Chapter 30

“Congratulations on the victory, but I'm afraid that you've been played by Diana. The link isn't connected to that, but reading it will tell you about that weapon.”

With Sachiko needing medical attention, Sam hadn't noticed that the message arrived, and even if she had she wouldn't have had time to read through the link anyway. Even with her partner’s injury, she still had work piling up as a result of that match. Each of the rigs used needed to be maintained and reset, and the one that Sachiko used had been damaged to the extent that most other places would buy a new one, rather than trying to piece together the jigsaw of parts that had been dumped in the workshop. That mysterious weapon acted like a thousand hungry wolves whenever it hit something, if she hadn't had Jeff's warning about the invisible beam, the match probably would have been over in seconds. The damage cause by the beam even broke through the shield when it did hit. Or rather, just going by the energy consumption, it didn't seem like that shield even noticed it was there. The readings she took just indicated the presence of a strong magnetic field and a dense air pressure. If she had to reprogram the shield to block higher air-pressure, than it would act like a wall whenever the rig moved too quickly.

After a week of working of the shattered device, on top of her regular duties, she had finally caught up with her work. She could have done it much sooner by working at night, but she was still technically required to have Jared there. While he usually was fine with fudging the system and just saying he was supervising her, that wouldn't work if they were in different suburbs at the time. Unlike Sam, he needed to sleep. Instead she spent some of her free time looking into the files Jeff linked her, and soon found that a lot of her classmates had also seen them. They were all speculating about the validity of the rumoured next generation of rigs, and cooing over how trustworthy the sauce was. One thing was for certain, if the leak was legitimate, it wasn't obtained legally.

There hadn't been an actual generational increase in rig technology in Sam's lifetime, with the industry instead making small incremental improvements. From what she had learnt about it, the transition from second to third and third to fourth hadn't been particularly smooth, and they were accompanied by radical pushes between countries. During the second to third, four whole countries had been devoured by their neighbours in a series of bad bets by increasingly desperate leaders. If that kind of thing was going to happen again, then pilots would likely be pushed through their schooling faster and mechanists would be scooped up even before graduating.

Despite the company's official denial of the validity of the leaks, Sam was very confident that they were real. She had seen the evidence for herself. That energy weapon was included amongst the files, called by a temporary name 'Phase-Disruption Cannon'. When she read about the PDC's abilities, she was terrified that something like that had been used against Sachiko, more so that it had been a student pilot who had acquired it. A professional would have the skills to ensure that they wouldn't accidentally kill their opponent, but giving a kid such a destructive weapon was absolute madness. She couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of idiot sold it to him in the first place.

Aside from the wild speculation about the files, and the surprising new components that seemed to be dug out from them with each passing day, Sam also came to realise what Jeff had meant when he said that Diana had played her. Just to survive, Diana's school had to cut back on their expenses, including downsizing their staff. Since they had to get rid of at least one mechanist, and Diana was a convenient scapegoat for them, as the mechanist that was there during the match, she was quickly fired. Being fired, however, got her out of her contract early and by the very next day she had a job with a professional team in the neighbouring country. Considering how quick the turn-around was, Sam immediately knew that it had been planned out in advance. Diana said that Sam would do, she had meant that she would work as an opponent that would beat her. Something about being used like that rubbed Sam the wrong way; she couldn't feel like the victory was earned if the opponent wanted to lose.

For a while after that life flowed in a regular pattern and the hype over the leak died down. As a few months past and another block of exams passed by also, a new buzz started to fill the air. The Quadrennial Games were only a few days away, and Sam clutched the ticket in her hand with a kind of cramped grip that was a delicate balance between crushing it out of excitement and treating it like the most delicate of eggshells. A week before the previous exam, Sachiko's grandmother, the legendary creator herself, called Sachiko and told her their family's company was making an important announcement at the games and, as such, Sachiko and her mechanist were required to be there. With their time working together, Sachiko had become one of Sam's closest friends, and that friendship earned her a ticket to mechanist heaven.

Sam was leaving a few days prior to the event since Sachiko had to have her rig with her for whatever her family had planned and it was a lot slower transporting a rig than it was a person, especially with the safety inspections at each and every stop. No country wanted to risk accidental core detonation, even if there was basically no chance of that, and as such they made her go through the song and dance of demonstrating it was contained. Her final stop before reaching the rig capitol of the world was Punta Arenas in Chile. While it had been a quiet and relatively small city three generations prior, it had quickly expanded into a thriving mega-city with more rig related labs than anywhere else in the world. As the closest city to the stadium, it was only natural that its growth would be tied to the growth of rigs.

In a waiting area of the airport there, Sam could see the boxy frame of the mark one rig that Erin Kaya first showed off to the world, proudly on display. Unlike the modern rigs that had form fitting designs that sat over the body, the mk1 had a style that looked like boxes strapped to the limbs and chest, with a larger box strapped to the back that the pilot controlled it from. The most surprising part of it was how few of its parts were formless particle based. She had heard the stories that a lot of it was made by hand, but Sam had assumed that meant programmed. With how clunky it was, she almost couldn't believe that it had been as revolutionary as the invention of electricity.

While she sat there waiting for her next flight, she saw a familiar figure. Slim build, pale skin that was either bordering on or well past unhealthy, tawny brown hair in its natural messy state, as well as the industry standard lab coat; it was Jeff. She hadn't seen him since the tournament, and even though she later found out about the way he was fired, she hadn't heard where he was or what he had been up to. Feeling a playful desire to tease him, she stood up and sent him a message.

“Turn around!”