Chapter 50: Decisive Action

Jack had forgotten what real war was like.

Watching tournaments, fending off pirate raids and even skirmishing with Fed garrisons hadn't reminded him. Even the brief, almost unreal charge into the teeth of a Federal offensive that should have been caught by surprise had only started to jog his memories, and Avalon's bizarre courtesy had banished them.

Now, he remembered.

He juked aside from a sword swipe, banged into another mecha, Fed or 'garch, he never knew and didn't have time to check. A bullet caromed off his leg armor and hit the machine he was touching and hurled it away. He never knew if it was disabled or damaged, either. He blocked another swipe and fired his rifle into the chin of his attacker, but before he could check the results he was thrown forward by a shockwave.

By the time he reoriented himself, two more opponents, a Wyvern and a stubby little line mecha, pounced on him. Both had lost their weapons. They pulled his rifle away and started to do the same to his arms.

He smashed the smaller machine into the larger and grappled the latter, sinking his Epee's claws into its chest and tearing toward its engine.

One of his instruments beeped loud enough to remind his instincts how bad it was to stay put. He dodged and watched a Fed heavy anti-mecha shell punch clean through a Fed mecha.

He didn't bother trying for the shooter. Disarmed, his only chance was to stay in the crowd and use his claws.

He didn't lack for a crowd.

The Epee ran hot. Damn hot. Jack's sweat soaked his flight suit despite the nanomachines meant to process the water and feed it back into his system. He felt like he was piloting an oven. Or was he that nervous?

Had he forgotten what real war was like?

Or was this just that damn much bigger than the battles he’d fought in the Civil War?

For an instant, he saw a gap in the crush of mecha. The Algreil cruiser Journeyman pierced the Federal lines. Shells bigger than the Mother Goose hurtled between the massive warship and the trio of Fed destroyers headed by the Reformer. When they clipped the swarm of mecha fighting between the vessels, the machines splattered like ants hit by a human-sized bullet, but even such powerful ammunition couldn't punch through the distorted gravity around the opposing capital ships. Near-misses flew into space or ripped through the shields of smaller ships with enough energy to blow them apart.

The capital ship duel was almost stately, like watching moons go to war. Jack could understand, aesthetically speaking, why the Feds wanted to put their trust in warships rather than mecha.

But he could also understand, watching the ships' immense weapons swerve through distorted space to no visible effect, why Otto thought the Feds were wrong.

Right or wrong, they were everywhere.

Jack caught the flat of a monomolecular-edged sword on his wrist armor and snapped it. The shattered blade twirled silently away in the vacuum, shedding pieces of hardened composite. The Wyvern pilot who owned it reversed his grip and shoved what was left deep into the arm of Jack's Epee.

He grimaced, punched the Fed in the throat, and slid his claws out. The Wyvern's head glided free almost gently, its trail of sparks the only sign of violence.

Jack snagged the machine's now inert arm and pried loose its boxy little automatic cannon. He hated automatics. He couldn't unload without hitting his own guys, but at least he could spray in the general direction of someone who shot at him and pray it wasn't by mistake.

As if to remind him, he took two shells in the lower torso. The first glanced harmlessly off his armor, but the second punched out a hole big enough for the Epee's arm to fit through, taking two of the mecha's spine-like wings with it.

"Damn," Jack muttered, twisting around to try to suppress whoever was shooting him. Another shell roared over his head. If he hadn't moved, he'd have lost it, and his life, too. He returned fire, but he had no idea if the mecha that jerked and spun away from his shots was the one he'd been fighting.

Damn whoever was shooting.

Damn the Feds for coming after Chloe.

Damn him for agreeing to fight for the Oligarchy again.

Damn, damn, damn Otto Abeir Algreil for charging in with a crazy plan like this!

Melee seemed pointless, exchanging fire suicidal. Mankind started using mecha to get around gravitic shields, not to throw punches and bullets like a bunch of groundling primitives.

Half-grimacing, half-grinning, feeling more than half-mad, Jack kicked off the headless Wyvern and dove for a destroyer.

A pair of Fed line mecha, mismatched types separated from their squadrons, tried to bar his way. He drilled both with a single wild spray, wincing as he saw a Stingray twitch toward him when a stray bullet clipped its wing. Jack shot through the gap the Feds' evasive maneuvers left, ignoring their return fire. Only a couple of their shots even grazed his machine, and they were too small to do anything to the Epee.

At least, he thought, without hitting the huge-ass hole in the mecha's stomach.

He wished he had a less active imagination.

For a second, he broke free of the melee and got another look at the battle as a whole. He even risked a glance at his tactical window before giving it up as useless – so many green Fed and red Oligarchical blips swarmed his screen, he couldn't identify capital ships, much less mecha. Instead, he put his trust in his eyes, or at least the Epee's cameras. Two Devil Rays had gotten through the Feds' screening mecha and started tearing into the destroyer below. Their lashing tails had just detached a panel emblazoned with an “L” ten times their height. The destroyer was now designated the “Equa_ity.”

If the Devil Rays tore their way through to its bridge, they'd go a long way toward equalizing the fleet battle.

Jack's grimace faded and his grin took hold. Another bullet tore into his shoulder, but it only managed to propel him faster toward the destroyer's shields.

He felt the distorted space even through his mecha's inertial dampeners. His stomach lurched as he passed through an especially weird wave. His suit compressed around his legs and arms and loosened around his stomach and neck. He gagged on the bile threatening to rise in his throat, choked it back down. The wave passed and he felt suddenly light as a feather, drifting free in his straps, then another hit from a different direction and pushed him hard into his seat.

If anybody had been able to line up a shot on him as he lurched through the shields, he'd have been a sitting duck. But the same gravitic maelstrom that tore up his innards threw off the aim of weapons with more mass than a hundred mecha. Nothing small enough to bother targeting him had a ghost of a chance of punching through the shield.

Ironically, it was almost the safest place on the battlefield... if he ignored the fact it would pulp his innards if he stayed in it for even five minutes.

Five minutes was probably better than the average outside the shield.

Getting through it took only two. Two minutes of being dashed against the insides of his mecha and having his guts assume new configurations and his brain blank out from lack, then excess, of oxygen. Jack drifted through the shields and breathed again.

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He'd never gone through shields that took even half that long to penetrate.

Suit or no suit, he threw up.

Thankfully, his suit knew his vital signs at least as well as he did. It rippled away from his face just in time to keep him from drowning in his own vomit, and all he managed to do was stain a few of his screens with it.

He gasped down a breath. Even with the stale stench of his stomach's contents and a disturbingly iron odor of blood, it was like breathing in a bouquet after the shield passage.

He shook his head, wiped his chin, and focused on the task at hand.

He'd come through close to the bow of the ship, half a kilometer from where he'd tried to enter. No surprise there. More surprising was that he couldn't see the pair of Stingrays. Had they gotten inside already?

Jack hoped like hell he hadn't come through those shields for nothing.

At least, he hoped not until half a Stingray flew past him, trailing sparks and uncontrolled engine exhaust. It spiraled into the shields and disappeared amidst the distorted view of the melee beyond them.

Jack dodged instinctively. It saved his life, or at least his machine. A golden blur shot through the vacuum he'd just occupied, twisted, and twirled back toward him.

Jack flipped neatly in the blessedly nonexistent gravity, and the Divine Auric Drake's polearm cut the nothingness meters from the Epee's face.

"Heya, Admiral," Jack said.

The black-and-gold mecha hesitated. "Colonel Hughes."

Jack grabbed Avalon's polearm and twisted off the blade, pulling Avalon into a perfect uppercut that would either slice his machine's head off or slice him in half in its cockpit.

Except that somehow, none of that happened. Avalon faded backwards, and the polearm spun, and a golden leg struck Jack in the face and crushed him into the side of the destroyer.

"I am sorry," Avalon said. But he didn't hesitate when he spun the polearm down and sliced one of Jack's mecha's legs off. The weapon twirled almost delicately in his hands and carved off part of an arm and half the Epee's wings.

Even without the pain receptors in Jack’s neural interface shut off, it came as a shock. He couldn't feel anything, but he could look down at 'himself' with the mecha's cameras and see the trailing mechanical viscera, the absences where there should have been working limbs.

And Avalon had been so fast.

Faster than a human on foot, and that was supposed to be perfect: 100% translation of the pilot's impulses. Only the nobs could get that good, get perfect.

The Divine Auric Drake was faster than perfect.

The admiral muttered, "I am so sorry, Ellie. He killed my men. He chose –" His voice sounded like it was going to break.

Jack couldn't bring himself to feel real sorry for the guy.

"He chose this," Avalon spat. His polearm arced downwards.

A red hand and a blue hand caught it in mid-swing.

"What is it with you guys and that stupid cat?" Otto Abeir Algreil asked. His Epee, its harlequin electric blue and red paint job somehow still unmarred, shoved the polearm back and sent the Divine Auric Drake reeling.

Jack fired what feeble thrusters he had left and rose. He might not be able to stand beside Otto, but he could still fight. Maybe.

Marcel Avalon backed off, his polearm held behind him.

"I hate having to keep bailing your ass out, Jack," Otto said, "but I'm pretty sure I'll need a distraction to put this idiot down."

"Otto, this guy is off the charts –"

"Of course," Otto said. "He was bred to be."

"Huh?" Jack glanced at the oligarch's smirking image on one screen, Avalon's ashen one on another.

"How come they didn't flush you down the waste disposal with the rest of the garbage, Marcel?" Otto asked. "Did they miss you when they vacuumed the place? I hear stains are so hard to get out."

"Shut up," Avalon snarled.

"Never have in my life," Otto said. "I guess you'll just have to make me. Shouldn't be too much of challenge for Madame President's born and raised – excuse me, made – 'genius of battle.'"

Avalon moved faster than Jack could see. Faster, he knew, than even Otto could see. Which meant the oligarch must have predicted the attack down to the microsecond, because he caught Avalon's polearm like Jack had tried to and sliced it in half with a click of his claws.

Avalon's momentum should have carried him into those claws, but his thrusters fired and he slid into a spin that clipped Otto in the legs and took them both to the hull.

Otto ended up on top, fist raised, claws flicking out. Avalon's golden hand shot up and grabbed his wrist.

"You really are as good as they say," Otto said. "Madame President knows how to pick a winner. Of course, considering she shot you freaks until one managed to dodge, I guess it was a pretty harsh field test you had to ace."

"That's not true," Avalon roared. His mecha's hand closed on Otto's Epee's wrist hard enough to snap metal and crush artificial sinew. "You're lying!"

"Prove it," Otto said. He couldn't be using a neural interface, because his voice didn't come close to wavering.

Avalon's suave exterior was completely shattered. He ranted like a beast, almost incoherent. All Jack could make out was snarls of "I'll kill you!"

Otto laughed in his face.

"Kill you," Avalon screamed, and tore the Epee's arm from its socket.

The pressure on its arm abated, the admiral's golden mecha surged forward, slammed its forehead into Otto's machine, and pounced on him. Avalon's fists rose and fell madly, leaving massive dents in the Epee's composite armor. Otto's image jerked as he slammed against his straps.

"A freak like you could never kill me," Otto said, his words punctuated by the blows that rocked his mecha. He still sounded in control, but he sure as hell wasn't. His eyes flicked sidelong.

Oh.

Jack realized what he'd been missing.

Avalon rocketed another punch into Otto's mecha's crumbling chest.

Jack drove his claws into the golden mecha's back. Wings sheared free, then armor, then Avalon's screams changed tenor.

Somebody was using a neural interface, it seemed.

Jack willed the channel to Avalon's cockpit closed to cut off the sound. Then he tore into the Divine Auric Drake's back. He hated the Epee. Hated fighting with claws. Felt like an animal. Hated hating feeling like an animal, because it made him think of the things Otto and the Feds said about Ellie. Hated Avalon for being a Fed. Hated Otto for being Otto.

Jack rolled off the bisected husk of the Divine Auric Drake and collapsed on the hull of the destroyer, gasping in heat so bad his hands felt blistered from gripping his controls.

A mecha's shadow fell over him.

No way Avalon could make it through that, no way no –

Otto's Epee, one-armed and with most of its chestplate punched into its chest, reached out its remaining hand. "Took you long enough," he said.

Jack stared at the outstretched hand. He started to reach for it.

He stopped.

"What the hell," he said, "was all that shit you said?"

Otto shrugged his mecha's shoulders. "I'll tell you when you're older."

"Dammit, Otto, this –"

"Is halfway to a victory," Otto said. "Can you get that piece of junk upright?"

"With one leg and half my thrusters?"

"Crap. That's going to make this display less impressive, but maybe the Feds will still see the better part of valor now that their golden boy is out for the count."

"Is he...?"

"Don't know," Otto said. "I'll step on his cockpit before we blast off from this hunk of junk."

Jack didn't want that, but he knew he couldn't stop it, either. "You think we're gonna win."

"Avalon is their symbol. I just broadcast that symbol admitting he was a hybrid freak –" Jack flinched at his once-and-current boss's words. "– and getting his ass kicked by you and me. Things were maybe forty-sixty before. I'll bet that little maneuver shifted them to fifty-fifty, and..."

Otto looked up from the destroyer's surface and grinned.

More compression tunnels were disgorging ships overhead, visible even through the ant-like cloud of mecha and the distorted space of the destroyer's shields.

"... and," Otto said smugly, "it looks like our reinforcements are right on time."

Jack stared up at the ship emerging from the largest of the compression tunnels. It was a true battleship, gleaming fresh and coppery and green: the colors of the Marchesses' United Shipping Magnate. Even the battlecruisers he'd seen were dwarfed by it. It was a space station in motion and gunports and shields and mecha. Twenty smaller vessels in similar livery emerged around it.

"That's –"

"Alarie's company," Otto said. "I'd say we can chock this one up for the good guys."

Jack thought he was going to puke again. If Otto was the lesser of two evils, it wasn't for lack of trying.

Then a new face appeared on Jack's main communications screen. Not Georg Marchess, as Otto expected, but Alarie herself. Jack saw Otto's frown and matched it.

"This is Alarie Wein Marchess," she said, her small voice ridiculously magnified by whatever com system she was using, "commanding the Marchess battleship Pacific Resolution and its battlegroup."

The hell kind of a name for a battleship was that, Jack wondered. Peace through superior firepower, maybe.

Alarie stared into the main screen. "All vessels and mecha," she began, her voice shaking. She paused, looked down for a second, then faced the screen again with a surprisingly nasty smile quirking up her mousy face. "Please be advised," she continued.

Otto whispered. "Oh. No. You little –"

Jack shot the oligarch a glance. His face had gone as white as its olive complexion allowed.

"We are here," Alarie finished, "to reinforce this police action by the Federal Navy."