Mecha Rogue (13 page)

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.

“Thank you for not telling the captain,” Ione told him, after a time.

“That's not an answer.”

A head shake. “I don't have any answers.”

“Can you . . . feel it?”

“I feel hot, but that's all,” Ione told him.

And later, what happens?
Matt wondered. But he couldn't chase that idea right now. He was here, on a Corsair ship, with a HuMax. So, back to the old question: What the hell are you going to do?

Matt grinned sadly. He had no idea. None at all.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

For several long moments, Ione just looked at him. Not quite a blank look, not quite an accusatory stare. Almost respectful. As if she was thinking,
You almost treated me like a real person there.

Then it was gone. She looked down at the table and asked, “Are you?”

Matt laughed. It was a fair question, after passing out yesterday. He probably still looked gray.

“It's a side effect of using the Mecha,” he told her.

Another odd look.
Then why do you use them?
she was asking. But too polite to ask it out loud. Or too scared.

Matt made himself stand. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let's take a tour. See how our new home works.”

Ione broke into an open, happy smile. It was the first time he'd seen it. It transformed her face. She was even more radiantly beautiful this way. Matt made a promise to try and keep her smiling.

“Yes, I agree,” she said.

Ione paid for their meal at Roberto's with cash the captain had given her. Even more bizarrely, it wasn't on a card but in old-fashioned plastic bill form.

Matt asked her where they were supposed to get more money, but Ione seemed confused by the entire concept. He decided not to press.

They went first down to the Displacement Drive core, which was accessible by a completely unguarded shaft. Anyone could drop down right on top of the fusion reactor, radiating blast-furnace heat in the big hollow inner chamber of the
El Dorado
. One bored engineer looked up at their arrival, and seemed only too happy to break his routine and show them the finer points of charging and discharging their antique Displacement Drive. The ship could only manage a Displacement every seventeen minutes.

Back up the corridors, they saw the dorms they were expected to sleep in. Coed, of course. Two bored crew members lay on their bunks and played video games. Like the engineer, they didn't have any problem showing Matt and Ione the finer points of reserving their own beds. Ione chose a bunk above Matt, near the walls in the back. She brushed rock chips off the top of the mesh cover. The chips spun off in the microgravity, falling slowly toward the floor.

Matt squinted at his surroundings. The crew didn't seem to care about them at all, despite the captain's mutterings. He didn't know whether to be relieved or worried. Shouldn't someone be at least curious?

Nearer the surface, the exterior viewing rooms were all barricaded off, still not vacuum-worthy after their battle with the UUS
Helios
. They discovered three other restaurants, the yawning spaceship dock, and a half dozen weapons emplacements, all but one of which were also sealed against vacuum leaks. At the last weapons emplacement, three technicians argued heatedly over the old-fashioned Taikong laser. Or at least Matt thought they were technicians. They wore no uniform, but they also didn't wear red armbands. And they had that totally absorbed, I-know-I'm-right geeky tone he knew all too well from Peal and Jahl.

One of them, a pudgy black-haired kid who couldn't have been more than nineteen, noticed them first. He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. “Hey, you smell something Union? It just got rank in here.”

Matt held up his hands. “Just leaving,” he said, grabbing a handrail and turning Ione around.

But the three were fast. They caromed off the ceiling and came down all around Matt and Ione. The chrome wrenches they carried suddenly looked very heavy.

“Yeah, the captain's crew choices are pretty crap, but this is the crap of the crapper,” another one said. He was a skinny, mousy-haired guy with a still-glowing slate peeking from an oversized shirt pocket.

“We don't want any trouble,” Matt said, looking for an easy way out. But the guys were clearly used to microgravity. The corridor was short and they covered it at all levels. There wasn't an easy way through.

“He has a nice pet,” the first one said, coming in close to touch Ione's cheek.

“Hey!” Matt said, grabbing the guy's arm. The kid wailed in pain and brought his ratchet up to strike.

Before it hit, Ione grabbed it and twisted it out of his hands, her hand moving in a flash. The two others paused for a moment, then moved in with their own weapons. Ione elbowed one in the chest and knocked the wind out of him. But the impact sent her spinning as well. The last guy's swing almost caught her on the forehead.

If you're going to fight, fight to win.
Matt brought his leg up and kicked the last guy away, and dodged a jab from the first pudgy kid. Ione caught her spin and came back like a flash, kicking the remaining techs hard in the groin, one-two, with legs that almost blurred as they moved. The two men screamed in pain and crumpled as the last guy backed away.

HuMax. Superhuman. But for how long?

“Let's get out of here,” Matt said, shoving Ione ahead of him. She led the way to a corridor intersection a few hundred yards away, then grabbed a rail and put her head down, her eyes tight shut.

“What's the matter?” Matt asked.

Ione's eyes snapped open and she looked up at him, her pupils darting from side to side. “I—should I—should I have done that? I—the Union—”

For once, Matt didn't think. He took the terrified girl in his arms and hugged her close. She tensed against him, then relaxed. She was very warm, very soft, and Matt heard the faint, rapid patter of her heart. She smelled of new jumpsuit and fear-sweat and cheap shampoo.

For the first time, Matt could almost imagine—

What? Falling for her? For a HuMax?

They had nothing in common. He couldn't imagine her upbringing. He couldn't imagine what her life had been like. And he had no idea what the genetic rewrite would turn her into. But, in that moment, it didn't matter.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For taking them out.”

Ione nodded, not pushing away. Matt made himself end the embrace and hold her at arm's length, just so his spinning thoughts would stop their dizzy march.

“It was okay?” Ione asked him, her eyes darting across his face again.

“It was exactly the right thing to do,” Matt told her.

* * *

“It was the dumbest-ass thing you could've done!” Captain Gonsalves thundered. “Now I've got a ship full of Union- and HuMax-haters on my ass!”

“No, he doesn't,” said a woman in a featureless gray jumpsuit.

They were on the bridge, such that it was. External viewports were welded shut with steel plate in the aftermath of the battle. Half the instrumentation was still dark. But one large holotank still worked, and that's what Hector Gonsalves, the woman in the jumpsuit, and a half dozen other crew members were gathered around. Tags showed the vector velocity of the
El Dorado
relative to Tierrasanta. They were diving into the gravity well of a gas giant, trying to get a closer match to their destination.

“Yes, I do!” Gonsalves yelled. “This is the calm before the storm. They'll roast me at breakfast!”

“No, they won't,” the woman said, an ocean of calm. She was fiftyish, with graying hair and a slim, almost ascetic figure. She turned finally to look at Matt and Ione. “Don't mind him. He doesn't like the Union. Everyone knows that tech crew are a bundle of dicks.”

“Come on, Anne!” Gonsalves protested.

Anne pursed her lips. “They are dicks.” She held out a hand. “I'm Anne Raskin.”

Matt and Ione introduced themselves and shook her hand. Anne went serious. “You guys should still be careful. Sleep together?”

“What?” Ione and Matt asked in unison.

“In close bunks, I mean,” Anne corrected.

“Yeah.” Matt glanced at Ione. Her face was red.

“Keep it that way. For a while anyway. Who's sponsoring you, our captain?”

“Sponsoring?” Ione asked.

“They'll be working,” Captain Gonsalves broke in. “Go to the boards first thing tomorrow, pick something you're qualified for. Not weapons or ships. Internal. Still plenty of repairs to make.”

“Yes, sir,” Matt said.

“No sirs here!” Gonsalves snapped, but he seemed to be in a better mood. He let them watch the rest of the velocity-matching maneuver, then even gave them some tips on the highest-paying jobs.

That night, Matt and Ione made it a point to hang out as long as possible in Roberto's Retreat, until the crowd had died down and the ship had drifted off to a quiet place. Matt didn't know what he could ask Ione about her life, without stepping into a minefield of bad memories. So he spent most of the time answering her questions about the Union, about his life, about himself. He wasn't sure how much of it made sense to her, but she watched him with apparent interest.

When they got under the covers, it took him forever to go to sleep. All he could do was stare at the bare steel of the bunk above him, knowing Ione was there.

But in the next week, as they made their way to Tierrasanta, it became more of a routine. Matt and Ione took jobs together, doing a lot of the grunt work of slopping plastic putty into cracks, hauling broken stone, and replacing bent reinforcements from their big battle. They got some hard stares and nasty comments, but nobody openly engaged them.

And, as they worked, they learned the reason they were going to Tierrasanta. For all their repairs, there was a ton of work they couldn't do. They needed to go into a full Displacement Drive dock for more permanent fixes. There was even a betting pool on how broke the captain would be when he got the bill. Some of the more morose crew members speculated that it might be enough to bankrupt him.

Captain Gonsalves wasn't angry, Matt realized.

He was scared.

9

TECH

From orbit, Tierrasanta was a mix of dun-colored rocky continents with olive green bands of vegetation and calm, deep blue seas. The continental mass was far larger than Earth, with only fifty-five percent of the planet covered in ocean. Only a few wispy white clouds wreathed the planet, and two tiny polar ice caps looked almost like an afterthought.

It could be any of a dozen Universal Union frontier worlds,
Matt thought. A fringe planet valuable in terms of resources or strategic position, but too marginally Earthlike to merit full inclusion in the Union Congress.

It had taken the
El Dorado
three attempts to match their velocity to a proper Tierrasanta orbit. Three attempts, each with a half dozen Displacements. But now that they were in a stable orbit, the repair ships swarmed in.

Matt watched through one of the remaining portholes as they clustered around
El Dorado
. The ships were huge scaffolded structures, with utilitarian gray-white cargo boxes bolted along their length. On either end, bell-shaped fusion ports provided thrust. Along their length, cranes and zero-g manipulation arms sprang from the scaffolding. Some were already at work on the
El Dorado
. The faraway grind of steel on stone filled the ship.

Maybe the bankruptcy talk was overblown,
Matt thought. Everything seemed to be moving right along.

Still, it didn't hurt to be sure. Matt took every job he could in the spaceship dock. His Demon still hung on a rack, a hulking red humanoid figure, polished and perfect against the backdrop of battered ships. It wasn't as though Matt had to worry about any of the
El Dorado
's crew getting into it. The Demon was keyed only to Matt's neural interface.

But they could sell it wholesale,
a little voice whispered in Matt's mind.

And who wouldn't want a chance to dismantle some of the Union's most prized technology? Matt wondered. Captain Gonsalves's dismissal of the Mecha market didn't sit right with Matt. If he was really hurting for money, he'd find a buyer.

After all, there was nothing stopping them from simply pulling it out of the dock with a winch. Maybe they'd already sold it. Maybe that's why the repairs were going so smoothly.

After the first couple of days above Tierrasanta, Matt started wearing his interface suit under his worker's overalls. The damn thing was hot, and the tight silicone ripped at every regrowing body hair he had. But it would warn him if they were tampering with his Demon. If they tried cutting into the pilot's chamber, or if they hooked it up to a winch, it would let him know.

This is crazy,
Matt thought as he worked on welding the scaffolding in the spaceport dock.

No. It wasn't. He was just protecting his interests. It made total sense. Matt looked up at the shining red giant once again and licked his lips. Maybe he should just take the Mecha himself. Head down to the planet. Make his own deals. He could get in the cockpit on his break. Even just Meshing for a while—

Mesh. Matt groaned. He longed for it. That amazing high, that feeling he could do anything. That's why he was fantasizing about taking his Demon. He just wanted to get inside and Mesh for a while.

Then why don't you?
that little voice asked.

Because I don't need it,
Matt told himself.
I'm not addicted.

Yes, you are.
That voice again. That grinding, screechy voice, almost like the ghost in the machine was talking to him, here outside the Mecha.

No!

Just give in. Get in the cockpit. You'll feel better. It's your Demon anyway. Do what you need to do. You're a God inside it.
The voice beat at him, growing more and more insistent.

“Are you all right?” Ione asked.

“I'm not!” Matt yelled. Snapping back to reality, he saw that his plasma torch had cut halfway through the expanded-steel decking he was supposed to be repairing. Ione had put down her wrenches and come over to see to him.

“Sorry,” Matt said, pulling the torch up and snuffing the plasma. “I—I'm more tired than I thought.”

“You're not sleeping well,” Ione told him. “I hear you tossing and turning all night.”

Thinking about my Demon
. “If you're up to hear me, how come you aren't tired?”

“I don't need as much sleep as you do,” Ione told him with an impish grin.

Her mood had improved remarkably in the past week. Whatever process was at work rewriting her genome had yet to manifest.
Maybe her father was wrong,
Matt thought. Maybe she was never treated. Or maybe the transformation had already taken place, and it was too benign to notice.

“Then you should do something else,” Matt grumbled, unable to keep the irritation out of his tone.

“Sometimes I do,” Ione said.

Matt opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn't want to ask. He wasn't her keeper. They were together by chance, nothing more.

“Shit work, that,” Anne Raskin said, passing by on an overhead handrail. They'd learned Anne had grown up Union like Matt. She didn't say much more, except her parents had raised her on Geos.

“Yeah, sorry!” Matt called.

“Try to keep your mind on your job,” she called back.

“Yes, sir!” Matt said, unable to stop himself.

Anne's yell of “No sirs here!” echoed through the spaceship bay. All eyes turned to look at Matt. He reddened and sparked up the torch again to fix his error.

But even then, he kept looking up at the Demon.

* * *

Matt took a loading job down on Tierrasanta. He told himself it was so he could see another world, an Aliancia world. The Aliancia was supposedly the sleepy backwater of interstellar governmental organizations, a place where a few bribes would buy you a life away from the rules and regulations of the Union. His refugee ship had traded with some Aliancia worlds, but he'd never had enough spare money to go down to the surface. He'd never seen one.

But was that the only reason he went down? A little voice kept whispering to him,
Because you're farther away from the Demon.

And it did keep him at arm's length from the Demon. Didn't that prove he wasn't addicted? Didn't that show he could let it go?

Says the guy still wearing his interface suit,
that little voice said.

Matt shook his head. It wasn't addiction. It was just a logical precaution.

Being down on the surface was interesting. Tierrasanta, on first glance, looked a little like a Union colony world. At least until you noticed how old the port city of La Malinche was. Low, native stone buildings stretched out for several kilometers from the main spaceport, with a cluster of midrise skyscrapers standing at the edge of a broad river. The city had grown for decades, maybe over a century, spreading far from the first landings without a Union-style master plan.

La Malinche's spaceport itself was like any other. Kilometers-long runways of fusion-glassed soil stretched out in a patchwork pattern to accommodate horizontal shuttles, while a wide, black-blasted patch served VTOL craft. Large warehouses and hangars backed up to the city, served by an ancient rail line that snaked deep into La Malinche.

In addition to the
El Dorado
's landing shuttles, there were a dozen brightly colored craft bearing the red, white, and green Aliancia stars, and a gigantic VTOL lander that might once have been Taikong, but was now so modified that its origin was beyond recognition. It bore the Corsairs' thousand-dagger crest. Powerloaders swarmed around the thing night and day, busy with an immense load of cargo from La Malinche. Their operation far dwarfed the
El Dorado
's. Matt wondered which Corsair faction they were.

His curiosity spiked the next day when the
El Dorado
's ground crew had to pick up some specialized transmitting electronics from a warehouse near the immense Corsair ship.

The interior of the warehouse wasn't the usual neat rows of packaged gear; it was more a grab bag of everything from the latest FTLcomm antennae to ancient flat-screens, all placed haphazardly on giant racks that stretched fifteen meters to the ceiling. Surplus and reclaimed gear. That wasn't unusual. But one of the items was.

Matt stopped stock-still at the end of one of the junk corridors. In front of him stood a Union Mecha Corps Hellion, its chest unfolded and one of its arms partially disassembled. Carbonized blast scars marred its black-chrome finish, and its biomechanical skin was peeled back from the side holster that would normally hold a Zap Gun. The Zap Gun itself was gone.

A Hellion?
his mind screamed. Hearing that the Corsairs had Mecha was one thing. Seeing a pinnacle of Union-funded technology piled among racks of surplus tech junk was a punch in the gut.

A dark-skinned woman came out of the Hellion's chest cavity and sat on the stairs to the cockpit, her head bent low over a glowing slate. She wore a white jacket that was smudged with dirt and pale red hydraulic fluid, and her hair stuck out in crazy spikes from what was once a carefully pulled-back bun. She glanced up at Matt once and went back to her slate, almost as if she had never seen him.

Metallic footfalls came down the corridor behind Matt. He turned—and jumped in shock. Two more Mecha were headed his way. But these weren't Hellions, Demons, or anything he'd ever seen in the Corps. They were multisegmented, dull silver, with four arms, like the strange things he'd seen on Keller. They were flanked by two men in formfitting gray uniforms, with a Corsair thousand-dagger insignia on their chest.

Instinctively, Matt dropped behind the end of the racks, prepared to fight. What were those things doing here? Were they from that other Corsair ship?

“Already?” the woman on the Hellion stairs called out, looking up at the pair of Mecha.

“Afraid so, Dr. Lira,” one of the men said.

“Another four hours?” Dr. Lira pleaded.

“Not a chance. Boss wants this loaded now.”

“Two hours?” She looked back longingly at the cockpit.

“Now,” the man said, his voice firming.

Dr. Lira sighed and jumped off the stairs. A young man, also wearing a dirty white coat, came out from behind the partially dismantled arm, holding a strip of biomechanical muscle.

“Make sure you leave all the parts, Doctor,” the Corsair said, his voice hardening.

“Of course.” She nodded at the kid, who tossed the biomechanical strip inside the Mecha's chest.

The researchers stood aside as the two silver Corsair Mecha flanked the Hellion, picked it up, and carried it down the corridor and out into the spaceport. The men followed the Mecha. They headed straight toward the giant VTOL transport, where they quickly blended in with the rest of the Powerloaders that swarmed around it.

Those aren't Powerloaders,
Matt realized.

Seen at a distance, they looked like Powerloaders, but every single one of those things was the silver-segmented Mecha. Entire platoons of the things.

What kind of Mecha were those? And what was that faction?

A sigh made him turn. Behind him, Dr. Lira and her compatriot were watching wistfully as the Hellion disappeared up into the belly of the Corsair transport.

“Who are they?” Matt asked.

Dr. Lira started, as if seeing him for the first time. “Who are who?”

“The Corsairs that just took the Hellion.”

“They're Corsairs. I don't know. Wait—you know what a Hellion is?”

Matt frowned. Shit. He'd said too much. He grabbed at the collar of his coverall and zipped it up even farther, to make sure it covered his interface suit.

“We've gone up against the Union,” Matt said, standing up straight.

“What do you know about Hellions?”

Matt made himself laugh. It sounded forced and artificial. “I know they're hard to kill. Are you trying to come up with a better way to kill them?”

Dr. Lira shook her head. “No. They're—they're really odd technology. It's a blending of nanomachines and artificial neural structures, at its base level, but I have no idea how it's all coordinated.”

Interesting, Matt thought. He opened his mouth to encourage her to talk more, but she interrupted him before he could get started.

“And there's a neural interface to the pilot too,” she said. “I can't see how that can be safe. They've had that Hellion in the warehouse for six months, and all the hawks have been saying, ‘Use the damn thing to defend La Malinche!' But I don't want to know what would happen to the pilot.”

Mesh, wonderful Mesh,
Matt thought. “You've had this thing for six months?”

Dr. Lira pouted. “And we only got permission from the bureaucrats to study it a week ago. Now they've gone and sold it to the Corsairs, and we haven't got half the answers we need.”

Sold it.
Sudden spikes of fear jolted through Matt. Just as they could sell his Demon. Maybe they'd somehow disabled the warning systems. Maybe it was already gone.

No. He couldn't think that. Not now.

“It looks like that faction already has Mecha,” Matt said, nodding at the Corsair VTOL ship outside. “I wonder why they need a Union piece.”

“Are you kidding?” Dr. Lira said. “Where do you think they learned how to make the Lokis?”

“Lokis?”

“Those things,” she said, nodding at the silver Powerloaders.

“What faction are they?” Matt asked.

“I told you, I don't know. Maybe the Cluster, maybe Last Rising. Why? What faction are you from? Don't you have Mecha?”

Yes,
Matt thought
. We have one.

“No,” he told her.

* * *

Matt paid the cancelation fee on his loading job and went back to the
El Dorado
on the next cargo carrier, squeezed between two-meter-high plastic containers of raw soy protein. His mind chanted terrible thoughts:
My Demon's gone. They've already sold it. They only agreed to let me go down on the surface because they wanted to get rid of me. I'll never see it again.