"Ich kümmern sich nicht wo oder wie, finde mich ein Steuereinheit."
The flight of the Verteidiger had brought victory for the West German allies. Its defenses made it nearly invulnerable to every strain of BETA. Its weapons decimated everything in its path. It even managed to take out a few East German units when they tried to feebly impose themselves in the middle of the crossfire.
If only Johanna could find the same peace of mind as the other pilots in her convoy.
She was a casualty of an alien-infested world. A sickly child since birth, Jo had been taken in as a ward of the state after the BETA invaded her town and massacred all of her known family. With no other outlet for her misery, she had grown up playing simulators, fighting in pretend battles against the BETA, imagining herself as one of the brave TSF pilots she adored, always clinging to the smallest hint of hope and normalcy.
After spending her entire childhood as a lonely cripple, her country had blessed her with a chance for a better life. The procedure had replaced over 40% of her frail body with prosthetics that seamlessly blended with her own anatomy. The hidden augmentations enabled her to move about freely while she was off-duty, allowing her to pass off as a perfectly happy, healthy young woman. On-duty, she was the Schildmaid: a living interface for the Verteidiger's control systems. The experimental craft was about the same size and shape as a typical European-made TSF, but it was engineered more like a high-altitude mobile carrier. Its advanced technology and intense g-forces required a pilot who could operate far beyond the limits of any ordinary human being.
The only side effect was she had no memory of who she had been prior to the procedure. Welding cybernetic prosthetics to her brain tissue had effectively erased all of her long-term memories from before the operation, leaving only the raw piloting skills she had honed during the decade she spent in simulations. It was a known risk she had consented to prior to the procedure. She had courageously given up part of her own identity for the better of her country.
Or at least, that was the fairy tale her superiors were telling her. They were always so kind to her, so willing to answer her every need in honor of her sacrifice, idolizing her above all of the other girls in her flight team. But something about all of their inspirational stories never quite seemed to add up.
Jo pressed the Replay button again. She paused, zoomed in, and squinted at the static-laced image that had been recorded by the Verteidiger's recon camera the previous day. Maybe it was the computerized portions of her brain that drove her to systematically analyze every piece of evidence. Or maybe it was something more personal.
A female figure climbed out of the wreckage of a downed MiG-21 and waited to be recovered by the rest of her East German squadron. Long blonde hair held in place with a black hairband. A blue and black Fortified Suit with a Captain's insignia. It was a person almost as alien to Jo as the BETA. Yet, somehow, she looked so familiar…
Jo suddenly slipped into one of the waking nightmares that often plagued her. The interlaced video turned into a vivid reality. Now she was the one in the downed MiG, but something was preventing her from climbing out. The blonde-haired girl was a few feet in front of her, standing on the edge of the crumpled fuselage with a pistol pointed at Jo's forehead. There was a cold expression in her eyes, but she seemed deeply saddened. Jo tried to scream, but all that came was the deafening sound of the bullet bursting out of the chamber.
Jo was rocked back to awareness. She was in her barracks in a West German base, sitting in front of a monitor reviewing the Verteidiger's recon footage. She sighed to herself and scratched her head, trying desperately to claw an answer out of the depths of her consciousness. She became so engrossed by the mysterious figure on the screen that she never heard the door slowly opening behind her.
Two of the infiltrators pulled her up from her seat and kept her hooked by the arms. They twisted her around so she faced the rest of the team.
There were four of them, girls around her age all donned in black fatigues. There were the two at her arms, a silver-haired one closer to the door, and one with long pitch black hair at the center of the group. She stood in front of Jo with her arms crossed, her blood red eyes piercing the darkened barracks. Jo's knowledge of the world may have only stretched back a few months, but her strict military education told her she in the presence of Stasi conspirators.
"Hello, Inghild." The dark-haired stranger spoke in a chilling sarcastic tone. "What's it like to come back from the dead?"
"What are you talking about?" Jo said. "Let me go!"
"What's gotten into you?" the woman scolded in return. "What are those filthy Western pigs paying you to keep you as their toy?"
She offered Jo a fake smile as she shook her head.
"You should have known we'd come for you. The Stasi make sure they always have the best technology available. You and that special TSF of yours just showed up on their inventory."
Jo struggled to break free of her captors, clenching teeth as she threw herself forward.
"Calm down, Inghild," the dark woman said jokingly. "We just want to take you back where you belong."
Finally, Jo overpowered them with her quasi-mechanical strength. She charged at the Stasi leader, knocking the wind out of her by plowing her shoulder into the woman's gut. She wrenched the Stasi into a headlock, so that with a small twist of her arms she could break the spy's neck.
A tiny glimpse of panic appeared in the woman's brooding crimson eyes.
"Psych её!" she gasped in Russian. The silver-haired girl moved away from the door. Jo seemed to freeze in place as a strange sensation took hold of her mind.
Jo's composite body made her immune to most conventional sedatives, but her mostly organic brain was still susceptible to the hypnotic powers of Soviet Espers. She felt like her head was quickly heating up until the inside of her skull was ablaze.
Jo released her grip on the Stasi leader and staggered backwards. Violently shaking her head, clawing her fingers through her hair, she tried to put out the imaginary flames inside her mind.
The black-haired woman shouted something else to the Esper. Waves of ice cold water crashed down to put out the fire.
Jo collapsed to the floor, overwhelmed by the sensation of sinking into darkness. She lost consciousness a few seconds later.