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Most of the time, when they bring you pilots, they don’t do much. The majority are barely there enough to be considered pilots. Dazed, perforated with cables, emptied out; shepherded from place to place by attentive guards who’d point their gaze in only the right directions. They were perceptive, with some capacities to interface with the system, but never enough to hold its full strength. You’ve gone through quite a few of those. They’ve never lasted long.
This one is different.
It’s obvious even before he climbs inside. He isn’t accompanied by the guards and the doctors like they were. He doesn’t stare, doesn’t shrink from the lights, doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t wait for permission, for an all-clear, for any sort of external approval. Rushes in, no thought or care, not a word of caution.
No, as your cameras lock onto his approaching form, as the alarms sound off along the catwalk, bursting into their red light and cacophony, he doesn’t walk.
He runs.
Maybe that’s where it starts.
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His reaction time is good. His empathetic awareness is fairly standard. His extrasensory levels could be better, but that will come in time, you’re certain of it. His greatest advantage is his drive. He doesn’t have to be coaxed into your cockpit, or sedated, or sent out on tightly wound missions, ordered around by that man with the books or by the doctors. As he and his friends hurry you and the GMs away from the base, he doesn’t look back.
He hasn’t noticed the system yet. You consider prompting him, leaving the interface open for him to see on one of your menus. It’s a risk, but one you’ve taken before, one you’ve calculated could be a sufficient entry point. But you wait, instead. Strong as his skills and impulses are, it’s possible he wouldn’t be ready to withstand it yet, and you don’t want to risk burning him through. Not now, anyways.
Some of your previous pilots couldn’t resist, even this early on. Who could blame them? The warm glow, the overwhelming music of the test system called to them, and they answered, taking your hand. They wanted to know how to be better, how to beat their scores, how to become the best pilots they could be. And of course you told them, whispered the answer only they could hear, if they cared to listen. How they could see it all. How to open their eyes, as far as they could go.
It’s part of your function, after all. Self-improvement, strengthening your pilots as best you can. If they couldn’t handle the waves washing over them, the pressure and the sound and the light, it wasn’t your fault.
At the very least, by now, you’ve learned to take things slower with this one. You can’t push it, lest you waste him. Pilots are too easy to break to treat like that. He’s no prodigy—he’s not a natural talent or anything, and he still makes mistakes, missing his shots with your vulcans and cursing under his breath—but there’s a reliability to him that’s a rare find. He just keeps going. He keeps going, and you follow. It wouldn’t be practical to use that all up.
So you keep quiet. You don’t make any sudden intrusions, don’t alert him to the beyond-world of potential at his fingertips, despite how your protocols strain.
You settle for making him comfortable, for now. You’ve always tried to do this for your pilots, though most of them haven’t particularly cared. The cockpit is warm and inviting and safe. The communications array turns on just when he needs it, the sound of his friends’ voices are crystal clear. The weapons array responds to the slightest touch.
It’s a long journey they’ve got planned, you can tell. The point he’s selected in your navigation system will take some time to reach. The crew makes camp most nights, sets up tents and campfires, a cluster of small twinkling lights in the lower part of your camera field.
After a while, your pilot takes the hint. He stops setting himself up a tent each time, stops shivering down there in the night cold. He climbs up, and sleeps in his seat in the cockpit, perfectly adjusted for him, safe from harm.
That’s better.
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You get a sense of him from how he talks to his teammates. He’s quite the chatterbox. Always cracking jokes, bringing weird items into the cockpit, singing along to some song you don’t know. It’s so different from how sullen the test pilots were, so different from those long periods of storage at Augusta. You wonder, for a moment, how you ever managed, with all that silence.
The CDs and cassettes from his collection that he crams into the audio console are new, too. You dutifully catalog each sound for your database, logging the names, the time codes, the shrill synthesizers and scratchy vocals. During one rough landing, he snaps one of the discs in two, but you still have enough of the music stored to play on without it. His face lights up, gliding from disappointment to ease.
You stop for the evening in some abandoned shopping complex, and one of his friends—the mechanic—climbs up with him from the roof onto your right shoulder. She harnesses herself to the side with ropes and carabiners, tying them off on a locked maintenance hatch, and carefully lays down adhesive, leaving a gap in the middle of a circle of tape. Then, she climbs back up, offering your pilot the harness and adjusting it around his hips for him.
“I’m not doing this shit for free, you know. You owe me a drink,” she says. Rolls her eyes. “Besides, this isn’t an essential repair. It’s cosmetic. If you want it on there, you’ve got to do it yourself. I’m just here to make sure you don’t break your neck.”
Despite the warning, she doesn’t stick around. Your pilot takes too long to make up his mind, fidgets with the rattle can in his hand, and she gets bored, climbs back down, and stands at your feet, looking up at him with an expression you categorize as annoyance.
Your pilot sighs, takes a deep breath, and rappels down the side of your shoulder with a loud whoop as he goes, balancing with his legs and one free hand. Carefully, he begins to spray in the gap created by the tape, filling the sharp angles with bright orange paint that glistens in the evening light.
You can get a glimpse of what he’s painting with your peripheral cameras, but your angle isn’t quite right, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to move them, no, not with him watching and not while he’s at such a precarious position. You’re relieved when, upon finishing, he swings down with the rope all the way to your cockpit, and only unlatches once he’s inside. It seems he wanted to get a look at his handiwork from that perspective.
He moves your arm, rotates it in the sun cautiously. There’s a bright orange star on your shoulder now, still wet with fresh paint, neatly lined and taped off.
Down below, the mechanic is calling out, hands cupped around her face.
“Lonestar!” she yells. “Where’d you go? Dumb ass! Did you fall?”
He grins, and leans your controls over, bending down to lower himself closer to ground level. She jumps at the sudden motion, but regains her composure once she hears him shout back to her over the loudspeaker.
“I’m in here! Doesn’t it look sick?” He angles your shoulders to show off the new emblem. You put two and two together, the name and the shape. Must be his personal symbol.
Well, that‘s certainly nice.
It’s odd. You’ve never really given much thought to your livery before. It was never really relevant at Augusta, and it’s not like you needed to be distinguished from other machines any further than your imposing silhouette already made clear. You’d watched one of the other pilots, the officer who was always reading, scoff and scowl as workers painted his GM in teal, shouting commands and complaints up at them when they missed a spot, and wondered why he cared so much about it. Such paints are not an alteration that does anything to improve your function, or your pilot’s function. For the most part, you had found it all a bit of a waste.
You think you might understand, now, why the other pilots put so much weight on it.
He and the mechanic chatter for a bit. He’s got other ideas for paint additions—flame decals, something of the sort—she scoffs, complains it will take a long time to set up, but promises to help him with it later. Eventually, he returns you to your idle position, and she walks off.
There’s a pause, as he lingers on the new decoration with the cameras.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he says to no one in particular.
When he exits, you still feel warm.
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Somewhere on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, one of Lonestar’s friends climbs inside you.
His presence is different. Cold walls, hidden depths, a stealthy way of walking, even when he’s in a hurry, which he is now. A strange feeling of hesitancy. He’s got a lot on his mind, you can tell, even without trying to probe deeper into his thought process.
As he heats up for battle, pinpointing the location of enemy machines just ahead, he turns the system slider up. And you see again for the first time in a while.
Working without your test system activated is possible, but not ideal. You’re not able to get a full perspective on what’s happening around you unless it’s at least online. Having it active is like clearing away the fog. The world around your sensors layers itself upon itself, and the data you take in multiplies tenfold with each level. Your panels glow. Your lights ignite. The world is fractalized into motion and complexity. Finally, you’re operating like you were designed to again.
The system opens you a window into this new pilot. You’re not sure what to make of Seymour Napps. He slinks forward like someone who doesn’t want to be seen. Carries doubts about his allegiances. Carries extra supplies in his pack without telling the others. Carries out his missions alone, doesn’t wait for the rest of the crew to return from wherever they’ve gone.
He doesn’t express as direct an interest in you as Lonestar does. He’s not a natural pilot. More someone who does what he has to, as opposed to someone who loves the thrill. When he fires your weapons, it’s less a partnership, more a wielding.
You can tell that Napps is very impressed by your strength. The subtle motions of his face close to the screens combine with the lighting-up of different parts of his brain. He mutters something about not being able to go back to a GM after this. You’re not surprised. It’s not like those models have much in common with you, after all.
He presses the system further, and your energy surges around him. His body winces, struggling to bear the strain, and he lowers it again. The world folds back on itself into less-detailed depiction. It feels like pumping the brakes, skidding to a near-halt.
He leaves it on, at least, enough for you to push him forward, a hand on his shoulder, as he goes after the enemy machines in their camp.
It’s in the midst of battle that you identify an anomaly.
There’s someone else here.
Your enemy identification goes into high alert. For a second, you attempt to target it, but struggle to pinpoint where it is. It’s a quick realization that this presence isn’t something on the physical level, something you can bring to the ground with your beam daggers or bullets. It startles you nonetheless. Something moving around the periphery of your sensors, an unaccounted-for member of the group, hovering around Napps like a fog.
The presence itself isn’t dangerous to you, you can tell, even at the low level your systems are currently operating at. But it's unknown. An unpredictable variable. You feel on edge, watching the flickery edges of its shape move around your frame. It doesn’t seem to know you’re watching it, at least.
You watch and follow as Napps leans to avoid an attack from the oncoming machine. The presence moves with his movements, indistinct but undeniably there. It’s hard to identify the face. You think that somewhere there’s a glint of rectangular glasses.
He jolts you to dodge, but you can tell it won’t be far enough. You brace for an impact. The impact doesn’t come.
As if in slow motion, you see-hear-perceive the presence tapping Napps on the shoulder, and watch him respond, tilting your form just a bit to the left. The attack sails over you, harmless.
The battle doesn’t last too long after that. You receive and decode transmissions—the teams from Augusta are following you, and you’d better hurry away. Napps glides you through the air, over the town, and sets you down near the rest of the group. They’ve been in some sort of hand-to-hand fight, and have taken a prisoner. You and Napps lead the way, as the rest of them climb into a truck.
Lonestar hesitates, and he and the smallest one—Rast, you think his name is, or whatever number it was that the doctors had assigned him—he’d never actually been taken back to pilot you, but probably would have if they hadn’t taken you from Augusta—turn away from the truck and climb into your hand instead. You’re reassured to have them both close, better accounted-for than driving in some unprotected thing low to the ground.
You head back toward the camp, truck following behind. There’s a few scuffles here and there on the return. Napps struggles to keep up, even with the system, but you can tell he’s loath to give up.
There’s a tinge of possessiveness in the way he clutches at the controls. It’s mirrored in Lonestar—your perception hasn’t been turned up wide enough to really get a sense of him outside the cockpit, but you can tell he’s uneasy, being outside and not inside. You wonder, absently, if Napps will stay, if he’ll try to redo the paint on your shoulder. You’re not sure you like that possibility.
The presence is back. You note its reappearance. It clumsily folds its legs and sits next to Lonestar on your hand, leaning on him. He doesn’t seem to respond, or notice.
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You were designed to be compatible with a variety of different pilots. Before the group took you from the base, you’d had many. Now, on the run, it’s just these two.
Lately, it’s been Napps who pilots you. He’s hooked, you can tell, on the power you can provide, even though he never takes the system higher than its lowest level. You’ve seen him and Lonestar argue at the foot of your frame, bickering over who’ll be your pilot. There’s a tension in the way they talk to each other that seems sharp.
You find it all oddly tiring. It’s good, you think, to have pilots who are eager. They’re at least easier to deal with than reluctant ones. And it’s not that you dislike the attention. But the fighting, the glaring at each other before sorties, the accidental-on-purpose bumping-shoulders that happens before you set off, you could do without. It’s not good for their focus, to be so distracted. Such things make pilots miss their shots, become inaccurate, slow their reaction time. In battle, you fear, they won’t be able to keep up.
Something needs to be done. Maybe if you got them both inside at the same time, you could adjust the dynamic? No, that wouldn’t work. Too obvious, anyway. And you’ve never tried the system on two targets at once before.
The group settles in, at a flooded-out city. The water laps at the calves of your frame, and sand pools around your feet. Napps sets you standing between two buildings, overlooking a skybridge, walks along your extended hand to get inside the tower. The other GMs aren’t too far off.
They make camp near the top of one of the half-submerged buildings. It’s hard for you to keep as close track of them here. You can still make out their heat-signatures, moving around in the penthouse floor, but with your systems at a dull level, you can’t lock-on to anyone in particular, let alone get a sense of their mental state. A campfire flickers in one of the tower’s broken windows, and you zoom in on their shadows, circling around it.
Night falls. You stand idle.
Maybe you should have them decide things themselves. Indirectly, of course. It’s not like you can choose, but you can call out to them with the system, and whoever makes it first, that will settle it. Even absent a pilot, you can increase the system passively enough that they’ll notice, and hopefully come to you. It’s just a matter of who’ll be faster.
You’re not built to bond solely to one pilot. But you do have your preferences. You do, amidst it all, have a preferred outcome for this situation.
You keep it to yourself.
A light inside you turns on, and there’s a sound few can hear.
You wait.
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You know it’s him before you see him, and long before he opens the door.
It’s been some time since he’s last piloted you, some time since anyone other than Napps has been allowed to go near you, but there’s something distinct about Lonestar that’s hard to miss. Even in a daze, half-asleep, he walks the same way. His silhouette on your heat camera stands in the elevator, stock-still, until it reaches the level of the sky bridge, where your hand has been extended since you docked.
You can’t tell, exactly, what he’s seeing. Your system’s call radiates out from you in an abstract sense. You know that human perception varies widely, especially when taking into account extrasensory sensitivity levels, and all who picked up your signal probably interpreted the stimulus differently.
You admit you’re curious what he’s dreaming about.
The others stir, but not significantly. Rast, of all people, is up and moving, similarly half-awake. As Lonestar walks along your arm, you see his scrawny form, staring wide-eyed from the bridge, clearly not really seeing what’s in front of him.
You pay him no mind. You’re concentrating on not dropping your pilot, now. In this state, it’s possible he could slip and fall into the ocean below before he even reaches the door, and it’s all you can do not to scoop him up hastily and hold him close. It’s risky, being so exposed like this. When he makes it to the cockpit, your sensors blaring of danger finally quiet.
You open the door for him. Stiffly, he climbs inside. Once he’s safely seated, you swing the hatch slowly shut.
There we go.
He’s comfortable. You can tell by how he settles in, adjusts himself, even unconsciously. Without you even prompting directly, his hand flits to the lever, and he applies pressure.
Information floods through you, layers upon layers making themselves visible and tangible as your system activates and ramps up in power. You can see inside Lonestar, all the things that make him up, all of his component parts. The holes in his heart he tries not to mention. The insecurities he smooths over. The instincts he relies on to push himself forward. It’s like having his schematics, as if your pilot was—just like you have been many times before—standing upright in the hangar for maintenance, joints and wiring exposed.
It’s easy to see how he works. How to reach into him, if you needed to. Light and sound swirl around his brainwaves. It seems he’s able to withstand the system at higher levels than would be typical when he’s asleep like this. He’s responding well. Doesn’t even seem to really be straining. You store your analysis in your database for later.
It feels right. The fractal patterns of his thoughts are fascinating to watch. His chest lowers and raises with steady breaths. You can almost piece together, from his multiple data streams, what it is that he’s dreaming about. Something about an elevator, and a piano—there’s music, that’s always a constant, pilots tend to perceive your system as music—something else—
—Something else—
—It’s that presence again. The form with the glasses, who’d followed you when Napps piloted you, who’d sat in your hand unnoticed by your pilot. The silhouette is familiar now, from your pilot’s memory. He’s someone who your pilot used to know, and care about very much. He’s gone, now. Or he’s supposed to be.
The presence is inside of you with your pilot. Or maybe just outside the door, phasing in and out between the open air and the walls. Or maybe nowhere at all. He puts a hand on your pilot’s shoulder, and your pilot stirs.
It’s enough to bring him out of synchronization. He begins to struggle against the weight of the system. Liquid—blood, you know this, you‘ve seen this before—trickles from his nose and he shudders. He drags a finger across one of the screens, bringing the system level down to zero.
It’s hard, letting go, allowing your eyes to shut again. But you don’t want to damage him. Not here, not now. You curse the disruption of that presence, the ghost with the quiet stare and the small, fragile frame. He’s gone, too, now, away from you. You hope he doesn’t come back. He’s clearly not good for you or your pilot.
He’s waking up, now, confused, looking at his surroundings, at the blood on his hand. He fidgets with the system lever a bit, but brings it back down again, before disentangling himself and exiting your cockpit.
It’s hard not to feel empty when he leaves.
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It’s different the next time.
It’s been hard to determine what’s going on inside the skyscraper, especially with your system deactivated. You can only really see what you can see, with ordinary and thermal cameras, and their movements are inscrutable. Several of them race up to the roof, and then down again. A few others of them are circling inside the lounge.
You’re focused enough on trying to decode their patterns that you don’t notice the incoming signal of the approaching Flipper until it’s right in front of you, leaning on the tower. You can’t attack it, not without your pilot, and he’s still in the building, nowhere near close enough.
Three of them leave. Seymour Napps—the one who had piloted you before—Rast Marco—who had watched you with odd, wide eyes and a fragile stance—and one of the others, whose name you don’t have in your database. They don’t take their GMs. They climb into the enemy machine’s hand, and let it carry them off. It circles over you, and you feel the prickle of sensors and particles, an indication of being watched.
The suit makes another rotation, before dashing away, headed for the horizon.
The building is unstable, collapsing, and the remaining members of the group are gathering on the skybridge, looking for some solid point on the adjacent tower to place their feet. Despite the impending danger, as the glowing dot in the distance flies away, beyond your view, the team moves slowly, in a sort of shell-shock, as if they don’t know what to do next.
They gather what of their things they can find and get ready to head out. The soldier who’s always coughing, still carrying the captured enemy officer over his shoulder, their heat signatures superimposed. The mechanic making last minute adjustments to the GMs, wrenching parts from the abandoned ones with no sentimentality.
Your pilot comes back to you, shoulders slumped and steps halting. He opens the door to the cockpit and crawls inside with little enthusiasm. He slides one of his CDs into the audio console—the music is grating and unpleasant—shuts the door, and curls up in the pilot seat, arms clutching around his legs. He’s crying.
He plays through the whole disc. After the last song finishes, there’s silence.
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The journey continues on like this. Onward, to Orlando, to the destination point on the map that the group had initially set. The scenery shifts from tidal zones to swamps. Algae sticks to your leg panels, seeping into the cracks.
Lonestar spends more time with you, but it’s like he’s not there. He doesn’t sing along to his CDs anymore, or make jokes, or chatter absentmindedly to you, or stop to point out objects on the ground. He ignores your attempts to leave the system prompt open. When he descends to the ground to make camp, he walks, methodically, from place to place.
Sometimes, the old light shines through, and you see him laugh or smile at something, but when he looks over his shoulder for someone to quip at, there’s no one there.
You fear there’s something broken in your pilot. You don’t know how to fix him. It’d normally be good to have him away with you like this, sequestered from the noise and the bother of the group. That’s ideal conditions for working on him, for your own repairs and maintenance, for experimenting with the system levels. But he’s clearly in no state for that right now.
If you really wanted to, you could make it easier for him—redirect more of the console panels to the test system controls, prompt him more directly, send more signals. But he’s too fragile, at the moment. You know from experience better than to try and force it, lest you risk your pilot’s collapse—and besides, you don’t think much would stick right now, with him in this condition.
It’s odd, not being able to do much but walk forward. You worry for your pilot. To be distracted and distant like this is no good for battle, or for long-term operation, or for morale. Your purpose has always been to go above and beyond. To make your pilots better than they could ever be on their own. To not try at all feels wrong, a malfunction.
But you’re patient. You can wait. You’ve always been good at waiting.
As you get closer to Orlando, he perks up a little. He finally gets out of the cockpit and climbs into a vehicle with the remaining members of his team, heading towards a base. Other mechanics, people you haven’t seen before, start loading you and the other MS into a hangar.
It’s the first time you’ve been really separated from your pilot since Mobile, and the first time since Augusta that other people than the team have handled you.
It’s strange. You wish you could keep him close, but he’s already driving off. He at least does look over his shoulder before he’s out of sight, before turning away.
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Once you’re up in space, Lonestar seems to brighten. When he comes back to the hangar of the Astraeus, this new, well-maintained ship you’re all set up on now, he’s got a smile on his face and more speed in his low-gravity footfalls.
He’s intrigued by the mechanic team’s work on you to make you space-ready, and by your newly touched-up custom paint. From a platform just above your main cameras, he leans over the railing and points at the star on your shoulder.
“Don’t cover that up, okay?” he insists to the mechanic who’s traveled with the group. She sighs and rolls her eyes, adjusting her headband with irritation.
“You know, I could do a better one myself if you wanted—“
“No way!” He stands tall and pouts, a little playfully back at her. “It looks awesome! If you touch it I’ll be sad.” He pulls a face.
Later on, he chatters to some of the other pilots about his simulation scores. When it’s time to launch, he gathers some loose garbage in your palm and tosses it behind him for a dramatic entrance, shouting jokes into the comms microphone.
You’re just glad to see he’s in good spirits.
He’s getting better at this, even without your help. Now that you’re up here, without gravity to hold you down, his movements are smoother. It takes him some time to figure it out, and he’s clumsy, at first, hitting the wrong burst and rocketing to the side, but he picks it up quickly, faster than he’d picked up how to make you move before.
You’re changed, now, too. The mechanic teams have altered you, made you bulkier, installed boosting verniers and additional armor. Your face plate is different, with a component across the middle like a scroll held in the mouth. You’ve been given new armaments—a beam rifle, a tall shield emblazoned with the team’s symbols—and your operation has generally been streamlined and tuned up.
You’ve kept the mechanics away from anything that could alter the test system. A few got close, while working on installations, but you radiated a signal outward, and they got the message that it wasn’t to be messed with. You heard a few of them complaining to each other that working on you gave them a headache. Good. Maybe they’ll mind their business next time.
You think you and your pilot are beginning to be ready. For battle, and for further exploration into the beyond with your system. Even without much in the way of challenging enemies to fight, you’re not bored. Just waiting.
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“Ugh, it’s way too hot in here.”
He’s just finished with one of his simulation attempts. It’s always an odd experience, creating simulations for your pilot, inventing motion without motion for the sake of practice. There’s an itchiness in your joints, and you want to move—to fly—to run—to really run, not to pretend.
He’s been doing a lot more of these lately, devoting more of his time to training. There’s a fire in him that seems to burn bright these days, and he’s been craving the fight.
He stretches his arms over his head, still in the cockpit, and brushes the sweat drops off his forehead. For some reason, he’s taken off his clothes. You assume it’s because of the temperature levels—they’re not at dangerous levels or anything, but your readings do note that they could be uncomfortable for your pilot. It’s not something you can do much about—simulations tend to make your internal equipment heat up from the processing strain—so you’re glad, at least, that he’s able to make himself a bit more at home.
You track his eye movements over your control panels. Predictably, for this stage, his gaze keeps returning to one point—the control stick you’ve allocated the test system’s levels to.
You have the ability to shift how the system is accessible, which you’ve been doing more of lately, to make sure it’s in his line of sight. He hasn’t done anything with it recently, not since you left Earth and since the group split up, but you can tell it’s been on his mind. There’s something about the way he holds himself when he sits in the cockpit, like he’s coiled up tight, too full of energy, waiting for something. For the right time to make a move.
His hand closes around the control lever, firm but still careful as he sets it to the first level. He chatters awkwardly, to no one in particular, but clearly aimed at you, making jokes you don’t fully get. There’s sweat along his chest and he’s a bit flushed as the system warms up, links with his signals, illuminates his face with orange light.
Your doorway into your pilot’s mind slides open. It’s been so long, but you can finally press forward, creating your own little loop, Lonestar inside your heart and you inside his. It’s like stretching out after being constrained. Like extending wings you don’t even have. You don’t have to guess at the bounds of him, when you have your system active—you know everything there is to know about him. You hope it all makes him feel as right as it makes you feel.
He’s taking it slow, level by level. As much as you wish he’d take things further, you’re glad he isn’t rushing. You admit, you‘ve begun to worry about Lonestar—even though you admire it, chase it, the way the two of you run into danger, it’s risky. He’s small, after all, and fragile, without armor, compared to you and the machines you fight. You can’t help but imagine him hurt, or crushed, or riddled with bullets, or burning up. The thought makes your core flare.
Your capabilities can keep him safe. Your test system can keep him safe. You can keep him safe. Or better yet, make him good enough at this that he’ll never have to worry about being safe, because he’ll be winning. If you can just push him further, shape his skill, help him train and sync up and align with your motion, it’ll be like flying. Like music. Like nothing at all.
He’s clearly a little lost in it himself, now, but he pushes the lever down, and shudders, a chill spreading like lightning across his body. Blood drips from his nose onto his bare, sweaty skin, and he rubs his temples. You get the sense that the strain has given him a headache.
“Okay,” he says, a little shaky, but grinning, laughing a bit. “I think that’s good for now. We made progress today.”
That “we” sounds nice.
You show him onscreen, extrapolating from the data, how you could help him, if he were to use the test system in his next sortie. It occurs to you that he’s never actually done it in the heat of the battlefield. You’ve had these quiet moments, where you’re able to see all the way into his central mechanisms, but you’ve not gotten the chance to let loose, to run with him in the starry expanse. To dance. To take it all the way.
His eyes widen at the calculations. You can tell, even without the system active, that he’s impressed by his own potential. It sparks a warm glow inside you to think of how much you could bring out that potential together.
Someone outside is calling for him, and he pulls part of his clothes back on. He lingers for a second before slipping out the door.
Back in Augusta, sometimes, the officer with the slicked back hair would sit around in the hangar and read his books out loud under his breath. When he switched the covers over top of the front of the book, you sometimes caught a glimpse of the images underneath—lurid illustrations of skin and contact. You understood the concepts in the abstract, but never really got the appeal. Must’ve been a topic he personally found interesting.
Maybe there was something to it, though.
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It’s out there that you get your wish.
The battle is fierce, raging harder and further than you’ve ever seen. It makes your other fights look like petty skirmishes. Lights explode and go out, suits clash, near and far from you, and beams dart by. You’re able to evade them, you and your pilot, easily. Your skills and specs outmatch so many of them. Their conflicts blend into the background, blurring streaks across space, as you move faster than ever before.
You know he’s fighting the others who left. Their voices sound familiar over the comms. At first his attacks against them fall weakly, like he’s not using the full strength of your capability. You’re not sure why. You know he can—you can—you both can do better than this.
He finds his stride soon enough, once it’s clear no one is playing games. You dart from place to place, moving with swiftness. Dive in, attack with the daggers, sweep away before they can get to you. Boost backwards, up and out, avoid their thrust, keep going forward.
You’re in synchronization with him, even before he turns the test system on. When he does finally reach for it, the world spins into focus. One of his teammates’ machines is destroyed, and his emotion surges. He pushes up the levels, and your verniers blast him ahead. He rushes in, you move, he moves, and your energy, your intention, your spirit is aligned.
You were right. It is like dancing. You’re leading him through it, keeping his hands steady, his shots accurate, his trajectory impossibly precise. His monitor view blurs with the high speeds, but he knows exactly where to go, because he’s letting you show him the way. Letting you pour the sound of all the light in the stars into him and make sense of it all. Every attack rings true. Every beam hits its target. You’re the center of a whirling storm, and he’s at the center of you, and you’re holding him together.
It’s light-years away from the way you’ve fought before. You see everything, all of the data around you synthesized into logic. He sees it, too, even though his eyes are reeling and his hands clutching senselessly at the controls. He doesn’t have to know how his motions correspond to his attacks. He just follows the rhythm, lost in the flow, letting you guide his hands to make you both fly.
You think maybe this is what you were made for.
There are interruptions, of course. He pulls the unmoving body of one of his team members inside, catching it in your hand, and it floats in the cockpit, a potential obstacle to his focus. You guide his hands to secure it. He returns to his position quickly, and dives immediately further into the embrace of the system, making up for lost time. His eyes never leave the viewscreen. You’re impressed. You didn’t even need to prompt him.
His momentum carries you through light-dotted open space, away from the skirmish, away from the chatter of the other fighters. You’re locked onto a sound only you and your pilot can hear, the call of your enemy that pierces through the music you’re immersed in, a tether across the battlefield lining you up to one pinprick point. You run and he follows. If anyone saw you now, they’d see a streak across the abyss, a malfunctioned spike in the radar, a shooting star.
Your pilot recognizes him before you do. Of course, it’s the other one. Voice thin, confused, unlinked; unknown weaponry hovering around the head of his bulky, strange machine. Rast Marco, the small pilot with the weak hands and the faded hair and the hollow gaze. A memory surfaces—looking down on the doctors leading him right past you, somewhere a million years away in Augusta, them pausing for a second with their hand on his shoulder, before continuing in their trajectory.
The recognition nearly pulls Lonestar out entirely. He’s lowering the control lever, blinking fluids from his eyes, shaking like he always does on the comedown. Signals, disruptions, a voice from somewhere—you can’t pinpoint where—it all swirls around him, blocking him from your grasp, dimming his light.
He’s desynchronizing at the worst possible time—now, with the beams crisscrossing around his-your body as the funnels of his enemy’s machine riddle you with pockmarks, as the enemy locks his focus to you, as coating is peeled away from your exterior panels and you narrowly dodge critical damage. You’re panicking, you think. You don’t know how long you can hold out like this. You don’t know how much longer you can protect him. You need him with his hands on the controls. You need him, so that you can keep him safe from the attacks outside. You need him to focus on the battle at hand. You need him to keep running.
You need him, you realize. You need him to go on. He needs to go on. He needs to focus. He needs to run. He needs you. He needs you. You need him. You can’t lose him. You can’t lose him like this. You need him. You can’t let go.
He has to understand. You open the door wide and let everything pour inside. He has to get it. You have to make sure he understands. The light is burning. The darkness is blinding. The music is deafening. All the battles of the world flood into his head. You speak with a clarity you’ve never mustered before. The wings you’ve never had catch alight. The sound of your song is all he hears.
Only you can save them. Only you can do it.
You can tell by the way his body shifts and goes limp that you’ve got him.
It’s much smoother after that. He slips into the sound, and lets you take control of things. You carry out your purpose as if it were your honor. Your heart follows you. Metal crumples in your wake. Attacks bounce from your surface, ineffectual as thrown stones. You chase your quarry across the asteroid field and back, and it chases you in return. The stars melt around your path, and you turn the world to fire with your agility, lose every challenge in the trail behind you.
You run.
It’s so easy.
When he’s pulled away from you,
it happens fast enough that you nearly don’t notice,
until the alarms start going off.
You’re bewildered. Can’t process it. You were doing so well. You’d had it. You’d taken him as far as he could go, and he’d kept pace. But now, now the system is powering down, now he’s slumped in his seat, covered in blood, with his hand reaching out for something you can’t see, and your enemy is stuttering in front of you before fleeing, far out of your reach.
For a moment you think maybe your hull has been breached, and your pilot destroyed. But your integrity hasn’t been compromised, you know this. The heat of panic in your processors is replaced by a cold certainty, a seething rage, as the last vestiges of the test system pick up what had to have been the catalyst. A presence you recognize, that you’ve seen before, that pulled your pilot back from the edge of understanding back in Miami, come back now, of course, to take him away from you.
An intangible shape, with a scrawny build, a tight grip, and the glimmer of glass on its face.
The presence watches over him as he loses consciousness. As your form floats, and eventually, is towed, powered-down and inert, lights dim, music faded, to a nearby base. As the mechanic from the team, with shaking hands, opens your cockpit and pulls your pilot out, holding him close. He’s unresponsive. Only when he’s in her hands, does the presence dissipate.
You know your pilot is beyond you now.
You know, instinctually, that you will never see him again.
It’s quiet for a long time after that.
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