Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “You’ll live, you stupid splice.” I trot across a skywalk, toward the gate, toward the squad. “Withdrawal won’t kill you. You’re in the service now, you’re an investment. They’ll keep you alive.”

  “It’s not withdrawal.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I’m not an addict.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “I’m a technopath.”

  CHAPTER 34

  My lens blooms with data. A hundred images avalanche into me:

  I see a two-year-old Tingting living in a scraper in Tangiers. Sickly and runtish, and hugged by her fiercely protective mother.

  I see a seven-year-old Tingting smiling in confusion as her addict mother sells her to a gutter gang.

  I see a nine-year-old Tingting working thirteen-hour days in a basement manufactory. I see her lose herself in MYRAGE without a visor or a lens, without any gear. A nine-year-old who sees the virtual world with her naked eyes.

  I see a ten-year-old realizing she’s a genefreek: a technopath who syncs her genetically altered brain waves with computational fields. She uses her skills to escape the hell of her life . . . and sees a new hell approaching.

  She sees the fate of technopaths.

  They don’t live past puberty. They descend into madness, tear themselves apart. And that’s if they’re not discovered. Technopaths are too powerful to allow. They can’t read your mind, but they can read everything you’ve lensed, every time you’ve interfaced, everything you’ve done in the most private MYRAGE sessions. They can kill you with your bedside lamp, with your cuff or a programmable hat.

  If they’re discovered, they’re torn apart by a mob or dissected by a corpo.

  Ting shows me images of herself as a twelve-year-old, deciding to follow in her mother’s footsteps, to overdose on stem and disappear. To drift away from life on ambient electromagnetic waves.

  Except ODing on stem didn’t kill Ting. She discovered that stem isn’t deadly to a technopath. Stem keeps her alive. It’s not her drug, it’s her medicine.

  For years, she lived quietly in Tangiers. Making herself small and worthless, like a scab on a dog. Working her shifts, escaping into MYRAGE, scoring stem and tweaking the manufactory computers to make the world less intolerable.

  Her crude tweaks were discovered and led to heavy-handed reprisal against an unknown hacker. Nobody suspected a fourteen-year-old technopath: that was impossible. No such thing. They never lived that long.

  Ting shipped herself to Anadarko Basin and lived the life of a stemhead. She shows me what that meant. She paid every price for her freedom until she realized she wouldn’t last much longer. So she hacked her way into a CAV, and then back out again.

  Now she’s here. Ten hours away from a meltdown.

  * * *

  • • •

  None of this is my problem. Technopaths are monsters. Ting is a biological weapon who already lived too long. Technopaths should die at puberty.

  “That’s how you broke the CAV,” I say.

  The path on my lens splits at a star-shaped bridge connecting five buildings: one branch remains blue, one turns yellow.

  “Blue Path is your optimal route to the squad,” Ting tells me, her voice flat and professional again. “Yellow Path diverts you into a lab that contains stem.”

  “You asking me to—” I take a breath. “I can’t just wander off.”

  “You are within my signals envelope,” she says.

  I trot onto the bridge. “Yellow Path edges right next to that fucking slime, Ting.”

  “You are clear on Blue Path,” she says.

  She’s not going to ask me again. She’s not going to say anything. She’ll guide me home and never breathe a word. Not until tomorrow when cerebrospinal fluid starts oozing from her pores.

  “Proceeding on Blue Path,” I say.

  “Blips on a walkway to your southeast.” She flashes them on my map. “Civilian signatures.”

  I glance toward them, but they’re not in my sight lines. My Boaz is heavy, and switched to slugs. Keeping low, I jog to the center of the bridge. I pause where the two paths diverge. Fuck. Fuck. I can’t let her die. I veer onto the Yellow Path and follow the bridge toward a tower with lichen vines instead of columns.

  When I stalk inside, I’m in a cavernous hall. A full-spectrum sweep shows nothing but offline bots, and Ting lenses me the profiles of civilians behind security doors.

  My footsteps make no sound. I stick to the wall, which is a frieze like I’ve only seen on MYRAGE. I suspect it looks better in real life, but my mind is a small, frightened animal. I’m going off mission. I’m going off mission while a slime-dripping lamprey is eating the city, to steal stem for a technopath.

  Yellow Path leads me onto a boardwalk in a maze of walkways—ramps and tubes and shunts. I’m halfway across when the floor in front of me ends at a ragged, pink-oozing edge.

  The lamprey burned through this district.

  I lens Ting for signal intel. She detects nothing dangerous. I creep closer. A thirty-foot hole tunnels through the walkways like a bullet through a block of mycofu.

  “Return to Blue Path,” Ting says flatly.

  “I’m already here.”

  “Return to squad,” she says, and Yellow vanishes.

  “Fuck you,” I tell her.

  I retrace my steps to a disposal hatch. I pop an emergency panel and follow a skywalk under the lamprey slime, relying on my memory of the Yellow Path.

  My lens tells me it’s been seven minutes since I fired my last jelly. Feels like seven days. I emerge in a cluster of what I think are single-family homes. That means each structure only houses a single family. The buildings are tall and skinny and jointed like bamboo.

  Civilians are active in this part of the enclave. So is a Garda company, evacuating them toward a gate.

  “I’ve hidden your signal, Tet-One,” Ting says. “Stay out of eyeshot.”

  She can’t entirely hide my signal . . . except she’s a technopath, so maybe she can. The Yellow Path flickers into place and guides me through the bamboo towers to a quiet corner.

  A lift hums and opens.

  I step inside and whoosh upward.

  Fourteen floors higher, I find what looks like a medical lab, with high-level gene- and flowcore processing. An autocabinet springs to life and the surprise almost kills me. A drawer extrudes a thin alloy case.

  I’m crossing a line here. The smart move is to walk away. The smart move is to forget about Ting, but I grab the case and shove it into my pack.

  The path turns blue and I race the gehenna out of there.

  CHAPTER 35

  Ting doesn’t lead me to the plaza with the trees and kiosks. The squad is now positioned along a string of alley balconies overlooking a boulevard. A flock of day-owls with embedded data-ports swirls between the buildings and lands on a ledge, giving the scene a sense of surreal disassociation.

  I lens my approach, and Voorhivey confirms me—but Cali and M’bari still target me from behind a barrier of linked paraframes.

  As I jog closer, I feel a flash of fear. They’re scowling, they’re edgy. What if they’re scanning the case tucked against my side?

  They’re not, though. Cali pings an acknowledgment and tells me, “Admin’s alive. The medipod extraction went smooth—he’s okay.”

  “Tet-One, you’re on overwatch,” Voorhivey lenses. “Get munitions and join Jagzenka.”

  “Our objective’s updated,” Ridehorse tells me aloud.

  After I slip behind the barrier, Basdaq exchanges my pinpoint Boaz for a sniper model with more kick. I’m still screwed for armor, though.

  “What’s the mission?” I ask, climbing a scaffolding toward Jag, who is positioned three levels above.

  “Still interdiction,” Pico lenses on squad channel. “But it’s official
that there’s no cataphract in the enclave.”

  “DepCom says we’re looking at an ‘undetermined hostile,’” Voorhivey says. “They’re calling the lampreys ‘autonomous drones’ or ‘genefactured weapons.’”

  “Undetermined,” Elfano says, shifting in the harness of her meka. In the dingy light, the new configuration looks like a massive silverfish.

  “Command knows this is a redline threat,” M’bari lenses everyone. “The primary squad is ready to engage. We’re just here for targeting.”

  “We’re a tripwire,” Ridehorse says.

  “Assholes,” Cali says, and shoots a day-owl with a quarter-juiced sniper round.

  When the dead owl tumbles from the rooftop and vanishes, the other birds don’t even react.

  “Settle down, orca,” Jag lenses her.

  Cali likes Jag’s pet name for her, so she doesn’t respond with more than a grumble. The channel falls silent as Voorhivey throws a flag telling us he’s in communication with command. I should communicate a little myself, and tell them about that pink river of death. I need time to pull myself together, though, so I focus on climbing until I reach Jagzenka’s level.

  We exchange silent handshakes, and then Ting overlays building schematics in my lens. She’s in control of herself, though I’m not sure how—or at what cost. I crawl onto a balcony fifty feet away and scope the gloomy boulevard.

  “There’s a hostile in Los Anod,” Voorhivey announces on-channel, in his official voice. “Our mission is to keep it within the enclave walls until containment and extraction arrives.”

  “Containment?” Ridehorse asks.

  Voorhivey laughs in relief, a bright sound in a dark city. “They’ve got a plan! I mean, management’s not saying much, but there’s a plan.”

  “The only thing scarier than not getting guidance from corporate,” Pico says, “is getting guidance from corporate.”

  “They’ve been working on it for months,” Voorhivey informs us. “Developing a tech to capture a lamprey. See, they need to catch one to classify them. To learn how to fight them. This is the first field deployment. We’re making history. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “So we kick back and wait?” Ridehorse asks.

  “Like TL always says,” Basdaq tells her. “Waiting is ninety-nine percent of the job.”

  “They’re dropping new munitions for us,” Voorhivey announces. “L-tech rampart gear.”

  Elfano snorts. “L-tech?”

  “Lamprey tech,” Voorhivey explains.

  “Yeah, I got it. It’s stupid.”

  “I’m reviewing the specs. The new guns throw lamprey-excluding film. So we fence them in. Us and seven other platoons in position around the hostile. We close the circle on this thing, then the extraction teams extract it.”

  “I saw tracks,” I lens.

  Jag glances at me across the rooftop separating our balconies, and Basdaq says, “What kind of tracks?”

  I ping images across the squad channel. A tarry pink slime trail. The hole burned through the buildings, the bodies on the street.

  “Ugly,” Shakrabarti says.

  “We’ve seen worse,” Cali says.

  “The remort’s miles away now,” I say, and don’t look toward the technopathic genefreek working the coms.

  “Not gone according to my scans,” Basdaq says. “Signal interference is hitting us in waves.”

  “Sorry!” Ting sends me privately. “I lied about it being gone.”

  “Don’t talk to me,” I reply.

  “Sorry,” she repeats, and closes the channel.

  “Not gone according to command, either,” Voorhivey tells Basdaq. “They’re projecting that it’ll stick around long enough for C&E.”

  “What’s that?” Cali asks.

  “Uh. Containment and extraction.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Nobody speaks for a minute. My jaw aches; my breath is shallow. The boulevard is quiet.

  “You’ve been searching MYRAGE?” M’bari asks Ting, because everyone knows she’s got a light touch with tech, even if they don’t know why. “Find anything?”

  “Not much, um. Someone’s scrub-scrubbing lamprey images faster’n anyone can archive.”

  “Is that possible?” Ridehorse asks. “Deleting MYRAGE that fast?”

  “No,” Shakrabarti says.

  “You know something,” M’bari tells Ting. “What do you know?”

  “They’re hard to kill,” Ting says.

  She lenses a grainy video scraped from MYRAGE that shows corpo soldiers unloading firepower at a lamprey that’s burrowing into a core mine. Impacts pock the fleshy plates. The lamprey shudders. Tendrils whip from its marbled edges, crushing tanks and missile platforms. An entire battalion forms a wedge around the mine. A million tracer rounds fire from Orit Gal gunships—and then three platforms fire simultaneous blasts at the lamprey.

  Three streaks join into a single weapon and lock on target.

  A hellfrost missile.

  A direct hit, and Cali says, “Bang. Handled.”

  There’s a blinding light. It looks like the video froze until the glow dims. The landscape is slagged. Craters of terrafixing gauze are torn away, revealing the charred, oozing earth. The light dims more . . . and the dull pink sphere of the lamprey collapses.

  In its death throes, the lamprey unspools into cables. One extends impossibly far toward the camera—and the screen blanks.

  The squad is quiet until Cali asks, “Did that fucker survive a hellfrost strike?”

  “Not for long,” Shakrabarti says.

  “Half that Army battalion didn’t survive, either,” I say. “The corpos collateralled them.”

  Voorhivey lenses me a dismissive click. “That’s the job description.”

  “At least they killed one,” Ridehorse says.

  “Except they need an intact specimen,” M’bari says. “That’s why they’re trying extraction.”

  Ting pings agreement. “They need samples to figure out what makes these things tick. I mean, I guess a hellfrost doesn’t leave enough behind to experiment on.”

  “It also digs craters in the New Growth,” Ridehorse says. “Ting, how far away is the one that’s here?”

  Ting says there’s too much interference, and the conversation falters again. If the lamprey rolls into sight, we’ll do our duty. Until then, we wait. Distant flares reflect against the film high above. A burning gunship arcs across the sky like a shooting star, then crashes out of sight. The rumble of a collapsing building sounds like thunder, and there’s a monsoon scent in the air.

  “Fuck waiting,” Cali lenses me privately. “They should lay down another hellfrost.”

  “A hellfrost strike would kill us, too.”

  “That’s the bad part.”

  “Plus half this enclave.”

  “And that’s the good part,” she says. “Los Anod reminds me of home. I could’ve grown up here.”

  “You’re Class A? You?”

  She lenses me an obscene picture. “You didn’t know?”

  “I thought you were clinging to Class C by the armpit, one step above the gutter.”

  “Fuck, no. I could buy a thousand of you with my pocket money.” She falls silent at the distant whoosh and whomp of battle. “I don’t want to die in some rich-ass enclave, Kaytu. I’m headed for the stars. I always thought I wanted to join the Army, but no. It’s the marines for me.”

  “You’re too big for a battlesuit.”

  “I am not. Asshole.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I’m only a little too big. That’s what surgery’s for. I’m going to—” She pauses when Ting updates our scans. “If you laugh at me, you splice, I’ll fold your dick into an origami swan.”

  “I won’t laugh.”

&nb
sp; “I’m joining the marines. I don’t care what it takes, I’ll test in eventually. I’ll find Rana after she gets a command and . . .” Cali’s voice is full of hope for once instead of bluster. “I’m going to serve on her ship.”

  “Yeah, you will,” I say.

  “I fucking will.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You will.”

  There’s a brief pause. “You really think so?”

  “You’re thick as lichenpaste,” I tell her, “but Rana’s not. She’ll make it happen. She’ll put a collar on you and tell you who to bite.”

  “I’m thick?” she says. “I’m not the one who—”

  A reverberant hum sounds, the lowest note in the biggest stringed instrument in the world. A white umbilicus flashes down from a ship and adheres to a balcony in the alley below me. At first the cord is the size of my forearm, but in a few seconds it’s as thick as my chest. It’s a paleo-tech aiming device, guiding a munitions pod into place.

  CHAPTER 36

  Basdaq hops a railing and unlocks the pod. “Looks like a modified rampart gun.”

  “Only one?” Cali asks.

  “Two,” he says. “Which means Shakrabarti and Jag are on the triggers.”

  “Shakrabarti and Ridehorse,” Voorhivey tells him. “We need Jag for recon.”

  “I’m better at longshot delivery than Jag anyway,” Ridehorse says.

  Pico pings her a mocking laugh while Ting starts breaking down the specs on the new guns. They’re loaded with L-tech exclusion foam, which is apparently some unholy hybrid of film and rampart. The eggheads are eighty percent certain that lampreys can’t travel through the foam.

  “Eighty percent?” Cali growls. “So there’s a one-in-four chance this won’t even work?”

  “One in five,” Basdaq says.

  Cali shoots another owl.

  “Orca . . .” Jag lenses.

  Cali grunts. “I don’t like waiting around.”

  “Then definitely massacre the local waterfowl,” Pico says.

  “How come there’s only two guns?” Ridehorse asks, securing the L-tech weapon to her harness.