Explosive Charge

Above the moon my mechsuit is stationed on, the real battle rages on. The giant warships of my empire shoot endlessly at the warships of the insurgency that’s turned into a powerful nation in its own right. Dancing around them are the newest models of mech. They aren’t mechsuits, since they’re all automated and pilotless and controlled from a central authority within each nation’s home base. They aren’t a suit worn by anything. They’re just mechs. They launch bullets and lasers at each other with the precision of the machines that they are. Some try to fly into the ships of the enemy faction, a suicide run (if you could even call it that with no onboard pilot), as the warships attempt to divert or destroy them.

They tell me the war is almost over, but I personally don’t think so. Regardless, it’s almost over for me. At the end of this skirmish of mine, the one on the moon I’m currently waiting for my rival on, my unit will be disbanded and my mechsuit decommissioned. They probably expect me to die in service of my superiors; they certainly seem like they want me to. Both death and decommissioning are the same: the end of a pursuit of something.

Maybe death wouldn’t be so bad after all. At least I wouldn’t be able to think about what I’m going to lose.

None of that matters at this moment, though. What matters is the fight that’s about to begin. My opponent approaches from the horizon and opens her comm channel.

“Celes, I hope we can get this one done quickly,” she says, with a familiar lazy cadence, as though this is boring to her. I’ve seen her struggle, so I know it’s not, but she sure loves acting like it is. “I need some maintenance done on this beautiful body ASAP.”

I switch on my comm transmitter. “Eliza, they’re decommissioning my mechsuit. They want to get rid of this thing and discharge me.”

Eliza’s mechsuit grips its lance tighter. “So, this is it? The last chance we’ll get to fight?”

“Unless you want to do a suicide run on our capital after I retire just to kill me.”

“Fat chance~”

I smirk. “I know you’d do it. You’d miss me too much!”

“Maybe I would. You’re the closest thing I have to an equal.”

I try not to think about how that really is true. Manual mechsuits like ours, ones that are solely pilot operated, can’t perform at nearly the same level as the automated ones fighting the battle above, or even the ones that they replaced, piloted via neural link instead of keyboards and switches and dials. Our weapons of choice have been outdated for a decade, too. I really am the closest thing she had to an equal. She’s wrong about who the superior one is, though.

I tighten the grip on my own lance. My finger is around the trigger. Both hers and mine designed with ranged capability in mind. They can explosively fire off rounds at short range from the base, but those rounds are long-range if you know how to hit with them or get lucky with the targeting computer. We would know. Both of us have landed them. With over a decade of experience, you get a little more accurate.

It takes a lot of skill, as if that even matters. The mechs above us can much more destructive explosive rounds at much higher rates and precision from far greater distances than we could ever hope to achieve.

Eliza’s comm channel lights up again. “So, are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

She engages her short range thrusters, lance pointing out in front of me. She doesn’t care about stopping at all. She’s confident in her instincts, distance from me, and targeting computer; she thinks she’ll skewer me in one hit.

She won’t though. These mechsuits can be fast with their thrusters enabled, but they can’t turn tight corners. I saw this move coming before she even took off. I step to the side. Her lance misses me, but it seems like she anticipated this; she fires off one of her explosive charges, but I acted fast enough for the detonation to miss and the round to only graze my right shoulder. My onboard computers don’t report any damage. I turn around and try to stab her with my own lance, but she’s angled away from me ever so slightly that I know a charge wouldn’t do anything to her, so I don’t fire one.

“Too smart for that, huh?” she taunts me over comms.

“You think I wouldn’t remember the first time we fought?”

“Just wanted to relive it for old time’s sake.” She giggles.

I smile a little more warmly. Glad to hear she’s sentimental for me too, in her own way.

Our first deployment was around the same time, though we wouldn’t meet until much later. Mechsuit combat back then was much smaller scale. Both sides of the war (and the manufacturer that supplied the mechsuits to both sides) knew that human pilots were more effective the less they had to keep in their head, and the process of remembering every button and dial to move a giant hunk of metal was already enough mental load. The cost of production was too much for one side to try to overwhelm the other with sheer numbers, too. The mechs above, though, were easy to mass-produce, and had robust enough algorithms and powerful enough hardware for them to track and plan around hundreds of thousands of spacebourne entities at once.

She engages her retrothrusters before slowing to a halt, and simply sprints towards me. Our lances clash, in the way we’re intimately familiar with. Our hands constantly move to operate our metallic bodies at a fraction of the fluidity a neurally linked pilot can, let alone an automated one. The software on our mechsuits is a decade out of date too, as newer operating systems aren’t compatible with our hardware, and new algorithms and weaponry assume a level of automaton or neural connection that our mechsuits don’t have. Even if we held the weapons that a neurally linked pilot did, we couldn’t use them nearly as effectively as what we have now. The way we fought hasn’t changed for years. All that’s changed is how intimately we know our tools and our opponents, now just one opponent.

Our lances clash again and again, deflecting the other’s strikes and stabs with our own, dodging out of the way before an explosive charge or its round can deal any damage. In fact, the only damage being done is to our batteries, slowly discharging the more combat we engage in. Battery technology is the only technology whose advances we benefit from; if our bodies allowed it, we could fight non-stop for weeks. Our biological batteries are a bigger constraint, though; there’s only so many rations you can pack into a cockpit, and so many places to pee.

The fight becomes less of a fight and evolves into more of a dance, as it always does. As we fight each other, we turn our targeting computers on and off as the situation demands. They do help with targeting and landing our strikes, but we’ve fought for so long that the angles of attack they recommend are predictable to us, and in ways that we can subvert. The only thing that can surprise us is each other, and whether we turn them on or not. I started to do it first; I’d realised I could predict her “perfect” strikes, and knew that she was starting to as well. I knew she’d rely on that perfection, and turning it off caught her off guard. I almost defeated her for good. It was only through intervention through a neurally linked mechsuit on the insurgency’s side, back then very new and experimental, that she lived.

Looking back on it, maybe that last part was a sign of the times to come.

I start being sloppy, or maybe bold depending on your point of view, and attempt to stab her in her shoulder. It’s a move that I know my targeting computer would have recommended in this situation, a move that I know she’ll anticipate. She should know I’m trying to surprise her, and that she should dodge. And yet, I do surprise her, just for a split second, but she dodges how I intend for her to; one of my strikes lodges itself in the tip of her mechsuit’s left hip, and I fire a charge. It doesn’t do much. The rounds need the explosive charge to penetrate most of a mechsuit’s thick shell, but at point blank range it can still do something. Either way, it’s the first hit I’ve landed on her in this fight. It hits a pipe of something; a backup route for coolant fluid, maybe. It spills out weakly onto the surface of the moon before her onboard computer detects it and starts using another route a few seconds later.

She jumps backwards, which gives me enough time to add a mark to my tally on the inside of my cockpit. 27 times I’ve landed the first hit, more than she has on me. She was right about me almost being her equal, it’s just that she was wrong about who was better.

Eliza laughs over the comm channel. “That’s the Celes I know!”

I wasn’t expecting a happy reaction from her. “You’re about to know that Celes a lot more intimately,” I say, not really thinking about how that sounds.

“Oh, is that so? Well, if this is the last time we’re gonna see each other, I’d love to know you as intimately as I can~” she says with a much flirtier tone of voice than usual.

I have no idea what she looks like. I know her voice well, considering how much we taunt and brag during battle. Her voice is gorgeous, a little deep and a little smooth, an accent I never hear at home. Maybe the rest of her is gorgeous. If we were in different circumstances, maybe I would have loved to know her many other kinds of intimately. However, we’ve only ever met on a battlefield. This is best way I could ever hope to communicate with her, and the only way I could know her in the first place. So, I ready my lance once again.

Then, the tension dissolves slightly. Now that we know the victor of our “who strikes first” competition, we start to talk a little more, like we always do.

“I can’t believe you almost beat me at our little game!” Eliza sings as she almost fruitlessly tries to pierce my mechsuit’s hide with her weapon. She lands a hit on me, and it severs a more severe pipe of superconductive fluid, which spurts out like a burst artery for but a split second before my mech severs the pipe.

“What do you mean almost? I beat you fair and square! 27 to 24!!”

“Really? Actually I got 28 marks. But 27 is good too I suppose.” I can practically see her mechsuit smugly grin at me.

“Because you drew extras on there to lie about it and one-up me one last time?”

“Actually…”

Our short range comm channels for communication with enemy pilots are mostly used for talking and hearing each other talk, but with a bit of know-how you can send images over them too. She has that know-how. She knows more about the software of our mechsuits than anyone else alive. She told me that particular tidbit, but outside of that she is leaps and bounds ahead of me. Either way, she lays off just long enough for me to see an image pop up on my onboard computer. It’s her tally. 28 marks. Dated at our previous fight.

“You must have changed the date,” I say. This is our 55th battle, and we agreed that four of them were too close to count. There’s no way she could have 28.

“Oh, not at all, my dear Celes. Sending now.”

She sends me 27 other photos, each one incrementing the tally by 1. Each one had a different timestamp, was shot from a different angle with different lighting, and each one of them corresponded to one of the battles we’ve fought.

“So you’re cheating!”

“Nope! Don’t you remember what we agreed? If one was too close to call, we’d both mark it!”

“We never agreed on that! We agreed to not count them!”

“Oh, I agreed! You were just too prideful and chose not to count them. ‘Oh, I don’t need your charity, I’ll win on clear victories alone.’ That’s what you said.”

“So that means…”

“Nice try, Celes! You really are almost my equal.”

“I…” I didn’t have any reply. She fucking got me.

She laughed over the comms. “Oh Celes, what would you ever do without me?”

I lunged at her and started trying to pierce her shell again. I genuinely didn’t want to think about that question.

“You know, I suppose I should genuinely ask that, shouldn’t I? As much as I would like to risk my life to rescue you from my opposition-”

“I’m not thinking about it until I’ve crushed your throat with my bare hands.” It slipped out of me. Normally I would say something like that playfully. Now, my voice betrayed how angry I was.

She noticed this too. “Nothing good, then?”

“I’m figuring it out.”

“I see.” She spoke with a less playful tone, before going on the offensive again.

Our units started off with 10 pilots at most. My unit had at least half of those in reserve. We were the first unit of manually piloted mechsuits, or mechsuits in general. I wasn’t the best, but I was deployed more than I was in reserve, and I had a hand in successful missions more often than not.

The amount of units grew. Mine was one of the better ones. Then the technology advanced. Neural interfaces were invented, and started being tested. Pilots were poached from our unit to fly them. Some died in the process of being linked with a machine, more than anyone would have liked, but some survived, and beat their peers.

Being a soldier changes everyone, but neurally linked pilots changed more. You could see the effect that it had on their personally over time. It changed how their brain was wired. They became more accurate with weapons when they weren’t linked. They retained all the knowledge it pumped into their brains with enough exposure. They became more focused, more formal. They complained less. They got more joy and pleasure from piloting and less from anything else. One time, when I was deployed with a few neurally linked pilots, the comm channels lit up with a chorus of moans every time they destroyed an enemy combatant. It was terrifying.

We didn’t know that initially, though. At first, we just saw the deaths of our comrades from unethical experiments. The ones who refused, who rightly saw the this and refused to follow suit like me, were relegated to less and less important missions. Eventually manual pilots were only deployed for special cases.

And that’s when I met her on the battlefield. With all my colleagues poached or dead, I was by far the best manual pilot around. That led to me commanding the unit, and facing off against the commander of an enemy manual pilot deployment, Eliza. She moved in a way that no other manual pilot I fought moved, in a way that not even neurally linked pilots did. It was the most beautiful thing I ever witnessed. Eventually I caught up to her, and we’ve duelled ever since.

Time passed. More manual pilots retired, and more neurally linked ones replaced them. Then, once automated mech mass production was efficient enough, they gradually discharged every mechsuit pilot one by one. Now it was my turn.

We clashed again. I landed a strike in her foot, and a gush of superconductive fluid sprayed onto my mechsuit, like I’d severed one of her arteries as revenge for our game as a whole. It sprayed for a full 3 seconds before sealing. We have some tiny differences between units. Mine manages damage more effectively than hers.

I wished my mechsuit had a tongue so it could lick that liquid off of its face.

It didn’t make sense to me why neurally linked pilots were fed positive associations with piloting. Even without fucking with your brain, this life made you a freak. I entered this world of mechanical warfare with the promise of being a hero; now, even though I’m disillusioned with the cause I fight for, this is all I can do. So when I do good at it, it feels good, better than anything else. It means I’m worth something.

My life is dedicated to a kind of physical intimacy. The only difference is the body that gets physically intimate. The feeling of destroying an enemy combatant, piercing their shell with my lance (or, if I’m feeling particularly deranged on any given day, peeling away the layers of their mechsuit like an orange and squashing the pilot with my bare hands), was far more intimate and far more sexually gratifying than any sex I’d ever had. It felt like my purpose was being fulfilled. It felt like the only thing I could ever do. It felt electric and ecstatic, like the veins within my flesh had superconductive fluid in them and someone had given them the shock of a lifetime.

She landed her own hit, which didn’t sever anything, but the explosive charge was enough to shake me around the cockpit and bump me across a particularly sharp piece of equipment. It left a cut on my right arm, which started bleeding just a bit. Thankfully cockpits are sterilised. Her comms lit up with laughter, a desperate laughter, one sourced from those ecstatic emotions I knew all too well.

I turned on my comms. I was used to deflecting her words, as much as deflecting her blows, but I also genuinely wanted to know: “What will you do afterwards?”

I didn’t know whether she was also due to be discharged, but I hazarded a guess that she was as well. Maybe our manufacturer wasn’t supporting these units anymore when there were 3 pilots of them being flown total. Turns out I was dead on. “I don’t know. It’s gonna be hard, isn’t it. No one keeps manually piloting because they love it.”

“I love it.” A lie.

“No, you love piloting against me.”

She was right, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I stayed silent.

Then she laughed. “Don’t worry, I love fighting you too!”

She stepped backwards, and then her mechsuit sat down on the ground. “But right now I need a rest.”

I did the same, because I also needed one.

Then she did something I didn’t realise our mechsuits could do: she opened a video feed, and I saw her face for the first time.

Black hair, clipped up at the back, fighting against its curly nature. Face dark and short and narrow. Scar straight across her forehead. Her face and her voice were the same: beautiful.

“I didn’t realise our mechsuits could do this…”

“Oh, no one does but us. It’s something I’ve been experimenting with. If you open multiple comm channels you can send low resolution compressed video with the internal camera central command uses to monitor you. Well, that’s what our central command does anyway. Takes too much processing power to do it during a fight though. I’m sending you the executable for it.”

I was about to ask how I knew it wasn’t a virus, something that would detonate my mechsuit, but if it was I wouldn’t have minded. It would mean that the last blow of combat would be a secret that only we shared, a mastery of the dance that only we could perform this well, that no one would ever approach again.

Turns out it wasn’t a virus. I took of my helmet to show her what I looked like. Auburn hair in loose waves, falling past my shoulders. A toothy grin, minus one tooth. Freckles on my round, pale white face.

“Huh!” she replied. “You don’t look like what I thought you would.”

“What did you think I looked like?”

“Ugly. But no, you’re beautiful.” She said it so matter-of-factly, like it meant nothing.

“Well… you’re beautiful too.”

“I’m glad you think so! It’s nice that we got to see our true selves before the end.”

I looked over at the onboard computer at the readings of the environment. Breathable atmosphere, habitable pressure, roughly standard gravity. “Well, there’s a more true way to see each other, if you’d like.”

“Leaving your mechsuit! Abandoning your post! I didn’t think you were this rebellious against your superiors.”

“I don’t have any love for them,” I replied, “I’m grateful that they give me a chance to fight. Nothing more.”

“Same here,” she said.

“It meant I didn’t have to learn how to do anything else. They let me continue here as long as you like.”

“Well, that one’s not the same for me. You know, it’s not healthy to just coast along the path of least resistance.”

“It’s not easy for you? Then why are you here?”

“No, it’s not easy for me! I could get some shitty labour job if I wanted.”

She probably could, and I probably could too, but that wouldn’t be a challenge like the ones they both sought. It wouldn’t be living. “Not a hacking job? With all the stuff you’ve done with this thing?”

“I would have a better chance of getting a job anywhere in tech if I had spent my days hacking fucking videogame consoles.” She scoffed. “No, Celes, I don’t care how easy it may have seemed to you: making this my life was hard. Facing you and knowing I’d never get to understand you beyond battle was hard. But it was worth it to try to understand you at all.”

“Why would you want to understand me beyond that? That’s all there is to me.”

“You’re the second best manual pilot. No one understands me better than you, and no one understands you better than me! Which means that I can say that there is more to you than this, more that you could be. I wanted to understand all of you.”

I waited for a second, embarrassed. No one had said these things to me before. My heart was racing. I changed the subject. “…they’re probably listening to our comms, you know.”

“Who cares? We’re getting discharged anyway. It’s easier to let us go than punish us. I won’t get another chance to confess my undying love for you, Eliza.”

I loved fighting with her. That was the only way I’d ever communicated with her, so yes, before I would have said I loved her, with a few asterisks for nuance. Now, seeing her face, hearing her voice reassure me, those asterisks fell away, and I understood the actual depth of what I felt.

“…I love you too, Eliza.”

Her video feed cut out, and her mechsuit stood up and grabbed its lance once more. “Then prove it!”

I did the same. We engaged our thrusters and sped toward each other. One last shot. One last chance to make our fighting mean something.

The collision was rough. Our mechsuits collided at high speed. My lance pierced just beyond her mechsuit’s cockpit, but where I knew it would be close enough to scare her, but not enough to actually kill her. She was safe, but I’d make her bleed. Hers pierced my mechsuit’s thigh. Oil and coolant and superconductive fluid sprayed out in a medley, dancing together as much as their mixed densities allowed, at a velocity that could escape the moon’s atmosphere. It would travel space for as long as it could.

We detonated our charges at the same time. Our onboard computers weren’t functional enough to report anything, let alone damage. Our mechsuits were totalled. One of each of our bodies, destroyed.

Both of us hit our cockpit’s emergency release. We stood on the soil of this barren moon. Slowly, we walked towards each other. Eventually we were not even a meter apart.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I grabbed her hands and held them in mine. She rubbed her thumbs across the back of my palms.

“Ok, I will.”

I got on my tiptoes and kissed her. It felt electrifying, the same way a good fight did, when our two mechanical bodies understood one another so well they may as well have been one.

She pulled me in by the waist and returned the kiss. It felt like she had more experience with this than me, but I didn’t care. She directed my hands across her body, making sure I got to know her flesh instead of the shell she’d inhabited. For the first time in my life, instead of feeling like an adversary who pushed me further, who I couldn’t live without, she made me feel… cared for.

Then there was a sharp pain in my abdomen.

She’d pointed a handgun at me at point blank range and fired. Liquid burst from my remaining body, but unlike my destroyed one it wasn’t oil or coolant. Blood had started to pool out, and it wasn’t going to seal itself. I knew that the upcoming decomissioning meant no one would come to save me. This was it.

She handed me the gun. “Prove it again.”

She understood. She had given me one last gift, the gift of a new kind of intimacy, one that had seemed impossible before, before we fulfilled out purposes together.

I collapsed. I had firearm training, yes, but I was so overwhelmed in every sense that I had more or less forgotten how to even point the gun. Despite that, I did what I had always wanted. I pulled the trigger. The beam annihilated her brain. She didn’t suffer.

She collapsed onto me. I felt the full weight of her body, her real one, the full weight of everything. With the last of my strength I put the gun back in her hand.

“Now you prove it.”

I closed my eyes. In my dreams we were flying together, flying through the stars, no barriers between us, no mechsuits no spacesuits no clothes no division of any kind, one and the same. We embraced tightly and understood everything about each other, completely, the way we always had.