Sword and Sorcery, a Novel

4

One moment, perfectly normal. Preparing to loop around Titania for the gravity boost that would propel him back to Glimmr, to the Orbital Station, Cerulean Dream, and the battle. Then, folding suddenly out of space almost on top of him, a Draug fighter crashed into V47. The impact was tremendous, crunching, jolting, thundering loud. He’d barely had time to reconfigure and turn before tons of hurtling mass struck, tore and… worse yet… infected.

His sensor feed flared bright red and then crashed, as V47’s AI locked up, attacked by an alien parasite. Enmeshed in the cockpit, the pilot had Mili-ticks to respond, releasing internal countermeasures (ICE) and then taking the battle outside.

Long ago, when pilots were considered persons, not assets, battle-mechs had included an unpowered emergency escape system. It was still there, now, just hard to get at. The pilot had to squirm loose of his probes, hand grips and contact plates, then tear out an auxiliary sensor panel to reach that spring-loaded hatch.

No V47 to calm his breathing and heartrate with music or drugs as he ejected free of the damaged mech. Or… almost free. He kept hold of the hatch rim like an idiot, like a n00b. Added mass to increase the length of his arm so that it wasn’t just torn right off by the force of that violent ejection. Swung hard around, getting a blurred and whirling impression of space, stars, Titania and the dark, flaring hulk of the Draug. It had been terribly damaged by battle and ramming. The pilot intended to make its day worse.

His thinly stretched arm somehow held, posting a storm of imminent-failure alarms. The pilot drew it back in and then swung around, his momentum bringing him crashing back down onto V47’s hull, just over the stump of a torn-away leg. He came down amidst sparking wires and twisted hull plating. Sent a brief message (‘I’m sorry.’) which the mech could not receive, being locked in combat with horrifically powerful alien malware. V47 Pilot patted the hull, then looked around with every lens and scanner he possessed. Saw that the Draug had next to no steering at all, was venting gas as it fought to come back around for another pass.

V47 Pilot made note of all this, imaged and archived. As Ace would put it, ‘life’s tough all over’. The Draug couldn’t steer. He had a crippled mech… and a plan.

Stupid. Dumb. Utterly foolish. Never work, and he did it anyhow. Propelled himself off V47, across the gap and onto the Draug fighter’s pitted, rippling hull, striking hard. At full burn, he used 72.6% of his power to get there and then to lock on. Deployed all three of his drones, as well. One stayed with V47, watching for further attack. The others remained with the pilot. His boot soles took hold; first magnetically and then… when the spam-son depolarized… with physical clamps.

It was dark-matter metal beneath him, not steel or neutronium alloy. Its density and magnetic properties were entirely alien. But he wasn’t aiming to bash through that twitching hull. Not when there were so many spark-jetting wounds available. His own breath misted the glass of his view plate as the pilot fought his way around ridges, pits and gunports.

‘Come on, mal-code, corrupt file,’ he sent. ‘I’m right here!’ Stomped out a lens, to drive home his point. ‘Come out and do something about it!’ But the Draug wouldn’t bite. Handshake refused, and time to try something else.

His cyborg body had wrist guns. Crowd-pleasers, meant to be used in surface melee combat. (Not bad at a pinch out in space, either.) Targeting the deepest section of damage, V47 Pilot flipped his hands down and unloaded both barrels, firing a continuous stream of purple-white plasma. Chewed through remaining armor, weak shielding and goo, into the fighter’s dark cockpit. Then, small-nuke shoulder missiles, rotated out of his fey-space pockets and into position: one, two, away.

They hit hard, not detonating… not until triggered… but still moving, pushing the Draug even further off course. Now, it had a wildly blasting pair of new engines to deal with, and crash-all power to do it.

Through his flickering drone-feed, the pilot could see V47 tumbling off into the distance, severed nearly in half. Himself, still riding the Draug’s pulsing hull like a moron. Titania, very much closer than it had been, flaring with power.

The Draug fought back, creating a pit on its hull to swallow him up. Easily dodged, as the alien meant to capture, not kill. The pilot had no such compunction, was raging inside with raw and unfiltered emotion. Waited until the fighter’s roll put it in just the right orientation, then de-clamped and blasted away. Next, recalling his drones, the pilot triggered both nukes. Hell opened up, first slicing the Draug in half, then completely destroying the craft in a burst of blinding, solar-core light.

The pilot lost sensory feed for 3.8 very long ticks, cartwheeling through space with next to no power left. Flickers and data-ghosts, bits of commands and files, faces… darkness… a lone, blinking dot and… reboot failed… reboot failed… system crash… reboot failed… reboot success… His sensory feed came back online, first through the drones, then his own glitching optics. Turned out that meat eyes were sensitive to wide bands of light. Worth filing, that.

The Draug was gone. Just fast-spreading gasses and dust. V47 was close, but about to pass off to one side. No evident power and no response to his queries. The pilot smothered emotion. Used his drones to push himself onto the derelict. The business took a full thirty ticks, during which time he hadn’t the will to view show-vids or reorder his data. Just measured the distance between them with foolish and wasteful radar pings.

Got there at last, touching down by the battle-mech’s transparent cockpit bubble. He was not in there, of course, and nothing was on. No light on the panels but one: a red spiral waiting icon.

‘It’s alright, V,’ he sent to the bisected mech. To his friend. ‘You’re going to be fine.’ It was under internal attack, and that was a fight that the pilot had no way to join. ‘I am here. I just… don’t know what to do… how else to help.’

And no time at all to spend watching for signs of recovery. They were well on their way to the magnetar Titania, which now filled up 60% of his forward view. V47 Pilot turned his own frustration and worry to what he could do, and that was to get them to safety.

There was a lacy, delicate, half-built structure around the magnetar, which seethed with force-lines and manna. Glowing particle jets shot away from both poles, casting a vivid, gamma-pale light. Under a layer of iron, Titania was creation-forge hot and spinning at over 12,000 revs per tick. The partly completed shell around that pulsating corpse was held in place by the magnetar itself, using tethers of lightning-like force. Safety, because only a fool would go anywhere near it, and only a bigger fool would come looking.

Using the drones and venting a reserve oxygen tank, V47 Pilot got them moving in the right direction. Twenty-two standard candle-marks passed in transit, but at last they drifted through a vast, quiescent gate, down where the magnetar’s gravity took hold. Its power accelerated mech, pilot and drones inside that lacy neutronium half-shell. There was genuine splendor, a whole landscape beneath, which V47 Pilot was too distracted to see.

He pulled manna from Titania, using the harvested power to bring V47 gently onto a section of ‘ground’. Burnt out and had to rebuild his own thrusters repeatedly but kept them all from being pulled into the hungry, dead star.

There was an atmosphere clinging to the shell’s underside, held in by force-shield and gravity. He guided them in through shielding and air, down to the shore of a turbulent sea. Hasty scans showed no biological life, and only a single sleep-mode AI.

He did not send a query. Merely flagged himself ‘Friend’. Then, having done all that he could, V47 Pilot powered down for much-needed repair.