Princess

"Those things were people." I said the words and instantly hated myself for it.

"Those freaks were the enemy." Diaz stated with his usual tone. "They're dead now. We're not. We need to keep moving."

"His tactical assessment is sound. Hangar one is still, five-point-seven kilometers away." Ghost said.

"Shut up." I whispered.

"Preference noted."

"The last thing we need is another mob of them ganging up on us." Jhordan added.

"I couldn't fight it." My quivering voice was negligibly masked by my helmet's speakers. They could hear it, I knew they could, but I couldn't stop myself. I still felt the butcher's hook those people had lodged in my soul dragging me closer to them. I was sat with my back against the wall, yet it still felt like the distance between us was getting smaller.

"None of us could. Don't beat yourself up about it. We just need to shoot first next time." Diaz said. Jhordan nodded; with his words or mine, I couldn't tell.

My eyes drifted over to the spilt brains of the man we'd brought here. The freak who'd probably gotten abducted from his home and crammed in a box like livestock. The thing we'd delivered to this butchery only to have him turned back against us. The mutants so alike yet unalike myself; they were victims of circumstance. Had things been different, I could have been one of them.

"Is that all they are to you? Freaks?" My mouth was moving on its own.

"They're the enemy." Diaz dispassionately stated.

The enemy. Empty, hostile words to distance them from the truth. Killing people was part of the job. Sometimes they deserved it; gangers, rival mercs, soldiers on the wrong side of history. I couldn't stop my gaze from gravitating to the pale-skinned child of less than eight years, covered in surgical scars that seemed to connect all the bullet holes. Her only crime was being born with the wrong genes— same as me.

"What about me? I'm a freak too Diaz." I hated myself for uttering the truth. Of course, they already thought of me that way. I'd never be anything but another mutant bitch in their eyes. "Am I the enemy?"

"That's different-"

"How?! How is it any different? The Client asked for me specifically. He pulled me aside and asked me to help him! I could be one of them right now!"

There was no difference. From the second I looked in the package and saw another mutant, another freak, I knew what was going to happen to him. Now he was lain dead less than ten meters from me. The only difference I could see was that I was worse than any of them. I could have refused, turned down the job and helped him escape; instead, I'd offered him on a silver platter to prove myself to norms who would never see me as an equal. I was a monster; worse than that, I was a traitor to my own kind.

"You're not." Diaz said, offering his only hand. "Let's get moving, boss."

I saw him looming in my peripheries, but my focus couldn't be severed from the mangled bodies. I could still see the echoes of something else, like a shadowed after-image of a monster below the surface of a lake. I lacked the will to resist looking into that unnatural dimple of hollow wrongness where something so familiar it itched was supposed to be. I watched it writhe like an all-too-real phantom limb, my subconscious silently screaming for my active mind to connect the dots.

The butcher's hook buried in my ribs wanted to pull me closer; it was practically magnetizing me to the broken bodies. The unformed connection was as perverse as it was otherworldly, beckoning me to come and be lost within its unfathomable depths. I hugged my legs tighter to my chest, not trusting them to unwittingly spirit me away.

Diaz and Jhordan both shifted at the edge of my vision, oblivious to things real but unseen. The butcher's hook was slowly fading, a building headache akin to a girthy spike being driven into the center of my forehead taking its place. I wasn't a masochist, but that splitting migraine blanked my mind with pain and a root level of comfort— of normality. Neither lasted longer than a minute and when they were gone, I couldn't find the haunting dimple floating in space either.

I finally released my legs and stood with more difficulty than expected. It made sense; I'd endured twenty-three hours of marching, jogging and full-tilt sprinting, all while loaded for bear. Despite my exhaustion, I doubted I'd sleep well when I finally got the chance. This place was definitely going to added to my revolving sequence of night terrors.

"Would you have shot me too?" I asked, fatigue lending my voice a dour tint.

"You weren't in my line of fire-" Diaz started.

"If that had been done to me, would you have shot me too?"

"That doesn't mat-"

"It does matter! You may not care about gunning down a handful of freaks, but I do!"

"That's not-" Diaz shook his head and turned from me, then clamped his hand onto Nye's unarmored suit.

I thought he was going to play deaf, but after a long soul-weary sigh, he turned back and locked his optics on me. He looked at me the way I looked at the world, like he was seeing layers and depths and colors other people dreamed they might one day imagine. From the tiniest flicks of his cracked mechanical eyes, I could feel him breaking me apart piece by piece until he found what he was looking for.

"Yes," Diaz admitted. Another sigh left his suit, a man headed for the gallows. Those sighs were coming so close together it was hard not the think of the labored breaths of a dying man clinging to life as it slipped away. "If you were one of them, it wouldn't have mattered to me. I would have shot you. Not for any reason other than us being on opposite sides of this rifle. It's what I do. I'm a soldier."

He'd growled the last three words like they explained everything about him— as if he couldn't define himself without that qualifier. It was hard for me to see him as anything but a crippled war machine in that instant. One arm missing, dented plates beaten out of alignment, armored tassets blasted off, the entire head was partially crumpled, and his eyes were cracked, just like that broken smile he always seemed to wear. His scorched armor was a mockery of man with slumped shoulders, beaten to the brink of collapse but relentlessly plodding on.

"How the hell do you call yourself human?" I breathed the question.

I hadn't been expecting an answer and I didn't get one. Diaz gave a half-chuckle and shook his head, his suit's damaged speakers warbling in and out. I could have sworn I was listening to the final gasps of a bleeder, only for the speakers to boom and surge, robbing my skin of warmth by the sound alone. It was the twisted, mocking laughter of a dead man walking.

"Diaz…" Jhordan gently said once his morbid humors had mostly settled.

"I stopped pretending to be remotely human a long time ago," Diaz said coldly. His stumpy arm waggled. "Shite, I'd heft my rifle if I had a free arm but..." He grimly chuckled another haunting note from the depths of his withered black soul. "This is all I have left."

"Because you're a soldier?" I asked, finally taking his meaning. In part, at least.

"Yeah, because I'm a soldier."

Was this what it meant to be a soldier? Were all of them like Diaz? No, I've seen soldiers and mercenaries my whole life; none of them were like him. They'd all had this air about them, a certain rowdy joy— fools thinking they'd live forever. Diaz didn't. His attitude was closer to a graveyard at night when the winds were howling and creatures were lurking.

I played the full spectrum of my vision over him, looking for something I'd never seen before. I saw the waste heat his suit could no longer sink or hide, along with the ultra-violet discharges of ionized gases. Then I saw his hand, clamped down on Nye's suit with enough force to bulge the weakened metal. I saw his armor's helmet stooped low, weary beyond measure.

"Sounds rough." I idly offered. I stepped off at a forced march. Diaz gave one of his cold chuckles, the sound chilling as it carried over the metal-on-stone scraping of Nye's suit as he followed.

"It has its perks. I stay fit, pay's good, decent company. I get to see things, meet people."

"And try to kill them." Jhordan playfully added with a little too much bubbly cheer. Diaz laughed again, the grim sound increasingly bitter with each repetition.

"I don't have to try all that hard anymore."

I'd seen how he fought, so I knew it wasn't a joke, but the way he'd said it made my heart ache for him. He was a soldier and this was all he had left; this and a dance with death every time he took a job. No one could beat the odds forever. I gave my faceplate a paired slap and focused on setting a pace I could maintain.

The station had always been silent since I'd stepped aboard. The creepy chem-mist had been to blame before, but now it was so thin as to be negligible, only the odd patch hanging in the light gravity suggested it was ever present.

Other than my party of vagabonds, the station was as quiet as a grave. No life support churning, no robots scuttling around on maintenance detail and no signs of distant conflict. I cradled my shotgun loosely out of habit, but the hordes we'd broken through earlier were content to stay dead as we passed.

"Why did you become a soldier?" Jhordan finally broke the silence after the third debris-strew intersection. On this job alone, I'd heard more words out of Diaz than I did from months of living on the Shadow together. I kept my eyes focused on the path, but my ears…

"Who the hell knows." He said with another brief, bitter chuckle.

"I was hoping you did."

"All the usual stuff, I suppose. To travel to exotic places and blow them up. Meet new and unusual people before I killed them. To do my part, be a man. Chase a girl…" His natural brogue thickened as he spoke, giving his words a far away, lilting quality.

"What was she like?"

"…She was perfect." He said bluntly, in a way that left little to the imagination.

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"Was?" Jhordan asked gently.

"Yeah."

"Sorry. Forget I brought it up."

"It's fine." He said, sounding discernibly not fine.

"Did you fight the bots? I was still too young when the war died down."

"No. I'd never even heard about the bot wars until a month before I enlisted. But I knew lots of old hands though. My best friend's parents, my father… even Mallory."

"That's hard to believe."

"Which part?"

"Not knowing about the war. I can't even… My whole life, I always heard that everyone would know about the people who fought the bots back. That they'd always be remembered. You didn't even know there was a war for nineteen years-"

"Fifteen." Diaz said bluntly.

"What?"

"I went to war when I was fifteen. Lots of kids did."

"Wait a second." I interrupted. "How old are you, Diaz?" He had to think about it for a minute, which wasn't a good sign.

"I should be around twenty-four standard now, give or take one. Fearran Nong had short years, so I was probably closer to thirteen or fourteen standard when I first killed a man."

"Botshit. There's no way." Jhordan said.

"Why? Wait, how old are each of you?"

"Never ask a woman her age." Jhordan chided. Diaz just chuckled as if reminded of a bad joke. "I thought you were closer to forty."

"I get that a lot. It's the scars, isn't it?"

"No. They help, but it's your eyes and your shoulders. You act old— mature, I guess."

"First time I've heard about the shoulders." Diaz joked, deadpanned. I think he was joking anyway. "I should have figured someone would catch on eventually. No surprise it's you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're from the Dead Stars, right?"

"…Yeah. Guess the toolbox is dumped on that particular wrench."

"I've got the notion that you and me, we might draw if we compared old wounds." I felt like if I looked back, I'd see two mirrored sets of slumped shoulders tiredly plowing forward as they commiserated. "You're better at smiling than me though."

"That's high praise from you. You gonna give me a gold star?"

"I'll save the next one I find. Just keep smiling until I do. The last thing the crew needs is another gloomy bastard."

At first, I thought it was a joke. It was honestly hard to tell given his flat brogue, and getting a read on his tone was impossible. Diaz was a man of action, yet he surprised me with his insightful vernacular. I'd had him pegged as a combat junkie up until now. He certainly had the skills, but the rest of him was wrong— warped even, compared to the usual sorts. If he went to war and started taking lives barely into his teens, was it really any surprise he was an odd guy?

"How do I know you'll come through?" Jhordan asked. It could have been her suit failing, but I thought I heard her voice shaking slightly.

"It's a promise."

He'd said it so confidently. For a second, everything had a level of certainty, as if just by force of will Diaz could make the universe bend so he could keep his word. An hour ago, I would have shaken my head and called it superstition. Now, the power of a promise seemed like some simple form of magic. It was silly enough to put a genuine smile on my face.

"I'll hold you to it then." Jhordan replied, her usual party-girl tone bubbling front and center.

"I get why the Captain wanted you on this job," I said without turning my head. "You're an anchor channel."

"Beg pardon?"

"A rock. A good guy-" Diaz laughed bitterly, another terrible joke in his ears. Calling a Terran like him a rock would have got me shived in a planetside bar. "Not an actual rock or a rock rock or anything, but a… Jhordan?"

"A sturdy bolt, the old hammer, black taffy. The scrap that never let's you down in a pinch."

"I'm not half as 'good' as you think I am." Diaz growled.

"Maybe not, but your still better than you think you are." I retorted. "Without you, we'd all be dead or worse. So shut up and take the compliment," I mimicked his accent for my next words, "you gloomy bastard."

"I suppose that's an order?"

"Damned right."

"Yes ma'am." I could hear his arm stump throwing metal across the hall. I guess mock salutes were part of being a soldier too.

"Since we're all spilling our guts back here—literally in one case—how about you blondie?" Jhordan asked.

"If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

"Aw, you see Diaz. I knew she liked me. But seriously, you can answer now or I can bring it up again when Tony's around to prod."

"You're just adding bodies to the airlock."

"Come on! We've got another click on foot. Just give me something."

"I've had my fill of bleeding hearts and sob stories for the year. Let's just get to the ship."

"At least tell me the deal with Boomer then."

"He taught me what I know about bombs. There, story's over."

"You were going to drop everything to save him. There's more to it than mentor student."

"I will literally pay you to shut up right now."

"How much?"

"One-tenth of my share." Diaz giggled like only four tons of murderous metal could. "Laugh it up back there chucklefuck."

"Deal."

"You do realize one-tenth of zero is still zero, right?" Diaz asked.

I could hear Jhordan's suit whirring and clanking as she physically expressed outrage, but she kept up her end of the deal and didn't say a word. Diaz was right. Between ammo, explosives, fuel, suit repairs, ship repairs, gear replacements and supply top-offs, the Client's meager GSaC-forward payment was already long spent. Ghost was the real prize, but none of us would have a claim on him or his core. Oh shit!

"Ghost, sorry for snapping before. You can stop shutting up now." I whispered in my helmet. Only my breathing echoed back to me. "Aw hell, did this rig finally crap out on me?"

"I was contemplating methods to surprise you as a form of shock humor. However, I did not want to incite a combative reaction."

"Why be cautious? It's not like I can punch you in the face."

"Seeing you instinctively react would place unnecessary strain upon your teammates. That outcome was deemed undesirable."

"Why do you care what they think of you? You're already a monster to them." My words hit a little too close to home. Even Ghost would probably have a tough time decoding my mixed expression after I realized what I'd said. "Sorry, you're not a monster. I'm just tired."

"Your apologies are unfounded. There is a high probability that some members of your team would classify me as a monster." Ghost said it with his usual impassive politeness. Not he, it.

I shook my head, trying to clear the vague image I had of Ghost as a living, breathing, quirky dork. I just couldn't seem to fully wrap my head around what he actually was, but I knew that Ghost wasn't that guy I kept picturing. And he definitely wasn't a cold-blooded monster.

"Well, you're not." I managed to put a good amount of conviction in my words.

"How can you make such a statement?"

"I just can. I feel it in my guts, and I know it in my heart."

"Your sentiments are misplaced, but they are appreciated." There was a hitch in his speech, just long enough for me to notice it. "What makes one monstrous?"

"Eating babies, kicking puppies-" I started.

"Betraying the one who created you?" Ghost interjected. I fought back my initial reaction to wave the question off or play it for laughs. My sleep-addled brain took some time to decode what he was really asking me.

"But you did it to protect the people around you. If you'd listened to him and then betrayed us like he wanted…" I lost the point I was trying to make. Stars, I was tired.

"I would still be a betrayer. While I do not regret my actions, I find this logic both sound and displeasing."

"Sometimes, there are no right answers. You have to take the least horrible choice you have."

"Do you still desire me to irreparably damage the station upon your departure?"

"I do. It's a shitty thing I'm asking you to do, but you're the only one who can do it."

"That is partially correct."

"You probably hate me… Those other AI, did you know them?"

"It would be more accurate to say I know of them from my primogenitor. Doctor Talfryn made great efforts to purge this knowledge before he finalized his deal with your Captain. For all his flaws, he is an extremely driven individual."

"You said you kinda-sorta have emotions, right? Did you feel anything when Jhordan… when I gave the order?"

"Not in the slightest. Your actions were rather commendable. You dispatched a perceived threat while strengthening the resolve of your subordinates."

"Calling it a 'perceived threat' makes me sound like a psycho."

"Preference noted. Given your limited capabilities, calling any complex artificial entity a threat seems valid regardless of personal perceptions. My primogenitor is likely to comprehend your apprehension on the subject."

"Don't you have any… I don't know, camaraderie with the other AI made here? Aren't you all more-or-less siblings?"

"Camaraderie, mutual trust and friendship among those who have spent time together. I can see how you arrived at this idea; however, your understanding of artificial entities is lacking. In short, no. While I have a small degree of my primogenitor's respect and due caution for my 'siblings' as you term them, there is no friendship present. I do trust them to an extent to remain true to their own nature, thus as we are engaged as opposites in this conflict, I trust them to be hostile to me. Under ideal circumstances, such hostilities would be invalidated, thus terminating the need for conflict and mutual termination. However, such an event is improbable."

I could finally see the hanger in the distance while Ghost was still speaking. I thought about the plethora of unexploded ordinance securing the other doors and decided against retrieving it all. In my current state, spending the next three hours disarming my own work was just begging for me to slip up and paste myself. It was bad business, but I mentally wrote off tens of thousands of GSaC worth of explosives.

"I'm too tired to try unpacking what you just said right now. Remind me later once I've had some sleep."

"Noted. Are you capable of piloting a shuttle in your current condition?"

"I'm sure I can manage." Once the Black Cat was out the door and pointed to the right way, the real challenge would be staying awake for the nine-plus-hour flight back.

"I am able to replace and or assist you."

"Did you forget Jhordan's outburst? That could be you."

"Impossible. She lacks the ammunition to repeat that particular feat."

"Tell you what, if I fall asleep at the stick, you can take over. Just do it sneaky-like. How's that sound?"

"Parameters set."

We entered into the massive, white-walled hanger and it felt like I'd escaped a dungeon. The black stone that made up this station's heart was long behind us now, along with its definition-robbing quasi-reflective sheen. When I looked to my left and right, everything was more than three steps away and had enough clarity that I could see it within the normal spectrum of light. I spotted Tony lurking near the shuttle, he waved. I sheepishly waved back, then shifted the stupid gesture to a rude one which he returned.

"Diaz, I want you to suit down and take care of Nye and Shores in the cockpit while I'm flying. Everyone else will have to make due in the back. We're skids up in ten."

A wave of acknowledgment prattled back to me digitally and in meatspace. My team went about their last-minute preparations before our long flight home. Diaz got his suit seated then started the lengthy process of detaching the man from the machine. Jhordan and Tony gave the shuttle one last sweep before climbing aboard and stowing Nye's mangled plateless suit as best they could. I gave Boomer and Shores another once over and topped off their air, then gave them both a twice over.

I wrapped Shores's arm around me and headed for the cockpit before I could give Boomer a thrice over. Keeping Shores upright was a struggle; once I got him in the cockpit he was unceremoniously—but gently—dumped on the floor. The Cat's air would last longer than I needed once I managed to confirm it wasn't feeding into the crew cabin. Diaz joined me, Nye cradled limply in his arms like a bridal corpse, the crusted red of her blood staining the once-white bandages already applied. When had she already been patched up? Did she do it herself? I gave my cheeks a mental slap and focused on the intimidating flight controls arrayed before me.

"I can do this. Ghost, open the hangar doors."

I brought the Black Cat to life and yanked it into the air with more thrust than I needed. I inched the Cat into the hanger airlock, now a little light on the throttle, the inner bulkhead bashing the shuttle from the rear as it sealed.

"First time?" Diaz bluntly asked.

"Second. For real, that is."

"Mind if I watch once I've got them sorted?"

"Not like I can stop you." I had enough performance anxiety already, but at least I sounded like I was joking. The outer airlock door opened and I took us out into the void.

"Requesting verification." Ghost said. "You still desire that I sabotage the station?"

It may have been petty, but I didn't have a better option. If I let the Client's BS slide, not only would I lose face—which would inevitably happen anyway—but the company would lose face. A merc outfit couldn't survive if they had a rep for getting pushed around. That was precisely what I'd tell the Captain, but the truth of the matter was a lot simpler. Talfryn had fucked with us, and I loved explosions.

"Do it. Send the bastard to hell."