Mecha Corps Read Free

use comms. Talking was pointless anyway. Their trajectory would take them close to the top of the bridge. With any luck, they’d hit it. That impact would sap their momentum and they’d fall back down to the surface.
    It would be close. The bridge swelled in front of them. Inside, a crew member looked up from her screen, her mouth agape in surprise.
    Matt stretched hard, but his fingers only brushed the edge of the bridge as they passed over it. That didn’t do anything except make their tumbling worse.
    “Hey!” Matt’s comms crackled alive. The guard had finally found a clue.
    Matt looked down. They were about ten meters off the asteroid and still rising. That was bad. That meant they probably weren’t coming down.
    Matt turned on his comms. “What’ve you got to throw?”
    “What?” the kid’s voice was high and screechy.
    “Throw! Something to throw! To get us back down.”
    The kid shook his head. “I—I don’t get it.”
    Matt sighed. “This is microgravity. We have to slow down, or we’re going on a long trip in a space-suit spaceship.” Matt felt along his own suit, hoping the digger had left an anchor. There was nothing. “We need to throw something in the direction we’re going, or we aren’t going to come down. Heavy things. Got anything heavy?”
    The kid shook his head. “I—Uh, I don’t know.”
    Matt groaned. They didn’t have time for this. He pulled the stun stick off the guard’s utility belt.
    “Hey! You’re under arrest!” the kid grabbed for the club.
    “Let’s save ourselves now and talk about that later.”
    The kid looked doubtful while Matt weighed the stick in his hand. It was heavy, but not nearly heavy enough to make a difference in the velocity of a 150-kilo mass. Unless he could launch it fast enough.
    “Give me your belt,” Matt said.
    “Why?”
    “Because you don’t want to die.”
    The kid pulled off his belt. Matt looped it through the wrist strap of the nightstick and twirled it over his head, like a video of an ancient cowboy about to rope a steer. He’d have to release it at exactly the right moment. That would be tough. They were still tumbling over the asteroid’s rough surface.
    “Hold on,” he told the kid. “And don’t move.”
    Matt threw the nightstick. It rocketed out toward Earth, disappearing almost instantaneously into the brilliance of the clouds.
    He’d timed it well. They were falling slowly toward the surface of the UUS Mercury .
    The guard saw it. “How’d you know to do that?”
    “I learned a thing or two growing up on Displacement Drive ships.”
    The kid nodded. He looked down at the surface, now only a few feet below them. They passed over a deep pit where a Rhino-class Union warship crouched. Dark gray and angularly utilitarian, it was intended for close-range combat in deep space. Lights glowed dimly through tiny, slit windows, deep-set under thick armor. Long gouges in its sides spoke of recent combat. Matt wondered where they’d been fighting. Some frontier world too insignificant to make the news? Or perhaps near one of the fleets of independent Displacement Drive ships?
    It didn’t matter. Battleships were single-purpose machines, whether they were slow Rhinos or fast Cheetahs. The decisive victories, the ones people cared about these days, came on the ground, via Mecha. Mecha were the only things that could protect the tiny number of habitable worlds in the Union without the wholesale destruction of nuclear weaponry. Even the Corsairs weren’t insane enough to poison a valuable planet. Mecha were used when the fight mattered the most.
    Matt and the kid grazed a rocky outcropping, spraying dust and rock chips in glittering, sunlit plumes. Matt pinwheeled his arms to change their orientation and dug his heels into the ground. More dust ballooned up as he brought them to a stop.
    “You can let go of me now,” Matt said.
    The kid blushed and released him, taking two unsteady steps away. He grabbed for his Spazer gun