by Joel Dane
My lens blurs twice. I shake myself and mutter, “Okay, okay.”
I follow Ting’s directions to the overhanging lounge, then into a gloomy alcove lined with vend machines. Despite the wreckage, they’re still selling snack nutrition, soft-drugs, MYRAGE gear, lens overlays, n-water. A FrendyPet machine chirps to life while I wait for guidance.
The FrendyPet machine chirps again.
I look at the machine’s cheerful animations. “Really? This is where you hid it?”
My lens blurs: yes.
So I request a menu of options from FrendyPet, and the blur leads me through a complex series of choices until bleeeeeep. The vend extrudes a paw that unclenches to reveal a strip of stem from the case I stole in Los Anod a thousand years ago. They look like barbed thorns: glossy and sharp and menacing despite being no bigger than my pinky nail.
My sleight-of-hand is rusty, but I disappear the strip into my fatigues. I just killed three lampreys, yet here I am, stealing drugs. I guess the saying is true: You can take the boy out of the gutter . . .
Another summons appears on my lens, directing me to the conference room. I ignore it; I need to dose Ting first.
The cable car returns me to the belly of the medicarrier and a crash makes a row of vents hiss. I pause for a second, but minor crashes are common. When the vents quiet, I make my way to the ward and sit beside Ting.
She doesn’t look any bigger. Or older. Is she even sixteen? Suddenly I’m not so sure. Lying there, she looks like a tired child.
“You ready?” I breathe into her ear.
My lens blurs.
“You saved thousands of people, Tingting. Maybe billions, if the techies learn how to kill these things. But I promise you this: I don’t care how many lives you save. You don’t have to prove anything, not to me.”
Cradling her head, I press stem into the base of her neck. Her flesh parts around the smooth thornlike barb.
“I don’t care what you are,” I say, feeling a click like the stem is latching onto her vertebra. “Because I know who you are.”
When I straighten, my heart is pounding. Ting doesn’t move, though. Her breathing doesn’t change, her eyes don’t shift behind her lids. And I’m out of time: a summons to the briefing flashes URGENT on my lens.
I squeeze Ting’s hand and leave her there. Small and quiet and limp.
In the hallway outside the medical bay, a squad of soldiers trots around me in tight formation. Most of them are in CrediMobil fatigues, but there’s a couple of Shiyogrid and Unidroit grunts, and one each from PRATO and Welcome 12. They move together easily, and I pause for two seconds to watch them.
The URGENT message flashes again, and I unpause.
The nearest lift immediately authorizes me for the bridge level. Four women in civilian gear join me on a higher deck. They don’t look like civilians, though. I’m still wondering if they’re Flensers when we reach the bridge level.
The women stay behind as I ease through the film. I’m almost at the conference room when Ting’s voice whispers in my earbug: “I was wrong.”
“There’s a shock,” I lens, after my chest explodes with relief.
“You’re not my best friend. You’re my brother.”
I tell her to knock off the sentimental bullshit and she lenses me a candy-colored kaleidoscope of flying squirrels.
The battlesuited guard outside the conference room eyes me warily. “What’re you smiling at, Private?”
“It’s private,” I tell her, which sends Ting into fits of lensed giggles.
I’m acting the fool, but I don’t care. We survived. We killed lampreys and survived. Not all of us, no. I still mourn Pico and Ridehorse and Voorhivey, yet I’m suddenly humming with selfish, greedy life. Despite my meditation, I’m not losing myself in the terrafixing. I’m finding myself in the squad, in the fear and the hurt, the hope and the love. It’s all I have. It’s all I am.
Death is hard, but life is sweet.
CHAPTER 63
The guard waves me into a plush waiting area. A few people are already waiting, and I recognize one of them, the cloisonné tech—Tech Specialist Gaaldine—who is downloading entire universes inside a cocoon of shimmering screens.
My lens tells me to take a seat . . . and that I’ve been fined five hundred scrip for Unauthorized Absence, on account of my delay in reporting to the briefing.
“Fuck me,” I mutter. “Five hundred?”
That’s more than I’m worth. What happens when I can’t cover the fine? Involuntary internship, probably. I guess asking permission would’ve been easier than forgiveness after all.
Except when I check my account, there’s nineteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-two scrip on my lens, in addition to my 101 shares. Not possible. I check again. The scrip is still there.
Feeling a tingle of excitement, I check my deposit history. Command bonused me twenty thousand scrip for “performance in alignment with the corporate mission statement.”
“Twenty thousand scrip!” I lens Ting on the squad channel. “They bonused me twenty thousand! I’m rich!”
“You rock,” Jagzenka lenses.
“That’s a good chunk of change,” M’bari says. “Now ask yourself what it means.”
The two of them enter the waiting area, looking stern and professional despite the on-channel chatter. Moving with the quick assurance of soldiers following lensed orders, Jagzenka takes the seat to my left and M’bari the one to my right.
“It means he rocks,” Jag lenses, nudging me with her knee. “I only got five thousand.”
“I didn’t get any!” Ting complains.
“It means they want something,” M’bari lenses me. “And they’re throwing you a few scrip to keep you happy.”
“A few scrip?” I reply. “Twenty thousand. Twenty. Thousand. I’ll never work again.”
“That’s one month’s income in a Class B household,” Jagzenka tells me, gently. “It’s nice, but . . .”
“I spend twice that on my hair every week, roachbait,” Cali says on-channel, as a projection of her shimmers into place in front of me.
“Cali!” Ting blurts. “You’re free, you’re back! Also, you’re bald. How do you spend money on your hair?”
“That’s why the stylist only charges forty small.”
“Small?” I say, honestly offended. “You call a thousand a ‘small’?”
“You’re cute when you’re stupid.” The projection of Cali scratches her neck. “Except wait, no. You can’t be cute when you’re stupid, because that’d mean you’re always cute. ’Cause you’re always stupid. But you’re not always cute, so—”
“We get it,” M’bari tells her.
“I missed you, Cali,” Ting lenses.
“You saw me three days ago, you splice.”
“Are you okay?” Jag asks.
“A couple nights in the brig is nothing,” Cali scoffs. “My family wergilded the officer I shot. Everything’s cool. I won’t say how much they paid, or Kaytu’ll start crying.”
“I fucking will,” I tell her. Twenty thousand is a fortune. I don’t care what they say.
“I’m on probation is all,” Cali continues, “and I got a glowing reference in my file for ‘maintaining a proactive approach in a crisis situation.’ Proactive. If I’d shot her in the neck they’d think I’m officer material.”
“You’re not the one who needs to worry about that,” Sergeant Manager Li lenses, slipping into the waiting area.
“Huh?” Cali asks.
“They’re promoting Kaytu.” Li looks to me. “Congratulations, you’re a Wing Leader.”
“I-I’m not—” I stammer. “They can’t—”
“It comes with a pay bump,” M’bari assures me, with a quick smile. “San.”
“It also comes with expectations,” Sergeant Manager Li
says. “Kaytu killed a lamprey—”
“He killed three!” Cali interrupts.
Sergeant Manager Li ignores her. “—and now every research unit on every continent is working nonstop, reverse engineering the lamprey’s arrival vectors.”
I frown. “Arrival vectors?”
“To find their point of origin. Their nest. And once they locate it, Kaytu? They’ll send you to kill it.”
“Me?” I ask. “You mean us.”
“Same thing.” Sergeant Manager Li gestures for everyone to fall in. “Okay, people, we’re up. Look lively.”
When we push through the security film, the conference room is actually an Operations Theater. There’s a raised table in the center, big enough for thirty people. The floor is a maze of workstations and monitors. Dozens of engineers and techs manipulate projections and cluster around workstations, screens streaming with data.
Until we enter. Then there’s a lull. A few of the staffers glance at us, a few stand from their desks.
Then the cheering starts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Caitlin Blasdell, Anne Sowards, Miranda Hill, Megha Jain, Amy J. Schneider, Ross Briscoe, Sage Blackwood, Diana Faujour Skelton, Adana Washington, and Lana Wood Johnson.
KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
BURN CYCLE
COMING SOON FROM ACE
The enemy attacks in the night. Three lampreys—biological weapons of unknown origin—rampage across Ayko Base.
Thousands of soldiers die before a cry pilot rises to defend the besieged base. With his CAV’s bladed ribbons whirling, he tears the lampreys apart.
The corporate military withdraws the survivors and relocates Javelin, the anti-lamprey initiative, onto mobile airborne platforms. Soon only a single unit remains in the wreckage of Ayko Base: Special Weapons Assay and Analysis.
Where better to evaluate an untested “special weapon” than in a base that’s already rubble? Where better to develop the instrument of our retaliation, our revenge? Plus, everything is already on-site: the combat courses, the technicians, the CAVs—and the cry pilot.
Because the special weapon is me.
CHAPTER 1
I spend the morning jogging through abandoned buildings. I’m the only person aboveground in Ayko Base, and my footsteps echo in empty corridors. The evidence of panicked flight is everywhere. In an Executive conference room, the tables are cluttered with abandoned meals, hygiene-sealed by drones after the attack.
A chopstick clatters to the floor when I run past.
My boots thud, my heart pounds. The exertion feels good after days of medical testing and paperwork. My body still responds with the automatic obedience of basic training when my lens directs me leftward at the next juncture.
“Your signals are strong,” Ensign Technician Nanty says in my ear. She’s in a sub-basement lab across the base, monitoring the LATscan that’s clamped to my shoulders and linked to my nervous system. “Proceed at that pace.”
“Confirm,” I say, swerving around a toxicology station.
A quarter mile along the hallway, an external door unfilms to my right and Nanty says, “Through there.”
I lope onto a balcony with a waist-high railing. I’m on the twenty-second story and surrounded by the remains of Ayko Base: dozens of interlinked buildings that rise from the seeded coraloid of one of the New Caspian Islands. The sea breeze is a cool 91 degrees, with a maple-ammonium scent. A flock of white birds swoops around the husk of a decommissioned dreadnought that now serves as a firing range.
A jagged hole gapes in the building to my right, edged by broken glassine. An ugly reminder of the lamprey assault. A weight shifts in my heart—not quite grief, not quite anger—but my lens interrupts, urging me onward.
When I approach the end of the balcony, Ensign Tech Nanty says, “Up and over.”
“You mean jump?”
She flashes the route onto my lens and yeah, she means jump.
“Confirm,” I say.
I clamp one gloved hand onto a railing and vault over the side. The breeze chills my sweat, and the white birds swirl around a corner and disappear.
This is the third day of a new phase of my testing. The first two days I spent in the lab, sheathed with medical film, poked and prodded like a chunk of dubious vat-meat. Then this morning the techs feathered my blood-brain barrier, clamped the LATscan to my back, and sent me jogging through the ruins to “establish a baseline physiognomic response to engagement with an unsecured, high-affect environment.”
I don’t understand what that means, but that’s okay. I’m not here to understand, I’m here to fight.
Well, and to fling myself off balconies.
After point seven seconds of free fall, a weight thumps my shoulders: that’s the remote-operated sailframe linking to my LATscan harness. Wings spread behind me, and my uncontrolled descent curves into an osprey glide.
A moment later, I’m soaring across the base at the mercy of an unseen operator. I’m swooping and banking over the wreckage, catching glimpses of my reflection in the unshattered windows. The rush is better than drugs, but I don’t whoop or shout. Because I’m a professional hardass, that’s why.
Maybe I laugh a little, though.
“Simmer down,” Nanty murmurs in my ear.
The sailframe lowers me to the entrance of the dreadnought combat range. Trash and debris crunch under my boots. “Now what?” I ask.
With a click, the frame detaches and drops to the ground. “Now enter the combat range.”
I rub my shoulder and amble forward. The armored doors slide open with a whirr. Inside the dreadnought, my lens adjusts to the shadows and my skin prickles at the feeling of abandoned vacancy.
A pillar of skarab drones orients toward me and an automated voice says, “Unauthorized entry forbidden.”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what ‘unauthorized’ means.”
“Unauthorized entry forbidden.”
“Wing Leader Maseo Kaytu,” I say, and rattle off my Shiyogrid ID.
That’s my rank now. Wing Leader. I’m a noncollateralized mission-specific officer, which means that in the field, under specific combat conditions, I’m in charge. Everywhere else, I’m still a grunt. Such as here, where I’m more of a rat in a maze than an officer in a squad.
When the skarab drones disengage, I step into a foyer with a flight of steps leading downward. At the bottom, an autocart offers me a Boaz IV assault rifle and a Vespr sidearm, then ushers me into a shooting gallery that reminds me of basic training. Moskito drones activate. Animated mannequins—animannis—shuffle from storage niches. The walls and ceiling ripple into a depiction of the New Growth, glowing images of fungal trees with gilled trunks and draping filtration moss.
“C’mon,” I say. “A firing range?”
“We’re comparing your current status to the bio workups from basic,” Ensign Technician Nanty lenses me. “This is a two-stage process. First we’ll—”
“Document the military potential of a piloted CAV,” I continue, because she’s told me this a dozen times. “Then we’ll get Provisional Approval for a fully funded CAV corps and you’ll start pairing cry pilots.”
“If we get Provisional Approval,” she corrects. “And unlock the pairing process.”
“Enough chitchat!” Technical Commander Gaaldine interrupts on-channel. “You recognize the weapons, the targets? Surely my intention is clear, Wing Leader?”
“Yessan,” I say.
“You are familiar with a firing range. Begin the exercise. Enact! Twelve degrees off-standard, attempt to recalibrate.”
The last sentence isn’t directed at me. Gaaldine always conducts multiple conversations at once. Still, he’s in charge, so I down-strap the Boaz and prowl onto the firing range.
The LATscan pinches my shoulders and a syrupy taste from
yesterday’s testing lingers in my mouth, but I find myself smiling. This is where I belong. Even though my past—my sins—drove me to enlist, I’m motivated by more than guilt now. The military needs cry pilots. The world needs cry pilots. I’m only one small cog in a vast machine, but I’ll keep grinding until the corporations authorize a CAV corps.
Then I’ll lead them into battle. My past is a minefield but my future is the service.
So that’s how I spend my third day as a Trial III test monkey, jogging across an abandoned base, then blasting through a combat course.
Days four through six are even better: the techs tell me to pair with CAVs.
CAV stands for Combatant Activated Vehicle. Decades ago, the corporate military tasked the top-level AIs with designing new weapons. That was long before the AIs ascended into sapience, and even longer before a shadowy faction genocided them. The military wanted uncrewed drones tough enough to chew through cataphracts, which are bio-forged remorts that nothing else could stop.
Except, to the corpos’ dismay, the AIs created “uncrewed drones” that required human occupants. Hence Combatant Activated. The occupants—the cry pilots—didn’t operate the vehicles, but CAVs needed to piggyback on the processing power of the human brain to function. My personal theory is that they also draw on human emotion and reflexes.
And frankly, I’d know: I’m the only person who’s ever piloted one from the inside.
Not that I’m so special. I didn’t earn the distinction, and I don’t deserve the praise. I stumbled through an open door, that’s all. Any other soldier in the corporate military would’ve done the same.
When I paired, the corpos learned that a manually piloted CAV is more powerful than a remote-operated one. Geometrically more powerful. They witnessed the birth of a new weapon, the only thing strong enough to kill lampreys. And after a single grunt paired with a CAV, they started calculating the firepower of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand CAVs. An entire army of cry pilots . . . if my test results support the investment.
