Hekate's Call, Chapter 41
The cockpit of the Work From Home was much nicer than The Problem With Inertia, between the nicer seat, more space, and the fact that it was better temperature controlled. Though Manya insisted that last part changed rapidly once the rail was discharged once or twice.
Manya nuzzled the back of her head and gave her a little kiss behind the ear. “It’s about time we split up.”
“Gonna slow down while I suit up?” Ilina grinned as she adjusted the quick and dirty climbing harness she’d tied with some spare rope overtop her hardsuit. It didn’t have to be comfortable, it just needed to keep her steady for a few minutes.
“Aw, is our little hunter scared she’s going to fall off?” Manya teased while she copped one last feel through the fabric of her hardsuit, pinching at the inside of her thighs and running a hand down her side.
The cockpit hissed open and Hunter climbed over Manya and hooked one of the two leads to an anchor on the hull. The cockpit closed behind her as she fastened the Hell’s helmet to her hardsuit collar. It always sounded a bit too much like a power drill being pressed against the back of her neck.
Gods, whatever planet they’d been doing missions on for the last few weeks was a nightmare of colors and scents that constantly threatened to give Hunter a migraine. She had to do some color dampening on her helmet to make everything less… green. But it wasn’t just the greens that were bright, it was the colors of all the flowers and the sky was so bright and blue. Everything was just bright. And it was all so strong with a particular scent that Manya identified as pollen. Morian was concerned that Hunter would be allergic to it and had given her various shots and medicines to take while planet side just in case, though they made her head feel a little fuzzy.
It was a short climb, juggling her two leads on her harness from anchor to anchor, to the back where the rest of the Hell was strapped down on the top of the WFH.
Titan-tall trees whipped past as the WFH sprinted through the forest in a winding path. Light broke up in the canopy, casting light down to the forest floor like bullet holes in cover. Even as it passed in a blur, the whole experience was making Hunter feel something. Could one be homesick for somewhere that never existed? If there used to be forests back on fucking-nowhere, then the last one must have fallen long before Ilina was born.
Manya. Suit up, pet. We’ll meet once the operation finishes.
Right. Hunter slid up to the Hell and opened her up and discarded the climbing harness with a few quick motions. One hundred ghosts, ninety of them women, and not a single one liked the way Hunter moved, so, the Again in Hell was a she. The Hell was anchored and once the first part closed around her she was secured again. The bolts of the Again in Hell bored into her skin like they always did, and the synthetic muscles overlapped her own, flexing as the suit synced to her brain. A few seconds of pain and tightness later, the Hell felt like skin to her.
Sync call.
Little messages scrolled in her vision. Visual clutter and noise, since the suit told her brain by instinct that the sync request had been initiated. She accepted it with a thought, and the timetable for the mission filled out in her vision along with a synced clock to move to. “Sync response. Confirmed.”
Off you go. Happy hunting.
The WFH swerved suddenly like it was trying to buck her off, and it just about worked. The suit responded before Hunter could parse what happened and launched off towards the mission point. The two machines shimmered and vanished as their active camo activated in sync.
Hunter had to conserve wire since she wouldn’t be able to restock until she met up with the Inertia later, so she progressed through the forest with long leaps in the canopy and long swings between the giant trees. It might have been a wonderful place to have a skirmish or three, with so many trees taller than the average Doru, but something more sentimental in her thought that it would be such a shame to lose trees this big for any reason. Or maybe it was the child in her that loved to climb.
Her only designated combat zones were three radio outposts to be pacified in time with suborbital defense positions. Open the path for both the client’s forces and for suborbital insertion of the Inertia and Scandal directly into two different forward operating bases. Both Illustrious and Hunter would arrive to support Hound at the first base, and then they would move to the second base to clean up after Chaser. Realistically, both of the bases would be fully neutralized before either of them arrived to back up the dogs.
The schedule was demanding with very little room for error. She couldn’t risk falling behind Illustrious. Velia’s operations the past several months had all been like that. Her clear goal was to prove the value of the pilots, so splitting them up and giving them heavy tasks did wonders for their reputation — or so Hunter was told, she didn’t really care. She didn’t even work here. Just a contractor.
That was why they gave her the dirty work again.
Outpost one. Ten minutes till operation start. Hunter posted up below the cliff and took a moment to recon. The equipment poked out the top of an old cathedral. The kind with the pretty glass and big spires. The town the cathedral was attached to was mostly blown to shit, which was why this outpost was just an early detection base against the client’s forces. There wasn’t anything to defend here, not even the pretty glass which had been mostly knocked free and shattered.
Three.
Two.
One.
Hunter was on top of the two guards out front before they could hear the winch. Hell’s axe bifurcated them both with one wide swing — she had to disable the mass-normalization something-or-other in order to not turn them into mist — somewhere between the heart and the shoulders. Instant death, no time to signal or shout.
The next instant she was through the doors. Twenty-two targets. Prioritized by threat to the mission objectives and then threat to her. In the moment where everyone was still processing the doors flying through the center of the cathedral, two hooks fired from her hips and planted themselves in the neck of two people at computers, and then detonated immediately. If they didn’t die instantly, then they would bleed out from the gaping neck wounds.
She landed halfway into the room and swung through another target with Hell’s axe before shifting it to a more defensive and less cumbersome configuration. The haft returned to its normal size, and the extra blade length clicked around in a circle at the top of the haft. Like a very sharp shield on a stick.
The rest of the events were a blur. There was something primal about a close-quarters fight in the Again in Hell. It felt like pre-instinct. The suit could identify targets and prioritize faster than she could ever hope to, and track all of the targets in real time. Hunter let herself be a passenger as her body danced around the room on strings to the armor’s ancestral choir.
Somewhere among the all voices she could hear Irene’s voice. Practice is always harder than execution. It must be. If you are caught thinking in the middle of a fight, you will die.
That was why she survived dancing between giants in her hacked together suit in skeleton city so many times when she shouldn’t have. She drilled in every outcome for every situation she could think of so that she didn’t have to think. How to fall. How to deal with a broken anchor. How to prevent a greyout. Do it blind. Do it one-handed. Do it on an empty stomach. Do it sleep deprived. Do it all again and again until you can do it dead.
Stop thinking. Let the body act. It knows what to do. You will only get in the way.
The Again in Hell deflected bullets fired from some targets to destroy or damage comms systems. It used some people as hostages and shields, commandeering their guns to take out others. It pulled itself this way and that on wires around the building, chasing down anyone who seemed like they were heading for an exit. Slight twists when shot at to ensure the bullets hit an armor plate and not the fabric hardsuit. In a few graceful motions, before the last two targets even hit the ground, the Again in Hell maneuvered to disable the communications arrays on the outside of the building.
Outpost one, pacified in 21 seconds from first contact.
Hunter activated the wash — an anti-coagulant mixed with something that reacted with the Hell’s hydrophobic coating to drop as much of the blood from the suit as possible. Near instant, quiet, resource-light. She couldn’t wrap her head around why the Again in Hell hadn’t come with a system like it to prevent the blood from interfering with the active camo.
Outpost two was further away, but she was ahead of schedule. She could conserve wire while swinging to make it to the next outpost along the valley.
- - -
The portable habitation wasn’t fancy, but it was much nicer than the tents and stuff the locals got. Six bunks, air conditioned, and an included washroom and shower. The only thing they ever really needed to leave for was meetings and food, which they were free to bring back to the hab.
Only move around the camp in pairs, Krystyn had urged. She’d probably had been ignored if not for Manya backing her up. They knew how close they were to Central Domon and bit by bit the others were starting to learn what that meant. Luckily nobody had to explain that to the mechanics they brought planet side with them, Taitle’s cadre already operated like that on the Gestalt and it was no different here.
Krystyn sat on the floor beside the curtained bunk where Ilina was snoring, still wearing the forced oxygen mask she needed for hours after taking off the Again in Hell. That thing was fast, a monster on the battlefield, and with every deployment Ilina got faster and more deadly in it, and this was the cost. A body pushed beyond human limits, barely able to supply itself enough oxygen and needing to gorge itself on calories and rehydrate for hours. Maybe they needed to have Ilina doping before deployments, just to get that red blood cell count up. But maybe there was a reason they hadn’t done that yet.
Ilina was the only one of the pilots who hadn’t been fitted with a neural hook, or modified in some way. Vigil was a vat-baby like every other expensive clone soldier on the market, so her endurance and reaction times were already jacked from the start. Manya had so many modifications it was hard to tell where she ended and steel began, and that was just on the outside. Morian insisted on Krystyn’s neural hook for her own safety, but didn’t see a reason why she needed any further modifications — the doctor suggested heat tolerance training, but found that just piloting the Inertia had already given her all the gains she’d get from that.
But Ilina was still a real girl through and through. Kyrnn had her under constant medical observation, frequent medical check-ups, and hours of tests done a week. Maybe Ilina was some vat-baby too. Or maybe she was just a freak of nature. Didn’t seem like Ilina herself was aware either way, if she even cared, which she clearly didn’t. And it wasn’t like the girl was going to turn down the doting attention of the doctor. She’d complain to anyone who would listen, but she’d never say no to Kyrnn.
Near the back of the hab, Vigil was doing pull-ups off a beam that ran along the ceiling while they waited for Manya and Velia to get back. Vigil had complained she was starving when they got back, but couldn’t actually go off to get food since Krystyn had to stay with Ilina, all the mechanics were doing repairs and tuning the machines, and Velia needed Manya to accompany her to the debriefing.
Manya and Velia. Since the room change four months ago, they were just about inseparable. They were made for each other, really. Krystyn’s head always filled with particularly nasty words to describe the ways in which they were perfect for each other, and they all felt vaguely wrong remembering they were both… like that. It wasn’t fair for that to shield them from the kinds of language they deserved.
The hab door buzzed and opened for the pair of devils.
Velia limped in, putting more weight on her cane than she had before they deployed. Now that she was out of sight of the people on the camp, the woman was seething through her teeth, wincing with every labored step towards the bed. Manya took the heavy coat draped over Velia’s shoulders and hung it up before kneeling down to get Velia’s boots off. The black leg brace strapped over her pants came next.
“They’ve been making me walk around all day from meeting to meeting,” Velia almost cackled after a few painful breathes. “Walk-and-talk! And have any of you noticed that chairs keep disappearing around camp?”
It was a rhetorical question nobody tried to answer. Vigil hung from the beam by one arm, before turning and continuing her set. Manya knelt next to the bed and organized some paperwork that Velia had dropped as she was sitting down. Kyrstyn kept her head down and just watched her decompress. They tried to warn her they would pull shit shit. They’d been trying to tell her that it would only get worse the longer Hekate stuck around.
“Oh, right,” Velia snatched a folder from Manya’s hand and tossed it across the room toward Krystyn, letting the contents scatter dramatically. “Ilina doesn’t leave the hab without two people with her.”
“That bad?” Krystyn picked up the pictures and scanned over the debrief. Gods below. “Manya, call Aegis and have her pull Caenes off Ilina’s steel.”
“I called during the meeting.”
“Good girl,” Velia ruffled Manya’s hair gently, eliciting some kind of multi-vocalized purr.
The only way to identify how many bodies were in the puree at each of the outposts Ilina hit would be to pull the data from the Again in Hell. Krystyn supposed she should feel disgusted like she used to looking at these kinds of scenes. Desensitization was a hell of a thing. Most of the bodies were cut to pieces with the axe, but many had debilitating or fatal wounds from explosives, and several were hung from the neck by steel cable. Ghastly scenes. Massacres.
And Ilina wouldn’t flinch seeing the pictures. Just like she didn’t during that counter-boarding operation just after she’d signed on. There was a lot about the freak’s head that didn’t make sense to anyone but Kyrnn, and Kyrnn had never been keen to illuminate any of those mysteries for Krystyn in therapy.
The thing that made it so hard for Krystyn to feel anything looking at them was knowing that it was just work to Ilina. Neither proud or ashamed of it. Just a job. Humanize the victims all you want, she would only ever see them as targets or obstacles that fell in the scope of her duties.
The door chime interrupted Velia’s engrossing, wordy complaints about the working conditions she’d been subjected to while everyone else was in their cushy machines doing their actual jobs. There was something admittedly charming about seeing Velia’s walls start to wear down after all this time.
An officer stepped into the hab and saluted a rather disheveled Velia. She didn’t bother doing up the top button of her uniform, she just sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the man to attempt to inconvenience her further.
“The General has some questions about the debrief,” the sharp looking woman announced. “She would like to see you in the command tent about them in five minutes.”
A few questions. The only question they cared about is whether or not she’d make the walk over after being given just enough time to settle down. The questions would be inane, or it would be a miscommunication that caused the soldier to fetch her and they had nothing to speak to her about at all. It was how the military punished people for injuries. Given some level of reforms and dubiously effective legal protections, the primary mode of getting rid of misshapen cogs in the machine was to wear them till they broke for good.
“If the woman has any questions she is free to drop by and ask them herself,” Velia waved the soldier away in the most dismissive manner she could. “Otherwise I will see her in the command tent at 0800 tomorrow morning to close out our contract.”
The soldier left quietly, most certainly not to deliver such a response, and Velia fell onto her back on the bed.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Velia groaned as she pulled her bad leg up onto the bed and shuffled into a slightly more comfortable position.
“Who?” Krystyn asked by accident. She didn’t need to ask. Of course it was—
“Liz.” Velia rolled onto her side and stared across the room at Krystyn. Manya was still putting things away and organizing the paperwork for Velia. “She used to deal with all of those people, do all of your reports, manage the expenses,” and so much more, naturally. Velia had only taken on such a small portion of what Crater had managed by herself for six years.
“How are you two getting on?” Krystyn smiled. You didn’t call the woman Liz unless you’d gotten to know her, and that was when she was the most dangerous.
“Can I tell you all something embarrassing?” Velia sat up and looked at everyone in the room in turn.
Everyone nodded. Of course she could share something embarrassing with her trusted friends. After so many team bonding exercises there was a level of comfort and familiarity between everyone for the first time since Hekate’s Call was founded. Ilina’s awful movies, many of which made the little thing burst into spontaneous, unexplained tears. Manya’s gossip corner, where she shared drama Orchid picked up on from the Gestalt’s systems. Symeon’s little war games with all their miniatures. Krystyn and Velia didn’t bring any ideas to any of those little meetings, but they were fun. Krystyn really hadn’t lost anything by losing that duel to the dog, if anything things were better for it.
And that was why nobody was going to go and snitch to anyone about Velia’s probable crush. It had to be a crush, right?
“I was the last one to leave at the end of a meeting,” Velia began with a bit of theatric flair she’d been picking up from Manya. She brushed over the little dregs of a conversation that the two had, the I still have paperwork and the I can’t let you stay all by yourself, nearly baiting Krystyn into thinking they fucked in the office right then and there. “She said that there was a bottle of wine in her quarters if we wanted to continue our chat after she left.”
Something about Velia’s voice was wrong. There was a misplaced longing in it.
“Liz should share the good stuff with you,” Manya teased from the floor, “it’s the least she could do for keeping you late so often.”
The realizations washed over Krystyn in waves as Velia told her little story. It wasn’t wine for Krystyn though, it was whiskey in Crater’s office. What a remarkable pilot Sgt. Fellows was! The rest of those hyenas were chaff, because the only pilot with any promise in the unit was little Charlotte. Some infantry ground troop who survived several years of front line deployments and a suicide deployment in a Standard, even got a kill or two confirmed on that first sortie. A budding ace that just needed some time, and Liz would make sure she had as much time as she needed to bloom.
“It felt like I was fifteen again,” Velia let out a soft little giggle. “Being given my first glass of wine and being told how different I was to the rest. The most special girl in the whole world.”
That’s not how you’re supposed to look back on something like that, girl. It wasn’t horrifying the same way Falke’s remembrances were, it was just sad. The same way Krystyn’s were just sad.
“I keep sitting on the edge of Liz’s bed while she listens to me talk, and she keeps looking at me like that, you know?” A hum, a sigh, some gesture of it-is-what-it-is. “It doesn’t feel quite like she’s leering. But every time I go back I ask myself, is this the night you’re gonna do it, Liz? Is this the night you’re gonna touch me? How low do I need to drop my guard for you to act?”
Krystyn didn’t shatter the illusion for her. Elisabet was never going to lay hands on Velia. She would follow the book to the letter, all the ways to single you out from the group and make you feel like you matter, and to get you vying for her attention, to make you dance just for her. It was how every officer who was going places pulled together their lifers, the people who would be their subordinates for the rest of their careers.
All of Elisabet Crater’s lifers rushed to her side the moment she called. Just like well trained dogs.
And you don’t fuck dogs.
The back rooms gave so many girls like Krystyn an excuse, everyone did it, but officers didn’t have that same freedom. Liz would never touch a woman under her command, even if she swung that way. There was simply too much risk to her career. The most successful officers were the girls like Crater who could probably get off on those psychosexual mind games, or the ones cold enough to put bodies in the morgue before anyone could talk.
Even years after Elisabet Crater explained the process step by agonizing step, Krystyn would still take a bullet for the woman without thinking. The officer’s little folders weren’t the leash that kept Krystyn from running away, they were just the reminder. Nobody else would have her, and even if they would she would never feel like she deserved it. She’d come running back to Crater’s side the next time the woman whistled.
What if she did say something? What if she told Velia what Crater was doing? Would it change anything? If you don’t open your fucking mouth Charlotte, you are beyond complicit in Liz’s ploy. But Velia should recognize those tactics. She did the same things to Ilina, right? Maybe she just deserves it. We can all die ground under the same heel together.
The present came back into focus with a sharp kick to her side. Manya stood over her, making some sneering face.
“Take her for a walk, she obviously needs some air.” Velia had finished her little story at some point. When? Everyone was staring at her.
Manya pulled Krystyn to her feet and dragged her out the door. The last thing she heard was Vigil shouting at them to bring back some food.
- - -
Krystyn hadn’t really read the briefings. She wasn’t sure what planet this was or the nature of the conflict about it. Almost a month on the rock and she hadn’t bothered to put any thought into who they were working for and what it meant for the planets citizens. But she could at the very least read the room and something had changed. The celebratory cheers of taking two forward bases had given way to something darker among the locals.
She stayed close to Manya. The devil was wearing a new jumpsuit that didn’t show off any of her skin, done up all the way despite the heat, and was wearing a cap to hide the ports on her head where her horns extended from. It was almost a shame she had to hide it all.
Manya ducked between a couple of the large habs and walked to the back between some of the heat pumps and generators that powered the lines of comfortable habs. Must be a rich military force if all the soldiers got them, or maybe these were just for pilots and officers.
“Still getting panic attacks?” Manya shuffled in close once Krystyn had made it over a weird pipe into the little space the devil picked out for their chat. “We rarely get time alone like this anymore. I worry about you. Is everything going okay with Ilina?”
Krystyn shrugged. What was she supposed to say? She’d be dealing with flashbacks for the rest of her life according to the doctor. And Ilina was a petulant, demanding brat who was impossible to reign in because there was nothing more in the world she wanted than to get her ribs kicked in. But the girl was charming and otherwise mostly good to Krystyn.
“She’s still throwing tantrums over not getting me naked,” Krystyn offered.
Manya’s smile had so much charm in it too. She felt bad for never noticing it before. Maybe she hadn’t smiled like this before. “You know she’s only doing it because she doesn’t like being told no.”
“Neither did you,” Krystyn jabbed at the devil with a pair of fingers.
She hopped up on one of the heat pumps, away from the fan, and kicked her legs some. “No, but that was different,” her voice suddenly too full of sympathy. “I heard stories about what happens in the military. I figured something happened, didn’t want to push you like that, you know?”
Someone laughed. A chorus of laughter in the distance that Manya didn’t react to. Maybe nobody was laughing. Krystyn took a few deep breaths. “A lot happened. But we’ve been pretty serious, I guess? I can trust her, at least.”
“I haven’t checked the history on any of the fabricators,” Manya’s voice pitched into teasing, “She still got that lil’ strap?”
Oh, shut up. Krystyn could feel her cheeks burning at the question for some reason. Why was she embarrassed about that? “She puts it to good use, at least.”
“Better than me?”
“How are things with you and Velia?”
“Dodging the question!” Manya giggled before staring up at the sky and sighing happily. Every time Krystyn looked at the devil she felt worse about never really seeing her before. “I always thought I was the only one like me. Everyone else had someone to lean on. Someone to turn to. Someone who had their back. And then one day I found Orchid. And then one day I had you. And the years went on and I forgot what it was like to be alone like that.”
Another Manya sob story? At least she wasn’t needling or trying to find a crack in Krystyn’s armor for once. The devil might be professing a real emotion. Being actually vulnerable for once! Krystyn couldn’t help herself from thinking like that, but the truth was that she felt jealous looking at those two.
“Feels like she’s on the edge of it. She’s so close to letting herself be truly vulnerable for the first time and I don’t want to push her or she’ll close back up.” Manya kicked at Krystyn half-playfully. “She’s gonna break my heart, I just know it.”
“How does Orchid feel about her?” Krystyn asked carefully. It was the real question. Manya and Orchid were inseparable, and Manya didn’t commit to anything without running it by her partner.
“Orchid’s already registered the woman as an Administrator,” all the play dropped out of Manya’s voice. “Almost called her Goddess over the comm with my voice on the last deployment.”
“I think your co-pilot is a chaser.”
“Getting the same vibe.”
It felt good to laugh and banter like they did before all of this. Before Ilina and Velia and Kyrnn showed up. Back when they just kept their heads down together and did their work. Things were simpler, or at least she got to pretend it was simpler. But things were better now, and maybe they could keep moments like these. As long as they could find time to shake their respective keepers.
“So, have you had the talk with Falke yet?”
“What talk?”
Manya stood back up and stared down her nose at Krystyn, suddenly different. Oh. This was something serious. “We are one gate away from being in Central Domon. Have you explained to her that she needs to stop acting like a faggot in public, Charlotte?”
Krystyn had been shot before. Bullets were cheap, and medical care was too. It was a more pleasant feeling than hearing those words come out of that thing. Even if it was right, Ilina wasn’t about to be any less Ilina about toning it down, and she didn’t have a great track record of actually listening to Krystyn about important things.
“Don’t give me that look,” Manya had a hand around Krystyn’s throat in an instant, claws digging into her skin. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, and don’t you dare pretend you don’t.”
“I’m trying to find a moment,” Krystyn tried to push Manya away, but it wasn’t happening. All that augmented strength appearing in full for perhaps the first time. “Besides, you know how she gets if you tell her to stop something."
That was the wrong thing to say, apparently. “If you care about her, you’ll find a way to force her to listen. Sooner rather than later.”
There was a crowd gathered near the food fabricators. Always was. But no line-up. All the pleasant little boys and girls of the local military opened a path and stared daggers at Krystyn and Manya. Every one of them was waiting for someone else to be the first to act. There was that misconception that the first to act was some kind of sacrifice, the one who would be punished to set an example. Krystyn knew from experience that wasn’t how it actually went.
Someone ripped something from someone else’s hand and stepped out in front of the two as they tried to leave with a basket of footstuffs for their starving team. A picture held out. The most dramatic pictures of Falke’s work on the last operation.
“Did you do this?” The woman barked.
Krystyn smiled sympathetically. She’d been there. It was grotesque, wasn’t it? That a human being could do all of that to another human being? War was so much nicer in the comfort of your steel where you never had to consider the ants crushed underfoot or what damage you left behind.
“I did not.”
She took the photo, and flipped through all the little pictures the woman had brought with her. Not all of them had made it to the briefing or to Velia. First reports of the damage from the local military’s clean-up operations. Everyone always focused on Ilina’s actions because there was so much red.
Manya’s sites were all clean, single shots with the rail destroying the suborbital defenses and killing all the personnel with the shockwave. They all died of internal damage, coughing up some blood here and there, maybe they were killed by debris, but if you autopsied any of them they would be soup inside. At least it was instant.
Vigil’s base was surgically dismantled. The least offensive to the average person’s sensibilities. Probably took out the comm towers before the suborbital sled hit the ground. Then immediately moved to disable any frames first, followed by air support, and then ground support. Any infantry casualties were entirely tertiary to disabling the base’s ability to request help, report damages, or defend itself. Looking at Vigil’s work always made Krystyn smile. The dog was really incredible.
Finally she found the photos of the second forward operating base — the one that The Problem With Inertia landed on — and turned them back around.
“This one was me,” Krystyn smiled wide as the woman’s face went pale.
It was like the scene of some of those alien horror movies that Ilina had shown them all in the way the carnage completely defied explanation. The pictures really didn’t do Krystyn’s work justice at all. Nothing but rubble and eight giant black obelisks ringing the base, all connected to a larger central one. It had taken a lot of practice to capture all the stray particulate and friction-weld it together. The obelisks weren’t art per say, but there was a part of her that wanted to start leaving behind something more interesting than giant metal slabs made up of everything that dared touch her battlefield.
Not that anyone appreciated that effort aside from Ilina, of course. Girl looked so proud of Krystyn’s progress it made her fucking blush. And a bit wetter than she’d like to admit.
“And what the fuck happened there?” The woman’s voice trembled. Poor thing.
“Above your pay grade,” Krystyn handed the pictures over and pushed past her with Manya in tow.
There was some murmur of disgust through the crowd. The problem with forces in Outer Domon was that they were all low-grade cannon fodder. They had frames, they had equipment, and they had some training, but they lacked the discipline and experience of real soldiers. Most of them had probably never seen a frame that didn’t come off an imperial state factory line, no matter what side of whatever conflict they were on. Specialist frames were uncommon, and probably never piloted by someone who could use it to its potential.
All of that to say each and every one of them was scared shitless of Hekate’s Call. Years of shifting battle lines across this beautiful planet and four pilots nobody has ever heard of drop in and make over a decade of progress in under a month. Of course they could have taken it slower, but Velia wanted to juice the numbers as much as possible before they crossed the next gate. Results were results.
And Krystyn remembered so well being on that side of things. At least in Central Domon you’d fight rebellion after rebellion, crashing like a tidal wave across battlefields filled with little rebel pilots who were worth a dozen or more imperial pilots each, flying their hacked together deathtraps. Humans were a resource, and the Imperium’s logistics were unmatched. There was no problem with throwing bodies and steel at a problem because the problem always buckled before the ledgers did.
“Move,” Krystyn snapped at the last dregs that stood between them and the path back to the hab, scattering them almost instantly.
Only a few more days on this pit and then they’d be back in space on their way to the gate. Home was so close she could taste it and it made her want to wretch until the only thing coming up was blood. Well, so long as she stuck close to Crater, there shouldn’t be any problems. She can trust Crater that much, at least.