Chapter 12: Gagged and Loaded
The walk from the head to Mech Bay Three was conducted in a silence so complete it felt like a third person walking between them. The earlier comfort, the humming and the warmth, might as well have happened in another lifetime. Now, Rysia’s grip on Nova’s elbow was purely functional, a steer leading a asset to its point of deployment. The scent of antiseptic from her quarters was gone, replaced by the familiar, greasy perfume of hydraulic fluid, ozone, and scorched metal.
Bay Three was a cathedral of war. Servo-cranes hung like skeletal giants from the vaulted ceiling. The floor vibrated with the deep, idle thrum of reactors on standby. And there, at the center of it all, stood her Razorfalcon. It was a 50-ton specter of molded ferro-fibrous armor and mirrored myomer bundles, its cockpit a dark, predatory eye gazing down. The personalized kill marks—a series of jagged lightning bolts—seemed to smirk in the bay’s harsh light.
Two other mechwarriors, Haas and Jax, were pre-flighting their machines nearby. Haas’s blocky Centurion and Jax’s bird-like Phoenix Hawk were older, louder, smelling of sweat and constant repair. The pilots leaned against a tool cart, their conversation dying as Nova and Rysia approached.
“Well, look who’s all tuckered out from her nap,” Haas drawled, his voice a gravelly bark. He was a slab of a man with a perpetual five-o’clock shadow.
Jax, wiry and sharp-eyed, snorted. “Heard you had a rough night, princess. Wet the bed again?”
The words were casual, standard bay harassment. But they landed like micromissiles on Nova’s raw nerves. Her face, already pale, burned. She stared straight ahead at the access ladder to her cockpit, her jaw clenched so tight it ached.
Rysia didn’t acknowledge them. She guided Nova to a pre-flight station beside the Razorfalcon’s left leg. Laid out on a clean cloth were the final pieces of her interface gear: the neural cap, its fibers gleaming, and next to it, the modified pacifier gag.
It was a newer model, medical-grade silicone. The shield was clear, but fastened to the front was a small, stupid pink butterfly emblem. It was meant to be a ‘soothing visual focus point’ according to the psych team. To Nova, it was a neon sign broadcasting her infirmity.
“Open,” Rysia said, her tone devoid of all the previous night’s melody. It was a command.
Nova’s eyes flicked to Haas and Jax. They were watching, not even pretending to work now, grins spreading across their faces. A hot wave of defiance surged through her humiliation. “I don’t need it,” she muttered, her voice low and thick. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re agitated. Your salivary control is the first to go under stress, and you cannot choke on your own vomit mid-maneuver. Open.”
“They’re looking.”
Rysia finally turned her head, her calm gaze sweeping over the two gawking men. They didn’t look away, but their smirks faltered slightly under her flat, assessing stare. She looked back at Nova. “Let them look,” she said, her voice dropping, meant for Nova alone. It wasn’t gentle. It was a challenge. “Let them see the ritual. Then let them watch you become something they can’t comprehend. The gag isn’t your weakness, Nova. It’s the key to the lock. Now, open.”
The logic was a cold blade. It cut through the shame, leaving something sharper behind. A focused kind of anger. She hated it. Hated Rysia for being right. Hated the pink butterfly. Hated Haas’s knowing chuckle.
She opened her mouth.
Rysia fitted the gag with swift, practiced motions. The silicone nub settled on her tongue. The straps tightened at the corners of her mouth, then around the back of her head, secure and inescapable. The world’s sounds became muffled. Her own breathing grew loud in her ears. She could feel the butterfly against her lips.
A snort of laughter came from the tool cart. “Aww, matches her decor,” Jax giggled.
Nova’s fists clenched at her sides, nails digging into her palms. The urge to turn and scream at them was a physical pressure in her chest, but the gag held it all in, turning it into a trapped, steaming heat.
Rysia leaned in close, her hands finishing the buckle behind Nova’s head. Her lips were near Nova’s ear. “Good. Now, hold that feeling. That’s your fuel. Don’t waste it on them.” She pulled back, her eyes locking onto Nova’s. They were hard, like chips of obsidian. “Focus on the drop, little star. The quiet is gone. It’s time to burn. Let them see the weapon you become.”
She gave the final strap a precise, definitive tug. Then she turned, her posture radiating a dismissal so absolute it even silenced Haas and Jax. They shuffled back to their mechs, the humor gone from their faces, replaced by a wary respect.
Rysia picked up the neural cap. “Ready for the link.”
Nova nodded, the motion stiff. The cap settled over her skull, cold at first, then warming. She could feel the faint, pre-connection prickles against her scalp, like static. Rysia ran a diagnostic wand over the connections, her expression one of intense scrutiny.
“Primary and secondary linkages… green. EI dampener is set to 70%. Remember, no pushing it. You feel the strain, you pull back and call it. Not a request.”
Nova couldn’t speak. She gave another nod.
“Alright. Up you go.”
The climb up the access ladder was different this time. The padded diaper was a silent presence, a humiliating reminder of her dependency. The pacifier gag shaped her breathing. The neural cap was a crown of impending fire. She was a bundle of contradictions, ascending into the machine that would simplify everything.
She hauled herself into the cockpit. The harness embraced her, clamping down with familiar, bone-compressing pressure. The canopy hissed down, sealing her in a world of dim, blood-red instrument glow. The scent was hers—old sweat, hot electronics, the faint, coppery tang of neural fluid.
Her hands settled on the throttle and joystick. They didn’t tremble.
Outside, Rysia gave her a thumbs-up from the deck, then moved to the bay controller’s station.
Nova’s thumb flipped up the guard on the primary ignition. She paused. She could see the blurred reflections of Haas and Jax in their own canopies, making final checks. She thought of the word that had slipped out in Petrova’s briefing. The warmth of the night. The cold judgment in the commander’s eyes.
She pressed the switch.
The Razorfalcon woke up around her.
It was not a gentle awakening. A deep, subsonic vibration rose through the frame, shaking her teeth. The holographic HUD flickered to life across the canopy, painting targeting data, terrain maps, and system diagnostics in shimmering green. The fusion reactor’s heart began to beat behind her, a low, powerful thrum-thrum-thrum that she felt in her ribs. The myomers in the mech’s limbs twitched, a giant stretching its tendons.
She keyed the mic. Her voice, filtered and distorted by the gag and the comm system, was a hollow, mechanical growl. “Razorfalcon, systems online. Reactor nominal. Weapons hot.”
“Confirmed, Razorfalcon,” came the bay controller’s voice. “Standby for drop sequence.”
The EI interface waited. A final, glaring prompt on her main screen: NEURAL HANDHAKE – ENGAGE Y/N?
This was the threshold. On one side was Nova, the humiliated woman in a diaper and a gag. On the other was the weapon, pure and ruthless.
She took a deep, shuddering breath through her nose, the pink butterfly flattening against her lips.
She selected Y.
The world dissolved.
It wasn’t like the slow, chemical blanket of the drugs. This was a violent, brilliant aperture. A screaming torrent of data replaced her five senses. She was no longer in the Razorfalcon.
She was the Razorfalcon.
The 50-ton frame was her own body. She felt the chill of the bay deck through its soles. The servos in its legs were her quadriceps, humming with potential energy. The 360-degree sensor sphere was her vision, a seamless panorama of the bay—she could feel Haas’s Centurion powering up to her left, could taste the heat-spoor from its exhaust vents. The crosshairs painting a targeting bracket on a distant light fixture were her focus.
The anger, the shame, the helpless warmth from the night before—it all found a conduit. It flooded into the machine, but the machine didn’t feel emotions. It translated them into pure, actionable calculus. The shame became hyper-vigilance. The anger became a predator’s patience. The memory of Rysia’s hands tightening the gag’s strap became a directive: CONTAIN. CONTROL. DOMINATE.
A new voice filled the comms, crisp and authoritative. It was Drop Control. “All units, this is Black Swan. You are clear for launch on my mark. Pattern Delta. Secure the haulers. Engage hostiles at will. Razorfalcon, you have point on the canyon flank. Mark in five… four…”
The bay doors before her groaned and began to part, revealing the infinite black of the transport ship’s launch tube, and beyond, the speckled velvet of space and the swirling, ochre-brown smear of the Luyten Dust Belt.
“Three… two…”
She fed power to the legs. The Razorfalcon took a step forward, the impact jolting through her.
“One.”
“Mechwarrior Nova,” Rysia’s voice cut in on a private channel, calm and clear amidst the digital storm. It was the last human sound she would hear for hours. “Come back whole.”
The catapult engaged.
There was no sound in the void, only a massive, physical shove that slammed her back into the gel-padded seat. The bay, the ship, Rysia—everything vanished in a streaking blur. For a heartbeat, there was nothing but terrifying, exhilarating momentum.
Then her thrusters fired, arresting her spin. The dust belt filled her view, a chaotic, beautiful maze of asteroids and glittering silicate clouds. Her tactical map updated, painting the fragile, slow-moving signals of the ore haulers, and ahead, in the jagged canyon she was to secure, the faint, skittering infrared signatures of unidentified mechs.
The quiet was gone. The warmth was gone. The humiliation was a fossil.
All that remained was the hunt, the burning clarity of the link, and the steady, mechanical rhythm of her own breath through the gag. The weapon was live.
The weapon was live, and space was a silent, freezing cathedral she plummeted through. Her Razorfalcon fell toward the canyon’s gaping mouth on the asteroid’s surface, a controlled dive with the dust belt’s chaotic glitter as her backdrop. The ore haulers’ distress calls were a static-riddled chorus in her left ear, a counterpoint to the serene, deadly math of her targeting computer.
“Razorfalcon, you’re coming in hot!” Jax’s voice crackled over the tactical channel.
“I see them,” Haas grunted. “Twelve bogies. Scratch-built junk heaps. They’ve got the haulers boxed in at the canyon’s dead end.”
Nova didn’t reply. Words were a distant, human clutter. Her reality was the streaming flow of data: thermal blooms from mismatched reactors, the unstable power signatures of cobbled-together weapon mounts, the jagged lithography of the canyon walls. Her breathing, regulated by the gag, was a steady, mechanical rhythm in the cockpit’s stillness. She felt a warm, spreading pressure in her lower abdomen, a biological alert her machine-merged mind acknowledged and dismissed without shame. It was just data. Fuel for the fire.
Her mech screamed down into the canyon’s shadowed throat.
The gravitational pull of the asteroid was weak, deceptive. She waited, watching the rust-colored rock rush up, her hand feather-light on the jump jet controls. At the last possible second, she fired them. A percussive roar of thrust vibrated through her frame, arresting her descent with a gut-lurching precision. The Razorfalcon’s feet kissed the dusty canyon floor, settling with a whisper of actuators, not a crash.
Silence, for one heartbeat.
Then the canyon erupted.
They swarmed from behind mineral formations and dust drifts, a pack of mechanical grotesques. They were Frankenmechs, just as the intel had suggested—a ’Mech’s torso welded to an industrial loader’s legs here, a surplus autocannon jury-rigged where an arm should be there. Their paint was slapped on, peeling. Their movements were jerky, overcompensating. But twelve guns, even poorly mounted, were still twelve guns.
“Well, they’re ugly,” Jax quipped, his Phoenix Hawk landing gracefully to her right, its own lasers cycling up.
“Ugly and pointing at us,” Haas finished, his Centurion stomping into a defensive position, its autocannon rotating with a heavy whir.
Nova’s world narrowed. The twelve red icons on her HUD weren’t enemies; they were sequences. They were problems to be solved in the most efficient order. The EI fed her probabilities, angles, heat dissipation rates. The simmering anger from the bay, the humiliation of the pink butterfly, it all compressed into a single, cold diamond of intent.
She moved first.
Her right arm came up, the Extended-Range Particle Projector Cannon charging with a rising, ionized whine that shook the air. A Frankenstein in a patched-up Wolverine frame was her opener. It was shambling forward, its pilot likely emboldened by their numbers. Nova’s crosshairs settled on its center of mass, the reticle flashing a solid, confirming green.
She fired.
A bolt of man-made lightning tore the dusty gloom apart, blinding and silent for a microsecond before the thunderclap hit. It speared through the Wolverine’s chest, melting armor plates like wax and erupting out its back in a shower of molten composite and vaporized components. The thing took one more stumbling step before collapsing into a heap of dead metal.
“One,” Nova breathed into her gag, the word swallowed by the interface.
Chaos erupted. Beams of ruddy laser fire and tracers from rotary machine guns lanced toward them, filling the canyon with violent light. Nova was already gone. Her jump jets flared, catapulting the Razorfalcon laterally up onto a rocky ledge as the space she’d occupied was chewed apart by incoming fire.
She landed, crouched. Her six medium lasers, housed in her left arm and torso, found their own targets. She didn’t fire them all at once. That was waste. The EI partitioned them, assigning two to a scavenged Locust hopping erratically on agricultural treads.
She squeezed the secondary trigger.
Twin beams of coherent red light licked out, precise as surgical scalpels. One severed the Locust’s makeshift missile rack. The second drilled into its cockpit glass, which bubbled and blackened. The mech stumbled and went still.
Heat spiked in her cockpit, the gauge climbing toward the orange. She ignored it, the sensation just another fluid metric in her bloodstream. She jumped again, a short, corrective hop behind a basalt column. A hail of autocannon rounds pulverized the other side, sending rock shards cascading down her armor.
“Haas, your ten o’clock is overextended!” Jax called out, his own lasers snapping off shots.
“I see him. Lunchtime.”
Haas’s Centurion weathered the fire from a bulldog of a mech made from construction gear, then his LRM rack unleashed a swarm of missiles that walked up the raider’s torso, stripping armor in explosive chunks.
Nova peered from cover. A spider-like thing with too many legs was trying to flank Jax. Her PPC was still cycling, the heat too high. She switched to pure laser battery. A quick mental command, and all six medium lasers fired in a staggered, rolling cascade.
The beams danced over the spider-mech’s legs, shearing them off at the joints in a spectacular shower of sparks and severed hydraulics. It tipped over, flailing helplessly.
The warm pressure in her bladder released, a sudden, soothing flood of heat that the absorbent layers in her suit handled seamlessly. It was a biological purge, a release of tension that oddly mirrored the violence she was dispensing. For a second, the sensation blurred the line between the Nova in the cockpit and the weapon she was part of. Both were simply… functioning.
“They’re breaking!” Jax yelled, exhilaration in his voice.
He was right. The initial bravado of the dozen had evaporated under the surgical dismantling. Four were already smoldering wrecks. The remaining eight were backing away, their movements turning hesitant, their fire becoming wild.
Nova stepped out from behind the column, her Razorfalcon’s armor scarred and smoking in places, but structurally intact. Her heat gauge bled slowly back into the green. The PPC was ready again. She selected the largest remaining signature, a hulking mass that might have once been a mining drill.
The raider pilot saw her, saw the deadly green glow building in her weapon’s barrel. He panicked, turning to run and presenting his broad, poorly armored back.
“Don’t,” Nova whispered, the sound lost in the machine’s hum.
She fired. The particle beam passed clean through the drill assembly and the reactor shielding beyond. The Frankenmech detonated from the inside, a fireball momentarily lighting the entire canyon in stark, brutal relief, casting the long, dancing shadow of her Razorfalcon against the wall behind her.
In the sudden, ringing quiet that followed, punctuated only by the ping of cooling metal and the crackle of dying electrical fires, the three Coalition mechs stood amidst the carnage. The remaining raiders were in full, scrambling retreat, their signals fading on the tactical map.
“Well,” Haas sighed over the comm, the sound of him popping his neck audible. “That was a thing.”
“Told you she was a weapon,” Jax said, and for the first time, there was no mockery in it. It was a statement of fact, tinged with something like awe.
Nova didn’t acknowledge them. She was scanning the canyon, her sensors at maximum reach. The immediate threat was neutralized. The haulers were safe. The mission was a success. But the diamond-cold focus was softening, and in its place, a familiar, dull throb was beginning to pulse behind her eyes. The EI feedback, the price for the perfection.
A new alert chimed softly, a private channel request. It was Rysia. The calm, the control, the aftermath. The thought of it sent a different kind of warmth through her, a confusing mix of dread and craving. The weapon had done its work.
Now the woman had to come back, and face what that meant.
Now the woman had to come back, and face what that meant.
Disengaging the neural handshake was a slow, sickening shackling. The limitless sensor sphere collapsed into a tunnel, then a window, then finally the confines of the blood-lit cockpit. The Razorfalcon’s massive limbs became foreign objects she piloted, not pieces of her own flesh. A lance of pure, white-hot pain drilled from the base of her skull to behind her eyes, a familiar invoice for the power she’d wielded.
She became aware, acutely, of her body again. The dampness between her legs was a cool, clinging presence. The pacifier gag was a sodden lump of silicone making her jaw ache. Every muscle trembled with a fine, exhausting vibration.
“Post-ops check, Rangers,” Drop Control crackled. “Dropship Persephone is inbound for dust-off. Six minutes.”
Nova’s hands moved on the controls, performing the shutdown sequence by rote. Reactor to idle. Weapons safed. Cooling vents open. The ritual grounded her. Outside, Haas’s Centurion was already knuckle-walking toward the rally point, its autocannon barrel glowing a dull cherry red. Jax’s Phoenix Hawk knelt in a scout’s crouch, its laser barrels steaming in the cold asteroid air.
She guided the Razorfalcon to join them, its footsteps heavy with a new fatigue. The silence on the tactical channel was comfortable now, the shared quiet of people who have survived.
The Persephone descended on a pillar of blue-orange thrust, a bulky, utilitarian craft that kicked up a blizzard of grey dust. Its rear ramp yawned open like a hungry mouth. One by one, they trudged their machines into the dim hold, the magnetic clamps locking down with definitive thunks.
Nova powered her mech down completely. The final hum faded, leaving her in a sudden, ringing silence broken only by the drip of coolant and the distant thrum of the dropship’s engines. She unstrapped, her movements slow and stiff. The headache pulsed behind her eyes with every heartbeat.
She removed the neural cap, setting it gently in its cradle. Her fingers then went to the buckles behind her head. They fumbled, weak and uncoordinated.
The cockpit canopy hissed open, letting in the ship’s recycled, metallic-smelling air. Rysia was already there, waiting on the gantry. Her expression was unreadable, a professional mask, but her eyes performed a swift, head-to-toe scan. She saw the tremble in Nova’s hands, the pallor of her skin, the way she slightly favored her right side.
“Easy,” Rysia said, her voice low and neutral. She reached in, her fingers deftly finding and releasing the gag’s straps. “Let me.”
The gag slipped from Nova’s mouth. She worked her jaw, wincing at the stiffness. The urge to speak, to say anything, was crushed under a wave of nauseating fatigue. She took Rysia’s offered hand, her own grip surprisingly weak, and hauled herself out of the cockpit. Her legs nearly buckled on the gantry grating, but Rysia’s arm was instantly around her waist, taking her weight without comment.
They moved slowly toward the rear of the dropship bay where Haas and Jax had already dismounted. The two men were pulling off their coolant vests, their faces smudged with sweat and grime. Haas stretched, his spine cracking audibly.
He glanced over as Nova and Rysia approached, his eyes lingering on her