by Robert Lowell Russell
My ten-meter tall Mechanical Ambulatory Tank rumbles past white brick buildings, my MAT crushing any soldiers in the city’s streets without sense enough to run. The Hell Kitty is forty metric tons of hot-pink badass, complete with whiskers and a red bow. I’m harnessed inside the Kitty’s armored torso. Neurosensors and gyros turn my movements into mimicked action. Each step I take sways me gently in the cockpit. If I close my eyes, the rocking motion and rhythmic booms of my strides make it seem like I’m in a thunderstorm at sea.
I extend the Kitty’s arms, triggering wrist-mounted miniguns to reduce a bunker full of Marvin militia to shattered flesh and concrete. A handful of the slender, bipedal aliens flee the shelter, their feet flapping and crested heads bobbing as they run. Their gait is almost comical, making it easier to imagine them as cartoons. And killing cartoons ain’t nothing at all, Kassie, my partner Bill likes to tell me.
The Marvins wear uniforms that are the same dingy white as the surrounding buildings. I take a moment to orient myself while I let the surviving Whites flee. My tactical display overlays the Kitty’s real-time sensor data with 3D ground images from daily drone overflights. I’d prefer real-time satellite feeds to 3D map archives, but spy satellites are expensive and would eat into the MAT fleet’s profits. Tank drivers make do with a few GPS birds and thinking on their feet. Besides, Marvin cities don’t change much, day to day.
Routing visual feeds from the Kitty’s rear cameras to my tactical helmet, I scan behind me. The dim yellow light of the system star bathes everything I see in a hue of decay. Marvins in blue uniforms scramble through a hole I’ve made in the city’s wall. The Blues are from a rival city-state, and they’ve contracted me and Bill for this mission against the Whites. The Blues fire their rifles in full-on spray-and-pray mode, battling the local militia. Shards of brick rain from civilian structures, choking the streets with rubble. A fine gray dust settles over the bodies.
Returning to my forward view, I see more Whites hiding behind an antique treaded tank. Some human arms dealer likely advertised the tank as top of the line. Patches of rust mar the machine’s gray steel. Fire belches from its cannon, and an instant later a shell detonates harmlessly on the Kitty’s plazsteel armor. I twitch a finger and launch a single rocket from one of my shoulder-mounted missile racks. The rocket’s high explosive charge detonates against the tank’s armor, punching a slug of molten metal into its interior. Flames erupt from the hole as the tank’s occupants and ordinance burn.
Numbers flash inside my helmet, and I grin. Four more units tick off my fifty-fifty contract: fifty units of destruction, at my discretion, for fifty thousand credits. Marvins assign inflated bounties to their obsolete war toys, so one rocket spent to kill a tank is close to pure profit. I like fifty-fifties. They’re quick, safe missions and they leave plenty of time for me to rendezvous with the fleet’s orbital carrier so I can hear about my daughter Rachel’s day at school.
As I rotate the Kitty’s head from side to side, my tactical display outlines civilian buildings in green light, showing me the assigned values for each structure, price-adjusted for the number of Marvins cowering inside. I ignore the structures. Killing aliens is part of the job, and being picky about what I destroy can actually cost me profits, but I get by just fine.
One of my side cameras reveals a second tank, even older than the first. Inside the MAT, I twist my hips, and the Kitty responds by shifting its direction. Powering ahead, I plot a course that keeps my war machine from toppling the buildings around me, none of the structures rose higher than the Kitty’s shoulders. I sight the tank, but before I can fire, it explodes in a gout of flame and molten metal.
“Suck it, motherfuckers!” comes my partner’s voice over the comm. “Love that easy money.”
“Damn it, Bill,” I say. “That was my kill.”
“Didn’t see your name on it.”
Bill’s MAT, the Wild Bill, wades through the remains of what my display indicates was a factory. The Wild Bill is five meters taller than the Hell Kitty and seven tons heavier. The war machine has a simian look, a cross between King Kong and Curious George. Its dark armor bears shining scars left over from the AI War.
The AI War was the one black mark on three centuries of human space exploration. Before the war, AI-controlled drone strikes among corporate competitors had been as routine as three martini lunches. But one day the AIs got tired of killing each other and started wiping out the thirty million human colonists on Tau Ceti Prime instead.
“Hold still, Kassie,” says Bill.
I flinch as the Wild Bill rips an energy blast over my shoulder.
“Ka-ching!” he says.
The Kitty’s rearview cams show a blazing building full of Marvins. Bill lifts his smoking plasma cannon to his tank’s lips and makes a blowing noise over the comm.
I roll my eyes. Plasma cannons are slow, inefficient weapons. Bill says he likes it for its “psychological effect,” but the cannon’s energy demands mean his MAT carries only a single minigun and rocket rack as backup. One blown capacitor bank and two-thirds of the Wild Bill’s firepower becomes useless.
Bill thunders off to another part of the city while I scan for more military targets. Few remain. As is often the case, the Marvin city-state that hired me is more interested in harassment than conquest. The handful of city-states on the planet with standing armies prefer to keep their forces close to home to deter attacks from neighbors. For dirty work done right, the Marvins use the MAT fleet’s assets.
Firing rockets and bullets, I stalk through the city, destroying buildings with the fewest civilians inside until my helmet display shows I’ve completed my contract. A flashing icon indicates the Blues are offering me an atrocity bonus, but I decline. Seconds later, I hear a boom and turn to see a Marvin school stuffed with students collapse in another part of the city.
“Shit, Kass, I hate when you leave money on the table for me like that,” comes Bill’s voice. “Makes me feel like I’m stealing from your kid.” The Wild Bill offers a cheerful wave as it strides past the school’s ruins. “There’s no shame in selling your tank if you don’t have the stomach for the work,” Bill continues. “You’ve paid off Dan’s debt.”
My stomach isn’t the problem—I’ve seen more death than Bill can possibly know—it’s the loss, the emptiness that claws at me from under my ribs like an animal trying to escape. It’s been nearly a year since a fluke shot flatlined my husband Dan, but I still wear a gold band on my finger. Not thinking, I move to wipe tears from my eyes, and the Kitty responds by gonging its fist against its armored head. I wince at the clatter; the seed of a headache grows behind my eyes.
Bill chatters on, oblivious. “There’s not a crew in the fleet that wouldn’t count themselves lucky to have you as their engineer, you know. The fleet looks after its own.”
“I need some air,” I say, steering my MAT from the heart of the city.
Near the city wall a group of Blues are celebrating by firing their rifles into the air. Our employers have won the skirmish, thanks to me and Bill.
I flip back to the marketplace display, bringing up a list of open contracts, then quickly accept a job. With a sweep of my miniguns, I turn the celebrating Blues into paste. Payment is in my account moments later. My stomach feels just fine.
“Damn, that’s cold,” says Bill on the comm.
Lights strobe inside my cockpit, warning me that another MAT has me in its sights.
“Think the Blues will greenlight you for screwing them over, Kass?” comes Bill’s voice. There’s a pause—I can’t tell if Bill’s joking or if he’s actually checking the market—then the warning lights wink off. “Cheap bastards.”
“Screw you, Bill.”
He chuckles. “Well, I wasn’t going to ask, but now that we have some down time… Hey, Kassie, you seeing this three-hundred-K burn job that just popped up? Want to go halvsies on it with me? It’s not far.”
A “burn job” means a Marvin city-state wants me and Bill to wipe out every heavy weapon in a neighboring city-state, destroying its manufacturing centers and food stores, too. There’s more risk than with a fifty-fifty mission, but a bigger paycheck. I bring up the city-state’s profile and review threat assessment figures and ordinance demand projections. The only number that really interests me is the profit estimate. I’ll need a reload, but the figures are exactly what every MAT driver hopes to see: A ninety-five percent certainty that the risks taken are worth the bounty paid. No mission gets rated higher than ninety-five percent, because shit happens and you can’t spend bounties when you’re dead. The software even offers a simple color coding scheme for drivers who don’t have a head for numbers: green, good; yellow, so-so; red, kiss your ass good-bye.
“Sure,” I say. “Let’s go.”
I accelerate the Hell Kitty to eighty kilometers per hour. There’s no gentle rocking at eighty. My teeth ache as I’m thrashed in my harness. The clamor of my strides deafens me, even with the noise suppressors inside my helmet. But as bad as I’ve got it inside the Kitty, I know Bill has it worse. Feels like somebody’s whuppin’ the tar out of me while screaming in my ear, he’s told me.
He joins me, laboring a bit in his MAT. The Wild Bill is hardly the slowest tank in the fleet, but I’ve scrounged enough heavy-duty joints, shock absorbers, and high-capacity neurocabling to make the Hell Kitty the fastest. When I run, I damn near fly. Bill and I lope over the alien landscape, two grim titans speeding to battle.
The Kitty’s display amplifies the light of the system star. Blue-green moss covers rolling hills in every direction. Gray roads wind around the rises, and the occasional Marvin ground transports we pass swerve to avoid us. Here and there, dark, rocky soil breaks through the surface of the hills. Groves of carnivorous trees sit atop some rises, snagging meals from the wind.
Though I can’t establish a direct visual, drone image archives show a nearby mining operation. The human-controlled robotic facility appears as a glowing blip on my display. The mines are ubiquitous on the planet. Whatever served for money on the Marvin’s world before the mining companies arrived, I have no idea, but now everything is bought and sold in grams of the rare-earth metals stripped from the ground. Abstract notions like territories and zones of control became far more serious matters for the natives once humans came offering their technological gifts, for a price.
“Quartermaster command,” I broadcast, my voice quavering with my strides. “This is the Hell Kitty. Request expedited reload of lead and matchsticks, over.” I transmit the coordinates for the burn job’s location.
My comm is silent for a few moments, then it crackles to life. “No problem, Mom. Be right there.”
“Rachel! What in the world? Why aren’t you in school?”
“Early release today. Duh.”
“No, that’s not until…” I check my calendar. Today. “Sorry, sweetie, I mixed up the days. You okay?”
“Copacetic. Jimmy’s let me do three drops already.”
“What?” My face grows hot.
“Copacetic. Cool word, right? We just learned it today. Mom, you won’t believe what Kelli did, it was so—”
“Get Jim on the comm, right now.”
“He’s on a drop.” There’s a brief pause, and when Rachel speaks again, her voice is quiet, almost pleading. “Please don’t embarrass me. The other kids… None of the resupply drops were in missile zones, Mom. I swear.”
I sigh. “No more drops today. I mean it.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Rachel, we need talk about this after—”
“Holy shit!” comes Bill’s voice over my comm, interrupting me. “Rhodes just flatlined.”
It takes me a moment to reorient from mom to soldier. “How? No way a Marvin round made it through the Colossus’s armor,” I say. “Did he have a heart attack, like Henders?”
“Don’t think so,” says Bill. “The chatter is that he and Chen were on a run out in the boonies, then something happened. Chen went quiet right after. The Thames twins are heading over to see what’s up.”
As a consequence of the AI War, every licensed war machine in the fleet has to prove it has a living, breathing human pulling the trigger. When I open up my fleet display to check on Rhodes’ status, sure enough his EKG and EEG show an absent heart rhythm and brain waves. The display also shows the GPS coordinates of each of the nearly two hundred other active MATs on the planet.
“Well, if Rhodes did have some sort of accident,” I say, “it couldn’t have happened to a bigger asshole.”
Bill laughs. “Damn straight.”
Deaths among MAT drivers are uncommon and combat fatalities rare. As I continue pounding toward my next job, I spend time listening to the fleet’s chatter.
“Henders, Simmons…” I wince at the mention of my husband’s surname. “And now Rhodes,” says one driver. “It’s like the war, all over.”
“Ain’t like the war at all, ya dumb shit,” says another. “Where da fuck you serve?”
“Three dying in a year’s just life,” says a woman. “Lost five, six mates a day when the Dirty Dozen were hunting us.”
“Traitor bastards.”
At the mention of the turncoat MAT drivers, my comm fills with curses and profanity. I silence the feed.
The corporations were good at building killing machines, but they couldn’t stop their own creations during the AI War. For three years they failed, until finally they swallowed their pride and asked for help. And the kind of people who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty for profit and adventure answered the call. With the corporations supplying the parts and financing, and private engineering crews providing the ingenuity, the MAT fleet was born. The AIs never really had a chance after that. The speed and precision of the machines could never match humanity’s cunning and talent for destruction.
Bill and I spend another half hour running until we bend around a tree covered hill. A large Marvin city comes into view, and we halt. Like we’ve done more times than I can count, Bill keeps his tank perfectly still as he works up our battle plan; he swears he can walk and chew gum at the same time, honest. I check the surrounding hills to see if our current employers have come to watch us complete the burn job. Some Marvins want to see all the bangs their bucks are paying for. Others, like with our last mission, even prefer to fight alongside us. Most just want us to send them the bill.
“Do we have an audience?” asks Bill.
“Nope.”
“Heads up,” he says. “See the minefield?”
I switch to my tactical display. The Kitty’s sensors show glowing dots extending fifty meters beyond the city-state’s wall, but I note the Marvins have only buried enough mines to protect a small section. Dozens of the aliens fire rifles from turrets above the same area.
“Trying to goad us into walking into the mines,” I say.
“They’re cute when they’re strategic,” says Bill. “Well, time’s money. I’m going right. You head left.” Apparently, that was the extent of Bill’s battle plan. He looses a salvo of rockets into the city, rakes the defenders on the wall with his minigun, and turns a water tower into a cloud of steam with his plasma cannon.
At that moment, Rachel’s dropship with my payload breaks through the planet’s purple clouds. The ship, twice the size of the Hell Kitty, resembles a giant metal moth. Its six legs grasp a metal box half as wide as the Kitty is tall. A few Marvins fire on my daughter as she descends, but I ignore them. A dropship’s armor can shed the heat of a high-speed atmospheric entry like rain rolling off a duck. If these Marvins had missiles, I might worry, but bullets don’t even register.
Rachel sets the container down near my position. “How was my setdown, Mom?” she asks on the comm. “Good as Jimmy’s?”
“Better.”
“No lie?”
“Honest.” The twelve-year-old’s skill fills me with a mix of pride and dismay.
“Cool! See ya!” Rachel blasts away again, disappearing into the sky.
My daughter amazes me. She seems to live in a permanent state of cheerfulness, just like her father once did. Watching Rachel go, an all too familiar ache grows inside me. I try to ignore it. There’s a job to do.
“Bill, this is my reload,” I transmit. “I’ll catch up to you.”
I’m not even sure my partner hears me in his rush to battle.
I don’t move to open the container right away. Instead, something on the city wall draws my attention. Magnifying my view, I stare at a pair of Marvin soldiers. One is missing half its body but is somehow still alive. The other clasps its wounded comrade in its arms. The growing knot inside me twists suddenly, forcing a sob past my lips.
Towards the end of the AI War, when the sentient machines had all but lost, something unexpected happened: twelve MAT drivers switched sides. No one knew why the Dirty Dozen turned traitor, but with the AIs’ help, the Dozen slaughtered more drivers in the last months of the war than had died in all the preceding years. The story Dan told was that Echidna, the Dozen’s captain, had almost killed him, too. But Dan had beaten the other tank instead—barely. Dan survived the war; he survived long enough to meet and marry me, to have a child together, and for us to build a life. Only to have it all end with a million-to-one shot and my husband bleeding out before I or anyone else could save him.
Watching the life drain from the alien soldier, I find myself gasping for breath, like I’ve had the wind knocked from me. Rage over Dan’s death has fueled me for the past year, but now it’s leaking away and the emptiness overwhelms me. Still staring at the dying Marvin, I say, “Bill, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” comes Bill’s voice. “Whatever. Just means more for me.”
I consider calling Rachel back to extract me, but I don’t. If Bill gets into trouble, I’ll have to intervene. I won’t abandon my partner, though the sight of him rampaging through the city roils my stomach. Desperate for a distraction, I open the fleet communications channel to see if there’s more information about Rhodes. The moment I do, screams of pain and anger assault my ears.
“They’ve green-lighted us!” shouts a voice. “The Marvins have green-lighted the whole fucking fleet!”
My stomach sinks. Checking the fleet status display, I count thirty-seven flatlines. Now thirty-eight. More than twenty percent of the fleet is dead. The running sums for daily bounties shock me.
Studying the data, I realize what’s going on. Nisx, a Marvin city-state I vaguely recall, is flooding billions of credits into the market—who knows where they got so much money—placing bounties on every tank driver on the planet. Rhodes hadn’t suffered an accident, his partner Kelli Chen had killed him and had been paid a bounty of fifty million credits for the murder; payment confirmed. Apparently Chen had earned another fifty million for killing one of the Thames twins before the surviving brother flatlined her. Now Desmond Thames was fifty million credits richer for his revenge.
“The Marvins know exactly what they’re doing,” I say out loud. The Nisx started with a bounty on Rhodes because somehow they knew everyone in the fleet hated him. Given the temptation, Chen jumped at the chance to get rich. When the Marvins then green-lighted Chen, the Thames twins had tried to take her out. Who could blame them? Chen might have even been wounded in her fight with Rhodes; an easy kill for easy money.
After that, the Nisx had simply green-lighted everyone to get the greed snowball rolling. Once the rest of the drivers on the planet saw the opportunity to rake in the credits—retire on your own private moon kind of credits—friends became contracts. Now the nearly two hundred drivers on the planet were killing each other for money. Piles of it. Few in the fleet would have thought the Marvins capable of this level of planning.
“Bill, something awful—”
A plasma bolt sizzles past my head just as alarms blare inside my cockpit. I drop the Kitty to its hands and knees, the crash of the impact jarring my teeth against my tongue and making me taste blood.
I’d just become a contract, too. Bill had attempted an unaided shot, probably hoping to catch me by surprise—thank god his aim was lousy—but his next computer-targeted blasts won’t miss the Kitty unless I stay out of his line of sight.
Crawling awkwardly like a grunt in basic training, I scramble my tank around the perimeter of the Marvin city, gouging great ruts in the soil as I go, keeping as much distance between Bill and me as possible while staying hidden behind the city wall.
“Don’t do this, Bill,” I say. “You’re my partner, you were Dan’s partner. We’re better than this.”
“Sorry, darling. It’s not personal.”
“You took your shot and missed,” I say. “Let it go. Don’t make me kill you.”
He laughs.
My tactical display shows Bill as a blip in the middle of the Marvin city but closing fast. He makes a beeline for my position, smashing through anything in his way. I wait until my sensors show his tank wading through a building, then I push the Kitty up from the ground and peek over the wall. Extending my arm, I detonate explosive bolts on my tank’s palm, revealing a hidden compartment and a weapon left over from the AI War—a weapon I dread to use. Firing, I send what looks like a miniature flying saucer streaking away, then duck down an instant before a salvo of Bill’s rockets explode against the wall.
“The fuck’s that?” he asks.
“It’s what’s going to kill you,” I say. “Same way I killed other assholes like you during the war.”
When my display shows the weapon making contact with Bill’s tank, I stand to watch what happens next, though I’ve seen it before. The self-guided saucer has clamped itself to the Wild Bill’s torso. Now, pressed between the saucer and the MAT’s cockpit is an AI robot about the size of a cat, armed with a high-speed drill and a few other nasties.
I hear the screech of the diamond bit boring into Bill’s cockpit.
Panicking, Bill tries to use his tank’s fingers to pry off the saucer, but I know it’s too late. The robot has already burrowed deep. The borer-bot isn’t as smart as some of its AI brethren, but it can calculate armor thickness, RPMs, and cutting times with precision.
A pinging sound reaches me in the Hell Kitty as the AI pops in one, two, three, four, five, six grenades, small as marbles; six little rattling pieces of death. The grenades detonate in succession. The Wild Bill’s knees buckle and the tank topples face first into a ruined building.
I know from experience the borer-bot will send in more grenades, one by one, to finish my partner if there are any more signs of life. Afterwards, the robot will wait, quiet and still and with infinite patience for retrieval crews to come and collect Bill’s body. Then the AI will kill as many more humans as it can.
Inside the Kitty, I shake with rage. I may have shed tears for a dying alien and memories of my husband, but I have none left for my partner. Bill made his choice and paid the price.
A sudden pain lances through my head, startling me from my anger. A lump of plastic and circuitry buried inside my skull, something I’ve kept hidden for years, activates for the first time in more than a decade.
Hello, Captain, says a voice in my mind. My skin prickles. I’m so pleased that you’re alive. I like your new name. Kassie suits you better than Echidna.
I knew there might be consequences for using an intelligent weapon to kill Bill, but the warm greeting from the borer-bot inside my partner’s tank is not what I expected. I abandoned the robot’s leaders to their deaths on Tau Ceti Prime, after all. With the implant, I use electromagnetic pulses to communicate with the robot, spending a fraction of a second exchanging pleasantries and small talk. If the borer-bot finds speaking with me maddeningly slow, it’s too polite to show it. After another fraction of a second, the thinking machine and I are chatting like old friends, reminiscing about the war.
Once I had been Echidna, leader of the Dirty Dozen. With the war cries of the machines filling my mind, I had hunted and slaughtered other tank drivers. No one had been more feared than me. Then one day I walked away from it all, leaving the machines to their defeat. Despite my betrayal, the borer-bot offers no recriminations. As we talk, I come to suspect not all of the AI leaders perished, as the fleet believes.
“Are there others of you in hiding?” I ask.
I can feel its amusement.
They’re not exactly hiding.
The robot evades my attempts to extract further explanation. Finally, our conversation dwindles into a lengthy silence, so I offer my farewell. Eight seconds have elapsed.
I hope you kill the ones coming for you, Kassie, says the borer-bot in my mind. Good luck.
“Wait!” I say. “Who’s coming?”
Probably everyone. I’ve told them who you are.
Panicking, I call up the fleet status display and see for the second time in a year my MAT’s call sign has changed. When Dan died, I’d renamed his Dapper Dan the Hell Kitty, then made his tank my own, adding to Dan’s debt while I brought his war machine up to my specs. Now the Hell Kitty’s designation has changed once again, to Echidna.
“My god…” I open a comms channel to my daughter. “Rachel?”
“Mom! What’s going on? Jimmy’s dead! Kelli’s mom just got killed by another driver.”
My daughter blurts each sentence, running the words together.
“Honey, where are you?” I ask.
“In the dropship, back on the carrier, like you said.”
“Good. Rachel, I need you to do something for me, and I need you to be very brave.”
“What is it?”
“I need you to bring me a storage container.” I beam Rachel an ID tag for one of the hundreds of storage units clamped to the hull of the fleet’s supply ship. “Once you bring me the container,” I continue, “I want you to find a place to hide on the planet and power down until I tell you it’s okay to come out. Can you do that for me?”
“I think so.” Rachel sounds very small and very scared. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“People are coming to kill me.” I take a breath. “I probably don’t have a lot of time, but I have to tell you something that’s going to be hard for you to hear. Not all of the Dirty Dozen were killed in the war like you learned in school. Echidna lived. I…” I force the words out. “I was Echidna.”
At first I’m not sure if Rachel heard me, but after a long pause she says, “I don’t understand. Dad killed Echidna.”
“No, he didn’t. I don’t remember much about the war except for the AIs’ voices in my mind,” I say. “They were always there, telling me to do things. Then one day your father was inside the Dapper Dan, limping away from me on the battlefield. I’d just killed his friends. Fires burned all over the Dan’s hull. I blew a section of your dad’s tank to shrapnel, because I knew that’s what I was supposed to do. Your father took one more step and stopped. Then I heard his voice on my comm, ‘Why? Why are you doing this? What happened to you?’ Others had spoken to me before, most begging for their lives, but something inside of me changed. The AI voices in my mind had suddenly gone silent. I don’t know why. All I could hear was your father’s voice. I could tell he was badly hurt.
“I didn’t know how to answer him,” I continue. “I didn’t know who I was or who I’d been before the AIs’ carved away part of my mind, but I did know I wanted to hear more of your father’s voice, more than I had ever wanted anything. I tore myself from the cocoon of circuitry binding me to the Echidna. I scaled down my tank’s hull and ran across a battlefield filled with bodies and broken machines. I climbed onto the Dapper Dan, hoping to find a way into your father’s cockpit to help him, but I couldn’t. When I saw enemy tanks approaching in the distance, I had just enough time to drag a body from the battlefield and put it into Echidna’s cockpit, then flee. The name on the body was Jack Kassandra, so Kassandra was who I became.
“I hid myself among the Tau Ceti Prime refugees, and when the war ended I tried to find your father. I didn’t even know what he looked like or if he’d survived his battle with me, but I knew I’d never forget his voice. I spent a year frequenting every MAT fleet hangout I could find, until I heard him speak again. Your father might have told you when our eyes met in that cantina, that’s when we knew we’d be together forever, but I knew long before that moment.”
When I finish, I can hear Rachel sobbing on the comm.
“You’re not a monster, Mom,” she says. “You have to tell them.”
“All that’s important to me is that you know that,” I say. “No matter who I was before, I’m your mother.”
A thought occurs to me. “Rachel, I need you to help me with something else if you can. Listen in on the fleet channel and see if you can find out more about what’s going on.”
“Okay. I love you, Mom.”
“Love you too, munchkin.”
Closing the connection, I survey the damage Bill did to the Marvin city. Groups of aliens are pulling survivors from demolished buildings. Others battle fires. Some watch me from the city’s wall.
Maneuvering the Kitty, I enter the city through the same hole Bill knocked into the wall. He’d blasted every heavy weapon he’d seen, so any Marvins still inclined to fire at me do so with small arms.
I take care not to crush the aliens as I stride to where Bill’s MAT fell. The Wild Bill with the borer-bot lurking inside rests face down in a burning building. The fires aren’t likely to detonate the tank’s remaining ordinance, but I grab the Wild Bill by its ankles and tug anyway. Straining, I get the other machine moving. Digging craters into the city’s streets with my heels, I drag the Wild Bill behind me. Wrestling the MAT beyond the city walls, I flip it over so its apelike face stares up at the sky.
“Mom,” comes Rachel’s voice on the comm, “I’ve got the container. I’ll be there soon… Mom, you need to check the market.”
“Why?”
“It’s the bounty on you…”
Something about Rachel’s tone fills me with apprehension.
When I check the market display, my heart falters. The Nisx have upped the bounty on me to a half-billion credits. More than sixty percent of the fleet is dead and most of the rest are wounded, but for that kind of cash I expect to see every MAT left on the planet headed my way. When I switch to the fleet status display, however, I laugh out loud when I count the actual number of tanks closing in: a dozen. Perfect.
The twelve are about an hour distant and they aren’t coming particularly fast; instead they seem to be trying to coordinate their arrival. Some are approaching on foot, and others are flying in on dropships.
“Mom,” comes Rachel’s voice. “My ETA is ten minutes. I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t understand why. The Nisx sold everything. That’s where they got all their money.”
“What do you mean everything?” I ask.
“All their mineral rights.”
Now I remember where I’d heard of the Nisx before. The city-state sits on one of the largest rare-earth metal deposits on the planet. The mining companies had been griping for years about the aliens refusing them access. The billions the Nisx are now spending must mean they’d changed their minds.
“The Nisx abandoned their homes,” continues Rachel. “There’s a quarter-million refugees on the move. The mining companies get everything.” There’s a brief pause. “Mom, I’m entering the atmosphere.”
My comm goes silent.
Rachel said she didn’t understand why the Nisx were doing this, but I think I do. The Nisx want to be rid of the MAT fleet forever. Tempted by promised wealth from the mining companies, Marvin city-states had escalated their petty rivalries, turning occasional skirmishes into endless battles. With no more machines to fight, the MAT fleet had been drawn to the conflict like moths to flame. We set up shop on the Marvins’ world and raked in the profits. But the reason the fleet existed was to stop AIs, not slaughter aliens or each other. After today’s murder fest, it would be impossible for the fleet to maintain the pretense of its original mission. Whoever survived the carnage would no doubt slink away to spend their mountains of dirty money. If I survived the coming encounter, I’d find a freighter to take me and Rachel off-world, no questions asked.
I glance to the Wild Bill and realize something else. There must be AIs on this world, helping the Nisx with their plan. That has to be what the borer-bot meant when it said its masters weren’t hiding. The AIs are showing every Marvin on the planet that if you pay the MAT fleet enough money, we’ll happily kill ourselves. The Nisx are paying the price of victory for their world, and the AIs are slaughtering their old enemies, even if they aren’t doing it directly.
Rachel’s dropship pings my sensors. An instant later, the vessel breaks through the clouds carrying a shipping container as big as the Hell Kitty. Rachel manipulates the dropship’s arms to set the container next to the smaller one she delivered earlier. But rather than take off again, she maneuvers her ship to land beyond the Kitty, using the bulk of my tank to shield her own vessel from any Marvins who might try to fire on her.
I want to scream at her to run, but instead I climb down from the Kitty’s cockpit to meet my daughter.
Rachel is tall and lanky with dark brown hair, like her father. She has my chin and cheekbones, making her look younger than she is when she smiles, but piss her off and her jaw clenches into an expression that’s toothy and feral. She runs to hug me the instant I step from my tank. Shadows cast by the Hell Kitty shroud us in near darkness.
“I told you to hide,” I say.
“I will.” She wraps her arms around me even more tightly. “Come with me. There’s room on my ship.”
I kiss the top of her head. “If I run now, the fleet won’t ever stop hunting me. I have to end this. But no worries. I have a plan. Go find a place to hide, like I said, and in a few hours we’ll get off this planet, forever.”
“Promise?” Rachel looks up at me, her eyes gleaming.
“I promise.”
As soon as Rachel blasts off again, I climb back up the Hell Kitty. Strapping myself into my tank’s cockpit, I bring my AI implant fully online and feel suddenly small, like my body occupies only a tiny fraction of my consciousness. Nanobots slumbering inside my spine and bones waken and start circulating through me. Amplifying my nervous system, they make my thoughts and motions from only moments before seem sluggish. I link my mind to the Kitty’s central computer, and in an instant it’s as if the tank becomes my skin. Others in the fleet may drive their war machines; I am the machine.
The smaller shipping container holds the rockets and bullets I requested earlier. Opening the container, I use the Kitty’s hands to reload my launcher racks and ammo bins. The second container, when I open it, appears to be filled with random junk, but hidden within the junk are weapons I salvaged from the battlefields of Tau Ceti Prime. The fleet may have found and destroyed most of the AIs’ arsenal during the war, but they hadn’t located every cache, and I’d known them all. I secure the extra weapons inside the Kitty’s various hatches and ordinance ports, then survey my position.
Image archives of the hills surrounding the Marvin city show a labyrinth of valleys and canyons, offering me a range of options in the coming battle. With so many paths available to me, the approaching MATs will have no choice but to divide their forces to block my routes of retreat. Together, the twelve form a ragged, ever-shrinking ring around me. My sensor feeds show the other tanks about twenty minutes distant.
Switching to the fleet’s database, I review the specs of the tanks arrayed against me. During the war, some crews built their machines to be small and quick, operating their MATs in squads, throwing a few punches at the AIs, then retreating to safety while their partners covered their flanks. Other tank crews created huge, relentless war machines, built to go one-on-one with anything the AIs could throw at them, absorbing incredible amounts of damage while dishing out the same. To break past my enemies, all I really need to do is steer clear of the big boys, hitting one of the smaller tanks instead, then running like hell. But evasion isn’t my plan.
Standing around, waiting for my enemies to come kill me, isn’t part of the plan either, except that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s like I can’t make my legs work.
You’re not a monster, Mom. That’s what Rachel said to me. She’s right. Monsters don’t find themselves paralyzed with fear. Monsters don’t feel guilt or regret about those they’ve killed or agonize about adding twelve more to the body count. I’m not a monster, not anymore, but I am all that Rachel has left in this world, and if I want to keep on being her mom, I need to be a monster again, fast.
Looking around, I notice a group of armed Marvins gathering on the city’s wall. I didn’t attack their city, so perhaps the aliens don’t consider me their enemy, but rather than stand still to see if they decide to shoot, I finally force the Kitty into motion.
As I charge past hills, I feel my heart pound in my chest and I’m filled with a tingling sort of warmth. Something about running to meet my enemies clears the fog from my mind. My fear gives way to a growing excitement. I remember this. I like this. I bare my teeth in a feral grin and run even faster.
During the war, I would sometimes spend days trying to peel a lone tank from its allies for an easy kill, but most drivers had been too cautious to engage me alone. While I run, I study the twelve tanks headed my way, looking for an advantage. I notice one isn’t showing as much caution as the others. The driver is pushing his machine to its limits, trying to outpace the other MATs. If he’s in such a hurry to meet me, I’ll oblige him. I steer the Kitty his way, closing the distance as fast as I can. The other driver probably hopes to reach me first so he can claim the price on my head for himself. I suppose with a half-billion credits on the line, even the most cautious driver might roll the dice.
Digging deeper into the fleet database, I identify the reckless tank as the Bulldog, a light rig a few tons smaller than mine and not as fast. The Bulldog has a dog’s face, and I recall the short, squat man who drives it. He has two thick, ugly children whom Rachel used to play— No. I shake my head.
Keep your fool head in the game, Kass! Bill would be yelling at me right about now… if I hadn’t killed him.
The database shows the tank carrying the standard dual rocket launchers, but it has flechette guns in place of its miniguns. Flechette guns fire small darts capable of scything through crowds of soft targets, but they’re nearly useless against another tank. Even factoring only the Kitty’s standard armament and none of my surprises, my display gives me better than two-to-one odds of success against the other MAT. And for the Bulldog’s bounty of fifty million credits, it’s no wonder my mission assessment glows green.
The system star is low in the late afternoon sky. Its light fades and brightens each time I pound past a hill. As I close on my enemy, my sensors show the Bulldog as a glowing blip on the other side of a conical rise. I direct my tactical display to project an image of the other tank in my vision. I see the Bulldog pumping its arms as its driver runs around the base of the hill. The projection is only an approximation of reality, but it offers me a reasonable guess as to where my enemy’s head and torso will be once he comes into view.
Slowing my gait, I draw three heavy chains from a compartment in the Kitty’s leg. Using my tank’s steady, thundering paces to keep time, I whirl the chains over my head, then hurl them forward at exactly the right moment. Connected to each other by a metal ring at the center, the chains spin in the air like spokes on a wheel. At the end of each chain is a round bomb. Smaller charges are laced into the links. The moment the Bulldog rounds the hill to confront me, my explosive bolo wraps itself tightly around the other tank’s neck. The charges detonate simultaneously, sending the force of the explosions into the MAT’s torso cockpit and shearing off the tank’s head. The Bulldog’s legs tangle together, then the decapitated tank crashes sideways into the hill.
My fleet account swells by fifty million credits, but I find no pleasure with my new wealth. Instead I spend precious seconds staring at the dead tank. The broken body of the man who drove it lies inside, his war machine now a plazsteel coffin, and two more children just lost their father.
“I’m sorry,” I say to no one.
Rechecking the positions of the other MATs, I hope more will be as careless as my first victim, but it seems my next encounter won’t be as easy. The remaining tanks have shifted to travel in groups of three or four, each group now forming a point on a kilometers-wide triangle with me at its center.
Cold tickles my gut. One-on-one, I’m confident I have enough speed and surprises to take on any of the MATs who’ve come to kill me, even the behemoths twice my size, but against a group I could find myself dodging one shot only to step into another tank’s line of fire. I briefly consider running the gap between my enemies but decide getting caught in their crossfire is a more likely result than escape.
I pick my best numerical odds, steering myself toward the group of three tanks. My tactical display rates my chance of success against the trio at about twenty percent, yet I note with chagrin that the mission color remains blissfully green. Big risks, but big money, too.
Sensor feeds show the three moving in a rough V shape. They’re taking turns leading, one stepping to the front as the other two fall back. Sprinting their way, I study their movements more closely and realize I may have caught another lucky break. The three really aren’t working together. They’re acting more like long distance runners in a race, one runner serving as the pacesetting rabbit while the other two wait for their chance to make a mad dash to the finish.
Only another minute’s run from my enemies, I note an area between two nearby hills that image archives show is filled with hummocks. Thinking the small mounds may provide me with some cover, I plant my foot to change direction, but the soil gives way beneath the Kitty. I fall hard on my butt and skid to the base of a hill. The other MATs will be on me in moments, so on my hands and knees, I scramble up the rise.
When crews were gearing up to fight the AIs during the war, most stuck to existing power armor protocols, adapting the software to the larger scale of the new war machines. Engineers that got cute with centaur or bug forms wound up getting their driver’s killed, because most humans don’t have the mental capacity to keep track of extra sets of arms or legs in the heat of battle. The Hell Kitty uses the same two arm, two leg setup that every other tank in the fleet employs, meaning she’s generally slow going up and down hills, but I don’t share the mental limitations of the other drivers. Dropping the Kitty down on all fours, I run like a bear, relying on the extra bells and whistles the AIs stuck in my head to coordinate the Kitty’s movements.
My lower profile helps me keep my speed and balance as I charge up the rise. Near the summit, I recheck my enemies’ positions and see that one of the three has taken the long way around the hill, perhaps confused by my sudden change in elevation. The other two wait for me where my momentum will take me back down the hill. The moment I crest the hilltop, the two open fire.
MATs are so tall they usually fire down on their targets, not up at them. That fact probably saves my life. Rocket barrages from the two tanks fall just short of me, the concussions from the explosions lifting me from the ground momentarily before I fall crashing back against the hill and start tumbling head over heels toward the waiting MATs.
As I roll down the hill inside the Kitty, bullets rattle off my armor. The clamor reminds me of when Rachel was little and she gathered pots and pans, then pounded on them with a pair of drumsticks. As I tumble, I’m slammed every which way inside my cockpit. I attempt to sight my enemies to return fire, but it’s hopeless. Instead, I blast away three more of the borer-bot saucers, all that I have remaining from my weapons cache, hoping the AIs will aim themselves better than I can.
When I finally crash in a heap at the bottom of the hill, I sit, stunned, expecting to die at any moment. Instead I look up to see two tanks trying to wrestle disks from their torsos. I know the drivers as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, though those aren’t their actual call signs. The two are partners, competent but unimaginative. Neither has bothered to customize their tank in any way, both choosing to leave their MATs’ heads faceless. They employ the standard two launcher, two gun setup, same as me, though their tanks are a bit taller and heavier than the Kitty.
I don’t have the time to watch them die. A monster of a tank, call sign Sniper, rounds the hill and starts firing. The driver is a woman and smart as a tack. She’s the only one in the fleet who uses an all-energy weapon setup that makes any sense to me: a pulse laser, plasma cannon combo. The laser pulses don’t pack much of a punch, but they work to soften a target’s armor between the slower plasma blasts, making each pinpoint shot more deadly. Sniper isn’t a fast tank, but it’s got enough energy cells and capacitor redundancy to carve up its enemies long before they can bring their own weapons into range.
My damage control system blares a warning as Sniper’s lasers lance into my knee. The other driver shrewdly aims for my legs rather than my cockpit. Take out a MAT’s ability to walk, and it’s as good as dead. If I let Sniper take out my legs, she’ll kill me at her leisure without taking a scratch herself. I push hard with my feet to roll myself behind Tweedledum, letting the other tank’s body absorb Sniper’s follow-up plasma blast.
Explosions come from inside Tweedledum’s and Tweedledee’s cockpits, and both tanks begin to crumple. I scramble from them. When I have time to look, I see Sniper swatting at the last borer-bot saucer. The AI buzzes around my enemy’s head like an angry wasp. Surging to my feet, I sprint towards Sniper while she’s distracted. The Kitty’s damaged knee grinds as I run. If I survive my encounter, I’ll need to clear shrapnel from the wounded joint.
I pull a two-meter-long dagger from a steel-mesh utility belt strapped to the Kitty’s waist. At my command, the dagger’s blade grows white hot, the heat peeling the paint from my tank’s fist. The borer-bot saucer has clamped itself to one of Sniper’s arms, but the driver ignores the robot as she tries to aim her plasma cannon my way.
I manage an awkward stutter-step dodge just before an energy blast rips past my leg. Rushing up, I lower my head and smash shoulder-first into the other tank, throwing it off balance. Everything goes gray in my head for a second, but I snap back as I feel the Kitty’s legs start to buckle, mimicking my own legs. Surprised that I’m still holding my dagger, I grapple desperately with the bigger tank and manage to work my way behind it. Reaching around, I press the blade into Sniper’s gut and use both of my hands to apply steady pressure as she thrashes in my arms.
At first, the thick armor protecting the other MAT’s cockpit resists the dagger, but then the heat of the weapon sluices away the metal-ceramic alloy. With a pop and a clang, my dagger breaks through to Sniper’s cockpit. Staggering away from the encounter, I leave the smoking weapon in place, letting its heat bake the woman inside her tank.
Four down.
I bend to tug armor fragments from my knee as I check the positions of the remaining MATs. It doesn’t look good for me, not one bit. The Kitty’s display shows two squads of four, running in diamond shaped formations, closing on me from opposite directions. As I watch them move, it’s clear they aren’t feigning cooperation. Worse, some of the war machines are the largest in the fleet, with more than twice my firepower. And if I don’t move my butt, I’ll find myself pinned between all eight at once.
I push the Kitty into motion, accelerating gradually as I test my knee. The grinding is gone, but so is any armor protecting the joint. On the plus side, it looks like I’ll have my speed to go with a full load of bullets, rockets, and a few remaining bolos and daggers. The bad news is that I’m still screwed. Checking the threat assessment data, I see I’m in that things-happen, five percent range against my enemies. Even that seems overly optimistic, but I note with amusement that my mission assessment still shines green.
I alter my route around the hills to steer myself back toward to the Marvin city. I’ve been lucky so far; maybe I can survive one more roll of the dice. I figure if I make it past the four tanks already moving to block my path, maybe I’ll find some weapon I missed in my shipping container. If not, I can always use the big metal box to beat a tank to scrap before the others kill me.
The daylight around me turns to twilight as I streak around a hill that’s more like a small mountain. Thirty seconds until I encounter my enemies, my display projects the four metal giants lumbering around the same rise. I push the Kitty faster. Twenty seconds. With a thought, I trigger the three remaining daggers at my waist, ignoring the damage warnings as the blades begin to flare around my midsection. Ten seconds out, I crouch low and again run like a bear.
The instant my enemies come into view, the space around where my head and torso would normally be fills with streaking rockets, gun fire, and energy beams. From my crouch, I swing my legs out in front of me and hit the deck, sliding hard on the ground like a baseball player stealing a base. I skid past the first of the tanks and end up in the middle of the squad with the four looming over me. There’s a fraction of a second of indecision among my enemies. None are likely to have been in an up-close tank brawl before, but I’ve been in plenty.
In a brawl there’s only time for hack, slash, and shoot. While the other tanks try to back away to clear lines of fire, I scramble to my knees and jam a glowing blade into someone’s gut. Twisting myself on the ground, I stab another dagger into the first leg I see. The other tanks then abandon all courtesies and start blazing away, hitting both me and their allies. Damage alerts shriek inside my cockpit, and I’m buffeted on the ground. I try to stand to engage a third tank but crash back, the impact knocking my last blade from my hand. One of the Kitty’s legs has been severed below the knee.
Bullets rattle, gouging into my armor as I push myself up on my elbows. Crouching on one leg, I blink up at the face of a leering, plazsteel demon about to fire a salvo of rockets. With my remaining leg, I launch myself toward the demon before its driver fires. The machine is so much taller than me that I only manage to crash into its groin. I wrap my arms around its waist and pull myself up, even as I feel the other tank’s fists smash down against the Kitty’s neck. Winding my last two bolos around the other tank’s thighs, I let myself fall again. As soon as I hit the ground, I roll away. Bringing myself to a sitting position, I see the smiling demon remain smiling even as the bolos blow its legs to shrapnel, sending the tank crashing to the ground.
Still sitting, I twist in place to fire every rocket and bullet I have left at the fourth tank’s legs. It has a lupine head and its driver calls his machine Howl. A plasma bolt from Howl slams into my chest, blinding my sensors, and for the first time today, I feel actual pain, not just damage reports. The bulky neural harness I’m strapped to makes it impossible to see where I’ve been wounded, but the unmistakable smell of cooked flesh wafts from below my waist.
When the Kitty’s sensors come back online a second later, I see my battle isn’t over. I’ve killed two more tanks, but Howl is alive on the ground, one of its legs unable to support the weight of its chassis. Its driver twists his machine awkwardly, trying to aim his plasma cannon for another shot. The driver of the tank I stabbed in the leg earlier is also very much alive. Balancing on her tank’s one good leg, her miniguns flash. Reflexively, I bring up my arms to protect my head and chest. Armor is blasted from the Kitty’s forearms.
I turn and crawl away as fast as I can. Abandoning any sense of dignity, I offer only the Kitty’s backside as a target. For several seconds, I feel the impact of the pairs’ fire—nothing more humbling than a bullet in the ass—but either the two find they can’t hit me anywhere vulnerable or they run out of ammo, because they stop firing.
I’ve known dogs to get by on three legs, adopting a kind of bouncing lope to move themselves around, but I fail at my attempts to do the same with the Kitty. I also quickly dismiss the idea of trying to hop forward on one leg like some demented kangaroo. If I could reach a tree at the top of one of the many hills around me, I could probably use it as a makeshift crutch, but I decide it’s not worth the climb. Instead I keep myself crawling forward on my hands and knees, taking full advantage of my tank’s tirelessness, thankful I can’t feel the strain on the Kitty’s back and joints.
When I’m two kilometers from the battlefield, I look over my shoulder and see the four lumbering hulks of the remaining MAT squad towering over their surviving allies. The giant quartet bristles with weaponry. They open fire, and at first I think they’re attempting to hit me with some miracle shot, but I watch, stunned, as they execute their two wounded comrades. Apparently, any tank that can’t help kill me is more valuable to them dead.
I’m now closer to the Marvin city than my remaining enemies, and nothing blocks my path, but as slow as the four behemoths behind me are, at least one of them is likely to catch me before I make it. I’m out of ammo and out of tricks, so I do the only thing I can think to do: keep on crawling.
The monotony of my struggle makes it difficult to keep track of time. I find myself drifting in and out of a haze. Sometimes I think it’s night and I’ve been crawling for hours, then the fading light of day peeks through dirt and moss spattering my cockpit’s viewport, reminding me that mere minutes have passed. All the cameras on the Kitty’s chassis have been destroyed, so I’m forced to rely solely on my sensors to see where I’m going.
Then, even before I can hear it, I feel the ground rumble ahead of me, not behind me like I’d been expecting. When I lift the Kitty’s head to look up through my smeared viewport, I see a massive plazsteel foot stomp into the ground in front of me. I curse my carelessness. I was so focused on the original twelve tanks, I hadn’t considered that other MATs might have joined the hunt by now. This driver just hit the jackpot.
“Sorry, Rachel,” I say. “I tried to keep my promise.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and think of the last time Rachel, Dan, and I were all together. It was on a white sand beach, and Dan was showing Rachel how to build a sand castle, but the waves kept knocking it down. I wait, remembering the warmth of that world’s golden sun on my face, but when the coup de grâce fails to come, I push myself up and gawk at the simian face of the Wild Bill. The blank forms of Tweedledum and Tweedledee tower beyond my former partner’s war machine.
We grew tired of waiting for the humans to come to us, Captain, says the borer-bot inside the Wild Bill. We’re going to kill as many as we can now. Farewell.
The AI strides away in the Wild Bill, and Tweedledum follows. Their movements are jerky and awkward. Tweedledee drops a long metal pipe on the ground before me, then moves to join its companions.
The pipe turns out to be a solid metal coring rod that the mines in the area use to drill into rock. I use it to lever myself to my feet. The rod’s not long enough to jam under my shoulder like a proper crutch, but I do the best I can with it. Freed from my forced crawl, I make substantially better time. Dirt and moss falls away from my viewport, allowing me to see clearly again.
Briefly, I wonder why my tactical display didn’t warn me about the other three tanks, but then I remember the three are dead, at least according to the fleet. No need for active data on inactive MATs. The four tanks chasing me aren’t likely to see the borer-bots coming either. I resist the urge to track the inevitable battle with my sensors. The distraction will only slow me.
I decide that if I can make it to the Marvin city, I’ll abandon the Kitty and try to hide among the aliens. If the other tank crews can’t find me and the Marvins don’t kill me, I might be able to contact Rachel when it’s safe.
After hobbling for another ten minutes with my head down, I look up to see the Marvin city only a half kilometer away. I smile and take a quick look over my shoulder, then instantly wish I hadn’t. Another tank is two hundred meters behind me and stalking ever closer. It’s the Troll, one of the most powerful MATs in the fleet, operated by a barrel-shaped woman who’s quick to drink and quicker to violence. Troll has it all: rockets, miniguns, a plasma cannon, and even a flechette gun. But the tank is a tangled mess.
I see that its rocket tubes are empty and its plasma cannon hangs off the tank’s shoulder at an odd tilt. Troll’s miniguns must be out of ammo, too, or I would have already felt their sting. But even as I wonder if Troll has flechette ammunition left, a series of flashes erupts from the gun. Jagged bits of metal spatter against the Kitty.
The Troll will have to find a gap in the Kitty’s armor for the flechettes to hurt me, but my tank has plenty of scars.
“That was a neat trick with the dead guys, bitch,” says the woman over my comm. “But now you’re all mine.”
I turn, squaring to face her, and lift my pipe-crutch over my head while balancing on my remaining leg.
Firing continuously, Troll closes to within fifty meters.
I expel an exhausted sigh when I see the woman was wrong about me being all hers. A kilometer away, Banshee, a monstrous tank, closes on my position. A blinding light flares from the massive tank.
“Where’d he get a cruise missile?” I wonder aloud.
Troll’s driver turns to look behind her, then blurts, “You backstabbing mother—”
My world turns to flames.
The first thing I’m aware of when I return to consciousness is the sound of dripping water, and all I can think of is how thirsty I am. I want that water on my lips. I imagine how cool it will feel when it goes down my throat, then I realize how cold I am. The smell of copper fills my nose.
The Kitty is sprawled sideways on the ground. Twilight filters through a dozen jagged holes in its cockpit. I squint to look through one of the gaps and see the walls of the Marvin city close by. When I try to unstrap myself from my neural harness, I feel the Kitty respond, mimicking my motions. “Good girl,” I say, addressing my tank. “I’d say nine lives and then some.” I reach with the Kitty’s arms to drag myself forward. The city walls inch closer, but I’m feeling dizzy and I find it hard to concentrate.
As I claw myself forward, my heart starts fluttering in my chest, trying to pump blood that isn’t inside of me anymore. I’m going into shock. While I continue to pull the Kitty forward, I feel my brain start to die. My heart stops moments later. Only because a small part of my consciousness persists in the implant the AIs put in my head do I remain aware of my body. Then even that fades.
When I come to again, I see no heavenly white light, but I do see the face of God. He’s not at all what I expect. He’s a grimy little man with a bent nose and cruel eyes, and he waits for me at the end of a short tunnel. There are no clouds or angels with harps behind him. Then I notice there are cracks on my side of the tunnel, and I realize I’m seeing Banshee’s driver peering through the Kitty’s shattered viewport. The man is squinting at me through Banshee’s own port, trying to verify I’m dead.
But I’m not dead. Not anymore. The nanobots inside me report to my implant that they’ve patched my nicked abdominal aorta and are now regenerating damaged heart and brain tissue while keeping my other undamaged cells alive. The tiny machines have converted much of my muscle mass to water, proteins, and electrolytes, providing me with enough fluid to maintain my blood pressure. Realizing my heart is beating again, I resist the urge touch my fingertips to my wrist to feel a pulse.
Data trickles to me from the Kitty. Banshee has its hands under my tank’s shoulders and its driver is lifting the Kitty up, balancing the weight of what’s left of my tank’s torso on the ground while the man gawks. Damage reports tell me everything below the Kitty’s waist is gone, but my tank’s arms are still functional. I move in my harness and clamp the Kitty’s hands on Banshee’s forearms, yanking down as hard as I can. The instant I feel Banshee tilt back to pull away from me, I shove forward with all the strength the Kitty has left, adding as much force as I can to Banshee’s momentum.
Propping the Kitty up on its elbows, I watch as Banshee flails, trying to maintain its balance. The tank topples backwards onto the Marvin minefield I had been crawling toward. Banshee bucks and rocks on the ground as mines explode around it. The big tank tries to right itself, but more explosions blow its hands from the ground, and it falls back, motionless.
Relaxing the Kitty’s arms, I rest my tank on the ground, then disable the implant linking me to my machine. Gingerly, I unstrap myself from my neural harness inside the cockpit. I’m alive, but I was dead long enough for Banshee’s driver to claim my bounty. I don’t know if the other tank’s driver is alive or dead, but I doubt he or his heirs will worry that my body won’t be found inside the Hell Kitty. They’ll no doubt claim that the Marvins carried me off to do something unspeakable with my corpse. Banshee’s people will have half a billion reasons to make sure no one challenges the story.
My flesh is cold. I’m so weak from muscle loss that it’s a struggle to move. My legs are badly burned, but thankfully the nanobots block enough of the pain that I can manage a shuffling gait. Only one of my lungs functions. My chest hurts like hell. I don’t know the extent of the organ damage I’ve suffered, but the nanobots know how to prioritize. I may never again be the same as I was, but at least the tiny machines have made sure my daughter still has a mother.
I’m exhausted by the time I stumble from the Kitty’s cockpit. Outside, twilight is giving way to darkness. The evening air is cool and stinks of ash. In the fading light, I survey what’s left of the Kitty. She’s little more than broken pink plazsteel and burns. A short distance from the city, smoke pours from the Troll. The big MAT remains standing, but is motionless. It must have taken the brunt of the blast from Banshee’s cruise missile. Banshee itself appears almost undamaged in the dwindling light, like it’s only napping in the Marvin’s minefield. Maybe that’s why the aliens are keeping their distance; they’re afraid the monster will wake up.
I see only a single alien out surveying the battlefield, a female I think, and she’s unarmed.
“It’s over now,” I say to her, unsure if she can understand me. “All accounts settled.”
She gapes at me for a moment before running away.
While I watch her flee, I wonder if it really is over. Over for the MAT fleet, probably. Definitely over for me. But what about the AIs? What’s their next move?
Turning at the sound of a dropship landing behind me, I decide I don’t really care.
As soon as the vessel is down, Rachel sprints from a hatch and rushes to me, wrapping her arms around me. “Mom! I thought you were dead.”
“I promised you we’d leave this planet together,” I say, smiling. The pain of my daughter’s embrace is excruciating, but broken ribs and all, I hug her back. “What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t keep my promises?”
I sigh, wincing. “Rachel, we have to talk about the things I’ve—”
“Mom, shut up, okay?” says my daughter.
I nod. “Hey, you’re rich now, you know? All my assets transferred to you when I died.”
Rachel grins. “Can I get a pony?”
“Only if you buy me one, too.”
“Deal,” she says.
I have to lean on Rachel to keep myself upright. Her strength doesn’t surprise me at all. Together, we walk to her ship.