“What have we got, Maya?”

“Port and starboard are online, sir. Aft visuals are online. Forward visuals…”

“Maya? Maya?!”

“Forward visuals working fine, sir. Just messing with you.”

“Ugh. When did you get a sense of humor?”

“Sometime around the last staff briefing, sir.”

“Well that was clearly a mistake. I’ll have to send you back.”

“Yes sir,” Maya chuckled.

“How are the legs holding up?”

“Holding up fine, sir. Permission to leave dock?”

“Granted, Maya.”

And with that, the door slid open, and the universe revealed itself.

Maya’s mech put one massive foot in front of the other. The suit came up to a total of fifty feet in height, ten tons in weight. She used the mech’s two massive hands to grab onto the edges of the dock, then launched herself into the endless night.

“Are you squealing, Maya?”

“I am indeed, sir,” Maya said though a wide, toothy smile.

“You’ve been out here before.”

“And yet it never gets old.”

The distant stars, dead yet undying, called to her, and she forced herself not to reach for them. She turned left, and the torso of her behemoth rotated on its axis before being joined by the legs.

Stella Eranti took a more complete view as Maya drifted further out. She was to stay at a half-mile perimeter as she circumnavigated that floating city, to prep her for patrol duty.

A week prior, she’d woken up in her pod. The barracks’ design was taken from old Japanese hotels, cots built into walls inside of folding doors. Apparently the aim was to save space and help the troops overcome any latent claustrophobia they might be suffering from. Maya, as far as she remembered, had never had that problem. Tight spaces had only ever been cozy to her. They’d opened her door, pulled her out, and told her she was going to pilot the Maisu.

Nobody was entirely sure where the Maisu 0 came from. It was an old model of mech rig, and it was found in an unclaimed solar system. On the planet now called Rangi, a massive sprawl of green sand and boulders, they’d found her. Buried beneath what was eventually decided as a collapsed mineshaft, they found her. The most perfectly designed mech-rig ever imagined. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been preserved well, but after several years of debate over who could claim ownership, the Duke of Stella Eranti was able to take her home. From there, his scientists analyzed the behemoth, and eventually reverse-engineered the Maisu 1.

… Which, as Maya and everyone else in Stella Eranti learned in middle school history, collapsed instantly when someone tried to get inside and pilot the damn thing. Maisu 2 had fared little better, and 3 and 4 were improvements, but it wasn’t until the Maisu 5 that any of the Duke’s people were able to bring the beast into the space, where it belonged.

Maya remembered the first time she’d read those words, in her school textbooks. It had been a revelation: the Rangians, whoever they word, whatever they’d truly called themselves, had been space-faring. She could recall the exact moment the information had entered her developing mind: a ten year old girl, black hair in pigtails, sitting in a cramped classroom at a desk already too small for her. Her classmates were so close beside her that everyone had no choice but to get used to it. Handed the text, a pad projecting holographic words onto holographic paper: 40,000 years ago, the Rangians reached for the stars and took hold. The only question is just how high they climbed.

Maya steered around the turn of the bottled city. They floating through unclaimed space, and nobody was on their sensors. They were all alone. Maya was all alone. But she didn’t feel that way. She never felt that way. Rangi was with her. Maisu was with her, all six of them. And it was perfect.

She pushed forward.

“Maya, what are you doing?”

“Just testing her out a bit, Sir.”

“You’re not authorized to do that, Maya.”

“I know, but… I think I can push her a bit more, Sir.”

“No, you can’t, Maya.”

“But Sir!”

“Maya! Report back immediately.”

Maya looked out at the cosmos unfolding before her. She reached out, one hand her own and one the Maisu.

The stars were there.

She reached.

She grabbed hold.

The only question was how far she could get.

At full thrust, the Maisu was capable of similar speeds to a runabout, but with far greater firepower and maneuverability. She launched, and she went forward.

The others were after her immediately, and she fired before they did. The backlash was mostly absorbed by the machine itself, but there was still a small jolt from firing that many times. Maya’s heart thundered, sweat bursting from her pores. Yet her hands remained steady, and she refused to blink. She didn’t know why she was doing this, only that…

Only that it was important. Important that she get to Rangi.

The other mechs started firing back. They weren’t as strong or as fast as her Maisu, but there were dozens of them. Indirect hit after indirect hit- they were targeting her life support systems. They were trying to save the mech.

Maya took down five, ten, twenty mechs before carbon dioxide flooded her cockpit. Then her hands stopped moving. Then her arms. Then everything. Her entire body began to stop. Simply… Stop.

The last thing she saw was the stars. She wanted to reach out for them. She wanted more than anything for them to reach back. But she understood: they were already dead.

***

“How are you feeling, Sir?”

“Very good, Your Excellence.”

“Sorry about the newest Maya. I knew you’d grown attached to that one.”

“She was certainly the most successful thus far. But she wasn’t good enough. Not for the Maisu, and not for me.”

“Too much of the original pilot’s DNA, you think?”

“Perhaps. More human DNA might make Maya 21 easier to control.”

“Very good.”

“And the mech?”

“Damaged. Not irreparably, but frankly it’d be more efficient to simply start work on Maisu 6.”

“How long until I have a body again, Your Excellence?”

“Three weeks at most. And again, I apologize for your having to shut down the last one. I understand that’s rather a painful process for you.”

“It is. Is there anything else, or may I rest, Duke?”

“One more thing: the Maya program is growing rather costly. We may have to face the reality that it’s not worth the effort or the expense.”

“So I’m on thin ice, then?”

“You are.”

“Very well. You do understand, though: the rig only responds to Rangian DNA. It has to be a Rangian, or at least someone with primarily Rangian DNA.”

“I do. I also understand that someone else can figure that out rather easily. So if this next Maya fails-”

“Then you kill me and the Maisu both?”

“That’s correct, Sir. You may rest now.”

And with that, the Duke left the room in which Sir slept. Extracted from Maya 20, placed in computer storage, the personality drifted off. It slept, and it dreamt of the stars reaching back.

More than anything, Sir wanted to go home. He suspected that was Maya’s problem as well. Home to where they’d been found, home to where they’d been pulled out of their sleep. They wanted the same thing, but they didn’t want it the same way.