#batterypilot

. . . “No hostiles remaining. System starting Battery relief cycle.”

Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of broken armor, the sides of a single titanic war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith, accompanied only by the callous intonation of an onboard automech AI.

“System administering four hundred thirty milligrams: meitothyl psythenigor.”

The halite planet of Hjkor III was always considered a power position in the system for the endless tundra of salt it bore, but devolved into a corporate warzone the day reserves of rare metals and fuel elements were discovered within its crust. Even if the rock bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, planetwide artillery shelling and the constant threat of any small homestead being interpreted as a rival corporate incursion is a pretty effective way to gatekeep colonial efforts. The lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared little for the politics of the war; it hardly had the facilities to comprehend them.

“System administering ninety milligrams: brimophyntynol.”

The pilot’s body twitched, exposed like the pistil of a flower in the freezing air. Her short, sweat-caked hair tossed in the arctic wind. Whatever human was in command of the idle giant was severely indisposed, form sagging without so much as a hint of vitality.

“System administering two hundred ten milligrams: carcyl methodine.”

Somewhere within the lifeless slab, a heart seized with unsolicited life.

“Stage one: cardiac vivification complete. Beginning stage two. System administering four hundred thirty two volts.”

Poking through the uncountable tangle of bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some metallic element, pressed against the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, had plans for its tiny ridealong.

“System administering regulation rhythm: seventy eight beats per minute.”

A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a comfortable, faux-natural pace.

“Stage two: pulmonary benchmark reached. Beginning stage three. System administering neural flash.”

In an instant, the previously limply bowed head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it.

Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.

“Reaction noted. System administering correctional dose. One hundred forty milligrams: glucomic tripsthentonol.”

The pilot could barely hear the words of the machine speaking through its flayed frame, but she could feel a warming presence melt through her body and mind, and that was good enough for whatever was left of her brain. It was only at this point that she began to think, primal lobotomized animal instinct put to bed by a rational human psyche that knew (vaguely) where it was and knew not to be afraid.

She knew she didn’t need to be afraid of being trapped inside the thick spinal column at the core of this walker: that was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems. She knew there was no reason to fear the pulsating, pale white endomusculature surrounding her, because those thick strips of flesh were what kept her safe. She knew better than to fear the dry and salty air whipping at her side–it didn’t matter if it was safe to breathe or not, her bloodstream was already so rigorously filtered that nothing short of being exposed to vacuum could kill her.

There was no reason to fear the sea of burning tanks, shattered human bodies, or the mangled pile of mech oozing flame in front of her. They were dead.

She had no recollection of how she ended up here, of course. The Battery spent her time riding shotgun in her own mind–her only purpose aboard the bastardmech was to serve as a biological connection between the pulsing muscles surrounding her and the bones of the traditional ground walker contained within. There was more kinship to be felt from the rhythmic vibrations of the idle musculature around her than the void of silence the autopilot’s brief disconnection left in its wake. The fact that she was having any measure of independent thought, no matter how benign, was an uncomfortable feeling to reacclimate to.

“System command: when ready, please recite your licensure number to verify cognizance.”

The voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was one of the few things left that she could recite on command, but even then, placing the digits in order took a long few minutes to prepare between violent fits of coughing to rid her throat of mucus, blood, and bits of necrotic tissue. When she was finally able to speak, her voice could barely be heard over the whipping translucent winds; the weak vibrations of her speech were read through implants against the throat, meaningless utterances checked against a small library of predefined command phrases to give the Battery some illusion of control and agency within the titanic war machine.

“Sta… st-sta… sta…”

The pilot murmured, lip quivering, chin craning upwards as though she was looking for some god to answer her. The sky, for the moment, was silent.

“System command: please recite pilot licensure number.”

The mech system beneath reiterated, artificial voice slightly more forceful.

“St-sta…tus…”

she tried again, eyes fighting to remain open as the initial rush of the revivification drugs began to fade off. The automech system was silent, working overtime to parse the faintest of murmurs from the spent body against the vibrations of the whipping wind.

“System record: priority target neutralized. Target ground resistance force neutralized. Area secure. All objectives met. Extraction craft inbound.”

The automated readout paused, before continuing with the only part of the status report the frayed pilot actually cared about. “Head Karabin sends her approval.”

Between the bandages across her face, the pilot’s dry lips turned to a smile. Her legs tensed, wiry muscles pressing against the restraint harness. She wiggled ever so slightly, head lowering to her chest and arms wrapping around her body. Her lungs began to seize, regurgitating sounds somewhere between a cough and a giggle.

“It… did-d… it…. It… di-did… it…It…it… di-di-d… it…”

Her voice was so small that it was lost in the exotundra gale, interrupted occasionally by weak hacking. The AI could barely process the fragments of words she sputtered, but it knew better than to try. After a moment of her senseless babbling, it once again repeated its first demand.

“System command: please recite pilot licensure number to verify cognizance.”

The pilot paused, recalling those specific words being important. Did it say “number”? That was important. She knew a number. Voice barely above a whisper, she recited the number.

“Four… four… four… eight… t-two… one… three… one… nine… sssssix.”

Each was labored and ragged, held together only by memorization and repetition so worn into her mind that she could (and often did) murmur it in rare moments of sleep. If pressed, it was unlikely she could recall the numbers zero, five, or seven. At the very least, she knew why everyone called her “Fours”.

“System confirms: Battery cognizance. Relief cycle will end in five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommendation: Enjoy the view.”

Whether or not the subjugated pilot trapped within the machine could even comprehend the voice of the automech systems hardly mattered. She was ancillary to the whole operation, an outdated holdover only relevant due to lost technology, no more in control than an engine commanded a car.

At the very least, though the drug-addled haze and overwhelming exhaustion, the Battery pilot could still stare out at the jagged horizon of this empty saline world. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of a sunrise in the distance never ceased to mesmerize her tiny, ragged mind. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.

“It… did… it…”

. . .

After retrieving their Remnant Mech, priority number one for the Sandfog Company was to remove the Battery. The clones are more expensive than any standard walker fuel cell, and Lincoln Karabin never failed to be the top name on the extraction itinerary. She had a philosophy–a dangerous thing for a mercenary commander to have–and believed that certain policies within her group could stretch their dollar further than the baseline. With finances as tight as they are, any practice that can squeeze an extra deployment or two out of the expensive clones is agreed to be well worth the headache.

Despite the potential dangers, Linc was always right up on the hangar railings as the ramshackle machine returned to its standing bay, watching with baited breath through the hazy visor of the crew’s sole hazard suit. She knew better to approach until the proper restraint bolts had been fitted and the valuable machine-mind core had been removed, of course, but no sooner than those tasks had been completed was she barking for the technicians to open up the Battery access and bring out the umbilical bridge for her to approach.

The walker bore a small head, torso speckled in observation cameras and sensors to keep up awareness where its neck could not. Even as the machine’s body split like a flower, plating and lunar-composite musclebands peeling away to reveal the hybrid alloy endoskeleton, it was hard not to get the feeling it was watching every move made around it. The catwalk extending into its body, straight back to the thick spinal assembly, gave the image of some carnivorous plant luring helpless insects between its maw. Despite all of this, when Lincoln confidently strode down the gangway, pulled the release, and opened up the Battery’s makeshift internal plugdock, she felt no fear towards the scrawny rag of a girlshape trapped within. There was only the exhaustion, and a desensitized echo of pity.

What had once been a cockpit was crudely converted into a plugcell hardly fit for a convict, welded straight into the spinal chain and sealed over by a muscular sheath. Most of the bones of the machine had once belonged to the walker commander herself, although the Frankenstein’s mech stapled to the wall before her was practically impossible to recognize as the Colony Rush-era corp armor it started life as. She knew the machine inside and out in ways even the underqualified crew of engineers that duct taped it together couldn’t imagine, and while that familiarity did contribute to the sort of career washed-up armorjocks could seldom dream of, that wasn’t to say that the job was completely free of unpleasantries.

Karabin didn’t bother regurgitating a smile—even if the Battery wasn’t blind as a bygr, little more than the vague impression of eyes were visible through the visor of her radsuit—but she didn’t have much choice but to dig out a voice wholly unlike her own: something soft and nurturing, saccharine to the ear of a vatgirl who didn’t know any better. Playing mother to a revolving door of disposable clones grew tiresome about as quickly as one would expect, but some semblance of love had a visible impact on the lifespan of the uncomfortably expensive Battery pilots.

With a heave, Lincoln threw the plugcell release, raising her free hand as the hiss of depressurization rushed across her crinkly suit. Inside rested only the lifeless corpse of the Battery halfway through vivification, yellowing bandages covering almost every inch of suit and skin not restrained by the metal harness shackling her to the core of the mech. The blinking indicators of the pilot’s onboard defib packs signaled their regulation of an induced heartbeat, as did the weary heave of her breath confirm a successful neural flash, leaving only her physical removal to complete her temporary separation from the semilune warform.

When the worklight of the hangar finally flooded the tiny plug, the Battery could only make out an indistinct orange blob standing on the catwalk opposite she. Even through the fog of revivification, color association and raw habit instantly attuned her mind to the identity of the person standing before her. One shaky hand reached out, fingers flexing somewhere between elation and desperation, and met with a reassuring clasp.

“You’re okay, Fours. It’s me.”

Karabin spoke. Beaten, burned, bloodied, and only minutes removed from death itself, the pilot still found the strength to smile at the voice calling out to her.

. . .

“It did it…Linc…oln….”

“You did. You did very well, Fours.”

The Battery pilot wiggled like an enthused dog, wet hair sticking to her face. Lukewarm water cascaded off her naked form–any warmer would agitate the synchronization burns, any cooler would risk disrupting the work of the antilune medication in her veins. Behind her, Linc held the showerhead, gently rinsing off the white particulate sticking between the pilot’s cybernetic spinebrace and her inflamed flesh.

“One or two more good contracts like that, and we might just be able to stay in business. This water is warm because of your hard work.”

Fours remembered a time when heating the water was too expensive, and before that, she remembered when water itself was rationed for drinking aboard the ship. She looked down towards her bare feet as Lincoln’s hands moved up her neck, skin tingling as the Division Head’s fingers delicately brushed her hair aside. In truth, the disposable clone pilots didn’t need to be bathed (the cryogenic bags they were intended to be stored in disinfected their bodies inside and out), but the merc found a personal touch to pay dividends enough to be worth the hassle.

“It has… a ques…tion.”

Lincoln paused. That was new. She leaned forwards, resting her chin atop the shoulder of the shorter girl in front of her.

“What’s your question?”

She spoke in a soft voice, briefly pressing the showerhead to her stomach to stem the noise of the water.

“Who is… it a cl…one of?”

Lincoln blinked.

“Spi…der sa…id it–”

“Spider.”

Lincoln repeated, confusion disappearing as quickly as it had set in. “Forget Spider, you aren’t a clone of somebody.”

Fours didn’t immediately say anything, but the slump of her shoulders hardly looked convinced.

“You’re a recombinant, it’s different. People like me are made when two other people swap genes, but you came from a thousand donors being all mixed together into something brand new. You’re about as unique as they come.”

It was a canned deflection of the question, words so practiced they were practically racing each other out the door. Linc’s eyes idly scanned the hundreds of identifying tattoos across the clone pilot’s body, but the foamy soap dripping down her back covered the majority of them.

“It's… uni…que?”

Sandfog Company’s fourteenth consecutive Battery pilot slowly repeated, latching hopefully onto the only part of the monologue Karabin needed her to process.

“One of a kind.”

Lincoln joylessly confirmed. She’d had some variation of this exact conversation no less than thirteen times past. Spider, the closest thing to the company's onboard medic, seeded it just to spite her, she imagined.

. . .

“No hostiles rem-rem-remaining. System starting Battery reli-eif-ei-ef cycle.”

Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of burning colony town, the sides of a lone war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith.

“Revivification res-res-res-erves drained. System administering emer-mer-mergency backup: thirty-five milligrams bizendotrine.”

The tundra planet of Hjkor III was well on its way to becoming a prosperous colonial effort. After the end of the corporate war, and the mass culling of the mercenary companies who’d contributed to so much death and destruction, the halite world was a prime spot for humanity to set down new roots and begin to rebuild. Even if the rock only bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, it was as good a place as any to plant flags and start anew. Not that the lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared.

“System inducing: gas-gastral purge.”

As soon as the emergency dose of bizendotrine was injected into her stomach, the lifeless pilot suddenly shot to life, screaming and bellowing like the devil incarnate. She was quickly interrupted by an artificially-induced heave, head lurching forwards as bile and blood poured from her dry, cracked lips. Bizendotrines were the caliber of chemicals used to ease alien megafauna out of cryo, one drop was enough to kill a human several times over. A concentrated dose in the right spot could damn near reverse death… so long as it was expelled just as quickly.

“Stage one: emergency vivifica-ca-cation complete. Begin-nn-ing stage two. System administering six hundred nine-nine-ninety eight volts.”

Poking through the uncountable tangle of crusty, brown bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some old metallic element, crudely welded into the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, was not ready to let her go just yet.

“System administering-ing regulation rhythm.”

A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked faintly in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a lopsided, barely natural pace.

“Stage two: pulmonary ben-ben-benchmark reached. Beginning stage three. System administering neural-al-al flash.”

In an instant, the head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it. Teeth clenched as offloaded memories surged through her frayed mind, her entire life and personality re-injected into a brain that was well past its warranty.

Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the lopsided resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.

“Reaction noted. No correct-ct-ctional dose available.”

She groaned through the pain, knuckles white against the harness that sealed her within the spine of the resting machine. She didn’t need any ‘correction’, she just needed to push a little further beyond. One more mission and everything would be back to the way it was. One more ambush and life would be right again. One more contract and they could retire like queens.

Even if the thick spinal column at the core of her walker was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems, that didn’t make it feel any less like a tomb. The pulsating, sickly white endomusculature surrounding her was deteriorating, slowly, but that rancid synthfiber flesh was what kept her safe. The lukewarm air surrounding her was just barely safe to breathe, but even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t let something so trivial slow her down.

There was no reason to fear the sea of crushed prefab homes, overturned trucks, and burning generators surrounding her feet. The target had been neutralized.

The best part of the lunar dust-infused musclebands surrounding her was that they bled with a hellish odor, which made damage very quick to assess. The fingers of her walker were coated in a black ooze, no doubt sourced from the oil reserve (enemy walker?) she’d thrown a dozen meters to the east. In the salt that piled thick as snow, she’d easily be able to smell any severe leakages by the putrid reaction the two made when they combined, but a quick once-over confirmed she’d executed the mission without taking any meaningful damage.

“System com-mm-and: when ready, please recite your licensure number to ver-ver-ify cognizance.”

The staticy, broken voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was… her number… she had a number… she knew it…

When she was finally ready to speak, no sound emerged from her dry, bloody lips. Her mouth curved into one single word, body so spent she could hardly muster the breath to give it life. The mockery of life she tried to persuade the automech systems still resided within her wasn’t even being checked for anymore; any meaningless utterance was automatically verified and accepted against an empty library of passkeys and command phases

First, her dripping lips closed tight to shape an F, then widened slightly into a long O. The lower lip stiffened slightly as she curved up into a U, then sustained an R. As her strength sapped, her mouth relaxed into the hiss of an S. Fours

.

“Sys-sys-system confirms: Battery cog-cog-cog-cog–Relief cycle will end in fi-fi-five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommen-men-men-men–Enjoythevi-vi-view.”

The Battery pilot’s mouth continued to move even as her head hung and her eyes closed, throat fighting to press enough air to hit the sharp “st”

. All she needed was the tiniest vibration in her neck for the system to pick up on her intention: after so many hundreds of missions, the AI had grown quite accustomed to the only two words she ever spoke.

“Ssss…sss…ssss…ssst…”

The Battery weakly hissed, lip quivering, head hanging on her shoulders as though an apple atop a tree.

“Sta-status-us.”

The walker AI repeated, not much better than she at vocalizing the word. Still, it soldiered on. “System rec-record: priorit-ty tar-target neutralized. Target grou-nnn-nd force neu-eutralized. Target escape pre-pre-prevented. All obj-obj-objectives met. Extraction craft unav-av-av-av-av–Head Karabin sends her ap-pp-proval.”

Between the countless scars and burns across her face, the Battery pilot’s eyes welled with tears. Those five words were the only reason she kept fighting, the only fuel for the limitless flame of willpower that burned inside of her. Those five words caused her to rock in her harness, dig her chipped fingernails into her sides, and throw up once more. Lincoln approved. Lincoln said good job. Lincoln praised her. That rush hit harder than the bizendotrine.

“It… did-d… it…. It… di-did… it…It…it… di-di-d… it…”

Her voice was so small that may as well not exist, dipping in and out of pantomime as her lungs struggled to keep up with her attempts at speech. Bits of phlegm and necrotic tissue clung to her mouth and chin, sickly hot in the cool breeze that billowed across her overheated body.

At the very least, even though the drug-addled haze and lifeless fervor, the Battery pilot could still stare down at the carnage around the feet of her walker. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of burning buildings and the red-on-white splotches of corpses in the white salt-snow was close to what she remembered a sunrise looking like. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.

“It… did… it…”

. . .

By the time the deteriorating Remnant Walker limped back to base, the sun was already well below the horizon.

Fours never questioned why Sandfog’s crew never moved out of the crash site of their flagship–none of the personnel were much for talking these days. That was alright, though; she had earned them out of tougher spots in the past.

The walker bay was impossible to access, but Fours didn’t want to moor herself there anyways. Even though the automech AI wasn’t supposed to be able to dock anywhere but its designated standing bay, the Battery pilot’s willpower proved more than sufficient to redirect the machine just about anywhere she wanted.

The three-story walker came to a stop near the side of the ship, at a point that gash easily five meters tall and ten times as long carved a jagged hole in the hull. The sickly body of the mech flayed and spread itself open on command, and after a short (equally painful) revivification cycle, the pilot unfastened herself from the restraints and slowly crawled across the fleshy innards of the mech until she could pull herself into the hole in the ship’s hull.

Even unable to make out all but the blurriest of shapes, the pilot knew this route by heart. She knew the exact place to drag herself through the gash to avoid getting cut on the uneven metal, she knew exactly how far to crawl down the catwalk within and exactly which hallway to stop at. Even if she couldn’t read the words “ESCAPE POD” written on the wall, she knew that the door with the bright orange number two on it was the one she needed. She’d done this hundreds of times, and she’d do it hundreds more. She’d crawl through this ship and mount up in the walker every day until she could finish enough contracts to save the company.

The door to the malfunctioned escape pod was jammed open. Inside, belted to the seat, was a decomposing body dressed in an important-looking uniform. It took all of the Battery pilot’s strength to pull herself up into the seat, curling her legs atop the lap of the stiff body in the pod. Gingerly, she rested her head against its shoulder, allowing herself to sink into that familiar plush. Deeply, she inhaled. The small space reeked of death, decay, gas, and rust. Somewhere underneath all of that, it smelled like Karabin.

“It… did it… Linc…oln…”

. . . According to Karabin’s vague understanding of lunar poisoning care, the pilot’s bandages didn’t strictly need to be changed nightly. Lincoln still chose to.

Fours sat cross-legged atop the bed, white strips already covering her feet and calves up to where they disappeared into her nightclothes. Her shirt lay discarded on the blanket beside, left arm extended forwards as the Division Head delicately swaddled each of her lesions, blisters, and synchburns. It was a slow, tedious ritual, but one that the pilot had grown to find comfort in. Even if she couldn’t see the woman sitting across from her very clearly, the warm white color of Lincoln’s long hair and the gentle pressure of fingers against her skin were all she needed to know she was in safe company.

“You’re looking better. I’ve got some new lotion from Yaro waiting for us at the next port, it’s supposed to help with the pain. And it smells like meilfluer.”

“You are… from Yaro, too.”

“I am. I told you that… what, last week, right? Surprised you remembered.”

The pilot couldn’t help but smile at the praise. Linc was mindful to inflict her tone upwards, but her cheeks were far from risen.

“Is that where… dogs live…?”

“Oh, no no, real yre pas are from the Earths. They can’t live on planets out here.”

“That’s sad.”

“It isn’t sad, they just aren’t made for space. Besides, they live nice happy lives in the cities on the Earths, with nice happy people who take care of them. No walkers, no war.”

“No walkers… no war…? That's sad, too…”

Lincoln shook her head in silence, turning the pilot’s palm over as she pinned the final gauze strip into place. The pilot couldn’t imagine a life without warfare; what in the world did people do all day, if they weren’t wrestling three-story mechs to the ground or dodging installation rocketfire? What was the purpose of life, if not to fight?

“It’s not as strange as it sounds. One day, I’ll take you to see a real city.” Lincoln let go of the pilot’s hand, and began to return the various tools she was using to the aid kit. “For now, shirt on, it’s bedtime.”

“What about…its face…?”

“The air will help it heal faster. Just be careful when you lie down, you don’t want to rub it wrong while you sleep.”

Fours gingerly reached up to touch her own face. It had been weeks since it wasn’t covered in bandages, even longer since it had been exposed to the cool recycled ship air for any meaningful amount of time. In truth, she didn’t even know what it looked like; her vision had always been poor, and the general wear and tear of being a lunar conduit had only worsened her sense. Tape-wrapped fingertips against the raw flesh felt novel: uncomfortable and new at the same time, some mix of painful and welcoming. But, how did it compare to…?

“What is…its face…like?” Fours slowly managed, turning her sightless eyes towards the driver captain sitting across from her. Lincoln paused, one finger halfway through extracting a contact lens, contemplating how exactly to answer that question. The initial link had taken many different things from many different batteries over the years, but Fours was the first to lose her sight so aggressively to the machine—for once, this was a question she hadn’t had a dozen previous chances to answer, but she’d yet to let such a hurdle crack her improv before. After a brief pause to think, Lincoln turned her body, and scooted closer to the waiting pilot. 

Fours could only see the vague, indistinct blob of Karabin’s hand move to rest atop her own, cupping her hand tenderly. The Division Head took her pilot’s other hand and raised it up to her own face, placing Fours’ fingers against the curve of her cheek.

“Your cheeks are higher than mine. And your jaw is more narrow.”

The pilot felt frozen in time, her senses keenly attuned to her hands, comparing and contrasting the sensations. Lincoln moved Fours’ hand across the front of her face, tracing the bottom of the eye towards the bridge of the nose. She felt her left index finger glide across Lincoln’s vital, warm skin, while her right was guided delicately over her own raw, tingling flesh.

“Your eyes are bigger, and gray. My eyes are smaller, and brown.”

Fours blinked, silent. She had some idea of what Lincoln looked like, between catching crystal-clear glimpses while connected to the walker sensory suite and her memories of seeing the Division Head when she’d first been woken up in Sandfog’s care. Still, never in all her life had she possessed a better mental image than this moment. 

Lincoln lifted their hands upwards in tandem, curving the pilot’s fingers forward gingerly to allow them to comb across their scalps. Fours could immediately feel the difference: Lincoln’s was thick and straight, still damp from their shower, while her scalp was tender and hair thin and slightly tangled.

“My hair is white and long. Your hair is short and black. Before I bleached it, my hair used to be brown.”

Fours nodded slowly, transfixed by the sensations. Never before had she felt such comparison, two things the same and yet so different cascading between her fingertips, guided by Lincoln’s hands. Slowly, her eyes drifted shut, the pilot more than happy to lose herself in her tactile sense for the time being.

“Your nose is smaller than my nose. A little more narrow, too.”

Lincoln pulled the Fours’ hands down gently, past her mouth and chin, letting them rest against the pilot’s lap, before cupping Fours’ cheeks tenderly. The battery had barely opened her eyes when the warm blur of Lincoln’s face subsumed her vision. So close, she could make out some of the larger details for herself, but her vision was just poor enough to protect the pale hesitation plastered across the Division Head’s expression. The heat of Lincoln's breath overwhelmed the stale, dry room air. If it weren't for the hands holding her cheeks, the clone wanted to lean closer to it.

Karabin lingered inches from Fours’ face long enough for her racing heart to catch up to her brain, then let her hands fall from the clone pilot’s face. The human among them couldn’t will herself to push the envelope any further. No matter how badly she felt like she needed to pretend otherwise, she was alone in this room.

“Our mouths are different.” Her voice was low, hasty.

Just beneath Fours’ eye was a barcode string: tiny text printed into the skin, and a seemingly endless series of numbers. This sight, the human commander found, was much more grounding than immersing herself in the animus of the… thing sitting across from her. 

. . .

As Whisper approached the target strongpoint, the ravenous combat walker slowed to a gentle jog. Its sunken head fixated across the tundra, locked firmly onto the silhouette of an equally-grotesque lune-infused machine that approached to oppose it.

"Stand down, Whisper. We’re negotiating a walk-past, do not engage.”

Not engaging didn’t mean it couldn’t advance, and advance it most certainly did. Both machines practically galloped towards each other, neither daring enough to move with enough gusto to signal a threat, neither willing to admit they were slower than the other.

Where they met, in a shallow valley between two dunes of salt, there was no room between them for anything more than muzzled malice.

The mechs stared daggers across the dozen meters separating them.

The thousands of sensors dotted all across Whisper picked and preened data from every visible surface of its opponent. Even as the biosupport system pivoted from stimulants to suppressants and rapidly flushed Fours’ body of all the irritant drugs it could, the mech couldn’t help but hunger for the kill it was actively being denied.

Whisper began to pace a slow circle, prompting the other mech to do the same. Its claws twitched with hunger, engine pulsing with the same weighty bass of a predator’s growl. The other mech’s back parted, spewing forth a short burst of flares. The rev of their psylune engines left fractal imprints in the white sand below, suspending particles between their opposing gravity wells. The two dogs circled each other, each snapping just gently enough so as to not incur the wrath of those above them.

Separated from the chemical and psychic influence of the walker, Fours was practically broken to Lincoln’s every syllable. Even jacked up on dozen of combat drugs and mind-melded with a superintelligence designed to kill, the woman’s voice cut through in a way that the faceless command operators simply couldn’t. The most dangerous parts of these encounters was the strain such a counterintuitive command put on whatever ad-hoc pilot was buried inside—but any group with the technical ability to maintain and deploy one of these wretched mechs certainly had the ability to effectively brainwash the single dumb, silly little peon that’d be driving it.

Within the internal structure of Whisper, microgravity flutters rippled. She was being probed, tested by the other creature for a weakness with which to exploit. Fours did much the same, gently pulling small pockets of space in awkward, fourth-dimensional directions to feel her way towards something fragile within the lumbering shape opposing she. It didn’t take either combat system long to feel their way straight to the cockpit, tiny gravitational ripples like the barrel of a gun pressed against the heads of the biological conduits within. Whisper knew its trigger finger was faster. Fear was a blacklisted emotional response. All she needed was the command. One word and she’d splatter that weakling against the side of its own plugcell. Any second now. Just say it. Just say it. Please. Please say it. Please let m

“Disarm and get moving, they’re playing ball with us. Your objective isn’t here.”

Both mechs came to a stop, heads mere yards apart. The imperceptibly light, fluttering pressure over Fours’ chest loitered for a moment too long, then faded. Before she could even process the words, Whisper’s own gravity engine sank back to idle.

. . .

When Whisper arrived, it did so as a storm. It moved fast and low, mingling with the salt taiga as though one with the ground, dragging a crystalline cloud in its wake. It was one with the whipping wind and stone outcroppings, weaving across the exoplanetary surface with all the poise of a naturalized predator. Hydraulic fingers grasped the saline snowcaps, clawing for inertia in tandem with a hungry set of traction-padded feet that dug deep into the dune beneath.

Mascoweave muscles pumped with unimaginable force, heaving along an indifferent skeleton and unwilling organs towards the smell of vehicular prey. There was nothing else but the kill on this entire planet, no other sensation than the closing gap between the satmarker and the mech’s own location. Whisper’s head remained pinned forward, as though its eyes could cut through the gale it tugged in its stead.

Eleven meters of lust for the kill propelled itself through sparse foliage, battering petrified treestems and kicking up sharp chunks of calcified mineral as it barreled through untouched tundra. The machine was not subtle, nor did it need to be; it charged headlong, desperate, fixated in its entirety on the reward that awaited it on the other end of the slaughter. The terrain was burnt into its very mind, each rock and crevasse accounted for as though the orbital survey cameras mounted to the underside of its support craft were a third eye. All at once, the automech could see the slow progress of its target convoy, the pair of walkers maintaining a light jog to either flank, and its own approach to the east, data parsed through the onboard digimind before being run through the Battery for a final cognitive parse.

Fours wanted blood.

The creature shackled somewhere deep inside the lower spine of the mech was, objectively, the tiniest stakeholder in its own existence, but that didn't stop her hunger from influencing even the judgement of the KRIEGSHIRN warmind that was currently utilizing her brain as wetware. If the hunter-killer automech AI wanted to budge the pulsating white lune muscles that gave the machine its horsepower, it needed to forcibly inhabit a human brain. If that brain wanted to force those muscles to pump with the same vigor as its own, the flesh body it was hidden inside required a series of (eventually) fatal hyperradioactive particulate injections. Suicide, perhaps, for a real person. Perfect for something less than.

Synaptic oscillators wired deep within the clone's brain fired artificial pulses across neural bridges at the behest of the AI possessing her, but that couldn't entirely suppress her raw willpower from infecting the commands the machine gave her drug-hazed body. Even after the strain of the lunar synchronization and the skull burn of the digibrain's mind meld quite literally killed her, like divots worn away in a road, the very way her brain chemistry was wired predisposed it to hunger. Lust for the kill. Obedience. Above all, a pitiful desire to be praised for a job well done.

Shortly into the deployment, the agony within the mech faded to a shameful whimper. Well before the machine made contact, the onboard monitors no longer read a pulse. Even still, as the hulking tower of living death crested a dune and met the line-of-sight of the convoy it sought to terminate, the indomitable bloodthirst of the corpse within still burned bright.

. . . The first thing she ever felt was the stick of a ten gauge needle into the back of her left thigh.

Two hands held her down—one calloused flesh pressed roughly into the top of her leg, one cold plastic wrapped around her ankle. A third wiped away the blood from the injection, smearing it across her still-dripping skin.

The first thing she ever smelled was the chemical rank of room-temperature cryogel still clinging to her body.

A crumpled, clear plastic bag lay in tatters on the floor, the pale green stain of melted solution tinting what should have been perfectly translucent.

The first thing she ever tasted was stale, recycled air.

She didn’t realize she needed to breathe until she felt the pressure rising in her chest. Laying prone on the sterile(?) medical slab put a weight on her chest the clone wasn’t aware she’d have to press back against. Her first inhale brought with it a wet glob of cryogel up her nose.

When the gel slid up her nose, she coughed. It was reflexive in a way that frightened her—new, yet natural, like a sort of physical déjà vu. Her body rocked on the slab, arms twitching for the first time as she lifted herself up to ease the pressure on her chest. There was a voice behind her, loud, authoritative, but the words were lost in the shock of the moment. A hand she couldn’t see grabbed her bicep, another grabbed the side of her neck, a third wrapped under her opposite arm to stabilize her shaky arms.

She heaved. Eyes watered, and suddenly, fluttered open. She wanted to turn around to look at the person holding her, but the plastic hand gripping the bottom of her head held it firmly in place. Through the blinding light of the room against her fresh eyes, the impression of a face loomed close. The articulated plastic fingers roughly gripping her mandible released, replaced by two soft, warm hands that cupped her cheeks and lifted her face upwards. Softened by the heat of her body, she managed to hack the gel out.

The first thing she ever saw was the face of drop captain Lincoln Karabin leaning over her.

It was soft in a way nothing else was. It was inviting in a way she didn't quite know how to process. As the world slowly fell into focus, the white hair and gentle smile of the woman holding her eased her racing mind.

The first thing she ever heard (that meant anything to her) was the voice of that woman.

. . .

The world spun in circles around Fours. Her eyes had long since faded a dull grey, but that didn’t stop even the vague blobs in front of her from drunkenly sloshing side to side as she staggered across the cold hangar. Every step ached deep in her bones, the unrelenting tug of magnetic gravity scraping away at metal inserts she could practically feel sliding around inside her marrow.

Words were being shouted on all sides, but none of them were even remotely parsable to someone dosed on twice the lethal limit of dexothalimide. Two forces pushed her from behind: one, a gloved hand clasped firmly to her bicep, the other the cold steel of a weapon pressing into the small of her back. Foot by foot, they progressed across the hangar, drawing ever-closer to the beckon of the giant white shape at the other end of the room. Fours could feel it calling.

It didn’t demand anything of her out loud, like the countless voices and echo of machinery in the busy hangar on all sides of her did. It didn’t draw her in physically, like the uncomfortable tug of GravMag bolting her to the floor. Through the nausea and dizziness and weakness that wracked her body, the indistinct monolith before her was a clear and definite objective that demanded nothing and promised everything. The machine had never made good on any of those promises, as far as Fours could remember, but that didn’t stop her heart from aching for the embrace of the cockpit. The iron maiden awaiting her deep within its bowels was the fastest way to make Lincoln proud.

Her toes caught on almost every step up the catwalk, scraping uncomfortably against the metal-tracted stairs. She’d long since outgrown the reflex of reaching outwards to steady herself on the handrails, stifled by the metal cuffs linking her wrists together behind her back. The further they climbed, the darker their surroundings became–the waiting maw of the machine as they stepped within was some small comfort. A tiny mercy of the mech's excruciating punishment was that it burnt the brain so severely that remembering the pain was practically impossible.

Whoever was guiding her withdrew their weapon only long enough to free their second hand. The haze of the pre-sortie cocktail coursing through her ragged veins dulled the sensation of the tight metal cuffs binding her so effectively that she hardly noticed her escort roughly drawing them off. The world lurched into smeared motion as she was spun around, the pulsing orange lights of the hangar masking the large shape of the hazard suit that was pressing her backwards into the plugcell. Things happened around her. Fours floated along with it.

. . .

Lincoln, followed closely by Spider, sprinted across the access gangway towards Whisper's peeled-back form. Neither took the time to don radiation suits. The mech stood idle in its bay, blood-splattered and contented after another successful mission on the surface. The onboard cameras dotting its form tracked both tiny bodies as they ran eagerly into its waiting maw, straight to the plugcell at the back of its peritoneal cavity.

Lincoln gripped the hatch with both hands, pressing one boot against the steel spine of the mech for leverage. Behind her, Spider placed a portable biomonitor on the catwalk. Two hands rifled through one of the side pouches while a third powered on the device and began adjusting the settings.

The plug opened with a vile hiss, spilling stale air into the hangar. Within, criss-crossed by the overhead spotlights, Fours twitched lifelessly in her harness. Several red lights within flashed, vestigial monitors throwing up countless warning messages that the pilot would never have been capable of reading. Above the Battery's unresponsive head, Lincoln strained to pull the emergency release, and braced herself to catch the body that began to sag downwards as the metal supports retracted. The glassy pupils of the pilot gave no reaction to the light that poured in, nor the shade of Lincoln's body subsuming her.

One failed neural flash wasn't terribly uncommon.

Two failed neural flashes typically required a few hours of monitoring for health.

Five failed neural flashes is the pilot support system's polite way of communicating that its pilot had become unrecoverable.

Lincoln stepped up into the plugcell, awkwardly bracing herself against the rim of the hatch. She gripped a handhold above with one arm, placing her other hand against the back of Fours’ head to bow it forwards. Resting against the clone’s spine, as expected, the mech’s onboard neurospike was cleanly contacting with her spinal buffer at the base of her neck.

"It's not a connection issue, I don't think."

"How many flashes has it tried?"

Lincoln twisted herself around to check one of the auxiliary monitors, tabbing through the screens to find an answer. When the answer did appear, she rather quickly tabbed past it. Only briefly did it warn of its ninth failed flash before the indicator was exchanged for an empty radar screen. Her heart began to race.

"Two."

Spider either didn't notice her uncomfortably fast response (or chose to ignore it), instead pulling a cable free from his portable biomonitor and offering it up to the woman halfway inside the cockpit. Lincoln hung back to grab it, although she had to stretch a little to pull it to the walker's external hookup. The mech's onboard support systems suddenly losing their capacity to squeeze the digitized psyche of the clone back into its head could only truly boil down to one of two failures: either there was a mechanical fault with the PSS' neuroflash suite or there was a fault with Fours' own neurology.

One meant her pilot's spirit was trapped within the mech's synaptic clipboard, waiting to be pasted back into a brain that would fit it. One meant that her pilot’s soul was fleeting through irreparable tears in the ephemeral barriers that were meant to contain the self. There wasn’t much she could do about either. This wasn’t how Lincoln wanted to lose her latest pilot.

While Spider began troubleshooting Fours’ body, Karabin adjusted her stance against the front of the hatch to get better access to the mech’s diagnostics. Her hand trembled as she began pulling diagnostics and reading through the system’s event log, picking through every line for any indication of a hardware fault. Maybe the verification scan was misidentifying Fours’ brain? Maybe there was a dirty neurospike that couldn’t secure a connection? Maybe the flash wasn’t fully charging? No matter how far she stretched her imagination, the system log gave no indication of a fault.

“Its NP wave is pretty much flat, I’m guessing the Psyche’s totally shot. That last flash was hardly a blip.”

Karabin turned her attention from the monitor to Fours’ unresponsive, twitching body, then down to Spider.

"Get her back."

“What? Linc, it’s not a medical issue, I—“

“Get her back or leave.”

“I’m not an aesper, we’ve got the money for a new one. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Leave.”

Spider’s response died in his throat as Lincoln pulled the portable biomon’s cable from the mech and let it loudly retract into the device on the catwalk. The echo of the elastic whine rippled across the hangar exactly as long as Spider stood there, before the man squatted down to pick the monitor up.

Lincoln turned back into the cockpit, stepping one foot against Fours’ harness to boost high enough to pull the internal controls. With a sinister whine, the open cavity of the walker began to slide shut.

Spider watched as Lincoln disappeared into the mech. The shade blotting out all but the glare of her eyes did little to deter the simmering frustration he felt towards her recklessness. He knew she couldn’t be objective about this, but it still never failed to bother him. Perhaps she simply wasn’t made to be the rational sort. None of those things were ever rational.

No sooner had she vanished into the machine than he began jogging back down the catwalk. He had no desire to end up just as diseased as those clones they fed to the walker.

. . .

Fours pulled her knees closer to her chest. Her hands didn’t look like her own. Sharpened, bladed fingertips scratched at her iron-plated skin. Her muscles were sore. The entire planet was silent and dark.

The KRIEGSHIRN hadn’t spoken a word in hours. She couldn’t feel its calculations white hot against the inside of her head. She couldn’t feel the throbbing of dozens of IVs taped to her arms. She couldn’t see.

She didn’t know where she was. It wasn’t hell—the suffering of the walker was replaced with naught but the unfamiliar sensation of normalcy. She couldn’t feel her burns, or her headaches, or her nausea, or her wounds.

It wasn’t heaven, either—Lincoln wasn’t sitting by her side.

A hand gently clasped around her shoulder.

The pilot whipped around, blindly swinging her hands outwards, but the thing behind her remained still and calm. Her head whipped ferociously, a growl emanating deep from her core. She had no mouth with which to snap.

In the indistinct void too dark to be black, a single figure stood, crystal clear and thrice as tall as she. Her snow-white body hovered barely a foot away, so far out of reach yet so close as to be suffocating. Its gravity dwarfed hers, even as she felt her psylune engine rev to its maximum to compensate. It was unmoving, unyielding, the featureless face of a god poised to crush her beneath its thumb.

It didn’t feel hostile. A glossy, smooth, devoid black head rested atop its shoulders. The towering thing stood out as a single focal point in the absence that surrounded it. Its movements were slow and graceful, as though afraid even the gentlest brush might break Fours.

When it spoke, it spoke with the voice of the only god the clone could fathom believing in.

. . .

I see you. You want to know how you can end up in your very own plugcell, don't you? It's a tough gig to nail down, but if you're so inclined, here's a handy six-step guide to surrendering your body, persona, and metaphysical self to the embrace of a radioactive moon's eager arms...

Step 1: Don’t be a “real” person.

While it can sometimes be difficult to define what makes someone “real”, your best bet is to be a recombinant clone or a genebank—something that’s made of all the same parts as a human, but without the natural gestation or any citizenship to speak of. Robots and aliens lacking a centralized nervous system need not apply; Gestalt inhabitance interfaces were only really designed with humanlike neurology in mind.

Step 2: Fall through the cracks.

Human genestock is a high-value product, and the multi-billion Yero companies that deal in organ synthesis or full-body replacement generally do a pretty good job keeping track of their inventory. Every so often, whether due to a corrupt insider or robbery in transit, these bodies have been known to leak beyond medical application and into black markets. If you want a shot at being within twenty feet of a psylune engine, you've got to lose (or, perhaps by your perspective, win) this logistical lottery.

Step 3: End up in the hands of a dealer with Remnant Corps connections.

The vast majority of human simulacra that end up in the galactic smuggling network find their way into the hands of those who can't get their hands on a human body through legitimate means. While Remnant Corps are one such group, the galaxy is full of other organized criminal groups, disavowed humanitarian organizations, and NGOs that have both more money and more necessity to scoop up just about anything they can get their hands on. Should your cryobag land in the inventory of one of the few bodysale groups with unregistered mercenary companies on their list of customers, you're in the right place.

Step 4: Survive.

Presuming you're picked up by a Remnant Corp, you're likely part of a bulk order. Those who can afford it tend to purchase a few bodies at a time, so you'd better hope you're the most psychically apt of the bunch. While death during the cyberization process is unlikely, you'll next be exposed to a bevy of psychistimulants and egostatic compounds to prepare you for your first contact with a lune-infused Gestalt inhabitance inteface--a first date you're statistically unlikely to survive and guaranteed to come away from different than you were before.

Step 5: Keep surviving.

Your new life in the hotseat is one of constant mental strain. Your ego is the fuel that powers the machine you're now part of, and the team supporting you is going to do everything they can to keep your spring of willpower flowing. Your primary contact, typically a pilot liaison or drop captain, will tailor your every interaction with them to manipulate you into blind, zealous loyalty. While your body will inevitably break, the idea is to keep you determined and willing to continue the fight no matter how sickly you become, no matter how much pain you're in, and no matter how loudly your basic human instincts are begging you to quit. You will fall in love. You will dream of the day the war ends. She will be your world.

Step 6: Stop surviving.

How you die isn't particularly important, but it is inevitable. Most Battery pilots succumb to lune poisoning or experience terminal psychic erosion, neither of which are particularly pleasant ways to go. Odds are you'll die with your boots on--your handler's not about to lose out on one last deployment, no matter how frail and sickly you are when you're shoved back into the plugcell. You'll promise you're going to complete the mission for her, and when you fail to resuscitate or your neural flash fails to adhere properly, you'll end up either dumped in space or cut up and sold under the table to clandestine research institutes. Your handler probably won't remember you; she doesn't have that luxury.