THE FACTORY STORY
Retreat. The order stung.
Inside the silver chrome frame of his mech, Mirrorknight, Adexe Gallian angrily slammed his fist into the console. He had come to the front to make a difference. It was something he needed to do, not just for his comrades or for the people of Thorne Hill, but for himself. How long had it been since he had really accomplished anything?
It was a sick feeling to see yourself on propaganda posters, always looking ten or twenty years younger and a hell of a lot more muscular than you really were, while knowing you weren’t worth shit outside of them. Branding him a hero had just been convenient. He was, at least once, a good-looking guy with a good-looking mech, and he had at least been around for a lot of pivotal battles, but that was it. He had never truly changed the playing field and the aching in his joints was telling him that he was running out of time to.
He watched the feed from Mirrorknight’s forward optics through his main monitor. Fiery explosions tore through a row of tower blocks in the distance. Prefab concrete panels burst into pieces and exposed steel rebar twisted into Gordian shapes. The whole city would be panicking right now, trying to get away from the violence. Those buildings might not have even been evacuated. They had assured people a situation like this would never happen and it had, like a lot of things, just been a lie.
Command lied constantly, not just to the people on the ground, but even to ‘ace pilots’ like him. He knew this and yet every day he got up and chose to put his faith in whatever they told him anyway. War makes it necessary to control what information ends up where. War makes it necessary to aggrandize or downplay the truth. War makes it necessary to tell shameless, barefaced, and outright cruel lies.
The National Army dogs attacking Thorne Hill are chaotic and disorganized. Our restraint so far has been strategic. As soon as reinforcements arrive, among them the valiant Mechcommissar Adexe Gallian in the indomitable Mirrorknight, we will quickly break the siege and restore order. Stunned by the might of the People’s Liberation Movement, their lines will collapse, and we will push the fascists all the way back to the hostaged capital. Let them see our fury!
All bullshit. He had believed it because he wanted a chance to be the guy who gets to save the day. As soon as he arrived, it turned out he was just here to help cover the evacuation of military assets.
Adexe moved his mech forward. He marched at a brisk pace down the road and then turned the vehicle into a public park, crushing fences and foliage underfoot. Mechs as large as his weren’t intended for urban warfare, but this sort of damage was inconsequential during a crisis. As long as he didn’t turn any civilians into a black and red paste, he didn’t care what he stepped on.
After cutting through the park, it was only a short distance to the highway, and he’d already made up his mind. His pride would take too much of a hit if he just turned around and ran. He had to make the enemy hurt first, even if he wouldn’t be getting the heroic victory he had been promised. Everything else be damned, he would show them all what he was capable of.
On the highway, elevated above street level, a convoy of PLM transport trucks were being pursued by foreign Cascadia-supplied fighting vehicles with mounted turrets. One of the PLM trucks crashed into an abandoned civilian car and the others were forced to slow down even at the risk of getting shredded by the enemies chasing after them.
“Targets acquired,” said the copilot AI as the enemy vehicles were marked with blue outlines, the color of the enemy.
Adexe aimed and pulled the trigger of his machine gun joystick. Quick and easy. Fighting vehicles torn to shreds. Trucks given the opportunity to drive away unharmed.
That was something. He had taken some enemy lives, destroyed some expensive enemy hardware, and saved a few of his comrades. It still didn’t feel like enough. It was too effortless. He needed to keep going. He needed to make it count.
Continuing up the road, he flexed his fingers where they were aching and kept a close eye on everything around him. Traversing the urban jungle, you never knew where the next threat was going to come from. There could be enemies down any street. They might have had time to infiltrate a building and could well be on the rooftops above him with portable anti-armor weapons.
It was a good thing that Mirrorknight was agile. Heavy, like any mech, large and destructive, not really even fast, but agile. It looked and moved in many ways like a giant bionic man. Anyone who underestimated Adexe’s reaction times was in for a surprise too, even if they weren’t quite what they used to be.
Sure enough, as soon as a column of tanks came into view, he aimed. As soon as he could hit them, they were wiped. That was the power of mech-scale heavy machine guns, even against vehicles like that. But he wasn’t satisfied. He still needed more.
“We’ve left the suggested mission area. Will we withdraw?” asked the copilot system in a flat, synthetic tone.
Adexe ignored it. He’d spotted something to the left of the elevated highway. There was another mech on the ground below.
This newcomer was a sleek quadruped with track treads on complex pivot systems to act as feet. There was a large cannon on a swivel above its body, where the cockpit would be, and a light machine gun chattered underneath. It was painted in multi-scale camouflage, highly desaturated yellows and browns that worked as well against Thorne Hill’s sand-blasted concrete as it would work against much of Daybreak’s natural environment.
His body tensed up instinctively. Mech-to-mech fights were always terrifying encounters. As a pilot, you felt unkillable a lot of the time, but any other pilot could remind you that you weren’t. It was fine. He could still take it.
“We’re engaging the enemy mech,” he told the AI system.
Adexe was honestly unsure of whether letting it know his plans would improve its combat readiness or not. Part of him really hated having the thing with him at all. It was too bland and bureaucratic, only ever pointing out the obvious. He didn’t need an assistant. He worked fine alone.
The most important part of this fight was something that had to be settled quickly. He needed to close the distance enough that the enemy mech wouldn’t be able to use its cannon.
Adexe kicked down the pedals of Mirrorknight’s jump-jets, compressing the hydraulics in its legs, and then unleashed that energy with a daring leap from the highway overpass. Mid-air, he directed Mirrorknight in unsheathing its sword with the arm not attached to his HMG, then thumbed the ignition switch to send a thrum of red plasma coursing along the blade’s edge.
Red energy weapons were unusual. Striking. Socialist. And the visor on Mirrorknight’s face glowed the same color.
He swung the blade in an overhead cleave.
The quadruped reacted quickly. It skidded backwards across the asphalt, dodging. Mirrorknight’s sword sailed through the air in front of its target before leaving a gash in the road as the mech landed with a heavy thud. His spine reported the impact in painful detail. Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have noticed.
“Warning! Secondary contact detected on our rear,” said the AI, sounding as unbothered as ever.
Shit, thought Adexe.
A screen to the right of his primary showed camera feed from the rear optics. There was a second mech, a squat contorted silhouette creeping out from underneath the highway. A floodlight, in place of its face, burst into life.
The mech adjusted its posture once it had the room to, but still had a hunchback look to it. It wasn’t quite as tall as Mirrorknight, but it was much broader, and it was flanked by a pair of rotary cannons that immediately started spinning.
Surrounded. But Adexe had been told so many times that he was one of the best pilots out there. If there was an ounce of truth to that, he was confident he would win.
“Come on and show me what you’ve got,” he said, directed at the enemy but felt only by himself.
He fired on the quadruped in-front of him. Although he doubted his HMG would be enough to get through its hull, it would startle the pilot and might do some damage to its limbs.
He then spun around to swing his sword at the hunchback, successfully gouging through some of the armor on its chest.
Depleted-uranium bullets hit Mirrorknight like metal thunderclaps, denting and scraping away Mirrorknight’s silver chrome, but it would hold.
Adexe fired back at the hunchback, aiming for the area he had already struck with his sword. The attack tore into the weakened area and through the hunchback’s electronics.
Seemed like a kill. No time to confirm.
Mirrorknight took a cannon hit to the back. The mech stumbled forward and Adexe reacted by stabbing its energy sword into the ground for stability.
He let go of the sword and turned the mech around to face the quadruped again, activating his energy shield as he did so. Mirrorknight’s sword arm unleashed a giant disc of energy that shone with the shape of a red star. The crimson blaze echoed across the reflective surface of its chrome body.
The powerful shield effortlessly blocked the quadruped’s second cannon shot in its entirety, but Mirrorknight’s power core was working overtime. Adexe could hear pained whirring from the engine it was hooked up to, and its heat was bleeding into the cockpit.
He fired again at the quadruped, this time focusing his attacks on its cannon. If he could take that out of action, the odds would be stacked heavily in his favor.
It seemed like he’d done it. The enemy mech went into reverse again, speeding away like an insect running from a boot.
The quadruped was in retreat. It turned a corner and disappeared out of sight, but Adexe wasn’t about to let it off the hook. He set Mirrorknight into motion after it, chasing it down the side street.
He couldn’t see where it had gone, but there were enemy ground troops. As they were highlighted by the AI, he used his HMG to reduce them into limbs and clouds of blood. The rest scattered in panic.
With the street now empty, Adexe made the decision to fall back. It was better to confirm the kill on the hunchback than to chase the quadruped through unknown territory.
The hunchback’s metal carcass was still lying on the ground next to his sword. If the pilot had survived the attack earlier, they would have evacuated by now, but they were a much less valuable target than their vehicle. He pulled the sword out of the ground and began repeatedly slicing at the hunchback’s body until it was utterly shapeless. He made sure there was no mech left to salvage.
Now that was something.
Adexe sheathed Mirrorknight’s sword and used the free arm to climb back onto the elevated highway. A lot of other mechs, and most vehicles, had no way to get off the ground at all, but Mirrorknight really was a superior piece of engineering.
The moment of satisfaction was brief.
Something rocketed against the back of Mirrorknight’s leg, and something in its hydraulics system reacted by exploding violently. The mech toppled backwards and fell off the highway.
While his reflexes were sharp, there was nothing Adexe could do to break his fall except trust in his pilot harness. Mirrorknight hit the road with such force that all of its electronics felt the hit. Every screen and light around Adexe flickered in and out of life.
“Alert, we, you, iwey, uit. Elewey–” babbled the AI.
More explosions hit Mirrorknight, but Adexe couldn’t tell what they were or where they came from. His optics were dead. Everything went dead. The explosions stopped.
The cockpit was pitch black and boiling hot. Everything smelled burnt. Adexe wondered why not a single one of the emergency lights was coming on. And he wondered why it felt like the mech was still falling. Then he realized that his head was bleeding.
■
Adexe Gallian was down a mech, an eye, and an arm. Adexe Gallian was up several cybernetic replacements and a couple of shiny medals. The cybernetics were the best that the PLM had to offer, of course. His new arm was stronger than any human arm, and his new eye could see things no human eye could see, but he knew which he’d rather have. The medals meanwhile felt undeserved, even laughable.
After he’d lost consciousness, he’d been rescued by Comrade Nauzet in the fortress mech, Iron Giant. It had been too slow to catch up with him before he went down, but there weren’t many mechs in the entire world that were more heavily armored. Nauzet had shrugged off the enemy’s attacks, grabbed what was left of Mirrorknight with a winch tool, and then dragged it back to safety.
The thought of Iron Giant trying to traverse Thorne Hill sent a shudder down Adexe’s spine. The thing was ten meters tall and shaped like a boulder. It was not capable of moving precisely like Mirrorknight was. He was almost thankful that he had been blacked out during the rescue. He didn’t want to know how many buildings Nauzet had torn through just to get to him.
Despite all of that, it didn’t seem like Nauzet even liked him very much. He’d visited him once, in the hospital, but all he’d said between explaining the rescue and coming up with an excuse to leave was ‘looks like you really bit off more than you could chew’. Not wrong, but it made Adexe feel old. Obsolete.
StarTV spun it well.
“Mirrorknight and Iron Giant fought side-by-side in the Defence of Thorne Hill. Hordes of fascists and enemy mechs were repelled by the valiant duo while they secured a clean tactical withdrawal for the People’s Liberation Movement. Comrade Nauzet was seen visiting his friend Adexe Gallian in the hospital where he is expected to make a quick recovery from injuries sustained during the defence.”
Whatever.
Adexe really had made a quick recovery, at least physically, but he was still waiting on Mirrorknight’s. The mech hadn’t just been damaged superficially, most of its systems had been devastated beyond repair. Getting it back into fighting shape wouldn’t be quite as resource-intensive as building a new mech from scratch, which was incredibly laborious and expensive, but ‘quite’ was doing a lot of work. The rebuild would be very slow.
He desperately wanted to get back to front for the counterattack. Everyone knew the next major battle would be a tight one, and every day Mirrorknight was still split across two dozen parts factories was a day that Adexe wasn’t helping poke holes in DNA’s defences. He knew almost for certain that he’d be back too late to matter, but it was hard to accept.
Originally, his superiors had filled his free time with a calendar of ‘morale boosting’ events. They told him that while he waited for Mirrorknight to be repaired, he should be cutting ribbons, making speeches, and shaking hands with party members over glasses of whiskey. Adexe insisted that no, he needed real work to do. Command had compromised and sent him to shuffle papers around in factory offices, which was funnier than plenty of jokes. But it’s good for the workers to see the pilots, apparently. Good for them to see a hero filling out requisition forms.
Paper was used because of the brownouts. They had been affecting PLM territory since trouble on the northern front put the Incides Nuclear Power Plant at risk. Terrorists had hit it more than once. This meant shortages, it meant a power curfew, and it meant keeping physical records was important again.
Today, Adexe had been to a recycling plant and acquired the numbers for waste import. He had then gone to Factory Ercoli and Factory Hentz to make sure that the numbers for waste export matched the ones at the plant. In both cases they had fallen within acceptable ranges, although these ranges were broad enough, he supposed, to cover up a fair amount of mismanagement. If an issue was ever serious enough to actually get flagged, it would have to be pretty serious.
The last stop of the day was Factory Kirov, a place that made parts for large artillery, and he was making the journey on foot. Riverpoint’s huge factory sprawl was highly interconnected and well-planned, so any buildings that often dealt with one another tended to be close by. The road layout was also simple and direct, and there were numerous back-passages and service alleyways that could be used by anyone with the proper authentication.
Adexe looked up at the mountains which formed the backdrop of this whole area. Gray threads of smoke were rising off the mines. Those too were interconnected. Conveyors and elevators strung the ore down into the refineries, and from there into the transit yards and factories. It was infrastructure on top of infrastructure. So dense with industry that there was hardly any room to stop and breathe in the choked air.
There was efficiency to it. Everything went exactly where it needed to go without anyone having to argue or negotiate. The supply chains were written out in cold logic and then turned into steaming hot reality. There was also stagnation. Change still required bureaucrats, people with human flaws, to listen to requests and act on them. There were either never enough of those people or they just didn’t allocate the resources with equal efficiency.
At Factory Ercoli, for example, Adexe had been wondering if they really needed as much steel as they were drawing. He could easily picture a production line somewhere else in the sprawl sitting idle because a resource they needed was being hoarded by another factory just a few blocks over. With pieces of Mirrorknight out there somewhere, the thought frustrated him.
Adexe’s ‘assistant’ walked a half-step behind him, the way he always did. On occasion, being assigned an assistant was a way for the party, or at least someone within the party, to spy on you. Mennar didn’t seem competent enough to be a spy. He was a true mid-level bureaucrat through and through. It was visible in his spectacles and his slicked back hair. It was visible in how he wore his jumpsuit with all the buttons up. It was visible on his facial expressions and it was probably even inscribed on his bones.
Command probably just hadn’t expected Adexe to give a damn about an assignment this small and this unlikely to be useful. They believed that he would lose interest in a few days or a week and then kick back and let Mennar do all of the actual paperwork. Adexe was partly doing it to spite them, but it had now been two weeks and he was still checking every form himself.
Mennar limped on a metal prosthetic. His leg had been blown off by a foreign airstrike before he had reached military age. They’d never conscripted him, which probably suited him just fine, but they’d replaced his missing limb as cheaply as possible. Adexe wondered if Mennar resented his own, high-grade, prosthetics, but it didn’t seem likely. When they’d first met, he’d told Adexe that he was one of his heroes.
“Uh-huh,” Adexe had said, and he hadn’t thought about that interaction again until just now.
6AM start, 6PM end, with a long break in the middle. It was already early evening. Adexe was sick of the sepia-stained dust that seemed to coat every surface, every railing, and every window.
People still liked to claim that all of the concrete factories and walls would eventually be painted, although nobody could say by whom. In artwork, Riverpoint’s buildings were always shades of pastel blue, green, yellow, or pink, and they were always surrounded by trees, benches, and belts of grass and flowers. Nobody had gotten around to making this vision a reality. Understandable enough, given the war, that painting and decorating wasn’t the highest priority for the party. It was far from the biggest lie.
At least there was still the occasional mural. Factory Kirov was marked by one next to the main entrance. It depicted kids in Red Youth outfits smiling as they surveyed an idealized version of the factory sector from the nearby mountains, one that had all the promised pastels and trees. Most likely, there was no such viewing spot, but it was still a joyful image.
A soldier standing guard by the mural saluted Adexe as he and Mennar walked past. He stood stiff and proper.
Adexe opened the factory doors using his keycard and the pair stepped into the building’s foyer. Inside the low-roofed room was an open passage to a metal stairwell, another to the factory floor, and a door labeled ‘Admin’. They went straight for that one.
The office was cluttered, every surface covered with stacks of paper and loose junk like plastic bottles and half-eaten snack packets. A man, who had been reviewing a technical-looking manual with a confused look on his face, turned around from the desk with an embarrassed expression. He’d only been reading, but he made it look like they’d caught him in a vulnerable moment.
The man was overweight and old, a little more than Adexe on both those fronts. His chubby red fingers were attached to rough hands. Adexe could tell that this was someone who, like him, was probably feeling the strain of his job on his body. He lacked any obvious physical charisma, but probably commanded the respect of his colleagues through the depth of his experience. Maybe he felt like needing a manual for anything was a sign of incompetence.
“Ah, Mennar, here for the paperwork. And?” asked the man in the office, not recognizing Adexe.
“I’m Adexe Gallian. I’m the Chief Investigator today, keeping myself busy while Mirrorknight is being repaired. Mennar is acting as my assistant,” he said, standing up straight and sucking in his gut to try and offset the disappointment of his appearance.
“Oh? Yer Gallian? Ah, uh, it's an honor. I’ve uh, followed yer career. We all have. Sir. I’m the foreman here, sir.”
He was flustered and had clearly been expecting someone who looked a little, or a lot, different. Red crept up his already ruddy cheeks as he realized how casually he’d addressed one of the PLM’s ‘greatest heroes’. His eyes were also glancing back and forth at Adexe’s cybernetics. It gave the impression that he was uncomfortable with them. They’d never been on the posters, after all.
“No, it's an honor to meet you,” Adexe said, switching into a certain mode of speech that he had learned many, many years ago. “Workers like you and your people are the beating heart of Daybreak.”
“Mind if I announce yer being here? I promise nobody’ll get in yer way, but it’d probably make their week,” asked the foreman.
“Go ahead.”
“Arright.”
The foreman led Adexe and Mennar out of the office and onto the factory floor. There was a radio there that was blaring out electronic music at a ridiculous volume in order to be enjoyable for the laborers over the top of clunking machinery. The foreman had to stop and adjust the volume before he could make his speech. While he did that, Adexe eyed the slogans on the factory wall.
LABOR SHOWS YOUR LOVE FOR THE LAND.
He kind of liked that one. He believed it, or at least the spirit of it. It reminded him that they were all, in their own practice, fighting for the same thing, for the same country.
YOU MUST ARM YOURSELF WITH THE IMMORTAL VALOR OF CHAIRMAN HENTZ.
And that one, he wasn’t so sure about. He’d met the man. And it wasn’t as though he disliked him or didn’t respect him, but he’d seen enough of Idoran Hentz’s human flaws to understand what a message like this might be covering for. Idoran was someone who let a lot of ‘un-socialist’ behavior go without challenge in his party so long as those responsible for it buttered him up with the proper lip service.
“Everyone listen erp!” said the factory foreman to the workers, who’d already noticed him turning down their music. “We herve a guest today, so yer better be on yer best behavior. Mechcommissar Adexe Gallian’s here in arr factory.”
The foreman spoke loudly and proudly, which made his south-river accent stand out even more than it had initially. Every person in the room reacted and tried to catch a glimpse of Adexe. He watched the familiar but peculiar mix of amazement and disappointment wash across their faces. This was their hero, but not exactly as they had imagined him. Most of them still remembered to salute, a kind of programmed response.
Adexe had a programmed response of his own. He rattled off a few greetings and encouraging phrases. They came so reflexively to him that he didn’t really even register his own words. He wouldn’t be able to repeat what he said back to himself even a minute later. It was the result of thousands of interactions like it, thousands of interactions he could now hardly tell apart.
After that, the workers returned to their labors. Tools and machinery whirred through mechanisms and for methods Adexe could not decipher, but he could tell that everyone had their place, and he could pick out a few things he recognized. A metal arm that looked like a primitive version of a mech’s was holding a cylinder of red-hot steel. Further along, a hydraulic press was turning one of those cylinders into a giant metal disk. The work was, apparently, stellar. The factory floor was hot, loud, grimy, and unpleasant, but the plethora of certificates by the office door proudly boasted the fact that it always came in above quota and produced quality work.
It was a shame, then, that the office was in such a state. Adexe and Mennar re-entered it with disappointed faces. Not only were the tables messy, but none of the filing cabinets or folders had any legible markings. Everything was either unlabeled or it was labeled with some of the worst handwriting Adexe had ever seen.
“Excuse me,” said Mennar to the factory foreman. “Where are the waste requisition forms?”
“Ah, right, I’m sorry. They’re right here,” he said, gesturing at a loose pile of papers. “I really meant ter get around ter sorting them out better for yer, but it’s not really my strongest area.”
“This is going to take longer than expected,” Adexe muttered, as the foreman sheepishly exited the room.
The papers were in no particular order and many of them were totally irrelevant. It was as though the stack had fallen over and been hastily scooped up from the floor, or perhaps dredged up from a deep sea of bureaucratic waste. Aggregation was wrong, too. Whole categories had been logged that shouldn’t have been, and items that should have been counted together were instead listed individually. Untangling the mess meant cross-checking everything by hand. Moreover, coffee stains and handwritten corrections made everything very difficult to parse.
For the first time, Adexe thought that having Mennar around as his assistant was actually quite useful. He was able to read some of the less legible papers as he’d seen similar sloppy work before. He’d seen it on previous visits to this very factory, as a matter of fact. But it was still a lot of work, even with two people. As they pored over the papers, minutes bled together and became hours, and the evening quickly started to slip away.
One of the factory workers knocked briefly on the door and then let herself in without waiting. She seemed anxious.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m not trying to bother you or anything, I just thought you’d want to know, our shift just ended. The guys are going to be locking the front up tight when they leave, so you might want to, you know, call it a day,” she said.
“Thank you, comrade, but we’re not finished,” Adexe said. “I want to stay until everything’s done. If the front’s closed, we’ll just leave through the service tunnels in the back.”
“Well, that’s alright, sir. I’m happy to help. Just be careful with the power curfew and all, you could get stuck in the dark.”
“We’ll be alright.”
The worker left the room and, soon after, the loud machines and energetic music of the factory floor turned into deafening silence. Adexe and Mennar continued working until every data point was accounted for and written legibly in its proper place. Finished.
Not even two minutes later, after Mennar had scooped up their documents into a folder and they’d begun their walk across the factory floor to the back entrance, the lights went out.
“Oh, no,” said Mennar with tired frustration.
The darkness wasn’t a problem for Adexe. Without being asked, his right optic toggled into a simulated phosphor matrix, rendering the factory in cool blue monochrome. Every shadow lost its depth, revealing all of the factory’s rusted pipes and concrete crannies in clean high-contrast detail. He could see the room more clearly even than he had been able to with the lights on using his organic eye, and part of him resented that.
“Stick close, Mennar. I’ve got night vision.”
The pair crossed the factory floor and entered the service tunnels through the back door. Mennar stumbled behind Adexe, his prosthetic leg almost tripping him up once on a loose grate.
These passageways were part of the interconnected nature of the factory sector. They were everywhere and meant that maintenance workers and cleaners could easily move from one job to the next without needing to go back to street level and without getting in anyone else’s way. They were also wide enough for forklifts and burden carriers so long as they were kept clean of stray cargo and furniture.
Before getting far, Adexe noticed a bright light, blooming in his phosphor vision. He stopped to investigate.
Adexe assessed it with his organic eye. It was a bright green LED light, and just the one, small but powerful against the darkness around it. It cast its emerald glow over an otherwise unassuming steel door, and was attached to a keycard reader that hummed quietly with electric current.
“The curfew’s in effect, the power is out for the rest of this building and presumably every other one, so how is this keycard reader still running? It could be connected to an illegal power source.”
“I noticed that another time I was here,” said Mennar. “I reported it and they said it was nothing. It’s just residual electrical charge.”
“And what’s in there?” asked Adexe.
“Storage, I guess,” Mennar spoke hesitantly.
“So you don’t know.”
“No, sir, I don’t know for sure. They didn’t tell me and I don’t have a keycard to check anyway. It’s not one of my jobs to investigate buildings after dark or look for power grid anomalies.”
“My card will work. It does everywhere,” Adexe said with confidence.
“With all due respect sir, I’d rather we just went home. It’s late.”
“You can go home. I’m not going to stop you. But I’m going to take a look anyway.”
“Hey, we’re a team. If you stay, I have to stay.”
Adexe couldn’t spit on cooperation, but he didn’t want to affirm Mennar either. He just whipped out his keycard and swiped it through the reader. The locks on the door released and it slid open hands-free.
The room inside was very small and largely unadorned, but it was populated with two PLM soldiers. There was a young grunt standing with his submachine gun hanging loose on its strap, and another sitting behind a flimsy-looking wooden desk with a newspaper and a mug of coffee. A second door waited directly ahead, plain and unmarked, and Adexe started towards it without a word.
“Hey, you can’t be here!” barked the soldier with the gun.
“My authentication works, doesn’t it?” asked Adexe, surprised that anyone would dare to speak to him so rudely.
The other soldier, who had been sitting at the desk, stood up and shared a glance with his partner. The one with the gun held it tight. They both seemed very nervous, and it made Adexe suspicious that they were guarding something of significant importance. He could feel a tension building that he hadn’t felt since he was last in Mirrorknight.
“Look,” the soldier spoke again, trying to stay calm, “we both respect you a lot, sir, but you’re inviting a lot of trouble by being here.”
“Is that a threat? You’re well aware that I outrank you. I don’t know who you work under yet, but I probably outrank them too.
Mennar and I are investigating logistical anomalies in the area. Running power to this place post-curfew is certainly an anomaly. This means that if there’s anything going on down here, you’re not going to stop me from finding out what it is. I’m going in.”
“With all due respect sir, this isn’t the cowboy mech pilot fieldwork you’re used to, this is Internal Affairs. You can’t just do whatever you want here,” said the soldier, raising his gun. “So yes, sir, you can consider this a threat.”
“Hey, let’s back off,” said Mennar, worried. “I don’t know who these guys are, but we shouldn’t risk anything. Tomorrow, we’ll just ask the forem–”
Adexe, in one sharp and sudden movement, lashed out with his cybernetic right arm and grabbed the barrel of the soldier’s gun. The arm whirred as he used its full force to crush the weapon where he held it. Then, while pieces of the gun were still falling to the floor, he clocked the soldier in the face with a left hook.
The disarmed soldier stumbled back into the wall as Adexe drew his service pistol and turned to stare down the soldier behind the desk. He didn’t raise the gun. He didn’t need to. The soldier sat down back in his chair while his comrade clutched what seemed like a dislodged tooth.
“You pointed a gun at someone a hundred stations above you? Now I’m really curious about what you’ve got in here,” growled Adexe, feeling powerful for the first time since Mirrorknight went down.
“Oh, oh,” breathed Mennar. “That was a fucking gamble. They could have fucking killed us.”
Adexe had never heard Mennar swear before.
He took a heavy step forward and used his keycard for a second time. The pair advanced through the door, leaving the soldiers and their checkpoint behind. It opened straight into a set of dirty metal stairs that stretched down steeply below ground level. With Adexe leading, his eyes focused firmly on the path ahead, they began their descent without a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m getting old, Mennar, but I can still read people. They weren’t going to shoot someone who outranks them.”
“You’re assuming they’re loyal to the PLM. They could easily be smugglers, criminals, or, like, spies for the fascists.”
“I said that I can read people. I can read them and see their allegiance in their faces. I know they’re loyal to the PLM because they had that same little glare of disappointment everyone else has.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mennar, confused.
“Don’t worry about it,” replied Adexe, his fight-fueled rush of adrenaline suddenly giving way to the melancholy norm.
It was cold, despite Daybreak’s usual climate, and there was the ozone smell of air purifiers working overtime. Pilot lights lined the path down, but their orange glow provided only the bare minimum comfort to prevent tripping and falling. It wasn’t an unknown that rejected them, but one that felt like it was only conceding to their presence in order to grab them in its snare.
“Perhaps you should leave,” Adexe said, realizing that more danger was almost a given.
“No way,” said Mennar. “I’m here to the end.”
Adexe didn’t want to argue the point. He could reason out that he was taking a risk and that there were better, safer ways to approach whatever was going on here, but he felt himself sinking back into a familiar feeling. He had to keep pressing forward. He had to ‘make it count’. He didn’t even let himself question what that meant.
At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway. It had windows on both walls that made it immediately clear this was a suspended walkway over a cavernous hangar. The hangar itself was full of scaffolding, shipping containers, and crates that looked like they could contain weapons or ammunition.
And the hangar was full of mechs. Adexe was forced to a dead stop. He couldn’t speak.
“What is this?” asked Mennar. “Some kind of military stockpile? Are those mechs? Are those… finished mechs? Five of them? Sir?”
Adexe didn’t answer.
There was no way to see from here if they had power cores in them yet, but they definitely looked like finished mechs. They were using a variety of different presets and each one was armed slightly differently, equipped for a different role on the battlefield. Some were equipped for killing infantry, others for killing mechs. They all, however, had the PLM’s flag, a splash of red with a distinctive three-point star in gold, painted on their hulls.
Adexe breathed in and tried to process what he was seeing. They seemed to be, at the very least, PLM mechs. This wasn’t a secret counter-revolution. But mechs weren’t easy to produce. They had no signs of wear and tear, but there was still no way that these had all been constructed recently. So why hadn’t any of them been deployed? Why hadn’t he seen any of them at Thorne Hill? The PLM, according to public knowledge and including Mirrorknight, only had 21 mechs. If these mechs had been at Thorne Hill, things would have certainly gone differently. And if these mechs were being withheld from the front, from their victory, for any reason…
He pulled out his radio. He needed to talk to his superiors. It wasn’t working. He felt sick.
The door at the end of the hallway opened on its own, but there was no one there. It stayed open, inviting them deeper.
“This isn’t right,” Adexe said as he walked towards the ominous opening, in a dazed autopilot, and stepped through.
This room was some kind of lounge. It stood in stark contrast to the windowed walkway, the dim stairs, and the tiny room with the guards. The lighting was good, it was fairly spacious, and it had four curved couches arranged around a circular table in the middle of the room. Each wall had another door, indistinguishable from the one Adexe and Mennar had entered through, as well as tables, filing cabinets, and the occasional quaint desk ornament that looked like it had been stolen from a display case in his grandmother’s old home.
It struck Adexe that he had lost track of how deep underground he was and had no idea how large this facility might be. It certainly did not parallel any particular building on the surface above. Each direction could contain any amount of secret facility.
The door opposite him opened and a middle-aged man walked in holding a stainless steel mug. Instinctively, Adexe raised his pistol.
And his flashy new cybernetics just stopped working.
It was no spasm, no glitch, no one-off error. Adexe’s mechanical arm and eye went totally, instantly, dead. It was as though some backdoor failsafe had been initiated to disable them as soon as he had started to threaten the man. His pistol clattered to the floor and his arm fell heavy to his side. Unused to the dead weight, Adexe was off-balance. Suddenly unable to see in one eye, he almost fell.
“Adexe?” cried Mennar, who was still a few paces behind him.
He felt powerless. It didn’t matter that he was unharmed and that most of his body still worked. He had been reduced, at what seemed like someone else’s mere whim, to the state he had been in when he was pried out of Mirrorknight’s wreckage. Fat and fleshy with missing parts.
Footsteps behind him set off alarm bells in his head. He spun around and came face to face with the two guards from before. They had followed Adexe and Mennar down here and had their hands on their service pistols, but they seemed to be waiting for a signal from the man with the steel coffee mug before they drew them. Adexe turned back to him. This was clearly whoever was in charge.
Adexe could not judge what kind of person the man was just by looking at him. He took in every detail and yet found no purchase for his instincts. Whether it was fair or not, he tended to form first impressions very quickly from the way people looked, how they styled themselves, and their body language. They usually didn’t need to open their mouths before he had pegged them as smart or stupid, kind or cruel, humble or self-important, and this man was nothing.
It was disarming. The man’s long ears, deep philtrum, and dark eyes stuck out as unusual, but they didn’t seem to mean anything at all. When he smiled, it wasn’t friendly, but didn’t quite come across as antagonistic either. It was an intentional expression that somehow still carried no real implications. The rest of his body, clothed in a standard issue khaki jumpsuit with the party’s pin affixed neatly to its left breast pocket, remained completely still.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mechcommissar Adexe Gallian. Please take a seat on the couch and I’ll explain what sort of work we do here. Would you like something to drink? A biscuit? We have coffee blend no.6. It’s lovely.”
Without waiting for Adexe to respond, the man motioned in Mennar’s direction, angling his hand towards the door on his right. The two soldiers perfectly understood whatever he’d just ordered. They grabbed Mennar by the arms and hurriedly escorted him through, his folder full of papers still in his hands, leaving Adexe and the man alone.
“I imagine you have a few questions and, for you, I’m willing to answer them all,” said the ‘nothing’ man.
“What about Mennar?” asked Adexe, opting to remain standing for this confrontation.
“This conversation isn’t for him. It’s unfortunate, but he should never have stepped foot into this facility. It doesn’t just put us at risk, it puts the nation at risk.”
Adexe’s jaw tightened. He clenched one fist and glanced at the gun on the floor.
“There are five working mechs down here?” Adexe spat.
“There are five working mechs down here,” parroted the man.
“And what are they for? Why are you hoarding resources that the fatherland needs to survive? It’s treasonous.”
“Consider them a vital reserve force for crisis situations. It’s actually all very much for the fatherland.”
“Crisis situations? So where were they when we were getting torn to pieces at Thorne Hill?”
“When the Daybreak National Army was posturing emptily over an economic black hole.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” said the man, taking a measured sip of his drink. “It’s a policy. It’s a rational policy. Territory in Daybreak has been in ebb and flow for a century now, and history clearly shows that whatever they gain from us will, in time, be lost again. We’re focused on a bigger problem than where exactly our borders come to a stop. We’re focused on what happens within them, because that’s what really determines whether or not those borders will even exist tomorrow.”
“Whatever happened to serving the people? We let over a hundred thousand people fall into the clutches of the enemy. Those mechs could have been there, fighting with us, and they could have turned the tide of the battle.”
“Yes, but we can’t let people know that we had them built. If they are unleashed too early and co-opted for the broader purposes of the army, we won’t control who pilots them or what they do. The upper hand in the upcoming conflict will be lost. My comrades and I will, most reasonably, be executed. And then, as the traitors begin to tear this country apart, it too will die.”
“It’s deception! You’re letting people die on the front line with the belief that we’re doing everything we can, all of us, in order to push it forward. You’re lying to them,” Adexe said.
“Of course it’s lying, but consider that lies are often for the best. Our nation’s entire command structure is built around the tactical deployment of lies, and it’s no different for anyone else involved in this war. The positive side is that this lie actually helps our side. It will make sure our enemies never win. The PLM won’t, can’t, be torn apart by revisionists or eaten up by fascists and foreign armies.”
Adexe’s feet were hurting, and it was making it harder to process what the man was saying. He collapsed into one of the couches and rubbed the palm of his good hand across his face. The seat was comfortable, plush leather.
“All my life, I’ve strived for that, and I’ve been doing it on the front lines. I’ve been doing it where those mechs could have made a difference,” bemoaned Adexe.
“And what has it got you? What has it cost you?”
Adexe didn’t reply. His mechanical arm was still dangling limply at his side.
“This isn’t a self-serving mission, it’s even heroic in its own way. It’s a necessary part of the struggle,” continued the man. “We need people like you, true believers, to keep the big red star of socialism shining. To make sure our dear Chairman or a few bad apples within the party can’t come too close to spoiling it for everyone.”
“What would you have me do?” asked Adexe, his voice quieter than before.
“Keep our secrets. Enjoy our gifts. And be on the right side of things when things begin to fall apart and these mechs come out of hiding with your comrades, real comrades, inside them. I say ‘when’ because it isn’t an ‘if’. The rot has been growing for far too long and in too many places. I’m sure you’ve noticed it.”
“And then what?”
“And then, once the rot has been purged, I believe we can make things better. Put the right people in the right places. You’ll see it, and everyone else will see the role you played in making it happen. No sacrifice will have been in vain.”
“That’s just… fantasy.”
“You don’t need to believe it at all, but we do need you.”
Adexe didn’t believe that either, but he so wanted to. His shoulders sagged and he once again found himself unable to reply to the man.
“Just relax,” the man said in an oddly cheerful voice. “Your part here will be easy. We have a plan for every situation.”
A single gunshot echoed from the adjoining hallway.
■
A television in the corner of the room buzzed to life with a familiar melody, the dreamlike theremin sounds of the PLM’s interval signal. It was attached to the StarTV broadcast beginning, every day, at 4PM. Each note was long and strangely heart-wrenching, even though Adexe had heard them thousands of times before. They had been the same since his childhood.
“This is a StarTV broadcast.”
A logo appeared on the screen. It was the PLM’s star in bloody red, with its three points stretched out ambitiously beyond the edges of a blue silhouette of not just Daybreak, but of the whole continent. Adexe felt as though he could reach out to it and prick his finger on its sharp edges.
“This morning, the brave fighters of the People’s Liberation Movement heroically engaged the nationalists on the western front,” the anchor announced, his voice full of loud triumph. “Despite heavy casualties inflicted on enemy armor, sure to be felt by the fascists for a long time to come, Central Command wisely organized a reconsolidation of our forces to ensure maximum fighting potential for the next phase of the war.”
Another miserable result for everyone involved, dressed up as something worth lauding. He leaned back in his chair as the television began a fast scroll through a long list of honors. Names, of both the living and the dead, attached to medals of varying importance. It was all just words to him, too divorced from the reality of these soldiers and their lives to mean anything.
Adexe turned his eyes to his desk. There was a stack of logistics forms that he still needed to fill out, a notice about Mirrorknight, and a navy porcelain mug filled with freshly-brewed coffee. He pushed the forms to one side with his cybernetic arm and then opened the notice.
Mirrorknight was almost finished. The engineers were working on the finishing touches and making sure that every detail was absolutely perfect. Most of its parts were brand new. It was due to have cutting-edge weapons, a stylish interior with an upgraded cooling system, and an AI copilot who was supposedly tweaked for maximum compatibility with Adexe’s ‘unique’ psychological profile.
The coffee smelled good. He raised it to his lips. It was rich, dark, and smooth. That was something. It was coffee blend no.6.
The packaging had been just as plain as all the other blends sold in PLM territory and handed out in ration packs, but it was completely free of the usual wood chip taste that most people had convinced themselves was just normal for coffee. The difference was enormous, and yet anyone who caught a glimpse of the container without trying its contents for themselves would have no idea just how much better it was. Even so, there was still so much bitterness.