(( Authors Note - This story contains spoilers for the Hare Brained Schemes Battletech campaign. This story also contains chemical weapons, re-education camps, and depictions of warcrimes as contained in the campaign. You don't need to know the lore inside and out to read this story, but it helps. For instance, the main characters is Canopian. ))
You are of noble birth. Though immigrants to the Aurigan Reach, your family soon established a comfortable presence in a small, backwater system on the edge of Aurigan space. By the time you were born, your family House Ramey had become the de-facto ruling nobility of the system's only inhabited planet. Rockwellawan may not be much on the galactic scale, but it is yours.
You are the oldest female child, heir to House Ramey's titles, businesses, and ancestral Battlemech. While you always longed for something flashier, you cannot help but enjoy piloting the elderly Blackjack. The world simply feels /right/ when you're striding over your lands like a living Titan of steel, the peasants like ants in their fields. Even gravity can't hold you down!
And somehow that makes you very, very /wrong/.
Mommy's little monster -1
Rockwellawan 3010
The wind swept cool and crisp across the vast fields of soyghum, the waves of sweet cane making a distinct rattle as the nearly ripe bean pods brushed against one another. That was good. As long as she crawled in time with the wind, sound of her passage was obliterated by the loud crops. Whatever centuries past geneticist that designed the hybrid crop had probably never included their suitability as cover as a design goal, but they'd succeeded admirably none the less. Not that it was hard to hide a twelve year old. Harriette's goal was a dilapidated farmhouse, and the greenery provided her safe passage right up to the back porch.
A canvas sling across her chest secured the reason she had crawled through the kilometer of cane field to her back. Riding high across her back was a chunky laser pistol, a lacquered wood stock added on. It was her mother's Sunbeam laser pistol, and Harri wished it was designed for a young girl's frame like hers. She had to continually adjust it to keep it from catching on things or digging into her as she slipped between rows of cane to her goal. The star league could design entire planetary ecosystems, yet not make a laser carbine that fit comfortably on a twelve year old girl's back.
On closer inspection the farmhouse was a worn out prefab, the windows mostly broken out and the polymer walls flaking off in scales. Harri recognized the hexagonal layout of a standard shipping container easily. She could scarcely believe anyone would call such a shack home. That same wind that had covered her progress brought her the smell of the place. Someone burned cane mash inside to fuel a stove, the sweet smelling smoke wafting from the chimney pipe a vaguely pleasant accent to a lovely day.
If she'd thought to carry a thermos of tea with her it would have been the perfect spot to plot the downfall and ruin of her family's enemies. It was sort of… snug in between the rows of cane. Comforting like a good quilt on a chill day. Harri had been to the sea shore regularly, and the wind blown rattle of the cane had the same soothing effect as waves crashing on the seashore. She wished she'd been able to simply take her skimmer right up to the traitor's door, but they'd hear the howl of its lift fans far before she arrived. So instead Harri pondered a bit on just how she should proceed with this threat against her family.
Harri's mother had long profited in the lawless frontier stars unclaimed by any nation. Some might have called her a crook or thug, but they were long since buried and an empire built on their bones. Deceit, ruthlessness, and a well deserved reputation for strong armed deals had server Lady Donna Ramey well. Not many could claim to own a small fleet of jumpships, nor a monopoly on the mines of entire worlds. It was only proper that her house ruled the world they owned a controlling interest in.
Her family ranch sprawled as far as the eye could see and was well supplied, with a working combine harvester that charged off a scrapped Wasp torso in the mech barn. The same source that recharged the power cells in the Sunbeam pistol she carried. All of that was little more than scenic background to the real wealth of the Ramey family, interstellar transportation, but it allowed them to cement their hold over the world. The combine alone let them plant and harvest far more acreage than most. Steady power let them process not just their own cane juice and edamame, but those of their neighbors and servants as well.
Envious servants like the swine Fa Zeng Li. Swine that were too stupid to learn a simple lesson: Don't bite the hand that feeds. And people wondered why she preferred a loyal dog to a treacherous peasant. Her House had taken him in, gave him a job maintaining the combine and air cars. Yet this is how he had repaid her kindness. She did not yet know why he had poured a cup of sand into the engine housing of her family's aircar. Perhaps it was banditry pure and simple. Perhaps it was but a prelude to a more vicious crime. A crime that she would prevent today.
She crawled through the final rows of gently swaying soyghum and took a few deep breaths as she contemplated how best to get answers. Mother Donna would no doubt just set the whole house on fire and never worry about the consequences. Mommy Danni, of course, would object to such an impromptu swine BBQ and possibly even withhold her allowance for a month as punishment. No doubt while pinching her ear and yelling at her about the importance of using words. It would be the breakfast in bed Mother's Day incident all over again. Well fine, Harri had a few choice ones for traitors.
"Fa Zeng Li! You stand accused of treason against House Ramey! Come out with your hands up! Or be roasted like the swine you are…" Hmmm… Perhaps she shouldn't have added that last bit.
The reaction was immediate, though not in the form she had expected. Harri supposed even peasants weren't stupid enough to stick their heads out the window like piglets to the slaughter. Someone tried to run through the rear door, but she fired through the thin planks as soon as it began to move. The smoking hole showed little evidence of a hit, but the blood curdling screams that began from behind it trailed off into wet retching sobs. She began to move as swiftly as she dared along the lines of ghum cane, seeking a new vantage point. Her caution was vindicated when a couple of shotgun blasts raked the crops behind her, the crushed and sheared stalks releasing an intensely sweet scent as their sap splashed all over.
Porcuswine were at their most dangerous when the prickle was enraged, and an unwary hunter could find themselves most painfully dead if they didn't keep moving. Harri had seen the bodies of more than one ranch hand who'd fallen prey to the beasts they were supposed to be herding, flesh ripped from the bone and meter long quills impaled through what hadn't been eaten. To everyone's surprise but her own she was a natural hunter. She'd shot her first porcuswine boar when she was nine, the impressive penetration and lack of recoil of the laser allowing the feat. Anti-material terminal effect was a requirement for getting through the dense hide and thick quills of the aggressively defensive creatures. Compared to stalking something that could smell you coming a kilometer away, this was too easy.
Her scurried path through the cane gave her a new angle on the house, and she could see someone reloading a shotgun with steady hands through the window. Mottled camouflage clothes, face hidden behind a helmet, he screamed professional to her danger senses. He was already turning to bring the shotgun around to her new position, without hesitation. Someone used to killing, like her. The Sunbeam was already up and the world shrank to a dark tunnel as she aimed down the sights and pulled the trigger without any hesitation of her own. She shot him under the shoulder, as mother had taught. Shoot for the heart.
The Sunbeam laser pistol was a heavy and ungainly thing. When she had been smaller she couldn't even lift it one handed, so her mother had made a stock for it that let her shoulder it like a carbine. The wood stock snuggled against her shoulder like a kitten, a welcome comfort. It wasn't the only gun on the family ranch, but it was her favorite. The high intensity beam and near silent operation made it ideal for hunting, compared to the loud blast of a gyroslug carbine. The only thing more dangerous than a stampeding prickle of porcuswine were those that hunted them.
The helmeted man's clothing flash burned, the halo of flames obscuring the charred meat and bone that replaced once healthy lungs and heart. He had nothing left to cry out with as he fell dead, a few wisps of greasy smoke curling from his lips his only epitaph. Harri kept moving, circling around to the front of the shack as the screaming inside reached a new crescendo of shrill terror. It sounded like a woman, or perhaps a young enough boy.
Her small, silent feet brought her around the front of the shack, just in time for her to see the front door begin to move. In her rush she shot too quickly, the beam moving in a brief arc barely below knee height. God favors children and fools, and in this case she was both. There was a thud heard just below the screaming, whoever she'd just wounded falling hard but aware enough to scrabble back inside. A smoking shin and sandaled foot still remained on the front porch.
Her small hands clutched at the weapon with white knuckled intensity as she tried to steady her aim with slow breaths. The screaming continued for what felt like forever, testing what nerves Harri had left. Wouldn't she ever shut up? The wailing dug bloody furrows into her ears, so raw was the suffering that was given voice. The first hints of regret started to bubble up in her mind. How many people were in that dirty hovel? How wide was this cabal of treason? That man she'd killed had a shotgun. No one local bothered with shotguns, they only enraged the feral hogs. She should have at least told the guards where she was going. And it was so HARD to think with that damnable screaming going on. There were words mixed into that cacophony, unlike the terrified squealing of a crippled porcuswine.
For the sake of her own sanity, she needed to end this. Her feet pushed her forward, out of the cane. Up to the front porch that once belonged to a servant, now home only to charred meat and conspirators.
As soon as she neared the door something flew towards her, a blur of motion to her tense eyes. Her finger moved before her brain could make sense of what she saw, the flash of luminous violence so close now that it blinded her. She staggered backwards, trying to crouch down against the wall as she blinked away tears and spots in equal measure. What she had seen caught up with her. A woman with her leg seared off reaching out to her. And the sun bright flash that she fired into her breast in response. The open door brought a breeze through the shack, the mingled odors of sweet ghum juice and charred flesh reminding her that she'd missed lunch.
At least it was quiet now.
She stepped over the latest corpse into the shack, finding a man in grimy overalls trying to shield a girl even younger than Harri behind his body. It seems her shot through the door hadn't had enough power to take his leg off, though the burn was deep enough to cripple him. She kicked him in the leg until he turned to face her.
"Fa Zeng Li, just the man I wanted to see."
