Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chuchu’s town sat at the crossroads of several factories and a mine and when her thoughts turned to her past it was the long, dusty path to the mine that she remembered first. It insinuated itself, even into memories that were unrelated as if the countless footfalls of the town’s laborers had tread a furrow not only into the earth itself but Chuchu’s memories as well.

A person could look to that path and forecast the mood of the day the way looking to the clouds on the horizon could foretell the weather. Most times the path was guarded by men wearing reflective glasses and seated in groups of three on technicals, their arms draped over their guns in a post of deliberate, casual menace. Most days that was all that was needed to remind the workers who was in charge. Chuchu never knew who those men were beyond outsourced private security, which was the only real growth industry Spacians allowed on Earth. They had names like Black Castle or Silent Forest. A rotating cadre of them depending on what contract was in effect.

If the media came, they’d be changed out. Who replaced them depended on the narrative needed telling. When a camera team came needing some red meat show of force — real blood and guts, Spacians-putting-the-Earthian-dregs-in-their-place jackbooted stuff — the company would pull their squad of four Prodoros out of the mothballs and stand them on either side of the road. It was theater, the mobile suits were outdated even then and half of them had trouble just walking; their joints corroded by neglect. The men with the sunglasses that hid their eyes and the guns mounted on their trucks always stood off camera. Chuchu had once gotten real close to a Prodoros. They had been lined up right next to the path, an absurd range for a fight but good optics. She got a good look down one of those barrels, curious the way a child was. It was probably her imagination but she swore she could see the oily-metal glint of the bullet seated in its chamber before one of the Guys had picked her up and whisked her away. She was maybe five? Maybe six. She never got a firm grip on her exact age.

She wondered if some Spacian news org had the archive footage of that moment, tucked away somewhere. Earth girl with her face stuffed up a giant gun. Probably didn’t fit the narrative.

If the media was coming for some puff piece about how magnanimous and kind the Spacians were to allow Earthians to work in mines and factories despite how ungrateful and whiny the lot of them were, then a softer touch was called for. Smiling, clean-shaven shitheads — Chuchu had heard the word for the first time, spoken by one of the Guys and directed at these soft cops — deployed with riot gear and non-lethal weapons. Chuchu had seen what a non-lethal round could do to a skull. Especially when they were misused, which was a matter of course during unrest. And she thought those were the worst. At least the men in their trucks didn’t pretend their presence was a kindness when they broke the bones of her friends and family. Once, when she was too young to know better, she had been approached by one of these smiling shitheads and offered a flower that she took from gloves that were padded so the evidence of their violence didn’t drip from the seams. That time one of the Guys rushed up from the side and kicked the smiling shithead to the ground.

Archive footage of that — and the riot that followed — did exist. She had seen it, years later in Asticassia. It had become the source for a long dated meme that still got play on social media. No one knew it was her and she wasn’t about to make it known. Sometimes she fantasized about finding whoever started it and demonstrate on him the inappropriate use of non-lethal weapons.

But most times the path to the mine was guarded by the men in their trucks. In the mornings the workers would rise with the sun and gather in the town square and a company rep would hold the morning’s lottery and those selected would walk the long road to the factory. Chuchu would wake up to watch them go and, when night fell and the sun slipped away, she would stay awake and watch them coming back.

There was one time when they didn’t come back

When she came to realize the insane lives they were leading she would verbalize her anger. The Guys smiled and ruffled her hair and told her hell yeah, Chuch, give ‘em the business. Then she’d slug the one of them who called her “Chuch,” then she’d get put in a headlock and they’d all fall to laughing. But there were those who would give her this kind of complicated smile, what seemed like a hundred different emotions all bundled in a twist and flex of muscles.

Looking back she wondered if that was the moment the Guys told themselves that they needed to find some way to get her out of there. That if she were in that town much longer, it would be her body they’d be scooping up from the side of the long path.

It was impossible to live their lives because they couldn’t predict what their lives would even look like from day to day and it was all by design; with the worker quotas and the lotteries. When Chuchu reminisced, she would feel the anxious energy that kind of existence had pressed on her. She would always see the lines.

Strange how these things came back to a person. No matter how far she got from that moment in her life — both physically and temporally — nothing seemed to dampen the live wire charge the mere recall of those times had on her physiologically. She carried it with her, through her first days in Asticassia to the upheavals that came with the arrival of Suletta and Miorine to Earth House, to Quiet Zero and in the immediate aftermath of Asticassia’s ruin, where she now waited to watch Nika walk the long path.

Nerves were raw as students found their way to outgoing shuttles. The lights were too bright, the crackle of flight announcements to grating on the ears, even the air had an filtered tinge to it that seemed to cause low-level migraines. It put a manic edge in their every movement and word. Things said too quickly, harsh and without thought. Impatience and an undercurrent of panic causing limbs to move too quickly, jostling. More than a few students were forced to step out of line by the Front Management Company’s security personnel as fights broke out.

Everyone could feel it, this atmosphere like they had all been awake for 48 consecutive hours in a long corridor where every footfall echoed like a struck gong on the tile floor and the only sustenance available was heavily caffeinated.

It was the first day for general evacuation from Asticassia, and the school bled students. It had been a trickle at first, having been too dangerous in the immediate wake of the Norea’s massacre that had left the academy a smoldering wreck. The elite and well-connected were able to sneak their children through the hazards and the no-fly restrictions. But with the space around the Front finally cleared for a narrow flight path, each announced departure carried a shuttle full of students and Asticassia became that much more deserted.

Still the approaches to and from the Asticassia were cluttered with debris and clearing each shuttle to launch was a slow, agonizing process. The line extended far into the massive concourse. It meandered around corners and through the passageways where low gravity caused students to hug walls and find handholds as they waited anxious for the last shuttle leaving and cutting them off from their homes.

A glass enclosed concourse overlooked the berths where the line of students slowly filtered into shuttles, and inside the concourse was Earth House, clustered over a display of schedules.

Chuchu watched the lines and how the students fidgeted in place, the skittish way they jockeyed for position. A fight would break out, easy to pick out in the sudden explosion of movement and the way security would move to quickly deescalate it, separating the Spacians while deploying nothing deadlier than a firm grip. She scowled at that.

“Look at them. Real desperate to get back home, eh?” Nuno floated by in the low gravity, his hands in his pockets. He allowed his momentum to bump him up softly against the glass, watching the line as he bounced off. “Well, I guess it’s nice if you have the option.”

“Would you?” Chuchu said distractedly, still focused on the drama below.

Nuno shrugged. “Not much to go back to. And distance learning from Earth? Ha. Whoever suggested that students learn remotely never had to deal with Earth satellites.”

He was right. Chuchu could just imagine it. Back home where the only network connection available for residents were three outdated computers at the end of a long line at a dive bar. Emailing her homework with a dodgy upload. No hope of conferencing remotely. Even if she brought her digital notebook, coverage simply wasn’t there.

And what would she have to show for all the sacrifice that had lifted her up? Put her here? What would she say to the Guys?

They’d want her back. They protected her from the factories, they’d want to protect her from this.

And then what? Throwing her name back in the lottery? Walking the long path back to the mines? What had she done except —

She felt the heat of the beam as it burned through Earth House. The air crackled as molten metal sloughed off the building and cooled in the air. They had put their effort, their short school lives, into making the dilapidated hangar that Asticassia had given to them into something like a home. The salvaged Demi Trainer other students snickered at when they caught a glimpse of it had been recipient to their care and ministrations. Slagged now. The heat of it touched her skin, threatened to burn it. She heard screaming, distant, and the smell…

Chuchu stilled the tremor in her hands by gripping the rail in front of her.

Combat wasn’t the only future that awaited a fully rated Mobile Suit pilot. Sure that’s what most of the rich Spacian kids were interested in — noble brats looking to spend a season stomping Earthian picket lines so they could come home calling themselves combat veterans — but a Mobile Suit could do serious construction work. Enough for her to go independent, earn her living and then some as a contractor. Enough for herself and to send a little back to the town, to the Guys. That had been her initial plan until that spoiled space princess hijacked Earth House with GUND-ARM Inc.

Not that GUND-ARM was a bad idea. It was… great, actually. Factory work was dangerous and made moreso by Spacian task masters. Being able to make a company that helped the people maimed in accidents was such a better idea than scavenging for contracts.

All ash now. Maybe. She didn’t have much chance to check in with Miorine about her current state of employment. She was… preoccupied these days.

So what else was there but to stay on shattered Asticassia? Its classes were rubble. Food was rations handed out at the end of a line. Water too. She had to show that to the Guys back home. Everyone would get a good laugh. Somebody would have a complicated smile. Probably most of them, really.

Maybe she doesn’t share this with the Guys.

From behind them, Lilique raised her voice. “That’s the one! That’s Nika’s! The Starlight Belle!”

Everyone scanned the berths. The Starlight Belle was an utterly ordinary shuttle. Smaller than the others. But there were more guards and these ones were armed. Chuchu felt her heart go tight, her lungs stutter.

It was already leaving.

Chuchu sagged.

For all the harm Nika had done, you could fill all of Asticassia from end to end and from floor to ceiling with a crowd of all the absolute dirtbags who deserved to stand before a judge before her. And yet there she was at the front of the line. The first to face punishment.

But Nika had insisted, and she had already confessed her role, and security had come for her by the time she said her goodbyes to Earth House. There had been a delay while Asticassia sorted its traffic, and now she was gone. They didn’t get to see her one last time.

"Are you okay?" Till said, floating surreptitiously beside her.

“Do I look okay?” She turned away.

Nika receded into a distant point of light in space.

“We will see her again.”

Chuchu felt her teeth grind together. “What, in a thousand years? Last I checked Spacians don’t exactly give Dawn of Fold members time off for good behavior.” Her voice rose and there was a rush of blood to her ears as even she began to realize the implications of what she was saying. “They’re going to put her in the highest security hole they’ve got and they’ll keep her there for decades! They’ll convict her of terrorism and we’ll be lucky if we get see a blurry security camera shot of her 20 years from now!”

“Chuchu…”

She turned back to see the rest of them, the way they huddled close to each other as she had spilled out their fears from her mouth. Well…

Her fists clenched. They were all thinking it, they had to have been. Certainly Nika thought it. She had such a distant expression on her face, like she knew she was seeing them all for the last time. On top of everything else…

Chuchu turned away from her friends and pounded her fist into her open palm just for the feeling of having done something. There was no enemy to punch, no ass to kick. Just a world of bloody gears to grind people down.

“Maybe she can do something.” Till murmured as he looked past Chuchu’s shoulder.

Following the direction of his gaze, Chuchu peered through the glass of the observation deck on the opposite side of the concourse. She saw a slender figure, gray and dressed in black. It was already receding, slipping around a corner.

“No you don’t,” she said fiercely and kicked off a nearby surface, sending her propelling towards the exit.

“Chuchu! Where you going?.”

“Making sure Nika isn’t forgotten,” Chuchu said.

“Hey! Prin — Miorine!”

She caught up to Miorine on a floatway that saw little traffic, being reserved for arrivals. She was surrounded by grim-looking people. One of them stepped in front of her.

“Madame President…”

“It’s alright,” Miorine said. She caught the bodyguard’s arm. “She’s one of my advisors.”

Which was news to Chuchu, but if ‘advisor’ is bodyguard talk for ‘don’t shoot this one’ then she supposed that yeah, she’ll be an advisor.

Miorine turned to the rest. “Please allow us some privacy, I’ll be along shortly.”

They drifted further down the floatway and Miorine approached Chuchu. Miorine Rembran took great pains to appear composed, not just in public but in private moments like this. It made it difficult for Chuchu to know where exactly she stood with Benerit’s president. She’d be a hit at poker night back home.

But up close, Chuchu saw the slippage of the mask. Miorine’s shoulders were bowed. Her eyes, normally so carefully cool, were hooded and dark with exhaustion, rimmed by fatigue. Her suit was wrinkled, creased in a way to suggest she had slept in it several times. Her hands twitched as if she was making to wring them together and it was conscious effort that kept them to her sides.

“I saw Nika,” she said quietly.

Chuchu cocked her head. She had been psyching herself up to remind Miorine of Nika’s existence.

“I wish we had,” Chuchu said. In truth she didn’t know what they would have even said. But they should have seen Nika off, if only to give her one last glimpse of her friends before she vanished.

Miorine nodded. “It was… difficult to arrange. Even for me.”

“Aren’t you the president?”

There was a smile — more a sardonic twist of Miorine’s mouth — it lasted for a second, blink and you’d miss it. “Yes. But that only goes so far with the League. They didn’t want it. The meeting. They wanted her to… they want an example.”

For all its labyrinthine twists, Spacian politics were so simple that it made Chuchu angry to see it being played out. Made an example. Yeah. They loved doing that. She’d seen what happened to people who were made into examples. Seen their simple graves. All for the sake of a chosen few who stood on the hill and kicked down at everyone else with the fury brought on by fear for their own position at the top. “She doesn’t deserve that!”

“I know.” Miorine looked up with a firm set to her jaw. “The League’s executive office wants her to be a distraction. The mastermind behind the attacks.”

“Not that Shaddiq guy? How does that make sense?”

“It doesn’t, and it won’t work.” The resolve grew in Miorine’s voice. She seemed on firmer ground when there was a problem to tease out and an audience to lecture on it. “I have dumped evidence of the League’s association with Dawn of Fold on their lap and it can’t be ignored. This is just the chairman flailing. At best it might buy him a news cycle or two but the League parliament is not going to be satisfied with that.” She bit her thumb. “I’m going to give Nika my lawyers. The best in the system. If we can ride out the next few months — maybe it’ll just be a few weeks — then I think… I think…”

The steam she had gathered seemed to peter out and her shoulders sagged again. Then she straightened up as if snapped from the lull. “I can’t promise that she’ll be kept out of prison entirely, but we will see her again. Sooner than you’d think.”

“And in the meantime Nika will get to have her named dragged through the mud.” Chuchchu held her tongue between her teeth, thinking of that news footage of when she was a kid. She had the benefit of anonymity. Nika would get her entire life dissected in front of a primetime audience and by the time the courts settled on the real criminals the news will have already moved on, unrepentant. Even with Miorine’s assurances, it still rankled.

“There’s not much we can do about that,” Miorine said. She took a deep breath and put her hands on her hips. “And if time proves me a liar, find me and punch my lights out.”

“I’m not going to punch you.” Chuchu said, loud enough that she drew the attention of the bodyguards who had drifted a tactically discreet distance away. “Is that what you thought I came here to do?” Chuchu continued in a whisper.

“It’s been a very long…” Miorine seemed to sag. “I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

“Are you…”

“I’m fine.”

That was objectively false. Chuchu frowned. “Well… thank you. For going this far for her.”

“Suletta liked — Suletta likes her,” Miorine said, correcting herself savagely.

“…How is she?”

This time the bravado drained out of Miorine and she shrank even further, like a puppet after the hand that animated it slipped out. If they hadn’t been in zero gravity she might have crumpled to the floor right there. Chuchu was grateful on her behalf that the physics weren’t there to subject her to such indignity.

“I don’t know. The doctors can’t explain what happened. Nobody knows.”

Chuchu reached out and squeezed her shoulder. Was this the first time she had ever actually touched Miorine? Imagine that. Dirtball Earth kid from a nowhere town, touching the president of the most powerful corporation in human history.

If only it hadn’t taken Suletta falling into a coma to make this happen.

She had seemed… well, not fine, but conscious and awake when they scooped her out of space in the aftermath of Quiet Zero’s fall. They had brought her aboard their ship, her head in Miorine’s lap as they returned.

Then they docked at Front 73 and it was like a light had gone out in Suletta.

And Chuchu didn’t remember much after that.

Now Suletta was in a hospital bed, eyes closed, machines hooked to her. Her heart hadn’t stopped and her lungs worked so that was something. Enough to hang a hope from.

“She’ll wake up,” Chuchu said in the here and now, willing certainty into her words the way she saw Miorine do it not too long ago. “She’s tough as hell.”

Miorine brought one hand up and placed it over Chuchu’s. Her fingers were cold. Neither spoke.

When her hand fell away, Miorine pushed off and put distance between them. “If any of you need anything…”

“Don’t do Earth House any favors,” Chuchu said. “The other groups will start getting jealous.”

“You’re still my employees,” Miorine said.

“Yeah? That right?” The wariness in Chuchu’s voice carried. Do we still have a plan after all… this? Are you still ready to do the work? Even distracted as you are?

She watched Miorine transform: drawing herself up, donning that aura of competence like a mantle, all in answer to her unspoken questions. “It is.”

“Hmph.” Chuchu nodded. “Okay boss. You got any orders?”

“Go to school.”

“Not much of a school right now.”

“I know. We’re working on it. I… know it will be difficult. I’ll tell you if anything changes. Keep them safe, Chuchu.”

Chuchu tilted her head. “You’ve got a lot on your plate. You have anybody helping you or is it just the stiffs?” She nodded towards the bodyguards.

Miorine smiled wanly. “I assure you I have no shortage of people who are ready to give me their opinion on every little thing.”

Which wasn’t really what Chuchu meant. She knew a person being stretched to their limits when she saw them. You saw them, back home. They were the ones most in need of someone to check in on them. Miorine was being pushed and she needed… something.

“Hey, princess.”

Miorine raised an eyebrow at her.

“Come around some time,” Chuchu said. “I know you want to be at the hospital and you need to be at your president job… but come by Earth House some time. Hang out with us. Feed a goat. Play some games with us. I promise I’ll go easy on you.”

Miorine did her best to hide it and the gratitude that showed on her face would only be evident to people who spent enough time around her to recognize it. “Pretty sure it’s the other way around.”

“Shut up.”

They shared a smile, unguarded and full.

Then they parted.

It took a while for Chuchu to rejoin Earth House. She had to wrestle her way through several lines.

“So many people running the moment things get tough,” she said as she found her housemates.

“A lot of them don’t have dorms anymore,” Aliya said. “They’re not accustomed to living like this.”

“There’s shelters. Besides, it’s a space station,” Ojelo said. “It’s all one big roof. It’s not like there’s rain.”

“Food and water are being rationed,” Nuno said. “Nobody’s sure what’s going to happen, there’s curfews, half the school is craters that’ll break your ankle if you fall in.”

“Yeah.” Ojelo made a show of looking wistful. “Just like home.”

“Damn right!” Chuchu said. She thumped him on the shoulder. “We’ll live. Even better, we’ll thrive. The Spacians’ll be coming to us for help.”

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us if that’s ever going to happen,” Martin said. “Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. Don’t even ask me what’s going to happen with GUND-ARM, I don’t know.”

“Miorine says she’ll take care of it,” Chuchu said. “So she’ll take care of it.” She held her head up, chin out, daring anyone to comment on her demonstrating so much faith. But it wasn’t unearned and raised little note.

Martin’s frown deepened. “I don’t know…” he repeated.

They made their way through the winding corridors of the transit hub, towards the elevator that would take them to Asticassia. One of these corridors had a window that ran the entire length of the hall and gave them a view of Front Sector 73. One section drew all their attention: a part of the toroid that seemed to dazzle. It was Asticassia, and the lights of the Front caught on the debris of the Dawn of Fold attacks, causing it to glitter. Till brushed his delicate fingers along the glass. “It’s a shame the refugee camp is being dismantled. I thought we would have learned that cooperation is the best way to make it through challenging moments.”

“Old habits die hard, I guess,” Lilique said. “All the Houses want to split off. Everyone thinks everyone else is a drag on resources.”

“Which doesn’t make sense,” Aliya said. “But leave it to the children of wealthy monsters to think they’d be just fine if they struck out on their own instead of working together.”

Lilique continued. “After Miss Dote loaned us their new mobile suit I really hoped we could be friends.”

A curious quietness fell over them after that. Chuchu looked up in thought. Was there something that she had forgotten? Like, almost certainly. With all that happened, something’s bound to slip. But what was it and why did it feel so pressing? It was a maddening urgency just beyond the reach of her recall.

Then Martin squeaked and froze in place. “The Demi Barding!” he said.

Everyone stopped and looked at him. “Um!” he said. He took out and nearly fumbled his notebook. “I got a message yesterday. I completely forgot.”

Ojelo slapped his forehead. “I guess we did just park it in the main hangar and leave it there. Did it get taken by the harbormaster?”

“Ugh. It’s Burion’s, right?” Nuno said. “Let Secelia and them deal with it.”

“Shit…” Chuchu said. The main hangar was not a place for long-term parking. Left on their own, ships would be relocated to the specific hangar they were registered to. Earth House’s ship would go to Earth House’s hangar. But the Demi Barding… how would that show up in the Front’s registry? Certainly not Earth House. It was a prototype that had been loaned out. Would it be flagged as Burion and sent to them? That’d be nice but it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone would leave to chance. Worst case it would be shuffled off to some random hangar in all this chaos and forgotten about. She cursed herself for forgetting.

But they had a lot going on at the time! Suletta was hurt! They saved Earth. Would that brat Dote care? Would she let it slide? How much were they willing to bet on that?

“Um. So.” Martin held out his notebook. “They said it was being impounded for being improperly berthed.”

“What?” the rest of Earth House shouted in unison, enough for Martin to flinch back.

“I forgot! I’m sorry!”

Chuchu pushed off the wall, floating back towards the transit hub. “I’ll get it! I piloted the damn thing anyway. I should have… I dunno… I’ll get it!”

“It’s late!” Martin called out. “We’ll sort it tomorrow!”

“I’m not giving Dote the satisfaction! Can you imagine how insufferable she’ll get if she’s the one pulling it out of impound?” Chuchu said. “I’ll meet you back at the academy.”

Mobile Suit impound was a warehouse in one of the spinning toroids, which meant it had gravity. A small favor for Chuchu, who personally found too much zero-g nauseating. It was dimly lit and vast with rows of MS containers; many occupied and sealed like tombs while others stood open and empty, their recess forebodingly dark in the low light. They lined the cavernous space as Chuchu puttered past them on a Haro bike borrowed from the front desk. The electric hum of its motor was tinny in the emptiness. She was far from the evacuations, on her own for the first time since… Quiet Zero, now that she thought of it.

She wondered if that was why she was engaged in this chase. If the Barding was impounded, well, it would be embarrassing as hell but it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It could keep, probably. She’d just have to deal with Dote calling her a flaky Earthian who can’t be trusted with — no, actually. Fuck that. it wasn’t going to wait until later. She’d drag the entire Demi Barding physically back to Burion House before giving her that kind of satisfaction.

Events had pressed, one upon the other, down on her. Just the act of puttering along on this flimsy little bike felt like it was giving Chuchu space to process it all. The ruin of Asticassia, Nika’s arrest, Suletta’s coma. Chasing down a lost Mobile Suit felt like a respite in comparison. In moments like these she’d wonder how Nika handled it all. She had a way of… Chuchu’s face scrunched as she searched for the right word. Prioritizing. Seizing hold of each crisis and ordering them in a way that made it all seem manageable.

Her little bike rumbled on uneven panels, warped by years of Mobile Suits and heavy movers passing over them. Every bounce caused its electric motor to whine in compensation and the sound of her passage echoed back to her in the empty space. The hollow sound of it raised the hair on the back of her neck.

It was only now, in this rare moment of solitude and quiet, that Chuchu was beginning to grapple with how she wouldn’t have Nika to help her navigate this world. The only place she had known before Asticassia was that little town on the crossroads — little more than a source for bodies that the mines and the factories picked at like vultures stripping the last of the meat from old bones. Then she had been propelled into Asticassia and its people who were from… everywhere. And who were — on paper anyway — her peers. Nika’s gentle instruction had gone a long way to helping Chuchu find her place. Without her, she’d probably have been on a ship back to Earth a week later having picked a fight with the wrong Spacian.

And now? How are you going to get by now? The thought bounced around her head alongside the echoes.

Chuchu frowned. What was that supposed to mean? She was Chuchu. She’ll be fine. She took no shit from anyone and owed no one anything. The only problem in her life was finding this stupid Mobile Suit so she could get back to her friends and help them rebuild Earth House. Beyond that she’ll get by fine.

She hit the edge of a dislodged plate and the wheel of her bike squeaked over it. And suddenly the soft rumble of the electric engine became the crumpling bulkheads of Plant Quetta as Dawn of Fold’s ballistic weaponry tore through it in thundering impacts. She clenched the handlebars. Now she was at the controls of her Demi Trainer as Gundvolvas tore through students and all around her the vibrations of their cannon was so intense that it got into her bones, ringing them like hammers on metal until she thought she’d never walk again for all the violence —

Chuchu’s legs buckled and the bike slipped out from under her. She skinned her knee as it skidded across the metal floor and then she tucked into a roll. When she came to a stop, she opened her eyes and looked over to the toppled bike, the Haro between its handlebars flapped its ears. “Emergency,” it said. “Emergency, emergency, em—”

“Shut up!” Chuchu hissed. She stood up and winced at the sharp lance of pain as she put weight on her knee. “Stupid Spacian piece of junk can’t even go in a straight stupid line.” Her pulse hammered in her ears and she grit her teeth as she urged the scooter forward. The sooner she could get this over with the sooner she could get back to kicking all her friends’ asses until they got their trainwreck lives sorted out. Because she was fine and had no problems at all.

Up ahead, around a corner, there was a screech of metal scraping against metal, then a flare of light, and the floor really did shudder. Chuchu’s heart kicked up to high gear before she even understood what she was seeing.

There was a brief spatter of sulfur-yellow erratic lights, suggesting a shower of sparks. Then a soft fwump and a rising whine of jets.

A black mass rounded the corner, dotted with points of flaring, blue-white lights and a single green cyclopean eye glowing on top. It loomed over her, having closed the distance with the deceptive inexorable speed of an avalanche. Just the air it displaced was enough to push her down. Her bike clattered and skittered off, unseen in the gloom. Heat came off of the thing in a jet that caused Chuchu to reel back. What she couldn't see, with her eyes averted in the dark, she could feel. The immensity of it pulled at her senses like gravity and her mind traced out images that were fantastic and terrifying.

The blue flare of maneuvering thrusters burned afterimages into her retinas and in the overwhelming darkness she was a child staring into the barrel of a Desultor. The deep well of the barrel pulsed evil and red and resolved into the shell unit of a Gundvolva that moved at her with the stuttering movements of a puppet on clumsily manipulated strings but with each movement its joints seemed to squelch with a nauseating grind of flesh caught between teeth and she felt a pressure on her chest and it was the burning lance of a beam, frozen in place and held over her heart, fired from the rifle of the Gundam Ur. It drilled into her with an unreal, agonzing slowness, boring through her chest and carving a gouge into her clavicle as the COCKPIT TARGET warning sounded in her skull until suddenly the beam started picking up speed and the intensity of it grew to a blinding white that --

"Hey! Earth nerd!"

Chuchu threw one hand up over her eyes against the light. Her chest was heaving but whole, taking in deep, rapid breaths that left her dizzy. She felt the cool metal panel of the floor with her other hand and the stale air of the impound filled her lungs. Her heart felt like it was trying to pummel its way out of her.

I'm fine, I'm fine, get a grip tough IT OUT.

The terrifying black mass had passed over her, the heat of its engine wash all that remained as it receded. She rose, ignoring how weak she felt in the knees. She couldn't afford to feel it because someone was shouting at her.

Standing, she squinted at the light that had blinded her as it became eclipsed by a silhouette. It was impossible to make out who, Chuchu just got a general air of impatience from the person standing before her: hands on hips, stance shifted to one side.

"Are you done rolling on the floor like an idiot? It's getting away!"

Chuchu had to squint, her eyes unwilling to believe what her ears were telling her. "… Dote?"

"Good, your brain isn't completely smothered under all that hair. Get in, Pom-Pom Head. I assume you can drive this."

Secelia Dote, normally so committed to seeming unphased by the world around her, simmered with impatience. Chuchu could feel it even as she was getting her bearings. “What the fuck just happened?”

“My Demi Barding’s been hijacked and if they get away with it, it’s your ass!” Secelia said.

“How is it my —”

“Less yapping, can you drive or not?”

She stood in the lights of car headlights. A nice one too. A pink novelty open-roofed plaything of the idle rich, not like the fossil-burning beaters back home. One of the Guys kept one in a garage and he had taught her on it as she came off power loader training with a taste for being at the controls of heavy machinery. The memory of it made Chuchu draw herself up straight. She tilted her head up, jutted her chin out pugnaciously, even if that meant she was staring up Secelia’s nostrils.

“I don’t care if it has legs or wheels or wings,” Chuchu said. “I can pilot anything.”

“Yeah, I didn’t ask for your life’s story. Get in and catch us up before it escapes.”

“What is the plan here?” Chuchu said even as she climbed into the driver’s seat. She saw a shape move out of her way and into the passenger seat. Small and furtive. Secelia’s minion Rouji. He discreetly unplugged his Haro from the car’s autopilot. Yikes. Autopilot. No wonder they haven’t caught it. Honestly, how do these Spacians function? “Like, I just drive close enough so you can nag at the pilot until they give up?” She did a quick scan of the controls, found them sufficient and grabbed the wheel. The car jumped forward, finding its grip on the metal floor before digging in and eating up the distance.

“Rouji is broadcasting the override command,” Secelia said. She leaned over from the backseat. Chuchu felt a shiver as she felt Secelia duck under the frizz of one of her buns to be heard, speaking directly into her ear. “If we get in range of its near-field communicator we can shut it down remotely!”

The Barding would be nowhere near full speed as long as it was in the impound. They could do this. Just… near-field meant getting in stomping range.

On the wheel, Chuchu felt her hands tremble. She tightened her grip.

Tough it out.

She pushed her misgivings aside and pressed down on the accelerator. She got the satisfaction of Secelia flopping back into her seat and the wind ruffling her hair as she sped down the rows of MS containers. They were in a long stretch and she urged the car to pick up speed, rubber tires churning on metal. The whine of the Barding’s maneuvering thrusters grew louder as they closed the distance. This was fun.

“Hey! Rouji!” She raised her voice over the rising noise. A smile had formed on her face without her realizing it. “This thing play music?”

Rouji, ever soft-spoken, said something and the wind immediately whipped it away.

“What?” she said.

Rouji’s mouth moved again and this time the Haro in his lap spoke but she could only make out a tinny crackle.

“What?”

Secelia leaned over into her ear again and shouted. “Rouji said ‘what?’”

Chuchu rolled her eyes. “Actually, just forget it!”

They reached the end of this row of containers and the Barding led them in a zigzag chase. Every turn they made bled the car of its momentum and put distance between them. This was getting them nowhere.

Between the containers were guards for the rails that they rode on: metal wedges that provided a narrow gap between containers. They weren’t designed to allow vehicles to pass through, but Chuchu could see through the gaps as they passed each container, catching a glimpse into the rows beyond.

Well, what the hell.

She steeled herself and yelled something akin to “hold on!” for the benefit of the others.

Then she yanked the car into a hard turn and felt it protest under her, its wheels trying to find purchase and its weight shifting ominously. Beside her, Rouji clung to the side, his Haro cradled under his arms. The passenger side lifted up into the air and by the time it came down Chuchu had guided the car into the pocket and its wheels came down on the wedge of the rail guards. She was almost certain she heard Secelia whoop as they surged forward at an angle. She couldn't help her own toothy smile as she floored the accelerator and pressed the car forward.

They burst out from between containers, bouncing as the floor flattened beneath them. The Demi Barding barreled towards them from the left, its thrusters gimbaling as it came out of its turn and proceeded to jet down the straightaway.

"Rouji!" Secelia shouted. Wordlessly, he handed her the Haro. Its eyes were pulsing blue as it sent its override signal.

Rising from her seat, Secelia took the Haro and raised it above her head. Chuchu braced as the Barding passed over her, the hot rush of its engines pressing her into the seat.

And it proceeded with its escape without even the slightest hesitation.

"What," Secelia said, blinking as she stood there, the Haro still held high and blinking in her hands.

"Rouji!" Chuchu shouted.

"Rouji!" Secelia shouted.

"We... might need to be closer," Rouji said.

"Straight ahead, Pom-Pom Head!" Secelia said, tapping her on the head. "Intercept her again!"

“Fine. But whatever happens to your car is on you, Dote!” This time when they slipped between the containers they hit the wedged shape metal at a bad angle and an indicator lit up on the dashboard. They definitely blew out at least one tire. The car bounced badly and Secelia juggled the Haro frantically as it threatened to fall from her grip.

The next time they sat across the Barding's path Chuchu could feel the damage as the car rumbled under her hands. They weren't going to get another chance. She heard the rising note of the Barding appraching.

The car jostled as Secelia put one food on Chuchu’s headrest. She looked up in time to see Secelia vault over her and land on the hood of the car. She stood defiantly, dwarfed by the looming Mobile Suit.

"Get the fuck out of my Demi!” she yelled.

Then she held the Haro in front of her and then kicked it as the Barding came upon them.

There was a moment for Chuchu to appreciate the flexing musculature in Secelia's thigh as it was caught in high relief by the lights of the Mobile Suit. The Haro arced up and went doink off the Barding's knee guard.

And the Demi Barding fell as if pulled out of the air. It only just cleared the car, carried by its momentum as all the lights and jets went off simultaneously, leaving it to collapse in a heap, sparks flying as it skidded across the floor.

In the immediate aftermath, there was only the ping of heated metal cooling.

“I’m not paying for any of this,” Chuchu said.

“We’ll work that out later.” Secelia hopped off the hood of the car and ran over to the Demi Barding.

“There’s nothing to work out! Hey! That’s dangerous! Spoiled Spacian piece of — ugh!” Chuchu clambered out of the car and followed.

Jogging up the length of the prone Barding gave Chuchu a moment to appreciate it. Yeah, her time with it had been short, but it had been full of incident. She passed by a scorch mark on its thigh twice as long as she was tall that had been left by a Gundvolva. It’s weird how she remembered that moment, as heart-stopping as if it were her own leg getting grazed by rifle shot. Piloting a Mobile Suit could do that to you, removing the barrier between you who piloted and the suit being piloted. In the moment it was exhilarating and, sure, terrifying. But something lingered afterward. Long after the armor plating got replaced and the damage became a memory. But it stayed with the pilot, in some intangible way.

Chuchu didn’t have any answer or insight into what that meant. It was just… weird.

She found Secelia standing before the manual release for the cockpit. “You wanna take a moment before you do that?” Chuchu said. “Whoever’s in there could be dangerous!”

Secelia looked at her with an expression that suggested nothing in there could possibly surprise her. “Yeah, it’ll be okay. She’s harmless.” She punched in a sequence and the hatch scraped along the metal floor as it opened.

“Wait you know who—”

A slight figure, features unreadable through the pilot’s helmet, staggered out of the dark cockpit.

“Nothing broken for your troubles?” Secelia said brightly. Her arms were on her hips and she had a mean little smile on her face. “How embarrassing it must be to trip in a Mobile Suit. A person might think this is your first time behind the controls of anything more complicated than a shopping cart. Lucky for you there weren’t many witnesses and we’re all willing to forget this unpleasant business every happened.” She reached over and rapped her knuckles on the shell of the pilot’s helmet.

As the smoke cleared Chuchu could make out the insignia of Burion on the pilot uniform. The pilot coughed and smacked her helmet until the catch came loose.

She was shorter than even Chuchu but otherwise reminded her of Secilia. Her face wasn’t as full and she had a darker skin tone but she was finely featured and they shared the same green eyes and that upturned expression that seemed to run through Spacian’s executive elites, like looking down on people ran… in… the blood…

Oh. Aw, dammit.

“Welp, I’m leaving,” Chuchu said.

Secelia gave her an arch look. “What? Why?”

“Why not? I’m not getting involved in your family garbage. You’ve got your Mobile Suit back so we’re square, right? Right. We’re square.”

“Yes!” The pilot spiked her helmet to the ground and called out at her. “Run along little henchfreak! Once I find out who you are I’m gonna have your entire family kicked out of the company!”

“Oh, no,” Chuchu said in monotone. “Not that.” She raised a single middle finger as she walked away. Well, it was confirmation at least. The voice, the wildly presumptuous attitude. She did not need to deal with another Secelia Dote. There was enough on her plate.

She approached the car and knocked on its hood. “Rouji,” she said with a nod. He was still in the passenger seat, looking forlorn without his Haro. “Please tell me this thing can still drive.”

He shook his head wordlessly.

“Great.”

Then he leaned over and pressed on the dashboard touchscreen. The car’s trunk popped and when Chuchu inspected it, she found a row of Haro bikes, folded up for storage. Chuchu breathed a sigh of relief. It was still a hike through the massive warehouse.

“Rouji you’re the only decent person here. Do you want a ride?”

“I’ll stay with them.”

He nodded towards the rising squabble back near the Demi Barding. Chuchu couldn’t make out what exactly was being said, just a few stray words that made it sound like some corporate thing. She heard the word “shareholders” and her senses immediately recoiled from the argument.

“I’m used to it,” Rouji said.

“Better you than me,” Chuchu said solemnly. She unfolded the bike and left the Burion people to their squabble.

Chapter Text

“Miss… Miorine… I feel fine… really!” Suletta’s voice was tinny through the speaker, but the rasp in it wasn’t just interference. She sounded raw, like her throat was seizing up. Permet glowed under her skin, angry and red like an infection.

“Shut up, Suletta.” Miorine hissed fiercely, her voice ragged with both relief and fear. “Shut up or I’ll boot you out the airlock myself. You need to save your strength!”

Miorine fumbled the lock on her helmet, the visor was impossible to see through with the tears and condensation. Her breathing was heavy and reverberated in the small space. Her gloves were too cumbersome, her fingers not working right. She made a frustrated noise. If she had to bash this fucking helmet against the bulkhead and crack it open she…

She found the catch and flipped it. There was the hiss of pressure differential equalizing and then she practically spiked her helmet to the ground. She took deep heaving breaths and fell to her knees where Suletta lay. All around them, the rocket capsule vibrated as Chuchu took a firm grip of it with the Demi Barding. They were leaving Quiet Zero behind. Or the space it once occupied, at least.

“Is she…” Somebody was behind Miorine. She didn’t know who. Names, places, everything was crowded out in her head. It was all Suletta. Suletta’s labored breathing, permet circuits glowing under her skin, pulsing with a light that seemed to creep into her eyes: red seeping into ocean blue.

“Doctor Winston!” Miorine called out. “Where —”

“I’m here.” Right. They were in a small capsule. Miorine probably could have stretched out a hand and found Belmeria Winston.

“We… we… do we… should we move her?”

Chuchu was putting on speed to dock with Earth House’s ship. There was a medbay there. Meant for treating a fracture or bleeding. But this…

Miorine couldn’t begin to guess what was happening to Suletta.

“Give me a moment, please,” Belmeria said. “Suletta, can you hear me?”

“Hello, Doctor.” Suletta’s voice was distant. Like she was somewhere far away, phoning into her body.

“Can you see me?”

“I… can see a lot.”

“What does that mean? Tell me if there is pain, Suletta.”

Miorine watched as Belmeria felt along Suletta’s limbs. She recognized it as the basic examination administered to any wounded person pulled from space, checking them for broken bones or other basic injuries. As the doctor did this, Suletta reached out. Miorine caught her hand with her own, the sensation dulled by their suit gloves. But she felt something and furrowed her brow as Suletta sighed and withdrew her hand, leaving in Miorine’s palm a small object.

The charm, blinking up at her with little LED eyes.

Miorine frowned.

Belmeria wedged two fingers into the space between Suletta’s neck and her pilot suit, feeling for her pulse. She hissed, an action Miorine could not unpack. Belmeria withdrew her hand and put in Suletta’s line of vision.

“Can you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”

“Two.” The answer was immediate.

“What did you mean when you said you saw a lot? How many fingers am I holding up this time?”

“There’s… lights everywhere. Four.”

Miorine frowned as she looked between Suletta lying on the floor and Belmeria hunched over her.

There was a shudder that ran through the capsule.

“Docking complete,” Chuchu called out from the Demi Barding. “I can’t connect to the ship’s network.”

“There’s damage to the permet links,” Nika said. “Likely from the wake of Quiet Zero’s destruction.”

“We’re docked to the ship. We should move her,” Miorine said.

Belmeria shook her head. “No point. Suletta, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“One.”

Miorine frowned. “Why do you say that?”

Belmeria moved her hand behind her back, out of Suletta’s view. “Suletta, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Suletta stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, permet pulsing under her skin, eyes wreathed in red. “Three.”

Miorine leaned back to see three fingers. “How…”

Belmeria curled two fingers into her fist, still keeping her hand hidden from Suletta’s view. “How many now?”

“One.”

Belmeria shifted and looked at her. Miorine only knew her to the brief extant that they had collaborated on the GUND-ARM project. She always seemed a furtive, nervous person, hunched in on herself, peeking backwards as if expecting to see… something. Miorine had never met anyone so haunted by her past and — judging by how Elan regarded her, her own deeds.

The look Belmeria gave her now — face drawn tight, eyes wide — she was seeing the past catching up.

“There’s nothing we can do here to treat a condition like this.”

“Then…?”

“Asticassia.”

“Um…” Lilique said. “Back to school?”

“It has the most advanced permet research facility in the Earth Lagrange system,” Belmeria said.

Miorine looked down at Suletta. She was breathing, she was here and alive. To have her so close…

“Suletta, can you hear me?”

“Miss Miorine.” Though she kept looking up, her hand, cumbersome in the normal suit, found Miorine’s and held her. “We… can’t stop… f-f-feeling…”

“Can’t stop feeling what?”

“Hang on,” Belmeria said. “Suletta, who’s ‘we’?”

“Everything. Everyone.” She did not elaborate beyond that. Suletta’s voice was shaky, as if she were on the cusp of some ecstasy.

Miorine put a hand to Suletta’s cheek before realizing it was similarly gloved. She bent down over Suletta and pressed her forehead against Suletta’s. Though the permet burned red, Suletta’s skin was cold. She trembled where she lay. Her breath began to hitch, like there were words that physically lodged in her chest and her eyes widened and Miorine got that feeling vertiginous like she were teetering over a great depth and stead of kneeling in front of her… her…

Miorine pulled away. “Asticassia,” she said. “Quickly. Please.”

Belmeria Winston raided the hospital break room for coffee, ears alert as she rummaged through the back of the cupboards.

It wasn’t that she was avoiding anyone in specific but… she had learned avoidance. In general. More and more it seemed like people wanted her for something and more often than not the thing they wanted was to ask very pointed questions. Now that Peil was liquidated, things were coming to light. A not very flattering light.

She heard footsteps from the anodyne-beige corridor beyond the break room and they sent a shiver down her neck. She froze in place as if the slightest movement threatened to draw attention. When the footsteps receded past the door, she allowed herself a breath.

The stress of this constant vigilance was like a vice for her brain. It hadn’t always been like this. Working for Peil was… horrifying. But she had been well hidden from watchful eyes, a necessity at first to hide her connection to Vanadis that in time became a novacaine numbness to the horrors that the Peil had her work on by degrees. Easy for all these doctors to judge, they never had to survive. The Gund format was humanity’s best hope in space and it had been made illegal by thugs who called themselves protectors. What choice did she have but to hide? And once she had hidden, what choice did she have but to adapt?

Allies of the League’s chairman after her, desperately looking to cast blame somewhere, anywhere as the evidence of his collusion with Earth terrorists continued to rock broader Spacian society. But they were hardly all. There were also hardcore Peil loyalists and the alien mind of the Peil Grade itself, and who knew what that thing was thinking? How would it react to recent news that its owners had changed? Did it understand revenge? Or even basic pettiness? There was no way to be sure. And then there was the fifth Elan. He seemed content to let things stand the way they had parted after Quiet Zero but... was she willing to stake her life on that? And he was hardly the only Elan...

Then there were the zealots of Cathedra, Prospera's die-hards... And that was just the people she could think might have her on a list specifically for her own misdeeds. What about guilt by association? Being in Miorine Rembran's proximity probably put her in the crosshairs of Dawn of Fold. As well as the many, many investors who suddenly found their position in the Benerit Group uncertain...

And for what? A few ethical compromises she'd been forced to make in order to prove her value to the Peil Grade? What else was she supposed to do? She didn’t want to hurt people.

She did do that, though.

Nobody ever talked about the paranoia. Or the guilt. Everyone loved to extol the virtues of the Peil Grade's innovations but nobody ever talked about what it did to people like her.

"Finally," she said to herself as she found the right packet in the back of the cabinet. She grabbed it shaky hand, tearing it with fingers that angered her with their feeble grip and dumped it into a mug of hot water. Soon she was walking quickly down the hospital corridors back to her office. Her footfalls echoed too loud in her ears. Most of the hospital teemed with activity, still dealing with the fallout of the attacks on Asticassia. But those were conventional injuries. This section of the hospital saw little use. It was a lab and an office, specifically dedicated to the study of permet contamination.

Under normal conditions most of that work was theoretical. For these past two weeks, it had been the only place to properly observe a very particular patient.

Belmeria slowed and stepped quietly as she passed by the laboratory, converted into a hospital space where Miorine Rembran sat in vigil over Suletta Mercury.

Daring a glance into the room, Belmeria saw Miorine, sitting in the same chair she seemed to have sat in for days, next to the bed where Suletta had been ever since she slipped into a coma.

Belmeria was briefly frozen in place as unnervingly watchful gray eyes flicked up at her passing. Then she was on the other side of the door and out of Miorine's gaze.

She felt an eerie hold on her heart, as if Miorine could pin her in place with that look. But she kept walking and made it to her office.

"Really, Bel." The voice hit her as soon as she closed the door behind her and she felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. "You have no bedside manner at all. It makes for a poor doctor."

Belmeria’s hand went to her heart as if to make sure it was still working as Prospera smiled serenely at her from within the office.

Once tall, broad-shouldered and imposing, Prospera had been confined to a wheelchair shortly after her return from Quiet Zero. Gone was the helmet. Her permet scarring, angry red and faintly glowing, was a garish tattoo across her temple. Her hands were clutched on her lap and her shoulders slumped in a way that Belmeria had never seen before. Some motivating force had left her. Still, she…

Well she was still pretty damn imposing. That assured smile was gone, replaced by something sadder, bittersweet. But her eyes were piercing in a way that her helmet had hidden before. And if her expression was sadder, it still had an enigmatic quality to it, like she could see through anyone she looked at.

Or… she could see through Belmeria at least.

Belmeria felt coffee and bile rise up. Ah. And the acid reflux. The paranoia the guilt and the acid reflux. They never tell you about those things.

A holographic projection flickered over Prospera’s head.

Letters scrolled across it like a marquee. MORNING DOC, YOU LOOK NAUSEOUS.

And… the keychain was here. It dangled from the side of Prospera’s wheelchair, little eyes blinking in a code that was translated into scrolling holographic text. They were working on audio. Which would be… great. Great.

“I didn’t expect to see… either of you here,” Belmeria said, silently congratulating herself for her composure as she closed the door.

“Oh?” Prospera said. “When one of my daughters is in need? What did you expect?”

“That you’d be arrested, frankly.”

Prospera chuckled, as if it were some secret, inside joke and not the destruction of an entire Space Assembly League fleet. And that was just the latest addition to the long list of dead.

“Everybody is quite confused about what happens next,” Prospera said. “The League is split. The hardliners are willing to defend the executive office, even in the face of colluding with terrorists who killed students on Asticassia.”

“Seriously?”

“There are always hardliners,” Prospera said with a shrug. “They are a minority, but they are vocal and have a great deal of money backing them. But that will only get them so far. The rest of the League is prepared to excise the entire executive office and put them on trial. In the face of all that, it is easy to forget one little old lady. Especially after Quiet Zero vanished, along with a great deal of physical evidence.”

“You’re hardly as helpless as you put on.”

“One should never discount the advantage of being discounted, though.”

Belmeria sighed. She couldn’t tell if she admired Prospera more for her confidence or feared her. Or feared for her. That was a new one. It had taken Suletta burning herself out from the inside for Belmeria to realize how much of Prospera’s iron resolve was the same thing: a fire eating at her from within.

Now, with Quiet Zero destroyed, the fire had burnt out. What was left behind was on the wheelchair before her.

“You… can’t walk anymore?”

“The nerve damage caused by permet contamination is quite extensive.”

MOM COULD HAVE MORE MOBILITY IN A LOW-GRAVITY HABITAT BUT SHE LIKES TO BE STUBBORN, Ericht wrote.

“I think it’s one of my better qualities,” Prospera said.

IT’S CERTAINLY A QUALITY. AND IT IS YOURS.

Belmeria tried not to think about Ericht too much. She had enough to deal with as it was. Speaking of which…

“About Suletta,” Belmeria began.

IT’S MY TURN TO WATCH HER, Ericht wrote. I SURE HOPE SOMEONE REMEMBERS TO PROP ME UP PROPERLY ON THE NIGHTSTAND AND PUTS THE SIGN NEXT TO ME THAT SAYS “PLEASE DO NOT THROW ME AWAY.”

“The cleaning people were a bit too thorough once,” Prospera said.

“I… see.”

There was a knock at the door, and Belmeria could hear Miorine’s voice on the other side. “Doctor.”

When she opened the door, Miorine was subdued. Well, that’s been the case since Suletta had been admitted to the hospital while in a coma.

THERE SHE IS.

“I… have to return to my office,” Miorine said. She gave Belmeria a passing nod as she brushed by.

“Miss Rembran,” Prospera said.

There was another nod, then Miorine plucked Ericht from the side of the wheelchair. Then she turned around and walked out the door.

THIS TIME TILT ME MORE TOWARDS THE WINDOW. I’D LIKE SOME LIGHT.

“Okay,” Miorine said.

After she left, Belmeria and Prospera remained in the silence that followed her like a veil.

“The poor girl is stretched thin,” Prospera observed.

“You tried to kill her once,” Belmeria said with more than a little reproach.

“I tried a great many things,” Prospera said. She looked off into the distance. “About the only thing I succeeded at was hurting my daughters.”

This was the closest Bulmeria heard Prospera voice any kind of regret and she wondered what Prospera’s feelings on all this was. What must it be, to live in the wake of being so close to achieving something horrifying only to have what seemed like an inevitable tsunami crest, break, and recede. There were moments where she could believe that Prospera might even be relieved, that a weight had left her as Quiet Zero consumed itself. Other times, she could see bitterness etch itself across that face.

Belmeria had remembered when Vanadis, her friends and her home, had been slaughtered right on the cusp of achieving their dream. It did not feel like a weight lifting itself from her. Nowhere near.

“How is Suletta?” Prospera asked lightly.

“Unchanged,” Belmeria said. “And worse.”

“Tell me.”

She sighed and sat at her desk, leaving the coffee between them.

“We still don’t know what caused the coma. We don’t know why. She’s just… not conscious. In the end I wouldn’t even say that’s the problem.”

“You believe the permet contamination is the real threat,” Prospera said.

“It’s creeping into her organs. Lungs and heart and kidneys. Everyone in modern society has been exposed to permet to some extant, but nowhere near what Suletta experienced in Calibarn. There are treatments to filter it out of a body, and we’re doing that but… to be frank, Suletta would be dead by now if she weren’t uniquely resistant to permet.”

“Which is a double-edged sword because any organ you transplanted would lack that unique resistance and it would succumb far quicker than if we didn’t perform a transplant in the first place,” Prospera said.

“We’re looking at nerve damage and organ failure due to cellular necrosis. Well… you seem up to date on matters,” Belmeria said peevishly. “We have months. A year if we’re fortunate. But…”

Prospera steepled her fingers. Where had she picked up this professorial attitude, Belmeria wondered? She had been a test pilot back on Folkvangr, hardly a teacher. She’s had to become so much more in the years since. “I want to focus on the coma, as little a problem as you might believe it to be.” Prospera gave her an infuriating little smile.

Belmeria rubbed her temples. “That’s not what I — nevermind. Go on then.”

“How did it happen?”

Belmeria shifted in her seat. She regretted coming to her office the moment she had seen Prospera in it, but now she was considering throwing all decorum out the window, followed by herself.

Across from her, Prospera leaned forward in her wheelchair. “You know.”

“I can only begin to guess.”

“An educated guess from a member of Vanadis is not something to discount.”

“Then you’d do better then me.”

Prospera shifted back into her seat. “I’m curious.”

A clock ticked away time in the silence until Belmeria closed her eyes and sighed. “Suletta achieved score eight.”

“Yes.”

“A level no human being has ever attained and lived.”

“It’s a pity you were not in a position to make any observations at the time.”

“You were trying to kill me.”

Some of that wryness came back to Prospera and she smiled. “Ideal laboratory conditions elude us all, Doctor.”

Belmeria closed her eyes and balled her hands up until she could feel her nails pinching into the flesh of her palms. She didn’t need this. She didn’t need this monster woman in her small office. Peil had given her a much nicer office when she worked for them. She reached out and took a sip of her coffee and in the small space where her lips met the rim of the mug she found some minuscule refuge, letting the bitter taste and aroma of the coffee occupy her senses before she had to open her eyes and be here with this ghost of Vanadis.

“From my observations…” she began.

“While aboard the rocket capsule.”

Belmeria frowned. Was that relevant? Was Prospera offering a clue or was she being deeply annoying? Either was possible. “Yes… inside the rocket capsule, Suletta was conscious and exhibited signs of extreme neural stimulation. A classic symptom of permet contamination that grows in severity with increased exposure. Typically, at the level she received it she should have burnt out every neuron in her brain. But… it didn’t. Instead…” Belmeria trailed off, reluctant to speak on it much further.

“There is a school of thought that believes permet bestows precognitive abilities,” Prospera said.

Belmeria scowled. By ‘school of thought,’ Prospera may as well have said ‘all of Peil Technologies.’

“Right. It doesn’t do that. But it does change perceptions. Not faster or… supernatural, but expanded. Beyond typical limitations. A heightened ability to predict and react. To read subtle motions and extrapolate conclusions that conventionally would seem impossible. Some do believe that this puts it on the verge of clairvoyance.”

“You’ve had experience with that attitude?”

“When the Peil Grade was being developed, it used as its basis the neural map of a human brain that had been forcibly exposed to high levels of permet.” Belmeria’s lips drew into a taught line. “Peil Technolgies believed that under such conditions, a person could predict the future, if only they could survive the process. Their theory was that an artificial intelligence could sustain that level of awareness indefinitely.” Belmeria shuddered at the implications. The halls of Peil’s front seemed to be soaked in a miasma of lingering malice and she had always wondered if that was her own generalized guilt or if there truly was something in the walls, lurking in the circuitry. A consciousness patterned after a human mind frying in a data storm, driven mad by a death spiral that never ended. Superstitious idiocy, but when she scurried down those long halls it was… easy to get caught up in the circumstances.

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” she said firmly. She met Prospera’s eyes. “It’s nonsensical mysticism. Peil’s entire executive class are — were — absolutely insane and had been for years. The only… the only reason why there was no accounting for it is that their insanity is the kind that can be very profitable as long as you’re willing to ignore the human cost of it. Which… I… everyone was.”

“How rational of you,” Prospera said.

“Do you know something or not?” Belmeria was suddenly annoyed. At Prospera. At her being here. At this whole situation. Why couldn’t she be allowed to have some peace? How many more times would she have to relive her actions?

“Set aside questions of precognitive ability. A fascinating thought experiment to be sure, but tangential to our needs. The point is that the brain enters an excited state and is flush with permet. Highly energetic permet that responds to bioelectric signals.”

“Yes…”

“So how does permet respond? What does it mean to respond?”

“Vibrate,” Belmeria said automatically. It was textbook stuff. “It vibrates.”

“And if you can make something vibrate, you can…”

“Well… you can keep time or… send a…” Belmeria stopped. She breathed. “You can send a signal.” She stood up.

“Ah,” Prospera said. “See? You do know.”

Belmeria paced. It was a short trip either way and she started feeling dizzy whether from that or the implications, hard to say.

“Suletta’s brain,” she said, wagging her finger in the air. “For a moment. Just a moment… it was a transmitter. In the middle of a data storm. Even after the storm dissipates there’s a lingering… medium. There was a medium. She could… to send as well… no… no that can’t…” She looked at Prospera. “…Ericht?”

Prospera nodded. “It is only, as you said, a guess. But an educated guess. She downloaded Ericht’s neural imprint out of Ariel into the nearest viable storage device.”

Belmeria stared. “Fuck.”

“Oh my.”

“We’ll never be able to prove this, you know! Everything we’d need to recreate the conditions for it were destroyed along with Quiet Zero! And even if they did exist the ethics of such an experiment would be… unacceptable! But the implications…” Belmeria bit her knuckle. There was no way. Still, wasn’t it worth…

“And yet you’re still thinking of how you could do it, aren’t you?” Prospera said. “You must have been quite a good fit with the Peil.”

“Is this all you’re here for?” Belmeria said sharply. “I am very busy. With helping your daughter. I’d like to get to work before..”

“Bel. For good or ill, we’re both here. The future is its own creature. I doubt the likes of you or I have much to worry about. History has a way of passing by our ilk.”

What did that mean? That she should stop worrying and let come what may? That they’d be ignored rather than pursued? Was that how Prospera did it? How she could sit here untouched by what she had done? Belmeria didn’t know if she admired that or was repulsed by it. “You can’t know that for certain.”

“One develops an instinct for such things. This has been illuminating all the same. But now…” Prospera pushed her chair away from Belmiria’s desk. “At the very least, this conversation has given our little Rembran time enough to clear out of Suletta’s room so that I may visit.”

“What?” Belmeria slouched as Prospera moved to wheel herself out of the room.

“Things are so awkward between us, you know?” Prospera said. “She means so much to Suletta but frankly I don’t know what to do around her. I suppose that is how it is between in-laws. And don’t get me started about her friends. They seem nice enough, but…”

“You… did try to kill them.”

“You really like keeping track of that kind of thing, don’t you?”

Burion Industries had its executive headquarters on Mars. While it was more fashionable to live off-planet, Secelia’s great grandfather had fancied himself a lord of the land in a feudal sense and Mars as a great frontier in need of taming. It had informed his choice of initial settlement: the vast continental plateau of Tharsis. The thinking being that once Mars was terraformed and seawater flooded into the vast northern basins, Burion would occupy the most valuable real estate in the inner systems.

Old Man Burion was like that: seized by romantic notions of taming a world.

This kind of fanciful ambition had made Burion the butt of jokes in the rarified spaces it sought to do business in. There was this embarrassing fantasy of a new imperial project on Mars that seemed to pass through the family the way ownership of Burion had. They built a castle. Multiple generations of Secelia’s family had diverted the profits of Burion into the making of that grand castle, fashioned in the neo-stella sort of folly that was the favored affectation of a certain kind of idle rich.

Save for the mines that extracted a modest fortune of permet from under the planet’s surface, Mars was a millstone around the company’s neck. Burion’s bread and butter were the offworld logistics that kept Spacian society flush with goods and resources taken from Earth. Its Demi line of Mobile Suits was another success. They were not glamorous but they were workaday machines that occupied every niche from construction to security. They were cheap to produce, easy to maintain and hardy in any environment. But Mars was a quixotic fantasy that guzzled up that profit and when that sort of behavior got the company in trouble, only the sale of controlling shares kept them from being carved up by the other corporations. The family maintained a partial ownership and very swiftly, the Mars projects came to a stop as shareholders demanded budget cuts. Secelia, at a young age, watched as Mars became an unfashionable backwater once again, but this time with the expensive ornamentation of her family’s extravagance standing in gaudy contrast to the labor camps. An entire planet as a monument to how much easier it was to tear down a dream than it was to build one.

Aliya Mahvash sat atop a small rise that overlooked the ruins of Earth House. In her lap lay the head of a goat, which looked up at her with one of its mad, staring eyes and attempted to eat the cuff of her sleeve.

“Now, now, Tycho,” Aliya said, chiding the goat gently and soothing her with long firm strokes down her neck. Tycho flicked her ear in Aliya’s face. “How will I explain this to the academy quartermaster if I have to replace my uniform?”

Asticassia’s climate control had always kept the temperature comfortably cool at night, but lately it’s been… inconsistent. A chill had set in and she was grateful for the warmth her animals provided in abundance. Tycho lay against her, the goat’s legs tucked under her body which was curled around Aliya. She settled against the goat’s bulk and looked up at the stars. Moments like this reminded her of home.

The landscape spread out in front of her and curled upward, following the curve of the torus.

Living in a space habitat has been an eye-opening experience as far as Aliya was concerned. For instance, you would think that for how much money they must have spent simulating the night sky they’d have figured out a way to not make it look so flat. It just went to show that you really can’t take anything for granted.

She felt the tug on her sleeve as Tycho got it into her mouth again.

“You have been very grumpy lately, don’t think I haven’t noticed,” Aliya chided and pushed Tycho gently but firmly away. She was beginning to suspect that Tycho resented her for leaving her in the care of those two Spacian girls. Or maybe she resented her for relieving them of that duty. She had done inventory upon their return and it looked like they may have given the animals more than the usual amount of feed. “You’ve become spoiled, haven’t you?”

The goat snorted and butted her on the elbow.

“Aliya, whatcha doing out here?”

From the ruins of Earth House, Aliya could see the distinctive silhouette of Chuchu approaching, her twin puffs of hair bobbing against the vista of patchwork reconstruction lights receding into the distance.

“Enjoying the weather,” she said. “And finding Tycho.”

“She get out again?” Chuchu squatted down and looked the goat in the eyes. “What’re you gonna do if you fall into a sinkhole, dumb animal?”

Tycho made a play for Chuchu’s hair, teeth coming down on empty space as she dodged back and stood up.

“What about you, Chuchu?” Aliya said.

“I have to go see Dote.”

“Secelia Dote? Now?”

“I’ve been pushing it off, but she’s been on my ass for weeks about the Demi Barding.” Chuchu crossed her arms.

“Not for how it almost got stolen, surely?”

“Better not,” Chuchu said. “She got it back. But she wants a meeting.”

“It was nice of her to loan that Mobile Suit, though.”

“Psh. Sure, I guess. She was just saving her own skin.”

“But Burion has its own pilots. Why do you think she chose you?”

Chuchu made a confused sound and scratched her temple. “I… don’t know,” she said after a pause.

Aliya watched Chuchu pursed her lips in concentration. She had known Chuchu for some time, as a part of her mechanics team and as a friend. Also as an occasional fortune teller. It was easy for people to assume things about her, that she was quick to violence. But, well, Asticassia was the school for the elite and the elite would never truly forgive someone like Chuchu for being here. Everyone in Earth House had their own way of coping with that pressure and Chuchu did it by answering each outrage with outrage. But in a match like that the Spacians would always have the upper hand. She may as well go into a Mobile Suit duel without a Mobile Suit. Not that she wouldn’t back down from such a mismatch.

That earned a smile for Aliya. She could already imagine it.

And that was an admirable thing. That strength. But it was also very lonely way to live. Chuchu needed someone who could… if not fight alongside her, then watch over her. Some way of leveling the field. Be the hand that puts a finger on the scale, this time in her favor. Perhaps that’s why she was so drawn to Nika, who had helped her navigate Asticassia when she first arrived.

“Well,” Aliya said. “Even Secelia may not be sure why she had done it.”

“What does that mean? She was… probably on the way already, right? She was dragging Martin along with her. It was just circumstance.”

“Maybe I should check the star charts.”

Chuchu clicked her tongue. “You know I don’t believe that stuff.”

“The stars never lie, Chuchu.” Aliya looked up, past Chuchu, up to the shattered sky.

“Those are literally lying stars!” Chuchu threw her arms upwards. “They’re fake as hell.”

“But there’s something in them still.”

“What?”

“Have you ever noticed,” Aliya said. “So much of the sky is broken. But directly over Earth House… directly above it… the sky is perfectly clear. There isn’t even the faintest flicker of static.”

“Wha… seriously? No way. It’s gotta be random chance.”

“I’ve kept track. Ever since we returned. It’s like the station had never been damaged. But only over Earth House.”

She had always liked to come out to the field across from Earth House at night. It had been a balm when she felt homesick, though a poor substitute for the real thing: the grassy plains of her home that seemed to stretch out endlessly in every direction. Far from city lights the galaxy shined and arced overhead, from one end of the horizon to the other. Like an embrace from the entire universe. It was impossible not to fall in love with all its possibilities. The night sky in Asticassia could never elicit that kind of ecstasy and Aliya sometimes wondered if Spacians even knew what it was like to see the Milky Way the way she had from Earth’s surface, in the slumbering plains surrounded by her animals. The Fronts use so much energy lighting up the asteroid surfaces and the habitat bulkheads that it was possible that they were just as blind to the galaxy as the city dwellers on Earth. Which seemed like such a shame.

The aftermath of Norea’s attack had left the sky smaller, crowded with static. Certainly the least of her offenses, but one that Aliya couldn’t help but feel a bit personally about. Still, as the static split the sky all around her, she couldn’t help but notice that the simulated sky over Earth House seemed perfectly intact, as crisp as the day she first arrived in Asticassia.

Aliya did not know what to make of that, so she appreciated it as best as she could, lying on the grass at night, looking up and letting it remind her of home.

“Huh.” Chuchu looked up and stared for a long, silent moment during which the stars over Earth House remained perfectly clear.

“That’s… really weird,” she said.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation for it.” Aliya watched as Tycho raised her head off her lap, stretched her neck forward and bit Chuchu’s hand, which dangled tantalizingly close as her attention remained skyward.

“Ow!” She shook Tycho off. “So. Um.” Chuchu gave off an air of indifference. “What did your star charts say?”

“Chuchu.”

“Yeah?”

“Before you go, there’s a half dozen fresh eggs in the refrigerator. It’s in a separate container from the rest. Why don’t you give it to her when you meet?”

Chuchu shrugged. “It’s your chickens, I guess. Okay. But why?”

“No particular reason. It’s a gift.”

“I don’t think she knows the meaning of the word.”

“I do hope you two can be friends.”

When Chuchu scoffed at that, Tycho made a sound as if mimicking her. Chuchu eyed her grumpily. “She doesn’t have friends. She has underlings. I already work for one spoiled Spacian princess, don’t need another one. But yeah, eggs, you got it. She’ll hate knowing she owes Earth House for this so it might be worth giving to her.”

Chuchu waved as she jogged down the hill. Aliya waved after her.

“You know, Tycho,” Aliya said in the silence that followed. “At first I didn’t see it, but now I really think I do.”

Tycho belched, flicked an ear in Aliya’s face and chewed idly at the Asticassia grass. That was another thing. The grass seemed greener around Earth House. That one, Aliya did not know what to make of, but it did make caring for the animals easier.

“And… and… that’s why we’re leaving!”

Secelia had a pretty good stare. One time, she had looked at a first year with such contempt that he fell over while waiting in the cafeteria, causing a chain reaction that annihilated the entire line. Well. He was going to take the last potato flatbread. Obviously he had to be stopped.

She pinned the two students in front of her with one of her heavier glares and they shrank into themselves where they sat across from her. Hermano Ruiz and Taron Greene. Second years in Mechanics and Management, respectively. They grew up on the Phobos Drag, a great chain of colonies anchored to Mars’ largest moon, trailing it as it orbited the red planet. Another one of the Old Man’s follies. The vision had been that the Drag would be made longer and longer until it encircled Mars in one giant planetary ring. The work would take generations. It lasted for two before Burion’s newly empowered shareholders halted the project and directed it to more arms dealing.

But the vast engineering and logistical work required to keep the incomplete colony functioning generated brilliant students. Greene and Ruiz were among them. They were also, it turned out, romantically involved which meant that one came with the other. And, it turned out, one would leave with the other. Romance. Such an inconvenience.

Secelia made a show of filing her nails, smoothing out the ragged edge along one pinky that had been doggin her all day.

“So…” she said with a distracted air. “Who are you again?”

She recognized Ruiz’s voice. “We’re —”

“Rouji,” she said.

Standing behind her, Rouji raised his Haro. “Taron Greene, Second Year Management Strategy. Student number…”

Secelia knew that Rouji knew that she knew all the relevant facts about these two, but having his Haro drone on about their academic record served to keep them a little off balance as well as reminding that what they were leaving behind if they abandoned Asticassia. It also gave her time to refine her nails, which was time she spent considering her approach.

Nobody ever did anything for free. Burion House needed numbers. She needed numbers. Students from the other Houses were leaving in droves, understandable but short-sighted. Whoever was left over would be first to the table for what’s coming next. If Burion was going to maintain a presence here and in turn shape the future of Asticassia then Secelia needed to staunch the bleed. All of the Inner system and the Jovian system had eyes on this place now. People couldn’t resist a car crash. One was in the executive office of the Space Assembly League and that was the kind of slow rolling scandal that would take its fair share of trophies in the form of resignations and prosecutions in its own time. But the big, showy disaster right now was Asticassia. The gossips were awash in it. In time it would give way to the dry, quiet work of reconstruction and people would grow bored and the League prosecutions will be picking up steam by then. But until that happened, it was possible that no one place in space had the attention that Asticassia did. There were even a few disaster tourists lurking around, taking selfies next to the rubble that used to be the crown jewel of Benerit.

If anyone was going to seize the moment…

“… received the third highest mark in last year’s Mechanics exam,” the Haro concluded.

Secelia let a sufficiently dramatic silence settle over the four of them as she blew across her nails.

Forget about leaving Asticassia, that’s just a consequence. What do they really want? And how will staying here get them that?

Find their wants, Old Man Burion would say in this moment. Find what they want and show them how you’re the one who’ll give it to them. Once you do that they’ll follow you anywhere.

Then she looked up and gave them a look that suggested she was being very generous in allowing them to waste her time like this. “Let me tell you,” she said with an eyebrow arched, her chin cradled in her hands. “Why you will want to stay.”

Under the static-speckled sky, Chuchu felt compelled to stop her bike in anticipation of another panic. She skipped off of it, letting it fall to the ground as she hurled herself against the solid structure of a still-intact bench before the world could spin out from under her with visions of shadowy Mobile Suits tearing the academy apart.

With her forearms on her knees and her head sagging between her shoulders, Chuchu breathed, in and out and waited for the moment to pass. The attacks were becoming more frequent. But she was… dealing. She was managing. Why was this getting to her so much? Nobody else in Earth House seemed so badly affected.

Why was she even out here, breathing raggedly while her pulse rung in her skull like a bell? Stupid Dote, calling her out here. Stupid Chuchu, for even entertaining the request. Stupid Asticassia, if its roads and tram network weren’t such a mess she’d be there already. She wished for running water, to splash in her face, wake her up, snap her out of this… stupid… whatever.

It didn’t take long to go from thoughts like that to wondering why she was even in Asticassia. They were still spinning their wheels. Miorine hadn’t contacted them since the day Nika was taken away.

Chuchu had fights. She’d been in fights. Started fights. But then there were slaughters. The long path leading up to the factory, lined with bodies when the Spacians pushed too far and the Earthians had no choice but to fight back. She had seen how those ended, heard the staccato gunfire as one of the Guys herded her and the other kids into the furthest, safest corner of town.

Wasn’t always safe enough.

They vanished.

She really thought she had left all that behind.

In a thundering cloud of shrapnel.

Her legs bounced with nervous energy as she sat and felt the muscles in her upper body seize up.

“Hello,” said a hushed voice behind her.

“Fuck!” Chuchu shouted so loud she was sure the construction workers patching the sky back together far overhead heard her. She jumped off the bench and executed a freakish catlike midair turn that she wasn’t even consciously aware of until she was on the ground, reared back, one fist raised.

Rouji flinched back and hid behind his Haro which was flapping its little ear flaps in distress.

Chuchu took several deep breaths.

“Rouji! You… Spacian turd!”

“Oh?” Secelia glanced up from her table. “Look who finally decided to show her face.”

“Shut up,” Chuchu said as Rouji led her in.

Like Earth House, Burion House had returned to their place on campus. The grounds had been deemed stable but the building had been condemned. All but the old dorm building had been demolished already and it stood, half-ruined, some distance from an artificial lake that had been drained to conserve Asticassia’s water. And the shelters for Burion students were clustered in neat rows between them. Rouji had walked Chuchu to the largest of the buildings, which turned out to be a makeshift common room and cafeteria, long tables all in a line. Secelia sat at one of them, her back to the table so she could drape her arms on the tabletop with her legs crossed in front of her. It ought to have been uncomfortable as hell but Secelia seemed to give no indication of being anything other than being utterly at home.

“What took you so long, Pom-pom Head?” Secelia was alone in the warmly lit space, her attention focused on her notebook, held in one hand, swiping through it idly.

There was the spin-up of energy and, with a piercing whine, bolts of light cut through the cafeteria.

“It was a nice night,” Chuchu said stiffly. “so I took my time. I’m not one of your Burion flunkies.” She turned to Rouji. “No offense.”

Rouji gave her a little nod as he walked past her. He leaned close to Secelia and whispered.

Chuchu narrowed her eyes. “If you got something to say about me you can say it out loud.”

Rouji looked up at her warily as if she were going to do something that would frighten him, like lunge at him, or shout, or be a girl in his proximity. When it turned out that she was going to continue being one of those things, he withdrew, self-conscious and hunched inward, his Haro held up as a shield. Chuchu felt a little bad about that. He was alright, really. But she didn’t know how Secelia could stand it, surrounding herself with cringing boys. Everybody had their preferences.

Secelia waved a languid hand. “You don’t need to stand on my account. Have a seat.”

With a grunt, Chuchu sat at the table across from Secelia. She couldn’t help the sullen posture as she slouched forward, one elbow on her knee, her chin resting on her hand as she avoided Secelia’s gaze.

“Do you like piloting Mobile Suits?” Secelia said.

Chuchu knitted her brow and darted a glare at Secelia. “What the hell kind of question is that? That’s what I’m at school for, isn’t it?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sometimes, Princess, you don’t get what you want.”

Secelia hummed at that and Chuchu felt her temper flare. This Spacian summons her and then acts like…

“The reason I called you here today is because I want you to fill this out.” She reached back for a tablet and handed it across the space between them. Chuchu took it, eyeing it with a scowl.

“You trying to get me to sign some kind of contract or something?”

“I assume you can read, Pom-pom Head.”

Chuchu hissed in the silence before giving in. Her glare twisted with confusion. “This is an after action report.”

“You’ve written them before.”

“Yeah after every piloting class. You think you’re my teacher?”

Secelia turned her expression into a leer. Her eyes glinted. “Is that something you’d like?”

Treacherous, unbidden thoughts of Nika surfaced in Chuchu’s head. So shocking an intrusion that it made Chuchu take a sharp breath as if cold water had been poured down her back. She had always been such a good teacher, Nika. Patient and kind and always willing to help Chuchu navigate this strange place that was so far from anything she had found familiar. Asticassia was hostile to the ones who didn’t know its mores. All of Earth House had helped out. They had all been where she was. But she was prickly, she knew it of herself. Quick to frustration and quick to express it in anger. She would have pushed them away through her own stupid short-sightedness if it weren’t for Nika’s gentle assurances and patience. And if in those times when she had taken Chuchu by the hand, the contact had sent a spark down Chuchu’s nerves and set her heart racing… that was something she kept to herself because… because…

”I would have done the same,” Nuno had said that morning Martin confessed snitching on Nika. And Chuchu had clamped down on her outrage as he sympathized with the leader of their house for doing so. And fine. Fine. Fine. Things looked bad but… but…

The betrayal in that! She loved her Earth House. She did. She would die for any of them but… that wasn’t the same for everyone and that was a lesson she was only learning in that moment. Ojelo, thankfully, wasn’t as quick to agree. Lilique said something about how you had to do what you thought was best in moments like these, even if they aren’t necessarily the best way. Well, for Chuchu that sure as hell wasn’t sell out one of their own to the Spacians. There had been people like that back home, who were eyes for the owners. In the long run, they found their due…

Well, she was pretty sure she had just made the case for keeping those feelings to herself. And that Secelia just happened to stumble on the right words to bring those emotions bubbling up under her skin felt like a trespass. She already had a shitty time just getting here. Hear out whatever she had to say and get the hell out.

Chuchu felt the anger drain out of her as if whatever fire inside her that usually sustains it had guttered away. She pressed a finger to her forehead and sighed. “Why don’t you stop messing around and just tell me what you want.”

Secelia raised an eyebrow at the outburst and the ensuing silence pressed down on Chuchu and her growing impatience pressed up against it, causing her to sit up straight and square her shoulders in defiance of how foolish she now felt.

Then Secelia shrugged. “Fine. You piloted the Demi Barding through a number of scenarios. I want to know if it performed well.”

“What? You want me to… write a review?”

“Analysis is a crucial step in prototyping,” Rouji said from behind Secelia.

“And the Barding is a prototype,” Secelia said. “It’d be nice to have a first-hand account of how it performed.”

“Are you serious?”

“You will be compensated, Burion is not in the habit of cheating its talent.”

“You’re damn right I’ll be — wait, what do you mean? I don’t actually work for you, you know.”

“We’ll make you a contractor for accounting purposes first but in the future —”

“There isn’t going to be a future! You don’t need me to test pilot that thing! Doesn’t Burion have anyone who knows how machines work?”

“Of course,” Secelia said. “… they’re just not as good as you.”

Ah. This is the first time Chuchu had seen Secelia lie, she was quite certain. Secelia could be vicious with her words but she was never dishonest with them. Which made her insults the more cutting. But these words caught in her mouth with a hesitation belying how unfamiliar the practice was to her.

“First of all,” Chuchu said, “you’re damn right they aren’t. Second of all, there’s no way that’s actually true.”

Secelia sighed and kicked her leg idly. “We live in a unique moment, don’t we? Everyone’s feeling unsettled with this disruption in our lives.” She looked at Chuchu and grinned, canines showing. “It makes the sheep hungry, thinking that they can fight their way up to the top of the food chain. It’s entertaining to watch them flail, but it also makes matters that should be straightforward… complicated.”

Stupid damn Spacians and their theatrics. Chuchu worked to untangle the meaning from the nonsense of Secelia’s sentence. “You… can’t use a Burion pilot… because why?”

“You’ll find our rates very reasonable,” Secelia said as if Chuchu had said nothing at all. “But there is something I’m curious about that I’d like to know right now. Since we got the Barding back I’ve been going through its records.” She produced her notebook from inside her jacket and activated the screen. “Is there a reason you used the beam rifle like a club? Did you forget how guns work?”

“Obviously not! We were —”

The Gundvolvas surrounded them — Chuchu and the Jeturk girl. At least Lauda wasn’t here to be a drag on her and she could fight like she meant it. But Chuchu… Chuchu… her finger had seized around the trigger of the beam rifle. Her shots had gone wide. The Jeturk girl was shouting over the comms. “I refuse to die because some Earthian with pom-poms for brains can’t aim!” and Chuchu knew she was trying to help shake off whatever… this was. How embarrassing. But she was right. They were going to die because Chuchu couldn’t bring herself to pull a trigger. She ground her teeth as if she could break them in lieu of the Gundvolvas. Her arm spasmed again, aching to be used where her trigger finger couldn’t. Fuck it.

She shifted her controls and the Demi Barding flipped the beam rifle around, grabbing it by the barrel and swinging.

There was a heavy battery near the stock of the rifle which gave it an alarming heft. It came down on the Gundvolva standing in front of her and shattered its shell unit. It fell unceremoniously to the ground. Chuchu lifted the abused rifle up in the air, found her next target, and swung.

“I mean… I was always better in melee rather than long-ranged combat anyway,” Chuchu said sullenly.

“The Barding comes equipped with two beam sabers,” Secelia said. “You don’t know how to use those?”

“Um, no?” If the question was meant to cause offense, it was only because Secelia clearly didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Wait, seriously?” Secelia said in genuine befuddlement.

“You gotta be fully certified before they even let you handle a beam saber,” Chuchu said. “I never got to that part of my instruction before Asticassia went to hell.”

Secelia blinked. “Seriously?” she repeated before leaning to one side. “Rouji.”

“Beam saber certification is a requirement in the pilot program,” he said quietly. “Until then, they are limited to training weapons.”

“Seriously?” Secelia repeated. “What’s the big deal? You just turn it on and swing it.”

At this, both Rouji and Chuchu blanched. “It’s… quite easy to do more damage to yourself than your opponent if you are not properly trained,” Rouji said.

“Yeah.” Chuchu gestured. “How can you not know that? Aren’t you on the dueling committee?”

“You think I keep track of their… training or whatever? I’m just there to watch them beat each other up for stupid reasons.”

Chuchu rolled her eyes. “Figures. If that’s how you get your kicks you should really do a search on ‘beam saber fails’. It’s a good way to burn an afternoon.”

“Well,” Secelia said. “This won’t do at all. We’ll have to get you certified at some point.”

“What?” Chuchu said.

“I’ll see if we can work it into the schedule,” Rouji said.

“What?” Chuchu said.

Secelia looked at Chuchu. “He said ‘schedule.’”

“I — I know that!” Chuchu said. “Why are you taking an interest in my pilot training?”

“Because.” Secelia tossed her notebook at Chuchu. “We can help each other out.”

Chuchu clapped her hands together, catching it in midair. She looked at the screen. Read it. Re-read it. Blinked and read it again. No way. She looked up, disbelief and amusement warring on her face. “You? You’ve been challenged to a duel?”

She laughed. She conjured up the image of Secelia Dote in a Mobile Suit cockpit and laughed harder. “Catty little space princess Secelia Dote finally pissed off someone who isn’t afraid of her? And now they’re finally gonna smear you across the landscape with a Mobile Suit?”

“Why, Pom-pom Head,” Secelia said brightly with a nasty smile. “You were frightened of me?”

“Spare me.” Chuchu said, as if the attempt at getting a rise out of her wasn’t obvious enough. “So we’re still holding duels, huh? Wild.”

“We weren’t until now.”

“This is the first duel that’s been declared since the attacks,” Rouji said.

Asticassia never closed. It didn’t close after the Open Campus and it’s hasn’t closed after Norea attacked. Nobody’s quite sure what to do but the academy remained open. But there was little of the day-to-day school life that remained. They certainly hadn’t conducted duels. There was no formal rule for it, it was something unspoken. The fact that most of Asticassia was too unstable to safely host a duel was enough to quell even the twitchiest pilot looking for a fight.

Now it seemed someone was a bit twitchier than that.

“Looks like you’re screwed then,” Chuchu said. She read the name of the challenger. “Who is Tober Dawe?”

“You don’t recognize her? She’s the one who tried to steal the Demi Barding out of impound.”

Chuchu clicked her tongue. “House Burion, huh? Figures that was an inside job. So that’s what you meant with that dumb riddle. It’s just politics. Can’t find a Burion pilot because they’re on her side or something like that?”

“I’ll spare you the details about Burion’s internal affairs.”

Chuchu leaned back and put her hands behind her head. “Sounds like you got a lot on your plate then. Well, I guess I can —”

“I want you to be my champion,” Secelia said.

“Would you let me —”

“And you will be compensated.”

“I said —”

“With the Demi Barding.”

“Just — wait what? What?”

“Earth House needs a Mobile Suit, doesn’t it? Become my champion and fend off any challenges until… say… I graduate from Asticassia and the Barding will belong to Earth House.”

“Wait, what? What do you… what do you mean?”

“I guess there’s more paperwork for a proper transfer of ownership but I think I’m being pretty clear.”

“You can just… like that? Ugh! You rich Spacians! You all have too much for your own good!”

“Maybe. Frankly I’d ask someone else but you’re the only pilot I know outside Burion who isn’t incapacitated in some way. Putting my future in your hands leaves me feeling cold.”

“Hey! I’m pretty good!”

“I did see you eat it hard in that team fight.”

“Fuck off.” Chuchu waved a hand at her. “I still landed the winning shot. With… help.” The memory of that moment when she had sniped the antenna off of that pretty boy Grassley puke Shaddiq was going to be a source of warmth and comfort for the rest of Chuchu’s life.

“Hm. Well, you’ll have to do regardless. So you prefer melee fights, huh? I guess modern Mobile Suit design and duel guidelines don’t really mesh well with that kind of combat. Though I had always thought that…”

Was she really going along with this? Chuchu mulled this over as Secelia went on. She… would have anyway, truth be told. Stand in for Secelia in the duel, that is.

The Burion Princess had been the first to throw in with them, after all. Even if it was in her typically offhand way, her intervention had gotten them out of the worst jams and that counted for something. It counted for a lot in Chuchu’s eyes. She had always envisioned herself as the kind of person who took care of her people. That used to mean her town, including everyone from the Guys who taught her everything she knew to the shitty teens who stepped on her to get the best jobs. Yeah some of them sucked but when a private security guy or some Spacian shithead pushed things too far you formed ranks around your own and pushed right back. She had learned and practiced that lesson in blood and bruises and broken bones. Then that tight circle expanded to include Earth House. There was no mystery in that, but she had never expected to include Spacians who could all collectively jump off the tallest building in Asticassia as far as she was concerned. But Suletta earned her place. Miorine too, though she sure as hell fell out of it for a while. And then more Spacians started showing up on her mental list of people she would draw blood for. It was confounding.

Rouji and Secelia had been the latest inclusions into the circle that Chuchu mentally thought of as “her people.” Maybe she had let the standards for entry into that club get a little lax, but anyone who threw in against Quiet Zero and all that madness deserved their place in it.

Still, no point making it known that she would have helped Secelia. Not vocally anyway. Not when there was a Mobile Suit thrown into the deal. If she meant it then hell yes, Chuchu would agree and Secelia could deal with the paperwork. She was practically giving the Barding away, after all.

“Hey! Pom-pom Head! You listening or are these things blocking your ears?” While Chuchu had been distracted by her thoughts Secelia had stood up, approached her and started fluffing at her hair puffs.

Chuchu batted at her hands. “Back off, Spacian brat!”

“Heh,” Secelia said as she stood before her, looking down. Isn’t this what it’s always like with her? Chuchu recalled her words with Aliya. No friends, only underlings.

That’s not me.

She stood too, but Secelia did not back away, putting the two of them far closer than Chuchu was accustomed. It rankled her how even when she stood up, she was still forced to look up at Secelia. What was it with Spacians? Did living in low gravity just make them taller? Up close she could feel the warmth coming off Secelia’s body. And, look, yeah, of course she’s attractive. Chuchu’s caught enough of the idle school gossip to know that she’s not breaking any ground making that observation. But up close, Secelia even smelled pretty. Which was… a weird thing to notice but there it was. Not cinnamon, but it brought to mind cinnamon in this kind of weird crossed-wires kind of way. It was enticing and heady and almost enough to make Chuchu take a step back. Only almost because hell no to that. She’d be forced to sit if she did.

“Let’s…” Chuchu ordered her thoughts when they threatened to scatter at another whiff. “Let’s get one thing straight though! I may be your champion, but that doesn’t mean I’m one of your gophers. So none of that, you know, painting your nails or other crap!”

“Aw. Have you been talking to Martin? He did a so-so job. Shaky hands. I bet you have steadier hands.”

“I don’t do manicures or pedicures or whatever cures.”

“For real? I bet it’d look good.” She reached down and took Chuchu’s hand in both of hers and this time Chuchu did take a step back, the back of her knees hitting the bench of the cafeteria table behind her, forcing her to take a seat. Secelia kept her hand though, turning it this way and that with the scrutiny of a jeweler regarding a rough stone.

“Hm, you got some serious callouses, you know?” Secelia’s fingers wandered down to Chuchu’s palm, causing her own fingers to twitch reflexively. A finger tip brushed against the base of her wrist and sent a thrill down her arm.

Chuchu pulled her hand out of Secelia’s (soft, warm, delicate) grip and cleared her throat. “Yeah, well, some of us had to actually work to survive, Princess. Anyway, so long as we’re clear about our roles we won’t have a problem.”

“Yeah, yeah. My champion has to maintain her dignity. Well, I suppose that will have to do for now.” Secelia held her hand out, this time for a handshake.

There was an issue with that ‘for now’ business, but at the same time Chuchu had to allow that she didn’t mind being referred to as ‘my champion.’ Even if it was Secelia of all people doing it. So… maybe on balance, yeah.

She reached out and shook on it.

Rouji left, escorting Chuchu to the edge of Burion’s camp.

Secelia looked down at her fingers and tried to recall the ridges and bumps of callouses that had formed on Chuchu’s hand. Well, there was a novelty to it, she supposed. That’s all.

But still…

Giving an outsider a glimpse into the dysfunction of Burion, no matter how brief, was unsightly. Secelia had always been careful to keep her own affairs out of sight and even the few things Chuchu had been able to deduce was more than Secelia liked.

But still, if that had been the price, it was… interesting. Holding the hand of someone who had lived such a different life.

She wondered what it would take to get Chuchu to sit still so she could give her a pedicure.

The stray thought snagged on the gears of her mind and she willed it away. Secelia sat back down, crossing one leg over the other and letting her head loll back, eyes on the ceiling as she thought. So many plates to spin, so many fires to put out. And the solutions were always so obvious. If only so many of the people necessary to solve them weren’t blinded by pride. Getting Earth House lined up was a simple but necessary step. She already had its head wrapped around her finger, now its sole pilot too, tempted by the Demi Barding.

Granted it was a hell of a prize, but the Barding was mostly a platform for untested concepts Burion had been working on. “Prototype” sounded sexy but what it meant in practice was a bunch of unproven ideas that often contradicted each other until sufficient testing ironed out the worst of the kinks. Still, she would not be able to justify giving it away to the shareholders.

But… if she can massage the circumstances right, she’ll never have to worry about pleasing a single shareholder ever again.

Only if.

“Alea iacta est, huh?” she said to the ceiling.

There was an almost imperceptible change in the air. Rouji was a quiet boy, sometimes startlingly so. People never seemed to notice him until he spoke up in that soft way of his at which point everyone in the room would jump as if they’d seen a ghost. One time Secelia had witnessed him eating alone at a cafeteria table when a Peil House student sat next to him without, apparently, realizing he was there. When Rouji reached out to the napking dispenser the Peil student reeled back so hard his food tray flipped up into his face. Hilarious. But Secelia had long since learned to tell when he was in the room with her.

“She wanted me to give you this,” Rouji said and rounded the table to leave a bundle wrapped in white cloth next to Secelia’s head.

Curiosity piqued, Secelia shifted to face the package. She slipped the knot loose with one hand and let the cloth fall open.

“Oh,” Rouji said. Rouji was a big breakfast boy. You wouldn’t know from looking at him but he loved his pancakes and eggs and sausages. So of course he was going to be pleasantly surprised by the half-dozen fresh eggs they were now looking at.

Hell, Secelia was salivating. How long had it been since she had real protein that didn’t come from a supplement? After Norea had attacked, emergency rations were flown in. But then Miorine had surrendered Benerit to Earth and Spacian corporations were dumping their contracts with Benerit. Including food services. Everyone was living off of vitamin gel and pills and an occasional graham cracker wrapped in foil…

Their necessities were being met, but only barely. Anything else was… Secelia had a team of Burion engineers working on warm water. That’s how bad things were. And Earth House had this? Did Chuchu have any idea how valuable these were?

“Fuck,” she breathed out. “I completely forgot they had animals. Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit. If I had… if I had remembered I would have requested a regular supply of eggs and milk as well for the Barding. Did she plan this? Giving this to me after we had made the deal? No. Impossible. But… how else…”

“Um. No. I think she just forgot to give it to you before,” Rouji said. “She was distracted…”

“Well.” Secelia settled back and picked up an egg. She moved her fingers in a wave motion and watched it dance over her knuckles. “She’s either a surprisingly good negotiator or absent-minded but either way the result’s the same: we need to make a new deal with Earth House. We can get a lot of influence over the other houses if we’ve got readily available fresh food. I would kill for a hard-boiled egg and I know I’m not the only one.”

“Secelia, I really don’t think they’re trying to leverage their assets against you.” Rouji was always freer with his words when they were alone. If he happened to come across the specs for some new machine it was all she could do to get him to shut up about it, but it was nice to see the little guy get animated. “Maybe if you just asked nicely they’d give you some.”

“Oh, Rouji. Everything has a price. Better to let them think they’re getting the better end of the deal.”

Rouji sighed. “Well… aren’t they?”

“I’ve got a bigger trophy in mind than a single Mobile Suit. Does Rembran know I’ve been challenged to a duel yet?” Secelia said.

“With the number of direct communications you’ve sent to her, I think it may be impossible for her not to know.”

“In my duties as the head of the Dueling Committee it is my obligation to make sure the academy executive is aware of all goings on.”

“Well, it worked. She wants to talk. She sent us details for a meeting.” Rouji looked up and considered the ceiling. Then he looked back to Secelia. “I really do think Earth House would help you if you just told the truth.”

“Oh, Rouji. So naive to the workings of the human mind. That’s why you need to stick with me.” Secelia held the egg up to her face and gave it a predatory look. “We need to take Earth House for everything we can. And do it with a friendly smile.”

“You might need to work on that smile because I’m not getting ‘friendly’ from it.”

“And that's why I need you around.” Secelia reached up and pulled him down into a headlock, tousling his hair. “It’s good for practice. Don’t be ungrateful about how useful you are.”

Chapter Text

Until very recently, when she became seized by the curse of the best of intention, Miorine Rembran had never entertained thoughts of taking her father’s position. She’d sooner die, a thing she had threaten to do on several occasions to very little effect. She had never really thought much of her future at all. None of her possible fates were desirable save for the possibility of somehow escaping her father and reaching Earth.

Looking back it all seemed incredibly naive. Assuming she had successfully smuggled herself to Earth at some point during all those attempts, how would she survive? All her resources were tied up with Benerit and the moment she used her account it would give her away immediately. Would she go further afield to evade her father’s eyes? Off the grid? And how would she survive? What food would she eat? What shelter would she take?

Well. She kind of wanted to believe she could do it. Lose herself on Earth, become so unrecognizably herself that even if some chance encounter caused her to cross paths with her father, he would not see his daughter.

These were the kind of annoying, fiddly questions that would make her stomp and shout and throw something. None of that stuff mattered. What mattered was that for once in her life, she might make a choice that was her own. Just… one step that hadn’t been decided by her father or a corporate board. Visiting her mother’s final resting place was that first step, and from it, a new life. Out here she was a thing, to be fought over and won. On Earth, maybe she could be a human being. There were precious few places left in space that didn’t have the Benerit logo branded on it. If there was no answer to how she was meant to live in space, then maybe she’d find it on Earth.

When she finally came to Earth, fire followed her like a demonic shadow. A laughing evil thing that upended Quinharbor and showed her how easily she could be outmaneuvered.

Prospera had never really taken her seriously and she wondered if the woman had indeed laughed, sitting in Aerial as Quinharbor burned. There was a cockpit recorder. Had Aerial not died with Quiet Zero, Miorine might have been able to at least answer that question.

It was possible that growing up meant making peace with never having the answers.

These unbidden thoughts of desolation came to her as she sat in a conference room illuminated by dim, flickering lights with a grand, vista-sweeping window out to Asticassia that must have been breathtaking once. Now, it showed her a land that had buckled under bombardments, the green spaces were blackened and the buildings lay in ruins. The whole of Asticassia looked a giant toddler’s toybox, its contents upended in a tantrum. The students lived amid the shattered landscape.

For all her shock at the death she had witnessed at Quinnharbor, seeing it repeated in Asticassia felt surreal and conflicting. Hadn’t she dreamed about this, in her despairing moments when it seemed like the only escape had been either she die or Asticassia? Being here and witnessing that grim fantasy made real gave her no feeling of triumph or satisfaction. Just horror that made her feel detached at the sight of it. She was still unused to the idea of violence up here, far from Earth, and that unsettled her. She had never realized that she had so internalized that easy Spacian prejudice that destruction belonged on Earth, that space was pristine in comparison, clean.

Well. Everything up here was a mess. The transfer of Benerit to Earth was going slowly. Too slowly. The goodwill the initial announcement had produced from Earth’s workers was beginning to wear off and the narrative Spacian media was running with — that it was all some weird PR stunt — was picking up steam. Meanwhile the investors who had access to the hard truth was calling for her head. And it was only a matter of time before the more direct investors started looking up mercenary groups to make that a reality.

She had hoped Guel would be able to assist in the transfer but he could only do so much. They had dissolved their engagement, to the relief of both, but he was as preoccupied with salvaging what he could from Jeturk Heavy Industries as she was with GUND-ARM.

It was up to Miorine, but she was…

She wished that Suletta were here. More than anything else, no matter how selfish and small it made her feel to think it, more than anything she wanted Suletta by her side. The desire consumed her, got the better of her. As the world’s upheavals threatened to throw Miorine off her feet, Suletta’s presence would ground her.

The calls to close Asticassia down and condemn it increased. The media was making hay of its dilapidation. And repairs were slow. The cost would have been enormous normally, but with the Benerit Group’s fate uncertain and Spacian concerns suspicious, funds were difficult to come by.

Some of the students took it in stride, surprisingly. The school did not close down after the Rumble Ring disaster, so no sense closing it now, they reasoned. Miorine… did not see the reasoning there, personally. But it was an odd civic pride they had that she never could have predicted. That perseverance was admirable and she wanted to keep it open. To hold onto something from before everything had gone so badly wrong.

But that was the students who remained. Much of the student body had already left and there was no point in resenting them for it. They had been living off of supplements, vitamin gel and crackers for two weeks and she counted herself fortunate that they hadn’t stormed her office by now.

There was an Asticassia here that she loved. For a brief time, in that stretch where Suletta saved her, gave her the space to be herself, it was more than bearable. It had been pretty damn good.

Miorine’s hands twitched at some outside stimuli that brought her back to herself and she blinked as she arose from the morass of reminiscence. She found herself smacking her lips, alarmed by how dry they were. Had she… eaten? Had a drink? She couldn’t remember. She woke up aching in the chair she had set next to Suletta. She wondered if she could convince the hospital to move a cot into Suletta’s room.

She couldn’t really recall what she had done, between that moment of waking up and coming to this meeting room. Days have been a blur, even as she felt she wasn’t really accomplishing anything.

Wincing, she touched her fingers to her dry lips. She really was thirsty.

Before her, the conference table thrummed. It was one of the advanced ones, the space underneath concealed so as to hide within it mechanisms that saw to the comfort of the elite executives that would normally make use of the table. A hatch slid open on the tabletop in front of Miorine and a crystal glass of clear water, condensation already collecting on its side, emerged.

Miorine blinked. This was not an uncommon feature for the better appointed conference tables, but it usually required some input from the person seated. She was certain she had done no such thing.

She took the glass, peering around her as if there were someone in the hidden corners of the room. Then she sniffed at it suspiciously. Still cautious, but also thirsty, she sipped at it. Just a bit.

It was good.

Alone in the room, Miorine suddenly felt self-conscious, as if she was being watched. She held a closed hand to her mouth and cleared her throat.

“Um. Thank you,” she said, hushed as if worried someone would actually hear.

Just another malfunction, but there are more pressing repairs that need addressing, she thought ruefully. She took another drink and then buzzed in her next meeting.

Today had been set aside for meetings, some face-to-face, most remote. All concerning the rebuilding and operation of Asticassia. Just one of several fires Miorine had taken upon herself to put out. It was a lot and very soon Miorine was starting to wish that the table dispensed coffee. Or ibuprofen. Mostly ibuprofen.

Alas, neither was forthcoming.

The hours passed and the day ground away. She had gotten off the phone with an Earth startup that concluded poorly. There was still so much bad blood. Her own ignorance of Earth industry wasn’t helping. She wished she had the foresight to take a day or two dedicated to studying up on the subject. But now…

She took a few minutes for a breather, nursed the now lukewarm water between her hands and checked the next appointment.

And frowned.

On cue, her notebook chimed. Her secretary.

“Your next appointment is here, Madame President.”

“Secelia Dote?”

“Yes, Madame President.”

Miorine sighed.

“She has three students with her, all are registered with Burion House.”

“Fine. Let them come up.”

Secelia Dote, newly arrived first year management strategy student of Burion House, sat across from a Daigo House second year. His hands were clenched in his lap, his eyes downcast, tears threatening to spill from them.

“Miss Dote.”

Secelia looked up to the lecturer. They were seated in front of the class as the lights rose. The demonstration had ended. With her eyes diverted, the Daigo second year saw a window where he could scrub at the tears in his eyes without drawing her attention. She saw, though. And she smiled, catching him in a sidelong glance to make sure he knew. He tensed up, all over, like a shock had passed through him.

“Could you explain,” the lecturer said, “the strategy behind calling your prospective business partner ‘a wretched scavenger feasting on the corpses of better men’ or ‘a petulant child given a loaded gun by buffoonish parents’ or ‘a self-important vandal who has never had a single thought worth thinking’ or ‘your only value is the fertilizer your dead body would render to the earth’?”

Secelia blinked rapidly, ordering her thoughts. “Professor. In the scenario you laid out, his boom-and-bust approach is unsustainable in the long run. His goal is to acquire my assets in order to liquidate them to balance his own ledger. If I wish to act in my own interest, my best move is to remove myself from negotiation entirely. But since that isn't an option, the outcome where we both benefit is for him to agree to terms where my superior executive decision making will benefit both of our companies while he takes a subordinate position. This is stated in the scenario you’ve written. So what’s it matter what I say? He should sign and be grateful that the worst that came of it is a little name calling.”

The lecturer sighed, long and weary. It was weird how often he did that around her, Secelia thought at the time. Wouldn’t it be better for all involved if he had just admitted she was right? Lecturer or not he should stick to the subject matter rather than weep over injured sensibilities.

“On paper, yes,” he said. “But surely you must see the benefit of preserving pride in sensitive moments like these.”

“Are we at a tea party now? Is decorum more valuable than good business practice? Is a bruised ego worth more than the well-being of a company?” Secelia asked. “I'm the one holding power in this situation, isn't he in the wrong for failing to recognize it?”

“That… is not what we’re here to decide, Miss Dote. This is about what is necessary to conduct a high-stakes business negotiation. Not swaddling up schoolyard insults with the pretense of self-righteousness. Perhaps you might find a more receptive audience at the business ethics class.”

A joke that would only work in a classroom full of children who had been raised by the most well-connected, rapaciously-minded raiders of the corporate sphere. It elicited a hushed murmur of laughter, passing over the class like the soft rustle of fabric.

“Please return to your seat, Miss Dote. And you, Mister Galien. Perhaps we can find two people less likely to let their emotions get the better of them to give us a proper demonstration.”

Those two people were, of course, the darlings of the management department, Miorine Rembran and Shaddiq Zenelli. Rembran passed by as Secelia returned to her seat, neither making a move to acknowledge the other.

Secelia kicked at the floor with boredom as the two proceeded with the demonstration. They were so robotic. Shaddiq with his shallow, placid smile and Miorine speaking as if her mind were a million miles away. Was there something going on between these two? They didn’t have chemistry. They had anti-chemistry. And you didn’t get like that unless it was a very deliberate choice. Mutual dislike? Oh, perhaps a lover’s quarrel? Some long-running familial spat? No, Miorine didn’t care about who her father considered enemies. She might even prefer them. The opposite then? Was Shaddiq a Delling lackey? It would certainly fit, his own father was permanently in Delling’s shadow. A ‘like father like adopted son who was eager to please’ situation?

People could be so interesting. There was the person that they performed, and then there was the person they really were. Their desires and wishes, carefully hidden. But they tell on themselves. Look at the way they leaned forward. They didn’t care about the demonstration. Rembran is the focus of attention. The prize and enigma of Benerit. There was no question what they all wanted.

She couldn’t be blamed if she thought this was all very funny. How Rembran, for all her placid facade, was so obviously roiling with anger for every moment she had to stand before them all. How the students, for all their high-minded boasting of their own refined breeding eyed her like boorish, salivating dinner guests presented with a roast lamb.

Old Man Burion would get a kick out of it all. You didn’t have to dig very far to see the kind of people you were really dealing with here. She could already imagine him in the upper row of the lecture hall, flicking pistachios onto the students below, cackling.

Ah, she did miss him.

It was all the more funny when she sat in on the Dueling Committee for the first time the day before. Pilots wrapped up their base desires in trappings of honor and glory on the battlefield. And then they grappled for each other’s antennas. Literal dickheads. Well, they didn’t actually grapple. That would have been more fun. Watching these fights reminded Secelia of her father and his worship of old Earth militaries. He’d love the spectacle. Mocking that spectacle, as well as each pilot — winner and loser alike — was so cathartic.

Below, the two star pupils concluded their demonstration in the customary way. A bow, a handshake, a bow. There was a smattering of applause.

“Thank you both, you may be seated.” The lecturer gave them an obsequious, indulgent little smile. Look how happy he is, Secelia thought. These children playing by his script, saying his lines, obeying his will. Do you think he gets off on it? Having the children of elites seeking his approval?

Shaddiq returned to his Grassley retinue and Miorine passed Secelia by with all the presence of a ghost, silent and almost ethereal. How dramatic.

The lecturer took the floor and Secelia could see him puff up for the long discursive talk ahead and she rested her chin in her hand and braced.

“You’re right, you know.”

Secelia scrunched her nose up at the unbidden voice and cast a surreptitious glance around. Rembran had taken the seat behind her.

“People like that shouldn’t hold power,” Miorine said, her eyes fixed straight ahead at the lecturer as she spoke. "If they value their pride over the company."

Secelia rolled her eyes and turned away. “Glad to know the daughter of the most powerful egoist in space agrees.”

“Hmph. That boy,” Miorine said unprompted. “Alexander Galien, the one you made cry.”

Secelia’s hands curled and she said nothing.

“His father owns one of the controlling shares of Burion, doesn’t he?”

“Nosy, aren’t you?” Secelia said, pouting into the distance.

“’A wretched scavenger feeding off the corpses of better men’.” Miorine whispered and Secelia was sure there was a smirk on her face. “That’s a good one.”

“You should hear what I come up with when I’m at the dueling committee if you think that’s good,” Secelia said with a brash smile.

There was a sharp intake of breath, barely audible as the professor droned on. “The dueling committee,” Miorine said in a whisper. “I see.”

It was probably a mistake to bring it up to Rembran, now that Secelia thought about it. The announcement that the Holder would be Miorine’s groom had been made on the very first day of the school year. Getting close to her would be a boon for Burion. Maybe even her family. It could give her the influence she’d need to shake off the shareholders, she’d…

Ah. So this was what it was like to be like all those other slavering wolves. You started to get notions, find ways to work Miorine into your schemes like a missing piece of a machine. Well. Secelia was never going to be the Holder. And Miorine was already shutting her out. She could imagine how her father would chide her for letting this opportunity slip away.

“You can’t think of a better use for your time?” Miorine said.

Thinking about her father had already soured her mood and Miorine was starting to rub her the wrong way. Well, screw dad anyway.

“If I wanted your feedback,” Secelia said crisply, “I’d fight the Holder for it and then remember it doesn’t actually hold any value.”

And that was the last time they spoke directly.

“How very magnanimous of you, Madame President,” Secelia said in the here and now. She put both elbows on the table and leaned towards Miorine, oozing insolence. “To bring us all here with concerns for our well-being. But when it comes to matters of safety, it is customary to address the Dueling Committee alone.”

Miorine sighed. It had been nearly half an hour since she had called up the Burion party. They had been going back and forth on the subject of the duel for far too long with no resolution in sight. And now Secelia wanted to talk to her alone? Well, so be it. She wasn’t making any headway by speaking directly with the challenger. “Very well.” She turned to the other Burion students who had accompanied Secelia: Tober Dawe, who had made the challenge and Collier Cress, who had a vested interest in the duel. “I am going to have a meeting with the Dueling Committee. All non-members, I thank you for your time. You may go.”

Tober Dawe trembled with outrage. “What do you think—”

“You may go.” Miorine flicked her eyes up at Tober from where she sat. The Burion scion wavered but ultimately left, dragging Collier with her. Soon it was just Miorine, Secelia and Rouji, who lurked in the back.

Miorine waited for the doors to close behind the first years before allowing herself to sag slightly in the chair. It wasn’t that she could be comfortable around Secelia, but she put less stock in keeping up appearances.

“Tough life you have there,” Secelia said.

That was easy bait, and hardly worth rising to. Instead Miorine nodded towards the door Tober had exited through. “If you don’t take her seriously, she’ll have your position.”

“All she’d have to do is wait a year.”

“But time is an issue.”

“Time is always an issue. So many people, living on borrowed time.”

Miorine turned and faced Secelia, who gave her little other than a Cheshire smile.

She couldn’t possibly know, no matter how well connected. She’s throwing darts blindfolded.

The two had only known each other in the vague way of classmates who never really talked. They were in the same year in the same management strategy course, but only for a couple semesters. It wasn’t long after when Miorine earnestly set to escaping the school and Secelia found her entertainment joining the Dueling Committee. And as far as Miorine was concerned, anyone who belonged to that group couldn’t be trusted.

So Secelia had been lumped in with all the other accomplices to her father’s scheme and Miorine hadn’t paid her much mind since. That she provided material support during the Quiet Zero crisis had been unexpected but welcome. Still, Secelia remained an unknown quantity that Miorine could not ignore. She represented Burion here and Burion machines were the backbone of Asticassia’s recovery effort.

“Why should I allow this duel to continue?” Miorine said.

“Tober wants control of Burion House so she can end our presence here on Asticassia and send everyone home.”

Miorine waited until she was sure her expression betrayed nothing. “Is Burion pulling its support?”

“Not yet. But it’ll be a real shitshow if it happens.”

Multiple contracts with Asticassia and the Benerit Group at large would vanish. Students trained on their machines. The construction workers who were rebuilding Asticassia did so with Burion machines. Burion Demi Garrisons were the main force of the front’s security. All these things were on lease and if Burion decided, then it could end those leases. There would be a steep financial penalty, but emotions were running high among Spacian corporations right now, the perfect environment for someone to make an emotional, critically damaging maneuver against her. At the very least, Asticassia would wither on the vine.

Suletta is here! The most advanced permet research facility is here! Asticassia cannot die!

“May I ask why Miss Dawe is set on this course of action?” Miorine spoke without a hint of the turmoil she felt. “The transfer of ownership does not affect Burion’s contracts.”

“Nobody likes uncertainty,” Secelia said. “Shareholders are a particularly cowardly bunch in that regard. It doesn’t matter if the contracts are intact. You’re pushing us into the unknown and everyone is panicking. What seemed like a sure bet is looking pretty shaky. Sure, the League was responsible for a lot of the instability that affected Benerit… but asking a shareholder to look at the bigger picture is like asking a flea to appreciate fine art. Plus… I may have ruffled my share of feathers.”

“I’m guessing that seeing Burion’s prototype Mobile Suit being used to facilitate our grand plan did not endear you to your shareholders.”

“They say it’s a return to the bad old days. My family has a reputation for using Burion for our own pet vanity projects. Dawe is from an offshoot of the family and is trying to protect her position. I’d sympathize if her actions didn’t stem from a critical lack of vision.”

“Preventing this duel becomes an increasingly more attractive option,” Miorine said.

“So the iron fist, eh? A Rembran to the core.”

This earned a slight downturn of Miorine’s mouth. However vital Secelia was she was still… Secelia.

“But it’s more than that, isn’t it, Madame President? You want to ban duels entirely, don’t you?”

“They’re an indulgence for the idle rich,” Miorine said. She kept her expression flat. She wondered if, in doing that she was still giving away her thoughts. “And a holdover that teaches violence as a first resort. It foments conflict rather than resolves it.” Miorine swiveled the chair and looked out the window. “I’ve seen the world our parents made and I’m not impressed. If the old want to teach the young how to fight their wars for them, they won’t do it in Asticassia. We can’t allow ourselves to become callous the way they have.”

Secelia produced a lollipop from within her uniform jacket, unwrapped it and popped it in her mouth. “Look at you, solving war. No wonder you were the top of the management class. Ban duels and you’ll hollow out the school while accomplishing nothing other than banning the aesthetic.”

“This is just the first step and aesthetics are important. It’s how they tell themselves that their violence is just.”

“That’ll show dear old daddy.”

“No!” Miorine slammed both hands on the table, no longer able to contain her annoyance. “That is not who this is about!”

In the immediate aftermath of her outburst there was silence, save for the sound of Secelia idly sucking on her lollipop. Then she pulled it out of her mouth with a pop and smiled.

“Phew!” she said after a moment. “That’s good. Then I won’t have to waste time telling you it wouldn’t work. What a relief.”

More silence followed, during which Secelia shifted in her seat, prodded at its cushion.

“Yeah, I’m sorry but this chair really does suck.”

Miorine drummed her fingers on the table as Secelia studiously ignored the petulant look on her face. And she knew she was being petulant. Knew it in that way where she knew she couldn’t stop herself even with the knowing. From what she had gathered, Secelia could be helpful, but she didn’t have much patience for overweening pride. Which was a bit hypocritical but Miorine wouldn’t do herself any favors by pointing it out.

She cleared her throat.

“If we were to speak in hypotheticals,” she said.

“Mhm?” Secelia said brightly.

“If it had been about my father.”

“Yeah?”

“Why wouldn’t it work?”

“What an interesting thought experiment you’ve laid out for me in a purely theoretical way.”

Miorine shot her a look and — to her surprise — Secelia raised a single hand in a gesture of surrender. Then she leaned back and looked away as Miorine waited.

“My family…” Secelia began, staring into the middle distance, “is a big fan of your dad, you know.”

This earned a raised eyebrow. Miorine did not know. Secelia never talked about her life outside Asticassia.

“My dad would buy all of your dad’s biographies,” she said, waving her lollipop around like a conductor’s baton. “Physical books! Actual paper! Bound in real fake leather! Seriously! They were never published like that of course, he knew a specialty bookbinder who’d do it for him for an obscene amount of money. Good on him too. Fleece the dumb old man while he still had the money to fleece.”

Miorine filed that away along with Secelia’s earlier comment about the family. Burion had been privately owned until a little under a decade ago. Its founding family still occupied executive positions, but they were little more than figureheads of a ship steered by shareholders. Sounded like there may have been good reason for it.

“He filled his office with books like those. A proper little library. Ridiculous. He only read a few of them and nobody else was ever allowed in that office, so you could only see them in conference calls. He could have just rigged up a fake background for that, right? But no. Not him. He had to have real books, on imported shelves made from cloned mahogany. The only mahogany on Mars. All filled with books by or about ‘great men.’”

She made a face. “You know the type. Grim-faced men who thought that killing people and conquering their homes was a substitute for having a personality. Sometimes he’d read paragraphs at me like they were stories to tell before bed. Great battles or triumphs or how one guy hurt another guy so bad that everyone saw it and made him king. He did this until I was eight. You know, he has this dream where, for one reason or another, the great Delling Rembran would need to call him, and he’d have his Delling Rembran books on display, and Delling Rembran would notice and he’d, like, say ‘I, Delling Rembran, am impressed by how much you recognize that I’m great. That must mean you are great too.’ They’d become bros and they’d bro out.”

“Bro out,” Miorine said flatly.

“Bro. The fuck. Out. When we started winning Benerit contracts he thought he had his in. He was gonna have sleepovers and knitting circles with Delling Rembran.” Secelia looked at Miorine across the table with an expression of long-suffering exasperation. “Daddy is real dumb. The only business savvy thing he had ever done was get born into the family. And yet! He thinks he’s gonna be the next Great Man. The best executive decision he made was to lurk in his office polishing his antique swords. While he was doing that, engineers built the Demi line. He’d send a memo about how we need to build mobile suits that had the pomp of a French musketeer, the spirit of a crusading knight, the armaments of a Greek hoplite and the regalia of a Polish hussar.”

“Spirit?”

“Don’t ask me what that means.” Secelia waved her hand. She looked faraway, gazing into the distance. “He was too self-absorbed to follow up on any of those. He just assumed that any good news the company got was a result of his executive leadership. If… we had a strategy. If he hadn’t wasted so much money, we could have…”

Miorine held her breath as Secelia’s brow knitted at some old frustration that had never gone away. Then she shook the shadows off and waved her lollipop at Miorine. “I know everybody says Burion products are boring, mass-produced and uninspired, but shit, they do the job. And they don’t need to pirouette like a fucking ballerina shooting beam lances out their asses to do it, either. We nearly turned everything around. We even started buying up the companies that Benerit bankrupted and tossed aside. They were good companies too, you know. They just didn’t make the number go up fast enough for your daddy’s liking.”

“I know,” Miorine said grimly. “He made them compete against each other, tear each other apart in order to stay ahead of the chopping block.”

Secelia snapped her fingers. “Right. And that’s the heart of things. That’s how he ran things, whether he was in the military or a corporate boardroom. Might is right! I remember all those awful fucking books daddy read to me. I wish I didn’t but holy shit, it’s in my brain ‘till I die thanks to him. Delling Rembran believes that ‘holding the biggest gun is equal—”

“— equal to holding the highest moral authority,’” Miorine completed. “You might have had to live with a fan, but I had to live with the real deal.”

Secelia nodded a little concession at that. “And that’s the man who shaped our society! Everyone believes this now! Everyone who gets to have a say in how anything is done, anyway. My dad? Not the only sad loser to think like that. Shit, the League has the biggest gun ever produced in human history and I bet your dad was real messed up over how he hadn’t done it first.”

“Probably.” In truth he had likely been part of its planning or construction at some point, before Benerit was on the outs with the League. Miorine made a mental note to follow up on that. “So… you’re saying that I wouldn’t accomplish anything with a dueling ban because the ideology that underpins it is too deeply rooted in Spacian culture?”

“What I’m saying is…” Secelia put the lollipop back in her mouth. Miorine heard it clack against her teeth as Secelia flashed a toothy smile. “I’m really glad I don’t have your job.”

But Miorine felt the gears turn. “Still, there are other ways to redirect that energy. If we can turn Gundam technology to medicine and healing we can reorganize the school to emphasize virtues other than violence…” She bit the knuckle of her index finger in thought.

Secelia crunched down on the lollipop. “How dull. ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’”

Miorine’s gray eyes flashed up to Secelia, first in surprise, then displeasure. “You certainly make a passable Toby, though I hardly am a good fit for Malvolio.”

“Wouldn’t think it from seeing you.” This was probably the most personally devastating thing that anyone had ever said to Miorine and Secelia was already moving on, waving towards the window. “I’m curious. What do you feel when you look out there? When you see this school all ripped up?”

“It’s terrible,” Miorine said, her answer automatic. “This is where future generations learn and it’s been destroyed.”

“As expected of Benerit’s President,” Secelia said, mockery dripping from her voice. “Nothing but sympathy. But if I wanted a press release I would’ve asked for that.”

Miorine shot her a glare. “What the hell do you want me to say?”

“Something true, I suppose. Can’t imagine why you’d waste your breath on anything less.”

Miorine shifted her gaze and looked out the window. She felt her jaw clench. “Perhaps a part of me does want to find satisfaction in it. This place was my prison. But… no. I could never truly want this. If there’s anything to be said beyond that, it’s… we have always been living in the wreckage of our parents’ decisions. This just makes it real.”

“Oh,” Secelia said, her mouth a neat O. “That is nice. You might want to consider making that a part of your speech. You’d find a few who agree with you.”

“Only a few, huh?”

“Better a few who are loyal than a horde who’ll desert,” Secelia said. “Those types are already leaving you.”

“And what’s that make you?”

Secelia seemed surprised, but Miorine was sure she must have a perspective on this school and what had happened to it. Perhaps she wasn’t used to having her input sought after. Well, she could be a pretty terrible person sometimes so maybe there was a reason for that. On the other hand, maybe she deserved hearing out.

Secelia hummed thoughtfully. “Somebody who sees an opportunity, I suppose. You know, ever since I came here I’ve been surrounded by dull men. Guel stomping around as if he was anointed by the stars themselves? Dull. Shaddiq with his secret little smile and head so full of schemes that every conversation felt like yelling into an empty room? Also dull. So many little boys with such big dreams that it made it impossible for them to be people, you know? Dull ambition that had gotten so big that it pushed out all the things that made them their own person.” Secelia looked thoughtful, her eyes far away as she stared out the window. “Having a dream is a nice thought but there are dreams that metastasize. They consume so much of a person that you need someone who can crush ‘em in a way they understand.”

“And that’s you?”

Secelia laughed, hearty and explosive. “Madame President! You give me too much credit! All I’ve ever done is make a few impolitic comments! Laugh in a few faces, perhaps. The likes of Guel or Shaddiq have egos too dense to be hurt that way. No. I was talking about your Mercurian Miss. She spoke their language. Violence and power. Sitting in the dueling lounge and watching her was like watching an artist. That was really something.”

Miorine felt her hands curl into fists reflexively. “Stop talking about her in the past tense.”

Secelia stopped short and Miorine watched as she blinked and made a little sound.

“Of course,” Secelia said, slightly inclining her head. “You know, watching her after the attacks, running around, handing out aid as if she could lift all of Asticassia onto her shoulders and hold it together… made me think… well…”

She flipped her short hair and and, with an effort that Miorine was polite enough not to dwell on, put on an expression of indifference. “Perhaps it might be worth it to stick around and see things through to the end.”

Okay. Miorine had to admit that was a better response than she expected. It was something that she could work with. Burion teetered on the precipice but if Secelia could bring them on to her side…

“I suppose you feel similarly,” Secelia said, perhaps making her own calculations.

“I want to believe we can make something better here. Yes.” Miorine nodded.

“Then we need to give students a reason to stay. And it’s not going to be high-minded ideals.”

“But the duels will keep them here?”

“No. At least, not the way they are. Not with that ‘put your souls on the Scales of Libra’ nonsense. That’s the problem, if you want my opinion. Rituals. Rituals aren’t a bad thing in and of themselves, but the ones we have are for stuffy idiots high on pride.” Secelia rambled as she scribbled with her finger into her notebook. “We need something relatable. Every duel is a story but we need stories that transcend houses or social status.”

“Sounds like you have ideas.”

Secelia looked up at her. “I’ve had ideas for years.”

“A pity Shaddiq never listened to you.”

Secelia stilled, her eyes went distant, as if she were putting something together in the moment. “Nobody listens to me. I’m used to it. The real pity is that he never listened to anyone. Imagine how many people would be alive today if he had.”

This time Miorine’s hands really did ball up into fists.

“I mean nothing more or less than what I said.” Secelia fixed her eyes down on her notebook as she continued writing in it. “It was not an invitation for you to accept yet more responsibility for another person’s actions.”

“I —”

“There’s few things more annoying than someone with an outsized sense of responsibility. Bad things happen in the world that have nothing to do with you.”

“You can’t know that! Not about… all this.” Miorine gestured out the large vista window.

“The ego of a boy prince is aggravating enough without you martyring yourself to it, you know?”

“If this is how you console people…” Miorine settled back into her seat. “You could use some lessons.”

“Do you feel that’s your fault as well?”

Despite herself, Miorine let out a brief chuckle. “I think I’ll let you bear that cross.”

“See? Not so hard. Anyway, here.” Secelia slid her notebook across the table. “These are my requirements for this duel. It’s not standard, but —”

“Enough.” Miorine slid it back. “I’ll let you handle the details.”

Secelia blinked. “Wait, what?”

“What do you mean ‘what’?” Miorine said.

“Don’t you…?”

“Handle this? No. I’m the executive of Asticassia and all of Benerit, Secelia. I don’t have time to deal with particulars. You’re the sole member of the dueling committee. The responsibility for this is yours.”

Miorine had to admit she did enjoy seeing Secelia caught on the back foot for once. Shaddiq, for all his (his) sins, had been a diligent steward of the duels.

“What, everything? How?” Secelia gestured out the window.

“Isn’t this what you wanted. After all this time, duels are yours to shape as you want. I believe I’ll let you bear that cross as well.”

Secelia clicked her tongue. “An annoying time to start learning lessons, Rembran.”

Miorine smiled sweetly. “Don’t say I haven’t done anything for you.”

Her smile was returned with a sardonic twist that left her in unexpected good humor. And she laughed, for real this time, the first time in a long, long while. It was hard to tell what Secelia’s deal was. She was still a wildly contrary, prickly woman. But… had they come to Asticassia under different circumstances, had she not been offered up as a prize to the Holder, Miorine could entertain the possibility that the two of them could have been friends. But then, they would have been entirely different people. Miorine would have, at least. What kind of person would she have been with that freedom?

“You’re putting a lot on Chuchu, you know,” Miorine said. When the laughter subsided she was reminded of her Earth House comrades.

Secelia immediately donned her cagey expression. “I don’t recall mentioning her in any way.”

Rolling her eyes, Miorine didn’t bother giving any respect to such artless artifice. “She’s the only logical option for your pilot. I’m aware of the situation in Burion House.”

Secelia tilted her head. Another concession. “Well. I haven’t told her that the future of Asticassia depends on this duel.”

“Do us all a favor and don’t. Earth House has had to take on too much in all this.”

“I might ask them to take on more.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ah.” Secelia snapped her fingers and Rouji, ever her silent shadow, walked wordlessly around the desk and stood next to Miorine. He held out his hand in offering and Miorine took what he held. A small, white object.

“How do you feel, Madame President,” Secelia said. “About hard-boiled eggs?”

Chapter Text

Chuchu lay back in the Demi Barding’s cockpit and closed her eyes. The machine was locked in a diagnostics self-check, hooked to its berth in the hangar space under Asticassia. Its monitors scrolled a slow procession of sub-system checks. Two days out from the duel and preparations were nearly complete.

She could fancy that she could hear the differences in the Barding’s scan, firing power to each individual system, reading back the results, moving on to the next. You never got true quiet on Asticassia. There was always the background hum of the station working to keep everyone inside it alive. At first Chuchu couldn’t stand it. It set her teeth on edge, reminded her of the distant roar of the factories and the mining equipment, a memory she had hoped she would leave behind. Maybe you can never be quite free of the place that made you.

But she got used to this place, as everyone always does. And now she could pick out the hum of her Demi Barding against the station chugging along. It was… yeah. It was okay.

Her Demi Barding. Hard to believe. It wasn’t hers yet. She had a great deal of affection for her old Demi Trainer, though it was hardly the Mobile Suit of her dreams. A salvaged, cobbled-together, two generations out-of-date Demi was never going to be anyone’s first choice. But it was her workhorse and it worked damn well despite every Spacian who put eyes on it turning their nose up at it.

Suletta. Suletta hadn’t. Chuchu found herself carving out an exception for Suletta as she very often had in the past.

But it was clunky and graceless and by necessity calibrated to the kind of combat that Chuchu favored least.

And it allowed her to understand what it meant to get what you need over what you want, to value what you have over what you desire. The kind of rare heartbreaking lesson that leaves the heart stronger for it.

Not that the Barding wasn’t nice. It’s very nice. So nice it made her wonder. Did Secelia really know what she was giving away? Or was there more to this?

It had left her unsettled. She didn’t think Secelia was the kind to walk back a deal, but that wasn’t enough to assuage that part of her that never really left Earth.

So, one night, before the demolition crews reached Earth House, Chuchu had snuck into it and retrieved from the molten wreckage of her old Demi Trainer the manual cockpit hatch release. And then she installed it into the Demi Barding. Demis were famously modular and even the newest prototype had components compatible with Chuchu’s Demi.

Now, the first thing she touched when she went to enter the cockpit was the handle from her first Mobile Suit.

Maybe it was silly, the odd things people latch onto. But this did make her feel better. The Barding wasn’t hers. Not yet. Too early to think about repainting it. But it was beginning to feel like something that was hers.

Maybe a little charm though. One of the Guys gave her a set of fuzzy dice, the same one that dangled off his power loader back at the mines. Kind of a good luck talisman. She never put it on the Demi Trainer. Too self conscious for it. But… things have changed since then.

Thinking of them again, she activated her notebook, docked to the cockpit console. She tried the number to that shitty little bar back home with the two internet stations and got another ‘connection failed’ message.

It’s been like that for a while. Asticassia still doesn’t have reliable connections to the outside world. It used to have its own communications hub, a necessity for the high traffic the academy had. But that had been destroyed. All signals were now routed through Front 73, slowing down the whole network and calls to Earth were not a priority.

They worry about her, the Guys. She’d have to keep trying.

Until then she’d let herself rest. It was hard to calm down these days. Flashes came and went, of violence and beam fire and blood along either side of a long path. Aliya has begun to brew for Chuchu her most calming teas, and that’s when you know things are bad. Chuchu’s grateful, but she found that quiet, a rare thing in this new Asticassia, was the best —

“There you are, Pom-pom Head!”

Chuchu jerked into alertness, her hands grabbing for the Mobile Suit’s control sticks. She was sweating. Like. Instantly.

Secelia Dote, one arm draped against the overhead hatch of the open cockpit, illuminated by the soft electronic light of displays, loomed over her.

“What the hell, Dote!” Chuchu slouched back in her seat.

“What the hell yourself. Are you performing final checks without me, your command and control?”

“My command and control is Aliya, Till, Lilique and Martin,” Chuchu said. “You’re just the person I’m standing in for. And you’re the officiator for the duels. Does ‘conflict of interest’ mean anything to you?”

“Yeah. It’s a phrase used by people with no power to tell people with all the power how envious they are. Why? Does it mean something else?”

“You know what they say about absolute power.”

“Yeah, that it’s really fun.”

Chuchu rolled her eyes. “You’re in a good mood. I can tell because I already hate this conversation.”

“Send me the checklist. We can sign off on inspection together.”

“It’s still in diagnostics.”

“It should be over soon.”

“It’s a full scan, Dote. It can’t be —”

From the corner of her eye, Chuchu caught a screen flicker and change color, accompanied by an electronic beep.

“…that was fast,” Chuchu said.

Secelia crossed her arms and looked pleased with herself. “The Demi Barding uses a proprietary algorithm that incorporates rolling checksum authenticators that it analyzes in a moment-to-moment cascade. That allows all software checks to be performed in record time.”

“Do you actually know that or have you memorized the pamphlet?”

“Underestimate me at your peril, Puffbrain. While everyone was chasing after Gundam, Burion has been developing the most sophisticated auto-diagnostic heuristic a Mobile Suit has ever seen. Ow!”

Chuchu had taken a tablet off the console and tossed it at Secelia’s forehead.

“Holy shit, if helping me will stop you from talking like an advertisement then fine, help me.”

“Auxiliary systems,” Secelia said.

Chuchu checked the readouts from a display. “Online.”

“Pitch compensators.”

“Online.”

“That’s it,” Secelia said, marking off the final check.

Chuchu’s hand hesitated over the display. Everything green. She was ready.

She stayed in the cockpit of the Barding, an unsettled feeling in her gut. The check screen was on an overhead display. She always preferred it there. Most pilots didn’t like it because it caused unnecessary neck strain prior to a sortee, but Chuchu always inclined her seat which made the overheads easier to read. And it was more comfortable. She was smaller and pilot seats never seemed to feel right until gravity settled her back into it.

Nika had known that. She was the one who calibrated the Barding.

It was one of her last acts before she went to prison.

“What’d I do wrong?”

Chuchu blinked. Secelia loomed over her, arms raised over her head, her hands gripping the upper cockpit hatch as she stood suspended over Chuchu. The green lights of the standby monitors lit her, light and shadow playing over her rumpled uniform and clingy bodysuit.

“Nothing,” Chuchu said. “All green. Why do you ask?”

Secelia shrugged and stepped inside. She sat on the main console and Chuchu winced. “That is not for sitting on,” she said.

“It’s my first pre-duel check,” Secelia said, apparently not having heard her. If anything she was leaning back and taking up more real-estate. “Figured it would be easy to mess up. And you looked bothered.”

“This is for record-keeping,” Chuchu said, choosing to ignore that last bit. “We’re just making sure there’s a paper trail that all parties have signed off on. The mechanics have already done the all-hands inspection.” Chuchu’s mechanics to be more specific. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to trust Burion, since both sides of the duel was coming from their House. Secelia hadn’t raised any objections.

“So that’s why I felt like this was going too smoothly.” Secelia reached up. Her idle fingers traced along the overhead controls.

“That’s because the Barding is already perfectly calibrated for me,” Chuchu said. Anyone else may have left it at that. Too late, however, Chuchu had realized that Secelia had been there for that. And Secelia loved to pry.

“You miss her, don’t you?” Secelia said.

Chuchu became contrary by reflex. “What the hell are you talking —”

“Are you gonna make me say it or will you let me spare you at least that much embarrassment?”

Chuchu wished she had gone into this final checklist in her full pilot’s suit, something she could hide her expression in. Her thoughts always seem to circle back to Nika. Especially around Secelia. Maybe that was unfair. It happens a lot in other situations too. Maybe it’s just… easier to blame someone else.

“I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

“Or anyone, it seems.”

Chuchu narrowed her eyes. “Have you been spying on me?”

“Yes.”

“What!”

“You’re my champion,” Secelia said, matter of fact. “I have a vested interest.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Hmmm. Wasn’t laughing.”

“Having second thoughts, Dote?” Chuchu said, feeling a stirring of anger. “Losing faith in your pilot?”

“I don’t have second thoughts,” Secelia said. “When you’re right all the time, you don’t need ‘em.”

Chuchu leaned back in her chair and looked up at Secelia, her face lit from below by the glowing displays in an eerie green. The shadows thrown up by the twist of her smile like a dark scar across the middle of her face. Her eyes were shadowed, with only a pinprick reflection giving away her pupils as she looked down and met Chuchu’s stare.

Chuchu looked away, hand drifting to a screen where she flipped through some option mainly just to look busy. “I’ve met my fair share of Spacians, but I’ve never met one as full of themselves as you are. Do you just imagine real hard that life will go your way until it doesn’t?”

“It’s worked so far.”

“Must be nice,” Chuchu said sourly, jabbing the screen hard enough she felt a dull pain in her finger. “If you’re so sure of everything, why concern yourself with me?”

“I should know my pilot, shouldn’t I?”

“Do whatever you like. You always do.”

“So tell me about Nika.”

“She was my chief mechanic,” Chuchu said by rote. She began flipping through screens faster. “She was very good at her job.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. If you want gossip go talk to Lilique aaaaaaa—” Chuchu’s voice trailed off as she realized the monumentally stupid thing she had just said. Lilique and Secelia together would be absolutely horrifying.

The delight on Secelia’s face could not be more obvious. “I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m not interested at the moment. I want to hear it from you.”

“I just said I don’t want to get into it,” Chuchu growled. “You can drop it or you can get the hell out of the cockpit.”

“I thought we were done.”

“I’m going to stay here for a while.”

“Then maybe I will too,” Secelia said.

She looked away to a display that couldn’t possibly mean anything to her, unless, Chuchu conceded, she had an interest in gyro stabilizers that had previously gone unremarked on.

It gave Chuchu an opportunity to regard her. She supposed Secelia was trying to be friendly, in her specifically annoying way. Well… Chuchu was pretty awkward at that too. Most of her friends were second-hand, made through happenstance. And how had Secelia made hers? Did she have any beyond her minions? Yes-men who followed her around. But did she have anyone who she could just talk to? She lingered like she didn’t know what to do in the presence of someone she couldn’t just boss around.

But still, she stayed.

I’m going to regret this. This is going to come back and bite me later. Oh well what the hell.

“Coming to Asticassia was my first time off Earth,” Chuchu said. “Before then, the only Spacians I knew… they’d throw their weight around. Find any opportunity to rub our faces in the dirt just to feel better about themselves. They’d bring their kids around and they’d throw rocks at us because they knew we couldn’t do anything back. So… I came here with a chip on my shoulder, I guess. Everyone in Earth House has some kind of story like that. Even Nika. Especially Nika. But… she was better at dealing with the bullshit than I was. She’d talk me down when I got angry. Or scared. Or sad or… whatever. I’d have been expelled long ago if it weren’t for her. She… helped me a lot. Taught me a lot.”

“And she worked on your Mobile Suit.”

Was it stupid of Chuchu, to assign so much significance to such a utilitarian act? Mechanics calibrated machines for their pilots all the time. Why was she so hung up over this?

Because it was Nika. Because it was a sign of her constant care. Her attention.

Chuchu didn’t realize how much she liked having that until it was gone. How she had starved for that.

“Yeah,” she said. “She worked on my Mobile Suit.”

“Hmmm,” Secelia said.

She left an expectant air hanging between them and Chuchu anticipated what would come next. Something like “all that and a terrorist too.” Just do something that would foul the air and turn this moment sour. Something that would remind Chuchu that she was the dirt wallowing Earthian and Secelia the untouchable space princess. It’s the classic Secelia move, and how a lot of their interactions had ended since they started hanging out more in preparation for the duel.

Secelia was good at that. Putting Chuchu in her place. Oh, you’re from a planet? I own a planet. Aren’t you quaint.

That kind of thing.

They can’t help their boasting, Spacians. It’s like a cultural thing. They have to let everyone around them know how much influence they have. Space is big and the people who live in it need to puff themselves up, maybe. My father owns an asteroid. Mine owns a moon. Mine has a fleet of patrol ships and he takes his friends out to blow off steam by firing warheads into Jupiter’s atmosphere and watching the detonations make new swirls in its thick band of clouds. Gas giants indeed. Ha ha. Nika would have laughed at that. Her sense of humor was awful but her kindness was boundless.

So Secelia could say whatever she’s about to say. She would never know that about Nika.

“I always liked her eyes,” Secelia said, arms crossed, looking upwards deep in thought.

An involuntary snort of laughter escaped Chuchu’s nose. “What the hell,” she said, mildly mystified.

“It’s true.”

“Whatever, Dote. Your eyes are fine.”

“I never said I had a problem with my eyes. But do go on.”

“Shut up,” Chuchu said with a chuckle.

“Oh, I suppose I should mention,” Secelia said. She stood up and stretched, her back arching and her hands brushing against the overhead displays. “The Asticassia Radio Committee will be by at some point to interview you.”

Chuchu made a face. “Interview? Why?”

“People need to know who you are. It’s how they invest themselves into a duel.”

“Yeah I’m from Earth House and that’s all they need to know to hate me.”

“Aw. Don’t say that.” Secelia reached over and held a lock of Chuchu’s bangs between her thumb and forefinger. “You could give them so many better reasons to hate you, Pom-pom Head!”

Chuchu felt a weight in her chest and her lip curled up involuntarily into a snarl. She slapped Secelia’s hand away. “I guess from where you’re sitting that’s just a fun show.”

From the corner of her eye, she watched Secelia’s face go carefully blank, as if she was buying herself time to ponder a response she hadn’t expected.

“Does that bug you?” Secelia said. “That they don’t like you? Why?”

Chuchu felt her expression tighten and she turned to look Secelia head-on. Secelia looked at her with a disarming curiosity.

“Aren’t we all just… Spacian turds to you?” Secelia continued.

“I really don’t want to get into this with you right now, Dote.”

“Well,” said Secelia. “They probably will make you out to be the villain one way or another.”

“Of course they will,” said Chuchu. “Man…”

“Handing out blankets and tomatoes isn’t going to undo generations of prejudice.”

“Thanks for the insight,” Chuchu said dryly.

Secelia huffed and leaned in closer. Her warm breath caressed Chuchu’s cheek.

“You know,” she said, her voice dripping with sly malice. “Sometimes, when someone hates me… and I haven’t given them any reason to… it helps me when I do.”

Chuchu had to look at her, eyeing her expression warily to see how serious she was being. “That sounds healthy.”

Secelia raised an eyebrow. “Fun too. So. You gonna let them make up their mind before you give them a piece of yours? Or…" Secelia leaned in, did that thing where she lifted one of Chuchu's hairbuns so she could get in close and spoke in a whisper. "Maybe you'd prefer it if I were to teach you how to conduct yourself in an interview."

As Secelia breathed in the shell of her ear, the response to that was immediate. Chuchu had to swallow as saliva pooled in her mouth and she felt an alarming flush in her cheeks, mercifully hidden by her pilot’s cap. She could hear the smile in Secelia’s voice.

“Oh, that’s the second time. So that’s what Nika did for you, eh?” Secelia’s fingers moved under Chuchu’s chin. “You like a guiding hand to — hey!”

Secelia wore her school jacket open and loose, letting it slip off her shoulders. So when Chuchu seized her and threw her down on the console in front of her, she gripped Secelia by the collar of her exposed bodysuit, looping her fingers under it so her knuckles were pressed under the soft flesh of Secelia’s jaw. The shock of the sudden movement overwhelmed Secelia’s height advantage and Chuchu pulled her off her feet and flexed, locking her arms and pressing Secelia down onto the console.

“Do not ever fuck with me like that again,” Chuchu hissed through her teeth. Secelia’s eyes were wide, dimly lit in the low illumination of the cockpit but Chuchu could see vivid blue-green pupils dilated in shock. Her throat bobbed against Chuchu’s knuckles as she swallowed; her pulse too, Chuchu could feel. It was like the flutter of wings under Secelia’s skin. Even like this…

Secelia was allowed to move through this world with the freedom of water. Has anyone ever said ‘no’ to her? Is that why she thinks nothing of picking at people, finding where they’re weak and jerking them around?

Not me.

“I told you I wasn’t going to become one of your lackeys,” Chuchu said. “So don’t bother trying. But keep testing me and I’ll throw every fight you put me in. I don’t care if you promise me an entire squadron of Demi Bardings. I’ll do it.”

She withdrew her hands from Secelia’s collar. Now Chuchu could feel her own heartbeat, thudding in her ears, coursing under her skin. It was becoming difficult locking eye contact with Secelia who had been left sprawled across the center console with a bewildered expression.

“You don’t get to act like that,” Chuchu continued. “You’re nothing like —” she stopped herself before she nearly stumbled into the worst possible word in that moment and she realized she was losing the thread, that Secelia was eyeing her too speculatively, that she needed to remove herself from this situation. “You don’t get to act like that,” she repeated. “Keep that in mind and we’ll both get through this dumb arrangement alive,” she barreled on. Then she stepped to the side and exited hastily from the cockpit.

Secelia lay there, the hard edges of the console digging into her back. The indicator lights, on standby, glowed down on her like stars. She coughed and felt the impression of Chuchu’s hands on her neck, a warmth that was dissipating faster than she’d like.

It was enough to make her mind race, paging through her memories like a desperate researcher flipping through a library’s worth of archives for the elusive answer to a single, infuriatingly simple question.

When was the last time someone had touched her?

That wasn’t how Secelia was raised. Or most Spacians, for that matter. Physical contact was a breach in the unspoken agreements that existed between people who were more than people, who also represented companies, celestial bodies, entire worlds, who were an extension of the political and corporate boundaries that delineated the extent of their authority. In the rarefied circles Secelia inhabited, to be touched was at the least a challenge, if not akin to all of Burion being attacked.

Okay, okay, Chuchu did literally body slam her so it wasn’t akin to being attacked, the attack was actual. But…

But…

Secelia liked to flirt with those boundaries the way she liked to test all the limits of what she was permitted, and yeah, that led to a lot of antagonism. She rarely meant anything personal by it, so she didn’t mind when people took it personally. They just didn’t get it. But if she were to take a hard look at herself — a thing that generally she does not — she would have to admit that she never truly transgressed. At least, as far as she measured such things.

She put her hand to her throat, pushing her fingers into the soft underside of her jaw until she felt the drumbeat of her pulse and experienced the faintest obstruction of her breath, trying to recreate Chuchu’s touch.

But there was no substituting the real thing, to her mild frustration.

Gradually, as minutes passed, she released herself and slid off the console, stepped out onto the gantry.

She had been in there for so long that the lights of the cockpit had burned in afterimage into her eyes and they shimmered in the darkness beyond the handrail she leaned on.

And, eventually, she made her own way back to the surface of Asticassia, giving no thought to the watery little smile she wore as she picked her way out of the underworld.

“Gross,” said Rouji as Secelia emerged into the light of Asticassia’s broken sky. He was sitting in the back seat of her car.

“What?” Secelia said. “Do I have… oil on me? Do Mobile Suits use oil?” As she climbed into the passenger side seat, Rouji plugged his Haro into the autopilot and it eased the car out onto the road, taking them back to Burion Camp.

“You have an awful smile on your face,” he said.

Secelia pressed her hands to either side of her mouth as if feeling for a foreign growth. There was something gormless to her smile. She liked her usual expression, the one that made other people uneasy, like they had been dropped into an enclosure with an animal, an encounter with which could go either way.

It’ll save you, that ambiguity, her mother had said as she aggressively trained Secelia out of the semi-feral state she had been in thanks to Old Man Burion’s method of child-rearing, which was a kind of good-natured neglect. We can’t rely on the money thanks to your fool of a father, but money isn’t half as useful as attitude. Keep them on their toes and they’ll jump at the chance to get on your good side.

“Does it have anything to do with Chuchu coming out here in a bad mood?” Rouji said. “You’ve upset her.”

Secelia waved that notion away. “It’ll all work out, Rouji. If she doesn’t understand that now, she’ll at least appreciate it when it’s all over.”

“Assuming this all goes the way you want it to.”

Secelia looked up at the sky as she massaged the dopey smile off her face. The glow came off her expression. “You may have a point.”

Ambiguity in the act was one thing, but there could only be one result. She could only allow for one result. There could only be victory. Secelia watched the demolished landscape pass her by as the car rolled over the cracked road.

The result itself…

Chuchu would not be happy, but…

“Secelia?” Rouji said. As she was looking out on Asticassia, he had a view of her face in profile.

Secelia blinked. “Hm? What? Am I smiling again?”

“Yes.”

“Gross smile?”

“No. The regular one where you’re planning to do something awful.”

“Good. Good.”

“What are you planning now?”

“You know what they say, Rouji. Victory is never decided by the Mobile Suit alone nor by the pilot alone.”

Rouji gave her an appraising look. “You want to cheat.”

“We’re going to ch — yeah. I need you to… make the perfect cheat. In two days.”

“Chuchu is not going to like this.”

“Like I said. She’ll appreciate it in the end.”

Secelia watched the face journey Rouji was on. From mild concern to the well-worn contours of resignation.

“I’ll need a room with utter silence, a bedroll, fully stocked with rations, five Haros, a Faraday cage and an untraceable computer,” he said.

“Rouji, I knew I could count on you.”

On the night of the duel, this was how it was setup:

The battleground was what was left of a cafeteria: multilevel, boxy, with lots of glass to let the artificial sun in. Now it was dilapidated with every window shattered and its floors partially collapsed. Slated for demolition already, if it were to be leveled during the fight it would save that much time for reconstruction crews.

Stadium seats had been erected around it, and a platform hoisted up in the air by temporary scaffolding was where Secelia would officiate the proceedings. Also on the platform, enclosed in a booth with effects, light and sound controls, Rouji would monitor the entire production. He piped music through mounted speakers around the makeshift arena and initiated pre-programmed holographic firework displays. Secelia had timed the fight to occur just as night was scheduled to fall. She stood over the crowd and on her cue Rouji triggered the containment bubble. It was a blue, flickering energy dome projected from a squadron of Haro drones hovering overhead in a ring formation. A curtain of beam light, it extended and extruded, its damaging energy attenuated into something that would repel a Mobile Suit that came in contact with it, rather than annihilating it.

In the simulated night it cast a blue-white glow over the students who sat along its outside perimeter, a crackling blue dance of light like a strange sort of campfire amid the toppled crush of Asticassia. Secelia had scouted the place. It was far from the traditional dueling grounds, that long strip of land had been the hardest hit in the attacks, and deemed unstable for any activity. With this setup, Secelia could fly theses duels all over Asticassia, making use of land that was safe and helping to speed along the slow demolition. Even overhead, she could see the construction crews, the claws of their work frames clinging to the ceiling and giving them a bird’s eye view as they sat, legs dangling in the air, watching the spectacle below. In the dark, surrounded by buildings like weathered tombstones, the light of the dome must have seemed like a will-o-wisp. Some stubborn spirit adrift in a graveyard, refusing to pass on.

It felt as if all of Asticassia was here, their faces lit up by the dome. There was an energy beyond celebration: it was defiance. They had all lurked on the fringes of this ruin, scurrying in carefully cordoned off safe zones. All of them, being here, felt like a dare, a challenge, an answer to a duel each student was fighting against the forces that conspired to throw them off the station. And it felt like violating curfew. Or sneaking into a restricted zone. It was all sanctioned, but there was that charge in the air of conventions being bucked.

They had accounted for and collected their dead and what was left was this. A world overturned, waiting for what comes next. Somewhere, out in the Benerit Front, Miorine was presumably doing that. But it felt like the first hint of that world was going to be seen here. And Secelia had all eyes on her. She was, if nothing else, willing to seize opportunities.

Secelia grinned. This could all be a terrible disaster, but she was going to have fun before that hammer fell.

“Ladies! Gentlemen! Students of what remains!” There was a separate platform, one made for the announcers. Secelia had farmed that job out, finding that she could only keep so many plates spinning in the air. Plus, the student in question really wanted to do it. ”The Asticassia School of Technology Radio Committee and F73 Asticassia Access is proud to present you the new age of duels! Asticassia’s first Rumble in the Crumble, the Decapitation amidst the Dilapidation, the Rack and Ruin Ramshackle Sack and Tackle, get Wrecked in the Neglect, no holds barred Bubble in the Rubble! This is Reiko Hamlet and you join me live on a platform overlooking the ruins of Dining Hall B where this historic match is taking place!”

There was little else for Secelia to do but be here, but she’d always been pretty good at being there. The Mobile Suits were in place, their pilots were ready. Earth House had very politely but firmly taken her place as Chuchu’s command and control, but that was fine. She seldom had issues with offloading her work onto other people.

But she did keep an open line to Chuchu on her notebook. Because it never paid to be too hands off.

Eventually the announcer got to a more relevant part of his script and Secelia refocused.

”If you’ve read the campus-wide bulletin from the Dueling Committee then you already know the rules. All beam rifles are deactivated. All beam weapons are deactivated. Thrusters are throttled down. Wire-guided weapons are permitted. If your opponent can’t stand, you win. If your opponent can’t move, you win. If your opponent taps out, you win. If your opponent exits the ring for 20 seconds, you win. How you make any of those things happen is up to you! We’re here to see a fight!”

“You wrote this didn’t you, Dote? What this idiot is reading out?”

Sitting in the Demi Barding as it stood ready in its corner of the confined fighting area, Chuchu was not believing the shit she was hearing.

“It’s good stuff,” Secelia said over the comms. The announcer kept talking as they held their own conversation.

“It’s corny! It reads like something from a bad AFF match.”

“Too good for quality wrestling, Puffbrain?”

Chuchu’s brow shot up in surprise. But then she shook her head. “I should have known you were an AFF fan. The absolute lack of class gives it away.”

“There is no higher form of entertainment than the All Fronts Fighting League.”

“Says someone who has never watched Earth Sphere Wrestling.”

“I would have to suffer a lethal number of concussions before I would enjoy that circus.”

“You can’t have wrestling without at minimum Earth normal gravity! It just doesn’t make sense!”

Secelia said something but Chuchu picked up on the announcer’s voice when it sounded like it was her cue.

”Without further ado, let’s introduce our challengers!

In the blue corner, at 70 metric tons, Burion’s prototype MSJ-R122 makes its dueling debut piloted by the menace of Asticassia! The Pink Pom-pomed Pain Purveyor herself! You’ll never know when she goes off next! Chuchu Panlunch!”

“Menace of A — Secelia I’m going to kill you!”

“Play the part, Pom-pom! You know how. Or has watching ESW taught you nothing about showmanship?”

“Tch. All a game.” Still, Chuchu took the controls in her hands and the Demi Barding moved. It mimed putting its hand to an ear, when Chuchu heard the boos. It waved both its hands, urging the discontent Spacians to whine their displeasure at it. And when the audience crescendoed to a peak, Chuchu waved a dismissive hand and strutted around her corner of the ring.

“Secelia is enjoying this too much,” Martin groaned.

“She does know how to put on a show,” Lilique said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Don’t ask me,” Martin said. “Every time I think about her I get stomach cramps.”

“Are we still talking about Secelia or Chuchu?” Till asked as he watched her Mobile Suit mug for the drone cameras.

They were all in a control room, with Lilique acting as Chuchu’s handler while Till and Aliyah were monitoring systems. Martin was overseeing it all as Earth House’s leader. “I hope Nuno and Ojelo are taking lots of pictures to show us later,” Lilique continued.

Behind her, Martin sighed. “Ojello just posted a picture of Nuno posing in the crowd while holding a tall glass of Astifizzia.”

There was a smile in Aliya’s voice as she chuckled over the line. “They never stop marketing, do they?”

“Why do they like that stuff?” Lilique said. “It’s way too sweet.”

“Novelty,” Till said. “At least, that’s what gets people to try their first sip. After that?” He shrugged. “A fascination with the grotesque?”

On Earth, Astifizzia had multiple forms and went by multiple names. The ingredients were always the same though, because it was made from the same awful aid packages the League would occasionally drop on Earth settlements and which now flooded Asticassia. Where Lilique grew up it was called the Delling Breakfast, a truly odious invention where the aid package graham crackers were pulverized and mixed with water to form a congee, which would be mixed with the vitamin gel and whatever moonshine concoction was on hand. Then it would be cooled and served as an awful jello shot that served as a portable breakfast at the start of a workday. People could down it and get the nutrition it offered along with a little sugar and a buzz of intoxication that helped to make the coming shift bearable. At least, that’s what people said. Often with a bewildered expression as if their mouths were saying words they did not intend.

Lilique had snuck one when she was 12 and her body rebelled, spitting it out before she could even swallow. It was a cloying sweetness mixed with bad booze.

There was no alcohol on Asticassia, but Ojelo had rigged a homemade carbonator. After making a similar mixture from Asticassia’s aid packages he shot it through with carbonation and the result was that same cloying sweetness without the alcohol and with a different consistency and fizziness that made it slightly more palatable. It would never make it into the halls of fine dining, but the entire point was that it was something new for senses that had been made dull by the same food day in and day out. It had become a rapid hit in Asticassia’s camps. Earth ingenuity saves the day.

“I hope they’re taking the time out of self-promotion to appreciate the moment,” Till said. “It must be an experience.”

“Now Ojello’s posting a picture of Nuno getting jostled and spilling his Astifizzia down the back of a Jeturk student standing in front of him,” Martin said.

“Oh!” Lilique looked down at her monitor. “The fight’s starting!”

“It sure looks like it,” Martin said glumly as he refreshed his social media. “Somehow a guy from Grassley got involved too.”

Lilique looked up, confused. “Grassley? No, Tober’s from Burion.”

Martin refreshed his screen again. “Okay, now there’s a Grassley guy and two Jeturk guys. Nuno’s fending them off with a trashcan.”

Till, speaking with his softest tone, said “Please focus on the fight, Martin.”

“I am,” Martin said mournfully. “I’m gonna have so much paperwork to fill out tomorrow.”

“Chuchu?” Lilique said.

“I hear you, Lilique. Is —”

A third voice intruded, interrupting Chuchu.

“You,” Tober said. “Earthian.”

Chuchu made a face. Her opponent had been giving her the cold shoulder every day all the way up to the duel. There were students like that. They didn’t pick on Chuchu or the Earthians, which was worse in its way. At least the bullies had to acknowledge your existence in order to get to the bullying. Tober and other students like her looked past their Earthian peers as if they were worth as much regard as fleck of lint attached to the collar of their jacket. So what reason did she have to call her up now?

“Victory is not determined by the skill of the pilot alone,” Tober said in a steady rote, then waited expectantly.

“The… new duels don’t include the oath,” Chuchu said. They were, however, expected to fistbump to start off the fight. Another AFF affectation.

“Unlike you and my cousin, I am not interested in spitting on the traditions of this school,” Tober said. “But I suppose I can’t expect much from you when she leads you around by the nose all the time.”

Chuchu closed her eyes and exhaled. Nika wouldn’t rise to the bait. “Look, if you’re trying some kind of… divide and conquer nonsense, make a rift between me and Dote, you really don’t have to. I already think she’s over-bearing, over-privileged —.”

“Open comms, Puffbrain,” Secelia cut in.

Chuchu leaned into view of her camera, made sure Secelia was getting the visual feed and smiled and held out her middle finger. “I know,” she said. “Anyways, she’s a spoiled space princess who needs to learn that being a spoiled space princess doesn’t mean jack in life. A lot like you. I thought you didn’t like this school anyway.”

“Asticassia is dead,” Tober said. “All that’s left is a corpse you’re refusing to bury.”

“Yeah, well… that’s a dumb way to think of a place.”

“Well done, Pom-pom Head,” Secelia said. “I feel like if this duel were fought with words that would’ve been a knock out blow.”

“Shut up, Dote.”

“Take your places and get to the fight!”

“I am not fist bumping,” Tober said.

“Fuck it, fine then,” Chuchu said. She pushed forward on the controls and urged the Barding into a sprint from a standing position. “Make it easy for me.”

”What’s this? I don’t believe it! Chuchu’s going straight for the kill before the bell even starts! She’s out for blood, folks!”

There was a comforting detachment, Secelia found, when she watched the world from above. It was probably a thing from childhood. Her family lived in a palace, which was embarrassing in that way unique to the idea of living in a palace. Every rich Spacian overcompensated in some ways but if you lived in a palatial space habitat then that was just expected. If your grandfather built a literal palace with towering spires and all on Mars then that was overcompensating. It was a favorite topic for the tabloids. When there was a lull in the scandals and foibles of juicier targets they loved to talk about the gaudy palace of glass and metal, its parapets of illuminated obsidian, hiding from the dust storms of Mars under a dome. In an age of excess, Burion’s palace was so nakedly excessive that other Spacians found an outlet in mocking it, by mocking it they made their own decadence acceptable. That it represented an economic money pit helped too.

But Secelia the child never thought of it in those terms. It was home. An upbringing amid cavernous halls and monolithic pillars that made her feel small in comparison. So from its walls she watched in turn the little people and she felt that detachment, and a comfort in it. Whatever they were doing down there, it didn’t give them the vast, echoing halls she moved through like a mote of dust drifting through a cathedral. And whatever her life was, clearly it was the more desirable one. It was, after all, the talk of tabloids.

Tober dodged to one side as Chuchu brought the Bardin’s closed fist down on her. It was a glancing blow off Tober’s Heingra. And the sound of metal striking metal reverberated across the arena and Secelia could feel it ring in the air.

Grassley machines had always been Tober’s preference. She liked the aesthetic. Knightly. She also liked the Burion palace quite a lot. Secelia mostly just liked to look down and see other people scurrying about their business. She got something akin to that in the dueling lounge.

Ah. She missed that place. But even there, for all the thrill of battle, that detachment was there. That whatever was going on out there was nothing to do with her. At best, the drama of Miorine’s status as the Holder’s prize was compelling viewing. But that was all it was, Secelia spectating a drama. It may as well have been television. Suletta Mercury’s splashy debut a surprise worthy of one of the better AFF storylines as well.

It had only ever felt real to her once, and that was when it actually was. When Sophia and Norea had poured hell out of the barrel of their cannons, punching holes through the sky, weapons hot and taking life. It had frozen her in place, to see it from her high perch and suddenly the dueling lounge didn’t seem so detached, so safe. But in the sudden awareness of her own vulnerability she had presence of mind to sound the alarms and order the evacuation. The schoolmasters had given her a commendation for that.

After Norea’s second attack collapsed the administrative building, there were no schoolmasters left to give her much of anything.

And now her future was being determined by the duel below and she found herself uncertain about her own feelings about it. If Miorine were here she would, perhaps, find amusement in that.

”Oh! Chuchu may have the weight advantage here but Tober’s no slouch. A beautiful, expert dodge and she’s got the Barding’s right arm in a lock!”

From behind her, in his control booth, she heard Rouji go “hmm.”

“What’s wrong?”

From her link with Earth House, she heard Lilique’s voice. “Chuchu! Are you okay? Chuchu!”

“Hey,” Secelia said, not caring if Earth House or Rouji responded. She spared a look below, where Tober’s Heingra had grappled with Chuchu’s Barding.

“Heart rate accelerated, breathing erratic,” Rouji said calmly. “Chuchu’s vitals are out of the norm.”

Of course they are she’s in a fight, Secelia thought. But Rouji wouldn’t bring it to her attention if it weren’t unusual.

“Like that night?” Secelia said.

“Mm,” Rouji said. “Yes.”

Secelia’s palms suddenly itched as she watched Tober force Chuchu to one knee. “Rouji.”

Rouji silently tapped a single button on his control board, innocuous in the crowd of other buttons but he had spent two sleepless nights programming in its function.

Lilique’s voice crackled. “I think… I think something’s wrong!”

What was Chuchu doing, in that cockpit? Was she having another attack? Chuchu had cut off her end of the call, but Rouji had described the one he had witnessed. Was she panicking? The tight confines of the cockpit growing tighter? How does she react, when the walls close in?

That was a question for another time, Secelia had too much riding on this duel to find out.

“Rouji, hit —”

“Secelia.”

Easily recognizable, the voice of Miorine Rembran made Secelia stand to attention. She had that kind of authoritative tone, if you didn’t guard against it. Secelia willed herself into a pose less rigid and turned.

Miorine was standing at the landing of the platform, surrounded by bodyguards. Off to one side surrounded by his controls, Rouji leaned away from the armed crew as if he could pass through the bank of controls and find cover on the other side.

“Madame President,” Secelia said with an easy smile. “I had no idea I’d be entertaining your company tonight.”

Miorine ignored this and made a show of looking around. “Some might say,” she leveled a sharp look at Secelia. “That this all is in incredibly poor taste. At the very least, it is ill-advised.”

Secelia spread her arms. “Look at the draw, though! Is this crowd ill-advised?”

“Yes. Do you have any idea what would happen if someone here got injured due to this spectacle? How much worse that would make things in Asticassia?”

“You did allow me my own discretion.”

“I’m beginning to realize how dangerous that might have been.”

“Oh, please. It’s always going to be dangerous here. Did you know that a member of my house fell into the drain system? She had wandered around in there for two days. Came out babbling about ghosts. And all she had done was take a wrong step. Don’t blame me for the environment we’re in.”

Miorine split off from her bodyguards, bidding them stay in place with a gesture. She approached the edge of the platform, the crowd and the melee below raised a raucous sound. “How is she?”

“Fine. Came out a bit dehydrated, ironically.”

“Water rationing… is another issue we have to deal with. Which is why I don’t appreciate you tempting fate like this. I don’t need more complications.”

“I’ll take the responsibility for any injuries.”

Miorine shook her head. “That’s not how this works.”

“Didn’t we just have a talk about your outsized sense of responsibility?”

“This is not that. It’s my school now. It is, by definition, my responsibility.”

A plume of dust and debris filled the bubble, which crackled with energy as it held back the cloud from overwhelming the students surrounding it. Secelia could see a fist — only a shadow of it, no clue which fighter it belonged to — come down with a hammering clang, the shockwave of which stirred at her hair and felt like a hand pushing her from the edge of the platform.

Neither said anything for a moment, watching the violence down below. The Haro drones inside provided a feed of the action without the interference of the dome casting a bright blue glow. But seen through that crackling blue field gave the fight a remove, as if they were viewing it through a hologram, rather than standing directly above it close enough for the force of it to be felt physically.

Secelia broke the silence, putting one hand on her canted hip. She looked to Rouji, but “You’re obviously not here to shut it down, or you would have already.”

“Where you get your unfounded confidence is an ongoing mystery to me,” Miorine said.

“Haven’t found a reason to feel otherwise. So… what has brought you out of your office and to my little domain?”

“My friend is down there,” Miorine said plainly. The hot wind stirred at the bangs over her eyes as she looked down.

”Tober’s got her in a submission lock! Unless Chuchu can worm her way out of this it’s only a matter of time!”

Chuchu barely registered the incessant chatter. She could hear the blood rushing under her skin, the hammer blow of her heart’s frantic pulse. She thinks she hears Lilique? But her words were lost as Chuchu felt a claw grip tighten around her throat, her hands trembling, her

The Barding’s arm groaned as its joints were forced past the limit of its articulation and the screech and clash of it was the grind of metal against metal in the machining shop when it groaned to a stop as the child next to her put her hand in the wrong place. The splash of warm blood from her abbreviated arm was cooling on Chuchu’s face by the time the machine fully stopped and when it did there was the child, weeping, clutching the stump of her arm and there were the workers, scrambling to pull her out from under the machine and there was the foreman, shouting ‘why did you stop the machine?’ and ‘I don’t care what happened you have a quota’ and all their voices snarling together like frantic, intertwined serpents were as intermeshed as the smell of machine oil and blood. And she was just as frozen by it then as she was now.

But there was no blood. Not here. Chuchu knew that. She knew but the smell was there nonetheless, pulled from her memories, recalled through association as the machine groaned all around her and the increasingly frantic voices from her command and control clashed, ran one over the other. All this had flung her back to when she was a child, before the Guys had pooled their knowledge and their money and afforded her this opportunity but here she was again in a tumble-down wreck of a place, Spacians cheering all around her. What… was she doing here? Why…

“I knew you’d need me to be your teacher, Pom-pom Head!”

Dote’s voice, nasal and keening cut through the fog.

”What?" Chuchu said.

“Your friend, huh?” Secelia said as she continued to watch Miorine.

It wasn’t really the done thing to openly state a preference like that, not among the executive class. It opened up potential vulnerabilities. Even to carelessly let slip a favorite food could lead to some scenario where it could be leveraged against you later down the line. To openly state a fondness for an entire other human being was opening yourself up to all sorts of possible attacks. It was a watchful kind of life, but the rewards were meant to be compensation enough: to inherit one of the companies that guided the ship of humanity’s fate, to be born into power, to rule if not through office then certainly through sheer economic strength. The meager folk could have their desires, but the powerful had control. They had to first school their impulses, disguise their friends and veil all the weaknesses that could make them meager in turn.

Prying these things out her targets was what made it so fun. Miorine was being supremely unfair, denying Secelia the opportunity.

Really, it was a wonder how much she had changed.

Miorine spoke as she continued looking down. “Understand that losing Burion’s support would be a hard blow to Asticassia. But I’m not willing to put Chuchu’s life at risk for it. If I deem this fight to be dangerous, I will put a stop to it. Here and now. Even if it means the duel is forfeit against you.”

A wonder and really damned inconvenient.

“Hold it,” Secelia said, annoyed at the petulance she could hear in her voice. “You gave me permission —”

“What’s given can be taken back. For all your contempt for the previous incarnation of the duel, you care more than you let on. But I never gave a damn about these fights.”

Miorine knelt, her dark suit a striking contrast against the glow of the dome.

“Protecting what and who I still have is what I care about,” she said. “And to hell with the consequences.”

“Nobody ever got anywhere without a little risk,” Secelia said.

“Easy to say when you’ve never lost anything.” Miorine turned her head to give Secelia a level stare which cut off any further objections. Secelia held back an eye twitch and Miorine turned back to look down.

Secelia made a scowl at Miorine’s hunched figure. Then she half-turned, caught Rouji’s eye from within the control booth and she made a complicated gesture that could be summed up as a silent communication along the lines of do not activate the kill curtain.

Rouji side-eyed the pack of bodyguards still lurking like hungry wolves at the terminator line of a campfire. But it’s all charged up and ready to go, he signaled back.

Do not. Secelia crossed her hands in front of her and brought them down in a chopping motion.

I worked really hard on it, Rouji gestured sullenly.

Rouji!

Maybe the President will like it.

Secelia shot him a glare. It’s a kill curtain! Rouji! Dumbass!

Rouji crossed his arms in a way that meant no, you call it that because you’re dramatic.

It makes sense! It shuts off Mobile Suits. Like a kill switch. So… kill curtain!

If you had called it something like stun bubble you wouldn’t feel so nervous about it. If we call it stun bubble can we use it?

No!

I stayed up two nights programming Haros for this.

By now the bodyguards were looking between the two as if they were having their own silent debate about which of them they should terminate with extreme prejudice first. Secelia gave them a pretty smile which suggested that they all should jump off the platform. Then she shot one last do not touch the kill curtain button look at Rouji before spinning around and crossing her arms with a huff.

She pulled out her notebook in a way that made Miorine’s bodyguards twitchy. She winked at them as she spoke into it. “Earth House, is your link still up?”

Lilique answered. “Secelia? Yes! But Chuchu’s not responding and her vitals — I think she’s having a panic attack!”

“Pass me through to her.”

“Um,” Lilique stopped as if seeking to pick her next words carefully. “She may need more delicate help?”

“This is not an environment where we can be delicate. I’ll piss her off instead.”

“Secelia?”

Miorine was now standing before her, one eyebrow raised in curiosity.

Secelia winked at her too. “Here and now, Madame President.”

She raised the notebook to her mouth once she saw it connect. “I knew you’d need me to be your teacher, Pom-pom Head!” She crowed.

She could hear shock and outrage intermixed when Chuchu’s voice came over the line. ”What?”

Chuchu felt the fog disperse in her head. Goddamn Secelia…

An alarm cut through her thoughts. Stress limits for her right arm were nearing the breaking point.

“Shit!” she hissed as she worked to reroute power. Her gyros were failing and she was on the verge of losing balance. The Barding had a height and weight advantage over the Heingra that won’t mean jack once she’s on the ground. Her only saving grace was that the Heingra didn’t seem to have the leverage to yank her down. The ground under them might still be loose with shifting debris.

“What’s this?” Secelia was saying, still — still! — talking despite all this. “If you let this state of affairs continue you’ll blow the servo motors. What’s the fourth principle of Mobile Suit maintenance?”

Chuchu grit her teeth. They had removed the Baori Pack to keep in compliance with these new rules and she desperately wished it were still there. Thrusters were at half power. She just needed to orient it…

“Pom-pom Head?”

Shit. She was serious. “Not now, Dote!” Chuchu wiped at a drop of sweat before realizing it was under her helmet. Her breathing was starting to accelerate again and the shortness of it bloomed in her chest with a stinging ache. Her arm was locked down if she used thrusters she’d lose it either way… but she’d be free at least. Free and severely damaged. Not the position to be in.

“The fourth principle of Mobile Suit maintenance!”

“Fuck! Identify the scope of maintenance to curtail waste!” This was covered by a basic class, required for mechanics and pilot students. Real basic but if that meant Secelia would stop screaming then whatever, she’ll fight and suffer a pop quiz at the same time.

“You’re doing maintenance right now,” Secelia continued. “What’s your scope?”

“I am going to kill you once all this is over,” Chuchu gritted out. “My arm is getting fucking wrecked! That’s my scope!”

“What’s the first principle of Mobile Suit maintenance?”

“Prior to any repair work ensure all power has been cut off from the area of concern…”

A thought occurred to Chuchu.

She reached over and routed all power over her arm. It went slack in its socket, spinning freely all resistance removed.

And the ground beneath them was loose. Suddenly over-leveraged, Tober’s Heingra stumbled forward.

Chuchu pivoted on her feet and raised her good arm. She bent it at the elbow, leading with the heavy armored gauntlet, gimbaled the thrust on her shoulder and fired it and sent 70 tons of metal elbow-dropping onto the spindly waist of the Heingra, right above the rear plating where the leg joints were.

The impact was like a gong, or a bell ringing and Chuchu was inside it. But whatever was happening here was going for worse inside the Heingra she was sure.

She settled on top of the Heingra, gravity tugging at her, causing the buckles of the pilot’s seat to dig into her shoulders and chest. The pinging and groan of metal surrounded her as a chorus. Warnings flashed across displays.

And the Heingra did not stir beneath her.

”We… we’ve got a winner! Chuchu Panlunch with a devastating elbow drop heard ‘round the Front!”

Secelia lowered her notebook, shifting her fingers over it so she didn’t drop it. She let out a breath, schooling it to keep it from shaking with relief.

“Secelia.”

Another plastered smile and Secelia faced Miorine.

“Madame President, I believe Burion’s support is secured,” she said.

Miorine crossed her arms. “That’s fine. I’m grateful for it. You…” She tilted her head to one side. “You were willing to do anything to avoid defeat, weren’t you?”

Secelia looked down at her phone. “Oh, you mean this? Well —”

“No.”

A bodyguard came up to Miorine with a tablet. “Madam President, it is confirmed.”

“Thank you,” Miorine gave the tablet’s display a cursory look before locking eyes with Secelia again. “Your sabotage was not subtle.”

“Two days!” Rouji shouted.

Secelia shot him a look. “Rouji!”

“Once I saw your interesting beam dome I wanted to see for myself,” Miorine continued. “My retinue detected a variance in the energy field that suggested… unpleasant possibilities.”

Secelia said nothing.

“You were planning to cheat, were you not? Engineer a technical fault that would nullify the match regardless of the results and close the possibility of future duels out of safety concerns.”

Secelia continued to say nothing.

“I would like to know your mind on this matter,” Miorine said. “You’ve already won and anything you say here would be… off the record.”

“I do what’s necessary. If I rigged the Haros to —”

“Funny. I didn’t know you were familiar enough with Haros to rig anything. On the other hand, I know someone who is.” Miorine shifted a glance towards Rouji.

Secelia shifted to block her view. “If I rigged the Haros to do anything… it was because I believed it was necessary.”

“For all your talk about preserving the duels you were still willing to lose them. And you would have suffered a blow to your own reputation for presiding over a faulty duel.”

“I believe you’d agree with me that there are more important things on the line than duels or reputations.”

Miorine said nothing, staring at Secelia longer than was comfortable. It was possible that her eyes had something to do with her position as top of the management department. She had an unnerving way of looking at people.

“Happily we will not have to test that on this day,” Miorine said, letting the issue drop. “Now… we will check on the status of our duelists and then I believe you had business with Earth House. Through me.”

“Now?”

“No time like the present.”

Chuchu had a mighty headache and then Miorine told her that they were going to have a meeting and all of Earth House should be present.

This sort of behavior shouldn’t be allowed. Don’t Spacians sleep? She could use sleep.

Some part of her was still in the cockpit, the metal screaming around her.

She couldn’t keep this up.

“Have you ever heard of taking a break?” She said. There wasn’t even have enough time to change out of her pilot suit.

“The sooner I hear Secelia out the sooner I can get on to more pressing business. Besides, her proposition has merit.” Miorine glanced over her shoulder as they walked. “You do not have to come. It’s unlikely these negotiations will concern you directly.”

“Now you tell me,” Chuchu groaned. “No. I’ll come. I have…” to talk to Secelia.

“Hm?”

“Nothing.”

“We need to make this brief.” Her words were clipped and precise and her demeanor a mask of professionalism. “Secelia wanted my mediation in a matter with Earth House, provided the duel was found in her favor.”

Walking alongside Miorine, Martin rubbed his chin. “What could she possibly have to negotiate with us?”

“It would be best to hear it from her directly,” Miorine said.

“So you know,” said Till.

“I have a… general idea.”

“Well,” Till said. “There you have it. Lilique, you’re our best negotiator so make sure to wring her dry.”

Lilique cast a genial smile at him over her shoulder. “Yes! I’ll take everything she has! Oh. Nuno, why’s your uniform all stained?”

Nuno winced. “Um. I had… a beverage accident.”

“Wanna watch the video — ow!” Ojelo said.

“Do not,” Nuno hissed.

“I’m surprised your bodyguards aren’t here, Miorine,” Aliya said.

“They don’t follow me everywhere,” Miorine said. “Just… most places.”

They had made arrangements for a prefab shelter not far from the location of the fight. Secelia waited for them there. Chuchu looked down at her hands as they walked, gripping the fingers of one hand in the other, stilling a trembling that had seized them.

When they entered the shelter, Secelia was indeed there. And so was Tober.

“ — can’t dismiss what’s happening to Burion!” Tober shouted at Secelia as they stumbled in mid-argument. “You are either utterly clueless or deliberately stupid if you think this can go on!”

“I don’t —” Secelia spared a glance at Earth House, who had the awkward look of strangers who had walked into a domestic dispute. Miorine meanwhile had a look of cool curiosity.

“You don’t?” Tober said, voice high and breaking. “What do you do, Secelia Dote? You provide restricted technology to Earthians. You collaborate with their silly escapade to Quiet Zero. You humor Benerit’s sad attempts to resurrect this corpse of a school. You leach Burion resources to do all these things! All of Spacian society watched her —” Tober jabbed a finger in Miorine’s direction. “— burn down the economy and she rode in on a secret prototype Burion Mobile Suit to do it! Benerit’s investors are very powerful people and they want to see punishment for what she did to their money. And you have tied Burion’s fortunes close enough to hers that we’re in their crosshairs too!”

“I am not responsible for a bunch of old fools who’ve gone hysterical over a stock price.”

“Easy to say that,” Tober said, “when you’re far from the consequences, playing Empress of your little patch of land on Asticassia. All you have to do is step aside. It’s not too late! Even now! Just being here, pretending you’re in control, is actively harming us all! All it would take is for you to say enough and give up your position and let someone with an ounce of sense to occupy it and recall Burion’s students, disavow any connection to Benerit. All you’d have to do is do less and you’d save Burion.”

“Save it for who?” Secelia said.

Tober’s teeth clack together audibly as she ground them together. “Fine, cousin. But all this? This duel? This was the soft option. Keep this up and the hard option will come for you.” By the time she had finished, Tober was breathing hard, the pilot suit shifting with each breath. Secelia met her darting eyes with a level gaze, refusing to give her the satisfaction of looking away. Finally, Tober huffed, spun on her heels and marched for the exit.

“Is now a bad time?” Nuno said mildly.

“When you said things would be settled after the duel, I suspected you were being optimistic,” Miorine said.

Secelia plastered a smile onto her face and she gestured with her hand. “Please, do take a seat. It’s not a secret that Benerit’s actions have disrupted the economy. Our investors will continue to question Burion’s close relationship with Benerit so long as they are in a position to. And mine is hardly the only one.”

Instead of responding, Miorine put her elbows on the table and leaned forward, clasping her hands before her face and staring at her own knuckles.

A few chairs down, Ojelo raised one hand. “Um. Sorry. What’s going on? I thought we were here to… negotiate? Negotiate, right? I’m not sure what we’re negotiating, but…”

“Then lets get down to business,” Secelia said her relief at the opportunity to move on from that whole spectacle was obvious. Chuchu mused that Secelia was the type to keep her own dirty laundry well out of sight. Maybe the type who couldn’t take what she regularly dished out.

“How would you like,” she said, steepling her fingers and pausing dramatically with a smile that Chuchu was rapidly beginning to realize was well-practiced. “To feed Asticassia?”

With a brief opening speech and a presentation assisted in part with a series of projected slides by Rouji’s Haro, it was Aliya who interrupted Secelia, interrupting her partway through the slideshow.

“Excuse me? Secelia?”

Secelia put her hands on her hips, clearly put out by this. “What? Yes? You, with the braids.”

“Aliya. Yes. I… think that this is all a very good idea in theory… but… and I’m very happy that you thought of us to fulfill such an important need! But… there is absolutely no way the animals we have here can produce enough food to feed even a portion of Asticassia’s students.”

Chuchu looked from Aliya, all the other Earth House students nodding, then to Secelia, whose hand was still raised mid-gesture towards a bullet point in her presentation.

“Seriously?” she said.

“You didn’t actually think we had enough goats to provide milk to hundreds of students, did you?” Chuchu said. “Or enough chickens to give them eggs? Daily?”

Secelia boggled at her. “Why wouldn’t I? You guys never seemed to have that problem.”

“We’re one House! And a very small one!”

“They don’t teach agricultural logistics in Asticassia, Chuchu,” Aliya gently admonished. Chuchu rolled her eyes. Of course she’d be nice about it. “There have been attempts at creating livestock fronts, though not many. It came about that the work of balancing an ecology for animal populations was a great deal more difficult than the early entrepreneurs had believed. Especially when there is a perfectly fine planet that had already developed the ideal condition for those animals. The price of beef on Earth doesn’t have the expense of maintaining an environmentally-controlled habitat baked into it, you see.”

“Oh here she goes,” Chuchu said, earning a whack on the shoulder from Aliya sitting beside her.

“In fact,” Aliya said while jabbing a finger into Chuchu’s already bruised ribs from the opposite side, “it’s an interesting quirk that no matter how technologically advanced Spacian society gets, its most fundamental needs — sustenance and labor — are still most easily and economically met by Earth itself. No amount of political and financial power will overcome billions of years of natural development. I’ve always thought that this contributed to the lopsided relationship between Earth and space, you know? There’s a resentment there about how badly Spacians need Earth. No matter how far they go, how much wealth they amass and what boundaries they push, they’ll never truly break free. When all you seek is power, it must be easy to hate the reminder that you’re inextricably part of an ecosystem.”

In the ensuing silence, Miorine cleared her throat. “I must confess that I never appreciated the processes that takes food from its point of origin to my plate. Perhaps… a course on that would be appropriate. At the very least, it would help to contribute a measure of understanding between Spacians and Earthians.”

“Um.” Martin raised his hand. “If… feeding students here is an issue…”

“Of course it’s an issue!” Secelia said, and Martin leaped in his chair at her voice. “How long do you think people can survive on vitamin gel?”

Silence landed on the table like a heavy, suffocating blanket as Secelia suddenly found every Earthian eye trained on her.

“Much longer than you think,” Ojelo, normally so gregarious, said gravely.

Secelia cast her eyes around the table. They were wide and alarmed at the abrupt attention. Even she, Chuchu noted, seemed at a loss for what to say in this moment.

“R… right,” Martin said. “Yes. But… have we tried to buy from Earth directly?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” said Miorine. “But…”

“Spacian corporations like to take more than they strictly need,” Aliya said. “That includes Benerit.”

“If possible, I would like to return Earth’s agriculture to its people,” said Miorine. “Even if we buy it from them, it still takes food off their table. Other corporations own their own stake in Earth’s fields. They are… not eager to do business with us.”

“Very principled,” Secelia said. “But we can’t eat principles.”

“I may know some herders back home,” Aliya said, her words slow and cautious as if feeling out the edges of an idea. “I can’t say that they can supply the whole school but… they would appreciate the opportunity.”

“Hey, that’s even better,” Ojelo said. “Scarcity, right? We can charge a lot for fresh produce.”

“The ones who can afford a premium probably have their own supply,” Nuno said.

“I bet we could undercut that and still make a profit. And if not there’s still a market underneath them.”

Miorine steepled her fingers. “If you truly wish to pursue this I would like to see an action plan on my desk. But that is beyond the scope of this meeting. Secelia. I have fulfilled my role as intermediary.”

“I suppose,” Secelia said. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, tapping a finger against her upper arm. Chuchu tried to imagine what she had envisioned for herself going into this. Queen of Dairy. The mind rebelled.

“This was hardly the outcome I had in mind,” Secelia groused.

“Nevertheless.” Miorine aimed a level gaze at her. “And now I want compensation in return for my time.”

To Chuchu it seemed like Secelia had the look of someone bluffing their way through an ambush. “And here I thought you were doing this out of the good of your heart. I didn’t agree to this.”

“I am still Benerit, Secelia. And my time is not free. In return for this I want you to commit to my side.”

“Buy a girl a drink first,” Secelia said lightly.

“I’m being serious. I need allies.”

“Normally a proposition like this comes with more incentive.”

“I’m aware. And I know what you want. I’ve known it ever since we were first years.”

Chuchu watched Secelia go still.

“You want Burion, and you won’t get it without our help. Come on side with me,” Miorine said.

“Excuse me,” Martin said. “Our? Help?”

Secelia leaned forward, one elbow on the table, her hand cradling her chin. By now Chuchu recognized the posture: interested, without wanting to appear so. But whatever was happening now between Miorine and Secelia, it seemed they were keeping it between the two of them.

“I already have Burion,” Secelia said.

“No. Your shareholders have Burion. Your family hangs onto it like a leach clinging to a greater animal, figureheads at best. Is that what you want to be, Secelia?”

“I am not a figurehead,” Secelia hissed. “Not yet.”

“What’s going on between these two?” Lilique whispered to Chuchu as Earth House watched the proceedings.

“Shh,” Chuchu said.

“You’re going to need support, if what Tober said is true,” Miorine said. “And I don’t see anyone rushing to your aid.”

“Tober is melodramatic.” Secelia’s words were too hasty. They didn’t convince Chuchu and Chuchu had no sense or patience for this kind of politicking. That Secelia didn’t bother to refute the point any further only made her words seem more hollow.

“You wouldn’t try to get me in here unless you had an ulterior motive,” Miorine said. “And that you included Earth House suggests their involvement. Let’s not dance around the issue.”

“So this isn’t… really about eggs and yak milk,” Martin said.

Secelia showed her teeth to him. “Oh, Martin.” The she sighed. “No. I suppose there’s no helping it. It’s true. Burion isn’t mine. Not in the ways that matter. My family has some influence. More than half the board would have to vote to override my decisions but that won’t be the case forever.”

“So?” Chuchu kicked back, feet on the table, her hands shoved into the pockets of her big jacket. This was a hell of a lot of talk that still didn’t mean anything for her or the House. “What the hell does that have to do with us?”

“You saw Tober’s outburst,” Miorine said. “Associating with Earth damages Burion’s reputation with their investors. You realize what you’re proposing is illegal.”

“Ah,” Secelia said. “So you do see.”

“You want to deepen your association with Earth,” Miorine said. “And you, personally, with Earth House.”

“There is an annual gathering on Mars,” Secelia said. “At a place called Tharsis Landing under the main dome. A sort of social gathering and trade expo. Bringing someone from Earth House under the pretense of a… deeper relationship, combined with my decisions here on Asticassia will be the final straw. It will trigger a stock sell-off. Which I will immediately buy. It won’t take much for my majority share to become a controlling share.”

“Did you hear that Chuchu?” Lilique prodded her. “A fake relationship! This is —”

“Stupid.” Chuchu glowered.

“Don’t worry too much about it, Pom-pom Head,” Secelia said with an indulgent smile. “All you have to do is protect my position here on Asticassia.” She shifted her eyes over. “Martin Upmont.”

“Whu — y-yes!” He said, alarmed at his name being called.

“Will you commit securities fraud with me?” Secelia said with a toothy grin.

Sure, Chuchu thought as she looked upwards at the ceiling. Martin is the obvious choice. The princess of Mars already has him wrapped around her finger. He won’t be able to say no to anything she says, just how she liked it.

“N-n-no!” Martin said.

“What.” Secelia said immediately.

“A-absolutely not!” Martin stammered out. He stood up abruptly, his chair nearly toppling over behind him. He was stiff as a board, his hands on either side clenched into trembling fists.

Secelia slammed her hands on the desk. “Are you kidding me? You’re saying no? To me?”

And while everyone else around the table sat dumbfounded, they all began to hear a strange noise, that none had heard before. A high-pitched wheezing. Something like a pilot suit with a leaking oxygen pump or a faulty seal. But Chuchu was the only one in a pilot suit and it wasn’t sealed. She looked around. Everyone looked around aside from Secelia, whose face was growing increasingly red.

Then they found it. The source of the noise they had never heard before. It was Miorine Rembran, President of Benerit, CEO of GUND-ARM Inc., doubled over, laughing.

Chapter Text

The Phobos Drag was a chain of cities anchored to Mars’ larger moon. It had been among the many grand projects that Old Man Burion had envisioned, one of the Wonders of Mars stamped with the company logo. It was meant to form a chain of colonies that would stretch around the world, an artificial ring that would shine in the Martian sky like a dew-dappled spider’s thread that was alive with the industry and bustle of a billion human lives.

Five habitats were strung onto the moon before funding became an issue, and they were already scaled down compared to the original vision. Even so it was one of the larger space habitats constructed and a popular residence for the Martian upper class seeking to distance themselves from those who toiled in the permet mines on the surface. Living at the bottom of a gravity well was considered a gauche thing no matter the planet, too reminiscent of Earth. What was the point of owning a world if you couldn’t look down on it? That Old Man Burion had built his castle on the surface just proved he was never really a part of proper Spacian society. It was like that with the new money types. Too rich to ignore, so you grin and bear their boorishness until you could take from them the bounty that belonged to more deserving people.

In the largest of the five habitats, those more deserving people held a meeting. A cabal of the megarich with plans to plunder and take is often viewed as a conspiracy. But since they were all shareholders of Burion, it was just a business meeting.

The conference room had one side that was a great transparent wall facing out to space and the rusty orange-red arc of Mars below. Seated at a great table, the shareholders were notable all, their pictures gracing the covers of high-minded periodicals. The kind that proclaimed the thoughtleaders of the corporate class, its boldest investors, the mavericks of the economy. Glowing articles were written of them featuring dramatically lit photos where their arms were crossed and they looked off with a steely gaze into some future only they were wise enough to discern, anticipating trends and market fluctuations. Profit margins and whatnot.

Among the decisions they made that marked them as the future of Ad Stella was their decision made years ago to buy voting shares of Burion at bargain prices and it was Burion they were focused on now.

“Okay. Let’s rock. What’s on the agenda?”

“Got a follow up on that query,” one said. “Tharsis is still a shitshow.”

An air of mild discontent fell, like the arrhythmic buzz of a fly smacking against a window..

“Thought we took care of that.”

“We didn’t do shit. The Burion family wanted to resolve it in-house. A duel or something I think.”

“So that was a bust?”

“Big time. Just came down the pipe. Streamed live too. Lots of eyeballs. First duel after that Earthian psycho blew the place up. Non-optimal.”

“It was a dumb idea anyway.”

“Cleaner though, it’s why we agreed to it. Too bad our help was unreliable.”

“I didn’t agree to it. We’d have to tie up loose ends afterward anyway. Gotta pop a loose thread like that. Best to put her down. That’s clean.”

“Then what happens to her shares?”

“That’s accounted for. We have lawyers. They’ll snatch ‘em up.”

“She must have a directive for her estate.”

“Words on a document. They’re not real. Not really. If anyone wants to make it an issue we’ll tie it up in courts and swap the shares between so many shell companies no one will know who owns what.”

“Okay then. Let’s rock. We should do it quick though. No reason to make her suffer.”

“Sure, sure. It’s just business.”

A short conversation, held in confidence. And just like that, a life was placed on the line.

“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard. Not in a while. The look on her face was… ah. You should have seen it.”

Miorine felt a ghost of the amusement she had felt at the meeting with Secelia and Earth House. She looked out the simulated window in recollection. It was a panel with the same programming as the Asticassia sky, and followed the same time. It showed evening, the telltale fading of sun into twilight coloring the edge of it.

She knew it was fake. She had seen the real thing. The sky. When she was very young and her recollection was murky.

And also on the night Quinnharbor burned. The unbidden thought of it caught like a word lodged in her throat. Miorine blinked and sniffed.

“So anyway, after that I suggested we adjourn the meeting. I think… I think you would have had fun. Ojelo has the most interesting video. I will have to show it to you when you…”

And that was a word caught in her throat. Rather than chase at it, Miorine stood. She looked down at herself, making a token effort at smoothing away the wrinkles of her suit. When had she last changed? She couldn’t remember.

There was a treacherous part of her that was grateful for the peace she could steal in this room. Far from the press, in the space between meetings. It was awful to think it but…

She turned from the window and looked down at Suletta in her hospital bed. Her peace shouldn’t come at such a price.

Suletta looked drawn, her skin losing its vital fullness, shadows under her eyes, the circuitry-patterned scarring clawing up her cheeks, running down her neck. Tubes ran from machines and under the covers, into her body. They flickered and beeped, the specifics of their functions not clear to Miorine, only knowing that they were keeping Suletta alive.

She knelt next to the bed, bringing herself eye level to Suletta’s face. In profile she was beautiful. The change in perspective stirring a profound sense of loss in Miorine. Could there have been a better way? A way that wouldn’t have required Suletta to put herself onto the sacrificial altar of a Gundam? Would Miorine have been able to wake up and see Suletta from this angle in happier circumstances? Side by side in a bed they shared, with a life they shared. With none of these damned machines or the cheap feel of hospital bedsheets or the antiseptic smell of the room around them.

Miorine rested her chin on the bed beside Suletta. Her mouth was sticky. When was the last time she had slept? Or had water?

Her eyes shifted and she watched the soft rise and fall of Miorine’s chest, the rhythm of her breath. The mechanical hum of the life-support machines made it hard to tell. Sometimes she had to be sure.

“I’d really like you to watch this stupid video with me, Suletta,” she said. She rubbed at her eyes, winced at what felt like a bruise. She felt the fatigue around her eyes and dared not risk a look. Maybe it had been a while since she slept.

The best she could get were these moments of restfulness, beside Suletta, in absolutely horrible posture. She’d awake at odd hours, not really refreshed, trading some fatigue and the bags under her eyes for an aching neck and back.

There would be more meetings in the morning. More arrangements to be made. More questions about how all… this would work than she had answers. But that was the morning. For now, Miorine brought her chair closer to Suletta’s bed. She sat in it, laid her head down beside Sulettas and yawned. She felt the energy leave her the moment she came close to Suletta’s face. Even if the lights were too bright she couldn’t be expected to get up and do anything about them. This was all becoming too hard.

“Good night,” she said.

And when the lights deactivated on their own and the simulated window suddenly went dark, the night coming too abruptly, Miorine was not awake enough to comment on it.

When she did wake up it was to the unpleasant feeling of drool down the corner of her mouth pooling on Suletta’s bedsheet. She became aware of an opened door and a rectangle of awful halogen light that beamed in from the corridor beyond like a flare going off in front of her face.

She didn’t feel rested at all as she heaved herself into a sitting position, bleary and unaware of her surroundings. When her eyes did focus, she took in a sharp breath at the person before her. The hospital should be secure, her bodyguards were stationed outside the permet research center. Everybody within should be safe.

But…

It was hard to reconcile that word with Prospera Mercury.

“Madame President,” she said from her wheelchair as she let herself into Suletta’s room.

Miorine groaned, and then covered up the reason for the groan by digging her notebook out of her inside jacket pocket and checking the time. She had another meeting within the hour. And then… she had to follow up on last night.

YOU LOOK LIKE CRAP, Ericht projected from where she was attached to her mother’s wheelchair.

It was still hard to nail down her feelings about Ericht. Engineers had taken a look at her and then shrugged. Something had happened to the simple circuitry of the little charm. The only person who could really shed light on it was Suletta. Another impossible feat she had accomplished. It seemed like she could pull those off without limits.

Well, they had found that limit, hadn’t they? The world had asked so much of her. Miorine had asked so much of her.

She scrubbed at her face and yawned. She had slept for hours. It felt like minutes.

“She’s right,” Prospera said. “You are a fright.”

Miorine said nothing to this. She had emerged from Quiet Zero a victor over Prospera. Made some fine speeches at her. But she felt hollowed out now.

“Oh, my lovely girl.” Prospera touched Suletta’s hand, opposite of Miorine. She held Suletta’s fingertips, the barest touch.

Mine. Miorine felt the thought stab at her from deep within in. Like an errant bubble from the thermal vent of some deep bathypelogic darkness. She calmed herself. Felt it for what it was. Some kind of wild jealousy. Why not be jealous? said that deep dark part of her. What has this woman done but use Suletta? How does she label herself ‘mother’ without being struck by lightning on the spot? How does she have more claim to her than I do?

She let the thought fume out inside her head until it had spent itself. There was no point acting on such petulant tantrums. Good or ill, she knew what Prospera meant to Suletta.

So instead she took Suletta’s other hand. It was dry, her fingers marked with the calluses of a pilot. Miorine squeezed and she did not squeeze back.

What a group we make, Miorine thought. I can barely talk to either of them. But with my father still recovering from his own injuries, they’re the closest I have to family.

If Suletta would still have her. She couldn’t settle on any specific reason why she’d refuse, but Miorine had been very good at coming up with pretenses to deny herself happiness in the past and old habits die hard.

“Belmeria says her decline continues,” Prospera said. “They have filtered out as much of the permet as they can but anything beyond would require transplants with organs they don’t have.”

That she can be so clinical about her daughter’s (mine) condition was a thing Miorine tried to skip past. Frankly, she had stopped talking to Doctor Winston. When all she had to report was the slow death of her… of her… of Suletta, there seemed to be little reason to check in. Which seemed to suit Belmeria too. She had become more furtive and Miorine was too exhausted these past weeks to deal with the kind of guilt that bled off of Belmeria like an ambient miasma.

Beside Prospera, Ericht’s eyes blinked. Miorine couldn’t guess at what this meant. For all she knew it meant her batteries were running low. Did Ericht have batteries? An engineer had drawn up a schematic of the toy she was in and where the circuitry should be he had drawn a great bit question mark. So many layers of permet had fused onto a cheap circuit board that was originally nothing more than a platform for two LEDs that tracing their paths or their functions was an exercise in futility.

Miorine opened her mouth, felt how sticky and unpleasant it was as she spoke thickly. “I have a meeting I must prepare for. Excuse me.”

She collected her things and made to walk around Suletta’s bed, past Prospera, who opened her mouth. “Madame Presid—”

“Yes, what,” Miorine said, too quickly to paper it over with niceties. There was something about the way Prospera used her title. Nothing that Miorine could pin an objection to but she didn’t much care for it.

Prospera seemed untroubled by this. “Sit? Please?”

Miorine hesitated. The meeting was a pretext to excuse herself and likely Prospera knew. They had been circling each other, like wild wolves on opposite sides of a campfire, needing its warmth but wary of the other. A part of her, that uncharitable part, wondered which would be the first to attempt and broker some kind of accord and she felt a small victory in not being that one.

So she sat. On Suletta’s bed, careful not to disturb her.

“You’ll keel over soon, running around like this,” Prospera said. It was not meant to be unkind. She spoke softly without being patronizing.

The petty victory Miorine wanted to feel was a fleeting thing, guttering out like a candle in a hurricane. She knew Prospera was right. But she knew in the way that an astronomer on Luna might know that a meteor the size of a continent was bound to strike Jupiter: a cataclysmic event of unimaginable scale that was happening somewhere far removed from her. Even though it was her own body failing, held up by caffeine and obstinateness and necessity. She knew the collapse was coming but that was somebody else’s problem. Specifically, Miorine in the future. Hopefully a far future, but probably not.

“Speaking,” Prospera said firmly, “as someone who once had a great undertaking before her and the specter of time keeping her to an impossible deadline, I very much advise you to —”

“Stop?” Miorine said with a scoff.

“Find people you can trust and delegate to them.”

Miorine clicked her tongue and swept back a lock of silver hair that fell over her eyes. It wasn’t an awful idea. Well, it was Business Management 101, really. That Prospera felt she needed to tell something so basic to Miorine must be a testament to how ragged she had been running herself. She had responsibilities to the Benerit Group, to Earth, to Asticassia, to GUND-Arm and to Suletta. She visited her father as well, though he waved her off often. She suspected this was his way of caring for her: putting a barrier between their presidencies so that people wouldn’t call her Delling’s shadow term. Admittedly there was merit to that, and knowing it rankled. Between all those demands, she was stretched far too thin and accomplishing little. But…

“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t. As long as I’m here —”

“What if,” Prospera said gently, “I told you there was good reason for you to be somewhere else? And quite soon?”

“What could possibly take me from Suletta’s side?” Miorine said. “After all that’s happened, do you think I’d make the same mistake again? At your request?”

“Let’s not make this about our past. Do you have people you can delegate to?”

“I…” Miorine stopped, then let out a breath. In truth she had people in mind. She wasn’t very excited about them. “There are. But… asking them would be… difficult.”

“Earth House?”

“Absolutely not. They are busy with GUND-Arm and I’ll not ask them for more.”

“Mm. So not them. Then, these people, it is difficult to ask for you? Or for your pride?”

Miorine breathed in sharply for some retort that did not come. She really must be tired. “How…”

“You are quite like your mother,” Prospera said. “But you have your father’s self-regard.”

Hoping to change the subject immediately from this line of thought, Miorine seized on Prospera’s earlier statement. “Why would I need to be somewhere else?”

“I do not expect you to trust my word on this,” Prospera said. “So I will submit to you a report later in the day.”

Miorine blinked at her. “You’re going to submit a report.”

“Later in the day.”

“Is this a good time to tell you I dislike surprises?”

“My,” Prospera said. “I’m glad we’re starting to learn more about each other! I shall have the report in your inbox.”

Miorine grimaced at her. “Fine. It’s fine.” Heap enough nonsense on her plate and one more would make no difference. She was already putting it on the back burner as she walked out the door, sparing one last look at Suletta before she withdrew, her mouth in a tight line across her face.

“By the way,” Prospera said, just as Miorine was about to dart around the corner.

Miorine hesitated, reluctantly peered back through the door. “Yes?”

“You don’t have your bodyguards today,” Prospera observed. “Usually when I come to this wing there’s someone in a dark suit looking at my wheelchair as if it were a bomb in disguise.”

“Yes…” Miorine pondered. Prospera was… probably done with trying to get her killed. It probably wasn’t smart to let her guard drop completely but… “I’m testing out a hypothesis,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. If you’ll excuse me.”

SHE MIGHT KNOW, Ericht wrote.

“No.” Prospera put her hand to her chin. “No, I don’t believe she does. But she is beginning to suspect something.”

SHOULDN’T WE TELL HER? OR DO YOU JUST LIKE SEEING HER MOPE AROUND LIKE THIS?

“If we did say something, she wouldn’t believe us. Well. Me.”

IT’S NOT LIKE I’M TIGHT WITH HER EITHER.

Prospera picked Ericht up.

“Then, my dear, perhaps it’s time to change that.”

There was a meeting on the continued devolution of Benerit assets to Earth. An exercise in frustration where lawyers dragged their feet as their clients scrabbled to pocket as much money as possible before it went to the Earthians.

Then there was a prospective customer who didn’t quite seem to understand that GUND-Arm was not interested in developing weapons. Also frustrating.

Further frustrating was a prospective client who did understand GUND-Arm was not interested in developing weapons, but really wanted her to look at the potential of using gundbits to apply a non-lethal level of electrical shock to an entire city. There would, of course, be a sliding scale and if the far end of it happened to just, maybe, a little bit, peek into the range of lethality well… isn’t it better to have the option available?

Then there were the no-shows. Representatives of companies who left her waiting, their proposals remaining unproposed. There were those who had been browbeaten by their corporate peers into abandoning these meetings, and Miorine had taken this into account. They would toe the line for now, but they could not resist the siren call of a new market for much longer. Once their executives got over their indignation they would be compelled to seek her out. It simply required patience. Then there were the ones who simply populated her calendar with meetings they never intended to attend. All out of some silly schoolyard pique. They… also required patience but Miorine did entertain fantasies of abducting them and stapling their ears to her office desk.

Many of her work days were like this, during which she move listlessly through Asticassia. And as she did, she noted the anomalies.

Asticassia had been tailor-made with her in mind. Her father commanded that it be built and as she grew, so too did the school, carved out of Front 73. It had the pretense of a place of learning but it was her guilded cage until she was to be taken away by the Holder of her class. She had grown up to resent the place, but resentment came with a degree of familiarity. You couldn’t come to hate a place until you really knew it and Miorine knew Asticassia.

So when it behaved in ways that didn’t make sense, these anomalies stuck out at her like a hangnail.

At first she had discounted them as random misfirings from a malfunctioning environmental system. The glass of water that had been spontaneously dispensed to her in between meetings some times ago. That kind of thing. But these moments piled up, too frequently to chalk up to coincidence.

Little moments of serendipity, like an elevator that opened just as she needed it. Or how, if she noted a flickering or broken street lamp as she walked down the broken paths at night, they would always muster up enough energy to stay illuminated as she walked underneath. Or when the environmentals seemed to work extra hard to maintain a comfortable temperature in any room she was in. When she commuted from the Benerit Front back to Asticassia an empty berth and a clear flightpath to it always waited for her ship despite the interminable traffic that still surrounded dogged Front 73. These were not some secret hidden perk of the presidency, she checked for that once she became aware of how often these moments cropped up.

And it wasn’t always strictly beneficial either. Or, at least, she wasn’t always getting her way. On more than one occasion she had given into the allure of conveniences and tried to get for herself some cup ramen from an automatic vendor. ‘Tried’ being the keyword. These machines always seemed to be curiously inoperative when she wanted to use them. Even trying multiple machines at different locations. And when she had given up and resolved to go to her destination hungry, a courier Haro would show up with a small but nutritious and tasty meal that she could eat on the go.

After the second instance of this she queried the Haro, asking it for details about the invoice, who put in the order, where the money was coming from. It was required to divulge this information to the person it was delivering to. Invariably, the Haros had no data to provide. It was like they weren’t even aware they were doing it.

On multiple occasions, when it got late and she finally succumbed to an hour or two of fitful stress sleep, she found that an alarm she had set was deactivated. It would sound, but only after she had gotten a slightly more restful slumber than she would have otherwise.

And then there was Secelia’s attempt at sabotaging last night’s duel.

From the moment the fight started and until she joined Secelia on the platform out of concern for what it all might mean, no matter what screen Miorine used it would always be interrupted by a live feed of the fight. Specifically, it showed her a tight shot of the ring of Haros that were being used to project the energy dome that enclosed the dueling grounds. She knew where to direct the scrutiny of her bodyguards and found exactly what she suspected.

It was a funny thing. She hated this place, once. Suletta’s arrival had given her the firebreak she needed between herself and her father’s designs and only then did she feel like she could call Asticassia… if not home then at least a place she could tolerate.

But lately it’s begun to feel like Asticassia — broken, shattered, bloodied Asticassia — was rearranging itself for her. And being kind of annoyingly attentive about it in the process. Miorine wasn’t sure she was being ungrateful about that, but she had never heard of such a thing happening to anyone ever so it was hard to gauge what the appropriate reaction should be.

One day, she had been scheduled to meet with the representatives of a company who had made some curiously tantalizing promises about a future collaboration. The representatives got very antsy and nervous half an hour into the meeting and left abruptly amid a flurry of hurried excuses. It was only afterward that Miorine had learned that an unscheduled docking at an airlock had been attempted by a cargo ship with a shielded compartment. Their docking failed when one of the Asticassia emergency buoys that had been deployed to steer ships away from hazard zones used its chemical thrusters to drift close enough to the dock to trigger a proximity alert and a repair crew response.

An inspection could not explain the buoy’s behavior and it had been returned to duty and had not malfunctioned since. The inspection did highlight that the airlock in question was very close to the meeting location, that the location had been requested by the company representatives who claimed it necessary for demonstration purposes and the access code of a member of Asticassia’s work crew — who had since been reported missing — had been used to leave the airlock open to any ship that attempted to dock with it. The cargo ship had vanished, its registry forged, its origin unknown. It had taken its unknown cargo and vanished into the void.

Her security team concluded that she had avoided a sophisticated abduction attempt by chance of a drifting buoy.

Taken all together… it had presented Miorine with a quandary.

She sat in her makeshift office-away-from-office, one of the first new buildings completed in Asticassia. It sat in view of the former administrative building, which was now almost entirely gone, its bedrock levels being inspected and reinforced for future reconstruction. This buildint’s metal halls gleamed from bright lights and her shoes clicked smartly on the floors. She was the only resident of the top floor, the lower levels slowly filling with the clerks who would bring Asticassia back to organizational parity.

So how would Asticassia respond if she left herself vulnerable? A dangerous hypothesis to test, but…

It was in a cloud of thoughts like these when Miorine swiveled in her chair, turned to face a window, and found another courier Haro hovering expectantly outside.

In its little courier basket, she saw something rattle around, small and orange.

CAN A GIRL GET A HAND HERE? Eri wrote. Her words vibrated from the motions of the Haro as it hovered in place.

Miorine put a hand to her temple and sighed.

“You know I’ve got automated defenses that shoot things like you down.”

YOU SHOULD THINK TWICE ABOUT THAT. EVER HEARD OF BIRDS? PIGEONS? A FEW OF THOSE COULD REALLY LIVEN THE PLACE UP IF THEY DON’T GET SHOT OUT OF THE SKY FIRST.

The windows in this building weren’t meant to be opened but it was standard practice to include a small network of service hatches and dumbwaiters specifically for Haros. They were kept secure by scanners meant to detect contraband and one of them flagged Ericht as an ANOMALOUS DEVICE, which was exceedingly fair as far as Miorine was concerned. Nevertheless, she used her override and soon Ericht joined her in her office, propped up by a coffee mug with a GUND-ARM logo on it.

“How did you even get past them anyway?” Miorine said.

I DUNNO, I FORGOTTEN THOSE THINGS EXIST UNTIL YOU REMINDED ME.

So the defenses did not activate and it wasn’t Ericht who disabled them. Another anomaly to add to the list. “That’s an odd thing to say. Did you have a reason to remember in the first place?”

FOR A WHILE AFTER I BECAME AERIAL, THERE WAS A TIME WHEN MOM WANTED ME TO THINK OF SOME WAYS AROUND YOUR STANDARD C-SUITE DEFENSE SYSTEM. YOU KNOW. FOR REASONS.

Miorine said nothing.

BUT THAT WAS AGES AGO. SHE SHELVED THE ASSASSINATION PLOTS WHEN SHE REALIZED SHE’D NEED YOUR DAD FOR QUIET ZERO.

“Wonderful,” Miorine said in monotone, marveling at the way she was handling how casually Ericht was spilling the unspoken horror of what could have been, all spelled out in a bland, scrolling text marquee over her head. It was never far from Miorine’s mind that Eri had once been a towering death machine. That the absurd incongruity of her current form made her appear harmless did not change that. How much agency had she had in her strange life? Was she like Suletta had been, conditioned to obey her mother’s commands no matter how murderous? And what was she now?

Certainly not anything that Miorine expected.

HEY, I JUST REALIZED THAT’S PROBABLY AN AWKWARD TOPIC. MY BAD.

“That is true,” Miorine said solemnly. “But it’s okay. More than that, you’re… chattier than I expected.”

The lights of Ericht’s eyes flickered rapidly. Miorine mused on this. Was she thinking? The mysterious tangle of permet flashing inside her like neurons? No. That’s anthropocentric thinking. Ericht represented an entirely new type of being. Consciousness etched in permet, with a non-human perspective. Even her senses were fundamentally different. For example, the engineers who studied her swore up and down that it was impossible for her to hear. She had no audio receptors. And yet, here she was, carrying on a conversation where half of it was verbally communicated. Mysteries abound around her. The head Benerit engineer who had been put in charge of studying her had, after a week of fruitless effort, walked into his boss’s office and tendered his immediate resignation. He was last seen spending his savings in a casino front that had been built on one of the approaches from Mars to Jupiter where he sat in a bar all day and ranted loudly at anyone who was in earshot that physics wasn’t real.

They gave her back to Prospera after that. Benerit needed to retain as much talent as it could and chipping at the foundations of the quantifiable universe seemed a poor way to go about that.

Ericht’s eyes stopped flashing and she projected her reply. YEAH? I GUESS. I HAVEN’T HAD MUCH CHANCE TO TALK WITH PEOPLE BEFORE SO MAYBE THIS IS JUST HOW I AM. OR MAYBE I’M HAPPIER NOW.

“You are?”

YEAH. Here, Ericht threw in a shrugging emoji composed of ASCII text. They were going to have to find some way to get her to speak because this increasingly complex glyph system was going to get out of hand fast. MAYBE I’M GLAD MOM’S PLAN DIDN’T WORK AND SHE’S NOT THE NEW TYRANT OF EARTH. MAYBE THAT’S WHY I FEEL ALL CHIPPER. OR MAYBE THIS CHEAP-ASS KEYCHAIN I LIVE IN DOESN’T HAVE CIRCUITRY CAPABLE OF SIMULATING SADNESS. COULD BE THAT TOO.

“Oh… I’m so—”

THAT WAS A JOKE. FROM A BIOELECTRIC STANDPOINT RESEARCHERS HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO DISCERN A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND SADNESS SO IT’S ALL THE SAME TO ME.

“Oh.”

OR MAYBE I’M JUST WRITING THAT TO MAKE YOU FEEL LESS UNCOMFORTABLE.

Ericht’s eyes flashed again and Miorine was coming to the conclusion that she was being fucked with.

“You’re very difficult to talk to.”

WE’RE ALL ON A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY TOGETHER.

Miorine felt a bloom of impatience and silently re-evaluated her opinion of the engineer who had resigned. Perhaps being in the same room with Ericht was a more taxing proposal than she first realized. She and Suletta were… very different. “So,” she said through tightly drawn lips. “What brings you here?”

I THOUGHT WE SHOULD HANG OUT MORE. ALSO I WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE TAKING WHAT MOM SAID SERIOUSLY.

“So long as Suletta is on Asticassia there is no way I’m leaving,” Miorine said promptly, having settled on this course of action long ago.

EVEN IF IT INTERFERES WITH YOUR OTHER WORK? WHAT ABOUT EARTH?

“I’m perfectly capable of working from here. I don’t need to be physically on Earth.” And the idea of it terrified her, Miorine amended silently. To return to Quinnharbor after all that had transpired? Someday, yes. She’d have to. Not yet though. Not yet.

DON’T YOU HAVE OTHER PEOPLE? DELEGATE, GIRL. WHAT ABOUT THAT ONE GUY? YOU KNOW, YOU LET HIM FAKE WIN? JERK?

“Jeturk. He… may be a capable executive, but he lacks the perspective someone would need when dealing with Earth.”

Which was her diplomatic way of saying that Guel wouldn’t have Earth’s best interests in mind. Not out of malice, but simply due to a lack of necessary perspective.

Ericht flashed her eyes. BUT YOU DO.

“You are really annoying, you know that? And what’s this ‘you’ business?” She interjected suddenly. “You were in on it too.”

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD BE GLAD YOU’RE FINALLY BEING FRANK WITH ME BUT THAT’S NOT AN ANSWER.

She really wasn’t like Suletta at all. Miorine supposed she should be thankful for that.

“Maybe you have somewhere else to be?” she suggested. “I have another meeting coming up.”

YEAH I’LL CHECK MY CALENDAR. Ericht flashed her eyes again. NOPE I’M FREE.

There was no use in pressing the issue. Well. There was. Ericht was a keychain charm. Miorine could put her back on a Haro and send her to the furthest part of Front 73 if she wanted. But that seemed incredibly rude and however unlike Suletta she was, they were still sisters. She should try to get along. It wasn’t like the next meeting was a particularly formal affair, as important as it was.

On cue, her notebook chimed.

“Madame President,” her secretary said. “Chuatary Panlu —”

“Chuchu!” her voice was recognizable through the tinny speaker. “I already told you I go by Chuchu!”

“Anyone else?” Miorine said, speaking over Chuchu’s indignation. “I specifically requested Martin Upmont to attend.”

There was a pause as the secretary checked, which really told Miorine all she needed to know.

“He is not. Lilique Lipati is also here, however.”

That made Miorine raise an eyebrow. “Hm. Send them both up.”

She put one knuckle to her lips as she thought. Martin wasn’t coming, which meant he wasn’t budging. But Chuchu’s here and bringing Lilique along. Or did Lilique insist on coming? It could signify different things if Chuchu knew what Miorine would ask of her. Right…

“Are you sure you want to stay here?” she said to Ericht. “It’s going to be very boring.”

I NEVER BEEN TO A MEETING BEFORE, Ericht wrote. ALL THIS INTRIGUE AND STUFF SEEMS COOL. USUALLY I JUST SHOOT SOMETHING AND WIN AND GET PUT IN A BOX.

Miorine winced at that. “Fine. But it’s not intrigue. It’s just negotiation.”

“Martin… says no,” Lilique said. Sitting across from Miorine, alongside Chuchu, she looked Miorine in the eye as she spoke. Yet it seemed she couldn’t help but let her eye drift towards the charm that Miorine had propped up against a mug. On an otherwise sparsely decorated desk it stood out. Did Lilique know Ericht was in there? She probably didn’t. But Ericht had been inactive the moment Miorine had company. Was it her place to point her out? Or was it ruder to let her listen in? Hard to say.

“It’s more like,” Chuchu said, “he’s holding up on the roof of the cow shed and shouting ‘no’ at anyone who even mentions Secelia.”

Miorine closed her eyes. “I see.”

“Well, she is a relentlessly exhausting bitch,” Chuchu said.

“Chuchu!” Lilique elbowed her.

“What? I’m right! Besides it’s nice to see Martin be more assertive. Even if he’s earning himself another week of stable duty.”

“Aliya is not happy,” Lilique offered by way of explanation.

This was all very silly, and Miorine missed it desperately, so desperately her hands clenched on the desk as if reacting to a physical hurt. Her time with them had been short — far too short — but she felt a yearning for those frivolous days she spent with Earth House and Suletta, with no concern beyond study and adjusting to life with her new Holder. She pined for it with the ache of a doddering elder remembering halcyon days. Even if everything were to go impossibly right for her, she’d still never get to relive those times. Earth House was now her employees, her responsibilities too numerous. Those moments slipped by before she could even recognize them for the brief glimpse into happiness they were. She’s tasted nothing but ash since the attack on Plant Quetta and she couldn’t even allow herself the pretty lie that better times awaited her. They already happened.

“But,” Lilique continued quickly, perhaps misreading Miorine’s ache for disappointment, “we have an alternative.”

“Oh?”

Chuchu waved her hands to draw their attention. “Before we get into that, just how important is this whole thing with Secelia really?” She learned forward, knees apart and her hands clenched between them.

“I have misgivings about her plan.” Market manipulation or securities fraud did not particularly trouble Miorine. Yes, technically those things were illegal but she had been born into the untouchable stratosphere of high society. Where white collar crimes were the spice of Spacian life. You did a little to keep things from getting dull. At least that had been the case conventionally. Miorine and anyone associating with her would be under tighter scrutiny and held to a higher standard now that she had thrown her lot in with Earth. She was loathe to put her friends through that wringer.

“But now I’m getting transmissions from Mars,” she continued. They started almost as soon as Tober lost her duel. It appeared that they had been waiting. “Burion wants to renegotiate our contracts. They produce a great deal of the machines Benerit relies on to do construction. Having Secelia in charge of Burion would allow for the reconstruction efforts here to go much more smoothly. Or… go at all.”

“Important, then,” Chuchu said.

Miorine sighed. “Obviously.”

Chuchu shook her head. “Man. Didn’t you guys ever think to build your own construction equipment?”

“Construction equipment doesn’t attract investors,” Miorine said. “Mobile Suits and weapon systems do. At least, that’s what father believed.”

“So it goes, huh?” Chuchu looked at Lilique. They shared a nod. Then Chuchu turned back to Miorine. “Then I’ll volunteer myself.”

“We should consult with Secelia first.”

Lilique raised a finger in opposition. “I’ll talk to her. She’s made it into a matter between Earth House and her.”

“That’s right, plus what choice does she have? Beggars can’t be choosers,” Chuchu said. She leaned back in her seat and thumped her feet up onto Minorine’s desk, the heels of her shoes marring the new surface. Miorine made a face at her, then closed her eyes.

“I was planning on asking you anyway,” she said.

“We know, that’s why we came to you.” Lilique slid her notepad across the desk. “But we have a demand.”

“Go on.”

“We want to talk to Nika,” Chuchu said. “All of us.”

“That’s not what we agreed on,” Lilique said. She turned to Miorine. “Chuchu will talk to Nika. If we can all be allowed to speak with her afterwards, that will certainly be nice.”

It would be just Chuchu’s style to disguise her own desires under the blanket of all of Earth House. Miorine watched as she pursed her lips and made as if to raise an objection but Lilique shot her a sharp, silencing glare. Chuchu slouched back into her seat and Lilique returned to her usual, cheery smile.

“Well?” she said.

“You bragged about getting her the best lawyers,” Chuchu said, joining in. “This should be easy, right?”

For a typical prisoner it might be, but the League still wanted to make an example of Nika. It wasn’t sticking the way they had hoped. Between Shaddiq’s testimony and the evidence Miorine had turned over, the executive office on Luna was squirming. Watching those excruciating press conferences didn’t put a smile on Miorine’s face, but it did make her feel a little lighter inside.

“That might not be possible right now. She’s being kept as a witness for the trial and…” Miorine sighed. “Okay. It is possible. But to avoid the appearance of impropriety her lawyers will likely have issue with —”

“Settle down, princess,” Chuchu said. “I didn’t say I wanted to see her tomorrow. Just… promise me that you will make it happen. I’ll believe you’re good for it.”

“Then I will,” Miorine said, buoyed by the trust she was shown. “I swear it.”

Chuchu pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow. “Alright then.” She swung her legs off the desk. Her seat landed on all four legs with a thump and she used the momentum to surge forward with her hand held out in front of her.

Miorine leaned back, but when she saw the proffered hand, she took it in her own and they shook on it.

“Deal,” said Lilique

“You realize what you just agreed to?” Miorine said while their hands were still clasped. “Spacian social functions are not exactly your field of expertise and Mars has its own customs. On top of that —”

“Yeah, yeah.” Chuchu let go and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “I’m trying not to think about it. Just… I don’t know. Send me a cheat sheet or something so I can study on the way over.”

“Misgivings… increasing,” Miorine said.

“Smartass.”

The rifle, the bullet and the person who applies them to their intended use. These too were the tools of capital. And when a ship from Mars came laden with a cargo hold full of such objects and such people, it was done with the intent of meeting investment objectives.

When the ship’s comms operator injected a false signal into Asticassia’s frayed sensor network, allowing it to slip through unnoticed, it was for the sake of meeting quarterly profit targets.

When they spoofed a signal to several worker drones repairing a hull breach so that they would leave, giving the ship clear access to a flimsily patched hole in Asticassia, that was also to bolster investor returns.

After cutting through the rough patch job the ship expelled its contents of armed mercenaries in ash-gray normal suits onto school grounds, all in the name of maximizing earning.

They emerged into Asticassia through a crack in the sky like something eldritch and otherworldly, black and skittering on powered exoskeletal legs that they wore on a harness.

They found hidden purchases in one of the vaulting support pillars that held up the sky. Tucked out of view, with the whole of the academy sprawling below, they activated their scopes, readied their rifles, and they prepared.

And all the while, Asticassia watched.

“Sooooo?” Lilique said, her voice on speaker.

Secelia did not reply immediately, staring at her monitor as she sat in the dark of her unlit shelter.

On her screen was a checkered board game grid with black pieces occupying the center and white pieces arrayed on all four edges of the board. In the corner was a small window where Lilique waited with an expression of great expectation on her face.

Tafl was a game that was encouraged for students in the management strategy department. An ancient game that had long fell out of practice, it found traction in Benerit’s former soldiers for its asymmetrical layout with roles for a defender in the center and an attacker coming in from the edges. Also appealing was that its original rules were lost to time. While recreations and interpretations had been cobbled together by historians, no one authoritative rulebook existed.

So opponents were to negotiate the terms of the game between themselves. It made Tafle a fusion between tactics and persuasion. In that regard no two Tafl games were alike and while there was no formal grade attached to it. Being accomplished at the game was often taken as an informal indication of one’s success in the program and it had become a common form of recreation among management strategy students.

A good Tafl player could appear to cede ground on rules only to use those concession to give themselves an advantage on the board and Lilique was one of the top players in her year. She had an open and sunny disposition that her Spacian counterparts often felt they could take advantage of. That overconfidence would often lead them to weaken their own position during negotiations. They would not recognize these vulnerabilities until it was time to play the game, at which point Lilique would attack them mercilessly. If she took the defensive role and the rules favored offense, her opponent expecting Lilique to crumble at first charge, she would seize the initiative and charge first. If they they switched roles and Lilique gave the impression of ceding her advantage as the offense in favor of defense, then she’d spread her pieces wide, using the defense-biased rules to cover every edge and corner of the board and leaving her opponent with few avenues of escape that she couldn’t collapse her forces onto.

And all the while she would smile and chatter, good-natured and friendly without a hint of poor sportsmanship or ill feelings. It was a humbling experience for students not accustomed to feeling humble.

But Secelia was not some gormless first-year who was encountering an Earthian for the first time outside of a caricature on a low-brow variety show. She was pretty damn good in her own class and had a full year on Lilique. She had not taken the obvious bait as they decided on the rules and they came up with something that was broadly balanced and left neither with a distinct advantage. To work so hard only to gain no edge was considered to be a difficult achievement, and if it was not the goal of either player it was something to be noted nevertheless.

“I think you’ve left me an opening,” Secelia said after some thought, moving a black defender piece to capture one of Lilique’s white attack pieces, moving her forward onto one edge of the board.

Lilique clicked her tongue. “That’s not what I meant,” she said as she made her move. “How do you feel about Chuchu going to Mars with you?”

“I would have preferred Martin,” Secelia said. “He knows his place.”

“But is that what you need? It wouldn’t be very convincing if he’s, you know, acting more like a servant than a partner.”

They traded moves as they spoke. Rather than exploiting gaps in the rules, this was becoming a game more about positioning which suited Secelia’s playstyle. Her preferred strategy was that while her opponent was busy playing the game, she would stake out and secure advantageous ground. Not one that brought her victory, but one that would fend her opponent off from making any game critical moves. Then she’d wait them out until they made a mistake and only then would she descend on them. She had a reputation for being a frustrating opponent but in a game that put both players in an unsettled, asymmetrical position she always felt more confident getting into a position of power before she started playing in earnest.

“And Puffbrain —” Secelia caught a near-imperceptible movement in the tiny picture-in-picture of Lilique and wondered if there’s a flicker of disapproval in her pixelated eyes. “— has no idea what she’s getting into.”

“But Martin does?”

“Martin follows my orders, he doesn’t need to have any ideas at all. This isn’t like going to school on a Front. This is an entire world with its own customs. If I’m going to bring someone into that situation it’s best if I can expect them to be completely obedient.”

“It’s always nice to have total control of a situation,” Lilique said. “But we can’t count on that. Sometimes you have to leap before you look.”

“Suckers who leave their pieces vulnerable shouldn’t be saying that,” Secelia said as she continued chipping away at the northern line.

“You haven’t won yet,” Lilique said with a confidence that gave Secelia cause to re-examine the board, glaring at the screen. “But you know, there are other considerations to make beyond how much of a doormat someone can be for you.”

“Poor little Martin,” Secelia said. “To hear his junior talk about him this way.”

Lilique puffed out her cheeks. “We both know that’s what you meant!”

“Oh? You beg me for one game and suddenly you know me.”

“I wouldn’t call a single message ‘begging’,” Lilique said. “But I do enjoy this! I bet Miorine is a great player.”

“Mm.” Secelia shook her head, her eyes still fixed to the board. “She never played.”

“Never?”

“Not that I saw. I think she hated it because her dear old daddy liked it. She’d always go off gardening.”

“Oh.”

Secelia made her move. “I’ve never needed anything else.”

“Hm?”

“Your ‘doormats,’” Secelia sat up straight, her legs crossed on her seat. “I give orders, people follow them, and because they’re damn good orders everything turns out as it should.”

Despite all the changes in Burion and the power that her family gave up, Secelia had never really known much want of any kind. The investor’s board seemed to feel that as long as they met the family’s less outlandish of lavish demands, they were satisfied with keeping them on for their social novelty. There was a niche in being a subject of tabloid gawkery and the Burion family filled it well with their castle and neon cities under habitat dorms. And so Secelia had her servants and yes-men. She was even beginning to contribute to business decisions before she left for Asticassia, deciding on what markets Burion should move into next and which companies to acquire. She would catch whispers on the Drag, that she was the ‘one good Burion.’ Which always tickled her because she no longer went by the name. By her mother’s request, who was starting to find any association with her father’s antics and her grandfather’s extravagances a little embarrassing.

Secelia hadn’t cared. She could call herself the next coming of the Dawn of Fold, but she knew she was Burion through and through. And everyone who mattered knew it too, back on Mars. She was beginning to think the trustees were becoming wary of her and quite relieved when she left for Asticassia. Possibly they hoped for a mishap where a Demi Trainer fell on her, which would be very ironic. But she spent her whole life moving through the world like a shark through water, the opinions of a few timid shareholders were the last thing she would ever consider.

“Just gofers, huh? What about Rouji?”

“What about him?”

Lilique tilted her head, her plaited hair shifting. “You must have friends. It’d be lonely otherwise.”

She had contacts. Connections. Well…

“Tober and I were close,” she said. This wasn’t something she’d share normally, but Lilique was good at creating the kind of private atmosphere that would bid someone to share more than they intend. It was intimate. No wonder she was popular. “Once.”

She heard a sharp intake of breath as Lilique looked delighted. “Tell me more!”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Secelia said. “Nothing lasts forever.”

Lilique is fine, better company than most people Secelia’s associated with. But they come from radically different backgrounds and she couldn’t be expected to know what it’s like as a member of one of the top corporations.

“If you’re going to manage a company in Spacian society,” Secelia said. “You’d better seriously consider finding that part of you that worries about things like loneliness and killing it. It makes you a target.”

“Hm. Don’t like that!” Lilique pouted into her camera. “How can you lead a more humane company if you don’t even let yourself be human?”

“Not the most compelling argument.”

“Well, I’ll let Chuchu argue my case for me. You might appreciate spending some time with someone who shows a little more initiative.”

“Does she play?”

“Do you have… bloodier video games?”

“I’m sure I have something on the yacht.”

“Yacht?”

“The Helium,” Secelia said. “It’s what I do all my traveling on. We’ll take it to Mars. It’s a long trip, but we should keep from being bored if she finds herself unable to make that case.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about then,” Lilique said. “She’s on her way right now. She said she had something to talk about.”

“What, now?” Secelia looked down at herself. She was out of uniform and half stripped out of her jumpsuit in favor of a loose top. It was these shelters. They were all well and good but they lacked air circulation. You’d think somebody would clue the manufacturer in on that. “For real? Why now? Why wouldn’t she call ahead?” Secelia ran a hand through her hair.

Lilique said something, but it was interrupted by a burst of static. Her image jumped, then artifacts jumbled her features before she snapped back into focus. Secelia pursed her lips. Was communications still an issue? She’d have to complain, Miorine had officially run out of slack.

“I’ve got to… I’ll… take a shower,” Secelia said. “We’ve got hot water working, you know.”

“What? It’s been — since I’ve had a hot shower!” Lilique’s sentence was abbreviated by another cut of static.

Secelia knit her brow as she tried to parse the sentence. “Well. Come by and I’ll offer you an exclusive discount, I… hello?”

Lilique’s feed had gone dark, the last frame of her face frozen with a black box, SIGNAL LOST overlaid in stark white.

Scowling at her monitor did no good, but Secelia did do it for a few second. “If you can still hear me I’m counting this as your forfeit and my win,” she said. She frowned, suddenly unsettled. Her hand went to her digital notebook, set down next to her computer and she took it as she stood.

Secelia grabbed her uniform and opened the door of her shelter.

A dense white fog filled her view, coiling vapors seeping past the threshold. Secelia puzzled at the stuff, holding her hands up and watching it sift between her fingers in a veil of satiny haze. She felt a strange heat in it, like steam.

Something stirred, a wind that formed whorls in the mist. Then a dark shape materialized in the thicket and rushed the shelter. Secelia stepped back.

Chuchu emerged from the fog and pushed her to the floor.

“Pom—” Secelia hit the floor, the air pushed from her lungs. Then Chuchu landed on top of her.

Chuchu lifted her head up off Secelia and spoke in a hissing whisper. “Shut up! We are under attack!”

Asticassia was watching.

The weather was controlled by a central computer that kept it at a pleasant springtime temperature at all times. There were no seasons, no winter chill, summer heat or autumn bluster. There had been attempts at it and if one were to dig enough into the files they would find programs for the projected sky. Simulated weather, gray clouds, cherry blossom blooms. But the logistics of that proved delicate and for simplicity’s sake the school was kept at a nominally pleasant day at all times. The closest it came to gesturing towards a natural climate was to drop the temperature a few degrees during the night hours. So there was no weather to speak of in Asticassia. Even the kind of vapor condensation that comes naturally to a large closed environment with water in it was managed away.

So when engineers were alerted to a dense fog rolling out of the water pipes that attached to the dry lake next to Burion House, it was a bit of a head scratcher. It raised eyebrows when the cause was found to be thermal transfer into a water reservoir from the runaway overheating of a nearby but unrelated heat exchange system. And it became more perplexing when the shutoffs refused to comply and all the bypass valves shutoff, funneling all that steam onto Burion grounds.

And blocking line of sight for the snipers nested in the sky columns overhead.

“Area of operation obscured,” reported one, cycling through their scopes as a thick white fog pooled onto the ground below, high enough and thick enough that the tops of the shelters were concealed.

“Switch to thermals.”

“That’s worse. It’s like a sauna.”

“What the hell is going on down there?”

“Compromised?”

Their comes went silent as they awaited input from the squad leader. Mercenary group deployments were a popular negotiation tactic and teams made their reputations with their commitment to seeing a job through. It was a poor look to call an assassination on account of weather.

“Negative. Likely a front malfunction. Proceed to infiltrate. Override shelter safeties, scramble communications, deploy establish perimeter control and do not go loud until you have identified target beyond doubt. Client purchased tidy.”

After a string of acknowledgments they went silent. Their exoskeletal harnesses, still clinging to the sky, deployed rappel lines and the squad descended rapidly. Doing so dramatically increased their risk of exposure.

But reputations were made through commitment.

They descended rapidly and were swallowed in the enveloping fog in the span of a single breath.

And Asticassia was watching.

Secelia clicked her tongue in annoyance.

Chuchu, still laying atop her, looked down at her incredulously.

“Did you just click your tongue at me — hey!”

Secelia put her hand against Chuchu’s face and pushed her away. “Who are they?” She walked to the computer, rapid steps betraying distress her expression concealed. She felt her heart pick up speed and a shortness in her breath. She prepared for this. Every executive family did. The drills were so old there were instructional videos that her mother had been raised on. Her hands shook.

Chuchu plunged both hands into her puffs and tugged at them. “I don’t know. I saw them while I was coming in. Wearing black and had guns and they were using ropes to come down here from the ceiling! And now there’s fog! I thought they threw down smoke grenades or something but it’s just… fog!”

“Okay well that’s weird but everything else sounds like mercenaries.” There was a trunk at the end of her cot, a standard issue thing that came with the shelter and it had a magnetic lock on it. All the locks in a shelter were magnetic. She wondered about that. Wondered about enough to instruct Rouji to disable hers, as well as the one on her shelter entrance. She didn’t like how it could potentially lock on her with no way to override it. It was why Chuchu was able to enter.

Secelia dug into the trunk until she felt smooth, rounded plastic. She reached in with both hands and pulled out a Haro.

Chuchu immediately groaned.

Secelia ignored this, waking the Haro. Its little ears flapped as she tapped commands into it. Then it chirped. “Ready,” it said.

“All Burion students,” Secelia said calmly. Chuchu perked up as she heard Secelia’s words echo in the thick fog beyond the shelter. “Locked down is in effect. This is not a drill. Shelter in place until either I or Front Management give the all-clear. Message is set to repeat.” She punched another command into the Haro and set it down very deliberately, its eyes facing to the entrance.

“What is the deal with Rouji and his Haros?” Chuchu murmured.

“Don’t get him started,” Secelia said. “This one’s rigged with point-to-point comms that can’t be jammed but they’ll be able to trace it. Come on, we’re leaving.”

“It’s probably crawling with the bastards out there! Fog or not they’ll catch us!”

“Obviously.” Secelia walked behind the Haro and pushed aside the trunk. She noted, with some satisfaction, that Chuchu saw her objective immediately.

“You are kidding me,” she said as Secelia found the catch for the hidden hatch and flipped it open.

“I had it excavated myself,” Secelia said with satisfaction.

“You mean you made someone else do it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Come on.”

“Seriously?”

“Why are you even questioning this?” Secelia said. She swung her legs into the dark. “If you wanna fistfight armed goons then nice knowing you, I guess.”

“I don’t… fine!”

Secelia waited in the unlit passageway below her shelter as Chuchu clambered down, her hair trailing behind her as she landed. With the two of them below, Secelia tugged the hatch closed with one hand and grabbed Chuchu’s hand with the other.

“Come on.”

“Why are you so sure they’re even after you?” Chuchu said.

“I’m the only one in the immediate area who’s worth hiring mercenaries for. Besides, Tober warned me.”

“She — oh. Right. The hard option.”

“I’ll have to thank her.”

“Oh,” Chuchu said, “so you used the time since then to prepare. You made sure to inform Front Management and the harbormaster and every other security concern on Front 73. And Miorine. You weren’t just sitting in the dark in your underwear playing nerd games with Lilique and dreaming up elaborate scenarios about going back to Mars to crash a debutante ball.”

“I had Rouji make a special Haro, okay?”

“You really only have one trick, don’t you? Any plans after that?”

Secelia scowled. Usually when you showed someone your secret tunnel escape route they’re a lot more appreciative.

“Are there no lights?” Chuchu said after a while more of walking. “Aren’t maintenance corridors supposed to have lights?”

“This isn’t a maintenance corridor, I told you I had it excavated.”

“Since fucking when! This thing just keeps going!”

“There’s a lot of construction equipment out there right now and not a lot of oversight,” Secelia said. “It’s a perfect storm for someone who has enough money to bribe people to do whatever she wants.”

Chuchu muttered flabbergasted epithets. “And you didn’t bother with lights.”

“I know where this passage goes, I use it a lot.”

“For what?”

“Spying,” Secelia said, matter-of-fact.

Chuchu didn’t say anything after that, allowing Secelia to lead her blindly down the passage. They padded past unseen intersections. There were only a few, there being limits to how much of Miorine’s reconstruction efforts Secelia could co-opt. So she made her listening outposts where they had the most impact. Underneath the temporary cafeteria, near the showers. Well, the showers weren’t there at the time but she did make sure that when it was time to install them they were exactly where she wanted them. She was allowed. Burion was hers.

But none of those were her objective, instead they barreled on.

“You are so weird I literally can’t think of any other way to describe you,” said Chuchu, her voice wavering somewhere between awe and disbelief.

Secelia felt herself grin. “I’m axiomatically weird? Aw. Puffbrain. Figures you’d appreciate me.”

“Wish you wouldn’t pretend to be so calm about this.”

“When you get to be as important as me, corporate assassinations is a part of life. Nothing I wasn’t trained for.”

“Bullshit,” Chuchu said. “Your hand is sweaty.”

Secelia pushed her hand away.

“Fine,” she said. “Grope around in the dark on your own.”

“Just saying. You’re a terrible liar. Seriously where are we going?”

“The old Burion House,” Secelia said.

“Why?”

“I had this tunnel made in two weeks,” Secelia said. “But I’ve lived in Burion House for two years. Imagine what I’ve done to it in that time. I’ve got panic rooms and escape tunnels. Secret passages and reinforced bulkheads with beam fields and… if even a fraction of it survived the attack then we can be off the Front before they even know we’re gone.”

They traveled in silence then, Chuchu’s footsteps the only indication that she was close behind Secelia. On first impression, people liked to get close to Secelia. She was rich, she had connections, she was hot as hell. She knew all these things about herself. But she also knew that people who learned too much about her tended to reassess their opinions pretty quick. They tended to get… alarmed.

Sharing with Chuchu now, here in the dark, felt different. She had no specific word for it. Just. Different.

“Why are you like this?” Chuchu said, and full credit to her for at least asking. Most everyone just made their assumptions.

“It reminds me of home,” Secelia said. “Old Man — my grandfather built it when he founded Burion Industries. He liked stuff like this.”

“What, so he was like some kind of whimsical, eccentric rich guy?”

“I still remember a story he told.” Secelia mused in the dark, her eyes catching some faraway light. “In his first days on Mars he didn’t have anything to his name other than his spaceship, his mining equipment, several hundred thousand in seed money and an investment partner back on Luna.”

“Oh, is that all,” Chuchu said dryly.

Secelia ignored this. “He found an old Permet mine. Well, he didn’t find it. People had been using it as a shelter long after it ran dry. That was common. There weren’t many dome settlements at the time and mines offered great protection from solar radiation and sandstorms. He set up shop in the back of the mine and lived there. He was old even then. He was like, one of those permanently old people who looked like they were sun-weathered and wrinkled even when they were young adults. So he even then he had a reputation for being crotchety and anti-social. While everyone else used the mine to live, he decided to mine. He used small equipment, so as not to get too many complaints and get chucked out. But he mined and mined and mined and then one day he found a permet vein. When that happened, he parked all his mining equipment bore a great big hole from the surface into the back of the mine. It permanently altered the air flow and allowed the storms into the residential areas. He flushed everyone out of the mine and forced them out into the surface. Some of them died.”

“He… told you this?” Chuchu said, as horrified as one probably should be at the story. But Secelia felt the warmth of reminiscence.

“He loved that story,” she said. “Do you know why? He dislocated a finger when he had a punch-out with one of the people he was pushing out onto the surface. He liked to show it to people at parties and tell them the story. He could make his pinkie bend at an angle that made the wimpy types nearly throw up on their tuxedo suits. My grandfather was not whimsical or eccentric. He was a vicious sociopath who strip-mined people’s homes and left them to die if it meant he could strike it rich.”

More silence. In it, Secelia wondered if she was saying all this to see how far Chuchu would bend for her. How much of what lay underneath the superficial prettiness could she reveal before Chuchu decided Secelia Dote was best kept at arms length. Nobody else had lasted this long.

“But he loved me,” she said. “Had a real soft spot for me. Called me the one thing his son didn’t screw up. And even after learning all the things he did, I miss him. Some of those things he did for my sake.”

Chuchu continued saying nothing and at this point it was even getting to Secelia. She felt an urge to turn and look. But what would be there to see? The thought kept her fixed on the objective in front of her.

“We’re here,” Secelia said after a short time. She stopped and felt for a hatch overhead. “We don’t know how things are in the old building so we should be careful, okay? The nearest escape route from here is in lobby. Ready?”

“Yeah,” Chuchu said shortly.

In the middle of the floor of Secelia’s shelter, the Haro rested. Another Rouji special, little of its stock hardware or software remained. While most mechanics sought certification for Mobile Suit or spaceship maintenance, Rouji was a relentless tinkerer who didn’t much care what he worked on, so long as it was available to him. And Haros were readily available across Ad Stella. Easy to mod with cheap after-market parts, he had set to work at a young age and never really stopped. It was surprising, the amount you could learn just by pushing the envelope on how much tech you could jam into a small plastic sphere. Surprising also was how much restricted tech you could get your hands on if you kept yourself to hobbyist electronics and assembled them yourself in a workshop that doubled as your bedroom.

Or. At least. It had a bed. In a corner.

Rouji slept at his workbench most of the time anyway, it’s fine.

“Breaching.”

The clipped, electronically filtered voice of a mercenary cut the air as one stepped inside, rifle sweeping across the entire space as he cleared it.

Secelia had activated several commands before leaving the Haro there. To record all sights and sounds, though she didn’t have much hope for it. Most mercenary groups worth hiring used signal scramblers to conceal their identifying marks while on a mission. A beacon, not much hope for that one either as signals were already being jammed.

As the mercenary took another step inside, the Haro’s eyes lit up and whine could be heard as internal components began to work and overheat. The mercenary swiveled his gun, training it on the Haro.

And then the whine subsided. The Haro, which had been trembling in place, rolled to one side and went silent.

In the new silence, fog curled around the mercenary’s legs as he remained alert. He kicked the Haro aside and noted the closed hatch behind it.

“Command,” the mercenary intoned, speaking into his communicator.

No response.

“Command?”

He lowered his gun and tapped the side of his headgear

“Come in. Anyone?”

He struck the side of his headgear with the palm of his hand.

“Command, come in. Command?”

Then he seized up and dropped his weapon as a rapid fire and calamitously loud drum beat blared directly into his ears, accompanied by a looping synthesized melody.

When the mute command did not respond, he started stripping off his gear as the volume started rapidly climbing. He fell to his knees, his rifle clattering on the floor.

The Haro looked on, the mercenary’s struggles reflected in dispassionate black eyes.

Chuchu had pushed Secelia aside and emerged into the ruins of Burion House first. As she reached down to take Secelia’s wrist, she heard a chime. With her free hand, Secelia held up her notebook, which was flashing an alert.

“What does that mean?”

“It means someone found my trapdoor,” Secelia said, grunting softly as Chuchu hauled her up. “And… assuming Rouji’s smarter than these clowns, it also means that a virus that contains my entire playlist has been injected into their comm system and is playing at a volume that will cause permanent physical damage.”

“Well, that’ll piss ‘em off.”

“It cuts off their communications too. There’s a good chance they posted at least one person here and we don’t want them raising alarms.”

“Okay…” Chuchu looked around. They were in a supply closet of some type, its shelves overturned and contents spilled to the ground. The door leading out was askance on its rails. “Let’s take advantage of that while we can.”

Burion House was a lot nicer than Earth House. It must have been a real gem of a place, back when Asticassia was intact and it sat on the side of a lake in a green space, unlike Earth House with warehouses pressing on it from all sides. It must have looked real nice on the inside too. They emerged into a hall that was interspersed with polished feldspar columns, black shot through with reds and pinks. Now, most of them lay in shattered ruins.

Leading the way, Secelia motioned for Chuchu to stay low and they rounded a corner into an atrium that dominated the center of Burion House. Unlike the Mobile Suit berths that occupied most of Earth House, this was once a lavish place meant for actual human habitation, with a fountain in the center surrounded by benches and tables with seats. And each floor of the house opened up to the atrium with walkways for each floor overlooking the wide open space.

The effect was somewhat ruined with the remains of a Demi Garrison that must have fought against Norea and her Gundvolvas. It lay at the bottom of an impact crater that had shattered the atrium, its limbs sprawled and its frame shattered as it lay looking up at the hole it had punched through the ceiling during its descent. Its arms and legs had gouged out great chunks of the surrounding balcony as it fell, leaving a trails of destruction along the walls. Its head lay crumpled on the shattered, dry fountain. Snaking from its neck was a tangle of cables leading back to its torso.

Its weapon, a stubby beam rifle, lay propped up against the side of the atrium, its muzzle resting against the second floor

Its cockpit had been caved in Chuchu could see that whoever was piloting it had to be cut out by rescuers. She wondered if the pilot made it. She wondered how she’d feel about the answer.

Light streamed down from overhead and particles in the air caught it as it caught on the hard edges of the dark Demi Garrison.

“Secelia!” Chuchu hissed. She huddled close “We’re way too out in the open here!”

“I told you I have an escape route.”

“Where?”

“Underneath that thing’s head.” Secelia gestured at the broken fountain, its masonry shattered under the Demi.

Chuchu eyed the crumbled fountain. It was under several tons of metal and whatever infrastructure was underneath it had been obliterated. “Well so the fuck much for that.”

“Maybe we can squeeze underneath?”

“You’re kidding m—”

Movement. Nothing she could immediately identify but… the simulated sun had streamed down through the shattered skylight and it reflected off the golden visor of the Garrison and for just a moment… it had flickered.

Every hair on the back of Chuchu’s neck pricked at her. And she threw herself atop Secelia again, sending them both down behind the cover of a toppled column.

The sound of their fall echoed off the high walls. Chuchu strained her ears for signs of movement. She heard her own heavy breathing, her pounding heart, Secelia beneath her.

And nothing else.

“Pom-pom Head,” Secelia said, letting her breath out in a long exhalation. The soft fluff of her hair got into Chuchu’s nose. She smelled like cinammon, the observation a maddening distraction. “If you keep this up, I’m going to start suspecting you’re just looking for excuses to get on top of me.”

“Shut up! There’s someone…”

They waited expectantly.

“There’s… I swear…” Chuchu poked her head up cautiously.

Nothing.

“You’re stressed, it’s natural,” Secelia said, and Chuchu heard something like… concern? Kindness? Pity? Maybe none of those. Maybe a mix. Whatever it was, Chuchu found the gentle tone disconcerting to hear.

Chuchu grunts and pushes herself away. “Just… stay here!” She wanted to do something decisive, something that advertised she still had it together and wasn’t being a panicky mess. She’d been in a gunfight before. Well. She ducked out of cover during a gunfight before.

“Why?”

“You’re the target, idiot!” Maybe these guys liked to be tidy. Avoid unnecessary kills. That was a thing, right? Yeah. In dramas. Chuchu tried to ignore the realization she was banking her survival on a cliche. She jogged across the atrium and nobody sniped her from overhead. So maybe she was right. Or no one was there and she was being paranoid.

The head of the Demi Garrison had already been severed from the rest of its body. It must have descended like a broken toy, the the two parts only connected by trailing cables as it came down like a meteor and demolished the fountain below it. An entire fountain! And a skylight. And all the floors were open to this cavernous, sun-drenched space of dark columns and bright light. It reminded Chuchu of an old mall, but it must have been a lively place just a few short months ago. She could almost imagine it. The way laughter and conversation would carry off the walls, the soft burble of water like a chorus to the murmurs. Chuchu stole a glance up at the levels that vaulted overhead. And yeah, there was a penthouse up there, decorated extravagantly and definitely Dote’s.

She didn’t know how she felt about the story Secelia just told her. Well, that wasn’t true. Holy shit. That’s how she felt. Holy shit. It was just another reminder that she shouldn’t get too involved with Spacians. This Spacian in particular.

But that wasn’t fair, was it? Miorine’s dad did awful things. He was the awful thing. And Suletta’s mom… again, holy shit. It wasn’t fair to judge Secelia for her grandfather’s evil. But she didn’t hate her grandfather the way Miorine hated her dad. But did that make her… dammit. She wished —

She clamped down on that thought hard. Sometimes she could go an entire day without wishing that Nika were here.

There was a gap underneath the fountain, exposing a dark pit and a breeze that was out of place pouring from it. Maybe they could squeeze in after all. There was space enough.

She considered waving Secelia over, but there wasn’t much point if the t unnel collapsed further up.

She sat down, swung her legs into the gap, reached back and pressed her hair down into something that could fit in, took a breath, then jumped. Under the Demi Garrison’s head, the passage was shadowed in near total dark.

Which made the flashbang that exploded in front of her all the more effective.

The concussive force of it burst against her ears and the flash of white left dazzling spots and blooms of afterimage fireworks in swimmy green and reds dancing in her eyes.

A trap! I’m in danger! They’ll come for me!

Her senses were shot. Hearing gone, sight gone. Her nose filled with the scent of powder burn. She was off balance and near to toppling but the space was close-in and her flailing arms caught the wall on one side.

And something else on the other. Fabric, padded. She didn’t wait, scrabbling for any hold she could find on it, for any way she could bear her weight down on it. She grabbed a loop of fabric and hefted herself forward, her other arm raised.

She caught what must have been an elbow to the side of her head just as she felt her fist connect with something. A glancing blow. But into a neck. She spread her fingers and grabbed for a face. She felt warm, clammy skin. Something rough. Maybe stubble.

Her skull was ringing, from the flashbang, from the hit. There was a lot going on. She felt blood tickle her nose.

She felt the air in front of her stir, fluttering her eyelashes and bangs. A fist? Did he miss? Weird.

Chuchu had been in fights, some fair, others not. Life on Earth was a pressure cooker and sometimes people exploded. Sometimes it was her. The Guys had shown her how to fight and mostly it was about being the last one standing and doing whatever it takes to get there. Her education hadn’t elevated much higher than bar brawling. Stuff like idiots squaring up and whaling on each other until one fell, venting machismo. Or the kind of dark rage where wide-eyed desperate people used anything, broken bottles, chair legs, their own nails and teeth, and did their level best to spill blood.

Sometimes you just needed to let someone swing their fists, stay out of the way of their frustrations. There was a lot to be frustrated at. Sometimes a person who was fighting mad wasn’t really mad at you specifically. They were mad at the bastards who ran their lives, who sat in the trucks with their guns.

Her searching fingers found a purchase in an eye and she dug in. She heard a scream and he hauled her up and slammed her against the wall. She a gasping cough was forced out of her as air evacuated from her lungs and pain bloomed on the back of her skull. Her head was already ringing. She was sure it couldn’t ring any further without shaking apart.

It wasn’t a pretty kind of fighting, and it never got her Guys very far when the private security assholes pointed their guns at the workers.

She was pinned against the wall now but that only gave her a better position. Why hadn’t he shot her yet? She reached over with both hands now and reached down, looping them under his arm and locking it against his head. She squeezed but he had some kind of helmet on and it was preventing her from putting him in a hold. She needed… she needed…

We only really scared them the one time. When they thought we got into the mining equipment. Power loaders and explosive can get their attention pretty quick. It spooked private security hard. They were used to dealing with hurled rocks with deadly force and now the shoe was on the other foot. Every dark imagining they could gin up in their heads preyed on them because the worst stuff they could imagine us doing to them was stuff they had already done to us and the thought that this state of affairs could be changed, could be fluid, enraged them. Filled them with a fury brought on by fear of this specter that only ever existed in their own minds. But it didn’t even matter if it was in their heads or not, it was justification enough to open fire.

He pushed her down, where wall met floor and now she was the one who couldn’t breathe. The swimmy fireworks in her vision got worse and they exploded in time with her beating heart, which pulsed painfully in her head like it could burst up through her brain. She released the futile hold and felt something else. A rifle. It was still slung around his neck.

Later, when the bodies were spilt out on the side of the path leading to the mine they would learn that nobody had taken any goddamn mining equipment. The Spacians who owned the mine at the time had sold it to another Spacian company and cleaned it out before transferring ownership. Which was a bit of poor etiquette and a breach of contract that they figured they could keep for themselves by hiding a transfer order. Security had been told about this. Well. The previous security firm had been told. Then their contract expired and they didn’t bother explaining to the new one that picked it up. So they inherited an inventory list for mining equipment that was no longer there and who did they blame it on? They shot nearly a hundred people before anyone bothered to do any actual investigation.

The gun clattered loose against her shoulder. She grabbed at it, her hand wrapping around the narrow muzzle and she pushed it up and the stock found his chin, snapping his neck up with a grunt. She took in a great gulp of air the moment he fell aside and as he feel she pulled herself up by the rifle she clung to.

And that wasn’t even the end of it. When they had realized the truth they hid it from their new clients. It tied everything up all nice anyway: Earthians who didn’t know their place got put into the dirt. The missing equipment was their fault, not the fault of the previous owners. Private security’s fuck-up became them bravely quelling a riot. Hero ceremonies were held. Photo ops were had. So what if a bunch of dead Earthians got the blame? There’s always more of them and they’re always looking for work.

The man flailed and Chuchu kicked him. He slipped out of the gun’s strap and she was holding it by the muzzle. She was in no condition to use it properly but this’ll do. She brought it down, still too blind to aim it properly but she swung hard on the dark shape underneath her. The butt of the gun landed on soft meat and she heard the grunt of an impact. So she raised the gun and swung again.

They kept their contract and they knew we couldn’t do anything about it. Ever since then there was something feral in the way that particular security company did its business. Like, they were all bastards. Every group. And they all knew they could get away with shit that wasn’t right. That’s the reason a good chunk of them joined. If it was all in the name of law enforcement they could get away with murder. In theory. But these guys actually did it. They had put theory into practice and found themselves in new territory. ‘Getting away with murder’ had stopped being words and started being their world. They knew it and we knew it and you could see it in their expression. Their smile, wolfish. And they kept their finger on the trigger of their weapons as if, now breathing in that rarified air that sadists could only dream of they had to be prepared to kill again for it because the moment they started doubting the rightness of their place over Chuchu and her Guys and their town, that would be the moment that they’d fall. And they’d fall all the harder for it. They’d burn on re-entry. So they kept the boot at our throats.

She raised the gun again swung it down again. This time she sent him reeling to the ground and before he could raise his hand up in defense she raised the gun in another arc. And swung. She alternated, overhead and then from the side, building momentum as she felt a heat rise up in her chest. Her heart was like an incessant cymbal crash reverberating through skeleton, from her rips up to her teeth and the small bones of her ears. Sweat — blood? — matted her hair and dripped in the back of her nasal cavity. Her whole body ached like a bruise. Itched like a scab. She had been in fights before and she felt in control, even when she was losing. She knew to hold her anger in check during a fight. Most times. But even as her senses returned she felt herself losing control.

He looks a lot like them, doesn’t he? It’s something in the set of their jaw, the lines of their eyes. These are people who found control at the end of a gun and now you get to show him the end of his gun ha ha ha. His tactical gear is the same and I’m pretty sure that’s the exact same brand of shithead sunglasses that was so popular with private security back home. How many times have you wished you could smash those fucking things off their faces?

She swung down and they shattered into shards of dark plastic.

Well, that’s one item you can cross off the ol’ bucket list. But why stop there? How many bodies do you think this guy has stacked up in his wake? How many more if you let him get back up again? He was the bastard on the truck, his gun resting on his lap while he watched a bunch of kids kick the shit out of you so they could fill the factory quota. He was the bastard who fired into the crowd. Every shitty Spacian and every Earthian who took their money in exchange for a little power and authority over their fellow. Every —

Chuchu was swinging wildly now and her grip on the gun wasn’t as firm as it could be so when she swung up for the next swing down and the gun didn’t come down, it slipped out of her hands and she lurched forward with nothing but empty air.

“—chu! Chuchu!”

Someone pushed her. Like this was some schoolyard bully shit. From behind with one hand. She was off balance enough that it nearly toppled her over. She braced herself against the wall, if only to keep from falling.

On top of the mess she had made of the mercenary below.

Lights still danced in Chuchu’s vision but she was definitely seeing more than she bargained for.

He was… breathing.

Being doubled over had a way of clearing her head and Chuchu looked up in time to watch Secelia primly toss aside the rifle. She had seized it from Chuchu by its blood-soaked butt and she looked at her hand with distaste.

“Hey… say something, Puffbrain.”

Chuchu took in a deep breath and felt an ache. Even as her ears rang, she could sense the strain in Secelia’s voice. Working too hard to play all this off, to belie the trembling tension in her voice. “I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Are you… okay?” Secelia asked the question like she was speaking an unfamiliar language. She was holding her hand out in a way that briefly put Chuchu in the mind that she wanted to shake hands, but on a moment’s reflection she decided Secelia was trying to keep the blood as far away from her as she could.

“I have no fucking idea,” Chuchu said. “Let’s just go.”

“This leads out of Asticassia,” Secelia said. “There’s a magnetic sled further down and it comes out to the hub where my ship is. So long as they can’t communicate with each other, we’ll make it.”

“Fine. Okay. All right.” And the waver in Secelia’s voice became something else. Resolve. Or at least the illusion of it, which would have to do for now.

Chuchu took a halting step and just before she could feel the frustration at her own slowness well up, Secelia grabbed her hand with her bloody one and looped her arm around her shoulders, keeping her standing.

Secelia was… surprisingly strong. She near carried Chuchu.

“Let’s not slow ourselves down, alright?” she said briskly.

“Yeah.”

The only problem was her blood slicked hand. It made her grip weak. So Chuchu held her hand tight and now the blood mingled between their fingers.

They continued that way for a while. Adrenaline was still flush in Chuchu’s veins and she couldn’t keep her giddy energy to herself.

“Lilique said you came over here because you had something to tell me,” Secelia said unprompted.

“Wha —” Chuchu let her head lull to the side. Her neck ached. “You’re asking now?”

“Didn’t have much opportunity before.”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“Okay.”

Chuchu heard her own breathing, rapid, like her body was still catching up with the demand put upon it. Secelia made no further comment, even as she was slightly doubled-over to keep Chuchu upright.

Eventually, when she felt more in control of her lungs, Chuchu felt a desperate need to fill the silence.

“He was so stupid.”

“What?” Secelia said.

“He could have shot me as soon as I jumped under the fountain. I guess he was expecting somebody better armored than a dumbass student. Wasted a flashbang on me and I still won."

"Oh. That wasn't his. It was mine."

Chuchu felt her legs gives out. "What?"

"Don’t do that.” Secelia kicked at her legs until Chuchu got them back under herself. “It was a booby trap. It's meant to catch people who don't have Burion executive clearance. Sorry, I completely forgot about that. Well, I mean, I didn’t think you were going to just jump right in so really it’s your fault. It sent my notebook an alarm. I'm impressed they still work."

Now it was Chuchu’s jaw that hung slack. That meant he had been just as surprised as she had been. She would have died if it weren’t for Secelia’s… being Secelia.

Well. She wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for Secelia. But also...

"Why didn't he set it off?"

Secelia said nothing but Chuchu could practicially hear the wheels turn. Her own started turning too. What came out made her frown.

"So it's only for people who have Burion executive access, huh?" she said.

Secelia did not reply.

"I think we know who these guys work for now."

“What, did your concussion affect your memory? I already knew that. Let’s keep walking.”

“Touchy,” Chuchu said. And they kept walking.

“Are you sure taking the Helium is the best course of action?” Miorine said, addressing her notebook.

“Rouji’s checked it for signs of sabotage,” Secelia said. “It’s clear to fly.”

“Still… you might be safer on Asticassia.”

“I think we’ve just demonstrated we are not.”

“Front Management has impounded the unregistered ship,” Miorine said. “And they’re smoking out the remaining mercenaries. We’ll have them secure before nightfall.”

“And these attacks will keep happening until I’ve asserted control of Burion and its resources,” Secelia said. “We need to get to Mars.”

Miorine drummed her fingers on her desk.

“How’s Chuchu?”

“I’m fine!” Chuchu called out from somewhere offscreen.

“Slight burns, bruises, probably a concussion, some bleeding.”

“It’s fine! I’m fine!”

“I hope you don’t plan to take her to a social function like that,” Miorine said mildly.

“She lost some hearing so there’s less chance of her overhearing something that’ll make her pick a fight. This might be an improvement.”

“You said that would be temporary!”

“Yeah!” Secelia called out. “See? It’s getting better already!”

“It’s a long way to Mars. I don’t like this,” Miorine said.

“We’ve got the Demi Barding packed away in the hold. We’ll be safe. And when we come back Burion will be firmly under my control.”

“If anyone messes with us I’ll kick their asses!” Chuchu said.

“Just… come back alive,” Miorine said. “When you return, it is unlikely I will be on Asticassia. I have… an obligation elsewhere.”

“Whoa, wait.” The perspective of Secelia’s camera shook and Chuchu filled the screen. She looked beat the hell up, if Miorine was any judge. But there was no point belaboring that now. “You’re leaving Suletta?”

“She is in safe hands. Belmeria will be here. And Earth House.”

“Oi.” Chuchu glared into the camera lens with one eye, a bruise blooming in the corner. “You’re not taking on too much, are you?”

Miorine looked away. “It may be that I am, but I am in the process of enlisting help.”

“The path is clear, we are underway!” Secelia called out.

Chuchu, evidently gearing up to tear into Miorine, looked offscreen and clicked her tongue. “Alright, alright, dammit… we’ll keep in touch, okay? Don’t do anything stupid!”

The call disconnected and Miorine looked up from her notebook to Prospera.

“She seems a fine friend,” Prospera said, across from Miorine on the other side of the desk.

“She’s a mess,” Miorine said. “I should have…”

“You can’t be everywhere at once. And if she has the heir to Burion with her then she’s about as safe as she can be on Mars.”

“They’re not on Mars yet.” It occurred to Miorine that Prospera may have insight of her own concerning the Spacian corporations. She might not much care if they all live or die, but she did work in secret among them for over a decade. “What do you think of Burion’s current CEO?”

“Her father? He occupies a largely symbolic position. A concession made by the board of investors that allowed him to keep his dignity, if not his company. He’s an idiot who spends most of his days on social media where he makes broad proclamations about human history that are almost all inaccurate and tinged with modern biases. In the process he’s managed to be corrected by nearly every prominent actual historian. Those who are left are crackpots with ideas like humans are genetically engineered by ancient astronauts or swindlers looking to find the angle with which they can divorce him of it his money. I like to keep tabs on him for when I need a laugh.”

“Ridiculous. Would he put out a hit on his daughter?”

“Oh. No, he wouldn’t. That was almost certainly the work of the board.”

“Well, that means she worries them so I guess she’s on the right track at least.”

“It is time we be on our track as well,” said Prospera.

IT’LL BE GOOD TO GO BACK HOME, Ericht wrote.

“Time is an issue,” Prospera said. “The sooner the better.”

“You say that now.”

“I said it before, you didn’t want to leave. But you believe now.”

Miorine glared. At Prospera, at the wall beyond her, at her own hands clasped before her.

“It’s hard to explain the sudden fog bank otherwise,” Miorine said. And a handful of other phenomena she had experienced. But what this all boiled down to is that once again, she would have to trust Prospera.

It was a difficult thing, but then, she was about to put a great deal of trust in a lot of people who haven’t necessarily earned it. Well… Chuchu was being this flexible amid unreasonable demands. It would be poor form for Miorine to be obstinate now.

“Good, then we should —”

Miorine’s notebook chimed. Speak of the devil.

“A moment,” she said, holding one hand up as she swiped at her screen.

A professional-looking man in a uniform appeared. He nodded. “Madame President, the prisoner you requested an audience with is ready to receive you.”

“Very well.”

With another nod, he vanished.

“What are you doing?” Prospera said.

“Delegating. Just like you suggested.”

In his place, a woman appeared. Blue hair in a braided bun, her expression carefully and skillfully composed.

Sabina Fardin was not one to waste time with niceties but it would not hurt to remind her that her relatively lenient treatment in prison was due to Miorine’s intervention.

“You are doing well,” Miorine said, not as a question but as statement.

Sabina inclined her head. “Yes, Madame President.” Her voice was cool, as measured as the look she gave Miorine.

“And your friends.”

“They are all being cared for.”

“I am glad to hear that. I want to discuss the terms of your release.”

Sabina raised an eyebrow. “Is that what your communique was about.”

“It was. Do you understand?”

Sabina said nothing. Instead she watched Miorine, who wondered what she saw. Did she see Miorine’s exhaustion? Her desperation? Her determination? Did she note the power she wielded and the casual use of it? Considering the current political climate, the release of Shaddiq’s co-conspirators was no mean feat, and she must be aware of that.

“You wish for an escort to an orbital colony at Mercury. You wish for that escort to consist of myself and my team. You promise release and — if we are found guilty — a full pardon upon fulfillment of our obligations.”

“Yes.”

Miorine waited expectantly. When Sabina did not immediately replied, she vowed to be as cool as the woman on the other side of the screen. She dared a quick look up at Prospera, who was smiling and she didn’t much like that.

And finally she lost her patience.

“Well?” she said.

“Absolutely not,” said Sabina.

Miorine blinked and sat at a loss for words, dumbfounded. Then she heard a strange noise that she had not heard before. A lilting tenor, discordant melody. Like a windchime floating in zero gravity. She looked up.

And found it. The source of the noise she had never heard before. It was Prospera Mercury, the mother of her groom, doubled over, laughing.

BIG OOF, Ericht wrote, mercifully out of the camera’s view.