Mecha Corps (16 page)

Then the Imp started trying to pull Matt’s arms off.

Matt screamed. A high and pure note, echoing in the tiny pilot’s chamber. His Hellion’s muscles tensed around him, writhing in sympathetic pain. Matt pushed frantically at the Imp, but the old Mecha was strong. Immensely strong.

But he wasn’t going to get beaten by a toy. Matt couldn’t get his hands together for a Fusion Handshake, but maybe he could use an RCM. He triggered the missile, then wondered . . .

BOOM
. The Hellion’s chest cavity rang like a bell, and Matt’s vision went blurry.

But the Imp was off him and reeling. Matt shoved it backward and triggered his Fireflies. They scorched out the Hellion’s torso, enveloping the Imp.

But the Imp stepped through the brilliance, seemingly unhurt.

Matt didn’t think. He rushed. Speed was his advantage. The Imp barely moved before Matt had his hands around its head. Matt looked down into the dark eyes of the old machine and softly said, “Good-bye.”

As he triggered the Fusion Handshake.

It was awesome. It was ultimate power. It was the end of all things. Matt shivered in delight. The ancient Mecha went purple with heat.

But it didn’t disintegrate.

Matt had a single moment of complete and utter shock. The Fusion Handshake
ended
things.

An icy hand twisted his guts, and a rough and terrible voice whispered in his ear,
This isn’t just an exercise. This is a test.

A potentially deadly one.

 

The Imp reached for him, and Matt ran.

Toward the bay. Toward the Corsair ships. That was the only way he would complete this mission. Run in, smash and grab, get out. He had to stay away from that hellish Imp. It could have any mods, any weapons.

It could kill him.

Matt heard his own breath loud in the cramped pilot’s chamber. He felt his sweat, suddenly freezing, between his skin and his interface suit. He remembered his first thought about this exercise:
easy as pie.

Matt laughed. His Perfect Record only went so far. He could do a drill once and remember it forever, but this wasn’t like that. This was unpredictable.
This is something I have to figure out.

Buildings streaked past him, and the Imp fell behind. Through a gap in the buildings, he saw a patch of dirty water. The bulbous shapes of three Corsair ships squatted in the middle of the cove.

There! Get there, get the hostage, and get out.
Speed was the key. Speed would do it.

Pain flared in Matt’s back. Suddenly, he was flying headlong. Muddy dirt road passed beneath him. He splashed to a stop at the edge of the moat. Through his kinetic-feedback suit, the water on the Hellion’s biometallic skin felt oddly soothing, like a warm bath.

He’d been shot. On the wraparound viewscreen, a dotted line traced the Imp’s missile that felled him; the screens told Matt both his left and center nexuses were compromised. Damage to its muscles made them feel partially numb, like scar tissue.

He flailed in the water, trying to rise. But the Hellion’s balance was shot. Even a random leap was out of the question.

Matt’s viewscreen showed a large Corsair transport flanked by two smaller fighters. The transport was spinning up its ignition drive for launch. Steam rose from the boiling water around it.

Matt thrust with his legs and managed to flip the Hellion over. The Imp scuttled toward him, a slow-motion death.

Only a single chance clawed at the surface of his mind. “Zap Gun,” Matt whispered.

A compartment sprung open in the Hellion’s side. Thin fingers drew forth the Zap Gun, bristling with potential destruction. The thrumming tension of the weapon’s antimatter heart permeated his senses. So warm. So comforting. So—

“Antimatter weapons are not recommended—” Sergeant Stoll’s voice, her icon glowing on the screen.

But her voice was drowned out by the throb of imminent power. Matt raised the weapon and sighted.

“—for close-quarters combat.” Stoll said.

She’s right,
Matt told himself.

But it was a fleeting thought, lost behind a tiny voice that gibbered
Easy as pie, easy as pie,
or another voice, not his own, that defiantly hooted in laughter and detached amusement. And as the Imp lumbered closer, something so primitive and ancient it shouldn’t even be in space, let alone be able to withstand the blast of a Fusion Handshake, Matt also had to wonder,
What other surprises does it have for me?

He pulled the trigger.

The air ripped apart. For long moments, there was nothing but the Zap Gun’s brilliance. There was no Cochran’s Cove, no Mecha Corps, no training camp, nothing but matter being furiously converted into energy.

The Zap Gun’s beam touched the imp, sparking hundreds of shards of blazing, spinning, mirrored light. Where the shards touched nearby buildings, glass shattered and concrete flowed in red rivers. Rebar flashed to vapor, and contents blew to dust. For a moment, the Imp stood as a black outline against the spectacle, and Matt had time for two coherent thoughts.

—
damn it, zero-permeability coating, damn it, damn it—

and

—
the whole town is burning, the whole town is burning—

before the Imp simply blew away like the last fragile embers of a fire.

His kill list lit with words that gripped his stomach in a painful vice: COLLATERAL DAMAGE: 1 CIVILIAN CASUALTY.

Of course. The Zap Gun should never be used in a town. It was too risky. Of course someone would get hurt. Of course someone would die.

“Mission failure,” Sergeant Stoll said. “Terminating.”

“No.” Matt’s voice was low, almost a growl.

“Cadet, your mission is terminated.” This time Major Soto.

“No!” It didn’t even sound like him.

Sergeant Stoll, slow, commanding. “Cadet Matt Lowell, your mission is terminated. Return to base.”

“No!”

“Cadet Lowell, this is Major Guiliano Soto. You are ordered to return to base. Acknowledge your orders.”

For a moment, it seemed like a good idea. For a moment, Matt saw himself acknowledging the order and going back to the base. But then the desire to compete and be the best tugged at him again.

“Orders acknowledged. I will return to base when my assignment is complete.” He wasn’t going to lose to an Imp.

Behind him, the Corsair transport rose in a column of steam and shimmering fire from the bay. The afterburn of its orbital rockets sizzled on Matt’s back.

Voices yelled, but he was done listening to them. It was time to finish the mission. Do the impossible. Easy as pie.

As if in response, Matt’s regeneration chime sounded. Matt stood.

One of the Corsair fighters screamed toward the sky, following the cruiser, making Matt think,
All I need to do is fly.

Matt thrust into the cove, splashing great white sheets. When the water was deep enough, he dove straight down. His Hellion’s hands came together and changed form. His head tucked in. His legs came together and joined. Suddenly, his Hellion was something like a cross between a shark and a submarine.

Matt shot at the remaining fighter like a torpedo. For a moment, he saw its pilot looking back at him, eyes blank behind his helmet. Other crew members tried to swing weapons toward him as talons sprung from the Hellion’s fingertips to pierce the fighter’s skin. Instantly, Matt felt something like a bond with the fighter, as if it were . . . something he had known for a long time. A friend.

“You will not Merge with unauthorized components!” Major Soto’s voice thundered out of the comms. “Emergency abort! Cut power!”

Matt reached deeper within the fighter, seeking its core, whispering to its simple-minded computer control. A strange thought, sudden in its intensity:
Merging is universal. Merging is what all things wish for.

Matt’s Hellion melted into the fighter, veins of his living metal running deep within the dumb alloy, rerouting, reconfiguring, and regrowing. Merging. Changing.

The thing that rose from the bay wasn’t the fighter anymore. It wasn’t the Hellion either. More than anything, it looked like a bat. A spiky black, metallic bat with fusion-tipped fangs.

Somewhere deep inside, Matt hung in his control suit, pressed close against pulsing metal muscles, not hearing Lena’s commands or the curses of Major Soto. There were only two things: the Corsair freighter ahead of him, spewing overheated nuclear exhaust as it raced toward orbit. And the insignificant peninsula of Mecha Training Camp, falling away below.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Matt muttered, lost in Mesh, unaware he was muttering, unaware that he wheezed painfully in the thinning air, unaware of the sweat beading into icicles on his forehead.

Something happened behind him. At first just a feeling. A tremor of incredible power. It coursed through Matt’s mind.

The merged Mecha sensed it. His POV swung sickeningly as sensory enhancement kicked in. The screens zoomed down through the haze of the atmosphere to focus on Launch Facility 99. Matt started, dimly remembering his ride down in the shuttle. Less than two weeks ago. It seemed an eternity.

The broad concrete expanse of Launch Facility 99 split in two, revealing a grand cavern almost completely full of water. Rippling shadows of brilliant lights and black scaffolding enveloped a barely visible red shape.

In the scaffolding, something moved. Something like a Hellion, its mathematically perfect curves shaped into a brilliant equation of Armageddon. This beast was twice the size of a Hellion, and its rippling metallic skin was tinted bright red. As if it didn’t have to hide. As if nothing could hide from it.

Then, with an eardrum-compressing boom like a close-range energy grenade, the thing leapt from the pit.

A fiery speck rocketed at Matt.

Another surprise,
he thought. No time to think about it. The escaping Corsair freighter was close. Close enough to touch.

Matt’s razor-sharp hand prodded at an engine pod. Matt clenched his fist, feeling the exquisite pleasure of tearing metal. The cruiser sang back at him, wishing to Merge. The whole Corsair freighter listed sharply to one side as an engine sputtered. Matt had one glimpse of the curve of the earth against black sky speckled with stars and time for one coherent thought:
Oh, shit
.

The Corsair ship tumbled out of control, and Matt was stuck along for the ride. Earth and black sky strobed sickeningly as they whirled.

Matt closed his eyes and thrust his hands deeper into the ship. It wanted to Merge. If he completed the Merge, he could save himself.

Something hit him hard. For a moment he spun even faster, seeing nothing. Then the earth steadied beneath them. Clinging to the scarred hull of the freighter was a giant red Mecha. It was easily three times the size of his Hellion.

Even in the depths of Mesh, Matt’s mind gibbered:
This isn’t an exercise. This isn’t a test. Someone is playing with me.

Hot rage exploded, and Matt lunged at the red Mecha.

Before he’d moved a yard, the giant machine closed the gap and grappled with him. Matt tried to twist out of its grip. But it held his arms seemingly without effort.

Then it ripped off one of his arms. Matt squealed. He’d never felt pain so intense. His vomit spattered on the floor as his left arm fell useless at his side.

The red Mecha pulled off his other arm. In the tiny pilot’s chamber, the noise Matt made didn’t even sound human. He surged against the confines of the pilot’s chamber, went rigid, and passed out.

As the mock Corsair freighter fell toward earth, the red Mecha ripped chunks of living metal off Matt’s merged Hellion fighter. It revealed an egg-shaped mass of shining muscle, the remains of the Hellion’s pilot chamber.

Green Florida coast grew close, swelling fast.

With a mighty rip, the red Mecha pulled the metallic egg from the Corsair and made a sonic leap. Leaving behind a speed trail of crimson, it shot upward just as the Corsair impacted murky swamp. Billows of steam rose golden in the morning sun.

 

Matt awoke in the swamp. His head pounded like after a night of doing shots of vacuum-distilled space whiskey. He squinted and raised a hand against the low sunlight.

His hand protruded from the ruptured sleeve of his interface suit.

Matt pushed himself up, slipping in a tangle of silicone and dead, hardened biometal. A giant red Mecha towered over him like a skyscraper.

The Corsair. The exercise. Memory crashed back like a twenty-pound sledge banging into an anvil into his head. Every dumb move, every stupid mistake.
Easy as pie.
And his Perfect Record meant it was etched in his mind forever.

“Ah, shit,” Matt said.

“Such eloquence,” someone said. Someone familiar. Matt blinked against the sun and saw Dr. Salvatore Roth. The man on the balcony with the senator. The voice on the slate. Now standing over him. He was tall and slim, with a hard-chiseled, craggy face as immobile as granite. Dark pupils fixed on Matt, looking through him with no hint of emotion.

Matt realized Dr. Roth wore a control suit like his own. And that the chest panel of the red Mecha was open.

“You . . . your Mecha . . .” Matt asked.

Dr. Roth cocked his head to one side, but his expression didn’t change.

“What kind of Mecha is that?” Matt asked, licking his cracked, bleeding lips.

Dr. Roth looked back at the towering red giant, as if seeing it for the first time. For a long time, he said nothing.

Then: “Demon class. Entirely new. I must admit, it was satisfying to finally test the least of its functional modes.”

Matt nodded. In that moment, his only thought was primal :
I want.