Mech Pilot who makes the machine move even after mission control ejected the cockpit.
"Look, it's simple," Bea says cheerily. "I just realised that I could still access the Docking Command Link after a reactor crit ejection—"
"I understand what you did." Anna-Maria van der Fabriek purses her lips, then coolly addresses the rest of the pilot team. "Can you give us the room, please?"
Taskforce RED MANDIBLE has been running live-frame simulations against a statistical composite model of recon captured performance data on the Butcher of Wallachia's mech, Drakul. For three months.
It's going...poorly.
The Drakul is the pinnacle of the problems of beating down the Splinter Fiefs: a vanity dragster of a mech produced by concentrating the entire resources of a neo-feudal planetary overlord on his own whims, without regard for the sort of issues the People's Navy have to deal with, such as "practicality", "budget" and "mass production constraints". It's unique, it's ridiculously overpowered, and it's armed with weaponry that the reverse engineers of the War Office would desperately like to get a close look at. It's a monster.
Another sim run has ended with their experimental brainstormed strategy dissolving in a series of ruthless, methodical (albeit simulated) reactor breaches, followed by the Count's software stand-in sweeping back across the field at its leisure, "gunning down" those pilot pods that made a successful simulated ejection.
That's one reason they call him the Butcher.
"Look, when he comes close enough to make sure the mech's disabled, you can issue simple commands over the DCL. You're not gonna dogfight that way, but if the core hasn't already popped it puts him close enough you can lock in an emergency power dive and catch him in a big old remote explosion."
"The DCL's maximum range is also inside the blast radius. We're not doing it."
"It's an option —"
"It's not a strategy," Anna-Maria says quietly. "Hoping that he cores someone's frame, but not badly enough to pop it instantly, and hoping they end up still close enough to it when he sweeps back that they can DCL, and hoping they're in a position to use that to their advantage...that's not a strategy. We're here to devise a strategy. You're here to devise a strategy. And the moment it popped into your head, you were instantly fantasising about firey mutual annihilation revenge on the Count."
There's a moment that would be a good time for Bea to deny it, which goes sailing past.
"So you're thinking strategy, suicide decoy strategy. And we're not doing it."
"It'd work," Bea says stubbornly.
"Simply leaving the neo-feudals in charge of the Splinter Fiefs would work," Anna-Maria says, folding her hands in that extremely annoying way that shows off the delicate bones of her slim wrists, "if we could stomach it. Conscript armies of fifteen-year-olds in mechs so singularly designed to hammer us that they don't bother fitting landing gear works, if you can stomach it. We're not out here to stomach things."
Bea can already tell this is another discussion where she gets flattened by Anna-Maria's sincerity and law-school-trained rhetoric. Law school; and out here chapping her ass in a mech pilot's seat.
"What are you out here for, then?" she says wearily, since this isn't going to go anywhere useful anyway, and she's startled to see something sharp-edged and genuine on the other's face, just for a moment, before the Baronet's evasive pleasantness whisks shut over it.
"Well, you might not know this," Anna-Maria says, the picture of authentic pilot jokiness, "but generally speaking, pilots get mad ass."
She sells it with wide, sincere eyes and a comedic exaggeration of her cut-glass vowels over mad ass to emphasise the fact she's joking and has never had a vulgar thought in her pristine life, may in fact have been bred incapable of it. But Bea saw something real down there, even if she doesn't know what, yet; and Bea has never, ever left well enough alone in her life.
"Do you know," she drawls, "why my callsign's 'Bitchless'?"
Anna-Maria gives her a slanted, dubious look. "Why do," she starts, voice coiling up into a little tense thing as Bea takes a lazy, sway-hipped step into her personal space, "they call you that, Bea?"
"Well, you see," Bea says easily, bent a little at the waist to say it near Anna-Maria's ear, "it's because," and she slides into her own mocking imitation of that too-perfect aristocratic diction, "we plebs love irony."
Anna-Maria laughs, a surprised and delighted noise that Bea instantly likes too much; bites her lip, looks Bea in the eye, chortles again, and then lightly puts a hand to Bea's chest.
"We're not doing this," she says, but her voice is warm; and Bea thinks it's maybe just a matter of strategy.
