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'Baron's Choice’

By SugarVenom

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Baron and Skye clash in an epic mech-on-mech battle…

Baron sailed over the orange groves and landed hard on the jagged cliff that overlooked islets surrounded with docked fishing boats. The stone ground split under the weight of his exoframe, sending loose stones tumbling down to the sea. Skye waited there in her renovated mech, guns aimed at the tiger’s mouth framing his helmet.

He lowered the barrel of his grenade launcher. The HUD on his visor targeted around Skye’s face and identified her by name and rank; the serial number of her decommissioned exosuit threaded along the bottom.

“You humiliated me,” whispered Skye; her canned voice echoed from his radio through his helmet.

“Any woman can be a wife.” Baron’s tone was angrier than he’d meant. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot.”

“I thought you wanted to end the war.” Skye glared at her own reflection in his visor, then jammed her elbow back into the throttle; the airjets switched on and lifted her off the ground.

“You have three seconds to exit the vehicle with your hands up,” grunted Baron. “Three.”

“You always said you were afraid you’d never leave the peninsula.” She set the target and the rockets locked into position.

“Two.”

“You told me that war has kept our people ignorant of the outside world. I thought you wanted to change that. I thought you wanted to change it with me.”

“One.”

A mortar shot from Baron’s launcher and the night erupted in blinding light. From inside his helmet the muted explosion was a deep bass roar. The place where Skye had stood was a black blasted hole in the ground.

As the smoke cleared, he took heavy steps to the jagged edge of the cliff and opened his visor. He unclenched his armored fist and looked at the tile there, the one with her name. “I wanted you,” he said to no one. He couldn’t look down. Instead, he turned his wrist to drop the tile over the edge.

“Then you should’ve chosen me.”

With a whoosh, Skye’s mech darted out from behind him and hovered in the air just over the cliff’s edge. Balancing on one foot and holding on with one hand, Skye reached out and snatched the tile out of the air, then dashed back to land at his flank before his HUD could register her movement. He turned, clunky and slow compared to her sleek, open-faced exosuit, lowering his visor just in time to catch a bullet in the glass. A jagged crack formed through her name in the HUD as she let loose with a forward barrage of bullets that pinged off his armor. One embedded in his power panel and set off alarms; his HUD wavered and blinked as she swung around to his back and shot off one of his energy packs; the crystal batteries leaked blue down his leg armor.

“What did you do to that exosuit?” he transmitted.

Her crackling laughter echoed in his helmet. His jump jets activated just in time to escape a rocket artillery strike; the missiles exploded into one another below him. Through the heavy smoke he lobbed down mortar after mortar but he’d lost too much energy to maintain the jump; he crash-landed, rolled onto his side and punched at the pressure-sealed neckring until his helmet came loose. A hundred yards off, Skye’s mech stumbled and shot without aiming into the smoke; her stabilizers were cooked.

Baron overrode the emergency shutdown and triggered the ion cannon, aimed it to where Skye’s mech wobbled. From his helmet, where the HUD blinked with the target coordinates, he heard her voice through the radio. “Baron,” she whimpered. “I’ll fix it. I’ll search for the energy wells. Let me go and I’ll find the tech. I’ll fix it …”

Baron slammed into her and the two careened off the cliff’s edge, his jets on full blast, the ion cannon projecting its devastating beam back to the target location, detonating everything between the cliffs and the groves.

Holding on to one another, their crystal-splintered faces grubby with smoke, their mechs leaking and broken, they coughed and laughed.

“We’ll find the wells together,” he said, watching the ground’s slow approach. “But the mechs are wrecked.”

“I’ll fix that too,” said Skye, and pressed her tile back into his hand.