To your relief, the pilot who retrieves you for orientation in the middle of your breakfast is neither Gutierrez nor Chang. Tall and brown-skinned, with a nose like a hawk and a stern, fine-boned, heavy-browed face, she walks five paces ahead of you no matter how fast you go and answers your questions in short staccatos: Yes—ask Meng—no—don’t touch that—you’ll see. Fine by you. Meekly you follow her down to somewhere below level 30 (the elevator ride is long and silent) and into a wide, dim room that smells strongly of salt. This is because it is full nearly wall to wall with water, clear and green and, you see as you peer over the edge, almost unfathomably deep at one end; you can’t see the bottom where it plunges off a white-tiled cliff.

  “Acclimation pool,” says the pilot, whose name—per the dog tag around her neck (you weren’t staring at her perfectly sculpted collarbone, you swear)—is Tagouri. “You’ll need it. Floating in the pilot chamber doesn’t come naturally.”

  “Right. Yeah,” you say. “Simulated weightlessness. Sensory deprivation and, uh, the cradle self-calibrates your muscle mass and weight distribution for movement matching, so, so you don’t outpace your Titan’s speed of actuation—we learned about it in—”

  “No you didn’t,” says Tagouri. “You were told about it. Feeling it is something else entirely.”

  You shut up.

  “Most of us spend an hour in here a day,” she says. “More if you know a sortie’s coming up. Get comfortable with it.”

  Dare you ask those stormy black brows a really dumb question? “Is there, uh,” you start, “I mean, I didn’t bring swim—”

  “Pilot suit. Usually.”

  “Pilot suit,” you echo.

  “You know. Battle onesie.”

  Did, for a millisecond, the corner of her stern mouth rise a millimeter? “You’ll be assigned one before we deploy in a few days,” she says, and you startle: Days? It hasn’t been twenty-four hours since you nearly drowned in Tokyo Calling’s pilot chamber and a shudder runs through you—you can’t. Nobody told you this would happen (untrue—it was in your onboarding briefing—but you’d shoved that under your bed without looking last night).

  But she’s watching you, one perfect dark brow raised, so you manage, “Thanks. When?”

  She wrinkles her majestic nose. “Sooner we get this over with, sooner you’ll find out,” she says. Clearly she doesn’t want to be here. Suits you fine—neither do you.

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  Back in the gym on 52 she puts you through a grueling series of physical tests that would probably have left you on your hands and knees if you hadn’t already been baptized by fire in the morning by Gutierrez. As it is, you find yourself wishing you’d eaten a little more than you’d managed (a tasteless tray of noodles and some sort of salty, dense imitation char siu, choked down alone in the corner, by the big wall-to-wall digital screen that projects images of some distant and long-ago Hainan coastline, pristine and idyllic, now lost to time and the rising seas, the facsimile itself undone by freckles of dead pixels). The weight of this meal sits wrong beneath your ribs by the time you finish, and Tagouri, tablet in arm, looks disgusted as ever when you come panting back to her, but she doesn’t tell you you’re discharged on the spot, so that’s a plus at least.

  Trying and failing to be nonchalant about it, you wheeze, “What’s next?”

  “Medical,” she says, curt as ever.

  Which turns out to occupy an entire bank of floors—sterile white and blue with gleaming silver accents wrought in curves that suggest exclusive mountainside crèches further inland rather than a military outpost that clings to the seawall, more of it below the waterline than above, its foundations sunk two thousand feet deep into continental shelf. A hall of fully kitted operating rooms—half-open cabinets coyly hiding stores of stacked medicine bottles and fluid bags—here, past a thick floor-to-ceiling pane of glass, something you’d only seen before in photos and videos: floor-to-ceiling glass chambers filled with blue saline. Convalescence pods. Tagouri wrinkles her mouth when you ask, which is the most feeling she’s shown since meeting you. “If something goes wrong in the cradle,” she says, and pauses. “Electrical faults. You know. Temperature discrepancies. The kind of thing that needs full-body submersion treatment.”

  You knew this already, of course. You’d studied these pods over and over and over again in your dogeared copy smuggled under your bunk at Alcatraz. You’d had dreams some nights of the tattered remains of Rachel’s body suspended in one of these—dreams where the infused algal gels were so powerful they could revive her, regrow her arms and legs and skin from nothing, bring her shining up out of the top of the chamber like some Venus reborn. You knew, obviously, that this was impossible; there had been nothing left on a molecular level of her.

  But back to orientation:

  Mess hall, simulator wing, requisition shop, machining—a whole bank of floors, and another bank for administration, and another for the dorms. It drifts past you like scum on a canal. You’re not really paying attention to Tagouri at all (lucky you: I pay attention to everything; surveillance is in my subsystems). On one of the five observation decks at the top of base you look out and down, past the looming seawall, knuckles as white on the metal railing as the caps on the tossing sea below, and you think of what you’ve really been wanting to see this entire time. Me. A warm fluttering feeling rises up from somewhere inside you; your heart rate quickens.

  “Houston, paging Kanagawa,” says Tagouri.

  You jump.

  Is that a grin on her face? As quickly as you glimpse it, it’s gone. No time to dwell on it: All at once the base is shrieking with alarms. That flutter of feeling wasn’t anticipation at all, or not entirely, but your slow mammal heart at last responding to my own alarm from within you, a twinge of your hippocampus in time with my subsystems. (I know, as Tagouri does, that you’ll only become as familiar as she is with her own helmmaster’s alerts in due time, and hardly soon, despite all your years of training. Ah well.)

  “Come on,” she says, with a tip of her head toward the access door. “Time for a dip.”