“Sure am, Drake, sir.” Calen gnaws on a toothpick, “My mecha are built for transporting goods and can do some fighting too.”
Drake smiles, “Good, good, I have your route registered and the permits ready for you to head out as soon as I load your mechs. Oh, by the way, don’t open the cargo. I don’t want you tempted to steal the niodes.
“I would never do that Drake, sir. My livelihood relies on getten the shipment from where it is ta where it goin.”
“I know, but some people can get tempted by the amount of niodes that you’re transporting for me.” Drake turns a sly smile on his lips, “Well off to see to the loading of your mechs.”
Calen stands up, “I should be doing that.”
Drake frowns, “No need to worry yourself, I am very familiar with shipping materials.”
“Beggen yer pardon, but this is my mechs and I want to make sure it’s done right.”
“Fine, come along but my clones are quite capable.” Drake strides from the room leaving Calen to hurry after him.
After the loading of the mech and Calen’s departure, Drake contacts his infiltrator clones, “All is a go for Drake’s Gambit. Start the chaos now.”
Drake uses a shortcut to get ahead of Calen’s caravan of mechs. He activates his stealth equipment to hide his Antithesis from radar and visual confirmation of his whereabouts as he travels parallel to his mobile trap waiting for the Gangsters to pounce on his irresistible bait.
“Calen,” I patch into the comm channel, “this is Myco, if you and Drake are good to go, I’m ready for my part in this mission and I’ve brought an Inferno and Dilophos to the party.” I’d left the Bishop at mom’s and swapped Ammoknight in its place on my lineup. My Dilophos, Firestorm, had twin Jackal heat swords and a Diablis Nozzle added to boost its pre-installed Judicator flamethrower. This was to be a slash and burn scorched earth type of coordinated attack, so I wanted to pull out all the stops. Flambe! is my inferno, it packs countless fire weapons for combat support.
Drake swears as he hears Myco’s comm signal to Calen. What’s the point of having an unsuspecting transporter if you’re going to warn him that he’s the bait.
Calen’s voice goes out over an open channel, “Who’s this? What are ya talkin about? Mission? What about Drake?” Calen’s caravan of modified mechs stop and weapons begin sweeping the area.
Sh*t, I guess that wasn’t part of his briefing. I think a little bit checking objectives on the Betrus. I respond thinking on my feet: “Just a rigger in city, posting some er… traffic conditions, out of city. Caesar’s Sideburns! Got bandits on the main travel road between Olympus Mons and Cygnus Outpost. Things are detoured while the police sort it out. As usual the PD is undermanned, means we’ll have to defend ourselves to keep from being picked off. Friendly tip from a fellow convoy. Not Myco, there must have been some feedback! This is Pax Flammae on the Ammonite Semi.”
Drake hopes that the gangsters still take the bait even with Calen on alert. If not he would have to hire another unsuspecting dupe to transport “niodes” that are actually explosive material. Hearing Myco’s quick explanation Drake relaxes a little.
“Thanks for the heads up, I’m not picking ya up on my scans. You must have better equipment than me to pick me up and my convey code. Ya shipping for Drake too?”
Goddamn*t… “Yes, different shipment. In city. We agreed to rendezvous at the rest stop on Mons after delivery, remember? That was in the briefing.”
“Wasn’t told who I was meeting up with besides Drake. He sort of left the details out said that the shipment was all that mattered.”
“Basic supply run after your main route. Whole bandit gang, big mess, bring some heavy guns on the way back. Boss, (referring to Drake) you did tell him it was a two part assignment, right? Over.” I hope to hell Drake has recognized my voice over the comm by this point.
Calen sounds a bit confused, “Heavy gunns, my mechs are old scraped out mechs that have been modified for transport duty. Sure we can hold off a few bandits but we’re no match for a serious attack. Hello... Over?”
Drake comms Myco on a secure channel, “Myco, he’s the bait. They come for him and his mechs explode taking them out any left over we wipe out. I just needed someone expendable to be the bait. Guess I could have used a clone instead of my clan mate but he was already an established transporter.”
I drop my space trucker act “Mom hadn’t explained that bit. My apologies.”
“Ah, yes I didn’t really explain that to anyone did I? I thought when I had laid out the plan that I said that the cargo would be some of my volatile experiments and assumed you would understand that I was expecting an explosion and ambush and not a dog fight.”
“I got that part, I just was wondering if I could get a little backup taking out the gangsters afterwards. You got Blue Wrath or anybody else, handy? Mom’s messengers aren’t much for fighting.”
“Oh yeah, I have about a thousand of my raid clones ready and waiting for me to send them where ever we want them.” Drake sounds very eager as he says that.
I patch Drake the coordinates to a side road between Old Mars and Olympus Mons off the major highway. “Good. Well, it’s like this. The gangsters’ hideout is in a ghost town that winds towards one of the oldest districts. A few hundred years back or so it was a ghetto, they declared it uninhabitable in the 3100s but squatters who were stubborn refused to leave. Attempts to renovate it as a garden then to turn it into a park met mixed success and in the end criminals wound up taking residence by 3200. So now you have vegetation and arboreal stuff growing on top of the old city, which means even more hiding places.” The map has street view information, major buildings overview and content about some of the structural info on the crumbling utilities of that region.
Back to the false ID: “So that’s a no go on the backup good buddy? Ten Four, I’ll just have to see if Gasman has his Namtar Fuel team en route then. Roger.”
“So, um I will be heading to my Delivery, whatcha call sign, so I can tell Drake that there was some sort of miscommunication in his instructions. Over.”
“Pax Flammae, Illyrian Trucker.”
Calen’s convoy starts cautiously advancing again its weapons systems still at hyper vigilance. Drake watches his scanners looking for the telltale signs of the gangsters. Halfway to the next gate location they strike. Coming out of the forests in droves. Drake waits patiently his weapons systems hot and stealth ones at full effect.
The gang leader has a Freon which has been painted a garish shade of YELLOW with green striping and two bishops standing at close attention behind him as bodyguards. One scratches its crotch… but mechas don’t exactly have crotches, so the pilot must be wearing a Spinal Tap.
Several Niftels and Oresters also strangely painted fill out the rest of the lineup. It’s evened out with a few Megazomes and some Buchises that must’ve been stolen from mech dealers since they look out of place and newer than the rest of the lineup. Crude tribal looking symbols have been spray painted on their hulls so they somewhat match the rest a little.
Calen’s mechs open fire, the old scrapped mechs recovered from junkyards and battlefields way past their prime shutdown from kickback and damage from the gangsters mechs.
Drake waits in anticipation, he knows they’ll have to come in to get the “niodes” and once they open the cargo bays that’s when they would meet his trap. Those that manage to survive would then be easy pickings for him and Myco to handle.
Calen is pulled from his cockpit and thrown to the ground by one of the gangsters, who points at the cargo bay and holds out his hand. Calen pulls out the ident card to open the doors and is rewarded with a backhand as the man climbs up to the cargo bay doors. The gangster laughs. “I don’t need your Ident card chump! What have we got … here?” The look of greed is quickly replaced with one of horror.
Multicolored explosions rip all of Calen’s mechs apart sending deadly shrapnel in all directions the explosions are many times the size what conventional explosives would have generated and the multicolored fumes trigger bio hazard readings in the mechs alarm systems.
Drake’s Antithesis tramples trees as he disengages his stealth mode and unleashes full weapons on every mech in sight the wide fork of his Antithesis modified for full effectiveness.
I tap the Synthman control headband. “Firestorm, Flambe, cover me. You two are active support. We’re to follow Drake’s offensive in overtaking their base as your primary objective. Use your Jackal bayonets and fire sprays for a controlled burn through the vegetation to clear a path for his mechs, save the flamethrowers for once we’re inside. Secondary objective… see how many gangsters you can kill.”
The former slum first turned ghost town and half abandoned public works project and now gang hideout was already crumbling and the overgrown vegetation made it difficult for large mecha to navigate, hence the need for acid and fire weapons.
Dropships begin landing at the coordinates Myco sent unloading tons of mechs of Drake’s clone forces. They attack in waves of sixteen mechs each, some easily blasted by the gangsters weapons while other mechs showed the horror that the clans know first hand of mechs with wide fork and so much armor careen down the ghost towns overgrown streets to assault the headquarters.
“And that is how you make a trillion credits.”
“Yes it is,” Drake whoops excitedly.
In the confusion of the firefight at the gangsters’ hideout in Ammoknight I’d managed to procure a Forerunner artifact they’d probably been meaning to hawk on the black market using the cargo manipulator arms I’d attached. Something which I’m fairly sure Drake would like a chance to study.
In the aftermath Calen manages to make it to safety, extremely angry to be used the way he was by Drake. Drake replaces Calen’s mechs and a nice cup of “special” Drake tea and it’s like the trap never happened for Calen.
In the den of Exile’s Children is a card with an apology from “Pax Flammae” and a bunch of new Namtar mecha for Calen. The revised event according to it was they got into a drag race or some demolition derby on Mars as a non televised dark match and that was what had trashed his mecha.
I twiddled my Van Dyke goatee looking at the old wrestling mask mom had saved in what was once my room, wondering if the fresh Namtars would be an adequate replacement when I remembered something.
I had a very hard time analyzing it after but from what I could make out it seemed to be either some sort of storage drive or the remains of the hardware to what may have at one point been an extremely ancient AI. One which I dared not interface with lest I befall a similar fate to Evil Santa.
What Evil Santa had gone about wrong was the way in which he’d attempted to directly interface Forerunner technology with his brain. I believe the reason why I was spared the cybernetic based insanity that engineer/pilot had suffered was because my integration method was more indirect having been conducted in a tertiary manner via a biological route. Maybe Drake could uncover something interesting about the relic.
“Oy Drake, you remember that thing back when we blew up those gangsters? Got something from their storehouse you may want to have a look at. Couldn’t make out very much from it but you’ve got a better head for this stuff than me so I sent it to one of your labs via express.”
“I’ll get to examining it right away. Did you send your results as well? It’s always nice to see what has already been done so I can see what else I can try.”
“Yeah, I got ‘em for ya, encrypted more seriously this time so you don’t have to blow the place up like last time. On a disk in the crate with the drive.” Drake laughs, “That is much appreciated my friend. Labs are expensive to replace when you’re not expecting to. Like that time Serpentarius Alpha swallowed my lab whole with me in it.
“Sounds smelly. Also, while we’re on that subject, Sutenresu wouldn’t shut up either by the way. He wants to put us in a comic book and mom agreed to let him sell them at the newsstands next to her courier offices on the three planets Cumulus covers. Atom thinks it is hilarious we disguised ourselves as space truckers and won’t stop laughing. Sends a lisi powered Noogie and I hope your clan mate doesn’t mind Namtars. Had an extra cache of them on hand.”
“Calen takes what he can salvage, he’s thrifty that way. So free new Namtars is a bonus for him. Well another comic with us sounds fun. Can not hurt my reputation I would think.” Drake chuckles, which turns into a hearty laugh as he reads the title.
Drake Novum: Science Hero and Bacteria Guy
Guest Starring: Atom Cumulus, Atomic wrestler.
“I don’t even get mentioned by name but my muscle headed idiot brother does? That’s really fair.”
I facepalm. Atom puts me into an antique half nelson “Oh come on, you get to be in a comic for free. My promoter had to pay to have his wrestling stable put in the funny papers.”
“I guess you’re right. Could you put me down now?”
Myco’s notes are cursory and say that the device seems a bit unstable and that the data is corrupted in a few places but from what sectors he could recover it seems to be either like a diary or some sort of a log kept by a Forebearer. He was not sure if it was an important individual or a commoner but the individual probably had to have possessed a trade to keep records like this. There is a great deal of confusion about dates which are referenced in the fragments however. One concrete one seems to bounce between 80 and 800,000 years in the past indecisively but the rest are incredibly fuzzy.
The artifact when unlocked though yields the following information - It would at least suggest that the Forerunners may well have been a type of hominid after all, which threw earlier theories of them being perhaps an amphibian or insectoid, even avian race completely out the window. A ridiculously advanced enough one that this would explain why their DNA seemed so different from humans. Yet, while having existed very long ago. Which was incredibly perplexing. This brought up intense chronological questions and near maddening lines of reasoning as the logic branches changed, creating an altogether different pattern amidst the old ways of thinking. The time span of the Forerunners’ Forebearer Civilization itself was becoming more and more unfathomable-
Drake’s asset file gained a few choice tidbits that he did not share with anyone, so much new data just unlocked so much more potential….
Submitted by Mycobacter & Drake Novum Scientist#712744 #706289