Lodestone TLR-99

Where's Mehr?

It is well past midnight, and Kath feels a sudden chill that rouses her from what was a wonderful - if melancholy - dream about plunging her hand into a pool of squishy marshmallows. She blearily swivels her head around to take stock of the hab-module bedroom. Lights off. Air conditioner still running. Forgot to turn that off. She cranks her head to the left. Nothing. The old mattress only has a mild dent, where her partner once lay. She must have gotten up before me again-- Kath notices the old alarm clock on the bedside table that still reads 12:20. Or she never slept in the first place. Gods damn it. Wide awake now, Kath shoves herself out of the bed in a way she hasn't in months - not since that last scramble alarm back at the SAF. She shoves the old bulkhead door open and sprints, bare-footed, into the open warehouse - its hangar door still hanging wide open, and the biggest thing in the room decidedly not being in the room anymore. Gods damn-- Mehr!!

Without much time to think, Kath rushes out of the warehouse, dressed in little more than her camisole and booty-shorts, and into the main corridor system of the repurposed bomb shelter that serves as The Crater's main foot-traffic road. A few wide hallways give way to smaller "two lane" corridors, going past the single-bed occupancies, and the un-lit neon signs of the Holdout '87 bar. At the end of one overly-long, under-featured pathway, Kath slaps the door button, over which is labeled, "Stork's nest." It leads outside to what is, by most appearances, a junk yard, but Kath has been around here enough times to identify the degree of salvage. A lot of it is parts from "decommissioned" military drones, from both Sunnr's scouting parties and Kerlaugar's advanced recon team. Kath had salvaged these herself. Somewhere between the mounting piles of scrapped armor and turbine blades is a little shack, built from ablative plating and mortared together with macerated rubble from the ruins of the city that used to be here. Kath pounds on the door in the most rust-free spot she can find for her fist to strike. "Cap'n Stork! Emergency!" she yells.

The door slides open right in front of her, as the Stork - Sascha Geelin - stands there, similarly bleary-eyed and unkempt, but still wearing the trimmed-down, sleeveless SAF grunt's uniform that they normally use as pajamas. "I just got to sleep for the first time in weeks. What is it, Kath?"

"She's gone!" Kath does a poor job of masking her panic. "She was right next to me an hour ago and now she's..." She can't construct the ending of the sentence in her state.

Sascha's frustration gives way to concern and understanding. "You'd better come in and sit down." They lead Kath over to a couple of floor cushions, sewn together from old flight jackets and stuffed with reclaimed cotton. Both sit, cross-legged, against the chopped cafe table repurposed into a crude tea-table. "Who's gone? Mehr, your partner?"

"Yes," Kath responds, her voice still shaking. "She took Lodestone. Or Lodestone is gone. The door was still open and..."

"You need to slow down and think carefully." The smooth and smoky jazz-singer voice only mostly masks the deep worry that Sascha feels for one of their two best assets. "The warehouse doesn't open from the outside, right?"

"...Right..."

"And who else knows how to start a classified-top-secret walking battle tank?"

"Me... and Mehr..."

"So that already rules out that either of them were taken. So Mehr has definitely taken Lodestone for a ride."

"I don't know what she..." Kath once again has no idea how to finish her sentence. There is a feeling of pressure behind her eyes, like a dam about to burst.

"Did something happen before you went to sleep? Did the two of you talk about anything that may have upset her?"

Kath has to think about it, even though it happened mere hours ago. "...She's been...wanting to go back to the Sunnr army. She's frustrated that she can't do the job she was trained to do, and thinks going back will help her to protect me."

"And?"

"And I don't want her to go. I'm positive I can find a better way for her to help that won't put her in danger."

"The one thing that I can tell you for sure, right now, is that Mehr Sherazi is not in danger right now."

Kath slaps the tea table. "How can you know that?"

"She has the most advanced piece of military technology this side of the border. She's doing the job she was trained to do, in the most direct way she knows."

"I need to go check on her, right the Hel now! She might have jumped in too deep--"

Sascha holds up a single finger of wisdom to silence the distraught pilot in front of her. With their other hand, they reach toward the old CB radio cluster on a nearby shelf and switch it on.

"--does not stand! Repeat, THE BOUNTY DOES NOT STAND!" The voice of command, faltering and panicking worse than Kath is, shouts over the radio.

"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?" Kath barely recognizes it in this intonation, this amount of aggression, but it's Mehr's voice. "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." Holy shit, girl, preach it. Let 'em know how badly they've fucked up tonight, whoever they are.

It is a moment of clarity for Kath. It feels like divine inspiration. All the time she's spent at the helm of the most fearsome instrument of death ever fielded, and she's the only one of the two that has accrued an active bounty. All this time and it's only ever been about herself. She's become a known quantity. But leave Mehr in the driver's seat, and the whole combat strategy changes. Nobody knows how to predict what she'll do. Her style forms a polar opposite. It's a whole new paradigm.

Kath straightens up and looks out the porthole window of the Stork's shack at the piles of junk in the yard. "I'm having some ideas. Sascha?" Kath addresses. "I'd like to put in a few orders."