The Mechaneer

Chapter 13: No-Name

“Fifteen minutes,” shouted the pit boss, a short, grizzled engineer in Algreil Aerospace overalls. If he had a name other than 'Boss,' Chloe hadn't heard anyone, even Rudy, use it.

The cockpit of the Epee hissed open. Chloe, positioned near the machine's shoulders so she could rush in and direct the coolant flow, watched Rudy stumble out of the cockpit and grip the edges.

“Are you all right?” she called.

He gulped down a breath before he could nod. “Hell of a neural feedback, though. I feel like I got the shit kicked out of me.”

“Admiral Avalon's quite a mechaneer,” Chloe said. “I’m amazed you won. That move where you grabbed the blade –”

“Risky and stupid,” Rudy said. “Bastard would’ve killed me if I’d mistimed it by half a second.”

Chloe bit back the rest of her commentary.

The Epee looked as bad as Rudy claimed to feel – though the neural feedback from each blow should have numbed after a single warning burst to his pain receptors, and vanished entirely once he was out of the cockpit. The mecha's chest armor was a mess, badly dented from Avalon’s kicks. Its left arm hung askew, and Chloe could see places where the joint actuators had blown entirely.

Still, under the circumstances, she thought the machine had held up pretty well. The pit crew swarmed over the broken arm. Even if they couldn’t get it operational again, they should be able to restore enough movement for Rudy to use it as a club. The chest armor wouldn’t stand up to another barrage like Avalon’s, but she figured Rudy could compensate against an inferior opponent.

Rudy seemed less enthused. He sat at the edge of his cockpit, panting and scowling at some perceived failure.

He seemed to be on track to winning. Wasn’t that what he wanted?

Chloe saw no way to raise his spirits. At least she could do something for his machine.

She’d pressed the remote for the fuel and coolant assembly almost without thinking about it. Quickly, she fitted a vibrating release to the intake valve. It hissed, so she replaced the release and pulled out an automatic wrench to slide the cap off. By then, the nozzle for the coolant – she quickly checked the color-coded band – dangled within reach, so she clasped it and attached it to the open valve.

The tube jerked, and coolant began to pump. Chloe watched the flow carefully. After what she’d seen from the first two rounds, she was even more convinced the Epee’s coolant system had a tendency to overextend. She hardly tapped the nozzle before shutting it off and releasing it again.

She felt Rudy’s eyes on her and mouthed, “Trust me.”

He didn't look like he did, but he managed a shrug – and kept his complaints to himself.

The liquid fuel for his thrusters took longer to top off, but Chloe understood why the pit crew took the time to fill them. Rudy hadn’t used extreme amounts of fuel, but only because his fighting style discouraged doing so. If pressed, he might need every last drop as he maneuvered for an advantage.

Personally, Chloe didn’t much care for the Epee. She had no doubt Rudy’s first two matches would look good in promotional films for the machine. They wouldn’t show its tendency to run hot or the hefty fuel requirements of its six thruster-wings.

She supposed it was meant to operate as a carrier mecha, with almost as much fuel and coolant in combat as it would have in the arena, but to her transport-trained sensibilities, it seemed like a great waste – and a great danger.

Since everyone around her worked for Algreil Aerospace, she kept her opinions to herself. The rest of the pit crew disliked her enough without hearing condemnations of their company's product.

She gave Rudy a thumbs-up. When she despaired of his returning the gesture, she descended the access ladder and watched the final preparations from an adjacent catwalk.

Rudy slid back into the cockpit. It closed over him.

The Epee hummed to life.

It made a ponderous turn, barely keeping its feet within a normal gravity environment, and braced itself as the platform it stood on rose toward the arena's circular gateway.

As soon as Rudy stepped off the platform, whatever air had leaked in when he entered was suctioned out. With the gravity already artificially suppressed, the interior of the arena was a reasonable approximation of the void of space.

Considering how much of space Chloe had seen, she had to wonder at the lengths the Wellach Cup’s backers went to to reproduce it on the ground – or over the water, as the case might be.

She didn’t need another glance at the stands to know how they managed to turn a profit, whatever their costs might be. Almost a complete sphere of seats engulfed the arena, those above with their gravity artificially set so they were looking 'up' at the action. Chloe figured the Wellach Cup could seat two or three hundred thousand, and the seats, which couldn't be cheap, were packed. She couldn’t begin to fathom how much the space-station-like ring of logo-adorned sponsor's boxes, each with a private dock for boats or aerospace craft, cost.

She doubted the crowd would get their marks' worth from the final bout of the tournament, but in truth a boring finale bothered her less than a dramatic one would have. Since she’d committed to rooting for Rudy, she wanted nothing more than a rapid and successful conclusion to his matches. Every time he got hit, she winced.

The Black Rook, his final opponent, piloted a thirteen-meter mecha that looked like a cross between a wasp and a suit of archaic plate armor. Chloe had seen two others of the same design lose earlier bouts, and neither had struck her as very impressive. Like most of the production model Civil War-era military machines, its equipment took the form of a mono-edged sword and an electromagnetic shield: sword and board, in mechaneer parlance.

Chloe turned to the pit boss. “Do you know anything about that pilot, Boss? He must be pretty good to have made it this far with an ordinary machine like that.”

“Never heard of him.” Four more words than the rest of the crew had deigned to say to her. She wondered, only half ironically, if they were warming to her.

At a thought, her goggles played back recordings of the previous rounds. In both, the Black Rook seemed only just competent enough to overcome. The second battle in particular showed nothing impressive.

Back in the moment, he bowed low to Rudy, a posture no mecha could manage except in the null gravity of space or faux-space.

Rudy gave only a slight nod in return.

Chloe supposed he’d earned the right to condescend. After all, he’d placed highly in the Etemenos Cup. Still, she wondered why he felt the need to antagonize his opponents.

She called up a different angle of the Black Rook's second-round battle with another Oligarchical test pilot, the Quicksilver Angel. Chloe felt spoiled for choice. The arena recorded from literally thousands of cameras so its editors could sell the best footage possible. Chloe – not even a fan, the pit crew had said, and she couldn't call them liars – was a lot more glad of it than she usually would have been: something about the Black Rook's fighting style struck her as odd.

She watched him barely avoid what would surely have been a killing blow from the Quicksilver Angel's bladed wings. The attack still scraped the side of the Black Rook's mecha. Then he lashed out with his sword. The strike didn’t look sound, but when the mecha parted, the Angel seemed to have gotten the worst of it.

Chloe frowned.

How had a glancing blow from a smaller machine done such damage?

The fanfare sounded, but Chloe hardly spared the present battle a glance. Her curiosity compelled her to look at the Black Rook footage from a third angle, this time directly above.

Her vision flashed from past to present.

Rudy had just missed with a pair of punches, claws retracted. He stumbled left from a well-placed shield bash to the chest, but recovered as quickly.

Nonetheless, a few seconds told Chloe what she’d feared.

Somehow, despite the differences in their equipment, the Black Rook had put the Crimson Phoenix on the defensive.

She looked to her recording again.

This time, she clearly saw a glossy black blade merely graze the Quicksilver Angel’s side armor – and saw the armor crumple as though it had been smashed by a destroyer’s anti-mecha cannon.

Rudy snapped a kick at the Black Rook, spun in the air and brought his other leg around.

He missed.

The Rook's blade shot toward the weaker joint armor at the Epee’s leg.