Lanis has so little it’s almost embarrassing: A few toiletries, a collection of antidepressants foisted on her by Fleet, two sets of streetwear, and several club-going outfits that she purchased at random from discount net sites, all stuffed into an overly large duffel. She flushes her cache of illicit drugs down the fluorescent-lit toilet before leaving, thankful for the foresight she had in purchasing the hostel's security and privacy package, if little else. She's also ruefully grateful that Fleet didn’t give her an additional lump sum of discharge credits, seeing as how she probably would have drank, snorted, or injected it. As it is, she has a two-year discharge stipend, longer if she has another psychotic break and qualifies for permanent disability. No thanks please, she thinks. The pension sounds grand in theory, but is in fact barely enough to rebuild the fragile beginnings of a life. I guess Fleet has better things to do with their money than make an ex Nav’s life comfortable, she thinks, though she imagines a single accelerator round from the Demeter’s mass driver gun would probably pay for a comfortable beach house somewhere. She tries again to not feel bitter. Anyway, what do I know about beach houses? What she needs is purpose, and a beginning. Lieutenant Tran would agree. Why not start the search at Mirem's; just for a while?
She calls Mirem just before she dumps the drugs, double checking that the whole experience wasn't some hallucination, hanging the bag over the toilet like an executioner. "You’re sure you haven't changed your mind? You can at any time, seriously. I have a discharge pension. I'm not destitute, you know" she says, a little too quickly.
She can almost hear Mirem’s smile on the other end of the call. “I know you can take perfectly good care of yourself. Here: I’ve pinged you the access code. Make yourself at home! There’s a gym on the thirty-second floor if you’re interested. Take a bath, help yourself to the kitchen. I’ll be back at six.” The call ends, and the drugs drop with a small splash.
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They quickly settle into a routine that each would have found implausibly scarcely three days ago. There’s love-making, of course; the delirious, ravenous kind that Lanis has never known and that Mirem can scarcely remember. Then, breakfast. It doesn’t take long for Lanis to realize that, despite her love of Murkata-Heinsin protein packets, the world of actual food holds perhaps even more pleasure than Mirem’s body. Mirem, for her part, can scarcely believe what Lanis’ has been subsisting on since her discharge. “The food at the hospital and rehab center was apparently pretty good, but I was on tube feedings for the first two weeks and anhedonic for most of the rest. I feel like my taste buds are finally coming back online,” she says. She savors each bite of fresh fruit and oatmeal and each sip of coffee.
Mirem stays present for about half the meal, but then her eyes unfocus as she scans the news feeds. “Work,” she says, ruefully, but Lanis doesn’t mind so much; the covert glances at Mirem are now able linger, tracing down her neck to a perfect clavicle, artfully exposed by Mirem’s thin black robe.
Mirem talks as she reads the feeds, multitasking like a Fleet tactics officer. She tells her about the various Zaibatsu rivalries and Lanis learns more about inter-corp feuding and administration politics in a few days than she has in the past twenty years.: An explosion at a HarlonCore refinery, artfully disguised as a gas leak; nothing so blatant that Authority would investigate, but enough to embarrass the rival Corp and decrease Admin’s trust in their research and development. Anyway, what’s the difference between being open to industrial sabotage and being just plain careless? Mirem says, “It's just weakness of a different kind.”
“And here I thought we were on the same side,” Lanis says. Mirem makes a non-committal noise. “Admin and Fleet decided a long time ago that industrial quotas were best met through capitalist rivalry. Of course, for that to work there has to be healthy competition. Authority tends to block the more egregious mergers, but they find it difficult to sacrifice the efficiencies of vertical integration. One day a conglomerate will become too powerful for them to take on. Arguably it’s already happened with KR,” Mirem says, taking another unseeing bite of oatmeal and yoghurt.
For the first few days Lanis is mostly left alone though, as Mirem travels to Versk Energy’s corporate structures at the edge of the city. She first meditates for an hour or two after Mirem leaves. A meditation practice was a core component of Fleet’s command track, especially for the Navigators. It helps magnificently with AI pairing, and the ability for a near transcendental awareness is essential for retaining one’s sanity during warp jumping. She hasn’t wanted to be alone with her thoughts, not since the jump, but she finds, to her annoyance, that the Leituent Tran was right when he brought it up at the rehab facility: It helps, now that she’s past the acute phase. It is still there, of course, the echo of whatever she touched during the jump, but her walls are holding, and each morning she feels like a little piece of her is, if not made whole, then at least glued firmly back together.
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Lanis visits the gym too, on the second day. It doesn’t rival Fleet’s training complexes, as nothing can, but it is still absurdly nice, enough to make her grin when she first steps inside its gleaming, soft-lit ambience. Well done again, Mirem. She underwent certain modifications during Command track at Fleet, and her unassuming body can now withstand gravity pulls multiple times beyond what any normal person could. A version of this modification course is legally only reserved for Authority Special Security Forces planet-side: The sum of it is, she’s stronger than she has any right to be. She catches a fellow gym-goer watching her, open-mouthed, at the end of a weighted pull-up set, and she remembers that it’s probably better to not advertise this too blatantly. The gym is usually empty around midday anyway, so avoiding eyes doesn’t prove difficult. The movement, and the resulting soreness, help nearly as much as the meditation.
Then there’s her research. Talk of the Arena Games has gone by the wayside after the first heady night, but Lanis hasn’t forgotten, and she knows Mirem hasn’t either, though she hasn’t brought it up. Connecting to Mirem’s net, she confirms her suspicion that being an Game pilot isn’t just a matter of being able to integrate well with the Suit’s onboard AI. These are people who have trained since they were kids, tinkerers and fighters and gifted AI drifters one and all, all put through a pressure cooker of competition and corporate sponsorship. Then again, that sounds a whole lot like Fleet training, she thinks, grimacing at the memories of the ultra-competitive classes, each genius-level cadet jockeying for a place in Command track.
She watches a string of Games, starting with the five-ton world championships qualifiers.
In retrospect, maybe starting with world qualifiers wasn’t the wisest decision: She can barely follow the action during her first watch-through. The bout has unrestricted armaments, which means it takes place on a semi-remote island with the opposing staging grounds set miles apart. I didn’t even know that was a thing, Lanis thinks. One suit, a sky blue mech with Torrusin Industries splashed its abdomen in red blocky letters, resembles a squat spider; it seems to try to keep its distance, unloading barrages of needle-like rockets that spit upward in rumbling and crash down in plumes of flame and metal. The other suit is sponsored by Kaisho-Renalis. It’s faster, a bipedal design with a plume-array of thrusters fanning out from its back. It sprints forward, its thrusters white-hot, then back, unloading what Lanis assumes are drone countermeasures against the Torrusin’s barrage, and occasionally spitting out a black, bullet-like drone that can never quite reach the Torrusin suit before disintegrating in a shockwave explosion.
There’s a stream of excited commentary, all couched in Game-technical terms that she mentally notes to look up later, and she toggles to a vid link of inside the respective cockpits. The Torrusin pilot looks shockingly young, not much older than a kid, his face pale with a shock of short, sweat-matted black hair. His eyes are open, unnervingly bulged out, but are focused somewhere far off. The bipedal suit’s pilot is the inverse of what she imagined. His head is shaved to a gleam, and he looks middle-aged, old acne scars partially covered by a neatly kept beard. One look at him and Lanis immediately thinks ex-Rapid Response, or even a Heavy Insertion veteran. His eyes are open too, but he seems relaxed, not frantic like the kid, and he even chuckles once, like his AI has made a particularly funny joke. She wonders how long it can go on before one of them runs out of ammo.
She gets her answer soon. The KR bipedal’s mass driver detaches and thumps to the ground as it unloads a flurry of chaff cover. Simultaneously it fully opens up its thruster array, white hot jets exploding behind it, and its right arm explodes open into a crackling, ten foot blade. The Torrusin mech lurches, seemingly frozen and confused: A separate screen zooms in on its targeting optics, the commentators excitedly yelling as the spider-like clusters furiously dilate and circle as they attempt to recalibrate the Torrusin mech’s targeting matrix.
What happens next is over so stunningly fast that Lanis has to slow down the replay to quarter speed. At a hundred meters, blade raised, the charging KR mech has a sudden, small deviation in its flight fath. In the replay, as pointed out by the commentators, Lanis sees that one of its thruster clusters has sputters out, the doing of a tiny tick-like drone that managed to burrow itself into a chink in the thruster fan.
The Torrusin industries mech springs up faster than Lanis had imagined it could move, evading the blade and catching the off-balance KR suit in a kind of spider hug, then tumbling together, ten tons of Mechanized Armor cleaving a massive furrow of earth. Through the settling dust, Lanis sees the mech’s six legs flex; the bipedal mech’s armor crumples in a hiss, the light of its targeting optics fading slowly black. A view inside the cockpit shows the KR pilot slamming his fist repeatedly into the pilot terminals, cursing, while inside the Torrusin mech the young pilot gives a tentative, boyish smile.
Lanis disconnects from the terminal for a moment and walks around Mirem’s apartment, aimless for a minute. She stops at the ceiling length windows, staring out at the city’s vast expanse of concrete, metal and glass. A shuttle blinks up in the sky, orbital docks beyond. She reconnects to the terminal, and, in-between watching Arena Game matches, puts together a resume for an actual job.