Point of Documentation: Cadence, Crew of HMW Betty
Cadence could feel the machine shambling onwards beneath her seat in the storage section. They had moved some seats from the other sections to this one in preparation for the talk. Apparently this Marshall person was going to tell them something pretty important, and demanded that they all be seated before they heard him.
Each of them had found seats in the storage. A couple chairs for the Captain and Roberts. Cadence had chosen to lean against the wall. She was far too energized to sit still in a seat! There was a living, breathing outworlder in their mech, and they were going to hear from him first hand! Though him thinking that they were all too weak willed or primitive or something to hear what he had to say without falling over was somewhat insulting.
Marshall seemed uneasy about the whole thing, but started off nonetheless. “I’m a member of the 11th Phoenix, Wing C of the Firebrand, as I said before. The Firebrand is a cruiser that I was registered to. That cruiser was in a holding pattern last I saw, which basically means waiting for results from the ones sent out. We had a mission to drop down to Terra’s level and investigate a disturbance in the Wasteland outside the Walls. Something was causing a massive flux in reality on the surface, and they thought a Hive was opening up again.”
As he spoke Cadence’s brows slowly started to raise themselves on her forehead. The idea of a Hive being active again was hair raising, especially one that would draw the attention of the Outlanders like this. Hives would sometimes draw out dozens or hundreds of Voidlings over their lifespan, then collapse in on themselves when done belching out their fill. Something about the fabric of reality being torn for too long and it trying to stitch itself back together. Cadence couldn’t remember the lectures she had gotten from Oslo back in their mockery of University.
Continuing, Marshall looked as if he was telling some frightful ghost story. “We tried to sweep high, hoping to stay out of the range of any quilled attacks from Vultures or catching the attention of any of the higher life forms. We didn’t see much in the way of evidence of a Hive, so we dipped lower to the ground. Sixteen of us went lower while seven more hung high. A typical pattern for a sweep, where some would stay on station to report back or dive in if something went wrong. That was when we came under fire from an evolved Vulture. The thing had tried to consume an anti-air gun of some kind, and it used it to open up on us along with its quills. We didn’t see it coming. None of us did. We were taken out in short order and crashed to the ground. I was one of the only survivors from the crash… and the only one I saw make it out after the Spawnlings descended on the mess.”
The Captain held up his hand in a stopping motion as Marshall spoke. Marshall paused, giving the Captain a curious stare. “Tell me, Marshall, why would they care about a simple hive birthing a few hundred Spawnlings and maybe a Vulture? No offense, but the Outlanders like you haven’t cared about helping anyone with any of the other infestations near the Wall in decades.”
A bitten lip showed Marshall’s nervousness well enough before he spoke again. “It wasn’t a few hundred… more like a few thousand with a confirmed Vulture presence being birthed actively. That and… they detected a trace of one of the Legion classes being birthed.”
The room got very quiet after that. A quiet that Cadence did not want to break. She herself was reeling with that revelation and barely holding on to her composure. One of the Legion was a threat not just to a Nomad-class mech like Betty, or even a convoy of them, but a threat to a whole town or possibly a part of the Wall! An icy fear rolled down her back as she thought of this.
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“Ok, so…” Came her muted voice from her ears ringing in anxiety. “... Say we believe you. What exactly are we supposed to do with this information? Captain? What the fuck are we supposed to do with this!?” She could hear her words coming out in a hurry, but the frantic nature of them betrayed her attempt at hiding her slowly forming panic attack.
Her eyes went to the Captain, who seemed to be maintaining his composure just fine. The bleeding, prideful bastard didn’t even let his neutral expression drop once. Her anxiety colored itself with a hint of rage at viewing the Captain unworried, so unlike what she was feeling now. Yet her loyalty as a crewmate on the HMW Betty kept her tongue and fist as immobile as this man’s eyebrows.
The Captain let out a sigh that seemed to finally cause the man to actually look anything other than neutral. His mouth turned into a frown and his brow furrowed. Cadence would have to rethink her standards for rigidity when comparing her loyalty now.
“Simple: nothing.” the Captain said plainly. “All we can really do is take this news back and pass it along to someone that can do something about it. And we need to do that in a hurry as well. By the sounds of it, since Marshall said earlier that these things were on his heels, they might be closing in. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Marshall, but we’re not a military troop. So please, continue with haste so that we can make our way out before they get here.”
Marshall gave a nod to this and continued his tale in a quickened tone. He laid out what he had had to do to get here, even calling out a Wastelander compound some towns over. Roberts frowned at this and asked him to point out where they were. Yeah, knowing where those bastards were at would make avoiding them easier.
Cadence disconnected from the conversation when the story finished up and they began discussing the best way back in a hurry. She stood and walked back through Betty to the front of the mech. The door to the head opened to the empty command deck with its lights flashing around the different consoles. Cadence moved over to the chair at the communications desk and took a seat. “So what do you think of this, Gwen?” she said aloud to the air in the room.
A reply came back from the speakers at the communications desk. “Well, it seems like the Outlander, Marshall, is truthful in his words. My guess is that he’s shell-shocked and is just trying to get home. The Hive is worrying, but the Captain has a point: it’s not our problem. He’s already sent me over a plotted route to take Betty in, which will take us a few days to get to at least. That is if storms or other phenomena don’t happen on the way… again.”
Cadence nodded to this absentmindedly. “Right… but, doesn’t it seem odd? Outlanders have always come for their fallen. It’s one of the ways that they’ve denied technology to us for decades. At least, that’s what the stories say. So why is he not… you know…”
“Dead or rescued?” came the quick reply. Cadence nodded to it, which caused a sigh to come through the terminal. “I don’t know, this is all new. Even the data sheets I’m getting from data terminals back home don’t really list an occasion like this.”
Cadence bit the inside of her lip in thought. If even Gwen had no idea, and the Captain was taking a no-care stance on it, then she would have to find out this oddity on her own. A prospect that made her more nervous than she should have been.
The door to the head opened up as the Captain stepped through. His eyes fell on Cadence, which caused her to stand up and give him a salute in response. He waved a hand for her to ‘cut it out’ and continued to his usual chair. It had a blanket draped across it and a small pillow at its base that he moved and fluffed as he covered himself with the blanket.
Sitting back in her seat, Cadence stared at the Captain and waited till he was fully seated. She then spoke “Captain. Where are we heading at this point?”
The Captain looked over his shoulder to her, a small frown still on his face from before. “We’re changing course. We’ll head back to New Minsk, Belarus.”
This caused some surprise from Cadence, but she didn’t dare question the Captain in this. If he was willing to go back to New Minsk, then he was taking this more seriously than she was willing to give credit to earlier.