Maya Tiangong is dangling from a comically oversized contraption.

Story of her life, if her authorized biography is anything to go by. Smyrnia-Silesia's infamous mistress of artillery claims that she was born in Singapore, on Earth, from a family of dockers whose lineage goes back to the late industrial era. When pressed about how good that claim of ancestry is, Maia Tiangong shakes her head and just says "the cranes, my man, the cranes!"

The cranes, indeed. Is this how she developed her taste for giant machinery, watching a forest of harbour cranes coming and going in the sunset, unloading cargo ships in-between two cyclones, then feeding the products of Laniakea vessels to USRE railways and vice versa? Maybe. Maybe not. A few friends of mine conducted an investigation in Singapore and found no Tiangong family on record, which doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Maia may have adopted a new name as she immigrated away from her homeworld, a long-established tradition among "late movers". Or perhaps she's never set foot in Singapore, let alone on Earth, and the cranes are yet another smokescreen.

The Singapore story isn't the only one. Some locals maintain that she was born on Mars, the daughter of a Red terrorist and a Blue scientist, that she lost her family in the nuclear destruction of Phobos, that she took the first ship to Smyrnia-Silesia, USRE spec ops hot on her heels. Others say she's a criminal wanted for first-degree murder of a Laniakean official, that she had her face surgically altered and that the Meta-Queen herself requested her services. A common whisper on the subnet is that she descends from the first anarchist settlers of the twin icy planets, that she was was forged by the glorious chaos of the flux state, and shaped it in kind. Some elements of these stories are mutually compatible, others diverge so much one is forced to admit they can't be true at the same time. In a sense, it does not matter. The individual known as Maya Tiangong has something of a cryptid hiding in plain sight. She flies close to myth, and myth is a narrative, not a list of logical facts.

Myth, indeed. There are many ways to become a legend in the splendid chaos of Smyrnia-Silesia, but few are more direct than the path Maya Tiangong forged for herself. Ten years ago, she shot a spaceship down with a railway cannon. The place, time and reason for the conflict matter little, for allegiances and frontlines are as fluid as spring water on the twin anarchist worlds. What matters is the act: senseless, clever, devastating. A sixteen inch cannon hastily soldered from discarded pipes and spaceship parts, a nuclear train running full steam ahead in the desolate plains of Smyrnia, a shell polished in a shed, a telescope with holographic sights and an abacus for a targeting system, a Luciole operated by corsairs-for-hire, four hundred kilometers above, ignition, a single shot -- target down. It was the day Maya Tiangong achieved escape velocity.

Since then, she's done everything. Jurry-rigging Orion drives with regolith concrete and copper strings. Pushing refurbished racing Lucioles past seventeen gees of sustained acceleration. Strapping nuclear reactors to ancient terran tanks and have them drive on the seabed, beneath the iceshelf. Eyeballing a high-velocity rendez-vous on an eccentric orbit around a black hole. Building the world's largest harbour crane. Guiding a glider in the eye of a hurricane the size of the Earth. Staring a Sequencer in the eye, holding a compact nuke in her hand. She's worked for everyone and with everyone. She has no allegiances, no masters and no gods, save for the titans of steel and atom she conjures up in her dreams. She recently went on record claiming she wants to build the Milky Way's biggest disco ball. When innocent bystanders reply that we already have a planet-sized disco ball, Xango, Maia Tiangong is unfazed. She already has a plan.

She's going to light up a brown dwarf.

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.