Chapter 1: The Unwelcome Rookie
The air in the briefing room tasted like cold metal and ozone. Blue light from hovering holographic schematics painted sharp angles across Commander Yuki Hayashi’s face, turning the silver streaks in her severe bob into filaments of live wire. Tara Sato stood at a modified parade rest, her boots silent on the polished floor, and tried to keep her breathing even. The faint, ever-present hum of the facility vibrated up through her soles.
“Sato.”
The word wasn’t loud, but it cut through the sterile silence like a knife. Commander Hayashi didn’t look up from the datapad in her hand. Her scarred knuckles were bone-white where she gripped it.
“Yes, Commander.”
“Your file is a joke.” Hayashi finally lifted her gaze. Her eyes were the colour of glacial ice, and they held no warmth, only a simmering, professional contempt. “Eight weeks of basic. Zero sim hours. Zero field conditioning. Not even a psych eval in the standard bracket.” She flicked her wrist, and the datapad skidded across the smooth tabletop, stopping an inch from the edge. “Explain to me why you’re in my unit.”
Tara’s kendo instincts kept her perfectly still. Don’t flinch. Don’t show the ripple. The holograms of the war machines—their war machines—pulsed gently behind the Commander, monstrous humanoid shapes woven through with glowing, vein-like structures. She could almost smell the inside of the pilot chamber from here. Not metal. Something wetter.
“I was ordered to report, Commander. I follow orders.”
“Don’t.” Hayashi took a single step forward. She was shorter than Tara but seemed to occupy more space, her presence a physical pressure. “Don’t give me that pristine recruit bullshit. I’ve buried veterans who had more right to be here than you. This isn’t infantry. This is a symbiotic death sentence. You get chewed up in there if your mind isn’t wired for it. So somebody wired yours. Why?”
A memory flickered, unwanted: the smell of singed circuitry and blood, a scream that wasn’t hers but felt welded to her spine. Tara shoved it down. “I don’t know, Commander.”
“You’re a liar.” Hayashi stated it as a fact, her voice flat. “Or you’re ignorant. Neither is acceptable in my cockpit.” She circled the table, her boots tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm. “I read your physicals. Exceptional neural conductivity. Off the charts. They fast-tracked you for a reason. Did they tell you what happens inside a Golem?”
Tara’s throat tightened. “The basics, ma’am.”
“The basics.” Hayashi snorted, a short, harsh sound. She stopped in front of a hologram, the blue light etching the fine web of scars on her neck. “You get folded into a cavity barely big enough for a child. The interface isn’t a control yoke. It’s an organism. It wants inside you. It needs your endocrine system, your nervous system, your fear. Every single hole you have becomes a data port. It tickles. It prods. It tastes. And then, if you’re lucky, it decides to let you breathe while it uses your cerebellum to walk.”
The clinical description was worse than any horror story. It made it real. Tara felt a phantom sensation, a creeping itch along her inner thighs, the ghost of a touch at her ears. She swallowed.
“You think your kendo trophies matter in there?” Hayashi continued, her eyes drilling into Tara’s. “Your body isn’t yours in the link. It’s fuel. The Golem has the instincts. You’re just the cerebral cortex it borrows. My last co-pilot…” She trailed off, her jaw working. For a second, something raw flashed in her eyes—guilt, fury, a pain so deep it had turned to stone. It vanished as quickly as it appeared. “He followed the basics, too. Now he’s a vegetable on life support in Ward Seven.”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the low hum. Tara’s heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. She wanted to step back. She wanted to run. Instead, she found her voice, quieter now. “Why accept me, then? If my presence is an insult.”
Hayashi stared at her for a long, punishing moment. “Because the order came from above my above. And because,” she said, the words seeming to cost her, “your sync scores, theoretical as they are, suggest you might not die in the first thirty seconds. That’s the only reason you’re not on a transport back to basic right now. A might.”
She picked up the datapad again, tapping the screen. A new hologram flickered to life—a simpler, skeletal outline of a Golem’s pilot chamber, the interior walls depicted as a squirming mass of tendrils.
“Suit up. Induction is now. We’re doing a live, low-power neural handshake.”
Tara’s blood went cold. “Now?”
“Is there a problem, Recruit?” The Commander’s glare was a physical force. “The war doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. You either sync, or you break. I need to know which it is before I waste any more of my time.”
The walk to the suit-up bay was a blur of sterile white corridors and echoing footsteps. The techs, silent and efficient, helped her into the form-fitting black interface suit. It was cold, sliding over her skin like a second layer of nerve endings. The material sealed at her wrists, her ankles, her throat with a soft hiss. No helmet. Her head would be exposed, the point of primary contact.
The Golem bay was cathedral-sized and deafeningly loud. Machinery clanged, hydraulic systems hissed, and beneath it all was a low, organic thrum, like being inside a giant, sleeping heart. And there it was.
Unit-7. It wasn’t just a machine. It was a titan of composite plating and exposed, grafted muscle-like polymer, its surface gleaming under the arc-lights. At its chest was the open cockpit, a dark, wet-looking maw.
“Up the gantry.” Hayashi was already suited up, her movements brisk, her face a mask of grim focus.
The climb felt endless. The smell hit Tara first—ozone, antiseptic, and something cloyingly sweet, like overripe fruit. She peered into the chamber. The walls were alive. A carpet of thick, root-like tendrils, glistening with clear lubricant, pulsed and gently squirmed over each other. There was no seat. Just a space.
“Step in. Let the interface suit guide you. Don’t fight the initial penetration. It will happen whether you fight or not. Fighting just hurts more.”
Tara took a final breath, the air tasting of fear, and backed into the opening.
It was instantly, profoundly wrong. The tendrils were warm. They yielded as she pressed in, then immediately conformed, wrapping around her legs, her torso, her arms with a gentle, insistent pressure. They caressed. One slid up her neck, behind her ear. She gasped as a thinner filament found the corner of her mouth, its tip probing with delicate, terrifying curiosity. More pressed insistently against the sealed seams of her suit at her lower back, between her legs. The suit, designed for this, began to retract in specific, vulnerable areas, allowing the organic system access.
Panic, pure and electric, shot through her. She tried to jerk her head away. A stronger tendril curled around her forehead, holding her gently firm. Don’t fight. It hurts more. Hayashi’s voice, in her memory. Tara forced herself to go limp, to let the breath shudder out of her.
The probing became more deliberate. A soft, slick pressure there. And there. A sudden, intimate intrusion that made her vision spark. It wasn’t violent. It was thorough. It was violation by absorption.
A voice, not in her ears but in the meat of her brain, slithered through the panic. SYSTEM… ONLINE. NEURAL CANDIDATE DETECTED.
The world outside vanished. Darkness. Then, a torrent of sensation that was not her own. The weight of giant limbs. The strain of hydraulic actuators. The taste of the bay’s air through external chem-receptors. And hunger. A deep, pervasive hunger for purpose, for motion, for command.
PRIMARY LINK ESTABLISHED. ASSESSING COMPATIBILITY.
Pressure built in Tara’s skull. She felt the Golem’s ancient, crude consciousness brush against hers. It sifted through surface thoughts—the fear, the cold, the memory of the dojo, the sharp scent of polish, her father’s voice calling a point—MEN!
The Golem fixated. It latched onto the muscle memory, the hyper-aware state of combat, the spatial geometry of strike and parry. It understood that.
In the control bay below, alarms chimed softly on a monitor. Commander Hayashi watched, arms crossed, her expression unreadable. The sync percentage on Tara’s screen wasn’t climbing slowly. It spiked. 40%. 65%. 89%.
It shouldn’t have been possible for a first contact.
Inside the wet, warm darkness, Tara wasn’t piloting. She was being. The Golem’s desire to move became her own. She felt a colossal fist clench. A servo in the bay whined in protest.
Hayashi’s eyes narrowed. “Sato. Ease back. You’re forcing a feedback loop.”
Tara didn’t hear her. She was drowning in the echo of a kendo shout and the machine’s raw, primal want. The sync meter ticked to 92%.
And then the memory surged—not the dojo, but the other thing. The thing that had gotten her noticed. The blinding light, the splitting pain in her mind, the feeling of her own consciousness shredding like paper to make room for something else, something screaming…
WARNING. PSYCHIC FEEDBACK DETECTED.
The Golem recoiled. The intimate tendrils inside her convulsed.
Tara screamed. A raw, soundless scream inside the pod as the neural link fractured into a storm of blinding static and fragmented, agonizing sensation. The last thing she was aware of was the taste of copper flooding her mouth, and the violent, shuddering jerk of Unit-7’s entire frame before the world went black.