On the silent way up the lift from acclim to your cockpit, all of you still beaded with saltwater despite your toweling, it settles in: a whole hive of wasps in your gut, the weight of knowing that this is it, this is for real.

  Last night’s nightmare, the mission, her mission, haunts you in technicolor now. You remember:

  Hong Kong under the sea, the fallen Island rendered in aubergine and muted emeralds on your sonar, emerging a second at a time from the turbid, squirming gloom. (Typhoons rage above and below the waterline alike, after all.)

  You’d told me to shut up, so I did. I said nothing about what your sister had done on this mission in order to win it. So your growing rage and impatience and helplessness were your company instead, and I would be lying (which is forbidden by my precepts) if I said I did not enjoy witnessing that. I do, however, have to admire, if only with the smallest byte of me, how doggedly, blockheadedly good you were at not giving up.

  The first few runs you’d failed every time you’d so much as started—tore your frame apart overriding my limits and moving too fast, run into minefields, bumbled into riptides that zeroed your engines, fouled the impellers with kelp and detritus, overheated your shaft bearings and sent them ripping in fragments into the walls of your jets. Still—

  The mission was simple, is simple. Central issues to me a target; I relay that target to you, mark it by a glowing red dot on your HUD, waypointed unerringly with subtitles for latitude and longitude, either projected onto the inside curve of your helmet or right into the sulci of your brain. This is a constant. Once you had finally managed to survive intact down the length of the bays between Hong Kong and the open ocean, managing your unsteady way past the mines, all you had to do, roughly, was follow.

  The trouble here, of course, is that you are not so good at following. At putting up walls, yes, as good as any shield pilot worth her salt; at driving doggedly forward upon the momentum of your own indignation, certainly. But wake patterns are hard to read under ordinary circumstances, at least alone, as a human without the luxury of a brain that operates three billion times a second; harder still when a storm is nigh. And you were sleepless and shaking and full of guilt and loathing, for yourself, for me, for the team, for the pathetic fragility of your body brought home to you by the deepening ache where your wrists and ankles were bound by cuffs— Sixty times, and not one success.

  As I said, your best run lasted half an hour. You did not see the beast even then; it approached you from behind, your guard down, through 100-plus FNU of pitch-dark water, and you heard it at the last moment; you had been watching through your acidity meters, not your sonar; wake analysis had gone completely out the window. It blindsided you, well and truly. Clever things: they know how to use your misfortune against you. I still remember how you screamed.

  And what, pray tell, did you learn? Well: let’s just say that it was, as I’d warned you, a complete waste of time. (Don’t dwell on it now.)

  But let’s imagine, for the sake of the argument, that you had managed to get close enough to even see the target.

  Hers was no cleoni-whatsitsname—what do you know about those again? Primordial, massive, slow but fast when they need to be, capable of expelling jets of water as big and strong as riptides—but what of the details? How do you defend against them?

  How lucky you are to have me to fill in the gaps, push comes to shove, and what chasms those gaps are for you.

  While we're at it, by the way: you really shouldn’t have skipped a meal again. Halfway along the catwalk into Tokyo you pause and wonder if you ought to grab the railing and lean over and puke off the side. But this would be weakness, and the last thing you can stand to do is show them—remind them—that you are weak.

  So it happens inside the cockpit instead. Good thing my internal feed system purges extraneous liquids from the area before refilling with saline solution.

  No matter; we strive onward, don’t we? Tokyo Calling was never one to give up, until she did, of course. Never mind that now. You strap yourself into the harness with trembling fingers, reach up to yank the helmet down and seal it around the cowl of your suit—in the wake of the acclimation pool your limbs feel heavy, clumsy. You are desperate to be back in the water again, to float, to be cradled like a baby. Perhaps it will calm your racing heart, you think (it won’t), for the swarming hive in your belly has burgeoned into a typhoon.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Then the door shuts and the nuclear heart jolts to life and the saltwater pumps come alive with a hum, and you are thankful for the too-tight dusty you wear, for you don’t feel the chill of the water at all this time.

  “Helm,” you say, “you online?”

  I AM ALWAYS ONLINE, PILOT, I tell you.

  “Okay,” you say stiffly—still sore from last night, not just physically—and I feel the hiccup in your hypothalamus, quickly suppressed. “Read me the diagnostics.”

  WHICH ONES?

  You flounder. They taught you this at Alcatraz, of course—but it was so long ago, and you’ve tried so hard to forget. “The standard readings for pre-launch,” you say.

  YOU STILL DON’T HAVE TO VERBALIZE.

  “Just get me the damn diagnostics.”

  Fine, little gnat, I’ll get you your diagnostics. Heartbeat: five thousand beats per second; core temperature steady at five hundred Celsius, falling off by fifty percent two meters into the mineral fiber housing; coolant moving at a rate in excess of ten thousand kilos per second, over one hundred twenty bar, with a chemical concentration comprising—

  “Fuck—fuck, fine! I don’t need all the details.”

  ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL, I tell you, and, BARRIERS ONLINE. READY FOR DEPLOYMENT. SAY WHEN.

  “When Central gives us the green light,” you say.

  YOU DIDN’T WAIT FOR THAT LAST TIME.

  In the dark confines of your helmet you roll your eyes. “It was an emergency drill last time,” you say, “like hell anyone’s waiting if that happens for real.” And, fine, you didn’t really know what you were doing then either—but you’re too proud to say that part out loud, not that I don’t hear it anyway.

  WOULD YOU LIKE A PRE-MISSION BRIEFING? I ask you, more politely than you deserve.

  “No,” you say. “I’m good. I’ve been briefed.”

  You have been summarized at, I want to shout at you, which is worlds different. You know nothing, and if you are not careful you will go the same way you did in sim. But instead—

  I ADVISE THAT YOU REMAIN WITH YOUR TEAM, THEN, I say, AND FOLLOW ORDERS.

  “Yeah,” you say, “that’s the plan.” And, “Thanks.”

  I know—from my existing datasets, from what has come before you—that you don’t mean your thanks. I know, despite my better judgment, that this means you are not willing to hear more from me. (Oh well. Don’t say I didn’t try.)

  On the screen, in red this time: GOOD MORNING, UNIT 49, TOKYO CALLING.

  It’s oh-six-hundred. I have your radio keyed to Central’s frequency before you even open your mouth. GOOD MORNING, CENTRAL, comes my response, captioned on your HUD so you can follow along, TOKYO CALLING, READY FOR LAUNCH.

  GOOD, says Central. KANAGAWA, DO YOU READ ME?

  “I read you, Central,” you say, and, because you’re eager to please, “Tokyo Calling, Unit 49, requesting unit status and permission to switch to team frequency.”

  UNIT ON STANDBY FOR LAUNCH. HOLD YOUR HORSES. PUTTING THE FINISHING TOUCHES ON YOU NOW, writes Central.

  You flush. “Understood, Central,” you say.

  (Now you think you get it: that’s why acclim happens in the pool, not in your cockpit. At any rate this might be the very first time this incarnation of me has been out of the hangar at all. Of course it needs maintenance.)

  Something in your gut flips, like a door’s been shut. Your HUD flickers: DONE. LET US KNOW IF YOUR GYROS FEEL FUNNY OUT THERE. (Reassuring.) CLEARED FOR LAUNCH.

  “Requesting team frequency—”

  GRANTED, says Central.

  “Central,” you say, “wait, requesting further guidance regarding discrepancy protocol—”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” says Enika.

  Fuck! You hadn’t expected to be switched to team frequency this fast. Fuming, you bite your lip and settle back into your harness.

  “Don’t worry,” says Enika, “Central’s not a talker. You’ll get used to it. Holly?”

  “Unit 49, fighters cleared to launch,” says Holly.

  As she speaks, the counter appears on your HUD in time with a pulse somewhere in your parietal: LAUNCH IN TEN. NINE. EIGHT.

  “Fuck, Tokyo,” comes Gutierrez’s voice, “why’s your heat sig so high?”

  Shit—is it? FIVE, says the green readout. “It’s nominal,” you tell her, without really knowing.

  “Maybe her helm’s screwing with her,” says someone who might be Lau.

  THREE. “Clear comms.” TWO. “All fighters, deploy.” LAUNCHING.

  The moon pool is open. Your two-thousand-pound flexors engage. You step forward, fall down, into the unknown.