“The old bastard,” Panya muttered, her raw palms sticking to the joysticks. Vance wasn't recruiting; he was staging theater to extract defense budgets. Civilians back home, tuned into the stream, thought they were spectating an exhibition. Her visor flickered with the carrier wavelength, pulsed over an unmasked fleet relay. The automated swarms had failed to cloak it. At 400% sync, she could seize the relay. “Zaidu! Tarek!” Panya’s voice ripped through the team comms, sharp and clear despite the internal scream of her burnt nerves. “Vance is puppeting these things! They’re not alien, they’re *his*! He’s feeding a fake war to the spectators!” Silence for a beat. Then Zaidu’s shocked gasp. “What? That’s… treason!” “He’s playing everyone, including us,” Tarek growled, his voice laced with venom. The realization, the sheer betrayal from his own father, hit him with devastating force. “He used my family’s name, my *mother’s* legacy, for this… this theater!” “Exactly,” Panya said, tapping scorched glass to bypass firmware interlocks. “The trophy is conscription into his private meat-grinder. And millions are tuned into this rigged exhibition.” She laughed, a short, humorless bark. “Let’s re-route our sensor array through his staging server. The arena crowd gets a look at the puppet strings.” [TRANSMISSION INITIATED: SYNAPSE CLASH PUBLIC BROADCAST OVERRIDE] Across Neo-Kowloon, holo-screens tore into snowy noise, replacing the tournament graphic with Panya's cockpit feed. Ripping metal and concussive blasts overrode the commentator mix. General Vance's bark clipped the audio channels. “You insolent brats! What in the blazes do you think you’re doing? Disengage immediately! I will personally see you court-martialed for insubordination!” A telemetry box opened in the lower frame, tracking directional datalinks straight from Vance’s bridge, alongside footage of the officer staring at his redlined consoles. The commentator, a seasoned esports veteran known for his booming voice, was utterly speechless. A low murmur spread through the stadium crowds, then a roar of confused anger. The illusion shattered. “He manufactured these swarms,” Panya said across the open channel. “They aren’t invaders. He steers them from orbit to milk funding.” Zaidu, his face grim, snapped his mech’s primary arm into an offensive stance. “What do you need, Pan? Give us the target.” “His dreadnought,” Panya said, locking onto the vessel. “The kinetic barrier is civilian-grade alloy. Ventral conduit is bare behind the bridge. Tarek, give me the Grav-Slam breach.” Tarek’s actuator whined as he cycled heavy railguns. “The K-Blast Surge? You snored through every scrim, but you always took the headshot. Stand by.” “Zaidu, suppress the surrounding craft,” Panya said. “Keep them off our flanks.” Zaidu’s chassis pivoted, twin autocannons stitching incendiary rounds into incoming hostiles to wall the squad off. Tarek dove beneath the dreadnought’s hull, pumping slugs into a singular structural seam until the deflector mesh splintered into white sparks. “Gap open!” Tarek bellowed. Panya didn’t hesitate. The Vigilant Aegis, now moving with a terrifying, almost predatory grace, shot forward like an arrow released from a bow. Her targeting reticle locked onto the exposed power conduit, a pulsating blue line visible only to the Aegis’s enhanced sensors. She armed her primary particle cannon, overcharged beyond safety limits. The Aegis screamed, a high-pitched whine that resonated through the ruined cityscape. Vance broke over the open channel again before she could squeeze the trigger. “Protocol Cerberus,” Vance snarled. “Purge the conscript units. Detonation in three minutes.” The automated cabin speaker chimed: [SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED: MECH INTEGRITY COMPROMISED] [DETONATION IN: 00:03:00] Panya fired, a thermal lance coring the ventral pipe. Fire bloomed along the dreadnought's belly, shearing off plating and cutting the transmission instantly. But the victory was hollow. The cold, digital countdown blazed across her HUD, mirroring those on Zaidu’s and Tarek’s screens. Three minutes. Three minutes until her mech, until *their* mechs, turned into nuclear fireballs. Her mind raced, desperately searching for an override, a hack, anything. The self-destruct was hardwired into the neural sync, a fail-safe against insubordination. It wasn’t a remote trigger Vance could just turn off. The countdown ran directly through the spinal tap. Ejection would spare her, but abandon Zaidu and Tarek to burn in their frames. She could eject, save her own skin, and Vance would have won. Or… she could try to cut the connection from the inside. But the only way to sever a hardwired neural sync like this, especially at 400%, was to overload the feedback loop, to fry the brain-machine interface with a surge so violent it would erase the command… and quite possibly, her own mind in the process.

Friendly Fire