Watching the Wolfhound speed ahead, Harper struggled against the fleeting urge to trigger the MASC of her Wolverine, anything less than a hundred kilometers per hour was pedestrian as far as Harper was concerned, and ever since she'd been told that the MASC installed in her BattleMech would let it push almost one hundred and ten kilometers in short bursts, she'd been fighting the reoccurring temptation to firewall her throttle. Still, she had little interest in scratching the paint of her shiny new BattleMech and she didn't mind the idea of someone else catching the first rounds of fire from some pirate raiders. Harper was a
lover pilot, not a fighter or at least that's what she liked to tell herself when faced with the soul-sucking-ly boring nature of life in military unit.
Nudging her joystick lazily forward, she began to follow, keeping a safe spacing and willing herself, despite her boredom to keep her eyes open, scanning the compressed three hundred sixty degree view that her neurohelmet rendered for her. All sensors were nominal, well, at least as nominal as they could be in a giant dust bowl made out of rocks and vast quantities of sand, and her radar wasn't picking up much beyond a closing dust storm. The movements of her BattleMech were smooth, almost too smooth, and she wondered, not for the first time, exactly how the quartermaster had managed to convince a FWL pilot to part ways with the Black Cat. However, she wasn't complaining, unlike Bjornson, she had a comfortable enough ride.
Small, unimportant, and largely a backwater planet bordering the Periphery, Steelton felt like home to Harper, her real home, all it was missing was a traveling pleasure circus or two. She wasn't sure that her Inner Sphere colleagues were quite as taken with the lifeless planet as she was, but they also didn't know much about life beyond the Inner Sphere. Having long since embraced her inner Periphery Rat, Harper was used to living on the very edge of civilization and the posting at Steelton had caused her no great discomfort, if anything she had enjoyed being away from the more theoretical instructors of the NAIS. Captain Hart was a hard-ass, but he was alright, at least as far as Davion officers went.
Harper was still deciding how she felt about her new unit. The pilots from the Federated Suns were no strangers, Matlov was a predictable devotee to all things Hanse Davion, but outside of that he wasn't bad, and Johan, despite his status as a black sheep at the academy, was a capable enough shot. She wasn't a Fedrat, at least not a proper one, but she felt she owed the Federated Suns for giving her a shot at the big leagues, not that she'd die for them, she wasn't a fanatic...and like all Periphery citizens, she knew that for all their niceties, the House Davion, like all the Great Houses, didn't care all that much about the Periphery, much less one lost Periphery rat.
Harper was far less certain about the Lyrans in the task force. The idea sounded good on paper, foster greater cooperation within the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth, heal old rifts that had grown from centuries of intermittent warfare between the two nations, and develop new tactics fit for a new decade of warfare...standard stuff really, but much harder to accomplish in practice. The Lyrans in the unit all seemed to be a sad bunch of nobles to Harper and she wasn't sure if they might not have been better kept as enemies. All she knew was that it was seemingly increasingly tempting to shack up with some passing pirates, at least pirates had rum...
She stifled a laugh hearing Bjornson's question and fired a laser comm beam in his direction, "Forget your book, Bananenbieger?"
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