119: Mecha Combat – Two
Viatrix had reached out to Klettur Erkanschlde's people as soon as Captain Adynduaa had shared her contact information, and by the time the rest of the crew had made it back to the Pelekys, a meeting had already been arranged.
"As soon as you're ready, I can patch the representative's call into the bridge." Viatrix had chirped in welcome, and Pryseia was powerless to stop the grin from blooming across her features.
"I appreciate you taking the initiative on this, we can be there in a moment."
Even out of their Kith costumes, the crew of the Pelekys fell back on their default positions on the bridge - Pryseia on her throne, Rhea leaning against it, V'tala propped up near the door with her arms crossed, Elytra and Malakh at the gunner stations, and Nevara at the helm. When the call connected, the first thing they were subjected to was blinding light streaming in from a large window, glinting harshly off an assortment of machined parts strewn across some sort of workbench, before a voice from just outside the view of the camera grumbled, "Oh, wrong way!"
A moment later, the view switched to show a woman - tall, pale blonde, and beautiful like all necupole were - wearing what looked to be coveralls that had been designed more for the runway, rather than for protection. The white fabric seemed to almost scintillate, the cut of it artfully asymmetrical, though it was marred by a smear of something dark and oily across one shoulder.
"Sorry, I didn't expect to be hearing from you so promptly," the woman said, pulling back what was clearly the data pad she was taking the call on, "Just going over some last minute checks for my mech. I'm Klettur Erkanschlde, and you must be the crew of the Pelekys?"
"We are indeed." Pryseia said, doing her level best to hide her surprise. Erkanschlde was not at all what she expected. The woman had her short hair slicked back, a hazy band of purple painted across her eyes that made their violet colour pop with lipstick to match, though there was a splatter of oil against her cheek that was obviously not part of her makeup routine. There was a frenetic undercurrent to her that reminded Pryseia of how Malakh sometimes got when in the throes of working out a mechanical issue in her mind, scattered as much as she was focused on the conversation at hand.
Erkanschlde's lips kicked up in a half grin, before her expression fell. "I was sorry to hear about Ahesa. I've known them for years, their loss… it wasn't something I expected."
"Their crew has taken their death pretty hard," Rhea said gently, "They passed on this job out of respect for Ahesa's skills."
Eyes bright as she looked away, Erkanschlde swallowed thickly before saying, "Yeah, sounds like something they would do. Ahesa was easily the best mech pilot on the Telum, but they were always so encouraging to the rest of their team. Taking their place in this tournament would feel like an insult to them, I think. They'd want someone who could put in as good a showing as Ahesa could."
"I humbly offer my services to their memory." Pryseia told her solemnly.
Pinching her eyes briefly, Erkanschlde took a breath before she nodded. "Adynduaa forwarded some highlight reels of you in combat, insisting that it was genuine and not editing, that they saw you in action recently enough to vouch for you. I must say, what I saw left me impressed. I know Hyttan mechs use neural interfaces for controlling them, but you've had experience with something like the Donishaik control system?"
"It's very similar to what is used in the SH-3N Mobile Armour Units, which I have the most familiarity with," Pryseia said, "Though I've had experience with nearly every mech type currently in operation."
"And I most definitely need someone with experience," Erkanschlde said, having fully pulled herself back together with a wry grin, "The Elstree Docklands Tournament takes place at the end of the month, and I'm hoping that's enough time for you to get out here to Trowsorab and familiarize yourself with my machine before it all starts."
Nevara ran some quick calculations at her station before saying, "Barring any unforeseen incidents, we should be able to get there within two Galactic Standard days."
Letting out a relieved laugh, Erkanschlde said, "I can have the coordinates for my lab sent to you in a moment. You're a lifesaver, Pelekys. We can go over the contract once you get here."
"I look forward to it." Pryseia told her, and with a brief smile and a bit of fumbling on her end, Erkanschlde ended the call.
In the silence that followed, Rhea let out a thoughtful hum. "She's a far cry from the necupole I crossed paths with when I freed Yarula."
"I'll say," Malakh scoffed, "That crowd didn't look like it would know a plasma torch from a socket wrench. This Erkanschlde at least seems to have an active hand in the product her company's building."
Turning her seat around, Nevara said, "Luck is on our side for the journey. Clearing the core by going along with its flow is what's going to take the longest, as it'll deposit us out into less turbulent space that will give us only an hour long jump through subspace to get us to our destination."
"Vi, have we been fully restocked of our necessary supplies?" Pryseia called out.
"Sure have," Viatrix told her, "Last of it got moved in while we were midway through the second act of the Drake's Alight. We're all set!"
"Then if no one else has any business to attend to on the Quanvengier?" Pryseia asked, looking around at the others, but Rhea just leaned over to pat her on the shoulder, saying, "We're all good. Let's get you to that tournament, eh?"
Kicking off from the wall, V'tala said, "The sooner the better. I'm curious to see what the Necupole are like in person."
"Arrogant," Rhea supplied as Nevara got in contact with the Quanvengier's docking personnel to get their departure started, "Erkanschlde was an outlier - do not expect any other locals to be so accepting of the presence of a Lesser among them."
"Charming." Was V'tala's droll reply as she and the others left the bridge.
Conditions in the core were tumultuous, to say the least. Debris as small as atoms or as large as planets, all of it being pulled by the gravity well of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy to near the speed of light, it made travelling through it an abrasive experience, even with protective hull plating and shields. Thankfully, the Hyttan upgrades to the Pelekys meant that the ship was able to heal from any damage it took almost as soon as it took it, leaving them no worse for wear on exiting the core as when they'd been entering it.
But still, they were all thankful to be out of the constant noise of it, if nothing else. Even through the hull, the roar of the core was an unsettling thing to experience.
But the journey did give Elytra enough time to edit and upload the video of their fight with the latest Lambda, and for Rhea to hash out an idea for their involvement with a Necupole mech designer.
Throwing herself onto one of the couches in the rec room, data pad in hand, Rhea asked the group, "So I promise I'm going somewhere with this, but what do you know about the Gheluc Isocracy?"
Her non-sequitur was met with confused stares before Nevara said, "They were one of the races that went extinct before any of ours made it to the stars, being wiped out in the Olensco Wars alongside the Melosem Charter and the Swenboi Hegemony. They were more xenophobic than their contemporaries, less expansive in their colonization efforts, thought they were arguably the most technologically advanced of their day. This was partly due to how extensive their studies of Hyttan technology were."
Pointing a finger at Nevara at that, Rhea continued, "Exactly! Pretty much everything we know about Hyttan tech is from the research that the Gheluc did. They had a real knack for finding Hyttan tech too, so some speculated that they had knowledge of where the Hyttan homeworld was, and were getting all their shit from the source."
Grimacing slightly, Elytra admitted, "I really was not paying attention in history class, because I have no idea about who any of these races are."
"From what I recall from my own distant studies," Pryseia began with an unsure shrug, "The Swenboi were the more expansive of these factions, encompassing much of the galaxy. As the first among these three to reach the stars, they had ample time to spread their influence unimpeded. The Gheluc's holding were just a fraction of what the Swenboi had, but they had no difficulty defending it from the larger Swenboi force, as their own troops were not spread quite as thin, and the Gheluc were in possession of more powerful weapons. Eventually the Swenboi left them to their own devices, as the Gheluc made no moves towards retaliation, and so they continued claiming the rest of the galaxy as their own. This led them to cross paths with the Melosem, who had been attempting to take all the worlds of the galaxy as their own, and so the two sides clashed - this was the start of the Olensco Wars. They were long and bloody, waging across the entire galaxy, and they were costly beyond measure. The constant conflict led to a dwindling of their population as the citizens of each power were thrown against one another, to the point where both sides lost too many people for their populations to repopulate, and so both of their races were driven extinct. The Gheluc had stayed out of this conflict as much as possible, but their xenophobic ways were to be their undoing, as they ended up being subjected to an alien disease that their immune systems were unable to withstand. Something that had been no more series than a head cold for either the Melosem or Swenboi wound up being the very thing that wiped the Gheluc from the face of the galaxy. The Zymeth had encountered them before they were driven to extinction, and so they were the first to reap the benefits of all of their Hyttan research."
"But not the only ones," Rhea said, bringing up the site for a Necupole research facility on the low table in the middle of the couches, "The Thalatte and the Necupole got in on the Gheluc's research too, because they were all looking for edges on one another. The Thalatte, as you'd expect, were all about anything that would make their conquests, plural, easier. The Zymeth were a little more broad in what they were researching, while the Necupole were less interested in how they could piggyback off of this research, and more how they could sell it to turn a profit. But you can't make money without having goods to sell, so they went all in in trying to figure out how the Gheluc went about finding Hyttan tech. And they must have found out how the Gheluc did it, because no one seems to have more access to Hyttan tech than the Necupole do."
Leaning forward in her seat on the couch across from Rhea, Elytra said, "I sense another heist in our future."
"Precisely!" Rhea replied with a wicked grin, bringing up information on the focus of study for the research facility she'd brought up, "This place, Dariyaschlde Institute, is renowned across the Plutocracy for being the foremost centre for artifact acquisition, Their teams are constantly and consistently bringing in stores of Hyttan tech to sell. They have to have found the Gheluc's secret for tracking down Hyttan tech."
Viatrix popped her avatar up on the table, spinning slowly in place. "Not to throw a wet blanket over your excitement, but how is something like that supposed to help us?"
"Oh it won't be helping us, it'll be helping you." Rhea replied, gently tapping the screen where Viatrix's avatar sat, "Your were born out of our need to find the pieces of Storlayacas, but that's a specialized task. We're all more than aware of how unique Storlayacas is, in comparison to the rest of what the Hyttan built. This tech finder that the Necupole got from the Gheluc is more generalized, sniffing out Hyttan tech as a whole, and that's what I think we need in our whole hunt for the Omega."
Frowning at that, V'tala admitted, "You've lost me."
That got an apologetic hum out of Rhea as she said, "Yeah, I think I put the cart before the horse with this one. What I'm trying to get at here is this: Storlayacas was built to fight the Omega, but we've got no idea how to find it. Viatrix is able to sense when it's going to arrive, presumably, but we've got no idea of the where. Our own original efforts at tracking down the pieces of Storlayacas involved a lot of fumbling in the dark, so I'm hoping that by digging into whatever it is that the Gheluc either made or used to track down Hyttan technology, we could combine that with Viatrix's data on the Omega to create something that would be able to track down the exact location that the Omega is going to appear at. Everything we've seen from the visions Storlayacas has shown us make it clear that the Omega is going to be like a boulder rolling down a hill - the more metaphorical hill it has to roll down to pick up speed, the deadlier the impact it's going to have when it reaches the people of the galaxy. My hope is that if we can find out where it's going to emerge ahead of time, we can put an end to it before it has a chance to pick up much momentum."
"That would be a boon to our efforts," Pryseia said from her sprawl in one of the armchairs, "I take it you've already thought of how to work this in to our mission on a narrative level?"
Bringing up a map of a world none of them recognized, Rhea explained, "I sure have! Luck is on our side with this one, as both the Elstree Docklands Tournament and the Dariyaschlde Institute - the very institute that has the tech we need - are on the same planet, here and here."
She pointed out two locations on the map, a continent apart from one another before continuing, "I looked into previous runs of this tournament, and they're not long things, a week max, the shortest one lasting only two days, so for our sake I'd just go and assume we have as little time to work as possible. In all these events, the pilots and their teams were confined to their ships when they weren't fighting - the Necupole here don't like the thought of any Lessers walking around and potentially mingling with them, clearly - but these ships were parked out in the open air. This is good for us, because we don't need to worry about trying to sneak out of a subspace parking lot without getting caught. We've still got one of the original shuttles that the Thalatte loaded onto this ship for its first mission. It's small and fast, and I'm hoping that we've got enough time for you to rig it with some of the stealth capabilities that the Pelekys has, and then we just sneak out at night to hit up the Dariyaschlde Institute for what we need and be back before anyone's the wiser."
She turned to Malakh at that last part, seated next to her on the couch, and Malakh frowned thoughtfully, pulling out her data pad and flicking through something on it. "Yeah, I've still got all the research notes from when I built personal stealth units for our heist on Ritroser, so it shouldn't take me too long to fabricate and install what we need to make that shuttle stealth too."
Turning back to the others, Rhea went on, "As for the narrative link, we just have it reflect real life. Augury gets a vision that the tech we need for our mission is on Trowsorab, and so we research the planet and discover the mech tournament going down. We use the tournament as a smokescreen for why we're here, and then sneak around for our own ends when no one's looking."
"Well, that would most certainly tie it all together nicely," Pryseia said, leaning forward with excitement, "I must admit, the thought of engaging in another heist is a thrilling one. I thought we'd run out of excuses to engage in them."
Turning to V'tala sat next to her, Elytra said, "Yeah, you missed out on all the ones we did to get the pieces of Storlayacas, so this'll be your first!"
"If it ends up being like your other heists, then I look forward to it," V'tala replied with a slight smirk, "They did look like fun."
Thankfully, in edition to giving them enough time to come up with a plan, the journey through the core left the crew of the Pelekys with enough time for Malakh to both make and install the parts needed to convert their shuttle into a stealth craft, even going so far as to replicate the light absorbing black paint that had been applied to the Pelekys' hull for that extra level of obscurity. After pausing long enough in empty space to take the shuttle out for a test run and make sure it was as stealthy in operation as it was on paper, they made their way to Trowsorab to meet with Erkanschlde.
The MGJX Corp was one of many tech firms on Trowsorab, all of them in competition with one another to produce the hottest new thing that would bring in the big bucks. Like the rest, MGJX's facilities were a sprawling complex of buildings, reminiscent of the recently destroyed Mercatus, only far more aesthetically pleasing. Labs though they were, the buildings themselves resembled massive works of art - large and complex geometric shapes with windows everywhere, almost making it look like a simple computer rendering of a crystal formation brought into the real world, girders and pillars of bright chrome with mirrored windows to keep those on the outside from seeing the secrets being developed within. The most shocking thing about it, as the Pelekys came in for a landing at the coordinates that Erkanschlde had forwarded them, was the fact that, despite all that reflective material, the building itself wasn't a blinding beacon in the brilliant midday sun.
Erkanschlde was there to meet them when they disembarked, flanked by a pair of her aids, the three women slightly taller than Rhea, the aids wearing matching business skirts and blouses of glittering cream, while Erkanschlde was dressed in an asymmetrical pantsuit of iridescent white that caught the entire spectrum of colour in every highlight and shadow as she moved, a geometric rainbow pattern running across her face from her right temple to her left jaw. She raised a hand as they stepped off the personnel ramp, positively aglow as she said, "Welcome to Trowsorab, I hope your journey was restful?"
"It was indeed," Pryseia told her, all casual professionalism, and absolutely not like she was there to stage a heist, "I'm eager to see the machine you've prepared."
"And I'm eager to see you in action," Erkanschlde replied, beaming at the lot of them, "I had a chance to go over your back catalogue of work, and I must say, you've got yourself another paying subscriber! Your escapades have been thrilling to watch! I was surprised to see that you'd done work in Necupole space before. Your alias is still wanted for the thefts you helped pull off at Miasferr."
Shrugging at the cheeky finger being levelled at her, Rhea said, "I don't think anyone going to be seeing Saela Monischlde ever again."
"Well, she most assuredly isn't here," Erkanschlde said with a wink, turning to lead them into the building, "I've got together the contract I usually used with Ahesa, so you can peruse that to see if there's anything you'd liked adjusted."
She brought them into a spacious conference room, and formal introductions were made while the contract was gone over. It was generous, to say the least. A hefty sum would be paid to them for the sake of participation, regardless of where Pryseia placed in the tournament, though the higher she finished, the more money she'd get. But more importantly than that, Erkanschlde and her people would be turning a blind eye to anything that the crew of the Pelekys did while on Trowsorab, and would play dumb should any authorities come sniffing around for them.
"You aren't worried about how anything we do might affect your business?" Malakh asked, shooting Erkanschlde a curious glance as she finished reading over the contract.
Erkanschlde scoffed out a, "No," before she told them, "The truth of the Necupole legal system is that if you've got enough money to bribe the courts, you're never going to have to worry about doing time. MGJX is very profitable for me, and I have the added bonus of having family in the legal system. I could be caught mid crime with evidence in my hands and I'd still be able to get away without even so much as a reprimand. If anything, a scandal would just get people more interested in my business, so there's nothing for me to lose here. But I have so much more to gain! I must admit, I'm enamoured by what the Kith do, spitting in the face of the cruelties of the galaxy and spinning stories out of them instead. I truly believe that you're the best of what the galaxy has to offer - a multicultural unity that we could all learn from. And, selfishly, I like getting involved, even tangentially, in your schemes. The Telum always made sure to do something thrilling for their audiences whenever they participated in one of these tournaments, and I'm hoping you'll be doing the same."
"We might have something in mind." Rhea said slyly, and Erkanschlde practically vibrated with excitement at that announcement.
"I won't ask for any details, but know you have my full support in whatever it is you're doing!" She promised, "I look forward to watching what you put together."
"It will be a spectacle, never doubt that," Pryseia told her, "As such, I believe this contract between us is more than adequate. I'm eager to sign it, as I am just as eager to see the mech you've prepared for this tournament."
"It's one of my finest yet, if I do say so myself," Erkanschlde beamed, pulling a stylus from a pocket on her jacket and handing it over to Pryseia, "I'm excited to see you take it for a spin. If you're as good as your videos claim, I think you're going to clean up at the tournament in this machine."