The day your sister died they weren’t facing a class C but an F: three orders of magnitude more massive than their initial target, so at least that much deadlier, theoretically, and at least one order longer. Unit 49 was one of three on the field that day. Their casualties comprised eighty percent of the total.
Who do you remember from the tapes? Shirley Lau, then twenty-two, bright-eyed and round-cheeked, sword to Aileen Shi, who was her elder by three years; Holly Tagouri and Enika Venkatesh, and your sister, all three of them twenty-four, seasoned veterans by pilot standards. The long-gone pilots of two more Titans who lie now in rusted ruins somewhere, picked over by gulls. And the prodigy, twenty years old, Carol Chang.
Shi went first, speared through the cockpit by Mazu’s own blade, or perhaps by the bone spike of the Meg they faced—class Fs pack a punch, and it had been only a C they’d prepared for.
Mazu’s Tears had been incapacitated by then, her blades torn out; and the two lost Titans were dashed aside by the effluent from the Rift itself, seven days into the sortie, somewhere among the icebergs littering the bay grave of the Ross shelf, their black boxes never recovered.
The Sydney team lost their captain to the Rift outpouring on the eighth day. That was when Rachel decided to bring out the deus ex machina, the poison she’d woven into her own engine months before, and set fire to the bottom of the sea.
An act of selfless martyrdom, then; the reason you are here now, struggling through the digital recreation of the day your sister set off into the deep that last time. It took her and her team days of hunting to even get to the Rift, to track the original target all the way there—and you do not have days.
In your best run of her scenario you die before you’ve made it even half an hour.
-
You wake from a saltwater dream, tongue gummed to the roof of your mouth. Someone is shaking you. “Kid,” says Gutierrez, “hey, come on, you’re going to be late.”
“What—?” You unstick your eyelids from one another. You’re in the sim room, the pod you’re in empty and dark, the cuffs and harness neatly suspended above you—you don’t remember having gotten out of them, having hung them back up.
Gutierrez grins; in the gloom her teeth seem fluorescent. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, “it’s oh-four-thirty.” At the look on your face: “Holly said to be at the pool by five, remember?”
You’re all but manhandled down to level twenty-something while you try, and fail, to extricate yourself from the lingering fuzz of your time in the pod, which seems to meld seamlessly into real dreaming: the sensation of being much bigger than yourself—of having been cut down to size, limbs lost, steel flesh carved away—of being far weaker and dumber than you are meant to be. And even in the dream, in your vast true body, you struggled over and over -
“Hey, Gutes,” says Holly, “Kanagawa. Did you spend all night in sim? You look like shit.”
“Yeah,” you mumble. The acclimation pool, right. The lights are so bright here. Everything, tile floor and walls and ceiling, past a nest of steel piping and ductwork, gleams with an uncanny fluorescence that hurts your still-blurry eyes. And it smells like salt.
There is the shimmering, nigh bottomless green pool, stretching a good hundred meters away from you; and there on the other side of it are the pilots, already dressed in red and black and white and blue.
One of them is a freckled redhead whose face you don’t recognize. “Hey!” She’s waving to you, so you drag yourself around the pool to meet her. Walz, obviously. You’re surprised she’s as friendly as the rest of them aren’t.
“Hey,” you mumble, and she smiles—Colgate white—and puts out her hand.
“Hannah. You’re Kanagawa, right,” she says in an accent so distinctly NorCal it makes you homesick—“Alcatraz? Think you’re the class a decade below me.”
God but you’re a baby, aren’t you? She must see the way your cheeks flush, because she laughs. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. “It’s good to get some young blood on the team! The ladies should be proud to have you.”
You glance sideways at the rest of them, scattered by the edge of the pool, none of them so much as looking your way. Lau’s back is to you. You don’t see Carol at all.
“They’re something, all right,” says Gutierrez, who has evidently come up behind you with a silence her massive frame belies. You jump. She just winks at you, claps a hand on your shoulder jovially. “Kanagawa! Need a suit?”
You squint at the proffered pile of khaki and gray. A suit, indeed—a spare. Cadet colors, one-shape-fits-all, not dissimilar to those you wore in training days at Alcatraz.
“Wow,” says Walz, whose hair, pulled up high and tight in a thick spray, is really red, too red against the clinical whiteness—it dances in your vision. Equally eye-burning is the ring you can’t help but notice on her left hand. “They still have dusties in her size? Why didn’t Holly get her her team colors already?”
“Got busy,” Gutierrez shrugs.
“Hella busy, huh,” says Walz. “With what, the new Meg?”
“Yeah—something like that.” Gutierrez leans in. “I’ll show you to the changing room down here,” she says, in a tone that suggests Walz can’t know about it.
You look desperately back at Walz. She just smiles at you.
The changing room is gray and unremarkable, a little mildewed, blessedly secluded from the pool. Prints of schematics hang, dog-eared and curling, on the wall. Gutierrez waits with her back turned (a funny gesture of needless, outdated chivalry, you think) while you shimmy into the suit: it clings in some places and sags in others, and you wonder briefly how many cadets must have worn it before you, early after intake, not yet assigned to an active unit. You should have been among them, frankly; but if Meng wants you here, then so be it, and you push your lingering doubts (and those doubts are well deserved) stubbornly to the side.
“Done already?” Gutierrez turns and sizes you up. “Not bad, soldier. Tight around the crotch?”
“No,” you lie.
“Great! Would hate for you to try and shimmy out of it mid-mission and catch cold all over again.” She turns serious. “So this is the real deal. Don’t forget: you talk if anything goes wrong. Otherwise, shut up and follow your goddamn orders. Got it?”
“Got it.” Right. Stay out of trouble, don’t get underfoot. Simple enough, isn’t it?
But your head aches and your sight dances as you head back out to the pool; in your mind you see Lau’s accusing face, Carol saying She wouldn’t be able to keep up, and Gutierrez—Gutierrez, unseen, a miasma in red and blue and killer whale: Kid’ll probably blow herself up too if you hurt her feelings. Well, you think savagely, so much for that, because I’m here now, fuckers, and I’m your problem, orders or no. Then you’re in their midst and acutely aware of how puerile and feeble your dusty looks next to their sleek senior uniforms in full team colors.
“Ah, there she is! The woman of the hour. Good of you to join us,” says Venkatesh, and you don’t miss the undertone in her voice: ought to be faster next time. “Ladies, we all ready?”
You feel their eyes on you: Lau’s, burning holes into the tile by your feet; Walz’s, curious and infuriatingly friendly; and Carol’s not looking at you at all but into the water, and you follow her gaze and see the mirrored surface of the pool so still, so dark, it seems nearly black from this angle. But then Debrah says, “Reckon we are,” and Holly claps her hands, and the array of red and blue and black and white seems nearly to turn as one. You scramble to match.
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“Thirty minutes of acclim,” says Holly. “That’s all we get. I take it everyone did their runs in sim this morning to their heart’s content—” well, content isn’t quite the word you’d choose for it—“because we won’t have another chance. Breathe deep. Let’s go.”
“Lead the way, MacDuff,” says Gutierrez, far too cheerily for just past five in the morning on what might as well be Doomsday for you.
There’s a line of helmets, you see now, waiting by the edge of the pool, ported directly into a metal sleeve that surely houses their umbilical cords—and in front of the helmets, folded neatly against the side of the pool, are harnesses. Alcatraz didn’t have a pool at all, let alone helmets and harnesses to play-act in—why don’t they just use the sim pods, or hole up in the Titans themselves to acclimate? you wonder, not a little petulantly. But no time to ruminate. Things are already in motion, set by hands that emphatically don’t include yours.
So you follow their leads: put on the helmet nearest you, avoid Walz’s over-eager elbows, sit on the edge of the pool and slide yourself clumsily in (around you you see the rest of the pilots, the true pilots, cutting down into the water like knives, no splashing). And then, submerged, you gasp—as if the hermetic seal between the helmet and suit will somehow fail—and tumble slowly in a fruitless effort to grab the harness from the side of the pool.
“Easy!” Gutierrez comes over your mic feed loud and clear; through the vulcanized glass of your helmet you see her sleek form reach out and steady you. “There you go. Not so hard, is it?”
Oh, if only she could see your glare past the dark curve of your visor. Instead you silently slip yourself into the harness and wait for it to buoy you back up, willing your racing heart to calm, your sense of being suddenly upside down to subside.
There. The magnets in your harness sync with the embedded grid in the wall and you’re stable, bobbing gently, the saltwater cradling you like it would in your real Titan, your limbs suddenly, wonderfully weightless.
Your helmet hums to life, the ox feed opens; there is your HUD limned in green, and there is me, though I do not greet you, only a flickering dot in one corner for now. You key your mic. I read your thoughts, direct you to the frequency you’re looking for.
“Gutierrez,” you say. “You read me?”
“Loud and clear.” Still annoyingly chipper. “Why?”
“How do I get Carol to stop treating me like I’m a little bitch?”
Maybe it’s the mic quality spiking, or maybe she huffs a laugh, or sighs, or scoffs. “What,” she says, “you think I’m her best friend or something?”
What the hell kind of question is that? “Aren’t you?”
She definitely laughs this time. “Slow down, Smalls,” she says, “you don’t have clearance to ask that kind of question yet. You think she treats you like a little bitch, huh?”
You let your silence answer that one.
“Well,” she says, “I mean—fair. But why does it bother you?”
“We’re going on sortie,” you say, “in half an hour.”
“And?” For fuck’s sake.
“Well,” you say, “how the fuck am I supposed to tell her if something goes wrong when she thinks I’m not worth listening to?”
You can almost hear Gutierrez’s shrug over the radio. “Say it anyway. If she ignores you, not your problem.” And: “Gotta tell you, Smalls, she’s kind of right to see you like that. Prove yourself so she won’t. It’s all uphill from here, you get me?”
“Yeah, thanks a fucking lot, Gutierrez,” you say, “real helpful.”
“Oh, I am!” You can hear her grin. “You’ll see. And, seriously, please, just Trace. I don’t bite. Unless you want me to.”
God, she really is just one big stupid meathead. You’d love to try socking her again, but you know you’d just end up with a bruised set of knuckles and more consequences, because punching her is like punching a goddamn refrigerator, all the more because you know your technique’s as shitty as she says (yeah, okay, so maybe you are a little bitch). So you settle for glaring in her direction, which amounts to nothing at all, since she’s settled five pilots downstream of you and the tints of your helmets hide your faces at this distance anyway.
“Hey, Kanagawa.” That’s Holly. “Not going to warm up before we go in?”
Oh, fuck, right: acclim’s supposed to include running through the static forms of piloting before entering the cradle. Hurriedly you twist yourself into the approximation of Clouds over West Lake, form five, straight as you can manage. (In water there’s little to brace yourself against.)
“Yeah,” you say, “yeah, on it, got distracted.”
“Happens all the time.” Fuck, this is a shared frequency? Walz says, “To me, anyway. Maybe not to Holly. She’s good.”
As good as Carol? you wonder. How good is Carol really, anyway? Her reputation precedes her—but how much of it is real, and how much is just smoke and mirrors? (If only Ray were here to tell you herself.)
“Long as it doesn’t happen when we’re out there,” says Holly drily. “Gutes, walk us through the plan.”
“Traces start around Ma Wan,” says Gutierrez, all business, “with aldehyde plumes leading away toward Anchorage, pooling near Discovery. Concentration and diffusion reads like a class C, pretty close to the one we’ve seen poking around Hainan recently—but labs are saying the signature differs subtly from 2940 C. Probably a new individual. Probably closely related. And potentially not alone.”
“How potentially is potentially?” says Walz.
“Well,” begins Gutierrez, “labs didn’t have all the model numbers ready to minimum certainty for us—”
“Likely,” says Enika, “at least two, unless the poor beast got an organ graft in the last two weeks.”
“Wow, Yen, brilliant insight, what would I do without you? Anyway, we’re gonna want at least two pairs on the case. We’re calling for Mazu and Fishhawk on the primary offensive tracking downwind from Discovery—and Holly wants Venky and Walz on second—”
“I can do it,” says Carol.
“No, Carol, you can’t,” says Enika, in the same tone she used telling you the same thing yesterday. “You and Emma will be sweeping north to hold by Ma Wan in case the beast comes running back tail between its legs before we can pin it down. Keep an eye out for any new traces up there.”
“And dearest Holly and I will stick around home base,” says Gutierrez, “because we need someone to keep the lights on, and Central would get lonely, and Holly thinks I’ve been a bad girl and don’t deserve to go monster-hunting today.”
“You do get messy about it,” says Enika thoughtfully.
“That’s enough. Thanks, Gutierrez. Are we all clear?” says Holly.
Lau’s silent. Carol says, “Yep,” and Debrah says, “Yes sir—want me to bring back souvenirs when we find it?”
“You know I do,” says Holly.
“What species is 2940 C?” you say.
The channel crackles with static. “Sorry,” says Holly, “Gutes, you never told her what we’re tracking?”
“She was in the pod all night long!” Gutierrez protests. “What was I supposed to do, drag her out of it?”
“Yes,” says Enika. “You can always launder the puke off you later, you know.”
“It’s a cleonicerotid,” Holly tells you shortly.
You wrack your brains to remember what that looks like. Something approaching an ammonite, you’re pretty sure, not far off from what you’d pictured in training with Lau, with chinks between each segment of the great armored spiral, and a writhing mass of limbs under that.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, doll,” says Enika, “if we do our jobs right, you won’t even see it.”
“Okay,” you say, “cool. What if I do?”
“Then—and don’t worry, I won’t take that as an insult—you can do what Carol tells you to do, and you’ll be fine,” says Enika.
Right, Carol, who barely seems to want to talk to you. Good. Great.
“Easy now. Don’t get in anyone’s way during,” says Debrah, “and we’ll bring you up to speed after, right, Holly? I’ll show you what we bring back, even, cross my heart.”
“Right,” says Holly. “Keep it simple, Kanagawa. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
If it’s nothing out of the ordinary, why bring you at all? Why not leave you on the cadet team to gestate? They’re still not being honest with you, that much is obvious; they haven’t been from the start, you’re sure of it, and the wrongness of it sits heavy in the hollow of your stomach. But it’s too late to protest now. What are you going to do—leave? If you even can, if they let you, the shame of it all will certainly kill you as surely as a bullet to your brain. (It very nearly did, back in the Bay. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Whether you admit it or not.)
So you key your mic and say, “Understood.”
“Good,” says Holly—and: “Time’s up. Let’s go, girls.”
