“And this is where the magic happens.”

No windows illuminated the assembly chamber. Industrial espionage wasn’t worth the risk. Instead, giant floodlights bathed the colossal room in whites and yellows. Every sound bounced off the steel walls and vibrated through the air, smoke sucked into ventilators high above. 

It was like stepping into a cathedral, and that wasn’t necessarily far off. 

In the middle of the chamber stood the Frame, treated in every way that mattered with reverence. At 115 feet, it towered over everything else in the room. Almost every light in the room was positioned in such a way that it lit up the chrome, steel and titanium alloy that made up its chassis. 

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” 

Diana hooked her hands through the loops on her overalls, transferring grease from one to the other, although it was hard to tell which got it worse. Not that it mattered. It was not the first thing the eyes were drawn to, at least not the eyes of a connoisseur. 

And Epoc was a connoisseur in the truest sense of the world. She had loved women since she was old enough to love things, and Diana was the kind of woman that was easy for a woman like her to love. 

Overalls tied around her waist, a once-upon-a-time white tank top that accentuated the heavily defined musculature of her forearms, stained by grease and sweat and hard labor. She had a reserved smile, tugging gently at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes were starting to crease with crow’s feet, betraying her age. Hard work, a steady diet, and some gene therapy had otherwise kept her looking young. That, and she could probably fold a door in half. 

Epoc tore her eyes away from Diana and looked back up at the Frame, all tons. It really was a gorgeous machine. Designed for combat, yes, but the Mako Group did good work. It wasn’t all mercenary contracts and corpo warfare. They were small, yes, and a bit of an up-and-comer, but they’d already made a name for themselves doing disaster relief and combating megafauna, something they apparently excelled at. 

“What‘s her name?” she asked. 

“Nexus Alpha,” Diana said, and walked them into the room. “You wanna take a guess at how much it weighs?”

“This size?” Epoc said. “With or without the Higgs modulator active?”

“You know your stuff!” Diana said. She seemed happily surprised as she led them to an open-walled elevator. There were yellow lines on the floor, but other than that, people were expected to use common sense. “Let’s say without.”

“Easily twelve hundred tons, then. Something this big would crumple under its own weight.”

“Pretty much, yeah. So wanna guess how much she actually weighs?”

“About two hundred tons?”

“Half,” Diana said, raising her eyebrows to see if Epoc knew what that meant. She did.

“That’s not supposed to be possible!” She looked up at the machine with renewed admiration. “How would you even get it that light?” 

“I’m just really fucking good at my job,” Diana said proudly. “If you can get everything in its sweet spot, you can square the output.” She talked the entire elevator ride up, and Epoc didn’t mind. She was an enthusiastic audience, and the engineer really did seem to love Nexus. 

“How fast is she?” 

Diana looked at her with the kind of pride shared only by engineers and parents. “Fast,” she said, and there was a glimmer of manic energy in her eyes. Good. No engineer worth their salt didn’t contain within them the seed of a mad, evil genius. Epoc had no doubt that if Diana could find a way to make Nexus Alpha break the laws of physics entirely, she would. 

“I’d love to fly her.”

“Well,” Diana said, “you seem capable enough, but it’s not up to me.” The elevator stopped. The catwalk they were on still overlooked the hangar. Everything did. When you had to build something this big, it was just economical to have every other part of your business adjacent to the big fuck-off room. Space was a premium. Offices lined the catwalk. “Look,” Diana said, “usually you’d be talking to Theia. She’s Ms. Winter’s assistant and she deals in acquisitions and hires. That said, Ms. Winter wanted to see you personally, so when you’re talking to her, just be yourself. She respects honesty.”

She paused, and Epoc stopped with her. “Always am.”

Diana crossed her arms, and Epoc wondered briefly if she was doing it on purpose to fluster her or if she just Did That. Either way, the effect was one of feeling supremely intimidated in a not entirely unpleasant way. Diana being half a foot taller than her certainly didn’t hurt. Or help. “I figured, but it bears repeating. Don’t play games, just answer truthfully and I’m sure you’ll fit in just fine. I’m not going to give you the whole ‘we’re a family here’ spiel but you don’t get many companies that are all-women, and we try to keep a good atmosphere. Honesty is… an important part of that.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Epoc asked. 

“Because I like you,” Diana said with a shrug. “You seem like you take this job seriously and yeah, you’re a little younger than the average pilot but we need some young blood in this business and you’ve got your head on straight. Besides, you listened to me ramble about Nexus Alpha for a good ten minutes, and your eyes didn’t even glaze over once.”

“Are you kidding me?” Epoc said. “There’s way too much to look at for me to zone out. Besides, if I do end up piloting her, I will want to know everything.”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “That’s why I like you.” She stuck out her hand. 

Epoc liked to think she was pretty fit. You had to be, as a pilot. Yes, technically speaking a Frame did all the work for you, but in practice you were still moving your limbs as your brain tried to manage the fact that you were operating two bodies, and if your little fleshy one was out of breath, that could still take you out of the battle. Epoc had been training for ten years. Not one donut. 

Despite all of that, Diana’s hand almost crushed hers, and it took her a lot of effort to give her some decent resistance. After a few seconds, the engineer let go, winked, and walked off with a swagger. Then, she stopped. Epoc wondered what was wrong when Diana suddenly flexed, the muscles on her back rippling under her shirt.

With a wink and a smile, she turned a corner and was gone, leaving Epoc with an overclocked heartbeat and fried brain. Dian had known exactly the effect she’d had on her! This was evil! This was flirting! Had she been flirting all along? Had there been other signs? There was no way of knowing, and that was, of course, worse. 

She took a deep breath and turned back towards the door. Mako Group was a women’s corporation. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a corporation, that just meant it had a different culture than the average. The woman who owned it was still a multi-millionaire with enough spending cash to start a company and own several Frames, each of which was a hundred-million expense on its own and could take years to pay itself back. All that to say that this was not going to be a meeting of equals. 

Epoc was, in essence, applying to become property of the Mako Group. 

There were worse things, of course. Most corporation contracts involved some form of indentured servitude and one way or another, if Epoc got the job, she’d get to pilot the mech. Where she slept and ate didn’t matter all that much to her. There was no greater freedom than sitting in a Frame and seeing the world through its eyes. 

She’d only had the chance once before. It had been a decade ago, at the age of nineteen, and it had altered the course of her life immediately. It had been a simulation, but a remarkably good one, of what piloting felt like. The synchronicity of the muscles and limbs. The sensory overload that, once it settled, made her normal vision seem small and insignificant and lacking by comparison. She could see and be so much more. 

There was something else, but she didn’t tell people about that. It was awkward and embarrassing and it was one of the reasons she had dreamt of piloting every single night since that day. Not something for polite company. 

After a knock on the door, Epoc was let into the office. It was large, with a lot of open space, and a large window that overlooked the assembly yard. Surprising was the glass floor. It added an air of danger to the room. They were suspended close to 80 feet of the ground below, where people moved gear back and forth. If you had a space this big, it didn’t make sense not to also use it as a storage room, after all. 

Behind the desk sat a woman. It had to have been a woman because statues don’t blink. She looked like she was carved out of stone, her hair slicked back and braided tightly. She was younger than Epoc had expected, maybe a few years older than herself, but she carried herself with the stern seriousness of someone older. She wore a tailored suit with the company logo just above a breast pocket, though she had decided to forego the customary clip-on tie. 

Her perfectly manicured hands were steepled in front of her, and she smiled slightly when she noticed Epoc looking at her. Her lipstick, at least three shades of blue, purple and a deep red, made it all that much easier to notice. Epoc tried not to look at it too hard, looking her in the eyes instead. They were a deep, warm amber.

“You must be Epoc,” Ms. Winter said. “No last name?”

“No, ma’am,” she replied. “I quit.”

“Daring. May I ask why?”

“I’m a very good pilot, Ma’am,” Epoc said. “I was losing my mind driving loaders around a construction site all day.”

“Hmm.” Ms. Winter stood up and to her absolute horror, Epoc realized this woman was taller than her, too. Her heels clicked gently as she walked around the desk to approach her. “You know,” she said, “the recruiter spoke quite highly of you.”

Epoc swallowed as she found herself craning her neck to look up at the woman. “Yes,” she said. “Like I said. I’m a very good pilot, Ms. Winter.”

“Apparently. And please, that’s a little formal. Call me Antimony. Only clients call me Ms. Winter, and my pilots call me Handler.”

“You oversee missions yourself?” Epoc asked, trying not to fidget. 

“Yes,” Antimony Winter said as she walked over to the window, holding her hands behind her back. “I pride myself on a close working relationship with all my pilots, and I like to think it’s what makes us competitive in this market. Do you know what the early retirement rate is for pilots?”

“A little over eighty percent,” Epoc said, parroting the statistic. Most pilots, if they didn’t end up in a coma, spent the rest of their lives severely shaken, often unable to function in society after the heavy duress piloting had put on their minds. 

“Do you know Mako Group’s?”

“At a guess? Closer to fifty?”

“Almost,” Antimony said, turning around with a smile that briefly, it seemed, reflected stars. “Five. Not only do all our pilots stay in action longer, but they all end up taking desk jobs at Mako Group after they stop piloting. Most choose not to, of course. Our oldest is Chiara. She’s pushing seventy.”

“But… how?” 

“We take care of our own here, Epoc,” Winter said. “We make sure everyone has their needs met and comes back asking for more. We don’t fuck around, and we’re a team.”

“That’s… admirable,” Epoc said, and it wasn’t a lie. It was just unheard of. Why didn’t they lead with those numbers? They’d get potential pilots falling over themselves to… ah. That was probably why. 

“So, Epoc.” Antimony Winter stepped closer. “Why did you decide to become a pilot?”

“Because,” she said, “there’s nothing like it. When I was in that cockpit the world was tiny and I was… free. Free in a way nobody is anymore. It made me feel like I could do anything, go anywhere, take on anyone. The world was larger and smaller at the same time, in the best way. And, well, I’m really, really good at it. I hold the record for most sim hours and successful remote runs for anyone my age.” 

She’d said the last bit with a not-unearned sense of pride. And yeah, remote runs weren’t the same. Input delay could make the difference between life and… well not death, which was the point, but between success and ruining a very expensive piece of machinery. That’s why remote jobs tended to be mostly construction, and that was hardly Epoc’s goal. 

“Good start,” Antimony said. “Is that everything?” There was a knowing hint in her voice and Epoc felt her ears burning. She just hoped the CEO couldn’t tell. She swallowed and opened her mouth, but Antimony got there before she did, sitting down on the edge of her desk. “Be honest with me, Epoc. I have no use for a pilot who can’t tell me what things are like on the ground.”

Opening and closing her mouth like a beached fish for a few seconds, Epoc, took a breath. “It’s exhilarating,” she finally said. “If I’m honest I…. I’ve never felt so alive and…” she kept trailing off under Antimony’s scrutiny, but she pushed through, “there’s a… sexual element.”

The silence was deafening. She stared at Antimony Winter, who didn’t so much stare back as she pinned Epoc to the wall with her eyes. It was stifling, like being lifted by her collar and slammed into the metal prefab wall with enough force to knock the air out of her. 

Antimony opened her mouth and it looked for a second like she was panting, and then her lips curled into a grin, the first outward expression Epoc had seen her make. She gestured to the chair. “Have a seat, Epoc.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to be comfortable?”

Epoc resisted the giggle rising in her throat, tension bubbling up between her shoulder blades. “No,” she said, “why did you ask me that? Why did you make me–”

“I made you tell me the truth, Epoc,” Winter said. “That’s it. And the reason is because we do things a little differently here. But I think you’re exactly the kind of person we’re looking for.” She stepped behind her desk again, opened a drawer, then put three folders on top of it. “I’d like to offer you a contract.”

“Oh?” Epoc sat down as she was asked and looked at the three files. The first had a little symbol of a mouse on it. The second had a cat. The third just said “CLASSIFIED” in big red letters. 

“The three contracts we’re offering are, I think, very fair. It’s all up to you.”

Epoc shrugged. “Let’s hear it.”