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I winced as I shimmied down the chain link ladder that spooled out of a small hatch underneath my cockpit. When my boots touched the ground I turned and looked at the ball of condensed fury in front of me. Despite standing at exactly 5 ft tall on a good day, Shannon "Wrench" O'Leary still seemed to tower over me. The large monkey wrench she expertly wielded in her left hand combined with her infamous temper always seemed to add an extra two feet of intimidation.
"Aw comon' Wrench, we knew I was gonna be out-tonned going into this. Despite that, thanks to my impeccable piloting, the old girl is in fine shape." As if to punctuate my claim to piloting skill, the left arm of my ON1-K fell to the ground with a resounding thud. "Er...relatively speaking." As the shock on Shannon's face began to slowly morph into murderous rage, I took several backward steps before turning tail and fleeing. I assured myself that on Solaris VII, the best MechWarriors are the ones who know when to get out of trouble.
After a much needed shower, I changed into my coveralls and returned to the Mech bay me and Shannon called home. I picked up my tool belt and warily approached the gantry where Lady MacBeth was anchored. What was left of the chest armor had been removed and I could see the light of an arc welder coming from inside the chest cavity. The Orion is beloved by Techs everywhere for its spacious interior, and combined with Shannon's diminutive stature it's downright cozy. I clambered up the gantry till I was perched on Lady's right arm. Leaning over, I knocked on her side plating with my wrench to let Shannon know I arrived.
A grease and sweat stained work glove popped out of Lady's chest clutching a scrap of paper. "Here's the list of vital repairs we need. You can start on the myomer bundles in the left arm." Her voice was gruff and clipped but lacked its previously homicidal tone. When she was hard at work, Shannon was more interested in finishing the job correctly than anything else. Reaching out I grabbed the list and gave it a quick scan. To anyone else, the cribbed scrawl would be little more than hieroglyphs, but I'd been deciphering Shannon's chicken scratches for years now.
As I was calculating how much of my winnings would be going towards repair and refit costs, Shannon poked her head out from inside Lady's chest cavity. "Hey, how's your arm feeling?" I looked down at the bandage I had wrapped around my right forearm. "It's ok, it was only a mediumish piece of ferro-glass. I had Doc Tanners patch me up after the match. Heh, itches like crazy though." Shannon expertly swung herself out of the cavity and onto the arm next to me. "Doc Tanners is drunk more often than he's sober and uses his own pain meds more than he hands them out, did he even stitch up you properly?" She eyed the dressing suspiciously, like it was a crate of questionable munitions.
I laughed. "Careful Wrench, don't want people thinking you're actually capable of concern for something that can't be assembled with a screwdriver." Shannon pursed her lips and backed up a step. "Well if you're healthy enough to make jokes, you're well enough to get to work on that myomer bundle." She then lightly punched my wounded arm and swung herself back inside Lady's chest while I bent over double and whimpered. She poked her head outside once more as I straightened up. "It's my job to take care of Lady MacBeth, and that means I gotta take care of you as well. Lord knows yer bloody incapable of doing it yourself." Maybe it was the painkillers, but I swear I saw a slight blush under the layers of grime and coolant smeared on her cheeks.
"Gotta be the drugs." I muttered as I clambered up the gantry and over Lady's head heading towards the ruined left arm. I paused to look at the shattered ferro-glass on the left side of Lady's cockpit. The Victor I had gone up against had used a LBX-AC/10 and one of the cluster rounds had ricocheted off Lady's raised left shoulder and smashed into the cockpit. Luckily for me the round had lost all its momentum by then and only shattered the glass rather than penetrating all the way through to me. Unluckily, a shard of the ferro-glass had flown across the cockpit and bit deep into my right arm. Despite my previous boasts, I had won the match by the skin of my teeth; blasting the Victor's leg off at the hip and then standing on its back when my opponent attempted to stand. A few more minutes and I would have bled out inside my cockpit.
"Don't scratch your arm!" I heard Shannon call from where she was working. "I'm not!" I said, then finished scratching anyway. Crouching down on the gantry near where the left arm had been severed, I groaned as I surveyed the damage. The cables that acted as a Mech's muscles dangled freely like frayed vines just below the shoulder actuator. "Gonna be a long damn day..."
It took the two of us about a month to repair the various injuries me and Lady MacBeth had suffered. After buying replacement parts, rent for the Mech bay, reloading the munitions, and paying the entrance fee for another match, we had burned through most of my winnings from the last match. Still, we had enough left over to live on and the Mech bay had a small apartment over it so we didn't have to worry about the exorbitant housing prices in Solaris City. All in all, we were doing a hell of a lot better than some of the other stable-less MechWarriors on Solaris.
Wannabe Mech jocks from all over the Inner Sphere would flock to Solaris VII to win fame and fortune in the fighting arenas. More often than not, those same pilots would end up dead, penniless, or both after their first match. Other than the "New Blood" grand tourney held once every three years, the matches for rookie pilots were never televised across the Inner Sphere or even fought in the massive colussems that people were familiar with when they thought of Solaris Mech combat. New pilots and solo operaters like Shannon and I fought in the minor circuit, desperately hoping that one of the recruiting agents from a major stable was in the audience the day you fought. Con-artists sold "insider information" on every block swearing they knew which match was gonna be under observation and even I had dropped a few C-bills on the off chance they might be right. "Buying a day dream." is what I told Shannon when she caught me doing it one day. She had scoffed, but I caught her forking over a few of her own C-Bills to another fellow a block away when she thought I wasn't looking.
Every Mech jock and Tech on Solaris dreamed of getting sponsored by a major stable like the Skye Tigers or Black Star Stables. A sponsored Mech Warrior had access to top of the line Mech repair facilities, doctors who didn't sanitize wounds with the same bottle they drank from, and more money than Blake himself. I personally wanted to join Cenotaph Stables, the team formed by the famous Kai Allard-Liao. Then again, Cenotaph took only the best of the best and kept their numbers small to maintain their elite status, so my odds were about the same as a Locust surviving a fight against a lance of BattleMasters.
"Speaking of BattleMasters..." I muttered to myself and looked at the fight card in my hand. I was sitting in what passed for our living room/office in the cramped apartment. It had a decent veiw of the city and windows that looked out over the Mech bay floor. I had been able to set up a match between myself and Don "Terminator" Frankfurt, a pretty talented BattleMaster pilot from the Lyran sector of Solaris City. Shannon came in from the bedroom and looked over my shoulder, examining the fight card with an appraising eye. "He's been in more matches than you." she said. "I know." I said. "His Mech outweighs Lady by about 10 tons and it's the BLR-1D chasiss so it'll run cooler." she continued. "I know." I said. "Frankfurt also yanked out the machine guns and ammo and used the extra tonnage to equip a sword." she said. I slowly turned to look at her. "I know." She opened her mouth to continue, but I pointed to the bottom of the fight card to forestall her. "The prize money is three times what we earned in the last match and all the bookies say he's the one favored to win. If we bet in my favor and I pull off an upset, not only will our money troubles be over, but I'll eat my neuro-helmet if the match doesn't catch the eye of a stable recuiting agent."
Shannon put her hands on her hips and stared at me intently. After a few moments, she sighed in resignation. "Alright fine, but if we're gonna do this, Lady is gonna need some more armor on her arms. I can redistribute the armor from her rear left torso and drop you down to a single ton of LRM reloads or I could..." she wandered off in the direction of the Mech bay stairs already lost in thought. I knew she'd be down there all night drawing up plans and tinkering with the armor and weapons loadout.
I reached for the phone on the desk and began dialing. Over the course of a few hours I had placed several bets with some trustworthy bookies. I then called around to the few contacts I'd made during my time on Solaris to dredge up any info I could on Frankfurt and his Mech. It was standard practice and I knew Frankfurt would be doing the same for me. A Solaris fighter looked for any advantage they could get and knowing your opponent and their Mech was the surest way to victory. I for one planned to win.
>>To be continued
Edited by Bill Bullet, 19 August 2015 - 12:20 AM.
