by Joel Dane
CAVs withdraw from combat after the occupant fails to respond. They’re hosed clean of jellied flesh and splintered bone, then return to battle with new passengers, new sacrifices.
New martyrs.
Because those people save the world.
Nothing beats a cataphract-class remort except a CAV, at least not without laying waste to huge swathes of the fragile ecosystem. The regular corporate military keeps less-formidable remorts in check, but without volunteers willing to die in CAVs, the cataphracts would overrun the cities.
So I have nothing but gratitude for volunteers; there’s no higher calling if you’ve only got a few months to live. Hell, there’s no higher calling if you’re simply tired of living. Still, it’s not an easy way to die. That’s why we don’t call the CAV volunteers passengers or activators or even martyrs.
We call them cry pilots.
* * *
• • •
The first two days after my arrest, nothing happens except processing. The initial scans miss my bonespur implant; a simple charge of nonconsensual contact doesn’t require high-level scans. The third day I refuse blinders and insist on placement in the CAVs. The fourth day, I waive a legal hearing and repeat my request.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh days I spend establishing that I’m psychologically competent. I also develop a nervous tic of stroking the lower joints of my middle finger.
The eighth day, a remort attack delays my departure.
Remorts aren’t simply regenerated bioweapons from a bygone war; they’re regenerated autonomous bioweapons, self-directed by combat-optimized neural tissue and genetically engineered instincts.
And one is currently targeting a perimeter wall sixteen miles from the processing center. A gentle chime alerts the populace that the enclave is under threat, but everyone stays calm. There’s no reason to panic unless a cataphract hits, in which case the alarm sounds like a strident whistle.
The army handles ordinary remorts with fierce professionalism and few casualties. No reason to interrupt your day worrying about them. Still, I always watch the battles. The army’s first priority is defending cities against remort assaults, so if I survive the CAVs—when I survive the CAVs—that will be my life.
I trot into the lounge and follow the action on a projection. I’m hoping the attacking remorts are knuckletanks or moths, but no luck. Instead, a swarm of umires—a teeming mass of tiny assault drones—burns a swathe through the wilderness.
On the video, I watch troop transports swoop from the sky. A cloud of moskito drones swirls from their belly-vents, followed by battlesuited soldiers deploying on filaments and inside pulse-hardened rovers.
Sparks explode across the mile-long swathe of umires as the moskitos make contact. With rippling bulges and crests, the tiny drones combine into wavelike fighting units. Combat engineers throw defensive ramparts across the battlefield; infantry squads drop into position. Liquammo sizzles. Gunships fire surgical strikes—careful not to damage the terrafixing—and the umire waves crash and burn.
In eighty minutes, it’s all over except the cleanup. Twelve casualties. The umire didn’t even touch the outermost perimeter of the enclave, and I feel a spark of pride. Pride and eagerness. One day that will be me: strapped into a weapons harness, the only barrier between a killing remort and a human city. One day soon.
Except not the next day, because on the ninth day following the arrest, my scheduled departure is delayed to the tenth day.
Today is the tenth day, and in the dim glow of the transport bay, I catch flashes of the other CAV volunteers. Rows of heads extend into the darkness in front of me. The vibration of the transport shuttle makes a soothing hum.
I’m sitting between a middle-aged man with a pelt of black hair and a heavily narcotized woman. The man trembles nonstop. His hairy shoulder is a quivering animal.
“For the good of the many,” the woman chants, in a slurred voice. “For the good of the many.”
We’re not heroes, despite her chant. We’re idealistic criminals: hopeless cases caught on corporate property, unable to pay fines or wergild and unwilling to live in blinders. The real volunteers, the real heroes, are escorted to CAV deployment in luxury, after months of predeployment coddling. Every ache is soothed, every appetite is sated—and every cell is scanned.
That’s why I couldn’t simply volunteer. I needed the neglect of a convict cohort to keep my bonespur implant unnoticed.
We’re the dregs of the enclaves, praying we’ll beat the odds or looking for redemption. We’re treated well, but we’re not coddled. Alloy collars cling to our necks, and we’re wearing Y-front jumpsuits of some thin, crinkly material.
We’re risking everything on a six percent chance of surviving. At least they are. My bonespur lockpick gives me an edge.
I’ve got a fifty percent chance of seeing tomorrow.
“For the good of the many,” the woman intones. “For the good of the many.”
My seat flattens into a bed. In the darkness, my skin prickles with fear and doubt. I’m no better than these other idiots. I’m worse—I did this to myself on purpose.
I take a breath, then another, reaching for the calm of flow. Ionesca taught me this terrafixing meditation when we were kids in the refugee camp; she branded every step into my mind. And now, lying in the transport bed, I focus on the afterimages inside my eyelids. I exhale the formless shapes into a fractal pattern of leaves and roots that divide and divide and divide into a blossoming mesh of subatomic filament.
The New Growth uncoils in my mind. Flowing inside me, around me; I’m one needle in a pine forest, one cell in a starfish, one raindrop in a monsoon. My doubt stays, my nervousness stays. Hell, even my fear stays. But none of them touch me anymore: the terrafixing meditation flows me away.
And more than ever, I want to live.
CHAPTER 3
I wake to the soothing chime of tinepipes.
The light is low and golden. The ceiling of the transport bay is blue. I’m warm and relaxed from an aerosolized narcotic. I’ve never been this comfortable. Even the worst cry pilots are pampered. We’re criminals, but our sins are forgiven as we prepare to make the ultimate sacrifice.
My bed reshapes into a seat ten minutes before the transport clunks and shifts, mooring on an unseen dock. The light brightens slowly, and my alertness returns. My thumb strokes the lump beneath the skin on my middle finger.
The seats straighten, forcing the volunteers to stand. At gentle tugs from our collars, we’re marched down a ramp into a hangar where soldiers and staff mill around workstations. A projected crowd watches us with teary-eyed adoration. Children wave messages of gratitude and support. The ripple of applause sounds like the patter of warm rain after a storm.
Our collars direct us toward airbays and split us into groups. The pelted guy heads toward a boxy transport with a Shiyogrid flag embossed on the side.
You don’t see flags much. Shiyogrid governs Coastal Vegas, most of the Saharan heartland, and the Black Sea States. I’m pretty sure it controls a plurality of shares from the Myitkyina Line through Industrial Siberia, too. The sun never sets on the corporate logo, but there’s something primeval about a flag, like a banner of war. We’re long past that sort of primitivism—at least in theory.
The drugged woman is guided away, and then a last cluster of us is ushered toward a big transport airship with three thrusters and an undercarriage bay.
“Huh,” I say, climbing the ramp.
“What?” a young girl asks, moving into place beside me. “Did you see something? I mean, do you know something? Why are we in this big plane instead of the little ones? Where are the CAVs?”
“This is an Antarmadesha 220,” I tell her. “Long-range personnel transport.”
She’s slender and shivering, and built like a boy. “How—how do you know that? Are you ex-military? Are you military? A
re you—”
“No,” I say.
“You look like a Freehold ganger. Like a criminal.” She peers at me over her pointy nose, which gives her the air of an inquisitive ferret. “You look like a gutter-roach mobster sort of criminal. You look like a knee-breaker kind of—”
“I get it,” I say.
She scratches her spiky amber-colored hair. “Except criminals don’t know about military transports, do they?”
“I’ve been studying up,” I tell her. “The transports will bring us to whichever CAV deployment zone needs us, according to the daily NMI. The Needs Managed Inventory.”
“We—” She bites her lower lip. “We’re inventory?”
“We’re ignition strips,” I tell her. “Disposable keys that start a CAV’s engine.”
“To save cities! To save enclaves and Freeholds and—and entire prairies and forests. The remorts destroy the Earth too, you know, they don’t only kill people. I mean, not that killing people isn’t bad enough—”
I spot a gleam of gold in her pupils as she babbles, which means she’s a stemhead. An addict. She sees me notice and lowers her gaze.
I don’t bother saying anything else, because talking to stemheads is a waste of time. She’s a perfect example of the kind of people who volunteer for CAV: idiots and junkies who don’t understand how the odds of survival work. Looks to me like that accounts for ninety percent of my fellow volunteers, while the other ten percent are idealistic nitwits who want to value-add to the corporation as payback for their crimes.
The thought hits a little too close to home. Payback for my crimes is why I’m here, though even an idealistic nitwit knows you can’t repay the dead. You can’t undo what’s done. Still, I’ll try to save more lives than I cost. That won’t wash away my debts, but maybe it’ll help me sleep at night.
In the bay of the Antarmadesha, my collar directs me to sit on a padded bench, and then safety straps extrude around me.
“What’s your name?” the stemhead girl asks. “What did you do? Are you innocent? I’m not! I mean, I am a little, but not totally. I was in Anadarko Basin and I guess I shouldn’t have gone looking for—”
I tell her to shut up three times before she gets the message.
A handful of screens flicker into place for our in-flight entertainment, mostly confessionals and default news-chans. I watch a screen showing a blakbird drone veering into a fungus forest in the terrafixing. Shadows flash as the sun strobes behind treelike trunks. Strands of filtration moss sway from smooth branches and an animal crashes in the gloom—a gazelle or boar, or some new species recovered by the terrafixed jungle.
The view angles through a gray glade, and then a white canopy blurs overhead, freckled with hives and nests and burls. The air shimmers with insects, and a flock of birds that looks like parakeets swirls after them.
Maybe they are parakeets. That would explain the likeness.
The drone speeds past bulbous plants wrapped in gauzy shrouds. The canopy ends at a whitemoss plain that undulates into the distance, an uneven carpet of spongy life, fifty or sixty yards deep.
“Ooo!” the amber-haired girl squeals. “Check out the amoeba reef.”
I look at the far-off mesa. “It’s made of amoebas?”
She giggles. “You’re silly.”
“Sure.” I watch the drone circle a flock of flamingos in a shallow lake. “I’m ridiculous.”
The terrafixing protocol, also known as the New Growth and Edentide, is an organic stratum that covers 99.99 percent of the planet’s land mass and permeates the hydrosphere. Everything except the megacities where humans live—the Freeholds and enclaves—is now a primordial wilderness. The Growth simmers away, doing the subtle, gradual work of healing. Of transforming the depleted, polluted Earth into something sustainable and nurturing.
Maybe even beautiful.
On the screen, the flamingos’ bright green feathers shimmer in the light. One day humans will leave the Freeholds and enclaves. One day we’ll resettle a burgeoning Earth, and live like natives of our own planet again.
The flamingos fade when a woman steps into the bay, leading an autocart. “Welcome, volunteers,” she says with a professional smile. “My name is Mar Cola and I’ll be your Assignment Coordinator.”
She distributes food and drink and soft-drugs. A volunteer who can’t stop apologizing is first, followed by a scarlet-skinned woman who mutters to herself. A skinny teenaged boy is third—and the autocart crashes.
The cart reboots as the Antarmadesha takes flight. The bay dims; quiet music plays. Mar Cola recites an official greeting and expresses the gratitude of Shiyogrid Corporation and the other four corpos. She rattles off boilerplate language before saying, “I’m excited to report that you will deploy from an offshore installation to engage a rare oceanic remort outbreak.”
“Offshore?” the amber-haired stemhead girl asks. “Like, off the actual shore?”
Mar Cola smiles. “Yes, you will be engaging in a naval theater.”
“So CAVs are amphibious?” the girl asks. “I thought they were only . . . the other thing. What is that called? Land-based. Unamphibious. Mammalian! That doesn’t make sense. Mammals swim, too. What’s the opposite of amphibious. Reptilian?”
“CAVs are amphibious. They are extraordinary, developed by the AIs along with flowcore processing and—” A slight edge sounds in Mar Cola’s voice. “Stem tech.”
“Oh,” the girl says, her face falling.
And because I’m tired and scared and stupid, I find myself rooting for the girl. “Some reptiles swam,” I tell her. “Turtles swam.”
The girl brightens. “So reptiles are amphibious, too! That doesn’t make sense. I mean, if mammals and reptiles are amphibious, what’s so special about amphibians? I mean, if everything is amphibious, what is amphibious?”
“Do you have a question?” Mar Cola asks, her smile brittle. “That’s not about animals?”
“Only, what’s different about a, a naval theater? I mean, is it less dangerous than normal CAVing?” The girl looks to the other volunteers. “Oh! And hello everyone. My name is Ting.”
“Our names don’t matter,” the teenaged boy says. “We’re dead anyway.”
“In fact, the survival rate of CAV operators is currently twenty percent,” Cola tells him. “For both terrestrial and naval engagements. So of the fifteen volunteers in this bay . . .”
“Three!” Ting scratches the base of her skull. “Three of us will make it!”
Mar Cola smiles again. “And every CAV volunteer who survives is absolved of outstanding legal judgments and encouraged to enlist.”
“Into a shock troop,” a soldier mutters.
The girl doesn’t hear him, which is probably a good thing. She’d start asking if shock troops are actually all that shocking. I know what he means, though: even if we survive, they won’t transfer us into regular training, where regular recruits prepare for regular jobs in military marketing or design, culinary chemistry or engineering.
No, they send ex-criminals into combat training.
Which is exactly where I belong. Except Mar Cola lied. The survival rate isn’t almost twenty percent. It’s six. Which means if we’re lucky, one of us won’t die during our first contact with a battlefield.
CHAPTER 4
The offshore location is a military compound that rises thirty stories from the ocean. We spend the night locked inside plush, impersonal cells—called suites—around a central atrium. Apparently there’s no rush: they’re still tracking this oceanic remort and planning the attack.
The man who apologizes starts apologizing again. Ting’s voice is soft, barely a murmur, the cooing of a stemhead in withdrawal. The teenaged boy is silent.
A scarlet-skinned woman named Chiinan turns circles in the room beside mine. She sees eyes staring at her. Watching her, weighing her, judging her
. I guess that’s why she volunteered: to end her life with a contribution instead of a catastrophe.
And me? I’m trying to start a new life, but I’m dead if my bonespur implant doesn’t work. Smashed to paste inside a CAV.
I stretch out on my bunk, breathing into my fear. I’m facing a death sentence. I’m locked in a room on a military installation. There is no escape, so I shift myself into a meditative state of flow. Fractal patterns bloom behind my eyes. The terrafixing stretches from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor to the D layer of the mesosphere to every cell in my body; there is nothing outside the environment, there is nothing inside the environment. There’s no fear, no hope . . .
There’s nothing at all, until sleep takes me.
A klaxon cuts through my dreams, and Chiinan’s shout rings out: “—found me, the eyes! Looking at me, watching me!”
Mar Cola leads four sailors into the atrium. “Good morning, everyone! Your deployment was moved forward. The situation on the ground is in flux and CAVs are urgently required.”
Our doors unlock and we’re offered another round of narcotics.
“In flux?” I ask, after I refuse the drugs. “What does that mean?”
“It means changed,” Cola says.
“I understand the word, san, what I’m asking is—”
“No time to waste!” she says brightly, and the sailors herd us into a wide bright corridor with security film at the far end, below a sign reading ACCESS LIMITED/EXION CLEARANCE/C-SUITE COMPLIANCE.
Serious security film.
My heart shrinks and my knees tremble. This is my last hurdle. If the bonespur passes through this film . . . well, then I’ll face my last hurdle. The CAVs. But I need to reach them first, with the bonespur implant still inside my skin, the only edge that can keep me alive.