Avona woke in darkness, the totality of it immersing her completely. A series of alarms screamed, made louder by the sound bouncing around the tiny cockpit. Instinctually she reached for the source of the searing pain in their leg by touch but her head was wrenched back into the seat. The neural shunt that connected her to her now dormant Enceladus-class mech was still connected to the base of her skull. Avona yelped in pain as the input yanked at her scalp, threatening to tear her implants free. Clumsily, she slapped at the emergency de-couple next to the seat, freeing her from the lifeless machine. Avona slumped forward as the tension released, and ripped off a glove to feel for damage to the delicate bio mechanics. Her fingers came away dry, so there was that at least, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that the air was increasingly thin, stale. A new problem.

Quickly, carefully, Avona ran her fingers over the multitude of buttons and switches that surrounded her in the pitch dark cockpit. She took slow, careful breaths as she searched until eventually she found the familiar textured plastic of the hard reset. She knew her machine so well she could read it like braille. The button depressed with a firm click and Avona waited and hoped beyond hope that at least life support was still functional. The alarms ceased, allowing her a moment of pleasant quiet. The reassuring hum of machinery in the belly of the machine told her the air would begin to clear.

The chunky plastic buttons and screens around her stuttered and flickered to life, bathing her in a soft orange glow. The screen to her right hummed, amber text printed line by line as it checked each of the myriad systems that kept Avona and the Enceladus unit alive.

In the dim light she could just make out her own form in the tight space of the cockpit, her jumpsuit unzipped to the waist against the heat of battle, the green fabric stained black below her right knee until it disappeared into the thick padding of her combat boots. Through the glass she could barely make out the enormous hand of her battle suit against the deep, the Enceladus unit.

A stretched humanoid shape, smaller than their opponents since the UPC couldn’t spare the resources for titans that the Hegemony could churn out en masse, so pilot sync and  maneuverability was their focus to win this. At least it had been. Scorch marks coated the pale silver armor, burnt into the steel like veins. And out beyond that, stillness. Not the flare of weapon fire or the quick movements of mech to be seen.  Even the planet, an isolated rock of rare earth, that had been the subject the whole war, was gone.

The battle was over. Both sides had retreated, leaving Avona with nothing for company save for shrapnel and the wreckage of Hegemony and Corps ships alike. She tried the radio. She checked the telemetry. Short, Medium, Long range. Anything, everything.

Silence.

In the gentle warmth of buttons and screens, a sickening thought dawned on her. She’d been left behind. The Encelaedus had been dead in the water, maybe the squad had thought her dead. Avona tried to stay calm - oxygen was at a premium - she needed to make every breath count. There was a standard day's worth of emergency supplies, a little water in case of power loss, but the suits weren’t designed to be active for this long, she burnt fuel faster than anything else in the fleet. An hour, two at most before the power cells ran down. She needed to find her squadron, to get the Enceladus online and moving.

The last thing Avona could remember was taking aim at an enemy suit, a brilliant light, then a wave of matter throwing both suits and ships backward with a force that had knocked her clean out.

“This is squad commander Jackson, reporting in.”

The radio clicked softly to no response. The regroup position was in the shadow of a nearby moon a few light-minutes travel, maybe they could hear her...

“This is Avona Jackson, is there anyone there?” She took her finger off the transmit button before adding a quiet, “please.”

A few minutes passed with only the sound of the life support hissing beneath her in the mech's belly. Idly, she kicked out her legs in the cramped cockpit, her right calf roaring back at her.

“Shit.” Avona hissed. Something was broken for sure, bones splintered and muscles wrenched out of place during the battle.

She tapped at the feed, tracing the glass with her fingers for any sign of movement on the long range scanner. Burnt hulls and great armored bodies ripped open from the inside by Fracture Shells. The corps’ specialty. She’d once worked the factory floor building those things.

There were bodies too, tiny frozen blips on her radar. Some very close it seemed. Out of morbid curiosity she flipped the external flood lights, cold sterile beams illuminating the space in front of the Enceladus. The mecha’s arms stretched out before her, stiff, encrusted with ice. Com readings stated the main interface was ready to power-up. But she’d need to hook back into the shunt to check if the machine would respond to her. Whatever power was left a full reboot would quickly eat through, so she had to work fast. With life support relatively stable, Avona ran through the complex series of checks and boot-ups faster than she’d ever done before. She pulled her hair aside, sat back in the seat and pressed connect.

She shuddered as the neural shunt connected to the base of her skull, ice water thrown over her. Avona shivered, gingerly zipping up her jumpsuit as the system flickered into her mind's eye, her field of vision expanding as it took on the vast array of sensors onboard. Her body flooded with system data fed directly into her nervous system, the pain in her leg became muted, far away. She tried to move the mech’s limbs, slowly making a fist with each hand, the joints stiff and battle damaged. A series of alerts flickered in the corner of her eye. ‘Do not launch, severe fuel leakage. Do not launch. Do not launch.’

“Shit.” Avona sighed to herself, touching the dashboard as the message looped, the warning symbol covering most of her vision. “Oh, what did they do to you baby?”

Avona muted the alert and continued checking through the many others the Enceladus had flagged for her, digging into the details, as if that would help. The engines were unstable, firing them up could detonate the mech. The only way to repair the mech would be to have it dragged back to base for a full strip down. Avona tapped her fingers nervously on the dashboard, as she digested the thought. The emergency beacon was active, but any one would hear it, including Hegemony ships.

She brought up the cam-feed from the battle, she had hoped to use it for training but now it seemed the only way to see what happened. As she wound back the footage, she realized she’d been unconscious for almost a full standard day. The life support had a few hours left at most, and only if there hadn’t been any atmospheric leakage. With a shudder, she hit play, and watched the battle unfurl before her.

She scrolled through her now poorly dated pep talk as they launched from the UPCs carrier, feeling a slurry of embarrassment and shame deep in her gut. For all she knew, they could all be dead by now. The Hegemony flag ship had arrived at planet A-487 - a continent sized steel lozenge-  a designated scientific site for both nations due to its strange isolation and structure, and began to frog march every UPC researcher off-world.

The UPC responded with their own fleet, and almost a standard year later, Avona and her fellow mech pilots were deployed to force the Hegemony to leave.

Hegemony ships fell before her and her squadron, hornets overwhelming the larger slower mechs. It had seemed like they were on the brink of victory. What had happened?

Then someone shouted over comms.

“What is that thing?”

In the distance, something emerged from the guts of the Hegemony flagship, a lance, a rail gun or sorts?

She’d never seen one before, and judging by the chatter on the recording no one else had either. The whole battlefield seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. A blinding colorless beam of light shot clean past the Enceladus into the planet below them. In the grainy feed she watched as the surface bore the impact, the outer crust rippled like liquid and then violently ruptured. A fountain the size of a continent spewed ash and bedrock into the atmosphere. The feed shook and spun as debris smashed into the mech-suit, her own voice a sharp yelp as she was knocked unconscious.

Avona kissed her teeth as the planet onscreen began to burst apart from the inside, superheated debris piercing ships and mechs alike ripping them apart. In the distance she could just about make out her lieutenant’s mech, the Demastor, torn in half. The lights along the mech’s stout frame flickered and went out as the two halves drifted away from each other. An old friend snuffed out in a moment.

“Shit.” Avona looked up through the window into the deep. Ten months fighting over a now atomised rock. Blood spilled for nothing. “Bloody waste.”

She paused the feed and began to troubleshoot the engines, in the hope there was a way to bypass the leaking engines. Over and over, she tried to fire them, increasingly frustrated and frightened. After the tenth try she fell forward head in hands, trying to stay calm, keep her breathing steady. Not think about how she was stranded alone in the ruined battlefield.

            Hell ----- llo?

Avona froze. It couldn’t be a voice, could it? The feed was extremely distorted, her eardrums cringed at the sharp crackles and pops. Whoever they were, their radio was fucked, or maybe it was her own like most things on board. She tapped at the radio in the hope she could dial it in a little. “Come again, I didn’t catch you there. This is Commander Avona Jackson of the United Peoples Corps, are you hurt?”

“Avona…Corps…” The voice veered between quiet and loud, stumbling over the words. Avona flicked through the different filters to clean up the voice in the hope of identification, and maybe evening locating them.

She wasn’t alone!

 “Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there? Your signal dropped out...” Avona opened the channel wide, her heart pounding. Whoever they were, maybe they had a working ship, maybe she could get out of here. Any Hegemony stragglers listening in would hear but the low oxygen warning in the corner of the screen told her she had to take the chance. “Hel- Shit.”

The burst mecha opposite her, a Hegemony suit, tilted its cracked head. Below her, the cracked screen identified it as the source of the voice. The partially dismembered body jerked as it moved. Avona tried the launch sequence again to no avail. How was the pilot even alive? The core of the thing was torn open, the pilot would be liquified by the radiation in a matter of hours. 

“Call… help…”  The voice gurgled like their throat was full, a person crying out as they drowned.

“What’s your call sign, Hegemony suit?”

The voice at the end of the feed crackled sharply, of a death rattle and went dead.

Avona tried to reconnect, sending out the signal again, and again. The silent wait quickly became unbearable and Avona hit play on the cam feed to fill the space. Maybe there was something to see after she’d been knocked out.

She pressed down on the button and sped through the detonation, the planet bursting open in an instant. Then something else. The feed shook and crackled, becoming distorted as a shape ripped itself free from the tear in the rock, crossing thousands of miles in an instant and engulfing the immobilised mech that now drifted opposite her.

She looked up at the battle suit. A puppet hanging limp in space.

“Hegemony suit, do you read?” The machinery opposite her hung limply in the deep, the throat of the mech rent open with detonation. 

The radio clicked - a wet gurgle.

The mech opposite her jerked and twitched, as the thing tried to crudely manipulate its broken body. It thrashed and tore itself to pieces, pieces of itself spinning endlessly into the deep.

“What in the fuck...”

A shadow emerged from the remains of the mech, a hole in space where something should be, barreling the few short miles between her and the remains of her desecrated opponent. It seeped through the panels. Air-tight, vacuum proof - but this thing saw no such obstacle.

A chill ran through her nervous system, her limbs contracted and pain shot down her leg. The entity paid no mind to her broken ankle, reaching out to puppeteer like it had. The claustrophobia of the cockpit magnified by the being that forced its way into her brain the pressure in her skull so intense she thought it might burst.

Call for help.

The voice thundered in her skull, a palimpsest of voices layered so thickly it became one. The voice of a planet. How long had that thing dwelt in the planet's core, how long had it slept? And what would it do with an intact body to puppet?

“What are you? What are you?”

Her hand twitched as the being played with her senses, every nerve ending tested for response, pushing her aside

Avona used that instant to rip out the shunt and threw herself forward to deactivate the computer but it was too late.

The recovery beacon was silent within the cockpit of the Eceladus but it might as well have been a scream in the dark. The corp, the Hegemony, anyone that heard would find her soon. And this being, this thing, would latch on…