Chapter 161 – Glamping 101; Leah’s Moving Castle

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On the way over to the Implacable equipped with crew quarters, Leah's Moving Castle, Leah got to watch the frankenthing attack another two Threes, and one Four.

The Threes were dispatched without much effort beyond a pair of floppy leap-squishes, but the Four apparently warranted a consummate rendition of Drunken Fist: Tiger Claws.

Leah squinted suspiciously at her girlfriend. The raw variety of moves programmed into the drone had her wondering if the black-haired woman wasn't much closer to Nerddom than she pretended. She would have to, ahem, investigate if there wasn't a collection or three of ancient crapfest shoestring-budget martial movies hidden somewhere in Tinea's old apartment.

That'd be a dead giveaway. And a pile of ammunition to tease her with. She was in need of such, considering that Tinea had discovered Leah's own status as a Nerd.

Before long, they arrived at the feet of the massive spider. It was truly huge, the abdomen alone larger than the Hatchets in their entirety, and the powerful legs overwhelming so near.

A small boarding ramp automatically lowered itself at the rear, just wide enough for two to pass each other, but Leah stopped as Tinea studied the legs on the way past, beneath the cephalothorax, the warstrider's head.

She'd chosen their tucked-in shapes for the appearance of powerful readiness. Always about to pounce. Their organic lines combined with their heavy armor plating to make them feel…dense. Extremely so.

They were all of that. Yet with the help of their prototype grav technology, these tanks could jump a dozen meters, only to come down with the force of a collapsing bridge.

Tinea dragged her hands across the leg as they turned past it. "I can see why you said they wouldn't be able to keep up with the Hatchets on the way home."

"Yeah," Leah nodded, "too much armor to go even half as fast. They're still hella mobile of course, and I made sure they wouldn't have unsolvable issues with loose terrain."

"Can't hope for reinforced highways so far out, I suppose."

"Nope."

"And you didn't want to go with lighter defenses?" the brunette asked, letting go of the armor segments she studied. "Class II does have forcefields at the top end."

Leah chuckled. "Prototype stuff, yeah. If I wanted them for primary defense on something designed to wade knees-deep into Antithesis hordes, then I'd need to shell out for Class III upgrades. Don't have any tokens left."

"Ah. How many do I have, Tynea?"

Two.

"Not enough, either."

No, unfortunately not.

"It's fine," Leah interjected, "these tanks are designed to rely on material armor first, and on forcefields second. I do intend to give them some, if it becomes necessary. They'd be special ones, too."

"Oh?" Tinea turned sparkly eyes on her, but it was the sparkle of the new choker adorning her petite throat that snagged Leah's gaze. The adorable murder machine wasn't yet used to having something around her throat and kept playing with it.

Those innocent gestures just tugged on her heartstrings. There was something impossible about the murder-cute juxtaposition Tinea presented, and Leah couldn't look away.

Murdercute. Leah really liked that, actually. It was a perfect descriptor.

"Yeah," she answered, "The Sternveil Cyclewards. Prototype gyroscopic forcefields."

Tinea blinked as she looked up at her girlfriend. "Gyroscopic?"

Leah nodded with a smile and tucked the smaller women into her side as she turned them towards the boarding ramp. The gloom was beginning to lighten as the sun came up, but frankly, she wanted to be out of the clammy moisture.

Poking Tinea's choker slightly, she answered, "Forcefields both absorb energy, and need energy to function, which is why those functions are often combined, and why they tend to prefer massive capacitors over massive powerplants."

"I guess you need the latter only to kickstart the shielding?"

"And to maintain their idle, yeah. That's why your forehead emitter has a microreactor. It can't handle the kind of forces the choker can, but it'll always be active."

"And your tanks?"

"The kind of capacitance you'd need to shield something the size of an Implacable, on an active battlefield no less, wouldn't fit inside the Implacable, not even at the top end of Class II. So, the Cycleward's emitter is a revolving mass wheel, instead. A gyroscope. It stores the energy it harvests as insane amounts of rotational energy. That comes with other natural forces, such as a magnetic field, like Earth generates, or the gyroscopic precession, the centripetal force, and others. A whole set of vectors and fields the Cycleward can manipulate to create interference for inbound energies and masses."

"Huh." Tinea remained quiet for a few seconds as she absorbed all that, until she came up with another question. "Don't gyroscopes affect the vehicle they're mounted to?"

"The precession, yeah."

"And the faster their rotation, the more powerful that effect?"

"Yep. It won't be an issue most of the time—there's some prototype bullshittery involved to avoid impacting the Implacables' mobility too much, but if a series of events rendered a Cycleward inoperable due to rotational overload, the mech can disengage the emitter disk and slip away."

Tinea's eyebrows rose. They rose even more when she took in the sense of dense mass she received from just one of the Implacables. Hundreds of tons above her head, held up by eight stout legs. "That's an awful lot of energy to release, if these guys can't handle it."

"Yep. Hella dangerous," Leah answered wryly. "Ypsilon told me that the earliest production units were known to cause cascades on the battlefield. One overloaded disk would hit the ground, rocket away like a loose bearing except faster, hit another Cycleward and thereby transfer its energy and overload that one too, and so on down the entire line."

"How'd they fix it?"

She laughed. "They didn't. They developed new protocols and turned them into weapons. When an Implacable comes close to the operability threshold, it assumes a posture that will make the wheel skip off in the right direction."

"That sounds like it'd make 'em easy targets, though?"

"Yep. But that'll just speed the separation, and the Implacable can absorb more fire too, so long as nothing wears out."

"Ah…"

"Indeed. The enemy learns quickly, or not at all."

"Mm. Any reason you didn't have them installed yet?"

"Cost, and lack of need. Antithesis of the tiers we've faced rarely throw metallic projectiles with enough force to do more than scratch the paint on this kind of armor."

"That'll change when we get back to civilization."

"Yeah. I'll get them if or when we need to worry about human attackers. If it's worth the points—the armor is pretty strong even without the shielding."

Deciding that they'd waited long enough, Leah finally tugged her Tinea-shaped bottle of murder-cute up the ramp and into the crew quarters, where familiar warm tones of red-gold light illuminated a short tunnel with a few crew hatches. The tunnel terminated in a space much larger than the tiny cabin inside Daddy-Long-Legs, but equally cozy.

Leah enjoyed getting her first look inside her Moving Castle, even if she already knew what she'd find. Her girlfriend was attached to her elbow again and looking around with grinning enthusiasm.

She pointed at the closest pair of hatches. One popped open and revealed a passageway low enough that Leah would have to duck to move through.

"That headknocker—" Tinea snorted. Leah rolled her eyes. She was perfectly aware that she would have to worry about that a lot more than Tinea would. "—leads through the joint into the cephalothorax. Most of the electronics are there, as well as the ammunition bunkers for the main armament. Also, backup lifesupport, but that's self-contained. We should never need to touch it." Her finger crossed over to the opposite hatch, which also opened, but revealed a ladder up. "And the port one lets us access the ammunition bunkers for all the mortars and secondaries, as well as the shielding systems once we have them."

Tinea stuck her head through the hatch and looked upwards. Leah joined her. There was much to see, after all.

"That complicated mess of conveyors and wiring connects the abdomen and cephalothorax."

"U-huh."

"And that entire space—" she pointed at the mess of girders, robot arms, tubes, and gantries set against the massive main hatch just above the mech's head-abdomen joint, "—is the drone bay. Space for eight combat drones, and able to supply and maintain them all, including minor repairs like replacing damaged armor panels. It doubles as a logistics bay, which is where the ammunition will be delivered to. Those conveyors automatically sort everything into the right bunkers or weapons. And all the way at the top of the ladder is another headknocker—" a quick poke did away with Tinea's revived snickering, "—that's the professional term for that kind of passage, by the way. It leads to the auxiliary systems. More electronics, main lifesupport, the shielding, and other stuff I might add."

"No drones?" Tinea asked, looking at the conspicuously empty bays.

"Nope, don't know what I want, yet."

"Ah."

"Mhm."

Satisfied after looking around a bit more at the forest of micromachinery, they ducked out and moved on to the next pair of hatches.

There wasn't too much to see—one side contained a tiny head—"No way your wings will fit in there, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there,"—and the other a much roomier shower. It had a tub. An actual tub.

Tinea groaned at the sight, and Leah agreed. They could really use a good soaking. "See the rest? Or a bath first?"

The brunette's eyes flicked to the last hatch awaiting their attention, but it seemed that curiosity lost to the prospect of comfort, considering how she dragged Leah towards the tub by her hands.

"Even if we looked at more, I'd be busy imagining steamy, soapy water," she added. "My brain's already soaking. It's torturing me with fantasies of warmed muscles and sleepy relaxation."

Fair enough, Leah thought and gave in. She sent a command to fill the tub with hot, almost scalding water.

In no time at all, Tinea had divested herself of her gear and hopped in without hesitation, well insulated against the sudden heat. She dove under and vigorously ran her hands through her hair, immediately staining the water a muddy brown with all the filth she'd collected while fighting. It seemed even the heavy rain hadn't been enough to wash it away.

Leah looked at the floor and saw that small feet had tracked some dirt in, but luckily the crew quarters came with a tiny housekeeping robot that was already busy scrubbing down the hallway.

She let the tub drain and refill until the water stayed clean, and then joined Tinea. Her prosthetics had no trouble with the heat, of course, but the water's temperature was high enough to sting her flesh.

It nonetheless drew a shivering sigh from her as she leaned back and closed her eyes—not that that stopped her network's cameras from detecting the soft relief spreading across Tinea's expression as the girl witnessed Leah's easing of tension.

Leah was…glad to be surrounded by literal tons of armor and heavy cannons.

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