When the chance to join the mechanized armor corps revealed to her, she knew took it with gusto. Working with giant hulking machines, some nearly fifty meters tall was fantasy she had. Seeing videos and pictures just weren't enough for her. She needed to get into the gears and guts of these hardened machines. The first one she saw was at a parade on Remembrance giant arthromechs marched in lockstep bristling with weapons (though disarmed for the parade). They towered over her and the sheer scale of them was awe inspiring. She would often point out this as the point in her life when she fell in love for the first time, followed by hearty laughs.
When she told her parents her decision, her father screamed at the top of his lungs. No child of his would waste away as cannon fodder. Her mother though sat silent. For years she had supported Karin's "hobbies". She thought it would help her gain skills to become an engineer or scientist. But the military was not what she was expecting. What was Karin thinking, her mother thought. Why do something so rash, when there were more safe paths. She had spent the next month bogged down in punishments, though strangely she did not
There weren't any mechs of the scale she had saw at the parade in civilian use. And there probably wouldn't ever be, Karin surmised. The only way to work on them was to enlist. Her mind had reached a tipping point. Join now or never get the chance. She knew her parents well, they would do everything they could to stop her. She needed to join quickly and made the mistake she would regret for years.
Enlistment meant that she would be at the mercy of the military. Officer school was reserved for those who had been accepted through university referrals and the junior military corps. Tough luck, the boot camp commander told her. She would go through the grueling and arduous training with no very little chance to be selected for Armored Warfare school.
That didn't stop her. She pushed her body ,through mud and misplaced shrapnel. She spent little time talking with her squadmates. Her free time was filled with obsessive re . She watched others bug out , running into the arms of parents. They took the path of shame, a walkway designed to reveal to the rest of the recruits what failure looks like. It was horrifying for those who walked it. But the perverse idea that it would reinforce the resolve of the remaining cadets was wrong. Karin didn't care. Her thoughts concentrated into a fine blade-like point to pierce through obstacles towards her goal to join with the towering titans of the battlefield.
Her resolve impressed the base commander. His recommendation would only go so far though. All that work, all the tears and the blood were betrayed. They didn't accept her into the AW officer school. Instead, much to the confusion to all around her, she was punished with becoming the chosen few to become command officers. Her dour attitude towards such an amazing achievement was confounding.
It seemed obvious to her. Fail. She didn't want to be a commander. She wanted to pilot those towering mechs. She didn't care about anything else. Her life's dream was to feel the ground rumble under her as she marched like a steel mountain. Failure was an option. It was obvious to her that they found her to be highly competent. They wouldn't toss her into the teeming masses of cannon fodder. They would acquiesce to her unspoken demand. They would give her the warmachine of her dreams.
From command school she went to electronic warfare. She wasn't so upset ,though even more time would be lost before she had the chance to climb into a pilot's deck. She positioned herself to lead up ground ELINT (electronic intelligence) elements, shadowy groups of light and mobile troops with the sole purpose to gather data. Finally, after years of work, she was closing in on her dream. Her ELINT unit turned out to be a company of light combat frames, machines close to 8 meters tall, designed to be speedy and carrying enough electronic equipment to be backup command and control units. Each frame could command hundreds of drone tanks and soldiers if needed. With their back mounted radisks (rotating radar disks) and a plethora of antennas, they silently skulked into the battlefield, often behind enemy lines with no support and few arms. It was exhilarating. The risk was life-threatening. But the tools of the trade were beyond anything she had ever seen. She felt as if power coursed through her hands , into the control panels that lined the joystick and through the holographic displays of frequency modulators and focusing arrays.
But she made a mistake, one that she wasn't sure that she regretted. When she became the commander of her own unit, their first mission was into a city that was infiltrated with Confederate rebels. Collecting information was difficult due to the buildings blocking line of sight and making every turn into a hesitant step into tank fire.
The rebels had forced the city dwellers to remain confined in their homes, to be used as human shields and to temper any thoughts of invasion. She was sent to find their heavy weapons and to mark them for precision orbital strikes.
She didn't realize how crowded the buildings were, nor did she think of how accurate a precision orbital strike was. They gave her a mission to do, that was all she considered. The initial EMP shockwave raced through the enemy ranks like chained lightning. The following rain of hypervelocity spikes turned the ground into a crater. The buildings adjacent to the crater cracked. Then the screams roared through her headset. The buildings began sliding and then spliting open. The silhouette of a body , a slow moving form seemingly suspended in the air, was all that she could remember when HQ rescinded her command afterwards.
It wasn't the end for her. She had become an available resource. The Void Walkers had summoned her. Few ever saw their crews. Fewer had seen their mechs. These soldiers were erased from time and space, only existing as shadows. Furtive glances out to deep space would bring about their presence into the periphery of vision. These phantoms did what seemed like the fever-dreams of conspiracy theorists. Even darker than clandestine , they killed, captured or destroyed anyone and anything. Even those within the hallowed ranks of the Republic star corps. Abiding by no laws, they were more tamed monsters jostling at the chain that held them to the loosest of battle protocols.
So what did they need with her? Such an elite force required the utmost in combat performance. Karin's experience was mostly in e-war and forward operations. She was in no mood to stuff her closet with skeletons. She didn't see herself as a machine of death. Even if she piloted warmchines, she looked at them more as pieces of art than weapons. But here, with these dour and brutish soldiers, marked by shrapnel scars and burns, there was no art.
"The reason you are here today is because you have excelled at your duties. You sacrificed your conscience to complete the mission" , the voice inside the opaque helmet said. That couldn't be right. Thats wasn't at all right, Karin thought. She didn't do it on purpose. She didn't mean to endanger the lives of civilians.
At the same though, she didn't even consider it. It was only after the buildings began to topple around her that she realized that those shadows weren't pieces of debris falling to the ground. Their lives had become mere background details. Noise to be filtered out. Distractions. The success of the warmachine was not counted in lives saved. That was what the Walkers were looking for. The soldier willing to commit the acts necessary to succeed. Her stomach tumbled, her mind turned and her body shook. Apathy had turned her into a machine of death without her consent.
With nowhere to hide from that guilt, she resigned herself to take her place alongside the mercenaries and cutthroats the did the jobs that the Sol Republic couldn't do itself. She couldn't face her family, her friends, her would greet her with smiles and laughter when she sorely wished for punishment. But it would never happen. She was a hero, one who made a mistake. She was alone. She was a Void Walker.
Ross followed the footsteps of his forefathers and foremothers. His father was a decorated colonel. His mother was a battalion commander . Rose, his sister, was a pilot and Dan, his little brother, became a propulsion officer. Everyone was proud of the family's history of military duty. They felt a camaraderie that most families could never enjoy. They were bonded by blood and steel , their minds in lockstep to military duty.
Ross, though, was unreceptive to the whole scheme. Everyone seemed to just let others make the decision to join for them. They all seemed so sure of themselves when they were helped into the decision to join. It seemed genuinely inhuman that they exuded such confidence in a decision with life altering ramifications.
Under hushed voices they spoke of how he lacked bravery. How he would break family tradition. That he was selfish. Selfishness! He was astonished at such turn of logic. His desire the see the world instead of being the force that would corrupt and destroy it was selfishness. Right, he said to his family. Absolutely. The sarcasm dripped so heavy but it only fooled his family into thinking he was repentant.
It wasn't for selfishness that he didn't want to commit to duty. He didn't want to be a chained to a rigid command structure, to have orders barked at him and to do as he was told. He went to the Republic University in Gliese , instead of joining the junior corps like his brother did. He took up Hypervelocity communications , experimenting with information catapults that launched packets of suspended radio waves through space in bubbles formed from Alcubierre rings. He was proud of his work, proud to know he had brought people closer with their friends and family.
His family wasn't as impressed. Though they never said anything bad about his work, they had never spoke highly of him either. He was just there, a presence that had no weight. While they regaled each other with tales of heroism, whether true or not, no one asked him about the discoveries his team was making.
He never expressly disavowed joining the Star Corps. He had just not thought it was right for him. But his research had gained the eyes of the upper echelons. They were shadowy figures that contacted him, never identifying themselves affirmatively, just merely implying who they were and why they were so important.
They wanted to give him a military commission, a fully stocked lab and a staff of the most intelligent researchers. He said yes. He thought it was a great opportunity to advance his career. Perhaps now, he thought, his family would actually give a damn about his work. Now that the Star Corps was recruiting him into their program, they had to treat him better. All those years of being ignored , repaid with the commendation of the highest echelons of the Star Corps command.
He never was told exactly what he would be doing. Nor did he pay attention to the terms of the contract he signed, one that was whisked away for "safe keeping" away from him before he could realize what he did.
He discovered soon enough what he had become a part of. His role in the team was to crack the encryption used in the hypervelocity communication network that his colleagues had made.
He adamantly refused to destroy what others had worked so hard to do. But his enlistment contract was clear, if in a obtuse manner. If he didn't accept the terms, his alternative was to become a grunt in the Void Walkers. He would not sacrifice the integrity of the work his friends had done. Instead, he accepted the four year deployment as the electronic warfare specialist of the Void Walkers.
