All the years you’d been working with the mercenary, you’d never once seen her out of her power armour. Hell, you have no idea what she even looked like beneath the impassive golden glass of her visor. You weren’t even sure you’d heard her voice without the crisp electric edge of her suit’s speakers.

Even during the long downtime between missions, the weeks spent trapped in the same 3 decks of your spaceship, she’d never so much as removed her helmet in the mess hall. Even when she was repairing her suit - a frequent necessity in your shared line of work - she somehow managed without removing a single armoured section.

Of course, you’d asked her about it - sometimes tactfully, sometimes drunk after a mission - but she’d never given a straight answer. She wanted to be ready for anything, she said. As you grew closer, fighting side by side through so many missions, her answers changed, if only a little. She was conscious of her scars, or she didn’t want you to think of her differently. Now, after spending so much time together outside missions, the bond between you growing, she’d stayed silent and you’d stopped asking.

She was happy in her armour. That’s what mattered.

Your last mission was when everything changed. Pinned down by a turret emplacement, she ran out of cover to draw their fire, giving you a few precious seconds to aim for its weak spot. Your shot found its mark a moment too late. You barely saw her take the hit; a brief flash of light as the round impacted against her helmet, her armoured body tumbling backwards.

The turret silent, you scrambled up, racing over to her.

Her suit’s servos whined as she pushed herself up, turning to you with her shattered helmet. You finally had your answer. The turret’s anti-materiel round had hit across her visor, shattering it into a thousand fragments — but there was no blood, no gore, no scarred face grinning back at you; just golden fragments glittering inside the empty suit of armour.

For a moment, you were both stunned, your shocked face reflected back in the mirror lenses of her helmet cams, the silence broken by that familiar electronic voice.

“I guess my secret’s out…”

Hours later, after gently encouraging the rest of your crew to make themselves busy elsewhere, you carefully worked to repair her suit. The first time in 5 years she’d allowed anyone else to work on it. The first time she’d told anyone why she never took it off.

Years before you’d shared your first bounty together, a lucky shot from a boarding party has punched clear through her chest armour. The suit’s primitive AI and medical systems did what they could, but there was more damage to her heart than the suit could possibly repair. So the AI did what it could and saved her mind, pilling it across the suit’s neural link as her body died.

She was the suit, and the suit was her.

The same circuits that ran the power armour’s operating system how danced with her thoughts and emotions. The AI joining its mind with hers, letting her see through the suit’s cameras, speak through its radio, and feel with every sensor and encoder lining the suit’s systems. The suit’s servos were never designed to operate without a person to guide them, and the first moments of her new life were spent awkwardly dragging herself to an escape pod, but that was nothing practice and determination (and a few black-market upgrades) couldn’t fix.

“There is one other advantage,” she spoke, turning her helmet to look at you, her new visor glittering in the repair bay’s lights. One armoured hand carefully traced the old repair work on her chest, the other gently touching your face.

“There’s room in this suit for you…”