The Big Damn Fight

“Would you look at this?”

Before the Executive, the silvery sphere smoked, black patches marking the shrapnel arms where enemy fire had ripped its weaponry apart. The hatch lay hanging off invisible hinges, and cables snaked from within to without, magnetic eddies powering…

A laptop.

The corpse of William William William, in fact, not that Raime knew or would care if she did. It hummed with a nanotechnological prowess - a potential untapped. Page after page of spreadsheet unrolled before her, extrapolated from her wrecked mech’s sensors and turned into action reports and executive summaries.

And frankly, it was a mess. Raime hadn’t much in the way of background when it came to the management of the entire multiverse, but the eleven-dimensional flowcharts hovering onscreen suggested a level of complexity orders of magnitude more than the minimum required - criminal inefficiency, if she did dare suggest it herself.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Ex-Private Cole began, “that we’re all bloody [bleep]ed up the [bleep] with a [bleep]ing [bleep] without a [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] and a [bleep] for a [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleeeeeeeeeeep]“

“I am absolutely glad I didn’t understand any of that!” Raime said brightly.

In the hatch, the princess sat weeping quietly.

“Shh.” Nova stepped around the royal, clambering out from the cramped mech’s interior. In one hand she still held a bright pink autogun barrel, scavenged from her own mech, which lay in a smoking heap some distance away. “Where are we?”

“Backstage, I think.”

“We’re not entered?” A faint note of panic entered the superstar’s voice. “I’m not in a talent show?” Casually, she scooped up Raime’s head and locked eyes with it. “What kind of a crazy world is this, anyway?!”

Raime tapped at a few keys from across the room. “I could get you in, if you’d like. This place is criminally undermanaged.”