Combat Frame XSeed Read online

  Equally relieved and wary that the Grentos hadn’t spotted him yet, Sieg tuned in the Coalition Security Corps’ dedicated frequency. From the three surviving CSC pilots’ chatter, he soon learned that his combat frame theft had gone unnoticed. The Grentos were still searching the forest near Sanzen’s compound for intruders fleeing on foot.

  Sieg piloted the Grenzmark into the warren of enormous passages between the colony’s inner and outer hull. Navigating by memory, he reached the CF-sized airlock that led to outer space and freedom.

  “Seal your suit,” he called down to Elliot, who pulled his helmet over his head. Sieg did likewise. His helmet magnified his heavy breaths of metallic-tasting air.

  “Come in, Chase. This is Sieg. Elliot and I are in position. Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Sieg,” said Chase. “I’m parked just out of sight. It’s a straight shot from the hatch to the shuttle. Come on out, and I’ll have us home for supper, over.”

  Sieg’s anger blazed like red coals in the pit of his stomach as he opened the airlock. “I’ll come back for you,” he promised his mother, his sister, and the unavenged ghost of his friend. He fired the Grenzie’s jump thrusters and launched into the black.

  What looked like a white dot soon resolved into the blunted bullet shape of the shuttle’s hull, which grew to dominate Sieg’s vision. Within moments, he and Elliot would be safely aboard and bound for L3, where the wayward son would face his father’s displeasure. I’d rather fight the Socs again.

  Sieg had come alongside the shuttle and was reaching the Grenzie’s free hand toward the bay door when a nasal male voice came over the CSC channel. “Gamma One to Control: Unauthorized shuttle confirmed twenty klicks to spinward off the end cap. Transmitting live feed from my Grento’s optical array.”

  “Acknowledged, Gamma One,” a brusque voice replied. “Target lock acquired.”

  “Chase,” Shouted Sieg. “They spotted you. Get out of here!”

  A point of light streaked from the colony and connected with the shuttle amidships. The resulting blast reduced the spacecraft to a hot vapor. Sieg barely managed to turn his Grenzie aside before the shockwave hammered the combat frame, sending it hurtling away from the colony at an acute angle.

  Sieg feared the damaged chair to which he was strapped would break loose and eject him into space. It held, but he almost wished it hadn’t when the tremors rocking his CF threatened to batter him into paste. The shaking subsided, leaving him bruised and in shock with cockpit alarms blaring.

  A frantic thought shattered Sieg’s respite. Elliot!

  Sieg’s throbbing hand gripped the control stick and commanded the Grenzmark to raise its left arm. Nothing happened. He repeated the process twice before a dread realization penetrated his numbed mind. Against his muscles’ protests, he released his harness, leaned forward, and craned his neck outside the cockpit.

  All of the Grenzmark’s limbs had been blown off.

  Despair drove Sieg back into his seat. He sat motionless for what could have been seconds or hours, until a familiar voice intruded on his daze.

  “Gamma One to Control: Detonation confirmed. Target vaporized. Request authorization to search for CF spotted before impact, over.”

  “Negative,” said an icy female voice Sieg couldn’t quite place in his near-delirium. “Break off pursuit and return to base. This mission was a total success.”

  Mother, thought Sieg as he tumbled through space. Liz. I failed you.

  2

  “The institute is entrusted with caring for the most extreme cases—those who exhibit disorders not seen in the colonies since before the Collapse.”

  The doctor’s pedantic droning filtered into Zane’s cell and roused him from his brooding. He eased himself off his bed’s foam mattress, crept across the spongy floor, and crouched beside the narrow slit in the padded steel door.

  “I see.” The stern male voice kindled dim recollections in Zane’s mind. “Tell me, Doctor. How do you deal with these prisoners?”

  The voices were getting closer, along with the click of footsteps on the hallway tile. There’s three of them. Two are about the same weight, wearing men’s dress shoes. One’s a lot lighter, in boots with raised heels.

  “We refer to them as patients,” Zane’s doctor said. “Sadly, the cases in this ward pose a danger to themselves and others. The best we can do is keep them confined to their rooms.”

  “You mean incarcerated in their cells,” said a girl whose soft voice took a harsh tone. The sound flowed like ice water down Zane’s back.

  “I was speaking to your father, young lady,” the doctor said. “I’ll thank you not to interrupt.”

  “My responsibilities to the Coalition afford me no time for children, Doctor,” said the second man, annoyance creeping into his stony voice.

  “I apologize, Director Sanzen. I’d assumed this young woman was your daughter.”

  Sanzen Kaimora? The head of the Coalition Security Corps? Zane wondered if he really was psychotic and the conversation in the hall was just a hallucination. He risked a peek through the slot in his door.

  Zane already knew the graying, lab coated figure of Cody, the facility’s head of psychiatry. Facing the doctor in the middle of the hall stood a tall lean man who, unlike most in the Coalition, looked used to manual labor. The only hair on his head was a severe black goatee. The lapel of his charcoal gray suit bore a gold O’Neill cylinder pin—the emblem of the SOC. Definitely Sanzen. But who’s that with him?

  A petite young woman stood behind Sanzen in a matching skirted suit. Black hair with a deep blue sheen fell past her shoulders to the small of her back. Dark eyes set in a pale narrow face scanned her surroundings with the calculation of an artic she-wolf. Her gaze met Zane’s, and he recoiled from the door.

  “This is my assistant Sekaino Megami,” said Sanzen. “She is here to advise me on my decision.”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor stammered. “As per your request, I’ve assembled a list of all patients who were originally part of Block 101. The first is right down this hall. His name is Zane Dellister. He’s been with us for several months.

  “The name sounds familiar,” said Sanzen. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Zane developed a strange form of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Cody said. “Oddly, symptoms manifested after he arrived here in Chicago but before his unit saw combat. He was arrested in an abandoned warehouse following a rash of thefts from Seed Corporation. Evidently he’d built his own combat frame out of parts stolen from Seed’s factory, the CSC’s own inventory, and even destroyed enemy units.”

  “I remember now,” said Sanzen. “He refused to cooperate with Browning’s analysis. Why wasn’t he confined to the stockade?”

  “Zane harbors an unhealthy attachment to this black combat frame. He put three security personnel in the infirmary during his removal from the warehouse. Since then, he’s displayed behavior verging on dissociative identity disorder.”

  “Fascinating,” Sanzen said dryly. “Put him down as a candidate for transfer to Metis, and let’s move on.”

  “Who’s next on the list?” asked Megami.

  The doctor’s stylus tapped on his tablet’s screen. “That would be Eiyu Masz, our most violent case. I advise proceeding with caution.”

  The Doctor’s words faded as he led his guests down the hall. “Did you hear that, Dead Drop?” Zane asked his absent combat frame. “They’re transferring me and Masz to that asteroid base in L5.” Zane didn’t get along with people—Masz least of all. He always seemed to be breathing down Zane’s neck despite being locked in another cell. “They’re not sticking me with Masz,” he told Dead Drop. “And they’re not sending me back into space without you!”

  A high time preference was among the personality traits that Cody said aggravated Zane’s dysfunction. That didn’t mean Zane was incapable of long-term planning. He could be patient when necessary. He just didn’t like it.

  Zane waited almost a whole hour a
fter Cody, Sanzen, and Megami passed back down the hallway and out of the ward before he enacted the escape he’d been planning for months. He stood before the mirror embedded in the wall behind a thick polymer sheet and pulled his light blue pajama shirt up over his head of buzzed, platinum blond hair. Then he stuffed the shirt down the drain of the small sink built into a wall recess and opened the taps.

  His slippers came off next. These he wrapped in plastic hoarded from weeks’ worth of prepackaged meals and jammed down the tankless ceramic toilet. The water flow valve was hidden in the white padded wall, so Zane kept flushing as cold water sloshed onto the floor. He knew security was watching him over the pinhole cameras installed in his room, and he knew they’d send orderlies to deal with his misbehavior. In fact, he was counting on it.

  It didn’t take long for the overflowing fixtures to flood the small room five centimeters deep. Zane lay face down in the rising water and held his breath. He was floating, and his lungs starting to burn, before the heavy door hissed open.

  “He’d been like that for five minutes when the second shift guy came on and saw the monitor,” said a male orderly who burst into the room, fighting the outflow of water.

  “Get him up,” said another man behind him. “If he drowns, it’s our asses on the line!”

  Zane pushed up from the flooded floor and drove both feet into the first orderly’s stomach. The air escaped the man’s lungs in a pained gasp, and the torrent swirling around his shins assisted in knocking him backwards into his coworker.

  Drawing a deep sweet breath, Zane sprang to his feet and rounded on the orderlies who lay in a sodden tangled heap outside. The man on top struggled to rise, but Zane leapt from the doorway and stomped on his chest, driving both orderlies back down. He knelt, bounced both men’s heads off the tile floor, and ripped the security badge from the top man’s white scrubs.

  The exit from the ward lay down the hall to Zane’s left and around the corner to the right. But the keycard alone wouldn’t get him out. The exit used an airlock system with two doors and a small booth in-between. Only one door could be opened at a time, and the whole booth could be remotely locked down to hold an escapee till security showed up.

  Which Zane was also counting on. He hauled the first orderly—a pudgy man with short brown hair—off his unconscious counterpart, bound his hands with his shirt, and stood him up. Zane positioned himself behind the semiconscious orderly and encircled the man’s neck with the chain from his extendable badge clip. He held the makeshift garrote closed with one hand while pushing him forward with the other. The fat man sputtered as they slogged down the hall.

  When they reached the heavy airlock door, Zane opened it with the orderly’s keycard. A beige steel box waited beyond with an identical door on the far side—a door that couldn’t open until Zane shut the one behind him.

  Security was certainly watching Zane’s every move. They knew he was in the airlock and that he had a hostage. The smart move would be to lock down the room when he closed the door and wait him out, regardless of the risk to the hostage. But Zane’s time on Earth had acquainted him with a fundamental difference between himself and other colonists. Socs couldn’t stomach making hard decisions. Instead, they jumped straight to excessive force.

  Zane shut the door behind him. He tightened his feebly struggling hostage’s chain and waited. Sure enough, the facing door slid open to reveal four guards in dark blue CSC uniforms. They all carried carbon polymer batons, but they hadn’t taken the time to don riot gear.

  Big mistake.

  “Release the hostage and get on the floor with your hands behind your head, now!” said a security officer with tan skin and a short crewcut.

  “I’m crazy-ass spaceman,” cried Zane. “I’ll do what I want!” He released the chain and kicked the orderly through the door. The security officers jumped aside, and Zane charged right between them into the outer hallway, stepping on his former hostage.

  The two rearmost guards lunged at him. Zane grabbed the guard to his right by the wrist, kicked his leg out, and levered him toward his oncoming friend while prying the baton from his hand. As the second guard struggled to prop up the first’s dead weight, Zane spun to intercept the two guards who’d stood near the door but were now charging him. He ducked under a vicious swing from the guard on his right and drove the butt of his own baton into the man’s stomach.

  With the man on his right down on all fours struggling to breathe, Zane launched himself at the guard on his left. His new opponent’s brown eyes widened, and he froze as Zane’s baton crashed into his temple. He folded to the ground.

  The first two guards regained their feet. The one who still had a baton brought it down in a whirring arc at Zane’s head. Zane angled his body to one side, let the stick blur past, and punched his attacker in the throat. That made three guards writhing on the floor.

  Zane let the last guard run down the hallway yelling for help while he took a detour to the right. A short sprint brought him to the commissary for low-security patients. He rushed through the pajama-clad dinner crowd, past a wall cluttered with disturbing finger paintings, and into the steamy, savory-smelling kitchen. The mostly female staff shrieked, and trays crashed to the floor as Zane bolted for the back of the room and plunged down the trash chute.

  The dumpster where Zane landed smelled decidedly worse than the kitchen above, but this air was free. Almost. I just need to cross the yard and get through the fence. Then I’m out, and no one will keep us apart, Dead Drop!

  Zane didn’t bother rummaging through squishy trash bags and soggy cardboard boxes for the baton he’d dropped upon landing. He vaulted out of the reeking metal bin and took off running across the cracked asphalt of a loading dock. Broken glass stabbed his feet, but he ignored the sting and fixated on reuniting with this combat frame.

  A wide green lawn sloped down from the low gray building that housed the institute. The cool grass soothed Zane’s tortured feet as he ran for the razor wire fence encircling the campus. A pair of wheeled gates flanked an enclosed guard box thirty meters away. Zane sped up, dashed across the road leading to the gate, and dove at the box.

  The panicked guard inside shot at the window, sending the reinforced glass sliding away in a spiderwebbed sheet. Red hot pain engulfed Zane’s mind as a bullet slammed into his right leg. His momentum carried him through the broken window and into the screaming guard, whose head collided with the opposite window before he got a second shot off. He slumped back into his chair.

  Breathing like a furnace, Zane hammered the gate button. More gunshots cracked behind him, and bullets ricocheted off the guard box and the fence. He ducked out of the box and rushed through the gate. But his wounded leg betrayed him. Zane stumbled and went rolling the rest of the way downhill. He splashed down in a drainage ditch at the base of the slope. A concrete pipe yawned to his left. Without thinking, Zane scrambled into the filthy darkness.

  3

  “Ritter!” Schwarze barked from the dirt path at the combat frame’s feet. “Quit tinkering and prep that Grenzie for action. We’re moving out.”

  Tod Ritter, soldier of the Black Reichswehr, closed the access panel in his prized Grenzmark C’s cockpit and poked his head out into the sultry African morning. Exotic birds and insects filled the air with song. He took in the lush green carpet of jungle rolling away from the hill where the German expats’ CFs were parked before lowering his eyes to Schwarze’s scrawny figure.

  “Already?” asked Ritter. “Is General Kopp sending us into a real battle this time?”

  A scowl pinched Schwarze’s gaunt face. “Are you questioning the General’s command decisions?”

  Ritter hopped down from the cockpit, using the Grenzie’s olive drab knee and foot as stepping stones to reach the muddy ground. He fixed his brown eyes on Schwarze’s beady, slate gray irises and said, “I’m questioning how raiding African settlements and caravans is supposed to help us restore Neue Deutschland!”

  “Have some patience
for once,” said Schwarze. “It took a hundred and fifty years to drive the Caliphate from our lands. The Socs and their lickspittles overthrew Kaiser Maximilian just three years ago. Marshaling a proper resistance takes time.”

  “What’s the target, then?”

  “There’s a small village nearby. The General believes they have a cache of parts, fuel, grain, and ammunition.”

  Fury welled in Ritter’s chest. “I joined up to liberate my homeland from the Socs, not to terrorize innocent villagers!”

  The way Schwarze’s travel-stained fatigues hung from his lank frame led many to misjudge him as weak. Ritter got a reminder that Kopp’s toady was made of lean muscle when Schwarze grabbed him by his frayed green collar.

  “You should know,” Schwarze spat in Ritter’s face, “that the caravan leader you urged us to spare sold out this village. The battlefield is no place for sentiment, boy! It will get you killed. I’m inclined to do the job myself before you take someone else down with you.”

  Ritter grunted as Schwarze’s tightening grip constricted his throat. He cocked back his arm to strike his superior, but his punch smacked into a firm gloved hand.

  “Stand down,” said a breathy male voice. The new recruit, known only as Blondie for his wild golden hair, stood to the right gripping Ritter’s balled fist.

  Schwarze inclined his head to the newcomer. “Here to help me enforce military discipline, Private?”

  “I was talking to both of you,” Blondie said as he released Ritter’s hand.

  Schwarze’s brow furrowed. He shoved Ritter down and rounded on Blondie. “I don’t care if you supplied your own combat frame,” said Schwarze. “That’s a contribution we’re all obliged to make for the Fatherland. It doesn’t earn you extra privileges, and it sure as hell doesn’t justify insubordination.”

  Ritter sprang to his feet and jabbed a finger at Schwarze. “It’s two against one. That’s all the justification we need.”