Lodestone TLR-99

A solo sortie

It is well past midnight. The citizens of "the crater" know well that being too loud, or shining too much light, could compromise the free living they have, so most are asleep by now. Deep within the "executive office" - several shipping containers welded together - Chief Harlan Moll dozes off in his chair. Several doors down, in a cobbled-together junkyard shack, Cap'n Stork is fast asleep in a futon made from scavenged army jackets and pulped carpet. On the opposite end of the corridor, the bar, Holdout '87, had last call an hour ago; the bartender tries his best to mop up some spills around the boxing ring.

On the edge of town, in the dusty old warehouse that has been repurposed as a mech hangar, inside the detached cargo ship hab-module tucked away in the corner, Katherine Niemeyer is fast asleep, with her left arm wedged between two pillows. Next to her, Mehr Sherazi stares straight up at the ceiling, as her heartbeat refuses to slow, and sleep evades her. She mulls over a mental checklist. She had plenty of activity earlier today, between pushing the cart of scrap from Stork's place to the hangar, and a few bouts of wrestling at the bar (mainly to keep in shape). No coffee today, no chocolates. She even opted not to watch whatever old monster movie was on TV, broadcast all the way from Idunn City. Deciding there's no point trying to rest now, Mehr carefully removes Kath's arm from her chest and slides out of the bed, trying to ignore the sudden chill as she does. This won't take long. She'll be back by morning. She quietly closes the bulkhead door to the hab-module on her way out, hoping it'll block the noise she's about to make.

Across the hangar, Mehr firmly presses the button to slide open the main doors. The proximity warning buzzer doesn't so much buzz as click repeatedly, the electronics in it being half a century old by now, and the wires no longer being pure and untainted. As the doors slowly slide open, Mehr runs to the other end of the hangar and clambers up the series of footholds leading up to the cockpit of the TLR-99 Lodestone.

It's not like there's a threat to take care of, tonight, Mehr thinks. I just want to make sure I still can.

The cockpit enclosure slides shut, sealing Mehr into Lodestone's torso as she takes her seat and buckles herself into the mechakinetic harness. She flicks the power switches in sequence, a sequence that she still remembers by heart despite never actually needing to use it. Reactor spooling up. Pre-warming limb hydraulics. Engaging human-interface drivers. Electronic counter-measures primed. Bypassing missing-device BIOS errors. Mechakinetic harness calibrated. External cameras hooked in and streaming. Ready to go. Lodestone takes a step forward. Mehr tries to limit her movement within the hangar, unsure if it will wake up her sleepy-headed partner, and manages to tiptoe the mech outside and into the sand.

She stands tall above the crater and stretches her arms, the Lodestone responding to her movements and mirroring them mechanically. It feels almost liberating to be out here, towering over the world once again. It's a sensation she's missed, over the last several months, even if she was never the one in the real cockpit. The feel of the controls responding so directly to her, instead of the very slight delay she was used to... "visceral" doesn't seem like the word, but it's all she can think of.

There is a sound somewhere in the cockpit that twinges a nerve. The contact alert. There is something in range that was not before. Mehr turns the Lodestone in circles until she is facing in the direction of the blip on the radar. Something's coming... and fast.

Out of reflex, Mehr turns up the radio, but realizes there is nobody awake to talk to. She steps cautiously in the direction of the blip and chambers the shoulder cannons. The blip is still approaching. It's a little over a kilometer away.

The radio crackles a bit. "Whoever's on this frequency," said the grizzled voice of a military man on the other end, "this is the Red Baron speaking. We're on our way to take what's ours. I'd thank you all to evacuate and stay out of the way."

Mehr can only chuckle to herself. Intimidating as the man sounds over radio, she knows. She's dealt with the Red Baron before - and that's not him. But to get into a scuffle with this man who still claims to be the most feared pilot of the North, perhaps this is the catharsis she needs. And she's already in the mech.

She keys up the radio with the left thumb-switch. "I know who you think you are, but you're no Baron to me. Kindly asking you to back off. The people here have nothing to give you."

Rather than a voice, the "baron" responds with a barrage of missiles. Mehr's instincts kick in; she auto-locks the missiles and counters the incoming swarm with a precision spread of bullets, detonating each one in mid-air, then takes off running up the dune towards their source, and engages the thrusters to launch herself off the lip.

A spray of gunfire begins to ping off of Lodestone's legs. A tank shell zooms past, wide of its mark by several degrees. Mehr's blood rushes as Lodestone drops out of the air, stirring up a cloud of sand as it does. The target is now only 500 meters away. She rallies back with a cannon shell of her own, not even aiming it but firing for suppression. It explodes in the sand, and the blast lights up the surrounding dunes for a brief instant as she continues running forward. The target is now in sight... and it isn't even a mech, let alone the Baron's.

The radio speaks up again. "Shit! Cease fire! Cease fire!"

"You expect me to listen? You shot first." She punctuates the sentence with a burst of LMG, not meant to hit anything, and keeps walking forward.

"Who the hell are you?" A few stray bullets make their way towards her and ping harmlessly off of the torso plate.

"I should ask the same of you, but I don't actually care. You're a threat. And I know what to do with threats."

She listens intently as other voices begin to come over the radio. "Boss, what do we do? I don't think that's Niemeyer!" The large radar blip she saw looks more like a bunch of LRVs, some technical trucks, and a tank. Not even the most up to date ones, either. These are scavengers.

The boss, the military man from before, speaks again. "It's her mech, but it's not her at the controls. The bounty does not stand, repeat, the bounty does not stand."

Mehr bursts into a mad cackle. "You thought you could roll in to town in a few dusty old trucks and take on a whole-ass mech? Let alone this one?" By now she has walked within 100 meters of them. She aims one of Lodestone's huge fists in the direction of the enemy jeep-squad, and keys up both the radio and the outer loudspeakers. "Get the hell out of here before I punish you all for such hubris. Even if Kath was driving today, you idiots aren't worthy to meet her."

The tank fires one more time; its shell bounces clear off of Lodestone's left shoulder, not even triggering the ablative plate. Mehr takes another two steps forward, closing the distance by another 20 meters, hard-locks on to the tank, and allows the system to point every last gun in its direction.

"I told you to cease fire!" shouts the boss.

Mehr knows the boss isn't talking to her, but she responds anyway. "You know you're not going to take me down. You try to intimidate your marks by pretending to be the Red Baron? Just cements how worthless you are." She surveys the pack in front of her, looking like little toys from this height. "Me, though? I'm the real thing. Fuck off before I turn you all to confetti."

"Pull back! Everybody, pull back!" The LRV at the front of the squad pulls a U-turn and zips away, with the rest of the squad; the tank, the handful of other LRVs, and the bunch of technical trucks with missile launchers behind them, struggle to keep up. Mehr fires one more shot and lands it just behind them, for effect. Once she is sure that the threat has pulled out of range, she safeties the weapons and turns back towards the crater.

Glad I was out here when I was... Mehr lets out a deep sigh and realizes that her muscles have been tense during this entire stand-off. She takes her time walking back to the hangar. Kath ought to know, she might be the star pilot, but she's not the only one that can drive this thing.

Wonder if she'll still be asleep when I get back.