Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
And so, the Petals tradition of always trashing the mother ship when given the choice continues.
Petals of Carbon Steel -- You're a Pilot, Not an Ace. Try your best.
- Thread starter Gazetteer
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi
Update 006: Aftermath I
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Material Damage: 25
Scars Are Cool: 20
Acquire Pirate Eyepatch: 5
Scarred and Maimed: 4
Spite: 1
Close Shave: 1
Scars Are Cool: 20
Acquire Pirate Eyepatch: 5
Scarred and Maimed: 4
Spite: 1
Close Shave: 1
DAME NALAH: I used to think that was the scariest feeling in the world.
STARSCAPE: What do you mean by that?
DAME NALAH: The moment where you're committed to an engagement, and you just... know in your bones that you're in over your head. That they're better than you. That all you're doing is buying yourself seconds before the inevitable.
STARSCAPE: How do you get out of a situation like that?
DAME NALAH: [She throws her head back and laughs] You hope your friends are better than you thought they were!
— Taken from an interview with Captain Dame Nalah North of the USE Navy, originally published in Starscape, 533 NSC
Your hands are moving your unit away with every bit of agility you can pull out of it, even while you know that it's going to be too late. That horror movie monster of a Divine Navy mecha, parade-ground resplendent in white and gold, bears down on you with death in its every movement. Time slows down, your world contracts to a single point — to the enemy's cutter, poised to kill you next.
Then, a green streak collides with the monster, and the cutter is mercifully dragged off-course. It takes you a moment to consider what has just happened, that there's someone shouting at you over the comm.
"Himegami — move!"
You don't actually need to be told to do that much, but Owusu's voice does jolt you fully back to reality. You take the chance he's buying you, putting as much distance as you can between you and the two clashing machines in the short amount of time you have.
Owusu's strange, streamlined Banner isn't as fast as the enemy. It's obviously not as responsive to his commands. But when the Divine Navy mecha lets loose a flurry of strikes with its cutter, he parries each one, somehow. You're not sure if it's sustainable, but the SRI officer is having success that the rest of you lacked.
"Ross, Lý, Kana, give me fire support. I'll keep it off you." At another time — any other time, honestly — you'd have all balked at taking orders from the SRI officer. These circumstances put it in a more favourable light, however. All three squad leaders are out of commission or worse, and he's the only one of the three of you who remain to voice a plan to keep you all alive. Plus, he's just saved your life once already. That earns him some leeway, from where you stand.
Owusu, plainly on the defensive, clashes several more times with the monster, before pulling momentarily away. Following your cue, you and what's left of Squad C take aim from three different angles and open fire on your enemy. You'd like to say that it's you who lands a solid hit, who finally proves that this thing was mortal, but the truth is, it could have just as easily been Ryan or Cam — when the monster bursts out of the hale of gunfire, it's not moving quite as fast as it was before. Maybe that's what lets Owusu intercept it again, when it comes after Cam's Lancer next.
In the background, you're all aware of the enemy ship and the Esther Strova continuing to have an exchange of railgun fire, shields failing on both sides. You're all too occupied with staying alive to properly support your ship, though. Owusu manages another exchange with the monster, and then another, before it finally scores a telling hit on the lower section of his Banner. Then, unexpectedly, it pulls back and lets itself be chased away by your combined gunfire.
"Attention all pilots," comes Naz's harried voice. "Disengage immediately. Allow the enemy to withdraw."
Mostly, you're just relieved to have the excuse, at this point. As bitter a pill as it is to watch the monster vanish back inside the false-Verdant's hangar and the ship accelerate away at a different vector, both plainly wounded. The problem is, in addition to half your pilots, the Esther Strova has taken a few licks as well, one of its modules having been breached.
You don't have any time to relax, however. "We've got things under control here," Naz continues, "Medical's standing by — anyone who can still fly, focus on retrieving our people." You have to wonder how much of that is the real story. Nazaret will be relaying these orders directly from Captain Leski, and you'd hardly put it past the captain to downplay the ship's own problems in favour of getting your fellow pilot's to relative safety. At the moment, you don't care.
Your eyes track over your scan map, until you find her. It doesn't take long. "I'm closest, I'll get Azara," you say.
"Understood," Owusu replies. "We'll check on the others, then."
Azara's Pennant is drifting slowly away from the battlefield, already a ways off from everyone else. You fly straight for it, trying to raise her on comm again. "Azara? Azara, can you hear me?"
The message is received, and not just by her mecha — her pilot suit is getting it. But she's not answering... or she can't answer.
Up close, the damage to her unit is obvious. From a combination of cutter impact and point-defence laser damage, her cockpit has been breached. With a sense of surreal dread, you carefully match velocity with her mecha, going into an uncomfortable spin to stay facing it. Then you reach out, and carefully latch your Pennant's arms tight to her unit's shoulders, burning your thrusters hard to gradually move out of the spin into something less nausea-inducing.
"She's not responding, her cockpit's cracked open. I'm blowing the hatch," you say.
"Understood," Nazaret says. "Good luck." Azara will certainly need it.
You hit the vacuum cycling for your cockpit, the oxygen in the small space seeming to take an eternity to be syphoned out. Every compartment around you seals up tight, and you run a hand out behind you to extend the emergency tether, snapping it tight to the waist of your pilot suit. You give it three sharp tugs to make sure that it's actually secure enough to hold your weight. Azara needs help fast, but you won't exactly be providing it if you let yourself sail wildly off into space and need to be rescued yourself. By the time you finish, the hatch on your Pennant is ready to open.
With the air already gone from your cockpit, you feel it rather than hear it when your hatch opens, leaving your pilot suit as the only thing standing between you and the scant mercies of space. You unhook your piloting harness, and move yourself out to the hatch. The bulk of Azara's Pennant fills your view, which is good — it means you don't have to look up, or down, or in any of the directions that reveal the endless, inky blackness around you.
You tell yourself that it's just like gliding across the hangar back on the ship, that you have a tether regardless. That doesn't actually make you feel any better, but you still take aim at the intact handholds bolted on beside her damaged cockpit hatch and push out into the void. In your mind, it takes a small eternity to reach your goal, and you grab the handhold in a death grip, your continued momentum as your body tries to move past it sending a thrill of fear down into the pit of your stomach.
Situated as well as you're going to be, you pry one hand off the handhold, reaching for the panel you know is there, set between two armour plates on the chest of Azara's Pennant. Thankfully, this too has escaped the gaping rent in the curved plane of the torso. The panel slides back at a swipe from you, revealing a small interface for you to enter an emergency code by memory. The hatch beside you shudders silently, then slams open. The blood is pounding in your ears as you pull yourself around to look into the now-open cockpit.
Azara hangs motionless in her harness straps, limp as a ragdoll. Here, alone in your pilot suit with the comm closed, you can't suppress a gasp at the sight of her helmet: The glass of the faceplate is latticed by hairline cracks, and fogged by condensation from the inside. Condensation and... Sol, that's blood!
She's been bleeding out at the same time her suit has been bleeding oxygen. There's no time to wait around being horrified. You push yourself into the cockpit headfirst, numb hands fumbling for purchase inside, before you pull a reel of emergency sealant tape from your belt. "Naz, she's fucked up bad. Her helmet's cracked, and she's bleeding. I can't see from where."
"Fuck." Nazaret's air of professional calm, never far from breaking, gives out. "Is she—"
"If I'd meant dead, I'd have said dead." You wonder who exactly you're trying to convince, though, even as you begin to apply strips of the tape to her damaged helmet. You try to be thorough about it, which is maddening under the circumstances, but you can't exactly pump more air into a compromised environment. Finally, finally, you can peel back a panel on the chest of your pilot suit, and extend the length of thin hose rolled up inside, slotting it into a corresponding port on Azara's suit.
"Leak's patched, feeding her some of my air now," you report. Your patch job is holding, at least, as the transfer of your oxygen to Azara hisses in your ears. "I'll get her into my cockpit in a minute, and get back to the ship."
"Good," Naz says, sounding relieved.
Cam's voice comes over general, sounding utterly desolate: "Zhìháo's gone. He's just... Sol, he's in pieces." You're not surprised, considering the hit his cockpit took — much worse than Azara's. But Cam's allowed to have a moment here. You know Sails is going to be in even worse shape. Sunny and Kitty... you'll find out when you find out. You can't help them — it's not your job. You can help Azara.
"... Did we win?" The new voice — weak, dazed — startles you. Staring down at the woman you're tending to, you're suddenly so relieved you could throw up. But you have an image to maintain, don't you?
"Glad to hear I'm not dragging a corpse behind me, Zar," you tell her. Then you switch back to Naz and add, with that forced, casual tone: "She's alive and talking."
You carefully disconnect the air transfer, and begin securing Azara to you well enough that you can chance the crossing back to your Pennant.
"... Kana?" Azara asks, for once not using the silly nickname.
"Yeah," you say. You wish you didn't have to move her at all, but leaving her alone in vacuum, with a breached suit and unknown injuries strikes you as a worse idea. "Try not to talk too much, for once in your life. I've got you."
"Who else...?"
"I don't know," you say. Then amend: "The Commander and Shen both didn't make it."
There's enough of a pause before she asks her next question that it takes you by surprise. "Kitty?"
It's not the name you would have guessed she'd ask about next, but you're not exactly in a position to be following the thought process of a heavily injured woman brought back from the brink of suffocation. "I don't know," you tell her.
"I... I need to tell her... putting it off. Stupid. Just... pretending nothing happened, since that time we... we—
Oh, hell. That's the kind of admission that should come after a night of companionable drinking, not like this. While the girl in question might be dead, for all you know. You cut her off: "Azara? Shut up and let me get you back to the ship. You're too fucked up for twenty questions."
She's quiet again for a long moment, before murmuring: "Okay, Pirate."
/////PoCS/////
Onboard the HDMS Sunspot,
Mecha Hangar
The prototype rests in its cradle, the damage obvious in the dents from projectiles marring its white and gold paint. Its hatch is still tightly, almost ominously closed, despite long minutes since it came to a stop there. Despite everything else going wrong at the moment, a crowd of mechanics floats uncertainly in front of it.
The crowd parts abruptly with the arrival of Captain Kron. She's in a rare fury, enough murder in her eyes that the assembled, white-uniformed naval personnel shrink back under her gaze. But in the end, it locks onto one person in particular.
With a snarl, Kron lunges forward, heedless of Sir Salimus's bandaged head, and shoves him into the nearest wall hard enough that they both bounce. "What part of what you were told," she demands, arm still pressed into the pilot's throat, "led you to believe that it would be acceptable to ignore all our transmissions and then get the prototype shot to pieces?"
Salimus struggles to speak, until the realities of zero gravity force the pressure to let up on his throat. He gives a ragged cough, and finally manages to croak out: "... asn't me!"
"What are you talking about?" Kron demands.
"Ma'am."
She turns her head, spearing the newcomer with her gaze next. The chief mechanic flinches. "... Ma'am, he's not lying. Sir Salimus hit his head when the terrorists started bombing us. He only woke up a short time ago. He wasn't the pilot."
Kron blinks, releasing the knight as she considers this. "Who was then?" No one seems to have an answer.
Then, as if on cue, the hatch of the prototype cracks open. Every eye in the crowd stares as a small figure is revealed in the mecha's strange harness apparatus. The figure struggles to remove the machine's opaque, in-built helmet, connected as it to the prototype is by numerous wires. When the figure finally manages it, the face that's revealed is shockingly young. Painfully aware of the watching crowd, the young girl floats her way out of the cockpit, hesitating cringingly at the very lip.
Narrowing her eyes again, Captain Kron surges up, using the open cockpit hatch to pull herself to a stop right in front of the girl... with a gun in her free hand. The girl recoils, falling back into the cockpit as if she might find some escape there. She finds none. "You're one of the civilian techs," Kron begins. "Are you aware what the punishment for hijacking Divine Navy Property is?" Truthfully, she doesn't relish the girl's abject terror. Although she is sad not to have seen Salimus's expression when he stopped to consider why, precisely, Kron had brought a sidearm with her when she'd set out to upbraid him.
"I—" the girl stares silently for a further moment, then an angry flush comes into her face. "I was just trying to protect the ship! My friends are here!"
"It's death," Kron says, perfectly calm.
The girl's defiance visibly deflates, brown eyes filling with panic. "Ma'am, I... I... I..."
The truth is, while Kron had been perfectly willing to get angry at Salimus when it seemed he had not even been willing to stay in contact during the skirmish, the performance of the prototype in its defence of the ship and destruction of a numerically superior enemy had been exemplary. Far beyond any of Salimus's test scores with the untried technology. That a civilian mecha technician, barely old enough to have been pressed into service for the duration of this voyage, had achieved them... It was approximately as impressive as it was completely unacceptable that Kron had allowed it to happen to begin with.
"What's your name, girl?" Kron asks.
"... Tanaka Mari," she says, voice a squeak.
Kron nods. "It is impossible that a civilian girl did what you did."
"Ma'am?"
"The pride of the Divine Navy cannot abide it. So, there's only one thing to be done." Paling further, Mari closes her eyes, waiting for the end. Instead, Kron holsters her weapon. "Welcome to his Divine Majesty's Navy of Correction, Cadet Tanaka."
/////PoCS/////
Onboard the Esther Strova,
Mecha deck
The immediate minutes following your return to the ship are an exhausted haze. You docked back in your cradle, Azara in your cockpit, her machine in tow, then handed her off to receive the medical attention she so desperately needs.
The whole area is swarmed with techs, under the watchful gaze of Yorke. You barely notice when you're shooed away from your own unit, left off to the side with the three other pilots still standing. You, Cam, Ryan, and Owusu regard each other, no one entirely sure where to begin, the controlled chaos of the mecha crew supplying a background buzz that's almost too loud to speak over anyway. You're saved the trouble of broaching a subject as a fifth person joins you.
Jay Tham looks, somehow, even paler than usual. He moves toward you with less of his customary grace in zero gravity, white hair dishevelled, face drawn. His gaze sweeps over the four of you, confirming what he must already know: Neither Sails nor Kitty, his squadmates, are among your number. "My squad..." he begins, then stops. Unsure how to continue.
For better or worse, Owusu breaks the heavy silence. "They both fought bravely and well." He's the least shaken out of all of you, looking harried, but otherwise calm. His tone is sympathetic, but there's something in his eyes that to you says 'I've seen worse'.
Jay jerks his head back as if struck, staring at the SRI officer with a blank intensity. His mouth is set in an unmoving line, dark eyes cold — this goes beyond his usual air of brooding inexpressiveness, and seems as though it might teeter toward something considerably more explosive. You're saved from whatever that might look like as a small body shoves off from the wall and half-tackles him.
Cam lets her helmet go flying to throws her arms around Jay's neck, burying her face in his shoulder. "We... it just went wrong so fast! It was fine, then it... and then they were... everyone!" She's shaking, you can see, although she's managing to hold back tears for now. You politely avert your gaze. "We tried."
Out of the corner of your eye, you see Jay unbend slowly. That explosive potential leaves him, and his voice is more flatly tired than anything, when he speaks: "I know you did. I... I should have been there." There's nothing remotely amourous about them, even as he puts his arm around her shoulders, guiding her toward the relative privacy of the briefing room you'd all been assembled in a thousand years ago.
"It's not your fault," you hear Cam say.
"No," he agrees, bitterly, "but I still should have been there."
You, Owusu and Ryan glance after the two of them, before exchanging another awkward look between you. Owusu, once again, speaks first. "Well, I need to go tell a few people 'I told you so'."
Ryan gives him a dubious look. "... You're joking," he says.
Owusu waves the hand that isn't keeping him anchored to the wall, airy manner returning. "No, not at all — I don't imagine Captain Leski will be particularly receptive, but... well, I might have some luck, hitting now while the iron is hot. Maybe next time, he'll take my qualified advice a little more seriously."
"Or he'll punch you in the face," you say.
Owusu is already floating for the hatch. He isn't even bothering to change out of his pilot suit. "They train us to duck," he says, tossing a careless wave over his shoulder.
"Dick," Ryan mutters.
You raise an eyebrow. "He saved all our lives today."
"Well, yeah, and I'm glad for that. Doesn't make him less of one, though."
You can't help it. Something about Ryan's expression as he says this strikes you is momentarily, inexplicably hilarious. You burst out laughing, drifting away from him into the wall behind you, cackling almost madly. "I'm sorry!" you say. "Just... your face!"
Ryan stares at you, long and hard. Then he lets out something between a growl and a sigh, and he's gone too, leaving you floating there on your own. It's not the ideal note you'd like to have left on, but sometimes you have to laugh so that you don't cry.
In the end, damages to the ship are severe but not cripping — a storage module ruptured in the fighting, leaving a hole in the Esther Strova's outer armour where it has been jettisoned. It took the body of a truly luckless crewmember with it. You're not in danger of starving for lack of those supplies, but you all face the prospect of living off meal replacement bars in due time. So far, no one has been tasteless enough to complain about that aspect yet.
Owusu has cloistered himself in Leski's office, along with the Captain and First Officer Booker. You haven't exactly pressed your ear to the hatch to listen to them, but you imagine that there's probably some raised voices involved in whatever conversation is going on, even if it doesn't quite rise to the level of anyone being punched. Cam is still with Jay, you assume. You have no idea where Ryan is, but you suspect that you wouldn't be welcome there.
Not that you're feeling particularly welcome in the place you actually are instead, mind you. But, all considered, you can live with that.
August was the picture of shock. "You've really figured it out, Miss Wong?"
October smiled knowingly, crossing her arms and leaning back against one of the few counters not piled high with fabrics. "I've had my suspicions for some time now," she said. "But it was you yourself who let the last piece fall into place."
"Whatever could you mean?" gasped August.
"It's simple, really," October began, "You see, I—"
"Ms. Himegami, do you need to be in here?"
You look up from your reading at the waspish voice, fixing Doc Goodwell with a 'friendly' smirk. "Yes." You promptly bring the tablet back up. "I will not be taking further questions at this time."
Goodwell huffs angrily, but doesn't attempt to eject you from the medical bay. She has no practical reason to, after all. Her patients are stable, and you're staying well out of her way, strapped in as you are at one of the waiting stations near the medical module's inner hatch, reading quietly. You're faintly aware of her puttering around her antiseptic little domain, but the bulk of your attention is divided between your novel and the module's other two occupants.
In the end, you lost three pilots. Two more are seriously injured. One of those two, Azara Black, is strapped down to the bed nearest you, peacefully sedated, half her face covered in bandages. She will live and make a recovery, but right away it was obvious there was no saving the eye. Beyond her, strapped into the second bed, the second injured pilot is similarly asleep.
/////PoCS/////
In addition to Jennifer Sails and Shen Zhìháo, Who didn't make it to this medical bay?
[ ] Kitty Wehrschmidt, Jay's squadmate
[ ] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
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Oh great, the civilian prodigy ace is on the other side.
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
Azara gets her confession
And we all move up in rank.
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
Azara gets her confession
DracoDracul
Transbian Communist
- Location
- Austin
- Pronouns
- She/They
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
By making Kitty die, Jay would be the only one left in his own squad. By letting Sunny die, that would be a minus one in the husbando wars.
[X] Kitty Wehrschmidt, Jay's squadmate
We were fighting a kid. Who was kicking our collective tails.
We're boned.
EDIT: I have been convinced that we need all the squad leads we can get. Sorry, Azara :, (
We were fighting a kid. Who was kicking our collective tails.
We're boned.
EDIT: I have been convinced that we need all the squad leads we can get. Sorry, Azara :, (
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- Location
- New York
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
I have a feeling that Sunny is gonna get yeeted out of life from this, and so because of that
[X] Kitty Wehrschmidt, Jay's squadmate
I'm voting for minority.
Oh, and for meme reasons, we can't just kill a husbando when we haven't seen his prospects yet.
[X] Kitty Wehrschmidt, Jay's squadmate
I'm voting for minority.
Oh, and for meme reasons, we can't just kill a husbando when we haven't seen his prospects yet.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
STARSCAPE: So, what's the scariest feeling to you now?
DAME NALAH: Excuse me?
STARSCAPE: You said that that "used to be" the scariest feeling in the world to you. What happened to change your mind?
DAME NALAH: Next question!
DAME NALAH: Excuse me?
STARSCAPE: You said that that "used to be" the scariest feeling in the world to you. What happened to change your mind?
DAME NALAH: Next question!
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- Location
- Earth
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
cB557
voOOP
Hm. I actually am interested in this aspect, a dead squad leader might be an opportunity for us to see why other view us as conniving, one way or another. Though, I think at least one of the other squad leaders died in the battle, so it might not be necessary for Sunny to die for that to happen.
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
Meme and contrarian reasons aside, yeah, this just put me more solidly into the dead Kitty camp
[X] Kitty Wehrschmidt, Jay's squadmate
Sunny is a cool guy! Let's keep him alive. Don't vote for Kitty to stay alive over him just because she got a tiny plot thread this update.
Sunny is a cool guy! Let's keep him alive. Don't vote for Kitty to stay alive over him just because she got a tiny plot thread this update.
Wings-Of-Change
On the Changiest of wings
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
[X] Sunny Monserrato, your Squad Leader
While I ride the change, I would not change the prospective relationship of Kitty.
While I ride the change, I would not change the prospective relationship of Kitty.