spears of Uu'kata (CLEAN(ish) Version)

Chapter 1 - Targets

Charlotte hit the final chord on the guitar, drawing out the last verse of Piano Man as everyone around her either sang along at the top of their lungs or stuffed their face with tacos.

The crowd packed into the mess hall hooted, hollered and clapped when the song ended and, just as she was about to put her guitar down to enjoy her own tacos, Vasquez stood up and yelled to be heard over the din, "Hey amiga! Sing, Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

"Fuck you, Vasquez," she said, much to the amusement of all the other pilots.

"Anytime, any place, my goddess," he said, spreading his arms and bobbing his dark eyebrows.

"Back off, Vasquez," Ben, her closest friend, said menacingly. That is, as menacing as anyone can be with half a taco in their pie-hole.

Vasquez put his hands up in surrender. "I would never push a lady. Her choice. She could just sit right here on my face and play her guitar if she likes. I'll make her siiiiing!" he actually sang the last word and even Charlotte burst out laughing. Leave it to Vasquez to sexualize everything and make a fool of himself while doing it.

She picked up a taco and said, "If I ever sit on your face, Vasquez, it will be to fart."

Thompson, sitting across from Ben, blew his taco all over his tray and choked on what was left. Captain Dover, who was only one table over, turned red as a beat and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head slowly.

Charlotte got one bite of her taco. Only one, before the lights turned red and the claxon blared.

***

Charlotte slipped the second contact into her eye and blinked blindly as the countdown sounded, her vision nothing but a field of white. She didn't need her eyes to know where her bio mech was though and she quickly climbed the ladder and slipped into the cockpit, fitting her nose and mouth into the respirator before she could freeze her ass off in the flimsy, rubbery garments pilots had to wear in their mechs.

Charlotte gritted her teeth and breathed slowly as the needles stabbed into her spine and the bio-mech suite closed in around her with the whirring sounds of gears and servos and a series of mechanical clicks and snaps. The needles retracted a moment later after the soft stents were inserted and as her heads-up display blinked to life, her back went cold. The icy sensation quickly spread to her arms and legs and after blinking a few times she no longer felt as though she were inside the suit at all. Her suddenly powerful arms and legs were bulletproof metal and instead of her usual five foot nine, she stood almost eight feet tall. Charlotte was over four hundred pounds of war machine, yet she felt light as a feather as she flexed her muscles and wiggled her fingers. The drugs being pumped straight into her spine also numbed out emotion so after a few minutes, the anxiety of knowing she was about to be dropped into a warzone faded to a distant static. The inside of the suit gurgled as it filled with warm, slimy liquid, not unlike amniotic fluid.

Glancing to the right, she nodded to Ben and he lifted a massive metal arm to give her a Boy Scout salute.

Charlotte snorted. Ben was never a Boy Scout.

The PX0112 bio-mechs were a glorious creation that gave the human race an edge over every other beasty in space who thought it would be easy to make the human race into their bitch. Which, literally turned out to be every species they'd encountered since developing FTL drives and pushing far enough to encounter another species some two hundred and sixty-seven years ago.

Every time she donned her suit, despite how painful it was at first, she felt lucky to be able to bind with it at all. Most women weren't compatible with the drugs and would become either psychotically aggressive or suffer deep depression similar to that of postpartum. Charlotte experienced aggression when coming down from the drugs, sure. But she was able to hold herself back from the violence she so wanted to inflict. After countless training hours and thirteen successful missions, her psyche evals were always stable. Only one out of a hundred women could handle the binding drugs. Looking around at her fellow soldiers, she believed it. Over a hundred and fifty soldiers were suiting up and she was the only woman. Many of the scientists and analysts and doctors who moved among the giant bio-mechs were women, but as far as soldiers went, Charlotte was it.