Quoted By:
“I will assure you, we will have all three of the Frames combat-ready for deployment in a year.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he already regretted it. Faces twisted in grimaces, supporters looked away. He tried again.
“If we accelerate the timeline, we can have one of them ready much sooner. Three months, at the fastest.”
The Empress spoke once more, and the whole room looked on.
“Three months. I require one of these ‘Core Frames’ operational in three months. I understand some things cannot be rushed.”
The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. The Empress had spoken, and thus the world must be aligned to her vision.
Powerful people dispersed via train, helicopter and plane to other places, but his mind continued to spin.
3 months! He could already hear the complaints of the engineers. He would need to lean on the other Projects responsible for the weapons. Frames needed the physical prototypes, not just specs for the simulator.
The Doctor made his way to the construction bay, where the frames rested. Gantries criss-crossed over the giants, where engineers would swarm over them for maintenance or installation. Even a cursory inspection could tell him that none were ready, and would not be for some time.
He tapped away on his tablet, pulling up the current status of each unit.
Frame 01 was missing its arms, shipped off to Project Yi for tweaking of their system. The cockpit for the human operator still had cooling problems, as spinning up the reactor to over 75% output would cause it to become dangerously hot inside. The supposed reflective panels of the stealth system had failed to come in still, supposedly diverted to elsewhere.
Frame 02 at least had all their limbs, and the reflective panels which HAD arrived were installed, but still experienced power fluctuations when trying to charge weapons, and that was before even engaging the stealth system actively! Human techs reading the sensors swore that they saw problems with the sensors, rangefinding being completely off, and targets sometimes appeared and vanished seemingly at will.
Frame 03 lacked legs and one arm, gone missing for engineers elsewhere to install the remaining thrusters. Its one remaining arm hung limply down, the oversized claw on the end the sole actually functioning prototype that was installed on the Frame. The secondary weapon on the back had ammo feed problems, refusing to deploy and load in acceptable amounts of time. The reactor was also temperamental, refusing to shut down properly after extended time running.
And all that was merely the largest outstanding problems. More teething problems would undoubtedly come, as more systems would get brought online.
