Mecha Corps (29 page)

If Matt could ever figure out how to hunt him down at all. Officially, the Union never had any presence on Prospect, so all the records were locked away. Matt remembered more about Prospect than any screen could tell him, and he still didn’t have enough to go on. Just the Corsair insignia and that memory of the Corsair leader with HuMax eyes.

“I’ve got my own location problem,” Matt said.

Yve’s eyes widened fractionally. “In regard to what?”

Matt shook his head. Yve wouldn’t help him if he knew about his insane quest. He probably wouldn’t understand it. He’d say something like,
Why are you wasting your life on a ghost?

“Would you take the Hellion offer?” Matt asked.

Yve frowned. “I’ve talked to Dr. Roth. About you. I’ve reviewed your records. And I know Roth wants to find a way to, ah, use you.”

“What does that mean?” Matt asked.

Yve shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps a Demon that’s designed to be leader controlled, rather than shared-Merge controlled. Maybe something else. I know he has more ideas on the drawing board.”

More ideas on the drawing board.
Matt leaned forward, licking his lips. A shade of that old Mesh compulsion rose in his mind:
Yes. More. Back in. Cockpit.

Yve’s slate shrilled. He flipped it open and looked at it. All expression disappeared off his face.

“I have to go,” Yve said.

“What’s the matter?” Matt asked.

Yve’s hand convulsed on the slate, snapping it closed. His eyes stared off into the distance. He looked like a dead man.

“Yve?”

Yve kicked off the table and shot for the exit. Matt thought about following, but before he could move, his thoughts were interrupted by Peal and Jahl. They rocketed into the lounge at what must have been thirty kilometers an hour, to make a hard landing on the stainless-steel wall. They flipped up to where Matt was sitting on the roof and caught themselves, breathless, on the edge of the table.

“You have to see this,” Jahl said.

“Everyone has to see this,” Peal added.

“Yes. You’re right. Coupling to the lounge’s wall screen.”

Shouts of “Hey!” and “What happened!” came from the patrons as the bar’s wall screens flickered and went black, showing only a single crimson insignia in the center. The insignia was similar to the Corsair’s thousand-daggers standard, with one significant difference: in this design, a single, large center dagger was orbited by a hundred smaller blades.

“. . . stand by,” the wall screen’s speakers boomed. “Please stand by. Please stand by . . .”

“I didn’t mean
we
had to show everyone,” Peal said.

“This transmission is happening on every world in the Universal Union,” Jahl said. “Simulcast across the FTL network and transmitted by local satellites. They’re just waiting for enough people to pay attention.”

“They?” Matt asked.

“Corsairs,” Jahl said.

“Rayder,” Peal added. “He’s stepping out from the shadows.”

Matt’s stomach flipped over. No wonder Yve had retreated at full speed. But what were they planning? Matt used his slate to send a message to Michelle’s access card. COME UP TO DECOMP NOW.

COMING, she sent back.

The transmission’s chanting stopped. The screen cut to a grainy, bit-rotted FTL image of a man dressed in a uniform bearing the a version of the Corsair insignia with a single dagger. He stood in what looked like a simple, spare office with windows that looked out over a dark city beyond. His hair was dark, almost blue-black. His face was angular and intense, as if carved from a block of granite by an inspired sculptor. And his eyes—

“I am Rayder,” the man said.

Matt rocked back with the force of recognition. His body burned, as if immersed in a sun. A storm of insane rage built in him. But through the storm, one thought screamed:

He hadn’t been chasing a ghost. The man was real. The HuMax were real. The greatest evil alive was the man he’d sworn to kill.

All of his success—in life, in school, in the Mecha—it was all suddenly meaningless. He was a fool, lazy and confused, letting Ash’s death consume him, letting Kyle’s antics enrage him, letting Michelle distract him with the possibility of love. He should have never wavered from his childhood purpose for an instant.

On-screen, Rayder smiled at the camera. It was the smile of a snake, a grin without a shred of humor. “I address you today first to make a simple demonstration.”

The screen changed to show a battle diagram. A Union Displacement Drive battleship, the UUS
Atlas
, floated over a green planet tagged CANTARA.

A new Displacement Drive ship appeared, this one tagged RAYDER 1. A second Displacement Drive ship popped into the frame, tagged RAYDER 2. Dozens of battleships swarmed toward the UUS
Atlas
. Shards of the UUS
Atlas
flew off into space, and a haze of fighters converged on the Union ship.

Stats began scrolling from the
Atlas
. Damage reports. Defenses mobilized. Time to charge the Displacement Drive. Deployment of internal troops. And, perhaps most important:

The screen changed again as everyone in the Decompression Lounge watched breathlessly. Matt was aware that other cadets and Auxiliaries had flowed into the bar to watch the show, but that was unimportant. His brain resonated with only one thought:
Rayder killed my father.

Now surveillance video showed a Mecha dock. A dozen Hellions stood, bolted down to metal mesh. Raw stone rose above the Mecha. A large control tower extended out of the stone. The glass walls of the control tower had shattered, and a woman hung impaled on the shards. The external air lock was open, showing glimpses of fighters and plasma explosions.

Three space-suited figures shot across the screen toward the Hellions. Tags identified them: CAPT. KYLE PETEROV, LT. PAULA VORJOY, and LT. BENE ROSSBARD.

“Kyle,” Michelle called out, echoing the screen in utter surprise. Matt looked up. She’d come to hang by his side.

Kyle reached his Hellion as a heavy cargo ship roared in through the air lock, thrusters full on in heavy braking. The interior of the cavern briefly lit as bright as day. Kyle held tight to the edge of the Hellion’s cockpit as he was battered by the ship’s exhaust. His two companions went tumbling out of the frame.

Space-suited troops poured out of the cargo ship. Some headed through the control tower, deeper into the ship. Some went to the main air lock.

And one group went toward the Hellions. Led by a single man, they moved with calm purpose, as if their actions had been scripted. They wore Rayder’s single-dagger version of the Corsair insignia.

As Kyle pulled himself into the Mecha’s cockpit, the Corsair in the lead raised a pistol and shot. The round hit Kyle in the upper arm. Air and blood fountained in a pink jet out of Kyle’s interface suit. Kyle sagged, barely maintaining his grip on the Mecha cockpit. He dragged himself in. Another bullet glanced off the Hellion next to him.

The screen changed to show a cockpit view of Kyle. His face was white and his eyes were bloodshot as he slapped a patch on his suit. The hissing stopped and he pulled in great breaths, whooping through the microphones.

As the cockpit closed, Kyle strapped himself in and brought his hands up to his helmet, ready to remove it and plug into the Mecha’s neural networks. He mouthed something as the cockpit folded up.

Something stopped the cockpit from closing. Kyle cursed and struggled with his straps. A hand reached down toward Kyle. The screen suddenly went dark.

The screen changed viewpoint again. The Corsairs had lodged a scaffoldlike device between the sections of the Mecha’s cockpit, holding two of its pieces open. The lead Corsair scrambled into the cockpit.

The screen went back to Rayder, who spread his arms to his audience, as if embracing them. “You see our power now. We can take any Union warship. We can smash any Union planet, as we had our revenge on Geos. We now even hold your Mecha technology.”

The camera panned to focus on Rayder as he paced. “But that is what I’ve had to do to level the field. Your Union would never seriously consider what I propose, if it wasn’t for the threat of the same violence they hold over every Corsair.”

“Subliminal influencing technology detected,” Jahl said. “Filtering signal.”

“My offer is simple: it is time for the Union to choose a new Prime. I enter my candidacy, provided that all votes from all Union worlds, frontier and core, are counted alike.”

“Elect me Prime, or die in fire,” Soto ground out, coming up to join the group.

“Elect me Prime. I will move the Union forward. And in time, I will show you what the Union hides in its labs. I will reveal how the Union has been lying to you all these years.”

Rayder continued. “Has it chafed you that the Union hides its greatest advancements in secure labs? Have you wondered if there is something more than longevity treatments and pervasive computing? There is.”

Rayder stopped to gesture outside at the city beyond his window. The camera’s focus changed to look out over it. When it snapped into focus, Matt gasped.

Carbon-darkened spires reached for the sky. Ruined buildings slumped together, like drunks holding each other for support. The stubs of elevated walkways projected from the buildings, arching over broad avenues that glittered with frost. Some structures spilled green-tinted light out onto the streets. Some were sheared off to reveal complex crystalline machinery. Huge squares hosted the fallen remains of monumental architecture. One was nearly intact. It showed a man and a woman looking up toward the stars, their gazes intent and piercing, even in ruin.

“10,956,” Matt said in sudden realization.

“What?” Michelle asked.

“That photo. My Perfect Record. My dad.” Matt spat. The ideas were too big. His father had shown him that image. He’d seen that sculpture and that city.

Did that mean his father had been there? To the world where Rayder was broadcasting from?

It made sense. There had been times when Dad was away on Displacement Drive ships for weeks at a time, while Matt stayed behind on Prospect. Was one of those trips to Rayder’s world, where he’d taken that image?

“10,956,” Matt breathed. He remembered that one clear as day. A perfect match for the scene outside Rayder’s window.

Was the location of that world what his dad was trying to hide from Rayder all those years ago? Or had Rayder already been there—and he’d attacked his dad on Prospect as retribution?

Either way, it all fit together.

All he had to do was remember what his father was working on. Then he’d have the answer he needed—and the answer to the Union’s location problem.

Matt searched his memories, letting his Perfect Record take him back to those far-off times. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he had a picnic with his dad on the hot surface of Prospect, during one of the times the near-constant wind died down. As he watched a video of Geos and Eridani, but not the Geos and Eridani he knew. These planets had rings. Spindly and thread-thin, they arced across the night. Something they’d lost in the HuMax war, his dad told him. They’d lost a lot of things.

He remembered the last time his father came back from his Displacement Drive jaunts. He’d been tired, withdrawn. Fighting with the Union, he said. Fighting with himself. But then it’d been Matt’s birthday, and there’d been cake, and Matt hadn’t thought about it anymore.

Matt searched the days after that last trip, remembering whirling star charts on the screens at night, seeing anew how his father had handled those gleaming HuMax artifacts with a thoughtful expression, as if he knew how precious and dangerous the objects were that were now in his possession.

But the star charts were of known worlds, not of uncharted planets with shattered cities. And his dad had spent most of his time in the sealed lab. Matt wasn’t allowed in there. Nobody was allowed in there. Dad had hidden too much.

Try as he might, Matt couldn’t put together the location of Rayder’s home world.

But if the data could be recovered from the lab on Prospect . . . if there was any chance, however small . . .

Matt tore himself out of the seat and rocketed at the exit. He had to find Yve. And this time, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

 

Matt’s headlong plunge led first to Yve’s office, where a Mecha Auxiliary explained that Yve was out. Matt jumped over her desk and opened the door to Yve’s meeting room. No Yve. He turned to find Peal, Jahl, and Michelle waiting behind him. They must have followed from the lounge.

“Gotta find Yve,” Matt told them, heading for the door.

“He’s in Cruz’s office,” Jahl said, peering at his slate. “But you shouldn’t—”

Matt didn’t wait to listen. He rocketed out of Yve’s office and down the corridor to Cruz’s quarters. In the anteroom, armed Auxiliaries snapped to attention and went to block Matt as he shot into the room. Matt flipped over, caromed off the floor, flew over their heads, and hit Cruz’s office doors. He pulled on the latch without effect. The door screen read: MEETING IN PROGRESS.

“Hands up, cadet!” bellowed one of the Auxiliaries, over the snick of his MK-1 safety release.

Matt gave the door one last tug, then turned. One of the Auxiliaries held his weapon pointed at Matt. The other covered Michelle, Peal, and Jahl, who’d just entered the anteroom.

“I have to talk to Yve Perraux!” Matt said, raising his hands.

“Turn around,” the Auxiliary said. “Hands on your head!”

Matt groaned, frustration building in him like a pressure cooker. “I know how to solve the origin problem!”