Kick the Sphere 11 (Patreon)

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 11 (interlude)

-VB-

They called her the elder.

Considering that she was now over a hundred years old, her title made sense. She’s seen generations come and go a few times. She’s seen it all. Before she had been the elder, she had been the advisor. Before she had been the advisor, she had been the youngest granddaughter of the governor of Dansur under the Free Worlds League.

Her entire family was here when the Capellan raid on their world destroyed the HPG, spaceport, and the only manufactory the planet had. The loss of those three infrastructures basically ended Dansur’s participation in the greater Free Worlds League, and soon, the League forgot about them. Why would they even remember when Dansur wasn’t important even before the loss of all of those infrastructures?

Dansur had been a sparsely populated, strategically irrelevant, trade-insufficient, and very minor player within the League.

So the League abandoned them.

Abandoned her family.

Her grandfather died to looters. Her parents died of disease. Her sisters got kidnapped and she never heard from them again.

She survived because she was the smart, gardening ugly duckling. No, she never bloomed to become a beautiful swan. She stayed an ugly duck, but it didn’t mean that she didn’t find love.

Daniel was such a man…

And now, their great-grandson came reporting.

“Elder,” he greeted her formally.

“Jarod,” she greeted from inside her small hut house filled to the brim with herbs. Soon, they would become less useful when the foreigner inevitably created a market for real medicine, but until she could get her hands on simple pills like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, she would continue to serve her village as a medicine woman. “What news do you bring from the mercenaries?”

Her great-grandson had none of her ugly features. His grandmother, not quite ugly, had married a handsome man just like her Daniel, and Jarod’s father won himself a pretty war bride from the now-dead forest raiders.

Jarod gulped. The tyke never got comfortable around her. Maybe it was because she beat the shit out of him when he almost got kidnapped by the raiders for his foolishness. “The mercenaries now have some kind of infantry armor that their commander is calling ‘IS Armor.’”

“Ho? And what do those look like, dear?” she asked with a frown on her lips.

The more powerful the mercenary company got, the less responsible they often became. On top of that, there was no Mercenary Review Board that would operate on planets no one cared about. But an infantry armor?

Where was the man getting his supplies from?

“It … has floating armors.”

She blinked.

“What?”

“Here. I made a rough sketch of it,” Jarod said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a rough parchment with charcoal drawing on it.

A part of the reason why she had Jarod take the job was that he was good at drawing. What information her people lost the ability to convey through simple photography, Jarod could do with his drawing. She took the parchment and looked at the drawing.

“He called it the basic 2nd Generation model IS suit,” he added. “And it could fly.”

She stared at the image of an armored woman in some kind of form-fitting wardress. Hovering behind her without support were two hexagonal shields.

“And did you get to see a test of this ‘IS Suit’?” she asked.

“I did,” he gulped. “The giant metal armor, the Glasgow, shot its gun at her.”

Elder waited with wide eyes. The commander had his people shoot at each other? That was uncharacteristic of him.

“The bullets bounced off some kind of … invisible shield.”

She remained silent. That sounded like science fiction except it was happening in front of her.

“My, my. Has the League changed so much that fantasy has become reality?” she muttered. “And if an infantry suit that can fight against an ultralight battlemech is called basic…”

She had miscalculated. She thought that the paradigm of her childhood remained the same as before. Why wouldn’t they? The Second Succession War had driven so much of the Inner Sphere to the ground. Innovation was rare.

The Third Succession War must have changed the course of the Inner Sphere if this IS Suit came out after only eighty years. The war must still be going on as well. Something must have also changed in the battlefield for IS Suits to be available to a mere mercenary commander.

“Jarod.”

“Y-Yes?!”

“Find out more about this IS Suits and also find villagers amenable to work for the mercenaries.”

Battlemechs were already oppressive on the battlefield on their own. How powerful must those suits be for the commander to feel confident about shooting them with his own mechs?

She must know more and know them soon.