It is early morning. The four Mech pilots sit in a previously unseen briefing room, some nursing styrofoam cups of mediocre coffee; Hanami sips hot green tea. A few of them are still adjusting to whatever time zone the Floating Fortress is in.
Commander Carver leads the briefing. Winter and Doctor Yi quietly observe.
“Pilots. You all have completed your training, road-tested your Mechs, and are now ready for the next step of this operation. You have asked why this team was ‘activated’ so suddenly. This is the reason...”
The Commander brings up a display on the nearly wall-length monitor behind him. A picture of a youngish man with a large brown mustache and flight helmet appears. Hanami vaguely recognizes the face.
“There are four of you here, but there were meant to be five. This is a picture of your Squadron Leader. Reginald Cook, 25 years old, Pilot Rank 11, formerly of the Royal Underland Air Force.”
I studied him in class, Hanami realizes. He holds the record for most sorties flown on a peacekeeping mission during the Slavic Disunification Conflict.
“Three days ago, he went missing.”
Chase, Reo, and Kora exchange surprised looks.
“He was operating his Mech on a… long-range test flight and dropped off all our sensors. Every effort so far to locate Cook or his Mech have failed. We need your help.”
Chase scratches his chin, confused.
“If you can’t find him with all of your resources, how are WE supposed to?”
Reo raises his hand.
“Somethin’ about our Mechs, right?” he asks.
Commander nods to Doctor Yi to let her answer the question.
“Yes, Mr. Mafui’e. We believe that by using the Mech interfaces you may be able to trace Mr. Cook’s movements.”
Chase speaks up again, “But... why couldn’t you just—”
He is startled to silence by Hanami’s steely gaze.
“Do you not see? We are the only ones who can pilot the Mechs,” she says.
Chase and the others look back at the Commander for confirmation. He grimaces.
“That is... correct. You are our only certified Mech pilots. Apart from Cook, the four of you are the only certified Mech pilots in any A-PAC allied country.”
Commander Carver switches the display to a map of a large swath of the Pacific.
“We have three geolocation pings. The last known coordinates of the missing Mech. Unfortunately, the time signatures for these pings are scrambled. Maybe that is a glitch on our end, or maybe it has something to do with whatever happened out there. We need you to fly over these areas and see if you can pick up anything, find any clues as to Cook’s fate.”
Reo raises his hand again.
“What’s the designation of the missing Mech?”
“Icarus. That is all you need to know. I will be blunt; we want you to find your missing Squadron Leader and bring him home. Hopefully he is alive. But the priority is the Mech. We cannot let Icarus fall into the hands of another government, especially an antagonistic one.”
“No matter what,” Winter adds ominously.
What cold bastards, Kora thinks.
Commander Carver turns off the display.
“Your Mechs have been restocked and the coordinates uploaded into your mainframes. Any last questions before launch?”
“Just one,” says Chase. “Can we get the Mechs repainted in a matching color scheme? I think that could help boost team morale.”
Commander Carver cracks his knuckles and imagines strangling Chase.
---
After approximately two hours of flight time over a mostly featureless expanse of water, they draw close to the first of three coordinates. The pilots look out the cockpit windows, check their radar.
“There’s nothing out here,” Chase mutters.
“I’m not even sure where ‘here’ is,” Kora admits. “Geography wasn’t my best subject.”
“San Lazaro is south. Neo Yamato far to the north,” Hanami says matter-of-factly.
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“So, middle of nowhere?” says Chase.
Reo checks his sensors.
“I’m not pickin’ up anythin’ unusual. Big Boss said he was all the way out here on a test flight? Just looks like a whole lotta ocean to me.”
Ranger jets off away from the group.
“Woah, hold on Hanami. Where are you going?” Chase asks over the Comms.
“To the next set of coordinates.”
“Shouldn’t we decide that as a team?”
Hanami says nothing, but stops her flight, letting Ranger hover over the surface of the water.
“For safety, we should stick together,” Kora adds.
“How about we vote?” says Reo. “All in favor of movin’ on to the next coordinates say Aye and all who want to keep searchin’ around here say Nay.”
“Aye,” Hanami answers immediately.
“Aye,” says Kora.
“And Aye for me as well,” says Reo.
Chase shakes his head.
“Aye… I guess,” Chase gives in.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Reo says. “If you want to lead the way, Hanami, we’ll follow you to the next stop.”
Who died and made her queen? Chase wonders.
After another twenty minutes of flying, the four again find themselves over an empty expanse of ocean. After fruitless searching, they agree to go to the final set of coordinates. They find it much the same.
“Nothing is out here!” Chase groans in frustration. “This is a waste of time!”
Hanami is thinking.
“We do not know the order in which Icarus visited these sets of coordinates due to some ‘glitch’ or ‘malfunction.’ Perhaps if we make an educated guess we could predict the trajectory of his flight,” she muses quietly.
“Give me a sec,” Reo says.
He taps some buttons on his console and shares a map of the area with the three sets of coordinates pinned. Hanami joins in, adding visual representations of all the different possible flight paths that could have resulted in passing through all three locations.
“Very pretty,” Chase mumbles, “but I don’t see how—”
“Look!” Kora says. Templar stretches its arm in a pointing gesture, mimicking Kora’s actions. “Look at those birds.”
In the near distance, a flock of white and black birds are bearing northwest over the ocean, studiously avoiding the giant hovering mechanical suits.
“Those are seabirds. Can’t tell the species from here, maybe a kind of tern? Big noisy flocks of them migrate through these parts in the warmer months,” Reo says, trying to get a zoomed-in view on his screen of the flock.
“Where do they rest, or nest?” Kora asks.
“If I was flying a plane and had some kind of major mechanical problem, I would try to find the nearest place to make an emergency landing,” Chase reasons.
Hanami taps away at her console and zooms out the image of the map. She lines up the possible trajectory that is closest in line with the flightpath of the birds.
“If we follow this course northwest, we will eventually reach the southernmost of the Pinnacle Islands,” Hanami says. “They are uninhabited, but disputed territory between the Red Star Empire and… Neo Yamato.”
“Is that a conflict for you?” Kora asks her.
“As Big Boss said, we aren’t representin’ just our own countries anymore, but Democracy and Human Rights and all that,” Reo adds.
“Truth, Justice, and Western Hegemony,” Kora says, seething with sarcasm. “Let’s just find that poor pilot and get him home in one piece.”
“If he crashed at sea, I doubt we’ll ever find him,” Chase says, checking his radar for the umpteenth time. “Hopefully our hunch is right, and he made for the nearest spot of dry land. On your six, Hanami.”
---
As they approach the Pinnacle Islands a small blip sounds on each of the Mechs’ sensors.
“Wait… what was that?” Chase asks.
“I heard it too,” says Kora.
The blip appears again, a bit stronger.
“It may seem too good to be true, but I think our Mechs are pickin’ up trace signals of a Fusion Core,” says Reo.
“Fusion Core… then that means…” Kora is hopeful.
As far as they know, the A-PAC Mechs are the only machines on the planet that use this Fusion Core technology. None of the pilots had even heard of Fusion Cores before. Remarkably, the Mechs do not need to have batteries charged or be refueled in any conventional way. This is the kind of technology that would win a Nobel Prize if the scientific community knew it existed. Reo makes a mental note to learn all he can about these Cores when he has time.
The southernmost island comes into view, growing larger and larger through the cockpit windows. Some of the other islands in the chain can be seen further in the distance. All appear quite rocky, with volcanic crags jutting upward and scattered patches of dense forest here and there.
The blips continue.
“We should tell Big Boss and the rest of them back at HQ about this signal,” says Reo.
“They said to be careful sending long-range messages with our Short-Range Q Point Communications Systems, in case they are intercepted,” says Hanami. “We should collect more data first.”
They fly over the first island, the blips growing stronger and stronger. Then, as they crest a rocky pinnacle, they see it.
“Is that enough data for you?” asks Chase dryly.
Below they see the body of a Mech face down on the ground in a wide, flat section of the island flanked by forest. A scorched trench littered with debris is carved through the ground for a good ninety meters behind the Mech, starting at the shore. An obvious crash landing.
The pilots descend at a safe distance from the crash site, their eyes glued to the immobilized Mech. The model, presumably Icarus, looks like a more aerodynamic version of Ronin—charcoal gray with pronounced gold plating and wing-like spikes on either side of its head and shoulders.
“Bugger!” Kora breathes. “Do you see any movement?”
“Look there,” Chase says, pointing with Ronin. “I’m not sure this was just an accident.”
The Mech’s left leg is completely blown away below the thigh—all black scorch marks and exposed wiring. Kora wonders if the leg could have detached during the crash landing but then notices large caliber bullet holes riddling the torso. Her pulse begins to race.
“You think he was shot down? Maybe Red Star or even Neo Yamato caught an unidentified bogey on their radar, had their navy blast him out of the sky?” Chase wonders.
“But could he still be ALIVE?” Kora asks.
“It is most probable that he died during the crash,” Hanami says in her usual cold way. “It has been several days. With his survival training, he could hold out for much longer waiting for rescue. But four giant Mechs landing on a small island is not subtle, and yet we see no trace of Reginald Cook. If he had been captured by a friendly OR hostile government, this island would be swarming. Yet, the crash site appears undisturbed.”
“Or he could have tried to reach one of the other islands…” Kora adds hopefully.
“Perhaps,” Hanami says.
The pilots lapse into silence. None are especially excited about the prospect of finding a decaying corpse of one of their own, even if they hadn’t known he existed until this morning. But they have their orders.
“Now would be a logical time to report our findings to the Commander,” Hanami says. “Engineer, can you try and send an encrypted message back to the Floating Fortress?”
“The name’s Reo, but yeah, I’ll give it a try.”
Just then, from under the cover of the dense forest thickets on both sides of the crash site comes an explosion of gunfire.