Chương 37: The Quarry

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum October 27, 2847 The rope ladder was awkward, and if Lieutenant Commander Libby hadn't been standing at the bottom to hold it in place, Arc wasn't certain he would have managed to make it all the way up to the cockpit. The Tyro waited for him like someone in the midst of surgery, chest splayed open, panels of RSiNC ceramic armor retracted. There was a final handhold molded into the cockpit itself, and Arc pulled his body up, then hit the button which retracted the ladder.

With a whine of motors, an axle spun, winding the entire ladder up into a compact storage compartment and leaving Arc twelve meters above the tarmac. It occurred to him that, without all of the pushups, pullups, and obstacle course runs they'd been forced through during those six weeks of Hard Burn, he might not have had the upper body strength to get there, and he wondered how much worse cadets from a low-gravity world might have it.

He stood, and for a moment looked out across the hangars and airfields, laid out beneath him, where crews of techs, cadets, and pilots scurried back and forth. The third hangar down was open to the hot Vidakan afternoon, and he could see that an Outrider had been pulled almost entirely apart, with an autocannon hanging from a gantry near its shoulder. He looked down, and realized that if he fell, he would be lucky to only break a leg.

The thought of it made him sway there for a moment, four stories above the asphalt. Below, he could see Lieutenant Commander Libby and Chief Jastrow shepherding the small crowd of techs who'd worked on his mech— his mech! —away like a line of ducklings. He supposed no one wanted to see a couple of cadets smooshed like over-ripe fruit in the event he fell over his first time in a real cockpit.

Arc took a deep breath, stepped back from the edge of the cockpit and the open air, and sat down in the contoured and padded pilot's seat. Unlike the simulation pods, which only needed a five-point harness to keep cadets from falling out while they were disorientated by the connection through their neural lace, the Tyro's cockpit had an actual ejection seat.

The entire thing was attached to a sturdy-looking and angular metal frame, both above and below the padded cushions, which could detach from the cockpit in an instant. There might someday be a grav-version of the seat, but at the moment it still used an old, reliable two-stage rocket motor. It was a comfort to have, but Arc would prefer not to use it at all. Part of the reason for that was that, unlike any of the imperial line mechs, Tyros weren't designed with an escape capsule.

Anything that might operate in zero-g, hostile atmosphere, or underwater needed a way to keep the ejecting pilot safe in a deadly environment, but the engineers who planned these training mechs knew they were only going to be used right there on Vidako. That kind of life support system wasn't necessary. Arc buckled the straps of the five-point harness first, then pulled his piloting helmet on.

Gingerly, he leaned back into the seat and found that the helmet and the cushioned supports built into the chair cradled his head. He wasn't locked in place, precisely—that would be dangerous—but he found that he wouldn't have to worry about breaking his neck if the mech fell. Arc pushed the button to seal the cockpit, and those retracted plates of armor moved like a grasping hand. A flat screen swung into place in front of him, and the armrests and control sticks locked into position within easy reach.

Pairing with T-3 Tyro unit seventeen, Iceni informed him. Neural Lace connection active—now. Arc's vision shivered, and the now familiar sensation of a second body, one built not of muscle and bone, but of graphene fibers, electronics, and armored plates, settled around him. As the sensors in the head came online, his vision was replaced by high-definition visual feeds. He saw Natalie and the other techs cheering, down below, and at a thought zoomed in on their grinning faces.

The wireframe damage readout, battery charge indicator, and ammo counts all populated in the lower left of his vision, along with a GPS map marking his waypoints in the upper right.

"Head on over and pick up that rifle, cadet," Lieutenant Commander Libby instructed, his voice crackling over the comms.

"Yes, sir," Arc replied. Slow is fast, he repeated to himself, and he could almost hear Cassie say it. He'd rather have had her on the radio, talking him through everything. Carefully, he reached the mech's arm out for the Centauran Optics Laser Rifle, slipped the mech's left hand beneath the barrel, and the right onto the grip. The connections built into the grip mated to the palm of his mech, and a third weapon display populated just beneath the other two, this one listing the rifle's internal battery charge.

"Good. Your call-sign for this exercise is Mole Rat Actual," Libby said. Arc had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. The instructors and older cadets never let the first years forget that they were at the bottom of the ladder.

"There's a Saker in the air, and a patrol out right now, designated Stalker Squad. Only comm them if you need help. On the other hand, if they contact you, you had better listen and do exactly what Stalker Actual tells you to, because it means something dangerous has slipped into the testing zone. Squad Leader Xiao-Solaris has tactical command while in the field, and he is authorized to fold you into his unit in the event of an emergency. Is all that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Arc repeated.

"Don't call unless I need help but be ready to do exactly what Stalker Actual says. Affirmative."

"Alright, Mole Rat," Libby said.

"I'm starting your mission clock—now!" Arc resisted the urge to spin the mech about and tear off across the tarmac. Slow is fast. Instead, he turned south carefully and began walking the Tyro toward the gate in the fence, and the road that stretched beyond toward the jungles. In the lower right of his field of vision, his current speed populated, settling at fourteen point eight kilometers an hour.

It wasn't anywhere near the Tyro's top speed, but he was still getting a feel for the balance of an actual, moving mech—and he certainly didn't want to break anything before he'd even got off Academy Hill. Once he was out of the gate and onto the access road which led downhill toward the edge of the city, Arc leaned the mech forward, cradled the rifle to its torso, and shifted into a jog.

The enormous feet pounded against the pavement, rocking Arc back and forth, up and down in the cockpit, and the speed indicator ticked up as he accelerated, until he was running the mech at a steady twenty-eight point six kilometers an hour. Time to first waypoint: forty-two minutes, Iceni told him. I have the Saker on our sensors; it's circling about twelve hundred meters up. Arc turned off the access road and was unsurprised to find that the academy had shut down street traffic along his route.

Cars, grav-trucks, and even a few sport bikes waited at the intersections of each cross street as he passed, but this section of the city wasn't one of the prime residential areas. It was surreal how quickly he made it out into the agricultural districts, until the same fields of crops he and his friends had marched past during Hard Burn blurred past to either side.

It had taken them an entire morning to get to the edge of the city on foot, and only now did Arc understand just how frustrating that trip must have been for the cadet pilots accompanying them. They'd had to hold back to a slow walk the entire way, when they could have made the trip in a fraction of the time.

"Mole Rat Actual, this is Stalker Actual, over." The voice of Cassie's cousin crackled over the radio, and for just a moment Arc wondered whether the older cadet was going to take this opportunity to cause him trouble, or to badger him. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"This is Mole Rat Actual," Arc replied.

"Mole Rat, you should be clear all the way through the testing zone, but be advised it is cornibus mating season, and we're tracking two males circling each other about sixty klicks out," Bhaskar Xiao-Solaris said.

"We don't expect them to come anywhere near you, and we're positioned to intercept, but be aware, over."

"Affirmative, Stalker," Arc said. He found that his throat was suddenly dry, and that he had to swallow. The prospect of facing a spiked terror, even in a Tyro, was daunting.

"I'll keep an eye out and be ready to move if you call me. Over."

"Happy hunting on those targets, Mole Rat. Stalker Actual, over and out." Arc was forced to slow once he got into the actual jungle, and it made him nervous: after all, he was on a timer, and he'd used forty minutes of it already. Still, he made it to the first waypoint without getting lost, crashing his way through a tree, or falling off a cliff, and he counted that as a victory.

The first waypoint put him at the top of an old quarry: sharp rock faces of pale granite cut away to either side of him, falling down some hundred and eighty meters to overgrown rock slopes below. He could see that the rain had filled some parts of the quarry with water, and it was impossible to tell just how deep those pools went. Weapons test commencing, Iceni informed him. Enemy grav-tanks on the opposite bluff. Arc's targeting systems lit up as the targets came online.

Pop-up paper targets on frames, painted to look like grav-tanks with autocannons and short-range missile racks, snapped into position across the quarry. He dropped his targeting reticule over the first, and the range read three-hundred and ninety-eight meters. Arc waited for the reticule to turn green.

"Three round bursts," he told Iceni, and then squeezed the trigger to fire his autocannons. The Tyro rocked back, but all the hours Arc had spent in the simulator had prepared him for the feeling, and he kept the mech balanced. Tracer rounds shot across the empty space between the two opposite cliff faces above the descent into the quarry. That's a hit, Iceni told him. Good beginning, Arc. Arc exhaled in relief.

"Alright, let's try this rifle," he said, and focused on the second target. 𝝮 Once he'd cleared away the targets atop the cliff, Arc wasn't even slightly surprised to find that the marked waypoints led him downslope, on a circuitous route to an access road which took him into the quarry itself. There, he was confronted by pop-up targets to the left and right, defenders who were well dug-in.

The variety of targets was actually quite impressive, from groups of up to a dozen infantry at a time, to concealed artillery perched high above, and even an enemy mech that shot up out of the depths of the second pool he came to. The first time an entire squad of infantry—the paper targets printed to look as if they were carrying rocket launchers, assault rifles, and even a single infantry-sized laser—popped out at his feet, Arc nearly panicked.

But he took a deep breath, repeated Cassie's words once again, and took a step back to let his autocannons rip the targets to pieces. And with each target down, he told himself, that's one more step toward getting into a Kestrel. One more step to getting justice for Phoebe. The final ambush saw him at the center of the quarry, backed up against one of the flooded pools, while targets populated to every side, ambushing him from above, behind, and both flanks.

It forced him to spin the Tyro around, sweeping the heights and the jumbled rocks at the bottom of the quarry with laser-fire and shells. And when that was done, of course, he still had to get back to San Teodoro and Academy Hill before his mission clock ran out. As he ran back to the city, Arc kept expecting something to go wrong. His weapons hit rate—66%—blinked just above the counting clock on the lower left of his screen, where he'd asked Iceni to post the displays.

If Bhaskar Xiao-Solaris called him with word that a spiked terror was coming his way, and he needed to abort the test, had he done enough to count as passing, or would he have to go through the entire thing all over again? Worse yet, what if he was called to help stop one of the things from barreling toward the city? He'd used a lot of ammunition, and there were only a dozen shots left in the battery pack that fueled his laser rifle.

But as he began to run the Tyro back uphill, past waiting cars, with the Saker still circling overhead, Arc began to accept that he was actually going to finish the test—and with time to spare. He slowed his mech to a walk as he came in sight of the perimeter gate, while his mission clock still read thirteen minutes and change to spare. The gates trundled open, and Arc carefully walked the Tyro through.

"Welcome back, Mole Rat Actual," Lieutenant Commander Libby greeted him, the older man's voice crackling over the comms.

"Congratulations—you are now qualified to pilot the T-3 Tyro imperial training mech. Unit seventeen there is yours. Walk her nicely over to hangar three-eleven and power down, so your tech team can treat her right."

"Affirmative, sir," Arc replied. Carefully, so carefully—how embarrassing would it be to scrape an arm against the side of the open bay door right now, after just passing his test? —he turned the Tyro about and then backed into the hangar. One of the techs was on the reinforced concrete floor below, swinging about two glowing signal rods, and the moment they made an 'x,' Arc stopped moving.

He gently set the laser rifle into the waiting rack, and made certain it wasn't going to go tumbling down before he let go of it.

"You're clear to shut down," a new voice came over his comms, and Arc grinned when he recognized who it belonged to.

"Is that you, Ramírez?" Arc asked.

"You're my tech, now?"

"I told you, Sandhurst," she said.

"I'm your huckleberry. You saved my life out there. Least I can do is make one-hundred percent certain your mech isn't going to fall apart on you. Now get on out of there so we can get to work." Arc laughed, powered down the mech, and opened the cockpit. Once he'd unstrapped himself he found, to his everlasting gratitude, that Ramírez and her team had extended a metal walkway out to the edge of the cockpit, so that he didn't have to use the rope ladder.

He took his helmet off and tucked it under one arm, then rattled his way across the cat-walk and down the stairs attached to it until he'd reached the floor of the hangar, where Natalie Ramírez was busily engaged in bossing around a crew of three other techs—a crew which included both cadets Tremblay and Moore, who'd also been under his command during the ill-fated water expedition back during Hard Burn.

"You notice anything jinky while you were out there?" Ramírez asked, tucking her tablet under one arm.

"We'll run diagnostics before we reload her and swap the battery packs, but we're never going to know your machine the way you do when you're actually in the field." Arc sighed.

"Honestly, everything moved like a dream," he admitted.

"But I also don't have enough time in the cockpit that I'm confident I'd notice a problem, if it was small enough."

"That'll change," Ramírez said.

"Now that you're qualified, they'll have you out on regular patrols. Especially once the first-class cadets go out on the Honor for the spring semester."

"Is two days going to be enough to get it ready to go again?" Arc asked.

"I'm supposed to be going out on the thirtieth. It wasn't set in stone until today, but since I passed..." He swallowed, because the prospect of going out into the jungle with Vijay Iyer was suddenly much more real than it had been three hours before. It wasn't something that might happen—it was something that would.

"Psht," Ramírez exclaimed, and nudged him with her elbow.

"Forty-eight hours? Please. I could have her turned around in an hour, if all we're doing is reload and swapping batteries. But this is the first time seventeen's been out of the hangar in a while, so we want to go over her with a fine-toothed comb and make absolutely certain we haven't missed any problems. But don't worry, Sandhurst. She'll be ready for you."

"Thank you," he said.

"I mean it, Ramírez. It's a relief to have someone I know, someone I can trust, back here waiting for me when I come home."

"I should be thanking you," she joked, in response.

"You're gonna be my ticket right up to the cushiest postings, Sandhurst. Twenty years from now, when you're an admiral, I'm gonna demand you take your crew out to the fanciest restaurants on Terra." Arc laughed, and it felt nice to break the tension. At the very least, Ramírez as his crew chief would keep him out of his own head.

"And if I ever get there, I will," he promised.

"But for now, let's just focus on the next trip out into the jungle."