You come at Carol, full speed, no reserve.

  Here’s the thing: You’ve never actually sparred with Carol before. You’ve seen her paired with others—always human-fast, her practice partners don’t bother slowing it down to Titan paces out of the cradle, not like they do for you—and you’ve seen, from the corner of your eye, her long limbs flashing in and out of view against Gutierrez or Holly or Lau (who, despite her stature, is terrifying at the height of her game, who gets even Carol pinned under her). From watching you know that she isn’t like Gutes, raw power and muscle, nor like Lau, speed and fury so incandescent it cannot possibly be smothered. Carol is languid, like a swimmer, slow and yet somehow also quick, every part of her body exactly where it needs to be, when it needs to be, as if she is dancing more than sparring.

  Here, underwater, in a body two hundred fifty feet long, you understand. It’s just Ten Hands, and yet in her hands it is art. And the sheer weight and size of her Titan is a virtue, not a detriment: when you launch toward her, summoning speed into the impellers of all your vector engines, she is already moving back, already blocking, and the momentum of both of these acts carry her further away and just underneath the arc of your fist as you strike.

  So she’s blocking right, you think, so hit with your left. But as you fire vectors to match you see her already turning; you are both moving at the same pace, by design, so in slow motion you strike and in slow motion she counters, leaving only negative space where you should have connected.

  She is like water. No matter what you try she moves with you, away from your hit. Feint right and she shifts left. Feint left and she fires her calves in a staggered rhythm to pass just under your kick. The long blue-black plane of her hull is steel and titanium, you know, and yet it may as well be wind. All she’s using is Ten Hands, and you are cycling through every form you know in turn, but Carol is utterly untouchable.

  You key the mic again. “Okay,” you say between breaths, “I get it, I’m not hitting you.”

  “No,” Carol says, “not if you keep going the way you are.”

  Turbulence and sweat in your eyes causes her outline to shimmer on your sonar like a mirage. You wish you had more than just the ambient fans in your helmet to help keep things clear. No matter. “So,” you say, “what’s wrong with what I’m doing?”

  “You tell me,” Carol says. “What do you think you’re doing wrong?”

  You surge your right shoulder thrusters to swipe experimentally at her. She dodges as easily as breathing: it’s hypnotic, really, the way all hundred thousand pounds or so of Barracuda shift and twist and contort gracefully like quicksilver in slow motion, not the rigid cathedral of spars and struts and piping and plate you know her to be. All the while her singular red eye watches you impartially, in flashbulb glimpses amidst the trembling of displaced water. It really is like she knows what you’re going to do before you do it.

  So, the question of what you are doing wrong, then. A lot of things, is your instinct, only that isn’t useful. What is? She’s coming slowly but inexorably toward you, taking space from you bit by bit, mistake by mistake, and it’s all you can do to dodge backward and sideways, engines straining, chassis groaning in a thousand riven voices under the sheer stress.

  “Okay. Okay,” you say. “Well—it isn’t a difference of equipment.” She leans into your parry, then around your accompanying forward lunge, all in perfect rhythm: like music, like dancing. “You’re not faster than me,” you say, spooling up your calves for a power hit, “or better at turning, or accelerating.” Same generation of Titan, after all, this much you know from the old tapes as much as from your studies at Alcatraz: sword-shield pair conceived that way the moment they exited the factory in Sendai, at that, matched in weight and speed and size as much as possible.

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  “No,” Carol agrees, “I’m not. You’re right.”

  She’s sketching a slow, deliberate circle around the edge of Tai Ho, like a tigress stalking her prey, like a wrestler in the ring. You maneuver so that you drift parallel to her, using engines alone to move, skimming over the sandy bottom; behind her the ruins of some ancient causeway catch the light of your headlamp and glitter like the broken strands of a god-sized necklace. (Beyond that lies the grave of the small inlet for which this waypoint was once named.) The relative distance between you now (some five hundred feet, twice the length of your own body) lends you a sense of false reprieve.

  You think back to the sparring room. Lau beats you even at this pace, too, but it’s different with her: the way she moves is understood to you, she’s a known quantity, she’s just better in a million tiny ways that add up. And here, in your Titan, modulated by my helm intelligence, all those little tiny mistakes you make are smoothed over and negated. Aren’t they? They should be. But—

  “I’m new to my helm,” you try. “Tokyo doesn’t know me well enough to read my inputs optimally.”

  You infer her shrug in the pause before she speaks. “Tokyo’s already trained,” she says, “not a fresh helm. On a dataset. Not yours, but close enough.”

  Which is true. Rachel was different from you in many ways, but not so much so that it would overcome my natural skill in compensating for pilot weakness—not even for you, and not now, certainly, after you have spent a good few weeks with me, so that I have a better picture of your quirks and tics, your flaws and failings (of which you have plenty, so you know).

  “Okay,” you say, “fine, got it. So it’s on me.” And then you pause and really think about it. “So my problem is, what, I’m predictable?”

  “Well,” says Carol, and you hear her smiling now just as much as you’d heard her shrugging before. “Ten Hands is predictable, and you keep using it.”

  “Well,” you say, "okay, how can I be less predictable?” It’s not like you have much other choice; you couldn’t deviate from form even if you wanted to. The Titan’s body lends itself best only to so many different shapes, and academy courses never taught you the more advanced ones. “Is this where I ask you to teach me the big girl moves so I can keep up?”

  “That’s step three,” Carol says. “Or five. Or more. Besides, I’m not using any big girl moves on you.”

  “Great,” you say. “What’s step one?”

  “Step one is, stop thinking about your form,” says Carol.

  Which makes even less sense than anything else she’s said so far.

  “Okay,” you say, “wait.” Truly your feeble mind cannot comprehend, can it? “How am I supposed to pilot if I’m not thinking about what I’m doing?”

  “You should think about what you’re doing,” says Carol. “You shouldn’t think about your form. That part you should just do. Like walking. Or breathing.”

  She hasn’t stopped moving: as Barracuda she sketches a graceful pirouette, once around, the water trailing the long sharp point of the nacelle on the back of her helm like a wedding veil in shades of teal on your sonar. She is breathtaking like this; she is terrifying. You are reminded of real barracudas, all teeth and scale-glitter (and briefly of Tokyo Calling too, the way it was twelve years ago, the way it looked in the background of your sister’s press appearances, back when I was someone else—the apex predator, cave diver helm and proud torii horns, nearly identical to what you pilot now, yet also entirely different; do you miss it? Do you?).

  Then she vectors back down and into the guard stance again. So do you.

  “So my problem is that I’m overthinking it,” you say.

  “Your problem,” she says, “is the same problem you had going up against Lau, and the reason she beat you. You keep making all these little mistakes—hesitating, misstepping—because you’re trying to do it all by yourself. You’re not good enough to do that yet. You’re paying for it.”

  “I get it,” you say. “So how do I fix that in the three months I have left before Meng kills me?”

  “You don’t,” she says, and spools up her engines, the same red as her eye. “Your helm does.”

  Nucleus 1 is a mature, multi-POV sci-fi epic featuring mech pilots, character-heavy development, and the unyielding persistence and resourcefulness of humanity. Upon request of the author, please note that this fiction was edited and proofread with the assistance of AI; however, all drafts and foundational content are human-created.

  NUCLEUS

  THE DUST OF MOON

  ?? A Space Opera Where Sexuality Meets Cosmic Drama

  ?? In 2295, humanity has expanded across the Solar System, but ancient terrors have awakened with them.

  Four destinies collide:

  - Lorna Weiss, a psionic operative with the Terra Alliance;

  - Zhi-Xin Wu, a programmer fleeing the Imperium's grip;

  - Jabari Adomako, an ambitious Scarab pilot from the Emerald Directorate;

  - and Dilinur Altai, a conflicted Conjurer serving Imperial masters.

  As these rivals, potential allies—and sometimes lovers—cross paths, they discover the Moondust Crystal, an artifact with the power to control mutated monsters known as Radi-Mons.

  Rich with diverse cultures ??????, complex relationships ????, and spicy cosmic romance ???? that'll blow your mind (among other things).

  New chapters released on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  Volumes 1 & 2 complete, 200K words ready for reading.

  3 more volumes in the works.