‘Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death.’

De Rerum Natura, by Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 50 BCE)

‘Three, take the flank and lay down cover, Two and Four, with me, Five taking targets of opportunity,’ Major Ford’s clipped tones instructed.

Lyyr fell into position at Ford’s shoulder, Kasey on the other side, striding powerfully across the dusty plain, weapons raised and ready. On the right flank she could see the blip of Adyan rounding a rock formation, then the dull thunder of cannon fire as contact was made with the enemy.

‘Ready, and... striding speed!’ the Major ordered.

Moving her arms and legs, the mech responded in kind, and the great god of war that was Lyyr Zainab moved forwards in formation with the others, an unstoppable charge of metal. Filled with the power of it, the rush, she grinned.

Soon they were on the battlefield and the enemy was in sight, five mechs of equal tonnage, closing fast and laying down fire as they came. Copying Ford’s movements, if a little slower to react, Lyyr and Kasey rotated their torsos and dropped their shoulders slightly, presenting a worse target for the enemies to hit, returning with their own fire. Slung under her right arm was the familiar rotary cannon, barrels whirring and spitting rounds with every squeeze of her fist.

She could feel the impacts from the opposing mechs, her HUD flashing and showing the shot locations, springing up damage reports in the corner of her vision – nothing had penetrated her armoured skin. She was invulnerable.

Crash. A cannon round impacted with her torso, the angle too shallow to cause damage but the explosive force enough to stagger her. Noting the target, she straightened out and resumed her charge, bringing both cannons to bear this time, hosing down her foe in a spray of armour-piercing rounds, sparks rippling in chains of fire across the machine’s carapace. It paused then began to back away under the onslaught.

Lyyr laughed at it, picking up her pace to catch Ford and Kasey, maintaining the pressure on that one mech the entire time, wearing it down.

A proximity alert flashed in her mind and she jerked to the side as another mech came at her from the right, where Adyan was supposed to be.

‘Shit fuck,’ she snapped, knowing he must be down already. Panting from the exertion and the rush of a hauntingly familiar panic, she swiped at the machine that was suddenly upon her, battering at it with a now-inactive cannon, trying to club it away. Her opponent took the blow on its arm, a sacrificial strike that allowed it to step in close and give her an almighty shove.

Arms spinning comically, Lyyr and her mech toppled backwards, hitting the dust with a resounding CLANG. Her heart was beating out of control now, beads of sweat running down the inside of her helmet, mouth suddenly dry. It was happening again, she was going to die, her skin flensed and flayed from her muscles and bones in a terrible burning beam of light...

‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck...’ she rapidly swore. She tried to shut her lids as a shadow closed in but her vision wouldn’t go, seeing through eyes that could never blink.

Major Ford’s Einherjar appeared in her view. Lyyr groaned.

‘Alright, we’re calling it,’ the Major announced, voice a fed-up drawl. ‘Congratulations Two and Three, you are dead. Again.’

The noise of fighting stopped, an eerie silence drifting across the battlefield, filled by the pounding of Lyyr’s heart and the bellow-pump of her lungs as she beat down the tide of panic that had so nearly threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Get yourself up,’ Ford instructed.

Gritting her teeth, Lyyr swung her arms and legs to one side, the momentum, assisted by thrusters on the mech’s back, pushed her onto her front. From there she could get her arms underneath her, getting onto her knees, then getting onto her feet, rising slowly but steadily, the inbuilt gyros keeping her upright. It was a difficult, physically-demanding manoeuvre but still much faster than doing it in a normal mech.

Now up, she looked at her opponent, like the others a Hoplite stripped down of most of its weapons and armour to almost match the speed of the alien Lycans, if not quite the agility, now covered in the black marks caused by her training rounds. The pilot had done a good job of matching the ferocity and violence of those otherworldly machines, despite using mundane controls.

‘Do we know why we fucked up?’ Ford asked. ‘You’re thinking too much like mech pilots and not enough like warriors.’

Lyyr frowned.

‘You try to keep range and lay down fire,’ the Major explained. ‘Great for old tactics and still good enough for something like a Hoplite or Trebuchet, but an Ajax just can’t traverse fast enough or put out the oomph to bring down one of those alien machines before it closes and rips you a new one. Two, you’re still behaving too much like an Ajax, Three, you just need to pay attention to your surroundings.’

Reaching behind her back, the Major’s mech unclipped something and affixed it to the weapon node under the right arm. It was a blade, huge and reinforced, probably seven metres long including the connectors. She held it up for all to see.

‘If you want to beat your opponent you have to be playing the same game!’

With one robotic hand she gestured for the nearest training Hoplite to attack her. The mech rushed forwards, swiping with its arms, and Ford stepped to one side, bringing the blade under its guard in an arc that tore through the thing’s waist section – well below the cockpit – with a terrible sound of rending metal and the drum-beat thud of both halves hitting the ground.

‘Two and four will learn to use these,’ Ford declared. ‘Three and five we will cover in as much gunnery as you can handle. We will be ready when the time comes. You will not make this a waste of time and money.’

Water thundered around, cutting through the billowing steam, running across her body and slicking her hair close to her scalp like oil. The shower was a god-send, the one time any of them could have privacy at any point in their day, if only for a quarter-hour. After their shaming and demonstration by Ford, the unit had returned to base and refit, going back into the battle – four versus four this time – with an unfamiliar setup.

The training had been exhausting. Mech combat was physically demanding at the best of times, the controls requiring a lot of effort to utilise, but this was another level of exertion. To be the mech itself, moving your own body in time to its, required a level of fitness none of them had ever known. Ford’s relentless physical exercise over the past few weeks had made it somewhat easier, but even so, Lyyr’s arms and legs shook faintly as she washed away the sweat, turned off the shower, then dressed and re-joined the others in their small barracks room.

To find Ford and the dark-suited CIC woman waiting for them. She was impassive as ever, but Ford looked uncharacteristically anxious.

‘As of fourteen-twelve today, a CIC message clipper made orbit and relayed marching orders,’ the spook explained. ‘Deep-space arrays detected an alien fleet moving on Allegra and High Command want to make that their latest stand. If it falls, they will have a clean run on Hero and the arms factories there. This will not do. All available reinforcements are being requested and, as such, you will be shipping out within the hour.’

Not waiting for questions, the woman simply left, leaving the five pilots stood in shocked silence.

‘You heard her,’ Major Ford said after a moment, managing a decent attempt at sounding her usual confident self. ‘I know you aren’t yet a hundred percent in your new mechs, you know you aren’t either, but it’s not like we have a choice. Get your stuff together and back into your suits, those hunks of metal aren’t going to walk themselves onto the transport.’

She left too, and the recruits looked from one to the other with varying levels of visible consternation.

‘Ah, fuck...’ Kasey voiced how they were all feeling.

‘Ok corpses, we’re ready to drop in T-minus five minutes,’ Ford explained. ‘Brace yourselves and say your prayers.’

Lyyr settled back in her rig and disconnected the sensory link to her mech with a thought, freeing her arms and sliding back the covers on her visor to let in the soft light of the cockpit. She basked in the peaceful solitude of it, underlain by the barely-audible beat of the Einherjar’s fusion engine.

Much of their three-week transit was spent figuring out the more subtle controls of the machines, the kinds of things that required force of will and concentration to achieve, that by rote would become as reflexive as blinking or breathing. Manually disconnecting was one of these things, retracting within the machine, carried within its armoured chest like a baby in the womb.

Walking her through this had been the same technician from the start, the man named Malachi. He was patient with her and incredibly knowledgeable of the mech and its systems, apparently having been part of the team who invented them, they who had offered themselves up as the very first test subjects for the safety and efficacy of the interface. He knew how it felt, which had gone some way towards he and Lyyr striking up something that was if not friendship then a cordial working relationship.

In idle speculation she had once wondered if it could be taken further, but as soon as she thought about someone seeing her body, with its mottled skin and old scars, she firmly shut that thought out. Adyan and Ivey were definitely Doing It, everyone knew despite their efforts at sneaking around, but no-one said anything. Thankfully, Kasey had never shown any inclination of attempting the same with her – or anyone for that matter – and the two of them had settled into a comfortable bond of complaining about the same things.

‘Ly, this is going to be shit,’ his voice appeared as if on cue, the neural interface bypassing her ears and putting it directly into her mind. ‘You ever done a drop before?’

‘A couple of times,’ she admitted, ‘Outside of training that is.’

‘Fucking hate them,’ he grumbled, with good reason. Trapped in a mech which was trapped in a heat-shielded box of metal with rudimentary arrestor thrusters and guidance control, they would be shot out the bottom of their transport, likely through the middle of a space battle, hurtle through the atmosphere of a planet being invaded, and hopefully the engines would kick in with enough time to stop them splattering on the floor like so much dross. If they weren’t shot down first.

‘Me too, Kase,’ Lyyr agreed. ‘But no backing out now.’

‘Yeah, you got that right... See you on the other side then, hoss.’

‘You too, Kase.’

In that moment she wanted to say something more emphatic and inspiring, especially if it would likely be her last words to another human in this second violent life, but was denied when Major Ford took over the channel.

‘Alright, corpses, dropping in T-minus ten... nine...’ she began. Lyyr quickly blacked out her visor, re-engaged her armatures, and slipped back into the neural link, feeling the rig automatically secure her head and neck ready for drop. There was feedback now, denoting estimated height from planetary surface, predicted atmospheric wind-speed, and any possible deviation from planned landing site. She tried not to look at it. ‘Eight... seven... six... five... four... three... two... one...’

A sudden lurch in base of her stomach as the insertion pod was blown free of the transport, followed swiftly by a sense of weightlessness and then… silence. All that existed was she and her twin heartbeats, the pump and the star, thundering in unison, accompanied by the irregular puff of her breaths. The altimeter at the edge of her vision was counting down at a rapid rate.

Then everything shook as the pod hit atmosphere, like it was trapped in the grip of an angry god, rattling Lyyr down to her bones even despite the shock-absorbing nature of the rig, cradling her safe within the implacable iron giant of her mech. Deactivating her vision again, she closed her eyes, allowing the darkness to overtake her, and began to sing under her breath.

It was a quiet melody from her childhood, from a memory of a mother years-now dead, a soothing thing about skies and trees and rivers that a little girl growing up in an enclosed dome on a blasted rock could only dream of, but every time she sang it and shut her eyes she could see them as clear as anything, a dream within a memory, beautiful and calming and pure.

And just long enough to occupy her mind through the worst of the fall.

Lyyr came back to her vision in time to see the altitude hit terminal and experience the awful, stomach-lurching kick in the spine that was the arrestor-thrusters kicking in. If entry was bad, this was even worse, but she needed to remain lucid and in control for when the pod hit dirt and the doors opened.

Three… two… One final jerk, an almighty, brain-jolting THUD, and the pod was down.

BANG. CLANG. Explosive bolts threw the pod’s door open, filling the space with a light that would have been blinding after so long in stygian darkness had the mech’s systems not compensated.

A shudder as clamps were released.

++RELEASING FULL SYSTEM CONTROL TO PILOT++

And Omega-One-Two was released into the world.