Chapter 38: Kidnapping XIV - Inkbird

“W-what? The Inkbird?” the director sputtered. “Have you not been listening to what I said earlier?”

Belevere shook her head. “I have been listening, and I agree, but I think that the Inkbird is a much better fit,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But it feels like something is drawing me towards the Inkbird. The Dovelight just doesn’t have the same appeal,” she said. “Have you ever heard of something like that happening?”

“Of what happening?” the director grumbled.

Belevere couldn’t tell why exactly he was so upset. Was he mad that his prediction was wrong? Or maybe he had some attachment to the mechs in his collection and didn’t want to see one of them go into the hands of someone who wasn’t really qualified to pilot it?

Regardless of what the director thought, though, Belevere was more and more certain of her choice. The Inkbird was the mech she came here to get.

“I don’t really know how to explain it. Whenever I take my mind or eyes off of her, something seems to draw my attention back to it. If you’ll excuse the sappiness, it's almost as if we’re destined to be together.”

Belevere fidgeted as she said her last sentence—she couldn’t think of any alternatives. Besides, there was no one that she was destined to be with other than Annabelle; no one else, much less a mech. 

Evidently, the director found the statement just as stupid, because he snorted. “If you’re talking about if I’ve ever heard of incidents of pilots claiming to be ‘destined’ for their mechs or vice versa, of course I have!”

Belevere looked up in surprise. “Really?”. 

“It’s pretty common, actually. It’s a bunch of romantic fools that turn out to be wanted to marry their mechs, or refuse to abandon them even when they’re about to be destroyed! Pfft... Odis, I didn’t think that you were that kind of person!”

The director finally couldn’t hold in his laughter. He leaned back and laughed. “Imagine that! The delusion! Hahaha!”

His belly laugh lasted for several seconds. Belevere frowned at being mocked, but she didn’t plan on saying anything. While the agreements had been signed already and it was too late for the director to change his mind, she wasn’t in the habit of acting ungrateful.

Suddenly, the laughter seemed to catch in the director’s throat. It died away slowly and gradually, as the director had realized something. “Actually wait...”

He put a finger to his chin, deep in thought.

“...What is it?” Belevere asked cautiously. Was he really thinking, or was he waiting for an opportunity to laugh at her? She couldn’t tell. 

He looked up, staring right at her. “Well, Odis. I know I said that what you described is pretty far fetched... and perhaps it really is to normal pilots... but you’re different.”

“How am I different?”

“Well, for starters, you are an expert pilot, well, a candidate. But both candidates and pilots are mysterious... no longer fully human,” he said. “They break the laws of reality. Who knows if reality truly applies to them?”

He squinted at her. “Perhaps it’s possible that your newfound superhuman senses, if that was what it was, told you what would be the better choice. It’s quite possible.”

“I see...”

That the director was no longer laughing at her, but was instead taking her situation seriously made Belevere feel a little better, though she still harbored her doubts.

Maybe she’ll have to hop into the Inkbird herself and feel her out personally before she could even hope to figure out the secret behind that strange feeling. A person could rave all about how a mech performed on paper, but only physically piloting a mech could reveal the mech’s secrets.

She turned to the director. “I’ve decided on the Inkbird. How long will I have to become accustomed to her?” she asked. The Academy Guards were on their way, and given how fast aerial mechs were, they’d get here much faster than the director’s car had.

The director did some maths on his finger. “You have ten minutes. To give you a bit more time, I'll brief the pilots one more time. When you leave with them, keep away from my Guards!”

He made it clear to her that he didn’t trust her to cooperate well with the Guards. Although she might be a more skilled pilot, she was a lot more inexperienced, not to mention she had not spent long hours training to fight side by side. 

“I understand!”

“Make sure you do,” the director said. He snapped his fingers, and right on queue, a door in the hall opened and a small bot rolled out. The actual signal must have been sent from his comms. The box bot stopped beside them and raised its body. The top popped open, revealing a set of keys on a velvet pillow.

The director took the keys and sent the bot away before he dropped the keys into Belevere’s hands. “Here you go. Don’t wreck her,” he warned. “I don’t want to lose the set. If you buy her off of me, I expect you to buy her sister too.”

As Belevere accepted the keys, her jaws dropped from the director’s words. “What?”

The man patted her on the back.

“It’s just a joke,” the director said, face deadpan. “Go on, you don’t have all day.”

He turned and walked away, beckoning toward Alecto who had once again faded into the background. He didn’t even say anything the whole time without being prompted.

Has he always been so quiet?

“Whatever,” Belevere muttered. “It’s time to get going.”

The mech was standing. Usually, mechs knelt when their pilots boarded to make the process easier, but this Inkbird had been a display model. 

She had to board the relatively harder way that was a nightmare for acrophobic people. 

A button on the keys caused the cockpit door to open. A line dropped down slowly. Belevere stepped forward and put one foot into the foothold at the end of the line while she grabbed onto the rope. She clicked the button again and the line retracted, pulling her up to the cockpit of the mech.

Once she was level with the entrance, she climbed in past various instruments and into the comfortable synthetic fabric seats of the mech. After she was firmly seated, she slotted the keys of the mech into the machine. 

With a faint hum, the mech began to start up as the engine and power reactor rumbled to life, injecting power into the metal behemoth. The doors closed slowly, enclosing her in darkness.

Various instruments lit up, their dials waving as they performed their start-up calibration. Finally, the mech secured her firmly to prevent her from moving too much. A large helmet descended, covering the top half of her head in order to facilitate synchronance.

A female voice sounded. “Synchronance in three... two... one...”

Belevere’s world turned white as all of her senses, even her thoughts, melded with that of the mech’s, becoming one.

Power filled her limbs, a bit slower than she was used to thanks to the size of the mechs, but she’d adjust quickly enough. She raised her arms and brought it up to her—the Inkbird’s—face, admiring the fine craftsmanship.

She moved each of her limbs in turn, clumsy at first, but she rapidly became more and more familiar with the intricacies of the Inkbird. How she had to put just a bit more force in her legs to move thanks to how the mech was balanced. The mechanical components in her arms strained against the unexpectedly heavy rifle, or perhaps her arms were just weak and more delicate instead to achieve maximum accuracy and precision when sniping.

All of these together made her feel like she was in an unfamiliar body, as if her soul had transferred into something else. With luck, most of that unfamiliarity will be gone by the time she had to leave.

“I think I’m ready to go.”

She took a step forward, carefully as to not bump into any of the mechs near her. While mechs were heavy and stable—they won’t fall so easily even when unpowered, it would still be rude.

The thick carpet absorbed some of the shock from her feet landing on the smooth floor, but the vibrations still propagated through the ground. “Walking is fine. What about running? I’ll have to go outside for that.”

As the thought flashed through her mind, the huge door at the end of the director’s collection hall began to rise, revealing the dark outside world. She vaguely recognized the view outside. She was at the bottom of the hill that the director’s mansion rested on. She urged the Inkbird forward, each step ponderous and heavy.

At least, it felt that way. The weight that Belevere felt from the legs was completely different from what she expected from a medium mech. It felt more like she was moving a heavy.

“She feels a bit clumsy on foot. I know aerial mechs fare better in the air, but this is a bit much. Did her designer cut corners?”

No, it couldn‘t be. Perhaps it was just out of necessity. Tradeoffs to improve other factors. She took a closer look, examining the legs. Belevere soon figured out the reason for the discrepancy. “No wonder. She has vernier stabilizers in her legs weighing it down...”

While the flight systems on modern aerial mechs did a decent job stabilizing the mech’s flight or hovering capabilities if they had one, they weren’t completely reliable. Fast fliers tended not to be very stable. Rarely, mechs like the Inkbird installed auxiliaries that helped. Being an extremely long-ranged sniper mech, stability was important.

“Alright then, it’s time to take you for a spin,” she said to her mech. The Inkbird strode out into the darkness outside and the hangar door closed behind her. 

Perhaps it was an automatic system.

After she got a decent distance away from the doors, enough that any minor mistakes she made wouldn’t do damage to the structure, she crouched and engaged her flight system. Force from her back thrusters pushed against the ground while anti-gravity modules installed in the mech designed to lighten the thruster’s load worked together to lift the Inkbird into the air.

“She’s... so fast!”

Compared to most of the aerial mechs that she had piloted in the Academy simulations or remotely, the Inkbird far outstripped their top speed. Of course, the Inkbird was a current-gen model compared to the relics of the previous generation she had grown accustomed to in her training, but the difference was palpable.

In most other mechs, the vibrations from flying at that kind of speed would have thrown off her aim.

“No wonder she has leg stabilizers.”

But just because the design choice for the stabilizers made sense didn’t mean that the other choices made sense. Why design a mobile sniper? Most pilots, including her, didn’t have the skill to snipe a target on the move—especially not at the huge ranges that the long rifle that was currently weighing down her right arm was capable of. 

The Inkbird was probably aimed at a niche audience. She wasn’t familiar with how the Inkbird was marketed.

More importantly, why did her supposedly superhuman sense point her toward this mech that seemed to run counter to everything she worked towards? The Dovelight was a much better fit.

“Firing the weapon here is probably off limits. I’ll just have to familiar myself with the flight and how it works. That and practicing my aiming. I’m more than a little rusty,” Belevere muttered. Her last time firing a mech rifle was maybe a few months ago? She had spent the rest of her time with her spear.

Her mech was soon more than a kilometer up in the air and still climbing. By now, the mansion was barely visible through the clouds. This high, she had plenty of leeway to maneuver and even if she fell, she had plenty of time to recover.

She urged the Inkbird into a series of loops, spins, twists, accelerations and decelerations. Many of these tricks were useless in combat, but the movements required to execute these tricks were important when fighting. The tricks were just a way to exercise those mental muscles.

Suddenly, she stopped in midair, entering a hover, and aimed her rifle, careful not the point anywhere she might regret hitting if she misfired. The barrel dipped before adjusting to the correct angle and she shook her head. “Not good enough. Again!”

Over and over, she took aim, trying to be as precise and fast as she could. It was difficult. She couldn’t completely rely on the targeting computer to do the aiming since the computer had only limited data, but neither could her human brain crunch the numbers fast enough despite having the big picture in mind.

A normal marksman pilot would have long grown accustomed to syncing their minds with their mechs, but for a melee pilot like her, her brain was wired a bit differently so to speak.

In the tiny amount of time she had left, she had to correct as best as she could if she wanted to join the Academy Guards in saving Annabelle without being a hindrance.

Belevere didn’t know how long she practiced, but soon, her sensors told her of a half-platoon of seven mechs entering her detection radius. Out of reflex, she aimed in their general direction, but the database already installed on her mech notified her that the newcomers were friendly.

The Academy Guards!

She lowered her gun and sent a greeting signal to them. After a moment, they greeted her back. As one in an organized formation, the platoon of aerial mechs descended onto the field outside of the hangar, the same one she had just come out of.

Shortly afterward, she received a message. She opened it to find that the director was letting her know that the Academy Guards had arrived. She smiled. “I already know. I saw them coming before they messaged you.”

The Academy Guards were about to be briefed and shortly afterwards they will depart on their mission to save Annabelle, with her accompanying them. The briefing probably won’t take very long, however—the director did mention that it was just to give her a bit of extra time.

The captain of the Guards might take offense if the briefing dragged on for too long. She recognized the leading machine—it was customized to Captain Maxwell’s colors. He had been a tournament finalist and was famous for his short temper. 

I have to hurry.

Belevere redoubled her efforts. She felt she had the basics of stationary sniping down, or at least as much as she was going to improve in the time she had left, so it might be better if she tried to practice shooting on the move. That will take a lot more time to grasp.

Before long, she received another message from the director, as well as the encryption keys of a private communication channel. As she connected to the channel, she realized that it was the platoon comms of the nearby contingent of Academy Guards. 

“The Academy Guards have departed. Are you done?”

Belevere shook her head. “Not yet. I still need a bit more time. However, I can always catch up to the Guards when I feel I am ready.”

The director snorted. “I hope you’re never ready. If it wasn’t for the chance to get a bombardment mech under its market value, I never would have accepted the offer of lending a novice like you a mech! Don’t make trouble for my Guards, you hear?!”

“Yes, sir.”

As the director cut off the communication, Belevere rolled her eyes and returned to her practice. Below her, she sensed the Guard mechs activating and lifting off. 

When she felt she was familiar enough with the Inkbird to not be a burden, she turned and flew toward where the signal of the transmitter had come from. It was in the same general direction the Guards had flown.