Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “Fuck!” Calil-Du kicks the wall. “We already lost three fucking soldiers.”

  “Staying alive isn’t the mission,” Rana says.

  Calil-Du glowers at her, Pico takes point, and three minutes later the surviving members of the group emerge onto a low rooftop.

  A pulse hits, killing all advanced tech in a quarter-mile radius. The moskitos drop to the ground and our lenses darken. We’re on our own.

  Calil-Du licks her lips nervously. She’s a skull-breaker, not a strategist. “Okay, um—what now?”

  “We need sightlines,” Rana murmurs.

  “Fuck you, I know that. Jag and Kaytu, um, you’re on overwatch.”

  “Chief,” we say, in uneasy acknowledgment.

  “Get high and find that crown-looking target, I guess,” she says. “We’ll, uh, break into three teams, under me and Basdaq and Rana.”

  “Basdaq is down,” Ridehorse reminds her.

  “Fuck! Okay, two teams. We’ll move northwest, toward that tower.”

  “That’s south,” Ting tells her.

  Calil-Du scowls. “Ting and Hefco, you’re on point. Doesn’t matter if we lose either of you.”

  I don’t hear the rest because I’m climbing to a sky bridge for the vantage point, clumsy in my safety gear. Jag is twenty yards away doing the same thing, only smoother. She was some kind of pageant acrobat as a kid, and moves through the world like a gymnastics routine.

  By the time I pull myself into place, she’s crouching on a strut overlooking the hangar’s faux cityscape. She throws me the all-clear, and I trot toward a pylon across the bridge.

  Shouting starts below me, and I look down into a nightmare.

  I know I’m on a military base; I know this is a training exercise. Still, my mind skips and my heart stutters.

  A horrible thing stretches between two buildings. It looks like overlapping spiderwebs with strands thicker than my calves. There’s a mouth in the center, a gaping alien mouth with grasping tongues, and dozens of veiny spider-creatures scuttle through funnels, bristling with shock-fibers.

  Someone designed this thing to light up the fear centers of the human brain, and they did a good job.

  “What the gehenna?” Jag gasps, slinking beside me.

  I point to the jeweled crown glinting inside the fang-filled mouth. “There’s the target.”

  “That’s not a remort,” she says. “That’s not a mock-up of a remort.”

  “Yeah, I—” My throat clenches. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not anything, Kaytu. It’s not a thing.”

  Down below, the fire teams are in disarray. Sure, the creature is a model built by a special-effects team, but it’s a model with smart materials, olfactory bursts, precision-designed projections, and pain compliance munitions. Ting is weeping; Calil-Du is glowering. Rana’s face is a death mask as she leads Pico and Ridehorse and Voorhivey toward the creature.

  Without looking upward, Rana points to me and Jag and twirls her finger.

  “We’re up,” I say.

  “What’s the plan?” Jag asks.

  “I guess—there’s only one way down there.”

  She goes still, her jaguar markings dark in the shadows. “You really want to jump onto that thing?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “But you’re going to,” she says, lensing me a “booyah.”

  “I’ll aim for the edge, to draw those spiders away. Then you grab the crown.”

  “You’re aiming at the edge, and I’m aiming at the jaws?”

  I nudge her with my elbow. “We’re badass corpo warriors.”

  “We’re screwed sideways,” she says.

  “See you on the other side,” I say, and leap off the bridge.

  I’m airborne for two seconds, a flailing of limbs and a shortness of breath, before I feel my safety harness catch on a belay drone. Good to know that the JST won’t let us die out here. The rush of air cools the sweat on my cheeks before I land on the web and almost slip through the strands.

  As I scramble to grab hold, one of the veiny-spiders spits goo at Calil-Du. A spark crackles—the spiders are built on stun-drones—and she stumbles to the ground groaning.

  White-skinned Gazi ignores the spider and races to Calil-Du, unstrapping her medkit. She’s a low-ranked squad member despite the medical training indicated by the nursurgeon prints on her hands, but she’s got nerves of alloy when it matters. Kneeling in front of these spiders to tend the injured? That takes some kind of bravery.

  So of course she gets shocked too, and collapses twitching.

  “Jag’s going for the crown!” I yell. “Draw the spiders away!”

  I’m not sure if I’m making sense, but Rana understands. As I tug on the web to attract the creatures’ attention, Rana stands from behind a wire hedge and leads a charge. She and Pico shout, Ridehorse throws rocks, and Ting—well, Ting stays behind the hedge.

  Spider-things scuttle across the web toward me. Seeing them close paralyzes me for a heartbeat, just long enough for another to wrap me in a ten-limbed embrace.

  So I head-butt it and knock myself out.

  CHAPTER 16

  When the medcart retracts into the infirmary wall, I roll onto my side to check Calil-Du. Apparently she shook off the first shock and tackled a spider from behind. There’s a charred pit in her shoulder from a second shock, currently being layered by medifilm.

  “How did Jag do?” I ask her.

  “Abject fucking failure,” Calil-Du says. “Just like you. Are you cleared for action?”

  “Yeah. There’s no concussion.”

  “Then form up. We’re going back in once my shoulder’s done.”

  “Put Rana in charge next time,” I tell her.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Because she’s smarter than you.”

  “Asshole,” she says.

  “Better vocabulary, too.”

  She rubs her bald head and watches the film form over her wound. “I dunno what kind of remort that was.”

  “It wasn’t a remort.”

  “How would you know? Gutter trash. Do the others say it’s not a remort?”

  “Which others?”

  “The smart ones, ass-eater. Not like you’n’ me.”

  I hadn’t considered the two of us in the same category, but fair enough. “Yeah. The smart ones say it’s not a remort.”

  “Then what the fuck kind of monster is the JST crawling up our ass?”

  “No idea.”

  “We’re training to trash-stomp remorts and patriots. Not this horrorshow crap.”

  “M’bari thinks it’s because of this pilot program.”

  “He thinks too much.”

  “Not like you’n’ me,” I say.

  She grunts. “Waste of fucking time.”

  An hour later, we’re back in the hangar. This time, the projected sky is a fish-belly gray and we’re entered on the second floor. Our lenses lead us inside a building designed to look like a MYRAGE cliché of a lawless Freehold gutter.

  A corridor stretches in front of us, cluttered with chop shops and warungs. Music blares, and projections of twitchy junkies and scruffy children flicker in every doorway. We’re wound tight, waiting for nightmare spider-creatures to erupt around the corner or drop from the ceiling.

  “Hey, Gazi,” Pico murmurs. “You got meds for Kaytu?”

  Gazi frowns at me, her lens glimmering. “What’s wrong? Your ears ringing? Your vision blurred?”

  “I’m fine,” I tell her.

  “He’s suffering from homesickness.” Pico gestures toward a pile of debris. “This all reminds him of his childhood.”

  “Stop picking on Kaytu,” Voorhivey says. “It’s not good for morale.”

  Shakrabarti shudders. “The corpos shouldn’t let Fre
eholds fall apart like this.”

  “I like the music,” M’bari says.

  “The music’s not authentic,” I tell him. “And it smells wrong.”

  “It does!” Ting pipes up. “It does smell wrong. There’s not enough incense and cooking and—and mostly cooking, I guess. It should be redolent with spices, if redolent means what I think. Juniper and kala jeera and sumac—”

  Rana cuts Ting off with a gesture and refocuses us on Calil-Du. She’s all business—except when she catches my eye, her gaze flicks to the projection of a beggar huddled in rags.

  She gives me a bland look in which I see the word beggar and stalks forward.

  I snort softly and follow. The entire squad is moving more easily now, and I catch a flicker of satisfaction in Pico’s expression. Voorhivey was wrong; picking on me was good for company morale.

  As we emerge into a derelict atrium with a bullet-pocked elevator bank, chiseled middle-aged Basdaq is on point. He moves well for an older guy and looks like the grizzled hero of a cheesy MYRAGE actioner.

  “Hey!” he gasps, and a gutter gang of nine crude animannis—animated mannequins—slots from behind a kiosk to fire stun-rounds at us.

  We dive for cover.

  Hefco eats a round and seizes on the ground. Rana and Pico and Werz draw fire while Jag, Shakrabarti, and I circle around and disable the animannis from behind. Gazi crouches beside Hefco as Calil-Du and Basdaq prowl the room, looking for prox-mines.

  Ridehorse toes a disabled ganger and says, “This one looks like Kaytu.”

  The animanni is a lean, dark, leering gutter roach with a gruesome scar.

  “They’re nothing alike,” Werz scoffs. “It’s almost a quarter inch shorter.”

  “Other’n that, though,” Gazi says, still treating Hefco.

  Shakrabarti grins. “It’s a quarter inch sexier, too.”

  “If you’ve got to count the quarter inches, you’re in trouble,” Ridehorse tells him.

  “You’re six foot three.” Shakrabarti smolders up at her. “I feel inadequate just looking at you.”

  Ting giggles. “You’re too bigheaded to feel inadequate.”

  “My head size is my fourth-best feature,” Shakrabarti tells her.

  “You’re vainglorious! If that means what I think it mea—”

  A pulse kills our lenses and cuts the lights. We freeze in the thick gloom of the mock-gutter atrium, and a thickly pelted thing clatters toward us, clinging to the walls and ceiling. It’s not built on the same base as those spiders; it’s more like an antipersonnel drone covered in fangs and fur.

  Because she’s a wise and thoughtful strategist, Calil-Du throws herself into the jaws of the enemy, howling for blood. So fuck it, I wade into battle beside her. Pico laughs as he joins us. Ridehorse falls in, all lanky limbs and gloomy mutters, while Shakrabarti and Werz grab lengths of cable to use as weapons. Rana and Voorhivey pair with Basdaq and M’bari to close a pincer around the pelted thing.

  We get stomped. We flunk the second exercise worse than the first. Nobody even catches sight of the jeweled crown.

  We’re trotting back to the barracks when Jag says, “Fighting gangers makes sense. Half of us will end up Army or Garda. We’ll face insurgents. I get that. But a shaggy drone?”

  “The rest are gonna face werebeasts,” Hefco says.

  “Still no remorts,” Basdaq says. “We’re supposed to be learning how to handle remorts.”

  “Maybe this is elite training,” Voorhivey says.

  Ridehorse shoots him a disgusted look. “Maybe it’s fodder for the entertainment channels. Showing us getting repeatedly stomped.”

  “They’re training us to face some singular threat,” M’bari says. “One oversized enemy. One terrifying thing.”

  “Cataphracts are terrifying, oversized things,” Basdaq says. “Maybe this is leading up to a cataphract. One step at a time.”

  I glance at Rana. “You know what this is about.”

  She ignores me. Trots forward smoothly. Her neck gleams with sweat and her shoulder shows me what dismissal looks like.

  “That’s why they’re making everything so scary?” Ting asks M’bari. “So we get used to being afraid?”

  M’bari nods. “Whatever this pilot program is, they’re prepping us for something unsettling.”

  We jog around a corner past MYRAGE-rigged classrooms, past workshops that stink of extrusion. Our slippered feet shush on the floor.

  “There are pilot programs in every corpo’s military,” Rana says. “Some are training elite troops, some are training recruits. There’s ambient engineers and combat cryptographers—”

  “What’s an ambient engineer?” Werz asks.

  “There are Orit Gal wings specializing in pinpoint delivery,” Rana continues, ignoring her. “They’ve even repurposed orbital platforms.”

  “For what?” Pico asks, scratching his freckled chin. “What’s the enemy?”

  After a moment, Rana says, “Lampreys.”

  “Say what?”

  “The designation for a new remort clade is lambda, and these—”

  “There aren’t new remorts.” Hefco shoots her a disgusted look. “Not for decades.”

  “There’s a new class of remort?” Voorhivey asks, his voice thin.

  “Yes,” Rana says.

  Ting babbles in surprise. Ridehorse grumbles in dismay. M’bari ponders. Werz and Gazi edge closer to each other. Shakrabarti looks beautifully concerned and Rana waits until the reaction quiets before she continues. “The designation for a new remort is lambda and these things are persistent, recurring, and emergent. So Lambda-PRE was their earliest designation. Lamprey.”

  “Maybe they’re mutant eels,” Calil-Du says. “That’d be cool.”

  “Remorts are based on bio-forged tech,” Basdaq tells her. “Not on eels.”

  “Maybe they’re bio-forged eels, asshole. You ever think of that?”

  “Did the terrafixing recover them from a weapons platform?” M’bari asks Rana. “What’s the base technology?”

  “No idea.”

  Shakrabarti frowns at her. “What does emergent mean?”

  “That they’re just getting started,” Ridehorse grumbles.

  “I heard they self-assemble—emerge—at the target area,” Rana says. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they are or how they work. Nobody does.”

  “Who cares?” Calil-Du says. “We go where the corps tells us and kill what they want.”

  “Yeah,” Voorhivey says. “The TLs will tell us if we need to know more.”

  “All I know is that Group Gabrielle is kicking us in the tit.” Calil-Du scowls. “If we don’t step up, we’re gonna fail out of this program before we fight anything.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Four more platoon members decruit. TL says that’s the other reason we’re called slippers: we slip away.

  I don’t blame them for leaving. They enlisted to fight patriots and standard remorts, or maybe with dreams of Flenser space battles. Nobody said anything about lampreys. In fact, nobody still says anything about lampreys. If we ask the TLs, they assign us extra duty.

  Pico still asks, though, because he’s Pico. We’d hate him for it, but he’s hard to hate.

  We’ve had a few lateral transfers, so Platoon 5323 is now at forty-five recruits, with fourteen in Aleph, sixteen in Bay, and fifteen in Gabrielle.

  TL is pleased that Group Aleph lost more personnel than Bay or Gabrielle. Rana says that’s because it proves she’s the tougher trainer. Pico says it’s because a smaller group includes more Pico per capita, and who wouldn’t want that?

  Ting doesn’t say anything; she spends most of her free time crying, especially after Calil-Du beats her for shitty performance. Yet she refuses to decruit. She’s a complete mess, but her determination impresses me.

/>   There are two kinds of recruits: the desperate and the driven. Some of us are terrified of failing, of returning to our previous lives. That’s Ting and me, Calil-Du, and maybe Hefco. Most of the others—Rana is the best example, but also M’bari and Voorhivey—aren’t running from anything, they’re running toward something. The Flensers, the academy, high-level officer positions, or well-paid corporate gigs. They’re from military families or ambitious affinity groups, and they’re working a plan.

  Yet for the next few days, throwing ourselves into a new nightmare capture-the-crown exercise every four hours, there’s no space between us. We bond.

  We still suck, but we suck together.

  After a series of challenges that force us to face disgust instead of fear—wading through sewage to reach the jeweled crown—we enter the hangar to find a mock-up of a one-hundredth-floor rooftop.

  “Maybe they’ll finally give us a normal remort,” Voorhivey says, with wide-eyed optimism.

  “Maybe you’ll finally stop saying that every day,” Ridehorse mutters.

  “There’s a remort evolved from a PDM we should learn to fight. I guess they’re pretty common.”

  We trot toward a fibrous lawn on the rooftop, and Ting asks, “What’s a peedeeyam?”

  “Pursuit Deterrent Munitions,” Rana tells her. “Developed in the SICLE War. Mobile bio-films triggered to explode by scent.”

  “I guess they’re called moths now,” Voorhivey says. “The terrafixing evolves them into flapping bat-things that—”

  “Moths are bat-things?” Pico says.

  Voorhivey blushes. “Or, or moth-things, I guess. They’re mostly a threat to the New Growth, unless they stumble into an enclave. They’re sort of translucent, with wingspans as wide as Ridehorse’s.”

  “Translucent?” Gazi crosses to the edge of the lawn. “We catch one, Shakrabarti can wear it as a headscarf.”

  “Translucence is so last season,” he says. “It’s all about opacity now.”

  Our lenses direct us to establish a perimeter. A handful of frail-looking balconies jut from the rooftop, designed by the special-effects team to look like gravel gardens and performance stages. It’s only five floors down, but projections and environmental controls add the impression of the other ninety-five floors with a visceral effectiveness.