Mech Pilot who kept their bone fragments to decorate their cockpit.
They're down on the mech deck, working through shoulder articulation calibration, when Ashley buzzes over the mechanic's gantry intercom: "Someone wants to pick your brains."
Bea wedges her tin mug of cold coffee behind the lumbar swivel brake lever. "Tell 'em I don't have any, I'm a pilot."
The laugh that drifts up to her open cockpit is too distant, too drowned beneath heavy machinery to consciously identify, but something certain and subconscious sends an instant jolt up her spine.
"She says that sounds like a pilot lying to get out of work," Ashley reports back, while Bea is already spinning down the gyros, centering joints, and locking down to deck-safe mech posture.
She's not even out of the seat before Morning appears over the cockpit rim, flight suit sleeves rolled to the elbow and a streak of grease in her hair. "Sorry to interrupt," she says, as if routine maintenance is high on Bea's list of hobbies. "I wondered if I could consult you; C-Wing's having a...personnel issue."
"Oh," Bea says, as the joy drains out of the day. "Him."
The three survivors of the Civeen Shipyard Massacre were all awarded the Triple Delta for courage under fire. Castor d'Avignon went AWOL without a trace from shore leave on a neutral planet two years later; fighter ace Rami Scott went back to the front as soon as he could pass Flight Basic with his replacement hand.
The third was awarded anonymously, because Bea wasn't quite old enough to even enlist. She's come a long, long way since, grateful that at least she doesn't have the fucking medal's reputation hanging over her. And there are plenty of people on Taskforce RED MANDIBLE who are there to make their grudge against the Butcher of Wallachia useful.
But people know, at this point, that for Reasons she's the one to call when Rami needs reeling back in.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't the diplomatic corps."
It's amazing how half-true word gets around about missions that nobody involved is allowed to talk about.
"Heard another mechanic is refusing to work with you," Bea says, perched on the access ladder to Rami's cockpit.
People decorate their cockpits, of course they do. It's not strictly regs, but smart COs know when to look the other way, leave space for people to feel human. To stay human.
Rami Scott spent sixty hours in a shattered mech, watching his air tick down, a state-of-the-art pilot support suit keeping him going through the shock and blood loss, pinned into his seat by injury and fused plastic webbing; with his severed hand gently, rhythmically knocking against his helmet faceplate. And then what was left of him went right back to war.
It's not that which makes Bea think there's not enough human left in him. It's not the fact his controls are decorated with bones. It's not even the fact they're the bones from his own lost hand.
It's mostly the way he torments the people around him to breaking point.
He grins at Bea with his nice white teeth. "Don't make 'em like they used to."
His latest mechanic had been raised on an Orbital, and when Rami started gaslighting them about the number of bones in the cockpit — pilfering small ones from kitchen waste — they knew intellectually that some food grew as organisms with skeletons, but didn't intuitively make the connection, and so Rami had managed to sow the nightmarish doubt that he was somehow, undetected, serial killing people aboard for their fingers.
...Honestly, Bea can't fault them for that.
She reaches back and digs around in the satchel slung across her. "Here," she says, and tosses a heavy comb-bound printed sheaf into the cockpit. "Little bird says we're getting a shipment of experimental upgrades from the War Office tech labs in a week, that's why sims are suspended and they've got us tuning the frames. That's the full seven-thousand-subsection factory checklist for the VIIb."
Three full days' work for a pilot-mechanic team to run through.
"I hear de Winter's going to check over yours personally before you get a crack at the new toys. Shame we've run out of mechanics, but you'll manage, right?"
He rubs his palms on his thighs. "What's it like being an aristocrat's sidekick, Bitchless?"
Ah. "Butler," she corrects him. "Baronets don't have sidekicks, Rami, honestly, were you born in a pigsty? It's great, I might get to see a real live Duchess taking afternoon tea with her ladyship one day. Lifetime ambition."
No. He's found a bruise to press on, and he knows it. She can taste his anticipation. He's going to say something, he's going to say something awful, and she's going to—
She reaches over the lip of the cockpit, into his horrible little ossuary, before she can think about it. Grabs a small bone held with a twist of wire, yanks it free.
"This a food bone or an asshole bone?" She holds it up in front of her face, looks at him past it, and deliberately crooks her little finger like she's holding a teacup in a period flick. "If I bite down on it, you think it's full of marrow?"
She opens her mouth, makes as if to clamp it between her molars, and he shrieks. No words, not even an identifiable vibe, just noise, like something bursting under pressure. And then he's just rigid and panting like a stunned animal as they stare at each other.
"...No? Okay." She flicks it into his chest. "Enjoy your checklist, Fingers."
"You okay, Bea?"
Bea wedges the cup, emptied again, behind the brake lever. She scrubs at aching eyes; they're the only team still on the A-Wing mech deck. She's hungry and tired and she wants a shower.
"I'm fine, Ashley," she says. "You wanna knock out the lumbar tilt calibration before we sack out?"
