Casimir Ruchana

Space sizzles. Boiling water, frothing, searing, burning forth the lightest of little cracks.

You had been called here. A cryptic apology. A searing enigma. A military summons, writ in language millennia out of fashion.

Your scanner informs you that this mission's OPFOR populates only a single other mech. You feel no need to correct its presumption that you are here to fight against an enemy. You are, to be fair, still here to fight.

The reeds brush against the still braces of your mech's lower body. You look. You see her.

Were you a less pragmatic individual, you would be inclined to call the body she now occupies beautiful. White as ivory. Pale as a moon. Flecks of cracked pink zigzag through the hundredfold ceramic platings and arcing, architectural pauldrons. Her thrusters are untarnished by gaseous fuel. The pallid robes encircling her anterior weapon arrays are silken-soft and pure as gossamer.

There is not a single optical sensor on the entirety of her frame.

As her weapon raises – a clearly alien thing, dark and solemn, fixed to her fourth forearm like a smudge of ash on a watercolour painting, her voice whispers to the part of you that lingers inside your cockpit.

“She who lands the first strike is owed the other's first answer.”

The same proposal as her summons. So, you're not surprised when the electrical bolt of silvery fire gouts from that outstretched weapon, like a lash of the Dragon's tongue, whipping and roiling and splintering straight towards you.

It incinerates several hundred meters of the moonlit landscape behind you. Your frame's perambulants already drum into the soil, closing the distance; eyeing the cooling of the gun's barrel. If you still had a heart, now would you feel only its roaring beat. You whisper back.

“You're getting rusty, you old hag.”

Her great ivory frame finally draws itself up to its full stature. Across the commlink, you hear a familiar hissing laughter. There are no edges of the eye to crinkle, no hoarse throat to mirthfully yowl. Still, Cassie speaks, her limiters decoupling, her cloak burning from the back of her frame in a meteoric wreath of pink.

She lunges towards you. You follow suit. Hulking metal engines, plasmatic blades, old war machines.

“Bet.”

—Written by Fionn McC.