#I swear I wanted to do something simple like the last little starry fox

[anfae]

!!!

[uncheckedtomfoolery]

Deep Space

Strap yourselves in for a giant robot story that is not gritty so much as an actual gravel pit, if that’s your thing. Under the cut.

They don't tell you how terrifying space is, when you sign on. Might be because they think you'd look at the uniform and keys they hold out, and slap it right out of their hands.

They guessed right, in my case.

There's no sound out here. Everyone knows that, but nothing prepares you for how wrong it feels in a battle. Two giants circling each other, trying their best to turn the other into a drifting, dead hulk. It's a- what's the phrase? A clash of titans, almost literally. It should be loud, but there's nothing. Plenty of pilots end up installing a simsound system, making up the sounds the machine thinks you should be hearing, all things considered. It's against the rules, but it keeps some of us sane.

So there's the quiet. At least that just gets under your skin. They say (quietly, after their tour) that nothing makes you appreciate life and all its fragility like deep space. Thousands of tons - I never looked at the specs, I'm taking some artistic license here - of steel and plastic, flying around between planets, and you still feel fragile. Where's the justice in that?

I'm still looking, if you really want to know, but never mind that. Truth is, a mech is one little mistake away from turning into a coffin, when you take it away from cozy planetside missions. The air supply, the heating, the propulsion, the navigation, or just a little part of the hull. Any of that could break down, even in a little way, and you'd be too far from help to-

We can walk out in our EVA suit and hope, but that's about it. Wait for rescue and pretend it'll come in time. They might try; pilots are expensive. They always come back for the mech. Those are even more expensive. Stands to reason. All that's between me and cold, deadly vacuum (assuming there's nothing exciting in this part of space, like solar flares, clouds of deadlier-than-usual radiation, asteroids, you name it), is a layer of robot skin, built by the lowest bidder, on an I-Want-It-Done-Yesterday schedule. The hull of my dear old MAA Indomitable.

Let me explain. Exosuits - mechs, giant robots or whatever, coloquially - were originally amphibious units, and the army and navy had a bit of a spat over the names. The compromise we got to was Mechanised Autonomous Armour, with a designation for each mech type, shared by its flagship, and a personal name for each one. They used to be unmanned, but as soon as they figured out flying one was 'safe', they decided unmanned piloting was even worse than manned piloting, and put us in. You don't skimp on the safety of a piece of hardware that expensive, if you can help it.

A couple decades later, they even got over the radiation leakage issues in the reactors, after swearing up and down there weren't any the whole time. I've got friends with grandparents still waiting on their compensation for that one.

Thus, the MAA Indomitable. It's the only one we can afford to mass-produce that's at all relevant to today's battlefields. I'll let that speak for its quality. This one came with its name already decided by its last owner, who I never met. Pitted, battered and scorched, with 'Rosinante' painted on the side in big, black letters. When I looked that up, it killed off most of my starry-eyed hope for the machine that I'd be trusting with my life.

Here's the thing. Out here, you depend on plating. AI isn't quite there yet, not enough to take control and move out of the way when it has to, so manned or unmanned, the bottleneck is us, not it. Not the hardware, but the pilot. All the mobility in the world doesn't mean a single thing when it's bogged down by the flailing monkey reflexes of yours truly.

You cannot dodge a bullet.

Out here, we pray it doesn't hit. We pray because when facing ridiculous odds in a monstrous environment, doing things we weren't meant for in places we were never supposed to inhabit, doing it all on the back of a machine we'd have to study for years before it becomes more than a black box of sufficiently advanced technology... prayer seems like the appropriate thing to do. Out here, we try to trust in plating. Try, because plating is fallible, it can't go everywhere, and we live on a line, dancing on the breakpoint where a little more protection is more expensive than rebuilding, or repairing a ruined hulk.

That's why the future of the past lied to you, and we don't have glowing swords, or lasers, or even missiles and machine guns. Those belong planetside. Out here, it's a quiet, dull dance, tracking speeding targets with guns that fire little heated ceramic darts. One simple puncture, and explosive decompression will do the rest. Hull gives out, and you just have to hope that whoever's in the glass giant opposite you has a soft spot for drifting EVA suits.

They don't tell you what it's like, fighting in space, but I've had time to see for myself. I've made up my mind. Space and I are not friends, and never will be.

A blip on my radar tells me that even out here, in deep space, I can forget about having any privacy. On the other hand, that's probably fair; I'm not supposed to be here. It's a Jackdaw – a Europan model, close enough to the one I'm piloting that I could say they're about the same, and most pilots would nod without a second thought.

Any mechanics in the room, on the other hand, would definitely throttle me.

We see each other's colours, and it doesn't go much further than that. No point in talking it out. No one watching us scouts out here, nothing forcing our hands, and neither of us – unless I'm projecting – want to be here or have anything against the other. So, why are we taking the first shots a second or two after we saw each other?

Good question. We've been at this many years by now, it's probably habit. That's the kind of thing that makes us realise, eventually, exactly how we're going back to normal when this is all over. It's not a lie, not really, it's just a question of how we go back. A bundle of drilled-in outside-context instincts and reflexes, set free and told to go back to normal.

As visitors. Just visiting, not part of the show. Something from Out There that came back one day, something other. Maybe that's just me – I never really talked about it with anyone, and everyone tells me I've never been much of a ray of sunshine. All this- it's not something anyone ever tells you. You're trusted to figure it out for yourself and, more often than not, decide not to worry about it too much.

Not like it's going to come up, right?

Maybe you're wondering why I think I can afford to talk so much in a firefight. One, you're overestimating the pace of two giant machines trying to poke a hole in each other. Two, it relaxes me, and jittery nerves will do a lot more to get me killed than a bit of distraction. So, I'm going to keep talking.

The Jackdaw flies closer, closer, spraying ceramic everywhere. I realise it's trying to put me on the defensive for long enough to get close. The Jackdaw, I remember hearing, comes with a hydraulic stake. No plating is going to save you from that, just so long as you can get close, but if you fired it, it wouldn't move nearly fast enough without a cannon three times the Jackdaw's size. So they're closing in.

I brace myself against nothing at all, out of habit, and fire a couple rounds, calling the Jackdaw's bluff, if that's how you want to think of it. I didn't do what I was supposed to, didn't follow the script, so I've got surprise on my side. It pulls out its stake, and then slowly, quietly drifts right past me. I look at its back with a stare I haven't used since I ran over a fox a couple weeks after I got my driver's license. I didn't mean to do that.

By the time it clicks, the Jackdaw is out of range. I shot out its thrusters, but momentum stays, out here. It just keeps going, too broken to turn, but I haven't pierced the hull. I just carried it across that short bridge from war machine to coffin. Explosive decompression won't kick in. Life support probably still works, even. It'll just drift along until... well. Maybe it'll hit some planet, burn up in the atmosphere. Maybe the atmosphere will be too thin, and it'll smash right into some moon or asteroid. Or maybe it'll drift forever, and the pilot will just sit there until thirst finishes them off.

I'd pretend it's kinder than a killing blow, but pretending is a lot of effort and I was never much of an actor, so I just watch. I'm too tired to put in that kind of work. Instead I make my exosuit snap off a mock-salute, and in the privacy of my little room inside a metal giant, I mutter something that was supposed to come out as “see you in therapy”. Pilot joke. See, it's funny because most of us aren't going to last long enough to get there, and even then, chances are, you can't afford to-

Well, you've got to be a pilot to laugh at it, but it's funny. Trust me. I don't feel too bad about the joke since- maybe this is another thing I've projected, but a lot of us, certainly me, took something I used to think of as the pilot's oath. Then I got tired of anything so overblown, and now I just think of it as not kidding myself. When you hold a grudge against whoever takes you out, you're really drawing a line between if and when. If someone shoots you down, and they just had to give you the wrong answer.

For me, it's more of a 'when'. Don't shoot the messenger, right? I see it coming and I promised to myself I won't take it personally. What's that do? Maybe whoever gets me is like that too, they'll assume the same from me, and sleep better for it that night. Until then, I get to do the same.

Then I take another look at the shrinking exosuit, and throw up in my helmet, because I'm only human. It takes twelve long seconds for my filters to clean the mess up. You'll forgive me for cutting the narration for a bit there.

I've taken too many hits, so it's time to fly back for repairs and a soft be- a bed. Just set autopilot, keep one eye on the radar, and talk. Why's that? You see...

Besides the obvious – mission objectives and so on – I'm here to make tragedies.

That sounded better in my head. Less sinister.

The thing is, only a story can be a tragedy. It's something told, seen and heard. Without it, you have spreadsheets and statistics, you have terrible things happening in the cold places between stars, you have stories cut short and people that stop being people. If a tree falls and nobody is there to hear it, or... something like that.

So I talk into the air. To keep myself company, to keep myself something kind of like sane, to make up for never being able to afford simsound or hide it well enough from the brass, and...

Ah, you know.

I make tragedies. Because at this point, it's the least I can do.