Steel Echoes

Photo by Oleg Moroz

Steel Echoes

by Matthew Castleman

Times were, even in a city as big as Leyton, the night sky boasted a bright swath of stars, tinged a lovely violet by Yemaya’s fussy magnetic field.

Now, as Elton Lye walked home from work, the purple lights in the sky were momentary flashes of white-edged lavender high in the hills, bright enough to leave ghost trails on your vision. A ripple of flashes would shimmer across the hills and thunder would follow. Less a chorus of grand booms than a chattering of ugly thumps, an argument of hollow claps.

It was the nightly light drizzle of Solar Coalition Expeditionary Force artillery. A silent scream of HiEx-tipped steel racing like dusk bats over their heads. The SCEF was slowly reducing the dense woodland ten kilometers west of the city to mulch and steam. The city had grown so used to it, it basically was part of the weather now.

Elton didn’t know how many resistance fighters were still holed up in those forests. He imagined the Coalition didn’t either; he’d never seen any recon units venturing out of their positions in the eastern hills. Why bother? The capital had fallen already. They could claim they were pacifying the region, sit around in their bunkers drinking as their automated targeting system sent telemetry to the automated gun batteries fed by automated loaders, continuing the glorious work of blowing up trees.

The green keypad in his door glowed up at him, framed in sharp white lines. He tapped his code and walked in. The room glowed to life in warm sunlit golds.

He sat on his bed, which was six big steps from the door, along with almost every other object in the studio. He took a grey plastic box out of his pocket and turned it over in his deep mahogany hands. He’d been fiddling with the prototype seismic sensor in between repairing forestry walkers. There was more downtime now that the SCEF had established a loud, explosive monopoly on the logging business. He’d gotten the idea in his head that a very sensitive seismometer could be useful on less tectonically stable planets, to help walker pilots calibrate their suspension and balance systems. He was still fiddling with it when he fell asleep.

Later, he’d say he knew something was off as soon as he woke up. Maybe that was just the bias of hindsight. There was a paleness to the sunlight, something about the thin fog rolling down off the highlands. He stepped out of his door and something told him today was going to anchor itself in his memory with steel hooks.

Small clouds scudded across the sky, making long leviathan shadows snake through the city streets. Elton’s shoulders hunched in, and he dug his hands deep in his pockets.

He was halfway across an elevated crosswalk when a sonic boom cracked the air. A trio of jets left exhaust streaks overhead. He looked at the dark lines, and then the payload the craft had released kilometers earlier struck.

The bridge heaved and cars below shook and veered wildly out of control as three massive concussion waves blasted through the city. Elton fought to stand. Screams rang through the air underscored by secondary explosions. The sun dazzled off shattered glass falling from high above. Then came the soft, ankle-rattling impacts of footsteps. The footsteps of forty tons of war machine.

By the time he felt the walker’s steps, Elton was sprinting through alleys and side streets in what he hoped was the opposite direction.

Small arms fire chattered from somewhere. Alert sirens buzzed and announcements rang over loudspeakers, but the voices were drowned in weapon reports.

Elton reached the end of an alley and scuffed to a frantic halt. Animal terror rooted him to the spot. He was looking at an alloy-clad monster.

In reflex, his engineer’s eye lingered on every detail. The armor plates that covered vulnerable components, whose edges missed one another by bare millimeters when it moved. Points of flex where entire small machine assemblies could expand and contract in accordance with the war machine’s movements. He’d only worked on utility walkers before. What name could do the tower of living steel justice?

What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The walker spotted a target down the long city street. A torso armor panel slid back and an autogun pod extended into firing position. Elton ducked and covered his eyes, but the muzzle flash wasn’t that bright.

It was his ears he should’ve covered.

The cannon cut loose with a krak-krak-krak-krak. Every round that fired felt like a giant had slapped his chest. Windows cracked on lower floors nearby. At the end of the salvo, he was hearing the world through a wall of cotton.

The part of his brain that cared if he died woke up. He turned to run back down the alley, but the littlest movement caught his attention. A car was wrecked in the street, burning. Stray rounds had killed the engine and put most of the windshield through the two adults in front. Their bodies and seats had shielded the kid in back. Five, if that. Flailing arms and scrabbling at the windows.

“Don’t be an idiot, Elton,” he said, but he couldn’t hear himself. He ran straight to the car like an idiot. The walker took a step towards them. Down the street was a crippled truck, several people fleeing its wreck. Seven or eight bodies lay between the Coalition walker and the resistance fighters.

The car door was jammed. Elton took a hand drill from the mini kit that never left his belt. With one motion he put a pinhole through the door’s latch mechanism.

A good pull broke the latch in two. Elton scooped the kid into his arms. The kid yelled something he only heard as distant mumbles. He moved away and the kid twisted and fought, trying to look back at the parents. Elton used his body to block the view and dashed down the street. No doorway looked safe. Most were wrecks of metal and glass. The undamaged ones were already crammed full of terrified people.

He was near the end of the block when he saw an alcove cut deep into the side of a stone building. It was the best they were going to find. He went for it, lungs ablaze, knees popping, and set down his passenger. He took one last look back into the street, just as the walker saw some new target of opportunity blocks away.

A violet beam cut through the air, right across Elton’s field of view, missing him by meters.

Elton’s hearing recovered in a few days.

But that searing violet was the last thing he ever saw.

Clara said, “I’m bored.”

“Then go outside.”

“I’ve been outside. All there is here is outside. What should I do, talk to trees?”

“Trees are better at listening than I am, that’s for sure,” Elton said, running his left hand over the misaligned piston he was fixing. There was a sharp texture where it had been scraping against the inside of the cylinder. He played his other hand across his wrench set until he found the right one for the task.

“Is that all you have to say?” Clara said. Her high voice echoed from the metal sides of the tractor Elton was working on.

“Oh, sorry, I thought you’d gone,” Elton said, grinning. He loosened a fastening bolt to get into the cylinder housing. “Blind man like me, never am sure who’s around.”

“You can hear my footsteps on the other side of a field, you big liar.”

Her footsteps approached slowly, and he set his wrench down as she hugged him around the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s boring here. But boring keeps us safe. When the war’s over we’ll move back somewhere with cities and music and everything. For now, we gotta make do with trees.”

He felt her nod against his back. It was funny; things had moved so fast when he rescued her from that car, he’d never really gotten a good look at her when he had the chance. Like everyone he’d met since that day, she was mostly a voice to him.

They now lived in a farming village of less than five hundred people. Fairaway was an insignificant farm world that helped feed this pocket of human settlement. You could see Yemaya’s star at night, but it was a decent few jumps’ trip. It was as out of the way as he could get them while still having air to breathe.

The ratio of arable land to population meant automation was king, and for Elton that meant steady work. Fixing something using only touch and sound had been a challenge to adapt to, but he had. He’d gotten used to clambering all over things to give them a proper assessment. His repair bay was set up like a jungle gym.

A knock clattered the door, and it creaked open before Elton could answer.

“Felix!” Clara said, alighting from Elton’s shoulders and running over to embrace Felix Zhou with an audible whump.

“How’s my best pal?” said the old man’s thin but steady voice. “You been breaking tractors at night to give your old man work?”

“Sounds like a two-person job,” Clara said. “Wanna be my accomplice?”

“Bet it’s more fun than farming,” Felix said. “Let’s see what heists we can get up to while Elton’s stuck in here.”

“I didn’t hear nothin’, officer,” Elton said. Their steps left a trail to the door until it gently shut. He lowered the tractor’s side engine cowling and felt his way along its pitted, pocked surface to its seat and dashboard. He turned it on and let it idle, listening to its gentle hum. Six cylinders whirred to life, and the telltale rasp was gone. The door opened again.

“Busy, E?” a woman’s voice cut in over the motor. Elton switched it off.

“Always things to fix,” he said. “Plus, the kid, y’know.”

“I passed her and Felix on the way here,” said Thea Yan, who ran a local heavy agritech business. When her own maintenance people were in the weeds, Elton was her first choice for overflow work. “Looked like they were off to find trouble.” He heard the smirk in her voice.

“What else is there to find around here? Wheat?”

Thea’s hand landed on his shoulder. It carried a perfume of copper shavings and engine grease, and hints of deep-worked oil that no amount of washing would quite remove. The pheromones of the tinkerer species.

“It’s a lot you’ve got to deal with, between trying to raise her and being about 10% of all decent mechanics on this planet.”

Elton sighed. “This is Thea’s ‘asking you to do more work’ nice. I know it a mile away.”

“It’s an important gig,” she said. “Irrigation advances have saved me a lot of upkeep. There’s good money in it for you.”

Elton took a rag from his belt and wiped his hands.

“Well, this one’s done. I got some time. Lead on.”

It was a ten minute walk to the other side of town, at a leisurely pace. Elton kept an extendable cane on his belt, but rarely needed it in the village. He picked up the tangy scent of Jonas’s kebab shop, heard Mira the cobbler tapping away at some farmer’s boots, was comforted by the heavy clink of clay mugs in Eli’s hole in the wall bar.

“This isn’t your main bay,” Elton said as they took a side street he wasn’t sure he’d ever been down. She put her hand inside his elbow and gently kept him in a straight line until a light squeeze signaled a stop.

“No,” she said, opening the door and guiding him in, “this is the mothball shed. Farms around here have been expanding into hillier, more uneven land recently. There’s a need for walking combines in places where wheeled ones get stuck.”

Thea closed the door behind them. From the way its click echoed, this was a big room. At least as big as her main bay in the middle of town. There was a lot of equipment tonnage in here. He could feel it. It thickened the atmosphere.

“I have three small walkers in gantries,” she said. “Last time they got called in to harvest was… I dunno, a decade? I’ve tried to keep them in decent shape, but they could use a more practiced touch than mine.”

“Right,” Elton said, inhaling drying engine oil and aging steel.

“Just look at the leg joints, will you?” she said. “Everything else should be ship shape. Here.” Wheels squeaked, and Thea put his hand on a rolling tool cart. He felt brand new die casts and unsoftened angles.

“Yeah…” he said, everything else already drifting out of his mind into the beyond. “Yeah, I’ll see what’s what.”

The legs were in good shape, considering. A few hydraulic lines needed flushing and some of the smaller joint components had to be replaced, but there wasn’t all that much work needed doing.

Something about the layout of the plating and its attachment points nagged the back of his mind.

“Hey Thea?” She didn’t answer. “Thea?” He shrugged and felt his way up the side of the gantry.

The torso was compact but reinforced. He slapped his palm against it and couldn’t even feel a vibration in the weight of metal. Feeling along the front plating revealed angled and sloped sides, where most utility walkers were simple and boxy. Finally, he reached the left arm assembly and grasped for the collector hose that fed the harvest into onboard storage bins. It wasn’t there, which wasn’t unusual in itself. Non-metal components were often stored detached. He searched for where its attachment point should be.

Several things were off about the attachment point he found. The power socket wasn’t the right shape. The stabilizers were massive overkill, like a cargo truck suspension on a motorcycle. The feeder port that should be where the harvester fed grain into the collector hose was strange, too. He explored it delicately, tapping and brushing like a jazz drummer. His breath stopped for a minute when his brain caught up to what his hands already knew. The port wasn’t for feeding a flood of tiny objects out of the arm. It was for feeding a series of small, heavy objects into the arm. Objects that needed to be handled with care.

When Thea walked back in twenty minutes later, he caught the telltale scrape of her stroll coming to a sudden halt.

“Hey, Elton,” she said too casually. “You find something else needed work?”

“This isn’t a goddamn combine walker, Thea. Unless you’ve been harvesting your crops with rockets.”

That hung in the air for a minute.

“The Coalition is pushing into this side of the cluster, Elton. They’re already hitting New Kinshasa.”

“I hear the news. We’re tiny. Less than insignificant. Even the other sleepy agriworlds around here are bigger targets than us.”

“I’m not willing to count on that,” she said.

Elton pulled a small wrench from his belt to give his hands something to wring.

“Industrialized, heavily populated worlds can’t field enough force to stop the Coalition,” he said, his quiet words reverberating just slightly in the huge room. “What the hell could you do? All that’d happen is you’d die faster and the rest of us would get stomped even harder for your efforts.”

“It’s not the SCEF I’m thinking about,” she said. “That’s not who’d come here anyway. Pirates, mercs, renegades fleeing the warzone. Everything gets stirred up when the giant walks through.”

Elton fiddled with the wrench some more.

“Who the shit are you, Thea?”

“Just a concerned party with the means to do something about it.” He heard her feet shift, followed by a long sigh. “I may also be a deserter from an SCEF light scout unit.”

“Huh,” Elton said. The syllable bounced hollowly from the walker’s armored front. A lot of moments resurfaced in his mind. The crispness of Thea’s bootfalls. The strength in her grip. Her ability to quickly assess and adapt to problems. How steady her breathing sounded, even when she was frustrated or stressed. He shook his head and chuckled at himself for not picking it up earlier. “If you’re a scout, is it really desertion, or just very deep recon?”

Her boots creaked as she started to relax.

“Will you help me get these things in shape?”

Elton drummed his fingers on the rocket hardpoint.”On the condition that you take an honest look at any threat coming this way, and don’t try and fight something you know you can’t… yes.”

“They don’t pick people too stupid to know when to run away to be scouts.”

“All right. I assume there’s at least one other pilot from your unit around?”

“Yeah. If we’re lucky, you’ll never have to find out who.”

The next three months passed quietly. Clara attended what passed for a school in the village and spent the rest of her time either playing in the fields or hanging around complaining, accurately, that there was nothing on Fairaway but fields.

Since Thea was one of Elton’s main clients, altering his daily routine so he could work on the ‘side project’ wasn’t that difficult. She just gave him less regular work. If anybody in the village thought anything of his spending more time in the tightly locked warehouse on the outskirts, nobody said so to him.

It wasn’t exactly a crack fireteam stashed away. A trio of older-model recon units with capable sensor suites, passable armor and functional anti-personnel and anti-vehicle weapons, though with limited magazines and even more limited anti-air capability. The only model he recognized on first feel was an early Coalition Sandpiper, whose beaklike jutting triangular hull had been featured on so many propaganda banners. Some time in its recent career, its right arm had been blown off. He couldn’t elbow grease a walker’s arm into being, but what he could do was turn a bunch of unused plating into a shield, so at least its right side was well protected.

Thea had a tough old farm walker slumped at the back of her main bay. Elton had laid eyes on it months back, but their new purpose had given him an idea. She agreed to let him have it for his own project as part of his payment. The prototype seismic sensor he’d once fiddled with back on Yemaya came back out to play. Everything got upgraded shocks and higher-capacity cables. Then he set out to delicately install the most convoluted, jury-rigged sensor suite he’d ever heard of. It was maddeningly slow, but he knew better than to rush it.

News trickled in from the fighting on and around New Kinshasa. It was as good as most news. Orbit was so choked with space battle debris it was actually hindering the SCEF’s landing efforts. The Kinshasan Navy was avenging itself from the grave, as the rolling shards that had been its forces cut into the sides of descending drop ships.

Times on Fairaway were all right, though. Yields were high, and storehouses were filling up in anticipation of the next trade flotilla’s arrival. Elton settled into splitting his time between farm equipment, his pet project, and Thea’s pawn shop scout team.

Things were okay.

Until they suddenly stopped being okay.

The lone ship was small, angular and painted in slashing stripes, and it kicked its landing thrust in low and hard, just outside of the village.

With a shout for Clara to stay home and lock the door, Elton hurried into the street, where others had started to gather. Familiar footsteps boomed.

“Elton!” Thea called, and he followed her voice.

“Who are they?” he said, struggling to take a full breath.

“Don’t know,” she said. “There’s no insignia on their ship. But they’ve got two walkers in better shape than mine. And one’s a Billhook.”

“Still not up on model names, but ‘Billhook’ sounds bad.”

“It’s bad.”

She described to him what happened next. Fifteen people carrying an array of small arms that screamed ‘Looted from dead members of a dozen minor worlds’ defense forces’ hopped out of the vessel, covered by the watchful weapons of the two walkers. Once they’d fanned out to face the crowd, the Billhook slowly knelt, and its cockpit opened.

Its head was still three meters off the ground, but the pilot didn’t bother with the climbing rungs and jumped it, landing in a deep crouch. He then rose to a full height that almost made piloting a giant robot redundant.

“Hi,” he said in a grating, oddly high-pitched voice. “I’m Benny. We,” he drew out the syllable while indicating the group, “are Benny’s Bargain Basement Buccaneers.” From the laughter of the others, he’d clearly made up the name on the spot. “We’re sort of a mercenary company, ‘cept we’re kinda… backwards mercenaries. See normally, you pay mercs to go somewhere else and do violence there.” He punched his palm on the word ‘violence’ hard enough that it must’ve actually hurt, and he seemed to like it. “With us, we come to you—so convenient, right? —and you pay us to not do violence here! Otherwise, well, things can happen.”

Thea’s voice caught in her throat, but Elton heard the slide of metal against leather as Benny unholstered a large-caliber solid round pistol. He heard the collective intake of breath among the crowd. Then a piercing crack, and a thump somewhere to his left. And screams.

“See?” Benny said. “Things! Sometimes they happen. Lucky for you, we have totally reasonable rates for making them not happen.”

“Gods, Elton,” Thea said in a strangled whisper. “Felix.” Elton felt a stab in his chest and a wash of rage. Thea’s grip on his arm tightened.

“It’s been a long trip,” Benny said as casually as someone who’d never murdered anybody in their life, let alone several seconds ago. “We’re gonna bunk up in our ship and get some sleep, leave you to your business. In the morning we’ll be back to talk about our very competitive plan. Sleep tight, all!”

Elton heard Zhou’s body being tenderly lifted and carried by his friends, heard seething muttered curses in seven or eight languages. Then the whine of Benny’s Billhook standing back up and moving back toward the ship with its companion.

Elton’s head turned slightly. There was something in the way one of those walkers was moving. Something underneath the low roar of its huge engine. Was it carrying an extra component? The sound was faint, but…

He only had a moment to think about it before the crowd burst into cries, shouts and arguments. People who wanted to run, people who wanted to fight, and people who wanted to pay the raiders off and be done with it. Several people walked up near him.

“Hit ’em at dawn,” said a gravelly contralto on his left.

“No,” Thea said. “Between now and tomorrow morning is when they’ll expect it most. We need to give it one more day. I’ll gather people up and tell them so nobody takes this into their hands alone. One more day, then we hit.”

“Mira?” Elton said incredulously.

“Hey, Elton,” the cobbler said, “yeah. Surprise.”

“Yup,” said Jonas the kebab man’s voice. “Me too.”

“Hi, Elton,” said Eli the bartender.

“Is everybody in this goddamn town a knight errant running from the evils of their past but me?” Elton said, crossing his arms.

“Sure could use the help,” Thea said, and Elton heard a resolute grin creep back into her voice. “Best we’ll do is a bunch of farm hands who’ve been able to hone their marksmanship on varmints.” She sighed. “Lay low tomorrow. Don’t leave your house if you can help it. Be ready to go the next morning.”

They exchanged handshakes and shoulder claps and dispersed, to the tune of crying villagers and the faint idling engines of the pirate ship just outside of town.

The next day drifted past fuzzily. Most of it involved holding Clara as they both cried and trying to explain why people were like this. There was a reason he worked with machines instead of people.

There was some activity at the edge of the village when Benny sent two of his people to ‘discuss terms’ with some of the village elders. Elton went nowhere near it and had no idea where the talks ended up. He was too busy in the garage.

The space filled with light he could feel as he welded on spare armor plates left over from Thea’s platoon. His hands and forearms picked up cuts and scrapes that burned when sealant dripped from his work. He tuned and re-tuned the suspension maniacally. Finally, he triple-checked a series of fine wires threaded through the superstructure that lead from the cockpit to the feet. Then he welded more plating over them and stepped back to breathe.

“Well…” he said to the hulking thing, almost thankful he couldn’t see how ugly it looked. He tapped his watch, and it told him it was late at night. He’d already told Clara he might not be home and to button up the house tight until he came back. And told her where he’d hidden a bag with food and other supplies in case he didn’t.

Elton climbed into the cockpit, practicing, as he had many times over the past months, finding and identifying every control by touch. Then he curled up as best he could in the control chair and tried to sleep.

Benny had slept in his Billhook’s cockpit, as he always did planetside. He hadn’t lived this long by pretending most people he met wouldn’t kill him if he made it easy.

“Boss,” crackled over the tinny speaker. “We got problems.”

“Do tell,” he said groggily, sitting up straight and pulling on his chipped old combat helmet.

“Three signals, coming—” there was a click as the audio feed switched to his helmet and Paxton’s voice became clearer and bassier, “—this way. I don’t think they’re tractors, man.”

“Better for it,” Benny said. “More they throw at us, the better the scraps. Let’s move, people.”

The walker got to its feet, coming alive under his hands and thoughts. Sleep galloped away. Pre-fight adrenaline flowed through him, a heavy, steady and carefully regulated flow thanks to his expensive augmented adrenal glands. His teeth bared in anticipation.

The sun was just starting to hint at rising, and he bumped up the HUD light amp. The world outside turned faintly green, like his cockpit was laced with emerald. He watched his men fan out, scurrying between the Billhook’s legs. “Peeping about to find themselves dishonorable graves,” he muttered, half-quoting Julius Caesar.

Paxton’s Nighthound formed up a hundred meters to his right. The Nighthound was a low-slung, bird-kneed skirmisher made to slink up, burn ammo and vanish into the landscape. Benny’s right was his weak fighting side. Paxton knew it, and would screen him there, letting him focus on the rest of his arc, in which he was absolute murder.

His scope lit up with the contacts, and he watched them move obliquely toward him. Trying to provoke him into a fight while pulling him away from the village. That was fine. The rest of his people would be happy to descend on the village while its best defenses were away.

“All set,” Paxton radioed.

Benny answered by throttling into an easy walk toward the targets. The gentle roll of the gait helped him sink into his zone. The control yoke rested in his hand like a delicate piece of art.

Small trees cracked and burst into matchsticks under him. They ascended a rise, and from the top saw a few more rolling miles of partly-wooded hills and patches of fallow field.

Just at the edge of visual range were the little silhouettes of Fairaway’s finest.

The triple chirp of target acquisition sang in his ears. The wireframe of a Scythian fast-attack walker popped onto his left display.

“One Scythian,” he said to his wingman.

“Plus a wonky Sandpiper and an undergunned Agema. It’s more than I figured we’d see here, but it ain’t much.”

“We’ll clean ’em up and then see what we can pull off ’em.”

He bumped his throttle partway. He’d happily hang at medium range and snipe these serfs to perdition while Paxton corralled them.

The three targets picked up their own pace and started moving slightly away from him. “They can’t want to fight us at range, not in those bantamweights. They’re trying to keep pulling us away from town.”

He slid a thumb toggle and felt the familiar hum of his 60-mil main gun’s ammo feed coming to life. A tungsten sabot round slotted home with a gentle lurch. He dialed in his view on the Scythian and teased his reticle into place, learning its pace and its gait.

“They’re painting me,” Paxton said a moment before the Billhook’s targeting alert told him the same. He twisted his torso as two rockets burned across the battlefield, one landing well short, one hitting his armor at a poor angle. His cockpit rattled, but most of the explosion bit into empty air. They must really be nursing their magazines if they were firing light rockets in pairs.

White lines flashed in his peripheral vision as the Agema fired at Paxton, cutting some burns into his armor and doing little else.

“Push in,” he said. “Try and break up their formation.” He settled back into his gunsight, calmly guiding it over the Scythian, using miniscule nudges to get it right where he wanted it.”I know,” he muttered under his breath. “Why’s he not firing yet? Where’s the rash, trigger happy guy we met the other night?” His smile showed teeth under his impassive helmet.

Paxton’s Nighthound lurched out ahead and pushed into closer range, raking fire across all three targets in a fine display of gunnery. It was enough to pull their focus and instill some mortal fear. They didn’t scatter like spooked geese, though. Maybe these weren’t just washed-up planetary defense pilots from the closest planet big enough to have a defense.

A second rocket salvo crunched into his torso and shook him harshly against his restraints. He saw blue-hot splinters of armor flying off and bouncing along the crop fields.

“Okay,” he snarled.

With a last breath out, he cradled the fire control and everything in the world fell away except the gentle motion of his walk, the reticle, and the exact spot he’d been narrowing in on.

His walker made a slight lateral buck as he pressed the stud home, and the round flew. The Scythian’s pilot hadn’t predicted when or where he’d fire, and once the trigger was pulled, even his onboard computer couldn’t have reacted in time. The last thing that went through Eli’s mind was his canopy.

The Scythian kept walking, stupidly marching away from the fight as its upper chest smoked and sparked.

“Who’s next?” Benny said. The Sandpiper and Agema picked up speed, realizing they weren’t dealing with a reckless brawler. Paxton struck at the Sandpiper, but the bizarre armor slab where its arm should’ve been shrugged off his blasts.

“Hey, you see that?” Paxton said. Benny blinked and noticed that a new contact had popped up, coming in from the village.

“I’ll take it out,” he said. “Keep these two occupied ‘til I get back.”

“Gotcha.”

Benny turned and gunned his walker in the new contact’s direction. His targeting system wasn’t telling him what it was, but it wasn’t big. When it appeared around a knoll he laughed.

“You serious now?” he said to the walking harvester facing him down. “I look like a goddamn cornstalk to you?”

He sighed and began his languid targeting routine. “Your hick-ass funeral, I guess.” The reticle eased itself over the enemy’s cockpit. It was coming straight at him, too. No attempt to avert its fate. He lifted his left hand from the yoke to flash a peace sign as he pulled the trigger.

Elton felt like he was inside a ringing cathedral bell. Teeth chipped as his jaw slammed together and something in his shoulder went with a snap. But he was alive. He grinned. He was alive because Benny had tried to snipe a plexiglass canopy that didn’t exist. Elton had replaced it with 40cm of solid steel, and he heard the wind whistle across the solid round as it tumbled over his walker’s head.

He pushed the throttle deep into red. The high-precision seismic module he’d wired into the walker’s system gave tiny haptic feedback cues in the controls to guide him across the terrain, using every footstep as sonar. A symphony of highly detailed audio cues synced with the physical feedback in the controls to lead him toward the Billhook, which was caught flat footed.

Those cues came from powerful external mics, and he listened to the Billhook as it tried to backpedal away from him.

“There it is,” he said quietly. “That hitch in your right step. I knew I heard it. Your right knee’s center pin is worn down to a toothpick. I’m surprised it’s even taking your weight.”

The Billhook opened up on him as he charged. He’d slipped in too close for the main gun, but vulcan rounds and particle blasts burrowed into his jury-rigged armor and started burning out components. If Benny had barraged him like this at first sight, he would’ve taken him down easily. At ten sprinting paces away, it wasn’t enough.

Elton shook violently as the shots landed. A voice in his left ear told him all the little things that were breaking. He clutched the controls and maintained the course he trusted his sensors to tell him was correct.

The Billhook started to dodge, but Elton’s walker bore down like a runaway train. He threw its right hip, with all the walker’s weight behind it, into the Billhook’s right leg.

A high-pitched ping cut through the massive engine noise, and Elton kept his wounded farm machine galloping away. The Billhook turned to fire—and the lower half of its right leg just didn’t turn along with it. With a gunshot-loud snap, the lower leg fell away. The Billhook pitched onto its face, dislodging the main gun’s barrel and crippling the left arm the machine automatically threw up to protect its pilot.

“Thea,” Elton said, breathing hard and ragged, “tell me you’re still alive.”

“Alive and pissed,” came Thea’s voice over the comm. “My railgun barrel’s a puddle on the ground, but I crippled the Nighthound with its last shot. Pilot’s out with his hands up.”

“Good,” Elton said. “Could use a hand mopping up this guy.” He walked carefully over and placed a metal foot on the back of the Billhook’s head as it made a slow attempt to rise.

“Be there in one,” Thea said, and he heard the sound of her engine gunning in the background. “Nice work.”

“Hey,” Benny’s voice cut in over the wideband. “I got people in your little town. Why don’t we just—”

“Your people are dead or captured,” Thea said. “Mostly captured. After the first couple died, the rest didn’t feel like fighting anymore. Turns out our village kebab guy knows a few things about guerrilla infantry tactics.”

“Elton,” Thea went on, back in their private channel. “There’s a lot of little communities like this around the cluster. Tiny places nobody cares about. A lot of good could stand to be done. So many people are getting thrown around by this war. Conditions are gonna get worse before they get better. We have a ship now, and some decent hardware.”

“If you’re asking me on as a pilot, that phase of my career has had its first and last day,” Elton said, taking his hands off the controls to calm their shaking. “But if our prone buddy here’s shown us anything, it’s that you need a good mechanic. And Clara needs to be somewhere she can get an education.”

“It’s settled then,” Thea said. She and Mira stomped over and helped pin down the Billhook. “We’ll give Eli and Felix proper burials. Then we’ll see about getting transit to somewhere we can base our operations.”

Elton just nodded. It was time to try and fix something bigger.

END