Bearing The Sky

The wind was howling around her like it was trying its best to shove her off the inner wall, but Supreme Commander Helen Ceres had bested tougher foes than this rearing autumn storm. The view from New Endurance's inner wall was what people in the pre-Kaiju age would have called 'cinematic'.

Now, there were barely any cinemas left on the globe, and all the one hundred and fifteen meters of titanium, ceramics and concrete under her feet could lift her up to show her were the central European wastelands north of the city, its deep gorges, sinkholes and struggling vegetation silent witnesses to the ever raging war. Even now troops were fighting on the horizon, keeping the first harbingers of the larger horde away from the city. 

Soon enough, New Endurance's great walls would come under siege again. The last time that had been the case was.. how long ago? She couldn't remember. Certainly long before her time, some two hundred odd years. A lesser leader would have cursed themself for being the one in charge at such a difficult time, but Helen had just accepted it with grim determination. She could still remember where she had been the day Thornwall fell, as could, she suspected, the majority of her city's citizens. The call had come in over her second cup of coffee. It was weird, but she still remembered the exact number and shape of the brown stains next to her mug her eyes had taken in while Nero had called her to apologize. 

Supreme Commander August Germanicus had been an old man. He'd already been a veteran sixer at the time he accepted the command over Thornwall, and that had been over fifty years ago. Under his leadership the European Conclave had kept the city safe, and his name and aggressive strategies had earned him the name everyone knew him by. When the wall fell under the onslaught of a category ten monstrosity and all orders had been given, he had dialed Ceres' number from the pilot seat of Geisthammer, his venerable MAK. Both of them knew what was happening and how irreversible it was. 

Shackled to New Endurance by project Chrysalis, there was nothing Helen could do except listen to the man's last words. She hadn't yet watched the battle records, which probably put her in the minority among pilots, but she simply couldn't stomach it. And so Nero's tired apology looped in her head again and again whenever she found a quiet minute. He hadn't even sounded desperate any more, all emotional capacity drained out of him over long weeks of commanding a city under attack. His words were soaked in fatigue.

"I'm sorry, Helen. We couldn't hold. You'll have to bear my share of the sky for me until Chrysalis is finished. I wish you luck, forebears knows you'll need it. Godspe-"

The recording would have made for a great bit of martyr narrative and Helen had considered forwarding it to the media more than once, but deep down she knew she never would. This moment belonged to her only. Her mentor had given her so much, and she owed it to him to take this moment to the grave with her. Which wasn't far if she couldn't finish Chrysalis in the next two weeks. Normally she wouldn't even had allowed herself to think about it openly outside of her office or apartment as a precaution not to have her thoughts read by a rogue passerby, but despite New Endurance registering more than a hundred psychic adjacent metabilities, the risk was minimal on top of the wall. A frail illusion of freedom in the face of extinction. 

In the distance, Boomerang slithered toward the horizon. They were away now, and not even High Command could change anything about that if they found out. The ridiculous amount of favors Helen had had to call in to make their mission possible made her nauseous, but that didn't matter if she couldn't finish Chrysalis before the flood of Kaiju crashed over the city. 

So her handpicked band of misfits would have to do the impossible. No, not impossible. Unlikely. A thin smile dispelled a frown she didn't know she'd worn. Unlikely. It wasn't like theirs would be the strangest story metakind's bravest had written over the centuries. Still, they sure were something. There were a few unconventional troops among the Conclave's ranks: The Al-Amriki family, a family of eight pilots protecting the city of Tbilisi. The Riptide quadruplets, remote piloting their MAKs through the unparalleled strength and synchronicity of their fusion. The Quanxi collective, the five rogue pilots only affiliated with the conclave on a contract basis, roaming east asia like postapocalyptic nomads. 

But all of them had something the Boomerang troop hadn't: Synergy. At least, that's what they hadn't had when Helen had first summoned them to her office. When they had first stepped foot through her door, the antisynergy had almost been comical. Reven, oozing contempt and thinly veiled rage toward the others. Daphne, leaving no opportunity to point out how she was the right pilot for the job. Even a tiny bit more right than the rest. Her overcompensation wasn't fooling anyone. Lynn, so full of childish enthusiasm it physically hurt Helen, painfully mismatched with the rest. And Neo, who, even before having the weight of the world dumped on his shoulders, had looked like a fish out of the water.

One of the many drawbacks of funding and commanding this operation so secret it was kept strictly on a need-to-know basis was that Helen hadn't been able to run her choice of pilots by anyone else before conscripting them, but she had chosen carefully. 

Reven had come with the personal recommendation of Jeanne Leroux. Scans done on her Lucky Number Seven without her knowledge had confirmed Leroux' suspicion; Its core showed a density normally only present in the most seasoned of MAKs. There was no way her official kill and assist record matched LN7's core strength, which meant she had withheld kills from rescue and scouting missions. She was a more formidable fighter than anyone save Leroux and maybe her mechanic knew. On top of that, she had invaluable experience of operating in the wasteland, far from resupply lines.

Daphne had been assigned a bleeding edge MAK only weeks after successfully testing for fusion capability, a coincidence too good to be true. Extensive research revealed that this was thanks to her brother getting up to his neck in debt in favors, though the girl likely didn't know it. Helen didn't know what exactly her troubled family backstory was, but she didn't choose her because of who her father had once been and instead due to the excellent ratings her previous troop leaders had given her. Helen had reviewed her combat footage, and Daphne Walker really had it in her. If she survived this ranging, she might one day become a great pilot.

Lynn was a prodigy, and it was a medium sized scandal she'd been allowed to rot in second rate Homeguard troops so far. Even if Helen hadn't chosen her for this, she would have asked Jovic to take her under his wing. Kids with this much potential didn't come along often, but more often than any of them ever knew. There were many reasons most of them didn't stick the landing; overconfidence, underappreciation, bad luck. But Helen's intuition told her that something about Lynn was different. Only time would tell if she was right, and if she wasn't neither of them would be around to regret it.

Neo was the only one of the bunch who hadn't been chosen for his skill in the cockpit, though that was solid also. Sifting through the selection of candidates, it had pretty quickly become clear to Helen that, regardless of her final team's composition, she would need a counterbalance to all the eccentrics. Neo was the only pilot she had access to that had the potential to be a good leader both on and off the battlefield, and that was just what she needed. His metability came in handy, but Helen had liked him from the second she'd set her sights on him. On his picture in the database he looked like a deer in headlights, but the reports about him showed he kept a cool head in the face of great adversity without fail. She needed someone like that to lead this venture, and so he'd been the first one she'd conscripted.

A reach, that's what this whole endeavour was. But when she'd talked to Jovic and Shen after their respective, more or less brief meetings with the troop and sent Smirnoff to snoop on them at the Workshop, they painted for her a picture that exceeded her expectations. Crises never failed in bringing people together. Either way, their fate was in their own hands now. Godspeed.

When the storm broke over her, it wasn't gradual or gentle. From one moment to the next, Ceres got hit by a torrent of rain and hail that soaked her to the bone in seconds. Last she remembered the stormfront had been a few minutes away, but apparently she'd been lost deeper in her thoughts than she noticed. In the downpour, she whipped out her datapad. Seventeen unread high priority messages, three missed calls. Thunder cracked above.

"Is everything alright, ma'am?" At her questioning eyebrow, Ivan shrugged. "You sighed quite loudly, ma'am." Ceres exhaled through her nose, blowing a raindrop down her upper lip. "Same old, Ivan. Let's get back to work."