The two Mantamechs penetrated the clouds in perfect synchrony. Robbie/Eve felt the nauseous thrill of G-force as they levelled off, an all-too-brief hypoxic high.
* Wow/Wow.
They were cruising in the stratosphere of EXO19. Storms broiled beneath them in cerulean swirls. Lightning pulses cracked the cloudscape. Above, a terrible gap of nothing crossed the predawn sky.
Just looking at it set Robbie’s pulse racing with excitement/sent a chill down Eve’s spine.
* 141592653589793…/3.141592653589793…
* DESYNC/DESYNC.
* Eve?
* Yes, Robbie?
Even with their neural entanglement implants desynced, Robbie could ‘hear’ his wingmate’s thoughts. But they were no longer one/one.
* You’re doing the ‘numbers’ thing. It means you’re nervous as fuck—which means WE’RE nervous as fuck.
* You know I don’t like wormholes.
* We came through one on the journey from Mars!
* Established, anchored in deep space. That one is larval…
* ‘Larval’? You’re thinking like a Christophite. Wormholes are just…just…
* That’s just it, Robbie. We don’t really know, do we?
Robbie watched Eve through his left wingtip camera. Her Mantamech was cocooned in a vapor cone, a ghostly shock collar traversing the thin air between storm and stars. The wormhole had dropped below the horizon.
* We know they get us from Sol System to the EXOs.
* We can’t objectively measure them…
* That bothers you, eh, Eve?
* …and no probe, drone, or AI survives transit.
* Keeps us human mech pilots employed.
* Does it not bother YOU, Robbie, that we can’t re-enter orbit while it emerges? That we’re cut off from reinforcements until it ‘completes’?
* We’re hardly cut off. We have our whole squadron back at the FOB…
* Out of comms range, on the other side of the planet.
* …and MMC intel is 90% sure this planet is clear of Christophites. Shame.
* ‘Shame’?
* Eve, as informative as I find our little ‘brainstorms’, I didn’t join the Martian Mecha Corps for discussions about wormholes. I came here for…
* ‘Sex, Death, and Mechs’, right. Typical flyboy.
* Remind me why YOU signed up again?
* Sunrise.
* What?
* Sunrise, in 7.4 seconds.
* I don’t…
* Just shut up and watch, Flyboy!
Sunrise back on Mars was barely worthy of the name—a cold star rising through the dust—and Earth hadn’t seen a sunrise since The Great Cascade. Now, EXO19’s sun broke behind the curvature of the horizon. A golden wave rushed across the surface of the clouds. Gaps in the storm revealed the ocean tens of kilometres below, shimmering blue beneath curtains of light.
* Wow.
* Wow.
The sun rose further. Robbie’s nosecam polarised the view, filtering the light to a tolerable glow. He could see…two black ✝✝s. Moving.
* Hell yeah! We’ve got…
* SYNC!
* …company/company.
* Two ✝mechs …/two ✝mechs …
* …in Aero Fighter Mode…/…in Aero Fighter Mode…
* …twenty-five klicks east…/…twenty-five klicks east.
* Matching altitude/matching altitude.
The ‘Eve’ half of Robbie/Eve separated the delayed sonic booms from the background thunder of the storms below, then analysed the pause between them: <0.0001% of a second. There could be no doubt: the ✝mech pilots were entangled too.
Robbie/Eve felt a surge of adrenaline/a hollow feeling in the pit of their stomach as they zoomed in on their counterparts. The enemy craft were based on the same post-Cascade mecha tech. But it had been decades since the Christophites left Sol System, and their designs had evolved. ✝mechs were bigger, sleeker, with vantablack wings and stiletto-spike tails. By contrast, Robbie/Eve’s Mantamechs felt drab: grey wings with overlapping ailerons, stubby tails ending in a spiked sphere.
* DESYNC…/DESYNC…
* …for parley.
* …for parley.
In parley, only one pilot would speak—verbally, as entangled thoughts never ‘sounded’ coherent to anyone but your wingmate. They had previously agreed to let Eve do the talking.
“ATTENTION, Christophite mechs! We are Mech Lieutenant Evelyn Umbasa and Mech Lieutenant Robert Cassidy and of the Martian Mecha Corps. This planet’s airspace is under quarantine due to the emergence of a Class IV wormhole in orbit. For your own safety, please return to your base. Over.”
Robbie strained against the haptic straps of his crash corset. He loved his wingmate—a platonic love engendered by the hundreds of hours they’d spent synced in training. But he couldn’t help feeling that when he was with her, his wings were clipped.
In the MMC dojo they’d released opponents from simultaneous chokeholds too soon. In 2vs2 chess, they’d spent too long executing Schrodinger’s Castle moves, rather than going straight for the Qing. In flight simulations, her tactical reticence was a drag factor—they’d opted to parley almost as much as they’d engaged in virtual combat.
Robbie had been craving real combat his whole life, from his childhood in the Cascade refugee camps, through bar fights in the Helles Basin strip, to the MMC academy on Olympus Mons. Now, here he was, aged 22–standard, out in the EXOs at last. He wasn’t here to ‘parley’ with Christophite terrorists, he was a Martian Mecha Corps pilot. Sex, Death and Mechs.
He could feel his Mantamech around him now like a second skin, a sensory homunculus of titanium. Frankly, he felt like a god. He wanted the Christophites to bite back, to say something that would justify hostilities.
They did not disappoint.
“We are Priestess Pilot Alicia Eminescu.”
* I knew it.
* Knew what?
* Clones, Eve. She’s an entangled clone pair.
The idea disgusted Robbie.
“We recognise neither your jurisdiction nor your quarantine,” continued the Priestess. Her accent was old-Earth—arrogant, infuriating, yet strangely more intimate in Robbie’s earpiece than Eve’s thoughts in his head. “What you blasphemously refer to as a ‘wormhole’ is an Artefact of Saint Christopher, the grace by which he carries the Children of Ectogenesis through the River of Spacetime. You will leave this consecrated atmosphere—now—and return to that red hell you call home. Or we will cleanse EXO19 of your presence. Over.”
“Your ‘Artefact’ is just an asshole in the sky…”
* SYNC!
* DESYNC/DESYNC.
* What the hell are you doing, Robbie?!
* Parleying!
* Sounds more like ‘escalating’ to me. Stay off the channel.
* Eve…
* Stay off, or I’ll sync us again!
“What my wingmate means to say is that the status of the wormhole network is part of the ongoing peace talks between Mars and the Church of Saint Christopher. Over.”
“We are the Artefacts’ natural custodians,” said the Priestess. “Humanity would never have reached the EXOs had we not forced matters with the Great Cascade...”
“My parents DIED in the Great…”
* SYNC!
* …Cascade…/…Cascade…
* DESYNC!/DESYNC!
* Robbie, stop it!
* Are we really going to just take this!?
* If we keep syncing/desyncing, we’ll risk a paradox…
* So, stop doing it then.
* Stop forcing me to!
Over the parley channel, Eve said, “We propose a détente. Let’s all disengage, put our mechs into Ground Walker Mode and deploy parachutes. Over.”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
The Priestess’s laugh echoed in Robbie’s cochlear. “You’re twenty kilometres away, Martians. Why don’t you come over here and make me?”
“You got it, Christophite…”
* Robbie, NO! SYNC!
But it was too late. Robbie had already fired his afterburner.
As their thought trains collapsed into one/one, Robbie/Eve felt the G-force ramp up in Robbie’s crash corset. Simultaneously, they could see his Mantamech from Eve’s perspective, accelerating over the clouds to engage the enemy at the head of a billowing contrail.
Belatedly, they fired Eve’s burner, feeling her crash corset constrict and pulsate, pumping blood to her brain so they could use it to assess their tactical options. A synchronised dive to the cloud layer was still possible. But the Priestess clones had also lit their burners and were closing fast. If Robbie/Eve dived, they would be hunted from above like bats in the Aviary Dome on Deimos.
* Proton lance online/ proton lance online.
The air in front of their mechs distorted into kilometre-long red beams.
Ahead, the ✝mechs shimmered against the golden crescent of the rising sun, their own lances deployed and ready.
* Distance to engagement: 16,000 metres…/ Distance to engagement: 16,000 metres….
* 12,000…/12,000…
* 8,000…/8,000…
* Firing m2issiles…/ Firing m2issiles…
Robbie/Eve used Eve’s craft to paint the enemy with targeting ladar and fired 192 m2issile clusters from Robbie’s Manta-wing batteries. A simultaneous fléchette launch from the ✝mechs filled the air with hypersonic diamonds.
Eve’s mech broke into a rolling pattern, her proton beam swatting the incoming projectiles out of Robbie’s path while one of the ✝mechs did the same for her counterpart. The m2issiles/fléchettes sizzled out of existence like moths against a forceflame.
Meanwhile, Robbie’s Mantamech and its ✝mech counterpart bore down on each other head on.
* 4,000 metres…/4000 metres…
* 2000…/2000…
* 1,200…/1,200…
* Approaching proton lance range…/ Approaching proton lance range…
The collision alarms were a caustic shriek in Robbie/Eve’s ears. They felt the nihilistic rush of killkillkill in Robbie’s endocrine system/Eve’s body convulse from the G-crush as her crash corset gimballed to counter her Mantamech’s roll.
* 141592653589793…/3.141592653589793…
For an instant, a second dawn bloomed in EXO19’s upper atmosphere as four proton lances clashed at Mach 8—a colossal FLASH which would have been visible from both orbit and sea level.
Robbie/Eve flickered in/out of consciousness as their crash corsets battled to keep the blood flowing. Camera views were grainy and overloaded. There was a sensation of heat and the smell of propane, but it wasn’t clear where or who it was coming from.
The view cleared as they exited the conflagration. They could see a falling cloud of burning debris—one mech was down.
* Gotcha!/Gotcha!
* Wait…/wait…
* Holy fuck…/holy fuck…
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
In Eve’s cameras, the view made sense. It showed one of the ✝mechs—a Priestess clone—plummeting towards the clouds in a ball of flame, while Robbie’s Mantamech banked around to the North. The remaining ✝mech burned hard for the South in retreat.
In Robbie’s cameras, reality looked different. From this viewpoint, both ✝mechs had survived and were coming about in a heart-shaped arc, deploying puffs of chaff in their wake. It was Eve’s Mantamech that was aflame, falling cloudwards in a terminal spiral.
* Paradox…/Paradox…
It was a mech pilot’s worst nightmare, a situation so rare it was practically a fable. A quantum paradox—where one half of an entangled pilot pair saw one reality and the other saw something different. There was only one resolution: desync so that reality could collapse back into one strand.
The alternative? Tactical chaos in the short term, and—if you survived—quantum dementia in the long term.
But which reality would prevail?
* Robbie…/Robbie…
50/50.
* Eve…/Eve…
The ultimate game of roulette.
* Whatever happens, I…/Whatever happens, I…
But the burning sensation was getting stronger and stronger…
* DESYNC…/DESYNC…
Even with their implants desynced, Robbie could ‘hear’ his wingmate’s screams, could feel the superheated straps of her crash corset as she thrashed within its cage, could smell her melting flesh mixed with propane as she plummeted.
* EVE! Pull the chutes! EJECT! EJECT!!!
But it was too late for parachutes. It was too late for anything.
* S…sun…rise…
* EVE!
But there was nothing, just his own stupid thoughts in his own stupid flyboy head— denial>anger>bargaining>depression>acceptance collapsing down to just one.
Vengeance.
The Priestess clones were completing their arc, lining up in their sleek ✝mechs for another run at Robbie, wiggling those blacker-than-black wings in a come-get-me taunt as old as aerial combat itself.
“You’ve got it, bitch…” said Robbie over the parley band, as he once again punched his afterburner and levelled his proton lance.
The two ✝mechs converged, their lances forming a killer V in Robbie’s flight path. He fired his remaining m2issiles, and the atmosphere swarmed as the Priestess pair responded with their own fléchette stream. But now he didn’t have Eve to protect him. He oscillated wildly on his axis but was quickly overwhelmed. He yelled in frustration and dived for the cloud cover, aborting his attack. Vengeance would have to wait.
The wind buffeted his Mantamech as he levelled out in the storm. Synced with Eve, it would have been easy to ride the turbulence, but left to his own judgement he found himself slammed from air pocket to thermal and back again. His proton lance cauterised the clouds, causing superheated rain to blow back into his cameras as steam. He could fly ‘blind’ using radar and ladar alone, but mechs were stealthed—he needed line of sight to see the Priestess clones, and vice versa. He deactivated his proton lance and the red beam winked out.
His did, at least. The Priestesses’ lances stabbed down from above, causing redlit blisters of steam to billow and pop in the clouds like underwater explosions. Robbie swerved and dived, his thrusters whining, his body bruised and beaten by the vasodilatory efforts of the crash corset, his visibility once again a big fat Zero.
Suddenly, the lancing stopped. His camera vision cleared—or at least, became just hurtling clouds and lightning pulses. He felt his heart hammering against the corset straps. Had he…lost her/them?
Something large and black—vantablack—loomed in his tail camera view. A terrible wingspan in the unmistakable shape of a ✝. The image turned to radioactive static as the pursuing mech powered up its lance.
Robbie bucked twice in his crash corset. This double mule kick sent a fly-by-wire signal cascade back through his mech fuselage to the spiked sphere at the end of his tail, which jettisoned and shot back into the nosecone of the ✝mech. Robbie fired his burner—again—and dove, bursting out from under the cloud layer just as the nuclear air mine detonated.
He would like to have been able to say he heard the Priestess clone’s screams, but it was probably just his imagination. He would have liked to see the mid-atmosphere mushroom cloud too, but the blast cooked his tail, dorsal and wing cameras. He did see a brief super-bright flash reflected on the ocean—still many miles below—before the view returned to storm grey waves, storm grey skies, and in the distance, the true dawn.
“That was for Eve…” he whispered to the sunrise, daring to hope. Perhaps he had killed both the ✝mechs in the blast. Perhaps he…
The remaining ✝mech dropped out of the clouds and landed on his back with a squeal of rubbing fuselage. Jangling in his crash corset, Robbie shook his wings and fired his thrusters, but she wouldn’t budge. With most of his cameras blind, he used haptic sonar to feel out their positioning and realised why. During her descent, the Priestess had transformed into Ground Walker Mode. She was now clinging to him, her ✝mech’s mechanical arms and legs locked around his Manta’s torso. Together, they were tumbling through the air towards the ocean—his one remaining camera showed sea, then storm, sea, then storm, sea…
“What are you doing?!” he yelled over the parley band.
“You wanted me in Ground Walker Mode…” snarled the Christophite.
“You’ll kill us both!”
“You think I’m afraid to be martyred, Martian?”
Robbie tried once more to shake her off, but her grip just increased. His wings crumpled and his fuselage buckled. The haptics in the crash corset responded—the safety cut-offs must have been damaged in the collision; he was being crushed. He might suffocate long before they hit the ocean, and he couldn’t eject with her wrapped round him like this. And he probably deserved to die. His rashness had got his wingmate—his friend—killed, and for what? What did he have to show for his life? Nothing. He closed his eyes, woozy from the lack of air. Then he forced them open, he should at least look death in the face…
The ocean and clouds spun before him. A jagged, violet fork of lightning fell from the storm. He was briefly away of an eruption of sparks around his corset, then he saw…
Two mismatched eyes, the vantablack pupils dilating with pleasure…
They hit the ocean, and everything went black.