Along with the weapons, the pack had a fresh combat suit for Iris. It didn’t fit right, but was able to cinch enough to do the job. She even had a helmet to cover her face with. She felt human again, unable to see the metal that made up her body. That made for a silver lining to the fact that she and Silvy were riding atop the back of the RW-33 presently controlled by a woman who had been trying to kill her the other day.

“Would you stop glaring at me? I keep getting warnings from this robot body, and it keeps being just you,” Roselyn asked as she sprinted through half-harvested farm fields, weaving in and out of nature hedges. Every step churned up swarms of insects and all the predators that feasted on them, but it was better than taking bullets from Chang’s aircrafts overhead.

“Are you really on our side? After I… you know…”

“Busted up my body? We’re HAB units, girl. You may as well have broken my car. I didn’t actually get injured,” Roselyn said, her response only slightly delayed by the radio transmission back to the Blumhagen ship. “I want a rematch though.”

Silvy stuffed her head under Iris’s arm to point a finger at the robot’s head. “Does this really seem like the proper time for that?”

“As opposed to when? After Chang kills her? How am I supposed to get a rematch if she’s dead.”

“Why do you even want one? Did you lose money on a bet or something?” Iris demanded.

“No! It’s because people I don’t like made money on you eating me. That’s bullshit.”

Iris and Silvy dropped it, shook their heads, and tried to not think about the impending death hunting them halfway across Taiwan. There was one spot on the whole island that they knew of, where Xi Chang couldn’t feasibly just hammer them with long range missiles. It was on the shore, about an hour south of Neo Taipei, beached and rusting. It had an air to it like a forgotten whale carcass, long stripped to the bones, but it was made of steel.

The road next to it had a little plaque, claiming the vessel had been left there as memorial, certainly not because the government couldn’t afford to clean it up after taking the munitions out. The UA-Delhi had originally been built as a large scale troop transport, the kind of barge that could have facilitated a ground invasion of continental America. Built as saber rattling between the two superpowers, it had only ever gotten use after an earthquake in the Sprawl. Then it had become a civilian rescue craft. When plague broke out, it became a mass grave.

“Internet says this thing is cursed,” Roselyn said as she trotted in through a gap in the hull. Once, there had been a torpedo bay within, but the reclamation teams had hacked through it to get the good stuff out.

“Curses aren’t real. If they were, no one would be able to live in Bastion,” Iris said, sliding off the machine and helping Silvy get down.

The RW-33 flicked up a few panels, exposing not guns, but lights for the corroding insides. The layers upon layers of hull cocooned around them like the shed skin of a cicada, hopefully providing enough ablative armoring that missiles would be too costly. “If curses aren’t real, how do you explain ghosts?”

Iris stared at the robot’s face. The RW-33 didn’t have anything to indicate emotion. The earlier models had come with display screens that could switch to emotes, but it turned out the PR wasn’t very good for murder machines that displayed crying faces. Unable to muster the willpower to properly refute Roselyn, she tried another tactic. “It’s a problem of scale. This ship had thousands of deaths. There are places where millions were killed, sometimes in about as much time. So, this has to be a thousand times less cursed than a death camp or something.”

“Damn, I think you’ve got a point there,” Roselyn said, sitting the RW-33 down.

Silvy had her face half buried in the supply bag. “Are you kidding me?” She pulled out an MRE bag. “This is it? This is all the food they provided?”

Iris was about to defend Mendel, until she saw it was Beef Enchilada flavoring. “I am so sorry. Also, I am so glad I don’t have a stomach.”

“You need to charge, don’t you?” Roselyn asked, and popped an interface port on the RW-33. For the next few hours, the three of them sat and refueled in their own ways, each watching radar scans. Hoverjets took up a rotation, circling round the wreck of the UA-Delhi and never taking it from their sights. The offshore tracking couldn’t confirm it, but there was enough local radio chatter that it was obvious a small army had amassed around the wreck. The Brothers of Steel were putting up insta-barriers like they were making modern day trenches.

Iris couldn’t figure out what good it did them to have an inch of polycarbonate, which her mag-rifle could treat it like plywood; but, who was she to interrupt them.

Night came, without getting dark. The militia surrounded the UA-Delphi with floodlights, bathing the exterior in yellow light. The layers of rust and grime barely filtered the light. “Just sleep,” Iris said, looking back into Silvy’s sagging eyelids.

“You need sleep too though.”

“I’m not the one on painkillers right now. You’ve got who-knows-how-many broken bones right now. Just, let me take care of the nightwatch.”

Only after Silvy gave up and passed out did Roselyn ask, “Aren’t your ears blown out? What good are you as a nightwatch?”

“Better than her. Just set the chrome boy to alert us, would you?”

“Sure, sure, but don’t expect me to sit around and chat with you,” Roselyn said, and throttled back her connection to the RW-33. Her actual body was out on the Blumhagen ship, where she could sleep in peace, argue with doctors and engineers, and whatever else she wanted to do. She was probably watching cartoons.

Iris sat and hugged her knees to her chest and waited the night out. She watched Silvy’s weak sleep, the way she would shift and wince. Silvy’s face flushed more and more throughout the course of the night, and she didn’t need infrared to see that her temperature kept rising. Arctic Cutters wouldn’t be arriving till dawn though, and then she would have to fight her way out.

She decided to get ahead of the matter, and Chang obliged. He hadn’t just been setting up barriers, but a stage. The floodlights weren’t just to catch her when she tried to leave, but to illuminate the cleared out boardwalk. They had taken their time because they were setting up a satellite relay, high speed internet for Chang’s livestreaming pleasure.

Iris stepped out to meet the island governor when the sun was nothing more than color on the horizon. The bullet had ripped off nearly a quarter of his face, the entire left side of his mouth. The muscles had locked up, giving him a mechanical scowl as he stepped forward. His voice came from a speaker, his mouth didn’t move. “You’re such a polite murder machine, aren’t you?”

“Killing soldiers isn’t murder.”

“Is that what you tell yourself at night?”

Iris nodded at the cameras. “Are they watching us?”

Xi laughed, the speaker crackling with the effort. “Yes. The ones who own banks instead of bank accounts. They’ve given me a chance, with a catch. They want you delivered alive… for as alive as a dismantled brain in a jar is.”

“And so here we are?”

He spread his arms out and paced the stage. With a few glances to the soldiers, each armed but not aiming, he said, “You and I are the only HAB units on the island. Not like I can call in backup from the Sprawl, now is it?”

“Too bad for you, you’re the one on a time limit, not me. I’ve got backup coming. Backup actually worth a shit.”

Xi laughed again. “And I’ve got their owner watching too. Miss Smith won’t be doing a thing to stop me if I win.”

Iris gritted her teeth. She was friends with Holly, in a distant colleague sort of way. But they were both professionals. Money talked. Mendel might have been breaking the piggybank, but Blumhagen had never been the richest PMC on the planet. They probably hadn’t even been paid for picking up that nuke in Siberia. Checks from the American government always took longer than crypto transfers. “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t stand a chance against me,” Iris said, drawing her micro-blade. It wasn’t anything fancy like Leilani had used, not even enhanced like Roselyn’s. Just basic graphene, but it would have to do the job.

Xi grinned, on the half of his face he still had left, and stripped his suit coat off. Beneath, he didn’t even have synth-skin, just sub-dermals in onyx black, lined in red to mimic muscles. The skin at his hands looked like he had gloves on, but what mattered was the size of his body. Xi dwarfed Iris, and didn’t seem to feel a need to get his own weapon.

“It’s a shame!” He said, “If you had your unit upgraded recently, perhaps you would have stood a chance.”

“I won’t hold your inexperience against you,” she said, and took a defensive guard.

Time was on her side, Xi had to take the initiative. When he stepped, his backfoot crushed the concrete. His body, hands raised in some unidentifiable martial arts, shifted forward. Without a flinch, he was suddenly closing the distance. Iris retreated. He sped up, every stomp of his feet breaking the concrete pavilion as he slid and shifted and charged at her.

Iris stopped messing around and cranked her reflexes as high as she could. It made his movements seem human again, revealed the sways and stutters as he adjusted his glide. She took an opportunity and cleaved in.

Her micro-blade caught nothing but armor plating on his forearm as he shoved it aside. Then his other fist smashed forward. She interposed her own arm, letting the fist smash against her elbow. It struck like a cannon shot, linking right through his body and back to the earth.

“Fuck!” Iris flew back, skidding over beach sand. She activated the magnetic clamps in her feet out of reflex, but there was no steel beneath her, not even rebar. When Xi charged in again, fearless of her blade, she slashed with her micro-blade like a baton. She caught him in either arm, chopped bits of plating from his hands, cracked the graphene in his forearm, but never once broke through. Every exchange jarred her body back, jammed up her muscles, drove her off balance. Time ticked by, the sun rose higher over the horizon, and Xi’s assault never faltered.

He shouted. A stomp of his foot shattered the concrete beneath him, all the way to under her. In a fraction of a second, she comprehended what had happened. Every step of his footwork had been tracking feedback, the vibrations of the pavilion. His onboard processor had mapped out an airgap, a gap of erosion and he had struck it like a drum. The concrete erupted and became useless. She found herself in freefall as he lunged in.

She hardened her combat suit as his fist impacted her chest. The blow nearly stopped her heart, and did send her flying across the pavilion. The Brothers of Steel threw up their arms and cheered, but Xi didn’t stop. He knew that wasn’t enough to stop Iris, and he leapt up. He struck down, breaking the concrete once more as Iris barely rolled away.

When she spun, she kicked her leg into him, not for damage but to hook her foot on. She curled, gripping her sword with both hands and slamming it in like an icepick. There was no scream of pain, no blood, not from a HAB unit, but she did rip a hole straight through his cybernetic thigh.

Xi’s hand slashed across her face. The mask Roselyn had given her shattered, chunks flying as her head bounced off the ground.

Iris gasped, damage alerts screaming in her head. She had lost her grip on her micro-blade. She had no weapon. Xi wound up another strike like a jackhammer overhead. No, she had one weapon inside herself. Iris struck back, striking her palm into Xi’s fist and activating the Gawain. The explosion made every soldier jump back. Iris’ elbow snapped backwards, the joint dangling by mere cables.

Xi howled in pain as lubricant and electricity sprayed out of his arm. The internals welded together, motors locked up, the muscle fibers tore themselves apart.

Iris recovered first, planting her boot into Xi’s chest and shoving herself away. She leapt to her feet as Xi ripped the micro-blade out from his leg and snarled at her. “I forgot about that one,” he spat at her.

“I didn’t.”

“Now for my surprise.” Something changed inside Xi’s HAB unit. The power output spiked, like a runaway exothermic reaction had taken hold in his battery, but the heat was uniform. Like his body was trying to set itself on fire. Where internal lubricant had landed, he did set himself ablaze.

Then he was gone.

He closed the distance faster than Iris could react and drove his fist into her gut. She flew back, not across the pavilion but straight into the wall of the UA-Delphi. The impact knocked the senses out of her, rattling her brain hard enough the suit couldn’t do anything to help. The combat suit only managed to harden as she tumbled to the earth and hit in a heap.

Iris twitched on the ground, feeling her HAB unit struggle through diagnostics, her muscle fibers twitching and breaking. She had to get up though. She forced herself to get back up.

When she finally lifted her head, Xi wasn’t looking at her, but skyward. She heard it then too, the chop of helicopter blades as Arctic Cutters waited overhead. Holly didn’t jump down to save her, no one did.

Iris stood alone, her back to the UA-Delphi because that’s where Silvy was.