ATROPOSOLOGY

By Sean Otwell

There are seventy-eight lights on the primary control interface of a Hoplite Mark II
Submarine Infantry Mech. Positively minimalist by modern standards. Some glow a steady,
angry red. Some strobe in vain for my attention. Some burnt out years ago, maybe before I was
born. I can count the green lights that remain on my gloved fingers.
The Operator Escape Pod System Indicator still glows a cruel, malevolent green. It taunts
me.
Flip the switch. Pull the lever. FWOOSH! It’s all over. Just that easy.
It’s a lie. In the sixty years since they rolled out the Mark II, there hasn’t been a single
recorded case of an operator retrieved alive after a combat ejection. Word is they don’t even
teach the procedure at the schoolhouse anymore.
Odds on a mobility kill that leaves the operator pod intact enough to safely eject? Low.
Odds on a mech going down in just such a way as to leave a clear path to the surface?
Also low.
Odds on a machine that was unreliable when it was new functioning as intended after six
decades in anaerobic hell, exposed to salt water, freezing temperatures, crushing atmospheric
depth, and constant combat? You get the idea.
“Yo. Fucker. Go time,” George prods me to consciousness with his right boot.
My wrist chronometer hangs from the crossbeam of the bunk above. I check it and groan
“It’s zero-fucking-four, you bastard. Formations not for another hour”
“And you wanna die sober?”
“I haven’t been sober in weeks.”
“You wanna die without breakfast then?”
I sigh “No, I guess not.”
George is my best friend. Likely by virtue of the fact that all the rest are dead or
discharged, the former outnumbering the latter to a degree I try and fail not to think about. The
pair of us have more operational hours in Angler Company than anyone else up or down chain of
command. We willfully misattribute our prolonged survival to a strict adherence to the handful
of superstitions we made up along the way.
Rule #1: Don’t get in the can sober. Check.
Rule #2: Don’t get in the can hungry.
We stumble down a red lit corridor on a bearing toward a diner called “The Salt Ration.”
I dress myself as I walk, stumbling through the dark a pace behind George. My socked feet
splash in the quarter inch of seawater on the deck. The taste of salt mingles with traces of motor
oil and the saccharine sweet scent of engine coolant. The combination of the three smells is
faintly reminiscent of toffee. If that smell ever becomes too pronounced, we’re all fucked.
But it doesn’t. I haven’t seen a major habitat failure since my first year on the plateau.
Even so, living through even one will keep you sleeping with one eye open for the rest of your
days.
The station breathes like a snoring beast as we stumble through its bowels. Every other
pace, reciprocating bilge pumps wheeze and suck out cubic meters of stale air and liters of
wastewater into floor level gills. The water goes to the desalinators and the air to the recyclers.
We’ll breathe and drink both a hundred times again before we’re dead if we’re lucky.
We reach The Salt Ration. The airlock to the dining room is still shut, but there’s a walk-
up bar adjoining the main causeway. I can already see the shutter is up and Julia is clearing
plates from diners recently departed.
I catch her eyes as we climb onto a pair of stools, “Working the morning shift?”
Julia winks, “Couldn’t let you boys slide out in violation of the first two rules.”
“And the third?” George asks with a
“Find yourself a mermaid for the third, fuckboy,” she says without losing any of her
charm.
Rule #3: Don’t get in the can horny.
Used to be that meant charming a mermaid (local color for operator groupie) the night
before every patrol, but these days it’s usually more of a do-it-yourself job.
When I was eighteen and stupid, none of the girls in my neighborhood gave time of day
to a guy without a uniform, so obviously I enlisted. If there’s a dumber reason to join up, I
haven’t heard it.
 Now I’m twenty-two, ever so slightly less stupid, and just as fucked for romantic
prospects as I was then. Sure, there are plenty of girls sufficiently impressed with secondhand
glory and what might as well be minimum wage that’ll lay down for a night at a time with a Salt
Stomper like me, but I’ve played that game a hundred times too many and, somewhere along the
way, the idea of sharing girls with generations of my dead brothers lost its charm.
I’m aching for something real. Unfortunately, the kind of women wise enough to
reciprocate are wise enough not to waste their affections on homicidal alcoholic man children
that measure their life expectancy in days and weeks. Julia is a prime example. She’s twice
widowed by operators and watched at least as many would-be suitors slide out for the abyss,
never to return. She won’t give George or I so much as a peck on the cheek so long as we carry
our recall pagers. Probably why were both in love with her.
Julia pulls two beer mugs from a shelf above her head “What number is this for you,
George?”
“Ninety-five,” George traces the number onto the stainless steel countertop with one
finger.
“Cheers,” she says over her shoulder as she pulls two drafts of the stations local lager,
“Good odds if I remember my Atroposology.”
“Eighty-one percent,” he confirms.
Atroposology. I’ve heard it called the Salt Stomper’s religion. I’ve heard it called
drunken pseudoscience and self-fulfilling policy. I'm inclined to agree on all three counts. The
brass were right to outlaw it, not that the Fatwa did a damn thing better than drive the cult behind
barracks doors.
I wait for Julia to ask me my Atroposology number. She doesn’t.
I tell myself it’s because she already knows, which would be sweet in an apocalyptic sort
of way. One-Oh-Six, in case you were curious. Second lowest in the centurion slump at thirty-
one percent. Thirty one out of a hundred operators survive their one hundred and sixth combat
drop. Sixty-nine never make it home.
Statistically speaking, today is the day I die. The kinda thing that, once known, can never
be unknown. Welcome to the joys of Atroposology.
“Glorious day for a war, boys!” a man’s voice approaches from the direction of the
barracks.
“Fucking glorious!” a woman’s voice agrees.
Amir and Genevieve. Corporals. Second and third squad leaders.
It was a touch unfair to call George my only friend. Amir and Genevieve are good folks and
first-rate Salt Stompers, regardless of how exhausting their enthusiasm may be. You march as
many hungover funeral details as me and you try to maintain a bit of professional distance, but
they're hard not to like.
Their numbers are fifty-one and sixty. Their odds are eighty percent and eighty-four
percent. I know them from memory. I remember when these numbers were my own. Damn
decent odds from where I’m sitting this morning. The kinda thing that, once known, can never be
unknown.
“Pull up a stool,” George says. The stools are bolted to the deck.
Amir climbs onto the stool to my right, “What’s the good word, sergeants?”
“Philosophists up to their usual fish fuckery. Building some bullshit on the southern
plateau,” George answers.
I backhand George across the sternum “Dude?”
George laughs, ”Fuck. What’s the difference? They’ll know in an hour.”
I can’t argue with that. We devour pancakes and drink like we’ll be dead by lunch time.
Next thing I know, we’re stumbling into formation.
The lieutenant singles me out, “Sergeant Hazrad, where is your helmet?”
I grope at my neckline and come up null.
Shit.
Upon further consideration, I reckon that my helmet is sitting on the toe rail at the Ration.
Maybe when I die Julia will add it to the memorial shrine everyone is sure she keeps in her
bedroom. I wouldn’t know personally.
“Sacrificed for good fortune at the Temple of Athena, Sir,” I say, as if it’s a reasonable
response.
“And how do you expect to survive an atmo failure without your helmet, sergeant?” he
continues.
I shudder “why the fuck would I want to survive atmo failure, Sir?” Been there. Done
that. Never again. Even with the reinforced positive pressure cuirass, the weight of the sea on top
of you at that depth feels like a Hoplite standing on your lungs. Even with the Acetic Meditation
Technique they make us practice, you can’t make twelve hours of stale backup atmo last much
longer than that and escape with your brain in working order. And that dark.
Fucking hell that dark.
The way it’s supposed to work: the operator pulls the lever, shaped charges sheer the
welds holding the operator pod to the chassis, a hydraulic ram shoves the pod free of the wreck,
and a hydrocarbon combustion reaction inflates the ballasts with CO2 and carries the pod to
safety.
The way this plays out in reality: the operator pulls the lever. Shaped charges weaken the
already compromised hull of the operator pod. The hydraulic ram smashes up from below but,
maybe the contact surfaces have corroded enough to seize, maybe they were damaged in combat,
maybe in the course of six decades of repairs and retrofits some mechanic wielded something he
shouldn’t have, or maybe it was just a shit fucking design from the slide, even before they sold it
to the lowest bidder to be assembled by slave children, half blind from malnourishment and atmo
pushed through a filter that was the wrong model when it was new.
Whatever the reason, nine-times-out-of-ten, the pod fails to eject. The hydraulic ram is
powered directly by the mechs nuclear reactor, so it’s not taking no for an answer. It pushes until
something gives and that something, nine times out of ten, is the atmospheric integrity of the
pod. The seals crack. Freezing seawater floods in at somewhere between 3 and 9 thousand PSI
and the operator is dead before they have time to pat themself on the back for having their helmet
on.
And, in that way, I guess it is sort of an escape. It beats the hell out sitting down there,
alone in the dark, waiting for a rescue that won't come while the needle on your Atmo gauge
winds down to null.
Do yourself a kindness: Flip the switch. Pull the lever.
“I got a spare,” a rough voice calls out from somewhere behind me.My platoon sergeant,
Master Sergeant Crawford, known affectionately as Crawdad by those nihilistic enough to enjoy
his brand of bone-dry Salt Stomper humor. He’s called my bluff. He’s the only man in the
platoon with an Atroposology number higher than mine.
Fuck. I’m about over this game of pretending I care what the brass thinks of me, but then,
that’s the Centurion Slump for ya.
 It always starts the same way. You spend the first few months as a Salt Stomper
perpetually terrified, expecting to die at any moment, but inexplicably surviving. Soon, you’ve
built up quite a winning streak at this whole “not dying” game, and you start trying to examine
the situation quantitatively. Survivorship bias takes hold. There must be a reason you’re alive
when so many fitter, smarter, more handsome guys and girls are dead.
Then someone in the barracks, probably the least fit, least smart, least handsome guy you
know, gives you your first Atroposology chart. It’s years out of date, but you don’t know that.
The guy that gave it to you probably didn’t know either. Hell, that guy’s probably dead by now,
statistically speaking.
You study the chart like the religious text your command believes you believe it to be.
Drop number nine: Ninety-One percent. Drop twenty-five: eighty-four percent. Drop
fifty: seventy-eight percent. You try not to focus on the bad numbers. Drop number sixty-nine:
forty percent. Drop forty-five: forty-five percent (that’s an easy one to memorize). Maybe you
beat the odds and make it all the way to the mythical drop eighty-eight. That holy day. That
statistical anomaly. Literally no operator in the history of the Submarine Mechanized Corps has
ever died on their eighty-eighth combat drop, or so the legend goes.
I still remember my eighty-eighth drop, charging out onto the plateau like an
indestructible god of war. I never felt better in my whole life.
After that, you turn a profoundly negative corner. There’s nothing left to look forward to,
so you make some shit up. You hear a rumor that anybody who survives all the way to their one
hundredth drop gets shipped off to the capital to serve out whatever remains of their term of
service in the emperor's Centurion guard. It’s pretty much Salt Stomper Valhalla. You get to
walk around in a clean, dry uniform all day and chase senators’ daughters all night. On the rare
occasions you have to climb into a mech, it’s one of those beautiful, freshly painted, top-of-the-
line rigs from the recruitment posters. Polished steel and sex appeal. It must be true. Why else
would they call it the Centurion Guard? How else do you explain the fact that you don’t know
anyone with a three-digit Atroposology number?
Oh sure, there’s some senior NCO in the next company that’s supposed to be at one-
thirteen, but he’s an animalistic killing machine that lives for the violence. That crazy bastard
probably told the Emperor thanks but no thanks, I’d prefer to go out with my boots on if your
holiness will permit me this indulgence.
 Then there’s that squad leader in the next platoon with a mysterious past and a spooky
three digit number that spent some time at the capital recently. There’s a rumor that he slept with
the wrong senator’s daughter, or even the emperor's own daughter, and got kicked back to the
plateau for his impertinence. There’s a different rumor that he’s back here on some covert
undercover mission from the Centurions themselves. Or, hell, maybe he’s just an anomalous
fuck-up that slipped through the statistical cracks and the Centurions didn’t want him there in the
capital, fucking up the vibe.
None of that matters. What matters is your number is coming and pretty soon you’ll be
sipping the fancy shit, watching the plateau disappear from the horizon and your future forever.
But the big one-oh-oh comes and goes. There’s a ceremony. There’s even a plaque with
what might even be the Emperor's real signature, but you are not invited to the capital.
First you tell yourself that it was your mistake. Your count was somehow off. This or that
drop didn’t count because of some bullshit imaginary technicality. Your day is simply behind
schedule for no other reason than your own shitty math skills. Your business is war, not
counting, after all. Your real one hundredth drop is just around the corner.
It’s probably around one-oh-four that it finally sinks in: You aren’t the chosen one. You
aren't some special fucking boy. The emperor doesn’t care about you. He’s probably never heard
your name. That wasn’t his real signature. You have achieved nothing but an arbitrary number
that only feels important because your civilization happened to choose a base ten number system,
when the civilization down the street chose the equally arbitrary base twelve but randomly died
of smallpox or some shit.
From here, you sink into a deep, suicidal depression that, statistically speaking, you never
recover from. Your Atroposology odds fall through the floor till they bottom out at drop one-oh-
eight: Nineteen percent. Lowest on the chart. Nadir of the Centurion Slump. Second worst? One-
oh-six. That’s Atroposology. That’s why I’m standing here, four pints deep and no helmet.
Because what’s the fucking point of any it? Why worry? None of it will save me.
None of their posthumous awards will convince my widower of an old man that his
genetic legacy didn’t implode somewhere out past the Reykjanes Ridge. None of their random
lottery of upgrades deemed absolutely mission critical by the procurement committee back when
I was a teenager will turn my mech into anything other than a nuclear hydraulic coffin. In short, I
truly do not care what the LT thinks.
 Unfortunately, I do care what Crawdad thinks. He may be the only man alive that can
claim as much, aside from George. I sigh. He doesn't beckon, but I follow.
It's a short hallway. Lockers and pipes and condensation pooling from somewhere.
I expect a dressing down about the example I’m setting for junior guys when I show up to
an op formation sans helmet with a five AM drunk on. In doing so, I underestimate Crawdad.
The man is a leader as sure as he’s a killer, and the rumor is he’s killed more men than Mars. He
understands that I’m well within the ninety ninth percentile of combat operators in terms of both
raw drops and combat hours. He also knows firsthand the existential minefield that is the
Centurion Slump.
The LT sees a broken tool and knows that there are thousands more on the shelf.
Crawdad sees a honed blade that’s served its purpose a hundred times before and will do
the same two hundred times again with a little basic care and maintenance. Both are
dehumanizing in their own way, but which would you prefer?
“One-oh-six, huh?” Crawdad asks like he’s discussing the weather.
“One-oh-six,” I agree.
“I’d tell you I remember my one-oh-six, but I don’t. Nobody remembers one-oh-six.”
“I’d wager Guillermo remembers,” I say, not sure why I’m arguing.
Guillermo was a team leader of mine a few years back. Aside from Crawdad, he was the
only guy I’ve ever dropped with that cracked three digits. He lost his right arm to a philosophist
plasma torch. Lucky for him, he’d just pulled the lottery on the new auto-compartmentalization
upgrade, so the moment the arm lost atmo, it sealed itself off and guillotined the limb at the
shoulder. Better to lose the arm than compromise the core, or so the official literature goes.
Unluckily for Guillermo, the upgrade was still in beta. Due to an undiscovered technical bug, the
arms were still synced and both auto-compartmentalization in tandem. He lost two arms for the
price of one.
The auto-compartmentalization feature is standard now. I’ve seen it work successfully a
dozen times. I still don’t trust it not to chop my arms off. I still wonder sometimes how long it
took Guillermo to notice he was a double amputee. It’s because of him that all our mechs were
retrofitted with voice activated tertiary LF Comms. For every new gadget, there is a martyr. The
kinda thing that, once known, can never be unknown.
 Guillermo married the bartender before Julia. Guess she didn’t mind opening his beers
for him.
“Some would still call Guillermo’s exit a win,” Crawdad points out.
Most would call it a win. Matter of fact, about the only true Salt Stompers I know that
wouldn’t, are the Master Sergeant and myself. Maybe George. That’s probably why I still care
what they think.
“Why are you still here?” the words fall out of me before I can catch them and hit the
deck like a waterlogged cadaver. What I wouldn’t give to take them back. What I wouldn’t give
to have said anything else. He stays silent so long that I allow myself to hope that I hadn’t said
the words aloud, or that he hadn’t heard me.
Crawdad stops, “I ask myself the same thing every morning.”
I resist the urge to comment. My participation is not required at this juncture.
Crawdad continues “I got out. After My first pump. I did a semester in dental school. Pre-
dental school, I guess. Three classes. F’s across the board. It wasn’t the academics, believe it or
not.”
This time I make a noise like Hmm? It’s not a word. Barely even a sound. I just need
him to know that I'm listening.
“I just couldn’t give a shit. I couldn’t pretend I cared about school while both my best
friends were out on the plateau, facing down their gods and fighting for their lives. So I came
back. Ten years later they’re both out, married with kids, and I’m still here, like a fucking
moron.”
I wonder how many others have heard this story. I wonder if those two friends have heard
it. He opens a locker and pulls a helmet out. Without looking, he pushes it into my chest. I take
it. He starts walking back toward the platoon.
“Think you’ll ever finish?” I ask.
“What?” he looks over his shoulder.
“Dental school? Think you’ll ever go back?”
Crawdad laughs “already did. Two years ago. Correspondence courses, aside from a few
labs and evals.” We’re halfway back to the rest of the platoon when I put it together in my head.
“Wait. You’re a goddamn doctor?”
“Of dentistry.”
 “Does that not count?”
“You bet your ass it counts.”
“Why didn’t you turn officer?”
Crawdad stops. We’re nearly within earshot of the rest of the platoon, but not quite.
“Because fuck that shit, that’s why,” he says under his breath, “You understand?”
I nod. I do understand. I wish I didn’t, but I do. The kinda thing that, once known, can
never be unknown.

We’re on the open surface deck of the deployment skiff now, buttoned up in our mechs.
There are twelve of us, not counting a helmsman, a coxswain, and a deck chief. Ten of us are
wearing Mark II’s, each unique after a six-decade mosaic of upgrades, repairs, and retrofits. The
Master Sergeant operates the platoon’s only Mark III.
I can never entirely eliminate the residual resentment that comes from knowing Crawdad
gets to hang his hopes of survival on a machine a generation more advanced and forty years less
beat-to-shit than our own, but the reality is that upgrades and retrofits are such a continuous
process that, aside from a more advanced communications and imaging suite, basically every
brochure selling point from the Mark III’s has trickled down to the Mark II’s by now. Beyond
that, both the Mark II and Mark III were declared obsolete, only to be used when absolutely
necessary, back when my old man operated one twenty-seven years ago.
Strange how elastic a term like absolutely necessary can become with age.
And beyond that still, Crawdad’s earned it. I’ve seen more operators than I can count go
to their graves in machines more advanced than any I will ever be allowed to touch, and I’m still
here. Statistical variance is a merciless bitch, but she’ll love you if you love her back.
Take the LT for instance: He’s buttoned up in a Polemarch Bravo. That thing is a legit
piece of super science. Its workings are so deeply classified that I’m not even allowed in the
mechanics bay when they’ve got it cracked open. It's supposed to cost more than the rest of our
mechs combined. I will never get to drive one, but I know in the pit of my stomach that I’ll
outlive that coward no matter how bad he fucks up.
The Klaxon screams out across the deployment deck so loud I can hear it through my
armor. My radio visuals are still squelched out from the ambient electrostatics of the station and
will be till we’re well clear of the ramparts. Until then my visual range is limited to a handful of
Balistreri portholes on my mech. Through them I catch glimpses of deck personnel dashing to
and for, checking dials and switches and dodging geysers of irradiated steam as pneumatic
drivers come to life.
I feel that click and then the familiar vibrations from my asshole to my teeth as screws
wider than a man is tall push the launch platform away from the rest of the dock. I hear the
woosh and feel the drop in temperature through four inches of steel as the chamber floods.
The way it’s supposed to work is that everyone in the Atlantic fleet rotates duty stations
every twelve months, mechs included. Every operator is supposed to work luxury postings like
the capital city and the Pillars of Hercules approximately as often as they work hardships like the
plateau.
In my experience, that was always a lie. Maybe there’s a version of the Submarine
Mechanized Corps that works like the recruitment posters say, but I’ve never seen it.
I’ve been in just over forty-two months of an initial forty-eight month term. I’ve dropped
105 times, not counting this morning. Eighty-one of those drops have certified combat time. If
you’ve ever had a Salt Stomper tell you he has this or that kill count, he’s either a liar or a
profound sociopath. I can’t fathom how you would track such a thing, or why anyone would
want to.
Thirty-six months of those forty-two were spent out here. Four were spent at, or enroute
to, the main side military hospital at the Capital. The other two were spent on diplomatic security
detail around the Capital during the changeover when they voted in Washburn.
Both enormous hydraulic cylinders supporting the launch platform start to scream as
centuries old iron on iron oxide slides out toward the abyss. They extend to a maximum length
greater than three hundred meters. Just far enough that the skiff’s engines won’t drown out the
radio networks on the station itself. There is a sudden freefall as pressure pins give way and the
skiff drops from its mooring.
It’s a short drop, about three meters, before gravity submits to buoyancy, but we all feel it
catch. Great rotor impellers bigger than my mech grind to life and the skiff glides out onto the
plateau. I try to busy myself in redundant diagnostics. I fail.
Probability has no memory, or so they say.
That is the alleged logical checkmate they like to throw out against Atroposology, but
pure logic can never defeat the demons we’ve seen. Under the state sanctioned interpretation of
probabilistic math, no drop is any more or less dangerous than the one that preceded it, but that
literally cannot be true. The conditions are simply not the same, so how could the outcome ever
hope to be?
I’m more afraid, but also wiser than the last time I dropped. True, some of that is self-
fulfilling prophecy, but not all. I’m not the same person I was last time. My machine, likewise, is
not the same.
According to the paperwork, aside from topping off ammo and other consumables,
starboard tibial hydraulics were completely overhauled after the last drop and the
communications firmware was likewise updated. Aside from those more obvious changes, a
hundred components have broken in whilst a hundred others have worn out and all the rest have
advanced somewhere along the gradient between. It is an accepted truth of the operator’s life that
we never climb into the same machine twice. If we are not the same and the machine is not the
same, to say nothing of the mission or the AO, how then could our life expectancies be the same?
That is the foundation of Atroposology. Hang your hopes on a single abstract numerical
value. Fuck the math that keeps the Capital City pure while Salt Stompers bleed the plateau
black.
“Radio Check?” George’s voice crackles through my comms.
Our comms gained the ability to auto radio check back when George and I were both
Lance Corporals. True, it’s an imperfect system, but not so imperfect that we need to keep each
other company over comms in real time.
I reply on the private channel “the LT say anything about me when I went out back with
Crawdad?”
“Not to the juniors. Amir and Genevieve might have heard, but I don’t think they bought
it.”
I sigh, “What did he say?”
George hesitates before saying, “that somewhere between one-oh-three and one-oh-five
you broke. That we should watch out for you to start bucking for medical discharge.”
I laugh “That twofaced coward.”
“Coward, for sure, but I don’t know that twofaced is accurate. It’s not like he said
anything kinder to your face.” George is the most reasonable human being I’ve ever known. It’s
a frequent source of frustration. He has a vexing habit of taking sides that don’t actually exist. Or
shouldn’t.
I laugh again, “well if that coward had more than forty drops he might know that it was
one-hundred on the button that broke me. Same as everyone else.”
George doesn’t respond. The most frustrating part of the Centurian Slump is that those
closest to you believe it’s been just as hard on them as it's been on you.
I love George. I remember when his callsign was New Join. I remember when he was
augmented to the platoon just before my seventh drop. He’s been at my port flank every drop
since but the two he missed for his mother and father’s respective funerals. I’ve been at his
starboard every one of his drops but the one I missed for a syphilis scare (false positive) and the
five I missed in recovery after that atmo failure that got me shipped to the capital.
I like to think that I don’t flaunt my Centurion status in front of George, or anyone for
that matter, but I also refuse to pretend I occupy the same world I did before that day. It may
have started as an abstract line in the sand, but expectations were raised and subsequently
betrayed. I can never go back to the optimism I had before. In another five missions, he’ll
understand.
“Do you want to die, Abby?”
I choke on a sip of water from a bladder mounted above my head. In most other
situations, my answer would have been an unequivocal yes, and even I wouldn’t know what
portion of it was a joke. At this moment I have to answer knowing that he’ll carry my words, and
all that they entail, into battle. I can’t burden him with that knowledge.
“Ask me in five missions.”
“I’m asking you now.”
I’m silent for as long as I figure I can get away with, “I don’t know, man. If you’d asked
me if I want this to end-”
There is a boom so low and so loud that it squelches out audio and visual comms. Up and
down invert and merge and smash into the ocean floor. I stretch my jaws and Valsalva over the
swan song of frequencies I will never hear again. Even before my senses return, I pull the
emergency deployment pin. An explosion so powerful and loud that it required ear protection in
operator school sounds like a muted cough. The time between the explosion and the thud and the
motionless silence is so brief that I know without checking that I’m pinned beneath the skiff and
the sea floor.
There are not a lot of real-world advantages to accumulating a hundred plus drops.
One of the vanishingly few, is that I’ve been in pretty much every kind of fucked up situation
before. IED induced skiff wreck makes that list.
It wasn’t in the books back when I went through operator school, but if you can stabilize
the armor segment equivalent to what would be your tailbone against a solid enough surface, you
can redirect the nuclear hydraulic ram from your ejection system to lift an impossibly heavy
object, like a sixty ton platoon skiff, above your head.
I’ve done it twice.
I grunt and brace myself. A lot of newer operators actually think that’s what the ram is
for. I’m told that I’m actually quoted on the procedure in the most recent edition of the textbook.
“Don’t you fucking do it, Hazrad,” Crawdad’s voice crackles through my comms.
I balk at the words, but before I have a chance to react to them in any more meaningful
way, the skiff starts to lift off of me. I fire off my optical sonar with three rapid pings. I see the
silhouette of the Mark III lifting the barge with the assistance of a pair of what must be
pneumatic jacks powered by isotopic decay cells. I’m a bit ashamed that Crawdad was able to
get free and position the jacks before I gathered my senses, but I remind myself that the forward
and aft most positions on the skiff auto eject if the major axis rotates more than eighty degrees.
I push myself up off the sea floor into a rising miasma of sand and fossilized corral to
evaluate damage.
“Philosophist Improvised Explosive Device?” I suggest.
“It would seem we were not invited. What kind of shape is your mech in?”
“Just a sec. I’m checking,” I run the diagnostics as fast as I can, “blew a pair of atmo
cartridges, so I’m down to ten hours. Some long-range comm extensions are fucked. Otherwise
I’m Green-Green Up.”
“Good. Can you reach the port forward excavation kit?”
First squad leader sits in the forward most cradle on the port side of the skiff. The only
positions that are forward of that are the helmsman sitting centerline forward and the Staff Non-
Commissioned Officer in Command hanging off the forward starboard side. From where I am, I
can already see what’s left of Terry, the helmsman, smashed flat against a rock formation. Eels
have already begun to feed.
I crawl forward on steel hands and knees and find the excavation kit compartment. I pull
the release tab and squint against a rush of CO2 bubbles as the cover blasts away. After the
bubbles, I can make out the silhouettes of pieces of gear that have long since been catalogued
into my memory.
“How do you want to do this?” I ask.
“Grab the jacks. Get over here to my position. Quick, fast, and in a hurry. People are
dying.”
I grab the jacks and swim over to his position. At twenty meters, it’s just short enough
that swimming in a metal gorilla suit is about as good as firing up rotary propulsion.
Between our ambient vis-spec head lamps and the swirling muck of the sea floor, visible illum is
more or less worthless, so I navigate the short distance by optical sonar. I find the Hoplite III
kneeling like Atlas, shouldering the burden of the skiff between a pair of hydraulic jacks. It
occurs to me that it’d be an awe-inspiring site for the people back home, a Platoon Sergeant
shouldering an overturned skiff. I’ve never seen it, and I’ve seen it all.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” he says as if he can read my mind.
I leap forward with a jack in each iron hand. I scan the skiff and panic for a moment. I
can see nowhere to position the jacks that would increase leverage over what Crawdad has
already achieved.
“Uhh...Crawdad...Where do I-“
“Give ‘em here,” frustration creeps into his voice.
I hand off the jacks, each about a thousand pounds apiece dry, to my platoon sergeant.
I’m back in student mode, waiting to see how the seasoned veteran solves this apparently
unsolvable riddle in the time allotted. I’m excited. I knew Crawdad was brilliant long before I
knew that he was a doctor. There was no doubt in my mind that he saw some solution invisible to
me.
He positions the base plates the one place it had not occurred to me to try, directly on top
of the upraised left kneecap of his Hoplite III Submarine Infantry Mech. Once both are in
position, he grabs an outrigger brace from where he’d left in on the ocean floor. In my mind, the
dots connect.
 There are a couple features of the Mark IIIs that never got ported back to the Mark IIs,
because they couldn’t be. One that I never thought much about till right now is the legs. You
control the arms of most mechs directly through force feedback, which is to say that you stick
your squishy little human arms into the big metal arms and the metal arms just do whatever the
little squishy arms do, but bigger and harder. For the Mark IIs and older, that only applies to the
arms. You control the legs with pedals and your little squishy human legs don’t extend beyond
the operator pod. It’s not an optimal system, and it makes us much easier to knock over, at least
until you’ve been in enough fights to get the hang of the thing.
They went with top and bottom direct force feedback with the Mark III, which is to say,
the pair of hydraulic jacks are sitting atop a layer of iron wrapped around Crawfords actual leg.
“Crawdad, no...” But there is no time. I lack the will to avert my gaze.
The jacks fire, spraying jets of bubbles as they rocket to their full three-meter length. It is
enough to break the tipping threshold. The skiff lurches over and drifts lazily down to the seabed.
All passengers and crew that weren’t killed in the blast are saved by the maneuver.
Crawdad’s left leg collapses beneath the force. The armor torques wildly
counterclockwise beneath the jack. I realize that my eyes are watering, and I know I lack the
courage to do what he just did. For the first time, I pray that the auto-compartmentalization
mechanism works as advertised. The kinda thing that, once known, can never be unknown.
“Fucking help me...Abdullah.” Crawdad has never before called by my first name. I rush
to him and catch him before he hits the sea floor.
The outrigger brace is a remote mechanical command strut. You can use it to reroute a
force feedback suit limb back to the central neural node if the nerves can’t be directly accessed.
In other words, you can use it to remote control a mechanical leg if the real thing has been
reduced to amputated flesh and bone jelly.
All three status lights glow green. Whatever Crawdads had planned, it's granted him
temporary control of the iron containing what’s left of his leg. The suit will already be pumping
local anesthetic into the stump, but I don’t imagine it’s a terribly pleasant process. He rises to his
mechanical feet.
I want to vomit, but I learned the hard way not to do that in a mech. However much I
believed I was over this life an hour ago, I am much more so now.
 The master sergeant's words kick in halfway through a stream of swears that proves he’d
muted his comms for at least a little while. He sags against my iron embrace and I try my best
not to draw attention to a scene that must look eerily romantic from a distance.
“Why...?”
He doesn’t turn to look at me, but his tone makes it clear that he’s regained his
composure, “The job ain’t done, kid.”
“Master Sergeant! Are you still alive?” the LT’s voice breaks into the channel.
Crawdad shrugs out of my grip and take a few awkward steps “Yes sir. Over here.
Forward starboard. And you, sir?” My eyes are wet and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m sad or
moved or simply too transfixed to blink. I’m also still a bit drunk, I remember. I wonder if
Crawdad is too.
Probably not as drunk as he wishes he was.
“Ten meters aft of wreck. Green-green up,” the LT says.
“Did you know?” I ask over the private channel, “Did you know it would-“
“I knew,” he says.
“Abby, come in!” George radios.
“I’m here,” my mind returns to mission mode. “status report?”
“I torqued a few torpedo tubes but they’re still within operational specs,” he says. My
immediate function check was more of a skim job. I run a deeper one now. I too have torqued a
few torpedo tubes, but they are also still within operational specifications at this depth.
“Good, Good. Me and Crawdad are still up,” I answer for the Master Sergeant, “everyone
else report.”
Amir: “Wathiq up.”
Genevieve: “Blackthorn up.”
Martinez: “Marty up.”
Ivanovic: “Ivan Up.”
Edwards: “Eddy online. Atmo at half max. Propulsion compromised on starboard side.”
Del Salto: “Salty up.”
Ironside: “Ironside ready for war.”
Giralt: “Gerry losing atmo fast. I got ammo if anyone needs it, but this suit aint walking
far.”
 Ignacio: “Iggy here, my suit is workable, but Jerome is dead.”
Numerous voices swear over comms. One of them is mine.
Kilgore: “Kilgore here, green-green up.”
I wait a moment. I don’t know if I should speak up or wait longer. I’ve been in two
previous skiff wrecks, but both times the crew were very obviously dead and the officer in
charge was competent enough to assume command before I had a chance to evaluate my role in
the process. I already knew the helmsman was dead. What about the aft crew chief and the
coxswain? I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know their first names.
“Mr. Giovanni?” I radio to the sailor.
Giovanni speaks through a spray of fluid that must be blood, “I’m alive. Probably not for
long.”
“Mr. Del Norte?”
“I can swim,” he says, “walking is iffy.”
I silently ping Crawdad. He silently pings back. I interpret this as the signal of
encouragement.
“Right,” I say. “Eddie and Gerry, prep the skiff for thermal detonation, then prep a float
to casevac Jerome. Del Norte and Giovanni, prep Terry for casevac back to station.” I almost feel
Crawdad nodding approval, but his mech is still as a statue.
“Are you not going to ask about my status, Sergeant Hazrad?” the LT asks.
I reread my comm logs to make sure I’m not mistaken: You already confirmed your
status, sir.
The LT is silent for a long moment, “of course...and the others?”
I hesitate. Is he asking me something other than the instructions I’ve already articulated?
“Edwards and Giralt are prepping the skiff for emergency destruction protocols and
casevac of lance corporal Jerome,” I reread my logs, “skiff crew is prepping the helmsman for
casevac as well.” Casevac is a bit of a lie. They’re babysitting corpses, but there’s obviously no
need for unarmored humans where we’re headed.
“Casevac?” the LT challenges, “under who’s orders?”
I hesitate again, even more confused, “Sir, I don’t understand the question?”
“It’s not a riddle, Seargeant Hazrad. Who told you to go home?”
 The only part of my job that I like is the chaos of the combat op. Not because I’m some
big strong badass with a hard-on for war, but because the bullshit and lies can’t follow you there.
I’ve heard a lot of war criminals try to make the case that what appeared to be wanton slaughter
from every conceivable angle was actually self-defense. I have myself stood vigil on a few peer
juries. The reality is that there is a fine line between murder and self-defense and I’ve never seen
a Salt Stomper worth his stripes stumble anywhere near that line. In our business, violence is
rarely ambiguous. Now, here I was at a loss. I never suspected I’d be questioned for telling the
wounded to carry home the dead.
Crawdad answers for me “that was me, sir.”I smile.
“I never heard you issue those orders?” the LT asks.
“Comms get banged up in a hit like we just took,” Crawdad says.
The LT is silent for what feels like a whole minute. I can almost feel him stewing. I’ve
long suspected him to be a piece of shit but watching him flail to control the narrative in a
moment of crisis is all the confirmation I need. All he has to do is shut the fuck up and let us do
our jobs, but it’s simply beyond him to exist at anywhere other than the center of his perceived
narrative.
“Very well Master Sergeant Crawford. Seeing as your comms have been compromised,
you’ll lead the casevac element.”
“Wait, what?” I can barely control myself.
“Is there a problem, Sergeant Hazrad?” the LT baits me, “Is your borrowed helmet
perhaps malfunctioning?” I receive another silent ping from Crawdad. The meaning here is more
ambiguous, but I get the gist.
It’s fucked up, but the part that gets to me most is not that I still have to complete the
mission. It’s my job. I honestly don’t think Crawdad would have called it off if the LT had died.
That’s why I didn’t when I took charge. It’s not just that the LT is a blowhard piece of shit. We
all suspected that. It’s that Crawdad is being denied his last ride. This is his hundred and fifty-
fourth drop. Atroposology doesn’t go that high. Not enough data point density at that end of the
curve. He’ll be medically discharged the minute the doctors pull what's left of him out of the
mech.
He could have gritted his teeth through what’s left of his last op and, with the help of the
Outrigger controlling his mechs leg, ridden home afterward to celebrate the final chapter of one
of the most storied and epic careers in this history of our profession. Instead, he’ll sit out his last
op on the bench because that man in charge is ashamed that his subordinates rose to the occasion
while he wriggled in the dirt.
A feral growl rises up at the back of my throat. I honestly don’t know if I had my comm
keyed or not.
Crawdad cuts me off, “Aye Aye, sir. Good call. I’m confident Sergeant Hazrad can fulfill
my duties.”
I admire Crawdad’s last act of defiance as an active Operator, even if I don’t agree with
it. I weigh the probability on my cutting the coward out of his Polemarch Bravo and feeding him
to the eels before we RTB. It’s a decidedly non-zero outcome. There have been a thousand
missions, or probably just a hundred and five or so, that I’ve made such a threat to myself. This
is the first time I believe it.

It takes three hours to reach the actual mission objective site on foot. I walk point.
As second most senior, George walks Tail-End-Charlie. The LT is directly ahead of him.
This is pretty close to standard patrol order, except that I should be tail end Charlie and
Crawdad should be in the lead. I still hate the LT for it, but already it’s occurring to me that I
may be letting my antipathy run away with me.
I kneel and raise my nondominant hand directly overhead with fist clenched. Three
hundred meters back at the exact extreme end of optical sonar, Ivanovitch does the same. The
signal cascades down the patrol to George.
“Why are we stopped?” the LT asks.
I sigh audibly into the mic. The entire reason for hand signals is to circumvent the need
for that exact question, “There are anomalies visible from my position at the head of the patrol.”
“What sort of anomalies?” he asks.
“Sir, would you like to lead the patrol?” probably shouldn’t have said that.
“I AM leading the patrol, Sergeant. What sort of anomalies?”
I regain my professional composure, “There are natural geothermal vent structures that
are not emitting heat, among other things, sir.”
“What?”
 I can almost hear nine operators grown into the silent channel of their comms. I doubt
anyone in my platoon is ignorant enough not to have to have grasped the implications of what I
just said, except the university educated man in charge, of course.
George answers, “Sir, there are vents not emitting heat. Nine times out of ten that means
that the ground beneath is being mined at a nearby vent.”
“And the tenth, Sergeant?” like it’s an intelligent retort.
I think about interjecting, but George beats me to it. Probably for the best.
“The tenth percentile may include rock structures that look like vents but are not, portions
of the plate shifted too far above the mantle by tectonic flux to directly vent thermal energy, or
that the entire area has been mined to exhaustion. “
“And why are we sure this is not one of those situations?” the LT asks.
Martinez, a bone-dry rookie on his fourth drop, speaks up “Sir, the briefing established
that this area was not mined as recently as ten days ago and that this plate is sufficiently proximal
to the mantle as to produce thermal exhaust.”
There is a long pause. I scan the surrounding area from my knees.
“Exactly what I was looking for, Lance Corporal Martinez. Let’s get a move on, Sergeant
Hazrad. We’re already behind schedule.”
I am befuddled by the LT’s ability to claim that I was both right to halt the patrol and
guilty of delaying the patrol in the same breath. Do they teach that sort of administrative fish
fuckery in OCS? I rise to my feet and resume our course. I crank the gain on all my passive
sensors to max. It won't do any favors to my carcinogen quotient but, out here without Crawdad,
I’m fighting for hours, not years.
The next time I kneel and signal a halt, the rebuttal comes even faster, “Sergeant Hazrad,
why are we stopped.”
“We’re here sir,” I say.
“I don’t see anything.”
“That’s the idea sir. Line of optical compromise. Objective is just over the next
ridgeline,” fuck I wish Crawdad was here, “This is the pre-assualt position. From the briefing.
From the Colonel. This is where we stop. Before we assault the objective.
There is a long moment of silence and crackling squelch, “Right. Well done, Sergeant.
Never lower your guard.
 I sigh. This time it’s off comms. I think to myself: What Would Crawdad Do.
Unfortunately, the answer is not: murder the Lieutenant in front of what's left of his platoon.
I wait a beat to allow the LT to give an order or something. He does not. I shrug and deploy a
video drone to the ridgeline. George does the same. We compare the imagery from both with the
pre-mission recon imagery. The philosophists are right where we want them, and much less
defended than we expected.
“Sir, shall we execute the mission objective?” I ask. It’s anybody’s guess what stupid
thing he’ll say next.
“Now?”
I contemplate half a hundred conversational arcs that will land me in the brig, “Yes. Now,
sir.”
After a while he answers, “Yes.”
There are easily a dozen specific parameters I would have asked Crawdad to clarify at
this moment, but I know in my heart of hearts than any and all delays will cost my brothers and
sisters some measure of their life expectancies, “Right. Gen and Amir, your long guns still in
fighting shape?”
“Ready and waiting, Abby,” she says.
“Sergeant,” the LT says.
We all wait for him to continue before Genevieve puts together that he was correcting her
“Ready and waiting, Sergeant.” I can almost feel her eyes rolling.
“Martinez and Kilgore? Are the Heavies good to go?” I ask? I’m referring to the multi
tube rapid deployment torpedo units. They’re the closes thing we have to an open water machine
gun. I have the standard four single tube launchers with a heavy fish in each tube and a reload
process time and concentration expensive enough to necessitate cover and concealment. The
Heavy is a sixteen-tube rotary behemoth that auto reloads the first tube by the time the last tube
fires. Between the two of them they can get more than a hundred fish out the tubes before the
reloading process requires manual intervention.
Both respond in the affirmative with all the useless formality the LT expects of us. I
assess and direct them to an overwatch positions on the ridge.
“Port element on Ivan, Starboard on George, center on me. You guys know your fire
protocols,” I say.
 I don’t direct the LT because he can't second guess a recommendation I don’t verbalize
and because I’ve never seen Crawdad direct the LT. Best to let him mill about according to his
own prerogative and hope nobody gets shot in the back. I ease over a low point on the ridge with
all the grace three stories of steel and hydraulics can manage. Once over the ridge, I switch my
mech to glide. Impellers lift the mech just off the ocean floor and carry me forward. It’s slow
going and energy inefficient, but it’ll preserve our stealth for a moment longer.
I count six philosophist mechs. No two are alike. One is even a beat-to-fuck Hopelite
Mark III. Probably looted from a fallen Salt Stomper. It’s obviously more advanced than my own
mech, but I console myself with the knowledge that I have more hours in the saddle than these
cultists could ever dream. I count more than two dozen unarmored philosophists as well. Most
congregate around entrenched harpoon gun nests. Those things are nasty. They can throw their
darts faster than the Heavies can spit fish, but their propulsion is all from the gun itself. The open
water attenuates their energy so rapidly they must be within twenty meters to have any chance of
piercing armor. They are also incredibly finnicky and the Philosophists are not exactly known for
their diligent attention to operational maintenance.
Still I glide.
I’m at the head of a wide V stretched across a kilometer of uneven plateau. We are all, I
hope, low enough to hide in sonar shadow unless someone points a sensor directly at one of us. If
I could, I’d issue more specific instructions but, even though the Philosophists could never hope
to break our encryption, a stray EM bust could still raise the alarm at this range.
I alter my course and make directly for the Mark III.
It was a mistake for the Philosophist to claim that mech. One, because they’re fucking
death traps. Two, because it makes things personal. Three, most importantly, because any Salt
Stomper consigned to the plateau knows the ins and outs of that machine better than they know
their own flesh.
I’m twenty meters from the Mark III’s position, barely more than a mechs length, looking
up at its perch from below. The Mark III is still as a statue. Even odds the Philosophist operator
is asleep or keeping the third rule inside. Hell, it could even be a scarecrow.
I ease the thermal trident from the storage rack on the back of my mech, load it into the
sling launcher on my right arm, and slave it to the nuclear hydraulic ram. The launcher has the
same range as the harpoon guns. No one gets around the inverse square law. I don’t fire up the
thermal coils. Too risky. At this range they could detect the heat or the red glow and, anyway, no
need at ten meters.
A previously red light on my instrument panel turns green. The sling launcher is fully
charged. I half expect the operator to look down at the last second. They don’t.
Thinnest skin on a Hoplite? The pelvic floor. Too many moving parts for a heavy plate
and who gets shot in there anyway? Even the porthole glass is thicker.
I take a deep breath. It’s easy enough to pull the trigger when your heart is racing and
your brain is drunk on adrenaline. At that point it’s a reflex. Doing it from a state of rest is a
different thing entirely. I remind myself of how it was this Hoplite came to be in the service of
Philosophists and squeeze the trigger.
The trident lurches forward with a hiss of nuclear steam and a thunk. The Mark III
topples over and limbs flail. It was occupied after all. I leap backwards because I know what
comes next. The pod integrity fails at a place that can’t be auto compartmentalized even if this
mech has that upgrade. Nine thousand pounds of pressure search for a way in. It finds it. The can
crumples inward, then explodes. A boom and a flash of white light.
To my port and starboard I hear three more explosions. Too distant to see the flashes.
Three of my comrades had pulled the same move as me. I’m not surprised. It’s their job.
I hear the Heavies open up. At this range it sounds a muffled drum roll but I know the
devastation that they’ve unleashed. I can’t keep an exact count but it sounds somewhere in the
order of two dozen fish.
I see four mechs, which means I missed two on my previous sweep. Two of them
disappear under a barrage of torpedoes, as does one of the harpoon nests.
“I can’t believe you got that guy in the dick,” Genevieve laughs across the platoon
channel. I’ll be hearing about that one for a while.
“Ivan is down!” Ironside calls out.
I turn to my port. Those two should be to my immediate flank. I see a Mark II laying face
down in the sand. An arm is gone. The core is a pincushion of harpoons. I see Ironside rushing
toward it. The downed mech buckles. If it were a more seasoned Salt Stomper, I’d count on her
reading the situation for herself, but Kate Ironside is pretty new. Eleven drops, I think. Good
chance she’s never seen a mech’s integrity fail at this range.
I tackle her to the sea floor.
 “Sergeant, what are you-“
Ivan’s Hoplite explodes. A boom. A flash of white light.
“Nothing you can do when pod integrity fails at the depth, Kate,” I get to my feet and pull
her upright, “nothing but get out of the way.”
I can’t see any mechs. I bound toward the harpoon nest that put Ivan down. I’m prepared
to try and dodge around an incoming burst but as I approach, I can see that the hydraulics are
venting fluid and a trio of Philosophist are trying in vain to troubleshoot. I see the horror in the
goggled eyes of one as they notice me. By now my endocrine system is firing wide open and I’m
pissed off enough about Ivan that I feel nothing for these bastards. I leap and stomp the nest with
both feet. Only one Philosophist is unsquished. I grab him (or her, can’t tell in the rebreather and
cloak) and crush the body in my iron grip. I spot the last remaining nest and send a fish of my
own that way. Total fatality. I look for the next target but find none.
Shit. It’s over.
“Sit rep!” I call out.
Everyone calls in but Vlad Ivanovitch. Del Salto is injured, but alive. He’ll be leaving
here on foot, sans Hoplite. I mourn for Ivan, but I know this is a good result. Good as a Salt
Stomper can expect. I want to find Ironside and check on her. I debate internally as to whether
it’s a misogynistic impulse.
“Shit, Abby, you see this?” Amir calls out.
“Sergeant!” the LT corrects. If Amir notices it doesn’t show.
“What is it?” I ask. Then I see it. What I’d taken for a small complex was merely the top
of a ziggurat that extends for half a kilometer at least.
“This is no construction site,” George says.
“It’s an excavation,” I agree. At the limits of my vision, objects I had mistaken for debris
come to life.
They're about as tall as a Hoplite Mark II, but as they don’t move like an mech I’ve ever
seen. There’s a creepy stuttering stop-motion quality to their gait that gives the impression of
some kind of bipedal crustacean. The armor doesn’t look like steel and a ping confirms an albedo
far too low for any form of metallurgy known to the index. I assume they're some sort of enemy
battle mechs. Any alternative is considerably more unsettling. There are hundreds. Maybe more
than a thousand. I have never heard of, much less seen, such a thing.
 “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
“Sergeant Hazrad! You cannot say that over the radio!” the LT sounds horrified. In truth I
hadn’t realized I was saying it out loud.
Pretense flies out the porthole in an instant. I want to tell the LT to go fuck himself, but
suddenly our differences feel unimportant.
A tentacle three meters across and longer than I can comprehend snakes out of the
darkness and wraps around Ironside. I lunge forward and grab her arm. It drags us both. I dig my
heels into the ground and the arm breaks off at the elbow. Her mech disappears into darkness. A
flash of white light confirms my fears. She never screams. Never says a thing.
“Contact front!” I roar, “Flares! Flares! Flares!” I dump flares and fire my jump jets. I get
to about sixty meters and start to drift back down, firing Like a mad man as I do. No one else
fires their jets. Too few release flares.
I loose my three remaining loaded torpedoes and drop all four depth charges. The fish
connect and do obvious damage. The depth charges ae not far behind and they do significantly
more. I’ve crippled or chased away plenty of tentacles and killed a few of the mech things by the
time I descend, but they are so numerous that my accomplishments are meaningless.
By the time my iron feet touch stone, I’m already moving. There’s no chance of getting
the breathing room to reload my tubes so I adjust the fuses on my remaining fish and start tossing
them like grenades. I’ve got a few mines and I do the same with them.
Pretty soon I’m down to induced reactor meltdown and plasma blades.
I ignite plasma blades and begin fighting my way across the necropolis.
The first wreck I reach is Del Salto. I see no signs of biological death. I don’t know if he
got out of the mech as planned or if he’s still in there.
“Salty, you in there?” I ask. No response.
I see on my instruments that he still has two armed fish in the tubes. I slave his suit to
mine, muscle him into position, and fire. Then I go through his remaining fish, depth charges,
and mines and distribute them amongst the mob of freaky enemy mechs. For a minute, I’m back
at the top of the food chain. The enemy dies in waves. Tentacles shrink from my sight.
All too soon, this reservoir of death is itself depleted. The enemy mechs find their
courage anew. The tentacles reemerge.\
 I start flashing through secondary and tertiary comm geometries in the hopes that some
stray EM wave will find its way to a living comrade. No such luck. Before I know it I’m
standing alone at the summit of a millenias old Ziggurat in the center of the long forgotten city. I
have nothing left to me but my core reactor and my plasma blades. Enemy mechs line rooftops to
the horizon. Tentacles the size of commuter trains flail incoherently as far as optical sonar can
see.
This has never happened before. For a moment, all is still and silent.
How did we not know this was here? We’re less than a ten-hour hike from base and this structure
is probably older than our civilization.
Fuck this fucking plateau.
A trio of enemy mechs leap onto the base of my claimed ziggurat. I charge down the
steps and cut them to pieces. I feel good for a moment. If it hasn’t been made explicitly clear by
now, I am substantially above average when it comes to mech combat. It comes with practice. I
could maybe slay a hundred of these things under optimal conditions, but these conditions are far
from optimal and there are well over a thousand, not counting the giant tentacles.
One such tentacle hits me like a train and my mech tumbles end over end. I see one of my
legs spiral away into the inky darkness. This time I’m relieved that Mark II legs are fly-by-wire
rather than direct drive. My leg wasn’t in that hunk of metal. I get to keep it, for now.
I tumble from my ziggurat into darkness.
When I come to a stop, best as I can tell, I’m about two hundred meters below roof level.
The walls of buildings around me rise up like bare stone blocks and between them I can see the
dying embers of flares. From what I can tell, I’m lying on top of a mound of dead and dying
mechs who are in turn lying on top the tentacles or whatever the tentacles are attached too. I feel
the mass rise and fall beneath me and it reminds of the pulsing bilge pumps back home.
A burst of static fires through my comms. I swivel at the waist in my cockpit and start
twisting knobs and throwing switches like my life depends on it. The next time the static cuts
through it’s clear enough to recognize the voice.
“Abby! Abby, are you there?”
I breathe a sigh so deep it ends in sobs. For anyone else I’d mute my comms until I
regained my composure, but it’s George.
“I’m here, man,” I say “Where are you?”
 “They pulled me down into a crevice. Ammo expended. Legs are toast. I got nothing left
but my reactor. Can you reach me?”
I try every control surface I have. One leg is gone, the other may as well be. I try to drag
myself with my arms but it’s a puzzle I don’t have time to solve. There’s not even any
satisfaction to be had at punching the mechs around me, as they were fucked long before I ended
up down here with them.
“Same boat, dude.”
“Fuuuckkk...” he groans.
“You’re not wrong,” I laugh, “Can you get me a ten digit grid?”
He does as I ask. I punch it in. He’s less than a hundred meters from me. What sweet
sorrow to die with my best friend so close and so far.
The real kicker is that we’re well withing each other’s range if either of us decided to
manually override our reactors and turn ourselves into a baby nuke. On top of that, I don’t know
how many comrades are alive up there that may or may not have the same idea. Honestly, I hope
one of them beats me to the punch. I don’t have to relay any of this back to George. He’s already
done the math. He knows. One of those things that, once known, cannot be unknown.
“Well, bud,” George laughs, “what’ll it be? The key or the lever?”
It’s a shorthand. There is a keyhole to operate every generation of Hoplite I’ve ever heard
of, but it’s bullshit. Generally, the key never leaves the keyhole until the day the mech is
decommissioned, and in my experience that never happens. That key cylinder has three
positions: neutral, drive, and overdrive. Drive is obvious. Drive means go. You put it in neutral
when you park the thing. From what I understand, it's been in neutral every time it’s been
worked on for three years it's been mine. Nuclear reactors are kinda hard to turn off, it turns out.
As for overdrive, I have no idea what it’s actually for, but turning the key to that notch is step
one in a five-step process that turns a Hoplite Mark II into a walking nuclear warhead.
Stories of that later function actually being employed are as likely to be reality as myth.
But the same is probably true of the ejection lever.
So what’ll it be?
The key or the lever?
The surface below me is far from placid and there are hundreds of enemy mechs on the
streets above. At any moment they can decide to come finish me off without firing a shot or
swinging a blade. They could just avalanche down on top of me and it’d all be over. At any
moment any of my surviving teammates can decide to go thermonuclear themselves. At any
moment my sixty-year-old machine could fail entirely of its own volition.
The long and the short of it is that I’m moments from the climax of an anticlimactic
military career, and the last choice I get to make is how my best friend and I will cross that last
great Rubicon.
“I vote the lever,” I say at last.
“I was thinking the same thing. Let’s see if thing works after all.” My best friend,
genuinely or sympathetically, spares me the final shame of my choice.
“Count of five?” I ask.
“Five,” he says.
I fantasize for an instant that it had been me that shattered my leg to flip the wrecked
skiff.
“Four,” I say.

I fantasize that I got to limp home on the outrigger.

“Three,” he says.
I fantasize that Julia is waiting at the slip when we arrive. Something she’s never done as
long as I’ve lived on the plateau. I get to tell her that my leg is fucked and I’m done with war. I
cast my recall pager into the sea, never to be seen again.
“Two,” I say.
I fantasize they we’re getting married. She’s wearing a beautiful white gown the real
Julia would never tolerate in a million years. I’m wearing my dress whites and for the first time it
doesn’t feel like back when I was six and I put on my dad’s dress whites and he screamed at me,
drunk and haunted by ghosts. Julia smiles at me and I smile back. I look over my shoulder to my
best man, George.
But George isn’t there. He’s dead out on the plateau. Our plateau. I should have been
there beside him and that knowledge will corrupt and destroy my marriage and anything else I
could ever love. Someday, Julia will be gone, driven off by the sorrow and the rage that she
understands all too well even if I could never talk about it. I’ll have a kid and he’ll find the
uniform at the back of my closet and put it on because he thinks it’ll make me proud. I’ll smash a
bottle of rum against the wall and scream at him because he can’t understand who George was,
who Gen and Amir were, because I could never find the words to tell him.
I flip the switch.
I grab the lever and breathe deeper than I ever have in my life.
“One,” we say together.
Somethings, once known, can never be unknown.
I pull the lever. There is a creak of metal on metal and an ethereal FWOOSH!