We were supposed to be untouchable. The only reason I went down was because I had to save my brothers and sisters in steel. I was their guardian; it was better for it to happen to me than them.

  ANGL frame armor is lightweight; we're not meant to be frontline combatants. We don't carry the hard-kill defenses and ECM suits you see on other frames because almost all of our tonnage is dedicated to sensors and surface-to-orbit uplinks to coordinate indirect and orbital fires. At best, we're rocking light autocannons and grenade unchers to deal with hostile recon teams who get a little too close for comfort. In an ideal world, there's a whole damned battlegroup between us and the enemy, but Laika IV was not an ideal world.

  We had dropped into what was supposed to be a lightly defended rock, only to find out that the damn thing was swarming with hostile mechs - it wasn't an outpost on the fringes of occupied space, but rather a testing ground for the AGD's own second-gen mechs. They called them "Golems." If you've never seen one, they're big, crude, ungainly fuckers, and on a good day, any given UGS frame will run circles around them and pick 'em apart. On a bad one, they'll score the first hit and then they won't stop coming, and they'll have a lot of friends around to maximize their odds of nding that hit.

  We were outnumbered, outgunned, and out of time. We broke the FOB down as best as we could once we realized what we'd stumbled into, called for orbital extract, but fleet denied us transorbital support when they looked down and saw a whole goddamned battalion of Golems already danger close to the wire. We'd lost two other ANGLs to high-yield IEDs earlier in the day, and my squad lead was having a mental breakdown in her handler's tent. I was the only combat-capable ANGL we had left, and I didn't want to see any more broken bodies in UGS interface suits if I could help it.

  I did the unthinkable. My handler tried to rein me in, threatened to separate me from my mech - permanently - and put me in the brig while command figured out what to do with me, but I think he knew all too well that if I didn't defy him, none of us would set foot starside ever again. I don't bme him. He was just doing his due diligence.

  When I unched, I didn't bring any point-defense weapons. I didn't expect to need them on a one-way trip. I burned hard and fast for the main line of contact and the skies around me burned with tracer fire and missile contrails. I dumped every countermeasure I had, quickly as I could, but I could hear the pings of shrapnel tearing through my mech, feel the oppressive humidity slice through my cockpit. I dove for the deck and popped off every signal tool I had - ser designator, IR fres, made my ECM scream so loud it burned itself to sg.

  I got the response I wanted, and fire screamed from the heavens, orbital ser batteries and naval railguns chewing up the formation I'd just thrown myself against. The impacts drowned out the bullets skipping off my gcis pte, but the sudden, horrid pop! of my maneuver thruster tank being mulched by an AP round rings through my mind to this day. I felt a piece of me fall away, and then I fell too.

  When I came to, I was in a cold, damp room, chained to a chair. I was interrogated for hours, about who I was, why I was there, who was there with me. Evidently, I was the only person they took alive. I didn't give them anything; all ops details were purged from my neural ce the moment my mech went offline. Besides, handler would've been disappointed if I had circumvented that failsafe.

  I'll give the AGD agent credit where it's due; he was, at least outwardly, very kind. He picked up pretty quick that I wasn't strong enough to put up any sort of physical resistance and happily unshackled me. He told me that he'd expected me to be...like this. Said it was what separated his Golem pilots - "temprs," he called them, from UGS mech pilots.

  He brought one in for me to look at. The tempr looked a lot like any other normal stick jockey you'd see in fleet - athletic, clean-shaven, with a little bit of stubble. He was very masculine, with broad shoulders and well-defined muscuture that I could see clearly in his tight-fitting combat shirt. The agent made a point of comparing him to me, noting how my small breasts were tenting the fabric of my interface suit, how my face was smooth as gss due to my facial hair having been completely removed to ensure a perfect mask seal inside the cockpit, how the stainless steel of my neural ports shone in the harsh lighting of the interrogation room.

  He called me "unnatural," told me that I had twisted God's design into something He hadn't intended it to ever be. He praised the tempr over and over, pointing to him as an example of human perfection, a healthy young man fully capable of serving the archdiocese, free of the impurities of steel I had taken into my body. He praised his strength, his looks, his capabilities, telling me all about his combat record and proud status as a family man, and asked me, "wouldn't you want to be perfect like that?"

  I told him I didn't give a damn about human perfection, because I was what I wanted to be.

  He said he could fix that.

  The cell I was put in was well-maintained, comfortable, even. There was a private washroom, clean clothes, a soft, warm bed, even a small media dispy and stocked bookshelf. Granted, they were filled with religious books and films that I recognized as borderline heretical towards the religions they cimed to represent, but it was at least something. My captors informed me that even as an interloper, an enemy, they intended to treat me with grace and hospitality (external locks on my door notwithstanding). There was only one thing that I asked for: my weekly immunosuppressant cocktail. The dosages were printed on the blood chit stitched into my interface suit's lining; surely they had them.

  I was denied.

  The next few weeks were a living hell. The first symptoms showed up after about a week - infmmation around my neural ports. The burning slowly became a rash as my body began to reject the impnts. A few days ter, white-hot fshes of pain began to spike through my nerves at random, and more than once, I lost control of my limbs and found myself lying catatonic for hours on the bed, paralyzed by agony. When the AGD agent visited me, I begged and pleaded with him to give me what I needed. He, again, refused, saying it was "God's pn," that the pain I was enduring was a purifying trial, and that I should pray for His forgiveness.

  Another week passed, then another, and another. I started to lose track of time; the suffering remained throughout. More arming was my reflection. The pain had been so severe for so long that I hadn't noticed other changes in my body - subtle ones, but changes I could notice nonetheless. The person in the mirror was slowly becoming someone else, someone I recognized, but someone who was definitively not me.

  Eventually the AGD agent offered me a reprieve. He told me that my purification would take time, but that if I promised to see it through, the medical staff would undo my augmentations, return me to how I was before. It was in this moment I realized how much I'd grown to hate him, hate his ideology, hate his closed-minded view of the universe, hate his inability to see both my own humanity and how he was suffocating it week by week.

  I spat in his face, then crawled into my bed and continued to writhe in agony. It felt like the only dignified thing I could do for myself.

  I don't know when it happened, but shortly after, the cavalry finally arrived. My neural ce pinged a friendly IFF tag, faint, but distant. A single voice in the silence. Soon, it was joined by another, and another, slowly rising into a chorus of my brothers and sisters speaking to me through the network only those who were like us could sense. Warmth flooded my body at the realization that this wasn't a hallucination, that I wasn't alone anymore.

  The scream of retrorockets and assault thrusters announced the arrival of the strike team to the camp from two separate directions. INF-S teams set the command post abze with incendiary rockets and high-output sers while ACAVs smashed through the gates head-on. In the distance, I could hear the scream of Panthers streaking through the night sky, directing orbital fires on the Golem gantries while carrying out supplemental precision strikes of their own. The AGD was going to be paid back in full for their hit on our FOB, with interest.

  The prison camp wasn't approached until the rest of the site was secure. When the breach team entered the compound, they found the AGD agent who'd tortured me by wresting away agency over my own body in the same hardened room I was being kept in. He surrendered immediately like the coward he was, and I shouted a single word: "AIRHYPO!"

  An autoinjector pen was produced by the rescue team, who knew full well what I had been denied for months on end, and tossed it to me without hesitation. I caught the autoinjector, popped the cap off the needle...and jammed it into that rat fuck bastard agent's thigh. He was immediately hit with a maximum strength, extended-release dose of every immunosuppressant drug he had denied me for my stay, as well as the serums unique to my physiology. It would've been enough to rapidly stabilize the levels in my body, but in his, it would do the opposite. He'd suffer in our brig for the next few months, enduring the horrors of his own body feeling like it no longer belonged to him, for reasons he would never understand.

  Once I was back starside, I was reunited with my handler, who I told my entire story to. He asked why I did what I did to the agent, why I had come to despise him so deeply, why I'd learned to see him with such disgust as to inflict upon him, even temporarily, the sense of dread and self-loathing I'd endured in my own body prior to joining the mech corps. After all, hadn't the agent gone to great lengths to make me comfortable in my captivity?

  I told him that I had seen the face of malice, and that it had hid behind a face of mercy.

  -ANGL "Canary"Date Unknown