Chapter Four - Mecha

The first time I piloted a mech I was eleven... maybe twelve? It was before I hit puberty, back when my parents were still alive.

My dad brought in this old junker, human made, from way out west. It wasn’t even a combat mech, but a construction model, meant to lift things and designed to ride on rails when it wasn’t thumping around.

Basically, the small, clumsy sort of mech with an open cockpit you’d see around shops and such.

Anyway, my dad set everything up for me. Cleaned the needles in whiskey and made me bite into a piece of wood. I thought it was all quite silly, all I wanted was to move the giant mech around. I think I ended up biting right through that piece of wood. Left big teeth marks in it that my dad was quite proud of.

Rusty was a lot harsher to pilot.

Mechs designed for combat didn’t have to go easy on their pilots. At least, that was how it seemed the systems for them were designed. It took a while to adjust everything so that it was just right for you. You couldn’t jump into someone else’s mech and take off without stumbling around like a drunkard.

The spike of pain through my head receded, like water being whisked away by the sun. My vision unfogged and I took a deep breath and stretched my neck. The piloting rig grabbing at my head moved with me, some bits of it clanking on the mounts above.

I still felt a little dizzy, but that would pass once I started moving.

My hands tightened on the controls and I moved my... Rusty’s right arm. It felt as if I’d grown a new limb, one that was just a bit out and ahead of me. I knew where it was though, just like I knew where my own hands and feet were without having to look.

I think it was called projected proprioception by the more learned sort. Most bounty hunters called it pilot’s sense. Rusty’s left arm, the gnomish one, felt like my hand if I slept on it. All tingly and a bit harder to pinpoint the location of, but still, it was good enough.

I looked out of the two mirrored panels before me and stared across desert and brush before I leaned up and pushed against Rusty’s foot-pedals.

The mecha rose up to its full height. I almost tripped forwards before pulling my arm out of the control glove and smacking the gyroscope just above and to the left of my head. It sent a wave of vertigo through me, but the thing got unstuck and it no longer felt like I was hanging backwards in the air.

Needed to replace that one of these days.

I closed my eyes and focused. Only one more system left to turn on. My thumb flicked out, pulled the top cover off a switch, then I clicked on Rusty’s vision.

Rusty’s eye opened. The world opened up ahead of me, in bright oranges with splashes of green. I could see the heat rising off the sand wherever the sun touched as reddish tendrils. The sky was a distant void, unseeably far.

The problem with mecha vision was that, while it allowed you to see things no man’s eye could see, it was never very good. I reopened my eyes and allowed the strange doubled vision to settle in. I could see farther from the periscopes ahead of me, my real eyes keener than Rusty’s.

Rusty wasn’t fancy. His eye had been outdated before I’d been born. But it worked.

I stretched in my seat, then spun the dial to make Rusty’s eye twist left and right. Nothing around. At least, no darker spots that would signal the presence of a goblin trying to sneak up on me.

“Alright ya old tin can, let’s go grab some stones. Gotta earn our keep.”

Rusty started to walk, weight shifting from side to side with every step. I listened to the hiss and clunk of each step for a while, just to make sure everything was working as it should. There was a lot you could learn if you shut up and listened. Or so I’d been told a time or two.

Nothing seemed to be out of order. Reaching up and over Rusty’s shoulder, I grabbed onto the handle of Rusty’s main gun, then tapped a release pedal with the back of my foot, letting the gun come free from the clamp holding it in place.

I had to time my steps not to throw Rusty’s gait off as I brought the gun out before me.

It was a real beauty. Twice as long as I was tall, and then a bit, with a hexagonal barrel and a scope mounted above it made of three folding bits of glass that would come up with a bit of pressure. The gun was designed to socket into Rusty’s wrist. With a press of Rusty’s fingers, I could tug the lever down and load in a new round.

Four rounds in the magazine. Each one was as big around as a dollar coin, and could punch a fist-sized hole through a plate of good steel as thick as your thumb was long.

The damned thing had cost me half a year’s wages, saved up and tucked in a sock. That was a lot of missed drinks. Still, it was worth it. Rusty could punch above his weight class, and that counted for a lot in my line of work.

We ate the land up as we walked.

Mechas weren’t fast, exactly. Each footfall was measured and precise. You didn’t run unless you had to. With legs as long as Rusty’s though, that still meant that a slow walk was as fast as a brisk jog.

The rocky valley where the goblins were holed up wasn’t so far that I couldn’t make it out within a few minutes. I leaned up, narrowed eyes looking through the periscope to try and spot anything.

A few little black blurs were wiggling around, somewhere past the heat-haze in the distance.

I brought Rusty’s rifle up, made sure all the hydraulics were connected properly, and spun the valve to send some fluid over to the scope.

The first two glass panes rose up and I brought the rifle up, aligning it with the periscope hole on Rusty’s face.

Three goblins, all of them scrounging around the bodies I’d left behind. A couple of dark blue vultures too, their red, sinewy necks twisting this way and that as they eyed the goblins scurrying over their next meals.

I considered what to do as I lowered the rifle. I only gave myself decent odds at hitting one of the goblins at that range. What about when I came closer?

Mecha were great against hardened targets, but against a few scrambling goblins? I didn’t want to get too close. I’d had a couple of goblins climb onto Rusty once. They’d bit and chewed through a couple of hoses before I could crush them. It wasn’t a mistake I intended to repeat.

So, the plan was simple. Move from cover to cover near the valley, take out any goblin I saw while moving in, then try to take out their own mecha before they had time to get it started.

Simple enough. I liked simple.

The goblins must have heard the thump of Rusty’s walk, because they looked up and started to scream and panic. They ran off, and the scavenger birds flapped over to their meals the moment they were gone.

I ignored the birds fighting over scraps of meat as I pressed Rusty to move a little faster.

There was one scenario that no one wanted to be caught in, and that was having to fight a mecha while on foot. Rusty didn’t have the thickest armour, but he could shrug off small arms fire without slowing down, and I doubted the goblins had anything that could slow me down.

They would soon learn what it was like to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

I couldn’t help the grin that tugged at my cheeks.

The vultures cawed and croaked as Rusty and I stomped past, some even carrying bits of their meals with them as they took off.

I slowed down as I arrived at the entrance to the valley. I couldn’t sight in while running. So, with Rusty’s rifle firmly secured, and everything running about as well as it could, I entered the valley and prepared to cull the rest of the goblins.