“In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended the differences that divided them and had recognized in their membership in the human race a common bond.” - Emperor Haile Selassie I conferring a degree from Addis Ababa University on Indian President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1965)
----------------------------------------
Feb 20, 2057, 0336 Hours (UTC +3)
Addis Ababa, Pan-Republic of the Horn
T.O.C.U. Deployment Complex
Araari Ahmed took a moment to rub crust from her eyes before accepting the phone from her husband. The communication officer on the other end heard a sigh, prompting him to ask:
“Am I speaking with Colonel Ahmed?” he asked in Hornya.
“This is she,” Araari replied in the same language.
“General Zenawi has requested the TOCU pilots for an observation mission. A plane will be arriving for you in thirty minutes, ma’am.”
The comms officer hung up before she could ask what was happening. Araari covered her face in her palms, running them up over her eyes and through her short-cropped black hair. Samson, her husband, rubbed her back. She was already in a constant state of exhaustion from being seven months pregnant, but being woken up at three in the morning did not help matters.
“I’ll get your uniform,” Samson said.
Refusing to let the aches in her back and hips slow her down, Araari was dressed in less than three minutes with Samson tying her boot laces while she shrugged on her camouflage jacket and patrol cap.
“Breakfast for you when you get back,” Samson said. “Fatira and eggs.”
She kissed him on the cheek before stepping out the door.
Their house was at the far end of a long stretch of tarmac leading to an enormous cement-and-steel hangar. Red runway lights trailed into the morning dark towards closed hangar doors illuminated in searing flood lights. Waiting to ferry her across this gulf of tarmac was a soldier in a golf cart who stepped off to salute her.
“Good morning, Colonel Ahmed,” he said in Amharic.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she responded in Hornya.
The lieutenant blushed at that. Correct procedure was to use the new, planned language of the Pan-Republic of the Horn, which was a deliberate blending of Tigrinya, Afaan Oromoo, Amharic, and Somali, so that no one group prevailed linguistically. A steadfast supporter of Pan-Democracy and Pan-Ethiopianism for her entire adult life, Colonel Ahmed was as fluent in Hornya as one could be in a language that had existed for barely a decade and a half. However, most soldiers and a good number of officers simply didn’t bother and reverted back to their original language.
“Relax, Lieutenant. I won’t make you clean my toilet with a toothbrush if you make my ride a smooth one,” she said in her soothing, motherly voice.
The Lieutenant chuckled nervously and took his seat at the wheel of the golf cart. It was bad enough she was a senior officer and grossly outranked him, but she was perhaps the single most famous Ethiopian alive. Internationally, she was the most famous Ethiopian in history. The better part of the world’s five billion people knew the name Araari Ahmed.
“What’s your name? I can hardly read your name tape in the dark,” Araari said to break up the dreary sound of tires crunching asphalt.
“Bekele, ma’am,” he said.
“How long have you worked with The Pride, Lieutenant Bekele?”
“I’ve been with the TOCU division for a month now, ma’am.”
“Not long enough to start calling it The Pride, I see. You can relax, Lieutenant. No one calls it the TOCU division here.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Araari chuckled. The pattern was the exact same for every new member of The Pride: They brought with them the stiff formalities of the Ground Forces and she would tell them to relax. Then they would relax too much and she had to be stern with them. The ones who’d been with The Pride the longest enjoyed watching the newbies struggle to figure out whether Colonel Ahmed wanted them to be at ease or have a stick up their butt. The truth was she wanted both.
It was hard to explain her reasoning for the same reason a theoretical physicist struggled to explain their own theories—she was a genius. Araari had a knack for social homeostasis for as long as she could remember.
Forced to put her instincts into words, they might be the following:
Her theory was there were two countervailing forces in all social units, from families to friend groups to the nation: One centrifugal, one centripetal. And there were two directions: strictness and ease. Like reeling a fish, scientific social cohesion was a give and take. At some times, strictness was centripetal by maintaining a common set of norms and rules of behavior, but this same strictness might become sclerotic and centrifugal. At that time, easing these norms allowed for a centripetal sense of camaraderie and humor, but too much and the social form disintegrated for lack of structure and ease became centrifugal. Intimacy was merely the inward-spiral of this form.
In Araari’s brain was a social network consisting of the entirety of The Pride. Every soldier, officer, engineer, and researcher, delicately balanced to gather them into an effective social organism underneath the broader project called the Pan-Republic of the Horn. She was, in other words, a Pan-Democratic subject par excellence. And the same 1-in-10 million mutation of her temporoparietal junction that made her an effective social shepherdess also gave her the rare ability to pilot TOCUs.
“What made you want to join The Pride?” Araari asked the Lieutenant.
“Why did I join? Because it is one of the most distinguished institutions in our country and our first line of defense against foreign adversaries,” he said.
“That’s not why.”
That was the most common answer, especially amongst the men. They always emphasized either national pride or the prestige and career potential of the appointment. But the men who thought like that were selected out during the screening process, Colonel Ahmed made sure of that.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“What do you mean, ma’am?” he asked.
“I mean, that’s not the core reason you joined The Pride. Modern battles are social and psychological as well as material. Your duty to this unit requires you to expose your own inner-workings and to understand how they conjoin with our unit. You would not have been appointed here if you weren’t up to the task. So, I ask again, Lieutenant. What made you join The Pride?”
“I…” the man paused and once again there was only the sound of crunching asphalt and the enormous deployment hangars rising up before them; cages holding steel lions.
“I thought— I still think giant robots are cool,” he said, blushing at the childishness of the words. His articulation was childish, however, the idea conveyed was anything but. On the contrary, it aligned with Araari’s theories about the true value of TOCUs as military assets.
She smiled. “We all do, Lieutenant. Welcome to The Pride.”
Her watch as they ground to a halt read 0357. Nine minutes before she was expected on the roof. Lieutenant Bekele offered to escort her, but there was something in his voice which sounded like the offer was out of concern for her pregnancy, which was something she could not abide.
“I will escort myself, Lieutenant. You are dismissed.”
A notch more strictness, perhaps. He saluted her again and left.
At this time of night she expected the hangar to be empty, a handful of overworked researchers and engineers propped up by unhealthy amounts of coffee, perhaps. She instead found it teeming with activity. Teams of engineers ran preparatory diagnostics on the TOCUs, technicians loaded them with jet fuel and ordnance, and commanders whipped their subordinates into a mad scramble. It was only then that she realized the importance of the call. She was to be deployed soon.
“Captain!” she shouted to one of the officers. His name was Worku, she knew, but she had no time for pleasantries. And he was in a tightening phase anyway since he’d become too relaxed around her and Haile.
He saluted. “Ma’am!”
“Are we at war? What’s going on?” she asked.
“It’s need-to-know right now, ma’am, and I don’t need to know,” Captain Worku replied.
She didn’t like that answer, though it was no fault of the Captain’s. The whole thing baffled her. If this was part of an offensive operation, she would’ve been briefed well before her 3am wake-up, yet she couldn’t imagine who might be attacking. Egypt was the most likely, but despite how tense water politics had become in recent years, they wouldn’t dare fight a cross-desert war. Araari could wipe the floor with their two TOCU pilots by herself, and the Egyptians knew that.
She arrived at the elevator, and the way it was oriented faced the TOCUs, and so her journey to the roof began at the foot of her own Steel Lion: HDU Maryam.
Its feet were a feat of their own, composed of an adaptive apparatus of mesh, hydraulics, and titanium overlaying gyroscopes, stabilizers, and pistons so densely and efficiently configured it made an internal combustion engine look like a doorknob. The result was that the HDU Maryam could walk as comfortably in the Ethiopian highlands as the highways of Addis Ababa. It was a triumph of mechanical engineering requiring skills and talent lost to the last century’s overreliance on electric power. That the people of the Pan-Republic of the Horn had come together to invent this independently of the United States or China was, to her, more impressive than anything she’d ever done while piloting it.
The elevator continued to rise and at around 18 meters the legs gave way to the body of the robot, with its backpack-like protrusion housing the fuel, engines, rockets, and missile defense system. Its arms, seemingly innocuous lengths of enclosed pistons and wires, opened to palms filled with rotary machine guns and autocannons in the forearm. Invisible from her angle on the elevator was the broad, titanium chest, painted in Pan-Republican blue, green, yellow, and red with a gold lion across the sternum. The words “HDU Maryam” in latin letters engraved the shoulder pauldrons.
The last sight before the Elevator rose into the ceiling was the head. In Araari’s opinion, it was the most critical piece, because it made the TOCU more than a piece of military hardware.
Though its in-built mobile missile defense was critical for defending against a nuclear first strike, and the firepower provided by a walking supertank was hard to beat, the TOCUs were, more than anything else, human. They walked on two legs, they swung two arms, and though visored and armored, the head on top was unmistakably human.
Gazing up at a TOCU, you did not see the blunt material operations suggested by the title “Theater Operations and Control Unit.” What you saw was an enormous metal human bearing the symbols and colors of the nation to which you belonged. A TOCU was something greater than human, yet brought about by the deliberate efforts of a social body of humans, their spirit and will cast into every part from the enormous titanium chassis to the code in its I/O computer.
The HDU Maryam was the Pan-Republic, and the Pan-Republic was the HDU Maryam, and she, Araari Ahmed, was the HDU Maryam. It was a responsibility all TOCU pilots in every country understood. The moment you entered the cockpit you embodied the hopes and dreams of a nation. When Lieutenant Bekele had said that they were, “cool,” this is what he meant.
A funny thought came to her then that made her chuckle. The child in her womb was, in a way, her pilot. That was why she was determined not to lose them.
With that thought, the HUD Maryam and her brother and sister units in the HDU Menelik and HDU Sheba disappeared behind sheer concrete and the elevator emerged on the roof of the deployment building. Almost as soon as she stepped off, the wake of a V-30’s tiltjets rushed over her, nearly blowing her cap off before she pinned it down with her hand.
The V-30’s four tiltjets swiveled downwards in their spherical sockets for a vertical landing. The rear door came down and an honor guard of four soldiers jumped out to line it. Major Amare, General Zenawi’s aide-de-camp, greeted her at the door.
“Good morning, Colonel! Lovely weather, no?” he shouted over the idling tiltjets.
“Why are we being mobilized?” she shouted back.
“I’ll explain when Captain Haile arrives.”
Araari came aboard and put on a pair of headphones to drown out the engine noise. She knew waiting on Haile would take awhile and sure enough it was another fifteen minutes before her fellow pilot staggered onto the roof rubbing his temples, his hat crooked and service uniform rumpled. He’d slept in it, she was sure.
Captain Tarik Haile gave the bare minimum salute to the major to not insult him then flashed Araari a peace sign and said in English, “good morning, Pannie!”
The term “Pannie” referred to Pan-Democrats. It wasn’t heard much once the Pan-Democrats took power, but Tarik teased Araari with it and she tolerated the teasing in the hopes he would someday appreciate why she was a pannie. For the time being, the only thing the 24-year old pilot cared about was enjoying his status as an ultra-celebrity party boy.
“Good morning, Captain Haile. A little hungover?” Araari asked in Hornya.
“Not yet. Give it a couple more hours and I will be,” he replied in Amharic with a wry grin.
“If I may give you some advice, from senior to junior, Mondays are not the best day to go out drinking. Especially when you may be rapidly deployed across the country.”
His grin became less wry and more guilty. “Aw, c’mon. Mondays are a great day to party. I can’t be partying on the Lord’s day.”
She noticed he didn’t address the fact that, as the only two active pilots, they were always on duty. This was a responsibility she long ago accepted, even as it had harmed her health and former pregnancies. The exchange they were having now was a cordial version of a much sterner conversation she’d had with Tarik several times, and was sick of having.
Tarik whipped his frohawk and pat her on the shoulder, “Hey, habibti, I’m here, ain’t I?”
She frowned. He also used Arabic to tease her sometimes since she was Oromo and Muslim, and though he didn’t mean anything by it, the flippancy irritated her. He himself was orthodox, but in the way all young men of a certain age are religious, which is to say he showed up at church and thought about girls and partying and confessed to overindulging in both. The only time he invoked God was when he was hungover.
“Not today, Tarik,” she said.
Even over the helmet mic Tarik heard the tone that meant it was time to lay off. Their difference in military rank meant nothing as fellow pilots, but he respected his elders, especially when they had saved his life.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, taking a seat across from her in the cargo hold of the jet.
The rear doors were shut and with a lurch Araari felt the tiltjets catapult the V-30 into the air. From inside the cargo hold it was impossible to tell in what direction.
“Where are we headed and why?” Araari asked Major Amare through the helmet radio.
“Sudan. Which means as far as we’re all concerned, this flight never happened. As for what we’re doing there, allow me to explain…”