Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “How come they didn’t arm us before we deployed?” Elfano adds, from inside her meka.

  “This is experimental tech,” M’bari says. “There’s probably only a few dozen modified rifles. The corpo didn’t know which squads would be in place and they’re experimenting.”

  “Which makes us lab rats,” Shakrabarti says.

  “You’re a lab rat,” Pico says. “I’m a test monkey.”

  Ting says she’ll provide pinpoint data by piggybacking the recon rifles to patch into the jellies. Nobody knows what she means by that, and I’m the only one who suspects technopathy.

  Voorhivey nods. “Good. Enact.”

  Ting tells me and Jag to climb higher to feed target data to the rampart gunners. They’re firing from a mile away and need to lay down the film-foam in perfect coordination with the other platoons, to encircle the lamprey.

  After I’m patched in, I lie prone on an angled roof and sweep the city with a targeting scope.

  A flight wing converges a few long blocks away. I don’t recognize the ships. Engineer-class craft, maybe. They hover between the film and the rooftops, above the lamprey’s signal interference.

  “Once we contain the hostile with L-tech,” Voorhivey announces, “the ships will extract the remort. If there’s trouble, we’ll advance on the target zone.”

  “To help with the extraction?” Elfano asks, on squad channel.

  “To keep it confined.”

  “To stomp its ass,” Cali says.

  “Gunners,” Voorhivey says. “Status update.”

  “Target acquired,” Shakrabarti reports.

  “Acquired,” Ridehorse echoes.

  “Prepare to engage,” Ting says. “On my mark.”

  A mile in front of us, pink-yellow light shines from the base turrets of the engineering crafts. Or maybe it’s not a light; maybe it’s a substance extruding downward below the rooftops, curling into the enclave streets.

  I magnify my lens, but the image doesn’t resolve. Something’s wonky.

  “Interference,” Basdaq mutters.

  “That’s why they’re sending soldiers instead of drones,” M’bari says.

  “What if the engineers don’t put it in a cage?” Ridehorse asks. “What if we get there and the tech doesn’t work?”

  Cali snorts. “We still stomp its ass.”

  “They need to capture a lamprey to classify it, right?” Elfano asks, her exoskeleton scuttling along a wall far below me and Jag. “To check what technology the terrafixing resurrected, to map the lamprey’s genetic samples and—”

  “Mark in thirty.” Ting overrides our lenses with the countdown, and she speaks it aloud for redundancy. “Twenty-nine.”

  The squad channel patches into a live feed that Ting compiles from jellies and orbital surveillance and faint bursts from other squads. Her video shows a quiet courtyard inside a building, four or five acres wide. A side panel tells me that the open space begins on the seventy-ninth floor of a research park and rises six stories.

  The lamprey already hacked through one wall like a serrated ax and is still rampaging through the building. Pink goo drips from half-dissolved beams, and Ting’s video highlights three squads waiting in the shadows. Silent, still, focused, and elite. They’re Army, not marines, but they’re Consultant Class. Special operations hardcases with the kind of sheets the rest of us only dream about.

  “Fuck me sideways,” Cali says, on a channel that excludes our gunners. “You see who’s on deck?”

  “Serious firepower,” Elfano says.

  “Eighteen,” Ting says. “Seventeen.”

  “Check their ammo,” Cali says, and the video obligingly zooms toward a consultant shouldering a Boaz V with blue-glowing cans.

  “L-tech,” Voorhivey says.

  “What does the L stand for again?” Pico asks.

  “Twelve,” Ting says.

  “Wait for it,” Jag whispers, on gunner channel. “Wait for it.”

  A mile away from my angled roof, the courtyard floor ripples. On the video, glassine and alloy erupt like geysers near one squad—and then two more geysers billow into the room. The floor splits and a long snaking strand of lamprey slices through the wreckage.

  The way it moves is wrong. Not mechanical, but . . . inhuman, somehow. Alien and viscerally revolting, and all of our capture-the-crown training suddenly makes sense.

  “Sweet biyo,” Pico whispers, and I know that Ridehorse is making a religious gesture, even though the thing is a mile away.

  On the video, the Consultant squads open fire. Glowing blue cans slice the air. The lamprey cringes and recoils. A dull pink strand unfurls from a meaty plate and chops at the closest squad. It whips past them and punches through two soldiers a hundred yards away.

  There’s an implosion of meat. M’bari gasps and Cali swears. Two more soldiers fall and my shoulders tighten so hard they hurt.

  The lamprey unravels up through the floor, a mass of strands dragging the spherical body into sight. Our squad channel erupts with horror. Blue tracer rounds smack into fleshy pink plates. My lens flickers, the video stutters, and the lamprey swivels—maybe in pain—and extrudes another dozen whipcord cables, lashing in every direction.

  “Two,” Ting says. “One!”

  A single hiss sounds as Ridehorse and Shakrabarti fire their L-tech cans.

  In less than a second, both shots find their targets a mile away. The video shudders and rubble shifts around the courtyard. Canisters burst open. I count six, eight . . . twelve strikes as the other squads open fire.

  Ramparts explode into containment foam that expands into a high spongy mass.

  When the final two cans hit the courtyard the lamprey is hedged inside a jagged perimeter. Dull pink plates shift and churn. Blue streaks crisscross in the air. Ooze splatters from the lamprey as the Consultant squads concentrate fire on a single plate—which bursts into a thousand threads.

  My squad cheers. Cali bellows encouragement at the Consultants, like they can hear her from across the enclave. The lamprey starts regrowing a new plate and unfurls a clubbed pink cable to whip against the L-tech foam ramparts. The blue ammo digs pits in the remort’s skin. A spearlike strand thrusts from the center of the lamprey, stabs the ramparts, and—

  The video freezes. I check the distance through my scope. Looks quiet. A sleepy city on a sleepy night.

  “What happened?” Voorhivey asks.

  “They pole-fucked that fucking fuck,” Cali says.

  Ting pings a message on squad lenses. “The feed stopped when—”

  My scope shuts down at a blinding flare of light.

  A blue-yellow sun rises to the north.

  The enclave is bathed in brilliance. The wide boulevards, the ornate balconies, the squad below me and the walkways below them. Every shape on the rooftop is illuminated, every decorative curlicue and mote of dust.

  Panicked shouts erupt on-channel. “Hellfrost strike! Take cover!”

  “It’s a shock wave,” Voorhivey yells. “The lamprey blew!”

  “Get inside the building,” Basdaq tells me and Jagzenka on- channel, his deep voice utterly calm. “Find a blast bunker.”

  “Eight seconds until impact,” Ting says. “Routing engaged.”

  Far below me and Jag, a paraframe barrier snaps closed, wrapping the squad like a dome. Pico screams in my earbug to take cover, take cover. Elfano rolls her meka into a protective pillbug ahead of the blast—and a mile across the enclave, a tidal wave of debris spreads from the impact point of the containment attempt.

  Apparently it didn’t work.

  I didn’t feel myself stand, but I’m already on my feet. Jag races toward me, our lenses flickering with blueprints and blast paths. We’re sprinting across a rooftop and sliding down a slope and tumbling across a sanitation hub, and then I’m on one knee fir
ing at a glassine wall—sszt, sszt, sszt—until Jag flings herself at the weakened panel with her shoulder.

  She hits with a thud. The panel doesn’t break.

  My lens glows with alerts. Three seconds to impact.

  I sprint forward and slam into Jag hard enough to break her ribs and we’re through the shattered panel and tumbling down a building shaft.

  A strut slams into my thigh, but my armor takes most of the impact. I gasp and tumble until we hit bottom.

  Jag goes limp and rubble falls around me like a Vila Vela plaza exploding into the death-trap ambush of my childhood, of my nightmares.

  My mind lashes in panic, then clings to the familiar memory of my betrayal: a chunk of alloy smacks my chest like Aowamo shielding me with his body, and I see the hurt in Sergeant Najafi’s eyes as darkness hits.

  CHAPTER 37

  After the ambush, Sayti’s troops pulled me from the wreckage of the destroyed plaza. I spent days in a medical bunk, recovering from bruises and scrapes—and seeing corpses every time I closed my eyes.

  Meanwhile, high above Vila Vela, my sayti’s plans came to fruition. The remains of Tokomak Squad reacted to the chemical baths in the recymatorium, and the modified terrafixing protocol that Sayti had injected into their corpses spread across the orbital Garda HQ.

  Thousands died. Two thousand two hundred and thirty casualties. Murdered by the Plaguemaker of Vila Vela, the most notorious war criminal of our time.

  The corpos responded with arrests and orbital strikes that killed thousands more.

  Sayti’s command structure went nomadic. We lived in mobile traincars, in luxury vaults, in dripping tunnels. As the battles raged, Sayti started focusing on a new initiative, a method for modifying exclusion film to defeat a dome.

  I guess she saw the endgame all along. I guess she wanted the corpos to drop a Doom on Vila Vela. At least that’s what I think now. She’d planned for this all along.

  One of the fighters poked her head into my tent. “The Ess Ayati wants you. For another special job.”

  “Okay,” I said, hiding my excitement. I hadn’t seen Sayti for more than a few minutes in the previous week, and I’d missed her. We were closer than ever. We shared more than blood, we shared guilt.

  She’d missed me, too. She stood from a conference with a woman I didn’t recognize and wrapped me in a tight hug, her eyes watery. “When did you get taller than me? Look at you, a hundred stories high.”

  “Maybe you’re shrinking.”

  She ruffled my hair and gestured to the woman in the business suit. “This is your new teacher. She’ll show you how to defeat security systems.”

  “Like to pick locks?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “Why?”

  “To get to the other side,” she said, and smiled at my expression. “We need to infiltrate the corpos’ engineering flight wings before they drop anything drastic.”

  She ushered me into her private tent, and after dinner of falafel and vatziki she placed a portable medical injector on the table. Blades and saws bristled inside a protective cap.

  “That’s a bonespur blank inside the cartridge.” She pointed to a pale gray worm. “We’ll insert it now, to give you time to heal over.”

  She explained how bonespur defeated scans. She told me how to activate the blank and extrude the lockpick. I put my right hand on the table, and she clamped the injector to my middle finger. She held my other hand. A numbing spray hit my skin, and then the blades parted the flesh and needles pierced my metacarpal and injected the spur.

  It didn’t hurt. It itched a little, that’s all. The next day, my finger looked okay.

  I studied the art of picking locks with the most paleo tools available—and the corpos found Sayti.

  They dropped a military film over the shabby apartment building where we were staying and pumped a few billion protozoan-drones through the vents. Thousands more died, chewed to death from the inside.

  I’d lost an argument with my cousins earlier that morning, so they’d stayed behind while I ran errands. I don’t remember the days after the extermination of my family. The next thing I recall is scattering lenses, torn from the bodies of corpo soldiers, across the workbench of some patriot techies. We needed to hack them for permissions to use the weapons we’d looted.

  My “special job” died with Sayti—all her strategies died—but we kept fighting without her; we fought in her name.

  I remember a grizzled gen teaching me to use a scope and a blade. I remember realizing that Tokomak Squad didn’t snatch my mother: what were the chances that the one squad Sayti needed dead to target HQ with a chemical attack was the one I hated most?

  I slept in the streets and causeways, just one more filthy Vila Vela child soldier. We died in the atria and we died in the alleys. We drenched the corpos with our blood. We lost every battle, and every loss hardened our resolve—until a hellfrost missile razed the Sweetwater Site.

  Sweetwater. The pride of Vila Vela.

  Even dead, the AI had been our rallying cry, the banner beneath which we fought.

  Horrified by the glassing of Sweetwater, the corpos reassessed. They determined that killing my sayti had deprived us of effective leadership but given us a martyred saint: we’d never stop fighting.

  So they built an Exclusion Dome. The largest ever made. They evacuated the populace and draped a shroud over forty square miles. And under forty square miles, too: domes are coffins, not just lids.

  Adboards and channels blared with the evacuation order: the populace had eleven days to surrender and leave. Moskito swarms clogged the air like black fog, enforcing the mass transfer. One block at a time, the people of Vila Vela tromped into transports for relocation to refugee blocks and temporary housing.

  Ordinary citizens and loyal corporatists went willingly. Most patriots and rebels joined them: without my sayti and her new initiative, we knew we couldn’t resist. Tens of thousands stayed behind, though. The most committed, the most stubborn . . . the most wanted.

  Then the corpos Doomed the city. A fleet of engineering drones dropped an impenetrable dome, cutting Vila Vela off from the rest of humanity. Nothing entered save dim sunlight, and nothing left at all. Solitary confinement for an entire enclave. A surgical excision, removing the malignant alleles of Vila Vela from the genome of the Earth.

  CHAPTER 38

  I regain consciousness in Los Anod, seconds after hitting the bottom of the shaft. Rubble still cascades down from above. My armor saved my life so far—I’m still waiting for the blast to drop the building on my head—but everything hurts.

  Jag’s rib is impinging on her lung. She swears at me between gritted teeth as I drag her beneath a protective overhang. I realize for the first time that she’s terrible at swearing and feel a weird burst of fondness.

  We wait for impact . . . and nothing happens.

  The life of a grunt doesn’t come in three tidy acts. Instead, we huddle in the green-tinted darkness, waiting for a blow that never lands. Apparently the shock wave tore through dozens of towers, but the worst of the blast radius missed my squad’s position.

  After what feels like hours, Elfano cracks a hatch into the shaft. A meka pincer gently lifts Jag away, then returns for me.

  Voorhivey works us over with the medkit until we drag our sorry asses to the departure point outside the enclave, where a rearguard company waits with medics and field tents—but no nonlocal channels.

  We huddle there as Jag is treated. We’re scared and deflated. We’d expected our first engagement to be a war story with ourselves in the leading role: a battle to glorious triumph or noble defeat. Not this. Not proof that we’re cogs in a machine. Not “creep around the edges until the fancy new tech misfires and flattens a square mile of enclave.”

  Still, we survived.

  “What if they weren’t trying to capture the
lamprey?” Ridehorse asks, even more paranoid than usual.

  Basdaq shakes his head. “You think they wanted to flatten an enclave?”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Voorhivey says. “Flatten all those towers. Kill all those people.”

  “Not a Class A enclave,” Cali grumbles.

  “Cali’s right,” M’bari says. “When the lamprey exploded—”

  “The lamprey didn’t explode,” Ting tells him. “The L-tech exclusion foam exploded.”

  “So it’s back to the blueprints,” Basdaq says.

  “You really think they still don’t know what lampreys are?” Elfano asks, her pointy ears askew. “They must have a plan.”

  “We just saw their plan,” Pico tells her. “It literally blew up in our faces.”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t think about the case of stem in my vest. I don’t look at Ting until air transport arrives. The rearguard commander orders us to board but won’t tell us if we’re returning to base. We don’t react to the order at first. We’re not sure how the chain of command works when coms are down, and we’re jittery with shock and wary of uncertainty.

  I can’t be the only one missing Rana. Still, when M’bari gives the nod, we do as the rearguard commander says.

  The transport is a retrofitted luxury yacht from the previous century, when private aircraft were tolerated. It’s shaped like a pineapple, and lands vertically on the leaves, which lower the body to the ground before extruding a boarding plank. Fancy . . . except the inside is a hollow core, with standard-issue benches hugging the alloy-armored walls and half-assed climate control. So much for luxury.

  “How many people died in the blast?” Jag mumbles from thera-sleep, when she’s strapped into place.

  M’bari shifts on the bench beside me. “We don’t want to know.”

  “How many?” Pico asks.

  Voorhivey consults his lens, then gives us a preliminary number. Cali spits, Ridehorse prays, Ting sobs—a little hysterically. I hear the sound of stem withdrawal, but Basdaq just holds her. The transport ship trembles around us. Our lenses link to each other, but we’re cut off from the mil-chans. We’re not seeing updates about our orders or destination. We’re isolated and alone, and suddenly feeling small.