Old Draft of "The Shadow of Phobos"

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Battles rage throughout the Martian Moon of Panic. A nameless mech and a nobody pilot lay crushed below my boot. In all my life, this is only my fourth kill; in the month I’ve spent as a Gladiator of Deimos, it is my third.

Half a mile ahead of me, my partner lunges a spear the size of a tower through the brainCase of an enemy MiniMech. Circuits, sparks, and oil burst out the exit wound alongside the spearhead; the sparks catch the oil so that flames twinkle and dance along the spear and all down the mech's back.

We’ve nearly disabled the last of EpicFare’s team; if we put down their three remaining warriors, we win the day and take home a bounty the likes of which has not been seen in a quarter century. Six million centues; more than most individuals would see in three lifetimes.

Caulder will use his share to retire some place quiet, probably; he doesn’t know where. Me? I’ll buy a ship, fund a crew, and plunge beyond the Oort Cloud—after I’ve plundered the Core for all I can carry.

The pirate’s life for me, you see.

I stand in the nook of my MiniMech’s chest cavity—a space called the pilotDeck—shielded from the tumult of the fray by three thick layers of Martian steel. I’m fed visual stimuli via an array of sensors which supplant the electric pulses fed to my brain by my own organic eyeballs. My feet are spread evenly apart, my weight on the backfoot, one hand hung low and hooked as if clutching something heavy. The other shields my face, poised to snatch a fist or swat a missile from the air should one swing my way. A wind winnows Deimos’s surface, likely stirred by the Game Makers for dramatic effect.

“Spear’s stuck,” Caulder’s voice speaks in my head as though it is my own inner narration.

“Shit,” I curse aloud, “on your six, Caulder. Blood Pot’s coming in hot from above.”

“Heard,” Caulder says. His MiniMech, the Cast Iron, releases its spear and spins its abdomen a-hundred-eighty degrees to face his would-be assailant. The Cast Iron’s shoulders open wide, revealing a duo of bombSlings.

Conveyor belts whir within their archaic mechanisms, and one after another shrapnel bombs are slung skyward. They smash against the Blood Pot, a lightweight MiniMech designed for aerial assault and stealth operations. In an instant the machine’s center-mass crumples; it plummets, tangles in its outstretched wings, and crashes to the Deimosian topsoil. A cloud of debris obfuscates my line of sight. Electricity cascades out in all directions, followed by a rain of shrapnel and circuitry.

I propel the Wrought Iron forward, dragging my sunderSquall—more a heap of red-gray steel than a sword—through the artificial soil behind me. Kinetic force gusts down the blade from its hilt, blasting the debris it rakes up out in all directions such that it would crush and shred any would-be pursuer.

I’m upon the cloud quicker than lightning, and I pivot on the balls of my feet into a spin. My sunderSquall sails up along my hip, the sheer weight of the weapon accelerating my spin to speeds which rival a Terran hurricane. My arms rise high so that the blade sails over where I suspect Caulder’s mech still stands, and then I pivot again, swinging the gargantuan mass of steel into a downward cattycorner slice. It connects, rending the Llorna’s chest just above the pilotDeck. Another flash of electricity blinds me. When it clears, the Llorna’s top half has been utterly decimated and blown to bits by my sunderSquall. The Llorna’s pilot huddles in a ball in the far corner of his pilotDeck, alive but shell-shocked.

To my right, the Blood Pot has crashed into a huddled heap of scrap. Judging from the flames and odd angles at which its limbs jut from the ruin of its body, I suspect the Blood Pot’s pilot is dead.

I release my sunderSquall; it remains entrenched in the Martian moon’s surface, protruding up like an ugly cliff-side. I bend, heft the hilt of Caulder’s spear, and slide my hand—my MiniMech, the Wrought Iron’s hand—along the shaft until my forearm presses into the disembodied neck of the Llorna. With an effort, I scrape it off the spear, then toss the weapon aside. If Caulder needs it, he can fetch it himself; I say as much to him.

“It’s not stuck anymore. You’re welcome.”

Silence.

I reach into the lingering cloud of smoke and grab the shoulder of Caulder’s MiniMech. I tug, and it stumbles out into plain sight. On the surface, he seems unscathed. If he is unscathed, then why the radio silence? I scan his mech again, looking at the finer details. His neckPort is open. Draped over the shoulder of his mech is a parachute, the pack it’s sprung from hanging lazily down the Cast Iron's front. “Shit, Caulder! You hear me? Got company, brother!” 

Silence.

I curse, and with a snap of my fingers, my psychodigital link to the Wrought Iron severs. I zip to the edge of the pilotDeck, grab a plasma rifle from its place on the wall, and slam an omniBeetle onto my chest. “Close quarters combat, mold specs to M. Monroe, sequence eleven-dash-seven.”

The omniBeetle’s gelatinous, ink-colored underside expands out over my body. Small metallic panels flow close behind. The omniBeetle shapes itself into something like a tabard, and then goes on to stretch and contort until I’m fully armored from the neck down by lightweight copper-colored panels, interwoven by black and purple gelatin rather than the fibers or chains of traditional Terran armor. Finally, the omniBeetle forms a half-helmet that stops just below the tip of my nose. I jam a filtration mask over my mouth and then I sprint through the sliding door. My feet carry me up a narrow spiraling passageway that has an increasingly steep incline.

Before long, I ram shoulder first into a panel that gives way to a vast expanse of wiring and gears and open air. A few feet ahead of me is a ladder, built into the innermost layer of steel of my MiniMech’s neck. I sling my plasma rifle over my shoulder and scamper up the ladder as quick as I can. The panel I climbed through swings shut and locks behind me as my biomet-sig leaves its proximity.

I weave my way around cable clusters, crawl over cooling fans and macroProcessors, until finally I pass the neckPort—a soft-edged rectangular indent in the neck of my mech. I grip the rungs of the ladder tight, kick off from the inner wall, and swing both my boots into the neckPort’s center. It flies open and I sail through it, carried by my weight and the strength of my kick.

The gelatinous matter underneath my armor comes loose, reshapes itself into something akin to webbed skin which forms an obtuse angle between my upper arms and hips. The webs catch the wind and ease my descent so that I tap down gracefully on the surface of the Wrought Iron’s shoulder. In an instant, the gelatin retracts and I swing my plasma rifle around so that it’s cradled now in my hands and arms.

I aim down the sight and flick a small gear with my thumb to increase its telescopic level. I narrow my view down onto the neckPanel, but I am minutes late. No one is present. I drop the rifle and it swings round to my hip, hanging there thanks to the fibrous sash strapped round it and I; the rifle slides along the sash, hooked to it by a large caravaneer.

I reach with my mind for the live map of Arena #23 and it renders in the top-right-corner of my vision nearly instantly. I give it a once over, my eyes darting left to right in search of any sign of life at all. There is no movement, at least none large enough for the map to re-render. Instead there are only a handful of blinking black X’s which mark the dead and disabled.

This match was a two-verse-five, and we’ve brought it down to a two-verse-one. I grin. Even if Caulder dies, I still win. I’ll crush whoever infiltrated his Cast Iron and walk away from this scrap with a cool six million centues to my name. My grin falters, and the world dissolves to a slideshow of images in my mind’s eye. Two months we’ve fought on Deimos. Twelve years I’ve worked and trained with Caulder. Yet all it takes is the promise of six million centues to make his death seem palatable. What a covetous prick I’ve become.

“omniBeetle, enter flight mode; keep parameters consistent with previous commands.”

From my back unfurl three pairs of wings, insectoid in look but strong enough to counteract the weight of my bones. Even if they weren’t, the omniBeetle’s gravManipulator helps to mitigate my mass. Both features are needed for flight to work, because relying solely on gravity manipulation would put off enough heat to cook me alive inside the omniBeetle. I try not to imagine what it’d look like if I tried to rely on the wings alone. Whether silly or grotesque, it isn’t a thought that will do me any good in the fray.

I leap. At the same time, I reach out with my mind and the wings auto-respond to my brainwaves, flapping faster than most eyes could track. I propel toward the Cast Iron; I am a dragonfly hurtling toward prey twenty orders of magnitude larger than what I ought to be hunting.

I accelerate. The arena lights and terrain, the smoke and flame, and the sparking debris of hewn and sundered MiniMechs all blur into a carnivalian swirl of color and smoke around me. I grip my plasma rifle tight, aim it forward, and then I pull up, hard. All of my momentum shifts from horizontal acceleration to vertical propulsion. I loose a torrent of plasma rounds, spherical clusters half the size of a standard grenade. They slam into the Cast Iron and, after a delay, erupt in a plume of green flame.

I come to a hover twenty feet above and thirty feet away from the newly made hole in the Cast Iron’s upper-left chest. Through the smoke and sparks, I peer into the MiniMech’s pilotDeck; from my angle, I see no one. I hear nothing. My radar shows zilch. Possibilities swirl in my mind, but I shelve them and drift down to the cavity. There is only one thing to do when the fog of war is thick and the fighting has reached its decisive moment; hail Mary.

My wings fold up and retract into the panels of my armor as I land inside the cavity. I lean forward and peer inside. Caulder stands stiff as a statue, and ten feet from him, equally frozen, is EpicFare’s final combatant. Neither move. Neither can move. Caulder’s eyes blaze with cyan light, as do our enemy’s; the two are locked in a netRunner’s clinch.

The woman is tall, lithe, built like some woodland good fellow that I’d rather flee than face. She wears phantomPlate, black armor that can blend with its environment and shield itself from most radars at the cost of about 300 centues-worth of leviathan oil per hour.

Pricey gear. Rich sponsors.

She wears a plain black cloak that bares no emblem. It cuts off just above the small of her back, and I’m not sure if it’s for show or utility. Her hood is down, and her hair is a jet-black sheet that curves to a sharp point on either side of her head, the tips of which brush against her onyx pauldrons.

I know this woman, and I have every reason to fear her.

I shake my head, level my rifle, and lick my lips. There’s no time left for fear. We have only five minutes on the clock. I think of all the ways I could end this.

I could snap her neck in a second. Stab her heart. Blast her—less personal, but quicker, and more my speed. As far as I know, few netRunners are capable of defending themselves when they’re in a clinch like this. But… If I kill her now, Caulder will die alongside her.

So it goes.