Mecha Rogue (26 page)

“And there is Arcadia,” Roth said. “On Eridani.”

“Arcadia?”

“The lab of labs. It may be the origin of the HuMax themselves. It is, I understand, largely inactive. But it may have evidence—evidence of Union-HuMax activity dating back to the Expansion.”

Matt licked his lips. “Why not do it yourself?”

“Unlike you, I do not have the advantage of surprise. I also do not have sufficient control over my Mecha pilots, as you have demonstrated to great effect yourself a number of times.”

“What do you want in return?” Matt asked.

Roth formed his lips into a smile. It was a mechanical gesture, like something programmed into an automaton. “I only wish to see the Union returned to balance, like you.”

Matt shivered, despite the warmth of the room. Somehow Roth wanting nothing from him made the offer even more terrible.

I will pay the price in the future,
Matt thought.
No matter what he says.

But what could he do?

Matt made himself extend a hand.

Roth did the same.

19

LIBERATION

In the Space Between the Union's Core Worlds, Free Stars Alliance Displacement Drive ships gathered. Five in all. FSS
Helheim
, led by Matt Lowell. FSS
El Dorado
, led by Captain Horatio Gonsalves. FSS
Midgard
, another Last Rising ship, now led by Lena Stoll. FSS
Niflheim
and FSS
Utgard
rounded out the Corsair ships, commanded by Anne Raskin and Uve Next, a HuMax, respectively.

Each ship was only one jump away from its destination. All Core Worlds: Aurora, Geos, Greenland, Utopia, and Eridani.

“If Roth's bullshitting us, we're all dead,” Soto said, his voice distorted by the FTLcomm transmission.

Matt nodded, but didn't respond. He was deep in the pilot's cockpit of his Demon, cradled by magnetorheological fluid and watching the world through his wraparound viewmask. It was as if he were fifteen meters high himself. Matt smiled, basking in the warm glow of Mesh. It had been a long time since he'd been in the Mecha.

I want to stay here forever,
Matt thought.

Yes, this is your place, this is your time.
Scratchy, like static and dust.

But that was the Mesh talking, eating deeper into his mind. It was a risk he had to take. He would deal with the addiction if—when—he got out of this alive.

Matt surveyed his screen. Five insets showed key POVs of his Mecha commanders on board each Displacement Drive ship. Four new faces, and Soto. Soto had introduced Matt to his best Mecha pilots the night before. All four were HuMax. Soto seemed embarrassed, muttering about the lingering effects of Rayder's programming and the rushed program, but Matt wasn't surprised. HuMax and genemod made better Mecha pilots. Which made Soto's proficiency that much more startling.

Unless he was a genemod himself, and didn't know it. There were so many secrets hidden in the human universe, Matt didn't think he could be surprised anymore.

And what the top pilots were didn't matter. Genemod or HuMax or human. They were all just people. What mattered was that Soto trusted them, and Matt trusted Soto.

Soto was inside an Aesir, within
El Dorado
's familiar spaceport dock. Waiting for the command.

Numbers spun down in front of Matt. Everything falling into place. Right vectors. Right timing.

Three.

Two.

One.

“Displace,” Matt said.

In the Space Between, four of the five ships winked out of existence. Only one,
Helheim
, remained behind.

From here, Matt would watch and wait. For now.

* * *

Soto's POV was at first a jumble: a quick puff of escaping gas from the
El Dorado
's docks; then the lush green surface of Aurora filled the screen. Every one of their drops was a deep one, to avoid the worst of the orbital weapons platforms.

Other Aesirs came to fly alongside Soto, joined quickly by squirming masses of silver Lokis as they descended deeper into the atmosphere. White contrails of flash-frozen ice crystals streamed from every razor edge of the Aesirs.

As he watched Soto descend over the fuzzy FTLcomm link, Matt's Perfect Record recalled his rationale for the mission.
If the Union can use Mecha to surgically extract diplomats with no civilian casualties, why can't we use them to extract HuMax from research facilities the same way?

“But you know someone will die,” Soto had told him.

“We don't know that,” Matt had responded.

“We might not kill anyone, but the Union will,” Soto had said.

Matt hadn't responded to that. Soto knew this was necessary. He knew there wasn't any choice. They had headed down this road, and they needed to drive it to its end. Soto just wanted to make sure Matt understood the consequences, and accepted it when the Union pulled out the stops.

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS TARGETING
, Soto's POV screamed. Lock sensors traced lines down to the surface of Aurora—to the same nondescript installation they were heading toward, a university lab set at the edge of a broad bay.

Of course. The Union wasn't stupid.

“Break formation!” Soto yelled. “Lokis, dive deep and try to get a line on the target. Aesirs, use antimatter arms!”

“No antimatter weapons!” Matt said. “You'll wipe out the whole facility.”

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS LOCK
, Soto's POV shouted.

The world went white. Soto sheared off, his Mecha tumbling wildly. One of the other Aesirs beside him disintegrated with a shrill, high-pitched explosion that sounded eerily like a scream.

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS TARGETING
.

“If no antimatter, looking for suggestions!” Soto yelled.

Matt ground his teeth. The facility had finally wavered into view. They were still a hundred kilometers out. A hundred kilometers of antimatter beam through atmosphere was a recipe for disaster. They could easily slice the whole lab to ribbons.

“Move in fast and loose! They won't be able to lock on you. Use the Mecha like you mean it!” Matt said.

“What?” Soto spat. “I can't move like you do in a Mecha!”

“You can if you want to! Do something unpredictable!”

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS LOCK.

Another beam split the sky, like reverse lightning. This one went wide and wavered for a moment, only grazing one of the Aesirs.

Matt grinned. A hundred kilometers of atmosphere also meant the Union's targeting would be off too.

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS TARGETING.

Soto groaned and muttered something about impossible moves. Then his flight jets screamed upward an octave, and he rammed himself into the nearest Aesir. Soto's cockpit reverberated like an immense gong, and the two Mecha fell toward the surface, their jets still screaming.

But the
ANTIMATTER WEAPONS TARGETING
icon flashed off.

Above Soto, two other pairs of Aesirs performed the same stunt as another brilliant lance came from the research facility. One of the Aesirs evaporated in the beam.

But now they were close. Less than ten kilometers. The research lab swelled in Soto's enhanced vision. Low-set concrete tilt-up buildings huddled on a spit of land that extended into a bay. A single, well-maintained road stretched through the grasslands and forests back into the mainland. It looked completely innocent: researchers performing routine science in the middle of nowhere.

Except, of course, for the antimatter gun installation at its near side.

“Targeting lock capability!” Soto yelled. “We can take out the gun now.”

ANTIMATTER WEAPONS TARGETING. LOCK.

“Do it!” Matt yelled.

Even before his words left his lips, Soto targeted the antimatter weapon and fired his arm gun. The two beams met in midair and interacted with a deadly concussion. A sonic boom flattened the grass on the hilltops and spread concentric waves to grassland miles away. Intense heat fried the skin of Soto's Mecha, and internal temperatures screamed toward overload. Down on the surface, grass exploded into fire and concrete melted and ran red like lava as the beam impinged on the antimatter gun installation.

Two other beams joined Soto's. The lab's antimatter gun flashed briefly through all the colors of the heat spectrum: orange, yellow, white, blue—then it was nothing but an expanding gas ball at the edge of the research labs. Molten steel and stone showered down on the facility, burning craters in the reinforced concrete roofs.

“Down, all Mecha!” Soto yelled.

The wave of Lokis accelerated in front of Soto like a flying carpet. To his side, the three remaining Aesirs dove straight at the facility.

Depleted-uranium shells streaked at Soto's Aesir as they reached the edge of the facility. They
spanged
off the Aesirs and Lokis without any effect. Soto brought in his Mecha squad to land—just as two Hellions stepped out of a concrete bunker.

The Union Hellions never even got a chance to raise their weapons. The Lokis bored into them, pinning the black Hellions with their crablike pincers. And when they struck, the Hellions spasmed and fell prostrate on the ground, immobilized.

“Careful!” Matt said. “They may have countermeasures for the system disrupter, according to Roth.”

“Acknowledged,” Soto said.

Sure enough, the Hellions began struggling to their feet. Fireflies erupted from their chest launchers, scattering the Lokis. Compartments opened on the sides of the Hellions as they began to draw their Zap Guns.

With a roar, Soto charged the nearest Hellion. His antimatter arm vibrated and thrummed with power as he slammed it into the Hellion's visor. It vaporized in a resounding explosion, and the Hellion dropped to its knees.

“No antimatter on the ground!” Matt shouted.

“Relax, I know what I'm doing,” Soto said. “You may be good at Merging, but I'm good at fighting.”

Soto turned to see two more of his Aesirs taking out the other Hellion. It went down, hard, on the Aurora grass, digging long furrows behind it. Like the first, they'd only destroyed the sensor arrays, so the pilots inside were safe.

Lokis poured into the main building, shattering glass and pulverizing concrete as they went. They flowed down wide utilitarian corridors, smashed through steel-reinforced doors, and cleared the way for the Aesirs. Soto's POV showed the heat signatures of the scientists retreating in front of the Mecha horde. Guards returned fire at the Lokis. Bright muzzle flashes from within the building spoke of energy or missile weapons.

But the Lokis quickly overwhelmed the guards, drilling deeper into the complex. Merged with the local computing systems, they quickly confirmed Roth's data: two hidden sublevels to the complex, set twenty meters below the main buildings.

As Soto entered the research facility, the Lokis had just found the elevator shaft leading down to the sublevels. A blast took out three of the Lokis as they scrabbled down the shaft, but the structure held its integrity. More Lokis found the other mines and disabled them before Soto and his Aesir came down.

Soto took the lead. His POV that he shared with Matt descended into darkness. At the bottom of the elevator shaft, wan light flickered from an irregular opening.

When Soto reached the bottom, he had to crouch low to fit into the underground space. The Lokis had already blasted through the reinforced doors and scattered plastic cubicle walls like fallen buildings. Several frightened technical staff still cowered in a conference room near the back of the space, but none took any action against the Lokis.

“It's a damn office,” Soto growled as he pushed through into other chambers. There was nothing there except cubicles, meeting rooms, and NPP displays.

“Still another level—” Matt said.

An explosion from the back of the space hit Soto like a hammer. His POV shook with the force of the blast, and billowing dust reduced his vision to IR outlines. Soto cursed and pushed forward toward the source of the explosion.

Soto's vision slowly cleared as he moved forward. Soon he stood at the edge of a gaping hole, twenty meters in diameter, which revealed the lower level of the complex. Shattered Lokis twitched and writhed at the edge of the hole. Others were Merged with door consoles in the space below. Some had sacrificed themselves to prevent the explosion from destroying everything below. Some were keeping the rest of the facility from self-destructing.

And, in the antiseptic level revealed by the blast, what they'd come here for: dozens of HuMax, cowering against the walls in abject fear. None of them were grotesquely transformed like the HuMax on Planet 5, but they were all recognizably HuMax. Wide violet-and-gold eyes stared up at Soto's Aesir, quivering in expectation of annihilation.

Matt closed his eyes. “Ione,” he whispered.

“What?” Soto asked.

“Nothing,” Matt said. “Go on.”

Soto leapt down into the lower level. The HuMax scattered as a guard turned to open fire on Soto's Aesir with a handheld fusion pistol. Soto plucked the gun out of the man's hands and crushed it with his Mecha's talons. A gout of flame erupted from his hand, and the guard fled.

Behind the guard was a fallen HuMax and a large burn mark on the floor. The guard had been using his gun. In the face of discovery, they'd been slaughtering the HuMax.

Cleaning up their mess.

“Fuck me,” Soto breathed.

Matt shook his head, his eyes filling. It was no different than Planet 5. No different than what they had done to Ione's father and what they had tried to do to Ione. He shouldn't be surprised. But it still hit him hard.

“Go deeper,” Matt told Soto. “Save who you can.”

Soto and his Aesir pressed deeper into the facility. In terms of scale, it was a tiny fraction of the size of the secure environment on Planet 5. The HuMax apartments were deserted. They were simple but comfortable, a far cry from the cells on that remote ice world. It seemed the only HuMax left were the dozen or so waiting to be gunned down.

In the grim images that streamed over the FTLcomms, one thing was clear: this was a secret lab. A prison. A concentration camp. One where the Union was working on HuMax. On a Core World.

“Are we still live?” Matt asked Lena Stoll.

“Yes. Our repeaters are being taken offline, but we're getting increasing rebroadcast throughout the Union,” she told him.

Matt nodded. “Good.”

On the other screens, similar imagery was coming in from Geos and Utopia. Only the Greenland mission had failed to penetrate the facility. In all cases, the labs were small and limited. But, also in all cases, they housed HuMax and UARL scientists. Geos's staff managed to kill most of the HuMax before Matt's Mecha team stopped them, but the images of the drugged superhumans lining up obediently for lethal injections was even more damning.

In all cases, most of the UARL scientists surrendered quietly. One, a staff director, took his own life with a depleted-uranium slug. Some remained sullen and taciturn; others gave halting questions about their research, their guilty eyes darting away from the cameras' glass eyes.