Chapter Text
An AC combines the versatility of a foot soldier, the firepower and armor of a main battle tank, and the engagement speed of a fighter jet.
The investment had been a bad one, all things considered.
Gen-four augs on ice were auctioning for less every year, and Walter had been young and desperately focused on the long term when he had made the purchase of twenty-five of them. C4-601 through C4-625, middle-of-the-range serial numbers, at least. Not the early ones full of quirks, not the late ones when production had gone sloppy.
After setting up shop, he had lost three just attempting to smuggle them past the PCA. Then the four he had managed to land on Rubicon had performed according to expectations over the course of their two-year careers and been lost in action despite his best efforts. Now he was down to the last five, which were all in worse condition than the first twenty due to improper storage.
Travel to and from Rubicon was strictly regulated and the PCA was at liberty to use whatever force they deemed appropriate to deter attempts at incursion. It was, however, freely permissible to inborn locals and humanitarian aid workers — Walter being registered as both, with only his name falsified — lest the PCA get in trouble with their overlords, the UNSH.
That only meant there was a lot of money to be made in smuggling. And the corpos had a lot of money with which to pay smugglers. The PCA didn’t care enough to stamp out such small-scale operations and everybody knew BAWS and Elcano and ToHa and RaD was paying the PCA to look the other way as they sold the corpos the materiel needed to supply their operations.
Even he hadn’t been above lining their pockets — both the PCA and the weapon mongers — to ensure his planetside operations. Aug pilots needed ACs, and Elcano was the only ones who could provide fabricators for their parts.
Everyone was corrupt, top to bottom. Even the RLF. Even the Independents.
Up in geostationary orbit, under PCA truce, was his second base of operations, the Aesculapius. Three hours of transit by shuttle — thirteen hours stuck in customs.
He slid out of the airlock, gliding through the hall towards the grav-ring.
“COM, Authenticate.”
“Welcome aboard, Doctor Watson.”
“Crew manifest report.”
“Fourteen souls aboard. Only crew.”
“Good. Initiate lockdown.”
“Welcome aboard, Handler Walter.”
“Take 621 out of storage and send it to medbay— whichever one is in best condition.”
“That would be number three, sir.”
“Get 611 to prep it and warm up the medifabs.”
He consulted his datapad and went over the health issues with this one, of which there were numerous. If he couldn’t get it off continuous life-support, he’d go on to the next one. The next seven hours while COM ran the thaw, he planned out the surgeries and ordered the organ prints. Then he slept for three hours and downed two tablets of amphetamines to wake himself up.
611 met him in the changing room. Like all its kin, afflicted with aphasic partial mutism, but unlike the others that manned the ship when he was away, this one showed some independence and a penchant for following medical procedure. Walter would have preferred an actual human assistant, but necessity was the mother of hacking. At least it made dressing for the OR easier to have an extra pair of living hands.
One of COM’s clean-room drones wheeled the bed in, covered in sterile plastic drapes. A mess of tubes and life support equipment, like eleven umbilical cords, kept the patient alive under there.
“Let’s begin. 611, remove the sheeting.”
The first session of surgery, aimed at stabilizing the patient to the point where it did not need transfusions, dialysis, bypass, a ventilator, and nine different drugs just to survive the night, took nine hours — comparatively quick considering the need for three separate transplants, a pacemaker implant, and thirty-two stents.
Then he went to the galley for a meal. If there had been patients and personnel to feed, today 607 would have served meal packs of beans and schmeat in genuine tomato sauce. Instead they were still going through last week’s alloted rations, pasta with cream sauce for two days in a row.
His quarters, like everything else aboard the ship, were serviceable. The mattress was well-suited to his body weight, the luxury of a private restroom was convenient, and there was enough space for his wardrobe. He picked out a dose of soporifics and oneirogens to get maximum utilization of the six hours of sleep he had time for, downed them with the rest of his meds and a mouthful of electrolyte solution, cleaned his teeth, and went to sleep.
The next session of surgery was aimed at restoring as much function as possible, overall, to let 621 rehabilitate enough for the cerebral Coral control device to fully integrate. The gene therapy that let augs genuinely regenerate from injury, combined with stem cell perfusion, reduced their healing time between major surgeries to just over 48 hours which was conducive to efficiency. At this point, the surgical costs was already exceeding the price he had paid for this specimen, but the alternative was to dump his inventory and go out in search of some gen fives, which came with all sorts of problems — notably legal personhood and personality.
Gen fours were docile, emotionally withdrawn, easily manipulated. And with twenty restorations under his belt, it was almost a welcome challenge. Specimen 621 required nine peripheral nerve transplants, a bone marrow replacement of the left tibia, and several cancerous lymph nodes to be removed. Even more importantly several sections of bowel were beginning to go necrotic and needed replacement, along with electrical therapy to normalize peristalsis.
Severe muscle atrophy needed to be corrected with steroids and rehab training, but that would not be possible before 621 could be put on a feeding tube, so restoring the digestive system was of particular importance.
He wound up working for twelve hours straight — until COM warned him to stop.
The third surgical procedure was perhaps the most brutal, even if least invasive. The activation of the CCCD involved the installation of several hundred cuffs around nerve bundles, replacement of five vertebra, and trepanning to install the neural jack for the ontological pilot link. The old Takigawa machine saw fit to blow a fuse on the warmup cycle, but that was easily fixed, and the rest of the procedure went as unproblematic as it was possible for it to do.
It would have been more pleasant if this final step could be undergone while the patient was in a medical coma, but even if that was the case, the Coral simply burned the contaminant away — it needed a waking mind to work on, and was willing to create one where there was none.
Paralytics were necessary to prevent the patient’s muscles from over-straining and potentially damaging tendons and ligaments. 601 had broken its tibia during the procedure.
Fortunately, 621 turned out to be a successful revival and conversion. Walter kept it in the recovery ward, monitoring metabolome for long-term stability, and went to work on the remaining four.
Moving on to 622 seemed initially like better stock than 621, but during the recovery phase, started showing signs of cybernetic rejection syndrome. In such a state CCCD integration would likely be fatal. The only feasible treatment was to put the patient on immune suppressants, which would leave 622 susceptible to every common pathogen imaginable. If he had a donor — which he didn’t — a bone marrow transplant had a 55% chance of alleviating it. The true cure, was gene therapy; also not an option.
Walter terminated 622, and moved on. 623 was brain-dead. 624’s spinal cord had necrotized, somehow…
625 was promising, until during CCCD integration, it suffered a catastrophic neurogenic shock episode leading to a tonic-clonic seizure, and subsequently a deep coma.
So that was a demotivating string of failures. That evening, he diluted a sample of medical ethanol and drank alone in his room, watching porn.
He had faced worse odds, but not by much. His plan, ten years in the making, was now hinging on a single merc with a fried brain — which he himself bore part of the blame for grilling.
There was nothing for it, unfortunately. It was tempting to give up and relegate 621 to one of the maintenance tasks aboard the Aesculapius, which was understaffed as it were, and take off from the system to acquire more hardware. It would set him back months, if not years, and give the Corpos time to possibly finish their survey which would be unacceptable.
Nothing like proper stakes to make him stressed. One mercenary. One chance. He absolutely couldn’t afford to screw this one up.
With 621 having stabilized, he cloned COM onto its implant suite, and began the Hound indoctrination procedure, rendering 621 completely obedient to him. But in selecting the level of autonomy, he hesitated. He had given 617 through 620 a very high obedience, and moderate martyr instincts. Part of him knew they had gotten themselves killed in action because of it, unwilling to back down.
He dialled all of the parameters down. 621 would be manipulable, but not so willing to follow orders as to be prone to stupidity. Daring without being a daredevil. Persevering without burning out.
The piloting ability of all the gen 4 augs had been verified at augmentation, and this was further verified by having COM run a lucid dream simulation exercise. 621 would perform adequately, in all probability. It was a waste of good pilots that 601 through 613 were only fit for manual labor on account of their CCCDs malfunctioning in various ways.
Final diagnostics were green across the board. Now came the most precarious part of the operation: smuggling it planetside with a functioning AC, acquiring a merc license, and making rendezvous with his mobile base. Luckily the mercenary network put guarantees that attacking the home bases of its patrons led to heavy bounties, though an insurance system for independents. Even the Corpos weren’t keen on doing so, as it would render them personas non grata in the eyes of the mercenaries they relied on for many of their operations.
He ordered 603, 604, and 607 to assemble an AC, LOADER-4. The parts were RaD-make, and shrouded in plausible deniability: they were for EVA repairs of the ship, basically a step above MT parts. He put in a transfer notice that he would be sending a landing craft through with vital supplies for an emergency on the surface — a bald-faced lie, even if technically true. The PCA System probably saw through it, but had four times so far hesitated, paid him reasonable doubt. Perhaps at some future time, they would come for Doctor Watson, on charges of collusion with smugglers.
Then he installed 621 in a cockpit gimbal, and loaded it up in the core. The only thing keeping 621 unconscious was the CCCD — nobody in their right mind put advanced remote medical capabilities in a cockpit, lest a hacker could get inside and disable the pilot.
And there, he left it, heading back to his personal quarters to pack, and then to the shuttle to head planet-side again, bringing an appropriate amount of medical supplies. There was an actual emergency, of course. There always was. The eleven million Rubiconians on the planet led wretched lives. Coral-ash contamination caused a variety of ailments, as did a diet consisting mostly of synthetic nutrients. They were poor like he’d never seen, too.
The trip back planet side was just as uneventfully annoying as the trip to orbit had been a month ago. The Transport Authority of the PCA were content to sit him with his luggage in an interrogation room for six hours, just to hear him present the same — with plausible alterations and alternate descriptions — case for why he had to travel to the planet. Walter knew well how to evade the polygraph tests they administered, and had a falsified bill of health to justify the cocktail of drugs he was on to evade said tests. This time they kept him for sixteen nerve-wracking hours, before he was allowed to take his shuttle to the surface.
New Constantinople was the largest city on Rubicon, and it was small. Only about a half million people lived there, breathing filtered air under domes and in hermetically sealed buildings, if they had the funds. There were slums beyond the dome, and the incidence of respiratory disease and CNS cancers was high, even here in one of the cleanest regions on the planet. It was a city whose populace hated the PCA and only merely despised the Corpos.
It was a city-state that made half its GDP on black market trade. If it could be found on Rubicon, it could be bought in New Constantinople.
In Walter’s case, all he needed was transportation to the edge of town. Clandestine taxi services were numerous, as was storage services that offered everything from lockers to garages to shipping containers to hangars.
His destination was one such hangar, where his personal aircraft waited. A ToHa ‘picket’-class hypersonic personnel transport, a 40-footer, painted in chromophore paint, prominently displaying a fraudulent red cross on either side. The license for the whole vehicle went for millions on the white market and twice as much on the black market. Theft would have been an issue, if not for the fact that the Red Cross had a monopoly on medical imports — and indeed the entire medical supply chain. Nobody wanted to make enemies with an organization that could threaten to withdraw medical logistics to the PCA if need be, and get the entire Planetary Closure Administration to come for your head.
He loaded his cargo from the cart to the plane, and got in the cockpit and tuned to the encrypted frequency of the local tower.
“This is Doctor Watson calling Tower, requesting permission to taxi to runway and take off.”
There was a long pause. “Doctor Watson, please stand by.”
He ran the initialization sequence while waiting.
“We have a time slot in fifteen minutes.”
The hangars themselves were radiation shielded and soundproofed, and the entire compound patrolled. They had an MT squad on speed dial to deter incursions. That was the kind of money and power the mafia had here. Everyone used this airport or one of the others; Arquebus execs, Balam officials, even local government.
Fifteen minutes passed, and the doors did not open. “Tower? This is Doctor Watson, please come in.”
No answer.
Acting quickly, he warmed up the onboard weapon system, point defense as well as main armaments. A Red Cross vehicle wasn’t supposed to be armed, but most were anyway. On the area sensors, he spotted the door at the other end of the hangar opening, and a couple of officers in power suits came in.
A trap.
He flicked the activation switch, and the tail-mounted laser turret tore them both to shreds. Then he opened fire with the main gun on the gates to the hangar, blasting the thick steel doors off their hinges. Then he fired up the engines and rode through the gates at far higher thrust than was advisable, switching to VTOL as soon as he was under open skies, immediately transitioning to level flight, hitting the pulse shields, the pre-cooler, and the afterburner. The plane accelerated at seven gees, pushing him back hard.
A few bullets hit his shield.
“Tower, you just lost yourself a lot of business,” he said through gritted teeth, selecting the sensor-recording and releasing them unencrypted on the local net. This would be the last time he could use the red cross as a deterrent: the Red Cross wouldn’t come down like a hammer on the spaceport for this, which would reveal him as a fraud.
He connected his ACS to the city air control AI, and gave it his departure vector, not even waiting for confirmation before speeding off north towards the Belius peninsula.
As soon as he exited New Constantinople jurisdiction, he ditched the Red Cross vehicle identification and scrubbed the exterior of the white and red, replacing it with radar-absorbent black.
“Calling ALLMIND mercenary support network, this is Handler Walter.”
“Good afternoon, RB-0451 Handler Walter.”
“I’d like to invoke insurance on the craft I am piloting.”
“The usual bounty?”
“No, double it.”
“We will deduct the difference from your future premiums.”
“I consent. Nothing else I need.”
“Enjoy your flight.”
The two hour flight went without issue. Not many things could intercept a picket going mach four in the upper atmosphere. Even the PCA satellites would have trouble tracking him. He landed on his mobile fortress — BAWS manufacture, like most other heavy military materiel — and let its automated hangar system take care of his picket.
“Welcome back, Handler Walter,” COM greeted him as he came into the main interior hall — half production floor, half garage.
“Submerge again. Open the secure comms-link to Aesculapius. Transmit the go-ahead.”
“Cargo capsule launched.”
He made his way into the C&C center and tracked the progress with bated breath, ready to assume manual control of the descending shuttle. Ready to watch it go up in smoke and leave him with his cover likely blown, and his ship soon to be confiscated.
Walter took a deep breath, and reached for his anxiolytics. It did not pay to imagine impending doom, only react to it when you saw it coming. The shuttle descended steadily from geostationary, on an approach trajectory that facilitated landing, rather than a Hohmann transfer to low orbit. It was blaring metaphorical emergency sirens, signalling its alleged humanitarian purpose.
“We’re close to Rubicon. Wake the dog up,” he said into the microphone, addressing the COM in 621’s CCCD.
“Handler 'Walter' verified. Activating Cerebral Coral Control Device. Augmented Human C4-621 has awakened.”
“Time to get to work, 621,” he said, projecting the usual confidence. “I’m powering down your entry capsule. On my signal…”
It wouldn’t do to pretend to come in for a soft landing. Medical supplies could easily withstand over 20 gees, and so he had to make it look like a hard landing until they were deep enough in the atmosphere that the mass drivers of the PCA Orbital Denial could no longer reliably hit.
Tense seconds passed as the entry capsule breached the Karman line and compressive heating began. He directed the capsule to begin active braking, and immediately the sensor arrays on the Aesculapius issued a warning that the OD was activating.
He lunged for the manual controls. “Now, activate the AC.”
Walter had to time the dodge maneuver perfectly. With one hand he aligned the telescope of his ship and zoomed in approximately on the mass-driver cannon of the OD’s main denial satellite, disaffectionately nicknamed ‘Eye of Ra.’ He only had a dozen pixel to go by, and an agonizing light-speed delay of over two hundred milliseconds to compensate for.
Please let this work, he prayed to no higher power in particular, and twitched the controls.
Half a second later, he saw the blast of light through the telescope transmission. A quarter second before that, the capsule took a glancing blow. The cargo was untouched — fortunately — but the landing avionics got fried from the electromagnetic pulse.
But now data came through the AC comms-link, and 621 activated its pulse blade to slice the compartment apart, leaping into the sky, thrusters on full blast to brake, and pulse armor protesting against the enormous wind pressure of entry velocity. It wasn’t going to be enough.
He watched as his last viable merc tumbled towards the roof of Grid 135, about to become a pile of scrap.
But then 621 had other plans, and turned their autocannon down, opening fire. The hail of armor-piercing auto-cannon fire softened up the landing area, and Walter watched with astonishment as it crashed through the ceiling through some structurally weak area, barely staying within tolerance of the AC’s pulse shield and landing on solid ground inside so hard they came within 10% of catastrophic failure of the AC’s leg hydraulics.
Astonished, Walter leaned back. Systems returned to normal. The AC was scratched and banged up, but nothing the onboard compensator couldn’t handle. 621, immediately upon regaining attitude control, spun to survey the perimeter.
He leaned in to the microphone. “Your position is Grid 135. Off-target, but within permissible range.” He covered the microphone with a hand: “Get me schematics for Grid 135.”
COM saw to it and he consulted the map on a monitor, then said to 621: “There’s a steam catapult up ahead. Use it to close the distance.” With the push of a button he transmitted the map data to 621’s COM.
Grid 135 was of some interest to the Dafeng subsidiary of Balam Industries, and they had a presence there to lay claim to the space. 621 set off, navigating the structure with confidence and arrived in a railway hangar space, which would have served the cargo launch system when that was still in place, encountering some patrols.
“Clear out those MTs. Perfect chance to test your AC.”
621 blasted into the room, taking down a few walkers with well-placed fire as they sped by, then eliminated another cluster of them with homing missiles, and tore through two MTs with the pulse blade without even slowing down, stopping only to let their electronic warfare systems engage with the control computer of a locked gate.
Down a half kilometer corridor was the open overhang of the Grid, overlooking the surface below. Through the LOADER-4 eyes, Walter saw the vista. Their destination was the remnants of a city, Castra Deva, evacuated fifteen years ago due to contamination, but strategically important due to the spaceport on the tower overlooking town. A recent three-way had taken place there, resulting in the deaths of several mercenaries. There were very good chances they’d be able to snag a license and commit a spot of identity theft.
“See the contaminated city down there? That’s where you’re landing.”
621 went to the catapult, initializing the launch sequence and strapping their AC into the launch pad — the traction control system that enabled ACs and MTs to skate across even rough terrain, could also provide extra traction.
They launched into an over-boost, then coasting the fifteen kilometers down to the city perimeter.
“If we get our hands on Rubicon’s Coral… we’ll make a killing. Plenty for a merc with a fried brain like you to buy their life back.”
It was an activation-phrase of sorts, part of the subliminal motivation structure he had implanted during indoctrination. Not quite false memories. Promise of a reward — genuine thought it might be — that would never be relevant.
The flight concluded in a few minutes. Walter scooted over to the cooler under the desk and fetched a bottle of water.
“Enough chat. Back to work. Scavenge the AC wrecks ahead looking for a valid mercenary license. We’re illegals here — you’ll need ID to operate.”
On the path down from the mountain they landed on, 621 encountered a patrol of MTs. He listened in on their open chatter while 621 tore them to shreds. “Guerillas from the Liberation Front. They’ll get in the way of our work. Eliminate them as necessary.”
621 pressed on like they were renting the LOADER-4 by the minute, reaching the city limits, and LOADER-4’s onboard sensor suite streamed in a plethora of data which Walter ran through his suite of data filtering algorithm, yielding three hits. “I’m picking up AC wrecks in the city.” Transmitting the annotated map, 621 immediately boosted towards the first target.
The RLF soldiers present in the city reacted with panic and/or overconfidence, and 621 dealt with them expediently or simply sped past them, reaching the first wreck in mere minutes. Walter received the data packet and skimmed the details. Black box contents for the AC clearly showed cessation of vital signs and failure to eject. License for one Thomas Kirk, rest his soul, a fool who had used his real name as callsign. Cheapest AC frame licenses available, expired since a few days ago. “This one is already expired.” 621 was already boosting towards the next wreck before he finished speaking. “So yeah, move on to the next one.”
Then Walter got a ping on 621’s radar. “What?!” he exclaimed, forgetting to cover the mic. A heavy assault heli came gliding over the city, blaring its PCA identification broad-spectrum. It opened fire on some RLF mechs, and coasted onwards on its patrol. 621 darted in behind a building. “That’s the PCA’s planet-side force. Keep a low profile, we don’t want them breathing down our necks.”
The protocol was to order the hound to do what they had already done, if it was a desirable action, and they would confabulate the order of the two. It was a delicate balance of emotional manipulation to keep a hound in line.
621 waited out the PCA heli’s sweep of the area and then blasted off towards the next wreck, several kilometers away, dodging engagements when possible, and swiftly ending them otherwise. Walter took the time to run the LOADER-4’s onboard radars to search for additional wrecks.
The next data packet arrived. Gun 7, Hakra. One of Balam’s elites had bitten it. That was unusual, but that meant they would probably go recruiting soon. “Corpo license. Easily traced. Forget it.” No sooner had he said that before 621 was skidding across the flooded streets.
A larger force of RLF mechs and drones were patrolling the area surrounding the third wreck, which barely presented a speed bump. Another data packet. A random no-rank no-name merc. “This one is still valid, but the rank is no good. We can’t use this. I’ve picked up one more wreck.” Making the map data available immediately sent 621 towards the upper tier of the city, the staging area for the heavy cargo launches to orbit. Another squad of RLF mechs was holding down the area.
There was a ping on the long-range radar. “Hold up, 621. That PCA heli is swinging back for another pass.”
It came swooping in with a barrage of well-placed missiles and auto-cannon fire, all but obliterating the RLF squad. A few stragglers managed to find cover, despite their MT’s lack of maneuverability. 621 had the same idea, getting out of line of sight, but that wouldn’t save them from scanning.
“You there, AC pilot. Identify yourself!”
“There’s nothing for it, 621, you have to take it down. Do it fast and they won’t have enough combat profile data to ID us.”
And then 621 set into motion, blasting down the corridor between the refractory concrete buildings. With a practiced eye, Walter recognized the flanking attempt for what it was. He switched to broadcast. “Attention RLF forces, if you want to live, lay some covering fire against the PCA heli!”
“Who the fuck are you to give us orders?!”
“I’m the guy with an AC.”
One either particularly brave — or particularly stupid — MT pilot ducked out of cover and fired a cannon at the heli. It dodged, of course, and spun its auto-cannon turrets to blast the poor sod to smithereens. Despite their massive size, PCA heavy assault helicopters were extremely maneuverable.
It gave 621 the distraction they needed to get into the open and blast off towards the heli, gun blazing, emptying the last of their missile battery. It attempted a dodge, but trying to outmaneuver an AC was generally futile. 621 landed on the side of it, adhering to it as much as the limited traction control of LOADER-4’s legs allowed, struggling with the heli’s pulse shielding, and turned their blade on the starboard repulsor turbine.
The pulse oscillator blade had the fortunate property of basically ignoring pulse shielding, and it bit deep into the turbine housing with the first cut, and hit the actual turbine with the second, immediately sending the heli’s ACS into overdrive trying to compensate for losing one of its four propulsion vectors.
Oscillator now overheated and cooling, 621 boosted over and onto the roof of the heli, jamming their gun into the exhaust port for the generator and ran the gun until the heli finally stabilized and tried boosting away under them. 621 followed in an instant, staying above the machine, and went in for another swipe, overcharging their pulse oscillator to disable the other starboard repulsor turbine.
The fifteen hundred ton machine crashed into the staging grounds, and now, with the pulse protection system disabled, 621 was free to blast it apart.
“Get the black boxes,” Walter said, transmitting the schematics of the ship. Then he switched to the broadcast channel to talk to the RLF: “PCA heli down. If you agree to let us leave, we’ll leave the heli intact for you to salvage.”
“Whoever you are, you just wiped the floor with the PCA. We’re not dumb enough to pick a fight with you.”
621 destroyed the flight recorders inside the huge craft with surgical precision, leaving the massive generators intact. Then they sped directly past a few of the RLF MTs — someone shouted “Hold your fire!” — and went directly to the wreck.
The data packet came shortly. Decent rank, valid for a few more days which could easily be extended. Registration number implied a rather more venerable career, which might pose a problem. The callsign vaguely recalled something or other. It might well be trouble to steal this ID, but they were out of options. “Rank is good, still valid. Registration number RB-0023, callsign: Raven. That’s your new name here on Rubicon.”
“Oh, I bet that pilot just came back to reclaim their ID,” one of the RLF soldiers said.
“Shut up, Gibbs.”
“Good job, 621, now get out of there. Transport heli is going to pick you up and take you back to base.”
Nine hours of transit later, 621 arrived at base. Walter had used the time in between to do paperwork, eat, sleep, directing the maintenance bots, and other kinds of busywork. RB-0023 would be valid for another hundred days, now.
The transport heli disgorged the AC into the garage before stowing itself in the hangar next to his picket. He directed the maintenance bots to extract the gimbal cockpit from the core and opened it up. It needed decontamination, resupply of the life-support systems, archiving system contents, and the routine system wipe in case any EW attacks had left viruses.
The AC needed a full diagnostic and refueling, and the weapons needed refurbishing and reloading.
621, asleep, needed a debrief, the regular post-deployment medical exam, and the special medical exam to account for their health problems.
621 sat on the medical examination table, and kicked their legs. Walter noted it as another potential symptom to correct for, while he picked out the appetite stimulants that would get them to eat.
“Ah—” they said.
He looked up. “Is something the matter, 621?”
“Uhn…” They pointed at a datapad on the desk.
“I don’t have any speech synthesis software on hand.” As a matter of course. Hounds rarely needed to communicate.
“Hah.” 621 mimed typing.
That was interesting. Did they retain literacy?
He grabbed the datapad, found a text-to-speech interface, and handed it to 621.
They typed for a while. Typing each word fast, but thinking a lot in between the words. Partial aphasia. “LOADER-4 AC severe lack fire power and speed.”
“It’s the best I had access to at the time.”
“Trash AC.”
“Once I acquire some design licenses we can manufacture something else.”
“Impatient.”
“There are some open calls. Once you’re cleared to sortie, ALLMIND will note your license has returned to mercenary activity and we’ll get to see what materiel licenses the previous owner had.”
“Hurry.”
This one was going to be a handful, but then, if he tried to medicate them for more docility, that might impair their absolutely stellar combat ability.
“Let’s get you authenticated first.”
They hopped down from the examination table, and pulled on their onesie, fumbling a little with the zipper, then shuffled after him on slippered feet into what could generously be described as the ‘living room’ of the base’s habitation area. Little more than a dining table and a small kitchen.
“Sit.”
621 obeyed, taking a seat by the table. Walter took out one of the MRE rations and put it in the microwave oven.
“COM, connect 621 to the mercenary support network, run authentication.”
“Yes, Handler Walter.”
They suddenly stopped fidgeting, their CCCD hooking into the merc net. He took the datapad from the table and cloned the feed.
“Registration Number RB-0023, callsign: Raven. Authentication complete. Removing MIA status. Restoring access privileges. This is ALLMIND, the mercenary support network. Welcome back, Raven.”
The microwave oven buzzed, and Walter took the tray out, cracking the lid and putting it in front of 621 with a plastic spoon and a glass of vitamin fortified synthetic apple juice. “Eat.”
Reading up on 621’s profile revealed a few clues as to their… eccentricity. It wasn’t often relevant to look at gen four’s pre-augmentation history. In this case, it turned out that 621’s history yielded at the very least an explanation for their unusual motoric behaviors: autism.
There were several other things in their self-report which might lend itself to manipulation. Gender identity, if they had any left post-augmentation, would lend itself to positive reinforcement. Sexual manipulation — while against his personal principles — was also unlikely given their pre-augmentation preferences.
Ordinarily, Walter would have picked out a job for them, but 621 approached him after eating — he was still in the middle of his meal — and shoved their datapad in his face, displaying the mission brief for an Schneider-sponsored hit-job on a Dafeng occupation of a logistically significant depot in Grid 133, not far from their landing site.
“This one.”
“That’s the job you want to take?”
“Small location. Target concentration. Fast.”
Their impatience might become a problem.
“Load me up. Please.”
Walter put his spoon down. “I suppose there’s no reason not to.”
He led 621 to the gimbal. He strapped them in, careful to apply talc and lubricant where necessary, then connected their neurojacks, IV access ports, and catheters, before running a full diagnostics. The bots loaded them up and the AC spun up.
“Everything all right, 621?”
The giant arm of the LOADER-4 rose and gave him a thumbs-up with fingers the size of filing cabinets.
“The base has moved further south, so the trip should be somewhat shorter.”
A message notification popped up on his PDA: Good. -621
The transport heli swallowed the AC, and disappeared out through the gate of the mobile base. The air filtration system immediately kicked in, purging the air of Coral Ash contamination. An airlock would have been ideal, but really it was unavoidable to come into contact with ash on the planet that was ground zero for the Fires of Ibis.
The trip to 133 was four hours at the trans-sonic cruise speed of the heli. Then 621 spent approximately fifteen minutes tearing through MTs, drones, construction bots, and heavy materiel, requiring only minimal interaction from Walter, before they got to take the four hour trip back.
99% of war was killing time, the remaining 1% was killing time.
621 took the confidential message from ALLMIND — even Walter wasn’t allowed to listen in on the direct communications between the mercenary support network and other mercenaries, not even the ones he legally owned.
Then 621 spent a long time with the license catalogue while receiving dialysis.
Walter’s PDA pinged. A text message consisting only of the word Two, with a hyperlink to a catalogue item: a 40mm auto-cannon weapon to replace the 30mm currently installed on the LOADER-4.
Then shortly after, another message, cryptically just the word blade, and a hyperlink to a weapon-bay attachment that an AC could use to stow hand-weapons.
Walter pondered for a few minutes. “COM, grant 621 petitioning privileges in the garage with myself supervisor.”
“Augmented human C4-621, privileges altered.
Not five minutes later, his PDA pinged with the details of the alterations and prints 621 wanted. He approved and the Elcano fabricator started rumbling in the other end of the base.
Then his PDA pinged again: Simulation training?
ALLMIND provided a wide catalogue of simulation training scenarios for mercenaries, the NEST program, free of charge, but restricted by rank. The mobile base had hardware on board to run them, and he had directed his other Hounds to use them, but never seen one of them actively requesting them.
So he hooked them up to the neurojack interface of the simulator and left them there to their own devices.
Then he did something he should have done a while ago, and started digging into what exactly the RB-0023 license had access to. It was a decent collection of weapon licenses, a number of custom training simulation profiles, and a number of simulation models of other mercenaries. That was, to Walter’s knowledge, a recent innovation in ALLMIND — some kind of heuristic mimic algorithm the behind-the-scenes technicians of the mercenary support network had cooked up. It had already been used to facilitate assassinations of a few unpopular mercenaries by letting the assassins get a feel for their targets.
621 spent a full five hours in the simulator before Walter cut them off for biological maintenance. Then afterwards, a pattern began to form, when they came to him with another job, this one a call from Balam directly to remove an RLF-related impediment to their Coral survey in Southern Belius, in a mountain pass near the city Castra Domini.
They had also left an entire backlog of work for the fabricator to churn out, including enough alternate internal systems to gut the entirety of LOADER-4. It was going to be a tremendous amount of work to install it, but also promising given 621’s performance so far in the admittedly limited AC platform at their disposal.
Indeed, only using the altered external arsenal, 621 completed the brief combat mission at an absolutely astonishing pace. Compared to 617 through 620, they had initiative, intuition, and a ruthlessness which Walter imagined the highest mercenaries shared. King, Vesper I Freud, Gun 1 Michigan; the big names that everyone knew about.
Walter began to hope, despite himself.
It was incongruous to see this wiry, scarred, quirked-up cyborg in a onesie meticulously plan out their next mission with the glee of… an engineer, or perhaps a scientist, rather than a warrior. It was a puzzle to solve, the intel, their available arsenal which was growing by the hour.
Most pilots fell into an AC configuration that appealed to them personally and suck with it, usually early in their career. 621 did seem to have a preference, but spent hours at a time running simulations and gauging performance of potential configurations before printing them.
The mission in question was a hit job.
Gun 7 Hakra had bit the dust, so the Redguns were recruiting to fill the roster, and recruiting meant tryouts. Balam Industries had the production capacity to send promising officer cadets off on low risk missions in full-fledged ACs, commanding MT squads of their own. This was one such. Arquebus had intel that they would be patrolling one of their recent conquests, Castra Excelsior in Southern Belius. Another ruin with a spaceport, an airfield, and a long-extinct coral well.
621 dropped in far from the combat area, and chose an oblique approach vector, coming in under the radar floor. Two high-caliber auto-cannons, a pulse oscillator, and a rocket battery, and the cold killing instinct of someone who compared AC-to-AC to chess of all things.
Walter followed their progress through the snow-covered hills and withered pine forests and down into the ruins of the city.
“Sir! I think we got incoming!”
“Do you have visual?”
“No, sir, but I picked up a signature for a second.”
“Seismometers say incoming AC, sir!”
“Fuck! Prepare for enemy engagement!”
621 made it within combat range, keeping cover of half-collapsed concrete structures between themselves and the Balam squad. Then they started taking potshots at the MTs, and to their credit, the Balam squad immediately tried to find cover and returned fire. This let 621 hang behind cover and tune their sensors up, holding until they detected the AC closing in.
Just as the Balam officer cadet came around their cover, 621 was already blasting backwards and unloading rockets directly into his face, before turning tail and vaulting cover to make a strafing pass at the MT squad.
“Don’t think I can’t keep up with you, merc!”
621 took out half of the MT squad out with just a few well-placed shells each.
The Balam AC was hot on their heels, and 621 shook him off once more and made another strafing pass, effectively wiping out his MT backup.
“No! How dare you do that to my men!”
The Balam pilot had his own rockets, but the AC he was piloting was a heavier model, slower, less maneuverable. He overcommitted to a lunge with his own pulse oscillator, and 621 relieved his AC of its left arm with theirs.
And then it was swiftly over. The Balam pilot brought his gun arm around and, unprotected as it was by overloaded pulse shielding, 621 simply blasted it to pieces, then boosted backwards to unleash a barrage of missiles that all struck home, and then over-boosting in to kick the off-balance mech over.
The core of the AC was of very hardy make, and still functioned, but the leg parts hadn’t survived. 621 loomed over their quarry, autocannon in hand.
“Careful, 621. He could pull the self-destruct and eject.”
“Fuck. I just wanted a callsign of my own.”
621 stood stationary over the smouldering wreckage for a spell.
Then Walter received the message: Space Cowboy.
He chuckled, despite himself. “What, you think he should have that callsign?”
Yes. Fought well. Tell him.
“What are you waiting for, you piece of shit independent! Finish me off!”
The first unclaimed spot in the Redguns roster was gun thirteen. “Balam pilot. This is Handler Walter.”
“What?!”
“Raven here has requested I put in a request with the Redguns that you’ll posthumously be awarded th callsign Gun 13 Space Cowboy.”
“The fuck is that supposed to—”
621 opened fire.
A hound with a sense of comedic timing. Imagine that.
Two days later, Balam’s mercenary contact reached out to him asking for 621 by name — Raven. Gun 6 Red was not known for his skill as a pilot, but in Walter’s estimation, that only meant he was more dangerous than his rank within the Redguns let on.
“Handler Walter.”
“Gun 6 Red. What can I do for you.”
“I was hoping to speak to Raven.”
“If you want to hire a hound, you speak to the houndsmaster: me.”
“Very well, mister. Your Hound, Raven, performed adequately on their last job for us. We’d like to hire those services again.”
“Send me the data packet. Raven will review it at earliest convenience, but it is up to their judgment whether to take the job.”
“Sounds like the hound has rather a lot of power over its master.”
“The hand that feeds gets bitten when it beats.”
“No offense, but this conversation we’re having, you’re not exactly confidence-inspiring Handler Walter. Maybe cut back on the dog-related metaphors.”
“One more thing. I hear you recently lost an officer cadet.”
“You don’t need to beat around the bush, Handler Walter. We know about the hit Arquebus placed on him, and we were pretty sure it might have been your new merc that took it. That only goes to show you’re worthy of our interest.”
“This is not about that. Raven has a request to make regarding the dead pilot.”
“Huh?”
“That he be posthumously granted the rank of Gun 13, with the nickname Space Cowboy.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t know whether to be insulted or amused.”