Chapters (41)
- Title
- Indicia
- Steel Frame
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About The Author
- 'Ironclads' by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- 'NineFox Gambit' by Yoon Ha Lee
- 'Grunt Life' by Weston Ochse
The shell goes rigid, and explosive bolts squirrel around its hull, up and down and under its arms, popping welds and peeling armour. The machine splits, and retro-rockets wake inside, spitting fire past the cracks.
The Juno and I skip clear in time to watch the cockpit burst free, trailing fuel and cable.
The Mirai doesn’t have its jockey any more, but it still has a little of its hindbrain left behind. The mindless body drives toward us, clawing through the air, sacrificing itself to keep us from the little pod bouncing away across the dust. The Juno and I oblige.
We kick out, plant our foot against its chest, ride it down to the ground. The hull opens up below us, shattered machinery suddenly bare where the cockpit used to be. Point blank, our rifle nearly cuts the thing in half.
We let it die.
My head is a rush and my lungs are raw. My skin prickles in the cold, but I’m burning inside. I’ve never made it past the limiters before. Never broken the magic ninety-seven. It feels like I might tip myself out, right here in my helmet. The Juno and I shudder together, darkness creeping in through the corners of my eyes.
A voice brings me back from the edge. It’s Salt, shouting something I can’t quite hear.
The line runs clear for a single, terrible second.
“Lear’s hit!”
Nine
NINE
INSTINCT CARRIES ME the first few steps.
A gunshot rings out in a crowded place, and most people run the other way, trample each other trying to reach the doors. It’s the sane thing to do, programmed into anything with a spinal column and a decent set of eyes.
Some run the other way. Maybe they don’t know better, or they don’t put much on their own lives, but they turn where they stand, and hurl themselves at the glare.
Stupid habit, I know.
I had the instinct to begin with, but NorCol drilled it deeper in. I crewed a company medivac for a while after basic, before I had the spurs to work a shell. I was on NorCol’s tab, and they weren’t going to let me off easy.
I flew an ambulance with an armoured snout and open doors, spin-guns mounted out the sides and bloodstains worked into the deck. It took me a few months to pass the trials for a jockey’s patch, three months and three weeks after that to get myself a shell, but my job didn’t change. My Spirit tore pilots out of flaming wrecks, collected ejectors before they burned up in the air or buttered themselves on the ground.