Chapter 5
Inside the container, all was complete darkness.
Jackson turned on his visor light. It illuminated the interior of the car, casting odd shadows. Down the middle of the car lay the Citadel M750, strapped down tight. About it were stacked Splendid Ventures cargo boxes that had also been tightly secured. It looked like a giant warrior in some tomb on his way to Valhalla, surrounded by mounds of loot. But even with all the loot, there was still enough room for Jackson to move, and more importantly, room for him to move the Citadel.
Jackson was something of a connoisseur of mechs, but there was no time to admire this beauty. Shortly, they’d be in space. Nivaas was a little smaller than Earth. So instead of having to accelerate to twenty-nine thousand kph to get to near-planet orbit, you only needed a little above twenty-five. The accelerator would provide a good portion of that speed. The last chunk would be provided by the rocket. And while the track was about eleven hundred klicks long, at a constant acceleration, it wasn’t going to take long to get to the end. The ride now was smooth as glass, though the rocket portion might get bumpy, and he didn’t want to be bouncing around in this can.
All he had to do now was free the Citadel, break into it, and figure out how to drive it well enough that he could escape with it during the three-minute window between when the rocket burn ended and the spaceport gremlins hooked up to guide the container to the Splendid Ventures ship. Going too soon most likely meant a fiery death. Exiting too late and working too slow meant capture by the port authorities.
Right now, the constant acceleration was causing just over two Gs. It was real pressure, but below that of most roller coasters, nothing Raj couldn’t compensate for. They’d start climbing soon—Nivaas had some truly epic mountain ranges—and it would get worse. Being at the bottom of the car was a precarious place. If any of the cargo busted loose, he’d be bludgeoned or squashed.
“How are we doing, Jane?”
“I stomped on the alarms. Nobody saw you. Tui is on his way to the port.”
“Good. I’m going to try and unlock the Citadel. Change my ID again, please.”
“Congratulations. You are now Dwight Oaks, mech pilot at Splendid Ventures. Like most fighter jocks you are extremely well compensated for your talents, but you secretly suffer crippling self-doubt, which you hide behind a veneer of cockiness.”
“Poor Dwight. I kind of like being the priest with the butterflies more.”
“What makes you think I was talking about Dwight?”
Jackson laughed as he climbed up the sleeping mech. “Danger close, Jane.”
It was truly impressive up close. It was the first time he’d ever seen a fifth-generation mech in person. This was by far the nicest machine he’d ever seen, let alone stolen.
When turned on, the Citadel was programmed to hook up to the nearest communications link and send its owners its coordinates and a notification that it was in use. Hopefully Jane would be able to block that until he could get it manually shut off. Otherwise this would be a really short trip. Jackson climbed up the sleeping giant until he was next to the cockpit, which took up a big chunk of the chest cavity. He took the medallion out and held it up to where the access reader was embedded. A light on the cockpit flashed. The Citadel pinged his personal embedded ID chip. He waited. And waited.
“Come on.”
And then the Citadel said, “Passphrase.”
Jackson smiled. “My monkey’s uncle.” Thank you very much, Dwight.
“Access granted.” The canopy opened. A puff of pressurized air escaped.
Okay, so he knew he could get in, he just couldn’t do it yet. He still needed to cut the Citadel free. It was so powerful, it could probably easily rip itself free of its tethers, and then punch its way through the walls. But if he damaged the container at all, SVC would see that immediately. Ideally, the more time it took them to realize they’d been robbed, the more time the Tar Heel had to make its escape.
“Jackson, you’re three minutes from rocket burn.”
He felt the car rise vertically. The Gs increased slightly. He checked once more to make sure everything on him was secure, then set the timer in his display to three minutes. This was going to get really uncomfortable, really fast.
The Citadel was secured with six straps that locked to the brackets in the floor. Using the plasma cutter on his multitool, he sliced the first strap holding the legs. Then the second. He worked methodically, but the problem with a compact tool with that much power was a lack of juice, and he’d already used a bunch cutting the lock. And so when the blue arc died partway through the second strap, he extended the diamond saw blade and started working on the strap the old-fashioned way. He finished cutting through the third strap and moved to the fourth.
And not a centimeter in, the blade snapped in half. He held up the now useless tool in his hand and looked at it.
Unbelievable.
The seconds ticked down. There was no time for dismay. He got his regular folding knife from out of his pack, and began to saw, but the straps were made of tough material. He put as much pressure into it as possible, but the straps defied the normal steel blade. The timer dropped below two minutes.
“Fifi,” he said and pointed to where he’d been sawing with little effect. “I need you to slice through this. Pronto.”
Fifi crawled out of Raj, sprang to the strap, and began her work.
“Follow the scoring of my knife,” Jackson said, then moved to the next strap and began sawing again. This was unbelievable. The seconds counted down. Fifi finished her strap.
“Here, Fifi. Cut here!” Jackson said and pointed at the fifth strap. Fifi jumped and worked. Jackson moved to the last strap. He was getting dizzy and realized the container had climbed enough that he wasn’t getting adequate air, so Jackson pulled on his mask and clicked it to his hood.
They reached one-minute-forty, then thirty, then twenty-five. He directed Fifi to the next strap and hoped that the religious members of the crew were praying for him.
The clock ticked to sixty seconds and then rolled to fifty-nine. Fifi finished cutting through the last strap. “Good girl, Fifi. Get back!”
Fifi sprang back to the pack.
The Gs increased again. Moving was getting really hard, even with Raj squeezing the blood from his extremities and back to his brain. Then there was a low pop at the end of the launch tube as the rocket motor started its initiation sequence.
He looked at the Citadel. It was time to drive.
Jackson pulled the canopy wide. Inside the controls glowed, blue and green. It was a fairly standard setup—seat, controls, pedals, displays, levers, switches. Though there were a few icons and buttons he didn’t know, he recognized enough of them. He slid into the chair and buckled himself in. It still had that new-mech smell.
A trembling anticipation ran through him. There were two ways to drive a mech. One was with manual controls, stick and voice. That’s how the vast majority of people did it. With enough practice, one could become very smooth. Or at least as smooth as anyone who learned to drive complex, heavy equipment.
But the second way to drive a mech—the real way—was to connect it directly to your brain and make it a part of you. That’s when the mech sang. And the pilot sang with it.
The difference in effectiveness between the two methods was astounding. One made for a lumbering, clumsy, walking tank…which was still pretty darned effective. But the other made it into a supernaturally responsive, quick-handling death machine. The problem was only a tiny handful of humanity had the natural gifts to do so.
But there would be no merge for him today. Or ever. Jackson was never going to jack anything into his brain again, wired or wireless. He didn’t dare.
“Close canopy.”
The canopy began to close.
“Full power.”
The Citadel powered up.
Memories of first soaring in an old Thunderbolt, the mech he’d wielded in the war on Gloss, his home planet, rose in his mind. Along with it came an echo of the artificial joy he’d been flooded with during those days. The craving ran along Jackson’s bones. A part of him still yearned for that mad euphoria, and always would. He ignored that part and locked the skeleton frame around his arms and legs.
The sensors would read his nerve impulses and muscle twitches, then translate those into mechanical movements. It was sort of like driving if you were driving four cars simultaneously. He scanned the status of the Citadel’s systems. They were all a go.
Jackson worked the controls, engaged the skeleton, and rose. Or at least his tiny movements against the skeleton mimicked rising in a truncated way, and the Citadel’s computer extrapolated the rest. His wishes were transformed into mechanical exertion, and the Citadel rose like a wrathful demi-god.
“Whoa.” This thing was smooth.
The timer was counting down. The rocket was about to go off. Since the Citadel was unstrapped, he needed to brace himself and hold on. Mechs were sort of man-shaped, two arms, two legs, because it turned out when you hooked your brain directly into a machine, that was intuitive. By stick, however, it still took some getting used to, and since Jackson exerted a bit too much pressure, the Citadel’s fist smashed a crate flat. On the bright side, whatever was stored in there turned out not to be explosive. Jackson crouched and pushed the mech’s palms against both sides of the container. Carefully. Because Jackson didn’t want to knock a big obvious hole in the side. He clicked the skeleton to lock it in that position, perfectly still.
The rocket ignited with a mighty roar. The force crushed Jackson back into the seat, but Raj kept him conscious. For this part all he could do was hold on.
The container blasted through the atmosphere. Jackson passed that time using his eyes to flip through the Citadel’s menus until he could figure out how to shut off the signal beacons and go dark.
This thing was impressive. It had active camo skin over a layer of non-Newtonian fluid armor that could take hits from a tank’s main gun. Jackson pulled up the power plant, and grinned when he saw that it was a thorium reactor putting out numbers sufficient to light a small city. He kept flipping tabs. The computer was powerful—but not an actual AI, because mankind had learned the hard way about sticking those in combat machines. The sensor suite was the best he’d ever seen. And the weapons…so many weapons…Most of those were unloaded for safe shipping, but Jackson knew they had most of these munitions available on the Tar Heel, because the captain prided himself in being the one-stop shop in illegal gun running.
This was a nice mech. It wasn’t just the big things, but also the little touches. Everything in front of him turned into a display. This thing had no blind spots. The Citadel’s cockpit was so insulated that even though he was riding in an unaerodynamic brick on the end of a massive solid-fuel rocket, it was quiet. The liquid armor layer made such an effective shock absorber that the only reason he knew the container was shaking so violently was because the sensors told him so.
The rocket blast and thrumming vibration of the car suddenly stopped. The pressure lessened, and all was silent. That was his signal. They’d reached space. Jackson closed the Citadel’s status tabs and started a new three-minute timer on his display.
That was how long containers usually coasted between their rockets stopping before the robotic gremlins that controlled orbital traffic took over to steer them to their final destination. Nivaas commerce ran on a very tight schedule.
Jackson unlocked the Citadel’s limbs, and very gently moved toward the main door. Since Jane had squashed the alarms, he pulled up the manual override. The instructions for accessing it were in his visual. He brought up the access screen and punched in the maintenance codes Jane had found. The wall in front of him flashed “You are now on override” while a male voice repeated the message.
“I’m ready to move, Jane. How are we doing on blind spots?” If someone was looking in their direction, there really was no such thing as stealth in space.
“There’s Taco Control, the SVC Profit, and two gremlins with eyes on the container now. I’ll do what I can to confuse and divert. There’s a lot of cargo moving fast right now, so I’m going to send you a very specific trajectory navigation worked up to minimize exposure. Stay between the cars. Hopefully nobody will get a good look at you and just think your heat signature was just debris.”
“Debris from what?”
“The explosion. But don’t worry about that. The captain’s just had to adjust plans again.”
Jackson sighed. There was a human-sized locking lever on the door. It looked tiny beneath one of the Citadel’s fingers, but Jackson managed to turn it without snapping it off. The doors made a satisfying snick, indicating they had unlocked, and then they began to open. There was a sudden whistle and whoosh as the remaining air inside the car blasted into space. Small bits of grit flew out with it into the starry blackness. That pressure change was enough to move the Splendid Ventures car off course. And the port watchers would note it.
Jackson grabbed the lip of the cargo bay with the Citadel’s hands and felt it through the pressure of the skeleton. He wasn’t totally in synch with this machine, but it was close enough, and he clambered out of the cargo car and squatted just forward of the bay doors.
The clock was down to twenty-nine seconds when he got the path from Jane. He opened the door. Below was Nivaas. Half of it gleamed in the sunlight, purple and green. The other half lay in shadow. In the opposite direction the spaceport shone no bigger than a star. He was now down to twenty-three seconds.
There was a lot of traffic up here, but none of what was nearby was manned. Most of it was accelerator containers awaiting their pickups. He floated away from the car, gently reclosed the door, engaged the small thrusters in the legs and arms to orient the Citadel, then hit the main thruster to shoot away, back toward Nivaas, back toward the next car that had been launched from the accelerator. It was close and coming fast, shining in the sun.
If their navigator was right, the container he’d just bailed out of would block the SVC ship’s view, and the new container would conceal him from accelerator command.
A bipedal tank wasn’t exactly aerodynamic, but in this environment, that was irrelevant. The clock ticked down. Twenty-one seconds. Twenty. Nineteen. The gremlins would have eyes on him soon. Jackson juiced his thrusters, zoomed toward the car, and then blinked at the display.
A warning light began to flash. “Collision imminent,” the Citadel said.
Dwight must have liked to play it safe, but then again, he wasn’t the one writing the checks. Jackson pulled up the settings menu with his eye and cut the danger radius by ninety percent. “Drive it like you stole it,” he muttered. Advice to live by.
Still, he juiced the thrusters just enough to move out of the way. Suddenly the oncoming container’s rocket engine did an emergency burst and it began to veer off course. At first, Jackson wondered if this was some treachery, but then realized the car must have sensed the collision as well, but because Jackson was jamming the Citadel, the two vehicles weren’t able to communicate.
Holy hell! He was going to hit it!
Instead of secretly transferring the goods, Jackson was going to crash them. He opened up all his thrusters at ninety degrees to his current direction. They flashed, shooting out long tails of propellant.
The container was still emergency firing, this time in an opposite direction, but Jackson didn’t know if his response would be enough. Jackson flattened himself, causing the Citadel to squeeze its arms tight against its body. It probably looked something like a really big skydiver going for speed. The container flashed past, with hardly any distance between them.
Relief washed through him. And then worry. He’d just created a lot of heat. Were they going to pick that up?
But that turned out to be nothing compared to the massive explosion that ripped the Splendid Venture’s container apart. Warnings lit up all over his screens as the rocket went up. Nothing was left of the Citadel’s container but an expanding cloud of gas and shrapnel.
Jane must have remotely caused some major system to fail and had just created one heck of a mess for the gremlins and port control.
He also saw he was well past his window. Seven seconds, eight, nine, and counting. With luck, those gremlins’ cameras were really distracted right now. It wasn’t too unusual for a rocket to pop, and then their biggest priority became steering the big bits back into the gravity well in a way that they’d burn up entirely, or on a trajectory that would put them into the ocean, then policing up all the garbage they could before it damaged any other containers, ships, or satellites.
After that suspicious explosion, Jane had gone radio silent. The Tar Heel couldn’t risk sending any transmission out this way without drawing attention to themselves.
Jackson’s only hope was to stick to the path given him. At least she’d let him get out of the blast radius first. He kept flying, ping-ponging his way between the ascending and waiting containers. Originally, Grandma had pulled some strings so one of their cargo containers was supposed to have been the car in line behind the one for Splendid Ventures, but that was before the Citadel had been bumped up in the queue. He got a sinking feeling in his stomach. Had the police on-planet stopped it?
He needed some options and quick. He could just turn around and fly into port. Maybe wave hello as he zoomed past the authorities. They would surely love that.
Or he could change his vector, and float farther out into space and hope the Tar Heel picked him up, but regulations required the citizens of Nivaas to keep their orbital lanes clean of debris. They had deployed a huge fleet of garbage collecting bots to do so. One of them would certainly spot him long before the crew came to his rescue.
He could go back to Nivaas. The Citadel was drop capable and would have no problem surviving re-entry, but air traffic control would track him and quickly find out he’d stolen the machine. There would be tons of security waiting for him when he landed.
“Come on, Jane. Give me a sign…” But he didn’t dare actually transmit that, because then port control would for sure know he wasn’t debris. He cursed.
Then something winked in the sunlight between him and the planet. He zoomed in and confirmed it was another cargo car. This one was white, with a fat, red diagonal stripe running down the side.
“Ha!” That was one of theirs. Somehow—either Jane’s technical skills or Grandma’s bribery—they’d gotten it bumped up in the launch queue too. Now he just had to hope that the port jockeys were distracted and that his little dance with the previous car had gone unnoticed. Each time he was hidden by a car, he reversed thrust to slow his approach.
As he approached the Tar Heel container, the Citadel understood his subtle motions and effortlessly grappled on. Nice and easy. No sudden snap. Jackson was super impressed. This was one nice mech.
Twenty seconds after that he was right above the car, matching speed. He reeled in the grapple until he could latch on. Even though they were going orders of magnitude faster, it was far easier than the first time he’d hopped a train today. He hugged the Citadel close to the body, and hoped that even as big as it was, it wouldn’t change the car’s radar signature that much.
“Activate camo.” It took a few seconds to adjust the tones, but the Citadel gradually turned white and red. At least visually it would look like a bulbous growth on the outside of the cargo container until the camera got really close.
He looked toward the port and could actually make out ships waiting there. This was way too close.
He was so exposed. So far outside his window. He sent a contact signal through the skin of the Citadel ordering the doors to open. For a moment, nothing happened, and he began to worry something was wrong, but then the doors slowly unsealed. There was no burst of air to cause a change in course. Captain Holloway was way too smart for that. He waited, waited, couldn’t wait another second and then crawled the Citadel into its new tomb a bit too fast. Its rounded head hit the roof hard enough to dent it. The car shuddered. The Citadel barely bounced.
He sent the remote signal for the doors to close and lock behind him, and then laid the Citadel to rest on the floor of the empty container. He engaged the magnetics to stick it in place.
Now came the nervous part where he could do nothing but wait for everyone else to do their jobs.
It would be chaos out there right now. Accelerator failures were rare, but they happened. People would be angry. SVC leadership would freak out when they discovered their very expensive mech had just been obliterated. There were surely a bunch of cops, insurance agents, and accident investigators getting emergency calls right now.
That was fine. Provided Jane was right, and nobody had seen him fly out, he’d be clear. All he had to do was sit here until the port started moving containers again. Nivaas was a thriving settlement with massive amounts of trade, so they’d want to clear the lanes fast. There were dozens of freighters big or bigger than the Tar Heel waiting their turn, and time was money. He just needed to kill time. It could take hours. It could take days.
Jackson checked the Citadel’s air tanks and discovered that the emergency scrubber system for resisting nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks, which could recycle a single tank for days, was working…Except it hadn’t been outfitted with any extra air tanks for extended use out of atmosphere at all.
Wow…Better hope for hours rather than days then.
Jackson shut down Raj’s air supply so he could save it for later. Then he told the Citadel to turn its supply to the absolute minimum for human survival and set an alarm for when its supply was running low…Just in case he fell asleep.
That habit had stuck from his military service. Sleep when you can because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Mech pilots had to have ice water in their veins or they didn’t survive. So it didn’t take Jackson long to come down off the adrenaline rush, and about a half an hour after that for the after shakes to stop. Then he took a nap.
* * *
He was woken up, not by the air alarm, but by the sensor warning him that the container was being moved. The cargo gremlins must have grabbed them.
The air alarm wasn’t due to go off for…Jackson glanced over…Three more minutes. Yay. He’d have to switch to Raj and hope for the best. Come to think of it, if the captain ever used this type of scam again, instead of an empty container they should fill it with air tanks, beer, and snacks.
But they were moving, which was good. Gremlins were bots designed to latch onto containers and take them in an orderly fashion to the various ships waiting in their lanes around the spaceport.
There were two ways this could go for him. They were delivering him to the Tar Heel or they were delivering him to the cops…Well, three possibilities actually, as he tapped Raj’s air gauge and saw he had about an hour to live.
Well, probably a bit longer. The Citadel’s scrubbers would keep recycling smaller and smaller amounts of useable air. He already had it turned down to where he was dull-witted and sleepy. He could probably go all the way to coma and stretch it out even longer. The next nap he took he might not wake up from. Not seeing much choice, he lowered the oxygen supply into the orange zone. If he lived, hopefully he wouldn’t have too much brain damage.
A minute ticked by and then two. His fingers were tingling. The gremlins altered the speed and direction of the container again. He flipped to the port channel and heard the normal radio traffic. Of course, if the port police were bringing him in, they might be using some other encrypted communication line. He didn’t risk an active scan of the surroundings to figure out where he was, because someone might detect that.
He waited, sleepy, as the container decelerated. There were a series of thumps as the gremlins detached. There was some bumping, more movement, and then the car came to rest.
Jackson must have faded back out, because when he came to, someone was knocking on the Citadel’s canopy.