The Empire has better tech.
There are many fronts, and the Empire does not win on all of them, but the advantages conferred by the most money and the most resources and an unfettered willingness to sink it all into military R&D and procurement, at the expense of literally everything that nominally defends, are vast. The Federated Polities win mostly on fronts where they can force the conflict asymmetric.
Today, the battle turned into too much of a fair fight, and Stella is very, very cold. Her machine is mostly inert, a quicksilver angel of smart-morph materials and fusion torch, gone dead-weight limp and immobile. The tok has gone into fail-safe, and would take a million bucks and a nuclear hangar crew to jumpstart.
There’s an envelope, a stark physics-delimited envelope of power output and structural integrity and functionality, and the Empire’s tech, in open sky, dogfighting toe-to-toe, is just better. Their envelope is bigger. They can push a little harder, turn sharper, pull a few Gs more, hit and sustain a higher airspeed.
Stella’s mech is a microwaved Barbie doll, drooping out of shape in its opponent’s triumphant clawed fist.
Audio crackles in her ears as enemy technocelium finally outpaces the rearguard action of her dying machine’s immune system.
“Pilot,” the Imperial mech’s controller croons. “Oh, Piiiiiiiilot.”
Assume the local network is compromised, Stella thinks. All the way up to the traceries laced into her peripheral nervous system, probably, but certainly the chin mic. She says nothing.
“I’ve got you on sensors,” the enemy says, in a breathless, caressing way. “I can see your heartbeat. I can see the fingerprint of your injuries, in the chemical plume you exhale. I can see your pulse jump when I talk. You don’t have to talk back. Not at this stage. We’ve got people for that.”
Stella’s vision abruptly switches from widescreen to darkly letterboxed, as enough of the core systems run out of juice for the mech to stop even telling her it’s dying. The last line of defence, the meatgapped isolated system in her head that a functioning mech connection suppresses from ever coming online, softly boots. The one that can rapidly rebuild the combat-stim metabolite junk in her system into toxins that will chemically deglove her nerves, shuck the technocelium from the inside, turn her into soup that not even an autopsy can interrogate much.
The enemy is still talking to her, in the sickly fascinated way that Imperial pilots do. Something they do to them, FedPol science thinks; something in the conditioning, intentional or not. They fixate. They obsess.
They pine and yearn and seethe and long. And they collide it, psychologically, with the programmed need to kill. It gets ugly, out here. The killswitch is partly to protect her.
“—What I’m for,” the enemy pilot is panting down the comms, “is pulling the wings off flygirls,” and then, “no. No. What did you do—”
The killswitch requires no manual intervention, at this stage; Stella opted in at the start of the sortie.
“No no no what did you do—” as the Imperial mech’s claws dextrously shred the mechanical carcass enclosing Stella’s own fading meat; delirious, heartbroken, hate-filled, shrieking. Too late for any intervention. There is no timely intervention; in this, at least, their tech is impeccable.
(Stella backed her mind up before getting into her mech. They’ll regrow her meat, slip her into it — minus the last few hours — like a new glove. That’s part of what the war’s about. Stella’s irreplaceable; and the Empire refuses the logical endpoint that technology brings that to, where the FedPol embraces it. She doesn’t fear this. Or — not half so much as she does the mindfuck-crazed wardoll outside that thinks it loves her.)
A sigh slips out of her throat, not so much voluntary as dislodged by muscles slipping into a rest state.
The enemy howls in anguish.
