The day of the assault, Zayd joined Fist Leader Sioban’s team in boarding the assault shuttle early in the morning. Before he left, he sent a short message to Eirian. “When I get back, cook for me again.” He didn’t know what to make of his relationship with the Fae priestess. He knew she was using him, she didn’t even hide it. At the same time, she wanted to be of use to him which made things at least somewhat mutual. He didn’t know what to make of her but he didn’t like the fact that she always seemed like the one in control of everything. If it had been one of the women he dated in school, he’d have asked for them to treat him as a reward for finishing a dangerous mission, but with Eirian, he felt like a polite request would just give her the opening to twist things to her own desire. Maybe he was wrong, but somehow, he felt like a demand would work better with her than a polite request.
Putting the sensual priestess firmly out of mind, Zayd followed his teammates into the briefing room as the shuttles began their ten-hour flight toward LZ-Wolf III and Bad Penny Station. Unlike yesterday, the room this time had come alive with holographic projections that not only contained a wealth of information about the upcoming assault, but the walls of the room itself had vanished as it transformed itself into a larger space to accommodate projections of team members from the assault team on the second shuttle.
Once Zayd and the rest of Sioban’s team had taken their place at the table, Wing Leader Tael began the briefing with an overview of their objectives, resources, and the overall plan for the assault. For Zayd, it felt almost like he’d returned to his days in school where a teacher or class leader organized one of the many internal competitions between members of Batch Yankee.
What impressed Zayd about Tael’s briefing was the extraordinary level of detailed information the Fae had managed to gather on Bad Penny Station. Every member of the assault would carry complete maps and schematics of the massive installation along with a number of planned routes between objectives that members of the team could switch between as circumstances dictated. When Zayd saw the initial target list for Sioban’s team, he’d initially reacted with shock at the ambition of it all, but the more Tael described the plan, the more his confidence grew that they’d be able to succeed.
Finally, Tael turned to Zayd. “We’re fortunate that our Champion has experience with how our enemies train their soldiers and how they utilize their mechs. Make no mistake everyone, while these humans seem to lack anything resembling competent infantry, they make up for it with the profligate use of smaller mechs. Champion Zayd, please help us understand what we should expect when we encounter the enemy,” the Wing Leader said as he yielded the floor to Zayd.
“Yes Wing Leader,” Zayd said formally as he stood and began to manipulate the projections. “There are a few things that you need to understand about Braxis-Quan Holding Company to make sense of how they use mechs and the roles that each of these mechs is expected to play. First, understand that most of the people working for Braxis-Quan in this star system aren’t actually Employees of Braxis-Quan. They’re Contractors. Contactors lack many of the rights of Employees, they’re frequently saddled with tremendous debts to the company or they’ve been ‘fired’ from positions for violations of company policy and are working as contractors to pay the company back for whatever damages they’ve inflicted,” Zayd explained. “These contractors are a poorly trained, poorly managed, and poorly motivated workforce. Abuse of contractors by employees is frightfully common. This power imbalance leads to the first thing you need to know about the mechs on Bad Penny Station: Many of them are intended to suppress the workforce on the station, keep employees in power, and prevent the contractors from organizing any form of resistance against their employer.”
“Is that why there’s no infantry aboard the station?” Lady Haelith asked. “They don’t want to provide weapons that could be used by an uprising of their own indentured servants?”
“Exactly,” Zayd replied. “While it isn’t unheard of for people with the requisite cybernetic augmentation to fall into the role of a contractor, those people are generally assigned substantially different duties than working in a resource system for the Mineral Extraction Division of the company. The only people in LZ-Wolf that can interface with mechs are employees and they use those mechs to keep the contractors in line. That brings us to the first mech model that we can expect to be employed by the enemy,” he said, tapping a command into the system and bringing up several images and schematics of a familiar mech.
“Braxis-Quan fields a number of purely industrial mechs that can be piloted by mechanical actuators rather than cybernetic interfaces. These mechs aren’t heavily armored and can easily be incapacitated by targeting joints or the cockpit of the mech. Your combat armor has been pre-loaded with schematics of any industrial mechs you may encounter but a quick kill should be easily accomplished by targeting the cockpit. This mech,” he said, highlighting the schematic currently displayed to the team, “is a very different thing. The BQ-21A Enforcer is a control mech intended to restrain any industrial mechs that contractors might attempt to use in an uprising. At six meters in height, it isn’t much larger than the industrial mechs it’s intended to restrain but it’s derived from a dedicated military platform, the BQ-21 Punisher light artillery mech. The shoulder cannon fires rounds that are designed to disable electronics and the Enforcer mounts a large number of grappling devices that are intended to restrain industrial mechs. It is generally assumed that the Enforcer will restrain mechs one at a time, however, it still retains much of the targeting capacity of the Punisher that it was derived from. Against an industrial mech, that allows it to precisely target multiple points on the mech for each of its grapples. Against armored infantry, there’s no reason that the enforcer can’t target an entire Fist at once. The grappling claws lack the strength and capability to crush a suit of Saighdear combat armor, but the locking force, combined with high voltage energy transmission along the grappling lines easily gives it the capacity to restrain anyone that it’s able to catch,” Zayd explained.
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“Why so much emphasis on restraint?” Fist Leader Sioban asked. “You said that the industrial mechs are easily disabled and their pilots can easily be killed in unarmored cockpits. Wouldn’t a sharpshooter be sufficient to eliminate the threat posed by rebelling contractors?”
“Good question, Fist Leader,” Zayd said. “That brings us to the second thing you need to understand about Braxis-Quan’s mechs. As a whole, the company has a strong culture around minimizing costs. A sharpshooter can kill a rebelling contractor, but doing so would also damage the industrial mech the rebel is piloting. The Enforcer is intended to restrain rebelling mechs without inflicting damage that’s difficult to repair. You’ll see this kind of cost-cutting throughout the Braxis-Quan mech doctrine. The Enforcer could have been designed as a dedicated mech model that’s highly optimized for its role but that would have required more money to be spent on product development. Instead, executives repurposed a military design that was ‘close enough’ to the requirements that surface-level modifications could make it effective in its modified role. You’ll also find, as we move on, that Braxis-Quan shuns ballistic weapons in favor of melee weapons and energy weapons. It isn’t because of the inherent benefits of one weapon system over another, it’s because bullets cost money and it’s cheaper to recharge energy cells or swing a sword than to reload a magazine of expensive munitions,” Zayd explained, unable to keep the scorn out of his voice, especially now that he’d experienced the much more results-oriented methods of the Fae.
“Now, while there are between twenty and thirty Enforcers on the station, the real workhorse of Bad Penny Station is an entirely different beast,” Zayd continued, bringing up projections of a less humanoid mech that sat on wide triangular tracks with a boxy torso sitting atop a three hundred and sixty-degree rotating ‘waist’, with long, bulky, forklift-like arms that ended in pincers shaped like massive tuning forks. “This is the BQ 741 Stevedore. Its primary purpose is to manage the loading and unloading of freighters docked with Bad Penny Station. It doesn’t have a high degree of articulation beyond the pivot at the waist and it's a very slow mech designed to carry heavy loads that require stability. In its base configuration, it poses little threat, however, the penny pinchers at Braxis-Quan have turned this into an incredibly cost-effective anti-personnel machine,” Zayd explained.
With the tap of a few keys, the projection shifted and the tuning fork arms detached from the mech to be replaced by a different set of ‘forearms.’ “There are two different weapon pods that can be mounted on the Stevedore. The first is an anti-infantry laser pod,” Zayd said, indicating a long, pinecone-shaped module, the underside of which bristled with small laser emitters. “Targeting is poor with this system because, unlike the Enforcer, the Stevedore was never purpose-built as a military machine. Still, the volume of fire it can produce using this pod is exceptional. The arms of the mech can lift up to thirty degrees and the body can rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees giving it a tremendous field of fire. Fortunately, it isn’t intended to suppress high-mobility opponents,” Zayd said with a dark grin. “There’s a cone above the mech that it’s unable to bring its weapons to bear on. The flight systems of our Saighdear combat armor are capable of rapidly crossing the enemy field of fire to strike from above in this cone of vulnerability. Unlike the other industrial mechs of Braxis-Quan, the cockpit of the Stevedore is lightly armored, however, once you cross the field of fire, you’ll have easy access to the power generator on the back side of the unit. In a true military mech, this would be placed much deeper in the mech to protect it from hostile fire, but in this case, Braxis-Quan opted for a placement that made service and repair easier and cheaper rather than hardening the system. That’s our best target for eliminating this platform.”
“What about the other weapon pod you mentioned?” Caedril asked. “I feel like I can dart past this porcupine and drop explosives on it easily enough, but is the other weapon system harder to deal with?”
“For combat armor, the other weapon pod isn’t that large of a concern,” Zayd explained, tapping in a command and changing the projection. “However, the other weapon system is a much bigger concern for our shuttles…”