It was a common practice by most corporations to task freelancers with establishing initial colonies on freshly acquired worlds. The freelancers would undergo the hardships of living in the environment on a trial and error basis, making the hard discoveries about the unique qualities of life on the new planet. It was dangerous work, but the pay was reasonable enough considering that most such freelancers were only one step away from the Red List anyway, if not already on it, and becoming a colonist was a way to, at least temporarily, get off the list and enjoy some of the protections of corporate sponsorship.
Sokol thought of the scouring winds of Vindi 9 as he hauled the semi-conscious Morgan with him out of the elevator and into the transit hub. Luxers were rushing to lock down the service tunnel leading to the dry dock even as they scrambled to shut every hatch and opening leading to the rest of the commune.
The mech pilot heaved his comrade along with him as they narrowly avoided a large piece of what looked like wall plating as it flew past them and clattered down the service tunnel. He knew, deep down, that something terrible had happened, far beyond a hull breach in the transit hub, which would have been bad enough, but the entire commune’s life support system must have suffered a catastrophic failure, knocked out by whatever accident or assault had breached atmospheric containment. The commune’s atmosphere was bleeding into the void, and even if they could seal off the parts of Fiat Lux that hadn’t already been stripped bare by the depressurization they’d have precious little air left to breathe. He felt the hollow pain in his guts, something resembling fear and the certainty of terrible things on the approach.
He’d had that same feeling on Vindi 9 as he and the other Coyote mechs patrolled several miles out from their landing craft, which served as a temporary base of operations. When they were ordered to proceed into the colony compound nearby, and to consider the community as hostile, the feeling had turned and twisted at his insides. It did not take long for the mechs to reach the compound, a pre-fab stockade wall that enclosed the various shipping containers and hab-pods that comprised the two-hundred- person colony. The intel must have been good, as the colonists started firing on the mechs as soon as they crested the ridge, little good it would do at this range and with those civilian model weapons.
It had been nothing for the three mechs to advance upon the settlement, shattering the stockade walls with mag rounds and striding through the slagged gaps with ease.
Once inside, the mechs had made short work of the colony. Sokol did as he was ordered, and fired upon any human being he encountered. Most of the adults were armed, fighting back with determination, though hope for victory was thin, and Sokol assumed that they had somehow become seditionists. Most of the combat ops he had been involved with up to that point was against seditionists, or at least that had been what he was told in the briefings.
The mechs performed beyond anyone’s expectations, handling the tight confines of the colony with grace and savagery, revealing the Coyote class to be potentially peerless as a close quarters war machine. In the final stages of the slaughter the one weakness of the Coyote was revealed.
Unexpectedly, a settler ambushed Tobin, one of the other mech pilots, using an upright cargo loader. The loader stood just as tall as the Coyote mech, and though it was a clumsy machine, the driver had been an expert pilot. The loader clamped its pincer-like appendage over the mag-cannon arm of Tobin’s machine, crushing all the stabilizer fins. Then the loader’s pilot had driven the points of the other arm, still holding Tobin firmly in place, through the thin vented armor that housed the mech’s grindcore.
The gyroscope engines that gave the mech so much raw power also generated tremendous amounts of heat. For the mech to maintain the kind of mobility that it was designed for the grindcore had to be mounted behind vented armor instead of the coolant bath cubes of the larger mechs. What the Coyote gained in speed, agility, and ferocity, it sacrificed in armor rating. Small arms might be nothing to a Coyote, but the kinetic force of the loader’s piston driven arm as it slammed into the mech over and over, revealed the weakness in grisly detail.
The loader was designed for lifting crates that weighed ten times its own considerable tonnage, and as it hit the mech’s grindcore housing repeatedly, the armor buckled backwards into the spinning grindcore. Tobin and his mech were ripped apart by the grindcore as it exploded, and while the loader was thrown clear the industrial grade plating kept the pilot alive.
Sokol looked down at Morgan as the atmosphere of Fiat Lux was sucked into the void while the occupants struggled to lock everything down.
She had been that loader pilot. A teenager defending her family of freelance settlers against the metal monsters that emerged from the perpetual winds. Sokol had exited his mech and approached the downed loader on foot, determined at the time to put a round between the eyes of the pilot as revenge for his fallen comrade. He had paused when he saw the young woman linked into the loader’s pilot slot.
He lifted the cracked cockpit and ripped the ident placard from her chest. All Helion citizens had such cards about their person, and it was corporate law that unless there was a special dispensation for being in armor or in the home, all citizens had to keep it visible. Authorities wanted to be able to access your personal data swiftly and at will, so in keeping with Helion ways, the freelancers were required to obtain them and display them in the Helion fashion so long as they were under the corporation’s employ.
The young woman’s card looked to be in order, until Sokol saw the data display flashing red with text indicating that ‘Marcross colonist status’ had been suspended.
The time stamp on display showed the status had been revoked hours prior to the battle.
As if his awareness had been lifted from darkness and forced into the light, Sokol realized what he’d just been a part of. These weren’t seditionists, they were just average freelancers, and Helion had cut them loose mere hours before he and his comrades were instructed to wipe them out.
Mind racing, Sokol realized that the company had determined for one reason or another that this colony was no longer worth the cost of the contract. The masters of Helion were cold pragmatists, which was usually a point of corporate pride in the citizenry, and Sokol grew more convinced that this was the work of a Helion manager seizing an opportunity to engage in a weapons test and divest his or herself of a cumbersome business venture.
Sokol could feel his breath getting short as the oxygen reaching his brain was further reduced. He considered his reckless and violent defection from Helion. Sokol did not know it at the time, but one of the other colonies that had also had its license suspended, had put out an all points SOS, broadcasting on every frequency they could manage with their limited devices.
Calmly pretending to be having a headset malfunction to trick his remaining comrade into opening his cockpit so that Sokol, the freshly minted defector, could shoot him in the face, he had then helped a shocked Morgan into the cockpit of the other Coyote mech, trusting her instincts to guide her, based on how skilled she proven to be with the loader. The Fatalis was already en route to their location.
Whatever madness has pushed him to fratricide and desertion, it kept him going as he and the disavowed settler pushed the mechs to the limit while they tried to put as much distance between them and the dead settlement.