Hangar Bay of Vox Fortuna

Orbiting Meridian III

There wasn’t any time for Malachi to get comfortable aboard his new ship. As soon as his boots hit the deck he was being ushered to move his ass. Someone took his bags to his bunk for him as an officer led him to the hangar bay where his exoframe was already being readied for combat. Artemis was intent on launching her operation as soon as possible to maintain the element of surprise, and Fortuna was in an uproar trying to meet her demands.

“Scuse me, are you, uh, Texas?” Malachi tapped a man on the shoulder. He was a short, chubby man in a greasy jumpsuit, a cowboy hat on his head and a droopy mustache covering his mouth. The man they called Texas Danger was shouting orders at his team of mechanics as they scrambled to load ammunition into oversized weapons, top off fuel gauges and make final maintenance checks.

“No,” The man they called Texas Danger growled. “I am not ‘Texas.’ It’s these varmints that went’n decided that fer me. My real name’s-”

As the crew chief started to give him name, he was drowned out by a cacophony of catcalls, boos and incoherent yelling.

A passing mechanic slammed a hand against Malachi’s lower back so hard he nearly fell over. “Didn’t we tell ya? Our chief’s Texas Danger, and that’s the only name he’ll ever need.” She cackled.

Malachi didn’t know how to respond, so he gave the chief an awkward grin and moved on to a different topic. “So how’s the exoframe look to you? Everything in working order?”

Texas Danger nodded emphatically, reaching into his breast pocket to pull out a handkerchief and wipe his hands. “That’s a mighty fine mech ya get there, son. Real old school beaut. She’ll need some new parts once we hit port if ya want to keep her runnin’ long term, but she’s good to go fer now.”

The two crossed the busy hangar over to where Malachi’s new exoframe stood. A pair of grease monkeys were lowering drums of ammunition into the mech’s massive backpack using a small crane, while a third was spray painting something on the upper right side of the torso. As Malachi grew closer he could make out a pair of dice clenched in the teeth of a burning skull. The artist wrote out ‘GAMBLER-3’ in big, blocky letters. A glance to the other two exoframes in the bay told him they all bore similar tags.

“A physical unit tag? With actual paint?” He asked Texas, shoving a thumb back at the painter.

Texas nodded. “Ye-up. Ain’t just a unit tag, though. That there paint has a special IR signature that let’s ya identify yer squaddies in battle. Keeps friendly fire to a minimum.”

“You don’t have a real time IFF database?” Malachi blinked. Union exoframes came with state of the art IFF- or Identification of Friend or Foe- transponders that allowed allied pilots to track one another’s movements across the entire battlefield in real time, usually with the assistance of a ship in orbit.

“Used to,” Texas chewed on his lower lip as he spoke, “before it got repo’d a few months back. Weren’t makin’ our payments to the manufacturer in time and they sent a retrieval team to take it. Those sonsabitches had more firepower than we did.”

Malachi nodded. He didn’t have much experience dealing with megacorps, but he’d heard plenty of horror stories. The agencies responsible for auditing bad behavior by corporations tended to concentrate their efforts in populated space, like the coreworlds. Out here on the frontier, though, whoever had the biggest gun was the law. And corpos could afford some damn big guns.

Maybe that was why the Gilgamesh had been deployed out here. Maybe the Federation was finally cracking down on the rich bastards running ramshod over the settlers on the outer rim. It was about time.

“Oughtta mount up now n’ make sure everything looks good ‘ta ya,” Texas suggested. “We’ll be droppin’ ya’ll any minute now.”

“Tell me about her,” he asked as he took hold of the bottom rung of the ladder. The climb up to the cockpit was an unfamiliar one. On his old exoframe, Malachi could close his eyes and find all the handholds just by memory. This wasn’t so easy. The distance between rungs felt awkward, like his limbs were too gangly or the ladder was too compact. He struggled to climb around to the exoframe’s right side where a biometric scanner checked his finger print before popping the hatch. It denied him entry, forcing him to input his security codes.

“Her name’s Ulysses. She’s an M-11 Grunt out of Europa. Saw plenty of action with us: ran twenty-eight flight missions over eight years, has sixteen confirmed exo kills. Her reactor’s older and the maneuvering thruster on the left leg is finicky. I’m sure she don’t look like much to one’a the navy’s flying aces but she’s a real workhorse. Saved the team plenty o’ times.”

“What happened to the pilot? That elusive seventeenth get him?” He yelled down, finally popping open up the cockpit. The lights flickered on, revealing a cramped interior.

Unlike many other vehicles, the cockpit of the Ulysses had few physical switches or panels. There was a seat with flight sticks and control pedals, and a long, segmented device mounted on the ceiling. The latter was how Armeade had trained to pilot. Flight sticks were a rudimentary tool for the incapable or the desperate. Malachi closed the door behind him and reached up to the mount, dragging the device down to examine it.

The neurospike was a wicked looking thing: long, segmented and ending in a sharp point, like a scorpion’s tail.

A pair of speakers on the chair’s headrest crackled to life. “Test, test.” Texas Danger spoke. Malachi could see him handling a small microphone on the ground under the exoframe. “Wasn’t combat that got Jazz. It was brain death. Cerebral fluid leaking out of his neuro implant in small enough quantities that nobody ever noticed. One day he just…didn’t get out of his bunk.”

“Oh, lovely.” Malachi ran his finger over the spike’s metal body, carefully inspecting it for any rust or other signs of wear. Even a single chip in its needle-thin tip could cause brain bleed, aneurysms, or a host of other problems. He felt a tinge of guilt knowing he was taking the property of a dead man. A soldier that didn’t even have the good fortune to die in battle.

“We replaced it, don’t you worry.”

Once Malachi was sure it was immaculate, he snaked the device over his shoulder and positioned it just at the base of his neck. That was with his neurodeck port was installed: a metal ring grafted onto his spine, its internal structure woven together with his cervical spinal nerves. He pushed the spike into the port until he felt a rush of pain and adrenaline.

Malachi lost all connection to his body’s sensory organs. No sight, smell, feeling- nothing. His muscles stiffened, frozen in place so he couldn’t accidentally harm himself. Only an override for manual controls would free him to move again.

Inside the cockpit, a sickly green fluid flooded in from grates in the floor. It filled the chamber to the top, rushing into Malachi’s nose, mouth and ears, though he only knew so intellectually; there was no sensation of drowning. The fluid would harden into a breathable, shock absorbent gel that protected the pilot inside. Unless the cockpit was breached during combat, Malachi would be perfectly safe.

He opened his second set of eyes.

The cameras mounted on Ulysses’s exterior blinked on, and through them Malachi absorbed his surroundings. A moment’s vertigo passed over him as he adjusted to his new height. At over two stories tall, he towered over the humans rushing around the hangar bay all around him. There were a few crawling over his body like little ants, securing equipment to his belt and checking his autorifle’s functionality for him.

Malachi flexed his iron fingers. All five digits on either hand worked fine. He took a step in place with his left foot, then his right. His exoframe had been modified a few years back to match his proportions. It was difficult to overstate the importance of preventing body dysphoria in pilots. An exoframe with six limbs or three hundred and sixty degree vision may sound advantageous, at first, but finding someone who was able to actually pilot the thing was another matter: human beings just can’t understand certain body shapes. They’ll quickly be overcome by anxiety, depression, or any number of other traumatic conditions that are hard as all hell to come back from.

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“Feels good to be back,” Malachi spoke aloud, dimly aware that the feeling of lips moving and air leaving his mouth was only false feedback created by his neurodeck to keep him from losing his mind. In actuality his voice was projecting from a speaker inlaid into the exoframe’s head.

“Surprised you even figured out how to turn her on,” Rem Landaris called from across the hangar, her voice tinged with mechanical distortion.

Another exoframe came stalking into voice. It was lower to the ground than Ulysses, longer. And it walked on all fours. Instead of steel fingers it had claws. The cockpit was a long snout, the antennae triangular ears. Teeth. It was an exoframe with teeth. Every other machine he’d ever seen was a man of iron; this was a monster, steely and alien.

“Landaris?” Malachi was bewildered. “What is that?”

“Varghast. The Direwolf.”

“Is it an exoframe?” He began to pace around it, fascinated. Ten feet tall to the shoulders, thirty to thirty five tons- a light reconnaissance frame. Visible armament included a back mounted cannon and two missile pods. Malachi’s computer fed him the Varghast’s exact specifications a moment later. Lone Star Heavy Pulse Cannon model 144. Effective range of seventeen hundred meters. Capable of liquifying titanium in fifteen seconds.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he admitted.

“That’s because there isn’t anything like it.” The beast turned, almost prancing as they spoke. “I built it myself. Dr. Kushner and the Metrovex Institute designed a number of multi-limb frames in a similar vein but they never resolved the neurological impairments. I designed a chip that’s inserted into the sella turica to regulate corticotropin output during dysmorphia episodes brought on by incongruent-”

“You- what? You designed your own exoframe? And you pilot it?” That was absurd. She must’ve been exaggerating. Engineering these massive, complex war machines was a lifelong endeavor, not a weekend hobby.

The mechanized wolf seemed to shrug in response. “Was a mechanical engineer before I ended up here. Wasn’t exactly an intentional career move, you understand.”

Malachi nodded as if he understood. He did not.

Loud alarms and a klaxon sounded, dragging his attention away from the conversation. The deck crew ushered him and Rem out of the hanger and toward the drop bays at the back of the hanger. Each bay was set in a divet in the floor, where a bullet-shaped coffin large enough to fit a giant awaited. There were eight such bays set along the length of the far wall, the ones on the right larger and deeper than those on the left. Half a dozen mechanics moved between consoles in front of each drop bay, running diagnostics up until the last moment before the assault.

There was a chaotic, electric sort of excitement to it all. Malachi had only experienced live combat a handful of times before. Each time before this he had been one pilot among hundreds, shielded from danger by the power of overwhelming odds. This time there was no galaxy-spanning navy at his back; no battalion of support staff to lift him up if he faltered. It was just him and a scattering of former convicts, rejects, misfits; he felt like a circus acrobat about to perform their routine without a safety net.

It was intoxicating.

“All units to launch positions. Repeat, all units to launch positions.” Someone called over an ancient intercom system. Numbers lit up beneath three of the drop bays, and he lumbered his way over to one marked ‘three.

Malachi turned his thoughts to Rem, wishing he could speak with her, and his neurodeck complied. An audio waveform manifested in the lower left hand side of his peripheral vision. A small, spinning circle told him it was ‘connecting’ to Varghast - Remus Augustus Landaris, 1st Lt.

The line clicked after twenty seconds and she answered. “Everything okay, new guy? Ya nervous?” She teased.

“Please, I was running drop drills when most kids were scribbling in coloring books,” he scoffed. “No, no. I was just wondering where the captain is. I thought she was headed down with us.”

“She is,” Rem confirmed. “She likes to get to the drop pod early. Has some kinda pre-deployment ritual she likes to run through.”

That was interesting. He’d known a few pilots like that. Some wanted time alone in their cockpit for prayer; making peace with the universe or a deity or what have you. Others thought they could avoid a stray round by performing ‘rituals’ for lady luck. It was all the same superstitious bullshit to him.

“What do you think she’s doing?”

“No clue. Arty doesn’t like to talk about herself.”

“Sorry, do you call your captain Arty?” Malachi blew raspberries. Disrespecting a superior officer like that would’ve gotten him a night in the brig. Or at the very least a few miles around Gilgamesh’s running track.

“Course I do! Everybody needs a nickname. There’s Arty, Texas…Not sure what I’m gonna call you, though.”

Ulysses and Varghast descended beside each other into their pods. Mechanical arms locked themselves around Ulysses, ensuring his stillness during the fall. Comms cut out a few seconds after the ceiling enclosed itself above Malachi. Darkness shrouded the chamber. The only light came from inside his eyes: crimson numbers counting down the time to zero hour. He could hear the dull roar of his engine cycling. MAL-176 burning in his veins like infernal blood. Ulysses’s hands were his hands. The REN-85 macrorifle he was holding had an assuring sort of heaviness; a promise of reliability, a friend who would stand by his side no matter the opposition.

The numbers ticked down until four, bloodied eyes stared back at Malachi.

Gravity took him into its hands and tossed him into Meridian III’s atmosphere. Thrusters fired atop the pod, accelerating him even further.

He was a rock picked up by God and hurled at His enemies in righteous anger.

The fall took eight minutes.

Interia tore at his flesh and bone inside the iron womb of Ulysses. Dampening fluid could only do so much. Some tiny tingles of sensations peaked through the neurospike. The pod’s armored plating groaned under the immense pressure of reentry. Darkness was abated by the white hot glow of metal beneath Ulysses. Once a layer of plating grew too hot to sustain itself, tiny explosives in the screws went off, throwing that plate away into the void of space. Three layers were shed in the minutes before impact.

Anxious in his waiting, Malachi called forth a map of their approximate landing zone. Simulations of their three pods hitting the dirt played in a loop. Hitting a particular spot with dead on accuracy from orbit was almost impossible. A planet wasn’t a stationary object; it was rotating, and so were the drop pods and the Fortuna above them. There was a mile and a half radius of expected drift from the landing site. Imaging from the ship’s sensors made the area out to be sparsely populated and less than twenty miles from their objective: a gargantuan hole burrowed into the ground. There were endless miles of tunnels running below the surface, likely even into the crust of the planet. Millions of drones were tearing up rock and dirt to extract precious materials of all sorts to be bought and sold on a far away world. According to the mission docket, said drones were of little threat in combat.

The drop pod exploded five thousand feet in the air.

A rush of fire, smoke and light blinded Malachi as he found himself suddenly plummeting through the sky.

“Shit!” He called, his voice lost through the cacophony of flak rounds tearing through the air around him. His sensors screeched warning after warning. A missile was inbound on his exoframe, ETA, ten seconds. Malachi slammed a fist into the thigh of his frame, and a burst of flares flew out behind him. The missile careened away, and he took the time he had to fire off his own thrusters. Needed to get clear of the missile’s radius. A frame like Ulysses wasn’t meant for flying inside an atmosphere. It didn’t have the equipment for it. Its thrusters were meant for rapid maneuvering on the ground, or in a Zero-G environment where even a small burst could send a giant like him soaring. Now he could only hope his tiny, inadequate rockets could guide him into falling the right way.

The missile detonated behind him. A shockwave followed that knocked Ulysses’s legs out from under her, causing him to spin worthlessly in the air. He cut his thrust as soon as he could, but the change in direction was too abrupt. His tenuous control over the situation slipped between his fingers as he plummeted into the ground.

He impacted hard. Rock and earth were sent flying in every direction as Ulysses cut a trench four hundred feet long through the ground as he skipped like a stone on a pond. His neurodeck screamed warning after warning at him. Damage reports scrolled across his eyes in a blur, unremarked on. The damage made itself known in his aching body and pounding headache.