No one spoke a word. The levity of the situation had crushed any sense of a grip on the situation. For all the time they spent fighting and surviving, the never considered what it would take to actually escape. No one thought of what sacrifice would be needed to accomplish that goal. But once Ryuki made it clear what he intended, they all realized that death was holding their hands as they approached the end of their ordeal. Leading them on to the other side, whether it be on the shores of Earth or in the inky darkness of oblivion.
The food seemed to have lost all its flavor. The fire didn't seem to warm their bodies. Sleep didn't come easily and what little sleep to be had proved unsatisfying. The only dreams were nightmares. Morning was just a trio of dying lamps.
Ryuki slept well that night. Somehow, knowing the path forward assuaged the tension in his mind. He finally had a real goal , a real mission in all the coldness that enveloped. The unknown ,the shadows that grabbed at him, seemed to shrink away from him. The air seemed to clear up as the fog over his mind dissipated.
Ross left the group to speak with Ryuki alone. He was unsure of what to say. Perhaps an apology first, he thought. He didn't want stay silent while the veritable end approached. He wanted to make amends for his outburst.
Ryuki lay in his folding cot, sleeping soundly for once. Ross wasn't sure if it would be polite to wake him up just to speak with him. He stood at the entrance for longer than he realized while he contemplated what to do and to say. Ryuki turned in his cot, yawning as he broke his sleep.
Ross walked in, silently cursing himself for barging in so quickly. "Sir, permission to speak?" he nodded his head as he was still shaking off the last wisps of sleepiness. "Sir, why are you doing this?" Ross asked.
It sounded like a simple question and could have been answered with a concise and courageous response. It wasn't that easy. There were real reasons why he decided to stay behind. "Im the captain of this crew and its my job to ensure your survival. If you consider what it takes to take down this ship then you know that it won't be easy and will take a long time to do it. The only way to be sure this thing never gets off the ground is to self-destruct the reactors. Im not a pilot or a ship captain so I won't know how to do it through the bridge controls" he said.
"Sir , at least let one of us help you program the ignition, I mean someone can help you so you can get out of here with us?" Ross asked.
"How long would it take to do that? No one here has experience with ships like this. We're soldiers. Even Karin probably wouldn't know what to do. These systems are not anywhere near similar to anything we've fiddled with. Our mechs were designed so tinheads like us can use them. The only thing any of us really know is the manual self destruct. If this ship is what I think it is, then it means its located at the foot of the main console, like in all the other ships we hitched on".
"But sir, you can set the timer to give you enough time to escape" Ross said with with his hands beckoning to Ryuki to consider what he was saying. "Any time I give it is time enough for those things to wreck any escape plan. There is no way we can know if they can't just abort the self-destruct. They're parasites, what if they have control of something that lets them do that? You know what, we already saw that. Those burned bodies we saw when we found those polyps, those were people. They were already using them", Ryuki told Ross as he stood up from the cot.
"Sir, we can't just leave you here" Ross implored.
"You are not leaving me here. You are being ordered to evacuate when the chance arises. I brought us here, on my orders. I will make sure that you get off this ice rock. And I expect you to fulfil your mission when you escape" Ross continued.
In his mind, he was astonished by his new found volition. Every word he said felt so true. It had been so long since he felt such confidence coursing through him. No more fear. It was at that moment that he realized what the darkness was. It was absence. It was the absence of his responsibility filling him with visions of ruthless shadows.
"Ross, we are professional soldiers. A bunch of fleshy mooks aren't going to stop us. If I'm lucky, I might even bring back a souvenir" Ryuki said as Ross walked out of the tent.
What passed for morning came the same way as it left. It was only slightly less dim than before , though thanks to the lamps it was hard to tell when exactly morning came. The new mechs were worked over by the team to make sure they were fully ready for combat. Most took this time to make adjustments. Some adjusted the height of the seat, others increased the brightness on the holographic displays.
Karin scrutinized the loadout of the mechs. All but Ryuki's mech had a standardized configuration. They all carried heavy autocarbines chambered for 60 millimeter high explosive anti tank rounds , with an ammunition feeder that could swap into cluster shells. On their left arms were combat shields with retractable bayonets ,designed to be thrust down to sever arms and legs like a guillotine. On their shoulders were Dagger semi-guided rockets inside retractable racks with a loader that an extra two loads of rockets. On their backs were two sets of weapons, one was a pulse plasma cannon and on the other an autonomous three barrel chain gun. Their heads were similarly mass produced with a single large sensor eye surrounded by a set of six smaller sensors , three to each side. The sensors sat on a gimballed ball allowing the head anunprecedented field of view.
Ryuki's mech was a combination of two machines. The Lionheart, with its small grey and white mane seemed to be some sort of leader mech, with multiple antennae that would indicate a battalion commander would have used it. But it seemed like some kind of parade showpiece instead of a war machine. What was the point? Karin thought maybe it was to make its presence on the battlefield known. But that kind of attention would surely make this a perpetual target. She pushed that thought aside when she saw the backpack unit.
Unlike most mechs, there was just the shingle weapon rack alongside an oversized thruster nozzles attach to a fin structure that ran down the center of its back. The rack though seemed to be of a singular purpose. A container sat on the hardpoint of the rack. Its size and shape meant something large was stored in it but the lack of access meant whatever was inside would take much too long to deploy in a combat.
She spotted something on the container , a symbol facing towards the mechs' back. She looked closer , using the creases and edges of the mech's massive legs as a ladder. She focused her eyesight on a yellow label, some kind of warning sticker. Then she saw it. The three orbiting hexagonal shapes around a single star-shaped dot. The symbol for an object containing fussible matter. A nuclear weapon.
She scrambled up into the pilot's deck and began to call up all the displays , searching for a schematic of the weapon bays. The menu structure wasn't easy to figure out. The future decades this ship lived in had brought with it the systems of a much more advanced user interface. Wrangling through the menus though would have been a good exercise in user experience had she entered into software engineering instead of spec-ops.
Trudging through the myriad menus,she found the weapon loadout for the Lionheart. At first it only showed what the original mech carried and none of the add-on parts. She happened upon the conformal parts menu ,showcasing all the abilities and weapons associated with them.
It was here that she found what the BSRM-1 weapon was. It was a two part weapon system, a rocket motor and a compound warhead containing four bombs. Each bomb ,she saw, was rated as ten kiloton nuclear warheads. With three of the warheads, the mech had the capability of absolutely leveling several cities within a fifty kilometer radius.
She jumped out of the mech and searched for Ryuki. He was was standing outside his tent, adjusting his hardsuit visor shield. She spoke like a machine gun sputtered bullets. "Slow down! What is it?" Ryuki said.
"Your machine, Sir, is equipped with a set of nuclear ballistic missiles, three of them. Theres enough in there to turn this ship into radioactive sludge. Such a weapon mounted to a mech would have been for a singular purpose. To eradicate an entire population. When he saw himself refute that word, he thought that Colonel Morimoto was telling the truth. But with this, what would he have done to accomplish his mission? But her, in the pits of a frozen over hellscape, there wasn't any leeway to consider the morality of his future self.
So he didn't deactivate the weapon there. As long as the warheads were unarmed, there wouldn't be any danger. He wondered if he would make the choice, whether to launch them. Wistfully, he wondered if he had the willpower anymore to make that decision.
The final preparations were made. Using the ship schematics scrounged from wreckages and the think-tanks sensor drones and radar dome, the estimated their location. They needed to march towards a freight elevator about 200 meters away and then go down it to the command and control there was the CIC ,the combat information center , which would have access to the auxiliary bridge. From the ship layout, there would be a funicular up to a small frigate sized transport ship. It had just enough room in its cargo hold for all of their mechs.
To exit out of the ruined cargo hold, they needed to traverse the wasteland and bust down a reinforced door that led into a large hallway, designed to ferry cargo from one hold to another. That wouldn't be much of a problem as the spec-ops mechs had tool-arms that contained plasma cutters.
Getting there though would have been a hassle if it weren't for the boosters mounted on all their mechs. While missing the rocket grapples , the boosters were enough to get across the rough terrain. Karin had earlier told Ryuki that his mech had a flight log and showed that whoever was piloting it had racked up close to 200 hours of flight time. For a bulky, nuclear armed mech, it seemed to be suited for long flights.
The Ravenclaw, as the Lionheart's conformal packs were registered under, carried a triple tandem nuclear micro-reactor. Three generators produce nearly twenty thousand kilo newtons of thrust, unheard of for a mech of its size. This warmachine was designed to be fast and hit hard, an assault raider. He realized then that the reason it carried its armaments was that it would be perfect for disrupting enemy ranks. Something that could hide so easily in forests, travel so fast through the air and launch such devastating attacks would be the bane of any and all militaries. Including those that were in the thralls of the alien parasites that had retreated from Glacius.
They flew through the air, jumping from one spot to the next. Thankfully the computerized navigation also had an autopilot capability, allowing the mechs to make full use of their jump jets without the necessary skills to manual pilot them. But the noise produced from their ignition surely brought unwanted attention on them. Whatever was chasing them was still out there, hiding in the shadows and the vents, searching for them and waiting for the right moment to spring their attack.
