Sigma/Star

Chapter 56: Grimsley-Rogue

"I told ya it would work Grimsley." Ronald slapped the youth on his back, reaching over the chair to do so. The Goliath rattled a little as they stepped into a ditch then kept moving. They had been wandering westwards since departing from Easley, towards the setting sun each night.

"Yes Ronald you've been telling me every five minutes since we left," Grimsley sighed, half-heartedly tilting the controls to manoeuvre around a tree. He was slowly getting used to the controls of a Goliath, slightly different from driving a tank. It seemed that Ronald had had the cockpit altered to function closer to the old tank had, but the two of them still needed to work together in order to do the functions a normal battlesuit pilot did on their own.

"Don'cha feel better knowing you did it though?"

"I suppose." Grimsley's eyes flicked up towards the image displaying Raven's face. The Goliath had recorded everything it had been looking at when Grimsley had proposed and so, with a little editing, a picture had been easy to extract, left on a viewscreen at the ceiling of the cockpit. The young pilot wondered how many other soldiers did this or carried around photos of their loved ones. And how many would die clutching it, never to see them one last time?

"Where are we going anyways?" Ronald shook Grimsley out of his thoughts, literally by grabbing his shoulders and rattling. There was another lurch as the warmachine moved. The head of the axe it wielded dipped down to touch the earth and carve out a groove in the ground.

"We're going west."

"Well I know that much. Not a crazy ol' man ya know. I mean where's the end result?" The axe struck a rock and sent vibrations throughout the arm of the Goliath, shooting into the cockpit and leaving Ronald's teeth chattering. "And can we pick that up please?"

"Sorry, wasn't paying attention," Grimsley muttered as he adjusted the controls. His eyes resumed staring out into the empty green fields of the Western frontier, with shallow, slowly rolling hills and an estranged tree breaking the horizon every so often. It was such a shame that nobody was using these places for farming or living, and few animals roamed here as it was the gap between two empires, the borderland where armies marched and passed through or new weapons were tested. Without war, these lands would return to being beautiful...or would end up exploited by a mining business and turned to rubble. "We're going to find the forward base camp of the Artisan Confederate."

"We're going to what?!" Ronald would've popped out of his chair were he not strapped into it but his eyes did an excellent job of bulging out. "Grimsley, not to tell ya you're nutty but we ne'er even fought with this thing afore. Why would we go into the hornet's nest? Why? Why? Why!" Grimsley was shaken again from behind and was really starting to regret ever bringing the old peddler along. But he did need Ronald's services to pilot the complex machine.

Grimsley stepped around another tree, double-checking the map and stopping for a moment to scan the area. "When I first saw Goliaths, the Artisans were attacking my town of Easley. After the battle was resolved though, I don't think anyone did anything about where the Artisans had come from. They must have some sort of small base around, something where they operate from. And I plan on finding it and paying them back for what they did."

"But...but...but couldn't we do that after we beat up some trees or something? Some sort of practice?"

"Just run a localized scan please for any activity in the area. And extend for bio-signatures, then a metal detection sweep."

"For someone who knew so little before bossypants..." Ronald grumbled.

"I've been reading up thank you." Grimsley pulled up a viewscreen, moving the image across the holographic field just in front of his vision with his fingertips. Upon it was a manual for different battle techniques. The picture flipped to a video describing the different scanner functions of a Goliath. The pilot glanced back over his shoulder and grinned.