The sun never set on Scrapworld, but there was no shortage of shadow, something those who labored in the endless sunlight were grateful for. The drifting space station’s irregular orbit had taken it especially close to the sun today, so they worked in the cool of the shade. What had once been a towering skyscraper, now collapsed and fallen to ruin, kept their dig site almost cool enough to be pleasant. The sweat on Hartwell’s brow was from exertion, not the heat.

He hefted another pile of valuable scrap into the hauler. They hadn’t exactly hit the motherlode, but it was a good haul. Enough to shave a good chunk off the debt they owed the Republic, and get every prisoner here a little closer to freedom.

“Heavy metals close to full, Hartwell,” someone shouted. “How’s electronics?”

“Barely halfway,” Hartwell shouted back. “Give me the excavation team, tell the rest of yours to take a breather. Five minutes.”

The diggers headed to join Hartwell’s group, while the rest of the heavy metal team took a quick break.

“You take a load off too, just want to make sure I know where to find you,” Hartwell commanded. The excavators happily took a break. “Giza!”

His voice echoed off the leaning skyscraper hanging above them.

“Giza!”

“Busy!”

“How busy?”

Something fell from the skyscraper above, not far from where it met the ground. Giza shook an empty container in Hartwell’s direction and then tossed it over her shoulder.

“Not that busy,” Giza snapped. She saluted sharply in Hartwell’s direction. “Nothing to report from the scouting team, captain.”

“That’s captain dad to you, young lady.”

Giza maintained her stoic face for a second, and then started to laugh, as did her father. She walked up, saluted again, and gave her dad a playful bonk on the head, rustling his dark curls, and then allowed him to do the same to her. The resting members of the excavation team rolled their eyes at the saccharine family ritual.

“Building’s residential, nothing valuable,” Giza said. “Eiffel and Jack are giving it a quick sweep for any outliers, but I don’t think it’s worth sending a full team after.”

“Damn. Hoped we could find a penthouse, at least.”

Raw materials were all well and good, but intact technology and relics from the Old World were far more valuable. Ancient family photos and nearly-disintegrated clothing, on the other hand, were less than worthless.

“Probably at least one working computer in there,” Giza said. “I trust Jack to find it.”

A little bit of rubble rained down from the skyscraper above.

“Sounds like Jack.”

A lot of rubble rained down from the rubble above, as the crumbling building rattled slightly.

“And that must be Eiffel.”

The two halves of the scouting duo dropped down with far less grace than Giza had, and practically landed on top of each other.

“Nice going, guys, you could-”

“Mecha!”

Giza’s joke died on her lips. Hartwell spun on his heel immediately.

“Haul in, power down, everyone under the building,” Hartwell shouted. “Pull in close. We’ve got cover, this is good!”

His authoritative voice brought some semblance of order to the sudden panic that overtook the Junker clan. They had been at this digsite for days, and now they stood to lose it all in minutes. If they were lucky, the scrap was all they would lose. Mecha’s were the most valuable, most powerful, and most dangerous of all the Old World tech, and those who piloted them were even more dangerous. Without fail, every mecha pilot was a heartless thief at best and a deranged killer at worst.

As the Junkers hauled their goods into hiding, Hartwell and Giza headed to the edge of the skyscraper, to peer out into the distance. Eiffel and Jack provided guidance and pointed them in the right direction, and gave them fair warning that the situation was even worse than their initial panicked shout had implied.

“I was in a hurry, sorry,” Eiffel stammered. “I should’ve specified-”

“There’s two,” Hartwell grunted.

“That.”

The two war machines were miles away, but their colossal frames were visible even from that distance. Right now they were preoccupied with what appeared to be a mountain of slag metal, a melted-down relic from whatever disaster had turned the Old World into the ruined junkyard they were now imprisoned in.

“They’re not...doing anything,” Hartwell said. “Yet.”

The larger of the two mecha carefully examined the mountainside for a moment.

“I don’t recognize them,” Hartwell said.

“I think I’ve seen them parked at the Hub before,” Giza added.

“Giza, get back with the clan.”

“No.”

Hartwell gave up. As a father, he had to try. As Giza’s father, he knew better than to try too hard.

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“Guys-”

Jack’s attempt at a warning could not come fast enough. In a sudden burst of motion and violence, the larger mecha pulled back, aimed a cannon at the mountainside, and fired. Giza stifled a shriek of horror, and Eiffel didn’t. Hartwell clung to some hope that the pilot had just been showing off a gun, and that no one had been caught in that explosion, but he knew it was unlikely.

His fear turned to abject horror when the two mecha turned away from the crater they had made and one of the two pointed towards the decaying skyscraper. Towards them. Then the duo started walking.

“Start moving, now,” Hartwell thundered. Their makeshift vehicles thundered to life and started hauling their hard-earned scrap away from the two bandit mecha. “Warren, power up the decoy hauler and give me the controls.”

In preparation for just such an event, the Junkers had prepared bait. Mecha tracked energy signatures, and more powerful energy meant more valuable loot. With that in mind, the Junker’s had jury-rigged a contraption that could amplify a power signature well beyond what it could actually produce. A surefire bait for any thieving mecha pilot, with very little sacrifice. In material costs, at least.

“What do you mean give ‘you’ the controls,” Giza snapped.

“I’ll be fine,” Hartwell said. “I’ll jump out and set it on auto before they get close. You just need some distance.”

“Dad, you can’t-”

“I will be fine,” Hartwell said. He forced as much paternal authority into the words as he could muster. “I’ll catch up. Keep the clan under control while I’m gone.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Giza insisted.

“I love you, Giza.”

Hartwell gave his daughter a kiss on the forehead and then ran off.

“Dad!”

She looked towards the approaching mecha, then back at her father. Then she looked right back at the mecha. Any and all grief in her head got blasted away in a second.

“Uh, Dad.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be-”

“You’ll be fine, yeah, I know, just-”

“Don’t worry, everything will be-”

“Dad! Come here and look at this,” Giza said. “The mecha are doing something weird!”

Hartwell stopped in his tracks and reversed course back to their vantage point at the edge of the building. Giza seemed more confused than scared now. Even Eiffel didn’t look worried, and Eiffel worried about most things. Hartwell poked his head out.

The mecha had rapidly closed the gap, but then stopped in their tracks about a mile away. One of the two mechs had its leg extended, while the other swatted it with a metal fist.

“Are they...fighting each other?”

“Not really, no,” Jack said.

The first mecha pulled its leg back in and started slapping itself on the chest repeatedly, then jumped up and down.

“It kind of looks like it’s fighting itself, doesn’t it?”

“Nah, it’s sort of...I don’t know,” Giza said.

“It looks like they’re trying to swat a bug,” Hartwell said. The three young adults next to him shrugged. Hartwell had spent some of his early life on Earth, but the teens had all been born on Scrapworld. They’d never seen a bug.

“Are there mecha-sized bugs somewhere out here?”

“No, Eiffel, I’m sure it’s some kind of system glitch,” Hartwell said. “We should take advantage of this and-”

“Woah!”

Giza’s shout of excitement was followed by a bright flash of light. With one sudden surge of power, the twitching mecha went rigid, froze in place, and fell. The thunderous crash of the titan’s body falling to earth shook the ground under their feet, even from a mile off.

“What the hell,” Jack said. “Did it just die?”

As its partner fell, the other mecha pulled out its gun again and blasted the fallen mecha. Though the energy blasts were now far weaker than the one that had erupted the mountainside, they were still strong enough to tear the fallen mech to pieces.

“Maybe they were fighting each other...oh, no, there goes the bug-swatting again,” Hartwell said. The remaining mech was violently punching itself in the leg now.

“I still don’t know what a bug is,” Giza reminded him.

“I’ve told you about this before, it’s like a tiny little living thing, with a shell outside and all filled with goo,” Hartwell said. It was incredibly difficult to actually describe anything to a person who’d never seen any kind of plant or animal before. “Lots of little legs and eyes. Very annoying.”

“Hold on, stop,” Jack demanded. “I think whatever’s happening is getting closer to the face.”

The mecha was pounding on its chest now, desperately clawing at some unseen assailant that was rapidly moving further and further up the chest. As the Junker’s watched, the mecha made one final grasp at its hidden foe, and reached for its face. Then, in a bright flash of light, that face exploded in a burst of energy. The mecha fell over, inert on the ground, as silent and dead as its counterpart.

The four Junkers stared at the two dead mechs for a minute.

“Uh, cancel that whole evacuation thing,” Hartwell said. He turned around to face his crew, and found they were all right behind him, staring slackjawed at the two dead mecha. “Oh.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of scrap, Hartwell,” someone mumbled.

“Are you kidding me, that’s insanely dangerous,” Hartwell said. They’d salvaged mecha before, but only those destroyed ages ago, the ones that had never been in a condition to be piloted. “Whatever is out there just killed two mecha-”

“Yeah, it’s great,” Giza said. She took off in a dead sprint towards the two fallen mechs.

“Giza! Giza, stop!”

Giza did not stop. Light on her feet and eager to see whatever miracle had just happened up close, Giza ran what was probably the fastest mile of her life. She was already out of breath and coughing profusely from the dust when she reached the head of the fallen mecha, but what she saw still took her breath away.

Sitting on top of the dead mecha was something inexplicable. It was the size of a man, but looked like a mecha -albeit a shoddy one. The strange construct had exposed wiring and circuitry, and what little armor plating it did have appeared mismatched and crudely made. The man-mech sat atop the head of its fallen foe as Giza approached, and then hopped down to meet her. Giza flinched and took a step back, but the man-mech only raised its hand in a stiff wave.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” Giza said, once she mustered the courage to speak to the unknown man-mech. “Did you just destroy two mecha?”

The man-mech looked over its shoulder, as if it also needed confirmation, and then nodded.

“Yeah.”

Giza put a hand on her chin.

“Could you...do it again?”

“Probably,” the man-mech said with a shrug. Giza’s lips curled into a devilish smile, and she stepped forward, hand extended.

“My name’s Giza.”

The man-mech had no visible eyes, but the metal where its face should have been tilted down towards Giza’s extended hand. After going ten seconds with no sign that the handshake would be completed, she slowly pulled her hand back.

“Do you have a name?”

“Rushmore. Rush, sometimes.”

“Rushmore. Sometimes. Are you, like, a person, or…”

Two gauntlets reached up and took hold of the metal sheet of a face, removing what was apparently a helmet. With the shell pulled away, the face of a young man, dark skin beaten coarse by overexposure to harsh sunlight, was revealed. He shook out dreadlocks that had been a bit too cramped in the tight headgear and stared blankly at Giza.

“Person, yeah,” Rushmore said.

“Cool. Would you like some food?”

“I would, yeah.”

Giza turned around and waved back towards her clan, all of whom were now catching up to her. She took a few steps their direction, and then turned around just to be sure. Rushmore was still standing in place.

“If, uh, you follow me,” Giza said. “I will give you some food.”

“Oh, okay. Th- wait, am I supposed to say ‘thank you’ now or afterwards?”

Giza turned around and did a quick double take between Rushmore’s strange suit of armor and the two dead mecha.

“Whenever you want, I suppose.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Rushmore started to follow Giza, and she started to wonder, more than ever, what the hell was going on.