“Clay,” Nasta warned. “I am seeing a lot of red lights. This console here is nothing but red lights. That isn’t good.”

  “No, it’s not,” Clay said. “But don’t worry. I’ll keep us together long enough to do what we need to.”

  Clay watched the rollers come straight for them. He opened a small hatch by his right elbow and tapped at the hidden keypad inside.

  “Thank you for entering the override code,” a warbling computerized voice announced in the cockpit. “How may I assist you?”

  “What the holy hell?” Crystal called out. “Didn’t know it still had a working computer.”

  “It does,” Clay said. “It’s not an AI, which is good, considering what I’m about to do, but it’ll be help enough to make sure we get out of here alive.”

  “Get out of here?” Nasta asked. “What do you mean? Are we done fighting?”

  “We were done before we hopped in this cockpit,” Clay said. “I told you this was not a battle mech. It never stood a chance. I just needed to know what it was capable of before I finalized my plan.”

  “What may I assist you with?” the computerized voice asked once more.

  “Self-destruct protocol,” Clay called out. “No override. Set for two minutes.”

  “Two minutes?” Crystal shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  “I’d rather be alive and stark raving mad than dead,” Clay said. “How about you?”

  “Never had to make the choice before,” Crystal said. “First for everything, I guess.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” Nasta said.

  “You don’t have to,” Clay said as he unstrapped and stood up from the pilot’s seat. “You just have to jump. And help my ass up when we hit the dirt. This is going to hurt. A lot.”

  “We’re bailing?” Nasta asked.

  “Unless you want to stick around in this rust bucket and get blown to bits when it self-destructs,” Clay said and gave her a kind smirk. “You have to trust me, Nasta. This is our only hope. A mech like this isn’t going to last much longer than the self-destruct countdown anyway.”

  “Okay,” Nasta said as the countdown started and the computerized voice began to echo shrilly in the cockpit. “I guess it’s best to die trusting you than to die with doubt in my heart.”

  “You should needlepoint that,” Clay said and held up his hands before she could admonish him. “Kidding. I’ll get Firoa to do it.”

  That got a smile from Nasta. She unhooked her straps and stood up as well. “Now what?”

  “You ready to throw some rocks?” Clay asked Crystal.

  “Sure am,” Crystal said. “Just give the word.”

  Clay grabbed the back of pilot’s seat as two cannon blasts slammed into the mech’s hull. Smoke began to fill the cockpit.

  “You see the space between the rollers and the mechs?” Clay asked.

  “Yes, sir, I most certainly do,” Crystal said.

  “Put all of those boulders right there,” Clay said.

  “Not at the rollers?” Nasta asked.

  “Don’t need to,” Clay said. “This baby will take care of them. They’ll be on us in just a few seconds as it is.” He clapped Crystal on the shoulder. “Bombs away.”

  Crystal nodded and let loose with the cargo claw. The arm stretched out over the top of the mech and the claw opened wide, sending the boulders flying through the desert night air. The rollers all took defensive measures, just as Clay knew they would.

  “We go now!” Clay shouted and pulled at Nasta, heading to the cockpit door that led directly onto the main cargo hold. “We get the hell off this thing and hide our asses. Then we wait for the dust to settle and see where we’re at.”

  Nasta didn’t argue, just let Clay tug her along through the cargo hold to the winch line at the back hatch. He clipped her to the winch line and waited for Crystal to catch up. Once he had the old man clipped on, Clay hit the hatch controls and the back of the mech opened wide to reveal the stand of boulders he had piloted them up against.

  The mech rocked as thousands of bullets hit the hull. But there were no cannon impacts. Those weapons were busy trying to shred the boulders flying up and over the rollers. The mech shuddered and Clay almost lost his footing, but he held steady long enough to slam a palm against the winch controls and then shove them all out into the open air.

  The line raced toward the ground. It was going much too fast for them all not to be seriously hurt when they reached the ground.

  “Jump!” Clay yelled as he pointed at the pile of boulders. “Get over the pile and get your heads down!”

  Bullets whizzed past them. There was a sting of pain across his hairline and he felt the warm trickle of blood start to make its way down his forehead.

  “Jump, dammit!” Clay yelled as he unhooked himself from the line and eyed the boulders in front of him. It was an easy enough task to shout at someone, but not so easy to do for oneself. The boulders weren’t as close as he had thought. “Just do it!”

  Nasta unhooked and leapt from the line, her arms outstretched as she reached for the boulders. Clay was about to jump as well, but he saw that Crystal wasn’t moving at all.

  “Come on, old-timer!” Clay yelled. “Jump!”

  The line kept dropping fast, and Clay had about three seconds before the point of no return. The first second ticked by and Crystal hadn’t acknowledged him. Clay began to yell again, but Crystal’s body rotated enough to see there was no reason to do so. The man’s chest was an empty cavity, dripping blood and bits of lung matter out onto the ground below.

  “Shit,” Clay growled as he bunched his muscles, aimed for a flat spot on one of the boulders, and launched himself clear of the line. He had liked the old-timer.

  Clay hit the boulder hard and his shoulder, not to mention basically every other part of him, screamed out in protest. Pain wracked him, and he thought he’d pass out right there and then. But consciousness hung on long enough for Clay to scramble hand over hand across the flat boulder. He grabbed onto the one above him and hauled his ass up onto it, coming face to face with Nasta.

  “We have to get on the other side of this,” Clay gasped. “And I need your help.”

  “I figured,” Nasta said as she put her hands under his armpits and tugged him up and across the boulder.

  “I can stand,” Clay said as he put his feet under him and twisted in Nasta’s grip. She let go of his armpits and moved her hands to his upper arms to keep him steady and from falling to the ground below.

  The two of them scrambled over the pile of boulders just as the cargo mech detonated.

  The heat and wind from the explosion was enough to send them tumbling down the other side. Nasta wrapped herself about Clay and held him as they bounced from one huge rock to another until they came to a painful rest on the red desert dirt.

  “You alive?” Nasta asked.

  “Barely,” Clay said. “Help me up. We’re not done.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Nasta asked.

  “Now it’s time to fight,” Clay said. “Get me around this pile and I’ll show you.”

  Nasta gave him a confused look.

  “Listen,” Clay said. She started to argue, but he held his hand up. “Just listen. What do you hear?”

  She listened for a second. “Nothing.”

  “Exactly,” Cay said. “We need to take advantage of that nothing before it turns into something. Come on.”

  Nasta helped him around the boulders, and the two people took a second to take in what they saw.

  “Holy hell,” Nasta said. “How’d you know that would happen?”

  “Not my first rodeo,” Clay said.

  Before them lay the ruins of four rollers, some more intact than others but none operational. Behind that was the real prize. Three mechs lay on their backs, completely inert.

  “God bless a low-level EMP,” Clay said. “We have about two minutes to get to a mech before the systems boot back up. Come on.”

  22

  The word “hurry” was a relative term for Clay. He knew he needed to get to the closest mech ASAP, but his body was not exactly cooperative. His belly hurt, his shoulder hurt, his legs hurt, his everything hurt. Some parts hurt more than others, but in general he was in that fabled World of Hurt that everyone always threatened each other with.

  “You going to make it?” Nasta asked.

  “Just keep me upright,” Clay said.

  He pointed at the closest mech which was maybe thirty meters off. The cockpit hatch started to open slowly, having to be manually lifted by the pilot inside since the mech’s systems were completely offline due to the EMP from the exploding cargo mech.

  “Put him down,” Clay said.

  “What?” Nasta asked.

  “Put a goddamn bullet between his eyes!” Clay yelled as the pilot dropped to the red dirt and turned to look at them.

  Nasta hesitated. Clay did not.

  He pulled his revolver and fired twice. The first shot hit the man in the right thigh. The second shot sheared off the top of the man’s head as he fell from the first shot. Blood and brains splattered the mech behind him, the gunk slowly dripping down the gunmetal gray of the mech’s hull.

  “Do not hesitate again,” Clay snarled, his voice void of any and all compassion that had been there a second before. “This is war, Nasta. Real war. Next time you hesitate we could both die. Got it?”

  “I know what war is,” Nasta spat back at him as they hobbled closer to the mech.

  “No, you don’t,” Clay said. “Otherwise you would have shot that pilot dead before I even had to ask.”

  They made it to the pilot’s body just as a second cockpit hatch began to open. Nasta went for her gun that time, but Clay swatted her hand away and shook his head.

  “No time now,” Clay said. “Help me climb up into the cockpit.”

  Nasta glared at him but didn’t argue. With the mech angled the way it was on the ground, the cockpit was only a meter or so out of Clay’s reach. He looked at Nasta, expecting her to brace her hands in a makeshift stirrup so he could get a boost up, but she’d left his side and was climbing into the cockpit herself. Once up inside, she tossed down the emergency ladder.

  Clay struggled to get up inside, but after several painful seconds he rolled over the lip of the cockpit, landing hard on what should have been the back wall, but was the floor at that angle and moment.

  “How do you start this up?” Nasta asked.

  “You don’t,” Clay said as he clambered past her and into the pilot’s seat.

  He didn’t have a pilot’s suit on, so he knew he couldn’t integrate with the mech the way he needed to in order to be fully effective. Didn’t matter. He was the best mech pilot in the territory. That he was certain of. Manual controls would have to do.

  “If we can’t start it up, then what’s the point?” Nasta asked.

  “Get a look at the other mechs for me,” Clay said. “That one pilot still jumping out of his mech, or has he climbed back in?”

  Nasta pulled herself up so she could see out of the cockpit at the landscape around them. There was no sign of any mech pilots and both cockpits were shut tight.

  “He went back in,” Nasta said.

  “Okay, it’s a race then,” Clay said as he lay on his back in the pilot’s seat. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Pull that hatch closed. When it latches, I want you to get into the jump seat behind me and strap in. Fully strap in. Don’t miss a buckle. This is going to be a rough start, and we won’t have even a moment to breathe before the fight starts.”

  “Are you up for this?” Nasta asked as she did what Clay asked. “You are not looking good.”

  “Not feeling good,” Clay said. “But we have no choice. Besides, I’ve been in worse shape in worse situations. This ranks in maybe the top twenty, but not the top ten.”

  “Peekachu’s ghost,” Nasta swore. “Who are you?”

  “Clay MacAulay, mech pilot,” Clay laughed. There was a slight rumble and shudder in the mech. “Hold the hell on! Here we go!”

  Before he finished talking, the mech started to power up as system after system came back online. Clay grabbed onto the manual controls and jammed the sticks forward while he worked the power levers with his feet. He’d managed to strap his calves in against the pilot’s seat which gave him more leverage, but it wasn’t anywhere near the same as being integrated with the controls. The other two mechs would have a huge piloting advantage. Plus, the pilots knew their machines, while he was piloting blind in an unfamiliar mech.

  But Clay couldn’t give a shit as he got the mech to sit upright, then rolled it over onto its hands and knees. He lurched up onto its feet and waited for all of the warning alarms to quiet down before he powered up the weapons system.

  Which wasn’t there.

  “Dammit,” Clay swore. “Crap, crap, crap.”

  “What’s wrong?” Nasta asked.

  “No weapons,” Clay said. “I forgot. I’m so used to my mech. Going to have to go hand-to-hand.”

  “Are you up for that?” Nasta asked.

  “Hell no,” Clay said. “But no choice. Hang on!”

  He shoved the controls forward and manually walked the mech toward the other two. One of the enemy mechs was getting to its feet while the other stayed down, motionless in the desert night. Clay wasn’t rookie enough to count that mech out, but he also wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to go one-on-one with the mech getting to its feet.

  Clay took a second he couldn’t afford and glanced down at the controls, making sure he knew exactly where everything was. It was an old battle mech but not the same as his. Clay’s was Fighting Iron. This one was infantry level, not cavalry. Cannon fodder before the elite arrived to shut things down. It had its limitations, and Clay felt a stab of fear in his guts as he braced himself for the inevitable revelation of those limitations.

  The first one showed itself immediately as Clay went to land a roundhouse kick against the opposing mech. His mech’s range of motion was shit. The hip servos and gears hadn’t been calibrated for full flexibility. They’d been reinforced for stability so the machine could take a heavy beating and still stand its ground. The damn thing was readied for tournament combat, not for battlefield combat.

  “Morons,” Clay muttered as he managed to keep the mech from falling on its ass as the roundhouse kick failed spectacularly.

  He brought his arms up in a cross as the opposing mech threw a fist fast toward the cockpit. There was a deafening clang of metal on metal and the mech shuddered, but Clay held it steady, locking the legs in place so the machine only slid back a few meters on the loose sand and dirt.

  “No wonder General Hansen wanted me to fight for her,” Clay said as he broke free of the other mech and attacked with a flat palm to the machine’s chest. “These guys are amateur hour for sure.”

  The other mech stumbled back from Clay’s blow but stayed on its feet due to the reinforced hip joints. Clay swore and made as if to send another roundhouse kick. The mech braced itself, but just barely, as the pilot knew the maneuver couldn’t be fully executed. Not that Clay wanted it to. He had other plans.

  Instead of trying to land the useless kick, Clay used the momentum of the leg to bring his mech forward several meters, then dropped down to one knee, his right leg extended out and back, bracing against the ground as Clay shot both arms straight out, catching the other mech square in the left knee.

  Metal shattered. Gears and pistons crumpled under the full attack. Clay had pumped as much power as he could into the arms without risking them overloading and coming apart at the shoulders. It was more than enough to send metal shards and broken struts flying in every direction.

  Clay smiled as he indulged his ego and dialed in a close-up visual of the opposing pilot’s surprised face. The other mech began to teeter and fall, but Clay wasn’t having any of that yet. He stood his mech up and grabbed the other mech by the cockpit hatch. He squeezed hard and the hatch crumpled under his mech’s grip.

  The pilot screamed, but that was all he was able to do as Clay flicked one finger straight out, pulverizing the man as he was trapped in the cockpit. Blood exploded out of the crumpled cockpit hatch, splattering far enough to send droplets against Clay’s own hatch.

  “Holy hell,” Nasta whispered as Clay activated the wipers and the pilot’s blood smeared back and forth a couple of times before being wiped clean of the plastiglass. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m the guy everyone wants to fight for them,” Clay said. “Yet none of you really understand what that means.” He turned in his seat and looked Nasta square in the face. “Do you understand now? You want me to fight for the comunistas and you? Then this is the fight you get. Not a single one—”

  Clay didn’t get to finish. The entire mech shuddered, then was flying forward on top of the other mech. The two machines collapsed in a heap of metal. Alarms blared and Clay hunted the consoles before him to find out what had happened.

  “Hello, Clay MacAulay,” a familiar voice rang out in the cockpit. “Don’t bother looking for the com controls, I have an override in place. I want you to hear my voice as I kill you.”

  The Captain.

  “Not going to happen, Scarface,” Clay announced as he rolled his mech off the beaten one and spun about on a knee to face the Captain’s mech. “Thought you weren’t able to fight anymore.”

  “Surprise,” the Captain said. “I lied.”

  “Lied rhymes with died,” Clay said. “Get used to the sound of that.”

  “I plan to, since it is what I have in store for you,” the Captain said.

  “Lovely conversation,” Nasta said.

  “Is that the undergrounder?” the Captain asked. “The one working with those lame comunistas? Hello, undergrounder. Are you glad you threw your hat in with this piece of mech trash?”

  “I will be when he beats your ass,” Nasta replied. She reached forward and was able to just barely reach Clay’s shoulder and give it a squeeze. “You are going to beat her ass, right?”