Salvage Conquest

by Chris Kennedy

  Figuring that I was already looking at life in prison for grand theft mech, I moved forward to step between Cinti and the guard. He adjusted his aim and pointed the barrel of the pistol at me.

  “Don’t move!” the man yelled.

  I took a step toward him.

  “I mean it!” he added.

  I took another step.

  “Don’t make me do this!”

  I took another step, and he fired. The steelglass cockpit, however, was built to take anything up to—and including—a .50 caliber strike. His bullet ricocheted off without even marring the surface. “Boo!” I yelled over the external speakers, running toward him, and the man turned and fled. I turned to find Cinti staring at me. “Let’s go!” I said. “Before he comes back with friends.”

  That galvanized her, and she scaled her mech and sealed it back up. “Ready!” she transmitted.

  Knowing that surprise was no longer an option, I raced out the door and turned right. The fence was a lot closer when you had a mech to do the serious running, and I reached it in seconds. I tapped the foot thrusters, and they fired, lifting the mech twenty feet into the air. I easily soared over the fence. I tapped the thrusters and bent my knees to land, absorbing the shock, as if I did it every day. Well, I did…in the game.

  I turned to look back and saw Cinti land. She stumbled a bit, but didn’t faceplant. In real life, I imagined that faceplanting would hurt. A lot.

  Several people were standing outside the warehouse, looking at us as we escaped. As one, they turned and ran inside. “Let’s go!” I transmitted. The further we could get before they brought in the pursuit, the better of a chance we had.

  * * *

  As soon as we were out of sight, we looped back around to almost the direction we’d come from, figuring they’d think that we would continue running away from the facility. We probably would have, too, but we had a destination in mind, not just “get as far away as possible.”

  We approached the airfield from the side that bordered the forest, which had the added benefit of getting us closest to the maintenance ramp. We jumped over the fence when no one was looking and walked brazenly to where they were loading our “tribute” onto flatbed cars to take out to the space shuttle which had landed earlier that day. Security was tight, as we’d known it would be, which is why we’d decided on the direct approach—we had to get to the shuttle unseen by the aliens, and we’d only come up with one way to do it.

  There was a squad of troopers in full battle dress guarding the transfer of the gold from an armored ground car onto the flatbeds, and all of them turned and pointed their rifles at us as we approached. While they probably couldn’t have penetrated our mechs, it was still somewhat disconcerting to have that many assault rifles pointed at you. We had polarized the glass over our cockpits, though, so at least they couldn’t see who they were dealing with.

  “Who are you?” asked a woman with a sleeve-full of stripes. I recognized her as a sergeant from the game.

  “We’re from SpecForConTwoOneNine,” Cinti said, using the mech’s comm system to mask the youth in her voice. She motioned for the loaders to continue. “You need to stay on schedule. We’re here to teach the aliens a lesson.”

  “I’ve never heard of that unit,” said the sergeant. There was no reason she should have—it was the group Cinti used in Worlds at War.

  “It’s a highly secret special forces group,” Cinti replied. “Like I said, we’re here to teach the aliens a lesson. We’ve been training for this mission for a long time, in secret; if the aliens had found out, they would have done their best to kill everyone involved.” Although horrific to think about, the last part, at least, was probably true.

  “I’m going to have to call this in,” the woman said, looking suspicious.

  “No!” I exclaimed, knowing what the response to the call would be.

  “Why not?” If anything, the woman looked even more suspicious now.

  “Radio silence, duh,” Cinti said while my brain frantically searched for a good reason. She used that special tone of hers which drove me crazy—the one that said she shouldn’t have to explain something so obvious. “If you transmit, they are likely to intercept it and compromise our mission. Do you want us to die?”

  “Well, no,” the woman admitted. “But how do I know you’re not trying to steal the gold?”

  “Easy,” Cinti replied. “You can stay here and watch. If it looks like we’re going to do that, feel free to go ahead and blast us.”

  That seemed to mollify the woman, who motioned to her troops to lower their weapons. “So what is your plan?”

  “We’re going to ride these flatbeds to the ship, then mount the ship and ride it to space. Easy peasy. Then we’re going to kick the shit out of them once we get to the mother ship.”

  That got the attention of the troopers, who expressed their pleasure with the plan in a variety of gung-ho noises and shouts.

  “Sounds easy when you say it that way,” the sergeant said. “But how are you actually going to get close to the shuttle without being seen?”

  “We’re going to ride on the bottom of the flatbeds.” Cinti got down on the ground and slid under one of them, then activated the magnets in her hands and feet and pulled herself up onto the bottom of it. “Just like this.” I had to admit, her plan was pretty good—I couldn’t see her under it.

  The woman turned to me. “Are you going, too, or are you just here to watch?”

  “I’m going, too,” I said hastily and followed Cinti’s example. Once I was attached, I went through the remainder of the plan in my head, trying to think about anything else besides dying horribly. The butterflies in my stomach seemed ready to rip their way out, though, and it wasn’t easy.

  We had timed it pretty closely, and we didn’t have long to wait. It seemed like only a few seconds before the sergeant came by and wished us good luck, then the flatbeds started moving. The journey across the tarmac took a subjective eternity, which I spent in a perpetual wince, knowing that at any moment the aliens were going to see us and blast us with some new horrible weapon.

  But they didn’t, and the flatbeds eventually stopped next to the ship, and a forklift roared up and began loading the gold aboard.

  I turned my camera toward Cinti, and when she dropped off, I did the same, and we rolled underneath the alien shuttle. I reached up to reattach my mech to the ship, but the magnets wouldn’t latch on. Unpolarizing my cockpit so Cinti could see me, I waved frantically at the ship, shaking my head.

  Cinti unpolarized her cockpit and shook her head as well.

  I shrugged, giving her a “Now what?” look, and she pointed furiously at various parts of the ship before rolling to the side. I looked where she’d been pointing and saw that, while the shuttles had looked uniform on video, up close there were a number of different colors and surfaces. I scooched across the tarmac to a different area and tried again. Still nothing.

  The urge to run, screaming, almost overcame me, and I frantically looked over to Cinti…who was hanging from the underside of the shuttle, waving at me. She pointed at the surface of the shuttle above her, then at a patch that looked the same about five feet away from me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flatbeds rolling away from the ship, and in a panic I threw myself over to the area she’d indicated. I reached up and my hand locked onto the ship with a clang! I breathed a sigh of relief and started to turn toward Cinti, but the ship began lifting. My heart leapt back into my throat, but I got my other hand and one of my feet latched while the shuttle hovered just above the ground for a few seconds.

  I got my last foot locked as we accelerated toward the sky and looked over to Cinti. She shook her head at me and mouthed something that looked a lot like, “Moron.” She might have been comfortable assaulting alien ships, but the whole thing had me seriously rethinking my desire to drive mechs as a profession. If this was what they did all the time, I didn’t think my heart could take it.

  My h
eart rate didn’t get any slower as the sky slowly darkened from dark blue to black.

  * * *

  “Do you see it?” Cinti asked over the radio a few minutes later. I guess she’d given up on radio silence. Hopefully, the aliens weren’t looking for transmissions in space, or we were going to be seriously hosed.

  “Do I see what?”

  “Do you see the mother ship?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Do you have your radar on?”

  Oops. “I do now.” The radar booted up, and I found the mother ship in front of me. Slaving my forward-looking infrared to the radar, I got my first look at it. The ship was huge—easily 1,000 feet long. I shuddered, and a cold sweat broke out all along my furry body—there was no way we were going to be able to hurt that ship. If we’d had nuclear missiles, maybe, but those had been outlawed in the Accords of ‘27. All we had were our mechas’ lasers, rockets, and railguns, and it would take a long time to hurt the ship with those. Far longer than the ship’s defenders would allow, I was sure.

  “Do you have your exposure suit on?” Cinti asked.

  “What? No.” I hadn’t even thought about the suit. When originally conceived, the mechs had been built with an orbital insertion capability. When the accords had gotten rid of nuclear weapons, some smart general had decided to fill our rockets with mechs instead. Launch the rockets, drop the mechs from space, and assault from high ground. Problem solved.

  It was an interesting plan, and it might have worked, except that the Accords of ‘35 had gotten rid of both the mechs and the missiles. The mechs had gone into storage—as is; that was part of the accords—in preparation for demobilization. Over the last two years, we had been destroying ours, in accordance with the accords. As they had a fusion reactor and used a variety of toxic heavy metals in their construction, getting rid of them safely was a lengthy process.

  “Hurry up and put it on,” Cinti said. “I’m coming over.”

  “What?” I could see her canopy going up; she already had her exposure suit on. I looked about the cockpit frantically and found the box labeled “Exposure Suit.” I yanked it open and pulled the suit out. It wasn’t much more than a helmet and light suit, with some controls and air bottles on the back to be used if the mech’s pressurization failed. I put it on as quickly as I could, being extremely careful not to slit the suit with my claws. The gloves were reinforced, so that wasn’t an issue once I got them on.

  The only difficulty I had was threading the wires from the haptic suit through the port in the exposure suit. It took a little while for me to get it right, and I heard a knocking sound. Looking up, I could see Cinti just outside my cockpit. She’d flown over to me without a safety harness! What was she thinking? Even in the suit, though, she managed to communicate her displeasure at how long it was taking me.

  My jaw dropped as I looked at her—she wasn’t tethered and the boots on the exposure suit weren’t magnetic. If she lost contact with my mech, she would drift off and be lost forever. I went back to the wires and finally drew them through the ports, reconnected them to the mech, and opened the canopy.

  “About time,” she said, once she was inside and the cockpit was sealed and pressurized. The cockpit wasn’t made for two people, and it was incredibly crowded. I found myself rubbing up alongside parts of Cinti I’d never rubbed against before, and the feeling was seriously distracting. And very, very nice at the same time.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s not like this is my first time in space or anything.”

  She made an annoyed noise, and I’m sure a face to go along with it; however, she was facing away from me, and I couldn’t see it.

  “You need to detach from the ship,” she said.

  “Detach? We’ll drift off into space.”

  “It’s better than staying attached to the ship,” Cinti replied. “You can trust me on that.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know the procedure in the game, where they tell you not to do something, because it will overload the fusion reactor and cause it to explode?”

  “You mean the fourth mission, where you turn your mech into a fusion bomb?”

  “Exactly. Well, it turns out that’s a real thing, and if you do it, you can make your fusion plant blow up. We have about five minutes before mine blows. I don’t want to be near it when it does.”

  Ack! “Me neither,” I said hastily and deactivated the magnets holding my mech to the ship.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well what?”

  She moved to the side, giving me a view out of the cockpit. We were still in formation with the craft and had only drifted about a foot away from it.

  “Do you want to push off or something?” she asked. “You know? Go somewhere else, maybe far away from the large explosion that’s about to happen?”

  I reached for the thrusters, and she slapped my hand. “If you use those, the mother ship will probably see us and shoot us. Just push off.” She paused and then added, “Hard.”

  “But if I don’t use my thrusters, how are we going to return to the planet?”

  She turned around far enough to slap me on the helmet. “You can use them after the big, nasty alien ship blows up, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug. This whole space combat thing was moving far too fast for me, and I had no idea how she was able to remain so calm.

  I turned my magnets back on to reattach myself to the ship, then pushed away as hard as I could while simultaneously deactivating them. I was pretty happy with our exit velocity, and was about to say so, but Cinti said, “About time you did something right,” which totally deflated the euphoria I was feeling.

  For a few minutes, it looked like we were going to run into the side of the ship—it was growing very quickly in front of us—but then I realized we were going to clear it. We went screaming past, and I reoriented the cameras back toward the alien ship. The shuttle was no longer in sight, and I hoped that it had gone into the mother ship.

  Nothing happened, though, for a long time, and I began to despair that the aliens had found and disabled the bomb. Then I worried what they’d do to our planet. Then I realized it wouldn’t matter to me, because I was going to go flying off into space, never to be heard from again. A fitting end, I decided, to an incredibly stupid plan.

  I turned to Cinti, unsure which of these issues to address with her first, but her lips were moving.

  “Three…two…one…”

  The ship blew up spectacularly in a blinding flash of light that made my cameras dim. When they cleared, there wasn’t a lot left of it. “Yes!” I exclaimed jubilantly. “We did it!”

  “Yeah, let’s see if we can get back before we celebrate too much,” Cinti said.

  “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “So…umm…” I had no idea how to even begin to get back.

  “Didn’t you ever do sub-mission 21-C?” Cinti asked.

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It was a secret level I found.” She shrugged. “I meant to tell you about it.” She paused, then added with a smile, “Oops.”

  I frowned. It wasn’t the first time she’d “forgotten” to tell me about a secret thing she’d discovered. “And this is relevant why?”

  She smiled. “Because of this.” She leaned forward and tapped several buttons on my control pad, bringing up a menu I’d never seen before. I caught the last one she pushed—”Emergency Re-Entry.”

  With a jerk, thrusters activated around the mech, reorienting us. I was thrown into Cinti with the force of the maneuvers. She was soft in a number of places I’d never noticed before—she’d always been like a sister to me, after all—and she frowned at me. “Get off me, you big oaf.”

  When the accelerations ceased, I pushed myself back off her, but was then unprepared for when the rocket boosters in my boots fired.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “De-orbit burn,” she replied, studying the control panel, which now had a flashing red li
ght.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Only if you mind crashing.”

  “Actually, I do mind crashing; in fact, I mind it quite a lot. What’s going on?”

  “We don’t have enough fuel to land safely,” she replied, interacting with the control panel. “We used some getting to the airport, and we’re a little overloaded with both of us onboard.”

  “Do we have any options?” I asked, wondering if I’d ever get a chance to play sub-mission 21-C. I had a feeling that, if I did, it would arouse far less excitement in me than it had in anyone else who’d played it.

  “Yeah,” she finally answered, long after I’d given up on her and decided we were going to go splat. She continued to interact with the onboard computer, “but it’s going to be ugly.”

  “Can you define how ugly?”

  “You can swim, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so we’re going to have to land in the water, rather than on land.” She held up a hand when I started to talk. “By, ‘in the water,’ I mean about half a mile off the coast. It’ll be a long swim, but we should be able to do it. But we’ll also have to eject—at the right time—before the mech crashes, because the impact won’t be survivable.”

  “That sounds doable,” I said, happy to have a chance at living.

  “Yeah…about that,” Cinti added. “I didn’t mention that we’ll be landing just off the coast of one of the Tuskers’ tropical islands. As soon as we land, we’ll probably get picked up and put in prison, and we’ll never be seen or heard from again.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh,” she replied. “But other than that, we saved the world, so we’ve got that going for us, even if we weren’t able to bring back all of the gold they stole. Hopefully, the Tuskers will, at least, appreciate that.”

  I thought long and hard, but wasn’t able to come up with anything I’d ever heard the Tuskers appreciate. It was possible they’d receive us as heroes…but I doubted it.