Steel Frame, page 14
97.31, says the little counter in the middle of my visor, fading in and out of my vision.
I make for the thick hatch that holds the back of the pod shut; the one that keeps its cargo safe and sound. It won’t stop us.
The Juno reaches over me. I reach over her.
It grips the hatch with its good hand. I grip the hatch with my good hand.
We spread our feet, and tear.
Metal splits around our fingers, bolts pop and hinges fail. Atmosphere boils in the vacuum.
I step into the breach, weapon drawn.
She steps into the breach, weapon drawn.
“Stand up!” I howl. “Stand up where I can see you!”
“YOU HEAR ME?”
My voice rolls around inside my helmet, leaves me alone in the cold with my pounding heart and heaving lungs. I inch my weapon past the broken hinges, and into the airlock behind it. I realise I can’t see the saddle.
A steel column stands in the way, splitting the narrow walkway in two. There’s something similar in the Juno, and variants in almost every shell I’ve ever flown. It doesn’t look the same, but I know what it is and what it does. You could call it a vertebra, one big link in a chain that supports the machine body, and carries the thick cables and conductors that run into the base of the saddle.
I shout again.
“Come out with your hands up!” It sounds shrill now that my heartrate’s running flat. I stand in the quiet another thirty seconds, making sure my channels are open. There’s nothing from the Sigurd pod. I shut them down, open them again, and clear every channel I have access to; I cycle back through the Juno’s transmitters, and boost the sound of my voice across every frequency I can reach, raw and unfiltered.
Still nothing.
And I’m running out of fire.
“Stacking up,” says a voice in my ear. It takes me almost a whole second to process the words. I spin at the weight of a glove on my shoulder and Hail steps back, one hand in the air, the other carrying a weapon like mine.
Her Spirit rests on one knee behind her, its little airlock cycling as it stands again. Salt’s shell moves through the dust in the distance, weapons crackling, panning through the shadows.
Hail catches my eye. “My shell’s set for overwatch. It’ll cover us,” she says as the slender machine turns away. She rests her free hand on my shoulder; there’s power in the grip. “Stacking up.”
I nod and turn to face the broken hatch. “Take right,” I whisper across our little net.
She taps my shoulder again. “Go.”
I pass the column, following the narrow walk along the inside of the cockpit-pod. Hail curves back on the other side.
A dark suit meets us in the middle, still in its saddle. We face it, weapons level with its helmet, fingers on triggers.
“Hands up!” I shout.
The jockey doesn’t move.
“I said, hands up!”
Nothing. We stand in the quiet, staring at our reflections in the visor-glass.
“Look,” whispers Hail. She reaches out and runs a finger across the collar.
I glance at her, but the Sigurd jockey doesn’t react.
She brings the glove back, works the fingers together where I can see. “Dust.”
Not the mix of ground steel and burnt insulation you’d get from inside a crash, and not the stuff floating around the ruddy desert outside. I do the same as Hail, leaving a streak across his visor. The dust is dark and tacky, the same oily glaze you’ll find inside any machine, no matter who’s doing the flying. Grease mixed in with tiny paint-chips, metal powder, fuel vapour, and regular old filth. It folds together into a sheen that clings to anything it touches, prone to collecting on any unmoving surface.
Hail and I trade glances.
“You think—?”
She shrugs.
His strange cylindrical helmet lolls to one side, covered in the same strange muck as the rest of him. Nothing strange about that, not on its own. There are times when the company will put you on a long-haul flight, or send you out on a couple of ops back-to-back. You can spend a couple of days in the saddle, catching sleep while the machine takes care of business in between. You always come out of those trips dirty; it’s what you get from being inside a living, moving machine. What’s strange is his gloves.
You can get your fingers dirty, sure, but there’s a pattern to that. Nothing collects on gloves.
There are switches to flip and buttons that need pressing. Even when you’ve got high-sync, even when the whole shell is one big phantom limb, there are some things that need a human touch. The oldest parts of any machine, usually: hatch locks, backup instruments, pressure valves. And that’s not counting the thousand times you’ll touch your visor, subconsciously trying to wipe away the sweat on your forehead, or reaching for an itch you probably shouldn’t be trying to scratch. But his gloves are just as soot-covered as the rest of him.
I lean closer, and Hail gives me an eye. “Let me try something.”
She watches me for half a second more, but doesn’t move just yet.
I feel it too. Like I might wake him up.
I rap my knuckles on the visor. My glove leaves a mark on the glass, moves the helmet. He doesn’t stir. I make a fist and hit hard enough to rock him back in the seat.
I flinch, and Hail frowns at me. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I lie. My fist feels like I’ve broken it, like there’s something loose inside.
It takes a second for me to realise why. The Juno and I hit so hard that we broke its hand and sank a Sigurd shell in the process. I’m still feeling the echoes of that moment. I switch hands and shove him back, a little more carefully this time. Something gives underneath the suit, soft and spongy.
I start, nearly fall over myself.
Hail catches him, and looks back at me. “Are you okay?”
But I’m not watching her. In the light from her helmet-lamps I see ice inside his visor. The glass is silver-grey with frost. Ice.
Inside his helmet.
I find my feet. “Look.”
“Christs.”
I reach under the helmet’s chin, feeling for the emergency release. They work on pressure; if there’s air inside, it won’t break the seal until there’s air on the outside too.
If it’s empty—
The helmet pops loose without a fight, almost dropping into my hand. We can see the patch on his chest now. The jockey’s name is Dane.
Dane doesn’t look up as I pull the helmet clear. He can’t. He stares straight ahead, eyelids puckered around a pair of open sockets. His skin is a deep red, and almost rubbery. It flakes in places, and cracks where the ice has turned it black. His jaw hangs open, stretched tight over empty cheeks.
Dane has been dead a long time.
“No gunshot wounds,” says Hail. “Suit’s still intact, by the look of it.” She checks his chest. “Trauma plates are still green.” She dials her headlamps up, runs them across Dane’s withered face. “Freeze-dried, rather than frostburned.”
I nod. “Dead before the cold got in.”
“Impact?”
I shake my head. “He’s still in the saddle. If the gee was high enough to kill him, it would have messed his connections up with it.”
Hail shrugs. “The shell seemed pretty functional to me.”
That’s one way of putting it.
I peer at the nerve-jacks still locked into his legs. The suit is torn around them, and crimson crystals show where they shredded muscle and skin underneath. “Too fast for freezing and too clean for impact. He suffocated.”
Hail’s eyes glow in the light of the displays inside her helmet. “No holes in the hull. And he didn’t die today.” She looks up at the ceiling. “This thing was flying hollow. No air, no jockey.”
“Worse than that.” I guide her eyes to the bloody jacks. “He choked, and the saddle held him while it happened.”
TEN
ISIT ON the Juno’s knee and drink from the little tube in my helmet. The water is warm and my skin is cold, but I’m not sure how much of it I feel. Not sure I’m feeling very much of anything right now.
I hold up my right hand and turn it over where I can see. It’s the one thing I can feel. My knuckles throb like I’ve just thrown them against a concrete wall.
I tell myself it’s all in my head and look the glove over for signs of damage. There aren’t any, and I can move the joints easily enough, but when I do it feels like there’s a loose bone, shattered just like the fist we used to break Sigurd’s machine. I know it isn’t real, and that it’s just an artefact of the operator’s feedback systems working a little better than they should, but that doesn’t help the ache.
I look up at the Juno’s glassy eyes. “I’m sorry, old bird.”
It glances at the stump of its hand. We hit so hard we crushed the fingers flat, fusing them with the rest of the gauntlet underneath. The shell gives a little shake. A shrug, if you know what you’re looking for. And there’s a stream of pilot-status queries, the kind you do before takeoff, or when you’ve lost connection and the machine can’t feel where you are…
Oh.
The big eyes watch me. Are you okay?
I’m not sure I have an answer. Not sure I could put it all together even if I did. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do what I did today.
I’ve pulled bodies out of cockpits full of holes, more air than armour, and I’ve burnt my flesh-and-blood hands in white-hot fires. I’ve done every kind of recovery that NorCol cares to train its S&R crews for, and then I’ve done them again and again until they all blurred together into one long rush of pain and dying. I’ve done things the company’s instructors could hardly imagine, let alone prepare me for.
There’s an informal chatter code among rescue corps: ‘DTW,’ Dead in The Water. It means everything and nothing, all at once. Catastrophic failure of the pressure-vessel, or the lucky pinhole shot that goes clean through. High altitude fragmentation, atmospheric shock, or a whole airframe splattered across terra firma.
It was a DTW that got me sitting here, on the inside of an alien rock, orbiting something nobody’s ever heard of before. Three of them, actually. And there was nothing I could do.
Worse, I was the one that led them into the fire. It wasn’t intentional, but you tell that to your own unit while they’re busy burning up. I was cleared of their deaths, but that didn’t help. The filings in my court martial called what came afterwards a ‘rampage,’ which I suppose is accurate enough.
Christs, my hand hurts.
Lear was Dead in The Water, but that doesn’t mean anything on its own. He wasn’t a bloody stain or a twist of skin and cartilage or anything. That would have been easier; I’ve cleaned half a dozen cockpits out by hand, done the bucket shift through human wreckage maybe a dozen more times on top of that. You zone out, and your hands keep running on automatic.
When Salt found Lear’s body, well—
Lear was still Lear.
I’m glad I couldn’t see his face.
He’s with Salt now, wrapped in a couple of silver blankets we stripped out of an emergency survival kit. Salt’s flight suit is thicker than mine or Hail’s, thick enough to handle the kind of cold that would freeze us both to death. It’ll keep Lear whole until we can send him off. Hail says NorCol doesn’t bury cons, but we’ll see to him ourselves. Jockeys have their own rituals.
Salt is around here still, humming that old tune of his across the net. Habit makes me follow along, though my helmet mikes are off. This one’s just for me. I close my eyes and let it carry me.
I don’t hear him stop.
“What would you have done?”
I almost miss it. I blink and find Salt’s heavy suit standing in the dust below me, looking up. I swallow and open my nets, but it’s a moment before I can speak.
“I got there as fast as I could. I—I just—”
He stops me short. “No. You did everything you could. The fault, if there is any, is ours, Hail’s and mine.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It has to be said, and I’m saying it. You saw it coming. Hail and I were fucking bystanders.”
Even when we were still in chain, still bolted to the low decks of a murky prison ship, I don’t think I’d ever heard him so bitter. He breathes loud enough that I can hear it, almost feel the changing pressure in my ears.
“I’m gonna wear that one a long time.” He clears his throat, and looks back up at me. “When I asked you what you would’ve done, I wasn’t talking about Lear.” He nods at the dark pod, lying in the trench it carved through the dust. “What would you have done if that Sigurd jockey had been alive when you found him?”
“Shot him.” It’s almost too easy to say.
Salt nods. “Me too.” He turns on his heel, wakes the dust around his boots. “Come on.”
I sit up. “Where are we going?”
“To find out why.”
WE SET DOWN near the first Sigurd wreck. I didn’t see where the ejector went, but I remember my way back to the shell. In the end, Salt tracks the pod back, following a thermal shadow only his big eyes can see. It’s resting up against a pillar, the snout buried in fallen brickwork. The Decatur dusts it off with its fingers while Hail and I dismount.
“Want me to open it up?” he asks.
Hail looks up at him. “You’re a gun platform, Salt. Stick to what you’re good at. Cover us.”
The pale machine turns away, rail crackling. “Aye aye,” he says, a little acid creeping in.
Hail’s already at the hatch, and I pull in behind her. She tries the lock-handle first, but it doesn’t budge.
“If there’s a key, we’re missing it.”
She spares me a glance, then looks up and blinks at her machine. The Spirit leans over and taps one of its slender fingers against the hatch.
Hail nods, turns and waves me back. “Get clear.”
We drop into the dust, and the shell sets down on one knee, clenching a fist. I shy away, but I’m expecting this to work the way the Juno would. I haven’t flown a Spirit in a while.
It draws a bead, and lands a punch that’s just exactly hard enough. It rocks the ground beneath our feet and spills dust from the pod’s armour, but where the Juno and I would’ve crumpled it under our fist, the Spirit lands a hit dead centre, warping the door and popping the bolts. It leaves everything else intact.
Cockpit pods are built to ride the sudden gee as they eject, to drift through storms and atmosphere until someone picks them up, but that means less than you’d expect. They’ll take a hit from just about anything a human being could carry on their own, maybe even a glancing shot from a shell, but it isn’t enough to stop the Spirit, not now. Hail’s machine pulls at the buckled door, hinges holding maybe ten seconds before it all falls clear to the dust, trailing cables and twisted metal.
Hail and I stack up, but she’s in the lead this time. I line up behind her, slap her shoulder to signal Go. We rush in guns drawn, circling around through a pod almost identical to the first. We find a jockey in the same black flight suit as the first, and she’s just about as dead. Judging by the body, she’s been cold as long as her wingmate has. She’s got the same odd tears around her jacks, the same frost in her visor-glass, and nothing else to say what killed her.
“I don’t know what we were expecting.”
Hail nods, but it’s a moment before she replies. “She didn’t fly all the way out here with a hollow shell on her wing. Same goes for the other one. You talk, you trade nav and obs and ranging.”
I tap my helmet. “You’d notice if there was no one home.”
“You would. And you’d turn back. Especially if they’d been dead as long as this.”
“If these machines were just hollow, it would be easier to deal with. These two flew here with dead bodies in their saddles. They took off like this.”
“Maybe they weren’t the ones flying.”
I holster my weapon. “You think the shell did it? All on its own?”
Hail shrugs. “It wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve seen.” She flicks her safety on and turns back the way she came. “Let’s get out of here.”
Salt watches over us as we make tracks for our machines. “Aren’t they supposed to turn back? Hollow shells, I mean. Aren’t they supposed to head home?”
I shrug, and the Juno mimics it, before I’ve even sat down in the saddle. “It probably depends on the company.”
Hail comes up on the line, her own shell swaying gently as its jockey comes back into focus. “No, Salt’s right. Leaving a hollow on the field is a waste of a shell.”
I guess so. “Difficult to kill the jockey without breaking everything else along the way.”
The Spirit nods. “Which means that if the machine survives, it’s probably taken a big enough hit that it might as well be dead. It’s more cost effective to get the hardware back home, jockey or no jockey.”
“But there’ll be some things that keep them around.”
“A friendly machine under fire, maybe, but it’d have to be pretty grim. Something the shell figures is more valuable than itself.”
“So that’s half of it, then.” Salt’s Decatur peers into the dark. “What’s valuable enough to keep two hollows in the line of fire?”
“Probably the same thing that got Hasei into the mix.”
Hail’s machine glances over its shoulder. Even without eyes, the expression is clear enough. “We don’t know how long ago that was. That plate you found might have been driftwood.”
“It wasn’t.”
The Spirit spreads its hands. “Even so, a scrap of armour and some bullet holes isn’t much to go on.”
Now Salt is looking at me too. “It isn’t much to go on.” He doesn’t make it all the way to asking.
We come about. Even with the pain in our hands, I’m beginning to think that I only feel alive in the saddle. “How about a whole shell, then?”
