An Aschrahmen Sturm class was designed for three things.
Move in fast. Hit hard. Get out before taking critical damage.
Liesel said this while walking around the unit, her hand tapping certain points on the metal body the way someone taps things they've memorized so well they don't need to think about it anymore.
"This unit has had three pilots." She said.
"All of them died."
She stopped at the left side of the unit and pointed at a panel whose surface was slightly duller than the surrounding parts.
"Right sensor has been a problem since the second pilot. Replaced three times, still the same. So you can't rely too heavily on right-side readings in combat."
She glanced at Levin briefly.
"Manual compensation. Can you do that?"
"Don't know yet."
"Honest answer." She said, and kept walking.
"The neural-link also takes longer to calibrate than other units. Usually two hours. Sometimes more. If the connection feels unstable in the first few minutes, that's normal for this unit. Don't panic."
'Don't panic.'
'Very useful advice.'
"One more thing." Liesel stopped and turned to face Levin directly.
"This unit has a reputation for being difficult to work with. The systems don't always respond correctly, calibration is slow, sensors act up."
A small pause.
"But as long as I'm the one maintaining it, nobody dies because of a mechanical problem. I'll make sure that stays true."
She said this in the same tone someone uses to report weather conditions. Flat. Factual.
'She's said this before. Probably more than once. To pilots who aren't here anymore.'
Levin looked at the unit again.
Three pilots. All dead. And now him.
'The unit isn't the problem.'
"What killed them?" He asked.
Liesel's hand, which had been about to tap another panel, stopped.
"The missions." She said.
"The missions specifically, or something about the missions?"
The hangar was quiet for a moment. Somewhere in the back, a ventilation pipe rattled with a sound that had been going on long enough to become background noise.
Liesel looked at him with an expression he couldn't read. Not quite guarded. Not quite open. Something in between.
"You ask a lot of questions for someone who just got here." She said finally.
"You know a lot for someone who's just a technician."
Something shifted in her expression. Gone before he could be sure it was there at all.
"Get in the unit." She said.
* * *
The entry hatch was on the back of the unit, between the shoulder blades. Liesel showed him the sequence: three points on the left side of the hatch, pressed in order, then a pull handle on the right.
Simple enough.
The inside was tighter than Levin expected. A single seat, molded to fit the average Nullrang body, which meant it fit him loosely in the shoulders. Control panels on both sides, most of them dark. A visor that would cover the upper half of his face once fully seated. And directly in front, at the center of the chest panel, a circular port about the size of a fist.
"Neural-link port." Liesel's voice came through a speaker near his left ear.
"The connector goes in there. Once it's in, the system will start calibration. It's going to feel strange the first time."
"Strange how."
"Like the unit is trying to read you. Some pilots describe it as pressure behind the eyes. Some say it feels like someone going through a room in your head looking for something."
'That sounds fine.'
'That sounds completely fine.'
The connector was a small device Liesel had handed him before he climbed in. He looked at it for a moment. Grey, about the length of a thumb, with a flat hexagonal end designed to slot into the port on the chest panel.
He put it in the port.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then every panel in the unit lit up at once.
Not slowly. Not one by one. All of them, simultaneously, in a single pulse of light that made Levin flinch back against the seat. The visor activated on its own. Data began scrolling across it, faster than he could read. He felt something, not pain, not pressure exactly, more like a very sudden awareness that the eight meters of iron around him had just become connected to his nervous system.
It lasted about four seconds.
Then it settled.
Outside, through a camera feed that had appeared on the lower left of his visor without him asking for it, he could see Liesel standing very still next to the unit. She was staring at the external status panel on the unit's chest. Her hand had stopped moving mid-reach toward something.
'She wasn't expecting that.'
"Liesel." He said. His voice came out through the unit's external speakers, slightly flatter than normal.
"Is this how it's supposed to go?"
A pause that was half a second too long.
"Calibration is running." She said. Her voice was even. Professional.
"How does the connection feel?"
"Like the unit is... deciding something."
Another pause.
"That's normal." She said.
'She's lying.'
'She's very good at it. But she's lying.'
* * *
Standard calibration for an AS class Sturm unit: two hours minimum.
Levin's calibration completed in thirty-one minutes.
The system didn't announce this with any kind of fanfare. It simply stopped scrolling, settled into a stable display, and presented him with a clean readout of the unit's status. Everything was green except the right sensor, which showed a yellow warning that matched exactly what Liesel had told him.
He sat inside the unit for a moment longer, getting used to the weight of the connection. It wasn't uncomfortable. Just present. Like a second set of senses that processed the hangar around him in a slightly different way than his own eyes did.
He climbed back out.
Liesel was standing at the external panel, tablet in hand, not looking at him. Her stylus was moving across the screen but it had been moving over the same section for the last thirty seconds.
"Calibration's done." Levin said.
"I know." She said. Still not looking up.
"Thirty-one minutes."
"I know."
Levin waited.
Liesel kept her eyes on the tablet.
"The previous pilots." He said.
"How long did their calibrations take?"
She finally looked up. The expression on her face was the same careful neutral she'd been wearing since he climbed out of the unit. But her stylus had stopped moving.
"Why does that matter?" She asked.
"It doesn't. I'm just asking."
She studied him for a moment. Then she looked back down at her tablet.
"Longer." She said.
That was all she said.
'She's not going to tell me the rest.'
'Which means the rest is something she doesn't want me to know yet.'
'Or something she doesn't know what to do with.'
Levin leaned against the unit's leg, arms crossed. The metal was cold even through his sleeve.
"You're going to write all of this in your report, aren't you." He said. Not a question.
Liesel's stylus stopped again.
"That's my job." She said quietly.
"And if you don't?"
She turned to look at him fully this time. Something in her expression that wasn't quite the careful neutral anymore. Something that had been there longer than today, Levin thought. Something that already existed before he walked into this hangar.
She didn't answer the question.
"Training starts tomorrow. 0600. Don't be late." She said and turned away.
She turned and walked toward the back of the hangar, tablet tucked under her arm, footsteps quick and even on the metal floor.
Levin watched her go.
'She's not going to write it in the report.'
'The question is why.'
* * *
He stayed in the hangar after she left.
There was nowhere else to go. His quarters, a room barely larger than the cell he'd come from, had a bed and a locker and a window that faced another wall. The common area for Nullrang pilots was three corridors down, and based on the noise that had drifted through the facility all afternoon, it was not somewhere he wanted to be tonight.
So he stayed.
He sat on the ground with his back against the unit's right leg, the same leg Liesel had been working on when he arrived. The metal was cold. The hangar was quiet except for the ventilation rattle and the flickering light in the right corner still going, still unfixed.
He looked up at AS-07-119.
Eight meters of grey iron. Paint peeling. Cables exposed. Every visible surface told the same story: this unit was built to be functional, not to last. Built for pilots who were expected to use it until it or they stopped working, whichever came first.
Three pilots before him.
He tried to think about what that meant and found that it didn't mean much. People died. Das Erhaben's system was built so that people like him would die at a useful rate, not so fast it created supply problems, not so slow it cost too much to maintain. The math was straightforward. Forty-three percent survival on the first mission. Seven percent by the tenth. And nobody made it to the twelfth.
None of that was new information.
What was new was the unit.
Levin pressed one hand flat against the metal of the leg behind him.
The connection was gone now that he wasn't in the seat with the neural-link active. But something about the thirty-one minutes sat at the edge of his thinking and wouldn't move. Not because it made him feel special. More because it was a variable he didn't have an explanation for, and unexplained variables were the kind of thing that got people killed when they showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
'Three pilots. All dead. System that doesn't cooperate. And then it cooperates for me.'
'Either I'm lucky or I'm not.'
'And luck in this program usually means someone is paying attention for the wrong reasons.'
He pulled his hand back from the metal.
Above him, the unit stood exactly as it had since he arrived. Still. Heavy. Saying nothing.
He didn't know what to make of it yet.
He filed it away and decided to think about it later, which was what he did with everything he couldn't act on immediately.
The flickering light in the corner kept flickering.
At some point, he fell asleep sitting up against the unit's leg.
He didn't dream.
* * *
He woke up when something hit his boot.
Not hard. More like someone had nudged it with their foot on the way past, and hadn't quite committed to whether it was accidental or not.
Liesel was crouched two meters away, setting down a toolkit, her back mostly to him.
"You slept here." She said. Not a question.
"Apparently."
"Your quarters are in Block C."
"I know."
She opened the toolkit and started laying tools out in a line. The methodical kind of movement that meant she'd done it enough times that her hands knew the sequence without her thinking about it.
"There's food in the common area before 0600." She said, still not looking at him.
"If you're not there by then, it's gone. These pilots eat fast."
'She came back early.'
'Training doesn't start until 0600. It's...'
He checked the small clock on the far wall. 0431.
'She came back at 0431.'
'To do maintenance work on a unit that was already cleared for the day.'
He didn't say any of that.
"What are you fixing?" He asked instead.
"Right sensor housing. The internal mount has been slightly off-angle since the replacement. It's not enough to flag in a standard check, but over time it drifts."
"You said the sensor was already replaced three times."
"Yes."
"And each time, the mount was slightly off?"
Liesel's hands stopped.
She turned to look at him over her shoulder. The expression on her face was the same careful neutral, but there was something else underneath it now. Something that might have been surprise, except it looked more like the expression of someone who had asked themselves the same question and didn't like the answer they'd found.
"...No." She said slowly.
"The first time it was correct. The drift started with the second replacement."
"Who did the second replacement?"
"Not me." She said. Then, quieter:
"I was assigned to this unit after the third pilot died."
Levin sat with that for a moment.
'So the sensor problem started during someone else's watch.'
'And she's been fixing a drift that someone else introduced.'
'She knows that. She's been knowing that.'
'The question is whether the drift was a mistake or something else.'
He stood up, joints stiff from the floor. Liesel had already turned back to the sensor housing, her hands moving again, precise and quick.
He watched her work for a moment.
'She came back at 0431 to fix a sensor drift that nobody asked her to fix, on a unit assigned to a pilot who just arrived yesterday.'
He could ask why.
But he already knew she wouldn't answer that directly. And she knew that he knew. So instead he just said:
"I'll get food before 0600."
Liesel didn't look up.
"Good." She said.
He left the hangar.
Behind him, the sound of her tools kept going, steady and unhurried, in the quiet of the empty hangar.
* * *
[AS-07-119 Status Update]
[Neural-link calibration: COMPLETE]
[Calibration time: 31 minutes 04 seconds]
[Standard calibration baseline: 120 minutes]
[Deviation: -73.6%]
[Note: Anomaly logged. Classification pending.]
[Pilot status: Nullrang — Active Assignment]