Takedown

February 2nd, 2386 ESY

Lunar Security Authority Surface Protection Force Annex

Mare Serenitatis, Luna

“Eleven. Twelve. Come on, Lex, bust ‘em out! Sloppy, that last one didn't count. Twelve…” Lucas Stefanson stood spotting for his teammate, Lexine Benitez, as she ground through the last set of bench presses. Her face was shiny with sweat and tense with exertion. The Protection Force team room on Sublevel Two was a cave, a rat's nest, converted from an old storage room for the express use of the Lunar Security Authority’s HE-V pilots. Workout equipment, tattered furniture, an impromptu bar surrounded by trinkets and talismans, and other paraphernalia packed the space. It was shabby, a little grimy, and smelled faintly of hydraulic fluid and lunar dust.

“Eighteen. Nineteen. Aaand, you got it, you got it, you got it, twenty! That's the way, Lexi!” He took the weight of the bar and helped her rack it. She sat up with a gasp and reached for her water bottle.

“Man. I swear the gravity decking still isn't enough. You lose your muscle tone so fast up here.”

“Nah, you just got to spend more time moving the weights. That's all there is to it, lady.”

“I'm telling you, there's a difference.” She had a long pull off of the water bottle. “Hey, you hear Third Section got into it down at Tranquility yesterday?”

“Something about a raid on a storage site?”

“Yeah. Some piece-of-shit belters moving weapons through. Had a couple glowflies with them. One of the guys from Three told Ma one of them spilled his guts, swore Echelon hired them to do it. Big money.”

Stefanson wiped his hands off on a towel. “Right! And the moon's actually hollow. Gun runners’ll say anything.”

“Yeah. Whatever, we just don't need a repeat of Ellison's Rise. Terrorists are going to get what's coming to them, no trial if I have my way. And if any corp death squad types want to try their luck, I'll burn them down too.” She held out her hand, and Stefanson delivered a stinging high five.

“Damn right. We’ll show those arrogant dicks how it’s done. Suits playing at being soldiers, psh. Try me.”

Across the team room, an older pilot sat on a tattered vinyl couch reading an old, dog-eared copy of Firepower! He lowered it and glared over the top at his younger associates.

“I never pinned either of you as suicidal types.”

“What the hell do you mean, Berg?” Benitez asked derisively.

“I mean I don’t even want to hear you joke about that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He glared now, serious.

Youthful arrogance covered much, including obvious warning signs. Buzzing with the high of his own hard workout, Stefanson fired off a retort, smirking. “Yeah? If you’re scared of the salaried slobs you should maybe hang up your guns then, eh, Berg?”

Benitez’s lip curled for a moment in second-hand regret. Erik Berg’s eyes grew cold and distant in the way a man’s do when he’s ready to fight for keeps. The space between the two pilots vibrated with animosity for a moment, then stilled. The veteran closed the magazine, set it aside, rose and walked to the table, never taking his eyes off of Stefanson. He flipped a chair around and straddled it. Hoping to defuse the tension, Benitez also sat and Stefanson followed.

The older pilot spoke again, solemnly. “No joke, kiddies. The best rigs. Best equipment. Best training. They’re no amateurs, none of them. All the corps pay the best and so they get the best, or raise their own. Killers. Real killers. VisalCorp, hell, even Selegin will give you a hell of a fight. You don’t have the stomach for it. Echelon sends in one of their stabilization teams? Your story ends there.”

Neither of the young pilots said a word. Recycled air rattled loudly through the vent. “But you fought them.” Benitez said.

Berg nodded slowly. “I did. When I served on Earth. Australia.”

—

Colonel Mosby’s entourage was two teams, eight machines total. Two Corsos and a Daiko escorting the Colonel’s Shepherd, his personal guard, his praetorians. The other team brought the big guns to pound the corporation’s mercs into the mud. Two more Corsos and a pair of old, gnarly, tracked Volstreckers, all set up for direct fire support. Berg was the Colonel’s second in the field for this op, and rode one of the Corsos in an escort slot. 

Their opposition was a mercenary outfit called the Redbacks. Well-equipped, fairly competent, aspirations of going big league. VisalCorp was displeased with Victorialand’s refusal to sell or lease their restored germanium refineries near Adelaide. The government and the Victorian Army’s leadership found it self-evident that they’d hired the mercs to cause trouble in retaliation. Visal had denied everything, of course, and the mercs had coincidentally taken over one newly opened facility the day prior, one of several in the region. The Ministry of Defense had decided enough was enough, and Colonel Mosby elected to lead the liberation sortie himself. 

Berg had reflected privately during the march that such an operation did not, in fact, require the Colonel's personal presence. Direct action missions never benefited from the presence of senior officers. Mosby was like that, though. A mustang who had come up through the ranks running an HE-V and leading fellow pilots, and the grunts adored him. Some twenty years of service, and he still liked to be out front. 

Cynically, Berg judged the propaganda value of such stunts immense for the Colonel, politically speaking. A staunch and very vocal anti-corporatist, and patriot, it wouldn’t be long until he retired and made an immediate bid in politics with the full support of the Australian Shipbuilders Guild. The Colonel’s peers and immediate subordinates, though, feared it was only a matter of time until he went down in flames, something sure to throw the ranks of the Army and the nation into turmoil. 

"Passing nav point lambda, coming up on the refinery access road. Check grid reference, maintain formation,” Mosby said over the net. "Recon confirms Redback pickets approx twenty-four klicks out. Immediate engagement expected on approach, but keep weapons tight. Do not fire unless fired upon."

‘Copy’ and ‘yessir’ all around. Despite the Colonel taking personal command, the mission was standard. Routine. Berg and the teams had done this sort of thing many times. The HE-Vs maintained a formation like a squashed diamond with the Colonel in the middle. Better to allow overlapping missile defence while permitting most of the formation to bring their firepower to bear in any direction, on demand. The two Volstrekers, loaded for bear with heavy autocannons and HE-V-cracking missiles, rolled along, side by side, at the front.  

Berg assessed his sensor board; passive pickups showed nothing in the skeletonized, old facilities ahead, on either side access road. He spoke into the helmet mic. “Tighten up, don’t hug the shoulders. Watch the flanks.” He watched the blue icons representing his fellows compress on either side of the Colonel’s HE-V. Sparse, broken ruins surrounded them; slag heaps, rubble, and forests of old, rusty pipes. Leftovers from a bygone time. Not many places to hide, and the Redbacks were far ahead yet. 

But he had long ago learned to recognize the feel, the scent, of imminent peril. An instinct most combat HE-V pilots developed early, or else perished. Right then, his flesh crawled. 

"Break! I've got near signature, eight thirty," said one of the other escort team members, Carrow, a woman he'd served alongside for two years. "Faint, though. May be-"

Then they were on them.

—

“Who did you fight? Which corp?” Stefanson asked, no longer cocky.

“Visal once, technically. They had a few of their own advising the Redbacks. The other time, the last time, I, I don’t actually know who they were. Echelon? I think they had to be. But…”

“Don’t know like ‘deniable’?” Benitez asked, slightly confused.

“Not exactly. They, uh, just came out in some shit you wouldn’t believe.”

—

A sleek, rounded, bipedal HE-V rose on roaring plumes of superheated air, over the ruins on the formation’s left and directly into their midst. This was no Redback machine. Berg knew in the first second. Pale, porcelain white bodywork, blood red trim. Bold. Had to be corporate. No other belligerents wanted you to know exactly who and where they were. At first glance, he thought the ambusher was a Buckler, and feared that VisalCorp had taken off the gloves and sent their best. The rig’s silhouette, too, was unknown to him: Smooth and sculpted, a flat, pan-like head. And no articulated missile pods, no long-barreled laser. Just a single, thin combat blade gripped in the machine’s hands, nearly as long as the HE-V was tall. Some six meters of molecularly-reinforced carbide alloy, its cutting edge reflecting the orange light of the Australian sun in cold silver. 

Orders were shouted over the net, and the formation reacted, but too slow by half. The unknown attacker landed, struck Carrow’s Corso twice from behind and it collapsed, legs cut from under her. It then launched into a sprint, fast and utterly without hesitation toward the Colonel, into the teeth of machines far outmassing it and their killer guns.

Situated between the attacker and Colonel Mosby, Berg had just pivoted to lay his own weapons on the rushing HE-V when other hostiles appeared. One plowed through the roll-up door of an old service bay ahead, emerging the moment the leading Volstreckers had stopped and swiveled to address its comrade. That one also carried a long blade. Then two different, larger, machines leapt from the opposite side and laid into the formation, the cutting edges of their larger swords wreathed in barely-contained plasma. 

He and his compatriots were embroiled in a wild, point-blank brawl, one they were ill-equipped to win. The smaller hostiles converged on the Colonel’s Shepherd from opposite angles. The other two quickly dismantled the hulking Volstreckers, their heavily-armed linebackers, with fluid, flashing strikes, carving through tracks and weapons and hulls. Explosions bloomed from sundered metal as screams of rage and fear sounded over the net. The phantoms dashed between the Victorian Army HE-Vs, never allowing more than a moment of exposure as they hacked and dodged.

Far too close for rockets, Berg aimed and fired both rotary cannons at the cyclical rate, struggling to track and inflict some damage on his far nimbler foes, to catalyze the assault. It was then he understood in that desperate instant, with shivering clarity: they were there for the Colonel.

Berg shouted over the radio for his commander to fall back, to get clear. Unheard or simply too embroiled to respond, the Colonel’s shot cannon boomed and scoured one of the charging lightweights, staggering it and turning its blade aside as the other lunged, thrusting like a fencer. The Colonel’s Shepherd rotated, clawed fist rising to meet it. The surviving escort team members rushed to intervene.

—

Neither of the young pilots felt even the embers of their earlier bravado. It was sobering to see an accomplished, brave pilot’s face etched with such fear as he recounted the tale. Berg’s eyes, bright and wet with moisture, went from Benitez to Stefanson and back as he spoke, boring into both in turn. He seemed to falter at one point and coughed, looking down at the pitted surface of the table.

“Holy shit, Erik.” Stefanson whispered.

“Indeed,” He swiped a thumb across his nose. “And it was two to one odds.” 

—

What started as a melee turned into a massacre within sixty seconds. Berg drove forward hard toward the two smaller machines, firing bursts, careful to avoid hitting the Colonel in the back. As he just about had a bead and settled to drill out one of the lights, he was hammered sideways in the cockpit, a wall of noise ringing through the interior of his Corso. Red damage indicators lit across his panels; something had detonated the rockets in the right-side launcher. His Corso stumbled sideways off the roadway, nearly falling, and it took some fancy footwork to go with it, pivot and regain his balance. 

As his viewscreen revolved and settled one of the larger assassins was already bearing down on him again. Half his firepower was now gone, but Berg gritted his teeth, ignored the rising alarms and slewed hard right to bring his remaining rotary cannon on target. A second before his enemy’s deadly plasma blade came down, Harris, in the Daiko, barged forward, trying to come to grips, chest-mounted particle cannon spitting lightning at perilously close range. Harris’s shot struck home, blasting an ugly, glowing crater in the white armor. The mysterious pilot reoriented and reacted with inhuman speed, cleaving off one of the Daiko’s arms at the elbow assembly before a follow-up backhand slice neatly split the machine’s protruding head. Harris was gone. Deprived of human input, the Daiko’s computers carried it forward, past his killer, for a few sluggish steps, a sleepwalker, one arm and a glowing stump still outstretched before it tottered and pitched forward.

Berg’s courage broke in a blink, and craven fear replaced it. These pilots were better than him, better than all of them. Not better in the way of ratings on a spreadsheet, or qualifications, or numbers in a file. Better at the savage dancing steps of close-quarters mechanized combat. Better at wetwork, at the bursting of the most delicate and important components in these warmachines that weighed dozens of tons. Far from the clumsy brawling that HE-Vs sometimes engaged in, this was a way of combat that he knew not.

His brain was screaming at him to turn and run, or else bail out and pray. Training alone kept Berg in the fight. A quick glance: everyone else was gone, save the Colonel and he. Mosby was holding his own, but his rig was coming apart. A vicious uppercut from the Shepherd’s claw crunched the chest of a smaller HE-V, lifting and dropping it in a heap. He swiveled to engage the other behind him, shot cannon belching smoke as fast as it could load its enormous shells. The other, larger attacker was sweeping in from his right side, plasma blade lit and ready to strike. Berg’s own assailant was still on him, and he got his first good look at its weapon: the wavering, arc-bright light surrounding the cutting edge cast a sickly glare across the surrounding devastation. 

The machine closed quickly, its pilot confident, the blade arm pulling back. Ready to kill at will. Berg aimed and opened up with his remaining rotary cannon at fifty meters, rounds sparking and spanging off his target’s layered armor that looked so much like the sode worn by samurai of old. His executioner fired directional thrusters, surging forward in a heartbeat. Erik Berg’s life stretched to fill the fraction of time between the swing and impact. The Corso’s temperature readout spiked an instant before every screen and every monitor glitched and died. A violent, whiplashing impact sent his arms flying off the sticks, and then he knew no more.

—

“Response unit pulled me from the wreck. I was half dead from inhaling burning hydraulic fluid. And Carrow, Carrow lived, too. Her Corso was just disabled, but the fall had knocked her out cold. Bad concussion. That saved her, I think. Her HE-V being dead in the water. They got the Colonel, though, cut him down. He fought like a man possessed. I think he took out one of them. I remember that. I think I do. But there was no sign of the attackers, after. Not a wreck, not a part. Nothing.”

“Who were they? Echelon, you said. Stepping out in that kinda high-tech, it had to be them.” Benitez asked, half as haunted as Mac looked. He gave her a strange smile in response, eyebrows raised, turned his head up and back as if to say ‘who knows’.

“The way they fought,” He trailed off, clicked his teeth. “It wasn’t their way. I believe they were corp, though. Yup, had to be. Some special strike unit, field testing… Something. Message was received, though, wasn’t it? Cross us, and nothing will protect you.”

“What happened after? What did the Army say?” Stefanson asked.

“Oh, that part.” Berg grew stoic again, painful emotions gathering and disappearing behind his typically gruff exterior. “They said my conspicuous incompetence allowed the Redbacks to ambush us. And, naturally, negligence resulted in the death of my commanding officer. Had to be someone to hold accountable. Our injuries made it easy for them to drum me and poor Carrow out. She took such a whack the docs didn’t think she could ever run a rig again, at least nothing with a neural control element. I mustered out, came up here. Safer chasing smugglers.”

With that Mac rose, flipped the chair back around and slowly pushed it forward, pausing and collecting himself. He addressed his younger teammates once more, with sincerity. “If you even have a dream where you want to lock horns with the corpos, you’d better snap out of it and then pray against it. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Yup, got it.”

Berg strolled from the team room without another word. Left behind, the two young pilots stared at each other as if they had witnessed something great and terrible.

Illustration by Eldon Cowgar