The crane wouldn't move until Gan was strapped in, so he made a quick, unceremonious gesture of pulling up his hair into a lazy tail, pulling his helmet down from the ceiling by its tubes, locking it in and pressurizing. He harnessed himself to his seat, and secured the socket around his neurojack plug. Having freed the strut propping up the canopy, he then closed that, cocooning himself completely in leather, steel, and aluminum glass. As well as a cockpit it was, in a certain way of thinking, a crucible: a young pilot would either strangle and kill his claustrophobia, emerging stronger from the mech as if from metamorphosis; or he would panic, shut down, and crack, like impure steel emerging from the foundry, or a shoddily spun clay pot from the kiln. For some reason, the rookie pilot struck Gan as one subsumed within this struggle, which struck him as odd; didn't Morrigan Group, or any private contractor for that matter, give first pick to pilots with long and storied careers; the ones who'd survived a few campaigns, won a few distinctions and ribbons first? They hated pouring precious time, and precious money, into training green-gills when there were vets lining up at the door, ones already seasoned on taxpayer budgets. So why was the young blood behaving like she didn't know her mouth from her asshole and her brains from a bowl of oatmeal?

And more importantly: what the hell had Streymoy seen in her when he let her in? Did she have money connections? Had she snaked her way along a path of know-a-guy nepotism until it reached one of the COs? Or, was she secretly a piloting prodigy ... despite appearances?

[i]Guess we'll find out,[/i] Gan ruminated as he wrestled a cyclic to and fro, waving his Basilisk's starboard barrel and thus signaling to the boots on the platform that he was ready for hoisting. Almost immediately there was the rumble of a crane arm; then the seismic clunk of an enormous winch, its whir more akin to a groan as, awakened blearily from a titanic slumber, it began to unspool a cable as thick as an oak round. When, thus, a cargo hook reached down from the girdered firmament as if to bestow a blessing from its iron palm, it joined to a slat between the shoulders of the Basilisk. Now the winch whined, despite its terrible size and power; it [i]strained[/i] against its own weight, and those of the rigging, the cargo hook, and the 130-tonne walking gun to which they were coupled. What other weapons platform—no, what other human project at all—could have culminated from forty years of materials, R&D, testing, QC, lobbying, contracting, and engineering? What else besides an ADAMAS warmech could have demanded that starships be equipped with such extravagant and excessive machinery, the stuff of Atlantean myth, just to lift it to another deck, or pluck it from a planet? For the same cost as a single of these units (never mind the infrastructure accommodating it), Morrigan Group could have fielded a whole battalion of armored infantry, including artillery and power-suits for support. And yet they chose Gan and the other fou—... five. Because once Gan and the others landed, they, whoever was down there, would witness firsthand what even a single fireteam of mech pilots could achieve. Six ordinary people, riding in the shirt pockets of their behemoths and leaving entire legions trampled in their wake.

Back in the 20[sup]th[/sup] Century, the semi-automatic handgun was christened "the great equalizer," allowing the small and the feeble to protect themselves from tyrannical strength. But inside a mech, David could rend Goliath; slaves could topple not just masters.

Empires.

For a time, the four mechs swayed in the pull of the ship's artificial inertia drives, and things, despite the industrial-mechanical chaos, were peaceful. Four became six as the Commander, and then the rookie, made their way to their docking stations. (How the ship rumbled and rattled, now! Through the cockpit window Gan saw Commander Voldova's two-legged, four-barreled 'Sword of Damocles' as vividly as he felt its apocalyptic footsteps shuddering through the floor, the winch, the crane, the cable, the Basilisk, and then into his cockpit, such were their immensity.)

Twin downward-facing camera feeds, intended as an anti-infantry measure, instead showed Gan a sequence of thumbs-up, flags, and beckons from the enlisteds at his own mech's feet, conveying that it was ready to receive the final piece of its loadout. And within moments it began to close in around him: two halves of a rifled iron-vanadium shell, coupled at the seam and then clamped shut. Gan surrendered himself to the internal darkness; and silence, as his radiovisual feed slowly sank into a sea of white static, neither penetrating nor escaping the ferrous cage now blocking it from all sides. Gan only knew when he began to move from the way his stomach sloshed against his ribs, and his brain against his skull, as the cargo crane pulled him along its dolly, swinging him just slightly at every directional lurch of the heavy cables. Now it was only him in here; no voices on the radio, no faces in the video feeds, like he was a pearl clutched possessively in his dark, cool little oyster, with only displays and dials to light his way, and his own breathing to battle the silence. The quiet turned some pilots anxious, itchy, desperate to burst free; from their harnesses, or their helmets, or the cheap alloy shells which protected them and their machines from atmospheric burning. Gan understood the feeling a little. Admittedly, he liked a bit of music to pass the time in what he could only liken to a gently humming, temperature-regulated, slightly-too-chilly purgatory. Even now, he reached down into a center console, past a Chinese copycat of an 1897 trench-gun stowed barrel-down in its holster, to run his finger over a collection of cassette tapes stashed beneath. Making his choice, he crammed the tape into the deck, dialed back the volume a hair, and settled in for the ride, which, as it happens, had just begun in earnest.

There was a gentle lurch as, once again, pulleys ached and cables strained in dropping the weight of the durasteel monster. It especially strained at the bottom, when all that weight had to come to a stop; only the walls of the launch conduit relieved these machines of their labor, rifling inward until they braced flush against the anti-atmo shell. The cargo hook released its death-grip on the Basilisk, and retreated into the ceiling, and made way for the hatch above Gan to slide shut, truly trapping him in the ductwork guts of the [i]Artaxerxes[/i].

A terrible hissing drowned out the music, for a time, as vacuum pumps drew the air out of the chamber. The hatch [i]below[/i] him opened. And this—the waiting—was the worst part, Gan reckoned; not knowing just when it would happen. But he'd done this enough times that he didn't bother bracing his stomach anymore. He liked to think it had long been annealed against all manners of gravitational roughhousing.

So he waited. And waited, with only the faintest spike of dread running through his blood. Until, simultaneously, the rifled walls loosened, and an explosion-propelled plunger [i]shoved[/i] the Basilisk out the launch port and into the thermosphere.
[center][hider=Diagetic Listening][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmFbTxZ7lWw[/youtube][/hider][/center]