The encampment leaches oil stains and trackmarks onto the wastes like a tumour. The transport crawler roars as it takes you in. Out of the gun ports you can see almost six klicks,the smog clearer today. The wastes are rugged out here, plates of ice rising into sudden cliffs and crevasses wide enough to swallow a tank. The crawler winds a path between sinkhole and ridge without slowing.
You are headed to disciplinary battalion 92.
The crawler passes a row of imprints on the ice. Deeper than the tracks, a mechanical exactness like a metal-stamp slammed into clay over and over again. Motile Armoured Chassis. Mechanika. Mech.
You recognize the footprints. Not your model: an RY-24, not quite old enough to be a relic. Just obsolete. Dreiker Forgeworks stopped production years ago. Too expensive, too complex. Not enough armour.
For this one to have lasted so long…
The crawler churns ice as it speeds closer, the radio in the cabin crackling as your approach is confirmed. Around you the soldiers mutter and wrap their coats tighter around them. They are returning from a week of leave, home in the combine cities. You have watched them brace for the moment they step foot on that ice for the whole journey.
At the end of the crawler the new recruits have a hot light in their eyes, fresh and raw in their augments. They natter. Joke. Their pallid jaws work at something invisible in the moments when they are not laughing.
The ice crunches beneath your boots as you find the officer you are to report to. Onerwrassi Hersiche is a good man, they had said. There is a position open for an operator under his command as the backup operator for a mech, far, far away from your disgrace.
A floodlight illuminates the dockyard as the man next to you turns his head. “Welcome to the edge of the war,” he says, the buzzer on his throat filling his voice with static.
You do not bother to make reply—
FORGET
—reaches almost to the canopy strung over the trench it sits in: a wedge of machinery you would hesitate to call recognisable, let alone humanoid. Splayed across the pages of the glorified spotter’s guide you studied, arms spread in mechanical exactitude and components and statistics labelled in clean black print (twelve metres high, fifty-four tonnes, top speed of sixty miles per hour at a sprint), it seemed far less than this machine is. This is a thing with one use: to lug its casting arms, and with them to generate advantage. All else is secondary.
The Onerwrassi stops ahead of you on the clumsily-laid concrete. “Operator,” he calls. “You have a co-pilot.”
Hidden by the sheer size of the machine before them a figure turns, grey fatigues rasping as she stands to a loose attention. She does not come forward.
“They should have radioed ahead that you were coming,” says the Onerwrassi as he strides forward, half to you and half to himself. “Not your fault, soldier. She has been with the battalion long enough to develop a certain…”
He does not finish the sentence.
“Operator,” he says once he is within comfortable speaking distance. “Running checks?”
“The techs have not repaired the cracked rubber in the cockpit,” she says.
“The polymuscle in the legs is past its replacement date. There is rust on the plating. There is always rust on the plating. And you do not fix any of it.”
“There’s a war on,” the Onerwrassi says, forcing dead joviality.
Half her jaw is a botch-job cosmetic surgery, cream silicon the colour of healthy flesh next to the pitted, sagging, maggot-white skin of a corpse. Everything she says is pushed out past a grimace, flecks of spit freezing on her lips.
“Find another use for her.”
“Operator,” says the Onerwrassi. There is iron in his voice.
Her eyes meet yours. “Let me see her file. What did she operate.”
The Onerwrassi turns to you with a smile. “She can answer that herself,” he says.
“Sir, super-light infantry support chassis, Tetra retrofit, sir,” you say.
“She’s a thaumaturge? Or just a sparkie?”
“Combat thaumaturge, sir,” you reply, head high and eyes carefully empty. “I have training in offensive kinetoglyphs and basic repair of enhanced materials. I am also a precog, sir,” you add. “It’s on my-”
Her fist connects with your skull.
“Evidently not a very good one,” she spits as you straighten, your head ringing. “Next time, duck. Hersiche, get this quaterlife out of my sight and find it another mech. I will not be piloting with this degenerate.”
The Onerwrassi does not react. “This is not a priority warzone,” he says. “We are the punishment battalion. Take what they give you. Operator.” He fingers the singular iron medal below the mark of rank on his coat. You notice that the Operator has a matching patch on hers, the same symbol rendered in fabric, and below that more patches, some which that you do not recognise. The scars of victory.
The twisted flesh of what remains of her lips distorts. “Sir, yes sir,” she says. “As you command.”
She turns to you again. The floodlights reflecting off her eye-lenses render them circles of pure light, like bullet-holes into purgatory.
The wind blows ice over the lip of the trench as sh-
THERE WAS SOMETHING HERE.
“-and clean, quick and clean. That is what we did. I- you were with the infantry, yes?”
It is the first time she has asked you a question.
“Yes, sir. I was on the frontline, aiding the infantry advance with support magics.”
She doesn’t respond, staring into her thermal flask. “Quick and clean,” she says again. “Not butchery. I am a professional. I fight for a cause. Not for glory. Not to kill.” She punctuates each statement with a clenching of her fist. Whether it is for emphasis or some tic worn into the channels of her ageing brain you cannot say, though you take vicious amusement in the idea of the latter. You hate this woman, you realise. You hate that you cannot put into words the essential, undeniable difference between you and her. You hate that you do not know if there is one.
You hate most of all that you are beginning to understand her.
“Go on,” you say, conscious of every slight movement of your tongue and lips.
Her eyes focus on something on the far wall of the mess hall. “We would go in just after the tanks,” she says, quiet enough to be almost drowned out by the sharp-edged babble of the soldiery. “Cut down any stragglers, drag any vehicles stuck in trenches out, all the while dodging mortars and hardnose rounds. It was a slow game played out second by second. Hole-punch glyphs from the left arm, grav-well and shock and cutting from the right, step by step, tank by tank… if you aimed the hole-punch right you could pull the engine out whole, still buzzing. Like pulling a cork. Or if you went for the crew you could pull out a mess of half-people dripping gore. She always thought it was a horrible way to die. I thought that it was too quick for that. But she was always such an aesthetecist. Never quite got that it was just about doing the right thing. About victory.”
She takes another drag on her thermal flask.
“If you hesitate out there,” she says, “I-
CONCEAL
-torn apart by the shrapnel from the blast even as the mech’s foot slams into the still-moving form of the infantryman who had been screaming forward and waving for you to advance with him only seconds before, a time as distant and unreachable as the ordovician.
[180°,] she Blinks. You focus the rear ocular nacelle, hot-running machine gun turning the shape of a khaprateni soldier with a heatspear crawling out of a foxhole into a nothing, cancelled out of the equation against the numeracy of the bullet.
The emplacement on hill 73c is ahead, the huge anti-dreadnought railgun sat atop it disgustingly phallic in its organic-shapen brass ornamentation. Take that down and the Hydrogen Songbird can get close enough fire on Khapraten accurately enough to hit specific targets. Airfields. Warehouses. Radio towers. Train lines.
[300°. ridge. cover.] The operator is already pounding the legs, leaning into her momentum hard enough to trigger the balance sensors. She ignores them and leashes the casting arms to you as she unfurls the tertiary ones. The bunker above the small clifface hails machine-gun fire on you but as she dives to take cover, one of the tertiary arms flaring into synthetic pain as it buckles, the forearm sent tearing through the polymuscle above it. Useless. [clumsy,] you spit to her. [maintenance lacking,] she returns. [this is war.] You can feel her, pressed against your back like a twin foetus. You are sharing her sweat. Breathing her breath. Aborted in the same plastic cannister that stinks of battery acid and piss and diesel and rubber aged with another’s effluence.
You aim the right casting arm directly upwards. The mechanisms at the terminus of the stubby limb switch to your required arrangement and you feel your cheeks sallow as the glyph lights in the periphery of the oculars before the backup batteries take over and the thought of cutting splits the concrete, the machine gun, the gunner in a perforated line. The distant rattling stops.
[radio command]
[yes sir]
You tune into the nonsense of the radio. You have come to despise the command. You have come to feel that you know better. This makes it so very, very easy to obey.
Well, you think. The climber tanks have all failed to meet their targets. This will be a retreat regardless of how hard the Onerwrassi bellows down the receiver. You radio your position. Are told to advance with the tanks.
[path?] you Blink.
[provide cover fire.] She does not elaborate but to leash control of the anti-infantry systems to you.
She brings the mech to its feet. [useless,] she Blinks. [dead weight. always dead weight.] An infantry squad speeds towards you, the chest of one blooming a red flower from sniper fire somewhere on the ridge above. Blinkers on the mech’s central mass tell them to halt at your position and their lead sputters a clumsy, panicked reply. Something about climbing. You feel the Operator take control of the Blinkers and flash them a message, a raw, syntaxless mess of commands. Th-
NO. FORGET
-ou sent here?”
You meet her eyes and smile. “That is not a matter of common record, sir.”
Her eyes, biomodified films holding her heat-scarred myopia wet beneath her eye lenses, flicker. “You are a bloodbag. I don’t think you have that freedom.” The others in the mess hall have begun to quiet their conversations subtly, listening in. The Onerwrassi, seated alone at the head of the subterranean room, raises his eyes from his nutrient block before letting them settle back down.
“I embarrassed myself, sir.”
Her jaw works, the plastic and flesh flexing unevenly.
“Afraid, are you?”
Your smile tightens.
“No, sir.”
“Say it, then.”
“I-” you bow your head, working the words out of your throat. “I was caught engaging in sexual degeneracy with a civilian in a liberated shafttown.”
“You fucked someone you shouldn’t have.”
The words are hot and leak sweat. “Yes, sir.”
“They a civilian and you an Operator. I wonder how consensual that was.” She is smiling. You can see the yellowed ceramic of her teeth. She is enjoying this.
“They consented,” you say, but her smile grows ever wider.
“The soldier and the conquered and consent,” she says. “What a funny contradiction. Did you bring your gun into whatever dark storeroom you took your brief plea-”
You launch yourself at her throat before she can finish. As she lets your fist fall and blood stains your pounding knuckles something enters her eyes.
As you are pulled back and away by the soldiery she stretches her arms out, bleeding where her faux-jaw’s augment bond split and laughs low and long, th-
FORGET
-arge up the ridge slows and the mech’s shoulder slams into the tank’s radiator, pushing it further into the glistering metal of the khaprateni tank.
You fire. Fire again. As hardnose rounds spark off the enemy tank’s armour the heat-sensors in the barrels tell you that you are burning yourself. But between the retreating adrenaline and the bruising over every muscle in your body you feel nothing. The tank’s barrel turns to you, the muzzle ornamented like some distended tooth-capped throat in that same perpetually wet brass. You feel the Operator spin up the left casting arm, the shuddering gravity well at the centre of the winding, glowing mechanism bursting into existence like a popped ulcer, septic light dragging everything toward it. The barrel retches, once, the sound of the chemical explosive digging through the insulation and ringing your ears as it is dragged off-course and away into the dark. You want to flinch but all but the faintest connection to your body was shut off when you jacked into the mech so instead you focus fire on that barrel as the tank that forms your human shield retorts again with its own gun, only a distant, flattened popping returned by the mech’s audios. Everything smells of smoke. Everything tastes of iron.
[overcasting cutter]
Your teeth grit as though through ten layers of cotton-wool. The places where the draw needles dig in itch like worming parasites as she uses you as a buffer for her own life-force.
The glyph readies and you watch through an ocular, the footage flickering with your waning consciousness. The shifting, irregular blade severs the barrel of the tank and cuts into the turret, sparks flying as molecular bonds are told to cease their work. There is a small explosion from within the tank’s turret and the glyph stops just as the dark begins to close in like a camera iris.
She leashes control of the legs to you. [push,] she sends.
You push, vaguely aware that the polymuscle is sending you damage warnings as she fires a line into the side of the enemy tank and drags it aside just enough for your tank to push against an unequal force and surge ahead another metre, the barrel turning to fire into the tank’s weak point.
[broadcast to command. need to find position to hold. cannot push much further.]
[yes sir.]
You radio. Over the interference and your own deafness and the weariness of old panic you hear that nothing has changed. You are to take the hill.
The tank surges ahead as its tracks dig into the sludge. You trudge behind it, a mechanical deity cowering behind cover.
[scan for anti-tank guns ahead,] she Blinks. The Operator is tired. Oh, how you want to laugh and show her how you were strongest after all, how your youth, your obedience, your talent and vigour are above all. Power, power over everything. But in the end you are both trapped in the same rubber, waiting for two kilos of steel to hit the torso at just the right angle to rupture your innards without more than denting the mech’s armour plating. Oh, the irony of the motile armoured chassis! You are poetic in half-death. Everything is laid clear in blurry ocular feeds and tinny microphones and the sound of victory being generated in a shifting, winding mess of factors. You, immense effigy to the grotesquerie of-
NO FURTHER
-in half under the pressure of your tertiary arm’s grip. The spindly limbs of the khaprateni drone spasm and then go limp as the arm-length heatblade melts to useless graphite slag in its grip. You drop it to the ice, still cowering behind the bunker. This is the last ridge. Somehow, you are winning.
A shell glances off the mech’s back and your spine rings like a struck bell. [operator, what is the plan,] you send, damning the shame.
She does not reply.
Then, burbling into your mind like a catheter full of pus, two words.
[victory, degenerate.]
She removes all component leashing from you. You are paralysed, the hindbrain twitch that disconnects your limp body from the mech severed like a ghost limb.
“Watch,” she whispers, slurring the words as she fights to overcome her own mechanically induced paralysis. You have never seen such a display of willpower, willpower that can only come from true, chemical, animal hate. “You wh- will know- what it ish- is like to- have- no- power.”
The mech moves, the sensors screaming in damage to leg polymuscle as the Operator drags the mech up and over, legs pounding as she leads the advance. You scrabble for a radio connection, unable to communicate but hearing the scrabble of confusion at your sudden charge and the Onerwrassi demanding that the tanks follow in support.
You watch helpless from the jolting ocular feed as the concrete fortress that caps hill 73c approaches, that obscene railgun crouching at the centre, too large to fire on something this close to itself. It is impossible to do more than behold the gun now, its industrial girth filling the screen with blurred yellow and unburnished grey.
The anti-tank guns atop the concrete wall turn to you, brass-cast human jaws around the barrels yawning open on mechanisms linked to the recoil dampeners as they fire. The Operator dodges the mech left, the guns tracking her and firing even as the grav-well sparks and the shots are dragged off-course, slamming off the steel-cast armour and sending two fists of pain through your innards.
[this is suicide,] you Blink, but if she can hear you she does not respond. The one remaining tertiary arm grabs the barrel of the anti-tank gun before it can fire again, dragging it forward and cracking the concrete wall before the barrel is torn clean off in the mech’s hand. Through your exhaustion and seeping terror you feel another force come to bear. Something is in the air you share. An electricity. A motive force that self-rationalises and self-actuates. An actuator driving a crankshaft driving a generator driving a gun. And the gun w-
LIQUID
-e base of your skull stings as the probe of the skulljack is slid out. The compatability check, like all the others, is a success.
“Man or a woman?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Was it a man or a woman. Or some Khaprateni halfway-thing?”
“-A woman, sir.”
She is silent, eyes scraping across yours. She wants you to stare back.
“Funny,” she rasps, “I thought it would be easier, somehow, if I heard it from you. But I just feel filthy. Filthy by association. It used to be I couldn’t live, you know. Degenerate. I was illegal. But we worked and times changed and the law changed too.”
She breathes heavily, trickles of warm breath hissing out of the breather ports on the sides of her chest. “But you are working so, so hard to bring us back to how it used to be. And I understand why they hated my- people like me.”
You are silent. You are silent and feel sick, like the meat under your augments has turned to raw sewage. You are a rotten thing. An inconvenience. A degenera-
FIREPOWER
-reaming on the radio. With a last pulse of overwhelming dispassion the railgun on hill 73c collapses into itself in a paratech cascade-failure, molten metal glowing purest white as it drags half the fortification inwards in an implosion of concrete and brass and tiny slivers of flesh, the sheer light burning the mech’s oculars hard enough to make you feel as though your eyes are washed in acid. Against your back she tries to trigger the exit hatch but i-
FORGIVEN
-he thing hangs above the battlefield-turned-graveyard, a ring of thousands of festering corpse-arms surrounding the newly-formed god-that-was-a-gun battling and digging their hands into the dripping ball of molten metal at its centre. Everything is lit. Nothing is seen. With a mechanical precision it pulses and with each pulse a new bullet-hole or shell-crater appears as though it had always been. There is no order to this. In this new world of firepower you are oh-so-neatly factored out of the equation with the force of a supernova lighting a candle, burned past wick past wax past candleholder, burning the coquettish dining room and all the guests with their silicon masks. Ash does not remain. The god takes their flesh and makes it into weapons and they do not care.
You find yourself with control of the mech. It aches with sensors it should not have. There is blood leaking where tendons grip around the metal, veins questing the fortifications of steel plate.
There is a flag in your hand, her hand, the hand of the mech. It displays the flag of the motherland. It displays the flag of the motherland.
We are at the pinnacle. Above her the god shines dimly. You wonder if this is what the sun felt like. Like a child in napalm.
We raise the flag, and receive our absolution in bullet holes.