Into the Breach

Some things never changed.  
Helen Ceres watched the horizon swallow the sun with the same carelessness it did every day, blind and deaf to metakind's puny struggles. 

In the absence of the sun, New Endurance's lights shone defiant. For hundreds of years, longer than anyone still alive could remember, the city had been an adamantine bastion. No Kaiju had ever breached its outer wall, not to mention its inner one. There had been a few close calls over the centuries, but not a single alien monstrosity had managed to set foot on New Endurance soil. It was a fact the city's Homeguard pilots wore with pride and that filled the civilian population with a sense of security.  

And it wasn't going to change on Helen's watch.  

On a normal night, the streetlamps and lit up windows would enshroud the city in a luminous corona, to be seen all the way to the Carpathians in the west. Tonight, three days into the evacuation, the upper ring lay mostly dark. About half of the homes around the city were still inhabited, and of those remaining, another million had chosen to leave the city and was waiting for their turn on the transports.
Escorted by the African Vanguard and even two troops of the Capetown Homeguard, the evacuation convoys had begun leaving for the Bosporus over the last week. Helen could still see the read guard of today's group on the horizon, but they, too, would be gone before long. If Helen's memory served, that last batch was protected by... Taio Alican of Azure Knuckle and Ranya Asura of Okhotnik. 

That's correct. 
"I hate when you do that, Clemens." 
My apologies. 

In the outer ring, a total of eighty-nine Mechanical Anomaly Killers stood ready. About half of them had sustained some amount of damage during the past weeks' skirmishes, but the frantic activity on the maintenance scaffolding around them told Helen the tech crews were working overtime to get them back in shape. Including the two troops currently in the field, that brought the number of MAKs at her disposal to ninety-seven: they were all that remained of the European Conclave after the fall of Thornwall.  

And judging by the historically unparalleled levels of fusion core radiation obstructing the satellite scopes in the north and west, a hundred MAKs might not be enough to hold what came for them. Not forever, anyway.  

They might stand a chance at turning the tide if Helen could awaken Chrysalis. If. Long term planning was utterly exhausting. There was a part of Helen that missed the simplicity of battle, where it was just one foot in front of the other and nothing else mattered. But someone had to do the shit jobs, she figured; better her than some other idiot. 

The last vestiges of magenta faded. 

The office door opened and fell shut again. Since nobody had knocked it had to be Ivan - she didn't turn around to check. 

"They're here, Commander." 
"Thank you, Ivan. Let them in."

Helen heard his feet shuffle, but lifted a hand before he could leave. She could feel him stop in his tracks. 

"Oh, and Ivan?" 

"Yes, Commander?" 

"Thank you. I really appreciate your effort. Today and every other day. I know I'm not the most forthcoming boss sometimes, and once all of this is over I'll see if I can hire someone for you to share the workload with, if that's alright with you."

"I... of course. It was... it's an honor working for you, ma'am." 

He slipped through the door again, this time without closing it. A good man. Helen had no idea if he had any idea how much easier he made her job. Maybe a little too much faith in the chain of command, but a good man. 

Muffled chatter in the lobby heralded the arrival of her roundtable knights. Her housekeeper Thea had once called them that, and somehow it had stuck.

Mel Ester was the first to enter. She was laughing at something one of the others had said, her cheerful chuckle matching her sauntering step. Despite Helen holding the title of Supreme Commander, it was actually Mel who was the seniormost of New Endurance's pilots, but only her ashen hair betrayed that fact. If not for that, one might confuse her for a woman half her years. 

About a week after Helen had taken her command, Mel had invited her to a drink at the Workshop. Her treat. Helen had been stressed and overwhelmed at the time, and the invitation had come at just the right time. Mel had listened, joked, offered advice and told Helen to call her Minky like all her close friends did. She never did unless they were in private, but ever since that day Minky had as much been her right hand as the one Helen had been born with. 

Behind her towered Ian Corhen, serious as usual. If Helen was the king of the roundtable knights, Corhen was her rook - methodical, straightforward, rock solid. When he wasn't in the field, he spent most of his time with the younger members of the Homeguard, teaching and taking care of them. Corhen didn't sleep - a side effect of his metability, one that made him a high functioning workaholic. Despite his irreplaceability for Helen's command structure, the man was the most humble person she had ever known. 

Rocking a neurosuit, a trench coat and no shoes, Fangs Jovic completed the trio. Helen knew that he could just teleport into her office whenever he liked and had the rank to support it too; physically walking in here after being invited was his way of paying respect. Fangs wasn't a permanent member of the knights, but since he spent about a fourth of his days in the city, and given his invaluable experience, he was welcome to join the sessions whenever he liked.

Between the three of them, they were probably responsible for saving half of Thornwall's multimillion population on the long evacuation trek through the central European lands, and they were here now for Helen to command. Ten years ago it might have given her vertigo. Now, looking at the aces standing around her map, she just felt proud. 

"Right, thank you for coming. Let's begin. I have prepared.."

A swooshing sound was heard as an aluminum takeout box slid over the table and came to a slithering halt right before falling over the edge. Its trajectory told Helen it must have been Minky's, who was now closely inspecting her own fingernails. Helen groaned, but her stomach groaned louder. 

"Lasagna?" Minky smirked. "Finished mine already."

"Business first, I fear."

"Whatever floats your boat, Commander."

The map table came alive at a wave of Helen's hand. In space of two meters by three, New Endurance and the battlefield that surrounded it were now floating in the air, slowly rotating around a vertical axis. 

Two batches of green dots symbolized the MAKs in the field. The city itself glowed blue; two concentric circles sheltering a few additional dozens of MAKs. But from both the north and the west, over a hundred angry red lights were closing in. The table was being fed by satellite gathered intel in real time, and once every few minutes another red dot popped up. It truly was a horde of biblical proportions.

"As I was saying, I have prepared a briefing for you, and it's a mixed bag. Bad news first: Current prognoses say that if the kaiju keep coming at us at this pace, we'll be overwhelmed in about a week. That's considering the tech crews as the main fault line, not losses in the field. If we lose pilots, it'll be even sooner. There's about a day of tolerance in the calculations for reinforcements from the land bridge, but as it stands most of their troops are digging in there to buy the civilians behind the wall enough time to safely make it to Africa."

Fangs muttered something that sounded suspiciously like kurwa. "Any info on why they're so organized all of a sudden? We don't normally see these numbers. Just our luck?"

"Looks like it. At least most of them are below category five, so that's something."

"Yeesh." Minky grimaced. With one hand massaging her own neck, she asked: "And the good news?"

"The good news are that we have a trump card to play."

Corhen's eyebrows shot up but he remained silent, letting Minky ask the question. 

"Trump card? What have we got?"

Helen leaned on the table. 

"I sent a troop north, to the well. Their hovertrans has a cloaking device Shen cooked up. They're tasked with harvesting as many fusion cores as they can, then get back here. If everything went according to plan, they're already on their way back as we speak."

Jovic didn't look surprised at all, which either meant he had a fantastic poker face or one of the pilots had talked. But to Helen's right, Corhen's frown was deep. "Ah."

Helen held his stare. If the man needed to say something, he would, but she couldn't wait forever. Minky bailed her out, but Helen had a feeling this would have an aftermath.

"Cores for what?"

Helen's smile was grim.

"MAKs, sixty-four of them. State of the art. Weapon and auxiliary systems with an energy output like nothing we've seen before, Vahl's pride and joy. The only cores we got our hands on so far that would have supported them were category tens, and I couldn't have made those disappear without a lot of questions from the likes of Barkreiter. So it's got to be fresh ones. I call the MAKs and the project Chrysalis, because they're going to protect us like one. If it works out."

Keeping the project from the council had been the real challenge, but hiding it from her closest confidantes hadn't been easy either. Telling them now took a weight off Helen's shoulders she hadn't known existed. 

Minky looked at her with one eye closed, her expression sour. A ripple of colours went through her skin. "And you didn't tell us? Why?"

"Guilt by association." Corhen and Helen responded, simultaneously. That earned him a grateful glance. "Or, like my mother would have said: Cling together, swing together. I couldn't risk that if they took me down, you wouldn't be there to take my place. The situation would have been terrible enough already if one of you knobheads had to take over, now imagine what happens if they promote Yuri."

"Smelly fucking Smirnoff." Minky shook her head smiling, but the commander could tell she hadn't taken it as lightly as she pretended. If she, too, was upset with Helen, there was no way around addressing it with them now. Helen had hoped it could wait, but shit happened. Her fist met the table.

"Listen, soldiers. You guys know you're my ride or die - I'd trust you with anything, unless I need to protect you. Sometimes my position puts me in that spot, and believe me when I tell you it doesn't make me sleep very well. But if the choice is between having you take the helm here and Yuri fucking Smirnoff or some other second rate bureaucrat, I know what I have to do. And I fucking hate it, I do, but I would do it again. Heavy is the head and such. Are we good?"

Helen looked from Corhen to Mel and back. For all their differences, the way they exhaled when they were forced to swallow a bitter truth was surprisingly similar. In the back, Fangs repeatedly tapped two fingers on his knees. His discomfort was palpable.

"We're good." Minky said, her tone a little too sunny. Corhen took a bit longer to reply but when he did, he sounded almost disappointed. "You won't hear me complain about it again, Commander. But just for the record, I still don't like it."

Then his features softened. "At least you picked the right pilots for the job." 

At Minky's silent side eye, he shrugged. "No pilot enters or leaves the city without me knowing about it. Especially if she poaches from my own troop."

"Appreciate your approval." Helen took a deep breath. "Now, tactics." 

Fangs leaned forward in his chair, his discomfort instantly replaced by the laser focus Helen valued in the man. 

"Clemens, divide the holo." 

Three lines appeared in the hologram, separating the northern and western part of the map into three slices. The western slice was mostly mountains and narrow canyons - navigating and fighting there involved a lot of verticality and quick repositioning, perfect for skirmisher type MAKs. 

"Minky, you and Ripper are going to take that front. I'd like you to take the brawlers of Homeguard two through seven with you, but I trust you to take your picks from the rest if you need more. Clemens?"

Minky's datapad flashed. She quickly skimmed over the troop compositions, then hummed in assent. 

The north-western front showed the least Kaiju population, but a look at the map showed that it wasn't about quantity. That part of the horde was lead by two category ten beasts, the largest ones in the entire mob so far. It was going to take a few heavy hitters to take them out. Helen cracked her knuckles, a sound like iron bars snapping. "That part is mine, which leaves the highlands for you, Ian."

The highlands were the largest of the three flanks, and as such were going to need an excellent strategist to orchestrate their defense. If Helen was completely honest, Corhen was more than her equal in that department. "You've got about fifty machines under your command, minus those Minky claims on top of her regiment. And you're taking Smirnoff as your XO, because if we're really being honest for a moment, he's a damn good one. Think you can handle that?"

"Yes, ma'am." The confirmation came immediately, but his eyes were already darting all over the map. Scheming, strategizing. Ever her loyal rook.

"That leaves me where?" Fangs asked, but the way he looked at Helen told her he already knew.

"You're going to drop in where the fighting is thickest. I've arranged a four-piece of helicarriers for you and whomever you choose to back up you and Terry. I'm giving you a carte blanche, except for Minky's and Ian's troops. Actually, now that I think about it: Only Ian's. But if you want anyone from Minky's, you'll have to take it up with her yourself."

Minky grinned at Fangs. "You wanna go, tough guy?" The challenge was given a playful touch by her stuck out tongue. 

Fangs scoff disguised his smile. "Think I'll pass, thank you very much. I.."

Whatever the veteran said next was filtered out by Helen's implants, which meant Clemens had engaged the noise filter. He would never do that unless he had something very important to say.

Two transponders just showed up on the edge of lake Jalpuh. Their signatures identify them as Scylla and Charybdis. They seem to be undetected by the Kaiju so far, but it is only a matter of time. What are your orders?

"On the map, Clemens." 

Her knights' laughter washed over her like a waterfall when the noise filter turned off again, but the commander didn't have any time to figure out what the joke was. Two grey dots now pulsed in the north, in the very middle of Corhen's flank. Clemens had added their transponder signature as well, and the way Fangs' laugh immediately ebbed made Helen think of a certain record purging incident a few years back. 

Fangs Jovic had nine stars to his name, but the number of conflicting emotions on his face far outweighed that amount. His gaze flickered over to Helen.

"If that's who I think it is, you don't have to wait for my permission. But you're taking the Helicarriers there and back, and you're taking Terry. I'm not letting you go out there alone right now. Understood?"

Wordless gratitude filled his eyes. Then, in an instant, he was gone.

"Never gonna warm up to that, I think." Minky remarked. "So many weird metabilities out there, yet the ability to be there one moment and gone the next just confuses the shit out of my sense of reality."

"Like you're one to talk, invisible woman." 

"Part time, sweetie. He does it all day, and makes it seem easy, too." 

Helen would have loved to banter with them for a little while longer, but more pressing matters called. 

"And there's another thing."

For all their jokes, both Minky and Ian knew when to shut the fuck up because she had something important to say. Only one of their many qualities.

"If I fall in battle.." 

The expected lump in her throat was there, but manageable. She pressed on. 

"If I fall in battle, I want you to take my place, Corhen. By rank, command would fall to Fangs, but he's not a planner. You are. The european pilots know that. And they'll follow you as they follow me to do what must be done. Understood?" 

Her calling Ian by his last name was rare, but not as rare as her closest confidantes saluting her. Strange times indeed. 

"Alright then. Get in the cockpit, and keep the drive-by looting to a minimum. We want the storefronts to still be packed when the people return, right? Dismissed." 

She sold that last quip with a sardonic smile. This office, these lieutnants. This, her, responsibility. It all might end far sooner that she had initially expected. But that was the way the cards had been dealt. 

"And, guys?" 

Minky had the doorknob in her hand already. Her questioning glance was garnished with a warm smirk. The lump was bigger now, so Helen scrapped the heartfelt thanks she had planned to say.

"Godspeed. Send in Ivan on your way out." 

________

"I've packed protein bars and electrolytes for you, enough for three days. The intravenous supply is also topped off and should last you enother week if you can't come back at all. But I'll cook if you do! Catheter nutrients are no way to live, right? I'm sure this will be dealt with in a few business days. Plus business nights, but it is what it is, right?" 

Thea always talked this much when she was nervous. While Ivan took care of everything administrative, the auburn-haired meta made sure Helen's physical needs were met. That included her meal plans, her workout schedule and, more relevantly, her fusion interface. 

Helen's Emerald Golem was an old machine. While it had been modernized over the centuries, modifying fusion interfaces was a tricky business with a non-zero risk of permanently damaging the core. So the Golem used an old neurosuit that was closer to a suit of plate armor than the sleek whole-body condoms of the modern age, old analog systems embedded in complex alloys. Helen liked it that way. 

Donning the suit gave her a sense of security, the familiar ritual that preceeded the clarity of battle. The drawback of it being so bulky was that she couldn't do it alone. Thea handed her the numerous pieces of her suit in well-practiced order and helped her out where she couldn't put them on herself. The seals hissed, snapped and clicked into place one by one, encasing Helen completely while her housekeeper blitzed around her like a redheaded whirlwind.

When it was done, the maintenance tower lift took her up to the cockpit. Metal steps rang on the gangway, then Helen was inside. Slotting the heavy overhead neural cable into her suit's neck slot came with a practiced routine. A heavy thud and the air lock snapped shut, leaving her in complete darkness. The tactical head up display booted up. And then, at last, the perfect bliss of her senses expanding, reaching out, becoming more than a single person could ever be. Helen Ceres closed her eyes, and Emerald Golem flexed its hand. 

"Pilots of Europe, this is Supreme Commander Helen Ceres of Emerald Golem. All troop leaders, acknowledge and submit status."

The comms channel came alive at once. 

"This is Echidna of EV One. Troop zero-four green, fully operational. Let's dance."

"Flashpoint of EV Two here. Troop zero-six green. Good to hear you, Commander."

Helen knew every single one of the senior officers on the channel, and she had never been this proud to serve with them. They all knew what was on the line, and yet there hadn't been a single relocation request. These people were ready to lay down their lives at her command. It was damn hard to rub her eyes with her gauntlets on, so Helen ignored the itchy feeling of her increasingly soaked collar. She had endured worse.

The last checkup customarily belonged to the second in command.

"Ripper of EH twenty. My pack is zero-five green. The Homeguard is at your service, Supreme Commander. Wield us."

It took Helen a moment too long, but when her voice finally came out, it was surprisingly firm at first. 

"My fellow pilots. I won't waste your time telling you about the stakes. You all know what we're fighting for. I am only speaking to you all right know to tell you there is hope. 

If we can hold long enough, our ranks will be reinforced by a whole legion of new MAKs. I cannot explain right now, but know that it is true. So for the first time in a long time, the clock ticks for us, comrades! Every second, every breath is a victory. When you go out there, don't throw away your lives recklessly. New Endurance has never fallen, and it shall not fall on our watch. We are the pride of the Conclave, the protectors of Europe."

Emerald Golem thrust its fist up into the sky.

"As long as we live, there is hope! As long as we breathe, we haven't lost! As long as these walls stand, the monsters cannot win! 

Into the breach, soldiers! Into the breach, my siblings!"

Helen's chest was heaving when she cut the comms, the last sentences more of a scream than anything else. But there was no response on the channel, no text messages on the HUD. Had she lost them? Had it been too much, too little buildup? Clemens had warned her about..

That was when she heard the first stomp. 

It was Trench, Corhen's sturdy machine, which had slammed its foot into the ground and was already lifting it again. Trench's heavy leg slammed down again. And again. The third time, his troop had joined in, banging mechanical fists against each other, stomping with every foot heavy enough. 

Gradually, more and more MAKs fell in until every last one applauded, their combined mass creating a deafening warrior's salute that echoed from the Carpathians to the sea, a roaring statement of defiance against a hostile world.

Emerald Golem was a gargantuan machine, but the way relief and pride fought for dominance inside of Helen painfully reminded her that the Fusion didn't increase the size of her heart.

Accompanied by the cacophony of the alarm klaxons, the gates of the outer wall slowly swung open. Almost a hundred Mechanical Anomaly Killers strode out of the safety of the rings and into the field of battle.

The siege of New Endurance had begun.