Arise from the grave. The world will end before I'd finish this
----
“Fucking things.”
Just when she’d begun to lose herself in her work, she bumped her chest with the inside of her arm. The surprise of it ran through her body like she’d touched a live wire, leaving her shaking as she stood.
Engaging with her body on her own terms, she could just about manage. Having it engage with her, destroyed the house of cards she’d stood herself on.
She took a moment to ground herself, biting her lip and forcing herself to be aware of her body again - from her ankles, to her hips, to her chest, to the hair on the back of her neck and how much taller she stood.
After a few moment, Gaige dove herself back into her work, hoping to drown out her body through sheer force of furious concentration. The harder she worked, the faster she got back to being Mackie.
All she had to do was cling on to that hope. The why would provide the how.
—-
Shinji slept.
He didn’t need to. He did anyway.
Miyuri wouldn’t have been able to, if she tried. She wandered the corridors of Frigga, feeling like she was searching for something that she’d only recognise after she found it.
She bought herself a coffee and cake at the Midoriyah cafe, then found herself a seat where she could watch the main concours. Life outside the cafe passed by as normal, workers in dirty overalls coming off shift for the day.
The station had its rhythms of life, much as any other place, they’d simply chosen to reflect the Crystal Millennium at night. Instead of the soft, calm daylighting of Stellviacorp, the lights on Frigga cut sharp black shadows, giving space for the Neon to shine and energise the atmosphere rather than being smothered in soothing tones. Technology was clear obvious and tactile – buttons, knobs, discrete screens and gauges - rather than being unobtrusive and hidden behind a black glass plate in clean wall. It intruded, or required you to intrude on it, rather than being onmipresent.
Not a look Miyuri liked. Places which tried to take the torment out of the torment nexus, tended to blunder into becoming the torment nexus anyway. Genaros had become a watchword.
Still, people around her were chatting and going about their day. A newly minted catgirl was gleefully demonstrating to her dubious, but supportive, friends why they should become catgirls too. People made plans. Couples shared meals. A slim engineer in orange overalls sipped a cappucino, leafing through the same three sheets over and over again.
Each time they cycled through, the print on the pages changed. The engineer made notes in pen which dissolved with the print.
Miyuri finished her coffee and cleared her table.
She thought, at least, she had the measure of Frigga. On some level, public opinion as a threat. Big Sister on Venus was a threat. And despite her misgivings, Shinji’d seemed a lot less concerned, than he had been at the start.
They felt weak, and feared the powerful. It was cyberpunk, dieselpunk, a little steampunk, a little too much atompunk, a splash of Sovietpunk and maybe some attempt to punkify the Ohtori aesthetic.
Miyuri returned to her search. A train waited at the platform, heading down to the hangar bays, after passing the catgirl factory at the other side of the rock. The same half-century old diesel locomotive had been hooked to a short rake of carriages, which had done up with some LED striplights to look like the future imagined forty years before.
She boarded, settling herself into a plush vinyl bench seat at the front of the car, beneath a poster printed in the stark red white and gold colours of the Soviet Union proudly proclaiming that the carriage had been restored by the same Fellow Travellers who’d created the mosaic from earlier. A plaque from the Stell-Oil contingent on the station attested to their contribution.
She shared the carriage with a clutter of catgirls and their garishly painted exocomps, a team engineers and a pair of strange anthropomorphic creatures who wore brightly coloured parka coats and bobble-hats, but didn’t quite seem to be human. They lurked at the back of the car, babbling on about hellfire thrash, and the glorious insanity of heavy-rail on an asteroid in space, even if it could never match the true deltic glories.
Miyuri watched the rock walls flash by the window, and wished they were stars.
Maybe that’s what was wrong. The stars were everywhere on Ultima.
The train terminated at the hangar bay.
A beep from her watch reminded her of the radiation as she disembarked. Thirty six microsieverts wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. It recommended she leave. Her skin still crawled at the idea that it didn’t bother anyone else.
Above her, the spacecraft Lun hung from it’s gantry – it’s stub-straight wings looking more like they’d been clipped to fit it through the door than an intentional design feature. It’s lights were on, with people running back and forth across the wings fetching and carrying unmarked crates, loading the ship.
Miyuri remembered her mission.
She saw Gaige working, priming hydraulics on a brand-new twin-jet fighter. If it wasn’t for the red hair, she could be doing a near perfect cosplay of Motoko Kusanagi. It reminded her of A.C., a little, with the bodysuit, the boots and the toolbelt. A.C. tended to be a little ‘dressier’ - a little more elegant - something you could feasibly wear on an evening out if you didn’t mind giving everyone else in the room a nosebleed.
Obviously busy, and clearly happy to be so judging by the amount of grease and oil she’d managed to get coated in – Miyuri decided it best to leave her be.
“Did you find the bus?”
Miyuri lept from her skin, caught completely off guard. The same woman from the day before, still carrying the same blue-screen table
“Yeah. I did,” said Miyuri, with a shamed giggle.
The woman smiled, nodded curtly, then walked away before anything further could be said.
Weird, Miyuri thought.
She walked amongst the parked spacecraft, a few of which had seen better days, before finally arriving at what she realised she’d been looking for all along.
Jet Jaguar’s workshop.
One amongst a dozen doors cut into the wall. She wouldn’t have know what it was, if Anika hadn’t shown it to her years before. She made to try the door chime. It unlocked with a chirp and a clunk before she could, leaving her with the unsettling sensation someone was watching.
She waited a moment before pushing it open, feeling a fool for assuming it’d be motorised.
The room beyond swallowed her in the gloom, surrounding her with the scent of hot metals, electric ozone, and the chemical traces of hydraulic oils.
She looked at the disorder around her and thought it was more like the aftermath of an explosion in a boskone chop-shop than anything resembling a cybernetics lab. Most of the equipment she couldn’t recognise – or had been adapted from things years out of date. Most hobbyists she knew worked with better gear. Lurking n the corner, stood a half-finished hardsuit awaited a fifth Knight Saber, its purple paint having built up a veil of dust.
At the centre of it all stood Jet, staring at a bank of monitors set into the wall which seemed to be happily displaying nothing but a corrupted datastream only she could understand. Cables trailed from her back, neck and ears to a cradle on her desk, to a snarl of equipment.
From the desk, a degloved skull stared back at her with dead, glass eyes. The back of the cranium had been cut open, A medusa’s nighmare of cables trailed from it to a collection of electronics that’d been ripped from the equipment around it.
“Miyuri, what brings you down here?”
Jet’s voice was calm, sounding like someone welcoming her to tea.
The skull stared at Miyuri, robbing her of her words.
“Noah asked me to convey his condolences, on behalf of himself, Leda, and all of us at Stellviacorp,” she said, rigid and formal. “But…” Her eyes turned.
The skull kept staring.
“Thanks,” said Jet, before noticing her distraction. “That? It’s just an empty now.”
“That was Mackie?”
“It was.” She said. “I assume you’re here to check up on me as well”
“People are worried.”
“It’s not my first time.” Jet’s eyes went to the skull, then back to Miyuri. “There’ll be time to grieve when the mission’s over.”
“Mackie’s still alive?” Miyuri phrased it as a question, rather than as a confrontation.
The wave could do strange things when emotions were high.
“The people who killed my brother - they wanted him alive.” The skull raised a silent objection. “To keep Gaige safe, Mackie has to stay dead. And I need to find who killed him as soon as possible.”
She suddenly became aware of how much taller than her Jet was, and that the oldest, coldest and hardest ice at the bottom of a glacier was the exact same shade of blue as the cyber’s eyes.
“I’m going to need your help with that, Miyuri.“
She blinked. A thrill of excitement crawled up her spine, recalling the times she’d been able to liberate some of the details of the Knight Saber’s exploits from Anika – back when they were still active.
Anika got surprisingly talkative when continuously fed Banoffie pie. Probably a little too talkative for someone who was supposed to be a member of a secretive group of pseudo-vigilantes.
Miyuri recalled her mission, getting the sense that this may be somewhat exceeding her brief. Still, she was supposed to follow Jet and report, and Noah had given her the instruction to use her own judgement.
She knew what her heart really wanted, even if she couldn’t justify it.
“I’ll do it,”
Jet welcomed her to the conspiracy with smile. The monitors on the wall behind her flickered, switching from steganographical gobbledegook, into something resembling a half-dozen flightplans, with time-on-targets spaced out around them
“Gaige is taking the Rebecca Brown to Prometheus tomorrow to be fitted with its weapons.” She tapped a screen where the Forge was marked, at least an eight hour trip away. “A.C. is having discussions with few talkative researchers that might insinuate Mackie’s memory chips were recovered intact, and the actual purpose of the trip is to transport those chips in secret.” Although not in so few words. “So that his engrams can be recovered, analysed, and we can determine that he was actually shot down.”
“That’s not actually possible.”
Not after days anyway. Miyuri knew that as well as any other artificial mind. It’d be like resurrecting the dead. Somebody’d know that.
“Maybe not really,” Jet gave a gallic shrug of her shoulders. “But, if there was any way it was possible, people would believe A.C. Peters could find a way to do it.”
Jet took a breath. “The short timescale, that little sense of panic and the narrowing window to act, rather than consider the risks – they’ll probably do something rash.” Jet paused, looked to the skull for its blessing. “They’ll have to – the alternative is even riskier.”
Miyuri felt herself nod in agreement.
“If we salt the data right, when and where the flight tomorrow gets attacked, will confirm who the mole is.”
A creeping unease settled in her stomach. “You haven’t warned them?”
“In this job, not everybody gets to know everything,” said Jet, calmly. “That’s the one thing everybody in this job knows.”
Jet caught the shift in Miyuri’s expression. “They expect there’s a threat. They’re ready,” she assured.
It still didn’t sit quite right, even if she could understand – it stirred up memories of things that’d never really happened, but still lurked in the back of her mind.
“There are two things I need you to do, Miyuri, to make this work.” said Jet, pulling her mind back to the present.
It already felt far too late to have second thoughts.
---
Jet sat and stared.
Mackie’s skull stared back.
Alone amongst the wreckage in the room, it’d been the one thing she’d managed to actually finish, the one flash which hinted at what she could’ve been. So many other ideas faded out before they could culminate. Sparks that failed to catch and burn.
She couldn’t even remember what half of them had ever been intended to become. Whatever impulse had driven their creation evaporated under the heat of the demands on her life. A dozen minor items on Frigga begged for her attention, along with the utter shit-show that would be the ARSC investigation.
Working hours on Earth had begun, with Stingray Engineering requiring Sylia’s hand by remote. The local Doctor of Democracy had begun to pester her over an upcoming unionisation vote and had pronounced the imminent death of Stingray Engineering once the UAW got its communist claws into it.
Or the imminent death of the UAW as a force if it couldn’t even get a vote passed in a company that didn’t seem to care about its existence.
Well-wishers asked after Mackie. The skull didn’t answer.
They asked after Jet. Normally there’d be a funeral, a memorial, or even a notice on deaths.fen where Mackie’s friends could mourn in peace.
Jet’s soul revolted at the idea of admitting anything – of doing anything. The dam would break if she did.
She had the idea that maybe stopping now would be a good idea, before things got too far, or too heated. Maybe, outing just the mole would be enough, and they could all simmer back down to their usual day-to-day. Jet could be grateful he was alive, instead of biting her lip to keep from screaming at the world.
The skull stared at her, offering a silent admonishment.
They killed Mackie. They had to be found. The idea of them just getting away with it made her sick. Sick as the moment she’d been told he’d crashed. Sick as the moment she realised he’d been shot down. Sick as the grotesque possibilities of what they could’ve done to him if they’d gotten him alive like they’d wanted.
They would try again.
That settled it.
They had to be found. They had to be punished. Every iota of her being demanded it. Mackie had to stay dead for that to happen.
They would try again if they got away.
She didn’t realise her grip had crushed the edge of her desk, until after she let it go.
The skull gave no comment.
—--
Miyuri’s mind lingered in a superimposed state of giddy excitement, and guilty apprehension. The chance to be involved in something cool, and the fear of being caught going well beyond her brief.
Something about this felt thrillingly, terrifying illicit – like being on the inside of a Scarlet Angel fenfic, rather than listening to the same ones told second hand at every family reunion. She’d have her own story to tell now.
And she had a part to play beyond just being there to watch.
She sat and simmered on the train, completing a full orbit of the station beneath its surface before remembering she had to get off the thing.
It gave her time draft a check-in message let everyone know she was safe, so was Shinji, and that if they needed details on the reported accident, the backnumber of the memo to check in the archives.
She dithered on what to say about anything else.
Stepping off the train at the main concourse, she still vascillated on the exact wording. She almost didn't hear her name.
Anika waved at her from The Midoriyah Café. Judging by the collection of plates in front of her, she’d regained her appetite from earlier.
“Hey, take a seat, dig in,” Anika beckoned her forwards, pushing a single steel chair out from under the table.
“A late snack?” she asked. A very big late snack. Enough to give a human being diabetes. Cheescakes, Banoffi, a lemon meringue, a pavlova swimming in chocolate sauce and a selection of cupcakes with cutie-marks printed on them.
Miyuri couldn’t help but take a seat. Miyuri didn’t know where to start with the cornucopia.
“They’re cheaper now. They almost haven’t gone stale yet,” Anika explained. “And I’ve an early start in the morning.”
“Oh?” Miyuri picked up a fork. The Pavlova looked inviting.
“I’m supposed to escort Gaige to Prometheus tomorrow,” Anika announced. “They’re arming the Becky Brown.”
Miyuri felt her skin whiten. She shrank into her own guilt, forgetting any sense of hunger she might’ve had. Her fork hung loose in her fingers. Anika noticed immediately.
“Was it something I said?”
Was Miyuri Akisato about to betray her friend by letting her fly into an ambush?
“Might that be dangerous?” Miyuri asked, her voice scarcely able to make it out of her throat.
“That’s why I’m going,” Anika assured. “Mackie was shot down for his engine cores. They might try and steal it again. But my brilliant mind will be aboard Hi-Streamer to stop them.” She tapped the side of her head with her fork, leaving flecks of cream in her golden hair. “I am a qualified Raven, after all.”
Not everyone got to know everything. But everyone had things they still needed to know. They knew enough.
Miyuri let the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding go with a relieved sigh.
“So that’s where all the cheesecake is going,” said Miyuri, giving a side-eyed look. “You’re terrible when you get a swelled head.” She aimed the prongs of her fork right at Anika’s face.
“But brains like mine need fuel!” Anika declared.
Miyuri felt herself giggle in a way she hadn’t expected, warming her body to the core, drawing a smile across Anika’s face. The Anika who’d explained the reactor coverup had vanished. The Anika she remembered, who brought a little touch of joy to everything she did, like a ray of sunshine filtering into the darkest of corners of the world, had come back.
Everything would be fine. Only the most evil of universes would turn on a person like that. And this wasn’t an evil universe.
The Pavlova still whispered her name.
---
Miyuri returned to Shinji’s apartment far later than she’d meant to – and far heavier than she’d meant to also. The door opened with the inviting scent of Miso, and the sound of bubbling.
Shinji stood cooking.
“You’re awake.”
“Nana couldn’t sleep,” he said, with a rueful smile. “She needed to see papa.”
Miyuri raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think she needed to sleep.”
“It’s good for her.” He said. “When the other children talk about dreams, she knows what they are now, because she’s had them.”
He wore a father’s smile, his mind wandering away to some small little joy he’d just reminded himself of.
“You were out late?” he said. It wasn't an accusation.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Miyuri
Shinji took a breath. The joy on his face vapourised.
“That’s a look I’ve seen before,” he said. “And when Misato came home late at night, or early in the morning, she said the same thing.”
Caught rotten.
There was a reason Shinji had become Security Chief.
Miyuri pursed her lip. A guilty gnaw settled in her stomach.
“Jet asked for my help with something, to help find Mackie’s attacker,” she explained, quickly. She looked away. “I might be gone for a week or two.”
Shinji’s steel grey eyes watched a moment. His expression flattened, like clouds overcasting a sunny day.
“I see.” He took a breath. “I’ll take the shuttle home to the station then,” he said. “Nana gets worried when I’m gone for more than a week.”
Miyuri answered with a soft nod, stepping carefully across the floor, before settling herself down into soothing embrace a plush foam sofa.
Shinji stirred, the spoon tapping against the metal sides of the pot.
“You really are a good father,” she said, after a few seconds.
Shinji looked up, stopping his stirring a moment. His smile had come back.
“She’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
And he had no intention of being a part of anything that risked him not going home to be with her. Some things were more important.
---
----------------
Something left on the floor:
From Stellviacorp's internal descriptions of Jet Jaguar. “Someone who combined the cool intelligence of Sylia Stingray, with the active athleticism of Linna Yamazaki, the technical nous Nene Romanova, and the chipped shoulder, wisdom and foresight of Priss Asagiri.”
----
“Fucking things.”
Just when she’d begun to lose herself in her work, she bumped her chest with the inside of her arm. The surprise of it ran through her body like she’d touched a live wire, leaving her shaking as she stood.
Engaging with her body on her own terms, she could just about manage. Having it engage with her, destroyed the house of cards she’d stood herself on.
She took a moment to ground herself, biting her lip and forcing herself to be aware of her body again - from her ankles, to her hips, to her chest, to the hair on the back of her neck and how much taller she stood.
After a few moment, Gaige dove herself back into her work, hoping to drown out her body through sheer force of furious concentration. The harder she worked, the faster she got back to being Mackie.
All she had to do was cling on to that hope. The why would provide the how.
—-
Shinji slept.
He didn’t need to. He did anyway.
Miyuri wouldn’t have been able to, if she tried. She wandered the corridors of Frigga, feeling like she was searching for something that she’d only recognise after she found it.
She bought herself a coffee and cake at the Midoriyah cafe, then found herself a seat where she could watch the main concours. Life outside the cafe passed by as normal, workers in dirty overalls coming off shift for the day.
The station had its rhythms of life, much as any other place, they’d simply chosen to reflect the Crystal Millennium at night. Instead of the soft, calm daylighting of Stellviacorp, the lights on Frigga cut sharp black shadows, giving space for the Neon to shine and energise the atmosphere rather than being smothered in soothing tones. Technology was clear obvious and tactile – buttons, knobs, discrete screens and gauges - rather than being unobtrusive and hidden behind a black glass plate in clean wall. It intruded, or required you to intrude on it, rather than being onmipresent.
Not a look Miyuri liked. Places which tried to take the torment out of the torment nexus, tended to blunder into becoming the torment nexus anyway. Genaros had become a watchword.
Still, people around her were chatting and going about their day. A newly minted catgirl was gleefully demonstrating to her dubious, but supportive, friends why they should become catgirls too. People made plans. Couples shared meals. A slim engineer in orange overalls sipped a cappucino, leafing through the same three sheets over and over again.
Each time they cycled through, the print on the pages changed. The engineer made notes in pen which dissolved with the print.
Miyuri finished her coffee and cleared her table.
She thought, at least, she had the measure of Frigga. On some level, public opinion as a threat. Big Sister on Venus was a threat. And despite her misgivings, Shinji’d seemed a lot less concerned, than he had been at the start.
They felt weak, and feared the powerful. It was cyberpunk, dieselpunk, a little steampunk, a little too much atompunk, a splash of Sovietpunk and maybe some attempt to punkify the Ohtori aesthetic.
Miyuri returned to her search. A train waited at the platform, heading down to the hangar bays, after passing the catgirl factory at the other side of the rock. The same half-century old diesel locomotive had been hooked to a short rake of carriages, which had done up with some LED striplights to look like the future imagined forty years before.
She boarded, settling herself into a plush vinyl bench seat at the front of the car, beneath a poster printed in the stark red white and gold colours of the Soviet Union proudly proclaiming that the carriage had been restored by the same Fellow Travellers who’d created the mosaic from earlier. A plaque from the Stell-Oil contingent on the station attested to their contribution.
She shared the carriage with a clutter of catgirls and their garishly painted exocomps, a team engineers and a pair of strange anthropomorphic creatures who wore brightly coloured parka coats and bobble-hats, but didn’t quite seem to be human. They lurked at the back of the car, babbling on about hellfire thrash, and the glorious insanity of heavy-rail on an asteroid in space, even if it could never match the true deltic glories.
Miyuri watched the rock walls flash by the window, and wished they were stars.
Maybe that’s what was wrong. The stars were everywhere on Ultima.
The train terminated at the hangar bay.
A beep from her watch reminded her of the radiation as she disembarked. Thirty six microsieverts wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. It recommended she leave. Her skin still crawled at the idea that it didn’t bother anyone else.
Above her, the spacecraft Lun hung from it’s gantry – it’s stub-straight wings looking more like they’d been clipped to fit it through the door than an intentional design feature. It’s lights were on, with people running back and forth across the wings fetching and carrying unmarked crates, loading the ship.
Miyuri remembered her mission.
She saw Gaige working, priming hydraulics on a brand-new twin-jet fighter. If it wasn’t for the red hair, she could be doing a near perfect cosplay of Motoko Kusanagi. It reminded her of A.C., a little, with the bodysuit, the boots and the toolbelt. A.C. tended to be a little ‘dressier’ - a little more elegant - something you could feasibly wear on an evening out if you didn’t mind giving everyone else in the room a nosebleed.
Obviously busy, and clearly happy to be so judging by the amount of grease and oil she’d managed to get coated in – Miyuri decided it best to leave her be.
“Did you find the bus?”
Miyuri lept from her skin, caught completely off guard. The same woman from the day before, still carrying the same blue-screen table
“Yeah. I did,” said Miyuri, with a shamed giggle.
The woman smiled, nodded curtly, then walked away before anything further could be said.
Weird, Miyuri thought.
She walked amongst the parked spacecraft, a few of which had seen better days, before finally arriving at what she realised she’d been looking for all along.
Jet Jaguar’s workshop.
One amongst a dozen doors cut into the wall. She wouldn’t have know what it was, if Anika hadn’t shown it to her years before. She made to try the door chime. It unlocked with a chirp and a clunk before she could, leaving her with the unsettling sensation someone was watching.
She waited a moment before pushing it open, feeling a fool for assuming it’d be motorised.
The room beyond swallowed her in the gloom, surrounding her with the scent of hot metals, electric ozone, and the chemical traces of hydraulic oils.
She looked at the disorder around her and thought it was more like the aftermath of an explosion in a boskone chop-shop than anything resembling a cybernetics lab. Most of the equipment she couldn’t recognise – or had been adapted from things years out of date. Most hobbyists she knew worked with better gear. Lurking n the corner, stood a half-finished hardsuit awaited a fifth Knight Saber, its purple paint having built up a veil of dust.
At the centre of it all stood Jet, staring at a bank of monitors set into the wall which seemed to be happily displaying nothing but a corrupted datastream only she could understand. Cables trailed from her back, neck and ears to a cradle on her desk, to a snarl of equipment.
From the desk, a degloved skull stared back at her with dead, glass eyes. The back of the cranium had been cut open, A medusa’s nighmare of cables trailed from it to a collection of electronics that’d been ripped from the equipment around it.
“Miyuri, what brings you down here?”
Jet’s voice was calm, sounding like someone welcoming her to tea.
The skull stared at Miyuri, robbing her of her words.
“Noah asked me to convey his condolences, on behalf of himself, Leda, and all of us at Stellviacorp,” she said, rigid and formal. “But…” Her eyes turned.
The skull kept staring.
“Thanks,” said Jet, before noticing her distraction. “That? It’s just an empty now.”
“That was Mackie?”
“It was.” She said. “I assume you’re here to check up on me as well”
“People are worried.”
“It’s not my first time.” Jet’s eyes went to the skull, then back to Miyuri. “There’ll be time to grieve when the mission’s over.”
“Mackie’s still alive?” Miyuri phrased it as a question, rather than as a confrontation.
The wave could do strange things when emotions were high.
“The people who killed my brother - they wanted him alive.” The skull raised a silent objection. “To keep Gaige safe, Mackie has to stay dead. And I need to find who killed him as soon as possible.”
She suddenly became aware of how much taller than her Jet was, and that the oldest, coldest and hardest ice at the bottom of a glacier was the exact same shade of blue as the cyber’s eyes.
“I’m going to need your help with that, Miyuri.“
She blinked. A thrill of excitement crawled up her spine, recalling the times she’d been able to liberate some of the details of the Knight Saber’s exploits from Anika – back when they were still active.
Anika got surprisingly talkative when continuously fed Banoffie pie. Probably a little too talkative for someone who was supposed to be a member of a secretive group of pseudo-vigilantes.
Miyuri recalled her mission, getting the sense that this may be somewhat exceeding her brief. Still, she was supposed to follow Jet and report, and Noah had given her the instruction to use her own judgement.
She knew what her heart really wanted, even if she couldn’t justify it.
“I’ll do it,”
Jet welcomed her to the conspiracy with smile. The monitors on the wall behind her flickered, switching from steganographical gobbledegook, into something resembling a half-dozen flightplans, with time-on-targets spaced out around them
“Gaige is taking the Rebecca Brown to Prometheus tomorrow to be fitted with its weapons.” She tapped a screen where the Forge was marked, at least an eight hour trip away. “A.C. is having discussions with few talkative researchers that might insinuate Mackie’s memory chips were recovered intact, and the actual purpose of the trip is to transport those chips in secret.” Although not in so few words. “So that his engrams can be recovered, analysed, and we can determine that he was actually shot down.”
“That’s not actually possible.”
Not after days anyway. Miyuri knew that as well as any other artificial mind. It’d be like resurrecting the dead. Somebody’d know that.
“Maybe not really,” Jet gave a gallic shrug of her shoulders. “But, if there was any way it was possible, people would believe A.C. Peters could find a way to do it.”
Jet took a breath. “The short timescale, that little sense of panic and the narrowing window to act, rather than consider the risks – they’ll probably do something rash.” Jet paused, looked to the skull for its blessing. “They’ll have to – the alternative is even riskier.”
Miyuri felt herself nod in agreement.
“If we salt the data right, when and where the flight tomorrow gets attacked, will confirm who the mole is.”
A creeping unease settled in her stomach. “You haven’t warned them?”
“In this job, not everybody gets to know everything,” said Jet, calmly. “That’s the one thing everybody in this job knows.”
Jet caught the shift in Miyuri’s expression. “They expect there’s a threat. They’re ready,” she assured.
It still didn’t sit quite right, even if she could understand – it stirred up memories of things that’d never really happened, but still lurked in the back of her mind.
“There are two things I need you to do, Miyuri, to make this work.” said Jet, pulling her mind back to the present.
It already felt far too late to have second thoughts.
---
Jet sat and stared.
Mackie’s skull stared back.
Alone amongst the wreckage in the room, it’d been the one thing she’d managed to actually finish, the one flash which hinted at what she could’ve been. So many other ideas faded out before they could culminate. Sparks that failed to catch and burn.
She couldn’t even remember what half of them had ever been intended to become. Whatever impulse had driven their creation evaporated under the heat of the demands on her life. A dozen minor items on Frigga begged for her attention, along with the utter shit-show that would be the ARSC investigation.
Working hours on Earth had begun, with Stingray Engineering requiring Sylia’s hand by remote. The local Doctor of Democracy had begun to pester her over an upcoming unionisation vote and had pronounced the imminent death of Stingray Engineering once the UAW got its communist claws into it.
Or the imminent death of the UAW as a force if it couldn’t even get a vote passed in a company that didn’t seem to care about its existence.
Well-wishers asked after Mackie. The skull didn’t answer.
They asked after Jet. Normally there’d be a funeral, a memorial, or even a notice on deaths.fen where Mackie’s friends could mourn in peace.
Jet’s soul revolted at the idea of admitting anything – of doing anything. The dam would break if she did.
She had the idea that maybe stopping now would be a good idea, before things got too far, or too heated. Maybe, outing just the mole would be enough, and they could all simmer back down to their usual day-to-day. Jet could be grateful he was alive, instead of biting her lip to keep from screaming at the world.
The skull stared at her, offering a silent admonishment.
They killed Mackie. They had to be found. The idea of them just getting away with it made her sick. Sick as the moment she’d been told he’d crashed. Sick as the moment she realised he’d been shot down. Sick as the grotesque possibilities of what they could’ve done to him if they’d gotten him alive like they’d wanted.
They would try again.
That settled it.
They had to be found. They had to be punished. Every iota of her being demanded it. Mackie had to stay dead for that to happen.
They would try again if they got away.
She didn’t realise her grip had crushed the edge of her desk, until after she let it go.
The skull gave no comment.
—--
Miyuri’s mind lingered in a superimposed state of giddy excitement, and guilty apprehension. The chance to be involved in something cool, and the fear of being caught going well beyond her brief.
Something about this felt thrillingly, terrifying illicit – like being on the inside of a Scarlet Angel fenfic, rather than listening to the same ones told second hand at every family reunion. She’d have her own story to tell now.
And she had a part to play beyond just being there to watch.
She sat and simmered on the train, completing a full orbit of the station beneath its surface before remembering she had to get off the thing.
It gave her time draft a check-in message let everyone know she was safe, so was Shinji, and that if they needed details on the reported accident, the backnumber of the memo to check in the archives.
She dithered on what to say about anything else.
Stepping off the train at the main concourse, she still vascillated on the exact wording. She almost didn't hear her name.
Anika waved at her from The Midoriyah Café. Judging by the collection of plates in front of her, she’d regained her appetite from earlier.
“Hey, take a seat, dig in,” Anika beckoned her forwards, pushing a single steel chair out from under the table.
“A late snack?” she asked. A very big late snack. Enough to give a human being diabetes. Cheescakes, Banoffi, a lemon meringue, a pavlova swimming in chocolate sauce and a selection of cupcakes with cutie-marks printed on them.
Miyuri couldn’t help but take a seat. Miyuri didn’t know where to start with the cornucopia.
“They’re cheaper now. They almost haven’t gone stale yet,” Anika explained. “And I’ve an early start in the morning.”
“Oh?” Miyuri picked up a fork. The Pavlova looked inviting.
“I’m supposed to escort Gaige to Prometheus tomorrow,” Anika announced. “They’re arming the Becky Brown.”
Miyuri felt her skin whiten. She shrank into her own guilt, forgetting any sense of hunger she might’ve had. Her fork hung loose in her fingers. Anika noticed immediately.
“Was it something I said?”
Was Miyuri Akisato about to betray her friend by letting her fly into an ambush?
“Might that be dangerous?” Miyuri asked, her voice scarcely able to make it out of her throat.
“That’s why I’m going,” Anika assured. “Mackie was shot down for his engine cores. They might try and steal it again. But my brilliant mind will be aboard Hi-Streamer to stop them.” She tapped the side of her head with her fork, leaving flecks of cream in her golden hair. “I am a qualified Raven, after all.”
Not everyone got to know everything. But everyone had things they still needed to know. They knew enough.
Miyuri let the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding go with a relieved sigh.
“So that’s where all the cheesecake is going,” said Miyuri, giving a side-eyed look. “You’re terrible when you get a swelled head.” She aimed the prongs of her fork right at Anika’s face.
“But brains like mine need fuel!” Anika declared.
Miyuri felt herself giggle in a way she hadn’t expected, warming her body to the core, drawing a smile across Anika’s face. The Anika who’d explained the reactor coverup had vanished. The Anika she remembered, who brought a little touch of joy to everything she did, like a ray of sunshine filtering into the darkest of corners of the world, had come back.
Everything would be fine. Only the most evil of universes would turn on a person like that. And this wasn’t an evil universe.
The Pavlova still whispered her name.
---
Miyuri returned to Shinji’s apartment far later than she’d meant to – and far heavier than she’d meant to also. The door opened with the inviting scent of Miso, and the sound of bubbling.
Shinji stood cooking.
“You’re awake.”
“Nana couldn’t sleep,” he said, with a rueful smile. “She needed to see papa.”
Miyuri raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think she needed to sleep.”
“It’s good for her.” He said. “When the other children talk about dreams, she knows what they are now, because she’s had them.”
He wore a father’s smile, his mind wandering away to some small little joy he’d just reminded himself of.
“You were out late?” he said. It wasn't an accusation.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Miyuri
Shinji took a breath. The joy on his face vapourised.
“That’s a look I’ve seen before,” he said. “And when Misato came home late at night, or early in the morning, she said the same thing.”
Caught rotten.
There was a reason Shinji had become Security Chief.
Miyuri pursed her lip. A guilty gnaw settled in her stomach.
“Jet asked for my help with something, to help find Mackie’s attacker,” she explained, quickly. She looked away. “I might be gone for a week or two.”
Shinji’s steel grey eyes watched a moment. His expression flattened, like clouds overcasting a sunny day.
“I see.” He took a breath. “I’ll take the shuttle home to the station then,” he said. “Nana gets worried when I’m gone for more than a week.”
Miyuri answered with a soft nod, stepping carefully across the floor, before settling herself down into soothing embrace a plush foam sofa.
Shinji stirred, the spoon tapping against the metal sides of the pot.
“You really are a good father,” she said, after a few seconds.
Shinji looked up, stopping his stirring a moment. His smile had come back.
“She’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
And he had no intention of being a part of anything that risked him not going home to be with her. Some things were more important.
---
----------------
Something left on the floor:
From Stellviacorp's internal descriptions of Jet Jaguar. “Someone who combined the cool intelligence of Sylia Stingray, with the active athleticism of Linna Yamazaki, the technical nous Nene Romanova, and the chipped shoulder, wisdom and foresight of Priss Asagiri.”
Oh sweet meteor of death
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.