Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who has something in their heart that is not in the world
We found them.
I don't know what our propaganda says, these days, about the shining Legion, the armoured fist of imperial might, but here's what happened: we found them.
A complex on a moon, housing 10,421 giant bipedal mechanisms. They'd been there a long time. A long-term storage facility, as far as I know; that was the leading archaeological thesis, up to the point where all the archaeologists were disappeared for intellectual sedition.
Giants robots of unparalleled power, virtually indestructible. And they're capable of true FTL jumps; all they need is a pilot.
That was the trickiest thing to work out. They need a person in there, to work. Obvious safeguard, I suppose; but we're — subtly somehow wrong for it, we don't work, not unless we trick them. You've heard of the Fountain?
Oh no, no, it's not an actual fountain. It's — I'd have to defer to the physicists on that. I haven't kept up; they probably all went for intellectual sedition, too. It's a ball of exotic — well, mass; I recall they were arguing about every other property. And it transfers, in some limited way, stuff between here and wherever the other end is. Never had much luck with sending stuff, but we got a reliable procedure going for pulling through Fountain-Water, which is of course — you know what I'm going to say — not water. Weirder than the Fountain, even.
There's a droplet of it implanted between the chambers of my heart.
All of this — the Empire, the wars, the conquest, the blood — all resting on a droplet. Because that's enough for the Legion to recognise us as ignition keys.
Are you having the dreams, yet?
Go ahead, kill me. I don't recognise the Empire's authority over me. You'll understand, when you're dying of homesickness for somewhere you've never been and can never go.