At the appointed time you surface and go to the elevator that leads you to the antechamber to Alpha Hangar. It has not escaped your notice that you have not seen Carol in the pool at all since you got in it; whether she’s slacking or just way ahead of you, you judge wisely that it would be best not to pry.
Then you find her sitting in the antechamber, suit on, towel around her neck, clearly wholly dry, and you immediately disregard your resolution against prying. “Hey,” you say, “no acclim?”
“Hey,” she says, getting up. “Yeah, didn’t need it. Okay, let’s go.”
Cocky asshole, isn’t she? Lau was right. Well, no skin off your back, but— “Didn’t you say you were going to talk about what I’m missing?”
“We can talk about it in the cradle,” she says.
Is she impatient? She delivers this in the same low monotone as ever, so it’s anyone’s guess. Whatever.
It strikes you as you step out that this is your first time out in the new suit. On the catwalk you look down and see yourself as you never were, the legs your sister had in all the CRT video press releases, only made real and no longer grainy and soft: the iconic orca and cobalt and red, this time fitted perfectly to your form, not like the dusty Gutes had given you. You look away. It feels wrong.
Door shut, helmet on, harness secured: while the telltale whine of pumps deep in my neck fills the chamber with saline, I say to you, HELLO AGAIN, and you flinch involuntarily.
YOUR HEART RATE IS ELEVATED, I inform you helpfully. WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADJUST OX FEED MAKEUP TO MODULATE THAT?
“Fuck no,” you say, “I’d like a critical systems state check. I’m fine.”
You aren’t. Your heart is thudding in your chest like a caged animal—you are like a caged animal, a rabbit in a snare, small and panicked. Though you are limp and still in the saltwater I know every urge in you is to run. And you’ve had firsts before—first time out at the academy, first time in me, first time in Hong Kong seas, first time on a sortie—but this is your first patrol, and your first time out since the sortie, and it is somehow far more intimate and thus terrifying than every one before it combined. Because there are only two of you here, now, and all the scrutiny will fall upon you and you alone. And your partner is, still, dare I remind you, Carol fucking Chang.
Get it together, Emma.
Amidst your panic the sync hits: slowly, then all at once, every part of my body becoming yours; your eyes expand to become a thousand and one, infrared and visible and sonic, and you taste acidity levels and aldehyde parts-per-million and salinity and more, the same old-new metamorphosis that surprises you less each time it happens, but still. And then you are two-hundred-fifty feet tall, and the panic of your rabbit-heart ebbs and is replaced, if only a little, by steel and ceramic and nuclear fire.
You lean into it like it is a solace, a cradle. “Helm,” you say, “status.”
CRITICAL SYSTEMS NOMINAL. You sigh into the curve of your helmet. MAY I RECOMMEND—
“No,” you say, “you may not. Tell me where we’re going today.”
THAT FALLS TO YOUR SQUAD TO DECIDE, I inform you. HAVE FUN.
“Nothing from Central?” you say. “Really?”
“Really,” says Carol. You jump. “Just a routine patrol. Why—you need something?”
Fuck! Shit! “No,” you say, “sorry, just—thinking out loud.” Somewhere in the back of your head you are furiously, vainly trying to figure out when I put you on the radio and why. “What’s our target?”
“Tell you when we’re in the water,” Carol says, and steps in.
No choice but to follow her. You lean forward, step in after her; the water embraces you, and the cold does not shake you at all this time. You are me, after all, and I am invincible, and you are learning to be, too, step by step, bit by bit.
Scratch that: not wholly invincible. You strike the bottom and the force of it shudders up through your chassis. From somewhere in your midsection an alarm tone, probably for some impulse monitor, sings out once and falls silent.
“Whoa,” says Carol. “Alright, lesson number one—easy on the landing.”
“Thanks,” you say begrudgingly. “Wouldn’t have guessed.”
Carol laughs—snorts, really, which is what passes for a laugh with her, you’ve seen. “Glad I could help,” she says, and then her headlamp flashes on and you follow suit, wondering if she meant it or not.
For several minutes the two of you proceed along the seabed in total silence. You are just trailing her, really, the way a puppy might. On the wireframe you keep track of your position; you’ve been careful, this time, to keep your heat sig low as possible, and so the water is not disturbed as much as it might otherwise be, and it is easier to see the existing currents and patterns that tattoo the water around Hong Kong through your sonar.
Into this silence, Carol says, “You know what our patrol pattern is?”
“No,” you say. In reality you’ve studied it from bird’s-eye view—west from Kowloon, around the northern tip of Lantau; then counter-clockwise, all the way around the east side of Hong Kong Island—but you’re of a mind to hear her tell you instead.
“That’s fine,” she says. “Follow me. We’ll stay close.” So much for hoping she’d brief you.
“Got it,” you say, and, “Sure you’re not going to be tempted to go off on your own?”
You can’t see her smile, obviously, but: “Nah,” she says, “Holly would kill me if I left you behind on our first real night out.”
“Oh,” you say, “I see, so you fear Holly and nobody else.”
“Maybe,” says Carol. Damn, she really doesn’t like chitchat, you think. You wonder briefly, bitterly, if she opened up to Rachel. Then you realize how pathetic this line of thought is, and how terrible and small it makes you feel, and you shut up.
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“So,” Carol says, oblivious, illuminating flashes of the seabed with every step she takes. “I owe you a lesson.”
You think back to earlier, when you’d lost it on her in sim, and your cheeks heat. “Right,” you say. “Said you’d tell me what I’m doing wrong.”
Barracuda pauses on the wireframe. “I did,” says Carol, and starts moving again. You’re nearing the flank of Lantau; there in the distance, half a mile away, is the golden flank of Tiantan Buddha, whom you cannot see—here at an average visibility of 50 FNU—but who you know is out there anyway, watching. “Does slowthink mean anything to you?”
“No,” you say honestly.
“Yeah,” says Carol, “didn’t think so.” Why, because she thinks you’re an idiot? Your temper flares, then quickly shrinks when she says, “I came up with that word. Well, Ray helped, but.”
Your heart leaps into your throat. “So what’s slowthink?” you say, ignoring the warning blip in your biosign monitoring process, which registers as a background twinge somewhere at the top of your neck.
Carol says, “You know how Titans move at the pace of their own weight?”
“Sure, yeah.” You all got the same spiel back at the academy: Big things require more energy to accelerate, to decelerate, to resist falling apart under their own forces. It’s no surprise you move slower in a Titan than in your own body; helm precepts and your own training help you acclimate, keep you from hitting testing-determined rails. “What about it?”
In the slice of sea floor illuminated by her headlamp you see the fallen remains of condo blocks, their corroded edges piercing the gloom like fence tops. “Okay, so,” says Carol, “you know what to do on paper. You know how to count out the pace of your limits. I can see that. But you don’t know it, not really.”
Should you be offended? No, probably not. She’s right. “So I should…what, think slower?”
Carol says, “You ever play chess?”
Which is the non sequitur of all non sequiturs, you think, failing utterly to see how one could possibly have to do with the other. (Admittedly I am cheating at that, since Rachel did come up with all this while I watched inside her head.) “Yeah,” you say, “a few times, as a kid. With family. Why?”
Carol doesn’t answer right away. By the long fallen silhouette of an oil tanker—or a container ship, not that you’d know the difference—she drifts to a halt, like an astronaut on a moonlit plane, and I cue you to do the same, but you are still unused to my tugs on the various parts of your brain and come rather closer to her than you’d meant to. You brace yourself for a reprimand, but Carol says only, “Tell me how you’d win.”
“I wouldn’t,” you say, startled and annoyed by this cryptic and labyrinthine line of questioning. “I’m bad at chess.”
Carol snorts, which comes out as a crackle over the Van Attas. “Most people are,” she says. “Unless they practice. That’s fine. Just, like, generally.” Her headlamp dims; she’s turned to look at you straight on, now, so that in the swirling darkness between the two of you you can see the red moon of her eye, but not so bright that it overwhelms your sensors. “How would you win?”
You think. What did Rachel teach you about it, before she left? “You have to take the opponent’s king,” you say. “The queen is the most powerful piece on the board, so I guess I’d have to use her to checkmate.”
“That’s one of the ways to win,” Carol agrees. “How do you get there?”
You wish, not for the first time, that you could see more than just the blank featureless helms of your teammates’ vehicles when you’re looking at them underwater. Clearly Atlas did not see fit to equip these with face cams—why would they, they’d detract from combat, from your wireframe and readouts and my own textual comms to you. “By playing smart, I guess,” you say. “Taking pawns, sacrificing pawns. Conquering with the rook and the, the cavalry. Why are you teaching me about chess? I thought this was about my performance as a pilot.”
“It is,” says Carol. “It’s the knight, by the way, not the cavalry.” And she turns back—with all the ponderance of a redwood falling—and starts walking again, one foot, then the other.
“Okay,” you say, “I get it, you’re doing some kind of Mr. Miyagi bit where you draw poetic parallels between my skill and fucking chess in order to teach me. I’m slow. Can’t you just—be clear?”
“Being slow is the point,” says Carol, and, yeah, you kind of walked into that one. “Besides, I’d like to think I’m more of a, I don’t know, So Hang-Suen, you know, in Smiling Wanderer.” At your silence: “Never mind. Walk me through Ten Hands?”
“You already know Ten Hands,” you say.
“I know.” Together, you’re rounding Tai Ho; current patterns and thermoclines all as expected; you feel no closer to understanding what she means. “Humor me?”
What, you almost say, you think I don’t know Ten Hands? But no, surely not: she’s doing this for a reason, you tell yourself, and the reason isn’t to just shame you, surely. She sounds earnest, you think.
“Okay, sure,” you say instead, and command my jets to reverse-fire so that you drift to a halt, only a little shaky; beside you, so does Carol. The bay stretches out before you, nothing so much as a vast and sandy arena, the bottom made a nigh perfect bowl by all the dredging efforts of decades past. “Here?”
“Why not,” says Carol, the sonics of her idling engines haloing her like angels’ wings on your HUD, her one red eye glaring expectantly.
Ten Hands is much different in a Titan, underwater, than on land, even here where there is still ground beneath your feet. After all, these stances were designed for the saltwater cradle. Still, you have always found it viscerally strange that you should feel lighter, less clumsy, when you weigh a thousand tons than when you weigh less than a tenth of one. No matter: right arm up, left foot back, sketching a shallow trench into the settled detritus of Old Hong Kong. The water buoys you up, ballast against mass. You exhale and, in your head, begin the count.
Not that you have to count, of course. If you do not, my precepts will impose the rhythm on you anyway, the pulse that measures out the hard limits of my body’s ability to move without tearing itself apart under sheer stress. (This you learned the hard way, six years ago, in a far less delicate system than mine.)
Weight to the front; your engines flutter and adjust. On sonar there is already the beautiful orange flare of wake patterns blossoming from your shoulders, your knees. When you raise your leg the water moves with it, and carries you up, around, slow and steady, no balancing act here when the sea itself balances you already—turn and kick, block and parry: the long unbroken form of it stretches out before you, in your mind.
Then your sonar lights up in a sudden wash of red, and that’s Carol, her engines pushing to max, launching toward you like a freight train.
You barely dodge in time. But your engines are still driving forward, and the attitude vectors you’ve taken aren’t enough to make up for it. You go sideways and down, as clumsily as you had in the sim room antechamber, this time a million times slower—which gives you all the time in the world to be mad about it.
“Fuck!” You flare your calf exhausts, push off the sea floor in a cascade of dust plumes. At least it wasn’t hard, by Titan measures. “Hey, whoa,” you say, panting, keying the mic, “what the fuck was that for?”
“Testing you.” Bullshit.
“Testing what—how much I trust you not to fuck with me?” Now that the shock has worn off, outrage has a chance to properly sink in. You trusted her. “The hell gives?”
To her credit, she doesn’t laugh. “Needed to do something you wouldn’t expect,” she says, “to see how you handle it.”
Okay, yeah, that’s fair, and honestly you’re kind of ashamed: imagine the great Tokyo Calling, shield of Unit 49, falling over at the littlest swipe. “Yeah, well,” you say, “but of a dick move. Could’ve warned me you were going to test me.”
“Sorry,” says Carol. “Would’ve defeated the purpose.” A pause. “Okay, yes, dick move. Here’s the thing. Megs are dicks, too. They’re not going to warn you, and they’re not going to just test you, either.”
“Okay, right,” you say. That pretty much defeats you. “So I have to be ready. That’s what you’re getting at?”
“It’s more than just that,” says Carol. “It’s easier to show you.” She takes up a stance opposite you—a familiar stance. Ten Hands. “Alright,” she says. “Go on. Hit me.”
