The Unseen War

Chapter 7

Earth Year 3010, June 21st

Twenty-Eight Months after the Attack

It had been just over a month since I had been taken prisoner by Qhil. I hadn't been around Taggons all that often but I doubted many of them were like Qhil. His excitement and creativity was infectious, making me more and more excited to try out the Proto Guardian. Qhil had been running me through a list of physical tests to prepare me for piloting the Proto Guardian. The tests were easy with my military training and exercises that I had gone through daily. It felt like all the extra exercises had just been me preparing to drive the Proto Guardian.

Qhil was giving me some final notes about the Guardians. "One of the biggest safeguards in the Guardians is that they are biometrically sealed. When you do an initial startup, it heats up and imprints your DNA into the Guardian so that the only one who can pilot any specific Guardian is the one who started piloting it. The only way you could change pilots is with a different Core or a different Guardian."

"So because the Ordeerians and Dilail have scales on their hands it wouldn't be able to imprint their DNA?" I asked, I had become increasingly interested in Qhil's work and he had been excited to show me most of it.

"Correct. And because the Graspers only have three fingers, it wouldn't start up for their DNA to be imprinted. Though after the initial imprint you could lose all of your fingers and it would start up fine."

I laughed. "That seems intuitive but I doubt that it would be fun to try and pilot without any fingers."

Qhil laughed with me. "It would be fun to see someone try. But we designed it that way because there were too many complications with having multiple pilots for one Guardian."

"I thought you weren't able to get any pilots."

"We were unable to get any human pilots. We had a few Whist pilots, unfortunately most of them didn't make it. They weren't as capable as humans and were easily distracted. We lost several pilots during testing." Qhil was somber as he told me about the Whists.

"If you lost several pilots that means some survived right?"

"There were four or five Whists who survived tests, but most of them left. We only have one left, he joined late in the program and has stuck with us. His name is Otath, he's our planetary pilot for the Mobile Guardian."

"Is the chance of death high for Guardian pilots?"

Qhil shook his head. "Whists can be easily distracted, but after initial tests we were able to minimize that risk as well as some others. You'll find the Central Pod of the Guardians to be quite comfortable."

"So where did you usually practice? I mean did you find an asteroid field near Sedronia, or did you just do practice flights in open space?" I asked, thinking back to my Totaller training.

"We usually did our initial launch and practices out in open space, then after they got used to the controls we would bring them to asteroid belts. To test mobility, it isn't always enough to just ask someone to practice dodging."

The idea of having to do physical tests of mobility was daunting. Maneuvering was hard as a Totaller, the airpacks didn't have enough strength to keep you moving for long amounts of time so it was all about precision. As soon as the enemy weapons were calibrated to begin firing at Totallers then it would be impossible for them to be effective. It hit me like a punch to the gut. Totallers were doomed to begin with. We were only going to be effective at the start of the conflict. If Qhil's theories were correct, we would have only been there while whichever government was looking for the Guardian. The only reason that most Totallers weren't wiped out already was probably because most of the ships we attacked were merchant ships.