Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who would be happy to give a presentation for the Investors Quarterly Meeting
Touchdown is stowing her pilot suit, in the chlorine-scented purgatory betwen base and hangar, when Firebomb walks in and bellies up to her own locker, all made of legs and temptation.
Touchdown points her eyes elsewhere, fumbles with the hanger, smoothes the suit's captive cables so they won't be tangled next time she hops in the cockpit. She's got no business looking at Firebomb, not looking looking, and she can't help it.
"Heard the scuttlebutt?" Firebomb murmurs, all purr, and Touchdown's abs clench.
"The new monetisation model? Yeah, I heard," she bites out. Ol' Touchdown. Ol' craggy miserabilist Touchdown. Leave me alone, she hopes feverishly.
"Yeah." Firebomb fiddles with her locker door, in an increasingly obviously fake way. "So the official announcement is at the investors' quarterly in about eighteen hours."
"Yeah," Touchdown says, running out of details to make shipshape, gripping her locker door too hard, and closing it with more care than can possibly look natural, and then Firebomb abruptly sidesteps closer and holds out a slip of paper, one of the ones that FieldComm use to print out sensitive coordinates ahead of time. Open sealed orders packet A, and all that. "What's this?"
"Someone in Accounts leaked the meeting location," Firebomb says, very quietly. "Can I trust you, Touchdown?"
Fuck fuck fuck. "Yeah," Touchdown says, dry-mouthed.
"Me and Panda and Loudmouth and Brick are gonna take a stroll outdoors around 1900, just over the big dune." Firebomb's barely breathing it, now, leaned close enough that Touchdown can smell her skin. "A guy in Logistics happens to have left five locked and loaded, fully fuelled urban assault mechs out there."
"Fuck," Touchdown says, almost soundless, and Firebomb curls her index finger under the point of Touchdown's chin and turns her face a little.
"How would you like to present some stakeholder concerns to the MBA bros getting us slaughtered?" Firebomb whispers against her ear.
Fuck fuck fuck. Touchdown keeps her eyes front, staring at the bank of lockers, sweating, and feeling so much that this'll probably give her a brand-new psychosexual complex about the sight of peeling locker-room paint. "1900?" she says, mystified at the way her voice sounds as flat and uninflected as always, not a desperate horny-teenager croak.
"1900," Firebomb says, and Touchdown can hear her smiling. "Glad you're along."