DynaStar’s most famous pilot received a notification on her neurorig, the red bubble appearing like an angry zit in her peripheral vision.

10 MINUTE WARNING

REPORT TO HANGER

The message distracted her, taking her out of the rhythm of bobbing on the cock lodged in her throat. But she was a professional in all things. Mentally dismissing the note, she returned to her current objective.

Fortunately, the man fucking her face was about to tip over the edge, anyway. She grabbed a hold of his waist and hilted herself on his shaft, her golden lips pressing against the base like a rubber O-ring. He grabbed her hair and shuddered, moments of drawn out pleasure sending gouts of cum down her esophagus. She gulped and swallowed, her muscles massaging his length til he was empty. Then, and only then, did she allow him to withdraw. She showed off an empty mouth by lolling out her tongue, to which she received an approving pat on the head.

“Looks like I win again~” Diva purred, turning to the camera and giving it a wink.

“Cut!” shouted the director. A bell sounded, and half a dozen crew came onto the simulated barracks. The makeup director was on her face prepping her for another scene, but Diva waved them off.

“Sorry boss,” she said, pointing to the visible neurorig nodes on the left side of her face. “Duty calls!”

The director threw up her hands like she’d just told him she was heading off to a Nunnery. “Barracks Blondes 5 is already weeks behind schedule! Marketing is up my ass already now that Vega redeployed. Lord knows where I’m gonna find another girl with a dick that big. And what happens if you get injured? D’you have any idea how screwed up continuity will be?”

Static in her peripheral vision, overlaying the heads up display of her neurorig. Some kind of feedback. She blinked, and it vanished.

The buxom pilot skipped over to her and gave the kvetching older woman a big fat kiss on the cheek. Her breath reeked of fresh semen, causing the director to recoil, much to Diva’s delight. She giggled, a melodic sound that lit up any room she entered.

For the amount the corporation spent on growing her vocal cords, it had better.

“The Corp needs me in a pilot’s seat right now, not on my knees!” she explained superfluously. “You know I’ll be back in no time. I’m looking forward to the big two-on-one scene…mmm, maybe I’ll find some Irreg pilots and get some practice in~”

The director scoffed in an appropriately theatrical pantomime of exasperation. But Diva was already off, dodging gophers and set dressers on her way out of the comms building they’d co opted for a soundstage and out into the real world.

Vannis Operations Base was a scrapheap only kept in service because of its convenient proximity to half a dozen places that actually mattered. Its most valuable parts had been blown to an amorphous mass of grey and brown rubble, causing her attention to slide over them and toward the little flecks of colour as she walked. Bright orange and yellow hi-vis uniforms on the ground support staff, the flashing lights on one of the enormous ground tractors that stuffed piles of earth into the hundreds of craters blown into the pavement. Every once in a while, the gleaming blue/white checkerboard patterns of DynaStar’s logo on suits of powered armour. Three metres tall, their boxy, top heavy frames resembled a cross between a fantasy knight and a particular extinct animal. A gorilla? That sounded right. They were pretty scary if you were practically naked, like she was!

Of course, if you were in a Mech, things were different.

She remembered something about Vannis being traded back and forth a couple times, each subsequent gain meaning another piece of it blown away. By the time Magic Company had hot-dropped, the Irregs had already left. Wasn’t worth a fight. Which was good. She hated fighting!

A tingle there, just at the edge of cognition. The Static again. This time she heard it. A dreary, low buzz. She didn’t remember much from when she was installed into her machine, but sometimes there were fragments of emotion that she could recall. Sometimes fear. Sometimes anger. This was…

“Hey, it’s Diva!”

She spun around on her heels to see a handful of people in fresh combat fatigues and shaved heads. Fresh replacements, like as not. They hadn’t seen a hair of combat, but they have seen her before!

“Hi cutie!” she said, cocking her head as if thinking about something. “Have we met before?”

The crowd laughed. Mostly men, maybe a woman in there. Hard to tell with the uniforms and shaved heads. Then again, gender didn’t matter to Diva. She fucked who she was told!

“God, I wish!” said the first one. He introduced himself. She didn’t bother to remember it. He’d likely be dead soon!

“Well, I’ll see you around the base,” she said and cheerfully strolled on, making sure to waggle her hips a bit as she did. Just in case they watched her as she walked away. They always did!

The Hanger in question loomed ahead like a sheer metallic cliff. Local forces used rigid airships to move between plateaus. More cost effective than traditional loaders and landers. Most of them had been destroyed in the war that lost DynaStar its hold on the surface, either popped like balloons and sent crashing to the inhospitable surface or had their gas bladders ignited by tracer rounds and turned to cautionary tales. Now hangers like the one in front of her sat empty all over the inhabited parts of the world. Empty. Like enormous, barren metal wombs.

She touched her lower stomach. Something tingled again. Another feeling. She closed her eyes, trying to peel back the Static, but it was hard. Too hard. The more she fought against the Static, the louder it was. Hissing. The noise of the universe, untuned and raw, blanking out her thoughts. Like always, she had to yield. The Static quieted. She was calm again. A smile spread across her face. Relief. It was easier not to think too much.

Diva entered the hangar not through the enormous airship doors but through the much smaller ones for maintenance personnel. They only opened the big ones when there was a deployment. She knew that now! Standing out in the rain for half an hour before someone noticed her waiting for the big metal beetle wings to open up, that had been totally embarrassing! This time, she remembered where to go, and slipped into the smaller doors. A cute boy in a clean suit opened the door for her, and she gave him a curtsey and a little wink. That’d keep him going for a week, she thought. She knew. Boys loved to do things for Diva~

The others had already assembled. Of the four pilots standing in the half circle, two were new faces. Diva smiled as she took her place next to the newcomers.

“Hope I’m not late!” she chirped, getting a side eyed glance from the closest of the two strangers.

“Is this serious?” she asked, turning to the vets in the lineup. “We’re deploying with a pornstar?”

Amethyst turned to the pilot who’d spoken. Her face had been so pretty once, but now there were these awful dark wrinkles where the skin graft had taken. Nevertheless, her eyes were still the same piercing grey they’d always been.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Not an assertion, a statement of fact. “Diva has twice the confirmed mech tags of the pilot you’re replacing. Ignore what she looks like and watch her in the field. You might learn something.”

But the newbie wasn’t finished berating her. “Look what she’s wearing!”

Diva looked down. Oops! She’d gone to the briefing wearing her ‘pilot’ costume fresh from the set! Nothing but a low cut cooling vest that was barely more than a corset, panties, boots, and an athletics sweatband. Totally impractical, but it’s what all the people at home expected from their pretty pilot girls. A blush rose to her cheeks, followed by a giggle.

“Don’t worry. I’m still good to fight,” she said, though that didn’t seem to assuage the doubts from the other woman.

Whatever direction the argument was going to take ended abruptly as two figures entered the room. The first was a chubby, older man who was kinda cute in a doughy middle manager kinda way. He wore the uniform of a senior officer in the DynaStar Expeditionary Forces: khaki fatigues, logo patches for the various brands and subsidiaries on his shoulders, and a brimmed cap on his shaved head. He was the one who brought all five pilots, including Diva, to attention.

But the person who walked through the door was what held her attention. Tall, taller than her, taller than anyone else in the room. She wore an unremarkable, androgynous suit the colour of coal dust, just tight enough to show off that she worked out without showing off. Her hair was likewise dark of hue, cut short and parted to the side, kept in place with product so that it appeared to be a single, formless fashion accessory. Slate grey skin completing the monochromatic intrusion into the real world. All save for her eyes.

Her eyes were a scalding, iridescent red. Ruby red. Impossibly, unnaturally red. The kind only possible if you’re Gemborn.

Diva sighed. Gosh, she was so pretty…

“At ease pilots,” the male officer said, weariness bled into his voice in a way that only someone up a full day could express. He took a long swig from a mug of something, probably coffee, probably something else as well, before continuing. “Buehlman, Amethyst, as always. Glad to see the new faces in here. Pilots Grissom and Munokhoi, welcome.”

Some perfunctory waves of acknowledgement from the others. Diva waved too, though both newbies ignored her.

“Glad to be here, sir,” one of them, Munokhoi, replied. “Magic Company has a reputation as being the best in the ExFor. Eager to see if we measure up.”

“And who is that, may I ask?” the other newcomer pointed to the taciturn woman in the grey suit. “She’s one of those vat-grown Gem freaks, yeah? Why is she at a briefing?”

“You may call me Harmony,” the woman replied, her husky voice bleeding authority and making Diva swoon. “DynaStar appointed Liaison-on-Mission to Magic Company, as well as Pilot Diva’s Agent. Best keep your focus on the briefing, Pilot Grissom.”

Fear lit up Grissom’s face. She snapped back to attention. “Apologies, ma’am. I-I didn’t mean anything.”

“Now that that’s settled,” the officer said as the topic was summarily dropped, pausing again to sip at the mug, “I’ve heard good things about you two, so make me proud and I’ll put in a good word to your sponsors. Nobody’s going to replace Rios or Vega, but-”

Static. Louder than before. Louder than ever. She couldn’t focus over it. Diva struggled to keep her demeanour, her smile faltered. Everything in her world buzzed and hummed and it was like her eyes were trapped open but seeing nothing.

“Don’t suppose you caught any of that, hmm?”

Diva blinked, finally. Time had skipped. She was back in the hangar, but this time, the other pilots were gone. The only person with her on the hangar deck was the tall woman with the gorgeous red eyes. Her Agent.

“N-no, sorry Harmony,” she said, bashful at the admission. “I was just thinking about other things.”

The tall woman gave a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure you were, Dove. Come, let’s get you plugged in.”

Diva shivered. Her Agent was the only one who knew that name. Her secret name. Harmony led the way to the scissor lift that took them up to the upper gantry. As it had been made for airships and not servicing Mechs, platforms had been welded to allow for the pilots to clamber aboard through the sally port in the upper torso. The metal planks made out of salvaged sheet metal were rickety and creaked as she walked across. Her Agent held her hand the whole way, though, and Diva knew that so long as Harmony was holding her hand, it would be alright.

Before them, the huge hatch hung wide open. She moved to enter, but a burst of colour caught her attention. She pulled the door shut to reveal what it had obscured: a name in huge, red letters.

Triarius

Beneath that, a pinup of a busty blonde bombshell wearing an absurd parody of a Roman soldier’s armour.

A picture of her.

Hair like a flowing field of golden wheat forming the background. Her lips lush, pillowy, inviting. Her naked breasts were enormous, gorgeous, grotesque-

My body doesn’t look like that, does it? Someone would have said something.

-after all, the boys loved her body. And the girls too. They want her, they love her. They want to make love to her, all of them-

-a million pictures of her on a hundred worlds, her cherubic face splattered with cum from men she’d find repulsive-

-she was an icon. A commodity. A totem. A lust idol from a culture of gaudy sin, her warped image like a crude fertility figure painted on the wall of a cave-

Half-formed thoughts started and stopped. Clipped conversation fragments in her own head that made her lose focus. Harmony pulled her forward. She followed her.

“It’s alright dear,” the Agent reassured. “If you go too long without plugging in, you know what can happen.”

She didn’t. But it sounded right, since Harmony was saying it. She followed her into the Mech.

Unpowered, the cockpit was pitch black. The only light came from Harmony’s eyes; two luminous circles in a void. But Diva knew the room inside and out by now. Even if the memories were blurry, unfocused, her instincts told her where the chair was. Where the master control circuit would be. Where to find the access terminal.

A heavy clang as she threw the switch. Three huge monitors sparked to life, each displaying a snowstorm of grey static. Harmony managed the hard part: the boot disks. Even when they were labelled, she had a hard time keeping them straight.

“Just sit in the chair,” her Agent said patiently. Diva obliged, getting comfortable in the molded black leather of the seat, head resting on the little cushion with the conspicuous hole where the neck would sit, the armrests already at the perfect height. As she settled in, she felt something strange on the bottom of the armrests. Indents. She put her fingers over them to feel the depth of them, only to realize what they were. Nails. Her nails. Why had she done that?

The static-filled screens each flicked to a black field, one after the other. A waterfall of gold boot text flowed from top to bottom on the centre screen, culminating in a blinking text prompt.

The words hung there like a demand. Diva’s troubled mind only grew more fuzzy. The Static returned, buzzing out everything else in her HUD. She looked back for comfort, but standing there was Harmony holding an enormous plug shaped like an ice pick. She’d seen that before.

“D-do we have to do that again?” she asked, giggling without cheer as she looked between the Agent and the sharp metal probe.

“You know what we need to do. You’ve done this dozens of times.”

The Static. Diva wanted to run. She wasn’t good at this, being a pilot. She was just silly little Diva. A dumb little cocksucker who-

“Shh…” Harmony said, smoothing out her hair. The sound of her voice was soothing, and Diva found herself resting her head back in the chair. The static still burned in her head, but she rested for now. Maybe if she had some time to think…

She felt the hair brushed from the back of her head. Her blond hair had to be long enough to cover the port in the back of her skull. Meant there were only so many styles she could wear it in without revealing the metal plate where they’d taken out a part of her occipital lobe. Inconvenient, really.

“Ready?” Harmony asked. Diva nodded, but the other woman pinned her forehead with her hand. “Don’t move. You know what can happen if you move.”

She didn’t. But she might soon.

The first part slid in. Diva shuddered. The static buzzed and popped around her eyes, but already the central parts of the HUD resolved into clarity. The bubbles became hard, rigid. Their titles became legible, as did their purpose. That screen was for monitoring power distribution. That one was for ammunition racks.

The second portion. Military indoctrination. Tactical training. Hours upon hours of simulated combat crudely seared into her brain like a branding iron. But it wasn’t just how to be a pilot that the shunt had. Her own memories zipped past like she was in a fast moving train, watching them go by. Her first bike. Learning how to play the guitar. Her girlfriend pushing him away. Him? What?

Harmony shoved the last of the neural shunt into Diva’s skull, and the static disappeared. Hours, weeks, decades of life slammed into her like a wall of water from a burst dam. Who she really was. What she had really done. She collapsed, retching into the bucket as the stained part of her soul was forcibly returned to her.

When her stomach stopped convulsing, the Pilot returned to her feet. Her bubblegum cheer was absent, her plush lips a flat line across her cheeks.

“Are you alright, Dove?” Harmony asked. “Can you remember?”

What the fuck did she even say to that? Of course she could remember. Unbidden memories pulled at her mind. Of crushing a fleeing transport with her mech’s foot. Of draining the balls of the officer who had just given the briefing because he told her to. Of watching a UniNET reporter convoy get ripped apart because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of telling a thousand young men and women with a smile on her face that service to DynaStar was worth the ultimate sacrifice and believing every word.

“Yes,” Dove said, her pretty voice straining even in a monosyllabic response.

Harmony knew her well enough to sense that she wasn’t alright. But it was standard protocol to ask, so she did. Every part of their interaction was according to listed instructions and protocol, as if being able to read it off a tablet made the whole thing okay.

Her face was already buried in the slate of black plastic, studiously ignoring the pilot as she went through the worst experience of her life. Well, the worst since she last plugged in. And the time before that. And the time before-

“Uploading the briefing, Pilot,” Harmony told her, and she nodded. But her mind was elsewhere. Elsewhen. Chasing down bad memories and pinning them like a wolf leaping on prey. Nightmares. Painful truths. Things she didn’t want to remember about herself but that she pursued anyways because They Were Her. Not Diva. Not the strutting, sucking thing they’d made her.

Dove locked up. Her hand reached down to the yawning space between her legs. They’d taken it. She hadn’t wanted to…but they’d taken it. More marketable, they’d told her.

“Chicks with Dicks are one thing,” a fifty year old man with dead eyes had told her, “but we want a real star. A real headliner. We don’t need another-”

“Pilot.”

Dove snapped to attention. It was so easy to follow the memory trails in her mind. If she was going to be combat effective, if she was going to stay in the cockpit of a mech at all, she had to keep her focus.

“Reporting.”

“Uploading the briefing notes again. Try to focus.”

The Pilot nodded. Once more the images and text from the upload flowed into her neurorig’s display. Her mind parsed them now, the data uplink straight into her mind allowing the same flow of information that a TacCom computer was capable of but in an organic shell. Machines couldn’t be pilots. There were laws about that kind of thing. So they hollowed out people instead.

The mission was simple. Theta Plateau, roughly six thousand klicks to the West. A convoy had gone dark. Dense cloud cover was making satellite surveillance difficult, but the thermal readouts implied live fires. Likely wasn’t a down comm line. Combat load recommended over a skirmish package.

Dove was surprised the Irregs were this bold so soon after the last encounter. They’d lost tons of heavy metal and ordinance trying to pull out from Phi, her and Vega slicing machines apart with an enfilade that-

Vega.

Oh my god, I forgot about Vega.

She gripped the shunt plugged into the back of her head and tried to rip out. She didn’t care. She wanted to forget. She wanted to tear the memory out by force. Harmony squeezed her hand until it hurt enough. She let go of the plug, her shoulders sagging.

“Report, Pilot,” Harmony ordered.

“Vega,” was all she could manage. The life had been sucked out of her. No. It’d been torn from Vega. It’d been torn out while she watched and did nothing.

“Vega gave her life for the mission. To keep you safe. You would have done the same in her place.”

Dove nodded. She would. She would have done anything to keep her safe. But it had been her on the wrong side of the HAMR round. Her armoured cockpit disintegrating like shattered glass as she watched, helplessly from the controls of an impossibly powerful death machine. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

“Do you remember why you volunteered for this assignment?” Harmony asked.

More memories, a veritable sea, threatened to drown her. A life spent as someone else. A revenant lurking in the mirror.

“I wanted to…I wanted to be a woman. It was the only way they would pay for it.”

Harmony pushed her chin up until she was looking into her eyes. Something about them made her stare. Her eyes were gorgeous. Red. Life preservers in that darkest of seas. Dove clung to them.

“And you’ve worked so hard for this body, haven’t you?”

She had. The horrible things she’d done. The degrading things she’d made herself do. She didn’t want huge breasts. She didn’t even like men.

“They’ll…they’ll take it all away, won’t they?”

Harmony didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. Every part of her that was real, that was a woman, was property of DynaStar.

“I need you to be combat effective. Your teammates need you.”

Dove stared into Harmony’s eyes. She could hardly even notice the patterns of luminescent scarlet pigment that flickered in millisecond bursts in her irises. Triggering commands. Manually controlling her neurochemistry like she was physically inside her mind. Pressing down on ganglia. Pulling on neurons like the strings on a puppet. She calmed.

“That’s my girl. Activation is in ten minutes, Pilot. Will you be combat effective?”

“Yes, Harmony.”

Her Agent broke her gaze. “Good. Run pre-launch sequence and internalize the mission parameters. Nobody else can do this. Just you. Just my Dove.”

***

Rider’s attention wasn’t on the cockpit screen. At low power, placed where he was, he wouldn’t be seeing anything unless it entered the barn with him and the other two suits of powered armour. Nor was it on the comms relay, silent save for a dull crackling of environmental interference. It should have been on the camera feeds from the Raven, currently programmed to provide overwatch while clinging as low as possible to the tops of the dead trees on this part of the plateau.

But his eyes weren’t there either.

Instead, it was on a portable media player. A compact unit that was barely more than a cartridge plugged into a small screen, he kept it buried beneath his survival ruck for long waits like this. Frowned on in personal time and strictly forbidden in combat environs, it was his secret little vice. Other guys had cigs, or gambled, or chipped. His compulsion was fairly harmless, he thought.

He looked at the masking tape label on the side of the media cartridge. This one was new. Supposed to be real good.

Cumsluts In Uniform - Rear Echelon Edition

From the first frames, he could tell it was good. With pornaganda you often had to speed through the talking bits to get to the good shit, but every moment she was on screen, Rider’s heart fucking hammered. She was on screen, in one of those tight little parody uniforms they made the ‘pilots’ wear.

Diva. His little drug. His favourite fucking addiction. God she was so fucking sexy. DynaStar might be the devil, but they made some great fucking succubi.

“You wacking off again, Rider?” chirped his comms. Tight band, had to be line of sight. And there was only one woman in the trio in the barn.

“If that’s an offer to come help me out, Veil,” he shot back with a grin. Veil wasn’t her real name. His wasn’t really Rider. Nobody in the LibFront used real names on mission. Even if you knew a pilot from before the invasion, even if you were balls deep in them during your offtime, it was callsigns only. Corps regularly skimmed captured radio logs and compared them to the pre-war Social Net. They’d use them to find you, your whole family, and anyone who ever loved you and make them pay.

“Not in your lifetime. Finish your thirty-second flute solo and focus back up. Don’t wanna get cored because your hand was on the wrong joystick.”

Rider grinned. He liked Veil. Bit of an ice queen, probably a dyke, but she was cool in a firefight. Especially against proper Mechs, that was crucial. He was a pig, sure, but he wasn’t braindead. There were plenty of girls who could operate powered armour as good as a man. Maybe even better.

But…some evil part of him liked seeing Diva get her ass fucked by her superiors, or slapped around by a fellow pilot to put her in her place. It was hard not to think that. With those tits, those hips…it all had to be intentional. She wanted guys like him to stare at her. Stuff her image in the wank bank for long deployments. Nobody could take someone like that seriously.

He unzipped his jumpsuit, fished out his cock, and lost himself in Diva’s little adventure. Couple minutes, tops. Then he’d be back on station.

***

Theta Plateau had been designated agricultural space before it had been lost. One of the few places in the world that could actually feed itself, let alone the other isolated population centres. But without the highly specialized personnel to maintain the pumps and the irrigation systems, the orchards and fields had died. Farm equipment sat rusting and forgotten, left behind by whoever had tried to salvage the harvest before it had all gone to shit. And that was before the fighting had started.

In terms of actual damage, the Plateau had been largely ignored in favour of more tactically-significant objectives. But here and there, the signs of war could be seen. A greenhouse smashed by an errant projectile. An overturned riot suppression vehicle, picked over bones bleaching in the sun. A quaint little cottage, once home to dozens of gainfully employed workers, burned to ash by an indiscriminate burst of incendiary rounds.

Magic Company strode down the railroad’s path in a loose pentagon formation: two forward, three in the back. The two rookies carried a standard pattern loadout: medium range gauss rifle for primary, a pair of Wyvern missile pods for secondary, and an autopistol as a holdout. Buehlman took lead on this patrol, so he’d ditched the missile pods for a dedicated drone package, enhanced comms and a deployable shardshield. Amethyst was lead on this op, so she dropped all the flashy extras save for her Mech Operated Weapon: a deeply uncreative name for the largest revolving autocannon ever built. Strapped to her back was a dispenser containing ten rectangular magazines, each enabling about two minutes of uninterrupted fire. And when those ran out, the fists of her Mech were reinforced tritanium alloy.

Dove had her own weapon of choice. She cradled it in her mech’s arms, haptic feedback making it feel like it was in her own. It was dangerous keeping feedback this strong. Most pilots pulled back on that. Too much connection and you could suffer system shock if your mech took too big a hit. But they’d built her neurorig to take that kind of neural load. With the bond between pilot and mech so complete, it let her do things others couldn’t.

It didn’t take long to find signs of the convoy. Visual scanners caught the outline of the vehicle that was supposed to be in the rear. Stationary, engine cold. Amethyst signalled a halt, and Buehlman tossed a pair of overwatch drones into the air. The feeds of both drones peppered back to the whole Company, the feeds clipping in and out as the quadcopters’ signal got further away, or was blocked by one of the skeletal trees that bordered the right side of the railbed.

“Hold up,” Buehlman said. “EM traffic. Can’t pick it up, it’s mostly directional burst. But I’m getting rebound. Too much shit in the way…”

“But you can tell it’s not ours?” Amethyst asked.

His response took a few seconds. “It’s ghosts, Lead. No IFF, just whispers.”

Dove watched the local map in the top right of her HUD ping with markers. “Magic, fan out. If this is an ambush, they’re not catching us bunched up. Dove, need you in reserve.”

Dove confirmed with a double tap of clicks on her mic, spooling up her rifle while letting the others move on ahead. She checked the unobscured side of the tracks, the one that spilled into a vast valley of desiccated corn stalks and outbuildings for the local agri complex. Just the right height to obscure powered armour if it kept a low profile.

“What’s the corn to our left read, Buehlman?” she asked.

“Above background heat, but those kinds of fields trap thermal all the time.”

She halted, bringing the full spectrum scan of the field across the three screens in her cockpit. Blocking out the other data save for the audio feed. She stood there, silent, and watched. A minute went by. Two.

There. There was a light breeze, making the tops of the dead stalks. She caught one of them jostle, back and forth.

In the direction perpendicular to the wind.

“Ambush Ambush Ambush. Spread out now!”

***

“Contact,” Mackie, his noncom, whispered into the wide band comnet. “Five full mechs, no mobile infantry or vehicle support. Ready up.”

Rider moved to press pause and get his dick back into his jumpsuit at the same time, doing neither and tossing the media player down into the cavity between his crotch and the leg joints. Cursing, he put his cock back into place and tried to ignore the fat-titted slut slamming herself down on a woman with a cock in his peripheral vision. Least he had the good sense to mute it.

They left the barn out the huge aluminium door that faced away from the railroad. Comms were limited, but if everyone was doing what the plan called for, they’d be eating DynaStar pilot rations for dinner tonight. Seeing them in his own optics, however, it was hard not to be intimidated. The mechs were huge, at least three times the size of their suit. Only the barn’s walls were keeping them concealed. Enough room to maneuver. Enough space to get it done.

They assembled the weapon as quietly as possible, snapping magrails in place with a quiet, satisfying click. Each member of their three person team had a role. Rider was the loader, Spectre was the spotter, and Veil aimed.

“AP,” Veil told him. As if he didn’t know to load Armour Piercing. The HAMR round slid into the hopper. Closing the chamber, the whirring charge of the capacitor drained the expendable battery until the readout displayed green. Occasionally, his eyes drifted down to the porn still playing in his suit. God this’ll be a story for the boys when he got back.

“They’re moving,” Spectre hissed. Shit. Rider helped Veil heft the weapon around the barn before they could get away.

“Discharging!”

***

Mechs were considered the conclusive answer to any question raised in ground combat, in the same way that the main battle tank or the heavy cavalry were in centuries past. An imperious vantage gave them a permanent line-of-sight advantage over their adversaries, increased weight capacity allowed for a full suite of ordinance options, and bipedal maneuverability allowed them to both dodge incoming hits and get to places a tracked or wheeled vehicle could only dream of reaching. Their strengths, and the prestige allotted to them, were why DynaStar’s Expeditionary Force was so mech-focused. Why bring, arm, and feed an entire division when you could bring five pilots and their war machines? Even with the absurd logistical tail that a mech carried, it was still insanely cost efficient by the standards of an interstellar Corp.

But for all their benefits, both physical and reputational, that a mech carried with them into battle, they lacked one critical component. For a mech pilot, it was both the hardest thing to remember and the easiest thing to forget.

They weren’t invincible.

Shortly after Dove called the ambush, a magnetically accelerated HAMR round tore into the left leg of Grissom’s mech mid-stride. It carried on through the air for a moment, before it plunged its shattered limb down onto a foot that was no longer attached. 100 tons of high density alloy and myomimetic muscle slammed into the ground.

The rest of Magic was already in motion. Two more magrail rounds slammed into air, missing their targets by centimetres in one case. Amethyst’s cannon came online and started tracing where at least one of the projectiles had come from. The corn field. She swept her weapon right to left, the low grinding of an apocalyptic rate of fire scything down the brittle stalks of corn through contact or shockwave from the bullet’s passage. Moments later an explosion as at least one of her rounds impacted. Could have been an HE round, could have been a battery suddenly exposed to the air, hard to tell. But now the field was smouldering, black smoke pouring up.

Amethyst broke into a run as she ditched her first mag and swapped to a second, the act of reloading in motion the thing she’d practiced almost every day until she could do it blindfolded. But it didn’t help her should her path be in the direction of a second wave of railgun launchers. Ones spaced to place them directly in the path that a fleeing mech might take should they wish to gain cover from the first batch. Fuck, these Irregs were good. Amethyst had just enough time to realize they might have underestimated the locals when the rails of another HAMR round appeared from beneath a dead apple tree.

And that is exactly the moment that Dove was waiting for. Obscured behind the wood, she couldn’t get a clean hit. Once they’d emerged, she squeezed the trigger and sent a focused beam of charged ions lancing across the distance between her and her target. Air cracked as the sudden explosion of heat and pressure sent a sonic boom through the area. An ion cannon was not a subtle weapon, but it was an effective one.

The suit aiming the railgun folded like wet cardboard as half its body disappeared, ionized to a vapour from the impossibly hot stream of particles. Realizing what was happening, Amethyst let her momentum carry her forward, jamming her feet into the soil until her mech crashed into the tree trunk. It rolled over, crushing another one of the armoured soldiers beneath it. She finished the third with a swipe of the butt of her gun.

“Good shot, Diva,” she said. “Roll thunder. Show ‘em what you can do.”

***

The second HAMR round was on rails when he watched Beta Team turn to fucking ashes. Crack. White light seared through the air and killed two, likely men. People he’d known for months, one of them years. The culprit didn’t rest on its laurels. It was already on the move. No, not moving. It flowed, metal made to do things he thought were impossible. It moved not like a lumbering giant, but like a person. A dancer. And in its hands was not a ribbon of silk, but a charged ion rifle. One aimed straight at him.

He slammed himself into Veil just in time to keep her from being atomized. It meant that the beam went straight through the air she’s just occupied and right into Spectre. His scream didn’t last more than a second before the ear protection kicked in, but there was no way to forget the sound of a man dying with all his breath.

“Get offa me!” Veil screamed, her suit’s servos whining as they forced Rider’s weight off. He fell onto his back, pulse hammering, unable to comprehend how close he’d been to dying.

“We need to pull back,” he told her.

“Mackie hasn’t-” she began, but he grabbed her suit by its fragmentation deflection collar.

“Mackie’s probably fucking DEAD. I’ve never seen a mech move like that. We need to move, NOW.”

Her facial expression was invisible behind the mask of her armour. But as she turned to face the rail launcher, her decision was clear before she spoke another word.

“Go on. I’ll cover you,” she said, her tone sepulchral. Rider sputtered an objection, but she ignored it. He watched her like a bystander as she single-handedly hefted up the HAMR round on target. Then, almost too quiet to hear, he heard her reply: “DynaStar took her from me. I can’t run. Not again. Not ever.”

Rider hesitated for another second before hearing the thundercrack of the ion rifle.

Sweat poured down his face as he forced his armour to go faster than redline. He could feel the servos give, knew that in moments the hydraulics would burst and he’d be in little more than an iron coffin. But he had to get away. He ran into the cornfield.

Legs pumping away, he heard more thunder cracks, knowing with cold certainty that one of them had killed Veil. Fucking Corps. Fucking DynaStar. A pillar of black smoke rose in his direction, but he kept running until he could feel the fire’s heat through his suit. The fucking field was on fire! That was good, though! He could run through it and hide in the smoke.

More sounds of gunfire. Gauss rifle, sounded like. Then a tearing noise like ripping paper. That big fucking autocannon they had. What were they thinking? Mobile infantry against mechs was like picking a fight with a God. No, a whole fucking Pantheon.

When he came to the fire, he leapt through, hoping it was just a line in the field. But it was larger now, much larger. The dry corn was like kindling. The field was going up. Metres of striding through bonfire later, he was still moving, but his temp was redlined. Hydraulics wouldn’t last long in that heat. But he couldn’t slow down. He couldn’t.

He made it to the clearing where the autocannon had knocked down the corn. Only a few steps in did he realize he’d left concealment. Didn’t matter. He was close. Just had to get across. Just had to-

The shot from the ion rifle speared widthwise through his chest, entering through his shoulder armour and out where his left kidney had been. He couldn’t feel pain, nerve endings cauterizing in an instant as the vast majority of his torso vanished in a cloud of charged plasma. But he knew it was fatal. The suit faltered in its previous manic pace, ambulatory systems taking a few moments of preprogrammed locomotion cycles before the hydraulics gave out. The suit collapsed onto its faceplate.

The last thing his eyes saw before the light went out of them was the little screen of his media player.

Diva, his little drug, mouthing words he could not hear.

***

The hangar doors were wide open for them as they arrived. Applause from the maintenance staff, as always. Hoots and hollers on the audio receivers. Dove tuned them out, trudging over to the alcove for Triarius and powering down her systems. She was tired. Bone-deep fatigue made even reaching over for the reactor spin-down toggles force a groan from her mouth. She wanted to sleep.

But.

Her hand reached up and felt the Shunt buried in her skull. This thing would have to come out. The cable connecting it to the mech’s systems was thick enough that her index finger and thumb couldn’t even touch around its circumference. She laughed bitterly. That ought to be something Diva would approve of.

She waited in silence in a barely lit cockpit, unsure what to do now. The moment she pulled out the Shunt, she’d be Diva again. A dumb, giggling, vapid piece of eye candy for use by DynaStar in every capacity. Here in her mech, she was someone. A monster. A murderer. But somebody. Those beneath her saw a war machine. Outside of it…

She looked down. In all the fuss, she hadn’t left her Pilot costume from the porn she’d filmed earlier that day. Cooling vest, panties, boots. And she’d still cleared the OpFor, likely saved Grissom and Buehlman’s lives.

“They’re waiting for you.”

Dove heard Harmony’s voice. She hadn’t even heard her Agent enter.

“I know.”

The tall woman slid in next to the pilot, crouching to put herself at eye level. “They said you did well out there. No casualties on our side. Diva’s a living legend.”

“And what the fuck am I?” Dove asked. Harmony tilted her head toward her with her chin, but the pilot jerked her head away. “No. None of that Gemborn bullshit. I don’t want to calm down. I don’t want to forget!”

Harmony nodded. She stood up to her full height, letting her hand rest on Dove’s head. Her fingers slid through her hair, sending little chills of frisson up her neck.

“Do you know what I am? What being Gemborn means?”

“Not…not really,” Dove admitted. “I know it’s some kind of Xenotech. Like an alien, crystal womb thing that grows people.”

Harmony tilted her head to the side, offering a wan smile. “That’s…broadly accurate. DynaStar made me. Grew me, in fact. Do you know why?”

“Same reason they made me, I guess. To be a cog. To do your duty.”

Harmony pushed Dove’s gaze to meet her own again. This time, the pilot didn’t fight it.

“They made me for you.”

Dove’s heart beat a little faster. Her Agent pushed herself forward into her lap, parting her knees with the width of her body. Her hands roaming around Dove’s vulnerable, nearly naked form.

“You think I’m pretty, don’t you?”

Dove nodded gently, keeping eye contact. She did. Her muscular build. Her high cheekbones. Her husky voice that sounded like whisky on the rocks tasted. Harmony rewarded her truthful answer by sliding her hand down into Dove’s panties.

“Of course you do. We’re inseparable, you and I. That’s why we have to work together, right? But we can only be together if we do our part. That’s why you have to be Diva.”

“But I don’t-” Dove began, her words cut off as Harmony’s fingers slid inside her. It was like she already knew how to please her. What to touch. How forceful to be. In moments, she was sopping wet.

“Diva has fun, right? She doesn’t have to remember the pain. The heartbreak. And she gets all the glory. All the special treatment.”

“It’s not fair,” Dove said, gritting her teeth and squeezed her thighs shut to thwart the intruder. “Why do I only get to be myself when I’m killing people? When I’m at the controls of this fucking machine?”

Harmony pushed her eyes closer. So close that Dove couldn’t see anything else. They were so perfect. Rubies. Glowing red rubies. Her legs relaxed. Harmony’s fingers returned, rewarding her obedience with a brush of the pad of her thumb against her Pilot’s clit.

“Ngh…” Dove wanted to lose herself in this act. It was the first moment of intimacy that she had in months. Maybe years. Not Diva. Her. The real her. But she knew there’d be a price. There always was.

“What you might not know,” Harmony continued, her fingers making Dove buck against her, “or rather, what you might not remember, is that Gemborn can’t exist without a body pattern. An idea. A desired self. I was grown from you, Dove. I was grown just for you.”

Dove shuddered. It made a twisted form of sense. The patterns in her eyes. Her physical attractiveness. They’d grown her. They’d made Harmony for her. Her controller. Her leash.

“B-but why…all that effort…mnf…” she tried to ask, her legs twitching. Harmony withdrew her fingers, only to slide both digits into her mouth.

“Because you’re valuable. Not just as a pilot, but as a recruitment tool. Dozens like you have signed up for extended contracts for the chance at transition. You’re responsible for so much talent joining DynaStar. Men. Women. Others. All asking to transition. Each with a Gemborn of their own.”

“That’s-” A jolt of lightning hit her. Her eyes opened wide as she realized what it was.

Harmony had just yanked the first part of the Shunt out.

“No! D-don’t-”

Her Agent’s right hand slid back inside her. Memories drained out of her mind like water in an unplugged tub. Visceral scenes of combat, faces of dead friends, of the lives she took, all fading into the Static once more.

“It’s okay, my Dove. You’re the reason I have life. Without you, I’m a jar of undifferentiated cells. No reason. No shape. Without your needs, your desires, I’m nothing. But that means I need Diva, too. She’s apart of us. Together, we form a whole.”

Thunk. The second part of the Shunt slid out. The cockpit became a hostile, unfamiliar place. Systems shut down, her HUD turned incomprehensible. Dove felt so helpless. All she could trust was the pleasure. The context was lost, but she knew Harmony wouldn’t hurt her. She humped the hand inside her, her need spilling over the seat.

“I…I love you,” Dove gasped, her peak close.

“And I love you,” Harmony said. She kissed her Pilot, and for a moment, the pair were joined. The kiss was beyond lustful. Beyond romantic. They were the same. They were one. When their lips parted, Harmony’s grip tightened on the Shunt. Pain radiated from her beautiful face. “I’m sorry only one of us could look like this. But that’s how it works. At least, in some way, you get to be close to the body of your dreams.”

Confusion briefly flickered across Dove’s face, but Harmony chose that moment to make her cum. As she’d done every time Dove had been unwilling to be unplugged. And she’d told her the same thing she always did. Because when she yanked the last part of the Shunt out of Dove’s skull, she wouldn’t remember any of this. The last few moments of truth, of intimacy, of the knowledge of just why her Agent’s body made her feel that way, erased in a datableed of her short-term memory.

When Diva opened her eyes, it was with the flutter of a recent, pleasurable dream. They’d been a pretty girl there. Or had it been a boy? Her panties were drenched, regardless. Must have been fun~

“Diva, sweetie. C’mon. The others are waiting. They want to celebrate you. You did a good job tonight.”

Diva smiled. That sounded great! She leapt out of the cockpit, her copious curves jiggling with the sudden movement. Just as she reached for the hatch release, she looked down at her sodden underwear.

“Umm…maybe I should change out of these?” She turned to Harmony for guidance.

“That’s alright,” the tall pretty woman with the glowing red eyes reassured her. “They all know you’re a naughty girl. Go on.”

Diva giggled and nodded. Then, without warning, threw her arms around Harmony. She was always free with her affections, but the act still caught the Agent off-guard.

“What would I be without you?” she asked.

The taller woman’s arms took a moment before they returned the gesture.

“It’s funny,” she replied at last. “I was just saying the same thing.”