Whose Strong Obedience Broke the Sky

The day of the Duel’s first round had been a blur until this moment. There had been reporters and cameramen held just out of reach by Gendarmes as he had walked out to the Don Juan de Austria, which stood on a tarmac at Nellis Air Force Base. As he mounted into the cockpit, three priests– one Zen Buddhist, one Catholic, and one Shinto– circled the massive robotic exoskeleton, burning incense and chanting blessings after their own fashions. The Duelist was then folded up into a massive steel box– twenty-five meters by eight and a half by six, in a show of compliance with the treaty– and lifted into the air. For about half an hour, Christopher heard the thrum of a new piece of California Air Force technology he had first seen when he had escorted one on a resupply mission to guerillas in Cuba. The Ki-25 freight ornithopter was an airframe like an enormous dragonfly, VTOL-capable but faster and higher-capacity than any transport helicopter. He doubted any other flying machine could pick the box up vertically and carry it the whole length of the journey by itself.

Now he felt the ornithopter descend, and knew to brace for landing when his communications systems showed only white noise. There was a hollow dome around their chosen battlefield of directional jamming signals, to ensure the Duelists could hail each other or remotely control any parts that detached from their bodies, but could not be piloted remotely or receive any outside intelligence once their battle had begun. The only electronic connection to the outside world was a long cable branching off to a series of hardwired cameras, run by a neutral civilian agency– in this instance, an American news outlet.

The box touched the ground with a surprisingly light jolt– the ornithopter pilot was an aviator Chris could respect, even if he was no fighter jock– and fell open.

This stretch of the northern Sonoran Desert was prettier than it had been when Chris had visited a couple weeks earlier. A spike of rainfall must have brought the brown desert foliage into greening and bloom. The arena for this match was a circle of desert fifteen kilometers in diameter, with each Duelist starting halfway between the edge and the center– Chris in the north, his Colombian opponent in the south, and a flat stretch in between. While the Shinobi Corps hadn’t been able to get any intel on the Colombian Duelist to him save its name, Don Quixote, the terrain would probably give him an advantage. There were only a few low hills to the south, east, and west, while he stood just at the foot of the small cluster of peaks called the Sawtooth Mountains to the north, jagged rocks that would make superb cover if he felt the need to give ground. His back-mounted railgun was one of the best bits of long-range artillery fielded by any military, against which his opponent would have little recourse but to close ground, and he could hold his own every bit as well in a hand-to-hand fight.

He dialed up the magnification on his display as the Colombian Duelist came in. It wasn’t carried in a box, instead being lowered into position by two long tandem-rotor helicopters similar to the American Chinook with cables on each shoulder. Don Quixote had a more skeletal, minimalist look to it than Don Juan, with long exposed struts, thinner limbs, and what looked like a comically large backpack. Running from pelvis to face were a series of long bars, which as the Don Quixote landed Chris made out to be the six barrels of an enormous rotary cannon, held in a vertical stowage position. It was crowned with an antenna dish plated in brass. The Helmet of Mambrino. His high school had devoted one unit each to English, Spanish and Japanese classic literature, and elements of those stories often blurred together in his memory, but he remembered his Cervantes well enough to recall that detail. Well, if they were going to make light of the treaty while going along with it, they were doing it in a classy way.

The Colombian helicopters took their leave of the sprawling arena. The Duelists held their positions, cameras trained on the horizon for the start signal.

All around the massive battleground, green flares mingled their light with the morning glare on the desert. Immediately, Don Quixote disappeared in the backblasts of a dozen rockets launching from its back. Once they reached a particular altitude, they turned sharply down and raced straighted for Don Juan.

“¡PUTA MADRE!” Chris screamed. If similar weapons were launched against his fighter, he had countermeasures, but that seemed to be a complete oversight on the Don Juan. Missiles with infrared tracking were likely a problem most ground targets rarely had to deal with, but the nuclear fusion reactor just under his feet put out more energy than his Duelist could possibly use, and all that excess was radiated as a nice, clear patch of heat, blindingly obvious even against the sunlit desert.

On the interface controlling his back-mounted railgun, he selected timed airburst shells with programmable fuses, then toggled off if that when he had a better idea. He turned the Don Juan around, and fired a string of incendiary shells at one of the Sawtooth peaks.

The missiles split, with nearly half deviating to where flame spouted as from a volcano, and a slim majority holding their course to the Don Juan. He threw the Duelist prone, then his camera feeds went red and brown with fire and dirt, and he flipped through the air.

He climbed the Don Juan to its feet– it still had enough limbs left to do that, though even with his lenses largely obstructed, he could see its right arm had separated at the elbow and lay on the edge of a crater. A puff of compressed air blew his left main lens clean, though the right side of his primary camera feed still had a long, dirty gouge. There were dents in his cockpit and holes in the armor protecting his reactor, though it was still running at close enough to full output as made no difference.

No more missiles were coming for him, and despite the rough start, Chris now grinned wolfishly. Artillery shells were easier to evade than missiles, perhaps, but they had the distinct advantages of being smaller, lighter, and cheaper, especially when the cartridge full of gunpowder had been swapped out for a magnetic field. He moved to toggle his railgun over to high-explosive impact shells…

“Error!” a soft electronic voice reported in his ear. Don Juan’s virtual assistant was surprisingly cutesy, displaying an animated avatar after the form of a petite female Air Force cadet with big ruby-red eyes and snow-white hair, and having a voice to match, but the message may as well have been accompanied by a grating shriek for the effect it had on Chris.

The loading mechanism for the cannon had been damaged in the explosion– it could still feed incendiary shells, but could no longer switch between ammunition types. Incendiary had been considered a niche choice, and so Chris had carried only twenty in the magazine behind his reactor– sixteen now, after that diversion– in favor of more concussive, fragmentation, or shaped-charge shells.

He fired a few off slowly, aiming carefully each time. Don Quixote lurched forward and sprinted across the desert with surprising speed, its two legs splitting into four appendages that moved with something between a horse’s gait and a spider’s skitter. How that was controlled with bodily motions, Chris could not guess, but it was probably a clever workaround to the training he had undergone to be able to move in Don Juan as though its steel were his own flesh.

Once Chris was assured hitting a moving target at this range was infeasible, he closed, barreling forward himself until about a kilometer and a half separated them. He then let off another burst of incendiary shells, this time scoring a glancing hit. Half of Don Quixote caught fire, and a shoulder-strut near where the shell had struck began to glow and sag.

Then Don Quixote dropped its autocannon to horizontal at pelvis-level with an obscene motion, and the rock and dirt around Don Juan flew up in a puff of dust and a shower of sparks.

Between the stream of bullets coming at Chris and the readout on his diagnostics display where they impacted Don Juan, he judged they were probably 30mm rounds, one-third each tracer, armor-piercing, and semi-AP high explosive. The pure AP rounds probably posed the most danger of disabling the Don Juan and ending the match, either by stopping its reactor or killing Chris. He dived prone behind a boulder, fired off a couple more shells, and drew his knife from its scabbard on his left thigh, pressing the flat against his cockpit. Then he barreled across the open desert, holding his last couple shots until just before he got within the effective range of his in-arm guns– that was, the one that was still working at full capacity.

Just as he let off his second-to-last shell, a burst from the autocannon came in just below his cockpit, followed by…

One last missile. Bastard held one in reserve.

Then he went tumbling, the virtual assistant announcing “Reactor offline, switching to emergency power.” His diagnostics display showed the entirety of Don Juan below the cockpit missing, and all of five minutes’ power left in a battery behind his head.

His Duelist’s torso had landed face-up, his enemy to his right. He turned the head to look, reached over with the left arm, only to realize he couldn’t pull it straight enough to fire the coilgun at that angle. The tubes to either side of the cockpit held small, shaped-charge missiles he had never gotten close enough to use, but one could also launch flares. He sent up a red flare, then hailed his opponent.

A video display showed the man he had been locked in mortal combat with, a squat, dark, round-faced man with the look of an indigenous Andean, perhaps a Peruvian of near-pure Inca stock. He grinned triumphantly.

“I’m… Captain Christopher Hernandez, California Shogunate Air Force, and pilot of the Don Juan de Austria. I yield, this match goes to you.”

“Major Carlos Quispe.”

Definitely Peruvian.

“Revolutionary Army of Gran Colombia. Pilot of the Don Quixote. I accept your yield. Better luck to your side on the intelligence game, before next match.” His smile disappeared, and Chris knew that whether he would face Major Quispe again, or his opponent would be quietly disappeared by MSI and replaced before next match, depended on whether they figured out what he had just told Chris.