Flares Bells (Welded Sunset)
#203 of Short Stories
An old piece of hardware finds challenges and hope.
The dreams always seemed to be of happier times, a bit of serendipity that Reah was perpetually thankful for. Most often of the successes she'd pulled together for her captain, back when she was young and the war was old. They'd come to her during the maintenance cycles, when most of her body was powered down and the Beagle core of her intellect slipped into a power saving mode. This morning, she was stirred from recollections of when she'd managed to bluff the enemy away from trying to take the pass without having to fire off the few remaining charges left in her tubes. The sky above was a glimmering dawn, and the air stale with rancid coolant and recycled grease. She shifted in place, carefully, to peer about her cage. Some yards away was Opher, who's engine reactor block had been removed and was in the process of being disassembled by the technicians. He wasn't going to be going out today, from the looks if it, and she'd been volunteered into the opportunity of the hunt. Her own proximity sensors confirming that no technicians were tending about her, she shambled up onto her feet to begin a trot around the small ring of walls and get a sense for the quality of the repairs that had been performed since she was last dragged back into the shop. Her hip wasn't balanced anywhere near correctly, and the relay leads to the massive puff of tendrils that made up her tail still felt stiff. She didn't trust her tail to spin out a cloaking field for more than a few minutes before those lines would seize up and fracture, to say nothing of the condition of her tail itself. None of the technicians seemed to know up or down of what it was made of or how it functioned, and it would always fall to her during nights out in the field to the delicate maintenance it required. She had earned the tail, and so long as the powers allowed it, she'd try to keep it in service. As the coolants and lubricants seemed to settle into the places they'd need to be, her trot adopted a more fluid gait. To her dismay, the mission brief came in over the line. Today, and possibly the entire week if she lasted that long, would be another of the hunts for tourists. These folk had apparently paid quite a premium, to have all of her own victory conditions waived. As long as the fools who would be pilots were willing to rent another remote frame, she'd be in the field with them untile one of them managed to take her to ground. She turned to plod over and sit down directly behind the lead technician, to simply glare down at him. Though she loomed at twice his height, the technician paid her no heed. Without even turning to face her, he explained, "They got money, and the boss has got you. By next week, he'll have both." The lanky fox-frame snorted in derision, but opted to not even vocalize her reply. Angering the technicians with more than a token protest would make them less inclined to bring her all the way back on line, and she'd long concluded they were likely just as much property as her. Over to the gate, she pranced in place anxiously, in a hurry to at least get some proper running in before the hunters were released out into the fields and trees.
It was during the extended dance of a fire fight that she came to realize just how foolish the hunters really were, despite having enough funding to have brought in their own remote piloted frames from home. A spray of flares bouncing off the armor of the heavy wolf frame, itself easily half again her own height, and she heard the shimmering ping of a long range comms relay buried deep within and under the wolf's armor. The facility was always wary to keep her either powered down or away from any networks, mindful that old hardware might be able to pull some tricks. She didn't quite trust her old glimmer array, a full calibration having been completed well beyond her immediate recollection, but she feinted a tumble to twist sideways and smash her midsection through a tree. The array's elements shivered with the impact, and their field calibration cycle kicked in. For the several minutes this would take, she closed the distance to the wolf. The opposing pilot had expected her to keep to kiting, and she managed to keep most of his blows to the intact sections of armor along her shoulder and neck, before rearing up to scatter a spread of flares across the wolf's face and ears. Presumably automatically, the wolf-frame again pinged some distant relay. Reah cut off the contact, and fled as quickly as her feet could take her. As she heard the launch of missiles from the wolf she fluttered the cloaking field in and out with each abrupt change of course, satisfied with the sounds of dirt and rock taking the hits that had been intended for her. By the time she got into the trees and across the river, it would be nightfall before he could find her, and dinner time well before he'd given up the chase.
Tucked in carefully amongst a fairly dense packet of brush, Reah sprawled out to her full length to let the internal recovery systems settle into their tasks. She could hear the soft buzzing of the scuttle welders shifting about in position while thin strands of moonbeam scattered down onto the leaves and debris of the forest floor. She thought back to the time she'd earned a number cracker module from the Captain, having shambled back into camp four days past having been assumed destroyed. Her armor was in pieces miles away under feet of mud, sub-frame a continuous groan of over-exertion, and an intact and functional Beagle module held firmly in her jaws. The cortical stack and delicate comms fray still attached. "He contained information that you needed, Captain, and I couldn't force it out of him.", she'd explained, "So I brought him back for you to open." The fight had been strongly against her advantage, on account of needing to extract delicate portions of the cat's internal geometries. The success she'd found was a matter of patience, stealth, and trading pieces of herself for positional advantages.
Having finally found the wolf frame in the company of one of the smaller partners, Reah bound down the cliff face and directly into the cat frame's center of mass. The hosts never seemed to particularly discourage her from making a show of her kills, so long as there were witnesses to be appropriately impressed, and for the outside observer she seemed to be playing with her catch as she batted the frame about between paws and into her jaws. When she'd managed to position the similarly sized frame's shoulders where she needed and dislodged the several armor plates, she ducked down to deliver her planned blow to the cat's power relay core. The resulting surge shuddered across her jaws and brought glimmering shades into her field of view. She lingered in place for a long moment, ear perked with anticipation, and was rewarded with the noisy and cryptographically vulnerable handshake of the wolf's frame trying to re-establish its long range link to whatever relay was somewhere out above the skies. She darted in place to close the distance with the wolf, her own number cracking module firing to full activity as she leaned into the connection with hopes of hijacking the traffic. Her opponent, not nearly so caught off guard as he'd been the day before, managed to catch her shoulder square with his jaws. With a jerk, several placements of armor plate came off and landed near the disabled cat frame. The remote relay welcomed her voice, and asked of her intentions. She hastily scrambled, in the realm of communications, to provide the message she'd prepared the night before. The wolf frame caught her through a tumble, landing heavily on her chest with both paws. She could feel the sub-frame's joints give out, bolts now rattling their way down along her spine. If there was anyone who could get her away from this place, anyone who'd be willing, it would be the Captain. She provided the relay with his information, with his comms-link address, and signed the message with her own private key. The wolf's jaws were onto her throat, and a spray of flares did little more than stall him. The relay happily confirmed the message transmission, and after a moment's tabulation of delays and relay synchronizations, volunteered that the message should be delivered to the destination system sometime around the Captain's four hundredth birthday. The wolf frame leaned in, a paw pinning the flare launcher into the retracted position, while Reah's diagnostics confirmed a catastrophic chronometer failure.