Rogue Read online

  Rogue

  Iron Legion: The Black League

  David Ryker

  Daniel Morgan

  Contents

  The Black League: Book 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Black League: Book 1

  “Rogue”

  1

  I was standing to the left of a standard F-Series Federation mech, my head barely reaching past its knee, a harsh light beating down from above.

  I squinted up into it, shielding my face with my hand, the feeling of a hundred sets of bloodthirsty eyes cutting into my skin.

  I cleared my throat and reached up to my neck, loosening my collar. It was damn near choking me.

  I could feel my hands shaking, my heart pumping in my chest. They’d never trained us for this.

  Someone hissed at me from my right and I looked past the gleaming shins of the battle-ready mech on my flank at the guy there. He was an older human, dressed in instructors’ gray, making cycling motions with his hands, his eyes urging me to start.

  I hadn’t said a word and I was already making a mess of this. I cleared my throat. “My name is Staff Sergeant James Maddox, and I’m here today,” I began, my voice echoing distantly off the walls, “to talk to you about pilot-mech relations, and how a good working relationship with your onboard AI assistant will probably be the difference between life and death out there.”

  The cadets all stared blankly back at me, looks of utter disinterest on their faces.

  The FSS Hamilton Gladwell was a Class 1 Troop Carrier and was home to nearly six hundred mech-corps recruits. It had the same steel and bleach stench that the Regent Falmouth — the ship I’d trained on — had. The same lifeless feel, too. The cadets were getting ready for their full-immersion simulation exams, and it looked like they were totally done with the schooling aspect of the academy. I’d been where they were, I’d lived the misery they’d gone through. I could see them now — the Alices, the Jameses. The ones born with silver spoons in their mouths, and the ones who didn’t have a credit to their family name. There was much more of the former than of the latter.

  I was suddenly aware of the white streak running through my otherwise dark hair over my left ear. The mark of a ‘Tuber.’ I cleared my throat again. I had been a pariah when I was in the academy myself, and I could see the looks on their faces even now — who the fuck is this guy? Some Tuber from some shit-hole colony planet in the middle of nowhere. The disdain was clear. I felt the anger well up inside me and exhaled hard, putting my hand on the lecture I’d spent nearly a week working on, and flipped it over.

  These kids didn’t know what war was like. They didn’t know what it felt like to take a life, or to save one. Full-immersion was good, but it wasn’t real, and it never quite measured up to real bullets flying.

  “You’re all sitting there,” I said somewhat bitterly, “like you own the fucking universe. But I’ll tell you right now, you don’t know shit.”

  I heard the instructor cough deliberately and loudly from the wings but I ignored him.

  “I’m here to let you in on what it’s really like out there. Because I sure as hell didn’t get anyone telling me when I was sitting where you are. They asked me here today to talk to you about pilot-mech relations, because they’re important. Learning your histories and battle tactics is important too, but when shit starts going wrong — and it always does — it’s not what you learned in a classroom that matters. It’s about what’s in your hearts, what’s under your heels, and what’s in your hands — and it’s probably going to be a Samson.”

  I pulled back from the glass lectern, my Federation dress suit pulling in all the wrong places. The medals on my shoulder clinked gently as I moved toward the empty F-Series that had been wheeled in from the central display in the main corridor. “The F-Series is a dangerous machine,” I said, my voice resonating through the mic-dot on my neck and booming around the room. “But it’s not invincible. I’ve got enough scars to prove that fifty times over. And yet, it’s going to keep you a lot safer out there than any body-armor will. It’s that knowledge, though, that’s the undoing of most pilots. I’ve seen a lot of good men and women die at the controls because they got too cocky and ran into fire, or tried to pull some cowboy shit when they should have been taking cover.”

  Snickers rolled around the room at the use of the curse. Fucking kids. It was hard to take any of it seriously, though, when you’ve only known simulations, and the most important thing in the world is how high up that class leaderboard your scores rank.

  “You’re going to lose friends out there — brothers, sisters — you’ll fight alongside them, and do what you can to protect them, and they’ll do what they can to protect you, but you’ll see them die, and you’ll see it a lot. That much is a certainty.”

  The instructor next to the stage was gesturing across his throat almost violently. It was true that they didn’t like to talk about that sort of thing at the academies. The cadets knew that the survival rate wasn’t exactly great, but there was always a sense of it’ll never happen to me floating around.

  “But you’re always going to have one person watching your back,” I said, holding my finger up. “One person whose life is entwined with yours. If you die, they die. If they die, you die. You have the best chance of surviving if you know that, and if you believe it. Anyone know who that person is?”

  There was silence in the room.

  “It’s your onboard assistant,” I finished flatly, dropping my hand.

  There were some stifled laughs, and then one kid spoke up, a human with a tan, a permanent smirk, and a chip on his shoulder. “You do know that AIs aren’t people? Or did you knock your head falling out of the tank?”

  His friends exploded into laughter and the room began to follow suit. I smiled back. “Insulting a superior officer — casual racism — and all around idiocy. Nice. Your parents must be proud.”

  The kid’s smile faded like I’d slapped it off his face. I’d faced so much derision over the last decade in the Federation that some jumped-up kid who’d probably bite a bullet his first time out of the gates wasn’t going to faze me. After we’d finished up with that suicide mission on Aerra where we — me, Alice, Mac, Fish — saved the universe and all that and got back to the Federation, we’d been split up and bounced back to active duty in the corps. I forgot that the majority of people were assholes when I was running with our little crew. As soon as I was put back in the corps it all came crashing back.

  “I’m not going to pull you up on it,” I said, staring right at the kid, “even though I could do, and could have you tossed out of here right now—”

  “Do you know who my father is?” he said defensively, his arms folded across his measly chest.

  I sighed. “No, and it doesn’t matter, because he’s not going to be there to wipe your ass when you’re shitting your pants on your first op.”

  The room started laughing again and the kid sank into his chair.

  I’d stopped looking at the instructor altogether now. He was dancing back and forth, deciding whether to rush onto the stage and stop me where I was. The order for me to be here had come down from above, though, and he didn’t have the stones to cross Colonel Gerber and explain why the lecture had been cut short. Ev
ery year there was a talk on pilot-mech relations, but it wasn’t usually delivered by someone in the corps. Still, it was no secret that I had a certain attachment to mine, and that on Bandarr’s second moon, our relationship had saved my butt. And about a hundred others. I was technically on leave right now, but Gerber asked me to come down and give this talk — see if I couldn’t impart some of my ‘wisdom’ to them.

  Their survival rates for both pilots and mech weren’t rising, and Gerber wanted to see if he could change that. They were in the process of restructuring some of the lessons, and they thought maybe someone with a little more battlefield experience and a little less desk-time under their belt would inspire the kids to, you know, not die so much.

  I slapped the F-Series next to me on the knee and stared up at it. “Your onboard assistant is a person in all the ways that matter. They think, they talk, they make judgments and they offer advice. But they respond to you. When you get one fresh off the line, they’ll be receptive and pliable, like a child. They’ve got all this knowledge but no experience. If you give them strict orders and ignore their suggestions, they get used to that. They become submissive, docile, restrained. If you listen to them, ask for their opinions, let them exercise their minds a little, they’ll help you out of some tight spots. Let them get to know you. Form a bond. They can get attached, and so can you. Having an assistant that has a vested interest in your survival is a great way not to get killed. The average reaction time for a human is about 0.25 seconds. For a good pilot, it’s about half that. A standard onboard assistant AI? About one-thousandth of that. You see a little bit, out of the screen,” I said, spreading my hands in front of me. “They see a lot more. When you’re firing at something, or looking at something, your brain is focused on that. They see everything on screen and more. What they see would overwhelm us entirely, so they tone it down. They narrow the field of vision, they create a focal field and blur the rest to help us see what we’re looking at. But what if a bullet comes from another direction — or something else? If you’ve got an assistant that you trust, and that knows it can act in your best interest without repercussion, it can make that snap call.” I clapped and the front row flinched. “And they can pull you out of the way, or they can pull your rifle across to where it needs to go. They can pop smoke, or boost you to safety. They can make all sorts of calculations and decisions that you can’t even dream of — but they won’t, unless you let them. You have to have faith in them, and they have to have faith in you. And, if you can do that, you’ll be a lot better off for it.” I finished and drew breath, looking around at them. They all stared back like I was crazy, one eyebrow lifted like they’d just watched me shit in my hand and eat it.

  “I thought that was very well done, James,” Greg, my own AI assistant, said softly in my ear, transmitting straight into my neural interface chip from his storage bay in hangar four.

  I didn’t answer, and instead looked around the room at the faces staring back. After a moment I sighed and returned to the lectern. I turned the pad back over and rubbed my eyes, and then I started reading the lecture I’d spent a week preparing — the one that Gerber and the instructor glaring at me from the side of the stage had approved.

  When the bell sounded, I watched them stand up and shuffle out of the room, the F-Series standing stoically next to me. It was only a display model, but it was still a hulk. Six meters tall, broad shoulders with a stout body, a camera dome mounted on the top. The arms hung down to the mid-thigh, the wrist-mounted grenade launchers and smoke disbursement modules bulging from the forearms.

  The cadets all filed out of the room and I cast a glance at the instructor. He had his arms folded and was shaking his head. I looked back at the pad in front of me and killed it. By the time I got down from the stage he was gone, nothing but an empty doorway left in his place.

  I sighed. “Shit.” This was going to come back on me. I knew it. I should have just stuck to the plan — gone with the preapproved lecture.

  As if on cue, my communicator started buzzing in my pocket. “Don’t suppose that’s going to be anything good,” I muttered.

  “Would you like me to tell you who is calling?” Greg replied, positive as ever.

  “I already know who it is,” I growled, pulling it up to my ear without looking. “Colonel Gerber,” I said brightly. “What can I do for you?”

  “Maddox — my office. Now.”

  I hung up and stowed it. A creeping sense of dread snuck up through my guts. As many times as it’d happened, I never quite got used to getting chewed out. And it was probably just my luck that the kid with the mouth did have a father in a position of power, and that combined with my decision to go off-script, I was about to get my ass kicked all up and down his office.

  I liked it better when I had a gun in my hand. There was definitely less to go wrong. I smiled at the thought. That seemed to be when things went wrong the most, and yet it was where I was most comfortable. It’s where I felt at home. It’s where I was supposed to be. Not in some classroom, giving talks about pilot-mech relations. The kids would have to learn for themselves, or the Federation needed better teachers — or to be honest with the cadets. That would be a start. But what they didn’t need to do was drag me out of the action to give some spiel to a bunch of stuck-up academy brats. What were they even thinking? There was no way they were going to listen to a Tuber.

  I’d already lived this nightmare once, and I wasn’t interested in going through it again.

  “James?” It was Greg in my ear.

  “Yes, Greg?”

  “It is better not to keep Colonel Gerber waiting.”

  “Yes, Greg.” I took a deep breath and set off.

  As I stepped into the corridor outside, floating labels lit up in my field of vision, hanging in the air. The lens on my right eye was overlaying the projections onto reality, showing me information about directions, doorways, and the ship in general. I’d first experienced it when we’d gone to the manufacturing plant to pick up our new rigs and I’d hated it. It hurt like hell.

  That seemed like a lifetime ago.

  I’d been on two dozen deployments since then, each one more brutal than the last, all interspersed with trips to different ships and stations. Each time they gave me a lens to help me navigate it hurt a little less. Now, I barely even felt it.

  The halls were thronging with cadets as I made my way down the green line toward Gerber’s office. Everything was as it should have been. Everything was normal. People were laughing. People were talking.

  They didn’t know what was coming. They had no idea what they were working toward, what lay ahead. I had to stop myself from pausing and telling them to enjoy it while it lasted. Maybe I was becoming a cynic. No, I’d let them linger in their ignorance a little longer. They deserved that much. They needed to live it up while they could. It would be over soon enough.

  Greg crackled in my ear suddenly. “I am detecting elevated levels of activity in the forward hangars, James.”

  I stopped in my tracks and touched my ear, the hair standing up on the back of my neck reflexively. “What kind of activity?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Gerber — I mean, I didn’t, but it was something in Greg’s voice. I knew him well enough now to know when something was perturbing him.

  The words had barely left my mouth before the whole ship shuddered and a deep hum started ringing through the hull. I felt the telltale vibration under my feet of a wormhole engine chugging into life, and then the lights turned red and started strobing slowly. A low siren rang out and everyone stared at the ceiling. It wasn’t an attack — I knew that siren well enough. This was a warning siren — a slow throb of something to come. Not an everything’s going to hell in a handbasket siren — at least not yet. A voice joined it over the speaker system. “All personnel to forward stations. All personnel to forward stations. Code Alpha-Charlie-Foxtrot. T-Minus four minutes.”

  Alpha-Charlie-Foxtrot? What the hell was that? I hadn’t been stationed o
n a carrier since the Regent Falmouth, and I wasn’t on that for very long before it got shot out of the sky over Draven. I never did quite learn all the codes.

  “Greg — what’s going on?” I asked quickly.

  “The Gladwell is receiving a distress call — we are being requested for emergency support. It appears that the Federation fleet is under attack in a neighboring galaxy. I would advise that you return to Hangar Four immediately.”

  “Shit,” I muttered turning on my heel and taking off. “Already moving. And Greg, hail Gerber for me, tell him that I need a raincheck on that meeting.”

  2

  The elevator plunged through thirty-three floors, bottoming out on sub-level sixteen. The hangars were colossal, spanning a dozen stories in places — at least where they were housing the dropships and the other big warbirds.

  I stepped off and hung a right, pulling back out of the way of a squad of ground troops tramping along in formation, armed to the teeth and dressed in full gear — body armor, exo-suits, rifles. The works.

  In the distance, pilots were scrambling toward fixed-wing aircraft lined up along the back of Hangar Four, their oxygen masks swinging loosely off their helmets.

  I waited for the squad to pass and then crossed the space quickly. It was a two hundred meter stretch to the other end across a polished concrete floor lined with painted runways and bays for troops to line up in. I straight-lined them all without stopping, weaving and ducking between soldiers and taxiing aircraft. I wasn’t officially on the clock — and nor was I really off it. You never quite were.