Basically a concept seed that hit me and made me go, "What If...?"
I've got a couple more scenes finished that follow on from it, but want to get feedback and ideas on what
other people expect the consequences to be before I roll with them.
Seven
ARCADIA, CLAN HOMEWORLDS
MAY 20, 3048
Like any other child of the warrior caste, Vera had been born from an artificial Iron Womb with the rest of her sibling company, her sibko, and raised and educated in the same creche until they were ready to begin their training as warriors. Unlike any other she knew, though, she'd actually listened when the Scientist assigned to instructing the sibko in mathematics had said his specialty could be used to describe any problem and point the way to a solution.
After that lesson, she had asked him if 'any' problem included how to be a better warrior.
He hadn't studied that himself, he said, since it wouldn't have been his place as a Scientist-instructor - but that was exactly what the scientists in charge of the breeding program that produced new generations from the genes of the Bloodnamed, the most successful of the warrior caste, were charged with doing.
She'd known that, even then. Instead, she'd been talking about ways to get higher scores in training, to earn more regard from her sibkin and instructors. It wasn't until years later that she'd seen the tactical skill with which that scientist had used the promised reward of that knowledge to lead her through acquiring the basic and not so basic math skills every mechwarrior needed.
Armed with the conviction of that self-study that accuracy of fire was the greatest multiplier of a warrior's ability, she'd turned all her free time to the passionate practice of that skill, staying up late in the simulators and yawning her way through the rest of her lessons.
Over the years of warrior training, as the weaker members of the sibko were weeded out and assigned to lesser castes, the need for the reassurance those practice sessions offered her had become more and more important. For every good-natured companion like Kaeli, or honest respect like Jane's, there were two or three Adelais that despised her drowsing as weakness, or a Mal that saw in the lack of support left by the departure, the elimination of those sibkin she was closest to a target to vent their own insecurities.
Usually, Vera would have tuned out Mal's self-important ranting. Of all the members of their sibko, they liked each other least. He had a habit of dismissing any bad performance in his own training as the result of bias or skewed tests, and no intention of forgiving the way she didn't acknowledge his obvious superiority no matter how many times he thumped her in hand-to-hand.
Of course she wasn't going to do that; she was a warrior cadet just like he was, and it'd've been a disgrace to their genes to grovel the way he tried to demand.
For this of all days, she was fully and completely rested, of course, but the increased focus made him harder to ignore, especially when she was finding it harder than expected to reach the half-meditative state she always used for practicing.
She opened her eyes, saw his sneering face look back at her. He had the same densely muscled frame as she did, and all the rest of their sibkin, and the green eyes and intense regularity of features, but they didn't look much like siblings. His jaw was heavier than the rest of the sibko favored, and her features tended more delicately, just as every muscle rippled under his skin and her body seemed to cloak itself in a layer of smoothness no matter how much she exercised.
"Mal," she said, "if I offer to let you have a shot at my targets, will you stop talking?" The Trial of Position that would make them from trainees into true warriors was graded by number of targets defeated, with each of them being granted three to try with. Only the best cadets dared to try to claim four victories by turning the series of duels into an open melee, and - so far - none had managed it.
He glared at her, but the belief that she wouldn't be willing to allow him his 'proper four' had been one of the things he was just complaining about, so he just snapped, "Well bargained and done," and began to ignore her ostentatiously.
Finally. Vera smiled to herself, ever so slightly, and closed her eyes as she began to meditate quietly. It was just like him to use that formal close, to pretend that they'd gone through the true Batchall, the bidding contest that determined which warrior or commander would face the enemy and earn honor by doing so while risking the smallest possible force.
When the time came and the test proctors called them to board their mechs, she went and did so with that same perfect calm singing in her center, strapping herself in and bringing the systems of the titanic war machine underneath her alive with motions so practiced that they seemed almost inevitable.
For this trail, for her Blooding, she'd contended for and won the right to select which omnimech and standard configuration she would use - a Nova, at fifty tons an unexceptional medium whose bullet-shaped body perched on squat, back-jointed legs, and in the potent A equipment package, a single medium pulse laser backing up a pair of deadly particle projection cannons. If she'd been allowed to tweak the systems individually, she'd probably have traded the pulse laser for an additional pair of cooling heat sinks, but the A was as close to ideal for her purposes as any of the standard configurations offered.
Mal, she noted, had been given a Nova Prime, the same basic chassis as her 'mech but fitted with an overwhelming array of extended-range medium lasers, giving it considerably more pure firepower than her own selection but in a shorter-ranged and less concentrated form. Even he should be able to defeat at least one smaller 'mech with it.
Guided out onto the field, each of them found three 'mechs waiting for them - one a light 'mech, another of equal power, and the third a heavy mech that should make easy work of them, skill being equal.
When he founded the Clans, Nicholas Kerensky, the first ilKhan, had set the rule - to be accepted as true warriors of his Clans, to win glory, each would-be warrior would have to defeat at least one of their opponents, themselves all already blooded warriors, in open, live-fire combat. If they couldn't - or if they failed to survive - then they, and their genes, were obviously unworthy, and would be condemned to obscurity, failure, disgrace. Even in a Clan that, like the Ghost Bear, refused to immediately waste the training they'd invested in creating a potential warrior would move them to the lesser branch of the armor corps.
Even if her state of mind at the moment had allowed it, Vera wouldn't have been worried. Her practice sessions might not have been recorded by anything beyond her own memory, but they had been as intense and difficult as her mind was capable of conceiving, and earlier practice with the rest of her sibko in real 'mechs and training weapons had confirmed that that practice did transfer.
Well. Not too worried.
Embracing the warrior's path meant accepting the risks of death and the costs of dealing it, and the battle of this Trial, like every other of the Six Trials by Combat, was in deadly earnest. The blooded warriors she faced wouldn't be holding back, wouldn't be picking their shots to protect her - they would destroy her machine any way they could, and feel little regret if that killed her along with her mount.
The first opponent to advance was the light, a Kit Fox, whose body married a hemispherical foresection to a blocky engine housing, and balanced it on reverse-jointed legs like a spindly version of her own Nova's. The large laser mounted on its arm slashed through the air only a few meters from her cockpit as her Nova rumbled into motion, and a few moments later, the missiles from its long range racks dropped from the sky to batter at her armor like hail, and most were swatted from the air by snarling antimissile systems before they could strike.
Instinct, or honed impulse, pulled the trigger on the first particle cannon only a split second after her 'mech's gyro had stabilized it in the wake of the last missile's impact, and the searing bar of man-made lightning threw the entire field into stark, overilluminated relief as it reached out and bored straight through the transparent armor panels protecting the Kit Fox's cockpit and pilot.
As the now-uncontrolled mech tumbled to the ground, she glanced around, refreshing her memory of the entire field before tackling her next opponent. Mal was struggling with his opponent, a nimble, blindingly fast Fire Moth - a cube on skeletal humanoid legs, with arms that it carried above its shoulders - whose limited firepower was tearing slashing chunks off of his 'mech with each pass and showing no difficulty in evading his own attempts at return fire.
A hint of amusement touched her calm at his difficulties. They couldn't be happening to a more deserving trainee.
She turned back and fired her pulse laser at the next mech in her own list - a Viper, faster than a Nova to go with its slimmer, elongated torso and legs, but with less tonnage available for mounting weapons on, in the A configuration that carried extended range medium lasers and a backing short-range missile cluster. She was far out of the range of any medium laser, of course, but that picked it out as her target under zellbringen.
For a moment, as the warrior commanding it fire its jump jets and launched it through the air towards her, she considered another cockpit shot. The ballistic arc of its approach would have made the shot easy, after all. But, since she'd already killed one warrior today, and assured her own advancement, she decided there was no need to. Instead, just instants before the jumping mech would have touched down at the very fringes of its own range, she fired again, PPC bolts reaching out to smash into the ankle and reversed knee of one leg right when they were needed most, fusing armor and joint together in a cloud of vaporized fragments.
The 'mech's entire forty ton weight came down on the leg as its pilot scrambled to compensate - and failed. The ankle locked, digging the foot into the relatively soft ground of the trial field and bringing all of the moving machine's inertia against the weakened knee joint.
The knee gave, shearing cleanly away in a scream of tearing metal audible even through the shielding of her Nova's cockpit and the half-kilometer of distance separating them. The Viper's torso continued the rest of the way to the ground, tumbling off of its mangled leg and rolling end over end. An arm thrown out to stop the motion was bent back upon itself, joints mangled and myomer driving bundles torn and twisted by off-angle stresses they were never built to absorb, before the remaining leg dug into the ground and bounced the tumbling wreck into the air again, splintering into flying shards in the process.
Centripetal force pulled the remaining arm outwards as the spinning hulk arced up and then down again, and the impact of landing, felt first by the outstretched arm, tore the entire assembly free in a spray of liberated O-rings. The limbless remainder rolled on and on several more times before finally sliding to a halt several hundred meters beyond the initial crash point, and Vera finally pulled her eyes away from the sight to glance around the battlefield again.
Mal's Nova was still standing, and so was the Fire Moth he was fighting - he'd clipped it, once, and in return its pilot had torn great wounds all across the Nova's frame. One arm, and probably at least half of the original armor, were missing already, and at this rate she doubted he'd last much longer.
Couldn't happen to a nicer freebirth, she thought again, and turned to sight in on the last of 'her' trio, a sixty-ton Mad Dog B, arms and weapons bolted to the sides of a torso like a brick turned on its long, narrow side with the top front corner cut off and a cockpit on the very top, all balanced on reverse-jointed legs. This fight she expected to be much more difficult; unlike the tiny Kit Fox or the shorter-ranged Viper, the Mad Dog had at least as much long-range firepower as she did, and backed it up with an even denser battery of short-range lasers and missiles as well as substantially more armor than her own machine.
That was what she thought; and then the world went somewhat mad. When she recovered her focus, she realized that her Nova was in the process of crashing to the ground, savaged from behind by a heavy volume of weapons fire. Even on her best of days, she had much more trouble getting her mech's feet and limbs to go where she wanted them to than she did with the fire of its weapons, and a crash already in progress was a challenge for much better pilots than she.
The crash happened, slamming her against her restraints hard enough to make her vision swim and send lines of bruising pain across her breasts and shoulders. Practiced at ignoring pain from her time as the sibko's hand-to-hand 'training dummy', she fought to bring the Nova back to its feet, twisting the torso to bring her wounded back away from the source of that fire.
It had been Mal. His Nova's remaining arm was still raised to point at her, to spit his hatred and to take advantage of the vulnerable point she had shown him in her focus on her legitimate opponents. He fired again, this time scoring only a single hit as battle damage and overheating and haste degraded his aim.
Automatically, she dropped the aim point of that arm's particle cannon slightly and put a bolt through the cockpit glass and Mal's irritating face. A half turn as her 'mech came back up to full speed let a bolt from the same gun exploit the only gap he'd managed to open in the Fire Moth's paper-thin armor and core its gyroscope and reactor out from under its pilot.
She turned her head, letting years of drill drive her movements, and put the pip of the other cannon on the head of the Mad Dog whose pilot was only now starting to react to the abrupt change from dueling rules to an open melee.
The lightning crashed out, and the heavy ‘mech dropped.
Two large laser tracks from the Stormcrow seared in and tracked along her Nova’s chest; this time she was lucky and was able to keep the ‘mech on its feet. She turned to look at it - another reverse-legged design, like most omnimechs, whose cockpit was at the front of a narrow core hull like a more angular version of the Viper's, but whose arms were mounted to the sides of the boxy equipment bays carried above the hull. Her right-arm PPC’s aim-point drifted across the Stormcrow’s cockpit - she fired.
Then frowned, as the bolt smashed home not against the target she’d chosen, but a meter or two away, against the much heavier plating of the other omnimech’s chest, scoring a long glowing trench in its glancing blow. The electrical corona from the PPC bolt would have temporarily scrambled the ‘mech’s computer systems, and give her a moment or two to…
The Nova’s bullet-like torso swiveled on its shallow, almost-hidden waist joint, and the left arm stabbed out - paused while she double-checked her aim - and then fired again as the Stormcrow’s arms started to bring their powerful large lasers to bear again.
This time she didn’t miss, leaving her alone with the Hellbringer that had been slated to be Mal’s last opponent.
She had only a moment to assess it, a tall, almost perfectly humanlike machine with thick plantigrade legs and a torso wider and taller than it was thick - to see the twin laser lenses on the left arm and the massive launcher box riding the right shoulder that marked it as an A-config unit - before its fire was reaching out to greet her. The autocannon burst walked across the ground by her Nova’s feet and then up one leg, and the long range missiles rained down around her in a rattling, battering hailstorm of fire that the anti-missile miniguns only blunted. She fought the controls desperately, trying to get her balance back and bring her PPCs on-target before...
Vera saw the left arm come up and fired a desperate, half-aimed snap shot from both particle cannons. One missed entirely, punishing the air over the Hellbringer’s left shoulder, and the other, aimed lower, smashed into the right torso, below the missile racks. A bloom on the IR band told her that she’d gotten a piece of its engine shielding as the last dregs of the particle bolt broke through its armor - for all its mass and firepower, the Hellbringer carried less protection than her own fifteen-tons lighter Nova - but then another, fiercer spike as the engine answered a power demand warned her of the shot from the lasers.
Both torrents of emerald fire, whether deliberately or by chance, found the already weakened armor plating of her left torso, searing and melting their way through the glacis and through her ‘mech’s delicate workings to slag the inner surfaces of the rear plating. The structural members, the metal bones that supported the entire left arm and held the ‘mech together, softened and deformed as they were heated beyond their tolerances by coherent light and radiation escaping from the damaged reactor shielding, and when the gyrocontrol computers tensed the myomers of the left arm - those that hadn’t melted in the holocaust - the additional strain sheared the weakened structure away. Bereft of that support, the shoulder and arm sagged, sawing half-ruined myomers against the razored, glowing-hot edges of the ravaged armor plating until they parted and the entire assembly dropped free.
Even at the best of times, Vera found it a struggle to keep her ‘mech on its feet in bad footing or sudden weight shifts like that, and now she cursed savagely as she failed again and measured her Nova’s height full-length in the dirt of the Trial field. Even as she fought to recover her wits, a part of her mind waited grimly for the salvo that would complete her Nova’s destruction…
...and waited. By the time she was capable of acting coherently again, she realized that the pilot of the Hellbringer was doing her the honor of granting her time to rise to her feet again. Or possibly he was simply unwilling to fire when his earlier strike and his damaged engine had already flooded his ‘mech with excess heat.
Either way…
She scrambled one of the Nova’s feet under it, just enough to stabilize the machine as she lifted its remaining arm and took aim. For a split second, she let the aim point hover over the Hellbringer’s head and the cockpit within - then dropped the arm a degree or so and fired into the gaping wound across its right chest.
There was a brilliant gold-orange fireball as the missile ammunition stored there cooked off, billowing out of the open wound and the designed blast-panels across the omnimech’s back, and the heavy staggered - and then a second fireball erupted from within the machine, probably as flying hot shards of metal or spreading flames touched off the machine-gun ammunition stored safely behind the thick plating of the central-torso glacis.
That explosion savaged fusion engine and stabilizing gyroscope alike, and the humanoid omnimech dropped unceremoniously to the earth even as the pilot's ejection system carried him safely away.
Vera panted as she looked at the wreck, abruptly conscious of the sauna-heat of her Nova’s cockpit, of the sweat pouring down her body and staining her cooling suit, of the strands of white-bleached hair clinging to her face and neck as she counted up the total.
Mal… the Kit Fox… the Fire Moth… the Viper… the Stormcrow… the Mad Dog… and the Hellbringer.
She forced the Nova to stagger drunkenly to its feet as the incredulous grin stretched across her still-damp face. SEVEN! Six blooded warriors and one of her own peers had walked onto this field with her, and only she was walking away. Since the day the Nicholas Kerensky had forged the Clans, tens of thousands of warriors had taken the Trial of Position, matched themselves against their kind and their future peers for the right to name themselves members of the noble warrior caste.
None had claimed more than three victories in that challenge, not ever. None but her, Vera of the bloodhouse Tseng, of Clan Ghost Bear.
She’d done it.
She was a Warrior.
