Priya Patel wasn’t a morning person. Well… maybe she was, but that depended on the context in which you framed a day. She certainly plied her trade in what one would call the ‘early hours of the morning,’ but that was more along the lines of one to two in the morning. Certainly not at six forty-five, when the rapping of heavy knuckles on her front door brought her out of alcohol induced stupor.

  “This had better be good,” She grumbled as she slid out of bed, wrapping a blue silk robe over her shapely frame, careful not to disturb her ‘guest,’ who was happily snoozing away on the other side of her massive king sized bed, a shipping magnate from a nearby system who had a fetish for all things… exotic. He was in his early forties from what Priya could recall, but looked closer to fifty with a wispy brown combover doing its damndest to hide a bald spot on the back of his head and low hanging gut that practically threatened to drape over the sides of the mattress. As she slowly creaked to the door, he snorted and burped, before reaching back with a pudgy hand-the one that still had his wedding ring-to scratch his exposed bare backside.

  “Charming…” Priya said to herself, stifling a dry heave. This was one of her least favorite parts about the job. Liquor was nice in the moment when she could drift away into a numb inebriated haze, but clarity always found its way back the next day, accompanied by a heavy dose of disgust and shame. Still, something needed to pay the bills, and she sure as hell wasn’t going back to any menial labor fields. Besides, there were some perks to her role, lucrative salary aside. The connections she made alone were worth more than twice their weight in silver. There was almost no one in Arsius that either didn’t know of her, or she them, and it was good to have friends in high places.

  Until the day they show up at your home.

  With the clunk of a deadbolt and turn of a knob, Priya cracked open the door, only to be greeted with the sight of a familiar figure, clad in thick robes, save for a few metal appendages that poked out from the sleeves and underneath a heavy hood. Her eyes widened, instantly lucid, as she flung the door open wide, her mouth moving faster than her brain.

  “F-Fletcher?!” She exclaimed.

  Indeed it was. No matter how many times or how quickly she blinked, her employer was right in front of her, inches from stepping into the threshold of her home.

  “I’ll forgive the outburst this once, since this rather unorthodox, my being here. But in the future, I’d urge you to use the professional honorifics that’s come to be the standard operating procedure for our little… Partnership, ” He said, his words coming out clear despite the volume of which they left the speaker on his proxy. It wasn’t quite a whisper, but more like the voice of someone speaking aloud on a screen with the volume lowered almost to mute.

  She blinked again, her mouth hanging slack as words failed to fill it.

  “Oh… erm,” She stuttered, “Y-Yes Sir.”

  “That’s better,” He said, “May I come in?”

  Before she could answer, Fletcher stepped inside, strolling through as if he owned the place, with Priya involuntarily moving to the side, afraid to deny him entry. He looked from the threshold, to the expansive living room and pristine kitchen, nodding slightly to himself, before speaking again.

  “This is nice,” He said, “Quaint… It suits you.”

  “T-Thank you Sir,” She said, closing the door as she wrapped the robe around herself a bit tighter than before. She felt exposed, standing in front of Fletcher, without her makeup or attire, nor the mental prep she’d run herself through before any interaction she’d have with him. It wasn’t an appearance thing. She’d long understood that he wasn’t interested in such trivial things like matters of the flesh. She felt safe around him in that aspect. She felt exposed in the way that someone would be standing in front of an X-Ray Radiograph without a lead-lined vest on. Life if she wasn’t careful, he would be the death of her.

  “I, erm,” She said, pointing towards the hallway leading to her bedroom, “I think you should know that I’m…entertaining right now.”

  “That’s fine,” He said, “I don’t intend to stay long.”

  “Then,” She swallowed, “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you here?”

  He turned, his featureless metal faceplate shining as it caught a stray gleam from the artificial sun outside her window, a unique feature that was one of the main reasons she lived here. As much as she loved the glitz and glamour of spire life in Arsius Station, a part of her still craved the normalcy of solar cycles from back home on Earth.

  “Cam Ket has been promoted to Beta-Sirius rank.”

  A look of confusion flashed across her face, her eyebrows narrowing as she stared off into space, trying to search for an answer in the empty air.

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  “I take it that the gravity of this achievement is lost on you, isn’t it?” He said after a few minutes of awkward silence.

  She blanched, chuckling awkwardly before offering a sweet smile, “I’m sorry Sir,” She said, “I know the basics of the A.R.M.S. field. I know the ranks, I know what they look like, but past that, I’m sorry to say that I’m at a bit of a loss.”

  A clipped sigh left his voice box as he leaned against the partitioned wall that separated the living room from the kitchen, “Let’s just say… It’s a highly unusual feat.”

  She nodded along with his words, then blinked, looking up at him with a raised eyebrow, “Wait…” She said, “I thought you expected him to level up from the fight… as long as he survived I mean.”

  “I didn’t expect him to skip a full beta rank,” He said, “Nor did I expect him to unlock a stratagem so quickly.”

  “What’s a stratagem?” She asked, keeping her eyes on him as she walked past him to sit on a plush green couch.

  “An ability… of sorts,” He said, no longer looking at her, but focusing on the ground now as he continued to explain, “An ability that is only given to pilots that are paired with an A.I.. It’s only achievable after a significant bond between pilot and co-pilot has been established.”

  “And…” She said, dragging out the word as she tried to follow his thought process, “I presume It’s probably not something that someone who just recently paired with an A.I. can achieve?”

  Fletcher shook his head, “Another highly unlikely anomaly. Along with a rather… strange brain wave scan that I recorded during the fight.”

  “Strange how?” She asked.

  “Strange in the way that, about halfway through the fight, several sections of his brain seemed to cease functioning.”

  He eyes widened slightly as she absorbed the information he was presenting to her, “What do you mean they ceased to function?” She asked, “Wouldn’t that mean he’d be in a coma, or… or…”

  “Braindead?” He finished for her, “Technically speaking, it would depend on the sections of the brain that are affected. There have been cases from old earth of victims of aneurysms surviving with pieces of the affected tissue removed. As to this situation, I’m not sure. But the part that is even stranger, is that after the fight, they returned to their standard function, like nothing had ever happened.”

  “Okay…” She said, a feeling of unease beginning to well up inside of her chest as she shook her head, trying to understand, “Sir… why are you telling me all of this?”

  This caught Fletcher’s attention, causing him to face her once again, “Because one event is a coincidence, two is an anomaly, and three is a pattern. Because my interest to gain knowledge about this man, and his mech has not waned, but in fact compounded. I’m telling you all of this, because I would very much like to invite Mr. Ket to fight again, only this time, as a Gamma.”

  Priya’s eyes widened with every sentence, nearly bulging out of their sockets when he’d finished.

  “You want to have him fight on the circuit?” She asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” He said, shaking his head, “I simply need another fight or two, until I can gather more data. Data that you can’t drink or screw out of someone.”

  She grimaced internally at the verbal barb, though her outward appearance didn’t reflect the flash of anger she felt.

  “But why do you need my help?” She asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” He replied, “I need you to lead him down the route I need him to go on.”

  “The… Route?” She asked.

  “First,” He said, holding up a single metal finger, “I need him to make it to the Gamma ranks. If he’s going to fight again, then there will certainly be more scrutiny into his background, as opposed to a spur of the moment scouting scrap. Second,” He held up another finger, “I need him to actually agree to fight in the first place. What does he desire in order to do it? Money? Favor? What? And third,” He held up a third finger, “I need to know everything you can find about what brought him here, and what brought that Headsman into his possession. I want to know about his stratagem, I want to know about his combat protocol. Most importantly, I want to know more about his A.I.. He likely won’t tell anyone who’s not close to him. And getting close to people is not something I specialize in, nor is it a luxury that I can make the time for.”

  “And you think I can?” She asked, doing her best not to sound incredulous, “I know next to nothing about this field Fle- Mr. Kahl.”

  “But you do know everything about the relationships,” He shot back, “How to start them, how to care for them, and most importantly, how to manipulate them.”

  He stood up straight, stretching languidly despite the need to as he made his way towards the door, speaking as he walked.

  “After today, you will no longer work your normal clients, I will handle those duties from here on out. Cam Ket is your sole priority until I say otherwise. You will receive official orders and initial instructions in a day or two once I shore up the specifics with another part of the plan. Until then, think of how you’re going to accomplish the tasks I’ve laid out.”

  “B-But!” She called out after him, causing him to stop halfway through the threshold, looking over his shoulder at her. She gasped softly, chastising herself internally for blurting out, “I-I mean… You’ve given me no direction here, Sir. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “It’s simple Priya,” He said nonchalantly, “You’re a woman blessed with beauty and charm. He’s a man shackled with the weight of youth and an overabundance of testosterone. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.