‘Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.’

From Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (1317).

Another week of torturous recovery, of every test in existence, checking parameters of bloodwork, nerve transmission, and rejection markers, Lyyr was climbing the walls, ready to be out of that room, to be anywhere else but there, trapped with her own thoughts and the spectre of her own death. So, when the long-limbed woman with the absent emotion came to collect her, she almost embraced her in celebration.

At first the corridors were familiar, following the design of every UTC ship the galaxy over, the layout similar to the dozens of heavy transports she had walked the decks of in her military career. A half-kilometre long, the beasts were designed to not only ship war machines such as mechs and tanks, but also provide the facilities to service them and give their crews room to exercise. It was familiar enough that it almost reassured her. Almost.

What was most peculiar was the absence of crew. It felt to her deserted and silent as a tomb when they proceeded through the vessel and she didn’t see another person until deposited unceremoniously into another featureless room.

Three other people were here ahead of her, two men and another woman, all of them – including her – wearing a mech-pilot's coal-grey jumpsuit, devoid of insignia in any form. Loose and comfortable, the uniform was another touchstone to her old life, a familiar ghost she could cling to. Each of them had gravitated to their own walls, arms folded and suspicious.

There was the older man, short and barrel-chested, with short grey hair and a dark goatee shot through with iron streaks, chestnut-coloured eyes darting around the room; door to person, person to door. On the wall opposite to Lyyr was the other woman, younger than she expected, slender and pale with black hair hanging in thick waves around her face as she stared at the floor. Slouched against the third was a swarthy-skinned man with dark hair and eyes, an expression of studied boredom across his face.

When she looked at them for more than a second, Lyyr could see the echoes of recent trauma. Mottling of regrown skin, dark lines of gashes healed too quickly, and the way the swarthy man favoured one leg, the other whirring in a faintly mechanical way when he moved. New skin and organs could be regrown from scratch, easy, but new limbs not so much. In the event of one being removed, without hope of reattachment, one would have to make do with a bionic prosthesis.

They were left together for god knows how long, tense and cautious, when the door opened and a new woman walked in.

She, like they, was dressed in a pilot’s jumpsuit, but walked with the confidence of a king. Tall and thickly-muscled, she towered over Lyyr, and her skin was beyond pale as uniformly albanistic white and smooth as if rebuilt in its entirety. Her plum-coloured eyes were hard and dispassionate, her coffee-coloured hair cut short.

Standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, she glared at each of them in turn.

Eventually she said, ‘My name is Major Sorcha Ford-’ a mention of rank and the rest of them stood a little straighter, some habits even death could not end, ‘-and you are the damned, spectres trapped in a hell of my making until I deem you are worthy to leave. Now don’t get me wrong, you won’t be going back to your old lives, not ever, but you will be able to go to a different hell – to war – and at least put your sorry fucking existences to some use!’

She paused, looking at them all in turn.

‘From hereon in, you four will be best of friends. You will eat together, you will train together, and you might as well piss together. I will forge you into an unbreakable unit, tighter than a duck’s arse; you will be gods of war and I will be your chief. Now, play nice, we touch down in two hours and you’re not leaving this room until then. Might as well get to know each other.’

Another glare, then she left the room, boots clomping on the deck plates, closing the door after her with the heavy clank of a lock.

Lyyr looked at the others, the others looked at Lyyr and each other.

This is going to be fucking great... She thought.

Hydraulics hissed, gasses poured in billowing gouts, and the main ramp of the transport began to lower, beginning with a luminous streak that steadily expanded to reveal an expanse of azure sky, a line of brown hills, and then the featureless plain of grey concrete beneath their feet. Blinking in the excruciating sun, Lyyr began to resolve some blocky structures across the landing apron, a scattering of low office or habitation buildings and the cyclopean edifice that was a mech hangar. Air flooded in, a blast of dry heat.

‘Make y’wonder don’t it, what’s in that thing,’ the short man, Kasey, commented. Despite their reservations, once the four of them began talking it had been easy enough to find common ground. All of them had “died” on New Atlantis, for example, and Kasey had been a fellow Ajax pilot.

Lyyr grunted and stared at the hangar, rubbing the mottling on her arms absent-mindedly. The itching had stopped days ago but the damage lingered deep in her psyche, the burning, the crisping, the flensing of flesh from bone, layer by layer...

She shivered and looked back into the ship as Ivey, the black-haired girl, and Adyan, the second man, joined them. Adyan had a noticeable limp, still getting used to his prosthetic, but was doing his best to cope. He and Ivey had bonded over being from the same world, the fifth planet in the Lumiere system.

Looming out of the dim vessel’s interior was Major Ford, like a warrior stepping out of a myth.

‘Where the hell’re we?’ Kasey asked. He was bolder than the rest of them.

‘That’s on a need-to-know basis,’ Ford replied blandly. ‘And you don’t.’

The short man frowned but kept quiet.

‘You see that building?’ Ford pointed at the hangar. ‘That’s your destination.’

‘There’s no groundcar,’ Adyan noted.

‘Oh dear, I guess you better run then,’ Ford drawled unsympathetically.

‘That has to be two clicks!’ Ivey protested.

‘Better get going, eh?’ Ford replied, her voice low and menacing, the grin on her face devoid of humour.

‘Ah shit,’ Kasey swore quietly.

Lyyr just got on with it, heading down the ramp at a trot. The sun was a powerful heat on her face, the air was dry and clear of pollution, and the gravity was close enough to Earth-standard for no difference to be noticeable.

A quarter hour later and the four of them were standing in the shadow of the building, puffing, panting, and sweating copiously, the trauma experienced and subsequent bedrest having taken its toll on their general fitness. Perhaps that was the point, Lyyr mused, to get them back in fighting shape. Adyan had experienced particular trouble keeping pace and three of them had rotated supporting him, stopping him from face-planting the ‘crete.

Ford pulled up a minute later in a military-issue groundcar, top down, engine whining, stepping out and taking a deep, satisfied breath.

‘Smell that, corpses?’ she queried, ‘That’s the smell of progress.’

No-one replied, desperate for breath and anxious to see inside. After an amused glance at their faces, the Amazonian woman led them around the side of the building to a door sized for humans, cranking it open without any sign of security measures. If this was a CIC blacksite, however, they would be unnoticeable but there and in huge quantities.

The space within was well-lit and silent as a cathedral, the gantries with their attachments for refuelling and repairing mechs familiar to any pilot, and Ford led them at a stride through and into the middle of the huge space, down a row of five huge machines in a quiet row along one wall. Each one of them stopped and stared in muted awe when they saw them, probably seventeen metres tall at a guess, and likely exceeding eighty tonnes in weight, they were of a design never seen before, humanoid in proportions with the familiar bulk and hard angles of armour plating, though marred by strange nodules at regular intervals. None of them had obvious armaments but Lyyr could see the ports and truncated cabling where they would go on the shoulders and arms, presumably to facilitate a variable loadout.

Those arms... They ended in very human-like fingers, if in a thicker proportion than a human of the same size would have. The head, too was odd, in that it was there. A normal mech would have the cockpit built as a hunch into the chest and shoulders, limiting its potential as a target, but these actually had one, protruding from an armoured ring that would protect its connecting systems from damage. It was a blocky thing with obvious lenses glittering in the light, several of them clustered in the front like a predatory insect.

‘Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the Einherjar-class mech – working title, mind – each of which is worth more than the horse you rode in on, packed with the latest technology created by the brightest minds poached from defence firms across the UTC and BU,’ Ford announced. ‘You will get to know these as intimately as your own body, closer than lovers, and in them you will be reborn.’

She looked at them all, letting the information sink in, then asked, ‘Any questions?’

‘What about different piloting styles? Kasey and I were Ajax, Ivey and Adyan were Hoplite, so how will these compare?’ Lyyr asked, still looking at the mechs. They were impressive to say the least, though she had concerns about whether they could take the same punishment her old one could.

Not that it helped her in the end...

Or maybe it had. Maybe the extra armour was why she was still here, rather than a greasy smear washed away in the New Atlantean rain.

‘Good question,’ Ford responded. ‘The Einherjar are modular, designed to switch loadouts based on preference or circumstance with weapons standard...’ she cocked an eyebrow ‘...and some new. We thought it’d be more affordable to build one adaptable mech rather than several specialised ones.’

Lyyr nodded. Made sense.

‘How long until we get inside them?’ Adyan asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ Ford answered. ‘I want you au fait with those things as soon as possible; there’s a war on, you know.’

Ah, yes, that... Lyyr had been so concerned about her own issues she had somehow managed to forget about the alien invasion carving its way across the galaxy, slaughtering humans, destroying their buildings, burning them to ash... A thought of an alien machine, dispassionate and cruel, framed against an iron-grey sky leaped to her mind, along with a bright flash of light. She shook her head to try and dispel the image, rubbing at her arms.

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Kasey growled. ‘Sooner we’re back in the better.’

The others nodded along with that assessment.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Ford agreed. ‘You’ll have your chance in no time – if you don’t wash out.’

She clapped her hands and began to make her way back out of the building.

‘Right, enough gawping,’ she ordered. ‘Time to get you settled in to your quarters and orientated with the rest of the buildings. We are thirteen-fifty local and your training officially begins at fourteen-thirty. Being dead doesn’t mean you get to rest, you know!’

The pilots began to file out and Lyyr took one last look at the towering machines, a grim pall falling across her soul. In the face of everything, the scale of the threat, the importance of the task, and even in the shadow of these titanic constructs, she couldn’t help but feel very small indeed.