FIRING PINS
‘A Pilot is not a Person. A Pilot is a Hero.’
Your instructor's words still come to mind some nights. They’d been a hard-assed veteran recently pulled back from the front and had all the symptoms of what you later understood to be desync syndrome but at the time thought was just ‘being a rude bitch’.
She’d been right about part of it, though. Nobody has treated you like a person since the first time you climbed into the belly of a mech, least of all yourself. Nobody has treated you like a hero either.
Training was quick, disorienting and entirely virtual. They pumped you all full of drugs and flashing lights, called it something like ‘baseline reconditioning’. You vomited on your interface suit and bled from the nose and had piercing headaches for weeks that passed like a blur and you’re not certain you ever even saw a mech in all that time.
You never had to open a manual or review a technical document, they’d just cracked your skull open and poured it all in one high intensity light pulse pattern at a time. Even if you lost every other part about yourself you knew you would never lose the parts they’d buried there.
They were not kind in the doing of it. Not in the way that a hunter is unkind to a dog sent to look for a wounded animal but in the way a workman is unkind to bar stock. You were not a person to them, you were raw materials they’d been told to cut and grind into shape.
Some of the others were taken away, you think, or died maybe. Stumbled in some incomprehensible way, failed some unseen test. By the time you ‘graduated’ only half the training pods were used. The Pilot-Instructor seemed satisfied with that, and the rest seemed indifferent.
You’re just relieved you made it.
‘A Pilot is not a Person. A Pilot is a Weapon.’
You have enemies now. Many of them. Some of them even know you, specifically, exist and they want to split you open and drag the whimpering thing in your cockpit out and crush it like a bug. You know this because you listen to their comms when you’re in the field, flicking through the open channels in the clear. ‘Smack talk,’ one of the intel officers that briefs you before each big push told you. ‘But still keep track of it, they might slip up and say something useful once.’
It doesn’t sound like ‘smack talk’ though, it sounds like a promise or a prayer. The other mechs are dangerous like a tank is dangerous, not like you are. Their bodies are stronger than yours and they sometimes have more weapons grafted to them but none of them has a soul. None of them can move like you can, can see like you can, can feel what you feel. None of them can hear you or the other pilots sing. Only your people have OFNIR, the thing that makes you more than just a pilot and something other than a person. The thing that makes your mechs into S-MAGs and not just dead machines.
They rage at you across radio bands as you duck and dive and roll through their fire. Every deflected hit registers as relief, every direct hit you score makes your toes curl. You’re in their formation before they can even understand how you covered the distance. Shell after shell from an autocannon in your arm turns their rage into terror. Glittering beams from your chest criss-cross over troop transports and set them alight with internal explosions. The gauss rifle on your shoulder fires and whites out all comms with the electromagnetic backwash and the feedback comes back into you as more rushing dopamine.
One other mech is still standing, still approaching you in the hesitant loping way enemy pilots with clunky manual input controls do. It has a wickedly oversized cannon that takes up one entire arm and with all its patrol turned to wreckage around you it can safely fire.
You don’t think about what you’re doing until you’re doing it. Thrusters burn hard in your legs and on your back. You’ve leapt into the air. You’re cutting one bank of thrusters out and pouring that energy back into the other, spinning in the air with so much speed that when your leg connects with the cannon it shears it off entirely and sends it skipping away into the woods.
The short range missile rack on your back pops up and fires where the cannon used to be, into the magazine it sat on and you gasp in ragged breaths as you orgasm. The enemy mech is burning before you even hit the ground.
They send a heavy lift VTOL in to carry you back to base before you even have to report the extent of your shattered leg. Of course they know, they monitor everything you do.
You monitor empty channels on the comms.
‘A Pilot is not a Person. A Pilot is a Firing Pin with a warm mouth.’
“You stupid fucking bitch!” he seethed and you knew he meant it, even without the connection of the fist against the side of your head to drive the point home. Dull pain bloomed behind one eye and you dropped to your knee more out of reflex than actual pain. You’d seen the technician storming over from the other side of the hangar even before you’d broken the OFNIR link and stepped onto the gantryway. You’d watched him the whole time coming down and you saw his arm cock back and then rocket in. You could have dodged it like an enemy mech trying the same dumb over-telegraphed thing but you didn’t.
You took it, and you gasped when it happened because it was the first actual sensation that had registered outside the cockpit since you’d started fighting in this awful place. He spit on you, actually spit on you, and then took back off the way he’d come with other members of the maintenance crew coming over to comfort him. Him. Nobody even approached you, and eventually you got back on your feet and went through the standard checklists, wondering if he’d be back.
He’d struck a superior officer, an actual officer with the rank tabs and everything and not just some fancy title like the mercs they kept hiring used, and not one of the dozens of people moving through the bay cared.
“You really messed his liberty up, you know. He’d had a pass for town but they pulled everyone back tonight for extra maintenance work.” one of the techs told you later while you both looked over the after action damage report. “The thing you did with the leg is going to take at least an entire day with his whole crew working to repair it.” they explain, obviously annoyed.
You just look down at the hangar bay deck and nod, once. You don’t apologize. Why bother? When an owner hits a misbehaving dog they don’t expect an apology bark from it.
The angry tech does come back for you, about a day later. You’re laying on the cot they’ve set aside for you in the back rooms of the hangar, a makeshift alert center that you share with whichever other pilots makes up the reaction team on any given watch. You were probably sleeping, but it’s become harder for you to tell when you’re dreaming and when you’re just remembering.
They’re drunk, and armed like everyone on base is. Three of them, all maintenance techs including the one who’d hit you. You know the other two pilots are awake now too, the conditioning would never let them sleep through that much activity that close by. Neither moves. The techs don’t care that you’re on watch and you don’t say anything, you just go limp as they pull you out of the cot.
Later the one who hit you is brushing one big and still very grease stained hand through your hair, the other leaving bruises on your hip.
“Be good.” he keeps saying, and thrusting, and saying again. “Be good. Be good. Be good.”
The fear, like the blow and now the too-rough too-desperate sex had actually registered as a feeling.
All you can do is promise to be good, knowing that you won’t change your field combat profile. Knowing that you can’t. Knowing he’ll be back the next time, angrier, when you shatter half your armor panels in a high-stress melee strike.
You want to be good, though. You want to be good.
‘A Pilot is not a Person. A Pilot is nothing at all.’
