Lancer, not a Mechwarrior 8 (Patreon)

A/N: since I’ll be gone for a week, I decided to surprise yall with this.

Lancer, not a Mechwarrior

Chapter 8

-VB-

They called her the Mech Bimbo. 

Honestly, Sasha Mikovsky heard it long and frequently enough that she didn’t care. The title did, however, tell everyone a few things about her. One, she was pretty enough in all measurable ways that an idiot would take one look at her and think that she was a bimbo. Two, she wasn’t just pretty but someone who’s hands have been in the guts of battlemechs long enough that people called her the best mechtech of the Kilbourne region. 

And she was quickly realizing that compared to the “core world” folks or the hardened periphery veterans, what she knew how to do was kiddie stuff. 

“What the fuck are those?” she uttered out loud and almost snapped her mouth shut. If she talked like that in front of her mother, then she would have had her ass whipped. Didn’t matter that she was legally an adult; her adult held the highest authority in the house. 

Before she even got aboard the Leopard, she signed a shit ton of NDAs. She thought it was because they were spies or something (and if they had been, then she would have gotten off scot free from her NDAs after reporting them to the government) except they didn’t turn out to be spies. No, they turned out to be something wholly weirder. Weirder than even the pacifist Outties. 

As a mechtech, her job was in fixing battlemechs. She knew how to fix other stuff, too, but only if there was a manual around. 

But here in the bowels of the Samantha, she found out that she was not the only mechtech, if what her new boss did could be called that.

The bossman’s mech, the cowboy looking thing he called Rayray but was apparently called Raleigh on the ship’s comp-net, had taken a few solid hits from the Centurions the crew had fought before she joined. The hits hadn’t chipped away at the armor like standard armor did because that’s what standard armor did: ablate off when they took hits. Instead, most of the damage looked like deep dents or outright shorn off in places around the edges. 

So she helped the bossman take those armor pieces off and … throw them into some kind of a laser furnace? 

Then she watched that same laser furnace(?) vaporized the fuck out of the armor in under an honor and rebuilt the armor pieces from the vaporized metal.

What? Huh?!

“These are Schedule 1 Printers,” Darius, the bossman, said as he tapped the side of the giant thing. “As long as we can feed it the right materials, it can pump out all of the parts that we need for our mech.”

“T-That’s ridiculous. I just fookin’ saw magic right there.”

The bossman shrugged. “It works,” he said and then gave the magic box a hearty slap on the glass. Sasha’s heart nearly stopped watching bossman treat what had to be a Star League experimental Lostech like it was a goddamn Urbanmech. “Alright, let’s put these armor pieces back up. After that, we’ll see about making the Locust better.”

---

“So … magic stuff is all over the place?” 

“Yes,” John, the First Mate, replied as he ate his dinner distractedly, shoveling reheated clam chowder from a can into his mouth like it was a delicious thing and not something handed out as ration on Kilbourne. 

“... No other explanation?” she asked.

John glanced at her from his datapad, which had some sort of a novel on it. He set his spoon down and seemed to think something. 

“Darius isn’t one for explaining so I don’t know what to tell you. I only know that he came in through the Outworlds Alliance space but that’s not where he’s from. He hasn’t told anyone where he came from, how he got his hands on that printer of his, how he knows to operate obvious Lostechs with such ease, and everything else. At the end of the day, we aren’t paid to ask those questions and our jobs are to support him and the other mechwarriors as they go about hunting pirates.”

She found that incredulous. “We have things that would have the Great Houses drooling and we’re hunting pirates with it?”

“Yup. Bossman hates pirates, so that’s who we go after. I mean this dropship came into his possession from pirates he took out by himself.”

She blinked. “... So he has to be a veteran at least.”

“Gotta be,” John agreed as he went back to his novel. “Everyone aboard has tried at least once to ask but the commander just shrugs them off. I wouldn’t bother asking if I were you.”

She groaned. “But then how am I supposed to know how to properly fix the damn thing?” 

“... You mean the commander’s mech?”

“Rayray? Yeah. I’m the mechtech, aren’t I?” 

The best mechtech aboard the ship, actually. 

“Don’t worry about it. The commander has been fixing it himself even before I came along. That was actually something he did answer me. A mechwarrior where he came from are called lancers, and lancers are supposed to be able to do all sorts of things, not just mechwarrioring.”

Sasha narrowed her eyes at that. “So, what, he’s supposed ta be some kind of a spec op kind of veteran?” she questioned as she pointed her fork at him. 

“Maybe,” he hummed. “Now, let me read my book. I want to know whether or not Jamie will let his step-sister peg him.”

She choked.

-VB-

The NDAs didn’t forbid her from talking about the general gist about her work, but the NDAs meant that her letters had to be viewed and authorized by either the bossman or the first mate and had to be accompanied to the HPG by someone else that either of them assigned to her. 

So when they landed at Bassfield (to buy stockfish of all things to sell on their other stops), the new girl, Sasha, came to him in his office to have him read her letter instead of the commander. That surprised him.

The letter was also surprisingly simple. 

“Hi Mother, 

I’m writing this letter like you asked me to. To my surprise, we’re stopping a lot earlier than I thought. Something about buying fish? 

Anyway, my boss has some fancy stuff he works with, so it’s fun learning about all sorts of stuff, though I’m not sure if any of those are applicable to the regular battlemechs. 

But the thing that I really liked was how he went and made a Locust better without sacrificing anything. “Like really, you could do that?” kind of way. Can’t tell you the details since I signed NDAs and everything but … damn. If he wasn’t a mechwarrior, then he would have been my rival mechtech, because he’s that good. 

Anyways. Love you mom,

Signed Sasha.”

Standard stuff as far as John was concerned. It was a little long for someone of their status, but John also knew from Sasha’s background that she had a rich parent. They could be the one footing the bill just to make sure Sasha would check in. 

“You can go with Jessica. She has a letter she wants to send as well. Apparently, she forgot to send hers at our last stop,” he told her.

“Great!” Then she paused. “So… are you sending any letter, John?”

“Me? Nah. Even if I wanted to, my folks are a jumpship clan. We don’t stop at any given place long enough for me to know where to send a letter.”

“Oh. That must be kind of sad. Can’t keep in contact with them and all.”

John grimaced. “I’m fine not knowing about them, thanks. They’re a jumpship clan. Work never dries up and anyone stupid enough to try to take the jumpship over from us are people who were too stupid to live anyways,” he dismissed her concern. He paused for a second before nodding. “Thanks for asking, though.”

“No problem,” she grinned. Then she paused, again. “You think Darius misses his peeps?”

“Peeps? Is that supposed to be short for people?”

“Yeah?”

John shrugged. “You know Darius. He doesn’t talk. If he isn’t working on his mech, eating, or only occasionally socializing with the rest of us, he’s inside his room and he never talks about his family. Now shoo, I have to be the one to finalize this deal with the locals,” he said before he looked back down at the datapad. “Of all things, fish? He wants to transport fish? The Leopard barely has any room for cargo and he wants to move fish?”

Sasha left after that, laughing at his predicament. 

When one of the boxes broke on the way and marinated the ship with its fishy smell, she wasn’t laughing anymore. 

-VB-

Sasha stared at the mech that definitely had not been there before she went to sleep today. 

She wanted her beauty sleep before they landed for the pirate hunting job and cargo drop off. 

And instead of getting the mech bays ready for deployment and their eventual repairs, she found herself standing frozen in front of one of the bays. 

“What the fuck is that?” she asked as she pointed to the mech standing in the Raleigh's mech bay. But it looked nothing like the lean and cool Raleigh. It was bulkier. Tougher. Meaner. And instead of the sleek revolvers, it had a giant fuck-off hammer in each hand. It didn’t look anything like the cowboy mech she’d taken care of for the last month.

Instead, there was a … a … How the fuck was she supposed to describe something between a dual hammer totting crusader with those skull motifs and actual paper tassels with wax seals and a grimdark cowboy with the wide brim head and the two pistols neatly holstered?!

“I wanted to test out a new design for Rayray,” he told her as he climbed up the steep stairs to reach the top of the gantry. Once he was there, he pressed a button in the back and the top of the mech’s flat red head opened up.

He climbed into the cyclop’s head and then there were a bit of rummaging sounds. 

Then it happened. 

Almost like heat was venting from the mech, a rumble announced the activation of the mech.

“Alright, boys and girls,” the bossman’s voice rumbled. It sounded like someone’s death knell. “It’s time to go hunt some pirates.”

-VB-

A/N: Build for this and next chapter

Darius von Hohenheim

Lancer, LvL 6

Rayray

Raleigh-class Size 1 Mechanized Chassis

Structure 4, HP 28, Armor 1

Stress 4, Heat Cap 7, Repair Cap 7

Limit Bonus +1, Atk Bonus +3, Speed 4, Evasion 9

E.Def 8, Sensors 10, Save 13

Frame Trait: Full Metal Jacket (reload all loading weapons at the end of turn if it didn’t save or attack)

Core system: Mjolnir Cannon

Primary: 2x Hand Cannon, Mjolnir, 2x Catalytic Hammer

Systems: Hyperdense Armor, CompCon, “Roland” Chamber

As a Raleigh, this is an okay build. Unlike a duelist that a Raleigh is supposed to be, this one was built to be a bruiser. It still makes use of the Loading mechanism to go with its frame trait that auto-reloads, but instead of “get to cover, shoot a lot, wait behind cover, everything reloads, shoot again” cycle, this is more “get to enemy while shooting, pull out hammers, smash enemy hard enough that they get stunned, hunker down with Hyperdense Armor, reload everything since I’m not attacking, tank damage, undo HA and go after the next enemy.” And because I invested a lot into HP, this build kind of works. And thanks to “Roland” Chamber, each reloading weapon also does more damage. Like 2x dmg if not more. And every single weapon except the Mjolnir is a Loading Weapon… and the Mjolnir can fire for free once per round every time something reloads.

This is also a heavy deviation from the initial build, which was about “MAXIMUM BURST DAMAGE”-ish. And well, advancing through the levels kind of opens up new tactics and strategies.