A song, a name, a vow.
We were under a quiet 0.75G so we could do our maintenance in the mecha and tanks. Sure you can do some repairs in zero G. You can shower blindfolded too, but why would you?
I had gathered all of the techs we had, and all the mecha pilots. There were noble born officers who believed techs were a lower caste and citizens did not have to dirty their hands with anything as lowly as mecha maintenance. Those officers entered the ranks at the same rank I am now. They are all dead. Those of us who are left, we came up the old way, the hard way. We started crawling around inside mecha to reach the bits the older techs couldn’t when we were in grade school. We learned circuit diagrams and cable runs for myomer bundling before we had our first sexual urge and before we ever thought about learning how to drive a ground car or motorbike we had been piloting mecha around the bay trying to find if a mobility issue was a gyroscope issue, a joint failing, or a power imbalance in the myomere bundles. We knew how to tear down a PPC and bench test its magnets for microfractures and respool the copper coils of the charge buffers when some idiot tried to fire it too close long before we were ever given a chance to pull the trigger on a live mecha weapon.
We had eighteen Vindicators, nine that could move under their own power, a single Wasp that had a grand total of one medium laser hit to its center torso. We had four Partisan anti aircraft tanks, with enough ammunition for about two seconds of air defense before they shot themselves dry, but at least they ran. We had more techs than any company needed, which was good, because what we had was basically a lot of scrap, and almost scrap. The Overlord was equipped for standard repairs with all the stock components for our most common designs, that being mostly Vindicators, Catapults, Locusts Wasps, and the very occasional Thunderbolt. We could get three of the nine wrecked Vindicators rebuilt with what we had. We needed a new gyroscope for two of the others, not something we can cobble together. We needed a full sensor and computer set up for another. The rest needed so much we were basically using them for parts on the salvageable ones. They had engines, they had functional chassis even if we robbed them blind of all their armour and any actuator or bearing the others needed.
When we hit whatever world we selected for our first supply raid we would be able to put a full mecha company in the field. They wouldn’t be pretty, but they would have at least mostly replaced armour, and something that shot for every weapon slot. Morale was mixed, we had some who were depressed, some who were burying themselves in work, but we had a few who went a little deeper into their introspection than was maybe healthy. A few set up ancestral altars and were making offerings. The loss of our homeworld, not just the living families, but the graves of their ancestors hit hard. There was one odd one that my XO flagged me about.
Hawk Heimdalson was a mecha pilot who had his Thunderbolt shot out from under him with the 2nd, and we got him from the hospital when the Fedderats shelled it with Long Toms. Legitimate military target, it was run by the CCAF. As a hospital. House Davion loves to talk about other peoples atrocities, I guess because somehow its not an atrocity if you lie about it afterwards. He wasn’t up to working on the mecha because he was in casts on both his legs from a bad ejection, but he was cheering us on by playing the guitar and singing to us while we worked. He had come up with something a few shifts ago. It started as just a melody and a few scraps.
Then he started stringing bits together and he started singing it a little louder. Soon he was gathering a crowd and the crowd was getting pretty emotional. According to Tina, some were walking away fists balled and tears streaming, some were punching the walls, and others were just silently listening and stroking their side arms. When your XO and your Maskirovka minder tell you that something is going on with the troops you need to listen to, you need to listen to it. Either you stamp it out, or you find a way to channel it. The second one is the best, because when the first one fails you end up having to lock down your troops and wondering when someone rolls a grenade into the officers mess.
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I heard Hawk, his eyes were closed, his cowboy had low over his face, and he was pouring his soul into the song.
Stolen banners
Unstained banners before us
Our mecha strode to war
Tanks swung their guns
Infantry dug in deep
The sun and sword
Like a stain upon our sky
Like corruption on our soul
Their ships fell like poison rain
But our banners were unstained
Outnumbered and outgunned
They owned the skies
Our skies
Yet bombs fell on every line
Three times our numbers
Five times our guns
Yet we stacked the bodies
Federated sons fallen
Broken swords trampled
Yet the sun burned on
Still more mecha came
Still more cities fell in flame
When no more cities stood
When no more missiles remained
When no cannon still could speak
We took our banners
We took our honour
We took our war
And returned to fight again
But they took the banners from us
They took our honour and our name
Our world fallen beneath the sun and sword
They took our homeland too
They took our banners
They took our nation
But they could not take our war
We have no hearth but our cockpit
We have no shelter but our guns
We have no homeland but our war
For as long as the sun burns
For as long as one sword remains
We will march to war
We will be Vindicated
Banners washed clean in blood
We will be Vindicated
We will put out the sun
And break the sword
We will be Vindicated
I felt the song dig its claws into me. I remembered it. Watching the 2nd Fall in flames, surrounded and pounded to scrap by the whole of the 71st Light Horse, a full Regimental Combat Team against one lone battalion, their own skies filled with enemy artillery, enemy aerospace fighters, and the smoke of comrades burned alive by the goddamned Feddies. Watching the bulk of our 3rd battalion die to buy us time to save who we could, only for the Confederation we bled for, that they died for, to shit upon our banners and piss upon our blood. Hearing our death sentence read and the last sight of my own homeworld being Algol’s sun shining on the goddamned Sun and Sword of the Federated Suns hanging in the sky I would never live to see again.
I was snarling, I don’t know how I was supposed to be feeling. They say the worst feeling for a Mechwarrior is being dispossessed, losing your mecha. They are WRONG. The worst feeling for a mechwarrior is losing their home. Not the rock, the people. When you give your life to a nation, train your life for a war, and you lose everything except your life. No honour, no home, no future, no hopes. All we have is our mecha, and a war we cannot win. No. That isn’t everything. The song.
If the Federated Suns took our world, and the Capellan Confederation took our name, then the song gave us a new one. We are the Vindicated.
I guess I wasn’t quiet enough, because Hawk stopped singing, the crowd parted. I guess about the time I made my breakthrough I drew my Sunbeam laser pistol. An ancient and honourable weapons used by the first of my name to soldier for the Capellan Confederation, and now I can’t even return. Hawk is looking pretty unsteady, but he isn’t running. I guess he is making peace with whatever I am planning to do with my pistol, because he hasn’t reached for his needler. The time for silence and whispers is over, the time for closed door meetings and memos is long past.
“ATTENTION!” I shout and the whole assembly snaps to parade perfect attention. I stalk with my drawn Sunbeam across the dropship’s deck, I passed Hawk and strode to the green shield with the sable bar and two sable iron crosses that used to be the insignia of the 1st Ariana Fusiliers, a name stripped from us by no less an authority than Chancellor Maximillian Liao. I slowly brought the pistol up to my eye and began to speak, pushing from my lower gut like they teach you in Junior Officer Training when you want to project to a crowd but not scream like a drill instructor.
I raised my Sunbeam and I burned a molten line from top left edge of the shield to the middle of the sable bar, then I burned another line up from the end to the top right edge burning a harsh black V into the green and sable shield of the former 1st Ariana Fusiliers. We were not them anymore.
If the Federated Suns took our world, and the Capellan Confederation took our name, then the song gave us a new one. We are the Vindicated. Brothers and sisters, they left us nothing but each other and our war, and I swear to you, we will be Vindicated!”
The roar that followed was not what we were told we should inspire in our troops, it was hungry, feral, and filled with the kind of rage that burns worlds; but there was no fear in it, no despair. Now I just had to find a way to get us across the strongest military state in known space in a Capellan dropship filled with scrap, without a budget, a paymaster, or a plan.