Embers After Flames, Chapter 6.8

6.8

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“I thought you said you were going on a scouting mission.” Freddie spoke, his confusion evident in his voice.

“I did say that. And I did go on the scouting mission.”

“Flatwell...” Dolmayan, more diplomatic than Freddie, paused for a moment, searching for the correct words to say. “That is a baby.”

“Yes. She is a baby.”

“Out of curiosity, how exactly does a scouting mission progress into... acquiring an infant?”

Flatwell sighed. “Nothing about this was anticipated.” He spoke. “You recall the PCA shooting an unlicensed ship down?”

“It happened yesterday.” Dolmayan stated. “You left almost immediately because of how close it was projected to land.”

“Yes.” Flatwell nodded. The baby fussed at the movement, and Flatwell shifted to soothe her with the kind of automatic motion that could have only come from experience. “I arrived in good time. The ship was a smaller vessel, a sloop at most.”

In the modern day, ‘Sloop’ no longer meant a small, single sailed boat. ‘Sloop’ now referred to the smallest of interstellar ships, the only kind that was even moderately available to civilian parties. Typically, they belonged to either a small clan of family members or to the kinds of decently rich people who sought adventure before realizing that life outside the established polities is, in fact, not great.

“Based on my immediate analysis, the Closure Satellite shot out its engine, which also destroyed the reactor when the fuel cells detonated. It made a completely uncontrolled atmospheric insertion that smashed most of the rest of the ship. I thought everyone was dead, but after I checked the only intact memory bank for information, I found that the ship had stasis pods aboard.”

Stasis pods were emergency equipment, rated for some absolutely insane scenarios, if you didn’t cheap out on them. Some people did, under the belief that anything which could break a ship would leave a stasis pod destroyed. This... was not completely inaccurate.

That was not, however, a reason to skip out on failsafes.

“I elected to check them just to make sure. They took some damage from the fuel cell detonation, but as far as I can tell, only one of them was actually in use in the first place.” He shifted, indicating the infant. “She was inside.”

I reached through the network, connecting to AC bays. His AC, TSUBASA, was already going through its initial maintenance cycle, the teams crawling over it and looking for any signs of any issues that may have somehow been hidden from the sensors. The COM interface was offline, but the data he’d recovered had been downloaded as part of the basic processes...

Hmm. And it’s extremely damaged, too. Information decay patterns consistent with a very close range electromagnetic pulse, which isn’t irrecoverable but did guarantee some loss. More than that...

Pointer references to other hardware. The storage setup had been utilizing a distributed array of devices for different purposes. There had likely been a backup for all of the long-term storage and recovery, but that had almost certainly been destroyed alongside the rest of the ship, so this data was all we had.

I started the cleanup processes, beginning to try and recover what had been lost.

“Who brings an infant onto a starship?” Dolmayan asked. “Interstellar travel is notoriously rigorous. Subjecting an infant to that... And travelling to a forbidden planet illegally at that!”

“I know.” Flatwell nodded. “I wasn’t exactly happy to see it either. Until we can check the data out in depth, however, we won’t know for certain.”

“From the looks of it, they were miners.” I helpfully stated. “The cargo manifest lists a lot of rare metals normally harvested from asteroids. No doubt that’s how they sustained themselves... Though, all nearby systems have developed to the point of oversaturation by now. They wouldn’t have had much choice aside from moving on to the periphery, or moving to trying to acquire more valuable substances. And, since they came to Rubicon...”

“They were after the Coral.” Dolmayan shook his head. “Too foolish or too desperate to realize that they were never going to be able to find it or take some of it.”

“And, normally, that would be where our care in the matter ends. However...” I sighed. “This time, they brought an infant over with them.”

“I have done a lot of things I’m not proud of. Things I regret and wish I could change.” Flatwell spoke. “Saving this life will not be one of them.”

“However it happened, she’s a child of Rubicon now.” I agreed. None of this was her fault. “She’ll need a name, Flatwell.”

“You couldn’t find one?” He asks, looking down at the infant.

“Most of the data was destroyed.” Nearly all of it, actually. I had some biodata, a few frames of a video that had been heavily corrupted, and a bunch of unrelated technical data. I had a sneaking suspicion that most of the more personal files had been stored on a different drive. I’ll send an Antigen over. Maybe I’ll find something Flatwell missed.

Flatwell looked down. The baby gurgled.

“Ziyi.”

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Little Ziyi’s sudden arrival on Rubicon shook things up for a bit. She was a clingy little thing, crying incessantly when she was separated from Flatwell for any length of time longer than a couple hours. It took months for that to fade, for her to grow comfortable around others. By that time, it was already too late; Flatwell had gotten attached in turn, and Ziyi had become a regular sight for the upper echelons of the RLF.

It had taken no small amount of effort to convince him not to add raising the child solely by himself to his workload. He did it whenever he could, but there was a fairly large circle of other caretakers available if and when it inevitably became necessary.

One unexpected little side effect was that it made me remember that there was another pilot associated with the RLF who I had never actually searched for just yet.

Rusty.

Yeah, it turns out I actually had already heard of him. Dunham constantly told stories of a kid who was always so eager to pilot an AC that he was causing a bit of trouble trying to do it; sneaking time on the simulators, burying himself in books, even asking Dunham himself about it.

Yeah, him. That was Rusty.

He’s twelve at the moment. A determined little guy, too. No surprise according to his file; an orphan who lost his parents in two different PCA raids, both of whom had been RLF, which technically made him second generation. If that had been all, though, he wouldn’t have been much different to a lot of other kids on Rubicon.

What separated Rusty from the rest had been determination and stubbornness. He was driven, mixing that youthful energy with decidedly un-youthful maturity. Sneaking into the simulators -not the AC-grade Pilot simulators, no, the smaller MT-grade ones- had only been the first step. The kid had managed to con his teachers into letting him try out the simulators officially, which they would normally only do a bit later in life, closer to adulthood.

It only took a few weeks for his scores and results to pull ahead of any of his peers his age. A few months and he was better than most who had years of experience.

The RLF was full of protagonists, I swear.

Anyway, his great performance obviously marked him as someone to keep an eye on, and the RLF had definitely been keeping an eye on him.

If he kept it up, he’d be on the fast track for the AC Pilot program, and, well, I didn’t really need the metaknowledge to know he was going there.

It’s a real strong protagonist energy that little kid Rusty has got.

Ah well. Enough about those two for now; they’ll come up again later.

The excitement after Ziyi’s adoption eventually faded back into the normal. By August, you wouldn’t have thought anything had changed. My operations continued, the RLF’s operations continued, the PCA’s operations continued...

It was in the background where things were really changing. By now C6 Augmentations had proliferated significantly through the RLF’s forces, safe and stable. Almost all of them were Stage Three at the most, not really needing much more than to handle the RLF’s primary machines. There were a couple of Stage Fours, mostly people who were piloting things that were a bit heavier than normal; Juggernauts and the like. And, of course, ACs.

There was one new Stage Five. A man by the name of Messam, one of the new AC Pilots. Dolmayan had read him in on the secret, and his partner probably wasn’t going to be too far behind.

The PCA was still whittling away at the RLF, but by now the RLF was growing faster than it could be cut away at. Trust and morale was higher than it had ever been, civilians constantly flocking towards it on account of all of Flatwell’s outreach and grassroots efforts, alongside Dolmayan’s ideology providing something that made it all stick. This greatly displeased the PCA, especially after Messam and his partner went active and they found out that yes, the RLF was still getting more ACs.

Unfortunately for them, they kinda couldn’t do much about it anymore. There were too many eyes hovering about, too much bad press and wrong expectations laid upon them. They did not have, and could not get, the justifications that they wanted to slap it all down. They were on a low, slow boil, and there were vanishingly few ways out.

One thing I did notice was that they had started to deploy prototype machines and equipment. Auxilia getting more powerful weapons and attachment thruster units, Sentries receiving a number of general upgrades and mobility wings which made them much more difficult targets. LCs these days were almost entirely equipped with high mobility units as a standard, with only a few specialist roles not receiving them.

The Heavy Cavalry unit made its first battlefield appearance in September, joining in on a ‘crackdown of illegal activity’. It was a far cry from the design that was meant to surpass ACs in every manner, better than Light Cavalry but still not really great. By far the most troublesome thing about them was the Pulse Shield Generator unit attached to the arm, which provided extremely potent defence for everything hiding behind it.

This... did not help the very first one. While the PCA attempted to destroy an outlying RLF base, what they weren’t aware of was the fact that Dolmayan had been in the vicinity.

Yeah.

The base got fucked up quite a bit, but we got the tactical data and a mostly intact Heavy Cavalry unit out of it- just one that was missing a head.

It was... significantly better designed than the LC, I’ll give it that. It didn’t have the forward ‘hunch’ of the upper torso like the LC did, and it was significantly more heavily armored while also having high mobility as part of its standard integration setup rather than an additional external gear like the LC. The redesigned leg parts could equip significantly greater amounts of weight before failing, and the Generator was a fine piece of work that went well with an HC’s primarily energy-based loadout. The frontal sensor pod was the closest thing it had to a real ‘weakpoint’, but it was sitting directly in front of very heavy armour, and its destruction wouldn’t effect immediate combat performance, only the scan range and angles.

The shoulder pauldrons were still ridiculous, and the ‘collar’ that surrounded the very low head prevented it from turning that head too far without turning its body to match, though. Which, yes, not actually necessary for a pilot, but it’s an instinct for Humans to turn their heads before anything else. It was going to trip people up, I was pretty sure.

It could use a bit of work, but it was still a fairly solid machine.

It was also really fucking expensive. Like, damn, that’s some very high quality alloys and very tight tolerances there. These things were going to be hangar queens at the best of times.

Hah... I was going to need to step my game up a bit. It’d been a decent amount of time since the Firekeepers got anything new. Couldn’t afford to be predictable on Rubicon.

And the next few years were going to be trying ones.