A quiet yet high pitched hum permeated the confines of NoCro’s citadel, an unavoidable electronic background that accompanied the host of monitors and computers and other electronic equipment that lined the vaguely spherical cockpit. The Pulse Drive, which supposedly gave life to all these things, supposedly operated in complete silence. However if she focused she heard a low, soft heartbeat—her own—amidst the din. Spectral analysis of the cockpit noise in the past revealed no such thing, so it might be a product of her imagination.

NoCro had a bit of time to reflect upon her new world while one of her Stingrays was vectoring in for a refuel. As she watched the craft taxi in front of her and attach its refueling probe to hers, as if she were aloft, she idly wondered if it were even possible to get the Ghost off of the ground again. There were no shortage of indications otherwise, as she drilled deeper into the damage reporting. At the very least the thing would have to be transformed and righted, which was no sure thing in and of itself. She squinted her eyes at the command line interface she was haltingly dealing with in half-remembered commands and leaned back with a great sigh. Perhaps no one had noticed her engagement of their NPCs at the San Cristobal airport. That would be nice.

She had tried again and failed to open her eyes. Something was keeping them shut. It was a worrisome situation. She ran her middle finger testingly down the curved, organic line of the right engine throttle. It didn’t seem quite so utilitarian as one would expect from LockMart. Looking closely, she felt and saw that it was a beautiful piece of steely industrial engineering and additive manufacturing.

Gently, she raised her hand and ran it softly over the block of physical controls that were lined up along her right side. They weren’t bolted in as a group in a panel as would be the case in many other aircraft. The whole control group was formed out of a curved surface that went up behind her and into the wall of the spherical Citadel. Feeling the cold aluminum, she traced her fingers along it until it met with the rightmost edge of the monitor array, which was situated just at the edge of her peripheral vision if she were to face forward. Realizing her hesitancy to continue, she picked up her middle finger and placed it squarely down in the corner the matte surface of the OLED screen. A fingerprint appeared there.

Putting aside the disturbing implications of that, the Ghost was undeniably a beautiful machine, crafted carefully by skilled individuals and perhaps a few AI. One but had to close her eyes to imagine them arguing over this and that little detail that she here took for granted.

“Sorry, Ghost.” she whispered, giving the console at her side a little pat.

“Eh?” Linear butted in suddenly, interrupting her reverie. NoCro winced as she remembered she wasn’t purely alone. “Fond of her? That’s the original Ghost you know.”

“Original…?” NoCro said, cautiously, though she had already made a few assumptions.

“Chain’s Ghost. After I stopped playing the game I decided to place it in good hands.”

NoCro closed her eyes and tapped her fingernail on the aluminum armrest a few times. Her idol had chosen to completely ignore her telegrams within the game, on the few occasions she had the courage to send them. That seemed to be natural enough behavior for a celebrity, and indeed it was exactly what she herself did during her semiregular bouts with infamy. Noel had evidently not gone completely unnoticed by the woman, however.

“So you were the one who sold it to me.” NoCro said. She had put forth a pretty lowball offer for one months prior, and hadn’t expected anyone to take her up on it. She’d done so through a straw account, which was normal behavior for players who wanted to pick up valuable equipment without everyone finding out, or who were engaging in otherwise ToS violating RMT trades. These people evidently had the means to see past that.

“Yeah.” Linear said. NoCro huffed out a breath through her nostrils.

There had been something unusual about this Ghost that she had noticed from the start, namely a collection of impenetrably written custom scripts left over in its local storage. Their function was a mystery, since from what she could tell they employed the in-game scripting language to immediately backdoor into something much more low-level and arcane. The finer points of this second mystery language were mostly unknown to her, and since it were clearly dangerous she had declined to share them with the player base. If she put that out there some hacker would be teleporting around the map by the end of next week; ruining the game for herself didn’t seem like a great time. Similarly, using them might result in a ban. However.

The equipment in the SERE kit was years-old but had a targeting razor on the rifle, which predated any Progressive who might have made use of it. In other words, this Ghost was the first one implemented in the game, and had been the one employed by Linear’s so-called sister. That woman was the second Ultimate system and a world-class expert in computer science. The scripts observably placed the Ghost into some kind of debug mode.

The fuel transfer was only about fifteen percent complete when she received a beeping notification. Someone was beaming a message to her via LOS communication. Which is to say, someone in the game, on grid, was communicating with her directly. That immediately sent her hackles up. She’d been ignoring telegrams for a while, but this wasn’t something to be ignored. The sender had chosen not to include his or her identity in the metadata, and she wasn’t on their Netwar, so the signal showed up as UNKNOWN.

“Go ahead.” she said. Her system took the hint and patched the unknown signal through.

“Crow,” the male voice on the other end said, in a friendly tone, “You have a contact approaching.”

NoCro winced. Whoever owned those NPCs had noticed her and was performing a standard aerial insertion. She had nothing on hand to fight over land, except for the Diamond Knife.

“Identify yourself.” she shot back, “And give me an ETA.”

“Four minutes. This is Signa. I’m crawling back from the shellacking we took down there.”

NoCro smiled. Of course he made it out.

“You don’t know how glad I am to hear your voice.” she said, “What have you brought?”

“Simpler to link up. I’m disconnected from Allied netwar, too.“

That explained a lot about why he was still floating. A flashing message appeared center screen, for her: Signa wishes to join your squad. Such an action would give him access to her Netwar, and all of her positions. With only a slight hesitation, she accepted. All that remained of his group was one slightly damaged Fubuki-class Aegis destroyer, with perhaps half of its complement of missiles. Predictably, all surface warfare and antiair. Nothing she needed right here and now.

“I can launch now.” he said, “Take the incoming out before it gets to you.”

“No.” NoCro said, “If you do that they’ll know you’re here. We don’t even know who it is, either.”

Signa had managed to slink away from the rout with his semi-stealthy destroyer, but sending a missile up into the big blue would point back to him like a laser.

“I know. Not equipped for ground attack here, Crow. Even the deck gun is out.“

NoCro here added up various little piles of information that she had. Signa to her south with a damaged destroyer. Her air wing to north with no fuel and an opposite mission. Her here on Cristobal with a fucked up Ghost with a knife to her name. Nothing, really. There was nothing here except her.

“Stand by.” she said, “I’ll fight.”

“You?” came the dubious reply.

“Wait,” she heard Linear say, “You can use the custom scripts—“

“No. I can’t.” NoCro said, cutting her off sharply, “Bring buckler and diamond online.”

The system responded by bringing her Buckler automatic countermeasures razor online. It also brought into play the Diamond Razor, an absolute last resort intended for close quarters combat. Upon its activation she was filled with a desire to get off the ground here and destroy whoever it was that menacing her. It was rather frightening. In fact here everything that was going into her head was frightening. It wasn’t like this, before. Not quite.

She also needed some way to operate the damaged Ghost without breaking it completely. That kind of information came at a price. While she didn't understand all of the scripts in the Ghost's memory, she did understand enough to rewrite one of them.

“Run script one-zero-five.” she said desperately.

The Ghost complied, transmitting all of the pain of its failed systems directly into her mind. Her heart immediately leapt into her chest, beating hard. A shooting pain ran up her left arm. All of Chain’s scripts she had named zero, so all of hers were one. It felt as if the entire Ghost she was controlling were actually her, disabled on the tarmac, the host of a thousand needle-like points of painful recollection. Upon seeing the exact nature of her resolve, even Linear recoiled into silence.

“She’s fucking nuts.” Linear said, now cradling the lifeless body of Noel. She turned to her husband. “I think she might be willing to die for this.”

Rej shot a glance over his shoulder at the lifeless woman.

—

Generally there weren’t a lot of women who played ACO, making up about 2% of the player base. Among this number, however, a few fairly online personalities prevailed. Arguably even NoCro was one of them. Tatsuta was another, and this was a woman who was loved by many.

“Get up, No.” Tats whispered, as she eyed the gimbal that defined her descent.

Based on the prone figure of Northern Cross's Ghost, Tats was gearing up for a decisive death-from-above maneuver involving her own Frame, a flexible middleweight machine designed by Honda. The solid rocket boosters affixed to her promised to give the humanoid robot a soft landing, relatively speaking. If one activated them a little late, however, it wouldn’t be so soft, and anything beneath would obviously be destroyed.

A whole picture of the situation on the ground was helpfully provided by the SK which brought her here. On the ground far below, a gauntleted hand burst forth from the side of the disabled Ghost and planted itself on the tarmac adjacent. Another followed, and the dead machine slowly started to bring itself back to life. It pushed itself off the ground as Tats descended, motivating her to change the angle of her descent from a decisive DFA maneuver into something more like a standard opposed-insertion just on the other side of a nearby rise.

The Ghost was still a proper Frame, and that meant it had the capability to assume a humanoid shape and fight. That was more or less required to wield a Pulse Drive in the first place. As it rose up the doors of the weapon bays snapped open and it loosed a handful of anti-air Meteor missiles. They flew upwards towards Tatsuta’s descending Frame and its attending Stratoknight. Skydiving as she was in her huge Frame, it was a simple matter to evade them with a jaunty sideways flip. That wasn’t true for her deliverer, the massive and winged Stratoknight, which blew up in a thousand pieces overhead as the missiles slammed into it.

Tatsuta, the descending opponent, never the less broke into a smile and shook her low blonde twintails back and forth happily as she watched NoCro’s Ghost come back to life. This tipoff she got might result in real content. Her falling Frame unshouldered the Sympathetic Lance it was carrying as she closed her eyes in delight, controlling all of it from her Progressive implant, which she normally used to manage her streams. This was Linear’s so-called stage control, the ability of a person to subconsciously manipulate her environment. Her humanoid Frame was targeting a landing on the other side of a nearby hill from No-chan’s Ghost.

“Everyone. This is it!” she said, opening her blue eyes suddenly. All of her feelings over the past couple years regarding variously confronting or working with No-chan were here compressed in this tiny Americanism.