Technical Failure in Debt Collection

The Armored Articulated Recon and Anti-Vehicle Force Projection Platform, known among the troops as an A-RAV, weighed nearly one hundred tons, and was festooned with hydraulic systems, radar systems, armor systems and comms systems, yet its air conditioning system was nearly absent. So, when it spent two hours in the exhaust stream of a dropship, the interior, where Kune Latras was cracking his knuckles and drumming his fingers, got far too warm. But, despite the heat, the cockpit was a familiar and comfortable place for Kune. It was where he could do what he lived for. His leg bounced frantically on the vehicle's color-coded command pedals, his fingers played nervously along the switches and lights before him. In this compact cell, big enough only for his body, the jumpsuit he wore, and enough open space to crane his head and wrists over the controls, Kune awaited his release with vibratory anticipation. The jungle-like atmosphere glowed with light spilling from the A-RAV's display. It was getting hot in here.

He could feel it, they were getting close. Two fingers coiled around a ring on the wall and pulled it down a vertical slot, bringing the AR-helmet down to his scalp. He smiled as its familiar, almost flirty, ECG probs massaged themselves into place under his coarse black hair. They buzzed with mechanical vibration and electromagnetic waves that stimulated instinctive reaction centers in his brain. Simultaneously, the visor closed against his high cheekbones, and lit up with a video feed constructed from a constellation of cameras scattered around the hull of the A-RAV. He could see through two inches of steel plate as well as God could see the children of Adam.

Above him was the gun-metal hull of his dropshop, piloted by a guy he knew as Sammy. Sammy was a shitty pilot. He was barely passable in training, but when he flew into real battle, he'd drop A-RAV as far out of the AO as possible so he could avoid flak on his way back to maternal safety of the capitol ship hanger. He also spoke to his passengers with a snivling, pouty tone that sounded more like a child that was scared of mommy than a pilot of Mitochondria's proud Asset Acquisition Committee. But shit pilots didn't matter once the carry hooks disengaged.

Those damn hooks better disengage soon.

Beside Kune's A-RAV was Killian's, then Pat-sui's, then Arbadah's. Three decent pilots, but he owed Pat-sui twenty Acals, so she'd hopefully bite the dust before the mission was over. Also, she was a bitch that hated him, so the feeling was doubled and mutual. Kune snarled at her A-RAV. It was indistinguishable from the others, not even marked with war paint or a unit number. In this unit, 'Interchangeable parts' was the holy gospel. No decorations or personalizations. And, the most cardinal sin, no modifications. But he still knew which one was hers because the way it rattled against its carry hook pissed him off.

They'd all bet that Arvin would die in the last mission they ran, which he did, since he was a moron. But Pat-sui had bet double or nothing that he'd die to system failure. Arvin was an idiot, but he was the only one besides Kune that did his own maintenance, and he protested loudly when she made her bet, complaining that she was picking on him for being tall. Kune joined in and called her an asshole for calling Arvin out like that, because she was calling him out by proxy. Then he ate his words when that retard had managed to over-heat his ankle drivers, melting the CAN bus on his right foreleg, which pitched him right into a ravine. System failure, just as Pat-sui had prophesied.

Kune subconsciously swiped the micro-pixel monitor next to his thigh, a gesture which temporarily let him see through his helmet to observe the instruments in his cockpit. He wanted to check joint driver status in all legs. All cool. He wouldn't go down like Arvin.

He scratched a finger on his visor; one of the ECG probes in his helmet mirrored the movement to scratch his nose. He was getting impatient! When was Sammy going to turn them loose? The sound of turbulence began to thump through the A-RAV's armored hull as they dipped close enough to the ground to avoid the cheaper kinds of radar surveillance. That only made the anticipation worse, the ground so close. Kune licked his lips and wrapped his hands around the primary drive sticks.

Any second now.

"-roaching drop zone Ecog. Pilots prepare for departure. Ack." Sammy's voice said in his ear.

"Ack-A." Kune said.

There was a long pause as the team's replacement for Arvin realized it was his turn. "Ack-B." Killian squeaked.

"Act-C." Pat-sui said. Her accent grated on Kune's nerves; she even managed to mispronounce common radio commands.

"Ack-D." Arbadah said, with the emphasis of a man asking for a drink.

"Acknowledge." Sammy said, "Drop in 10."

"Killian, don't skrew 'tis up." Pat-Sui said.

"Channel quiet." Kune said.

"Someone's eager to get their payout, aren't they?" Arbadah taunted.

"Don't worry Pat, I got great scores on the pre-amp test." Killian's boyish voice said, just a little too shrill.

"Channel quiet!" Kune barked. Damn, was it really still three seconds to the drop?! His leg was bouncing so bad his A-RAV started running in place as it hung from the belly of Sammy's dropship.

ClunkBANG!

Freefall.

Kune howled as his quadruped disengaged thirty feet above the ground. His stomach jumped into his throat, then slammed down as he landed in a wide stance. In a flash he snapped up the auto-impact switch, snapped down the manual ambulation switch and slammed both control sticks forward. The A-RAV galloped forward, reaching seventy miles an hour in a matter of seconds. Acquirable targets blinked into existence on his primary display. He looked out through the camera constellation to see enemy light armored vehicles bouncing along the crater-splattered battlefield.

Prey.

A half trigger pull adapted his right stick to cannon control. The 4 inch diameter twin barrels were unlocked from the underbelly, shifted forward on their damping piston, and swiveled around the thorax of the A-RAV to rest at the dorsal firing position.

Left stick directed him after the fleeing vehicle at breakneck speed, the A-RAV's terrain navigation engine automatically placing his feet to maintain footing even as it careened over trenches and between trees. The truck had no such systems and its suspension was slammed in every direction as it tried to get away from Kune's quadruped mecha.

He cranked the trigger home. He felt the auto-cannon's blast thump through his ribcage as both barrels fired into the fleeing truck. A hundred yards away, it detonated with a concussion that made rain spontaneously form out of the humid air.

Kune halted his gallop, carving deep divots as four claw feet dug into the muddy ground, pivoted his abdomen and cranked off three more shots before he'd come to rest. Three more light transports erupted into flames as his high-velocity HE rounds tore through their plates like tissue.

"Kune! Kune! Act!" Pat-Sui was shouting into the radio.

"Ack-A" he barked, still blasting away with his twin cannons.

"Get with te' prokram! What te' hell are you doink out 'tere?"

He didn't reply immediately as he let go of the sticks and started switching controls and feeding coordinates into the nav computer. Auto-nav. Ambulation on light. Throttle to 50. Towards mission waypoint 1. Defense radar target acquisition was fed straight to cannon target-fire routine.

The A-RAV set out at a light trot back towards his team, running much quieter than his frenzied sprint upon landing. Now that motion was handled by the computer, Kune scanned his telemetry readings.

"I was exerting the system to generate field diagnostic data, Unit C." He said, sure not to say her name, "Unit B, carry contiguous squad to rally point 1." In hindsight, it sounded nice to acknowledge that she existed, but to give command to Killiam. And what a perfect microcosm to illustrate why. Arvin would have never questioned him less than a minute into a mission over something as simple as blasting light transports.

There was a low chime as the radar picked up a target. Then a whirr as the cannons swiveled towards it, then a thump as the target was erased. He hardly noticed; he was scanning the data he'd collected from his spree.

All temps within the expected window, lubricant pressure high, battery voltage hardly dipped as the cannon activated. Perfect. But he did reach behind his seat and tweak the coolant flow into the forelegs, just in case. He'd also opened up the trimmer valve to let more coolant flow through them. Interchangeable parts may be the axiom they were supposed to live by, but Kune would never trust his life to the default calibration and settings imposed by the maintenance crews.

While the system was configured for auto-pilot, he took a moment to look at the mission map. Four letters for him and his team. Blips with numerical tags for known enemy equipment. And a nice big star to call out their objective.

The star was hardly necessary; the planet's U-net node was tall enough to be visible from space, and was the single most obvious feature on the horizon for a hundred miles around. As long as that space needle was online, the locals could call for reinforcements, buy food, surf the web, and learn how to oppose whatever Asset Acquisition Systems Mitochondria sent their way. Even now, the eggheads upstairs were spending millions of Acals an hour to scramble the connection space-side so these people couldn't find out how to hack his precious A-RAV. Best estimates said his team had four hours before the locals dug up some obscure bug or virus that could disable his team. Well, that was the lingo. Really, he had four hours before the top brass stopped spending money to keep the internet offline. For a colony like this, Total took bribes by the hour. He had until then to upload Mitochondria's seizure program, or else the locals could, potentially, turn his own vehicle against him.

Not that he cared. These animals could throw all the intel in the Galaxy at him and it wouldn't matter, since he had an Ace card. He snaked a hand under his seat and through a hole he had cut through a key-locked access panel. He gently wrapped a finger around the power line to his decryption amp. Every signal his A-RAV received would be pumped through this black box; everything from software updates and real-time position data to radio feeds and mission updates. Interchangeable parts be damned; this mod meant that, with one tug, he could shut out the whole world. Of course, that meant he couldn't rely on the cloud-computers that handled all his autonomous functions, but those were luxuries he could cast aside for a few hours. He was the best A-RAV pilot in Mito, the Bastard of the Core. He could drive it 'by the stick' until the mission was over.

He consciously hoped it would never be necessary, of course. But at night, or when Pat-sui pissed him off, it was always tempting. He brought his hand back up to the control cluster and flicked off auto-nav and re-tuned his drivers for the high-speed, unstable balance that better suited agile combat. Instantly, as each toggle clacked home, his A-RAV's gait changed. Its bounding gallop was less graceful, its stance widened. Its center of gravity swang through each bound, jostling the pilot inside its belly.

"Unit B, return command." Kune said.

Units B, C and D appeared on his monitor. He assigned the follow relationship and grabbed the control sticks, leading the four vehicles as one. Each was barely visible to the others as they fanned out hundreds of yards away across the battlefield, but they are more closely coordinated than a pack of wolves. Kune's radar pinged another light transport, probably the last one within ten miles of the front line. He locked the stick forward and prodded the icon on his screen. With the target designated, Arbadah's A-RAV determined it was closest. His cannon armed, locked, and obliterated the fleeing vehicle seconds later, without pilot input. But the cannon did not return to it's dormant position; the transport may have been evacuating wounded, or it may have been deploying field infrastructure for a defense drone. The system stayed alert, ready for rapid follow-up. Kune dialed his radar frequency to expand the area of effective scan.

No new pings.

It seemed they were alone on the battleground. Twenty hours ago, a pitched battle had turned this farmland into a bullseye-shaped swamp that wrapped around the U-net node for thirty miles in every direction. They moved through abandoned mortar nests and past burning auto-turrets. Drone chassis and corpses were sinking through the mud, occasionally squishing under his metal claws. Of course, none of them were Mitochondria assets. Just as none of the drones overhead were theirs. Kune's employer hadn't been part of this war twenty hours ago. They were just here to abduct the survivors, an operation that would be less profitable if those survivors had a working U-Node they could use to gather intel.

Despite winning the assault from their neighbors, the city that lived in the shadow of the node was too cash-poor to defend themselves from Mito. And too hated by the rest of this planet to request defenses.

Or maybe not?

"Tis is C, long skan showts hostiles." Pat-sui said.

"Ack." He said, bringing up the output from her scan. Apparently, he'd been correct to assume that the last transport wasn't running a suicide mission just to recover bodies. It had dropped off a micro seismograph so that some new enemy could locate them based on their vibration signatures. The graph was passive, too small for their sensors to pick out, but it sure knew about them. 2 blips were entering their radar range; T-Epsilon ATTOs, more affectionately known as 'Scrubbers', named for the cleansing effect of their twin 40mm, 13 barrel gatling guns. They could also hit Mach 5 in this planet's atmosphere, so the A-RAV's had four seconds before the scrubbers opened fire. Any other day, these four seconds would be a scramble to disperse even more, but Mito’s recon division had dug up some useful intel for once; the key flaw of the Scrubber design was that one pass could only rip dirt for five hundred yards before the plane passed out of range. Since they were already spread more than five hundred yards apart, he was able to prepare instead by loading a return-fire routine. How lucky they were that Mito's Intel department had let them in on this secret, Kune thought sarcastically. Two V's zipped silently overhead, wings swept forward and nose-cones as sharp as surgical needles. Two seconds later the ground exploded like det-chord as the rounds struck followed in lock-step by the hornet-swarm 90 decibel white noise of their miniguns and sonic booms.

"Unit D Hit." Arbadah said, as calmly as ever over his cannons' thump-thump, one-two, one-two, like a heartbeat, "Fire returned, no joy."

Of course 'no joy'; hitting a scrubber with an auto-cannon was like hitting fruit-fly with a spitball; they could dodge a direct hit at point-blank. Kune ground his teeth as he swiped up a list of squad-configuration presets on his monitor. They only had fifteen seconds before the scrubbers could cycle back for another pass, another 'secret' performance characteristic to exploit.

________________________________________

Airman Halberd chewed his rubber mouth guard as he nudged the textured control stick with his bare fingertips. The muted howl of supersonic wind attenuated as his scrubber swang through the turn. Only fifteen seconds to cool barrels and reorient for the next pass; with any luck those quads wouldn't expect him to be back soon soon, and get caught with their guns cold. Even though his turning radius was over a mile across, the centripetal force was squeezing blood out of his head like orange juice. His nose was freezing and his legs were leaden.

"Omega-2 calling, we have joy." His partner, Airman Flamberg, said over the radio. Through encryption, compression, noise filtration and a pack of cigarettes every day, the older man sounded like an ocean wave with a voice.

Halberd tried to reply, but just ended up swallowing his words and a mouthful of vomit. And then they were out of the turn, thank the gods.

He looked down to where the control cluster had been for all two weeks of his Scrubber training, but instead he just saw the helmet-interior display. Dammit. Where were his controls? What was the point of the training rig if they didn't put the fucking helmet in it? Where were his fucking controls?! He needed controls! He swallowed the spit pooling in his mouth-guard as he found the switches he needed to re-arm the gatlings. Thank the gods!

Instead of his cockpit, all Halberd saw were mission objectives and instrument read-outs, more like a videogame than a war-machine. Still drunk on G-force, his mind latched onto that nostalgia, reeling with the old comfort of virtual worlds, where the war was over when he dropped the controller, and where he wasn't fighting for his life against the other cities, or Mitochondria, or whoever it was today.

"Omega-3 receive, snap out of it." Flamberg said.

He saw the orange enemy diamonds zipping up the display. Three of them were spread out and moving laterally to minimize the effect of his mini-gun fire. His trainer had mentioned that he was supposed to increase the lateral spread trimmer to counter this, but he didn't have time to remember how to do that, even if it was as simple as flipping one switch on his control cluster. He just chose a diamond at random, felt the buzz as his computer confirmed lock, and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil was like opening an airbrake and he would have slammed into the controls if his harness didn't preemptively harden to hold him in place. But he wasn't the only one firing; he saw a flash, then a fourth diamond appeared as the disabled A-RAV returned fire. Shit! Why wasn't the sonar-?!

BEEP.

The harness felt like steel bands as it ratcheted down on all his limbs at the same time as an explosive evasion charge detonated under his right wing, throwing the jet out of the way of a auto-cannon round from below. He felt pinpricks on his neck as the jet pumped Non-Naesu into his system to keep him from puking in his helmet. Maybe it would keep him conscious through the G's, but he was conditioned for that? Was he? The G-force meter spiked to 9.4.

BEEP.

Instantaneously, another evasion charge was dispelled, to his rear, intentionally knocking the scrubber into a vicious eccentric tailspin just before another auto-cannon round screamed through his flight-path. Halberd tried to grab the security straps scattered around the cockpit, but the sleeves of his flight-suit were rigid to prevent his limbs from snapping during this superhuman maneuver. G-force 16.5. The world collapsed into a mote, then blackness as Halberd went unconscious.

BEEP.

He never felt the third charge as it flipped the jet into a completely chaotic tumble, missing the third auto-cannon round by such a narrow margin that its pressure waves rattled the scrubber's landing gear cover. He also didn't see the G-force meter spin wildly across a dozen values in a second as red alarms winked across the control cluster.

"Omega-3! Respond!" Flamberg said, but Halberd didn't respond, "Dammit kid! Respond! Shit! Omega-2 to Omega-1, pulling emergency extract on Omega-3!"

________________________________________

Kune smiled as his squad's fire converged on the tumbling scrubber. The other one was long-gone, but they only needed to snag one of them at a time. This pilot was either a toddler or an idiot; they hadn't even tried to manually evade his salvo.

It was true that scrubbers, with their vectored thrust, evasive detonators and forward swept wings, were so maneuverable that they could dodge a cannon round fired within a quarter mile. They could dodge accelerated rockets, and a good pilot could even dodge guided munitions with a bit of prowess. But, while the first one had a pilot that knew the most basic principles of fire evasion, that being to regain control as soon as possible, the second one had let himself get flipped and flopped by the automated evasion system as the A-RAVs launched rounds carefully aimed to trip the auto-evade. And he was probably out cold right about now, given that his jet was throwing him around like a salad spinner. That's the danger of having a pilot more fragile than the jet.

Sure enough, something triggered the ejection seat. Probably the pilot of the other jet, overriding safety policy. It was a good move; the jet would be lost, but at least his partner would be saved from centrifugal death. And, now that he was floating down under a white parachute, he was a legally protected POW.

Detecting the surrender signal, Kune's A-RAV started turning its cannons away, but they halted as he flipped a switch. Now under manual control, the twin barrels punched out and blasted the descending airman into fine mist. A clean, well earned kill.

Kune licked his lips as he released control again and let his automatic systems take care of the returning, lonely jet. With all their fire focused on him, and now adjusted with auto-evade characteristic frequencies from the first jet, the A-RAVs plucked him out of the sky like an athlete catching a ball. Before the jet's fireball hit the ground, Pat-sui located and destroyed the seismograph.

"Phew! That was, uh, kind of scary!" Killian said.

"Tey ditn't even soot at you." Pat-sui said as her vehicle climbed out of the crater where the seismograph was hidden.

"Speaking of which," Arbadah said, "I've lost most of my Dog's in two legs, and I think my cannon is shot to pieces. Sending diag report. Kune?"

Kune swallowed the automatically generated report in one glance, "Ack. Switch with Killian. New guy, you're the rearguard now. Catch up."

"But-"

Pat-sui had been waiting for this call, "Kune! You ckannot leaf te new kguy behint! Andt it's your fault Unit C ist tamagedt because you kept takingk te controls!" She was so aggravated that her accent descended into a near unintellible crackle and hiss, "Tis shikt ish what kilt Avrin! Switking vekless its-"

Kune muted her channel, abridging a retort about how ignoring 'interchangeable parts' had killed Arvin, "Arbadah, switch units with Killian. We need to keep moving."

The other two were smart enough to follow his orders over their first commandment, but Pat-sui was still spouting off to herself, betrayed by a bouncing waveform next to her designation letter. Arbadah cranked on his field ejection lever, popping off the electrical and hydraulic connections from the back of his jumpsuit and helmet as Killian did the same. Even with their pilots disconnected, their A-RAVs automatically came alongside each other for the transfer. Settled in to their new seats, the sub-computers in each suit loaded the vehicles with the new pilot's preferences and settings. But mechanical adjustments couldn't be made so easily. Kune gave them just enough time to adjust their seats, then slaved the two fully functional units to his own and set them trotting across the battlefield again. Killian limped after, under manual control, but he was soon lost among the blasted trees and bodies.

Finally, Kune let Pat-sui back on the radio.

"Now we are a man shot." She spat. At least she managed to pronounce that properly, Kune thought. Mostly.

"We don't have time to wait around for a broken machine." He said.

"At least havt a pilot wit a machine tey know." She said.

"A-RAV's are exchangeable. We need Arbadah's experience when we get near the node. Interchangeable parts." Kune said.

"Thanks." Arbadah said, "But this kid's machine is practically stock. Not sure how much help I'll be with a fuel ratio still set to 0.02." Kune could practically hear Arbadah shake his head.

"You say tey are extsageable, but you motify yours." Pat-sui said to Kune.

He didn't reply. Over the radio, and in the recordings that Command would be reviewing later, even Killian wouldn’t have confirmed an accusation like that. She was digging for something to throw in his face when they debriefed in front of the brass, something like openly admitting to cutting a hole into his decrypt box. She wanted some gap in his judgement she could blow up, but only after checking that he didn't have a retort for it. Normally, she would just report him for blasting an ejected pilot, but she had slipped up too, and now he could peg her for questioning orders. So she needed to dismantle the order she questioned so that he didn't take her down with him. He hated her politics almost as much as her accent.

When she realized he wouldn't give her any ammo, she went quiet. Around them, as if sprouting from the ground, the ruins of buildings began to thicken into a parody of cityscape. They were nearing the parts of the city that were still livable and therefore better defended. Kune slowed their approach as they started passing buildings that were two and three stories high. It would be unwise to crash into landmines, auto-launchers, or any nasty electromagnetic surprises these dolts thought would stay the squad of A-RAVs. The change in pace also gave him a chance to re-focus on their objective.

It loomed overhead. So tall and straight that it tricked the eye into perceiving a curve that didn't exist. Warning lights blinked up its length, almost like a visualization of the terabytes traveling up and down the nano-tube tower. fourty eight hours ago, it was probably yotabytes, and forty eight before that, it was probably near saturation. Occasionally, a blink was skipped as it was eclipsed by an ever-present maintenance drone. Even in total war, the drone swarm that patrolled the tower was given all the resources it needed to keep the U-node in perfect condition. Because anything less than perfect condition could lead to a collapse. A U-Node collapse, a space-elevator falling to ground, would impart enough kinetic energy to level the city and everything in sight around it. Even a Funny-class Mitochondria battleship didn't carry nukes that powerful.

Made of Total's most perfect developments in material science, the space needle pushed the limits of structural possibility and economic feasibility. A tower like this was the most valuable asset on the planet, after the human population, but destroying it was as easy as missing a single shot with their auto-cannons. A single stray shot would end the career of everyone involved in the mission, including theirs, because they would be atomized by the collapsing tower. Kune had already enforced a no-shot protocol to keep the A-RAV's from shooting towards the tower, but now he adjusted the rules, just to have something to do.

"Long skan showts hostiles." Pat-sui said.

The blips showed up on Kune's display as well, snapping his attention away from the U-Node. As he expected, the approaching hostiles stayed between the squad and the Node; the no-shot zone. Safe from return fire.

"Ack. Fan out south. D stay centered. Cover C." Kune said, "Pincer maneuver-"

"Grounded threat!" Arbadah interrupted.

Their radars hadn't detected the ambush laying in wait, and Arbadah had just stepped into a nest of 98-363's. The six-legged autonomous defense drones sprang out of their dormant mode in an instant, latching onto Arbadah's forelegs with hydraulic pincers. They had no guns and barely any comms, they only existed to disable legged vehicles like theirs. In the quarter second it took for Kune to approve his A-RAV's automatic close fire support, two of the 363's had sliced through Arbadah's left foreleg, completely disabling it. Kune's twin shots were so tight that they ablated the squad logo right of Arbadah's haunch, the shockwave whipping his severed fluid lines into tatters. But they hit true, turning the nearest 363 into swarf, and scoring a collateral on another that absorbed so much energy from the metallic mist that its batteries caught fire inside its torso. But the flaming hexapod simply logged the damage in a status-report, dropped batteries into an incandescent puddle and used energy stored in backup supercapacitors to finish severing Arbadah's right forward tendon. With a crash that would have rattled a pilot even in locked straps, Arbadah's unit slumped forward, crushing the remaining, undamaged 363 into sheet metal.

"Unit B disabled." Arbadah said, "I have a broken leg. My leg, I mean, not the A-RAV's. My hand is pinned. Evac required." As always, he was an icy professional, but the onset of shock put a quaver into his voice

Pat-sui was cursing in her native language as she launched salvo after salvo into the surrounding buildings to root out any more ambushes.

"Unit C! Stop wasting ammo!" Kune shouted. She fired another round, and he mashed a fist into her symbol on his controls. Detecting the ECG spike in tandem with the command, his computer intuited that he was responding to a high-energy action in her A-RAV, and disabled all weapons and ambulation.

Her firing system locked instantly, ejecting an unspent round onto the shattered street with a thud. He had the radio muted before she could react.

In the back of his mind, Kune filed the outburst away for later recollection during debrief. The forefront of his mind was running the numbers. Arbadah disabled. Killian bringing up the rear. Pat-sui ready to question anything he said. He remotely set Pat-sui's unit into a sweeping maneuver to draw and return fire with the incoming aerial attackers while he did the same in the opposite direction. The drones were savvy enough to stay in the no-shot zone, but lateral motion made it impossible for them to keep out of both A-RAVs' firing lines. His fingers programmed and executed the maneuvers, accounting for terrain and syntax with hardly any conscious thought. He double-checked that the A-RAVs still had an active no-shot vector on the tower. Killian was still ten minutes from catching up, but his mission was now to remove the injured pilot from combat. That meant they were down to just him and Pat-sui.

Kune raised an eyebrow as he scanned a radar read-out from Pat-sui's machine and noticed that he had more intel than he thought. The brass had loaded it into his machine during their fight with the Scrubbers. Not accounting for ambushes, it looked like they were would have a difficult path into the heart of the city, but brass had delivered that report when they still had 4 A-RAVs. Well shit, they had just become a 2 unit squad. Or, more precisely, they would be a 2 unit squad once Killian left with Arbadah. Kune licked his lips and grinned as he sucked up the intel. With 2 units, the report estimated a 40% chance of survival. This would be fun, but no amount of fun would make dying worth it. After all, if he died, he wouldn't be able to ride the A-RAV anymore. Could he scrub this mission? Would he still be able to pilot the A-RAV if he abandoned the objective? That also wasn't an acceptable risk. If they had three units, even one injured, the likelihood of success was probably over 50%.

Killian was approaching, and would then have to carry Arbadah out of the fight. Once that happened, the decision would be made for him; it would be down to him and Pat-sui. Shit. Run a suicide mission with that bitch, or risk losing his pilot status?

Outside, the drones had arrived, but they were never meant to take on equipment like his. His and Pat-sui's auto-cannons thinned the skies easily, and crawled over the ground to avoid the worst of the drone-fire.

Kune licked his lips and cracked a knuckle against his helmet. He estimated that he had spent approximately 4 weeks of his life hanging from the bottom of drop ships, waiting for missions to start, and another 54 hours in actual combat. And he'd spent as much of the rest of the time as possible tinkering with his A-RAV with an active disregard for the 'exchangeable parts' doctrine. Most of that tinkering was wiped out when someone else used it, but the lessons he'd learned had stuck around. During that time, he'd found out that he could manipulate almost any data that moved between the vehicles, including the pilot biometrics that A-RAVs broadcasted continuously to other members of their squad. He'd had a sense of humor back then, and had 'killed' a squad-mate to scare the crap out of his CO.

If Arbadah was dead, then Killian wouldn’t have to escort him away, and Kune would have a third, albeit dysfunctional, unit in his squad. They could just come back for Arbadah later.

He logged into his personal files, stored in his jumpsuit, and found the old macro. It took a couple tries to remember what he'd written back then, then another to recall Arbadah's raw network address, then he just had to hit enter.

"Fuckt! Tey kilt Killian!" Patsuit shouted.

"Shit." He forgotten that they'd switched. He corrected the mistake and was gratified by two flat heart monitors on his crew-status display.

Oddly enough, Pat-sui didn't react to that, but he didn't notice as he called over the radio.

"Unit B, Ack." He said, a little shakily as his A-RAV jumped through cover while engaging the flying drones.

"Ack. Something is screwy with the network, I'm fine." The rookie said.

"They killed Arbadah, a bug made it look like you, the transfer did something. Maximize speed, we need support." Kune said, not missing a beat.

Killian responded, "Ack."

But Pat-sui still said nothing.

Finally, her silence peaked his notice. He double checked that he hadn't reflexively muted her. That's when he saw that she wasn't even online.

There was no trace of her.

A deafening BEEP and a hardened harness was the only warning before an auto-cannon round with more kinetic energy than a locomotive engine punched through a dirt berm and most of the way through his flank. A head-sized inverted dent slammed into him from the side of his cockpit, cracking ribs and melting his jumpsuit as it knocked his breath away. If that had been a direct hit, he would be in the same grave as that scrubber pilot.

Still dizzy from the hit, he instinctively launched the sticks forward, narrowly avoiding a follow-up shot, and galloping into deeper cover between two buildings. Auto-cannon rounds pulverized the architecture behind him, but his reaction was faster than she'd expected. Then a stream of smaller caliber rounds rattled on him like hail on a drum as the defense drones laid into him. Their puny guns were meant for lighter armor than his, but nothing was stopping them from getting a lucky hit.

What the hell? Concussion drained away as adrenaline and Go-Juice drugs flooded in, with comprehension washing in close behind. He had over-ridden her controls just a minute earlier, hadn't he? Pat-sui had fucking shot him! Where was she? Hadn't he put her on auto-pilot? That fucker must have had a hardware disconnect for her decrypt box too!

"What's going on?" Killian said, "Pat-Sui just went completely offline!"

"Kill that bitch!" Kune growled, pushing his sticks forward.

"What's going on?!"

Kune gritted his teeth as he ran his vehicle through tight alleys and over rubble. In the pass-through cams he could see her unit crawling after him. But without any kind of auto-nav or external intel she had to maneuver manually. Except that didn't seem to slow her down as much as it should have. There was no way this mutinous bitch was a better pilot than him. He took cannon control into his right hand as he deployed the drive pedals so he could use his left hand and feet to control ambulation. Rubble was crushed underfoot as the vehicles stomped through the destroyed city, soaking up dust and gunfire as they went. Auto-cannon rounds cracked through the air in both directions, all blind shots that missed by feet and inches.

Kune was imagining her process, visualizing the cannon's lock and fire routine, and timing his dodges to narrowly avoid her aimed fire. Around this corner, it would take a moment for her to re-acquire her target, a moment he used to skid across the ground and leap laterally into a municipal pool. Algaed water slapped aside and splattered his thorax, but he was already climbing back out like a buffalo fording a river. Ahead was a mall, to his left the U-Node overlooked the fight.

She hadn't expected his sharp turn, compounding his lead and giving him enough time to clamber inside the mall, blasting the wide doors into detritus. A cannon round ricocheted off a rear pauldron, but none of his systems went offline and he was out of the way of the follow-up. If she was still online, her auto-targeting system would have turned him into a sponge; only her human hand had saved his ass just now. But he still couldn't face her head-on; if he miscalculated by even a tenth of a second, she could land the first shot, and it would be all over. Damnit, he also couldn't lure her into the open so Killian's A-RAV could take her out; her system wouldn't respect the no-shot zone now that it was offline. And if that bitch missed him and hit the U-Node, they would all get fragged.

So he galloped through the mall, away from the U-Node visible through the plaza's skylights.

Killian was sobbing some bullshit on the radio, Kune risked the two seconds it took to direct auto-nav towards a random nav point so he could take control of the rookie's robot, send it to the same nav-point, then grabbed his controls again.

Shit; warning lights were clicking on. The scalp interface was directly broadcasting his damaged status into his brain; he knew he was losing power in his cannons as surely as he would know if his leg was broken. That first shot had hit his cannons' cap-bank! And, worse, despite his custom cooling profile, leg drivers were beginning to warm up. Dammit, he would not die like Arvin!

Another thud as Pat-sui shot... The roof of the mall? No, that was her landing on the roof, not shooting it. She was directly above him.

Kune realized, if she was on the roof, it would be easy for her to follow his acoustic signal, his crashing and slamming through walls. And, across a flat roof, she would have no trouble out-running him and getting the drop on him once he left the building. She would be wherever he tried to go. He had been check-mated as soon as he went indoors.

But that bitch wasn't the squad leader.

Kune jabbed his control screen four times, and grabbed his sticks, throwing them forward.

His A-RAV did not move.

Now he was looking out through Killian's, previously Arbadah's, mecha, which lunged forward, raising mechanical degradation alarms, but those were irrelevant for the thirty seconds he needed with this machine. He saw the mall, and the fresh claw marks where Pat-Suit had climbed up. Damn this A-RAV was too slow! In real life, overhead, he could hear pounding as Pat-sui started digging into the building. The bitch knew he was up to something, probably abandoned his vehicle to escape on foot, and she intended to come down on his head.

Killian was trying to take the controls, confused into hysterics, but Kune ignored the kid's spamming control requests. He crested the roof. Pat-sui was dug down; he had no line of sight. Shit!

With one hand, Kune manipulated the squad-command console in his own machine, with the other he over-rode operating limits in Killian's A-RAV, giving him a few seconds of performance over operating spec. Pat-sui's digging was so close he heard light clicks as debris feel from the ceiling over his thorax.

A skylight; He skidded to a stop, looking down at himself from Killian camera constellation. His left hand updated the mission marker, resetting it to origin, himself. He dragged Killian's auto-cannon to aim at that star, tapped up and mashed the trigger. A chunk of ceiling crashed on top of him, he heard the hydraulic whine as Pat-sui's auto-cannon swiveled toward him, then PANG! The shot from Killian's cannon tore the forward sensor array off her A-RAV, throwing it aside like trash, her shot flew wide. Kune flicked controls inside his cockpit, reaching awkwardly around the inverted dent to reset his command allocation, and grabbed his sticks to lunge at her. Killian froze, he was back in action. Pat-sui tried to jam her cannon into his torso, but he was too close now, too dexterous with his A-RAV's claws. He could practically hear her screaming in her god-awful language as he grappled with her A-RAV, keeping her damn cannon from lining up on him, and throwing her into the cement floor, trying to crush the cannon out of commission. But she was damn slippery, caught herself on forelegs, and stood in a surreal handstand, rear legs on the wall, cannon swiveling, he dodged a shot and closed the gap again.

Even upside down Pat-Suit fought like a mad dog, punching with her claw and legs, ripping at his hydraulics like the 363s that took out Arbadah's A-RAV.

A chime sounded as Killian requested control again. The drones were raining small-arms fire on him, but Kune was neck deep fighting Pat-sui, and barely dodged as she tried to snag a claw into his ankle hydraulic line. He stepped away, shifted balance, trying to body-check her off her feet, but she rolled with the blow, cannon still locked on, Kune saw, fell with his momentum and felt his teeth rattle as the round glanced off his armor, fired from so close that the explosive charge hadn't been primed, but the muzzle blast knocked out an exterior camera. Blindspot.

He closed the gap before she could line up another shot, staying aggressive, grappling and trying to snag his claws on any control lines he could see through chinks in her plate armor. He had the advantage that his auto-cannon was already offline, so he didn't have to worry about exposing it. She had the advantage that her cannon was online, so if she could create any gap between them, she could blow him away. So they fought and clawed at each other, both mechas too well armored to expose a vital component. Kune tried to tear into the exposed electronics where he'd shot her in the face, but that was the most maneuverable part of her A-RAV, and put him in front of her forelegs. He couldn't take the time to get back into Killian's controls to fire on himself remotely, and she was beginning to use shots from her auto-cannon to keep him from grabbing it.

Now lights were flashing continuously, glaring red temperature readings all blinking and beeping as his ankle-joints climbed steadily with the excessive torque loads of close combat. He really was going to die like Arvin, and he couldn't even take this bitch down with him.

Then, as he climbed on top of her in impossibly dexterous maneuver that demanded he over-rode the ambulation engine to make sure his claw landed on the cannon to keep her from blasting him off her back, he felt her lurch. As he fell off her back on the other side, he saw a glowing red puddle under her right foreleg; she had overheated.

He lost no time. Kune side-stepped her cannon's next shot to get at her flank, ignored a bone-rattling rear-leg kick, then saw that joint lock just like the others, fully extended, glowing dull red and shimmering like a stove, and he got a claw under the armor panel over her micro-reactor.

Victory. Checkmate.

Hauling back on his sticks and punching forward his aux-command pedal, he wrenched on the compound alloy plate off her power supply. But it didn't come off at all. In fact, the compound alloy, a cutting edge blend of ceramics, metal and nano-tube fiber, caught on his claw. Stuck.

The auto-cannon locked on.

Fuck.

He actually heard the click as Pat-sui pulled the trigger.

And nothing happened.

She was empty.

She was more shocked than him.

Kune ripped his claw free and punched forward in one motion, crushing something delicate in the power core. Machinery inside Pat-sui's A-RAV screamed as power was cut, then softened as auxiliary supply came online. But aux power was never meant for claw to claw combat, and her cooling system, already overtaxed after her digging and fighting and with none of the careful tuning of his own system, began to fail outright. Sparks spewed from the cannon actuators as a blinding electric arc developed in her right foreleg. Pat-sui sluggishly, finally turned to take her core away from Kune, but it was too late. Her legs were locking up as joints failed in succession, armor plates were jettisoned to maximize cooling capacity. He dug a claw into the ravaged front-end that had taken Killian's cannon-shot, and twisted. Metal screamed as it tore, and Pat-sui screamed as the control console was ripped away from right under her hands. The swampy atmosphere inside her A-RAV was sucked away as Kune pulled her machine apart. Then, he put it back together, just a little bit wrong. Pat-sui was crushed so easily, he didn't feel it in the ECG motor feedback.

The A-RAV stood stock still, then, like a headless chicken too stupid to realize it was dead, sat down. It looked, for all the world, like a cat sitting on a shelf. A cat with kilowatts of heat baking off of shimmering heat-sinks. Dead heat.

But Kune didn't see; he re-focused on Killian, still stuck under his command, now covered in as many small-arms dimples as a golf-ball. He gave the kid control again, and the youngster instantly let his auto-cannon do its work. In three shots so fast they sounded like someone knocking on the front door, the drones were vaporized.

They both limped back to Arbadah's A-RAV for the pick-up. Kune ended his macro. Two of his teammates were suddenly online. The fourth would never be online again.

"What happened there, Kune?" Arbadah asked.

"Pat-sui tried to collect her debt early." Kune said.

The three mechs, two disabled, stood in a triangle. Though they were still and their pilots silent, they were wary. They were waiting for Kune.

He took diag reports from Killian and Arbadah, then considered his own state and what he had done to unit C.

"We will retrofit." He said at last, "The weapon system from Unit C for my unit, and Killian will take Arbadah's functioning legs. Acknowledge."

There was a pause as the other pilots considered, then Arbadah said, "Ack."

Killian took a bit longer, then said it as well.

Arbadah was able to use his good hand to run radar. Kune and Killian cracked open their units, retreived tools, and began the retrofit. With interchangable parts, it would take two hours.

They would only have two mobile units after the retrofit, and one of them with a pilot as green as Soylent. But, as he pressed the bolt driver into the hex-heads that secured the cannon's track, Kune looked up at the U-Node. It was the first time he had seen one with his bare eyes, with no constellation cameras or heads-up-display. It looked the same. The impossible black line from hell to heaven was nothing but a cartoon star on his screen. Actually, the sight made his head hurt. It looked better in the cameras.

Interchangeable parts. That's what it was all about, wasn't it? Cameras, electronics, machines, U-nodes, cities, drones, bullets, betting dollars, data. Pat-sui and Killian.

Interchangeable parts. He pulled more interchangeable parts out of his auto-cannon assembly until it fell crashing to the ground, then he looked up the sky. The scrubber pilots.

There must be more to war than trading parts? Yes, there was removing the bad parts.

Finally, Kune smiled. Well, he'd done that, sure as hell.

Technical Performance in Field

Destructive Potential (DP) equals the rate of energy introduced per unit volume into a volume of flesh, squared, times the corrective coefficient to account for the form of energy, further refined by a cast of secondary factors that are added or omitted at the engineer’s discretion. DP calculations assume an insignificant time of energy application, of less than one half second. Consult other text if this assumption is not met.

This is often called the Barbaric Equation.

Kinetic energy, the most ancient form of energy used in war, has a coefficient of 1. Thermal energy, the second most ancient form generally has a coefficient of 2, depending on the convention used to define ‘destructive potential’ and historical data. Laser energy, though technically thermal energy at the end of the day, has a coefficient of approximately 0.5 because charring and low volume of effect tend to dominate the heat transfer operation in weapon applications, though this varies widely based on pulsing, wavelength and tracking precision. Chemical energy, radiation energy (alpha, beta and gamma), and even obscure effects, such as yantological energy transfer to grey matter, all have coefficient expressions, though they are often non-linear and must be deduced or guessed based on even more factors. The rule of thumb is that a Total Heavy Industries Hollow-point MK112 9mm bullet delivered to the torso has a DP of 1.2, a FT-06 or GR-H1 flamethrower applied to the torso for one second has a DP of 3.4, and a fist-sized rock to the back of the head has a DP of 1.0. The engineers that wrote the training material where the Barbaric Equation was first recorded insisted that the rock’s DP was purely a coincidence, and that 1.0 was an arbitrary relative scaling number, that the biblical method used to kill Able was not the “base unit” of lethality, and so on.

But Kune suspected someone had massaged the data to make that one have a nice, clean number. After all, it was easy to tell the grunts, “Rock number is one. Gun number bigger than rock number, flamethrower number bigger than gun number,” followed by scientific sounding monkey noises.

But DP was only ever a gross metric, too coarse and opaque to apply blindly when Mitochondria decided to develop new weapons platforms, which meant that real-world testing was required.

And, every damn year, someone tried to prove that the DP on a laser gun made it just as good as the equivalent DP of a firearm, or any other sane man’s weapon. So, every year, the Acquisition Instrument Testing Committee put their neck on the line to find out just how bad this year’s crop of laser weapons was. Everyone knew laser weapons were hot shit. If the enemy has reflective armor, they don’t die. If they are too far or too close, they don’t die. If the laser moved across the target too fast to deposit energy, they don’t die. If the laser moves across the target too slowly and develops a layer of insulating char, they don’t die. If the laser bounces the wrong way, they don’t die but the person holding the laser does, or goes blind. And if the laser blah blah blah… All the other ways to fail ran into each other. But, paradoxically, he thought, all the ways to fail meant nothing to the engineers. In fact, they were a bonus; every mode of failure was an opportunity for a solution, and every solution was a chance to out-nerd the other engineers and get a payday for a new invention and, in his cynical opinion, solving problems with lasers was such low hanging fruit that some engineers spent their whole careers on laser weapons because they couldn’t hack it on a real weapon platform. After all, the 9mm bullet had persisted for centuries; it was just too good. It made the nerds uncomfortable, like trying to approach a woman who was out of their league. It was paradoxically too attractive to get any attention. But lasers; that easy, ugly technology riddled with issues, was an easy lay.

This time, the new hotness was “Adaptive-Band Ranged-Point-Focus Pulsed Multitube Concussive Burst Laser Stimulator”. Kune liked to treat all tech as black boxes, but he had been around this block enough to know monkey-speak. The grunt-speak translation was approximate; “the problem with reflective armor has been solved by making a laser that changes color. The problem with range has been solved with moving lenses that can break. The problem with char-shielding has been solved with light that explodes, sort of. And the problem with the beam reflecting off smoke or mirrors to blind people could not be solved with a buzzword and has been ignored.”

At least they were lightweight. Technically speaking, this shouldn’t matter since Kune had an exosuit to lug the laser across the battlefield but when he was sitting in a troop transport like this one, exo off to save power, he was glad he didn’t have to balance a hundred kilo power pack and flash tube across his knees.

For Jobbu, though, the weight mattered a lot more because he did not wear an exosuit.

“You still wearing that lobster skin?” Jobbu called across the aisle, raising his voice above the whine of the ion thrusters, “You know that stuff will break your arms and legs if it ever glitches up? I don’t trust it!”

Kune ignored this.

“I just use Gopamine! That stuff is great, look at this!” Jobbu flexed, showing off a ham-sized bicep laced with green veins, “All natural stuff!”

“That stuff is as natural as your left foot.” Kune responded, kicking the metal prosthetic that jutted across the aisle.

“Nah! They get it from those Jellaallal trees Freshson grows back home on Lasshic. I grew up on those Jellaallal’s, I trust them. You ever climb a tree? It makes you a man!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Trees!” Jobbu made some kind of gesture that was supposed to look like a tree, “Trees, Jellaallals! they’re the real nature.”

Kune just shook his head and looked at the red clock at the end of the troop compartment. Two minutes to ingress. Jobbu traced his sight, and made a barking laugh.

“Hah! That’s what I’m talking about! You gotta read clocks? Can’t even track time without some computer doing it for you?”

Kune ignored this too.

“Sorry, just giving you a hard time. You really shouldn’t trust them. That one’s probably fine, but I know the alarm clock they issue us will change time so you wake up earlier and go to sleep later; the brass can make them change to whatever time they want so that we end up working more than we think we are.”

How the hell do you argue with that? Kune thought. The man thought time itself was a conspiracy.

“And these lasers,” Jobbu continued, lifting his own prototype with one hand, “What do you think they actually do?”

“What?” He asked before he could stop himself.

“You know they aren’t weapons, right? Everyone knows lasers are terrible weapons. I bet they’re actually mind controlling beams. You know that lasers are electromagnetic waves? Well, guess what, so are our brains! It’s all electro-signals. I bet we’re actually testing mind control beams. That’s why I added some ferrite to my Gopamine. It makes it so much easier to think, since the iron particles block the electro-signals from all this technology crap we have to wear. You should try it! And it’s natural too, just grind up some natural rust and combine it with-“

“What are you talking about?” Sarah-Ann asked from her seat beside Jobbu. Kune tried to shake his head to warn her off interacting with the meat-head, but it was too late.

“Natural rust! You ever eat rust?”

“You’re a fucking idiot, Jobbu.” She said.

“And I bet you suck Illuminati cock!” He shot back with a smile. They knocked knuckles, both proud of their witty banter.

“That rust will screw you up.” She said, “Lojack got screwed up from it.”

Jobbu shrugged, “It helps me; maybe it just messed with his inflammation.”

“No! He got tetanus!” She had to shout over a swell in the engine buzz.

“Then he’s an idiot! You have to give it a sanitation rinse before you eat the stuff! Jeez, what moron doesn’t sanitize their rust?! If you don’t know that then tetanus is the least of your problems.” Jobbu shot back.

Kune was mildly impressed at this point; he didn’t think Jobbu even knew what ‘sanitation’ was, and if he had known, he was more likely to reject it as a conspiracy to destroy his immune system than anything worth thinking about.

Before the intriguing conversation on the health benefits of eating rust could continue, Sergeant Davis appeared at the end of the compartment, “Listen up, Brain Buckets!” the Sarge saw Sarah-Ann had some recreational reading on her lap, “Sarah-Ann, put that shit away! Don’t you Buckets forget, we’re here to test these platforms! We’re not hear to sit on our asses and pick our noses! Get out there and shoot shit! Secondary objective, put the hurt on Kalter Returnerists! Those cult fuck nuts are spreading salacious rumors about our outfit, and what do we think of that?!”

The troops seated down both sides of the transport cheered, entirely unaware if an affirmative cheer supported the opinion of Davis or the Returners. Kune just gave a half-hearted fist pump. As usual, they didn’t get their real objective until they were seconds away from ingress, and even then, in their usual ‘just do it, don’t think about it’ way.

The transport’s lighting switched from white to yellow, and all those wearing an exo suit flicked them on. If they hadn’t expected Davis’ final words, they would have been lost in the whine of power packs priming up.

“What are we?” Davis chanted.

“Scientists!” The committee cheered. Now the wine of power packs was keening under the subhertz rumble of ions straining to maneuver.

“What do we get?!”

“Blood and data!” Was blasted away as the deployment doors cracked open.

“That’s right! Now get out there and get some!” Davis roared and charged down the aisle towards the growing crack of true light. The chamber lighting switched from yellow to flashing green as Davis leapt out, and the twin rows of ‘scientists’ stood as one. As they trooped out, Kune caught a glimpse of Jobbu clutching the tags around his neck, then saw that his tags were still hanging down the front of his plate carrier, then he was out of the doors and into the screaming wind. Even over the roaring wind of freefall, he could hear Jobbu howl with the thrill of it.

Then the floor was gone and he was falling too. After hundreds of drops, the tedium of process numbed the thrill. First, finish priming the Exo, which gave its electromechanical whine as its powerbank span up to full wattage. His limbs trembled and flexed as they started dynamic self-diagnostic, an action that would have been awkward to go through in the cramped carrier. Then it was fixing the payload for landing, planting the heavy laser module in its lug at the base of his spine. Then, eye on the display mounted on his chest plate, he watched the ToF sensor read his altitude as it closed in on retro-range. The Exo’s power supply whined and chirped, then he felt the haptic heartbeat against this chest, signifying Exo self-diagnostic was all good. Well shit, it had better be all good, he was falling into a cement combat zone at terminal velocity. As he entered the green retro-range, he felt the machine gun pops and jolts as his retro turbines span up, then the dull roar as they ignited and kicked into sustainment and control thrust. As he fell into yellow retro range the engines were howling and his weight doubled as they fired in earnest, trying to squish him between his own falling momentum and their hundreds of pounds of upwards thrust. Then retro red hit, with urgent thumping from the haptics as the Gs fell away and he had enough control to retrieve his payload and bring the laser to bear. Just in time too, as small arms fire erupted from the squat prefab buildings all around, some of it thumping into his plate armor. He fired back.

It sounded apathetic. Just a snappy click and a pop as relays switched, then his first target crumpled, screaming. To his right, he saw Jobbu land, still howling, jutting his weapon out in all directions, as if he needed action-hero movements to catch the null recoil of a laser shot.

“Put on your damn goggles!” Kune shouted over the comms. He saw Jobbu pause and pull a pair of goggles from his carrier, then give him a goofball thumbs-up.

“Hey Jobbu, if you go blind, can I have your pornos?” Sarah-Ann added, over the radio.

“No chance in hell, a lady like you couldn’t survive my stash.” He said, turning slowly, pumping his arms against imagine recoil with each laser pulse.

“I’m already in your stash!”

“Focus, you idiots.” Kune barked, pivoting his instrument towards a new target climbing up the side of Jobbu’s landing site. His shot didn’t land with enough DP to kill, but the stunned falling body probably caught enough on landing to finish the job.

Jobbu’s voice lost some of its machismo, “No, are you serious?”

He could almost hear Sarah-Ann’s shit-eating grin, “What do you think I did for Mito before I signed up for the Committee? You know I started as an Asset myself?”

“Shit! You-“ There was a chirp of feedback and radio noise as Jobbu’s weapon shut down, taking his power system offline in the process. Kune gave him covering fire while he rebooted, giving three more tangos the snap-crackle-pop of his spread spectrum laser fire. He felt a low buzzing from his haptic feedback; his weapon was getting too hot. Two shots later and his own system shut down, just as Kol’s came back online.

Lucky asshole, he thought as he paused to open up the cooling throttle on his prototype. If I hadn’t landed up here, or if this shit had over-heated ten seconds ago, or if I hadn’t reminded you to use your goggles, you’d be packed in a casket. Then he was back in the fight with a long shot; the weapon’s onboard target tracker picked off a sniper four hundred yards away, and he didn’t even have to hold it carefully. That was one advantage of laser weapons, whatever DP they delivered, galvanometers made sure they could deliver it almost anywhere in line-of-sight.

Jobbu finally had a moment to get back to important business, “Please tell me you’re not the girl with the horse mask in-“

“You fucking perve!” Sarah-Ann shot back, “I can’t believe anyone bought those horse mask videos!”

“All units report landing status!” Davis barked as the last of the platoon made land-fall.

Kune punched the Auto-Acknowledge button on his carrier interface and went back to shooting, now focusing suppressive fire on a stack of Returners huddled inside some kind of cement watchtower. He commanded his goggles to zoom in, saw that there was a metallic instrumentation panel in line-of-sight, and focused a series of measured laser pulses on it. The first, tuned for wide divergence, ablated the paint off the console with a series of bright flashes that probably blinded the bastards who thought they had cover. The rest of the pulses, with a wavelength tuned to reflect off the metal instead of melting it, bounced around inside the tower and… lucky hit. He saw a gout of flame, then panicked motion as one of his reflections hit a target with enough power to light their clothes on fire. What was the DP of that shot? Didn’t matter, the DP of the impact after that unfortunate bastard jumped out the window was more than enough to finish him off. He pumped a few more megajoules into the tower to discourage the targets from getting back in the fight and returned his attention to his immediate area.

Scorch marks and dazzling lights were dotting the cityscape under his tower as the rest of the platoon descended to the streets for close-quarters ‘science’. Morons. Within those few meters of range to target, the reflected laser light was still strong enough to blind, maim and kill. And no sooner had he thought it, than he saw it. Coming down the lane in front of his perch, a grunt was chasing someone, man or woman, wearing the Returnist robes, carrying what looked like an honest-to-god kitchen sink. It was just unfortunate timing; the Committee Member brought their weapon to bear, to gun down the fleeing Returnist, just as the Returnist turned to see if their pursuer had caught up. Their torso pivoted, bringing the sink-thing around in time to catch the shot. It was all right-angles, a coarse retro-reflector. The person in the cloak dropped the boxy object as it flashed white hot at the same time a sunspot appeared on the shooter’s face. Kune cringed as the screaming and smoking started. Their goggles weren’t rated for a direct hit, or even a secondary hit, at such close range. Just seeing the reflection from where he stood, his own goggles reported that they had lost 5% of the sensor area in his right-side optic. The computer vision system filled in the lost data with the feed from his left side, but he got the feeling he’d have to swap sensor plates before he was done here. As for the man on the ground, clutching his face and staggering blindly towards a wall, there wasn’t much to do besides call in an injury and start moving.

Finally, almost a full ten minutes after ingress, Davis had set a rally point on a Returnist Hall of Convergence. Ironic, because there was a whole lot of Committee members converging on it now. Kune kicked on his retro thrusters, keeping them revved up so he could start traversing the rooftops. He only had enough kilojoules of fuel for a few minutes of thruster use, but he intended to use every second of it. The longer he could stay out of the cramped streets, the better. When his thrusters were up to speed, he made a half leap, half stride off the roof to coast down to a lower building, then jumped to turn his momentum into a bounce to the next one, then to the next. On the bounce, he saw Jobbu running through the streets between his rooftops. He had his goggles pushed onto his forehead, heedless of any chance he could accidentally catch sight of a laser shot. Well, screw him, Kune thought; he’d already got his one warning for the day.

Over the comms he heard a report that Sarah-Ann had caught a reflection; sounded like someone forgot what they were doing, missed a target and bounced enough laser light off a flat wall to score some friendly fire. Damn idiot; lucky she only got a DP of 0.01, or the shooter would have to report to the Committee head. Other reports were coming through of power system failures, charge chambers bursting into flames, dust on the optics cracking lenses and Committee members forgetting to wear their goggles.

And as fast as their equipment was failing, the Returnists were rallying. Faster, in fact.

With the uncanny synchronicity that could emerge from chaotic pitched battle, the Returnists lit up the rooftops with kinetic weapons. Plumes of dust impact peppered Kune’s next roof, forcing him to turn the landing into a slide, then a thruster-cushioned fall into the street below. Shot-tracing in his heads-up-display pointed at the steeple of the church, but he was too deep in the streets to get a line of sight. He pushed a couple keys on his equipment to call in the threat so that the rest of the committee would know, then began his deliberate walk to the congregation point. No running for him; it just burned energy and convinced his brain to act fast. With a weapon that could kill its user at lightspeed, he needed to be slow and deliberate.

But Jobbu had no such need. He charged around a corner hollering “Get ‘em! Behind me! Get those fuckers!”

Kune had his gun up as a horde of Returnists followed, and squeezed the button. A gout of flesh-fire burst off the first in line, then danced across the rest, saccading from one to the next as the weapon’s tracking system automatically delivered 5 DP and moved to the next target under its own discretion. Unfortunately its discretion sucked. By the time the last grey robe was lighting up, the second one, who was not as dead as he was supposed to be, was shooting at Kune, raising sparks and ceramic fragmentation across his exo’s chest. And the damn gun was too locked onto its current target to shoot him, even when Kune yanked the gun towards the guy trying to fucking kill him. Jobbu span, got a sight picture, and lit him up, turning the man’s head into a candle. Then another one, who’s nerves had cooked so fast he didn’t realize he was an amputee, opened fire. He shot Kune’s weapon at the same time Jobbu shot his.

It was too fast to track; Kune felt like a supernova had gone off in his arms and had one frame of pure white before his goggles went totally dead, and all he could hear was a tinnitus ring and Jobbu screaming. For a dizzy moment, between the heat, blindness and pained howls, he thought he’d finally gone to hell. Then he pushed his goggles up and saw that his gun had, in his stead. He shook it as if it just needed a little bump, but that only caused scorched plastic and expensive glass to fall out of every burst seam. Then, in a bolt of panic, he dropped it hard and held up… two perfectly healthy hands. At least the designer had done one thing right. The husk that stank of burning plastic rolled on the ground, revealing a steel plate that had ballooned, but not cracked, when the weapon failed. A few millimeters of steel was all that had saved his flesh.

“Shit.” He hissed and stowed the junk on the lug on his back. The nerds would want this one back to see how its life had ended. Fortunately, it had stopped his life from ending. That bullet was meant for him. He swapped in his back-up goggle sensor plate and scanned the Returnist bodies for anyone playing dead. All were cooling rapidly. Had it been his last burst, or that exploding gun? What would he write in his report?

A heavy hand fell against his shoulder, he span to this new threat, but saw it was Jobbu. All life and joviality was gone. He was looking through Kune like a ghost.

“They- they got my eyes.” Jobbu said.

Kune stared, with numbed horror.

There were goggles on Jobbu’s forehead.

“They got my eyes!” Jobbu gasped, he tried to reach out for Kune, but he stepped back on instinct. Jobbu heard the servos whine, and stepped towards the sound, “I can’t see! Kune, you there?! I can’t see! It’s dark!”

“You’ll be fine.” Kune said, but he found himself stepping away again, “They can fix you up.”

“No! They got me. Just like Jespa.”

They had to move. This place was crawling with Returnists and they had a rendezvous to make.

“Get it together! Set your suit-“ he started, but Jobbu wasn’t wearing an exo like his, “I’ll guide you. Follow me.”

“I can’t bro, I’m- I don’t think I’m going to make it. They finally won.”

Now rage was filling him like ice water, “Jobbu, cut that shit. We have to get moving!”

By now, Jobbu had felt his way to a wall and slid down to the ground, “Nah, they won. The tech. The system. I’m done man.”

“What are you talking about?!” Kune held a button on his controls, “I’m reporting a-“

“Stop!” Jobbu shouted at the world, “Leave me!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!”

“I’m done man! What’s gonna happen now? They stuff robot eyes in my skull? What kind of sight is that? Only see what they want me to see? I’d rather see Jespa.” He said. His hand had found those second dogtags around his neck.

Kune was about to ask again, but Jobbu had more on his mind “She was all I had man. After I got picked up, you know? They got us both. She was an asset of course.” He sighed, “I was- fuck, I was so mad. I fought them all the time. Then you know what they told me? ‘Jobbu, your sister moved up! She’s having a great time. If you stop fighting, you get to see her again!’. I knew it was shit, I tell you. I could see it in their faces.”

Kune scanned up and down the street. Davis would kick his ass if he made it to the egress late, if he made it to the egress at all.

“Then let’s move so you can see- so you can meet her again! Come on!” He reached out. Jobbu protested and tried to push him away with the animal strength of a desperate man. Servo joints whined as Kune batted his hands aside, and without the sight to fight back, Jobbu was no more effective than a toddler against Kune’s machine.

“Let me go! Let me die!” Jobbu protested, trying to strike Kune, but his fist landed on a mounting lug jutting out of Kune’s shoulder, “Fuck!”

“We’re getting out of here!” he shouted back, “If you want to die so fucking bad, then why didn’t you eat a laser?”

Instead of answering, Jobbu started pawing at the suit controls, but he didn’t find anything before Kune rolled him back to the ground, “If you don’t tell me what the hell is going on, I am going to knock you out and drag you back to the ship to face whatever the hell you’re freaking out about.” He hissed.

The impact with the ground, and Kune’s threat, finally cut through Jobbu’s hysterics.

“My sister.” He said, “They put me on a call with her. I hadn’t seen her for over a year. Said if I kept cooperating, I could keep talking to her. I thought she was dead, but when I heard her voice I knew I could make it. You know how it is for assets; they behave, do- do their thing, they get out, same as us.”

Kune had picked up Jobbu’s gun and fired a test pattern at the opposite wall as Jobbu talked. Self-diagnostics were shit, since Jobbu probably never set this thing up properly, but it was might just be good enough to get them to egress.

He continued, “But I knew she would never make it easy. We’re from Lasshic, we don’t fit in the system, we can’t ‘behave’ for these assholes. They probably shot her before she even got to a Home. But then I heard her voice! Dude, you have no idea, it was like… like the best Gopamine in the Galaxy! As soon as I heard that, I knew I could do it. Just serve my time and I’d be good. Even if Jespa gave them hell, I’d go to her and break her out, or die trying.”

“Get to the point!” Kune said. Now he was finishing a rough calibration routine to keep the gun from overheating again.

“Well… You know me. I was kind of suspicious. I just had to pry.”

Kune had a cargo hook on his belt, which he snapped onto the drag handle on the back of Jobbu’s vest and started hauling him towards the church. He didn’t even know why he was dragging the man back to the extraction site. Cynically, he thought that Jobbu’s huge body would act as cover for his legs, or so that he couldn’t be blamed for leaving the man behind. But this was Mito. No one cared if someone was too weak to keep up, and no one would blame him for thinking the same. At this point, he might even be dressed down for not shooting the man as punishment for losing his nerve, or to close a potential leak, or to treat him as a run-away. And even with his exo suit, the body was heavy, it slowed him down and made it harder to evade detection. But this… empathy was as strong as it was mysterious. Damn. He wished he was like this stupid laser gun, coming into the field with a suite of self-diagnostics, and a back-up team of brainiacs to figure out the solution to every idiosyncrasy.

But he had gray matter instead of silicon, and he had to do what it said. With sick irony, he realized Jespa was not so lucky. Jobbu was still talking.

“She wasn’t even one of the good models! They had just prompted some shitty sexting AI to act like her! It didn’t even know what a Jellaallal tree was anymore! They just-”

Jobbu was still babbling and pawing at his eyes, but Kune cut him off.

“So they used a machine to copy your sister to keep you in line!” He growled over his shoulder, “Don’t be a pussy about it. Yeah, sucks she’s probably dead, sucks you didn’t get to make a suicide pact with her, sucks you both got pulled into the Mito ‘family.’ Either give up or don’t, stop making it my problem!”

“It’s the system!” Jobbu wailed, “The system is all artificial! It’s mechanical! It ain’t humans keeping us in line, it’s-“

“It’s not real!” Kune shouted back.

“It’s killing us!” Jobbu retorted.

Kune saw a large courtyard ahead, with one broad avenue leading to the extraction sight, a tall spire of the church poking above the small, square buildings. They could try to sneak around the alleys, hope they connected, didn’t get ambushed, and still made it on time, or they could make a dash across the open ground. If he didn’t have three hundred pounds of useless junk strapped to him, it wouldn’t even be a question.

Jobbu had moved past pathetic wailing into pathetic rambling, “Once I realized it wasn’t Jespa anymore, I knew. The system isn’t here to help us, it’s here to control us. It’s here to make us into machines, so we can turn calories into profit, so we can put DP where they want it and stop it being where they don’t want it. We’re just fucking machines, man. When they turned Jespa into a computer voice, they didn’t even change anything except stopping her heart.”

Kune still had his laser up and ready, but he spared a moment to glare down at the man, “You are a moron. You don’t even know what ‘the system’ is. You actually think it’s real.”

Jobbu started to reply, summoning indignation as he was sat on his ass, but Kune was just getting started.

“There is no system. There are only cowards, morons, try-hards and egomaniacs trying to get what they want. They don’t care about you, they literally made your sister into a number, which to them and you, was barely a difference. The only difference between you and ‘Them’ is that you dealt with your problems by acting smart cause you eat rust and hate clocks, while they dealt with their problems by applying 1.2 DP to your sister and turning her into a vocaloid. There is no system, there is only taking whatever shit you have in front of you and making the most of it, and hoping it doesn’t tick off anyone so much that they leave you for dead in the middle of the battlefield.”

Jobbu finally shut up, but Kune had one more thing to say, “You know my gun just blew the hell up? That’s what blinded you. Boo-hoo, the system gave me a crappy gun. But there are two differences between us, besides the fact that I’m not a total retard. First is I’m not so blinded by fear that I don’t take basic fucking safety advice, which means I’m not literally blind like you. And second, is just because one thing went wrong one time, just because this shitty gun went nuclear in my hands, I didn’t give up, sit down, and wish someone besides me had the balls to finish the job. I picked up another shitty gun, because it’s the only way I can get myself, and three hundred pounds of idiot and rust, out of this godforsaken place. You got that?”

Jobbu turned his head away, but Kune saw the obstinate set in his jaw.

Kune had said his piece and Jobbu had heard it. Now it was time to get back to work. He did one more check to make sure there weren’t any Returnist snipers on the roofs around their lane, then unsnapped Jobbu.

“Can you see anything at all?” He said

“I- I can see a bit. Bright lights.”

“Can you see my silhouette?”

“No way. It’s all dark.”

Dammit, that’s what he was worried about.

“I’m going to strike a flare. Follow that. It’s a hundred yards straight ahead to the exit point. Just follow me, and we’ll be out of here and you can keep telling me your sob story, and I can tell you how stupid it is.”

Jobbu got to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall with one hand, grabbing dogtags with the other. He nodded in Kune’s direction, “Let’s get out of here.”

Kune looked down at the flare in his hand. Make himself as obvious as possible, crossing an open field, surrounded by blinds, in enemy territory. Just to get one rust-eating asshole back to a company that would send a hundred men to die just to prove that lasers are stupid weapons. But this was what he had in front of him. And if he left Jobbu to die, if he struck this flare and threw it the other direction, or didn’t even strike it at all, then he would just be another cowardly, moronic egomaniac, taking what was in front of him to screw the other guy.

Jobbu stared blindly, waiting for the mote of light that he might follow to another day. He could hear the drop-ship approaching, the last sound he’d often heard before extract, signaling the last half-minute of heads up before their last chance left them behind. One of the many choices the system gave them; get on, or stay behind. And it was time to get on.

Kune twisted the top of the cigar-sized tube, pressed it in, and ripped it off, opening a near-blinding fountain of pink light. As he darted out into the courtyard, he clipped it to his belt, brought his gun up, and started firing deadly flashes at any window that seemed to have a body, at any thing that poked above a roof. His heart and servos were pounding as he ran like a bat out of hell across the exposed space. Now shots started ringing out, shooting geysers of dirt around his feet, some even thumping against his armor. His laser flashed again and again, sometimes causing gouts of fire to spew out of Returnists that were caught by the auto-target, sometimes just leaving sunspots behind where he only imagined a threat. As they finished crossing the courtyard, he risked a glance behind, and saw Jobbu, arms pumping, chest heaving, veins stood out so far they looked green, racing to keep up with him. And he charged forward those last hundred yards as the drop-ship swooped in at the end of the street. Their last chance to exit, but they were too far away. Between violent breaths, Kune cursed Jobbu, cursed himself for talking too long, cursed the damn company for sending them here.

Then Davis peeked around the edge of the ship, “Kune! Get your ass in here! Double-time!”

For the first time in his career, the ship waited. It was only ten seconds, but that was as good as the rest of his life. He didn’t even slow down, one mechanically assisted hand latched onto a hydraulic struct, swinging and pulling him into the crew bay, while his other reached out for Jobbu, ready to help the blind man into the ship.

There was no blind man there.

The ramp was closing already, and through the thinning gap he saw the ground fall away with a lurch of vertigo. Kune couldn’t even get a glance outside to see what happened. He felt a burn start on his back and ripped the flair off his suit before it could do any damage. It filled the crew bay with white-pink light as he threw it aside.

“Where’s Jobbu?” He asked Davis.

“How the hell should I know?” Davis said.

“He was right behind me.”

“Guess he didn’t like what he saw. Good, you got his gun. Check in your gear and take some Slondrium, we’ve got a long flight back to the ship.” Then Davis moved on to berate someone for leaving their busted prototype behind.

Kune glanced behind him, confused that Jobbu wasn’t there. But by the time he got to the armorer at the end of the crew bay, he was livid. He had practically stuck a flair up his ass just to give that guy a fighting chance. He had hauled him a hundred yards, and had carried his gear, just because Jobbu didn’t the nerve to own his mistakes.

The armorer recognized Jobbu’s weapon and absence.

“He bit it?” the armorer asked.

Kune could only give a tight nod.

“Bad luck.”

“Idiot.” Kune spat, “Coward”. The armorer glanced up, and saw that Kune wasn’t talking to him.

The armorer scanned the code on Jobbu’s gun, and squinted at the charred mess where the code would be on Kune’s gun.

“The idiot got himself killed, after I dragged his ass right up to the drop ship.” Kune said.

The armorer decided to look for a component serial number so he could figure out the ID for the hunk of slag Kune had given him. As he unscrewed a blanking panel, he said absently, “Why’s that got you ticked off?”

“Cause I stuck my neck out for him. I gave him a chance and he threw it away. Couldn’t face it. Thought being blind was worse than being dead, after I nearly got shot in the ass pulling him back here.”

The armorer shrugged and used an optic probe to scan the internals for a serial number so he could log the gear into the system.

“Wouldn’t that piss you off?” Kune demanded.

“You get mad, he gets sad-“

“So, I should just be a rock?!” Kune glared at the lump he brought back, as much rock as tech.

 The armorer broke into a smile as his scanner finally found something to identify Kune’s gun, “Ah, there it is. You’re Kune? One of the brass asked to get you back.”

Kune’s chest was still raging against his breastplate, but his mouth had stopped in confusion.

“They wanted to make sure you got back.” The armorer said again, then called back to Davis in the crew bay, “Kune made it back!”

“Damn straight he did,” Davis shot back, “I had to hold up this whole shit-rig for him!”

“Who wanted me to make it back? What do they want?” Kune asked.

“No idea, I guess the system likes you. Maybe you’re useful. Haha, like this thing!” the armorer slapped the blackened mass.

The DP calculator fell out of a mote of ash.