Dreadnought, Chapter One: December 11th, 1998

“Please,” Elaine whimpered. “Please don’t make me go.”

“You’re the pilot on duty,” Hatcher said wearily. She stood at the bedside behind Elaine’s back. The major’s voice was soft, understanding. “We’re depending on you.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Why can’t you do it, El?”

She thought of the earth cracking beneath her feet, of Chiron’s dreadnought clutching numbly at the hole in its stomach. There had been so much blood. Coils of neon green intestinal tubing as long as freight trains slipping through Capricorn’s massive fingers and Kelly screaming on the emergency freq, screaming so loud that— 

“I can’t.”

Elaine forced herself not to flinch as Hatcher laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. The older woman’s touch burned like dry ice. 

“El, honey-.”

A light flicked on across the narrow dormitory. Leah sat there on the edge of her bunk, hair a greasy tangle, belly resting heavily between her short, thick legs. “I’ll go,” said the fat girl. 

Hatcher sounded tired. “You need to sleep.”

Leah got out of bed and started dressing. Her undershirt was stained with sweat between her breasts and down her back. She didn’t look at Elaine. “I’m fine. ”

Elaine felt a rush of nauseous relief and then another of cold, gut-wrenching guilt. What if she dies when it should have been me? What if they pull Gemini apart like they did to Capricorn?

Hatcher was angry now. “We have the rotation for a reason. You have six hours of rack time left before you’re supposed to so much as run biofeedback.”

Leah struggled into her leggings, cheeks blotchy, already puffing. A few of the other girls stirred in their beds. Eyes blinked bright and wet in the dark. “You want her out there like that?”

Elaine covered her face. Her breath came in low, whistling gasps. I hope when you’re dead you can sleep. I hope it’s like being asleep. I hope I die in my sleep and don’t notice, that nobody notices, that my body sinks into the bed and becomes a part of it. I hope when the world ends I’m still sleeping there.

She heard Leah leave. Hatcher sighed, sinking down onto the edge of Elaine’s bed. The springs in the ancient mattress, stained and sagging, creaked. Elaine thought of Leah crossing the yard to Main against the wind, riding the lift down to the cradles where the dreadnoughts slept curled up like gigantic children, their shunted vat-grown brainstems crackling with the electrochemical slurry of vestigial dreaming.

Hatcher tucked an errant lock behind Elaine’s ear. This time, though Elaine pressed her face into the pillow and curled her arms tight around herself, she couldn’t hide her flinch. Why am I so worthless? she thought as Hatcher hesitated, hand lingering on her cheek. Why can’t I feel good? She’s taking care of me. I’m a freak. Ungrateful.

“It’s alright,” said Hatcher. She stroked Elaine’s hair, her slender fingers combing through it, picking gently at the tangles. “Go back to sleep.”

                                                                                  ⇋

Kelly sat in the deserted locker room. A tap dripped, or one of the showers. Pinkish slime dried tight and brittle on her skin and on her gray-green link suit. She picked at it with lacquered nails, tugging so it tented and grew crazed with minute cracks like a caramel glaze struck with a spoon.

She had missed the proximity alert by minutes. From her outflow basin on the Delta Cradle catwalk she’d watched the lights flash, listened to the sirens whoop. Someone else’s problem. She hated wearing Cancer, hated the way the dreadnought stretched her senses and dulled her thoughts like too-tight clothes chafing her skin. I’m not even good at it, she thought. I still de-sync sometimes. 

That was the worst part of it, that helpless kicking in the cockpit, suffocating under a mountain of synthetic flesh and titanium, her mind’s impulses lashing wildly out at nothing while the dreadnought’s brainstem screamed in the throes of psychic abandonment, like a baby. I can feel it dying. The outer door’s hydraulic arm hissed and Leah stormed past a moment later, hair plastered to her neck by sweat. 

The fat girl undressed with mechanical detachment and shoved her clothes into her locker. Her dimpled thighs pushed at her belly, shifting its soft rolls as she took out her link suit and forced a leg into it. The blood-colored plasticized fabric drew taut, deforming where her fingers dug into its hem. It’s so tight, thought Kelly. Her cheeks felt hot. There’s so much of her.  

“You look good in that,” she blurted. 

Leah looked up at her. Blotches of dark color mottled the other girl’s face. A shiny pimple glistened on her forehead just below her hairline and angry red crusts of acne pitted her round, heavy cheeks. Kelly’s mouth was dry. I want to pin her to the floor and put my hand inside her. I want to knead her belly like fresh dough. I want to— 

“Shut the fuck up,” Leah snarled through gritted teeth. Her voice trembled with rage. “Go back to your bunk while I keep you and the rest of the fucking infants safe. You fucking freak.”

She hates me. She wants to kill me. I’m the most disgusting person in the world. I should have raped her because that’s what this feels like now. That’s what I am. Dirty. 

She unsealed her link suit’s front as Leah turned and stalked past the showers toward the outer exit and decon, her own suit’s right sleeve still hanging loose as she fought to force her left over her soft arm, dimpled at the elbow, and up the freckled slope of her shoulder. 

“I could help you with that,” Kelly said, half-rising. She regretted it before the words were out of her mouth. Leah, half-hidden by a bank of lockers just before the open tiled expanse of the showers, stopped in her tracks. For a moment Kelly remembered the first time she’d seen the fat girl, walking red-eyed and hunched out of the observation room overlooking Delta Cradle. Michaels had been taking her for her biofeedback assessment when Hatcher, one of the C Block proctor, led Leah out, her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

I know I took what you wanted, but I hate it. I can’t stand it.

Leah’s voice trembled with rage. “Why are you still talking to me? Do you want me to break your fucking legs?” 

“Don’t you ever get lonely?”

You sound so pathetic. 

The fat girl’s fists, white-knuckled, shook at her sides. Kelly sank back down onto the bench and rested her head in her hands. A gray wave of despair washed over her. The humid air of the locker room felt sickening against her sweaty skin where she’d begun to undress.

Stupid.

Leah unclenched her fists. She took a deep, hitching breath and it seemed for a moment that she might say something, might turn and come back, maybe to slam Kelly’s face into a locker’s grille, maybe for something else. And then she left.

Stupid.

Kelly forced a hand into her open suit, wincing as her nails scratched at the unwashed and rashy skin of her inner thighs. She was half-hard already, as stiff as she ever got anymore, and whined as she cupped the overheated mess between her legs, pressing against it, two fingers hooked under to probe at her soft pubic hair and wrinkled flesh.

Don’t cry.

She bit her lip. A hot spike of need pushed against the suffocating blanket of the gray fog still pounding over her. It felt like it would tear. She fumbled with it, with the thing, her nameless meat, which wept precum against her palm.

Don’t fucking cry.

                                                                               ⇋

Leah hung weightless in the dreadnought’s flooded cockpit. Diodes blinked around her in the gloom. She paid no notice. Her attention was elsewhere, her thoughts burning in the dissociative chemical soup of her link to the great machine. Through its bank of synthetic eyes she watched the launch shaft’s towering doors grind open and light spill through onto the concrete surface. Wind scoured the glacier’s surface, clouds of powdery snow blowing forty and fifty feet high over the ridged seracs and broken chasms. She stepped out onto the ice and felt the pack shift slow and vast beneath her feet of synthflesh muscle and roughened steel. 

Her earpiece crackled with a sudden snarl of static. “We have you topside,” said Hatcher. “Can you confirm?”

“Roger,” said Leah, her voice muffled by the click and hiss of her respirator mask. Awareness of her body flared through the smooth purity of the link. Greasy. Heavy. Slow. She took a deep breath, pushing her senses out, away from the soft prison of her meat, into the body of the dreadnought, which was perfect and invincible and hers.

“Radar puts the lilim due north of you by ten miles, maybe eleven. Shouldn’t be long.”

Leah crouched, keeping the dreadnought’s slim white bulk as low to the glacier as she could while she picked her way over the broken ice. The bio-mech’s slender fingers found purchase easily in cracks and crevasses. She—Leah always thought of it as a she—moved with fluid ease through the flying snow. The glide of her high-tension synthflesh, kept lubricated with amnia between her core and her carapace, made Leah smile as biofeedback washed her brain in feelings of limitless power.

My hands can break the backs of mountains. My steps leave craters where I walk. The armies of the world before the giants came would shatter like glass against my skin. My heart is a sun and my blood is the blood of the earth. 

The wind scoured the dreadnought’s ivory hide. Runoff from her reactor ran down the small of her back where it froze in sheets of cloudy ice, icicles weeping from her pelvic mount and the backswept crescent headpiece of her helm. It didn’t matter. She’d been made to brave the polar winter. The ice couldn’t hurt her. She could stand in place for a month without feeling the chill.

She came out of the blowing white and there it was a half mile distant, the lilim, hunched atop a ridge with one arm stretching down into the mouth of a shaft eaten into the glacier by decades of meltwater. Her position made it hard to gauge her height, but Leah guessed it at two hundred feet. Muscles rippled under her embellished golden hide. Black hair hid her downturned face, a coal-dark waterfall a hundred feet or more in length and too heavy for the wind to stir. 

She was beautiful, like the one that had killed Chiron last summer and painted the ice pink with his dreadnought’s blood in a mile-long splatter. I’m upwind of her, thought Leah, Gemini’s muscles tensing in sync with her own, heat exchange systems cycling their vents open as sweat beaded on her upper lip. With great care she slipped into a sprinter’s starting stance, hands braced on the ice, left leg stretched out behind her, right drawn up against her chest. 

She won’t even hear me coming.

“Visual,” she said.

“Roger, Gemini,” said Vogel. “You’re cleared to engage. Over and out.”

Leah shrugged her shoulders. She bit her lip, hard. Her real body was perfect. It did what she told it to do. It did it unerringly. Without hesitation. What she told it to do was kill. She broke into a dead sprint, hurling herself out onto the naked pack. The dreadnought’s legs—her legs—ate up the distance in great sweeping strides. The lilim looked up, the dark curtain of her hair dragging over the ice. She tensed herself, claws digging into the walls of the moulin—the shaft in the glacier—until sheets of rotten ice began to calve.

Closer, and Leah could see the lunatic detail of the lilim’s skin, the billion twining, intersecting patterns carved into her hide, the hideous bas reliefs of things too alien to process. The vast angle of a shoulder blade pushed against shining skin as she adjusted her position, and then the creature launched herself. Forty thousand tons of biomass flung airborne, moving faster than Leah’s eyes could follow. The graceful lines of a long body caught against the polar sun’s white disc.

They came together with a crash that opened fissures in the ice and blew loose powder into boiling clouds. Sensory feedback squealed in the wet, crackling crotch of Leah’s mind as the lilim’s claws skittered over her upraised forearm. Coils of black hair whipped serpentine around her. They rolled over the glacier, cracks spiderwebbing out from their behemoth struggle, one of the lilim’s blazing white eyes just visible through a gap in the fall of her hair. Leah thumped against the cockpit wall and screamed as dissonance dissolved her vision for an instant into jagged static. Clawed fingers scrabbled for a hold on Leah’s throat. Her fist beat against ribs as long as a frigate’s keel. The bowl of the sky spun pale and cloudless overhead as the lilim gouged furrows in her armor and she clasped the titan creature close against her chest, squeezing until the great fibers of her muscles sang with tension and the pop and crunch of shifting bones echoed out over the ice. Pain. Blood. 

They came apart a moment, Leah pushing herself awkwardly up to her knees as the lilim scrambled around, legs almost going out from under it before it found its footing, and then threw itself at her headlong. Its impact sent her skidding at speed over the ice. Powder and broken shards flew. Her right heel plowed a canyon in the pack’s dirty surface as they hit a rill and rolled again. Claws scored Leah’s sides and drew hot lines of pain over her ribs, her collarbones, her face. She screamed into her respirator, spit flecking the plastic, and the fat, wriggling tumor that was her false self convulsed within her armored might.

She got a hand around the lilim’s throat as they crashed to a halt against the ridge, ice screaming against her armored hide, crashing over her in a bitterly cold deluge. The ridge collapsed around them. White clouds boiled against the sky where the sun hung small and dim and distant. 

“You cut me,” Leah screamed, wrapping the lilim’s fall of hair around her free hand. She shoved its face into the broken ice. The mouthparts of its insectile jaw jerked and twitched independent of one another, slaver dripping from them in great gluey ropes. Its eyes burned white through the curtain of its swaying tresses. “You cut my face!” 

She shifted her grip to the back of the lilim’s neck and looped its hair around its throat, pulling it taut as she rose up and planted her foot on its breastbone. It smiled at her, writhing under her weight, clawing weakly at her calf with its one good hand. Its other flopped at its side like a landed eel, puffs of white fire guttering from its lacerations and its elbow joint where a black jut of bone protruded through torn flesh. Blue blood gushed in steaming torrents out over the pack.

“Cut my face!” she shrieked. She hauled back on the rope. The gashes the lilim’s claws had left burned like hot pitch against her skin. It felt like another Leah sketched in wounds and maddening itches and the creak of overtaxed synthetic musculature had been stretched over the framework of her body. The lilim’s clawing hand slid from her leg.

Cut my face.

It smiled at her, left mandible loose, drool pooling between its small, flat breasts to trickle down over the scrimshaw labyrinth of its hide. The dark rope of its hair cut deep into its throat. Leah’s shoulders ached and burned. Loose tendrils of the lilim’s mane crawled curious and slow over her wrists. She screamed. She hauled with all her might, steam roaring from her vents, chemical impulses scrambling erratic through the gray meat of her brain.

Cut my body. Cut me out of my body.

Blood erupted from the lilim’s throat in a torrent of blue, a high-pressure jet that coated Leah’s face, her chest, her arms. She held with slick and slippery fingers to the rope of hair. Gore splattered her eyes. She could taste the sweetness and the putrid rot of it. Thick and cloying on her tongue.

She pulled harder.

                                                                                       ⇋

In the little galley off the dormitory El stole a foil packet of dried seaweed from Kelly’s shelf and ate it sitting on the counter, watching the door in case one of the other pilots woke. She didn’t like to be seen eating.  Everything was easier when you weren’t being looked at. 

I’ll go next time, she told herself as she chewed, but beneath the hard throb of her guilt there was only a distant numbness and the memory of hot blood boiling in the snow. The kitchen fluorescents buzzed in their dusty housings. A flat brown roach, a descendant of the little clutch that had come in with some shipment from the mainland years ago, scurried across the yellowing linoleum floor and out of sight beneath the counter. El thought of Hatcher’s hand tracing the line of her jaw.

The seaweed lost its flavor. El spat it into the sink and rinsed her mouth with frigid water. Green flakes circled the drain. She imagined eating fudge, letting it melt on her tongue, savoring the way that it flavored her spit. Rich and buttery and thick. She wondered what Chiron’s blood had tasted like when they’d pulled him out of Capricorn’s convulsing wreckage.

                                                                                       ⇋

Leah’s shunt disengaged with a click and slithered free of the socket at the base of her skull. It felt like being hobbled with a sledgehammer. She tasted blood as the cockpit began to drain with a listless, sucking gurgle. Cool air brushed her slime-coated face. She pulled off her breathing mask and spat red into the pinkish amnia. The gel-padded frame cradling her body disengaged into its component parts, releasing her to slide down toward the spinal drain as it cycled open with a hiss of machine-scrubbed air.

Leah’s hips brushed the sides of the tube and for a single suffocating instant she was sure that she’d get stuck, that she’d have to be cut out with saws and welding gear, that everyone would see. Then she was out, splashing into the outflow basin and coughing as she pulled herself up onto the rim. A man’s face was waiting for her, flushed and furious, red and gray stubble on the scarred lump of his chin, deep-set eyes wide and fixed. Preminger, Gemini’s morning shift crew chief.

“If I have to resize this fucking thing one more time I’m going to start personally counting every calorie you suck in,” he snarled, pushing closer to her. “You’re endangering the integrity of this machine, which means you’re endangering the future of the human race. Do you understand that?”

Leah met the crew chief’s stare. Her stomach twisted itself into knots with slow, deliberate loathing. The rest of the deck crew stood in uncomfortable silence on the service platform that ringed her basin or else busied themselves with Gemini’s shakedown routine, hooking up the massive hoses that cycled the biomech’s amnia and coolant, pretending that they couldn’t hear. 

“Get out of my face.”

Preminger gave her a look of pure disgust, then turned his back on her and stalked away to supervise the biomech’s spinal pressure purge. Leah heaved herself awkwardly out of the basin, face burning with rage and shame, limbs shivering with post-link tremors as vagrant emotions flitted through her biochemically addled brain. Soupy, lukewarm despair. A hot needle of joy. Her body felt unwieldy, soft, and useless after Gemini’s armored invulnerability. Her legs trembled as she pushed her way through the deck crew and down the catwalk, trying not to look at the crew in their scorched and grease-stained jumpsuits, trying not to look past the safety rail at the long fall down to the drainage canals where vented amnia flowed from Gemini, mingling with her blood. The livid gashes on the dreadnought’s sides made her breath quicken and her throat constrict.

Look at what they did to me.

The pilots’ lift took her up at an angle past Gemini’s seated bulk. The dreadnought’s arms were smeared blue and gold and green to the elbows with the dead lilim’s fluids. Cleaning crews swarmed over the scaffolds around her. Leah itched to be back inside the cockpit, to feel the flexion of vast muscles answering the crackle of her thoughts, to float in the kettledrum thunder of a biomechanical heart the size of a truck.  

I hate watching you touch her, she thought, and across the vast distance she imagined reaching out and plucking the crewmen off of Gemini’s beautiful frame, flicking them away like ants to splatter on the bare white walls. She imagined snatching up the crew chief, holding him between her fingertips. Squeezing him like she’d squeezed the lilim’s slender neck until he squirted soft and wet between her fingers.

Leah watched a pair of crewmen rappel down Gemini’s left leg toward one of the ragged claw marks the lilim had left on her. Tiny figures pushing off against pale armor, pulleys whirring, safety lines hissing as they played out. A few sprayed disinfectant foam into the open wound. Others bolted high-tension wires across the cut to hold its bloody lips together. 

She could feel their hands on her.