MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  A thought struck her, like a blast from one of the mechs.

  Yeah, why not?

  Keeping her bad hand as close to her body as she could, she rummaged in her cargo bay with the other. Her mechanical claw closed around one of the flat white containers. Spinning back to face the scads of enemy fighters, she flung the contents in their direction, set it to open and hit activate.

  One her scope, forty spots went live on infrared, all tumbling in random directions, as the pizzas started to bake in their individual boxes. They’d heat for 25 minutes, assuming they stayed intact that long. Sami didn’t wait to find out.

  “Counterattack!” the Mongol commander blared. “The blue mech is armed! Destroy the missiles!”

  The fighters from both sides formed defensive wedges, shooting at each hot spots. Sami took advantage of the distraction to duck behind GojiStar 4 and thrust upward.

  “What are they?” the Indian commander wailed. “They are not exploding! They are just disintegrating! Don’t let the debris touch your hull! They might be dangerous!”

  “Yeah, they’ll coat your arteries in Parmesan,” Sami said, thumbing her nose downward at the fighters. Her mech’s enormous hand spread derisively in front of her control bubble. “Cholesterol bombs!”

  “Stop the spy!” the red leader bellowed.

  Sami threw another containerload of pizzas out of her hold. She let them tumble in space for a moment before activating them.

  “I’m hit!” One of the Chechen fighters cried as a hurtling box struck it head on. The yell cut off in mid-scream. “What in the motherland…?”

  “Everything on it!” Sami shouted. She glanced at her heads-up display. Just a little farther. The enemy craft had finished demolishing the pizzas and were back on her tail. Hot red and orange flames whizzed past her. She wasn’t going to be able to ascend safely. They were starting to work together to take her down. Talk about a tough delivery!

  Two hundred klicks to go, the blink of an eye. They were closing in on her now. She let out a yell of pain as a blast of heat energy hit her square in the back. The mech’s sensors fed the attack into her suit. It felt as if the skin on her back had been gouged. That probably meant one of Sami Plus’s panels was flapping in the void. She gasped. Another hit, this one in her left foot. A meter to the left and it would have taken out half her propulsors.

  Sami had no choice. She reached into her hull and flung another containerload of pizzas at her pursuers. She activated them all at once, creating an expanding net of heat signatures in her wake, then veered hard left, going west as fast as she could move. Dammit, there go my mushroom pizzas! But safety lay ahead, she hoped not too far. With her chin, she activated her communicator, and transmitted her IDs and receipts. She tried to keep her voice level.

  “Europe zone, this is Samantha Veracruz, mech pilot. I am a non-combatant delivery vehicle working for Bassani Industries. I am approaching your eastern border. I’m being chased by a bunch of enemy fighters. Here are my credentials. All I want to do is get to the moon.”

  “Quite right,” a clipped woman’s voice said. “Come in, Bassani. Divert north and west, please. Attention, Sino-Mongolian craft, Indian craft and Chechen craft—my heaven, Bassani, you certainly do draw a crowd!”

  “It’s pizza,” Sami said modestly. “It’s the world’s favorite food.”

  “—Turn back at once. Our defense craft are scrambling now to meet you. I say, turn back now.”

  Sami scooted over an invisible border indicated only as a line on her navigational atlas. Over their comms, she heard the screech of overworked components as the pursuing fighters did hairpin turns to avoid intruding on European airspace. Blue-tinted mechs and wedge-shaped jets roared past her, trailing white smoke. They zipped straight upward at the border, providing a screen for Sami to launch into space. She activated her propulsors, jetting up out of Earth’s pale blue halo and into the darkness of space.

  “Thanks!” she called, as the mech crossed the troposphere into the blackness. “I owe you.”

  “My pleasure, Bassani. Next time, stop by with a few.”

  “I’ll do that, Europe. What do you like on your pizzas?”

  “Oh, bacon and pineapple, of course.”

  “Figures,” Sami said, with a grin. She hit the burners and soared toward the moon.

  For four hours, her co-workers demanded constant updates on her position, like they couldn’t see her on long-range scopes. The hydroponics dome, meant to be the showpiece of the whole resort complex, was the weakest point of the construction. Its structural integrity depended upon the framework from the hotel complex on one side and the amusement park on the other. Neither was complete enough to sustain the bubble of greenery that sat in its midst like a big glass blister. On her own long-range scanners, she could see bursts of blue-white light indicating where the welderbots were doing their best to secure beams in place.

  To make the transition, she couldn’t just hit the accelerator as she would with an atmosphere-bound vessel. She had to power up as fast as she could to attain maximum velocity, then at the apex, start dampening down her speed so she wouldn’t crash through the station and end up a compressed wad of metal on the other side. It seemed to take forever to reach top speed with the damaged propulsors.

  Sami Plus was hurting. At least three big pieces of plating had been knocked off during her fight. Sami ran a quick calculation on the maintenance program to see how much it was going to cost to replace those plates, plus to repair the left arm. It still flapped limply. The connection between the servos as the top of the enormous body had been slagged by the Mongolian fighter’s blast. She put together a claim for maintenance from Bassani and sent it to home office, hoping it would be approved. Otherwise, she could be working one-handed for the rest of her contract. The way things were looking, there was no hope of a second contract. Maybe she ought to consider going back to delivering pizzas. Once she reached the station, her life would be pretty much over. The side comments from her fellow construction workers practically assured that.

  “I can’t kick it up any faster,” Sami replied to every complaint. “I’m running crippled as it is.” It was her own mistake not to check the news before she took off. She knew it. Meadows knew it. Everybody knew it.

  Piling on top of the verbal abuse, the smell of toasting cheese reached her through the mech’s ventilation system. One of the boxes had to have been jostled during the fight and activated its cooking element. Her mouth watered at the gorgeous, rich scent. Too bad she couldn’t reach the pizza. One more frustration to add to the others causing her stomach to fill with acid like a laboratory beaker.

  Listening in on the chatter coming from the station made her feel like a ghost haunting a house. They all knew she was there, but were pretending she wasn’t. It didn’t help any of them to know the hull pieces were on the way until they were actually there. She hoped they could make due until her delayed arrival. Damn it, damn Dillon for making her stop off on the way, and damn her own carelessness about the rules!

  “Haul up there!” Nistul’s voice came over the audio. She was Meadows’s welding chief. “Get that one into place! Torches One, Two and Three, ready… burn it!”

  Sami could see the combined blast of the arc welders bloom suddenly on the bulk of SkyHeaven. Mechs, as tiny in the distance as little black gnats, buzzed around the burst of light.

  “Yeah, that ought to hold it until the replacement shells get here,” Meadows said. Sami felt another surge of guilt. She was still twenty minutes out, dumping velocity as steadily as she could. “Goddamn it, no!”

  A host of voices cried out. Sami clenched her hands in frustration.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Welds aren’t holding,” Dillon said. “The ring structure at the base of the garden slipped right out of place. Look out, Miner, that side’s bulging! Together now!”

  Through his head-cam, Sami saw the glass side of the garden dome bow outward. Dillon’s mech an
d dozens of others flew to shove it back into place. They couldn’t hold it forever without a superstructure underneath for stability. Sami heard Dillon grunt as he pushed back against the wall of his control capsule.

  “It’s not holding!” shouted Miner. “We’re going to lose it!”

  Fifteen minutes, and dumping. Sami could now see the problems for herself on medium-range. Any minute now, the bending wall would burst. Atmosphere in the garden would vent into space, killing millions of dollars’ worth of hydroponic plants and garden beds.

  Another wail went up as the side of the hotel started to collapse inward onto the dome. The supports underneath it must have buckled. A hundred mechs of all colors and configurations lit their foot-jets to get into place, bracing the enormous bulkhead before it could smash the garden flat. The welderbots crawled over them like glowworms, patching the superstructure as fast as they could.

  “It’s cracking!” Meadows said. “It’s going to go!” Even at her distance, Sami saw clouds of air venting into the vacuum in puffs of white. “We’re losing the dome! Dammit, get those heaters pumping!”

  “We’re blowing all the heat into the zone that we can, boss!” yelled Chang, the environmental tech chief.

  “There aren’t enough of them,” his assistant Natira Sachin said. Sami could hear the hopeless exhaustion in her voice. “Got to hope we don’t lose too many of the tables. I’m fogging the center where the rare varieties are. They’ll freeze last.”

  They needed heat! Sami grinned. She had heat! She and Sami Plus could make up for their errors on Earth.

  She was sixty klicks out. Reversing the slowdown program, she nudged up the acceleration. She’d have to do some fancy driving not to crash the whole structure, but she could do it. She flipped Sami Plus in midair so she was coming in with one foot forward, one knee up, aiming for the breach in the hull.

  “I can heat the room,” Sami said, holding the pose so she wouldn’t hit the edges. Fifty klicks. Forty. Twenty. “Meadows, I’m dumping the construction gear out here so you can fix the hull. Everybody else get out of the way!”

  Every mech’s head turned her way. She had just enough time to haul the skids of torches, tanks and hull sections out of her belly bay with her good hand and all her loaders before she plunged into the big, plexiglass-sided dome.

  Sami Plus landed on one foot in the rear of the immense garden near the shared hotel wall. Over her head, through the glass dome, she saw the host of mechs pushing the wall back into place. One with a big white patch on his chest gave her a thumb’s up. Dillon.

  Her temperature sensors told her the room was already cooling off. Sami tottered toward the open edge where the constructorbots were snagging her cargo and activating the new torches. The crippled mech knocked into a growing table the size of a swimming pool and knocked it off its feet. It’d be all right. It would have to be!

  Sami balanced on one foot while hauling the remaining food containers out of her cargo bay. She threw a whole container toward the breach in the dome and activated it. Her infrared viewscreen lit up yellow instead of cold, dead blue.

  Thanking all her stars for years spent on the beach throwing Frisbees to her family dog, she started whipping her wrist outward, holding an imaginary discus. In response, Sami Plus swirled flat boxes out into the garden. With deadly accuracy, she sent pizzas skidding underneath the growing tables and into the heart of upright vine clusters, hoping she was in time to keep them from freezing. Again and again, Sami Plus whipped the boxes out onto the perimeter, until steam coated the inside of the glass bubble with condensation.

  “Lunch in 25 minutes, guys!” she called. “You better finish in time.”

  By the time her cargo bay was empty, the mech teams had repaired the broken place in the dome. The loud rush of air told her that someone had reactivated the ventilation system. In minutes, enough air had returned that Sami was able to unlock her pilot’s compartment and clamber down the mech’s body into the garden. It was a little chilly in there, but no colder than a spring day in Queens. After her own personal screwup, she had made good.

  The pizzas hadn’t even finished baking by the time the rest of the construction workers piled in, jumping out of their own control pods and rushing for the steaming white boxes. They had lost very few of the precious growing tables. Even the one she had knocked over could be repaired. In the meantime, the operators only cared about the pies.

  Dillon loped over to her, still trailing control cables off the back of his lanky frame, and handed her an open box containing half a pizza. Sami looked up at him with a grin and grabbed a piece.

  “It’s not mushroom,” she said, “but it sure tastes good.”

  They ate their carryout lunch, standing in the middle of the arching dome, which was now perfumed with the fresh, green scent of live, growing plants and an oily haze of pepperoni.

  She spotted Meadows heading toward her. The bulky man with red hair sticking out from under his control suit’s hood snagged the last slice of garbage-can pizza from a box lying on a table of seedlings. Sami braced herself as he homed in on her, a stern expression on his face. Then he grinned.

  “That’s some fancy flying, Veracruz,” Meadows said. Sami sighed. He wasn’t going to ream her out. He folded the immense slice in half lengthwise and took a bite. “But you’re 120 units short. Hope you’re not expecting a tip.”

  Sami put her hands on her hips, and the big steel-blue mech above her followed suit.

  “You bet your ass I am, sir. If you want me to deliver to a dangerous address like this one ever again, it had better be worth it.”

  Awareness returned to Agent Curt Montez, announced by a storm of throbbing pain and pounding agony. His head felt as though a gorilla had used it as drum.

  His ears rang with a piercing wail. The coppery smell of blood was in his nose. As he opened his eyes, he found his vision glazed with a speckling of red dots.

  All things considered, he was shocked to find himself still alive. There wasn’t much forgiveness for mistakes in his profession. The kind of people who would clobber an agent of the Kaiju Response Intelligence Initiative weren’t known for their mercy. Yet, as he tried to move his hands to massage his pounding skull, Montez found his wrists bound together with what felt like a plastic tether.

  “I wonder why they took me prisoner instead of just killing me?” Montez wondered aloud.

  “I begged them not to,” a tremulous voice replied.

  Montez blinked away the dots swirling through his vision. He craned his neck around to see if the voice matched the person his bludgeoned memory told him it should belong to. Across the narrow steel-walled room, a young woman sat on the floor. Slim of build, her professional attire rumpled and torn, Zita Rambaldi’s long black locks were in disarray, hanging down into her lovely face. Like Montez, her hands were secured behind her back.

  Illustration by ROBERT ELROD

  The agent forced a reassuring smile. “They listened to you, Miss Rambaldi. That’s something at least.” He experimented with his bonds, trying to see if there was any give in them.

  Zita’s voice dropped to a whisper. “These…these are the same people…who abducted my father…aren’t they?”

  The agent used his feet to spin himself around, so he could look at Zita without getting a crick in his neck. “Almost no question,” he said, then let out a shallow laugh. “Though that still doesn’t answer who they are. Or what they want.”

  The woman’s body shuddered, a ragged sob rising. “They took Johnny…”

  Montez felt his blood go cold. Dr. Rambaldi was one of the top cybernetics engineers in the world. His sudden disappearance had put every thinktank in the nation on the alert. Covering all possibilities, KRII had tasked Montez with playing bodyguard to the scientist’s twenty-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son. Rambaldi, by all accounts, was a humanitarian and a patriot, a man of principle his captors would find hard to break—unless they had the right leverage.

  “It’ll
be okay,” Montez reassured Zita. “They can’t hurt Johnny. Not if they expect your father to cooperate.” He fussed about with his hands. Just above his bonds, he could feel the snug constriction of his watch. A sloppy oversight on their part, whoever had captured them. A mistake Montez was determined would cost them dearly. He worked his fingers against the band, rotating it around. Some instinct, the sixth sense any field operative develops if they want to survive, warned him to hold off. Too soon to play his cards. He needed to know a bit more about the table he was sitting at and who else was in the game.

  “What do they want?” Zita asked. “Why did they take my father?”

  Montez shook his head. He had a few ideas, but none of them were pleasant. Zita was nervy enough under ordinary circumstances, even weathering the abduction of her father better than he expected, but her fear for Johnny’s welfare was pushing her to the edge.

  “I don’t know,” Montez lied. He looked around the tiny room. He knew what it was now, the inside of a cargo container. For a second, he wondered if they were being transported somewhere, shipped out of the country to whatever secluded hideout these men called home. A moment of reflection eased that worry. He couldn’t feel any vibration in the floor. If they were on a ship or plane then there’d certainly be some subtle tremor provoked by the engines.

  A sudden motion, a shaft of light streaming into the room. Montez twisted around, pushing himself towards Zita. The light came from an aperture in the wall, a slit through which an ugly face leered. Quickly, the viewport slid shut again.

  “I don’t know,” Montez repeated, “but I think we’re about to find out.” He crawled over to Zita, interposing himself between her and the steel door just as it swung open. The woman stifled a gasp when she saw the men standing in the doorway. Montez felt his blood go cold.