“Zeta squadron, mount up, you’re already late!” an announcement blared from the intercom system, speckled with static. She didn’t understand why they even bothered, she could feel the order to move in her spine, ringing in her thoughts with her operator’s beautiful, inevitable voice, forcing her attention to the mission with inhuman coldness. Yet, she persisted, just a moment longer. Maybe she would come. 

She stared at her reflection in the mirror, trying to distract herself. From the unwanted command, from the ugliness of her surroundings - murky grayish green tiles, flickering fluorescent lights casting dark shadows on her hollow face. A face that at some point must have seen better days, dark circles under her eyes, skin almost translucent, strands of white-blond hair clinging to her head like cobwebs to the light fixtures above her, but she couldn’t remember. 

She couldn’t remember a lot of things. She must have learned to pilot her armature, the five-story tall war machine that had subsumed her life, but that knowledge was gone, lost in the murky black of her memory, together with everything that came before. There was no before, there would be no after, she would drive her metal sarcophagus into battle until she would one day not come back. Why she fought, she couldn’t remember, all she knew was her operator’s truth, her truth. The war against the northern coalition forces had raged for longer than she fought, it would continue after her, but she had to go on. Her operator demanded it, and good drones obeyed.

Her gaze traveled down, over her steel collar, over the black rubber encasing her body from neck to finger tip to toe, only interrupted by the metallic studs of the interface, her connection to the electron brain of the machine she hated to love. Not quite clothes, it provided no warmth or comfort, more akin to part of a machine than the possessions of a human. She shivered. It was cold, she was not meant to be outside in her interface suit. 

When she was ready to give up hope, a second figure joined her in her staring contest with the mirror. Clad in an identical interface suit, its shiny black rubber clinging to her form, a similar hopeless expression on her face. She turned to her, embraced her, felt her fleeting warmth for a moment through their layers of foreign not-quite skin. They kissed, the ashen taste of her lips the first human feeling sensation she had felt since being awoken this cycle. 

“I’m sorry I’m late,” the other woman apologized in a low strained voice after their lips parted. “They didn’t let me out of their sight, you know how it can be.” She knew. Every misstep was punished on the spot. Their bodies were expendable, only their augmented brains and spines truly mattered, everything else was little more than a target to their wardens.  

Her apology was sincere, but she didn’t have time to consider it anyway. They didn’t have time, she wanted to take at least some humanity with her. She kissed her again, harder, greedy for connection. They were already out of time. She felt the searing sensation in her soul that came from an ignored order. They broke apart, again. 

“4F, just promise me you’ll come back.” She nodded. She knew she would, she had fought for longer than she could remember. Hundreds of battles on nameless wastelands, and she had always come back. That she had someone to come back to was new, it was exciting. 

A dark figure, clad in black armor and blacker disdain burst into the washroom. It shouted something, it took 4F precious moments to understand. 

“Move it defect! To your armature, you’re late.” It barked again, its voice as cold as her body. She obeyed, scurried out of the room, past the figure that had turned its steel attention on her mate. She wished she could help, she wished she could fight that thing, but she was pushed by fear, pulled by the compulsion to obey. 

She hurried along concrete corridors and cold lights, through magnetic doors and across steel catwalks, past the ever present watchful eyes of the black-clad figures until she reached her hangar. She had entered it from the top, looking down on the gigaton of hatred given form; of armor, weapons, and sensors that would be her grave. 

Almost automatically she noted it was ready for combat.

The pockmarked, cratered reactive armor on its crab like torso had been fixed, the armor around the accelerator barrel of the gauss cannon protruding from its right shoulder outright replaced; the left shoulder’s vertical launch cells rearmed with tactical nuclear missiles and surveillance UAVs. The eight argon x-ray laser assemblies that formed its hands had new optics in place of the molten ruins she had returned with from the last mission. Even its reversed, bird-like legs didn’t have the bloodstains of leaking hydraulic fluid anymore. 

She climbed into the access hatch, and settled on the reclined pilot's seat. It took little conscious effort for her to connect the wires and probes to her suit. 

First: Power. She flipped one of the few switches in the pitch black void of the cockpit, and immediately the hum of the fusion reactor filled her ears. 

Second: Connection. Another flick and the control lamps on the interface helmet lit up. She pulled it over her eyes, the black nothingness of its featureless inside taking away her sight, while the contact points on it mated to the transdermal conductors on her temples. She clicked her spinal contacts into the central ridge of the seat, finalizing the connection. The armature’s electron brain recognized its pilot and sealed the access hatch. Hyper oxygenated dampening fluid streamed in from vents all over the cockpit, flooding it entirely. She breathed in deeply, momentarily drowning herself in the darkness. Like always, it burned as the fluid was forced into her lungs. Panic rose, but that was just the worthless, atrophied animal part of her brain not understanding her purpose. She could breathe the not-air, even if her instincts rebelled.

Lastly: Control. She reached out a final time, slowed by viscous resistance, and flicked the third and final switch. Her mind was pulled out of her protesting body, out of the darkness. Momentarily she existed in the void until the machine had caught up with her, then suddenly sensation came back. Not from her senses, the machine's senses had overwritten them, the electron brain feeding her mushy biological one with the data from its sensors. She stood tall in the hangar, the world of steel around her shrunken under the gargantuan form of the war machine she now piloted, and waited for the order to move out. 

A momentary eternity later, static crackled through her mind. Her operator’s voice, beautiful and irrefutable, gave her purpose even in its militaristic mundanity once more. 

“4F, callsign Zeta one, operation start.” 

She stepped out of the hangar, off the ramp of the land crawler that carried her and her squadron, and into a new nameless wasteland. The stars shone from above, unblinking, unhindered by an atmosphere, cold light illuminating a desert of ferrite dust and minerals. Grey, glittering shards, broken crystals covered the ground from horizon to horizon, only interrupted by jagged metal teeth piercing the ground. 

Behind her two other armatures followed, similarly imposing designs, but each unique in its monstrosity. They trudged along following their nav points across a ridge of gleaming metal, through a pass where a past battle had molten the shards that made up the surface into dirty glass. They were to intercept a coalition convoy carrying… something. That information wasn’t important to know for a drone, her operator knew and that was enough. She expected an attack at every corner, but Zeta squadron made it unhindered to the ambush point. Everything had been quiet, simple. 

“Contact in five minutes, be ready. Status report.” The voice over the radio was filled with more static than usual. All the metal in their surroundings made communication more difficult, 4F realized. That was a complication that had not been mentioned in the briefing, an irregularity. Irregularities were dangerous, but it was not up to her to plan. She was just a drone, her operator would have to compensate somehow. 

With a lung full of dampening fluid, and a temporary body without vocal cords, she couldn’t answer with a voice. Instead she sent a message in their standardized tactical command encoding, as did her squad mates.

Zeta Two [TC-03]:  Ready to proceed

Zeta Three [TC-03]:  Ready to proceed

Zeta One [TC-04]:  Squadron ready to proceed

“Acknowledge, proceed as planned,” the response came, and they settled to wait the minutes until contact. She felt more nervous than usual, she had made a promise to come back, and with that the possibility of failure felt more present than ever. She wanted to see her again. She needed her, she was the only thing since she could remember that wasn’t war. 

Zeta Two [TC-42]:  Prepare for enemy contact

Her second warned, the estimated time to contact was up, but the response from the operator didn’t come. She could feel panic welling up, that was not standard operating procedure. As squadron leader, it was now her task to follow through with their plan. 

Zeta One [TC-05]: Proceed as planned

She swept her sensors over the horizon again. There was nothing coming, and the static in her electronic ears was too quiet, the communication to their operators was lost. 

Suddenly, the silence was broken, their radars lighting up with warnings as ballistic missiles suddenly fell out of the sky. White fireballs bloomed around them where they struck, one hitting Zeta Three square in the torso, consuming their armature in nuclear hellfire. She ran for cover under an overhang, ground penetrating radar showing highly dense materials that should provide protection from the incoming fires. The electron brain had run its counter battery simulation, a glowing red sphere superimposed on her vision where it placed the attackers.

Zeta One [TC-44]: Open fire on targets of opportunity 

They launched a volley of their own, 4F fully depleting her stock of ballistic missiles by placing hopefully devastating ripple fire on the enemy. Then, they were upon them in direct fire range. Five war machines burst over the horizon, carried on blue burning rocket boosters. As they closed, the static in her ears got louder, they were jamming them. She had to destroy them, she needed to hear her operator again, without her she was lost. 

She aimed her shoulder cannon on their leader and energized its accelerator coils with the same ease as she would flick her wrist in her flesh body. She took the shot, her projectile blasting across the wasteland at at near relativistic speed. The 200mm tungsten slug hit the enemy armature, ripped open its approximation of a chest, broke open its reactor shielding, and burned it with the energy of a star trapped in its body. 

The remaining four closed in, Zeta Two strafing them with auto cannon fire. She brought her laser arrays on target, but before she had a firing solution, a gurgling scream burst over her communication link. One of the enemies had lit up Zeta Two with their lasers in turn, and had found purchase. The invisible beams of coherent x-rays melted through her squadmates armor, through their armature’s structure, and finally through the cockpit. Pilotless, with a ruined crater in its chest, the machine fell over. 

“That’s the one we’re supposed to take alive.”

“Do we have to? It already got two of us.” 

She could hear the comms chatter of her attackers, they didn’t even encrypt it. Still, she got two, that meant the missiles must have gotten one of them. The operation had gone as wrong as it could have, it had been a trap, and apparently they were hunting her. 

This was bad, she had a firing solution and dumped her lasers into one of them. Her attack sheared off an arm, but she was still hopelessly outnumbered. In a desperate bid to win distance, to aim her gauss cannon again, she took to the skies on her own boosters. A mistake, as she noticed too late. As she rose on the jets of flame, two of the attackers managed to lock onto her and fired volleys of rockets at her machine, crashing into her boosters making her spin off course. Instead of gaining distance, she crashed straight into the ridge she had tried to take cover under, smashing the cannon on the shoulder of her armature. 

Falling, she fired her lasers again, this time hitting the already damaged attacker more effectively. An ammunition cook-off tore the armature apart in a black cloud of smoke. 

She crashed to the ground, the legs of her machine buckling, but she managed to remain standing. She ignored the painful feedback of her weapons, warning her that she had overheated her lasers, and fired again before her enemies had recovered from watching their comrade getting torn to shreds. 

She found another target. Four parallel running gashes of molten metal traced over the closest enemy, an ugly, low to the ground construction not completely unlike her own. Amongst the metal slag, she could see dampening fluid leak out, and the machine froze in place as its pilot expired, cooked in the protective liquid by the heat of her assault.  

That was when her luck ran out. The remaining two attackers fired at her with a mixture of lasers and auto cannons, and this time they scored. A horrible crack of static ran through her entire being, and suddenly she felt her body again, trapped in the flooded cockpit, encased in the interfacing suit. A shock ran through her destroyed armature, it must have fallen over. For a moment she thought about ejecting, but there was no atmosphere and she carried no oxygen. She could either suffocate in the vacuum or drown in the dampening fluid, the latter of which would take slightly longer. 

The moment was longer than expected, she floated in the dark, cooling fluid for minutes until she could feel the burning of her lungs being starved of oxygen. I’m sorry I broke my promise, she thought, and waited for the inevitable darkness to take her.