“I saw that, but that was no excuse. You hit her twice.”

I nodded and sighed. “And how would you have handled it?”

Boris moved far faster than I’d ever expected him to, which meant he was really steaming. He grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around, then dropped his arms around me in a bear hug. He squeezed tight and lifted me from the ground.

I struggled for a second, then shrieked and went limp. A quick jolt ran through him, then his grip slackened for a moment. He leaned forward to put me on my feet again, but my knees buckled, so he grabbed me to hold me upright.

I pushed off the ground with my feet and smashed the back of my head into his face. Something snapped and a warm fluid gush ran down through my scalp. Boris’ hands left my body to go to his face, which is why, when I snapped my right heel up between his legs and into his loose flesh, there was nothing to protect his beer-buying brains. His previous howl of pain rose into the inaudible range, then he toppled back with the slow grace of the tall trees we cut, and shook the ground about as hard when he landed.

Hector, our foreman, looked over at me and shook his head. “I wish you hadn’t done that, Sam.”

“He’ll be fine by morning, Hector. You won’t lose him for work.”

“I don’t care about that.” Hector jerked his head toward Pep. “He had next game. His paycheck was gonna be mine.”

“Glad to know you have our best interests at heart, Hector.”

“He does, Sam, unlike you.” Keira-san shifted in his chair and gave me a venomous glance. “You just messed up someone from PADSU. The GGF is working the area. You just issued them an open invite to make our lives miserable.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, Keira-san.” I smiled. “Oh, well, working beats unemployment. Leary, another beer, for tomorrow I may die.”

ARU Lot 47-6

Joppa, Helen

Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

14 November 3132

I didn’t wake up dead, which was all to the good, nor did I feel that bad. I had a couple of swollen knuckles on my right hand, and a bump on the back of my head, but I wasn’t in jail and didn’t need stitches, so I figured I was way ahead of other mornings. I crawled out of my rack and pulled myself into crusty jeans and my work boots, then stumbled to the head to divest myself of my beer inventory and, to use the literary term, attend to my other ablutions.

I found a mug, knocked dirt out of it, and poured myself a cup of something hot, black and strong. Since I found no metal parts I decided I’d gotten coffee this time, not solvent, though it would have been easy to be wrong. Still, it burned down into my belly and opened my eyes. Being as how it was still before dawn, that was only a marginal benefit.

When we’d gotten back from Leary’s, Hector had gotten a notice that said the judge had given us a twenty-four-hour extension before the restraining order went into effect. I’m sure PADSU would say he’d been bought off, but I doubted it. The lumber company did everything on the cheap, and if he couldn’t be bought off for a metric ton of sawdust mulch, they weren’t going to pay. Closer to the mark was the fact that the Mottled Lemur wasn’t actually native to Helen and, for centuries, had been the object of summer festivals devoted to killing the little things before they could descend like locusts on a farmer’s fields. And they were stupid, too—cleaning their mortal remains out of the guts of an AgroMech after harvest is seriously bothersome, I’ve been assured.

So we thought of the lemurs as varmints and PADSU thought of them as “cute.” Cute becomes something of a trump card, but I guess the judge wasn’t of a mind to be trumped, giving us another day to decorate the forest with sawdust. Not the greatest of jobs, but it had me driving a ’Mech, so I was not of a mind to complain.

I wandered out to the hangar and mounted the ladder to the cockpit of the ForestryMech I’d been assigned. It still had that ugly, factory shade of yellow paint on it, but had been scraped down to bare metal in a number of places. Aside from Alpine Resources Unlimited decals on it, the only decoration was a finely scripted name, “Maria,” above the cockpit. The story goes that one of the other pilots named it after his wife. That sounds romantic until you learn that it was the shrieking of the chainsaw that most reminded him of her.

I secured the hatch behind me and settled into the command couch. My coffee mug went into the holder beside the right joystick, freeing my hands to pull on and snap closed the cooling vest. It was bulkier than others I’ve worn—“Cost cutting begins with YOU,” being one of ARU’s more endearing motivational mottoes—but it did the job when I plugged it in. It had a ballistic cloth cover that wouldn’t stop a bullet, but might soak off a few splinters.

Reaching up and back, I pulled down the neurohelmet and settled it on my head. It, too, was bulky and heavy, but the extra padding in the cooling vest helped there. I made sure the brainwave pickups were seated in the right places and snug, since the last thing I wanted was having the machine lose track of my sense of balance when things got rough.

Punching a few buttons, I brought the secondary systems on-line, then waited to initiate the engine start. The computer flashed me a check code, which I replied to, then a mechanical voice asked for my personal activation code. I always opt for a voiceprint check as opposed to something keyed in, so I said, “There once was a fair lady Knight, whose smile was so very tight…”

I won’t continue because I suppose you’ve heard it before. So had the computer, so the huge engines began their popping, gasping and smoky journey to life. Maria shook like a house on a fault line, but no coffee sloshed from my mug. Across the command console all the systems came live and were green.

Up against a real BattleMech, a ForestryMech like Maria wouldn’t seem to be much of a threat. The left arm ends in a grabbing claw, which could crush light armor or snap off some small weapons. The chainsaw that is the right hand can do some serious grinding, and the pruning laser mounted above it might melt some ferro-ceramics, but it was a jury-rigged laser rifle and so would probably only bubble paint. I’m not saying Maria could put a BattleMech down, but anything that came to tangle with her would have scars to show it had been in a fight.

And if you don’t believe me, there are plenty of tree stumps in the forest that would say otherwise.

I stepped on up and out, guiding Maria past Black Betty, the ConstructionMech Boris drove. I keyed my radio and greeted him, but it looked like he wasn’t talking to me. Or, it could have been that his broken nose was making him talk funny enough he couldn’t get his ’Mech started. I laughed at that idea, then began the trudge up to the worksite.

Pep raced by in her hovercar, hauling a butt-cart full of trimmers. They are the folks who swarm over the trees we fell, trimming off branches and affixing the chains we use to lift the logs into another cart for Pep to drag back to the loading station. They’re actually the ones who are in the most danger from GGF attacks. Hitting an iron spike driven into the trunk of a tree won’t even nick Maria’s chainsaw, but it will destroy one of the handhelds these folks use. That leaves a lot of chain shrapnel flying about which could, as moms everywhere warn, poke an eye out.

The base of our work area was about three kilometers up the mountain, though taking the road we’d carved out made the trip a bit longer than that, what with all the switchbacks and everything. The road was actually looking pretty beaten up, with ’Mech tracks frozen in mud like fossilized dinosaur footprints. The piled mud squished down pretty easily under Maria’s heavy tread, but it was as difficult for her to make headway as it would have been for me to go mucking about through a swamp. Maria was using my sense of balance to control the gyros and keep her upright, and I was fighting the controls with every step, sloshing coffee all the way.