As Witnesses to Allah [Original Mecha Quest]

Midgard Serpent I

In seconds you decide which of your subordinates will live and which will die. Later you're sure you'll agonize over it, interrogate your motivations, your goals. Whether you did the right thing, whether Allah will forgive you, whether He should. Now, you do not have that luxury.

Shorn lives. Mouse dies. There's a moment of hesitation and protest between you realizing this and it happening. Before you fire your thrusters, burst through the debris cloud, and pull Shorn away from Valiant. She insists that she can save them, both of them, and asks you to let her go back. She doesn't force the matter, and so you remain silent, disagreeing with her won't help. She opens her comms to protest, but then the plasma round rips through the debris cluster, vaporizing Mouse and everything else in the area.

Another You dies somewhere over the Kipling's spine as Shorn processes what happened. "What's the plan, sir?" she asks.

"We get to that carrier," you say, pointing to the Serpent, "Escape. Find survivors. I don't know what comes next."

There's an uncomfortable silence, then she nods, no happier with the plan then you are. The drone comes soon afterwards, long and gangly, Yvette, now unconscious from her wounds, and Oliveira grasped in one claw, the other extended to pick you up.

The pair of you latch on, clinging for dear life as it takes you away from the fighting.

You see the Kipling die in the distance. Her guns don't go silent, but her superstructure begins to fail. A great shard of her starboard bulk shears off, but the lights stay on. She's meant to survive punishment like this, and that shard of warship can, and will, go on fighting for days as it drifts in system. And soon enough a dozen shards like that will be all that is left of the Kipling.

You see the ambushers begin to win their battle against some distant foe. Small flotillas of warships and civilian vessels beginning to melt away from their position. The Ambushers consolidating their hold, tightening the vice around the dying Kipling, closing and boarding as the massive ships defenses are worn away.

You let go of the Ghul King's last drone as you approach, grabbing the wounded and drifting silently off. The drone is swatted out of the sky by point defense a minute later, and you lose all contact with the Myriad Yous that had guarded the Kipling.

And all at once the battle disappears as you glide into the Midgard Serpent's guts. She's had ragged holes punched into her superstructure, the light blue of atmospheric shielding shimmering in the void, but while wounded she's far from crippled. Her guns fling bolts of light out towards the battle and you can see engineering teams at work clearing her launch catapults.

The four of you glide through an atmospheric shield into what must have once been a crew compartment. Charred corpses float between scorched and shattered bunks, a tattered, brightly colored poster covers one wall, and a duty roster is posted by the door. You land gently next to Shorn, both of you grabbing onto Yvette with one hand to help her land safely.

A door slides open before you can. Two armed, orange-clad crewmembers, though you hesitate to call them soldiers, float in. They wear glorified spacewalk suits, engineering rigs with armor plates bolted on, an orange paint scheme, and a crest emblazoned with the arabic for "The Shield of Dabiq" on their shoulders and chest. You turn towards them but hesitate, waiting to see what they intend.

One raises a rifle.

The room explodes into violence. Everyone else goes for a gun. You don't need to.

You crush the first soldier's skull through their visor. Impale the second on an exposed deckplate as they fumble for their gun, and you grab you grab their jaw and wrench. There is a sickening crack, and then silence.

Shorn's pistol is not yet leveled. Yvette and Olivier float, serene and unconscious, next to her.

"Shorn," you say, " I'm going to capture the ship and signal survivors. Wait for thirty seconds after I leave, then take Yvette and the Principle to the nearest Medbay and get them into pods." She doesn't move, it takes you a moment to register her heightened vitals, the crick of her helmet, and realize that she's staring at you.

"Yes sir," she says, finally.

You have a plan to get onto the bridge, but it's going to cost you an irreplaceable piece of gear. What is that gear?

[ ] A Haqq personal shielding device, designed to keep you alive in case of a cockpit breach or catastrophic reactor meltdown. If you get to the bridge and overload the shield you can use it as a breaching charge, blast through the armored shell and storm the bridge. [Secondary Stat: Hull]
[ ] A Haqq personal phase cloak, designed to keep you undetected during pilot operations. If you get to the bridge and purposefully overclock it you can simulate a phase teleporter for a short jump, straight through the bridge's armored shell, and kill everyone inside. [Secondary Stat: Agility]

Mechanics

Witnesses uses a narrative system akin to quests like Number None and We Stand in Awe. You have stats that come with perks and improve over time but there aren't explicit mechanics attached to them. Instead they serve as a guide.

Pilots have four skills:

Hull: Close ranged combat, surviving fire, 'dynamic terrain rearrangement'. It governs the durability of your mech, CQB, and crashing through the environment like a madman.
Agility: Evasion, Aerospace maneuvers, precision fire. It governs your fine control of your mech, evasion, and long range weapons.
Sensors: Electronic warfare, sensor suites, and drone control. It governs your ability to manage the software of your mech in combat.
Engineering: Repairs, jury-rigging equipment, battlefield modifications, and heat management.

Skills are on a 1-8 scale, with perks at 4, 6, and 8.

In addition, characters will have techniques and backgrounds which represent wider skill sets or special tactics. This will cover non-combatant and crew abilities as well as non-combat or unique areas of expertise for Pilots.

However, unlike most Quest protagonists Shahid begins at the peak of his personal power. He's already a superhuman, augmented ace, with a decade of active combat experience, there isn't much room for him to gain more skills. As such, you don't spend XP on Shahid. You spend XP on his subordinates. Mech Pilots, engineering crew, command staff, ground troops, and diplomats will all join your crew, some represented as the general complement of the Midgard Serpent and others as specific individuals.

We'll be getting more into this system as the prologue continues. For now, all you need to know is that choosing the Ghul King as Shahid's mech has locked in Sensors as your primary stat and Engineering as your worst.

You leave Shorn and head bridgewards. The Serpent's electronic systems aren't well protected, and you're in within moments, marking yourself as friendly on their IFF, downloading a map, figuring out where people are, where they're going. Who's running for the escape pods and who thinks that this is salvageable.

You don't tolerate the endless indignities of a corporate contract for the money. You didn't sign the Contract, didn't sell your soul to the Sphere and GCVD and their interests for ten years of your life, for the money.

You come through the wall, impaling one soldier on a piece of shrapnel. Grabbing their gun, hosing down the next. Flinging a stolen grenade into the center of the squad as they turn around. Then you're gone, leaving the injured survivors to question their memories, to fire wildly at shadows in fear.

You didn't do it for the ride off world, you didn't do it because it was your best way off of Ain Jaloot, you didn't do it for the career prospects or the promise that, when it was over, for the first time in your life, you would live on a planet that wasn't at war.

There's no Printer on the ship. Just an expansive bay filled with warmechs and weapons. You leap between them, running across walls and sliding through crawlways as you fight you way to the bridge. Bullets fly in all directions as they try to identify you, as they do your work for you. You bellow contradictory orders into their comm networks, deepening the confusion, the panic, overtaking the ship.

You didn't even do it for the hormones, for your city, or your then-wife, or your family, or your nation. They were nice, they were perks, but eight years ago, when you made this call, they were not what motivated you.

They set up a heavy machine gun as the bridge seals its pressure doors. You leap into view, and as they bring the gun to bear you shift. The world goes bright, colors wash out and people fade away as you slip through the gunfire, past their lines, and phase back into reality with your weapon trained on the gunner's head.

The others don't survive much longer.

As much as you hate yourself for it, you signed up because when you were eighteen and stupid you enjoyed this.

The bridge is sealed tight. Pressure doors, armored bulkheads, no electronic overrides. Just an armored porthole where a guard watches you in terror. You stare him in the eyes for a moment, crank the phase-cloak up past every warning threshold, and step out of the universe.

It is blindingly bright and deafeningly loud. You feel yourself burn and freeze all at once, and the stench of blood and death is replaced with a myriad of pleasant memories, of printed food and cakes and candles and flowers. You can see the outlines of the bridge as you step through the bulkhead, step into the void where you know several crewmembers are staring through the porthole.

Then you resume existing. You realize immediately that you're materializing inside someone, you feel your body wrench in all directions, feel nausea you should be immune to rise in your gut. Then you are in the world properly, gore flying in all directions. Lightning arcs across the room, fusing panels, killing crew, blowing out consoles. Soldiers turn, raise their guns, scream in panic, and your pistols are already blazing away.

One of them manages to surrender. Two more were so badly injured by the lightning that you decide that they're not combatants. Eight corpses litter the bridge, and more lay in the halls you came through on the way here.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji'oon

You collapse into the captain's chair, sore more than anything else. You pull the ruined phase cloak out of your hardsuit, and your spine immediately makes its unhappiness about the overload known. You stretch, trying to work the kink out of your back as you wait for Scorn to make contact. You try not to think about….anything about the last thirty minutes, really.

The bridge is ruined, and wasn't that great before you got in. The Midgard Serpent does not have the luxury of clean, bright colors, hidden lights, and omnipresent holographics of the Kipling. It's industrial, grimy, all steel and tubing, like the makeshift armor of its crew. Speaking of which, your healthy prisoner starts inching towards a gun. They stop when you glare at them, but the movement was obvious. You're debating saying something about it, about everything that's happening here, that is anything besides an incoherent scream of rage and loss when Shorn calls.

"Got 'em to medbay," she huffs. She's breathing heavily, but she had two bodies slung over her shoulder so it's hard to blame her, "Doc's already evacuated. It's, uh, they're hooked up but it's weird here."

"Weird how?" you ask

"There's not much in the way of equipment," says Shorn, "And, uh, there are Flash Pods here. Lots of them."

You mute your microphone for a moment and stare at your conscious prisoner. "You have flash-clones here?" you ask.

"We are flash-clones," they reply.

You blink, and suddenly see things about the corpses in the room. How all but the captain seemed ill before you shot them. Sickly pallor, sunken cheeks, limb braces bolted to their exosuits. A dozen signs as to who, and what, they were that you did not notice because you were busy killing them. Suddenly, you begin to understand how a backwater system may have manned the largest warfleet in the Sphere. "My condolences," you say, and you turn the mic back on. "They're flash-cloning soldiers," you say, "Are Oliveira and Yvette stable?"

"Yeah," replies Shorn, "It's just monitoring equipment and I can't-ugh, Mouse was better at this stuff. I can't do much besides, just, look at them."

"That's fine. All you need to do is monitor," you say, the computers in the bridge are starting to reboot, recover from the electricity surge. Many of the consoles are just ruined from the fight, but enough works here. You see dots pop up across the Midgard Serpent's internal map, hundreds of people fleeing via escape pod and shuttle launch. You find a brig, twenty dots still located in its cells. And, finally, you find the medical bay. It's placed oddly, adjacent to the hangar and a pilot's quarters that looks like it was cored out by weapon's fire early in the battle. "Keep them safe. I'm going to try and hail survivors and get us out of here before they figure out that we've taken the ship, so prepare to have more wounded in there."

You're fairly certain that Shorn nods, because there's a pregnant pause before she finally apologizes and confirms.

You start sending pings, a pit in your gut half-convinced that there's no-one left out there. That no-one's going to be able to make it to you. You nearly cheer aloud a minute later, when the first response arrives and the first pods land in the hangar. Five people, then twelve. Twenty. Thirty. Wounded, battered, and demoralized but alive and safe. Most head to Medical. A pair of marines grab guns and begin to track down the last hostiles on the map. As you tell Shorn to find you anyone who can man the bridge, you get one last call.

"Captain Shahid, I-I got your message," says Margai. You can hear him breathing heavily, on the verge of panic, "I have fifty crew aboard a shuttle. We're on our way but-" You hear a detonation over the line, then screaming, and frantically check the Serpent's sensors. You see the shuttle, inbound at high speeds. And you see the Pulsar-class corvette in hot pursuit. "We are under fire, please assist!" comes Margai's message.

You promise to help on reflex as you analyze the situation, but it's bad. You're some distance from the hangar, and Shorn and the crew are some distance from the Bridge. You could deploy, but it'll take valuable time that might well mean that you're too late to save the shuttle. You could deploy Shorn, have her take one of the Midgard Serpent's Supermarines and fight the thing. It's a bad mech, but she's a good pilot. Or you could just try and ram the Corvette. It'll mean more damage to an already fucked-up Midgard Serpent, but a ramming action won't put the people you've saved in danger and will avoid risking Shorn in an untested mech. However if the Serpent's light-drive burns out, you may have issues getting out of the battle.

Defend the Incoming Shuttle

[ ]Have Shorn install remote-pilot software into a pair of the Supermarines. You should be able to at least drive off the pulsar. You have suffered multiple aneurysms from remote-piloting six mechs simultaneously, the module is burned out.
[ ] Have Shorn take the helm and control the still-functioning guns. If she can convince the Pulsar that you're a real threat it should buy you time to launch a Supermarine and go fight. (Risk the shuttle, protect Shorn and the Ship)
[ ] Take the helm and tell Shorn to deploy. You'll put the Midgard Serpent and its jamming between the Pulsar and your shuttle while Shorn suits up and drives it off. (Risk Shorn, protect the Shuttle)
[ ] Take the helm, jam that thing's sensor array, and ram it. It may damage the ship, but that's better than losing the Shuttle. (Risk the Ship, protect the Shuttle)