Chương 83: The Duel on Chel II: Into the Deeps

The Surface of Chel, Vidako System Imperium Stellarum May 18, 2848 The stars wheeled overhead in the light of Vidako's binary suns, and a gentle curve of the world itself was visible just over the gray horizon of the artificial moon. Puffs of gray dust swirled around the enormous feet of Lady Ren when Arc walked the mech out of the hangar airlock onto the surface. Commandant Marlowe has marked The Deeps with a waypoint in our systems, Iceni told him. Distance: approximately forty-five kilometers.

A thirty-six-kilometer radius around the location has been marked as 'off-limits' to all air and ground traffic, with a warning that violators will be fired upon.

"Exactly the range of a short-range missile," Arc muttered, to himself as much as to his AI companion.

"Alright. The next part is you. We've only got a ton of fuel for our thrusters, and Radecki's carrying eight times that. We can't waste any, or we might run out before the duel's finished. I'm going to need you to fire off our thrusters with a burn that will get us there using the absolute least amount of fuel possible." Adjusting thruster nozzles for a forty-five-degree angle, Iceni said. Bring the mech around toward the target, please. And shift that shield in front of the mech.

Holding it off to one side makes a mess of our ballistic profile. Arc pulled the shield mated to his mech's left arm around so that it was in front of his chest, held tight to his laser rifle, pinning the weapon against the chassis. It was roughly rectangular in shape, though the lower edge instead consisted of two angles that met at a sharp point in the middle, all made from two plates of ceramic armor that Natalie Ramírez had sourced from salvage.

In between the two plates, she'd sprayed lightweight composite metal foam, capable of stopping fifty caliber bullets by itself. He shifted Lady Ren on her feet until she was facing the waypoint which marked The Deeps.

"Do you need me to be more exact, or...?" No, I can compensate by angling the nozzles from here, Iceni said. Commencing three second burn in three... two... ignition! Arc felt his body slam back against the seat as he was hit with three and a half gravities all at once. For the entire three seconds of the burn, his body weighed almost two hundred and forty kilograms. It felt like having some sort of large farm animal standing on his chest.

Deep breaths in and then push the air out through your lips like a straw, Arc repeated to himself, just like he'd been told in his first centrifuge training session. Flex the muscles in the legs. He could already feel the skinsuit working, using hydrostatic pressure to compensate for the stress his body was experiencing. When the burn finally cut off, he breathed a sigh of relief.

The mech was rocketing up toward the top of a parabolic curve that took it above the moon's surface; if Iceni had plotted their course correctly, it would drop them nearly on top of The Deeps—though he'd have to feather the thrusters to bring them in for a gentle landing, rather than crash into the rock surface at over three-hundred and seventy kilometers an hour. Time to target, just under ten minutes, Iceni informed him. Fuel reserves at ninety-five percent.

"Thank you," Arc said. With nothing to do, he let the optical sensor feed fill his mind. Intellectually, he knew how fast they were travelling: but high above the surface of Chel, it almost felt as if they were floating. Without wind resistance, the sensation was strangely peaceful. Detecting three satellites locked in synchronous orbits above The Deeps, Iceni spoke up, as they began their descent. Arc flipped to the comm channel he shared with Commandant Marlowe.

"Sir, my sensors are reading satellites above the waypoint."

"Affirmative, Lady Ren," Marlowe answered.

"Those are media satellites equipped to capture images. They're maintaining a distance greater than our thirty-six-klick exclusion zone, so there isn't much we can do about them at the moment. Just ignore them."

"Wonderful," Arc grumbled, once he'd muted his microphone.

"We're already being filmed. Bringing us in for a landing." He managed to bring them down to the surface at just about 91% fuel capacity, using his thrusters to cut velocity very carefully and absorbing the last of the shock of impact by flexing the legs of the mech, just like Lieutenant Estrada had taught him. A cloud of gray dust puffed out around Lady Ren, blocking his optical sensors for a moment. The Deeps looked, from the outside, like a sort of sinkhole.

The surface of Chel had collapsed here, as rocks beneath the ground shifted, and formed a roughly circular depression, interrupted by cracks and crevices. Iceni painted three entrances to the subterranean depths in Arc's sensor feed, each marked ahead of time as large enough to accommodate a twenty-two-meter, fifty-five ton mech. As Radecki was coming in after them, there wasn't much difference for their purposes, and Arc merely walked Lady Ren over to the closest.

"Entering the dueling site," Arc sent over his comm channel, so that both Marlowe and his support team back at the hangar would be able to hear. Then, he stepped off the edge of the rocky crevice and let his mech drop into the darkness below. Activating low-light mode, Iceni stated. Arc's optical sensor feed flicked over into monochromatic shades of gray, picking out the jagged shapes of the rock faces around him in bright white outlines.

"Confirmed. Lady Ren has entered dueling site. Karabela, you are clear to launch." It had taken Arc just under ten minutes to get to The Deeps, but he'd been trying to conserve fuel. There was no reason that Fletcher Radecki couldn't come screaming in at much higher speeds; the base model Kestrel itself could easily pull ten gravities of acceleration, and Jessica had been able to find training data that confirmed he could handle at least seven Gs.

In the other pilot's place, Arc would have come in hard and fast, in order to cut short the time his opponent had to find an advantageous position. He had to assume Radecki would be at least that intelligent. Arc took his mech downslope, toward an exit that he'd chosen in advance. He feathered the thrusters here and there to control his descent, pushing off rock faces with Lady Ren's feet, until he'd followed the descent through an acre and a half of the sloped cavern.

There, he set his back to the crevice which had been labelled on the incomplete survey maps of the caverns, Exley Gap, after an explorer who'd vanished inside, never to return from her explorations.

"Crow's Foot rockets," Arc muttered to himself, toggling to the first type of specialized ammo he'd had his tech crew load into the Lady Ren's short-range missile systems. He set two targeting reticules at the upper slopes of the cavern and launched. The force of the missile systems letting loose pushed back on his mech, but its wide feet scraped along the surface of the rock and held firm.

With muted flashes of light, the rockets broke apart into dozens of mines, each of which in turn fell down through Chel's light gravity to the rock faces below. Arc didn't hold out much hope that many of those mines would inflict significant damage, but he didn't necessarily need them to.

"Prepping chaff and flares," Arc said. He reached down to the flat screen held on a swivel arm in front of his pilot seat and swapped from the Crow's Foot rockets to countermeasures.

"Get ready for jamming." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Ready and waiting, Iceni assured him." Karabela has landed just outside the depths," Commandant Marlowe's voice came over the comm channel." Lady Ren, are you ready?"

"Ready, Commandant."

"Karabela, are you ready?"

"Ready and waiting, sir," Fletcher Radecki said. It was the first time that Arc had actually heard the man's voice in person for months.

"Karabela, you are cleared to enter The Depths. Cadets, you may begin." Arc tried to keep his attention on all three entrances at once. The closest to Fleet Station Chel, in a straight line, was the one that he'd used, so if Radecki was impatient, that would be where he entered the first cavern. But if he was trying to surprise Arc, he'd probably come from one of the other - Contact at north entry! Iceni practically shouted in his mind.

Arc hit both triggers on his control sticks, launching something like ten million aluminum-coated glass fiber dipoles, each less than eight millimeters in length and only one millimeter in diameter, to fill the cavern. At the same time, flares using a fuel-oxidizer mix of magnesium, Teflon, and Viton exploded in balls of bright blue light halfway across the distance between the two mechs, lighting up the darkness.

For her part, Iceni began throwing jammer signals into the cloud of chaff, using a broadcast designed to make the cloud's radar frequency match that of Lady Ren. As soon as everything was launched, Arc raised his laser rifle, snapped off a shot, and then dropped backward into Exley Gap, using the left arm of his mech to hold the shield that Natalie had made for him up in front of the chassis. Several things happened at once.

At the other end of the first cavern, Fletcher Radecki's sensors must have detected Arc, as well, because the moment he flew the gray-painted Karabela through the entrance, he launched everything he had. A flight of eight short-ranged missiles lit off above his mech's shoulders, burning through the space between the two pilots on trails of fire.

Simultaneously, he raised the distinctive arms of an FS-3 Kestrel, ending in two Centauran Optics heavy lasers strong enough to melt warship armor, rather than in articulated hands. The barrels of the integrated lasers lit with bright blue light, stabbing across the intervening space and through the cloud of chaff and flares faster than the missiles could follow. At the same time, the mines Arc had laid exploded.

Rather than depending on pressure plates, like primitive anti-personnel mines, those laid down by his Crow's Foot rockets utilized seismic, acoustic, and infrared sensors to acquire and then track their targets. The cerulean beam of his laser rifle connected the tip of Arc's barrel with the upper left torso of Radecki's mech, splashing off drops of superheated ceramic armor in a puff of vapor.

The entire cave system shook with explosions, and optical sensors became instantly useless as the light of lasers, exploding mines, and missile thrusters shone through clouds of rock-dust, shrapnel, and chaff. One of the Karabela's heavy lasers flashed wide, burning through a rock face above Arc's right shoulder rather than hitting his mech. It might have been the exploding mines that threw Radecki's aim off, but Arc couldn't be certain in the moment.

The other took his ceramic and metal foam shield dead-center, melting armor that flashed into super-heated vapor. Only an instant later, two of the Karabela's twenty-four MIRV short range missiles hit the shield and exploded, shredding the already damaged barrier and sending pieces of it flying in every direction, while Lady Ren's left arm was left holding only a twisted and burnt piece of scrap.

The wire-frame schematic of the mech's armor systems flashed between green and yellow on the indicator for the damaged arm. The other twenty-two missiles either went off course completely, a casualty of Radecki's subpar skill with the missile systems or exploded inside the cloud of chaff that Arc had thrown up.

On his mech's right arm, the highly classified IMT plasma shield generator detected the incoming blast waves and automatically fired off a combination of lasers and microwaves to heat the air around Lady Ren into a bubble of plasma, which blocked the force of the explosions before fading away. Arc grunted as his mech was slammed backward by the force of the heavy laser and missiles which had destroyed his shield.

The rear of his torso hit the jagged rock of the cave, and he had only a moment to hope that none of his vectoring thrusters had been damaged by the impact before he dropped down out of the war-torn cavern into the crevice.

"How bad did we get him?" Arc asked Iceni, as he threw what was left of his shield away and let it tumble down into the darkness. Superficial damage to the armor of both of his mech's legs, its front torso, and arms, the AI replied. Doubtful that he's suffered any substantial loss of capability yet. Up above, the cavern continued to shake and rattle as more of Arc's mines lit off, delaying Radecki's pursuit.

"We might have got the better end of the exchange," Arc decided.

"Damage to one arm and the rear torso armor. That's not bad." We have, however, lost our shield, Iceni pointed out. The next time those heavy lasers come our way, we don't have anything to hide behind.

"We were always going to lose it sooner or later. It did its job," Arc declared, as he came out into Buried Mountain Cavern. The space was named for the enormous rock at the center, shaped vaguely like a sort of rounded pyramid, which divided the area of the large cave, so that Arc had to choose which side of the obstruction he would descend past. The good news was that it also presented cover for him to dodge around, when Radecki followed him.

With a stab of his fingers, Arc swapped to his fire-and-forget missile packs, which jutted up above Lady Ren's shoulders and increased the height of her profile. It would have been nice if he could have Iceni automatically fire them when Radecki's mech poked its head out, while Arc handled the laser rifle, but the imperium's laws prevented artificial intelligences from ever using a weapon independently of a living, biological operator.

Arc crouched the mech down, using the slope of the Buried Mountain itself to protect as much of his mech as he could, his laser rifle extended above the rock face and pointed up at the entrance to the cave. Above, the explosions of the mines stopped, and there was only silence for a long moment. Radecki shouldn't have been able to fit through any other entrance into this cavern from above. Arc had checked and double checked that when he'd planned his route.

And there was no way that he should have been able to take the Kestrel all the way around and below, to come up from underneath—though of that, Arc couldn't be as certain. The lower Deeps were barely mapped, after all. But the man should have come by now, shouldn't he? Arc had just about convinced himself that Radecki had taken some other route, and it was time to move, when the Karabella burst down into the cavern at high speed.

Arc snapped off a shot with his rifle, but despite the fact that he'd been waiting, the flying mech was just too fast when it actually appeared. He triggered his missiles next, and then immediately fired the exploding bolts which would detach the missile pods before using his thrusters to send Lady Ren strafing sideways, aiming to get behind the bulk of the rock formation and use it as a shield.

The rock formation exploded into shards of superheated stone, beneath the impact of half a dozen missiles, at the same time as one of Fletcher Radecki's heavy lasers hit the Lady Ren directly over the cockpit. An instant later, another cluster of MIRV missiles peppered the Buried Mountain and the upper half of Arc's mech with over a dozen explosions. Two of the warheads, at least, must have locked onto Arc's discarded missile pods, because he caught a glimpse of the blasts.

He didn't have the slightest idea what he'd managed to do to the Karabella with his shots, because Arc's body was thrown against the restraints inside the cockpit. He was dimly aware, with the portion of his mind still paying attention to his physical body rather than the mech itself, that there was smoke inside the cockpit now, and the smell of something burning, and that some of the lights had gone out. Then, inexplicably, a second detonation came from behind him, from somewhere in the rock.

"What was that?" Arc shouted. Mines, Iceni said. Can't be anything else. But they were planted in a pair, and for some reason only one went off. Arc fired off his thrusters, sending his mech toward the nearest exit to where he'd positioned himself: a shaft labelled 'Dead Man's Drop' on the survey maps, which led to a barely mapped maze of dead ends and increasingly smaller crevices and caverns.

He spared one glance for the armor readout and saw that the entire upper half of his mech was flickering yellow, save for the center torso. There, the ceramic plating that protected the cockpit was a glowing, vibrant orange. Radecki's aim had been true, and he'd shot to kill. Our rifle is damaged, Iceni told him.

Arc held the weapon up in front of his mech's head out of reflex, and his optical feed showed that the length of the barrel was pitted and cracked by the explosions of the missiles that had been sent toward him; it ended in jagged, torn pieces of metal. With a grimace, he threw the rifle away. It was useless, now. The comm crackled.

"You can still surrender," Fletcher Radecki's voice came through clearly.

"You must know you're beaten. My AI says you've lost your shield, your rifle, and just about all your missiles. And I know I got you right above the cockpit. You're lucky there's anything at all left between you and the vacuum. One girl isn't worth dying, mole-rat."

"Fuck off," Arc shot back.

"If you want to win this, Radecki, you're going to have to chase me." With a gentle touch to his thrusters, Arc sent Lady Ren down into Dead Man's Drop.