Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  “I don’t know what that means,” I tell the voice. “Pair me.”

  “I can’t! There’s no way!”

  “Try,” I say, shifting slightly in the pilot frame.

  The CAV shifts slightly—and golden pinpricks glow in the pure white saddle.

  Constellations of stars brighten among the screens and walls, the cables and cords. Branching golden lines take shape between the pinpricks, like lightning bolts or veins.

  My breath catches. Ting did it. She paired me.

  I don’t feel anything except for a fizzing of fear and excitement at the base of my skull, but I’m paired with this CAV.

  “He’s in control!” another tech blurts. “You did it!”

  “I—I did?” the cloisonné tech says. “I did! I wish I knew how.”

  “Kaytu,” M’bari lenses from inside his semiactive CAV. “Are you seeing this?”

  I watch the golden threads crisscrossing the saddle. “Yeah.”

  “On your prox screens.”

  Oh. Right. I make myself focus as M’bari flashes me semitransparent overlays showing three blue targeting diamonds inside Ayko Base: the three lampreys.

  One is tearing through an underground tunnel toward the CAV post, one is pulling down a barracks, and the third is bulging through the building behind the rampart squad.

  A hint of confusion penetrates my flowing numbness. How is the lamprey still behind the rampart squad? Is it stalled there? Did it veer away and return? I don’t know, I don’t care, and I don’t wait for the overhead clamp to shunt me into the deployment shaft. A spark of hope kindles in my heart. Maybe that rampart squad is still alive.

  With a flick of attention, I maximize the targeting diamond and plot a route. And before the jolt of panic can break my calm, I lean forward and shove the control loops.

  My CAV slams backward through the bay.

  “Shit!” I yelp, my calm shattered. “Wrong way!”

  Apparently I’m completely paired, though, because the commands stay responsive despite my spiking brainwaves. The golden lines brighten as I yank the loops toward me and the CAV stops preternaturally quickly—then roars forward.

  The CAV ribbons blur, speeding me toward a bank of transmission arrays on the wall. Maybe I should brace myself, but I don’t. I lean into the impact, slicing through the wall like alloy through mushmallow.

  I burst from the side of the building nine floors from the ground.

  This time I’m not afraid of falling.

  Cali whoops in my ear and M’bari flashes me screens from his CAV—which is still in the bay, not responding to his commands but transmitting me data—and I stab the building wall with my alloy leaves to control the descent. Then I’m soaring or swinging around the corner, I can’t tell which; the world is a blur and Cali’s whoop is a battlecry and I push forward faster and faster until I launch my CAV from the wall and rocket across the base, ribbons extended to shove and hurtle past a launchway, a sat-array, a skarab deployment housing.

  The target lamprey appears on my foremost external screen, churning through a field of ramparts and bodies and the seeded coraloid earth of the island.

  The rampart squad is long gone. The rampart squad is long dead. I’ll never meet the soldiers who saved our lives, I’ll never buy them a tube or shake their hands.

  But I’ll make these lampreys pay.

  My rage is hot for a heartbeat—then turns icy.

  I hear myself telling M’bari to plot the movements of the other two lampreys. I hear the cloisonné tech talking about CAV links and signal interference. I hear the sounds of battle all around me as the CAV filters the noise and transmits it into the saddle, maintaining the direction of origin to keep me oriented.

  I’m surrounded by rubble and death and speeding at the enemy.

  My CAV’s ribbons blur like the legs of a mutant remort, pushing, dragging, cutting me closer. The lamprey is three times my size, cables and strands flashing a hundred yards in every direction, spearing into the ground, punching through walls, leaving a trail of pink tar behind.

  I drive forward until the lamprey fills my vision—fills my mind. Shifting fleshy plates swarm around a latticework interior. Dripping slime, cutting edges. A faceless, merciless, inhuman thing.

  My chest clenches, and a pink cable clubs at me, a fast and killing blow.

  When I flinch, my CAV hurls itself aside, responding to my reflex.

  I dodge the cable, throwing the CAV too far off-course, grinding across a ruined obstacle course and falling into a maze of ditches. Fuck! The controls are too sensitive, or I’m too amped.

  Spinning in the gold-tinted frame, I climb from the ditch, grasping for calm, for focus. Trying to shed my fear and anger and turn myself into a weapon, a mindless cutting blade. My CAV thunders across the field, too jerky, too fast. Unstable, unsteady. I’m chopping ramparts to tatters. Part of me is stunned by the sheer power of a CAV—cutting through ramparts?—but a bigger part is just stunned.

  What if I can’t do this? It’s too much, it’s too big, it’s too—

  I feel Rana’s hand on my shoulder, I see her steady eyes. She expects better than panic. She demands better. Between one breath and the next I tap deeper into the flow, and fractal patterns of terrafixing bloom in my mind.

  My pulse slows.

  My sweat cools.

  My shoulders drop.

  My hope dies with me, and my fear and shame. Everything falls away except a murderous urge in a killing CAV.

  I’m thirty yards away when the lamprey fires strands at me—thinner, longer ones. On my screens, the tips glow but the stems are dull. I’ve seen what these things do to alloy, and to flesh. If the tips hit me, they’ll explode my CAV into a husk.

  I pivot slightly in my frame, and the strands miss by three feet.

  “Dance, you fatherfuck,” Cali growls at the lamprey.

  Or maybe at me, I don’t know. I don’t care, I don’t think. I drive forward and spread my wings, slipping ribbons past the glowing tips of the strands—and with a desperate grunt I slice at the stalks behind the tips.

  My CAV hacks through ropy pink tar.

  The glowing tips splash to the ground in puddles of inert goo. The severed strand retracts, and the lamprey recoils.

  The lamprey retreats.

  A shout sounds in the CAV—from M’bari and Cali and the operators—but I barely hear. I’ve drawn blood now. I hurt that fucker and I liked it. One thing every patriot hitter knows is this: when your enemy falls to his knees, kick him in the throat.

  The golden threads in the saddle throb with my heartbeat.

  I feel my lips curl, and I advance faster than the lamprey retreats.

  Another fat cable clubs at me and I hit it with a pulse that slows it for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for me to alloystomp another gooey strand with my CAV’s shell—sideswiping to avoid the cutting edge.

  Then I grab the fat cable in my ribbons and tug. I don’t think it’s possible. These cables seem infinitely expandable. Yet I rip that thing out of the lamprey at the roots.

  There’s a sound I can’t describe, and I use the stump of the cable to pull my CAV at the lamprey and an oilstorm of strands spews at me, like a net thrown at a cockroach.

  Except roaches run, roaches scatter.

  Not me. Not this time.

  CHAPTER 60

  My CAV frame spins and whirls. My ribbons unfurl so fast that sonic booms shake the quad.

  I dance through killing pink strands and plates. I’m a whirlwind, a twister. I’m a bladed tornado and I hack the lamprey until it’s a dripping heap of fibrous oil and this time I hear the shouting.

  That time the shouting shakes the world.

  Tears pool in my eyes and the cloisonné tech murmurs in my ear. M’bari shoves screens at me, tracking the other two lampreys, and
I hear myself say, “I want her name. I want her name.”

  He doesn’t know what I mean. None of them know that I’m talking about that CrediMobil rampart soldier who fired and fired and fired again, utterly calm in the face of her own onrushing death.

  Alerts flash before I have a chance to explain.

  Images condense on my screens: an underground vault with glowing yellow tanks containing shadowy shapes that look like sea creatures, like M’bari’s ass-tat, like L-tech bait; hundreds of civilians crying and soothing children in a bunker; a knotted pink cable slashing at a Bumblebee, then retracting into an access tunnel.

  The second lamprey is underground, thrashing closer toward a bunker full of civilians—driving toward the L-tech bait in a vault beyond.

  I rise from the smoldering strands of the dead lamprey and lash my CAV toward the shareholders’ pavilion, planning on smashing through to the access tunnel.

  “Rendezvous with transport,” M’bari tells me, sending a route.

  His words make no sense. “The what?”

  “On the rooftop,” he says. “Now, Kaytu, confirm-confirm.”

  I don’t know what I’m agreeing to, but M’bari is in my squad, he’s in my head; even if he’s not here, we’re a team. I confirm and climb to the roof, ribbons whirling and slicing, and an Antarmadesha drops from the sky and hovers thirty feet above me.

  Oh. That’s what I was agreeing to. I launch my CAV upward, and the transport’s cargo clamp grabs me like a scraperhook.

  I’m swinging through the air. The cloisonné tech sends me a stream of calculations, but I see the lamprey hole before I understand them—a black cavity dripping with slime—and I slash myself free from the clamp and hurtle through the smoke and tracer rounds with the Antarmadesha’s momentum behind me.

  The CAV lands hard. The gold-flecked saddle buckles toward my shoulder, but my signals stay green.

  I fling after the lamprey at whiplash speeds.

  My CAV spiders along a tunnel, through shredded layers of exclusion film and a graveyard of anti-assault mines. A swarm of pulse-hardened drones fills the air, pinging off my shell like buckshot.

  I reach the lamprey at the mouth of the bunker. Forking pink strands explode inside, slaughtering the civilians—until I stab into the rear of the lamprey like an assassin’s blade.

  Cali bellows in triumph and calls me a name so foul that it silences the chatter from the CAV operators. M’bari laughs and Jag screams encouragement for the first time, which means her knife isn’t at the officer’s throat anymore.

  “Orca’s falling in love with you,” Jag tells me. “Two down.”

  “Ting?” I say. “Ting?”

  “She’s okay,” Jag says. “She’s in thera-sleep.”

  I take a breath. “Where am I?”

  “Almost done. The third one’s deeper underground.”

  “Coming at the vault from below you,” M’bari says.

  “I see it,” I say, checking my screens. “What’s the best approach?”

  “Straight through the dick,” Cali snarls. Which, strictly speaking, isn’t a lot of help.

  M’bari raises maps and schematics around me—I’m still not sure how he’s sharing them from his undeployed CAV. The cloisonné tech feeds me walls of data and Jag says, “Go in soft, Kaytu, recon style. This one’s ugly.”

  I’m looking at the same screens and don’t see any fresh ugliness, but Jag’s got a sharper eye than I do. For the first time since leaving the bay, I feel exposed; I want my squad around me. Or maybe I’m just missing Ting on overwatch, safe in the security of her signals envelope.

  There’s no time to worry, so I tilt in my frame and move. My CAV scrapes through some kind of ventilation sphincter, and I hunt the third lamprey a half mile into a goo-dripping burrow that it excavated in the seeded coraloid of the island.

  I lose contact with the surface three seconds before I splash underwater.

  I’m below sea level. I’m in the waterlogged tunnels underneath the vault. The CAV feels sluggish and I’m disoriented by the silent weightlessness.

  My screens feed me information that I don’t understand, and the calm of my flow creaks under the realization that I don’t know how CAVs work, not really; I’m operating on guts and guesswork. And while CAVs were clearly built for exactly those two things, I’m surrounded by untapped capacities that I can’t imagine, and by critical weakness, too.

  Maybe CAVs don’t function in whatever fluid’s surrounding me. I don’t know how much air I have, or how much pressure I can withstand, and I’m still checking my screens when the lamprey explodes from the depths.

  No time to focus.

  No time to respond.

  My CAV jerks; the right-side wall buckles toward me from a nasty hit that cracks my shell. With a surge of panic I corkscrew away from the lamprey.

  My frame spins; the control loops curve smoothly in my sweaty palms as the lamprey batters me. I grope for the calm uncaring of meditation, but fluid is pooling inside my saddle, it’s rising around me.

  When the chill touches my feet, I’m dodging a dozen pink strands, calling on every iota of my self-control. When the cold reaches my knees, I’m cutting my own tunnel away from the lamprey, hacking a path in blind terrified retreat, trying to cling to my meditation. And when the fluid fills the saddle high enough to grab my balls in an icy fist, my mind blanks with panic.

  Fear cracks the armor of my calmness.

  I’m trapped inside a CAV; I’m trapped in an underwater tunnel fighting an oily beast. I’m drowning in a swimming pool, clenched and—

  A pool? An instant before the lamprey’s strand slices a hole in my shell, I stop fighting the water and start swimming.

  Forget about thrashing and frothing, forget about lashing at the lamprey and the tunnel. Forget about my desperation. I’m a weapon, but I’m not a tank, I’m not a Jitney, I’m not a hardened alloy platform.

  I’m a dolphin like those catamarans I saw in the ocean months ago, and I knife the CAV through the water. My ribbons are fins and my shell is streamlined muscle, graceful and glossy as an ocean predator.

  I’ve always loved swimming.

  I curl between the lamprey’s killing cables. I’m a flash of untouchable silver, despite trailing bubbles like guts. Fluid rises to my stomach inside the saddle and I fire a pulse from my CAV. Not just a pulse: a full-bore strobe that stuns me almost as hard as the lamprey.

  My vision flickers but I manage to lash forward. I ram my CAV’s snout into a curved plate of the lamprey’s oily shell. The CAV punches through and with one last gasp I whirl my ribbons and shred that fucker into an oil slick.

  Then it’s over. It’s dead. A floating corpse.

  I’m half-drowned and semiconscious, but at least I’m not cold anymore.

  The untreated water filling the saddle is acid on my skin.

  A plume of my blood wafts across my field of vision.

  The golden threads fade to pinpricks, then to a blank whiteness. I’m not paired anymore: I’m finished now, and alone.

  I drift in the CAV like a baby in an artificial womb. I remember Ionesca’s scarred fingers stroking my arm. I remember Rana standing in the glow of that orbital pod. I remember Ridehorse and Pico, and I smile as screens flicker around me and voices speak. I don’t understand a word, but that’s okay, I don’t mind. My breath is shallow and my mind is unmoored. That’s okay, too. Everything’s okay.

  I’m a little sleepy, that’s all.

  The CAV jostles when a rescue drone clamps my shell. The world is a meaningless hum except for M’bari’s voice. He says my name. He tells me to blink if I can hear him, he tells me to blink. He tells me to blink. He keeps telling me to blink, he won’t fucking shut up. He tells me to stay with him.

  The tunnel flashes on a wavering screen six inches from my unfocused eyes. M’bari ta
lks nonsense at me until a Tenured Colonel appears on the screen. He’s an eyeborg; a web of tech covers the left side of his face from eyeball to ear canal. He talks to me. I can tell, because his mouth is moving. He congratulates me for bagging a lamprey. He mentions crystalline residue and polymorphic specimens.

  I don’t understand, but it’s not important.

  Then I’m on the surface. My saddle ribbons unfurl, releasing me to slide to the puddled floor. Nursurgeons foam spinebraces at me; they prod and spray and I’m suddenly outside my damaged CAV. The daylight surprises me. Maybe it’s not daylight; maybe the hangar is brilliant with emergency lights.

  I’m lost and dazed until a pattern of jaguar rosettes floats into my vision. I know that pattern. I know the feel and scent of that pattern, and the toughness. The knot in my heart loosens. Jag is trotting beside my stretcher. She’s holding my hand hard enough to bruise.

  “Shakrabarti?” I gasp to her. “Ting?”

  “Still with us,” she says.

  That’s all I need to hear.

  CHAPTER 61

  Turns out that a full-bore CAV pulse is nonstandard, like everything else about a CAV. The remote operators never trigger them because the effects are unpredictable. For example, a full-bore pulse fired from a leaky CAV in an attempt to kludge an underwater lamprey in the depths of a seeded island might scramble the cry pilot’s brain a little.

  Just temporarily, nothing serious—but keep it in mind next time you’re fighting to the death in a flooded chamber beneath a besieged base.

  The toxicities on my skin and in my flesh are excised, the tissue debrided, and the damage repaired. My synapses start firing in the right order again, more or less. The nursurgeons tell me I got off easy. They’re right: two days later, when I’m mobile again, mortuary drones are still crawling through the wreckage of Ayko Base.

  I’m recovering in a medical carrier that’s hovering over the ruins, big enough to block out the sky and full to capacity with casualties. Medipods stream through the air in both directions, like honeyflies from a hive when the lichen force-blooms.