Iron Empire

Twenty-Eight: Loss and Gain

Report: Fisk
The Nevada Desert.
Arizona.
Axion manufacturing base.
Designation: "The Forge"

Two hours before Draco's address to Jackson Quinn.

"Director Fisk?" Captain Oakley called. He stepped into my office with the air of a man who knew he was in trouble.

I held up my finger.

"One moment," I responded. It wasn't efficient to be interrupted.

I replayed the video, taking in the sights and the sounds of the second battle of Stalnoy. A battle that, for a second time, we'd lost. A terrible waste for Axion, but even the most crippling of losses could hold a small bit of gain.

There it was again.

I rewound the video with a flick of my finger, the light from the tablet dancing off the far wall in my office.

"General, sir, Commander Harlow is dead," Oakley continued. "Stalnoy has been lost."

I nodded.

"I'm well aware, Captain," I responded. "While you gathered the nerve to inform me, I've been analyzing the footage for over an hour."

Captain Oakley winced, stepping quickly into the room and shutting the door behind him. He was late to inform me of Axion's most recent defeat, and he knew it.

What little footage I had received told a sordid tale—Axion's mighty forces routed by an unprecedented level of coordination from our new enemies. Unfortunately, most of the footage was corrupted—what little remained had been rendered blurry and garbled by its transmission through irradiated skies.

"Now," I inquired, staring Andros down, "tell me how the hell this happened."

"It was Harlow, sir," Andros confessed. "He deployed Project Apollo as requested, but instructed his squadron to overcharge their reactors."

"The hell?" I spat. "Harlow is an experienced commander, he should've known that overcharging the Apollo was fatal! It was a prototype for a reason!"

"He wanted revenge on that stealth mech," Oakley explained, "and he decided to use the overcharge to his advantage. I tried to talk him out of it before deployment, but he ignored me."

"Idiot!" I snarled. "He cost me the lives of an entire squadron and hundreds of thousands of dollars!"

Shock wracked my brain as I struggled to maintain a relatively calm appearance. Harlow was dead because of his own error, not my own. His blood was not on my hands.

I forced myself to calm down, taking a deep breath.

"However, the operation went almost exactly as I planned it to."

"Sir?" Oakley inquired.

I motioned to my tablet.

"Look," I beckoned, replaying the video. I turned the tablet in Andros' direction.

Onscreen was shaky, low-resolution footage that had been transmitted from the cams of a Goliath in battle. Harlow's mech. The audio from Harlow's footage had been corrupted, but the video itself was still intact.

A British Crusader, armour pitted with bullet holes, was dead in the sights of Harlow's mech. The distance closed as the Goliath we were watching tore forward, smashing into the Crusader and making Andros flinch beside me. The camera rocked in its casing and the Crusader flew backwards, crashing down into a skyscraper and shearing off the building's outer wall.

A distorted version of Harlow's voice filtered through the tablet's speakers, hissing in and out of existence at random.

"There," Harlow's recording boasted, "now—not going anywhere! With—side of this building, it's effectively immobile! I'll retreat—fireworks."