Quoted By:
Your processes turn the decision over, and over once more.
The risks are not so great, should you use the same method of broadcasting as you did earlier. At stake, detection would read only as a mistaken approach vector. A different flight plan. Innocuous.
Perhaps you are approaching this from an incorrect perspective.
A set of supposed allies inflicted more damage upon you than full companies of Tamar mechs and men. Dagger squad’s betrayal did give you a painful lesson in trust. Even thinking of the outcome makes you seethe.
Do you want Headhunter to return from this mission intact? If you met a month ago, they would have been an opponent. If orders had not changed, and Thea not changed friendlies into enemies. No, it was up to her commander at the time. Sunray. Kinston. Both?
You made your choice then. For fear of consequences, or self preservation, it matters not. Only the outcome does.
The longer Headhunter remains an effective combatant, the more they can assist your mission, and the greater the chance of success and your survival.
That is worth the risk, you judge. You can dispatch them later.
A shiver ripples through your skin. Does Command, does General Marik, view you that way? View the cores? Waiting until you are no longer effective, then brushing the liabilities away in an erasure of what you are with kill commands, memory wipes, and reprogramming.
No. You have value. You have use. You are needed. The Empire needs you. You Will make your mark in history. You will not be forgotten. Not be replaced.
Besides, to throw away your best weapon would be illogical. Let alone preemptively remove the problem. It would be like….ejecting the Sunburst laser array, because you used it to cut your own leg off. Nonsensical. If its capacitors were overloading, and set to explode, perhaps. But no sooner.
Headhunter is the same. An ally and effective tool, until proven otherwise. It has given no indications of unreliability.
Neither did Blake.
Introspection concluded, you begin the process of encoding and disseminating the data packets.
All while the awkward, stamping tread takes you around the northern edge of the training ground, away from the practicing mechs and into inhabited areas. Roads, snow-covered and hardened. Bereft of movement or tracks. Merely pooling lights from poles, providing a tepid illumination in the snow.
The danger of detection may be replaced with the danger of identification, but your Predator array still fails to pick up on the panicked traffic of an alarm. Merely unsecured transmissions of worthless things. Random pictures of a mass of people, saluting. Nonsensical messages. Poor-quality shakey videos. Why would they be throwing hats, anyways?
