Chapter Fifteen – Mech Makes Might

Chapter Fifteen – Mech Makes Might

“The issues with mechanised walkers, as in, bipedal mechs, is… everything. There is no advantage to any of this. On paper, every aspect of this design is a disaster waiting to happen!”

–Ignored Noeing Engineer Memo, 2048

***

If I wasn’t used to dealing with whining children then I might have been a little overwhelmed at the level of brattiness I had to deal with when I returned.

“It’s not working,” Princess said.

“Well, we haven’t exactly tried everything, now have we?” Crackshot shot back.

“This isn’t according to protocol. Not that any of you have the faintest clue what that even means,” Hedgehog grumped… okay, so it wasn’t grumpy, but rather the mature adult man’s version of grumpy, which was the same but with a deeper voice.

I blinked at the lot of them, then slowly looked over to where Knight was standing next to Tankette’s tank. Neither of them seemed willing to join in on the incessant whining, which was actually kind of nice.

“Alright, fuckwits,” I snapped. That calmed them all down, though I think it might have pissed off a couple. “Someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”

They, of course, all started talking at the same time.

I sighed. “No, no, shut up. Hedgehog, you go first. Gimme a report as if I’m… I dunno, some out of town shareholder.”

Hedgehog stood taller at that.

When I’d come over, I’d discovered the newbie squad spread out across a couple of acres. They were bitching over the comms and very clearly not working out what to do next. Princess and Knight were stabbing at the ground on one end, Tankette was parked at the back doing nothing. Crackshot was planting explosives into the ground with a sort of post-digger, and Hedgehog was patrolling the outside area while complaining the hardest.

Nothing practical seemed to be getting done, and it kind of annoyed me. So I had them all gather up in the shadow of that hill we’d fought from earlier, then I got out of my mech so that they could read from my body language. I wanted it to be clear that I wasn’t impressed.

“Once you left with Gomorrah, we continued to fight the antithesis until the area was cleared of living examples,” Hedgehog began.

“Alright,” I said. So far so good.

“Then we couldn’t decide on how to get rid of the hive. I suspect we all started to take care of things in our own way,” Hedgehog said.

“We were just gonna cut up all of the roots,” Princess said.

“And I was planting bombs all over. They’re sucky vacuum bombs, they’ll rip the area up without tossing too much dust into the air,” Crackshot said.

I nodded slowly. “And Hedgehog, you were…”

“Waiting for orders,” he said.

How did this wet sock become a samurai? “Tankette?”

The tank’s hatch opened up and Tankette slowly poked her head out. “Um, well, I didn’t want to argue with the others. I was mostly keeping an eye open for any distant aliens that might be coming around.”

I couldn’t be angry with her. Tankette’s mom aura had a critical advantage bonus here. “Fine,” I said. “Princess, cutting things is a good idea. Doing it manually is stupid. We have plebs for manual labour. Or robots. Crackshot, better idea, but again, too slow. Hedgehog… you are the one who gives orders now.”

“They didn’t seem inclined to listen,” he said.

“They’re listening to me, and I have no more authority than you do,” I said.

The merc opened his mouth, then shut it slowly. I saw him eyeing my mech, and I was sure he was thinking that having that gave me some authority–and he was right–but it was just a big toy that I’d bought that he could buy one of for himself, not an actual sign of any actual authority. “Understood,” he said in the end.

“Right, so, Crackshot’s idea is the least useless. Get back up on the hill. You still have those mortar launchers?”