Hekate's Call, Chapter 21

The shuttle ride to the staging ground, some DIN-controlled training field, was quiet and dreary. Vigil and Manya sat across the isle in an odd silence. She wasn't used to Manya keeping her mouth shut. Krystyn refused to let go of Ilina, but that was... okay. It was comforting, somehow.

"Did you like her? What was her name?" Krystyn had asked after dragging Ilina to a dark, quiet room where they wouldn't be bothered.

"Butcher," Ilina had said, quietly into Krystyn's jacket. "I liked her as much as I liked anyone at Carrion. They were all really nice."

And they were. Ilina found out that The Butcher had specified in her will that Ilina was to receive all of her stored up wages. The Scavenger had done the same. She didn't even know Carrion paid the corpses, but it was a sweet gesture, even if the value was rather low. Before they died, they'd mostly spent their money on personal upgrades to their chassis, or ordering gifts for Morian.

She'd really tried not to think about the Fiends. Hospital, Devil, Mountain, and Minnow were probably all decommissioned. Scavenger was dead. That was a surprise. Scavenger was the hardiest of any of them. He kept trying to get Ilina to quit Carrion, warning her that the Corpse Eater would turn on her someday. Butcher said that was nonsense; Morian never broke her word. She was a lot of things, a monster even, but Morian had never once broken a promise.

Ilina could feel a well of grief, ignored until now, start to bubble up. There was work to do. She couldn't spend her energy on regret and grief.

Manya was the first to break the silence. "Charlotte, what were you doing in the hallway outside the bridge?"

There was a pause, Krystyn didn't answer. Her eyes looked hollow and haunted. Apparently she'd had a conversation with Morian after the negotiations. A lot of people had that reaction after talking to Morian alone.

"Whatever," Manya spat, "Just don't choke like you did then. It's four against one, right?"

Vigil jumped in. "Should be easy enough. But they probably have our combat data, but we have no idea how they fight."

"Well, the little Hunter's got a new toy. Is it any good?"

Ilina chewed her lip. Morian tuned the Again in Hell for her on the zip shuttle, but she'd never fielded it. Morian said it would come naturally to her. She also said it was haunted, but try to ignore the ghosts. It had an axe and several wire systems. And her grenades. It could be good. But it was fragile, which meant she couldn't take hits like she did in the Parting Word.

"Well?" Manya pressed.

"I'll be fine," she snipped back.

Manya snarled. She was in an exceptionally poor mood today. "Are you even going to be useful without one of your little playbooks? Sure you can handle it?"

Vigil cut in, "What's got your tail in a bunch? Ilina hasn't disappointed yet. Meanwhile, half the fights we get into I can never be sure if you're even on the field."

The shuttle landed alongside the small carrier with their mechs. How Morian could get an entire, if detached, branch of a military agree to settling accounts with a duel was beyond her. Beyond any of them. House Dote was apparently a big deal, not that Morian would have told her.

The first person off the small carrier was Crater. Each boot fall echoed in that special way that sent shivers down Ilina's spine. It was impossible to tell if they were the good or bad kind of shivers. She sure was lucky her mom made her call her 'Sir' or Ilina might have slipped up by now.

"Letting Dr. Kyrnn off the ship was a mistake," Crater's lip turned up. She shot Ilina a disdainful stare. It's not like Ilina asked for a field trip.

Manya was in a mood. "Taking the necromancer off-world was a mistake. Dragging us all the way out to that pit was a mistake. You've made a lot of mistakes, Liz."

Crater smiled. Cruelty incarnate. Ilina felt like she was about to melt under it. "You should trust your dogs more, Carie. It's just a fox hunt. Nothing to worry your pretty little head about."

Nobody was going to bristle at that? Vigil was probably used to it. But Krystyn didn't even react to being called a dog. Manya's dog. Ilina had been called worse, but even still. Crater's ability to cut every one of her pilots with a single breath was something to admire.

Crater took a step forward, tilting her head to look into Manya's eyes around the brim of her little officer's cap. "I would just love to make a joke about you turning tail, or tucking your tail between your legs and running for the hills. But we both know you won't. Not with so much on the line."

Manya turned and started her march towards the WFH without responding.

Ilina was starting to wonder what exactly Crater had to keep her in line.

The other pilots made for their steel to get them sortied and ready for the duel. Crater placed a firm hand on Ilina's shoulder to keep her in place. The silence was agonizing, and Ilina didn't exactly want to turn to look up at her.

"Sir?"

"I don't want any of my pilots dying for your sake," Crater's voice was steady and collected. More vicious than it had been in any of her previous encounters with her. "Nothing you could offer would make up for the headache you've caused."

And then she was alone. Crater marching off to a control station to oversee the fight. Plilar apparently was doing the same for her pilot. Her head was still spinning either way. The headache she caused? No. This was Morian's fault. Why are you blaming me?

Before the swirl of frustration and hurt could overtake her, she felt something like a heavy hand shove it all down. A broken child who'd been betrayed too many times, hurt too many times, wasn't going to survive this. Survival was the only thing that mattered.

The only thing Ilina Falke was good at was surviving.

Hunter stepped out onto the field. Cityscape. Mix of tall and short buildings, tallest around the center ring of the colony. No centrifugal gravity, or artificial gravity for that matter. That put Hekate's Call at a disadvantage if the target was better equipped for zero-g combat. They almost assuredly were, considering Plilar was so confident in them.

The Hekate crew found the starting position, on the opposite side of the ring from the target machine. Ilina couldn't see it around the central pillar. That was the intention. It was a fair enough handicap.

Control. Five minutes until start.

Charlatan. Yeah.

Something was wrong with Charlatan. She needed to focus on the fight, but her head was somewhere else. Hunter wasn't the only one who realized something was off either. The Scandal trended closer to the Inertia than it usually did.

Hound. Charlatan. Plan?

The slightest tug to try to pull her back to the now.

Charlatan, dead-voiced and probably still absent. Fox hunt. Like Control said.

It was the brain dead plan. The fallback plan. The contingency. Let Illustrious and her heavy rail win the fight for them. All they needed to do was get knocked around a bunch. If they died before that happened it would fall on Hunter, somehow. That wasn't a real plan.

She needed to refocus Charlatan. Hunter boosted over to the Inertia, pulling herself near the cockpit. Hand on the Inertia's gigantic ribcage.

"Thanks for taking care of Velia," she said into the microphone.

There was a short gasp. Like the breath before the first sob. Charlatan. Ilina, I...

Hunter kicked off and moved to the edge of the deployment area. "Can it, Charlatan. If you don't come up with a real plan, I'm taking charge. Control, confirm?"

Control. You think Charlatan is compromised? Charlatan, speak up.

Finally an edge came back to Charlatan's voice over the radio. Oh, piss off Liz. Hunter's the biggest liability on the field in her tacky little hardsuit. Trying to wrap my head around how to keep her safe when bullets start flying.

Control, her smug voice undistorted through over the radio. She could practically hear that lip curling. I can make that easy for you: Don't. She's just a contractor. Mark set. All pilots in position. Mission start, three... two... one.

The WFH shimmered and vanished in place and took off. The only reason Hunter could track it's position was with the friendly-finder. It's movement was so quiet too, it was able to shift its weight across surfaces so cleanly. It was a shame she never got to see it.

Hunter kicked up the Again in Hell's active camo. The under-suit was so tight she could pass for a fetish model if it were shiny, and the external armor left so many places around the joins exposed. It was built to assist movement and strength, and couldn't compromise her natural range of movement. She would have killed for something like this back home.

Four wires with micro-reels; two in her wrists and two at the waist with a whole lot of directional control. The micro-reactor was half-exposed, but it kept her profile and weight low. The Hell's axe was stored on the back, and it was a nasty piece of work. And then her faithful grenades. She couldn't live without the spike charges anymore. They were too perfect for the way she fought.

And before she could get too comfortable a blue and gold lightning bolt struck directly between the Scandal and Inertia.

Hunter reoriented and tried to get a glimpse of what was going on. Explosions, mostly. But there was something fighting between the two titans that by all accounts was winning, judging by the radio.

Charlatan, after several seconds of cursing. Got it.

Blue, with gold livery. A smaller, striker frame with two handheld rocket launchers. Tethered to the Inertia like a bird caught in a snare.

Hound spun up Heaven's Hammer and took the one step necessary to reach it.

And then the opening salvo hit. Not the ones from when it landed between the two and hit them both with force. The rockets it launched and outran from its starting position on the opposite side of the colony.

Both the Scandal and Inertia were sitting fucking ducks. They both needed to stand still to do what they needed to do and this pilot knew it. And they knew to hit the Inertia hard and fast. Enough of the salvo hit the Scandal it needed to get out of there fast, but the rest crashed on the Inertia and broke its shields.

Hunter closed the distance some. She couldn't get involved in that melee though. Not with the rockets flying everywhere.

Stars above, that machine could dance. Kicking off one of the Hekate machines and spinning around a swing from the second. Every motion accompanied by rockets fired from the handheld launchers or back kit. A destructive ballet. A kind of beauty that Hunter wasn't used to witnessing. She could feel herself getting hot about it.

The finisher. It spun a launcher in its hand and parried the Inertia's lance, dipping low under the ferrofluid barrier and bringing the barrel of its second launcher up to the Inertia's chest. Charlatan let out a strange, airless grunt as the Inertia slumped over the enemy machine.

And then it was in back in the air before the Scandal could effectively get back in. Level five or six neural integration was required for the kind of movement and control that machine exhibited. Like an extension of the body. Might as well be one of Morian's Fiends with how much surgery would be needed to make that kind of tightness stable.

Hunter just watched now that she was close. It would be hard to challenge it in open-air.

A spear of ferrofluid, faster than her eyes could follow, shot out towards the enemy. The enemy machine rolled back -- pitched back? It didn't matter. Half a backflip. -- and moved out of the way enough.

EM interference, strong. Just from the HUD in the Again in Hell she could tell that this was the kind of practiced teamwork that came naturally to the Hekate girls. The Inertia attacked high, knowing it couldn't hit it, forcing the enemy lower for the railgun to take it out at a different angle.

There was a crash on the opposite side of the colony where the rail slug landed, before of course all the other effects of the rail firing washed through the field. It didn't miss. In that instant, it teleported to a new location just out of reach of the shell.

Illustrious. Fuck.

For a moment license data for the blue machine appeared. Pilot name, didn't matter. Machine name, A Scandal In Heaven. Before she could read the rest of the license data it was scrubbed from her data feed.

Illustrious. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The name bothered her, but now she had something to refer to it by. The False Scandal, the blue and gold pretender, fired a large volley of rockets and punched it towards the WFH. The missiles hovered for a moment before finding their trajectories. Several towards the real Scandal and the Inertia, and a large number in the direction of the WFH, following a distance behind the False Scandal.

That was it's approach strategy. Land with speed, get in close and hit them with the handheld launchers, and then use the pre-fire as cover when you make distance to get safe again. The way the missiles floated back showed they were planning several steps ahead. Not all at once, but landing in waves. Probably had real-time control of them.

The Inertia's reactor went offline, and it vanished from the HUD.

Wow. She was dead then. In the first strike.

And the False Scandal did have real-time control. The volley meant to pin the Inertia down redirected towards the Scandal.

Hunter was breathing heavily into her microphone, panting hot and heavy. Had she ever felt this way about a fight? She'd watched plenty of bloodbaths, recording data to sell. But this felt magical. She wasn't sure when she had started off in a sprint towards the WFH, ahead of the pretender, but she knew where it was going, what it would do when it got there.

She wanted to sink her teeth into it.

C'mere little birdy.

The Again in Hell didn't feel like it was made for her. It felt like it was her. The neural linking was tight because she couldn't afford to chase or be chased by the system's motors. She had to keep up with the speed of the suit with her physical body. It hit her as she closed in that her body was being piloted by the armor.

A mental probe spidered out in a way that scared her. The sets of routines that it was guiding her body through. She could turn each one on and off. She would have to tune this as she went if it was going to get in the way of what she wanted. Hunter needed to be the one in control of her body when she was airborne.

A crash. Blue thunderbolt. The False Scandal landed where Illustrious had fired the first shot. A rookie pilot in her position would have fired at it in a panic, but Illustrious was a professional. She'd already minimized system use and reduced her sensor profile. She probably tucked her machine tight between some objects out of the way. She would wait it out. There were other targets after all.

A blip on her HUD. Didn't matter.

The false Scandal was in reach. In front of her was visions of actions she could take. Ghost's voices. Now that she was aware of them it was more disorienting when they were just leading her. What's more, the ghosts were stupid. They wanted to latch on to the false Scandal as if she wouldn't black out the moment it decided to relocate.

The radio crackled, and a ragged voice growled into her ear. *Hunter. Buy me two minutes.

Two minutes was an era. But, it was the undead field commander's orders.

The waves of missiles landed, one after another. Each one directed at a possible hiding space. They deeply underestimated the WFH's speed though. Hunter approached through a space struck by the missile, as soon as she could after it blew through the building's ceilings.

A wire crawl. She used her four hooks to grab debris and pull herself towards the false Scandal. She didn't want to rev up her thrusters until the last second. Spike charge in hand. One or two of these, some radar mirages with the help of Illustrious, and they could waste this thing's time and ammunition.

Before Hunter could communicate the plan the false Scandal pointed one of its launchers directly at her and fired. These missiles seemed to be short-range. Did she get clocked? Would it airburst if she dodged it?

Hunter let the ghosts take over. If there was gravity she would have tried to dodge it herself, but zero-g was still a bit beyond her. A slight flex and adjustment by the thrusters. She could feel the missile through the Again in Hell as she passed by it.

Oh, that was dirty.

The heat spreading throughout her body wasn't from the lick of thruster burn, and if there needed to be any proof of her excitement it was the moan she let slip into the hot microphone. How long could she keep it up? Fighting giants like this. There was nothing like this high.

Focus. Focus or you die.

Hunter spun and lobbed the spike charge in her hand. It was somewhere on the thing's leg. She could see the charge was firmly planted because it spun to kick her in the chest. She was invisible, right? Must be tracking the exposed reactor signal, and the visually identifying the gaps in the camo. She fired a hook on reflex as she felt her chest crack.

"Light it up!" she screamed into the microphone.

Hound didn't respond with words, instead firing with its rifle and vulcans from some respectable cover back near the Inertia. Illustrious used the WFH's mid-range rifles, which gave away her position. She knew what to do though, even though Hunter never got the chance to say it. Several bursts, and then back to hiding.

Something was wrong with the world. The sound of gunfire stopped from everywhere. Like a paused movie, she could see the muzzle flash from the rifles as she was pulled through the sky by the false Scandal like a ragdoll. Oh, it wasn't teleportation. This was something different. It only lasted a few seconds before everything started again.

Hound. Hunter teleported?

Illustrious. She'd be dead.

The false scandal pulled the same maneuver as they spoke. Missiles out, charge in. She blacked out until her body crunched against the ground, still tethered by the arm to the thing. Hunter twisted her arm behind her and grabbed the entire mount for her grenades and hurled the whole thing, with more strength than she'd ever had before, up across its chest.

The false Scandal turned and kicked her across the roof and leveled one of its launchers at her. Execution style.

The one-two shot from the retort loop and the heavy rail both went wide. There was blood in Krystyn's eyes from where her head slammed into one of the overhead consoles. She needed a second. Concussion probably. Her arm felt fucked too. Even through the blood she could see the screens were all busted up.

Yeah, that piece of shit got her good, huh.

A shaky hand hit the emergency shutoff while the Inertia doubled over, clutching at its broken ribs like they were her own. The cockpit wasn't compromised, but those shots to the chest weren't supposed to breach the cockpit, just kill her from the shock. Unfortunately for everyone, the reason Krystyn even made it this far was because she could take the hits.

Auxiliary power kept the radio on. She reached to the switch from memory. "Hunter. Buy me two minutes."

Behind the seat was a little drawer she had to punch to get open. The first thing she needed to do was combat stims. She grabbed one autoinjector in her good hand and put it up to her neck and pulled the trigger, and she did a second for good measure. The cool liquid flowing through her body felt refreshing, and helped steady her almost as much as the stimulants did as they hit her heart and started spreading.

Bandages next. It was a cut to her forehead. The skin was tight above the eyes, and it wouldn't stop bleeding without intervention. She slathered some paste over it before putting a bandage over it. She couldn't do a proper eye wash in her cockpit, but she didn't need her actual eyes right now.

Beyond her cockpit, even with everything off, she could feel the fight. Not to mention that awful little freak cackling and moaning into her microphone. Krystyn couldn't keep the grin off her face. What else could one expect from someone who BASE jumped off mechs in the middle of combat for kicks? Fucking pervert. A true sicko. She was a genuine delight.

She revved up the Inertia again. The pilot's collar was pinching tight, and since she had to move it for the combat stims, it felt weird. She needed to push it though. While the Inertia was compiling a long list of things that were deeply broken with it she adjusted it as best she could before turning it on.

Her senses expanded rapidly. Broken chassis, major structural damage, and both her and the Inertia's arms were smashed to pieces. Air conditioning still worked. What a relief.

Adversity was the mother of invention or some shit, right?

The liquid the Intertia operated off of was called ferrofluid. Nanomachines suspended in a ferrite slush, using electricity and magnetism to shape the shields and the spear. But if she really focused she could do so much more, right? If she got her head right down into that fluid. She was already controlling the nanomachines, just through abstraction.

Strip for me, girl. Let's see what we can get going without all these layers in the way.

The entire universe opened to her when she realized that if she really thought about it, she was sitting in a puddle of ecophage. Gray goo. It worked on metal, but the Inertia was made of metal. Do you understand how many things were made of metal?

The Problem With Inertia stood, sloughing off puddles of ferrofluid that hadn't yet reactivated and reconnected to the central processor, like a skeleton climbing out of a pool of unrefined oil. Thick and black and heavy. Her arm snapped into place, like setting a broken bone, and began to weld all the breaks, couple all the little tubes, and repair all the cables. It wasn't as good as new, but as the ribcage heaved and crunched and snapped into place, welding and reinforcing itself with her living blood, it sure as hell felt like it.

She reached for the radio and flipped the little metal switch over to the public local frequency. Everyone was going to hear her.

"You should have finished the job the first time around," Krystyn was trying to hold back her own awful, stimulant-induced hysterical laughter. "I'm fucking immortal now, baby."

The sounds of explosions in the distance stopped. The thing hovered in the sky over near where Manya was stationed. The Inertia had no hope of catching it. But the clarity of her bloodlust granted her solace. This duel was to the death, wasn't it? That means she didn't have to go hunting. Her prey had to come to her, unless Plilar wanted to go to war with the Corpse Eater.

A thousand tendrils of black blood flowed from the cracks in the Inertia's frame, seeking out every piece of scrap. Streetlamps, abandoned vehicles, and drilling into concrete for rebar. The longer she was left alone the bigger an uphill battle this would be for them.

The blue Scandal flickered towards her. With each little flicker and jump it released a hoard of rockets. As if anything could simply overpower her now. Teleportation didn't let you fire rockets from between your starting and end point. Probably had a singularity engine. Little window in it's heart that could slow time to a crawl for everyone but them. Neat trick, but not helpful.

Time to crack her head in two and do four things at once.

She engulfed the Inertia in a black ferrofluid orb and circulated current through it. She could feel each missile moving through the magnetic fields, like radar. Reinforce and shape the barrier right where each one was about to hit, and start eating them on contact. The staggered waves overwhelmed pilots, but only made her strategy more effective against it. She could background the process once she'd established it.

Reaching past the small disturbances in the field, she groped for the larger one. Measuring the distance between each jump. It wasn't using blinkspace and that meant it still obeyed the laws of physics, even with the singularity engine. It kept its momentum through the travel, so its heading and distance would be relatively predictable.

The retort loop was charged. She had a basic idea, but if she missed then the little clone girl inside that blue piece of scrap would recognize she's been made. Cadence. One, two, three. One, two, three.

She fired a segment of the barrier on the next three-count.

Somewhere above her she clipped it, just barely, but it was enough. She formed a spear and sprinted towards it with everything the Inertia would give her. The ferrofluid shield dragged behind her, trying to keep up with the machine's long stride. A long wind-up for a deep swing with the spear.

The blue Scandal's pilot was good. And confident in their skill. They corrected the spiral quickly and boosted to get out of reach of the spear, aiming both its stupid little launchers directly at her.

Gotchya.

The spear split into tethers as she swung out at it, reaching further and wrapping around the thing's limbs. With all the Inertia's strength behind it, she swung the entire Scandal into the street and pushed her ferrofluid mass onto it.

"Beg," Krystyn panted under her breath. "God, please let me hear that voice."

The ferrofluid moved like fingers and hands, holding it to the ground. Grinding its legs and wrists slowly as the Inertia approached it slowly. It looked like some kind of knight? That was real cute. She pushed her black, oozing fingers up its little battle skirt and started grinding at the hip joints.

The pilot was panicking. It jettisoned entire plates of armor, and an arm and leg, to get back in the air away from the grasping, hungry ferrofluid. It was unarmed now, though. It couldn't exactly win a fight in that condition. Not that Hunter's little grenades were going to give it a chance. It made it such a short distance into the air before all the little grenades on its chest detonated together, slamming it back into the concrete. Back into her reach.

The Inertia reached out with its skeletal hands, holding it aloft by the head with one hand and slowly pushing a finger into the shoulder joint with the other. Seeping black blood into its internals under the plate and eating it from the inside out. With her neural linking, she must feel all of it, right?

"Oh," Krystyn laughed to herself, speaking at her monitor alone, "oh, mommy took away your radio, didn't she. Is that why you aren't crying?"

Plilar's voice over the public radio. We forfeit. Release my pilot.

Control. The terms were to the death. Illustrious, cleared to fire.

Friendly in firing line. Control, advise.

Cleared to fire.

Roger.

Fine. Fine. Have it your way. The Inertia tossed the wreckage back and pinned it in place with its blood. A moment later it was first skewered by the rail's interference causing havoc with the ferrofluid control, creating a kind of grotesque iron maiden, and was promptly cored like an apple.

Krystyn reached up to her overhead console, to the radio, to speak over the public channel. She had to try to blink the blood out of her eyes, but it looked like the little red light was already on. Oh, so her microphone was just live then. The whole time.

Hunter wheezed something into the radio. Wordless. Friendly tracking systems said she wasn't very far. But gods below, her vitals were abysmal, she hadn't checked since she revved the Inertia back up. They both probably needed medical attention. Vigil might too. Manya almost certainly got out without a scratch on her. At least she didn't abandon them this time.