Lodestone TLR-99

The one way out

Mehr's head was just small enough to poke through the hole where the Lodestone's used to be. She surveyed the sandy expanse around her, the Twin Cities in the distance looking like not much more than a couple of dots between the mesas. She ducked back inside the cockpit - too tight for two people under normal circumstances, but there wasn't much other choice, and it wasn't like she or Kath really disliked being scrunched that close together. "Nothing to report."

Kath's sigh betrayed her exasperation. "Look, we're as good as deserters, now. Lay off the mil-speak."

Mehr's heart sank. It had only taken a year to drill those habits into her, to overwrite the very way she acted with the Bog Standard Military Default. Who knew how long it'd take to beat it back out of her, or for that matter, how long until the military themselves would notice that their star unit had not returned from her last sortie.

"I'm gonna start moving again. Brace yourself."

Lodestone's leg actuators, about the only thing still largely undamaged by Red Baron's assault, revved into low gear and began their desert trek once more. Mehr thought she heard a faint pinging in the works, but it wasn't loud enough to be sure... or concerned. Mehr had wedged herself into the floorboard, a technique she had honed from the six months of hazing rituals she'd suffered back in the 98th Reserve, back before Kath came into her life.

Out here, Kath could only see what was immediately at ground level, using the Lodestone's parking and landing camera. All the other cameras, the adjustable viewpoint and the remote monitor and several of the radars, were in its missing head. The repair crew had managed to get most of the frame back into enough working order to move around, but the head unit had needed special parts that weren't in stock on base, so they had left it off, with the gaping hole still there over the cockpit. Mehr, from her supine position on the floor, could still see the sky through it. It was her one comfort, in case any air units were for some reason directly above them, that she could see them without needing to stand up.

"Remind me why we're doing it this way?" asked Mehr, wishing she at least had a seat belt down there.

"HQ have got the motor pool locked down harder than the repair bay, ironic as it is." Kath focused all of her attention on the landing camera. She couldn't walk too fast, for fear that the leg bearings would give out again, or else crash into another mesa the second she was looking at anything else. "I would have preferred a recon vehicle, too, for the simplicity, but the thought of depriving those assholes of their murder machine just struck me too funny not to."

"I'm... still not really comfortable with calling the Lodestone that." Mehr bumped her head on one of the medical compartments as the Lodestone's cockpit bounced with each footstep. "I'm the one that did a lot of the... murdering."

"You couldn't have known. You were down there in your little capsule, and besides, it's not like Colonel ap Nestor ever told you that Kerlaugar's 'driverless' tanks weren't so driverless."

"And that's why we're running, huh..."

"That's why we're running."

"And you don't think the Red Baron was trying to psych us out? All that talk about the thousands of comrades he was blaming us for?"

"I thought about that, too, Mehr. But nobody shouts that passionately about a cause that they know is a lie."

"But we..."

"We didn't know our cause was a lie, too." She stopped moving the leg controllers and allowed the Lodestone to slow to a stop. "I need to check something. I'll be right back." Kath unbuckled herself from the mechakinetics and stood on top of her seat, ignoring the warning buzzers as she climbed up on top of the arm rests and grabbed the hand-holds from the ceiling, hoisting her head up above the Lodestone's vanished neckline.

Mehr couldn't see Kath's face from the floorboard, but detected a note of shock in the rest of her. "Do you see something?" she called upwards.

"...There's an alert going, back at the Cities. I see the searchlights going even from out here. I think they know we're gone." Kath dropped out of the neck hole and back into her seat, trying not to stomp on Mehr on the way down. "I wish I could buckle you in better, but I need the extra field of view." She threw the overhead lever that opened the chest, offering her a more direct viewpoint out front. Mehr would have to settle for hanging on to Kath's ankle as she tried to adjust herself to a more comfortable position. From this direction, there wasn't much to see, but at least it meant they weren't running directly into trouble...yet.

"I hate this. There's got to be a better way."

"Well, we ran out of better ways the second we took off. Unless you want to huff it all the way back to Mimisbrunnr and hope someone left the key in the ignition."

"This'll - oof! - work fine. But I hope you've got a plan once we can't ride any further." Even with the cockpit open, Mehr was still bumping her head on the panels.

"Hang on tight, then. If they catch up with us... I'm gonna do something they didn't think I'd ever do."