The People’s Fleet won’t let Raine fly combat mechs because she’s too short.
“What,” she’d whined at the recruiting sergeant who lined her up against the marks on the wall of the little trailer-shack mobile signup booth towed behind a ground support vehicle, trying to stand on tiptoe without being noticed, as if that’ll make a difference to the number he already wrote down.
“There’s a height cutoff for combat pilots,” he’d blandly repeated.
“But I can already pilot a mech—”
He’d shrugged — “There are non-combat pilot roles—” and Raine had wheedled and complained and signed up anyway. It wasn’t fighter piloting, it wasn’t the real stuff, but War Effort was War Effort and what was she going to do, not be a hero?
So here she is on a flame-licked flight deck, with her back to a cluster munition that failed to deploy in-flight, punched through the sidewall of the touchdown hangar, and lodged itself in a twisted metallic trench in the decking. If it goes up, there’s going to be a hell of a lightshow, scattering a chain-reaction of erupting bomblets all over the shop; it’d probably total hangar B entirely, not mention wiping out the entire fire-suppression crew working around it, the damage control team attempting to defuse it, and of course Raine.
Raine ignores the flickering of self-ox incendiary fires behind her, and does her job — her stupid, stupid low-tech traffic-directing job.
The Meridiana is a workhorse DiGiorno torso fitted with stretched-taffy limbgear, all disproportionate strut and reach. It’s wrapped in microprismatic coating and scored lengthwise along the body and all four limbs with high-output colour-coded lightbars. It’s a stilt-legged uncanny-valley yaoi bishounen disco ball monstrosity of a mech, visible — as the saying goes — from space.
The unfunny, practical truth is: they’re getting bombed out here, and the mechs on sortie are getting shot to hell. Neither side can rely on the other, come landing time, to have working comms, or working much of anything; and you have to have some way of conveying to the incoming shot-up fighter aces that some landing bays are Not In Service, and colour-coded lit-up limbs make the Meridiana both visually orientable and capable of minimal-data-capacity semaphor.
UXB, she signs into the black. UXB, UXB. Divert to C Deck. Divert to C Deck. UXB, UXB, UXB.
The D-C team have peeled open the munition’s casing, delicately extracting bomblet after bomblet, and getting rid of them the safest way possible, under the circumstances: gently yeeting them off into the void sternward, passing Raine less than ten metres off her left shoulder, relative motion carrying them far enough into the ship’s wake for point defence to whack them one by one. Space’s scalelessness turns them into tiny little silent firecracker bursts.
UXB, she signs into the dark, thinking of Danny flying out there; or maybe, on any given sortie, already not flying out there, as already-dead as a supernova whose brilliant light is only now reaching distant observing worlds. Danny; a heavy body atop her back last night, fingers pushing into her punishingly hard, tears dropping one-two on the back of Raine’s neck, footsteps briskly fleeing without a word afterward.
This, at least, is a clear signal. UXB, UXB, UXB.
