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

The Bridge of the prototype stealth carrier, HIMS Night Lily

"It's a friendly ship, your highness: The HIMS Titanium Rose."

"A cruiser, I hope?" Imperial Princess Daystar Helios floats freely behind the warship's command seat, one hand gripping the back as she looks over the shoulder of the man sitting in it. She sounds faintly hopeful, even if a certain guarded quality speaks of a readiness to be disappointed.

"No, your highness," the captain says. He's the one monitoring the scan feeds personally -- rather beneath his pay grade, but the HIMS Night Lily is hardly running in an ordinary Imperial configuration. "It's an old Ranger class -- a scouting ship with a few teeth. It's--" on the scan feed on his workstation, the small red dots in the debris field buzz to life like a small swarm of bees, converging in the direction of the new blue one. As they pass the only other blue dot, the last, crippled remnant of their poor escort, it blinks out. "... the enemy mecha just blew the Iron, and are moving to attack the new ship," he says, grimly.

Daystar closes her eyes, letting out a respectful sigh. "I'm sorry, Captain Lucas," she says. Then she turns her attention, necessarily, back to the living. "What are the chances of the Rose holding by herself?" she asks.

"Minimal," Captain Patel says, shaking his head. "I'd give them a chance against just the remaining escort corvette --Singhs aren't made of much, when you start firing actual warship ammunition at them, and a Ranger is faster, and has a mecha compliment. But it's not made of much either, and it's not what you reach for to take on a carrier with most of its mecha compliment still operational."

The princess pushes herself back, scanning the bridge in its entirety. The standard Imperial layout isn't modified terribly much. There's the familiar delta, with its banks of workstations facing inward to the spine of the ship, and its large display screens on the walls. Most of the stations are unmanned, however, and an alarming number of them do not seem to be entirely set up. Most of the stations in the CiC are still covered in a layer of protective plastic, a seal proclaiming that they had had not yet been properly installed. The majority of her bridge crew, such as it is, is currently in this area, attempting to get the main weapon systems back online with an air of quiet desperation.

Daystar cuts an elegant figure amongst the strange emptiness and localised chaos, with an Imperial officer's dress jacket worn over a trim travelling dress, smart-fabric forcing it to remain improbably flattering in zero-g. She's slender, imperceptibly regal, and instantly recognisable as a member of House Helios, bearing the tanned skin and unnatural, almost luminous red-blonde hair that is something of a trademark for the imperial family. The historians can't quite agree on the first Emperor's true origins. The story has long been muddled in the sort of imperial propaganda and creation myths that have lately -- possibly inevitably -- led to the creation of the Holy Empire. Whether her beautiful, sculpted features truly are the result of divine intervention or merely generations of cynical genetic modification, when she frowns, it's difficult not to feel a sharp pang. "We have to try to help them," she decides.

"Your highness?" The captain asks, eyes going a little wide. Patel was, in truth, more of a technical officer than anything, assigned to a top secret weapons development station to help oversee the outfitting of this ship. Not to command it. The fear of going into battle in it, in the condition it is currently in, can almost literally be seen flashing through his dark, intelligent eyes.

"We can't count on anymore responses to our distress signal in time," the princess says. "We're safe as long as we have the stealth drive up… but we've never tested it for this long, and we can't count on staying hidden from scans indefinitely. Assisting the Rose is the best chance we have. And I don't want to watch another ship full of brave soldiers die for my sake."

"We're the farthest thing from battle ready, your highness!" Patel argues. "We can't even activate the main drives, or send our allies a message without overwhelming the stealth field and giving away our position, and the weapons system isn't ready! We have a hold full of mechas still in storage, and the ones we do have prepped don't have pilots."

"Then we use the secondary drives to get ourselves into a good enough position, get the weapons online, and provide support at a crucial moment," the princess said. As she spoke, she raises her voice to carry over to the technicians working on the weapon's system, who look back at her with a slightly panicked look briefly, before redoubling their efforts. "And we do have one pilot," she reminds him.

"I can launch, princess," comes the quiet, calm voice behind her. "I'm finished prepping my Morrigan." The young woman had just drifted through the hatch, oriented sideways to them in a way that is mildly disconcerting, but apparently unconscious. She arrests her progress and corrects her orientation with almost eerie expertise, catching herself by hooking one food under a handhold and twisting, using the other foot to cancel the momentum exactly before she can go into a spin. The reason for this display, was, apparently, that her hands are full: Immediately upon stabilising, she's raising a capsule container full of angry red pills to her lips, and clicking the mechanism to release one of them before washing it down with a gulp from a water pouch.

"You have impossibly good timing, Jaycee," Daystar says, smiling a little fondly, in spite of the overall somber mood. The girl in question is 20 at absolute most, likely closer to 18. Small, but wearing the bright, sunburst colours of the Imperial Guard on her flight-suit. Her untraceable blend of European and East Asian facial features isn't particularly remarkable in Saturn System, but her hair -- so fair it's closer to white -- is. This is hardly the strangest thing about her, however.

"I have to be," she says, with a light shrug. Her dialect is a quiet, monotonous high Imperial, more perfect than anyone born speaking the official dialect ever manages. As her shoulders move, her bobbed hair shifts enough to reveal the raised pattern of metallic plates embedded in the skin over one temple. "It's my job"

"Stay safe," Daystar says, gently. "Don't get killed."

Jaycee nods, salutes, and then pushes herself backwards in the direction of the shaft, twisting around in the air to see where she's going.

"Even if we get the weapons online in time, princess," Patel goes on, "We have no way of knowing how the main cannon will behave during live fire. We've only ever tested it at 25% power."

"It will have to be a learning experience for us all, then," the princess says, with just enough curtness to make it clear the discussion was over. "We need to do this, captain."

Patel sighs. "Yes, your highness," he allows. "Helm, bring us into something like a firing arc, as fast as we can without blowing out stealth."


The bridge of the Holy Empire Flower class ship, HDMS Biar

"Ivanov gets sent off to knock over a satellite dish on some undefended rock in the middle of nowhere," Lady Rousseau, captain of the Divine Navy ship Briar snarls, "The rest of the raiding task force leaders are at least going to seize something important. Me? I'm wasting my time out here with you. But after all this, I refuse to come back here empty-handed because you're too much of a coward to do your fucking job!"

The young commander on the other side of the video call, captaining the last of the HDMS Briar's escort, blanches from a mixture of anger and fear. "It isn't the scouting ship I'm worried about, ma'am," he says, defensively. "The new model just vanished."

"It didn't vanish!" she snaps. "That's impossible." She watches as the little snot visibly stops himself from an impatient outburst. Not that she can't guess. He thinks she stupid, unknowledgeable. Incompetent. That she only got her rank because of her family name and title, and that she's been saddled with this posting because, eventually, everyone realised this. Projecting? Of course she's projecting, that doesn't mean he's not thinking it.

"Ma'am." Her head snaps around to find the source of the voice -- her scans officer. She fixes the young woman with a venomous stare, but she holds firm.

"Yes?" Lady Rousseau asks, reluctantly.

"The strange ship went dark on sensors completely as soon as it cleared the exploding station. Not even ambient radiation -- just off, like flicking a switch. That means, unless the enemy has stealth tech thirty years ahead of ours, it's still here. There's no way they can cloak their main drives that way."

"I don't want excuses!" Rousseau shouts, making the girl, as well as the commander on the other end of the line, flinch. "It doesn't matter. We'll find it, but first we need to kill that scout ship. Commander Rose, you will take the Agricola out to hit them in the flank. They're already engaging out mecha squads, who we will be supporting. They'll be too busy to pay attention to that to focus scans this far out."

The Agricola's captain looks distinctly unhappy, but, gratifyingly, he nods. "Yes, ma'am. Right away."

Rousseau never gets tired of that feeling. He can look down at her all he wants, but in the end, she's the one in command.


The bridge of the Titanium Rose

Your fingers slide across your workstation, the tiny servos in your gloves giving each finger feedback everytime you make an adjustment. As you adjust your scan priorities, you feel vindicated to see that Perbeck's Huntress is indeed providing enough data of the general area to be useful, and even as more as the small, hot debris field comes into clearer and clearer relief on the battle map, the area around the map expands at a quick rate. It's empty, so far, but even that is useful information. Although this is not entirely due to the fixes you helped to implement in her scan suite, you're less pleased to say.

Lady Perbeck's unit is fast enough to fly circles around her attackers, who fortunately are in a trailing formation, and therefore not to be able to cut her off at once. But there are four of them. No, five -- and Ito is only just leaving the ship to join her now. The entire fight is also well outside of the range of the ship's point defence weapons, and will be for long enough to be worrisome.

"Captain!" Anja calls, "Lady Perbeck wants to use the main gun on her mecha."

"... Negative," Andre says, after an imperceptible pause. "Put her on the line with me."

A moment later, the feed from Perbeck's cockpit blinks into focus. The video is chaotic, the view-plane spinning wildly as she meaneauvers around multiple attackers and arcs of weapons fire, warding off attackers here and there with a burst of fire from her mecha's secondary weapon. "I need more firepower than this," she says, flatly. The feed of her face in one corner of the screen shows her not even looking at the camera, eyes tracking back and forth along her own display, mouth invisible inside her helmet. "Has there been any indication of surviving friendly ships?"

"Not yet," Andre confirms.

Perbeck's eyes narrow in a frown. "Well, Captain? she demands.

"From that transmission, and from Captain Lucas's final report--"

"If you can call shouting incoherently a report!"

"From his final report," Andre continues, undeterred, "we have reason to suspect that our VIP is still in the area."

"Do you understand what the chances are of me hitting one lifeboat or ship out here accidentally, Captain? We're no use to her if we can't even defend ourselves."

Andre mulls this over for a long moment, and lets out a sigh. "Fine. Don't lose your head over it."

"Understood," Perbeck replies, with more than a trace of of irony in her tone.

You stare harder at your display, as if willing such a ship or lifeboat to simply appear in front of you. It isn't forthcoming.

"North, could there be a stealthed vessel in the area?" Andre asks, suddenly.

You glance up momentarily, before hastily forcing your eyes back down. "It's… possible, ma'am. A stealthed shuttle or ultralight observer craft. Unless she has stealth technology thirty years ahead of anything I've been trained to know about, she wouldn't be able to activate main drives without overpowering the stealth field."

Andre nods, looking thoughtful. She opens her mouth, about to say something further, when suddenly you cut her off, by necessity. "Enemy craft detected!" you say. Sure enough, a red dot appears on the edge of the scan range. "It's… another Singh class corvette, ma'am! Moving wide into a firing position on us!"

Andre half pushes herself up out of her seat in her agitation as she barks orders out to the bridge crew. "Helm, I want us turned around into a firing arc now even if it tears us in half. We're already past worrying about railgun fire -- how are we for weapons?"

"Main guns hot, ma'am," came a voice from the CiC, opposite Anja. "Calculating a firing solution now."

"Li, make sure Perbeck knows what we're doing. North, keep an eye out for something bigger -- Singhs are escorts. Lieutenant, fire on your mark," Andre says.

The helmsman doesn't quite tear the ship in half, but you're sure that everyone onboard feels the sudden change in position as the ship rotates in space without actually changing trajectory at all, rolling forward and around to bring its lethal main guns to bear on the target you've found. If there's one thing a Ranger class ship has going for it -- and it certainly isn't firepower, armour or living space when fully crewed -- it's speed and maneuverability. "Main gun, fire!" Grayson's deep voice calls out. You feel that particular, faint vibration pass through the ship, and the gun fires silently into the void.

"Direct hit!" the weapon's officer calls, excited. "Enemy shields are failing!"

"Helm, get us another angle while it's recovering," Andre says. "Weapons, give them another taste. We won't catch them flat-footed for long." As the yes ma'ams ring out across the bridge, the Rose changes vector, preparing to enter into a lethal, three dimensional dance with the enemy corvette.


In space, nearby

Perbeck stares death in the face. The lead banner has a proper angle on her this time, she knows, even as she throws everything the Huntress has into evading it. Salvation comes in the form of something very large and metallic all but ploughing into the enemy mass production model.

"Reporting, ma'am!" comes Ito's voice over the comm. His own, heavily modified Banner overpowers the leader and, back thrusters struggling valiantly to maintain his own position hurls it bodily in the direction of its wingmates. They scatter, but an instant later, Perbeck's main cannon fires, and the Banner is torn violently apart.

"You don't get extra pay for dramatic entrances, Sub-Lieutenant," Perbeck says, not without a trace of gratitude.

"You know that payroll only added that rule because of me, ma'am," Ito quips, but his heart isn't entirely in it. Even working together as well as they can -- the speed and firepower of Perbeck's Huntress combined with the strength and durability of the custom Banner -- they aren't going to win with the remaining two to one odds. All it will take is one unlucky shot, one wrong move, and then another, and they'll be dead. And so will the ship that's even now exchanging fire with an enemy Corvette that's only just now getting close enough to properly pick up on the optical camera -- once the two of them are gone, nothing is keeping the enemy mecha from assaulting the Rose directly.

"Unknown unit approaching! Ensign Li's warning tone calls over both of their comms. "Sending you the heading now!" True to her words, a new dot appears on Perbeck's scans, moving toward the skirmish at speed. As it draws nearer, the Huntress's powerful main camera picks it up:

It's bulky, but moving fast -- armour a strange, almost mirror-finish silver, confirmation like someone took a Banner and hammered out all of its blocky edges, leaving behind something sleekly intimidating. The camera array in its head, unlike the Huntress or the Banner, however, is a cluster, rather than simply being dominated by one large lens. As it approaches, to Perbeck's relief, it raises a rifle, and begins firing on the enemy.

A new voice comes across the comm, using an official military channel, clipped and flat, without a trace of excitement, despite the present circumstances. "Guardswoman First Class J6, Second Imperial Guard regiment. Assisting in the IDIMX Morrigan."

Perbeck scarcely has time to ponder what sort of name 'J6' is supposed to be, or how the guardswoman seemingly appeared from nowhere -- new ally or no, they're still fighting for their lives. "Lady Perbeck, mecha commander, with the Titanium Rose and the Outer Fleet. The help is welcome."

As if in response, the new, friendly mecha proceeds to execute an impressive pivot, first firing at an enemy Banner with its main rifle to put it on the defensive, then launching several somethings from the legs and back of its bulky frame. Guided missiles, Perbeck thinks, for a moment. But instead of flying into the distracted mecha, they surround it, each sleek, silvery shape opening fire from an integrated, low-recoil gun. The Banner loses an arm first as successive shots hit it in a joint, then vents its oxygen along with a half of its pilot as further fire rips into the exposed components and tears its cockpit wide open.

Pebeck decides that she'll add 'capacity to operate multiple drones while also piloting a mecha in combat' to the pile of mysteries surrounding J6. From here, alarmed at the suddenly even odds, the enemy, if anything, only fights harder.


The bridge of the Titanium Rose

All at once, a new dot appears on your screen, from seemingly nowhere, in an area you had already scanned multiple times and found empty. "Unknown mecha detected!" you call, caught off guard. "It's… another new model!"

"Li, make sure Perbeck knows," Andre says, briefly diverting her attention from the battle at hand. Almost as soon as she says it, the entire ship shudders, and alarms go off.

"Hit off the Starboard bow! Getting shields back up!" the harried defence tech cries out, scrambling to fix the problem. You aren't dead right away, so it could be minor damage, or the hull could be about to rupture and vent the entire contents of the ship into space. Time will tell.

"Keep us out of that firing arc!" Andre snaps at the wincing helmsman.

"Fire gun batteries in the following sequence: Auxiliary A, Auxiliary B, Main!" Grayson commands, and, before the Rose moves completely out of firing vector, she unloads on the enemy Singh with all of her guns. The already weakened shields of the enemy corvette flare with the first hit, fail with the second, and are gone completely when the last and largest strikes it square in the bow, breaching the hull. Its retaliatory and possibly dying attack -- it's entirely possible that you've done enough damage to sink it -- sails largely wide, although the ship shudders again as the shields absorb a glancing hit.

"Well done!" Andre says. "Position us to finish them off. How is Perbeck?"

"They're holding, ma'am," Anja says, sounding half distracted from splitting her attention between the bridge and the mecha skirmish. "But--"

The edge of your scan range lights up again, and you gasp, cutting off Anja. "Captain! Second enemy ship on far scans! Flower class, weapons hot!" A flower class does not have a particularly formidable arsenal for its weight and lack of maneuverability, but at this point, even that could do incalculable damage, as low as your shields currently are. For all your quick thinking with the scan priorities, and all your collective luck, and all the skill of the Rose's crew, it very well might end here and now.

Andre's eyes go wide. "Evading, captain!" the helmsman says, before she has a chance to open her mouth. But evading will mean completely altering the Rose's vector, nearly impossible between now and when the Flower begins to pound you with its main batteries.

All at once, another dot appears on your scan feed, well below the plane the enemy. This time, like with the mysterious mecha, in an already-scanned area, seemingly out of nowhere. Unlike the mecha, however, it's big. "Another ship-sized object detected!" you say. "Unknown classification, it must have a stealth system!" And it's not simply a stealthed shuttle or ultralight observer, you quickly realise: It's at least as big as the Flower class you're looking down the barrels of, and its weapons are likewise hot. "At that size?" you can't help but add, "impossible!"

Impossible or not, the newly-appeared ship is already opening fire on the hapless Flower class. Whatever kind of weapon the unknown ship carries, it lights up your scan with a strange heat distortion all along its trajectory, visible as a streak of green light even from the Rose's exterior cameras. It strikes the enemy carrier as if its shields are nothing, and scores a direct hit on one of its hangar bays, and, your scans tell you, cleanly holing that section of hull. Something contained there goes off, and the enemy ship is wracked with a series of explosions that, enemy or no, are difficult for any spacer to watch even the readouts for.

On the main screen, a message flicks into life: Priority contact from the HIMS Night Lily.


You've survived another skirmish with the enemy. Despite delays at Quetzle Station leading to you arriving too late to assist with the battle itself, your improvements to Lady Perbeck's unit payed off, as did your decision to rely on those improvements and focus on keeping an eye out on what was happening at a distance. Battle still has its costs, however.

Choose one.

[ ]The Rose didn't take major damage to its hull or any of its important subsystems

[ ]None of the friendly mechas took disabling or life threatening levels of damage

[ ]The Singh didn't survive and escape

[ ]The enemy mecha didn't disengage without further losses