What happens when you crack open an angel's shell?
A mechsploitation micro-fic by MollyTwos
Content Notes: This story contains violence, piss, blood, death, religious themes, sexual imagery and implied brainwashing.
I hate angels. They lie there, in a womb of wires and IVs. Engine beating like a heart and cannon red-hot as they reign down death and destruction on us. Those they deem sinners simply for not rolling over and dying.
But I know that deep down they are gore and bone and frightened piss just like the rest of us. That a divine form has the same flaws as a mortal form one. Something me and my squad of hunters aim to prove.
It didnβt take us long to realise. A mecha has arms, legs, and a head. Machinery in the image of man. All of the same weaknesses too. We go for the joints.
A single one of these shoulder mounted rail cannons wouldnβt do much, but we have a dozen and we are pretty good shots. The angel kneels as its knee explodes, cable tendons whipping lose and pistons deforming under the unexpected impacts.
She screams her defiance over the vox-speakers. It doesn't sound different to her usual cries.
We barely have to aim now. Rockets streak across the sky and it goes down as its arms can no longer hold it up. It has no way to right itself. Combat doctrine knows that once a mech is down, it's as good as dead.
She doesnβt know that yet. She flails, lashing out, clawing deep furrows in the earth and howling. We sit in our hidey hole out of reach, sharing cigs and waiting her out.
Eventually it is quiet. The lull in her stim-cycle. Canβt keep them juiced indefinitely, but they keep them damn close. We move in for the kill.
We work methodically. Severing cables with our shots, blasting what is too big to shoot, clambering over the divine machine like ants. Stripping it to the bone.
My team climb to the head. Our job is the least and the most important. It's technically easier to go in via the neck, but we want her to know what we are doing.
She starts screaming as soon as she sees us. Heretics. Apostates. Scum. Unfit to touch her divine form. She tells us what she is going to do with us when she is free. She describes in graphic detail how she is going to crush each and every one of us slowly. That our lives are forfeit to her Goddess.
We ignore her. We know how this ends.
When we cut her external feed, her tone changes. Fear creeps in. Then the next stim-pack kicks in and she starts raving again about the divinity in her machine and her Goddess again. I prefer that to when they start begging.
We prize the cockpit open like an oyster. The smells of incense, need, sweat, unwashed flesh, anointed oils and machinery wash over us. The newbie wretches and I hand him another cigarette and tell him to go watch the perimeter.
The pilot had once been a woman. I could tell from the ugly red knots across her chest. It's about the only bit of colour on her besides the blue of her veins against pale skin that had not seen the sun in a long time.
As I lower myself into the cockpit, she is whimpering. I listen in and hear her reciting devotionals to her Goddess. Her head slightly bowed, her hands never leaving the controls. I am amazed she can raise her withered neck with all that hardware.
There is a slight buzzing between her legs and after each amen, she shudders a little, then the next batch of stims kick in and she thrashes. The hushed whispers turn into fanatics ranting. She screams about how fucked we all are. How she is the Goddessβs Chosen. How we will die screaming.
She is bucking her hips now, her skin flushed, froth forming around her gaunt lips.
I cut the wire to the vibrator. She bucks harder, suddenly she no longer feels Goddessβs blessing against her crotch and frantically seeks it again. She keeps screaming. It's almost pathetic.
I clamber onto her, knife clutched in my teeth. I am suddenly there and close, and she starts to rub herself against me. I press a knee between her legs.
It's disgusting to let my fatigues be used this way by her, but it pins her with me on top, and stops her thrashing as she begins to moan and whimper to her Goddess again, thanking her. I take no joy in the fact that what she thinks is her Goddess is just the knee of one of those hated rebels.
I shuck her. I cut the adrenaline line first to calm her down, and the oxycontin last to stop her screaming so much. As I cut the sensors she whines, forced to focus on the only thing she can experience and I feel her shudder and twitch against my knee.
I cut her catheter and quickly move out the way as the cockpit fills with an acrid scent. I can see her nostril twitching, and as the adrenaline finally leeches out her system, I see her realise how fucked she is.
She begs the Goddess that fills her vision to save her. She lists all the things she has done in her name. I take that moment to cut her feed.
She screams and begs as her Goddess vanishes into darkness. I stroke the few wispy hairs left on her head and she presses her head into it. βGoddess?β
I begin to list the dead. She tilts her head, confused, too stupid to realise what I am saying. She cries and begins to recite prayers, believing them to be saints. She asks her Goddess to receive them. I lash out, and my fist bloodies her lips.
She asks her Goddess for forgiveness, unsure of how she has angered her, as I drag the angel by the throat into the sunlight. I am glad that the Imperials weld the helmet to their pilots so she cannot see my tears.
I toss her into the mud with us and the soldiers gather around. We stand around and look at this thing. A cockroach on its back. I am unsure who kicks her first. But once they start it is hard to tell.
Without the drugs, she begs, all defiance gone without the chemical backup and constant divine reassurance. She surrenders first. Then she offers information. Finally she offers her faith. The value all of those things less than their revenge and someone kicks her in the jaw, silencing her pleas.
I lean back, and watch. I have lost my taste for it, but I still have a role to play. I watch her body change colour under their blows. Brown mud and purple bruises. Eventually I step in and offer her the only respect I will give her.
Two shots and an angel lies dead in the dirt. The newbie doesn't come back, and the veterans won't meet my eye. They know I am the line that separates us from them.
We leave her body splayed across the mech in a parody of their iconography alongside a promise, scrawled across the metal. βWe will drag your angels into the mud with us and drown them.β
