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

The enemy fleet silently slides into scan range, dots on your map, streams of data from your feeds. Battleships, cruisers and their sundry escorts moving in formation, deceptively slow on your displays. The relatively close confines of the debris choked bottleneck that marks the hole in Iapetus's outer defences soon turns space into a shooting gallery as the larger ships came into range of one another, swarms of tiny mecha flying in from all directions to clash with each other, attack and defend the ships.

To you, it's all abstract. All numbers and display. You can barely spare a thought for the grand narrative behind it, the lives being lost, the habitats being threatened with every stray shot. Iapetus is heavily populated, and the desperate attempt to evacuate the entire population to the far side of the planet is only fractionally complete, adding to the carnage and confusion from the earlier disaster.

You're only academically aware of the Rose, along with several of the other small ships in the Attack Group, focusing fire on an enemy cruiser's escort corvette. The ship's shields flare, then fail. An instant later, the Singh is all but torn apart, atmosphere and debris venting from multiple hull breeches.

"The cruiser is coming to bear on us."

"All ships, retreat to the safe zone!" Beside you, Mazlo is struggling with his own task -- namely, keeping open the lines of communication between the Rose and nine other light ships, to say nothing of the rest of the fleet, so that a crucial order doesn't come a moment too late.

You're only peripherally aware of this. All you can do is your best, and hope that the people you care for make it through the day.


The HDMS Righteous Fury

"You are cleared for launch, Lieutenant North."

"Lieutenant Mosi North, taking off with the ISMX17 Provespa." The words are routine, utterly rote, and as the mecha-sized hatch slams open in front of her, Mosi doesn't even need to think before she's flinging herself out into space. The rotund bulk of the carrier grows small and distant with a speed that once would have surprised Mosi. Now it would be routine even if her mind weren't decidedly on different subjects.

"Glad to have you here, LT," Smith's voice says, coming in over the comms. It's good to hear him, in the end -- even if he is a little overly excitable for a scout.

"I don't sit out a fight, Ensign," she reminds him.

Mecha combat is something that Mosi usually finds strangely calming. It cuts straight through the petty politics and looming sense of mortal peril that accompanies her day to day existence within the Divine Navy. It's simple, pure almost -- follow mission parametres, complete objectives, keep her people alive. It's possibly the one thing Mosi can say with certainty that she utterly excels at. Shooting or cutting an opponent down, sinking an enemy ship -- the pleasurable feeling she gets from these actions is the satisfaction of a craftsman plying her trade. She dresses it up in the appropriate religious rhetoric later -- dead heritcs and the glory of the Emperor -- but at the heart of it, that's what it is:

She lives and dies by her own skill and her own wits. When she destroys an enemy machine, it's because she was better, or smarter. When she's in the cockpit, maybe only when she's in the cockpit, Mosi has control over her own destiny. Today that feeling is gone and scattered to the wind, leaving in its wake only grasping, blind indecision.

The tablet is still clipped to her pilot's suit. She can feel its slight presence through the garment, snapped to her belt. Why does she have that? What possible use could she have for that data? Space all around and behind her, displayed on her Provespa's scan map, is alive and teeming with her allies. Space in front of her is likewise filled with the enemy, who will shoot her down and kill her. What can she possibly do with this tablet, in the face of that? One small cog in a mammoth, plodding machine grinding its way over everything in its path. What can she possibly do, other than she she's ordered to?

Two answers spring to mind, in two very different voices. Neither of them are particularly soothing:

"The right thing!"

"Something! Anything! You could try."

All at once, the battle is joined. Mosi realises she's been issuing orders this entire time, as well as accepting them from Green -- now, when she resurfaces, his heavies are making a run on an enemy cruiser, their bulky mechas almost gracefully juking around the close range beam weapons of the ship, while Mosi's lighter units run interference to keep the enemy's own mecha off of them.

A Banner is in front of Mosi, close range, filling up her camera. She dodges the enemy pilot's comparatively clumsy arc of fire, pivoting in order to slam them in the chest with one of the Provespa's legs, using her thrusters to build off the momentum of the move. She loops around beneath the enemy, raking them with point blank fire before coming up behind them and ramming her energised spike straight through the main thruster pack. The Banner is abruptly disarmed and flailing in space, but the pilot is almost certainly alive. Had she done that on purpose?

An instant later, Smith empties enough rounds into the helpless Banner to make the point entirely moot. "You missed one, LT!"

"... Thanks," she acknowledges.

"Heretics deserve no mercy."

Mosi's throat feels dry as she echoes the statement. "Heretics deserve no mercy."


Space, near the HIMS Titanium Rose

As the shot strikes the enemy corvette in the engines, metal and chemical debris scattering in a lethal cloud, Gloriana is forced to reluctantly, belatedly admit that the Artemis is an improvement over her old Huntress. Here, in private, in the heat of battle, at any rate. If Patel and his surviving R&D flunkies ever heard her say that, he'd be beyond insufferable.

"Group approaching the Rose from the following coordinates," J6's familiar monotone informs her. "Intercepting."

"I'll be there to assist you in a moment, Guardswoman." Milo still sounds infuriatingly cheerful, even in the heat of battle and dodging machine gun fire. It's one of his more maddening qualities. Still, though, she's relieved that the two of them are at least cooperating in combat.

"Understood," comes J6's clipped reply.

As the Rose and half of the accompanying light ships do a coordinated strike on a Divine Navy cruiser, Gloriana runs a series of firing solutions with assistance from the ship, levelled the Artemis's railgun, and contributed several shots. The cruiser's shields flare and die, and while the enemy ship gets a few licks in before the lighter ships come out of range again, it definitely takes more damage than is advisable. Gloriana glances at the scan feed she's getting from the Rose appreciatively. It's astonishingly detailed for a battle as chaotic as this, updating much faster than she could reasonably expect it to.

Ordinarily, seeing this and knowing that the ship's scans operating was such an eager young officer would have worried her. In an extended fleet action, burnout is a real concern, and consistency is often much more important than sheer skill. However, as the high quality scans allow Gloriana to land unfailingly accurate shots, instead she feels something akin to a smug, proprietary pride. It could be argued that Gloriana is a bit partial on this count. And not simply because the officer in question is a girl who she cares for. Amani has genuine talent, which is rare enough, and good sense, which is much rarer in an officer of her age. Gloriana is, at this point, entirely comfortable with putting her life and the life of her squad so heavily in Amani's hands. Although there is the one, small part of her that, at the thought of all of this, can't help but think that, when they survive this battle, the moment she can get Ensign North alone, she'll take--

A burst of gunfire, too distant to be effective, completely banishes everything but the current moment from her mind. She adjusts her trajectory, neatly avoiding the gunfire entirely. Before she even has a chance to target the enemy unit herself, Milo's Empress Banner has flown in to half cut it in two.

"Any damage, ma'am?"

"None," she confirms. "Thank you for the save, Lieutenant-Commander."

"It's why you tolerate me." Three different services or not, having competent, experienced pilots is doing her a lot of good.

Something familiar flashes by on scans -- mecha sized, going fast. She frowns, mouth working into an unhappy line. She recognises that signature. It's the prototype they encountered at Pheobe and again later, the one that had killed Ensign Song. It's just barely close enough to bring up on her main camera, confirming it. As luck would have it, she does this just in time to see the prototype employ a particularly slick maneuver on an allied Banner, evading and disabling it in one smooth, agile motion. A slick, familiar maneuver. One that was employed on Gloriana mere hours before this, albeit with a one-legged construction mecha rather than a state of the art prototype.

"Mosi North," she growls, jaw clenching with a sudden rush of hate. What Mosi had done around Iapetus would be reason enough for anger, to say nothing of actually having held Amani hostage, however briefly. But there was another part to this anger now. Gloriana is a professional soldier, and she tries hard not to take combat deaths overly personally. In one sense, Ensign Song had come up against an enemy combatant, fought them and lost.

In another sense, Ensign Song had been a 19 year old girl whose remains the techs had practically had to scrape out of her cockpit. A 19 year old girl in Gloriana's care, entrusted to her by influential parents who had had enough of a say in where the rookie pilot had been assigned to pick a fellow aristocrat who they thought they could rely on for Song's continued development. Gloriana really should have killed Mosi before, shock or no shock.

She takes aim at the formation of enemy scouting mecha that Mosi leads, the firing solution taking seemingly an eternity to calculate. There are a lot of moving pieces in space right now, and the last thing anyone wants is for Gloriana to fire a railgun into an ally, or into a helpless habitat. But once it's done, she knows she'll be able to obliterate the problem once and for all. She almost has it. Almost...

"Lady Perbeck, enemy formation approaching the Rose."

Gloriana tries not to outright scowl at the timing of it, abandoning the bead she had on Mosi and reorienting herself to deal with the new threat. "Understood, Guardswoman."


The HIMS Defiant Storm is in trouble. Separated from its escort by debris from the defence array, the ailing cruiser is being beset by at least two teams of Banner Heavies, while its crew struggles to deal with the damage from an earlier engagement. Dame Nalah North feels a guilty thrill in the pit of her stomach. Good spacers are dying, just now, and for nothing so important as the whims of a tyrant a billion kilometres away. There is still part of her, though, that simply lives for this. "Jonah, take your squad up to deal with those light mechas screening the heavies. Tran, you take the heavies closest to us. I'll take the ones farther away."

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Sure thing, Cap'."

The wing splits into three, then, her lieutenants taking their individual squads in different directions as Nalah lead the remainder.

"Engaging, ma'am!" Jonah's squad hits their targets first, Banner recon types tangling with the sleeker, newer lines of the enemy scouting units. Vespulas, Nalah knows, are fast but might as well have been made of wet tissue paper. The strange prototype, similar but not identical to the other two, is more worrisome... but it's Jonah's problem now. She'll trust him to handle it.

The heavies are slow to turn as Nalah's squad hits them, and she has the satisfaction of slicing deeply into one with her extended cutter. Her Fenris Lancer practically dances around the wounded brute as it attempts to swing its oversized main weapon around to bear, weapon fire arcing uselessly in her wake. She darts in to cut it again and again -- heavy armour or no, she knows where to hit a target to make sure it stops moving. The Heavy goes still, drifting for a moment, before the Storm blows it up with a point defence beam.

Nalah dodges another burst of fire, this one considerably more expert. It's close enough for her to note the officer decal on this new mecha -- a Commander. To her surprise, it opens a video hail. She hesitates momentarily, before accepting. Let the fool have their last words.

"Nalah! As lovely as ever."

It takes her a moment to recognise the pale, rugged looking man grinning at her from inside a Divine Navy pilot's helmet. "Tyrone Green," she says, displeased. "For a moment I thought I was going to regret having to kill whoever you were."

He laughs, dodging backwards with impressive grace as she tries to pepper him with bullets. "It's been a long time since Luna, hasn't it?"

"Not so long," she says, reasonably. "I remember knowing you back then. And I remember you betraying us at the first opportunity." She doesn't try to hide her disgust. What's the point, with a dead man?

"I saw where the winds were blowing, and I did the only smart thing."

"And now," Nalah says, giving him an almost feral grin, "you're going to die anyway." Swooping in, she slices off a chunk of armour, barely missing the Heavy's head. Her two squad members are locked in combat with Green's last Heavy, its pilot proving cannier than the one she so easily dispatched.

"Hard words from a woman who abandoned half her family," he shoots back.

The smile dies, and she knows her eyes have clouded over with anger. "... I'm going to enjoy doing this," she snarls, ducking under his latest barrage of weapon fire to sheer off the Heavy's main gun at the barrel.

Green can't win this. She knows it and so does he. She can see it in his face now -- Nalah's better than him, even if all other things were equal. And they're not. Her Fenris can fly circles, spirals and helixes around his Banner Heavy. He's good enough to drag this out, and spiteful enough to get a few licks in before his inevitable death. Even if they're emotional ones. "Still, a sight better than the husband did, of course. With you, at least it was only half the family."

"Don't you dare spit on a brave man's sacrifice!" One of the Heavy's arms comes off. Another gun goes silent. Green's grin, if anything, only gets wider.

"Amir North wasn't willing to do what needed to be done to save his own child. He took the easy way out. The coward's way--" Green's last words are cut off in a sharp cry, as Nalah plunges her cutter very nearly into the cockpit, a secondary explosion within his own cockpit obscuring her view of him.

"Keep talking!" she shouts. "Go on! I am going to RIP YOU OUT OF THAT COCKPIT and then I'm--"

"Dame North, Lieutenant Jonah's down!" comes the panicked cry of one of Jonah's ensigns. Then she has to burn hard to move out of the path of the strange, black prototype as it plunges toward her like an avenging angel, putting itself between her and the stricken Commander Green.


On her third pass with the Banner Recon, Mosi realises, to her confusion, that she's going out of her way not to kill the enemy pilot. He's not terrible -- he maneuvers his light mecha with skill and seeming confidence -- but she's better. Faster. She's had three openings to take his life so far, but she simply... hasn't.

A Divine Navy battleship blows up in the distance, a point of light on her cameras, a warning sign on her scan map. This battle is not turning out to be the cakewalk that it was intended to be. Somehow, that realisation, that the Divine Navy can lose here, makes everything snap into focus: Does she have to do this anymore? Was Amani, sheltered girl that she is, actually right, on that one point? Mosi is acutely aware, still, of her tablet, the data that could change the course of this invasion, if it fell into enemy hands.

Mosi thrusts away from the Banner Recon's latest pass, an unfamiliar sense of panic coming over her. Can she surrender here, to this pilot? Will he simply blow her out of the sky, will her squad turn on her? No one ever teaches you how to defect in the middle of a battle. Defect. Defect. Even thinking the word sends a shiver down Mosi's spine. Can she really--

The sight of something approach Commander Green fast on the scan map obliterates all such thoughts. For a fraction of a second that seems like an eternity, she only stares at the scan signature of the mecha engaging her superior. When she sees that he's losing, though, that he's about to die--

The Provespa's energised spike punches straight into the enemy pilot's cockpit with an almost nonchalant ease as every superfluous emotion boils away to leave behind nothing but a rage the likes of which she's never felt before. "Leave him alone!" Mosi screams, heard by no one but herself as she coaxes every bit of speed she can out of the Provespa, streaking down straight for the Fenris Lancer.

Straight for her mother.

Mosi sees that the Fenris is going to dodge the initial blow at just the right moment, expertly engaging her breaking thrusters to keep herself from simply rocketing past. Her body strains against the straps with the suddenness of the stop. A distant part of her mind acknowledges that it hurts, but that detail is so laughably unimportant she barely even pauses before lunging in for another stab directly at the Fenris's torso. The spike is deflected at the last moment by the Fenris's cutter.

Mosi barely realises she's opened a voice channel until she hears the distinctive sound of it being accepted. "Dame Nalah North," she growls, every syllable a promise of death.

"You're all so talkative today," replies a voice that's so achingly familiar that Mosi just wants to scream and scream and scream. She'd known that this was her mother -- that this was the woman whose death she had dreamed of for years. But hearing her voice, that same confident alto that she had so desperately tried to imitate as a child, somehow makes her angrier. The thought of this woman nearly killing Commander Green, one of the very few people who actually gives a damn about her is so intolerable that she feel her hands shaking on the controls.

"LT!" Smith's voice. She's still responsible for him.

"Grab the commander, get him back to the Fury. He's hurt."

"But--"

"Now!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

Mosi thrusts backwards as Dame Nalah strikes back at her, the cutter literally grazing the Provespa's paint with its passage through space. It's fast, no doubt, and she can already tell that its hated pilot knows how to eke out absolutely everything from that speed.


The two of them trade blows furiously, neither gaining good purchase, the two high speed mechas going faster and faster and faster until almost nothing else on the battlefield has a hope of catching them. "You're going to die today!" Mosi informs her mother, voice shaking with righteous fury.

"How old are you, little girl?" comes Nalah's infuriatingly blasé voice.

"I'm not a "girl!" Mosi practically screams. How dare she treat her like a child? How dare she not take this seriously?

"You're not, huh? You sound damn young, regardless. I'll warn you once -- I'm not about to lose to some hotshot commissioned yesterday, looking for a notch in her belt."

"I won't lose to You!"

"This isn't the path to a long life, girl."

"NEVER call me that!"


In spite of the speed she's pushed this duel to, the fury with which she presses her attacks, Mosi's technique never wavers. She's lethally precise, fighting better than she ever has in her life, driven finally to this one grim purpose. Every shot picture perfect, every strike like something out of a training video. And it doesn't matter. Nalah, in spite of her older years and older machine, is like a ghost, always just one step ahead of Mosi, movements tauntingly minimal. Mosi snarls with frustration. She wishes she could just reach through the cockpit, through space, and physically wrap her hands around Dame Nalah's neck to throttle her. "I've waited so long for this chance!"

A snort of disdain. "The chance to butcher thousands of innocents?"

Mosi forces herself not to flinch. The comment is far too close to something Amani said. Wait. Amani. Amani. "... it's your fault she talks that way!" Mosi accuses.

"I beg your pardon? Now you're just a dead girl who isn't making any sense." The expert cutter stroke nearly takes out Mosi's main camera array before Mosi blocks it with her extended killing spike.

"Amani!" Mosi shouts back. "That's why she talks like that! It's your fault!"

The confused silence is almost tangible on the other end of the line. "How do you... wait!" A ping for a video call now. Mosi almost ignores it, but in the end she can't resist. She's older than Mosi expects. Somehow, irrationally, she hadn't anticipated that her mother would change. In her mind's eye, it was always the way she'd looked when Mosi had said goodbye to her that last time, at age 13. Staring straight into Dame Nalah's dark eyes, so much like her own and Amani's, Mosi has the satisfaction of watching some of the rich colour drain from Nalah's face, returning Mosi's glare of loathing with a look of horrified recognition. Her voice is strangely soft when she speaks next: "Mosi?"


Mosi doesn't relent. If anything, her attacks redouble. With every blow, Mosi remembers the pain she had to endure because of Nalah. She pierces one of the Fenris's arms, and it's the burning sting of Limin's riot baton. She sheers off part of the Fenris's head, and it's Mosi being beaten behind an outbuilding for a minor mistake until she has to crawl part of the way to the infirmary afterward. She lands a hit on Nalah's thrusters, and she's back in the dorm rec room at the Academy, two girls holding her down, a third standing over her, something small and deceptively harmless in her hands and a cruel smile on her lips: "Now let's see--"

"Mosi, please! I don't want to fight you!" And she's not, Mosi abruptly realises. Her mother is merely defending herself... barely, no longer actively fighting back, no longer lifting a finger to try and harm Mosi. The fight has completely gone out of Dame Nalah, leaving behind only a pleading look in her eyes.

"Then just fucking die!"

"Mosi, Malaika, please--"

"You abandoned me in that place!"

"I thought--"

"You left me there!"

At those words, Nalah's face freezes up, staring at Mosi in renewed horror, as if she has no recourse from the accusation, her mecha momentarily dead in space. Mosi shows no mercy. She snaps off the Fenris's oversized cutter, smashes off the gun arm at the elbow joint -- it smashes hard into the Provespa's head, sending warning lights dancing up in Mosi's eyes, but she ignores that for now, grabs hold of the Fenris by its damaged head with one hand, pulling back the arm with the retractable spike with the other for the killing blow. Without a moment's hesitation, she screams out ten years of neglect and suffering, plunging the spike directly into Nalah's cockpit.


Mosi hauls so hard on the controls that she feels something pull in her shoulder. Too late to stop the blow she's already set into motion -- instead of plunging into the cockpit, of crushing Nalah to death, it instead plunges into the Fenris's side, destroying internal components along the way. On the video feed, she sees the force of the blow rock Nalah... and then lets out a gasp of dismay as sparks and smoke from a secondary explosion light up the Fenris's cockpit. As they clear, Mosi can only stare at the flickering video image, in which her mother hangs from her straps, barely moving.

"I... I... I take it back," Mosi says, so quietly she's not even sure if her mic picks it up. Nalah doesn't stir. Sucking in a deeper lungful of air, Mosi says, enunciating more clearly: "I surrender!" Dead silence continues to reign, and a horrible, gut-clenching fear begins to settle in to the pit of her stomach. "I said I take it back! I surrender!" Nothing. Silence. Stillness. Mosi knows in that instant that she's done what she originally set out to do -- she's killed her mother. Bile rises in her throat. There's no catharsis, no expected sense of accomplishment. Just this empty, hollow feeling of... what? "I'm sorry, Amani," Mosi whispers.

With how inattentive she's being to her scans, Mosi is lucky that she isn't simply blown up by railgun fire. It's the proximity to Nalah's dead Fenris that saves her from this fate. The first thing she's aware of is anti-mecha fire rattling against the Provespa's armour, followed shortly by a screaming proximity alert. She releases her mother's unit, spinning the Provespa around just in time to dodge a cutter blow.

The ISMX40 Artemis hangs in space in front of her for the second time in less than 24 hours. The audio hail comes before Mosi can even make the call herself. "This is Lieutenant Mosi North of the Divine Navy of Correction! I have valuable intelligence to trade and wish to surrender!" she says the words in a rush.

Rather than respond, the cold voice of Countess Gloriana Perbeck comes over the comm without even waiting for Mosi to finish. "I should have ended this before." Then the Artemis is flying at her again. Mosi parries, eyes wide and breathing ragged.

"I said I surrender!" she practically shouts.

"No last words? Suit yourself."

"You can't hear me?" Mosi dodges the next blow, weaving around the less maneuverable mecha. "You can't hear me!" It's with a strange mixture of frustration and elation that Mosi realises the truth, what those warning lights meant before -- her outgoing comms are fucked. She passively dodges a few more of Perbeck's attacks, before letting out a growl of frustration. She doesn't want to kill this woman, in spite of what happened to Kim, but she won't just let herself be hacked to pieces.

Mosi ducks under the next cutter swing, smashing the Artemis hard with a sideline blow from her energised spike, thrusting away from the Countess and attempting contact again in an air of faint desperation: "I surrender!" She risks switching to local general comm, in spite of her worries of the Divine Navy picking it up. "I--"

More mecha fire. Getting her bearings, Mosi realises that her fight with Nalah has put her out of the centre of the battle, off to the flank where a number of smaller enemy ships make risky, darting runs on the Divine Navy's fleet. One of them, she realises, is none other than the HIMS Titanium Rose. She's being driven away from the Artemis by a strange looking Banner with, of all things, SRI decal.

"This is Lieutenant Mosi North of the Divine Navy of Correction! I have valuable intelligence to trade and wish to surrender!" Mosi repeats, hoping beyond hope to reach someone. There's no response, leaving her to dodge and weave frantically, fighting for her life. Then the third mecha looms up ahead of her -- the mirror finish Imperial Guard prototype she fought before. Mosi realises that she's surrounded, cut off from help. That she's going to die.

The laughter, heard only by Mosi, is long, hard and bitter. Here she is. Finally, belatedly, doing Amani's 'right thing.' And she's going to die for it.

... Amani.

It's all Mosi can do it dodge the Guardswoman's drones -- she's taking hits, and they're adding up. Although she knows it won't help matters in that regard, she swoops in close to the Rose, dodging point defence fire as best as she can. One hand leaves the controls, reaching out for the small object clipped to her belt, right next to her tablet.


The HIMS Titanium Rose

You're still buried in your work, sore fingers operating your workstation with stalwart persistence, doing your best to block out everything around you not immediately pertinent to your job. You watch the progress of the battle on your scan map in an oddly detached manner -- see the defending forces mostly holding their own, if slowly giving ground. The enemy is advancing past the breached defensive array, but they're taking heavy losses. Your updated map notes that an enemy battleship no longer exists.

The Rose and several remaining attack group members put the finishes touches on a flagging, out of position cruiser, the general chaos and the ship's new quasi-stealth system having allowed it to substantially escape damage thus-far. You try not to let yourself become distracted by the terrifying elation of that moment, or, less uplifting, by the captain of one of the other ships frantically informing Andre that they've taken heavy damage. Or the scan dot that is Lori moving and fighting and taking fire. The dot that you know is your mother racing across the battlefield locked in combat with an enemy unit. Through Herculean effort, you don't scream when that dot is flagged "INACTIVE." You do your job.

This professional haze continues to cloud your vision, until it's eventually pierced by the sensation of something vibrating against your chest. You ignore the distraction at first, but when it persists, half irritably, you hook a finger under the cord around your neck... and pull out your black box, thrown for a split second by the object's mere existence. Mosi? That shouldn't be possible, she's not on the Rose, and the range on the little communicator doesn't extend terribly far. Your eyes then flick to the tiny enemy dot moving dangerously close to the Rose, harried by the ship's defences, pursued implacably by J6. The same unit, you're dimly aware, that was fighting your mother.

Your workstation recognises the presence of the black box, and without conscious thought, you allow it to transmit to a quarantined area. A short message, text only, hurriedly transcribed from voice:


You continue to work even as you read the message, struggling to process it and do your assigned task at the same time. You don't immediately know what to do... but you need to to decide right now, or you won't have a chance later.


[ ] Do nothing.

Ignore the message, forget you saw it. This is too little too late, whatever intelligence she's claiming to have.

[ ] Pass the message off to Communications

This is Mazlo's job. Let him handle it. You've never known him to be petty in an active combat situation.

[ ] Pass the message off to Communications, requesting it go to Owusu

(Unlocked!) If Mosi isn't lying this is above your paygrade and Mazlo's. Mazlo doesn't like you, but you've never wasted his time with something like this before.

[ ] Try to contact the pursuing mecha directly

Ignore your duties and bypass Comms and Mecha Control in order to send information directly to the pilots. This is too important to go through Mazlo.