Her Approval
Once, for a brief time, humanity elevated itself to godhood.
United Earths’ Tidal Gestalt gravity mechs commanded the very laws of nature themselves, each built from the choice cores of the nine moons that were cracked for the project and piloted by the most advanced and highly-trained clones ever birthed. All of them are dead now.
In the fringes of a new dark age, opportunistic scavengers and refugees from the United Earths’ now-disavowed Tidal Gestalt program have begun reclaiming bits of lunar tissue from the exclusion zones surrounding the bodies of the mighty lunar mechs and engineering vague approximations of a body capable of enduring synchronization with the deadly lunar material for even a few weeks, willing to do just about anything to field a machine comparable to the long-lost t/Gs.
These bastardmech companies, rare and illegal as they may be, can still be contracted by those willing to deal with such devils.
. . . “No hostiles remaining. System starting Battery relief cycle.”
Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of broken armor, the sides of a single titanic war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith, accompanied only by the callous intonation of an onboard automech AI.
“System administering four hundred thirty milligrams: meitothyl psythenigor.”
The halite planet of Hjkor III was always considered a power position in the system for the endless tundra of salt it bore, but devolved into a corporate warzone the day reserves of rare metals and fuel elements were discovered within its crust. Even if the rock bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, planetwide artillery shelling and the constant threat of any small homestead being interpreted as a rival corporate incursion is a pretty effective way to gatekeep colonial efforts. The lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared little for the politics of the war; it hardly had the facilities to comprehend them.
“System administering ninety milligrams: brimophyntynol.”
The pilot’s body twitched, exposed like the pistil of a flower in the freezing air. Her short, sweat-caked hair tossed in the arctic wind. Whatever human was in command of the idle giant was severely indisposed, form sagging without so much as a hint of vitality.
“System administering two hundred ten milligrams: carcyl methodine.”
Somewhere within the lifeless slab, a heart seized with unsolicited life.
“Stage one: cardiac vivification complete. Beginning stage two. System administering four hundred thirty two volts.”
Poking through the uncountable tangle of bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some metallic element, pressed against the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, had plans for its tiny ridealong.
“System administering regulation rhythm: seventy eight beats per minute.”
A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a comfortable, faux-natural pace.
“Stage two: pulmonary benchmark reached. Beginning stage three. System administering neural flash.”
In an instant, the previously limply bowed head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it.
Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.
“Reaction noted. System administering correctional dose. One hundred forty milligrams: glucomic tripsthentonol.”
The pilot could barely hear the words of the machine speaking through its flayed frame, but she could feel a warming presence melt through her body and mind, and that was good enough for whatever was left of her brain. It was only at this point that she began to think, primal lobotomized animal instinct put to bed by a rational human psyche that knew (vaguely) where it was and knew not to be afraid.
She knew she didn’t need to be afraid of being trapped inside the thick spinal column at the core of this walker: that was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems. She knew there was no reason to fear the pulsating, pale white endomusculature surrounding her, because those thick strips of flesh were what kept her safe. She knew better than to fear the dry and salty air whipping at her side–it didn’t matter if it was safe to breathe or not, her bloodstream was already so rigorously filtered that nothing short of being exposed to vacuum could kill her.
There was no reason to fear the sea of burning tanks, shattered human bodies, or the mangled pile of mech oozing flame in front of her. They were dead.
She had no recollection of how she ended up here, of course. The Battery spent her time riding shotgun in her own mind–her only purpose aboard the bastardmech was to serve as a biological connection between the pulsing muscles surrounding her and the bones of the traditional ground walker contained within. There was more kinship to be felt from the rhythmic vibrations of the idle musculature around her than the void of silence the autopilot’s brief disconnection left in its wake. The fact that she was having any measure of independent thought, no matter how benign, was an uncomfortable feeling to reacclimate to.
“System command: when ready, please recite your licensure number to verify cognizance.”
The voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was one of the few things left that she could recite on command, but even then, placing the digits in order took a long few minutes to prepare between violent fits of coughing to rid her throat of mucus, blood, and bits of necrotic tissue. When she was finally able to speak, her voice could barely be heard over the whipping translucent winds; the weak vibrations of her speech were read through implants against the throat, meaningless utterances checked against a small library of predefined command phrases to give the Battery some illusion of control and agency within the titanic war machine.
“Sta… st-sta… sta…”
The pilot murmured, lip quivering, chin craning upwards as though she was looking for some god to answer her. The sky, for the moment, was silent.
“System command: please recite pilot licensure number.”
The mech system beneath reiterated, artificial voice slightly more forceful.
“St-sta…tus…”
she tried again, eyes fighting to remain open as the initial rush of the revivification drugs began to fade off. The automech system was silent, working overtime to parse the faintest of murmurs from the spent body against the vibrations of the whipping wind.
“System record: priority target neutralized. Target ground resistance force neutralized. Area secure. All objectives met. Extraction craft inbound.”
The automated readout paused, before continuing with the only part of the status report the frayed pilot actually cared about. “Head Karabin sends her approval.”
Between the bandages across her face, the pilot’s dry lips turned to a smile. Her legs tensed, wiry muscles pressing against the restraint harness. She wiggled ever so slightly, head lowering to her chest and arms wrapping around her body. Her lungs began to seize, regurgitating sounds somewhere between a cough and a giggle.
“It… did-d… it…. It… di-did… it…It…it… di-di-d… it…”
Her voice was so small that it was lost in the exotundra gale, interrupted occasionally by weak hacking. The AI could barely process the fragments of words she sputtered, but it knew better than to try. After a moment of her senseless babbling, it once again repeated its first demand.
“System command: please recite pilot licensure number to verify cognizance.”
The pilot paused, recalling those specific words being important. Did it say “number”? That was important. She knew a number. Voice barely above a whisper, she recited the number.
“Four… four… four… eight… t-two… one… three… one… nine… sssssix.”
Each was labored and ragged, held together only by memorization and repetition so worn into her mind that she could (and often did) murmur it in rare moments of sleep. If pressed, it was unlikely she could recall the numbers zero, five, or seven. At the very least, she knew why everyone called her “Fours”.
“System confirms: Battery cognizance. Relief cycle will end in five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommendation: Enjoy the view.”
Whether or not the subjugated pilot trapped within the machine could even comprehend the voice of the automech systems hardly mattered. She was ancillary to the whole operation, an outdated holdover only relevant due to lost technology, no more in control than an engine commanded a car.
At the very least, though the drug-addled haze and overwhelming exhaustion, the Battery pilot could still stare out at the jagged horizon of this empty saline world. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of a sunrise in the distance never ceased to mesmerize her tiny, ragged mind. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.
“It… did… it…”
. . .
After retrieving their Remnant Mech, priority number one for the Sandfog Company was to remove the Battery. The clones are more expensive than any standard walker fuel cell, and Lincoln Karabin never failed to be the top name on the extraction itinerary. She had a philosophy–a dangerous thing for a mercenary commander to have–and believed that certain policies within her group could stretch their dollar further than the baseline. With finances as tight as they are, any practice that can squeeze an extra deployment or two out of the expensive clones is agreed to be well worth the headache.
Despite the potential dangers, Linc was always right up on the hangar railings as the ramshackle machine returned to its standing bay, watching with baited breath through the hazy visor of the crew’s sole hazard suit. She knew better to approach until the proper restraint bolts had been fitted and the valuable machine-mind core had been removed, of course, but no sooner than those tasks had been completed was she barking for the technicians to open up the Battery access and bring out the umbilical bridge for her to approach.
The walker bore a small head, torso speckled in observation cameras and sensors to keep up awareness where its neck could not. Even as the machine’s body split like a flower, plating and lunar-composite musclebands peeling away to reveal the hybrid alloy endoskeleton, it was hard not to get the feeling it was watching every move made around it. The catwalk extending into its body, straight back to the thick spinal assembly, gave the image of some carnivorous plant luring helpless insects between its maw. Despite all of this, when Lincoln confidently strode down the gangway, pulled the release, and opened up the Battery’s makeshift internal plugdock, she felt no fear towards the scrawny rag of a girlshape trapped within. There was only the exhaustion, and a desensitized echo of pity.
What had once been a cockpit was crudely converted into a plugcell hardly fit for a convict, welded straight into the spinal chain and sealed over by a muscular sheath. Most of the bones of the machine had once belonged to the walker commander herself, although the Frankenstein’s mech stapled to the wall before her was practically impossible to recognize as the Colony Rush-era corp armor it started life as. She knew the machine inside and out in ways even the underqualified crew of engineers that duct taped it together couldn’t imagine, and while that familiarity did contribute to the sort of career washed-up armorjocks could seldom dream of, that wasn’t to say that the job was completely free of unpleasantries.
Karabin didn’t bother regurgitating a smile—even if the Battery wasn’t blind as a bygr, little more than the vague impression of eyes were visible through the visor of her radsuit—but she didn’t have much choice but to dig out a voice wholly unlike her own: something soft and nurturing, saccharine to the ear of a vatgirl who didn’t know any better. Playing mother to a revolving door of disposable clones grew tiresome about as quickly as one would expect, but some semblance of love had a visible impact on the lifespan of the uncomfortably expensive Battery pilots.
With a heave, Lincoln threw the plugcell release, raising her free hand as the hiss of depressurization rushed across her crinkly suit. Inside rested only the lifeless corpse of the Battery halfway through vivification, yellowing bandages covering almost every inch of suit and skin not restrained by the metal harness shackling her to the core of the mech. The blinking indicators of the pilot’s onboard defib packs signaled their regulation of an induced heartbeat, as did the weary heave of her breath confirm a successful neural flash, leaving only her physical removal to complete her temporary separation from the semilune warform.
When the worklight of the hangar finally flooded the tiny plug, the Battery could only make out an indistinct orange blob standing on the catwalk opposite she. Even through the fog of revivification, color association and raw habit instantly attuned her mind to the identity of the person standing before her. One shaky hand reached out, fingers flexing somewhere between elation and desperation, and met with a reassuring clasp.
“You’re okay, Fours. It’s me.”
Karabin spoke. Beaten, burned, bloodied, and only minutes removed from death itself, the pilot still found the strength to smile at the voice calling out to her.
. . .
“It did it…Linc…oln….”
“You did. You did very well, Fours.”
The Battery pilot wiggled like an enthused dog, wet hair sticking to her face. Lukewarm water cascaded off her naked form–any warmer would agitate the synchronization burns, any cooler would risk disrupting the work of the antilune medication in her veins. Behind her, Linc held the showerhead, gently rinsing off the white particulate sticking between the pilot’s cybernetic spinebrace and her inflamed flesh.
“One or two more good contracts like that, and we might just be able to stay in business. This water is warm because of your hard work.”
Fours remembered a time when heating the water was too expensive, and before that, she remembered when water itself was rationed for drinking aboard the ship. She looked down towards her bare feet as Lincoln’s hands moved up her neck, skin tingling as the Division Head’s fingers delicately brushed her hair aside. In truth, the disposable clone pilots didn’t need to be bathed (the cryogenic bags they were intended to be stored in disinfected their bodies inside and out), but the merc found a personal touch to pay dividends enough to be worth the hassle.
“It has… a ques…tion.”
Lincoln paused. That was new. She leaned forwards, resting her chin atop the shoulder of the shorter girl in front of her.
“What’s your question?”
She spoke in a soft voice, briefly pressing the showerhead to her stomach to stem the noise of the water.
“Who is… it a cl…one of?”
Lincoln blinked.
“Spi…der sa…id it–”
“Spider.”
Lincoln repeated, confusion disappearing as quickly as it had set in. “Forget Spider, you aren’t a clone of somebody.”
Fours didn’t immediately say anything, but the slump of her shoulders hardly looked convinced.
“You’re a recombinant, it’s different. People like me are made when two other people swap genes, but you came from a thousand donors being all mixed together into something brand new. You’re about as unique as they come.”
It was a canned deflection of the question, words so practiced they were practically racing each other out the door. Linc’s eyes idly scanned the hundreds of identifying tattoos across the clone pilot’s body, but the foamy soap dripping down her back covered the majority of them.
“It's… uni…que?”
Sandfog Company’s fourteenth consecutive Battery pilot slowly repeated, latching hopefully onto the only part of the monologue Karabin needed her to process.
“One of a kind.”
Lincoln joylessly confirmed. She’d had some variation of this exact conversation no less than thirteen times past. Spider, the closest thing to the company's onboard medic, seeded it just to spite her, she imagined.
. . .
“No hostiles rem-rem-remaining. System starting Battery reli-eif-ei-ef cycle.”
Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of burning colony town, the sides of a lone war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith.
“Revivification res-res-res-erves drained. System administering emer-mer-mergency backup: thirty-five milligrams bizendotrine.”
The tundra planet of Hjkor III was well on its way to becoming a prosperous colonial effort. After the end of the corporate war, and the mass culling of the mercenary companies who’d contributed to so much death and destruction, the halite world was a prime spot for humanity to set down new roots and begin to rebuild. Even if the rock only bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, it was as good a place as any to plant flags and start anew. Not that the lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared.
“System inducing: gas-gastral purge.”
As soon as the emergency dose of bizendotrine was injected into her stomach, the lifeless pilot suddenly shot to life, screaming and bellowing like the devil incarnate. She was quickly interrupted by an artificially-induced heave, head lurching forwards as bile and blood poured from her dry, cracked lips. Bizendotrines were the caliber of chemicals used to ease alien megafauna out of cryo, one drop was enough to kill a human several times over. A concentrated dose in the right spot could damn near reverse death… so long as it was expelled just as quickly.
“Stage one: emergency vivifica-ca-cation complete. Begin-nn-ing stage two. System administering six hundred nine-nine-ninety eight volts.”
Poking through the uncountable tangle of crusty, brown bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some old metallic element, crudely welded into the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, was not ready to let her go just yet.
“System administering-ing regulation rhythm.”
A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked faintly in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a lopsided, barely natural pace.
“Stage two: pulmonary ben-ben-benchmark reached. Beginning stage three. System administering neural-al-al flash.”
In an instant, the head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it. Teeth clenched as offloaded memories surged through her frayed mind, her entire life and personality re-injected into a brain that was well past its warranty.
Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the lopsided resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.
“Reaction noted. No correct-ct-ctional dose available.”
She groaned through the pain, knuckles white against the harness that sealed her within the spine of the resting machine. She didn’t need any ‘correction’, she just needed to push a little further beyond. One more mission and everything would be back to the way it was. One more ambush and life would be right again. One more contract and they could retire like queens.
Even if the thick spinal column at the core of her walker was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems, that didn’t make it feel any less like a tomb. The pulsating, sickly white endomusculature surrounding her was deteriorating, slowly, but that rancid synthfiber flesh was what kept her safe. The lukewarm air surrounding her was just barely safe to breathe, but even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t let something so trivial slow her down.
There was no reason to fear the sea of crushed prefab homes, overturned trucks, and burning generators surrounding her feet. The target had been neutralized.
The best part of the lunar dust-infused musclebands surrounding her was that they bled with a hellish odor, which made damage very quick to assess. The fingers of her walker were coated in a black ooze, no doubt sourced from the oil reserve (enemy walker?) she’d thrown a dozen meters to the east. In the salt that piled thick as snow, she’d easily be able to smell any severe leakages by the putrid reaction the two made when they combined, but a quick once-over confirmed she’d executed the mission without taking any meaningful damage.
“System com-mm-and: when ready, please recite your licensure number to ver-ver-ify cognizance.”
The staticy, broken voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was… her number… she had a number… she knew it…
When she was finally ready to speak, no sound emerged from her dry, bloody lips. Her mouth curved into one single word, body so spent she could hardly muster the breath to give it life. The mockery of life she tried to persuade the automech systems still resided within her wasn’t even being checked for anymore; any meaningless utterance was automatically verified and accepted against an empty library of passkeys and command phases
First, her dripping lips closed tight to shape an F, then widened slightly into a long O. The lower lip stiffened slightly as she curved up into a U, then sustained an R. As her strength sapped, her mouth relaxed into the hiss of an S. Fours
.
“Sys-sys-system confirms: Battery cog-cog-cog-cog–Relief cycle will end in fi-fi-five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommen-men-men-men–Enjoythevi-vi-view.”
The Battery pilot’s mouth continued to move even as her head hung and her eyes closed, throat fighting to press enough air to hit the sharp “st”
. All she needed was the tiniest vibration in her neck for the system to pick up on her intention: after so many hundreds of missions, the AI had grown quite accustomed to the only two words she ever spoke.
“Ssss…sss…ssss…ssst…”
The Battery weakly hissed, lip quivering, head hanging on her shoulders as though an apple atop a tree.
“Sta-status-us.”
The walker AI repeated, not much better than she at vocalizing the word. Still, it soldiered on. “System rec-record: priorit-ty tar-target neutralized. Target grou-nnn-nd force neu-eutralized. Target escape pre-pre-prevented. All obj-obj-objectives met. Extraction craft unav-av-av-av-av–Head Karabin sends her ap-pp-proval.”
Between the countless scars and burns across her face, the Battery pilot’s eyes welled with tears. Those five words were the only reason she kept fighting, the only fuel for the limitless flame of willpower that burned inside of her. Those five words caused her to rock in her harness, dig her chipped fingernails into her sides, and throw up once more. Lincoln approved. Lincoln said good job. Lincoln praised her. That rush hit harder than the bizendotrine.
“It… did-d… it…. It… di-did… it…It…it… di-di-d… it…”
Her voice was so small that may as well not exist, dipping in and out of pantomime as her lungs struggled to keep up with her attempts at speech. Bits of phlegm and necrotic tissue clung to her mouth and chin, sickly hot in the cool breeze that billowed across her overheated body.
At the very least, even though the drug-addled haze and lifeless fervor, the Battery pilot could still stare down at the carnage around the feet of her walker. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of burning buildings and the red-on-white splotches of corpses in the white salt-snow was close to what she remembered a sunrise looking like. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.
“It… did… it…”
. . .
By the time the deteriorating Remnant Walker limped back to base, the sun was already well below the horizon.
Fours never questioned why Sandfog’s crew never moved out of the crash site of their flagship–none of the personnel were much for talking these days. That was alright, though; she had earned them out of tougher spots in the past.
The walker bay was impossible to access, but Fours didn’t want to moor herself there anyways. Even though the automech AI wasn’t supposed to be able to dock anywhere but its designated standing bay, the Battery pilot’s willpower proved more than sufficient to redirect the machine just about anywhere she wanted.
The three-story walker came to a stop near the side of the ship, at a point that gash easily five meters tall and ten times as long carved a jagged hole in the hull. The sickly body of the mech flayed and spread itself open on command, and after a short (equally painful) revivification cycle, the pilot unfastened herself from the restraints and slowly crawled across the fleshy innards of the mech until she could pull herself into the hole in the ship’s hull.
Even unable to make out all but the blurriest of shapes, the pilot knew this route by heart. She knew the exact place to drag herself through the gash to avoid getting cut on the uneven metal, she knew exactly how far to crawl down the catwalk within and exactly which hallway to stop at. Even if she couldn’t read the words “ESCAPE POD” written on the wall, she knew that the door with the bright orange number two on it was the one she needed. She’d done this hundreds of times, and she’d do it hundreds more. She’d crawl through this ship and mount up in the walker every day until she could finish enough contracts to save the company.
The door to the malfunctioned escape pod was jammed open. Inside, belted to the seat, was a decomposing body dressed in an important-looking uniform. It took all of the Battery pilot’s strength to pull herself up into the seat, curling her legs atop the lap of the stiff body in the pod. Gingerly, she rested her head against its shoulder, allowing herself to sink into that familiar plush. Deeply, she inhaled. The small space reeked of death, decay, gas, and rust. Somewhere underneath all of that, it smelled like Karabin.
“It… did it… Linc…oln…”
Lincoln said nothing. Fours closed her bloodshot eyes, and after a long while, drifted off to sleep.