When her coworkers get bored, they get annoying. She can hear them over the comms, bthering away when they’re supposed to be on duty.

  Osprey Watkins will have to pick up the sck for them. As usual.

  “I spy with my little eye… something that starts with ‘b’,” Raptor 3 says.

  “Blockade,” replies Raptor 2.

  While the others are pying their little game, Osprey runs a system check on her armor frame. The Aves Crown is a delicate beast of a mech, spindly and rounded out. With a frame-sized rifle in its hands, and a sidearm at its hip, it’s the world’s prettiest death machine. With its motif of feathery patterns, and its falcon-hood head, it’s a bird of prey watching for mice. That is, if the mice were Kuiper belt miners throwing a temper tantrum about healthcare or whatever.

  “Okay, that was too easy. Uh, I spy with my little eye…”

  Osprey cricks her neck. Sniping is a thankless job; she sits in the same position forever on the off chance something might happen. Someone could fly a ship or an armor frame through the debris field, bob and weave through icy rock and bits of exploded buildings, and then they’d be sorry.

  So far, they haven’t. It’s been silent. And the silence gives her too much time to think.

  “Something that begins with a ‘d’.”

  “Debris. Dead ship with the lights still on.”

  “Fuck! How did you know?”

  Osprey cuts in on the radio. “Because, you doofuses, that’s all that’s here. Kuiper belt objects, and the distant company ships keeping the union types trapped and starving. The second you see anything other than one of those things, you put a ser through its chassis. Understand?”

  “Captain’s pet.”

  “Fuck you. I’m switching to a different channel. Signal me on the emergency line if one of you dies.”

  She does that. The Kuiper Belt Miner’s Union Local 2402 has a pirate radio station, and it’s pretty good, so she listens to that. It’s an eclectic mix of whatever they’ve got on hand, so it seems. They py dance music, there’s some sadboys with guitars, there’s someone pying the serharp. They might be her enemy, but she can appreciate their tastes in music.

  A somber, quiet tune pys. There’s someone pying cssical guitar and humming. Osprey feels the music, and looks out over her environment. It’s all she can do.

  It’s a myth that space is empty.

  Sure, it’s a vacuum, and you can get a long distance without touching any kind of solid ground, but it’s not empty. The forces of physics are always at work, and there’s cosmic radiation, or telecommunication signals bouncing around.

  From her sniper’s perch on an icy rock, she can see, just barely, the Earth and the sun. They twinkle in the harsh distance.

  She stops looking out that way. No point in it, is there? Whose fault is it that she’s out in the ass end of the sor system, working for the worst company around? Hers. Always hers. No use in –

  One of her squadmates, it seems, is ft-lining.

  The Aves Crown, like all Security Division armor frames, has a squad biometrics monitor in the cockpit. It’s helpful to know if your teammates’ hearts are still beating or not. Sure, plugging your soft tissue into a murder robot isn’t the safest for long term health, but it’s better to die of health complications ter than die in battle sooner.

  “Come in, Raptor 3, come in,” she says, into the radio, “Do you have eyes on Raptor 2? His heart monitor is –”Raptor 2 says, “I told you she’d fall for it.”

  “Ha! Nice! Sorry Raptor 1, but we’re just having a little bit of fun. You know how it is.”

  In a fit of annoyance and petty drive for revenge, Osprey boosts the input volume and gain on her radio’s mic, and then screams into it. It comes out somewhere between a horror queen’s scream and an eagle’s screech.

  Raptor 2 says, “Ow! Raptor 1, that was uncalled for.”

  “So’s pying with your biometrics monitor like a toy. Deal with it.”

  “Raptor 1, you have no sense of humor,” Raptor 3 says.

  Before Osprey can respond properly, though, she catches something on her sensors. It’s a tiny little thing, a blip, but it’s something. Novelty is priceless out in the vacuum.

  “Hey, Raptor 2, are you seeing this?” she asks. “I’ve got something on my instruments. Looks like it should be in your line of sight.”

  “Uh, no? Nothing on my end. Just the usual.”

  The blip vanishes from her sensors.

  “Nevermind. Might have been a technical problem, or some radiation.”

  “Your frame is ancient,” Raptor 3 says.

  “Respect the old bird or else, Raptor 3.”

  About now would be the time Raptor 2 pipes up with an annoying quip back, but he doesn’t. In fact, his heart rate is ftlining again.

  “Raptor 2, that isn’t funny. I already told you not to py with… Raptor 2? Raptor…”

  “Buddy, are you there?” Raptor 3 cuts in, “Are you?”

  Silence.

  Well, it’s almost silent. The sharp, high sound of Raptor 2’s heart going dead is the only sound. It’s a concentrated burst of tinnitus in Osprey’s left ear.

  The blip returns on the sensors. How is it moving that fast?

  “Raptor 3, we have a problem.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m adjusting my sightlines…”

  While he does that, Osprey gets her own machine in gear. She summons forth a group of ten silvery drones from the Aves Crown’s tailfeathers. They’re shaped like feathers, and when the light hits them, they’re shining like a polished mirror. Remote controlling them is a hassle, but so so worth the trouble.

  “I’m setting up the pinfeather mirrors. If you can spot our blip I can hit her from here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I…”

  Raptor 3 sounds distracted.

  He says, “What the hell is that?”

  And then he can’t be distracted any more. He can’t feel fear, or py I Spy, or be annoying over the radio, because his heart rate goes ft.

  And Osprey is alone with her bogey.

  She could bring the pinfeathers back and activate their stealth cloak, maybe? She could stay still and hope whatever-it-is gets bored and goes after some other Security Division sniper team. This whole slice of the Kuiper belt is lousy with them, hiding in wait for union types trying to leave or leftist types trying to come help. She could let this blip be someone else’s problem!

  Counterpoint: she could put a ser slug through its cockpit, instead. That sounds more like her style. She scrambles the metal feathers out further.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”

  The blip manages to disappear off her radar again, but Osprey knows her quarry is still here. Her throat tightens and dries up, and she can hear her heart beating in her ears. She can do this. She can bst this sucker. All she has to do is –

  “Okay!” a new voice says over the radio, “I’ll come out!”

  And then, at the speed of a freight train, another armor frame collides with the Aves Crown, and knocks Osprey and her machine to the ground.

  It stands tall over her. The armor frame has none of the Aves Crown’s elegance, none of the sleek lines or rounded edges or fancy paint. It’s more like a pile of scrap metal, welded together in the abstract form of a person. The chassis is covered in yers of armor of different colors and textures, construction yellows and emergency reds and dull greys; a long access dder runs up from its leg to its colrbone.

  And that’s not to mention the spines. Its back, shoulders, and hips are covered in sharp bdes, like hedgehog spikes. It’s all sheer angles and sharp edges, rough and unrefined and terrifying.

  “Now,” the new voice says, “I’m not supposed to leave any of you Pinkerton types alive, so uh… die? If you please?”

  The mech brandishes a pair of sharp hooks, connected to it by thick cable. Before Osprey can react, the hooks are tearing chunks out of the Aves Crown’s silvery coat. From within her armor frame, she can hear a deep groan of displeasure.

  In something of a panic, Osprey scrambles the pinfeathers and takes a wild shot at them. The ser reflects off of it. That’s the thing about the Aves Crown: even if it misses the shot, the shot can bounce back.

  It reflects off the feather-mirrors and collides with the chimera machine’s head. It leaves a burn mark on its cyclopean head.

  “Got you,” Osprey says.

  “Wow! Curved sers! That’s a new one. Here, let me try.”

  Her quarry retracts a tow hook from the Aves Crown’s downy metal flesh. It grabs hold of Osprey’s ser rifle and pulls it into the machine’s waiting hands.

  It fires off a shot at one of the feathers. The pilot ughs as the hard light shot bounces off it and hits the Aves Crown right on the chest. Osprey can feel the heat of the ser from inside the cockpit; it’s less than a foot of armor and airtight carapace between her and the beam.

  “Now, before I…”

  The woman, the other pilot, pauses.

  “Hold that thought. Don’t move, or I might get an itchy trigger finger! Just take a breath, Hydrate. Sucks to die on a dry throat.”

  Osprey takes a sip of water, and moves the Aves Crown’s arm a little. If she can sneakily grab her sidearm…

  The enemy pilot doesn’t seem to notice the movement. Good. She wraps her metallic fingers around the sidearm in its hip holster, and begins to draw it. Osprey isn’t even sure where to shoot at on the damned machine.

  “Okay,” the pilot says, “It’s your lucky day! I have bigger fish to fry. You go ahead and tell your comrades over at your HQ that Local 2402 won’t take it lying down.”

  “Not comrades. Coworkers.”

  “Okay! Whatever! Have a good one! I’m taking this rifle, though. I like it. It’s mine now.”

  And then, as quickly as it was there, the enemy mech jets off into space.

  ***

  Osprey returns to her home ship with her tailfeathers between her legs.

  The ship is a smooth, elegant vessel; it can blow a moon to pieces AND it looks pretty doing it. Osprey admires that philosophy. Look good, be bad: w. Words to live by.

  What she admires less, though, is the captain folding her arms at her as Osprey docks the Aves Crown. It’s a bit of a hassle to get it back into pce, and she hates doing it for an audience. She feels the captain’s eyes boring into her soul even as the head-mounted cameras shut off and the cockpit screens go bnk.

  “Okay, Osprey. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing more wrong than usual, anyways. She’s going to yell at you, and you’re going to be fine. It’s about her, not you,” she says. She almost believes it.

  She gets out of her cockpit seat and squints at the light rushing in. The silver-patterned chest of the Aves Crown lifts up to let her free, and the great big hangar floodlights are really earning their name.

  “Sergeant Watkins,” the captain said, “do you care to expin where your squadmates are?”

  “Dead. We ran into an unknown armor frame that made idiots out of us.”

  “Where is your frame’s gun?”

  Oh, boy, this is going to be a fun debriefing.

  ***

  The captain finishes yelling at Osprey; there’s only so many ways to call someone who’s already heard it all a screwup. It’s not like the captain should be surprised, either. Osprey’s whole deal is being there against her will and also being a huge fuckup! That’s her brand!

  Maybe it would have been better if that pilot had killed her. It would mean one less scolding to suffer through.

  Whatever. She’s got some time to herself now, to decompress. Certainly the ship’s commanders are scrambling around trying to figure out where to park Osprey, or whether they can find a loophole in her contract that lets them fire her. Osprey, if asked, would suggest they merely shoot her out the airlock and let God sort her out, but no one is asking her what she thinks.

  So, she sits in her cabin.

  It’s somehow even more cramped than the Crown’s cockpit. Or, it feels that way. An armor frame is a second body, and plugging in and piloting one makes its arms her arms, its legs her legs, its motion her motion. She’s freer in another body than in her own; ironic, since she’s spent so much time and effort making her own body a better pce to be. The half-empty vial of estradiol on her bedside table is supposed to solve that problem!

  But, as it turns out, when her body is fated to work for Jupiter-Kuiper Incorporated Mining’s Security Division till she dies, estrogen is only half the battle. The other half would be… any other job, anypce but here. As.

  She shucks off her flight suit, peeling herself out of it like a soft-boiled egg. At least she can stare at the ceiling till she passes out. Right?

  Wrong. She gets a buzz on her phone. It’s a new assignment – no rest for the wicked.

  It reads:

  JKIM SECURITY DIVISION SGT. OSPREY WATKINS YOU ARE NEEDED IN BRIEFING ROOM IN TEN MINUTES I AM NOT KIDDING DO NOT BE EVEN ONE MINUTE LATE OR YOU ARE DEAD TO ME.

  There are no prizes for guessing who that message is from.

  ***

  It takes Osprey eleven minutes to reach the briefing room. She’s dressed in a JKIM tank top and a pair of shorts she made herself.

  “I find your outfit distasteful, and you’re a minute te,” the captain says, “but you are clearly too thick-skulled to take a threat properly. So, instead, let’s talk about your next mission.”

  “The Crown is in no shape to go out again, though. Is this beneath Carrion Squad? Is this a punishment detail?” “No, and no. This is your reward, Sergeant Watkins, for being lucky enough to survive a brush with that hostile armor frame, and bringing us back usable footage of it.”

  Great. Osprey lives, and her punishment is facing that hulk of a machine again. Maybe those hooks are more merciful than they look? Probably not. But a girl can dream; sometimes, in fact, it’s all she can do.

  “Okay,” Osprey says, “Hit me. What do I need to do?”

  “Scrap the hostile armor frame, and sink the ship that carries it. Do you think you can do that? Shoot a few socialists, and help starve out those striking miners?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.”Osprey shrugs. “Let’s find out, then. What do we know about this armor frame? Scratch that, what do we know about its pilot? Who is this dy?”

  ***

  Blip had that sniper right where she wanted her. It would have been so easy to just… finish her off. But, no. She was called back home before the job was done. If there’s one thing Blip hates, more than the Security Division, more than fascists, more than cosmetic damage to the Dilemma, it’s an unfinished job.

  Oh well. It’s not like the job is ever truly done, is it?

  At the other end of the debris field, another ship waits in silence. It’s not sleek, or beautiful. It’s sort of like if a brick had heavy-duty thrusters and a crew of fifty people on board.

  For all its obscene austerity, though, it’s home. The great cargo bay doors open with their distinctive stuttering motion, and Blip Horowitz and her beloved machine are welcomed back into the bay with open arms.

  Her armor frame, the Hedgehog’s Dilemma, barely fits in the cargo bay. As it turns out, stowing a jury-rigged war machine inside a civilian freight vessel is a fraught business. She nestles her bulldozer of a frame between shipping containers full of baby foods and fuel cells for heating systems.

  She has to y the stolen rifle down on the floor to fit in properly AFTER engaging the safety on it.

  With the press of a button and the flip of a lever, the armored chest swings open. Blip then climbs down the dder. Sure, she could use the bay’s microgravity, but better safe than sorry. There are more lives than just her own riding on her well being.

  “Ah! Hello, cargo bay. Hello, home.”

  Blip leaves the Dilemma to rest with the storage crates. The cargo bay is tight, and cramped, and kept at an absurdly cold temperature for the perishables; not exactly a pce to hang out for fun. Even in her skintight flight suit, it’s a bit chilly for Blip. Her daily estrogen intake kills her cold resistance and it’s so so worth it.

  There’s a big common room down the corridor. Or, big enough. When people live in a freight ship, their notions of space and architecture contort and bend. If someone lives in a box for long enough, they find the idea of two boxes decadent.

  “Hey Blip!”

  “Blip! You owe me ten bucks!”

  She’d stay and hang out with some of her friends on the crew, but…

  There’s always more Security Division jerks to deal with; they never quit.

  And neither will Blip!

  * * *

  Osprey watches the hangar crew with a scowl. The ready-to-deploy Carrion Squad’s frames are left unattended, in their sharp and terrible glory; instead, they’re strapping an arsenal’s worth of weapons onto the Aves Crown. As if just one more gun is going to make the difference between killing her quarry or not!

  The secret isn’t in a machine, alone. It’s in the pilot. She’s going to have to outwit and outmaneuver Blip Horowitz, climb inside her quarry’s head. Easier said than done, though. The info packet the captain had was very informative, with just enough detail to tell Osprey that she is screwed beyond belief.

  She’s supposed to fight a test pilot? The test pilot who flew an armor frame at light speed?

  Sure, it was for about 30 seconds, but still. It’s guaranteed this woman is a better pilot than Osprey, and also completely out of her fucking mind. Osprey is doomed. There’s no way she’ll match Blip Horowitz’s moxie.

  Hence, all the guns, Osprey supposes. The crew is done strapping a 3 by 3 rack of missiles to the Aves Crown’s shoulder, and they’re adding another hip holster to hold an energy sword. If you can’t outsmart someone, ssh them to pieces and blow the fuck out of their armor pting.

  But she can’t get the photo on top of the info packet out of her mind. It’s a picture of Blip Horowitz, dressed in a grease-stained sleeveless shirt, smiling at the camera. Her teeth are sharp, and her eyes hold mirth inside them. Osprey can’t help but think about Blip. She sees the photo when she closes her eyes, and can’t help but wonder.

  The maintenance team clears off, and Osprey’s body away from her body is ready. Or, as ready as it can get. There are still a few chunks of soft metal gone from its torso, ripped out by Blip’s tender loving hooks.

  She lingers her gaze over the scratches. Something about them invokes the sense memory of scratches from long nails, dragging up and down her back, stinging just right.

  Osprey really needs to refocus her thoughts, if that’s what’s coming to mind.

  “Alright,” she says to the Crown, “Let’s get this girl.”

  She climbs up onto the catwalk. It’s level with the open cockpit, right to the seat that is the frame’s empty heart. The frame’s chest swings shut in front of her, and its avian eyes glow their harsh gold. Go time.

  Ready or not, Blip Horowitz, here she comes.

  * * *

  Seeing how the Dilemma barely fits into the cargo hold, they have to do maintenance on her out in space. They have the armor frame standing on the surface of the ship, out in the vacuum. The mechanics are piloting little frames of their own, with four arms for holding as many tools as possible.

  “Why these big, stupid thrusters?” Blip asks. They’re fitting massive rocket boosters to her back, complete with oversized fuel tanks.

  “If you leave Osprey any distance, she’ll snipe the hell out of you,” her commander says. She’s in one of the maintenance frames, helping install the massive boosters to the Dilemma’s back. Like a socialist writer once said, a person should be able to be a fisherman in the morning, a writer in the afternoon, and a chef in the evening; hence, all Socialist Confederated Republic soldiers are trained in many pursuits. Just because the commander is an officer doesn’t mean she can’t also fix an armor frame and disarm a bomb.

  Meanwhile, Blip is sitting in her cockpit. Someone has to keep the Dilemma’s massive combat boot feet magnetized. Otherwise, it would be liable to just float away and become just another piece of debris in the Central Dysnomia Colpse Field.

  “Okay, but won’t she spot me on her radar if I have these on my back?”

  “She doesn’t use a radar, she uses a ser-based system. Your data spoofing trick should still work. That Aves Crown uses a very old OS, st I knew.”

  Blip goes ‘hmm’ and says nothing more. She’s got an info packet on Osprey Watkins and her armor frame on her p. This thing could easily be fifty pages long.

  “How do we have so much on her, anyways? I know she was a big deal once upon a time, the Silver Bolt and all, but...”

  The commander says, “I knew her, back when.”“The war?”

  “Yeah. The war. We were in the piloting program together, and got assigned to the same ptoon. She was scary good. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take up a rifle as quickly as she did.”

  That checks out. Blip doesn’t know a whole lot about guns, being a test pilot in her heart, but she thinks that curved ser trick is impressive. It looks like a game of billiards, to Blip, with concentrated columns of photons.

  “Okay, so, I’m using these big unwieldy boosters to close the gap with her. I see. I thought my armor was enough to take a hit, but…”

  “You can take many hits. But you’re not invincible. Like I said: she’ll snipe the shit out of you, Blip. Maybe the fifth direct hit won’t stop you, but the fiftieth just might.”

  Blip flips through the packet.

  “Hey, how come you know her exact height? And… she’s got freckles on her… what?”

  “We were close,” the commander says, voice tinged with regret, “maybe too close.”

  “I don’t see why you had to put that in there, is all!”

  It’s always dead silent in space, no sound in a vacuum and all, but right now it’s even deader silent.

  “Commander?”

  “I’m doing some very fiddly work. Do you want me to misweld this, Blip Horowitz? Don’t distract me.”

  “Sending me to kill your ex is kind of a bad look, is all,” Blip shrugs, “especially since I had her and could have finished her off already. That would have saved us so much time, fuel, and energy.”

  “You don’t have to kill her. All we need is her neutralized until after we make a run on the blockade. In fact, I would rather you didn’t kill my ex, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Fighting the Silver Bolt of Titan without killing her. Great. Blip is going to have to rip that Aves Crown to pieces. Such a shame to have to destroy something so beautiful, but it really can’t be helped.

  After all, if Osprey Watkins didn’t want her shit wrecked, she shouldn’t have betrayed the SCR and run off to bust unions with her Security Division buddies. It’s a simple remedy to a simple problem.

  “And,” the commander adds, “we called you back because the Security Division ship spotted our ship. You’re buying us time, really, to get clear of their reach. We can’t supply the strike if we get sunk.”

  So... Meat shield duty. That’s alright, really. The Hedgehog’s Dilemma is perfect for the job.

  Blip closes her eyes, and stretches. She could look out over the debris field, but she already sees it when she closes her eyes. The Central Dysnomia Mining Campus makes a spectacur ruin. Cracked photo frames and old pillows mix with broken mining tools and burnt-out computer chips, teddy bears and worker frames mingle with rock and ice.

  “Blip, we’ve got your thrusters attached. Are you ready to go light speed again?”

  “That’s not –”

  “I know, I know. We have one more thing for you.”

  One of the little yellow maintenance frames approaches, with the pilfered rifle in its arms.

  “I barely know how to shoot,” Blip says, “I haven’t held a gun since basic, human or mech-sized.”

  “I know. But Osprey is going to want this back.”

  Blip takes the rifle in her Dilemma hands. She’s had no need for a gun in all her days, but if the commander says to bring it, well, sure. She’ll bring it. Why not?

  “That’s all. You’re fueled up and all set. Happy hunting, Horowitz. Tell that traitor I said hello.”

  The maintenance frames clear out from Blip. Looks like there’s nothing left to do but get going.“I will! And don’t you worry, boss. I’ll be gentle!”

  It’s a lie, but it’s a comforting one. The Hedgehog’s Dilemma lights up all over: her five camera-eyes, arranged in a triangle, her thrusters, her superheated hooks. She’s going to rip that Silver Bolt of Titan a new one, she’s going to fuck up this traitorous Security Division bitch right up.

  And she’s off!

  Announcement New chapters will be out for the next few weeks. This one is all done, and has been up on patreon and itch for a while, so I figured it was time to post it. If you want to read the rest right now, you can pick this up on itch.io as part of a bundle (or by itself) at https://itch.io/b/2684/stwl-presents-the-fruit-of-our-efforts, or you can join the patreon at https:///c/MissJuniper.

  Anyways, some time after I started writing, mecha stuff became a pretty big interest of mine. Thanks Witch from Mercury! This is a genre I intend on returning to. Giant robots and girls fighting/kissing/both/a secret fourth thing are great, and we need more. So, here I am, writing some! See you next week for chapter 2.