Hullmetal Girls

by Emily Skrutskie

  Above us, a klaxon starts to wail, and the tide of the protest falls into shaky confusion. “Hull breach is coming,” Marshal Jesuit roars, her enhanced body blasting her voice over the crowd. “Everyone needs to get to a sealed zone now.”

  The conscious people don’t need to be told twice. A cry goes up across the crowd, screams piercing the air around us as people start running. Some know where they’re going. Others look lost—my exo identifies them as potential Fractionist organizers, people who might have traveled to the Aeschylus specifically for the uprising. They follow the others in a confused jumble.

  We reach into our download of the ship’s layout, searching for the closest emergency airlock. The nearest one is a hundred yards along the thoroughfare. As we take off toward it, a ping of guilt runs through me for the people we left behind. It pushes my legs faster and faster, and we easily outstrip the humans, who dive to the side when they hear the thunder of our footfalls behind them.

  The entrance to the airlock space bottlenecks the crowd into a dangerous, seething jumble. We push our way through, our awareness expanding, our cameras flickering nervously, just in case someone has a stunstick, but it seems that having unconscious Fractionist protestors on our backs is doing wonders for our public image. People even part to let us through.

  “Here,” Key says, foisting one of her limp humans onto a pair of protestors. “Take them in. Watch their heads.” Wooj and I follow her lead until we’re unloaded, then immediately turn and start pushing back through the crowds.

  As we make it past the bottleneck, we pass Marshal Jesuit, who’s coming in with what seems like an impossibly large number of people draped over her back. “There are still a couple unconscious back there,” she says. “I think some of the protestors are helping, but—”

  “On it,” Key snaps. Purpose ignites inside her, and she takes off down the street.

  “Where’s Praava?” Wooj asks. His worry sears the space between us.

  “Best to let her follow that impulse corrupting her. Otherwise she’d be completely nonfunctional.” Marshal Jesuit hands off her unconscious cargo to the other people cramming into the breach shelter.

  “So she went into the facility?” he says, hitching his head at the building the protestors had gathered around. “All by herself, with her mind a mess, in the middle of an armed protest?”

  The marshal shrugs. “She has her breach suit. The ship’s management software will clear a path for her, so she won’t be ripping down any doors, and no human’s going to go after her with the breach alarms going off. You two stick with me. We need to make sure these people get locked down safely.” Farther down the avenue, more refugees are racing for the shelter, herded by Scela forces. Some of the Scela have children clinging to their shoulders.

  My exo does its best to tune out the klaxons overhead. I glance back, wondering how many more people the airlock can take. They weren’t built anticipating this many people in one area—the shelters are supposed to be able to support the ship’s population, evenly distributed throughout the living quarters. It’s already tightly packed.

  The pitch of the klaxons changes, and my heart sinks. The Scela run faster, grabbing whomever they can. Their pounding feet echo my pounding heart. The air draws tight around me. “Get inside!” Marshal Jesuit screams, wrapping her arms around the people nearest to her.

  It’s too late.

  We’re too late.

  The Aeschylus is venting.

  I’ve never known wind. The air circulation systems on every starship I’ve ever been on have been gentle creatures, barely noticeable. I’d seen casts, of course, taken from discovered worlds, from inhospitable planet surfaces, from Old Earth, showing the menace of weather that the void has protected us from for three hundred years.

  Now the void is reminding us why we need to be protected from it too.

  The rational part of my mind knows that I’m in my breach suit. I’m still breathing, even as the air explodes out of the ship.

  But something irrational is taking over me as I freeze in the middle of the thoroughfare. It feels like it’s rising up out of the holes, clawing out of the emptiness to seize my brainstem. The exo fights back, trying to stuff this worming, strange sensation back where it came from.

  My eyes land on a person gasping for breath as the air goes thinner and thinner, and that thing bucks and thrashes against my exo’s hold. Is it compassion? Concern? That raw emotion the marshal warned us about? But I’ve felt those things before—admittedly in smaller doses than the others—and the exo never fought me like this. What’s so different about now?

  My cameras flick erratically from person to person. The Fractionists around me have no protection from the void. The conscious ones flounder and gasp, the unconscious ones going stiller and stiller. My exo urges me to detach from them. It’s the only way to save my mind from the horror of the inevitable.

  I glance back at the shelter. The airlocks are already sealed. There’s nothing I can do for the people around me.

  For the second time today, a larger exosystem snaps me up. I plunge into the stream of minds, all of us electrified with the new order pounding into our skulls. I search for the marshal and my squadmates, but none of them are here. We’re all the Scela still outside the breach shelters, and we’re being ordered to—

  No, I rebel. I can’t.

  The twisting, scrabbling thing inside me fights against it, but my exo urges me to stoop, and the will of the order bends my legs.

  I shouldn’t—

  My fingers close around the hilt of a protestor’s discarded stunstick. They turn the knob to its strongest setting.

  All around me, the other Scela move back and forth through the stragglers, dolling out the flash of stunsticks’ mercy.

  A sick feeling twists in my stomach that the exo does its best to remove. I’m not supposed to have a heart anymore. I’m not supposed to care that we’re killing these people left and right. Is it cowardly that I’d rather let them die painfully by the void than easily by my own hands?

  It’s a peaceful way to go, the exo wills me to understand. A brief, painful jolt is better than the agony of asphyxiation and vacuum exposure.

  I lift the stick.

  I bring it down. I force my brain to disconnect, force my emotions to quiet, stuff whatever that thing was back in the holes that riddle me. But there’s some part of it that never goes away. No matter how many times I touch the stick to skin. No matter how gently I do it. No matter how hard I do it when doing it gently doesn’t work.

  My only consolation is the exosystem. It’s somewhere between a current and a song, the voices of dozens of minds in concert flowing through grief and anger and frustration. Some are furious at the Fractionists, their strikes rough and thoughts red-tinged. Others are torn apart at the thought of killing—we’re supposed to be defending these people, after all. But every last one of them doesn’t want to be doing this, and it keeps me steady, knowing I’m not alone. For maybe the first time, I’m truly glad to have other people in my head.

  I force myself to watch as I do it. To bear witness to these people’s end as they stare right back at me, clutching their throats. I rip back the fetters the exo has slammed down over my cameras and expand my gaze until I can see absolutely everything around me. The quiet, motionless bodies, and the ones that still twitch with life. There’s a camera crew creeping through the thoroughfare, breach suits on, but undoubtedly human underneath. Their lenses twist and focus, bending low to catch details on the dead and nearly dying.

  Something unsettling rattles through me. Something the exo is trying to keep me away from.

  One of the camera crewmembers turns and spots me. She hoists her device, her hands flying over the controls as I find myself pinned by her gaze. An echo of my dreams shudders up my spine. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in the face of it, so I
just stare back at her. She seems like she exists in a world completely removed from the one around her. Her breach suit is polished and athletic, clearly not a Fourth District issue.

  In fact, everything about her seems First District to the practiced eye. She must have flown out to cover the protests. Of course the First District–based news cycle would want to get prime material for the cast that will inform the rest of the Fleet of what happened here. It’ll be a devastating blow for the Fractionist movement—this mindless destruction, this meaningless death. No one even seems to be sure what the objective of the protests was.

  The woman turns her camera away, and I let myself breathe easy.

  Then the thought hits.

  She’s wearing a breach suit.

  She came from First District.

  She’s here moments after the Aeschylus vented.

  Her suit’s not from this district.

  We’re all wearing breach suits. All of us Scela. It was part of our mission. We knew it was going to happen.

  The machine along my spine reminds me that the General Body is good. I already know this. I know the work they do—the work we do for them—is for the benefit of all humankind. The Fractionists are the ones who would vent a ship. They melted the Kronos, and they ripped the Aeschylus’s hide open the moment the tide of the protest turned in favor of the Scela enforcers. It’s them. It had to have been them. The General Body wouldn’t slaughter a group of people for show. It’s part of their mission statement to bring all of the Fleet to the next habitable world when we finally find it.

  I try to let that notion soothe me.

  It doesn’t take. As the order in the exosystem mutates, urging me to move the bodies to a lower deck, the mismatched pieces itch against the back of my mind. I pick up as many corpses as I can carry, and try to ignore the way their fragile deadweight scalds me.

  Up above, on the habitat’s domed ceiling, a few Scela crawl toward the location of the breach with tool belts and patch kits. The hull will be fixed within the hour, the ship will keep flying, and we’ll all pretend this tragedy could have been avoided if it weren’t for the Fractionists starting the protests in the first place.

  I can see the casts already.

  I can hear the rhetoric.

  I can feel the cameras on me.

  All at once, my drive to defend the Fleet feels like a construction. Like something the exo is forcing into my brain and my muscles and my sense of purpose. The memories I’ve been striving to recover, the rewards the exo’s been doling out for work well done—what if they’re just bait to keep me from the truth?

  My muscles lock tight, and the exo presses down a wave of pain as they strain so taut they feel as if they might rip. Scela strength pulses against what’s left of my human flesh, trapping me in the cage of my metal.

  I have to get past this. I can’t be the Scela I need to be, can’t pull myself to the level that’ll put me right if I’m doubting.

  But the doubt is in my veins, and I can’t flush it. Like something’s woken in me. Like the edges of my holes are leaking.

  I reach out for the exo, and it lends me enough strength to shut down that line of thinking. To push through. I let the exosystem sweep me up and lose myself in the greater whole.

  But when I drop off my last load of bodies, the exosystem relinquishes me. In my own lonely brain, my thoughts run wild.

  What happened to the Aeschylus—I grapple with my exo to fully form my treasonous suspicions. It fights and fights, trying its best to protect me, but I can’t stop the puzzle pieces from clicking together. The conspiracy unfolds like this: The General Body is alerted to another uprising. They send in Scela to shut it down, all the while planning to breach the hull and lay waste to the area. If they’re lucky, they take out a few important Fractionists among a whole lot of innocents. They send in camera crews to make sure the whole thing gets captured. To make sure it’s clear the Fractionists are to blame. The General Body looks like heroes, their masses of hyperpowered soldiers rushing to save as many people as they can. Protecting. Defending. Always acting in the people’s best interest.

  It’s not true. It can’t be true. It’s treason just to think it.

  Besides, with our position in the Fleet so uncertain, now isn’t the time to be doubting the General Body that gives us our orders. We’re far enough right on the rankings board as it is. I stuff my wild theory down into the recesses of my holes, praying the others won’t find it there when we reconnect. I can’t put this kind of thought anywhere near Woojin, who couldn’t contain the idea if he tried; near Praava, where it might mix explosively with her gut instinct to defend her sister; or near Aisha, who would just use it as fodder for her rampant anxiety.

  I’d be better off forgetting it entirely. I seem to be good at forgetting important things—why can’t this be one of them? But my theory won’t unstick. Not with the crippling uncertainty that grows in me with every breath of reprocessed air I take. Not with the bodies around me. Not with the feeling in my gut that I owe something to the people who lost their lives today.

  The unfocused eyes of the dead surround me, pleading for the truth. And all around, the void offers nothing but silence.

  The howl of the breach winds has quieted to nothing as the vacuum takes the place of the ship’s air. I’m swallowed by the murmurs and whispers of the humans who surround me inside the breach shelter. We’re packed as it is, but as I look around, all I can think is that we could have fit so many others.

  I scan the faces around me. Most of the humans have pressed themselves back against the walls, as far from the Scela as they can get. Marshal Jesuit keeps one hand clasped around the hilt of her stunstick, just in case. There’s no telling who in the crowd is armed and who among them are stupid enough to try taking us on. The other Scela who made it into the shelter cluster around us, near the doors. Mercifully, the marshal has kept our minds separate from the others, but our exosystems are rattling with an unfulfilled order—once the hull breach is patched and the doors are opened, we’re supposed to start making arrests. A transport has already docked on one of the sealed levels of the ship, waiting for us to fill it.

  My aunt may not be part of this cell, but these Fractionists are her people. The ones who would rip a ship open the second the tide turned against them. A sinking feeling wraps around my stomach, and the exo shudders under the weight of the secrets it’s been keeping bottled up inside me. Aiding the Fractionist rebellion seemed right this morning. I thought I understood their point of view. I thought I saw value in doing anything it took to get humanity out from under the General Body’s thumb.

  I thought it was worthy.

  But I can’t understand any point of view that justifies what’s happened to the Aeschylus.

  Un-Haad, Lih. Marshal Jesuit nudges into our exosystem. We’ve got a special assignment. Her voice is hesitant, still tinged with her anger and frustration at not being able to control us. Once the doors open, we have orders to regroup with Tanaka and retrieve Ganes. Apparently she’s found what the Fractionists were trying to get at. Or rather, who.

  Ratna, we all think at once.

  Ratna Ganes and her team, the marshal confirms. They’re at the heart of this, somehow.

  A new connection flares up as our linkage to Praava restores. Her relief washes into the system, and it’s easy to forgive her when she’s beaming, her smile Scela-wide. Ratna’s safe, Praava says. She and her team made it to an airlock within the facility. I’m outside it, waiting for the all clear.

  For a moment we inhabit her body, shivering with anticipation in the little corridor outside the airlock. Ratna hasn’t seen her sister as Scela yet, and Praava’s scared to pieces of what her reaction will be. Wooj and I push a little encouragement into her exo, and her spine straightens.

  When we pull back into the breach shelter, I can feel a hint of an approving smil
e drifting from Marshal Jesuit. Something tells me we’ve just moved leftward on the board.

  * * *

  —

  The temporary patch takes exactly twenty-five minutes to install, with another five to restore the ship’s atmosphere from the ancillary supplies. The crowd presses closer and closer to the shelter doors, anxiously peering around the Scela as creaks and groans rattle through the ventilation systems outside.

  A countdown starts up in our exos. Ten seconds until the doors open.

  Every passing moment is a prick against my skin. I know what’s coming.

  When the airlock hisses open and fresh air comes rolling in, the humans sigh in relief. But it doesn’t last. Cries of alarm echo off the walls as the Scela leap into action, pulling away the protestors they’ve identified.

  The three of us slip through the tumult of the arrests to find Key waiting for us outside.

  She rejoins the exosystem with her guard up as usual, but even so, it’s easy to tell that something’s shifted inside her. The emptiness doesn’t come from her holes anymore—there’s another hollow feeling consuming her now, one she assures us we can’t possibly relate to the moment Wooj and I ask what’s wrong. The power levels of her enhancements are lower than ours. She spent them carrying the bodies down to the nearest intership deck. Her walls lock her away from the rest of us, and she follows at a slight distance as we make our way to the research center.

  As we enter, we pass a team of Scela elites, made distinct by the white striping painted across their exo ridges. They carry unconscious humans in tactical gear by their ankles, making it look as easy as lifting a sack of groceries. The protests were cover, the marshal says with a nudge. While most of the Fractionists made noise, this team of infiltrators was attempting to break into the labs upstairs. The elites got to them before they made it—though apparently the infiltrators benefited from an unmanaged Scela clearing a path through the building.