Armor Frame Battle (1)
The old knight's—no. The old man's son.
The broker who nursed his ailing father and worked himself raw had lent out more than an armor frame. He had also introduced a man to maintain it and keep it running.
The man's name was Zack: a Black man who looked equally suited to rap, a brawl, and a thorough cursing-out of his parents.
Laurent stepped into the hangar where the armor frame waited. Rented on credit just like the machine itself, the place wore a distinctly shabby look.
He entered the password and passed through the door, and there was Zack with a hamburger jammed in his mouth.
"A fine morning."
Rumble—crack!
Light flared beyond the great wall of glass. Thunder and lightning.
Hard rain came with it, thick streams sliding down the pane. Kaidal-4's artificial weather service, laid on for the colony's citizens.
"Odd taste you've got."
"I like the rain."
Laurent meant it. A fondness for rain was an honest preference.
He climbed up over the armor frame. The fifteen-meter bipedal weapon lay in the center of the hangar.
Zack finished the hamburger and set his hands to a laptop. Meticulous despite his looks, he never seemed to weary of running the same checks again and again.
"Look it over yourself. Training's simulation."
"Might I not simply move it in truth?"
"You crazy? There's nowhere to move it."
As Zack said, the hangar was absurdly cramped. Stretch an arm, and the armor frame might well punch through a wall.
"How dull."
Laurent sat in the cockpit and began the simulation training. It did not last. Soon enough he quit.
"What, you're not doing it?"
"A hero does not stoop to study."
"Keep that up and you'll just embarrass yourself in a real fight."
"Embarrassment? A word that ill befits me."
Laurent lifted one corner of his mouth. Whether Zack shook his head or not, he plainly did not care.
His gaze shifted to one side of the hangar. A screen covering the whole wall displayed the list of entrants for the coming duel.
Thirty-two in all.
Every champion who would fight for Count Hogus and the Countess was there.
"Few entrants."
"An armor frame isn't a hamburger. It'd be strange if just anybody could have one."
Zack worked the laptop and threw one man's photograph onto the screen. An ordinary fellow, the sort one might see anywhere.
"Steve Ahn. Your first opponent. Used to collect scrap. Went freelance."
"A scrap collector?"
"Yeah. Problem?"
"If he was a scrap collector, his skill must be considerable."
"Probably. Those guys practically live in space."
Space was full of scrap. Satellites dead of age or wrecked by harsh conditions, ships dumped in secret by owners too cheap to pay the disposal fees—junk lay everywhere.
Scrap collectors made their living hauling in that cosmic trash, and so they were adept at maneuvering through dangerous, tangled environments.
"Watch yourself. Word is that one even partnered with space pirates. You know how dangerous those bastards are."
Laurent thought back to what had come before. The incident aboard the pilgrim ship Venus.
What a scrub.
Steve Ahn, former scrap collector, was a scrub. Laurent settled on the conclusion and opened his mouth.
"He shall be no opponent of mine."
The word scrub had failed to pass the filter.
A few days later, the duel raised its curtain.
"Please... please...!"
Count Hogus fretted, his leg jittering without rest. In the VIP seats beside him sat the Countess, a sneer resting on her lips.
"Give it up. Your champion can never defeat mine."
"Silence!"
Rough as the Count's words were, the Countess did not so much as blink. Their marriage was a binding of house to house. Her private life was riddled with blemishes, but divorce was no simple matter.
If he truly meant to divorce her, he would have to produce a ruinous settlement. That was the way of the law, at least. A duel was the exception. From ancient times, trial by combat had been noble society's all-purpose cheat code.
"I will not give up!"
"Heh."
The Countess laughed, mean and low, like a gambler certain of the winning hand.
At that same hour, Laurent sat aboard his armor frame, ready to launch, while Zack repeated the cautions over the comm.
"I am aware. When the passage opens, one simply charges. Is that not so?"
Zack bellowed in a fury, and the cockpit filled with the racket of his howling.
"As I have said time and again, I am no lunatic afflicted with knight-sickness. I am a true knight."
Zack pressed a hand to his brow. A headache seemed to be coming on, but that was no concern of Laurent's.
Laurent turned his eyes to a device drifting weightless inside the cockpit. They were already outside Kaidal-4, beyond the reach of the space colony's artificial gravity.
"Psi Connector."
He closed his hand around it. The device fit in one palm: a glove trailed by several cables, the Psi Connector.
"There is a steadiness to it."
"I am listening. Speak."
Laurent flexed the hand wearing the Psi Connector. The device that let a pilot steer a machine by psionic wave sat more comfortably than he had expected.
Meanwhile Zack explained how the duel would proceed. A duel was not a matter of simply charging in.
The rest was simple. Two champions, launched from different points, would seek each other out and join battle, fighting short of killing.
Destroy the armor frame's head, or take a surrender, and the victory was yours. Kill your opponent, and even a win was a disqualification.
"Why go to such lengths?"
"A frail and paltry notion. Unworthy of a knight."
"Yet I shall comply. However it displeases me, a rule is a rule."
Zack's face eased. Judging by Laurent's manner, there was no need to fear some disaster.
"......"
"Of course. Do not belittle a knight's refinement."
Zack did not understand. That the piloting of an armor frame was a knight's refinement.
It was no ancient custom. Nothing more than declining knights laying hands on armor frames in a bid to survive.
A chime sounded, and the countdown began. Departure drew slowly near.
"Understood."
He roused his will. That will traveled through the Psi Connector.
Armor frame Zing.
The first armor frame in the history of human warfare, a machine that had appeared in the latter days of the 10-Year War, flared to life.
KRAAAAAAA!!
Plasma gas roared from the boosters and shoved the frame forward. In the same instant the long passage seemed to shrink to nothing.
No. That was an illusion.
He had crossed the long passage in a heartbeat.
"At last, it begins."
A moment later the Zing broke into a vast open reach. The star Kaidal. A cosmos lit by that brilliant white sun.
"Where are you."
The freelancer, Steve. Once a scrap collector, he drove his machine through a field strewn with space junk.
His armor frame was the Red Bird. Contrary to the name, the frame was painted black, and it blended with the dark of space as it searched for an opponent waiting somewhere out there.
"I said, where."
The opponent did not appear. The Zing's pilot, the man called Laurent, stayed out of sight as if fear had taken him.
The radar flickered without rest, marking object after object and waiting on a human judgment.
Nothing.
No—he could not tell.
Great and small pieces of space junk made the radar impossible to trust outright. The stealth system the Zing was sure to carry made it harder still.
In the end, the only things worth trusting were optical data, and his own eyes to sort it.
"Damn it, where are you!"
The instant he shouted in frustration, a corner of the radar flared hard. A clear red point was closing at high speed.
"What...?"
Steve could not understand it. This was beyond him.
"He turned the stealth system off?"
A red point. That stark light was the signature of a frame with its stealth system released.
Steve was thrown into a panic. And at that very moment, Laurent was catching an earful.
"A knight holds cowardice in contempt."
"A knight shall fight fair and true."
Zack shrieked under the stress. Laurent, offering not the slightest comfort, even switched on the Zing's exterior lights.
Flash!
The Zing blazed from head to toe. Far from hiding in the dark, it was advertising, plain as a sign: I am here.
"A knight does not hide."
That was when Laurent's eyes caught something.
"The enemy."
A black frame entered his view. By the briefing, that machine was the Red Bird, an armor frame exceptional in mobility and utility.
"What is he doing?"
The Red Bird was detaching parts from its body and setting them about the surroundings. In a flash they transformed and buried themselves in the piles of space junk. Automated turrets, by the look of them.
"A fine sight. When one faces a knight, one ought to give one's all."
Laurent judged the matter entirely to suit himself. He took it that Steve had acknowledged his own inferiority and meant to lean upon his tools.
"To that sight I pay my respect. I, too, shall give my all."
Laurent sent his will. Receiving it, the Zing seized the competition live-round rifle that extended from its back.
And then—
He threw it away.
Silence came back over the comm. While Zack could not manage a word, Laurent spoke, proud and plain.
"A gun is a coward's weapon."
Zack's cursing split the ear.
"Why cowardly, you ask? I fail to grasp the question."
Laurent said it with perfect calm, and selected the second weapon mounted on the Zing.
"Sword fights are just the law."
The Heat Blade. A heated short sword that could melt a plate of steel armor in a single breath.
Laurent drew the blade.
"Lunatic, lunatic, lunatic!"
Zack spat curses without pause. It was not that he feared for Laurent, the man an acquaintance had introduced.
It was only that his own pay rode on Laurent's performance.
The visit of Count and Countess Hogus, and the trial by combat that had sprung from them—backed by the Count's fortune and the sponsorship of Kaidal-4's corporations and broadcasters, the affair had swollen into a festival with a colossal prize.
Reach even the round of sixteen, and they would safely recoup their costs. Anything beyond that, and the payout would be a windfall.
"You bastard! Do it like a normal person!"
Feeling rode the voice that blamed Laurent. The prize was grand enough to turn even a mild man into a beast.
At that same hour, feeling rode Steve's voice as well.
"He's a nutjob."
An emotion wholly unlike Zack's. Relief, and a thrill.
"No. Maybe I ought to thank the bastard."
Steve drew his armament. A mass-production live-round rifle, the sort issued for the match. Competition-grade or not, it was no weapon that ended in a bruise if it hit.
"Haha! Eat this!"
The muzzle spat fire, and dozens of large-caliber rounds tore away. Armament worthy of an armor frame some fifteen meters tall—rounds that would rip a tank apart without effort.
The aim was exact. Because Laurent had killed the stealth system, nothing interfered with the fire-control. One strike would take a vital point and end the match.
"Huh?"
But what he wanted did not happen. The Zing slipped the rounds by a hair.
Chance?
Taking it for that, Steve broke into an evasive run and lined the Zing up again. True to an early-model armor frame, the Zing's mobility was nothing worth looking at.
"This time it's real!"
Dududududu!!
The live-round rifle vomited fire once more. A dreadful blaze split the void and drew streaks of orange light.
"Again?"
Not chance.
Not a mistake.
That was skill.
Steve's mind raced. He seized on what it would take to pull off movement like that in a Zing so slow on its feet.
"He predicted it?"
In that instant, his face twisted.