Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  Bonespur defeats scans—most scans—because it reads as part of your body. It’s a programmable assembly technology that uses your flesh and blood and bone as raw material. You can’t build in any complexity: you can make a shiv or a lockpick, but not a firearm, not a code-card. And bonespur is forbidden. After the devastation of the SICLE War, all bio-forged tech was prohibited, but this lump in my finger was a gift from my grandmother. It’s my only link to her, and now it’ll either save my life or hasten my death.

  The stemhead girl Ting is talking to me—to my surprise, she didn’t narc herself senseless—but I’m not listening. The scarlet-skinned woman is the only other volunteer who looks alert, stepping through the security film. The teenaged boy marches dreamy-eyed behind her, and the apologetic man follows with a smile on his face.

  The film is ten feet away. Five feet, two feet, and then I’m stepping through.

  I feel the tingle on my face and the tug on my chest—

  My finger burns.

  Agony rakes from my hand to my elbow, like blades are cutting away the flesh. The security film is frying the bonespur tech, and the pain is blinding. With tears in my eyes and a rasp in my throat, I stagger through the film, cradling my throbbing arm.

  I peer downward, half expecting to find my finger black and charred. Instead, it looks fine. A little swollen but fine. Maybe the bonespur is okay. Maybe this isn’t disaster—maybe it’s victory. Still bent over, I tap the activation sequence on the implant.

  Nothing happens. The implant is dead. Crashed by the security film.

  Which means I’m dead, too.

  Two sailors step toward me, because I’ve stopped short, hunched there with tears on my cheeks. I stumble forward, my mind clawing with fear, and tap the activation sequence again.

  Nothing. The bonespur is a lump of inert sludge inside my finger.

  The sailors hustle us along a series of serene corridors that must’ve seen thousands of volunteers marching to their deaths. I need to run diagnostics, but there’s no time. I need to escape, but there’s no exit. I can’t run, I can’t fight, I can’t fix the bonespur.

  I need to reboot the implant.

  How? At the very least, I need to deliver a surge that might force a restart. I don’t know what chance that gives me, but greater than zero.

  Except what kind of surge?

  Anything might work: pressure, data, electricity. Of course, any of those might not work too, but I can’t think about that. I need a recycle board, a filter shunt, anything. I’d throw myself at a bolt of lightning if I could, but the hallway is wide and empty, and the soldiers vigilant.

  We shuffle into a launchdeck that looks like an aircraft hangar. The ceiling is interrupted with huge circular ports, and screens flicker above diagnostic bays and facilitation stations. The air smells of repair foam and well-lubricated machinery. There’s the whine of tools. Two engineering crews crawl over gunships—and my breath catches at the sight of CAVs.

  “Sweet biyo!” Ting gasps.

  Most of what I know about CAVs I learned from my grandmother. The AIs designed CAVs—or overdesigned them—and her engineer’s mind found that fascinating. Unlike bio-forged tech, there is nothing organic about CAVs. Nothing alive. They are purely cold-tech, but they mimic organic systems.

  They don’t heal, but they self-repair in much the same way. They don’t feel anger or fear, but they respond with the equivalent of adrenaline surges. They might even piggyback on operators’ brains for processing power and sensory input.

  They look like seven-ton alloy pods wrapped with overlapping leaves and ribbons, like massive unfurling pinecones. The leaves and ribbons range in width from a few inches to a few feet, swaying and furling around the cockpit—called the saddle—like a sea creature in the tide.

  A shifting latticework of ribbons surrounds each of the three CAVs, and each is pitted and blackened by thousands of remort strikes and blasts.

  Sweat pricks my skin despite the cool air.

  Seeing the scarred alloy brings home what I already know: these things are sent into battles on kamikaze runs. They leap into the path of attacks to die.

  One volunteer starts singing a hymn and Chiinan screams, “Eyes! They’re not going to!”

  She breaks formation, scrambling away from the CAVs. I tense, ready to follow, desperate for a way to reset the bonespur. But Chiinan only takes four steps before her collar emits a tranquilizer that brings her gently to her knees.

  I watch four sailors usher Chiinan toward a bank of seats and feel the tightness of the collar around my own neck. A moment later, I’m sitting between Ting and the drugged teenaged boy. No chance to move.

  “It’s like flowers,” Ting breathes, staring at the CAVs. “How they . . . flower. I mean, with petals and tendrils and leaves.”

  As if in response to her words, the ribbons of the nearest CAV shift and sway, opening a path into the bright interior. Ting is right: they unfurl like a bud blossoming—a flower made of superhard alloy. Inside, the saddle waits, an oval cockpit with a pilot’s rotating seat-frame.

  Except not a cockpit: a guillotine, an electric chair, a death sentence.

  There’s beauty there, too. Cords sway from the cockpit’s white walls, like vines ready to wrap the cry pilot in gentle tendrils, and I flash to a childhood game I played with my grandmother: what does this machine crave? I don’t know, I can’t tell. The external leaves want to stab and slash like blades, but also to cling and crawl, to sprint and grab. The long ribbons want to spider up walls or carve through barricades. They want to bunch together for armor and to extend into rippling spears and—

  My throat clenches when I see the padded clunky manacles adhered to the pilot’s frame. They’re crude and bulky and all-too-human, added to keep the operators from leaving the frame before they die.

  At first, the corpo military had welcomed the presence of pilot’s frames in CAVs. Sure, they’d requested uncrewed drones, but they appreciated the redundancy of manual controls. While the remote operation worked seamlessly, at least in occupied CAVs, what if countermeasures broke the connection?

  Better to have a pilot in place, ready to assume command.

  They’d spent years trying to train pilots, with no luck. Skill didn’t matter. Practice didn’t matter. Experience didn’t matter. Despite the swiveling frame and command interface, you couldn’t control a CAV.

  Not well, at least. Even the most gifted pilots never managed much more than random lurching and spinning.

  So why had the AIs designed unworkable manual controls? Maybe the vestigial cockpits helped CAVs sync with the human brain. Maybe the AIs were teaching humanity a lesson about violence and sacrifice. Or maybe the question didn’t make sense; even before turning sentient, the motivations of the AIs were as incomprehensible as the psychology of a krill swarm.

  That’s probably why someone massacred the ascended AIs: they were too unfathomable to live.

  The military needed occupants to activate the remote-controlled CAVs but couldn’t risk anyone damaging the equipment or interfering with the operators. So they’d installed manacles to secure victims—sorry, passengers—into place. Stretching them on a rack, nailing them to a cross. Maybe that’s what the AIs had wanted all along.

  “That one looks like a Fibonacci artichoke!” Ting gazes with wide eyes at the middle CAV, her golden pupils glinting. “Do you see the shape?”

  “I see the shackles,” I tell her.

  The shackles that will deactivate the CAV if unlocked during operation. The shackles I need my bonespur implant to disengage.

  “I guess we’re like kill switches,” Ting says, “except the other way around. I mean, we close the circuit. If we’re not in place, the CAV deactivates. What’s the opposite of kill? Resurrect switches. That’s not really the opposite, though. I mean, killing is natural, but resurrection is—”

>   “Welcome, volunteers!” a warm voice says, as screens spring to life in front of our seats. “Your contribution to the future of humanity—and of the Earth itself—is invaluable. Your actions today bring a better tomorrow.” The pep talk continues, and I drift into a fugue state of fear and dread until the end: “. . . your upcoming deployment!”

  “When?” I ask Ting. “Did he say when?”

  “Now,” she tells me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Commander on deck!” a sailor barks, and my collar murmurs for me to stand.

  An officer and his entourage enter the bay from a higher deck. The officer is average height with a middle-aged paunch and a craggily handsome face. His silver hair falls in short, conservative dreadlocks. He’s wearing a uniform I can’t place. A CFO-General, maybe? Definitely Executive Class.

  “How long before the CAVs are ready to deploy?” the Exec asks a woman at his side.

  She’s wearing Fleet Comptroller braids and she reeks of command. The sailors salute the man, but she’s the one they watch. “Twenty minutes,” she tells him, with unhappy tension in her voice. “When we moved the schedule up—”

  “There is nothing more important than this,” the Exec snaps at her. “We need to know that CAVs can kill these new fuckers.”

  I guess that’s what Mar Cola meant by “in flux.” There are new fuckers that need killing. But that doesn’t make sense. CAVs can kill cataphracts—if you’re willing to lose a few—and no remort is worse than a cataphract.

  “Yes, san,” the Comptroller says.

  “I’d sacrifice your whole fleet for one chunk of dead lamprey. Twenty minutes is your best? It won’t stay in place much longer.”

  I don’t know what kind of remort a lamprey is, but “twenty minutes” sounds terrified alarms in my mind. I don’t care about flux, I don’t care about lampreys. How am I going to force-restart the bonespur in the middle of a military bay?

  I scan the room, and my gaze snags on a cadet in the Exec’s entourage. She’s wearing a newblue uniform and in a beige world she’s onyx. She gleams. Her cheekbones are blades. She’s as tall as the Exec and even in her crisp uniform, there’s a hint of music in the way she moves.

  The aide beside her is even more interesting, because his sarong is covered in glittering braids and ornaments. My attention sharpens on a cluster of smartwire on his hip, unscrolling into new shapes and then condensing into a ball the size of my thumb. Smartwire is programmable decorative thread that houses a self-contained power source: maybe enough to reboot my implant if I deliver it right.

  “—honor to be privy to the earliest phase of a cavalry charge,” the Executive is saying when I tune back in. “How many CAVs are currently operative, Cadet Rana?”

  “Just under three hundred worldwide, san,” the cadet in newblue says, and her voice is toneless.

  “She sounds deaf!” Ting whispers to me. “I mean, except if she’s deaf, why didn’t she regrow her cochlea?”

  I look closer at Cadet Rana. She doesn’t watch the Exec when he speaks, so she’s not reading his lips. Her lenses must compensate for her deafness, flashing her a transcript or shunting the auditory input onto another sensory system. Why hasn’t she surgically recalibrated her hearing? I don’t know, and I don’t care.

  “I pray that’s enough,” the Exec tells her. “A pity that we’ve lost the making of them.”

  “Did we ever have the making of them, san?” Cadet Rana asks.

  “We did not,” the Exec says, with a hint of a smile. “But we knew how to make the AIs that did.” He turns to his other side. “Fewer than three hundred. In how many theaters, Fleet Comptroller?”

  “Seven currently rated ‘risk-management’ or above for cataphract emergence, san.”

  “And how many CAVs are in Shiyogrid’s direct control?” He looks to the cadet again. “Rana?”

  “Eighty, san.”

  “Seventy-eight,” the Fleet Comptroller corrects. “We lost two recently. Lampreys burn through them like a Boaz blast through butter.”

  There’s a muttering of fear and disbelief from the entourage. The Exec brushes a silvery dreadlock off his face and says, “You spent last night prepping a sortie against some kind of marine remort?”

  “Yes, san,” the Fleet Comptroller says. “A full-grown Ijapa that we’ve been tracking. One hundred twenty feet long, displacing eight hundred tons.”

  One of the sailors whistles. “Big fish.”

  “What’s Ijapa class?” the Exec asks.

  “A bio-forged submarine drone,” the Fleet Comptroller explains, “running extrapolated bacteria wetware.”

  “That means nothing to me. What’ve you got in the barrel?”

  “Six dive units ready—eager—to flush the remort to the surface for the tender care of the CAVs and the 105th Catamaran.”

  “Lampreys dissolve within hours of emergence . . .” The rumble of a conveyor swallows the Exec’s voice. “. . . a happy coincidence that I was bringing my daughter to Joint Service Training when word of the attack came. I’m sorry to override all your hard work, but a lamprey will wipe out the 105th without slowing down. We need CAVs.”

  “Yes, san,” the Fleet Comptroller says, her voice sharp. “We’ve reallocated to your specifications.”

  When the Exec approaches the volunteers, the ribbons around the nearest CAV sway like seaweed. I catch a glimpse of the padded manacles again. They’re aftermarket add-ons, weak links in the chain—and I glance at the fashionboy aide and feel a feeble spark of hope.

  “Chiinan,” I whisper without moving my lips. “They’re looking at you.”

  The scarlet-skinned woman jerks beside me. I hate myself for tormenting her, but that’s okay. I’m willing to hate myself.

  “All those eyes,” I whisper. “Watching you. The officers see you.”

  “Kick your fancyface,” Chiinan snarls under her breath.

  The dreadlocked Exec stops in front of the volunteers. “Take pride, my friends! You’re doing more than you know.” His voice is deep and reassuring. He says a few more comforting words before finishing with a flourish: “Your sacrifice, your contribution, and your selflessness will save the human race.”

  When he finally strolls onward, Cadet Rana’s black gaze sweeps past me and doesn’t slow.

  The entourage turns away and I shout, “Chiinan, no!”

  She’s standing quietly until I scream. Then she freaks. She hurls herself at the Exec, a whirlwind of elbows and moans. The perfect distraction.

  A moment before her collar tranqs her, I drop to my knees in front of the fashionboy aide. “Save me!” I throw my arms around his sarong. “I can’t do this! I’m begging you!”

  He jerks but can’t break my grip. “Get him off!”

  “Please, please!” I bury my face against his thigh. “I’ll do anything!”

  He smacks my head ineffectually, and the collar shocks me. I bite down hard. A sharp edge of smartwire cuts the roof of my mouth and my body spasms.

  Through my tears I see Cadet Rana watching me. She’s the most beautiful thing on Earth and Luna and all the habitations. Even the disgust on her face is as deep and pure as a starlit sky.

  “They shouldn’t allow junkies and beggars to volunteer,” she tells the Exec. “The CAV corps deserves better.”

  “Help him up,” the Fleet Comptroller says.

  “Yes, san,” a sailor says, and drags me to my feet.

  The Fleet Comptroller inspects me. “What’s your name, volunteer?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Maseo Kaytu, san,” the fashionboy aide says, his lens scrolling.

  “We’re all in service to the same cause, Volunteer Kaytu,” the Fleet Comptroller tells me, her voice frighteningly gentle. “You’re performing an admirable task, a vital one.”

  “More vital than ever,” the Exec
says.

  “And we’re all of us afraid,” the Fleet Comptroller tells me. “Still, I’d ask you to apologize for your outburst to CE Rana-Cain.” She tilts her head to indicate the silver-haired officer. “He’s a guest in my house.”

  CE tells me that he’s a Colonel Executive. And the Rana half of his name tells me that he calls his daughter by her surname when in uniform. Off the top of my head, I can’t imagine any information less helpful than that.

  “An apology isn’t necessary.” CE Rana-Cain steps in front of me, and there’s a hardness in his eyes that his heartiness can’t hide. “Listen to me, Mar Kaytu. Your sacrifice matters. You matter.”

  I swallow the blood in my mouth and hang my head.

  The Exec touches my cheek. “Troubled in life but redeemed in death.”

  “Beg the Colonel Executive’s pardon,” a sailor snarls into my ear.

  “He was eager to beg a moment ago,” Cadet Rana says.

  I lift my head to look at her. I’d like to say that she flushes. I’d like to say that her eyes tighten with anger or acknowledgment. I’d like to say a lot of things, but her face doesn’t change at all.

  I don’t blame it. If I looked like that, I wouldn’t change either.

  “Say something,” she tells me. “At least have the courage to speak.”

  I clamp my jaw and remain silent. The sailors return me ungently to my seat and a new screen flickers into sight above the CAVs.

  “Load and lock!” the Fleet Comptroller says.

  A junior officer leaps into action, barking orders. As the Exec and his entourage leave, the sailors escort Chiinan and two drowsy volunteers into waiting CAVs. They engage the padded manacles, remove the collars, and step back.

  Clamps grab the now-occupied CAVs and hoist them through the ports in the ceiling. The hatches close. My head pounds. There’s a flurry of activity, and somewhere above me the CAVs launch into the battle.

  CHAPTER 6

  I swallow a mouthful of blood and watch the ceiling ports. Where are the cry pilots now? What are they fighting? They’re strapped into machines to meet the requirement of a human presence. Trapped, helpless, driven into a warzone by remote operators and sacrificed.