Combat Frame XSeed Page 5

  “I think I see where this is going,” Larson said. “The space frogs don’t want to provoke the Socs, so we get to be their proxies.”

  “The EGE General Staff already signed the deal,” said McCaskey. “In return for defending the sovereignty of Earth’s nations, which we’re doing anyway, ZoDiaC is supplying us with aid and weapons to resist the Coalition; including combat frames.”

  Larson perked up. “We get our own CFs?”

  McCaskey nodded. “The delivery date hasn’t been set, but they’ve sent some cash as a good faith offering. It’s not enough to compensate us if Sanzen freezes our funds. That’s where Mr. Friedlander comes in.”

  “The Coalition has installed a new Mideast Region governor sponsored by Commerce Secretary Satsu,” said Sieg. “Her name is Prem Naryal. She’s got a reputation as a ruthless bean counter. Our sources say Mitsu’s putting Naryal in charge of bringing the Mideastern and African ‘warlords’ to heel. I’ve been assigned to gather intel on her organization.”

  “Why were you prancing around the Congo with a troupe of German bandits?” asked Larson.

  “ZoDiaC smuggled me planetside through the Coalition’s Kisangani Spaceport,” said Sieg. “I joined up with the Black Reichswehr for cover. I’d planned to travel with them to Sudan, where my handlers left an equipment stash. Collins threw a wrench in my plan.”

  “That limey rotorhead can be a real pain in the ass,” Larson said, “but if his mother cut him a check, he’d ask for ID. You and your teen sidekick must’ve been pretty naughty to get on Major Anal-retentive’s shit list.”

  “We did what we had to,” said Sieg.

  “With the crisis we’re facing,” McCaskey said, “I’m prepared to sweep that incident under the rug. In the meantime Friedlander, I’m granting you the EGE Army rank of staff sergeant and assigning you to Admiral Omaka’s flagship. A helicopter will fly you to the Lloyd George at 0800 tomorrow. Naval Intelligence will instruct you from there. Any questions?”

  “Just one, Sir,” said Sieg. “What do you plan to do with Tod Ritter?”

  McCaskey’s chair creaked as he leaned back. “I honestly hadn’t given him much thought.” He looked to Larson and Sieg. “Suggestions?”

  “Right now, he’s just ballast that eats,” said Larson. “Let’s dump him on an island with a full canteen, a week’s worth of rations, and a knife.”

  “I won’t rule it out,” said McCaskey. “Sergeant?”

  “Ritter’s competent with a CF,” said Sieg. “He has the makings of a real pilot, but he lacks discipline.”

  McCaskey’s lip twisted in a half-smile. “Lucky for him, we just acquired three combat frames. The Yamamoto will need its own CF teams when ZoDiaC comes through. We may as well organize one now to shake the bugs out.”

  “Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say,” sighed Larson.

  “Sorry, Griff,” McCaskey said. “You’ve got more combat frame experience than anyone aboard. I’m assigning the captured CFs, and Private Ritter, to your command.”

  “I’ll need some time to get my people organized,” said Larson. “What if the kid doesn’t want to enlist?”

  “Then we find him an island,” said the General. “If there’s nothing else, you men are dismissed.”

  Sieg and Griff rose and saluted the General, who stood and returned the gesture.

  “For what it’s worth, Sergeant,” McCaskey said, “I was sorry to hear about your father. He was an honorable man.”

  Sieg strained to keep the emotions warring in his heart from showing on his face. “Thank you, Sir.”

  “One more thing, Ed,” said Larson. “If this caper ends in tears, don’t forget I warned you.”

  McCaskey resumed his seat. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  Larson stepped to the door and opened it. The cacophony of the hallway flooded in. The Colonel exited. Sieg followed and closed the door behind him.

  I’ve thrown in with another quixotic company, thought Sieg. His hand delved into his breast pocket, and he ran the silken ribbon between his fingers. Hopefully the EGE fares better than the others.

  6

  Zane felt his way along the grimy wall of a narrow alley in near-total darkness. Thick clouds blanketed the strip of sky between the five story buildings on both sides. The only real light shone from the street ten meters ahead, where harsh LED lamps hung over an empty intersection. The lack of traffic meant the city was probably under curfew.

  “Won’t be long now, Dead Drop,” Zane promised. He’d have recovered his stolen combat frame already if the guard at the institute hadn’t shot him in the leg. He’d tied off the burning wound with a rag, but warm sticky blood still seeped through his light blue pants. Both his legs felt cold, and the once-throbbing soles of his bare feet had gone numb.

  Two meters from the alley’s exit, Zane pressed his back against the right wall and sidled to the corner. He peered around the bend and saw a Grenzmark II standing in the middle of the next intersection to the right, its domed rotating head sweeping a blinding beam across the neighborhood like a bipedal lighthouse.

  That makes eight, thought Zane, mentally counting the Coalition CFs stationed in a five-block radius of his position. They’re fencing me in. I need to get past their cordon.

  Tires sped over damp pavement to Zane’s left. He turned his head to see a pair of headlights approaching the intersection. The streetlights revealed the vehicle as a white van with a Seed Corporation logo on the side. Wet brakes squealed as the lights turned red and the van came to a stop in front of the alley’s opening.

  As soon as the Grento’s face grill turned in the opposite direction, Zane picked up a loose brick, hobbled to the van as quickly as his wounded leg allowed, and smashed in the front passenger window.

  A feminine yelp sounded from the driver’s seat, and the van lurched forward. But Zane crawled through the shattered window and threw himself down on the glass-strewn passenger seat. “Stop,” he ordered.

  The van screeched to a halt less than a meter from the red light. The driver, a young woman with shoulder-length almond hair and brown eyes wide with fear, looked over Zane’s bloody pants and filthy undershirt. “You’re the escaped mental patient,” she said in a trembling voice.

  Zane twisted around and scanned the back of the van. Step ladders and bales of electrical cord lined the walls. The dingy confines smelled of stale machine oil. A blue jacket and a matching cap, both bearing Seed Corp patches, hung on a hook behind Zane’s seat. He snatched them up, put them on, and laid a tool belt over his bloody pant leg.

  Green light spilled in through the windshield. “Drive,” said Zane.

  “Where to?” the woman asked.

  “You were headed to the factory, right?”

  “I work third shift in the infirmary.” The woman’s eyes darted to a plastic card that hung on a lanyard from the rearview mirror. The card bore a snake-entwined winged staff and her picture above the name Dorothy Wheeler, RN.

  Essential Seed personnel must be exempt from the curfew, thought Zane. It explained why a nurse was driving a maintenance van. They’d lent her a company vehicle to get past the cordon, which meant he could get through the same way. “You’d better drive to work, then.”

  Dorothy eased off the brakes and rolled slowly through the intersection, but her brow furrowed. “The Coalition’s looking for you. Shouldn’t you leave the city?”

  “I go where I want,” said Zane.

  “But what do you want at Seed Corp?”

  “The Coalition stole my combat frame. I’m taking it back.”

  “Oh.” Dorothy’s voice fell. “I understand. The Socs that run Seed Corp denied me bereavement leave when my dad died in a factory accident. They take from everybody.”

  The van pulled alongside the Grento’s stubby green foot. Its 115mm rifle barrel yawned just above the motor vehicle’s roof. Blinding light slanted down from the middle row of five slits in the CF’s hemispherical head. Zane’s muscles
tensed, but the Grento made no move to stop the van as Dorothy continued through the intersection. In the rearview mirror, the CF’s searchlight roamed over the silent block.

  Made it, thought Zane. I’m coming, Dead Drop.

  “That wound looks pretty bad,” said Dorothy. “How’d you get it?”

  “A guard shot me.”

  “Do you want me to take a look at it?”

  “I want to find Dead Drop.”

  Dorothy fell quiet and fixed her eyes on the darkened road ahead. A towering fog bank rolled off the lake, engulfing whole buildings and dividing the city’s heart with a wall of cloud. A sense of peace enfolded Zane like a blanket, and though his legs were almost numb with cold, he leaned back in his seat to relax for the first time in days.

  White light filled Zane’s vision. It’s a Grenzmark, he thought with a start. But he felt himself lying on a padded table. I’m back at the institute. They recaptured me!

  Zane sat bolt upright on what proved to be an exam table under an operating light in a small, astringent-smelling room. Charts and safety posters plastered the white tile walls.

  “Easy.” Dorothy rushed to Zane’s side from the room’s back left corner and laid her soft hands on his arm. “I can’t believe the sedative wore off that soon!”

  Zane glared at the nurse, who now wore a set of gray scrubs. “Where am I?”

  “You told me to go to work, so I did. This is an emergency treatment room in Seed Corp’s infirmary.”

  “Seed Corp?” Zane swung his legs over the side of the table and slid off. The pain that stabbed up his right leg when his feet hit the tile floor forced a grunt from his chest.

  Dorothy’s arms encircled his shoulders. “Careful! I removed the bullet, treated the infection, and stitched you up, but you lost a lot of blood. You should stay off your feet for a while.”

  Zane freed himself with a firm push. “I’m going to look for Dead Drop.”

  “Dressed like that?”

  Only when Dorothy pointed at him with a bemused smile did Zane realize he was only wearing a hospital gown. “Get me some clothes,” he grumbled.

  “Already did.” Dorothy grabbed a blue bundle from the stainless steel table behind her and dumped it in Zane’s lap. The wrinkled ball of fabric turned out to be a Seed Corporation jumpsuit. “If you insist on ignoring my advice, throw that on and we’ll head down to the factory.”

  “We?” Zane asked as he donned the sturdy garment.

  “Yeah,” said Dorothy. “We. I won’t let a recovering patient wander around a factory alone. Besides, I know the plant’s layout.”

  Zane slipped his smarting feet into a pair of brown work boots on the floor next to the table. “Fine. Show me where Dead Drop is.”

  “The plant’s on a skeleton crew right now,” Dorothy said as she moved to the door, “but we still need to be careful. There’s a terminal in Product Testing where we can do an inventory search. Come on.”

  Zane followed Dorothy from the empty infirmary. Their footsteps echoed as they traversed a series of concrete hallways with bare gray floors and color-coded walls under ceilings overgrown with pipes and cables. A short ride in a lift with brushed steel walls brought them to an open warehouse style room rife with plastic-wrapped machinery stacked on wooden pallets. The warm air smelled of metal and hard rubber.

  Dorothy stepped up to a mobile terminal perched atop a rolling black steel cabinet. A half-wall of plastic drums and a couple of parked forklifts gave her reasonable concealment. Zane joined her as she hunted and pecked on the plastic-covered keyboard.

  “Where is it?” he asked over her shoulder. Her hair smelled like a purple flower he’d seen while fleeing through the forest preserve near the institute, but he didn’t know its name.

  “Hang on a second,” Dorothy said in a harsh whisper. “I’m not finding—darn! My session expired, and I don’t have a password to log back in.”

  Zane turned on his heel. “I’ll have to do a visual search. Where do they store the combat frames?”

  “Wait!” Dorothy urged him. “That area’s off limits. If we’re caught, we’ll get in serious trouble.”

  “I’m already in serious trouble.”

  Dorothy sighed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Five more minutes of navigating Seed Corp’s maze of corridors and two more elevator rides later, Zane stood on a narrow steel catwalk suspended over a warehouse floor spanning three city blocks. Though the combat frames arranged in ordered columns below stood over seventeen meters tall, the catwalk passed half again as high over their heads.

  Dorothy leaned over the railing beside him. “Do you see it anywhere?”

  A company’s worth of Grenzies and twice as many Grentos stretched from wall to wall below him, but no black, square-shouldered CF stood out from their ranks. “Dead Drop’s not here,” he grumbled.

  Slow footsteps clattered behind them and sent slight tremors through the catwalk. Dorothy gasped. Zane rounded on the approaching figure, revealed in the glow of an overhead light as a lab coated man in his early thirties with dull brown hair.

  “Dead Drop,” the stuffy-looking man said in a calm, oddly boyish voice. He adjusted his wire frame glasses. “Seed Corp designation XCF-08D-1.”

  Dorothy stepped forward. “Dr. Browning! We were just—”

  Browning interrupted her with a raised hand. “The inventory management system alerted me to your search for Mr. Dellister’s combat frame. You are Zane Dellister, correct?”

  Zane pushed past Dorothy. “That’s right. And you’re Dr. Tesla Browning, the guy who invented combat frames.”

  “I’m not really a doctor. Tesla Browning is my nom de guerre, or it would be if I’d ever used a weapon. Instead I attached one to a work frame and licensed the design to Seed Corp.”

  “Where’s Dead Drop?” asked Zane.

  “On a cargo plane to Kisangani, Africa. I should congratulate you on creating a one-of-a-kind prototype.”

  “Africa?” repeated Zane. “What’s Dead Drop doing there?”

  “The advances in energy weapon technology Dead Drop incorporates helped us break through the dead end in CF evolution,” said Browning. “The next generation of CSC combat frames will be based on your prototype. As such, it’s being shipped to the space colonies for further study.”

  Zane pounded the railing. The vast space swallowed the loud clang. “You won’t keep Dead Drop from me. If it’s in Africa, then I’m going to Africa!”

  Browning stood aside. “Far be it from me to stop you. In fact, I’ll arrange transport for you on a Seed Corp barge.”

  “A barge?” repeated Zane. “Why not a cargo plane?”

  “Because the security is far laxer,” said Browning.

  “Why are you helping Zane?” Dorothy asked.

  “The new combat frames inspired by Zane’s design will make the Coalition’s victory inevitable,” Browning said. “I don’t see how they can begrudge him his freedom. I’ve also taken the liberty of purging Nurse Wheeler’s security breaches—and her relation to an anti-SOC militia leader—from the record.”

  Dorothy’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment before she could form words. “You know about my uncle?”

  “No need for alarm,” said Browning. “I’m from L3. My working relationship with the Coalition is simply a marriage of convenience. Your family’s politics are none of my concern.”

  “Thank you,” Dorothy stammered.

  “Don’t thank him yet,” said Zane. “A river barge won’t get us to Africa.”

  “Not all the way, no,” said Browning. “Norma, the barge’s pilot, will take you to the free city of New Orleans. Seek out a man named Jean-Claude du Lione. He’ll be easy to find. Tell him what I told you, and I’m certain he’ll give you passage to Africa.”

  “When does the barge leave?” asked Zane.

  “Under the current circumstances,” said Browning, “it’s best if you leave right away. The barge is parked in the canal that runs pas
t this complex.”

  Zane bolted for the exit. He hardly felt the dull ache in his leg. Pursuing footsteps shook the catwalk. “Wait,” cried Dorothy. “You’re still my patient! I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “Whatever,” said Zane. “Just try to keep up.”

  7

  Upon his release from the brig, Ritter made a beeline for the Yamamoto’s cavernous hangar. Walking across the matte black deck that spanned two-thirds of the ship’s length, he felt like a solitary ant deep within a bustling colony. Members of the ship’s company navigated artificial canyons between mountains of metal crates while steering clear of the forklifts that rumbled back and forth bearing supplies.

  The buzz and whine of power tools led Ritter to an open area where several Shenlong jets sat parked. The machine shop smell made him feel at home. One plane stood out: a white and blue collection of acute angles and sharp edges.

  A smooth male voice emanated from below the open canopy. “Increase fuel flow to the starboard engine by ten percent.” Ritter had heard the same voice over his Grenzie’s radio.

  “Okay, Max,” a tinny-sounding woman replied. “Projections show that the increased thrust should compensate for the damaged stabilizer.”

  “That’s my girl!”

  Is someone in there with him? Ritter wondered, craning his neck to examine the cockpit.

  “Max,” the woman said, “Someone is eavesdropping.”

  A handsome man with brown hair spilling almost to his shoulders popped up from the jet’s front seat. He wore a brown flight jacket with an old American flag patch on the sleeve. His hazel eyes zeroed in on Ritter. “Hey, kid.” his soft voice took a mischievous tone. “You lose your tour group?”

  Ritter snapped to attention and saluted. “Sir, Private Tod Ritter reporting!”

  “Captain Maximus Darving.” Max casually saluted with a screwdriver, which he pointed at Ritter. “Judging by your grungy fatigues, you must be one of the irregulars Collins brought in. Shouldn’t you be in the brig? For that matter, why are you reporting to me?”