Mech Pilot who makes sure they're strapped into something so weird that it'll be impossible to mark a kill tally for.
"So here's the situation," Alex says wearily to the squad, packed into a flimsy prefab hut to keep out of the eternal drizzle. "Doctor Keyes here is the last of the targets our employers want evac'd offplanet, but the timescale we warned them they were cutting too fine? It's right on us." He waves to a portable tac display. "The superstorm's coming in off the ocean fast. We're not getting air cover unless we get off the coast to higher ground."
"What's the bad news?" Alice chirps, and he spares a weary glare for his fraternal twin.
"Glad you asked. Consortium mercs have arrived and taken up positions on the ridgeline right above us. They can't come any closer to the settlement without putting themselves in breach of treaty conditions — this isn't a warzone — but they have orders to take Keyes into custody for the Consortium. We can't match them for firepower, we've got nowhere to go except up the valley under their guns, and if we stay put the storm's gonna pound us to pulp." He looks at Keyes. "I'm sorry, Doc, but I'm not seeing much option except turn ourselves over to them. We're all just mercs here, they'll handle it professionally; I'll ask for assurances about your treatment in return."
Keyes is short and round and bundled in a weathered heavy-duty parka. She's pale, but none of this is a surprise. "It's not their treatment I have to worry about."
The rival mercs will hand her to the Consortium in one piece. After that....
"I'm sorry, Doc."
She nods, mouth set.
"I've got an idea."
Yeah, like always. "Not the time, Al," he tells his sister wearily, hands pressed to his mech's genespliced camo bark, gently holding his awareness extended into it, feeling its condition. Some kind of local fungal tree disease trying to lace its fibres up into one leg; nagging heartwood damage in one shoulder joint from an engagement en route here. "You can get up to some wacky shenanigans some other time."
"Hey," she says firmly. "I'm not fucking around. I've got an idea to get Keyes out."
A flicker of hope. Alice constantly straddles the frustrating line between lateral-thinking tactical genius and fucking liability, but she doesn't want to hand the Doctor over to the Cons any more than he does. If anyone call pull this one out—
"Of course, you're not gonna like it," she adds.
This world, and the dig personnel currently fleeing it, are contested due to its archaeological record. There's a well-evidenced narrative of early humankind's development of mecha; of the development of Synchronisation with naturally-occurring mechanical frames, such as fallen trees. It's part of the Consortium's culture-narrative, of their destiny to synergise with all of the resources of the natural universe in order to expand and apply human power.
The discovery, here, of petrified wood in the remarkably complete and unmistakably fashioned form of Mobile Logs, dated radically earlier than the Consortium's account of human history, directly disrespects their propaganda. Their mythology of natural supremacy.
"Oh, you're fucking joking," Alex says.
"What?" Alice gives him the madcap grin that says she's invested in her terrible idea already, all the way to the hilt. "Hey, we used to Sync with natural wood all the time when we were kids!"
He looks up at the prehistoric relic. "Trees, Alice," he says, annoyed. "This is a fossil. It's a rock, Al."
"I can do it!"
"You're gonna Sync a chunk of rock."
"Sure!"
Organics take Sync naturally; inorganics are a headsplitting showoff party trick. But she is good — very, very good. Maybe. Maybe.
"And then what?"
"We squeeze the Doc and me in the rock log, form up, and walk straight up out of here."
"And they don't shoot us, why?"
She fingerguns gleefully at it. "Archaelogical relic. Breach of treaty."
Just like the Doc herself; even if the Consortium plan to bomb it to shit when they have their hands on it, the mercs they hire work to standard treaty terms.
He looks up at the fossilised tree and thinks it over, in the methodical way that drives Alice nuts. "Well, if they don't kill you, the archaeologist probably will," he says.
Alice grins slyly. "Don't worry about Keyes, I'll talk her into it. Hey, at least this way she gets to take it to a museum afterwards!"
"Sure, after we walk the legs off it," Alex snorts.
When the other merc company politely ask them to surrender, Alex takes great pleasure in politely pointing out in return that, actually, his unit is transporting a millions-of-years-old archaeological relic, and they can suck shit.
"What the fuck."
"Check your scopes."
"I did. What the fuck." A charged silence. "They told us we might see action against the diVayne twins on this one. That must be your sister in that thing? Piloting that thing? That's nuts. She's nuts. If I run into you guys in a bar one day after this job's over, first round's on me — if this doesn't kill all her brain cells."
"She didn't start with many," Alex says cheerily, knowing she'll get him back for it later, "but they're surprisingly tough."
