The sound of keyboard clatter relaxed Kieran as he swiped his fingers over the tablet. The movement dismissed the final report from the screen, the last traces of two dead bodies that once had names and faces. It had been Kieran’s first permanent assignment as an operator.
‘Permanent’, of course, was a fickle word - in a world where physics were heavily affected by tears in reality, pilots died and operators survived long enough to learn not to get attached. For Kieran, permanent meant that the pilots were assigned to him.
He leaned back in his chair and allowed the white noise of hundreds of running computers to envelop him. These late evenings always had a certain kind of languid quality to them, the murmuring conversation, the dimmed lights. It was relaxing.
He clicked open the file he had received and read earlier, the information about the new pilots that would come to work with him and die. It was their job.
Kieran’s job was to make sure they lived for as long as possible, and to make their death count when it would come to it. How good he had been at his job remained unclear to him.
He should have been grateful to be still alive, him and Lonan both - and yet gratitude never seemed to make it to the top five of how he felt. For better and for worse, he missed being out there with other pilots.
Being the assisting operator had its perks. For one, he had not been attached to the pilots, and thus, writing death reports had been easier. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this one; two pilots with whom he had worked for two years, suddenly gone, their names something Kieran wished he would be able to leave into the report and forget.
Most pilots died while encountering anomalies. Sometimes they were monsters - every shape and form, all of them ugly, all of them deadly. Sometimes they were phenomena that rewrote the rules of the world as they knew it - invisible energy fields, magnetic pitfalls, sudden collapse of haywire gravity. Mechas were built to combat against the monsters, and monitors helped avoid any areas where physics suddenly decidedly stopped functioning.
These two were different. A mission in the civilian area of the city, serve and protect. As humanity had managed to enclose the rifts and anomalies to zones restricted from civilians, life outside the military bases was flourishing under strict border control. And, as these zones became increasingly less active, more and more manpower was aimed to turn their efforts towards maintaining harmony among human societies.
Not everyone took the military presence kindly. There were calls to withdraw the martial law, the occasional clashes between inexperienced pilots and self-proclaimed freedom fighters. Kieran’s pilots had ignored a suggestion to wait for backup.
In hindsight, Kieran realised he should have made it into an order, not a suggestion.
“It’s probably just an empty threat. We can finish a patrol and regroup with the backup.”
Turned out the bomb threat hadn’t been an empty one. The first thing Kieran had done after the incident was to file an expenses report on the mecha - Phantom - that had suffered extensive hull damage. It could be salvaged, but it would cost money.
For the death report, he had waited until he had received the news. Another pair of pilots had been found, two siblings who would be transferring to the base in a few weeks.
Somehow, being assigned to new pilots made it sink in that the dead would not come back.
Kieran sent the report, and with it, consciously pushed away from his mind the names and the voices he had been working with. With his left hand he picked up the internal phone, typed in a number, and waited.
“This is the Command Center. Can the analyst who ran the diagnostics for our newest hires come here at their earliest convenience?”
Fifteen minutes passed in waiting, during which Kieran had time to reaffirm his goal for his next assignment. No suggestions, only orders. They would not be stepping out of line with the rules. Chain of command was more than just officers barking orders - for the pilots, it was a lifeline.
Brisk steps echoed across the command centre, and a lowered voice offered greetings and condolences to those who were assigned to the midnight watch. As per usual, none of the greetings were returned. The steps stopped in front of Kieran’s desk, and a man with thick, black hair on a short ponytail saluted Kieran dutifully.
“You wanted to see me, Squadron Leader?”
“At ease,” Kieran stated and turned, then allowed his polite expression to meld into an amused grin as he lowered his voice. “I think we can manage with a little less formality, Caspian.”
Caspian slid his hands in the pockets of the service centre uniform and grinned. His form, which always seemed to tense upon formalities, relaxed.
“Whatever you say, you’re the one with all those fancy badges,” Caspian replied. Kieran watched him sit down. He liked Caspian, even when nobody else at the command centre seemed to share his view.
Then again, nobody at the command centre had liked Kieran, either, back when he had been a pilot. Back when he had struggled with anything he had deemed a colossal waste of time - such as formalities. Back when he hadn’t understood that discipline saved very real lives.
“I wanted to ask you about this. You were the analyst to run the diagnostic for these two, right?” Kieran handed his tablet towards Caspian. The pale blue light from the device reflected the restlessness of his expression as he flicked a few pages back and forth, going through the numbers before nodding.
“Sure did. I heard they were going to be assigned to you,” Caspian replied. “How come? Was there a mistake?”
Kieran reached over to the tablet and tapped it all the way to the first page. Caspian’s eyebrows settled into an expression that half-resembled a frown as he was scanning through it, meticulously searching for any mistakes.
“You tell me,” Kieran sighed and turned around to open a copy of the document on his laptop. He navigated to the page of the fighter of his new pilots. “I mean, do they really ride that thing? I thought that model was decommissioned years ago.” Caspian let out a short laugh.
“Ah, the good old Interceptor,” he said cheerfully. “Yeah, nobody uses that model anymore - higher death count than any other model, hands down. They were offered a replacement, but they turned it down.” Caspian opened the same page on his own tablet, before moving to check the pages with identity cards. Kieran arched an eyebrow.
“Why?” It was not an unreasonable question. Pilots may have been on suicide missions, but they usually cared about their survival rate. Caspian turned the tablet towards Kieran, revealing two photos side to side: one of a grim-looking young man with light hair, another of a woman of the same age. Worried eyes, tense smile. Perhaps it was the lighting, but their hair seemed to have the faintest green tint.
Both were lacking in bravado and the stoic expressions of professional soldiers. The haunted look in their expression resembled more the civilians without homes, families torn apart, too many bodies to bury.
“Because he said every other model slows his sister down too much,” Caspian said, tapping at the picture of the man before turning the tablet back towards himself. “And if that’s the real reason, he would be correct, of course. Interceptor model is more manoeuvrable than any others, it just comes at the cost of defence. Even one hit from a big one can be lethal, and there are plenty of hits from big ones around here.”
“And Marshal just accepted that?” Kieran glanced towards the centre of the room, to a platform that the marshal occupied during the missions. It was empty now; no marshal and no personnel, save for the second-in-command, a sleek man with a silver tongue.
As the second-in-command was one of those people who seemed to always find ways to benefit from others, Kieran had deemed it fit to try and steer clear of him.
“Marshal finds it hard to argue with the results. These two have participated in ten kills last year alone. The year before that they took down a big one all by themselves. Not a single scrape on the fighter.” Caspian was still going through the document as he spoke. He arrived at the last page and nodded at Kieran with a satisfied smile.
“No mistakes in the document, Squadron Leader,” he quipped and drew a smile from Kieran.
“Your skills go to waste in analytics, Caspian,” he noted, “with that amount of attention to detail and capability of making snap judgements, you should be sitting up here as an operator. You know the fighters inside out, you know how they react if something goes to shit.”
“You flatter me,” Caspian chuckled and performed a theatrical bow, then stood up straight with a smirk, “maybe one day they’ll consider me as their last option. Especially after today.”
“Today wasn’t your brightest moment,” Kieran admitted and felt his mood sinking slightly. “Command chain exists for a reason. You can’t just march in like that.”
“Fair point,” Caspian replied, but didn’t seem remorseful. “But in the end, who was right?”
Before Kieran could decide whether to agree with Caspian or to scold him, Caspian opened something else on his tablet and handed it towards Kieran.
“To return to the topic of your new kids, I think they would be a good match for this,” he said, “operating for this would look excellent in your CV.”
Of course Kieran had heard about Phoenix. Everyone had, at this point - but it was a different thing to hear what the mech might be capable of than see the data for it actually in your hands.
From the looks of it, the rumours about Phoenix being something else completely had not been overly exaggerated.
“It would definitely look good on my CV,” he said, slowly, already thinking about how a pay raise would affect his chances of helping Lonan, or having a future after the Eurasia base would shut down. “And if these two really are as good as the data says, they very well could be a match for this.”
He hadn’t assumed that operating for Phoenix would ever be in the cards for him, but suddenly his mind was excited by the possibility. It was just that, a possibility, but it excited all parts of him - the operator, the pilot he was still at heart, the man who saw an opportunity.
“Just thought I’d let you know,” Caspian commented, glancing over his shoulder before taking his tablet back, “I’m not supposed to show that to you, but there aren’t really that many options at the base, now are there?”
Kieran sneered as he dismissed Caspian - formally, to avoid any deprecating stares. As an operator he enjoyed a modicum of respect from the others, formal or not, but surprisingly few here seemed to recognize the innate talents of one of their brightest analysts. Kieran trusted Caspian’s judgement over his own at any time when it came to graphs or data.
A part of him wanted to keep Caspian here and argue longer. Surely there was something off with the data that dictated such good numbers and values on such an old model.
He had gone to see Interceptor right after it arrived. The pilots would be here in a couple of days, but Kieran had wanted to see the mech for himself. Maybe it’s not that bad, he told himself. Maybe it just looked awful in the pictures. Maybe you’ve just heard all the nasty stories.
What he had seen was a rusty, patched-up mech from the last decade, non-compatible ports for cords, full of dents. He had watched the mechanics scrubbing it, analysts running diagnostics on it, engineers looking at it and shaking their heads solemnly.
“Difficult to argue with the results, huh”, he muttered to himself as he turned to look at his tablet again. Siblings, nineteen, three years of actual combat experience and simulators before that. The world was truly in dire need if they were sending kids to the battlefield to grow them into proper soldiers.
Be as it may, the Interceptor siblings were now his responsibility to keep alive for as long as he could. Them and their pile of trash.
With a heavy sigh, he filed a message to the supply depot, asking them to check in with the mechanics and keep one of the newer Striker models in reserve. The first step would be to meet these two, the second step would be to get them into an actual fighter.
Kieran didn’t want to get too good at writing death reports.
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