Steel Frame, page 9
We turn to watch Hail again. She lines us up and marks something we can see. A little dark spot against the glow, and a thin strip of shadow out behind it.
“See that?”
We do.
The clouds shift around it, but it doesn’t seem to move.
“Is that a rock?” asks Lear.
“No,” I say, “it’s matching our orbit. Look.”
But Hail shakes her head at me. “Other way round, and yes—you could call it a rock. It looks like one up close; a rock for all that you could tell the difference, but it won’t behave like one.”
“Artificial,” I reply. “That’s what you said. You called it artificial.”
“That’s because it is. That and almost every scrap of rock out there. Built, engineered, whatever. There are four more above us and eight behind us, all moving at the same speed. All keeping the same orbit from the Eye, for what that’s worth in a place like this.”
“Horizon’s moorings.”
“Everything sinks towards the centre, given enough time. Everything except these rocks. Without them, the storms would have us all over the place, and Horizon would have to burn just to keep from sinking. We don’t know how they do it, how they keep their altitude, but we stopped trying to figure it out a while back. Truth is, we need them.”
“There are others, then?”
“Thousands. Hundreds of thousands, millions. Some are small, no bigger than this room. Others are bigger than Horizon. Some aren’t much more than balls of dust, but NorCol’s found things that look like hangars, weather stations, cathedrals, and shapes we don’t have names for. So far, everything we’ve found has been uninhabited, but we’re still paddling in the shallows. A little deeper in, that might still change, we might find something that makes sense of all of this. But the truth is, we don’t know much of anything. None of this is human-origin, but nothing is natural either. That’s it. That’s what we’ve got.” She offers us a nasty smile. “This is your new day job, convicts. You are my new recovery team.”
“Recovery? You mean like—”
“Like the diplomatics do? Yes, only the Authority has too much on its plate to keep a Diplo crew flying out here, so the companies have taken over. Whatever anyone will tell you, NorCol is here to pick the bones of a dead civilisation. Same goes for everyone else.” She takes in our expressions, softens her smile just a little. “Welcome to the froth.”
SIX
RIGHT FROM THE moment I open the door, I can feel the Juno watching me. It’s back in its cradle. Someone has salvaged a new door for the front of it—stripped off something obviously intended to hold a Decatur. It’s supposed to be a form-fit, with hatches and windows; instead, it’s angular, all crags and odd geometrics, with ragged holes cut into the sides. And whoever put it back up took the time to weld a couple of deadbolts over the top, locked them into the concrete on either side. The welds are still black.
I look up at where the Juno’s head would be, hidden behind the ugly panelling. I can feel its eyes.
I’ll get you out of there.
I march on the nearest NorCol uniform. “You.”
He looks up at me, blinking.
“Name?”
He gawks for a second before catching up. I can see the fight brewing, even before he knows it himself. The hairs on his neck stand up, and some dry comment perches on the tip of his tongue, something about jockeys minding their own business.
I hold my ground, work my fist. He wouldn’t be the first knuckledragger I’ve laid out on the deck. “Something wrong with your hearing?”
“Avery,” comes out in a choke.
“Avery,” I repeat, filing the name away. “Who put those locks on my machine?”
“Kadi,” he says, without a moment’s hesitation.
He flicks a glance at my helmet. I’ve got it resting on two fingers, hanging by its chin guard. Three kinds of bonded composite, metal plating over the top, combat marks and badges jingling. The skull-bucket in the middle of it all is built to take a bullet, front and centre. Probably worse than bullets, but I’ve never had reason to test that.
His eyes check off the helmet and skip to my waist. Different units have different loadouts, but he can see the big pistol on my hip, and he’ll know about the nasty sawback blade in the small of my back. I can see the calculations rolling around inside his head.
His job doesn’t count much fighting, and you can see that from a K away. His fingers are fine, covered in clear oil, rather than the muck and grease you’d get on a mechanic. His patches mark him as the senior ’dragger for this block, but by the look of him, he’d be happy to be left alone with the avionics.
He’s already worked out I wouldn’t go for the knife or the gun. That would be too much.
No. He’s seen the same thing before. A bar fight, probably. A jockey panting in the middle of it, heavy helmet like a bloody wrecking ball. Avery maps his teeth out with his tongue, like he’s taking a moment to remember how many there are and what they all feel like.
If there was going to be resistance, it evaporates. After all, this isn’t even his fight. Sul Kadi seems to be in charge, but Avery is the first point of contact. Kadi can only shit on him when he’s got the time and inclination, and being the boss knuckledragger means that he’s almost always bingo on both. Avery will be attached to this particular block. He’ll have to deal with me every day.
“I’ll pull the locks,” he says, already spinning on his heel. He wrangles a pair of greasers on the way, snaps at their heels.
“Already the big dog on deck,” says a familiar voice. “Didn’t take you very long.”
I turn to find Folau, or rather, half of him, leaning out from a tangle of wires and belt feeds. It looks like part of the fire-suppression system, the casing bent around the Juno’s fist.
“Didn’t take you long either.”
He sketches a gasp. “What are you suggesting?”
“That thing’s scrap, at best. Whatever you’re doing isn’t going to save it.” I lean in. “But anyone looking for their newbie greaser might miss that you were here.”
“Are you making out that I’m anything but a model em-ploy-ee?”
“Seems that way, doesn’t it?”
Folau grins at me. “I guess it does. That a problem?”
“As you were, greaser.”
He disappears, gets back to whatever it was he was doing before. “Aye aye, chief.”
I shake my head and leave him to it. Knowing Folau, he’s probably overqualified for whatever Avery has him doing.
The other knuckledraggers are fighting and sweating on the scaffolds around my shell. Whoever put the bolts in did it quick and dirty, like they were trying to sneak it in while Hail and I were on the other side of the hangar.
I grind my teeth. Kadi doesn’t have much to worry about from fresh meat like me and he knows it. I’ll have to find some way of returning the favour, make sure everyone’s clear on where they’re standing.
I’m still simmering when I look up and find the Juno looking at me. It’s only half a head—three eyes down one side, peering through an awkward gap in the steel. The lenses are perfect now, and I can feel them on me.
I pull my helmet up and over, run through the seals and pressure checks. I let it settle and blink my way through a sync.
20.01, says the counter in the middle of my screen.
28.12
The floor falls away under me, and the hangar block spins with my head at the pivot.
31.48
I swallow hot spit and fight to keep myself standing. “Too soon,” I manage, gasping. “Too soon.”
24.17
11.62
5.59
1.00
And I can breathe again. My head feels lighter than the rest of me, and my vision clouds around the edges, but I’m still standing.
The Juno is a subtle pressure now, like a finger resting on my skin. I can feel its eyes on me, but not much more than that. It’s the feeling of someone close by, or a light breeze on your neck.
“Thank you.”
The machine warms at me.
Christs, I’ve missed this.
Avery interrupts my thoughts. He’s got his crew knocking the big bolts free with hammers, the steel shrieking as they go. I grit my teeth and turn away. I’m not sure I can watch.
I push through the airlock separating the block from the rest of Hangar D, then onto the pad, looking out at the flipped city where two hundred other shells live. It’s close enough that I can feel the Juno still, but too far away to hear the clanging.
Hail finds me there.
“There are others, you know.”
“Other shells?”
She leans against the guardrail next to me. “Lear and Salt have brand new Decaturs. I’ve got a line on one more, if you want it. It’s the M661, variant F. Factory-fresh. Paint’s still tacky.”
But I’m shaking my head before I’ve even decided how to answer. “I can’t.”
Hail nods but holds herself steady. “There’s a Spirit as well, if you want, same as mine. Six-forty-four, M-variant. Heavily modified for ops in the froth, and probably one of the fastest machines on Horizon.”
“I can’t.”
10.79, says the counter, just a heartbeat before it drops back to 1. The Juno is listening to us.
Hail crosses her arms. “Why?”
I’d say it was the machine itself. Kadi needs an excuse to get rid of it, and Hail will do anything to keep it. A jockey using it for day-to-day is the only way to keep it on our deck. But that would be a lie.
“What is your score?” I tap my visor, right above the place where the little counter flickers on my display. “With the Spirit, I mean. What kind of sync do you get?”
She cocks her head. “Enough for high functionality. I get mid-seventies in flight, solid. Peaks around eighty-one, eighty-two under load. I’ve hit eighty-five in a fight.”
I look back at the huge airlock, made to take a shell. “How far away do you think we are? From the Juno, I mean.”
“Not counting the walls?” She blows out her cheeks. “Thirty meters. Forty maybe. Why?”
“What kind of sync would you get from this far out?”
Her eyes track along the ground. “This far out? Single digits, probably. With all the metal in the way, three to five percent, if I’m lucky.” She watches me again. “What has this got to do with anything?”
“I flew a Spirit with Ten-Seven-Seven. From here, I’d probably do a little better than you, but I’d had that machine a long time.” I turn back through the access-door. “Let me show you something.”
I lead her out onto the launch-rail, halfway between the Juno’s casket and the airlock doors. The machine tracks us.
“How far, do you think?”
She eyes it. “Fifty metres. About the same as before.”
I nod and test the hangar’s local net. “Avery?”
One of the overalls looks back. “What?”
“Get clear.”
He hesitates, on the edge of mouthing off, but I’d bet that he was part of the crew that went behind my back, did work on my machine that I hadn’t authorised, Kadi or no Kadi. Another jockey might have taken matters into their own hands, made an example of one so all the others understood. I’ll let him go with a little PT.
“Understood,” he mutters.
I wait for them to hit the deck, then spread my feet, take a deep breath, and stiffen all the muscle in my core. I close my eyes, and whisper, “Carry me.”
31.44
The floor speeds away. My head feels like it’s pulled free of my shoulders. My chest fills with fire, and makes me want to choke. My arms lock up, and my knees tremble.
48.09
62.13
My lenses shift in their focus-rings, trying to bring the world back from the blur. My reactor chamber reads a temperature spike, and pressures climb. My hydraulics flex and my fists stir in their housings. My wings press themselves against the cradle.
88.71
I can’t hold it. I have to catch my head before I drop it. My stomach turns and my throat constricts. I don’t hear the sound of tearing metal up ahead, or the shouts of the technicians.
2.43
I find Hail above me, holding me up by the webbing on my suit. Behind her, the cradle stands open, scaffolds scattered across the floor, the crew clear and watching. One of the lock-bolts has broken free of its mounts, landed end up on the concrete. The Juno stands in the midst of it, unsteady, a hand on its forehead.
Just like me.
“Christs,” says Hail, eyes on me, then on the machine. “How did you do that?”
I have to gasp for air. “I can hear it.”
IT SMELLS LIKE war in here.
And I’m barely through the door. I’ve got both feet on the ladder, and my back against the wall of the operator’s airlock, listening as the outer hatch winds shut below me. My helmet would normally filter it, but my suit is trading air with the Juno’s own supply, sucking it in through one-way valves in my face plate.
There’s the smell of oil from the hinges, and a sharp tang of hydraulic fluid. The plastic stink from the shell’s air scrubbers, and the mix of solvents and surfactants that keep mould from growing in its lungs. There’s plain old grease under everything else, but then, there would always be. The more of it drifts in, the more I recognise.
Hot metal mixed with body scents; a little acid underneath and a little iron overtop. Saline and blood and burnt propellant, acrid fuel and ozone. Other things more difficult to wash away.
Meat. Carbon. Fire.
Death.
A lot of it.
An amber hazard lamp spins in its socket, and a little panel informs me that the hull is back under pressure. I work the lock above my head, and climb the last of the ladder into the cockpit. The inner door shuts without my help, cutting the yellow light away to nothing.
I stand in the heart of my machine, swallowed in the warm and dark. I take a deep breath.
This is home.
“I’m ready.”
Bulbs chatter and come to life: little ones hidden in the walls near my feet, bigger ones hidden in the tangle of cable above everything else. There are three or four directly overhead, giving the narrow cockpit a patchy yellow glow and leaving deep shadows in between. Even with the sickly lighting, the cockpit looks how I would expect, considering what you can see on the outside of its hull.
As without, so within. Exposed metal and chipping paint, every part built dull and heavy and over-engineered, built and rebuilt over generations.
I run my fingers down the wall. “You’re an old bird, aren’t you?”
Chunky welds plug holes in the pressure vessel, probably matched by others even thicker on the armour outside. I count four breaks, all about as big as railgun slugs. Four dead jockeys, if I had to bet.
“And you’ve been through hell.”
The counter spikes, and a log-stream scrolls down the side of my visor. It remembers thousands of operations, keeps the kill tallies from each one. Gun-cam feeds, mission replays, transcripts of everything its jockeys heard and said. Medical records.
Through hell, and back again.
I breathe more of the Juno’s air and feel more of its hull, soft as I can with my fingers numb inside their gloves.
I trace oil stains between clusters of bolts and open ports. The more I look, the more patches I find. Some are just the welds, but others have metal plating fused crudely over the top. Cables run between newer components, and the stand-ins for things that couldn’t be salvaged or replaced: jury-rigged substitutes hanging from cages and cable ties. Air filters jut out from sockets that don’t quite fit them, joined with tape and solder and expanding foam.
In the middle of it all, is the saddle.
It’s a little bubble of calm in the chaos, clean, and if you didn’t know what to expect, completely out of place. It looks just the way it sounds; curved and padded, shaped like it was actually built with a human body for reference. It rests in its own little depression, half a metre below the cockpit floor.
There’s a rut on either side of it, just wide enough to take your boots. In the flicks, they put jockeys in bucket seats as if they were pilots, or make them stand on open decks with their arms outstretched, as if the shell had the brains of a marching band and they were doing the conducting. They don’t understand the way a shell works.
It needs to feel you move, and so it gives you space, but only as much as it can spare. There will be impacts, and gee high enough it’ll turn you to bone-flecked jelly. So it gives and it takes away. It gives you space to move, but closes as much as it can around you, pads you so that you won’t die the first time you take a turn with your engines burning.
I’ve missed this.
“I’m ready,” I say.
The saddle rises from its hollow, and one of the consoles pops out of its sockets so I can step past. One foot in the well, and the other over the top. I slide my weight back in the saddle and it takes the load, moulding around my hips and fitting itself around my knees on either side. I do the dance, the little shake-and-shimmy when the saddle doesn’t know you yet. It adjusts, and a little window pops up in the middle of my visor, asking what I think.
Continue calibration?
I shake my head. It doesn’t feel like my old one did, but, “This will do for now.”
I close belts around my waist and over my hips, anchoring myself in place. Muscle fibres in my suit run taut, offering something solid for me to rest against. They’re the strongest part of the suit, made to keep me from folding over under load, but able to respond when I need it.
New user profile created, it replies. Begin jack assembly?
I let out a breath. “Do I have to?”
The window doesn’t move.
“All right, all right.”
I hate this part.
YOU SIGN ON the dotted line, and the first thing the company does is take a pound of flesh. That’s not code for boot camp.
I went from feet on the street to my first round of surgeries in less than a week. They put me under without a word, and pulled my civilian wetware out on the same day they put the proprietary stuff in. They didn’t bother to wipe the old OS; they just wrote it over, left some of the peripherals running in the background while the old implants went dead. I read the log from a company hospital bed two days later.
