This prompt comes from Xpholia with 'modest gains from a mighty task', return us to Blood and Steel, where the rebuilt Charon Squadron is going through some growing pains as Ngan attempts to get three very different pilots to mesh together. Enjoy!
Practice Makes Perfect:
“All right,” Ngan said as his pilots took to their chairs around the briefing table. “Who wants to go first in explaining why we’re all dead?” He looked at the three faces. Skye stared back at him like she had nothing to apologize for or confess to. Which, to be fair, she didn’t. He never thought he’d say this, but it wasn’t the veeb causing problems.
Despite inviting her to help rebuild Charon Squadron, Ngan had harboured misgivings about Skye. He’d kept them to himself, but they’d been there. Were still there if he was totally honest with himself, but they were quieter every day. Skye didn’t have any of the arrogance he’d expected from a voidborn. She was standoffish, but more like a wary animal than a haughty self-styled superior specimen. She’d spent most of the time on base obsessively researching everything they had on the Alliance mechs. When in a Lancer, she was laser-focused and confident in a way that only another Lancer pilot could understand, and she was a quick thinker. If she wasn’t voidborn, she’d be the perfect second in command.
Korioto wasn’t meeting his eyes. Inside a cockpit, she had infinite patience and a stillness of mind that served her well as a reconnaissance pilot. Outside her Lancer, she was always moving unless she had one of her half dozen fidget toys in hand. She had one now, a glow in the dark spiky cylinder that she was rolling across the tabletop under her palms, passing it from right to left hand and back again.
Raszack was sitting back in his chair, arms crossed over his broad chest. The big Jovian was leaning back in his chair, looking up at his captain. He wasn’t smug or insouciant. He looked like someone who honestly didn’t see what the problem was and if there was one at all, couldn’t have been anything that he’d done.
“Lieutenant Raszack,” Ngan began. “Why don’t you start?”
The Kalkye pilot blinked, then leaned forward. “We got scrubbed, sir.”
“I see. Nothing else to offer?”
Yosef shook his head. “Not in this company, sir.” As he said that, his eyes darted towards Skye. She caught the brief gesture, but she didn’t say anything.
“We’re all Lancer pilots here,” the captain replied. “We’re all working towards the same ends. If you have any insights, lieutenant, then by all means I want to hear it.”
“All right then, sir.” Raszack leaned forward. “The veeb’s plan was shit and it got us all killed.”
Ngan was silent for a moment. He glanced at Skye. The pale woman didn’t say anything in her own defence. He wondered how many times she’d tried before only to get shut down by other comrades and superiors. He might have even been the one to do it if he hadn’t been the firsthand beneficiary of her planning. “No plan works,” he said, keeping his tone measured. “When you don’t follow it.”
Raszack straightened, his eyes flashing. “Sir-”
The captain cut him off. “The plan,” he began, activating the table’s holo tank and bring up a wireframe hologram of their simulated battlefield, Graz’s industrial quarter. “Was to lure a Knight into a killbox. Charon Four,” he gestured to the icon denoting Korioto’s Neso. “Was to find us one, while Two and I herded it into one of several potential firing lanes, whereupon your Lancer,” he pointed to the marker representing Raszack’s massive Kalkye, “was to be the hammer and the rest of us, the anvil.”
The simulation started to replay before their eyes, time-lapsed like a miniature animation. “Charon Four established contact,” a hostile red icon appeared. Charon One was the closest and moved to intercept and hound it towards their designated ambush site. “Unfortunately, our target was faster and more aggressive than we’d planned for.” After a brief exchange, enemy Lancer put the Praxidike down. Ngan’s mech had taken a beam straight through its core. If this hadn’t been a simulation, he’d have been flash-fried inside his cockpit like a hot dog in front of a radar dish.
“At this point, Four came about to re-engage the enemy and continue to draw it into the kill zone.” Saika’s scouting mech emerged from a warehouse firing, vanishing before the enemy Lancer could respond and starting the chase. Her Neso couldn’t do much damage, but it was fast enough that the enemy Lancer couldn’t easily run it down like it could other SOWCF mechs, and there was enough air cover with railing, transmission lines and heavy pipes that it couldn’t jump up and come down on her. “Two moved to intercept and ambush and gave you an order to place your Lancer at this position.”
A yellow circle denoting the specific coordinates appeared on the map. “Yet instead, you took this position,” Ngan continued, showing Charon Three’s actual firing position and its final resting place for the simulation. “I’d like to know why.”
“In my estimation, Lieutenant Skye misdeployed my unit,” Raszack said. “The suggested sight offered little positional advantage, making my unit’s bombardment capabilities much less effective and it put my mech at risk of close-quarters engagement.”
Ngan looked at his voidborn officer. “Lieutenant?”
“I’m aware of the Kalkye’s capability for indirect fire,” Skye answered. “But until Mishi-Khar gets sufficient resupply, its current loadout is optimized for medium armour and of minimal value against a Knight’s armour. We needed to deploy its full, direct arsenal against the target at close range. I’m aware that this is a tactic that Kalkye pilots normally don’t employ and that it put Charon Three at heightened risk of engagement, but Knights have repeatedly proven capable of rapidly closing sizable gaps between themselves and their targets. Distance wouldn’t have saved Lieutenant Raszack.”
She paused to take a breath. “Secondly, the position I ordered Charon Three to take would have given Lieutenant Raszack a completely unobstructed view of the target.”
“And give it one to me too, veeb.”
“As you found out, that hardly mattered,” Ngan said. “When it actually decided to come after you, it was able to lock on and cripple your Lancer within seconds even with the additional cover you had.” He nodded back to the simulation’s replay. “But let’s see what led up to that point, shall we?”
Charon Two’s icon was zeroing in on the Knight pursuing Korioto, Raszack’s heavier unit moving towards the spot he’d chosen. “Lieutenant Skye was arguing with you here, telling you to take the ordered position,” he played a clip from the simulator’s comm logs.
“No, Three! I need you on that firing lane. Get your Lancer there so we can-”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, veeb! I know how to handle myself, you just look after of that junker of yours-”
Ngan cut the replay. “Because she was arguing with you, Lieutenant Skye’s Lancer was delayed in arriving to support Lieutenant Korioto, who was also slowed because she was receiving conflicting instructions on where to draw the enemy mech. As a result...” he brought up a video clip of Korioto’s Neso. It was running at speed, dangerous within the close confines of factories, warehouses and production plants. That it hadn’t collided with anything was a testament to its pilot’s skill, but Korioto had lost too much time as Raszack and Skye barked at each other.
A bright red beam came in from off-screen, a sustained pulse that sliced through the smaller mech’s legs just below the waist, severing them completely and the small Lancer’s forward-learning torso crashed onto the debris-choked road. Nesos didn’t have hands like other Lancers, so it couldn’t even drag itself along the ground. Before Saika could use the escape hatch, the Knight was on her, driving its sword down through her cockpit like a medieval warrior dispatching a fallen enemy. “And then there were two,” Ngan said, his dispassionate tone speaking louder than any heated invective could.
“At this point, Lieutenant Skye made contact with the enemy. To her credit, she tried to fulfill the original plan and lured it to your position. Unfortunately, well....” Ngan let the next clip speak for itself. Raszack and his Kalkye unleashed hell, a storm of missiles and reactor-fuelled plasma beams that tore through the cityscape like it was nothing as he fired everything into the exposed TPA mech. His indirect weaponry was, as he predicted, much more effective from his elevated position. His primary weapons less so. “The intervening terrain,” Ngan pointed out, “absorbed nearly a third of your Lancer’s assault. You did a lot of damage to the surrounding area, but not enough to the enemy mech. It was able to take shelter and once you were forced to reload...” a brief but furious battle between the target and Charon Two erupted as Skye made a desperate push to pin the enemy in place until Raszack could get a second shot. It severed her mech’s arms, cut off its head and then plunged its energy blade through the chest to incinerate her within her cockpit. The Atropos fell and the Knight spun, bringing up its beam rifle. There was only a fraction of a second before Charon Three could fire again, but that time was all it needed.
With a triple burst of carefully-placed shots, the Knight took out the SOWCF Lancer’s right knee, then put two shots through the head to blind the heavy mech. It took to the skies, landing like a ballet dancer right in front of the crippled Charon Three, negligently bringing its sword down to bisect the machine.
The recording went to a black screen. “And then there were none,” Ngan commented. He looked back at Raszack. “If I become incapacitated, Charon Two is next in the chain of command. You’ll follow her orders as you would mine. If anyone feels they will be unable to discharge that duty, you are free to request a transfer to one of the other Lancer units. Given everything going on, it may be some time before they can assign you another mech.” Ngan paused to let that sink in, but not so long that any of his subordinates had time to speak up.
“We’re on the brink here,” he continued. “The TPA’s Lancers have tech we’ve never seen before and their pilots have an edge that we don’t have. That Knight everyone pats me on the back for killing? It had over a dozen confirmed Lancer kills before we,” he stressed that word just enough to remind his new pilots that it hadn’t been him alone who’d taken Nutcracker out, “put it down. We can’t afford to make those trades, especially if the rumours about a second wave are true.”
He paused again. “The TPA played our worlds off against each other for generations,” he pointed out. “We can’t let ourselves be divided now. I need pilots who can work together. Anyone who can’t or won’t do that had better jump ship now, because the alternative is looking for a new career.” He looked back at the hovering black screen. “I was going to make this the last run of the day, but after that performance, I think we need some additional rack time. Back to the sims, everyone. We’ll run it until we get it right.”