Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “I don’t know why I never thought of that,” I tell her.

  She looks at me for a long moment. “I guess they don’t accept many recruits from . . . the lower levels of Freeholds.”

  “Not many,” I agree, and don’t mention my history in Vila Vela.

  “It’s called ‘below the belt’?”

  “It’s called the gutter.”

  “I spent two months in a Freehold.” She almost smiles. “The food’s amazing and I’ve never seen anything like the dancing; I’ve never felt anything like that.”

  I almost say something stupid about music, about dancing, about her. “Yeah.”

  “I stayed in the penthouse levels.” Her smile tightens. “You think that’s weak. You think I’m sheltered.”

  “You’d have to be pretty sheltered to think ‘sheltered’ is a bad thing.”

  “I’m starting to suspect that you aren’t a fool.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  She dangles her legs over the side of her bunk. “It’s hard for me to forget what happened the first time we met. What you did. Begging like that.”

  “There’s nothing to forget,” I say. “That’s who I am.”

  “I’m not sure it is,” she says.

  I shrug. “Are you going to tell me about the lampreys?”

  “They’re a new kind of remort, coming out of nowhere. That’s all I know. My father doesn’t share classified information with me.”

  “Huh,” I say. “How high was your decruitment bonus?”

  The change of subject stops her. “What?”

  “That first day, when we started? How much was your bonus?”

  Her eyebrows draw together. “What does that matter?”

  “At first I didn’t understand why they offer more money to get rid of the better recruits. But I guess the crappy recruits are going to decruit anyway?”

  “Not all of them,” she says, with a glint in her dark eyes.

  “Was that a joke?” I ask. “I didn’t know you had a humor setting.”

  She shows me her middle finger. “I can’t figure you out.”

  “I’m a man of mystery.”

  “No, it’s a cultural thing. Even in the Freehold, I never spent any time with anyone quite so . . . unpropertied.”

  I can’t tell if she’s joking again. “Yeah, but you should see us dance.”

  “My initial bonus was seventy thousand six hundred and twenty-two scrip.”

  “No—” I shake my head in disbelief. “What?”

  “And two shares in Li-tren Capital, which is a Shiyogrid subsidiary.”

  I gape at her. “No way. They offered you shares for quitting?”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I believe you. Robots can’t lie.”

  I’m hoping for another smile, but instead her eyes narrow. “Don’t call me that.”

  “What?”

  “A robot,” she says, with real anger. “I know what my voice sounds like.”

  “I didn’t mean your shitty voice,” I tell her. “I meant your shitty personality. I like the sound of your voice.”

  “I miss social cues sometimes,” she says, her expression stiff. “In people’s tones. So if that was sarcasm, you’ll need to be clearer.”

  “It wasn’t sarcasm,” I tell her.

  Her unwavering gaze stays on my face.

  “It was mild flirtation,” I explain, “of the sort that if you ignore it, we can both pretend it never happened.”

  A laugh sounds from Pico’s end of the room while Rana and I look at each other. Training doesn’t leave you with enough energy to think about sex in the first month. Even the eighteen-year-olds don’t stare in the shower. Too tired, too achy. Plus, there’s the sight of Calil-Du shaving her head. That’s enough to keep anyone from feeling amorous, to say nothing of M’bari’s neon ass-tattoos.

  Still, there’s a spark between me and Rana. I’ve felt it for weeks, and now it’s burning hotter. I’m pretty sure she feels it, too. That’s probably why she changes the subject: there’s no percentage in feeling a spark for Maseo Kaytu.

  “What branch do you want?” she asks. “After basic.”

  “What branch is this pilot program feeding us into?”

  She shakes her head. “Army, I suppose, to handle these remorts. But after that, what’s your goal?”

  “I’m not sure. How high should I shoot?”

  “Marines,” she says.

  “That’s too high for a gutter roach.”

  “You weren’t born in the gutter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re educated. M’bari says there’s a trace of schooling in your accent.”

  “Not enough for the marines. Plus, I’m too big for a battlesuit.”

  “Lots of marines don’t wear them. And the marines value control, Kaytu. They prioritize self-control.”

  “More than the other branches?”

  “If you live in a vacuum, you can’t make stupid mistakes. The Army values obedience; the Garda values violence. At least the urban Garda.”

  “There’s another kind?”

  “In the Class A neighborhoods, the Garda is less violent and more investigative.” Rana brushes her hair behind her ear. “They’re seventy percent male when they contract out to Freeholds, fifty percent female in vested areas. Cuts down on brutality. Did you ever see the Garda called in for riot suppression or whatever?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Did you wonder why the units were so male?”

  I shake my head. “Never occurred to me.”

  “An inclination for mindless violence works in a Freehold but isn’t exactly popular among shareholders.” She sits straighter on her bunk. “The Army is sixty percent male. The marines is the other way around, sixty-five percent female and gendother.”

  “That’s where I’ll fit in?”

  “Yeah. Physical strength doesn’t matter so much in space.”

  “Thanks.”

  She laughs, and I feel like I’ve won something. She says, “I mean what matters most there is control, and nobody’s more controlled than you.”

  “You are.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m just trained.”

  “You’re joining the Flensers.”

  “If they’ll have me.”

  “Maybe robots can lie. You know they’ll have you.”

  Her flare of anger is almost a physical thing between us. “Because of my father?” she asks, her toneless voice hard. “Because I didn’t fight for every inch, because I didn’t earn every braid. Because my boots are gifts?”

  “No,” I say.

  Seconds tick away before she softens. “Fine, yes. I’m joining the Flensers.”

  “As a pilot? An engineer? No, wait. A gunner.”

  “A pilot, I hope.” She ducks her head. “Space is . . . I don’t know. Untouchable and impossible and perfect. It’s so far above me, but it feels like home.”

  I almost say, That’s how I feel about you.

  I manage to keep my mouth closed. I’m not falling in love with her. I’ve fallen in love with exactly one person in my life, and I walked away from Ionesca a year ago. And anyway, Rana is nothing like Io. Rana is a cutting edge while Io is a tangle of roots. Rana is a starship; Ionesca is the New Growth.

  “The Flensers are seventy percent female,” she blurts, maybe reading my thoughts in my face.

  “And twenty percent robot.”

  She flips me the finger again. “My father says women make better Flensers because Flensers don’t fight on distant battlegrounds or in foreign cities. They fight in their homes. A space station is their home. A dreadnought or a dinky orbital ship is their home. My father says a woman will cross any line to defend her home.”
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  “So he’s kind of an idiot, your father. You only have the one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do your mothers say?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Gen parents?”

  “It’s just my father and me.”

  Her expression tells me that she doesn’t appreciate that particular subject. We fall silent for a moment, and I almost ask about her hearing. Instead, I say, “If you’re a Flenser and I’m a marine, maybe we’ll serve on the same ship. I’ll salute when you march past, and you’ll pretend you don’t remember me.”

  “Sounds perfect. Well, if we work for the same corporation.”

  “Huh?”

  “If we work for the same corpo.”

  “I heard you, but—” I shake my head in confusion. “We’re both Shiyogrid.”

  “Other corpos can buy your contract after basic.”

  “No way.” I frown. “Really?”

  “You never read the fine print?”

  “I was too busy begging for my life.”

  “Almost ten percent of recruit contracts are transferred to another corporation. Either through purchase or trade.”

  “They can trade me for another soldier?”

  “Sure,” she says. “Then you’d fight for CrediMobil or PRATO or someone.”

  “Why bother? We’re all on the same side.”

  “The corpos cooperate on the important things, on the terrafixing and remorts.” She swings her legs. “They cooperate on ninety-eight percent of their initiatives, but the other two percent devolve into violence.”

  “No way. Really? Against each other?”

  She nods. “We’re a violent species, and the corporations don’t try to deny it. Instead, they channel disputes into managed conflicts within specific parameters. Humans need competition to thrive.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  “You’re naïve about the strangest things,” she tells me.

  Before I can answer, our lens flashes a one-minute warning. A surge of noise echoes in the barracks as everyone rushes to their bunks, and then silence falls at lights-out. I shift uneasily. Should I hope to become a marine or a Garda? Shiyogrid or Unidroit? I’m not sure why I feel so itchy. Because the future is sneaking up on me, or because Rana is slipping past my defenses?

  I try to forget about both. I focus on my new boots and fall asleep with a smile in my heart.

  CHAPTER 20

  Two hours later, an alarm cuts through the barracks.

  Calil-Du wakes with a shout, Ting wakes with a whimper.

  I’m crouching beside my bunk before my eyes are fully open. Jagzenka drops beside me—and then the lights brighten, and TL and Admin are standing on the horseshoe. The squad staggers into formation, and Admin orders the three lowest-ranked recruits in the group to rip the dorm apart.

  Ting, Hefco, and I overturn bunks and empty duffel bags onto the floor. We scatter boots and kick shirts behind the vend machines.

  The air turns poisonous. Even Pico stops smiling. Only M’bari looks thoughtful, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle about social engineering.

  Then Calil-Du is demoted.

  Why? To keep us on our toes, I guess. She’s not happy, though. Well, she’s never happy, but now she looks even more homicidal than usual.

  Voorhivey is made our new chief. He’s grown in the last month and doesn’t seem so nervous anymore. He’s still clean-cut and eager-to-please, though. He flushes with pleasure when TL calls him “Chief-of-Barracks,” and stands a little straighter.

  “Fucking kiss-ass,” Calil-Du mutters.

  Voorhivey flushes again—this time with shame. He looks at Calil-Du, then at the TLs, who remain expressionless, then looks at her again.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I mean fucking kiss-ass, chief.”

  He takes a shaky breath and stands directly in front of her, his face a foot from hers. Calil-Du is an inch taller than him and a mile tougher. She could drop him with one blow, and I see a faint echo of Io’s wildness in her eyes. She wants to feel his bones break.

  “Clean the barracks, recruit,” Voorhivey says, and his voice only cracks once.

  She’s on a knife edge and doesn’t know which way she’ll fall. Apparently there’s more to Calil-Du than a bully. I’d never seen that before. There’s a streak of self-destruction in her, too.

  A few seconds bleed away before she says, “Chief,” and moves to clean the barracks.

  Voorhivey manages not to faint in relief. He’s tasked with assigning our job duties every morning, and guess who gets latrine duty? Me, Ting, and Hefco. Except now there are slippers doing the bulk of the work, so we’re only scrubbing for two hours a day.

  The rest of our training intensifies. We focus on dispersal agents, boarding-and-repelling exercises, micro-g chambers. We return to the hangar every day to play capture the crown, except now we’re using gear. Not firearms, but coms and trenchknives and boots.

  At the end of a week, we’re hitting a twenty percent success rate.

  “I still don’t get why they’re training us to fight lampreys,” Shakrabarti says, in the shower, “without ever showing us what one looks like.”

  “You worried they’re pretty as you?” Ridehorse asks.

  “We know what they look like,” M’bari tells Shakrabarti. “Terrifying.”

  “Like your ass-tattoo,” Pico says.

  “That’s what I heard,” Rana tells M’bari, ignoring Pico. “The first problem with fighting lampreys? Soldiers freeze up.”

  “So why don’t they teach us not to freeze by showing us actual lampreys?” Shakrabarti says.

  Calil-Du rinses the razor she uses to shave her head. She doesn’t just switch off her follicles, because she’s Calil-Du: she likes blades and she likes stubble. “Maybe lampreys are so fucked that special effects can’t copy them.”

  “Yeah, but—” Basdaq frowns. “That’s a good point.”

  “Maybe that’s part of it,” M’bari says. “But also they’re keeping these things quiet. They don’t want anyone even describing them.”

  “The first new remort in fifty years,” Jagzenka murmurs.

  “I’m glad the corpo’s keeping them quiet,” Voorhivey says, stepping toward the drying film. “They don’t want to panic anyone.”

  “They can’t be worse than cataphracts,” Shakrabarti says.

  “If I only teach you one thing, my beautiful infant,” Ridehorse tells him, “things can always get worse.”

  “And if I teach you one thing,” he says, “it’s that you need to exfoliate.”

  The lamprey habituation regime slacks off, though, as the fitness training intensifies—with thirty-pound, forty-pound, fifty-pound packs. Our lenses max me and Calil-Du and Basdaq at fifty pounds for long hauls, seventy for short. Pico is shorter than I am, but he maxes at sixty and eighty. He’s an ox, the strongest guy in the platoon.

  Ting only weighs ninety-nine pounds; she can’t carry more than the minimum. Thirty pounds, not including her helmet, boots, and com-plate, the transmission module she uses to govern our communications and sensors. She’s freakishly good with tech, though, which matters more as the exercises grow increasingly complex: we trot in formation into boarding scenarios and dropship deployments, into urban sieges and space-hab environments.

  Half the time, pulses knock out our coms, and Ting coordinates the group through our cuffs using paleo bursts.

  When a pulse hits, you go low-tech. Until everything reboots, you’re a caveman, with a blade and hand gestures and—if you’re lucky—narrow-beam com bursts. Our gear crashes with disheartening regularity, until Ting batters the systems back to life. Unlike the twenty-first century when pristine operating systems ran bug-free software in flawless compatibility, these days technology is a lurching mess.

  “It’s Moorphy
’s Law!” Ting announces after a crash in a starship mock-up, when we have to resort to SBC, Scream-Based Communication.

  Pico presses against an engine room panel. “What’s that, prez?”

  With her attention still on the com-plate linked to her battlecuff, Ting says, “It’s a law. I mean, not a law, but a saying. Like a law. ‘Processing speed doubles every four years, but complexity triples.’ It’s a race you can’t win.”

  “We can’t even win this fucking course,” Ridehorse mutters.

  “And expectations quadruple,” Ting continues, her fingers blurring. “Some people add that part. Speed doubles, complexity triples, expectations quadruple. I mean, so even with flowcore, speed never catches up with demand.”

  Still, she manages to get us running again while Groups Bay and Gabrielle are still shouting at each other. And her skill with tech is the only thing that saves her from involuntary decruitment and vicious ostracism. Because otherwise, she’s a burden on the group.

  “You’re significantly lagging Group Gabrielle,” TL announces, during the first inspection of the week. “Chief Voorhivey, explain.”

  “I—there is no explanation, TL.”

  “Of course there’s an explanation, chief. There simply isn’t an excuse. Explain.”

  Voorhivey starts sweating. “Our—our group is smaller, TL. The smallest.”

  “Calil-Du,” TL says. “Explain.”

  “We’re carting around deadwood, TL!” Calil-Du barks, her scowl shifting toward Ting and Hefco.

  When TL tilts her head, her scarification catches the light. “I’m about to tell you two things in violation of all my instincts. The first is this. You’re good. You’re one of the best groups I’ve trained in three years.” She looks at Pico, who must’ve messaged her. “Permission granted, Pik-Cao.”

  “We can’t be one of the best, TL,” he says. “On account of Gabrielle is better than us, and they suck pump.”

  “Gabrielle is not better than us, recruit.”

  “They score higher.”

  Her gaze sharpens. “Because of your deadwood? Is that what you think is weighing you down, recruit?”

  Pico grins, and I know there’s no way he’ll ever point a finger at a squadmate. “Only thing weighing me down is gravity, TL.”