On the surface of LZ-Wolf VIII, referred to as ‘Rotten Egg’ by those laboring on its surface, several industrial mechs toiled deep in the network of tunnels. The five-meter-tall mechs had mostly human proportions that made it easier for unskilled pilots to manage their rudimentary controls without the use of a cybernetic interface and several of them had clustered at the end of the deepest shaft in the mine where they carefully worked to break down massive piles of volcanic rock to extract valuable gyucite crystals for refinement and processing.
In the cockpit of one of those mechs, Zayd sighed in deep relief as he finished loading the last of the high-grade crystals he’d discovered into the storage module on the back of his mech and temporarily disengaged from the restrictive control system of the mech to wipe the sweat from his face. The BQ-2110 Rock Breaker was a workhorse of a mech designed to be piloted by contractors with limited training and even less experience in mechs. Because it didn’t require the use of a Cyberlink, all a person needed to do was strap into the Manual Control System and the actuators attached to each joint in their piloting suits would replicate their movements to the mech. It sounded nice in theory, but the Rock Breaker was a very basic mech with a limited range of motion. Rather than allow barely trained pilots to move in ways the mech couldn’t, the MCS of the Rock Breaker locked down the pilot’s body to the mech’s range of motion. That meant that for the majority of Zayd’s ten-hour shift, he’d been unable to bend his back, raise his arms above his shoulders, or walk with a normal gait.
“‘Put your training to use,’ they said,” the young pilot grumbled. “‘Pay off your debts faster,’ they said. Of course, they didn’t add the ‘or destroy your body trying’ bit.” Suddenly, a brilliant flash of red-orange light consumed Zayd’s vision, blinding him for several seconds and leaving his body with the feeling that thousands of insects had crawled across his flesh before vanishing like they’d never been there. “The hell was that!” he said, blinking his eyes and running both hands over his arms as though he was wiping away the feeling of things touching his skin.
“Hey Thal, Kels, Rikken, any of you just see a bright flash?” Zayd called out to the pilots of the other nearby mechs. “I just got hit with this really weird feeling.”
“Too many painkillers mister hot shot Zed-Alpha?” one of the other pilots sneered on the local channel. “Maybe those genetically engineered eyes of yours are finally bugging out.”
“Hey Thal, cut him some slack,” one of the other men chimed in with sarcastic sympathy. “Remember, he’s ‘defective’, you shouldn’t hold him to the same standards as the rest of his batch. He should be a normie like the rest of us natural born. Unless that defect really is showing up. Hey Zayd, if you’re dying, I call dibs on your bunk,” the man finished with a laugh.
“Oh screw you all,” Zayd said. “Maybe it was just a display malfunction or an electrical glitch. This rust bucket is way over its minimum service hours.”
“You think the big shots at Braxis-Quan care about meeting the service hours requirements?” Tals laughed. “Kid, I swear, there’s a supervisor or a manager somewhere who gets a bonus every time we come in under budget for replacement parts. We’ll see an arm fall off before someone decides to actually replace the lifters. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.”
“Yeah, well, shift ends in an hour anyway,” Zayd informed the rest of the team. “I’ve got a decent haul so I’m headed back to the hanger to get things checked out. I’ll see y'all at dinner.”
“Your funeral man,” another of the pilots said. “Hope the technicians find an actual problem or they’re going to doc you for the hour.”
“Not like I care about an hour,” Zayd replied, picking up the heavy rock-breaking maul his mech had been using and turning back toward the base. “The amount of debt I’m in, a thousand hours wouldn’t make a difference.” Most of the men and women working in the mines on this desolate world had gone into debt to the company as a result of one choice or another that they’d made. Zayd couldn’t help but envy that kind of freedom. Unlike his coworkers, he’d been born into debt, the result of a massive investment gamble that, in his case, hadn’t panned out.
Twenty years ago, after a series of humiliating defeats forced Braxis Quan Holding Company to abandon their open war against several rivals, company executives launched several initiatives to bolster the strength of their military forces in the long term rather than the short term. New mech piloting academies were built and the best pilots of their generation were recalled from active war zones to become instructors training the next generation. Project Zed-Alpha, however, went a step further in creating the next generation of superior soldiers.
The program started by selecting two of the best pilots from across all the planets controlled by the powerful mega-corporation. The first, Shard Braxis, was one of the most legendary combat mech pilots of the Lima Star Cluster, and the style of heavy weapons combat he developed had allowed the mercenary forces of Braxis-Quan Holding to not only command outrageous fees across the cluster but to outright conquer several planets. Some of those planets had belonged to weaker native alien species but others had been held by bitter business rivals. In a company that had suffered a string of catastrophic failures, Shard Braxis’ consistent ability to pummel any adversary into submission had been a notable bright spot.
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In the current era, perhaps the only person within the vast company who could match up to Shard Braxis was Andromeda Quan. While Shard dominated the world of heavy infantry and developed a brutally efficient method of using everything from his signature two-handed sword to polearms and giant mauls, Andromeda Quan soared above it all on the wings of a nimble and agile raiding mech. Her incredible intellect along with a physiology that was more compatible with cybernetic enhancement than ninety-nine percent of humans allowed her to unleash storms of precision munitions from dozens of kilometers away while moving at speeds that would boggle the mind of most standard humans.
With such amazing talent, Braxis-Quan Holdings would have been foolish to not attempt to reap the greatest possible profit from their talents. They’d harvested thousands of eggs from Andromeda Quan and fertilized them in batches of one thousand infants, each one carefully matured in an artificial womb before being raised in a specialized training program.
Zayd, known at the time only as Zed-Alpha-Twenty-Seven-Yankee, had been one of the most exceptional close combatants of batch Yankee. As early as five, he’d demonstrated both greater physical strength than normal for his body mass and a keen eye for details that let him topple other children in competitive matches. At the time, he’d poured his entire heart and soul into training. From a young age, he and the others of his batch were told that only the top five children at age fifteen would be allowed to meet their genetic donors to be recognized as their children.
To produce the next generation of great mech pilots, Braxis-Quan Holdings invested millions of credits in each child. They ate a refined diet that was highly optimized to their specific nutrient needs. They received the best education with tutoring from both veteran pilots and acclaimed scholars. They used top-of-the-line training equipment and so was everything else they interacted with met a similar standard. Starting from age eight, nearly ten percent of the active members of batch Yankee washed out or were otherwise deemed to be failures. By the time they were thirteen, the approximately five hundred remaining children faced the most brutal hurdle of their lives - preliminary cybernetic augmentation. It was impossible to install a complete piloting suite in children so young, but at thirteen, their brains had developed enough for a simple data-link cyber suite that would allow them to connect their minds directly to the machines they would one day control. For most of his batchmates, it was a day of celebration.
For Zayd, it was the day they discovered a mutation in his development that inhibited cybernetic augmentation. It didn’t matter how well he fought, how hard he studied, or how highly he’d ranked before. As soon as they’d discovered that he couldn’t be augmented, they’d added a permanent ‘-D’ to his designation. Defective.
The label haunted him everywhere he went in space controlled by the massive corporation. Since he was still a child, he’d been allowed to complete public education. Thanks to his expensive training, he’d qualified for scholarships at decent high schools and even placement into a university after graduation if he’d been allowed to pursue it.
Instead, as soon as he turned eighteen, he’d been given the bill for everything the company invested in him while he was a member of batch Yankee. Eleven million credits. It was an astronomical sum of money, one he could never repay in most professions. He could, however, take one of the company’s supposedly lucrative contracts to work in the frontier zone. For the first time since his days as a trainee, he’d be able to sit in the cockpit of a mech and swing a hammer, even if the only thing he got to swing at was a pile of rocks.
A year ago, it felt like he could get himself out of this horrible debt with just a few years of hard work and then he’d be free to make his own way. Now that he’d been on the Rotten Egg for a while though, he realized that the whole thing was a trap. Managers did everything they could to keep contractors like him exactly where they were with no hope of rising through the ranks. Maybe in a few years, Zayd would be like the old-timers around him, doing the minimum required by the company, day after day, until his soul was crushed like the rocks under his hammer.
For a moment, Zayd paused in his return to the foul-smelling surface outside of the mine’s primary access tunnel. The idea of letting this place grind him down turned his stomach. His hands flexed on the controls of his worn-out mech, gripping the massive hammer tighter and adopting a modified fighting posture with the ponderous mech. Deep down, he knew that fighting back was impossible. Even if he could defeat the Enforcer assigned to keep watch over the contract laborers like Zayd, it wouldn’t do him any good. Without a shuttle, he would be stuck on the planet and Braxis Quan Holding Company was more than cruel enough to cut off food resupply to any mining camp that staged a rebellion. Even if he could get off planet by hijacking a shuttle, he’d still have to make it all the way in-system to Bad Penny Station to have any hope of boarding a starship. There were too many links in the chain to fight his way out.
It didn’t stop him from thinking about it though. The fantasy of fighting his way out step by step that ran through his mind was enough to push back against the sense of defeat that had begun to overwhelm him. It might be impossible today, but at some point, he’d have an opportunity for things to change. Right now, he just had to make sure that he was ready to seize that opportunity when it arrived!