by Joel Dane
The sailors talk openly in front of us. There’s no reason not to. From what I overhear, that big submarine Ijapa is homing in on an ocean-based factory or refinery. Predatory remorts do that. It is in the nature of weapons to seek targets, and remort behavior is organically encoded in regenerated—though corrupted—neural impulses and genetic imperatives.
Two corpos, Shiyogrid and CrediMobil, responded to the threat with conventional forces, while requisitioning CAVs. Then a lamprey approached. Drawn by the conflict, or the activity. And CE Rana-Cain ordered the CAVs to ignore the submarine remort and fight the lamprey-class remort instead.
I stop listening when Chiinan’s CAV returns through the ceiling. The sailors salute and a tone poem plays while screens project pictures of sunsets and swamps. A hose attaches to the bottom of the CAV. There’s a slurping sound and a waterproof bag emblazoned with a Shiyogrid flag inflates.
The hose is pumping what’s left of Chiinan into the bag.
“That’s a coffin,” Ting says, her teeth chattering, “that’s her coffin. It’s a, a disposable—fuel for the furnaces—”
The sailors lay the bulging bag gently on an autocart. The stemhead babbles, the drugged volunteers gaze at the screens, and I’m dizzy with fear.
I keep my teeth clamped and Chiinan’s CAV unfurls, reopening the path to the saddle. It’s empty and bright and clean inside. Untouched by death, untouched by fear. And when sailors lock the next volunteer into the saddle, he doesn’t seem to feel any horror.
However, a few whimpers sound when another CAV returns. Its skin is sliced open like an eviscerated animal and a pink tarlike substance splatters the wound.
As another cremation bag fills with flesh and fluid, the teenaged boy starts crying. Sailors narcotize him into stunned pleasure, then strap him to the saddle frame. My jaw aches. Engineers stroll past. Tools clatter; the building sways in the ocean current.
More CAVs return. More bags fill and more cry pilots are manacled in place.
Then the teenaged boy is pulled out of a damaged CAV, bleeding and trembling.
“He’s alive,” Ting breathes. “He survived.”
Medics ease the kid into a trauma cart. He beat the odds, the six percent of survival, and my fear sharpens. I know this isn’t how odds work, but I feel like mine just vanished into nothing.
Ting edges beside me. Her eyes are big, with golden pupils. She’s shaking and scratching her scalp through her spiky amber hair, a complete stemhead meltdown.
“T-tell me it’ll b-be okay,” she stammers to me. “Tell me ‘g-good luck.’ I—I need to hear a friendly voice. Just say my name. Please. Please? Just say my name.”
I touch her elbow. I want to comfort her; I want to promise her that death will be quick. I want to lie, but I keep my mouth shut. I don’t say a word.
More bags fill with the jellied remains of cry pilots, and finally the sailors come for me.
* * *
• • •
The CAV reacts to my approach, swaying and shifting. With its leaves woven tightly together, it’s less than twice my height. When the leaves expand into a looser lattice, it’ll grow larger, like a clenched fist opening into a clawed hand.
Traces of battle scars catch the light: dents and scrapes and pockmarks. The alloy leaves unfurl away from me, clearing a path into the bright white saddle, and a chill touches my skin. I’m being fed into the gaping maw of an alien machine—
The sailors feel my rising panic and move me faster into the CAV.
I swallow convulsively, and then I’m inside.
There isn’t a speck of blood or a whiff of death. The cables covering the saddle walls grope slowly toward me like the tendrils of a climbing vine.
The sailors secure me into the pilot’s frame, a slanted rig that pivots 360 degrees. The padded manacles lock around my wrists and ankles with a sound like bones breaking.
I feel a spark of panic and force myself to focus. I can’t miss anything, not now. The saddle is half cockpit and half cocoon, sheathing me inside the CAV. Cables quiver toward my skin. This thing was built to explode through minefields, to leap in front of missile strikes. It was designed by AIs to meet human specifications, but did the machine intelligences truly understand human input?
Nobody knows.
The CAV is an impenetrable enigma, so only the add-ons can save me. I inspect the manacles around my wrists. They show more wear than the exterior: they’re covered with scratches and dings and even a tracery of rust.
My heart lifts at the sight.
The sailors remove my collar and the door braids shut behind them. The CAV shifts and sways. Screens shimmer to life around me, showing deployment assignments, route optimization, force distribution, system checks.
Cables extend into loops near my hands, like gunner joysticks or thrust controls. I can’t reach them, not with my wrists manacled. Not that they’d respond if I did. Maybe they aren’t even controls; maybe they’re just sensors that help the CAV respond to my physiological responses. Well, my fear.
More cable-vines wrap my shoulders and chest in a warm, sinewy embrace. When I shift my weight, the frame swivels.
I almost yelp but keep my teeth clamped.
I swivel one way, then the other, getting the hang of the motion. The screens follow me almost seamlessly, flickering in front of my face no matter how I’m oriented inside the saddle. One of the screens shows the exterior of my CAV. I pause upside-down in the frame and watch as my CAV is loaded into the dropbay of a fat-bodied gunship.
“CAV Zero-Two, this is Control,” a staticky voice says. “You’re on sector Chamesh. Operator Zero-Two confirm.”
“Confirm,” the voice of the operator says. “They want me following the backsplash again?”
“Negative. The lamprey is gone.”
“Thank Edentide.” The operator exhales in relief. “We took it down?”
“We didn’t scratch it,” Control says. “It dissolved.”
So my CAV isn’t going to face a lamprey after all. I spin in the frame again. I can’t tell if that’s good news or bad—except nothing is good news, not while I’m manacled in place.
“Head straight into the pipe,” Control says. “We’ve still got a big-ass Ijapa to handle.”
“Never seen anything like that lamprey,” the remote operator says.
“Nobody has. Transmitting targeting data.” A screen flashes. “Watch you don’t get bunched up again.”
“That wasn’t me, that was twelve.”
“It was both of you,” Control says.
I swivel upright and take a few breaths. My heart is beating too fast. If my hands were free, they’d be trembling, and they can’t tremble, not now.
I tilt forward.
One inch.
Two inches.
I shift until my face is directly above my right hand, then open my mouth. Out drops the wet knot of smartwire that I tore from the fashionboy’s sarong with my teeth. That’s the reason I didn’t say a word to Ting, the reason I haven’t opened my mouth.
The moment the wire passes my lips, I know I’ve missed. I won’t catch it. I’ve lost my chance, my last chance—
I lunge desperately, and the frame spins.
The ball of smartwire hits the edge of my manacle and bounces past my hand. Shit! I torque into a blur, and the frame bats the wire against the saddle wall. It ricochets, twirling in the air. Giving a panicked shout, I swivel frantically—and snag a curl of the smartwire between two fingertips.
“Fuck!” I whimper, my fingers pressed tight like pincers. “Fuck, fuck . . .”
“Linked,” the staticky voice says, utterly oblivious to me. There’s no reason for the operators to hear the dying screams of the cry pilots. “Check your Fita, Zero-Two.”
“Fita checks, Control.”
Slow and steady, I ease the
wire into my palm. When it’s safe in my grip, I try not to faint from relief.
My plan is simple. CAVs only function with living pilots in their frames. So the minute I free myself from the frame, the CAV will power down and return to the fleet. I need to unlock the manacles—and this decorative smartwire is the only way to get my bonespur lockpick working.
My CAV patches into the video feed of the gunship, and we’re already in flight. I didn’t even feel the takeoff. The gunship skims low over the water. A thrill touches my heart at the sight, then curdles into fear. This would be fun if it weren’t for my imminent death.
“If we head into the pipe,” the remote operator says, “I’ll lose my CAV in a minute. That Ijapa’s not playing.”
“Orders is orders,” the other voice says. “Disable its aft junction before dying, that’s all.”
“Copy that, Control.”
The screens flicker and change around me. I untangle the smartwire and run a fingernail along the length to find the command nub. No doubt the fashionboy configures his smartwire with his lens, changing the shape and color and frequency according to his mood, but there’s a manual interface as well. I know, because I used smartwire to pick locks in Vila Vela—and you don’t exactly lose those skills in a refugee camp.
Screens expand around me and a control deck projects across my chest, blocking my view of my hands.
The CAV wants me to drive.
Self-piloted CAVs spin out of control. Every time. Cry pilots can’t operate CAVs; they only function via remote. Still, this CAV craves a driver. I don’t know why, but I feel the urgency throb in my skull.
I ignore the feeling and focus on surviving. “I’m not a pilot,” I snarl. “Get that screen out of my face.”
The control deck doesn’t move. Fine. I half close my eyes and straighten the smartwire, working by touch. Easy. Steady. I stiffen the end into a sharp point and puncture the skin of my middle finger. Okay. Fine. I miss the bonespur implant and try again. My fingers are slippery with blood when I finally scrape the smartwire against the injection port of the implant.
Once I deliver a jolt of electricity, the bonespur will reboot. Either that, or I’ll die in this CAV, trying to disable some watery remort’s aft junction.
On a curved screen in front of me, the ocean darkens. The texture thickens, turning gummy and viscous. Glutinous waves tremble. That’s terrafixing in action, transforming chemical sludge and particulate plastoids into livable ecosystem. Snaking lines cover the surface of the slurry, and then two things happen at once:
One, I trigger the smartwire with my fingernail.
Two, the gunship fires my CAV into battle.
Velocity shoves me backward, and the frame compensates. A few cables wrap me tightly, but the rest writhe and coil like Medusa’s hair, never quite touching me. Screens blur and data streams. The targeting system comes online: crosshairs and weapons systems and threat assessments.
Despite my fear, for a lightning-flash moment, I want to fly this thing. The saddle adjusts around me, cradling soft, and I want to grab the cables, engage the command deck, and burn through enemy lines.
Instead, I tap the confirmation sequence on the bonespur and feel a throb of acknowledgment. The implant is live. I almost weep in relief—until the CAV jolts.
We’re in the water, in the sludge. The CAV swarms forward like a hecatopus sea monster, cutting through waves with wide ribbons that pull and stroke and churn.
And I see the remort on my screen.
At first glance, the Ijapa doesn’t look so strange. Long and thin and narrow, like some kind of underwater sword. Except impact craters line one side, and the terrafixing patched them with chitin or coral or seashell. A dark gelatinous mass clings to an orbital array—and a translucent version of the same stuff surrounds the entire remort, a fifty-foot-thick blob of speckled jelly.
Circles appear in the remort’s armored skin. Gun turrets extrude, displacing gouts of dirt and algae, and lock on target. Lock on me.
CHAPTER 7
The corporations implemented the terrafixing after the devastation of the SICLE War. It’s been seeping into every ecological niche outside the human settlements for centuries, rebalancing the atmosphere, restoring microbes and viruses, regenerating the endless diversity of biomes.
The terrafixing is a self-monitoring, self-modifying biological protocol. The street-corner Gaiaists claim that it’s self-aware. They’re nuts, but everyone accepts that the terrafixing learns, adapts, and reacts. New systems emerge, new strategies evolve . . . and old species reappear.
The Growth reevolves extinct organisms via recovered scraps of DNA. It scours the Earth on a cellular level, identifying tissue samples of dead species and regenerating them. Lacy treeferns returned early, as did a hundred families of mosses. Aphids and silverfish and butterflies spawned anew. A century ago, the terrafixing recovered shrews and pelicans and a bewildering assortment of ant species before moving on to squids and Tasmanian tigers.
Only one problem. During their death throes, the nation-states deployed bio-forged weapons with capacities beyond anything we’re currently willing to build: Armored Assault Vehicles with integrated biological components, Pursuit Deterrent Munitions based on the sensory organs of the silkworm moth, Personal Battlesuits boosted by synaptic software. In the aftermath of the SICLE War, these defunct, abandoned bioweapons scattered the Earth. Most of them decayed into sludge, but the terrafixing occasionally latches onto the organic components of ancient autonomous systems and resurrects them into remorts.
Bio-forged knuckletanks roar to life, their targeting systems suddenly online. Subterranean breaching drones burrow beneath city walls, driven by the inchoate instincts of rejuvenated DNA. A perimeter defense platform with a neural net clear-cuts a burgeoning forest while gathering feedstock.
The regular armies usually handle them.
But the terrafixing also reanimates medipedes, heavily armored medical units twice the size of freight trains. Centuries ago, they crawled through battlefields, treating injured soldiers and malfunctioning tech in the quasi-organic repair suites secreted inside their bellies. Wielding the power of advanced autonomous wetware, medipedes treated the soldiers and patched the tech, then returned them to battle.
The terrafixing identifies medipedes as naturally occurring organisms. It brings the ancient, abandoned husks of medipedes to monstrous life as cataphracts, impenetrable assault machines that grow racks of bio-forged battlesuits . . . which then attack independently, shambling into combat like up-armored zombies.
Everyone knows cataphracts. They’re the stuff of nightmares. This submarine is a rarer type of remort. I’ve never seen one before, and it’s possible that nothing smaller than a CAV can take them down.
Not my CAV, though. I’m not dying here, not today.
* * *
• • •
The gun turrets shiver and lock on target. On me. The Ijapa is armed despite centuries on the ocean floor because bio-forged weapons were designed for autonomous action, implanted with the urge for self-repair, and given the ability to manufacture their own munitions.
In retrospect, not a great plan.
My chest tightens as I watch the remort open fire. “Dodge!” I yell at the oblivious remote operator. “Dodge! I need time—”
The operator doesn’t dodge. The operator pushes me directly into the missile paths and impacts rock the CAV, shoving my head against the frame.
I activate the bonespur implant and a fibrous growth pierces the skin of my middle finger. A dull brown filament self-assembles from my blood and flesh. If I need more length, the tech will cannibalize my bone.
The implant extends into the rough shape of a lockpick. I grunt in satisfaction before I notice motion on a nearby screen: the Ijapa has unleashed tracker mines at me, a dozen gleaming shapes cutting through the sludge.
I’m
too late. I’m already dead.
The remote operator triggers a pulse to knock out the remort’s tech. The screens around me shimmer blue, the mines drift away—and a torpedo blast hammers me through the saddle and sets fire to the sludge. Oozing craters open around my CAV and I catch a glimpse of a pinkish, oily smear left over from the combat against the lamprey.
The ruins of catamaran crafts smolder in the jellied water around the pink smear. I see the wreckage of a disemboweled CAV sink in a field of debris, and my skin tightens.
Whatever lampreys are, they tear CAVs into pieces.
Another Ijapa torpedo hits. One of the walls buckles. I whimper and caress the implant propagating from my finger, directing the lockpick tip toward my manacle.
Pain throbs in my hand as the bonespur lengthens.
Too slowly.
There’s another impact, and another. My screens waver and the saddle walls bulge inward. Every impact drives them closer.
This is how cry pilots die: crushed to death an inch at a time.
Despite my fear, I feel the untapped power of the CAV. There’s more speed here than they’re tapping, more strength. Even strapped in manacles, I’m aware of the potential: this CAV is a laser rapier and they’re swinging it like a koncrete sledgehammer.
“C’mon, you splice,” I growl at the voices. “Use this thing, dodge, move . . .”
The operator doesn’t hear me, and wouldn’t listen if she did. She drives the CAV into anti-armor enfilades that rock the saddle and crimp the walls toward me.
As the CAV’s alloy ribbons slap at the remort’s flechettes, I angle the tip of my lockpick into the seam of my manacle. There’s a fissure there, a catch between the two halves . . . a release switch.
Another blast hits, and the buckling saddle slaps my left knee. I’m going to be crushed to death and—clink. I feel the tip of my pick catch on a seam. I extend the bonespur, probing for the pinhole leading into the release switch . . .
