*The com remains wordless for a while, audio only, the feed sitting there in the emptiness just long enough for you to consider reaching over and ending the loneliness of a hanging call, with only the familiar resonance of ill-mounted wires and questionably insulated circuitry punctuating the silence. You can almost smell the burning plastic.*

“Isa’, I’m black on Paralysers, c’mon, man, you’re not on training wheels. Get a G.O.F.O before I knock you into a meatwagon. Bolt those hardpoints down and secure me a fresh cassette before I lose all sense of target discrimination! Move ass and get off my fuselage…”

“…Shi’. Sorry, Munen. Brothers n’ all. What can you do, right?”

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Cradle 47-J, Hanger bay 2, Flight Deck, Battleship Matsuda.

---

“The advantage of being a snake is that nobody even wants to think about stepping on you… Isamu, you’re three mills out to the right of the port… kay, gotcha, we’ve got munitions feed… That’s the glory our movement - manpower is not a consideration so long as we have enough to keep the Dream flowing into the arteries of the mother empire. We are the life support machine that keeps Kusari from a living death, and everybody wants to turn us off. Better to be seen as something abhorrent, a ‘nuisance’ nobody quite wants to admit to being terrified of, an entity that is known to snap a few ankles, than a direct threat. So, yeah - I talk in social metaphor. If that’s too bamboozling for you, Hatsuyume, hell, I’ll speak in plainsong. But I’m not sure you’d have me doing what I do if I did, would’ya’?”

“…Right, I’m full as as the Kanzler's snatch. Blow the trailer off and find a blast shield, gotcha’.”

*The reedy, serene hiss of atmospheric gasses fills the feed as the cockpit vizor seals tight. Barely audible are the wisps of her breathing as the microphone nestles against her lips. The proximity jars with the camera, and reminds you once again that you’re not in the canopy with her. Perhaps she wanted it that way.*


“I don’t want to look as if I’m taking advantage of the First Sister’s good will, but I’m sure your heart tells you that I didn’t mail you only to bore you with trivialities. I’ll be blunt, I’m losing my edge. Har har. The wolves; they’ve have worrying at me ever since that psychotic little tryst with the KNF. Tohoku… Tohoku didn’t exactly balm life for me. My spine is a worm and sleeping pills just fall to dust. I can either grab an ever-higher dosage and chance my luck as a human vegetable, or I can do something of use to you and the Empress and continue my work on Malta, and leave the pain behind. I’ll still be available for patrols, it’s just… Goddess, I want to be human being, kicking and screaming, in a gravity field that doesn’t feel wrong on an actual freakin’ planet without being led to the nearest torture house. I’m a terrible human being, whatever, but I’m - a - human being, and I’m not going to be any good to you if I can’t see the sun without a UV filter draped over my eyes and a computer scaling the light down. Is it pathetic? Sure. Is it what we’re fighting for? Sure, and my grasp on that memory is slipping away from me. I’m an old woman - my peers are dying of Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and Poverty, whilst I’m still my everlastingly-Botticellian self.”


“I do what I do because I want to help people. What do snakes ever have to do with helping people? Efficiency, packed up in one dexterous whole. No limbs, just joint, one wriggling spine with a hole in either end for taking you in and crapping you out. Yep, that’s my tether reached - I’m out of rope.”

---

---

*You notice, for the first time, the wheedling groans of the waking servos coaxing coolant around the fighter’s guts, the super-chilled argon slush resisting like clotted blood. The ambience changed; the ship was no longer a dead thing, no longer merely the sum of her parts - she was alive, animate, and like a racehorse held too long in her stable was champing at the bit.*


“Effectively I’m asking you to let me work on the Seifuku-sha amongst the presence of people who barely look at me twice, amongst a civilisation that doesn’t regard everything I have ever done of personal value as a form of social excrement, before my conduct as a leader of men suffers some crippling breach that gets my sisters killed. My record is mostly stainless, and I’ll move hell and high water to keep it that way.”


“I’ll be turning whatever personal effects I couldn’t jam into the cargobay in with Sister Akiyama. Lillian needs something to do other than holding her eyes in her hands, so I’m temporarily elevating her as my acting replacement until I get back - Kirishiki will accompany her and spot-check for any judgement errors that elude her own discretion. They’ll make a fine pair; they’ll be needing each other, too.”


“I’m not asking this of you, Munen, I’m telling. Why on Amaterasu’s sainted sector would I be telling you from the hanger bay otherwise? The goddess didn’t vilify me for it, and I’ll consult her again before I clear Okinawa. Trust me, as much as you ever do…” *Nishi stares, or, you think she’s staring. It’s hard to tell where the console is, or the camera, or even if there's another camera - parallax could be deceiving you.* “- this comes from the freakin’ top, do you understand me, sis’?”

“Stay safe and firmly undead. Tell the point defence guys not to frag my arse once I punch out of the bay - I’ll be reading as an unregistered takeoff. That’ll make ‘em sweat.” *she chuckles, a low, crackling thing as the terminal struggles not to deafen you, so naked by comparison, so vulnerable against her skin of steel, and yet, so much more human for it.*

“Bon voyage. I don't know why I'm wishing that for you, Munen. I’m mostly talking to myself.”

---

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*Eleven gees pile-drive into the universe, and, in a bleared blurr of swearing and reheat, she’s gone, swaddled from the universe in a cradle of cable.*

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