In a mecha setting, where good pilots - especially those in nonstandard suits - are worth double their weight in gold, and every one of whom we have personal reasons to save... you let one of them die. For cargo.
"Commander," he says, "do you realise how valuable that much Menschy matter is? That is enough to keep the shipyards around Iapetus churning out warships for the next twenty years! I'm shocked you could even suggest such a thing!"
That cargo represent 20 years of shipyard production. It's priceless, and worthy vastly more than any single soldier. Losing the matter was explicitly mentioned to cripple defensive efforts for decades to come.
Meanwhile, a single soldier is just a single soldier. It's not like he was superhuman, he died in a 3:1 fight.
Not to mention, as interesting as Ito's apparent ability to modify a production model into a unique, elite unit was, we have Faiza to make up for that, even if we might not see her for a bit. She's loads better than he was, he was only a mediocre pilot in spite of his engineering capabilities, and though I wasn't there for the vote in the first place, and would've probably voted slightly differently from the way we went....
We instead took the materials that would go into a whole new line of ships and then some. Considering how this battle is turning out so far, if we actually rebuff this assault then: the first wave will be extremely screwed, we will quite possibly win a huge morale victory for our forces, and depending on the propaganda, a major recruitment drive from this, and more! Those potential people might be the very ones who get to crew those potential ships we helped start creating, etc, etc.
Now, granted, we very well might not win, and this could turn out disastrous for the war effort. But at the end of the day, Ito just wasn't worth the cost to save him, then and now.
People bringing up the quest's "depressing" nature isn't exactly new. I should know, since I've commented on it twice before, with points similar to those made recently, albeit in a shorter form. There is some merit to it, seeing as this quote:
seems to encapsulate what a number of the quest's decisions have been. A lot of those decisions were made back to back as well, which I feel heightens the feeling of... bleakness?
Are you telling me a galactic war in a Gundam-like setting that spans an entire solar system and with casualties right up in the millions with some being civilians that were slaughtered simply because they don't follow the Emperor is dark and depressing?
I also think it's almost uncomfortably dark, but I also realize it's in the opening stages too, and that's pretty much the gundam trend, if you look at MSG and SEED as examples of how the plot progresses. Lots of bad shit happens early on before they have a chance to flip things around.
Yeah, we've taken losses, but those are inevitable, and despite them the ship has held together. Considering the situation we were in it wouldn't have been unreasonable for the Rose to have been caught by the enemy fleet and destroyed, but instead we saved the princess, recovered priceless resources, and got ourselves and the civilians back to friendly territory. It hasn't felt to dark to me; while there's a very palpable cost of war I feel like we have something worth fighting for and the ability to win.
Yeah, we've taken losses, but those are inevitable, and despite them the ship has held together. Considering the situation we were in it wouldn't have been unreasonable for the Rose to have been caught by the enemy fleet and destroyed, but instead we saved the princess, recovered priceless resources, and got ourselves and the civilians back to friendly territory. It hasn't felt to dark to me; while there's a very palpable cost of war I feel like we have something worth fighting for and the ability to win.
Honestly in hindsight it could be a highly decorated story of a great crew and her ship in the eyes of the restored Empress. When you put it like that- I doubt so many of our ships have been so lucky or so capable in that way.
Yeah, we've taken losses, but those are inevitable, and despite them the ship has held together. Considering the situation we were in it wouldn't have been unreasonable for the Rose to have been caught by the enemy fleet and destroyed, but instead we saved the princess, recovered priceless resources, and got ourselves and the civilians back to friendly territory. It hasn't felt to dark to me; while there's a very palpable cost of war I feel like we have something worth fighting for and the ability to win.
"[ ] The Rose isn't sunk" is a possible after-battle option that would have come up in battle #3 if you hadn't successfully mitigated it down to the possibility of the ship being heavily damaged instead.
It was really only the scene of Mosi getting beaten after the Academy was occupied. I could hear pavlov's bell ringing down here in Australia. Damn, that was a tragic scene for all involved.
Be advised, this post in particular contains flashbacks of abuse toward a minor, at more length than previous depictions.
Thanks in particular to @Kei for significant help and feedback in terms of early structure and character direction with this update, the end product would not have turned out as well without it. Thank you for your hard work and for continuing to put up with me.
Guilt, confusion, 42 votes
Cold disdain, 15 votes
Anger, accusations, 3 votes
hug mosi : ( 1 vote
Finding Amani has not, as Mosi hoped, made things simpler, or clearer. As she hauls her sister down the hallway at gunpoint, Mosi can barely stand to look at her, to see that uniform, with its HIMS Titanium Rose ship patch gleaming so proudly silver in the light of the ancillary station shafts she's dragging her through. Everytime she sees it, she thinks back to all the times she wanted to sink that ship. How she tried her hardest to do so, not knowing she was fighting to kill her own sister. Her mother is one thing, but Amani? It's enough to make her sick to her stomach all over again. Somehow, what makes matters worse is that Amani wears it well -- even now, she exudes a comfort in the garment that few ensigns manage. Like she was born to wear it. If Mosi doesn't do some very fast talking back at the fleet, she's also likely to die in it.
She can feel Amani's dark, familiar eyes on her. In Mosi's mind, they're harsh and judgemental, a mirror for every bad thing she's thinking about herself at the moment. As the initial, disorientating shock finally begins to fade, she registers that Amani's still talking. Mosi blinks, stealing another painful glance at Amani, at Ensign North of the United Solar Empire's Imperial Navy. To Mosi's surprise and relief, she's not glaring, although the mix of hurt, fear and intense scrutiny she finds looking back at her isn't much better. She makes herself concentrate on the words, rather than just on their eventual destination.
"I said, do you even know how many people you've killed?" Amani is asking, voice thick with something like disbelief. As if still in shock that Mosi, her own sister, could have done something so--
So--
"Yes!" Mosi snaps. Squeezes her eyes shut, forcing herself to open them again before it's time to take them down another sharp corner. "... No," she admits. "Not exactly. I... I have an idea. We... I didn't know."
"You... didn't know?" The incredulous note in Amani's voice makes Mosi want to cringe away from her.
"I didn't know!" she says. "About... about the civilians on those platforms. Not until right at the very end!"
"But you did it anyway," Amani points out. Appalled. She's as horrified as Kim had been, Mosi realises. She's just more composed about it.
"It was too--" had it been too late? No, it hadn't been. Mosi could have shot Roth and the others. She could have prevented it, for once. "... why were there even civilians on defence platforms?" she asks, the anger in her voice surprising her. "How can you be defending people who'd use civilians as human shields?"
"Mosi, there was nowhere else to put them. After the exodus, there were too many people and nowhere near enough habitats to keep them all in. We did what we could." 'We'. That's as hard to hear as the uniform is to see. That particular 'we' is what will get her sister summarily executed. "... and why would we have bothered to try using civilians as shields against the Divine Navy, even if we were that heartless?" Amani continues, "It's not as though the Holy Empire has ever been shy about murdering civilians. The Utopia purges."
Mosi flinches. "Dad wouldn't have died if he'd just... done what he was told," she says, speaking quickly. She stops short of taking them down a wrong turn. "He could have saved himself! He just needed to stop defending her and swear allegiance. Dad could have lived."
"Even if they hadn't shot him, Mosi, plenty of other people died that day. You were on Mars, you must know that. I've seen footage."
Mosi looks at her suddenly, wild eyed. "You--" Amani shouldn't have seen that. She shouldn't have heard the screams or the gunshots, or seen the sea stained as red as the Martian soil, let alone-- Not Amani. Not even on video. She swallows her revulsion, forces down the memories. Tries to forget the feelings of that day. The smells. There are enough atrocities going through her head at the moment, without dredging up the past. "Being there was worse," Mosi says, voice abruptly hollow, far away.
"Why are you working for these people, Mosi?" Amani whispers. "Why are you doing this?"
She serves His Divine Majesty and carries out His will. The rote response comes readily to mind, and nearly to her lips. But this isn't a Divine Navy officer or a Holy Empire official. This isn't someone watching her like a vulture, looking to report any sign of weakness she shows. This is Amani.
So Mosi lets the quote from the Divine Navy's Oath slip away, and lets the truth come out of her mouth instead, a bitter and petty sentiment, next to the grand religious statement. It's been so long since she's voiced anything close to it, that it feels strange, and a little exhilarating. Mosi looks at Amani and gives a quiet, derisive snort. "Call it the last thing dad ever taught me."
"He taught you to serve his murderers?" Amani asks, voice flat, judgemental.
"He taught me to do what I'm told and say what's expected and I won't be the next one shot! I did what I had to!" Mosi snaps, anger flaring. "I'm... I'm still doing what I have to." She glares for a moment, until her face falls again, and she admits, voice suddenly haggard, "He'd be alive, and I wouldn't have been... I wouldn't have had to..."
"But you're not, Mosi! You didn't have to do any of this!" Amani say. "None of those people had to die. None of this had to happen. You could have done the right thing."
"The right thing?" Mosi asks, incredulous, almost surreally indignant. "The right thing?"
"Yes!"
The latest burst of anger subsides, and when Mosi next speaks, her voice takes on a clear streak of cold bitterness again. "You have no idea what the 'right thing' is," she mutters.
"I know that the right thing isn't spacing a few hundred civilians, Mosi!"
That hits home. In spite of Mosi's indignation at Amani, she feels the horror of that moment claw in her chest again. "And it's not leaving your thirteen year old daughter to rot so you can die pretending to be a hero," she says, voice filled with real venom. "I've been on my own, surviving for ten years, Amani. What do you want from me? Just flip a switch and... and..."
Amani cringes at the harsh characterisation of their father's last moments, but pushes past that with visible effort: "You haven't had to be on your own since you found me," Amani insisted, "you could have just told me. You could have just admitted what was going on, and we would have done whatever we could to help."
"You would have helped me?" Mosi lets out a harsh bark of laughter. "You would have helped me, Ensign North? Yeah, I'm sure your influence would have been enough to keep me out of a dark cell somewhere."
"I would have done what I could!" Amani says, visibly stung. "And I didn't just mean me -- Mother's a knight, Mosi. She would have done whatever she could to help you, no matter what kind of trouble you were in. She would have used all the pull she had. She-- Ow!"
Guilt piercing her blinding rage, Mosi forces herself to relax her suddenly painful grip on Amani's arm. "Don't," she says, voice low and menacing, "talk about her helping me."
"... why? She would help you!" Amani says, voice thick with confusion. "No matter what you've done!"
Mosi takes in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. She hooks a foot into a handhold on the shaft floor, feeling a sudden urge to stop. "I'm going to kill her," she hears herself saying.
"You're--" Amani is momentarily speechless, caught off guard by the black determination in Mosi's voice. "What?"
"I've been planning to kill her for years," Mosi says, deadly serious. "I swore I'd do it."
"Mosi..." Amani is still at a loss, staring at Mosi like she's saying something insane. "Mosi... she's our mother! She lov--"
"She's a heretic fighting in opposition to the guiding will of our true Divine Emperor! Heretics defying His will deserve no mercy!" Mosi's words are automatic, drawn from the deep well of opinions it's safe for her to have, the ones that have kept her alive all these years. Even so, the force behind it is genuine, livid anger.
"So am I," Amani points out. "Does that mean you're going to kill me too?"
"No!" Mosi recoils as far as she can without letting Amani go. "I'm not-- You don't... you don't understand!" Abruptly, she hauls on Amani's arm, pushing off to send them floating down the shaft again, faster this time.
"What don't I understand about you wanting to kill our mother?
"She... She..." Mosi, flailing, blurts out, "it's her fault you're in the navy! It's her fault you're wearing that! You never wanted to be a spacer, you told me!"
"That was when I was a little girl, Mosi," Amani objects. "I've wanted to be an officer since they killed you."
That's enough to momentarily break through the hate and pain directed at Dame Nalah. Mosi opens her mouth to respond, but she can't seem to muster anything. She's silent for a moment before asking, softly, in a strangely halting voice, "Did she tell you they killed me?"
"Everyone did," Amani says. "We all thought you were dead. What don't I understand, though? Why do you want to hurt mother? Stop giving me these empty, meaningless answers! Why?"
"She... she!"
"Why?"
Mosi sucks in a deep breath, as if she's going to scream, but what eventually comes out is barely above a whisper. "... she left me." It's the first time she's ever said it out loud, and it leaves her feeling unmoored, uncertain.
"What?"
"She LEFT ME!" The shouting comes belatedly. So loud that it reverberates around the walls, makes Amani's head jerk back from Mosi. "She left me behind in that place! Where they... they..." Her eyes go blank, and for a numb, harrowing moment, she's sixteen years old again:
Rough hands seizing Mosi, pulling her, dragging her out of bed in nothing but her undergarments, startling her from a deep sleep, feminine voices jeering as she hits the cold, hard floor. Staring up to find herself surrounded by uniformed girl-cadets. Girls in Mosi's own year, who have long since realised that being cruel to a traitor's daughter -- one who may not even survive to graduation -- wasn't just acceptable, it was a good way to prove their loyalty to the Divine Emperor.
"Get up, Mosi." The sing-song voice of the ring-leader. Limin, whose older brother had died in the purges, like Mosi's father, every vindictive line on her face saying 'as long as it's you, it's never me.' Mosi's face suddenly bathed in the a crackling, blue light of a riot-baton presumably liberated from the Academy's armoury, forcing her to scramble to her feet to avoid a poke aimed at her eye. It grazed her bare stomach instead. Gasping, lancing pain shooting through her, muscles seizing momentarily. Seeing, then, that Limin was hardly the only cadet so armed. "Come on, Mosi. Let's go for a walk."
Mosi going with them, herded through darkened corridors, head bowed in shame-faced, terrified submission, feet bare against tile floors chilled by the Martian winter. Their destination, it became clear, was the third year boy's dorms. 'Nothing' happened after they'd shoved her loudly in and blocked the door -- none of the sleepy, startled, young boys in the dorm had touched her, but their stares and jokes and callous comments, the stark humiliation of the moment, were all frightening enough. The threat of what hadn't happened was still something that would keep Mosi awake at night for years to come, alongside the other worst episodes from her time as a cadet.
"You don't know what it was like!" Mosi says, back in the present, dragging a girl of her own at weapon-point through very different passageways. "You have no idea what... what..." She gasped in a shuddering breath, forcing the panic down, forcing the hand holding the gun not to press the muzzle into Amani's skin as the slideshow of traumatic incidents continues through her head. "... ping-pong balls," Mosi says, suddenly. Amani can feel the shudder of revulsion that just went through Mosi's body, she's sure. "How many... how many of them do you think it takes... how many of them do you think someone can--"
The growing confused horror on Amani's face is enough to force Mosi's throat to click shut in a moment of blind panic. Judging by her expression, Amani doesn't entirely understand -- she's not imaginative enough for that. For a fleeting moment, Mosi is entirely overcome by a surge of overwhelming relief. She never wants Amani to understand.
"You saw videos?" Mosi demands, as if she hadn't started the previous sentence at all, "Of the massacres? I was there, they made me watch when they... I saw--
Amir North, slight, unimposing, a man who had never held a gun in his life. The short but intense swell of pride Mosi had felt, watching him refuse to denounce his wife and kneel to the terrifying warrior cult that had overthrown the government.
That pride had died when he had, when Mosi had seen his blood and brains strewn over the beach, watched his body drop dead and useless to the ground.
"You can't... you can't know... you weren't there." Mosi's initial anger at her mother peters out into something closer to anguish as she struggles to catch her breath. "I'm... so, so glad you weren't there," she adds, in a much softer voice.
Amani stares for a long moment, wide-eyed, before she can seemingly find her tongue again, voice hoarse and shaken. "She really thought you were dead!" Amani insists, urging Mosi to understand this. How much she wants Mosi to believe it, to accept it as an excuse, is intolerable.
"She gave up on me," Mosi says, refuting Amani's claim with single shake of her head -- an oddly brutal gesture. "She left me for dead. I would have died there, if it hadn't been for Professor Green, and for... for the Commander, afterward." Her flight instructor and his brother, the active-duty officer she'd served under for years. Her unlikely saviours, when she'd had no one else. "If it wasn't for them and... and everything I-- everything I did, everything I had to do... she left me!"
Amani's voice has grown gentler again as if she keeps trying to be soothing. It makes what she's saying all the more grating. "What could she have done against the entire rebel army, Mosi? Their fleet in orbit? She's not invincible."
"Something!" Mosi snaps, simultaneously knowing it's irrational, childish even, yet still feeling the old betrayal of it. The full weight of years filled with torment and misery pressing down on her, with no escape or outlet. With no validation or acknowledgment as she spent her days in silent suffering. "Anything! She could have tried!"
The words are met with a ringing silence, so much so that Mosi twists around again, staring at Amani hard. Amani has a strange expression, one that Mosi doesn't like. She's studying Mosi's face like she's seeing something there that Mosi can't perceive. Not pityingly, but sadly, as though she's surveying the scene of a tragedy.
"What?" Mosi demands.
"You don't even really know, do you?" Amani asks.
Mosi slams her foot down, and barely brings them to a stop again without spilling them both through the air. "What don't I know?"
"How much like her you are, sometimes."
It's not rage so much as blind panic that spurs Mosi's next action. Heedless of the gun, she releases Amani's arm, and grips a handful of her jacket. "Don't you dare compare me to her!" Then she flings Amani back against the far wall, hard. For a horrible moment before Amani impacts, Mosi thinks of herself being slammed again and again against a wall by Roth, and she wants nothing more than to take it back. She can't, though -- Amani's back collides with the wall, and she lets out a pained cry.
Mosi begins to move over to her, apologies spilling out of her mouth frantically. "I'm sorry! I shouldn't have done that, I never wanted to hurt you!"
"Mosi!" Amani says, voice sharper than it's been any time before. "You're kidnapping me at gunpoint! You can't just do that, or shoot my friend or space hundreds of civilians and just be sorry afterward!"
"I--" Mos catches herself on a ceiling handhold, stopping herself from getting too close to Amani. Afraid to, suddenly, as if she might hurt her again without meaning to. Mosi hadn't wanted this, any of this. She just wanted Amani to live. She wanted, somehow, inadequately, to be able to protect her. "I... I just wanted--" Whatever she'd meant to say, however, catches in her throat as she sees the object -- a naval-issue communicator headset, still lit from an open call -- drifting in the shaft between them. From where Mosi has just inadvertently knocked it loose. "You had a call open!" she shouts at Amani, an irrational feeling of betrayal twisting inside of her. "Who was listening to that?"
"Mosi, it's not too late. Just, turn yourself in," Amani says. "You can still try to make this right!"
Mosi looks at her for a moment, conflicting feelings roiling inside her. She wants to make things right. She has always wanted to make things right, ever since she found herself trapped on Mars, surrounded by people who wanted her to suffer, who wanted her dead. Now, it's all she can do to increase her chances of surviving, find some measure of security so that she can be sure no one can torment her again. This is as good as things get. This is as good as anything will ever get. Making things right isn't real. It isn't possible. Things haven't been right since the civil war. Instead of right, what she has was... This.
"No," she says, shaking her head, "It's ten years too late." And with that, she launches herself down the shaft alone, leaving Amani behind. Leaving Amani to die when the Divine Navy takes the station, and finally giving up on the cruel dream of saving anything from that hazy past where she had anything in her life beyond serving and fighting. Would Amani have had any more of a chance if Mosi hadn't left her? No, she's sure of that now. And not because of the uniform: When Mosi thinks about Amani talking like this, of the Right Thing, of fine morals, of what Mosi should have done, it's not her younger sister's face that Mosi sees in her head. It's her father's.
As she goes, trying to remember the way with frayed concentration and shattered nerves, she keeps expecting for a shot to ring out, for her to be seized by the hands of security officials. As it is, the worst that she encounters is a group of spacers who she all but bowls through. They're annoyed, but they don't notice the gun.
She almost doesn't believe it when she reaches the shuttle bay, when her hand slaps down on the door of the small shuttle standing idle there. But suddenly, she's inside it, and the pilot, his hatch left open, has twisted around to regard her, half frantic. "Oh thank fuck!" he says. Blinks. "Wait, where's--"
"Just me!" Mosi says, hurriedly sealing the door and strapping herself into the nearest seat. "We need to go now. We've been made."
"Made?" the shuttle pilot demands.
"I'm probably being chased. You should go before they realise that I'm on this shuttle."
He noticeably pales, his outer-Saturnian accent getting even thicker. "Fucking dammit," he mutters. "Fine. Fine! You kicked enough of a hornet's nest that I can pass for a relief shuttle for a while, but-- Sol."
"The worst that happens is they kill us," Mosi says.
"Yeah, that's what I'm worried about!" the pilot snaps, quickly keying in his ignition sequence. "If I somehow make it out of this, I am never doing another favour for Heinrich Lee."
--
You watch Mosi go, stunned and dismayed, simply floating in the shaft for a moment. The physical force of hitting the wall -- it will leave a bruise, nothing more serious -- is nothing compared to the barrage of emotion that your sister bludgeoned you with before fleeing.
Watching the veil of fanatical religiosity fall away from Mosi was both encouraging and discouraging at the same time. On one hand, your sister isn't a mindless zealot incapable of reason or moral thinking. On the other, what she does appear to be is a girl who has had every ounce of fight kicked out of her by things too horrible for her to even try and convey to you. You vividly recall those multiple times where you could tell she was forcing herself not to voice something particularly horrible. That might prove to be equally unreachable, in the end, and it doesn't change the fact that she has such openly murderous intent for your mother.
Regardless of whatever else, just hearing her talk like that broke your heart.
You know your words affected her, and it's clear now that she was never actually going to shoot you, but you have no way to know whether any of what you said actually sunk in. Or what it could accomplish if it did.
"North? North!" A hand is gently shaking you, and you snap back to alertness.
"Sir!" you say, looking up at the concerned face of Lieutenant-Commander Owusu. Behind him, you catch sight of a group of security personnel armed with handguns, clad in sinister black rather than the ordinary station security uniforms. Gathering up your wits, you point in the direction Mosi vanished down. "She went that way!" you say. "She has some way off the station, I think!"
Owusu gestures the security team onward, and they leave without him. "Are you alright, Ensign?" he asks.
"I'm fine, sir," you say. "She only shoved me, right at the end. Did you... get all of that?"
"Yes," he says, nodding. "You were doing well on stalling her, right up until you hit that nerve about Dame Nalah."
"I..." you shake your head, trying to clear out some of the distressing clutter. "I... should get to the Rose, sir."
"She's gone," he says, pushing back from you. He's wearing a pilot suit, you realise. Mint green like his regular uniform, with the SRI eclipsed sun clearly visible on the breast. A black disk rimmed in a white penumbra, the final result like a staring eye. "The Rose unmoored a few minutes ago. Your unplanned sibling reunion made you miss it."
You groan. You're so keyed up now that the thought of being forced to wait around uselessly on Anchiale while a battle goes on makes you wish Mosi had slammed you against the wall a little harder. Owusu is eying you, though, glancing between you and the empty shaft that Mosi vanished down. Finally, he mutters: "Justice won't do much good if everyone's dead."
"Sir?"
"I'll be most useful out there anyway," he says, "rather than in here, chasing a fugitive. The security team will catch her or they won't, with or without me breathing down their necks." He looks at you sidelong. "Are you sure you're alright for ship duty right now, North? We're going into combat and... that was a lot just now. I heard it. Even ignoring the gun."
You close your eyes again, shaking your head. "I just want to do something useful," you say, hoping he understands, "I just want to do my job. There's no time to fall apart while we're about to have a battle."
He looks at you for a moment longer, before finally nodding. "Well, in that case, I think I have a way to still get you to the Rose before the fighting starts."
You look at him, uncertain. "... how, sir?"
--
Dame Nalah North stares down at the busy signal on Amani's comm line, before sighing, setting all personal calls to silent, and snapping the tablet back to her belt. Things were moving quickly and chaotically enough, ships launching as fast as they could be safely cleared, that she'd half expected not to be able to get ahold of Amani before the battle. Still, though, before they're both forced to risk their lives again, she would have dearly liked to hear her youngest's voice.
Nalah looks up at the towering form of her Fenris Lancer, the sleek, black paint interrupted by the freshly retouched blue emblem of the Knights Lunar. The pleasing, smooth lines of the classic Lancer design, for this proposed replacement, had been reshaped into something both elegant and dangerous, its singular main camera glowing large and green, periodically blinking on as pre-flight tests continued to be run.
All around, the hangar was filled with the sounds of shouting voices, power tools, mecha joints being slowly tested. Nalah's wing, consisting of three full squads, had already gone through post-mission maintenance by the time of the Defence Array blowing. However, they hadn't been quite ready for active deployment. Now, there is a scramble to fix that in time for the enemy attack that is bound to be on the catastrophe's heels. This isn't going to be a minor skirmish or a light fleet action -- Nalah can somehow feel that in her bones. It has been the better part of a decade since she's been involved in a truly grand engagement. Not since the Asteroid Belt. Not since Ceres. A battle that had ended with, in terms of troops alone, two hundred thousand dead, by conservative estimates. In Nalah's experience, conservative estimates are almost always wrong about such things.
"Can't I just wait here for you all to get back?"
Nalah is startled, slightly, by the small, childish voice at her elbow. Faiza Bal hangs next to her, holding onto a wall handhold with both hands. "You should have left already, Miss Bal," Nalah says, eying the girl a little sternly. "What was the deal about me letting you watch my unit being serviced?" At Faiza's continued, half-insolent silence, Nalah sighs, and reminds her. "You agreed to follow instructions."
"So I have to go to a shelter?" Faiza whines.
"It's not safe for you here," Nalah agrees. "Go on."
Faiza lets out a long sigh, comically weary coming from a 12 year old who could pass for 10. "You're not going to die, are you?" She asks it in such a straightforward way that Nalah has to choke back a bark of laughter. Faiza frowns. "I'm not joking. Do you promise you won't just go off and die?"
Eying the girl more seriously, Nalah shakes her head. "I don't make promises that I can't keep. You're old enough to understand." Faiza looks at her for another silent moment, before slowly, glumly nodding. Thawing a little, Nalah reaches out and ruffles the girl's dark hair. "I'm damn hard to kill, though," she says, by way of reassurance. "At least compared to most people. Now, get to safety. Go straight there."
"Okay, okay," Faiza agrees, reticence almost verging on melodrama. But in the end, she obeys, navigating out of the zero gravity hangar with an agility that no one born on any kind of a planet could hope to match. "You'd still better try your best!" she calls over her shoulder.
Grinning in spite of herself, Nalah watches to make sure she leaves. Despite what one might assume, the quick shine Nalah has taken to the girl has little to do with her reminding her of either of her own girls at that age. She doesn't: Faiza bears little resemblance to Amani's earnest, quiet sweetness, nose in a reader app, all manners and gentle smiles even then. She bears just as little to driven, self-seriousness pre-teen Mosi -- preparing for her first year at the Imperial Academy on Mars, the crowning ambition of her young life. Determined to be the best student she could possibly be. Determined, Amir had insisted, to live up to Nalah.
The truth is, Faiza's mix of genuine prodigy and cocky bravado, obscuring that deep loneliness the girl was too proud to admit to, is deeply endearing to Nalah all of its own sake. She likes the child, and wants to help her.
"Chief, did Jonah ever tell you about that faulty thruster array?" Nalah asks the thin, composed looking Chief Warrant Officer Zhu as he glides past.
He stops himself short on the nearest mecha limb not currently being tested and turns to face her, eyes narrowed. "No, ma'am, Lieutenant Jonah did not mention anything like that. While we were spending days already servicing these machines." His voice is pitched to carry to the young man in question, despite seemingly having not having raised it at all. It is, as far as Nalah can tell, a skill mysteriously possessed by all warrant officers.
"It's not faulty!" Jonah calls, shooting Nalah a look worthy of a schoolboy being told on for slacking off on his work. "It's just... I just have to compensate a bit, Chief! I'm used to it."
"You being used to your unit being fucked doesn't do your squad a lot of good if you get killed over it, sir," Zhu growls. "And it sure doesn't do me any good when I have to explain why a mecha I serviced failed in combat." The 'sir' manages to communicate 'you brainless idiot' well enough that Jonah very nearly flinches. He theoretically outranks Zhu, but the practical dynamic between a chief warrant with 20 years of service and a young mecha lieutenant whose Banner Recon Type is currently in the former's hangar is somewhat more complicated than that.
Nalah's sympathies are limited. Jonah has been putting off getting the problem fixed for months, and she'll be damned if he's going to go into combat like that. He's her newest squad leader, and he has to learn that being a hot shit pilot isn't licence to set that kind of example. She could have simply chewed him out, but at this point, he deserves to have a senior NCO doing it instead.
"Glad you got to that, Cap'," a gravelly, feminine voice notes, from the other side of her. "You took your time -- you've been out of it lately."
"Thank you for your valuable opinion, Tran," Nalah says, eyeing the middle-aged career lieutenant, half amused at the near insubordination in spite of herself. "I do always appreciate you telling me how to do my job."
"It's not a good sign when I'm the one trying to," Tran notes. She stares hard in the direction of the still closed mecha hatch. "This is going to be shit, ma'am. The zealot fucks have killed a lot of people already, and we haven't even started fighting yet. Do you have your head where it belongs?"
Nalah's humour evaporates, and she eyes Tran with uncharacteristic gravity. In spite of holding the same rank, in practical terms a mecha captain does not hold quite the hierarchical prestige of a full ship's captain. Regardless, Tran's conduct would still be very unwise, even leaving Nalah's knighthood aside, were it not for a long enough working relationship to presume a degree of familiarity. Tran's greatest asset is not her manners at the best of times, and Nalah can tell that the defence array blowing has her rattled. Or furious. Or both. "My head's where it needs to be, once we're out there, Lieutenant," Nalah tells her.
Tran sighs. "It always is in the end, ma'am. I just don't want to watch you die over something stupid anymore than I do the kid." she glances at Jonah, where he's sheepishly showing Zhu and several specialists the subtle malfunction on his thruster array.
"It's like I just told the girl," Nalah glances back in the direction Faiza has just vanished in, "I'm hard to kill."
"Respectfully, no one's hard to kill, ma'am," Tran says, flatly. "You know that as well as I do."
"I do," Nalah concedes. She can understand where the concern is coming from. She's been distracted over concern for Mosi. But she isn't lying when she says her thoughts will be where they're needed once she's actually behind a set of mecha controls.
In spite of that, she is, of course deeply worried about both her girls. It still doesn't seem real, thinking of Mosi as a person in the present-tense, as a grown woman who spent ten years on her own in who knows what kind of hell hole. Part of Nalah -- in spite of how badly she wants to talk to her, apologise to her, even just see her face -- hopes that she got off of Anchiale right after the shooting. Hopes she's somewhere far, far away from the fighting, when it starts. Stars all know, Nalah can't even hope as much for Amani. Scouting ships often don't end up in pitched combat, Amani's disastrous first voyage aside, but one way or the other, the Titanium Rose would be in pitched combat this time. Ranger classes had just enough guns to make them a worthwhile target, and just little enough in the way of armour to make them go down distressingly fast under sustained fire.
Nalah finds herself thinking, suddenly, of Gloriana Perbeck. With her golden hair, frosty formality and vestigial title. She's still entirely unconvinced that the countess is any kind of a good match for Amani, but if she manages to keep that little ship safe amid the fury of the coming invasion... well, Nalah might find it in her heart to buy her another drink, on friendlier terms.
"I had a friend stationed out there," Tran explains, belatedly, "in the Defence Array control centre. Probably not seeing him again."
There will be no shortage of that kind of story to go around, Nalah knows. "We'll make them bleed for him," Nalah promises. "For all of the dead."
Tran nods. "Very good, ma'am. He owed me money."
--
When your third call goes unanswered, you're forced to accept that you're not going to get through to your mother. You'd wondered if Lieutenant-Commander Owusu would raise an objection when you voiced the intent to warn your mother about her eldest daughter's murderous intent toward her, but he hadn't. As much good as that did you, in the end. "She's probably prepping to sortie," you say, glumly.
"Cheer up, North," he says, "even if she manages to get herself into something combat-worthy, space is big and there are a lot of mecha involved in these things. Your mother won't exactly be easy to pick out of the crowd."
"She flies a Fenris Lancer, and I... told Mosi that when we first met. She asked."
He grimaces awkwardly. "Oh. Uh, well, space is still big, and Dame Nalah isn't exactly known for being a pushover when it comes to a fight."
You don't find yourself particularly comforted.
The mecha hangar Owusu brings you to is small and empty aside from a single occupied bay. "Maintained for SRI use," he explains. "I'm the only pilot we have here at the moment. So it's just my Empress."
The machine he's referring to is quite clearly a Banner, but... different, somewhat, from what you're used to. More sophisticated looking armour, housing subtly different thrusters in addition to a significantly more advanced anti-mecha rifle. The classic, monocular main camera has been augmented with several smaller ones.
"The ISM32ex Empress Banner," Owusu clarifies, watching where your gaze has landed. "Limited production model, for now, " He's gone over to a storage locker in one wall, quickly keying it open with one gloved hand. A moment later, he sends a green, folded garment sailing across the hangar toward you. "Should fit you," he comments.
You catch the pilot suit, frowning down at the SRI emblem over the breast. "Is it legal for me to wear this?" You ask.
"'Under emergency conditions, it is permissible for an individual to don emergency life saving equipment bearing insignia of rank, title or office to which they are not entitled, so long as a clear and concerted attempt is made to disavow any assumptions of rank, title or office implied by said insignia.' It comes up more often than you'd think." He points to the far side of the hangar. "Change over there, North. I'll have it online in a moment."
You only have a brief opportunity to look at yourself in the mirror, to note your appearance in the relatively form-fitting pilot suit that feels so strange against your skin, before you gather your folded uniform up into a sealed, plastic bag and push yourself back out into the hangar.
The mecha is now active, the camera that serves as its 'eye' glowing a steady white. Owusu floats near the open hatch, waiting for you expantly, although not yet impatiently. As you send yourself gliding on a direct course for the hatch in the torso, he smiles a little approvingly. "That's a better colour on you than turquoise," he notes, tossing you over a helmet in the same shade. You catch it in one hand, latching onto the handle beside the cockpit with the other.
"You are getting increasingly unsubtle with this, sir," you say. With your momentum halted, you let go of the mecha in order to gather your hair away from your neck and slide the helmet down in place. The seals on the helmet, at least, are the same basic technology as a standard navy space suit, and you manage them without any difficulty. Sound cuts out almost completely for a split second before the exterior audio pickup kicks in.
SYSTEM STARTUP... proclaims the block text in the upper corner of your vision projected onto the interior of your visor. PRESSURISED, OXYGENATED ENVIRONMENT DETECTED: ENABLING PASSIVE AIR FILTERS. In the presence of a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure, those same tiny filters will slam shut instantly. They can also be deactivated at any time. As is, they allow the suit's internal ultrapressurised air supply to remain full for the event of an actual emergency.
Owusu has already slipped his own helmet on, considerably faster than you have with the aid of long established muscle memory. "Well, we might be dead before I have to make good on the career advancement hints, so I might as well be."
The cockpit is cramped, and after Owusu straps himself into the pilot seat, you're forced almost up against him while he engages the final launch procedures. Your helmet continues to display information, seemingly going through an automated setup through simply proximity to the mecha.
SYNCHING WITH ISM32ex PRE-PRODUCTION UNIT 0000024
You gasp a little as you feel the haptics throughout the suit activate, rolling over your skin in an uncomfortable wave as the pilot suit tests that everything is functional.
ATTENTION: PILOT SLOT OCCUPIED, SETTING DESIGNATION AS "PASSENGER 01"
WARNING: THE ISM32ex IS NOT RATED FOR PASSENGERS. CONFIRMATION OVERRIDE REQUIRED.
ATTENTION: OVERRIDE AUTHORISED BY PILOT LCdr M. OWUSU. PLEASE EMPLOY EMERGENCY STRAPS FROM UPPER LEFT.
"Here," Owusu says, dragging the strap down from the top of the cockpit. "You'll need this, or you'll get thrown around."
You struggle to pull the strap down across you. It takes some awkward maneuvering before you're properly secured. In the interests of not obstructing his arm movements, you find yourself in a fairly awkward position -- had there been gravity, you'd be practically sitting in his lap. The fact that you're in pilot suits, along with the shock and dread warring in the pit of your stomach prevents this from being intolerably embarrassing. Fortunately, he does not seem inclined to comment or find humour.
While you were strapping yourself in, the lieutenant-commander has been speaking with Anchiale Control. You have yourself arranged adequately just as he's finally cleared to leave and a scan map appears on the inside of your helmet alongside a feed from the Banner's main camera array.
"Alright, North?" he asks, as Anchiale begins to recede behind you, and you're greeted with the busy expanse of space around Iapetus.
"I think this may be some kind of harassment, sir," you tell him, lips pursed. This would never work in actual combat -- not only would it be unsafe for you, there would be too much chance of fouling up the pilot's movements. The two of you aren't planning on fighting like this, however.
Despite your heart not really being in the repartee, Owusu laughs. "I hope not," he says, "you have a scary-- oh, wow, that's timing for you."
A video feed opens up, occupying one corner of your helmet's display -- an entirely familiar face, calling Owusu from within a cockpit of her own. "I see you have your destination flagged as--" Lori stops, mouth partially open, clearly taking in who, precisely, is sharing a cockpit with her old 'friend.' "Milo?" she asks, blue eyes narrowing almost dangerously.
"Yes, Lady Perbeck?" Owusu sounds entirely too by the book, all of a sudden.
"Why is Ensign North sitting on you?"
You resist the urge to point out that you're hovering in front of him, rather than sitting on him. "I was delayed and missed departure, ma'am," you say, hurriedly, "Lieutenant-Commander Owusu is permitting me to come with him to the Rose."
She glances at you in some confusion. "I... see." Not just confusion -- there's something there, some hesitation, something troubling her as she looks into your eyes for that brief moment. When she looks back to Owusu, however, her eyes narrow again.
"Ensign North was taken captive by an enemy infiltrator," Owusu says, bluntly.
Gloriana's eyes widen, her head jerking back. "What?" she demands.
Owusu sighs. "This is still technically classified -- please keep it under your hat -- but, one of the infiltrators who blew the Defence Array was Mosi North. She seemed to be trying to take Ensign North with her back to the Divine Navy's fleet."
Notably, Lori doesn't actually register surprise as she learns about your sister's identity. Instead her face darkens. "I should have killed her." You find yourself shocked more at the conviction in her voice than at the implication that she had the chance to do so. "Ensign North, are you unharmed?"
"Fine, ma'am," you say, quietly. In that particular moment, the need for professionalism chafes.
Lori scrutinises your face a moment longer, as though trying to detect a lie. Then she once again gives Owusu a hard stare. "I take it you let her escape, Lieutenant-Commander?"
"From the sound of it," Owusu says, mildly, "I'm not the only one."
Lori frowns, producing a harsh, self-critical sound from her throat. "Granted," say says. "She's the one I missed." You're not sure, just then, how to feel about this. Had Gloriana killed your sister under such circumstances, it would have been difficult for you to blame her for it. That's not the same thing as being happy about your lover having to kill a family member. How your mother would respond, by contrast, doesn't bear dwelling on.
One particular dot on the crowded scan map, labelled HIMS Titanium Rose, is flagged as your destination. You can see that the two of you are approaching it faster than you expected. Being in a mecha cockpit is nothing at all like being on a ship. You can feel every minor change in course or momentum, hear the steady thrum of the war machine's innards all around you. Even accounting for two bodies occupying a space intended for one, it's a little claustrophobic. Strange lights and ancillary screens fill your beyond the helmet, the pilot forced to contend with all systems on this smaller craft rather than just a singular station. Readouts on thrust, reactor temperature, hull integrity and weapons systems crowd the periphery of your visor, bewildering in their multitude, even as you can't help but feel that the scan suite on display is frustratingly rudimentary.
"If it's alright with you," Owusu says to Lori, "I'd prefer if we could talk face to face, once I'm onboard. I'm contacting the Rose now and requesting permission to land."
"Very well," Lori allows. With one last look at you, she cuts the feed.
"Attention, HIMS Titanium Rose," Owusu says, opening a new channel, "This is Lieutenant-Commander Milo Owusu of the SRI, piloting the ISM32ex Empress Banner. I am formally requesting permission to land."
The voice that responds to him isn't unfamiliar, but it takes you a moment to recognise that this is Anja's temporary replacement. It's a strange feeling. "To land, sir?" The mecha coordinator sounds hesitantly confused.
"Yes. I have one of your junior officers with me."
"You--" the coordinator's frown is all but audible. "I'll... relay the request, sir?" Fortunately, the request is accepted, and the two of you are placed in the short landing queue, right after Lori.
The process of docking with the Rose isn't particularly involved. Matching velocity with the ship at a safe distance, you get your first look at Lori's mysterious new unit on the Empress Banner's main camera. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the railgun on this new unit is seemingly even more substantial than the Huntress's. It would have to be, to lure Lori away from her agile, long-ranged classic.
Before long, Owusu has locked his unit into the exterior of the Rose's mecha hatch. The massive doors slam shut, cutting the mecha off from vacuum. A few moments later the gigantic airlock fills with atmosphere again and the interior doors finally slide open. Seeing the familiar space of your ship's mecha hangar from this angle is almost surreal, and you continue to stare as the hangar crew guides the advanced Banner unit to Bay 02. Sub-Lieutenant Ito, obviously, will not be using it.
As the cockpit hatch finally opens, you have to get out first. As soon as you've cleared cockpit, you're greeted by the sternly concerned face of Lori, in person, helmet already removed. In the space of time it takes for you to salute and move aside, Owusu is out beside you and has somehow already removed his helmet.
He snaps off a salute that is both picture-perfect and somehow obscurely mocking. "Countess Gloriana Perbeck," he says, crisply, "I would like to formally put myself and my unit at your disposal for the coming battle."
Lori returns the salute, a small frown on her face. Her eyes stray to you as you grapple with the release on your helmet, but she's doing an admirable job of acting like you're someone she hasn't been kissing, intimately touching or aggressively pinching within the past 24 hours. "Why?" she asks.
He smiles charmingly. "I'm just one pilot, in a battle like this," he says. "I know you're not an idiot, and I know that you still haven't replaced the two lost pilots who were assigned to this ship. Ma'am."
Her eye twitches slightly, mollified only a little by the belatedly added honorific. "There were a few names that went over my desk," she muttered.
"None of whom are actually here," Owusu says, agreeably. "You know I can follow orders."
"I do," Lori says, almost despairingly, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Going into battle with a squad made out of three different services. Sol help me."
When she says three, you think to glance over at Bay 03. To your surprise, it's occupied by the familiar mirror-finish bulk of the IDIMX Morrigan, all three of its drones repaired and properly stowed, the Imperial Guard emblem freshly repainted over the torso. You frown at this, until you spot an even more familiar human-sized figure, clad in a sunburst-coloured Imperial Guard pilot's suit. J6 studies the emblem on the chest of Owusu's newly arrived mecha, before her eyes track upward to the two people floating beside Lori. When she recognises you, newly liberated from your helmet, she gives a long, slow blink. For her, the equivalent of a double take.
You feel oddly self conscious as she launches herself up to you, eyes on the SRI insignia on your pilot suit. When she draws level with you, you have to fight the urge to immediately babble out an explanation. "I didn't expect to see you still here, Guardswoman," you say, politely, aware that the two higher ranking officers beside you are looking on.
"Her Highness is on Anchiale," J6 explains. "We're defending Anchiale." She's silent for a beat, before admitting, quietly, "I don't want this ship to be sunk."
You find yourself oddly touched by this sentiment. "I would have been left behind there too, if the Lieutenant-Commander hadn't brought me over," you say.
"Ah," she says, nodding fractionally.
"That's why I'm wearing the SRI pilot suit."
"Mm," she acknowledges.
"A pleasure to finally meet you, Guardswoman First Class," Owusu suddenly says, taking the brief lull as an opening. He's reorientated himself toward her, giving her a friendly smile. "I understand you were a great help to Ensign North on the extra-curricular assignment she was working on for me." Beside him, Lori casts him a skeptical look. "Lieutenant-Commander Owusu," he says, by way of introduction.
J6 looks at him, eyes tracking from the eclipsed sun on his chest up to his face and back again once or twice, holding her silence for an uncomfortably long moment. Then, as if he hadn't said anything at all, she turns to face Lori. "My Morrigan is prepped to go when the time comes, Lady Perbeck," she says, giving the Navy Commander a salute.
Looking half amused at Owusu's expense, half grim about squad cohesion, Lori nods. "Thank you, Guardswoman," she says.
With a nod at you, J6 pushes off again, not even looking at Owusu. He stares after her. He waits until she's most likely out of ear shot before speaking in a low, frustrated mutter: "Well, it's probably best to leave well enough alone there. Sometimes, I'm not sorry that most of the Jupiter Branch SRI died in the war."
"It's good to have you on board, Ensign," Lori says, able to turn her attention to you, finally. "Ng's perfectly competent, I'm sure. But I saw his face when Mazlo told him he'd be filling in for you in combat. It didn't inspire confidence."
"... oh," you murmur, wincing. You suppose that a fleet action is probably a bit much for him, all at once. "If we're still on Level Two Battlestations, I can relieve him," you say.
"Please do," Lori says.
"Ma'am, Sir." You salute the two of them again. Then you push off from Owusu's Empress Banner, bag with your folded uniform in tow, and prepare to change as quickly as you can.
--
The HDMS Righteous Fury,
Divine Navy Oak Class Carrier
When Mosi's Saturnian smuggler pilot, forehead dotted with sweat and shoulders trembling visibly, finally brings the shuttle to a stop in one of the Fury's large bays, he lets out a ragged groan, and slams his head down against his board. "Fuck," he says, emphatically. "Fuck. How are we not dead?"
"They were distracted, and you know what you're doing," Mosi says, bluntly. "It wasn't as bad as you're making it sound." The smuggler doesn't answer. Instead, he seems to be hyperventilating.
To be fair to him, as Mosi floats alone out of the passenger's bay, finally returned to the bosom of the Divine Navy, she stares around at the expanse of the carrier's shuttle bay as if in a dream. She still feels both stunned and sick at heart, unable to process such an abrupt return to normality. To what had become normality, for her.
Mosi goes rigid as a heavy arm falls across her shoulders, trying to force herself to relax as she belatedly recognises the voice of the man it belongs to. "Just you, huh, kid?" Commander Green says, grinning in open relief to see her alive and mostly well.
"Looks like, sir," she replies. Her voice sounds far away in her own ears, something someone else is saying.
"Well, shame about the rest of them," Green acknowledges, "but Roth was a bastard anyway. If you don't mind me speaking ill of the dead."
"You're... not wrong," she mutters, too quietly to carry.
The shuttle bay of an Oak class carrier is nearly as large in of itself as the main mecha hangar on a Flower class like the Amaranth. The large chamber is filled with activity, spacers and specialists scrambling to last minute battle preparations, she assumes. More friendly faces than she's seen in weeks. Well, 'friendly faces.'
"The Admiral is going to want to be debriefed, Kid," Green says.
She gives a start. "Countess Nakamura? Personally? By me?"
"Well, by Roth, ideally." Green lets go of her shoulders. "It's a little above your paygrade, normally."
"That would be hard," Mosi admits. "He lost his head."
Green raises an eyebrow. "Figuratively?"
"No. We were jumped on the way back. Cutter went right through the passenger compartment on this tub they had me flying." Mosi runs a hand down her face, and is startled to realise it's shaking. She glares at it, trying to force the digits still through sheer will.
"You're keyed up," Green advises her. "She'll have heard that your shuttle arrived -- go shower
and put on a uniform."
"Right, sir," Mosi murmurs.
The intervening minutes are a blur of busy ship shafts, white tiles, hot water and hot air. At the end of this, Mosi is floating in front of a wall-mounted mirror, staring at her reflection in the crisp white jacket of the Divine Navy of Correction. "Lt. M North" is proudly proclaimed in gold. She is looking at very nearly the sum total of everything she's fought and clawed her way to achieve, these past years.
"I've wanted to be an officer ever since they killed you."
The young officer staring back at Mosi from the mirror is abruptly unrecognisable to her. And not just because of the bruises still on her face.
She shakes her head hard, trying to drive the strange thoughts, the memory of Amani's words, the look in her eyes when she'd said that, out of her mind. It doesn't work -- if anything, it only seems to force all of them into even sharper focus.
"I wasn't dead!" she insisted to the officer in the mirror. "I survived!" The forceful whisper she'd intended is undercut by the look in her reflection's eyes. Uncertain, afraid. Adrift. The version of Amani in her memory is unmoved, giving her that strange, sad look she'd had at the end. A brief, sudden burst of anger wells up, and she raises a hand to smash against the mirror, muscles straining with the last minute effort of stopping the punch as it fizzles out again. Mosi had survived everything. She'd done what she had to. She's still doing what she has to.
What she has to.
"You don't even really know, do you? How much like her you are, sometimes."
Shortly thereafter, she finds herself trailing along after Lady Nakamura's aide, the officious young man giving Mosi frequent, censorious glances. "Not precisely a ringing success, was it, Lieutenant North?" he asks.
"We completed mission objectives within acceptable parameters, sir." Her voice is flat, cold, firm. Everything it's meant to be. Like a thin sheet of ice -- enough to hide what's underneath, but too brittle, Mosi suspects, to hold up to much pushing.
He acknowledges the point with a sniff, coming to a halt at a hatch ahead of her. "Barely." His gaze hardens. "Her ladyship is expecting you inside."
"Yes, sir."
"Do not waste her time, Lieutenant."
"Yes, sir."
He gives Mosi a hard look. Without breaking it, he keys in the comm code beside the hatch. "Ma'am," he says, "Lieutenant North is here." His tone apprends 'finally' to that sentence.
Then Mosi is floating past him, catching herself on a handhold in the room beyond the hatch in order to bring herself up to attention at the front of the sumptuously appointed admiral's office. Countess Nakamura famously began the Civil War as mere knight and Captain. The Emperor, however, rewarded many of his most fervent early supporters handsomely. Those who had survived the war, and who hadn't subsequently fallen out of favour and vanished, at least. Nakamura had threaded the needle to avoid the latter fates through a mixture of skill, luck, and sincerely vicious fanaticism. In person, she's a sturdy woman in her 50s, imposing in her brilliantly white uniform, weighed down by the gold trappings of her rank and titles, the Medals of Deimos and Ceres prominently displayed over her heart among their less famous companions. She pushes herself up from her workstation in order to face Mosi. Mosi finds herself studied by brown eyes, unreadable in their intensity, even as she forces her own gaze to remain somewhere above the Admiral's shoulder.
"Lieutenant Mosi North," Nakamura says, voice flat and faintly rusty. "You're what's left of our infiltration team, I understand."
"I am, ma'am," she confirms.
Lady Nakamura reorientates herself, holding onto the edge of her desk in a more relaxed posture. As she shifts, Mosi can see the rough outline of the files displayed on the admiral's workstation. Planning documents, fleet movements, all with a distinctive, bright red CLASSIFIED STATE SECRET hanging over the top. The Admiral presses a button in order to start a recording. "Lieutenant -- your mission was a mixed success. Within acceptable parameters, but well short of our hopes. Report."
"Yes, ma'am." Mosi's voice takes on a steady, robotic cadence. "At approximately--" The version of the mission she delivers is highly edited, omitting her own escapades surrounding her sister, omitting Kim's panic at the end. She lies without thinking about it, aware that to do otherwise is even more perilous. It's possible, of course, that she'll be caught out on this. That a worse punishment will come down on her at some later date. Why is it still so hard to care?
Throughout, Nakamura is impassive. As Mosi finishes, she gives a fractional nod. "At ease, Lieutenant," she says, finally, belatedly allowing Mosi to adopt an easier position to hold than zero gravity attention. "Not ideal," she says, "but Roth made the right call. A shame he didn't live to hear it." She eyes Mosi with an expectant air.
"He died in glorious battle against the foes of our Emperor," Mosi says, the response coming without hesitation.
Nakamura nods, vaguely approving. "Enough of the defence platforms blew, at least, to ensure the attack's success." She frowns sharply. "What are we going to do with the rest once we take the moon, though?"
"Use them, ma'am?"
Nakamura gives a start, and to Mosi's mortification, she realises that the question had been rhetorical. That she answered with anything but obliging silence is a strong indicator of Mosi's mind being half somewhere else. "I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?"
"Any remaining defensive infrastructure still intact when we captured the moon can be put to our use, ma'am," Mosi says, thanking every star that her complexion makes it difficult to tell when she's blushing.
Nakamura stares at her for a long moment. Longer, Mosi thinks, than the moment warrants, with all that the admiral must have left to do. "Yes. I would suppose so," Nakamura says, finally. The blandly noncommittal note in her voice sends a prickle of dread down Mosi's spine, for reasons she can't immediately identify. "At any rate, Lieut--"
"Ma'am?" Mosi recognises the voice on the comm as belonging to the prissy aide who led her here.
Nakamura sighs. "Yes?" she asks.
"Captain Bresden would like your approval on changes to the Fury's assigned ship placement."
"Changes?" Nakamura's lips curve down into a sharp, displeased frown. "Now?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, he is insisting that--"
"I'll be right there," she snarls, "this won't take long."
Mosi, seemingly forgotten, watches out of the corner of her eye as Lady Nakamura launches herself out the hatch and into the shaft at a borderline undignified speed, leaving Mosi not entirely certain what to do with herself. She hasn't, after all, been dismissed.
At first, Mosi simply stares unseeingly at the frames on the wall, the ornate decorations built into the surface of the false wood of the desk, the luxurious amount of space even aboard a ship as large as an Oak class. Again and again, however, her eyes keep returning to the one place she doesn't want them to linger.
It's a little like when she primed her anti-personnel gun back on the defence platform -- very nearly as though her body is taking action without her explicit sayso, to the point that it takes Mosi a moment to fully realise that she's standing in front of Nakamura's workstation... left carelessly unlocked. Mosi forces her eyes to focus on the plans on the screen. Not, she realises, simply pertaining to the coming invasion of Iapetus. These include documents pertaining to the high level strategy of the Saturn campaign, some containing what looks horribly like the Emperor's personal seal.
There's no time to read it all. Mosi shouldn't even be doing this much. It's foolish, bordering on suicidal. She needs to just turn around and go back to her place. Mosi instead reaches down to her belt, and slowly snaps off her tablet.
By the time Nakamura returns, Mosi is exactly where she was to begin with, floating at ease. The admiral eyes her, with an air of reminding herself of who, precisely, Mosi is. "Ah, Lieutenant," she says. "I never did dismiss you."
"No," ma'am," Mosi agrees.
Nakamura closes her eyes as she reaches the desk, face briefly being allowed to show both fatigue and stress. "Too many things happening at once," she murmurs. Then, louder: "You're free to go, Lieutenant. You are, of course, excused from participating in the coming battle. Get some food and some sleep."
"Ma'am?" Mosi asks, carefully.
"Yes, Lieutenant?" Nakamura asks, frowning. Clearly she hadn't been anticipating an answer other than 'yes ma'am'.
"I would like to respectfully request permission to participate in the invasion, ma'am."
Nakamura looks at Mosi with mild interest. "You haven't had enough, North?" she asks.
"Not yet, ma'am." There are few things Mosi can imagine being worse at the moment than laying in a sleeping bag with only her own thoughts for company, while outside battle goes on. "Commander Green is here, ma'am," she adds.
She looks as though she's prepared to leave things at that, but unexpectedly, the admiral's frown turns understanding. "... You're the North girl," she says, as if this explains everything.
"Ma'am?"
"I can understand why you might want to participate in this battle in particular, Lieutenant," she says. "You're dismissed. Report to your Commander."
"Thank you, ma'am."
As Mosi leaves, she realises what, precisely, had disturbed her so much earlier. The admiral's bland reaction to the suggestion that surviving defence platforms would be useful to them once the Holy Empire took over Iapetus and its population centres -- somehow, it had reminded her of nothing so much as Roth lying to Kim about the civilian habitats on the Defence Array.
"Why are you working for these people, Mosi?"
"So they won't kill me," she whispers under her breath to her sister's ghost. "I can't just stop. I follow orders, I serve my Emperor." The tablet at her belt, somehow, seems to be weighing heavier than it should.
Food, then changing into her pilot suit. She couldn't have told anyone what she actually ate -- one of the beautiful things about Navy issue spacer food is that it's possible to ignore unimportant details like that. Or it might just be the sense of unreality she continues to feel, back with the Divine Navy. Her body almost on autopilot, doing what it needs to, sheltering her from reality until she's confronted with something she needs her wits for. It's been a long time since Mosi has felt that particular way. Not since graduation.
The next time she resurfaces, though, she's wearing her pilot suit, staring up at the familiar, sleekly black form of the most valuable thing anyone has ever trusted her with. The almost insectoid proportions of Mosi's cherished Provespa have been completely repaired since her extended skirmish with the strange Imperial Guard mecha, and she knows that it will serve her well today. Even if her receiving it to begin with had been entirely the Commander's doing, its sinister, three-eyed 'face' is somehow more welcome than almost any other she's encountered since arriving back at the fleet. She hadn't entirely expected it -- she and Commander Green, along with their mecha units, had been assigned to the Amaranth, with the lighter raiding fleet, rather than this larger one.
Regardless, it will be good to be able to just go out in a mecha and see actual combat. To do the one thing Mosi is really good at. To aim a weapon and fire. But just who would she be aiming at, this time?
"You don't even really know, do you? How much like her you are, sometimes."
And just what had that been meant to mean? How is Mosi anything like Nalah? Was Amani accusing her of running out on her family? That makes no sense, given how fervently Amani had argued in their mother's favour. But the bizarreness of the statement, how out of the blue it had been, that stuck in Mosi's head, nagging at her.
"Glad you're joining us, kid," Commander Green says from behind Mosi.
"You know I hate sitting around during combat, sir," Mosi reminds him, turning to give him the barest hint of a smile.
"I know the feeling," Green agrees, "that's part of why I got us transferred out here."
"Both squads?" Mosi asks.
"Yes. I got Sir Ivanov to sign off on it, and the invasion force here was hardly going to turn us down. Your Vessies are here too, next hangar over -- make sure you check in on Smith."
"Yes, sir," Mosi agrees. The outfit that Green commands is slightly irregular, originally an anti-piracy task force putting down brigands and rebels in Jupiter. It had grown to the point that there had been talk of simply promoting Green and making it a more permanent unit... but being reassigned to the invasion of Saturn had put that on the backburner.
He looks at her a little sidelong. Behind him, the ordered chaos of a carrier hangar being prepped for combat is plainly visible, almost comforting in its familiarity. Almost. "You sure you're up for this, kid? You look a few thousand clicks away."
Mosi swallows, before quietly admitting, "The heretics had put civilian habitation pods on the defence satellites. I didn't know, until the last minute."
Green's expression cools slightly. "It's a good thing we'll be removing the illegitimate government who would do such a thing from power, then. Using civilians as human shields is a prime example of heretics having no honour."
Mosi blinks, most of her wanting to take heed of the warning note in Green's voice. "Sir," she says, slowly, unable to stop herself, "I think-- I know that Roth knew, ahead of time. Command knew, ahead of time. I almost--"
Green holds up a hand, stopping her short, his expression turning a little graver. "I think you'll find, kid," he says, "that the official explanation will be that the gutless, heathen rulers of Iapetus put those people there as hostages to stymie our attack, that their deaths were unfortunate but necessary."
Mosi's voice is suddenly a little brittle as she responds: "The official explanation, sir. But not the truth."
Green glances around in a way that looks casual but, Mosi is suddenly aware, is masking a growing anxiety on her behalf. "The official explanation is the only truth that matters," he tells her, with the air of reminding her of something he expects her to already know. "Come on, kid. You're smarter than this."
"Sir, it's just... I..."
"You can have doubts, kid," Green says. He reaches a gloved finger out to physically tap at Mosi's temple, "but you keep them in there. You keep them in there, and you bury them. It doesn't matter with what. Just keep them down until one day, they go away. I've told you that before."
"It gets hard, sometimes," Mosi whispers.
"It's staying alive, kid. Sometimes, staying alive is hard."
"Yes, sir," she says.
"Kid-- Lieutenant." He's looking at her with increasing concern. "You know why I picked you up out of the Academy, all those years ago?"
"Because Professor Green asked you to?"
"Yes, because my brother asked me to," Green agrees, with so much bluntness that Mosi can't help but giving a snort of bitter laughter, "and your simulation scores were through the roof, sure. But the real reason? I took a look at you, this skinny, underfed teenager, and I could tell that you were willing to do what it took to live." He gives her a thin smile. "Survival instinct makes up for a lot, kid."
"I know, sir," Mosi murmurs, shoulders slumping. "I hope you know I'm grateful."
"I know," he says, smiling at her with something like pride. There's a moment of sad, companionable silence, before he asks: "Did you find out anything about your mother?"
Mosi sucks in a breath, and slowly lets it out. "Yes," she says. "She's captaining a scouting wing, piloting a Fenris Lancer."
"An 07fx?" He smiles at that. "There aren't many of those left operational, kid. If you set your scans to ping a Fenris, she'll stick out like a sore thumb, even in the mess you're likely to see out there."
"I've heard they're fast," Mosi says, the feeling of savage catharsis she usually experiences when contemplating her mother's death is somehow diminished, now that the opportunity is finally within reach. Amani's horrified, confused stare at the pronouncement somehow seems to have sucked some of the enthusiasm out of her.
"Sure," Green says, shrugging, "That Fenris Drive they packed onto them is pretty impressive, for its day. Made the Lancer actually viable in combat. But it's still an over-a-decade-old modification to an ancient design. I'd fancy your odds, considering what you're flying." He Glances up at Mosi's Provespa, smiling wider.
"It'll be that easy?" Mosi asks.
"Fuck no, Lieutenant. Dame Nalah North is not famous for being easily shot down, and it's too much to hope that she's lost her touch in her old age. She'll go down hard. Youth and agility versus age and experience."
"You still think I can take her, though?"
His smile turns into a grin, one with a nasty edge to it. "Bury your past here, kid. Stab it through the heart and let it asphyxiate in the fucking void. No one will be able to call you disloyal then."
"For the glory of our Emperor," Mosi agrees, her answering smile not entirely making it to her eyes.
"Exactly."
After Green leaves to see to the rest of his people, Mosi sets about doing some routine checks on her Provespa, cracking the cockpit in order to hover there, looking at tests on the monitors and on her linked tablet. Everything looks fine, barring a few personal adjustments that the techs hadn't known to set for her. It's almost comforting in its uneventful monotony.
The tests aren't quite enough, however, to distract Mosi about the file on her tablet. The one she categorically should not have. The one she took from Nakamura's workstation. The sensitive strategic planning documents that, if they somehow found their way to the enemy, could spell disaster for the entire invasion campaign. She should delete it, of course -- delete it, reset the tablet's hard-drive, 'accidentally' put the tablet out an airlock, hope her highly illegal activities never come to light. She should do that. And she should categorically not open or read it.
With a trembling finger and a studiously blank expression, hidden in the shelter of the Provespa's cockpit, Mosi expands the document and quickly begins to read. Not all of it, of course, but she skims enough to understand precisely what the Holy Empire's plans are for Iapetus and for Saturn as a whole. Each new sentence seems to send ice dropping into her stomach. When she's finally finished, she carefully attaches the tablet to her pilot suit, and pushes herself out of her cockpit.
For the first time in years in the preparation for battle, Mosi finds the nearest washroom and empties her stomach completely.
"Why are you working for these people, Mosi?"
--
The HIMS Titanium Rose
When you quietly slip onto the bridge, dressed once again in your turquoise uniform, Ng is the first one to notice you. The stark relief on the ship's scans second is so great that you're forced to smile uncomfortably, and reflect that, harsh or not, Lori had a point when she expressed doubt about him being ready for this.
Mazlo looks up as Ng begins to leave his seat, noting you with a frown. You salute him dutifully, and he returns it with an air of ill humour. "Well, Ensign, perhaps you're quite finished with your dramatic entr--"
"Mazlo, I need quiet," Andre says, sharply, as if he should know better. Given that he's the comms officer and is likely the one who set up the call Andre is in the process of taking, very likely she has a point. Andre's grey eyes note you taking your place beside Mazlo with distracted interest. Up on the main screen, what looks like a conference call is queuing up. As it begins to populate, you hear the sound of the bridge hatch sealing -- evidently, you made it just in time.
The face that appears is dimly familiar to you as Lord Hawk, the commodore in command of the escort fleet that saved you in your near-disastrous last engagement, seemingly a lifetime ago. His is followed by several smaller faces, all officers seemingly either sitting on small offices or in the command chair of a bridge like the Rose's.
"Good, you're all here," he says. His jaw is set firmly, and there's a fierce glint in his eyes, but something about horse-like features seems a little too rigid. Someone forcing themself to project the idea of iron will, rather than someone who is actually exhibiting it. He seems almost at risk of snapping in two. "Light Attack Group A, under my direction, will consist of the [/i]HIMS Titanium Rose, the HIMS Red Thorn, the HIMS Steel Violet, the HIMS--" Hawk continues down the list, in the end naming some 10 ships, mostly Ranger or Herald class, along with one aged Dagger. All, it quickly becomes clear, are light, fast ships intended primarily for scouting. The term 'attack group' applied to such ships is slightly ominous, and a sign of just how desperate a struggle the coming battle might be.
While Andre is paying rapt attention, it plainly takes her by surprise when her name is directly mentioned. "Captain Andre, you're the ranking officer," Hawk says. There's a brief stir among the faces of the other scouting ship captains. The others all wear commander insignia, and many are considerably younger than she is. Highborn officers at the start of their career, you suspect. Almost belatedly, Hawk adds, with a weak but genuine smile, "... and I should say, congratulations are in order, Captain, for the promotion. It's regrettable that this came up before you could be reassigned to a more suitable command."
"Thank you, sir," Andre says, attempting to keep the surprise from showing too much in her voice. You suspect that, for all her years of service, not being the bottom of the proverbial pile in terms of interacting with other ship captains is a novel experience for her, still. "I've been through a lot with the Rose," she says, "Another battle or two with her won't offend me."
"Very good," Lord Hawk says, nodding. You have a strong suspicion, all at once, that he's not simply being polite to an officer he's previously encountered. By drawing direct attention to her new rank and standing in front of the others, he's ensuring that, should she need to give orders to any of the others, they'll know to listen. It's still strange to hear. On one hand, you knew that Captain Andre now possesses a rank that entitles her to a more prestigious posting than the HIMS Titanium Rose. On the other, considering that this is a woman who once bluntly described the scouting ship as the likely end point for her career, it's strange to think of her moving up to commanding something else. Of a different captain being given command of this ship in her stead. You're pleased for her nonetheless. Of course, all of this is entirely contingent on the Rose's survival.
The scan map of Iapetus that Lord Hawk is displaying shows a transparent web surrounding most of the moon, with a conspicuous gap in which numerous other ships are already beginning to muster. The Defence Array, clearly. A cone of light is projected onto the image, highlighting the gap. "Just under 1/4 of our defence platforms have been destroyed or disabled," Lord Hawk explains. "The platforms are designed to have enough overlap in their firing arcs to make the actual hole in our defences somewhat smaller than that in practise. In short, we know which direction the enemy will have to come from, if they want to reap any advantage from their sabotage efforts.
"The task of Light Attack Group A will be, using the cover of the remaining Defence Arrays, to commit hit and fade attacks on the enemy flank within the highlighted sector, working in conjunction with Groups B and C to divide the enemy's focus and destroy targets of opportunity where possible. Prolonged engagement is to be avoided at all costs." Hawk finishes, and an uncomfortable silence ensues, briefly.
Even taking the remains of the Defence Array into account, this will be highly dangerous. Neither the Rose nor the other ships in the Attack Group have the offensive or defensive muscle to truly last in and kind of commited fleet battle, and will have to rely on a combination of agility and skill in order to make this work. The combined firepower of the small ships, especially the four Rangers, will be not-inconsiderable, but it will be a fragile sort of firepower.
The Rose, at least, will have the benefit of the newly-installed and largely untested quasi-stealth array installed within its hull, confounding enemy scans and making it harder to hit, particularly in a fleet action around an occupied moon where a misfired shot has a relatively high likelihood of hitting something the enemy doesn't want destroyed. You don't look forward to the day when that particular piece of tech eventually finds its way into the hands of the enemy. It won't make your job any easier.
Part of you, as you listen to this plan be described, is simply sick with worry. About the fate of what remains of your broken little family, even if half of it is apparently trying to murder the other. About Lori, who will as always be at even greater risk than you will be. And about what is to come of Iapetus, the people of Anchiale in particular, who you'll be fighting to defend. It seems unlikely to you that the Holy Empire would want to destroy such a valuable station deliberately, but 'mistakes' do happen in the heat of battle. And even if the station were to survive an enemy conquest of the moon, such an occupation would be far from safe or pleasant. The footage you saw of the mass executions at Utopia has been conjured freshly to mind by your confrontation with Mosi. It's easy to imagine similar scenarios playing out in the spheres of a habitat like Anchiale. You think first of Faiza, but a number of faces pass through your head. The awkward young man who gave you information about your mother when you first arrived, the teenage barista who had sold you your first truly great cup of coffee in months, the other refugees, glimpsed briefly, in the repurposed barracks Faiza is staying in. All of them are depending on your successful defence of Iapetus. And for their sake, you're determined not to let your anxiety over recent events stop you from doing your job to the best of your abilities. On top of what you managed to accomplish in helping Lieutenant-Commander Owusu, that will have to be enough.
As the preliminary scans pour into your workstation from various sources -- forward scouts, outward sentry buoys, the long-range scans on the Defence Array and the assembled allied ships -- you can tell conclusively that this engagement will be far beyond anything you've had to manage a scan map for before. The number and size of enemy ships converging on Iapetus, already seemingly greater than the assembled defenders, is nearly overwhelming to you. You wonder if you can really survive something like this, if there's any hope of you not being utterly lost to the point of uselessness.
You give yourself a mental shake, and force yourself to get over that feeling. You'll have to. This time, The Rose is just a tiny part of a larger battle. Nonetheless, you tell yourself, it can still make a difference, and that tiny corner of this battle contains far too many people you care about to give up on it that easily. The fighting will be intense and you know many people are about to die regardless, but you'll all fight your hardest to prevent yourselves and your allies from joining that number.
As you begin to make preparations for managing the combat scan map, you are, for once, almost spoiled for choice. The number and variety of friendly scan feeds available to you extends far beyond The Rose and her compliment of mecha. You'll have the entirety of Attack Group A to pull from, to say nothing of the Defence Array and the rest of the fleet. That's a tremendous amount of information, much of it redundant, for you to sift through -- your job in this scenario is simply managing the glut of information the Rose is receiving in order to interpret it in an actually useful form.
A few approaches immediately jump out at you, and you enter into the familiar calculus of weighing them against each other:
--
What is your approach?
[ ] Conservative
Rely primarily on the Rose's scans for the scan map, using additional information only for extending her range. This will create a more consistent scan map within range of the Rose's scans. It is technology you're familiar with, and you don't need to worry about losing scan sources to battle attrition. This may slow your response time to urgent information sent from other sources, however.
[ ] Broad
Concentrate your effort on gathering and matching up data from as many sources as you can. This will present more data at once, and build overlapping sections from multiple sources over as wide an area as possible. However, this may cause issues with consistency with the various types and ages of technologies on the battlefield, and may lead to lag as allied ships and mecha are damaged or destroyed.
[ ] Daringly Meticulous
Go all out and spend your time seamlessly combining the Rose's scans with alternative sources. If there's ever a time for you to pull out all the stops, this is it. Employ various tricks and advanced techniques in order to painstakingly stitch together sources in nearly real time, combining the strengths of both. This will be difficult and require intense focus, but this is your job, after all.
"... ping-pong balls," Mosi says, suddenly. Amani can feel the shudder of revulsion that just went through Mosi's body, she's sure. "How many... how many of them do you think it takes... how many of them do you think someone can--"
A video feed opens up, occupying one corner of your helmet's display -- an entirely familiar face, calling Owusu from within a cockpit of her own. "I see you have your destination flagged as--" Lori stops, mouth partially open, clearly taking in who, precisely, is sharing a cockpit with her old 'friend.' "Milo?" she asks, blue eyes narrowing almost dangerously.
"Yes, Lady Perbeck?" Owusu sounds entirely too by the book, all of a sudden.
The tests aren't quite enough, however, to distract Mosi about the file on her tablet. The one she categorically should not have. The one she took from Nakamura's workstation. The sensitive strategic planning documents that, if they somehow found their way to the enemy, could spell disaster for the entire invasion campaign. She should delete it, of course -- delete it, reset the tablet's hard-drive, 'accidentally' put the tablet out an airlock, hope her highly illegal activities never come to light. She should do that. And she should categorically not open or read it.
Uhm, Mosi dear,. I know this definitely isn't the right time for me to be a pendantic nitwit, but I don't think you have really done a lot that would be considered "legal". At least not by universal standards.
No matter how the dice land, things are gonna get nasty for you, I am afraid.
[X] Broad
There are so turtlehugging important stuff we need to spot out there, and I am not going to miss them by not looking in the right places!
"... ping-pong balls," Mosi says, suddenly. Amani can feel the shudder of revulsion that just went through Mosi's body, she's sure. "How many... how many of them do you think it takes... how many of them do you think someone can--"
