Steel Frame, page 15
I’M THE ONE who made the offer, but it’s the Juno who remembers the way. We backtrack across lines of heavy footprints—our own, already disappearing in the little breezes that creep across the floor.
The Hasei wreck is where we left it; there’s a deep furrow where we set our knee and used the dead shell for cover. Now that I’ve got the time to look, it’s worse off than I remember. It was killed in a stand-up fight, withered by the steel wind. There’s a little body heat left, but only just enough to show in infrared.
There’s something else, behind the warmth. Something that sparks and tingles on our skin.
“Reactors are bleeding,” says Salt, just behind me. “They hit it hard.”
Hail peers past him. “Any sign of the pod?”
The Juno looks over to where the Mirai had been before we lost it.
I have to turn our head. My first instinct is to point the way, but our damaged right arm cramps at the thought and our left hand’s full of rifle, so I blink a quick marker instead. I don’t want to look too hard. “Over there. Look for Hasei’s colours.”
Hail vaults the wreck and follows our faded footsteps between the pillars. The pod flashes into view under the Spirit’s lamps, fading again as she turns to look for the jockey. Or what’s left of them.
“Christs,” she whispers.
The line is silent for a moment.
“This is what you saw, isn’t it?” The Spirit clenches a fist. “You were here”—it looks over its shoulder—“and we were over there.” The angle changes. “Which puts that Mirai at twelve o’clock. Maybe half a K.” Her shell looks down suddenly as it hits something in the sand. An orange plate skips away into the dark.
“We kicked foot that same piece of scrap.” The Juno and I roll up behind her, adding our headlamps to the scene. “And this is what we saw.”
An ejector pod, opened up by massive gunshot wounds. They’re close-range and methodical.
Hail breathes deep. “Lear wasn’t the first.”
“Not even the second,” growls Salt.
I’m expecting his pale shell right behind us; the helmet adds a vector to his voice—tweaking levels to give direction—but always keeps the volume high enough to hear. When we look back, there’s nothing to see. Infrared brings him into view a few hundred metres clear. Five reactor-cases light up around him, warm sparks on a field of purple and grey.
Salt stands in the middle of a wasteland. Carbon streaks mark the stone around his feet and draw little glassy circles where burning munitions baked the dust. The pillars around him are still standing, but worn down from thick trunks to narrow cores by a gale of hypervelocity shot.
There should be five wrecks to match the five powerplant units, but I’m not sure I could point them out. Even with Hasei’s bright colours and Sigurd’s mirror-black, it’s impossible to tell where one machine ends and the others begin. The companies aren’t in the habit of colour coding the insides of their shells, and what’s here has been carved up, spread wide. Give us a week and we still wouldn’t find it all.
The reactors didn’t fare much better than the shells that carried them. Two are still intact; one of Sigurd’s little suns, one of Hasei’s silver supernovas. Two more are almost there, but hairline cracks run across them, their contents haemorrhaging into the cold. One has lost containment, both heart-chambers compromised 60-70%. It doesn’t hurt us; our skin is thick and our parts are sturdy, but that doesn’t stop the strange sparks across our eyes.
Putting a hole in a reactor-case is difficult, breaking one more so. Easier to kill the flesh and blood riding in the saddle.
If the cores are out in the open, casings cracked and shattered, then—
“What happened to the jockeys?”
The Decatur aims a finger, raises markers on the net. “Two Sigurd ejectors. One—and two.”
The first is almost close enough for us to touch. “Clean break. No damage.”
Salt marches on the other. “More of the same. Hatches sealed. No squealers.”
No emergency beacons, no radio, not even a strobe light. Nothing. An ejector can keep a jockey alive for days, assuming nothing leaked or was damaged in the fight: but it’s the last ditch. They have to survive everything else dying around them, and the chances are they haven’t. And if they have, someone still has to find them.
Ask a jockey how they’d like to die, and most will opt for hot and fast and flying. If you weren’t a jockey, you’d assume it was an ego thing; that’s what we signed up for, right? A blaze of glory, rendered in burning steel and exploding magazines. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. No one wants to burn to death, even if it’s what we all expect. It’s just better than the alternative.
Every so often, a patrol will turn up an intact ejector, a mummified jockey still resting inside.
Fallen pods are where we keep our nightmares.
“It’s cold.”
Salt rumbles. “Hollow?”
“I’d put money on it.”
Hail hangs back, watching. “Any orange?”
“Over here.” Salt’s words turn to a growl. “Christs. Tally one.”
“It isn’t a tally if someone murdered them,” says Hail. Her voice doesn’t have Salt’s distant thunder, but that almost makes it worse. “We’ve got five cores and three pods. Find me the other two.”
Something orange catches our headlamps. Dammit, I really want to look away. “Got number four over here.” The Juno pulls us away, aims our eyes at something else. I let it. “Jockey tried to run on foot.”
Hail doesn’t let me drift. “Just need number five.”
I take a deep breath, and the shell matches the feeling, the little ember of our reactor warm inside our chest. We pick through the wrecks, but it looks exactly the way I’d expect.
Hasei and Sigurd tripped over each other in the dark and tore each other to shreds. We find dead missiles, and a couple of live ones too, tipped from their tubes. Piles of unusual brass, and a few of the rounds themselves. Long tracks from railgun shots. Armour in sheets and fragments, whole limbs and severed fingers. One of Hasei’s hammerheads, still intact, wide eyes peering up at us from the dust. But no ejector.
“I’m not seeing anything.”
“Keep looking. It has to be around here somewhere.”
“I’ve got it,” says Salt. “One moment.” We watch as he traces something we can’t see. His shell is hot and loud, but it’s got eyes like nothing else. “Dead and cold, just like the others,” he says, but: “You’ll want to have a look at this.”
ELEVEN
ONE MACHINE SHOULD look just the same as any other; after all, the wind doesn’t care what badges you’re wearing so long as there’s a point in your snout, a curve in your wings, and enough fire in your engines to keep you up and flying. You’d think the companies would all just find the meanest shapes they could, build them over and over, pausing only to change the paint scheme.
They don’t. NorCol’s design bureaus like slopes and crags, tips like beaks and spines like feathers. Sigurd rounds its edges, fits everything into brutal frames that look like they could break you down by hand, and covers them in that strange mirror-finish that hurts your eyes. Hasei likes bright colours, and silhouettes that don’t make sense until they’re upside-down and pulling twice your gee.
There’s a reason for it: adaptation.
The Articles give the Colonial Authority final say over any volume of space that happens to contain a human being—at least, that’s the theory. They’re supposed to be what keeps us all in line, the biggest stick in human space, but they can only reach so far. The companies all keep colonies of their own, so far from the shallows that they might as well be a different species. Cities staffed with citizen-employees, managers who run their own boroughs, and governors with seats on the companies’ massive boards.
When you’re that far out, there isn’t much the Authority can do to keep the peace, and the companies will always find things to squabble over. On the frontier, that usually means solid ground. Stable worlds are rare, and even then, they have a habit of being deserts, only just fit for human life, give or take a few decades’ terraforming. There are a few that are shear with ice, and even fewer where it melts for more than a moment every few months or so.
There are temperates, but only two that are anything like the little blue marble that started this mess in the first place. Jotunheim is one, and Sigurd-Lem holds it tight. Kildare is the other, and it’s NorCol’s crown jewel, out of bounds to anyone and everything. A pair of dreadnoughts watches its skies, and a trillion extra stars mark the minefields out beyond. It has two moons, but knowing the company, they’ll be all dug out, innards replaced with anti-orbital batteries so big they’d sink a planet.
It’s a prestige project, and I’d put money on Jotunheim being Sigurd’s version of the same. Held up where employees can see but never touch, like some blue-green kind of heaven.
Shells aren’t built for the crown worlds. There’s no point. Nothing can come close enough to threaten them, not without being turned to vapour a thousand times over. We’re made for the hard ground on their borders, and the places they mean to keep but don’t have the raw firepower to hold. The deserts and tundras and volcanic wastes where their factory-cities live.
That’s where the quirks come in. Each company has its own mix of fire and dust and dirty ice, weather patterns and atmospherics you have to live somewhere to understand. The hardware gets made to match; everything from a whole living shell to the boots its ground crews wear around their hangars, built to take advantage of every quirk and peculiarity.
Once you’ve been flying long enough, you start to notice it. Everything is easier when there’s friendly ground beneath your feet, and hostile skies always seem to rattle you around. It creeps into everything, even the things that ought to be the same. After a while, you start to notice it in the competition as well.
Show a jockey a silhouette, and we’ll probably tell you who built it. If we can’t, we’ll have some handle on where it lives, and the colour of the skies it’s used to flying.
The same goes for the ejector-pod coming into view ahead of us. It’s missing its skin, and most of its internals are spread around it in the dust, but even with all the damage, markings hidden by dust and carbon-score, it only takes a moment in the glare of Salt’s huge lamps.
They’re Hasei brand. The pod, and the jockey too.
The ejector landed at an angle, beached on a sand drift. A Mirai followed it but didn’t bother getting in close to make the shot. The pod was propped up like a target. High-cal rounds tore through the roof, nearly broke the whole thing in two. A few shots went wide and buried themselves in the dunes on either side. A few went high and hit the wall behind it.
Salt stands close and pans his big lamps up and down. The wall runs floor to ceiling, made of the same bricklike stuff as the pillars. It’s still solid, but you can see where Sigurd’s munitions struck. There’s light on the other side.
“What do you think it is?” asks Salt, running fingers across the surface.
“A bulkhead, maybe,” says Hail, picking her way across the remains of Hasei’s shell.
“No,” I say, “it’s the foundation.”
Hail and Salt look back at me.
“Check your bearings, count your steps. The Lighthouse is right above us.”
The both of them go quiet, waiting while their machines do the guesswork.
“And when you’re done, you can take a look at that.”
They turn, following the marker I’ve just planted in their eyes, then take a second to work the angles, trying to find a bullet hole that’ll give them the best view. They crane, trying to get a look at the thing resting in the sand on the other side, but they don’t need any more than a glance. It’s mirror-black, with familiar curves and stencils.
“What is it?” asks Hail, as much for herself as the rest of us.
“I can’t tell from here, but one thing’s for certain: it was built by Sigurd-Lem.”
WE LINE OUR shells up against the wall. Salt’s machine gleams up ahead, casting craggy shadows in the light through the bullet holes. Hail stands right behind him, not much more than a shadow in the glow. I’m behind her, still listening for any sound on the other side.
My jacks don’t tell me anything we don’t know already. We’ve been at it ten minutes or so, Hail and I listening for vibrations, Salt cycling those huge eyes of his. As far as our instruments are concerned, the space beyond is sterile. That doesn’t mean we’re taking any chances.
The Juno and I would always have been at the back of the line—we’re both the lightest, armour-wise, and the slowest. That probably wouldn’t have stopped us before, if it wasn’t for our hand. We’ve got the rifle balanced on our wrist, with enough grip to get two shots off, provided we aimed the first one low and worked the trigger fast enough. After that, we’ll be lucky just to keep a handle on it.
The Juno works the machinery in our right arm, flexing mechanical muscle that doesn’t feel connected to anything on the other side. My hand tingles and my heartrate climbs in time with the heat of our reactor. I understand the message.
If we can’t shoot, and can’t fight the muzzle for control, we’ll just let the whole thing go. Your average jockey fights from so far away that they’ll almost never see the opposition in person, and the companies build shells to match—machines like the Decatur in front of us, with a pair of rails so long that he has to fold their muzzles back for the breach. They’re deadly at range, but they don’t do so well when you’re stepping on their toes and aiming a battering ram at their chin.
Besides, we don’t need the hand to work. We just need it to hit.
Grit your teeth, and don’t give them anything.
“Ready?” asks Hail.
“Ready,” Salt and I reply.
“Countdown,” she says.
A red light blinks in the corner of my eye. A little tone plays in my head.
It flashes, and the sound keeps time.
Ding, ding, ding—
—deeeeeee—
It turns green, but Salt’s already on the move. One step forward and another to the right, burying the foot in the sand. He drops his left shoulder and slams it into the wall. Ruddy brick explodes around him and dust fills the air.
Hail’s Spirit zips through the haze after him, vanishes just as quickly as the Decatur did.
We throw ourselves out behind her, into open air and Eye-light, panning our weapon across a bowl of powdery sand. At least, the Juno does. It rides the transition, filters shielding its lenses as they adjust to the brightness. I’m out of practice, and not so lucky. The sudden change rides down the feeds, flows across my skull.
It’s raw, and painful enough that it dumps me back in the saddle. There’s still an edge of what I had a moment before, flashes of what the Juno can see as it turns across the open, hunting. Echoes of Hail and Salt on the network.
Clear left.
Clear right. All clear.
Fading away into a wash of static.
It leaves me cold and aching, my eyes desperately trying to adjust to light that isn’t there. It makes me dizzy, cutting back and forth between the Juno’s steady senses and my own. The machine makes the call; it drops me back into the dark with a blinding migraine and a surge in my stomach.
00.00
I can’t see.
It feels like my heart has stopped.
The Juno finds me there, watches over us both while the connections reset and the saddle pumps me full of stims. Two are drugs I recognise: ModAlign and Neuregen. You can’t reboot a human being, but you can get close. They flush me down a tunnel, cloud my vision, wash my skin in shivers and sweat. Then they snap me back, root me in place. The counter flickers in the middle of my eyes, and the rest of the world filters in around it, like it’s using the little light as an anchor. The numbers come to rest where they should be, but they’re a long way short of the limit. I know we were higher when Salt breached.
Seems there’s a reason they put a cap on it.
“Rook?” is the first sound I hear for certain, followed by the dull rumble coming in through our feet. Hail stands in the middle of our vision, looking down on us.
“Lost you there for a second. Everything okay?”
“OSEv,” I croak. Operator Strain Event. It’s when a jockey hits the wall and dips into shock for a heartbeat or two. It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t quite the truth. I’m not about to tell her that I’ve been running past the limiters.
I clear my throat, force myself to breathe. “It’s under control.”
Her shell nods. “We’re in the clear. Take it easy.” There’s a pause, and something that might be a sigh. “You’re going to need it.”
Why—
The word doesn’t make it all the way to the tip of my tongue. The Lighthouse opens up above us, galleries spiraling all the way to the top of the tower we saw outside, framing a distant spot of the passing sky above us. The wind flows in through the gap, and follows the corkscrew down to the ground. An eternal hurricane spins around us, powered by the Eye itself.
It’s moulded the floor around us into a bowl. A small patch of stone shows right in the middle of it, but the dust climbs up against the wall, giving everything an awkward slope. Drawing us toward the centre.
A hunk of Sigurd steel lies in the sand—a narrow capsule, sealed tight and covered in company glyphs. It isn’t alone.
A statue stands over it, buried to its shins in the ruddy sand. It’s made of the same stone as everything else in this place, features ground down by the perpetual whirlwind. It has two arms: one ends abruptly, shattered at the elbow, and the other has a hand with six long fingers, wrapped around the handle of something that could only be a sword.
It’s tall, but that only exaggerates the curves of its limbs, the strange set of its spine. A pair of wings rises from its shoulders, tips curving around to meet each other in the middle above its head like a giant halo. Its face reminds me of Hail’s Spirit: smooth and unnerving, with the lightest hint of features underneath.
The Hasei wreck is where we left it; there’s a deep furrow where we set our knee and used the dead shell for cover. Now that I’ve got the time to look, it’s worse off than I remember. It was killed in a stand-up fight, withered by the steel wind. There’s a little body heat left, but only just enough to show in infrared.
There’s something else, behind the warmth. Something that sparks and tingles on our skin.
“Reactors are bleeding,” says Salt, just behind me. “They hit it hard.”
Hail peers past him. “Any sign of the pod?”
The Juno looks over to where the Mirai had been before we lost it.
I have to turn our head. My first instinct is to point the way, but our damaged right arm cramps at the thought and our left hand’s full of rifle, so I blink a quick marker instead. I don’t want to look too hard. “Over there. Look for Hasei’s colours.”
Hail vaults the wreck and follows our faded footsteps between the pillars. The pod flashes into view under the Spirit’s lamps, fading again as she turns to look for the jockey. Or what’s left of them.
“Christs,” she whispers.
The line is silent for a moment.
“This is what you saw, isn’t it?” The Spirit clenches a fist. “You were here”—it looks over its shoulder—“and we were over there.” The angle changes. “Which puts that Mirai at twelve o’clock. Maybe half a K.” Her shell looks down suddenly as it hits something in the sand. An orange plate skips away into the dark.
“We kicked foot that same piece of scrap.” The Juno and I roll up behind her, adding our headlamps to the scene. “And this is what we saw.”
An ejector pod, opened up by massive gunshot wounds. They’re close-range and methodical.
Hail breathes deep. “Lear wasn’t the first.”
“Not even the second,” growls Salt.
I’m expecting his pale shell right behind us; the helmet adds a vector to his voice—tweaking levels to give direction—but always keeps the volume high enough to hear. When we look back, there’s nothing to see. Infrared brings him into view a few hundred metres clear. Five reactor-cases light up around him, warm sparks on a field of purple and grey.
Salt stands in the middle of a wasteland. Carbon streaks mark the stone around his feet and draw little glassy circles where burning munitions baked the dust. The pillars around him are still standing, but worn down from thick trunks to narrow cores by a gale of hypervelocity shot.
There should be five wrecks to match the five powerplant units, but I’m not sure I could point them out. Even with Hasei’s bright colours and Sigurd’s mirror-black, it’s impossible to tell where one machine ends and the others begin. The companies aren’t in the habit of colour coding the insides of their shells, and what’s here has been carved up, spread wide. Give us a week and we still wouldn’t find it all.
The reactors didn’t fare much better than the shells that carried them. Two are still intact; one of Sigurd’s little suns, one of Hasei’s silver supernovas. Two more are almost there, but hairline cracks run across them, their contents haemorrhaging into the cold. One has lost containment, both heart-chambers compromised 60-70%. It doesn’t hurt us; our skin is thick and our parts are sturdy, but that doesn’t stop the strange sparks across our eyes.
Putting a hole in a reactor-case is difficult, breaking one more so. Easier to kill the flesh and blood riding in the saddle.
If the cores are out in the open, casings cracked and shattered, then—
“What happened to the jockeys?”
The Decatur aims a finger, raises markers on the net. “Two Sigurd ejectors. One—and two.”
The first is almost close enough for us to touch. “Clean break. No damage.”
Salt marches on the other. “More of the same. Hatches sealed. No squealers.”
No emergency beacons, no radio, not even a strobe light. Nothing. An ejector can keep a jockey alive for days, assuming nothing leaked or was damaged in the fight: but it’s the last ditch. They have to survive everything else dying around them, and the chances are they haven’t. And if they have, someone still has to find them.
Ask a jockey how they’d like to die, and most will opt for hot and fast and flying. If you weren’t a jockey, you’d assume it was an ego thing; that’s what we signed up for, right? A blaze of glory, rendered in burning steel and exploding magazines. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. No one wants to burn to death, even if it’s what we all expect. It’s just better than the alternative.
Every so often, a patrol will turn up an intact ejector, a mummified jockey still resting inside.
Fallen pods are where we keep our nightmares.
“It’s cold.”
Salt rumbles. “Hollow?”
“I’d put money on it.”
Hail hangs back, watching. “Any orange?”
“Over here.” Salt’s words turn to a growl. “Christs. Tally one.”
“It isn’t a tally if someone murdered them,” says Hail. Her voice doesn’t have Salt’s distant thunder, but that almost makes it worse. “We’ve got five cores and three pods. Find me the other two.”
Something orange catches our headlamps. Dammit, I really want to look away. “Got number four over here.” The Juno pulls us away, aims our eyes at something else. I let it. “Jockey tried to run on foot.”
Hail doesn’t let me drift. “Just need number five.”
I take a deep breath, and the shell matches the feeling, the little ember of our reactor warm inside our chest. We pick through the wrecks, but it looks exactly the way I’d expect.
Hasei and Sigurd tripped over each other in the dark and tore each other to shreds. We find dead missiles, and a couple of live ones too, tipped from their tubes. Piles of unusual brass, and a few of the rounds themselves. Long tracks from railgun shots. Armour in sheets and fragments, whole limbs and severed fingers. One of Hasei’s hammerheads, still intact, wide eyes peering up at us from the dust. But no ejector.
“I’m not seeing anything.”
“Keep looking. It has to be around here somewhere.”
“I’ve got it,” says Salt. “One moment.” We watch as he traces something we can’t see. His shell is hot and loud, but it’s got eyes like nothing else. “Dead and cold, just like the others,” he says, but: “You’ll want to have a look at this.”
ELEVEN
ONE MACHINE SHOULD look just the same as any other; after all, the wind doesn’t care what badges you’re wearing so long as there’s a point in your snout, a curve in your wings, and enough fire in your engines to keep you up and flying. You’d think the companies would all just find the meanest shapes they could, build them over and over, pausing only to change the paint scheme.
They don’t. NorCol’s design bureaus like slopes and crags, tips like beaks and spines like feathers. Sigurd rounds its edges, fits everything into brutal frames that look like they could break you down by hand, and covers them in that strange mirror-finish that hurts your eyes. Hasei likes bright colours, and silhouettes that don’t make sense until they’re upside-down and pulling twice your gee.
There’s a reason for it: adaptation.
The Articles give the Colonial Authority final say over any volume of space that happens to contain a human being—at least, that’s the theory. They’re supposed to be what keeps us all in line, the biggest stick in human space, but they can only reach so far. The companies all keep colonies of their own, so far from the shallows that they might as well be a different species. Cities staffed with citizen-employees, managers who run their own boroughs, and governors with seats on the companies’ massive boards.
When you’re that far out, there isn’t much the Authority can do to keep the peace, and the companies will always find things to squabble over. On the frontier, that usually means solid ground. Stable worlds are rare, and even then, they have a habit of being deserts, only just fit for human life, give or take a few decades’ terraforming. There are a few that are shear with ice, and even fewer where it melts for more than a moment every few months or so.
There are temperates, but only two that are anything like the little blue marble that started this mess in the first place. Jotunheim is one, and Sigurd-Lem holds it tight. Kildare is the other, and it’s NorCol’s crown jewel, out of bounds to anyone and everything. A pair of dreadnoughts watches its skies, and a trillion extra stars mark the minefields out beyond. It has two moons, but knowing the company, they’ll be all dug out, innards replaced with anti-orbital batteries so big they’d sink a planet.
It’s a prestige project, and I’d put money on Jotunheim being Sigurd’s version of the same. Held up where employees can see but never touch, like some blue-green kind of heaven.
Shells aren’t built for the crown worlds. There’s no point. Nothing can come close enough to threaten them, not without being turned to vapour a thousand times over. We’re made for the hard ground on their borders, and the places they mean to keep but don’t have the raw firepower to hold. The deserts and tundras and volcanic wastes where their factory-cities live.
That’s where the quirks come in. Each company has its own mix of fire and dust and dirty ice, weather patterns and atmospherics you have to live somewhere to understand. The hardware gets made to match; everything from a whole living shell to the boots its ground crews wear around their hangars, built to take advantage of every quirk and peculiarity.
Once you’ve been flying long enough, you start to notice it. Everything is easier when there’s friendly ground beneath your feet, and hostile skies always seem to rattle you around. It creeps into everything, even the things that ought to be the same. After a while, you start to notice it in the competition as well.
Show a jockey a silhouette, and we’ll probably tell you who built it. If we can’t, we’ll have some handle on where it lives, and the colour of the skies it’s used to flying.
The same goes for the ejector-pod coming into view ahead of us. It’s missing its skin, and most of its internals are spread around it in the dust, but even with all the damage, markings hidden by dust and carbon-score, it only takes a moment in the glare of Salt’s huge lamps.
They’re Hasei brand. The pod, and the jockey too.
The ejector landed at an angle, beached on a sand drift. A Mirai followed it but didn’t bother getting in close to make the shot. The pod was propped up like a target. High-cal rounds tore through the roof, nearly broke the whole thing in two. A few shots went wide and buried themselves in the dunes on either side. A few went high and hit the wall behind it.
Salt stands close and pans his big lamps up and down. The wall runs floor to ceiling, made of the same bricklike stuff as the pillars. It’s still solid, but you can see where Sigurd’s munitions struck. There’s light on the other side.
“What do you think it is?” asks Salt, running fingers across the surface.
“A bulkhead, maybe,” says Hail, picking her way across the remains of Hasei’s shell.
“No,” I say, “it’s the foundation.”
Hail and Salt look back at me.
“Check your bearings, count your steps. The Lighthouse is right above us.”
The both of them go quiet, waiting while their machines do the guesswork.
“And when you’re done, you can take a look at that.”
They turn, following the marker I’ve just planted in their eyes, then take a second to work the angles, trying to find a bullet hole that’ll give them the best view. They crane, trying to get a look at the thing resting in the sand on the other side, but they don’t need any more than a glance. It’s mirror-black, with familiar curves and stencils.
“What is it?” asks Hail, as much for herself as the rest of us.
“I can’t tell from here, but one thing’s for certain: it was built by Sigurd-Lem.”
WE LINE OUR shells up against the wall. Salt’s machine gleams up ahead, casting craggy shadows in the light through the bullet holes. Hail stands right behind him, not much more than a shadow in the glow. I’m behind her, still listening for any sound on the other side.
My jacks don’t tell me anything we don’t know already. We’ve been at it ten minutes or so, Hail and I listening for vibrations, Salt cycling those huge eyes of his. As far as our instruments are concerned, the space beyond is sterile. That doesn’t mean we’re taking any chances.
The Juno and I would always have been at the back of the line—we’re both the lightest, armour-wise, and the slowest. That probably wouldn’t have stopped us before, if it wasn’t for our hand. We’ve got the rifle balanced on our wrist, with enough grip to get two shots off, provided we aimed the first one low and worked the trigger fast enough. After that, we’ll be lucky just to keep a handle on it.
The Juno works the machinery in our right arm, flexing mechanical muscle that doesn’t feel connected to anything on the other side. My hand tingles and my heartrate climbs in time with the heat of our reactor. I understand the message.
If we can’t shoot, and can’t fight the muzzle for control, we’ll just let the whole thing go. Your average jockey fights from so far away that they’ll almost never see the opposition in person, and the companies build shells to match—machines like the Decatur in front of us, with a pair of rails so long that he has to fold their muzzles back for the breach. They’re deadly at range, but they don’t do so well when you’re stepping on their toes and aiming a battering ram at their chin.
Besides, we don’t need the hand to work. We just need it to hit.
Grit your teeth, and don’t give them anything.
“Ready?” asks Hail.
“Ready,” Salt and I reply.
“Countdown,” she says.
A red light blinks in the corner of my eye. A little tone plays in my head.
It flashes, and the sound keeps time.
Ding, ding, ding—
—deeeeeee—
It turns green, but Salt’s already on the move. One step forward and another to the right, burying the foot in the sand. He drops his left shoulder and slams it into the wall. Ruddy brick explodes around him and dust fills the air.
Hail’s Spirit zips through the haze after him, vanishes just as quickly as the Decatur did.
We throw ourselves out behind her, into open air and Eye-light, panning our weapon across a bowl of powdery sand. At least, the Juno does. It rides the transition, filters shielding its lenses as they adjust to the brightness. I’m out of practice, and not so lucky. The sudden change rides down the feeds, flows across my skull.
It’s raw, and painful enough that it dumps me back in the saddle. There’s still an edge of what I had a moment before, flashes of what the Juno can see as it turns across the open, hunting. Echoes of Hail and Salt on the network.
Clear left.
Clear right. All clear.
Fading away into a wash of static.
It leaves me cold and aching, my eyes desperately trying to adjust to light that isn’t there. It makes me dizzy, cutting back and forth between the Juno’s steady senses and my own. The machine makes the call; it drops me back into the dark with a blinding migraine and a surge in my stomach.
00.00
I can’t see.
It feels like my heart has stopped.
The Juno finds me there, watches over us both while the connections reset and the saddle pumps me full of stims. Two are drugs I recognise: ModAlign and Neuregen. You can’t reboot a human being, but you can get close. They flush me down a tunnel, cloud my vision, wash my skin in shivers and sweat. Then they snap me back, root me in place. The counter flickers in the middle of my eyes, and the rest of the world filters in around it, like it’s using the little light as an anchor. The numbers come to rest where they should be, but they’re a long way short of the limit. I know we were higher when Salt breached.
Seems there’s a reason they put a cap on it.
“Rook?” is the first sound I hear for certain, followed by the dull rumble coming in through our feet. Hail stands in the middle of our vision, looking down on us.
“Lost you there for a second. Everything okay?”
“OSEv,” I croak. Operator Strain Event. It’s when a jockey hits the wall and dips into shock for a heartbeat or two. It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t quite the truth. I’m not about to tell her that I’ve been running past the limiters.
I clear my throat, force myself to breathe. “It’s under control.”
Her shell nods. “We’re in the clear. Take it easy.” There’s a pause, and something that might be a sigh. “You’re going to need it.”
Why—
The word doesn’t make it all the way to the tip of my tongue. The Lighthouse opens up above us, galleries spiraling all the way to the top of the tower we saw outside, framing a distant spot of the passing sky above us. The wind flows in through the gap, and follows the corkscrew down to the ground. An eternal hurricane spins around us, powered by the Eye itself.
It’s moulded the floor around us into a bowl. A small patch of stone shows right in the middle of it, but the dust climbs up against the wall, giving everything an awkward slope. Drawing us toward the centre.
A hunk of Sigurd steel lies in the sand—a narrow capsule, sealed tight and covered in company glyphs. It isn’t alone.
A statue stands over it, buried to its shins in the ruddy sand. It’s made of the same stone as everything else in this place, features ground down by the perpetual whirlwind. It has two arms: one ends abruptly, shattered at the elbow, and the other has a hand with six long fingers, wrapped around the handle of something that could only be a sword.
It’s tall, but that only exaggerates the curves of its limbs, the strange set of its spine. A pair of wings rises from its shoulders, tips curving around to meet each other in the middle above its head like a giant halo. Its face reminds me of Hail’s Spirit: smooth and unnerving, with the lightest hint of features underneath.
