The Hydrogen Songbird crawled.
Conservative estimates put the number of augmentees standing on the scalpel-flat concrete expanse of Emtu-Rafich’s dockyard at a tenth of the bandcities’ total population. A shifting sea of steel augment half-skulls, pale jaws set with loose teeth chattering in the cold despite the heaters set into the ground, leeching petty arguments into the brisk wind. But when the faint outline of the crawler dreadnoughts started to show through the smog- a clear day had been predicted and the precognitives and weather satellites and the charts had all proven right, just this once- the citizens called out to them like a V-Eight stormfront. High on their pillars above the crowd, holograms of the First Minister flickered on pexiglass.
“-new era of stability based on the bedrock of the latest addition to our naval fleets,” the faces chanted, and the huge mouths flickered into something like a smile. “The CCV Hydrogen Songbird will patrol our borders and the borders of our allies and bring stability to regions that were previously the domain of scavengers, criminal weapon operations, drug rings and sex traffickers. She is the embodiment of our unified national spirit and the foremost exemplar of our technological-”
Maescker tapped her on the shoulder. ||What is he saying,|| he asked.
||Glorious steel as the bedrock for peace and prosperity for all,|| Eteschen signed back, keeping the cowl of her padded cloak low as she stood at the foot of the cliff base of Emturen’s topside, the titanic concrete-skinned slab of excavated earth scraping at the upper mists like an errant tectonic plate. Below her, somewhere, was the bandcity itself, a tube of city foetal in the earth as it clung to the warmth of its gas turbines and core siphons. ||That sort of thing. Nothing new under the sky.||
The wind tugged at her coat from where she stood at the back of the crowd. She ignored it. Her eyes didn’t leave the triumvirate shapes of the crawlers as they began to emerge.
This First Minister was right about something, she supposed. The Hydrogen Songbird was immense, the two dreadnoughts flanking her- Voracious and her twin, Ravenous- barely coming to two thirds of her bow height. Of course, the cynic in her remembered that this was not the first time they had been usurped as the largest vehicles in Emtu-Rafich’s navy. The only factor in whether this was the last was if they were decommissioned before this latest cock-baring of a machine found an engineering defect to turn it to an expanding cloud of irradiated shrapnel.
The churn of the dreadnought’s tracks- the nuclear reactors at their cores silent at this distance- began to outgrow the low roar of the crowd and for a second there was a kind of silence as the citizens all paused to listen.
I wonder if this kind of unity can ever be anything but ugly, she thought. Here they stand, shoulder to shoulder, feeling passionate about anything for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe since the last parade- but it’s for a glorified processor for turning humans into wet salvage, a bureaucratic penwave that threatens slugging nuclear shells at a target forty- forty! Such engineering! klicks away. Emtu-Rafich! Glory be! Then they’ll go home and shiver while the First Minister orders another dreadnought. And behind him in the shadows, fingers steepled and hood low, is me, demanding it. WOoOOoOoo.
She masticated the thought it as the dreadnoughts crawled on. The shapes of their deck guns, the batteries along their hulls, became more distinct, the flag of the combine cities hung off every barrel and every railing on the huge vehicles, trailing leeward in the wind like iris-blue blood.
Yet here I remain, she thought, mandibles shifting into a grimace, Would you be proud, Eteschens-Before-Me? I pulled the strings you wove, listened to the same whisperings from you did. I made this city great and against all odds technology progresses, just as predicted, but nothing changes. The guns are just bigger, the war a different shape.
She felt the silicon chip that was the inheritance of thousands of iterations of her pulse coldly. From among the memories within it there came a single sensation. A hill. The feeling of sunlight on skin, the muggy warmth of a slow breeze. Grass. The smell of living earth. The memories of the first Eteschen, born under a blue sky with a yellow sun.
Her hand went to her face, feeling the transparent protein-polymer flesh. Her lips, fingerlike mandibles baring their copper-laced bone to the light, flexed against her fingertips.
Was it all worth it?
The dreadnoughts drew closer.
Yes, said her mind. For golden light.
Something flashed in her occipital.
Her hand tightened on her mandibles until the bone creaked.
Behind her eyes, in the secret wetness of her mind, she saw-
There was a great fire without fire bleeding from an orifice ringed with brass and steel and ash and a single blue spark falling toward it as the scene twisted, the inside of the Hydrogen Songbird’s nuclear cannon a dessicated corpsethroat as it retched shot after shot to the thumping of the cancer-rods of its wet nuclear heart, the nuclear mortar-rounds slick and ejectile against the bottomless sky, a writing static mass of radiation interference on an ocular sparking data into an empty skull picked by a scavenger, long-limbed, many-times-reformed, in the hazy shards of a battle two hours concluded, that ship moaning like whalesong- (you remember whalesong, yes, seas, dark oceans, that haunting sound flowing through water that still remembered being free of microplastics and oil, the immensity of finite space too great conceive of but by the edges) -as it crawls off into the dark for another target, barrels warping and shifting as cold clenches where friction had wrought heat, endless soldiers falling one and one and one with bullet holes set into them like jewels, flashing past too fast, too many to make out any marks but those sudden punctures, and around it all the shape of something huge and gold suppurating through the smog-
The vision broke and she staggered, dry-retching against the palm of her hand, raw, muddy pain registering where her fingers had almost crushed her mandibles.
Maescker touched her shoulder.
||What did you see,|| he signed.
Eteschen looked to him, eyes still flickering and leaking quicksilver light that dribbled upwards from her tear ducts as molten realities pounded through her mind. Bullets becoming mushroom clouds drifting in storm winds to form the shape of knives sliding into flesh that were paper roses in soldier’s hands withering to bullet holes weeping blood and the wet, coppery taste of organ suspension fluid on the deck of the crawler dreadnought that growled across the ice before the watching crowd, its nuclear canon dark, darker, darkest yet against the floodlights and the smog.
||Firepower,|| she signed back, and as the dye-smoking jet squads screamed overhead in performative rage her mandibles-that-were-fingers-that-were-lips split into an empty smile.