The ready room smelled of stale heat and synthetic lemon — the kind of clean that never felt clean. Kasmina sat with one boot up on the bench, jacket unzipped halfway, posture loose but eyes distant.
Juno stood by the locker wall, snapping her gauntlets into place. She was still learning to make it look effortless.
"You nervous?" Kasmina asked, not looking over.
"Only when you're quiet," Juno replied, strapping her thigh rig tight.
Kasmina gave a faint smirk. "That's fair."
A silence passed — not uncomfortable. Just full. The low thrum of readiness hung in the air between them.
"Just say the word," Juno muttered, voice lower now. "If they ever order you to burn another hospital, I'll pull you out myself. I don't care who gives the order."
Kasmina turned, studying her for a long second. "You're a good friend."
"Don't make me prove it," Juno said.
"Then stay close on this one."
Juno buckled her helmet with a soft click.
"Always."
In her cockpit, Titania didn't move.
The hauler squatted in the middle of the avenue like it had been lowered from orbit — massive, matte black, too clean to belong. It sat still, engine dead, snow dusted over its curved armor like the world wasn't brave enough to bury it yet.
The doors were open. No one inside.
She'd seen the drivers run — two figures in half-buttoned suits sprinting into smoke. They were running like their life depends on it. And maybe it did.
That had been a minute ago. Maybe two.
And still she hadn't moved.
Finally, as if something finally snapped, she raised a comm to her mouth.
"Nobody, this is Hammer-One. Do you read?"
Static answered - just wind through wire. She switched bands, hoping it would work. It did just half an hour ago, but now...
"Hammer-One to Nobody. Respond."
Nothing.
She swallowed, forced her jaw to unclench. Switched again.
"Big Fish, this is Hammer-One. Unmarked hauler, District Six corridor. Biohazard markings confirmed."
The reply came slower than it should have. The Colonel's voice, brittle and too sharp:
"Titania. Back off. That's not one of ours."
"I know that," she said — teeth clenched now. "And I know exactly what it is."
"Fall back to regroup."
"We don't have time to regroup."
"That's not your call. We're unsealing the old metro tunnels. Anyone crossing the surface boundary is being tagged as hostile and dropped."
"Shit," she whispered.
"Fall back. That's an order."
"Negative," she said, quieter. "There are still people on the ground."
"Hammer-One! This is—"
She never heard the rest.
The walker screamed as it surged into motion — one sharp shriek of strained servos grinding into life. Concrete cracked beneath each step of massive feet, the legs unfolded in a fluid lurch, plates flexing with a hiss of pressure. Dust bloomed outward as she vaulted the barricade in a single step and dropped into the open street.
The hauler loomed larger with every step — not just big, but imposing, like the street had bowed inward around it. Her HUD scanned for access points, vent lines, dispersal fans. She saw three — all sealed.
It was odd. No radiowaves emitted. No timer. No external ports. Nothing.
She reached the last line of cover — a half-fallen skybridge slumped across the avenue like a broken rib. One more step, and she'd be in open air.
She never took it.
The first impact came without warning — no alarm tones, no predictive arcs, no shiver across the HUD grid — just weight and momentum folded into silence, a shape darker than the snow-swallowed skyline dropping from the rooftop above like it had always been falling, like it belonged to gravity in a way nothing built by hands ever could. Juno hit her right flank hard enough to make the entire chassis lurch off balance, metal straining against limits she hadn't touched in months, concrete blooming upward in a hiss of snow and cracked rebar as one leg buckled and the frame dipped toward failure.
"Friendly fire! Friendly fire!" She activated Empire's comms channel, expecting to hear static, but instead, she heard only silence - as if she was heard, and ignored.
She stepped back — violently — skidding through fractured stone, as the enemy mirrored her, disengaging with precision. Titania's pulse slowed — not out of calm. Recognition had arrived.
Black-armored, seamless, nothing wasted. Humanoid in profile, but only in the way knives might resemble keys. The plating didn't shine, her HUD couldn't tag them — the scan matrix flickered, failed, tried again, then surrendered. Then her eyes gripped a red shoulder pad, and Titania swallowed, reaching for comms.
"Hammer-One to Big Fish. You might want to hurry up. Bloodsuckers are here."
The first circled wide, deliberately slow — like it was drawing the perimeter. The second mirrored. Wide step. Silent angle. They were writing the fight before it began.
She adjusted her stance, anti-tank knife slid in her hand from the waist holder, blade steady, elbows flared, weight perfectly centered. Her walker wasn't meant to move like this — it was a recon unit, not combat. It was too heavy for what it meant to do, and too slow for her. But under her hands, it began to respond, joints shifting half a beat ahead of command, motion bleeding clean from intention.
She hadn't told it to dance. But it was ready to do her bidding.
She could feel the electric current rising, less like energy and more like something coiled and listening beneath her ribs, crawling up through her arms, biting, slipping into the metal around her.
It wanted out. It wanted violence. Her dossier flagged the risk — biotic spike variance too unstable for regular use. But control was never her strength.
But there was no lattice. No relay. Just old copper wiring and cold steel. If she let it go now, she would fry both herself and the walker.
Titania had no choice but to hold It.
She stepped left, and her walker obeyed, moving with her. Heavier than she liked, lighter than what she was used to. But alive.
The joints hissed. One leg dragged across broken glass.
Across the street, Kasmina stepped forward — slow, unhurried, like a dancer moving into position beneath a ruined theatre arch.
Her gauntlets came alive, and Titania's HUD flared with a small symbol: fire inside of red triangle. Titania shook her head, forcing a thread of hair off from her face, and smiled.
"So you are that bitch who almost killed Nobody."
Kasmina didn't hear the question, as it hung heavy inside of Titania's war machine.
But to Titania, it felt like she did, as the fire lashed out — fast, sharp, low across the ground like it had been waiting there all along. It struck Titania's right side before she could shift — licked across her plating with a hiss of chemical burn and fused half her thigh guard into one solid piece.
Titania barely moved her vector away and surged forward into the gap, low and brutal, blade's whirring teeth dragging sparks from the road as she came in swinging at Kasmina's hip. The black walker twisted — fire trailing behind it like a cape of smog and pressure — parried with the back of her bracer, venting excess heat as she absorbed the blow and shoved Titania sideways, into open.
Right into Juno's line of fire.
A kinetic flash that tore across the street and punched into Titania's shoulder from twenty meters out — hard enough to rotate her vector mid-air, dropping it on the ground. Something exploded at the impact, and nose got filled with smell of burned insulation.
She rolled right.
The next two rounds bracketed her, as Kasmina advanced again.
This time her whole arm lit ablaze — fingers wide, flame pouring from every joint, a crescent of biotic heat ripping through the air in a tight arc that left the street scorched and steaming in its wake.
Titania ducked under it — barely — shoulder plating warping at the extreme heat. Whole frame groaned, hot polymer-ringer fluid spilled at her feet. Titania's vision blurred as the current surged — her own biotics driving muscles faster than bone could follow, forcing response beyond what a human frame was built to endure.
She spun out of the crouch, blade up again, slammed it across Kasmina's bracer and followed with a hard left jab from her empty arm into head module, which staggered the black walker half a step.
Kasmina twisted — raised both hands — and the fire bloomed, wild and elegant.
Point-blank.
A concussive pulse of heat that wasn't shaped like a weapon anymore — it was shaped like rage, and Titania took it full in the chest.
Her walker lifted — feet skimming the ground — then crashed through a broken storefront and hit wall.
Her breath cut out. The cradle blinked. Red washed over every control. Extreme heat warning flared once in the corner of the screen, which started to fail as it melted.
She didn't decide.
She just stopped saying no.
The current tore through her like it had been waiting its whole life for the chance — a scream without sound, a storm without sky — snapping out from her fingertips in a burst of raw electric hunger that found every exposed circuit, every open contact, every fraying wire inside the walker and made them holy for just a second before they caught fire.
The frame seized.
Then ignited.
Her arms lit first — blue-white arcs crawling down both limbs like veins made of lightning, the fingers of her left hand flexing involuntarily as the charge overflowed into the arm.
The fire around her collapsed.
Kasmina stumbled back, vents flaring wide trying to sustain the sudden surge of overheated plasma, as the lightning bolt of unimaginable voltage burned a hole in the air, creating absolute vacuum in its wake. She dropped to both knees, her walker venting heat in massive, uneven bursts, flames gone completely. Juno had staggered — only half a step, but a real one. Her arm hung low. The paint on one side of her frame had burned to exposed alloy.
And then silence.
Titania's HUD went black.
Not glitching.
Gone.
The cradle began to fail beneath her — heat warnings blinking into red and then white, then vanishing entirely. Power routed backward into the neural frame. Feedback coiled up her spine like wire being pulled too tight, and her vision started to blur red.
Titania tried to laugh.
Coughed instead.
Something thick came up. She swallowed it.
Another second and the walker collapsed — legs locking, torso seizing in a forward tilt, joints locking one by one as if it were kneeling in prayer to something neither old nor kind.
Titania slumped with it.
Inside the pod, blood rolled down her face in slow lines, like tears.
She had no strength left to wipe it away. She looked at the street in front of her, through flickering screen and smoke.
One hand still on the controls, though the controls no longer responded. The other lay in her lap, twitching once every few seconds as the biotic overspill continued to leak out of her like heat from a broken core.
And still, she listened.
Because something was coming.
She felt the footsteps before she heard them. Cold. Certain. No hurry, no hesitation. Just arrival.
Juno stepped into view.
Her walker was damaged now, although not critically — one side scorched to raw alloy, the edge of the chestplate curled inward from the discharge, blackened where the fire had tried to claim something that refused to burn.
But it still moved perfectly.
Juno stopped two meters out — standard protocol, no weapon raised. Her visor turned toward the cockpit.
The comm clicked.
Private line. Empire-encrypted.
No delay.
"First Lieutenant Titania Montawells, Armored Division Theta-9 "Last Light", I command you to stand down. Your war is over."
Titania didn't move.
Couldn't smile.
But her mouth twitched.
A cough — dry, wet, hard to tell — passed through her chest before she found enough voice to speak.
It came out shredded. Cracked. Sarcastically amused.
"Do I finally get a medal?"
She blinked once, but everything dragged.
The pod's heat sensors blinked red-blue-red, trying to compensate.
Across the street, Kasmina stood fully now, one leg still favoring the last impact. Her flame was gone; only heat dissipators still hissed in silence. Her frame bent slightly at the shoulders, ready for another impact, if need be. Titania's grip slipped, then re-tightened. One hand still on controls. The other... twitching, uncontrolled.
Nothing moved.
Then the screen flickered — too bright for this time of night, as the sky lit up. Something flared high above Amaranth city, followed by streak of long white smoke. Falling star carved through the clouds in a smooth, descending arc, bright enough to turn glass to mirror, fast enough that no one could look directly at it.
Not a signal flare. Not an artillery shell. It was approaching fast, curving its trajectory through lower layers of atmosphere.
Juno's head module turned sharply. Her frame rotated just enough to track the signature.
"What in the goddamn hell is that..." Her voice dropped — sharp, unsure. Juno wasn't used to not knowing.
For a moment, Kasmina and Juno locked eyes across the ruined street. No signal passed between them, but both knew: whatever was coming, it wasn't theirs. And it wasn't friendly.
Kasmina's voice came slower.
"Did rebels launch something from the orbit?"
"No. Arc doesn't match. Regional burn. Four-stage thrust."
A pause.
"That's a missile."
Titania coughed once in the cradle. Couldn't sit up, but she didn't need to. Her private channel was still open. The hauler hadn't moved. Its hatch still hung open, like a mouth that had finished whispering something no one understood. Smoke coiled from it. Still warm.
"Did you fuckers lose your minds..." she muttered.
"This is not ours." Juno responded, panic in her voice, as her walker stirred. "All Empire's units, fall back immediately! Authorisation code Fafnir Beta-Null — repeat, Fafnir Beta-Null!"
The sky didn't blink again.
Just that one flash — that one clean arc above District Six — traced now into every sensor on every side of the war, screaming down without identification or warning or demand, before suddenly vanishing.
"That's not a warning shot," Kasmina muttered.
Somewhere, a rebel commander was saying:
What the hell did the Empire do now?!
And somewhere else, in a clean Imperial bunker:
What the hell are the rebels thinking?!