[X] Write-In: Doom Through Zoom And Boom
[X] Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.
"Pilot Langley," Ling sends by DNI. She finds it much easier than speaking normally, but most people can't handle communicating this way. It'd take them many, many seconds to talk like this - but here and now both of them are plugged into high end war machines and are thinking faster than meatbags can.
"Pilot Clarent," she gets back, a familiar 'voice' in her mind. "I'm surprised. You're handling yourself differently."
"Yours is not." She can't track down precisely where the signal is coming from - but then again, she's shielded herself too. The damage to her mimetic camo is heavy too, so she's not got as much to lose. "You're still overconfident. And an inferior Iterator. And a deviant individual. And-"
"I'm sorry."
The words strike Ling like a kinetic impactor. She doesn't have a response. Because she's focussing on her weapons management and trying to track down Henriette, of course.
"No, really, I am." A sigh - a false vocalisation injected into a DNI-to-DNI conversation. "I was a pretty awful person as a teenager. I went after you because you were a threat to... to what I wanted. Because you'd sometimes beat me in sims. And I am sorry for that. Since we last met, I've had to grow up a lot. Basically, I was kind of a bitch to you. So I have a lot of things to say sorry for."
"Your apologies mean nothing." Ling deploys a high power ground penetrating radar to hunt for the annoying voice. She just needs to keep her distracted, until she shoots her down in flames.
"I talked quite a lot with Major Jane Clarent. Before this current thing, I mean. I didn't know what it meant to be a Clarent before. I thought it was just a surname. And then I talked more with her after she realised what the traitor Gregor was up to."
"Stop attempting psychological warfare on me."
"No, that's the truth." Henriette pauses. "It makes sense why they'd pick you for their little attempted coup. You believe what you're told. You don't ask inconvenient questions. Here - have the actual facts on the ground."
Ling immediately purges the file squirt. She's not an idiot to open an EM-warfare package like that.
"Urgh, you didn't even read it, did you? Well, long story short, we're the ones directly following Command's orders. You've been tricked by a corrupt Progenitor into supporting a coup against the Technocratic Union. And I don't blame you." There's a soft chuckle. "You don't have a disloyal bone in your body. And you're much younger than Jane and haven't learned to overcome what they did to you, like she has."
Ling's stomach feels hot. Not the kind of hot it feels around Sanjeet. The kind of hot it feels around Yinzheng Li. In fact, Henriette Langley is sounding wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong! She's too soft. She sounds almost kind. Henriette doesn't sound soft. She's never kind. She's spiky and unkind. Is that even her, rather than some drone imitating her? But no, it's handling just like her.
Which is to say, really annoyingly.
"I don't want to have to hurt you," Henriette's voice says. "You're just following orders. If you power down your unit, you won't be sanctioned for this. And if it helps, I'll also let you slap me a few times. I deserve it."
"You can't make me turn traitor just by promising to let me slap you." Without asking, Ling's brain provides the mental image of her bringing her hand into Henriette's face. It does feel... good.
"Would punches do instead?"
"You're making fun of me!" It comes out as an exclamation rather than a flat statement.
"Look, I'm trying to say sorry to someone who's literally betraying the Union right now." Henriette appears to have reached the end of her infamously short amounts of patience. "I'm trying to give you a chance. A chance you deserve because I know more about what happened to you Clarents than I did when I was a bitchy teenager. Are you going to power down or not?"
[RESPONSE GOES HERE]
THE FOLLOWING SECTION IS ONLY USED IF HENRIETTE'S ATTEMPTS AT APOLOGY DO NOT WORK.
IE THAT PROBABLY MEANS IT'S GOING TO BE USED, 'CAUSE HENRIETTE AIN'T ONE OF THE PARTY'S SOCIAL MONKEYS
High up above at the edge of the atmosphere, Henriette finally listens to the warning bleep of her systems and cuts out of her ascent. The air is thin up here, and she checks that her heat shielding - fitted by her sister for use against plasma weaponry - isn't compromised.
And then she flips 180 degrees in one vehicle length, and starts accelerating downwards, adjusting for the motion of the earth. Aiming directly for the multiped. Her inertial shift system glows green, trailing ionised particles. The first sonic boom comes moments into the dive.
And in her wake follows a collapsing mass of air, a pressure wave that has more in common with the front of a nuclear blastwave than any mere sonic boom.
Despite the enforced paralysis, the corners of Henriette's lips curl up. It's probably just from the acceleration. She's certainly not looking forwards to see if she can shift her inertia in the fraction of a second she'll have to avoid pancaking herself straight into the multiped. That would be mad.
The orders are already on the line for the Watchers and Media Control in Japan.
HIGH URGENCY
PREPARE COVER STORY OF MICROMETEOR BURNING UP IN ATMOSPHERE ABOVE JAPAN
LIAISE WITH VE AS NEEDED FOR SUPPORT FROM NASA ET AL
EXPECTED BRIGHT LIGHT, SONIC BOOM
DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT ALLOW RUMOURS OF NUCLEAR WEAPON USE TO SPREAD
CROSS REF PREV INCIDENT "Chelyabinsk-20130215"
The boom shatters glass across the area. The surrounding buildings, already weakened by the fighting, sag and collapse in clouds of shattered concrete. The weaponised lab experiments were never made to face this kind of noise and many collapse from ruptured ear drums. Piero grits his teeth and shakes his head, mildly disorientated.
[Henriette - Forces 4 - As an all-round self-proclaimed badass with a thing for getting to pilot lots of walkers, Henriette is familiar with the weaknesses and strengths of spider-walkers like this one. Like all modern military hardware, their external sensors are weak against overpressure and pressure fluctuations - and spider walkers have it worse, because in extreme cases their legs shear off due to the stress of the body being applied to the narrow connective joins in the legs. Now, normally you could only get that kind of overpressure with a nuclear weapon, but Henriette has a reactionless drive. All she needs to do is buzz the multiped fast enough and low enough and her sonic boom will shatter everything around her. Like the ground. And nearby buildings. And the external sensors and the legs of the multiped. You'd have to be a legendary pilot to pull off something like this, but hey, fuck you she is. Enhanced by Int + Piloting, requires a fair amount of time to calculate the best approach and then get a sufficiently large run up to build up the needed speed (hence why she's already setting this up while she talks to Ling)]
