Pain Bringer (The Constant War Book 2), page 2
Even with a head start, he could hear it closing in on him. His footsteps, loud, heavy thuds, were drowned out by a thundering gallop, growing ever louder.
Staggering, he managed a glimpse over his shoulder.
And saw nothing.
Over the roar of hooves, heavy panting snorted loud in his ear. Hot breath singed his neck as viscous slobber sprayed his skin.
It didn’t make sense. He was in a pressure suit. Nothing was exposed. He shouldn’t be able to feel anything, let alone wet, sticky phlegm spattering his body.
Teeth sank into his calf.
Pain erupted.
Clutching at his leg, Mitch skidded to the ground, kicking up a storm of dust. He waved the dust away, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing that had bitten him.
Through gaps in the dust cloud, he could make out the stars in the night sky. And Heaven, the Sakamoto Six, and behind the stations—Earth.
The beast was nowhere to be seen.
Only heard.
Loud in his ear.
Felt.
Right on top of him.
Another bite sank into his thigh.
He screamed. For help. For Garret. For anyone.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. In desperation, he called out once again, but he knew that on this planet-sized monster, he was all alone.
No matter how loudly he cried out, there was no one who could save him.
Part One
Chapter One
Despite the tricks Char picked up along the way, the endless hours of training were all for naught.
Persistence, grit, and determination didn’t do a damned thing. No matter how much time she put in, she would never be the hero of the Constant War. And worst of all, she would never be able to prove herself to her father.
She had missed her chance.
The Constant War was over.
However, being a stickler for naming conventions, humanity always seemed to find artificial ways to keep war going.
Squiddie guts splattered against the canopy. A nasal voice blasted in her ear. “Char, you have a dozen squiddies closing in on you!”
“Yeah, yeah. I see ’em.”
Inside the Painbringer’s cockpit, Char dangled from a rattling support harness. Her sonar blipped with thousands of green dots against a sea of black. Lights flashed across her canopy HUD, a blinding disco array. Shifting her weight, she felt pins and needles shoot through the input jacks in her spine, metal spikes digging into her back, cold against flesh.
The Painbringer veered right, dodging an incoming wave of squiddies. Together, Char and her mecha bee-lined for Earth, hoping to scrape off her tail in the outer edges of atmosphere.
Writhing tentacles whipped at her mecha like a dominatrix a little too excited for forceplay. Acid drooled from rows of sucker-mouths on the underbelly of each tentacle.
The first wave of squiddies managed to attach themselves to the Painbringer’s hull. Tentacles wildly flailed, prying at armor plating.
Static crackled. Einhorn’s nasal tone grated Char’s last nerve. “Char, you are taking unnecessary damage.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“I don’t think you are taking this seriously.”
“What ever gave you that impression?”
In typical Asperger’s response, Einhorn replied, “The data, of course. Generally, your performance is much better than this.”
Portside reticles crawled over the canopy, finding targets, black against the backdrop of space. Char couldn’t see the enemy, but the Painbringer could suss them out of the darkness and aim an arsenal with pinpoint accuracy in their general direction.
It could also fire.
On her thought, of course.
But she was distracted, busily punching the interior of the Painbringer and yanking on her harness. “Why aren’t the controls responsive?”
“What do you mean?”
Einhorn’s keyboard rat-a-tatted over the comm. He was checking the data. The fucking data. Who cared about that shit? She didn’t need a machine to tell her something was wrong. She could feel the difference.
“Diagnostics show everything is normal,” said Einhorn. “Well, normal, for being attacked by an entire invasion force of squiddies.”
“Normal, my ass. I can’t feel a thing!”
Char rocked to the left. The Painbringer shoulder-checked an incoming pack of squiddies, sending them colliding into one another, spiraling away in a squirming clump of limbs and slime.
“See, nothing.”
Another mecha pilot would have reached overhead and flicked switches, bringing up the external diagnostics reports. But the Painbringer didn’t need that. All Char had to do was think. A wireframe layout popped up on her canopy HUD. Green lines. Sporadically dotted yellows. A few oranges.
“And I got another half dozen on the hull. Damage readouts are starting to light up. Yet I don’t feel a damned thing!”
The Painbringer was still in the prototype stages. One of a kind.
Not because Heaven didn’t want more.
Simply because Char was the first and only pilot able to operate the thing.
Or rather, she was the only one to have survived the bonding process. All those pesky wires stabbing her in the back, poking into the surgically implanted jacks lining her spinal column.
“Correct,” said Einhorn. “You don’t feel a thing.”
“You say that like it’s a positive.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Char grunted. “The hell do you know anyway?”
“Quite an extraordinary amount, actually.”
“Sure amounts to shit all, doesn’t it?”
“I…am not precisely sure what that means.”
“Thank you for proving my point. This isn’t the Painbringer. This is FakeBot. It’s nothing like the Painbringer.”
“How can you tell?” Einhorn’s voice faded. He had turned off-axis from the comm mic, addressing someone else in the room with him. “How can she tell?”
“I just told you! I can’t feel a God-damned anything!”
“Correct.” Einhorn was back at full volume again. “As I said before. We have fixed the problems with the sensor inputs. You aren’t supposed to feel anything.”
“You? Fix something?” Char snorted. “Not likely.”
A barrage of energy bolts pelted her from starboard, shaking the Painbringer.
Eight-limbed insectoid cephalopod hybrids rocketed through space on nothing more than a steel ring. These were more humanoid in appearance than their squiddie counterparts.
Off her starboard flank, three matched her velocity, rotating to face her. A bright white energy grew from the center of the rings. In the glow, the figures disappeared into shadowy silhouette.
Ringriders.
Squiddies were old hat.
The ringriders were the new hotness. Mid-range fighters that followed up behind an initial squiddie swarm, taking potshots where they could.
The last incursion with the Sindarhe swarm saw them pull a space station the size of Heaven through an open rift. These new fighters, these ringriders, had accompanied them.
This particular batch had blindsided her.
Odd. Especially in the Painbringer.
Normally, she could anticipate where they were coming from. Could feel it. Could sense it. Through the Painbringer. As a part of the Painbringer. An extension of her. And her of it.
But now, she felt nothing.
Char punched the interior of the Painbringer. “You’re supposed to warn me about that shit! Where’s your head at, huh?”
White energy discharges rocked the mecha. Squiddies crawled across the windshield. Spiderweb cracks splintered glass. Next to the growing, crackling line in the canopy, a graphic wireframe display of her mecha went from yellow to orange to red. Air hissed into vacuum through a widening hole. With a flick of her wrist, Char secured her rebreather to her helmet.
Three more ringriders circled in front of her, matching her forward velocity, spinning to face her like something from an outdated arcade game.
White energy grew.
Beams blasted into infinity.
Blinding.
Tearing through the Painbringer, liquefying metal. White light radiated through the cockpit. Disintegrating her mecha.
Until there was nothing.
“You are dead,” said Einhorn in a matter-of-fact tone. His head was down, buried in a handheld device he used to monitor her performance.
“Thanks for the newsflash, Doc.”
Despite having been atomized, Char was in rather good condition.
She stood up from the simulator cockpit and threw off her helmet. It bounced a couple times, coming to a stop at Einhorn’s feet. He retrieved it, checking to make sure nothing was damaged or broken.
Next to him, Marcia Black thumped a clipboard with a ballpoint pen. She glared at Char through a pair of thick red horn-rimmed glasses.
Char imagined Marcia was trying to convey disappointment, but it was difficult to decipher anything from her standard nonplussed expression. Marcia wasn’t her biggest fan, so Char didn’t waste time trying to solve that puzzle.
“Back to square one?” asked Einhorn.
Marcia took her time, sizing up Char, before laying into Einhorn—telling him what a mistake it had been getting Char involved with the prototype in the first place, haranguing him for a new test pilot.
New guinea pig was more like it.
But Char had stopped paying attention.
Only bits and pieces blurted through as she stormed over to rows of Tigerclaws stationed in their recharging units along the wall. She found one mecha in particular. In fact, it wasn’t a Tigerclaw at all. It was twice the height, lithe and agile in comparison to the boxy mecha tanks. Its finish was highly polished, a smooth veneer with rounded corners and a plastic sheen.
The cockpit sat low. A sleek bubble topped it. Inside, barely visible, a harness dangled. No other instrumentation was visible, or necessary.
It was the Painbringer.
The real Painbringer.
Char climbed onto its lower leg, hung from the kneecap, and hoisted herself on its thigh. Without a word, the canopy popped open and she hopped inside.
The jacks slid in.
Synapses fired in ecstasy, chemical exchanges bridging bio-chemical gaps. Flesh and tech becoming one.
“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” said Char. “The good stuff.”
Before she had time to think, Einhorn was at the foot of the Painbringer. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know. To see him. He was present on half a dozen different systems within the Painbringer. From thermal imaging, to visual scans, to aural monitors, to olfactory skims, inside every system, he was there. In an instant, she knew because the Painbringer knew.
“There is no difference in the code,” said Einhorn. “The simulation should be the same experience as the real thing.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not.”
“We need to—”
“Could you just leave me alone a minute?”
It was unlike her to avoid an argument, but, in all honesty, she didn’t care what Einhorn had to say.
Right now, it was all about the rush.
Her senses became one with the machine, reached out through it, extending as far as the top-of-the-line military-grade mecha could see—which was practically everything. Everywhere.
“I—” Einhorn started. But Char loudly shushed him into silence.
Her head swam. A euphoria haze flooded her senses.
In here, in the Painbringer, targeting reticles became unnecessary. Graphical displays were for a human user—a user that needed something to look at to interpret information as it was presented. But she didn’t need to see anything. She understood, as the Painbringer did, all potential threats surrounding her at any given time. Became aware of them instantly, as the Painbringer did.
It was pure.
Knowledge in its rawest form.
In a way, she thought, this must be how God feels.
All the time.
All knowing. All encompassing. This was what had been missing from the simulation. How could the labcoats think the two were remotely similar?
Char didn’t care about her performance in the sims. That wasn’t real. The sims were only projections of how things were supposed to go. Simulated reality. A fabrication.
Even her death was phony.
But this—
Her senses tingled. The Painbringer relayed tactical information, bombarding the dopamine centers of her brain. On a whim, a mere thought, the docking locks securing the Painbringer clacked open. The machine stomped across the room, moving as she moved, mirroring her gait, yet faster than she could travel under her own locomotion. Together, she was doing things she never could alone. A thought and boot thrusters ignited, lifting her several meters off the ground. Flames shot from the twin mounted engines on her back, and the Painbringer traversed a three-hundred-meter span in the blink of an eye. The response was well beyond instant.
—this was real.
“Char, do you hear me?”
“Of course I hear you. The Painbringer hears you.”
“Your reaction times in the sims are slower than ever.”
“So?” scoffed Char. “What’s your point? The war is over. What are we even training for?”
And in the sims, she wasn’t even in the real Painbringer. Of course, her reaction times were slower.
Einhorn was muttering something else. But Char wasn’t listening. It was fine. The Painbringer could listen for her. She could watch it again on playback if she needed to. Unlikely. But still—she could.
She prepared her entire life for the incursion with the Sindarhe, aspired and prepped to end the war her father never could. Even risked her own life in the prototype trials.
And now it was over.
She felt like her whole life had been a simulation.
Now, what was she supposed to do with her time?
She tried to focustried to focus, but her thoughts ran into each other like too many squiddies chasing a single target, bouncing off one another, becoming a tangled mess.
She felt a peculiar detachment she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She heard the shush of the canopy, a sound normally only heard when it was fully opened—strange hearing it now.
A breeze hit her skin. Brisk, giving rise to gooseflesh.
Her pupils dilated.
An image slowly came into focus.
Einhorn.
Pointing at her with the small electronic device he had been using earlier.
It was only now that she realized the jacks had retracted. Cold comfort no longer lined her back. Her consciousness slammed into the minuscule confines of her body, a prison of meat and bone.
A momentary state of confusion transpired.
She tried to shake the sensation.
He had done it. Deactivated the Painbringer.
Deactivated her.
Einhorn’s mouth was moving. Was he talking to her? Slowly, she nodded. He had been talking to her. When she finally registered the sounds in her ears, she heard him say, “I’m afraid you didn’t pass your basic training requirements. You’ll be unable to take out the Painbringer until you pass.”
“Wait…what?!”
Einhorn repeated himself. Words that Char hadn’t heard since she was twelve years old.
“You are grounded.”
Chapter Two
Awire sparked.
“Ow, mother of gravy!” Brent Wilkins jammed his hand into his mouth. He sucked on it until the sting dissipated. Taking his eyes off the control panel had not been his brightest idea.
One of the electrical grounds glowed cherry red, hot to the touch. Loose wires settled on smoldering metal. A grey ribbon of smoke twisted. His nostrils flared at the scent of burning plastic.
A second later, flames burst from the panel and licked his face. Black smoke filled the cramped confines.
Coughing, he yanked a crescent wrench from his toolbelt and beat the bejesus out of the sparking panel.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid piece of malarkey!”
The flames died down, but the last hit landed askew and sent the crescent wrench skidding across the floor, coming to a stop at an intersection a couple meters out of reach.
Wilkins sighed. The maintenance tunnels were not made for a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Marine. They were barely made for someone half his size. But since the Constant War ended, there wasn’t much use for big beefy brawn these days. He had to settle for what was available.
In light of the recent damage to Heaven, that meant maintenance.
Wilkins twisted, leaned over as far as he could, and reached for the crescent wrench. His fingers tap-danced, beating a pattern against the corrugated steel floors, as if that would somehow make the crescent wrench magically jump into his hand.
Of course, that didn’t happen.
Wilkins withdrew, sitting upright. He glanced at the wrench on the floor. It was mocking him.Two meters to his right, the maintenance tunnels ended in a sheer drop. Nothing but stars and void as far as the eye could see. The hazy purple glimmer of plasma barrier was the only safety precaution, keeping oxygen in and space out.
Beyond the sheer drop, Heaven’s eastern catwalks dead-ended into an abyss of endless vacuum. Twisted, gnarled steel clawed at the stars. Misshapen metal brackets once housing the eastern counterweights were now empty. Bolts, sheared from their grommets, had distorted precise machine fittings into oblong gaping mouths.
Heaven was in a serious state of disrepair.
That’s why they’d hired him. Truth be told, that’s why they were hiring anyone.
Wilkins had felt the effects of the damage from deep within the confines of his abode. Heaven spun with a lumbering gait, an old man hobbling along on a cane. Those that had been living in the formerly straight up and down now felt gravity at odd angles like the rest of Heaven.
That’s what he was out here fixing.
Or at least—what he was supposed to be fixing.
