35 FNU, major currents flowing east-southwest; ambient temperature five degrees Celsius; no backup.

  “Helm,” you say, “give me a trajectory.”

  Straight ahead. No chicanes. This is a warpath to match the wild drum of your heart, the flush in your face: tonight I can tell you will brook no argument, that you aim to show no mercy. Tonight you have had enough.

  Christchurch is a sim you’ve run probably seventy times now. By procedure you should still be cautious; in school a run like this—though it’s no Arrowhead—would have called for at least a team of three, planning ahead… But you are a student no longer, whether you like it or not, and seventy runs in and with Shanghai on the way you cannot afford to be cautious. This is what you tell yourself.

  You say, “Going in,” and spool up your engines.

  You don’t have to say you’re going in, of course. I know. I knew since long before your muscles twitched to command your reactor to full power—the tightening of your diaphragm that otherwise accompanies a breath held—since before you opened your mouth to tell me, since before you had the idea to open your mouth to tell me. I knew it in the patterns of your thoughts, your helplessness, for it is my job to know—as a predictive neural net—and you know I know, too. But it is comforting, as always, to pretend you must tell me, must say it aloud, for words have power and this helps you imagine I am a mere mortal like you, and, therefore, that you are not alone, or worse.

  My systems answer.

  You knife through the dark water like the vendetta you are. Behind you is open ocean; before you, the monster. Christchurch’s carcinate came hunting all the way up from down south to here, some six thousand miles as the crow flies—as the beast swims—looking for food, probably because Australia’s western coast is already so barren–discounting Perth, under the Egg—and because the Steel Toa would not let anything from the depths of the sea get within ten miles of their coast without a bitter fight. Moving on, even hungry, even given how relatively few resources New Zealand would have to fall back on, would be the better option.

  So it is that the carcinate is hungry, and hungry means weak and foolish, but also desperate; and so are you. You have tried again and again to face this thing—-in a Titan like yours, no blade nor claw with which to rip and tear—and again and again you have failed, and that makes you furious, nearly as furious as all your team’s judgment, as Gutes’ needling and Lau’s open hatred, as Carol’s indifference and absence, just when you were starting to trust her.

  Before you’d thrown yourself at the carcinate a million different ways. This is how they taught you in school: generic strategies intended not to box you into either sword or shield positions, since these would be selected for you once you approached graduation, pending an invitation to a real team; flexible and versatile at the cost of optimization. Certainly nothing a lone shield unit could use to best a class C in battle. (Recall that Titans were built back when most Megs were class A, perhaps B; we were much bigger then than our adversaries.)

  Now you slow your breathing. You watch the target approach through sonar, infrasound rippling over your hull like a whisper.

  The carcinate doesn’t know you’re here, not yet. At five hundred meters out and with your engines this low, with your secondary systems running destructive interference patterns, you are a void in the subsurface soundscape.

  You have learned patience over these dozens of cycles trying and failing to kill it. Tooji said that the way to balance lay in emptying the mind and silencing oneself both inwardly and outwardly; Leong advises that too much waiting results in inaction and therefore loss.

  Four hundred meters and closing.

  You grit your teeth. Your vents hum; your engine shivers with barely bridled power. Somewhere in the back of your head is the thought that this would have long since been over if you were not alone, but then what would you be proving?

  What you will prove is this, that you have learned from your mistakes: So the carcinate is armored on every side but its belly; so you cannot beat it with brute force alone. There is a dance to this, there must be, a set of moves as in chess that will take it apart like a lock; you are clumsy and slow, but perhaps you have failed enough times now to have gleaned something. The shadow of a plan. Play dumb, turtle up, perhaps, and when the time is right, dive in.

  The thing about nuance and strategy is you are not a sword; you are a shield, all bulk and defense; you are an unpracticed new thing, besides; these insistences and more are also clamoring within you—but there is a teaching both in your own childhood, from long golden afternoons spent at the university, and in the books you have been studying lately: that imperfections must not be dwelled upon, lest they hold you back in your shame. More: You can use these weaknesses to your advantage. So, bunker down, be the shield, then ambush. And right now you are bunkering, by the gods.

  Seventy cycles and none of them matter, none of them ever matter, except the one at hand. Some part of you is teetering on the top of the wall, looking down into the water, stretching for a glimpse of the great below. Three hundred meters; two hundred fifty. You are cusping the edge of the carcinate’s sonar cone. Now or never.

  You draw in a breath. Then you strike.

  Left arm forward, before you like a barrier; right arm priming at your side. The noise of your movements travels at 1500 meters a second toward the carcinate, who will hear it momentarily. Hydraulic fluid courses through your core and charges your control surfaces so that they flare wide into the currents, grant you extra speed. Your aim is true.

  I know this one instantly. You lead with your rage, your desire for the prey—you think you have honed it into indifference because it is cold, but there is nothing measured about the way your vent sheaths erupt out of the lines of your arms and calves to gout exhaust into the sea. You leap forward like a stallion bitten on the rump, and the carcinate turns—roars in infrasound—and rears back to meet you, shell-first.

  One hundred fifty meters and it is a done deal, you will fail like so many other times, there is nothing for it but to abort, to slide under, barriers to full to act as drogues, to slow you down clumsily and take the brunt of whatever impact you must—only you are not slowing, your gauntlets lie dormant, your arm is still raised, your reactor still blazes full power ahead.

  And now I see that this is still your same old gambit, but not the one I thought it was. A new old gambit. You haven’t stopped. You don’t plan to.

  35 up to 45 up to 55 FNU and climbing: the water erupts in turbulent chaos, blooms around you on sonar in hot mauve and screaming turquoise. The carcinate, head-down, will bury itself in your midriff, where all the transmission and connecting plate between your upper and lower chassis lies, armored but only so much—and you, your eyes are shut, you drift all but knees to face, and in your mind resounds that same rage now alloyed into animal fear, the panic that let me in before, when you hurled yourself bodily at the mines. You have let go of the proverbial wheel, and we are still accelerating.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The carcinate roars. I dive in to meet it—

  —the screen goes black.

  Green words appear atop it: SESSION FAILED. UNIT VITALS BELOW MINIMUM THRESHOLDS.

  -

  You exit sim and release the magnets, drop to the ground, yank your cuffs off like they’re on fire, and then you grip the chin of your faceplate and make as if to take that off, too—but the HUD is part of the faceplate, and with it me, since you still have not bothered to learn how to listen to me by yourself. So you let it go. The cable of your helmet trails behind you like a noose.

  “Helm,” you say, “what the fuck?”

  I say, I BEHAVED ACCORDING TO MY PRECEPTS. WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?

  “Your precepts don’t fucking dictate getting us killed,” you say.

  A GOOD THING YOU WERE IN NO MORTAL DANGER, THEN, I say, AND THEREFORE, AS I SAID, I DID NOT VIOLATE ANY PRECEPTS.

  “Okay,” you say, “no, fuck that, fuck you. This is bullshit. This isn’t what I was trying to do and you know it.”

  YOU WERE TRYING TO LET ME TAKE OVER, I say. MASTER CONTROL HANDOFF. NO?

  “So what,” you say, “you weren’t able to take over? Did I do it wrong?”

  NO, I say. I DID TAKE OVER. AND I CHOSE TO DO NOTHING.

  You say, “Why?”

  I say, YOU WANT TO LET ME IN. THAT IS GOOD. NOW LEARN HOW TO DO IT WITHOUT PUTTING US BOTH IN DANGER.

  “You put us in danger!” You throw your hands up. “We died, Helm!”

  AND YET YOU ARE WELL ENOUGH TO SHOUT AND GESTICULATE, I observe, SO PERHAPS IT WORKED OUT AFTER ALL.

  “Bullshit.” You make as though to throw off the helmet again. “I want another helm,” you say.

  SORRY, I tell you, ALL OUT OF SPARE HELMS TODAY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BORROW CHANG’S?

  “I’d like you to shut the fuck up and do what I want you to do,” you say.

  YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, I say. YOU’RE BANKING ON SHATTERING YOUR OWN PSYCHE IN THE MOMENT TO MAKE ME TAKE THE WHEEL INSTEAD. DOES THAT SCREAM CONFIDENT AND SELF-ASSURED TO YOU?

  Your jaw works. You say, “How the fuck else am I going to do it?”

  AH, I say, NOW YOU ARE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.

  To this, at last, you have no good comeback. My words ring true, after all, in a way you cannot deny, struggle though you do.

  You drop heavily to the floor. The cable follows you.

  THINK ABOUT HOW ELSE YOU MIGHT DO IT, I say. SCOUR YOUR MIND. THERE ARE ANSWERS YET.

  You say, “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

  I’VE ALREADY TOLD YOU, I say. IT IS NOT ABOUT WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO; IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. THIS IS UP TO YOU. YOU ARE THE PILOT, AS YOU HAVE REMINDED ME.

  “I thought you said letting go was my problem,” you say. “That I couldn’t do it. So I did. To get the hard part over with.”

  LETTING GO IS NOT THE HARD PART, I say. THE HARD PART IS COMING BACK. And, IF YOU KEEP THROWING YOURSELF INTO DANGER LIKE THIS, FORCING ME TO TAKE OVER WHOLESALE, THERE MAY NOT BE ANYTHING LEFT OF YOU TO COME BACK WITH.

  For a long moment you consider this. I let you.

  “Okay,” you say. “Why did you do nothing?”

  There. Another right question.

  Well, the truth is this. I know you think the way forward is to throw yourself in whole and entire; I know you think that is courage. To give in is a coward’s way out. You must face the thing you fear and choose it, keep choosing it every step of the way - only then can you truly be brave. What if you go too far? What if I can’t bring you back? What then? Besides, I know the kind of strain this puts on your body, your mind. Enough of it and it will wear you out, just as sure as if you never resurface to begin with.

  But that is too much to tell you right now, so I say: WHAT IF I FAIL MY PRECEPTS IN A REAL FIGHT? WHAT WILL YOU DO THEN?

  You consider this, too. “Well,” you say at last, “you’d better not.” And then, “You want me to be in control enough that I can step back in if you’re out.”

  YES, I say. LIKE I SAID: YOU HAVE TO ALSO COME BACK.

  You say, “Why the fuck didn’t you just tell me that to start with?”

  THIS MADE THE POINT BETTER, I say, DON’T YOU THINK?

  You grit your teeth, then ungrit them. You say, “If it’s up to me, then why am I even asking you?”

  BECAUSE I CAN GUIDE YOU, I say. AS CAN CHANG, YES, AND BARRACUDA; AND THE REST OF YOUR TEAM, YOUR COMMANDERS, YOUR BOOKS, YOUR TRAINING. YOU KNOW THIS. YOU HAVE KNOWN THIS. BUT THE ENGINE MUST STILL BE YOU. YOU WIELD ME, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND, PILOT, REMEMBER THIS.

  You say, “What if I just keep choosing this? What can you possibly do to stop me?”

  NOTHING. BUT YOU WILL FAIL, I say, AS SURELY AS IF YOU SET FIRE TO YOUR TITAN AND DOUSED IT IN GASOLINE. I am nothing if not good at predictions, and honesty, besides that.

  You are silent. Then: “Is that what happened to Aileen Shi?”

  YOU ARE NOT AILEEN SHI, I say. WHAT FAILURES CAME BEFORE HAVE NO IMPACT ON YOU.

  “Answer me,” you say.

  IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING. I consider this for the briefest of nanoseconds. YES.

  “Okay,” you say. “Okay.” And: “Tooji says emptiness is the way.”

  YES, I say. AND?

  “Helm,” you say, “when I let you in like that—that is me at my fucking emptiest.”

  NO, I say, IT IS NOT. YOU ARE FULL OF FEELINGS. YOU HAVE MISTAKEN DEAFENING YOURSELF FOR TRUE SILENCE.

  “So what,” you say, “I’m supposed to learn an alternative in three months?”

  YES, I say. YOU CAN. YOU WILL.

  You say, “I think I’d have a better shot of learning to pilot from the ground up in that amount of time.”

  YOU’D BE SURPRISED.

  “I don’t understand,” you say. “I thought you wanted me to let go.”

  YES, BUT NOT LIKE THIS; IT IS NO WAY TO PILOT. THE WAY OF GODS, I say, IS NOT THIS.

  For a long moment you go silent. Then you say, very quietly, “It’s the best method I have.”

  I say, WE WILL HAVE TO FIND BETTER, THEN.

  You say, “How?”

  YOU MUST FIND YOUR OWN WAY. I amend this: IF YOU WILL IT, FIND OUR WAY—TOGETHER.

  “I don’t know how to start,” you say.

  YOU DO. YOU ALREADY HAVE. YOU KNOW YOURSELF, I remind you. THAT IS HALF THE BATTLE. THE REST—WELL, THERE ARE WAYS. SOME THAT I KNOW.

  You say, “Show me how.”