Post and critique works of writing here, because I'm not sure where the old thread went to.

Suicide Run
Not very good imo, but getting there. Still not enough emotional output. Smallified for easy scrolling.

"You don't have to take it, Fritz. A drone could work just as well."
"bull♥♥♥♥ sarge. Drones can't think ahead like a human can. Besides..."
The two fell silent. Sergeant Agram couldn't finish the sentence just as Mecher Kobold couldn't. It didn't need to be said anyway.
Fritz began again,
"Sarge, let me go. Both me and Junior have to. Junior's not keyed to anyone else and he's the only one that can carry it."
Matt Agram sighed. He couldn't deny the kid, logically or otherwise. He certainly couldn't deny him his last wish.
He had only one course of action left to try, though he knew it would not be enough.
"I can't give you the medal you deserve, Fritz. You won't exist anymore."
"That's the idea, ain't it sarge?"
Kobold cracked a crooked grin. Agram couldn't help returning it, though it was soon replaced with the sad frown present prior. He looked up at the stained bulkhead ceiling, sighed and shook out a cigarette from his pocket. He looked over at the clock on the wall while lighting it, then turned back to Kobold.
"Alright. You know the timetable. Quadruple O sharp, carrier deck. We'll have Junior all buffed up and ready for you."
"Yes sir!"
Agram wasn't sure what he was feeling when he left Kobold's cubicle.
--
The command deck of the Danali was unusually quiet. Quiet, but tense. Soon it would get a lot louder. Sergeant Agram sat at a command desk behind the rest of the deck's crew, on the commodore's dias.
"Sergeant Agram, is Little Louis ready?"
Commodore Dunn wasn't helping things.
"Yes commodore. Kobold is standing by inside Jun-, his mech. The technicians have just finished with it."
"Good. Captain Yoshima?"
Yoshima's Rattlers were assigned to cover Kobold as he made his way through the blockade. She and Agram had already gotten together beforehand. Right after Agram had talked with Kobold, actually.
"My squad is ready, commodore."
"Good. Alright, let's begin."
With that, the combat cameras in Junior and the Rattlers' mechs began sending footage to the Danali's archives. The launch bay was captured from seventeen different angles and recorded faithfully, despite the uselessness of the image.
"Kobold, Junior, launching."
Agram's eyes clouded a bit at the voice coming through the comms console in front of him. He quickly blinked his eyes. He had seen too many men and women die to get sentimental in the middle of an operation. On the main screen in front of the deck crew and the commodore's dias, Junior with the dark angular package of Little Louis sat in the launch cradle. Junior's engines roared to life silently on the screen. The entertainment vids always added in sound, but the bay had been evacuated. Only the odd ion or two remained to transmit the blast of Junior's engines. Using the cradle to guide Junior in a straight path, Kobold throttled up Junior's engines and screamed out of the hangar's open doors. Waiting for the Rattlers, Kobold entered a holding pattern in front of the Danali.
"Oulong, Icy, launching."
The myriad voices of the Rattlers launching filled up the comms for the next minutes. They formed up around Kobold, forming a half sphere in front of him. When all the Rattlers had gotten into position, they and Kobold maxed their engines and screamed off, accelerating toward the center of the blockade.
"Agram. ETA?"
"Five minutes sir. Mechs can cross the belt a lot faster than ships of the line."
"Indeed."
Dunn looked slightly annoyed at the extra information. He was feeling tense too. There was little to do for the next five minutes. Actually, Agram's part was done. He was just along for the ride. It was mostly Yoshima's show from now on. Yoshima's and Kobold's.
"Thirty seconds out. Blockade's quiet." One of the deck crew members informed Dunn.
"Visual?" Inquired Dunn.
"None yet sir. Radar?"
"Do it."
The screen changed from what Junior saw to what Junior got on radar. Ghostly green outlines of angular destroyers, blocky cruisers, and flat carriers emerged from the black background. As the crew member had said, there was no activity to be seen. Kobold and the Rattlers seemed to have taken them napping. Seemed to.
"Terris, anything to report?" Yoshima asked. She didn't trust it. Agram silently agreed. It was too easy. Ten seconds out and nothing.
"No ma'am. Radar's clean, so is emissions and EM."
"Keep me posted. Haley too."
"Roger. I'm not feeling anything but boredom from the blockade." The ghostly image of the blockade loomed larger in the screen. The mechs were inside the blockade now, some of the ships were sliding off the edges of the screen. Something was wrong. Something always was, Agram reflected.
"♥♥♥♥! Terris! Gloating and triumph at 30/10!"
"Bloody hell. Form up team, keep it together. Don't chase, but keep limber."
A chorus of "Roger" answered him and the half sphere opened up a bit. Kobold switched to assisted radar. Reticles and targeting information filled the screen, waiting for Kobold to choose which to target.
"Agram." Kobold calling.
"Agram here. Need something?"
"Is the recorder on? I need to say something." Kobold's last words, then. Agram thumbed the recording button on his desk.
"It is. Give it to me, Kobold."
Kobold was silent for a moment. Onscreen, a carrier that had been silent twenty seconds ago belched atmosphere from her bays and disgorged two wings of mechs.
"This is Fritz Kobold, Mecher first class assigned to the Danali at time of this recording. I'd like to publicly apologize to Earth. Sessona was my fault. At the time, I was a mecher assigned to the Polotonia. With orders to stay away from the procession, I drifted close to Amiga 1 and held there. My fiance, Elise Borrato, was one of the governor's aides, and was present in the procession. She is the reason I am making this recording."
Agram looked up from his desk. The screen was filling up with hostiles. The Rattlers continued to hold their fire until fired upon. Still at full throttle, Junior and his entourage were perhaps another minute away.
"You all know the story. Bonnie's Brigade rocketed in from their concealed hangar inside a freighter. The Polotonia's mechs and I moved to intercept."
The hostile mechs opened fire. Both the Rattlers and Kobold were highly trained. If any fire intersected their half sphere, the mechs opened a hole large enough to let it through, then formed back up. They were not here to trade hits, but to deliver a package.
"The Brigade weren't interested in us, they wanted the governor. We tried our best to keep them out, but half of the mechs from the Polotonia were on the other side of Sessona. They couldn't get to us fast enough to hold the Brigade back."
The destroyers' small arms came to life, spraying flickering trails of metallic pellets at the intruders. They dared not use their larger bore weapons for fear of hitting each other. One small kindness, Agram thought with sadness.
"With our wall broken, we split and ran down individual targets."
White blossomed on the screen. Kobold quickly enabled the compensator AI and the white receded to a more manageable blob. One of the Rattlers had gone down, to either the enemy mechs or the destroyers. Neither option made a difference.
"The Brigade and we were still five klicks out from the procession, but we were getting closer."
More flowers of death bloomed on the screen. The Rattlers exacted their revenge three or fourfold on the defenders, dodging a linear cannon slug or a missile, then returning fire with the magnetic acceleration chainguns the squad was notorious for. They rarely missed.
"I was tailing one of their bombers, one of them who had a nuke strapped to him. Hah, just realized how similar we are right now."
They were in the cloud of enemy mechs now. The Rattlers continued to exact heavy casualties on the part of the defenders, but more of them were being shot down as well. Kobold was only twenty seconds away from the objective. He was using his maneuvering jets like a madman, the remaining Rattlers the same. Kobold's skill was easily evident, the Rattler cameras behind him showed him spinning, corkscrewing, sidestepping, and somersaulting to avoid enemy fire. Despite the acrobatics, he continued to accelerate.
"The bomber was only seconds away from hitting the governor's transport, so I hit the afterburner and came up next to him."
They were through the cloud now. Half of the Rattlers had been taken down, but a good quarter of the three carrier swarm was dead or incapacitated. Agram knew that somehow the Rattlers had managed to bring along a few mines, they couldn't have done such serious damage without them. Practiced or not, there's no way a mere 17 mechs could take down over 50 live enemies with MagAcks alone.
"When I got close enough, I grabbed him and pushed him off course. I forgot something. Me."
Agram's respect for Kobold had grown a lot today. Kobold was facing his past, working the present, and ensuring the future. And, he hadn't interrupted his narrative through the entire battle.
"With the afterburners, I was going about four hundred klicks an hour. Mechs are built to take impacts of six trillion kilogram meters per second and keep their pilot alive. Barely, but alive. Civilian transports are not. I tried to slow down, and I got it to under two hundred klicks an hour, but it wasn't enough."
Kobold was within maximum range now. Agram didn't know if he knew.
"Kobold, Agram. You're within maximum range. You can go at any time."
Kobold interrupted his narrative just long enough to acknowledge.
"Aye aye, sir. Even with the slowing, I crushed the spacer. There were no survivors."
At the last syllable of "survivors", Kobold's voice wavered, increased in pitch, and died. A small icon appeared in the bottom right of the telemetry from Junior. Little Louis had been activated. Kobold resumed speaking again, albeit with a tremor in his voice.
"I was critically injured, but I made it. Without Elise."
He broke down again. The countdown for Little Louis started up. It took about a minute for the twisted thing to do whatever it had to do to explode. Or rather, to do whatever the hell it did. Kobold came back on.
"It was the worst collision in years, I've been told. Shrapnel from the initial impact collided with other vehicles in the procession and caused over three hundred deaths."
Only thirty seconds to go, and Kobold was well within effective radius. The blockade, shaped like a rough rectangle, had two sections. The first line was what Kobold and the Rattlers had broken through, the second was what they were approaching. Best case scenario would have them exactly in between the two when Little Louis started up his tantrum.
"Three hundred innocent deaths. I've been carrying that for four years. Thank you for listening."
The countdown was almost over. Kobold knew how to time things.
"Agram? That's it. And thank you, as well."
Kobold was still accelerating. He had great timing all over, it seemed. He was going to be within a klick of the point of maximum effect. Agram shut off the personal recorder and started two copies of the data it held.
"Captain Kobold, I'm going to miss you."
"Cap-...? Thank you sir. Keep fighting for me."
"Will do, Fritz, will do."
The timer reached zero. The screen splashed into a dizzying pattern of interference. Colors fought with each other and squeals with groans before it was switched off. On the Danali's scanners, the blockade disappeared, to be replaced with... something. Whatever it was, strange matter, tangled strings, coal, the stuff was blacker than the surrounding space but emitting EM radiation all over the rest of the spectrum. After a few minutes, it slowly bled away. It looked like a great cloud of black dust, slowly being swept away by some sort of cosmic wind. His desk ejected three disks, the original and the two copies. He gave the original and a copy to the commodore and pocketed the other, then turned to walk to his quarters. Dunn called to him.
"Agram, where are you going?"
Agram paused,
"I'm tired. I'm going to bed."
Dunn looked at him, sighed, then waved him off.
"Yoshima, you're free to go as well." He added.
Yoshima nodded, but returned to her inspection of the desk. Agram looked wistfully at his desk that for seven minutes, thirty seconds, had been his last contact. Then, he turned and walked through the bridge door.

Through the magical thing called DeviantArt, I will eliminate pagerape.
http://deathbal101.deviantart.com/art/In-the-House-of-Tomorrow-120163163