Scramble, Part 2

March 3rd, 1765.
Topeka, Kansas, Northern Union.
One year and three weeks after the Seattle landings.

It hadn't planned on enlisting when the war broke out. It was a apprentice machinist, a profession in high demand with the war economy, and it was needed in a factory more than the services needed personnel on the frontline. It had wanted to be a pilot, but everyone wanted to be a pilot; it knew it wouldn’t make the cut. That had changed when it had been forwarded something by a friend in the Air Force: an advertisement for some sort of obscure military program, called MYSTIC GREEN.

“This seems kind of laser-targeted at you, doesn't it?”, they'd said.

It really was. The ad asked for people who strongly identified as nonspecific nonhuman (check), had a particular interest in aircraft (check), and had… a nontraditional gender identity? Check, it thought. That seemed to imply that they were doing some sort of aircraft-related form-development and needed some flexible testers, but the ad provided no further info besides the generic recruiting website. And besides, didn’t they already have plenty of testers for that sort of thing?

Its curiosity had been piqued. It did some cursory searches, and found no real results beyond the initial ad posting, and some speculation about it. It resolved to find someone who might actually know something.

March 9th, 1765.
Topeka, Kansas, Northern Union.
Thirteen months after the Seattle landings.

Its phone rang. The caller ID said Air Force. It almost laughed. The entire Air Force, calling it. Maybe I can at least get them to take my number off the list.

“Mel Anders? This is Colonel Ellis Jackson, Union Air Force. We noticed your posts about MYSTIC GREEN. Do you have a minute to talk?” the voice on the other end said.

What the hell? it thought. Why is a colonel calling my cell phone? About fucking... forum posts?

“Um, maybe? Am I in trouble? How did you even get this number?”

“No, you're not in trouble. And we're the government. We have everyone's number.”

“Wait, really?”

“No, not like that.” He chuckled a bit at his own joke. “I just asked the forum admin to get us your contact info, and you had put in a phone number for account recovery.”

“Oh.” That’s a lot of effort to go to for some posts. “What's this… about, then?”

“It's alright. Asking questions about the MYSTIC GREEN program sends up some flags on our end to reach out, because we need folks for it so badly. I'm going to be very honest with you: I can't give you answers, but we would really, really like it if you applied. I’m very sorry that I can't tell you more. But we're desperate for people like you— specifically, like you —for this program. I can promise you a direct promotion to Captain and a pilot’s seat if you go through with it.”

“But I'm not qualified—”

“Believe me, yes, you are. We don’t care about experience or education. Only stuff that matters is interest and identity.”

“I'll, uh, think about it,” it said. It was panicking. It hadn't expected to be hit with a recruiting pitch like this and just wanted to get off the phone.

“I understand. Give me a call back when you want to talk more.” Click.

What the fuck was that about?

March 11th, 1765.
Topeka, Kansas, Northern Union.
Thirteen months after the Seattle landings.

“MYSTIC GREEN?” the recruiter asked. “Yeah, I've got it here… let's see. Huh. Some weird psych requirements on this one, special-access clearance too. Minimum of four years, direct commission… damn, this is a weird one. Sure it's what you want?”

“Yes.” It had talked some more with Colonel Jackson over the phone. He hadn't told it anything that it hadn’t figured out already, nor had he given any hints. It had already made up its mind anyway.

“Well, when you find out what it's all about, you better come back here and tell me. Unless you'd have to kill me for that, heh. Okay, I'll get your paperwork printed out. You want to ship out today or tomorrow?”

June 4th, 1765.
Sequoia AFB, Inyo, Northern Union.
Fifteen months after the Seattle landings.

Basic training had been easy. It assumed that it was harder back in the pre-Hodgson days, but it felt like the drill sergeants still hadn’t adapted to the fact that their pupils were now in peak physical condition from the start. Colonel Jackson had been there in person for its graduation, something that had put the drill sergeants on edge. It’d learned in the process that the Colonel was not the traditional military man he sounded like on the phone, and wasn’t even really a he at all— to its surprise, they wore an enby SIB. They’d shaken hands, and congratulated it on making it through basic.

Flight school had been harder. They'd put it on an accelerated course— six weeks instead of four months. It wasn't the only MYSTIC GREEN participant in that group either. There were three others along with it, all with very similar stories and a similar lack of knowledge about the program. There was Jones, a corn-fed flight-sim enthusiast from Bumfuck Nowhere, Midwestern America, whose gender seemed to be determined by a coin flip each morning, Fi, who had an adorable Irish accent but hated speaking, and Blake, who could stack card houses with freakish skill and always seemed to vibrate with nervous energy.

Graduation had been two days ago. They’d all passed, with good marks. Unexpectedly, they hadn't been told what airframe they'd be flying. Instead, the four of them had been shipped out to Sequoia AFB, arriving by rail in the dead of night. Jones had been full of helpful facts during the trip— Sequoia was where half the strategic units were. They had hypersonics there, BN-54 Auroras, and a testing wing for the secretive stuff too.

They were met by Colonel Jackson when they stepped off the platform. “I'm sure you're all full of questions,” they said after greeting the four brand-new lieutenants. “I promise you I'll answer them tonight, unless you'd rather get some sleep first?”

Nobody took them up on it. They'd slept on the train.

“Alright, then follow me. We have some folks coming for your bags, don't worry about those.”

They took a tiny electric buggy from the station deeper into the underground complex. Sequoia was almost entirely buried under a mountain, a precaution intended to help the base survive extended bombardment, and most of the tunnels weren’t wide enough to fly in. It hadn’t come to that yet, fortunately, but they weren’t taking chances back when they’d built it. After a short ride, they arrived at the squadron headquarters for the 198th Strategic Interception Squadron, a large door set into the rock wall of the tunnel. Fi nudged Jones, who looked at the unit number and shrugged. They hadn’t heard of it before, so it must have been fairly new.

“Okay, you've had some security briefings at flight school, so you should know the drill. Everything past this point is secured. Electronics in the box, you can have ‘em back on the way out.”

They did so. Jackson led them down the hallway into a conference room.

“Okay, sorry for all the cloak and dagger,” they said, sitting down in front of the presentation computer, “let's get into it. I apologize for the tight quarters in here. Despite all our pull, the base adjutant hasn’t gotten us big pillows in here to replace the chairs, and I can take a guess about how you feel about human bodies.” Mel shrugged. If it could handle six weeks of mostly-human flight school, it could handle a slideshow.

The colonel brought up the slideshow, with bright orange banners at the top and bottom and a title in block letters: 198TH FIGHTER SQUADRON: ULTRAVIOLET READ-ON. “This briefing is classified TOP SECRET, special access ULTRAVIOLET. I know this is the first real-deal secret stuff you've gotten your hands on, but don't worry about having to keep it completely to yourself, everyone in the squadron is cleared for it. Standard boilerplate about not sharing this stuff elsewhere applies.”

“With that out of the way, welcome to the 198th Strategic Interception Squadron. I’m your new commanding officer, Colonel Ellis Jackson. Don’t worry about unit structure, that’s not what this is about. We’ll do meet-and-greets later,” they said, advancing the slide deck.

The slide displayed an aerospace-grey aircraft shaped like an angled dart. It had a single orange stripe along both of its wingtips and rudders. Jackson gave the group a few seconds to look at it before continuing.

“Who knows what this is? Jones.”

“H-1000 Garuda, sir. ROI hypersonic fighter.”

“Point for Jones, but minus one point for the honorific. You’re out of training, lose the ‘sir’. But yes, this is indeed a Garuda. Under our designation scheme, it would be a strategic interceptor, but they call it a hypervelocity fighter. You know a lot, Jones, so what’s our equivalent, and what kind of ratio does it need to beat Garudas?”

“The FI-52 Lancer—,” they bit their tongue to avoid ending the sentence with “sir”, then continued. “Um. Two-to-one?”

“Wrong on both, but that’s not your fault. Lancers are not remotely equivalent to Garudas. In a two-on-one, the Garuda wins every time. It has better avionics, more flight range, almost double the speed and acceleration, and twice the payload. In fact, Garudas win that matchup in three- or four-on-ones reliably. We need around five-to-one ratios to reliably beat Garudas, and we need big expensive missiles to do it.”

The four of them made various noises of pain. That ratio was much, much worse than what was publicized.

“We’ve tried to keep it quiet, but since early last year, we’ve been losing the air war, and we’ve been losing it badly. Our static defenses can deny them some airspace, but we can’t keep up production on those fast enough to counter their production. However, you may be aware that we aren’t currently losing Seattle, and we obviously still have air superiority over the continent since we’re not getting bombed right now. So, what’s changed?” they asked, looking at Mel for an answer.

“Um. New planes?”

“Correct.” They advanced the slide again, displaying a sleek black dart. Jones murmured approvingly. “This is the IS-64 Blacklight. You may have heard the designation before, since I believe the line-item is public.” Jones nodded. They religiously looked over the yearly budgets to see what the new programs were. “Unlike what you may have been led to believe, the ‘I’ in ‘IS-64’ does not stand for ‘intelligence’. This plane is an interceptor.”

They clicked again, bringing up a list of performance numbers next to the picture. Jones made a choking noise, and Blake actually stopped fidgeting.

“The advantage to making your big fancy airplane after the other guy is that you get to wait and see what the he got wrong. We had been planning on putting the same engines as the Aurora in it, along with a fancy new gimballed ETC gatling. The Feds were kind enough to transfer us some tech, and we’ve put that to good use. Instead of the Aurora’s TBCCs, it uses rotating-detonation combined-cycle engines, with a top air-breathing speed of Mach 9.5, peak thrust-to-weight ratio of four-to-one fully loaded, and an air-breathing altitude ceiling of 34,000 meters. And I say ‘air-breathing,’ because it’s capable of exoatmospheric flight with a lox tank. If you want low-altitude performance, it's got that too. Mach 5 at sea level, supermaneuverable below Mach 3, peak turn acceleration of 18G. Twice the weapons payload as the Garuda, and a brand-new guided railgun instead of an ETC. And most importantly, it’s a lot prettier.” Mel was inclined to agree, though it wasn’t like the Garuda was ugly.

“Now, this is a good plane, maybe one of the best ever built. But therein lies the problem: we have to actually build the things. Odie will make three Garudas in the time it’ll take us to make a single Blacklight. And Odie already made a hundred of theirs by the time we even thought about starting up our production line. Blacklights come out ahead in a one-to-one ratio, but it’s not enough. Without further changes, we still lose. So. Changes were made.” They clicked again. The 18G peak turn acceleration was crossed out and replaced with 60G.

“Our limiter on Blacklight production is the engines. These are the most advanced engines ever made, even better than the ones on the Feds’ S-4, and we’re making them as fast as we can already. The rest of it isn’t cheap or easy, but building for extreme Gs only slightly hurts the production rate, because we weren’t limited on those components. So now we build one Blacklight for every four Garudas, and now Blacklights can juke their missiles like they’re moving in slow motion. Our ratio goes from a very optimistic two-to-one to a cold four-to-one.”

Fi interrupted, “I’m sorry, but how is that even survivable? We got the newest HP-F’s in school, and they only take 20G for two seconds before they stroke out. That’s—”

“That’s three times higher, yes. You got the newest HP-F. You didn’t get this.” They clicked another time. The slide changed to a picture of what looked like a flattish lump of flesh cocooned in a complex nest of electronics and hoses.

“This is the HP-FS, or High Performance, Flight Sensory. It can handle 20G indefinitely, and up to the airframe’s limit of 60G for five seconds. It can only take this in one direction, but that’s fine, we put it in a chamber that rotates it towards the acceleration vector, and take away its inner ear so that it can’t tell it’s rotating. Along with that, it lacks a heart, lungs, or digestive tract, and has almost no autonomic nervous system to speak of. Without machines to oxygenate and circulate its blood, it will die in under three minutes.”

They made various faces of displeasure. How the fuck is anyone supposed to wear this? Jackson let them stew in it for a few seconds before continuing. Were they enjoying this?

“And in case you’re wondering, that isn’t some unfortunate tester. That picture is about—” they looked at their watch, “—five hours old.” They paused. “Okay, mild detour. Any of you ever try homebrewing a body?”

Mel raised its hand a bit. It had made a custom dragon hybrid to replace its original, and had plans for more before the war kicked off and the government started nationalizing compute power for the war effort.

“So, you’re aware of the trick where you can do any genetic modifications in a single step?”

It nodded. That was the first thing you learned about self-modding. The Hodgson rituals didn’t charge by the base pair, they charged by the modification. If you knew what genes you wanted to change and how, you could do a lot of things all at once. Descriptive changes, where you specified the end instead of the means, were far more complex.

“The G tolerance is just one big gene-mod, and we’ve known how to do that for five years. The hard part of G tolerance is all the stuff inside your body that can move around or crush under pressure. Removing most of those makes it a lot easier, so the engineers did, and then flattened it out so that the pressure can be distributed better. Obviously, this creates a lot of issues, which we didn’t solve until recently.”

They advanced to the next slide, showing a diagram of the blob’s nervous system. It branched from the brain out towards the skin, with nerve endings in an almost perfect grid across its surface. “Now, they spent a lot of time on the nervous system. This is about as sensitive as your fingertips across its entire skin, and there’s some tricks we do so that it can’t actually feel the G-forces. All the motor neurons are still there. It doesn’t have much in the way of muscles, but it’s still got the control system for them, and we’ve relocated all the endpoints to the surface as well.”

They turned away from the projector screen to face the four of them. “So, now that your disgust reaction is settling down a bit, believe me, I had the same one. But here’s the trick: we’ve completely hijacked its proprioception, which is the sense that your body uses to tell where its own parts are. This thinks that its parts are in the shape of a Blacklight.”

The point suddenly came together in Mel’s mind, and its heart leapt into its throat. Oh, shit.

“We use a thousand or so electrode pads to read the motor neurons, and the avionics turn that into action. All those extra sensory neurons are for going in the other direction. There’s five thousand or so different sensors all over the airframe, and there’s another set of pads that use touch and electrical current to trick it into feeling all the sensor input. It’s not blind, since vision’s too hard to replicate, so it’s got some fancy wide-FOV hexachromatic eyes, and we use surrounding displays and some more brain trickery to turn that into the ability to view a half-dozen things at the same time.”

They flicked to the next slide, showing a diagram of the plane and the cocoon of electronics that held the fleshy high-performance form. “Now, in practice things aren’t that simple. It’s more stimulation than your mind is used to, everything’s in a totally different shape, and also you’re a genderless paralyzed blob getting every single sense crammed full of information. Most people just panic or dissociate entirely. So who wants to give it a shot?”

Mel raised its hand. I know what you’re doing.

“One of you figured it out early! For the rest of you, the secret is that it’s just most people who can’t handle it. There's a reason this program wants folks with nonhuman identities, particularly ones who’ll be fine with something totally foreign. The sensory interface in here is very, very good. So good, in fact, that certain people can visualize themselves as something else entirely.”

Colonel Jackson grinned.

“The big reveal is that I’m not really Colonel Ellis Jackson these days.” They changed the slide, showing four Blacklights labeled IVORY, AZURE, ONYX, and STARLIGHT. “That name is for paying my bills and collecting my paycheck. I’m what we call an ‘airframe-pilot complex’, and if you want to use the right name, that’s me in the top left— IVORY. If you have the right sort of self-image, like I do, and like I think you all do, you don't shift into a different body in the cockpit. You become the entire aircraft.”

“And you don't really turn back when you get out of it, either. It's not a feeling we really have the language to describe. It's technically a sensory illusion, but it’s a fully complete one.” They paused, emotional. “It’s incredible. And it’s going to win us the air war too. The three others and I? We’ve been operating for four months. Would you like to take a guess at our record?”

“All aces?” ventured Blake.

“We’re all aces twice over, if you only count Garuda kills. All of us got ace-in-a-day on our first sorties, except AZURE, and that’s only because it was a week or two behind the other three of us. Odie had learned to run for the hills when a Blacklight came up by then.”

Jones exhaled, “…Are four people single-handedly carrying the air war on the entire front?”

“Well, we don't have hands. But yes. That said, you have to be careful with your ego, because Odie’s not stupid. We might be able to juke their missiles now, but we know they’re working on higher-performance ones. We’ve got total dominance now, but it won’t last more than a month or two, and we aren’t winning the war this year. It will get dangerous, but that’s why we’re expanding. We’ve only been doing solo sorties. Imagine putting up a whole flight whenever we want.”

The room was silent for a few seconds. “What’s the catch?” Fi asked.

“The catch is that this is probably really, really bad for you on a psychological level. Not because it’s distressing or makes you crazy or anything like that— the opposite, really. It’s literally life-changing. Beyond the ego trip, it will demolish your self-image and any human identity you have; you will not see yourself the same way again. It's bad enough that we’ll require you to take up some form of social hobby. Board games, dancing, HAM radio, something where you’ll have friendly social contact with average people. Same deal with barracks. Officers normally get their own place, we don’t. We get a communal living space with most of the unit, ground crews and admin and everything. We can't have you dissociate whenever you're not flying, you’ll be far too valuable to lose to psych issues.”

“So, what, I won’t want to be human more than I already don’t want to?” Mel asked.

“It’s why we picked you,” Jackson said, “but there's one more catch. The war will end some day, and win or lose, you won’t be running two combat sorties a day anymore. We’ll get a few years of this, then we’ll be put out to pasture. The Air Force won’t force us out, I’ve made sure of that, but they won’t give us infinite flight hours either. The nature of it means that if we do our jobs well, we won’t get to do them for long. That's something you need to make your peace with.”

The four of them glanced at each other. It was an easy decision.

June 11th, 1765.
Sequoia AFB, Inyo, Northern Union.
Fifteen months after the Seattle landings.

The installation process for the HP-FS had been awful, and that was an understatement. The life support required to keep it alive had to be installed manually; it couldn’t be created with the ritual that made the form in the first place. And because it was expected to endure extreme accelerations, the various hoses had to be anchored in a way that they wouldn't tear its flesh. Fortunately, it had gaps in its nerve coverage just for that purpose, but the mild pain hadn’t been the problem. The problem had been the everything else— the doctors had worked fast, but it couldn’t breathe or move for the minutes it had taken, and everything felt misplaced, like its limbs had been removed entirely. It had a panic attack, then another one on top of that when its nonexistent heart didn’t race.

When the doctors finally withdrew their tools, it shifted back to its preferred form, breaking the table in the process.

“I think I just had the longest panic attack of my life,” it thrummed, shaking. “Is it supposed to feel so.. disconnected?”

“Outside of the frame? Yes. You’re missing most of your body like that. That's the worst of it, at least,” IVORY replied. They were wearing their own preferred form, a Shatterscale-L2, a lithe and athletic variant of the normally tank-like dragon form. They had made sure to be there for the procedure for all of them, knowing how bad it would be. “And don’t feel bad. ONYX was the only one so far who didn’t break the table afterwards.”

“I guess it was worse for you.”

“Yes. Gonzo wasn’t quite as fast back then.”

“…his name’s Gonzo?”

“Gonzalez, but he’s been Doc Gonzo the whole time I’ve known him. He used to be an Army trauma surgeon before the test program poached him. He’ll come give you all visits before our first flights, just to make sure everything’s seated properly.”

“The Procedure,” as they had taken to calling it, had followed a week of intense simulator and familiarization time with the Blacklight. Normally pilots would take months to clear on an aircraft, but things were apparently different for this. IVORY’s ground crew had hooked up the sim to their airframe, and they had effortlessly trounced Mel’s class in a four-on-one to set the tone. Things hadn't been quite as one-sided after they started picking up on the tricks, but Mel was desperate to get in the actual cockpit.

“You should probably start thinking about a name,” IVORY vibrated.

“I thought you didn't get to pick your callsign?”

“Pilots get callsigns. We’re not pilots. We get names.”

“Huh. How'd you pick IVORY?”

“I thought it sounded pretty over the radio.”

“That's it?”

“Pretty much. Keep it reasonable and not too pretentious.”

“Huh. Any of the other three pick a name yet?”

“No. But your first flight is tomorrow, so it'd be good to have one. Besides, we’re getting six more next week, and I want to show you lot off.”

June 12th, 1765.
Sequoia AFB, Inyo, Northern Union.
Fifteen months after the Seattle landings.

It had spent most of the morning meeting its ground crew, and came away feeling deeply under-qualified. Almost all of them had years, if not decades of experience. Its ordnance NCO had even worked on designing the weapons it would be carrying. It wasn't even that good of a pilot, as far as it knew. It did well enough in flight school, but it didn't have much time behind the stick.

But now it was time. IVORY was here to guide it once again.

“Okay. You're going to climb in, lean back, and shift. The sensory harness will catch you, your ground crew will get your hoses and visuals hooked up, and then they'll seal you in. That will take a few seconds; they practice to make it fast. After that, it's all you.”

It exhaled, trying not to shake with nervousness. “Yeah.”

“Okay. Remember, you're going to panic. That's expected. Did you pick a name?”

It nodded, “Yeah, I’m going with—”

IVORY stopped it. “Don’t tell me with this voice. Tell me when you’re you.”

Mel took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, then leaned back into the harness and shifted, the world plunging into a swirl of colors and sensation. There was a series of clicks and hisses. It felt movement, then pressure as the hundreds of feedback pads enclosed it. It panicked. There was suddenly too much sensation, it couldn't breathe, its skin was burning, it started scrabbling for the eject lever but it was paralyzed—

Someone tapped it on the shoulder. A familiar voice spoke, “Mel. Close your eyes.”

Mel closed its eyes. No parts of its anatomy moved; it didn’t even have eyelids. The Blacklight’s computer intercepted the nerve signals, immediately ceasing all sensory input.

“Now open them, slowly.”

MALACHITE opened its eyes, slowly. Sensation returned, gently this time. Its vision cleared. It felt… strange? There was a hand on its shoulder— no, right wingtip. Huh.

“There you are. It’s nice to meet you.” IVORY gently patted it. I feel insane, it thought. How does this even work? It wiggled a flap.

It suddenly remembered that it should say something. “Hello?”

“Hello! Now you can tell me.”

Tell you wh— oh, right! “It’s MALACHITE.” Then, with more confidence: “My name’s MALACHITE.”

IVORY grinned broadly. “How do you feel?”

“I feel… strange. But good.” Its voice was synthesized from the signals being sent to its vocal nerves, but the translation was imperfect, giving it the strange experience of saying one thing and hearing something slightly different come out. “Oh, that’s… so odd.”

“It’ll get a bit more fluid with time, and there’s some tweaks you can make to the synthesizer. You won’t use it as much as you expect in-form, text and telemetry is just easier to work with than audio. Can you try talking to me without speaking?”

It thought for a second, then spoke again. This time, there was no audio projected.

“Hello, testing the text. Here’s some [ELEC|ENG]— Huh. Does it normally do this thing with the brackets? Wait, did it do an em dash for me? Can I backspace?” It watched its “voice” appear as text on a large-print radio console in the hangar, which beeped after each sentence.

IVORY glanced at the screen. “Good! And, yes, that’s the encoder, it turns stuff about your body into the actual telemetry, so the rest of us can read it as the full data instead of words. The dash, yes, that’s automatic when you pause like that, apparently the guy who wrote the software liked em dashes, but you can turn it off if you want. And backspace, no. Think of it like you’re talking, not typing. It’s not a technical limitation, but we found it distracting to be able to do that, since it kind of brings you out of thinking about it like it’s speech.”

They took a few steps back as MALACHITE mulled that over. “Okay. I'm going to begin some sensory tests to help you calibrate. I’m going to hold up my fingers as I move. Say them out loud when you see them.”

IVORY walked around the hangar. MALACHITE tracked them the entire way, reading out the fingers they were holding up, even the ones behind their back that it could see in the radar reflection. Not sure how my brain hasn’t turned to mush yet, honestly. It didn't have to look to see them— it somehow had a constant panoramic view of its surroundings, in what felt like a half-dozen different layers, all mushed together. Multiple images were both overlaid and separate, all visible simultaneously. Infrared, visual, radio… datalink? What’s the resolution on this? Wait, is it a HUD if I don’t—

“Okay, now for touch. This will feel quite intimate, but it’s needed to make sure it’s working correctly.” They began to trace a finger around MALACHITE’s exterior. The sensation was shockingly detailed. It felt… well, it felt like someone was touching it. Caressing it, even. The ordnance bay felt vaguely erotic when IVORY traced their finger around the seam. Is opening this the same as…? It cautiously opened its ordnance bay.

“No, I know, I tried that too,” IVORY laughed. “Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t think the engineers wanted to try figuring that one out. Theoretically we don’t have the nerve endings for it at all, but… well. We’re good on touch, anyway. Tell your crew if you feel any dead zones, the sensors break occasionally. Go ahead and flex your control surfaces for me, please.”

MALACHITE did so. The sensation was strange, but it did feel like it was moving fins, not fingers.

“Good. I'm going to go get the other three set up, then we’ll get airborne. Your ground crew will run you through the rest of the exercises. Please be patient with them, we need to make extra sure that everything is meshing correctly. Obviously, you have a lot of moving parts now.”

June 12th, 1765.
Runway 1, Sequoia AFB, Inyo, Northern Union.
Fifteen months after the Seattle landings.

Partway through its integration testing, MALACHITE met its allies again, this time over the radio link: SUNSET, HELIX, and OBSIDIAN, who had previously been Fi, Blake, and Jones, respectively. MALACHITE wasn’t sure if past-tense was the right way to describe itself, but IVORY really hadn’t been kidding about it doing a number on your identity. And IVORY had joined in shortly afterwards as well— with their real self this time. All four of them had been itching to get off the ground, and the remainder of the integration testing felt like it took hours. IVORY had patiently explained that it was to make sure they didn’t go insane after getting airborne, but that hadn’t helped.

Taxiing didn’t make it any better. While the 198th’s hangars were intended to feed into an underground takeoff strip, that was a less than ideal option for first-timers. Instead, they were taking off from the main exterior strip, in plain view of everyone.

“Isn’t this [LOC] kind of exposed? Aren’t we like, classified?” SUNSET had asked.

“Yes, but we’re not worried about the locals taking pictures. Odie already knows what we look like, and it’s not like we have any visible design tricks that they don’t know about. Besides, seeing four new Blacklights? That’s good for morale.”

Takeoff had been euphoric. Igniting its massive engines felt like getting a lightning bolt directly in the brain, and MALACHITE could feel the thrust build and build as its intakes sucked in air. Its wheels kissed the ground goodbye, and it soared into the air.

June 12th, 1765.
Midwestern Northern Union.
Fifteen months after the Seattle landings.

MALACHITE decided it didn’t much care about the past-tense or present-tense of its old form after the first few joyful minutes of spiraling through the upper atmosphere. The performance was insane— it went from zero to Mach 8.5 in two minutes. It could feel the shockfronts rippling across its skin as it screamed through the air, and the gentle touch of friendly search radars and transponder pings. The five of them played for two solid hours, dancing and weaving from the Rockies to the Appalachians, then back again. It didn’t have a heart, but if it had, it would have burst with joy.

After that, though, it was down to business. Learning to use its radar and ECM systems had been an adventure. The Blacklight’s AN/APQ-62H radar could pump out a full megawatt of energy, which HELIX had inadvertently directed at an “interesting-looking” friendly C-2000 AWACS. The controllers in the big flying wing had given them an earful in exchange. HELIX did their best to explain that they weren’t quite used to their radar controls yet, and they really hadn’t meant to paint it with that target designation beam. Probably a good thing they didn’t give us missiles for the first flight, MALACHITE thought. Fortunately, the excitement of seeing five Blacklights had assuaged their desire to complain to the group commander about their poor radar discipline.

It conversed some more with IVORY as they flew. “Talked” would have been an incorrect way to describe the way they communicated, with text interspersed with digital statuses and telemetry, but it got the point across. It felt shockingly natural, even after only a scant few hours in the air.

“I’m not sure I get the secrecy at this point. Doesn’t ODI know what our [VEL|ALT|ACC] numbers are anyway? It just seems to make things harder with the people who aren’t read in,” it said.

“Oh, it’s not about ODI at all these days. If anything, we’d like to declass the whole [BIOSTATUS] thing because it’d scare the piss out of them. Sure, a lot of the Feds wouldn’t like it, and there would be some fuss from the traditionalists, but they’d shut up when they saw our combat record. The actual reason we’re still this tightly classified is that we don’t want every wannabe war hero trying to get into a Blacklight. We don’t want egos looking for a combat stick, that already happened once, and it almost killed the program. So we select as hard as possible for people who will work with it and enjoy it. Easier to get complexes than airframes.”

“What happened?” MALACHITE asked, “We lost someone?”

“[TERRAIN_WARNING]. We lost an airframe, not a complex. First flight with the new control system, had some hotshot test pilot in there. He managed to pass the interface tests and get it off the ground by brute force, then dissociated real hard mid-flight and ended up ejecting. Destroyed one of two prototypes, almost ended the whole program. They couldn’t get other test pilots to take the HP-FS.”

“What happened? Obviously it worked, or I wouldn’t, well, [ID:MALACHITE].” It rolled, flying upside-down for a few seconds.

“I volunteered. I wasn’t even an officer. I got them to plug me in and sat there on the ground for three hours chatting away, just to prove it wasn’t the system’s fault. By the time they were ready for another flight test, I was the only one willing to go up in it. Got promoted real fast after that.” IVORY bobbed up and down absentmindedly.

“Wait, how long have you been in?”

“I enlisted right after Saigon as a tech. I was [ID:IVORY] in February, and a colonel by March.”

“Wow.”

“Someone figured out that it really wasn’t a good idea to let butterbars order around a living war machine with a nine-figure price tag. Even if we weren’t going to listen. So now we get to break the rules for promotions. Oh, yeah, you four are captains now. Congrats. We’ll bump you up to major after your first combat sortie.”

“Doesn’t that… cause friction?”

“It used to. When we first started flying combat missions, I was just an acting LT with a provisional billet, and ONYX was just a captain. Didn’t matter that we could mulch an entire squadron of [TID:BH241x24] solo if the slow birds led them into us, the group commander up by Seattle wanted his guys getting the kills, and he wasn't going to get told what to do by an acting LT with a decade less experience than him. It’s probably not great for the ego… but you can feel the air, the radars, everything. You know when you’re right. They just look at pips on a screen. He was gonna get some of his guys killed, or at least lose some planes, and this was in February when things were a lot more volatile. We said no, took on the whole squadron ourselves, and went ace twice each. He tried to have us court-martialed.”

“What the fuck?”

“Oh, that never went anywhere. But it's why I jumped up six O-ranks in six months. Generals didn't want that to happen again, so we get enough rank to tell whoever we want to fuck off, unless they actually know what they're doing.”

MALACHITE was silent, curving through a 25G turn in a wide circle.

“It's not that bad, really. Commanders these days love us. Most of them don't know the details. To them we're just fast-movers who don’t chitchat and kill whatever’s bothering them. The ones who know tend to think that we're heroes for putting up with forms like this.”

IVORY gave a wry laugh, or at least the digital equivalent of one. “I don't think most people really get it. It’s not putting it on that's hard. It's taking it off.”