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[Rick Rawlings]

The Drop

LaMarc Soluyev glanced at his watch as he wandered the labyrinthine lower decks of the Ultimos Invalides 2, the massive drop ship where his lance was stationed. It had taken forever for this ship to be ready and there were some who said it still wasn’t finished. Looking at the convoluted corridors and conduits that made up the underbelly of the UI 2, LaMarc wondered if they weren’t correct. Seeing that he had an hour and a half until drop time, LaMarc decided to head up to The Matchmaker^TM lounge to grab a bite to eat and relax. Jumping into the first lift that went to that deck, he soon found himself in the massive sprawling concourse that occupied the center of the ship. Upon entering The Matchmaker^TM, LaMarc found himself marveling at the chaos that reigned there. Pilots were scrambling this way and that, desperately trying to link up with other lancemates before their drop. Sometimes they would never find everyone and a lance would drop short. Other times, they would think that they had everyone only to find after landing that the mech had made it, but the pilot was left behind. LaMarc smiled ruefully to himself thinking of the many times it had happened to him.

After a few moments of reveling in the confusion, he purchased his lunch and looked around to find a seat. It didn’t take him long to notice T.O.M. Berenger sitting a few tables over. Not that it would be hard for anyone to miss him. T.O.M. was a huge man, and at 6’4” tall and with shoulders to match, they had to permanently remove the T-roofs on his Cicada so he could fit in the cockpit. T.O.M. spied LaMarc at about the same time and waved him over. As he approached, LaMarc noticed something embarrassing about his friend and hurried to the table.
“T.O.M.”, LaMarc hissed in a stage whisper, “Your Elo is showing!”

T.O.M. blushed all the way up to the top of his already red hair and tucked it back into his pants. “Thanks, mate!” he returned sheepishly, “Not anybody needs to be seein’ that, though I don’t see what it would hurt anyway…”

LaMarc sat down as T.O.M. surveyed the tray he carried. “LaMarc,” he inquired, “Are you just having a salad again? You could stand to put on a little weight, mate.” LaMarc looked down at his torso and legs. They did look a little angular and low rez now that he thought about it. He shrugged.

“I’m sure I’ll fill out at some point”, he countered, “Probably before September, at any rate.” The two ate in silence for a while as they surveyed the mayhem around them. Some teal pilots, some blue, a few red way off on the other side of the room.

“So, did you get your ERPPC’s installed?” LaMarc inquired after several thoughtful bites.

“Yup, I sure did… both of them! Can’t wait to try them out in the field.” returned T.O.M.

“Isn’t that a bit much for a Cicada? Won’t you overheat a lot?” replied LaMarc, heading down a frequent conversation path for them.

“No, no, not at all! It’s an alpha strike game, mate! Go big and go long or go home, that’s the way of it.”

LaMarc thought over this as he chewed. He certainly had seen himself ejected from the smoldering wreck of his mech quite a bit over the last several drops. Maybe running with the default loadout and single heat sinks wasn’t the best of ideas after all…

“Oh, no, it’s Gavroche!” hissed T.O.M. suddenly. LaMarc involuntarily ducked as his eyes scanned the room. Sure enough, Gavroche was slowly winding his way towards them through the throng. He was a tiny, insipid man who had a grossly overinflated sense of his self worth. Without acknowledging either of them, Gavroche sat down at their table and started eating.

“Well, bog in, then,” said T.O.M., mostly hiding his displeasure. LaMarc sighed inwardly. Despite their dislike of him, most of the pilots felt that they needed to suck up to Gavroche because he ran a Commando with the lance’s Guardian ECM on it. They needed to humor him so he would stick around and cover them after the drop. Otherwise, he was likely to wander off with his ECM and get destroyed early in the fight. Then the Lurm Rain would come. LaMarc hated the Lurm Rain because it would leave little dents in the top of his mech and would chip the paint. And somebody would have to clean all that up. LaMarc wasn’t sure who. He had often wondered how his damaged or destroyed mech ended up back in his mech bay after every drop new and shiny and ready to go. It was just one of life’s little mysteries he figured, and since he was always making a profit, he looked no further into it than that.

Still, it would be good to keep Gavroche around. He tried to think of a good opening to the conversation. “So, Gavroche, did you get your HUD fixed?” he tried.

“Well, you ze…” he began in a forced Gallic accent that no one had spoken in nine centuries. “Zometimes it works and zometimes it doesn’t. I would zay it eez about 50% at this point. Zometimes I have no minimap and no IFF at ze zame time!” He threw up his hands dramatically. “Oh, T.O.M., that reminds me, I am zorry for shooting you in ze back the other day.” There was a slight gleam in his eye as he said this. The other two both caught it.

“Um, that’s okay” said T.O.M., not in the mood to take the bait. “So, where are we dropping today?” he said, changing the subject. He glanced at his iPhone 1042 for a minute. “Ahh, Tourmaline Desert!” he exclaimed.

“Again!” LaMarc and Gavroche yelled together. Well, LaMarc yelled that. Gavroche yelled “Zut Alors!” which LaMarc was pretty sure meant the same thing. “It’s like every other drop we are there!” he continued. “Why are tourmalines so valuable, anyway? Have you seen the gift shop lately? It’s nothing but tourmaline crap…”

“Yeah well, we better get our signals straight, I guess” T.O.M. interjected. He had just gotten his girlfriend a “My MechWarrior fought in the desert and all he got me was this Tourmaline” T shirt…

“O.K., if I move left zen right, we will make a base run.” Gavroche stated. “If I go forward zen back, it means that they are by ze drop ship. And if I do zhis…” Here Gavroche actually stood up and did a neat little pirouette, “it means that they have more than one ppc-boating stalker.” He sat back down.

“Hey, does it bother either of you at all that we can’t actually communicate on our coms in our mechs?” LaMarc blurted out suddenly. “I mean, that would just seem like common sense, wouldn’t it?”

Here T.O.M. and Gavroche cast sidelong glances at each other. They had seen this before. Both of them settled down in their seats for The Rant^TM. “Sure we can text message each other, I guess” LaMarc continued, “But, to be honest, I find that pretty hard to do in the middle of a fight. And I also don’t always have time to read the stuff that you write to me, witty as it is, I’m sure” he said, glancing quickly at Gavroche. “I just feel like we should be able to talk to each other, you know, using our voices…is that too much to ask? I mean, we live in a fantastic age where we can lumber around in big stompy robots destroying the environment around us…”

“Not yet…” interjected T.O.M. helpfully.

“Right, well, we can’t do that yet” continued LaMarc, “But we do fight other big stompy robots in battles that defy most of the laws of physics that I learned about in school. I mean, that’s gotta be some pretty cool technology right there, right? We can shoot giant projectiles that move ridiculously slow and still do massive amounts of damage, but we can’t talk over the radio?!? It seems like most of the troubles we get into could be mostly be overcome by simply talking to each other. Have you looked at the message boards lately? A lot of those problems are due to a lack of communication options during the battle. It seems like if the bosses could just get voice coms working well, most of that other stuff would just go away. Want one lance to break left and one to break right simultaneously? Tell me over coms. Is there a 6 ppc stalker over the ridge? Or two? Or three? Tell me! Don’t have a hud and need to know where everyone is ‘cause you are swarmed by lights? Call out over the coms! How we do in a drop depends on how we perform as a team, but the one piece of technology we are missing would let us do that! Sometimes I just feel like no one is listening!”

LaMarc looked around to see that no one else in the room was talking. In fact they were all looking at him. And listening to him. It seems he had gotten louder as he went on. Now that he had stopped, there was not a sound to be heard. T.O.M. and Gavroche looked around in surprise too. After a moment of silence, somewhere off to one side, someone started to clap. Slowly it was picked up by others, until the whole room was cheering and applauding for LaMarc. He sat down in his chair, blushing profusely. After a solid minute, the cheers died down as the pilots started to head out for their drops. Several clapped LaMarc on the shoulder as they passed.

“Good onya, mate” T.O.M. said approvingly.

“Well, I guess I’d better go check on my mech before we drop.” LaMarc said after the room had settled down.

“What are you taking out today, the Hunchback?” asked T.O.M.

“No, remember that cheese build we popped on Caustic Valley last week?” LaMarc said.

“Well, it got all through the vent intakes and now I overheat like no one’s business. Plus, every time I fire the lasers, the whole cockpit smells like nachos. I’ll be out in the Cent.”

“Well, I’ll be off too!” said T.O.M. after a second. They both looked around. Gavroche had left without a word. “Huh! Where’d that galah get off to?” wondered T.O.M.. “Well, see ya in a bit, mate!” He wandered off into the crowd.

LaMarc cleaned up his trash and headed off to the mech bay turbo lifts. On the way down, he checked for any new information on the company message boards on his iPhone 1041. (His friends constantly ribbed him for having last year’s model) After looking around for several minutes, he realized he couldn’t find anything useful or even make heads-or-tails of the new cluttered board structure and logged off in disgust. He stepped off the lift into his number three mechbay. Standing in the lower right corner, he basked in the glory of his Centurion. It suddenly occurred to him that he could walk over to the lower left corner and see his mech from a whole new angle. He wondered why he had never done that before?

Not having any time now to pursue this new avenue, he jogged over to the elevator that would take him up to the cockpit. On the way up, he remarked on the greenness of his mech. He had thought about painting it several times, but that cost MC, and he was holding on to his. He figured that someday, there just might be something worth buying with it. He of course kept up with all the sales, but everything was still ridiculously overpriced. He supposed that he could have got basic colors with his c-bills, of which he had a ton, but when he looked into it, he found that there were no basic blacks or whites. So, green it would stay.

He stepped off the elevator and crawled down into the comfortable and cozy cockpit from which he had witnessed so many thrilling battle scenes in 6 different exciting and exotic locales. Smiling to himself, he reached over and switched on the power coils to initiate startup. He leaned back and closed his eyes, listening to the soothing voice that had been his only friend in many deadly encounters. The friend who never lost her cool, never got angry and who always provided him with the information he needed, just when he needed it. Except for that one time when she kept telling him every time a sensor sweep passed over him, but that was long ago…

“Reactor Online” He felt the powerful beast roar to life and buck underneath him.

“Sensors Online” The very subltle high piched whine of sensor pings and relays pricked his ears.

“Weapons Online” The lasers coils charged up with their distinctive sound. It used to bother him more; now, not so much. Maybe he was getting used to it.

“All systems: Nominal” His smile deepened with real pleasure. This Centurion was fast and packed a punch and would serve him well today. He had given it a name once, but he had forgotten what it was. He seemed to remember that he didn’t like the name all that much and had planned several times to change it, but something had always stopped him. No matter, he was satisfied. With T.O.M. and Gavroche in his lance, and some other random guy, he would do well. They would bring the pain to their enemies and all would be right with the world. He felt like nothing could stop him. LaMarc opened his eyes.

“WHAT?!? NO HUD?!?! SON OF A B…

The End