During the protracted Tellarax Campaign, near the beginning of the year 451 CE, disaster befell Madoka "Immortal" Cooper1 of the Blue Hawks Mercenary Company, and by extension the Blue Hawks as a whole.
She'd been riding high, the company's golden girl, with the lowest Repair Cost/KPM ratio recorded according to their surviving archives2. This all changed when one day3, seemingly out of the blue4, Maxine "Mad Max" Cooper1, her wife of 7 years, defected to the Sojourn Conclave United Mercantile, absconding with her mech6, along with the latest strategic plots and intel about the Blue Hawks' plans to liberate the beleaguered Moon of Tellarax IV7.
"Immortal"'s star fell, and she lost the trust of her coworkers - and most importantly, their respect. Especially when soon after, they were ambushed during a relief mission, and at least half of their fighting strength was wiped out, the abandoned mechs captured by enemy forces. Her callsign was stricken from the company records, and replaced by the pejorative "Bitchless", up to and including on the side of her privately owned machine8, laser-etched as an eternal reminder of her own personal, bewildering grief.
This might seem cruel and unnecessary, but I'm sure the good men in charge of the Blue Hawks Mercenary Company had their reasons9. I would however like to speculate10 that precisely this event would later directly lead to what will be described in chapter 6, "Rage of the Phoenix".
— Excerpt from Chapter 4 of "Down in Flames: A True History Of The End of the Blue Hawks Mercenary Company (153-452 CE)" by Pyotr Edant, historian, released by Ironworks Press in 15 NE
1: See Appendix IX: Roll Call Of 451 CE for ages, places of birth and personal history, inasfar as we've been able to piece together.
2: See Appendix X: Partial Accounting And Burndowns For 451 CE.
3: 3rd Pentday of the year is the consensus among our colleagues. Our apologies for not being able to pinpoint the exact date.
4: Of course, we now know that Maxine "Mad Max" Cooper1 had been the target of a new psychic weapon based on the then recently discovered mindslugs native to Kibou Daisan5, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
5: Please refer to this author's earlier work, "The Tragedy of Kibou Daisan: The Vanished Colony", also released by Ironworks Press, for more information.
6: A Synergy Mechanics B1-TH/C with the Repair Drone loadout, which rolled off the assembly line at Port Despair in 435 CE.
7: Which had been blockaded by the Sojourn Conclave United Mercantile for almost a year at that point, and was in dire need of relief. Our colleague Steffen Hoddie has written up a middling but solid enough history of the place in "The Tellarax System: Once The Place To Be, Now No Place At All" by Skullduggery Imprints, even though he sometimes resorts to crass flights of fancy.
8: An older, refurbished Ayukawa Robotics K1-OG with the Wings of Wrath loadout, assembled in Shin Kobe in 417 CE.
9: Reasons we can't begin to guess at, but we must trust that they had them. Otherwise, what happened after should have been obvious to them.
10: And of course, this can only be mere speculation, because as alluded to in the preface and prior chapters of this volume, it would be charitable to call our records of that period "spotty".