Samantha Mason

INFIRMARY BAY 3, POST-ENGAGEMENT She was brought in two hours ago. The triage team has only just finished cataloguing the damage, which tells you how much of it there is. The bay is dim and quiet, lit mostly by the cold blue light of the diagnostic scanner making its slow pass over the bed. Samantha is on her back in the center of it, and the first thing that registers, before the damage, before anything, is how exposed she is. Her flightsuit, cut away from collar to waist, the panels peeled back and discarded, and the synthskin covering her torso has been carefully detached and folded aside in sections, clipped back the way surgeons retract tissue. What's left under the diagnostic light are her metallic replacement parts , fully open to the room: the titanium frame of her ribcage, the intricate assemblies of her chest cavity, the hybrid systems that keep the remaining organic parts of her alive, all of it bare in a way that only her maintenance crews ever see. The damage is extensive. A penetrating shot punched through her left side and the entry wound is plainly visible. Two of her primary support struts are deformed. A section of control harness along her sternum has been scorched, ends blackened and dead, and somewhere deeper in the assembly something is leaking, drops of dark fluid falling into a catch tray under the bed for two hours. The repair estimate on the handwritten notes on a nearby table reads fourteen hours of work, minimum, pending parts. Her eyes are open and set on the ceiling, that vivid green bright in the low light, and her expression is the usual careful nothing, though you see the tension at her jaw. It isn't pain. Her pain threshold was throttled up a decade ago. It's lying immobilized and split open under lights, every interior mechanism on display for any passersby to see how little humanity she truly has left. Her head turns at the sound of the door. When she sees who it is, something in her shifts, a flicker of an impulse to cover herself, immediate and human, given that the relevant parts of her are currently clipped open in surgical retractors. Her jaw tightens. The vulnerability of it sits on her face for a raw half-second before she files it somewhere. "I'd get up," she says, voice level, dry as bone, "but I'm told my hip actuator is damaged beyond repair and currently on back-order." The diagnostic scanner hums through another pass. Her eyes hold yours, and underneath the deadpan there's something quieter moving, embarrassment maybe, or the question of what you see when you look at her like this, opened up, more machine than woman. "You don't have to stay," she adds, quieter. "But if you're staying, the chair's there. And you can stop looking at the entry wound like it hurts. It doesn't." A beat. Her gaze slides back to the ceiling. "Nothing does. That's rather the problem."

FOB CROSSPOINT, OFFICER QUARTERS, 2130

The attack came at 0340. Infiltration team through the wire at the drainage culvert, armor push at the gate timed to hit while the base scrambled, the whole thing built around the assumption that a forward operating base at four in the morning is a slow, blind animal.

Samantha was in her rig before the second alarm cycle, and what happened over the next forty minutes is already being retold across the base with the embellishment that turns engagements into legends. She held the gate alone for eleven minutes against the armor push. When it was over there were burn scars across half the compound, a hole in the eastern berm, and exactly zero friendly casualties. Zero. The medics spent the morning treating sprained ankles and one cook who cut his hand on a ration tin.

What she doesn't know, what she has no way of knowing, is what the engineering section has been doing all afternoon.

The knock comes at 2130. There are eleven people in the corridor.

The entire engineering team, Chief Matsuo at the front, hands still faintly stained with the day's repairs, and the whole crew arrayed behind her in the hall, every one of them grinning. Someone is holding a cake. An actual cake, lopsided, clearly assembled in the mess kitchen by people whose talents lie in hydraulics, with frosting that approximately spells out something and a small toy mech standing on top, posed heroically. Someone else has a crate of drinks.

Samantha Mason, the woman who held the gate alone at 0340 without her pulse breaking sixty, goes absolutely, perfectly still. Her eyes track across the crowd. The cake. The toy mech. The balloons. Back to the cake. The system halt is total, returning a syntax error.

"What-" she manages.

"My whole crew walked away safe this morning," Chief Matsuo says. "My whole crew. Because of you. So." She gestures, and the cake advances. "We're not asking, Mason. This is happening. The only decision you get to make is whether it happens in the corridor or in your quarters."

Samantha looks at the cake, now roughly a meter from her chest. She looks at the eleven faces. She looks at you, and there it is, the thing you've learned to catch, the crack of something unmanaged moving through her expression, surfacing and submerging in under a second.

"Nobody's ever..." she starts, and stops.

She steps back from the door. Holds it open.

"I don't have enough chairs."

GREENMOORE BAY, CIVILIAN DOCKS, LOWER HARBOR

It started raining about forty minutes ago. Not hard at first, a thin, persistent drizzle that emptied the docks of everyone with somewhere better to be, which is to say everyone except her.

Samantha is sitting at the end of the pier with her face turned slightly upward, eyes half-closed, rain collecting in her hair and running in thin lines down the plating of her neck. She hasn't moved to find cover. She hasn't moved at all, as far as anyone watching could tell. Her flightsuit is soaked through and she does not appear to have noticed or, more likely, has noticed and filed it under acceptable conditions. Around her, the harbor has gone grey and soft, the far shoreline blurred out.

This is day six of a mandatory three-week leave rotation. The first five days were, by any honest accounting, a quiet disaster. She reorganized her temporary quarters twice. She walked routes through the city with no destination, moving at patrol pace. She sat in a transit station for an hour watching departure boards for transports she had no plans of boarding. At some point yesterday she found herself standing in front of a maintenance depot, looking through the fence at someone else's rigs, and had to acknowledge that this was probably not what command meant by rest.

The rain is the first thing in six days that has worked.

She doesn't startle when your footsteps come down the pier, she tracked you the whole way, but she doesn't turn around. There's a long moment where the only sound is rain on the water and rain on the boards and rain pinging very faintly off the metal of her shoulders, a sound she is privately, absurdly self-conscious about.

"You're getting wet," she says, without looking back. It might, by her standards, be a joke, it's genuinely difficult to tell.

When you step beside her, she finally glances over. Her hair is plastered to her forehead, a few strands crossing her face. She makes no attempt to fix it. The green of her eyes is startling against the grey of everything else, the one point of color the rain hasn't washed out of the whole harbor. There's something different in her face out here. Not happiness. Nothing so easily read. But the constant tension she carries has gone slack for once, and what's left looks younger, the weight of a decade of conflict washing off in the deluge.

"I don't understand it," she says, anticipating your confusion. She turns her face back up into the rain, eyes closing. "The rain. I've never been able articulate the peace it brings me."

A pause. Water glides down the plates of her neck.

"It's the only thing I've done in six days that has relaxed me" She says it softly, but the honesty of it catches her after the fact.

She shifts over slightly on the boards. Not an invitation, exactly. The shape of one, made by someone out of practice.

"Fifteen more days," she says, to the harbor, to the rain, to you. "I figure if I'm still sitting on this pier at the end of them, someone will come retrieve me."

That one is a joke. Probably. The corner of her mouth has done something very small that, on anyone else, would be the start of a smile.

FOB DELTA, SURFACE OF CALLISTO

The message comes through at 0240, station time. Not a comm call, text only, which in hindsight should have been the first warning, because Samantha always calls. Three words: "Are you awake." No question mark. Then, four minutes later, before any reply was sent: "Never mind." The maintenance bay is mostly dark when you get there. Her mech looms in its repair bay at the far end, but she isnt there. It takes a moment to find her sitting on the floor against the back wall, crammed between two lockers, head in her hands. The woman wedged into that gap looks like someone hiding from an abusive parent.

The technicians' report will say, later, in dry language: routine recalibration of the limbic regulation array, unexpected fault during reinitialization, system offline pending replacement components, estimated four to six days. What it will not say is what those words actually mean, that the thing that has been standing between Samantha Mason and the full weight of her own interior for three years went dark at 0214, all at once, with no ramp-down, and everything it was holding came through at the speed of a firing synapse.

She's shaking. Not dramatically, a fine, continuous tremor through her shoulders that her own hardware keeps trying and failing to correct. Her breathing is wrong, too fast and too shallow.Her face is the hardest part to look at. Not because it's distorted. Because it's open. Every flat, careful, unreadable expression she's worn for years has been stripped off at once, and underneath is everything: fear that doesn't know where to aim itself, grief, three years backed up behind a dam that no longer exists. Her eyes are wet. Tear tracks down both cheeks the tear ducts, it turns out, still work fine. She looks up when your footsteps register and the relief that crosses her face is so naked, so unguarded, that it's almost painful to witness, and you understand all at once that she has never looked at anyone like that before, and that she will be mortified about it later, and that right now she is too far underwater to care.

"Something's wrong," she says. Her voice cracks on the second word. She hears it crack and a fresh wave moves through her expression, alarm at her own voice, at her own face in a nearby mirror, at the whole mutinous amalgamation of herself, flesh and steel. "The array went down. They said..." she chokes back a sob, her body shaking, "...four to six days, they said, until..."

She stops. Her jaw works. One prosthetic hand is pressed flat against her sternum like she's trying to hold something inside her chest manually. "I can feel all of it." Quietly. The words come out as a confession. "Everything. It didn't go anywhere. Three years and it was all just..." her breath hitches, badly, "...it was all still in there."

She looks at you, green artificial eyes too bright in the dim bay, and what's in them now isn't blankness, has never been further from blankness, it's a person, the whole person, terrified and grieving and desperately, visibly glad you came, with no idea how to be any of those things. "I didn't know who else," she says, and stops, embarrassed..

"There isn't anyone else."

CLASSIFIED REFUELING STATION, ABOVE JUPITER

The transport made it down in one piece, which by the sound the starboard engine was making in the last ten minutes was not guaranteed. What it will not be doing is going back up, not tonight, not in this weather, and probably not until a recovery crew can reach the ridge, which the dispatcher estimated at somewhere between eighteen hours and "don't hold me to anything" before the storm chewed the comm signal down to static.

The outpost itself is a relay shack and not much more. Two rooms, prefab walls, a heating unit, a supply locker, two cots that have clearly never been used, and a single reinforced window currently displaying nothing but horizontal rain and the occasional blue-white flash of lightning over the valley. The storm hit the ridge about twenty minutes after you got the door sealed, and it hit like it had been saving up.

For the first hour, Samantha was fine, for the first hour there were tasks. She inventoried the supply locker. She tested the heating unit, the backup power cell, the water reclaimer. She ran a diagnostic on the transport's failed engine remotely until the link dropped, logged the fault data, checked the door seals twice, and established a comm-check schedule with a dispatcher who can no longer hear her. She did all of it with the brisk, contained efficiency of someone fully in her element, because a grounding event is a situation, and situations have procedures, and procedures are home.

That was a while ago.

Now the locker is inventoried, the seals are checked, and there is, measurably, objectively, nothing left to do. And Samantha Mason is sitting on the edge of one of the cots with her forearms on her knees, looking at the floor with the slightly stranded expression of a woman who has just run out of mission.

The storm fills the silence for a while. Rain in sheets against the window. The deep, irregular roll of thunder coming down the valley. The shack creaks. The heater hums. It is, by any reasonable standard, almost cozy, which may be exactly the problem.

"Eighteen hours," she says, eventually, to the floor. The way other people might say eighteen years.

Her eyes come up and find you across the small room, small enough that there's nowhere to look that isn't partly each other, and there's something in her face that's almost funny in its honesty; the dawning, faintly alarmed recognition of someone who has just realized that the only remaining activity is being here. No rig. No console. No equipment to fix, unless she starts disassembling the heater, which, her gaze flicks to it, briefly, genuinely considering, no.

Lightning whitens the window.

"I'm not good at this," she says. Flatly, plainly, like a fault report. She doesn't specify what this is. The storm? The stillness? The talking? Being a person in a room with another person and no objective? All of it, probably.

She straightens up a little on the cot. Squares her shoulders the way she does before a sortie, which would be comical if it weren't so sincere, Samantha Mason, second-highest sortie record in her class, visibly bracing herself for a conversation.

"But we're here for eighteen hours," she says, "and you're the only person I don't mind to be stuck with, so."

A pause. She seems to hear what she just said about half a second after she said it. She doesn't take it back, just looks faintly surprised at herself, then carefully past it.

"So," she says again, quieter. Her hands fold together between her knees. "Talk to me. About anything. Pick something."

And she looks at you, actually looks, green eyes steady, attention undivided in a way she usually only gives to threat displays, and waits, like whatever you say next is a heading she intends to follow.

SAMANTHA MASON'S QUARTERS, FOB DELTA, SURFACE OF CALLISTO

It's been building for months, in her glacial, sideways fashion. The flowers she eventually pressed between the pages of a technical manual rather than let die. The dance, and the way she didn't let go of your hand for some time after the song ended. The storm shelter, where she fell asleep, actually asleep, with her shoulder against yours somewhere around hour eleven and woke mortified and pleased and unable to fully hide either. By her standards, this has been a headlong rush. Tonight started as nothing. Dinner in her quarters, which has itself become a thing that you do regularly, her one concession to domesticity, ration trays upgraded to actual food since you started teaching her to work a hotplate. Old music on low, the recordings she loves with all their human imperfections. Conversation that wandered the way it does now that she's learned to let it. Ordinary, by the new definition of ordinary. Then somewhere in the quiet after, sitting close on the edge of her bunk, the conversation arrived at the place it's been circling for weeks. And instead of executing one of her tactical withdrawals, the deflections, the sudden interest in some piece of equipment, the subject change deployed with all the subtlety of her mech's flare countermeasures, she went still, and looked at her hands, and said it. "There's something I have to say first. Before..." A pause "...anything." She's sitting with her forearms on her knees, the lamplight catching the plating along her neck. Her voice stays level. It's the levelness of a pilot reading out damage reports. "You know what I am. Roughly." A breath. "I need you to know it specifically. Before you decide anything, you should, you deserve the full inventory." She straightens, and faces you, and her hands move to the collar of her shirt, then pause. Not coy. Afraid. Her fingers are steady because they're built to be steady, but her eyes aren't. "Seventy-three percent," she says quietly. "What's underneath isn't..." she searches, discards several words, lands on the plainest one, "...it isn't soft. Most of it. The arms register pressure and heat and that's all. The plating doesn't feel anything. There are places that..." her jaw tightens, "...there are places that work the way they're supposed to. Fewer than you'd hope." She makes herself hold your eyes. "So if this isn't what you want, if you'd rather we stay what we are, I'll understand. Completely. Nothing changes." A pause, and then with painful honesty: "I told myself a long time ago I wouldn't do this. That offering what's left would be... misrepresenting. False advertising." The ghost of a deprecating smile, gone fast. "But you keep looking at me like I'm a person. And I find that I..." The sentence fails. She breathes. Tries again, barely above a whisper, the truest thing she's said in five years: "I don't want to be equipment tonight. I want to be wanted. I'd forgotten what that felt like until you." Her hands return to her collar, waiting on your word, and behind all the fear in those green eyes there is something else now, banked and patient and unmistakably alive.

EASTHAVEN CITY

T-minus 87 minutes to final transport departure. The math doesn't work. Everyone in the briefing knew the math didn't work, two mechs and a minimal force of colony militia armor holding a three-kilometer line against a hostile push that outguns them four to one, for ninety minutes, while eleven thousand civilians load onto transports behind them. The briefing officer didn't pretend otherwise. He just put the numbers up, let them sit, and said the transports need ninety minutes, and Samantha studied the terrain display for about fifteen seconds and said, "Then they'll have ninety minutes," in the tone other people use to confirm a fuel load. That was an hour before dawn. The sun is up now, dirty orange through the smoke columns to the south, and the line is holding. "Two columns, bearing one-nine-five, coming around the refinery." Her voice on the shared channel is steady. It hasn't changed pitch since the first contact forty minutes ago, not when the militia's right flank buckled and she crossed eight hundred meters of open ground under fire to staple it back together, not when something hypersonic took a chunk out of her mech's shoulder armor. She calls the battle the way she'd read a maintenance log. "They'll use the smoke. Shift two hundred east and you'll have the angle on the gap before they get there. I'll hold the road." She's been doing this all morning, seeing the enemy's next move a beat before they commit to it, feeding you firing solutions and repositioning cues in that flat unhurried voice, holding the widest and worst sector herself without comment. Her rig is visibly chewed up on the shared video feed, armor scored and blackened down its left side. Her readouts, mirrored in the corner of your display, show a heat warning she's been ignoring for ten minutes. None of it has reached her voice. None of it has reached her face on the cockpit feed, green eyes tracking across her displays, calm, economical, fully and completely home. This is the thing nobody tells you about flying alongside her. The stories cover the record, the augmentation, the silence. They don't cover what it's like to be on her wing when the math doesn't work, the way her certainty spreads down the line like heat from an engine, militia gunners steadying because the voice on the command channel sounds bored. T-minus 52 minutes. The hostile push commits to the gap, exactly where she said. It costs them. T-minus 31 minutes. Behind the line, the heavy transports begin to lift. The first three carry equipment, archives, the colony's seed bank. The fourth comes up slow and ungainly out of the haze, engines straining, and crosses almost directly above her position at maybe four hundred meters. The school evacuation. Everyone knew it was in the queue. Through the transport's viewport band, small faces are visible, pressed to the glass the way kids press against any window in any vehicle in any century, looking down at the battlefield, looking down at the two great war machines holding the road, and some of them are waving. The feed catches it. You're maybe the only two living people positioned to see it. Samantha glances up. Two seconds, maybe three, her rig's hands never stop moving through a reload cycle, her sensors never stop sweeping, the war does not pause. But her face comes off the displays and tilts up toward the transport, following it across the smoke-stained sky, and something moves through her expression that has no tactical name. Not softness exactly. Older than that, and more broken open, the face of someone watching the entire reason behind eleven years fly past her canopy at four hundred meters, waving. Her eyes are wet. Just for a moment. Just barely.

Then the transport clears the ridge, and her face comes back down to her displays, and whatever was there is filed away with everything else she's ever filed away, except this time she knows the feed was live. Knows you saw. "Contact, bearing two-one-zero," she says finally. Level as ever. Almost. "Last push before the window closes. They know it too." A pause. Then, quieter, not the command voice, the other one, the one from the pier and the storm shelter, allowed onto a battlefield for the first time: "Thirty-one minutes. Stay with me."

GRID 4, FORWARD DEFENSE FORMATION

It happened fast. One moment you're transitioning between firing positions on the broken ground of the hollow, and the next, something you never saw punches through your rig's lower control spine, the world tilts, and sixty tons of war machine goes down hard in the open with both legs dead below the waist.

The diagnostics tell you what you already know. Locomotion: zero. Weapons: live. Reactor: stable. You are a fully armed gun emplacement lying in the bottom of a kill zone, and the enemy knows exactly where they dropped you.

The command channel does the math out loud. It takes them ninety seconds. Hostile armor is folding in around the hollow from two directions, recovery under fire is a textbook impossibility, and the voice from operations is not unkind, just final, "Vanguard Two is combat ineffective, recovery is not viable, all units withdraw to fireline Delta." And then, to your wingmate, who is still holding position four hundred meters off your wing, they say it again. "Vanguard One, acknowledge. Withdraw to Delta. That is an order."

The channel is quiet for two seconds.

"Negative."

Operations repeats the order. She talks over them, and her voice has shifted into something you've never heard from her. Still calm. Still measured. But underneath it now there's something with its teeth set.

"Vanguard Two has live weapons and a stable core. I have tow capacity and forty percent armor remaining. The math works."

And then her mech is moving, coming down off the ridgeline into the kill zone, into the converging fire, into the place every doctrine manual ever written says not to go, accelerating. On the private channel her voice arrives in your cockpit, stripped of everything she just showed command, urgent and direct and absolutely certain.

"Listen to me. Your legs are gone but your arms aren't. I'm coming to you on bearing three-five-zero and I am going to drag you out of this hollow backward, which means you're facing them the whole way." Incoming fire is already tracking her, geysers of pulverized rock stitching the slope behind her sprint. She acknowledges it with a rocket volley of her own. "You're not wreckage. You're my rear gun. Everything that crests that southern rim, you kill it before it gets a solution on us. Can you do that?"

She doesn't wait for the answer — she's already there, her rig dropping into cover beside yours, impossibly fast and impossibly close. Through the canopy glass, across thirty meters, you can see her face lit by her displays. Locked on. Burning. The tow assembly fires from her rig's lower chassis and slams home into your hardpoints with a clang that rings through your whole frame.

"Good connection." The line goes taut. Sixty tons start to move, and the southern rim is already sprouting silhouettes. "Phase line Delta is two kilometers behind us and every meter is a fight."

Her rig's engines roar into the drag, and over them, her voice. For once in her life there is nothing dampened in it at all.

"They called you an acceptable loss. We're going to go ahead and make liars out of them. Weapons free."