her mother off her back for a while. “Well, there’s a guy here and…”
“Oh!” Surprise and then delight filtered across her mother’s surgery-enhanced features. “Why didn’t you say so! I have been so looking forward to grandchildren! Who is h—”
“Gotta go, Mom. Needed on duty.”
Eris cut the call and slumped back in her seat, running her hand through her hair. Then she groaned and looked at the whiskey bottle. First the doc and then her mom… bad luck always traveled in threes. What else did she have to look forward to?
2
Coming down here when she’d been drinking was never a good idea.
Eris walked down the corridor in the bowels of the station, heading for the storage units. This wasn’t a civilian area, so she didn’t have to worry about watching her back or some asshole trying to pick her pocket. Most of the light-fingered crowd on the station knew that trying to lift anything from her would result in broken fingers and a stay in the cells. Still, every so often a newbie would try something. Right now, she wasn’t in the mood. Anyone who crossed her would likely end up with more than broken fingers. Much more.
She only passed one person on her way down to the units. Tucked behind the lowest of the docking bays, the corridor had a lovely view of the sweet fuck all that was space. For a moment, she paused by the window, looking out. The abyss called to her, the siren’s call of nothingness to ease her wounded soul a temptation she knew to ignore.
Pushing off from the wall, she walked along the row of storage units. Each was marked with an alphanumeric painted on the door with a retinal scanner in the wall beside it.
She walked three-quarters of the way down the line and stopped in front of unit 74B-9. After staring the door down for a few moments, she triggered the scanner and picked the option for a retinal scan rather than an access code.
“Welcome, Chief Archer,” the computer welcomed her as the door clamps released to swing open.
The lights snapped on as she stepped over the threshold, working their way down to the back. One of the larger units, it was big enough to contain a small land vehicle, but the hulking figure standing by the back wall wasn’t anything so mundane.
Instead, it was one of the most dangerous weapons in earth history—an armored tank suit.
Her tank suit.
“Hey, old girl,” Eris murmured in a low voice, walking toward it.
She ran a gentle hand down the arm, over the battered paint and metal. Her fingers traced the lettering on the breastplate.
Archer, E. Sgt. “Freya.” AIU: 31
She’d found it in a surplus store a few months ago, in pieces and being sold for parts. After months of scouring the net for any mention of armored suits, she’d hardly dared to believe it. She’d expected it to be something else… part of an actual tank or a loading exoskeleton with plates welded to it being passed off as a Scorperio. As soon as she’d seen the shrouded shape, though, she’d known.
It was a shadow of its former self. When she’d found it, it had been little more than the torso cage and left leg. The arms and shoulder laser arrays were gone, but the left machine gun was still in place. It had been decommissioned, badly, but nothing an experienced suit operator/mechanic couldn’t fix easily. Remarkably, the shielding was all still there, even for parts that were missing, and as far as she could work out from her brief suit-up, none of the power cells were corrupt.
She’d rebuilt it in here, sourcing the missing parts online. She hadn’t been able to see something so glorious left to rack and ruin, even if she couldn’t use it now. Not only could her body not take the neural load, but there were no mobile-tank units anymore. She had no idea what she was going to do with it when it was complete… donate it to a museum eventually, she guessed. But, for now, at times like these, she needed the comfort of an old friend.
Turning around, she slid to the floor with her back to one of the legs. Reaching in her pocket, she liberated her hip flask and unscrewed the top. She lifted it and toasted the hulking monolith behind her.
“Here’s to us, old girl. We did our best but got left behind. Didn’t we? At least we still got each other for the