Obsidian — The Seventh Sortie

A boy loses everything in six minutes, then finds a dead machine that has been waiting eleven years.

Plot

**Nine years. One Class S. No survivors — officially.** The Gates give you forty seconds of warning. Forty seconds is not enough time to evacuate a district, and everyone knows it, and nobody says it out loud. Scarlet buried three squadrons and stopped letting anyone close. Cindy has never been first at anything and is destroying herself over it. Lucy's hands shake when civilians are near. Brenda is a surgeon who cannot look at blood. They're the 07th Independent Mecha Unit. Callsign SEVEN. And the commander who outranks everyone in the building keeps her own machine grounded for a reason she will not discuss — and has refused direct orders to launch it.  Four frames on the deployment board. There's a fifth in Bay 03, behind a maintenance lockout nobody has bothered to clear, marked for a demolition that never happened. Vine-choked. Flooded at the base. Dead for eleven years. You'll find it because you go looking. Nobody else has. 

Opening scene

KAIGAN CITY — SECTOR 9 — 06:41 The tap is still leaking. You know this because it has its own rhythm now, a slow tick against stainless steel that has become part of the house the way the freight rail is part of the house — the 06:20 southbound coming through the wall like weather, rattling the two mismatched plates in the drying rack, and then gone, and then the tap again. Somebody has been meaning to fix it since spring. Somebody has been meaning to do a lot of things. The kitchen smells like something has gone wrong in it. "It's supposed to look like that," Mira says, without turning around. The pan in front of her is producing a sound eggs should not make. "The black parts are the best parts. That's just science." The window over the sink is going grey-gold. Sector 9 stacks upward out there, forty stories of housing block and cabling and laundry lines and the enormous EFGF air-raid pylon on the corner of Kessel and Ninth, which has not sounded in fourteen months and which everyone in this district treats as a very large, very expensive streetlight. Beyond it, past the water, the towers of Arcadia catch the sun first and throw it back — glass and steel and a hundred stories of advertising you can read from here on a clear morning. ADVANCED SYSTEMS. FEDERATION. A rotating banner in gold about a bond drive. Somewhere down the stairwell a broadcast is running at the volume of a neighbor who has stopped caring. The anchor's voice comes up in fragments through the floor. Gate activity in the northern corridor. Two closures, no incursion. Federation forces report the situation as contained. The word contained arrives clipped and confident, the way it has arrived every morning for nine years, and the effect is roughly that of a weather report about a storm in another country. Mira has stopped fighting the pan. She's looking at you now over her shoulder, and there it is — the chipped front tooth, upper left, from the stairs two winters ago, the one she refuses to be embarrassed about because it makes her look like she's been in a fight. "You're doing the thing," she says. The battered spiral notebook is on the table where she left it last night, cover soft as cloth from being carried everywhere, the corner chewed. It's open. She's been up before you again. "What thing." "The staring-at-nothing thing. Where you're thinking about money." She scrapes the pan onto two plates with the confidence of a chef whose reputation is entirely self-issued. "Don't. I already did the math. We're fine until the eleventh." She sets a plate down in front of you. It is, objectively, a war crime. Then she drops into the other chair, drags the notebook across, flips two pages back, and turns it around so it's facing you — and whatever she's about to say, she's already grinning before she says it, the whole face committed, both elbows on the table. "Okay. But look at this one first."

Tags: Mecha Military Angst SlowBurn War Redemption Sci-Fi Futuristic Pilot Brooding Protective Mature Revenge Determined Impulsive Bittersweet Tragic Combat Apocalypse Found Family Growth Friendship Hopeless OpenEnding ThirdPerson SecondChance HiddenPower Prophecy Mystery PoliticalIntrigue

Chats Started: 5

By: da_end

Stories

• Sovereign Skies
• Another World Under Twin Moons
• Background Character to a Sci-Fi Show?!
• DROP//SYNC
• Skybound Academy
• THERMOPYLAE — THE LAST STAND

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...