Chapter 27

“Diana Reilly is here. What should I do?”

Reading that, Jeff couldn't help but sigh. Just hours before, he received an email from Diana, or Dee as he knew her, telling him not to ruin her fun by giving spoilers to his students. The school she worked at was very different to Sam's. They didn't have any cores, so they ran school model rigs in maintenance mode; complete with a cord connecting the to the power grid.

As a result, the students there had much harsher learning conditions and rules in combat. If the cord was cut, then it was a loss. If a shot misses and damages the grounds, then they would spend time after class filling in the hole. If a shot missed and hit a building, they would have to pay for the damages. Without a shield to protect the buildings, there was a lot of incentive to learn precision shooting. With fear of having to fix holes, there was a stigma against explosive weapons. And out of despair at the lack of available power, energy weapons were seen as useless. As such it was a school that specialised in bullets.

It was somehow remarkable to Jeff that that school survives at all. Having been there to help out with their rig maintenance, he knew just how tightly wound everyone there was. Any kind of waste was like an affront to them, and if they had time to mess around then they had time to train. It was more like a military organisation than an educational one. That was actually the key to their survival. While they had never produced a pilot that made it to rank 1 in the country, the rank 2 spot had been held by one of theirs for a consistent 30 years. Despite that record, they had still never received a core to help with their training, and there was a decent reason for that; no one there had a DC above 45.

While a DC of 40 was considered the base level required for rig combat, Sam's school wouldn't accept anyone with less than 45. On pure statistics, there was almost no chance of someone with less than that to become professionals in the modern sport. That was unless they went to Dee's school. The current rank 2 had the abysmally low DC of 38, too low to even qualify for becoming a pilot. But since Dee's school didn't concern itself with DC and potential, it accepted anyone that was willing to put in an almost inhumane amount of work. While the government would love to implement the same training methods at Sam's school, the reality was that any country that tried it had their best pilots defect to more pleasant environments.

That school even made sure that its pilots respected their mechanists, and included classes in rig sciences that counted towards the initial subjects of a university degree. The reason they were chronically under-staffed was completely different to Sam's school; the mechanists were expected to work just as hard as the students. As such they ended up even more overworked, but didn't have the nice facilities to show for it. That was why they ended up using the same scam-like scholarship program. Though, they still had a marginally higher staff retention rate.

Not that he really had time to think about that, the past few months were hardly the vacation he had hoped for. He barely had time to count his winnings when an international incident sparked.

There was a hacker operating in their country that stole the designs for several high-performance rig armours, through social engineering and pivoting through several networks. He then sent the designs to some shady parts dealers who quickly produced their own cheap knock-offs that were just barely legally distinct enough to be sold. Even though that country's higher-ups, pressured by lobbyists, wanted to prosecute that hacker, the two countries didn't have any treaties about extradition or international prosecution.

In order to get the guy and seize the servers, they had to have them placed as the bet in a rig match. But to get Jeff's country to put that land, land in a city in the centre of the country, up as a bet, they had to offer nearly four times the amount of land, including a major solar farm. It was honestly a terrible deal, but they had to make a deal fast, or else the hacker could have destroyed the servers or sold the property. Once the land was a part of the deal, it could no longer be sold or changed in any way, until the end of the match, and doing so would be an international crime.

The terms of the match were set as a best of three matches, with each match being an armour brake match with three different pilots. That meant three professional level pilots from each country with two victories netting the overall victory.

While the junior league pilots had nothing to do with the matches, they were still required to go along as a show of support for their seniors. It was a tradition that came about when a professional pilot was involved in a sudden car crash before a match began, and they were able to avoid forfeiting due to a junior league pilot that happened to be in the crowd. But simply having to go to the hastily thrown together competition wasn't what caused Jeff's work. The fatal stupidity of another mechanist was to blame for that.

It was a well-known issue in the industry that before major matches, mechanists tended to get killed off to get an advantage. As such, going anywhere alone, using unguarded vehicles and other similar activities were avoided like a plague. As a side note, plagues also had to be avoided; a mechanist was once assassinated via a plague that was set loose in their hotel. But the main issue was that the mechanist for one of the pilots at the competition didn't follow that simple advice, and instead went to meet with their lover in a public park.

While they sat on a bench, a package delivery drone that was flying overhead suddenly malfunctioned, inexplicably, and dropped its delivery, that happened to contain a shipment of new lead weights for a home gym. The resulting blunt trauma meant that they needed a new mechanist to continue with the event. When the junior league team was asked to provide a replacement, Jeff drew the short straw. As in, they actually drew straws and Jeff lost. He then had a week to learn everything he could about his temporary partner.

Abby Parker was her name, and she was a 188cm tall pale skinned woman of Russian decent whose piercing blue eyes were as cold as winter. She kept her golden blond hair cropped short and her atmosphere could only be described as practical. It was an atmosphere that she had honed at a school which was her country's equivalent to Dee's school. On the surface, some people might think that she was similar to Sav, but Jeff could tell in an instant that they really didn't have much in common.

Abby's weapon of choice was a rig scale anti-material rifle with a 15cm diameter barrel, 4 meters long; a precision weapon with a heavy impact. She then topped that massive weapon off with a sharp and dense axe strapped to the end of the barrel. She was completely a power type, whose every action was slow and deadly. She also had a habit of disengaging and attacking from a distance, only entering a melee once her target had taken damage.

In terms of combat style, she and Sav were essentially opposites. They might even be described, somewhat clichéd, as two sides of the same coin.

He was too busy simply understanding his pilot and researching his opponent and didn't have time to watch the two matches before his own. Yet despite their preparation, their fight was never needed. The first two rounds were lost and it would have been pointless to do the third.

So despite not having actually participated in the event, Jeff was sent along with Abby and the other two losing pilots to an official reprimand, a session where they spend days in a dull room being lectured by economists and civil servants about the value of the land they lost and what could have been done with the land they would have won. It was actually fairly rare for official reprimands to be given, but the value of the opportunity meant there was a lot of political pressure to be publicly punished. If Jeff had been brave enough to watch television, he would have seen a far worse berating. The news needed someone to blame, so he, as a foreigner, and Abby, as a pilot with a low DC, received far more media attention then was entirely fair, despite not actually having the opportunity to fight.

The witch-hunt even led to the governing body for rig mechanist putting his licence under in an 'under-observation' status. That lit a fire deep inside him. That was the status given to someone suspected of having cheated or taken a fall, and even once the observation period was over, it would remain on his employment history for the rest of his life. A lot of pilots in the professional league would see that mark and not hire based solely on that, not wanting to risk association with cheating. The injustice made him want to immediately run out an expose every one of the body's dirty little secrets. If they wanted to mess around with his life then he'd mess up theirs!

But with a few drinks in his system he started to cool down. Bringing down the body wouldn't change a thing, only make his situation worse. The mark didn't really change his immediate situation much, anyway. He still had his contract with Sav, and her career was only just beginning. He still had many years before her retirement to work out what he would do next. On the other side of that, he would have to work out what to do once she retired.

Rig pilots, like most athletes, retired young. Rig piloting was a young person’s game and as the body and mind deteriorated, the chances of losing only increased. Rig mechanists however, only improved with age and experience, and as such had much longer careers, partnering with plenty of pilots. But Sav was Jeff's first pilot, and he would still need pilots after her to trust him. If a serious injury forced her to retire young, it would be almost impossible for him to continue on as a professional mechanist. If she retired young, he'd have to either work at a school or even find work in another field.

One thing was certain; he needed to get some revenge.

Rigs contained some of the most advanced programming ever developed by mankind. Compared to that, delivery drones were absolutely nothing. It was a common conspiracy theory that the security on them was so bad deliberately, to allow for government sanctioned assassinations. The reality was that it came down to a dispute between the manufacturers of the drones and the makers of the CPU used in the drones. The user agreement for the CPU prevented unofficial updates and that prevented the drone company from making security updates. The device was basically being held up for ransom, and the drone makers found that it was more cost effective that one or two drones simply failed to work from time to time.

Thus the assassinations were a result not a design. A story that a certain news media production company found less funny when a drone, coincidentally, lost control and crashed through the window during a meeting, over-heating, catching fire and burning a large server room, requiring the building be evacuated. When the drone was investigated the drone's components had, as always, erased its access history.

Since that event was entirely unrelated to Jeff, he returned home to his team's headquarters. There he was greeted with a lot of guilty looking faces that wouldn't make eye contact. As he went into his work space, he found the team manager waiting for him there.

“I'm sorry,” he started to say, though his face and tone seemed more like apathy and self-interest than remorse, like he was reading a script into a mirror and got distracted by a new mole, “Our team can't take the bad publicity of having you. As such we are buying out of the contract and finding a replacement. We wish you luck in your future employment. Please turn in your security pass on the way out and make no attempts at contacting Savannah Luca.”

He was fired. It was a fairly new contract with a reasonable buy out option, enough that he wouldn't need to work for a couple months even if he spent money wildly, but it also marked the end of his career. And that led to how he spent the remainder of his time before he received Dee and Sam's messages. He spent it looking for work. He tried at every professional and junior level pilot that advertised, throughout the world, even if it was a shortage of mechanist, the observation mark was still toxic.

While he looked for work, he returned to his home city back in the same country as Sam and Dee. A local rig parts store had connections with some illegal betting rings he used to use, and he was able to get some part time work there through them. The store was actually one of the many shops that made the cheap knock-offs for the hacker that got him into this mess; something that he found some dark humour in. That was actually one of the tasks that he found most rewarding. Taking someone's hard work and making a quick buck out of it, it somehow filled the pain he felt. He had spent decades working towards that job, and unavoidable politics brought it down around him. That burning rage that he held inside only seemed to quell when he inflicted that same pain on others, or when he drank.

Maybe the one good part to come from all of it was that his sleeping pattern became a lot healthier. It was almost like a coping mechanism, sleeping so he wouldn't have to think about what he was doing. He couldn't imagine what he would be like if he was like Sam and used Sleepless.

At the time Sam messaged him, Jeff was too busy to think about helping her. He had looked through other people's hacks and was starting to grow tired of that. He was busy because he was breaking into a server through a chain of unsecured phones. The company was tasked with designing Sara Campbell's new rig, and he didn't want to miss that chance.

For that reason, and Dee's request, he replied to her saying, “Sorry can't help you there.”