nose goes

you rubbed the scar on the underside of your columella for the hundredth time that evening and the millionth time in the last three weeks. fucker still itched. some tiny splinter of a dissolvable suture slowly working its way out of your nose, and you'd know no peace until it was ejected. though afterward wasn't looking great either.

———

"hey, newbie," Emerald had said. "we have pretty good health care. get your nose unfucked. i'm tired of looking at it."

"oh," you'd said, dumbfounded, "i can get that fixed? regimental medics said not to bother." it had been bent since you bashed it against the inside of a miniframe with a bad jump booster. they'd said there was a line for operationally necessary care and your nose wasn't messed up enough to even get in it.

the director's raptor of an assistant had cocked her head to the side. you were still learning the specialized biology vocabulary you weren't sure if you'd live long enough to need, but "raptor" seemed right: skinny, sharp features, unclear if she blinked, probably ate lizards.

"military healthcare is shit. don't exceed three gees while healing, don't shove anything up there, don't miss work," she'd said, and flicked a net address to your handheld. a civilian medical appointment.

you should have known that it had been too easy. you'd woken up in a room that hadn't been the one you'd gone to sleep in. more blinking lights and display screens than a frame maintenance bay. and your boss was there. sharp suit, curly hair, looked like she was in a hurry.

"good news, everything went well," she said. "and volunteering saved me a bit of time, so thanks for that. here."

you were still incredibly out of it, but you accepted the vase of mixed flowers. the smell almost put you under again. you'd never smelled anything like this. or maybe you had, but you were suddenly smelling a hundred things on top of it. an incredibly rich roiling blend of scent. grassy, floral, faintly acrid, notes of emergency sealant, hangar moonshine, the smell of the taste of the filler in shipping containers…

"bwuh?" you managed. she'd put something up your damn nose. had to be.

"olfactory and recall augment. it'll adapt with you, to some extent, but it's also pre-biased with hundreds of thousands of Terran and CEZ biochemical presets. one of these flowers doesn't belong. show me."

you'd taken a big sniff, which was stupid and hurt. then you took a few smaller, more careful sniffs. one of the yellow-orange ones was off. not bad. off. like you'd tasted a dozen red Nebula Chews in a row and the last one was supposed to be purple but the factory fucked up the dye.

you plucked the flower from the vase and showed it to her.

"you're probably right," she said. "one of the marigolds is infected with a hybrid xenopathogen. doesn't have a name. something that evolved on one of the CEZ DNA worlds after Terran life was introduced, and that doesn't really get along with our soil bacteria — the CEZ nearly lost that planet. its metabolism produces a volatile compound that'd be useful for detection, except that i can't smell it, nobody else on staff can smell it, and more importantly, our current generation of mass-production biochips can't either. but now you can."

she turned to go, heels clicking on the floor. then she looked back over her shoulder.

"you look a little spooked. you shouldn't be. it's a knockout, can't reproduce without an excess of a dextral amino acid that nothing outside of our labs makes," she said. "keep the flowers."

———

"stop rubbing your fucking nose, newbie," Emerald said from across your restaurant table.

"i have a name," you groused, putting your hands back in your lap, where you could fidget with the edge of the expensive-looking tablecloth instead of decking the barely field-competent backup posing as your dinner date.

"i don't care. people are looking. or they might. so quit it. you find anything yet?"

"not yet." you'd noticed a few unusual scents on the air, but so far they'd all been strictly known compounds and the most noticeable one at this table wasn't exactly mission-related.

the waiter turned up, finally, and presented the next course. you lifted a spoon to your lips. rice. you'd had that plenty of times. several different mushrooms. a rare treat, but just because you couldn't really afford them. and an accent of… cassia, cheap shampoo, hot paint? your new nose wasn't sure what to make of it. but you'd smelled it before.

there was a sample terrarium running Celeq Corporation's proprietary synthetic biology in one of the library labs. Celeq, the Director had said, like many synthetic biologies, was fine. perfectly stable. if your planet didn't have seasons. or weather. or humans. worked fine on her parents' homeworld, because they could never leave the domes.

"i think we're going to want to talk to the chef," you said.

"damn. can i at least finish dinner first?"

"probably. but you can have my risotto. smells like Celeq."

she shrugged and reached over the table to pull your plate over to her side. "not toxic, then, just unsustainably high maintenance. and better you than me with that augment. i already have my nose the way i like it."

"thanks for volunteering me, by the way. all these wonderful things i can never unsmell." you paused, smirked. "you ever read the specs? you know the breadth of the Terran biochem recall?"

"do you have a point."

"yeah. you can relax with the bitch act. i can smell how hot you are for me."

she dropped the fork.

"as if!"

you scratched your nose again. "doesn't lie."

"fuck you," she said. "i'm not hungry any more. let's do this." she stood up and pulled a badge from her slacks, screamed at the waiter: "Directorate of Planetary Ecology! take me to your chef!"

you pulled your pistol. wasn't a frame, but the enzyme pellets were a lot safer inside a hab. "god. you really are out of practice. gun first, threats second…" □

#mechPilot #mechposting #microfiction

team effort

handler and mechanic who bond and eventually bang over how much they hate their pilot. she won't follow orders unless i get weird about how they're phrased. she keeps coming back with bits snapped off and phased array radars don't grow on trees. her mommy issues have mommy issues and her daddy issues also have mommy issues. her radiators are constantly full of mud, i don't know where it comes from in a desert theater. three days after we first met she showed up in my office with a dog bowl and a leash. yeah well she's always in my break room demanding i bolt more armor onto her light scout mech and won't even look down my tank top. hey you know what would really show her? you wanna do it in her stupid cockpit? yeah? yeah let's. oh god. yes. i needed this. i needed it too. how's this, having fun down there? godddd yessss i'm gonna cream all over her fucking flight stickkkkk

"Tower, this is Golf Echo Two, about halfway down the preflight checklist, be advised I'm experiencing some… uh… difficulty with the manual operations panel."

"Golf Echo Two, patching you through to Control."

"Golf Echo Two, this is Control. I've just spoken with the flight line chief, she says manual panel parts are in scarce supply at the moment. Are you go or no go otherwise?"

"Ma'am! Your attack dog is go, ma'am!"

"Uh. Yeah. You're just going to have to live with it." □

#mechPilot #mechposting

gardening

you did something stupid and now you're here in your itchy twice-a-year dress uniform in this bright busy room in the regimental HQ trying to figure out if you're going to be yelled at, shot, or promoted. the room's full of folding chairs. apparently not enough furniture in here normally to contain all the suits and all the brass.

your "ops coordinator" ("we don't say 'handler', grunt, it gives the civilians weird ideas") got pulled off for a side conversation two minutes after you got here and you haven't seen her since. you're looking anywhere for a familiar face. you're coming up empty. at least the woman next to you looks equally stressed. she must be civvie, some consultant or other; soft face, masses of curly hair. she's wearing a blazer and slacks with big round dataframes.

"hey," you elbow her. "what are you in for?"

"gods above and below." she sighs. "everything. but today mostly Neryx-9."

"the ag research station. you were there?"

"hardly," she says. "just came up on my huge list of problems."

"creepy shit. i was front and center for it…"

she cocks her head to listen. you explain.

Neryx-9 had been a cluster of greenhouses on the surface. supposed to be vacant, powered down — actually they'd said "mothballed", then looked at you like you were stupid when you asked what a moth was and what they did with their balls. but not vacant. far from it. you went in with a miniframe. first thing you found was the bodies of the grid authority techs that had called it in. purple mold already growing over them.

"it was wrong," you tell her. "not like that white stuff you get when an open nutripak sits in the fridge too long. i mean, i don't know if that would have been better. i just, i don't know, i didn't want to get any of that stuff on me. frame or no. maybe there was some already on me, but didn't want to get it on anyone else. so i backed out, sat in the airlock, thought about calling for extraction. thought better. backed to the wall, cycled my flight jets until it was starting to get warm even inside the frame, thought maybe i'd cook it off me. my ha– ops coordinator asked me what the fuck i was doing. snapped me out of it, i told her, i need fire. incendiaries."

they'd found them, somewhere. support rigged another airlock outside of the main airlock after you'd yelled at them to keep that shit inside. a miniframe-scale plasma cutter for outside construction work, and some purpose-built low-velocity liquid pyrophoric agent rockets.

the woman in the blazer made a face. "we just have those sitting around?"

"starship boarding actions. when we don't want to breach the hull but we do want to use all the oxygen. splashes around, gets everywhere, but nowhere near hot enough to melt anything structural. only used 'em in sims, of course, not like we get a lot of star traffic. horrorshow shit. or i thought it was, before this."

the outside airlock door opened and you'd taken up what they'd brought you.

you stepped over the bodies of the grid techs into hell. purple and orange jungle everywhere. insane external humidity and particle count. dome after hallway after dome of the shit, growing over the grow lights, growing up the walls, into the vents. you could feel it through your frame, through your suit. it was hungry. it wanted in.

"ma'am, compared to that feeling, that pressure, the first giant critter trying to eat my frame was a relief."

six thick legs, triangular jaws, scales and plates all over, massive paddle tail. it had reared out of a pond and tried to drag you back in with it. it wasn't as heavy as you, maybe, but it was mad as hell and a fast mover, and fuck, what right had anything like that to exist in an abandoned greenhouse? you knew you didn't want to be in that filthy water. who knew how deep it was? it'd clog your exhaust, choke your radiators. you twisted around as best you could in its grip, armed your wrist weapon, and blasted a thousand flechettes directly into its face.

"and that stopped it?"

"well, wasn't much left to be stopped, but yeah. and that's when i found it that it had friends and they could smell blood in the water."

she wrinkled her nose in a way that was either a dataframe input gesture or genuine surprise.

"why not just depressurize the domes, at this point?"

"thought about it. i had breaching charges. but… like i said, this stuff felt like it shouldn't get out. there's not much out there, yeah, but i just couldn't. and i had the cutter, and the rockets. so i decided to make it too hot on the shore for them to get me so easy."

you'd turned the artificial jungle into curtains of flame. the big creatures dove back into the water, giving you a narrow path to keep going. in the burning canopy, smaller things flared and dropped; you hadn't seen them moving until they died.

your handler had been screaming at you to get clear, get back to the airlock, but the flames made that a losing proposition. so you kept going in. Neryx-9 was roughly linear. there was another lock on the far side.

"past the labs, it turned out. and maybe some of those corpses in there had been growing these things, but it looked like the shit got away from them and was growing on them. there were these ribbons of orange moss, growing everywhere, out of containers, branching into foam and fabric and dead flesh — i tried to pull it off someone, before i realized they were all dead, and their skin came off in sheets, brown-black and full of tiny holes. charred, but not. think it was acid."

"something like a lichen."

"yeah, maybe? i learned about those in school. you can see 'em out the windows in a lot of places. they grow on rock, right?"

"they do," she says. "useful. so what did you do then?"

"i set the cutter to max spread and i torched a path through to the far airlock. and i don't mind saying, when i noticed the cutter battery and gas cylinder were doing okay, i started spreading it around a lot more. i just. i had to burn it."

"happens that was the right move," she said. "good instinct."

"please tell me someone did something about that shit."

"well," she smiled, "there's you. you know, you're refreshingly simple. like a cat that somehow had the sense to eat an invasive lizard. and since you didn't drag the bits all over, i tasked a solarsat to finish the job. can't beat a pass with an X-ray cloudpiercer beam for that kind of cleanup."

she wrinkles her nose again, and the general murmuring of a dozen conversations in the room changes as people look to the main wall display, which now shows a collection of greenhouse domes sagging as if collapsed by an invisible weight. the rock under them begins to glow.

"what's a cat?" you blurt out, before the words "i tasked a solarsat" have a chance to sink in. like, her, personally?

"an animal. a dumb little predator that associates with humans. from Terra, way before the Catastrophe. we're not ready for them just yet, but maybe someday."

a door opens to your side, and you both turn to see your handler, looking about at the end of her rope, and next to her, her boss, the major, who reports directly to the colonel.

"shit, there you are. look. you're gonna have to answer some questions. and it's not guaranteed you're going down for this, not yet, so just be honest, but for fuck's sake be brief, don't try to understand or interpret—"

both of their faces blanch. like, almost completely bloodless. eyes wide.

the curly-haired woman in the blazer smiles widely. "don't worry," she tells them, "she already did. she's been very helpful. in fact, i think i might like to keep her." she puts a hand on your knee.

"i'm not sure i understand, ma'am?"

"pilot," the major says, "is there a reason you've been occupying the time of the Director of Planetary Ecology? the woman who keeps this entire planet breathing oxygen and eating something other than rocks?"

and now your face must be bloodless too. the DPE? even you know that position. but you can't remember ever seeing a photo.

"oh, she was just telling me how she improvised containment protocols to prevent someone's experiment with Araukan imports from getting out of hand. clever girl. or lucky, at least."

you risk a glance to your side. she's still smiling. the woman who can steer any bioscience research on this planet, cut off power and water and air to anything she deems anathema to the coming ecosystem, commandeer keystone orbital infrastructure and burn habitats like you burned trees.

"i don't think we can possibly say no, Director," your handler says, carefully.

"no," the Director agrees. "you can't." □

#microfiction #mechPilot #mechposting

officer's ball

If there was one thing that eventually turned you against the aristocracy, it was the yearly humiliation of you, your handler, and your entire ground crew being forced into beribboned beyond-antique pre-starflight fashion every year for the Officer's Ball. They insisted. They said the nobles needed the human element. They said it'd justify your funding.

"Ammo doesn't grow on trees," the woman who directed your every combat action said. "And if it did, they'd be found growing only in First Landing family gardens. I hate this. I hate these people. Every fucking year, just to keep the program running. Don't they get bored?" and then she burst into tears and you had to do her makeup again, from the beginning.

You didn't mind it so much for yourself. The entitled fat old perverts of every gender trying to grab your ass and catching a handful of hoopskirt were entertaining. So was being forced to sample a continuous mix of canapés, sherry, cocaine, chocolate, PL-2141, and further canapés. If you really worked at it, you could approximate a slight buzz, the faintest echo of what interface drugs did on an average mission day.

But your poor mechanic wasn't used to being groped by the nobility or plied with anything stronger than hangar coffee. By two hours in, she was looking green around the edges and ready to puke in the nearest potted palm. Your avionics specialist, parted from her usual headphones and overlay glasses, was rigid with sensory overload and unable to dissociate because some third son of some electronics bureau minister had her cornered about a harebrained idea and wouldn't let go.

Your handler was worst of all: thoroughly miserable in her tightly corseted dress and constitutionally unsuited to any kind of discomfort inflicted upon her own person, rather than yours. She jumped at the slightest touch, gritted her teeth even more noticeably with every introduction. Your signed or whispered attempts to quietly reassure her that the "mission" was on track and would be over soon caused her to twitch and on one occasion even yelp, startling the admiral responsible for your fuel allocation. You smoothed it over as best you could, insinuating something about "combat nerves" — the old fool might have actually thought she was a pilot! But you didn't feel the need to explain, not that night.

The next day, as you hunted down a rebel tactical element in the hills above Seyan's Folly, she was still hung over. Not hung over enough to not notice when the pinned-down rebel lieutenant started in on an honest-to-God "you're not so different, you and I" speech, but hung over enough that she told your comms operator to cut the audio feed to Command, not your cockpit speakers.

"We're listening," you boomed over external PA speakers, forwarding her orders. "Wait? We're listening? Apparently we're listening."

"Shit. I mean. We're not that different, really, but obviously there's, uh, you're part of a system, and there's, redemption is on the table, I guess, maybe you'd like to, uh… honestly, I was just buying time."

"Don't get cocky, I've had your reinforcements bracketed by smart mortars for the last two minutes," you said. "You never had any time to buy. But… tell me about your side's command structure. Does it have a yearly ball?"

"Are you fucking joking?"

Things got complicated after that, with the improvised extraction, but what the hell, your team already worked well together.

You've had to work for every round and every joule and every mole of active nanomachinery since (much of it wrested from lesser units sent from your homeworld to drag you back) and you share a tiny, noisy cabin with your handler above the large bay of a rebel assault transport.

Maybe you're on the right side. Maybe there isn't one. But they're still letting you pilot, and your handler has happily returned to a tank top, fatigue pants, and what's left of her battered leather jacket, restoring her confident growl over the tactical link. The liaison officer they've got watching you has assured her that there's not a single brocade ball gown in the entire fleet. □

#mechPilot #microfiction

a drone swarm operator is cute when she's all "i am the spider hidden at the center of a web of metal and light, dare you walk into my parlor?"

and even cuter once you've shattered all of one's toys, peeled the lid off her bunker, plucked her from her command couch, and are holding her by her collar as she tries to remember how to hit you with her own two fists instead of the thirty or forty appendages she's used to.

if you decide to take her home, do remember that she'll need new swarm elements in short order. she needs to give orders as well as take them. you will not be remotely enough to satisfy her need for control in both directions.

they don't need to be the same specs or count as you found her with, and in fact, she will often be able to adapt to operating biologics or cyborgs with similar need for direction as her original drones, which can be very helpful if you're already a collector of such things. but if you're not prepared to provide replacements of some kind, however initially crude, it's kinder to finish her where you found her, and move on. □

#mechPilot #microfiction

armies are always fighting the last war. survivors come home with scars and lessons learned and ranks achieved by virtue only of being still standing at the end, and busily begin the process of figuring out what they should have done to keep more of their friends alive. but everything's obvious in retrospect, and the enemy learns too.

R&D is always fighting the next war. or trying to make war obsolete. or working on something completely unrelated that just also turns out to be able to fly or float or explode or reduce humans to paste or circuits to scrap… if it actually works on the battlefield.

fighting the last war makes you predictable. trying to fight the next war needs you to be lucky. it was the bureaucrats who forced the compromise that is modern pilot hardware, yoking the fractious generals and scientists together in the present.

the original, basic function of the implants is keep our pilots alive and conscious through high G and EMP and blood loss and battlefield fatigue, and to keep them informed and connected to the network. the implants work very well. the technology matured a long time ago.

but they can only help so much if the pilot's training is wrong: if she has learned to duck under an incoming K-29b, and then the K-29c comes along with better lookdown sensors, well, that's all over but for the flag they mail home.

so the other function of the implants, sacrosanct, in place of all the other features that the lab monkeys claim they could be fitting in that limited space instead, is memory patching. faster than training an old reflex out of someone and a new reflex in. click. download. done. keeps you fighting the current war, and winning.

don't worry too much about how. the side effects from a few too many doses of neural plasticizer is a small price to pay compared to death, disability, or forced retirement. besides, they don't mess with the higher functions much: principles, ethics, loyalty, if you had any to start with, you'll probably still have them. those are much less amenable to memory patching than the low-level functions. muscle memory. threat recognition. fight/flight balance.

it's true that there are some side effects that can be more initially distressing than others. they're fast low-level reflex functions too, and the patch source could be anyone in the fleet, after all. broad compatibility is important. so yes, sexual preferences and orientation can get a little… blurry. but you'll get used to it, pilots. the system works. □

#mechposting #mechPilot #microfiction

downed mech pilot who carved a swath of destruction through hundreds of klicks of heavily patrolled territory with just the survival tools in her bailout kit to steal an enemy mech from a depot and extract herself, powered by the sheer indignance of being explosively evicted from her nice comfy interface tank

it's true what they say about pilots. spoiled princesses with the muscle tone of kittens, every one. but never underestimate how attached they are to having a hundred tons of machinery between themselves and the horrible outside world.

callsign BOOMERANG would have been welcome in any infantry bar in the theater after that, but she never found out that she was the sole pilot so honored, due to never leaving her hangar on foot voluntarily again. □

#mechposting #mechPilot #microfiction