"Hey, Beeper, there's a message at the desk for you. You know a Julia somebody?"
They're fresh off a six-month tour in an active hotzone, squared off against heavily mechanised armed forces, autonomous weapon booby traps, and — worst — Klein-Mackenzie. A clean, professional shooting war against another, evenly-matched mech company is nobody's idea of a good time.
Fletch has been keeping a quiet eye on Beeper for a while, since they got RALFed — severely outgunned by a popup Rocket Assisted Launch Fighter drone. They spent a real shitty afternoon, one scout mech head-down in a crater with a leg shot off it, the other hunkered hull-down in cover, waiting for backup. Fletch had been the one who took fire, Beeper the one in a shelled-out ruin where the RALF's cheapass sensor integration couldn't resolve her as a target. Frankly, Fletch would probably be less worried about her if it had been the other way round.
The RALF was cheap, but not that cheap, and Beeper had spent hours watching it circle, monitoring it and handcrafting spoof radio signals in realtime to confuse its adaptive targeting, so its decision tree wouldn't collapse on "circle back on initial target and finish the job". Fletch is pretty sure Beeper hasn't slept through the night since, and xie's pretty sure Beeper keeps waking up from stress dreams where she wasn't smart enough and the RALF came back.
Fletch really hopes xie's not gonna have to say something to someone. Xie hopes Beeper will do it herself, before it gets that bad. But they dusted off sharpish at the end of the tour, and for now they're holed up on whatever planet the Cap can make currency arbitrage and old favours stretch the materiel budget furthest; plus there's a sunny beach with a bar. Maybe — fingers crossed — that's helping.
Well, was. Beeper's just frozen up, tense as a grammar textbook.
"Oh," Fletch says, penny dropping. "That's the ex-wife?"
Beeper mutters something indistinguishable.
Well, Fletch can't help with the other thing, but this one — maybe. "You know, wives are like ammo," xie says sagely, fishing for a laugh. "Once you fire 'em, that makes 'em someone else's problem."
No laugh, but Beeper swallows a few times until she can unlock her throat. "Had a lot of wives?" she manages.
"Fuck, no." Fletch gives her an angelic smile. "I'm a low value target."
Xie pretends xie can't see Beeper's body language screaming that Beeper thinks she is, too, and it didn't save her. If Fletch lets on xie sees it, xie's gonna have to swear vengeance on the ex-wife, and the Cap doesn't exactly love it when they start knock-down drag-out fistfights with randos. Plus Beeper would probably find a way to convince herself it was her fault, and she doesn't need to load any more onto her shoulders. So Fletch shoves xer hands deep in xer pockets, and says, "You're allowed to not like her any more," a little more sharply than xie meant to.
Beeper just shakes her head. "If I can start just not liking people," she says in a low voice, "what's even left of me?"
That's—
Fletch points at a random building. "Jacquemart G-series just popped into visual above that roof," xie says. "How long have I got before it engages?"
"You're already dead," Beeper says instantly, because Beeper literally cannot help it.
"Why's that?"
"Because this geology's all limestone caves, the only Jacque-G that's low enough tonnage to walk around here without dropping knee-deep in sinkhole is the 450, and that's just a walking sensor suite for Long-Range Target Designation. Some other unit dropped a missile on you from over the horizon."
"Well what if it's a Coleoptera with the twin chainguns?"
Beeper gives xer a paint-stripping look. "Firstly, you can't see it behind the building because the Coleo's only twenty feet tall; and secondly, you know perfectly well the only time that's ever had a twin chaingun loadout is that stupid TV series—"
Yeah. Fletch has been in several bars that have been treated to that impassioned lecture.
"And that only got one season because they spent so much money fixing the mech, because every time they spun both guns up for an FX shot, it blew the main power distributor and it fell over."
"If you stop liking people, you'll still know amazing amounts of stuff," Fletch says.
"Oh," Beeper says, and that was somehow the wrong thing to lead with, because there's a deep, deep bitterness there. "Useful. I'd be useful. That's good."
Fletch decides to blame the ex-wife. Fletch blames a lot of things on the ex-wife. Fletch has a list of poorly-evidenced beefs with Beeper's ex-wife xie's never met, and it's long. If time travel ever gets invented, Fletch is gonna retroactively set Beeper up with somebody much better.
"You'd still stop a RALF from coming back for me," xie says before xie can think twice about it, and then takes a shuddering breath. "No. No, sorry, that's—"
Beeper cuts her off. "Yeah," she says, and then she gives Fletch a look, a real one, calmer. "...Yeah, I would."
"Besides, she's not people. She's your ex-wife. Pretty sure that's an actual loophole, you can just stop liking your ex-wife specifically."
"And you're the wife expert."
"Hey, you're the mechs expert." Fletch gives a comedy exaggerated shrug. "I gotta get something."
(As soon as xie's not in earshot of Beeper, Fletch runs interference so hard. It takes less than an hour for a couple of their artillery guys to walk into a cocktail bar across town and pointedly suggest that certain faces might randomly get a table broken across them by rowdy drunken mech pilots, if they keep hanging around. And next time, the circling threat will probably have upgraded intel integration, and know to stay under Fletch's radar; but that's next time.)
