The machine dwarfed her as she ran her hand over the cold ceramic exterior, feeling the pits, the bumps, the scars, letting her fingers trace and glide over them, rising and falling with each divot. It feels ... more right, more comfortable than her own skin. Still needs a armor patchup at some point, though. Then, hidden in a small groove - a patch of warm, yielding silicone. She dug her fingers in, with more and more pressure until - a cascading series of clacks echoed through the small room as the latches released and the cockpit hatch swung upward. The inside of the cockpit was dark, lit only by the meager bounce lighting from the fluorescents above. She lowered herself into the leatherette couch and awkwardly closed the hatch behind her.

Utter darkness, utter silence.

Then, a rhythmic clicking.

Slow at first, then faster and faster and faster until the clicks ceased to be distinct sounds and blurred together into a sharp whir - and then ... nothing. A long, terrifying second later. Then - finally - a hum and an irregular series of clicks as the computer system spun up, a dull background whir and a rush of warm air tickling her skin as the fans kicked in, an amber glow shining through her eyelids (She didn't even realize that she had closed her eyes until now) as the CRTs warmed up. The plug slid smoothly into the neural port on the back of her neck, already perfectly aligned. She felt.... nothing other than a dull warmth in her nape. Exactly what she expected - The equalizer's set to 0%, after all. She took a final glance over the panel of switches above her, illuminated only by a dim green underglow and the dull amber of the CRTs, then gripped her hand tightly around a handle to her right, mounted on a short slider. It was silicone, vaguely translucent, dotted with small bumps intended to improve grip (in truth, it felt odd and slightly fleshy, but she really did not want to mess with such a critical component, even if it was just to install a new handle.) Slowly, delicately, she slid the handle up to 05%, careful not to let it slip. In the background of her mind, like a dull ache or an annoying background noise, she felt something new, a mirror neural system, the sensation of limbs and vision and sound. She focused on it, dragged it into the foreground. She dimly felt the tension of the limbs, the tightness, blurrily saw the concrete that the machine's eyes were presently pressed against, felt the useless noise of the radar system, echoing around a small concrete room. Then, she let go, unfocused, and it faded into the background once more, the dull tension of the legs present alongside and underneath the stiffness and acheing of her own, barely discernible as different. Gone, like a hidden image in an optical illusion that you stopped focusing on. She tuned the radio system to standard frequencies - in case anyone wants to call me for a social hour - flicked on the various switches for boosters and sensors, and - took a shallow, sharp breath, then slammed the equalizer handle to 60/40.

Suddenly, the sensations of the machine almost overrode her own, crowding out her own muscles, her own vision. The tightness of the joints, the compression of the springs, the noise of the radar, the vision that was just a gray wall, rendered with unbelievable detail. It was loud, overwhelming. Her mind filled with senses, touch, sight, sound, crowding out her thoughts. Why the fuck did I just slam it to 60???? She took a deep, shuddering breath - with her own body, not the machines - and slowly probed her senses, carefully navigating the border where the machine ended and the body began.

I am so out of practice.

Over the course of the next 30 seconds, she drew lines - distinguished the rhythm of the generator from her heartbeat, the shape of the steel armor from her own skin. The overload faded slowly, safely, gently. She moved her hands experimentally, then rested them awkwardly on her lap. She felt the roughness of her pants as through fog, distantly. She felt through the tension of the legs, the springs latched in place, the booster thrusters cold and ready to fire - then - all at once - she released it. Well. Here goes nothing. All at once, every single faux-muscle, every single joint, every single servo released, springing from one extreme to the opposite in a fraction of a second. The machine launched upwards with an immense acceleration roughly equivalent to that of a car crashing, tearing through concrete, rebar, water pipes, electrical wiring, foam insulation, a mattress someone had left in storage, and what appeared to be the remnants of an old vinyl collection. Then - she shot through the top floor and kept going, reaching an apex high over the building. Looking down, she could dimly see the path of destruction she had carved through the building, obscured by dust and rubble. She quick-fired her boosters almost unconsciously, careening to the right in midair before landing roughly on the remaining surface of the rooftop.

She nudged the equalizer down to 10% and rubbed her face roughly, prodding and tugging at various features, before letting out an audible groan. She dimly felt the rubble stream off the shell's body like water off a steeped roof, saw the steam rising from ruptured pipes as if through a dream. She slid the equalizer back up to 60, slowly this time, deliberately, feeling as the machine's senses overtook her own.

Then, perched on top of a pile of rubble that had a minute earlier been a building, she looked around. For some reason, she still vaguely expected everything to look the same, expected to still see the rolling hills of green dotted with lakes and rivers, expected to see the vast forests (their leaves and spines red year round, unlike anywhere on Earth), expected to see the trams snaking their way through narrow cobble streets.

The hills were gray, almost barren. Thin patches of barbed ivy were strewn about, almost sadder than if there was no life at all. The landscape was dotted with colossal mounds of dirt, waste from the vast mining pits that scarred the earth like smallpox. The dense city had been replaced with a sprawl of concrete and metal, with smokestacks and chimneys jutting up like upturned hypodermic needles stuck into the sky. From the distance came the dull rumbling of artillery fire. There was scarcely a sign of life in view, just cars and trucks like ants crawling along asphalt roads.

Anger welled inside her, mingling and blending with despair. She considered her options again.

I could probably leave now. Just another corpo taking a shuttle offworld with cargo.

They didn't know she was here anymore, didn't have the augtrackers sweeping the planet. A massive intermodal container would hardly arouse suspicion, as industrialized as the planet was now. She felt bile rise in her throat even thinking about it.

I'm not running again.

She caught a glimpse of the sky. It was a pure, brilliant blue-on-blue gradient, almost cloudless (save for the smoke rising from the various chimneys around the city.) It hadn't yet been choked from the smog, hadn't yet had its oxygen pulled from it, hadn't yet turned into the dull endless black that came when they'd consumed the entire biosphere. Suddenly, her limbs, torso, heart, lit on fire, filled with anger and rage and blood. She couldn't stay still, couldn't sit here thinking about fucking plans and ways to escape.

There's still a chance. I.. can still save it. Save something.

Her limbs - her vast metal limbs - twitched, itching to move, attack, destroy. A beep from the display inside the cockpit, quiet, distant: About thirty armored craft, none e-shells. Twenty-five of them with the Anscom IFF tag. The remainder had ... no IFF tag whatsoever. A civilian guerilla force. She'd seen them - hell, fought them - before. They relied on ambushes and the immobility of their targets - artillery installations, small tanks, factories and refineries and transports. They never won. They couldn't win, it was physically impossible at worst, highly improbable at best. The forces of an entire corporate army, all arrayed and amassed to protect buisness interests, against modified mining mechs? And now, against me. Her chest felt tight with anger, with anticipation, with that sort of joy that comes only from revenge and destruction. She saw the smoke rising in the distance, correlated with her radar scans, and noticed her leg was tapping, crushing and leaving cracks in the concrete underneath.

Careful. Don't want to get ahead of ourselves now.

She ran down the checklist with scarcely controlled anticipation.

"Retrorockets, good. Leg tension, good. Missile tracking, good. Weapons systems.... " She focused on her actual muscles again, tensed and pulsed them, flicking a switch overhead. "Good. Radar, good. We're ready to go." She realized that she spoke as if to a nonexistent commander, as if there was something on the other end of the empty radio link besides static. Concerning, huh? She shook the thought out of her mind, threw it in the trash heap, never to be revisited. Then, she tensed her legs, fired up her boosters, mostly unused for 40 years, activated her flight control - then exploded into the air with the joy that only anger can provide.

----------------------------------------

[1100 meters and closing.]

As she approached, her mind flicked between her eyes inside and the cameras outside, eyeing the 'battlefield' (the parking lot of some large industrial complex) closely, or at least as closely as she could given the limited resolution of the telezoom cameras. Among the ex-mining mechs of the guerilla fighters was a taller figure, its tell-tale ceramic plating gleaming slightly in the afternoon sun. It looked like - no, it was, a heavily modified scouting Shell: a slow, corporate-built craft, designed for scouting and "exploring" newly acquired corporate investments. It was built for durability, endurance, and surviving for a long time away from "civilization." What it was decidedly not built for, however, was 25 vs 3 combat (two of the guerilla mechs had been blown up in the time she'd been flying.) it was a testament to the skill of the pilot that they were still alive at all, let alone continuing to fight. They held up a large metal plate in front of them as a makeshift shield - the metal of it glowed dimly from the constant onslaught. She gave it roughly 45 seconds before it began to buckle. A buzz from inside the cockpit -

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[400 meters and closing.]

She timed the retrorockets with instinctual precision - the vertical velocity would zero out at the exact moment the machine's legs hit the ground. On the other hand, the horizontal velocity would remain constant. Yes, it was overly dramatic. Yes, it was unnecessary. Yes, shells had no valid reason to drift across asphalt, kicking up dust and throwing up a colossal shower of sparks as the mech's 'feet' scraped against the ground. Yes, her former CO hated it, told her off every time she did it. fuck him. Just for that I'll do it every damn time.

[100 meters and closing.]

Her shell skidded along the ground in a rough arc between the combatants, tearing up the cracked asphalt ground and tossing a plume of gravel into the air. Immediately, her radio buzzed to life, at first with static, then with low-bitrate voices, fighting for space, colliding, shrieking, clashing against each other.

"Is that a fucking shell - " "Is it on our side- " "Calling reinforce- " "Where the fuck did it - "

She raised her hand to the radio switch abruptly, muting the radio system. The corpo mechs stopped firing, lowered their weapons in confusion. She could almost imagine the utter panic in the control room, the buzzing of radios filling the air. Well, I'm not gonna wait for them to come to their senses. She swung her arm to the right and released her arc-blade - the metal slid out of her forearm with a dull clunk, carried by inertia. Before the corpos could react, she lunged at the closest mech, impaling her blade through its torso. She tore it out roughly, showering the ground with hydraulic fluid and the remnants of the machine's internals, before turning sharply to the left.

How nice of them to line up for me, she half-thought, half-spoke. She felt the familiar adrenaline pulse through her body, felt how the sensations of her body were subsumed by metal. Her mind tracks the 3 corpos at the back, triangulates their position with an instinct that is not her own. The volley of missiles feel like almost nothing as she fires them, like dead skin peeling off or dandruff falling from an unwashed scalp.

Now, the other four.

She launched herself at them, weaving between the hail of machine-gun fire - the bullets ricocheted off her shell, rain off an umbrella.

The first, an arcing swipe from her arc-blade - the cheap aluminium armor of the mech crumples like origami paper.

The second, an uncharged railgun shot from her left arm. The corpo twitches for a second before the hydraulics lose pressure and it collapses in on itself.

The third, another railgun shot - the last in the clip.

The fourth - shit. Nothing's ready yet - except - The five barrels of the EML launcher on her shoulder twitched like fingers on a keyboard, zeroing in on the mech's front. A slight recoil, barely even felt through the link - and its torso was .. gone, obliterated in a fraction of a second.

Eight down, seventeen to go. A delicate symphony of metal as everything reloads, silently, smoothly, almost automatic. Then - she took a second to actually look around - the 'battlefield' was a maze of warehouses and administrative buildings, awkward rectangular structures embedded in a sea of asphalt. She'd fought in places like this before (sometimes with civillians still in the buildings), and it was an utter nightmare - identical sheet-metal roofing, concrete walls with windows punched irregularly into them, metallic catwalks cris-crossing narrow passageways, cluttered with forklifts and shipping containers. Come to think of it, I usually just follow the smoke. In lieu of smoke, she spots a large hole in the concrete wall to her left, leading to a large loading dock. Ah. A chokepoint. She bounds into the air about 20 meters to the right of the wall - and spots 17 corpo mechs. Every single one of their guns was trained on the precise center of the hole in the wall.

She ran through the arithmetic in her head - Five with the EML launcher, then three with the first volley of missiles. Another five with the first clip of the railgun.. then... Her plan was interrupted halfway through execution (just after the missiles) by the impact of a large bazooka shell directly to her right.

It was like.. an electric shock, a pulsating current, fluctuating over every single inch of sensation, stripping away every mental safeguard. fuck fuck fuck fuck. Why couldn't she fucking MOVE? come ON, i've survived SO MUCH WORSE. Her mind, her muscles refused to comply - then finally, finally, moved, unconsciously, almost automatically. She felt... numb, saw her shell as if through a telescope. It weaved through a stream of bullets, ricocheting off the charred ceramic, smoke still streaming off the newest dent in its hull. Then - a flash of blue-white as it's - her - arc-blade deployed. She dimly saw the thing that had shot her - it was taller than a standard corpo, but not a shell - a poor imitation of one, clad in cheap aluminium pressed into facets. It held a massive shield (if one could call it that): a slab of solid metal almost as tall as the machine, peppered with bullet-holes and noticeably creased in the center. Well, there's no getting through that. It-her fired her retrorockets to the side, lunging to the right - and in the same instant, her blade arced down, directly through the shoulder joint of the mech. The arm (and attached shield) fell onto the concrete as the shower of hydraulic fluid coming from the shoulder joint steadily slowed to a dribble. She raised her railgun and fired through the joint, bypassing the armor entirely. The machine unhurriedly collapsed as all its limbs lost hydraulic pressure, falling to the ground like a discarded doll. Fuck you. Then - Ugh, is that really the best one-liner I could come up? She quickly assessed the damages - not too bad, nothing the self-healing ceramic couldn't deal with. She could already feel the subtle, warm buzz over her not-skin as the atoms reformed into their crystalline structure line by line, hex by hex. Mind - it still needs a patch-up. The ceramic could repair itself, but any material that was lost or scattered still had to be replenished, painstakingly wiped on by hand, filling all the cracks and dents one-by-one with a bright green slop that reeked of almonds and bone-dust. The dull numbness had been replaced by adrenaline. Now - eight left.

She turned and saw ... all eight, standing in a semicircle around her, not firing. She already imagined their commands echoing over the airwaves, some variation of "Stand down" or "Surrender!" or, best of all - "we've got you surrounded." No need to wait for them to start firing... She lunged directly at the closest one, impaling her arc-blade through its torso. Now - 4 with the EML launcher, 3 with the missiles. An empty second, utter stillness - then, one-by-one, they fell. Ugh. She lowered the equalizer down to 15%, then ran her hands over her face, poking, prodding, stretching, pulling. It was warm, soft, malleable. The transition took a few seconds to get used to: a shift in her reference frame from hard ceramic to yielding flesh. Through the link, she dimly saw a shell in front of her - the guerilla scouting shell she'd spotted earlier. It stood perfectly still at first, as if waiting for her - then it began to move its hands in a crude attempt at sign language. Fuck. She turned the radio back on, cringed as static filled the cockpit.

"Sorry, I had the radio off. Over."

"Fair enough, thanks for saving our asses earlier. My callsign's Berberis." The spiny bush. Thrives everywhere. The pilot's voice was deep, vaguely melodic. "Now - who the fuck are you?"

She flicked through the various possible answers in her head before replying -

"My callsign's Peregrine. I'm ex-Anscom. Over." Her voice came out scratchy, weak. Great first impressions.

"Ex-anscom, huh?" She could hear the eyebrow-raise in the other pilot's voice. "How long since you've updated your shell?"

An odd question, but - "40 years, give or take. Why do you ask?"

"No reason. And I'm sorry in advance."

"Wha-" Before she could finish, the radio link filled with a loud buzzing punctuated by digital shrieks, piercing her brain like a thousand tiny needles. Then her neural link went dark, followed by the CRTs, radar displays, and, finally, the lights. The hum of the generator seperated out into clicks then slowed to a halt. Silence. A minute later - the sound of helicopter blades and a jerky acceleration upwards.

Figures.

She could do nothing but wait for wherever they took her.