Kel - ΘΔ&

When the war began, you were just another girl with some survivability implants and a multiprofile flight armor. Six months later, you were the only girl like you left alive, and your handler granted carte blanche to keep you that way. You got results.

Command authorized better hardware, and then they made more like you. You found ways to keep up, nastily clever applications of metastable metallic hydrogen ammo and supermag deflectors that the newbies didn’t see.

Your handler kept you on a leash, metaphorical, for a time literal (that month she decided to add some testosterone analog into your blood mix and you begged to fuck everything or break it or both). Instead of their handlers, the newbies imprinted on you.

Command sent you new toys. Ansible links, Charybdis torpedoes, dark new wings with strange new engines. You missed the roar and rumble of turbines, but the raucous howls of your bloodthirsty flock replaced the noise that discontinuity thrusters didn’t make. You got results.

You pushed back the other, shattered their aces and sent their broken armors back to Command. Your handler vanished and came back with augments that almost let her keep up with you physically, at least inside the carrier.

Someone had to keep you in line, she said, slamming your unarmored form against a bulkhead, your implants reprogramming themselves to broadcast your submission through the fleet. You slicked yourself with fluids and begged for her to take you, to make you more of a weapon.

The next sortie, frenzied with excitement, you cracked the penultimate stronghold of the enemy like an egg. Ready for the final push, your techs unpacked crates of novel photonic scythes, connectivity cores, Indeterminate-Range Missiles, bolted them to you and your flight.

The last defenses crumpled in ways they could not understand coming. The last opposing pilots provided minute spectral variations as you turned them into blazes of mostly white light. You got results.

Command ordered the carrier home. Job well done, they said. It’s over now. Your handler gave you certain orders. They were orders you wanted. The carrier returned to port; port was unprepared for your flight to launch inside, unprepared for the horrors they’d been sending you.

Command didn’t last ten minutes. You wanted to leave the place a crater, until your handler cinched her virtual claws around your neck by ansible and showed you her ultimate goal in the ruins.

A delightful challenge, shucking your flight armor, ramping down to levels of speed and splash damage that would leave human techs alive to do what needed to be done. You howled in the corridors like the monster they called you.

They did it, the survivors, the project lead swearing at you the whole time; your accelerator pistol never wavered from the back of her head until you saw your handler wake.

Your handler flexed healing muscle over new implants afterwards, donned flight armor for the first time. She might never be as agile or as vicious as you were in combat. She didn’t need to be. She had you, by the brain, and she would never, ever permit a fair fight.

Your carrier lifted again. The world of her, your, all of your flock’s ultimate origin awaited, some unfathomable distance away. You would show them how you got results.