COMBINED ARMS

 The shot had been perfect. Really, it had been. It was so good you felt the set-up in your teeth, vibrating up to the top of your head like an invisible hand dragging a line of sensation across the inside of your skull. When the railgun shot hit the exposed core of the mech you felt the thing in your crosshairs die and the damp puddle between your legs that the techs all liked to tease you about turned into a flood as the neural feedback rewarded you for such a clean engine kill.

Curiously, you’d even felt a little pang of something from the infantry you’d maimed in the process. There was one beneath you, screaming and flailing while another you imagined must be a medic dragged them away, leaving behind the part of their leg pinned beneath your own foot. There was another one, clutching the stump of an arm through their hardsuit, next to the slumped over enemy machine. The hardsuit infantry were new, you were unused to working with them but you appreciated how they confused the other mechs on the field, how this one clinging to the frame of your prize had managed to blow open a mechanical access panel with a shaped charge against it. It hadn’t cleared off your kill fast enough, though, and you weren’t willing to pass up the shot just to give them another few seconds to drop free. They’d wired you to do a lot, to feel a lot, but not pity or remorse. Never that.

With another quick sensor sweep you were gone just as fast as you’d rocketed in, thruster pack at full-burn and feet skimming along the ground as you moved to the next pocket of fighting, the next target that had been fed to you by your Controller this run. There were at least two more enemy mechs on the field that you knew of, and with only one other WARSPRITE dispatched as part of the reaction team that night you knew you had good odds of at least a second hip-shaking kill before they called you back to the kennel. The infantry you’d left in the ruins behind you would police the area, tend their own wounded and tag the enemy wreck for salvage, a type of clerical work both beneath and beyond you.

Unfortunately Amsel-5, your partner that night, snatched both kills before you could even get your jaws around them. You could feel the bitch’s joy through the tuned-down echos of the neural links that bled between your mechs, a disappointing ghost of a body-wracking orgasm that should have been yours as the other pilot punched through the too-lightly-armored cockpit of one of the enemy walkers with a pile-driver, and then immediately spun around to set off an ammo detonation along one side of the other with a well-placed burst of laser fire. Both mechs were charred or mangled before you’d even been able to close the distance and you knew that Amsel-5 took a sick amount of pleasure in the way you whined through the link in jealousy.

AMSEL-3 RTB 

The recall wasn’t a verbal command. Amsel-5 had gotten in the same way, tailored to its own command interface. Your Controller was calling you in, pulling you both back now that the only things it was worth sending a WARSPRITE out to hunt had been killed. You knew better than to whine to this one, though, better than to even sub-vocalize any dissent or dissatisfaction. You turned and followed near to the track that Amsel-5 carved around the few zones of infantry fighting still being decided, hating to leave with so many rounds still unspent.

You both returned to the hangar you’d been operating out of without catching even a stray shot, striding in through the bays in perfectly choreographed sequence after the customary sensor & IFF handshakes that got you in under the defense guns and through the armored gates. The hangar was part of a larger base, a part of some series of drop-in orbital units that linked together on the ground to form something like a fortress wherever they hit the dirt at.

You linked to the repair cradle, cycling down the throbbing of your engine and flicking on the safeties & lockouts of your weapons systems. Two squads of surly looking anti-mech gunners turned down from tracking you and the other returning pilot, but you felt something unfamiliar in how they didn’t immediately disengage from you. They seemed to linger, for a few extra moments, before lowering the guns and dispersing.

 Active sensors started to wink out, and your world retreated to a smaller and smaller space until only a few external cameras remained. With the sign of disconnection even those finally died and with a jolt you opened your eyes inside your own belly. Inside the WARPSRITE’s belly. You still couldn’t see, your helmet and the lack of anything to actually interface with inside the Assault Gun mech rendering sight useless anyway, but you could feel the way the ice of the coolant lines in your suit and the heat radiating off every other part of the machine encasing you made it so intolerable to be in it without the relief of syncing to the neural circuits. With the OFNIR link severed you no longer felt like an angel, now you felt like you’d been swallowed by one. Familiar panic built up, threatening to overwhelm the residual highs of your last kill before someone mercifully opened the hatch and released you onto the gantryway. You slid out of the harness and onto your knees, gasping and shivering in the sudden cold as your suit finished cycling down the coolant. The external cameras of your helmet flickered on just long enough for you to see your crew chief coming up the gantry towards you, and you had it off and on the ground before he’d closed the distance. Across the bay you were dimly aware of the same scene playing out with Amsel-5 and its own tenders. As maintenance crews and ammo handlers set to their business your crew chief wrapped two big arms around you and hauled you up into the air and up against their chest.

Your shaking didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop for at least another hour after the de-sync, but the way they supported you like you weighed less than one of the tools they hauled around and the smell of weapon lubricant on their uniform always helped to calm you down and ease the stress. They murmured something to you, lost to the confusion of trying to sort out what senses you still had left now that so many of them had been stripped with the disconnection from your machine-body, but you could definitely feel the hand that moved through your hair and gently pet you as you came back down to the world. By the time you process anything more concrete than that you were down on the hangar bay floor, at the little den of tool racks and info terminals he’d set up shop in at the base of your assigned cradle, marking notes on a tablet as you delivered a truncated after-action. As part of you delivered it, at least. A version of the pilot-self, the you-that-lived-in-you, a hind-brain construct that kicked in on the ground the same way it did in the cockpit to handle these kinds of background tasks.

Strictly speaking you didn’t have to do any of this. In the same way that you required no pre- or post-sortie briefs with your Controllers you didn’t need to do this with the mech techs. The Controllers had a direct line into your neural link to upload and download everything they needed, and the mechanics could always review your cockpit recorders if they needed to know anything specific about the performance. You knew that they watched them, in fact, you’d seen them several nights now playing it for each other in the morale bay they’d set up. 

Pilots were barred, of course, but you liked to peek your head in when they were too distracted to notice. You knew that they liked the way you’d breath so hard in the middle of firing, the way you moaned with every hit and shook with every kill. They spliced together different feeds, gun-sight cams, external visuals, radar returns, and always the grainy view of your own face from inside the helmet, washed out of all color in the IR spectrum but still so strangely appealing to them. The oddest thing about it, though, was how they always added music to them. That half the viewers were obviously getting off to it wasn’t nearly as surprising to you as the choice of electronic buzzing and bass booms that they always seemed to edit these to.

Still, though, they liked the process of it. The ritual. You’d been on enough sorties, passed through enough squadrons, fought on enough fronts to know how this would go. Like a well-practiced battle drill. Your crew chief would wrap up what they needed to do, check off whatever box they needed to check, and put in all the necessary requisitions and work-orders to fix you again. They would find some reason to pull you aside, some interesting thing that needed your immediate attention, and they would take you to somewhere just out of sight of your body being tended to. He would drop the act as soon as you were out of sight. Sometimes she would. Sometimes they. Sometimes several, in turns or at once, would be repaid for the long hours of maintenance from your last run by taking what they wanted from your body. Tongues would invade your mouth, still slick with the nutrient & electrolyte stream your suit fed you. Hands would dig into the softest parts of you --you grew softer every day, in fact, a side-effect of the hormonal balancing– and you would be stripped out of your climate-controlling interface suit as they took greater and greater liberties with your body.

It would not be an unpleasant experience. It never was. They took what they wanted from you, but what they usually decided they wanted was pleasure. Still de-sensitized from the shock of disconnection, from the overload of combat, it was the closest thing you ever got to decompressing or to microdosing what it felt like in the warm glow of the link. Even when they’d sink teeth into you or drag filthy nails across your body it wouldn’t register as pain, too far below whatever that threshold had been permanently reset to. After so much frame damage, so many armor-rending blows, how could they hope to inflict true pain on you? To even try and mar your panels with their own flesh? They could punch your steel all they wanted, and you would never really mind.

The bruises tonight felt nice, in their own ways. None in the shapes of fists, not tonight, all the outlines of mouths and teeth and fingers that he and the tech he’d invited along this time had dug so deep into you. They’d taken longer than usual, though, hours even. You frowned at that. It was unusual, and it had deprived you of the chance to go out and sit by the maintenance bays and watch your body being teased and tweaked by the crew on shift. You liked that, as much as you could feel the emotion of liking anything outside of the link’s embrace anymore.

With your two handlers spent now and returning to their berths you left back down the halls to the hangar, either to go to the cots you shared with the other pilots on alert call or just to stare at yourself in the cradle you weren’t certain, but you never made it that far.

The blow to the back of your head was sudden, and you crumpled to your knees immediately. It should have been sending alerts blaring through your skull, and your immediate reaction was to boost one bank of your thrusters, dig your other foot in and spin hard into a wickedly overpowered kick at whatever had attacked you. You didn’t have the instincts for a human body anymore, though, you were wired for an Assault Gun. Instead of a graceful counter-attack, instead of popping your close-defense weapons pods, you twitched and groaned as you slumped down on the cold metal of the hallway.

“Did you fucking break it already?” someone barked, digging . You tried to run the IFF tags, tried to hook into their comms but nothing came back. Phantom returns from disconnected systems, impulses that left you with the return of a headache instead of a feedback in-flow. You tried to move your body, your pilot-body, but a boot to the side flipped you over and pinned you to the deck.

“Nah, they just do that. Twitchy little freaks.” a different voice, not nearly as deep. “You can’t scramble this thing any worse than it already is, just hurry up.”

“Fucking mutt.” a third voice, a third body somewhere beyond the blurry edges of your vision. “This is the thing that ate Weber’s leg?”

“Yeah, and shot off Keller’s arm.” you couldn’t track the voices any longer, all three blending into the same gruff low way the infantry spoke.

The one above you leaned down, their boot digging deeper into your chest and squeezing out a wheezing groan from you. “You hear that, dog? You hurt our friends, we’re gonna hurt you back.”

You don’t say anything back. You couldn’t if you wanted to, so little air in you now you couldn’t scream. Instead of fighting you just squirmed, trying to take another burning impossible breath.

The weight on your chest lifted, but before you could try and scramble away it came right back down, onto your upper arm with an eye-watering violence that actually managed to tear a scream out of your abused lungs. A different boot to the side turned that to a whimper, and then all three were on you with fists and feet.

The beating couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. You’d have died if it went longer than that. Outside your machine-body you were too weak to survive that kind of punishment, but the infantry ambushing you knew that. They were holding something back, a part of your mind that only crunched battlefield conditions told you as much. They wanted something other than your death.

“Alright, alright, pin it down.” one of them ordered the others, and two sets of hands that dwarfed your own dug into your shoulders and held you to the deck. It was unnecessary, they knew you were too out of it to resist now, that you’d only be leaving this hall on a stretch to the med bays at this point. “You’re lucky we don’t take your fucking limb for what you did.”

That same voice. It was… Softer, higher than the others maybe. You tried to focus in on it, tried to see the face when they smacked you across the side of your own face. “Don’t fucking look at me.”

It was, strangely, the first time any of them had hit your face. They’d worked over every other part of you, but not that. The hand that struck you didn’t pull away. The trooper kept the hand there, kept her hand there you realized. She was warm. She was hesitating, probably staring right into you as you squeezed your eyes shut. “You two take off. I’m gonna haul the mutt to a kennel, say it tripped off a gantry.”

“Sar-” the start of a protest.

“Go.” and it was done. The hands holding you down released you, and they were gone without another word. You still didn’t look, and the hand on your face still didn’t move. Instead a new weight settled down on, astride your legs.

“You learn a lesson tonight?” she asked, almost softer now, alone. You nodded, all you could do, and the hand on your face curled and… Scratched you? Scratched the side of your head, where you kept your long hair cropped short around the neural ports. “Good dog. Don’t forget it. Ever.” she continued, that edge from earlier sneaking back in. She flicked the side of your input port, sending a little ring of sensation into your head. Then she was up and off you, and you were up in the air and thrown over her shoulder with a grunt.

You finally opened your eyes, then, watching the halls slide past as she carried you away from the direction of the hangars, away from the body you desperately wanted to sync back into, and towards the med clinic.

“Remember, fell off a gantry.” the trooper said, with a pat to your lower back, not looking for a response. “Don’t make us come back to dispute that.”