Sunward

Maria

Date: mid-September, 2830

The sunlight was blinding, even when only reflected off the brown cliffs. Basalt as dark as any on Earth glittered brilliant gold. Maria's eyes squinted in the brightness, feeling searing heat on her face even through the reflective faceplate. Sight was impossible, ironically, because there was too much light.

Noontime on Mercury.

She turned away from the cliffs, toward the plains where the slightly greater visible area of black space provided some small relief from the searing sunlight. "Del," she said softly over the comm, staring at the tiny form of the young woman's Executioner, sitting on the lip of a crater several hundred meters distant.

"Ready."

"Icey," Maria said, glancing uphill, toward the peak of the crater protruding over the rim. A brown Gorgon, just another rock unless you knew what you were looking for, decorated the top of the peak.

"Yo," Icey replied, wiggling his Gorgon's ELFs at her.

Maria nodded once, satisfied, and turned to her own Apocalypse, a mottled brown like Icey's Gorgon, and climbed up to the crouched vehicle's cockpit. They'd better show up fast, she thought, as she checked the slowly rising temperature gauge on her console. All the liquid nitrogen and helium they could scrounge up would only buy them an hour in the heat of the swollen white sun.

"Contacts," Delithita was the first to call out. "Bearing three twenty degrees."

"Right out of the damned sun," Icey said with a soft curse.

"Prepare," Maria said, and released the stored battery power into her weaponry, a little bit at a time, charging first the four EM pulse cannon, then the bulbous heavy blasters hanging from the vehicle's massive shoulders. "Fire before I call I'll kill you myself."

"Just once I'll actually try it to see if you do," Icey said.

Maria raised an eyebrow. Perhaps her students were having doubts about her resolve? She flicked the EMPs to the side and fired a shot. In the distance Icey's Gorgon shot sparks off its shoulder and lurched.

"Maria, damnit--"

"Don't test me, and don't try my patience," Maria said softly. "Look north. Commence sensor sweeps." She looked down at her console, seeing her own sensors come alive as the Gorgon's active sensors came online.

"They saw that..." Del said, turning her comm system's transmitter down as far as it could go. Her voice was almost entirely obscured by the solar static. "They're changing course. Headed this way."

"Enumerate."

"I make three mids, probably Adjudicators, and three tanks. Bolos by the maneuverability curve."

"VLO, PTF," Maria snapped: visual lock-on, prepare to fire.

"Aye."

"Icey, retreat."

"Happy to oblige," he said. The Gorgon rose to its feet and slid down the hill, just as the Cybrids fired.

The brown hull, mottled and dented as it was, gained some additional camouflage in the form of burn marks. A railgun slug slammed into the vehicle's shoulder, nearly knocking it off the peak with sheer kinetic energy. Icey stopped and returned fire, a single pair of Shrikes. The green-spitting missiles arced over the rim of the crater, and back down to splash against the Adju's shields.

Icey hid his Gorgon against the inner crater rim, as the Cybrids closed in around him.

"Del, stand, approach, TLO Adju westmost, fire," Maria called out, and pressed the controls to fire her own weapons.

Her HUD blanked out as megawatts of electricity surged through the vehicle, releasing in an explosion of deadly energy. The westernmost Adjudicator shot sparks from its main hull, and as Maria swiveled her blasters in smooth arc even as she fired, the two green plasma orbs struck perfectly on the vehicle's now unprotected leg.

A bare tenth of a second later, a particle beam and railgun shot slammed through the vehicle's other leg. Twenty tons of metal came crashing down, shaking the Mercurian rock. A second later, the two severed legs fell inward to join the vehicle's main section.

Maria permitted herself a small smile before calculating the vectors for her next shot. "Comm jam," she said, pressing a control that would turn her active sensors into static generators. The comm system washed out completely. A moment later, Del's jammer also came on, and Maria had to turn her comm system off to avoid the deafening roar.

The other two Adjus were converging on her; she put all her vehicle's power into the engines and broke into a run, straight at the silver behemoths.

She raised an eyebrow as she saw the weapons the lead Adju was mounting: a pair of PBWs and a pair of captured human ELFs.

She said goodbye to her shields as the vehicle, now at knife range, opened up. Armor shrieked as energy violated it, and Maria felt a sickening lurch as her Apocalypse's right shoulder fell off.

Pulling back she spun clockwise to present her less-damaged side to the Adjus, swiveling her remaining three weapons and firing a few quick shots into its head, taking down the shields but doing no further damage.

Del was five hundred meters away, firing valiantly with her slow, lumbering vehicle, chipping away at the other Adjudicator, a more common twin-laser/railgun variety, with, unfortunately, heavier shields than the other. The Bolos climbed over the crater rim to harass Icey. They wouldn't last long, but neither would she. This ambush had failed.

She saw the flash of weapons in prefire and spun, catching the Adju's PBWs on her other shoulder instead of her cockpit. She narrowed her eyes, drove forward, rammed the Adju, and spun as she pulled backward, trying to run a backward circle around the taller vehicle.

A pair of railgun slugs severed her Apoc's legs, and it tumbled. She could see the railgun's barrel slide back to prefire, twitch slightly to aim directly at her cockpit--

And the Adjudicator rocked with the impact of half a dozen missiles and exploded in a massive fireball.

She blinked. An ELF arc slashed over the rim of the crater, and a Shrike blew a chunk off the crater rim. Where had the missiles come from?

She tried to activate her comm system, to call Delithita and ask her what had happened, but her comm system had gone the way of most of her other systems. Frustrated, she watched as Del dispatched the overloaded Adjudicator and stood over the rim of the crater, firing downward at the Bolos. Judging by the light show that painted the crater peak red, the Bolos exploded impressively.

Maria looked away, toward the plain--

She blinked, her eyes watering in the sun. Surely not--

A human Apocalypse stood silhouetted against the sun, black on white.

She blinked again, rubbed at her eyes to clear the black afterimages away, looked back.

The Apocalypse was gone.

-----

Date: mid-February, 2834

The tunnel walls trembled and the roar of shaking rock filled the tunnel for a moment, making Delithita jump. It was over in seconds though, and she breathed a sigh of relief, resting her chin in her hands and gazing down at the screen set into the desk.

Fantasma was back online, and the battle to hold off the Cybrids as the transports unloaded had taken its toll on her nerves, and Xenogears's as well, though she refused to admit it. "Inefficient," the icy woman told her when they returned from the battle. Del just turned away in disgust and stalked off down the corridor.

The handprints on the walls the residents kept reporting were no help either.

"Report," Del said over her portable commlink, knowing Xeno would answer instantly. She was reliable if annoying.

"Mag five point two mercquake, epicenter seventy kilometers northeast, depth fifteen meters, attributed to heating effects," came the reply before Del had even finished the word.

Mercury had three kinds of quakes: the rare volcanic action deep within the planet's metal core, the occasional meteorite impact, and the much more common cracking and buckling of the stone caused by thermal expansion. Mercury was rarely quiet in their quadrant.

"Del--"

Bang.

Del fell to her knees, scraping them on the hard stone, as a terrific shockwave coursed through the tunnel. "What the hell was that?"

"An impact, two hundred kilometers to the west," Xenogears reported.

Before the panicked calls could start, Del pressed a button on her commlink, patching the small device through to the colony's main intercom system. "Delithita to Fantasma residents," her voice reverberated down the stone corridor. "The impact you just felt was the result of a massive meteoritic impact several hundred kilometers away--" she paused as she considered the magnitude of impact needed to create such a shockwave. "There is nothing to worry about; it's over now. Please carry on with your business. Del out."

"An interesting estimate of the situation," Xenogears said dryly. "A meteoric impact of that magnitude would blast us a new Caloris... I cannot seem to patch through to our satellite, so I cannot get any readings from the region. Oddly, neither can I detect any ejecta as an impact like that would create."

"Theories?"

"Nothing I am familiar with could..." Xenogears went silent for a moment. "Whatever it is, our sensors are picking up Cybrid movement. They're going to investigate, it seems... the heavies we tagged awhile back are all setting course to the coordinates..."

"Do I need to come up there?"

"Not... that I can... there is a distress call being transmitted from the target coordinates!"

"Patch it--"

Xenogears being Xenogears had the transmission emanating from Del's speaker instantly. Static washed over an alarmed male voice. It took a moment for her to realize the static was not static but intrinsic to the transmission. "..ss.kkhhh...Ko'ah calling any... -man...ssssses in the...-a. ..sskkkhh...drive unit slaggedkkkhhsss...going to blow-ssss-timate six hours before...ssskkkrrrctor goes critical...sskkkhhh --sssistance required, detecting bogies inbound, my Herc is trapped--sskk please helppppkkkhhh--"

"I got an uplink to our satellite, it seems some large space vessel has crashed... vector analysis indicates an orbit..."

"Yes?" Del said impatiently.

"As near as I can determine, this vessel was accelerating on a straight-line path into the inner Solar system decelerating at ten gravs... pretty much hit Mercury by pure luck... I have to assume it's extrasolar."

"Extrasolar?"

"Yes, as in, 'from outside our solar system',"

"Xeno, I am fully aware..." Del stopped, shook her head, refusing to get into this again. "Look, it's two hundred kilometers away you said?"

"Two hundred forty-five point--"

"Extraneous data are inefficient," Del harassed. "Have you got the turbine boosting systems installed in those vehicles yet?"

"Affirmative; my Emancipator and Icey's Goad have had the modification."

"Excellent. Prepare. We're going to get those guys out."

"I should point out that with such limited firepower--"

"Save it."

The channel clicked off abruptly. Del broke into a run down the cross corridor, heading for the lift to the top level, where a tunnel from Ops led to the Banshee pad on top of the scarp, hidden beneath heaps of rocky rubble.

The lift shrieked as it slid along its not-too-well-lubricated track, passed through the second, construction level, to the mostly deserted first level. Her ears ringing from the noise, Del took off around the outside ring of the spiral to Ops.
Ops, as usual, was cluttered with strings of computer cable, flashing displays tossed haphazardly over every available surface and many unavailable ones, and speaker grills of every shape and size muttering with sporadic comm chatter among a blanket of solar static.

She ignored the debris, kicked a stack of damaged computer cores out of her path, and passed her hand around the doorframe to the tunnel. She felt no leaking air, so she slid it open, spun her body into the small space, and slammed the door behind her.

She climbed the 45-degree incline, glancing upward at the lights that formed a trail up the kilometer-long tunnel but provided little light. She sighed, thanking the low gravity, and climbed.

She came to the end of the tunnel several minutes later, breathing heavily. Opening the airlock she took a deep breath, and stabbed the main power control on the aft end of the black-painted Banshee, the only flier in Fantasma. Flames licked the stone beneath the flier's disk-shaped pads. Satisfied, Del clipped her suit helmet on and climbed into the waiting cockpit.

"Status report, Xeno?"

"In my Eman, standing by at the base of the scarp."

Del grunted, pressed the control to open the Banshee bay door, and shoved the stick forward. The Banshee slipped out into the blazing sunlight, absorbing it perfectly. She looked down, seeing Xeno's brown Eman with the white-paint X slashed across the nose, the massive vehicle seeming no more than a toy so far below.

"Heads up," Del said, and cut the engines.

Unimpeded by air resistance, the Banshee fell like a stone directly toward the Emancipator's stubby form. An instant before the basalt rock would have turned the flier into an ugly spot on the surface, she blasted the thrusters on full. Flames enveloped the Emancipator briefly as the Banshee stopped, just in time, the base ringing as it tapped the fusion cannon on top of the Herc.

"DAMNIT Del!" Xeno bellowed. The woman had a voice when she needed it.

"It was the most efficient way down," Del said sweetly. Xeno's disgusted growl sounded over the comm. "Let's get going. Heading two eight four, maximum speed. Charge the backup batteries."

"Understood," Xeno snapped, her voice even colder than usual. "You will provide air support?"

"Sure thing." Del checked the launchers for the Minion missiles, checked the feeding mechanisms linking the tubes to the overloaded ammo packs.

"Linking us to the satellite--"

"Xeno, you gotta have more sense than that!"

There was a pause. "Conceded," Xeno said tiredly. "No point shining a flashlight on us I suppose."

"Indeed," Del said, fingering the switch that controlled the Banshee's ECM gear. It would protect against missiles and active sensors, but anyone with a radio eye to the sky would pick her out as if she had a halo. "Let's hope we don't need to worry about it," she muttered, knowing it was a futile hope.

-----

The Banshee and the Eman below met its first Cybrid resistance an hour into the trip. Fortunately it was only a Bolo. Ghosts ate Bolos for breakfast, and this fragile vehicle died as quickly as most of the irritating patrol vehicles they'd met in their years on Mercury.

Del checked her sensors again, and gritted her teeth. "The force ahead is fanning out to surround the ship when they reach it. We're about to drive right into them. I'd like you to veer off east, avoid them, while I overfly and see what's going on."

"You'd like me to veer off," Xenogears said dryly. "I think I would like that as well. Toodles." The Emancipator swerved to the right, fell away behind her.

Del looked ahead. In the distance, tiny glints of silver marked the enemy position. She winced, counting the points of light. One, two, three, four, too many, she thought. Combat with them would be futile: she didn't have enough ammunition and Xeno did not have enough firepower. Even working together this was a battle they could not win.

Somewhere below...

His white-banded Apocalypse hidden in a crevasse, Razorback squinted into the black sky, where two tiny points of blue light marked the Banshee's exhaust. The Emancipator with its white slashed X had missed his position by less than fifty meters, close enough for him to feel the tremor of its footsteps.

He knelt by the knee of the Apocalypse, opened a panel, tinkered with the controls below, and snapped it shut. He glanced at the sun, then to the east where the Emancipator had gone.

He boarded his Apocalypse, bringing power in from the weapons to the engine, and took off at a dead run in pursuit of Xenogears's solitary Emancipator...

-----

Xenogears looked out the Emancipator's side window as a flash of silver light sparkled briefly against the horizon. Great, an incoming, she thought, calculating its path and deciding it was indeed on an intercept course.

Weapons up turbo active batteries patched into main grid--

A blaster bolt flew at her and she wrenched the Eman to the side, narrowly avoiding the green energy globe. Her eyes narrowed and locked on her target like laser sights, she turned the turret control bar and squeezed off a shot.

An EMP burst stuck the enemy and sparkled briefly against the shields. A moment later, the fusion cannon atop her Eman roared as it spat a massive golden globe of fire at the enemy vehicle.

The enemy Herc, no visible as a Goad, managed to avoid the fusion cannon burst, but not the three subsequent EMP shots she fired while waiting for the cannon to recharge. Sparkles decorated the ground below the Goad as systems short-circuited, throwing pinpoints of fire on the rocks.

The Goad turned to flee. Xenogears shook her head, and struck the turbo control.

Eman's engines whined as extra power was forced into them, and the stubby little vehicle began sprinting after the Goad. The pilotform inside would have known panic if it had been human: Xenogears came right up behind it, rammed it hard, and fired a double shot directly into the weak point of the lower leg. Sprinting at a hundred and forty kilometers per hour, the suddenly one-legged Goad tumbled, flew end-over-end for a few hundred meters, ripping itself apart. It came to rest a hundred meters in front of Xeno, and a moment later the breached reactor turned what little remained of the Goad into a mass of molten metal.

"Xeno, successful encounter, Goad, DNA," she reported crisply. The Do Not Acknowledge was unnecessary; Delithita knew better.

Her radar chimed softly and she glanced to the right, slowly an eyebrow when she saw what was approaching. For her, that was the equivalent of fainting with shock.

Approaching from portside aft was an Apocalypse.

"Xenogears to Apocalypse," she breathed into her comm system. "Who are you?"

The Apocalypse, like most of the Ghosts' vehicles, was brown, but considerably lighter. White bands wrapped around the legs, each with the green-and-orange symbol of the Antipode on them.

The Apocalypse was riddled with holes, though its visible weapons, two blasters and two heavy autocannon, were intact. In fact, they were in better condition than most of the Ghosts' equipment.

The Apocalypse matched course with her, slowly falling behind as she outdistanced it. She eased back on the throttle slightly.

The other vehicle's blasters powered up, and Xeno put full power to the shields. After a moment, she noticed that the blasters were not firing, but instead they were flashing with a pattern of short and long flashes.

Morse code? Xeno narrowed her blue eyes thoughtfully, as she translated the message.

HEARDISTRESCALALSOWILASISTYOUIFNEEDED.

Xeno turned her fusion cannon sideways and began pumping power into it, hoping she would not overload it.

UNDERSTOOD. IDENTIFY.

The reply came back a few seconds later.

IKRAZORBACKHAVENOCOMSYS.

UNDERSTOOD Xeno replied. PASSMEMATCHCOURSEATFIFTYMETERSFORTYDEGREESRELATIVEME.

A longer pause, then, as the Apocalypse obediently slipped into the indicated position, the retort came: NOTHETRUSTINGTYPEAREYOU.

Xeno did not dignify the comment with a reply. She watched the Apocalypse pass by, in front of her where it could not attack without her instantly seeing it, then hailed Delithita.

-----

Delithita called over the low-gain radio just before Xeno and the unfamiliar Razorback were about to encounter the right flank of the Cybrid force. "Who the hell is that?"

"Human. Unknown," Xeno responded.

"Where'd he--"

"Bad time. Later. Comm from ship?"

"Yes, weak though. Could barely receive. Ship's reactor about to blow. Occupants trying to free several HERCs. No contact down though."

"Noted. Further necessary info?"

Del closed the channel. Xeno nodded once, though logically there was no reason to do so.

If the ship's occupants were unable to get their vehicles out, they would be unable to save more than a handful of them (assuming there was more than a handful of them to begin with.) Their vehicles could only hold perhaps four passengers between them...

The Apocalypse would be able to hold another two or three though...

If he could be trusted.

The blaster on the Apocalypse began flashing: CONTACT325DEG2KLICKSADVISTURNSTARBORDARCAROUND.

Xenogears nodded. PROCEEDACCELERATEIFPOSSIBLE. The Apocalypse did speed up slightly in response.

The comm system crackled to life abruptly. "ssskkkhheactor will blow in tenkkkkzzrkkkrepeat ten minutes! kkkggssshhgot four vehicles free, sending the other two kkkggggon autopilotkkkgghhsssssskkkssssbrid force incoming, need backkkkkkkksssstil we can get out of the battle zonekkksssssfffkkkksss--"

Xenogears looked at the Apocalypse. The slow vehicle would never make it in time; she had to leave the other pilot behind. ADVISEPROCEEDINGMAXSPEEDTOCOORDS. LEAVEAREATOSOUTHANDIWILLMEETYOUAGAINAFTERWEGETTHOSEPILOTSOUTOFTHERE.

The response was immediate. NEGATIVWILNOTRUNWHILYOUGOFIGHTANDDIEALONE. THATISWHATHAPENEDTOME. Before Xenogears could type out a response, the Apocalypse arced to the left, heading directly for the rear of the Cybrid force.

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