Mecha Corps (6 page)

Michelle blew out a big breath and nodded.

Pechter turned to Matt. “You’re next, rich boy.”

Matt opened his mouth to correct Pechter, then stopped himself. Why did he care? Let everyone make their assumptions based on the way he dressed. Let them be wrong.

Matt got up in the seat. The thin padding covered hard metal, but it wasn’t cold. In fact, it was almost uncomfortably warm.

“What kind of test is this?” Matt asked.

“I told you. Mind Raze. Or Neural Interface Assessment, if you want to be formal and academic-like.”

“But what does it do?” Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Michelle watching intently.

Pechter sighed, as if Matt’s question was the greatest burden in the universe. “It determines whether or not you can use the advanced brain-machine interfaces that are part of your training.”

“So Mecha are run by mind control?”

“Ye—Oh, hell.” Pechter looked away. “Lie back. I have to start the test.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

Pechter crossed his arms. “Like everyone says, you can waltz out at any time. It’s a helluva honor just to be invited to training camp. No real shame in washing out. With all the data they have on you, I’m sure you’ll still get lots of job offers from your daddy’s rich friends.”

“Then this test is required.”

Pechter set his jaw. “That’s right. And we’re on a clock. Should I tell all the other cadet candidates who’s holding up the line?”

Matt lay back. The translucent cowl descended over his head, blocking his vision. For a moment, the entire world was cool, blue-white light.

Then it went away and Matt saw nothing. He tried to move his head, but he couldn’t see or feel his body anymore. His senses registered zero input, other than the sensation of space, as if he were floating in an immense, pitch-black room.

In the darkness, something moved. Something that scratched at the edge of his vision, ultraviolet and infrared. Matt wanted to run, but his body didn’t respond. He was numb. He couldn’t move anything, not even a finger.

The thing in the dark moved closer. Matt felt its presence, like static electricity in the desert, like a musty odor in an old room.

It touched him, and brilliant, acid pain cascaded through Matt. He tried to thrash against it. Every time he tried to move, the pain reached a new crescendo.

Relax,
a distant voice whispered.

Matt thrashed again. Pain exploded. It was worse than the chemical nerve stimulation that refugee-ship police used to extract confessions. It was worse than anything he could imagine.

There is no pain in acceptance,
the distant voice said.

Matt relaxed. Immediately, the pain stopped. The thing wrapped its static-musty embrace over him. Matt had to force himself not to struggle. It was like being smothered.

It pressed inward. Into him. Into his brain. Matt screamed a silent scream. Talons raked through his mind, scrambling his thoughts, rooting through Matt’s cortex. Every neuron rifled, sorted, and cataloged.

And he heard that distant voice again. Now it bellowed throughout his body from his head to his toes. And it was overlaid with feelings: intense interest; ravenous hunger.

What are you?
it asked.
What made you?

Matt’s thoughts turned backward. Toward his childhood. Toward his father.

Suddenly he was six years old again.

 

Matt ran ahead of his dad, down the long, dusty hallway deep below the surface of the planet Prospect. He was just back from another one of his Displacement trips from Eridani, and Matt was happy to see him.

The lab crew had strung bright phosphorus utility lights along the ceiling, but much of the hall was still draped in shadows. Rooms off to either side gaped like yawning mouths.

Matt didn’t like the dark. Once, he’d found a skeleton in the shadows, slumped over the rusted remains of a mining laser. In the shaking light from his flash, it almost seemed to move. It had come back in his dreams, chasing him down endless halls that bent to no refuge.

“One hundred forty-one,” Matt’s dad called behind him. Matt grinned. The picture game. Dad was seeing if he could remember the image from its index number.

“A pink flower.” The picture was vivid and defined in Matt’s mind. Twenty-one petals, shot through with thin veins of white. A bright yellow center. An insect hovering nearby. “With a bee.”

“Seven hundred ninety.”

“An asteroid. Stars in the background.” Matt tried to match them to constellations he knew, but couldn’t. “Far away from Earth.”

“Four.”

“You, in a lab coat.”

“Five thousand, one hundred ninety-three.”

Matt frowned. That was a picture of a world a lot like Prospect, except the sand ran up to bright green water under a clear blue sky. “A world. With water.”

“A beach on Eridani,” his dad said. “Someday I’ll take you to a planet with beaches.”

Matt looked back at his dad. He was looking at the photo that Matt had just described on his slate. His face had that sad, faraway look he got whenever he thought about Mom.

Dad looked up and saw Matt. He thumbed off the slate and put it in the oversized pocket of his white lab coat.

“No more?” Matt asked.

His dad shook his head. “No more. I don’t need to test you further. You remember everything you see.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Nobody does. Not like you.”

Matt walked in silence for a while. His dad had told him this before, but it didn’t seem possible.

Dad caught up with Matt and put a hand on his shoulder. “You haven’t told anyone, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s very important you don’t tell anyone. Your Perfect Record is a small gift. I wish I could do more. But it was difficult enough separating out that trait from the . . .” He trailed off, then squeezed Matt’s shoulder. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Like I can’t tell everyone you’re a secret agent for the Union.”

Dad laughed. “I’m not a secret agent. The Union just trusts me to do some very important research for them.”

“A secret agent.”

Dad looked doubtful. “In a lab coat?”

“Secret agent scientist!”

Dad laughed. They’d reached his lab, a small room with walls covered in copper mesh. On stainless-steel tables were pieces of twisted wreckage. They were tagged with holo-floats calling out atomic maps and carbon dates, as well as compositional analysis and genetic sequences. Matt didn’t know what they were at the time, but later on, reviewing his memories, he’d understood more and more.

His dad turned on the wall screen and leaned close to it. Cross-sectional views of Prospect’s tunnel maze rotated on the screen, bright with false colors.

“Be careful what you bury,” Dad said. “You never know what may bloom.” He wore that faraway look again.

He was probably thinking about Mom, Matt knew. He’d never known his mother. She’d died in childbirth. Matt’s Perfect Record didn’t reach back to the womb.

Footfalls echoed from the hallway. A man brought himself up short at the doorway and darted wide eyes from Matt to his dad. It was Yve Perraux, the head of security for Union-Prospect Research.

“We have to evacuate!” Yve gasped.

Dad frowned. “I haven’t heard the—” A warning Klaxon blared through the concrete hallways, cutting him short.

“Dad?” Matt said.

“Not now,” Dad said. To Yve, he asked, “Corsairs?”

“Maybe.” Yves eyes skittered to Matt. “Maybe worse.”

“No,” Dad said, toggling the wall screen to the security view. A number of multicolored dots descended toward the curved edge of a tan planet. They all converged on a single target: a green block labeled UNION-PROSPECT RESEARCH FACILITY 1.

Their facility. Matt’s guts clenched. He knew what Corsairs were from videos. They were the bad guys. They killed people. And they were coming here. What would they do then?

“Dad—,” Matt began.

“Matt, sorry, but
not now
.” Dad fumbled frantically with the mass-storage-system interface on one of the desktops. He slotted his slate down into it. Its screen showed it filling with data.

Dad pulled the slate out as soon as it was full, and typed in commands. Matt didn’t know what they were at the time. Later, he saw they were instructions to wipe and reformat their entire data system.

“I’m scared,” Matt said.

“Just a second, just a second. Gotta do this,” Dad muttered. “Just a second; then we go. I promise. You’ll see those beaches—”

The wall screen flashed a red warning dialogue. Even at six, Matt knew what it was. It was what happened when you wanted to make the data system do something that it couldn’t.

Dad pounded a fist on the table, making artifacts jump. “No, no, no, no!” he chanted. He pounded out new instructions on the keyboard. More red dialogues appeared.

“They’re already in the system!” his dad cried, turning to Matt with an expression of abject horror.

Matt’s stomach rolled over and he felt his bladder loosen. He’d never seen his dad look like that.

Dad scooped up the slate, grabbed Matt’s hand, and pulled him out the door. Matt’s feet tangled in the hall. Dad swept him up and carried him, like he used to when Matt was a baby.

Dad came up short at the lift. It was still crawling its way down the thousand-feet-deep shaft. It had never seemed so slow. Dad pounded on the control panel.

“We’ll make it,” he said. “We’ll make it.” It was as if he were trying to convince himself.

Corsairs. A thousand images from the news came to beat at Matt: scruffily dressed men in armored spaceships descending on a new colony town, pelting the rough concrete buildings with explosives. A shaft on a Displacement Drive ship, filled with bodies. Flickering red lights at the edge of the Union, like torches outside a castle.

What if the Corsairs were already on the surface, waiting for them? Matt whimpered and squeezed his dad’s hand tighter.

“We’ll make it,” Dad said.

Finally, the lift came. Dad slammed the door shut and pressed the button marked SURFACE a dozen times. With a groan, the lift began grinding upward.

“We will make it,” Dad repeated, his voice cracking.

Matt remembered the security display and the dots. He remembered how fast they had moved. He counted out the seconds. The dots should have already reached them.

An eternity later, the elevator socked into its cage in the surface hangar. The outer doors of the building were open, revealing a dry, sandy landscape under a beige sky. Wind howled outside, and dust swirled into the hangar, driven by Prospect’s seemingly endless wind. One of their three six-man Hedgehog transports rose into the sky outside.

The other Hedgehog sat on the steel-grate floor only fifty feet away, it’s cargo door open. A Powerloader stood like a sentry outside the Hedgehog’s cargo bay, clearly abandoned in the rush to leave. Its ready light still glowed.

Through his fear, Matt felt a strong pang of desire. Rex Cooper, the ops steward, had let him drive it once. Strapped in its battered steel-tube frame, he felt like a giant. Rex had to chase him around the hangar before Matt gave up the cockpit.

“See!” Dad said. “Close up the ’Hog, and out we go. We’ll make it!”

The screaming rush of missiles echoed through the hangar. A brilliant flash came from outside, followed quickly by a rolling crump of thunder. The rising Hedgehog was gone. In its place, a dark transport hung in the air. Figures dropped from it.

Dad punched the EXTERIOR DOOR button. The steel doors began grinding closed, laboring through layers of sand and grime.

“Come on!” He dragged Matt toward the ship.

They didn’t get far. Blue-white light flashed in front of them, and the doors buckled inward. Matt’s eardrums compressed painfully. Then he was flying backward, sliding along the expanded steel grate as pieces of the door flew overhead.

Matt looked up. His dad lay ahead of him on the ground, his leg bent back at a crazy angle. Red blood stained his khaki pants. Dad tried to push himself up off the ground and hollered in pain. His leg rolled limply. Even back then, Matt knew it was broken.

Something inside Matt snapped.
Dad is hurt!
His dad! Dads didn’t die, except in videos he wasn’t supposed to watch. Matt wailed. It was a shrill sound, echoing off the metal walls.

Through the door, black figures came. One, two, three, a dozen. They wore scarred, bulky black space suits and carried short, deadly looking weapons with gaping barrels and well-worn magazines. Their visors were mirrored, concealing the troops’ faces. They reflected only the steel girders of the hangar like a fun-house mirror.

On the suit helmets, Matt recognized the red, thousand-daggers insignia of the Corsair Confederacy. Back at the base circling Alpha Centauri A, he’d played Union vs. Corsairs with the kids. He never wanted to play as a Corsair. Never. He’d only play as Union. He wanted to bring people together. He wanted to save them. Why would anyone play as a Corsair? Hot tears streamed down his cheeks.

Matt’s dad groaned and tried to stand again. It was a terrible sound. Matt shivered, his mouth dry. Even without his Perfect Record, he knew he’d never forget this day.

“We’ll make it!” his dad said, dragging himself along the floor toward Matt. His limp leg trailed blood.

The approaching Corsairs looked at one another, as if in amusement. They didn’t hurry. They just sauntered. As if nothing could stop them.

A red-hot dagger of anger shot through Matt. He didn’t think. He just moved. He ran for the Powerloader.

He expected the Corsairs to yell or try to intercept him, but he didn’t turn around to check on them. He had to get in the Powerloader. Fast.

He scrambled up the steel tube and threw himself in the seat, punching the control panel for the smallest operator. The hand grips and foot pedals whirred closer. He strained to reach them. Slipped in a foot pedal. Caught a hand grip.