“I think there’s something weird with my interface,” Bottlerocket says meekly.
Everybody kinda, secretly, thinks they might be a fighter ace, right? Until they get in a simulator and rack up a Standardised Pilot Aptitude Rank and turn out to be ordinary. Bottlerocket did, anyway, and then turned out solidly, immovably, not just not-top-decile but not-top-quartile.
Still. She dutifully put in her hours of mediocre K-frame piloting, notched Basic and Advanced Handling Certs, Levels I–III apiece, on her belt, and is very, very ordinary, right up until she hears about Wolfpack.
Wolfpack is extremely fucking shady, old milspec augs reverse-engineered, the kind of stuff you have to have in a backstreet clinic and the receipt says you bought a bulk quantity of farm animal feed or something, because no health authority in the universe is going to sign it off as human-safe. The way Wolfpack works is, they take a gene sample from you, automatically splice it together with a wholly artificial genome, and grow a uniquely pilot-tailored organ in a vat: like a neural interface, but integrated with your brain on a seamless level that conventional implants can’t hope to match.
Bottlerocket mentioned it obliquely, in passing, to Gamble.
“I wouldn’t,” Gamble said quietly, but Gamble was the kind of top-decile pilot they’d wanted for milframes, and had a shinier interface fitted than civilians would ever be allowed, and didn’t understand.
“I don’t wanna be B-grade forever,” Bottlerocket told her, fiddling with her beer and not looking at Gamble.
“Who the fuck called you that?” Gamble said angrily, and Bottlerocket threw her a wary sideways glance.
“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody had to.”
Gamble doesn’t get it, because Gamble’s always been good. So Bottlerocket quietly handed a bag of money and a set of tissue samples to a guy, and went back a while later when they had shore leave; spent her leave in a fleabag hotel with a dressing and cold pack taped to the back of her head, drinking metabolite-and-nanite shakes on the hour, then back to work with what was left of the bruising around her replacement port covered with a beanie.
Gamble spotted it the moment they next suited up to get in their frames, made a little whistling inhalation sound through her teeth. “Do you even know if you’re safe to drive?” she said in a low voice, hand on Bottlerocket’s elbow. “Tell me you’ve at least been in a sim.”
“Yeah,” Bottlerocket said defiantly. (She’d sneaked an hour in last night. She’s not stupid, okay? Not that stupid. There might only a be point-zero-something percent chance that first time out she’ll develop abnormal brainwaves, desync from her frame and crash, but if it’s gonna happen she didn’t want to find out on live hardware, with the risk she might drop tonnes of frame on somebody.
(It felt great. She felt so much faster.)
She shook Gamble’s hand off, and piloted her frame, and it was fine, better than fine. She’s better already, first time out of the box; how much better is she going to get when it beds in?
So it’s a couple of weeks later and they’re far, far away from the backstreet lab and nobody knows — well, some of them probably know, but know-knows — she’s had illegal work done, except Gamble. And she feels weird. And maybe she’s been a bit of a bitch to Gamble about this, but she’s willing to apologise and say, “Hey. Y’know. You were military, you ever actually see one of these before? You hear anything about them? Take a look maybe?”
She gets as far as, “I think there’s something weird,” and Gamble, face crumpling, has a careful hand round the back of Bottlerocket’s neck, reeling her in for a hug. Gamble starts, and fails, to say something, three or four times.
“Wolfpack is pirated from a thing called Pilot Enhancement Program-742,” Gamble manages eventually. “And PEP-742 was — there was a lot to it, and Wolfpack tries to narrow it down to the implant upgrades, but it’s all bootleg and based off various beta versions and who knows, right? I saw some of the 742 pilots, back in the system.”
“Yeah?” Bottlerocket says, into Gamble’s shoulder, and Gamble shivers.
“How do you feel?” she says apprehensively.
“Like,” Bottlerocket says, and hesitates. “You know when headaches throb? Like that, but it…doesn’t hurt, not exactly. Feels weird. Like I’ve got a temperature, but only in my head, but I sneaked a thermometer out of my frame’s first aid kit and checked and I’m fine—”
“They call it Wolfpack because they never managed to get all the traces of the enhanced pack-bonding shit out of it,” Gamble mutters. “You’re. Um. Tell me if this hurts, okay?”
“Okay,” Bottlerocket says, then crumples at the knees when Gamble presses cool fingertips around the edge of her interface, like she’s checking for inflammation. Bottlerocket makes an indistinct noise, clutching Gamble’s shoulders, and Gamble snatches her hand back.
“Oh,” Bottlerocket croaks.
“Right,” she croaks.
“Uh. No. Didn’t hurt,” she says, face burning.
“Yeah, no,” Gamble says, audibly cringing, because she already said—
“Seen this before, then,” Bottlerocket says glumly into her shoulder.
“The PEP-742s were monitored for this, yeah,” Gamble says. “They’d, uh, they’d need to form pack bonds with their unit. Need it. And there was supposed to be a procedure, they’d get monitored after they were enhanced, they were supposed to be treated with like shots and inhalers, cultured stuff mimicking their unit members’, I dunno, pheromones and shit? But the other 742s could sense it, sometimes, before the medtechs could pick it up.”
“And then what?”
Gamble clears her throat. “Jump ‘em in the showers, mostly,” she says. “Shove ‘em on their knees, face pushed in corner, the rest of the unit lined up behind ‘em with their dicks out, and—”
There are, of course, hundreds of stupid fucking jokes about doing things to the new hole of the pilot implant. The regular kind, it’s fucking nonsense, you couldn’t if you wanted, there’s just not enough hole.
But the cultured bioport, Bottlerocket thinks, stomach pitching queasily—
“Well,” she says, pushing herself away, hand shaking, feeling hot and achy and flulike and abject to be peeling herself off Gamble, “guess I’d better go down to medical and own up.”
“They’ll fire you,” Gamble says.
“Yeah,” Bottlerocket says, swiping the back of her hand over her face. “Yeah, they will. Guess I should — guess I should have listened. I just wanted to be a good pilot, you know?”
“You are a good pilot,” Gamble says, sounded even more upset than Bottlerocket. “Listen. Listen, Rocket. I don’t want—” and she hesitates over whatever before choking out a lying-sounding, “—to have to break in a new partner.”
Bottlerocket blinks at her, waiting for that to make any sense, because the first thing to mind is pretty obviously not…but no other sense arrives.
“Are you offering to. Uh.” She licks her lips. “…Should I stick my head in a corner?”
Gamble shakes her shoulders, looking furious. “I left the Corps because it’s a bad place full of bad people where bad shit happens,” she says. “I am not gonna stick your head in a fucking corner—”
“Sorry,” Bottlerocket says, trying to jerk away. “Sorry, I thought you meant....”
“Why don’t you fucking think I’d take you to bed, B,” Gamble says plaintively, and shakes her again.
“Oh,” Bottlerocket says.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh?”
“I dunno,” she says. “Is that what—” and lets it hang in the air, in case she’s still somehow got this all wrong.
Gamble says something indistinct, high-speed and high-pitched that has a lot of fucking and exasperation in it.
“Listen, though,” Bottlerocket says meekly, knees shaking. “I might actually need you to — it really is fucking weird, I think I need you to at least put a finger in there—” and Gamble, still exasperated, says, “I know what kind of weird you need,” in a tone that punches her straight in the panties.
