1 - Down the Pipe

  They sent you to World's End because you fucked up so bad they didn't want a record of the execution, because should be dead but were still useful, because someone owed a vatmate of yours a big favor. They sent me to World's End to find out what the hell went wrong there. Supposedly.

  As I stepped off the transport I felt a wave of nausea hit me and what they call the halo. A glowing nebu of light all around me. I was never supposed to pilot a machine. Bad neurology, bad personal history, and I knew too much. It'll poison the interface, they said. But shit happens in war. Sometimes you fuck up. Sometimes you have to make a tough decision.

  They gave me a medal and recruited me into Special Concerns. That's how I knew they were mad. They don't give you a medal unless you fuck up.

  And I'm not the right choice. I'm bitter, disillusioned, tired. At forty-two I'm old for a handler or a spy.

  When the halo comes, it looks like beautiful light all around me. And with it comes the memories, the smell of blood and that metallic tex smell. Hemocyanin, blue liquid dripping from her mouth.

  Blinded by the vision, I still have to move. A dockworker drags me off with my bag and I nd roughly on the metal grate. I can smell the sickening ozone, hear the crackling, as the transport sanitizes its interior and seals itself off.

  Nothing living returns from World's End. Just ore, salvage, trinkets. Useful crap for the habitable levels.

  “Hey Mister, you need help with luggage? You need pce to stay?”

  I looked up to see a kid, no older than ten. What the hell could he have done to be sent here? Then I remembered: most the people here can still breed the old-fashion way. Like livestock.

  “I'm not a Mister,” I said, pushing myself up to my feet. As quickly as the symptoms came they vanished, then I was back to being an eight-foot-tall augie with a threatening aura. I tried to smile at him but whatever came through the nerve damage made him wince. “You got a pce to stay?”

  I let him guide me to one of the housing strips for new arrives, a shantytown of scrap metal perched precariously over a lipid refinery, then disappeared into the crowd before whoever he worked for could jump me. The fresh ganglia I had chilling in my bag would fetch a good price if I needed local credit but for now I was just looking to orient myself. There weren't any maps avaible in the habitable levels.

  As I was crossing away from the smell of rending industrial tallow I gnced to my left and see it: the great trash river. All the wastewater and sewage and flotsam of this segment of the ring flows here, where detritus builds up outside the recmation tower. Maybe once, generations ago, this whole level was a beautiful ke. Back when things worked, before gauss cannons and energy weapons and thermonuclears tore through most the ring's infrastructure and left us with scarcely enough habitable nd for a hundred billion people. Now the river concludes in a heap of debris rge enough to host a city of criminals, outcasts, heretics, reprobates, and the forgotten.

  I needed to orient myself, I needed to connect with someone.

  You need a friend. The thought came to me unbidden, like a halo symptom. In the silky tones of a young woman's voice. Tones of vocal cords that had never been regrown with healing gel under heavy fire. It made me want to cry. I hadn’t heard a voice like that in a long time.

  That was when I saw the girl, also towering over the crowd. A second-generation pilot strapped in a ghost machine. There were no first-gens, none that had survived. The generations weren't named after the vat eras, they were named after the weapons systems they served. The enemy had found an exploit in first-gens. Every single one to a man had died in the pod, victim of a synthetic sacculina parasite that disrupted the physiological connection between pilot and machine. That ended up being the key: the second-gen pilots incorporated the parasite. It worked perfectly, from the military's perspective. Just some unintended side effects.

  And now the second-gens can't move in meatspace without the help of a machine. Since there are, supposedly, no weapons systems in World's End, they use a ghost. A light frame, metal twisted around their limbs in that rootwork pattern of minmaxed stress points. And the filigree tiara, channeling their brain into the frame. And those ghostly pale eyes dancing liquid silver. They burn out the eyes when the military career is over, but the ghost frame comes with impnts. If she had wanted she could have even had humanlike prosthetics. Few of them do, used to the dozens of optical sensors all over their body, used to seeing in thermal and infrared alongside visual spec.

  You can't sneak up on a pilot with her machine. Without it, she'd hardly know you were touching her.

  I didn't know there were still second-gens out here. I was used to working with four-point-fives and the zero series. She looked young too, less than thirty. Although you could never tell with a pilot. Their skin doesn't age right. The same way a lot of them have to avoid the sun, regardless of menin. It's always wet, and the sun dries it out. Hurts the sacculina. And without that, they die.

  They say a pilot comes to need the touch of a handler. They don't tell you about the other part.

  They don't tell you how you come to crave something innocent to care for. To corrupt.

  It was difficult to approach her. She would have that crippled emotional stunting that comes from the hard drop into the real world.

  When you're in it, you think what you're doing matters, you think it's important. You think you matter to people. Fans, old cssmates, lovers, coworkers, coconspirators. Then when you get burned... if you're lucky, they kill you. If you're unlucky you have to deal with the dawning realization that none of those people were real. That it's a handler's job to make a pilot resilient. And self-sacrificing. And emotionally stable. And that comes from the illusion of a support network, of a community that cares about you. Then you get out, and you look people up, you read the unexpurgated feed. That girl sending you horny messages? She died two years ago. The schoolyard bully who grew up to be a patriot with a heart of gold cheering on his former victims? He's a prison warden in the mountains, he's never heard of you. You think they would tell you that your friend hates you? That your vatmates hate you? That no one knows what you do? That they're protesting the war, that they see you as a mass killer? A war criminal? A freak of nature? You never hear a word of it. That's your handler's job: crafting a fiction. For you, for the support team.

  Then you piss them off and they send you out here, beyond the meshnets, left to either find a way to make yourself useful or die.

  “You look like you know your way around here,” I said from further than arm's reach. For most people I'd be drowned out by the crowd of residents, refugees, and hustlers but her ghost machine would be able to isote and amplify my voice. And it would, just as surely as she would respond to my microtonal fluctuations. There were certain advantages to being a handler, even in the system's cesspit.

  And you never really retire.

  She approached me backward in that odd way experienced pilots do. When I was new to the field it used to creep me out. Really it's a sign of trust; most weapons systems have a higher front offensive capacity.

  “A fresh augie just out the pipe,” she said. It took me aback. Unusual to hear a pilot talking that way. She must have gotten used to local dialect. Then she made a soft cooing I was familiar with. I had passed her immediate security checks. “You'll do. I need help.”

  They always need help.

  “Sitrep?”

  “I need ops for piloting a scavenger-hauler.”

  “You know the machine?”

  “Yes, we're intimate.”

  Which just left the important question. “What happened to your old ops?”

  She turned, just her head, craning around a full halfcircle to face me standing behind her, reflected in pale silver eyes. And she smiled bittersweet. “They died. You arrived at a good time.”

  This wasn't normal. Arms were going off in my head. She'd been waiting here for a handler fresh off the transport. She was hunting for me.

  That wasn't how this was supposed to go.

  But shit happens in war.

  “You arrived at a good time,” she repeated. “The wartide is coming. Bountiful harvest in the river.”

  They could get superstitious like this sometimes. Brain full of parasite and feedback burns. “Is that so?”

  “In thirteen cycles there will be a massacre at Hatchet Rail. All that carnage will rain down here. I collect it from the river. That is how we live below the habitable zone.”

  I almost frowned, instincts kicking in to keep my face pcid. She wasn't supposed to be able to know that. No one at World's End—no, no one outside of Command should know something like that. Yet here she was talking about it on a crowded street next to a stall selling fried chicken feet and rock sugar.

  Something was very wrong here.

  XXXXX

  Her pce was spacious; she'd been here a while. I didn't need to be told to make myself at home. They say it helps the retionship if you sleep together but it's a fine art. You can't just treat a pilot like a piece of equipment. A pilot, like a weapons system, is a living thing.

  I wanted her to beg for it.

  Right there in her bedroom was the coms station. Still crusted with sweat from her st handler. Tomorrow we'd take the scavenger-harvester for a safe spin, train the haptics that would let me tap in to the weapons system, once it slid into her synaptic network.

  “You haven't asked me my call sign yet,” she said as she brought me a meal. I was expecting reconstituted compost mush but it was crawdad and mushroom stir-fried with rice. So a different sort of reconstituted compost, rebuilt with in the bodies of living things that crawled around among the sewage. Special food for augmented people; we were immune to any disease it might carry. The bugs in us were stronger.

  “I'm Tritium,” I said.

  “Phosphor,” she said in response. Then she drifted off, staring past me, staring at nothing, her limbs falling ft. Halo, even in the ghost machine. They must have done a number on her back in the nd of the living.

  So I ate while she sat limp and then I made my bed. There was only one bed in the pce; beneath it was what we called the coffin. A getinous suspension in a transparent tank. It was anesthetic, hydrating, nearly exactly neutral buoyancy. It would give the sacculina a chance to rex, and it would push her overstressed nervous system into a colpse something like sleep. Pilots don't sleep, not anymore. They just turn themselves off until their systems recharge.

  The gel feels strange on your skin. Like concentrated nothingness. Technically no one but the pilots are supposed to touch it. But in the field it spshed on support crews and if a force beam or a mortar nded in your forward base you would get a fine mist of it all over you, mixed with shrapnel and bits of your compatriots' flesh.

  It's against regs but some handlers like to fuck in it. Like the feeling of no feeling at all. Just action, two bodies, handler and pilot, squelching in the blue ooze. It’s a conceptual turn-on, the knowledge of sex without the messy sensations.

  Not for me, though. I liked the other gel, the stuff they put in the cockpit connectors. The bck ooze that makes your nervous system light up, pouring in extra neurotransmitters so it can outperform all your biosystem specs. That’s really against regutions. They don't let the handlers know it works on everyone. Well, every augie. Rub a little of that on your nipples and you can find a way to take the stress off even with three inch tungsten slugs raining all around you.

  I learned this when the weapons system next to me—a third gen, a clunking hulk from that boxy more-is-more era—took a microfissile self-destructing bde right to the pilot's seat and suddenly my body was riddled with shrapnel burning hotter than my sensory system theoretically should have been able to experience. When I got out of the regrow two weeks ter the first thing I did was collect a capful of the bck ooze for my personal kit.

  When you're young they teach you all the rules and regutions and they'll drop you, court martial you, or kill you if you cross them.

  When you're bringing back rare genomes in a suction pack, when your pilot's outcssing her whole vat ten-to-one on kills, when you secure functional legacy pieces of the ring megastructure, they give you a lot of leeway. Until you fuck up.

  Phosphor returned to the world and silently ate her cold rice and crawdads. The little red legs crunched between her perfect white teeth. Exotic ceramics; the sacculina’s juices eat through dentin like vinegar. She didn't wipe her lips until she was all done. Sloppy, but fast. A handler notices these things.

  You have to. Notice, I mean. There's a part of your brain where you have to build a little model of your pilot, all her little traits and attributes. It's her job to internalize the weapons system and it's your job to internalize her.

  XXXXX

  Phosphor was transcendent in motion.

  The scavenger-hauler was a glorified dredger. It was built with mechanical controls, built for the hands of a non-augment. Someone modified it, added a proper cockpit, stitched reflex wire and polymer muscle in pce of hydraulics, reinforced stress ptes with printed webwork scaffolding, and added in some nonstandard parts—very nonstandard. I recognized one of the massive cws off a zero-series weapon system fitted to the front of the whale-like body. Apparently all the politicians' and generals' reassurances that current tech never makes it off the battlefield failed to account for the watershed.

  And I recognized the pattern of webwork scaffolding. Support crews develop signature patterns, like quilting or ce. The night before I traced out the same rhythmic patterns on the skeleton of Phosphor's ghost machine while I spent hours failing to sleep.

  Insomnia is a monster. The gel unconsciousness of a pilot gives some handlers nightmares but I'm jealous.

  But I don't need sleep, I need stimunts and they were easy enough to get. I dropped a mnemonic ganglion in a wetwork market and got a new adrenal gnd and a tune up on my hypothamus-pituitary axis. I could have spent more and cleared out the rest of the nonsense but I've got an unprofessional emotional attachment to my limbic damage.

  And Phosphor was tracing out patterns I recognized in my limbic system.

  She was dancing around like all that metal and hardened ceramics were just a shadow. The best pilots are a movement, a gesture, making everything seem effortless. I'd seen it with advanced weapons systems, dazzling insectoids rolling across the battlefield, athletic anthropoid ncers, even once a troop extractor that flew like a butterfly until it dove on its target, only decelerating at the st moment to scoop up most of the heads and torsos of POWs held in dubbing rigs. Never once had a seen someone turn junk into something this magnificent. Phosphor was a natural.

  Which begged the question: what the hell was she doing down here?

  She might have not known. Often the pilot only knows the mission parameters. It's the handler's job to be aware of the externalities.

  “You're impressed, aren't you?” was the first thing she said when she docked.

  I gave a silent nod. Limited approval, it's called in training.

  “I could tell from the feedback. The way your fingers were guiding me.”

  “We should practice again tomorrow.”

  “Oh, definitely. It feels good to move.” As she dragged her frail limbs out of the cockpit and felt for the ghost machine's tiara. On the field it had been the job of the support crew to transfer the pilot between machines. Or, if they were busy or dead, my job. I could tell Phosphor wanted to show off, so I let her. She'd lived on her own. No support crew, no command structure, no massive budget or propaganda campaign. For some time even, no handler. And she was able to slip her body out of the cockpit, little bits of dried bck ooze encrusted around the ports in her wrists and neck. Even more on the sacral port, where her soft vender flesh met the pale green of the parasite that lived in her spine and gonads, binding her body systems to piloting. Making her an obligate parasite herself on a social system that could provide machines and gel and nutrients. And making her a woman: sacculina only binds to people with male sex-traits. And in the process it consumes the gonads, the reproductive system, nesting up in the body, repcing the gonads with ovaries, growing a vulva, flooding the body with estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, proctin. Causing fat redistribution, breast development, milk leakage. While the parasitic sacculina—a type a barnacle, actually—connects with the blood, the nervous system, the lymphatic system. Building a secondary parallel system. It protects the body of the pilot, makes them immune to gravitational forces and shocks that would kill an ordinary human, even an augment. It amplifies nervous response, creates redundancies. And in exchange it has a pce to live, a pce to grow the eggs that develop in the false ovaries.

  Everything is worthwhile for marginal advantage. When you’re limited to the resources of one decaying ringworld of habitable space, no interstelr travel, and a star that will eventually burn out, you start to do the calculus. One battle won or lost makes the future of a piece of infrastructure, of a sector, of a whole resource cycle. One machine won or lost makes the future of a battle.

  In the minutes before the first-gen pilots burned out they piloted better. The data was right there, channeled to the coms stations of their controllers. This was before dedicated handlers—we had arrived when it became clear how unstable the sacculina made the pilots. But that same instability, born of hormonal extremes and overclocked gray matter made the difference. It saved machines, won battles.

  Won too many battles.

  And who to sacrifice to the barnacles? What special popution could easily be scouted away from family and friends, highly disposable, all for the dangling possibility of an ecstatic transformation? For the possibility of being the community’s hero for once, finally, instead of just the hated other, instead of just the repulsive accident, the pervert, the degenerate?

  Of course I knew they were using us. It was my job to know these things, to keep the pilots from knowing. I was the handler.

  I wondered who'd been harvesting her eggs. They wouldn't be much use out here. Only some augies can handle them. The crustaceans need to live in a special aquatic environment during their motile juvenile form, with particur highly-reguted pnkton as food. If they build up too long in the pilot they get bloated, strained, internally injured. Less than fully effective in battle.

  They told me my immune system was too good for sacculina, that I'd kill the parasite before it could properly establish itself. That's why I got shunted off to support training, then handler training. That's why I'd had to acquire my breasts and estrogen the same way a noncombatant transsexual would: biotech workers looking for quick credits. But it could never really compare. Pilots weren’t just women; the sacculina didn't just mimic normative estrogen profiles. It kept the pilots on highly elevated fluctuating hormone levels, maximizing their capacity to care for its egg clusters. It kept them in the peak of a preternatural pregnancy. Ethereal.

  Yeah, I was jealous. But that jealousy made me a furious lover.

  As she went for a cooldown wash in one of the shower stalls by the riverside, I took the opportunity to examine her cockpit. It looked like nothing I'd ever seen: a chimera stitched together of three different chunks. I could see where the molded metal polymers were ser stitched together. I thought she was second-gen when I first saw her, based on the ghost machine and how she moved. But this cockpit had a piece of gen three, a piece of a zero, and even a piece of exotic. That meant one not made by military or government. By a private developer.

  Or an enemy.

  I ran my fingers, still buzzing from the haptics, along the uneven curves of her seat. It was finely molded to the shape of her body; you could see her form there in the reverse. The neck, the spine, the buttocks, the small of her back. It was still wet. Pilots have to stay hydrated; they're always sweating.

  The sacculina needs them that way.

  As I was preparing to walk her back to her pce, I suddenly got a ping on my private com. That should have been dead down here; we were beyond the meshnets. Or so I had been told.

  What are you doing here, handler? asked the voice. The same one from before, silky smooth, a woman out of the dream of peacetime. What are you looking for? The living world has abandoned you. Can't you just be content with what's in front of you?

  No. I never could.

  XXXXX

  CARE OF CONTROL

  Safe nding. Found a stray pet. Your concerns confirmed to have basis. Intel leaking from your end. Following up on it.