Foreign Dominion

Chapter 10 - On a Long Enough Timeline

The student council office was nearly empty except for the few that remained after the meeting. These few were the President, Vice President, and a representative for the school's Sealift Division.

"Is Sealift going to be occupied anytime soon, Miss Ramsay?" The Vice President asked.

The representative looked uncomfortable talking to the senior leaders like this.

"Um, no, why? And please call me Elsie."

"Well Miss Ramsay, we you may need to transport the Tankery team sometime in the next week. We'll let you know the details later, but thanks for helping. You are dismissed."

Elsie rushed out of the room, unsure exactly why she was so uncomfortable. She took the shortest route back to her domain in the well deck. As she ran, Elsie wondered if the there would even be a landing craft free when it was needed. She hadn't actually said yes, but somehow a deal had been made.

"Why must you torture everyone?" The President asked.

"It's fun seeing people squirm. And it's fun making people do stuff for you."

"You're a sick bastard, you know that?"

"Yeah whatever. You're a softass."

"Hey, you can go- ah whatever. Where's the Tankery team headed next?"

"That depends on who they're fighting."

"Why not ask Ayame? She's like, the one in charge of that after all."

"This next battle isn't her decision."

The president was confused. "What? It's her team, isn't it?"

"Well, the goal here is of course to beat Ooarai to a pulp one day, but it's not like we're ready to take them on. The national tournament is on right now, so everyone's focused on the schools in it. What if we challenged one of them to a skirmish and beat them? Everyone would look at us then!"

My VP is such an attention whore, the president thought. And a creep. An annoying, unsatisfiable creep.

"Good lord, how do we mess up a spring in just a little practice?" Amy complained from beside the Ram. Every crew was performing maintenance, or at least pretending to. During practice, Amy had felt the tank handling weird and was now inspecting the running gear. She'd found a faulty volute spring on one side and was now working with the rest of the crew to replace it.

"There's another one on this side too." Delilah called from the opposite side. "It's messed up pretty bad. Like, the inside is rusted out and falling apart."

Behind the tank, Yelena and Mia were passing tools to Eiko, who being the smallest and most mechanically inclined, was contorted around the engine. "So I figured out why the tank felt so slow at the end of practice. The head bolts on the lower cylinders are so worn and rusted out that it's a wonder we didn't blow the heads clean off the short block. How the hell was this thing holding compression?"

Delilah was listening to all of this, amazed at how poor the condition of their tank was after they'd been using it for a couple weeks. No wonder the school was able to get it cheap. Whoever sold it knew how bad it was and was able to hide it for a short while until it was Dominion's problem. As she finished pulling the remains of the spring out of the inside of the bogie, she turned her head upward while looking around. She froze and her eyes widened.

"Amy, come here. Do you see what I do?"

Amy walked around the side of the tank. Delilah stood up and pointed.