Astral Fall

by Jessica Mae Stover

  Must have lost consciousness after Skyface left. Hood’s on and intact. Maybe it didn’t happen like I remember. Could have been a hallucination. I fell from high enough to hit terminal velocity. Severe concussion? Worse? Can’t remember. Hurts to think. Should be dead. I’m dying. Out of time. Turquoise waters, the air is warm—I’m on the beach…

  Crave calmed himself. The waves of clouds dissipated and moved on. His IF flickered and shifted his basic scan mechs on its own. With the change he could see more variant light and the night sky came alive—

  Stars.

  The IF shifted itself again, changed the view back to terrestrial standard, back to what the naked eye could see. The band of galaxy and stream of stars splashed across the sky disappeared. Too much light from their sunstar… Lucy.

  The horizon’s red glow, the patches of floating soil, the rise balcony at the foundation of Ridrain base, towering far above, unseen where it met the mountain.… Crave rolled his left eye around, taking in as much as he could through his half-transparent mask. Twenty-nine native cycles old, and this is my death image. Alone in the Red Theater. Shattered, legless… like some deckee.

  Mom will gain my death benefits. Good. Haven’t spent much of my credits, should be more than enough there for her in addition to what I already allocated to be sent annually. Hardly know my brothers anymore.

  He exhaled slowly. Listening.

  Feels good to breathe. How much longer? Precious. Lucians won’t capture me alive, and my hardhood will purge itself when I die so they won’t gain my tech or intel.

  His head tingled and burned; he felt light-headed, like he was floating. It was harder to track time, harder to breathe, but as long as he didn’t push his short-term memory, he wasn’t in pain.

  Maybe this shit suit’s basic chems finally activated.

  His IF spontaneously shifted again.

  Stars.

  Through the universe patterns are repeating, creating, destroying, and somewhere in some obscure repetition, me—here. Deployed to make History with a capital H, and then didn’t even fight in the war I was going to end.

  War has to exist, I have to exist, Dad has to die, his benefits have to go to Mom, Mom has to use the resources for my education, I have to get into a top military academy, I have to have the desire. I have to have the personality, I have to succeed through elite selection and boot, then through UTS training and roselaurels, draw as commander, build a unit, live the mission, get an inside line on the bluebarred orders, develop my plan for the war, convince Zii to let me go in his place.… Hundreds, thousands… hundreds of thousands of years—how far does the thread of things that had to happen to create these conditions go back? All ending here in this fucking absurdity.

  His IF shifted again.

  No stars.

  “Hash input elixa alpha, Crave, shift mechs to aural mechs.” His hood still failed to acknowledge the command. He marshaled his thoughts, then attempted a workaround through a different aural vocal command. “Aural capture. Active IU log. Begin.”

  His IF visuals strobed, made him dizzy again, but the alpha symbol for his unit log appeared on his IF’s perimeter, followed by the ear symbol for aural mode, and asked him to confirm.

  “Confirmed.”

  It blinked, indicated it was live capturing and logging reports.

  “Unit be advised, this is Crave on the deck of the Red Theater. It’s night now. It’s quiet. Exact time unknown, but understood to be within hours of unit docking at Ridrain. Recent events preceding current position: unknown. Severe PT damage to both suit and hardhood. No chatter capability.” He paused, unprepared to admit the reality of his situation to them. “My mind’s not right. I was shot. I fell. I’m paralyzed in the hot zone and unable to read threats. Severe body damage. I know you’re doing everything you can to find me, but I don’t have much time left. Finish the mission. Stay with Leo and the new crew. Stay together.”

  When I die, my hood will find the closest friendly point and send my data there, then purge. This is the last thing I’m ever going to say to them.

  It shifted again.

  Stars.

  “Charis, Wheck, Skregs, we’ve served together for over ten years. I know everything about you. Together we explored farther into deep space than any humans preceding us. We saved so many lives that I lost count years ago. We mastered the most advanced technology in existence. None of us could have achieved these things without the others. I had the life I wanted because of you. We seized it together.” His throat stung. So did his eyes. Emotional response. “It’s time for you to take Thwip there. To show him what being an SJ Nova means. Thwip, hold them to it. Finish the mission. Raise the flag. Stay together and put me on the wall next to Yviss.”

  Can’t say anything to Zii and Monarch, Luzie, Widow and Bambo… wouldn’t be standard. Log could be received by the base—any ranking friendly. Preserve the secrecy of the unit’s closeness to Zii’s unit. They’ll need him.

  “IU log end.”

  It shifted again.

  No stars.

  “Zii… Whatever happens next, I won’t be a part of it,” he mumbled to himself. A vision of a wall engraved with a small rose laureled in a pair of wings came to him. Charis, Skregs, Wheck, and Thwip stood before it, together, and later, Zii, alone. “I won’t have to see another rose go up before mine.”

  The relief was unexpected.

  It shifted again.

  Stars.

  “Cosmos…”

  It shifted again, and this time he was sure he felt something—his right hand involuntarily twitched and hit the inside of his glove.

  No stars.

  My fingers—twitching inside my pulse gloves.

  Crave focused on adjusting his IF mechs, and stars returned to his innerface composite. His head tingled with a rush of adrenaline. I can almost feel my fingertips… He imagined using his fingers, and his IF shifted. He duplicated the effect again, and again, shifting the scan back and forth, the band of galaxy and stars blinking in and out.

  Toes! I can feel them! Faint. My legs are shattered. I can’t move them. I wouldn’t be able to feel my toes. Phantom sensations, the brain compensating for lost limbs. Even Zii experienced illusions and crossed signals, and his biomech recovery was flawless. But a user can’t pulse a hood without the connections in the gloves, and I just adjusted the light scans on mine multiple times. He dared to hope, prepared himself for horror, tipped his chin down…

  Cosmos. IT WAS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE—A HALLUCINATION!

  My legs! Whole! Perfect! Cosmos. Fucking Cosmos.

  He raised his right knee a centimeter, felt his chest rise. Sensation was increasing slowly throughout his body. He could move his hands up to his wrists, then his elbows. Meanwhile his hood’s status seemed to be going the opposite direction. It independently changed to fully transparent, and the only thing he could access was the light filter mechs on his master composite.

  Might not be dying. What happ— His head burned so badly that he grunted and lay still, unmoving, eyes closed, until the pain waned.

  Ignoring his concerns about his mental state in favor of recovering his body and gear, he took his hood offline, and then reactivated it, and as soon as he could move his arms fully, performed a stiff head-to-toe by feel, finding one talon blast hole in the front shoulder of his SI suit, and a spread pattern across his upper back from a gravis.

  I was shot. Twice. Evidenced. Talon shooter could have blown me apart, but opted for precision. Clean. Who’s the gravis spread from? Advanced weapon. Nova-only. He looked up the mountain, estimating where the shielded balcony of the base would sit, if he could scan it. Two-kilometer drop. Should be dead. Crave pulsed to access his recent SOCs, which would reveal what had happened to him.

  808 UNAVAILABLE HASH SEQUENCE

  EVERYTHING CAPTURED WILL BE LOST

  Capture mech must be damaged. No recent history and not currently logging SOCs. Medical damaged, too… basic chem balancers semi-operable. No, empty
now. Fucking SI. Need PT support. Try chatter again—No, silence all communications. Risk of enemy interception and discovery. First assess position and risk, then make a plan to reestablish contact.

  Through the front hole in his suit he ran his gloved fingers over his shoulder and what the fingerpads sensed splashed across his IF in the SI’s inferior form.

  His skin at the shoulder was ridged into the micro seams of a freshly sealed wound. The work was good; no bruising. Sealed my shoulder with my medpen. Don’t remember. My body must have auto-relied on survival muscle memory. When you have nothing else, training and instinct take over. Organic mechanism. I was on the rise balcony. How the hell could I have gotten nailed in the back by enemy gravis fire from the deck? Might have spun from the force of the first shot. But then I would have flown farther onto the balcony and not over the edge of the rise. What if Skyface was a manifestation of mental trauma, like my legs? But I was shot in the back. I asked Skyface to seal me up. Could a kid do this? Hell, could my trepid medpen do this? Looks like surgical-grade healing via medica.

  Crave touched the healed wound again—low pain came over his body in waves, but his shoulder remained dull. He added more pressure and had to lean back against the ground; his vision spun as though he were drunk. A vivid memory of red contrasted with the grey of the deck and black of his suit; Skyface holding up the SI’s arm, indicating his blood. He pulsed to scan his body, was denied, and toggled through system diagnostics until the SI’s basic internal health scans were operational. His body map rang out in stable gold on his IF. You goddamn shit suit, what about my head pain and memory loss?

  A few cool-toned splotches arrived on the map. Blue: Wounds on his back sealed and no internal bleeding. Blue: Wound on his shoulder sealed and no internal bleeding. Green: His shoulder medicinally numbed.

  Superficial numbing agents aren’t stealth code. Can be read on some scans even through trepid. Vulnerability. Enemy can use med scans offensively to locate wounded adversaries who have been injured and numbed. Not included in any trepid chem balancers. Skyface moved around me, and I couldn’t always see what it was doing.

  Crave focused on reforming the pieces of what happened, winced through a sharp pain in his head. He calmed himself, and made another attempt. The pain returned, so he again set regaining recent memory aside in favor of a paced recovery. He magnified the green area of his body map to confirm the hashes: NUMBING AGENT UNP06.

  Superficial numbing agents are not part of the trepid kit. They’re not part of any combat kit!

  Crave pulsed to unknit his emergency innie seam for quick reach through his exosuit, but he wasn’t in his trepid, and so he didn’t have one. He had to pull his auttie yank and work his suit off one arm to get inside it. He found his trepid medpen and quickly resealed and reactivated the suit. The medpen indicated that it had no chems.

  Was full when I packed it during suit-up, and it would take ten times as many wounds as mine to max out a trepid medpen. Why would Skyface scavenge my medpen chems instead of just taking the entire device?

  Aside from meds and weapons, the rest of the tools and items that came native to the suit were in inventory. SI tools weren’t valuable enough to a scavenger to be worth the risk of the Red Theater, if anything could be, but the SI’s short talon might have been enough of a consolation prize, and that was gone.

  Maybe it just scavenges weaponry.

  He gripped the medpen. At close range, he could use its incision mechs as a weapon.

  Swirls indicating circulation moved through his body map on his IF view; another suit function randomly returned. He felt the rhythm of his heartbeat through his body as he saw its representation pulsing on the map out of sync, lagging due to the lower-caliber suit.

  I was shot—someone sealed me up. Shoulder’s medicinally numbed. So is my back. Not stealth code. It would have been some fucking magic trick if I could reach to heal my back like that with a medpen so that my suit could do the rest, if it even works. I experienced… some kind of trauma-based hallucination—my legs. What else was false? Possibility: Part of it was real. If Skyface was here, exactly like I remember, then why did it keep me alive?

  His body map bloomed with another piece of chemical data. AMOSCII, it informed him, and his anger flared. Someone fucking drugged me. It’s still in my system.

  What is amoscii doing in a war zone? Illegal recreational drug. No wonder I don’t know what I fucking saw. I was high. I am high. Skyface could have been anything. I could have been talking to rocks.

  He moved his fingers and pulsed his IF for more about amoscii, confirming that possible side effects were those typical of recreational drugs. Faint hallucinations, potential for short-term memory loss, euphoria… Crave had a nasty feeling that the amoscii interacted badly with some of the chems already in his system from before he’d changed out of his trepid suit into the SI. Trepid chem balancers were overseen by the best medicas and personal techs and carefully crafted for individual Novas, and he had his balanced for optimal performance. The violation of his body autonomy, coupled with not being able to remember exactly what had happened, sickened him.

  His IF advised that eating and drinking water helped curtail the length of the side effects of the drug. No time. Focus. Need sitrep. Need a safe position.

  He checked his shoulder and back more closely. If he didn’t tear the wounds open, then they would heal neatly. He pulsed his IF clear and rolled to his stomach carefully, not wanting to accidentally draw the attention of who or what might lie over the ridges or under the topsoil of the Red Theater.

  He was positioned in a craterlike depression at the top of a low hill. Its smooth edges rose around him to three sides, giving him some cover. The floating soil increased the effect and offered some offensive scan mitigation. However, it also inhibited his scans, which were already at a decreased performance.

  Unable to read threats. Hostiles could scan me at any moment. But chances are fair that if they haven’t found me yet, they don’t know I’m here. Except for Skyface. Skyface knows. Can’t stay here.

  An object a few meters from him read on his IF: a translucent cylinder marked with the round military crest for Ridrain. On the crest was a circle to symbolize each of the UNP’s five sunstars along the Sunway, all sharply guarded inside one larger geometric circle, the words KEEPERS OF THE GOLDEN GATE in halfhash protectively surrounding them, representing Ridrain’s crucial role in Nativity defense. Lucylight caught the container from behind, giving the water a bloody tinge. He glanced at the deltoid of his suit, where the same crest was textured into the tech.

  Faint grooves striped the sandy soil around him as far as he could see. The wind had worn the perfect pattern down and wiped it away in patches, and there was no apparent evidence of the humans or technology that had created the lines. If there had been any footprints from the scavenger, they were gone now, weathered away or obscured by human intervention. The container was out of place in the war-ravaged wasteland. Crave’s IF said it was made of morsin-coated glass and contained water.

  Morsin’s used to prevent glass from fracturing. Also used in improvised antipersonnel devices.

  His damaged display made him nauseous, so he pulsed scan labels and explanations to interrupt only when critical and pressed his eyes shut.

  “What do you hear, Commander?”

  A musical voice, another flashback so sharp that he thought Skyface was back—he snapped his eyes open—he was alone.

  The answer to the question had been nothing. It was still nothing. Crave removed his hood, listening in case its aurals weren’t fully functional. Taking his IF’s advice, he pulled his a-yank and extracted a pack of thinbents along with his spirewire from his internal kit, then sealed back in, replaced his hood, and retracted his mask, listening for activity and considering his next move.

  Drugged up, having a fucking snack in the middle of the Red Theater. Hooah.

  He ate, hoping it would help clear his mind, watched the hanging soils, and li
stened to the empty sounds of an empty land, relieved that his hood aurals were working but unsettled by the unexpected calm. A hollow wind… the deck remained silent. The thinbents gone, he repacked their container, pulsed his mask back in place, looked at the water container, and fingered the hole in the shoulder of his exosuit. Suit’s not reknitting itself. This fucking bullshit SI suit.

  My trepid hood sustained damage too, though. Chatter’s black. The loop had never been severed on a mission, and the sudden absence of Charis, Skregs, Thwip, and Wheck, his inability to hail through and access them at will, made him uneasy. His hardhood shifted back and forth between external and internal aurals outside his command, forcing him to be silent or risk detection. How can I tell them where I am without risking interception by hostiles? Sitrep first.

  Crave crawled. Ten meters away, he dug out a rock and threw it at the water container. It made a small thump, and with it came the memory of a rock smashing into his mask.

  He listened and waited.

  Nothing happened. Using the spirewire, he lassoed the container and yanked it a yard, flinging it away from his position. Still nothing. He pulled the container toward him and gripped it, weighing it. His IF reconfirmed the contents as water inside glass, but he wouldn’t risk consuming it unless he was severely dehydrated. He reviewed his H & O levels. Thwip had done him well in reviewing his suit systems and contents: his moisture cycles were golden and would last for weeks. He could process drinkable water from what he found in situ on the deck. Crave dumped the dubious water into the dust and packed the container with rocks and sand. His IF scanned the weight at 2.2 kilograms.

  Needs to be 10 kilos to reliably fool and trigger mines.

  The deck strategy for antipersonnel mines was to blow an opposing combatant’s leg off without killing them, to increase the medical and evac burden on the enemy. He shivered at the hallucinatory loss of legs he’d just lived through, and the memory of what happened to Zii on Transmorthea left him gripping the container like it could anchor him in the present.