by Tim Marquitz
“Chekker! You’re amazing!”
—Thank you. The mech does not possess much power, so please strap in. And make it count.—
As Laurellyn Grey had once done a hundred years earlier, Antiquity strapped herself into the harness. It felt right, taking her great-grandmother’s seat. The last buckle clicked into place, the wall behind the chair opened and various pieces of gear settled onto her—the apparatus that would give her control over the mech. The mech adjusted for her smaller stature, the controls tightening about her, making her one with it. When the final piece of gear, a set of goggles, clicked into place over her eyes, a hum vibrated through Saph Fyre, its engines and machinery coming to life even as it kept her from death.
She was no longer Antiquity Grey. She sensed that. She was not the girl who had been raised to ignore hope. She was not the girl who had been subservient to all Solomon Fyre families, recompense for her great-grandmother’s false failure. She was not the girl who hid from the Dreadths at every turn.
As she merged with the mech, feeling its energy joined with her own, Antiquity realized she had become so much more.
And never again would she turn back.
“Chekker, did you remove the molecu-virus?” Antiquity asked.
—I removed it once I discovered it.—
“Good. I am free, then.”
Moving her limbs inside the cockpit, Antiquity drove Saph Fyre to rise from what had been her grave for so very long. The mech returned to the world, sand sliding off her like falling rain. Antiquity felt resistance in the mech’s joints, yet Saph Fyre’s systems were already expunging the decades of grit, giving her more freedom with every passing second. Through her goggles, Antiquity saw what Saph Fyre saw; she looked down at frightened scavengers, some already firing their weapons at her. She saw Manson and the other Dreadths still hiding, looks of awe on their upturned, sandy faces.
With some effort, Antiquity got Saph Fyre to hands and knees, just as the scavengers spread out on their trikes and launched a barrage of cram-missiles and spike-rips.
—Incoming fire, Grey-child.—
Antiquity braced as blasts slammed into her, pushing her sidewise. Still, they did little damage. She was happy to find their weapons were a negligible threat to her design.
She smiled inside the cockpit, made a fist. Saph Fyre hammered the closest air-trike. The vehicle and its driver vanished beneath the wastes, leaving behind a few pieces of metal in the resulting pit and little more than that.
—The Dreadths are about to be attacked.—
Antiquity turned her head, as did Saph Fyre. Chekker was right. Two air-trikes had circumvented her, driving behind to where the boys hid. Before she could do anything, one launched spike-rips at her knee, while the other fired cram-missiles at the boys.
The spike-rips hooked into her knee plating, rending parts of the joint, but Antiquity didn’t hesitate; she made Saph Fyre reach out and snatch the cram-missiles. They exploded harmlessly against her massive palm, showering fire.
Still, the Dreadths would remain in danger until the scavengers retreated or were all destroyed.
“Do you trust me, Manson Dreadth?” Antiquity’s voice was modulated, and it thundered from Saph Fyre’s loudspeakers with a slight crackle from the infiltrating dust.
The Dreadth boy made no move, even as the others gripped him in panic.
“Who am I?” Saph Fyre asked, an electronic hum accompanying the utterance.
Manson looked back toward the desert, where the scavengers were regrouping. “Antiquity Grey. You’re Antiquity Grey!”
“What is my real name?”
The scavengers were drawing closer, their numbers more than Antiquity could completely stop at once. In a few moments, Manson and his kin would be dead, unless…
Darkness and understanding furrowed Manson’s brow for a split second, then he stood, fists at his side. “You are Antiquity Angelus!”
Her true last name. It gave her an exhilaration she’d not ever felt before. It was all she could do to focus on the present.
Saph Fyre used both of her metal hands to gently scoop the boys from their perilous situation. They were scared, perhaps more from her action than from what transpired below, but it was the only way to keep them safe. And safe they had to be kept, for this to succeed.
She stood, towering over the desert wastes. She kicked an airtrike attempting to rope Saph Fyre’s feet. More circled about her. She took one step and crushed another, killing the murderous thieves within. She did not feel sorry for it. Unlike her family, the scavengers had chosen their crime.
The remaining scavengers, realizing they were outmatched, sped away, leaving their dead behind.
Antiquity took a deep breath. “Was all of that recorded, Chekker?”
—Every moment.—
She lowered the Dreadths near their airbikes. Three didn’t wait to thank her. They dashed to their vehicles and jumped on. They fired the engines right away and sped off, back toward Solomon Fyre. All except Manson. He stared up at Saph Fyre’s faceplate, but had nothing to say. She had saved his life and the lives of his brothers and cousins, and she knew he was trying to figure out why.
He would know soon. When his father and Elders watched video of the sabotage that had murdered Laurellyn Angelus. When his father and Elders watched video of him illegally screaming her true family name.
As well as saving his life.
Shaking his head, Manson walked away and mounted his airbike. He left the way he had come, leaving a small, singular trail of dust as a reminder of the path she must take as well.
“I did it, Chekker We did it. For our family.”
—For our family, yes.—
If Antiquity could have hugged her friend, she would have. “Do you think Grandmother will be pleased?”
—She will be angry, I think. And immensely proud.—
“Do we have enough power to make it back?”
—Saph Fyre does. As long as we do not return by flight.—
Delicately picking up the mort-shroud containing the remains of Laurellyn Angelus, Antiquity walked home, moving her legs in her cockpit, the mech matching her step for step. She had no idea how to use the other systems yet—its firepower, its flight—but she would. One day. It would take a little time, but it was time she had won for her entire family.
The days to come held promise for a change.
And Antiquity Angelus knew she was to forge her own destiny.
Two hundred and fifty-three days since the decisive victory over the kaiju at the Battle of McMurdo.
One hundred and ninety-six days since the UN Kaiju Defense Force had declared the successful completion of their founding mandate—the complete eradication of the kaiju from the planet.
Ten minutes since Captain Sutiya Puedpong’s standard entry debriefing for her new position had been tilted utterly sideways.
“Sir,” she said in the first discernable break in Major Akisato’s clipped summary of her new duties, “I was told that I would be doing the assistant handling for Pilot Dolly Madison II.” Sutiya felt pleased about her tone of voice, which had betrayed no panic at all. Not for nothing had she spent three years as the platoon leader on a kaiju ground engagement crew—in that job you either developed nerves of steel or you ended up shipped out as a gibbering mess.
The major gave a long, level look over the tops of her glasses, then took a deliberate slow sip of her tea. Sutiya had seen this particular approach before in commanding officers. The trick was to never indicate discomfort, no matter how long the silence lasted. Akisato gave it another minute, then set her cup down on the desk with an audible clink.
“Pilot Madison II is no longer available to the KDF. She has been recalled to America.”
Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO
Sutiya blinked. She’d spent the first eight years of her career with the KDF as a backup handler, before moving on to platoon leader, then four years as a recruit trainer after injuries had left he
r unfit for the front line. She’d been away from the pilot programs for a long time, but eight years was eight years. For a pilot to no longer be available for handling, even though her transfer orders to handle that pilot had come in only two weeks ago, was certainly no great anomaly. The simple fact was that the lifespan of a pilot in the program had all the reliability of a thoroughbred at the racetrack. Horses broke down for any number of reasons. So did pilots. Sometimes a pilot suffered injuries that required them to be taken off the active roster while they were rehabbed back into shape. More often, pilots were rendered permanently unfit for the fight, had to be euthanized, and a replacement decanted at the primary amnio tanks in Geneva.
Sutiya had never heard about a pilot being recalled. And as for recalled to America, well, it was certainly the truth that Pilot Madison II was under the aegis of the American military, American money had funded her development, an American patch would’ve decorated the sleeve of her uniform, American schoolchildren had probably put her glossy PR poster up in their bedrooms, and an American flag would’ve been draped over her inevitable coffin, but she’d been decanted in Geneva, trained at the KDF facilities in the Alps, and any trips she might’ve made to her country of ownership would’ve been merely in the course of her duty as a mech pilot.
“As of thirty-three hours ago, all of the remaining American pilots have been recalled to their home soil,” Major Akisato continued. “Also recalled were their mechs, which of course were the property of the United States military. All American support personnel were also withdrawn. As of twenty-eight hours ago, the same has been true of the Russian resources, followed almost immediately by the Chinese.”
Sutiya didn’t gasp, because years of fighting in humanity’s greatest conflict had shown her that melodrama was rarely useful, but her carefully folded hands did twitch spasmodically. All the countries of the world, when faced with humanity’s certain doom, had poured money and resources into the combined military of the KDF, but the Big Three had, between them, comprised five eighths of that military.
Which shouldn’t matter anymore, she reminded herself.
After all, humanity had won. The kaiju were nothing but rotting meat spread across the remains of their great breeding ground in the frozen deserts of Antarctica. Sutiya had a montage of the officially-released photos loaded onto her phone so that whenever she woke up from a nightmare she could just cue it up and stare at the proof that humanity’s great enemy had been sent to join the dinosaurs.
“The official announcements will undoubtedly be made in a few days,” Major Akisato noted, her face and tone so bland that Sutiya could only imagine the towering extent of her personal fury at this development. “But, as I’m sure you can appreciate, this has caused some staffing adjustments on our side to continue to maintain those pilots whose countries have chosen to leave them under the authority of the KDF. Add to this, of course, the reduction of our personnel, as those who were drafted for the duration of the conflict return to civilian life, and the natural drawdown of many others as we begin to return to a peacetime world, albeit one that needs a great deal of rebuilding. And we have our present situation.” The major fixed Sutiya with a gimlet gaze. “One in which you, Captain Puedpong, are now our most experienced pilot handler.”
Sutiya hadn’t passed out since the field amputation of her left leg but, as the full weight of Major Akisato’s pronouncement sunk in, she gave it serious consideration.
Sutiya’s childhood had not been entirely ideal, given that her parents and older siblings had all been survivors of the Miracle of Bangkok, when almost seven million refugees had been stuffed into every ship or aircraft that had dared join the last great rescue effort before the entire southern Malay peninsula was given up for good and henceforth referred to as the Mosh Pit, given that it had become the preferred habitat of packs of sub-adult kaiju, but had at least been in the relative comfort and safety of the French Rhone-Alps, where her family had been settled after three years of being scuttled from one refugee camp to the next. She’d been born three months after her family arrived, ten years in age from her nearest sibling, and the only one in the entire family who had grown up with perfect French and heavily accented Thai. As a raw recruit in the French army, one of her sergeants had told her about the most important feature that she could develop as a soldier, her military hindbrain.
“It’s an organ that you develop only after years in the army,” Sergeant Mitterand had told her. “Once you do, it will enable you to continue on in even the most idiotic of circumstances, and even when your higher brain functions cry out that all is madness around you. In those moments, your hindbrain will step in, and you will simply follow all protocols until, at last, your mind can calm down.”
For the remainder of the day, as Sutiya was shown around the base’s pilot facilities, introduced to the other four handlers on staff, all of whom were taking the news that they were her subordinates with varyingly visible degrees of relief or jealousy, and walked by the base lawyer through the mountain of forms and nondisclosure agreements that always accompanied the pilot program, and finally the introduction to her new charge, Pilot Mubashirabanu Patel V, she relied entirely on her military hindbrain.
After all, it was entirely insane. When she had been a backup handler, she had been one of over twelve staff who were assigned to each pilot’s personal care and maintenance, all under the direction of a primary pilot handler who had spent over ten years in the program before being handed such a critical assignment. Now, there was one handler for each pilot, and on night and off-hour duty there would be a single handler attempting to cover all of the pilots. Sutiya frankly couldn’t even figure out how that was supposed to work (in her day, there had always been three individual staffers per pilot during non-active hours, with a designated primary handler always on the base in case of emergency combat deployment), but, by then, she’d been so ready for escape she had taken it at face value and returned gratefully to base housing.
“Sounds like a nightmare, but it can’t last for long,” Ruben said reasonably later that night, having been given as much of a summary of the day as Sutiya’s non-disclosures would allow. “After all, the whole program is being decommissioned.”
Sutiya made a noncommittal noise, then changed the subject. “Do you think that Chenpeng is completely asleep, or is there any chance that I can still say goodnight to her?” She’d eased off her prosthetic and was icing down the stump, which began two inches below her left knee, now quite swollen in protest after a day that had started before sunrise and ended just a breath from midnight.
“Completely out, I’m afraid,” Ruben replied. “Our boxes finally arrived, and after I unpacked her room she spent such a blissful day rediscovering all of her toys that she conked out halfway through dinner.”
“Longshot anyway,” she admitted. With the workload of handling a pilot on her own, Sutiya was grimly aware that her interactions with her four-year-old daughter were restricted to weekend leave for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, Ruben had received his honorable discharge papers from the South African Air Force (though almost the entirety of his career had been spent on UN bases and with KDF forces), and eagerly declared himself more than ready for full-time parenting.
A sizable portion of Chenpeng Puedpong-Mpuang’s first years had been spent in a variety of base crèches, which, though no different than many children of her generation, was something that both Sutiya and Ruben were ready to forego.
It was only after the lights had been turned out, and they were lying in bed, that Sutiya considered Ruben’s earlier comment. Technically, of course, the pilot program was in the process of being decommissioned. That had been one of the promises made at its inception, that the pilots would exist only so long as the kaiju did. Now that the kaiju were gone, the time had come to hammer the swords into plows and find peacetime work for the pilots. Given that fully ninety-seven percent of the pilots fielded in the Battle of McMurdo had been killed, it seemed like a rather strai
ghtforward proposition.
In the months since the victory, there had been a flood of suggestions for post-kaiju activities proffered in op eds, online petitions, and the stump speeches of political candidates—building bridges, clearing dangerous rubble, laying deep-sea pipeline, and certainly the very pressing topic of having to rebuild the nearly half of all human cities that had been destroyed in kaiju attacks. The problem was that there were already basic robot rigs to do all of those things—ones that were automated, or simple control suits. To bring in the mechs and their pilots would be like trying to put an F-16 fighter jet to work as a farmer’s cropduster: prohibitively expensive, and probably not even particularly suited to the work.
Which didn’t even touch on the other issue—what to do with the surviving pilots themselves, whose humanity was, at best, up for debate.
None of which was a problem for Captain Sutiya Puedpong, she reminded herself. Her job was to focus on how to do the work of twelve people herself. Nice, easy, post-war problems. At which point, she finally fell asleep.
Sutiya’s second week as lead handler began inauspiciously when the weekend handler report on her desk necessitated a pre-dawn conference with Sergeant John Shearer on the serious subject of why his charge, Pilot Mustafa Ataturk XI, was eleven pounds over his target weight, and what exactly that said about Sergeant Shearer’s ability to properly monitor Pilot Ataturk XI at the cafeteria. This had prompted an impassioned defense from Sergeant Shearer on the subject of the cafeteria, which Sutiya had to admit was not exactly unreasonable. With their numbers reduced from hundreds to four practically overnight, the decision had been made by the base bean-counters that it made no sense for the pilots to have a dedicated cafeteria anymore, and they were to use the general cafeteria from that point onwards. The pilots, possessing a dual glow of the saviors of mankind plus the tragic survivors of the Battle of McMurdo, to say nothing of a puppyish fixation on food that no accelerated growth cycle seemed capable of eliminating, had entered the general cafeteria like fallen warriors suddenly ushered into the halls of Valhalla. Gone were hordes of watchful handlers and mindful dieticians-cum-chefs who curated menus that were calculated to the individual calorie, and in their place were four overworked handlers facing down a cooking staff who regarded them as nothing short of ogres for attempting (with all the success of firefighters facing an inferno with squirt-guns) to regulate their pilots’ intake.