Dreadnought: Leah's Body

Leah hung weightless in the dreadnought’s flooded cockpit. Diodes blinked around her in the gloom, but she hardly noticed them. Her attention were 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 wind scour the glacier’s surface, clouds of powdery snow blowing forty and fifty feet high over the ridged seracs and broken chasms. She 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 approaching mile marker forty-four,” said Vogel, the shift specialist. “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 awareness 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 a mile, maybe a mile and a half. Shouldn’t be long. Over and out.”

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 old Europe and America 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 skin. 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 silver 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 golden with his dreadnought’s blood in a mile-long splatter. I’m upwind of her, thought Leah, the dreadnought’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.

“I have visual,” she said.

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

Leah shrugged her shoulders. She bit her lip. 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. Half a million tonnes 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 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 fair. 

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. Exaltation of the fist.

Perfection.