“Why are they doing this?” I asked nobody.I was staring at the power plant’s wall, at the concrete coated in drywall dust – but in reality, I was staring past it, looking through the eyes of the orbiting Scout Drone. The northern approach was a muddy wreck. Water was spewing up from an underground pipe that had been cracked open by a rocket. It was ugly, dirty, brackish stuff, intended for the water purification plant to the south of us.
The other four Suits in my ad hoc Squadron were doing likewise. We were all waiting for the next sign of where Khagan’s raiders would attack next. We’d beaten back half a dozen attacks by now, everything from headlong charges to cautious probing of the defenses. There was no room for subtlety or trickery – we’d answered every single one with overwhelming force.
I’d learned all their callsigns through the tactical network at this point, nearly ten minutes after I’d arrived at this frantic defense. They were Witch, Fossil, and Moses. I’d been wrong about Rye’s callsign; his name was actually RAI, all-caps, though I didn’t know what it stood for yet.“Mongols,” said Moses dismissively. “Who knows why they do anything?”“Everybody’s got a reason for what they do,” Fossil disagreed. He was an old man, and his voice was like old leather, worn and creaky, but still strong. “The Japanese came here for the Royal Navy base, and to capture the Strait of Malacca. Damn horrible time to be alive, that was. The base is gone, but the Strait is still here. We’re Gibraltar, we are. Can’t ship to India without passing through here, or Sunda Strait, or all the way down to Bali. Geography is king.”“If they’re really working for the Chinese, then it would make sense,” RAI said, wearily. “Pull it off covertly, keep it under wraps so they get away with it.”“And what, close the strait to all traffic but China’s?” Witch replied, rhetorically. “I don’t think so. It would be too obvious at that point, and it might be enough to finally get a war started against them.”“What do you think, Wraith?” RAI asked, turning towards me.
“…I think they’re desperate,” I admitted, giving voice to the thoughts niggling away in the back of my head. “Their Suits are too damaged. It’s not just us… they were already damaged, well before now. They’ve got guns without ammo. And those charges? Narwhal said that isn’t Khagan’s style. He likes hitting less defended targets. Sweeping around them. Not like this. Taking over the city, that’s my best guess.”“Desperate to take over the city,” Fossil repeated, slowly. “I could see that as a possibility. I don’t know if you’re right, but it makes sense.”
I bit my lip, and shrugged.
“Wraith, new information that might help you,” came the voice of Major Jun Hao, my combat controller, over the Squadron line. “Reinforcements are on their way, but it’ll be half an hour. Can you hold that long?”“Don’t know,” I said. “What do you guys think?”
“It’s not up to us,” Fossil declared. “Khagan has the initiative and the numbers. If he realizes that he’s got us by the throat, then there’s little we can do. He just needs to send all his men at the weakest part of the line. Bloody history, repeating itself.”“How’s the rest of the battle going?” RAI asked.“Dying down,” Major Hao replied. “There was a major push by the Mongol infantry through the nature reserve. The Gurkhas held them, but with a lot of casualties. Place looks like a slaughterhouse. Hundreds, maybe thousands dead. Defenders called down howitzers on their own heads.”Witch let out a low whistle.“They can’t have too many more infantry,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “This… this doesn’t make sense.”“So long as they’re not attacking, it doesn’t have to make sense,” Major Hao said. “We can figure out their reasons after this is over. Those reinforcements should convince them to surrender.”“…but will they?” I asked, unhappily. “This is… God, this is so fucking stupid. They can’t win.”I paused, and the jumbling thoughts in my head started to click together. A dreadful realization that I had seen this before.
I knew exactly what Khagan and his raiders were thinking, because I had thought the exact same things, back when I first got my Suit.“They can’t win,” I repeated, more slowly. “They’re afraid.”“They should be,” Moses grunted. “No, no, you don’t get it,” I said, turning my Suit around and looking at them all. “What if they are a deniable ops group from the CUI? That place is a nightmare, I can’t imagine they were treated well. They’d be nothing more than attacks dogs on a chain. That would explain why all their Suits are so damaged. If the Guild is right, and they came here without orders, then they’re cutting ties and running.” “What does it matter?” Moses shot back, growling at me. “They’re still killing our people.” “It matters because they’re trapped,” I told him. “Not physically. They’re emotionally trapped. They’re backed in a corner. They think there’s no way out. For all they know, either China’s gonna kill them, or we are. They don’t have a repair shop anymore, so it’s this or nothing. When someone thinks that they’re going to die anyway, they’ll do all sorts of crazy things.”“In death ground, fight,” Fossil quoted.
“Khagan is in death ground right now,” I said, nodding to the old man in thank. “If he thinks that he’s about to lose, he might not surrender, because he’s been a slave before. He doesn’t trust us to not do the same. Which means instead, he might stop trying to capture the water plant intact. They could start shelling the whole area.”“We can’t risk that,” Major Hao replied, swiftly. “The humanitarian crisis would be catastrophic. Thousands could die before we get enough clean water for everyone.”“So let’s offer him a way out,” I said. “Let me go talk to them. I’ll go out with a white flag.”
“You want to surrender?” Moses demanded, his Suit’s fists clenching. “No,” I said. “I’m going to ask Khagan to surrender.”“I don’t know if that’s a good plan,” Major Hao said, his voice hesitant. “They’ll shoot you on sight.”“They haven’t attacked for two minutes now,” I pointed out. “We’ve killed… what, a dozen of them? They’re nearly naked on armor, and another push might just kill them all, but they can’t surrender, because they think we’ll just execute them all.”“We would never do that!” RAI protested, stepping towards me, crunching a chunk of rubble underneath his boot. “No, but the CUI would,” I reminded him. “They kill their own people all the time. I knew a couple people who got out of the country, and it’s not pretty there. They’re abused dogs. They’re lashing out because it’s all they know! But they’re not evil. Some of the surrendered to me. Some of them figured out that we’re not going to do it. I just have to convince these guys of the same thing.“You don’t speak for us,” Moses said, his voice tight. “You’re not one of us, Wraith. You’re an outsider.”It hurt to hear that, but it wasn’t anything new. I’d been telling myself that I didn’t belong in any faction for years now.“Which is why I’m gonna do it, and not you,” I countered. “My armor’s intact. I’m air-mobile. If they don’t respect the white flag, I have the best chance of tanking the hits and getting out without dying. And if I die, so what? I’m not one of you, right? What would you care, if I die?”The angry Pilot exhaled fiercely, and then stepped closer to me, and laid an armored gauntlet on my pauldron. He was careful about it, not so much as scuffing my paint, but I stiffened up anyway. “Just because you aren’t one of us doesn’t mean we want you to die,” Moses said gruffly, with a hint of apology in his voice. “What I meant is that you’d better clear this with command, before you start offer them something the Prime Minister won’t accept.”“I’ve got Narwhal and Lieutenant-General Hong on the line,” Major Hao said, speaking up for the first time in the last few minutes of arguing. “I filled them in on your plan.”“Wraith, talk to me,” Narwhal’s voice said, ringing through my helmet. “Explain this to us. Quickly.”“I think Khagan might be willing to surrender,” I told her. “We know they’ve got a majority of their Suits here in Tuas, but they’re not attacking any more. We’ve knocked out a dozen of their Suits. Their infantry just got wiped out in the nature reserve. Khagan has got to know that even if he takes no more losses, he can’t conquer Singapore – he doesn’t have enough people to occupy it, to control the population. He’s screwed.”“He might not realize that,” Narwhal said, but she sounded disinterested, as if she was only playing the devil’s advocate.“Maybe I’m wrong,” I admitted. “From everything I heard in your briefing, Khagan has managed to survive as a public menace for two years. He’s hit multiple nations successfully. But this time, he’s broken his pattern. He hasn’t left quickly, he brought infantry, his Suits are already damaged, and a couple of them have surrendered to me.”“The CUI is a cruel nation,” remarked an older man. My HUD identifying the voice only as ‘Hong’. The Lieutenant-General, it appeared. I waited for Lieutenant-General Hong to say more, but he didn’t. I took a breath, and kept talking.“I think Khagan has backed himself into a corner,” I said. “Because the CUI treated them so badly, he didn’t trust anyone enough to just defect to another nation. He can’t go back to China, and he’s lost too many men to conquer Singapore. He’s desperate, and if he cares about his men at all, he’s probably feeling pretty guilty that he led so many of them into this death… and he’d want to keep as many of them alive as possible. Just like we want to keep as many of the locals alive as possible.”“That’s a big assumption you’re relying on,” Narwhal warned me. “He might not care about his men at all.”
“If he didn’t care about them, then he would have run away from the CUI on his own,” I argued. “Instead, he brought all his people with him – not just the Pilots, but infantry, too! That was a big risk. That would have taken a lot more effort to hide from the CUI. Even if he doesn’t care about them, and he only cares about himself, then he still knows that he’s lost, and there’s no way out. He’d want to stay alive.” “Even assuming that you’re correct about all of this,” Narwhal said, “you said it yourself – he might not trust anyone enough to just defect. Why would he do it now, when he didn’t trust us in the first place?” “Because we can point him to the prisoners we’ve taken,” I said. “We can tell him their names, we can put them on the phone to talk to him, to convince him that we’re not going to execute his people the moment they stand down.”I paused for a moment, and then took the plunge.“And even if I am wrong about all of this, then what are you losing, really?” I asked. “You’d be losing one Pilot, who isn’t a member of the Guild, and isn’t from Singapore. I’m expendable, Narwhal.”“You’re not,” Narwhal shot back. “Don’t talk that way, Wraith. That logic is never good. It makes you sound like you want to die.”I swallowed the lump in my throat at her pointed jab.
A few years ago, that would have been true. I always thought that I charged into battles to try to live up to Dragon’s legacy… but I’d also feared that some part of me wished to find something capable of killing me.Not anymore. I was no longer that person.
Things were getting better. For the first time in many years, I had hope.
I didn’t even know why. Maybe it was Amy, dragging me out to socialize with normal people. Maybe it was the Robin Hood Brigade, and the Guild, and the Pilots of Singapore, who accepted me and treated me like one of their own. Maybe it was just a false hope, a mirage. But I had lived without hope for a long while.
I had been the punching bag of Winslow and the strange refugee from Brockton Bay, the weird girl who kept to herself in the halls.
I had been the loner Pilot, the coward that always ran away when the fighting was done, named Wraith for it.
I had been – and I would always be – the girl who couldn’t save her father.
Living like that was horrible. I was some squirming bug crushed under a rock. I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that I was crushed, or the fear that if anybody ever lifted that rock, they’d see me and put it back anyway, crushing me again. A few seconds of relief, before I was stomped flat.
The first option was bad enough, but the second one would have been a conscious choice to put me in that place. Something that only Emma, Sophia, and Madison had ever done to me. Would the pain have been even worse, because I’d had a few seconds of relief from it?But I’d grown past that crippling fear. I’d thrown myself into so many battles with that fear chasing me, diving headfirst into hell. Somehow I’d survived and emerged out the other side of hell, bewildered and alive… and somewhere along the way, that fear had dulled.
I still remembered it… and I didn’t want to live like that again. I wanted to do more. I wanted to live up to the legacy I’d been handed.And what was highschool bullying compared to being tortured and forced to fight for the CUI?
I knew what happened to Capes and Pilots captured by the Yangban. After the first attempt on Amy’s life, I’d done my best to figure out what would have happened if I hadn’t been there. The answers were horrifying. An industrial-grade, mechanized version of what my bullies had done to me, with all the power of a nation.
The first Mongolian Pilot I captured, I asked them why. She said: ‘Because you won’t kill me.’
The second Pilot hadn’t said anything, but the third, just before I’d come to the power plant, had said ‘My life is worth it.’Desperation and fear… but beneath all of that, those Pilots been hopeful. They hadn’t fought to the death, believing that there was no alternative. They had hoped that if they surrendered, they would live to see another day. A tiny, little flickering ember of hope. Sometimes, that’s all you need. “This isn’t some suicide play,” I told Narwhal, with only a second or two of hesitation. “I genuinely think he will either surrender, or at least won’t kill me. And even if there is no ceasefire, it’ll buy us more time for those reinforcements to show up. All I need is your agreement to call a ceasefire.”“I don’t like this idea,” Lieutenant-General Hong said, slowly. “Still… even a temporary ceasefire is sorely needed.”“General,” Narwhal started to say, but he cut her off. “This is my nation to defend, Narwhal,” he said firmly. “You have the thanks of our people for aiding us, but this is not one of your missions. Khagan is not the Blasphemies, nor the Ash Beast. It may possible to negotiate with him, and my duties demand that I accept any chance to reduce the loss of life.”“…I understand,” Narwhal said, after a moment. “Please recognize, General Hong, that my concern is purely that this may not work.”“There are no guarantees in life,” the Lieutenant-General replied. “This Pilot is willing to make the offer, and I am willing to back it up. Wraith, you have my support. If you are successful, inform Major Hao immediately.”“Thank you sir,” I said.A sigh worked its way out of my throat as soon as Narwhal and the General disconnected.I looked around at the other four Pilots, each of them native to this city-state, or at least citizens of it. “Do you guys know where I could find a white flag?” I ask them, a bit sheepishly.
Xxxx
It took a little while to get everything set up.The 3rd Division had a couple white flags stashed away in someone’s kit, and a little scavenging found some steel pipes of the right size and length to mount them on. The infantry hadn’t looked too encouraged about it, but their officers were explaining the idea to them when I picked them up from the loading dock.Fossil volunteered to go up to the roof and wave one of the flags, since he was in a Light-weight Suit, and wouldn’t collapse the stairs on his way up, unlike the rest of us.We decided to wave the flag from the north-west corner of the power plant’s administration block. It had the best visibility from the surrounding area, the best chance of the Mongolians seeing it. It took about a minute, and then one of the Mongolians shouted out a question from across the western front, where the distance between our lines was the shortest. Fossil shouted back an answer, and then switched lines to tell us.“They’re willing to talk,” the old man said, a hint of disbelief in his voice. “They’ll sent out a single Suit. Looks like you’re up, Wraith.”“Boys, wish me luck,” I said, trying to put on an air of confidence to hide the butterflies in my stomach. “Who needs luck when you have skill?” Witch asked, jokingly, getting a round of laughs. “We’re Pilots! We make our own luck.”I chuckled along with the others, but on the inside, it didn’t help.
I’d never done anything like this before, and it scared me.
After another half-minute, I got the word.
“I see the Mongol,” Fossil said. “Heavy-class Dragonsuit, centaur body. Blue and white paint, carrying what looks like a lance.”“Khagan,” RAI whispered over the line, his voice tense. “That’s him.”
There was no more time for hesitation, no matter that my heart was now hammering like a steel foundry. Witch and Moses pulled the larger chunks of debris away from the hole blasted in the exterior wall, and I squeezed my Suit through the hole, taking care not to rip the flag.
They sealed up the hole behind me, and I looked out across the war-torn grass field, where I could see the distant sight of a Dragonsuit approaching.Heavy-weight Suits were special. Just like the Boar I’d met in Kansas City, or Thief in his tank, each of them was much larger than my Medium-weight. They could carry the heaviest of weapons, where only a rare few Mediums could. They were tough enough that my Vulcan would barely damage them, and I’d need twelve salvos to take them out. My beam saber would do better, but even then, it would take far, far too long.The thing most civilians don’t realize about the weight classes of Dragonsuits is that they’re not really based on size. They’re based on mass. Thief drove a tank, but tanks were squat and fairly blocky. When you changed the body to something with a different shape, a Heavy-weight suit could grow in height, drastically.
For comparison, my Medium Suit stood at three and a half meters tall. But it was humanoid, so height was easy for me. That Predator-shaped Medium that I’d fought back at Kansas City was barely two meters tall at ‘full height’.
Even from this distance I could see that Khagan’s helmet stood at five meters above the ground. His lance, held at a diagonal angle with the white flag of truce draped over it, reached even higher. I’m gonna be talking to a small building, I thought a bit hysterically.I strode forward on autopilot, my brain processing the need to keep moving while my thoughts were focused on analyzing everything about the man I was facing. My arms held the white flag steady in a one-handed grip, like I was carrying a torch. The flag itself was barely moving, since there wasn’t much wind.Khagan moved forward in a steady walk, his legs moving naturally enough that it was clear that he had a brainwave harness. It wasn’t much of a surprise, given that most of non-humanoid designs had those.
I was tempted to scan him for weapons, to make sure that I’d be able to beat him… but I didn’t. Maybe he’d be able to tell, maybe he’d see it as a hostile action. Still, even without an active radar pulse, I could see a bracer on his empty left hand that looked like a plasma shield emitter, the same as mine. On his back, the buttstock of a rifle protruded. It looked too big for me to use, which made it a plasma rifle.
That meant that Khagan had two of the rarest and most powerful of Dragon’s weapons. Tier Three weapons, some people called them. He’d really won the lottery with his Suit, in contrast to me, in my humble Medium trooper.My Suit had a recording function. I didn’t tend to use it much, often forgot that it even existed, but now I activated it. One way or another, I thought the next few minutes should be recorded for history. Our Dragonsuits closed the distance, until we stood only ten meters apart and stopped.“I am Khagan, leader of the free forces of Mongolia,” the man said, his voice booming from in-built speakers. He spoke with a clear diction and no accent – signs of nanite learning. “Who comes to negotiate for the people of Singapore? I do not know you, and you do not bear their markings.”
“They call me Wraith,” I told him, a bit proud of how my voice didn’t waver. “I’m an independent Pilot, and today I’m here with the Guild of Toronto.”“And why is the Guild of Toronto interested in the affairs of Asia?” Khagan asked, an interested note in his tone. “They do not often leave the Americas, save to hunt their prey.”“You’re attacking a neutral nation,” I pointed out. “And for the first time, you stayed long enough for them to show up. That’s pretty interesting.”“Is it?” Khagan asked me, rhetorically. “Why have you asked for this ceasefire, Wraith? Is this some scheme to delay me, for your reinforcements to arrive?”“Not a scheme,” I answered. “Reinforcements are coming, but you already knew that would happen anyway.”“Then why?”“I want to hold a ceasefire,” I told him.Khagan gestured with his empty left hand at the field around us, as if to indicate that we already had one. He didn’t speak, perhaps as a power play, to get me to demand more, to seem ungrateful or something like that.“A ceasefire for the entire conflict,” I said, undaunted. “Let’s stop killing each other, and talk.”“What is there to talk about?” Khagan asked curiously, so casually that I almost thought he meant it… but I wasn’t pretty sure that he didn’t. “I am here to claim a nation. Not to die, and not to run.”“I’m not asking you to die,” I replied. “Or to run. All I’m asking is that we talk, without more men dying. You’ve lost too many of them already, just like Singapore has.”Khagan didn’t reply for a long moment. He tilted his helmet, gazing at me beneath the enormous visor of his human-styled helmet – though I suspected his real body was somewhere inside the horse-body, rather than the humanoid upper torso protruding from it.The silence drew out for a moment, and I started to worry that he wouldn’t agree to the ceasefire.“Three of your Pilots are still alive,” I said, after a few more moments. “I captured them, and we did not kill them. I thought you might want to know that.”“Who were they?” Khagan asked in a commanding voice.“They didn’t give me their names,” I said. “A Medium trooper designed for police work, with a female Pilot and a beam saber. A Light sniper with a plasma bow. A Mesh Suit that was trying to blow up ships in the harbor with mines.”“Sable, Crane, and Rat,” Khagan said, identifying them.“You call him Rat?” I asked, skeptically. “What did he do to earn that name?”“He is… skinny,” Khagan said, with a small chuckle. “…you know what, I’ve heard stupider reasons,” I said, unable to keep from chuckling.Khagan nodded, and then raised his lance higher, straight vertical in the air. He waved it back and forth, signaling something to his forces.“Very well, Wraith,” the Mongolian Pilot said. “Let us have a ceasefire, and talk.”