Facet 5

Facet 5

…

Commissioned by Sivantic

Wordcount: 2500

…

Battle is simple.

If you try to stay alive, then you’re going to die.

Thinking about anything else besides killing the enemy and acting on instinct and experience means getting shredded by hypersonic munitions launched your way by aliens.

I’m sure that saying came from someone else, and that my instructor didn’t pull it out of his ass, but I couldn’t be bothered to read unless I was paid to. With my life hanging in the balance, I trained my ass off and enjoyed my life whenever I wasn’t training or out on the field.

Therefore, the fault of plagiarism lay with my instructor who gave me the advice and didn’t properly cite the right source, while I was free of any blame.

Anyway, back to the situation at hand.

My commanding officer’s Facet was halved and the mountain of muscle was probably dead. My two supporting Facets, with my allies, had no more ammo after wasting the Gegner’s units with energy weapons, and I was standing in the middle of a horde with a Facet-sized Warhammer. The Facet that I was using was a mass-produced model whose armor I’d ordered blasted off instead of weighing me down, and I was overclocking it to achieve greater speed and reaction time, but being cooked by it as it overheated.

A swarm of Gegner surrounded me and lit up my sensors. A quick, approximate glance showed that there were nearly a hundred of them in the immediate area. They masses of flesh surrounded themselves in layers and layers of rock that they processed with acid and slathered on one another like armor until they resembled boulders and they used fleshy tendrils or rolled rapidly to reach destinations.

My immediate problem was four packs of eight getting ready to engage me, while the rest were rolling over to me and my allies, while I was the only one with any viable way to fight back and survive against the oncoming horde.

As far as situations went, it was utter shit.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: with my personal Facet and regular layout, I’d be able to wipe this group out within a few minutes and move on to a bigger battlefield, but here in dumbfuck nowhere, I was fighting for my life with several deadweights hanging over my shoulders.

I was angry.

I had a big hammer.

And, I was boiling alive in a machine that might kill me if I made any wrong moves.

The only way out of the situation was by dying or winning.

Unfortunately for the Gegner, both options meant a lot of them dying, because even if I was a coward at heart… I wasn’t the type to just curl the fuck up and die.

So, I grit my teeth, took in a breath, and committed to the situation with all I had.

This was going to suck, but at the very least I’m not going to die like a bitch.

…

The scent of heated oil. The noise of thundering pistons. The whine of servos.

My skull reverberated with the movement of my Facet, while the rest of my skeleton and frame was bruised and bashed by the g-forces exerted by my maneuvers.

The overclocking of the entire machine made it so that I was practically flying a jet a meter-or-so-off the ground. Without the armor the Facet came with, its boosters were oversized and overpowered for the skeleton of grinding servos and gears vaguely in the shape of a human. It’s optical sensors were barely able to keep up with the movements, with Gegner being vague blurs in my sight as I moved, and barely coming into focus before I swung the Facet Warhammer upon them.

The Facet Warhammer was a simple, robust weapon designed to smash through Gegner with ease. It was used by heavily-armored and shielded Facets in vanguard squadrons to bust through specialized Gegner that developed tough enough shells to withstand continuous artillery and gauss cannons. It was a massive, armored booster attached to a robust staff that turned Gegner to paste and it did its job… but I was using a spindly Facet frame instead of a specialized vanguard.

Activating the Facet Warhammer threw my Facet along for the ride, and I just had to compensate by letting my warmachine get flung like a ragdoll, until I could correct it with the help of gravity, and use whatever was momentum was left to either enhance a boost from the Facet or swung with the Warhammer again.

I was sweating from entering a point where I was close to being cooked alive.  My body was straining with the dozen inputs I had to make every second to stop my machine from being lost in a maneuver, and sacrificing the durability of its limbs to stop the machine when swings gained too much speed and forced me to use the legs as stoppers against barely-resistant soil. However, out of all my current issues, the worst part was that I was getting really, really nauseas.

I didn’t have motion sickness. That thing faded away a long time ago when I started zipping around like a madman in my personal Facet just to stay alive. The issue was the shit camera and screen in front of me, and the constant rotating of my Facet as I spun to conserve momentum and to not rip my machine in half by the torso.

Of all the problems to have while trying to stay alive in a fight, needing to puke along with a throbbing headache that felt like metal tongs melting into my skull was the worst.

But I kept fighting, because I didn’t have a choice.

With every swing of the rocket-propelled hammer, I tore through two or three Gegner at once, and used the speed it gave to dodge the opportunistic fire their remaining friends had. Their brains were simple, but they reacted quickly, and so with each attack I had to choose between evading or attacking.

Evasion meant dying to the next volley, so I sighted the closest Gegner after each kill and went after it.

Damage warnings blared, while Gegner shells broke and their fleshy insides turned inside out. I took what hits I could, while straining the structural frame of the Facet so that I could avoid the shots of the enemy.

Mobility to stay alive. Enough power to kill. In theory having enough of both allowed one to fight, but in practice… lacking a stable vehicle, having to go to extreme lengths for one kill, and being boiled alive to get the minimum levels greatly deteriorated my ability to fight.

I barely smashed through half of the Gegner gathered across the plains, turning them into a carpet of meat and smashed rock across the ground, when I reached my limit.

I wasn’t going to save myself, let alone save the others in my unit still in their Facets… because I was suffocating in the heat and it was going to knock me out.

The second half of the Gegner force arrived ready to turn me into a pincushion and I let go of my grip on consciousness.

At the very least, I was going to die unconscious, so I had that going for me.

…

Unexpectedly, I awoke to a painful hell beneath a harsh light.

My skin felt singed everywhere, despite the fact I had an IV strapped to my arm feeding me pain killers and whatever else was necessary to bring me up to speed. That meant that I’d probably go insane if someone cut me off, because the burns were a lot worse than expected.

“The atmosphere within the pod heated up more quickly the expected. You were practically being air-fried within the cockpit.” Someone noticed my awakening, and it was my AI on a module next to me. Which was weird, because it should be in a maintenance bay getting repaired. “I am here because I carried out your orders to modify your machine to unsafe levels. As you can see, I am disconnected from all systems until you verify that they were your orders.”

I felt some sass and blame coming from the AI, but I raised my bandaged hand to give it a finger.

The middle finger.

“Two minutes my ass. I was dying half a minute in. You need your core recalibrated.” I antagonized the AI. Most people would say this would be stupid, because they controlled massive war machines in tandem with pilots. But the crux of the matter was the word “tandem.” “I’m replacing you the moment I get the chance and I hope we never see each other again.”

If a simple, holographic ball could look angry, the AI that had been strapped to my Facet made a good attempt at it, before grudgingly agreeing.

“I agree. I would rather work in a sewage facility that with you ever again.” The AI warbled its speech a bit in an attempt to be intimidating, but stopped when it noticed that I didn’t care and lay back. I was bandaged up from head to toe. My eyes stung a lot too… like they were new. Oh, man, they probably were. The encroaching darkness and vision loss was probably my eyes getting fried. Combat implants and drugs really worked too well sometimes. “Would you like a summary of your surgeries and life-saving treatments?”

I was curious, but not curious enough to give the AI the pleasure of reciting how much I went through, so I eloquently denied it.

“Fuck off and eat shit.”

I glared at the AI, while it glared back at me, until the door to my room opened.

It wasn’t a doctor or one of the grunts stationed at bumfuck-nowhere.

Instead, I found myself locking eyes with a nondescript man in a suit, who’d blend in anywhere besides a military hospital.

So, I paid attention to him and summoned all the focus I could, despite looking like a mummy on a hospital bed.

“Good evening. It’s been decided that you’re unsuitable for Forward Base 51 and will be transferred immediately.” I was tempted to calm down and make demands to be treated better for my near-death experience, but instinct told me to shut the fuck up and not do anything stupid. It was my own instincts, so I naturally listened to them. If I couldn’t trust myself, then I couldn’t trust anyone. “You have options. The first is to return to your old post after a few weeks of rest and recuperation, after you have healed, of course.”

That sounded too good to be true, so it probably was, so I just nodded.

“However, the current circumstances have given us an opportunity. It is easy enough to say that you perished during surgery and assign you to a location far more befitting your talents.” The spook pulled a slim, little piece of tech from his shirt and a holograph imposed itself between him and me. I found myself looking at the moon, but not the half that held colonies and was building spaceships just in case shit went to hell here on earth. I found myself looking at a warship on the surface of the moon’s dark side. A big one. “We have successfully located the Gegner’s home system and developed the technology necessary to reach it within a year’s time. We would like to offer you a place on the strike team on The Answer.”

My refusal was ready to leave my lips quickly, but I was more than capable of putting two and two together. After my lengthy talk with my therapist, I should’ve been assigned to military leave and given time to recuperate in luxury. That didn’t happen and instead I was posted in the middle of nowhere and suddenly faced an enemy force that was beyond my ability to handle, while everyone in my squadron was supposed to be wiped out to the man.

I didn’t need a supercomputer for a brain to put things together.

“If I choose the first option, I bet that I’ll get healed up, rest up, and work on Earth until this happens again and we talk again, right?” I was a precious asset capable of piloting a death machine whose derivatives could barely be used by others with the right implants. My body could take in more implants and cybernetics than most, so I could even be further refined. There was one of me and I was being used for defense, when I could be used for offense.  “Let me guess, there’s going to be another ship built pretty soon, and I’ll get into another series of unfortunate events that leads me to waking upon the ship next time, right?”

The spook didn’t smile at my deduction.

He only nodded decisively and answered.

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes an uttered the only appropriate answer to that statement affirming that I was going to be sent to fight an alien species no matter what I did.

“Fuck.”

…

I made a deal with the spook.

I’d get on the first ship, but I wanted my rest period and my vacation.

And, of course, that vacation was going to happen on the government’s dime, while my accounts stayed nice, plump, and invested in when I came back.

The spook raised an eyebrow at my decision to invest, but he agreed to all my terms when I made it clear I wouldn’t talk, resist, or try to kill myself with a bullet to the brain. As effective threatening to kill myself would be, since I was apparently that vital to their future plans, I wasn’t brave enough to even use that as a bluff and they knew that.

So, after negotiations finished, I found myself lying back on my hospital bed with an AI on my bedstand.

I answered its unspoken question, before it could speak.

“Whatever they’ve got up there is better than you, so if you want to get on board, you’re making your own case before they figure out I don’t give a fuck about you.” The AI’s holographic orb pulsated at my words, and was about to argue, but I waved at it and settled into the bed to get some sleep and hope that I didn’t wake up for when all my skin peeled off. That was going to be gross. “Work on making better modifications to Facets. They’ll probably bring you along then, since most AI can’t do it.”

With that argument pre-empted and buried in the ground, I took a breath and let the situation catch up with me.

In a few months, I was going into space on an offensive against the Gegner on one of humanity’s first warships, which was apparently capable of faster-than-light travel.

There were so many things that could go wrong, so I didn’t even bother quantifying them.

I just did my best to wrap my head with the idea, until I started thinking about what I could do on Earth before I left.

With pleasant thoughts of five-star hotels and resorts, I fell asleep in the hospital bed.

At the very least, on “The Answer” I wasn’t going to be surrounded by absolute imbeciles, but instead other weirdos who could pilot death machines like me.

I looked forward to avoiding them, fighting alone, and letting them survive on their own without being a burden to me like everyone else in my life.

I had that to look forward to, at least.