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Solaris Nights

Solaris Fiction

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#1 Bill Bullet

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Posted 25 June 2015 - 11:48 AM

"Oh fer cryin' out loud! What in blazes did you do to my Mech, you bloody lunatic!?"

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.


#2 Bill Bullet

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Posted 19 August 2015 - 12:19 AM

"Frankfurt is going to chew you up and spit you out. The odds on this match are so damn lop-sided I should turn myself in as an accessory to murder, taking your money like this." Pocketing the wad of C-bills I gave to him, Desmond Kilpatrick glared at me from behind his oval-shaped glasses as he handed me a data crystal. Desmond worked alongside me as a part-time bouncer at an upscale club called "The Watering Hole". He was also a small-time information broker looking to make his fortune on Solaris same as me. We became friends after a particularly messy fight at the bar and a mutually profitable match. "You know, you can be hurtful sometimes Des." I said, clutching my heart in mock pain. "Frankfurt may be a veteran and have a bigger Mech, but he's still a minor league jock." Desmond folded his arms across his barrel shaped chest and slowly raised an eyebrow till it was perfectly arched, a move I was convinced he spent hours perfecting in front of a mirror. "In case you forgot, you're a minor league jock too." I waved away his concern impatiently and turned away. "You're worse than a mother hen sometimes Des."

We stood on a balcony overlooking the first floor, keeping an eye out for any trouble. The pulsing bodies on the dance floor matched the rhythm of the flickering lights and pounding music. It was a hypnotic display that I found relaxing. The upscale nature of the club and the large amount of security discouraged most patrons from getting too far out of control, so most nights I could relax and collect my paycheck for doing nothing. Working a part-time job like this was the less-than-glamorous side of being a Solaris Mech jockey. Anyone who came to Solaris hoping to live solely on their winnings was quickly disappointed, everything on the planet is designed to systematically take your money and lots of it. So unless you had more money than sense you either became a part of that system or you ended up selling everything you own to buy a ticket off planet.

Desmond clapped me on the shoulder, and I did my level best to pretend that my knees hadn't nearly buckled. "You're a damn good pilot and a damn good friend, but you can still walk away from this match. Pay the cancellation fine, and set yourself up with a match inside your weight-class against some fresh meat. Easy win, easy money." I looked over my shoulder at Desmond, the light from the dance floor reflecting off his glasses was the only way to find his face in the shadows of the second floor. "Between my piloting and Wrench's tinkering, Frankfurt won't know what hit him." I insisted. It was a mantra I'd been telling myself from the moment I accepted the fight. "I've watched him fight dozens of times and I've picked over every scrap of info I can about his Mech." I started counting off on my fingers. "He hates being under long-range missile fire, he always torso twists left when taking laser fire and he over commits every time he uses that sword of his." I watched Desmond's face grow contemplative as I dissected Frankfurt's piloting. "Furthermore there's this." I said, pulling out the data crystal Des had given me. "Now I got my hands on Frankfurt's weapons load and armor layout for this match. I'll know what to avoid and where to hit him." In the major circuit, owning such information was WILDLY illegal and was heavily guarded. Down here in the minors, winning was all that mattered. Normally, I avoid buying info like this and Wrench would skin me alive if she caught me, but I have way too much riding on this match to worry about things like "a fair fight". Besides, was it really an advantage to know the exact weight and speed of the train rushing towards you? I slipped the crystal back into my pocket and looked back up at Des.

"The two of us stand to make a lot of money on this fight Des. This might be my ticket out of the minor circuit and into an actual stable." I said. Desmond grinned wide and shook his head. "Well damn, if you of all people starts talking like a starry eyed rookie, you may actually believe you can pull this off." Shaking my hand, Desmond continued. "Alright, I'll place the bets and you better come out of this in one piece. Can't enjoy your wealth if you're dead right?"

>>>To be continued

Edited by Bill Bullet, 28 August 2015 - 10:33 AM.


#3 Thom Frankfurt

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Posted 19 August 2015 - 08:28 PM

[OOC: Interested on seeing where this goes. Also, no relation. And a Battlemaster with a sword? Oh my.]

#4 Bill Bullet

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Posted 20 August 2015 - 09:29 AM

[[Major edit in second post: changed Desmond to be an information broker rather than a bookie and added a touch of grey to the main character's moral compass.]]

Edited by Bill Bullet, 20 August 2015 - 09:32 AM.


#5 Bill Bullet

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Posted 20 August 2015 - 09:52 AM

I stepped off the bus and headed towards my apartment. Dawn was peeking over the mountains and lighting the sky, though the lower city wouldn't actually see the sun till well into the noontide, the sky scrapers and arenas of the upper city artificially extending the twilight for hours. I found my keys and turned them inside the lock. A small panel swung open to reveal a rudimentary bio-metric scanner. Wrench had installed it when we first moved in after I showed her how easy it was to unlock the door with a bank card. I pressed my hand against the scanner and the panel buzzed angrily, making me jump. Muttering curses, I banged a fist against the wall of the hangar a few times and then pressed my hand down again. This time, the scanner chirped and the door unlocked.

Inside the hangar was dimly lit by a few hanging light bulbs. The windows of the apartment however were bright and cheerful. Shaking my head, I walked towards the gantry and Lady MacBeth. Sure enough, there was Wrench curled up like a ball inside one of Lady's legs, leaning against the bundle of myomer cables she had been replacing. Whistling a jaunty tune, I picked up a socket wrench and after a decent wind up, smacked it against the leg armor as hard as I could. The resounding clang was drowned out by Wrench's shout of alarm, its echoes were drowned out by her oaths of slow and bloody vengeance as she chased me across the hangar, up the stairs and into the apartment.

>>>To be continued

Edited by Bill Bullet, 28 August 2015 - 10:34 AM.


#6 Bill Bullet

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Posted 21 August 2015 - 11:28 PM

After a shower and a few hours sleep, the pair of us were back to work. While Shannon was downstairs finishing the myomer replacement, I was in the office looking over the schematics Desmond had gotten me. While the files were very thorough, most of the information was about the weapon systems on Frankfurt's BattleMaster. It seemed Frankfurt had a system that worked and he was sticking to it. He liked rushing in close, covering his charge with a steady stream of PPC, large laser, and medium pulse laser fire while absorbing return fire with his Mech's heavy front loaded armor. Once he was within melee range, he would drop the PPC and use both hands to deliver a crushing blow with his sword. Most Mechs were crippled or outright destroyed by the first swing that connected. The question is, how does he get his Mech to move so damn fast? I scrubbed my face with my hands, vainly hoping to shake loose a few ideas. In every match, Frankfurt somehow got his BattleMaster all the way up to 76 mph, a blistering pace for an Assault Mech. What deepened the mystery was that he was going 12 miles faster than what a BattleMaster was normally rated for. The data crystal had no info on what sort of power plant Frankfurt used to pull off such speeds, no doubt the information had been much more carefully guarded and all of Desmond's skills as an information broker hadn't unearthed so much as a single hint.

Shannon had remarked on the increased speed more than a few times when we were reviewing footage from Frankfurt's previous matches. "I'd like to see what kind of black magic his Lead Tech is using." she was fond of saying. "It's not natural for a BLR-1D to move that fast." she would grumble as we watched another opponent's Mech get sliced to ribbons. The obvious answer was that Frankfurt was using an XL engine. XL engines provided more speed while taking up less tonnage and had become quite popular with Solaris jockeys who wanted to cram a few more tons of weapons into their ride. The problem with using an XL was that the larger volume of the engines makes them much more likely to end up in the path of penetrating hits. Furthermore, those bulkier engines intrude into the side torso bays of a Mech, exposing them to catastrophic engine failure from structural damage that would be otherwise survivable. After watching one of Frankfurt's hapless victims blast away his entire right torso to no avail put the XL theory to rest while causing both me and Shannon quite a few restless nights.

I got to the last page of the schematics, a long and dry list of the various technical modifications, general maintenance repairs, and orders for new armor plating. I was just about to shut of my terminal and call it a day when something caught my eye. In a flash I was up and running towards the apartment door. I yanked it open and nearly ran full tilt in Shannon standing on the landing outside. With a whoop I grabbed her and spun us both around, laughing like a maniac. "I figured it out! I've got him Wrench! I've got him, I've got him!" I shouted. "Put me down you lunatic!" Shannon shouted back, her face burning crimson through the grime on her face. After I put her back on the floor, she stood with her hands on her hips looking up at me, clearly flustered. "Just what is going on?" she demanded. Too excited to explain it clearly, I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the desk. Jabbing a finger at the terminal I pointed to the repair manifest for Frankfurt's Mech. "Look at this, tell me what you see." I said.

Shannon looked at the screen for a few minutes. "How did you get this? Nevermind. I know how you got it, you went to Desmond didn't you?" Too late I remembered Shannon's disdain for Desmond's services. "Comon' Wrench that's not important-" she whirled on me, her temper rising. "Of course it's important! The major circuit would toss you off-planet if they caught you with info like this! You can't rely on a crutch like this, especially if we want to get picked up by a major stable! You want to throw away everything we worked for? After all we've been through, you'd risk our chances just to find out that Frankfurt puts only eight points of armor on his right leg?" Shock at her announcement stopped me cold. "How did you know that? You didn't read that far yet." Buried in the delivery manifests was the answer to Frankfurt's speed. Every time he placed an order for new armor plating, the distribution to the right leg never exceeded eight plates. "I had a hunch he was going light on his leg armor last night when I was replacing the myomer." Shannon said, her fists balled up in fury. "I didn't say anything because I had to re-watch his matches to confirm my theory." She started pacing as she talked, a hurricane of anger in our living room. "By figuring he was skimming on his leg protection, I checked for irregularities in his Mech's gait. Without the extra armor the whole thing is top heavy, he'd have to lengthen his stride to stop from tipping over. Unless he was using a larger standard engine, then the increased speed could compensate for the imbalance." As she spoke her pacing lessened, though her anger didn't. "My guess is that he's using a tweaked VOX 365 engine. Watching him fight he always turns left to intercept incoming fire, so he put all the armor into his left leg to hide what he was doing. It's why he hates LRM fire so much, the erratic nature of the barrages means he can't protect the weak leg as well as he'd like. The final clue is that when he goes for his finishing blow he lunges very far forward. He's not over committing when he swings, he's thrusting his weak leg back when he lunges to shield it from harm!"

Folding her arms across her chest she stared me down. "We had all the information right in front of us. If you used that pumpkin shaped head of yours for more than just holding a hat, we'd have figured it out together and sooner." I rubbed the back of my neck and shifted my feet, feeling very much like an errant school boy caught fibbing. "Comon' Shannon-" She thrust a finger into my chest and glared. "Don't comon' Shannon me! No amount of hicktown, country boy charm is gonna make me any less mad at you! We're partners damnit! We work together. Running off and wasting money on insider info is an insult to me as your Tech and to your own God-given talent as a MechWarrior! Bloody feckin' hell if I didn't care so much about you and your damn hayseed hide I'd-" stopping cold Shannon's green eyes went wider than dinner plates. Honestly they were probably as wide as mine at that moment. "Gawd blast it." she muttered and reaching into her overalls, she pulled out a noteputer and shoved it into my hands. "Here's the list of adjustments I made to Lady. Memorize them and key your weapon commands into the cockpit computer. I gotta go take a shower." Then without another word she shoved past me and headed to the bathroom, rattling the windows as she slammed the door.

>>>To be continued

#7 Bill Bullet

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Posted 21 August 2015 - 11:40 PM

[[Alright so real talk here, never written a romantic sub-plot before, like ever. Not sure how I feel about it yet, I blame real life influences for even trying/I suck at writing dialogue and wanna fix that. That being said it is a sub-plot not the main one, so the meat of the story will be what I'm good at; rompy-stompy robot destruction.]]

#8 Thom Frankfurt

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Posted 22 August 2015 - 01:46 AM

[[Good dialogue is difficult at best. Well, in my opinion anyways. Throw in a lovey-dovey sub-plot and it can potentially get real weird real fast. Especially when you throw actions, thoughts, descriptions, or even an accent in there. And remember each character has their own distinct point of view and opinion on things... But that happens.]]

#9 Bill Bullet

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Posted 27 August 2015 - 06:56 AM

I stood staring at the door for a few moments before turning tail and fleeing towards the hangar. "It's not cowardice...she clearly wants to be left alone...right?" Once I was safely bolted inside Lady's cockpit, I closed my eyes and breathed in the familiar scents of sweat and motor oil. Even when things were at their worst, I always felt better sitting in Lady's command couch. Something about having 75 tons of raw destructive power at your command tends to steady even the shakiest of nerves. Booting up the control console, I began the process of assigning the various weapon systems to their respective triggers. The console softly hummed and beeped as I ran a few tests to gauge the response times of each weapon. In the arena, a millisecond could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Solaris arena combat was a world of difference from actual Mech warfare. In the arena, combat was a methodical and suspenseful affair as each combatant sought each other out. The slow pace was perfect for setting bets and preparing the perfect camera angles to catch the upcoming action. The moment contact was made though, the fighting would be blisteringly fast and was usually over in a heartbeat. While a military man had to worry about preserving his Mech to aid some grand overarching strategy, a Solaris fighter only needed to win as quickly as possible. Damage to your Mech could be repaired with a winner's purse and the crowd loved to see the sparks fly. I'd heard of some fighters who installed pyrotechnics on their Mechs to add to the flash and pop of their combat, each blow resulting in huge amounts of fire and smoke even when the damage itself was minor.

The system diagnostic showed all systems were green and the weapon response times were perfect. Shannon had once again out done herself, turning Lady from a battered heap into a finely tuned instrument. Scanning the noteputer she had passed me, I saw a new command prompt that needed to be entered. As I was entering the necessary codes, I heard the sound of someone climbing the ladder and reaching into the cockpit. "I gotta tell you Wrench, you're a genius. Poor Frankfurt won't know what hit-" I felt something round and cold press into the space behind my ear and the unmistakable sound of a pistol's hammer being cocked. "Why don't you stand up nice and slow for me, huh champ? Keep those hands where I can see them." the voice was colder than the gun barrel against my skull and I slowly raised my hands above my shoulders as I stood up. The pressure against my head lifted and I carefully turned to face the intruder.

Filling the door frame of the cockpit hatch was a mountain of a man in a black leather blazer. He had a vicious looking scar trailing down from the corner of his lip to his collar-bone. In his hand was an equally mean looking TK Enforcer Semi-Automatic pistol. A favorite of gangster types all over the Inner Sphere for its ease of concealment and use of assault rifle rounds. Any idea of rushing him flew out the window the moment I saw that beast in his hand. One twitch of the trigger, and all my favorite internal organs would be splattered across Lady's cockpit. The gangster kept me covered as I stepped out and following his instructions I shimmied down the ladder. Waiting for me was a group of 4 men and 1 woman, all dressed in the same black leather blazers as my escort. The woman stepped forward as I approached, extending her hand. "It's nice to meet you Mr. Trenton, or can I call you Christopher?" Her amiable speech was offset by the dangerous look in her eye. Of all the toughs arrayed before me, there was no doubt in my mind who the most lethal was. I shook her hand more out of a sense of self-preservation than politeness.

"Chris will do fine." I said, hoping that my smile looked genuine rather than terrified. Though I wouldn't have put money on that bet. It's not everyday you shake hands with Madame Tiburón, the boss of the entire Under-City.


>>To be continued

Edited by Bill Bullet, 27 August 2015 - 07:00 AM.






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