TEXT: BATTLECORPS
  PIRATES OF 
  PENANCE
  By Kevin Killiany
  PART TWO
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Pirates of Penance • Page 2
  Asteroid Mining Habitat, Viborg Asteroid Belt 
  Venaria Operational Area, Periphery March 
  Federated Commonwealth 
  08 May 3057
  Lex wondered about the real purpose of the space impersonat-
  ing a ballroom for the Undersecretary’s formal reception. It was 
  big enough to be a soccer field, though at four meters the ceiling 
  wasn’t really high enough for sporting events. If it was a hangar, 
  they’d done a terrific job of cleaning the deck—unless the area 
  rugs were covering the worst stains. All of the sharp utilitarian 
  angles had been covered with artfully draped fabrics by someone 
  with a real feel for design. 
  She was particularly impressed by the ersatz picture windows 
  spaced along three of the walls. Each mural showed a night view 
  of a different world painted in such lifelike detail she expected 
  breezes to ruffle the framing curtains. There were no actual win-
  dows, of course. With gravity at about point eight standard, Lex 
  estimated the real night sky was spinning wildly by a few meters 
  below their feet.
  The band—and they were live musicians, not a holographic re-
  cording—was playing a selection of soft jazz tunes. Lex didn’t 
  recognize any of the compositions. In fact, she didn’t recognize 
  some of the instruments,but they provided an airy undertone for 
  casual conversation. 
  The formal dress of the habitat residents tended toward utilitar-
  ian with decorative additions. As though a lot of thought had gone 
  into adding just the right details to make the standard and uni-
  versal exceptional and unique. Actually, given their isolated lives, 
  that’s probably exactly what had happened. She bet the skillfully 
  worked ornaments and jewelry were examples of the wearer’s 
  own craftsmanship.
  Lex found herself thinking of the self-reliant spirit of her child-
  hood kibbutz. Her parents would like these people, she decided, 
  and no doubt would have been accepted as kindred spirits.
  Not so the Undersecretary.
  Whatever Bartholomew Clemments was discussing with the 
  mining administrators was not going well. Lex was too far away 
  to hear what was being said over the general murmur of the re-
  
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  ception, but the body language of Undersecretary’s audience was 
  clear enough. They weren’t interrupting, but they weren’t listening 
  either. 
  Sort of like how you’re ignoring the miner. With an effort, Lex 
  pulled her attention back to the earnest young man who had at-
  tached himself to her. Actually, he’s not much younger than I am, 
  he just looks young. Must be the earnestness.
  “... being a MechWarrior,” he was saying. From his inflection she 
  deduced she hadn’t missed a question. “Just about anything to 
  get off Penance.”
  “Penance?”
  “Periphery Engineering and Northcross Asteroid Mining 
  Consortium,” the young man explained. “The name of this place.”
  “That spells PENAMC,” Lex pointed out.
  “Close enough,” the young man shrugged. “The company 
  straights call it PEn-NAM, but we call it Penance.”
  “We being?”
  “Just about anybody below top management—and the owners, 
  of course,” he gestured towards some miners who looked no dif-
  ferent than anyone else to Lex’s unschooled eye. “Most of the 
  good rocks have been staked out, which means the only future is 
  in wildcatting, working for someone else or getting out of here.”
  “Wildcatting?”
  “Heading off on your own and hoping you find something.” He 
  made a face. “A good choice fifty or sixty years ago. Now getting 
  out of here makes more sense.”
  Lex nodded slowly. Her parents had been unable to attend her 
  graduation from Buena because a violent uprising on Valliore had 
  triggered a planet-wide shutdown. No one had been killed, thank 
  God, and the violence had been a continent away from the kibbutz. 
  But dispossessed citizens, forced off their small farms by Acrux 
  Agricultural, had torched thousands of hectares.
  “I see what you mean,” she said, encouraging emigration over 
  insurrection. “And you think the service is the way to go?”
  “Don’t you?”
  
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  Pirates of Penance • Page 4
  “It’s how I got off Valliore,” Lex conceded. “And how my grand-
  mother got off Terra.”
  “Your grandmother wanted to leave Terra?”
  “If that were so unusual, none of us would be here.”
  The young miner chuckled a good deal more than the quip 
  deserved. Lex found herself wondering when was the last time 
  someone had been impressed with a Leftenant from the Florida 
  PMM. She decided the folks on Penance didn’t get out enough.
  Though his jumpsuit, augmented by an artfully worked geomet-
  ric embroidery, bore lapel pins that identified him as a miner and 
  a ’Mech pilot, there was no name tag.
  “I’ve forgotten your name,” she admitted, though she wasn’t 
  sure it had been mentioned.
  “Officially, it’s Woodrow Pickering,” the younger man grimaced. 
  “Eventually, however, everyone ends up calling me Woodpecker. 
  They mean a kind of Terran bird, not—”
  “I know,” Lex said. 
  “Call me Wood for short,” he grinned. “That’s what I try to get all 
  my friends to do.”
  Lex promised absently, her eye caught again by the Undersecretary 
  and the habitat administrators barely keeping their exchange civil. 
  What could be at issue here on the edge of nowhere?
  She glanced over at Michaels, but he was deep in conversation 
  with an attractive woman who seemed to find whatever he was 
  saying fascinating. In the weeks they’d been traveling together, 
  Michaels had discussed tactics and equipment, never with any-
  thing approaching insight or interest. Either there was a side to 
  him she hadn’t realized or the stranger found dry recitations of 
  operation manuals enthralling.
  For her part, Michaels’ new acquaintance was striking, in a pale, 
  almost ethereal way. Her hair was so blonde it was nearly white 
  and there was just the faintest blush of pink to her alabaster com-
  plexion. Only her eyes, which at this range Lex could see were a 
  dark blue or violet, saved her with from being completely color-
  less. The effect was somehow unreal, as though the woman were 
  an elf or ghost of some sort.
  “... Lex?” Wood was saying.
  
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  Pulling her attention back to the young miner, Lex replayed the 
  last bit of conversation. He’d just asked about her name.
  “I was the fifth Alexandra accepted to my class at Buena,” she 
  explained, hoping the organizational pause hadn’t been too no-
  ticeable. “Lex was the only unclaimed variant.”
  “What’s your ’Mech?”
  “It’s not mine, it’s the Florida’s,” Lex corrected. “You don’t get 
  many MechWarriors piloting their own machines any more.” 
  Particularly MechWarriors from a working-class kibbutz on the 
  back side of Valloire.
  Wood waved the distinction aside. 
  “What do you pilot?”
  Sims, mostly.
  “I’m assigned a Grasshopper 5-H.”
  “Long range missiles, not the new anti-missile system.” Wood 
  nodded. 
  “That’s the one,” Lex confirmed. “I’ll admit I’m surprised you 
  know either model.”
  “I keep up,” Wood blushed slightly under the compliment. 
  “Actually, beyond the anti-missile system, all I really know 
  about Grasshoppers is they’re about twice the size of our 
  MiningMechs.”
  “I think you’re right,” Lex said. “I saw one of those when the 
  shuttle was docking. It looked armored.”
  “Meteors,” Wood nodded again.
  “Meteors in an asteroid belt?” Lex asked “I’d think the larger 
  planetoids would sweep them away.” 
  “In an old one, like Terra’s,” Wood agreed. “Viborg’s belt is less 
  than twenty thousand years old.”
  “How can you tell?”
  “It’s only spread through about forty degrees of its orbit,” Wood 
  said, his tone suddenly dark. “That’s why the rocks are so dense 
  that one centralized operation can monopolize the whole system.”
  
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  “So how did it happen?” Lex asked, hoping to fend off a political 
  diatribe. “The asteroid belt, I mean.”
  “Captured interloper, like Pluto in the Terran system,” Wood’s 
  tone was almost grateful. He was evidently equally eager to keep 
  the conversation from going sour. “Only here it hit something. 
  Slowly.” He held his drink glass out from his body and moved his 
  other hand gradually toward it. “Overtook the fourth planet from 
  behind; probably took weeks.”
  Lex found herself wondering if the fourth planet had been in-
  habited. She imagined local wildlife gazing up at the strange light 
  growing in their sky night after night. She shook the image out of 
  her head. They were well beyond this sun’s temperate zone; these 
  had been two barren rocks.
  “Tidal forces would have pretty much broken the planets up be-
  fore impact,” Wood spread the fingers of the approaching hand. 
  “It was more a case of two debris clouds colliding.
  “It’s still going on,” Wood gestured as though indicating the thou-
  sands of tumbling rocks that shared the habitat’s orbit. “Big ones 
  make little ones with every impact. Micros, mostly, smaller than a 
  pea. But sometimes you catch a rock,” Wood held his hand about 
  ten centimeters from his drink glass. “At four or five hundred me-
  ters per second, a meteor hits like a Gauss rifle.”
  “What is the difference between an asteroid and a meteor?”
  “An asteroid is a rock in space” Wood grinned. “A meteor is a 
  rock in space that’s coming at you.”
  Lex smiled at what was obviously an ancient joke. Though not 
  always a laughing matter, she thought, recalling the apparent bat-
  tle damage to the ’Mech she’d seen on the surface.
  “If that armor ever breeches, you’ve pretty much had it,” Wood 
  was explaining. “Myomer freezes solid in a vacuum, you know.”
  “Yes, I know.”
  “Yes, you would know, wouldn’t you?” Wood agreed. “You guys 
  do anti-pirate work, don’t you?”
  Lex made a noncommittal sound, letting the question slide.
  “Fracture chips and backwash from the lasers are a lot more 
  common, of course,” Wood went on when he realized she wasn’t 
  going to take advantage of the opening.
  
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  Pirates of Penance • Page 7
  “That’s why the ’Mechs are polished silver?” 
  “Poor man’s laser deflector,” Wood nodded. “That, and the fact 
  polished metal shows up better on scanners.”
  “What’s the jump range on those MiningMechs?” Lex asked, fol-
  lowing her own thoughts.
  Wood chuckled again, for once shaking his head.
  “What’s so funny?”
  “Jump jets,” Wood explained. “That’s blue sky thinking.”
  “Blue sky?”
  “Blue sky, dirtside, whatever you want to call it,” Wood smiled. 
  “Jump jets only make sense on a planet.”
  “I’d think they’d make perfect sense in space.”
  “Jumping makes sense in space. Micro-gee course adjustments 
  make sense in space,” Wood said as though explaining to a child. 
  “But jump jets able to shove you at four or five gee with no guid-
  ance system? This does not make sense in space.”
  “There’s a guidance system.”
  “Which is slaved to the neurohelmet, which keys on the human 
  sense of balance, which in turn depends on gravity to function.” 
  Wood’s smile was grim. “You’d either splatter yourself against 
  a rock or die of old age trying to get back to where you started 
  from.”
  Wood chuckled again and sipped his drink. He looked awkward 
  at it, as though he wasn’t used to drinking. Which he wasn’t, Lex 
  realized; he’d spent most of his life in zero-gee. She glanced 
  around at the other party-goers with new eyes. Drinking a liquid 
  that wasn’t safely sealed in a nippled globe must be a pretty novel 
  event for most of the habitat dwellers.
  Speaking of novel....
  “So,” Lex kept her tone casual, “When can I try out one of your 
  MiningMechs?”
  “What?” 
  Not quite a spit take.
  
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  Pirates of Penance • Page 8
  “I like to check myself out on every ’Mech I can,” Lex shrugged. 
  “And you’ve just convinced me I’ve got something to learn about 
  zero-gee maneuvers.”
  “Um, I don’t know.” Wood glanced over towards Michaels and 
  the ethereal miner. “No one’s ever asked to just take out a ’Mech 
  before.”
  He looked so flustered that for a moment Lex suspected she’d 
  blown his cover. Perhaps she’d mistaken a student’s lapel pin and 
  he had only been posing as a ’Mech jockey to impress the new girl 
  at the cocktail party. 
  Wood rallied visibly: “I’d have to ask Mr. Ortega.”
  “Is Mr. Ortega here?” Lex smiled, keeping any edge from her 
  voice
  “Uh, over there,” Wood nodded toward a tight knot of Penance—
  PEn-NAM—administrators standing foursquare behind what was 
  apparently their leader. For her part, the leader was explaining 
  something in no uncertain terms to the Undersecretary.
  “Not a good time, then.”
  “No.”
  Indicating a need for another drink, Lex moved away from the 
  boy before he could offer to get it. For the next half hour or so she 
  let Brownian motion carry her through the reception, exchanging 
  pleasantries with the people who would be their hosts for the next 
  few weeks. 
  There was definitely a tension in the air, but it was clearly at 
  a level far enough above her head that she could pretend to be 
  oblivious. Everyone else seemed bent on being equally oblivious, 
  focusing steadfastly on enjoying the novelty of the moment and 
  the company.
  Particularly Michaels, Lex noted. She doubted he was aware of 
  anything beyond the young woman gazing rapturously up at him 
  as he spoke.
  The long range shuttle sidled up orbit, moving against the flow 
  of the river of stone, its pace only a few percent below the aggre-
  
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  Pirates of Penance • Page 9
  gate of the larger asteroids. Not enough differential to trigger the 
  Habitat’s automated meteor alarms. 
  The shuttle passed from shadow into light, then again into 
  shadow as it approached the underside of a majestically tumbling 
  boulder nearly twenty times its mass. Using only passive sensors 
  it moved to near contact range, then rotated, bringing its missile 
  launcher to bear.
  With a burst of flame a featureless cylinder, dark gray and 
  perhaps two meters long, leapt to the surface of the asteroid. 
  Explosive anchors triggered at contact, burying pitons deep into 
  fresh fissures. The frigid stone leached away their chemical heat 
  in seconds. By the time the asteroid’s rotation brought it around to 
  face the habitat, the cylinder was indistinguishable from the rocky 
  surface around it.
  On minimal thrusters, the shuttle pushed away from the aster-
  oid. Angling across an open space in apparent random drift, it 
  moved toward its next objective. 
  
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