“KNIGHT Actual, status.”
Alice can tell how close they are to one of the nuclear detonation sites by how loud the radio sings to itself, the unending ambient sievert drone, never silent; today’s windmill-tilting is to a medium-loud ionising soundtrack.
They were the last, best generation of mech pilots: flesh and machine suffused with self-repair nanites. The Immortal Warrior program, though Immortal was intended to be figurative. Then the bombs dropped, and in the hot mutated aftermath, the Immortals are all that’s left, the broken-off speartip of a vaporised military hierarchy that will never rebuild. It’s been — well, it’s been a long time since then. Alice is the one that keeps track of things like that, and she’s, well, she’s just not sure any more.
There are things alive out here, but anything that thinks is closer to the Immortals than to human meat.
They used to say that the military which produced the Immortals was the historical peak of military efficiency, requiring as it did a mere five or six people in the pyramid of support staff for every combatant fielded. The Immortals and their machines — self-repairing, ambiently self-fuelling, logistically untethered — broke that logic entirely. In a very real sense, the bombs were to take them specifically off the board.
A direct nuclear hit does seem to have been sufficient.
They never found KNIGHT One or KNIGHT Three, and it’s been long enough, Alice thinks, that if either were going to regenerate, or had been hiding in some deep dark hole, they’d have emerged by now. So it’s just the mech-and-pilot pair that was once KNIGHT Two, and Alice — MAJESTY — the pilot-grade but mechless human enhancile designated as unit liason.
They searched, for a while, for any surviving military hierarchy; then just any surviving human hierarchy; and then, eventually, to stave off KNIGHT Actual’s bleak black despair, Alice set them new goals. If all that’s left on this bitch of an Earth is chimerical nanoslime, mutant monsters, and self-organising collectives of mission-drifted combat bots, that’s still enough for recognisable if rudimentary society to form. For peril and injustice. For wrongs and oppression to be committed.
If all that’s left of the old is KNIGHT, well…they can turn ronin, and do what crude good they can.
And that’s kept them going.
“MAJESTY,” KNIGHT Actual says, frustrated to the edge of tears. “I — I can’t — it’s not working.”
Alice had hoped, for a long time, that the other KNIGHT units might regenerate because KNIGHT Actual had, from so little. But even she lost things in the process which never came back; she can’t, for example, retain Alice’s name. Alice gave up telling her, before they even gave up on finding the other KNIGHTs. Alice is just MAJESTY, now and for ever. Plodding along on foot, with not even a jeep or a spotting scope to support what’s left of her unit, able to hitch a ride by clinging to a shin on sufficiently smooth terrain, until they find trouble, then just — hanging back, shouting what tactical advice she can into their shortrange link as KNIGHT fights here-be-dragons.
They’ve had some scary moments. KNIGHT lost a whole mech leg to feral counter-nanites, and they doubted for a while whether it would grow back, the ragged surface of the amputation site fizzling as nanoscopic machinery fought a war to reconstruct or rip the rest of the machine molecularly apart. MAJESTY reduced to mist by ancient, autonomous thermobaric weaponry. Both pilots and the mech plagued for an entire decade or two by some nano- or infological infection, creeping scaly diffraction-grating green in Sierpinski triangle lattices, until their nanobots seemingly gained the upper hand and purged the corruption.
Alice is keenly aware, with each disaster they do not succumb to, that Immortal is figurative.
“She’s not responding,” KNIGHT Actual sobs, and Alice looks over the machine readouts and knows that whatever the problem is, it’s not on the mech side of the link. The oxyfluid bubble of the cockpit is ready to receive its occupant; the machine is aware of KNIGHT Actual, her physical presence, her floating body, chin above water and hands clutching the rim; the cable is firmly in place in the back of her skull, and the machine is dutifully trying to enact its protocols. There is some failing part, and it’s in cerebral meat.
What’s supposed to happen is that the mech, through the cable link, stimulates the motor disconnection of REM sleep, suppresses KNIGHT Actual’s full conscious awareness, and regulates her breathing. And then, by the mechanical anchor of the cable, reels her beneath the oxyfluid, pumps her lungs full of breathable liquid, and hands the reins back afterward. It’s a workaround for panicky legacy meat behaviours: sure, a pilot could learn to inhale oxyfluid, deal with the pseudo-drowning acclimatisation, but they never had to; the procedure was built-in.
They’ve promised a bot colony they’ll do what they can about a huge, roving chimera; they’ve lured it into a canyon killbox. And now, with it bearing down on them, a matter of minutes away, KNIGHT Actual is clinging to the rim of her cockpit, machine link process stalled at the part where she needs to fill her lungs.
“KNIGHT,” Alice says, running a hand over the other pilot’s sticky-wet hair; KNIGHT Actual had tried ducking her head to see if it would jump-start something, and just come up wet and sputtering and ready to freak the fuck out. The mech is sending them red-bordered pings about the chimera’s distance and time-to-engage, quicker and quicker.
“She won’t recognise me until I’m breathing fluid,” KNIGHT says, raw and terrified, staring up at Alice, and Alice opens her mouth around the options: hop on out and we’ll run for it on foot, come back for the mech later and see what she needs to grow back after the chimera’s done whaling on her. Or—
Alice would get in herself, but. Their long-ago creators wanted control of them; they’re not allowed to get flexible about who does what, procedure embedded deep in nanological programming. MAJESTY can’t sub in for a KNIGHT pilot, not unless there’s such a state of emergency that KNIGHT Actual, too, is dead, and somehow her machine isn’t. A pilot built for a machine, without one, for ever. Futile cheerleader for KNIGHT, for ever.
“MAJESTY,” KNIGHT Actual says, and puts her shaking hand on Alice’s, atop her head, eyes like a trapped rat’s. “You’re going to have to…help.”
Ping! Ping! Ping! go the successive perimeter alerts, and Alice twines both hands tenderly into KNIGHT Actual’s crewcut, forever the length it was when she went into the initial infusion bath of nanos.
They take identical deep breaths.
“Let go of the rim and count to three for me,” Alice says, bracing herself, and KNIGHT Actual reluctantly unclenches her fingers and lets her hand slide down the inner wall, under the goo. She bobs in the oxyfluid, shuddering.
“One—” she says, and Alice rams her head under before she can get herself subconsciously keyed up to struggle, red-bordered prox alerts going Ping!—Ping!—Ping!—Ping!—Ping! as KNIGHT Actual panics and claws at Alice’s arms and flails at her face, chokes and retches and abortively, bubblingly screams a little.
KNIGHT Actual’s airway stops frothing as her lungs fill. She stops fighting, abruptly. The mech’s fists clench instead, and Alice thinks for a second that KNIGHT will reflexively pluck her off and fling her away to shatter on the ground, lie wheezing in her own blood-weltering wreck while she self-repairs, maybe get smushed underfoot to a dirty red skidmark in the fray and have to build all the way back up.
If she does, this time. If what’s happening to KNIGHT isn’t the herald of their end.
KNIGHT scruffs her instead, painstakingly gentle, and she only tumbles the length of the kingsize metal hand, ribs barely cracking as she impacts against technocarpals and metal phalanges and rolls off and across the dusty ground. The robot lunges, fist thundering into the onrushing bulk of the chimera. Another day, another kaiju fight.
Alice closes her eyes and just lies in the dirt for a while.
