Iron Empire

Twelve: Patchwork Job

Report: Stonewood, L
The airspace above Moscow.
Russia.
A radioactive "exclusion zone".
Neutral territory, until now.

I sat in the pilot's seat of Dropship 13, head bobbing, as the sweet melody of Elton John was hammered out over the speaker system. It was intended to be a shipwide system for announcing things to the mech pilots onboard, but it had seen more use as a stereo system. The song's beat was mangled by static and age but the melody rang loud and clear. Loud was what counted.

Loud meant that I couldn't hear the battle going on below.

I couldn't hear the pilots I'd transported to their deaths.

Elton John's snappy melody spoke to me. After all, we'd been through the alliance was still standing, but I certainly wasn't feeling like a survivor. I'd never fought in a battle. I just maintained the mechs, flew the dropship, and did patchwork to both mechs and pilots.

Fix them up and ship them back out. The cycle was endless. I sent pilots out until they either came back victorious or didn't come back at all.

When my brother Dan had first contacted me about the Iron War I'd been living in an old garage in Montreal when I wasn't behind the controls of a plane. The offer had seemed glorious at the time—instead of shipping freight, I would be delivering good people to fight the good fight against bad enemies.

But now? I was suspended in a flying tin can while death-machines blew each other apart with guns bigger than I was. It was funny how life worked.

It wasn't that I doubted we were on the right track, but the method felt flawed. No matter the mission, the Chinese-Canadian Alliance was an unknown, undocumented and undeclared military organization. We were technically a rebel militia at best and a terrorist organization at worst.

I didn't feel like a terrorist. We were fighting to end the fighting. We were the good guys.

Did all terrorists think that they were the good guys?

A roll of thunder shook me out of my thoughts for a moment.

Axion Industries was furthering a war for profit. They were the terrorists. They endangered civilians, not us. We were right.

We were, right?

Too put off by that thought to properly enjoy my music, I reached up to the console overhead and switched my comms to a public radio station.

Instead of the music I had hoped for, an announcer's voice accosted me, reporting something about odd lunar activity.

"...while scientists are able to theorize about the cause of the quakes," the announcer broadcasted, "most progress is hampered by the loss of functioning satellites due to the Third World War. Still effectively blind to our lunar neighbour, many space agencies have turned to amateur astronomers to—"

For a brief instant, I was almost relieved when my console lit up, a solitary red LED interrupting the all-clear green signal of the control panel.

My relief faded as I remembered what the light meant. One of the mechs had just been destroyed. That meant a command capsule, either Taewi's or Jackson's, was on its way at lightning speed.

I sighed, turned off the radio and wrung my hands. It meant I would be doing some kind of patchwork job, either to the command capsule or, in worse scenarios, to a friend.

The red LED flashed yellow and I felt the ship vibrate as the hangar bay automatically plucked the capsule from the air.

Whoever it was, they'd docked.