Mecha Kiss: Chapter 1

~ Lawrence ~

“I can't believe how big it is.”

The correspondent for the NewStart Gazette hadn't offered an original observation, but Lawrence could hardly blame the woman. The first time anyone got close, their first words were almost always some variant of, “It’s so big.”

“Can I feel it?”

He raised his eyebrows and folded his arms. “Go ahead.”

The woman stepped forward with a hungry expression, but her pace slowed when she was just a few feet shy. Lawrence knew it was even more intimidating to be this close. He waited.

Slowly her head tilted back. The woman looked up…and up, until her mouth parted in unconscious wonder. This always happened. 

“God.”

She might have been speaking directly to the colossal weapon of war towering three-stories above them. It was human-shaped, but also angular and somewhat ungainly—especially when peering up from the height of its ankle. The machine's head, with its two swept-back antennae and “unicorn horn” sensor mast, was just a bit off-center to make room for the anti-drone cannon on one shoulder.

“It looks…” the correspondent trailed off, as if she were trying to be delicate. Lawrence resisted the urge to snort. It’s not like he’d designed it.

“Like a statue of Frankenstein’s monster if Doc Frankenstein had been a roboticist?” he offered.

She turned to him, eyes bright with approval. “Yes! Do you mind if I use that?”

“Feel free.”

Her answering smile made his blood warm. The blond reporter was cute, and despite her one-piece coverall—issued to all civilians in the war zone—being three sizes too big, it was obviously hiding a body with generous curves.

The correspondent turned back to the gull. She finally touched it, her fingers tentatively brushing the bottom rung at the base of the shin plates, just above its massive left foot. The reporter eyed the long line of rungs stitching up the gull’s leg and twining around its front to end at the closed hatch in the chest.

“They use this to get in?” she asked skeptically.

Lawrence unfolded his arms. “Only in an emergency.” He gestured to the space they were standing in. Vastly high, but narrow, like an old cathedral, the concrete walls were close enough for their words to echo. “This is where we store back-up units. This one isn't in active service. In the main bay, the pilots use overhead walkways to access their gulls.”

The woman turned suddenly and tapped a graceful finger on her chin. “Explain something to me: ‘Bipedal Ordinance, Manual Model.’ ” Her tone held a note of challenge. 

He wasn’t sure what she was asking. “Ma’am?”

“Rainey,” she corrected, adding in a toss of her ponytail. Was that flirting? The possibility made his stomach tighten. But then she continued. “Why does everyone call them ‘gulls’?”

“Oh!” He smiled. “Well, the paperwork still refers to them as ‘B-O-M-Ms,’ but pilots don’t enjoy strapping themselves into something that sounds like ‘bomb.’ ”

She laughed. The rich sound spiked his pulse and tightened his throat. God, he was easy prey around confident women.

“But the ‘gull’ part?” Rainey prompted.

The return to familiar ground steadied him. “Ah…that comes from Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels,” Lawrence said. “The story about a normal man who visits a nation of tiny people—”

“I’ve read it,” she said, and there was that distracting smile again. 

“Right.” He tried an assured grin. It felt lopsided. “Well, there you go.”

Lawrence didn’t feel the need to share that the arrogant fuckers also liked to call non-pilots “lilies,” after the diminutive Lilliputians of the same book.

“See, that's the sort of thing that makes these articles shine. Readers like those kinds of details.”

Did they? Lawrence guessed they probably did. Colorful trivia might help distract from the increasingly bloody stalemate Unipol forces had found themselves in.

“Wow…it’s strange that they have full hands.” Rainey had walked over to peer up at the jointed fingers ten feet overhead. “I never see them moving on the news feeds. They’re always holding a gun or something. I thought they were just solid pieces styled to look that way.”

“No, they work.” In fact, gulls’ hands were fully articulated. He knew that because, one: he’d all but memorized the maintenance specs, and two: unit Charlie-One liked to flip him off on her way out of the facility.

“Makes sense when you think about it.” Rainey ran two delicate fingers along her jaw. “Hands can be so…versatile.”

She angled another look at him, this time with her mouth quirked. 

Lawrence was dense, but even he could see this was a come on. His breath quickened as his mind suddenly offered a mental image of Rainey’s amused mouth on his body.

He ruthlessly tamped the fantasy down. His job was to escort her, not ask her on a date. He was bad enough at the former and he’d be disastrous at the latter. Besides, civvies always expected soldiers to be experienced warriors in bed, and as far as that went—

The floor suddenly trembled under his feet. Outgoing arty? Lawrence frowned. No, he would have heard the guns firing. 

“What was—” Before Rainey could finish her question, the floor vibrated again and a metallic squeal ran through the entire building. Whatever it was, it was loud enough to be heard through multiple security doors. Had the Freecaps unleashed some new weapon?

He pointed at the correspondent. “Stay here.” 

Lawrence hit the button for the accessway hatch and squeezed past as it trundled slowly open. Halfway down the linking corridor, the ground shook again, only now he could hear the crackle of buckling concrete. Incoherent shouting was going on and it was getting louder. 

He reached the main tunnel and turned, jogging toward the gull bay. There was no gunfire, just the wild shouts. It sounded like the mother of all arguments, but echoes made the angry voices indistinct. Now he could smell overheated metal and the sweet stench of gull hydraulic fluid. He increased his speed and flew into the massive chamber at the end of the tunnel.

Shit!

Lawrence slid to an awkward halt to avoid plowing into a tight knot of people just past the doors.

“Brier! You son of a bitch!"

He had barely turned at the sound of his name before his lip was split. 

The flash of pain had him stumbling back against the doorframe, his hands clapping over his mouth. What the hell was happening?

“Ow!” The same female voice pierced his shock and confusion. “My goddamn knuckle.” It sounded familiar, but he was too busy trying to figure out if he still had all his teeth. Then a blur of motion warned him of another attack. He twisted and managed to take a painful blow on the shoulder.

His assailant was a gull pilot, so fresh from a mission she still wore the bulky helmet that revealed only a triangle encompassing her eyes and mouth. Her sortie suit had been half-unzipped and the sleeves sloppily tied around her waist. The long-sleeved unitard underneath revealed a showstopper body—too bad every shapely muscle was engaged with trying to clock him.

“Stop,” he cried. “Don’t-woah!” He ducked as the woman’s helmet flew past his shoulder and hit a locker with a deafening crash.

The woman glared at him, tossing her head to swing a single massive braid of auburn hair behind her. “Lazy fucker,” she spat.

Max. Of course it was Max. How had he not guessed?

Lawrence had managed to assume a clumsy guard position. Seeing it, Captain Maxine “Max” Simms gave him a dangerous smile. In response, the madwoman who’d once cracked the Midas Motors defense line, the legendary gull pilot, and—in Lawrence’s opinion—the biggest bitch in the Unipol Martial Forces, took a step back and assumed a formal fighting stance of her own.

“Stand down, Captain!” called a man’s voice, but Lawrence didn’t think for a second that the furious woman would listen.

She moved and he brought his arms up to block. A feint! With fluid grace she adjusted her hips and sent a hard kick to his shin. The impact was magnified by the chunky heel of her “bomb” boot—lucky him that every pilot got a pair. Lawrence cried out as agony engulfed his leg like fire. He staggered and was already sliding to the floor as several enlisted men and a noncom swarmed into the space.

Hands encircled his arms, but they were arresting his fall, not restraining him. A pilot had attacked a maintech in the maintenance bay, which put all of the witnesses on Lawrence’s side, even if he was only temporarily attached to the 98th Support Battalion.

He sagged into the soldiers, still trying to get his feet under him. While his leg pulsed in pain, a tickling sensation tracked down his chin—blood from the first punch. Ten feet away, thrashing amidst a heavily-muscled sergeant, two enlisted men, and a heap of kicked-over storage containers, was Captain Simms.

“That’s enough, ma’am,” grunted the sergeant. This was the one who had told her to stand down. The brawny NCO had managed to get one arm across her shoulders, making it clear that a choke hold was the next step. “You can cease, or I can call the MPs and they can sort this out.”

The mention of MPs had an immediate effect. The captain abruptly stopped trying to throw herself across the room at Lawrence. She stood there, chest heaving and dark eyes full of menace. If looks could murder, Lawrence’s body would already be tossed in an unmarked shell crater.

“Now what the hell is this about?” the NCO barked, but there was a note of uncertainty. His eyes went back-and-forth between them, his nomcom instinct to maintain order warring with his desire to stay out of an officer pissing match that could ruin his career.

Lawrence opened his mouth to answer…and realized he didn’t have an answer. As he was trying to get his adrenaline-soaked brain to say anything intelligent, one of the men in front of him stepped aside, giving him a view of the full bay.

“Aw…fuckshit,” he muttered.

BOMM Depot Twelve had taken significant damage. One of its massive outer doors had an obvious bend—exactly like a giant hand had roughly grabbed it and wrenched it open. A nearby section of the overhead gantry had collapsed onto the cement floor in a tangled metal heap. Beside the wreckage, a long furrow had been cut across all the painted floor guides, gouging up great chunks of concrete.

The culprit was still in the center of the bay, splayed out on its hands and knees like a colossal drunk about to puke. He stared at the crude painting on the gull’s thigh: a skull with crossed knife and fork. “OLI BLOOD IS MY BEER” was stenciled underneath. There was no doubt. It was Charlie-One, his assigned maintenance BOMM. Its chest was split open to reveal an empty cockpit.

So it had puked. It had vomited up Captain Simms.

Lawrence belatedly realized that Max was shouting again. He blinked, focusing on her surprisingly carrying voice.

“…seized up! The whole ankle! Locked right as a swarm came down on us like a goddamn biblical plague! I had to dive backwards through a building just to get the fucking Trip-Dee pointing in the right direction. Thanks to the shitty angle it pissed out three times the ammo to get the job done. Now it’s slag too, numbnuts!”

Even a casual glance confirmed it. The five barrels of the shoulder-mounted Trip-Dee—Dedicated Drone Defense—were…slumped. One was blown apart, marking the fatal moment where the superheated metal had drooped enough for a bullet to dig in and tear it off. The internals would be shredded from the blowback.

Lawrence forced his expression to stay impassive as he got to his feet. Pointedly looking past Captain Simms, he studied the gull’s legs.

One foot had seized, pointing straight down. It was the one he’d known it would be. The gull’s “toe,” an angled edge of sharp ferrobond polymer, had wrecked the floor just like Max’s heel had wrecked his shin. Poetic.

He tried to keep his outrage pure…but damn. Captain Simms had managed to limp a gull in that condition all the way from the engagement zone? Lawrence couldn’t help but feel a little impressed—even as his throbbing shin steadily raised the temperature of his anger.

“You’ve got no answer?” Max actually barred her teeth. “Not even an excuse? You're my maintech, asshole!”

His temper finally boiled over. She wanted an explanation? He would be happy to provide one. Max was about be humiliated in front of everyone in the bay. Lawrence opened his mouth to speak, only to be interrupted by an eager feminine voice just behind him.

“Now this is what I call color.”

Rainey. The correspondent for the NewStart Gazette. The same woman he had promised his commanding officer would only see positive depictions of the UMF. His sole responsibility other than Charlie-One.

Lawrence’s fury collapsed. With slow, hobbled limps, he pivoted to face the reporter. There was nothing flirtatious in her eyes now, only hunger for a sensational story.

“Rainey—”

“Is what she says true?” the reporter asked. “Were you in charge of maintaining this gull, Lieutenant Brier?” She eyed his helplessly working jaw, and her hungry look intensified. “I would love to hear your comment.”

“Fff-uck,” he commented.

[ A/N - Thanks for reading this glimpse into the world of Mecha Kiss! Now that it's on the Patreon, additional chapters may be offered in the future. Let me know if you think this potential love story is the BOMM! 💣 (As usual, I couldn't resist.) ]