Mecha Corps by Brett Patton Read Free Book Online Page B

promise. You’ll see those beaches—”
    The wall screen flashed a red warning dialogue. Even at six, Matt knew what it was. It was what happened when you wanted to make the data system do something that it couldn’t.
    Dad pounded a fist on the table, making artifacts jump. “No, no, no, no!” he chanted. He pounded out new instructions on the keyboard. More red dialogues appeared.
    “They’re already in the system!” his dad cried, turning to Matt with an expression of abject horror.
    Matt’s stomach rolled over and he felt his bladder loosen. He’d never seen his dad look like that.
    Dad scooped up the slate, grabbed Matt’s hand, and pulled him out the door. Matt’s feet tangled in the hall. Dad swept him up and carried him, like he used to when Matt was a baby.
    Dad came up short at the lift. It was still crawling its way down the thousand-feet-deep shaft. It had never seemed so slow. Dad pounded on the control panel.
    “We’ll make it,” he said. “We’ll make it.” It was as if he were trying to convince himself.
    Corsairs. A thousand images from the news came to beat at Matt: scruffily dressed men in armored spaceships descending on a new colony town, pelting the rough concrete buildings with explosives. A shaft on a Displacement Drive ship, filled with bodies. Flickering red lights at the edge of the Union, like torches outside a castle.
    What if the Corsairs were already on the surface, waiting for them? Matt whimpered and squeezed his dad’s hand tighter.
    “We’ll make it,” Dad said.
    Finally, the lift came. Dad slammed the door shut and pressed the button marked SURFACE a dozen times. With a groan, the lift began grinding upward.
    “We will make it,” Dad repeated, his voice cracking.
    Matt remembered the security display and the dots. He remembered how fast they had moved. He counted out the seconds. The dots should have already reached them.
    An eternity later, the elevator socked into its cage in the surface hangar. The outer doors of the building were open, revealing a dry, sandy landscape under a beige sky. Wind howled outside, and dust swirled into the hangar, driven by Prospect’s seemingly endless wind. One of their three six-man Hedgehog transports rose into the sky outside.
    The other Hedgehog sat on the steel-grate floor only fifty feet away, it’s cargo door open. A Powerloader stood like a sentry outside the Hedgehog’s cargo bay, clearly abandoned in the rush to leave. Its ready light still glowed.
    Through his fear, Matt felt a strong pang of desire. Rex Cooper, the ops steward, had let him drive it once. Strapped in its battered steel-tube frame, he felt like a giant. Rex had to chase him around the hangar before Matt gave up the cockpit.
    “See!” Dad said. “Close up the ’Hog, and out we go. We’ll make it!”
    The screaming rush of missiles echoed through the hangar. A brilliant flash came from outside, followed quickly by a rolling crump of thunder. The rising Hedgehog was gone. In its place, a dark transport hung in the air. Figures dropped from it.
    Dad punched the EXTERIOR DOOR button. The steel doors began grinding closed, laboring through layers of sand and grime.
    “Come on!” He dragged Matt toward the ship.
    They didn’t get far. Blue-white light flashed in front of them, and the doors buckled inward. Matt’s eardrums compressed painfully. Then he was flying backward, sliding along the expanded steel grate as pieces of the door flew overhead.
    Matt looked up. His dad lay ahead of him on the ground, his leg bent back at a crazy angle. Red blood stained his khaki pants. Dad tried to push himself up off the ground and hollered in pain. His leg rolled limply. Even back then, Matt knew it was broken.
    Something inside Matt snapped. Dad is hurt! His dad! Dads didn’t die, except in videos he wasn’t supposed to watch. Matt wailed. It was a shrill sound, echoing off the metal walls.
    Through the door, black figures came. One, two, three, a dozen. They