A visitor watching the rushing waters of the mighty Fraser River.

British Columbia

The journey to Paz's quarters was a familiar one, though he'd never seen it from the ceiling, which made the experience all the more surreal. To his surprise, the door was ajar when they arrived.

"I've already been here." Spider told him, "Where do you think I got this?" he gestured to where he'd stowed the photograph.

Quaritch assumed a crouching position to better look through the doorway, his flashlight beam scanning the room slowly. A few things were out of place, but the room was still orderly in spite of the layer of filth time had deposited on it's surfaces. Even the bed was still neatly made. Memories rattled at the edges of his consciousness, and he grew exceedingly aware of Spider staring at him.

"A lot of her stuff was taken for people to use, clothes mostly. She didn't have much else."

"Nah, Paz wasn't too sentimental." Quaritch said automatically. "Kind of a hardass really. I liked that about her." he turned his beam on Spider, illuminating the disappointed frown etched in his features. "She didn't log much either."

"Yeah, I know. I tried that too."

The two of them sat in silence for a long moment, their glum expressions mirroring each other. The air was stale here, growing staler by the second.

"Come on, I know a place you haven't tried."

Quaritch lead Spider down to the first floor, through the halls opposite the main entrance. There was a back airlock, rarely trafficed, that served as a utility access and emergency exit. Sunlight from outside streamed through the window in the door, casting a small bright rectangle on the floor. It was there Quaritch stopped, and began running his hands along the walls.

"What are you doing?"

"Do you know how hard it is to get laid in a place like this?" Quaritch's hands groped along the duct-work carefully. "Everyone knows each other, everyone talks."

"W..what?" Spider choked out, mortified.

"The last thing you want to do is to get caught with your pants down, especially with a subordinate.." the recombinant commander continued patting the walls down, conveniently ignoring the horror slowly playing out over the boy's face. "So, we had to take precautions."

Behind the HVAC diffuser duct, Quaritch's fingertips made contact with what he'd been hunting for. "Bingo." he produced a small rectangular object, disturbing a dust cloud that eddied through the sun shaft as he held it aloft. It was quite a bit smaller than he'd remembered, until he realized it was made for human hands.

"No open conversation, no loaded looks. Only this." He held the data stick out to Spider. "She stopped leaving these for me after we broke things off, so I imagine.." he dropped it in Spider's outstretched hand. "This one's for you."

It was all Quaritch could do to keep up with Spider, who scrambled out the exterior door once he realized what was in his possession. The salvage team probably had an extra data pad, so he wasted no time crossing the tarmac towards Con. He only looked back at the Colonel when he remembered he needed permission.

"Go." Quaritch waved him on, watching the boy break into a full sprint. When the Spider was out of sight the Colonel's gut's twisted on themselves once more. He turned back to Hab3, wrenched the door open and crouched back through into the gloom. Ten paces down the hall, he searched the walls again, turning up another data stick in half the time. He stared at it for a long moment, before pocketing it.

Eclipse came and went, sky patrol's switched out twice. All quiet. Quaritch paced outside of ConMod, his hand resting on his weapon. The tension in his gut hadn't let up, but it wasn't doubling either. His mind was curiously blank, a holding pattern of sorts. He'd thought about checking his old rooms, but found himself unmotivated to do so.

A soft sniff sounded from somewhere behind him, and he turned to see Spider emerging from whatever hiding spot he'd absconded too once he'd had a pad in his possession. His eyes were red, puffy, but he hid the rest well.

"How'd it go?"

"Good. It was.. good." Spider cleared his throat, "Too short." The kid was gone for over an hour, he probably watched it dozens of times

. "Yeah." Paz wasn't one to mince words, Quaritch knew all too well.

"Thanks." Spider muttered. Their eye's met, and something passed between them. Something heavy.

"Sure thing, kid."

-----

Start

A a hiss of displaced gas preceded a hatch swinging open, and an extremely inebriated redhead stumbled her way across the threshold and into the Hell's Gate mech bay. Scarlet, ostensibly part of the militia and one of five mech pilots on the “Strategic Response Team,” had spent the last several hours attempting to drink herself into oblivion. The rest of the team had been celebrating a successful operation at GMS_Generic_Bar, getting round after round from Bartender Motherfucker, and they were entirely right to do so: the SRT's first time out wasn't just a victory, it was a complete walkover. The moonlighter pirates trying to make a quick buck from the “unarmed freighter” had no idea what hit them.

By all rights, Scarlet should've been celebrating with the rest... but she didn't really feel like it. While everyone in the bar had been busy watching Agarin show off his karaoke skills, she had quietly slipped away while no one was looking. For the last hour or so, she had been nursing a particularly large bottle of razbo – some Ol' Smokey's Reserve – and eventually wandered her way into the station's mech bay.

The bay was eerily silent and still. Usually, the place was buzzing with technicians running around, doing some kind of maintenance of some sort or another, but... no. No one else was here. Even Calamity Havok was nowhere to be seen, which was extremely odd. Scarlet had never seen the retired Hell Hound anywhere else on the station, and just assumed she lived here.

She downed another slug of raspberry infused liquor and staggered over to the alcove where her mech was currently housed: a truly ancient GMS Everest, covered in dozens of shades of red paint, hand-lettered slogans, and artwork designed to cover up the myriad scars and bullet wounds from centuries of combat. The mech had been built, stripped down, and rebuilt so many times over the years that it possessed a very haphazard quality to all of it; it was the kind of machine where you could pick any panel at random, open it up, and see more splices than wires. It had an “official” name (at least as far as anything on Calliope could be said to have one of those) registered in some file somewhere that she always assumed was a pun based on its serial number: R4GE MACHINE. But thanks to the paint job, everyone just called it Big Red.

The mech stood immobile, surrounded by a mess of cabling, powered-down diagnostic systems, and catwalks to give the technicians access. She stared up at the machine, her gaze drawn to the wedge-shaped “head,” and the distinctive spiderweb of cracks radiating out from around the left optical unit. She grumbled in frustration, taking another drink.

Scarlet kept thinking about the operation against the pirates from earlier. During the fight, she'd tried to disable the pirate ship the moonlighters had arrived on by attaching a HEX-B explosive mine to the ship's cockpit, but it hadn't gone exactly to plan. Right as she armed it, the mech controls briefly became unresponsive, and instead of attaching to the enemy ship, the electromagnets kicked in and firmly attached the mine... to her own torso.

It didn't matter that the ship was disabled immediately after her blunder: when the ship tried to disengage, she felt a tug at her cranial socket, and Big Red plunged the heavy combat blade it carried directly into the enemy cockpit. The whole front end of the ship had practically exploded, both from the impact and the sudden depressurization.

It didn't matter, because after the smoke had cleared, everyone could see the armed mine still attached to her mech. It had been removed after the fight, of course, but the carbon scoring on the hull of Big Red was still visible for everyone to see. Her teammates had given her shit for it the entire flight back to Hell's Gate. And rightfully so, far as she was concerned. A phrase had been swimming around in her head, ever since the fighting had stopped. They were words that had haunted her for the better part of a decade:

You're not good enough.

“Why y'gotta emb'rass me like that, huh?” she slurred. Scarlet stood there, staring up at her mech with drink in hand, and downed another slug.

A noise began to echo in the otherwise silent mech bay. It was a low, persistent clicking, almost like a purring animal, steadily growing in volume. Scarlet recognized the noise immediately. It was one of Big Red's many peculiar quirks; every so often, it would just start clicking like that, and nobody knew why, because nobody could find a source of the noise, no matter how hard they tried. When Calamity had tried to fix it, she said it sounded like a damaged hard drive moments away from catastrophic, unrecoverable failure... but even her considerable talents were at a loss.

Scarlet snorted and began to shake her head. Why'd she even come here? She didn't know. She sighed heavily and started to walk away...

“Because you are holding Us back.”

The words echoed in the empty mech bay, and seemed to hang in the air above her head. Scarlet stopped immediately, and her blood ran ice cold. She'd never heard that voice before. It was synthesized, utterly inhuman, and spoke the words with a curious inflection. The mechanical purr had grown louder, turning into an angry growl. Very slowly, Scarlet turned back around to face Big Red.

A trio of glowing red pinpricks stared at her from inside the darkened crack in its metal wedge of a head. The mech was very clearly looking down, directly at her.

“You tried to be clever,” the voice bellowed from speakers buried somewhere in his chassis. “So We taught you a lesson.”

The war machine – which should have been completely cold and powered down – began to shudder in the harness keeping it tethered in the maintenance alcove. It was as if the mech was a wild animal, caged against its will, struggling to break free of the restraints shackling it so. Metal hands balled into fists, and everything in the bay seemed to shake.

“We are not a tool,” it continued, as Scarlet remained rooted in place, staring at the machine in bewilderment and terror. “We are a weapon. You need to act like it. You must never forget what We are.”

The cables, pistons, and servos connecting the wedge-shaped head to the torso should've looked like a neck... but it didn't. From where Scarlet was standing, it looked like Big Red was grinning: a wide rictus grin, with teeth that weren't teeth made of metal, and sharp as kitchen knives. The machine continued to stare at her, left optical unit glowing with malice, and metal not-teeth glinting in the dim light of the mech bay.

“Do not deny Us our purpose again.”

Scarlet gulped hard to try and steady her breathing; she really hadn't been prepared for this at all, and wasn't doing the best job of disguising her terror. She looked down, and began to vigorously rub her eyes with her free hand, shaking her head. She could barely hear anything with so much blood pounding in her ears. This wasn't real, it couldn't be real...

She gulped once again, and looked up.

The noise had stopped. The clicking had stopped. The mech was looking straight ahead, and its metal hands were no longer balled into fists. Everything in the mech bay was exactly like it was when she'd first arrived: completely silent and still.

Scarlet looked around with wide eyes, uncertain of anything. She looked down at the empty bottle of razbo in her hand. She looked back up at her mech, still and cold as the metal plates beneath her feet.

Without another word, she turned on her heel and left as quickly as she could. She grabbed the edge of the pressure door, and pulled it shut behind her.

But just before the seal around the hatch could engage, that same clicking started up once more...

BT4-112 | Hell's Gate

Option Card

Rare | Purple

sim collection 4