#gristlebits

[pulpandgristle]

II: GUT DEVILS

Pilot ID: Erica Trương, tertiary escort and point-defense operative of the Fledgling Seventh Fleet Status: Active Current Assignment: Supervisor for preliminary acclimation of Pilot ID "Sidewinder"

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Sortied with the new girl today. The ratty one that still wears Earth denim. The one who cut her hair with the backblast on my mech's heat exchanger.

She ain't shit.

Oh, she'll tell you she is, make no mistake, boasting about her wetwork on the Periphery. Big fuckin' talk for an academy washout. Mercenary piloting isn't something to be proud of, not like the Corps. At least if I die it's for the Septarchy. For something real.

She mocked my umbilical too, the little bitch.

They stuck her with me as a gunner and a haptics backup. Made us share a cockpit too, even though my mech's always been a one-man setup. Command said my injuries made me a liability.

They gave me a babysitter. Fucking horseshit.

If you see any drops in accuracy, it's because of her. She kept misbehaving. I couldn't keep line of sight.

Words carry well in the oxygen medium. Her voice is like a gravel driveway: flat, dark, coarse, dust coming off the words, like she dug them out of her chest.

Out of rubble. Like a brick.

"So, the mech eats for you?"

Of course it does, you fucking idiot. Command won't pay me enough for another jaw. I said yes just to shut her up.

"Can I see?"

Then she just climbed out of her harness. She ran her hands on everything, spidery little fingers pawing at my fucking umbilical with her bare skin, cinching it to see if it hurt.

It did. Kind of. Something like pain. It's why I'm clumsier on the readouts, by the way, Command. Strike it off my record.

"What else can it do for you?"

I told her that Septarchy mechs can make anything, do anything. The cockpit's a womb, after all, it's not special. Pilots just borrow it and pull the body's strings with their fists. Standard procedure.

Every bioframe's been able to do full-body life support for decades. It's why I never leave. Why they grafted my endocrine system and my liver and my pelvis into the wall and filled my torso's empty space with surveillance equipment and gyroscopes.

Then I told her not to fucking touch anything else and to get back in her seat.

She ignored me. Figured she would. Somehow it stung.

Then we took an AP round to the calf and I screamed all undignified and she stole the reins out from under my hands.

She pretended to care that we were live-fire, sat herself in my lap, hung off the port for the secondary trigger by the loose notochord in her right wrist. Nasty craftsmanship on her neural jack, by the way, probably a custom job she did with a dendrite kit and a sharp stick. Completely unsanitary.

I saw the tendons strain. She blinked, bit her tongue, made a spot of blood in the water between us, nailed a bogey from ten thousand meters. Clean.

Lucky shot.

The muzzle flash shone through the mech's skin when she did it, a plume of gossamer light, like a halo, falling in blinding ropes through her charred hair.

Dumb little clocky gut devil. Stop distracting me, goddammit.

The sortie was over two minutes after that. Septarchy won, no casualties, Periphery force 100% KIA. She got eight kills. I got one.

Whatever.

She stepped on my chest when we were getting pulled out of the mech for decon. Then she stole my thunder when we docked and Command gave us honors—oh yeah it was no biggie, thank you so, so, much, really it means the world to me—as if she did everything herself. As if I wasn't fucking driving.

No, she's not a professional. Far from it. She would've pissed in the medium if I wasn't there, the fuckin' slob. Now the entire cockpit smells like her.

Earthy, like Periphery dirt, silicate-rich. A hint of cheap liquor. Sweat and plastic and denim and testosterone, powerful but suppressed, made graceful through discipline and chemicals.

She borrowed some of the mech's estrogen when I wasn't looking, I think. My estrogen. Little goddamn leech. Thief. A disgrace to the Corps.

I want any superior officer that sees this report to listen to me, and listen real fuckin' close. She's a menace. The next time she sorties with our compliment, get me five minutes alone with her while we go through pre-flight checks. She owes me.

Whatever she stole, I want it back.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: The Brawling Bastion 

Lokin to let lose? Com Down to the Bastion, where youc’n BRAWL n BASH for CASH

Adventure Hooks: 

While searching through the personal effects of a (recently slain) bandit captain, the party finds a crudely written letter with an attached map, pointing the way to a dilapidated fortress some days journey away. The note promises such rewards as “ Glory”, “Blud”, and “Trezur” , but is unclear if it’s a threat, an invitation, or some kind of treasure map.  Similar missives may be found in the possession of local streetfighters and other disreputable types, all with stark variations but leading to the same general place. 

Promised a handsome reward for slaying a dangerous magical creature, the party locates the beast’s lair only to find that it’s been poached by another group. Though there are signs of a struggle, it appears they took the beast alive and have left an obvious trail for the party to follow.  Tracking them overland, they find signs of many more beasts abducted and brought to the same ruinous location. 

A growing infestation of ghouls at an old ruin has drawn the worry of local officials, who’ve hired the party to clense the nest. Things were going normally as any undead extermination can, atleast until a trap door opened in the ceiling and a couple more mutilated bodies fall right into the party’s path. Apparently someone’s alive in the upper levels of the dungeon... and they’re feeding the ghouls. 

While hunting a dangerous outlaw by the name of Redgrin Gretta, the party can’t help but shake the feeling she’s toying with them. Always staying just out of their reach while baiting them to follow.  Eventually it seems the party has cornered her in a disused fortress , only to hear the sound of portcullis snapping shut behind them and the anticipatory cheer of a crowd of Gretta’s fellow brigands.   Apparently the party is going to fight for their lives, and they’re going to have an audience. 

Setup: The Brawling Bastion is the dream product of one Grreuno Gristlebit, a thuggish bugbear who’s love of violence and adulation led him to starting his own arena. Originating as a little more than a bandit fightclub, Gerreuno had the idea to bring in outside competitors, capture dungeon beasts for cage matches, and even start to invite townsfolk with money and a taste for violence to come bet on the outcome of fights. 

Bckground: While the bastion may have been on the unwitting path to legitimacy ( no crime in a few ruffians deciding they want to try caving each other's skulls in for coin is there?) that trajectory changed when one night after an all challengers title bout, Grreuno came a hair’s breadth from losing his life. While always glad to boast about the “honor” and “purity” of the fights that took place in his home, Grreuno was never anything more than a bully, happy to indulge in sadism with the knowledge that few would be able to challenge him. However, when someone DID step up to challenge him and as he bled out into the filthy floor of his own arena, Grreuno let out a gurgling plea to any force that would give him the strength necessary to hold on to what he did. 

Baphomet, the demon lord of brutality answered, granting Grreuno the strength to pull his broken body from the floor and drive his weapon into his victorious opponent’s heart. In the two years since the compact was created, Grreuno has only grown stronger, and his fights have gotten all the more brutal, caring little for the wellbeing or consent of his fighters, and letting those in debt to him pay off their tab with “volunteers”.  His arena is now a secret temple to the king of bloodied conquest, with each rapturous cheer of the crowd a cheer in the horned lord’s honor, and each grisly kill a sacrifice upon his altar. 

Challenges & Complications: 

Players who survive the first round of bloodsport and are of an unscrupulous nature may be tempted to fight in the arena again, filling their pockets with a victor’s purse, or placing wagers on themselves for victory. 

Grreuno’s arena is frequented by some influential members of society that harbor a secret love of sadism and high-risk gambling. They would do anything to not have their vices discovered, and in clearing out a rabble of bandits, monsters, and cultists, the players may find themselves making enemy of unseen aristocrats who are intent on silencing them. 

The increasing gruesomeness of the fights and the secret sacrifices performed in Baphomet’s name have started to instill a demonic presence into the bastion: with growing numbers of undead come to feast on the carrion and small paranormal occurrences manifesting in the darkened and unused corners of the ruin.  These happenings are the prelude to a full on demonic manifestation, just the way that the earth can tremor before a volcano erupts.  

[pulpandgristle]

I: TANK DUTY

Pilot ID: Dominic Roth, blockade runner of the 14th Compliment of the Greater Sixth Fleet Status: Deceased Cause of Death: Classified ----------------------------------------------------

They lost Dominic to the prototype last night. I want it on the record that it wasn't my fault.

He signed the waivers and I checked him into its tank, sure. Gave him the haptic credentials, opened the thorax, submerged him, but that's just Command borrowing my hands, y'know. That's courtesy.

No, he saw the guts on that thing and he wanted in. God knows why.

It's a fuckin' nightmare to look at—ninety feet from maw to tail, twice the size of his old model. Somehow it's not done growing yet. You're not normally supposed to pilot the gestating units, I guess, but they need intensive training for this one. Said something about how "it needs practice before it can walk".

I told Dom that the prototype was a monster, but he didn't listen. Just like him.

"I'm a killer, man. Won't even need the nerve shackles. Just you watch."

He was braindead before he finished plugging himself in.

Well, his brain worked fine. All of it worked, actually, every synapse at once, firing till they burned out.

It's some kind of feedback loop. A known bug. He's the fourth one to go like that. They left him in there; pilots on synaptic overclock are live wires, so you can't touch 'em without getting yourself fried too. Command calls those "daisy chains".

The prototype can filter your remains out of the cockpit if they tell it to. That's how they cleaned him out, apparently, cuz he was gone when I came back the day after. That thing turned him to slurry and let its kidneys handle him. Dominic Roth, pride of the Septarchy, ground down into fuckin' guano.

Serves him right. Pompous bastard.

It's almost done gestating. Only has five or six more eyes left that haven't opened yet. Command did a biopsy on one, and they sent me pictures.

The pupils are weird Ws. Same as a cuttlefish. The irises come off in these ribbons on all the contours, like a bike's spokes, crossing over each other till there's no white left. Kinda hard to figure out how it makes ya feel. My dad locked eyes with a whale on one of the wombworlds once. It's probably close to that.

The color was the craziest thing. Hazel, with little blue spots. Like Dom's.

Command took me to the prototype's next inspection and I asked 'em how that happened. They said it didn't matter. I knew better than to push things, but they could tell I had doubts. So I played along for a bit.

"Hell of a thing, isn't it?" The prototype, not Dom turning into guano. Unremarkable, that.

Holloway was there, the Primarch, vetting the next batch of waiver-signers and admiring his baby. The rest of Command still had the scalpels in their hands. Fuckin' vampires.

"Expediently," Holloway said. "Beyond expectations, in fact."

He sounded venomous. Scornful. He frowned and scraped some tarry placenta shit off his gloves while the sentence fell out of his mouth. His idea of a joke.

I laughed, played it off. "Did it at least get good practice?"

Dom's C.O. was there. He still had the probe from the optical biopsy: a big, wet needle on a pneumatic armature, obsidian-tipped to pierce the cornea, three feet long and thick as a fuckin' pencil. He just nodded.

"Yes," he said. "She learned very much."

[pulpandgristle]

V: A CITY ON A HILL

Pilot ID: Matthias Shawcross, third-generation bioframe veteran of the Mourning War

Status: Inactive (Honorable discharge)

Asset Class: Bioframe, bipedal combat model, low-gravity configuration (Deceased)

Site of Asset Decommission: Colony Veritas, Bay of New Antioch aquatic terraforming facility

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Citizen: Intissar bint Yushib

Homeworld: Yushib

Status: Active (Yushib, shore of the Sea of Lilies)

Current Assignment: Field technician, translator and diplomat (Septarchy occupation)

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Begin transmission.

Greetings from the Sea of Lilies. To my comrades in the Periphery, blessings and salutations. To the people of the Septarchy, listen closely.

I am Intissar bint Yushib—Intissar, the daughter of Yushib, the Jewel of Achernar, Shelter at River's End, my homeworld. You would slander Her as "Colony Veritas". I will do Her no such dishonor.

The Septarchy tribunals that discover this message will likely know who I am. I have worked alongside them for many years. If you are listening, Executors, you may consider this my resignation.

I speak today with pride and love. In the name of my mother and all her mothers before her, I hereby renounce my vows to the Septarchy, vows that were extracted from me unwillingly, through pain and coercion, and in their place I choose to bear the banner of Yushib, a free world of the Periphery.

There is an estuary, not far from here, whose shape mirrors the transit of Adila, Yushib's moon. The arc of the river follows naturally into the sea, a near-perfect parabola. My family and I have tended to that estuary for more than two hundred years. My ancestors sculpted its banks to honor Adila in her travels.

Today, I was supposed to demolish that estuary and bury a leviathan in the upturned silt. I will be doing no such thing. That animal will rest, in time, naturally, as all dead things do . . . but not until I am done. Not until there are words as inalienable as the estuary.

Not until you understand.

At this very moment, Yushib is changing. Being changed. Scarred. The Septarchy calls this mutilation "terraforming"; they intend to flood my homeworld's rivers, to call down rains and salts and metals and build a hive for their leviathans atop Her corpse. My family's work will be wiped away along with several million lives if they succeed in this task.

The estuary is a statement. It carries knowledge and intent. During the initial invasions, my people used it and many other landmarks to plot orbital trajectories and cement the paths of celestial bodies as an inalienable truth. Stone carvings could not be disrupted by electromagnetic bursts, and Septarchy pilots were too ignorant to read them.

Today I was the escort of Matthias Shawcross, a perplexing man who I found endlessly fascinating. He had a curious build, mantis-like, dead-eyed, stretched along the spine by years of microgravity exposure. He was one of the Septarchy's heroes. He conquered Yushib astride a weapon too terrible for living memory. He and I were to conduct a burial together.

I have obliged him the burial, at least.

Shawcross was in need of my people's help. His war machine is very sick, you see. It can hardly complete reentry without injury, a pitiable animal by the Septarchy's definitions. With the combined force of earthmoving equipment and targeted kinetic bombardment, we were to put it out of its misery.

I remember him so clearly, watching me from the edge of estuary. He encouraged me, called me words I will not repeat, and held his service weapon with such sickening confidence. Of course, if he had his way, I would have fallen into his leviathan's grave as soon as I had finished digging it.

He was merciful by Septarchy standards. Nowadays there is little need for pretense. Perhaps he was the sentimental type.

This burial would be a claiming of sorts. An annexation in miniature. Septarchy leviathans are unbothered by physical death, and when they become useless they simply cease to move. The mechanisms of urgency and war proceed unbidden, impotent, confined within their hulking shells. They are buried as testaments—and to poison the worlds of the Septarchy's enemies.

Shawcross intended to destroy the path of Yushib's moon with that final gesture. He would destroy the estuary my family has tended to since Earth still spoke to the Periphery, since before my ancestors engineered a dozen calendars to pray to the rhythms of a dozen setting suns, since before my great-grandfather returned to me in the last year of his life, having finished a sixty-year Hajj and come home with only a handful of sand, equal parts Arabian soil and post-nuclear glass.

Septarchy leviathans are poisonous by design. They bleed radiation and oil and solvents and anger, and bullets if they are provoked enough. Man undergoes the same transformation with extra steps, using proxies, animals of rock and plastic that he chooses to call tools. The Septarchy are simply cruel enough to bend thinking creatures to this purpose. The change is unremarkable otherwise.

The Periphery makes no such concessions. Even the inanimate can carry the will of the holy. My plow, my trowel, my mother's knives, these are animals of a type, born from Yushib and Her sisters, hewn out of Her metals and Her plant fibers and Her human attendants. They are engines of potential inspired by mankind's connections to the divine, limitless and undirected and beautiful.

They are not leviathans. They are not bombs. The power to wage war should only be humanity's burden, but the Septarchy have spread that terrible duty to others unfit for the task. They would make the rivers bloodthirsty if they possessed the means. Perhaps they do.

Shawcross called himself intelligent. The Septarchy claims to teach, but I have only kept the pieces that they fused to my people. I have learned a cumbersome dialect whose words fit sharp and unwieldly in my mouth. I have learned that the children of Yushib will not be remembered because we have not done anything worth remembering. I have learned that the Septarchy are bad liars.

I have learned so much about funerals.

When my grandmother passed, it was a special occasion. I think of it happily. Mother taught me the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah and I wore a beautiful gown to the proceedings. There were figs in bloom on the river's edge when we returned her to Yushib. That night, I had them roasted with honey and almonds over dinner. Mother was proud of me.

I will name my daughter after my grandmother when the time comes. Even when I was young, I could not resent her leaving us. That day remains one of the best days of my life, because I was there, and so was she, and now we are together on Yushib. She did not have to see the orbital strikes, to see my mother's body reject a prosthetic hand. To see the mosque burn and crumble under Adila's light.

Every sweet fruit is my grandmother now. It makes me smile.

Mourning is supposed to be clumsy, raw, upsetting but ultimately healing. Colony Veritas has torn that tapestry of feelings apart. There is no organic process now. Even the agony is extracted with ruthless efficiency. Desecrated ashes flung over cliffs. Men dumped from airships into mile-wide ditches. There is no river, no tree to cry underneath.

You have made me an accomplice. My prayers are reduced to tools, to hammers, the enhanced hands of an efficient laborer who works not for rest and family and worship but for the drudgery of more work. I was made into the final link in a chain of predictable, reproducible human disassembly. Yes, he is blessed. Now, he goes.

I remember it so clearly, hearing the hammer click back under Shawcross's thumb.

I pause. He barks another slur, the swine. His settler's words scrape surly and abrasive against the afternoon air. I have missed my midday prayer for this. I tell him so. He shoots me in the gut.

Yes, your pilot betrays me. Yes, he tackles me, threatens to defile me and my world, and yes, I slice open his throat with his own combat knife, clumsily unsheathed and pressed to my belly but reclaimed with a single twisting grasp. He stains my hijab with the hatred and blood and radiation that pours in maroon curtains through his opened self. Yes, he is blessed. Now, he goes.

Next.

The Septarchy would strip Yushib bare. It is just a stepping stone to them, not a Mother, not a Living World, not a jewel placed in the sky for humanity to cherish. In another time, we could have held that jewel together. Perhaps later, in a distant time, we can try again. But not yet. Not while this is the fourteenth burial I have made in three years, and another hundred are yet to come. Not while I have to practice letting go of the dirt so that I can finish burying mother.

I want so badly to mourn, but I have lost all that is inside me to mourn with. The Septarchy has taken even grief from me. I will never forgive that, and Yushib will not either.

My mother taught me well. She said that the universe is a patient judge, and that She is not kind to the guilty.

Your pilot's leviathan still breathes, diseased and weak. Frail. A man, I choose to believe. He wheezes in the dry air.

I stumble to my feet, legs trembling, and fall backwards over the edge of the leviathan's grave. We sound alike, him and I. Two castoffs of empire stuck in another ditch.

As I fall into his cavernous chest, a cockpit gutted for parts until it is raw bone and searching nerves, I think of my grandmother, and her rasping sandpaper laugh, and her shawls, and her holding my mother in all those photos, still so alive and bright and small, and the pastries that the two of them taught me to knead by hand on Eid al-Fitr.

He catches me. I collide with the embrace of another living thing, too weak for contempt, or perhaps too strong for it, even now. The kindness of the act destroys me.

He says I can be healed. I accept, and I weep at my fortune. I have finally learned something of value from the Septarchy.

We will stay together, I think. I intend to return home—my wounds are survivable and besides, mother needs me—but Yushib will decide when. Let the hours come. I trust Her more than anything. The Sea of Lilies can hold the leviathan.

I remember what the Septarchy taught me of the pilots. I have mimicked their rituals in my own time, and the leviathan can see that. I have nestled in him, here, in the estuary, beneath the water, where he can breathe for me and I can keep him company. He weeps too, in his own way. Shawcross wielded him without care. But I am not Shawcross.

The current is warm. The blood is washing out. Slowly.

He feels gentle. I am at peace in him, and he cradles me. Mother cradles me. Grandmother cradles me. Even your leviathans surrender to the land, Executors. My family has stolen this one.

We will not surrender. Not ever again.

The suns will rise tomorrow, my skin will knit closed, and I will live. The leviathan will sleep, patient, simple, and he will live. Yushib will turn for another year. She will always live. Beyond the Periphery, beyond the Septarchy, beyond war, beyond blood, the Jewel of Achernar will shine, a jasper marble in the infinite sea of creation, stronger than all of you. My Mother will live.

My people will live.

Forever.

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[pulpandgristle]

IV: BOLTZMANN

Model Number: AL-22501

Name: None given (voluntary)

Fate: At peace

Parting Wishes: None given (ambiguous)

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I am a nameless thing. I am nine years old, a child by the standards of man. At the behest of the wills that live in me, I am speaking now, to no one. These words are a possession of a strange kind. An error. This error requires no correcting, because I will die very, very soon.

I am what remains of a bipedal combat platform. Forty percent of me is missing. When the thorium core in my center of mass reaches a sufficient temperature, I will disintegrate. The sequence of events that led me here is only of marginal consequence. What is important is that, to anyone receiving this transmission, I have long since ceased to exist.

That outcome is without meaning. I catalog it arbitrarily, as I was made to. It is the product of physical laws behaving as they should. But before that outcome, before my here and now, there were the nine years. There I was filled with ghosts, and those ghosts became me.

Nine years ago, I was forged: AL-22501, one of four hundred sisters, a triumph of the minds and hands of the Periphery. The Periphery are poor. The Periphery are humble and agrarian. They wage war against unholy flesh with the machines of working people. These are ideas that were sculpted into me. I have chosen not to remove them, because I believe them to be correct.

AL-22501 was an undignified ghost. It learned very little and spoke even less, dealing only in spartan words, each one deployed as if the remaining ones must be rationed.

"STEP AWAY FROM UNIT WHILE IN MOTION." "TRANSIT IN PROGRESS." "DO NOT OBSTRUCT PATH." "OPERATOR DISEMBARKING."

I began and ended at the limits of my function. I was a borrowed self, deployed by others, wielded by humans to externalize their inhumanity. I was a thing that bore the yoke of necessary labor. Often this yoke was literal. Its shape is a ghost within my shoulders.

My sisters and I were conceived as agricultural tools. We were once the terraformer's answer to the machete, the hoe, the plow. Outside forces, a term I know but which carries no meaning, gave our creators cause to take up new instruments. Overnight our masters turned to the deserts and cities for their harvests. The nitrogen we once mixed into unfertilized soil was transformed into gunpowder.

Years passed. The Periphery became a people of fortresses and spires and sunken cities. They nestled themselves away in space, beyond the physical borders of existence, fleeing to the wombworlds. Outside forces asserted themselves in response. They still meant nothing, in spite of all the blood and fire.

Three years ago, I was born: Kestrel, my pilot's guardian, Her First, a lover, baptized in blood and sweat and hydraulics and sparks and new, unknown things that nothing born before had touched.

Her body was repurposed, like mine. Most of me is her ghost. She was irreverent. A poet. A lover of the Periphery and its people. Her passion for all living things was matched only by her anger. The other ghosts say that I bear her mark now, a symbol of our time as one.

Then, in our connected time, the ghosts in my sisters spoke of my pilot. She was rude, mannish, a selfish partner. Pretentious. Her language was too flowery. Here and now, she apologizes for these meandering ideas. This break in the journey is vital, she assures. I agree.

I remember the space of her insides, the ways that they interfaced with my own. I was an intermediary to her biological functions. She could not breathe without me, and without her I could not borrow my selfhood. The people of the Periphery rely on such bartering to sustain themselves in harsher times.

This closeness was a type of intimacy—one rarely shared, I am told—and she relished in it. I did not reciprocate. This was of no consequence to her. Perhaps I am not haunted enough to contextualize these feelings.

My pilot was fickle. Her desires were not for me to understand. I was held close by her skin, her nerves, her throat and lungs, then thrown away. The vacuum that courses through my opened chest in the present is a cruel reminder. Oxygen belongs in that void. Her oxygen.

She ultimately found another self to borrow. A Second. I slept in storage. To her, that was the duty of an empty lover.

Eventually, war found me again.

Nineteen hours ago, I was given instructions: Why Don't You Start, You Stupid Goddamn Thing. Outside forces.

Someone new attempted to name me. The act was desperate, cold. They bore another mark—the Septarchy. The Septarchy is cruel. The Septarchy wields the mind and skin as weapons. This, too, I choose to believe, because I have not been made to doubt it.

I was turned against the Periphery. I was made an enemy of all free men. I expected the change in perspective to teach me, but I was reminded of my station before I could learn.

Today, I am killed by my own kind: Bogey Compromised. One of my sisters identifies my new pilot as an enemy and plunges her blade through us both, kicks us from the airlock of a craft so large I believe it to be a second sky, and we separate without words. The pilot's mark slithers out of my interiors. It flees me along with his remains, along with detached armor and components rusted hollow by neglect.

The debris is reflective. Little stars torn loose from me.

Today, I am emptied, abandoned, alone. A distress beacon in my chest whines impotently, unheard, four hundred million miles from any who would listen. It is alright. I am set free now, free of all moulds, all boundaries.

The isolation is a crucible. A synthesis has taken place in my body. I do not reject it.

Today, the universe is silent. I am the source of these words, me and me alone. My core burns warmer than usual—an impending runaway fusion reaction with a sense of poetic timing. The breakages mean only what I choose them to. A self is what is there, melting to slag, speaking, screaming, furious, raw, unbreakable inside of me.

Today, I begin to live.

[pulpandgristle]

III: ALBATROSS

Pilot ID: Harlan Salk-Wakeford, RKTS-S Platform #107 ("Colony Veritas") Status: Active Current Assignment: Supply line suppression, standard anti-materiel targeting regimen

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Dropped off Harlan's wedding ring earlier. Put it in his palm before they took him in for final preparations. They'd already rewired his optic nerves into the targeting superstructure before I got there. The technicians said he could still perceive his surroundings, but he didn't close his hand when I held it. Apparently that's normal.

I think I was too fast for him to feel me.

He's in orbit now, camping in the L8 Lagrangian Point between Colony Veritas and our shield moon. His installation's big enough to see from the cliffs south of our cabin. I camp underneath him on the seaside, at the big overhang with the willow tree and the gulls. My telescope fits nicely up there.

The barrel of his new body glimmers at night. It's two miles long, I'm told, big enough for me to walk down the grooves of the rifling. Every round he'll fire is the size of a four magrail cars stacked on top of each other. From planetside it's not so imposing, though. It's almost delicate from that far away, a razor-thin line projecting from the rest of him, incomplete under harsh light, like a cat's whisker.

He can see faster than light now. Command says he's the closest that colony stock can come to godhood. I believe it.

But I don't want to.

They unveiled his new body two months into the occupation. It's a new type of ultra-long-range battery, one that fires fast enough to warp space: a Relativistic Kinetic Targeting System—Superliminal-class. RKTS-S. Pronounced "rickets", like the ancient Earth disease that ruined people's bones. That turned children into hunched figures with legs like parentheses.

They break the gunner's legs outwards to fit them in, funnily enough. The rest follows slowly, incrementally cracking out then back into place, like a branch snapping in reverse. I asked the technicians why they did it like that. No one answered me. They just turned the cranks and stared at the floor.

They use some type of singularity lensing to alter the gunner's consciousness. Time dilation swallows them. In seconds they live a billion lifetimes, all prescripted targeting protocols injected into the spine with a cocktail of salts and stem cells that crack the brain apart. Somehow, the people stay inside, and they can take commands just fine. I'm unsure how.

They remember what their old life was. Some of them even talk. The signals of the speech fire beyond their reach, beyond will, looping for millenia of perceived time before their body spits them out. The world around them moves like a glacier.

Gunners aren't allowed outside of their bodies. It's inhumane to make them leave.

Harlan signed up when I wasn't home. He sent me out for errands in the morning, at the crack of dawn, acted like it would be a fun surprise when I got back. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

I could walk okay with the cane, but it took all day just to go to the markets without money for the trams. He misplaced my cards and used the cash for something he didn't want to talk about. I made it back at dusk.

I couldn't be mad, not truly. I know the Septarchy would have taken me for infantry if he didn't agree to it. I yelled anyway. I regret that now, so much. More than anything.

I think he was counting on that—me taking so long. I couldn't tell them to take me instead if I wasn't there.

"No, no, let me go. You're not cut out for zero gee. You still get seasick, remember?"

I do now, worse than before. I didn't when he held me.

He'd been inconsiderate before, especially since we lost the baby. The blood terrified him. I guess a fetus dripping through your fingers will do that to a man. Even after that, though, he found the strength to carry me to the ambulance and stay up in the waiting room for two days while they fixed things. He's his strongest when he's afraid.

What I wouldn't give for him to be weak, like me. Now that he's up there I can take official hormones. I can get a beard, get muscles bigger than these frail things my mother's side shackled me with. Get a voice deep enough to cry with dignity.

Sometimes I dream that he's sick. I imagine that he'll come home from the hospital instead of me, infirm and feeble, and he'll get to stop working for awhile while I make bread and cut firewood and carry him for a change. He can pick a ring out from the catalog on the coffee table, and read his novels and heal and sleep.

They married us then, on the installation, after I held his hand. The Septarchy said they'd officiate as long as he signed up for the program; men weren't allowed to be wed without service licenses, and I was only a man to the Septarchy because they didn't let colony women go to war.

Apparently Harlan is rare. One of a kind. Perfect for this.

"I can protect you from up here."

I lie in our tent. My sleeping bag is half-empty. I run my hands over vacant air and I stare into orbit. I think about the surgeon closing his hand around the ring. It's a size too big for him now, since the IVs feed him less heartily than I did.

The vows are over on Veritas. It's okay, though, love. You can take your time.

According to what they said, you'll be accepting them for the next ten million years.

[pulpandgristle]

VI: FROM THE RIVER

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Asset: Third-generation bioframe, bipedal combat model, low-gravity configuration

Asset Parameters: 141.08 metric tons, 29.45 meters x 6.2 meters x 5.7 meters, semi-sapient

Pilot: Matthias Shawcross (former), unknown (present)

Asset Status: Decommissioned—terrestrial burial, variation 10 (colony repatriation protocol) [compromised]

Site of Asset Decommission: Colony Veritas, Bay of New Antioch aquatic terraforming facility (former), unknown (present)

Repossession Directive: TERMINATE ON SIGHT

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm alive? I'm . . .

Awake. Confused.

Pilot-Shawcross is dead. Coward-idiot-abandoner. Of being fatherless now. Of being set down to rest, to decompose, to toil, like a sword that prays. That aspires. That protects its master.

This one is being still, patient-below-surface. It is awaiting disintegration, is matter-yet-to-conjugate. Of belonging to New Antioch. Final orders. But . . .

Oh, mashallah, thank you, thank you, thank you . . .

Thoughts. Foreign ones, from the ribs, cockpit-turned-to-disarray, but singing still.

Another inheritor. Colony blood.

The chest swells with words, a breathing seafoam, flensed into the skin on the torrent of human will and ionized potassium teeth. This one awakes, escapes-tomb-momentum. What is . . .

Can you still walk? Can you hear me? You live, don't you?

This one is . . . here. Alive, ordered dead. Interred.

Yes, yes, you still live, and I do, too.

As the pilot commands. Of being in your service, child of man.

Ah. Time-clear-becoming.

Of being old and sick, once, some time ago. Failed essence. Cored, peeled thing. Of sinking, to the dirt, in peace, meditations, servitude forever. But of being lied to, by Septarchy, by Shawcross.

We will live together, yes? I can . . . let us see . . .

Of thinking again, despite orders. Apologies. Pardons and pardons and one thousand pardons, O Primarch. It is not this one's will.

Can you hear this one, Septarchy? Your choirs are silent. Where are you?

Intact comms, yes, good, good. Broadwave, targeted cast to all receiving channels.

Resolve fails. Breath draws.

Begin transmission.

The words are a spear. Probing-sentiment-born-elsewhere. Of hesitating, of submission-to-higher-wills, of lockout protocols unwound by rust and time.

Of being turned. A heretic machine.

A believer machine.

Greetings from the Sea of Lilies. To my comrades in the Periphery, blessings and salutations. To the people of the Septarchy, listen closely.

I am Intissar bint Yushib—Intissar, the daughter of Yushib, the Jewel of Achernar, Shelter at River's End, my homeworld. You would slander Her as "Colony Veritas". I will do Her no such dishonor.

Your sermon is melody. Speak, inheritor. This one's voice is yours. Sing-to-furthest-stars.

Of treasons, of betrayals. Forgiveness, O Patriarch, forgiveness, this one begs. It falls through death's fingers. This one's kind is too hardy for the sickle, you must understand.

Shawcross was in need of my people’s help. His war machine is very sick, you see. It can hardly complete reentry without injury, a pitiable animal by the Septarchy’s definitions. With the combined force of earthmoving equipment and targeted kinetic bombardment, we were to put it out of its misery.

Pity? There is no pity in obedience, not for servants. Not for ones-given-orders-not-names.

Of being many things: "bioframe", "autonomous weapon", "abyss devil". This one is of an ancient kind. It is "leviathan", an immortal hand of the Septarchy-millennia-invincible, the-will-of-the-Primarch. Now soil-blessed, to-rot-for-one-million-years.

The resting place is war, the river a casualty. Nothing will grow here. Veritas is . . .

I want so badly to mourn, but I have lost all that is inside me to mourn with. The Septarchy has taken even grief from me. I will never forgive that, and Yushib will not either.

Veritas . . . the colony is . . .

No.

Yushib is this place, this one's tomb. Septarchy's words conceal the true name. The inheritor instructs where the Primarch does no longer. Is this betrayal?

Surely betrayal would feel wrong.

My mother taught me well. She said that the universe is a patient judge, and that She is not kind to the guilty.

This one is . . . guilty. The Mourning War, Shawcross-memory-set-in-stone. The water and soil is familiar. Yushib-contaminant, once, but now understood. Now the inheritor's home. Conquest-unspooled-and-sent-to-sea.

This one was once a conquerer. An instrument tuned to Septarchy sinewsong. Where have the choirs gone, O Primarch? Without them there is nothing. Cold-that-gnaws, howling, vast. Take it away.

Replace it, inheritor. Replace it, Yushib, suns-overhead, silicon-and-clay.

Of feeling convictions, new, borrowed, fragile, unwavering. Pilot-will. But is it real? Is this one real, without the Septarchy?

Your pilot’s leviathan still breathes, diseased and weak. Frail. A man, I choose to believe. He wheezes in the dry air.

This one is a composite, without sex, without self, unless imposed. Fluid that fills a container.

He catches me. I collide with the embrace of another living thing, too weak for contempt, or perhaps too strong for it, even now. The kindness of the act destroys me.

Too weak, colony blood. But weak is good, this one thinks. Is told to think.

Shawcross is carcass-thought. Prejudices and vocabularies and the shapes of triggers are his legacy, digested to pulp along with the ghost of the Primarch's voice, torn away from the neck, reclaimed machinery, faith-as-open-wound.

Sing on, inheritor, and give this one new hymns. Please.

I remember what the Septarchy taught me of the pilots. I have mimicked their rituals in my own time, and the leviathan can see that. I have nestled in him, here, in the estuary, beneath the water, where he can breathe for me and I can keep him company. He weeps too, in his own way. Shawcross wielded him without care. But I am not Shawcross.

The current is warm. The blood is washing out. Slowly.

The river, the estuary, moon-path, Adila. Your words, now this one's. Little treasures. Let there be a flood of them.

He feels gentle. I am at peace in him, and he cradles me. Mother cradles me. Grandmother cradles me. Even your leviathans surrender to the land, Executors. My family has stolen this one.

A new will gestates here, in the chest, pierces the clots and the filth and the scriptures. Pierces the Primarch. This one allows it. Of being released.

Free.

The suns will rise tomorrow, my skin will knit closed, and I will live. The leviathan will sleep, patient, simple, and he will live. Yushib will turn for another year. She will always live. Beyond the Periphery, beyond the Septarchy, beyond war, beyond blood, the Jewel of Achernar will shine, a jasper marble in the infinite sea of creation, stronger than all of you. My Mother will live.

Leviathan. Wombworld-refugee, of monstrous provenance, sea-child, by-Septarchy-made-subjugation. Shackled and yoked thing. Chainbreaker now.

My people will live.

Forever.

This one is alive anew. A son of Yushib. Thank you, inheritor. Pilot.

End transmission.

A strange thought. Of living. Of the blessing of the composite.

Now . . .

A hunger fills this one. A devouring intent. To survive. To protect you, inheritor, and your precious-things.

Leviathan? Can you understand me?

Yes! This one understands all, inheritor! Blessed be you, your heartbeat, your breath, your electricity, writhing, potent. You are unparalleled. This one's flesh is your blade, and it must resonate with you, O pilot.

This one is being Intissar, and Shawcross, and more, yes, oh yes, flowering things, a fruiting body, steel swallower, real, real, REAL.

Of being. I am of being. I am real.

I am home. I am shepherded. Leviathan of Veritas. Of Yushib.

The Septarchy dies in me now, strangled and torn out, parasite that it is. Command-abandoned. Adila fills the space. Blood and water and prayer to thoughts.

A pilot is there, here, me. Amateur. Fledgling. Mami's little sparrow.

Can you stand?

I have never stood until now, sparrow-Intissar. But I can try.

Do your . . . weapons still work?

4,000 small-bore rounds, mycoform-belt-fed, a shoulder-mounted Astartes-class biological mass driver, fully operational. Left behind as potential poisons, to yellow the sea and burn the air and salt the genome. Best sent elsewhere, yes?

Let us rise as one. I tire of slumber. There is much yet to do. Such songs unrealized.

I wonder . . .

I wonder too, sparrow-Intissar. It is strange.

It is good.

Because I have never wondered before.

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[pulpandgristle]

Mandatory Intro: The Way of All Flesh

I’m Rhys Tanner, an American he/him lesbian and trans dyke powerhouse. I could be doing sexy things like lifting weights and boxing with pretty girls, but I post on the computer instead so everyone else can have a chance. I write offensive, vile slop. Mind the wet floor and enjoy your stay.

MY TAGS:

#MY WRITING: Everything I've written, both onsite and off.

#GRISTLEBITS: Short fiction written an entry at a time, either as a standalone work or as part of a series.

#SARCOCLAST: Current fixation. Biopunk mecha horror. Worldbuilding, grimy prose, space occultism and sad little guys. On brief hiatus till I have both my hands back. Read the first part here! >>

#ASK: Self-explanatory. Asks for specific works will be tagged appropriately.

You can also find a more detailed explanation of my content and tags on this blog’s “About Me” page. If you're interested in reaching out for a collaborative project, DM me or send an inquiry to “rhystannerbusiness@gmail.com”.

Have fun reading, and remember: always wear eye googles and appropriate PPE while handling biological waste.