Chapter 13: Vandalism Interrupted
The heavy magnetic locks of the dropship’s ramp sealed with a final, resonant clang, cutting off the void and sealing in the familiar bay smells of oil, ozone, and spent adrenaline. The Persephone’s engines cycled down to a low, persistent whine. Nova leaned heavily into Rysia’s side, each step off the gantry a conscious effort. The world felt brittle and too bright.
“Moving like you’re a hundred years old, kid,” Haas called out, his voice echoing in the vast space. He’d shucked his coolant vest and was wiping his face with a rag, but his eyes were sharp, boring into Nova’s retreating back. The victory had pumped him full of a restless, aggressive energy. “What’s the matter? All that naptime catch up with you? Or did you just remember you’ve gotta get changed?”
Nova flinched, the words a physical slap. She kept walking, her gaze fixed on the distant archway leading to the crew quarters. Rysia’s grip on her waist tightened imperceptibly, her pace not slowing.
Jax, who was running a diagnostic wand over his Phoenix Hawk’s shin actuator, straightened up. “Haas. Knock it off.”
Haas laughed, a short, barking sound. “What? I’m just making conversation. Kid fights like a demon, then toddles off to have her diaper changed. It’s fascinating. A study in contrasts.”
“She also shredded six of those junk heaps before you’d even finished targeting your second,” Jax said, his voice losing its usual playful edge. He tossed the wand onto a tool cart with a clatter. “And that spray from that Spider’s rotary? That was coming for my cockpit. She saw it, categorized it, and removed the problem. Saved me a real bad day.”
He walked over, cutting between Haas and the path Nova and Rysia were taking. Nova had stopped, compelled by a confused curiosity, her body still half-turned into Rysia’s support.
Jax stopped in front of her. He looked at her directly, his expression unreadable for a moment. Then he stuck out his hand, palm calloused and stained with grease. “Clean work out there. Thanks.”
Nova stared at the proffered hand. The gesture was alien, formal. People didn’t shake hands. They slapped shoulders, they cursed each other, they ignored each other. This was something from a vid, something between adults. She glanced up at Rysia, whose face was a careful, neutral mask, then back at Jax’s hand. Slowly, hesitantly, she detached herself from Rysia and placed her own, smaller hand in his. His grip was firm, dry, and brief.
“You’re one of ours,” Jax said, letting go. “One of the best we’ve got, weird shit and all. Can’t promise the whole ship’ll get the memo, but… I’ll see what I can do. Try and get the boys to back off a little. Give you some space.”
Nova just nodded, a quick, jerky motion. Words were a tangled mess behind her teeth. “Okay,” she managed, the syllable rough.
Jax offered a tight, not-unfriendly smile, then turned back to his mech, the moment over.
Haas watched this exchange from his spot by the tool cart, his earlier bravado curdling into something darker and quieter. The camaraderie, the recognition—it was an offset. A wrong note. His eyes tracked Rysia as she led Nova away, the smaller woman’s steps growing more sure as they neared the bay exit. The rigid set of Rysia’s shoulders spoke of a long night already planned: blankets, quiet, the structured care that sanded down Nova’s sharp edges. A reward. It made his skin crawl.
His gaze swung to Nova’s Razorfalcon. It stood silently in its berth, sculpted and lethal even in repose. A monument to a power he found obscene in someone so broken. Next to a maintenance trolley, a couple of cans of gloss sealant and a few jars of high-visibility mech-paint sat, left from a recent touch-up job. The brushes were there too, still clean in their wrapping.
A slow, cold idea dripped into his mind.
‘Can’t have our pilot getting a big ego,’ he thought, a cruel smile touching his lips. The thrill was immediate, a jolt that straightened his spine. This was better than hazing. This was a declaration. It was a predator’s instinct, pure and simple—he sensed vulnerability, a deep, emotional woundedness in Nova that was as glaring as a breach in armor. She was weak where it mattered, for all her machine-killing prowess. A diaper-pissing regressed woman playing soldier. He would remind everyone, starting with her. He would make the inside match the outside.
He waited until the bay was clear. Jax had departed, whistling. The night-shift techs wouldn’t start for another hour. The security camera in the upper corner had a blinking green LED. Standard feed. He’d dealt with them before.
Moving with a methodical calm, Haas accessed a service panel on the nearest console, his fingers flying across the keypad. A few lines of override code, a manual loop of the last ten minutes of empty bay footage, and the LED on the camera winked to a steady red. Recordings halted. He had maybe twenty minutes before the system’s integrity check would flag the glitch and reboot.
It was enough.
He picked up a medium brush and a can of lurid pink paint. On his personal tablet, he pulled up a folder of decals—simple, clip-art style images. He selected a batch: a cartoon butterfly with exaggerated lashes, a grinning puppy with a bow, a simplistic rainbow, a cluster of smiling stars. The kind of thing you’d find on a little girl’s stationery set, vapid and sweet and utterly demeaning.
He approached the Razorfalcon’s left leg. The armor here was smooth, a perfect canvas. He didn’t sketch. He just started, dipping the brush and laying down the thick, glossy pink. The first butterfly took shape, large and deliberately clumsy, right beside the kill-mark lightning bolts. The contrast was the point. He worked quickly, his breath coming shallower, a faint sheen of sweat on his brow that had nothing to do with exertion. This was it. This was the real victory. This was leaving a mark that couldn’t be washed off easily, a joke that would trail her every time she boarded her machine.
He moved to the cockpit surround. Here, he painted a procession of stupid, joyful stars. He was so engrossed in his work, in the visceral satisfaction of each stroke, that he didn’t hear the soft hiss of the personnel door.
“Having an artistic moment, Specialist Haas?”
The voice was dry, cold, and sliced through the bay’s ambient hum like a vibroblade.
Haas froze, brush dripping a fat pink tear onto the deck plating. He turned slowly.
Commander Anya Petrova stood just inside the doorway, arms crossed over her impeccable olive-drab uniform. She wasn’t smiling. Her gaze traveled from his face, down to the paint can in his hand, and then up to the defaced leg of the Razorfalcon. Her expression didn’t change, but the temperature in the bay seemed to drop ten degrees.
“Sir, I— I was just—” Haas began, his mind scrambling for a lie, a reason.
Petrova held up a hand. She didn’t raise her voice. “Save it.” She pulled a small holo-imager from her belt. The device whirred softly as she took a clear, well-framed picture of the pink butterfly next to Nova’s official kill marks. Then she lowered the imager and looked at Haas. The faintest ghost of a smirk touched her lips, but it held no warmth. “I’ll be keeping this for… motivational purposes.”
She took a step closer, her boots silent on the deck. “You see this entire mech, Specialist? Every square inch of it. It looks… unbalanced. Unfinished.” Her icy eyes pinned him. “You will paint it, cover every square inch in those decals.. You will do it by hand. And you will have it done by 0600. No assistants. No sprays. Brushwork. I want you to understand the scale of your insult.”
Haas’s face drained of blood. “0600? Commander, that’s impos—”
“It is an order,” Petrova stated, her voice final. “Consider it a lesson in respect, and in consequence. And Haas?” She paused, letting the full weight of her authority settle on him. “The footage. I’ll be reviewing the real logs. Not your loop. Touch that system again and you’ll be painting latrines on the penal asteroid until you’re old and grey. Now get another brush. You’ve got a lot of mech to cover. ”
Haas stared at Petrova, realizing how scary she really was.
Haas stared at Petrova, realizing how scary she really was. The humorless calculation in her eyes dismantled any thought of appeal. “Understood, Commander,” he mumbled, the words tasting of primer and victory. He watched her turn and leave, the door sighing shut behind her, sealing him alone with 45 tons of his own making.
He looked at the single, garish butterfly. Then at the vast expanse of unblemished armor stretching above him. A joyous, cruel feeling opened in his gut. He fetched another brush.
Back in Rysia’s quarters, the world had shrunk to soft light and warm, steamy air. Rysia guided Nova to the bathroom, her hands already working at the seals of the flimsy undersuit. “Let’s get you clean,” she said, her voice a low murmur that seemed to absorb the last echoes of the PPC’s whine.
“I can do it myself,” Nova protested, but her fingers were numb and clumsy against the fasteners. The fight had left her; only a brittle, hollowed-out weariness remained. “It’s not necessary.”
“I know you can,” Rysia answered, not pausing as she peeled the damp material from Nova’s shoulders. “But you don’t have to. That’s the point.”
Nova stood shivering as Rysia finished undressing her, the cool air raising goosebumps on her skin. The evidence of her lack of control was clear on the inner layers, a cold, damp patch she couldn’t hide from. She didn’t look at it. She stepped into the bath Rysia had already drawn, the water perfectly, painfully hot. It stung at first, then seeped into her aching muscles with a deep, forgiving ache.
She sank down, letting the water close over her shoulders. A part of her brain, the part that had orchestrated six kills in under three minutes, screamed that this was infantilization. That Jax’s handshake had meant something, and this undid it.
Rysia, without ceremony, unbuttoned her own fatigue shirt and stepped out of her trousers. She joined Nova in the bath with a soft slosh of displacement, the water level rising comfortably. It was routine, prescribed, but the intimacy of it never failed to send a confusing jolt through Nova’s system. The sheer physicality of Rysia’s presence, calm and unassailable, filled the tiled room.
“I don’t need a bath attendant,” Nova muttered, watching the ripples distort their submerged legs.
“You’re right,” Rysia said calmly, picking up a soft washcloth and soaping it. “You need stability. Your nervous system is a lightning strike looking for ground. This is the ground.” She began washing Nova’s back in slow, circular strokes. “The fight’s over. Let it go.”
Nova leaned into the touch, hating how good it felt. A sharp, sudden fear cut through the steam. Was this therapy rebuilding her, or was it dismantling the last pieces of the person who could function alone? Was it healing, or a gentle, total conquest?
The fear crystallized into a cold knot in her stomach. As if her body itself was answering the question, a fresh, warm trickle escaped her, merging seamlessly with the bathwater. No stress, no warning. Just a simple, humiliating failure of control.
She went very still. The heat on her skin, Rysia’s hands on her shoulders, the silent acknowledgment floating between them in the steam—it all converged into a brutal, clarifying truth.
She was dependent. Utterly. The Mechwarrior who had painted a canyon with fire needed this woman to wash her. The weapon required this keeper. The scared, furious little girl inside her craved the boundaries Rysia enforced.
There was no separating them. They weren’t layers to peel back, revealing a true core. They were facets of the same fractured crystal, held together by Rysia’s unwavering hands.
She stopped fighting the warmth. She stopped fighting the washcloth, the quiet, the care. She went limp, letting Rysia support her full weight. A sigh escaped her, releasing the last trapped air of the battle. It was all her.
It was all her.
Rysia’s hands slid under Nova’s arms, lifting her from the cooling water with effortless strength. Water sheeted off Nova’s skin, pattering on the tiles. A large, warm towel enveloped her, and Rysia began to rub gently, methodically, from her shoulders down to her calves. The coarse terrycloth grounded her, the friction a dull static against her oversensitive nerves.
“Come on,” Rysia murmured, guiding her from the bathroom. The main room was dim, lit only by a low glow-panel. The air was cool and clean. Nova stood passively, a doll being dressed, as Rysia slipped a soft, long sleep shirt over her head. It smelled faintly of Rysia’s detergent, a crisp, alpine scent.
She was led to the floor, to a cushion placed before Rysia’s knees. Nova settled there, drawing her own knees up to her chest. The floor was cool through the thin fabric of her pants. Rysia sat behind her, her presence a solid wall of heat.
A comb appeared in Rysia’s hand, then a brush with gentle, plastic-bristled pins. She started at the very ends of Nova’s dark, damp hair, working out the tiny knots with infinite patience. Each pull was firm but never sharp, a steady, rhythmic pressure on her scalp.
Nova closed her eyes. The repetitive motion was a whisper against her skull, a counterpoint to the phantom, screaming data-stream of the EI link. This was different from the bath. The bath was about cleaning, a clinical necessity. This was purely senseless. This was entirely for comfort. It unraveled her.
“Jax shook my hand,” Nova said, her voice quiet in the semi-darkness.
“I saw.” The brush swept through a long section, from root to tip. “It meant something to you.”
“It felt... normal. Like before.”
The brush paused for a heartbeat. “You aren’t ‘before,’ Nova. ‘Before’ is what cracked you open. This is now. The handshake can be real, and this can be real, too. They aren’t at war. They’re just different rooms in the same house.”
Nova absorbed that. The brush started again, a soothing cadence. She thought about the house. The room where she was a weapon, all cold fury and perfect angles. The room where she was this, a collection of needs being met in silence. Maybe they were connected by a long, dark hallway she had to walk alone every time.
She leaned back, incrementally, until her spine rested against Rysia’s shins. A permission. An admission. Rysia accepted the weight without comment, her brushing never faltering. The scent of clean hair, a hint of Rysia’s soap, filled the small space between them.
Memories of the canyon tried to surface—the blast patterns, the sheared leg of the spider-mech, the warm flood of relief in her cockpit. She let the brushstrokes push them down, submerge them. Here, she was just a body. A head of hair being tended to. A breathing pattern slowly syncing with the woman behind her.
It was a different kind of surrender, one that didn’t taste like defeat. It felt like setting down a terrifyingly heavy weight because someone had silently promised to watch over it for a while.
Rysia worked until Nova’s hair was perfectly smooth, falling in a dark curtain down her back. She set the brush aside. Her hands came to rest, warm and heavy, on Nova’s shoulders. They just stayed there, an anchor.
From deep within the ship, a muffled, rhythmic clanging began—servo-hammers on armor plate. Haas, somewhere in the lonely bay, making good on his punishment. The sound was distant, a tolling bell. It didn’t touch the quiet in the room.
Nova’s eyes remained closed. Her breathing was deep and even. For the first time since the drop, the last coil of tension in her stomach unwound. The weapon was asleep. The girl was quiet. The woman was just… present.
She was present, and for this moment, that was enough.