Astral Fall

by Jessica Mae Stover

  “Agreed,” Crave said.

  Skregs’ fingers twitched as he pulsed his chatter. “Skregs to PT lab. Freight in the CMD briefing module to move to lab. Hash for Blyku’s review wi—” Crave’s face shifted and Skregs read him, and paused. “Lab, standby, two.” Skregs muted the lab chatter connection.

  “Have them take it to Thwip’s lab space on the V-Oh instead,” Crave said.

  “Then I have a new objection,” Thwip said. “Blyku is far more advanced and should handle all of our suit prep.”

  “She won’t be with us when we execute our approach, and this way the risk is further minimalized by keeping it in the loop that I’m swapping for an inferior suit. I’d prefer a Nova review. And you’re the one who will be doing the final check just before docking.”

  He trusts me. “I’ll get into it.” Thwip remembered Sanders’ appeal to be included and added, “I’d like Sanders to handle the freight move.”

  Skregs twitched a finger, pulsing chatter again. “PT lab frago my last. Freight in the CMD briefing module to move to V-Oh lab hashed for Thwip only. Thwip requests Sanders to supervise.”

  “Sanders to Thwip, on my way.”

  DH Aaiane arrived before Sanders and his loaders, and collected the unit’s dress cloaks and sashes. Skregs took his leave to the V-0’s sleeping module to resume his wake duty off-rotation, his sleep shift, like Aaiane’s, interrupted by the mission briefing. Thwip ate in the commissary with Crave, Wheck, and Charis, joined by three heavy-mech operators and a clever special-payloads pilot named Daviey Rumma who flew in Charis’ mission formation. Thwip chewed silently and watched her talk to Charis. When they were done, he pulsed his retracted face mask forward into place so that it made a slight snapping noise, catching Rumma’s eye, and rose from the table with the rest of the unit. Skregs was still available—he hadn’t gone to sleep yet—and Charis was headed to the WD. Thwip was on his way to the 0-lab. He walked with her, while Crave went with Wheck to the command deck.

  “Skregs, what’s the protocol on socializing with crew?”

  “As long as it’s extra-Nova, then it’s fine, if you can find the time. Extra-crew intra-military is generally preferred. This mission is different, so it’s safer to keep socializing internal to crew. Avoid Leo’s direct line of officers. Mind the secrecy code. I’d wait until after we land, although Wheck might disagree.”

  Wheck picked up on chatter. “Ah, well, the most famous PT genius alive invites you to let her pull your auttie yank in her quarters, see if you pass.”

  “How was it?” Charis asked.

  Wheck smiled his gaunt, ironic smile. “My suit is finely calibrated.”

  In the 0-lab Thwip opened the SI container, tethered the suit to his flat arc, and ran the few diagnostics applicable to its basic quality, with no errors found. The objects in the inner suit’s kit were all downgrade, intended specifically for infantry on deployment to the Red Theater. They wouldn’t be of use, but he saw no reason to remove them. Culture cards, thinbents, spherical cells, eye jam, independent respiratory device, spirewire, castorwire and scalable patches, spare pulse pads, talon concealer… He went through the kit, itemized its contents in his log, and made a note for Crave to add his medpen, since the SI didn’t have one and it was required that Novas pack them, even when they shed the rest of their kit’s gear to make a weight minimum. There were no further tests available: the suit was too simple for more complex review. How else can I ensure the suit’s integrity during landing? Improvise.

  “Thwip to unit, de-suiting as a part of testing the SI.”

  “Copy that,” Charis said.

  Thwip repacked the SI’s inner suit kit, removed his trepid suit, put the SI on, and sealed it to his hardhood. The unit disappeared—it broke the loop. His IF became less complex: the chem balancers held only a few dozen static lines, and his body map lagged compared to trepid, dulled to his suit being touched. The SI also showed contact and stimuli in less detail. High-caliber loop functionality, scans and SOCs, and anything else that was hood-only still showed in trepid quality, but any mech that connected to the body of trepid was downgraded to SI-level data and suit connection. He pulsed his fingers and looped back in. The unit’s faces reappeared, except that of Skregs, who was on private mode.

  “Thwip to unit, testing the SI with trepid hood and broke loop. Might happen again.”

  “Copy that,” Charis said, then, “It broke all of us out, not just you. Request report on tech compatibility issue.”

  Thwip searched the studies and reports that Sanders had given him, and found a section devoted to the effects of connecting a trepid hood to an SI suit.

  “To come. It’s a known issue.”

  Thwip paced and jumped, testing the SI’s range of motion, then ran the SI set of diagnostic tests once more, this time from the inside, again with clean results. He removed his hood, then pulled it back on and sealed it. The loop broke again. After repeating the action a dozen times and experiencing the same effect, he de-suited and resuited into his trepid. Remembering Kevlin, and that the entire crew could possibly have access to the lab under orders, he laid the SI suit, hood, and other contents on the flat arc. He pulled his trepid’s a-yank, removed his arm from his suit, put a naked hand to the orgo-panels on the fractal trepid suit’s more secure container, opened it, loaded the SI inside with the fractal suit, and sealed it behind his biomarkers so that absolutely no one else could access the suit before Crave wore it for mission.

  I’ll have to reloop the unit in the window between his last-minute change of suits and landing. He composed and sent a brief report to the unit, and hurried to make his next duty. I’ll run another full check on everyone’s PT then, not just Crave’s.

  Forty minutes on a training circuit in the fitness module with Skregs, then forty with Charis, learning how to self-position to use trepid to defy enemy scanning, then another forty reviewing SJ mission history at a private station in the command deck. Twenty minutes of early dinner with Leo and Wheck in Leo’s comm office. Thwip’s shift time got away from him, and he returned to the 0-lab later than usual. “Thwip to unit, preparing to tether my hood to my IF for lab work. Momentary visual and chatter break.”

  “Copy that, Thwip,” Charis came back over aurals from her position on the WD.

  Returning to the lab relaxed him; it had unofficially become his comfort space, where everyone else deferred to him. He’d held himself back from accessing the second trepid suit he’d requested as his sweetener, saving it as a self-reward he could take his time in studying. He removed his hardhood, tethered his IF to the flat arc so that he could see the unit’s loop, and circled back in on chatter. After he prepped his workspace, he removed one of his hands from his gear, pressed his palm to the right container’s orgo-panel, swiped in, and folded the doors open and out, and then open and out again. This suit was taller than the previous, and also looked untouched. Probably an identical backup suit, like the ones we have. Hell, this might fit me, looks my height and weight.

  He removed the hardhood and rolled it over, and his stomach dropped. The hood was marked on each side with serpents formed into Möbius strips.

  Thwip turned to his hardhood SOC showing on the flat arc, relieved to confirm that it faced the opposite direction, capturing the lab’s opposite wall. They haven’t seen this yet. Pulsing the arc, he set his hood on private mode, and returned to Serpents’ suit, remembering the rosewall, the SJ seal, and the man with shoulder-length hair who’d stood before the engravings, a man who was the same height as Crave and Wheck, and who had dark hair.

  They never talk about Serpents. If one of them were on the rosewall, and then I saw their replacement dissecting their gear… I wouldn’t like it. Thwip respectfully returned the hardhood to its mount, resealed the Serpent Nova’s container behind the secure orgo-panel, and hashed it to go with his inessential cargo when they separated the Vesper-0 from the Vesper, Leo, and the crew. There it would remain secret, safe, and untouched. He began to remove the
fractal suit to work on. Six minutes later, Crave arrived to join him.

  On the 230th night, three weeks after they’d separated from the Vesper carrier and were alone aboard the V-0, and the last night before their covert mission landing operation at Ridrain, Crave appeared at the 0-lab’s entry, keeping their unspoken ritual. He went to the flat arc where Thwip’s hardhood sat tethered, mid-diagnostic, to see where Thwip’s work had taken him.

  “Not much of interest tonight. PT mission prep and A-STATing. Your SI suit is ready for you in the weapons hold, inside the trepid container with your other gear. I sent some notes to your hood with a reminder to pack in your trepid medpen to the SI. As planned, I’ll do a final PT pass and reloop us all once you’re refitted during entry tomorrow.”

  Since Thwip was dehooded, Crave nodded acknowledgment, then gestured for him to come to the arc and spoke through his hood’s external aurals. “Some things are secret and compartmentalized as a preventative measure, some are NTKO for other reasons. There are four mission histories that you won’t be receiving. Three are of little meaning, and are only included to distract from the fact that P2 didn’t want to clear one mission. I believe Leo won’t be able to move them on that front; they did the same for him. I’ve opted not to try. You’ve got the rest.”

  “I’ve been going through it as quickly as time allows. Wheck gave me a list of missions that are relevant to this mission. I’ve reviewed most of those as a priority. And Leto Cross.”

  “It’s cleared, so now I can confirm. You were one of the roselaurels present for that mission?”

  “Yeah, I was there. You allowed RL unit visual access to your raw SOC. I watched live with another recruit from the navigational waybob between docks twenty-three and twenty-five. And then about ten hours later you recruited me.”

  “When I pulled your training history on P2, that mission observation didn’t appear in the data. Might have been too fresh for the update. I assume you’re the one who worried Command about recruit knowledge of trepid water disadvantages.”

  “You didn’t know that? That’s why I thought you recruited me for my PT specialty.”

  Crave almost looked amused. “I know what I overheard that day in the briefing room with Sawyer and I pulled your general data as we walked through the corridors, but P2 didn’t give me anything to do with roselaurel missions, as that’s NTKO. And training doesn’t count as unit mission history, so you also won’t receive data about your time in training. However, I asked Madingo to look into what happened inside your recruit group and made an additional, specific request. Leo followed up with him and cleared the data for you to review.”

  Thwip looked over the records Crave had pulsed to the arc and then looked up. “It was a theoretical exercise?” He paced the length of the lab, returned to the flat arc, and reread to make sure he’d taken in the information correctly.

  “Command planted a nonelite soldier in your recruit group and let him sabotage the group as a random psych theoretical. Doubt that came from Sentinel. It’s not her way.”

  “So Kevlin wasn’t a RL recruit. Did Command use him without his knowledge, or did he know?”

  “He knew. His orders were to embed with and impede the progress of elite recruit group Y-SIL.”

  “My group. So fucking Kevlin wasn’t—isn’t—a traitor.”

  “He followed orders and did his duty.” Crave looked at Thwip, his opaque hardhood between them. Thwip saw his own angry reflection.

  I took that huge risk, and it was only a setup. Now it means nothing.

  “What about the recruits he sabotaged? Will those errors still count against them?”

  “I didn’t receive that intel.”

  They brought the fractal suit over to its container and remounted it in its case together, A-STATing the lab. “I don’t understand.” Thwip shook his head. “The most unsettling theoretical I went through was early on in space school. There were forty-four of us who made it that far and we were in space on our first walk. Tomtom loaded us into the training carrier’s docking module to return to P2, and took to his ryker to lead the ship in. After we de-suited, but before we began traveling on return, one of the ship’s pilots issued a distress pickup. Somehow Tomtom had left him behind, outside the carrier. We were alone without an officer, but it wasn’t a concern. The pilot was just on the other side of the entry module in space. We started to resuit so that we could let him in, but then his arrow suit experienced an environmental warning and he panicked and used his swipes to override ours and open the exterior hatches. We yelled at him to desist and wait, but he didn’t stop. He was coming in. We were unprotected. We all scrambled to get back into our gear but there wasn’t time. The hatch opened, we were exposed to space.

  “Turns out that Tomtom and the pilots had docked the training carrier into a larger carrier, and surrounded it with a bunch of huge arc walls showing a live capture of space so that we thought were still in the black. When the hatch opened, the ship didn’t depressurize, and we found we were safe instead on a carrier ship’s freight deck. Three recruits had already passed out from pressure or fear, one jumped out onto the deck, thinking she was going to go jumping at death head-on, and one pissed himself. P2 washed all five of them out and moved the rest of us up to UTS.”

  “That one is standard. All Novas have been through it.”

  “That one makes sense. I thought theoretical tests were always more like that; more to do with parts of specific exercises and sims, things we might actually encounter on a mission. Fuck me, I did not see this Kevlin theoretical coming.”

  “If a training theoretical is obvious or easy, then it has no purpose.”

  “Yeah. But if Nova trust is perfect, then why would we need a theoretical that tests group integrity? That’s the one thing we aren’t supposed to ever face.” Thwip de-suited his left arm temporarily and used his biomarkers to pulse-seal the container. “It fucked me up a little,” he admitted, “thinking another recruit was capable of that, and that somehow it got by our trainers and Command.”

  “The worst theoretical I experienced happened during what I thought was my first roselaurel op. They made me think that I accidentally shot Charis to death and vice versa.” Crave controlled the lab’s wall arc, sifting through ship nav readings. “They pulled me from the mission before I could reach her position and retrieve her body, isolated me, and let me think that I’d killed a fellow recruit—and not just any recruit, but one I was planning to unit with. Thirty-six hours later they showed me that it was a sim theoretical. She was alive. Then they advanced me to a roselaurel team with another recruit.”

  “Fucked up.”

  “Yep. But nothing else in training seemed hard after that. For both of us. They know what they’re doing.”

  “I think I’d rather have had yours. At least that one makes some sense if you’re going to test elites. It made you stronger. It makes sense to explore the psychological factors involved in making a mistake. That was a part of the Kevlin theoretical, but it went further than that. They didn’t play you and Charis against each other while at the same time requiring you to completely trust one another, like they did with us.”

  Crave returned to the flat arc. Thwip joined him, checking on his hardhood.

  “On the other hand, Captain Sawyer was technically correct in that I wasn’t in a unit yet. It’s different now. I can feel the difference. Every day just gets better.”

  “They wouldn’t have done that theoretical once you were out of your roselaurels. There is inside the unit, and there is outside the unit. There are lines that once crossed cannot be uncrossed. There are oaths. And there are orders. Those lines are clear and sharp. You’re under the Nova chain of command now, and that runs parallel to P2’s chain until it reaches the same point at the top—the generals. We defend humanity for the Nativity, with no exceptions. And we don’t have the loyalty issues that other people do. That’s a requirement we need in order to perform our jobs. P2 wouldn’t violate that: it’s too muc
h of an asset, and the backlash from the Nova community would be severe.”

  “What would you have done, if you were me?”

  “If you had waited a day, you might have been out of your RLs. Then you could have outed him without risking your position or subjecting yourself to Sawyer’s judgment.”

  “But someone might have been washed out before then, unfairly. Or what if they were hurt? And what if it took longer for me to shed my RLs?”

  “Consider that the theoretical they put you through might have been about what you wouldn’t see coming. Recruits are trusting, and have no rank or authority. They wouldn’t look for internal enemies—they’d let the trainers do that—and would defer concerns. Often people don’t see what they aren’t looking for, or resist acknowledging anything that conflicts with what they expect. Novas don’t have that luxury.”

  “My specialty made it easier to detect,” he said. “That seems unfair to the other recruits.”

  “Duplicity always leaves many signs. Something led you to check the tech, and they had just as much chance as you did to notice and investigate that something.”

  “The sabotaged recruits were too skilled to error out in the ways that Kevlin arranged. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.”

  “I can’t tell you the best course of action. You know more about the situation than I do.”

  “I appreciate the intel.”

  “Heard you tell Leo in the loop that you had agreed to form a unit with another member of your RG. You didn’t get to transition out of training the way Novas usually do. And after you mentioned your paranoia about sabotage, I thought the closure would be useful.”

  “It seemed dishonorable to leave without explanation.” He never talks this much, not even on the day I shadowed him or when his superiors are present.

  “My best friend from first academy and I made it all the way through roselaurels together. We had the same agreement, except we had the entire unit planned out, and all five agreed.”

  The diagnostic wasn’t over, but Thwip pulled his hood on so that he could hear and see Crave in the loop.