Chapter Text
"Overwatch to Thorn. Tacnet link stable, targeting codes transmitted. Sixty seconds to contact. Over."
Norea licked her lips, tasting blood. Imagined? "Thorn copies. Do I have firing discretion? Over."
"...Firing discretion authorized." A hesitation over the open line, unforgivable. "Good hunting, Norea."
Norea bit her lip. Blood, not imagined. She nearly said something she probably wouldn't regret, but decided against it on practical grounds. "Stay focused, Nanaura," she snapped instead. "Over."
"R-right. Over and out."
A laugh skittered around the arc of the cockpit, tickling Norea's palms through the control sticks and running a finger up the inside of her spine as holographic lips grazed her ear. "You're so cute when you're mad at your ex."
Norea gritted her teeth, willing herself not to be distracted by the almost-real, the breath on her skin that couldn't possibly exist. "Fuck off, Sophie."
"So cold~" Sophie crooned, swaying with giddy grace as she cast herself forward to lie on the dashboard like a miniaturized pinup model. Her skin shimmered and pulsed with holographic patterns, hypnotic, but at least she was wearing clothes today. "But that's what I love about you, Nory—so focused! It's delicious."
"I'll be more focused when you stop distracting me," Norea said. "How long?"
Sophie pouted, pushing her wrists into her cheeks and kicking her legs. A timer flashed alive above her head—37 seconds. "Awww, you're so mean~, I'd almost believe you were really mad at me."
Norea's teeth ground, audibly.
Sophie laughed. She rolled onto her back, lifting one arm to lazily trace circles across the HUD. Four, then seven, then ten, then twelve. "And all that just for us!" Sophie sighed, suddenly sitting up and grinning at her Pilot. "You'll leave a few for me, right?"
Sophie's voice struck an odd chord; anticipation blending with fondness. It resonated against something in Norea's nerves, calming her.
"No promises," Norea said, letting her lip curl viciously.
Sophie grinned to match, eyes gleaming sapphire-sharp. "Oooooh... there's that fire I love..." She flicked a finger, and the camouflage netting fell off as the clasps unlatched themselves. Another flick triggered a bone-deep hum, Thorn's coldcore reactor coming to life beneath Norea's seat. A third finger, and a harsher tone, as that energy found direction.
Norea shifted the controls, closing her eyes as she felt the fingers reaching into her spine, felt the twenty-ton Tachyon Lance rise to brace against her right shoulder. The barrel split, and the drizzling rain hissed into puffs of steam against the exposed heatsinks.
There was an emblem on the side, worn and scratched and defaced, but still visible.
The brass wanted her to paint over it. Nika did too. "Bad optics," said one. "Bad luck," said the other.
Norea disagreed. As her second set of hands stabilized the Lance, she imagined the hard angles of that emblem—trinity enclosing hexagon. It was both a maker's mark and owner's brand, blazoned royal purple. To the people of Asticassia-III, it was a symbol of terror. The spectre of burning forests, death hanging in the sky, hell on corporate wings.
But to Norea? It was a mission statement. Declaration of intent.
If Harrison Armory ever got the chance to sift through her wreckage, she wanted them to know that she'd used their own guns to kill them.
15 seconds. The target locks—trinities enclosing hexagons, because even Nanaura could appreciate a grim joke, sometimes—crawled up the landscape towards the horizon line.
"They'll be in range the moment they clear the hills," Sophie said. An unusual note of concern entered her voice. "You're sure you're ready for this, right?"
Norea almost scoffed, but Sophie's expression caught her off guard, the genuine concern pulling at something she liked to pretend she didn't have inside her anymore.
Not the part of her that feared death, but maybe the part that feared the death of others. She thought of the battle lines collapsing, of Olcott and Naji, the kids, (...even Nanaura, damn her) lying dead in the street. She imagined Sophie flickering out, the cockpit lights going dim for a final time. All their souls, like steam, escaping through bullet holes.
Then, Norea reached back into her mind and rolled back the tape. Pushed souls into bodies, pulled bullets from their flesh and stitched closed the holes. She followed those bullets back to those guns, to jackboots, uniforms. Trinties enclosing hexagons. She imagined herself. She imagined she was holding a gun.
She imagined pulling that trigger, and a different kind of whole-body shiver rattled Norea down to her teeth.
"Hey," Sophie cut in, all levity gone.
Norea scoffed at the concern. "What?" she said, reaching out her palm. "You think I'm going to back out now?"
Sophie stepped into the offered hand, riding it up to stand in front of Norea's face to look deep into her eyes.
"Humans aren't supposed to enjoy killing each other," Sophie said, as if that meant anything.
Norea's lips thinned. "Humans aren't supposed to enjoy a lot of things," she said, leaning forward to kiss Sophie. It was a ridiculous piece of theater, with Sophie currently standing no taller than a dress-up doll, but if Norea could convince herself she tasted lipstick, who was going to call her a liar? "Fuck being human," Norea whispered, aiming the words down Sophie's throat.
Sophie laughed, breathless and sharp. She broke from the kiss, and suddenly burst outwards until she matched Norea's size. She straddled Norea's lap, bracing her hands on her pilot's shoulders and gazing into her with fathomless blue eyes.
(There was something terribly compelling in the particular blue of Sophie's eyes, a certain complexity in the pattern of the iris. Like sapphires—not poetically, but faceted, like she had real gemstones set into her sockets. Inhuman, in the sexiest way possible.)
Sophie licked her lips, letting the clock run down precious seconds. At first, Norea thought she might say something, but Sophie just twirled herself around instead, shimmying her intangible shoulders against Norea's chest. She was just short enough to fit her head under Norea's chin, and Norea could almost trick herself into feeling the warmth as she let her arms fall around Sophie's waist, just for a moment.
When Norea's hands returned to the controls, Sophie's hands settled over them, fell into them, became one with them as the neural link between them hummed, hums, like the Lance on their shoulder, like the rattle of a heater, the buzz of a vibrator, the staccato beat of desperate hearts. Time dilates into sapphire irises. The world becomes sharper. The world becomes more real.
Norea looks up.
The targets cross the horizon.
The clock reads 2 seconds.
The tachyon lance whines, held at the very edge, pent-up.
1 second.
Norea takes a breath—and does she smell something, like moist earth and wood smoke mixed with stale sweat? When she presses her nose into Sophie's scalp and breathes deep, it feels so terribly real.
"I love you," Sophie hisses. Not through the speakers, not any audible way. Her words rattle down the plugs in Norea's spine, in the seat under her ass, in the flexion of her hardsuit's joints, in every twitch and micro-adujustment of their targeting computer, in every part of Norea's soul.
Norea doesn't have to answer. She just lets Sophie sink in deeper, until the lines between them blur white, until they open the same faceted eyes and squeeze the same trigger, together.
The Tachyon Lance lets out a scream of impossible timeless light, and the shooting stars begin to die.
(The Elan series of flash-clones were characterized, Elan-05 had been told, by a number of defects.)
"Ontologic bridge, stage one engaging. Brace."
Elan-05 screamed into the bite bar, as fire flooded his spine.
(Many of these defects were inherited from their progenitor/owner, allegedly; a predisposition towards egomania and laziness that needed to be beaten out of them. A subtler, more stubborn tendency towards melancholia and depression, which limited their operational lifetimes severely.
And, of course, a below-average tolerance for pain.)
"Callback green. Stage two, engaging. Brace."
The fire took on a new texture, a flavor, almost sweet. Still hurt. Elan-05's screams paused as he ran out of air.
(Not that anyone was listening—the cockpit comms of all Elan clones were disabled by default, activated only when a superior officer opened the line. All this screaming, you see, was considered bad for the morale of other units. Some operators had even been known to hit their charges' killswitches early, out of some misguided effort at mercy. Better training had largely eliminated such practices, these days.)
"Looking good. Stage three, engaging. Brace for two shocks in sequence."
(There were three, actually. There were always three, but Elan-05 never reported that. The techs and operators always insisted that stage three connection was supposed to have two shocks, and deviations from the norm were a dangerous luxury. It could be evidence of a faulty component—the problem was that Elan-05 couldn't be sure the faulty component wasn't him. They'd replace it, either way.
So he made sure only to scream twice. Even if nobody was listening, it still paid to be careful. He'd learned that lesson from what they did to Four.)
"All readings are clear. Ontologic bridge is stable. Engaging final connection and introducing combat cocktails."
Chemical madness flooded Elan-05's battered little brain. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Testosterone. Dopamine. Amphetamine. The relief hit, hits like a water hose, flooding out those fires in his spine.
"Connection finalized, locked and set. Happy hunting, Pharact Five."
With a fatalistic shudder, the floor drops out from under him, the gunmetal of the hangar bay unfolding into the alien sky of Asticassia-III.
Gray clouds swirl like patterns in marble.
"T-minus sixty seconds to planetfall—wait, fuck, helm, break right! Break—!"
Then there comes a flash of something. Not-light. It doesn't show up on sensors directly, only in its aftermath—in the streak of atmosphere that turns to glittering plasma as it passes through.
The streak almost touches Elan-05. The radiance of it scorches the purple from his second skin and buffets him away like a leaf in a storm. The audio link to his operator suddenly cuts out, and he looks up.
The Harrison Armory assault ship Gracious Envoy, Elan-05's only home, lists in drunken confusion. There is a hole through the center mass, the metal plate still bubbling and popping as air sputters out—then fire, and then all at once the hull bulges and bursts and blooms like one of those flowers, from the contraband texts that Elan-04 used to get Elan-07 to pull from the secure omninet terminal in the officers' lounge.
(Five remembers running his fingers over those images, scrolling through a time-lapse of the transformation, the petals opening and closing as Seven tried to explain the reason for it—pollen and pollinators, cycles of growth and life.
Five always heckled Seven, back then, but he never made fun of Four for the way he looked at them. Nor for the drawings he made, his shaky finger tracing petals on the touchscreen of that jailbroken slate, long after the rest of them were strapped into their bunks.)
Watching the Envoy finally fucking explode, Elan-05 finally got it.
Another operator jumps on the comm, trying to reintegrate the Gracious Envoy's squadron with the rest of the army—but then she's cut off too, as another red-gold flower blooms upon the sky. More follow, the tacnet band choking with screams and contradictory orders, until suddenly a wave of interference—(legionspace jamming?)—smothers it all into silence, leaving just the rattling of the cockpit cage, and Elan-05's own shallow voice.
They mute the comms of his strain, so that nobody else will have to hear him screaming. But as Elan-05 falls towards the gray world where he will die, he doesn't scream.
Instead, he laughs.
"I get it, Four!" he shouts, as the retro-rockets fire and his drop pod throws open its braking fins, inertia kicking him in the chest as Asticassia—III rushes up to embrace him. But his eyes are on the sky, dazzled by the lights, the flowers. His heart is beating—he can feel it, he can taste it, suddenly. Maybe it's the shock, the pain, the drugs, maybe it's something so much simpler—the quiet, forbidden hatred cherished by the enslaved. Maybe it's hope. That'd be funny.
But now, at last, "These flowers really are beautiful!"