About thirty-five minutes later, the shell came to a jerking halt, only barely slowed by the unpowered suspension. The cockpit door hissed opened with a hiss and a clunk, and her vision filled with the blinding green-white of fluorescent lights. This, they seemed to have accounted for - alongside the handcuffs, she was given a pair of sunglasses. What they did not account for, however, was the fact that her legs no longer seemed to work. "Ah, well. Fuck." She was lifted out of the cockpit - her left shoulder carried by a scrawny, acne-riddled man in a wrinkled, stained flight-suit who seemed to struggle carrying even her meager frame, and her right by a woman in an identical (though much cleaner) flight-suit with short, curly hair and a sharp face, with dark, deep-set eyes - and set roughly down in a folding plastic chair immediately in front of her shell. The woman sat down opposite to her in an identical chair, wincing slightly as the plastic dug into her back.

"Berebris, from the raid earlier." She mock-saluted flamboyantly. "Nice to meet'cha."

"What the fuck did you do to my shell?" And, less importantly, my legs.

"An old vulnerability in the shell's computer system. It was found and patched like... thirty years ago? Seems you didn't get the update. Y'know how your shell can run executables n' programs sent to it?"

"No?"

"Neither did I. I'm honestly not really sure why that's a thing in the first place - it seems there's an priviledge escalation exploit with data sent over the radio system - they probabbblyyy shouldn't have let the radio system parse n run unmarked data in the first place, but hey." She took a deep breath, cut herself off from a lecture/rant she'd clearly gone on a hundred times before. "Anyway, Heath over there is patching your shell." She gestured behind Peregrine - the same skinny man from earlier had his torso halfway inside the rear compartment of the shell. A messy bundle of cables trailed loosely behind him, splitting off and snaking into the depths of the hangar. She didn't exactly trust him to fiddle with her shell - not that I have any choice. "We'll fix your legs, too, after a little chat."

"Now - down to business." The woman in front of her dropped her smile, glared at her intensely. She could feel her eyes searching her, cutting into her soul.

"You're an ex-corpo pilot. Hell, not just ex-corpo, ex-Anscom." Her voice was deep, hell, deeper than deep, almost growling - the words scraped against her ears like nails on tree-bark. "The devils themselves. No-one escapes - no one just leaves Anscom. And the one's that do have one hell of a chip on their shoulder." that's not... The words were dripping with malice, a threat - but there was no gun, no blade, no weapon, nothing menacing her.

"And yet you just helped us wipe out a squadron of Anscom special forces." wait, those were special forces? "So then, corpo - " The word was like a red-hot needle embedded in her heart, a stinging reminder of the past - " tell me why you're here."

She sat still for a second, attempted to weave together the disparate moments of her past into a coherent narrative, minimize the vulnerabilities such a tale would necessarily expose. Then, she began speaking, shakily at first -

"I was roped into Anscom at 16. Told me my test results were great, promised me a massive salary, my mom a great stipend. Gave me the augs." She still remembers her mother watching through the glass of the operating room, searching her face as it-her changed, shifted. She was long dead now, after so many years of cryosleep. "They tested me again, said I was off the charts. Shoved me in a combat shell." She still remembers piloting it for the first time, flexing the machine's fingers as if they were her own, feeling the mechanic's touch on her ceramic not-skin. "Then they launched me across the galaxy, freezing me before every trip - preserving their precious little asset." She can still faintly feel the first time that piercing cold snaked through her veins, from her heart on outwards. "Destroying all the opposition, murdering the strikers, wiping out the little militias and resistance movements of every planet that dared to stand up to our - their pillaging." She can still clearly recall, word for word, the booming commands from the loudspeakers, urging them to lay down their arms, asserting the legal justification for their actions under interplanetary law. "And every time I did, I felt that weight in my chest, that building anger and hatred and guilt, like molten lava pulsing under my skin. Then one day, it was too damn much, like a dam slowly cracking over time under the weight and never getting repaired until it finally fucking breaks - " fuck. too much. She took a deep breath (it didn't help very much) and continued.

"I wiped out my entire squad and ran." She remembers how easy it was, how satisfying. "Dug out the tracker chip from my forearm with a screwdriver. Fled. Hid my machine in an intermodal container and skipped off world. Since then I've been planethopping, heading to all the newly colonized planets, the first offworlder in. Anywhere, everywhere." She trailed off, lost her words somewhere in the expanse of her mind.

"S'long as there's no corpos there." The first words the other pilot's said since she began.

"Exactly. Stayed as long as I could and then as soon as it was even hinted at, even a single article in the newspaper, I fled. Leaving right before the aug-scanners, the sweep of suits looking for exactly me. I hated it, leaving just when I settled in. Every beautiful planet destroyed, wiped out, and me, the fucking tourist who just skips as soon as she has to. It was that weight again, that anger, that burning hatred."

She squirmed in her chair, adjusted herself so the plastic dug into a different part of her back.

"I left too late this time. Got a storage container, pre-paid it for 40 years. Froze myself, planned that when I'd wake up, I could sneak into an intermodal container and leave again. Just like I had before. So many times before." She could almost feel the cold metal against her back, the constant hum of the generators, the oxygen levels in the cargo hold at a bare minimum so that she was constantly on the verge of fainting.

"But I couldn't. Not again. Not while the trees are still alive and the sky isn't black."

She grinned weakly, more of a veiled grimace than an expression of genuine mirth.

"Well. That's it."

It wasn't, but it was enough.

Berberis stared at her face for an inordinate amount of time, tracing every line, every little bump, every miniscule detail. It was as if she was being dissected, having every imperfect crack pried open violently with a crowbar.

"I trust you." She stated simply, plainly.

"Wh-"

Berberis got up with a pained grunt, walked over to remove her handcuffs.

"What's your name? Your actual name, not a callsign."

Peregrine worked up the will to respond. "I- I'm Evelyn."

Her handcuffs came off with a clink.

"Very pretty. I'm Katalin. And a pro-tip for handcuffs - make sure they're actually locked before acting all helpless." She winked, an awkward expression that ill-suited her face.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She walked behind Evelyn, grabbed a neuralink cable.

"Here, I'll fix your legs. Keep your head straight ahead."

Evelyn took a deep breath, tensed her neck muscles. She felt Katalin's hands grazing the back of her neck, gently brushing aside her hair, touching her skin ever-so-slightly - and willed the blood away from her cheeks, just anywhere else. It didn't work - her cheeks flushed a warm pink.

Evelyn took a deep, shuddering breath as Katalin pried open the silicone flaps covering the port, jammed the cable roughly in place.

"Sorry, I'm not ... the best at this."

"No worries." well, some worries, but those were best unvoiced.

She kept her head fixed straight ahead, heard receding footsteps on concrete from behind her. Then, a brief burst of furious typing, punctuated by the loud, plasticky clack of a loose spacebar.

" 'kay, here goes nothing."

The loud clack of an enter key - then - an electric buzzing, pulsating down her spine, through her pelvis, radiating down her legs. She twitched her thigh experimentally - it moved, albeit weakly, slowly.

"It'll take a few minutes to go back to normal... anyway, do you have a place to stay?"

"...I did, like forty years ago. It's probably - no, definitely, foreclosed on by now."

"Perfect!" Katalin clapped her hands together like an uncle after finalizing plans for an upcoming potluck. "n do you have any stuff/luggage in the shell?"

Mostly just stuff I had in the storage locker anyway, but... "Yeah?"

"Great, I'll have Jesse bring it to your room." My room? Katalin walked off, exchanged a few words with a tall, lanky woman, who mock-saluted before walking off.

Katalin returned and helped her up, slinging Evelyn's right shoulder over her own.

"Sorry if I'm overly kind, haven't had a chance to be nice in a while." She made a grand sweeping motion with her free arm. "We're in one of the old planetary shelters, dug out when the colonists landed. Built to sustain 'round 15k people in the event of a solar flare or gamma ray." She looked around - the hangar they were in was a large, circular room dug out of the ground, its hewn rock walls covered in cables and scaffolding that clung to it like ivy on a cliffside. The little space on the walls not obscured by scaffolding or cables was covered in grafitti, ranging from ancient tags made by urbexers from back when the shelter was first abandoned, to more modern anti-corpo slogans and art. The walls sloped slightly inwards as they rose, rose, rose, culminating in a large circular loading-door, sealing the cavern in like a cap on a colossal soda-bottle. The actual floor of the hangar was ... not densely packed, but decidedly full - practically every inch of space aside from designated walkways was occupied, if not by navy-green crates stacked terrifyingly high, then by helicopters or munitions or heavily modified mining mechs, crammed together front-to-back. I can ask about the armor patchup later.

"Here's my shell - " Katalin gestured limply to her right, where a dirty-gray machine stood, surrounded by scaffolding and plugged in from every angle like a prematurely-born child in the ICU. Its shape is abrupt and bumpy - made of compound curves and bulges like a plastic bag vacuum-sealed over a collection of discarded children's blocks. The chest is adorned with a massive graphic barberry-bush, cutting across the dark-gray paint of the shell, wrapping around the limbs of the machine as if it were tangled in spines. The space around joints and near moving parts was highlighted by a chipped, shabby safety-orange, accompanied by decals warning of the hazards of pinch-points - the one reminder of the shell's past as a scout machine. The slight iridescence of the ceramic, not completely dulled by paint, gleams warmly under the fluorescent lights of the hangar, interrupted by the dirt and grime that clung stubbornly to the shell's surface.

She's lead through a large doorway off to the side of the hangar, then through a series of progressively narrower hallways before they finally stop in front of a small, metal door.

"Here's your room - it's right near mine. Bathroom's over there, my room's over there if you need me - "

Katalin points vaguely down opposite directions of the hallway.

"I'll be back to get ya 'round dinner time. Try to get some rest til then, yea?" ... And then she was gone. Well, definitely not gonna do the resting part, but... The room was small, but not cramped - the room was warmly lit, and the walls were a nice shade of off-white, punctuated by a light-blue stripe just under eye-level. A twin-sized bed was pushed against the right wall, and a relatively small desk (with an accompanying office chair) sat in the far-left corner. A surprisingly plush mint carpet had been laid out in the middle of the room over the laminate flooring, and the bed was fully set, with crisp sheets and plush pillows. Her luggage (consisting of one whole duffel bag) had been laid down carefully on the carpet. She opened it and started unpacking, mostly to have something to do - nothing in it was that crucial. She'd had no time to actually grab stuff from her apartment, so it consisted entirely of the things she had dumped in a storage unit in the first place, all the second favorites - the books she deemed unworthy to even sit on her shelf, her old clothing from that phase where she really liked tweed, those posters of bands long since disbanded and promptly forgotten, an awful 'vintage' laptop that failed to even turn on, a bottle of ink that'd long since dried up, that tacky elephant statue she'd got at thrift store for too much money. When she was done, she ended up with a room that was almost, but not quite, her - a room that was the net sum of all her pasts, all the phases and interests and things that were her, maybe, but aren't quite her now, not anymore. The worst kind of familiarity. Well, still better than an empty room. She was about to sit down on the bed when she noticed a folded note, scrawled in half-cursive, half-print on old card-stock.

"Hey corpo Evelyn - Nice to have you here! Together, we'll beat the shit out of those scumbags and kick 'em offworld. Can't wait to meet ya - Jesse.

(P.S - Katalin likes to act tough, but she's just an overgrown softie/nerd with a shell (haha, get it?) Seriously though, she likes you. Wouldn't have asked me to bring all yer shit over and patch up your shell's ceramic if she didn't.)"

Scrawled next to it was a roughly-drawn smiley face stylized as a monospace emoticon.

There was a new weight, a new emotion tugging at her, not one of anger, or of revenge, or even quite sadness - it wasn't hot, burning a hole in her, nor cold, freezing her veins, preventing her from moving. Was it even a weight? Maybe it was just ... a presence. It was barely there, a small, light little thing, perched delicately on her collarbone. Evelyn set the note down gently on the carpet, and felt, for the first time that she could remember, the urge to cry. fuck, but the bedding's so nice. She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box conveniently placed on the desk, laid them over the pillow, and planted herself comfortably face-down on it. Then, finally, after so, so long, she let herself cry.