"The Count's mine." Bea makes as if to look around the briefing room, but she can't quite make rage-blurred eyes focus on another human face right now, pointing her gaze over their heads instead. "If you find the evil fucker in your sights, you leave him. You leave him for me."
Anna-Maria van der Fabriek, a defocused blur below where Bea's eyes are set, makes a little movement that she doesn't even need to see. Slim, uncallused hands fold, one over the other, as if to rest on the pommel of a sword balanced point-down on the floor before her. Callsign Morning, because she's AM, because she's like a daybreak, because she's a fucking morning person. And she'll understand, this once, because of her stupid posh paladinly habits, because she's a fucking aristocrat with more in common with the Count than she ever will with Bea, pilot notwithstanding, because this is blood debt, this is vengeance, this is—
"I'm pained beyond words to say it," says motherfucking Baronet Anna-Maria van der Fabriek, deeply meaning every fucking word, "but no."
It takes a few seconds, but now Bea can look her in the face, can't look anywhere else. Her own voice tears at her throat like it's got thorns.
"What."
Morning unfolds her small pale hands slowly, like if she doesn't Bea might spook and lunge across the table at her. And, hell, Bea's muscles are trembling, she's straining forward, she might; as the other pilot reaches into a pocket and takes out a gnarled and heatstained lump of metal, the sheared head of a heavy-gauge bolt.
"This is from one of those shitty raids over Gavria," she says. "Running escort for the supply ships under fire."
Bea knows this story, they all know this story, even if Morning never tells it herself. (...Morning never tells this herself.) Morning's mech took a hullbuster, an anti-capital-ship armour-piercing round; a billions-to-one fluke that didn't go straight through machine and flesh and instantly pop her reactor, an unrepeatable exactly-right angle to just glance off—
"Eighteen high-tensile bolts just like this, holding the cockpit assembly to the mech frame," Morning says. "When they stripped her down afterwards, she was missing a third of her frame, twelve bolts had sheared, and there was just one holding her together. One. If that had gone, she'd have come apart like a bow in a hair ribbon with the ends tugged."
She takes a deep, meditative breath.
"The Butcher of Wallachia needs to die," she says. "And you deserve to pull the trigger. We all know you do. I'm deeply sorry, but there's a reason why they don't hang the cockpit off just one bolt to start with," and she closes her fist tight around the memento. "If it helps, should I find myself firing on him, I swear to say, 'This is for Bea.'"
Bea's head has a sharp pain in the centre of it from the pressure of holding so much rage inside her. She becomes aware, as the tense silence begins to telescope, of the tickle of a bead of blood as it wanders down the outside of one hand, where even short, blunt nails are managing to bite her palm.
"Bitchless," she corrects viciously, and doesn't even feel the muscle she pulls in her shoulder as she slams the briefing room hatch behind her.
A couple of hours later, feet climb the access ladder to Bea's cockpit with her mechanic's familiar smooth ease. Ashley drapes her arm on the cockpit rim, folds the other over it, rests her chin on them, and looks at Bea: a huddled lump in the pilot's seat, a tattered blanket pulled round her shoulders, cuffs stained with snot, too tired out from crying to do any more.
"Heard you got into it," she says, then more warily, "and behaved, more or less. You okay?"
Bea grunts.
"Want some ice cream?"
"If I have any more I'll throw up," she says with as much thick-voiced dignity as possible.
"Mhm."
A couple of minutes pass in comradely silence.
"Stupid fucking posh Tour d'Olympus face," Bea says eventually, with terrible resignation.
