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

Anchiale Station

There are various factors to balance here.

Carefully, you slide the note back into your pocket, telling yourself you'll destroy it the moment you've committed its contents to memory. A little spy-novel, perhaps, but it seems in keeping with the gesture of giving it to you in the first place. On one hand, there are certainly risks to keeping this entirely to yourself. If Owusu is involved in something dicey or even illegal, or simply something command dislikes, and you have made no effort to clear this with even your immediate superiors, you will be exposed to potentially serious blowback.

On the other hand, Owusu clearly would like you to keep things close to the chest, and he could well be a useful contact to cultivate. It's like Captain Andre told you -- you're not just going to have advancement or promotions handed to you on a silver platter. Sometimes, it's going to require taking risks.

The latter wins out, and you decide to take the risk. To assuage your concerns somewhat, on the off chance that things go truly pear-shaped, during your commute you compose a quick message addressed to all three of your superiors, set to send if something happens to you. You should also, you decide, make arrangements to meet people over the next few days, so that they'll notice if something happens to you. You feel both silly and reassured by these countermeasures, and can't shake the feeling that Anja will laugh at you if she hears about it. Assuming you don't actually turn up vented out of an airlock.

You're in the officer's compartment of a train with a number of others you don't recognise. By happenstance, you have managed to seperate yourself from the bulk of the Titanium Rose's crew. The transit line is a bizarre combination between train and multi-car elevator, running as it does between both habitats and their opposing pseudo-gravities. On the spindle, where you're getting on now, it can function as a short train. Three large cars, each with seating for twenty five people twice over, requiring belted seating on two separate surfaces along with handholds on the remaining walls for zero gravity maneuvering.

There's no hurry to get people into their seats as you first move out, going down the length of the transit shaft toward Beta Sphere. "Up" here, by arbitrary fiat, is perpendicular to the length of the station and while a few of the riders are already belted into their seats early, you and most of the others simply float along until you all feel your progress artificially slow.

"Attention passengers," a pleasant, female voice says over hidden speakers, "We are nearing the inertial tipping point. For your safety, please take this opportunity to move to a seat on the lit up surface, and fasten yourself in as instructed. If you require assistance, please press your nearest help button now."

Sure enough, the seat-lined wall nearest the direction of Beta Sphere has lit up a soft blue. Animated signage has appeared on the wall, using arrows to direct you all to "please take your seat." As you drift down into a vacant seat, you can already feel the faint tug of the gravity simulated by the rapid spinning of the habitat. You's been awaiting this with some interest, as you've you've never actually been in a "bolo" style station before. The design sacrifices a degree of usable habitat surface, compared to a standard sphere or larger cylindre, in exchange for orbital stability, each habitat acting as a counterweight for the other, tumbling end over end around the little moon.

You begin to feel the faint tug of gravity quickly as the car begins its descent in earnest, growing stronger and stronger as you regain speed and get farther along the spindle, your eyes following the glowing dot on the map while the metal struts of the transit shaft fly past the windows. Then, just as the dot reaches the sphere, the car is flooded with sunlight. You along with everyone else cover your eyes until you adjust, and you're looking out through a glass-lined shaft at the wide, open expanse of the Beta Sphere habitat.

A city spreads out beneath you, built into the unnaturally symmetrical basin of the sphere, radiating out from the base of the spindle on modular, hexagonal tiles. Prefab buildings march up the slope, interspaced by the greener spaces of parks and trees. Buildings climb up the sides of the sphere in narrow terraces, until the top half of the sphere transitions into a glossy blue "sky" interspaced with focusing sun strips. Small birds, deliberately introduced to the habitat, wheel through the air.

The illusion of this being a strange but somehow organic real space is destroyed by the unfinished hexes -- the interior of Alpha Sphere was well underway before Beta was even started, and ugly grey scars still dot the landscape where earth, roads and buildings have yet to be extended. Even with those, however, this is still the closest place you've been to an open, natural feeling environment in months and months, and you find an unacknowledged tension sliding out of your body even as it's weighed down more than it has been in a long time. The business with Lieutenant-Commander Owusu is strange and worrying. You remain disappointed about your mother's absence to say nothing about the larger invasion. Nontheless, it feels good to be here.

Stepping out onto the multi-layered departure platform, you spend a moment just taking in the sights. The space overhead and around you is vast enough to disguise the artificial quality left by the air scrubbers, and what you breath in tastes fresh and invigorating on your tongue. Without weather to worry about, the departure station at the centre of the city is open to the air, rail-lines stretching out to the edges of the sphere in three directions, the whole thing surrounded by a narrow band of parks and lakes. The air smells like growing things and good food, and for a while, you simply walk around the hexagonal platform.

Only about a quarter of the foot traffic around you is military, but naval personnel are such a common sight that no one bats an eye at your uniform, and there's none of the hard-eyed stares you received from the civilians in the Shadow Ring. There's an uncomfortable tension in the air, though. People keeping their voices lower than necessary, or laughter that's a little too high and a little too shrill. News of the invasion will have gotten to these people by now. The Phoebe Ring lost, and Iapetus now a prime target. Working your way through them, and through the other naval officers, it's a good, long while before you finally run into someone you recognise.

The small, uniformed figure of Ensign Anja Li leans against a railing, looking down at a little grove of cherry trees growing in the shadow of the platform. At first, you think she's relaxing. As you approach, however, you see the knot in her shoulders, the white knuckled death grip she maintains on the railing, and her face: eyes squeezed shut, mouth twisted in a pained expression.

"Having trouble adjusting?" you ask, approaching.

She doesn't look up at you, merely lets out an exhausted breath. "This is bad, North," she tells you.

You look meaningfully at the cherry trees. They're in full bloom. "I thought they looked rather lovely," you say.

"That's not what I mean and you know it. I'm trying to adjust to the gravity, but the ground is tilting the wrong way. This is almost as bad as a damn cylinder!"

"Have you ever been to a standalone sphere station?" you ask, walking up to lean on the railing beside her. Your own transition to gravity is, as always, slightly disorientating, but easily managed. You're finding your legs again already.

"No," Anja mutters.

"Imagine this, but there are buildings on every side."

Anja groans. "I'll be alright, I just need… I just need a few minutes before I can get on another train."

"I'll keep you company," you say. "Our accommodations should be near each other, I think?" and she doesn't object.

"Stars I'm glad I don't have to leave this sphere again until shore leave's over," Anja mutters. You find yourself very grateful that you don't have her particular problem with gravity fields.


The Surface of Iapetus

Mosi's ears are full of the sound of her own breathing, the quiet hum of the meager systems keeping her alive, and the muted thump of her own footfalls travelling through her heavily insulated, spiked boots. All else on the airless lunar surface is silent as death as the team trudges forward. As they head to their rendezvous point, they maintain strict comm silence.

The Saturn system in its natural state is hardly hospitable to human life, and Iapetus is certainly no exception. The landscape is beyond barren, plains and valleys of ice frozen hard as rock stretch as far as the eye can see, the pure white visible from orbit sullied up close with small patches of mineral brown. Mosi isn't cold -- rather, she's still uncomfortably hot. The heat from her suit will be slowly leached out into the ice underfoot through her footfalls, but she would have to run out of breathable oxygen long before that could happen. Ahead, Saturn hangs partially visible over the horizon, almost as large as Earth seen from Luna. This close to the gas giant, the planet dwarfs the large, bright star that is the sun. Moving lights among the stars are the military platforms they braved to get here, as well as habitats home to thousands each. The stations are in a relatively close orbit to the little moon, but right at this moment, they feel indescribably distant.

Mosi thinks about what would happen if their contact simply doesn't show up for their rendezvous. The best they could hope for then would be capture, imprisonment, and possibly execution. The six of them have no excuse for being out here at present -- cover documentation is to be handled by their local contacts. It would hardly be difficult to correctly guess who they were, even in these clunky, civilian spacesuits. More likely, they would simply asphyxiate once their suits ran through their air supplies, their corpses laying frozen where they fell forever.

It takes over two exhausting hours for them to finally make the trek out to the rendezvous point. The six of them -- strung out in a rough line -- stop at the same spot without needing to communicate. They all have a copy of the relevant map loaded onto their suit, and all are enjoying the benefits of a small navigation map projected into the inside of their helmet. Right beside the indicator counting down how many breathes they have left to breath.

It's another tense half an hour before a plume of dust on the horizon announces the arrival of their initial contact. When the battered old ground vehicle pulls into sight, roaring up over a hill of ice-gravel, an entirely different sort of apprehension grips them. Ancient, blocky and patchwork, the small mining hauler is a far cry from a well maintained military warship or mecha, and Mosi cringes to see the amount of air it gets when it goes over the hill. However, it's light enough here that the catastrophic landing in Mosi's head fails to transpire. Instead, it lands heavily on its tracks, rattling and settling dramatically before anyone feels safe approaching it.

Its airlock works, though, as Mosi pulls herself up the ladder, even if it's so small that they can only enter the vehicle two at a time. When Mosi finally steps into the cabin, she practically rips her helmet off, and even the stuffy confines of the vehicle and the unpleasant chemical odor that permeates the air isn't enough to stop her gulping it down greedily. Against all hope, it's actually cool in here, the air exchange rattling deafeningly.

"So you made it without being shot out of the sky," the driver says, as the last of the team piles in. There are seats for six in the back -- a tarnished, unadorned metal box crammed up against the cargo compartment -- but Mosi's gives alarmingly when she lets her weight settle down onto it. Iapetus's frankly floaty gravity, approximately an eighth of what Mosi grew up with on Luna, is all that keeps the seat from collapsing under her weight. She wonders how much of the vehicle this is true for.

"Evidently," Lieutenant-Commander Roth says, letting his sweat drenched head clang back against the wall of the transport. He's in command here, trained in infiltration and small arms. In descending order of rank, there are the two pilots: Mosi and the insufferably perky Ensign Kim. Next is the perpetually silent Chief Wallace, and finally the two nervous looking specialists here to carry out the most vital part of the mission.

"I wasn't sure," the driver says, grinning at them crookedly. She's older, and sounds almost comically Saturnian. It's mostly native Saturnians down here, Mosi's information packet told her, working the mines and other ground-side industry, and in the older habitats up in orbit. The newer, nicer ones -- Anchiale especially -- are in practice reserved for the newcomers who fled here.

"Won't someone notice you have this thing out here?" Kim asks, seemingly genuinely curious.

"Paid off the rest of the crew to punch out, then go home," the driver says, with a shrug. "We were meant to be on a survey mission -- got lost and had to turn back instead, as it would happen." She gives that grin again. Mosi decides she doesn't like the coarse, leathery old woman. "You're wearing the same suits our teams do. When we get back to base, you'll put the helmets back on, punch out for them with the copied IDs, then no one's going to look too hard."

"As long as none of the six workers you paid off say something," Mosi adds, a little sourly.

"Oh, little enough chance of that. They'll assume I'm smuggling, and no one wants to be a snitch about that. That's where what nice things we have come from."

Mosi nods reluctantly.

"When will we get to Point C?" Roth asks, sounding tired and unamused.

"Tomorrow sometime," the driver says, with an easy shrug. "That's not me. I pick you up, give you a place to spend the night. Your boy comes and grabs you, then you're his problem and I go back to hauling rocks, a little bit richer than before."

She very pointedly doesn't give them her name. If they're caught, she's up for treason. Point C is Atlas, the largest permanent settlement on Iapetus's surface. In actuality, it's a poky little mining town, but it's also the main launchpoint for shuttles leaving the surface to go to one of the stations in orbit. Mosi closes her eyes, and tries in vain to get some, any sleep.


Anchiale Station

Your quarters are both larger and more comfortable than what you had on the Rose, although shipboard life has probably lowered your standards. As a junior officer, you rate something in the neighbourhood of a tiny bachelor apartment, furnished with a bed, a table and chairs, vaguely patriotic wall art. The beige walls and the grey tile underfoot are eerily spotless. You think it likely that, considering the development going on all around the military housing complex you find yourself in, you're the first person to stay in these rooms.

When you arrived with Anja yesterday, with her still feeling slightly ghastly, you had each gone to your respective temporary housing. You'd used the tiny shower and collapsed into the bed almost immediately afterward. The small luxuries of gravitational living: falling-water showers, the ability to sink into a mattress, are already as seductive as they are easy to take for granted. In the morning, you enjoy another of them by emptying the contents of a single-serve coffee pack into the miniaturised kitchen's coffee machine and watching the bitter, heavenly liquid fall into the navy-issue mug.

The coffee is both weak and cheap, with notes of cardboard and chemical and an unpleasantly astringent finish. You drown it in whitener, and it is the best you've had in months. You treasure every drop like the embrace of a faithful lover waiting for you at port. Sitting at your table, you can look out the apartment's one window to see a view of the barren adjacent hex. Opening it lets in the sound of chirping birds and distant construction vehicles slowly pushing load after load of synthetic earth over the bare struts and inner station hull. You somehow find this charming.

You then make a point of setting up the first of two meetings for later this week, by messaging Anja. Her reply is prompt and disgruntled:

Anja: It is TOO FUCKING EARLY for you to be messaging me

You: You're awake, though.

Anja: I could have been sleeping in

You: Your body's still on ship schedule. Feeling better?

Anja: Ugh, I hate that you're right
Anja: I want to die a little less

You: Have you found a bar yet?

Anja: A bar?

You: You're getting me drunk, remember?
You: Your idea, so you pick the place.
You: Does tomorrow night work, or too soon?

Anja: Oh, you're not weaselling out of it, good
Anja: I'll be fine by then. I'll start looking for a place
Anja: Maybe we'll find you a tall blonde once you've sobered up a little

You can't suppress a slight stab of guilt at using the social occasion, which your grieving friend has clearly been looking forward to, as a failsafe against clandestine action taken against you. After you dress in a clean uniform, you head out the door.

It's constantly a pleasantly warm summer day here, and sitting in an open-air transport car on your way back to the hub is more than a little nice. It's not without a certain pang of regret that you realise you're going to have to leave this behind for a time, in order to transfer up to Alpha Shere. You're not quite ready to go back into zero gravity shafts yet. Still, it's necessary, if you're going to meet Owusu.

On your way to the station, you conduct a bit of research. Necessary for what you intend for the second date you have to make. You send the second message after about twenty minutes of this, sitting on a pleasant bench in the shade of the cherry trees outside the main station, waiting for your carriage to arrive. A songbird sings overhead, and you're surrounded by meticulously curated greenery.

To your surprise, the response to your text message is a face and voice call. You answer quickly.

"Ensign North. There's something you needed?" Perbeck sounds harried, but not annoyed with you. More interested, in a distracted way. You can tell from the way her golden hair floats around her that she's still in zero gravity. Probably the spindle. "I've been in and out of briefings since coming here. I don't have long, unfortunately."

That explains the fatigue. "Ah, I'm sorry to bother you, ma'am, if this is a bad time."

She waves that off with a sharp shake of her head. "I'm on a break. And I've already answered. What is it?"

You hesitate for a moment, although not too long -- you're mindful of wasting her time. "You aren't going to be busy the entire time we're docked here, I assume?" you're impressed that your nerves don't show in your voice.

She looks surprised, eyeing you curiously through the screen before answering. "No, thank the stars."

"How does real tea sound to you?" you ask.

"Frankly, I'd murder someone for it," she says. She's giving you a strange look now. Intrigued, you hope. "Why?"

"There is a very well regarded shop, in Beta Sphere," you say. "If it wouldn't be… inappropriate, would you like to go there with me?"

"Not quite a bar on shore leave, is it?" she asks, dryly, referencing her earlier comment.

"There are still drinks, ma'am," you say.

She laughs, a weary sound, but genuine. "I can't swear it's entirely appropriate, she says, finally, voice low, almost teasing. "But I don't exactly care at this point. I'm free in three days time. We'll be doing this out of uniform." She smiles at you. It's a different smile than her previous ones, momentarily unrestrained by the boundaries of professionalism and protocol. Just for an instant or two, you're a mouse being scrutinised by a cat. You feel your face heating ever so slightly: You like it.

"I'll send you the address, ma'am," you say, smiling back nonetheless, tone cool but receptive.

"Good," she says, nodding. She's back to being a superior speaking to a junior outside of her direct chain of command. That invisible barrier that makes life in the service function is back in place. "That's something to look forward to, at least."

The journey back up the spindle is much like the trip down, albeit with a gradual lightening sensation instead of the reverse. You don't need to transfer cars in order to continue down to the other side of the station. The entire production takes approximately thirty minutes.

Alpha is much the same as Beta Sphere -- identical in dimensions -- but significantly more built up and crowded. Most of the buildings here have four or five floor modules, and the platform you land on has twice as many transit lines coming out from it, throngs of people going in all directions.

Five years ago, no one lived here. Construction on Anchiale was started before the Civil War, you know, but it languished for years with a lack of funding and materials, and was only finished so quickly afterward through a truly herculean effort. The result is a city where everything is suspiciously new. Metallic surfaces untarnished by exposure to oxygen, wear and tear on public spaces barely present. A population that almost entirely came from somewhere else a decade before. So far, the only Saturnian voice you've heard has been Anja's.

The address you were given is for the second story of a squared off modular tower, flowering shrubs growing outside, which a few cheerfully industrious bees made themselves busy with. The insect life is a little jarring to you, even in such a limited scope as this. The genetically modified, stingless bees are still the most nature you've been exposed to in a long time.

The building appears to belong to Naval Intelligence. You're thrown by this -- what's the point of the cloak and dagger secret letter if you're coming to his place of work anyway?

After clearing security, The receptionist who greets you, uniformed as you are, has an expression of muted annoyance when you inform her of your appointment to see the Lieutenant-Commander. "You're in here, ma'am," she says, looking at her schedule on her workstation. "For a debrief. Although he forgot to put it through the outgoing system. Again." She looks abruptly alarmed at giving even that much of her displeasure a voice.

You only smile awkwardly. The office around her is quiet and serious, but comfortable. Glass surfaces and potted plants, security monitoring equipment hidden rather than in plain view. Uniformed analysts go past, working at tablets as they walk, or talking quietly in pairs.

"I've buzzed him," she informs you, stiffly.

"Thank you," you say.

In gravity, Owusu moves with a languid, casual grace that doesn't quite constitute unprofessionalism. "Sorry to drag you in here on shore leave, Ensign," he says, smiling at you crookedly.

"Not at all, sir," you reply, deeply confused.

He offers no explanation at all on the way back to his small office, and once you're inside it with the door shut, he begins fussing with something from inside a drawer at his workstation before he speaks. "Well," he says, finally, "that should give us a few minutes to talk, at least."

"Sir?" you ask, looking at him blankly.

"Sit down, North," he says, waving a hand impatiently. You slowly take a seat on one of the chairs as he leaves the workstation to sit next to you, apparently in an effort to put you at ease. The office has the empty, neglected quality of a work space seldom used and maintained only for periodic visits.

"You're probably wondering a few things," he says, smiling self deprecatingly.

"You might… say that, sir," you admit.

At your expression, he actually laughs. "Right. Of course you are. I needed to set this meeting up without proper paperwork while making it look like a filing error on my part -- hence the nonsense with the paper."

"Oh." You stare at him, only a little less confused.

Rather than explain why, he snaps his tablet off his belt, and begins looking for something. "You're good with encryption and code, I gather," he says.

"I have an interest, sir," you admit, cautiously. "And I've taken some courses."

He nods, fingers still gliding over the surface of the tablet. "You identified those fleet movements a while back. The ones Titan got before Phoebe went dark."

"... partially, sir," you reply, even more cautiously. You're glad to hear that the strange transmission from what seems like a lifetime ago made it safely, but you still have no idea what this is about.

"Could you have decrypted and decoded the entire data stream, with enough time?" he asks. "From what Glory says, you've got a good reputation for it."

"You mean, Lady Perbeck?" You don't know anyone else who'd have any working knowledge of your abilities whose name could be shortened to 'Glory'. In spite of everything, you can't help but feel a slight glow of happiness, hearing that she spoke highly of you to someone she had not seemed to particularly like.

"Yes, Perbeck," he confirms, slightly impatient. "Could you have done it? No false humility, and no exaggeration, please. I'm looking for an honest self-assessment."

You think for a long moment, recalling the tangled mess of encryption and unfamiliar enemy code. "Yes," you say. "I think so."

He nods, his beautiful face relaxing slightly. "That's good," he says, "because what I'm going to ask you for is somewhat less involved than that. I know you're on shore leave, but I would like you to find the time to look at a few coded transmissions for me. Discreetly."

"You… don't have specialists for this, sir?" you ask, thinking about the orderly office outside the room you're both in, the knowledgeable looking staff doing work too important to look up from.

"I have them," he says, slowly, "but… I don't want to make this an official investigation, just yet."

"... are you worried about the department here being compromised?" you ask, quietly. You hope he'll laugh again. He doesn't.

"Something like that," he says, leaning back in his chair with a tired sort of sigh. "Hand me your tablet, please?" You comply, and watch as he presses yours flat against his, and initiates a contact transfer, using a data stream set to fragment beyond recognition after only an inch or two. "I've been finding strange transmissions, while poking around on my own. I'm the only SRI on the station at present, so I've got a lot of latitude to operate in as long as I don't annoy the higher-ups here too much. Which is good, because I have reason to believe that someone is skimming our databases on Iapetus for certain keywords."

"You disabled security when you brought me in," you guess, thinking about his first actions in the little office.

"Garbled it temporarily. If no one looks too closely, it will seem like a system malfunction. I'm hoping that what I have to worry about is automated detection, not an enemy operative specifically keeping tabs on me personally." He gives you a grin that sets your heart racing, even though you're not certain whether or not you like him on even a personal level. Or any of this.

"This seems serious, sir," you say, stating the obvious.

"Oh, it is," he agrees. "You can't tell anyone about this. If anyone asks, I'm calling you in for debriefs about the scan data for enemy mecha prototypes."

"I… see," you say, accepting your tablet back from him.

"Assuming we're not all dead," he continues, smiling again, "Do this right, and I will pay you back in kind. It should be well worth your while."

"I hope so, sir," you say, venturing to allow a trace of irony to enter your voice. This is an under the table assignment, after all, and it's not like he can write you up for insubordination.

He laughs.


Your trip back down the spire is uneventful, but it does give you a lot of time to think. You can't help but feel a little silly over the elaborate preparations… but at least you haven't been disappeared into a back alley.

Not that that still can't happen, considering the Lieutenant-Commander's vague hints about at least one enemy operative. The fact that he's sneaking around on his own rather than trying to contact his superiors on Iapetus is also greatly worrisome, saying something either about the man you find yourself doing impromptu work for, or about the state of Naval Intelligence here being worse than he's letting on.

Regardless, you've already made your decision to help him. When you told no one prior to coming here, you decided that this was too great a potential opportunity for your career to pass up, risks aside. And if you can help find proof of an enemy spy with access to sensitive databases on Iapetus, you can be of material aid to the war effort. Your tablet, with the recorded transmission quarantined in an obscure corner of its hard drive, feels strangely heavy on your belt.

You know you'll be spending a significant amount of time on this project, and you've already made some plans. In addition to getting caught up on some much needed sleep, what else in particular do you want to do over the next week?

You have one point of downtime remaining:

[ ] Meet up with Anja (one downtime)
[ ] Try to make plans with Perbeck (one downtime)
[ ] Forget rest and relaxation, pull all nighters until you can get Owusu's task completed early (three downtime)

[ ] See if you can find where J6 is staying (one downtime)
[ ] Find where the civilians were taken in, to check up on Faiza (one downtime)
[ ] Gather information on what sort of mission your mother was sent on, even though you can't affect the outcome (one downtime)