Prologue
It was the fall of Gloss.
As Captain Nicholas Holloway flew closer to the port, he could see hundreds of terrified refugees below, desperately fighting for a spot on a dropship that was only meant to seat twenty. They were pushing and shoving their way up the stairs onto the landing pad. Women and children were clawing at the landing gear, and crying mothers were holding up their babies, begging for a place.
More Union ships were coming in fast, trying to get as many people out as they could before the Collectivist forces reached the port, but Holloway was a master of logistics, and could tell there was no way they could get them all out in time. The lucky would catch a ride to one of the civilian freighters waiting in orbit. Those left behind would get executed on the spot or tortured and sent to work in the gulag for the rest of their miserable lives. The Collectivist government held no mercy for those who wouldn’t bend the knee. There was no forgiveness for rebels. The Collective were real bastards, which was why Holloway had been happy to run guns to the people who had the guts to stand against them.
His ship, the MSV Tar Heel, was one of those freighters waiting in orbit. His involvement in this war had begun by smuggling weapons in. His involvement would end by smuggling rebels out. He had promised the Union that he’d cram in as many bodies as they could get up there, and the Tar Heel was one big ship. He would transport those people through the gate and get them to the refugee camp on Amon in the next system. After that, they were on their own. That was a lot of extra mouths to feed for a month. It was an act of charity which would cost him dearly, but the Union had been good customers and he always had a soft spot for the underdog.
Mankind had colonized thirty worlds since the discovery of gate travel fifty years ago. Some of those worlds turned out better than others. A few were paradises. A few were even worse than war-torn Gloss. Hopefully, the decent people who survived today would be able to make a home for themselves on a different rock, but that was out of his hands.
Holloway brought the striker in fast and low over the port facility to avoid attracting AA fire from the Collective forces. The last free people of planet Gloss looked up, briefly hopeful that he might be coming to save them, but then he flew by and left them behind. It sucked. He hated it. But the striker was a small craft, and he had to try and rescue a friend first. After that, he could worry about these strangers.
Ahead of him, the city of Pilling burned.
Captain Holloway had been an honored guest for a celebration at the rebel headquarters in Pilling once. It had been a much happier place then. After nearly a decade of unrelenting war, for the very first time the Union of Free Cities was winning and the Collective was on the ropes. Independence was no longer just a dream. The purpose of that celebration had been for their leadership to make a big show of giving awards for valor to their heroes who had turned the tide, to rally the rest of the rebel troops before their next big offensive. Chief among those heroes had been a mech pilot named Jackson Rook. He was just a kid, but Sergeant Jack, as the propagandists had named him, was already a legend to these people. Holloway had been invited to the party because he had been the one who had smuggled in Rook’s mech.
Then everything had gone sideways.
Now Pilling lay in ruins, their headquarters was a smoking crater, and the last of the rebels fought house to house, trying to delay the inevitable.
That party had been only five days ago.
* * *
Captain Holloway had really taken a liking to Jackson Rook. It was good to see Union command pinning their highest medal on him. He’d certainly earned it. The feats that boy could wring out of a mech were astounding, stacking Collective bodies from Pilling to Red Valley. Jackson was the most naturally gifted pilot any of them had ever seen, with the bravado to match, but beneath that swagger Holloway could tell he was basically a good kid who’d gotten stuck in a crap situation, doing his best to make things right.
The award ceremony was brief. The people of Gloss were pragmatic that way, another thing Holloway appreciated about them. Get through the speeches quick and get on to the feast. The colonists on this world had tried to seed the local biosphere with Earth animals, but few of the tasty ones had stuck. The giant lizard wasn’t bad though. If he used his imagination it could almost be mistaken for beef.
As soon as it was socially appropriate, Jackson escaped the main table with all the generals and politicians and gone out to mingle with the rest of the crowded banquet hall. Of course, as soon as he saw Holloway, he came over to join him. “Captain! You made it.”
“Good to see you again, Jackson. Congratulations.”
The kid looked down at all the new ribbons on his uniform and grinned. “We both know this is just to give the recruiters some new vids to work with. The important thing is what new toys have you brought us this trip?”
And they proceeded to talk shop for the next hour. The kid had no formal education—hell, he’d grown up in a refugee camp—but Jackson was a genius when it came to mech combat. He was a fighter. The Collective had sent their best after him, over and over, and Jackson had sent them all home in a box. Every few months for the last couple of years, the Tar Heel had run the ISF blockade to get more arms to Gloss. Several of those deliveries Holloway had ended up working with Jackson, and each time he’d been impressed. The kid had really grown on him.
To be honest, Jackson kind of reminded Holloway of himself at that age, except that he had been in the prestigious Earth Force Fleet Academy, and he never had tested with the mental acuity or reflexes necessary to pilot a mech that well, nor was he one of the tiny percentage of human beings born with the genes to accept the brain implants necessary to let a pilot fly by thought. Where man and machine became one, and the results were greater than the sum of its parts.
Jackson had the instincts, genes, and Gloss had scraped together the black-market upgrades for his brain. Which meant when he was driving something like the Shockwave that Holloway had smuggled here, Jackson Rook became a lightning-fast, all-seeing, battlefield-dominating god of war.
Someone like that could do really well for himself in Holloway’s line of work. “You’ve got the Collectivists on the run. You might actually win this by winter. Have you given much thought about what you want to do after the war?”
“A little,” Jackson admitted. “Why? Are you offering me a job?”
“I am.”
“Wow…” He seemed a little taken back by that. “Serious? That’s quite the honor.”
Holloway chuckled. Lifelong groundbounds often had serious delusions about the glamor and excitement of being a spacer, especially a mercenary gun runner. But Holloway had a code he lived by, a good ship, and a better crew, a hundred strong, most of whom were actually worth a damn. So, in the case of the Tar Heel, it was actually a pretty good gig.
“Of course, I’m serious, son. Once your term is up obviously. Come with us. Travel. See the other worlds.”
“And smuggle munitions to other people like us who aren’t supposed to have them?” Jackson asked with a nervous grin.
“Obviously. Most of our business is legit, but that’s just to cover for the part I enjoy most. I hate seeing good folks get pushed around, so I get them the means to protect themselves. My contracts are fair. The pay is good. Every man gets a share.”
It was obvious Jackson was seriously considering the offer. “I was born here. I’ve never been through a gate.” He sounded a little wistful. Because to someone who’d spent their whole life on one poor colony world, the idea of getting flung across light-years in an instant was rather exciting. Then a look of determination crossed his face. “But I can’t. Gloss is my home. As much as I appreciate it, and I truly do, I have to stick around. They need me, and maybe, when this is all over, we can make Gloss into something nice, something to be proud of. They tried to ruin it. It’s my responsibility to fix it.”
That was a lot of weight for a teenager’s narrow shoulders, but Holloway could respect the sentiment. “You’re a good man, Jackson Rook. Alright then. Should you change your mind later, my offer stands.”
“Thank you.” It was obvious the boy was sincere. He stood up to leave. “I’d better go check with my crew chief about how maintenance is going. Tomorrow morning Mech Troop is heading back to the front. We’re going to push those shanks into the sea once and for all.”
But then Jackson winced and put his fingers to his temple.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just a headache.” Jackson steadied himself and waved it off. “I’ve been getting this weird feedback to my implant off and on for the last few days. Diagnostics can’t find anything wrong, though.”
“I’ve got a fantastic new technician back on the Tar Heel. I’m talking an actual specter-level hacker. She’s a miracle worker. Probably way better than anyone in your Union. No offense to your country, but the tech level on this world is downright barbaric. I could have Jane take a look at that for you.”
Jackson thought it over. “It’s nothing. I’ll be fine. Thanks again, Captain. We couldn’t have done this without you.”
* * *
The next day the desperate Collective had activated a technology so vile that its use was considered a war crime by every civilized world.
The attack was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Even in Captain Holloway’s considerable experience, he had never heard of slaveware this aggressive. One minute, the elite Free Union Mech Troops had been crushing their enemy. The next, they turned their guns against their surprised allies. It was a slaughter.
Union Command had gone into a panic. Out of nowhere their best soldiers, armed with their mightiest weapons, had betrayed them. Worse, the mech pilots knew every target vital to the war effort, and went about methodically destroying them, one by one. Units were decapitated. Vital supply dumps obliterated. The rebel army collapsed before the Collective advance.
By the time anyone figured out what had happened to their pilots, it was too late. This was a new kind of weaponized slaveware, far beyond anyone on Gloss’ capabilities to make. No one knew where the Collective had got it from, or which offworld maniac had been willing to sell their services. The insidious program had crept in through the mechs’ firewalls, invaded the pilots’ minds through their implants, and when the opportunity came, the Collective had flipped the override switch.
Every linked-in pilot on Gloss had been turned at once. Their wills overridden as they were forced to murder their friends. All of them were lost.
Including Jackson Rook.
The Union had asked for their help. Holloway had Jane analyze the new slaveware’s code. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he had proclaimed her a miracle worker, because Jane was from a world so advanced that its technology bordered on magic. But this was something new, even to her, and she had no easy answer to give the Union. From what she could tell, there was no way to stop the slaveware’s infection remotely. It would require direct access to the pilots to stop it, and good luck doing that when they were riding around wrapped in twenty-ton killing machines. And the Collective would run their new slaves nonstop until they died of exhaustion. The program itself was so overpowering that Jane said that it would require a miracle of willpower for a pilot to pull himself out from under its spell, even temporarily.
Except then they had intercepted a message from Jackson Rook, begging for someone to kill him.
* * *
Holloway deftly flew the striker away from the port, threading it between the crumbling high-rise habitats of Pilling. It was a small craft, fast, and exceedingly maneuverable in atmosphere. Hopefully those traits would be enough to keep him from getting shot down in the next few minutes.
For the Collectivists, to say, write, or even think their ideology was wrong was a capital offense. In their minds, anti-collectivist words led to actions that hurt others. Words could starve people, murder them, oppress them. Words were like flies, carrying disease. Freedom of speech was not allowed. The costs were too high. So a lot of Free Glossians were about to die. And Holloway wanted to be off this planet before the cleansing started.
“Do you have his signal, Jane?”
She was safely high above in the Tar Heel, feeding him paths through the city to avoid getting shot out of the sky. “I do, Cap. Ten klicks north of you. He’s reaching out again.”
“Are you sure it’s not a fake?”
“It’s the Shockwave. The pilot’s transmitting his vitals for confirmation. They match what’s in Rook’s personnel file. I don’t think it’s a spoof.”
He’d come to trust her on tech and comms. If Jane said it was Jackson, it was him.
“But that doesn’t mean he’s not still mind-controlled and trying to draw more rebels out of hiding to shoot at.”
“Maybe.” Holloway suspected the boy was in hell. After all, he’d just been forced to murder bunches of his own people. He liked the boy, and so that filled him with a simmering rage. He slowed the striker and hovered a few meters above an abandoned street. “Put him on.”
“This is Shockwave One calling for Pilling Defense Battery. I am at grid two-six-niner.” It was Jackson all right, and he sounded like death warmed over. Strung out and exhausted. “Requesting heavy fire on my position.”
“Rook, this is Captain Holloway from the Tar Heel. I’m inbound to you so quit asking for artillery to bombard us. They’re busy retreating anyway.”
“Captain? You’re alive?”
“What can I do for you, son?”
“I need this thing out of my mind.” Jackson’s voice was shaky, raspy. “I can’t unlink from the machine. I can’t move my limbs. I tried to fight it, but the voices wouldn’t stop. I’m so sorry. It locked me out of every system I could think of to kill myself or disable the mech with. It won’t even let me crash it or get it stuck. They missed one system though. When medical came online to keep me awake I pumped myself full of thrillers. It shut down before I could overdose though.”
Thrillers. The powerful stimulants would screw with his brain chemistry and make it harder for the wetware implants to function. It was a plausible story. But it was possibly a lie.
“Why not call one of your mech trooper buddies to shoot you?”
“I think they’re all dead…You said your specter was tops. If I shoved the voices to the back of my mind for a minute, I might be able to temporarily power down the Shockwave’s firewalls briefly. She could overheat the reactor, or set off some onboard munitions, or something, anything. I’ve got to stop this.”
Holloway was torn. He had flown down here hoping he could get Jackson out, but this could be a trap. He should just fly away, but damn the Collectivists. They didn’t deserve the satisfaction. He contacted Jane.
“He’s alive, but he’s in hell.”
“I listened in. If he throws the Shockwave’s comms wide open for a few seconds, I can launch a cyberattack and sabotage one of his systems. But it still could be some kind of trick to draw you in.”
The Collectivists had surely ransacked all of Rook’s contacts. What a splendid show it would be to make an example of the man who had provided the Union with upgraded weaponry, including the mech Sergeant Jack had used to stand up to them. His better judgment told him to forget it. People died in war. That’s just how it was. But the boy’s damn voice was pulling at him.
“Honest assessment time, Jane. If I got him out, could you save him?”
“He just killed his own people!”
“No. He didn’t.” It may have been Jackson holding the gun, but he wasn’t the one who had pulled the trigger. “Can you save him?”
“I can try.”
“Try isn’t worth the risk.”
“Okay. I have cleared slaveware before.”
“This hack? You’ve repaired this specific kind of attack?”
“An early variation. On rats. And a beetle once.”
“A beetle?” he asked in disbelief. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t much older than Jackson…and that he was too old for this. “Can you do it or not?”
Jane took a deep breath. “I can do it, Captain.”
Prudence said to leave Rook to his fate. But if Nicholas Holloway had been a prudent man, he wouldn’t have ended up a gun runner.
“That’ll do. The Shockwave has a pilot ejection system. When Jackson gives you an opening, that’s the system I want you to activate. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. Configuring now.”
There were warnings flashing on his screen. Collective drones must have sensed the striker and were moving this way to investigate. He switched back to the Shockwave’s channel. “Alright, Jackson. Give Jane a window and she’ll do the rest. I’m on my way.”
“No. Stay back. I’m too dangerous.”
“Too late. Get to work, kid.” He fired the thrusters and the striker took off like a bullet down the street. The Collective drones were much slower, but they were relentless machines, and once they had a target they’d pursue until he broke atmo.
Holloway was putting a lot of faith in two very young people to come through for him right then. He needed Jackson to fight off the slaveware enough to open a window for Jane, and for Jane to crack the mech’s system before Jackson’s mind control forced him to blast the striker out of the air.
“Captain. Rook made a hole. Virus away.”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t know. The Shockwave’s got good defenses. My program will only work if Jackson lets it.”
Drones behind, killer mech dead ahead. The safest route was up and away…But Jackson Rook didn’t strike him as a quitter. Holloway pressed on.
This part of Pilling had been a recreational area once. There had been streams, lakes, and nature trails. Now it was a blasted wasteland of trenches and bomb craters.
Right in the middle was the Shockwave.
It was a sleek mech. Man shaped, but nearly five meters tall, with integrated weapon systems covering every centimeter of the thing, and when it was driven by someone like Jackson, mind linked directly to the machine, it could move with insane speed and grace. Manufactured by Durendal, the Shockwave was one of the nicer mechs Holloway had ever stolen.
In combat on open ground, bipedal mechs usually lost to lower-slung vehicles like tanks. The less you stuck up, the less likely you were to be seen or shot. Mechs were tall, but they really shone in terrain where other vehicles couldn’t maneuver, like urban ruins or the steep canyons of Gloss. When you had a pilot who could plug in and become one with the machine, a mech turned from a clumsy walker into something absolutely terrifying. It could low crawl to avoid incoming fire or scale skyscrapers and bound from roof to roof. It could stealthily stalk prey and then run it down like an apex predator.
At that moment though, the mech was on one knee. Massive hands clenched into fists in the mud. And somehow, Holloway could tell that Jackson was doing everything in his power to keep that mech anchored there. It was perfectly still, but the pilot inside was fighting a life-or-death battle against the monsters in his head.
And then the mech exploded.
Or at least that was what it looked like at first. Shrapnel flew and smoke spread, but it had only been from the ejection system. The armored pod the pilot rode in was launched out the Shockwave’s back. It flew ten meters before hitting the ground and sliding through the mud.
Now missing the center of its torso, the massive mech toppled face forward and splashed into a stream. That had been smooth. Jane was an artist.
Holloway aimed the striker right for the pod, full burn. He’d left the drones behind, but they’d be catching up soon. He had a very narrow window. When he was almost on top of the pod, he flared the directional thrusters hard, coming to a dead stop directly above where Jackson had landed.
The pod was about the size of a coffin. Thankfully, the design had several external points set at different angles to fast-hook a grapple to for high-speed extraction by combat search and rescue. Luckily one of them was oriented so that he would be able to grab hold without landing.
Except as Holloway carefully maneuvered the striker into place, he saw people running toward him. They must have been hiding in a ditch. At first, he thought they were Collective soldiers, but then he realized they were waving their arms overhead, trying to get his attention. They were just poor terrified Glossians, desperate to catch a ride before the death squads got here. He checked the scope, and saw the drones were getting uncomfortably close, and would be in gun range in less than a minute.
The grapple attached to the escape pod and the magnets engaged with a clunk that he could feel through the soles of his boots. He gave it a bit of power and the striker hoisted the pod out of the muck. Alarms sounded as the Collective drones scanned his craft.
“Captain, you’ve got bogies incoming,” Jane warned. “You need to dust off now!”
Instead Holloway turned the Striker’s nose in the direction of the civilians and sped toward them. “I’ve got one more thing to do first, Jane.” Wind whistled through the crew compartment as the door slid open. He’d save every one of them he could.
Today might be the day he died, but he’d do it with a clean conscience.
He slewed the striker to a stop, so close to the ground that the directional thruster threw up a mud plume.
“Get in now! Move!” he shouted at the Glossians. “Hurry! Collectives almost here!” They clambered in, and just kept coming, more and more of them, desperate and shaking. The strongest lifted the weak. They filled the seats, filled the cargo area, crammed against him. He moved his seat all the way forward to make more room. They appeared to be women and children mostly, dressed in filthy rags. The striker only had six seats. He had at least twenty people inside by time the drones opened fire.
The refugees outside screamed as bullets ripped through their bodies. The striker shuddered as it took a hit. Holloway could barely hear all the alarms over the sound of children wailing. He lifted off. A Glossian hanging from the landing skid plummeted to his doom. Holloway hit the door override and shouted, “Get your arms and feet out of the way before they get cut off!”
Green tracers flashed past the striker’s nose as he flung it hard to the side. His passengers were all crushed against each other or the hull by the force as he launched the striker down a street. He got some ruins between him and the drones, made some distance, and then pointed the craft upward and went to maximum thrust. The new few minutes would surely be the worst ride of these people’s lives, but it was better than being massacred.
“Shanks,” he muttered when he checked his readouts. Between the bodies and the escape pod, the striker was massively overweight. “Come on, baby. We’ve got this.”
The striker was so packed with humanity he could barely move his arms enough to steer. It stunk of sweat and fear. Some of his passengers were crying, but most of them were just holding on to whatever they could with white knuckle terror as they were squashed with extra Gs. The engine was getting dangerously hot. One of the drones must have hit a line because they were leaking coolant. If the engine blew they would drop like a rock, but hitting the ground in a fireball would be a far more merciful way to go than ending up in Collective hands.
Other dropships were rising around him, cumbersome Union shuttles and cargo haulers, but Holloway watched, horrified, as one exploded, lanced from the sky by Collective fire. A few seconds later, another was obliterated by a projectile that had been too fast to see. The Collective wasn’t supposed to have any railguns, but they did.
Holloway put the striker into an erratic, climbing corkscrew, further tormenting the already damaged engine. “Jane! Do whatever you can to screw with their AA targeting. Scramble everything.”
“Already working on it, sir.”
“Good girl.”
As more ships were swatted out of the air around them, Holloway said a prayer. It wasn’t until a couple of the Glossians closest to him said amen that he realized that he’d been saying it aloud.
The next few minutes were agony, but they made it past the range of the Collective’s guns.
Holloway had ordered the Tar Heel to get as close to the planet as she could without endangering her, so that the smaller ships performing the evacuation could make more trips back and forth in the time allotted. His great big beautiful lady was tantalizingly close, straight ahead, camping at the edge of space.
The escape pod slung beneath the striker had been radio silent. All he could do was hope that a bullet hadn’t punched Jackson’s pod, because that would have been a lot of effort wasted. Holloway looked around to see just how many other transports had made it through but saw none. He scanned back toward the planet, hoping for stragglers. There weren’t any.
He, and those he carried on the striker, were the last to escape Gloss.
* * *
The Tar Heel cargo bay was nearly as chaotic as the port. His overwhelmed crew was herding refugees out of the way as fast as they could. Most of these people had never been in zero G before, so they were flailing and crashing about, endangering each other, while his men were trying to get them tethered for their safety so they could be towed someplace safer.
The striker had been cycled through the Tar Heel lock, guided into place with a cargo hauler, and mag-locked to the wall. As soon as the hauler was safely away, he popped the doors. An absurd number of people spilled out of the little striker, as if it was one of those old-Earth clown cars.
The Glossians—at least those who weren’t panicking or vomiting due to weightlessness—tried to thank him for saving them, but he hadn’t gone down there for them. He’d been trying to save a friend. So he unstrapped from his seat and smoothly floated outside.
Jane was already there, boots locked to the hull, waiting nervously as two of the cargo crew unhooked the escape pod. “I’m so glad you made it,” she said when she saw him.
“Me too, kid.” Then Holloway looked over at all the suffering wretches and realized that once word spread that their beloved Sergeant Jack had betrayed the Union, and that he was here, among them, alive but helpless, somebody was bound to try and murder the boy. He pinged his security chief and requested a few guards be sent to protect the pod, posthaste. “Let’s get him to sick bay.”
“There’s no time,” Jane stated. “I’ve got a reading on his vitals here. The slaveware’s programmed to not let anyone escape. It’s killing him. I’ve got to work on him now.”
“Medbay’s got better—”
“He’s going to crash and die before we get him there.”
The captain took a deep breath. “Do it.”
The cargo hands popped the locks on the pod and moved the hatch out of her way. The mind-controlled mech pilot lay in the open coffin, hooked to all manner of machines, so still and deathly pale that at first Holloway thought he was dead. It was only the weak and erratic readings on Jane’s med display that suggested otherwise.
Jane launched herself from the wall, landed at Jackson’s side, and went to work. A few of her little bots flitted around, helping by placing probes on Jackson’s skull. A 3D holographic image appeared, floating over the probes. “This is bad. Very bad.” Jane turned the image. “He’s dying.”
The moment struck Holloway. Here she was, barely a woman, frantically trying to save the life of someone who was barely a man. War was a hell of a thing.
“This slaveware infection is far worse than I thought. It’s evolved beyond anything I’ve seen before.” She unslung her pack and pulled out her tool kit. “I need to get inside his skull and manually install a block.”
“Here?” Holloway asked, but his incredulity was just wasting her time. “Fine. Do what you’ve got to do.” Every member of the crew that had any medical training was already in the cargo bay helping with the many injured evacuees, so Holloway signaled for one of them to grab their kit and come assist Jane.
She hesitated, seemed genuinely terrified, knowing that the life of someone she’d never even met before was in her hands. “I’ve never done anything like this before, sir.”
“Try your best, Jane. It’s all any of us can do.”