Mecha Rogue (22 page)

Soto watched impassively, flinching only when the Demons came through the roof of the facility. Lena leaned forward intently, as if studying the scene, but her usually impassive eyes narrowed in sympathetic pain as the HuMax died. Perhaps thinking,
I'm a genemod too. Could they do this to me?

When it was over, there was another silence in the room for a long time. Eventually Soto shook his head.

“This could be faked.”

“It isn't,” Matt shot back.

Soto looked at the floor, as if unwilling to meet Matt's eyes. “The Union must have a reason for doing . . . what they're doing.”

“Yes. They're continuing the research they started a long time ago. The Union created the HuMax.”

Soto's eyes snapped up to meet Matt's. “Now I know you're insane. There's no possible way—”

Matt pressed on. “They're also looking for more HuMax technology they lost in the Human-HuMax War.”

Soto shook his head violently. “I don't believe it.”

“You were at Jotunheim. What became of it?”

Soto clamped his square jaw down hard, but said nothing.

“You were on Keller. What were they digging for?”

More silence.

“You're here on Forest, training new cadets. What are they ramping up for? More ragtag Corsairs? Or are they shooting for an army big enough to take down all the Corsair Mecha out there, and the HuMax they've lost control of?”

Soto shook his head and said nothing, but his expression was deeply troubled.

“Let me show you something else.”

Matt ran another clip, this one of Esplandian. It wasn't the best video in the world, or the most coherent, but Matt knew it was showing Soto something he'd never seen before: a neutral Corsair outpost.

Matt let it play through the Last Rising attack, and his fight with Rayder. At Rayder's first appearance, Soto sat straight upright. “He's dead!”

Matt held up a hand, and let the video play. The rest was too much. Soto didn't need to know about mind control, the Last Rising intelligence network, or anything more.

When it was done, Lena was the first to speak. “What are you going to do with this?”

Matt grinned. “Same thing I always thought I was here for: save the universe.”

Soto barked a hard laugh and then looked embarrassed. “Seriously.”

“First, I want to see if you'll join me.”

“On the basis of a couple of videos—”

“You know it's more than a couple of videos.” Matt turned to Soto, there at his side. He'd stood with him a year ago in front of the Union Prime via FTLcomm as she explained they'd have to sweep the whole thing under the rug. He knew there were secrets. More than secrets. Deep, dark, buried things, orchestrating all the happy public relations to keep the Union on an even keel. Or worse.

If anyone would join him, it would be Soto.

Soto looked to one side, then the other, his face twisted in a rictus frown. It was as if he was trying to deny the whole thing with a gigantic shake of his head.

Finally Soto's eyes rose to meet Matt's. “You believe in these . . . Corsairs?”

“I believe in people having a right to their freedom. And I believe they deserve not to be lied to by the people they trust to lead them.”

“Mikey and Marjan were here last week,” Soto told Matt. “If you'd been here when they were—”

“It would have been bad.”

“They would have recognized you! What would you do?” Soto still didn't look at him.

“I'd escape.”

“And if you couldn't?”

“I'd do whatever I needed to do,” Matt told him.

Soto's eyes finally rose to meet Matt's. “You believe so much—in Corsairs?”

Matt just nodded slowly. Anne began to speak, but Matt put a hand on her arm to silence her.

“Why are you taking this kind of chance?” Soto asked.

“Because I need you. It can't be just me.” And a decorated hero of the Union was one of the most important allies he could have.

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Same thing you're doing here. I just thought you might like doing it for the right team.”

“Corsairs don't have Mech—” Soto began, then bit back his words.

“We have Mecha. A lot of them like you've never seen before.”

More silence. In the Faraday-shielded room, it was total and absolute.

“You've had your doubts,” Lena said, her soft voice suddenly loud. Everyone turned to look at her.

“Lena,” Soto said.

The sergeant came to put her hands on Soto's shoulders. She looked him in the eye, and waited until he met her own.

“You don't like this assignment. Admit it.”

“Lena, I . . .” Soto trailed off and looked at Matt, almost as if for support.

Got him,
Matt thought, his heart hammering hard with excitement.

“I know about the new training camps,” Matt said.

Soto nodded. “Bag of shit, they are. Knocking these kids through in half the time, man with knife versus shark-style.”

“You weren't easy on us,” Matt said.

“They don't care here. Dead, insane. Doesn't matter. We're losing nine out of ten. Three out of ten dead.”

Matt frowned. “I thought Roth was under additional oversight.”

“He is. But it's not about cadets. It's about the big goal. They're mobilizing for a bigger operation than Pushback, but I don't know much more than that.”

Time for the offer. “Come and train our guys. I'll give you as much time as you need.”

Soto shook his head, his eyes bright and uncertain. “How can I trust you?”

Matt nodded. Time for the third video. He showed them the programmed Last Rising crew, and the ongoing release procedure. Soto watched the video twice, then looked up at Matt with new respect.

“You're doing this?”

“Yes. I am.”

Soto looked at Matt with an expression of mixed awe and distrust. He seemed completely unable to speak.

“If you don't go, I will,” Lena told Soto. She turned to Matt. “I assume you need Mecha controllers on your staff.”

“Lena, hold on!” Soto snapped.

She turned to him. “You've had your doubts. It's time to do what's right.”

“Can I think about it?” Soto asked Matt. “Come back in a week—”

“The Union's going to review the records here, match up their faces, and come asking hard questions,” Lena said. “It might not even take a week.”

Matt nodded. For all he knew, the Union was Displacing warships into orbit right now. “It's now or never, Major.”

“Colonel,” Soto corrected.

“Actually, if you join us, you won't have a rank. Or we can make one up.”

Soto looked shocked. “What are you, then? Prime? President?”

Matt laughed. “I haven't even thought about that yet.”

Soto stared long and hard at Matt, as if trying to decide whether or not he was kidding. Finally he nodded. “If you want me, I'm your man.”

Sergeant Stoll stepped forward. “I volunteer as well, sir.”

Matt grinned. “There won't be any ‘sirs' where we're going.”

Lena and Soto both looked completely confused, which caused Matt to break into laughter again.

Just before they left, though, Soto put a hand on Matt's shoulder and bent close to say, low and serious, “If I don't like what I see when we get there, you won't live thirty seconds.”

* * *

Back on Esplandian, Soto stared up at the grand array of Mecha, his mouth hanging open. Their firepower had swelled as the integration of Last Rising personnel continued. Dozens of Aesir, their Hellion-like Mecha, stood in ranks on either side of the dock, their smooth black curves a stark counterpoint to the rugged rock walls. Matt's Mecha pilots trained in Aesir, except for the handful of captured Hellions and Matt's lone Demon. Deeper in were racks of silver-segmented Loki.

“It's not polite to stare,” Lena Stoll said, giving Soto a sidewise grin.

She'd opened up during their transit on
El Dorado
, asking Captain Gonsalves tons of questions about his home, his vocation, his ship, his political philosophy, and Corsair economics. Gonsalves had seemed thrilled to have her as an audience, and went on for hours.

Matt's slate chimed, again and again, as they toured the docks. Matt looked at the screen and sighed. Everyone knew he was back, and there were a thousand decisions to make. He knew why Federico didn't want the leadership job.

Soto looked over his shoulder at the slate. “You really are their leader, aren't you?”

“He told you that,” Lena said.

“How should I know?” Soto looked genuinely pained. “Nobody even salutes anyone here!”

Captain Gonsalves, who'd come up to join them in their tour, laughed. “The kids do, when they're playing Corsairs versus the Union. But only when they're playing the evil Union.”

Soto's face compressed in brief anger. Then he sighed and addressed Matt. “So, what percentage of the Corsairs do you lead?”

“I don't know,” Matt admitted.

“You don't know?”

“We don't have a complete census,” Matt explained. “Hell, we don't even know how many of the Last Rising crew will join us as we release them from their programming.”

“Most of them,” Gonsalves said. Anne nodded in agreement. “I'd say, all told, the Esplandian Nation will end up being about a third of the Corsairs.”

“Esplandian Nation? Is that what you're calling it?” Soto asked.

“I guess so,” Matt said. “I hadn't really thought about that either.”

Soto frowned. “Names and symbols are important, Matt. Esplandian isn't bad. If I remember right, it's a fictional land in Spanish legend. That will connect to a lot of the Union—and, more importantly, it makes the Aliancia predisposed to like us.”

“We have good relations with the Aliancia,” Gonsalves said.

“But what flag do you fly?” Soto said.

“Flag?”

“You're not going to use the Corsair thousand-daggers flag, or Rayder's symbol?”

“I hadn't thought about that either.”

Soto stopped Matt with a hand. “You'd better start thinking about it! This stuff is important. The better you present yourself, the better chance the Union will accept it.”

Matt swallowed and nodded. Soto was right. He couldn't just play it by ear. A lot more had to be added to the plan. Which meant even more decisions.

Soto seemed to realize the weight he was laying on Matt's shoulders. He looked around and changed the subject. “So, where are these kids you need trained?”

16

LUCK

Soto and Stoll fell into Esplandian life as if they'd been born on the asteroid.

Soto worked with the Last Rising Aesir pilots, grumbling at first about the differences between the Aesir and Hellions, then finally conceding that yes, maybe the Aesir's weapons systems (a single micromissile that straddled the line between Fireflies and Seekers, and a single antimatter annihilation weapon built into the right arm of the Mecha) were simpler and easier to master than the Union Mecha. Unfortunately, the Aesir also lacked neural buffering, so they were as addictive as Demons. Documentation on their Merge ability was sparse, but it seemed that they fell somewhere in between a Hellion and a Demon in overall capability.

Matt stuck to his Demon, in the few times he went out. The Aesir were no match for it. He could take out an entire squad by himself.

But add the Loki to the equation, and things got dicey. Their neural disruption capability edged the balance of power to the Aesir. Matt was always able to prevail in the end, but Soto had a simple, blunt explanation for that:

“The kids are crap,” he told Matt. “They have way too much to unlearn. They've probably been programmed in some way or another their whole lives.”

Matt told Soto to see if anyone from Esplandian wanted to try the Mecha. Soto posted the job, but he was surprised to see very few takers even at “hazardous duty” pay grades.

“They know about the addiction,” Gonsalves said. “They're not willing to throw their lives away for an infernal machine.”

“It's only a mental addiction,” Soto grumbled.

“Is it?” Gonsalves asked. “Unless he was just being dramatic, I saw Mr. Former Major here pass out from withdrawal.”

Soto looked away.

“There are ways to manage it,” Lena Stoll said. “We can minimize the risk. All Mecha Auxiliary once piloted Mecha, and we do not require Mesh.”

“But you
want
it,” Gonsalves said.

“Desires can be damped,” Lena said, almost as if she were emphasizing her impassive demeanor.

Gonsalves sighed. “It's a rough chance, no matter how you paint it.”

“We'll bring in new pilots from other Last Rising worlds,” Matt said.

Soto groaned. “Which will be just as shit as the ones we have here.”

“There's an ace in every team,” Matt told him. “It's your job to find them.”

“Great,” Soto said, bitingly sardonic. But Matt knew, deep down, Soto was enjoying the challenge. He'd find the aces. And he'd train them.

And, with any luck, they'd be ready before the Union struck them first.

* * *

One eighteen a.m. Dr. Arksham's office was completely silent, except for the low rush-and-tick of Ione's respirator.

Matt sighed and rubbed his eyes. Ione's cheeks were deeply sunken, her eyes almost lost in their sockets. Her life support's coolly glowing screen showed all bodily functions optimal: breathing at sixteen breaths per minute, blood oxygenation within normal limits, and pulse at a strong sixty-five beats per minute. But those healthy numbers were a fiction, something imposed on Ione by the machine. Without the respirator and cardiac maintenance, she'd already be dead.

“You really care about her.” Dr. Arksham's voice came from the doorway. Matt jumped and looked up.

“Yes,” Matt said. “I do.”

Arksham came to lean over Ione. He put a palm on her forehead, even though the screens read her exact temperature to two-digit precision: 40.13 degrees.

“Why?” Dr. Arksham asked.

Why do you care for her? That's what Arksham was asking. Matt thought of a thousand instant answers. Planet 5. The injustice. The Union.

“Maybe I'm part HuMax,” Matt said, finally.

Arksham shook his head. “What do you mean?”

Matt spent the next fifteen minutes giving Arksham a brief account of his life, focusing on his father's genemod tricks and his Perfect Record. He even explained how the Perfect Record had seemed to expand into a frenetic probability calculator when he'd fought Rayder.

When Matt was finished, Arksham nodded. “Genemod. I should have known. I wondered how you were able to beat Rayder.”

“Have you heard of anything like—like what I experienced?”

Arksham shook his head. “No. Never. Your Perfect Record sounds like it betters even a typical HuMax memory. You don't know what genetic sources your father used for your genemodding?”

“No.”

“We can find out, if you'd like.”

Matt jumped. “How?”

“I'll have our Last Rising intelligence network run a sequence on you.”

“Do it!” Matt's heart pounded. After all these years, after Roth's dismissing him as “not HuMax,” maybe he'd finally have an answer.

Arksham took a blood sample from Matt and ran it into a compact chrome instrument. When he was done, the machine chimed.

“What now?” Matt said.

“Now we wait. This machine just does the sequence. Last Rising techs do the cross-reference.”

“How long?”

“A few days, maybe more.”

Matt sighed, and looked again at Ione. Arksham saw the direction of his gaze and said, “Yes. I've had them run her genome too.”

“What did they say?”

“Whatever the rewrite is, it doesn't cross-reference.”

“Will she recover?” Matt asked.

Dr. Arksham looked at Ione for a long time. When he spoke, he didn't turn to face Matt. “You should worry about yourself, not her. This plan to ‘change the Union' is suicidal.”

“Someone has to do it.”

Arksham shook his head and stood up to pace. He said nothing for a very long time. Finally he stopped and turned back to look at Matt.

“A long time ago, a famous man—I forget his name—said something like ‘The measure of a good idea is how hard it is to ram it down people's throats.'”

“Aiken,” Matt said, suddenly remembering his American Principles class in Aurora University. “It didn't quite go that way, but I know what you mean.”

“You really think you can change the Union?” Dr. Arksham asked.

“‘If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it,'” Matt quoted.

“Who's that?” Arksham asked.

“Einstein.”

A nod. “An excellent quote.” But Arksham just shook his head and looked even more troubled.

“What's wrong?” Matt asked.

Arksham fixed him with tired eyes. “For all Einstein's ideals, they still built the atomic bomb.”

Matt nodded. “And we learned to stop using them to wipe out worlds wholesale. Change is possible.”

Arksham sighed. “I just hope your change doesn't start with a war.”

* * *

Matt's breakfast with Soto and Lena was interrupted by priority comms from Gonsalves, beeping for attention on his slate. Matt turned on the video and saw Gonsalves down in Esplandian's docks, overseeing the unloading of supplies from Tierrasanta.

“What are we short on?” Matt asked, anticipating Gonsalves's emergency. It was normal to come up short on important supplies, but Anne Raskin was usually the person who reported it to him.

“We're not short. We're plus.”

“Plus what?” Matt said, irritated.

“I think you need to come down here.”

“Why?”

Gonsalves grinned. “Just come on down.”

Crap,
Matt thought. Between the late nights and the constant grind of leadership, he didn't want to play any of Gonsalves's guessing games.

“Tell me.”

“No,” Gonsalves said, his grin getting bigger. “Just come down. And smile. This is a good plus.”

Matt grumbled, but he knew Gonsalves wouldn't drag him away for no good reason. He left his breakfast behind and went through the corridors to the docks, with Soto and Lena in tow.

When he got there, he found Captain Gonsalves talking with two slim, dark-haired men wearing casual Aliancia attire. Two very familiar men.

“Peal?” Matt cried, pulling himself along the rail faster. “Jahl?”

Peal laughed and waved as Matt approached. Jahl just nodded, grinning. Matt brought himself to a halt only a meter away from the pair, his mind going a thousand miles per minute. Peal and Jahl, the wunderkind of Hyva. Former Mecha Cadets. One a full Hellion pilot. For long moments, all he could do was stare at them.

“He looks confused,” Peal said.

“Surprised,” Jahl added.

Peal nodded. “After all, how can we possibly be here?”

“Yes, a real problem for their security, he's thinking.”

Matt frowned. They were right. If Peal and Jahl could find him, could the Union be far behind? Was there a Union warship parked outside Esplandian?

No. Gonsalves wouldn't be standing there comfortably, watching in good humor. That meant Peal and Jahl had—

“You defected from the Union?” Matt asked.

“Like we loved it there so much,” Peal said.

“No big surprise,” Jahl added.

Matt nodded. Peal and Jahl had been “invited” to Mecha Training Camp as an out for some highly illegal hack work they'd done on Hyva. They'd never really been good obedient Mecha Corps—they'd looked at their status as a way to get deeper into the Union systems.

“How did you find us?” Matt asked.

“It wasn't easy,” Peal said.

“Don't worry, the Union is too stupid to put it together,” Jahl added.

Peal frowned. “For now.”

“The probability that they will do the deep-cover research necessary to determine this location is very low—”

“But nonzero.” Peal cut his brother off.

Nonzero. Esplandian's docks seemed suddenly chill, and Matt shivered.

“Essentially zero for the hacks at UARL,” Jahl argued.

“But you have to admit—” Peal began.

Matt rolled his eyes. If he let them continue, they'd argue for hours. It was what they did. He cut Peal off. “Why the hell are you here?”

“And it's great to see you too,” Peal said.

“You know what I mean!”

Jahl saluted. “We are here to join your great and valiant forces, sir!”

Matt reddened, embarrassed. “Don't do that.”

Peal elbowed his brother. “Tell him.”

“Tell him what? That it's easy to put together fake Union reports about Matt Lowell being lost in a Mecha exercise and the disappearance of Major Soto and Lena Stoll? Or what we found when we unsealed his records? Or that it's just a hop and a jump from that to conclude the Union doesn't have any qualms about using genemods like us, any way they want?”

“No. Tell him the important part.”

Jahl frowned. “Shouldn't we at least sit down first, have a drink, something?”

“Tell him!”

Jahl groaned, looking visibly uncomfortable. “The Union has expanded Pushback II to include ‘unspecified Corsair locations in near-Union space.'”

Matt swallowed, feeling the blood rush out of his head. “They know where we are.”

“No,” Jahl said.

“But they'll be looking,” Peal added.

Captain Gonsalves's grin had disappeared. He cleared his throat. “I think I could go for that drink now.”

* * *

After shots of vacuum-distilled whiskey in Hector and Federico's private dining room, the full story came out.

It seemed the Union was expanding Operation Pushback II to target specific Corsair factions, including the Cluster, Last Rising, and what they called “nonspecific close-range Corsair incursions.”

Peal and Jahl brought comprehensive files with them, and the video and text glowed brightly on the NPP screens in the darkened dining room. The list of resources dedicated to the mission was staggering. Not just
Helios
and
Juggernaut
, but a half dozen new Warship-class fast-recharge Displacement Drive ships. Over a hundred Demons and twelve hundred Hellions were listed as supporting.

“If they find us, Esplandian is dust,” Gonsalves said morosely.

“They have to find us first.”

Gonsalves nodded, but remained glum. “Not only that, but the Union had noted ‘recent upsets in the Last Rising faction, with significant shifts in their overall activity.'”

“So they know I killed Rayder,” Matt said.

Peal looked confused. “He died on Jotunheim.”

Matt and Gonsalves exchanged glances.

“What?” Peal asked.

“So the Union didn't know Rayder led Last Rising?”

It was Peal's and Jahl's turn to look confused. Matt brought them up to date on what had happened. The duo sat silently as he talked, but their slack expressions spoke of complete amazement. They rocked back when Matt told them about deprogramming the Last Rising members, and his plan to bring the truth to the Union.

“You're a crazy man,” Peal said.

“And that's why we love him,” Jahl added. But he wasn't smiling. His face was creased deep in a frown, worried.

“We can help,” Peal said.

“We already have a team of five thousand informants in the Union.”

“Ninety-eight percent of whom are known, and being fed incorrect information,” Peal replied.

“By us,” Jahl added.

Peal grinned. “Well, not by us anymore. But you understand. Your information is not necessarily accurate.”

“We can cross-check it,” Jahl said. “Interpolate and synthesize.”

“But we can't hack,” Peal added. “FTLcomms hacking is tricky. They'll have decaying neutrino trails to back-trace—”

“—unless we use proxies—” Jahl said.

“—but even proxies can be matrixed—”

Matt's laugh interrupted the arguing twins, making them turn and stare at him. He held out a hand. “It's good to see you guys again. Welcome to the team.”

Jahl looked confused. “You trust us?”

“We could be working for the Union,” Peal added.

“Not a chance,” Matt said. “If it was the Union, you would have shown up with a half dozen warships.”