Everything is in pce.

  Blip knows this gas pnt, past and present. In the search and rescue and cleanup efforts, she traveled every inch of the pce in its new destroyed form. She’s seen the rotten husk of the habitation building, its broken schoolhouse rooms and the ruined apartments. Her and her parents’ apartment was left untouched by the explosions, save a hole in the wall.

  That wasn’t fair to everyone else, so Blip trashed the room herself. Not her best moment. She still regrets throwing the st family picture out the hole, into the vacuum. She still feels her stomach churn when she thinks about it.

  Then, of course, there’s the maintenance building. Been there, done that. The admin building is a wreck, so much so that when Blip and Osprey are setting up for their defense, Osprey asks ‘what building’. They rig it with explosives, so soon enough, there won’t be anything left of the JKIM’s office here.

  There’s also the processing building; it’s a hermit crab’s abandoned armor shell, now. All the electronic and useful mechanical bits are long stripped out.

  Good riddance, Blip thinks.

  That’s it in terms of buildings, just hab, admin, processing, and maintenance. Everything else is clusters of pipes and electrical lines, running lights, and the greebles of a long dead industrial facility.

  “Are you sure about this?” Osprey says.

  They’re in their hiding spots. Osprey, perched on a floating piece of the admin building in orbit around the camp. She’s invisible, but Blip knows exactly where she is, and there’s comfort there.

  “Sure about what?” Blip asks. She’s taking cover behind the maintenance building, radar spoofing active. Once Carrion Squad is in visual range, they’ll see her, but if they can see her…

  If they can see Blip, Blip can see them. And she’ll tear their fucking throats out their necks.

  “I mean… the bombs. All this. We could just run.”

  “And they would chase us! For as long as it took,” Blip says, “It’s better this way.”

  “But we’re desecrating... I mean, you yourself called this pce a mass grave. Doesn’t that –”

  Blip cuts in, “Look. I’m the st daughter of this pce. If anyone gets a say in whether it’s okay to blow it up in the name of self-defense, I do. And I’ve heard of these carrion squad guys. Better blow the pce up then take them in a fair fight.”

  Osprey ughs.

  “There is no fair fight with these guys,” she says.

  “Exactly!”

  One of the worst parts about fighting isn’t the fight. Yes, the brutality and death is bad, but even worse than that is the wait right before it. It’s the lurch in the stomach, it’s the heat before the fever, it’s the horrible crack outside before the wind blows a tree over and it crushes the house. Blip fiddles around in the cockpit of the Dilemma, in hopes of staving off that feeling. There’s a loose lever to tighten, a tight one to lubricate, and RGB lights she strung up to change the colors on.

  Yeah, pink and blue and white will do nicely. Perfect cockpit light colors!

  But she can only make herself so busy. She’s already tinkered with Osprey(‘s frame, the Crown), she’s done a check-up on the Dilemma, she’s gotten a briefing on the five frames coming to kill Osprey and also her.

  “Hey, Osprey, I spy with my little eye…”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Osprey ughs, “if you do that, they’ll show up instantly.”

  “Okay, what do we do, then?”

  Osprey says, with the shape of a smile in her voice, “You ever listen to the pirate radio station the union has?”

  * * *

  They’re keeping Osprey and Blip waiting, and Osprey knows it.

  It’s a common security division tactic. Wait a few hours and let a target either lower their guard, or start jumping at shadows. If either Osprey or Blip try and make a move to escape, Carrion Squad will most certainly swoop in and vivisect them until the process becomes dissection.

  So, she and Blip are listening to the radio. It’s a Camille Saint-Saens piece, according to the DJ. It’s pretty nice. There’s someone going ham on the piano, with the orchestra going ham in support.

  She’s watching the campus, and the debris field. Nothing seems out of the ordinary yet: this is the surest sign something is wrong already. Osprey holds fast, keeps her eye through the scope camera and her finger on the trigger. Her frame and her flesh are married together as one being-machine, the nerves connecting to her wrist connecting to her finger muscles to the joystick to the frame’s finger connecting to the gun. She is the gun, the frame is her, the gun is the frame.

  In the Security Division, they consider that attachment to a frame a sort of disease. But for however sick a pilot who blurs the machine and metal is, as long as they are sick in a useful way, they have a pce. Osprey strived for being just useful enough to not throw away, but not useful enough to get any important jobs. Now, though? She’ll be sick. Watch her, just watch her be a sick little freak about her connection to the Crown.

  “Hey, I’ve got something on my instruments, Osprey,” Blip says, “it’s coming from south-southwest.”

  “How many?”

  “One.”

  Osprey says, “Then we wait.”

  She can see it on her instruments now, too. It’s moving pretty slow. Testing the waters? A distraction? Hard to say. Osprey is going to let this py out a bit more before she makes any judgments.

  The frame touches down, in the shadow of the ore processing building. It’s a heavily-armored military frame, all pentagons and rectangles and vaguely fascistic decals stuck on it. Osprey’s favorite is the bible verse that forbids crossdressing, written across the frame’s chest.

  But, most importantly, the frame, the Crion Caller, is carrying a heavy machine gun bigger than the apartment Osprey grew up in. It’s fed with a massive tube that runs from the gun to its huge backpack.

  (“Crion Caller, that’s their door-kicker,” Osprey had said, “Heavy armor, big gun, impossible to knock down without getting shot full of holes.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Blip replied.)

  Osprey watches the frame probe around the campus. There has to be a weakness of some kind, some connector or loose panel she can take advantage of.

  “Osprey, he’s coming this way,” Blip says, “are you taking the shot, or am I dealing with him?”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking.” She hisses it as a whisper, even though that will have no impact on whether the pilot can hear her or not.

  The Crion Caller is indeed approaching the maintenance building, gun brandished and ready. This pilot was definitely a soldier, and there are no prizes for guessing which war he was in and which side he fought on. Osprey looks forward to adding another tally mark to her long running list of dead fascists.

  Anyhow, she thinks she’s found a weak point on the Caller. The ammo tube has a loose connector to the backpack. Osprey’s hit smaller points than that from farther away.

  Lining up the shot is all in the shoulders. That’s where the motion starts, that’s how Osprey knows it will nd. It was true when she was shooting BBs at cans as a kid in the SCR, it’s true now, when her and the woman she’d like to have a date with and also fuck’s lives are on the line.

  Come on… come on…

  She fires.

  The ser flies straight and true...

  But the same instant it’s about to hit. hits, the Caller is ready for her. It swivels around, bearing the shot on its armor pting, and unloads a dozen rounds of ser machine gun fire in Osprey’s general vicinity. None of them hit, but she does feel the burn off a few of them.

  “Blip, a little help?”

  “It would be my pleasure!”

  Blip emerges from her hiding spot, hooks in hand, and fires herself at the Crion Caller. She is a missile tipped with sharp hooks and cobbled-together pte armor and a killer smile, and Osprey thinks she could fall in love with this woman.

  In seconds, she’s right at the Caller’s back. She swings a hook at the ammunition cable, and it severs instantly, like it was in two pieces and physics merely forgot to make it so before. Unfortunately, it seems the machine gun still has some ammo left.

  The Caller swings around and attempts to unload the rest of its magazine into Blip’s torso. Thankfully, Blip is fast enough to grab the frame’s arm and twist it away. The shots burn uselessly against the habitation building.

  Blip takes a hook, and swipes at the armor. There is no love or py in how she does it, this is not a lover scraping nails on skin, this is all business. It’s skin to skin of another kind, the kind that hurts and only hurts, the touch of war.

  And that’s when four more frames appear on Osprey’s instruments… and when she hears a new voice over the radio.

  “Scrap the spined one, and kill the pilot. Leave Watkins for me.”

  “Captain, so nice of you to join us in the field today,” Osprey says., “but I’m afraid you’re hurting Blip over my dead body.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Blip and the Caller are still fighting. the Crion Caller draws a frame-sized combat knife, when Osprey isn't looking. It’s trying to get a hit off on Blip; Osprey shoots it out of his hands.

  “Thanks, Osprey!” Blip calls.

  “Any time!”

  Three of the other four frames fly in formation, towards the campus. The st one hangs back and watches; she’s the captain, she’s saving her entrance.

  Blip is kicking the Caller away, just in time to see the other three nd.

  “Osprey, could you do me a favor and snipe the shit out of the Caller before this gets out of hand?”

  Osprey fires at the Crion Caller several times, but not with her rifle. Instead, she opts to use the missiles on the uncher on her back, the little guys. They swarm around the frame and detonate all around it, burning away the fascist logos and book of revetions verses. The Crion Caller is left a burnt shell of an armor frame; its right arm’s joints are fused together from the heat of the explosions. Perfect.

  “Blip, take the machine gun.”

  “It’s out of ammo and I don’t know how to use it!”

  “Then unscrew the casing and throw it at them.”

  There’s no time for that, though. The three new frames are approaching. Osprey takes warning shots at all three of them. This does not dissuade their approach, but it does warn them not to attack frivolously.

  In the center of the three is the one that Blip needs to worry about the most. It’s a frame that appears to be made out of swords and knives, the shape of a body formed out of sharpness intersecting with sharpness. It brandishes an energized ser greatsword in both hands.

  (“Tell me about the Continuous Cutting Motion,” Blip had said.

  “It cuts. The pilot, she’ll keep you on the defensive.”)

  The Motion focuses down Blip, holding the sword out in an ‘en garde’ motion. Blip brandishes her hooks.

  But it’s not going to be a fair duel. The leftmost frame, the short one with the dome-shaped head, with the long spear and riot shield in its hands, it’s approaching, too. It’s a little guy, compared to all the other frames, but it carries the menace only an angry short girl at a concert can.

  (“Watch out for The Early Bird Gets the Worm,” Osprey had said, “It’s a crowd control frame, the kind that busts up protests and demonstrations.”)

  Osprey takes a shot at the Early Bird, but the pilot, she angles the riot shield just slightly and blocks the beam. Fuck this. Osprey scrambles the pinfeather mirrors. She’ll see if they can block a shot when it bounces first.

  But the st of the three attacking frames leaps into motion, literally leaping, right towards Osprey. It’s got webbed feet, with a bright green coloration that runs up its legs to its waist. Its upper half, though, is a hard-shelled carapace in a deep red color, with cwed hands and a stinger hanging over its head like a sword of Damocles.

  (“Ugh, Parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. Don’t let it sting you.”

  Blip had said, “What’s the stinger do?”

  “Gives your computer mainframe a virus that lets the pilot control your frame as well as his.”

  “Oh, absolutely fuck that. What the hell?”

  “Yeah,” Osprey said, “Yeah. I know.”)

  Osprey fires at the Parable, and the hit registers. Sadly, it hits the carapace instead of the soft legs.

  It’s way too close for comfort, the Parable, so Osprey unches off the icy rock, and shoots some missiles off. They hit. But they don’t cook its joints the way they did on the Caller. So this calls for pn ‘B’.

  “I’m using pn ‘B’,” Osprey says, “wish me luck!”

  “I will if you wish me luck first!”

  And with that, Osprey jets towards the massive storage tanks. The Parable follows close behind, firing off a beam from its left cw.

  * * *

  As it turns out, Blip was much less prepared to deal with two attackers than she thought.

  Either one would be dangerous; the Motion’s sword has long reach and strikes a chill in Blip’s heart, and the Early Bird can attack quicker than she can blink. But, together? Blip is already breaking a sweat.

  The best thing she can think to do is grab a chunk of rock with each hook and use them like a pair of fils. She narrowly avoids getting her side slit open when she attempts it, though. Any offensive she can go in is foiled by the Early Bird’s spear, constantly jabbing at her. With each poke, its ser bde lights a sickly green color, the color of the candy apple nutrient paste they used to serve in the Hab building. It makes Blip sick to look at.

  They’re backing her into the remains of the admin building. The Motion swings at her from a few feet off the ground, while the Early Bird is rooted to the rock and blocking all attempts at attacking with its riot shield.

  “Osprey, are you done in there?”

  “God,” Osprey says, terse as can be, “I’m a little–urgh–busy, don’t die for the next minute or two and get back to me, okay babe?”

  “Babe?”“Gottagobye!”

  Right. Blip is on her own for a bit.

  She’s going to have to find an escape vector, once she’s back near the admin building, and then Blip is going to have to detonate the bombs. It would be nice if she didn’t have to, or at least if she could dey it, but oh well. The further desecration of the ruins is preferable to one of the few survivors of it bleeding out all over the pce.

  Blip fils a hook-mounted rock at the two of them. Yes, she’s being backed into a corner, yes she has to let them do it for her pn to work, but she can still put up a fight in the meantime.

  Unless the Motion cuts the cable on both her hooks. It does that, leaving Blip totally unarmed save for the hidden bombs she’s baiting them into. Her heart is pounding in her eardrums. One wrong move and she’s blown up just as much as these two are. Or, she’s sliced open like a rotten watermelon. Neither sounds like a nice way to spend an afternoon.

  Just a few more steps back, now. She can probably escape on the Early Bird’s shield side, since the Motion is attacking from the spear side. The gap should be wide enough that she can slip past with the use of some of her booster jets.

  Or not. She could simply die. Blip really, really hopes not.

  * * *

  A minute, during a fight, is sixty eternities strung out on a clothesline. Each one is special, each one is the chance of a painful demise, each one is precious.

  SCR combat regs drum in Osprey’s head as she’s pursued for many of those miraculous seconds on that clothesline. The Parable of the Scorpion and the Frog is fast enough to close the gap between it and Osprey over and over, even as Osprey dodges between storage tanks and pipes.

  She hasn’t been stung yet, which is good. Osprey isn’t sure she likes being alive, but she is sure she will like it even less when someone else gives her frame a virus that lets them march her straight to the Captain. If she’s going to face her horrible CO she’d rather do it on her terms.

  But that is neither her nor there, because the Parable is opening its right cw and shooting missiles at her. It’s right behind them, too, charging with its stinger out. The carapace glimmers under the faded running lights.

  She has about five seconds to do something about them, because she knows they will wreck her if they hit.

  Osprey could try slicing them open with her ser sword! But she cks the dexterity and melee training. And if she misses, she could slice open a storage tank and get melted by acid or blown up in a fuel explosion.

  Four seconds.

  No, she could shoot the missiles! That might detonate them in midair, though, which could again damage the tanks.

  Three seconds.

  These fucking fluid tanks! All they’re good for is being dangerous and…

  She has an idea, at exactly two seconds to impact. Osprey draws her ser sword, and slices at the missiles. They are cut into pieces.

  And then, as the Parable charges at her, she jabs her sword into fluid tank three. Osprey goes full throttle backwards, with the sword still stuck into the tank, and the tank tears open like she’s slicing through hot butter. Orange acid, some sort of ore refining product, spills out of the tank like blood from a fresh wound.

  Osprey dodges it. The Parable is not so lucky. The fluid coats the hard shell of the frame, and it dazzles horribly in the light.

  “What is this shit? What did you do to my frame?”

  Osprey says, “Acidic fluid. Sucks to suck.”And then a huge chunk of carapace armor simply peels off the metallic skin of the frame. It’s like watching a mechanical sunburn come off, except there’s no new skin underneath to repce it. Just a yer of pstic and metal casing to hold the electronic and mechanical bits in.

  The Parable tries to sting Osprey, but she manages to dodge the swing. In the miracle moment between the dodge and whatever is supposed to come next, she listens to her gut.

  Her gut tells her to slice the stinger off. So she takes her glowing red bde and cuts the tail at a join; between the acid and the bde it comes clean off, like pulling a leg off a tender pte of lobster. Not that she’s eaten much lobster. She’s seen people eat it in movies, though, so it works.

  Regardless, the tail comes off. More and more of the armor is peeling and cracking under the ministrations of industrial mining acid. The Parable is looking more and more naked.

  The skeleton of the frame can still fight, though. It swings a sharp cw at Osprey, and when that misses, fires a beam from that cw. Osprey, with all the poise she can copy from Blip, brings up her bde and prepares an attack.

  Her attack is messy, wobbly, and nowhere near Blip’s beautiful and clean cuts. But it’s an attack, and it hits, which is what Osprey needed. The heat off of her sword burns the skeleton casing of the frame and exposes bundles of colorful cables and hydraulic joints and pistons. Osprey feels like throwing up seeing that, as much as she would by looking at the vivisected insides of a human body.

  From there, she takes her sword, and sshes at the remaining chest armor. It goes off easy, and Osprey can see the shape of the cockpit clearly.

  “Sorry man, but I really want to go home,” she says.And then Osprey draws her sidearm. The sers are as silent as the pilot they kill, silent like a fresh grave, like mist over the cemetery. Someone probably is going to miss that pilot.

  Two down, three to go. Osprey better check on Blip.

  * * *

  Blip is not doing so hot, all told.

  She’s a mere steps from the admin building, from the massive cache of bombs lined across the building’s interior. She’s almost there, and she is losing her fucking nerve. Why didn’t Blip pick up a gun? Why did she limit herself to stupid cargo hooks as weapons?

  Is this what it’s like to see life fsh before her eyes? If so, it sucks. If God is taking any critique, He could really do with editing this a bit.

  The Early Bird has been jabbing at her, pressing her back, nonstop. Blip has to admit being just a little bit sick of this fucking thing. Just a step away from being backed against the wall, she makes a stupid grab for the spear…

  And manages to catch it, hands just before the ser-heated bde.

  She was really not expecting she’d get this far. Both she and the Early Bird sort of look at each other, caught off guard by the sudden breach in combat etiquette. You’re not supposed to, you know, catch your enemy’s bde. Either you dodge, or get hit, or parry, or…

  Or anything else. But this? No one is prepared for this. Blip has to press the advantage in any way she can.

  So, she grasps the spear as tight as she can manage, and swings it (and the Early bird on the other end) as far as they’ll go. The Early Bird impacts against the admin building’s crumbling wall, and leaves it even more crumbling than before.

  From there, Blip lets go of the spear and jets off. Both enemy frames are right there, so… She waits, just a second. And then she detonates the bombs. They explode in a ball of great fire. The Early Bird is swallowed in bst, disappearing in an instant, while the Continuous Cutting Motion is bsted backwards, sent careening into space.

  All that’s left of the Early Bird is a partially melted carcass, and two intact weapons. Blip takes the spear and riot shield, which is good, because the Motion is jetting back towards her.

  She holds up the shield and blocks the first blow. The strike is weighty, even in the total vacuum, and sends her backwards by a bit. It takes Blip jabbing in return with the spear to feel in control again. She’s armed, she’s dangerous, Blip Horowitz can return every blow.

  The odd angles and sharp edges make the Motion hard to damage, though. It’s made out of intersecting lines and knife points that Blip finds hard to parse for the purpose of attacking. The torso seems to be made of yers of swords melted together like the world’s thorniest arrangement of roses. Hell, in another context, Blip would find being gifted swords far more romantic than a bouquet of flowers.

  There’s no romance here, though. The Continuous Cutting Motion swings once more without any of the love or pyfulness that Osprey attacks with. Hell, no one she’s ever fought has had Osprey’s delicate approach to violence. Blip is one lucky girl.

  She blocks the blow, and the next, and the three after it. Blip has avoided being damaged, but she hasn’t made any forward progress, either. Just like her st several retionships! Hey!

  Blip jabs the spear at the Motion. It hits, but it just barely nicks the frame. The dull steel scratches, at least, so Blip can prove she’s done something. It all feels a bit useless, though.

  Less useless is Osprey swooping in from out of nowhere and bsting a hole the Motion’s head with her sniper rifle. It’s a clean shot, right through the camera sensor eyes, and the hole is perfectly circur. There’s got to be some kind of record for that.

  “Hey, I’m back,” Osprey says, “Miss me?”

  “More than I can say. I’ll take it from here,” Blip replies.

  The Motion can still move, but it’s now without its head. This makes it far easier to fight, as most frames keep most sensors (cameras, barometer, pressure gauge, seismograph) in there. Each swing of its bde is less sure, slower, more measured.

  Fine by Blip. Slower attacks are easier to block, less overwhelming, and Blip even parries a few. She catches the enemy frame off guard several times, too. The spear finds many new notches to carve into the Motion’s chassis, new holes to poke into its body.

  The Motion’s knife-body is shifting around itself, the angles of its shape rearranging. Blip once found an early 21st century computer, somehow still working, on a passing scrap trader’s vessel. She traded some of the coolest pieces of metal her mother gave her from the frame development shop for the computer. It had this thing called a ‘screen saver’ when the monitor went to sleep, and it looked like a shifting mass of metal objects making shapes Blip had never seen before.

  That, that shifting mass, that’s what the Motion looks like as it transforms itself into a new shape. The recognizable parts of it fade into the form of a giant fucking sword with a pair of legs and a set of thrusters sticking out of the hilt.

  “Oh, shit,” Blip says.

  The Motion unches the pointed end of itself at her, and the rest of it follows. Blip has to give herself some vertical thrust to avoid getting skewered.

  Okay, Blip is floating a few feet above the surface of the rock, and has precious few seconds to pn. She…

  Fuck it. No pn. She tosses the shield to the ground and takes the spear in both the Dilemma’s hands. The pilot of the Motion isn’t the only one who can transform their whole self into one big weapon.

  Blip gives herself some more thrust, and unches herself right at the sword-shaped frame. The spear makes fast friends with the sword’s hilt, because Blip is about fifty percent sure the cockpit is in there somewhere.

  She doesn’t find the cockpit, but she does tear at some of the armor.

  “Osprey, any ideas where the cockpit is when it’s in this mode?”

  “You’ve got the right idea, I think,” she says, “Cockpits usually go where there’s the most protection. You can repce every part of an armor frame but the pilot, after all. Want me to take a probing shot?”

  “If you would be so kind.”

  The pilot of the Motion speaks up, “Can you all shut the hell up and die, already?”

  Osprey responds with a resounding sniper shot to the sword-ship’s hilt. Bits of armor break off from the heat and force of the ser, and bit of mechanized gore are exposed. A few cables are severed and cauterized from the bst, the way a wound closes up under heat.

  The enemy pilot grunts. It’s the perfect sound to accompany his next attack, yet another charge bde-first towards Blip. He clips her arm, enough to break metallic skin, but all the mechanical anatomy inside the arm is still intact. Thank goodness!

  Blip responds to this broken skin the best way she knows how: taking the spear and dragging it down the length of the sword-frame, with her boosters at full speed. Circuitry and metal cogs fly out of the wound in an abundance any scrap trader would salivate over. This thought makes Blip smile, just a little, as she reaches the hilt.

  When she’s there, Blip takes the spear out of the gash she’s cut, and then stabs it full force into the hilt. The hole it makes it so deep that she has to peer into it and see that…

  She’s found the cockpit.

  The spear finds the inside like a fork to meat, and blood spills into the cockpit, and onto the spear’s point.

  * * *

  And then, in the permanent shadow of space, the void calls.

  It’s not the usual hole in the world Osprey feels in her worst moments, though. This one is coming from the outside: it’s a gap in gravity, it’s a deep dark well that your wish will fall down uselessly.

  It’s L’Appel Du Vide.

  The captain’s frame isn’t an armor frame that most people would recognize. The average armor frame is a vehicle for the human being in its heart to exact their will upon the world. This one is… not that.

  It looks like it’s made of holes, and it functions as a hole, a pit, a bottomless well to pour oneself down.

  It’s yers of interlocking loops of phosphorescent metal that somehow emphasizes the negative space within. The loops and holes connect into the vague shape of a person, torso, limbs, and head. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanical parts in the negative space, or electronics, or anything. The machine cks all the anatomy that would make it a legible piece of mechanical and electrical engineering.

  L’Appel Du Vide moves slowly, towards the pnt. It doesn’t need to be fast. It’s unarmed. It doesn’t need a weapon to kill.

  “Blip… I can deal with this.”“Osprey, you’re out of your mind if you think I’m leaving you here,” Blip says, “We took down four frames. What’s one more?”

  “I can’t get rid of you, can I?”

  “Nope!”

  Blip holds the spear and shield, brandishes them. Osprey has her rifle held tight in her frame-hands. They’re both so small next to the L’Appel Du Vide. It must be what dolls feel like compared to humans, the way they feel.

  “Where’s the cockpit on this thing?” Blip asks.

  “The chest, I think. Buried underneath the yers somepce.”

  “Bring it on.”

  And all at once, L’Appel Du Vide is no longer slow. It draws fragments of metal and rock debris together, old and new, sharp and dull, into the shape of an executioner’s axe, big enough to cleave a decent-sized TNO.

  “Hello Watkins, and other one. This is the end of the line.”

  The captain swings her axe. It cuts not just the rock of the ground, it also slices through space itself. Space tears and rips like fabric under the axe bde, and she steps right through the tear, and she vanishes.

  Osprey’s heart drops.

  “Move it!” she cries.

  Her and Blip book it from their current positions, just in time to avoid another rip opening up for the L’Appel Du Vide to emerge from. Its exit from the rip is violent and disquieting; holes, in the shape of a frame, emerging from another hole. Absence has a shape and a form, and it is L’Appel Du Vide.

  There’s a tug in Osprey's heart, even as she avoids the attack. It’s gravity, it’s the pit opening beneath her.

  She shakes that feeling off. There is simply no time to entertain it right now, not with a frame twice her size attacking. If she slips up she will fall into the pit for good.

  “I don’t think I can do much to her,” Blip says, “any ideas?”

  “Let me try something.”Osprey has a few missiles left, the little ones. The interconnected loops that make up L’Appel Du Vide obscure any good targets, but she’s got to try something.

  But as it turns out, the missiles get stuck in orbit around it. The gravity well locks them in a wide oval around L’Appel Du Vide and makes little moons out of the thermal projectiles. Are all physical attacks off the table, then? Piss.

  “Okay, new pn: I’m going to shoot her with sers until she stops moving.”

  Easier said than done; the L’Appel sshes through the space in front of her again and vanishes into the gap. This leaves Blip and Osprey scrambling to take cover in separate parts of the campus: Blip behind the fluid tanks, Osprey by the habitation building.

  Osprey squares her frame shoulders with her rifle. The pinfeather mirrors are scrambled through the campus; if the captain dares show her face again, she’s getting hit for sure. What that hit will accomplish is up in the air, though.

  The vacuum opens, skin of space with a huge bloody gash, and the L’Appel emerges from wherever it ends up when it disappears. The frame stands over the bsted-out remains of the admin building, gathering debris in its gravitational field. Bits of rock and fried office computers circle around it, along with the unexploded missiles.

  Osprey squeezes her trigger. The shot nds, pierces past the gravity well. It leaves a slight burn on the otherwise perfect loops that make up the L’Appels body.

  “You’re going to pay for that, Watkins,” the Captain says.

  “Make me.”

  And then, L’Appel Du Vide gathers all the junk in its gravity field, and unches it at Osprey. Missiles of all kinds fly her way: explosive ones, ones made of rock, office-chair shaped, the whole works. Detritus of space, war, and spreadsheet mine all fly.

  The good news is that space is a vacuum, and if Osprey can simply get out of the way, they will keep flying into the void and collide with some accursed TNO out thataway. She flies as fast as she can manage, and she can really feel the jet thrusters work, as she would feel any other muscle.

  All the junk gets past her, without clipping her metal flesh. Good. Great. Phew.

  How does Osprey kill this thing? Scratch that, how does she fight this thing? The void, or the great big pit that opens beneath her, those are easier to fight than this machine. She can make up reasons not to let her own death drive take her. Osprey can tell the void, actually, I’m busy today, can we reschedule for another day? But this is an entirely external void. This is the void sending a debt (death?) collector after her. And unlike other debt collectors, she can’t just shoot this one.

  Or, well, she can. It’s just that the shot won’t do much damage.

  She takes another shot, anyways. It leaves another burn on otherwise fwless metal, impossible opalescence marred by the muck of reality. L’Appel Du Vide is an impossibility, and damaging it is to anchor it down.

  What weapons does Osprey have left?

  A ser rifle, her sniper. Okay. A few missiles, but those won’t do much good. The sword! Again, not helpful. The psma cannon?

  Fuck it. Sure.

  The gravity well is reasserting itself around the great machine. The remains of the other four armor frames are being drawn into the L’Appel’s orbit. Fitting, really. Security Division can’t even be corpses peacefully.

  But the rest of the facility is coming with them, it so seems. The fluid tanks are shaking in their fastenings, and the lights and cables and piping are coming loose and flying to their new home. The walls of the maintenance building are shaking and cracking under pressure, like so many of the people who worked and died within it.

  “You have my permission to give up now, Watkins.”

  Osprey wields the psma cannon in her arms. It’s already warming up in her hands, excited to bst someone. This time it’s not even for a bluff! She actually wants to hurt her target this go around, instead of pushing them to fight even harder and scratch her again.

  Speaking of Blip, Osprey has lost track of her in the chaos of the fabric of the local geography coming apart. Where is she?

  No, seriously. Where did Blip go? Osprey isn’t kidding. She scans around the screen in front of her, and her instruments, and cannot find her. The psma cannon is warming up nicely, and she can’t even enjoy the heat on her metal hands.

  Oh, she gets it. Blip fucked off, as she ought to. This is not Blip’s fight. People will miss her if she dies: Miranda, Blip’s aunt she mentioned once, her doubtless plethora of friends. Who will miss Osprey, the deserter, the traitor, the union buster? They forgive fascists, because fascists are self-involved enough to forgive themselves, but the SCR won’t stomach a traitor. It all makes sense now!

  Or, it does, for a second. Blip reappears on the visual sensors, but not the other instruments. She’s brandishing a spear and a shield, and her booster pack is burning hot blue. How does anyone move that fast? Forget armor frames, or ships, or celestial objects. How can a living being move so fast they breach the gravity well around L’Appel Du Vide, right up in its strange apertures, and cut at it? Because that’s what Blip does. She’s past the event horizon and stabbing at the insides of the great machine with her spear. Electronic and mechanical viscera come out as she withdraws her spear, just to sink it in deeper.

  Is it bad that Osprey wants Blip to do that to her? Would it be so terrible for Blip to remove some of Osprey’s insides and show them to her? Maybe, under the tender ministrations of Blip, Osprey could learn to see a little beauty in the crass goo and meat that make up her fleshy form. Or in the mechanical bits of her metal form. Osprey’s not picky.

  But that can wait. For now Osprey needs to be intact, sadly. The psma cannon is starting to burn the feathered metal of her arms. It’s good and ready, now.

  “Get clear, Blip!” Osprey calls.

  Blip’s path brings her right back through L’Appel Du Vide’s grasp, both that of its arms, and its gravitational powers. And that’s not even to mention the massive orbiting circus of rock and desiccated mass grave that is the ruins of the facility. And Osprey is more than certain Blip has this in the bag.

  “Already on it!”

  Like only the woman who once moved at the speed of light can, Blip jets right back towards the event horizon. She flies through it like she’s driving through opposing traffic, like she’s skipping herself like a stone, like a beautiful and powerful test pilot. Her jets burn hot, but not as hot as Osprey feels for her, and Blip makes it back to the orbiting debris.

  “Die, pest!” the Captain says. At her whim, floating bits of cable and piping spin, faster and faster, in hopes of knocking a hole through Blip’s armor.

  “Pest, ‘other one’,” Blip says, as she weaves through revolving debris, “Not my name! I’m Blip Horowitz. I chose it, so you can at least call me by it!”

  “Oh, a Christ killer, are you? I bet you’ve grown horns on your head. I know how to deal with your kind.”

  And then, the top half of fluid tank three comes loose from the pull of gravity (and loosened by Osprey slicing its stomach open), and it crashes into Blip.

  It ought to make a titanic sound; the whole of space ought to hear the noise of the impact. It collides with Blip’s armor frame body, and the Hedgehog’s Dilemma folds in half around the tank.

  The waist snaps at its key connectors, and the legs and torso are rolled around it like dough stuck over a rolling pin. Spines fly off Blip’s armor from the force, and the eyes of her frame head shut off.

  And then, like st week’s dinner, L’Appel Du Vide discards Blip, and the whole of the debris. The gravity well simply switches off, and the frame flies off to leave it all floating like so many corpses in a ke.

  The Captain and her frame close in. She’s unarmed once more; the executioner’s axe is naught but excess junk back with the rest.

  “I know what you want, Watkins.”The psma is burning Osprey’s hands, but she can’t fire until she has the perfect shot. The frame is close; not close enough, though. Just a bit more…

  “You’ve joked about it, you’ve suggested it as a punishment… You want to die.”

  Closer, now. Her fingers are melting together. But it’s not close enough for her. She has to destroy the Captain where she stands. If Blip is dead, Osprey will find the Security Division ship and set it to blow up, and hunt down the rest of the blockade enforcers herself.

  “I can grant that wish, Watkins. I’ve always wanted to. But my superiors regard you somewhere between a trophy and a prisoner; it would be a waste. But you were a waste before you were even born. So now.”

  The chest of the L’Appel Du Vide opens. It’s the pit growing beneath her feet, it’s the tower of her tombstone erected, it’s a great metal weed sprouting. Emptiness and void are not a ck of substance, they are substances all by themselves, and they are grasping for her.

  “All you have to do is stay right where you are and shut up. Can you do that? Just remain right there and do nothing and you won’t ever suffer again. The pain will end. It’s that easy! You don’t even have to make a choice, since I know you hate those, Watkins.”

  “Not choosing is still a choice,” Osprey says.

  “Then choose to sit still and die, then.”

  Instead of doing that, Osprey pulls the trigger inside the cockpit, to fire the psma cannon. She’ll really get--

  Oh, fuck.

  The trigger finger melted! She literally cannot fire the cannon. The tendrils of substanced void are worming their way towards her, ready to pull her into her coffin inside the L’Appel.

  Well.

  The psma cannon’s red lights are bsting the brightest emergency color they can. Osprey is overloading this thing, and the trigger finger is stuck on the button.

  It was nice knowing the universe, she supposes.

  The psma cannon explodes, and even though she is about to die, she cannot help but shield her eyes from the screen. The fsh is neon green so neon green it is white and orange and blue. It’s the color of the universe’s blood, it’s the gore and guts of the world showing themselves in chemistry and physics.

  * * *

  The fsh passes.

  Osprey doesn’t feel any different. Is the afterlife just more of the same? Fuck. What a rotten deal.

  She lowers her arms from her face, bit by bit, to look at the screen. It’s… well, it’s burned out. The fsh has passed, but the cameras must have been destroyed in the bst.

  Right.

  Osprey puts her helmet on, and pops the hatch. It looks like the same old space out there, same old ruins, same old…

  Oh, that’s different. L’Appel Du Vide’s torso and arms look awfully melted together, liquid running and resolving back into solid. But it’s solid the way wax left out in the sun and brought back in is solid: runny and gross.

  The mech stirs. The endless interlocking loops of its chest are broken and melted, but the limbs can still move, and the head shifts.

  “You idiot,” the captain says, “I was going to go easy on you. A nice, clean, quick death.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Your loss.”

  L’Appel Du Vide stands at its full height; from a tiny flesh body, it’s even more massive. Osprey feels truly weak and naked. She’s up against a force of cosmic power, of gravity itself, and her frame body can’t even fire a gun anymore.

  The arms of L’Appel reach for her, frail fleshling she is. Each finger is as long as she is tall, if not longer, and there is no way to get enough momentum to evade it. The hand wraps around her like a bear trap wraps around a leg; this looks like it for her.

  That is, until Osprey gets a glimpse of the wreckage left behind in the Captain’s wake. The Hedgehog’s Dillema’s eyes power on.

  “Blip?” Osprey asks, in spite of herself. Her heart is in her mouth.

  The Captain says, “She can’t help you now.”

  That’s where she’s wrong, of course. Blip in her frame-body is really fucked up, with the waist and legs bent out of shape and barely connected to the torso, but she’s not dead. She powers on her thruster pack at a light burn. Whatever she’s thinking, she better do it fast.

  But ‘fast’ appears to be Blip’s middle name. Even with mechanical entrails hanging out of her torso, she’s able to jet around and swoop at L’Appel.

  The Captain is so surprised that she lets Osprey go to face off against Blip. However, Blip is not here to fight her. Blip Horowitz the beautiful, the fast, the amazing, scoops up Osprey in her hand and makes a break for the maintenance building.

  Osprey can feel the pull of the Captain’s gravity weapon again, tugging at her flight suit and her skin and the frail meat of her organs and tissue underneath. It’s like riding the roller coaster at Terrand (The premier theme park of the SCR, conveniently located on Titan!), except unlike the coaster, it’s someone trying to kill her painfully.

  But Blip outspeeds physics and gravity, and flies herself and Osprey into a hole next to the maintenance building; a yer of rock and skeletal wall has been stripped away, leaving the reactor control room open and exposed.

  “Hold on, honey,” Blip says, “we’re going in.”

  She sets Osprey down in the control room, and climbs out of the Dilemma. They’re both soft as the insides of bugs now, tiny little flesh creatures under threat by their natural predator.

  “What are we doing?” Osprey asks, “We’ll get squashed in here.”

  “Not in the It Takes Two, we won’t.”

  “The frame with no weapons?”

  Blip smiles, her teeth sharp, and gestures to the gss wall at the end of the control room, and then beyond it. The reactor, glitter away in its spirit trap, is thrumming.

  “Who needs a weapon?”

  * * *

  The gravity is disturbed inside the control room. Blip knows this signals doom, that time is short and her and Osprey’s lives are shorter if this doesn’t work.

  No matter. All the furniture is floating towards the hole, and Blip can’t focus on that. She sprints to the It Takes Two, because this is the st resort. It’s not a combat frame, it’s a glorified forklift, and it’s the only option left.

  She’s halfway up the dder to the cockpit when Osprey gets to the dder herself; the girl is panting and barely held together. Fuck.

  “Are you up for this?” Blip asks.

  “Duh. Just,” Osprey catches her breath, “just tired. Give me a second…”

  A massive arm made of locked-together circles bursts through the hole in the ceiling. It grasps at the gathered furniture and computers, pulled there by the gravity weapon. Of course, it doesn’t find Osprey there, but the Captain is looking.

  “Okay, okay, we don’t have a second,” Osprey says, “coming.”

  She’s up the dder, and both of them are in the cockpit. Blip is strapped in and ready to go, Osprey is sitting down, and the It Takes Two To Tango is powering on.

  Once the screens are up and Osprey is set in, they go right away. Right, left, right left right left, they walk as one being back into the reactor room. This pn is so fucking stupid and Blip is so excited for it. Even if it fails, it will be a spectacur sight to see.

  “What are we even doing?” Osprey asks.

  “We’re pulling the reactor off its cable and setting it to zap the hell out of L’Appel. You damaged it somehow, which is good, but we need to stop her.”

  “We can’t stop her forever.”

  Blip says, “Then long enough to get the fuck out of here. I’m not picky.”

  It’s back down the amphitheater steps to the grand machine that is the reactor. The bck and yellow shielding is still holding it in pce, which is good. They’re leaving the shielding on, and simply taking the whole thing off its housing. The ghost is still hungry, after all. Blip is more than happy to give it something to feed on.

  “So,” Osprey says, as she’s moving her leg of It Takes Two.

  “Hm?”

  The pilr holding the reactor does so from both the floor and ceiling. It’s going to take a titanic effort to rip it out of there. Blip narrows her eyes at it.

  “How did you… survive? That impact snapped your frame in two.”

  Blip says, “Well! I nearly died, but thankfully I didn’t bang my head on the dashboard. That hit did knock my main power out, and it did fuck up my main systems, but… I got lucky. Again. God’s not through with me yet! Plus, I’ve got to get you home, Osprey. What kind of friend or…”

  She gestures, to indicate the vague pce they’re in as people who know each other. Lovers? Rivals? Friends? Friends with benefits? Pilots get into these weird things all the time, and there’s no easy way to pin it down.

  “Point is, I’m not finished, and neither are you.”

  “Yeah. I’ll take that. I guess,” Osprey says, “I guess that’s good. I mean, it’s good you lived, but…”

  She trails off, and says no more. They’re right back at the reactor, anyhow. Blip can’t help but worry, but there’s a job to do, and a frame to kill.

  “So, how do we do this?” Osprey asks.

  “We used this for maintenance, mostly, but also a bit of search and rescue. We’ve got some cutting tools handy. There’s a button for each arm that activates the ser cutter tool. See that?”

  “No, hang on… No, no, no… Yeah. Here. Boom.”

  The bottom pair of arms split at the forearm panel, and a set of ser cutters emerge, ready to go. Blip primes hers, for the top pair. They burn hot blue in the shale grey of the reactor room, and they bathe the construction yellow of the It Takes Two in soft light, like the por borealis over Saturn’s clouds. Blip took a girl on a near-Saturn trip once, to get a good look at the south pole lights. She cried when she saw them, which was highly embarrassing and vulnerable of her.

  “Blip, are you alright?”

  “Fine!” Blip smiles. Her tear ducts sting. Uh oh.

  “Really?”

  “No, but we don’t have time to talk about it. Let’s get cutting.”

  Blip brings her pair of arms to the top of the reactor pilr, and sets to cutting. Reinforced concrete is not an easy material to damage, and they do not have the leisure time to waste. Osprey is working her part of the pilr as well. All four arms of the It Takes Two are hard at work slicing away yers of material in concert. Both women are in one body, one being, united in concert and harmony.

  The concrete is stubborn stuff. It’s built to house an extremely powerful magnetic reactor that rages against its undead shell, it’s a cage meant to hold in a ghost. It will not bend to anything’s will easily. What a brat.

  It does start to crack, though. Just a little. Good.

  “What’s that on the cameras?” Osprey asks.

  “Let me check.”

  Blip checks the back cameras… and does not like what she sees. The gss separating the control room and the reactor is developing a spider web of cracks along the edges. It’s buckling out, towards the gravity disturbance, towards the hole in the rock her and Osprey entered from.

  The Captain is using her gravity weapon to break the gss.

  “Shit,” Blip says, “work faster.”

  “On it.”

  Blip has one eye on the front camera and the reactor, and one eye on the back camera and the gss. Both are holding, for now. The concrete is breaking bit by bit, but it’s barely visible even under the blue light.

  The gss’s spiderweb grows, like a million little orb weavers working in tandem. If only they’d go build a web and catch some flies, instead of signaling the moment where Blip and Osprey will both cease to be living beings. Oh well, Blip supposes, it’s a living.

  A chunk of concrete falls away, and then another. Progress!

  “How’s it on your end, Osprey?”

  “It’s going. These cutters aren’t great.”

  “They’re meant for normal concrete, not the stuff for the pilr,” Blip says, “or some softer metals. I think?”

  Yeah, she’s pretty sure. Though she feels less sure by the moment, less and less secure in what she thought she knew. Imminent doom has a way of destabilizing things, people, the things people think.

  The window bucks under the pressure. It is not yet broken, but pieces of it are wiggling as the cracks spread. It looks like the rest of the control center is piled in a heap at the back of the room, all the computers and chairs and coffee mugs sucked to the back wall.

  L’Appel Du Vide’s arm once more pokes into the hole, and digs through the detritus. The rubble disappoints her. Osprey’s shitty boss will have to wait a bit longer, thank goodness.

  More concrete is breaking, now. Blip wiggles the reactor in its housing, just to test, and it moves around in there. It’s not long now. They can do this! They can kill Osprey’s shitty boss and get home and fall asleep, they can go to her aunt’s Pesach seder, the world of possibilities is open to them. The old dies at Temple would have a ball with Osprey, the way they do with Blip. “Have you eaten?” “Yeah, actually…” “You have? What are they feeding you?” “Well, you see…” “Here, I have some leftovers. Eat, girl, eat.”

  Heh.

  “Hey, Blip, are you good?”Blip shakes herself, “Yeah. Yeah. Daydreaming a little.”

  Osprey doesn’t respond for a second.

  “You might want to keep daydreaming, actually.”

  “What? Why?”The gss bucks one final time, and breaks into a million thousand shards. Blip watches as it joins the rest of the pile of garbage in a quiet sort of fear. The pull from the gravity weapon is getting unbearable inside the It Takes Two To Tango, inside Blip’s chest and on her skin and on the rattling of loose parts inside the cockpit.

  “Oh, fuck,” Blip says, “It’s over, isn’t it?”

  Osprey thinks about it for a second.

  It’s a long, long second. G forces tug at the hidden bits tucked away inside Blip and Osprey’s warm corpses, G forces so powerful they suck hope into the well as much as anything else.

  “No.”

  With the bottom pair of arms, Osprey punches through the cracked concrete housing, and the whole lower half of the pilr shatters. The hard skin sloughs off in split pieces, discarded, and it all flies back towards the gravity well.

  “Right, okay.”

  Blip punches the top of the pilr. It doesn’t go as cleanly, but it goes, and all that is left of the reactor’s housing is a few metal rods.

  Both sets of arms grab the reactor. The connection points from it to its many wires and cables are sparking as pure physics tugs at them, like a child pulling a cat’s tail and ughing when the cat panics.

  And then, one by one, with It Takes Two To Tango holding on for dear lives, the reactor disconnects from the body it has possessed for decades. It lets out a silent howl of electricity as all its pent up rage and ghostly hunger wails out to anyone, anything, who will understand its message. It wails for the dead, trapped inside the secure parts of the building. It cries for the unread safety audit, it cries for the striking miners of the Kuiper belt.

  The It Takes Two is holding it in a four-armed bear hug. It cries, and the machine’s two hearts say, ‘There, there’. The reactor says, if it could speak, ‘I’m hungry’, and they say, ‘your next meal is close’. It says, not really of course, but it says, ‘They’re dead, and it’s my fault.’ Blip says, ‘no it isn’t. It’s the JKIM bosses.’

  And then, the ghostly and the living machine both are pulled into the gravity well. The reactor says, ‘I’m scared, I’ve never left home before’, and Blip says, ‘neither have I’, and Osprey says, ‘you will miss it like you miss nothing else’.

  And then L’Appel Du Vide grabs them. Not with anything so vulgar as its hands, though. The gravity well moves up, at the captain’s behest, and the head of It Takes Two To Tango is level with the L’Appel’s.

  “Well, what have we here? A piddly little construction frame and a worthless machine.”

  Then, out of its loose connections, the reactor lets out a great bst of electric power. It’s a deadly voltage, a voltage that has killed and will harm if allowed to, not by its own intention but as a consequence of physics and its own unfortunate birth.

  But this time, it only hurts one person.

  The electrical power courses through the loops of L’Appel Du Vide’s body. The colorful metal shines white and gold and blue under the shocking force. The machine goes limp, and all tension of it flees eagerly into the hungry reactor’s open maw, energy that it would be gd to eat if only it were sapient.

  Blip and Osprey watch it strobe and glow, and they kiss inside the cockpit.

  Announcement That's the main story complete! Epilogue next week.