Chapter 1: FULL METAL GLADIATOR
Takari Tanida, callsign ‘Ronin’, had run out of options five minutes ago.
Enemy fire had savaged his Phoenix Hawk, crippling most of its offensive capabilities, while Takari had failed to inflict meaningful damage on the enemy Quickdraw.
After that, he had been running—staying in cover, conserving what remained of his machine, hoping against hope that some opportunity for a comeback would present itself.
It hadn’t.
Now Takari was boxed in between towering barriers of welded scrap, pressed back against the boundary of the Scrapyard, an arena of broken BattleMechs and old machinery outside Solaris City.
It wasn’t an actual wall, but it might as well have been.
If he stepped across the crimson line glowing on his cockpit display, he would forfeit the match.
Takari glanced at the main system-status board again, searching for anything that might give him an edge.
The situation remained completely hopeless.
His BattleMech’s armor had been breached in a dozen places. The machine leaked liquid-metal coolant, and its fusion reactor stuttered whenever he pushed it beyond a fast walk. The entire right arm of the Phoenix Hawk was a ruin, and with it the main large laser, one of the medium lasers, and a machine gun.
His remaining firepower amounted to a single Harmon medium laser and an M100 machine gun with less than half a drum of ammunition.
A crippled forty-five-tonner against a more or less undamaged sixty-ton Quickdraw.
The arithmetic offered no comfort.
It was like Tamar all over again, except no Lyran Guards were bearing down on Takari’s position. No quartet of medium-heavy Mechs trying to overwhelm their Sword of Light counterparts through weight of steel and firepower.
Instead, his opponent was another Solaris gladiator: Marcel Duval, callsign ‘Dervish’.
His dossier said Oriente native. Former Free Worlds League Military officer. Mentioned in dispatches twice. Dishonorably discharged for dueling.
More importantly, Duval was a veteran with seven seasons under his belt.
Not many gladiators lasted seven seasons.
His early career had been especially promising, but several mediocre years had followed. This season, Dervish had made a solid comeback. He had gone undefeated through league play, then through the elimination rounds, all the way to the final of the Earthwerks Mixed Cup of 2997.
And now Dervish was seconds from winning.
All Takari could do was wait for the inevitable.
Unless—
Something about the scrap wall to his right looked wrong.
Takari leaned closer to the primary display. The sensor feed was badly degraded, but the Phoenix Hawk’s remaining cameras showed three straight seams beneath the overlapping armor plates. Too regular to be accidental. At ground level, the rust and dust had been scraped away in a shallow arc.
A door.
He twisted the Phoenix Hawk’s torso and engaged the fine manipulator controls for its remaining left arm. The BattleMech’s hand closed around the protruding edge of a metal plate.
Takari pulled.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the entire section swung inward with a shriek of tortured metal.
He had found one of the arena’s hidden features.
It would not save him, but it might postpone the inevitable.
The opening was a tight fit, forcing the Phoenix Hawk into an awkward crouch. Takari was certain he could squeeze through.
He was equally certain a Quickdraw could not.
He pushed forward.
Partway through, the Phoenix Hawk’s ruined right arm caught against the frame. Warning icons flashed across the damage display as Takari tried to wrench it free. He could waste precious seconds teasing the mangled limb through the gap—or accept a little more damage to an arm that was already useless.
He pulled hard.
The Mech groaned under the strain. Something tore loose with a sound like a collapsing building, and several new red icons appeared on the status board.
Then he was through.
Takari straightened the Phoenix Hawk as much as its damaged frame allowed and hurried down the narrow lane, away from the glowing crimson boundary.
His left shoulder twitched inside the cooling vest.
A lingering gift from the stun gun the Syndicate thugs had used on him before the match.
The Earthwerks Mixed Cup was a recent addition to the Solaris tournament scene. Any BattleMech up to seventy-five tons could enter, with heavier machines receiving handicaps when facing lighter opponents. Armor might be removed, weapons disabled, ammunition restricted. Less commonly, heat sinks or jump jets were taken out of service.
The handicaps were never intended to make weight irrelevant. A Stinger still had no business fighting a Warhammer. But the system could turn otherwise hopeless matchups into competitive bouts, and Solarians were absolutely crazy about the weird and wonderful statistics that resulted.
Heavier mediums and lighter heavies generally performed best, especially jump-capable models. A Shadow Hawk had taken the first two Cups. A jump-equipped Thunderbolt had won the third. Then an up-armored Wolverine. Last year, a heavily modified Grasshopper had torn through the competition.
This year, it appeared the winner would be a Quickdraw.
Dervish’s handicap—fifteen tons heavier than Takari’s Phoenix Hawk—had amounted to half the ammunition for his long-range missile launchers.
Nothing else.
Takari had known he was being set up to fail as soon as the ruling was announced. Complaining to the judges would have accomplished nothing. One or more of them had to be on the Syndicate’s payroll.
So he had gritted his teeth and climbed into the cockpit.
The match had dragged on for almost an hour, mainly because Takari had played it safe, looking for an opening that never came. Dervish had used up his long-range missiles, but several hard-hitting short-range salvos remained.
Not that Duval needed them.
At arena distances, the Quickdraw’s four medium lasers were more than enough to finish Takari’s battered Phoenix Hawk.
Takari peered at the sensor display, trying to track Dervish’s progress. The feed was a mess of static and phantom returns. He had lost too many sensor nodes, and the heaps of rusting metal made the Scrapyard difficult terrain for even an undamaged system.
But he did not need clean data to understand what had happened.
The Quickdraw had stopped beside the hidden passage.
Dervish would inspect it, realize he could not fit, then use his jump jets to clear the barrier.
Thirty seconds.
That was all Takari’s trick had bought him.
And the situation remained essentially unchanged.
Beyond desperate.
All he had was a broken BattleMech and a reservoir of defiance dwindling as quickly as his coolant reserves.
He wanted this win.
He needed this win.
He needed it because victory would take him one step closer to his goal. Closer to the Combine. Closer to vengeance.
Closer, perhaps, to the sweet embrace of death.
But most of all, he needed to win because his honor demanded it.
The Syndicate goons had come to him in the Mech bay shortly before the match.
They had told him, in no uncertain terms, to take a fall.
Takari had told them to go fuck themselves.
They had laughed and explained the excruciating manner in which they would kill him if he refused. It involved blinding, disembowelment, and being left to be eaten alive by winter-starved Solarian wolves.
Takari had drawn his katana, intending to chase the ruffians from the premises.
But the blade of a samurai fares poorly against stun guns.
He had ended up twitching and drooling on the concrete floor, unable even to lift his head as his assailants walked away.
He could still taste metal at the back of his throat.
And to add insult to injury, the criminal scum had arranged for a grotesquely unfair handicap in the final.
Takari Tanida was a samurai—or had been one before outliving his master—and there were no provisions in bushido for taking a fall.
If the Syndicate came for him after the match, he would try to kill some of them and be done with this honorless life.
But first, he had to win.
He had to prove them wrong.
Show them that he had not rolled onto his back.
Show them that all their threats and tricks had been for nothing.
Takari knew better than to turn back.
He did it anyway.
He spun the Phoenix Hawk around and pushed a stud on the left-hand control stick.
The bright yellow BattleMech leaped into the air on fusion-powered jets, like the mythical creature for which it had been named.
At almost the same instant, Dervish fired the jump jets of his sixty-ton Quickdraw, intending to clear the barrier and finish his opponent.
Both machines rose from the ground, curving forward as they gained altitude.
Halfway through their jumps, the Phoenix Hawk and Quickdraw cleared the tangled wall of scrap and acquired visual contact.
Dervish fired first.
Four medium lasers flashed through the smoke-filled air. An instant later, missiles burst from the Quickdraw’s SRM rack.
But Takari’s jump had caught the old gladiator by surprise. Dervish’s reflexes were not quick enough to bring his weapons fully to bear on the rapidly ascending Phoenix Hawk.
Lasers grazed Takari’s machine, burning away some of its last remaining armor. The missiles failed to lock and sailed past, trailing smoke before detonating somewhere beyond him.
Takari did not return fire.
His single medium laser would do nothing meaningful to the Quickdraw. The machine gun was even more useless.
Instead, he kept climbing.
The Phoenix Hawk was fifteen tons lighter. It had been designed for speed and mobility, while the Quickdraw was a heavy machine burdened by more armor, weapons, and mass.
Takari trusted—nay, willed—his Mech to rise faster.
The Quickdraw’s fire-blackened cockpit module appeared below him, mounted prominently atop the heavier machine’s torso.
Takari saw the opening.
He stamped down.
The Phoenix Hawk’s right foot struck the Quickdraw high on the shoulder, hard enough to throw both machines off balance. The damaged leg slipped across armor.
Takari twisted the controls and lashed out with the other leg.
The machine responded.
The metal toes of the Phoenix Hawk smashed into the Quickdraw’s head-shaped cockpit module.
Armor crumpled.
Mountings sheared apart.
The entire cockpit tore free from the torso and spun away, trailing cables and glittering metal fragments.
The impact shook Takari’s smaller Mech and sent it tumbling sideways. Warning lights exploded across the cockpit as the Phoenix Hawk’s jump jets and gyroscope fought to compensate.
They could not.
Takari hit the override without hesitation.
There was no chance the computer could recover from this.
He grappled with the controls, fighting the spinning machine through instinct, training, and blind luck. The arena rotated across his canopy: scrap wall, sky, ground, fire, sky again.
He fired one jump jet, then another.
Too much.
He corrected.
Not enough.
The ground rushed up to meet him.
Takari hauled back on the controls and turned what should have been a headlong crash into a landing.
A very hard landing.
One of the Phoenix Hawk’s weakened actuators gave way beneath the impact, and the machine stumbled onto one knee.
Takari reacted quickly, throwing out the Mech’s remaining arm to keep the landing from becoming an ignoble face-first tumble into the dirt.
For several seconds, he remained frozen over the controls.
The Phoenix Hawk knelt amid drifting smoke and falling debris. Alarms screamed throughout the cockpit. The status board was a nearly solid field of red.
Takari looked through the canopy.
The headless Quickdraw had crashed beyond the barrier, half-buried in a heap of rusting machinery. Its legs twitched once, then went still.
Farther away, the cockpit module lay amid the wreckage.
Takari could scarcely believe it.
He had won.
He was bruised and battered. His stable-owned BattleMech had been reduced to a wreck. The Syndicate would come for him now, and this time they would not settle for warnings.
But he had won.
Against all odds, he had won.
It was more than skill.
More than luck.
It was the favor of the gods and the ancestors.
It was kamikaze.
The divine wind.
