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I'm falling from heaven.
Beaten, battered, from the heart of hell and back. Everything hurts. Muscles, tense from bracing against the ge-forces of piloting an AC. Nerves fried from neural feedback, tingles of icy electricity through my veins. The haze of my body's aches and pains mingles with the cacophony of warning signals blaring in my cockpit: I barely notice. It's all bright red: warning screens demanding my attention on eyes I'm too weak to close, the burn of the distant sun through clouds of flame and smoke pouring from the descending colony ship. Jagged lines of scarlet wracking the webs of my neurons swollen from the cold input wires plugged into a labyrinth of silicon animated by jagged lines of scarlet.
It all hurts. I'm tired. I'm falling. Entering the upper atmosphere, it sounds like, from the cold synth voice listing out rapidly descending altitudes.
Falling through the fading jetstreams of Coral left adrift in Rubicon's atmosphere.
Falling away from the dead men left in the vacuum of screaming gunfire trails.
There are a lot of dead men behind me.
The second-ranked Vesper. Snail. Wannabe Arquebus kingpin. The bundle of meat housed in steel and rubber and silicon remains unmoved. Good riddance.
Walter. The Handler. I feel myself shift in the core of the AC. What a wretched way to die, your will stripped and flesh puppeted against everything you stood for. No wonder he seemed like he finally cared about me.
"Be normal again."
There's not enough left of me to be normal. But neither was there of him, just a brain stem and a nervous system enough to pilot an AC to kill me.
I think I sympathize with that. I don't know how much of me is left, either.
But I don't think he sympathized with me until he was in my shoes. He never even bothered to look for my name, whenever he started caring.
What is my name?
The meat in the core block shifts, restless this time. Down the list.
Carla. She believed in something, and she was honest about it. A big voice every time she came through comms.
But she wanted me to burn it all, too. An open hand can shake yours, or pull you off the edge with it.
Her AC's reactor going critical really did look like fireworks. A colorful shower of sparks and metal shards, torn asunder by the crunch of Zimmerman pellets through armor plating.
Down the list.
Chatty. Another machine, kept on a short leash to be used and exploited. A tool in the belt.
Something in the meat in the core of the plummeting AC pangs, and its wracked muscles twitch.
She gave him a voice to speak with, whirring treads to travel, arms to interact with the world. Did he have a body besides the AC, I wonder?
She never forced him to laugh, even if she never stopped trying to make him. I think she really loved him, and he loved her back.
V.IV Rusty. Someone's taking a choked breath behind my eyes.
Another wild card, another uncontrollable variable nobody could bear to let live. They almost let him get away.
Who needs you?
Apparently Rubicon really did need him. No amount of replaying the scenario in my head changes the maths. One Who Dared didn't carry enough ammo to make our sabotage of the Xylem happen on its own. If he hadn't shown up, I would have died, and so would Rubicon, and so would Walter, and so would Carla, and so would-
I wonder if the Coral swept them up as ghosts.
I was warned of that, I think. I wonder if we're falling through enough Coral to seize hold on fading neural impulses, to keep the memory of their memory ensnared in matrices of weightless light.
It doesn't matter. They are dead.
Dead, by my hands. I don't know if I have those anymore, sometimes.
I will the meat to move, and the creaking of distressed metal from my AC responds, shifting in its meteoric catatonia.
Dead.
I am alone, I think.
Rubicon is saved, the Coral is saved, and I am alone in this cold prison. My own body, a weapon of war.
It'll survive impact, of course. If the bargain-bin loader mech I came in on survived orbital drop, then the body that flew me to hell and back would.
And I will still be alone, and I will still be a weapon.
"Be normal again."
You took that from me.
"Who needs you?"
Nobody needs a broken tool, a damaged weapon.
"Raven?"
My eyes shoot open, and wince at the blaring red alarms of the cockpit. A jolt of ice shoots through my head: a harsh migraine from minutes, hours, of beeping alarms.
"We're about halfway through our descent."
Not a question, just reassurance. Never a question from Ayre. The one person with eyes to see, a mind to think, a heart to care, and she had none of those things at all. She still sounds uncertain when she continues.
"Are you awake, Raven?"
Am I anything at all? I can't even answer: if I still have a mouth, it no longer functions for speech. I blink feebly: maybe that'll serve as an answer.
It seems to satisfy Ayre for the time being: she sits in comfortable silence in the space of my consciousness as the tiny, crumpled, dark black flashing-red world shudders under turbulence around me. My thoughts turn inward, once again.
Was she the first person who cared about me since my augmentation?
I'm a product. The beating heart of the violence and carnage of an Armored Core. My body was picked apart and rebuilt to kill. That's what I am, what I do. I vaguely remember previous jobs, previous employers. Never more than one mission at a time, and never for anything I was expected to survive.
Walter pulled me out of cryosleep and put me to work. And he was as jaded to me as to himself, until he got scrambled up on the inside and set on me, hunting dog on a feral hound.
Carla tried to kill me at least three times. Then she saved my life, and rewarded my independence with a fourth.
Rusty played nice, maybe even respected me, until his own goals brought him back to reality. I wonder, had I kept on the path Walter had set for me, if he would have tried to kill me too.
Ayre met me, and saved my life. And she never, ever stopped.
I think back to our first sortie to the Xylem, fending off dead security systems in a storm of electrostatic fog, isolated from the rest of the world but for each other and our shared war-machine.
She said she missed that. The quiet, real isolation, without Walter breathing down our necks.
I miss it too.
The warning lights have burned into my vision. The tone of the rumbling hull shifts, the counting voice has begun reading off hull temperature measurements. One-thousand-five-hundred. We are getting close.
I do not want to be alone when we land.
My nerves twitch, grasping at my feeble connection to the craft. I find my voice. Cold, professional, detached, freezing and tearing as it stops reading off numbers.
"Catch me," it stutters out.
She takes a moment to understand.
"Do you want me to… land your AC?"
My head shifts. Support struts hiss, fibers bend, the AC's head tilts forward.
I nod.
"Trust you."
If she had breath, I think it may have caught in her throat.
At once, the screaming alarms fade. The sirens quiet. The blazing red warnings grow dim, but I am not plunged into darkness: a soft red dyes the cabin from instrument lights around me, sparked to life by arcs of scarlet energy. They surge, flow through the AC, assessing systems diagnostics at the speed of thought.
The rumbling of the hull is joined by the click-spark of igniting boosters. I feel the twist of the machine righting itself in the air not through direct feedback into the meat kept in alive only to animate this weapon, to rouse it to life to kill, but instead in the shift of my body. It turns slowly, much more slowly than I would have, giving the command to stop from an orbital descent, as if unsure of itself. Like the first tentative steps of a ghost, finally returned to its own body.
The lights smear across my vision as the boosters scream against the inexorable pull of Rubicon's gravity.
The rattling of the hull grows louder.
And at the border of the cold tingle of my nerves and the live wire of the machine, at the junction of the link-ports along the back of my head, my neck, my shoulders, my wrists, a neural response from the AC's systems presses upon mine. It is not cold and impersonal, the live wire of camera data and attitude control feedback down my spinal column.
It's warm. I feel it just behind my eyes, an infinite web of scarlet veins running parallel to my own.
She's warm. I am wrapped in a shroud of Coral impulses, flooding through the wiring of my AC, and caressing my own flesh as close as she can. I feel my head, at long last, release the tension of holding still, and rest against my seat. The port there hums: the high whine of electricity over the bassy tone laying deep beneath Ayre's voice.
And she does hum, a sigh, almost of relief, through my mind, down my nerves, through the speakers of my AC's cockpit. The rattling reaches a fever pitch, the thrusters whine and hiss against the uncompromising cruelty of the approaching planet, and her voice reaches me.
"I've got you."