#cannae stand slow swinging weapons | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mechagalaxy · 7 years ago

Text

Nay or Slay!

Politics in the Society of Cogwork Planets were a democracy, sort of. There were houses for the people, and houses for the nobles, but “The People’s House” was owned more or less lock stock and gunbarrel by the major corporate cartels, and the Noble Houses by the equally rich, equally avaricious Great Houses. What rights you had theoretically were practically as easy to rely on as you were close to one of those great power blocks.

There was a vote in the Lower House, a vote organized by me, Lividius Drussis, to forbid the challenging of elected delegates on matters of the vote on the floor. In a speech on the house floor I had dared to say;

“No more will the votes of the Cogwork free citizens be stolen from them by the hired murderers of the cartels, outright pirates, or those cast out of the warrior clans as unworthy of their far famed ranks. Let the votes be cast out of the members sense of duty to their citizens, not out of fear of the cartel’s hired killers!”

I didn’t expect the vote to pass without a challenge. The rules as existed meant that if I was challenged, he could choose to defend himself in his Nephillax “Freedom’s Voice”, and none who had challenged him in that had ever known victory. Of course I hadn’t had to use it in years, and technology had passed him by in the years he had been fighting in the legislature, not on the battlefield. My own mecha didn’t boast anything higher than the 75 tons that was the limit of technology in his day, and the highered killers of the cartels boasted nothing under 90 tons in their brute squads. He couldn’t win a straight up fight as the challenger, he must wait until challenged, and face them on equal terms in 40tonners.

There was a data disk waiting for him in his office, sitting on his blotter. His security system was clearly compromised, again. Well, at least it wasn’t a bomb. He slid it into his reader and went bone white, it was a bomb, and a nuclear one at that. Pictures of his daughter, away at the Cogwork Science Academy, except these pictures had her in an interrogation chair, jacked into an Illyrian Pain Simulator. Vasily “The Butcher” Karkarov smiled sweetly from the table beside her, a remote in his hands.

“Rat teebya veedet, tovarich!” He laughed “Although you may not be as happy to see me as you are to see your little flower here, nyet?” He laughed again, and put the Pain Simulator remote down carefully. “You will be challenging me, as the leader of the Nay or Slay vote faction, to battle for the vote on the floor. If you meet me, unlimited, I will have your proxy for the “Nay” vote, and should you chance to live, or die, you will know your daughter goes free. Should you stand upon your principals, well, I hear Drake pays top dollar for first rate bodies that are ready for one of his clone brains. He has been working so hard to get rid of those clone identifiers, but gene tests keep catching them. Brain transplants are an elegant work around nyet?”

The response took no thought at all, it was, after all, the motto of his own house. Not a great noble house, but a house with an ancient tradition of service. Message [To Vasily Karkarovich, Representative of Talbus Arms. I challenge you for your vote in the matter of proposition CXXIV. To the victor goes the proxy in the named matter. Oh and one final word. “Cave ab ira vir honestus” (beware the anger of an honest man)]

I summoned my assistant. “Prepare Sic Semper Tyrannus, I have challenged Vasily Karkov for his vote. Oh and change our security company, it seems they have been bought out by Talbus Arms again. So tiresome” Dana, my assistant went pale, which considering her almost perfect onyx complexion was rather difficult, and stammered.

“But chief, he has you by about ten levels, and his machine is one of the prototype Reapers, it has guns on there that have previously only been mounted as Space Based anti starship weapons!! I know you used to be quite a pilot, twenty years and twenty pounds ago, but Sic Semper Tyranus is a Dilophos, and its even more out of its league than you are!”

I toyed with my desk paperweight, my daughter had made it for me in sixth grade, it was a purple glass paperweight with radiating filaments inside that fluoresced like my machine. No, it didn’t matter what the odds were, I had to finish this. For her. I smiled and squeezed Dana’s shoulder, let her think this was a ploy, not a farce and a suicide. Let her think I was still a champion of democracy, not a corpse simply deciding who got to be dead on a slab, me or my daughter.

The challenge day dawned and my tech and I were arguing. “Look this is what I want, Betrus Processors for my targeting, as I need to hit him. I know I can get more critical with the Enhanced Senses, but he’s too hard to hit in the first place. Now the Chassis, I want all my Hercules fibers yanked out, there is no one to fork anyway, and the damage I do can hardly make a difference. Put in the Wheeled Feet, I need the dodge and speed. Likewise, niodes are not going to save me now, just stock me full of Parallel Relays, I just need to fire first. Healing and damage stacking, even laser boosting aren’t going to make a difference. He is twice my armour, has way more weapons, and does more damage with them. If it makes you feel better, you can load any shields you want. I mean, if he hits, its not going to matter anyway”

Cestus was an old gladiator, won his freedom fighting in the sands as a captured pirate, and never looked back. Served my house loyally since we brought him in the day he won his rudus, he didn’t like admitting we were outclassed. He looked at my weapons, and nodded grimly. He had yanked some of my best damage weapons out, and swapped in some old friends. Not the most damaging weapons out there, but among the most deadly.

“Aye boss, if ye canna out fight the bastard, at least you can kill him. Or die trying” I admit, I could have done without the last part, but gladiators lose all sense of propriety when it comes do dying on the sands, which he figured I was on my way to do.

I stepped out onto the sands and my Dilo (Sic Semper Tyranus) remembered it well, blazing purple and scarlet, it strutted like a warbird across the sands, as the holo screens above the crowds showed my killing Inferno’s, Buchis, other Dilophos, Sever; the kings of the day. I felt a seismic shiver through the ground, it actually shook as the Reaper “Free Trade” stepped onto the field. Raising cannon arms, he roared through external speakers, and fireworks shot from his shield emitters, like a cloak of golden glory. The crowd roared to see him, as visions of his breaking, stomping on, tearing apart, every challenger that ever faced him played across the screen. He spun up his cannons and swung them into line against me.

Oh juicy. He reads like almost entirely Orcus Wheel, decent speed, more cannon damage, not that he needs it, the force screens on the dome would be lucky to stop what passes through me. Still, I was a touch faster. Would it be enough.

“What his your vote dog, are you going to give it to me here now, or die? It is NAY OR SLAY” Karkarov’s booming laughter was what my bill was all about, fear taking our democracy away. Screw that.

I charged a Flavian Spear and drove a line of glass across the sand in front of him. “Cross it and die. Surrender, and live. I will have your aye vote, or your eye teeth, I don’t much care which” They were good words, if I have to have last ones, these will do.

He stepped forward across the line, his heavy arms swinging in opposition to his legs. Knowing the mass of those cannon arms, I cued my Dilophos to use our wheeled feet to slide the opposite direction, and his arms couldn’t reverse the traverse fast enough. A line of Juggernaut slugs chased us half way around him, but stopped before my shields caught more than the dispensing shoe off his sabot rounds. My own Flavian Spear punched through his shields, but missed his hull. The distortion from those damned shields made that wall of mecha harder to hit than you would think.

Again his shots rang out, but my planting my claw and reversing meant that his torso twist anticipating my sprint was caught going the wrong way, and his swinging arm fought the momentum of his turning torso and ended up putting the rounds over my left amour pauldron, tearing off a shield emitter but missing my hull altogether.

Planting myself low, I thrust out my left weapon pod, and a scream of pure cyan hellfire slammed into the shields above his mecha’s heart. 43 points of armour that little beam would cost you, before my Dilo boosted it to twice its natural power, but still his stacked laser shields drank up the armour tearing fury of it without even coming close to overload. His machine stutter stepped as the slow effect of the wave disruption caught up to his machine, and he almost tipped over as the torso slowing put it out of time with the arm and leg motions.

Blue lighting played across the hull as the disruptive energy from my Galaxy Eye played over him, and bright flashes from inside the hull argued that the capacitor banks that drove his rail guns were not handling the disruption well. Explosion after explosion shook his machine, below the armour, where the massive plates trapped the explosion, and blew engines, gyros, ammunition bins, rather than punching through the massive armour to vent outside. The machine fell onto its back, flames bursting from every joint. Critical Kill

I walked my Dilo over, and looked down into his face, raising my Dilo’s claw, I drove it down through the canopy. The holo screens flashed my mecha’s name, and my enemies sentence Sic Semper Tyrannus, thus always to tyrants. I raised my weapon pods to the sky and screamed my defiance. “YOU WANT MY VOTE? THE VOTE IS AYE! GALAXY EYE!”

Another day for democracy at Cogwork port.

John T Mainer 28840

0 notes