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.