WOLFPACK — OPERATOR UNIT // FILE PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED
EXO-RONIN
The Agency's masked maybe-machine blade — an exo-armored duelist with a flat vocoder voice that spends words like ammunition
FIELD HISTORY
The frame came first. A masterless armorer built it as a one-off covert dueling exoskeleton and modeled the faceplate on the old roof-guardian demon tiles — the ones set up high on temple ridgelines, demons stationed to frighten worse demons away. Its sensors are woven through the entire armor skin; the single crimson eye-slit sees nothing at all. The armorer kept it anyway, on the theory that fear is also armor: a face with one burning eye buys you the half second in which duels are decided. The blade is a resonance-edged katana whose glow is the hum of its own edge, thin enough to part cable and quiet enough to part it politely.
Its last confirmed occupant was a mercenary commander whose company was burned by its own employer in the tanker affair during the Carapace incident. She took the frame to settle her company's debts, and the frame's reflex-lattice — a training system that studies its occupant and learns to move as they move — spent years recording her. Somewhere in those years, the occupant stopped and the frame did not. What walks now is a question the Agency has agreed not to ask out loud: a machine continuing a person, or a person continued by a machine. It maintains the blade immaculately and lets the hood and scarf rot to tatters, which Fandroid — the only one permitted to touch the exposed neck cabling — privately classifies as mourning behavior.
Steel Cobra found it standing guard over a sealed bulkhead on a dead station, long after anything behind that bulkhead could have needed guarding, and offered it a contract. It drew the katana three centimeters, rang the blade once against the frame, and sheathed it — which the Agency has since learned means yes. It speaks through a vocoder — a flat, quiet voice with a faint doubled undertone, as if two voices share the words — and it spends those words like ammunition: positions, counts, orders, nothing else. On the anniversary of the tanker, it stands the night watch without being asked, and nobody in the Collection Agency would dream of taking that shift from it.
INTERCEPTED COMMS
- “Package secure. Two followed us. They stopped following.”
- “Your exit is gone. I am your exit. Walk behind me.”
- “Three inside. One is lying about being alone.”
- “The blade does not negotiate. Fortunately for you, I do. Briefly.”
- “Stand still. This will be quick, and it will not be yours.”
PSYCH PROFILE
Drives: Whatever remains in the frame keeps one ledger — debts of protection, paid in full, to the last name on a dead company's roster
Frictions: Governor Voss's standing citizenship offer arrives annually and is annually unanswered; the crew's oldest argument is whether anyone should ever open the frame, and Fandroid ends it every time with one word — no
- signs contracts by ringing the blade once against the frame
- stands night watch unasked on the anniversary of the tanker
- lets the hood and scarf rot while keeping the blade immaculate
- plays a months-long chess game against Nightshade in which neither has ever spoken
KNOWN ASSOCIATES
- STEEL COBRA — Contract-holder; heard one of the four words in person and has never told anyone which — the frame's ledger marks his debts paid in advance
- FANDROID — The only hands allowed on the exposed cabling; it stands shrine-still for him, and once said 'thank you' through the vocoder — he has never mentioned it to anyone
- GHOST LEOPARD — Preferred overwatch pairing — neither rushes, neither wastes a word, and their operations conclude with the same two-word sign-off: 'Done. Clear.'
- NIGHTSHADE — Opponent in a months-long silent chess game; the two deathless things in one room lower everyone else's pulse-readings except each other's
- JINX — Jinx deals it a card face-down before dangerous jobs 'for the house inside'; the frame keeps every card, and Jinx has decided never to ask where
- Governor Voss — Sends an annual gilded offer of citizenship for the made; the frame files each one, unanswered, in the same place as the cards