Petals of Titanium -- My Life as a Mecha Setting Bridge Bunny Quest

"How much have we lost?"

"About one third total capacity, ma'am." The LS engineer's voice on the other end of the internal comm line makes Captain Andre's shoulders visibly slump, and she seems to allow herself to deflate for a short moment, closing her eyes and massaging her temple with one hand. You remember, abruptly, that she has had all of four hours sleep in the past 24 hours. "Ma'am?" She opens her eyes again at the tech's prompting, glancing around the bridge at all of you, her assembled staff all looking at her with some variation on dismay or outright horror.

She draws herself back up, putting a trace of weary steel back into her narrow shoulders, and asks: "How does this affect things?"

"It isn't good, ma'am. I'm looking at the tank now, and the readout was correct. We picked up a lot of extra lungs from those shuttles. We're looking at our effective travel range cut in half. And that's with minimal activity."

Costly or not, Lady Perbeck's improvised plan had the effect of buying a lot of time for the evacuating shuttles to put distance between themselves and the battlefield, and not one, but two managed to dock with the Rose before it had accelerated too much for them to catch up. You saw more than one of the lifeboat shuttles take damage or rupture from battle debris or stray fire, but, once the Rose was out of range and the other enemies were neutralised, the enemy had been far more concerned with attempting to assist the heavily damaged corvette you'd left behind than in trying to chase down unarmed escape shuttles. Their target had always been the listening post on Phoebe, not the people stationed there. It does mean, however, that the ship is stretching its reduced oxygen reserves dangerously thin.

"Minimal activity, when we're flying with a hole in my ship covered up by a bandaid," Andre says, clearly annoyed. Although the way she glares into the middle distance, it's clear she's not mad at the tech in question. "That's not possible."

"We're doing what we can, ma'am," the life support tech says again, sounding a touch defensive.

"I don't expect otherwise," Andre says. "Keep me informed of any new developments."

"Yes, ma'am!"

She cuts the connection, and turns her attention to First Officer Grayson, who has just glided back into the bridge. "Do we have an accurate casualty count yet?" she asks.

"We lost five," Grayson says. "Spacers Chang, Less and Tanner were caught in the depressurised department and suffocated before the breach could be sealed. A fluke shot entered the mecha bay as well, when the crew was attempted to get Perbeck and Ito back inside. Mechanical specialists Garcia and West were killed, but damages weren't critical."

"And Song makes six," Andre says. There's a weighty silence in the bridge as she mulls this over. Eventually, she breaks it, and asks: "What's our situation with the lifeboats we took on?"

"One was full of civilians," Grayson says. "Service workers, and the families of some officers. We have plenty of space for them, if nothing else." The Rose had, after all, been a little short-handed even before people started dying. "The other was a military escape pod. All hands survived on both, with only minor injuries. Whiplash and the like."

"I don't suppose anyone on the second pod is qualified to fill in for our missing crew?" Andrew asks, with clear reluctance. It's responsible, necessary even, but it feels a little callous, so soon after their deaths were reported.

"All of them were with Phoebe Station security," Grayson says, shaking his head. "Station-side security. Marines."

"... understood, Grayson," the captain responds. "I'll speak with their commander when the time allows." Her eyes flick over to you, where you're still sitting at your workstation, monitoring your incoming scan data for any sign of enemy pursuit or other abnormalities. You've picked up nothing of particular interest since the shuttles, and the large communication's burst from Phoebe right before the observation post was bombed into decompressed rubble. Large enough that Mazlo, carefully not looking at you or mentioning you in any way, had surmised that they had likely sent a copy of the strange signal to high command. That, at least, was good news.

So far, you've seen nothing. There has been no indication, so far, that your performance with the scans in the battle has been deemed unacceptable. You performed your duties adequately, your actions textbook -- nothing that could result in a reprimand, certainly, if not exactly setting yourself up for a commendation. You're aware of this, and you expect your report, which you will write and pass on to Mazlo, will reveal no glaring mistakes on your part. You do find yourself wondering if, perhaps, another course of action may have resulted in a better outcome for the ship. If there was some more novel approach that you could have taken. You're confident enough in your own abilities to think that you would have been able to make any of them work, but ultimately, the risks involved were too great to take on your own prerogative. You respond to Andre's gaise by turning to face her, posture straight and alert.

"How long has it been since we've had sign of enemy activity on scan?" Andre asks. You would, of course, have reported any such activity, but it is the kind of thing that it doesn't hurt to verify in a position like the one you find yourselves in.

"Five hours, ma'am," you say. The weight of that time -- the tense minutes that had crept by in seeming perpetuity. You're exhausted and hungry, and you can tell that the men and women around you feel the same fatigue.

She considers this. "Grayson, bring us down to level 2 battle readiness," she says. "And, if nothing else happens in the next few hours, level 3."

"Yes, ma'am," Grayson agrees, and the red lights along the walls that give the bridge a much more urgent glow soften to a less glaringly alarming yellow. He glances around the room, seeing the same fatigue in you and all the others that you do, if perhaps a little more acutely, given the responsibilities of command. "I can begin organising a relief shift as well."

"Very good," Andre says. "We can't exactly fly a ship if everyone's dropping dead from exhaustion." She's turned away from him, studying a readout on the large screen, and so doesn't see the slightly pained expression that the First Officer shoots her. You, and presumably Grayson, do not get the impression that the captain includes herself in that statement. "We're going to need to renew our air supply before we do anything else. That's going to be a costly detour."

"I'll have a list of options within our range at your station shortly, ma'am," the ship's navigator says, in her frustratingly quiet voice.

Andre nods fractionally. "See that you do."

--

"Well, we're not dead," Anja says. "There's that." The two of you are finally drifting your way through the main shaft. Her tone is slightly ironic, but it also reflects the general vibe you feel throughout the ship. Relief at coming away as unscathed as most of you did, but nonetheless rattled by the violence and the loss of life. The illusion of safety you all share here in the Saturn system being abruptly, harshly gone.

"Some of us are," you reply, perhaps a little more primly than you intend.

"And if that shot had been angled a few degrees differently, we'd all be dead," Anja says, with a mildly derisive note in her voice. "Count your blessings, North. It's sad we lost anyone, but we're allowed to be happy that we didn't blow up or decompress."

"It… still feels a little ghoulish," you say, stiffly. "I wasn't trying to chastise you. Why are we going up this way?"

Anja catches one of the handholds in the shaft long enough to turn herself around to face you, gliding backwards, and presumably relying on you to help prevent any mid-air collisions. "I wanted to go past the mecha bay," she admits.

"To check on Sub Lieutenant Ito?" you ask, voice softening.

"To murder him for fighting off two enemies on his own over retrieving a body," Anja corrects. She's trying to sound angry, but there's a faint quavering note in her voice as well. you don't know all the details of their past together, but they certainly behave like real family. You know enough about losing a sibling yourself that you can relate, and so don't make an objection to the detour. However much you might want to go straight to a much needed shower.

The shafts are busy with overworked spacers and technicians, their salutes to you and Anja so perfunctory that they don't even stop to deliver them. Under the circumstances, you let most of it slide, although normally you're want to gently correct such slips. They're doing it because they have urgent work to do, not out of laziness or disrespect, after all. Still, one spacer is so lax about it that you make a point of catching his eye meaningfully as you pass, until he hastily gives a better one. Anja seems to privately find this unaccountably funny.

Even if you hadn't been making your roundabout trip to go past the mecha deck -- located near the very top, rear section of the ship -- your well memorised commute would need to be adjusted. Part of the ship is still closed off from the battle damage, and so in the end, Anja's detour isn't costing you too much extra time. The mecha deck consists chiefly of a three mecha hangar, with accompanying facilities to keep the machines at combat readiness, and adjoining space to house the mecha squad's pilots and support personnel, greatly reducing the amount of time it takes a pilot to go from their bed to their cockpit in an emergency. Although it's certainly not strange for officers from elsewhere on the ship to pass through the deck, you feel conspicuous today. If the mood is confused and slightly crazed in the rest of the ship, this entire deck has a distinctly funeral air to it. Evidently, the mecha crews are taking their own losses particularly hard.

Activity, predictably, is concentrated around the hangar. By necessity, it's an unusually large space for zero gravity. A boxlike chamber, longer than it is wide, with the three giant mecha bays spaced out along its length, each sporting a series of huge, armoured hatches that serve as mecha sized airlocks. From your vantage point in the shaft beside the hangar, you can see maintenance workers expertly navigating the empty void in the centre of the room, criss-crossing it in all directions, somehow without major incident or collision. The maintenance workers are swarming around the three gigantic metal figures resting in the mecha bays:

The familiar, boxy shape of Ito's Banner sits in the middle, its singular, main ocular camera dull and lifeless, with several specialists busy doing something to its main thrusters. Banners are always broad-shouldered and thick-torsoed, built as they are with pilot survivability in mind. Ito's unit, with its modified limbs and layers of additional plate, takes this to an even further extreme. To the left, in Bay 01, Perbeck's Huntress seems almost like the Banner's slight, unassuming younger brother. More streamlined and narrow, with minimal armour, even if its thrusters are clearly more sophisticated, and its own ocular camera is larger and more powerful. The illusion of relative harmlessness is thoroughly ruined by the black, sinister length of the Huntress's linear rail cannon.

In Bay 03, to the right of Ito's Banner, rests Song's. The ruined, crushed cockpit has been pried open, and the machine rests limply in its cradle. You consciously try not to look too closely, but it's impossible not to notice the dark stains within the mangled interior of the cockpit. Song's remains, at least, have already been removed.

"Hiro!"

Anja spots Ito standing near the hatch to the hangar, talking with an older, grave-faced woman. He starts at hearing his first name, but relaxes upon seeing Anja. He turns toward her, grinning with open relief. "Good to see you in one piece too," he says.

"I'm fine," she replies, bringing herself to a stop in the hatch, and crossing her arms to give him a disapproving look. "I'm not the one who flew off on my own straight into the enemy, before we even had any proper scan data."

He only spends a moment or two looking taken aback by this. "I was following orders," he says, not looking somewhat repentant.

"You were ordered to assist Song, not avenge her," Anja counters, floating close enough to glare directly in his face.

"It worked out," he says, posture going a little stiff. "For us, anyway."

You glance around the general area, at the people surrounding them. There's a slight awkwardness on display, and you wonder, dimly, if his insistence on bringing back Song's body and damaged machina may have been a contributing factor to the accident that resulted in two of the fellows' lives being lost. The mechanical chief -- the older woman who Ito had been talking to, and who he had earlier professed an unlikely desire to marry, looks on with an unreadably impassive expression.

"Li, is there a reason you're accosting my pilot?" came a familiar, coldly aristocratic voice.

Anja glances between Ito and Lady Pebeck, who has just floated within earshot, expedience with an officer who clearly has less patience than the likes of First Officer Grayson clearly warring with a more emotional impulse. The latter wins out. "I'm accosting him because he's an idiot," she says. Before hastily adding, a split second later, "... ma'am."

Perbeck narrows her eyes at Anja for a moment, as if displeased by her lack of decorum, but then looks back at her unsmiling, and at the plainly mortified Ito, before saying, "Granted." Ito splutters slightly in stifled shock, if not mild outrage. She continues: "However, you are creating a disturbance in my hangar. Accost him later if you must. And more quietly."

"... yes, ma'am," Anja agrees, shoulders slumping a little. She pushes herself backwards into the shaft, snapping an apologetic salute as she does so.

Perbeck's eyes land on you, and you find the stare a bit nerve racking, before she nods, and says, "Good work on giving us some warning, North."

You try not to register too much surprise, instead, returning the nod, and offering a salute of your own. "Thank you, ma'am." You're about to leave with Anja, when a surprisingly timid voice catches your attention.

"Ma'am?" a slight young man, wearing a mecha crew jumpsuit with a specialist patch, drifts into view, catching himself against the wall above the hatch you're all standing near, oriented perpendicular to you all. "Ma'am, I'm… trying my best, but…"

Perbeck lets out an explosive sigh, which makes the specialist flinch visibly. She looks more annoyed by that reaction than anything. "You can't fix the problem, can you?"

He shakes his head. "I know that Garcia said she'd figured it out, and she told me what she was going to do… but all I can do is reset the system. The scan settings keep going wrong at startup -- I'm not… as good with the software as she was." A flash of grief crosses his features -- regret that clearly goes beyond simply missing the lost specialist's expertise.

Perbeck pinches the bridge of her nose. "So, I suppose I'll just have to continue manually recalibrating every time I need to launch. Lovely."

"I apologise, ma'am!" the young man said, near panic.

"Yes, I know you do," she says, without expressing anything like the anger that the specialist seems to expect. "I'm sure you have other duties you could be attentending to outside of my scan troubles."

"Yes, ma'am!" the specialist says.

"Why do I ever let those idiots from headquarters do these firmware updates?" Perbeck mutters, glaring up at her huntress with some displeasure.

You hesitate. The ISM16 Huntress is one of the older active serving models -- its basic performance was always high enough, and its role specific enough, that so far the few in use haven't been entirely phased out, unlike the Lancer, which has been largely consigned to rear guard duty for good reason, as the skirmish around Phoebe clearly demonstrated. But that age is something that is still likely going to show itself in terms of onboard software, specifically with something like scans, where the mecha's systems need to be able to integrate with modern warship software suites. You're not surprised that this is creating problems, and if it really is entirely software…

"There's… a possibility I could help, ma'am," you say. Scans are a mature technology, regardless of the small leaps in progress that get made now and again, and the primary difference between ship scans and mecha scans is scale. You're not intimately familiar with every onboard system of the Huntress, certainly, but you're confident you could at least make it display a scan readout.

Perbeck looks at you again, surprised, then thoughtful. "... supervised, perhaps," she allows, which is a given. She shrugs. "We're short-handed in that area now, and I'll hardly turn down the help, if you can actually do something. When you can be spared from your regular duties, of course.."

You nod, grateful that the suggestion wasn't met with offence or derision, at the very least. Such issues are typically time consuming, but you've dealt with similar software integration issues before. "I'll try to find the time, ma'am,' you promise.

--

"I can't believe you just volunteered yourself for more work," Anja says, hanging her jacket up in the locker next to yours. "After all this!" There was a lineup for the women's officer showers when you arrived, but it's moving quickly. Showers in space are not long, and the ship has enough units to do several people at once. The shower room is sparse, in austere white tile, clothes lockers on one end, shower units on the other, a row of mirrors in between.

"It's important to the ship's combat readiness," you tell her, unflustered. "And, I'll have to find time to do it, first." Your own jacket is already stowed away perfectly, without so much as a crease. You're undoing your shirt, when Anja suddenly points toward you, indicating the small, black box that's hanging there.

"What is that, anyway? You always have it," she comments.

You pause, suddenly uncertain. It isn't quite a secret, necessarily. But it's very personal, and not information you've simply been volunteering on your own. It's a long, conspicuous moment before you decide what to say.

"It's… a short range tracker and comm link," you admit.

Anja frowns, confused. "Like… what you put on kids' school bags?"

"Yes, exactly that." You're relieved at how quickly she hit on it, although you have resumed your shower preparations -- it wouldn't do to hold up the line. "My mother gave this to me when I was young. And the other half to my older sister."

"You… have a sister?" Anja looks surprised. "You've never mentioned her before."

"I did," you allow, cautiously.

Understanding comes across Anja's face, and she looks abruptly apologetic. "So you just… kept wearing it?" she asks, cautiously.

"She went away to school, before the civil war," you say, not quite looking at Anja. "I made her take the other half with her to school, even though I was old enough that mother didn't make her mind me nearly as often anymore." You steal a glance back at her, even as you slide the black box back over your head, and lock it in the small item's box within the locker, to keep it from drifting into the walls. "I know it's silly."

Anja shakes her head. "I wasn't going to call it silly," she says.

The shower is extremely welcome, a short time later. It's not nearly as nice as an in-gravity one -- the unit is a completely enclosed cylindre, floating globules of water being suctioned away almost as soon as they have a chance to gather on your skin. But while it lasts, the water is warm, and you can forget about everything for a long while.

--

The HDMS Amaranth, mecha deck

"You can come out of there anytime, you know, kid."

Commander Green's gently amused tone abruptly snaps the lieutenant back to wakefulness. She attempts to straighten to snap out a salute, but only ends up looking silly, entwined as she is in her cockpit's restraints. "Sir!" she says, hurriedly disentangling herself, and pushing up out of the cockpit. "I was only resting my eyes!"

"You have a bunk for that," he notes, and a passing mechanical specialist plainly tries his best not to laugh. Green, out of his pilot's suit and back into his uniform once again, floats his way up to the Provespa's cockpit, catching the edge of it, so that he can look down at his pilot with light exasperation. "Why are you even still here?" he asks.

"I was… going through some calibrations and performance checks," the lieutenant admits, complexion too dark to flush.

"... and you fell asleep," Green finishes, before actually laughing out loud. Behind him, hangar two of the Amaranth is busy with activity, mainly centred around the urgent repairs needed for the heavily damaged Vespula. The scouting squad had gotten off lightly, comparatively. When he finishes laughing, much to the lieutenant's quiet indignation, he adds, more seriously, "The enemy's gone for now, we've done what we can for Tang and that glorified derelict of hers. Wash up, eat something, and get some sleep, kid."

"Is that an order, sir?" the lieutenant asks, finally pushing herself up from the cockpit.

"Yes, Lieutenant North, in fact it is." His jocular mannerism doesn't drop, but long experience has taught the Lieutenant when it's concealing commander Green being deadly serious.

She sighs. "Yes, sir," she says, saluting smartly in spite of her annoyance.

"Oh, don't look like that," Green says, a broad grin coming over his chiseled features. "You're no use to me dead in space from exhaustion. We're on route again tomorrow -- Captain's orders. And with any luck, you'll have that nice reunion with that traitor mother of yours you've been looking forward to for so long."

She does smile at that, although it would not precisely be described as a happy smile. "Yes sir," she agrees. Some things are worth the wait.

--

There is a substantial period of time after the first battle where the ship is simply in transit, conducting what repairs can be managed on the move. You're very busy, as is everyone else, but you're not working all the time. Your downtime is a resource to use wisely when you can -- remember that doing extra tasks can have additional benefits down the road and impress superiors, but that if you don't take at least a few moments to relax or socialise, you'll burn yourself out, and miss out on opportunities to grow closer to your shipmates.

You have three units of downtime to spend for the next update. You may choose as many options as you can afford.

[ ] Spend time with Anja (one downtime)
[ ] Get to know Ito (one downtime)
[ ] Volunteer to help the refugees settle in to their temporary housing (one downtime)
[ ] Complete the initial analysis on the annoyance with Perbeck's scans (one downtime)
[ ] Help to completely eliminate the annoyance with Perbeck's scans (two downtime)