Valerie picks a dive bar near the mech base and walks in, burrowed into a Fleet-issue bomber jacket, collar turned up against the autumn wind. She sits at the bar and orders, rubbing chilled fingers together, still wearing it. Camouflage.
She sinks a couple of slow drinks, scopes the place out. Watches a gaggle of loud pilots playing pool, eyes hooded, obvious enough that at the end of game, when they’re handing the cues around to their buddies to rack up for a new one, her target saunters over — casual, casual — props on the bar next to her, not looking at her — not yet — and grabs herself a longneck. Finally graces Valerie with a up-close once-over.
“New on base?” she says. “One of the transfers from the 16th?”
“Not exactly,” Valerie says, and lets her head drop forward bonelessly. Under the bomber jacket, she’s wearing a heavy cotton on-duty tee, with the wide magnetic eyelets down the back to snap into place around and expose her sockets. The movement shifts the top implant into view, above the shirt’s collar, snug inside the jacket’s.
“Plughead,” the pilot says reflexively, almost under her breath, and Valerie lifts her head and her drink, takes a sip, smiles wryly.
“You should hear what they call you guys, in the barracks,” she says.
The pilot is leaning a little away from her, now, tense around the eyes. “Thought they picked all anorexic teenagers for it,” she says.
“The initial volunteer intake, pretty much,” Valerie says. “You know doctors — if you know doctors. Like the meme, you know, pointing at a routine surgery on someone with body fat and going Is this a: medical impossibility? But I’m second intake.” She turns her glass on the counter, within its own ring of condensation. The implant surgery is still very far from routine. “The d’Avignon got torpedoed at dock at Lamont, I took some shrapnel, and the neural integration treatment improves spinal surgery outcomes across the board. They’re still working out how to apply it to procedures without the hardware. They quoted me the outcome numbers; gave me the choice.” She shrugs.
The pilot looks her over again, cooler. “What do you people call us?” she says, and take a pull on her beer.
Valerie puts the tip of her tongue between her teeth; grins. “Tractor drivers,” she says sweetly, and exaggeratedly mimes frantic pulling on control levers; catches the pilot’s eye and waggles her eyebrows.
“Rude,” the pilot says, and laughs a little, but her eyes are on Valerie’s hands. “You’ve done real piloting,” she says, and Valerie realises she’s given herself away with the correct hand positions for the DiGiorno control yoke.
“They’re giving kids brain surgery to send them out to be combat casualties,” she says, tucking her hands into her armpits. “If that’s not real enough for you—”
“Hey.” The pilot sidles a step in, shaking her head. “That’s not what I — here, let me buy you another.”
“I know what you meant,” Valerie murmurs, though she doesn’t refuse, or refute the pilot flagging down the bartender. “Until the plugheads, you were the elite, you were the combat aces, you were the shiny war heroes—”
“Are you flirting or picking a fight?” the pilot says dryly.
Valerie picks up her newly delivered drink, downs it in a series of long swallows, and licks her lips as she puts the glass down. Her voice is slightly hoarse, corner of her mouth challengingly quirked. “Do I need to pick one?”
“Show me your machine,” Valerie says from kiss-bruised lips, as they cross the base.
The pilot doesn’t actually hesitate for a moment; Valerie can see the wolfish spark in her eyes. For form’s sake, she drawls, “I thought you wanted to see my bunk.”
“You don’t want to show a plughead what a real mech looks like?” Valerie flashes teeth at her, steps close, palms her bulge. “Tell me you don’t want to show off your cockpit.”
“Are you always this much of a brat?”
“You couldn’t handle me if I started,” Valerie says, and trails off into a whine as the pilot takes hold of a fistful of her hair and tugs.
“You want a tractor driver to hold you down in their sweaty little mechanical cockpit, doll?”
“Thanks for noticing,” Valerie manages breathlessly, “I thought you were gonna need a mission briefing—” and stops because the pilot gives her a little shake by the hair, rolling her eyes, leaving Valerie melty and shivery.
The hangar is full of machines, the new 300s, the furthest you can get from a DiGiorno without all-new tooling. Hunch-shouldered aerospace combat monsters, all-new articulation design, uprated reactor, murderous acceleration. Several are in full maintenance dogeza for thrust-vectoring teardown; the others squatting straight-backed with boarding stairs rolled up to them for quick cockpit access. The DiGi’s deathtrap chest-mounted bubble has been replaced with a single flush armoured window and cutting-edge glass cockpit; physical access is through the machine’s back, one of the shoulderblade assemblies lifting away for access to the hatch, little more than a crawlspace. The pilot’s seat swivels 90° in place to remove its padded back from the entry vector, no space to manoeuvre around the chair into the seat.
The pilot walked Valerie up the boarding stairs, gestured her to the hatch, smirking, to offer her a look; then crawled in atop her, Valerie propped on her elbows on the seat, the sheer lack of space keeping her pinned prone in the crawlspace, beneath the pilot’s body.
“So you might not know what one of these is,” the pilot says condescendingly, reaching around her to hook one of the hand controller assemblies with a finger. Entirely fly-by-wire, on these models, and with the haptics offline it moves without resistance. The pilot draws it right up under Valerie’s face. “It’s what we tractor drivers use to control our tractors.”
“Fascinating,” Valerie mumbles, wriggling her hips back against her.
“Don’t be a brat,” the pilot warns, against the side of Valerie’s head. “You wanted to know about real piloting, didn’t you?” She shifts about atop her; gets one arm hooked under Valerie’s chest, holding the control arm steady, braced against the chair, and the other hand fisted in Valerie’s hair. “Let’s show you how to treat a pilot’s joystick.”
“Cliché,” Valerie taunts, succumbing easily to the pressure on the back of her head, parting her lips for the plastic tang, sweat-salt and alcohol cleanser residue sting of a control surface that spends its working life clutched in a sweating fist, fingers and thumb working over its sensitive nubs. The pilot pushes her slowly down until Valerie flinches: ghk!
“Fuck,” she says into the crook of Valerie’s neck, desperate enough to make Valerie shiver all over with the thrill of accomplishment, and lets her hand slide out of Valerie’s hair. “Fuck!” she repeats, when Valerie slowly bobs her head and slurps, incitement, as the pilot, rough and frantic, wrestles Valerie’s fatigue pants down her hips, and then her own.
They both moan as she nudges inside Valerie. “Oh that’s gooood,” Valerie slurs, letting the flight stick slip from her lips; it gets her exactly what she wants, the fist clamped back in her hair.
“Use that mouth,” the pilot snarls, shoves her back down, and thrusts, the jolt of her hips driving Valerie’s mouth onto the stick. It takes a few angry jerks for her to find a rhythm, for her to free up her other hand — the stick remaining stabilised by being lodged in Valerie’s drooling mouth — and grip it around Valerie’s throat instead.
Valerie floatily recognises, in a distant way, that the deliberate firmness of the hand on her neck is to protect her from being driven throat-first onto the flightstick too hard, kept carefully see-sawing around the fulcrum of her gag reflex instead. She sinks sweetly into not thinking about it; or at all.
Afterwards, the pilot sits at the top of the boarding stairs, Valerie seated on the next step down between her knees, the pilot’s jacket wadded up on the steel mesh tread under her in gentlemanly fashion. She nestles back into the pilot’s chest, head tipped back, smiling. The pilot smokes; holds the cigarette to her lips when she pouts for the occasional drag.
“Thanks,” Valerie says, when the pilot finally grinds the butt out. “I needed that.”
“You could still tour my bunk,” the pilot says, all diffident bravado, and Valerie rubs her head against her like a cat, groaning.
“I wish,” she says. “I have to report to my new assignment at oh-fuck this-hundred. You know the Fleet.”
“Mhm,” the pilot says, toughing out any trace of disappointment. “Well, if you’re ever back this way and need more piloting lessons....”
Soft with post-fuck affection, Valerie wants to coddle her in apology, cradle her head against Valerie’s chest, stroke her hair. God, this is why she should have made her wobbly legs carry her away before the pilot was done smoking. Valerie lets herself twist around and tug her down for a sweet, messy kiss. “My new favourite instructor,” she lets herself promise; lets herself follow up with a second, lighter kiss. “I do have to go, though.”
“You good?” the pilot says, as Valerie wobbles down the first few steps.
“Don’t be smug,” Valerie tells her, giggles, and leaves her sitting on the stairs and lighting up a second smoke.
In the morning, in her dress blues, immaculate, Valerie stands just out of sight of the pilot briefing and listens to the sour mutters and heckling as their CAG lets them know what’s coming down the pipe. Brainwired pilots are new and exciting and envelope-pushing, but they’re always going to be scarcer; you can’t demand brain surgery from people. Rather than keep them isolated in a parallel plughead command structure, Fleet Command is keen to develop field doctrine that merges them into the service proper, find ways to milk better out of both them and their conventional counterparts by playing their strengths to each other, side by side. It’s not going to be popular, not with anyone, nor easy.
One easy introductory tech transfer to make is the Handler battlefield information system; the one-on-one plughead pilot link adapted to a squad-integrated Aerospace Electronic Warfare & Control mech, with a signals operative working at brainplugged speed and bandwidth — not to drive a combat mech’s controls, but a conventional squad’s tacnet, providing best-in-class battlefield overview, comms, and coordination.
She tweaks the sit of her peaked cap.
“And here to brief you is Specialist Messina,” the CAG is saying sternly to quell their muttering. She takes a deep breath, pastes on a professional smile, and comes forth to the podium when beckoned.
Public speaking, she reminds herself: pick a face in the crowd and deliver it to them. She glances over them.
Locks onto a pair of wide eyes and a slightly dropped jaw.
“Thank you,” she tells the CAG, and turns her attention back to her chosen face, whose cheeks are already preemptively reddening. “I’m Specialist Messina. Let me say one thing first, so we don’t have to spend the next year repeating it....” She leans on the podium a little, toward them, as if confiding. Pauses theatrically for a moment.
She was picked for this to build rapport as much as implement the trial scheme itself; never too early to establish she can talk to them on their level.
“Handle ‘er?” Valerie leers gleefully, to her chosen pilot in the crowd. “I hardly—”
