Over the course of the last seven months in the academy, Yuri’s planet-side mech training had covered several skills to effectively navigate around a battlefield. He knew how to use grids and maps to chart friends and target locations, and he found the z axis easy enough to pick up on the fly.
What he hadn’t practiced was navigating in a gravity-free environment. He didn’t have a feel for the subtle, high precision adjustments needed to maintain his position in the asteroid field, so he kept drifting into rocks and overcorrecting into more rocks.
Eventually, he realized it was foolish to even try and decided to land on the same asteroid the empty Gecko II mech rested on. At least that way, he wouldn’t lose track of it so easily.
He also wouldn’t need to dodge as many asteroids if he went with the gravitational flow, instead of against it. This idea wouldn’t have worked if the asteroid the enemy mech clung onto wasn’t so massive.
Yuri crashed more than landed on the back of the turning asteroid. The training Ajax face-planted into the crumbly, pock-marked surface, then the rest of the mech’s body followed.
Plenty of Earth-side combat drills had ingrained how to roll and crouch and kneel, and he was able to right the mech. Not wanting to simply drift away, Yuri tried to bury the mech’s left hand into the asteroid, by punching it.
WHAM! The dense space rock held together, but dust sprayed up the Ajax’s arm and temporarily clouded the basic viewfinder.
There was no sense of tactile sensation, at least not with the controls he had now, but he did feel slightly more stuck to the massive rock after he splayed the right hand’s fingers to anchor himself.
Then the waiting truly began.
It was surreal. For the first few hours, the newness and adrenaline kept Yuri’s mind awake. He was sure at any moment the Zard craft was bound to wake up, like a horror movie. He was ready for the jump scare, the next hack. He reflected on it and how truly terrifying it had been, to lose control and be confused and helpless.
Yuri didn’t want to be caught off-guard again, but after four hours, his attention started to wane. He pulled up an advanced maneuvers training ebook, and began to read. He didn’t understand much of it.
Adjusting for gravitational pull when firing was interesting, but he wondered if it applied to Laz weapons l, which fired energy particles instead of projectiles. Too bad there were no instructors around to ask right now.
During his hours of alone time, he also read some news feeds. Public media was all sensational garbage, but this machine had been seeded with internal FTA military bulletins that rank-and-file pilots were expected to keep up on. They must have done it when they upgraded his equipment.
The private bulletins were a collection of selective, covert briefings that could be expanded with more details. Yuri read snippets, including:
Snitch discovered at Inter-Planetary Peace Committee. Zard mobilizing deep-space artillery from Zilla to unknown destination. Radical merc group captured with Durok funding. Raiding parties and skirmishes near Circadia.
These headlines were pulled by the Niobrara deep space data link, and were cached by his mech when it was connected to the ULSS Niobrara’s network.
Although his Ajax didn’t have a DSDL, a few new bulletins popped up every few minutes. The more he read, the more he learned how fragile the Millenium Pact treaty actually was.
Yuri had been raised to believe the decades-long peace between empires was real. He had heard rumors around the academy that tensions between FTA, Zard and Durok Empires were rising, but these bulletins left no doubt.
If Boone was there, he would have told the cadet to filter by priority, and that anything under “high priority” could be ignored, unless it was in your current sector. Maybe that would have made Yuri feel better. But it didn’t change the fact that peace was held on a knife’s edge.
Another hour passed. Yuri considered removing his helmet, but decided against it. No reason to tempt fate.
It was only his first real mission with the FTA, and incredibly, he was working with a highly selective Counter Intelligence unit. He didn’t want to take any chances. He wanted to make a good impression. But the helmet was still very new and uncomfortable.
In his planet-side training, he could’ve done most of the mech drills in his underwear. The units were old and leaky, but they had AC. In contrast, space was cold and quiet.
A chirp echoed through the cabin and Yuri felt his wrist vibrate. It was a comms link message from Boone. To get to Yuri, the message first had to route through a nearby deep-space satellite, or perhaps directly to the Niobrara itself, before it could be re-routed back to Yuri’s Ajax, and then to Yuri’s wrist transmitter.
All that took quite a bit of time. Yuri looked at the sent time and saw the message had taken 20 minutes to arrive.
Although slow, these messages were an incredibly secure form of communication. It had been years since the last report of a military-grade encryption algorithm being broken. The superpowers of the universe were evenly matched when it came to encryption.
Voice comms in mech combat were a completely different story. Most mechs were equipped with hyper-sensitive directional listening devices that could hear exactly what was being said in another cockpit, even in space. There was usually some distortion, but the technology was so widely used, combatants of all sides assumed they were always being listened in on.
Unlike voice comms, text transmissions could be trusted completely. Perhaps the only way to read an encrypted message was to outright control the sender or receiver. The Niobrara could probably read anything coming through its network too, but that was because the vessel logged all official communications.
Yuri quickly tapped the message icon and read it, the hairs on the back of his head tingling with excitement.
Boone: Haven’t found the scaly bastard yet. No sign of him on or off colony. Waiting to hear back from Kenshi. Are you good to stay out there a few more hours?
Yuri replied quickly.
Yuri: Yes, just bored. Have food and water for another 24 hours. Oxygen too.
20 minutes passed before another message from Boone surprised him.
Boone: Good, sit tight for now. Kenshi hasn’t found anything either. Going to try some creative surveillance. Will message again in 4 hours. Boone out.
“Boone out” sounded like his way of saying “don’t message me again, kid.” Yuri hoped he hadn’t said something wrong. Maybe the part about being bored had annoyed the sergeant. Yuri made a mental note to try and be even more serious from now on.
…
Another 14 hours passed. Yuri slept with his mech’s carbine pointed straight at the Zard vessel. He had dimmed the screens and disabled the wake-up alarm that would trigger if his heartbeat slowed. He had spent his time reading, eating, and checking his transmitter.
Boone had kept in touch, but the FTA operatives hadn’t found anything new on the colony. Luckily, Cpt. Octavian had secured the blockade quickly, so they weren’t worried about their fugitive escaping the colony, if he was still there. But other than that, there was no real news.
It seemed like they really would be here for weeks. Eventually, word would spread through the colony about the blockade, and the Zard hacker would bury himself as deep as possible to avoid being caught, knowing he’d been followed all this way.
They had been hoping to catch him out in the open, but it seemed the Counter Intelligence unit was losing their window of opportunity. Soon, there’d be no point for Yuri to keep waiting. He’d destroy the Zard mech and then do something else. Finally.
Right now, however, he was stuck out there.
Just empty space, stars and asteroids. And time. Lots of time to kill. Yuri sat in his mech, completely knocked out. His feet were up on the console, his head and helmet leaned against the wall beside him, and his arms were folded over his chest for warmth. He was dreaming of warm sands and gulf waters when something disturbed his slumber.
In the corner of the viewfinder, there was a small, yellow, junker pod ship facing his direction. Suddenly, its flood lights flashed across the cabin. When the boy realized he was staring at an unknown vessel, he panicked.
Yuri pointed his gun at the small craft and barked out an order over an open comms channel:
“Yellow ship! Stay where you are and drop the lights!”
The unknown pod ship complied, then returned his hail.
“Ope! Sorry about that! Thought you and that other mech were worth scrapping. I’ll just be leaving now.” A voice responded. She sounded like a young woman.
The other craft began to turn around, but Yuri interrupted:
“Stay there or I’ll shoot!” The cadet panicked through the mic.
The yellow pod stopped mid-turn. Its two manipulator arms rose slowly over its head, miming a hold-up pose. Even slower still, it turned back to face Yuri’s mech.
“Easy now, I’m just a scrapper. I don’t have any money onboard. But you can have my scrap. Haven’t really collected much yet.” She said.
“Don’t move.” The cadet replied.
Yuri frantically checked his transmitter. He wanted to ask Boone what to do, but it was impossible. It would be twenty minutes at least for the reply.
She seemed like a normal civilian, but why was she out here? How long had she been out here? Who was she?
“What’s your name?” Yuri finally asked.
“Janet, what’s yours?” She answered.
“Tell me your last name too.” He said, feeling completely lost and making up the protocol as he went along.
“Wilder, and my scavver code is 101238-B. Want my mother’s maiden name too?” She mocked.
“Why are you out here?” Yuri asked.
“I told you, scaving for junk. Gotta say, this is the most conversation I’ve had on the job in about a year.”
“Is anyone else in that ship with you?” Yuri thought she might be ferrying the Zard back to his mech. That or she really was just a scavver.
“There’s only enough room for me in here.” She replied.
“Can I search your vessel?” He asked.
“Please don’t! I’ll die if you open that door!” Janet pleaded, making Yuri even more suspicious.
“I don’t have PLS on, I don’t own any.” She added.
“That’s convenient.” Yuri scoffed.
“And true! Please, you can follow me back to the colony and search my ship there if you have to, just not here!” She begged again.
“We won’t get into the colony. There’s a blockade. Hey wait a second, how did you get out here?” Yuri wondered aloud.
“There’s no blockade on Rocco, not since I was there last. Takes almost a full day to get out this far. My yellow submarine is pretty slow.”
Yuri was stumped. He was getting nowhere with this interrogation. Somehow, he was certain she was playing dumb. No way was this a coincidence. But he couldn’t think of a reason to detain her any longer. He didn’t have any proof, and his inexperience told him he needed to be sure before detaining a civilian. They sat in silence for a while longer, until Janet spoke again.
“… can I go now, mystery spaceman?”
Yuri sat there, staring at the monitor, hoping the right words would come to him. He waited a short eternity before he gave up.
“You can go. I won’t hurt you. Don’t tell anyone I’m out here.” He replied, defeated.
“My lips are sealed! See ya!” The strange girl replied.
Her bright yellow scaving rig, with scratches and dings and a long, solitary crack running down the length of the glass front window, pulled back, spun around and fired up its conventional engines. Its thrusters fired up and carried her away, a lone yellow bubble in an ink pool abyss.
Yuri opened his home directory to search for the recording of the conversation they’d just had.
All voice comms running through a transmitter were recorded and later downloaded when a mech reconnected with the FTA’s internal network, but a pilot could still access them while they were stored locally.
The boy rubbed his temples and listened closely, then he typed out a transmitter message to Boone:
Yuri: Scavenger Janet Wilder, Id 101238-B approached the mechs. I Held her at gunpoint. She claimed to be scavving, and hadn’t heard about the blockade. I Released her. Please advise.
He sent the message, and wondered if he’d said enough. An accountant’s anxiety crept over him and scratching the back of his head, he wrote more.
Yuri: She flew a single-seater pod. Yellow. Two articulating arms. Carried no salvage.
It took Boone about 20 min to reply.
Boone: Det the mech. Pursue and apprehend her. Watch her heading. Find out if she was going back to the colony or not. We’ll pick you both up in the docking bays. No kill.
There was no ambiguity anymore. Yuri fired up his engines and took off, diving between a pair of large asteroids, and exiting the belt. From 500 meters away, he fired at the Zard mech until it exploded in a huge fireball that was snuffed out as quickly as it bloomed.
The cadet turned his mech towards the colony. One of the deep space essentials he’d read about during his previous study session was called “sniffing” which used the onboard geiger counter to trace recently discharged ambient radioactive particles to follow an untracked target. This was technically one of the ways the nav system already tracked targets, but apparently, pilots could manually do this too.
Yuri turned up the volume on the geiger counter and began flying slowly towards the colony, but listened intently for the geiger counter clicks. He zigged and zagged, hoping to pick up a trace, and finally did. It was faint at first, but as he got closer and closer, the clicks came faster and steadier.
He was flying for about 11 minutes before a blip appeared on his navbar. It was the standard tri-dot triangle for an “Unknown” heat signature. FTA mechs were specially calibrated to search for larger heat signatures like tanks, aircraft, and other mechs. By default, the tri-dot triangle was used for unknown signatures, and normal hollow triangles (colored white or red) were used for friends and foes alike.
Janet’s banana-boat scav pod was going as fast as its conventional fission reactor could haul it in the direction of the colony, which relative to Yuri’s mech, was quite slow.
It was obvious she hadn’t noticed him yet, otherwise she probably would’ve said something over an open channel, like the first time he discovered her. Her ship sensors were probably only forward mounted, with limited range, to save on cost.
Yuri eased off the throttle. He hid behind, in Janet’s radioactive wake and followed her for a while. She was definitely moving towards the colony. He followed her for 10 minutes to be sure. They were moving at a snail’s pace compared to his mech’s normal speed. Her fission reactor was smaller and dirtier than most commercial operations would allow. The craft had undoubtedly been sold and resold many times.
Finally, he decided to hail her on an open channel:
“Janet Wilder, please stop your ship.” Yuri said, leaning forward in his seat.
“You again? Is this gonna be a thing now? Could we just skip to the part where you let me go?” She said, slowing and eventually halting her craft.
Yuri didn’t answer her and instead typed the following into his terminal:
vwfr grapple -f
Then moved the viewfinder to focus on the smaller craft.
“Last time I checked, free space didn’t have speed limits. Is that why you pulled me over, officer?” Annoyance was clear in her tone.
Yuri hit the enter key, and a grappling hook fired from his mech and hit her craft. The banana-colored pod tried to fire up its engines to wiggle free, but the grapple line retracted slowly until the Ajax mech could grasp the vessel in its hands. He had caught her.
“Hey you fucking creep! Let me go!” Janet yelled.
“Janet Wilder, I am placing you under arrest on behalf of the FTA. We’re going to Rocco 2 where you will be questioned. Please do not resist.” Yuri tried to sound as professional as possible, but he had no idea the exact statute to cite or what her rights as a citizen were.
“Listen, you 12-year-old little shit! You can’t arrest me! I haven’t done anything illegal! Let me go, you creepy little weasel punk—” Yuri cut her off by silencing the comm channel on his side.
The two of them floated in space for a moment before Yuri fired up his rockets and flew off towards Rocco 2. He swore he could feel the faint shaking of the pod within his mech’s grasp, as if Janet was bouncing and stomping around inside trying to dislodge it.
It took them about four hours to reach the mining colony. On the way there, the raw acceleration had rattled-off one of the scav pod’s arms. Yuri chalked it up to a lack of regular maintenance and scoffed.
Rocco 2 was a huge, multi-tenant hex-dome installation built into the surface of a giant asteroid. From it, extended in a long line, was an enclosed, razor-straight corridor with ships and scav pods docked on either side. That was the port.
A few motionless freighters hung around, undocked, evidently delayed by the blockade. The colony itself was contained within five massive plasti-fabric domes on the asteroid, while the port stretched its long titanium arm into pure empty space.
Many different vessels were docked. There were plump Eggs-Bella tankers, stout Cinnamon Whale haulers, and even one extra-long and pointy decommissioned FTA Sequoia-class lancer. Between those larger crafts were hundreds of smaller scav pods, mining rigs, and transport vessels, closer in size to Janet’s small banana-colored pod.
All those vessels were lined up in two rows on either side of the port corridor, but none (save the old lancer) were as large as the Niobrara. The vast majority could only hold 1-3 people each. These small vessels were like streams and tributaries in the grand river of resource extraction that space mining had become. It was one of the most profitable industries in the universal economy, for a number of reasons.
With fusion energy creating massive power surpluses for all three space-fairing empires, the policy focus had shifted to matter acquisition. Getting fusible material was a huge priority for leaders across the galaxy, but no one wants to burn up their own planetary reserves. So corporations formed to extract unclaimed resources from space.
As space mining profits soared, these consequential and powerful mining companies became massively corrupt. They escaped regulation for a time, but eventually, the FTA waged a successful war against these corporations. But instead of fully decimating the revolting companies, public officials mandated extreme regime changes. Most of the mining companies were completely unionized, creating impenetrably strong labor coalitions.
Today, older colonies like Rocco-2 are joint operations between these unions. But Rocco-2 is essentially a backwater. The estimated fusible resources in the nearby belt are dwindling, and as such, the colony is going bankrupt. Losing the mining contract with the FTA is only the most recent blow in a long saga of decay, stretching back to the corporate mining wars.
At least, that’s what the briefing doc said when Yuri read it earlier.
Yuri spied Boone’s and Kenshi’s mechs sitting on the far end of the port, with a few empty slots beyond them. They had probably been some of the last to enter the colony. Yuri halted his mech and sent a message to Boone, detailing his progress.
Yuri: I have arrived with Janet. We’re docking near your mechs.
The cadet then moved towards the stall next to Kenshi’s salmon-pink machine. As Yuri pulled into the stall, he was hailed on an open channel:
“Unknown craft, you are forbidden to dock here. Please leave, or wait until the blockade ends in—” The voice was interrupted.
“HELP! PLEASE HELP ME! I’M BEING KIDNAPPED!!! My name is Janet Wilder! I work for Anthros Mining Union! My scav code is 101238-B! HELP ME!” Janet shrieked.
In the background of Janet’s squeeling, Yuri could hear some strange noises coming from the colony controller’s mic:
“Hey, you can’t be in here, leave— AGH! RAAAGH! OOF!”
Then, there was a sudden silence. Janet and Yuri both waited for a response from the colony.
“Hey there kid. You’re cleared to dock. Kenshi will be nearby to help with your pickup.” Yuri recognized Boone’s voice coming through the controller’s mic.
“What happened to that other guy? Who are you!? Are you with him!?” Janet shrieked.
Yuri checked the command for docking using the following command:
fbasic -h
Using the help documentation as a guide, he tried a few combinations but finally found on the following:
grapple target | fbasic dock -f -y -n
After entering that command, the scavver’s pod extended a docking tunnel made of fabric and metal tubing towards the colony’s docking door. Yuri had manipulated Janet’s machine into attempting to dock. It missed the connection points and rested against the wall of the port. A few error messages appeared in Yuri’s terminal:
Error: #1039 Please try again. One or more lock points misaligned. Retract with ‘fbasic undock’. Error: Leaks detected! Error: Leaks detected! Error: Leaks detected!
At first, Yuri didn’t know how to handle this. It took him a few minutes to find the error code in the help documentation, but when he did, he realized that Janet’s craft wasn’t capable of auto adjusting to match the dock inserts, due to his mech holding it in place.
From the docs, it said it was possible to leave the dock tunnel extended, and to try to manually manipulate it into place. To do that, he’d need to leave his mech and attach the lock points by hand.
The cadet decided to try to manually align the tunnel. He powered down his mech, double checked his helmet was locked in, and cracked open the sealed cockpit door. Air and water vapor sucked out and suddenly he was very, very cold. For the first time, he was alone in the vacuum of space. His PLS chirped in his ear:
“Oxygen levels: 100%.”
The yellow scav pod sat directly in front of the wide open cockpit door. Yuri reached out, untethered, to find a hand-hold. He gently drifted towards the pod’s rear thrusters, then mantled his way around the craft, using the metal seams, running lights, and the empty arm socket to climb around until he reached the limply extended docking tunnel.
The tunnel stretched for about 30 meters before hitting the rugged steel exterior of the port. Unfortunately, the tunnel itself was lined with a smooth, seamless, plastic-lined airtight fabric shell. Yuri ran his hand over it and felt the dry-polished slickness through his glove.
Within the tunnel’s fabric shell were thin, widely-spaced metal extenders. Stretching the fabric along these extenders is what gave the tunnel its flexible, semi-rigid cylindrical shape.
A thought slowly crept up on Yuri as he tried in vain to find an easy way to climb alongside the tunnel: he would need to jump, and propel himself along the side of the docking tunnel to reach the port, where he could manually guide the lock points into place.
Jumping 30 meters untethered through open space. It was a scary thought.
If he slipped, he could fly off, lost forever. Or, he could just slightly over jump and sail over the top of the port, unable to right himself. If Diego and the other engineers hadn’t cleaned out his mech, he could have used the rope lift as a tether. But it was gone.
As far as he could tell, there was no other option. He would have to jump. It took him a few moments to steady his nerves. Then, all at once, he leapt out of the open cockpit, diving into the darkness.
At first, it went perfectly. He sailed along silently beside the tunnel. His momentum was good enough to carry him all the way to the port. But about halfway through, he realized the tunnel cylinder was getting closer. His angle was slightly off.
Before reaching the port wall, his course would crash him into the smooth tunnel shell.
As he came closer and closer to the plasti-fabric tube, his heart beat faster and faster with fear. He would need to somehow slide along the tunnel and keep enough momentum to keep going straight. If he pushed off too much, he could stall himself, or glide off into space.
He came closer and closer to the tunnel, and with a quarter of his journey left, he reached out his hands to try to slide. It didn’t work. Instead of remaining rigid, the tunnel gave way quite easily to Yuri, who pushed the column farther away from the port’s ring coupler and recessed airlock door.
He kept pushing and the tunnel kept shifting, until finally, the bending slowed, and the whole extended plasti-fabric cylinder began to spring back into shape. This rebound effect slowly pushed back against Yuri, who sprawled on the side of the tube before scooting forward again.
The rebound bumped him again and again, each time propelling him further off target, but still in line with the long port. His heart rate was exploding, but at least he wouldn’t be lost in space. Finally the tunnel slowed its bend once again, and Yuri floated into open space towards Rocco-2.
Moments later, the cadet hit the exterior wall with a painful thud and crumpled into a roll. He caught a light box, and steadied himself against it and the port. He hung on the light box with one hand, while the other gripped a divet in the metal wall. Yuri stayed like that for a few minutes, catchinging his breath and savoring the feeling of being attached to something substantial again. He had made it past the hardest part.
From the light box, Yuri crawled along the rough port wall until he reached the metal rim of the ring coupler. Holding onto the rim, Yuri was able to shift under the lip of the extended tunnel and found himself in a large, enclosed tube.
This felt even safer still, and it seemed the worst was over. From inside, Yuri could take his time and examine the situation. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but that was a feeling he was starting to embrace, given recent circumstances.
He noticed three large hooks along the tunnel’s rim. He also noticed three notched grooves along the edge of the ring coupler. It didn’t take a deep space harmonics engineer to figure out that the three lock points needed to fit together. That would have been easy, except they were completely misaligned. He would need to twist the rim counter-clockwise, to rotate it to the correct position.
It was stiff, but eventually he got all three circumferential lock points in place. When the last lock snapped in and turned blue, the lights inside the tunnel behind him turned on and the red warning lights disappeared. Slowly, the tunnel pressurized and expanded. Even with the new artificial atmosphere, this lonely tunnel had no artificial gravity, like the Niobrara had.
“Pressurized area detected. PLS no longer required.” His suit confirmed aloud.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Yuri chuckled under his breath, talking back to the electronic voice.