It wasn’t so much that their concerns had fallen on deaf ears, quite the contrary, as the governor himself had halted the expansion after receiving their impact study. He was too late to save most of the wild species, though some had managed to linger for decades after, before dying off anyway due to their irreversibly damaged eco-system.
The real infraction of the protestors was assembling in a non-leisure group larger than five people, which was unlawful assembly according to Helion corporate law.
Activists had been disallowed from assembly for centuries, and were expected to keep their groups small, remain in sanctioned protest zones that were comfortably arranged away from the capital buildings and business districts. The system seemed to have worked fine until that day, and though Sokol’s mother was spared from a lengthy prison sentence due to the peaceful nature of their demonstration, her mobility was restricted. Sadly, that had meant that the family itself also had some restrictions on their mobility, though more so Sokol’s father, as the children were given mobility grants on a probationary basis.
Sokol felt Ogre’s grindcore ignite, and soon power thrummed through the entire machine. Such fools they had been, thought Sokol as he raised Ogre’s left arm, which had a massive ripsaw attachment on the underside of the forearm.
The bulk of the arm was comprised of a mounted autocannon with several armored ammo drums set into a cycler. Sokol thought of his parents, who, when faced with the crushing reality of Helion’s total control over their lives and their very thoughts, had retreated into the quiet life of farmers. Their peace was a lie, thought Sokol, gazing upon his right arm, which was a mag-cannon, replete with stabilizing fins splayed out from the jointed elbow section. The world beyond Helion’s oppressive demand for peace, community, and equality, was a brutal one indeed.
Out here, on the ragged edge between the corporate world and necrospace, a man could find true freedom. Sokol turned his head, and Ogre’s cockpit turned as well, so that the pilot could look upon the other four mech-warriors who were also powering up and preparing for the assault.
There was camaraderie to be found here, and so long as the weak submitted to the strong, there could be a kind of community too. No bureaucrat would ever stamp a mobility pass for Sokol Targe again, he snarled to himself inside his own mind, and there was no force in the universe that could stop him from going where he wanted to go, thinking what he wanted to think, or taking what he wanted to take.
“Ogre One,” came the voice of Lelani Ursa, the deck chief aboard the starship Fatalis, and as his comm-bead chimed, Sokol could see that the other mechs were online and fully powered. “I have Swift Hammer, Thunder Walks, and Night Witch online and ready for action.”
“Locking positions!” bellowed Sokol as the onboard computer registered his retinal commands with the head’s up display in his cockpit, following his orders to activate the magnetic clamps that would hold his mech steady during the descent.
Sokol, like most other mech pilots, believed that the heads-up display and onboard computers were not the full extent of the mech’s ability to interpret the desires of the pilot’s will. There had to be something else, some whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, that allowed the truly gifted mech pilots to work with their war machines as if they were a single mind in two bodies.
Sokol used to think that, though after his first combat mission with the now dead mech, Tank Bane, he had come to believe that it was correct to think of it as two minds sharing two bodies. Sick of farming, he had endeavored to join the Helion armed forces, finding himself mentally and physically well suited to the lifestyle. He had been on a training mission, his first solo operation, out of Frost Base on a classified planet that served as one of Helion’s most prized mech bases.
The entire operation had turned into a nightmare.
Tank Bane had been a Tyrant class mech, easily standing tall enough to sweep its arm through the third floor of a standard building. Apparently, a group of seditionists had infiltrated the base and arranged for a rookie pilot to take the mech out on a training mission.
The seditionists were hoping to seize the mech and use it to destroy as much of Frost Base as they could. From what he’d read in the after-action reports, those that weren’t deemed classified by the intelligence and culture officers, the seditionists were attempting to show the rest of corporate space that the might of the Helion army was a lie. Sokol had known by then, after having served for several years in the Helion military, the particular brand of white-washed culture propaganda.
While Helion might be the most egalitarian corporate entity in the universe, offering equal opportunity to its common citizens from one end of the empire to the other, Sokol knew that the corporate elites maintained a hard glass ceiling above those masses.
Sokol never found out exactly what the seditionists had hoped to accomplish. What he did know, was that when he and Tank Bane came under attack by several assault skiffs and two aerial gun drones, the mech reacted to the assault before he had even become fully aware it was happening at all. It felt as if the machine had borrowed the young man’s awareness, and before he knew what he was doing, Tank Bane had repelled the enemy assault with devastating effectiveness. Despite the praise heaped upon him by the tech crews and some of the other pilots, he could not help but observe that even in those moments of heated battle his reactions felt slow, and his connection to the machine seemed shallow compared to what he knew it could be.
That had been a long time ago, before he had renounced his Helion citizenship without declaring for another corporation, the very act of which was illegal and earned his name a place on the Red List, and joined the Fiat Lux ravager commune.
All of which had led Sokol to this backwater world, which was really just a planetoid so small it was only one rating above a satellite body. It didn’t even have a name, just atmosphere and a number, PM2258, which marked it as belonging to the corporation known as Praxis Mundi. It was thought of as a small corporation by most, though the sheer expanse of mapped space it occupied was misunderstood at best and unknown at worst. As the company’s chief business venture was the shipment of cargo, Praxis Mundi had an abundance of corporate allies and its few enemies were upstart shipping groups on an, as yet, minuscule scale.
Planetoids like PM2258 were claimed by Praxis Mundi, either by commerce or combat, and used as rest-refit waypoints and distribution hubs for the corporation’s vast shipping network. While most of their known sites were large and on well-traveled courses between and in star systems, most of them operating within corporate space were held by one company or another and maintained via hefty land leases. There was a multitude of backwater stations like PM2258. In fact, most of Praxis Mundi’s success was owed to these ‘dark’ stations, as they were positioned in necrospace, either in uncharted areas or abandoned quadrants where nobody would notice the intrusion.
Such facilities were essentially private starports, and though they did maintain military capabilities for the purpose of self-defense, these places were outfitted for low grade threats.
Sokol thought of the short mission briefing he and the others had received aboard Fatalis, and mused that from what intel had been gathered, the facility was at least formidable enough to repel space pirates and to drive off Red List squatters. This would not be an easy kill by any means, though it wasn’t as if they were about to assault a real fortress. Cor-sec may yet prove worthy opponents, thought Sokol as he flexed his fingers, relishing in the sight of the articulated digits of the mech following his movements, he longed for a real fight.