ExSol Ch. 01

Nina watched the line of four-legged walker robots scuttle into position behind a worn-down hill. The same hill that had periodically hosted squadrons of such machines for weeks now. The hill was the ideal location to launch missiles against a nearby structure, which Nina also kept an idle eye upon. What purpose the grand metallic structure had once served was anybody's guess, every bit as much as it was anybody's guess how many thousands of years ago it had served that purpose. The last of the robots reached its destination, slowly settling into place, and there was a moment of silence.

Nina took a bite of her protein bar and started to count. The last few dozen times it had taken them twenty five seconds to come up with a firing solution. The bar tasted like dirt, more like dirt than it was supposed to. She scowled in annoyance and stuffed it back into one of the little compartments in her rover and clicked her tongue to activate voice commands.

"Call Nugan," She commanded.

"Nina I'm busy you-" a crackly, impatient voice came through the rover's speakers after a very brief delay.

"Oi! Nugan you shifty little shrew, you told me the protein combiner was fixed!" she shouted over his whiny voice.

"I did! ...I mean, it is. Fixed it last night." Nugan answered with only the barest hint of conviction.

"Lies."

"No, I-"

"Lies!!"

The line went dead as Nugan cut the connection. Nina clicked her tongue to reactivate voice commands again but before she could call Nugan back to yell at him some more, a flurry of motion from the foot of the hill caught her attention. Two dozen missiles streaked away from the hunched squadron of robots, arcing through the air and flying straight into a hail of fire from the fortress' anti-missile defenses.

"Playback recording in forty five minutes," she muttered at the rover's computer. It beeped at her in response, prompting her to record her message. "Make sure 'rina knows Nugan is useless." The computer beeped again, acknowledging that her request would be followed.

The remnants of the precursor's society, the machines that were currently killing each other, were typically divided into four factions. Before they had reawakened and resumed their war where they had presumably left off, Earth Coalition had their own names for them, based upon some kind of structural analysis of where their strongholds were located along the gateway network. ExSol society just called them based by what their logos looked like, Talon, Cat, River, and Eye.

Talon was the dominant faction on the planet, and it was Talon's fortress currently under siege by River's missile launchers.

Several missiles detonated against the walls and outer periphery of the fortress, filling the air with roaring percussion even from all the way over where Nina was. A hangar on the ground floor of the fortress opened, and about thirty intercept craft poured out, racing towards the robots attacking their base of operations. The vehicles, designated 'Locusts,' were basically just cannons mounted to crummy anti-grav engines that suspended them a few feet off the ground. They zipped along the ground, taking a roundabout route that passed very near Nina's own rover. The sound of their engines roared to a crescendo as they passed not much more than ten meters away. She knew their scanners detected her, and that Talon would be aware of her presence, in much the same way that that the fortress was aware of the strange tree-like flora that grew all around it. Which was to say, it couldn't care less so long as she didn't get in their way.

The squadron of thirty Locusts descended upon the group of walkers just as they fired a second barrage of missiles at the fortress. The unwieldy walker robots tried to turn around to face their attackers, bringing the small autocannons mounted into their egg-shaped torsos to bear against their agile attackers. As had been the case for months, they were easy prey. The Locusts nimbly avoided the walker robots' awkward attempts to bring their guns to bear, while their plasma casters tore superheated holes in them in turn.

In a matter of minutes, the twelve artillery walkers were all either disabled or totally scrapped, and the remains of the fortress' interception force started to peel away and return back to their hangar. Nina's hands went to her rover's controls, and she started the vehicle up, heading towards the remains of the artillery walkers. The fortress would dispatch a team to start scavenging the remains of the walker robots, as would the factory that sent them. There would be about a twenty minute window before they both arrived and clashed once again, and Nina had every intention of making the utmost use of that time.

Her rover tore up the sand and dirt as it brought her to the site of the battle. Nina's practiced driving brought her around a pair of scrapped walker robots. A melted hole in the side of one had detonated the artillery piece's ordnance and the resulting blast had triggered a chain reaction that had taken down the one next to it. The resulting mess was two utterly useless unsalvageable hunks of molten metal that she had no interest it, and so she went in deeper to the site of the battle looking for something better.

She spotted a walker robot with its two front legs melted off, and a small but well-placed hole burned right through the control module far off to her left. She immediately swerved her rover around and drove towards it like a madwoman, spinning her wheels at the last minute to do a 180 degree spin. The rover squealed and protested and the centrifugal force made her stomach lurch but she cued the breaks and came to a stop with her cargo bed facing the downed machine. Nina grabbed her plasma cutter and welding mask off of the passenger seat of the rover and hopped out onto the scorched dirt below. Her heavy boots cruched against some partially glassed sand and she only took a brief moment to maintain her footing before jogging over to the fallen robot to inspect it.

There were several armor plates that had come loose but were mostly intact that she could probably pry free and use just for the titanium, steel and carbon that would be contained within, but those materials weren't especially difficult to find, and certainly weren't worth Nina risking her life for. Insead she spotted a missile rack mounted upon the robot's back, the firing port jammed half open by a fragment of metal from some other machine. The fuel inside those missiles, that's what she was after, and the explosive payloads weren't useless either. Nina cracked her knuckles and started to climb, finding hand and footholds in the robot's shredded armor and strange, alien joints. She ascended the fallen robot and got up onto its sloped back. She moved in a crouch, keeping her center of gravity low on the angled, unsteady terrain as she approached the jammed missile port. Her plasma cutter came out, her welding mask went down, and she started quickly shearing off small bits of metal and machinery away from the edge of the missile rack to get it all the way open. She worked quickly but carefully, not interested in hitting the warhead of the missiles directly with the small stream of magnetically bottled plasma and accidentally detonating them.

The port came open, and then a few small cuts later, she sheared the entire missile rack free of its port. She grunted and started to remove some of the missiles, they were relatively small projectiles, maybe a meter and a half long, slender and not too heavy. She carefully grabbed three at a time and went down to her rover, piling them into the back until she had all twelve of them. As she strapped them tightly into the cargo bed of her rover, she heard the grinding sound of treads ripping up the coarse earth. She looked over her shoulder and saw a small convoy of five reclamation machines getting closer, coming to start salvaging the raw materials from this skirmish on a scale that she herself couldn't ever manage.

"Bereaver's tits," Nina cursed to herself and vaulted back into her rover, tossing her cutting equipment back into its proper location on her passenger seat and starting the engine. Tires screeched and crunched as the vehicle lurched into motion. She drove at a ninety degree angle away from where the other convoy of salvage machines would be approaching from. She drove up a hill, her vehicle groaning in protest as it struggled against both gravity and how hard Nina was trying to push it. As she crested the rise, she allowed herself one single glance over her shoulder to see if part of the convoy had broken off to pursue her.

A small treaded vehicle had broken off from the pack and was cruising up the hill directly at her. These particular vehicles were called Widows, and were known to chase down small human vehicles to extract their materials, and occasionally even killing humans for the same reason. She barely registered the pursuit before a turret mounted on the side of the Widow fired out a stream of dark red web-like filaments that expanded outwards in the air and descended towards her rover. Nina swerved off to the side in a panic as the red web descended upon her and narrowly missed. That stuff was a chemical adhesive and if it got in her wheels she'd be spun out and immobilized almost instantly. If it weren't mortally dangerous, it would almost be funny that Nina had much more to fear from a machine designed to gather resources than she did from one designed for combat.

Nina got out of sight from the Widow as she went over the edge of the hill and started racing down a slight decline. She might not be able to outrun the advanced alien vehicle in an extended chase, but if she got far enough away then the machine's calculation of how much the raw material was worth its time to chase down would get worse and worse, and eventually it would give up. It reached the top of the hill only a few seconds after she did, the treads allowing it to smoothly but swiftly crawl up over the lip where her own rover had crashed and bounced around like popcorn kernels over a fire.

The Widow aimed and fired again, casting another wide web of sticky red filaments at her. She spared a glance over her shoulder again to try and gauge where it was aiming, and swerved to the left this time. Her rover jerked to a stop, sliding and skidding across the dirt as the adhesive stuck to the outside of the cabin, draped itself across her wheels, and jammed up the mechanism. The resulting jolt slammed Nina's ribs against her steering wheel and she groaned in pain as dizzying lights flashed before her eyes and consciousness almost slipped away for a brief moment.

The Widow rolled steadily closer to her rover, the sound of dirt grinding beneath the treads, the sound of Nina's own death growing louder and louder as she groggily reached for her plasma cutter to maybe try and cut off the rover's door. With luck, she could make some distance and the alien machine would salvage the missiles and the materials from the rover and not the water and minerals from Nina herself. Before she could ignite the tool to start cutting her way out, a series of three consecutive cracks drew her attention through the window. She saw sparks flying and the Widow lurched slightly off to the side, spinning to face its attacker.

"Ugh. Why her," Nina muttered to herself, almost wishing that the Widow would just disassemble her into her constituent parts so that she wouldn't have to talk to the pilot of the Mech that was currently rescuing her.

The strange-looking tripedal craft was called Twinshya and Nina was very familiar with it, being one of its main mechanics. Twinshya's body was sleek, elongated, and close to the ground. It had two legs in front and one in the back which gave it a sort of a strange jolting gait and a twisting, undulating movement when it turned. Near the back of the body, the pilot seat curved forwards and up in a way that resembled a scorpion's tail. Nina had always hated that Twinshya looked kind of like a scorpion but didn't have a scorpion-themed name. Totally wasted opportunity.

It loped up a bit closer to Nina's rover and turned, facing its sides towards the Widow and fired all three of the autocannons mounted along its body there. The weapons cracked in rapid succession, tearing bits of armor off the Widow and making it reel backwards once again. Widows were well-armored armored vehicles but didn't have much in the way of offensive capabilities. This one fired a pair of small plasma casters at Twinshya. The superheated matter streaked towards it but as it got close it was pushed off to the side by Twinshya's deflectors before they could burn holes in the Mech's patchwork of armor. Even though Twinshya was a rag-tag machine that was basically held together by Nina's spot welds, it was still an Ascension Mech, and it had access to technology that was unable to run on an autonomous craft.

Suddenly, Twinshya twitched a little, and a red glow suffused through it, seeping out from cracks and joints in the machine's armor. The Mech's pilot reoriented it, facing the primary railgun directly at the Widow as the machine shifted into offense mode. The cannon fired, and the hyper-accelerated slug ripped a hole straight through the Widow, the friction and diffusion of heat from the projectile melting and slagging the machine in an instant.

Her Rover's computer beeped as it received an incoming connection request, and she was sure to get her very loud and pained groan out of the way before the computer started sending audio back.

"Ay, thanks for savin' my bacon, Carrina," Nina answered cheerfully.

"By the Archangel, Nina, what are you even doing out here?" Carrina's voice replied with an exasperated and patronizing sigh.

"Scavvin. I got twelve undetted missiles in my—"

"Make sure 'rina knows Nugan is useless," Nina's own pre-recorded message interrupted her explanation. There was a moment of awkward silence as Nina tried not to snicker at the situation. Carrina had no sense of humour at all, she'd just get annoyed.

"Scavenging like a reckless idiot if you're getting chased by a Widow," Carrina replied, ignoring the interruption. "Cut that crap off your rover and lets get out of here in case more come, Call for help if you need it, I'm Counter-Pulsing in thirty."

"Yes'm," Nina replied with all the fake saccharinity she could muster, and killed the connection. Twinshya's red lights went off, shifting the Mech into defence mode and also cutting off Carrina's ability to talk for a few minutes. Twinshya circled Nina's stranded rover for a good thirty minutes watching for more pursuit while she cut her own door off and then started melting and cutting away the adhesive that had immobilized her. She got the rover moving again without further interest from the robots, not that any scav team would be a real issue for Twinshya. She drove off towards their camp and Twinshya followed along beside her at a pace that was more than leisurely for the Mech even if Nina was moving about as fast as was safe.

They travelled in silence through the foothills that lead towards their camp, the dirt roads and paths carved through the vegetation ages ago and maintained by the repeated press of wheels and treads and, in Twinshya's case, metal legs. Nina really wanted to mute and refuse incoming voice connections but she knew it would only be a symbolic gesture. Carrina had an administrative override on their internal network and could easily force a connection through any block Nina could put up outside of melting her speakers into a useless pile of scrap with her plasma cutter. After the third long glance, she tucked the cutting tool away and out of sight so as to remove the temptation.

"So what's the problem with Nugan?" As expected, Carrina's administrative override forced the connection.

Nina winced, her stomach turning at Carrina's condescending attempt to bond with her. Still, she knew it wouldn't fly to be rude when Carrina was trying to be nice, especially about something she was planning to talk to Carrina about anyway.

"Tol' me he fixed the protein combiner. Lied. Still busted. The piking shrew-face is gonna toss his work on my back again." Nina muttered.

There was an extended silence, and eventually the speaker crackled back to life with her answer. "I'll talk to Sam about it."

'Talking to Sam about it' was code and it meant nothing would change. Nina rolled her eyes and didn't press the issue, she was about to be in enough hot water with the entire camp as it was. They wound their way up the side of what qualified as a mountain on this planet. Their camp was built in the ruined husk of a Post-Connection observatory so it was situated on the highest point on the continent. The camp itself was a mix of hastily refurbished and addended sections of the old structure and ruined, overgrown sections.

Twinshya finally left her side, striding off towards its hangar where Nina herself would probably re-arm the autocannons, load in a new railgun slug, and patch up and dings in the armour later that night. Nina drove the rover over to their garage, backing it up into the charge port so that she could unload the missiles strapped into her cargo bed a little easier. A boy who was technically Nina's apprentice and also far too big for his age, Ryan, was there. He was tinkering with one of their other rovers and looked over at her excitedly as she pulled up.

"Nina! What'cha... Err... Where's your door?" he asked, frowning at Nina's dust-coated clothes and the melted, empty door frame on her passenger side. He took two steps forward, getting uncomfortably close to her, his concern for her eclipsing his sense of boundaries.

"In the back. Widow jus' 'bout caught me. Yer gonna hafta rip out half of the frame to re-seat it." Nina tried not to scowl at the impressionable boy and took a half step backwards to reclaim her personal space from him.

"A Widow? You're joking. Are you..." He took another half-step forward as though to offer her a conciliatory hug and Nina responded by turning away and walking towards the back where her salvaged missiles and passenger side door were both strapped.

"Got a dozen undetted missiles here, leave those for Nugan." She laid a hand on the missile rack and gave Ryan a purposeful look over her shoulder that made him pale a little bit. "If you det 'em accidentally the damage'll be on my butt. And you'll probably be scrapped." She left him standing there awkwardly and went off to another part of the garage to where her bike was stored.

Less than a few minutes later, she was crouched low over her bike, roaring down the slope of the "mountain" towards the city of Abrandia, away from the recriminations of her peers and away from the consequences of her actions.

***

1-13:25 NinaS: 'Where r u?'

1-13:27 Butterfly: '1Sec.'

1-13:28 NinaS: 'U better'

1-13:42 Butterfly: 'Sry had a meeting. I'm heading to SolSanna's.'

1-13:42 NinaS: 'Omw 2 abrandia need to see u'

1-13:46 Butterfly: 'Sure. You alright?'

1-13:47 NinaS: 'Almost got scavved by a widow life is shit'

1-13:50 Butterfly: 'Oh wow, that's so messed up, I'm really sorry.'

1-13:51 NinaS: 'Its fine i just wanna see u'

1-13:52 Butterfly: 'Sure. SolSanna's?'

1-13:52 NinaS: 'C u soon butterfly.'

1-13:53 Butterfly: '<3'

***

Another sensor sweep went out, as it did every forty seconds, and once again Dawn's eyes flickered to their instruments for just a brief moment. The readout again displayed a 1.74 x 10-23% chance that the sweep would have detected the presence of Dawn's Mech through the stealth field. Three airborne drones buzzed almost directly overhead. Dawn's instruments calculated and displayed possible firing solutions for the Mech's surface-to-air missiles. None leapt out of the shoulder-mounted missile rack, and the drones flew past unmolested.