Chapter One
Portia Zayas still hadn't gotten used to piloting a mech suit. She was certainly competent—passed her license exams and everything—but she felt unbalanced, lumbering and awkward in her machine. There was some intangible quality that her opponents were privy to, something she couldn't perceive, let alone point to and name. Over the course of her rookie season as a duelist, she had thought, something would click into place; as of the final tournament of the year, she had yet to win a single match.
She did her best not to feel bitter about it—she told herself it was just the nature of fighting for money. You lose and lose and lose and lose, until you either learn something and start winning, or you run out of losses to take. Competing in the MCAM was the latest in a long string of attempts for Portia to put her retaliatory streak to good use, attempts that had near universally ended in her failure. She had managed to kick the can this far down the road, and she knew it was about to drop off a cliff.
Of course, it didn't help that she was unsigned. Her only support was her meagre savings, and every hit that her frame sustained was one that her bank account likely wouldn't. By now, Arsonist for Hire was showing more than its fair share of wear. It had never been anything particularly impressive, but it had very nearly looked the part—back when the thrusters operated at full strength, before half of the plating had sloughed off, and it had only looked like a mild burn victim instead of a charred corpse.
"Confirm: combatants in position." The referee broke the silence in Portia's cockpit. She took a deep breath in and sent out a quick comms flag to signal she was ready. "Portia Zayas, piloting Arsonist for Hire. Confirmed. Heather Rhea, piloting The Queen's Lady. Confirmed. Match begins in three... two... one..."
The starting tone sounded and Portia began vying for a good view. Arsonist's thrusters sputtered to life, gasping for oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, vaulting her over a half-collapsed low-rise and onto a neighboring pile of rubble. The dust and concrete shifted underneath her, and she scrambled for purchase—she lowered Arsonist to its haunches to keep balance—before giving up and leaping ungracefully to the next crumbling building on the block. Not her best work. She clambered onto what was left of the roof, and looked down on her arena for the day: the skeletal remains of Phoebe.
She had called this city home once, though it was verging on unrecognizable. It was as if someone had picked up the entire place at once and dropped it back down to the surface to watch it break into chunks. Concrete and titanium stretched up from the rust-tinged surface of Mars in irregular, jagged polygons. Only a few buildings still stood beyond a few floors, while the rest peeked out halfheartedly from rolling hills of dust and ash and stone.
The first sign of her opponent came when one of those hills erupted into a cloud of saturated sand. Rhea's first attack missed Portia entirely, but she was rattled by the speed of the spear as it hurtled past and lodged itself in the wall behind her. Before Portia could track where it was thrown from—her proximity sensors hadn't beeped, it was so fast—Rhea had already zipped her machine along the spear's attached chain, retrieved the weapon, and bounded off of the building, directly at Portia.
That was the first and only direct view she got of The Queen's Lady. It was a short thing; squat, with a low center of gravity that allowed for ridiculous acrobatics. When it tucked in its head and limbs, it was practically a sphere. The aesthetics weren't half bad either—usually these rich kids had just awful taste, but Portia liked the way the head looked like it had grown organically out of the abdomen. Several twisting, knobby golden stalks sprouted from its top in a kind of crown. And of course, the spear, which was nearly twice the height of the machine itself, and sporting a lengthy retractable chain that fed into a pack on its back.
Portia gathered her machine into a low crouch to leap from the roof toward the scrap hills, but she had looked for too long; Rhea threw her spear again, and it pierced through Arsonist's left foot. She yanked the chain back so quickly that Portia's stomach was left behind, a small mercy that kept her from losing her lunch as she slammed back onto the roof. A warning flashed on Portia's display that she was leaking coolant. Great.
Rhea pinned Arsonist under her foot and drew a hidden progressive knife—it slid out along the Lady's free arm and into its waiting palm, and sparked to life with the faintest thrum—the head of Portia's machine now poised and ready to be sliced off to mark Rhea's victory.
Portia tried to push herself up, but the cooling fluid pooling underneath her jettisoned Arsonist's hands out into a splayed pose, like she was trying to do jumping jacks lying down. She cursed and wrestled with her controls. Nothing. That cliff's edge she was so afraid of was advancing faster with every failed struggle. The Lady held her firmly in place, foot planted atop the booster mounted on Arsonist's back to keep her from jetting away. Portia kicked her frame's legs in frustration, pounded its fists the roof below her, twisted and strained to no avail—they had evidently discovered the only building left in Phoebe with anything resembling structural integrity—until she noticed the spear, still stuck in her foot and dangling just within reach.
Rhea pulled her frame's arm back for her deciding slice in the same instant Portia contorted hers just enough to grab the spear. She tugged it out of Arsonist's foot, and yanked on the chain as hard as she could.
Unfortunately, this did not topple The Queen's Lady. The chain flew from its pack without resistance and spooled, disorganized, on the ground. It did, however, distract Rhea for just long enough for Portia to wrest Arsonist onto its back (the coolant made a sickening SQUERT as her steel slicked over it), and heave the oversized spear with as much strength as she could manage at the Lady's head.
It hit the opposing machine where its neck would be, if it had one. This had the intended effect of making Rhea drop her knife, stagger back, and fall off the building—as well as the unintended effect of tangling Arsonist's right leg in the chain, taking Portia with her.
The Queen's Lady hit the ground first, bouncing like a skipped stone with a dull THUNK, THUNK, THUNK through the dusty alley below. The chain wrenched free from Arsonist's leg, leaving the limb dangling from its socket by electric tendons and hydraulic ligaments—it provided no support as Portia crashed to the surface.
Shit. Shit. Shit. About a billion warnings flashed across every screen in the cockpit, as if she couldn't see with her own damn eyes that her leg was about to fall off.
She cleared the alerts and watched the Lady's spear soar over Arsonist's head and land in the ground behind her—but Portia knew this trick now. She kicked at the chain with her good leg, pinned it to the ground to disrupt the Lady's momentum, and activated the thruster in her foot, rending the chain in a white flash of heat. It worked: her opponent spun out of the air like an insect caught in a bad wind, ping-ponging out of the alley and into an expansive dead courtyard, landing in a heap in front of a crumbling, thirty-foot fountain at its center. Portia smashed a fist through a nearby window, heaved her steel to its foot, and fired off her rear booster.
In attempting to compensate for her trailing right leg, she way overdid it: Arsonist tumbled over itself like an unconfident gymnast and crashed into Rhea's machine legs first. Portia grabbed onto the top bowl of the fountain to steady herself, keeping the Lady pinned by its head underneath Arsonist's left foot. If the structure had ever housed water, nobody would know it now; its five pyramidal bowls, each in varying states of decay, now held miniature deserts of Martian ash. Particles of sand kicked up by the two mechanical beasts floated out of the fountain and around this tableau like a faint membrane.
Rhea scrabbled at the leg pinning her down, but she was out of weapons. The frame's short, dense arms were excellent at throwing that spear, but could barely dent Arsonist's plating. Watching the thing squirm underneath her foot reminded Portia of a fight that she had won—a fight that had earned her a month's suspension from Phoebe Elementary, and made most of the kids in her grade give her a wide berth whenever she passed for the rest of her time there. A fight she had ended with a lighter and the same vicious grin that was currently cracking across her face.
The Queen's Lady looked even better melted, she thought. The sparse Martian atmosphere meant there was no flame, so she had a perfect view of her booster tearing its head apart. The golden stalks turned a crisp brown as they bubbled and bent away from the heat; the hole she had opened in its neck yawned and softened, stretching until only a thin membrane of molten metal kept the machine together. The armor warped—bubbled— foamed. The heat swam into her own cockpit, wobbling through the oxygen and into her lungs.
Rhea forfeit before she could see if the head would melt all the way off.
Portia didn't get to relish in her victory for long. All of Arsonist's injuries compounded, and despite holding together just long enough to progress to the second round, it didn't take long for the competition to stiffen. Portia's next match was against Dawn Whitlock in the Hit by Pitch, a pilot notorious for inflicting as much extraneous damage to her opponents' machines as she could get away with. Arsonist flew right past "trashed" and settled on "condemned." Just like that, her rookie season in the Mechanized Combat Association of Mars was over. No choice but to save up while she waited out the offseason.
Portia landed home on T4-077 the next day to no fanfare at all—before the tournament, she had been seen off by a dozen or so acquaintances wishing her luck; now, nobody—and she drove home alone from the shuttle station, with the remains of Arsonist, squeezed and folded and crunched into its transport trailer, trailing her like a funeral procession.
It was winter on 077; grey velvet curtains dropped between the buildings, coating her windshield in a crackling sheet of ice. She crept through the city, watched the billboards smudge with each drop of sludgy water that splattered her windows, and tried not to think about how badly she'd lost.
Instead, she thought about The Queen's Lady and its gnarled, rocket grease-stained head. She thought about what it might've looked like if she didn't forfeit: she pictured a rubberized lump of nearly-molten steel with drooping, flaccid branches. She thought about how much repairs were going to cost Heather Rhea.
She thought about how much repairs were going to cost her.
She badly needed a drink.
At least Teri had only kind words for her.
"Zayas!" they said, with an earnest grin to welcome Portia inside the pub. "Hey—great upset! Your drinks're on the house tonight."
"Thanks, Teri."
She must have sounded pretty glum, because Teri leaned in close and said, "Look, don't let anyone tell you otherwise—you had a fantastic season." They smacked Portia heartily on the shoulder and leaned back again. "Everyone knows you'll be back."
"Thanks, Teri," she said, a little more enthusiastically. Teri handed her a celebratory cocktail (some new invention of theirs with rice liquor), which she happily sucked down while the two of them caught up. They always knew how to improve Portia's spirits, usually by getting her drunk and feeding her stories about the latest unruly drunkards who had gotten them into trouble. They bragged that it was packed during Portia's first round match; they didn't mention the second.
Portia found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar while Teri recounted the story of a particularly stubborn old man who had refused to leave at last call. She found her eyes—drooping into the dark circles below them as if gravity decided they were the only part of her face worth touching. It certainly didn't care about her hair, which spun tight brown curls out in every direction, the ends of which were beginning to lose their dyed-red haze. Too long since she had touched it up.
She was snapped out of this train of thought when Teri said, with a start, "Oh, someone was asking for you, by the way."
"Who?"
"Dunno. Big lady over there."
Teri pointed at a woman sitting in a booth, with her back to the bar. She certainly was a big lady, and loomed over the top of the seat, draped in a gigantic UEF officer's overcoat that looked at least two decades old. She was out of place in the midst of the pub bouncing and bobbling around the amorphous shadow of her overcoat. Portia was more than a little disappointed when she sat down and recognized the weathered, cracked-chalk face of Shana Renwick across from her.
"Portia Zayas?" she asked, like she wasn't sure. She stuck out a hand. "Good to see you again."
"Oh, it's you," said Portia, folding her arms in defiance of Renwick's proffered palm. "It's been what—eight, nine years?"
Renwick gave up on the handshake and poured from a large bottle of deep amber liquor into two waiting glasses. It smelled like a backfiring reactor engine.
"If you're here to offer me another job, you can fuck right off."
"Slow down," Renwick said, putting up a hand. "I'm not offering you anything—except a drink. Here." She slid one of the glasses over to Portia.
"I don't drink bourbon."
Renwick ignored this. "I saw you," she said, in that brisk and clipped voice of hers that Portia remembered meant she was building up to something, "in the MCAM tourney last night. Didn't catch your name at first, but I knew I recognized that—quaint little machine of yours, and a friend said you were a bit of a hometown hero. You put up a hell of a fight."
Portia scoffed. "I lost."
"You lost to one of mine." Renwick shrugged and took a sip of her drink. "But you beat one of the favorites in the first round. Brutally. Did you know you were only a foot shy of blasting the cockpit?"
"Of course I knew where the cockpit was," Portia snapped, more defensive than she had intended.
"I'm sure," said Renwick. Another sip. "You know that was the fastest KO anyone's made on Rhea since her debut? And piloting manually, no less."
That was a bit of a shock. Portia tried not to let it show on her face, even as she could tell that Renwick spotted it.
"What's your point?" she asked.
Renwick sighed and finished off her drink, then fished a small hand-rolled cigarette and a lighter from her coat pocket.
"Teri's not gonna let you light that in here."
"It's raining," she said, as if that explained anything. She flicked the lighter open and lit the cigarette as it dangled from her lips. "You still smoke?"
"Not in years. How do you smoke? I thought it wasn't feasible to import tobacco out here anymore."
"Little job perk I've negotiated." She plucked a second cigarette from her pocket and raised an eyebrow at Portia.
"No thanks." Renwick shrugged and put it back. "You still haven't answered me," Portia continued. "What's your point?"
"My point," she said, pausing to refresh her glass—and Portia's, although she hadn't touched it, "is you've got nowhere to go but up. Some upgrades to your machine—neural connect and everything—you could really go places. I'm already planning on moving Whitlock up to the Solar League after one more season in the minors. I'm looking for potential partners for her. Pilots like you."
"Shitty?"
"Overlooked." She inhaled and blew out a plume of smoke. "Are you signed yet?"
She already knew the answer. Portia contemplated her still-full glass of bourbon. It smelled slightly less acrid through the smoke. She took a sip and felt the lines on her forehead disappear, then reappear. "So you are offering me a job."
"No. I wouldn't call it a job. Not yet, anyway."
Of course she wouldn't. "What would you call it?"
"Contract work. Financial support. We can hash out the details later."
"Last time we spoke," said Portia, cold, "was when you cut me loose with no warning. So forgive me if I'm not exactly eager to work with you again."
Renwick reflected her lack of tact, which was only fair, Portia supposed. "Well, you were a shit mercenary." Puff. She blew the smoke almost directly in Portia's face. "But it's peace time now, and you're not a kid anymore; that's all behind us. Plus, you seem like a better duelist."
Portia nodded and knocked back the remainder of her glass. Renwick refilled it without bothering to ask. "What if I like my frame how it is? What if I don't want to move up to the MCSL?"
"Look," said Renwick, waving away both the buildup of smoke and Portia's questions, "I don't need an answer right away. I'm a patient woman." (Portia tried and failed to stifle a laugh at this.) "Just think about it. When you make up your mind..." She dropped a business card on the table just as Teri strolled over.
"I'm afraid you can't smoke that in here, ma'am."
"So sorry—I was just leaving." Renwick stood up and pressed a wad of cash and the second cigarette into Teri's hand, before flashing a grin back at Portia and the mostly-full bottle of bourbon. "Looking forward to hearing from you."
The year ended, and winter trudged onward. Portia returned to her day job piloting a glorified forklift at the Avvis Interplanetary factory and tried not to think about Shana Renwick. It would give her far too much satisfaction to see her come crawling back, she thought. Stupidly, she assumed that if Renwick wanted her so badly, other MCS managers must, too. All she had to do was hold out for another, better offer.
So, she waited. The offseason stretched to the sun and back. She tried to budget for repairs in the hopes of returning to the ring come summer, but the rent on her garage was eating up nearly every spare cent of her paychecks.
Portia had always hated artificial winter on the colony—hated the way the air hung motionless around her, stale and dry even during a snowstorm. The city itself seemed to have turned against her; the slush bit at her ankles, leaving a festering damp in her bones. She waded her way to work under the shadows of buildings tall enough to blot out the sun, and shuffled home through lurid, droning electric light that threatened to split open her skull. The scarlet glare of Mars permeated every waking hour, draping the orbiting station in a bloody haze that pierced the artificial sky. At night, the sparse stars glowed a dim, incandescent orange. The whole place made her homesick for somewhere she had never been.
No other offer arrived. Portia took to repairing Arsonist piecemeal, spending chunks of her savings she could hardly afford on components that would likely fail within a few hours in the ring. She swiped a few pieces from the assembly line—small things: power cells, chunks of steel piping and rubber tubing, anything she could discreetly stuff into her bag before clocking out—and the paranoia of being caught and having to hunt for a new, likely worse job sapped her sleep away.
She couldn't bring herself to care about any of it. She had discovered the taste of victory—worse, actually: she had only caught the faintest whiff, and had it wrested away before being allowed a bite—and she needed more. All of her past wins were sour, in hindsight. Triumph in name only, laden with consequence and regret. This one was only sweetness, or at least had the aroma of it. It didn't matter; she was hooked. She had to fight again.
On the day the winter weather broke—while the dim sunlight hovered over the last of the morning fog, grabbing specks of dew and whirling them away—she stumbled on Renwick's business card, buried underneath schematics for the replacement thruster she had been struggling to integrate into her rig. She stared at it for a minute or so: one of those gaudy ones laser-engraved in metal, so you felt bad throwing it away. No job title, just "Shana Renwick" and a local comm-line number.
It wouldn't even cost anything to call her.