Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “What are these things?” Elfano asks, rewatching the video from the courtyard. “They’re like a—a monster CAV.”

  “They’re not like CAVs,” I say.

  “They’re based on an experimental weapon,” Ridehorse says. “The terrafixing regenned an experimental weapon.”

  Calil-Du pops the ammo can from her Boaz. “They’re aliens.”

  “Aliens?” Pico asks.

  “You were expecting a mothership to say, ‘Take me to your CEO’?” Cali snorts. “They’re fucking aliens.”

  Ridehorse secures Cali’s empty weapon into the cart. “So we’ve been invaded?”

  “No, asshole, they were invited. Of course we’ve been invaded. That thing’s dripping slime. Alien 101.”

  “They were bio-forged in the SICLE War,” Voorhivey says. “And somehow—somehow one of them killed that space-hab.”

  “That was a fucking technopath,” Cali says.

  Ridehorse seals the weapons cart. “Maybe it’s a remorted surface-to-orbit missile platform.”

  “It’s an alien egg,” Cali says.

  “You’re an alien omelet,” Pico tells her.

  Our lenses flash with preflight information, and the ship shudders into the sky. After the squad dips into the soft-drugs, I rifle through their packs, pretending to rummage for spare tubes. I slip the stem into Ting’s pack, then snag a wood-apple-flavored tube from M’bari’s stash.

  I chew the tube, heavy with the aftershocks of fear and exhaustion. My gaze keeps slipping toward Ting. She’s sleeping with her head on Pico’s shoulder, her amber hair messy and her mouth slightly open. She looks harmless, but whatever she does from this point forward, I’m responsible.

  If she loses her mind and tears apart this transport, the blood is on my hands.

  If she crushes a space-habitation like Dag Bravska, that’s on me too. And yet passing her the stem calmed me. Maybe we’re fighting an alien egg, but gutter roaches still make time for a drug deal.

  Some things never change.

  An hour later, the ship hums and hovers. Announcements flash and the medipods detach, darting to the treatment centers.

  We land at Ayko Base in one of the New Caspian Islands.

  Interlocking thirty-story buildings enclose training grounds, recreation balconies, and playing fields that are actual fields, grown on this seeded island that broke the surface twenty years ago. Sure, there are firing ranges and obstacle courses, but the air is salty-sweet and the foliage in the parks is glossy.

  We’re put on light duty for the first few days and encouraged to explore. There are public MYRAGE rigs and entertainment complexes. The mess halls each offer a different cuisine. We find assault galleries and climbing walls, combat courses, and even the rebuilt husk of one of the early dreadnoughts.

  Our barracks is three living areas surrounded by private bedrooms. We still use common showers, though, thank sagrado. I’d miss the sight of Calil-Du shaving her head. To say nothing about M’bari’s neon tattoos, Pico’s freckles, and the jaguar patches that cover every inch of Jagzenka.

  Plus, there’s a swimming pool. Full of actual water. I haven’t so much as floated in ten years, but after I splash around a while my childhood skills return.

  Elevators are different on the base. In the Freehold, they travel in straight lines, up and down. On the base, they also move diagonally and horizontally. Some are as long as corridors and slide through the building even as you cross them. Others are wide as parade grounds or as narrow as closets. Some are public; some hide behind privacy films. They check the passengers’ rank and assignments to determine transportation priority: a private might jog for ten minutes to reach the thirtieth floor, while an executive might travel the same route in ninety seconds.

  Rank literally changes the map. The shortest line between two points is privilege as the organization chart rewrites geography, rendering concepts like ninth floor and twenty-first floor and north and west irrelevant.

  In other words, we do a lot of walking.

  That’s okay. We like walking.

  What we don’t like is being kept in the dark about lampreys. M’bari puts out some feelers to learn more, but he doesn’t have a network of friends at Ayko Base. Not yet. I almost ask Ting to use her skills but decide not to because her skills terrify me.

  Maybe Cali’s right. Maybe lampreys are aliens. Sure, and maybe I’m a Class A shareholder. They’re remorts, resurrected from some unholy SICLE tech.

  We need details, though. We need strategies.

  We’re also not too fond of sharing the base with soldiers from other corpos. PRATO, Welcome 12, Unidroit, and even CrediMobil troops live in the same building. Ayko Base is a pan-corporate initiative. The other soldiers living on different floors still make me uneasy.

  I guess that’s my nationalist roots showing. We’re all trained to fight the same enemy.

  Except my platoon isn’t trained. Officially, we’re still a few days short of a full Anvil Month, so the other grunts start calling us Anvil Squad. We don’t mind. Hell, we love it. We came through the fire at Los Anod; we’re hotter and harder than ever.

  After the first few days, our training intensifies under the command of Sergeant Manager Li. She’s a soft-spoken woman in her late thirties, with delicate features and a ropy build. During business hours—before our evenings in the rigs or the pool—she directs our coursework and training regime. Signals, tech, history, and full-squad tactics.

  She doesn’t simply order us onto the courses, either. She joins us. She competes against us, and she’s not afraid to lose.

  She’s not as strong as Pico; she’s not as aggressive as Cali. She’s not as stealthy as Jagzenka, as savvy as M’bari, or as quick with ramparts as Basdaq. And of course she’s not a tech-head like Ting.

  She’s solid as a tower, though.

  Li never flusters. She never raises her voice. She speaks so quietly that we fall silent and strain to listen. I hate to admit that it actually works.

  And she knows this shit backward. After Cali beats her in hand-to-hand, she teaches her how to win faster. Hand-to-hand is worthless outside the gutter, but Li handles Cali’s excess energy by making me give her lessons in what Cali calls roachfighting. I spend hours in a training helmet, exchanging head-butts with her.

  I suspect Li is handling me, too.

  Voorhivey still buckles under pressure, so Li drills him with a gentle implacability, making him slow down. Then slow down more. Then more. After three days, he’s responding to events twice as fast. I’m not quite sure how that worked, but I can’t argue with the results.

  Li starts molding Ridehorse into a leadership role, and Pico into a strategic one. She doesn’t push Basdaq into management training, which means his political problem is still lingering in his file, though he won’t talk about it.

  I bet M’bari knows, but he won’t spill. None of my business, anyway. Everyone has secrets. Well, except Cali. She’s not capable of secrets.

  Sergeant Manager Li rarely uses her lens during exercises, so by the fourth day of her on-the-course training, we’re responding to gestures and murmurs. She’s big on paleo, because we’re not done with lampreys yet. Not even close.

  And we finally get a briefing.

  CHAPTER 39

  We strap into MYRAGE rigs and enact terrifyingly restrictive Non-Disclosure Indentures. Calil-Du grumbles, Pico laughs, and I think about Ting, for whom no agreement is binding.

  “Five months and four days ago,” a narrator intones, as projections bleed into view, “marks the first emergence of an unidentified remort in forty-two years.”

  A lamprey appears, a semisolid ball of dull pink goo, like a spherical skeleton with bones made of oily ropes. The exterior is partially plated with overlapping scales, while the interior is crisscrossed with dripping strands.

  “The remort cause
d seventeen hundred casualties and seven picolev in economic damage—in fifty minutes. Yet investigators were unable to pinpoint the cause of that damage for four days.” A destroyed tower rises on the channel, blurry and blotched. “Signal interference prevented high-resolution reconstruction. Five weeks later, disaster struck again.” Another projection appears, this time of a research center laid to waste. “Every corporation has lost people. Every corporation has lost property. And we still have not classified the remort or established a strategy for containment. Javelin was formed to address this imminent and catastrophic threat. First we must identify, and then destroy, lamprey-class remorts.”

  The projections continue, showing us smoldering enclaves and research centers. Ugly and unhelpful. “There’s no specs,” Ridehorse grumbles. “There’s no strategy.”

  “Maybe that comes at the end,” Voorhivey says.

  It doesn’t. There’s nothing actionable in the presentation, which we find more daunting than the images of destruction. The corpos still don’t have a clue. Even Voorhivey turns pensive, and dinner is a quiet, edgy meal.

  That evening in the common area, M’bari says, “That shitstorm in Los Anod was supposed to turn this fight around. They’ve got a hundred research units begging for a viable sample of lamprey to test.”

  “L-tech is worse than useless,” Pico says, sipping a soft-drug tube.

  “So far. They’re working on something new.”

  “On what?” Elfano asks.

  “I don’t know,” M’bari says. “But it involves us.”

  Cali frowns. “Us-us? Anvil Squad?”

  “All of Ayko Base. We’re the front-line troops in the fight against the lampreys.”

  “We’re not equipped for that,” Ridehorse grumbles.

  “Not yet!” Voorhivey tells her. “That’s got to be the ‘something new’ they’re working on! They’ll give us whatever we need to win this fight. No doubt.”

  “I’ll, um—” Ting wrinkles her nose. “I guess I’ll see if I hear anything.”

  “I heard something,” Jag says, after a glance at me. “They’re gathering CAVs at the base.”

  My interest sharpens. CAVs, here? Already on base, being prepped for deployment, alloy ribbons unraveling for access. Gleaming white saddles waiting for activation by hapless volunteers. Useless manual-override controls uncoiling out of reach while the CAV taps into the cry pilot’s synaptic activity for processing power.

  “Huh.” I scratch my shoulder. “Did you know that CAVs piggyback on human brains to optimize performance?”

  “Everyone knows that,” Jag says. “That’s what cry pilots are for.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe the corpos keep that part from Freeholders,” Ridehorse tells Jag. “So they don’t stop volunteering.”

  “Why would that stop them?”

  Ridehorse’s eyes narrow. “Would you want some machine rummaging around in your cerebellum?”

  “Anyway—” M’bari clicks his tongue. “CAVs make sense.”

  “Yeah,” Basdaq says. “Nothing else can take the kind of punishment a lamprey dishes out.”

  “CAVs can’t either,” I say, thinking back to the disemboweled CAV at that offshore location. “Not for more than a few seconds.”

  “That’s longer than anything else keeps plugging away,” Shakrabarti says.

  “Even you?” Pico asks.

  Shakrabarti throws him a fake-sexy expression that is, actually, quite sexy. Throats clear around the room, and breath catches. Shakrabarti looks confused for a second, and then his lips quirk in satisfaction.

  “It sucks that you’re such a pushover,” Cali snarls at him. She still only sleeps with people who can beat her in a fight.

  “You’d snap him in half,” Pico says.

  She smiles hungrily. “Loving every minute.”

  “Just wait till the research units develop this new tech for us,” Voorhivey says. “Modded battlesuits and next-gen Boazes, mark my words.”

  “I guess one problem is timing,” Elfano says.

  “How’s that?” Voorhivey asks.

  “Lampreys strike without warning,” Elfano tells him. “They hit, then they’re gone.”

  Basdaq nods. “Yeah, there’s no time to respond. We can’t plan ahead. We’re always reacting.”

  “I’m sure they’re developing something to handle that, too,” Voorhivey says.

  “That’s the beauty of being a grunt, prez,” Pico says. “We just go where they say and kill what’s in front of us.”

  “No hard choices,” I say, raising my tube in a toast.

  That night, I join Jag in the showers. She’s still small, but she’s not petite anymore. She gained muscle in the last few months, and I enjoy the view. I lens her video of herself, looking powerful and feline and sexy. She lenses a video of me watching her, from a jelly she’d placed—in violation of policy—in the locker room behind me.

  I laugh and she tells me her back aches.

  “Peeping Tom,” I say, as I massage her slippery skin.

  “I like to be prepared.”

  “How’d you hear about the CAVs?”

  “I thought you’d like that.”

  “Yeah. CAVs are . . . I don’t know. Close to the bone for me.”

  “I’ll tell you what I heard,” she says, turning in my hands, “for the right price.”

  An hour later, I collapse breathless onto her bunk between her and Shakrabarti. There’s a long lazy pause before she lenses me, “I was spying on Welcome 12.”

  “What?” I lens, because I’ve forgotten what I’d asked.

  “I like spying,” she tells me.

  “Oh!” I say, as memory returns. In my postcoital haze, I almost tell her about the Djembe. “You heard them talking about CAVs?”

  “Yeah,” she lenses, taking one of my hands in both of hers.

  “They’re gathering them?”

  She turns my hand over and touches the calluses on my palm, intent and serious like she’s reading my future. “From all the corpos. Bringing them to Ayko Base. The women I heard were just midmanagement, though. No guarantee it’s true.”

  “That’s all you heard?”

  “Yeah.” She curls her fist around two of my fingers. “What animal would you be?”

  When I laugh at the change of subject, Shakrabarti makes a grumpy sound and rolls over. “Is that what you’re looking for?” I lens Jag. “Claws?”

  “I almost got claws when I did my markings.” She bares her teeth. “And fangs.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “My dad.”

  “Smart man.”

  She nips the pad of my thumb and starts speaking aloud. “One of his wives came up from a Freehold. My dad said she never lost that hunger, you know?”

  “What hunger?”

  When Jag laughs, Shakrabarti doesn’t grumble. Then she sees my face and says, “Oh! You’re serious.”

  “What? What are we talking about? You lost me.”

  “Nothing.” She kisses my palm, which is surprisingly sweet. “Why do you care about CAVs?”

  I don’t answer for what feels like a long time. I think she’s half-asleep before I say, “Surviving a CAV is like crawling out of your own grave. I don’t know.”

  “Close to the bone?”

  “Yeah. I felt something in there. All that potential. The untapped power. There was a moment when I was . . . connected.”

  “Maybe that’s your animal. A CAV.”

  “Because I hold people close, then crush them?”

  “Works for me,” Shakrabarti mutters sleepily.

  “Where are they keeping the CAVs?” I lens Jagzenka. “Do you know?”

  She shows me a map of the base, with the top floor of a warehouse highlighted.

  “You lik
e spying?” I ask, inspecting the visual.

  “Since I was a little girl.”

  “Ever tried your hand at burglary?”

  “Are you out of your skull? You’ve already got a reprimand.”

  Kaytu, Maseo

  “Only one,” I tell her. “Do you want to come or not?”

  As an answer, she climbs on top of me.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next night, Jag is with me when I pop the lock to a drone maintenance garage for access to a window facing the warehouse. She’s trembling with excitement, and flushing with embarrassment that she’s so excited. She still flits like a shadow across a moonless nightscape, though, silent and smooth.

  I amplify my vision and stare across the base toward the CAV deployment post, a sixteen-acre warehouse with fat-bodied Bumblebee airships crowding the roof. They’re ugly and heavily armored, each with a single primary barrel twice my height. I can’t see the hatches beneath the Bumblebees, for loading CAVs from the building below, but they’re there. Volunteers are there, too, drugged to the eyebrows. Cry pilots waiting to die.

  “Surviving a CAV is like crawling out of your own grave?” Jagzenka says.

  I turn toward her. “What? Yeah. Maybe that’s why I can’t shake them.”

  “That’s not why,” she says.

  I give her a look, because that sounds like the kind of thing Rana would say.

  “All that untapped power,” she says. “You put yourself in the middle of it and—”

  “Pissed myself.”

  “You liked it,” Jag tells me. “Do you want to get closer? What are we doing here?”

  “I’m not sure.” I tell her about the game I used to play with my sayti. “She’d ask me, What does this machine crave? But I can’t even guess, with CAVs.”

  “Sure, Kaytu,” she says. “You don’t know what they want.”

  * * *