by AnActualCrow
Project Armada will not be remembered.
People will take pictures and write books. They will cast it onto film and bronze, commit it to terabytes of jpg and gif and pdf. They will have an image of a mech, larger than history, grappling an equally colossal monster. They'll pat themselves on the back for this, believing that they have immortalized Project Armada.
And maybe, for a brief moment, Armada truly will be this. But it did not begin that way.
Before Armada, there was data. Ever since the Dragonslayer's first and final battle, there were blips in the spreadsheets. What first looked like errant readings on seismographs quickly became evidence that there could be, must be, things moving deep below Hy-Brasil. Big things. And then there were readings east of Australia, and in the Indian Ocean, and near Argentina. Some thing — some things were starting to stir. Some things were starting to go up.
Humanity had 30 years to prepare.
We got lucky at first. Before we had anything safer than nuclear energy, before we'd invented lightweight wonder-alloy and non-intrusive control mechanisms, we had a prototype mech ready to fight in case the horde came early. But there was no early onslaught of creatures. The few creatures that did show up were harmless. Unthreatened and unthreatening, the lumbering giants that once destroyed the Veil were more interested in being tourist attractions than fighters. The more we insisted that the creatures lurking down there were still a threat, the less anyone cared. We needed to show the public we weren't another money sink with big dreams.
Then, our prototype abandoned us. The autonomous piloting system stopped responding to us and followed one of the beasts back into the ocean. When billions of dollars and over two decades of our work ran away, we went from a bad joke to a really good one.
Foundation Mecha folded after that. We didn't have a choice. The Coalition had already started their own mech program, and the Foundation made a big show of how they were giving everything to the GOC and stepping away from the project. Of course, transferring all our staff and facilities meant that production was back to normal after 6 months. Hell, sharing notes with the GOC let us work faster.
— Alan Wei, Paraintelligence Expert
Some nights, Andrew Morales dreams of being back home. Most nights, he dreams of Mississippi Queen. Mech Number Six, the trickster, built nimble to navigate Hy-Brasil's urban environment. It's in the hanger now. Towering, unmoving, the titan held to the wall by clamps bigger than cars looked like the statue of an angry god. It was a monument to be revered. It largely stayed that way, with Morales' pilot training instead taking place in a simulated world.
He's in there now, plugged into a pod with a fishbowl screen, facing off against a sturgeon molded into the shape of a knight. Its scales are thick, with rows of bony scutes that are impossible for Mississippi Queen to crack. They're even harder to block.
Seven hits, six blocks, seven dodges. Follow the rhythm.
Morales punches when he can and maneuvers when he can't. Punch-punch dodge. Punch weave-deflect. All to the beat of the drum reverberating off the pod's walls. The creature latches onto Mississippi Queen's right forearm and yanks it to the ground. She buckles over. Grabbing, twisting, tearing, she frees herself. The creature throws its scute-plated tail into the back of Queen's legs. She stumbles.
"Don't get frazzled." Lucille's voice comes through over the drums. "Find your rhythm."
Mississippi Queen spins around. The creature's right behind her, two scaled fists raised to the sky. Thump thump. Mississippi Queen jumps to the side. Thump. The creature's arms go sailing past. Thump. Queen winds an arm back. Two fists resonate off the creature's skull. Thump thump.
The image on fishbowl blurs as a number comes into focus: 18/20.
"How's the drum?" Lucille asks.
"It's good. I just wish I was getting nineteens."
"It's not about the number. It's about the-"
"-the improvement. I know. Except I bet you were getting nineteens by this point in your training."
"You don't know that."
"Did you?"
Every time Lucille goes silent, Morales swears he can hear a subtle whirring. Possibly a desk fan. "I don't pilot Queen. The numbers aren't equivalent."
Morales mutters some things under his breath that Lucille pretends not to hear.
"I'm assuming you want to run it one more time before lunch?" Lucille asks.
The sharp tone of the intercom pierces the cockpit through its PA system and again through Lucille's microphone. "All personnel, prepare for deployment of Mech Number Six. This is not a drill. Launch in sixty minutes."
PRE-CLASSIFICATION BRIEFING
Placeholder Name: Loch Ness Giant
Still frame of footage taken between camera outages.
Loch Ness Giant was discovered on 05/03/2017 in Hy-Brasil's Black Rock Beach. Personnel were alerted when multiple Foundation-accessed cameras simultaneously stopped transmitting footage. The devices had been manually disabled with the login credentials of the late Ken Porter, a mech pilot predating Project Armada. Porter's clearance level was revoked and affected cameras were rebooted. They were quickly disabled a second time using the credentials of the late Maria De León, a mech pilot predating Project Armada. Procedure following first camera outage was repeated.
Potential Anomalous Properties/Phenomena:
- Colossal
- Digital
- Data-based
- Spectral
Last updated 13 seconds ago…
People in uniform and carts of equipment flow through the hallway — a rolling thunder of footsteps that keeps churning, constantly overtaking itself as the quicker walkers shift to the front of the line and the slower ones fall towards the back. Andrew flows with them, already in his control gear.
On the top floor of the compound, a phone rings.
Lucille Boshe, Pilot: Director, I realize that this is an emergency, so I'm not challenging your decision. But why him?
Amanda Kohen, Project Director: You mean, why not you?
L. Boshe: …
A. Kohen: You know why: Morales is a capable pilot with an operational mech. Trinity Sun still needs repairs.
L. Boshe: I don't need the weapons systems. I can run reconnaissance.
A. Kohen: So can Morales. We need the option to do both. We don't even know what this is.
A technician with a plastic syringe double-checks the control gear as soon as Andrew walks into the hangar. He slips the needle into metal rings dotted along Andrew's gloves, boots, and vest, injecting more conductive gel between his skin and the metal contacts.
"You're clear." His voice barely picks up over the machinery and other callouts echoing off the walls. Andrew spays his fingers, twists around, disperses the gel into a thin, even coat. The technician circles Andrew one last time, muttering to himself as he makes sure all the straps are strapped and all the cables are plugged in. He claps a hand on Andrew's shoulder. "Make us proud."
L. Boshe: (inaudible)
A. Kohen: You're not piloting Mississippi Queen.
L. Boshe: How—
A. Kohen: I know because I know you, Lucille. You want to save everyone. And you want to save him because you don't think he can save himself.1
L. Boshe: …
A. Kohen: I get it. But this is his fight.
Kohen's voice comes over the PA system, "Launch in 15 minutes."
Morales climbs a staircase higher and higher, spiraling from the sole of Mississippi Queen's foot to the back of her head. Two assistants are waiting for him at the top. They double-check his vitals and hook the control gear into the cockpit. Bend and twist, offer a hand or a thigh or a head as each plug latches into its socket. Half a dozen wires plugging into his back zip-tie together into a single, multi-color braid.
Even before she turns on, Morales feels that she's watching him. Every motor signal, every errant twitch and deliberate motion will conduct through the gel, up the wires, into the heart and limbs of Mississippi Queen.
Somewhere deep in the heart of the colossus, fans begin to whir. The cockpit's head-up display flickers to life, Project Armada's helm of swords appearing in the top right as system diagnostics dash down the glass. Ten unseen lines appear and disappear with every blink. The cockpit shudders. Old metal joints come to life again. The clamps binding Mississippi Queen to the wall whine as they release, one shrill centimeter at a time.
After the transfer, everyone from the GOC and Foundation Mecha had this fire to make up for lost time. We knew the situation was worse than the public believed. A single mech wasn't going to cut it when it mattered most. We needed to build a fleet, each member specialized in something else so that no matter the threat, there was always something to stand up to it.
We were working against the clock to do the impossible. That was when we started calling ourselves Project Armada.
— Catherine Clarke, Recruiter
The hanger door starts to open. A seabird, uncaring, lands on the roof of the compound. It had listened to the construction inside the hangar all its life. The roof ran warmer than the surrounding buildings. This building stood taller than the ones around it. In the eyes of a seabird, that was all that mattered.
Mississippi Queen's weight shifts slightly as she's freed from the wall. The cockpit screen's white-on-black terminal is swallowed by an image of the outside world. Morales takes a step, then another, then another. His fourth step takes him clean over a street. A few more and he's down the block.
In front of him is Black Rock Beach. Thirty years ago, it was one of Hy-Brasil's liveliest beaches. Now, it's littered with abandoned beach towels. Seared by the nuclear flash, half-buried by time, forgotten by people whose scramble for safety was almost certainly in vain. An abandoned buggy rests dead on the pavement as Mississippi Queen steps over another road and onto the sand.
"Loch Ness Giant's approaching from the north. All we know is that it's big and walks on two legs." Kohen says, "We want you to non-violently intercept it. We don't know if it's hostile."
Morales hears a thump coming from outside the cockpit as he moves north. Then another. The footfalls of the giant clash against the sounds of the waves again and again. Each time, the giant takes a little more. The thumps grow louder, reducing the crashing waves to background. Morales takes a deep breath. The giant rounds the cliff in front of him.
It's a walking battleship. Grey plates of curved armor shift back and forth as the giant moves across the sand. Even with the armor, Morales can see that this isn't one of the ocean monsters he's trained to fight. Where one might expect flesh, there are pistons, ventilation shafts, and all the other assembly-line organs that allow a giant metal man to walk on two legs. But it's not entirely artificial — the giant's body is studded with barnacles and slathered in dark blue blood that shimmers in the sun like an oil slick. It hasn't finished drying.
"That's it," Morales says to no one in particular.
"That's it," Director Kohen responds. "It could be…" On one hand, it makes sense: the prototype, the runaway, gone before Project Armada had its name. On the other hand, it would have taken a daisy chain of miracles for it to have survived this long. It would be as close to impossible as things get. "If that is Manhattan Child, then…" the rest of Kohen's sentence is drowned in feedback as her hand tightens around the microphone. "Be careful out there."
"I'll try."
The giant's cameras peer into Mississippi Queen's head, a human pilot faintly visible through the cockpit's tainted windows. Within its own head, there's a thicket of wires and sensors. Inside that thicket is a black box the size of a refrigerator. What exactly is inside that box will never be declassified. When the Armada records are censored and released, that box will be mentioned only in passing. It will be a loose end not worth chasing, a missing tree forgotten for the forest. An extremely scrupulous reader, combing every archived footnote, will find three key words:
- Gödel-class
- Repurposed
- Chess
That box soaks in all the data, all the camera footage and audio and recordings it had picked up over the last fourteen years. A white piece moves. For a game of this scale, there are not many pieces left. Even so, the mech and the boy inside it have been communicated to the chess game's players. A moment passes. Then, black moves.
Alfil to e16 — "Engaging."
The giant's arm reaches for Mississippi Queen's shoulder. Morales forces it aside. The giant's left arm cocks back. Queen bobs to the side and sends a punch into the giant's torso. It's time for Morales to perform.
First comes the percussion section. Andrew can see the training monster in his mind. His body remembers what punches to throw. His mech follows. Bob, weave, retaliate. Mississippi Queen punches in single paradiddle: right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. The giant misses again. Morales lands another two punches. Routine tells him to aim for anything that would cause internal bleeding. The giant doesn't bleed. Instead, a glowing light, nuclear cyan in color and origin, escapes through the gaps in its torso armor. With each punch, it grows like a flame stoked by a bellow.
The giant retreats a step. Then another. Queen closes the gap every time. The giant's armor grows dimples. Then divots. Then dents. Too slow to escape, too massive to get knocked away to safety, the giant kicks at Queen's right hip. Routine tells Morales to catch the leg. Wrong move. Mississippi Queen stumbles away from more inertia than she was ready for. Being built before the invention of lightweight armor plating did more than make the giant slow. It made the giant close to unstoppable.
Queen catches herself and turns. It's the giant's turn to close the gap. Two fists come crashing down. She steps to the side, but the fists catch a plate of armor on her arm. It crumples. She backs away.
"You're going to let two hits scare you off!?" Kohen yells.
"I'm finding my rhythm!" Morales yells back.
As the giant chases him, Morales realizes that it's hardly gotten any slower. All the dents he's given it, all the claw and teeth marks it's earned from past foes, they only matter when they force the warped armor plates to scrape against each other. If he wanted to beat the giant this way, he'd have to pulverize the armor and then destroy whatever is underneath. Or, he can try something else.
The giant lunges towards Morales, its clenched fist eager to catch his retreat. Morales steps forward and to the side. He ducks the punch. All he can see is the giant's exposed flank. Morales is ready to bring out the string section.
Mississippi Queen's right pinky falls towards the earth. An unspooling length of metal still connects it to her hand. To a human, it's a bridge cable. At the scale of a mech, it's garotte wire. Morales can't choke a machine, but he can bring it to the ground. She flicks her wrist. The pinky finger sails past the giant's neck before being caught in Queen's left hand. The giant feels a yank from behind. It hardly stumbles. Too heavy.
It must be the prototype.2
The giant's elbow smashes into Queen's chin. The giant won't let her fall. A yank on the cable throws her back into the giant's shoulder. A left hook collides with her temple. Her left hand drops the cable. The giant's grip on it tightens.
Director Kohen wants to yell at Morales to free himself. She stops herself. He knows what he has to do — but no one knows how to do it.
Mississippi Queen is yanked up for another hit. Morales brings Queen's arm in front of her face to block it. It helps. Barely.
Cara Malina's screen flashes warnings at her. She's staring at a diagram of Mississippi Queen. Everything above the shoulders is changing from yellow to orange to red. Connectors, mechanical joints, neck stabilizers, they're all starting to fail. She flips the override switch just in case she needs to use it. She prays she won't. She prays she won't have to eject Morales remotely.
Morales has lost track of how many hits he'd taken since the giant turned Queen's right arm into a leash. As he fights back another wave of nausea, an epiphany: Tchaikovsky. He gestures and the tops of Queen's rail mounts pop off. Underneath are two artillery cannons.
All he needs is a clear shot. All he needs is to get perpendicular to the giant. And he has to do it while Queen's right arm is being held up.
Mississippi Queen's head lazily sways into the giant's punches. Morales tries to shut everything out. To think through the whiplash. Closing his eyes only makes the nausea worse. How much more vomit can the cockpit take? His hands come off his face. Queen drops her left shoulder, her palm falling to the ground. There.
The first shot careens into the giant's face. The second shot finds its lower torso. Two direct hits. Morales hears the giant stumble back. He feels it let go of Mississippi Queen. She starts to stand up—
"YOU NEED TO MAKE MORE ROOM," Kohen's voice screams through the cockpit. Morales looks up. The giant's done stumbling. It's hardly an arm's length away. A push off the giant's back foot covers most of the distance. It swings—
What happens next is a matter of perspective:
Morales sees a fist, then the sky, then the ground, then the sky, and so on. He sees the eject lever, placed impossibly far from him by centrifugal force. His hands are pinned beside his head.
Malina sees a warning for critical joint damage, then an error. The diagnostic system wasn't built to handle these sorts of incidents.
Kohen sees the first half of her career's biggest failure.
Everyone else in the command room sees Mississippi Queen's head tumble through the air as her body stands comparatively still.
Source: Command Room, wall-mounted camera.
Malina presses the remote eject button.
MISSISSIPPI QUEEN is unresponsive.
Malina presses the remote eject button two additional times.
MISSISSIPPI QUEEN is unresponsive. Malina's hand slowly covers her mouth.
A. Kohen: Pull him out! What's wrong with you!
Director Kohen reaches over Malina's shoulder and presses the remove eject button.
MISSISSIPPI QUEEN is unresponsive.
C. Malina: The signal receiver's in the torso…
That's the second half of Kohen's biggest failure.
The last thing Andrew Morales sees is the ground, but everyone will learn to convince themselves it's the sky. Somehow, it feels better that way.
And then it's over.
A few people in the command room pray. To God. To the universe. To the gargantuan robot that appeared suddenly, almost magically, from the sea, heralding Morales' time to die. It's standing there now, unmoving, the body of Mississippi Queen resting against it like a tired lover. The right side of its face is blasted open, colorful wires and magnetic tape dangling out the wound. Its chest plating is punctured and torn, dented metal regressing into warped and twisted ribbons. Its functioning cameras fixate on the mechanical head that holds Andrew Morales' corpse. The black box in the giant's head shudders against its bindings as a new player joins its game.
Cara closes the diagnostics window and pauses. There's a request to change the Project Armada database. In most cases, this means updating the clearance level of a researcher or changing the measurements of a redesigned component. These requests are the kind of things that happens on slow weekdays, not during an emergency. She opens it while Kohen peers over her shoulder.
Manhattan Child's head has turned. Not towards the cameras, but towards the Armada Hy-Brasil compound itself. Malina looks up at Director Kohen. If Kohen was alone, she'd put her head in her hands.
Eventually, she speaks. "Let it in."
"Director, do you trust-"
"No. But we can't stop it either way."
Malina approves the database changes. "I'm not sure if it's mounting mechanism is the same as Queen's. It looks like it has mounting rails, but even minute differences could prevent it from being securely mounted."
Kohen nods. "We can modify Manhattan Child as needed."
With a press of a button, the hangar door starts to open. "Do you think we're making the right choice?" Malina asks.
Kohen looks down at her. "I don't think we have one."
"A choice, or a right one?"
A seabird jumps from the roof of the compound. The wind lifts it above the city, above the beach, into the cloudless sky.3
And so Manhattan Child, the firstborn, the prototype, the ghost vessel, the loch ness titan with a uranium heart, traces Andrew Morales' gargantuan steps back to the hangar. The corpse of Mississippi Queen is not so lucky. Stripped for parts, left to rot, she's salted and sanded by the elements.
One day, when Hy-Brasil once again becomes a place a child can grow in, Mech Number Six's empty frame and forgotten armor plates will become a forbidden jungle gym for the island's most daring children.4 Some of the more creative ones will spin tall tales about the robot's head. Some will say it was hit so hard you can still hear it echoing, others will say that its brain has a living person trapped inside who's desperate to get out. Regardless of how the stories start, they'll all end the same way: if you put your ear against the robot's head on a silent night, you can just barely hear a thumping.5
