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

You take half a moment to consider the best way to convey this story, without being too revealing or too personal. There's a pleasing sense of reciprocity in talking about Lori after Satou has just told you about her fiance — and even if you're still keeping that under wraps while you're both... stationed on the same ship, it's less awkward than trying to talk around the troubled history between you and your elder sister.

"The last time I spoke with my girlfriend," you say, smiling in spite of everything, "I reminded her that she owes me dinner. Nice dinner."

"You do seem like you'd be an expensive date," Satou agrees, unthinkingly. Almost instantly, in spite of your startled laughter, her face becomes a thing of wide-eyed horror. "I didn't mean— I wasn't trying to— you just seem so... so... so... particular!" You giggle a little harder, and her eyes somehow go somehow wider. "No, I just mean—"

"Quit while you're ahead, Ensign," Mazlo murmurs, sounding faintly amused in spite of his overall black mood. You'd have to guess that he agrees with the assessment, but there's no malice in his tone, this time. The humour, at least, is not lost on the others present.

"Where are you going for dinner?" Satou asks eventually, face still red through the glass of her helmet.

"I'm not sure," you admit. "She's been cagey about that part. I'll find out as soon as possible, though. Once w— once I'm done here."

Satou, luckily, does not put a lot of stock into the near slip. "I think as soon as we're done here, I might just get drunk," she says in a whisper. Unfortunately for her, her helmet broadcasts the comment rather louder than she'd intended, leading to nervous, hunch-shouldered giggling on her part. You think you can see her rallying a little, though. Whatever might happen in war movies after this kind of talk of the future, it's clear that at least speaking as if there will be a future, for all of you, is good for her, here and now. She needs it.

Mazlo, his momentary flare of humour exhausted, slumps against his harness. A heavy, defeated silence hanging over him like a shroud. You don't think that he's currently able to imagine the same.


The HIMS Hawthorne,
CIC

Daystar is back where she was before making that last call, strapped into her seat, mask of serene calm firmly in place. Projecting nothing but the utmost confidence in the brave fighting men and women of the Navy to carry the day in her aunt's name. Regal and refined, more a symbol than a flesh and blood woman. Certainly not someone with an almost physical ache in her chest, like something precious has been violently carved out.

She watches as Lord Admiral Sikes convenes with his counterparts, Admiral Hunter of the Inner Fleet and Lady-High-Commander Okello of the Imperial Guard, as they all discuss a course of action that seems destined to cost one of them their lives.

The two of them couldn't look more different from the thin, sour-faced Sikes, although in radically different ways:

Admiral Hunter is thick-set, round-faced and florid. Ordinarily, this gives him a slightly youthful, Cherubic look, but now an unaccustomed pallor has come into his face and his blonde locks have been plastered to his forehead with a nervous sweat. A muscle along his doughy jawline refuses to stop jumping, no matter how stoic he attempts to otherwise appear. He has the distinct impression of a man pushed past his ordinary limits, still admirably functioning in spite of this.

LHC Okello, meanwhile, is as thoughtfully quiet as ever. A delicately small woman of obvious African heritage, Daystar has watched her age more gracefully into her 60s than many can hope for. Okello looks back at all of them through the display with that same, assessing stare that had made Daystar squirm as a girl, being formally presented to her Aunt, the Empress, for the first time.

Perhaps adding to Hunter's discomfort is that the others present on this call should not, ordinarily, even be here, on a battlefield. Sikes and Daystar have chosen to be here out of a sort of apocalyptic urgency that had gripped them all back over Iapetus, when the warning about Titan had been delivered. Okello, meanwhile, is here on mere happenstance. Properly, the one whom duty of commanding the Guard's orbital forces in the field would have fallen to was Lord-Deputy-Commander Yang, a relatively recent appointee. When news of the invasion force had reached Titan, however, Yang had been attending to matters on Titan's surface, while Okello had been in orbit with the Empress. When the Empress had been evacuated to Titan, it had simply made more sense to have him rendezvous with her Imperial Majesty, while the LHC had simply stayed in space with the defending fleet.

If Okello resents risking her life in this way, at her age and rank, she doesn't show it. In fact, she has quite startled both of her counterparts by appearing on call not in her resplendent Imperial Guard jacket — orange, copiously adorned in gold heraldry and braid — but in a pilot's suit. She's clearly leaning over a workstation in the command room of a warship's mecha deck, the Imperial Guard's colour scheme prominent even here.

"You're quite certain of this course of action, Lady-High-Commander?" Sikes asks.

"Entirely," Okello says. Her tone is soft and polite, but brings to bear every ounce of authority her position has earned her. A trick that Daystar has tried to capture herself, with mixed results. "I know what this plan will cost. Her Majesty's Guard will shoulder that. If I give this order, I will not cower at the back while it is carried out. In life we serve, and in death we serve."

Hunter holds his tongue, clearly giving room for Sikes to have the final word on the matter. Not the Lord Admiral has command over LHC Okello — she serves the Empress, and no one else. Sikes nods, slowly. "Good-hunting, Lady-High-Commander."

"I will personally commend your bravery to Empress Solana," Daystar promises. "Come what may."

Okello nods gravely. "Long may she rule."

"Long may she rule." The words are echoed by all three of them, Daystar included, a reflexive call and response drilled into all of them all from childhood. It's not anything that Daystar has had to give a moment's thought to in years.

Things feel... different this time. So soon after Jaycee, the full realisation of what those words mean hits Daystar in a way that it never has before. What it means, holding the power of life and death over millions. What it really means. One can very credibly argue that the Imperial Civil War and now this entire invasion is an internal dispute amongst her own family, spilling out onto the entire Solar System. One day, if they survive this, if nothing truly spectacular happens politically to jeopardise her position, Daystar will be the one on the throne. She'll be the one who those words are spoken about. How many more people is she going to see die for her, or because of her? How many more Okellos or Jaycees?

The deepest truth Daystar knows, right at this moment, is that she does not want it anymore. She doesn't want to have the throne, the title, the power, the responsibility. She doesn't know if any one person should have those things. How many times in the history of the Solar System has that much power been wielded badly, through malice or good intentions?

But, at the same time... there are things that must be done. That only Daystar can do, that she will need that power to accomplish. Whatever she might personally want doesn't matter anymore. Like her Lady-High Commander, Guardswoman J6 was strong until the end. Daystar will have to be the same.


Space,
The Battle of Titan

Large-scale, pitched battle is not typically why the SRI maintains operatives who know how to pilot a mecha. That's what the Navy and, once, the ground forces were for. This isn't Owusu's first such battle, though. He was a raw Ensign still with the Navy at the Battle of Phobos, the disastrous rout that had led to the loyalist forces abandoning as a lost cause first Mars, then the Inner Solar System entirely. He'd been injured there, still drifting in and out of consciousness while the Battle of Ceres was fought.

Still, back when his transfer had first been approved, it had crossed his mind that joining the SRI would mean never enduring this particular brand of exhausted, helpless terror ever again. Then he'd gone and voluntarily thrown himself into the thick of things, first at Iapetus, then again here. Well, he thinks, as if addressing his past self directly, joke's on you, kid.

Having broken through the invader's defending formations, the Outer and Inner Fleets are now coordinating for a massive, grinding push against the enemy formations closest to Titan. It has the feeling of crawling one's way up a hill, only to see a mountain on the far side of it.

Owusu, massing with the survivors of the Hawthorne's offensive mecha forces in the shadow of an Inner Fleet capital ship, has time to risk unsealing his helmet long enough to take a gulp of water and let a combat stimulant dissolve on his tongue. Then the order comes to move again. The message isn't what he expects, though. He's not being asked to take his remaining forces and plunge with them into pitched combat again: He's being told to approach the enemy with all speed... then pull back as soon as the enemy has committed reinforcements. It's a feint, he's sure, but to cover for what? The feeling of being perpetually in the dark is another thing he doesn't like about playing Navy pilot again.

The latest clash of mecha is fierce, as ships on both sides of the battle position themselves to support. His Empress Banner's cutter splits open yet another enemy machine in the mad seconds before he's fending off attacks from two others.

Then, he and his fellow pilots are disengaging, retreating back to the relative shelter of the combined fleets under a hail of covering fire. The enemy is left reeling, reserves committed to a sector that suddenly isn't seeing the massive engagement that was expected. Owusu does a quick tally of surviving mecha, a quick status check of his machine, as the real attack comes from an angle he doesn't expect:

The Imperial Guard's space forces are modest compared to the Navy's, but altogether they're not insignificant, superior training making up for their numbers. They used the cover of the larger and more alarming fleet movements, the most recent skirmishing, to pull themselves away from the Inner Fleet's formations one or two ships at a time, forming now around their single, out-sized capital ship in order to make an almost suicidal push toward the Divine Navy's command formations, weakened as they are by the reserves having been committed elsewhere.

Owusu isn't Amani, but he doesn't need to be to see the story told by the scan data he's looking at: Mecha in the colours of the Guard pour out of the ships as they enter into range, and a storm of concentrated death ensues. He doesn't have time to watch however, as the elite soldiers of the Empire spend their lives on this tactic: He's being ordered out again, to re engage the same enemy formations that they'd just pulled back from. Delay the reinforcements' departure, buy the Guard as much time to do their damage as possible.

It all makes him think of Guardswoman J6. They've been separated for hours, of course, and she hates him on general principle, but all the same... He finds himself hoping that she makes it out alright, just as he leads another flight back into a waiting mass of enemy machines like the Navy pilot he isn't.


Onboard the HDMS Sacred Victory,
Divine Navy flagship,
CIC

The losses pile up. A battleship formation. Many cruiser squadrons. The escort ships for another several mauled beyond use. The mecha forces for all these ships scattered and decimated. In return, Renaud strongly suspects that the Empress has lost most of her Imperial Guard's orbital forces — a dear trade, but quite possibly a wise one. They fell short of reaching the position of his flagship, but he almost would have rather that than what they did do before being stopped hard.

"A shield for the Throne, a dagger to the heart of its enemies," he murmurs, the storied motto of the Imperial Guard coming easily to mind. Sometimes, it would seem, they manage to be both at once.

"My Lord?" asks the voice of Renaud's aide, floating by his elbow.

"Nothing," Renaud assures him. "Give me half a moment." He raises the hand that's not keeping him anchored to the workstation in front of him to rub at his tired eyes.

In his head, Renaud knows what must be done. Which surviving commodores' forces can plug the gap — commodores, because his rear admiral is gone, along with her ship — what mecha reserves can be spread even thinner to shore the damages up. How to make the enemy bleed for this as much as possible.

In his heart, though, he knows that making the enemy bleed is all that he's doing, now. Falling for that feint was a fatal error on their part, leaving them open to take a mortal wound that doesn't kill immediately. He knows what Nakamura would have done in his stead: fought to the last, kept discipline hanging on by terror and summary execution if need be. Die with the emperor's name on her lips. Spend every one of his subordinates, from his aides and commodores, ship and mecha captains down to his pilots, warrant officers, spacers, specialists... thousands of lives, unable to be used to buy victory any longer, instead only able to be spent on pride and spite and blind adherence to a man a billion kilometres away.

Renaud opens his eyes, looks at the scan map, and in that instant, he makes his decision.


Space,
Jettisoned escape pod of the HIMS Titanium Rose

It's been five hours, forty two minutes. You know this time exactly by the grace of your helmet display, a number you're incapable of not tracking minute to minute. Part of you will always need access to whatever data you have available to you. You are, in fact, looking directly at this timestamp when it happens:

The emergency broadcast, received by the escape pod itself, is relayed to all of your suits. Audio and video mandatory. You instantly recognise the thin-lipped face of Lord Admiral Sikes.

"Attention, all United Empire Navy personnel. This is Lord Admiral Sikes, overall commander of the Saturn Outer Fleet. As of 2200 hours today, all hostilities within the orbital sphere of Titan will cease in full, pending the complete surrender of surviving enemy forces. I repeat: all hostilities will cease within the orbital sphere of Titan, pending the complete surrender of surviving enemy forces. Stand by for orders for your respective ships or formations. Long may Empress Solana rule."

At first, you're all too shocked to respond in any way. Then, a ragged cheer echoes through the confines of the escape pod, all of you unable to hold in a relief so profound as to be truly surreal: However it happened, the Battle of Titan is over.


The surviving invaders have surrendered, on condition of their safe and humane treatment, Admiral Duke-Consort Renaud Grangier forgoing any such guarantees for his own continued wellbeing. There is some confusion regarding the sudden de-escalation of hostilities, and tensions are running extraordinarily high regardless. The battle was long and bloody, and this victory came at a terrible cost.

What are the lasting impacts of this day? How is the Battle of Titan remembered by the Solar System?

Pick two. Votes will be counted as a set.

[ ] A defeated enemy laid down their arms as one

The enemy stood down and surrendered without significant internal conflict or successful attempts at mutiny.


[ ] The virtuous defenders swallowed their anger at their helpless enemies

The surrendering enemy was put into custody in good faith, without a major instance of abuse or retributive violence to sully the victory.


[ ] The Imperial Guard weathered the storm

While mourning for their Commander and their many lost comrades, there remains a battered core to rebuild the Guard around.


[ ] The heroic defenders shielded Titan from the worst

Titan's infrastructure is miraculously far more intact than anticipated. Habitats were still damaged and destroyed, civilians still lost their lives, but it might have been far worse.