FEEDBACK CURVE

You’d been doing something like sleep when the general quarters sounded. You don’t really sleep in the way you used to anymore, you just cycle down now. Make your heart rate slow to a crawl, try to empty your head until all that’s left are the ghosts of control interfaces burned into your brain.

You’re not in your cot. It’s some technician. A crew chief, you think? Your crew chief? You can’t really separate the face from any of the others anymore. They don’t have the scars the pilots have, they don’t have the implants with the little ID squawks. They don’t have the interface ports drilled into their bodies. Generic. Baseline. This one only sticks out because it’s the one that keeps taking you back to this cot when you aren’t sleeping in the alert room.

You’re an officer. They consider that important, you know. You have your own quarters in another part of the hangar bays, with clapboard walls and a lock on the door and your own info terminal. You haven’t been there in weeks. The technician cots, separated from one another by crudely strung up sheets that form a small maze, are slightly closer to the cradle bays so that’s where you sleep.

You’re up and in your interface suit before the tech has fully regained consciousness. Their reaction times are slow. Too slow. You’re up and on the gantryway before the on duty crew has finished the launch preps, still running around and shouting at each other about fuel lines and weapons loads.

Your helmet is on and the world is gone, blacked out in that moment between when you put it on and when the S-MAG reaches out and integrates, when your body melts back into the OFNIR’s embrace. You can feel the way your pulse quickens in the darkness, and all you can hear is the blood rushing in your ears.

Mercifully it doesn’t last long. Systems turn, banks of sensors light up and you wake up in the body of an avenging angel full of fire. The coolant lines and data cables are popping their seals and retracting as the sleeping techs start filling up the hangar, swarming like insects around different stations. The other two pilots that were off duty are ready too and you can feel the muted over-broadcast of their own OFNIRs like teeth drawn across your ears. You all report your status back to control, and get an acknowledgement in a way that isn’t quite words, like it’s blooming from the back of your own skull.

SYSTEMS GREEN

You know whatever happened was bad because the infantry are moving too, loading into the bulky VTOL gunships and slinging big plasma casters and gauss rifles around. Anti-mech weapons.

You get another impulse from the control terminal. 

LAUNCH

The hangar bays are wide open and you’re moving through, head of pack, the tip of a delta. You feel the heat from your thruster pack and the coolant from your fusion core is like ice in your veins as it compensates. All three of you have standard weapons packages: shoulder chainguns and rocket pods, an arm-carried over-sized gauss rifle, a pile driver built into the opposite forearm, a network of laser emitters and close-defense pods studded around your bodies.

You start to get the mission profile in flight, splitting your mind between hugging the terrain and dodging around the urban wreckage between you and the target zone and parsing the data flowing into you: a pilot is dead. Vogel-5, one of yours. It had been backing a push when the infantry had broken and the armored column had scattered in a panic. Few enemy mechs. At least seven of the big tracked weapons carriers they’ve been fielding. Unverified numbers of infantry. The alert crew was already in the field north of there, where the fighting is fiercest tonight.

Every time you evade the spur of some shattered tower you get a little flutter in your stomach. You don’t feel anything about knowing the other pilot is dead.

The three of you can see the target zone before it comes up on visual spectrums. Sensor streams let you see through the concrete dust and the black smoke from the cored vehicles. A little stutter of signal interference that feels like a razor across your teeth where a weapons carrier is firing a heavy gauss cannon, a pain in the back of your eyes where an infantry unit is setting up some kind of signal emission device. That’s the first thing that goes: Vogel-6 hits it with the chaingun the moment you all pop over the ruins and the proximity fuzed anti-infantry shell detonates right in front of the target. The pain is gone with the puff of fragments. You can feel the joy that radiates from Vogel-6.

You close with the largest of the targets on the field. A lumbering mech, a little larger than the Super-Maneuverable Assault Gun you pilot. It has armor plates twice as thick as yours, and a gun complement that dwarfs your entire arsenal. It doesn’t matter though: it’s slow, and clumsy and dead.

Your close-in weapons fire with a thought and take out its sensor pods with little pulses of light, and the chaingun on your shoulder chatters with the same fragmenting shells that Vogel-6 had loaded. Blinded, the thing rages and lurches and the tickle in your gut blooms into pleasure as you taunt it with your speed.

The gauss rifle barks twice on the first pass, once into the mech you’re strafing around and once again at the end of your run into the flank of the weapons carrier with the cannon. Armor rends on the mech and the weapons carrier simply ceases to exist in a shower of burning metal. Your toes curl up at that, and you ride the feedback as far as it’ll take you, all the way into the next attack run against that mech: another blast with the rifle and you’re following it up with a salvo of the rocket pod into the rents in its armor, little blossoms of flame blooming through some important control surface. You think you moan when that happens.

Vogel-6 and Vogel-3 are fighting around you, you can feel the edges of their sensors at the limits of your own with little flashes of what they’re feeling, of the control sequences they’re sending out. It stopped being disorienting a long time ago and now it just feels like communication. You know exactly where they’re going to be, the firing solutions they’re tracking, the targets they’re closing in on. You’re perfectly orchestrated without ever having to think about it and the blooming pleasure in your collective skulls is ratcheting up into something a lot better than the group sex the support staff on base keep dragging you into.

This is what lets you kill the mech before the operator can manage to respond with more than just blind and angry fire. When Vogel-6 shears away an armor panel on the back torso in the last pass you know exactly where to close, exactly how to dodge the firing arcs and then you’re on it, inside it with the pile-driver.

Nothing feels like a pierced fusion reactor does. Like taking a star into your hand and squeezing so hard it dies in your fist. The feeling is intense, the heat from the quenching reactor and the pop of its EM shielding dying nearly maxes out your feedback curves. You actually froth. You can feel something wet in your interface suit and you’re babbling incoherently in a way that only the cockpit recorder will ever pick up on. The gout of heat melts your pile-driver and sends thermal alarms squealing down your spine but the enemy mech is beyond salvage now, and you pull away in triumph to lock on to the next kill.

It genuinely shocks you when you hit the ground. The pain is like a hammer blow, and you can feel warm blood drip down your pilot-body’s lip. It’s been so long since you’ve taken more than a glancing blow, a long time since the raiders in this part of the Perpetual Liberation Army’s advance had actually surprised you, that it almost feels like a treat even though one bank of your thrusters are sputtering with malfunctions now and the neuro-sympathetic pain will leave you with a limp for days.

The blow had come quickly but you could just barely piece it together from scratches of your own feed and the feeds coming from the other Vogels: another mech? Cloaked? Triangulated now. Locked in. You target it without seeing it, pulse of lasers and the gauss for good effect and the lightweight quadrupedal thing dies as the sensor-shrouding tarps draped over it are shredded between you and Vogel-3’s overlapping fire. That feels good, too. 

You’re still coming down from the back-to-back sensory spikes, breathing hard and feeling your sensor net for the next target when enemy infantry try to swarm you.

You don’t panic. You don’t panic. You do not panic. Your heart rate drops as your blood fills with a new drug cocktail, and your breathing steadies again.

They’re only half engaging you. The friendly infantry from the gunship have dropped in too, spread out wide across the concrete wreckage that used to be a city and they’re distracting each other. Some of them are close, too, but there’s more of the enemy on your position than them so you don’t give it a second thought when you fire your point defense batteries.

Anti-infantry shrapnel pods on your body burst out in a cloud that sends limbs and guns and viscera flying out in a circle around you, bloody streaks against the dusty wrecks as a constellation of IFF beacons wink out of existence. You shiver and you can feel your leg start to shake with the kill tallies. You wonder if the technicians that watch your mission recorders after every sortie will make illicit copies of this one too? Will they care that some of the writhing dead were their own?

You’re back up on your feet and closing in on the next target Vogel-6 has flushed out without thinking about it again.