Her name was Roca del Yaung y. McDonald, born a female on the third planet of Vanderme-7, known in the local language as "Land of Flowers" and settled for over 3,500 years. Like most Confederate citizens, she'd grown up in luxury and privilege. Nearly anything she could want was available in the public nanoforge template libraries. She had clean air, clean water, safety, she went to sleep with her belly full. Her DNA had been cleaned and tweaked, her parents had chosen her eye color and hair color, although that lasted till her teenage years. She was educated via eVR, in schooling till she was 22. At 25 she was proclaimed an adult and even though she could have left at any time, her parent's house had plenty of room.

She switched bodies often, just like her peers. Rarely going for longer than six months in the same body. Her fully mature body had long blonde hair, tan skin, green eyes, freckles on her face, was six foot two (the shorter side of normal for women), and well built and sculpted.

She'd been killed twice. Once when she'd choked on a piece of food because she'd been talking with her mouth full on the phone while walking along a trail outside of the nanite zones. The second time she had not been paying attention, immersed in an Enhanced Reality Game and walked into traffic, injured badly enough that the 'soup' couldn't save her. Therapy had eased the trauma of being killed, since both of them were 'lingering traumatic death events', and she had largely forgotten about them by the time she was 19.

Her life was one of parties, hanging out with friends, luxuries, and wanting for nothing. She had even traveled to other planets, and during Final Education Year Three she had even visited Earth and her ancestor's ancient homeland of Azatlan and The Wailing Loch. She'd even seen the immortal Bessie as the great beast surfaced to blow air at one of the Lochs.

It wasn't until she was almost thirty-five that she began to feel like something else was missing.

She had two children. Not like her mother, who she kind of looked down on as a 'breeder' and 'free birther', but normally, making sure the zygote was formed from donor sperm and a carefully selected egg, the DNA edited properly, then implanted in her womb for two months before being placed in an artificial womb.

To be honest, she'd felt some relief when her two children had reached 25 and left.

She was only sixty. Not even finished with her first century, largely considered a young adult.

Her friends and even her children invited her to events, exciting parties, and the like.

But there was still something missing.

She tried pair bonding, but after six years grew to resent her wife and deliberately reskinned as a man, causing her wife to divorce her.

The yelling, the screaming, during the divorce, made her feel... alive.

Something inside her made her reskin back to her original DNA template and show up for the divorce finalization, making sure she was well dressed and prettied up.

The hatred in her now ex-wife's eyes made her giggle and warmed her heart.

Roca tried a lotus planet, despite people's warnings.

Within eighteen months she was bored and left.

She tried the LARP worlds, but wasn't very good at it.

She drifted around after that. She even signed up on a slow-haul vessel for a twenty year hitch as a professional prostitute aboard the ship.

Roca didn't mention that.

Being a spacer wasn't bad. New sights, new planets, new people.

By the time she was a hundred, everything was blurring. Just one long effortless time period of lovers moving in and out, friends met and forgotten, new worlds seen and left.

Roca was in the HK-82732 System when the H'Vertrik Empire, not believing the reports of the true scope of the Confederacy, attacked eight planets.

By the time the fighting was over, eight years later, she was a different woman.

It was picking up a rifle from a dead Planetary Defense trooper, leveling it, and firing it, just like in the eVR games.

The shot hit the H'Vertrik soldier in the faceplate, shattered it, and filled his helmet with chunky salsa.

The felt something then.

She'd fought for three years as Civilian Auxiliary.

To be honest with herself, Roca had to admit that she would have fought, authorized or no.

She enjoyed it.

Even in the desperate fight hand to hand with five of the smaller H'Vertrik, down to a vibroknife and an empty SMG, she had enjoyed herself. Even when one had managed to blow apart her knee with a lucky shot, the pain was real to her.

Had enjoyed watching their eyes as she shoved the vibroknife through their plasteel armor and into their throats. Enjoyed the gush of blood. Enjoyed the way they beat on her chest.

It wasn't sadism. After the war, she found the H'Vertrik to be a fun people. It only took a decade or so for the violent impulses to fade into the background noise that had become, again, a life that each day blurred into the next.

Roca had found herself, drifting along, feeling as if she was wrapped in cotton and someone had grazed her with an anesthetic beam, through the outskirts of the Confederacy. She signed up as shipboard security, as space station security.

She qualified for her bounty hunter license. She qualified for Confederate Magistrate status.

The days still blurred.

She was two hundred years old and felt fatigue. Felt the Lazarus Fatigue already.

Roca had gone on a date with a polycule, dinner and then a Tri-Vee movie. They were kissing and groping by the opening credits.

Roca had just broke a kiss when she saw what was on.

A dramatization of the H'Vertrik Hiccup that mixed the actors with real footage.

She was on the screen, laughing maniacally, beating a dozen H'Vertrik with a plasma machinegun belt while the blood sprayed.

Roca felt it again.

That flicker.

She'd watched the movie with one eye even while the polycule got more and more involved.

Roca knew there was something narcassistic and wrong about how intensely she got off while being pleasured on all fours and watching an actor laughing and firing a heavy plasma machinegun into the tops of tanks, yelling "RUN, YOU WRINKLY BASTARDS, RUN!" and giving a McDonald banshee scream.

An actor playing her.

Roca had felt it again.

Drunk and high, Roca had staggered into a Confederate Recruiting Office, slapped her open tri-fold badge wallet down on the desk of the recruiter, yelled "SLAM MY GASH INTO THE MOST DANGEROUS SHIT YOU GOT!" then promptly vomited on the floor and passed out.

When she sobered up, she went back and was much more polite.

Roca didn't even vomit on the floor.

They showed her a few vids to let her see what kind of life it was. They encouraged her to go to Officer's Candidate School. She had an impressive bounty record and they'd found her H'Vertrik Hiccup record, she was highly educated with excellent test scores.

She turned it down.

"What part of 'I want Death to ride my ass like a midget in a cheap plas bobsled' do you not understand?" she finally asked. "If it doesn't hurt, I don't want it."

They tried to convince her to go into one of the many vital support jobs. Electronic Warfare, missile targeting systems, hyperdrive engineer.

Finally, Roca had gotten frustrated and told them that they could find something 'really really shitty and dangerous' or she'd just go back to hunting bounties again.

One recruiter had shown her.

Heavy Assault Polyphasic Infantry.

"Gimme that," she said.

The recruiter tried to talk her out of it.

Roca asked if he wanted sexual favors, citing that she was highly skilled at that.

She got a new recruiter, the old one seemed to avoid her.

The next one started the whole "Your scores say you'd be an excellent officer" routine again.

"Gimme that poly-prazik thingy."

The recruiter signed Roca up just to get her out of his office.

She signed up for the Confederate Army. Most Confederate Marines she'd met always had an I-beam stuck up their ass.

Plus, the ex-Army guys were always the funnest to hunt on bounties. Half the time the Marines came along quietly, unaware that they'd done something wrong. Or killed a couple of people they shouldn't have.

The Army guys had usually blown up a shitload of stuff, caused massive havoc, and done something like make off with a planet's strategic ice cream reserve to hold it for ransom.

Plus, the Marine's polyphasic ranks were largely phased out.

The Army seemed to keep them around like some people kept around old hubcaps.

The first thing the Army did was take her down to base DNA, removing her mods and upgrades. Standard practice.

Basic Training was with everyone else. It wasn't boring, she enjoyed it.

Close Quarters Combat was the best. Nothing felt better than getting socked in the mouth, feeling her lips crush against her teeth, tasting blood and feeling minuscule tooth chips on her tongue, smiling at them, and punching back. She loved standing toe to toe with an opponent and trading blows. Loved the feeling of a sore eye socket and tingling lip the next day.

Her instructors had made quiet notes. The quiet, almost shy girl that had arrived at Basic was an act, the woman who laughed maniacally and traded punch for punch, kick for kick, strike for strike was the real Trainee McDonald.

Then came the next phase.

DNA/RNA manipulation, cybernetic implants.

If your body couldn't take it, and you died, you washed out and went to some other job.

Roca gritted her teeth and stared at the ceiling, feeling her muscles clench, quiver, shake, and tear, all the while ordering herself not to die.

At the end, it was more training. To learn to activate the system. To learn to use the system properly. How to handle the heavy guns. How to use the armor.

How to fight.

How to win.

Her first posting was at a backwater planet that had a few problems with pirates.

She had been on patrol when the pirates had hit her patrol, killing her squad leader and three squad mates instantly. The heavy magac rounds had hit her, shattering armor.

Bouncing away when they hit her skin.

Her eyes bright red, Roca was laughing when she tore her way into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot, and tore him in half before beating the copilot to death with the torso of the pilot.

The only thing that had prevented her from undergoing total psych eval was the fact she had been in the middle of throwing a punch when the pirate's hands had gone up.

Her punch stopped three point six inches from his nose.

The concussive force from the air had knocked him down and goofy.

She enjoyed being 'full form' on duty hours. She enjoyed close quarters combat drills in full form. Trading punch for punch with her fellow polyphasic infantry.

Punches that could shatter sixteen inches of warsteel.

Roca moved from duty station to duty station, half the time redirected in transit to a just occurring war-zone. She had the ability to easily 'turn it off' when the fighting was over, something that others had problems with.

True, she wasn't like one of those freaky Mar-gite War guys. She didn't drool liquid warsteel or anything like that. She wasn't powered by rage as far as she was concerned. She was just powered by sheer overwhelming joy when the fists met the metal and then the meat.

Roca reconnected with her mother, her father, her siblings.

Even her estranged children.

The friendships she made were deeper than even the connection with lovers.

She felt more for her squad than she ever had for her wives or husbands.

At times Roca felt like she had wasted nearly two hundred years of life.

When the Council-Confederacy Conflict, or C3, broke out, she found herself already in Council space, fighting the Precursor Autonomous War Machines.

Privately, she was slightly gratified that someone, in ancient history, had programmed the PAWM to scream when took catastrophic damage.

Roca even enjoyed fighting the Dwellerspawn. The bigger, the better.

She'd ripped the face off of an Ohm Class Dwellerspawn more than once when in Full Form.

Not even the SUDS packing it in bothered her.

She was Roca del Yaung y. McDonald, Heavy Assault Polyphasic Infantry, Confederate Army, and she was built to kill with iron will.

Roca had been part of 235th Infantry Division, part of XXII Corps AKA Double Deuce. She often flashed 235's hand sign, index and middle and pinkie fingers out, ring and thumb folded, thumb over ring finger.

You know, 2-3-5, if you had to use your fingers to count like a jarhead.

Then came the Slorpie Invasion.

Talk about great.

To be honest, she didn't like fighting the Lanky's or their slave armies. She felt like a bully, something she'd never considered herself. Yeah, they'd killed a couple score billion humans, but it wasn't like she knew any of them. It was nothing personal, it was war, but against the Lanky's and their slaves?

It felt like picking on some unaug'd cripple while wearing a power-loader. Like chasing a guy with no arms and legs named Matt while driving one of those big honking heavy main battle tanks.

It just made her feel a little dirty.

And not in a good way.

The Slorpies, though.

By Enraged Phillip's overflowing ballsack, she loved fighting them.

At one point she'd jumped off a building after she'd finished destroying a buzzbomb hive, landing on the ground, and the shockwave had disrupted Slorpie stealth shielding.

For the first time since the Big C3 started, she was laughing as she wreaked havoc.

She could feel their dismay, their terror, as she killed three of them with one swipe of her spiked fist.

She laughed as their psychic blasts did nothing but distort air and blow debris off of her skin.

"ROCK 'N ROLLA LOCK IN ROCA!" she'd bellowed before grabbing one of the purple slorpies and biting off his head in front of the others. She spit in their faces and laughed at their panicked attempts to stop her.

It was good to have that feeling back.

The battle for that planet had ended and she had been ordered to a new station. More Dwellerspawn, out by the Council/Long Dark Rim. Double-Deuce was ordered to a friendly planet to establish a forward operating and logistics base.

The people there were nice. Small, barely coming up to the bottom of Roca's breasts even when she was only 6' 2" and in Garrison Form (Garry'd Out). Like the rest of 235, she'd only been in Garry, better that the locals not get an eyeful of her and her fellow Heavy Assault Polyphasic Infantry.

Then had come the headache.

It was sudden, a rushing burning feeling that started in her brainstem and rolled down her spine even as it burned through her brain. She could see on her retinal link that she was suffering multiple failures, bioware and cyberware rejections, incompatible DNA linkages.

She had gone down on her hands and knees, staring at the floor, while the little lizard people had rushed over to her and tried to help.

Her datalink had clinked.

And she'd felt it.

Felt her youngest child die first.

Then her oldest.

Then her siblings.

Then her mother and father.

She screamed, long and loud, and tried to get to her feet.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

She felt her squad die. Her company. Her battalion. Her brigade. Regiment. Division. The Corps. 12th Army.

Everyone in 12th Army on the planet.

Then it spread out like a wave, then came rushing back like the water that runs off a beach before the tidal wave.

All of them crashed into her brain.

It surged through her datalink, into her brain. She felt them die.

And screamed.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

She'd gone into recovery mode.

Down on one knee, fist pressed against the ground, head down.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

She was aware of the little reptillian lizard people moving up to her. Moving around her. Talking to one another in voices she couldn't hear.

The deaths of everyone she had ever known, people she had never known, even motherfuckers she'd hated, burned and screaming in her mind.

They'd rolled her onto her side with a winch, onto a stretcher. They'd used loading straps and power loaders to straighten her limbs. They'd carried her to a vehicle, then to a hospital, and, eventually, put her into a bed.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

Roca had laid there, caught up in a tsunami of death and agony and misery, afloat in the deaths of trillions.

Then she heard the whispering.

soft human warm human good human sleepy human safe human

She fought, she struggled. She howled and screamed her denial as she lived death after death.

The other whispering slowly turned into a song, wrapped around the pain and screams, and started to lift them from her.

Then she heard it.

Far away, but audible.

you belong to us

eat a dick she whispered back, still struggling, still fighting.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

Then she heard it.

riiiiice riiiiiiice riiiiice

She saw it on her retinal link.

Black Fleet Neural Link Override

Codes flowed in. Unlocking codes.

I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE I WILL NOT DIE

Rage followed.

The Phrewicken nurses ran to the far side of the room as formerly immobile and comatose patients suddenly sat up.

"ROCK N ROLLA LOCK N ROCA!" she bellowed out, jumping to her feet.

With a roar she threw her head back, her arms out before going into recovery pose.

Spikes erupted from her skin in a shower of blood and scraps of uniform. Her jaw lengthened, her skull thickened, massive tusks ripped free of her gums. The floor creaked as her weight increased. Her limbs thickened as her body grew.

Molten warsteel ran from her jaws.

The Phrewicken nurses stared as she stood up.

Three steps and she threw herself through armored cryplas windows, launching outward in a spray of sparkling shattered molecularly bonded crystal.

She dropped nineteen stories and hit the ground with a crash, leaving a crater fifteen feet wide.

Roca stood up slowly as a half dozen others dropped around her.

In unison they rolled their shoulders and necks, thick heavy vertebrae popping.

They could sense it, feel it.

Phasic energy.

They broke into a long stepped, almost jumping, run.

The nurses looked out the broken window and watched them bound away through deserted streets.

Heavy Assault Polyphasic Infantry, Monster Class.

One.

Each.