Arbelos Chapter 2: Hollow Chase

By Max Brooke

“Less than a day into the scouting mission, the Varallen Irregulars were half way into the crater, stuck atop a teetering platform, and engaging an unidentified enemy. As I lay flat on my face from the blast, I remember thinking ‘This cannot possibly be a routine operation.’ But I didn’t see anyone panicking—not Liaison Borread, not Sergeant Vedos, not Lodi the chief mechanic, even though he’d been nicked by shrapnel. I couldn’t see Hazhlet and Tahl in their covered M-Traks, or Auglez inside her rugged hauler. So I got up and I kept snapping pictures of the fog, hoping to capture something that would make this all make sense later.”

-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula

“Mount up!” Borread shouted the command even before his ears stopped ringing and his vision cleared. The falling platform had lurched to a halt, rails above bent and seared. Miraculously, the clamps had jammed on the rails without tipping the platform. The expedition might be rattled and trapped on the side of the crater, but they were still in the fight. Borread looked around, seeing Lodi on the ground, injured but alive, and Vedos crouched over him, the sergeant’s scarred face taught. Both of the tracks were still on the platform, so that was good. Time to get control of the situation.

“M1, M2, get your engines burning, and skip the checks! Vedos, get the M-Traks clear of their camo – we need vision!” Sergeant Vedos moved from behind the cover of the supply crates to begin pulling the fishnet cover off Tahl’s machine. 

With a quiet pop that jostled the air, the traks’ displacement drives came online. As ordered, Hazhlet and Tahl had fired up their M-Traks. Even as Vedos struggled to clear the camo from Tahl’s trak, there came the sound of shredding cloth. A mechanical arm pushed through the netting covering Hazhlet’s trak, then bent inward to seize the cloth with three articulated fingers. With another rip, the metal hand tore away most of the camo. It held the fluttering ribbons and netting it in its grip for a moment before releasing the whole mess into the abyss.

Quiet settled uneasily on the platform. It hung partway up the wall of the crater, metal creaking. A chilly breeze twisted the rising fog into whorls. Below, Borread thought, was whoever had sprung the trap. The enemy.

“So, who do you think we’re fighting?” The question surprised Borread, and he turned to see the reporter, Riston. His lip was split and a bit of blood clung to his scruffy beard, but Borread was pleased to see the reporter was alive.

“You veterans of the old war are tough, huh? One second.” Borread held up hand for quiet and scanned the misty floor of the crater, staying crouched. Lodi stepped to his side and pressed a rifle into his hand, and he nodded appreciatively. 

“Who shot at us? Don’t know. Could be Essonnite insurgents. Could be Herunock recanters from the war playing mercenary for the Oberects. Could just be scavengers hoping to mop up our equipment after we get squashed by the fall. Whoever they are, engagement protocol is the same. These Irregulars are good soldiers, the best Varall has to offer, if a bit untested. Well, this is the test. For them, and for the M-Traks.”

Borread turned to look at the two machines, sloped torso armor pressed low to their folded track-legs. The low profile of the tracked mode made them a hard target and kept them stable while firing, but also limited their field of vision. Each one had a single primary optic in its head, and several more secondaries across its body. Borread knew that inside the cramped cockpits, Hazhlet and Tahl were switching between views from the optics on the interior screens, trying to pin down the enemy location.

Borread spoke into his hand radio. “M2, stand up! Give us a spot on those hostiles. M1, prep 60mm autocannon to fire at M2’s mark.” He turned to Riston. “Firing from standing up here would be risky.” Riston nodded, and his eyes flicked down to the teetering platform.

Servomotors began to whir as the synchros controlling the legs and pelvis position shifted, bringing Tahl’s M-Trak to its full standing height of 12 meters. The platform shuddered slightly and groaned, but the rails held.

“Tahl, what do you see down there? Give me visual intel.”

“Uhm, a lot of mist, sir. Some rubble at north-northwest - could be ruins of the old city.”

“Switch to thermal.”

“Right, sir.” A few seconds passed, and the machine clicked and whirred as the machine’s head turned and its optics shifted modes. “There’s a group of… eight, maybe nine soldiers, with a four-legged light trak, coming around the ruins. Still getting residual heat signatures from the rocket fire.”

“M1, set rangefinding for target. Three-round bursts, starting on my mark.”

Riston pushed in again as if to say something, but then fell silent. Borread wondered for a moment at the reporter’s hesitation, then turned his attention back to the battle.

“Mark!”

The gun sounded three times in precise succession, and the platform shook. The shots tattered the fog. Distant flames flickered through the fog, followed by a resounding crunch of metal twisting.

“M2, confirm hit?”

The voice from the radio was hesitant.

“Hit confirmed, but the trak is still moving. It seems to be breaking off. Two or three casualties, maybe. Hard to tell with the fire.”

“Vedos, can we get the platform down to pursue?”

A few terse words in Varallen passed between Vedos and the still-crouched Lodi before the sergeant stepped up. “We can get down. But the rail is damaged. So if we do-”

“Good, we won’t need to call off this run on the first day.” He turned to Riston again. “Now, let’s go find out who we’ve been trading bullets with.”

---

The process of lowering the damaged descender was taking longer than Borread wanted, and he pawed through the charts impatiently. Patching Lodi’s leg up was a quicker job. The shrapnel had only grazed him, and while the lead mechanic didn’t look happy, he could walk.

Plotting a pursuit, on the other hand, wouldn’t be so easy. Getting the rest of the way down was making a mess of the damaged rail, so they needed to reach one of the backup rails to exit, elsewhere on the lip of the crater. He sketched absently with a pencil through the sections marked with the deeper probability fields. It would be risky to go after their attackers, but some risk was within mission parameters…

The sound of a camera clicked, and Borread looked up and smiled. “You never stop with that thing, do you?”

Riston gave a shrug, his grey eyes on the mists below. “It’s my job. I spent a couple of years watching every angle when I drove a trak. The glint of a spotter’s scope here, a smudge of smoke on the horizon there. Had to keep watching to survive, because the little things you miss can kill you. The habit stuck, so I might as well put it to use, right?”

Borread nodded.

“So, how’re we going to proceed here? Isn’t it protocol to break off when the mission goes this far off track? I want to understand, so I can tell the story better.” Riston let his camera fall to his neck, and pulled out his notepad.

“If this were an Astiagen operation, you’d be right. But these Varallen soldiers have their own chain of command. Sergeant Vedos is the ranking soldier, with chain of command straight down from the high house in Yarselo. I’m just here to ensure proper use of the M-Traks and report findings to S.I.”

“But you’ve got the maps.”

Borread looked at Riston in surprise. “Well, sure. These have sealed intel on them. This whole region is under info quarantine by S.I. I’m technically not supposed to let the Irregulars see them, but I doubt they know the jargon. Even I have to look up what these codewords mean half the time.” He gestured widely to the scramble of letters and numbers on the page. The reporter nodded.

“Should you be letting me see them?” Riston joked, pulling up his camera to snap a picture of the liaison.

“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m sure S.I. will be scrubbing your report of anything sensitive, right? I bet they’ll change the theater of operations when they print it. Maybe say it’s somewhere up north.”

“That sounds like Strategic Intelligence. Hopefully they’ll let me keep my name on the byline this time.” Riston chuckled at his own little joke, and Borread flashed him a smile.

Vedos approached, and Riston stepped aside to take photos of the M-Traks as Lodi popped a panel to check the status of the servo-motors.

The Varallen sergeant addressed Borread. “We’re ready. Not sure if we can still pursue, though. Quite a lead they’ll have.”

“They’ve bloodied our nose, sergeant, but we clipped their heels. I think we can still catch them. Lower us.”

The sergeant nodded and stepped aside as Riston returned.

 “They definitely seem… enthusiastic to give chase.”

“Oh, absolutely. They’re hungry for action. Want to prove to the world that Varall’s raising its sails high to catch the wind that’s blowing, I think. Long history around here, lots of local baggage with the neighbors. A bit like the Islands, before unification. Local pride comes before any sort of regional identity.” Borread watched the Varallens work. Riston scribbled something on his battered notepad.

---

A few minutes later, as the platform descended the wall, Borread hopped the last meter. The silt crunched beneath his boots, and he peered through the gloom before waving the M-Traks forward. They whirred into position, rolling forward in tracked mode, and the hauler followed, carrying the rest of the Irregulars. Borread thought he saw a camera flash from a porthole as it pulled ahead. The hauler slowed, and Borread grabbed one of the bars on the back, pulling himself onto the rear ladder. He swung into the hatch and slid up to the alcove where he’d pinned the charts.

The reporter was chatting up the Varallens again, the pace of the conversation quick and casual. After Borread waved him over, Riston broke away with a few more words Borread didn’t understand and a wave of apology most anyone could interpret.

“This is our route. We’re going to slide right around the edge of this area – that wavy line is hazardous, but we won’t be deep enough for it to cause problems – and intercept our attackers here.”

Riston nodded. “What makes you so sure they’ll be there?”

“They’ve probably got a lifter built into their trak to ride the rail directly, so they don’t need a platform. We’ll have to do something similar when we get there, using the hauler. And they’ll need the rails to get out, same as we do. The northwest set are their best shot, given that their trak is damaged. We’ll catch up here, then use the rails to exit. It’ll give us a good chance to really push the M-Traks and get the pilots some combat hours. That sounds like a solid plan, right?” Borread looked up at Riston expectantly.

Riston turned to look out the window of the moving hauler and tapped his pencil on his notepad. “I wouldn’t want to undermine your… advice.” Borread wondered what made such a plainspoken man so evasive now. He watched the reporter conspicuously observe the mist out the window, grey eyes looking tired and stubble showing some white hairs amidst the mix of black and dark brown.

“I mean it. You’ve led before. What would you do if this was your op?” Borread looked up to see Riston meeting his gaze.

“Well, if I was leading this operation…” Riston began, and then paused. The hauler trak rattled as it passed over some chunk of unseen debris, and Riston caught himself roughly against a grab bar. Then the reporter continued “Back then, I really just wanted to survive. Whenever we deployed, there was an objective that stood between us and going home. Usually it was a biophagic reactor spitting out death for us and everything else in a hundred miles or more, and a bunch of Dominance killers wedged in like barnacles all along the places you couldn’t avoid. If this was my op, I’d pick the path that takes us straight home.”

“So you were always on the back foot? Must’ve been awful. You old guard really are tough.” Borread spoke with admiration.

Riston broke his gaze away and stared out the window. “I don’t know if we’re really that tough. I think we’re just cracked in ways nobody wants to see.” Riston let this hang for a moment, before continuing. “But like my friend Edu said, ‘The Dominance might be the meanest bastards the world has ever seen, but I’d hate to have to point a gun this big at anyone who wasn’t.'”

Borread cracked a smile, then shrugged. “You seem to have it together. Well, I appreciate the… advice on my advice. Gonna let the sergeant know the route. Intercept point, then straight home!”

---

The liaison probably never heard the shot that killed him. The thought floated through Hazhlet’s mind even as she pushed her trak into frantic action, rising to a standing position alongside the hauler and levelling her sights on the enemy.

Only a few seconds had passed since the hulk of a building atop the ridgeline came alive with fire, plunging into the hollow where their convoy sat and tearing into the liaison. Perhaps a minute since he had called the halt and stepped out of the back of the hauler to inspect the corpse left behind in their quarry’s wake, Sergeant Vedos at his side. There were three bodies prone on the ground, though she was unsure whether Vedos or Lodi had been hit. There was no question about the liaison.

I guess none of this is his problem anymore. This stray thought also bubbled by coldly, adrenaline and training leaving little room for more nuance in the moment.

Hazhlet and Tahl had their M-Traks back to back on either side of the hauler, just as they’d been trained by the liaison. From numerous sideways windows of the toppled skyscraper, bullets ricocheted off the sloping armor at their knees and shoulders. Around their massive metal feet, someone scrambled to return to the hauler, pulling bodies with them. Lodi and the reporter, perhaps.

“Sergeant, orders?” Hazhlet waited a few seconds more. When no reply came, she made a decision.

“Hauler, keep behind me. M2, cover my advance.” She stalked forward, letting momentum build as her M-Trak accelerated toward the nest of machine gunners. The hollow wasn’t a good position to do much except die, so they’d take the ridge.

Her trak rattled forward, shots sparking off the front armor. From behind her, she heard Tahl’s 60mm cannon tearing chunks from the concrete of the building. The bright flare of a rocket arced from the building, and Hazhlet lurched her trak to the side before evening its stride to stay upright and maintain the momentum she’d need. The missile shot off into the ominous gloom. Clearing the building with the autocannon would take too long, but there were other options. With a twist of the controls, Hazhlet took her machine’s full momentum and threw the metal shoulderpad into contact with the building with a mighty shove. She heard the engine pop and whine, but the force of her charge combined with the drive’s output gave her the power she needed. With a great groan, the façade of the building broke apart, collapsing into chunks under the weight of the blow. Dust shot upward. Faintly, her sensors picked up screams.

“M1, the hauler!” came a crackle from Tahl. A split-second later, something emerged from the fog at her right: the trak she had damaged from atop the lift. Black smoke poured from its dying engine, but the antique, Oberect-built machine surged forward. It looks like a crab, Hazhlet thought, her mind drifting back hazily to a grey day on the riverbank for an instant. Its hexagonal metal frame rested on four squat legs, each ending in treads. Its guns blazed, putting hail-sized dents into the hauler’s wracked frame. As it rolled forward, a claw unfolded from its back and poised to strike.

Hazhlet jammed down on the pedals and her M-Trak sprung to life again, barreling across the distance. Moments before the grappling limb could tear into the hauler, her trak’s right hand deftly knocked the claw-arm aside and while her left jammed the barrel of its underslung cannon into the exposed joint that held the grappler to the enemy trak’s chassis. Metal screamed as the arm tore asunder under the strain, and Hazhlet felt the reverberations ring through her own machine. The foe’s engine squealed as it shifted into reverse and began to pull away. Its severed arm fell aside and Hazhlet raised her machine’s foot, stomping into the dirt where the Oberect machine had been a moment earlier. The ground gave way and the leg pushed through, sloshing into something beneath the jagged crust. As Hazhlet tried to draw the leg back, the servomotors ground angrily but the appendage refused to budge.

The old Oberect machine withdrew slowly now, peppering Hazhlet’s M-Trak with more shots. Though the weapons were antiquated, Hazhlet knew they could pierce even the M-Trak’s steel armor with a few seconds of concentrated fire. She turned her trak’s other shoulder to the enemy to keep too much damage from accumulating in one place. Hazhlet braced herself within the rattling cage, teeth gritted and eyes flitting from screen to screen. She’d have to try for another close shot with the 60mm autocannon and hope to get lucky, unless…

As the dust from the shattered building began to clear, Hazhlet saw the enemy trak lurch to the side under a fusillade from the hollow. At optimal range, hitting its unarmored flank, the salvo from Tahl’s machine ripped into the cockpit, and the venerable machine collapsed. She looked over at where his trak stood. His bursts are still too long, Hazhlet thought, but over the radio, she simply said “Target cleared.” She braced her M-Trak’s left knee against the ground, and with arms and legs, pulled the right leg free of the ground. 

Where the parched earth cracked away, an iridescent green liquid spilled forth. It slid cleanly from the metal of the M-Trak’s foot, but didn’t settle into the dirt, instead running in rivulets atop the ground. The liquid streaked off, creeping up the lip of a nearby ridge before sliding down its side.

Odd, Hazhlet thought. She turned her optics to follow the liquid until it vanished from sight. The perpetual gloom seemed to twist and writhe in the direction it travelled. Something like lightning flashed in the distance, and the clouds were struck through by the silhouettes of spined towers that vanished back into the fog. Very odd. Even for this cursed place. She shivered.

Shots rang out, and Hazhlet spun her M-Trak away from the surreal scene to face an all-too-real danger. Switching her optical mode, she saw three more of the quadrupedal traks, gunbarrels blazing hot. A lucky shot deflected off her machine, then another. From this far away, there was little risk of a piercing hit, but they were advancing quickly.

Without thinking, Hazhlet let the momentum of taking charge of the battle carry her forward into command. “M2, hauler, we have enemy reinforcements. Probably their plan all along, to lure us out here to attack from both sides. We’re lucky that we broke their ambush, but it’s time for us to go.”

“Go where?” Tahl’s voice was uncertain.

Hazhlet looked down the other side of the ridgeline and watched the last of the iridescent liquid flow beyond sight. The darkness into which it vanished seemed almost to shimmer, and she felt that deep cold set into her bones again.