Session #7 pt.2
Trace Coburn
BattleTech Starfighter Analyst
- Location
- NDBBM, New Zealand
>AWRIGHT THAT FUKKIN DOES IT-
The words are still echoing through the air when you spin around, sand kicking up as you launch yourself back at the wooden shack, your lungs expanding as they haul in the diaphragm-deep breath you'll need to Lay Down The Fucking Law-
- and it's snatched right out of you by your own uniform collar as it slams into your throat.
"NO! Admiral Settle, you musn't!"
You round on your attacker, flailing madly at the slender, pale arm restraining you – belonging to Shoukaku, she of the long, flowing white hair and sweetly pretty features. Like Zuikaku, she's not in "ship-mode" yet, and though she's surprisingly strong you're able to pry her fingers off your collar – barely.
"Admiral, no! They might-"
"STAND DOWN, SAILOR, OR I'LL RIP YOUR RUDDERS OFF AND MAKE A SANDWICH OUT OF YOUR ASS!" you thunder with the kind of rage you haven't felt since the day you stumbled across a rating trying to set fuzes in the 5-inch shells with a fucking hammer. Shoukaku was and is a warship, and it's hard to resist the old instincts – she jolts into Attention long enough for you to storm back down the beach to the two CVs who are squaring off for another go. They're so intent on their scrap that they haven't noticed you yet, bellowing be damned.
You aim to change that.
Zuikaku launches herself at Kaga's midsection with a cry. The other CV is larger, stronger and well-muscled; but her face betrays surprised at the ferocity of the smaller girl's assault. They go tumbling and rolling in the sand, ripping at each other's clothing as they struggle to come to grips.
Any other day you might've tried to nudge the squabble closer to the waves and sat back with a good beer. But right now, you're quite literally seeing red.
You don't remember what came ripping out of your throat just then – but it was savage and raw enough to make them look up in shock. You loom over them, glaring from beneath the scrambled-egg bedecked brim of your dress cover.
"GET ON YOUR GODDAMNED FEET, SO HELP ME GOD, GET TO ATTENTION RIGHT THIS FUCKING INSTANT!" Your voice goes snarling over the empty beach and stomps away across the calm waters.
They rise – but they don't come to attention. Zuikaku is staring at you wild-eyed; the fury of battle still in her eyes, but it's Kaga who speaks first. "Or what, yankee? You're out of canes to hand out, it looks like."
It would seem her visual memory is acute.
"I've still got two boots," you growl, the anger rumbling rough in your throat, "and if you don't fall in line right now you'll taste l-"
You're not quite sure how she hits you, just then – only that for a few seconds, every nerve in your chest goes numb, and then you're hitting the firm sand like a sack of wet mice. Hands of literal steel ball up in your shirt, and then you find yourself hauled upright to hover inches away from the bloodied, battered face of Kaga.
Her brow's been split open by a good crack across the brow; and beneath the flesh is revealed the dull gleam of metal. The wound is bleeding over her eye, caking it with congealing filth, and the orbit of the other is rimmed with steel where Zuikaku's fist split the skin. Later it'll be a shiner; but now it's just swelling up, red – and at the center is one rage-filled eye.
It punches through the numbness in your mind and begins flooding your internal spaces; lights sparking and shorting out as the tide rises. Fear. Cold, mad, terrified, gibbering fear, images of the abyssals, the first abyssals, the one flaming awful shattered eye glowing in the cold wet dark as it came for you – the embodiment of death, the most incredible concentration of resources turned to the purpose of destruction that man ever made, compressed into the neutron-dense nugget of a body and given a human's hatred.
As the shock of her blow fades – comes the true, spine-tingling terror.
"You might get away with snide jabs in a mess hall, but direct threats on an open beach?" Kaga snarls, and you can feel the heat of her body – a draft of air powerful enough to ripple your clothes. "Do you want to die, you fucking scum? I'll kill you. I was MADE to kill you. WHO DO YOU FUCKING THINK YOU ARE!?"
>Someone who's fucked up and very much doesn't want to die – too much to even find words, assuming you could even find the breath.
>"I'm expendable. Like every man who's worn this uniform."
>"Your commanding officer – one of the few you'll ever get, because of shit like this."
>"Your commanding officer – one of the few you'll ever get, because of shit like this."
>"I'm expendable. Like every man who's worn this uniform."
Staring into the mad, swollen, fury-filled eye of the once stoically-reserved Kaga, it suddenly comes to you that you now understand exactly what the diplomats meant about the duality of Japanese culture during your extensive pre-transfer briefing. Ancient, strict authoritarianism... and beneath it, a pulsing river of pent-up fury, like a long-dormant volcano just waiting for some moron to kick the lid off.
Funny, what you think of when you're about to die.
"I am," you say, your words tired and blunt, "your superior officer."
You see her lips twist in disdain and denial, but she pushes past the blunt truth to find the technical one. "Goto's my Admiral," she snarls, and shakes you once. "You're just-"
"-another fucking yankee," Hornet says from directly behind her. Kaga's head snaps around with another violent epithet forming on her lips – which dies there when she finds herself staring down the long shaft of the only "live" arrow in Hornet's quiver; the one she never goes anywhere without.
The black arrow.
"Anyone can get a forty-percent hit rate when they ambush you. Isn't that right, you backstabbing slant-eyed cunt?" Hornet's lovely dark eyes are as cold and jagged as the obsidian arrowhead hovering eight inches away from Kaga's nose.
"Hornet," you say, soft but firm.
Hornet keeps her flinty eyes on Kaga. "Yes, Admiral?"
"Stand down, Hornet."
Hornet doesn't budge a single muscle. "Sir?"
The terror screaming up and down your nerves suddenly stops stock-still – seeping into your very marrow. Your entire body seems heavy and cold as ice as the implications sink in.
"Hornet," you say softly. "Who am I?"
"My Admiral," she says without hesitation. "Mine."
"For now," you say. "One of two." You turn and face Kaga's cheek – she's still staring over her shoulder at the wicked glint of the obsidian arrowhead. "Kaga."
Slowly she turns her face back to you – her face is flushed; the pendulum of fight-flight swinging away from violence, and now her one swollen eye is simply wide, wide with everything.
"Who am I?"
"A-admiral Settle," she says softly – and with a start, she damn near drops you, as if just realizing she'd been hoisting you upright. Your weight comes down on your bad leg, first, and you go down like a sack of drunken bricks. She holds her hands out in front of her, staring with one swollen eye as if she can't believe she *has* hands.
You struggle up from the ground, gaining little until you feel Hornet's arm slip around your waist and hoist you up easily, her slender frame nonwithstanding. You stare at Kaga staring at her hands, her battered face blank with shock, and a lot of words tumble through your mind as you think furiously -
- and they tumble right past your tongue to land in your stomach as a cold lump you know well from your Academy days; the feeling that you've just fucked up immensely – that you have, in fact, failed as an officer and a gentleman. You stand there, aching and clueless for several seconds, questioning not only your ability to serve, but your ability to continue to serve – as a Court Martial will no doubt be doing very shortly.
But that's not the message you can send to them – after all, you're not the one that started swinging. You slap a cap on that flaring ember quickly, but the heat's enough to get your tongue working again.
"We are one Navy," you say slowly, your ribs aching a bit as you speak. "And we're only fighting one war."
You can see Kaga transforming before you; almost your mirror image – the cold distance of professional conduct sliding neatly over her true self like a glove. She simply comes to a more regal stance, staring straight past your shoulder as if she's not aching; making no attempt to stop the dripping blood from her busted brow dripping off her chin and onto her white uniform. "Yes, Admiral Settle."
"Look at me, Kaga," you say, an edge creeping into your voice.
She looks.
"Now look at the ground," you instruct.
She gives you that particular kind of blank-eyed emptiness that only the truly talented officer can manage; a silent way of conveying her utter lack of faith in the sense of anything you fucking say. Her head swivels dutifully – and that one swollen eye damn near pops out of her head as she sees the Corgis.
All of them.
This is, after all, the torpedo range – and the CVs only need a corner of it for archery practice, after all. You – and judging from the disturbed expressions of everyone else present, nobody – noticed them arrive; because the energetic little demons and their hyperactive, nigh manic yapping is as inseparable from them as is light from the Sun.
And yet here they are, sitting in a wide circular blob around this little tableau, plopped down on their haunches – and every one of them stock-still and deathly silent, their eyes fixed on Kaga.
Waiting.
"Now back... to me," you instruct. Kaga obeys, her face full of confusion and upset in equal amounts.
"They were expendable," you quote. "I am, too. All soldiers are, in the end." You shake your head once, keeping eye contact. "Maybe because you're..." you sigh, letting that go. "Which war did you come back to fight, Kaga?" You lean forward, and almost lose your balance – your entire body seems empty now, a slab of dead meat, ice cold and immobile. Only that voice keeps rolling on, those sepulchral tones you hardly recognize as your own. "Now... back to *him.*"
She turns her head towards the direction you tilted yours – and finds Hate. He's standing stock-still, forty-odd leashes slung in a twisted mass over one shoulder. Seeing he has the stage, he fixes his characteristic focused glare on Kaga... and raises one hand to his shoulder, fingers poised to SNAP.
"Now back to me," you say, your voice whisper thin.
Kaga looks back to you.
"It's really, really easy to die, Kaga," you say with the simple misery of experience weighing your words. "So think real hard on what you want it to be for."
You hold a palm towards Hate, and he lowers his poised fingers. He gives you a slight nod, and keeps an eye – and an army of corgis – on Kaga as Hornet helps you away from the place. Your chest is already feeling better, but it's really -
- you twist away from Hornet and manage to stumble into the long beach-grass before you lose your lunch entire. You kneel there with the long grass tickling your face as you empt out into dry heaves, and then you struggle to one knee, focusing on your breathing, focusing on your discipline, finding the smooth hard fact of your rank and your duty and squeezing it tight in your mind till it hurts – but the shakes, if they come, are gone by the time you're ready to open your eyes.
Not that it can unfuck what you've just royally fucked up, but – at least its something.
You glance around and find Hornet some distance away, helping Hate clip leashes to the corgis – he must've come down to collect them after their daily "fuck around and shit on the beach" practice, as he characterized it once, back in the 'States. And maybe they drop more turds than torps, but it keeps the little bastards busy. You find a grassy sand hummock and sit on it, watching them work, letting the adrenaline out of your system. God bless Hornet for giving you room, when you needed it. God bless her for saving your fucking life, just then.
And bless God for stopping her from loosing that arrow and getting everyone killed.
"That was the end of my fucking career," you opine to empty space as you stare across the placid waters of the torpedo range.
"No," a bright, youthful voice opines from behind your shoulder. "That was fucking AWESOME."
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