Coalition Head Quarters, Ehyra, 0237 hours.
The night was quiet one for a city under siege.
The distant sound of mortars and anti-aircraft fire only occasionally wafted through the open window of Rictor's barracks quarters. The perimeter breach klaxons - indicating a Locust incursion - hadn't sounded for the first time in several nights, so it sounded like the Reavers, the long-limbed flying mounts of the Horde, were back to testing the COG defences.
Blackout curtains swathed the room in darkness save for a small candle wedged in the neck of an ancient whiskey bottle that guttered occasionally in the slight breeze but held true.
Rictor lay in bed with his hands behind his head, watching the soft warm currents of air seep out from under the curtains and disperse his exhaled cigar smoke. Beside him (because one of the few perks he could think of for officers during these dark days was having an actual bed rather than a cot) Ramirez was sleeping on her side, arm draped across his chest, head resting on his shoulder.
Her nose wrinkled unconsciously as she breathed in cigar smoke and her muscles tensed lightly as a small involuntarily cough escaped her lips.
Rictor futilely attempted to blow smoke away from her, stubbing out the stoagie on a dented metal mess hall plate on the bedside table and fanning away the remaining fumes with his free hand.
Ramirez sighed shallowly and drew in a little closer to him before her breathing quickly returned to slow, even peaks and troughs.
The veteran continued to watch her, admiring the smooth olive skin of her athletic body (the odd scar here and there that somehow managed to accentuate her beauty, unlike his bullet-ridden hide which looked like a relief map of Ephyra in this light), the swirls of a South islands Bakuaia tattoo that spread from her exposed shoulder across her collar bone and down to the swell of her rising and falling breast (so much more graceful than his own 26th Royal Tyran Infantry Skull and Lancers one). Just visible above the top of the sheets were the beginnings of the amorphous purple-black bruises that covered a good portion of her ribs on both sides from the explosion outside the mansion earlier.
A small smile played across her lips.
"Anyone ever tell you that you were a dirty old man?"
"Not recently," Rictor replied, a faint note of sadness underpinning the statement as he glanced at a tarnished wedding band on his left hand. "Maybe you oughta trade up for a younger, more reputable model."
Ramirez opened her eyes and moved her hand upwards from the tangled mass of salt-and-pepper hair on his chest, pulling his chin to hers and kissing him deeply before breaking and looking at him evenly. Rictor stared back at her, that one slate-grey eye searching for something in hers.
She rolled over onto her back, pulling the sheet with her to cover herself and took a slow breath before addressing the ceiling; "most people – not Gears, I'll give you – but most real people would've been exhausted after a firefight, after the adrenaline rush has left them. I know for a fact the fifth of Wallin's moonshine you necked would've floored a lot of guys hands down on its own."
"I swear he uses it to de-grease the engine on that piece-of-shit derrick," Rictor grinned weakly, trying to diffuse the argument he knew was coming.
Ramirez turned to Rictor, a half-mocking grin creeping across her face. "But I really thought my own personal style of debriefing," she smiled again, a rogue-ish twinkle in her eyes "would've tired that big brain of yours out."
"Sorry, darlin'," Rictor began sheepishly. "I'm totally wi-"
Ramirez placed a finger firmly over his lips, stopping him.
"But not you," she accused quietly, a note of indignation in her voice that she hadn't intended to add, the sly glimmer gone from her deep brown eyes. "You're still sitting here stewing over the damned mission!"
The slight embarrassment in his face disappeared under a scowl of anger and resentment. Rictor's eye patch had been removed earlier, discarded on the floor with the rest of his clothes before their exhausted semi-drunk coupling. The barren socket was covered by the remains of his stitched together eyelid but it hid nothing of the attack's ferocity, a tangle of jagged angry scars that twitched and writhed as his brow moved.
The Captain sat up, his powerful shoulders working up and down as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not the mission," he said slowly, as if searching for the right words. "It's him."
"You're losing sleep over Baird?!"
"It doesn't make sense him just handing over that drive to the Onyx Guard. He's gotta have a copy stashed away somewhere."
Ramirez threw her hands up.
"Great! Go talk to him – there's too many people in this bed!"
Rictor turned to her questioningly.
She looked back, saw it wasn't just the moonshine talking and dropped her head to the pillow heavily. "Go," she sighed, her voice terse with emotion and pain from her bruised ribs.
Rictor got up from the creaking bed, pulled on some well-worn fatigues, a moth-eaten t-shirt that had had the sleeves ripped off of it long ago, picked up his boots and the discarded eye patch.
He was turning the handle on the door before Ramirez spoke again.
"He nearly died today. If it was me, I'd want to know what for," she opined.
Rictor opened the door but didn't turn back to her.
"We all nearly died today," he replied flatly and then was gone.
"Good point," she conceded, running a hand through her hair.
Rictor stalked through the engineering bays of the COG's motor pool flitting between harsh yellow spotlights, a plume of stale-smelling cigar smoke lingering in his wake like an old-fashioned steam engine chugging towards its destination.
Even this late at night, there were still members of the Engineering Corps (affectionately known as 'knuckle-draggers') crewing the bays, repairing and fuelling vehicles, prepping heavy armour for sorties, and maintaining others. The clank of spanners, fluid clicking of socket wrenches and the hiss of welding torches filled the night air.
The Gears may be the ones laying their lives on the line each and every day but the knuckle-draggers were the (mostly) silent backbone of the armed forces; getting the Gears where they were needed time and again.
Those crews that spotted the veteran's brisk passage through the grimy bays saluted, salutes which were returned reflexively as Rictor seethed his way towards Baird's workshop at the rear of the motor pool.
The Onyx Guards who were waiting on their Raven's designated landing pad for Alpha had appropriated the drive containing the Project Myrmidon data before they'd even had a chance to disembark, let alone get Schoenick into the care of Doc Hayman's similarly waiting medical personnel.
The more Rictor thought about Baird just handing over the drive to Prescott's lackeys without incident (sure he'd made some barbed comment but that was just Baird, every time he opened his mouth something unpleasant came out), the more certain he was that something else was going on. It was just too easy.
Eventually, Rictor covered the length of the motor pool and arrived at Baird's workshop; a grubby construction of wood and metal that looked to have been some form of foreman's office prior to the war. The dusty yellowing glass had been crudely painted over from the inside to obscure whatever activities the surly mechanic was conducting inside.
On the door, a sign finger-painted in grease proclaimed: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, FUCK OFF.
Rictor planted a boot in the middle of the door, just below the warning sign, enjoyed the sound of splintering wood.
Baird looked up from the bowels of Ernie's naked chassis (his dented and compromised carapace had been removed), a small stream of smoke spiralled into the air from the circuit board he'd been soldering. The mechanic's eyes narrowed with a look of disgust.
"I guess you can't read then."
Rictor barely broke his stride after kicking the door open. He steamed straight into the makeshift workshop and grabbed Baird's throat, pinning him painfully up against the workbench with a thick swarthy arm. Baird scattered a pile of the bot's sections of abused skin as he flailed in Rictor's grip.
"Where?!"
The word all but spat from Rictor's lips.
"You're going to have to help me out on that one," Baird choked. "I'm a genius but I'm not psychic!"
The older man threw Baird to the ground, pacing back and forth next to his gasping form like a caged animal.
"The data from the mansion," Rictor growled. "Where is it?"
Baird collapsed against one of the legs of the workbench, ignoring the further shower of Ernie's remaining metal plates that cascaded to the greasy worn floor.
"You were right there in the Raven! I gave it to those smug Onyx fucks!"
The workshop was a scrap merchant's treasure trove. Piles of discarded and scavenged electronic, electrical and mechanical parts were stacked on every available surface and in piles that lined the walls in no readily apparent order. Where there weren't components there were books; rescued tomes of not-so ancient knowledge stacked and littering the space, filling the gaps where the hoarded tech salvage ended. Crammed into the corner of the all ready cramped room, next to a gas cylinder for a welding torch, was a rickety cot that was host to reasonably clean rumpled bed clothes, some more books and a collection of tarnished used dinner utensils.
Rictor took all of this in, none of it surprising him even though he had never ventured down into Baird's lair before now, before turning to the Corporal.
"Oh, I saw that," Rictor hissed. "It's the copy I want."
Baird looked up at him mutely.
Rictor stopped mid-pace and crouched down low in front of Baird meeting him eye-to-eye.
"You had plenty of time in that bunker to copy all the intel you downloaded," he said dangerously.
"I do-"
Baird had discarded his plate armour but kept the dark base layer on as he had been tinkering with Ernie and it was this that the veteran Gear grabbed, bunching the high-wicking padded material up around his chin as he pulled him from his knees and threw him across the room.
"DON'T LIE TO ME!"
Components, scavenged metal and aging books scattered as Baird hit the wall. He lay in the midst of the toppled columns of scavenged goods for some seconds before slowly pulling himself into a sitting position. As the clatter of streams of mechanical and electronic viscera trickling to the floor petered out, he looked up at Rictor, mocking sneer in place.
"So you figured that if I had made a copy of that data – and I'm not saying I did – you'd just come down here, beat a confession out of me and I'd hand it over?"
Rictor was silent. The tip of his cigar pulsed between bright orange and duller red embers as he breathed in and out.
"This may come as a shock to you, Sir," Baird leered. "But this isn't my first beating."
"Oh, I don't doubt it," Rictor said absently.
Baird stared a challenge at the older man for a few seconds.
"Are we done here or do you want to skip to round two?"
When nothing further was forthcoming, he stood, dusted himself off and spat just beyond Rictor's boots.
End of discussion.
"It'd be a shame," Rictor said slowly, as if he were thinking aloud, "for you to get transferred to another unit."
"Maybe you're not up to speed," Baird said dismissively, moving past Rictor to the workbench. "But that wouldn't be the first time that's happened either."
Rictor continued to stand with his back to the other man.
"Be a shame for Cole, I mean."
Baird paused shortly as he reached the bench before picking up the soldering iron again and returning to Ernie's innards.
"Especially when I get Hoffman to deny any transfer request he puts in to follow you."
Rictor turned and closed on Baird, who still appeared to be ignoring him.
"Cole's a good soldier," Rictor continued conversationally. "He'll understand I'm sure. After I tell him why I had to transfer you, of course. Hell, I imagine he'll have a few choice words for you himself."
Baird straightened, his turn to stand with his back facing the other man.
"And I thought," he said carefully placing the soldering iron back in it's wire-frame support, "I was meant to be the squad bastard."
Rictor stood silently behind him.
Baird reached into a drawer in the workbench, pulled out a computer internal hard drive and turned to Rictor, handing it to him.
"Don't worry yourself unduly, Corporal," Rictor said. "I'll not sully your reputation any. As long as you remember how this squad works."
"And how, exactly," Baird said with a thick undertone of contempt, "is that?"
"I give the orders and you follow them," Rictor growled.
"And you always follow orders, right?"
The veteran walked towards the doorway before turning back to Baird.
"Grey areas are for those higher up the chain of command. You of all people should know that."
Baird ignored the jibe, gestured at the hard disk in Rictor's hands: "you just going to hand that over to Prescott?"
"That's about the size of it."
The mechanic took off his cracked goggles and threw them on to the workbench.
"I didn't copy the files," he said simply. Then quickly before Rictor cut him off as a scornful look passed across his features; "that's the original hard disk from Avery's desktop. The concussive blast from the grenade blew apart the computer's casing so I just grabbed it."
Rictor looked at the drive, noticed the broken and twisted mounting brackets along its side before returning his gaze to Baird who was leaning against the bench arms folded.
"Which means it has all of the DRA's dirty little secrets on it, not just Myrmidon. You trust the 'good' Chairman with all of that?"
"Nope," Rictor snorted. "I trust Hoffman to keep him on the straight and narrow, though."
"Good luck with that," Baird grinned humourlessly. "You're not even slightly curious about what's on that drive? They just about dropped a fucking mansion on us and you don't even care?!"
"You keep telling everyone how smart you are, Baird. Smartest man in the continent. Maybe even the smartest man in the world, whatever's left of it outside Tyrus. But it takes a dumb bastard like me to tell you that this isn't a war any more?"
Baird threw back his head and laughed hollowly.
"You finally woke up and smelled the extinction, huh?!"
The veteran continued unabated.
"This is survival and survival is whatever it takes to get through! If whatever's on this drive gets us to that point, the point where we have the upper hand over those bastards, I've got no problem with that."
"You don't even know what's on that!" Baird advanced on Rictor, stabbing a finger at the drive. "It could be a dead colonel's back catalogue of porn! Or it could be the next Hammer of Dawn and you're just handing it over to Prescott."
Rictor stared at Baird, dumbstruck and silent for long seconds.
"Your psych evaluation makes note of 'a pragmatism that borders on the ruthless'," the Captain stepped in close to the other man. "You left the squad behind with a wounded man today because you wanted to rescue a piece of hardware! You are hands down the coldest bastard I have ever met and now it turns out that you're worried about someone else making the hard choices?! Did that grenade blow your ego out of proportion?!"
"No! Fuck that," Baird ranted. "Hard choices are all that's left! I worry about him making those choices! It's too much power for one man."
Rictor flicked a clump of ash from his cigar onto the ground and took a long drag.
"Absolutely. But he's not showboating for election any time soon and even if he was, you know anyone else who'd want the job?"
"He dropped the Hammer on the planet without even blinking," Baird persevered.
"He did what needed to be done," Rictor folded his arms. "Don't matter if we agree with it, it wasn't our call to make."
The mechanic stood a few metres from Rictor and the older man could see the internal debate boiling away inside the younger man; the compulsive need to argue the point being outweighed by the frustration of knowing he wouldn't convert Rictor to his point of view.
"What if you're wrong about Prescott?" Baird said finally. "What if whatever leash Hoffman's got him on isn't short enough?"
"Then I'll look like a damned fool."
Rictor turned and exited the workshop, pulling the broken door to behind him
"Finally," Baird sighed. "Something we agree on."
