Mecha Rogue

by Brett Patton

  (graphic expands to show additional volume at the edge of the Union, farthest from its IGO neighbors)

  Impressive, isn’t it? In the span of only three hundred years, humanity has expanded to control a volume of almost thirty million cubic light-years.

  (graphic transitions to show only two single white stars to represent their separate but united systems, lonely pinpoints of light)

  But this statistic hides the fact that we in no way control all of these thirty million cubic light-years; we pop from place to place using our Displacement Drives, with cumbersome routes based on gravity-well velocity relative to the destination.

  (overlay of a Displacement Drive ship disappearing in one system and reappearing in another)

  We don’t explore the space between the systems; indeed, it’s not even feasible for us, at this time, to explore many worlds of our own galaxy, since they do not align with the galactic mean rotation.

  (diagram shows a system canted to an angle off the galactic plane)

  And without exploring those spaces, we do not control them.

  (diagram shows the space between worlds, expanding out to show the relative cubic volume between them—it is mind-bendingly huge)

  So, in reality, our empire is better seen as points of light.

  (transition to historical footage: an antique jet plane, flying over flat cropland)

  In the past, our ancestors referred to the space between the East Coast and West Coast of the United States of America as “flyover country”—relatively unimportant for the megabusinesses of the era. However, this flyover country largely fed and clothed the same people who disdained it. And, unlike our Space Between, flyover country could be explored.

  (transition to historical footage of Expansion-era Displacement Drives)

  How much of our history has been written by the routes our primitive Displacement Drive ships can take? And how much will be rewritten once we discover a reliable way into this unknown space?

  8

  ALIANCIA

  Matt and Ione’s debriefing with Captain Hector Gonsalves wasn’t a debriefing at all. Matt didn’t really know what it was.

  The Union military, even a relatively loose unit like the Mecha Corps, operated on the razor’s edge of discipline. You knew that after a mission, you’d be given exactly one hour to shower off the magnetorheological gel and get back in your dress uniform. Then you’d report to a sterile stainless steel conference room, strap yourself down on a Velcro-bottomed plastic chair, and wait for the mission leader and Mecha controller to report. If there were fatalities, they’d spark up the FTLcomm and turn on the nonphysical displays, so fuzzy images of higher-ups in the Union Army and Mecha Corps could glare down at you from their chilly offices on Eridani. You knew they’d spend two or three hours with you, reviewing every decision and giving you feedback on how they’d do it better. Debriefings were Matt’s least favorite part of the Mecha Corps, but he’d mastered the art of looking as if he was listening, nodding in the right places, and having a decent answer ready when they asked their nonsensical questions.

  But Captain Gonsalves didn’t operate like that at all. After laughing hard at Matt’s declaration that he “was a Corsair now,” he and two of his biggest guards escorted Matt and Ione up to his captain’s chamber. Or at least Matt thought they were guards. Except for a single red strip of cloth on one sleeve, they wore no uniform or decoration. One was clothed in a tan digger’s coverall, and the other wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt.

  They floated through rough-hewn rock tunnels, patched here and there with shiny black blobs of sealant. Some still stank of long-chain polymers—fresh wounds from the engagement with UUS Helios. Hector brought up the front, moving with the practiced ease of someone who had grown up in zero g. The two guards brought up the rear. Matt glanced at Ione, but she didn’t meet his gaze. Her eyes were wide, glassy, and fixed straight ahead.

  In shock, Matt thought.

  The captain’s chamber was another rock room, but this one was clearly appointed by someone who was comfortable living in microgravity. There was no ceiling and no floor. Rich wood cabinets ran along the short walls of the room, and the exposed stone was acid-etched with intricate, intertwining patterns. Screens divided a free-sleeping scaffold and a rudimentary zero-g kitchen from the rest of the space. Polished aluminum handholds and footbars radiated out from a central space where a 3-D holotank showed their position in a relative star field. It was notably devoid of tags, except for their current velocity and vector.

  Captain Gonsalves went to one of the cabinets, pulled out a large, plush towel, and threw it at Matt. “You might need this.”

  Matt caught the towel, but made no move to wipe the remaining magnetorheological gel out of his hair.

  Gonsalves turned to Ione. “Can I offer you anything? Food? Water? A drink?”

  “Alcohol?” she asked, looking both fascinated and repulsed at the same time.

  Gonsalves grinned. “Of course.”

  “Water is fine,” Ione said. She watched in fascination as the captain flipped himself upside down to reach a tap and bulb in the zero-g kitchen, and gripped the handrail even tighter. She wasn’t used to microgravity. She wanted to orient herself, like the Union military.

  Gonsalves came back, handed her the drinking bulb, and hooked a foot around a rail. “Okay. First let’s figure out what the shit all this is. Let me guess the basics. Mr. Former Major here was sent by the all-knowing and ever-benevolent Union to clean up its nasty little mess. And by clean up, I mean kill everyone in the place.”

  Matt opened his mouth, irritated by Gonsalves’s look of smug satisfaction. Then he closed it. Gonsalves was right. His thoughts beat slow and stupid, as Mesh hangover began to clamp down on his mind.

  “I refused the order,” Matt said. “Sir.”

  Gonsalves laughed. “No ‘sirs’ here. People call me ‘captain’ because I call the shots on this ship. Beyond that, there ain’t much in the way of salutes and sirs. No pomp and circumstance. Not any more than there absolutely needs to be.”

  Matt crossed his arms and said nothing. Did Gonsalves want him to believe they weren’t a heavily militarized group of terrorists? What was he playing at?

  Gonsalves continued. “So you deserted your team and came to join the big bad guys in the sky, the terrible Corsairs?”

  Matt tensed. “I was team leader.”

  “Not very bright on the Union’s part, putting a potentially disloyal leader on this mission.”

  Matt started. But Mecha Corps never expected he could be disloyal, given his history. On paper, he was the safest choice.

  “HuMax killed my father,” Matt said.

  Hector’s smug look faltered a little. “HuMax?”

  “Yes.”

  “I find that very hard to believe,” the captain said.

  “I killed Rayder,” Matt said.

  Gonsalves stared openmouthed at Matt for several seconds, then rocked back, bellowing laughter. He couldn’t catch his breath for almost a minute afterward. When he was done, he wiped tears from his eyes and patted Matt on the back, like an old friend. “Oh, that’s good. Real good. You’re a riot.”

  Matt realized how stupid it sounded. Like something out of a low-budget melodrama. Even the Union wouldn’t admit the mission ever happened. He could never prove it.

  “Is it true?” Ione asked. “A HuMax killed your parent?”

  Matt nodded.

  “And you tried to save us. Save me,” she breathed, her voice husky and low.

  Gonsalves shook his finger at her, like a man admonishing a child. “Don’t swallow the whole line, my dear,” he said. “Anyone who can claim they killed Rayder can make up some real whoppers.”

  “Who is Rayder?” she asked.

  Gonsalves shook his hea
d. “Someone we’re better off without.”

  “You didn’t follow Rayder?” Matt asked.

  The captain snorted in disgust. “Hell, no. His faction never made even a twentieth of the Confederacy. Of course, we got tons of other crap factions out there. But let’s get back to this. Okay. Secret Union lab, supposed Union defector. Are there any other Union bases out here Beyond the Between that we need to know about? Anything we’re going to get surprised by on our way to Tierrasanta?”

  “Tierrasanta?”

  Gonsalves frowned. “I’m asking the questions, Former Major.”

  “We went straight to the system, no stops or detours,” Matt said. “So there could be additional bases, but I don’t think the Union would group, uh, things like this together.”

  “You didn’t go into any other systems? Not even for velocity matching?”

  Matt shook his head. “The UUS Helios has maneuvering thrusters.”

  A nod. “Right. It’s one of those damn new warships. It doesn’t have to slug around in gravity wells like we do.”

  Matt remembered the orbital velocity matching they’d had to do on older ships: laboriously detailed, iterative Displacements into gravity wells of gas giants, so they could precisely set the big asteroid into an orbital velocity and vector at arrival. He’d forgotten how difficult it could be, being spoiled by the Union’s newest generation of Displacement Drive ships.

  It must have been even more work for Hector Gonsalves, with this ship’s old-style, slow-recharge Displacement Drive. Why had he gone to the trouble to come all the way out here to save Ione and the other HuMax?

  “What were you going to do with them?” Matt asked, nodding at Ione. “If we hadn’t gotten there first?”

  “Well, obviously we were going to roast them on a spit and chew the succulent flesh off their bones,” Hector said, leering at Ione. “Or at least the ones we couldn’t sell as doxies or slaves.”

  Matt stared, wide-eyed. He couldn’t tell if Hector was joking or not. The man appeared dead serious.

  “That’s what your Union would have you believe, right?” Hector continued.

  Matt nodded.

  Hector shook his head. “Well, there are Corsairs who would do just that. Maybe worse.”

  “It would still be better than staying there,” Ione said softly.

  “You can’t possibly mean that,” Hector told her, his expression crumpling with concern.

  “I mean it.” Ione wouldn’t look at them.

  “What did they do to you?”

  Ione shook her head, but said nothing. The silence stretched out, only the low hum of the Displacement Drive charging as a background.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Matt said. “What would you do with them?”

  Hector sighed and cast hooded eyes at Matt. “It’s never so simple. Our explanations probably won’t be satisfying to someone who lives with the nanny Union wiping their ass.”

  Matt’s head twisted in Mesh-hangover headache as rage fired in his belly. I grew up as a refugee, he thought. But Captain Gonsalves didn’t deserve to know that. Instead, he said, “Try me.”

  “Talent is valuable,” Captain Gonsalves said. “And HuMax are some of the most talented people out there. Some would remain with us. Others—we’d exchange with other factions—”

  “For money,” Matt said.

  “Of course for money!” Gonsalves snapped. “Or ships, or machine tools, or food, or whatever the hell else we need.”

  “Like slaves.”

  “Like football superstars!” Gonsalves yelled, his face turning bright red. Ione’s eyes darted from one man to the other, her expression tightening in concern.

  Gonsalves saw it. He bit down on another remark, and instead said, “Look, Former Major, you don’t have to like the way we operate. But this is the way it works around here. There’s no safety net. If you don’t like it, you can step out right now.”

  “I bet you’d like that,” Matt said, drifting deeper into Mesh hangover. This one was going to be bad. How long had he been in the Demon?

  “It’d be easier. I wouldn’t have to spin you to the crew.”

  “Sell me. Sell my Mecha.” Matt’s words were suddenly slurred. He had to get to bed. Better to sleep off the hangover than try to tough it out awake.

  “Small market for Mecha,” Gonsalves told Matt. “And the factions using it, well, I don’t think you’d like them. And they may already have gone past that clunker.”

  “Demon is great! Try me. Greatesh Mecha pilot ever.” Matt’s eyelids fluttered as the headache beat deeper into his brain.

  Gonsalves suddenly looked concerned. He bent over Matt and thumbed up one of his eyelids. “What’s the matter with you, kid?”

  “Not a kid. Mesh hangover . . .”

  Gonsalves pursed his lips and nodded. “The illustrious Union. Just pay your bills, don’t break any of the rules, and never mind the secret labs, or the addiction of your best and brightest to a destructive technology.”

  “Union isn’t like . . . uh . . .” Matt trailed off. His vision had gone dark and blurry at the edges. What had he been talking about?

  Gonsalves smiled. “I thought you were a Corsair now.”

  Matt nodded. Why not? Corsair, Union, HuMax, all fine. He stared down a long, dark tunnel. Sounds seemed to come from very far away. Someone leaned over him, someone with bright violet-and-gold eyes.

  “Beautiful,” Matt said, and passed out.

  * * *

  When Matt woke, he was alone in Gonsalves’s room, wrapped in a sleep net.

  Matt pulled himself out of the soft synthetic mesh, his head pounding like a runaway antimatter reaction. He’d passed out from Mesh hangover. Passed out! He’d never done that before. Why was this so bad? Because he’d shared the pilot’s chamber with Ione?

  Matt went to the door and tugged at it, half expecting to be locked in. But the door popped open, revealing rock tunnels.

  Across from Matt’s door, a red-sleeved guard hung casually off a handrail. He looked up as Matt emerged.

  “Am I under arrest?” Matt asked.

  The guard shook his head and muttered into his slate. Gonsalves’s squeaky voice came back from it.

  “Hang out,” the guard said. “Captain’ll be back in a minute.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  The guard shrugged. “Then you’ll get lost.”

  Matt waited. After a few minutes, Captain Gonsalves came down the corridor, trailed by Ione.

  “Why am I under guard?” Matt asked as they came up.

  “For your own protection,” Gonsalves said. “I still have to figure out how to spin this to the crew. We don’t normally go picking up Union military, you know.”

  “Former military. I’m a defector.”

  Gonsalves nodded. “Traitor there, traitor here, goes the saying.”

  Matt reddened, his head pulsing tripletime. “I’m not—I wouldn’t be—” A traitor. That’s exactly what he was. He’d turned his back on the Union.

  But the Union didn’t deserve his loyalty.

  “They broke my trust,” Matt said. “I don’t owe them anything.”

  Gonsalves nodded. “That’s a good start. But we’re going to need a lot more spin.”

  Ione put a slim hand on the captain’s green suit jacket. “He deserves a chance.”

  “The crew ain’t exactly friendly to the Union.”

  “I will protect him,” Ione said.

  Gonsalves bellowed laughter, then quickly sobered. “I forget. You probably could protect him.”

  Ione colored. “I can’t change what I am.”

  Gonsalves looked at Ione for a long time. Then he sighed. “You sure?”

  Ione nodded.

 
Gonsalves sighed. “Your call. We’ll see how it goes.”

  Matt just looked at Ione, wondering what he should say to her. Thank you? But he’d saved her life. And she was HuMax! Ione returned his gaze, her violet-and-gold eyes confident and intense.

  Matt turned to Gonsalves and asked, “What are my duties, sir?”

  “Duties?” Gonsalves asked. “I don’t command any more than I have to. That goes double for Union defectors. But there’s plenty of work on the job boards. You better just hope they’ll give the Union kid a shot.”

  Matt nodded uncertainly. What mattered now was getting some food. Anything would be fine. Anything to help his murdered head.

  * * *

  Ione took him to the mess hall first, which was labeled, rather playfully, as ROBERTO’S RETREAT, A FINE DINING ESTABLISHMENT.

  Fine dining evidently meant mismatched tables bolted haphazardly to cracked native stone, with a long buffet featuring powdered eggs and soy bacon, glopped together with an unidentifiable gravy to keep it on the plate in microgravity. That was fine. Matt dug in, surprised at his hunger.

  “Is it good?” Ione asked when he was done.

  “Good enough,” Matt said, looking around. Roberto’s Retreat held only a few crew members, and none of them paid the pair more than passing attention.

  “Thank you,” Matt told her. The words felt right. “For promising to help me.”

  “You deserve your chance.”

  “So do you.”

  Ione looked away, her eyes brightening with tears. Matt reached out to take her hand, but stopped himself before he touched her. Two voices warred in his head: She’s HuMax. She’s a person.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said.

  “For what?” Ione asked, not looking at him.

  For everything, he thought. But that wasn’t him. That was the Union. What could he say? He said the first thing that came to mind. “What’s going to happen to you?”

  Ione started. She knew exactly what he was talking about. The genetic modifications, now starting to take place deep in her body.