5 - Considerations

Fourth Talon Cluster Firebase
Persistence, Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
28 November 3053

    The Summoner is one of the true icons of Clan Jade Falcon. A 70-ton heavy OmniMech with a top ground speed of 86.4 kilometres per hour, it can jump 150 metres at a time. It has pod space for onboard weaponry totalling 22.5 tons.
    Star Colonel Yesukai’s Summoner has been standing idle in its assigned service cradle for months now. Her personal Tech has spent more time in the cockpit than she. It is a cold, ugly little fact that brings the taste of bile to her mouth.
    I have to get out into the field. Soon... or I will go crazy, she realises.


Camelot Command (Location Classified)
Dark Nebula, Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

    “We’re not going to fight over this, are we? Because I really don’t think I would win...”
    Zoë hangs her head and actually looks bashful. “You heard about the Trial between Colin and I, quiaff?”
    Delaney cranes his neck to look her in the eye. It’s not exactly easy; she is so much taller than he. Taller and, well... a whole lot bigger. “Yeah, I heard. You smacked the living snot out of him. This place isn’t all that large, you know?”
    The Elemental nods, managing to give him the impression of a kid caught scribbling on the walls with crayons. “I am sorry, Anton.”
    He rolls his eyes. “Del. Call me Del. Everyone does.”
    “Why is that?” Zoë regards him curiously.
    “My first real paying job, way the hell out on Gibraltar. We had three guys working in the refit yards, all of us called ‘Anton’. Confusing as hell, let me tell you. We ended up using nicknames and it just kind of stuck. Especially once Amber was old enough to talk and called me her ‘Uncle Del’.”
    “Oh.” She considers that for a moment. “That means that you and Sergeant Valentine have been comrades for a long time, quiaff?”
    “You’re making me feel very old here, Zoë...”
    The trueborn woman looks away. She has just blundered again. What is the term? I have put my foot into my mouth.
    Anton... Del... reaches up and taps her on the forearm. “Hey. Are you okay?”
    Zoë blinks. “Apologies. I keep... making mistakes.”
    He nods. “That doesn’t sit too well, does it?”
    She thinks of Montmarault, and of what happened there. “Neg,” she replies.

    “That’s a priority target right there,” Colonel Snord says, pointing at a blinking cursor on the map. “A supply dump out on the edge of the colonised regions.”
    “We land nearby, barrel on in, and strip the place bare...” Brigitte scribbles a notation onto the screen of her datapad. “They must have some security in place.”
    “Probably a Star of foot troopers,” Rhonda Snord says with a shrug. “Older warriors and freebirths. Guarding a storage barn isn’t anyone’s idea of glorious service.”
    “Just hand weapons? No Toad armour?”
    Snord shakes her head. “I’d guess they’ll have some spare parts and repair gear to work on battle armour on-site, but no, they won’t have access to suits.”
    Olafsdottír leans back away from the holotable and rubs at the back of her neck. She’s been trying to cram in as much information about Persistence as she can, as well as read up on the ‘how and why’ of Clan Jade Falcon. Her head’s spinning. I could really use a nap right now, she realises.
    “They won’t have tanks, will they?”
    “No. The Falcons don’t much like armoured vehicles. They tend to see their MechWarriors as the be-all and end-all of warfare. Everybody else is there to hold their coats, basically.” Rhonda shrugs. “Falcon commanders will usually bid away their fighter cover and Elemental support before they even think of bidding away any ’Mechs.”
    “Stupid,” Brigitte says, rolling her eyes.
    “Yeah... but it can be useful to know, Captain.” The older woman raises her coffee cup to her lips, looks at it with a sour expression, and sets it back down on the edge of the holotable. “Any more of this crap and I’m gonna turn into an urn,” she grumbles.
    Olafsdottír nods. “It’s too damn late to be drinking coffee anyway. Can I stand you a round? Our commissary isn’t too bad...”
    Rhonda grins. “Deal. The biggest pain about being stuck out here has to be the rations the FedCom keep sending us. Cheapest, nastiest, buy-in-bulk shit I wouldn’t feed to someone I hated.”
    “Sounds a lot like the stuff the FedCom supplies office tried to talk us into buying. I wasn’t falling for it.” Brigitte gets up out of her chair and stretches, groaning as sore muscles in her shoulders and back complain.
    As Rhonda Snord stands up herself, she winces and rubs at her legs.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah.” She shrugs. “The grafts play up now and then. Could be worse; they didn’t give me very good odds on the surgery.”
    “What happened?”
    Rhonda sighs. “Direct hit on my ’Mech’s cockpit. I was younger than you are when it happened. Everything below my knees was smashed, and I had flash burns nearly to my hips. Ended up having almost all of each leg removed.”
    Despite herself, Olafsdottír looks again at Snord’s legs. They look perfectly ordinary, clad as they are in the leggings of a battered jumpsuit. It makes her think of Mike Holznecht. “Damn,” she says softly.
    Rhonda shrugs. “It’s okay. The worst thing of it is that I can’t cut my toenails any more.”

    “I’m not sure that we should be taking that Uller along,” Marc Campbell says.
    Jacqui Chiang raises an eyebrow. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”
    “Nothing. That’s not the point. Who would we have pilot the thing?”
    “Hmm. You’ve got something there.” Jacqui sighs. “I’m just glad my job is to fix the stupid things. You official officer types can worry about who goes where.”
    They’re standing together on the support gantry enclosing Marc’s BattleMaster. Each has a safety line hooked onto the railing. Jacqui has been working on the ammunition feeds for the pair of Sperry Browning machine guns mounted in the ’Mech’s left arm. It’s only one of a dozen different repair and refit jobs that are happening in the cavernous maintenance bay given over to the Norns’ machines.
    Marc leans back and watches her for a moment. She’s been fussing over the assault ’Mech almost every spare chance she’s had, since...
    Since he nearly had the whole left arm blown off by the Jade Falcons. That was all of a fortnight ago.
    “Hey... Are you all right?”
    The Bomb almost jumps out of her skin. It’s like he just touched a raw nerve or something. The look she gives him is a mixture of fright and anger.

    Working with Cameron, Midge Fairchild glances down from her vantage point behind her rebuilt Zeus and fights down a crawly feeling on the back of her neck. Down on the bay floor, Amber is speaking with one of the Falcon ‘solahma’ pilots. Alexis or Alexandra or something. Just a kid...
    Like the Falcons that hit Apollo over three years ago.
    “Midge?”
    She shakes herself. “Sorry, Cam. You want the circuit tester?”
    “Aye,” comes a hollow voice from the innards of the assault ’Mech’s thorax. Cameron Mackenzie has wedged his entire upper body inside the narrow inspection space giving onto the big Thunderbolt A5M large laser.
    Midge pulls the circuit tester out of the tool kit and places it in Cam’s outstretched hand. “There you go.” She’s glad he’s too busy to really notice her distraction. Sorting out the problem with the laser’s charge coupling is occupying his full attention.
    She gets that crawly feeling again. Clanners. Not just any Clanners, mind you. These are Jade Falcons. Midge can’t help but wonder if any of them took part in the attack on Apollo... not that she has any intention of asking any of them. Just keeping a distance is hard enough, especially when they’re all cooped up together aboard the Lodestar.
    She wishes that Brigitte had never decided to bring them back to Camelot. She lets out an exasperated snort. Why not wish you were back on a real planet, with real air and gravity? It’s not gonna happen any time soon, unless you count this little raid operation.
    Midge forces her attention back onto what she’s supposed to be doing. It takes more effort than she’s prepared to admit... even to herself.

    Liam Tyler looks from the datapad in his hand to the exposed workings of the Enforcer’s left arm and back again. He shakes his head and sighs. “Fracking piece of crap,” he remarks without any particular passion.
    The ChisComp 43 Special large laser in the arm is one of the ENF-4R Enforcer’s main weapons; the other being a Federated-model autocannon 10. This particular specimen of Enforcer once also carried a ChisComp 32 small laser as standard, but that’s been removed in favour of a CASE system to safeguard the autocannon reloads in the right torso.
    The large laser is out of action. Again. It broke down on him before he even touched down on Galatea back in March and now it’s acting up once more. He’s tempted to just start whaling away on the stupid thing with a sledgehammer...
    When he looks back up, the two other people on the catwalk with him are looking as if they want to run for their lives.
    They’re from the Iron Tower, the DropShip that is docked alongside the Lodestar. They’re Technician Caste, both of them still wearing the dull green coveralls of Clan Jade Falcon BattleMech specialists. They’ve removed the Clan insignia from their sleeves, but they each retain a little coloured pin on the lapel that Liam guesses marks their field of expertise.
    Their names are Rupinda and Noma. Neither young woman will look him in the face. They both seem to have a reflexive flinch whenever he speaks or makes a sudden move... as if they expect him to punch one of them in the head.
    “I am... I am sorry,” Noma says in a tiny voice, staring at his feet. Her hands are wringing away on the handle of a hydro spanner. “We cannot find the problem with the laser.” Her knuckles are showing white through her dark skin.
    Liam lowers the datapad and regards them both. Rupinda, standing beside the Enforcer’s elbow joint, is almost trembling on the spot. It gives him an insight into how they must get treated by their trueborn lords and masters.
    Badly, he realises. Since they were support staff for a Falcon solahma unit, they must have been catching even more abuse from the warriors who were looking around for an easy target to vent their frustrations on. It makes him feel sick. They’re expecting me to hurt them.
    Now he understands what Jacqui was so mad about, not so long ago. She’d mentioned to him how Angelica was expecting The Bomb to exact violent punishment upon her for her ‘lack of respect’, back at the Bountiful Harvest recharge station. Jacqui had been furious, sickened, and appalled in roughly equal amounts.
    These two girls can’t fix the fracking laser, so now they’re waiting for a punch in the teeth. Jesus... Liam takes a moment to compose himself. “Okay. It isn’t the end of the universe. The laser’s out of action... so what? How long would it take you to get it out of there and replace it with one from stores?”
    A pair of astonished expressions greets him. Rupinda’s mouth opens, but all she can do is make a small squeak.
    “We, ah, we need to get the repair platform that is being used on the Excalibur, Warrior,” Noma says. Her words nearly tumble over themselves, she’s so anxious.
    Liam nods. He knows a little basic maintenance, so he’d expected as much. “Fine. We’ll wait for them to finish up over there. Let’s go see if we can draw a new laser in the meantime.”
    “All of us?” Rupinda looks up at him in amazement. She catches her breath as she remembers her place, and switches her attention back to his boots.
    “Yeah. All of us. That means you two will come with me.” Liam guesses that the two of them would feel more relaxed juggling primed hand grenades than follow him down to the stores. Poor little frackers.

    “Crap,” Clara Harper says succinctly.
    Beth has to agree with her sister’s sentiment. Flying the cargo boat again. Brigitte had given them the bad news in person, but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.
    “At this rate, we’re going to forget how to fly our birds,” Clara grumbles as she opens a storage locker in their shared cabin aboard the Lodestar.
    “I know,” Beth says with a sigh. “But there it is. The Skipper needs the cargo space in Black Buck, and that’s all there is to it.”
    “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Clara shoots back, her head buried in the locker. “Where are the clean jumpsuits?”
    “Next locker along.” Beth leans back in the cabin’s single chair, held in place by a seatbelt. She glances at the small computer terminal at her elbow and shakes her head. So much for taking their Sparrowhawks out for some flight time, she muses. They’re going to have to transfer back over to the Buck and make sure it’s ready for flight…

    “Sweetheart? Try that real cute smile on someone else,” the quartermaster sergeant admonishes Liam Tyler good-humouredly. “I’m old enough to be your Momma.”
    “Sorry, Ma’am. Gotta ask, though.”
    “ChisComp 43 Special, yeah?”
    “That’s the one,” Liam smiles back. The quartermaster scrolls through her data slate, hunting through her manifests.
    “Pretty darned sure we’ve got one. You go and sit with your girlfriends while I see if I can dig it up.”
   Girlfriends? Liam wonders. Hell, the only one I’ve thought about is Honey…
    “Girlfriends, trooper,” the older woman points at Noma and Rupinda standing awkwardly at the entrance, trying not to make eye contact with anybody. Liam glances at the two young women and casts a look over his shoulder at the Sergeant.
    “Go on, sweetcheeks. Buy them both a coffee and a sandwich,” she waves him away. “I’ll find you when I’ve found it.”

    “Coffee, black,” Liam passes the mug over to Noma, and the next one to Rupinda, “Coffee, white, one sugar.”
    “Thank you, Warrior,” they say in unison, without looking up at him. He rolls his eyes as he picks up his mug of tea.
    “Guys? Please. Stop calling me ‘Warrior’. I know your name is Rupinda, and I know your name is Noma. My name is Liam. Liam Tyler.”
    They both study their drinks with a grim determination that begins to unsettle him.
    “Am I being especially ugly today?” Liam sighs, “Please? Would you guys look at me when I talk to you? All I can see is the top of your heads.”
    Rupinda glances up for a moment before looking back down again. Noma’s hands tighten around her mug. “We... We should not,” Rupinda finally says. “It is lacking respect.”
    “Aff,” Noma says to the tabletop.
    “They tell you that just before they hit you ’round the ear, right?” Liam hadn’t thought the two Techs could get any tenser, but they visibly flinch when he says ‘hit’. Noma manages a tiny little nod.