lived in Rio,” he told me. That was answer enough. The city was still classified as a hot zone years later, the legacy of a dirty nuke that had torn it apart late one summer evening. “I was skilltested at the orphanage. We all were. I had the best metrics, though. They asked me if I wanted to do something to make sure that other people’s families would be safe. I said okay.”
Aiden explained that all the pilots shared the same kind of story. Every teenage Paladin rider was a victim of the war, and the Hegemony had offered them the chance for some payback. The logic of it was as clear as it was callous.
I could even understand it if I pushed myself. The techs had invented those massive battle-engines but they couldn’t field them with regular pilots, so they looked for the next best alternative. Before the Paladins, the truth was that the Hegemony had been on the ropes, but now with them in the field we were turning it around. Here in the jungle things were bad, but elsewhere the enemy was being repelled.
And the mechs didn’t just beat back the Federate forces on the front lines. They’d become a symbol for our beleaguered nation-state. Something for the civvies to rally around, something for dogfaces like me to have pride in. It’s not a lie to say they altered the course of our war just by existing. The weapons were too vital to be allowed to stay in their hangars.
And all it cost was a handful of children.
“Are you going to let me go back to my mount now?” Aiden wiped a sheen of sweat off his face. His color was better, but he still looked strung out to me.
“I’m not sure.”
“I could make you.” He eyed me, and outside I heard that machine-groan from the mech again. I don’t know how Aiden was doing it, but the thing seemed to reflect his emotional state. I had visions of it rearing up to stamp the tents into confetti if the kid didn’t get his way. “I outrank you,” he added.
That was true. Technically, Aiden was a grade above me as a senior pilot officer. I guess the Hegemony brass thought it wouldn’t seem right to have someone with a cadet rank running hundreds of tons of firepower.
But he wasn’t a soldier who had been through mud and blood, and I reckon he could smell that experience on me. I cowed him with a hard look and shook my head. “Not until Doler says you’re good to go.” The look was the same one I’d used on my little brother Leon when we were growing up. It worked here, too.
What I said ended up counting for little, though. I broke off our conversation as I heard voices outside the tent—the scouts had come back—and what they had to say turned everything upside down.
Corporal Ross was one of the best I had, and sharp like you wouldn’t believe. A marksman, anyone would think to look at him that he had ice-water in his veins. Nothing seemed to affect him, not trench rot or bad coffee or hail-bombs.
So you’ll understand that I was a little alarmed to see him worried about something. There was a hard set to Ross’s jaw and a haunted look in his eyes that on any other man would be cold sweats and shaking hands.
When he told me what his team had seen out there, I realized exactly how far up merda creek we all were, the kid and his mech along with us.
Ross had got it on his helmet camera, and I took his rig and put it on my head so I could watch the playback through the gear’s fold-down monocular. I crouched there and relived Ross climbing up a tree so he could peer over the dragon-back ridge line to the east of us.
On the far side, the jungle had been denuded by a cascade of defoliant shells, showing piebald patches of dull brown earth though stubs of dank greenery. And there, moving with a steady, precise pace, was the biggest bloody column of Federate hardware I had ever seen outside of a May Day Parade. Spiders and wolves marching in lockstep alongside those six-legged beetle tanks, the ones with the broad-mouthed fusion guns on their backs. Lots and lots of infantry in their air-cooled carapace armor. And aero drones too, the ones we called hornets, flashing around them in endless patrol loops.
Had the AWACS seen this coming? I guessed not, and that’s the fact, isn’t it? You didn’t know. Nobody in Kommand had a clue that the Feds had committed to a lightning armored thrust right through the middle of our sector.
Hell. The spider and the wolves we’d fought, they were the advance party for this little outing. If the Paladin hadn’t chanced by, we’d have been a day dead and lost as these creeps rolled over our corpses and followed the old road all the way back to November Station.
The speed they were going, they’d get in firing range before sunset, before the next AWACS overflight. By then, it would be way too late.
I did the numbers in my head, painfully aware of my troops gathered around me, waiting for me to take off Ross’s helmet and tell them the bad news. Even if we double-timed it, there was no way we would be able to make it out of the jamming zone before the Fed column caught up with us. If we went to ground? Those hornets had t-wave cameras for eyes. They’d see us if we had an inch of steel in the way. And if we fled… Everybody at November Station would be looking the other way when the hell-beams started up.
“Lieutenant,” said Ross, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. “What’s the call?”
I gave him back his lid and swore like I was in church. “There is no scale to measure how deeply we are screwed.” I called every non-com into a huddle and set it out, with Ross offering the occasional pessimistic embellishment. Death stalked us on iron claws. A whole lot of death.
Jane fingered her rifle and fixed me with a bleak stare. “If we’re down to give up, run and die, hide and die, or fight and die, I go for the last one. I mean, if we could slow them down some, at least until the AWACS shows up…”
“That won’t be for hours,” noted Doler. He nodded toward the Paladin. “Even with the kid and his toy, even if it was at full kick, we can’t stall an armored column. We’ll be bugs on the windshield.”
“They’ll have to cross this valley,” Ross noted. “I reckon we got a couple hours before they get here, tops.” He glanced at me, and then they all did. Waiting for the order.
I looked away, trying to frame my next words, and I saw Aiden standing at the entrance to the bubble-tent. He’d been listening to us talk. “You can’t stop them,” he said simply.
“Oh yeah?” Doler rounded on him. “Thanks for that. Why don’t you do something useful? Go call in more of your playmates!” He shook his head. “We are so fu—”
“Wind your neck in,” I snapped. And in that second, I got an idea so wild I couldn’t do anything but make it happen. “We’re not hiding, running, and we sure as hell are not surrendering.” I drew myself up, tried to look all commanding-like. “Gather your gear. Leave anything you can’t pack in the next ten minutes. We’re going back to the rail bridge.” I pointed off toward the trees.
“What?” Ross blinked at me.
“Yeah. You said they gotta come this way, right? And unless they’re planning to go the long way around that canyon back there, they’ll have to condense the column to cross the old bridge.”
Doler shook his head. “We can’t hold that! For crying out loud, we’re not the Spartans, Storm.”
I shook my head and looked back toward Aiden. “I never said we were gonna hold it.”
“The medic is right,” said the kid. He walked stiffly after me, and when I didn’t stop him, he took it as permission to fall in by my side.
“Is he?” I deliberately put myself between Aiden and the mech. I swear to you, I could feel it staring at my back.
Aiden’s head bobbed on his skinny neck. “I think you should come with me. I can retune the thrust matrix for a fast escape boost, get us up and away from the enemy’s A-O.”
“Us?”
He nodded again. “You and me. I could fit one other person in the cockpit.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “And leave everyone else behind? Hell, no!”
“They’re going to become casualti
es. It’s the expedient choice.” I shook my head but he just kept on talking. “And I…I want to…” Aiden frowned, unable to find the right way to articulate what he meant. “I want you to stay alive. I think I could learn from you. You remind me of my brother…from before.”
I was all ready to tear him off a strip, but those last words sucked the air right out of me. After a moment, I pushed that aside and gave him the hard look again. “You’re talking about my troops, Aiden. My unit. I won’t leave them behind to save myself. Not today, not ever, you understand?”
“No. You’ll die. That’s not tactically sound.”
“Who taught you to think like that? These are real people, men and women with lives and families. They’re not pieces on a game board. We fight with them, not for ourselves.”
Who taught Aiden and the other kid pilots to think that way? I didn’t know the answer then, but I know it now. The rear-echelon big brains and the strategic planners who controlled the synthetics that raised these orphans. The techs who wrote the programs that ran their lives, that trained them. The people who decided somewhere along the line that empathy wasn’t something to be encouraged.
And yet, they hadn’t totally erased it from Aiden and his cohorts. Because right then and there, I saw how lonely that kid was. And I knew what it was he needed.
I pointed at Jane and Ross. “You see them? That’s my sister, my brother over there.” I nodded to Doler. “Him too. All of them. You get me? Not by birth, but by blood and shared hardship. This is my unit. That’s why I won’t leave them.”
He nodded slowly, taking it in. “Okay.”
“You’re with us now, so you’re part of that.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the mech. “Him as well. Is that clear, Pilot Officer Aiden, sir?”
“Clear,” he said, blinking those big eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
I stopped him before he could go on. “It’s all right, kid. I’m scared too. But courage is being afraid and doing the dangerous thing anyway. Which is what’s going to happen here.”
He cocked his head, trying to follow my reasoning. “Even at full fighting strength, a Paladin is no match for an armored column.”
“Combat’s not always about the brute force approach.” I turned to look the mech in the faceplate. It glowered back down at me, impassive and threatening. “The big guy will still be operable after that plasma hit, right? You can drive it?” Off a wary nod from Aiden, I indicated the boxy missile pods on the machine’s shoulders. “Are those dumb-fire or seeker warheads?”
“Seekers,” he said with a hint of pride. “I can put a missile anywhere you want it, Lieutenant.”
“Good to know.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Get in there and start it up. We’re on the move in five minutes. You’re gonna be our ride.”
He almost ran for the cockpit. “Where are we going?” he called.
“I’ll explain on the way.”
“Kid asks a smart question,” said Jane, quietly enough so no-one else could hear her. “I hope you got a plan, boss.”
“Making it up as I go,”
“Ah. No change from the usual then.”
“I guess not—”
The rest of my words were drowned out by a low, hollow thud as the Paladin’s chest hatch slammed shut. The mech shuddered like a waking animal, arms and legs flexing, twisting, working out knots of tension. Then it rose in one swift, fluid motion, dust and fallen leaves scattering around us. It was all I could do to stand my ground.
The unmoving metal mask pivoted to stare down at us. Then the mech raised one gigantic hand and beckoned.
We ran to the bridge. Or, it would be more accurate to say that the Paladin did all the running and the rest of us just hung on for dear life. The mechs have grab-bars on their thigh plates and lower torso so humans can scale them if needed, but they double as places for riders to tie on. We must have looked a sight, a damaged war machine crashing through the undergrowth with a half-dozen people roped to it. Ticks on a dog, we were.
The plan was straightforward. The old rail bridge had to go, and we were going to make that happen.
Without the crossing in place, the Federate advance would have to find another way over the canyon or scramble an engineer battalion in to repair it. Either choice would slow their blitzkrieg armored thrust and give us the chance to warn Kommand. Aiden’s Paladin had enough missiles in its racks to blow out the supports on the bridge’s centerline, but we couldn’t afford to have him aim and hope for the best. The seekers had to hit in exactly the right places to be sure of smashing the crossing into scrap metal.
The mech climbed up the incline, and we tumbled off the handholds, all of us shaky and a little dazed after the ride. Ross handed out targeter dots to everyone on marker duty, and I pointed out where they needed to go. The dots were cloaked retroreflectors no bigger than my fist, and we used them to pinpoint targets for airstrikes or orbital drops. Aiden already had their channel programmed into his seekers so the missiles would home in on them and the bridge would be history.
I left Doler in charge of the team at the far end, and I double-timed it with the other troopers down to the big, weather-stained arches over the road bed. The rusting husks of abandoned trucks and cars littered the bridge, and we wove around them.
I slapped a dot on the side of a support pillar and looked back over my shoulder. The Paladin stood in a combat stance, legs astride the buckled highway with warped air wreathing the crimson edge of its heat-sword. Its other hand rose to its brow and the thing saluted me. Was it Aiden doing that, or was it the machine?
Then from out of nowhere, a thread of brilliant green light connected with the pillar just a few inches from my head, and a piece of the corroding metal exploded into a spurt of tiny molten globules. A dozen of them peppered my cheek, burning needles making me howl in agony and spin away. A second lance of green was suddenly there, this one touching Private Chade at his shoulder. Chade liked playing poker, I remembered, but he sucked at it.
The beam was tuned to the frequency of the human body’s water, so it flashed his blood to steam inside him and made the poor bastard burst like an overripe fruit. The rags of the man scattered all over the roadbed, and I put aside my pain and fury to bring up my rifle. Firing blind, one-handed, I aimed the bullpup assault weapon in the direction the sniper lasers had come from and let off a couple of three-round bursts.
“Contact west!” Suddenly people were shouting and more guns joined the chorus. I rolled into cover and stole a look toward the opposite end of the bridge. A skirmish team of Federate elite troopers advanced out of the tree line, and they were armed with the kind of laser weapons that grunts like me never got to lay our dirty little hands on. Green beams winked on and off as they went on killing my people. They had camo cloaks too, which explained why the Paladin’s sensor eyes hadn’t seen them coming.
“Fall back!” I bellowed, emptying my ammo mag and slamming a fresh one into place. The dots hadn’t all been deployed but there was nothing we could do about that. The Feds had moved way faster than expected, so we had to pull the trigger right now.
I burst out of what meagre cover I had and sprinted in bursts toward the far end of the bridge, blasting out enfilade fire into the teeth of the Feds—for what good it did. They had that bloody carapace armor which was good for turning away anything less than a direct hit.
I was in the open, racing toward the shell of an overturned bus, when the bridge shook under my boots. The Paladin jogged toward us, sword coming up as he moved. I heard Ross call out a warning and I spun.
Two spiders leapt onto the bridge and scrambled forward, their skinny legs thrashing the air like scythes. They ignored all human targets, fixating on Aiden’s mount with unswerving machine focus.
Jets of sun-hot plasma crackled through the air, landing at the Paladin’s feet as they tried and failed to get his range. Closing the distance, the spiders decided to double-team him, splitting apart to catch the mech in a pincer m
ove.
Aiden pivoted, the whole of that big machine spinning on one foot, absently kicking a rusted car over the side of the bridge as it moved. The Paladin ducked low as the first spider executed a pop-up attack and dove at it. Around went the heat-sword in a humming red arc and momentum carried the spider right on to the tip of the blade. Black metal cracked and split, and the Paladin carved off a good quarter of the enemy drone. That was a kill.
The second spider used the sacrifice of the first to get close, though, and I saw the plasma gun in its turret spitting pre-fire fumes. I think maybe it was going to execute the same attack pattern as the one we’d met in the valley. No matter, though. The Paladin didn’t wait, punching it with a bell-clang that echoed down the canyon and following through with a point-blank burst of heavy autocannon fire from the wrist guns.
The spindly drone staggered back as armor-piercing rounds splintered off great divots of its lamellar plating. It jerked spasmodically and finally met its end with a hard kick from the mech. I watched the spherical body of the spider roll off the roadbed and tumble away to the canyon floor hundreds of feet below.
But no cheer went up this time. The arachnid drones had just been the opening act, and now the main event was here. In the back of my mind, I’d wondered why the Fed ground troops advanced so cautiously—and now I saw why.
A thickset, stocky shape as tall as a house bulled its way forward out of the trees and shrugged off a sail-sized camo cloak. The Federate’s designers had a real thing about modelling their mechs on members of the animal kingdom. I looked at one of their nastiest bruisers, a hunchbacked semi-humanoid machine with massive forearms and a wide, armored torso. Autocannon cupolas bristled from its back, and its clawed hands—big enough to pry apart a tank—flexed and scraped at the cracked asphalt. We called these ones wreckers on account of how the Feds use them for area denial ops, but if you told me to sum it up, I’d ask you to imagine a huge silverback gorilla made out of gunmetal.
