Scarlet Steel

Every fight between mechs is a war on two fronts. While the human fires lasers and slings bullets in the physical world, their AI companion is doing much the same in the digital world. An AI losing their fight can, at best, make the human’s job harder. They can cause sensors to go haywire, cause movement assistance to fail, and even reduce the effectiveness of parts of the mech. At worst, however, an AI can take complete control of the mech. Shutting it down completely and leaving it as a sitting duck, or even turning the mech against the pilot’s squad members. - A Walk Through Warfare.

Mom doesn’t say anything when I stop going to school, even when some of the other teenagers come to check on me. She covers for me, creating an excuse without me even needing to ask.

It’s not my fault I’m not going to school! I just needed time to recover from the news about Dad, and by the time I started being able to think about anything but Hoppy, so much time had passed that catching up would take weeks, and that’s time that I can’t work on my mech. Besides, school doesn’t teach me any engineering I don’t already know, so what’s the actual loss?l

I step back from my work, the final piece of the engine. It’s been three years since Mom started helping occasionally, but most of the work was done by me.

I’ve spent every single day out here for so long, it feels weird to be done. Or at least as done as I can get her without firing her up. For that I just need two pieces. A chiral mesh to pull a perfect vacuum, and an antimatter cell. I’ve checked every scrapped mech within fifty miles, and those pieces have been stripped out of every single one. I’m not surprised, of course, chiral meshes can only be produced on a few planets in the center of the Spur. They’re expensive, more expensive than this town, and it’d take a miracle for someone to scrap a mech without recycling it themselves. And the cell is a literal bomb. Even a scout mech, which uses a 32nd of a gram of antimatter, would be equivalent to a kiloton of TNT if it was full. That could level our little town, or at least do a lot of damage.

We do have a power plant in the village, and I’m pretty sure they use tiny amounts of antimatter to power the forge, somewhere on the scale of a hundredth of a gram delivered every few months. If I could get my hands on one of those cells, I could adapt it to work in Hoppy. Heck, I don’t even need that much. A thousandth will work. The only reason a mech needs so much energy is to power the Photon Lock Shield, I don’t need all that much power to just walk around.

I can’t just steal one though. Well, ok, I could if I had a working mech, but I’d need a cell for that. And also I haven’t even touched the weapon systems, not that I’d use them of course! I’ve just been considering all my options.

Cars! Cars are the answer! They use a thousandth of a gram! After their cell runs dry, after 115,000 miles, the cell is tossed out and the car is refurbished! Or at least, the average car is. This planet is a junkyard, we don’t see those cars. What we do see, however, are cars that have been in crashes and ruined. Those are everywhere! The engines are a closed system, the cells aren’t really designed to be removed, but I’m desperate enough to try.

I grab my tablet and pull up every wreck my drone has seen. Sure enough, they’re everywhere. They’re all in awful shape after being dropped from the sky, but I have plenty of options. All I have to find is a car with an intact engine compartment and hope they didn’t drive it too much before it got destroyed.

I fly over my digital copy of the junkyard and tag every potential car. There’s no way to tell if the cell is still even in there, much less if it’s undamaged, from the sky. I just have to hope.

What do I need to tear into an engine? I have no idea. Cutting torch, handheld power saw, a collection of hand tools. If I need anything else, I’ll come back.

I don’t even head home first. I just head directly out into the junkyard. I’ll probably be back before sundown.

The nearest car in decent shape is only a mile away. It’s a short walk carrying heavy tools, but I make it. I pop the hood and look in.

Shit. The engine is missing. It’s just the frame they threw away. Fine! Next one!

No engine again. Every one I check is the same.

I’m so dumb! If I ever bothered to stop and think my life would be so much easier. If the engine wasn’t damaged, of course they would recycle it. I need to find cars where the engine was damaged, but not to the point where the antimatter cell went through a full emergency safety vent.

I grab my tablet, find a new target, and set off again. It’s already getting late in the day by the time I arrive, but I have a few lights, and I don’t need to sleep tonight.

I throw open the hood the moment I arrive, and the engine stares back at me! It’s fine! Well, no, it’s not fine. It definitely got hit by something. A good quarter of the engine is a dented mess with pipes and tubes sheared off from their connections. But there’s hope! I set up a few lights before the sun goes down and get to work.

Not a single part of this engine was designed to be worked on by anyone but the manufacturer. Every single connection is either welded, riveted, or uses proprietary bolt heads. I guess it’s reasonable when it’s powered by antimatter, the average person shouldn’t play with it, but it sure does make my life hard. At least I don’t need to get this thing working. The engine already has air in it, which should mean the cell either sealed itself, or vented. I’m good to just start cutting away, as long as I don’t breach the cell there’s no danger.

After hours of cutting, drilling, bending, and a little smashing, I get to the core. The cell is a heavy metal sphere that fits in my hands. I pull it out and rotate it, finding a small screen built into the side. I touch it with my finger and it comes to life with a full readout of the cell.

It’s very nearly empty. Less than one percent of its starting matter is still inside. That’s alright! That’s still plenty of energy to test with. I just need to scavenge a few internal parts of the engine and I should be able to adapt this to Hoppy! I still need a chiral mesh, but I can figure that out later.

By the time I’m done scrapping the remnants of the engine for parts, it’s well past midnight. Instead of trying to head back in the dark, I just curl up in what remains of the car’s interior and head to sleep. It’s better than my sleeping bag on the ground at least.

I can work a little bit on finding a solution before I sleep. I pull out my laptop and get started. I need to model the parts I just scavenged, and that takes all night, cross checking every part with the documents I’ve traded with spacies for. 

These parts are pretty robust, able to detect and change their magnetic fields to keep the antimatter suspended in a vacuum, but that only makes my idea possible, not easy. My first idea is a failure, blowing up the simulation of my engine. The turn the antimatter needs to take is just too tight. That can be solved for, it’s just going to require a minor change in most of the engine compartment. Changes that’ll need to be undone when I get an actual 32nd to power it. There has to be a better way.

I’ll sleep on it.

I only get a few hours of sleep before the morning sun wakes me up. I should have brought some actual camping gear, or at least an extra shirt to throw over my head.

I reluctantly drag myself out of the car, load up my gear, and stop by Hoppy on the way home. Might as well drop off everything on my way.

I stumble into the house just in time to catch Mom making breakfast. She glances at me for just a moment before speaking.

“You’re supposed to call when you stay out.”

“Sorry, it slipped my mind.” I collapse into a dining chair and rest my head on my hands. “I made a big breakthrough and got excited.”

“Oh yeah?” She asks.

“She’s ready to test. I just need to install an adaptor and figure out how to pull a perfect vacuum without a chiral mesh.”

“Where are you getting the power?”

“An old junked car. I pulled out the cell. It’s a tiny thing with just a hundred-thousandth left, but that’s still 1.8 to the 9th joules. It’s plenty as long as it doesn't need to clear out any air in the system.”

“That’ll get you ninety miles if you can get the cell to use all its matter and your mech is running well." Mom nods.

“Yeah.” I’m amazed she knew that off the top of her head. Although the numbers are pretty easy to remember. I pull out my laptop and work on my simulations again while Mom finishes making food. “How would you pull a vacuum?”

“With that little antimatter? Take it to high planetary orbit. Open the airlock and work on it in EVA.”

“How am I supposed to get five tons into orbit? I guess I only need to take the engine up. That’s still half a ton, maybe a quarter if I really strip things down.”

“You don’t. That’s just how we did it when we were short on meshes or time. Walk me through what you have, what’s your best plan?”

“Find more cells. Figure out a way to swap them out without letting more air in and let them go through their vacuum cycles, obliterate the air and vent the energy. If I’m lucky I’d only need a hundred grams or so. I could maybe get that down to ten? That’s only 10,000 full car cells and months of safe venting.”

“You can do better than 10 grams in the system, but you're right, it's still not an option.” She puts her undrunk cup of coffee in front of me, and I just scoot it back to her. That stuff just puts me to sleep. “I’ll call Juno and ask-”

“No! No, I can solve this myself.” I quickly cut her off. If I want to prove to her that I can be a mechie, I need to do this myself. All of this. That’s why I haven’t talked to her since… I haven’t talked to her in three years. Even when she comes to visit, I take a few days of food and work on Hoppy.

“Walk me through it then.” Mom prods.

“No spacie would trade for a mesh. Nobody would toss out a mesh. I’m not just going to stumble across one, even if I check the entire junkyard. I need one planetside that I can borrow.”

“And who has one?”

“The recycling plant. I already know that. If their power generation goes down and the batteries run out, the entire town runs out of power. They need a mesh to clear out their engine in case of repair. That might be the only one on the planet.”

“Then you need to get your hands on it.”

“Nobody will just give me it! I wouldn’t give it to me! I wouldn’t take that risk.”

“You don’t need to be given it, nobody needs to know you borrowed it.”

I look up at her blankly, not believing my ears.

“Are you seriously saying I steal it?”

“No! I’m saying you go apply for a job there. You have so much hands on experience with antimatter reactors, they’d be dumb to not hire you, especially if you work for cheaper than off planet specialists. That’ll get you access to the mesh, and as long as you can find a way around whatever security measures it has, nobody will know if you borrow it for a few days.”

“That’ll take years. And if I get caught and arrested…”

“That’s the only other option I see.”

She knows it's a bad idea. I know it’s a bad idea that will take too long.

“Call Juno.”

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