FIVE MINUTES

There’s a saying in Calliope: “your last five minutes.” It’s got a story behind it, but it’s one of those stories that’s so well known by locals that you only need to explain it to outsiders.
It goes something like this: Thalia Rue was senior system administrator aboard the MHS Legerdemain, one of the first colony ships to arrive in the system. When the Legerdemain was stripped for parts to build the Three Sisters, that included the mainframe, for which Thalia was responsible.
Now, nobody is quite sure why she was also doing EVAs, but what we do know is that on a fateful day in 4696, she was doing suit checks in an airlock when some faulty wiring caused its outer doors to slam open. Thalia got spat out at thirty meters per second, and she must’ve clipped something on the way out, because her suit started leaking oxygen. By the time she patched it, she had only five minutes of air left.
Now, in that situation, most of us would’ve panicked and desperately tried to get ourselves home. But Thalia must’ve done the math and realized she was too far out to have any hope of saving herself. And in that moment, Thalia stopped being just a system administrator and became Calliope’s first hero.
She fired up her suit radio and started reeling off every single one of her passwords, most important ones first, and set the transmission to loop after the air ran out. This act saved thousands of lives; without it, her entire habitat would’ve been locked out of the admin functions of their own computer systems, and died slowly as critical systems went down.
That’s what the five minutes are: if you knew you were going to die, if you had just five minutes left to make a difference, to save as many lives as you could, what would you do?
That’s what I’m struggling with right now. I think I have a little bit more than five minutes, but probably not a lot. I’m going to die very soon, and I want to make sure I’m doing something worthwhile until then.
In the old world, they had to use mirrors on sticks or risk peeking around corners, but I’ve got sonar, and it says four bandits, loose formation, advancing on my position. Tactical breaks them down as an Assault (already traded blows with that one, it’s a Raptor-4), a Cataphract (from the silhouette, probably a Nelson), a Sentinel (too small for a Tortuga, maybe another Raptor-4?) and a Scout (a Swallowtail? Where the fuck did they get the money for that?!). Way too many for me to take alone.
I do a quick check of my own rig, and it’s not great. She’s beat all to hell after the last fight; I literally had to duct tape the control linkage for the middle arms back together, the core’s running hotter than I’d like and ammunition reserves are nearly dry: three Roland slugs, six chest bullets, two mags apiece for each shooter, one BB charge. Raleighs are tough, but they aren’t meant to be facing down whole squads like a Tortuga or a Drake.
A Drake. Fuck, I wish Zin was here.
No. Can’t stop to think. I queue up a full-load on the chest gun, and the metal monster screeches to life underneath my feet. There’s a loud “clunk” as a round – damn thing the length of my leg and three times as thick – slides into the chamber and then a whine of unoiled metal as it rotates. One in the cylinder.
The charge goes on the wall next to me. If I back up, they have to come down this corridor. This wreck wasn’t built with mechs in mind, and this is the only accessway large enough for their rigs to fit through. Maybe I can take one of them out. Please? Please. I have to take at least one of them out.
Can’t think about how I’ll be dead in an hour. If I think about that, I’ll freeze up. They’re gonna kill me, and then they’re gonna laugh about it over drinks, and–… no, fuck freezing up, I can’t get emotional about this either. I’m alive now. I’m alive now, and I can make a difference. Clunk. Two in the cylinder.
The Nelson is the first around the corner, because of course he is: those damn things are quick. Too quick! The goddamn arming sequence on the charge hasn’t finished yet! Fuck!
I have to keep backing up, but it’s not enough, and it lunges forward, stabbing at me with its ridiculous blade on a stick. But by some act of God, the jab goes wide, slips between my rig’s arm and torso. In zero-g, his mech’s hunched over, mag-clamps the only thing keeping him anchored, so instead of wasting ammunition I kick his legs out from under him and smack him in the face.
His buddy with the shotgun (hey, what did I tell you? Raptor-4. It’s always a Raptor-4) comes round the corner next, but the Nelson is blocking his sightline as it sails backwards, away from me and towards the corner. I can see his gun waving around, searching for an opening, but he can’t find one. That’s the advantage of being alone: I don’t have to worry about friendly fire.
Shoving the Nelson gave me some breathing room, but not much. The other Raptor-4, the one I already took some chunks out of, slips past his buddy, hits the far wall of the hallway and opens fire.
I feel the impacts almost before they happen, like I could see each bullet’s flightpath as it was being fired, just too damn slow to do anything about it. On the heads-up, angry red spots blossom on my mech’s left thigh and upwards across its flank – no critical systems hit, but the armor there’s given up entirely. I take any more hits in that spot and they’ll start chewing servos and control linkages, and that leg won’t work anymore.
But at the same time, he’s overextended, completely out of cover, and I still see the dents I left in his chest armor. Like it was the most natural movement in the world, I flip to manual arm control on the upper and lower arms, grab the armatures, aim and squeeze without even taking a breath.
When you fire these things in atmo, IPS-N six-guns blare like the horn of God itself, but here in vacuum, there’s just a muted thump-thump-THUMP carried into my cockpit through the arms themselves, and the click-click-CLACK of their actions cycling.
I don’t think the cocky bastard even has time to register his mistake. I don’t know if all twenty-four rounds hit, but enough did: a leg flies clean off, and I see the whole rig backlit for a split-second in a white flash: I popped his coldcore right through the reaction chamber. Even if the pilot isn’t dead, his rig is.
One less rig to hunt with. One less rig to kill with. One less mech on the Hounds’ roster. That’s my five-minute gift to this system: one less Hell Hound mech. Yes! I’m not dying for nothing! I’m taking one of these sadistic motherfuckers with me!
There’s another clunk-shriek-CLUNK as the chestgun beneath my feet chambers another two rounds. Four in the cylinder. Four in the cylinder.
But the Nelson continues sailing backwards, towards his fallen comrade, and out of the sightline of the Raptor-4 with the shotgun, and he’s already got it levelled at me. I see a flash, feel the impact, hear a sickening crunch and my screen cuts to white noise.
My cockpit voice warning system dispassionately underlines how fucked I am: “Impact: sensor dome.”
Radar echoes paint a picture for me, but it’s slow, way slower than visual, everything’s half a second behind. I can’t aim like this! I can feel panic rising, heart rate spiking, breathing getting shallower, faster, I know I was looking for my five minutes but I don’t want to die like this, I don’t want to die–
Dig deep enough into the Muse and you can still find Thalia’s final transmission cached on old mirror servers or bouncing around deep-space repeaters. I’ve listened to it.
I always wondered what it was like for Thalia in the last seconds. As the grey started to creep in at the corners of her vision, as it became harder to think. I can’t imagine what she must’ve been feeling, dying cold and alone in the void at the age of 33 instead of in her 200s, surrounded by family on the colony world she was promised. But her voice doesn’t waver at all, doesn’t tremble. She just keeps listing off one password after another, right up until the end.
There’s a chime as the BB charge’s arming sequence finishes. Without even thinking, I slam the detonator.
When the backup sensors kick in and my visuals return, it’s chaos. The wall I placed the charge on is just gone, turned into a cloud of razor-sharp, yellow-hot metal shards bouncing around the compartment it breached into. The other side of the corridor is buckled outwards like a giant punched it.
And there, drifting between them, gently spinning in place, is half a Swallowtail.
Two. I got two. Two less rigs to hunt with, two less rigs to kill with, two less rigs on the Hounds’ payroll…
The Sentinel lunges forward, and I start backpedaling again. My rear-view shows another corner, thin, not really wide enough to maneuver a mech, but I’m desperate, I’ve got no other options. Maybe if I duck? Maybe if I crawl? Clunk. Five in the cylinder.
The Raptor’s shotgun flashes again, but I jerk my rig around, catching the fire on its intact right-side armor. My HUD flashes “minimal damage” but I don’t have time to celebrate. My six-guns are empty, and I can’t spare the precious seconds I have left to reload them.
My left hand reaches above me, for a set of switches not installed in standard fleet-issue Raleigh frames. Harrison Armory calls it “War Emergency Power,” SSC calls it “Performance Reserves,” GMS calls it “Hyperspec.” In an IPS-N cockpit, they’re labelled “DIO: Direct-Injection Overcycle.”
I don’t know why they bother with the fancy names. Everyone knows real pilots just call it “Overcharge.”
My HUD turns solid red. Core heat spikes like it just deep-throated a habanero, and I can feel the sweat beading on my brow. I think every radiator strip on my rig must be glowing white hot. The cockpit voice yelps “core temperature” in the same disapproving tone of voice a schoolteacher takes with a kid eating erasers.
But this is precisely what I want. I flick another switch labelled “Hardpoint 5 Firing Chamber Redirect.” I say a prayer, switch the armature to manual control of my middle arms, and level the Big Boy.
The Raleigh was an IPS-N experiment in jamming as much firepower as they could onto a single mech, and the Big Boy was an IPS-N experiment in jamming as much firepower as they could into a single gun. It fires high-explosive bolts at five times the speed of sound, and when you jam the up-tooled Roland slugs into it, the detonation can twist a mech’s endoskeleton like taffy with blast force alone. I just turned the outer casing white-hot with core heat exhaust.
The Big Boy is a really goddamn impractical gun when it comes down to it. Even with a good pilot and serious modifications, your rate of fire on this thing is going to be about six to ten rounds per minute. It kicks like a pissed-off android and its accuracy is a joke – if you’re outside of about eighty meters, this thing just will not hit its godsdamned target.
But this piece of shit is less than thirty meters away, and I only need to hit him once. I pull the trigger.
The round moves so fast that I can’t actually process the instant between firing and hitting the target. Deep in the haze of adrenaline and combat stims, I feel like I’m seeing things in the wrong order. First, I see the overpenetration, as what’s left of the round after it detonates punches clean through the wall behind the Raptor. Then I see its torso bulging outwards, harsh white light spilling through cracks slowly spiderwebbing across its armor, and finally I see the entry wound where the round went in widening as reactive armor cooks off, far too late to stop anything.
I blink, and there is no Raptor, just the smoking remains of its feet, mag-clamps still rooted to the deck plating. There’s a hole in the wall behind large enough for a person to crawl through, and visible through it is another hole in the next wall, size of a pumpkin.
That’s three. In my last five minutes, I’m taking three pirates with me, and they will never, ever hurt anyone again. I will spend these last seconds making the people I love just a little bit safer. I’m not wasting my last moments. I’m doing something useful. I’m not–
Something tears my mech’s upper right arm clean off.
Damndest thing is, that old mainframe is still on Three Sisters, and those passwords still work. It’s no longer connected to anything vital, of course, that would be a security risk, not to mention that the mainframe was out of date even when the colony ship launched. But they kept it alive, a three-hundred-year-old computer, and you can still dial into it, and use passwords Thalia gave her life to ensure we all knew.
That’s how we remember heroes here in Calliope: we make sure there’s a part of their legacy you can feel.
There’s a big memorial wall on Hell’s Gate, and every militia pilot who dies in combat ends up on it. You see kids leaving candles for their lost parents, and lovers laying down a flower or a trinket for someone who died to keep them safe. There’s a lot of pictures up there. I wonder where my folks will put mine.
The Nelson is already on top of me, wildly stabbing at me with that goddamn pike, and I don’t even need to look at my screens anymore to watch bits of my mech go flying: I see the tip of the damn thing punch through the front of the cockpit. All my guns are dry, not that it would matter this close anyway.
My comms panel registers an incoming point-to-point. Do I want to listen to this guy gloat as he kills me? Ah, hell, might as well spit in his eye one last time. I open the channel, and his ugly fucking face appears on my screen, eyes in different directions, grinning like a boy ripping wings off a butterfly.
“Ready to die, Gater? I’m gonna gut you like a fuckin’ fish for what you did to my buddies!”
“Three of you in my last five minutes,” I answer. “Took four of you to take me down. Make sure you mention that when you’re drinking over this tonight. Oh, wait, but you don’t have anyone left to drink with, do you?” Despite everything, I crack a smile.
The spear tip pulls out, and then slams straight through the screen, inches from my face. Well, I certainly pissed him off. “Oh, you’re gonna scream before I’m done with you, Gater! You’re gonna scream! Any last fuckin’ words?!”
Then I hear it. Clunk. Six in the cylinder.
“Yeah,” I reply. “See you in hell.”
This close, there’s no way I can aim it, but this close, there’s no need. Obligingly, this dipshit put himself right in front of the barrel. I slam the firing pedal, and underneath my feet, a revolver the size of a motorcycle dumps its entire cylinder straight upwards.
The first blast rips the Nelson’s spear arm out of its socket. The second smacks that dipshit little shield it’s carrying and sends it spinning off into nowhere. The third and fourth hit it right in the cockpit, and for just a split second I actually see the piece of shit for real, face-to-face through the hole in my cockpit and the hole in his. For a split second, I get to really savor the look of gormless surprise on his face through his hardsuit visor. Then the gun fires a fifth time, and his cockpit turns a different color.
The sixth shot goes a little wide and just tears the armor off the Nelson’s right leg, but at this point, there’s not much Nelson left to hit, so I can forgive it for that. Even after the last shot, I can still hear the autoloader cycling furiously, trying to pull bullets from a dry magazine.
There’s a quiet in the aftermath. I can hear my cockpit breach alarm going off, but it’s getting quieter as the air leaks out through the holes.
There’s a part of Thalia’s story they don’t talk about so much: see, they never actually found her body. It’s weird, because her trajectory wasn’t enough to take her into a planet or out into deep space. They should’ve eventually been able to find her hardsuit and give her a proper funeral, but for three hundred years people have tried and failed.
Now, some imaginative people say that this is because she didn’t actually die. For her courageous act of selflessness in the face of death, so these legends say, Thalia Rue achieved enlightenment or transcendence or something and watches over us to this day, like a guardian spirit. That’s the real reason why you don’t mess with the old mainframe, you see: how else would she stay in this world?
I don’t know if I believe any of that, but in the stillness, I can’t help but wonder: what happens when your five minutes passes and you’re still alive?
I shove what’s left of the Nelson off my rig, haul the old girl back onto her feet and take stock. The cockpit’s depressurized but the air recycler’s still good, so if I close the vents and hook it up to my suit, I’ve got a day of air left at least. Water supply in the suit is topped off, so I won’t die of thirst. Rations are undamaged, even if it’ll be a challenge eating any until I get the cockpit patched up.
The mech itself is probably a write-off. I reckon if I make it out of this alive – still not a certainty – Chief McArthur is just reprinting the whole damn thing. I can probably seal this thing to vacuum, but I can’t repair this much damage on my own. She can walk, but every couple of steps there’s a grinding noise that sounds like a servo’s chewing something.
Even if I had any ammo left for the six-guns, I’m missing at least one and I’m pretty sure the control linkage for the one on the opposite arm is broken. My squad’s omnihook is subatomic dust after Zarick detonated his coldcore. That means I’ve got to broadcast a distress call on lightspeed radio and hope there’s no more Hounds in the area. If any more of them show up, I really am fucked this time.
I take one last look at my work, and then set off to find a way out of the wreck. Maybe I’ll find my five minutes somewhere else.