“Telemetry says it’s over four hundred meters tall,” someone crackles through the comms. “Category Delta-Red. That’s a first.”
“Means we get to name it,” I say, cracking my knuckles.
“Means you’re going to die,” someone else mutters. Probably Jorl from deck six. That guy’s never liked me.
I grin anyway. Because this? This is what I live for.
The scale. The chaos. The line between impossible andlet’s try anyway.
Then I see her.
Aria.
Running across the deck, boots clanging, half still in her engineer’s jumpsuit, curls jammed under her helmet, and a datapad clutched in one hand like it’s a sword. She looks grim. Focused. Beautiful.
“You’re late,” I call.
“You’re insane,” she snaps.
“Same difference.”
She doesn’t slow. Doesn’t stop. Just reaches the base of the ladder and climbs fast, eyes already scanning the mecha’s side housing like she’s doing the math on whether Whiplash will survive the next twenty minutes.
“We haven’t finished stabilizer mod C,” she says, breath coming hard. “The radiation shielding on the neural feedback loop is still uncalibrated.”
“We’ll finish it in the field,” I say, swinging up into the cockpit.
“Your lack of planning isn’t a strategy, Naull.”
“But it’s sexy, isn’t it?”
She huffs, but I catch the faint twitch at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile, but close enough to call a win.
“You coming?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. But she climbs in after me anyway.
She always does.
The cockpit seals around us with a hiss and a thud. Pressurization engages, filtering the air. The hum of startup routines pulses beneath my fingertips as I sink into the harness. Aria moves beside me, checking diagnostics with swift, practiced precision.
“Reactors online,” she says. “Whiplash is green across the board except for?—”
“I know,” I cut in. “Stabilizer mod.”
“I’m serious. If we hit turbulence mid-Meld, it could trigger a feedback burst. You could stroke out.”
I flash her a grin. “You say that like I’d notice.”
She shoots me a glare that could disassemble atoms.
Then she sighs. “Let’s just try not to die.”
We settle in. Plug the neural bands in. The system comes alive around us—lights, circuits, the familiar buzz of machine consciousness waking up between our bodies.
“Meld interface initiating,” the AI drones.
I close my eyes.
