Hullmetal Girls

by Emily Skrutskie

  And then a world sprawls out before us.

  The surface ahead is star-baked and desolate. I heave in a deep breath, my mask fogging when it washes back out again. I wish I could smell it—the rocks, the dust, the thin layer of algae that coats the plain ahead of us. All I get is plastic and bottled air. I squint my apertures, my vision zooming in on the hazy spine of a distant mountain range.

  It’s so still. So quiet. For the first time in my life, there’s no rumble of distant machinery, no whisper of recycled air streaming through vents. The only noise is my breath, my heart, and the internal hum of my Scela power. I try to wrap my mind around the planet’s size, the lonely speck we make on it. Our squad, the marshal, and the pilot. No other people within billions of miles. Nothing but the fuel in our engines to save us from the gravity keeping us pinned on this world’s surface.

  “Welcome to Alpha 37,” Marshal Jesuit says. “As far as the scientific analysis from the initial scouting has revealed, the only thing this world lacks is breathable air. Your tank is your lifeline. Pay attention to your levels. A minute without air and you’re unconscious. Seven and you’re dead.”

  I check in with my exo to make sure it’s reading the tank. It is.

  “Your rigs should keep you protected from any dangerous environmental elements, but if any of you get an open wound, report it immediately. I’ll be at the edge of your system like usual.” Marshal Jesuit stands at the head of the exit ramp, her hands on her hips, and information pours into my exo. A beacon, a terrain map, a countdown. “Today’s exercises will be a test of how your squad performs in a completely new environment. How cohesively you can function when faced with the unfamiliar. You all now have a deadline and set of coordinates to a location on the planet’s surface. Get there before the time expires. Good luck.”

  Our exos flock us together as we flood down the ramp and out onto the rough, rocky ground, past the glow of heat still radiating from the shuttle’s engines. With the same target uniting the four of us, our minds link up in perfect synchrony. Key plunges ahead, taking the point of our formation. Praava and I flank her, while Wooj brings up the rear.

  And we run.

  They try to approximate a sky on the ships. The habitat domes, with their painted, faded blue. I hear in some frontend starships, they even project shifting clouds onto the arched metal ceiling. But now I’m staring at real sky, sky that reaches miles above my head, scattered with graying wisps of haze. Nothing can compare. Even the vaulted ceiling of Gym Deck seems claustrophobic. It has visible boundaries. This world feels limitless.

  Our boots plunge into the dirt, leaving deep tracks behind us as we plow across the open plain. The countdown urges at the back of my neck, each number peeling away like a layer of skin.

  The target flashes in my vision, distant, but the space between us is closing with every pump of my legs. A boulder field lies ahead. Flat ground to our left. But Key doesn’t divert. She runs the squad straight into the uneven terrain, vaulting over the rocks. I feel Wooj stumble, but he catches himself on his hands for two strides and then he’s after us again.

  The boulders fly past us, our hands skimming over them as we wind and twist. I can feel my exo reading the landscape, taking my vision and transforming it into a map that I flow over like water. My breathing and heartbeat align with Key, Praava, and Wooj, and we push ourselves as fast as we can go. Nothing less will do with this much at stake.

  The scattered rocks give way to larger slabs as we approach their source, a towering cliff face that juts out over the landscape. We thin down to a single-file line, and I take the point, dodging back and forth between the massive boulders. At the base of the cliff, I hesitate, letting my HUD map a climbable route.

  Every second that ticks by burns into me as I wait for my direction. I can’t stand it—even though the path is only half calculated, I lunge forward, my gloved hands digging into the stone as I scrabble for handholds. Praava’s fast on my tail, then Key, then Wooj, each of them slotting their fingers into the spaces where mine went before.

  The star’s heat blazes down on us as we climb, but I savor the sensation of its energy melting into my skin and metal. In the Fleet, starlight is cold and distant, kept at bay behind hullmetal. But here, with dirt beneath me and sky above, the warmth embraces every inch of my body.

  The exo loves it too, I think.

  There’s a crumbling noise beneath me and terror spikes through our exosystem as Wooj latches on to Key’s ankle. A mess of conflicting signals floods out of him—none of our exos can make sense of them, but the human parts of us know what’s going on. He’s getting distracted by the stress of the assessment. It’s devouring his thoughts and making it easier for the glitches to slip through. Wooj grimaces, ducks his head, and grabs for a rock hold before any of us can ask a question. He presses us to keep climbing.

  So we do.

  I summit the cliff, then Praava, then Key, Wooj lagging slightly behind us. Something vicious and animal takes over Key as she lunges to her feet—her urge to reach the target is so strong that she almost takes off. Waiting around for Wooj is weakness, and it’s going to keep us from an elite assignment.

  Praava stops her, first with a hand locked around the back of her rig, then with a forceful mental grip that keeps her pinned in place. Key struggles to break free, but I lend my strength, and our combined will reduces her to a seething mass, heaving against her casings as we wait for Wooj to make it up the cliff face.

  “It doesn’t count if we don’t make it there together,” Praava chides her.

  Key bares her teeth. The expression’s warped beneath the mask but inescapable in the exosystem. It gets a twinge of sympathy from me or my exo—I can’t really tell which. There’s something that aligns between us. Even if I don’t agree with her reasons, I know in my gut that I want this just as badly as she does.

  Wooj is still struggling, his HUD frantically insisting on the path as he tries to grab the handholds. He’s so close. But his exo is flailing. It feels like half of him has been torn away, and what’s left is scrabbling to keep its hold on his mind. “What—” he chokes, and his exo convulses against his spine.

  He can’t glitch on us. Not now. I drop to my knees and reach out, my fingers scraping along the ridge of his armpieces. “Grab on to me,” I grunt.

  But Wooj is locking us out, his exo raging inside him, and his grip slips. I lunge down to stop him, but Praava darts forward and snatches the back of my rig before my momentum takes me over the edge of the cliff. With one last burst of strength, Wooj lashes out and catches an outcropping.

  It shatters under his grip.

  All our exos flood with his panic, with the sensation of falling. Every rock he strikes on the way down pummels into our nervous systems. When he hits the ground, the exosystem evaporates with a blinding flash of white.

  I blink, suddenly and horrifically stuck in my mind and my mind alone.

  Praava shakes her head next to me. I reach her mentally, but the system is gone. “Did it—” She chokes, muffled through the mask. With her headpiece down, I can’t see her eyes, only the flicker of her cameras’ lenses as they roll frantically. “Wooj!” she shouts, stumbling for the edge of the cliff.

  I grab her shoulder to steady her, worried she’s about to go the same way. Key steps up beside us, her lips set in a grim line as she leans out over the edge. “Woojin?” she calls, her voice wavering somewhere between fury and concern.

  His body is a small, crumpled speck at the base of the cliffs. I zoom my cameras in, my breath frozen between my ribs as I search for movement, for any sign that he survived the fall. My exo’s in a frenzy trying to beat down my distress, but if he’s dead, if we failed—

  He shifts, rolling onto his side, and my enhanced hearing picks up a faint groan. Praava yelps, lunging forward again. “Careful,” I shout after her as she starts to spider her way back
down the cliffs.

  To my surprise, Key plunges after her without a moment of hesitation. “Move your ass, Un-Haad,” she shouts, cutting a haphazard path down the crumbling handholds. “We can salvage this.”

  I’m after her in a flash. I hate that this gets me moving so quickly, but Key has a point. If Wooj isn’t too hurt, we can get him moving again. We might not be breaking any records, but we still have a chance to finish our assessment and make an impression.

  Hand here. Foot there. I let the exo puppet me, the growing distance from our target burning in the back of my mind. By the time my feet hit the ground, Wooj is on his feet, his back to us, turning his arms over and over as he checks his rig for damage.

  He turns around. His mask dangles from his chin, nothing but a warped, twisted hunk of metal and plastics.

  “Shit,” Key hisses.

  I check my internal clock. The amount of time that’s passed since the exosystem evaporated.

  Unconscious in a minute. Dead in seven.

  But it’s been two minutes since Wooj hit the ground. Praava fumbles with the straps of her mask, stepping toward him, but he holds up a hand. “Guys,” he says. “Nothing’s happening.”

  Praava shakes her head. “Maybe it’s slower for Scela, but—”

  “No,” Wooj retorts more firmly. “My blood-oxygen levels are stable. My exo’s saying nothing’s wrong with my body. I mean, I’m bruised as shit, and I think my rig’s pretty banged up, but nothing’s wrong with this air.”

  At my left, Key inhales sharply, the sound strangled beneath her mask. My exo protests inside me, but its denial just makes the truth more starkly clear.

  Alpha 37 is habitable.

  Well, this is bullshit.

  With no exosystem between us, I have no way of gauging my squadmates’ reactions. Their faces are impassive, their eyes hidden behind their headpieces, their muscles impossibly still. I feel like I should be running, but the target’s no longer pulling at my consciousness. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go or what I’m supposed to do.

  Though the exo resists, I reach up and unlatch the mask from my headpiece. This is it. This is the planet we’ve been waiting three hundred years for, and I don’t care if my neural systems say otherwise—Woojin Lih doesn’t get to be the only one breathing its air. I rip the plastic away from my face and inhale.

  Something goes quiet in me as the fresh oxygen floods my lungs. For one shining moment, I’m at peace with myself and whatever I’ve become, because this planet is mine. I didn’t even know I wanted it so badly. My empty spaces don’t feel anywhere near whole, but maybe I don’t mind it so much now.

  Aisha follows my example, tugging at her mask’s straps.

  Praava keeps hers on. “They’re gonna kill us,” she mutters. Even though our exosystem is disabled, my headpiece’s hearing picks up the hollow fear in her words.

  “Why would they?” I retort. My exo urges me to come up with a logical explanation for what’s happening, struggling to keep me away from the inescapable facts. “Maybe it was a miscalculation. Maybe the air is a slow killer. The General Body’s been world-searching for centuries—there’s gotta be some reason—”

  “Fractionism,” Woojin says, like it should be obvious. He brushes some dirt out of his rig, swaying slightly. “The General Body wants the human race to assemble neatly under their rule. The seven-district system only works within the Fleet.” His jaw tightens, and I know his exo is struggling to accept what he’s saying. “We land, and all that goes to shit. There’s no obligation to be united under the General Body when we’re off the ships, free to expand, and we have an entire world to settle.”

  “You sound like a propaganda cast,” Aisha spits out. Her tone is defensive, just like yesterday.

  Woojin shrugs, a wasteful motion in a full exorig. “I’ve listened in on my fair share, but I’m just saying—that’s what they’re scared of. That’s why they’d cover up something like this.”

  “What if they’ve done it before?” I mutter, and feel the cameras of their rigs snap to me. “Other Alpha worlds. We could have—” Turmoil rises in me, the exo trying to curb my voice. It doesn’t feel like part of my body anymore. It’s a parasite, I’m the host, and now my holes have never felt bigger.

  Aisha nods along with me, and I know she’s thinking of her siblings. Of her life in the backend of the Fleet. Of how unnecessary the whole system is if we could be building a new way of life on this planet.

  “Ratna,” Praava breathes, going still like something’s just hit her. “Ratna was investigating the origins of the wasting fever. The consensus has been that the fever is a mutation of a different disease that was already aboard the Fleet, but she said they were starting to look into a more niche theory that the disease was terrestrial in origin. They must have looked too closely at the data from the recent discovered worlds and found things that didn’t line up.”

  “And maybe the Fractionists got wind of it,” Aisha says with a nod. “And that’s why the riots targeted your sister’s research center.”

  And the General Body vented the ship to keep them from reaching it. I don’t dare say it aloud. Instead, I heave in another breath, trying to settle back into the exo’s embrace.

  Aisha’s lips twitch like there’s something more she wants to say, an extra dot she’s connected, but after a moment of waiting, it’s clear she isn’t ready to share it just yet. It’s fine—I’m not sharing everything I’m thinking either.

  A nudge from my exo lifts my arms, and I reluctantly press the mask back over my face. The blast of air that hits me tastes sterile, filtered beyond recognition and compressed into nothing, but it makes the exo happy. It sinks back against my spine.

  But I can’t shake the fact that there was real air in my lungs. Molecules in my body that came from a planet’s atmosphere. If I had any of Aisha’s reverence, I’d call it a holy moment. None of this seems real.

  “So,” Woojin says, rubbing at a bruise. I’m almost jealous—his full rig protected him from the fall, so much so that he probably won’t need any clamps or endoscopes to put him right. “Now what?”

  “We have to go back,” Aisha mutters.

  “They’re gonna kill us,” Praava repeats.

  “We’re fucked,” I say, just to round it out.

  “Hey, there’s a whole habitable world out there,” Woojin replies with a sly grin. “We could always take our chances.”

  But I can feel my exo urging me back toward the shuttle, and I’m sure a similar impulse is rattling through my squadmates’ systems. The only real option left is to face the consequences of our discovery, whatever they may be. Woojin tests his legs, shifting and flexing until he’s sure that his rig is still functional. Then, for the first time, he leads the squad, setting off into the boulder field at a steady jog as the three of us flock in his wake.

  * * *

  —

  The marshal catches us before we’re halfway back. She thunders to a halt in front of Woojin, her rig flashing in the starlight as she snaps her headpiece back. “What the hell happened?” she asks, and even without the system, I feel the moment her disappointment shifts to cold betrayal at the sight of Woojin’s mangled mask.

  Her eyes narrow, and a click at the back of my skull sends me rocketing back into the exosystem. Only this time, we have a fifth participant fully present in all the intimacy of a small system.

  Her presence washes over us in a new light. This is Marshal Gwen Jesuit. Thirty-five years old, Scela for fifteen of them. Born in the Fourth District. Mother. But before we can go too much farther, she pulls herself back and takes a step forward, towering over us as she approaches. The exosystem boils—rage from her, fear and anxiety from the rest of us.

  “So—” Woojin starts, but Marshal Jesuit’s exo throttles his speech before he can get another word out. We’re insignificant next
to her level of control, and as she yanks us in mentally, all four of us flinch at the simmering fury waiting for us there. A wary hum runs up the backs of our necks, a threat if we try to speak out of turn.

  Back to the ship, she orders. Hurry. Lih, try to hide that thing behind your hands. We have to protect the shuttle pilot.

  If the marshal’s afraid too, we’re even more fucked than I first thought.

  She turns and sets back off the way she came at a punishing pace, and we spill after her. My stunstick wound aches as my arms pump, and across the system, I can feel Woojin’s body groaning with near-constant complaint.

  And now that we’re reconnected, my thoughts flood with Aisha’s indignation—not just over the secret we discovered. She had so many hopes for today, so many dreams riding on getting an elite assignment. All of them now lie shattered at her feet. She’s looking for someone to blame, someone to punish. Woojin for falling. Me for rushing Woojin.

  I don’t think Aisha Un-Haad realizes what a profoundly angry person she is.

  When we reach the shuttle, the marshal ushers us quickly into the cargo bay and seals the ramp behind us. We’re forced to keep up the ruse of the masks as the air filtration systems whine overhead, replenishing the hold. When at last the hum shifts from a low rumble to a steady whine, Marshal Jesuit lets us take them off.

  No speaking out loud, she says in our heads. We keep this as quiet as possible until we know for sure what’s going on here.

  We do know what’s going on here, I retort. This world is habitable.

  This world is survivable, she counters. Certainly more survivable than we thought. But “habitable” could be dependent on other factors. We need to stay calm, and we need to lock down this information. If it gets out, it could set off a panic that might not be justified.

  Aisha drops back suddenly. I flick my thoughts her way and find her…smaller. Heavier. Weighed by something I don’t understand, something she’s not sharing. She shoves me away.