Smith's Rest, New Anchorage | Operations HQ
Present Day
“On foot? You’re shittin’ me, right?”
Of course, Stein wasn’t shitting anyone. Alan doubted Stein had the capability to even excrete waste. She probably just dropped a tiny cube of detritus in the morning which was then incinerated and finished booting up for her daily missions. After three months living in close quarters with this woman, Alan still struggled to find any human connection with her. Her name was enough of an indicator at that. Truth be told, understanding the etymology of stein beyond a reference to a drinking mug had been a fun research adventure for Alan, perusing old reference works in his PDA. Not that any of his fellow pilots would understand how he made mental connections for each of them. Since he himself was like the soldier, aloof and distant with others. The difference was he wasn’t cold, he was just false in his attitudes and his words.
A liar. Or a con man. A shit-eating grin, a greased palm, and a fine “look-over-there” as he slipped away into the shadows. The only real thing he could count on was the Wild Wolf, and he felt more and more distant from his mech the longer he went from piloting the machine. Here he was, working with a soldier and a middle-aged rookie. He never thought he’d be fighting alongside these two..
Smith's Rest, New Anchorage | Hangar
14 Hours Ago
...I never thought I'd be out fighting alongside...
Alan Foren gazed upwards at the large machine that he had piloted for the lion’s share of his adulthood. How long had it been since he’d actually been inside the cockpit? How long had it been since he’d been engaged in actual combat? Sure there’d been the sims from time to time, but the actual weight shifting of the odd patchwork like pieces of the machine, knowing how to shift as he moved to keep proper balance… if he didn’t get a chance to take Wild Wolf out into the field soon, he was afraid he’d forget how to pilot the damn thing. It felt like a lifetime, between the attack and the awful speeches, he just wanted to be somewhere that felt like home.
The Wild Wolf’s cockpit was his home, anyways. There were the barracks, the lockers, the mess; but those places were part of the NA. Wolf was home. The only surviving debris from Dead Springs besides him at any rate. He felt a pang of regret deep in his chest. How many years now had he pushed Dead Springs further down, under the surface? How many years had it been now since he’d felt the tearing of metal tear through the cockpit; what had felt like his own chest being ripped open; cutting at his face and scarring him? How many missions, how many sorties, how many bodies buried now? He was so lost in his own thoughts that the sudden, jarring sound of mechanical tools above his head and the bright sparks of a torch broke his spiral of self-loathing and put him into sudden defense.
“H-hey!” He yelled, moving towards a maintenance platform that was still lowered on the ground, “what the hell are you doing up there?” He looked around for something he could use as a weapon: a wrench or a metal hammer, even a cutting torch. If more of those bastards from the attack were here, trying to sabotage the mechs when they weren’t in use...
The sound of the tools abruptly cut as the engineer from above looked down towards him as they paused their current work on the Wild Wolf. It was hard to make out with all of the noise in the hangars, but the voice was definitely female. That much Alan could tell. “Depends where you want to start?!”
“Fucking shit.” Alan muttered under his breath, hopping onto another maintenance lift, slowly moving up towards the catwalk and towards the female working on his mech. Even though he’d been around New Anchorage for three months, he’d done his damnedest to keep to himself. He’d met a few of the main staff, there was no getting around shaking hands with the people who looked down on you, after all, but his normal time in the hangar was after the staff had left. Who the hell was messing with the Wild Wolf at this hour? As he approached the catwalk, he called to the girl, “Is it the left neck connector wire?” He was trying to eye her work the best he could. While he’d never been the greatest mechanic, he knew the Wild Wolf from top to bottom, finances and perfectionism being the two driving forces for him to constantly titter over the machine. “It got hit bad in a dust storm outside of Chicago last year.” he added, sizing the woman up. He’d seen her around a few times, and at the very least felt that she wasn’t going to shoot him if he turned away from her.
The woman leaned up against the Wild Wolf, utility tool in hand as she pushed up her visor up to her head, causing her raven-colored bangs to be pulled up in the process. She crossed her arms before the lift ultimately came to a stop, a curious look on her face. It appeared she had little-to-no qualms about taking a break to facilitate conversation between herself and one of the pilots.
“This may be a wild guess, but you must be the pilot of this thing, huh?”
“Yeah, I’ve piloted Wild Wolf now for about five years. Every scratch and dent, I’ve felt.”
“I’m kind of new to the independent scene; but it takes a lot of something to come out of it without being toasted. The life expectancy for an independent is much lower, right?”
“Yeah, most don’t make it past the six month mark in the indies. I guess that’s why some of the pilots here are former company folks. With the indies, you get younger folks like Ryn and me.” He nearly froze when he realized he’d brought up the girl in normal conversation. He wasn’t thinking right. He had to be cautious about what he said especially to these NA workers.
The girl nodded, “Well, I wouldn’t call a lot of the pilots ‘corporate’ either. Outside Kane and Stein. New Anchorage is kind of dysfunctional if you think about it. Bringing a bunch of outsiders, locals, and corporates together and thinking they are not going to fight is kind of crazy. I think so, anyway.”
“I’ve been lucky enough that I haven’t really fought with any of the pilots. But then again, I’m used to working with folks who look at me like i’m going to steal everything not bolted down.” He chuckled to himself.
“Well, that’s good. Fights aren’t very fun.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” he muttered. “So, why are you up here so late messin’ with my mech?”
“Couldn’t sleep, so I decided to finish up some of the work I haven’t finished. Commander told me he needed them at one hundred percent by the end of the week.”
“I tend to come up here and see the Wolf when I can’t sleep. So I guess I can’t be too pissy with you then.” He tried to eye up her work. “Well, at the very least I can give you a hand if you want. I’ve done field maintenance since I started piloting.”
She smirked, “Not much to be done, if I’m going to be completely honest. It’s mostly busywork. There was a lot more work to be done at the beginning of the year, which is all pretty much done now. But I’d rather be doing busywork up here than be doing busywork down there.”
He nodded in agreement. “I’ve spent so much time training, it feels like I’ve forgotten what it’s like to actually be in the cockpit. All the sims I’ve ran with the others are nice and all, but it’s nothing compared to actually being in the mech.” His face contorted into a half-hearted grin. “Only thing I’ve ever been good at, at least.”
“So how long ago is that, Mr. Wolf? The stuff you’re good at.”
“Alan.” he corrected her. “Sorry...never even introduced myself. I’m not very good at the whole…” he motioned his arms in an awkward motion, “talking...thing.”
He returned to her question after awkwardly apologizing, “I’ve only been a pilot for...about five years give or take. I guess it’ll be six years soon.”
She pressed her back against the railing, “I think that was my first year at Fairbanks, right out of the engineering academy back home.”
“Nice. Junker towns had… something like schools, but out in the wastes there was never any chance for a real education. You don’t really talk like a girl from the Megacities. Where are you from?”
“Louisville.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I’m from outside Atlanta. Back when I started piloting, we led a few caravans through Louisville and some of the townships around. I’ve seen the market district a few times. Seems funny to me, your first year out of your academy was my first year around there. It’s an interesting coincidence.”
“There’s a lot of that here, I guess. Graham’s organization has attracted all sorts of people.”
"You’re not wrong. We've got folks who I never thought I'd be out fighting alongside."
“That a good thing or a bad thing?”
“That’s…” Alan looked down. He wasn’t in the mood in in the headspace to go around telling people his own “real” feelings. “It’s a mix of both. I’m working with good pilots and rookies. It’s just tough to parse being in an independant that’s more… structured than most places.”
“I was here back when Sophia was in charge. It wasn’t structured like this. That’s all been part of how Graham thinks things need to be run. It’s…” The female engineer broke eye contact to look off to the side, her hands gripping the guard railing as she did so. She took a light breath, but tried to hide what Alan recognized as someone who had reservations. “…it’s an adjustment.”
“I guess a lot has changed around here that I don’t know about.” The young man scratched his messy hair and looked over the railing, placing his elbows on the metal rails and leaning slightly, staring at the hangar below.
“That’s why we need to be positive. Look forward, not back. These are some of the most beautiful and amazing machines ever created. They have so much potential to be used for good. We could put a construction frame over them instead of weapons. Rebuild everything. Build new things. The world doesn’t have to be an empty, broken thing.”
Alan chuckled. “I wish it could be like that. I’d rather use the Wolf for easy missions like transporting goods or protecting people instead of having to fight and kill.” He leaned over a little more, pointing to the large weapon on the Wild Wolf’s left arm. “You see that? It’s built like a giant industrial saw. It’s used to cut into a mech, but you could also use it to cut through metal debris. Even the weapons we use now can be repurposed into something better.”
She nodded, “But the world is built on a monopoly. A monopoly of war and fear and control. That’s why I’m never ever working for a corporation again. I don’t want to be part of the problem. New Anchorage is something new. Something different. Maybe it’s stupid or naive to think that it can change things. But it’s the right kind of stupid.”
“If there’s any chance of something better out there, then we’ve got to go through some powerful people to make that change. Companies with endless resources compared to ours.” He laughed. “It’s suicide, if you think about it.”
The woman’s hands gripped the cold metal bars tightly. “It is suicide not to. There are so many independents out there that are loosely affiliated with the megacities. For the protection. Did you know people in Fairbanks actively encouraged raiders to remind those settlements that the world was dangerous? To remind them how valuable their allegiance was? It’s terrible. It’s immoral. It’s accepted. And somehow Louisville executives kept it quiet.”
Her smile dropped.
“And what are we engineers and soldiers told? To do our jobs. That it is how the world works. Fuck. That.”
Alan’s hands grasped the cold metal railing. He was silent, staring intensely at the hangar floor now. His eyes were no longer soft and wistful from his conversation with her; but instead they were harsh, wild and obsessive. He was visibly shaking from her words. Did you know?
“Yeah. I know.” He muttered, his voice ice cold. “Fairbanks did the same thing to my hometown.”
She looked in his direction, a sympathetic frown pursed on her lips. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. That kind of thing is one of the reasons I left Fairbanks.”
“There was nothing I could do. One kid in a junker mech?” He closed his eyes and grinned, his face a harsh mask of pain. “One pilot is meaningless compared to how many there are in the world. Sure, they call us “special” for being able to sync, but how many thousands upon thousands of pilots are actually out there? And the big cities? They’re the ones who lead the ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the pilots.”
His mind was racing. The dust. Rusted metal. Pain, blood, screaming. Fire. Dead bodies. The corpses all blurred together in his memories; the bodies of his family, his neighbors, his friends...and the bodies of their murderers. How long had he gone without rest, stalking and hunting them down?
Too long. Sure, the paper went back to the cities. Sure the trail went all the way up to the dirty rotten Fairbanks offices. There were so many fantasies that plagued him at night, dreams of blowing his way through countless soldiers to find the fat cats in suits who ran the world, the so-called gods that ran this festering radioactive dead world. And in those dreams, those wild, fiery fantasies, he took every pound of flesh he knew he deserved from them. He gave them sacrifices of blood, broken bones and an ecstasy of pain that only a man who truly saw the brink of humanity’s coldness could deliver. He’d woken up hard after fantasies like that. But that’s all they were. Dreams.
Smith's Rest, New Anchorage | Operations HQ
Present Day
Alan blinked himself back to reality, looking around. It seemed that neither Stein nor Percy noticed he’d zoned out for a few minutes. He opened his locker, getting his own gear. Similar to what Stein had gathered up already. Instead of a compact assault rifle, he grabbed a scout rifle, checking the scope and making sure he had enough ammo. “Well,” he muttered looking at the two, “are we ready?”
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