Mission 5 - History Begins to ‘Creek’ - Part 1

  Ta419 10/02,

  Remembrance Heavy Cruiser Class ‘Palladium’ - Pilot Break Room.

  I'm really not so sure about all this," The Scarlet Scourge muttered as her second in command, Lt.Jasta, smiled, "You got this, kid, don't worry," the old man's lined face grinned, clapping her on the shoulder.

  "See that right there, you still see me as a kid, for Sun’s sake! Why don't you take the lead?"

  "Me? Getting me prompted past NCO is already way too weird."

  "It is for me, too damn it!"

  "Ma'am, they’re ready for you," Lt. Manfred called, coming over to them. He was young and 'proper', or so Scarlet felt. Oval glasses and nicely cut hair framed his face. Most likely a good-natured plant, here to take command in the emergency that Scarlet fucked it up; that was her guess anyway. Still, he seemed inoffensive. Behind those glasses, his eyes were soft, certainly compared to her own. Then again, Scarlet felt everyone had better eyes than her scraggily red-rimmed irises.

  The three exited the anti-chamber into the pilot’s break room they'd been given. The space was cosy, with a relatively low ceiling, a few benches and pool tables, just about big enough for the twenty pilots to gather in.

  Said pilots stopped chatting amongst themselves to turn and salute Scarlet. She winced at that. Twenty in total plus herself and one cadet for good measure, so twenty-two.

  Spread between four ships, the Mithral, the Ruby, the Amber and the Palladium - making up her small battlegroup. In reality, all four vessels and their crews could be considered her troops, too. The four cruisers would certainly go up in flames if the pilots ever fell. It was a lot of weight for a supposed lone wolf.

  "Ahem, thanks for coming," the second-ranked of the Five Great Aces said.

  The assembly was mostly men, almost all veterans of the previous war; they were a collection of skilled pilots. Unlike the fifth and third ranked, Scarlet had been given just one battalion to command, and even it felt overwhelming. Twenty faces trusting in her, baldies, upregulation-length long hair, eyes all colours, some short, others broad - a hearty mix of skin tone and age - and everyone one of them expecting some kind of speech?

  She took a deep breath. There were too many people to let down; she couldn't walk away from this. The admiral, Kigen, her ‘Nakima’ behind her, even the sole cadet, young Oames, looking up to her for mentorship - but who said she had to do this the standard way? Would people complain if she wasn't a textbook officer? Surely, they'd known what they were in for.

  Scarlet began to smile. Worrying wasn't her style, nor was command. She'd do it her way, and to hell with it! Her smile morphed into a wolfish grin, "Alright, boys, I'm the Scourge and you are the unlucky bastards stuck with me. I ain't gonna’ be a stuffy officer; treat me like a jumped-up sergeant at most, got it? So what if it's irregular? Irregular got me to second-ranked ain't it? So follow me if ya’ like, and let's cause us some mayhem!"

  A chorus erupted in front of her as the men grinned and cheered. Jasta rested a palm on his face, but the grin beneath revealed his true feelings, while Manfred looked bemused. Scarlet kept on smiling and spouting similar lines to the assembly - happy with the reaction and never noticing the young cadet just back from visiting her father, frowning in the back of the crowd.

  Ta 419, 14/02,

  Orbit around Nation-Satelite 3.2.

  Chas Collins had become a real pilot. That had not been his initial life goal, mind you. He had graduated with a bachelor's in technical science and then applied for Vanadis’s test pilot programme. He’d turned out to be quite good at it, too. Perhaps it was just a natural knack, a hidden talent or some latent ‘Magi’ thing as the Curadh’s doctor had speculated - but his dream job of working with cool giant robots, sans the ‘war part’, had come true.

  So then it was maybe strange that Chas Collins was now standing - or well, sitting - on a live battlefield. Perhaps it had been a foolish choice; people certainly hadn’t approved of it. Vanadis headquarters and Bailey Mechanics both had tried to keep him, offering eye-watering pay rises. Chas had turned them down, taking the far less tear-inducing sum of a TSU pilot.

  He had ‘a duty’ he felt. The stolen Chevaliers had been a project he’d worked on; therefore, could he really just look away when he had the power to make a difference? When the machines he helped make were running rampant?

  “On your left,” called Ensign Gemon over the rather crisp close-range radio.

  “Got it,” Chas replied easily. His sleek, humanoid G-type turned, a glowing arc-staff in one multi-jointed hand. Charging at him was one of the dung beetle-looking Type-Bs of their enemy, a Calabar blade at the ready.

  With a half-hearted twist of the wrist, Chas's machine served the Type-B’s hand, blade and all. Next, Chas reached forward with his other appendage, grabbed the enemy by the shoulder and rammed his blade right through its chest. The round brown armour shattered like fine china against the plasma cutter blade. It slid in smoothly with a gross efficiency and out the other side.

  Chas pushed the now certainly dead machine back off his blade with a lazy shrug.

  Looking around, he took in the battlefield. Today was his tenth battle, maybe? He was starting to lose track. Almost every day, the Curadh would be sent to some hopeless space station or fuel refinery, there to do one of three things.

  Arrive early enough and they could prevent an attack entirely. The Remembrance raids tended to have more ships and mechs than the Curadh did, but it seemed the cost of taking on the two Casnels was enough of a deterrent to make them abandon any fight before it started. This made some sense to Chas; after all, the Grand Admiral’s forces alone outnumbered Remembrance ten to one or more. Losing a couple of dozen ships to take out the Casnels might very well end their guerilla war.

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  The Second scenario was when they were too late. In these cases, Chas usually just sat in the G-Type on stand-by, not leaving the ship. There would be a quick check of the smouldering wreckage for survivors, and they’d move on. Once or twice, they’d actually found ships that had survived their patrol fleets otherwise being destroyed. Those vessels were now following the Curadh, giving them a little escort flotilla of sorts.

  The third was like today, where they arrived during a raid, launched as a team and made to save what they could. This particular case was a Nation-Satelite, the giant ‘rectangles in space’ TSU was so proud of. On one side, all solar panels, the opposite a city in the stars. The Union’s idea of a fully man-made space colony.

  Each one generally housed a few million people, but thankfully, Remembrance didn’t seem to target the cities themselves. Not yet, anyway. Attached to one end of the massive space rectangle, however, was a small TSU barracks. That was today’s target.

  When they’d arrived, the barrack’s Vijaik defenders had been trying to fend off the Remembrance attackers, but that had been a whole five minutes ago. Now, just two remained.

  One Type-B being handled by the excellent teamwork of Moncha’s two wingmen, Gemon and Yazan. Gemon got in close, holding the Type-B in a clash of blades, while Yazan silently made his way under the enemy and blasted it to smithereens with his rifles. Chas respected the two’s clean and quiet efficiency during battles like these.

  The two had new mechs, the ‘Vijiak-Speical’: A high spec Vijiak developed alongside the G-Type Casnels. It was a good machine, Chas felt. Though its limps were narrow and thus somewhat light on power in atmospheres with gravity - out here in space, it was fast and precise, with joints almost as good as the gen-3 frames. Its standout visual was its sloping V-shaped head, giving it a slightly intimidating facade.

  Moncha and his G-Type engaged the other, but it was no Type-B. A machine called the Khopesh was once the cutting edge of Vijiaks. A large oval full-body shield, arching pauldron shoulders. A slopping flat-faced head unit that curved at the back and a narrow torso - it had been the ace’s choice of Abhailen mechs… five years ago, that is. Now it was quite the outdated machine, but compared to the Type-B, the Curadh had come across a few enemy squad leaders using Khopeshs.

  This one,in particular, had skill. Even Chas could tell its footwork was almost human, which was no mean feat in an older machine. Moreover, it had lasted more than five seconds against Moncha’s Casnel.

  The Commander swung forth with a jab of his spear. The Khopesh carefully rose a Calabar mk2 blade, not to block, but to just lightly make contact with the spearhead, pushing it off course and thus preventing a body blow to itself. These little exchanges had been repeating for a bit.

  Then again, Chas was confident Moncha could finish it instantly if he wanted to, but the man had an odd excitement for battle. It was less that he was toying with his foe and more that he was enjoying not using the Casnel’s full potential to win instantly. Chas respected Moncha as a leader; the guy seemed to know his ‘stuff’, plus he had saved Chas’s life back at Vanadis site 2, ‘I really gotta thank him properly for that sometime.’

  Chas yawned. It was indeed a day like any other over the course of these last few weeks. Remembrance launched some raids on seemingly random targets. The Curadh turned up and stopped one.

  It had been surprisingly easy to get into this routine. Perhaps he did just have a knack for it, like with test piloting. Just then, a lightning bolt cut across the sky.

  “Hey boss, six o'clock,” Ensign Yazan called out.

  Moncha dodged the incoming projectile easily, simply stepping to the side and letting the roiling energy beam pass by. Chas turned his attention to the direction it had come from, the Remembrance ships. Generally, they didn’t engage the enemy's warships in these missions. They focused on the mechs and defending those being attacked.

  Out in the distance were a dozen enemy ships and the Khopesh, which had apparently taken the momentary break in Moncha’s attacks to make a run for it.

  Chas drew a rifle at his machine’s waist and began to take careful aim.

  “I’ve got a shot boss.”

  “Go ahead,” Moncha replied.

  Shooting at range in a mech was an extreme skill few pilots had, but this close, it was easy enough to line up the shot. Chas pulled the trigger.

  The bolt of overheated energy soared through space towards the Khopesh’s unguarded back. Moments from impact, it instead hit, a wall.

  “What the heck is that?”

  A glowing wall, of energy, perhaps? It had simply appeared in front of the of the Khopesh, saving it. No, if Chas focused the cameras a little more, he could see a cable or something coming out of the shiny wall and stretching back to a, ‘a shield?’.

  Hanging in space was indeed some sort of shield. Or rather a machine that looked like one the traditional silhouette of one. And behind that, “A Chevalier?!”

  “No, looks wrong, don’ it,” Ensign Gemon mused.

  Chas had worked on the Chevaliers. He'd been unit 001’s dedicated test pilot before it was stolen that fateful day, so he’d have to agree with Gemon's statement, but then what was it? It had the same rough knightley design as the Chevaliers, but sort of ‘scuffed’ - a crude interpretation of sorts.

  “I’d bet money they’re testing prototypes. Sly bastards didn’t just steal ‘em; they're probably looking to make more of them,” Moncha added.

  Remembrance trying to create more Chevaliers? Chas felt his blood boil and his anger flare. How could they - how dare they even! It was one thing to steal them, but now they were making shitty copies?

  “Can we pursue?” the young man asked, a building rage in his voice.

  “Eh, what? Course not. They're retreating. We turn up and stop the baddies, no more than that. We’re not here to wipe them out, kid,” Moncha replied.

  “Right, right,” Chas took a deep breath. What was there to be stressed over? It had always been a possibility, so what? He had joined the Curadh’s crew precisely because he couldn’t bare to watch a machine he’d help make hurt innocent people. This just proved his duty all the more correct.

  When the time came, he was sure they’d crush this counterfeit and that strange shield thing as quickly as they did the Type-Bs, that time just wasn’t today.

  “Sorry about that, my bad.”

  For Chas and the Curadh squad, it was another mission complete. They watched the enemy machines silently fall back to their ships and depart. They did a sweep of the wrecked barracks and helped pull a few survivors free. A typical day, or as typical as days were since he’d joined the military proper.

  Chas might have had a knack for piloting but not so much for soldiering. Unlike what all his comrades were thinking at that moment, Chas was simply a little peeved at the Chevalier knockoff they’d seen and the Khopesh that had got away. He didn’t consider the strange circumstance of today’s battle, that the enemy had brought two powerful machines, as though tempting them to engage, as though acting as bait while a more critical attack happened elsewhere…

  Vijaik Specials mentioned in this chapter. This sketch is from UnderCurrent Volume 2, where the particular Special had twin physical sword. Yazon and Gemon do not have such load-outs, hence I'm putting it here in the afterword, that said the head shape is the same ;)

  This isn't a shout out trade or anything, we just beta read each other's works and chat a lot (he read the earliest version of this book ;) ) and he gifted me these! I'd recommend anyone to check his out and just, just look at em already!!!!!