Miaiphonos

200 k.

The message slid into the top right of her field of view, pulling her attention back from the cheap liquor and drugs and women that usually occupied her at this time of night.

She reopened the line to her fixer. “They’re really paying 200 kilos?” she asked.

“Oh, sure, now you call back. Guess I know how to get your attention, huh?”

Of course, she didn’t care about the extra mass allowance. She didn’t want much that couldn’t be found on-world, and what couldn’t be found was often cheaper to smuggle than to import legally. But MAs were a reasonable proxy for difficulty, for the real reward, and so she was willing to bite.

“Who’s the client?”

“I don’t know, and for 200 I wouldn’t ask around too much.”

She grunted at this, willing to concede the point but not to go so far as to say so.

“I’ve already dropped you the intel packet – get going! They want this done ASAP,” her fixer said.

She mumbled something that could’ve passed for agreement, cut the call, and closed out her tab. She staggered out of the bar on legs that were unsteady not because of the cheap alcohol, but because they were 10 years out of date. The omnipresent sleet from IPSA’s failed terraforming didn’t help either – it made the ground slick and got caught up in her legs’ lattices, and their coprocessors weren’t new enough to compensate for the change in balance. She could’ve stretched her account for a newer pair, but she found it hard to justify emmas on bullshit prosthetics when the best she could get would still be years out of date.

So she stumbled on autopilot toward the aerodrome, toward her temporary nirvana, while she wolfed down the intel packet like a woman dying of thirst. It was an “anonymous” search and destroy job, routed through layers of automated contract resellers and short on details. A more savvy pilot would’ve read between the lines, seen the picture painted by the target’s location in former FCA territory, traced the money back through layers of subcontracts to the impenetrable wall of the Imperial Private Contracting Office. A more prideful pilot would’ve chafed at the epithets – wardog, freebooter, wirehire, jackal – and at being treated like nothing more than a tool, at the idea that they could simply be bought.

She was neither of these.

Suddenly she was inside the drome; she fumbled the remote from her pocket and got Lycaon warming up as she stumbled to the pilot’s staging platform. Lycaon filled the previously empty drome with whirs, clicks, and hisses; the sounds were the beautiful murmurs of her second skin waking up and it put a pit of anticipation in her stomach.

Next to Lycaon she shrugged off the layers of hats, coats, gloves, and masks that were nearly mandatory for nighttime walks. She reached up behind her and pulled down the lifter hooks, clicking one into each of her scapular hardpoints. She leant forward and felt the weight transfer from her hip sockets to her shoulders; a moment later she unclipped both legs and let them drop forgotten to the ground.

The lifter hoisted her up and deposited her somewhat roughly into Lycaon. She reached back again and placed her hands around two metal contacts, one on each lifter cable, at around head height. Her hands magnetized to them, her arms detached at the shoulder, and the whole assembly of lifter cables and arms snaked out the top of Lycaon.

The hatch closed above her with a comfortingly weighty thud. She heard the pop-whine of pressurization and fresh sterile air tickled her forehead. She saw a galaxy of blinking LEDs before her and smiled briefly into the darkness before the solitary red cockpit light flickered on.

She knew every step of meat prep by heart, a pattern she dreamt of every night. The tap-click of magnetic restraints attaching and closing around hardpoints in her hips, scapula, the parietal bones of her skull. The subtle tightening and whine of synthetic tendons ratcheting themselves down, fusing the vulnerable moving parts of her body into a single mass.

Then, her favorite part – the hookups. If she could still move she would have been bouncing with excitement.

Haemo rig, sympathetic regulator, spinal inserts, reflex cutouts, motoric diverters, all tap-tap-tapped up her back like Lycaon’s gentle fingers. She felt a slight chill as the haemo rig started pumping, scrubbing the alcohol from her blood and filling it with hyperox cells and metabolic boosters; her breathing and heartrate became monotonic as Lyacon relieved her brainstem of those responsibilities.

She heard Lycaon’s heartbeat then, growing gradually louder, alternating melody and countermelody with her own. The thrumming of its turbines resonated through the cockpit, pitching higher as they warmed up.

The cerebellar plug slid home at base of her head with a weighty thunk; the clicks of its latches closing echoed around the inside of her skull. Next was the cortical spike – she knew she didn’t have nerves up there, but she still swore she could feel it slide slowly in. A wreath laid itself on her head from behind, and she heard its high-pitched whirring as more plugs and spikes screwed themselves into ports and sockets poking through her close-cut hair.

Finally, she came alive again.

Her brain was fed inputs from Lycaon’s sensorium; its outputs were stolen and redirected. She turned her head and the sensor dome up top spun, delivering a crisp superresolution view of the other mechs sleeping in the drome. She flexed her arms and fingers, felt the power behind them; she grabbed an old ammunition canister and reveled in the feeling of it being slowly crushed in her fist.

She was finally back. Excuses to climb back into her skin were becoming harder and harder to find, but it made finding them all the sweeter.

She started loading armaments and lost herself in the simple physicality of the task, resurfacing in a launch tube. Her flight pack was attached and fueled, her hardpoints were full, and the launch rail was charged. She could feel Lyacon thrumming, trembling, aching to slip the leash and run free.

She gave the launch command. Giant industrial switches snapped shut beneath her like the jaws of some ancient beast, sending hundreds of thousands of amps racing around the newly connected circuit of source to rails to sink. At the launcher’s highest setting – and she never launched at anything else – it was enough to make the rails groan in protest as they threw her down the tube with an acceleration that rivaled some high-atmosphere fighters.

She broke through the clouds with a soft puff, temporarily free from the constant low ceiling and wet sleet. The sky up here was a pale blue and the clouds were bone-white beneath her; the distant sun blazed a soft yellow. (#TODO something with suborbital flights?) The wind caressed not-quite-her skin, the air rushed and buffeted in not-quite-her ears, and she almost lost herself in the beautiful freedom of hanging kilometers in the sky.

But not quite.

Before long, she felt the faintest brushing against her skin, the rhythmic feather-stroke of long-range search radar. Lycaon was coated and shaped to ward off inquisition at this distance, but she sighed and changed course regardless.

She hit the ground early, 30 klicks farther than she’d expected she’d have to. She ditched the majority of the flight pack, leaving only a couple of maneuvering thrusters attached, and began to weave carefully through the stone forest.

Several frustratingly boring hours of silent running later, she finally arrived. She pulled up behind a fallen stonetree, the natural wall it formed providing the perfect cover. She poked around it and started to reconnoiter – nothing active, not yet, just cameras and receivers. At this point, she had traveled south enough for the climate to warm; the sleet had transformed into a fine rain that layered a fine static over everything.

She saw a clearing, a hill that rose gently and then sharply, a yawning mouth cut into the steeper section. There was a scattering of cars, prefabs, and generators around the entrance, but no people. There were floodlights, in front of the entrance and positioned a dozen meters or so above the entrance, creating a bubble of light around the two guards.

They stood motionless at the entrance looking outwards, each angled 30 degrees away from the centerline, each holding something that looked old and kinetic. She guessed they were older scout cav models: lanky and lightly armored, built for surveying and running rather than staying and brawling. Amongst the flat antenna octagons and glinting camera irises on their hulls she spotted faded FCA crescents; that dated these specific mechs to the separatist movement of a few decades back, smothered in its cradle by IBIS counterops. Not a problem for her.

She flipped her eyes through infrared, passive EM, a half-dozen filters straining to pull meaning from the static, but saw nothing unexpected. Theoretically she could loop around them, drop down the steep side of the hill and crack them both from their blind spot. But they probably had prox/motion stippled all the way up that hill – it’s what she would’ve done – as well as a daemon watching their backs.

So she slid back behind the tree and pulled the pieces of her coilgun off her back, clicking them together as softly as she could. Hopefully the scout cavs weren’t also running mics sensitive enough to pick up the coilgun’s quiet clinks and capacitor whines. She pulled three uranium composite sabots from her bandolier, filled the gaping chambers of her newly assembled coilgun, and cranked the handle a half turn.

She slid slowly to her right, down the tapered stonetree towards the thin end until she was hull-down, the barrel of her coilgun just poking over the lip. She sighted in on the light armor of the left scout cav and paused. If she could’ve, she would’ve taken a slow, deep breath in and out. She was pulled taut, a drawn bowstring, one long thread of pent-up tension.

Lycaon’s thumb clicked the firing stud, and with the loud snap of capacitor discharge the sabot screamed down and out of the barrel at several times the speed of sound. The instant it was out, she gave her coilgun a full crank, sighted the other mech, click, boom. She felt the twin beat in Lycaon’s shoulder, her shoulder, and it was like the embrace of an old friend.

The cavs must’ve been new enough for some halfway competent electronic reflexes, because they both jolted at the same time – but there’s only so far that several tons of mass can move in the time it takes a supersonic spike to go from over there to right here.

The first cav had barely started its turn when the sabot impacted, burrowing into the soft spot where arm met torso. A dark hole appeared there as the projectile punched its way straight through the cockpit and into the dense earth behind it. The second cav managed to almost face her head-on, and caught the round straight in the chest for its trouble. The armor there was harder, but it still crumpled; adiabatic shearing turned her spike into a needle that shredded its way through in a gout of sparks and fire.

She planted one hand on the stonetree, gripping hard enough to gouge, threw the coilgun behind her, and vaulted over. The boosters she had scavenged from the flight pack lit, and she sprinted for the entrance. The mechs hit the ground almost as she reached them; the first collapsed like a someone had cut the strings holding it up, the second fell backwards and spasmed for a moment before going still.

Just before crossing through the entrance she detached the boosters; they exploded in twin fiery concert as they impacted the hill, hopefully confusing any seismics monitoring the entrance. Her heard would’ve been racing if not for the sym-reg; it was trickling adrenaline for her and she felt again the wonderful cold pit in her stomach.

The hunt was on.

She pulled the slugger from her back and skated at full speed down the maze of tunnels, radar and sonar building a map of the complex as she went. The intel said whatever she was looking for was deep in the mountain, and her shock-and-awe advantage wouldn’t last long.

Soon enough, one of the next junctions she’d hit would be busy – sensors had another mech coming towards it, and it probably knew that she was on her way with just as much clarity. She spotted a metal corner support at the junction, a leftover from when this place still saw regular traffic, and a plan coalesced in her head.

She tucked the slugger against her body, held her left arm straight out, and as she hit the corner at full speed she clamped her fingers around the support. She pulled, hard – locked fingers to wrist to elbow to shoulder into place – and whipped herself around the corner.

Centrifugal force did its best to paint her insides across the cockpit and her outsides against the wall; her body groaned and pinged and popped, the complaints of rivets and tendons and welds and intramesh blending together. She felt herself stretching, the pleasure-pain of a tendon pulled to its limit, and snarled into the empty cockpit.

Her turn was over almost before it started. Her fingers unlocked and sent her careening down the new hallway, straight at the unprepared mech. It tried to raise its own rifle but she was already there, ducking under the barrel to drive the point of her shoulder right into her opponent’s center of mass.

She hit it like the hand of God.

The wedge of her shoulder went in right under the faded crescent and left a crater the size of a boulder. She had leant forward while the other mech had been standing straight; now she stood straight as the other mech clotheslined, grasping for purchase as she brought her slugger at the chasm her shoulder created. Her slugger called and the HESH slug responded, the twin staccato blasts echoing down the tunnels, and her prey stopped scrabbling against her. She stood perfectly still over it, painted in sweat and hydraulic fluid and dust and metal shavings; her eyes were wild and alight and she was alive.

She set off again, weaving through tunnels towards a cavern on her map that her sensors were slowly carving out of the noise. She stopped at the junction just before its entrance – her proximity had transformed it from a fuzzy hole to a cathedral, resplendent with vaulted ceilings, thick pillars, and absolutely nothing moving.

Her hackles raised; she slid a hand behind her back, pulled out a sensor eyeball, and synced it to her surveillance. A second later it was ready for handoff, and at her command all active transmission switched to the eyeball. She gave it a strong underhand throw into the cathedral, putting in just enough force for it to skitter through the doorway at something approximating her speed – where nothing happened to it.

The eyeball sat like that for almost a full minute, banging away with active sensors and proclaiming nope, don’t see anything in here, before she couldn’t take it any longer. She grabbed her slugger with one hand and barreled into the room at full tilt, starting as closely as she could while still reaching her top speed. Right before she passed through the door she shifted her weight, put one leg up on the wall, and pushed.

This choice saved her life.

As she crossed the threshold, she found herself abruptly on the other side of her earlier exchange with the scout cavs. She felt the impacts at the same time as she registered the shots being fired, frigid beams of light that cut space in two. There were two shots simultaneously, one from either side of the door, intersecting right at the center, where she should’ve been.

As it was, the shot from her right caught the tip of her slugger and followed it down, slicing through the loaded HESH slugs before lodging itself in her right forearm. The shot from her left grazed the front of her cockpit, carving a deep furrow in its armor before passing through her knee and coming to rest deep in the wall behind her.

Lyacon shot a dose of accelerant directly into her brain and time slowed by half.

This wasn’t the good stuff that the ISOC droppers got – everything she touched was made of static, more than a few microliters at a time would turn her brain into one big seizure, and she’d have the migraine from hell the next morning – but it was an edge nonetheless.

She rode the momentum delivered to her right arm around and ended up rotated almost backwards, her left arm outstretched. She glimpsed a ranger pitoned against the ceiling, matte and angular to deflect any probing waves, and her forearm hinged open and hurled a starling straight at its center of mass.

At that same instant, the room exploded. There was a thud she felt through the armor as every surface in sight erupted in a cloud of grey-brown dust, filling the room and enveloping everything in it. She didn’t have time to think about this, to be confused by this: she dropped her inert slugger, deployed the aux joint for her knee, dropped both feet on the ground, and sped for cover.

She took stock behind a pillar as Lyacon flushed the accelerant, shivering from the comedown despite Lyacon’s best efforts. If one of the starling darts hit the ranger she saw, there was a minimum of one other assailant. She had one more starling, her lucerne, and her claws. Her right hand was effectively useless; her right leg could, at best, bear weight. A round impacted the pillar she was hiding behind, and she grinned without humor.

It struck her that she was getting suspiciously bad returns from her sensors, like trying to eavesdrop through a thick layer of cotton. She wondered if someone out here got their hands on some ECMines to bury in the walls, or if it was just their good fortune that the walls were made of a broad-spectrum blocker. But before she got too far down that avenue of thought, something loomed out of the dust in front of her.

It was, in respect, a well-executed scorpion: the stealthed claws in front to grab her and keep her in place, the tail slipping in from behind to deliver the fatal blow. Luckily for her, she was looking backwards, and caught the bruiser tail by surprise.

She ducked left, under its swinging mace, and into its body, planting the hooked spike of her lucerne into the weak part of the bruiser’s shoulder. This crouching maneuver extended her leg beyond the protective shadow of the pillar, and she felt a needlepoint bury itself in the thick armor of her upper leg.

She had to finish this.

TC/G claws thunked home around her bad hand and she drove them straight through the bruiser’s other shoulder joint, snarling with equal parts pain and elation. She pirouetted on her good leg, spinning them both around the other side of the pillar and putting her prey between her and the ranger; her right arm pointed straight at it through the prey’s shoulder.

As one, a hole opened in the dust, her prey jerked against her, and she fired her final starling. It traveled through the hole left by the ranger‘s round and airbursted halfway between it and her. She saw the five darts steer themselves into the ranger, and a quarter second later the ranger popped like a grape between her teeth.

She screamed victoriously into the cockpit; she wanted to rip out her prey’s neck but settled for dropping the lucerne and driving her other set of claws straight through its cockpit. It dropped like a rock and then there was only her, panting, limbs burning and leaking fluid from a dozen places, lips peeled from mechanically clenched teeth, euphoric.

She spun on her heel, lucerne abandoned, brain still sparking with accelerant aftershocks, and slalomed around the giant pillars to where she knew a crevasse hid behind a false wall. She burst through in a shower of rocks and dust and what she saw on the other side was so strange that it jolted her back into herself.

It was a mech, probably, but it was unlike anything she’d seen or even heard about.

It was the color of fresh bone, a central mass with multi-jointed arms, a flattened ball with 16 perfectly symmetrical tendrils swaying like seaweed in gentle surge. It was an avant-garde painting of an octopus the size of a building, just staring at her. She couldn’t see anything like weapon ports or sensor surfaces on it, just 16 strange eyespots that iridesced like oil in the room’s flickering light.

They stood frozen, looking at each other, seconds strung out to an eternity.

It started sliding sideways, slowly, cautiously, the legs shifting but the eyespots staying locked perfectly to hers. She couldn’t imagine how the fuck they got someone to interface with something like that without their brain turning to mush – until it bunched its legs up and jumped, threw itself at her with one long tendril outstretched, and she stopped trying to imagine anything.

She snarled and threw herself to the ground, claws whipping up to tear into the tendril but all she caught was empty air as it slithered past her through the opening she had just come through, arms pushing off floor and wall and ceiling alike. The fire came alight within her again and she was on her feet and howling in the cockpit: the hunt was on.

She pelted down the tunnels after her quarry, Lyacon pushed to redline, cockpit boiling from the turbines and bathed in red from warning lights. There were no guns, no EW or careful maneuvering or rehearsed ambushes, just her and her prey, just the hunt.

She felt her knee creaking with each turn, but each turn brought her closer and closer until she was practically touching the ends of her quarry’s arms. Twice she strained herself to snag a tendril with a claw, only to have them detach cleanly at the body and try to curl around her as though they had a mind of their own.

At the final corner before leaving the mine she threw herself forward and managed to hook a single barbed claw into the perfect white spheroid of its body. It nearly wrenched her arm from her socket but she screamed in delight as the unexpected weight sent them both careening into the wall.

Instantly an arm snaked around her bad leg and squeezed like a brick python; others descended to grasp at her arms, her torso, her head. Her leg was being amputated by a rusty bonesaw but it didn’t matter; her brain flooded with endorphins as she was finally able to swing around and plunge her full two meters of titanium carbide into its core.

Later, she would swear she heard it scream.

It kept fighting her, a bundle of supple arms that were everywhere at once, coiling and pulsing and fighting for grip, desperate to hold her down and pry her open and devour her.

They were perfect, then: boiled down to single points, the extraneous parts of their souls jettisoned in favor of the here-and-now, the dance, the hunt. She was locked to it, and it to her; two eagles tangled in a downward spiral that could only end with one of them rent limb from limb.

She ripped and tore until the arms went slack, until both its bone white hide and her mottled brown skin alike were stained with the various sickly blacks of hydraulics and blood, and only then did she begin to return to herself.

Her hunt was over.