He Shakes His Lance of Iron and He Claps His Wings of Stone

Jen had been different since Cuba. Not in any stark way, she had always been quiet and focused, but that quality of hers seemed… heightened, more dignified, elevated closer to some ideal, to Chris. Stoic and resolved seemed a more appropriate way to put it, now. Completing her last inspection of the pre-match check and stepping back past the circuit of the three priests, she gave his camera feed a thumbs-up, and signaled for Don Juan’s transport box to be folded up and prepared for ornithopter-lift.

As Chris had lost the last round, the Shogunate had once again selected the battlefield, and this time went gloves-off with selecting terrain that would work to Don Juan’s advantage. This new field was not all that far from the last, moved from near the center of the Earp clan’s Tucson Han to straddling its northern border with the Tlizilani clan’s Four Mountains Han. These two fiefs were divided by the Mogollon Rim, a towering escarpment separating the Colorado Plateau from the highlands where the Sonoran Desert petered out into pine forest, in places six hundred meters of near-vertical cliff.

The section marked off for this match had a steep dropoff in the center, two hundred meters of sheer stone cliff with another two hundred of steep, rocky slope below. To either side, the Rim was shallower, an earthen slope forested with ponderosa pines and topped with a much shorter cliff to the east, and a continuous pile of ridges and tumbled boulders to the west. The hills below the Rim were thinly wooded, the plateau on top more dense with trees along the ridgeline but broken up by meadows behind. Nowhere was the canopy or undergrowth particularly thick, as the whole area, top and bottom, was only a little less arid than the desert to the south.

The rules for how starting positions were selected each match were a bit more complicated than the rules for who selected the battleground, but essentially, because this was the second battlefield in a row the Shogunate had gotten to choose, the Colombians had been allowed to pick between placing the Quixote on the plateau, a little over four kilometers back from the ridgeline, or below it a little shy of three and a half kilometers back, right where the ground started to rise into a steep slope streaked with rocky outcroppings. They chose the high ground, meaning Chris was dropped down among the ridges and washes at the base of the Mogollon Rim.

Immediately, but unhurriedly, he launched an incendiary shell into an isolated copse of trees on hilltop a few hundred meters to his right, then ducked into a jagged fissure between two long rock formations and followed it uphill, the Don Juan advancing in a crouch with only its head and shoulders exposed from the sides.

While it took longer than in the previous match, Chris hadn’t made it very far uphill before the smoke trails of missiles cleared the edge of the Rim. Some software engineers had pulled all-nighters to pull off the countermeasure he was about to deploy.

A rangefinder in the camera array on the head bounced a laser off a missile at the peak of its arc, then off the hilltop Chris had set ablaze. Along the whole path connecting the two– about half a kilometer longer than in the first match, thanks to the rim– the Don Juan launched an interchanging string of incendiary and fragmentation shells, on fuses timed to guide the missiles along the false path and destroy as many as possible along the way. Chris counted ten missiles. The first incendiary-frag pair took out two missiles, the second one, the third four, then two impacted the burning hilltop. The last one deviated in his direction at the end of its path, but scraped a treetop as it banked hard and detonated a hundred meters short of him. The resulting fireball had a vaguely conical shape, meaning some or all of Don Quixote’s missiles were equipped with shaped-charge warheads this time around. A near-miss, then, would likely be harmless, but if one scored a direct hit… well, the separation at the waist-joint last match was an unlucky hit, but anything that did damage on its order of magnitude this time around would amount to good luck for Chris.

The same bit of targeting software that had traced the intercept path for the missiles now generated a target area, based on the arc along which they had risen, that the Don Quixote now stood somewhere within. Don Juan’s railgun pivoted, and Chris loosed every frag shell left in the magazine, the railgun staying locked on target as he ascended the rocky western slope.

He held off on dumping the rest of the shells until the Don Quixote showed itself on the ridgeline. Although Don Juan climbed this rocky slope far faster than a twenty-five-meter-tall man would have managed, Quixote was still first to arrive at the precipice. It stepped out of the trees on two legs– the front sections that split off into forelimbs for a quadrupedal gait had been damaged by Juan’s bombardment. A section of its back-mounted missile launcher was missing, as well. The whole thing, even at a distance, seemed more robust, its skeletal look diminished, than in the first match when its modules had been mounted on Frame B. Its autocannon dropped to the firing position, and Don Juan leveled both its railgun and its EMP gun.

It was a good tactical rule of thumb, that the high ground carried an inherent advantage. Hell, as a fighter pilot, Chris worked under a similar assumption, that one of the best ways to approach an enemy aircraft was from above. But, for the second time today, Chris showed Major Quispe that this generality didn’t always hold true.

The autocannon spun up and sprayed Don Juan’s position. Chris tagged the Quixote with the auto-targeting rangefinder, set the railgun to dump concussive shells at it continuously, and lined up a shot manually with the EMP gun.

The tumbled boulders and jagged ridgelines on the western slope shielded the Don Juan from most of the 30mm rounds, a few impacting the head and arms without damaging anything major. The concussive shells from Don Juan’s railgun, though they came in a far slower stream, had no such cover to stop them. Shots landing to its left and right forced it to shift its feet to stabilize, one shell struck an arm at the wrist and deprived it of one hand– a claw much cruder than the Don Juan’s hands, but likely every bit as strong. Quispe probably thought the ones that stuck the cliff below were the lucky ones.

He was wrong.

As soon as Chris caught motion in the rock below Don Quixote, he squeezed his index finger, and loosed an EMP round from the gun on Juan’s shoulder. They had received their own launcher, rather than being incorporated as an extra shell type for the railgun, because their ideal size was markedly larger than its standard, and because their electromagnetic inductance-based design limited how aggressively they could safely be propelled by an electromotive force, hence the use of a hybrid coilgun and recoilless rifle instead. Power levels momentarily dipped, the cockpit jolted– “recoilless” was a naming convention for a style of weapon that rarely lived up to it– and the pointed oblong piece of metal crossed the nearly one kilometer separating the Duelists in less than a second.

Quispe had realized a massive piece of rock had cracked away from the cliff beneath him, that it was about to tumble, that it would likely travel at least half a kilometer before stopping and may well take Don Quixote with it the whole way. He took one step back, but before a second footfall came, another shell struck near its feet. He braced for another shockwave to jolt his cockpit.

Instead, his diagnostic systems reported every motor in his frame going out at once. The reactor dropped to 20% output, then the display he was reading all this on flickered and came back with half its pixels dead.

Chris watched his opponent tumble over the Mogollon Rim, the Quixote trapped in freefall for three and a half seconds before striking the slope below and tumbling end-over-end down the ditch carved by the boulder it had followed.

Quispe’s head impacted the font of his cockpit, and blood stung his eyes, but the motion-control systems had dampened the impact. None of his bones were broken, and he was only slightly dazed.

And very, very angry.

Chris was hailed, and pulled Quispe up on a video display. The lights and screens inside his cockpit flickered, and his face was a scarlet mask with a white-toothed snarl.

“I take it you yield, Major?”

“Ándate a la concha de tu madre.”

“Oh, not as gracious in defeat.”

“How the fuck did you get an EMP weapon that powerful without my hearing about it? And how did my first volley of missiles not so much as scorch you?”

Good, he’s even looser with his tongue when he’s angry. They had compartmentalized the exact nature of those two changes to half the project each, with only Chris and General Earp having full knowledge of both the EMP gun and the new missile intercept system– if MSI had known neither, then the source was no longer talking. If it was an informant, and not just a compromised database or a well-placed bug they had lost by happy accident, it meant it was somebody who would know Chris had tipped off the Gendarmerie. That narrowed it down to a few leads and important engineers– everybody who had been quietly taken aside and questioned.

“Better luck to your side on the intelligence game, Major.”

An impact rocked the Don Juan, and all his camera feeds except the view of Quispe’s face cut out.

“Come on, then, Captain Hernandez. Finish the match. Take my head, if you can pull it off without yours.” He killed the call.

His virtual assistant– Mokou, he had nicknamed her– listed off the cameras one by one, each followed by the word “DISABLED”, but he didn’t need to wait to know what had happened. The diagnostics screen showed the entire head of the Don Juan missing, blown clean off by a single shaped explosive detonation.

Chris slid the narrow viewport of his cockpit open. He stared through a fresh bulletproof glass installed where the last blocky pane had been shattered by a Black Wasp sniper, until he could make out the Quixote on the slope below him. It had come to a stop shortly after falling, not rolling downhill, and was held in place by one arm dug into the ground. Either that arm had not been completely disabled by the EMP, or the fall had shifted some electrical wires and connectors around, shorting a gap or resistance created by EMP damage.

Either way, it had shifted while they had talked, and fired its last two intact missiles. One had impacted a boulder along its path, turning it to gravel and dust, while the other had put him in this position. Now, Don Quixote was twisting to bring its autocannon to bear.

Chris threw Don Juan down behind a rocky ridge on its back, though the puffs of dust that rolled over his viewport suggested it was more loose dirt and less solid stone than he would have hoped. Dirt would do, if Quixote ran out of ammunition quickly, but the automatic fire went on for several seconds, until he heard ricochets pinging off the front of his cockpit.

With every second, waiting this out looked like a weaker choice, and violence of action seemed like a stronger tactical principle to fall back on.

He rolled downhill, and the pinging stopped as the Quixote writhed to adjust its aim. He brought the railgun level, though his manual aiming systems all worked by overlaying a projectile path onto his camera displays, meaning he had no good way to line up a shot with only this viewport to see through. He toggled it to incendiary shells, and loosed, using the things like tracers to walk his eyeball-aiming in with their bright impacts. By the time he was catching the Don Quixote in his blast radius, he had only a handful each incendiary and concussive shells left, plus his shaped-charge shells that were really only useful if he could score a direct hit. He dumped the concussive shells, then the rest of the incendiaries, shifting slightly whenever the Don Quixote reacquired him as a target. Immobilized as it was, it took a few seconds to land another hit on him whenever he changed position. Shifting also, however, threw off his aim, causing him to miss completely, or to only catch the Quixote at the edge of a blast radius.

When all the concussive and incendiary shells where expended, and the Quixote’s reinforced Frame C was was a half-buried pile of twisted, glowing metal, Chris drew Don Juan’s knife and charged downhill. The autocannon spun idly, with no working mechanism left to pivot and aim at the oncoming threat.

Chris considered planting a shaped-charge shell in the Quixote’s cockpit, since Quispe had refused to yield earlier, but instead he dropped the Don Juan to its knees above the Don Quixote, bringing his knife along the hatch of its cockpit to pry it open.

Then the cockpit ejected from the frame. The launch, from a charge of solid propellant behind where Quispe sat, was violent enough to launch it a good kilometer or two as an escape capsule. Instead, it impacted the Juan in the right thigh.

Because of the small handful of weeks allotted between matches and the multiple, compartmentalized systems being implemented into the Don Juan, there had been no time to design and build a reliable automatic loader for the EMP gun. It was instead single-fed by the Don Juan’s hand from a compartment on the outside of the thigh, which would prime and partially pre-charge a shell as soon as was disturbed. When Don Quixote’s cockpit impacted this compartment, Major Quispe’s sternum and right collarbone were broken, and three EMP shells were charged almost halfway, primed, then immediately detonated. The high explosive components of their mechanisms punched through the Quixote’s cockpit, killing Quispe instantly, and tore Don Juan’s right leg out from under it.

Every light in the Don Juan’s cockpit went out, and the Duelist fell forward limply, the cockpit-hatch pinned shut against the Quixote. Chris fished his smartphone from a pocket in his flight suit. He doubted it would somehow penetrate the signal-bubble around the battlefield, but maybe he could check the time, see how long it took someone to realize what had happened and…

The EMP had taken out his phone, too.

He waited.