Chương 40: Courage and Cowardice

San Teodoro Peninsula, Vidako Imperium Stellarum November 1, 2847 Arc was only half-aware of the first spiked terror staggering backward from the force of Vijay Iyer's assault. Five tons of sophisticated alloy in a very unsophisticated form sent the xenobeast careening through a second tent, tearing the polyvinyl walls and roof down around it as it fell onto its back. But Arc's lasers weren't kinetic weapons, and they carried no weight at all.

They burned through the left shoulder of the second cornibus, leaving a blackened, cauterized wound in their wake once they'd flickered out, but they didn't knock the monster off its feet. I might have picked the wrong weapon, Arc realized, as the monster threw its head back and let out a roar, then charged directly at his Tyro. I'm not confident the autocannon rounds will pierce that thing's hide, Iceni told him.

"Time to find out," Arc muttered. He turned his mech to the left and began to circle, so that the charging predator's back would be to the jungle, and not the tents where the drug runners were still trying to take shelter. The cornibus was coming too quickly for him to wait for his targeting systems to lock on, so he simply dropped his targeting reticule right at the monster's center of mass, selected full automatic fire, and squeezed his trigger.

Tracer rounds burned through the air, drawing twin converging lines from the shoulders of the Tyro to the torso of the cornibus, but the succession of rapid impacts didn't slow the monster's approach in the slightest. One of its enormous, backward curving back spikes was blown clean off, leaving a jagged, broken stump, and then it slammed into Arc's mech, bearing him backward and down to the ground.

The wire-frame outline of his mech flashed between green and yellow at the torso, indicating damage to the rear ceramic armor which had taken the brunt of the impact. The cornibus followed Arc's mech down, pinning him there, then lowered its head and sunk its massive snout-horn into the bicep of his mech's right arm—the same arm which held his rifle. With a toss of the head, the spiked terror tore the entire limb off the Tyro, flinging it high overhead.

I hope it doesn't hit anyone we were trying to save when it lands. Arc realized that kind of thought, and the urge to laugh, were probably signs of panic or hysteria. That horn would be coming for his cockpit next, he was certain, and there didn't seem to be a whole lot that he could do about it. He'd promised Cassie that he wasn't going to end up like Blake Van Camp, pulled out of a ruined mech and loaded onto a stretcher. Now it looked like he might be in even worse condition, when they got him to the academy.

Maybe even in a body bag. Was this what Phoebe felt like, right before she died? Arc wondered. Did she even have time to know it was coming? He felt, in that moment, very foolish for promising Cassie that he would come back to her. It was a promise made out of the illusion of control.

The cornibus reared up, then lowered its head, but before it could gore his mech again, a beam of cerulean light shot right across its face from off to one side, leaving a blackened scar and the smoking ruin of an empty eye socket once the light had faded. The creature shook its head, maddened by pain, and roared again.

"Get up, Sandhurst," Christina Fortin said, her voice coming through clear over Arc's comms with only a hint of crackling static.

"Khan's pulled a runner and Iyer's busy with the other one. We've got to take this thing out ourselves." Options. Arc sorted and discarded them one after the other, in the space between heartbeats. It was clear his autocannons didn't have the force behind them that would be necessary to blow the spiked terror back off his mech. His shoulder mounted lasers would be even worse. He'd lost one arm and his rifle, which meant he was missing his best weapon and half the grasp he might use to wrestle the thing.

That seemed like a suicidal tactic even with two fully-functioning arms. What did he have left? He could always head-butt the monster. The plasma sword. It came to him in a moment of clarity so sharp, so distinct that it was like a lightning bolt to the skull. The only reason Arc could think that he hadn't considered it before was that he'd only had Ramírez attach one to the mech's back to keep Cassie happy, and that he'd never actually intended to use it.

Arc reached back with the Tyro's left arm, grasped the handle of the plasma blade, and felt Iceni release the magnetic lock that secured it to the mech's chassis. Above him, the cornibus shook its head once more, then looked down, focusing its one remaining eye on the mech pinned beneath its front claws. It wasn't hard to imagine what was going through the predator's head: something had wounded it badly, and it was going to rip and tear and batter at its enemy until there was nothing left to hurt it again.

Arc brought the left hand of his mech right up beneath the beast's chin and activated the plasma blade. A line of brilliant white light, edged in purplish-blue at the edges, pierced the cornibus's throat and extended up through the crown of its skull, humming and smoking as the flesh and blood of the beast burned away. For a moment, the body remained upright, stiff and unmoving. Then, Arc drew up one leg of his Tyro, set his foot against its bulk, and managed to roll the enormous carcass aside.

You realize that you're going to need to tell your girlfriend that her insistence on adding a plasma blade to your loadout just saved your life, Iceni pointed out.

"Our lives," Arc grumbled. He rolled the mech onto its feet and stood, keeping the lit plasma blade in his left hand. The balance of the training mech was all off, with the right side, where it was now missing an arm, so much lighter than the left that he had to pay careful attention to how he moved.

"Remember, your hardware occupies the same real estate as my brain. This head gets cracked open, and you're going with me." Trust me, I am well aware.

"Sound off," Vijay Iyer's voice came over the comms. Arc saw, through the visual feed from his mech's head-mounted sensors, that the older cadet's club was sunk so deep into the skull of the beast he'd been fighting that the handle jutted up into the air at an angle, like a half-fallen tree. Iyer's Janissary had acquired a few claw-rents in the torso armor, but overall he seemed to have come through the fight in much better shape than Arc had.

"Fortin here. No damage. Ran my battery down to seventy-six percent, though," the other pilot reported.

"That's one battery just about entirely drained." Arc hadn't fully considered just how quickly using adaptive camouflage armor in combat burned through an Outrider's reserves, until just that moment.

"We'll hot swap one of mine," Iyer said. While the smaller mechs only carried four solid state batteries each, his fifty-five ton Janissary was loaded with six.

"Sandhurst? You alright there?"

"Lost my right arm and took some damage to my armor when I fell," Arc said, surprised at just how calm his voice sounded.

"Other than that, I'm fine—just down a rifle."

"You seem to have made up for it with the sword, though." Iyer sighed.

"Khan's probably halfway back to Academy Hill by now. Fortin, I need you to get up to some high ground—the best elevation you can find—and call back. We're going to need Sakers loaded with medical teams and salvage crews out here, as soon as they can get in the air. And someone's going to have to round up Khan before he gets himself lost in the jungle." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"Affirmative," Christina said, and turned her Outrider about, guiding it out of the clearing at a fast jog.

"I'll be back once I've made contact."

"Sandhurst, I want you to cover me while I get out and talk to the survivors," Iyer ordered.

"I don't expect any trouble after all that, but you never know. A warning shot from your autocannons should settle down anyone who gets out of line but do not, I repeat, do not actually shoot anyone without my express order. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," Arc said. He turned off the plasma blade in his mech's left hand, secured it to the back of the chassis by engaging the magnetic locks, and shifted his machine around so that he could keep the entire clearing in view, with his back to the jungle. Once he'd moved, he noticed the severed arm of his Tyro, still clutching the rifle, where it had fallen on one of the parked grav-trucks, crushing the vehicle.

Vijay Iyer's cockpit opened, plates of ceramic armor withdrawing like spreading ribs, and a moment later Arc saw the rope ladder descend, unrolling as it went. Iyer climbed down easily and made his way over to where the survivors huddled around the dead and the wounded. Arc wasn't certain he could have done the same—at least, not so confidently. All at once, he felt very, very tired.

His heartbeat was so loud that he couldn't hear anything happening down on the ground, and Arc's hands shook so violently that he had to let go of his control sticks because he was afraid that otherwise he'd accidentally squeeze a trigger. He realized that his uniform was soaked through with sweat, and he felt like he couldn't get his breath. You're experiencing an adrenaline crash, Iceni told him. A reaction following temporarily elevated levels of epinephrine and cortisol.

Focus on slow, deliberate breathing, and the feeling will fade. After a moment's hesitation, she added, I'll do what I can to even things out, chemically speaking, but I don't have as much control as I would with a genetically modified adrenal system.

"Just do your best," Arc gasped. He wanted to close his eyes, but he needed to be ready in case someone made a threatening move on Vijay, so instead he just forced himself to pull in a deep breath, so deep he almost didn't think he'd be able to hold it, and he began to count.

"I wonder if this is what Sareth Khan felt like when he ran," Arc murmured. Iceni had no response. 𝝮 Though the fighting had been the work of minutes—surprisingly few of them, actually, once Arc had asked Iceni to check her records for him—what came after took hours.

By the time four Sakers came in low over the jungle, skimming the top of the canopy before descending into the clearing, Arc, Christina and Vijay Iyer had separated the survivors of the camp into two groups: the workers who been forced to harvest and process the drugs, and the surviving members of Calle Infierno who'd made them do it at gunpoint.

Two of the VTOLs carried medical teams, while a third disgorged San Teodoro police officers who immediately set to work restraining the gangers who'd survived, and collecting evidence of the drug processing. The fourth opened its bay door to let out Lieutenant Commander Libby, Natalie Ramírez, and the rest of Arc's tech crew.

To Arc's amusement, if not his surprise, the technical cadet stormed right past Libby without a moment's hesitation, fixed her eyes on Arc's Tyro, and raised a finger to point directly at the cockpit. His external audio pickups had no difficulty carrying her voice to him.

"Arcturus Sandhurst, what did you do to my mech?" Ramírez shouted.

"You go on one patrol—one single patrol! —and you lose an entire arm?"

"External speakers, please," Arc said to Iceni. Activated.

"I didn't lose the arm," Arc protested, and used the Tyro's remaining hand to point to where they'd dragged the severed limb and rifle off the wreckage of a grav-truck.

"It's all right there. We can take it back with us." Iceni made the choice to zoom in on Ramírez's face, close enough to see her eye twitching, because Arc would never have done such a thing in a million years.

"Can it, Ramírez, and get to work strapping that salvage onto the bottom of the Saker," Lieutenant Commander Libby said, reaching up with one hand to adjust the earbud and attached microphone that let him onto the mechs' comm channel.

"You can tear Cadet Sandhurst a new asshole once everyone is back to the academy." With a visible huff, Ramírez turned and began stalking toward the mechanical limb, shouting at her crew the entire way. Arc could only hope that by the time they got everything back to the hangar, she'd have calmed down a bit. Enough not to chew him out, perhaps. He suspected the fact he was on track to be an officer, and that she wouldn't ever get out of the enlisted ranks, wasn't going to mean a thing.

The thought was almost as comforting as it was intimidating.

"In any case," Libby said, looking over the mechs arranged about the perimeter of the clearing, "the three of you did good. Accepted wisdom is to engage cornibus with two mechs, or from a significant distance, but obviously the situation didn't permit that here. Iyer, most of your team came through well. I'll debrief you all once we're back to the academy and get the details."

"Has Cadet Khan been located, sir?" Vijay asked. Once again, Iceni zoomed in to show Arc how the instructor's face twisted with anger at those words.

"Sareth Khan has a court martial waiting for him once he's returned the government property that he's currently riding around in," the older pilot said.

"A court martial which will require testimony from all three of you, I might add. You'll also be making statements for the San Teodoro police department, before we send you on your way home. Cadet Iyer, is there any reason your squad can't make the journey back to Academy Hill in its current condition?"

"We could use a fresh load of ammo and a few battery change-outs, sir," Iyer said.

"But no, all our mechs are functional enough to bring them home on foot."

"Excellent." Libby nodded.

"There's a lot for the three of you to learn from this, and we'll be talking about it over the days to come. But right now, what's important is this: when you responded to a call for aid, you did the right thing. You did exactly what officers of the imperial fleet should do. You came in and you worked together to protect people. The fact that you've helped our local constabulary to bust a drug trafficking operation is just icing on the cake. We'll take it from here. Bring those mechs on back to the barn, soldiers.

You are hereby relieved from your patrol duties. Scram." 𝝮 Under Iyer's direction, they made good time cutting east back through the jungle. With two out of their three mechs damaged, there was no more sending Christina Fortin out to roam about, kilometers away. Instead, they all stuck close together, with the Outrider kept to the best pace of the slowest mechs. Arc reconsidered his early thoughts about bringing a Culverin, in place of one of the two Tyros.

Having a single one of the massive fire-support mechs would have been like dragging an anchor along with them the entire way back. They had to make camp once, even taking a direct route at their best speed, and the lack of a fourth person was obvious. Iyer helped Arc dig the latrine and took two watches so that both Christina and Arc could get as much sleep as possible. He clearly cared about the people under his command, and Arc thought it was a good quality in a squad leader.

But it would have been a problem if Vijay was put in charge of a larger force. An officer needed to be at their best in order to make the best decisions. And if they'd been out in the field, without the support structure of the academy to bring Khan in? Having a rogue pilot roaming about the area in a stolen mech would have been a disaster. It felt almost arrogant, though, to be critical. After all, Arc had never been in command of anything other than an army of plastic miniatures on a table.

What did he really know, other than what he'd read in books? He stewed over those thoughts the entire time he kept watch, while the other two cadets slept. Worse was that Vijay Iyer had stuck his neck out for Arc on multiple occasions, at this point. It felt downright disloyal to be thinking this way. Finally, when Iceni told him that his watch was up, Arc walked over to where Iyer was sleeping and put a hand on the other man's shoulder.

"I'm awake," Vijay said, and rolled onto one knee.

"I don't think I got more than an hour of sleep. Less." Arc wasn't certain what to say to that.

"I can wait a bit longer," he offered.

"No." Vijay Iyer shook his head and stood up.

"Get some sleep, if you can. And Arc?"

"Sir?"

"You were right," Iyer admitted.

"Khan was a liability, and I almost got you killed by giving him a chance. That's on me, not you. And I won't forget it." Arc simply nodded and climbed into his sleeping bag. He'd had enough of the jungle, and of patrolling, and of killing xenobeasts. All he wanted right then was to get back to the Academy, see Cassie again, and tumble into his own bed.