Date: December 24, 2438
Location: Terra
Title: Break-Away
Author: Ilsa J. Bick
Type: Short Story (BattleCorps)
Synopsis:
Yakima, Washington
At the Yakima Proving Grounds, simian neuropsychology specialist Dr. Carolyn Fletcher continues her work with the experimental neurohelmet after some early morning practice on the firing range. Since her boss, Dr. Htov Gbarleman, gave the neuroscience staff the week off for the holidays, Carolyn is alone in the lab.
Her work is interrupted by a cacaphony of screams from the inner habitat. She races inside to find the chimpanzees agitated, and one of them, Jack, weeping - an activity not seen in regular chimps.
She notes that the helmet is working fine in simulations, where Colonel Kincaid has been leading the evaluations, but she hopes Amanda Cunningham will get the nod, being more emotionally controlled.
Grand Tetons, Wyoming
Three days into the SERE course, Major Sarah James observes Charles Kincaid as he stands below her on the western shore of the Snake River. She fires, and he goes down, playing dead per the rules of the course. Sarah watches the body for a few moments, then goes to inspect it more closely. She kicks his fallen laser rifle away and gloats over her advancement towards becoming the Mackie pilot. She is stunned when the colonel rolls over and fires a silenced pistol, blowing her head off.
Major Amanda Cunningham, meanwhile, has staked out an observation site on Inspiration Point, between Jenny Lake and Mt. St. John. She notes that the goal of the exercise to to reach Death Canyon by midnight, December 25, where she can call in a chopper for extraction, assuming she can avoid HAF hunter squads and the other contestants (Brian Hackett, Sarah James, and Charles Kincaid). She feels emotionally conflicted - not wanting to hunt Kincaid in the SERE competition because of their love affair (ended due to his House Kincaid-arranged engagement to Isabelle Cameron, the Director-General's third cousin).
At the Snake River, the colonel takes James' dog tags and hides the body. He takes out a photo taken at the MacBeth spaceport on Tybalt, showing Amanda in her flight suit after the battle, and relishes having saved her for last.
Yakima, Washington
Carolyn reports to Colonel Nathan Powers that the test chimps may have developed Parkinson's Disease - a disease to which chimps are normally not susceptible. She suspects it may be due to the neurohelmet's augmentation loop. Powers blows off her concerns, saying it will be too hard to get an expert in over the holidays, and suggests they go out to lunch.
She begins to yell at him to do his job, but is interrupted by the sounds of renewed screaming from the chimp habitat. They run back and open the door with a command overrride to find a scene that renders them speechless.
Grand Tetons, Wyoming
Approaching Death Canyon, Amanda spots vultures near Phelps Lake. She finds it odd that she hasn't run into any other competitors or hunter squads. She finds two tents, and smells blood. Suspicious, she carefully investigates, unaware that the colonel is tracking her with a sniper rifle. He prepares to fire, just as she lets out a cry of horror.
Yakima, Washington
Blood and gore from the female chimp, Shana, cover the chimp habitat, and Jack perches on a sycamore branch, dangling the limp body of his son, Tongo.
Dr. Fletcher and Colonel Powers head back to the laboratory.
Grand Tetons, Wyoming
Inside the tent, Amanda sees the bodies of one of the hunter teams, bullet holes in their chests, throats slit, and bodies carefully arranged. She finds James' and Hackett's dog tags coiled around a KA-BAR knife stabbed into the ground, with C.K. engraved on the butt. She screams in horror, not fooled by the attempt to implicate Kincaid, but realizing that the murderer must have already taken out Kincaid to have his knife. A bullet tears through her left leg.
Yakima, Washington
Colonel Powers and Dr. Fletcher try to determine why Jack went on a killing spree and exhibited sadistic traits. Powers is intrigued by the possibility that the neurohelmets' augmentation loop might have the effect of making the soldiers using them into aggressive, remorseless killers, with no fatigue and superhuman concentration.
They go to drive to the communications center - Fletcher warming up the car, while Powers goes back inside to get his jacket. After an unusually long interval, he returns, explaining that he had to shut down the computers. Fletcher remarks she thought they had been shut down. Powers comments that the candidates must be freezing in Wyoming, and Fletcher notes that earlier, he'd said he didn't know where they were.
Powers pulls out a laser pistol and tells Fletcher to turn left.
Grand Tetons, Wyoming
The colonel sees Amanda go down.
Using her training, Amanda stays down and ties a tourniquet above the leg wound. Using her own weapon scope's IFF unit, she sweeps it towards the shot's origin and is shattered when the ID comes back as Kincaid.
The colonel watches as Amanda limps away. He follows, intending to herd her to where he wants her to go, enjoying himself immensely.
Yakima, Washington
Powers and Fletcher drive northeast across the proving grounds. Fletcher considers going for her gun, under the seat, but Powers sees her glance and grabs it himself.
Fletcher realizes he went back to erase her data, and asks why. Powers tells her not to worry about it, since he'll be shooting her with her own gun shortly, and making it look like a suicide.
Fletcher crashes the car, throwing off the laser pistol's aim and sending the pistol case flying. The airbags deploy, pressing them into their seats. As they deflate, Fletcher grabs her pistol, struggling with Powers for it. She bites his leg to make him let go, then seizes the pistol and shoots him.
Grand Tetons, Wyoming
Amanda closes in on Death Canyon after three hours of limping. She wonders how Kincaid could have smuggled a sniper rifle into the exercise. Thinking back to the bodies in the tent, she comes to a realization and stops running.
The colonel emerges from the woods, and is disappointed to no longer see horror or shock on Amanda's face.
Amanda addresses her pursuer as Sang-shao. She notes that the scars on his victims' bodies match those from the wounds he suffered in the Battle of Tybalt - flying on the Capellan side, and that the cuts were from right to left - whereas Kincaid is left-handed.
The Capellan grins, and tells her she is the sauce for the goose, but not his main objective. She asks what it is, but his answer is interrupted by the arrival of a HAF helicopter gunship.
The Capellan colonel kicks her legs out from under her and carries her body up to where he'd left Kincaid days earlier.
Kincaid remains in the cave where the colonel left him after shooting him three days earlier, guarded by two Maskirovka operatives. The colonel had promised he would keep Kincaid alive long enough to see him torture Amanda to the point where Kincaid would beg for him to kill her - knowing suffering just as the colonel's wife had when she died in orbit over Tybalt.
After hearing a shot and the helicopter, Kincaid tells the guards he has to go to the privy area. While the guards argue over who will take him, Kincaid takes a fork from the table and stabs it into one guard's eye, steals his laser pistol and shoots the other guard.
To attract the helicopter's attention, he uses the laser to start a brush fire. Kincaid's jubilation fades as he sees the colonel approaching with Amanda. He scrambles along the ridge to put the smoke between them as the colonel drops her and readies his rifle.
Amanda regains consciousness as the colonel takes aim at Kincaid on the ridge. Kincaid fires his own laser and places the shot directly through the colonel's sniper scope, burning out his eye. Unable to see, he only hears Amanda approach and club him with her target laser, sending him plummeting over the canyon rim to his death.
Kincaid watches Amanda finish off the colonel as the Redhawk VTOL descends for their extraction.
Notes: By cutting back and forth between Yakima and the Grand Tetons, Ilsa Bick tries to set up the possibility that the experimental neurohelmet augmentation loop could have driven Kincaid insane, causing him to flip out and murder the rest of the candidates.
Standard neurohelmets simply allow the pilot to assist the gyroscope in keeping their 'Mechs balanced. However, this experimental "augmentation loop" process seems to suggest that the HAF was actually on the path that led the Clans to develop Enhanced Imaging (and the NAIS to develop the Direct Neural Interface) centuries later, with similarly dire impacts on sanity and health. We can presume that the HAF shut down the augmentation loop research based on negative reports from Dr. Fletcher. That being said, I wonder if Kincaid suffered any neurological disorders in later years due to his exposure to the experimental augmentation loop.
There are a few inconsistencies regarding Capellan involvement in the Mackie project. Amanda calls the Capellan colonel "Sang-shao" when she figures out his origins...but the CCAF didn't adopt that rank until Sun-Tzu's Xin-Sheng reforms in the late 3050s, so there'd be no reason to use it at this point. (Heck, at this point, we're chronologically closer to Victor Liao - who wore a Scottish kilt and swung a mean Japanese katana, so there certainly wasn't enough Han Chinese cultural dominance in the Confederation to lead Amanda to translate "colonel" into Chinese as a way of calling out the Capellan officer.) Also, despite the Maskirovka having inserted one of its operatives into the neurohelmet program at a level where he had full knowledge of the candidate selection process, the Capellans were somehow uninformed about the capabilities of BattleMechs for decades after this, resorting ultimately to dispatching the Northwind Highlanders to Ningpo to gather intel in the field in "Goliath Out of the Box."
Mention of the unstatted Redhawk VTOL confirm that we certainly don't have anywhere close to a full accounting of the types of military hardware fielded during the Age of War.
The Maskirovka guards fill the standard role of goons in the presence of certified action hero Charles Kincaid - cannon fodder to showcase his buff heroism.
The motivation of "the colonel" comes down to twisted desires for revenge - having found out that Kincaid and Cunningham were the two HAF fighter pilots who splashed his wife and scarred him in combat over Tybalt. He certainly couldn't have known anything about them during the fight, so he must have researched them after being released from a CCAF field hospital. I was somewhat confused when Amanda remembers getting a briefing on the colonel on Tybalt after the HAF conquered it. With the rank of Colonel, he would probably have had a leading role in coordinating the planetary defense. As is typical for Bick's work, there's a sexual component to the colonel's obsession - he explicitly wants to rape Amanda in front of Kincaid, followed by torturing and mutilating her until Kincaid begs him to let her die.
There remain a lot of questions around Powers' role at the Yakima Proving Grounds. Was he a Maskirovka agent himself, or just suborned and in their pay? He was clearly in close communication with them, having provided classified data on the SERE competition to a Maskirovka strike team. But the lack of Capellan knowledge in "Goliath Out of the Box" suggests he wasn't giving great reports back to HQ. One possibility is that "the colonel," driven by his thirst for vengeance, misused his authority to appropriate Maskirovka assets and only intersected with the Mackie project as a sideshow to his pursuit of Kincaid and Cunningham. He may have recruited Powers simply as a means of going after the two HAF officers, not realizing (or caring about) the significance of the project they were involved in. Talk about tunnel vision!