Mech Pilot who has a name scrawled on their battlefield tomb. I knew you by that name.
The billion-year-old stargod mo Maru Szes refuses all attempts to communicate with it except face to face, and it refuses to deal with any ambassador as physically small as a human. Communication with it is fraught.
Shine walks across plains of still-burning glass, her mech's feet glowing furnace-hot, twist-lock interface cables securely anchored to her skull sockets. She meditates deeply on the fragmentary telemetry from the failed overture that burned this world.
mo Maru Szes is still in geostationary. mo Maru Szes apparently sees exotic-bombing a continent as no impediment to another mech-dancer simply continuing where they left off, no greater a show of displeasure than an annoyed throat-clear. Or perhaps that anthopormorphises a billion-year-old stargod much too far.
It is impossible, of course, to divine from the data what it was that happened here. What ineffable cause and effect led to this, whether they did something wrong, whether this was avoidable. But small and pedestrian minds, political and military, insist on the contact corps staring into the abyss, as if there's anything staring back but apophenia.
At the epicentre, when she finally arrives, is a plateau of exotic paracrystal, killingly cold and unmelting, despite floating on a sea of molten silica. And at the epicentre of the plateau, a lonely outcrop, what was once a mech and a human pilot inside it, petrified mid-axel, form perfect.
The silvery transmutation is so absolute and precise, here, that it's possible to scan the callsign, standing a paint-layer's thickness proud of what was once metal hull beneath.
By now, her scattered peers must have inferred the identity of their newly lost, but Shine was closest, already en route to Antares in deep cryo; diverted and thawed with no more explanation or apology than the ruined planet below her transport and the emergency amended flightplan in the computer banks.
"Jackson," she sighs. Another name to embroider onto the breast of her habitual mourning jacket; bringing it, counting Qo Scanlon, to an even two dozen. She closes her eyes to review, once more, the choreography, the melody, the lyrics—
lyrics abridged from a piece by Qo Scanlon. The golden child, forever inescapable.
