Restart

There would be no one to miss her, she thought as she quickly mounted the metal steps taking her closer to her machine. A torn back-pack hung limply from her right shoulder, its sparse contents everything she would use to set up her new life in space. Her purposely destroyed uniform caught on a bolt and she yanked it free without a care to the cloth. Already, her barely there undershirt showed down her side, along with one scraped knee and the back of her other thigh. One more rip didn’t matter when time was closing in so quickly. Her mind retraced every step she had taken to get into the hangar: through the corridors, around the corners, past at least two guards. Each step became a silent oath to escape; every movement a soundless testament to her stealth training. Step after step had assured her that she had at least five minutes before anyone noticed something amiss. She glanced at her watch again. At seven p.m. on the dot, she would be summoned to dinner with Commander D’Morte, and then, there would be panic because her room was disarrayed and her window open.

She wasn’t in the least worried about anything or anyone she had left behind. The room was left in a flurry from her searching for her few wanted possessions and the window had been the only feasible escape. She knew better than anyone the sensitivity of the alarm on her chamber door. D’Morte had intended it as a way to keep would-be assassins out – instead it had become the lock on her freedom. Heather sadistically shook herself from those thoughts. There wasn’t much time to access the system and leave without someone realizing she had broken direct orders and left the barrack, and it would take a good three point seven minutes to activate the system and attach the command modules. It had taken her longer than she had predicted to fish out the old clothes from her trunk and a few meager seconds longer to find the hat she had been ordered to destroy. Outrageous orders didn’t make a leader – they made a tyrant. The tyrant’s orders meant nothing without true meaning behind them – it only made them more words from a madman – and it made her even more determined to disobey them.

That hat had become her first form of rebellion. She smiled faintly as she jammed her hat further down on her darkened hair, making sure the bulk of her curls remained tightly coiled underneath. Not that her appearance mattered, but appearing boyish would buy her a little time if she was spotted walking around base before she could get to the Lilith. The faded black cap protested the stretch, but accepted the strain allowing a few wispy ringlets to dangle. There were no symbols or writing on it, but it wasn’t part of the standard Federation uniform. Heather often thought about how she had ended up with that hat anyway, but couldn’t remember anything before Blue Cove Base. Commander D’Morte complained it was offensive and had ordered it be destroyed. He hadn’t told her why – just that she couldn’t keep it. Not only had she not destroyed it, she had kept it in her own barrack instead of her issued locker, making it her talisman – a shield against the oppressive regime she was supposed to be serving. She turned the final corner and entered the courtyard around the Suit for Piloted Interspacial Flight. Her machine, the Lilith, seemed to call to her, begging for release from the stupidity of the surrounding lackeys. For Heather, there was no question about how to operate the machine. It had become as simple as second nature during the short training period, and advancing past the morons who had begun the class with her had been easy.

No one would suspect a titled officer to be a traitor. This was the second form of her rebellion. Commander D’Morte had issued her commands to destroy a base three days ago. He was expecting her to leave and return – with or without the simpletons that made up her battalion. The fact that she was flying solo wouldn’t alarm him, nor would the detail that she had taken the meca she was supposed to be banned from. He would see it as taking the tools necessary for the mission in the utmost efficient way. Everyone else would assume she had been kidnapped, or forced, or something equally dastardly and cruel to have gone against direct orders.

‘Everyone’ was a blithering idiot.

With a scraping metal sound, the hatch clicked open and the door slid slowly into the machine, leaving a sixteen inch hole in the head plate. Heather threw the worn bag in, before dropping herself into the only seat in the cockpit. Her body contorted easily, allowing her to slide down the side and place her feet on the floor before flopping down on the seat. The top hatch wasn’t the easiest entrance to the machine, but it was the only stealth entrance. She couldn’t open the main front hatch without alerting everyone to her presence and ruining everything she had worked so hard for. She paused to tuck a loose strand of her raven hair back behind a silver laden ear, flicking one of the small loops in the process with a wince. The pilot’s seat swiveled giving her a view of the instrument panel that covered the entire wall behind her. She scanned it quickly to verify that all the multitude of knobs, levers, and buttons were set in the right positions. Few soldiers knew what the levers meant, but since she had been banned, a mechanic had been assigned to clean the machine. If she could get her hands on him, she would strangle him for his greasy hands on her machine. Her fingers clenched unconsciously. When she noticed, Heather forced herself to relax, taking a deep breath to fortify herself against the rest of the trip.

Space travel was cold and lonely, but it would be a sauna in comparison to the treatment of her ranking officer – her only ranking officer. The Commander was too cold for his own good when it wasn’t necessary; and, unfortunately for everyone at the Federation of Earth Colonies Alliance Boston Base, fiery about the wrong things. It would do her self-control good to retreat now and fight later: She hadn’t the strength or the force to take him out by herself now. She would not fight unless more than assured of her victory. Rule number one in winning the war: Never fight a battle you’re assured to lose unless you have two planned escapes and can considerably weaken their defenses for another day.

Failure had never been a viable option.

She pulled the hatch closed and punched in a series of key codes to activate her mechanical friend. The figure moaned to life, followed by several yelled reactions from below as they realized that someone was stealing one of their precious mobile suits. Almost instantly, alarms rang out from every tower on the base. But, they were too late now that the machine was activated. Red lights blinked from the centers below her causing the sensors in the machine to twitch in response. She closed her eyes and pressed her palm to the control panel. The machine responded to every thought and movement as the sensors from her seat connected themselves to her body. One clamped onto the support of her skull cutting her neck, but she refused to flinch – until the one attached itself to the base of her spine. That sensor attached itself directly into her spinal cord, reading every nerve. Heather bit her lip hard to keep from screaming, even though she had been prepared for the connection. It sent a wave of bile through her throat, but she swallowed it down harshly. Her stomach twisted in a giant knot that she had never gotten quite used to as she fired up the lift rockets and blasted away from the cement and steel hanger and toward the orbital colonies and her future. The coordinates for Sector Two flashed on her front screen before magnifying to show her Fort Bratumil, the current base for the Neo Orbital Vigilante Alliance and her destination. Almost as an after-thought, Heather spun the machine so she could see the office windows of her ex-commander and saluted – a mockery of the years spent under his tutelage and iron fist. She would be free.

From his office, Commander Rue D’Morte, clothed as always in his impeccably neat and polished uniform, watched his young charge blast off and smiled evilly, his elongated eye teeth protruding in the sinister snarl. He was supremely confident in Heather’s mechanical ability to complete her mission. She wasn’t top in all her classes for nothing. She had been trained to complete every aspect of her duties regardless of the cost to herself. Efficiency was her best weapon and she wielded it with a deadly accuracy. His little butterfly would test her wings for now, but she would return. He would see to it. She would always be his and only his. After all, he had trained her to be as such.

Space moved more quickly than she had expected. The colonies did not orbit far out of the Earth’s gravitational pull and it wasn’t more than a couple of hours before her destination came into view in the window of the Lilith’s main console unit. A star seemed to twinkle in the distance, and Heather closed her eyes making a childish wish for peace and protection, even when she knew she was walking into a war zone. She frowned, knowing things like wishes had never been a part of her life and she knew now would be no different. Briefly, she wondered why she could remember no childhood, but she suppressed that thought with her memories, her eyes glazing at the effort. Blinking her vision clear, she began her descent to the colony below her – a deep breath her only fortification against the coming clash to be accepted.

Heather watched, smiled almost cynically, as the guards below her scrambled to clear enough room in the storage hanger for her humanoid machina. As she shut off the engines and brought her machine to a complete stop, two soldiers, clearly marked as higher rank, marched into the room and stopped to await her descent. The hard lines of their faces wiped the smile off her face as she unbuckled the machine from her nervous system. Wincing as the last sensor detached, she assessed the men and their threat level. Quickly she dismissed the idea of the infamous Commander Renata showing up for such a routine request. With a nervous flutter, she wiped the few drops of blood off the base of her neck and watched the men for a moment longer. However, one of the men stood unmoving and fairly unnerving as he waited for her to show; the other danced around impatiently, almost imperceptibly. Only a quick assessment outlined this second man’s movements as if he wanted anything but to be waiting, much less with the other officer. ‘He would be the easy one to overcome,’ she thought, ‘Simple to ignore and march over in the quest to destroy the Centre in Boston.’ She told herself this, but at the same time, there was something about that man that set the alarms in her head wailing. Slowly, she pushed open the hatch and for once she was glad she had refused to wear the uniform of her last home. There was no doubt that with a Federation uniform she would have been seen as a ‘daughter of Earth,’ and therefore a threat to what the Alliance wished to accomplish. It couldn’t have been farther from the truth – on the contrary, she wished to further their goals and take out the main base as soon as it was feasibly possible. She sighed as she dropped quickly to the hanger floor, after all, she could have done worse. But, if the dancing officer and the ice cube were the best that N.O.V.A. had to offer, it could take a while.