Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  Instead she protects Voorhivey while he foams Admin’s injury. The crowd surges against Cali. She shifts her weight and elbows someone in the face. She’s only a blurred shape on my lens, but I can still feel her satisfaction. Then Elfano lands in front of her with a bone-trembling clang. The crowd crushes people against the meka but with Elfano giving them cover, Cali and Voorhivey drag Admin to safety.

  After the bulk of the crowd stampedes past me, I scan the enclave past the open gate. A few stragglers cross a plaza scattered with kiosks and treelike sculptures. A dozen wounded people moan and writhe or—worse—lie still on the ground.

  I lens Ting my perspective, so she’ll send for medical units, and a final Jitney screams out of the shadows of the enclave. A Garda clinging to the side shouts, “It ate Shroder, it ate Shroder. It’s not a fucking cataphract. Get out before they Doom this whole place—run!”

  The Jitney disappears into the parkland and unsettling silence descends, broken only by Ting reiterating the coordinates for a medipod drop.

  “Hey, Ridehorse,” Pico says.

  Ridehorse holds her Boaz high on her shoulderframe, staring into the now-quiet enclave. “Y-yeah?”

  “Hope it’s not too late to avoid the rush, because I’m pissing myself now.”

  “Nobody’s Dooming a Class A enclave,” M’bari says.

  Dooming is a nonlethal, painless way to destroy a neighborhood or a city. A dome is placed over a tower, or a cluster of towers, or an entire enclave, shutting it off from the rest of the planet for months or years—or forever. Complete isolation for a nationalist stronghold. Unbreakable quarantine for a patriotic outbreak.

  So yeah, nobody’s Dooming wealthy shareholders.

  On the other hand, I’m pretty curious about what might be eating them.

  Voorhivey lenses me, “Kaytu?”

  I confirm, still scanning the enclave in front of me. My display doesn’t show any motion, but my display doesn’t show much of anything at the moment except signal interference.

  “I’m staying with Admin,” Voorhivey tells me. “I’m our best medic now Gazi’s gone. But I’m, um, getting pinged by Department Command. They want eyes in the enclave.”

  I take a steadying breath. “So order recon to advance.”

  “You sure? I’ll say no if you want. I don’t care. There’s only two of you.”

  “I’m sure,” I say.

  Voorhivey confirms silently, then makes an announcement: “We’ll stay with Admin till the pod drops. Gimmel, Wu, Shi—hold the gate against anything coming from inside the enclave. Meka, cover our poles. Tet, we need eyes inside.”

  “Yes, chief.” I lens Jagzenka. “I’m going in soft. You follow softer. If I flush anything, don’t let it eat me.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re not that tasty.”

  When I step into the enclave, darkness thickens around me. The ceiling is sixty feet overhead. The height and profile of the buildings probably tells a story of wealth, culture, and demographics to people who know how to listen. I’m not one of them, so all I hear is the splash of small-arms fire in the distance, the trill of alarms, and the whir of repair bots.

  “Tet, you are within my signals envelope,” Ting lenses, which means she’s watching over us like a stemhead angel.

  I slink around the injured people, staying in the cover of the laminated trees and pulse-deadened kiosks. Buildings surround the plaza, spiraling overhead. The cityscape reminds me of my father’s artwork: elegant proportions, feathery walkways, and swirling designs. Most of the buildings are cordoned off behind well-manicured private parks—yards, I think they’re called.

  The beauty is breathtaking and irrelevant. My heart hurts from pounding and my breath is too loud.

  I stalk into the shadow of a glossy arch, listening to the distant shouts and alarms. The hiss of another missile strike ends in a crash and the rumble of a structure collapsing. Lights dim inside one of the surrounding buildings, and I hear the hum of vehicles but nothing moves in the abandoned streets.

  A dull thump comes from outside the gate. My stomach clenches before I recognize the sound of a medipod dropping. My lens gleams with squad chatter about Admin as I wait there, feeling the rhythm of the gloom. I quiet the channel and wait some more.

  Good scouts play with tech; great ones play with time.

  “Chief,” I whisper. “That Garda encountered a lamprey?”

  “No official word yet, Tet-One,” Voorhivey says.

  “You know the unofficial story, prez,” Pico says. “You know what ate them.”

  “Stay off Tet channel,” Voorhivey snaps, then tells me, “Our orders stand. Maintain the perimeter, interdict if necessary until reinforcement arrives.”

  I acknowledge, scanning the gloom.

  “They—” Voorhivey takes a breath. “Except now Department Command wants intel from deeper inside the walls.”

  A chill touches my spine. We’re supposed to hold the gate and wait, not stumble after a lamprey in the dark.

  “We’re barely rookies,” Jag murmurs.

  Voorhivey opens a private line to me. “They’re adamant, Kaytu. DepCom needs to know what in the hellstorm’s going on.”

  “And we’re the only disposable drones they’ve got.”

  He grunts. “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know. Talk to M’bari?”

  “We need Rana, but she’s off with the Flensers, a million miles away.”

  “Yeah.” I take a breath. “Okay, Tet team is going in. The rest of you hold position outside the gate. Inform DepCom you’re waiting on me before entering.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m recon leader, it’s my call. Wait on my green, confirm.”

  He lenses me a relieved confirmation and I shift my gaze toward Jag. She’s nowhere. The plaza is empty. Except my lens marks her twenty feet behind me, a patch of shadow beside an overturned kiosk, smashed by the stampede.

  “Show-off,” I lens. “Are we clear?”

  “We’re clear, Tet-Leader,” she replies, her voice flat.

  “You’re understaffed in there,” Ting says, in a private message to both of us. “You want me to yank you?”

  “Tet-Two?” I query.

  “We’re clear, Tet-Leader,” Jag repeats, even more flatly.

  I almost smile. Jag is such a low-key hardass. Took me months to realize there was more to her than a quiet girl raised in a Class B enclave. At first, I took her jaguar markings for a boring person’s bid for attention, making a play on her surname. There’s an element of that, but Jagzenka is catlike deep in her soul.

  Okay, then. This is the job: walking into dark places. Not for revenge. Not for my sayti. Just so other people can walk out of them.

  Maybe I’m not leadership material, maybe I’m not willing to make the sacrifices. Maybe I’ll never be a real corporate soldier, but I’ll keep my squad alive.

  CHAPTER 33

  I sheathe my Vespr and bring my pinpoint Boaz to bear. Like my armor, it’s modified for recon: half the weight of a regular Boaz, inflicting half the damage at half the range.

  If I stumble into a firefight, I’m dead, but in lieu of stopping power and a firehose capacity, my Boaz is loaded with eight jellies: Gelatinous Field-Emplaced Signal-Reconnaissance Monitors. Each one expands to the size of my palm and the texture of watery dough. Once you splat a jelly into place, it starts transmitting signals to your proxy. They’ll paint a picture of the inside of this enclave for DepCom to review. They’re paleo enough to function through most pulses, though easy to detect with a focused sweep.

  Still, jellies are highly effective with proper placement. That’s the next hurdle: we need to place them.

  Three streets branch from the plaza. Two lead toward the heart of the enclave—toward the small-arms fire—while the third curves through a th
eater district in winding loops. I want to keep Jag behind me, covering my advance, but Voorhivey tentatively countermands. He’s feeling pressure from above: widening our surveillance footprint is a priority.

  We have to separate.

  “I’m on the northwest route,” I lens to Ting and Jag, highlighting my path into the shitstorm. “Tet-Two, take the eastern route, confirm.”

  “Confirm,” Jagzenka sends.

  “Tet-Proxy, transmit optimum position for jelly emplacement.”

  “Transmitting,” Ting says.

  Seventeen target dots appear on my map. I flip to Jagzenka’s map and see thirteen on hers: more than enough options, with only eight jellies in each of our cans. I lens Jagzenka a wordless click to say good luck, scan the street again, and slip toward my first target.

  Halfway through a gauntlet of upscale retail displays, pounding music spills into the street. A window unfilms four or five floors above me. My heart jerks, my barrel rises, and my thumb switches to liquammo slugs.

  Silhouettes shift against the clearing film. It’s not a threat, it’s a party. A dozen people are dancing and drinking—and shouting close it, close it! The security film re-forms. Either they don’t know what’s happening outside or they’re making the best of a bad situation.

  Although on second thought, I don’t know what’s happening outside, either. I’m not seeing any meaty-pink lampreys, but ninety percent of my display is composed of black splotches and dead zones, from privacy films and signal interference.

  I’m working blind.

  I slink beneath a chromacrete gazebo and fire two jellies: one at the high tower of a residence, one at an orbital array steeple that looks like a work of art. Neither is a bull’s-eye, but both stick within usable tolerances.

  “Vehicle approaching.” Ting shoots me a map with a blinking dot. “No arms signature, threat level low.”

  Crunching sounds behind me and I switch to slugs again. A six-door civilian tramcar—a rarity in an age of public transport—whips past, following the print-path around the corner.

  When the noise quiets and my heartbeat settles, I climb to a high, swaying walkway.

  The sound of small-arms fire is fading. I lens Jagzenka for a status update and I’m firing my third jelly when her response comes. She’s safely within Ting’s envelope and currently inside a public performance hall, climbing to an overlook balcony. She’ll splat six of her targets from a single spot.

  “Lazy,” I lens.

  She replies with a blank click that reads like smugness. Jagzenka’s a rated sharpshooter; she’ll hit her marks.

  Ting sends me another map. “Three units to your northwest, Tet-One.”

  I slouch against an ad-mural, my camo-skin breaking my edges to match the pulse-dulled graphics. In the gloom of the filmed moonlight, I watch three soldiers in Garda gear stagger along a bridge two levels down. One appears injured. The other two keep her on her feet, but all three look jittery.

  Dark patches speckle their armor, and fear tightens my chest. When I zoom in for a closer look, the patches resolve into pink goo.

  “Proxy, are you getting this?” I ask, my voice oddly steady.

  “Confirm,” Ting says.

  “My filters aren’t built for—” For whatever the fuck lampreys are. “Can you ID?”

  “The substance doesn’t scan as any known threat,” she says, before reverting to her babble: “You think it’s a lamprey? It’s totally inscrutable, Maseo! It cannot be scruted.”

  “What am I supposed to—”

  “Wait, don’t look away! Keep feeding me data! I mean, it’s oily and thick, like melted pink tar or . . . but look! When the gunk drips off . . . is it evaporating? It’s inert. I’m not seeing trace aerosol or—”

  “Tet-One, report,” Voorhivey breaks in.

  Composing a report helps me steady my nerves. I don’t mention the lamprey’s presence. Ting will update the squad. Instead, I request instructions for further recon and Voorhivey tells me to splat my jellies and get the gehenna back to the squad.

  The Garda soldiers stagger into the darkness and a missile explodes miles across the enclave. A plume of smoke and dust flattens against the pulse-deadened environmental film that stretches over the rooftops, dulling the moonlight and killing the breeze instead of customizing the former and filtering the latter.

  I splat my fourth and fifth jellies onto targets my lens pinpoints, then climb the ladder of an offline tube to street level.

  A minute later, I’m prowling across a park with actual growngrass underfoot, spongy and soft. From a little rise, I catch sight of the top of my second-to-last target between the surrounding buildings, a residential ziggurat with alternating garden levels.

  “Tet-One, Tet-Two, you’re in my envelope.” Ting lenses me a wider schematic of the southern enclave, using the data from the jellies. “You’re c-clear to a moderate confidence.”

  “‘Moderate,’” Jagzenka echoes.

  “I can’t s-scan the interiors,” Ting explains, sounding twitchy again. “Jag—I mean, Tet-Two, I’m showing a hundred percent of your monitoring systems in place and operative.”

  Moving toward the ziggurat, I adhere a jelly to the eaves of a dangling structure. I trot along an underpass—and freeze. My whimper is the loudest sound in the world.

  “Tet-Two, return to, um, to squad?” Ting says. “Follow your blue path. Confirm.”

  “Negative,” Jag responds.

  “What—what’s up?”

  “Send me to back up Kaytu. Where is he?”

  I’m staring at a brown river glinting in the moonlight, a wide current cutting across the heart of the enclave. Maybe forty feet wide, and extending in both directions before vanishing in the half light. Except it’s not a river—it’s a lamprey scar, layered with filthy pink goo. It looks like a scorch mark, charring gatehouses and vehicles, people and trees. Organic, though. Slimy pinkish streaks smear the floor while dripping craters pock the walls.

  A handful of misshapen lumps ooze on the street and balconies. At first I think they’re clots of goo . . . and then I realize they’re flesh.

  “Sagrado,” I whisper.

  There’s a disembodied torso. A corpse that looks like a flayed anatomical diagram. An empty sack of skin enclosing a brown splat. Past the bodies, the slime trail burns through a wall and disappears into a building. A gaping hole, big enough for a trirail tunnel.

  “Are you there?” I whisper. “Ting?”

  “I see you, Maseo,” she says.

  “S-status. Status report. I need a . . .” I take a breath. “T-tell me what I’m looking at.”

  There’s no answer.

  “Ting, answer!” I say, almost begging. “Tet-Proxy, respond!”

  “I-I-I’m here.”

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “N-nothing. Signal interference.”

  “Bullshit, Ting.”

  “You’re l-looking at lamprey marks,” Ting says, clearly trying to make her voice curt and professional. “The residue gives off, um, signal interference and I guess—”

  “Tet-Two requests a route to Tet-One,” Jag says on Tet channel, instead of the private one with me and Ting. “Where’s Kaytu, Ting? Send me to Kaytu!”

  “Denied.” Ting returns to the private channel. “You’re c-clear, Mase. You’re clear, the lamprey is miles away.”

  “We—we need eyes on the hostile.”

  “Not yours,” she tells me. “There’s twenty other c-companies in here. Sometimes you’ve got to run away.”

  I don’t answer, staring at the wreckage and seeing another ruined enclave street in another decade, with body parts littering the ground.

  “Come home,” Ting says, and flashes a picture of Pico’s grin, Cali’s scowl, and Voorhivey nervously chewing the tips of his combat gloves.

/>   I almost smile. “Show me the way.”

  “Here.” A blue path flashes on my lens. “That’s your best route.”

  “Returning to squad,” I say.

  I stalk two blocks before my stomach settles. What kind of weapon does that? Appears inside an enclave without warning, burns through walls, turns people inside out?

  “Continue along Blue Path,” Ting says. “Except, um . . .”

  I follow a ramp to a rafter park. “Except what?”

  “I, um, I know this isn’t the best time. I need help, Mase.”

  “I’m playing tag with a meatmonster and you need help?”

  “‘Meatmonster’? I’ll check MYRAGE for that.”

  I grunt and wind through the rafters.

  “Searches of downdark—the downdark—of the downdark channels only show a few blurred images.” Ting’s voice is a singsong chant. “Other’n that, there’s nothing—null—nil about lampreys. They’re scrubbing the channels—”

  I’m disoriented to find myself in this conversation. “Tingting, focus!”

  “I just . . .” She makes a throaty noise and regains a little control. “You didn’t tell the Djembe about me. You didn’t tell her anything. You tried to protect me.”

  When an explosion sounds in the distance, I crouch behind a railing. “You know about her?”

  “I watched.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? You eavesdropped on corporate intel?”

  She takes a breath. “I’m out of stem, Mase.”

  “This is about stem?”

  “I—I can’t hold it together m-much longer. I need stem. Today. You know w-what happens if I don’t get any?”

  I scan the streets. “I don’t care!”

  “I’ve been . . . getting stem at base.”

  “You saw those bodies, Ting. Get me out of here.”

  “It’s been harder since Phase Two started. I can’t, Mase. I just can’t.”

  “You want to talk about this right now?”

  “The lamprey is outside my envelope.”

  “How would you know, with all the signal interference?”

  “I’ll die if I don’t g-get stem,” she says. “I’ll worse than die.”