I have really cool ideas for a story/premise but idk the best way to introduce the world without it just being an infodump at the beginning. idk
A contrail cleaved across the sky, partitioning it into two equal halves. Then another, at a 45 degree angle to the first, and another, and another, until the sky was diced and chopped into a multitude of angular pieces, like a glass pane dropped on concrete. Before today, there'd been, at most, one a week. Why did it have to be every fucking planet?, she wondered, picking herself up from the wet grass. This wasn't the first sign it was coming - she'd saw the newspapers, heard the muttering, had the displeasure of encountering the scammers capitalizing on it. It'd happened too many times now. There'd be some backwater planet, water (or what passed for it) glittering, an utterly unique native ecosystem thriving, a community of colonists fresh off the generation ships, living peacefully - and then some fucker just had to discover some precious resource in the water, some mineral deep underground, some novel element in the atmosphere, and suddenly the corporations and the speculators and the scientists stormed in, ransacked the place, and refused to leave until whatever it was was gone. Maybe thirty, forty years of ransacking, pillaging, of "jobs", of "investment", of whatever it was they pasted over shop-windows and wrapped on trains and wrote in their 'impartial columns' in the newspapers. It wasn't usually the colonists, shockingly enough. The colonists numbered 20k at most, and generally had hindsight of the flaws of Earth with the technology to make what they dreamt. They usually ended up with compact little towns with very good trams, or canals, or whatever specific thing they'd decided was utterly necessary in the ~150 years of isolation on board the ships. It didn't matter, though. Where there was money...
The back of her shirt was wet with dew, her pants too. I just gotta remember to look forward when I leave, it'll be okay. Not that it mattered, it's not like they'd be seeing her again. The sadness was buried so far down that it barely even felt real, like a terminal disease that was, for now, only a diagnosis. The tram to the downtown was quick from where she was - they'd erected a small station this far out from the town, in the southern prairies, even though only one road lead to it. It was only a basic shelter, a rough assemblage of sheet metal and wood embedded into a rough concrete foundation. Every inch of every vertical surface (and many of the horizontal ones as well) was covered in paper - posters, articles, drawings, adverts for a play or some sort of concert. The corporate flyers had not yet made it out here.
i got this so far.. now to write everything else lol
By the time she made it back to her apartment, there was already a gray-suited foreigner (or, more accurately, newcomer - when a place had existed so short, there was scarcely such a thing as a foreigner) waiting in the hallway outside her door with a clipboard in his right hand and a augtracker in his left, tapping his cheap faux-suede shoes against the floor. He stood there, almost static, a rock as a stream of people flowed past him, muttering and pointing and staring. The first, most obvious sign he was an offworlder was his red face (the air here had a composition that took some weeks to get used to), but the cheap corporate suit and the shoes that were, inexplicably, a pink and orange gradient did not help matters. She eyed him suspiciously as she slowly approached. A recruiter or a collector? As she approached, he hurriedly stowed the augtracker in his pocket (it responded with a furious array of beeps) and rearranged his face into a vaguely agreeable expression. His face had utterly no distinguishing features - you could run your eyes over it a hundred times and never find anything to be stuck on. He stuck his left hand out awkwardly. "I'm from Anscom." A second later, and a booted foot hurtled towards his face - another second later, and she was gone. How nice of him to warn me.
She paced around a small prepaid storage unit in the city outskirts, made even smaller by the fact that half of the space was taken up by a colossal machine, so densely packed one could hardly tell what it was. Its joints had been folded in on itself so tightly it appeared they were going to snap, its springs and suspension compressed until it bottomed out. It was terrifying, as if the slightest brush would cause it all to unravel, to burst outwards and tear through the concrete walls and ceiling. She knew it wouldn't - it had survived months of space travel, of bumping and denting and weight, shoved carelessly in a cargo hold. Nevertheless, she kept a safe distance out of superstition. Taking up half of the remaining space was a small metal box, about the size of a twin-bed, powder-coated safety orange. It was plastered in safety stickers, medical warnings, a long spiel about human rights and combat casualties covering its front. It was almost overwhelming to look at, so dotted in bright colors and symbols and text. She made sure that it was entirely out of her field of vision while pacing. So, all said, she had about one and a half square meters of space to pace in. She had, at this point, covered every single centimeter in her pacing at least 3 times over. "Maybe it will be different this time?" It never is. It always ends the same. "What if I can help fight it?" And what, get yourself captured again? Her chest felt heavy and hot, like a cannonball in the process of being forged. "Maybe I can leave before it starts?" They already have 50 aug trackers. Even if you could hide it, there's no way you'll be able to bring the " cargo ". The euphemism tugged at the edges of her brain. She felt the ball growing, pushing aside organs, cracking ribs. The familiar anger and hopelessness rising. "And so what, so I fucking run away again? Become fucking rip van winkle and go in the fucking freeze tube and wait til they don't notice? Til the planet becomes a fucking husk and I can leave?" There was no stopping it at this point. "It's a fucking grinding machine, churning up everyone and everything until there's nothing left." At this point, she was shouting at loud. "I can run from it, over and over again, ensure there's always a slower prey. Like I've done for a hundred fucking years. " Or fucking what? Beat your hands against it til they bleed? You can run or you can punch against a brick wall and that's it. She almost walked into a wall. "At least I'll have fucking tried." Do you really still believe it? That someday they'll all fucking rise up and wipe out the corpos? "No - no. But I can't fucking not believe it. I can't. There has to be some hope to the anger." The ball had grown larger and heavier, weighing her down and igniting her veins, becoming so dense it produced a gravitational field. "I need to fucking rest." It collapsed into a tiny dot, a pinprick of pain, weight, and heat. She resigned herself to it, ran her hands through her hair. The storage unit had been pre-paid for 45 years, and she didnt have anyone here to miss (or to miss her.) There was no obstacle but herself.
There was something about freezing yourself that was innately enjoyable, in the same way that rotting in bed til your legs were weak was, as going on a chatroom and joining the dogpile was, as lying down in muck and letting yourself sink was. It was the erasure of the line seperating you and everything else, the bursting of that tight container that kept you tightly in and the universe tightly out. At some point (around -175c), the body and the container ceased to have different temperatures, ceased to require liquid nitrogen to be pumped through the veins by wheezing bellows. It was an organic state of homeostasis. No more differentiation. The routine was familiar - she'd done it countless times before. It was designed to be simple: the 'intended' use of single-use cryopods was either keeping survivors of some disaster in a stable state til they reached the hospital, or allowing rich fucks to skip the ~6-10 month travel time of interstellar travel by simply freezing them. Either way, it had to be approachable. She'd set the timer already. 36 years and change - the rated maximum time of the pod. You're procrastinating. She relented and hit the button - a surprisingly pathetic microswitch under a small silicone sheath - and lay back as the coldness spread, cell by cell, like a drop of water on a paper towel. The body shut down before the mind did - it was a single moment, stretched to what felt like an hour. The muscles stiffening and contracting, the skin crackling like crepe paper as the water changed its density (she'd already prepared the moisturizer for when she exited, a shelf-stable solution to last the years), the deep hum of the body (the one you hear only in those very unfortunate moments when your heart stops) slowly come to a halt. And then she fell into the abyss.
When she awoke, it was... warm. A vaguely fungal smell pervaded. Her mind skipped along, skimming off consciousness - - - before finally diving into it. She was aware, all of a sudden, of how much she hated it - hated her skin cracked and wrinkly like a sunburnt elephant, hated the way the contents of her stomach were still frozen and weighed there heavily, hated the way her muscles felt brittle like unvulcanized rubber. The distant rumbling of artillery shook the room - she barely even noticed. It was too familiar after so many years. Finally, after applying a copious amount of moisturizer and performing a series of increasingly outlandish stretches, she pulled the door in towards her - only to be faced with a literal brick wall. Evidently, the 45 year deposit guaranteed only that the contents of the unit were safe, not that there'd be a way to get to them. Ah. Well. Time to use the cargo. [TO BE CONTINUED] [ALSO YES THE CARGO IS A MECH]
The machine dwarfed her as she ran her hand over the cold ceramic exterior, feeling the pits, the bumps, the scars, letting her fingers trace and glide over them, rising and falling with each divot. It feels ... more right, more comfortable than her own skin. Still needs a armor patchup at some point, though. Then, hidden in a small groove - a patch of warm, yielding silicone. She dug her fingers in, with more and more pressure until - a cascading series of clacks echoed through the small room as the latches released and the cockpit hatch swung upward. The inside of the cockpit was dark, lit only by the meager bounce lighting from the fluorescents above. She lowered herself into the leatherette couch and awkwardly closed the hatch behind her.
Utter darkness, utter silence.
Then, a rhythmic clicking.
Slow at first, then faster and faster and faster until the clicks ceased to be distinct sounds and blurred together into a sharp whir - and then ... nothing. A long, terrifying second later. Then - finally - a hum and an irregular series of clicks as the computer system spun up, a dull background whir and a rush of warm air tickling her skin as the fans kicked in, an amber glow shining through her eyelids (She didn't even realize that she had closed her eyes until now) as the CRTs warmed up. The plug slid smoothly into the neural port on the back of her neck, already perfectly aligned. She felt.... nothing other than a dull warmth in her nape. Exactly what she expected - The equalizer's set to 0%, after all. She took a final glance over the panel of switches above her, illuminated only by a dim green underglow and the dull amber of the CRTs, then gripped her hand tightly around a handle to her right, mounted on a short slider. It was silicone, vaguely translucent, dotted with small bumps intended to improve grip (in truth, it felt odd and slightly fleshy, but she really did not want to mess with such a critical component, even if it was just to install a new handle.) Slowly, delicately, she slid the handle up to 05%, careful not to let it slip. In the background of her mind, like a dull ache or an annoying background noise, she felt something new, a mirror neural system, the sensation of limbs and vision and sound. She focused on it, dragged it into the foreground. She dimly felt the tension of the limbs, the tightness, blurrily saw the concrete that the machine's eyes were presently pressed against, felt the useless noise of the radar system, echoing around a small concrete room. Then, she let go, unfocused, and it faded into the background once more, the dull tension of the legs present alongside and underneath the stiffness and acheing of her own, barely discernible as different. Gone, like a hidden image in an optical illusion that you stopped focusing on. She tuned the radio system to standard frequencies - in case anyone wants to call me for a social hour - flicked on the various switches for boosters and sensors, and - took a shallow, sharp breath, then slammed the equalizer handle to 60/40.
Suddenly, the sensations of the machine almost overrode her own, crowding out her own muscles, her own vision. The tightness of the joints, the compression of the springs, the noise of the radar, the vision that was just a gray wall, rendered with unbelievable detail. It was loud, overwhelming. Her mind filled with senses, touch, sight, sound, crowding out her thoughts. Why the fuck did I just slam it to 60???? She took a deep, shuddering breath - with her own body, not the machines - and slowly probed her senses, carefully navigating the border where the machine ended and the body began.
I am so out of practice.
Over the course of the next 30 seconds, she drew lines - distinguished the rhythm of the generator from her heartbeat, the shape of the steel armor from her own skin. The overload faded slowly, safely, gently. She moved her hands experimentally, then rested them awkwardly on her lap. She felt the roughness of her pants as through fog, distantly. She felt through the tension of the legs, the springs latched in place, the booster thrusters cold and ready to fire - then - all at once - she released it. Well. Here goes nothing. All at once, every single faux-muscle, every single joint, every single servo released, springing from one extreme to the opposite in a fraction of a second. The machine launched upwards with an immense acceleration roughly equivalent to that of a car crashing, tearing through concrete, rebar, water pipes, electrical wiring, foam insulation, a mattress someone had left in storage, and what appeared to be the remnants of an old vinyl collection. Then - she shot through the top floor and kept going, reaching an apex high over the building. Looking down, she could dimly see the path of destruction she had carved through the building, obscured by dust and rubble. She quick-fired her boosters almost unconsciously, careening to the right in midair before landing roughly on the remaining surface of the rooftop.
She nudged the equalizer down to 10% and rubbed her face roughly, prodding and tugging at various features, before letting out an audible groan. She dimly felt the rubble stream off the shell's body like water off a steeped roof, saw the steam rising from ruptured pipes as if through a dream. She slid the equalizer back up to 60, slowly this time, deliberately, feeling as the machine's senses overtook her own.
Then, perched on top of a pile of rubble that had a minute earlier been a building, she looked around. For some reason, she still vaguely expected everything to look the same, expected to still see the rolling hills of green dotted with lakes and rivers, expected to see the vast forests (their leaves and spines red year round, unlike anywhere on Earth), expected to see the trams snaking their way through narrow cobble streets.
The hills were gray, almost barren. Thin patches of barbed ivy were strewn about, almost sadder than if there was no life at all. The landscape was dotted with colossal mounds of dirt, waste from the vast mining pits that scarred the earth like smallpox. The dense city had been replaced with a sprawl of concrete and metal, with smokestacks and chimneys jutting up like upturned hypodermic needles stuck into the sky. From the distance came the dull rumbling of artillery fire. There was scarcely a sign of life in view, just cars and trucks like ants crawling along asphalt roads.
Anger welled inside her, mingling and blending with despair. She considered her options again.
I could probably leave now. Just another corpo taking a shuttle offworld with cargo.
They didn't know she was here anymore, didn't have the augtrackers sweeping the planet. A massive intermodal container would hardly arouse suspicion, as industrialized as the planet was now. She felt bile rise in her throat even thinking about it.
I'm not running again.
She caught a glimpse of the sky. It was a pure, brilliant blue-on-blue gradient, almost cloudless (save for the smoke rising from the various chimneys around the city.) It hadn't yet been choked from the smog, hadn't yet had its oxygen pulled from it, hadn't yet turned into the dull endless black that came when they'd consumed the entire biosphere. Suddenly, her limbs, torso, heart, lit on fire, filled with anger and rage and blood. She couldn't stay still, couldn't sit here thinking about fucking plans and ways to escape.
There's still a chance. I.. can still save it. Save something.
Her limbs - her vast metal limbs - twitched, itching to move, attack, destroy. A beep from the display inside the cockpit, quiet, distant: About thirty armored craft, none e-shells. Twenty-five of them with the Anscom IFF tag. The remainder had ... no IFF tag whatsoever. A civilian guerilla force. She'd seen them - hell, fought them - before. They relied on ambushes and the immobility of their targets - artillery installations, small tanks, factories and refineries and transports. They never won. They couldn't win, it was physically impossible at worst, highly improbable at best. The forces of an entire corporate army, all arrayed and amassed to protect buisness interests, against modified mining mechs? And now, against me. Her chest felt tight with anger, with anticipation, with that sort of joy that comes only from revenge and destruction. She saw the smoke rising in the distance, correlated with her radar scans, and noticed her leg was tapping, crushing and leaving cracks in the concrete underneath.
Careful. Don't want to get ahead of ourselves now.
She ran down the checklist with scarcely controlled anticipation.
"Retrorockets, good. Leg tension, good. Missile tracking, good. Weapons systems.... " She focused on her actual muscles again, tensed and pulsed them, flicking a switch overhead. "Good. Radar, good. We're ready to go." She realized that she spoke as if to a nonexistent commander, as if there was something on the other end of the empty radio link besides static. Concerning, huh? She shook the thought out of her mind, threw it in the trash heap, never to be revisited. Then, she tensed her legs, fired up her boosters, mostly unused for 40 years, activated her flight control - then exploded into the air with the joy that only anger can provide.
[PART 4 HAS THE FIGHT SCENE I PROMISE]
First attempt at a fight scene, any feedback would be appreciated.
[1100 meters and closing.]
As she approached, her mind flicked between her eyes inside and the cameras outside, eyeing the 'battlefield' (the parking lot of some large industrial complex) closely, or at least as closely as she could given the limited resolution of the telezoom cameras. Among the ex-mining mechs of the guerilla fighters was a taller figure, its tell-tale ceramic plating gleaming slightly in the afternoon sun. It looked like - no, it was, a heavily modified scouting Shell: a slow, corporate-built craft, designed for scouting and "exploring" newly acquired corporate investments. It was built for durability, endurance, and surviving for a long time away from "civilization." What it was decidedly not built for, however, was 25 vs 3 combat (two of the guerilla mechs had been blown up in the time she'd been flying.) it was a testament to the skill of the pilot that they were still alive at all, let alone continuing to fight. They held up a large metal plate in front of them as a makeshift shield - the metal of it glowed dimly from the constant onslaught. She gave it roughly 45 seconds before it began to buckle. A buzz from inside the cockpit -
[400 meters and closing.]
She timed the retrorockets with instinctual precision - the vertical velocity would zero out at the exact moment the machine's legs hit the ground. On the other hand, the horizontal velocity would remain constant. Yes, it was overly dramatic. Yes, it was unnecessary. Yes, shells had no valid reason to drift across asphalt, kicking up dust and throwing up a colossal shower of sparks as the mech's 'feet' scraped against the ground. Yes, her former CO hated it, told her off every time she did it. fuck him. Just for that I'll do it every damn time.
[100 meters and closing.]
Her shell skidded along the ground in a rough arc between the combatants, tearing up the cracked asphalt ground and tossing a plume of gravel into the air. Immediately, her radio buzzed to life, at first with static, then with low-bitrate voices, fighting for space, colliding, shrieking, clashing against each other.
"Is that a fucking shell - " "Is it on our side- " "Calling reinforce- " "Where the fuck did it - "
She raised her hand to the radio switch abruptly, muting the radio system. The corpo mechs stopped firing, lowered their weapons in confusion. She could almost imagine the utter panic in the control room, the buzzing of radios filling the air. Well, I'm not gonna wait for them to come to their senses. She swung her arm to the right and released her arc-blade - the metal slid out of her forearm with a dull clunk, carried by inertia. Before the corpos could react, she lunged at the closest mech, impaling her blade through its torso. She tore it out roughly, showering the ground with hydraulic fluid and the remnants of the machine's internals, before turning sharply to the left.
How nice of them to line up for me, she half-thought, half-spoke. She felt the familiar adrenaline pulse through her body, felt how the sensations of her body were subsumed by metal. Her mind tracks the 3 corpos at the back, triangulates their position with an instinct that is not her own. The volley of missiles feel like almost nothing as she fires them, like dead skin peeling off or dandruff falling from an unwashed scalp.
Now, the other four.
She launched herself at them, weaving between the hail of machine-gun fire - the bullets ricocheted off her shell, rain off an umbrella.
The first, an arcing swipe from her arc-blade - the cheap aluminium armor of the mech crumples like origami paper.
The second, an uncharged railgun shot from her left arm. The corpo twitches for a second before the hydraulics lose pressure and it collapses in on itself.
The third, another railgun shot - the last in the clip.
The fourth - shit. Nothing's ready yet - except - The five barrels of the EML launcher on her shoulder twitched like fingers on a keyboard, zeroing in on the mech's front. A slight recoil, barely even felt through the link - and its torso was .. gone, obliterated in a fraction of a second.
Eight down, seventeen to go. A delicate symphony of metal as everything reloads, silently, smoothly, almost automatic. Then - she took a second to actually look around - the 'battlefield' was a maze of warehouses and administrative buildings, awkward rectangular structures embedded in a sea of asphalt. She'd fought in places like this before (sometimes with civillians still in the buildings), and it was an utter nightmare - identical sheet-metal roofing, concrete walls with windows punched irregularly into them, metallic catwalks cris-crossing narrow passageways, cluttered with forklifts and shipping containers. Come to think of it, I usually just follow the smoke. In lieu of smoke, she spots a large hole in the concrete wall to her left, leading to a large loading dock. Ah. A chokepoint. She bounds into the air about 20 meters to the right of the wall - and spots 17 corpo mechs. Every single one of their guns was trained on the precise center of the hole in the wall.
She ran through the arithmetic in her head - Five with the EML launcher, then three with the first volley of missiles. Another five with the first clip of the railgun.. then... Her plan was interrupted halfway through execution (just after the missiles) by the impact of a large bazooka shell directly to her right.
It was like.. an electric shock, a pulsating current, fluctuating over every single inch of sensation, stripping away every mental safeguard. fuck fuck fuck fuck. Why couldn't she fucking MOVE? come ON, i've survived SO MUCH WORSE. Her mind, her muscles refused to comply - then finally, finally, moved, unconsciously, almost automatically. She felt... numb, saw her shell as if through a telescope. It weaved through a stream of bullets, ricocheting off the charred ceramic, smoke still streaming off the newest dent in its hull. Then - a flash of blue-white as it's - her - arc-blade deployed. She dimly saw the thing that had shot her - it was taller than a standard corpo, but not a shell - a poor imitation of one, clad in cheap aluminium pressed into facets. It held a massive shield (if one could call it that): a slab of solid metal almost as tall as the machine, peppered with bullet-holes and noticeably creased in the center. Well, there's no getting through that. It-her fired her retrorockets to the side, lunging to the right - and in the same instant, her blade arced down, directly through the shoulder joint of the mech. The arm (and attached shield) fell onto the concrete as the shower of hydraulic fluid coming from the shoulder joint steadily slowed to a dribble. She raised her railgun and fired through the joint, bypassing the armor entirely. The machine unhurriedly collapsed as all its limbs lost hydraulic pressure, falling to the ground like a discarded doll. Fuck you. Then - Ugh, is that really the best one-liner I could come up? She quickly assessed the damages - not too bad, nothing the self-healing ceramic couldn't deal with. She could already feel the subtle, warm buzz over her not-skin as the atoms reformed into their crystalline structure line by line, hex by hex. Mind - it still needs a patch-up. The ceramic could repair itself, but any material that was lost or scattered still had to be replenished, painstakingly wiped on by hand, filling all the cracks and dents one-by-one with a bright green slop that reeked of almonds and bone-dust. The dull numbness had been replaced by adrenaline. Now - eight left.
She turned and saw ... all eight, standing in a semicircle around her, not firing. She already imagined their commands echoing over the airwaves, some variation of "Stand down" or "Surrender!" or, best of all - "we've got you surrounded." No need to wait for them to start firing... She lunged directly at the closest one, impaling her arc-blade through its torso. Now - 4 with the EML launcher, 3 with the missiles. An empty second, utter stillness - then, one-by-one, they fell. Ugh. She lowered the equalizer down to 15%, then ran her hands over her face, poking, prodding, stretching, pulling. It was warm, soft, malleable. The transition took a few seconds to get used to: a shift in her reference frame from hard ceramic to yielding flesh. Through the link, she dimly saw a shell in front of her - the guerilla scouting shell she'd spotted earlier. It stood perfectly still at first, as if waiting for her - then it began to move its hands in a crude attempt at sign language. Fuck. She turned the radio back on, cringed as static filled the cockpit.
"Sorry, I had the radio off. Over."
"Fair enough, thanks for saving our asses earlier. My callsign's Berberis." The spiny bush. Thrives everywhere. The pilot's voice was deep, vaguely melodic. "Now - who the fuck are you?"
She flicked through the various possible answers in her head before replying -
"My callsign's Peregrine. I'm ex-Anscom. Over." Her voice came out scratchy, weak. Great first impressions.
"Ex-anscom, huh?" She could hear the eyebrow-raise in the other pilot's voice. "How long since you've updated your shell?"
An odd question, but - "40 years, give or take. Why do you ask?"
"No reason. And I'm sorry in advance."
"Wha-" Before she could finish, the radio link filled with a loud buzzing punctuated by digital shrieks, piercing her brain like a thousand tiny needles. Then her neural link went dark, followed by the CRTs, radar displays, and, finally, the lights. The hum of the generator seperated out into clicks then slowed to a halt. Silence. A minute later - the sound of helicopter blades and a jerky acceleration upwards.
Figures.
She could do nothing but wait for wherever they took her.
[SORRY FOR THE CLIFFHANGER BUT NEXT PART IS GONNA BE COOL]
About thirty-five minutes later, the shell came to a jerking halt, only barely slowed by the unpowered suspension. The cockpit door hissed opened with a hiss and a clunk, and her vision filled with the blinding green-white of fluorescent lights. This, they seemed to have accounted for - alongside the handcuffs, she was given a pair of sunglasses. What they did not account for, however, was the fact that her legs no longer seemed to work. "Ah, well. Fuck." She was lifted out of the cockpit - her left shoulder carried by a scrawny, acne-riddled man in a wrinkled, stained flight-suit who seemed to struggle carrying even her meager frame, and her right by a woman in an identical (though much cleaner) flight-suit with short, curly hair and a sharp face, with dark, deep-set eyes - and set roughly down in a folding plastic chair immediately in front of her shell. The woman sat down opposite to her in an identical chair, wincing slightly as the plastic dug into her back.
"Berebris, from the raid earlier." She mock-saluted flamboyantly. "Nice to meet'cha."
"What the fuck did you do to my shell?" And, less importantly, my legs.
"An old vulnerability in the shell's computer system. It was found and patched like... thirty years ago? Seems you didn't get the update. Y'know how your shell can run executables n' programs sent to it?"
"No?"
"Neither did I. I'm honestly not really sure why that's a thing in the first place - it seems there's an priviledge escalation exploit with data sent over the radio system - they probabbblyyy shouldn't have let the radio system parse n run unmarked data in the first place, but hey." She took a deep breath, cut herself off from a lecture/rant she'd clearly gone on a hundred times before. "Anyway, Heath over there is patching your shell." She gestured behind Peregrine - the same skinny man from earlier had his torso halfway inside the rear compartment of the shell. A messy bundle of cables trailed loosely behind him, splitting off and snaking into the depths of the hangar. She didn't exactly trust him to fiddle with her shell - not that I have any choice. "We'll fix your legs, too, after a little chat."
"Now - down to business." The woman in front of her dropped her smile, glared at her intensely. She could feel her eyes searching her, cutting into her soul.
"You're an ex-corpo pilot. Hell, not just ex-corpo, ex-Anscom." Her voice was deep, hell, deeper than deep, almost growling - the words scraped against her ears like nails on tree-bark. "The devils themselves. No-one escapes - no one just leaves Anscom. And the one's that do have one hell of a chip on their shoulder." that's not... The words were dripping with malice, a threat - but there was no gun, no blade, no weapon, nothing menacing her.
"And yet you just helped us wipe out a squadron of Anscom special forces." wait, those were special forces? "So then, corpo - " The word was like a red-hot needle embedded in her heart, a stinging reminder of the past - " tell me why you're here."
She sat still for a second, attempted to weave together the disparate moments of her past into a coherent narrative, minimize the vulnerabilities such a tale would necessarily expose. Then, she began speaking, shakily at first -
"I was roped into Anscom at 16. Told me my test results were great, promised me a massive salary, my mom a great stipend. Gave me the augs." She still remembers her mother watching through the glass of the operating room, searching her face as it-her changed, shifted. She was long dead now, after so many years of cryosleep. "They tested me again, said I was off the charts. Shoved me in a combat shell." She still remembers piloting it for the first time, flexing the machine's fingers as if they were her own, feeling the mechanic's touch on her ceramic not-skin. "Then they launched me across the galaxy, freezing me before every trip - preserving their precious little asset." She can still faintly feel the first time that piercing cold snaked through her veins, from her heart on outwards. "Destroying all the opposition, murdering the strikers, wiping out the little militias and resistance movements of every planet that dared to stand up to our - their pillaging." She can still clearly recall, word for word, the booming commands from the loudspeakers, urging them to lay down their arms, asserting the legal justification for their actions under interplanetary law. "And every time I did, I felt that weight in my chest, that building anger and hatred and guilt, like molten lava pulsing under my skin. Then one day, it was too damn much, like a dam slowly cracking over time under the weight and never getting repaired until it finally fucking breaks - " fuck. too much. She took a deep breath (it didn't help very much) and continued.
"I wiped out my entire squad and ran." She remembers how easy it was, how satisfying. "Dug out the tracker chip from my forearm with a screwdriver. Fled. Hid my machine in an intermodal container and skipped off world. Since then I've been planethopping, heading to all the newly colonized planets, the first offworlder in. Anywhere, everywhere." She trailed off, lost her words somewhere in the expanse of her mind.
"S'long as there's no corpos there." The first words the other pilot's said since she began.
"Exactly. Stayed as long as I could and then as soon as it was even hinted at, even a single article in the newspaper, I fled. Leaving right before the aug-scanners, the sweep of suits looking for exactly me. I hated it, leaving just when I settled in. Every beautiful planet destroyed, wiped out, and me, the fucking tourist who just skips as soon as she has to. It was that weight again, that anger, that burning hatred."
She squirmed in her chair, adjusted herself so the plastic dug into a different part of her back.
"I left too late this time. Got a storage container, pre-paid it for 40 years. Froze myself, planned that when I'd wake up, I could sneak into an intermodal container and leave again. Just like I had before. So many times before." She could almost feel the cold metal against her back, the constant hum of the generators, the oxygen levels in the cargo hold at a bare minimum so that she was constantly on the verge of fainting.
"But I couldn't. Not again. Not while the trees are still alive and the sky isn't black."
She grinned weakly, more of a veiled grimace than an expression of genuine mirth.
"Well. That's it."
It wasn't, but it was enough.
Berberis stared at her face for an inordinate amount of time, tracing every line, every little bump, every miniscule detail. It was as if she was being dissected, having every imperfect crack pried open violently with a crowbar.
"I trust you." She stated simply, plainly.
"Wh-"
Berberis got up with a pained grunt, walked over to remove her handcuffs.
"What's your name? Your actual name, not a callsign."
Peregrine worked up the will to respond. "I- I'm Evelyn."
Her handcuffs came off with a clink.
"Very pretty. I'm Katalin. And a pro-tip for handcuffs - make sure they're actually locked before acting all helpless." She winked, an awkward expression that ill-suited her face.
She walked behind Evelyn, grabbed a neuralink cable.
"Here, I'll fix your legs. Keep your head straight ahead."
Evelyn took a deep breath, tensed her neck muscles. She felt Katalin's hands grazing the back of her neck, gently brushing aside her hair, touching her skin ever-so-slightly - and willed the blood away from her cheeks, just anywhere else. It didn't work - her cheeks flushed a warm pink.
Evelyn took a deep, shuddering breath as Katalin pried open the silicone flaps covering the port, jammed the cable roughly in place.
"Sorry, I'm not ... the best at this."
"No worries." well, some worries, but those were best unvoiced.
She kept her head fixed straight ahead, heard receding footsteps on concrete from behind her. Then, a brief burst of furious typing, punctuated by the loud, plasticky clack of a loose spacebar.
" 'kay, here goes nothing."
The loud clack of an enter key - then - an electric buzzing, pulsating down her spine, through her pelvis, radiating down her legs. She twitched her thigh experimentally - it moved, albeit weakly, slowly.
"It'll take a few minutes to go back to normal... anyway, do you have a place to stay?"
"...I did, like forty years ago. It's probably - no, definitely, foreclosed on by now."
"Perfect!" Katalin clapped her hands together like an uncle after finalizing plans for an upcoming potluck. "n do you have any stuff/luggage in the shell?"
Mostly just stuff I had in the storage locker anyway, but... "Yeah?"
"Great, I'll have Jesse bring it to your room." My room? Katalin walked off, exchanged a few words with a tall, lanky woman, who mock-saluted before walking off.
Katalin returned and helped her up, slinging Evelyn's right shoulder over her own.
"Sorry if I'm overly kind, haven't had a chance to be nice in a while." She made a grand sweeping motion with her free arm. "We're in one of the old planetary shelters, dug out when the colonists landed. Built to sustain 'round 15k people in the event of a solar flare or gamma ray." She looked around - the hangar they were in was a large, circular room dug out of the ground, its hewn rock walls covered in cables and scaffolding that clung to it like ivy on a cliffside. The little space on the walls not obscured by scaffolding or cables was covered in grafitti, ranging from ancient tags made by urbexers from back when the shelter was first abandoned, to more modern anti-corpo slogans and art. The walls sloped slightly inwards as they rose, rose, rose, culminating in a large circular loading-door, sealing the cavern in like a cap on a colossal soda-bottle. The actual floor of the hangar was ... not densely packed, but decidedly full - practically every inch of space aside from designated walkways was occupied, if not by navy-green crates stacked terrifyingly high, then by helicopters or munitions or heavily modified mining mechs, crammed together front-to-back. I can ask about the armor patchup later.
"Here's my shell - " Katalin gestured limply to her right, where a dirty-gray machine stood, surrounded by scaffolding and plugged in from every angle like a prematurely-born child in the ICU. Its shape is abrupt and bumpy - made of compound curves and bulges like a plastic bag vacuum-sealed over a collection of discarded children's blocks. The chest is adorned with a massive graphic barberry-bush, cutting across the dark-gray paint of the shell, wrapping around the limbs of the machine as if it were tangled in spines. The space around joints and near moving parts was highlighted by a chipped, shabby safety-orange, accompanied by decals warning of the hazards of pinch-points - the one reminder of the shell's past as a scout machine. The slight iridescence of the ceramic, not completely dulled by paint, gleams warmly under the fluorescent lights of the hangar, interrupted by the dirt and grime that clung stubbornly to the shell's surface.
She's lead through a large doorway off to the side of the hangar, then through a series of progressively narrower hallways before they finally stop in front of a small, metal door.
"Here's your room - it's right near mine. Bathroom's over there, my room's over there if you need me - "
Katalin points vaguely down opposite directions of the hallway.
"I'll be back to get ya 'round dinner time. Try to get some rest til then, yea?" ... And then she was gone. Well, definitely not gonna do the resting part, but... The room was small, but not cramped - the room was warmly lit, and the walls were a nice shade of off-white, punctuated by a light-blue stripe just under eye-level. A twin-sized bed was pushed against the right wall, and a relatively small desk (with an accompanying office chair) sat in the far-left corner. A surprisingly plush mint carpet had been laid out in the middle of the room over the laminate flooring, and the bed was fully set, with crisp sheets and plush pillows. Her luggage (consisting of one whole duffel bag) had been laid down carefully on the carpet. She opened it and started unpacking, mostly to have something to do - nothing in it was that crucial. She'd had no time to actually grab stuff from her apartment, so it consisted entirely of the things she had dumped in a storage unit in the first place, all the second favorites - the books she deemed unworthy to even sit on her shelf, her old clothing from that phase where she really liked tweed, those posters of bands long since disbanded and promptly forgotten, an awful 'vintage' laptop that failed to even turn on, a bottle of ink that'd long since dried up, that tacky elephant statue she'd got at thrift store for too much money. When she was done, she ended up with a room that was almost, but not quite, her - a room that was the net sum of all her pasts, all the phases and interests and things that were her, maybe, but aren't quite her now, not anymore. The worst kind of familiarity. Well, still better than an empty room. She was about to sit down on the bed when she noticed a folded note, scrawled in half-cursive, half-print on old card-stock.
"Hey corpo Evelyn - Nice to have you here! Together, we'll beat the shit out of those scumbags and kick 'em offworld. Can't wait to meet ya - Jesse.
(P.S - Katalin likes to act tough, but she's just an overgrown softie/nerd with a shell (haha, get it?) Seriously though, she likes you. Wouldn't have asked me to bring all yer shit over and patch up your shell's ceramic if she didn't.)"
Scrawled next to it was a roughly-drawn smiley face stylized as a monospace emoticon.
There was a new weight, a new emotion tugging at her, not one of anger, or of revenge, or even quite sadness - it wasn't hot, burning a hole in her, nor cold, freezing her veins, preventing her from moving. Was it even a weight? Maybe it was just ... a presence. It was barely there, a small, light little thing, perched delicately on her collarbone. Evelyn set the note down gently on the carpet, and felt, for the first time that she could remember, the urge to cry. fuck, but the bedding's so nice. She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box conveniently placed on the desk, laid them over the pillow, and planted herself comfortably face-down on it. Then, finally, after so, so long, she let herself cry.
It had been so many years since she had naturally fallen asleep that she had almost forgotten it was even possible. They'd planned it perfectly, precisely, back in the corpo days - timed the sleep down to the second. A small pellet, pressed and dropped into her hand by a machine. Then when she'd fled, she almost couldn't remember how to sleep. It sickened her, lying in bed for hours and hours and hours. She still remembers that little shock, that twist in her stomach, the way she could almost feel the roots of the aug twisting through her brain like noxious weeds burrowing in. Her resolve wore out after five sleepless nights. Back to the pills. There was a familiar tugging to them - there was no 'trying' to sleep. There was awakeness, and then, in a fraction of a second, quick as a predator snatching its prey, she was pulled into the deep, dreamless abyss, free-falling. It was comforting, taking the responsibility for the plunge out of her grasp. But this - this wasn't like that. Still lying on the tear-soaked pillow, barely conscious, she slid gently towards the abyss, was powerless to stop it, like a child's toy rolling off a table, so slowly as to be unnoticed until the inevitable loud crash.
A klaxon wailed in the background, dim, distant. A voice, authoritative, plain, booming all around her. She saw, in the way that one sees blotches when putting pressure on ones eye, ships hanging in the sky like flies caught in a glue-trap. No. Not this. The booming of artillery, the chanting of crowds, the specks of pain scattered across her sensation. Not again. Anything but this. Anything. And then it blurred away, wiped from her vision. Rain on a windscreen. She was staring at a CRT monitor, the amber burning its way into her retinas. The bold monospace of a terminal: "TL-33. [BEGIN]." The highest mission type she was aware of, requiring nothing short of utmost discretion. Then, another voice, if one could even call it that. It was the cold artificiality of a machine, awkwardly mimicking syllables like a child just learning to speak. 'Target - North Flats Research Hospital. Our competitors -' (the word comes out staccato like semiautomatic gunshots) ' - at Iso-Nord are developing a new generation of augmentation technology. The hospital provides a setting for this research, as well as medical services to the many Iso-Nord employees and their families of the North Flats region. Annihilate the hospital. Leave no survivors. Destroy any fleeing vehicles.' The voice comes to an awkward, sudden halt, as if cutting off in the middle of a sentence. What was this? She sees it, vaguely, a squat concrete building nestled between two hills. Then, it too is wiped away, gone like dry-erase marker on a whiteboard. Now, she's in a shell, plugged in with a thousand cables that tug at her skin like insects, tearing and pulling. She tries, but she can't find the flesh, can't find the body underneath. It's gone. Just metal and ceramic and digital sensors and a mind entangled in all of them. The cables start to burn. The roots of the aug, deep in her brain, start to twitch. Then, two loud gunshots, and it's gone, annihilated. No evidence it, any of it, was there in the first place.
She burst awake, her body burning, boiling. "Evelyn? You in there?" Another series of raps on the door. fuck fuck fuck. "Y-yeah, just gimme a sec." She launches herself out of bed, tears the tissues off her pillow and discards them. Her legs want to move, her whole body burns with energy. She feels sick yet alive, oh so achingly alive. What is this? She could swear her skin is bubbling, twisting under her, pulsating and squirming like bugs are under her skin. She opens the door. Katalin stands there, cocks her head quizzically like a confused dog.
"You okay? You look awful." "I'm - I'm fine." Hah.
Her feet are tapping frantically, arrhythmically. "No, you fuckin' aren't." She pushes through the doorway, approaches Evelyn before she can react. "Jesus fuck, you're burning up." She presses the palm of her hand to Evelyn's forehead - she flinches at the contact, recoils. "What the fuck happened? Don't pretend you're okay, just don't." Evelyn paces quickly, turns on her heel when she reaches a wall. "If I knew, I would tell you." She wouldn't.
"Tell me what you do know, at least."
"I - " Should I? She runs through possibilities in her mind, settles on a half truth. "I fell asleep. I think. I haven't fallen asleep without pills in years - never felt safe. And - and something happened." She glared at Katalin preemptively. "It wasn't 'just' a nightmare, before you say anything. I- I don't know what happened. Something with my augs."
That's as far as I'm willing to go.
"Oh." Something stirs in Katalin's eyes. "I- have an idea. Sit down." She pulls out a double-sided neural link cable from her pocket. "N-no." Panic rises in Evelyn's chest, tears well up again. Not again. I can't. An expression of pain flits across Evelyns face.
"J-just let me sit for a minute." She plants herself awkwardly on the bed, interlaces her hands together, arches her fingers against each other. "I'll be right back, will you be okay?" Evelyn nods sharply, too quickly, as if she's trying to prove something. Katalin leaves the room, returns a minute later with a tall glass of water. It's downed in a single gulp. Evelyn sits up, forces herself to be still, bunches her hands up so tightly her nails dig into her palms. She roots around in the back of her mind, digs to that forbidden place with words she can't think, thoughts she can't articulate; probes the contents delicately like an artisan reaching for tools.
She grasps, lets it flood her mind.
Then everything is blank, an empty void. No touch, no sound, no vision, no proprioception. Then - it's back, arcs through her body like a lightning bolt through heavy summer air.
"I'm - fine." This time, she wasn't lying.
"You sure? Like, actually this time?"
"Yeah. I rebooted the sensory system, it's all good now." She remembered dimly the sessions to drill those words in, the ones to lock them out. The dim rooms, the linoleum flooring, the buzzing lights. No. Not again. The roots of her aug were comforting, heavy like a blanket on her mind.
"Let's go eat."
