In the aftermath of the Amaunet fiasco, General Motors
went to great effort to hide its duplicity from the Federated
Commonwealth units on Kathil. In the scramble to erase
traces of the battlemech --and the massacre-- before
curious troops arrived, GM did not have the resources to
prevent the escape of its pilot and designer, Alexis
Karisen. Having found the empty ejection pod, they simply
could not spare the manpower to both hunt down the
"lunatic" and cover up their "experiment". Karisen
escaped off-world --under the unlikely alias of a mental
patient bound for New Avalon pending treatment. Within a
year she had made her way to the Kallon Industries offices
on Talon and repeated her meteoric rise through the ranks
of her newly chosen corporation.
The driving force behind her second coming was the
relentless promotion of her latest design theory.. Her
confidence bolstered by her successful completion (if not
mass-deployment) of the Amaunet, a Marauder-Catapult
hybrid after the Clan Mad Cat, Karisen boasted that she
was inspired to create newer, more original battlemech
crossbreeds. So it was that she came to pitch the
Sekhmet, a cross between Kallon's own Crusader and the
ever-popular Warhammer.
While the look of the completed battlemech is closer to
that of the Warhammer than the Crusader, the former
design is such a staple across the Sphere that Kallon
faced little difficulty in replicating the components. Seeing
their opportunity to cash in on the celebrity of a
competitor's mech as well as renew interest in their own
not-unpopular product, Kallon spared no expense in
supporting the project. Indeed, so great was their interest
that they even gave in to Karisen's demand for completely
pristine study models, digging deeply into corporate
pockets to find an original Crusader and Warhammer that
had never seen combat.
The project did suffer the usual oddities surrounding an
Alexis Karisen undertaking, not least of which was the
clearing of an entire battlemech hangar for undisclosed
purposes. It was later discovered through declassified
security camera footage that the designer was throwing a
romantic dinner (complete with music and candlelight) for
the Crusader and Warhammer, which she had christened
"Mommy" and "Daddy," respectively.
Capabilities:
Armed with the Warhammer's trademark twin PPCs and
the distinctive shoulder/hip missile ports of the Crusader,
Sekhmet is capable of a withering barrage at long or short
range. A modest laser array rounds out the ensemble. The
initial plans of the battlemech mounted full-sized LRM-15s,
but these caused such severe balance issues that they
had to be downsized despite Karisen's efforts to the
contrary. Earlier in the project the eccentric "genius" had
also railed against the use of an extra-light engine, but
ultimately could find no other way to safely power the
70-ton behemoth. As a result the Sekhmet has a reactor
shielding vulnerability that Alexis herself found particularly
distasteful.
Perhaps these and other design problems could have
been solved if several promising engineers had not been
critically injured in a regrettable incident wherein an AMS
unit was apparently reprogrammed as an "anti-insect
device". Although nothing was ever conclusively proven,
when questioned as to who might be responsible the
Project Leader simply muttered "damned fly."
Deployment:
For once not hiding her fairly respectable piloting skills from
her employers, the charismatic project leader was granted
the option of demonstrating the freshly completed
prototype for upper-echelon members of Kallon Industries'
hierarchy. While undoubtedly an entertaining repeat of the
Amaunet incident may have been in the offing, this was
not to be.
The evening before the demonstration, Kallon Security
was flooded with reports of fires, explosions, and intruder
alerts. Communications with nearby military bases were
cut; several of Kallon's own battlemechs suffered
extensive computer troubles, gyroscope failures, and
spontaneous shutdowns. One JagerMech painted a
bizarre one-eyed smiley face over its HUD, refusing to
obey piloting input for a good ten minutes before
autoejecting its mechwarrior (with the Betty unit reportedly
offering the cryptic admonition to "take the blue pill", no
less). Planetary sensors reported phantom signals of
jumpships disgorging dropships, ships lifting off from the
surface, enemy aerospace fighters swarming through the
skies.
Files and data relating to Project Sekhmet spontaneously
erased themselves from Kallon computers; backups
proved corrupt. Engineers and prominent workers
associated with the project simply disappeared into the
night --some with no signs of struggle, others only after
panicky reports of sighting black-clad jump infantry. And
some time during this total chaos, the Sekhmet prototype
physically pummeled the pilotless, defenseless, priceless
"Daddy" Warhammer and "Mommy" Crusader into
unrecognizable scrap, itself vanishing entirely in the
confusion.
By the time order was restored, all that was left of the
ambitious and potentially profitable Project Sekhmet was a
note addressed to the ranking Kallon executive:
"With two LRM-10s, two SRM racks, two small lasers, two
mediums, two PPC.. two turtle doves and a partridge in a
pear tree... I am Sekhmet. Goddess of warfare and divine
retribution."
The current whereabouts of Dr. Alexis Karisen and her
prototype are unknown.
