Chapter 18: Salvage! Salvage!

With the soldier Darus Kael’s departure last night, carrying the other red-green mecha strapped to his strider’s back, Aina now claimed salvage to the remaining three striders. Broken striders, yes, but Aina was confident she could get them working again. No different to how she made Darus’s mecha work again. If she could do it once, she could do it again for sure.

Yesterday, she had dragged and piled them all together in the field behind her old house while she still had Darus’s mecha. So today she was only checking the condition of the mechas and trying to determine which was most likely to be repaired. By the time the sun was high on her head, she had already decided on a candidate.

She decided on a battered Gurn strider, the one the captain managed to defeat first, as the base. Apart from the engine compartment, it had the least damage. Even that wasn’t too bad, The engine was fine, only the compartment was a bit squashed and the electric cable pulled out during the battle. Much of the steel components inside the mech were also practically brand-new.

It was like a rich young master had ridden off for his first mission astride a brand new steed. Fought valiantly against the local natives. And ended up dying in foreign lands.

“Well, his loss, my gain,” Aina said to herself.

The other two had more severe damage, but if she could swap out the damaged parts with a substitute like what she did with Darus’s mecha, she could probably get one of them to work again. The problem was, where would she get the spare parts to swap them out with?

The village had one blacksmith, sure, but he could only make small things. At most she could ask him to forge a screw or some tools, but he didn’t have the skills nor the facility to manufacture an entire steel piston.

She thought about the wooden part that she carved for Darus’s mecha. While it was a viable temporary measure, it wasn’t very durable and not every component could be replaced with wood. Or at least she didn’t think so. She thought she would at least try to check if such an option was viable.

But the biggest problem was the operations of the mecha. To walk, she had to rev the engine and continuously rev it and then lift her real foot to move the leg control so that it would lift the actual mecha’s leg, and then she had to put down her foot to put the mecha’s foot down. Rinse and repeat, it became very tiring, very quickly.

There must be a better way.

Yet a surprising gift simply fell into her lap as she inventoried the mechs. She had been agonizing about making a rechargeable battery to assist in the mecha’s operations. But she only knew the basic principles. She wasn’t a chemical engineer. She didn’t have the know-how to make a rechargeable battery from scratch.

Luckily, she didn’t have to. She found that the Gurn striders actually had rechargeable batteries. But instead of using them to assist in the operations of the mecha, they only used them for the spotlights. It was baffling to Aina, how they could have a battery but not actually use them properly.

It was a simple lead-acid battery, not too primitive, nowhere near advanced. It was just right. Aina had no facility to make sulphuric acid, but she could easily build a water distiller. From the three Gurn striders, she managed to recover six batteries. She noted that they should be good enough for daily operations, but she would still need to test their capacity, how long she could run the mecha on them and how much power she could exert on the mecha.

Still, just having the battery was a huge leap forward from the standard mechas of this era. Now, with the power issues resolved, Aina set herself to work on the blueprint of the modified mecha.

Meanwhile, Darus Kael had arrived at Branvar Hold. When he approached the base, he was immediately surrounded by a team of warstriders, demanding that he stop and come out. It was only when he opened the cockpit did they see who it was and escorted him back into the base.

The base commander, a grizzled veteran by the name of Elmus Varan came out to welcome him back. He had been anxious when he heard nothing from Darus or his unit for over a week, worried that he was dead, wounded or taken by the enemy. Any of those would mean a lot of explaining to the higher ups.

After all, Elmus Varan was only a fort commander, holding the noble rank of Bladelord. While Darus Kael had no noble rank yet, at least not that he knew of, Darus’s father wasn’t someone that Elmus Varan could easily offend. While noble ranks were not supposed to interfere with military operations under the laws of Ferradorn, that law didn’t apply to certain high-ranking persons.

And that high ranking person had chosen that week when Darus Kael was gone on an interception mission to actually ask how he was doing. How could Elmus say that Darus had been missing for a week? Wouldn’t that mean an immediate removal of his position or even worse, exile? His pension aside, an exile would extend to members of the immediate family and they would be banned from holding government positions for twenty years.

Elmus wished he could just transfer Darus Kael to another fort. At least he wouldn’t have to constantly worry about when he would be thrown out in disgrace. He was a fighter, a warrior, not a politician. This event had made him unable to sleep or eat for days. He was even worrying more about Darus Kael’s life than about the looming threat of Gurn invasion.

Elmus stood behind his desk accompanied by his scribe and the patrol commander in charge of the lance that Darus Kael was a part of. He listened intently to Darus’s report on what happened after they left the base to intercept the Gurn infiltration unit, feeling sad at hearing the loss of the pilot and the captain.

For some reason, Darus Kael omitted the part about having his warstrider repaired by Aina and her sons. Or about leaving the enemy striders at Wyrmrest Hollow. He wasn’t sure why he did that, but he thought it would probably be troublesome having to stand there having to explain every detail. So he only went with the account of the battle and being nursed back to health by the villagers.

When it was all over, the fort commander sighed, lamenting the loss of two experienced strider pilots. While warstriders were valuable, they were just machines. They could be manufactured, repaired and recovered. When a pilot was injured, they had to wait until he recovered before they could send him out. When a pilot was maimed, he could only be retired from active service but at least he could serve as a reservist or a training staff. But when a pilot was killed, that was the end.

“It wasn’t like they could be brought back from the dead,” Elmus accidentally let his thoughts out loud.

Darus simply kept his mouth shut. Maybe they could, in Wyrmrest Hollow. After all, that Virell woman crawled out of her grave on her own.

Darus actually had a fleeting suspicion that he too was somehow brought back from the dead. How could it be possible for such a fierce battle to result in only minor wounds on his body when it felt like his whole body was broken? How could he be the only one to survive when every member of his unit, as well as the enemy were all dead? And most importantly, all his wounds from that battle healed quickly and didn’t leave a scar.

There must be a bigger power at hand here.

Darus Kael wasn’t superstitious, but like the rest of the population of Ferradorn, he believed that there is a higher power. Call it a god or spirit, but he believed that nothing was a coincidence. He believed that something decided that it wasn’t his time yet and thus gave him a second chance.

Much like that woman of Virell.

If she had died and stayed dead, wouldn’t he have died too? He heard from the villagers that it was the woman who found him alive and called the villagers to help pull him out of the wreckage of his strider. It was also that woman who fixed his strider, and even improved it. If this was not fate, what was?

Thinking back about the Virell woman, it was strange how she knew how to repair warstriders. In order to gain the qualifications to even do maintenance on a warstrider, you’d have to enroll into the Imperial Academy and receive a certificate. Usually, that would take eight years. He knew of people who hadn’t graduated even after twelve years.

And then you have to apprentice under a technician for another five years before you are entrusted with doing repairs or modifications on a warstrider. After all, warstriders aren’t cheap, or simple. All in all, it would take thirteen years minimum.

He didn’t think that the Virell woman was old enough to have done all that.

Sure she had four sons and one daughter, but that was nothing. Women in the rural areas married early. And that would be another issue. While you were attending the Imperial Academy to be a warstrider technician, you wouldn’t be allowed to be pregnant. So any woman who wanted to attend had to remain chaste or drop out when they were pregnant.

The timing simply didn’t match.

That Virell woman couldn’t possibly have gone to the academy.

Come to think of it, he didn’t even know her name.

He slapped himself mentally for forgetting to ask. Doesn’t matter. I’ll just ask her when I deliver this month’s food interest.

“Darus Kael,” the fort commander called.

“Yes sir,” Darus stood at attention.

“After careful deliberation of your skills, devotion and merit in these difficult times, I hereby promote you to the rank of Lance Officer. Do you accept this appointment?”

Darus Kael was extremely excited at receiving this long-overdue promotion. But he tried to avoid it from showing on his face. He stood straight and saluted. “Sir, it is my pleasure, sir!”

The fort commander then picked up a box from his cabinet, and put it into Darus’s hand. “You may now gather and command a maximum of four warstriders, as well as recruit non-regular personnel into your unit with the Strider Commander’s approval. Congratulations, Captain Darus Kael. We look forward to your future contributions.”

“Thank you, sir! I will not let you down!”