THE BUG EATERS

They moved the generator and then Phantom Soul into the back of the truck and secured them in place amongst its other cargo using ratchet straps. Kravitz and Rayli entered the truck’s cabin while Faina and Airam sat down in the back. Airam started an enthusiastic explanation of his plan only as the truck’s engine roared to life. She could smell the exhaust gas.

“There have been a few mechs stomping around Smoke Desert lately. A pilot serving the KA took down another from the DNA not too far from where we were hiding out. Using a scavenged radio that we bought from Crumb, we lucked into a good idea of where they are right now. They’re going to be heading from a small Forward Operating Base, where the pilot’s been resting up in the immediate aftermath of the fight, to a larger base in the northwest that’s capable of handling mech repairs. We’re 90% sure we’ll be able to intercept it while it’s on route.”

“Alright, and then what? You trip it up with Phantom Soul and we just hope it doesn’t blast us to pieces?”

“Uh, almost. We trip it up with Phantom Soul and then we blast it to pieces!”

Airam, with too much dramatic flourish, pulled a cloth covering away from a wooden crate. There were two MVMs on beds of straw, portable anti-tank missile systems most commonly referred to as ‘mums’. They were powerful weapons, but Faina remained skeptical.

“That most likely won’t be enough. Mums can probably hurt a mech, damage it a little bit, but if that’s your whole plan then I’ve just agreed to a suicide pact. There’s no guarantee we will be able to pierce a mech’s hull and completely take it out of action if we’re using anything short of plasma weapons.”

“Like that one?” Airam nodded towards Jazael's knife.

“Huh?”

“The energy knife. I saw it, I know what it is, and I know what it can do. You can slice through basically anything with one of those.”

“Nobody’s ever taken out a mech with a knife, Airam, that’s insane!”

“Yeah, but that’s only because they haven’t been able to get close enough. It won’t be hard to slice into the mech with that thing once we’ve knocked it over.”

Faina didn’t know what to say. She sat for a moment in stunned silence. With the energy knife she really could cut into the thinner sections of a mech’s hull if she got the chance, but the idea was still absurd. It wasn’t impossible, sure, but neither was the truck getting blown up before any of them even spotted the mech.

“Alright, it’s possible,” said Faina, “but you were planning this before you even had me and my knife on-board. What were you going to do?”

“Keep hitting it and hope for the best, but I promise that’s not as delusional as it sounds. They really don’t build mechs to counter what we’re about to pull. We just need to be fast and aggressive.”

“You’ve got to think through what you’re doing better than that. If we live, I’m going to make sure you’ve got a real plan next time.”

Airam only smiled in response. There was an arrogance in it. Faina wondered if the man she was looking at was really no better than Tulio, stubbornly putting everybody’s lives on the line, but she also couldn’t imagine the two of them being friends. Airam was too relaxed and Tulio too somber. Still, she supposed she’d have to introduce them if this worked out.

They stopped by the side of a stretch of highway where a number of other vehicles lay in ruin. Aside from its tires, their battered truck fit in fairly well. Anyone moving through the area at speed wouldn’t pay a moment of attention to them. It was a good place to stage an ambush from.

Waiting for the mech was agonising. There was no more conversation, just tense silence as they waited and watched the road through an opening in the back of the truck’s canvas tent. Faina half hoped that the mech wouldn’t come, that Airam got it wrong, that they would give up and drive her back to Lamplight where she would get drunk on Copper Street and forget that she ever agreed to something so reckless.

Taking down a mech was a terrible, terrible idea. What if Phantom Soul wasn’t as effective as this team believed it would be? What if the mech’s hull was thicker than they expected? What if it was followed by an escort of soldiers? What if they succeeded? Was Airam just thinking one step at a time or did he really have a vision for the future?

The ground rumbled. A large, gray shape came into view over the horizon, its hard metal edges shimmering with the light of the sun as they took form. It was tall and humanoid with guns for arms, one cannon and one powerful mech-scale heavy machine gun. Both were capable of tearing through armored tanks, let alone trucks like their one. Faina could hear the roar of its machinery growing louder. The monster was here and the plan, good or bad, was going into motion.

“Wait for my signal and then aim for the leftmost cannon using the mum,” Airam ordered.

He flipped a switch on the diesel generator and then used two hands to configure Phantom Soul at an impressive speed. It spluttered loudly. Faina could not follow his movements or tell the purpose of any of the various dials he was tuning, but he felt to her like the composer of an orchestra. When he was done, and it didn’t take him long, he hit a switch next to a datachip port with the word ‘WALL’ taped above it. The air in front of the mech shimmered and there followed a deafening crash.

Airam jerked one of the dials 90 degrees counterclockwise and Faina watched in awe as the mech was swept off its feet and onto its back in the blink of an eye. Airam then hit another port switch labelled ‘THREAD’ and spun the dials until the mech’s cockpit was covered with a cloud of whirling sand. The pilot would have no idea what just knocked them on their ass and now they would be struggling to make out anything at all through their viewfinder. They were blind!

“Now, Faina!”

Without that encouragement from Airam, Faina believed that she might have sat in stunned silence forever. She raised the MVM and fired it at the mech’s left arm. In sync, Airam fired the other MVM at the right arm. Explosions engulfed the mech, leaving its main weapons mangled and unusable.

“Let’s fucking go!” shouted Rayli excitedly as Faina realized she had already sped out of the truck and was towards the collapsed mech, calling on the others to follow her.

Rayli’s goggles were down and her long hair was now loose and blowing about in the wind. She was holding a huge breaching charge using both hands. She hastily stuck it onto the mech and pulled a tag, setting it off. It looked powerful, but it wasn’t enough on its own.

Faina jumped out of the truck and caught up with Rayli. She pulled Jazael’s energy knife from its sheath and hit the trigger to ignite its blade. The edge lit up bright blue. Rayli looked surprised, like she’d never seen a weapon of its kind in person before.

Stepping up onto the mech’s collapsed metal frame and crouching over the area damaged by Rayli’s breaching charge, Faina cut into it with the knife. It was effortless work. The metal offered no resistance to the plasma infused blade edge. It couldn’t. Only energy shielding stopped energy weapons.

Once the metal was loose, she and Rayli pulled on it to expose the mech’s interior.

A terrified pilot, a disheveled man with huge wild eyes, scrambled out of his seat and lunged towards her. Faina was caught off-guard.

She knew immediately that this pilot was a trained soldier who could handle himself in a fight even when separated from his mech. He grabbed her wrist with one hand and her bicep with the other, twisting her arm sharply to reverse the direction of her blade. Scrambling on top of her, pushing her over, he let his body go limp so that his weight would drive the knife into her chest.

She tried to push the trigger to disable the energy current in her knife, but she was too panicked. Even if she did manage to disable it, she’d be screwed. She was about to stab herself. The pilot’s crazed eyes bore into her soul. He knew these might be his last moments and was just trying to take her down with him.

Then the top of the pilot’s head disappeared with a red flash and a boot swiftly kicked him off of her.

“Well, shit,” Rayli said, the disgust plain in her voice.

Airam was standing with both of his BLAST-250s drawn, smoke trailing off from their barrels. He looked totally calm, almost like he was posing for a camera, with one leg on the highway and the other up on the collapsed mech. The sun turned the tips of his hair gold. For the first time Faina got a heroic impression from him. She wasn’t sure if it had always been there and she just hadn’t noticed before.

“And that’s that,” he said, matter of factly. “Everyone okay?”

“I’m not! That was so gross. You splattered the pilot’s brains all over the highway. I’m going to have nightmares about this for weeks,” replied Rayli.

“Ah, sorry. What I meant to say was, are you okay, Faina?”

Faina’s ears were ringing from the gunshot. She felt dizzy. It had been a chaotic couple of minutes. They had taken down a mech, she had very nearly died, and then someone else had. She turned off her knife and placed it in its sheath before she sat up and got her bearings. The dead pilot was still next to her, but she avoided looking at the body.

“That pilot… He’s dead. Was this always the plan?”

“If we could have taken the mech core and left him alive, I suppose we would have. It was never very likely though. Really, don’t sweat it, these pilots kill people like us all the time. Tormenting scavs is like their bread and butter. They’re scum, every single one of them.”

Faina was instantly reminded of Jazael’s rants. It disarmed her and made it easy for her to accept that Airam was right, even if she disliked how casually the killing of a human being was being treated.

“That went so well! Let’s do it again, I want revenge for Serdesh!” Rayli said, excitedly.

“Serdesh was killed by a mech pilot?” asked Faina.

“Yeah, like I said, they kill people like us all the time. We’re still thinking big here, but Airam says he’ll recognize the vehicle if and when he sees it, and revenge is going to be sweet.”

There had been no revenge for Jazael. The boy who shot him had been in a similar position to them, a scavenger who was scared and struggling and doing things that he didn’t want to do, and it was their fault much more than his that anybody had died. Faina would feel guilty about it for the rest of her life, even if the decision to jump the scavengers hadn’t been her own.

A mech pilot? That was different. There’s a power imbalance. It isn’t killing a peer with a similar story, or an equal with a similar struggle, it’s actually punching up for once. She still wasn’t excited about killing anyone, but she could understand why Airam and Rayli might feel gleeful about revenge.

Airam helped Faina to her feet. Rayli was behind him, already climbing into the mech. She was so full of energy that Faina was exhausted just looking at her.

“You two might want to step back!” Rayli shouted, as the downed mech began to roar back to life.

“Seriously?” gasped Faina.

When a mech is about to be breached, usual practice is for pilots to enter self-destruct codes that wipe the computer systems in order to prevent their technology from falling into enemy hands. This pilot must have been so panicked that he didn’t realise they were about to get inside until the last moment, when he went into full fight-or-flight mode, so he never bricked the mech or its activation key. AI copilot systems are also capable of initiating self-destruct, but it’s not unheard of for the AI to make mistakes or for pilots to bend the rules and switch them off in order to get some alone time.

“We didn’t just get a mech core, we got the whole damn mech!” Rayli’s voice rang out through its speaker system.

“I think our dreams just got a little grander,” Airam mused.

Even though Faina was still in shock, she couldn’t help but feel hopeful. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was becoming part of, but it was new and powerful. Scavengers taking down a mech was unheard of, and she had just seen it happen with her own eyes, she had even been part of it. Maybe scavengers were still scum as far as the rest of the world were concerned, but anything felt possible now.