(Sigma Mercenaries, Story 0002: Training The Trainers)
(Chapter 02: Handling Large Equipment)
(23 March, Magi Year 14408 / Year SL 8838, 0700 Hours Local Time)
(Jump Engine Construction Area, Base Boarhound, Terra 232)
(Day 6 of Campaign)
"What's the plan, sir?" Moira asked as she looked at the parked machines, the parked trailers with the engines, and the trench going from the Administration Building west wall to the Jump Engine enclosure.
"Mosley's team will not be ready for engine deployment until 1000, they're working out some details for the base controller system and the Jump Gate Beacons, which gives us a golden opportunity to do something now before they start," Sigma One said. "Can you drive one of the large heavy-hauler trucks?"
"The HEMTT trucks? Probably can, never tried," Moira said.
"C'mon, I'll give you a crash-course in running these things," Hess hopped over the cable trench and waved her over as he started for the vehicle.
"Are you sure about this, sir?" Moira asked the departing militiaman-turned-planetary-administrator. The Black Dragon hustled to catch up to the boss as he went for the truck and headed around to the passenger side. After he disappeared around the far side and the sound of the door opening was heard, she simply sighed in resignation. "Couldn't hurt, I guess." Moira moved to the driver-side door, opened up, and climbed up into the cab in the most graceful fashion she could while wearing 20 kilos of armor, gear and guns.
"Any experience running wheeled vehicles from your time in your homeland?"
"No, sir. Dragon, remember? If I didn't fly there, I teleported there," Moira explained.
"Good point," Erich acknowledged. "Still, I don't think Dragons can lift more than five tons or so?"
"On a very good day. I never tried lifting more than two tons at one time in my draconic form," she admitted. "These things are definitely higher than 3000 kilos."
"And that's why they're so useful. Key is above the visor, go ahead and turn your ignition to 'Run', then flip the starter switch and hold it up until the engine catches."
Moira followed the instructions completely and was rewarded with the throaty diesel revving up briefly before it settled down to normal idle. "Okay, first thing, vehicle safety. Number one, seat belt. Click it or lose it." Hess pulled his seatbelt down and locked himself in, and the trainee driver did the same. "Number two: your dashboard indicators. These three bar graphs on the HUD are the critical ones: electric, oil, and engine temperature. Keep all three of these gauges in the green zone; if one gets into the yellow or red, bad things happen. If they go yellow, shut down and call for service. I'll take an operational delay over a dead machine any day."
"Green is good, yellow call for service, red is dead, easy enough," Moira said.
"Other one you need to worry about is the fuel. Little hard to go anywhere without fuel, but running it dry isn't necessarily damaging to these machines."
"Now that I figured already," Moira pointed out fairly.
Hess chuckled at her tone. "Okay, time to work on the movement aspect. First thing, you need to determine if you're going forward or reverse."
"Forward, I think," Moira said, then checked her rear-view mirrors. "Yeah, there's a vehicle hangar behind us. Wouldn't go well backing up."
"So you need your gearshift, then." Hess pointed it out. "P is park. R is your reverse. N, neutral, D is your full range of forward gears, and L is going to be your low-range selectable gears."
"So I want D?" Moira put her hand on the gearshift.
"Not yet. Before we do that, we need to discuss your footwork," Sigma One said.
"The pedals. I have heard about this. Left is brakes, right is throttle?"
"Yes. The thing I like to tell people is, when in doubt, use those brakes. In fact, for most purposes when moving loads in close quarters, you're going to ride your brakes as a means of keeping your speed down. So, when shifting out of park, always put your brakes on, then make your change. Set it to Low, then move the secondary electronic switch down to '1' and we're ready to begin."
"Make it or break it time," Moira said. She dropped the gearshift down to 'L' and set the manual selector to '1' for the start.
"Now, foot off the brakes and feather the throttle. You'll hear the engine rev up as you apply gas."
"Speaking of gas, this thing is close to empty," Moira said.
"You know where the Northeast Fuel Farm is?" Hess asked. Moira nodded. "Let's go there, it'll be a good confidence builder and we can keep the machine going."
Moira slipped the brakes and applied some throttle to clear the impromptu parking lot. "Okay, this is weird," she said. "I think I've got this." She turned the steering wheel over to the right once the truck was clear of the other vehicles and applied a little more throttle. "We're going, but I can probably run faster."
"That's what I want to see," Hess said. "Get used to moving slow, then we ramp up to higher gears as you build experience and skill."
-x-
(15 minutes later)
"How much fuel does one of these things hold?" Moira asked in shock after the counter passed 80 gallons.
"Dry tank fill is 155 gallons," Sigma One said. "If you were down below a quarter, should take about 90 gallons to fill."
"Oh," Moira said before the pump shut itself off. "Done."
"Close her up, shut the pump off and jump back in, we're done here," Hess said. Moira, having been a near-luddite over her years, took a bit of time to work through shutting off the pump and hanging up the nozzle. Still and all, Erich had to give her credit — she learned fast and had no problem with it, where he would have figured her one more for the use of magic to do the job.
"No logging or tracking?" Moira asked.
"I already did the logging." Hess waved his tablet at her. "Next time you drive up to the pumps, it will flag one of the tablets in your vehicle crew to do the logging, before it starts the pump up."
"Insane, how much these systems work together. And this used to be your job?" Moira asked as she hauled herself up into the cab and buckled back in.
"Still is, but on a different level now," Erich said quietly. "Now I make sure everything works together in a government, not simply an integrated system."
"Except when it doesn't," Moira said. "That punk Nicholas…"
"I do not expect universal success," Hess admitted. "Nicholas is a symptom of a larger problem, and we shall have repeat offenses as we go forward."
"And you're not concerned about it? Eventually they're going to stop doing the civilians and start taking shots at you," the black dragon pointed out as the HEMTT lurched into movement.
"Good. The longer I take flak and fire, the longer I have to consolidate personnel and positions," Hess said with a savage smile.
"What are you referring to?" Moira asked as she trundled down the roads between the hangars.
"Simple. The longer this goes on, the less likely the racist elements can build support for their position," Sigma One pointed out. "Given enough time, it becomes possible to simply out-man them with nonhumans. At that point, the racist minority of xenophobes have two options: shut up and slink away, or try to go to guns against a numerically and wizardically superior force."
"Oh," Moira said. "You're going to… basically…"
"Oh yes. Force them into a position whereby they must choose either civil war or removal from planet, unless they just want to shut up and smolder in place," Sigma One declared his intention. "What option they choose is entirely up to them; I have contingencies planned for all of the above."
Moira chuckled. "So, basically, you saw this coming and are ready to hammer them flat."
"More or less, yes. Take a left here," Hess pointed down an alleyway between two of the hangars. "Take a right and head down three hangars."
"What's this about?"
"Trust me," Erich said while watching the GPS Map on his tablet. Moira shrugged and took the turn, then shifted up to a higher gear to pile on some small amount of speed. "Okay, stop here by that second personnel door."
"Sure," Moira brought it to a halt at the requested door. "Park it, or shut down?"
"Park it, we won't be long," Hess slipped his belt and dropped out the door fairly quickly, to which Moira did the same after she ensured the parking brake was on.
Moira made it to the door as Hess started looking around through the window. "Expecting something?"
"Coyotes," Hess said after he looked through the window. "Not seeing any."
"That's good," Moira said. "Now what?"
Hess turned the latch and hauled the door open. "After you."
"Uh-uh. I may be guarding your arse, big guy, but that doesn't mean I trust you completely yet."
"I somehow expected that," Sigma One said, then stepped through and held the door open for her.
Just inside the door was the light panel for the hangar lights, which Hess flipped up the master power lever. After a few moments, the lights began droning, then they started popping on with an audible clicking sound.
"Empty hangar. Nice," Moira said, still unconvinced why she was here.
"Check this," Hess flicked the diagram he was looking at on his tablet over to her tablet.
"Okay, I'll bite," Moira pulled her tablet from the TT pouch on her Dragon Scale Six armor set she was wearing. "Whoa."
"Yeah, lots of parking for engines while we wait to move them out to different array locations. But that's not the primary purpose of this space," Hess commented.
"Then what is?" Moira asked. "Wait, what are these runes?" Moira did some readjustment of the picture on her tablet. "Wait… these are…" She read over the diagram on her tablet several times in the space of thirty seconds. "No way! Is this for real?"
"Exactly intended as shown," Erich said calmly. "This hangar for the ladies, the next hangar west for the gentlemen. Space unused for the Runes will be used for engine storage, as I expect we'll get a large stockpile of engines before we can put them all in service. After we disburse the engines, we can always retask the storage levels, or clear them out and do something else."
"Okay, why?"
Hess sighed. "There is still a lot of fear running around the non-humans about the possibility I would go 'protectionist' and turn on the non-humans whenever the race war kicks off."
"Bullshit, we already know you're not going to do that," Moira scoffed at Hess' intro to an explanation.
"You know, yes. The average recruit, not so much," Erich pointed out.
"Oh," Moira conceded indirectly.
"Actions always speak louder than words. A couple big, loud actions would move the pendulum in the proper direction," he said.
"You know this will provoke the race-fiends?" Moira asked, waving the tablet at him.
"How skippy do you think they will get when they want to destroy one of the Runes and have to try to run a gauntlet of various Phoenix and Dragons to get to it?" Sigma One asked.
"If we had some of the heavier Dragons, Gold, Platinum, or Eternal, it would be a complete blowout if anyone tried. They'd have to have anit-tank weapons to even harm a Platinum or Eternal."
"And the combined wizard skills of the defenders would be overwhelming to anyone except a Transcendent," Hess completed the thought.
Moira saved the view on her tablet — the other Secret Service officers would want to see his plan. "You know, on the way in, I said I don't trust you completely. I stand corrected; anyone crazy enough to bait the xenocidist elements like you intend to has to be on the level or extremely crazy."
Hess chuckled. "So, if I may ask, which of the above is it?"
"Both," Moira answered with a smile.
-x-
(10 minutes later)
"This is where the trailer camera comes in handy. You want to back the tractor yellow line back into the reflective plate, which will guide the kingpin into the lockpoint. Take it slow, you don't want to try to fight the trailer once you connect."
Moira focused on the backup camera and partially let off the brakes to slowly creep backwards until the kingpin entered the lock well and finally slammed into the fifth-wheel recess. Once the truck came to a stop, she went full brake. "Lock it in now?"
"Yes," Hess said. Moira tripped the kingpin lock and the whole truck shuddered to the ratcheting of the lock plate. "Set your park brakes, we need to prepare the trailer for movement."
"Got it." The Black Dragon-in-human-form unlatched herself from the five-point harness and dropped out of the driver's seat with increasing grace. Hess joined her a bit slower, since he didn't take the drop to the ground but simply climbed down. "So, I need to pull up the jacks, anything else?"
"Cabling," Hess climbed up on the beaver-tail between the trailer and the cab. "Two cables: one pneumatic, one electrical. These control your lights, accessory power, and air brakes on the trailer. The connection points are different for each, so confusing them is not possible."
"Brakes would be good," Mira said as she climbed up on the beaver-tail to connect the necessary cables. The electrical connection was square with sixteen prongs, the air line was circular with two partitions inside, so connecting them was simple enough. Both connections simply locked in by way of ratcheting rotational locks, so Moira plugged them in and locked them down. "Done here. Get the right side jack?"
"Will do," Hess dropped down to the ground and ratcheted up the jack stand on the trailer until it was up to storage location. "Done here."
"Ready to go, sir." Both climbed back into the cab and strapped back in. "Driving test?"
"Not yet. Now that we have the trailer on the fifth wheel, we check it before we simply drive off. Brakes on, set yourself in first gear, but make sure the brake valve to the trailer is closed." Hess indicated the valve selector for the extension lines, which was indeed closed. "Now, pull forward slightly until the trailer recoils against the kingpin latch."
Moira released her brakes slightly until the tractor jolted from the impact of the kingpin against the latch. "Okay, it works, I guess?"
"That is what we IT gurus call an ID-10-T test. If you don't get the recoil impulse after a half-meter of travel, you're not locked in. If you do get the recoil, you're connected and ready. Always do the check before you move the trailer, it saves grief and damaged trailers or hardware."
"Sneaky trainer, you are," Moira said. She flipped the trailer air lines open, which caused the compressors to begin pressurizing the trailer brake lines and eventually released the brakes. "Where to?"
"Pull over to the trench and run your trailer parallel to the dig." Hess diddled with his tablet while Moira maneuvered over there deftly. He was slightly worried about the other trailers, but she managed to avoid the trailer-turn pitfall of cutting corners with a long trailer.
Monica managed to avoid the obvious pitfall of driving the tractor into the meter-wide trench while she brought it parallel to the trench. "In place, sir."
"This is likely going to fray your nerves, but it's time for the all-important back-up training. Backing up a vehicle cleanly without staring backwards is something that eludes most wheeled drivers, doubly so for a vehicle with a trailer."
"I'm here to learn, so what's the trick?" Moira asked.
"Two separate tricks, actually, depending on what you are driving. If you drive a stick vehicle, no hinge points, the direction you turn the steering wheel is the direction it will turn. If you drive an articulated vehicle, like a tractor-trailer, you turn the wheel the opposite direction you want the trailer to go, but you want to be careful that you don't turn too far into the trailer or you jackknife."
"Got it. Turn the opposite direction," Moira said.
"Remember to turn it easy when you need an easy turn, and turn it hard when you need a hard turn," Erich reminded her. "Now, we'll do this entirely in Reverse 1 gear, no high speed. Take the trailer all the way back to the end of the trench, where it meets the outer wall of the Administration Building."
-x-
(20 minutes later)
"Bring it down, bring it down, good," Moira said. She connected the tension cable to the block and tackle of the Pipelayer. "Ready to begin laying it in!"
"Not until you're out of the way, we aren't," Hess corrected her. The Black Dragon-in-human-form dropped down off the trailer and headed back to the cab of the HEMTT 2 tractor to help play out the cable. As Jeff Evans was now at the dig site, he would help with the cable operations in the wall interface and for the block and tackle.
"Bring it over, boss," Jeff said. Hess brought the cable end up off the trailer, pulled it over the trench itself, and used the entire pipelayer to unwind the cable from the massive coil on the back of the HEMTT trailer.
Once the cable was in position, Jeff began signaling for Sigma One to lower the cable into position for the coupler. Given the winch motor on the Pipelayer was strong but not fast, dropping the cable some four meters to the connection was not the fastest process. Still, Erich watched the hand signals of the engineer-to-be as an indicator of what he needed to do, and between the two the cable was positioned properly for the connection. Specialist One applied a putty to the threads on the connection point to seal out moisture from the connection and to provide lubrication in case they had to unhook or replace the cable, then came the tough part. Jeff straddled the cable, pushed it into place, and screwed down the tensioner nut on the 30cm Fusion Power Cable to completely lock it into place on the wall.
"Good to go?" Hess asked by radio.
"Yeah, we're in here," Jeff answered before he climbed his way out of the trench. "You can leave the chains, I'll pull them off before I start filling in. Where is the Pipe Harness?"
"Should be on the back of the cable trailer," Hess said. Jeff found it faster than Hess was able to get the pipelayer boom into place, so the harness was in place around the cable by the time he was in position to begin moving the cable. "Testing lift now, stand clear." Five seconds of winching the cable up and it became obvious that everything was connected properly and the pipelayer could handle the cable weight easily. "We're good to go. Moira, you ready?"
"Listening," the Black Dragon said.
"I am going to guide the first section of cable into the trench, then we begin the move-and-drop process I explained. Stand by for first drop," Hess said before he started lifting the cable on the harness and sliding the harness down towards the cab of the HEMTT 2 vehicle.
The 400 meters of cable was a bit of an oddity the way the contractor company had put it on the trailer. They had welded four supports onto the HEMTT trailer and wound the cable around the supports in a racetrack pattern with some tension to prevent it shifting during travel. So, Hess had to unwind the cable from the trailer using the boom and harness of the pipelayer, not an easy task overall for a novice on the pipelayer.
The first loop of cable — 40 meters or so — dropped to the ground with a significant thud after Hess had the first section loosed. "You all right, sir?" Moira asked after the truck stopped rattling.
"Definitely, I'm good. Pull forward about twenty meters and we'll do it again," Erich said with some gusto. While she was pulling forward, the misplaced Tech Analyst-turned-general purpose guy pulled a length of the cable into the trench in such a way that it would not yank the transition connection point out of the basement wall of the administration building. "Good there. Time for the next loop." The process was roughly the same, Hess pulled the slack of the cable up, cleared it around the pins, and flopped it down on the ground to be snaked into the trench.
"This has definitely been a learning experience," Moira commented as Sigma One dragged the cabling into place.
"We'll be doing a lot more of this in the future," Erich said with assuredness.
-x-x-x-
(Administration Building Mess Hall)
"Where is the boss?" Toni asked as Moira took her seat with a tray of comfort foods, which was a bit unusual for her (so far as Toni had seen Moira's diet, it was small but heavy on the vegetable products).
"He's upstairs getting cleaned up," Moira said. "Oh man, that was intense. I didn't realize how hard that was until after I was done."
"What?" Toni asked, surprised to hear that from the normally even-keeled Moira. More surprising was the complete lack of context, and the multiple directions it could have gone or multiple things she could be referring to.
"The big guy had me out at the construction site, learning how to drive the HEMTT tractor-trailer rigs. I was fine while doing it, but man, he wasn't joking about it fraying your nerves, driving something like that," Moira explained as she dug into the meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gusto.
"First time behind the wheel, and he had you driving the HEMTT 2 tractors? That is cruel and unusual," Anastasia said.
"How so? Someone has to drive the truck while the pipelayer lays out the cable," Moira answered.
"He started you on one of the largest, heaviest wheeled vehicles in the project. Normally, drivers start in small, passenger car wheeled vehicles, or something similar maybe?" Anastasia pointed out. "I don't think he was being deliberately malicious, but still…"
"Well, it was a learning experience," Moira said, mostly to convince herself of her own logic.
Author's Chapter Afterword:
And the training continues!
The average person never really considers how many varied skillsets they have or use in a day until one writes them down on an itemized list. Then there is the consideration for Sigma: not every person walking in the door is a fully-trained modern society adherent, so they will be missing certain skillsets.
Moira is a classic example of this consideration. A Dragon by nature, she did not really have an operational requirement for certain skills in her homeland. Hence, little skill with firearms and no skill with motorized vehicles. Now, in Sigma, she isn't using her Dragon form so her offensive options come back to using modern weapons and her mobility options consist of teleport magic, hot-footing it or vehicle. Thankfully, Moira is still young enough to not be hidebound in her ways and old enough to be reasonable in her learning pace and focus. It helps that Hess is a very willing and capable instructor to step her through the pitfalls involved in learning vehicular pursuits.
While the scale of her initial training will come back to bite Hess in the arse before all is said and done, the utility of the training will become evident fast enough in both the mainline story and coming Contract stories. After all, Battletech has a lot of wheeled vehicles for both support and combat purposes, so those classes of vehicles will make a big showing in Sigma as well. After all, the Combat Wheeled Vehicle maximum mass is 80 tons, which is well in excess of a fully loaded HEMTT vehicle, so…
The only thing that remains to be seen is when the Secret Service realizes their boss is training them harder than they are training him, and decides to do something about it…
That's pretty much it for this chapter. NEXT UP: Sigma One's prior job, Technical Analysis and Systems Engineering, comes back to haunt Leonora.
Review Replies: Three Reviews for the last chapter. MUCH THANK YOU FOR THE FEEDBACK!
Kilvanya: I kinda-sorta forgot I had the chapter ready and posted it 5 minutes before I had to crash for my sleep cycle to get to work. You have my apologies for that :)
Knives 91: Yep, 70 to 80 pounds of gear worn routinely will get someone in shape quickly.
The icepick gag is effectively the ballistic truth about M193 and M855 rounds for the AR-15 / M-16 platforms. On the other hand, Sigma will be using the M855A1 most of the time, and likely using expanding ammo where they can get away with it (Hornady V-MAX, Nosler Ballistic Tip, similar). They're mercenaries, not altruists. Fighting fair is for the football field, not the battlefield.
HolyDragoon: There are indeed two sides to the equation, and the second side to this story will bite everyone in the arse in days to come.
Keepin' that fuel coming! Thanks guys!
The Gripe Sheet:
No complaints on the last chapter, and this may be the first chapter ever that my clean-up Beta Reader Necroblade reported no visible errors in a production chapter. So, much thanks to One Village Idiot, Sieben Nightwing, and Takeshi Yamato for cleaning thangs up!
Footnotes:
No footnotes for this chapter's material.
Included Works:
— Sigma Standard: All applicable material from the mainline Sigma Mercenaries applies here.
— Personal Works: The Runic Magic System, of which the Transformation Runes that will be installed in the hangars are part of, is a physical stationary manifestation of the standard magic system in use throughout my stories.
— IRL Units: The HEMTT System (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck) is an IRL unit, but the HEMTT II units are improved versions in use by the Magi for noncombat or rear-line duty. HEMTT II units are available in both ICE (Diesel Engine) and Fusion (not shown here), and have a maximum tow capacity of 60 tons as opposed to 40 tons for the United States HEMTT units.