Ravens of Eternity

Chapter 13: Callsign

Music blared in her cramped core as Eva effortlessly navigated around a debris field. She was piloting her Federation-issued starter mecha rather leisurely. It certainly wasn’t anything fancy, and was fairly average. But any mecha was better than no mecha at all, so Eva was plain happy just to be in one.

It just felt nice. Like she was home.

Miko’s countenance appeared on Eva’s comms display, and she too looked rather happy and content.

“Have you determined what callsign you will register?” Miko asked.

Callsigns were an important part of all pilots. There were thousands of Lieutenant Mitchells, but only one Maverick, for example. It didn’t just make them easy to remember and identify, it made them unique. And the callsign they picked often reflected their inner truths.

In short, their callsigns gave them power.

Eva thought back to her old screen name – StardustDreaming. She used it for pretty much her entire online persona, from her social media to her streaming account. It was also her callsign in Bellum Aeterna.

.....

It represented how often she had daydreamed about being physically fit, or more attractive, or obscenely wealthy. She had always felt that they were all so far out of reach that they may as well have been lightyears away.

But now that she was here, and she was well on her way to actually being that person, to fulfilling her dreams... Well, that meant she no longer needed that old name.

And she had spent a good many hours thinking about what callsign she needed to pick, and pored over the meaning of this and that. In the end, she picked a simple one. But it most certainly reflected the person she was destined to become.

Just as she opened her mouth to respond, an alert popped up on her primary MFD.

“Looks like something good,” she said instead.

“I am headed there now,” replied Miko.

The two of them accepted a simple scavenging and salvaging job. And funny enough, the location was at the battle they had just escaped from.

They figured that they could collect reparations from the pirates who shot at them by picking up the guns they had dropped.

It was only fair!

They ported in with a Scav cruiser, who was contracted to do the cleanup. Eva and Miko were just a couple of the dozen Scrapper pilots that were subcontracted to do the cleanup.

Scrappers didn’t get paid, per se. Instead, they got to keep whatever they could haul away. In exchange, all they had to do was help strip down and scrap whatever was left. Well, they got a meal, too. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing.

There was definitely quite a lot of cleanup to be done at the ambush site.

Although the fully-intact disabled cruiser was still there, it was also commandeered by the Federation Navy, and was strictly off-limits. Eva cried inwardly as it no doubt had some juicy treasures hidden inside.

There were also the two cruiser wreckages, but those were already blown to shrapnel. Nothing more needed to be said about that.

Instead, the bones they had to pick through were from the pirate fighters. Since their loadouts were a chaotic mess, chances were high that they were scattered with all sorts of weird parts.

Miko was already closer to the spot when it pinged, so she naturally got there first. She had actually configured her core to pilot a light hauler. It was a bit of a bulky boi, but it did its job well.

They had been here for a handful of hours already, so it was already half full of glittering treasures: various guns, a couple of rocket pods, random modules, and the like.

Eva’s mecha slid in right after. On her shoulder was a rather large cannon. It would have looked like a truly imposing weapon, if it wasn’t painted yellow and black and plastered with warnings.

It was actually a focused multi-beam plasmacutter meant for Scrapper jobs like these. Although Eva would have preferred to have a hand-held version, Miko wasn’t sure if it was powerful enough to cut through everything there.

They ultimately both agreed on the shoulder-mounted gun, as it gave them the most flexibility in the long run. So they spent all the credits they had left and banked on it paying off.

They looked at the wreckage that their MFDs pointed them towards, and realization swept across their faces. It was the pilots they caused a collision with! Well, two out of the three, anyway.

They were still a twisted wreck and somewhat fused to each other. There were gaping holes where the Diomedes’ cleanup crew had pulled the pilots out and rescued them.

How lucky.

Eva would have left them to rot for eternity. Shoot at her, would they?!

She quickly got to work as she cut into the ships. Eva carved into them like they were roast turkeys, and expertly wove around the guns and modules to make sure they were intact. After they moved aside all the good loot, Eva then cut the hulls into smaller pieces.

That allowed the Scav crew to pick them up easily.

While she did that, Miko scanned the parts in front of her and picked out the best ones out of the batch.

She tagged them on one of her MFDs, which prompted a couple of small drones to snag them and put them in her hauler’s cargo hold.

Eva whistled when Miko shared the stats of the gun she picked.

Most ships utilized ballistic and energy cannons, as they were typically most effective at neutralizing enemies quickly. But there were certainly plenty of other kinds out there, such as the more militarized version of Eva’s Plasmacutter.

They bagged themselves a B-ranked Ragnarok Arms Thermalite Beamcannon.

Beam weapons were relatively difficult to use due to two drawbacks. They required constant pin-point accuracy and needed the target to be at relatively close range. These weapons were often best used by highly agile ships against larger targets, such as destroyers and cruisers.

Like the Plasmacutter, it emitted a superheated beam that cut through armor like melted butter. Eva mused on how devastating it could be in a dogfight, and imagined bisecting a fighter in half with it.

Miko also shared the stats for a canister of ammunition that she found. It was filled with 200mm Piranha Shells, also by Ragnarok Arms.

These things could be fired out of any ballistic ship cannon with that caliber barrel, but they weren’t just regular shells. These were a swarm of Devourer nanites encased in a depleted uranium shell. They were designed to punch through armor, and then eat away the ship from the inside.

Devourer nanites often ate away until they ran out of power, but could also be neutralized with repair nanites, though it destroyed both swarms.

Not only did they do devastating damage to armor, but they also severely weakened repair systems at the same time.

These were perhaps most useful in sieges to break through toughened armor.

Eva was pretty glad that she took these two pilots out. If either of them had fired at her, it would have all been over.

“I just calculated the market prices for everything we have so far,” said Miko. “Would you like to guess?”

Eva shook her head, “Not a clue.”

“Just over one hundred thousand credits. A good haul, yes?”

She then listed out each item they had, and assigned a market value to them. Even if they kept some of the more valuable parts, they could still walk away with a sizable increase in their ledgers.

Not that it would be hard, considering they were broke.

“Definitely a good haul,” said Eva, “and we’ve still got room for more. Your detection algorithm is really amazing, Miko. I’m really glad you whipped it up before this job.”

“I only just tweaked it when we got here, so we could filter out the better parts more efficiently. Our margins will go up significantly with just a few lines of code.”

She scanned the area again, and got another ping on their MFDs, so they moved towards it to pick over the spoils.

One of the other scrapper teams who saw that they were picking the best fruits became green with envy. They went over and pored over what they had left behind, and noted that they were surprisingly decent. They were in relatively good condition, and were worth a decent sum.

But that meant that they took the absolute best parts already. Lucky bastards!

Eva hadn’t gotten to the next site before she got an incoming message alert on her comms display.

Her eyes went wide when she saw who it was coming from, but quickly recovered before she opened the line and shared it with Miko.

Commander Chase’s handsome visage came on the screen, a genuine smile on his face. Though he was a bit surprised to see Miko also in the call.

“Hello Eva, and er, Miko,” he said. “Hope you’re both having a productive cycle.”

“Yeah,” Eva replied, “we’re just scrapping for cash. Gains aren’t bad.”

“Well, seeing as how you’ve gotten your licenses already... I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m calling because I have kind of a tough contract, so I immediately thought of you.”

“Thinking of me, Commander?” teased Eva.

His mouth gaped as he wasn’t sure how to respond, but it quickly turned into a grin.

“You say that now, but you haven’t heard the contract yet.”

“Touché,” she said with a laugh. “Well, tell us more, then. Does it pay well? I mean, our haul here’s already a hundred grand, and we’ve only been here half a cycle, so...”

He was flabbergasted. Although there was some good money in scavving and scrapping, that was a rather large amount for just a few hours. How lucky were these two, anyway?

“Well this is a military contract with a risk clause, so the pay is rather hefty. I’ll send the details so you can look it over. The only hurdle is that it requires a military license.”

Eva perked up. The both of them needed military licenses in order to get access to more lucrative contracts. They could continue to space pirates and score big off their bounties and their scrap.

“Well, we were going to get them anyway. So... what’s the best way to get ’em?”

The Commander stroked his chin as he responded, “You could get it by doing some of our standard contracts. Usually troop transport here and there. Nothing dangerous. But you have to clock in 15k hours doing them. Safe and profitable...”

Eva shook her head. 15k hours was too long. And as a shuttle pilot? She may as well do that for a touring company and at least get to see the sights.

“But the fastest way is to go to the Naval Academy. It’s a month of boot, but – ”

“I’m not going to enlist,” Eva stated adamantly. “Not into being some soldier. No offense.”

“I am not enlisting either,” chimed Miko.

He shook his head, however. “You don’t have to. And Miko, you’re too young to. You can join as an engineer recruit, if you have any aptitude in that. We usually recruit engineers and programmers from a young age anyway.”

Miko nodded, as that was definitely a more suitable path for her.

“Regardless, at the end of basic, you get the option to enlist, or enter into a contract agreement as a PMC. You benefit from the training and the license, but in exchange you’ll have to do a minimum of 500k worth of contracts.”

“500k? Isn’t that basically the same as doing a bunch of shuttling around?”

.....

He shook his head again. “Naw, because the contract I’ve got will pay quite a big chunk of that, if not the whole thing. How convenient!”

Eva and Miko’s mouths fell open simultaneously. Five hundred thousand? For one job?

“I’ll take your silence as acceptance,” he continued.

They could only nod in agreement.

“Very well, give me your callsigns, so I can register the both of you.”

“My callsign is Raijin,” Miko said, with pride in her voice.

In Japanese folklore, Raijin was the god of lightning and thunder. Miko had always felt the desire to create an unstoppable storm, and so felt a kinship with the old god.

Eva’s callsign was also based on an ancient deity, one that represented wealth, fertility, and battle. In this universe, she was going to live as true to herself as humanly possible.

“And I,” she said, “am Freya.”