This week's prompt is 'millimeters and caliber' from AS900, bringing us back to a universe of intersolar war and mech battles, with a little flashback from before the first drabble. Enjoy!
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Right Tool for the Right Job:
Andrea ducked under the outstretched arm of her Lancer, Talon One. It was one of the first run of Atropos-class mechs built by the OWCF, and though it had been retrofitted and upgraded to bring it up to modern specs, it wasn’t one of the shiny new Kalykes, Praxidikes or any of the modern Lancer models and it had never seen combat.
Neither had she, except for a brief skirmish with three TPA tanks that got separated from the rest of their column back on Mars. That had been over in less than fifteen seconds. She had the same training as the rest of the OWCF’s Mechanized Strike Force, but she had one fatal flaw.
No matter how much they pretended to be a unified front against Earth, Venus and Mars, the ‘Sovereign Outer Worlds’ were a disparate collection of cultures and nations. Jovians and Saturnine, Neptunians, Uranians and Plutonians all had their own feuds and conflicts with each other, weaknesses that the TPA had played like a fiddle for generations, getting each of the Outer Worlds more focused on each other than the institutionalized plundering caused by Sol’s inner planets.
One thing that all the outer worlds could agree on, though – they all hated voidborn. ‘Veebs’, as Andrea had heard all her life, weren’t natural. They weren’t the result of generations of natural adaptation to different environments. They’d been created in a laboratory by madmen seeking to improve humanity and create a ‘perfectly adapted’ race. The project had ultimately failed, but tens of thousands of ‘veebs’ had been let out into the universe. Andrea was third generation, growing up on ships and stations across the Outer Worlds, hated by every other ethnicity she’d ever met. As a child herself, she’d been chased by one child gang into another and the two had shared a moment of camaraderie as they’d both beat her ass.
At first, the OWCF hadn’t even allowed voidborn into the military, but as they pushed the TPA back and casualties mounted, manpower shortages had necessitated allowing ‘veebs’. Only in reserve roles, where they couldn’t show up ‘pure’ humans with the skills and instincts engineered into them, and sparingly few command roles.
Andrea was one of those few, and it wasn’t much of one. She led three other Lancer pilots, all of whom had good reason for being removed from the front and none of whom wanted to serve under a veeb. Tanto was a drinker. Jelique was short-tempered and started fights. Carsil was an insubordinate glory-hound. It was a pointed statement from command that none of them were trusted more than a veeb to lead a reserve squadron of old Lancers.
Red Talon had languished in obscurity since it had been founded eight months ago. They’d participated in no actions, major, minor or otherwise and were deployed as a rearguard for facilities that were already far from any fighting, or to give the illusion of additional security to VIPs for whom the appearance of Lancers was all that mattered to their egos. They’d earned a commendation for raising an alert about the presence of Allied armour so close to their base after Andrea’s brief engagement with the lost TPA tanks on Mars, but it had been another Lancer unit that had dealt with the rest of the column. Her pilots had taken her presence as a lightning rod to dump any chance of self-reflection, deciding that it was because a veeb was leading them that they weren’t getting good assignments. Jelique had even taken a swing at Andrea. She’d been a little more restrained after finding out how easily a Voidborn could take down an ordinary human, but that was all the attitude improvement Andrea had seen in her pilots.
The young woman – silver-haired, and yellow-eyed – touched her Lancer’s right arm. Atropos-class mechs stood twelve meters tall, with a hunched, stoop-shouldered posture. Their heads were directly in front of the pilot’s cockpit instead of above it, and they had with sensors on their backs rather being able to turn their heads like newer Lancer variants. Talon One’s head had little of facial features, just a single cyclopean sensor eye set in the middle. A collection of smaller sensor lenses were there too, but they were lost amidst the mottled black and red paint.
Its right arm carried the mech’s primary weapon, a 130mm machine gun. Too large for any conventional AFV to carry, it was equipped with multiple round types, but its most common was a standard high-explosive, armour-piercing bullet meant to deal with hostile armour. It could carry a shield – a cut-down piece of starship-grade armour – but those had been prioritized for use by front line units. Its secondary weapon was a pair of back-mounted missiles used to bombard entrenched positions and flush out the defenders, while a standard auto-firing point defence mount on the carapace and chest protected the mech from missile attack.
Atropos were a solid mix of firepower and mobility, far more nimble than something like a Kalkye, but more heavily armoured than something like a Neso. This model had been produced late in the OWCF’s initial push against the TPA and like its pilot, it never seen action, kept in cargo holds and transports and upgraded when necessary, but gathering dust until it had found a pilot.
Andrea stared up at Talon One’s great black eye. The assault on Earth was coming. In sixteen hours, she’d be standing on the home of the species that had rejected her, fighting for a faction that hated her as it needed her. Maybe, she wondered as she looked at the machine, silent and still in its dock.
Maybe we’ll both get a chance to show them what we can do.