by Joel Dane
“I said—” She points across the base. “There’s two more.”
Oh! She’d said two more, not Timor. “Two more lampreys?”
“Fuck me,” Cali says. “Three lampreys at once?”
“Never happened before,” M’bari says. “We should . . .”
He trails off when a smoking Orit Gal veers wildly overhead, trailing a lamprey strand, then crashes out of sight. A Welcome 12 squad fires an anti-airship barrage at a target we can’t see, and twenty yards from them broken CAVs grope unsteadily for the reloading gutter that crosses the grounds.
Beaten CAVs, returning to base.
There’s a rumble like thunder, and the building behind the CrediMobil rampart soldiers shudders. The reflection of fire and smoke trembles in a hundred windows. A lamprey is tunneling through the building, heading for the rampart team.
The man glances over his shoulder. He says something to the woman, but she just shrugs and fires—pop-slurp—and fires again. Each pull of the trigger saves lives, and she won’t let her own onrushing death distract her.
“Fuck it,” I say, and lens frantic, muddled questions at Ting.
She understands, of course. Ting is good at muddled. “Even if I can pair you,” she replies, “I can’t protect you.”
The building behind the rampart squad cracks open and Cali growls and my lens flickers to life. Casualty rate: 2,602, 2,617, 2,651 . . .
“They’re killing us.” Horror shines in Jag’s eyes. “They’re killing us all.”
“Without Javelin,” M’bari says, “if they wipe out Javelin—what’s going to stop them?”
“We are,” I say, rising from the trench.
“Gutter roach,” Cali snarls.
“Form on me,” I say. “I’ve got an idea.”
“W-what kind of idea?” M’bari asks.
I swallow. “A bad one.”
“Tell us,” Jagzenka says, her voice a rasp.
“We’re loading me into a CAV,” I tell her. “And seeing if I know how to drive.”
“That’s suicide,” M’bari says. “It’s impossible. You can’t drive a CAV.”
“I came close once before,” I say, and don’t mention that I’ve got a technopath this time.
“No way,” Jag says. “Even if you could, the lampreys chew through CAVs, you won’t last a—”
“Form on Kaytu!” Cali bellows, standing by my side. “Move you lazy fucks, move!”
CHAPTER 58
When Cali spots the CAV post through the madness of the base, she powers ahead in her crossweave armor, leaving the rest of us fifty yards behind. Jag and M’bari follow quickly, while I’m slower, supporting Ting in her dazed stupor.
Cali calls to a guy in an up-armored Jitney. She trots beside him and talks for a few seconds. When he frowns, she lunges forward on the balls of her feet and head-butts him.
I absolutely do not feel a sneaking flash of pride.
The guy drops and Cali lenses a request for permission to use the vehicle. That’s not a problem: base command is issuing blanket permissions. At this point, they’d give a nutrition consultant permission to fly an Orit Gal.
Three seconds later, Cali is alone in the Jitney, speeding toward the perimeter fence of the CAV post. Driving fast, aiming to crash through.
“Cali, you thick fuck!” I shout, as I drag Ting forward. “You’re going to hit the—”
She lenses me an obscene image and smashes the Jitney into the fence at speed. The vehicle pivots, nose down, ass to the sky, engine howling. There’s a terrible ripping crumble as the fence sizzles and flattens. Automatic countermeasures pound the Jitney with shock rounds.
Sparks coalesce and shimmer and fade around the wreckage.
“Oh, no,” Jag breathes, staring at the charred Jitney. “Oh, orca . . .”
M’bari says, “She popped the gate.”
Twenty yards from the point of impact, a gate swings open on bent hinges, sparks crackling across the rings. Of course, the guards would’ve simply let us in if we’d asked. Except that would’ve taken time . . . and there are no guards at the gatehouse.
“Bang.” Cali pushes unsteadily from the wreckage of the Jitney. “Handled.”
Her crossweave armor is in tatters. She peels from the remaining sheets and trots toward us, scratched and bleeding and shining with satisfaction. She’s naked except for the underlayer, which is a bright orange mesh, and I feel an upwelling of affection that surprises me.
Jag calls Cali names as we trot into the deployment post. More injured CAVs crawl past us in the re-arming gutter, ribbons severed and bodies scorched. Ting doesn’t look much better: I don’t know what she’s doing with her technopathic brain, but her breath is ragged and her feet are dragging.
On the ninth floor, the door to CAV Operations is still too high-security for me to wire.
“We can’t get in here,” I say. “I’ll pop the lock at the bay—”
M’bari pounds on the door. “Let’s try asking, first.”
A gray-haired tech with bloodshot eyes flings the door open in a panic. “Are they here? Are they here? Are we evacuating?”
“We need your help,” I tell her.
Jag slips past the tech, and then Cali shoves her backward. She and M’bari follow the tech’s stumbling retreat and I bring up the rear with Ting.
It’s a big room. Screens everywhere. The reek of flop sweat and cutting-edge tech fills the air, along with the thrum of desperate voices and damage reports. The operators’ stations—where they remote-control the CAVs—look like saddles without rotating frames.
“Hey!” I call.
Nobody stops. Nobody looks at me.
Six operators are strapped into saddles, remotely guiding CAVs across the base to fight the lampreys. Six more wait for deployable units, wearing matching expressions of unfocused nausea as they witness the destruction of Ayko Base on their lenses. Frantic support staff swarm around projections, all of them on the edge of panic, while two unarmored officers watch from a raised platform.
“Hey!” I repeat.
“LISTEN UP!” Cali yells. “YOU FUCKING FUCKS!”
A ripple of stillness spreads across the frenetic activity. The operators waiting for deployment glance at us briefly. Their harried staff ignores us after a moment, but the rest of the room watches us with varying degrees of surprise and concern.
“We need a CAV decoupled from remote control,” I say, leaning Ting against a bank of what I think are orbdata racks. “We’re putting our own cry pilot inside.”
“On whose authority?” one of the officers asks.
It’s a reasonable question, but I just read from my lens: “Three thousand one hundred fifty casualties. Three thousand one hundred seventy. Eighty, ninety—”
“We don’t have the time for—”
“Pardon me, san,” M’bari interrupts. “Are your CAVs having any effect?”
“Stand down, soldier,” the officer barks. “Walk the fuck off my unit.”
“Because we saw them in action in Belo City,” M’bari says. “Getting crushed.”
“You will spend the next six years in blinders.”
“You have nothing to lose,” M’bari says. “We all have nothing to—”
“Get these people out of here!” the other officer roars.
Jag materializes behind the first officer, my trenchknife touching his neck. “We’re begging you, san,” she says, as gentle as Sergeant Manager Li. “One CAV is all we—”
“Step away!” the other officer says. “Or I will gutterdamn—”
Cali shoots her in the stomach.
The cough of the sidearm is a pressure grenade in the station. A ringing silence fills the air, broken only by the officer’s gasping as she slumps against a railing and presses the wound.
A medic sidles toward a supply cabinet
, then moves faster at M’bari’s nod.
“Three thousand two hundred and forty-two,” Cali announces, with a frozen flatness in her voice. “The next time I aim for the head.”
“W—what do you need?” one of the staffers asks her.
The officer grunts as the medic films her wound and applies shock patches.
“Two CAVs,” Cali says. “With, um—without remote controls.”
“We only need one,” I say.
Nobody listens to me, though. They’re too busy staring at Cali, smeared in blood and wearing crossweave underlayer and looking every inch a deranged killer.
“We’re—” The uninjured officer takes a breath and continues in a conversational tone, which is a pretty impressive display of nerve. “We’re burning through CAVs at an unsustainable rate. There are under eighty, worldwide, at this point. We can’t waste them.”
“You are wasting them,” I tell him.
“Driving a CAV won’t work,” he says. “They’re drones. You want to modify one? Give us a month. Except we don’t have a month. We don’t have a week.”
I privately lens Ting, “Are you ready to pair me?”
She looks unconscious, but replies with a wordless: !
“We don’t have ten minutes,” I tell the officer, throwing the casualty count to an in-room projection.
“With our current strategy approaching critical failure, we need to try something new,” M’bari says, his voice professorial. “Standard response isn’t enough.”
“You!” I point to the gray-haired tech. “Jailbreak a CAV for me.”
“Two CAVs,” Cali says.
“Me?” the tech asks. “I—I can’t.”
“Then who can?”
“Nobody?” Her gaze flicks toward a man hunched at a workstation. “Er, nobody.”
My lens tells me that the man is a Tech Specialist with a dozen service commendations. I don’t care about his skills, though. When he raises his head, I see the gleaming cloisonné on his forehead: brilliant colors and vivid shapes, embedded in the bones of his skull. A gorgeous, segmented, geometric depiction of a CAV.
Yeah. I guess if anyone knows CAVs, it’s this guy. “Jailbreak the controls,” I tell him. “Cut the remote operator and let the cry pilot drive.”
There’s a glitter of excitement in his eyes. “It’s never been done. Not successfully.”
“But you’re dying to try.”
“No! No, I don’t know . . .”
“I survived one trip in a CAV; this time I’m—”
“You were a volunteer?”
“Yeah.”
“That won’t help. You still can’t manually operate a CAV. You’ll spin like a—”
“TWO CAVS!” Cali bellows at him, raising her weapon. “NOW!”
The tech snaps into action.
I seriously doubt that even a cloisonnéd freak can decouple CAVs from the remote controls in a matter of minutes, but I know Ting can. I’m positive the tech can’t pair me with one, so I’m counting on Ting for that, too. Sure, it’s never been done before, but nobody’s used a technopath before, either.
That’s the only reason I’m dragging the tech into this; I need to draw attention away from Ting and her abilities. This guy’s a distraction, not a solution.
Two others techs exchange looks, like they’re thinking of making a move. Cali snarls at one of them and Jag gives a twitch. They quiet down. A minute later, the unlinked remote operators are removing softwires attached to their stations, and staffers are prodding at the saddles. Decoupling them from the CAVs . . . I hope.
Meanwhile, the Tech Specialist is furiously plucking at his screens, his cloisonné forehead gleaming. He’s such a whirl of focused activity that I start to wonder if he can actually pull this off. Maybe, but my money’s still on Ting.
“Cali,” I say, edging beside her. “You’re not coming.”
“Fuck you,” she says, with a wolfish grin. “Blaze of glory.”
“I need you here,” I tell her.
“Was fuck you too vague?”
“You think Jag’s going to shoot an officer? Because you know M’bari won’t. They’re not damaged enough for this.”
“Forget it,” she says, a little less firmly. “I’m coming with you.”
“If Command hears what we’re doing, they’ll roll over Jag and M’bari in the blink of an eye. But the entire board of generals could tell you to abort this mission, and what would you do?”
“I’d fuck them all the way off.”
“Yeah, you would,” I say. “That’s why I need you here.”
Her jaw clenches, and for a moment I worry she’s going to shoot the officer again, just to hear the scream.
“You’re such an asshole,” she says, which is her way of agreeing.
The remote operators huddle together. The medic treats the injured officer. Cali stalks and mutters while Jag is a lethal statue. M’bari pops a weapon locker and arms himself. And Ting slumps on the floor, looking unconscious.
I’m betting my life—all our lives—that she’s not.
A new alert flashes on my lens: someone in the CAV operations station sent up a flare, a plea for help, for base security. Good luck with that, with a thousand alerts blaring and three lampreys laying waste to Ayko Base.
“We’re going to hang for this,” Jag lenses on the squad channel.
“Only if the lampreys don’t kill us first,” M’bari says.
“So we’ll only hang if we kick their asses?” Cali barks a sudden laugh. “Fair trade.”
“Tingting,” I lens. “What do I need to make this work?”
“Me,” she lenses, motionless at the base of the orbdata rack. “And a gutter-ton of luck.”
CHAPTER 59
The casualty counter hits six thousand as M’bari and I shove into the CAV deployment bay. A dozen damaged CAVs face three pristine ones. Rows of volunteers are drugged and happy in comfort chairs, but the soldiers tasked with escorting them are defocused and agitated, watching nightmare stats on their lenses.
M’bari and I separate so we won’t present a tight target. A few of the soldiers glance at us, eyes flicking over lensed messages. One starts to speak—that’s why M’bari is here, to keep them off my back—and then they spin and trot away.
“They think you’re relieving them,” Ting lenses me, “and I’m two minutes away from a comprehensive breakdown.”
“Keep it together,” I tell her.
“Two minutes,” she repeats. “Start flatlining your brainwaves. So I can pair the connection and not smoosh you.”
“Smoosh me? Nobody said anything about smooshing.”
“What’s wrong with Ting?” Cali asks on-channel. “She’s bleeding again.”
“She ate a shock round,” I lie, crossing toward the CAVs. “She’s fine. Tell the operators to open the saddle.”
Leaves unfurl at two of the undamaged CAVs—because two is what Cali initially demanded—and I’m halfway inside the closer one before I realize that M’bari is standing there staring at the other CAV like he’s looking at his own grave. Which makes a certain amount of sense, considering he’s probably dead in the next few minutes.
I guess the same is true of me. I don’t say anything, though; I just push into the saddle, imagining fractal blooms in my eyes. Dead doesn’t bother me. Death isn’t real, there’s only the flow of life into life, decaying, re-forming. There’s nothing to win, nothing to lose. No fear, no joy, no failure—I’m nothing but a swirl of terrafixing telling itself that it’s me.
The ribbons braid closed behind me and the interior walls shine white.
I take a breath, soothing my nerves with the calm of Edentide. I ease into the pilot’s frame. The open manacles on the armrests rise between me and the joystick-looking ribbons that’ll help me fly this thing.
When I rest my wrists inside the manacles to reach the ribbons, they lock around me.
My pulse rockets. “Um . . .”
“Sorry!” Ting’s bleeding face appears on a screen. “One sec.”
I take another breath, reaching deeper for the meditation, listening for Ionesca’s voice, feeling her breath on my face. After a moment, my panic subsides. I’m not quiet, I’m not brave—because I’m not apart from anything, not separate and alone.
Cables squirm and grow into loops at my palms.
The frame shifts, cradling me soft and tight. Not the frame, the flow. I’m gone: my body is hollow, my mind is empty, my hope is dead, and my love is unrequited.
The manacles pop open but there’s no such thing as free, there’s no such thing as bound. My unreal arms reach for the loops. They fit my hands better than my fingers do.
M’bari appears on one of the screens. He’s squeezed inside the other CAV, which must’ve taken Cali-levels of dumb courage. He’s trembling as he lowers himself into the saddle, trying to turn himself into a cry pilot—or at least trying to ensure that I don’t die alone—but his frame doesn’t wrap around him; his CAV remains inert.
On Ting’s screen, her body stiffens and she collapses. A CAV station staffer kneels above her with a medkit while Cali scowls in the background.
“You’re flatlined,” Ting’s voice says, though her mouth doesn’t move. “I’m pairing you. Can’t pair M’bari. He’s brain-active and CAVs—permissions—impalpable—” A weak laugh sounds. “If impalpable means what I think.”
The CAV cables wrap around my hands until I’m not holding them, they’re holding me. I’m fraying into fractal threads, and cables grow around me like tree roots around a rock. They extrude across my chest and hips and legs, my neck and forehead. Things get a little intimate, but that’s okay, a flow doesn’t have any personal space.
“CAV Thirteen-Thirteen, this is Tech Specialist Gaaldine,” the cloisonné tech’s voice says. “I mean, this is Control. You’re on, uh, your own recognizance. Operator Thirteen-Thirteen, confirm.”
“Confirm,” I hear myself say.
The CAV hums around me. “Check your Fita.”
