1. The Dance

CWs

The cockpit of my personal YF-155-B Revolter-class Armature was cramped and hot. It was a steel coffin, lit only by scattered indicator lights and the cold green glow of the tactical terminal. The outside camera views were black voids, a deliberate sensory deprivation meant to force my focus to the rhythm of system checks while I waited for the brewing storm beyond the carrier’s hull. I had already done them. Twice. All green. All nominal.

So I waited. For minutes that stretched into an eternity, I sat fused to the pilot seat, an inglorious throne only made semi-comfortable as a grudging concession to the limits of human endurance. Connectors, cold and metallic, jutted from the seatback, socketing directly into the ports surgically implanted along my spinal column. With that connection came the constant, intrusive buzz, less a sound in my ears and more a feeling of static in my very brain, a reminder that my nervous system was unpleasantly and irrevocably bridged with the fifteen-meter tall humanoid weapon, in the chest cavity of which I sat. A necessary violation, the engineers said, to achieve the synaptic reaction speeds that kept the mech—and by extension, me—operational. Alive.

I closed my eyes, leaning my helmeted head against the padded rest behind it. Despite the atmospheric seals and thick armor plating, I could hear the bulk of the tactical carrier Toktogul groan around the Armature, straining against the void of space. I could just barely make out the muffled shouts of the hangar crew, the percussive thump-clang of munitions lifts, the whine of torque wrenches making final adjustments. The wait before a launch was always the worst part. It was a pocket of loaded silence where there was far too much time to think—to remember faces you shouldn't, to picture the myriad, inventive ways your foes, be they other mechs or the indifferent guns of a starship, could unmake you. A stray shot, a reactor breach, the simple, elegant lethality of a single, well-placed railgun slug.

It ended with a familiar CLANG that resonated through the Armature’s frame, a shockwave that vibrated up my spine and rattled my teeth. My eyes snapped open. The cool green of the terminal had bled away, replaced by a pulsing, urgent amber. LNCH RDY, it declared in stark white capital letters. Whole words were unnecessary. I intimately knew what it meant. The static in my head sharpened, its low buzz tightening into a high-frequency whine as the machine was disconnected from the carrier's grid and its own reactor surged to life.

The external views flickered to life, momentarily blinding me. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the hangar crew scattering like startled, colorful birds in their high-visibility vests, their jobs done. My world shifted. I—the Revolter, to be exact, although for me, in this moment, there was little distinction—had begun to rise, lifted by a massive hydraulic platform, to be chambered like a live round into the cannon that was the catapult deck. A familiar, welcome surge of adrenaline flooded my veins, chasing away the cold dread of the wait.

"Epsilon 1, launch imminent," a voice—the launch control officer's—crackled in my earpiece, flat and indifferent. Like every time. "Catapult is hot. Rail charged. On your mark. Godspeed."

The hangar lights vanished as the immense catapult chamber doors slammed shut, plunging me back into darkness. A scant heartbeat later, a sequence of red guidance strips illuminated the launch tube, a glowing vector directing my gaze from my feet to the circular opening into pitch darkness a hundred meters ahead. The world fell silent again, but this was a different kind of quiet. This was the breath held before the trigger pull.

The wait was over. Now there was only the fall.

My thumb keyed the comms. My voice, steady and clear, filled the steel coffin. "Shiloh Gett, Epsilon 1, launching!"

The declaration hung in the air for a fraction of a second. Then came the kick. It wasn't a push; it was a detonation. A thousand tons of electromagnetic force seized the Revolter and hurled it forward. The acceleration was a physical blow, a brutal, crushing weight that slammed me deep into the already intrusive embrace of the pilot's seat. My vision tunneled, the edges blurring into a grey smear as the G-forces tried to pull the blood from my brain.

The launch tube blurred past in a red streak—gone in less than a second. Then, nothing. One moment, I was a bullet in a barrel. The next, I was adrift in the silent expanse of the void. The transition was always jarring, the cataclysmic roar of the launch replaced by utter, profound silence, only broken by the background hum of the reactor and my own breathing.

For a disorienting second, I was adrift, a mote of dust in an infinite black sea sprinkled with diamond-sharp stars. The Toktogul was already shrinking behind me, its running lights a fading constellation, just one of many in the battlegroup arrayed behind me. My tactical display blossomed to life, overlaying the void with a grid of cool blue lines and geometric markers. Two other friendly markers, E2 and E3, blinked into existence on my left flank as my flight cleared the carrier. Their Armatures were subtly different. Less aggressive. Different model. Their internal camera feeds appeared in the top right corner of my vision, a ghostly reminder of the other two souls encased in their own steel tombs.

"Epsilon 2, clear. All green," LT-JG Elah’s voice reported, calm as a placid lake.

"Epsilon 3, clear! Right on your six, Miss Major!" Ensign Gilboa added, his voice a half-octave too high with the frantic energy we all felt. The kid.

Easy, Gilboa. Breathe, I thought. Just keep them alive.

Far ahead, almost too far to resolve, a single, silent star flared with impossible brightness—the telltale sign of a capital ship's reactor detonation. The storm had broken. My HUD instantly painted a flashing red cross over the green rhombus that had marked the location—SIG LOS: CL CARCOSA. A friendly cruiser, hundreds of lives, gone in a literal flash. My hands and feet, moving on instinct, pressed on the controls, and the Armature answered, its vernier thrusters firing in short, sharp bursts as it angled toward the fight. I reached up with the machine's right arm, my own fingers dancing across the controls on the right yoke. Outside, a weapons binder unlatched, smoothly inserting the heavy grip of a 100-millimeter rotary cannon into the mech's waiting hand, locking into the armored palm with a k-chunk that I felt, rather than heard.

"Epsilon, on me," I commanded, my voice the calm center of the brewing chaos. "Form combat spread and burn for waypoint one. Let's go to work."

Our three mechs, a trinity of black-painted steel-composite, accelerated as one. The main thrusters ignited, spewing blue-white plasma into the void and pressing me back into the seat with a steady, reassuring pressure that was a gentle caress compared to the violence of the launch. The void ahead was no longer empty. My heads-up display, a symphony of light and data, began to populate as the Armature’s combat-logic suite went to work. IFF interrogation pings pulsed outwards, and the system began tagging and prioritizing the returns.

Red icons—triangles for small, fast-moving craft, diamonds for larger signatures—flickered into existence, swarming around the ghost of the Carcosa. The enemy. The Spacers Union. The triangles were their Foxbat-IIs, nimble, wasp-like drone fighters designed for harassment and point-defense suppression. Annoying, but manageable. The diamonds—three of them—were the real wolves, the enemy mechs that had undoubtedly torn the throat out of the cruiser. My system cross-referenced the energy signatures and mass-profiles against the intel database. The result flashed next to the lead diamond: DSG-09 DECURION.

Decurions. Heavy assault Armatures, notoriously durable and armed to the teeth with particle cannons and thermal lances. They were brawlers, designed to get in close and savage capital ships. Seeing them out here, operating so far from their main fleet, meant this wasn't a skirmish. It was a planned ambush. They had known the 14th Expeditionary Fleet, of which we and the Carcosa were part, would be here.

And on top of that, I recognized the lead unit. Its silhouette was subtly different—customized pauldrons and a distinctive triple-lensed sensor array on the head unit. All painted a vibrant red. My tactical display confirmed it, flagging the transponder code with a small, amber tag: ID+ 'LADY OF YS'. Her real name, I knew, was Jeanne Bierce, a defector from our own officer corps. A woman I had once served with. A woman I had once called a friend, and something more. Now, she was a ruthless killer, piloting her Decurion with a scalpel's precision. My blood ran cold. This had just become personal.

"Epsilon 2, Epsilon 3," I broadcast, my voice keeping up a mask of command I barely felt. "Target the drones. Swarm missiles, ripple fire. Take down those Foxbats and clear our screen."

"Copy, Epsilon 1," Elah's voice returned, as steady as a rock.

"Wilco! Let's get 'em!" Gilboa chirped, his youthful eagerness a stark contrast to the cold knot in my stomach.

On my HUD, I saw their Armatures break formation slightly, the missile pods on their shoulders blossoming open like deadly flowers. A flurry of bright, angry sparks erupted from their frames as dozens of self-guided missiles streaked away, their engines igniting in brilliant flares as they accelerated towards the drone swarm. I ignored them, my entire focus narrowing, tunneling onto the lead Decurion. Onto Jeanne.

"This is Major Shiloh Gett of the Terran Federation Tactical Carrier Toktogul," I transmitted on an open, unencrypted channel, a cold fury tightening my grip on the controls until my knuckles ached. "In the name of the Federation Council, I order you to power down your weapons and surrender your vessels." It was a formality. A pointless, hollow ritual demanded by the articles of war before the killing began. The drones, already being torn apart in silent, blossoming fireballs by my flight's missiles, hadn't been covered under that particular formality. They were just machines. Jeanne was something more. Something worse. A traitor.

A voice, laced with static and a chilling, familiar amusement, crackled back. "Shiloh! I was hoping they'd send their best attack dog." The voice was unmistakably hers. Confident. Mocking. "Still chained to the losing side, I see. Still fighting for the old men and their dying ideals. Surrender? My dear, the time for talking is long past. Let's dance."

Her last word was the trigger. Before she even finished speaking, a proximity alert shrieked in my ear and a crimson line traced a path from her Decurion to my Revolter on the tactical display. My Armature whined in protest as I slammed the control yokes, shunting all available power to the leg and torso thrusters. The world outside tilted violently. A lance of incandescent, purple-white energy, a particle stream of terrifying power, tore through the space where my cockpit had been a microsecond before. It was a silent, instantaneous bolt of lightning, so bright it momentarily overloaded the external cameras, painting my view in a smear of white static.

The Revolter shuddered as it rolled, its thrusters firing in a chaotic, desperate symphony to escape the beam's lethal touch. The G-forces threw me against my restraints, and for a heart-stopping moment, I felt the beam’s radiant heat wash over my starboard side. Warning indicators flashed across my vision–armor temperature spiking, a non-critical sensor array on the right side slagged into molten ruin. She hadn't missed by much. The neural uplink, the violation I so often cursed, had likely saved my life, translating my panic into motion faster than thought alone ever could.

This wasn't a warning shot. This was an execution. Jeanne was still just as ruthless as I remembered from our previous encounter. A cold knot of fear tightened in my gut. The dance had begun, and she was already leading. My fear curdled into rage. The Revolter’s frame had barely settled from the violent evasion when my right hand clenched on the yoke, my thumb depressing the primary firing stud. The neural link translated the simple, furious command into a cascade of mechanical action.

The low hum in the cockpit was instantly drowned out by a deep, percussive vibration through the mech’s entire structure, resonating directly in my bones. Outside, the six barrels of the 100-millimeter cannon, a weapon designed to chew through starship armor, spun into a grey blur. A torrent of incandescent, high-explosive tungsten shells erupted from the muzzle, a solid stream of man-made fury bridging the gap between us. Each round was the size of a milk bottle, a kinetic sledgehammer that crossed the void in a heartbeat, tracers showing the trajectory.

My targeting reticle, a glowing green chevron, slid across the Decurion’s torso. I held the trigger down, "walking" the stream of fire toward her, forcing her to react, to move, to stop that goddamn particle cannon from lining up for another shot. This wasn't about landing a killing blow; this was about suppression. Through the storm of my own making, I saw her Decurion jink and weave, its own thrusters firing in sharp, controlled bursts. She was good. She absorbed some hits on her thickest armor before deftly rolling, letting the torrent of shells pass harmlessly over her shoulder and into the void. She wasn't panicking. She was weathering the storm, waiting for the cannon to overheat, waiting for her opening.

I wasn't going to give her one. This was my turn to make her dance. I closed the distance, my HUD showing the cannon as rapidly reaching critical heat. I couldn't succumb to tunnel vision; as I kept the pressure on my nemesis, my attention flicked briefly to the tactical display, assessing the wider chaos.

The Foxbat drones were mostly gone, reduced to shattered, tumbling debris by the coordinated missile volleys from my squad. On my left flank, Elah’s Armature was a model of efficiency, methodically picking off the last surviving drone with precise bursts from her own cannon. To my right, Gilboa was chasing down a crippled straggler, his movements a little too eager, a little too aggressive. He was over-extending.

A proximity alert blared, pulling my focus back with a jolt. While I had been hammering Jeanne, her two wingmen had finished their bloody work on the Carcosa's escape pods. Now, their diamond-shaped icons on my HUD were turning, vectors shifting to converge on me. They were flanking me, preparing to create a kill box with Jeanne's Lady of Ys as the anvil and their own particle cannons as the hammers.

"Gilboa, break off! Rejoin the formation!" I snapped over the comms, my voice tight. "Elah, cover him! Decurions inbound, my position!" I couldn't let Jeanne go. I released the trigger on my cannon, the sudden silence in the cockpit feeling heavy and ominous. The barrels of the gun glowed a cherry red, radiating heat I could see as a shimmer on the external cameras. I let it go, sending it flying off into space, probably never to be seen again. At the same time, I rammed the main throttle to its absolute limit, engaging the afterburners. A fresh wave of G-forces slammed me into my seat as the Armature leaped forward with a surge of raw power, its thrusters burning from blue-white to a furious, incandescent orange. My free right hand moved in concert with the machine's, reaching down to the Revolter's hip binder. With a hiss of pneumatics, an angular hilt was presented. The mech's armored fingers closed around it.

My thumb stroked a control on the yoke. A low, hungry hum filled the cockpit as the hilt erupted, projecting a five-meter blade of contained, shimmering plasma–a sword of pure, searing energy that painted the cockpit in a pale, ethereal blue light. The Decurion was a fortress, strong at a distance, but I knew its weakness. It was slower, less agile in close quarters. My speed was my only real advantage against three of them. I had to get inside their effective range, had to make this a knife fight in a closet. I had to end this with Jeanne, now.

The afterburners cut out, and inertia carried me the final meters in a silent, terrifying rush. My plasma blade, a tool for carving open battleship hulls, swung in a vicious, high-energy arc aimed at the Lady of Ys’ head and torso. This was the killing blow.

It would have been, had it landed.

With a speed that should have been impossible for a heavy assault frame, Jeanne’s Decurion raised its own arm. A weapon I hadn't seen on any schematics, a massive, cleaver-like blade, flared to life, its edge shimmering with crimson heat. The impact was not a clang of metal but a cataclysm of pure energy. A blinding flash of actinic light erupted where the two blades met, momentarily washing out my external cameras in a flare of white and violet.

The Revolter shuddered to a dead stop, its forward momentum completely arrested. The strain on the arm actuators was immense, a groaning protest that I felt as a phantom ache in my own shoulder. My HUD flashed with overload warnings. We were locked, face to face, plasma blade against heat blade, two miniature, warring suns pushing against each other in the void. Through the shimmering distortion, I could see the trifocal visor of her Decurion, a malevolent red glare just meters from my cockpit. She had a melee weapon. A thermal cleaver. My intel was wrong. I was wrong.

"You always were predictable, Shiloh," Jeanne’s voice purred over the comms—private, contact comms, an intimacy that felt violating—her voice dripping with condescending pity. "All fury, no finesse. Do you like my new toy?"

Before I could answer, she used her superior mass, twisting her blade and driving mine downwards. My Armature staggered, its gyroscope trying to compensate. The dance had changed again, and now I was on the back foot, at point-blank range with a killer.

"Shut your damn mouth!" I screamed, my voice raw in the confines of the cockpit. My hand was already moving, slamming a control stud on the left-hand yoke.

Finesse be damned.

The Revolter’s free left arm, a limb with the crushing power of an industrial press, snapped forward in a brutal haymaker. The fist, a slab of steel-composite armor weighing several tons, connected with the side of the Decurion’s head with a sickening, grinding CRUNCH that I felt through the blade lock and up my own arm. The enemy mech's head snapped to the side, its red eyes flickering wildly. The blade lock was broken; this was the opening I needed.

Then I heard Jeanne laugh.

It was low and throaty, broadcast over the intimate channel she had opened, filled with genuine, horrifying mirth. It was the sound of a predator enjoying the futile struggle of its prey. I remembered that laugh from the day she defected, the same chilling amusement in her voice as she broadcast the kill-codes for our defense grid over an open channel. The triumphant surge I’d felt from landing the blow evaporated, replaced by a freezing, familiar dread.

"That's the spirit, Shiloh! Beautiful!" she mocked, her voice a venomous caress. "Always so adorable when you get angry!"

The Decurion’s damaged head snapped back into place, its red eyes flaring with renewed intensity. The brief opening my punch had created was gone. Worse, by breaking the blade lock, I had freed her weapon.

Her thermal cleaver, now unopposed, became a crimson blur. She didn't bother re-establishing a guard or aiming for a quick kill. A cold, analytical understanding lanced through my panic. She wasn’t aiming for the cockpit. She was going to dismember me first, starting with my right arm.

There was no time to bring my own sword around to parry. Instinct screamed through the neural link. I yanked back on the controls, firing my front-facing thrusters in a desperate, instantaneous burst. Simultaneously, I threw up my now-free left arm—the one I had just used to punch her—as a sacrificial shield.

The thermal cleaver bit deep.

There was a silent, incandescent flash as the crimson blade scythed through the Revolter's forearm, shearing through layers of armor, hydraulics and actuators as if they were tissue paper. Superheated metal and molten slag vaporized, debris spraying across my view. A symphony of alarms shrieked inside the cockpit. My HUD lit up like a dying star, a cascade of damage icons scrolling down the left side of my vision. LA NO RSPNS. LA HDRLC PRSS CRIT. LA ACTTR FAIL.

The neural link, for all its wonders, had no filter for this level of damage. A phantom fire, an agony so intense it felt real, exploded in my own left arm, from my knuckles to my shoulder. I bit back a scream, my vision tunneling as the feedback threatened to overwhelm me. The Revolter’s left arm, from the elbow down, was simply gone–a cauterized, glowing stump.

"Still with me, Shiloh?" Jeanne taunted, her Decurion already moving, bringing the cleaver around for another swing, this time aimed at my legs. She was going to cripple me, leave me helpless in the void. She was toying with me. "Don't tell me you're down for the count already!"

Just as she was about to bring the blade down, a new alarm, a piercing, high-frequency tone, cut through the cacophony of damage alerts. In the corner of my vision, a stark notification pulsed in time with the sound: LCK DTCT. It wasn't just a warning; my HUD painted the grim reality in glowing red vectors, two distinct targeting locks tracing unwavering lines from the flanking enemy Armatures directly to my cockpit. The other Decurions. My mind, a cold corner of it still clinging to tactical analysis, processed the geometry. A three-on-one kill box. A death sentence. Was this it? Checkmate.

Then, through the private comms channel that she kept open like a leash, I heard Jeanne click her tongue—a sharp, impatient tsk of annoyance.

"No! She's mine," her voice cut across the channel, sharp and imperious, not to me, but to her wingmen. "Engage the others! The Major and I are catching up on old times."

As suddenly as they had appeared, the two flanking targeting locks vanished from my HUD. The piercing whine ceased. There was no relief in the silence, only a deeper, more profound horror. A quick, efficient death by firing squad had just been rescinded. My execution was now a private affair.

"Fuck you, Jeanne," I hissed, the words forced through teeth clamped tight against the illusory agony. The front-facing thrusters fired again in a desperate burn, buying me precious meters of distance in the void, making use of the momentary pause her imperious command had created.

My right hand, slick with sweat inside its glove, darted from the control yoke to a secondary console. My left arm, the source of the torment, was clenched into a useless fist in my lap, a prisoner of the howling feedback loop. My fingers, guided by pure muscle memory, flew across the panel, jabbing at the illuminated keys. A command line appeared on my HUD. I slammed the confirmation stud. LA FDBCK DSBL.

The change was instantaneous and violent. The shrieking phantom fire in my mind wasn't eased; it was severed, cut off at the source as if by a guillotine. The agony vanished, leaving behind a cold, dead numbness. A hollow void now existed where my left arm had been, a silent patch in my sensory map that was almost as disorienting as the pain had been. I had cauterized the wound in my own mind. I knew feeling in my arm—normal, not the agony from the machine—would start to return in a couple seconds. Seconds that I didn't have.

Through the momentary blur of sensory recalibration, I saw Jeanne’s Decurion. She hadn’t been idle. Her thrusters flared, and she closed the distance I had just fought for, a relentless hunter refusing to let her wounded quarry escape. The brief reprieve was over. The pain was gone, but so was my left arm. I was damaged, cornered, but my head was clear. For the first time since she'd laughed, I could think.

Still, with one arm out of commission, I couldn't exactly work any magic. Jeanne’s Decurion lunged, her thermal cleaver raised high in both of the machine’s hands. It wasn’t a swing; it was a vicious, two-handed chop, an executioner’s blow meant to split my Armature’s torso from shoulder to hip. There was no meeting that force head-on. To even try would be suicide; her heavy assault frame would shatter my remaining arm and tear through my cockpit without slowing.

My only option was to not be there.

I slammed the machine's lateral thrusters to port, a violent, instantaneous shove that threw me against my restraints. The Revolter skated sideways across the void, a desperate dodge to pull its center of mass out of the cleaver’s direct path. As the crimson blade descended, my plasma sword, held in a one-handed grip that felt terrifyingly inadequate, rose to meet it, a prayer translated into engineering.

I angled my blade, catching her cleaver with my own shimmering plasma edge. The moment of impact was a cataclysm of light and sound that my external sensors struggled to process. A blinding white flare erupted between the two mechs, and a shriek of protesting metal screamed through the Revolter's frame. The stress on my right arm’s actuators was immense; overload warnings flashed red on my HUD, and I felt a jolt of the impact in my own shoulder.

But it held. My blade deflected the force of her attack, shunting the massive, glowing cleaver aside. The crimson weapon carved a harmless, incandescent scar through the empty space where my cockpit had been a second ago. The maneuver had saved me, but it had also thrown my Armature completely off-balance, its gyroscope spinning wildly to compensate. For a terrifying moment, I was adrift, spinning, my single weapon knocked wide from the parry. And Jeanne, her powerful Decurion already absorbing the recoil of her missed strike, was turning, her red eyes burning with killing intent as she prepared to strike again.

Fighting to stabilize would be a death sentence; she would cut me down before my gyroscope even found its footing. So instead of stopping the spin, I leaned into it.

My fingers flickered across the vernier controls on the yoke. A series of short, sharp bursts of thrust fired from the Revolter's maneuvering jets, feeding the uncontrolled tumble, shaping it. The nauseating carousel of stars and steel became a streaking vortex. I wasn't just falling anymore. I was putting the Revolter into a furious, clockwise rotation, a fifteen-meter pirouette.

My plasma sword, flung wide from the parry, was now the vicious tip of this whip. It whipped around with the building momentum, drawing a brilliant blue arc through the void. It wasn't a powerful blow, but it was fast, and it was coming from an angle Jeanne would never expect. I aimed for the junction of her Decurion's left arm and torso, a desperate attempt to maim, to cripple, to force her to abandon her own killing blow and deal with mine.

She saw the attack at the last possible microsecond, her two-handed executioner's chop half-formed. There was no time to bring the massive cleaver around for a block. Her Decurion, an engine of implacable offense just a moment ago, was forced into a desperate, indignant dodge, its thrusters firing in a panic burst to jerk its torso out of my blade's path.

She was fast, but not fast enough.

It wasn't the clean, disabling blow to the torso I had hoped for, but it was enough. My plasma blade, at the apex of its high-speed arc, connected with the Decurion's right forearm. There was a violent judder that I felt through my entire frame, a shuddering concussion as my sword’s containment field met hardened armor. A silent, brilliant flash of blue-white light erupted at the point of impact. The plasma didn't cut so much as it erased, vaporizing layers of steel and composite in a hissing, incandescent spray.

The arm, from the elbow down, was carved away. The severed limb, its armored fingers still locked in a death grip around the hilt of the enormous thermal cleaver, dangled uselessly from it. It wasn't enough to make Jeanne lose her grip on her weapon, but it certainly hurt. The cleaver's malevolent heat faded as half its power link was broken.

Now we were a matching set.

Unlike me, Jeanne didn't bite back the scream. The feedback from her severed arm must have hit her neural link like a 100-millimeter shell, because a raw, animalistic shriek of pure agony erupted over the private channel she kept open between us. It was a sound stripped of all bravado, a piercing, ugly transmission of pain that made the hairs on my neck stand on end.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the scream cut off. It was replaced by a ragged, wet gasp for air, then another. A low chuckle bubbled up from her throat, catching in her lungs before it burst free into a full-throated, utterly mad cackle. Her Decurion, mirroring its pilot's state, shuddered in the void, its one good arm twitching erratically.

"Shiloh! You really got me!" she gasped, her voice cracked and hysterical. "Not even my father ever hit me that hard. Not for lack of trying, of course," she added, the words punctuated by a sickeningly casual chuckle. "Which is why he's not around anymore."

"You're the best, Shiloh," Jeanne breathed, her voice dropping suddenly to an intimate, conspiratorial whisper that was somehow worse than the screaming. "I'm going to enjoy every second of tearing you apart."

A cold dread, deeper than the fear of battle, settled in my gut. "When did you go so wrong, Jeanne?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

Her Decurion’s head tilted slightly, a parody of curiosity that was deeply unsettling. A terrible, gleeful clarity returned to her voice. "Oh, I was always like this, my dear," she said, her voice laced with cruel amusement. "I really thought you realized that when we were together."

The silence that followed her words was more profound than the vacuum of space. It was a deafening void where my entire history with her collapsed in on itself. The memories—a shared joke in the academy mess hall, a quiet moment looking out at the star-dusted plains of a colony world, the warmth of her hand in mine, our bodies intertwined—flashed through my mind, instantly curdling, twisting into something monstrous and unrecognizable.

My horrified trance was broken by a sudden, violent motion from her Decurion. With a contemptuous flick of its remaining arm, it shook the mangled forearm free. The severed limb, free from the massive cleaver, tumbled away into the void—a grisly piece of refuse.

Then, with a fresh surge of power, the thermal cleaver, now held firmly in the Decurion's one good hand, flared to life. Its malevolent crimson glow intensified, painting her Armature in hellish tones and casting a bloody light that filled my cockpit. The flight comms, the distant flashes of the wider battle, the very stars themselves–it all faded into a distant, irrelevant hum.

At that moment, we were the only two people in the galaxy.

The part of me that was a professional officer—the part that analyzed, that calculated, that prioritized survival—was incinerated in an instant. All that was left was the raw, gaping wound of betrayal.

And I screamed.

It was not a sound I recognized as my own. It was a ragged, ugly tear in the fabric of the universe, a noise ripped from my throat that was equal parts rage and grief. It was the unmaking of a person, the sound of a carefully constructed history being shattered into a million pieces. The scream was the only answer I had left.

My foot slammed the main throttle forward, pushing it past the red-lined safety limiters into the emergency override. The Revolter, my battered, one-armed machine, didn't just accelerate; it launched itself forward like a javelin. The G-forces hit me with physical force, throwing me back into the seat as the Armature’s frame groaned in protest. The main thrusters, pushed far beyond their intended capacity, burned a furious, over-pressured orange.

I raised my sword—not in guard, not with finesse, but like a primal spear, a banner of incandescent rage. The cool blue of my blade sliced through the hellish red light cast by Jeanne’s weapon. All thought, all strategy, all training was gone, burned away by the white-hot fire in my mind. My entire universe, which had narrowed to the two of us, now compressed even further into a single, unstoppable vector.

There was no finesse to the collision. My charge met her waiting blade not with a clean parry, but with a grinding, screaming impact that sent a shockwave of pure force through both of our machines. The scream of rage that had fueled my attack was choked off, replaced by a grunt of raw, physical exertion as every actuator in my Armature’s remaining arm strained to the breaking point.

The duel, if it could be called that, devolved into a hideous, intimate brawl. We were too close for proper swings, too entangled for elegant maneuvers. It was a bar fight with fifteen-meter titans. A desperate shove with the Revolter’s shoulder to create a half-second of space. A short, vicious hack with my plasma blade, aimed at her head. A frantic block from her thermal cleaver that sent a shower of incandescent sparks into the void. Thrusters firing in opposing directions as we struggled for leverage, for a dominant position, for the final, fatal angle.

The universe inside my cockpit was a maelstrom of light and sound. The view outside was a strobing, nauseating blur of her machine’s blood-red plating and the brilliant violet of our clashing weapons. Alarms shrieked in a continuous, meaningless chorus, a waterfall of red text scrolling unread down my HUD. Every impact slammed me against my restraints, my knuckles white on the controls, a wordless snarl locked on my face.

Our weapons clashed, again and again. It was a frantic, ugly rhythm of desperate swipes stopped by desperate blocks. Each blow was a wordless scream. Each jarring parry was a memory being shattered. This wasn’t a battle between soldiers anymore. It was a demolition derby of broken hearts waged by two desperate women who had once, impossibly, loved each other.

Our blind, mutual fury had its own inertia. Locked together, a single, struggling entity of metal and hate, we were heedless of our position. The frantic, opposing bursts from our thrusters, meant only to gain a momentary advantage, had combined to send us on a long, slow, uncontrolled drift across the battlefield.

I became aware of it first as a change in the light. A new, immense shadow fell across my cockpit, eclipsing the distant stars. A proximity alert, a calm, insistent chime utterly alien to the cacophony of combat alarms, began to sound. My eyes, for a fraction of a second, tore away from Jeanne’s Decurion and flickered to the tactical map. Our two icons, locked in their frantic dance, were sliding into the massive, red-tagged signature of a debris field.

It was the Carcosa. Or what was left of it. The ghost ship loomed—shattered steel drifting in silent dark. Its back was broken, a gaping wound revealing the skeletal ribs of its internal framework. Entire decks were exposed to the void, their emergency lights still flickering erratically like stray synapses in a dead brain, casting a ghostly pallor on the wreckage. Twisted plates of armor multiple times the size of my Armature tumbled in a slow, graceful, and utterly silent ballet of destruction around the main hull. Some buried voice of duty screamed at the tactical insanity of entering such a dense field while engaged in combat. But the rest of me could only stare in a choke of horror and reverence. I hesitated.

A predator like Jeanne doesn't miss such a cue. She sensed my falter in the subtle shift of pressure from my machine, in the fractional second of stillness. With a brutal surge of power, she pressed the advantage mercilessly. There was a grinding screech of stressed metal as she shoved the Revolter backward, pinning me against a cold, unyielding bulkhead of the ruined cruiser. The plasma blade dropped from my hand—spiraling away, its light fading as power died. The searing-hot blade of her thermal cleaver was pressed tightly against my mech's chest. Against the cockpit.

The crimson light turned my small cabin into a red-hot cage. Through the layers of armor and environmental seals, I could feel its oppressive, baking heat begin to warm my face. And yet she didn't plunge it into me.

"What are you waiting for?" I snarled, the words a rough, desperate rasp in the sudden, hot silence. My own voice sounded distant, a stranger's bravado in the face of an execution. Every fiber of my being screamed to fire my thrusters, to twist away, to do something–but there was nowhere to go. My back was all but fused to the cold tomb of the Carcosa, and her blade was a promise of imminent, agonizing death. All I had left was defiance. "Get it over with, you coward. What are you waiting for, an invitation?"

Jeanne's voice, when it finally came through the comms, was gentle. It was stripped of the hysterical laughter, of the agonized scream. It was a soft, reasonable, and to my absolute horror, sincere tone that I remembered from quiet moments in the dark, a lifetime ago.

"Join me, Shiloh," she murmured, the words a venomous balm. "I'll take care of you. It'll be just like the old days. No," she corrected herself, a hint of excitement in her voice, "better. I'm stronger now. I can give you everything."

My mind reeled, unable to process the logic. Join her? The cold dread in my gut became a churning nausea. This wasn't a victor's taunt. This was a proposal.

"You're the only one who I ever cared about," she continued, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. "The only one who matters. With me, you won't have to fight for lost causes or die for old men anymore. You won't have to fight anyone other than me."

A private, eternal hell. That was her offer. A cage built for two.

"Maybe," she finished, her voice full of a terrifying, hopeful light, "you'll even manage to kill me one day."

And at that moment, I understood. Death was not what she had in store for me. Death would be a mercy. Her grand prize, her ultimate expression of love, was this: an eternity of this exact moment, locked in a violent, obsessive orbit around her, with my own death as her plaything and hers as my life's impossible goal. The heat from the blade was no longer a threat; it was a promise of the cage closing.

My stomach churned, a bitter bile rising in my throat. This wasn't a battle. This was a twisted courtship, a macabre tango where the prize was my unending torment. The intimacy of her voice, the sincerity of her offer—it was more terrifying than any weapon.

"I’d rather die," I rasped, the words barely audible. I focused on the heat radiating from her blade, on the claustrophobic press of the Carcosa's ruined hull against my back. Anything to ground myself, to stop the horrifying image of her future for me from taking root in my mind.

A sigh, soft and wistful, drifted over the comms. "Such a pity, Shiloh. Such a waste."

Then, the pressure against my back eased. Her thermal cleaver, still glowing with malevolent intensity, retracted, pulling away from my cockpit. A sudden, dizzying sense of disorientation washed over me as the heavy weight against my chest was lifted. I braced for another attack, for the blade to plunge, for the final, searing pain.

But it didn't come.

Instead, her Armature, still looming inches from my own, began to rotate, its massive frame slowly turning away from me. I watched, dumbfounded, as the crimson light that had filled my cockpit began to recede, replaced by the flickering, spectral glow of the Carcosa's emergency lights.

"This dance isn’t over, my dear," Jeanne said—amused, knowing. "Just postponed."

The Decurion moved, fluid and effortless, sliding away from the wreckage, then, with a flash of her main thrusters, Jeanne was gone. Vanished.

I was left alone, adrift in the silent graveyard of the Carcosa, my Armature clinging precariously to the fractured hull. The battle, the real battle, was still raging around me, the distant flashes of weapons fire a silent symphony of destruction I had briefly escaped.

"Epsilon 1, report!" Elah's voice, sharp with urgency, cut through the quiet of my cockpit. "What's your status, Major? We lost your signature!"

I took a shuddering breath, the air thick with the metallic tang of fear and adrenaline. My right hand, still gripping the control yoke, tightened. My eyes, still wide with a lingering horror, scanned the tactical display. My Armature, battered and one-armed, was a stark green icon against the cool blue grid. The two signatures of my wingmen stood alone. They had dispatched Jeanne's companions.

"Epsilon 1…" I started, my voice a ragged whisper, forcing it to be steady. "Major damage. Retreating."

The dance wasn’t over. It had just begun.