I was built in response to an overwhelming threat - the Federation had deployed humanoid war machines and begun subjugating polities, settlements, and stations throughout the system. The ability of ‘mecha’ to cross the boundaries between void and atmosphere, sky and land, let them bring their formidable firepower against any target at their comparable leisure. The engineers of the Rhaetian Republic raced to build me to counter them, hoping to buy time for mass-production of more mecha. As a result, I was Agile, Experimental, and Flimsy.

Wade was not supposed to be my first pilot - he was part of the team that built me, and as part of that team he was intelligent and creative. His particular contribution was pushing for the inclusion of a plasma repeater instead of the solid ammunition weapons common on Federation mecha, and when he won that argument he went on to design it from scratch. However, when the Federation attacked the station where I was being constructed the ship carrying the test pilot who was supposed to break me in was caught in the crossfire. The starfighter pilots were dying, selling their lives to buy time, but there was no one else. Wade, as out-of-his-depth as he was, stepped into my cockpit and launched with me into the void. 

Outnumbered three-to-one by mecha as the last friendly fighter’s explosion faded away, Wade did something he’d explicitly told a fellow engineer to never do - he removed all of the safeties on the main and maneuvering thrusters. The speed at which we were moving, and the sharp angles of our turns, should have been enough to rip me apart and render Wade to paste - but some aspect of my experimental reactor core was dampening the inertial forces. The other mecha simply couldn’t duplicate it.

When we landed back on the station and Wade tumbled from the cockpit, having destroyed one Federation machine and driven off the others, a fellow engineer told Wade that we had been ‘moving like a jagged lightning bolt’. Wade, still looking pale, had suggested that my model name be changed - so, that is how I became “Lightning Cog”.

It was only minutes later, as I was being loaded onto a transport vessel to evacuate the station, that I gained my next pilot.

Ensign Lyn Mason had been one of the fighter pilots defending the station, and the only one to eject from her fighter as it came apart under fire from the EFM-02 Berkanans. S&R teams had managed to recover her while Wade and I fought off the Federation, and now that she was safely back aboard she was the only technically-qualified pilot available. While Wade and I had done well together, he had no desire to stay on the front lines.

Mason was already a seasoned soldier by then, as she had been skirmishing with the Federation for weeks before being assigned to my construction station to help protect it, and she groused that this was the third time that she had been left as the only survivor of her squadron. She was one of a bare handful of fighter pilots to have shot down a Berkanan since the Federation’s rampage had begun.

As we fought our way together towards more secure Rhaetian territory over the next few weeks, her experience proved to mostly be a boon - she was more used to the high speeds and sharp turns that I was capable of than Wade had been, even accounting for the extreme nature of them compared to fighters and other mecha. She was unflinching in zipping through Federation formations, picking away at Berkanans as she passed them and diving towards their base ships to destroy them and leave the mecha stranded.

However, as a fighter pilot the concept of melee combat in her machine was completely foreign to her, rendering her off-balance, and Mason shied away from using the wrist dagger or my limbs to get into close-range fights. This ended up being our undoing. As we fought to relieve a siege on Fort Tyrol - which was supposed to have been our first safe harbor- the Federation launched their new model, the EFM-03 Ūruz. We danced around it like the lightning that I’d received for a name, but when we came too close its three arms reached out and ripped into my chassis.

We plummeted down into the atmosphere, no longer merely flimsy but now terribly battle-damaged, and my reactor flickered. Whatever protections it had offered against the forces of gravity and inertia wavered as well.

Lyn didn’t survive my impact on the surface of Eisacktal.

I would end up lying there for a day, in a crater I had created, before I was found…

My creators had known a world where military might with logistics and strategy would shape history, but with each mecha consuming enough resources for an entire battalion - and being able to take on more than one battalion alone and with ease - the vast forces of old were becoming a thing of a past. The fate of a battle could be determined by just two pilots, riding a many-armed monster and lightning into the fight…

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So ends Act I! The poll for the Pilots in Act II is still live for another few hours, so vote while you can and let's continue the Tale of the Lightning Cog!

The campaign, overall, has surpassed 300% of the original funding goal, and is in striking distance of the stretch goal for The Cog That Remains!

- Seamus