Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who wants to take a mission just because a rival has been hired by the target
Shiloh Stokefurnace chews the stub of a cigarillo in the back room of a gin hall on a sweaty armpit of a planet, 15 Out and fuck-all to recommend it. Still, she remembers where she's from, the smog-billowed single-file alleyways and subsiding rookeries of Ranbariel's Star III. When 'Eavy Bill Roofbracer asks after her, she stows the mech in her ship's drophold and turns the nose to where he'd like to meet. It's a long way from huddling together in the unlit hearths of blocked chimneys to keep out of the wind, waiting for the bars to kick out, prime purse-lifting hours on the tipsied uptown crowd.
'Eavy Bill's all cheap suit and wide smile these days, clean under his nails and permanently accompanied by a couple of guys who get blood under their nails for him, when he wants someone to bleed. But this isn't a favour to him; he's evening a score of his own by means of an introduction.
The client sits, rolling a glass of botanical drain-cleaner between fingers cleaner still than Bill's, in the crisp jacket of a senior technical researcher. Explains as little as possible, sitting cold and stiff and untouched by her blatant mismatch with the environment in which she sits. There's an experimental Diaspora-era vessel crashed on a planet, she says. Things that she'd like recovered, for their speculative tekneic value.
Shiloh steadily drains a couple of glasses of gin of her own, gently warmed but in no danger yet of a clouded head, and thinks: liar. Bad liar. Whole thing stinks.
The catch the ice queen is willing to admit to is that it's an elven greenworld. Fleeing the ecopocalpyse, driven mad by the devoidity of space, the feral remnants of elven peoples went to ground on planets apart from the other survivors, awakened and melded entire alien ecospheres into heterogenous gaian hive-intelligences, and whipped them into accelerated, antagonistic evolution. Not here, despoilers, is the fang-bared message: not this natural world. This one, we've warned and armed against you.
Which is fine. Greenworlds are hostile, aye, but the drooling fangs of ever so many beasties turn aside on the skin of mech. No, Shiloh recognises the habitual lying implicit in don't worry what the cargo is, citizen. Know your place, ask no questions.
"Doesn't sound like my sort of job, if we're honest," she says, keeping her voice bored. "Why's my name in all this?" and 'Eavy Bill's smile widens a tooth more at the sides.
"More'n one principal wanting their hands on the payload," he says. "You've got competition, love."
Shiloh points at the researcher with the rim of her glass. "She has, you mean."
"Nah," Bill says, watching her, and waits.
"Oh, it's like that, is it."
Canticle. The only elf she's ever met who understands an engine worth a damn. Half a lifetime entangled, fucking, fighting, half in love and half murderous, accidentally married in a drunken stupor neither will admit to remembering anything of. Canticle, who shot Shiloh in the chest with a shotgun twelve years ago, paid every penny of her resulting bills with the Apothecarium while she was still horizontal, and has hounded her by mail with divorce papers on her birthday every year since, which Shiloh returns stamped Addressed Person Does Not Exist.
Shiloh drains another gin, spins her hat slowly on one finger, and breathes, feeling fire lick through her in ways that distilleries only wish they could bottle. "Half the fee up front, non-refundable, non-negotiable," she says. "And Bill, old pal. Mate. Me old sparrow. Don't do this coy shit to me."
He nods agreeably, like it means anything. "'Course," he says, just like the last time.