It had been a month since Drakes induction, and what followed was a blitz of lessons and drills, of long days that started at five in the morning and ended abruptly at ten on the night. He was placed in a small group of others, which he assumed was more like himself. Five other people, a mix of late teenagers and early adults, two boys and three girls a perfect mix of gender. Unlike before, all of them shared his eye colour. It took a week for chatter amongst the group to become normalised. He’d learned that there names were Gene, Tanis, Lora, Sheena and Fern. As before, no last names were given, and this time he didn’t give his own out. He and his fellow trainees had even been given a team name by one of the instructors, though Drake didn’t think it was meant to be a compliment. The Silver Six, it brought up imagery of a covert unit or some kind of specialist squad but the truth was that they were expendable, and the events that followed proved it.

Tanis was the first to die, during a basic training exercise that was anything but. Drake remembered the look on his exhausted face, and the desperate look he made when he was ordered to climb the fifty meter high wall, with no harness.

To disobey meant death anyway, and like Drake, Tanis had people depending on him doing as he was told. Though who was never brought up, and their fate Drake would never be told. In this case, climbing was the only course of action.

He made it half way up before his hand slipped, he recovered it quickly but it was the last time as another ten meters saw him lose his grip on both hands. His fall was in slow motion his head smacking off the pointed rocks below even more so. The instructor in charge didn’t bother sending for a medic, instead getting a couple of morticians to take the body away, to dispose of with no ceremony. The rest of the trainee squad got little time to mourn, getting only the hour it took to get rid of the body. This was only a fortnight in.

A week later, Fern died. She was unceremoniously killed as she tried to escape, the training, the drugs and callous treatment, breaking her down. It was the middle of the night that she ran, the alarms blaring loud enough to wake the dead. Drake and all the others in the block went outside just in time to see Fern halfway across the testing range. It was a fool hardy attempt and maybe she knew it but just didn’t care anymore.

No one was chasing her, which led Drake to believe that they knew what was about to happen, as the distant sound of an engine roared. Drake called out wanting to call her back but it was too late. The night was filled with one sound, that of a blast from a Vector Unit’s rifle weapon.

Fern’s body was blown into the air like a rag doll, coming apart like one as well. If they had been inhumane in the wake of Tanis’s death, they were downright sub-human in the wake of Fern’s, the language painting her as a traitor and a coward. Why he didn’t run away from this haunted Drake, just as much as he knew the others were thinking about it. He then wondered if Gwen, Cen, Sara and Ash had been through any of this, well more so Gwen, he assumed that having different eyes would have spared them. He couldn’t leave, Ava was in their care, and he’d hate to think what the Empire would do to her if something happened to him, but at the same time, all this was taking a toll on him, even though it had only been a few weeks in.

The last week in comparison had gone a lot smoother but no one dared act out of turn, and took what was thrown at them. This was perhaps the idea all along.

Throughout all this, he had barely spoken a word to his sister, having being amazed at the video to video communication system, having seen nothing like it before. They were monitored and the early stages of the treatment had reduced Ava to a shell of herself, which was worrying in the extreme, and again, it felt like someone was pulling the strings to prove a point, one which Drake got loud and clear. Do as we say as your sister’s life is in our hands. What was better for him was that he had been promised time to visit it her, but only once the first month had been passed. This is what kept him going.

The end of the month came, but with it, an important milestone for the trainees. With some trepidation, the four Silvers were led to a hangar, one they had been to before multiple times, learning about the equipment. Today though, would mark the first time they would piloting the Vector Units, having only previous spent some time in the simulators.

Standing in awe before the giant metal incarnations of men, Drake saw fear. He hadn’t forgotten that it was one of these machines that had cruelly blown Fern a week or so earlier. Then there was the terror that they induced naturally, that they were instruments of death and destruction, mimicking humanities appetite for it. Each trainee had been put in front of the machine they were to be expected to use. What made things worse was the instructor they had been given, Cody. Each of them had heard stories of this man, who by all rights should have been killed a hundred times over if they were true. He was supposedly more machine then man one tale went, while another tells of him destroying three air ships in a barely functioning Vector Unit, by plowing through them. The only story that seemed the absolute truth was the one that he liked to make his students wait.

“I heard the probation guards talking outside my room today” Lora said softly, welcomingly breaking the silence. “They were putting bets on who was going to die next.”

“Bastards, the lot of them. Bet they won’t say half of this to our faces once we’ve moved up to their ranks” Sheena said clenching her fists. She had become the little groups defacto leader, having emerged from her quiet shell in the wake of the deaths. On most occasions she would emit an aura of calm but somethings, you just had to get riled up about..

“All that talk of special treatment we were supposed to get...Remind me why we all wanted to be in this place again?” Gene asked, he was the oldest at twenty five, having come here to try and ensure a better life for his pregnant girlfriend and their unborn child. Apparently, she was holed up in the same hospital as Ava. Each of them had someone they were willing to throw their lives away for, after all the Empire was using them as leverage holding their wellbeing to ransom.

“What choice did we have?” Sheena said shaking her head. Drake was going to chip in but the voice of their instructor called out, bringing their attention back to their imminent task.

“What choice did you have?” Cody said quizzically “That’s the thinking that’s holding you back and setting you firmly in the place of second hand citizen. Instead of that, you need to see this as an advantage. You’ve all been given a chance to prove that you’re more then just your eye colour.”

The instructor came into the light from behind, a normal, yet imposing looking man. One of his eyes had been replaced with an eye patch with a camera lens built into it, and it looked like his arm was artificial from the elbow down. He spotted the trainee’s gazes and then welcomed them. “Take a good look at what my time fighting brought me.” He pulled his sleeve up, showing the metal hand that was like the gauntleted fist of a knight.

“The stories were true?” Gene said with some shock.

“Not all of them, I’m still more human then machine, more flesh then steel...But what I got means I can still fight all those pricks against us.” Cody strode forward, marching in front of the little group so he could better address them all.

“Today you’ll undertake your first steps in these Vector Units, these personal machines of yours are now under your protection, and as such, all care of them falls on your shoulders. Fail to keep up their repairs and you’ll pay for it in battle. Now unlike some other instructors who would spend a few days just getting you inside, we’re going to fast track things.” What this had meant was they were only given a short time in the cock pit, they weren’t even told at first how to get into the cockpit. Sheena was the first to figure it out, a hidden button in the foot that called down a rope with a foot rest in it. She grabbed hold tightly and was quickly taken up, up to the chest of the Vector Unit which waited till she put a keycard in to open the hatch. Once she had done it, the rest followed suite, and Drake climbed into the dark chamber.

The hatch shut behind him with a heavy clang and lights started to flicker on. First it was the console lights and then a main light came on. The controls looked a lot more basic then he was expecting for such a machine. The chair was laid back and floating monitors attached to a metal arm floated just over ahead. The console was just at the side of the chair with different switches on it. To control the Vector Unit, all Drake could see were two foot pedals, and two levers where the hands would be. One of the monitors flickered on as Cody’s face filled the small screen.

“Get used to this place, as you’ll be spending a lot of time in these. I think everything should be self explanatory, the monitors will be your eyes, the levers your hands, and the pedals your feet. You should find a head set resting on the monitors, put them on and sign in. You’ll get proper callsigns later so just call in using your names for now. Once that’s done, we can get these moving.” That was a daunting prospect for the trainees, but they followed the orders, with Drake finding his to be a snug fit.

“This is Drake.” He said tapping the microphone, the headset wasn’t connected to anything, but he had seen portable radios before, that being the only form of long distance communication they used on the outside. One by one, his team mates called out, till Gene was the last one. As soon as he spoke, Cody piped up with the next command.

“Alright, I want you to lay back in those chairs and strap yourselves in. Then position the monitors so they are in front of your face, don’t worry about them looking so complicated for now.” This seemed a suspiciously easy step, and it was. Now Drake had five or six screens hovering in front of him, he couldn’t be sure of how many they were, as they all blurred into one. Aside from Cody’s face, the rest showed the view from the main Vector Unit camera, which was the head of the machine.

“So how do we move these things then?” Sheena asked, giving a voice to the other’s scepticism about the endeavour.

“Place both your feet on the pedals, and your hands around the two levers....” Cody instructed. When Drake did, he felt a shock and the feeling that something was moving in his body, his grip tightened without his control and he felt strange and detached, though most of all, he felt cold suddenly. Like he had left a warm room and jumped into a river in the middle of winter, his arms and legs lost all feeling.

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“I can now tell you what some of those injections you’ve been getting, are. You’ve been injected with special nanobots that those clever gits in the Research and Development lab, Black Flare, have come up with. The moment you completed a circuit by grabbing those levers and putting your feet down, you activated those bots which turned you into a man-machine interface. Congrats you now know what it’s like to be me.” Cody said with some glee. “With them activated, you can move around, sort of like you can in your own body. The connection might be sluggish though and it will take getting used to the finer movements but, I don’t give a shit about them today.” Drake flexed his arm and saw through the camera that the Vector Unit moved, mimicking his movement. The others were doing this as well, experimenting on their own, taking the odd step here and there.

“If you’ll follow me, there’s still more to learn today, and the dangerous stuff starts in a moment.” Cody had already boarded his private use machine, one that looked similar in structure to the others, but diverged in actual design. With grace and efficiency, he walked out of the hangar doors, leading the team onto the next phase of their training.

Moving in the Vector Unit was a strange experience, the dissonance between what he felt and what he knew was going on, was causing Drake to have a headache. He fought through it though and made the behemoth walk with thunderous footsteps out of the hangar.

“This feels...wrong” Lora admitted, her balance was off slightly so her attempt to walk was more of a swagger.

“Lora, you need to adjust your balance. Use a mental command to free one of your hands and then access the controls next to the seat. One of them is a weight diagnostic. It will relay where the problem is and how to sort it.” Cody said. So far, his reputation didn’t seem earned, he was actually being helpful, but that didn’t mean much, there was still time to be a bastard. Gene and Sheena didn’t have any of the trouble and stood in the wind, that whipped helplessly at the machines. Cody was ahead of them and waited for Lora to sort out her issues before moving on to what he thought was the important thing to learn.

“One of the many things humanity has longed to do, when first waking in this hellhole, is to take what so many other creatures take for granted. We see those endless skies and long to fly through them. While nature provided for the birds and all the rest, we’ll make do with our own wings, namely these Vector Units.

These models are equipped with Asx Aerial Engines, and while they aren’t the best we have, they’ll do for our purpose.” There was a level of tension rising within the group. Walking was one thing, it was easy to do and if they fell, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Flying was going to be trickier, and the speeds involved could be fatal if they lost control.

“Sir, shouldn’t we wait till we’re more accustomed to these controls? I mean, I don’t even know how we would operate a jetpack in this configuration.” Sheena complained.

“Well, the people who created these were going to expect you to start flapping your arms. There’s a series of buttons on the lever your left hand should be holding. The top most button is the one that preps the jet engines. On the right lever, there’s a slider which controls how much thrust will be generated. To control your direction, you lean that way. The boosters on this model of Vector Unit are stuck at a forty five degree angle, so bare that in mind. Being trainees, we were going to give you the best toys yet.” As Cody was talking, Drake was absently following the commands, and felt the rumble as his engines kicked in. With little thought he put the slider to max and felt the g-forces push him further into the seat, threatening to knock him out.

Back on the ground Cody smiled, he knew there was always one who played with the controls, it didn’t matter if they were just clumsy or a daredevil. He set his engines to max as well and headed into the sky, adjusting his trajectory so he was flying parallel to Drake, then he continued his lesson for all to hear.

“Thank you, Drake? Thank you for volunteering. No doubt you’ve felt the g-forces, and maybe that’s why you’re flying like a cock eyed bird who can’t quite tell which way is the ground or the sky. Good news for you is that they aren’t as bad as they should be. There’s a special substance built into the cockpit that absorbs the g-forces through some process I don’t care to understand.” Drake managed to pull himself together and tried to steady himself, pulling the slider back a bit so he wasn’t going full out. “Also, some of those injections you’ve been having. At least one of them is a concoction that the guys in the white suits will hope to lessen g-forces further. Don’t know who’s been given what with that one mind.” Cody flew around Drake’s machine, showing off his expert control and started to lead him back down to the ground, closer to the other trainees who daren’t move.

“Good grief Drake! You’re making that look easy!” Gene cried out as he pushed the engines to max, flying straight into the sky. Sheena took off as well, leaving Lora behind, who was still apprehensive. Fighting her fear, she pulled the slider down and joined the others in the sky, she found that she could handle it a lot better in the air then on the ground. None of them could handle it as well as Cody but slight rocking aside, they could go forward and that was all they needed to do. Just as their instructor had wanted, they all felt something, vindicative about this process, flying through the air, being as close to it as possible. Drake looked around and through the powerful cameras in the heads of the Vector Unit, he spotted a few soldiers on patrol around the base, and recognised them ones who had been giving him a hard time for being a Silver. With mischievous intent, he angled himself so that he aimed at them and powered to full speed, making them dive for cover before pulling up at the last instant. Seeing them cower made him smile, a kind that he hadn’t done in a very long time.

“Excellent manoeuvre Drake, you’re a natural in there.” Cody wasn’t bothered about him scaring the soldiers, it might have been different if he had crashed but as long as he showed some intuition when piloting, the pride of a few upstart airmen was a good price.

“A natural? I’m not doing anything that the others are.” Drake replied, levelling back with Cody’s Vector Unit.

“Most pilots wouldn’t dare play chicken with the ground like that.”

“Well I’m not most pilots, and those guys deserved it.”

“Hah, just keep crap like that to a minimum you’re expected to still work with them and they are your superiors.” Drake wanted to reply to that with a comment along the lines of ‘for now’ but decided against it. As for now he was at the bottom most rung of the ladder, and would be as long as they kept their end of the deal and treated Ava.

Around him the other trainees were getting used to flying.

“Sir, where is the information on how much fuel we have remaining?” Sheena asked, having noticed that the monitors contained no stats whatsoever, meaning they had to go on visual information alone.

“You don’t need that stuff when you’re in my sessions. You’ll learn to pilot with your gut. That’s the difference between me and the other instructors. If you can fly these basic machines with ease then once you get into to pride of the Atlantis Empire, flying them will like sleep walking.”

Sheena was about to reply when Lora cried out.

“Something is wrong!”

“What’s wrong?” Drake spun the machine round and saw the problem as her Vector Unit’s jet pack started firing out in uneven bursts, till one of the thrusters simply exploded, shaking the robot and causing Lora to scream as the cockpit was ruptured.

“Sir, do something!” Sheena shouted at Cody who just stopped in mid air and watched. Drake was now right next to the stricken Vector Unit, he had no idea of what to do but he couldn’t stand there and do nothing. He manoeuvred so he was guiding Lora’s machine but found controlling it hard as the remaining thruster was going into over-drive. All the time, he was talking to her.

“Hang in there! We’re going to get you down.”

“Please don’t let go! I can’t see anything...Smoke is...”

“Gene! Get over here and help me!” Drake shouted to Gene who was too dumbfounded to offer much help. Sheena flew by him and gave him a tap, focusing his attention on his friend. The three of them then tried to help stabilise Lora and bring her down safely. Another explosion tested them, as the whole of the jet pack blew out and Lora’s link went dead. Gene let go as his head camera was damaged but even with just the two of them, Drake and Sheena crashed into the ground, but with Lora’s Vector Unit on top.

Drake wasted no time and tore himself from his seat and opened the cockpit and clambered up to Lora’s machine and began fighting with her sealed cockpit doors. Sheena soon joined him, after helping guide Gene down to a slight tumble. Getting in, Drake helped free his badly injured friend, sparing a look at the now opened back of the robot, twisted metal torn like paper. He found her a bloody mess, but alive, barely. There was metal fragments stuck in her skin, and she was unconscious.

“Don’t you die on me!” Drake shouted as he tried to wake her. Sheena stood behind him and used the head set to bark orders to Cody, shouting at him.

“We need help here now! This is your lesson so take some responsibility!”

“Help is coming, there’s nothing you can do now.” Cody sighed as he landed near by. True to his word, help did arrive. Drake helped load Lora onto the back of a all terrain buggy and watched as she was whisked away. He didn’t like how he felt, helpless. He was feeling numb, drained even. None of the medics paid much attention to him or the others, despite Gene suffering a few bruises given his landing.

They were dismissed after this, and didn’t even see Cody again, he was whisked away to give a report on the accident. Drake should have been happy as he was informed that he could speak to Ava, and he duly activated the connection. Even with her face on screen, he didn’t reply to her, just nodding. He let her speak for a full half an hour before he said anything.

“I’m sorry Ava, I really am. I’m going to have to go now, I’m just...tired. Bye...” It hurt him to just cut her off like that but he needed to rest, what happened with Lora...His lingering feelings about the deaths of Fern and Tanis. He threw himself on his bed and buried his head under his pillows, struggling to make sense of things. There was also something else, the way he felt in the Vector Unit, that sense of power he got, and that sweet revenge against those thugs. He was confused by it all. Sleep eventually came to him.

-------------------

Melody Moon laid in her now empty bed and looked around her room, it was silent again, like it should be. She put her night clothes back on and went to the window. Down below, many storeys, she knew that Darren was getting back into his car and he was going to go back home and do whatever a monster does in his den. It hurt her resolve but she knew that she couldn’t do anything yet, but already she was making plans, learning things that would ultimately help her.

She remembered that the last thing that prick had said to her, was reminding her of a special request she had to do, a meeting at a hospital with someone, a fan. She was told that the fan was a thirteen year old girl, and that the eyes of a governor was already on her. She shivered at the thought that new prey were already been picked out. Wanting to prevent any more girls like her being created and abused, Melody knew she would have to pick up the pace in her preparations.