Live Ammo

                                                                           PART I: CONDUCT

In basic they taught us that the worst thing a pilot can do is hesitate. Hesitation means a sock soaked in gel oil and superglue and full of plastic explosives tossed into your exhaust manifold, or a lit road flare jammed into one of your baffles to act as a beacon for the little ATRAM launchers we’ve been seeing in the field the last few years. Hesitation means while you’re wondering whether or not to fire on a convoy, the tac team of Degenerates hidden in the ruins on your left comes up on your blind spot and cuts your hydraulic cables with repurposed Jaws of Life. You wind up lurching back to base like a drunk, repulsors misfiring, millions of adjusted dollars worth of damages exacerbated with every step, your panicked mental calculations ticking up and up and up. You could lose your charter, get shipped back to the algae farms or one of the big service hubs in the Midwest to work some shabby private security gig, no benefits, no pension, for the same companies that used to trust you with billion-dollar psychogenic war machines.

Or worst of all, hesitation might mean that the figure in your sights has time to lance you. A lancer, to keep it simple, is a kind of psychic, a mutation we were warned about at length during our deployment simulations. The going theory is that after four or five generations of living out beyond the rad-domes and air scrubbers of the big cities, the Degenerates have reached a density and diversity of genetic contamination where radical biological phenomena become not just possible but inevitable, along with all the stillbirths and the skyrocketing cancer rate. I don’t know why they can’t just take a contract like the rest of us, come in out of the acid rain and contribute so we can all work together, but the other pilots in my Diversity Outreach squadron say I’m too soft, that the Degens are cosplaying some big edgelord revolution, protesting tyranny that doesn’t exist — the last three presidents were WOC, and by the time the former secretary finally took power during the looting after Hurricane Benson she was disabled and neurodivergent! I mean I understand some of the Degenerates’ issues; the chem-strikes and bio-bombardment campaigns after the rioting were definitely mishandled, and forced sterility is a real problem — though a lot of them do it to themselves with their homemade hormones — but the way they express discontent is just not acceptable.

Anyway, lancers — give them enough time to warm up their psychokinetic entanglement neurons and and they’ll kill your whole rig system by system, knock out your hydraulics, lock your gyros, even stall your emergency repulsor engines so you can’t eject the weapons platform and get the most expensive hardware back to base. No, you’re stuck there pounding on unresponsive controls, squeezing a trigger you should have squeezed five minutes earlier, praying that thing staring straight into your audiovis hookup lets something slip, just for a second, while the Degenerates start to strip your rig, peeling it away from you layer by layer. And once they get past the rad shielding and peel away the sheets of soft, dark lead shielding the unit’s nerve center… I don’t even want to think about it.

That’s why I fired the second I saw the column. They were marching, I saw what I’m confident were armaments, and with the M1 Tanden — the first solifuge-class all-terrain main battle tank named for a woman of Southeast Asian descent — you need to allow a full third of a second for the anti-personnel repeaters to spin up. With urban engagement zones like Detroit it’s hard to make these people understand that the buildings they squat in and remodel illegally still belong to people, that there are rights being infringed on and that we’re not cops, we’re not soldiers, we’re just there to make sure those property rights are respected. We want what’s best for everybody. So, at about fifty percent casualties the Degen column started running for cover. I sought higher ground, scaled a nearby tenement I judged already damaged enough that demolition would be required before reclamation efforts could begin anyway, and then deployed my unit’s BRS cluster launchers — that’s biorhythm-seeking, new technology — as the enemy had begun to return fire and my Tanden had already suffered upwards of five or six thousand adjusted dollars worth of cosmetic damage. We’d just been repainted — Breast Cancer Awareness month — and so, you know, additionally that counter-fire had heavy and obvious misogynist overtones.

During the incident my commanding officer issued an order to cease fire, but I followed my best judgment and I don’t regret it. Major Fuller, with respect, as a white woman of male socialization, doesn’t yet understand that rapid threat assessment and response is the bedrock of preserving civilization and the safety it provides. Whatever disciplinary measures you recommend, I will abide by them totally. Totally. I have nothing but respect for you — the AFAB Affairs Subcommittee is something my mother, who was the first Latinx admiral and served during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in the Sudan, and in the initial waves of looting and property destruction that prefigured the collapse of the East Coast into anarchy, waited for all her life. I believe my actions would have made her proud, and that’s my chief concern. Thank you.

SUBJECT: 2nd Lt. ALVAREZ, AIDEN

UNIT: 3033rd Diversity Outreach Squadron, “Screaming Angels”

PRONOUNS: SHE/THEY

GAB: FEMALE

GRIEVANCE: Reckless and unauthorized discharge of weaponry at civilian targets

COMPLAINANT: Maj. FULLER, ALLISON

UNIT:Ibid.

PRONOUNS: SHE/HERS

GAB: MALE

DISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE VERDICT: Lieutenant Alvarez’s actions found warranted and correct. Targets met parameters for reasonable assumption of high-level threat.

RECOMMENDED COURSE OF ACTION: Terminate Maj. Fuller’s command, reassess success parameters of AMAB psychosocial reconditioning program.

                                                                         PART II: JUNK

Tasha couldn’t really explain how she channeled. It was like how some people could tell you what spices were in chili after a single taste, or make a shot from the hip a trained sharpshooter would miss six times out of ten from a concealed nest. You had it, or you didn’t. She had it. Now, watching the huge metal spider of the Tanden scuttle along the street below, raking the exposed floors of tenements and office buildings with anti-personnel fire to clear out “potential high-threat terrorist operations” — read, squatters trying to stay out of the constant dust storms and distill and filter enough drinkable water to keep their kids alive — she was glad she did, no matter how badly it hurt to slip out of her body, leaving it to thrash and foam in Stan and Jaya’s arms as her consciousness squirted out and into the crystalline lines and vortices governing or describing or proceeding from all thought and motion. She slid frictionless over black planes of infinite glass and down the jagged paths of frozen lightning to the Tanden’s middle left leg motors, slightly mistuned and shaking their titanium housings.

Into the machine, its actions now her actions, its processes the thunder of her heart, the slow draining filtration of her liver, the muscular caterpillar crawl of the intestines. She flexed steel digits and the motors seized, coughed smoke, began to grind. She blew out a long, weary breath and fuel pressure dropped, failed, began to vent in slick black torrents to the street, and then she was slipping through the spark-on-spark-off catalytic chamber, flame one moment, void the next, and up into the casings that housed the ejection system’s explosive bolts. Her body hummed with silent tension, no moving parts but the slow dance of compounds in the sectioned priming caps. She relaxed herself, imagining the muscles of her body releasing their tension, shedding stress and venting cortisol. Molecules decayed, chemical bonds dissolving, rendering the charges inert even as the pilot, realizing why her unit’s leg had stalled out, hammered the ignition button. Tasha had heard their commanders checked the logs to see the pilot’s response times as part of determining how much they owed in negligence debt.

That wasn’t important now. She was growing, swelling through the Tanden’s systems, locking up its targeting servos and gyroscopes, jamming its loading mechanisms, running her fingers over circuit boards until they sparked and burned and melted, trails of molten gold seeping into the mech’s coolant system. She could feel the pilot starting to panic, her neural load thrashing around wildly, rebooting dead systems, flipping switches now connected to dead subroutines as she cycled between defanged weaponry again and again, screaming in frustration, kicking manual primer pedals until two of the actuating locomotors tore themselves apart and blew, scattering white-hot shrapnel over half a block. By then the junker crew was coming up out of the sewers, figures in ponchos and gas masks, dwarfed by the Tanden’s sessile bulk, its seized arachnid legs and wedge-shaped chassis, racks of missiles and turret-mounted guns spinning at random or juddering in place. The junkers free-climbed up the legs — Tasha was always amazed that they could do it with so much equipment on them —their grunted curses and footsteps echoing through the immateria of her consciousness, and got to work cutting through the outer layers of armor plating with sonic jackhammers and hypercompressed acetylene torches. Slag drooled between their boots and dripped off the edges of the chassis to smoke in the street below. They had to work fast; another Tanden was probably already on its way via caryall. Soon they’d hear the thunder of those huge rotors and the next spider would drop down like a depth charge, spraying the whole block with bunker-busters and nerve gas before touching down to spear and machine gun whoever survived the shock and awe approach. Some of the things even had big stupid sword arms that could cut straight through an apartment building. The unit had to spin to build up enough momentum, but it did look pretty terrifying.

Tasha was starting to feel her body’s call, the irresistible line connecting her to that frail vessel slowly drawing taut as she laid herself over the enemy’s machine, making it hers, her body, her instrument. It hurt to let the junkers cut into her, but that was just psychosomatic. Anyway they had a big section of plate peeled back before too long. They got the lead paneling up after just a few minutes more and by the time they drilled into the Tanden’s processing towers it was safe for Sadie to stop channeling. She snapped back across the space between machine and body, hurled into her flesh so violently it felt as though her skin would split, her skeleton go tumbling back over the floor of the abandoned apartment where Jaya was rubbing her back, murmuring reassurance to her while Stan held her hair and she vomited again and again. She always threw up, after. It was starting to fuck with the enamel on her teeth, and sometimes she tasted oranges for hours or days before her senses readjusted. A few times she’d even had intrusive thoughts she thought must come from the pilots themselves — flashes of unreasoning terror at the sight of her comrades, — but they usually went away as soon as the junkers cut the drone signal uplink. Once that was done everyone was back where they belonged, she and the rest of her team in the toxic ruins of the city, the pilot holding a dead joystick in her little cubicle, maybe back in the field a day later, maybe transferred out to some arm of the occupation where she couldn’t lose so much expensive shit all at once.

The way they freaked when you cracked their units’ central processing hubs, you’d think they were afraid of getting killed.