4
Guest chapter by Zogster
Counting Costs
“It’s over. You lost. Let it go.”
Violetta Vujic exhaled. Repeating the line to herself in her cramped office onboard Torquemada, the unit’s Union dropship didn’t do much to calm her mood. The microgravity of transit usually helped her relax, but today it just added to her annoyances. Even knowing they were leaving Esteros behind once and for all didn’t help her mood. And as much as she hated what the screen before her showed, she knew worse was yet to come.
The office door slid open and Maeve appeared, floating in mid-air. She was hanging onto the doorframe with one hand and holding a tablet in the other. “Here comes the bad news,” she said and propelled herself into the office.
“Sure. I need more of that,” Violetta replied. She leaned back into her chair and took a hold of the armrests to keep herself from floating away. Maeve took hold of the desk to stop her momentum and righted herself. To an observer, they could almost have been under gravity.
“It’s not all bad news,” Maeve said. She caught Violetta’s fierce gaze and amended her statement. “I mean, it is all bad news, but you can take some of it as good news. Sort of.”
“Just…” For once, she was not in the mood for her BattleMech commander’s banter. Violetta let a groan slip through her teeth, then started again. “Give me the report.”
Maeve nodded, uncharacteristically silent. She handed over the tablet and waited a moment as the unit’s leader scrolled through it.
In time, she spoke up. “Technically we’re up on BattleMechs.” She spent a moment studying Violetta’s face for a reaction but found none. “Adding the remnants of the Screaming Demons more than compensated for our losses, even if they’re down a couple after the final conflict. Problem is, that makes our new Demon Company the most complete of our BattleMech forces.”
“And we can’t reassign anyone from them to bolster your company,” Violetta replied.
Maeve nodded her agreement. “I mean, we can. Sort of. You gave Markov control over the company, but with the agreement we hashed out, he gets to veto any troop movements for former Demons MechWarriors. So… No, basically.”
At this, Violetta glanced up at Maeve. The agreement had worked at the time, and while it hadn’t won them the final battle against the opposing mercenary forces, she knew that their losses would have been much worse without the former Demons’ support.
Of course, Markov and the remainder of his company were handily tucked away on their own dropship and spared from her scowl.
“Good news is that most of our individual lances are intact, just missing a ‘Mech or two. Well, apart from…” Maeve trailed off, watching Violetta’s reaction closely.
Violetta didn’t need Maeve to identify the particular unit in question. Her Miscellaneous Detachment had been wiped out when their own raid on the opponents’ civilians had been ambushed. It had been a devastating blow; not only had she lost four BattleMechs outright, but also the means to carry out the piracy that had provided so much support to her unit.
Maeve had made her feelings on that particular unit clear. If nothing else, Violetta had to admire her restraint in not rubbing the loss in her face.
“Conventional forces were savaged,” Maeve pressed on, as much to break the silence as to get the report over and done with. “Putting the fragmentary remnants of the Demons’ armour and infantry with our own still won’t bring us up to full strength.”
“But Markov was only worried about his ‘Mechs,” Violetta replied.
“Exactly. So we can mostly rebuild that way. The flipside is that by inheriting their dropships, we’ve now got too many transport assets.”
Violetta nodded. The Screaming Demons had not been the best equipped of mercenary units, and it showed in their dropships. Their Triumph was an old but capable design, while the Trojan was nothing more than a simple cargo transport. Woefully inadequate for their needs.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Violetta replied. “At this point, the Trojan’s just a waste of fuel. We can flog it and refit the Triumph to carry BattleMechs.”
“The refit will be pricy,” Maeve replied. “And ridiculous as it sounds, we probably won’t get much for the Trojan. It’s common as muck, old and in bad shape.”
“Great,” Violetta groaned. “Plus we got stiffed on salvage.”
Maeve nodded. “If there’s an upside, it’s that a lot of the salvage that Guise took from us was already pressed into service, so it’s ours anyway. Well, Markov’s,” she added with a shrug. “Downside is that we got basically nothing out of that to restock our parts and supplies. We could have gotten away with a lot more if you didn’t insist on reclaiming the Longbow.”
“Jackson’s Longbow,” Violetta said, meeting Meave’s gaze. “And I was not going to leave it behind.”
“Okay,” Maeve said with a shrug and looked away. Her commander’s affection for her lancemate seemed completely at odds with her usual callous nature. Maeve was aware they had some kind of history but was careful not to prod it.
“So we move the Demons’ conventional assets onto our own, refit the Triumph and set Markov up on that, sell the Trojan and use what we get from that to re-arm. Assuming your predictions of a crap price for the dropship, where will that leave us?”
“Yay, accountancy,” Maeve said as she took the tablet back from Violetta. “That’s why I wanted to be a MechWarrior.” She glanced up from it momentarily to take in her commander’s frown, then returned to work. She spent a moment tallying up numbers and feeding in a few more. Eventually, she set it aside and looked Violetta square in the eye.
“In desperate need of work,” she replied.
“It’s over. You lost. Let it go.”
Maeve furrowed her brow. She had barely heard her commander muttering to herself and was unable to make out what she said. She gave Violetta a few seconds, but she seemed in no hurry to repeat herself.
For her part, Violetta glanced aside to her desk. A bottle of brandy sat in the top drawer and had done for a long while. The temptation was to just pull it out right now and let it do its thing. But that wouldn’t help anyone. That wasn’t the answer.
“So what happened?” Maeve eventually asked.
“Yasir turned on us,” Violetta said. “Fed them intel on our units and made it easy to predict what we were doing. That’s how they got Rickie, and that’s how they could bait Guise.”
“Imagine that,” Maeve replied. “You kidnap a guy, press him into service and her turns on you. Who could have expected that?”
“He was supposed to be afraid,” Violetta replied. “He shouldn’t have trusted them. I don’t know how they got to him.”
Maeve gave a casual shrug. “Hey, you can’t control everything.”
She started in place when Violetta slammed her fist on the desk. Silence rung out for a moment, and Maeve took the opportunity to study her commander’s face. Violetta’s lips were pulled back, her brows furrowed and her teeth clenched. Her breath whistled through her teeth as she purposefully calmed herself. The best thing Maeve could do was to give her a moment.
“Is that all?” Violetta quietly asked after a while.
“Sadly no,” Maeve replied. “Your favourite person was asking for you. He’s down in the ‘Mech bay.”
Violetta rolled her eyes. She didn’t even need to check who Maeve meant. She pressed her hands against the table and slid out of her chair. “We need to come up with a new name for the Triumph,” she said, before propelling herself past Maeve and out the office door.
“You’re welcome,” Maeve said to herself once Violetta was gone.
-----
“It’s over. You lost. Let it go,” Violetta muttered to herself as she coasted across Torquemada’s BattleMech bay. Microgravity opened up the cavernous space, giving her so much room to move. She enjoyed the feeling of freedom, floating wherever she wanted in her dropship. But responsibility weighed her down even now as she approached her destination.
Demos hung onto one of the upper railings, bobbing awkwardly just off the ground. His satchel jutted out sideways, as if it felt gravity pulling itself in an altogether different direction. She smirked as she saw him fumbling his way through the air, eventually bouncing off the airlock behind him. That at least was a victory for her.
“There you are,” he said, seeing her approach. She reached out and grasped the railing as she approached and used her handhold to gracefully flip over it and bring herself to a halt in front of him. He nodded in approval of her acrobatics and commented, “Yet to get my space legs again.”
“I thought we were done,” she said flatly, staring him down.
“Well, mostly. Obviously, you failed in the contract,” he began as casually as he could. “You weren’t able to secure the continent from Mandragov, so we weren’t able to reestablish our supply lines.”
“Neither did Guise, no matter how much you egged him on,” she countered.
Demos waved a hand in dismissal. “Guise was disposable, you knew that.”
“And?” She said, arms folded. She certainly didn’t need to be reminded of this.
“And so there will be no further renumeration beyond the advance your unit already received.”
“You,” she said, jabbing him in the chest with a finger “Extended the scope of the contract and you,” she added with another jab “Failed to anticipate the level of resistance present.”
“The situation changed while I was in transit,” he said. “I hired a unit that I thought was capable and adaptable.” Beyond that, the slight shrug he gave was all he needed to say.
“So you called me down here to gloat?” she asked.
“I called you down here to say that I still need to make a recommendation to my people on whether to hire you again. Obviously, this failure looks bad, but if we can both agree that there were extenuating circumstances, then maybe I can convince them to overlook this failure.”
“For the right consideration,” Violetta replied, knowing exactly what he could have said.
Demos merely shrugged.
A quick shove from the railing and she would be on him, pressing against the airlock door. The control was easily in reach. She was more experienced in microgravity, and despite his bizarre array of skills she would wager she was the better fighter. He would be in the airlock with the door closed before he could respond. Then… Oh, then…
“It’s over. You lost. Let it go,” she told herself.
“Come again?” Demos asked, confused.
“We’ll get you home,” Violetta replied. “And I think that’ll be enough.”
She turned and kicked off from the catwalk, soaring back the way she came. Demos blinked in confusion but could do no more than watch her slip away.
Recent Posts