Tulpa War: First 5 Chapters

Chapter 1

	“In this world, the relationship between the virtuous is more important than a relationship resulting from birth.” 
	-Drona Parva 

Joey was going to work. He ran fast enough for the damp polluted wind to billow out his uniform jacket while he pushed his neurosuit-clad hand and arm through one of its sleeves. He did not yet know why there were a pair of alloy-ringed holes that went through its lining and out its back, but at the moment, all they did was make eerie whistling sounds which put him on edge.
His Intuitive-Neural Interface responded to his quickening breaths and rising heart rate by sharpening his senses to battle-readiness.
He scanned over each Olympian Trade Authority wage-warrior that saluted him while he ran past. Their goggles and masks made them all look the same, but he didn't need or want to see their faces anyway. The heads-up display in his optic implants confirmed that all of the corporate cannon fodder present were registered and fully compliant with Rama's local synergy network. The network's predictive algorithms were designed to detect traitors, sometimes before the would-be traitors were aware of their own wavering loyalty.
His audio discriminators checked for the tell-tale hum of the enemy's low-tech spy drones, but for the moment none were found. The enemy used stolen technology, much of it appropriated from his own employer.
His olfactory implants sifted through the persistent chemical stench for signs of unaccounted-for life forms, such as eco-terrorists or other vermin. The toxic byproducts of the Norilsk Industrial Zone flowed outward along the jelly-thick Yenisey River toward the lifeless Kara Sea. The chemicals causing the stench halved the life expectancies of the laborers there under the best conditions, but he wondered if some unseen horrors survived and thrived just out of sight.
He decided, in spite of his anxiety and his runaway imagination, that there was no real threat. The toxic stench around him put his implanted filters to the test, but he shut his eyes and visualized that he was instead walking amid the falling blossoms of cherry trees, like the ones that lined Yoshino's parade grounds. His INI responded to his desire for calm by slowing his breathing and heartbeat while he pushed his second hand through his jacket's remaining sleeve.
There was no immediate sign of the so-called Earth Restoration Alliance, but he couldn't banish his anxiety during his first day of real work at his new job. His body and mind were an expensive investment, trained for weeks with no expenses spared, and returns were expected from that investment. So many others, including Amerats like himself, washed out. Unlike those failures, he had earned his place among new warrior-elite and he would not dare disappoint his employer now.
“Jai Shri Ram, Dove!” a sharply-uniformed but maskless man called out, hailing Joey with enthusiastic adherence to Rama Aerospace corporate protocol. The greeting could be translated, roughly, as “Glory to Rama,” commonly used with business people and military-security personnel alike.
Joey's artificial state of calm was challenged by that greeting. His systems returned to battle-readiness, unnecessarily, entirely because of how he felt about the man. His INI made positive identification, flashing the man's full rank and designation in the Rama corporate hierarchy, but Joey only had to hear his voice to recognize him. Praetorian-Elect Gabriel Maxton was annoying, but he was not a threat. 
Joey exhaled through his gritted teeth as he stuffed his hands in his jacket's pockets and walked faster. He didn't have time for Gabriel's predictably-patriotic pleasantries. 
“Don't be like that, Dove,” Gabriel said as he caught up with Joey's steps. “Don't you want to, you know, get in good with the boss?” He mockingly returned some of the salutes Joey was continuing to get as he followed alongside.
“We stand upon a rogue nation. This is a combat zone,” Joey said. “This is my jurisdiction, Mister Maxton.” 
“Fine, you win, sir,” Gabriel said. “Ah, there it is, that wide cheeky smile of yours. Glad to be of service, sir.”
Joey's smile appeared before he realized it was there, but he let it persist. Militarily speaking, in an OTA-designated war zone, even a newly-minted junior officer held authority over Gabriel, no matter how close the Praetorian-Elect was to the boss.
He kept his eyes fixed forward toward the ruins of Rama's former corporate headquarters. Once-pristine gardens near the front steps were long trampled and left to seed by invading ERA forces. For all of their ruinous rebellion, there was still a nice hilltop view of nearby Lake Sita, one of Earth's last remaining freshwater reservoirs. The beauty was stained by his awareness of just how remarkably close the reservoir was to the incalculably-polluted runoff downstream of the Yenisey. He was told not to look out the helicopter's window on the way to the mission zone. He should have listened.
“You must be so excited. Beta Squad is your first real command, isn't it, Dove?” Gabriel asked.
Joey nodded, trying to hide his irritation. He had never liked his call sign. At some point in his training, everyone from Olympian overseers watching from Mars to the lowliest menial base personnel started calling him “Dove.”
The most obvious explanation that Joey could come up with was the presence of the eponymous image of such a bird, extinct on Earth but said to flourish in Martian aviaries, on the mission patch of his uniform jacket. On that patch, it carried an ornate kylix drinking vessel in its talons. Above its feathered wingspan was a light shining between bordering columns, like a light from Olympus itself, framing the numerology and lettering of Beta-1, signifying his leadership position in the squad he had trained to command. 
The singular numeral was an unintentional reminder of his isolation after being accepted into Rama's Tulpa program. For the entirety of his training, he was isolated, often didn't even know where exactly he was, and his only human contact was with instructors.
Joey was aware that the rest of his squad trained away from him but were prepared to follow his orders as a newly-minted squad leader, but because of some unprecedented failure in the OTA command structure, his own helicopter was late to finally meet them. 
If anyone in the mission zone knew why, it would be Gabriel, but even he, apparently, didn't know the reason for the delay. Or worse, if he knew why, he was deliberately hiding that knowledge.
Was Joey experiencing some sort of elaborate and secretive post-graduation test during his first day in service to Rama? He could only wonder.
Joey kept walking. He was late, but he might have lost some of his hard-won dignity and respect if the boss caught him running up the steps of the old corporate headquarters. Besides, by the looks of things, his Tulpa was not yet on site.
Gabriel followed quietly behind Joey until Joey was at the weather-beaten entryway of the old headquarters. The doors had long since been battered down, leaving the reception desk and the chandelier-like elegance of the central lobby to ruin by way of corrosive air. Looters may have come after ERA left, but the stains here and there, picked up by his augmented vision, were probably fresh blood at the time ERA's pet cyborg sadistically massacred the office staff.
“You're under orders, sir, but so am I,” Gabriel said, as he threw his arm out and interposed himself in front of the door-less doorway. “Your fun doesn't start until your Tulpa is dropped off. Why didn't you come in the fun way, by the way? You know, in a drop-pod?”
Joey had landed within the combat zone from a standard-issue Hummingbird, probably the same model that transported the wage-warriors that were already on site, but he knew that he was no ordinary soldier. The helicopter pilot had the audacity to make small talk, such as warning him not to look out of the window during the flight over the Norilsk Industrial Zone. Such unprofessional behavior was dangerously close to insubordination, but he allowed it, if only because he felt lonely and didn't dare admit it.
Joey was one of Rama's warrior elite, one of the chosen and specially-trained operators of the latest generation of semi-autonomous combat walkers commonly known as Tulpas. He was capable of remotely operating such war machines, but when battlefield conditions called for it, he could also serve as a directly-connected pilot, using his own unique brain structure as an encryption and decryption basis for countering enemy electronic warfare. 
The word “Tulpa” was always strange to Joey, sounding mystical, but considering that the enemy stole earlier versions of the same technology, he knew it was a common and expected corporate practice to seize the ideological momentum away from a rival, in much the same way that Revolution Nootropics appropriated the very concept of rebellion away from potential rebels, turning the concept into nothing more than drinking a proprietary beverage. That drink's nickname, “RevNoo,” was commonly said by employees and loyal consumers of its competitors, deliberately chosen because of how closely that sounded to “revenue.” Revolution only cared about profit. By contrast, Rama had grander, more transcendent goals in addition to mere profit motives.
“My assigned Tulpa was only recently built, up in Beinn Breagh,” Joey said, deciding to respond to Gabriel because ignoring him didn't make him go away. He wished he had a chilled can of RevNoo Praxis Punch in his jacket, but he drank his last one during the flight. He avoided eye contact with Gabriel, taking his hand out of his pocket to clarify the direction of the orbital factory with his thumb raised past his shoulder. “I was brought straight here after my graduation ceremony in Yoshino...”
“Hey, Dove... Joey... sir,” Gabriel said, with increasing irreverence with each address. “Look at me.”
Joey gave in. He raised his eyes to see what he expected to see. Gabriel was, as always, a handsome, smoothly-shaven and freckle-speckled man with windswept curly coppery hair and deceptively kind-looking green eyes. His paramilitary imitation of an OTA service uniform tightly fit over his gym-sculpted body.
“One of us is out of uniform code, and it isn't me,” Gabriel said.
“I don't see how that's relevant to the mission-” Joey jumped with surprise as Gabriel reached out and pinched over Joey's chin.
“Fuzzy as a peach, Joey.”
Joey swung an arm at Gabriel to make him let go. “OTA officers are allowed to grow beards-”
Gabriel rubbed his own chin while he shook his head. “That isn't a beard. That's peach-fuzz.”
“How exactly am I supposed to grow a beard if the in-between is out of code?”
“Your problem, Dove, not mine. Don't worry, I got your back.” Gabriel reached into his jacket pocket and threw a small object that Joey caught, if only out of self-defense reflex. It was a small platinum-cased trimmer.
“How am I supposed to show I'm not just some pitiable Amerat from a charity boarding school if-”
Gabriel pushed a finger to Joey's lip to hush him. “The boss is inspecting the site, right now. If you're seen like this, you're screwed. Copy that, soldier?” 
“... Copy,” Joey said with a sigh. The trimmer's tiny motor hummed as he surrendered his attempt at a beard, letting the shavings flutter away on the corrosive breeze. He pocketed the trimmer afterward, turning to look over the abandoned ruins of the Norilsk Industrial Zone down the hill.
“You should have known I'd want my trimmer back,” Gabriel said from behind. Joey reached into his pocket to give it back, but then realized his pocket was already empty.
“Stop doing that,” Joey said with gritted teeth. “Who are you trying to impress here?”
Gabriel said nothing but whistled into the wind, rocking on the heels and toes of his boots in a way that Joey's audio implants picked up but couldn't quite filter away.
“Ah, there's your Tulpa, coming this way,” Gabriel said, pointing out into the polluted murk.
“Are your implants sharper than mine?” Joey asked. “I don't sense anything.”
“This war zone may be your jurisdiction, Dove, but the flow of information is mine. TN-1 needed to get here without the enemy... or any of our friendly OTA competitors... knowing when or where. The rest of your squad's been assigned combat air patrol in the meantime.”
“Why-”
“Your Tulpa is still waiting for your handshake. All it would take is a few well-hidden ERA terrorists, waiting in ambush, to take it out without a fight. Because of that, I decided a low-flying Hummingbird haul, along a heavily-patrolled flight path, was called for.”
“You're the intelligence expert here. Are you saying you're not sure if this area is fully abandoned?”
“I'm saying that we can never be too careful, Dove. You're going in alone, because the rest of us have to worry about, you know, externalities.”
“But why-”
“Why, why, why? Because the boss says so. She enjoys a good rite of passage, you know.”
“She?” Joey didn't expect to hear that. He knew that Rama's founder and CEO, Baba Shah, was notorious for micromanaging his company to the point of ensuring that women were nowhere in Rama's management tiers. One of Joey's instructors, after class, had told a story about a brief but ugly power struggle between Baba and his company's former vice-president. That moment marked the last time a woman held any meaningful position in Rama's corporate hierarchy. “But you said-”
“The rest of your squad's already handshaked and on assignment. Relax, Dove. They got the safe and boring part of the mission. You're going to go in and you're going to slay a monster.”
“I am?”
“When ERA were done with their merry massacre at Rama HQ, they ransacked the surrounding industrial zone. Before OTA realized what happened, ERA seized every vehicle that rolled in, took hostages, and even commandeered the local nuclear missile silo. When they finally did leave, they took everything they could carry off. They did all of this pretty quickly too. They thought an orbital strike was always right around the corner, and who could blame them for that? Space superiority is a hell of a thing.”
“So about that monster...”
“Right. The monster. There was more than one 'Anti-Tulpa' prototype. There was, actually, an entire factory line of the things waiting to roll out, but lucky for you, but only two cores were loaded with Pretas before the ERA attack.”
“Ravana, yeah. One was destroyed, but not before taking out an entire squad of rebel Tulpas. So there were two...”
“You saw the commercial, huh? That combat footage was supposed to be for Olympian eyes only.”
“And the Elect,” Joey added.
“Me? Yeah, I saw it too. I was there. Well, for part of it.”
“I'm sure you were, Gabriel. So there's a second Ravana somewhere around here?”
“Oh, yes. ERA got a few of their scavengers killed when rummaging around, but they blasted the entry tunnel shut before that thing escaped. Not even a Ravana prototype could dig itself out without caving itself in, so my educated guess is that it's asleep, on power-saving mode. Waiting for retrieval... or fresh prey.”
Joey's INI detected accelerated heart rate in his own body, but he dismissed the notice while hiding his anxiety. “I was trained to kill Tulpas. I can kill that so-called... Anti-Tulpa.”
“Good! That's why you're going in there all by yourself, as soon as your gallant steed arrives.”
“Steed? I'm a pilot, not a 'rider,'” Joey corrected him while not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice. ERA were eco-terrorists with a quasi-religious sort of animistic bond with their stolen technology, and it bothered him more than it should have that their slang was catching on with OTA personnel.
“If you manage to hurt ERA enough, maybe we'll all start saying 'pilot' instead of 'rider,'” Gabriel suggested while patting Joey's back until Joey swung an elbow to drive him away. 
A moment later, Joey's augmented hearing picked up the complimentary sounds of two pairs of helicopter blades whipping through the murk. As Joey's optic implants zoomed in and magnified the source of the sound, he spotted the bipedal war machine tethered beneath and between the two primitive rotor-bladed aircraft. Its head had a long armored beak-like extension, shaped to protect the command and control hardware hidden inside. Similar bladed extensions fanned out from his shoulders and back, running parallel with the bird-like V-shape of the chest. Its arms were folded against the sides of its densely-armored torso, containing a compact archaic-seeming cockpit. Its bird-like legs dangled over the ruined factories beneath its assisted flight, hanging low enough to almost kick over a brittle old smokestack. A series of overlapping armor plates, like a feathered tail, hung behind the rear of the frame. RA-5 bullpup-configured autocannons, much like the ones he trained with, were attached to the armored tassets that hung down from the machine's midsection.
More than anything else about the Tulpa, the presence of an anachronistic yet elegant Tulpa-sized sword, adjacent to one of the paired autocannons, caught Joey's attention and made him smile. It seemed as if the machine was configured specifically for his preferences, including his eccentricities. Perhaps it truly was.
“I know you two have never met, not in person,” Gabriel said. “TN-1 is the prototype of a next-generation Tulpa line. While the rest of your squad was busy with shakedown sorties, your Tulpa received some... modifications. I don't think any of your simulations included them, so be ready for a few surprises.”
“Did you know about those surprises, Gabriel? Is one of them that sword?”
“Maybe,” Gabriel answered, as the helicopters severed cable connections and let the cutting-edge answer to ERA's Tulpas fall the short distance to the ground. Even without the handshake, the Tulpa-class pilot-assisted combat walker landed with an impact-distributing crouch, remaining low to the corroded cracked concrete all around it. “I hope the quartermaster got you the watertight version of that suit...” 
“Watertight? Why?”
“You'll find out. Your Tulpa is waiting for you. Go on, introduce yourself. Go on,” Gabriel urged, giving Joey a little shove, enough to make him stumble back down the stairs before regaining his balance. “I'll tell the boss her star rid... her star pilot has arrived. Oh, and don't forget to name your Tulpa. Name it... name him anything you like. It's an important part of the handshake process. It's not just superstition, trust me.”
Joey glared back over his shoulder but calmed himself with a downward tug to the open flaps of his jacket. He looked the Tulpa in several of its eye-like sensors. Many were on the head but were not exclusive to that location. Redundant systems were all over the machine, and he was aware from the simulations that he would be able to see all around while operating it as if its cockpit was transparent on the inside.
“Before you climb into the cockpit, Dove, seal up that cowl and make sure your breathing mask is fitted comfortably.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. You'll thank me later,” Gabriel said, turning around to walk away, whistling as he went. After a few steps, he glanced back with a wave of his hand. “Have fun!”
Joey considered ignoring Gabriel's suggestion entirely out of spite, but then he wondered if he was being tested for compliance during his first real day on the job. Because of that, with a sigh of resignation, he pulled the cowl of his pilot suit up and over his head and took a breath through the mask.
The air in there tasted better than it did in the rest of Norilsk, Joey conceded. After that first breath, he was startled by the sensation of his own jacket tightening over his arms and back. The smart-fibers woven through it did not stop wrestling with him until they snugly and symmetrically sealed more closely against his body. The alloy rings on the back of his jacket were now attached and locked against the breathing tubes that lined the ribs of his neurosuit.
No wonder the quartermaster had insisted that the pieces of his uniform were inseparable from one another, Joey thought. 
He looked up at his new Tulpa's cockpit. Cockpits were such quaint and archaic burdens on such sophisticated war machines. He knew he was fully qualified to remotely operate a Tulpa from a safe distance, but unfortunately, the briefing Joey received before his arrival in Norilsk informed him that he was expected to maintain direct physical connection with his Tulpa at all times during the mission to prevent the risk of enemy attempts to distort, jam, or even hijack his remote command signal.
The ordered precaution seemed excessive: Rama's forces had already recaptured most of the territory that was previously invaded and ransacked by the ERA insurgents. Unfortunately, the response was too little and too late. The enemy had already spread like a disease, going on a rampage through Mongolia and elsewhere. Those eco-terrorists were not receiving the opposition they deserved because of the apparent apathy of regional governments that were supposed to be defending OTA interests.

His instructors told him that captured enemy “riders” often talked about how much more vivid and “real” things felt while in their cockpits compared to the bleakness of their mundane lives outside of their Tulpas. They bonded with their stolen war machines and grieved when they were destroyed. To them, it was like losing a friend, or even a sibling.
That all sounded like superstitious nonsense to Joey. It was time to find out for himself.
Joey walked up to his crouching Tulpa. He climbed the tiny extended rungs along the side of its narrow chest, holding on to the top rung while pinching through the protective lining at the back of his cowl's neck to draw out and pull the tip of the spooled cord from the input-output port of his Intuitive-Neural Interface implant. He lifted the access panel between the segments of his machine's armor by the sealed cockpit hatch and inserted the tip of his INI cord.
His machine recognized and accepted his mind-map like a key. The hatch slid open to let the outside light in. The smell of fresh polymer seat cushioning wafted out.
Joey unplugged the cord and pulled himself further up, then turned half of his body and squeezed inside, trying to make himself comfortable as his pilot suit squeaked against the seat cushioning. He noted a pair of alloy rings that lined up with the back of his jacket upon the seat cushions just before the hatch sealed shut behind him. He fumbled around in the sudden shift to near-total darkness, lit up only by the HUD of his optic implants, until he found the gap between the head and neck cushions that was intended for his INI cord. He extended his cord and inserted its tip into the slot until it locked in place.
“Life support connection error detected,” a gruff masculine voice with a crisply synthetic modulation echoed through the darkness of the cramped cockpit. “Disconnect INI cord, adjust seating to ergonomic preference, re-calibrate life support connection, then re-insert INI cord.”
Joey didn't expect his Tulpa to talk back to him, let alone say what almost sounded like orders. He puffed out his chest, dragged out an indignant sigh, then rolled his shoulders against the seat cushioning until he felt the seat re-sculpt itself to fit his spinal curve with a warm buzzing hum up and down his back.
It felt quite comfortable, as far as military hardware was expected to be. He closed his eyes in the darkness and allowed himself a moment to recline and relax.
In that moment, something in the chair buzzed against the back of his neck and then tugged at his INI cord and stretched it through the seat's I/O port without waiting for him. Before he could react, the rings on the back of his jacket clicked against the rings on the seat, locking into place. He felt a shiver up his ribs as the breathing tubes of his neurosuit pressurized with something cold that quickly reached his mask and pushed down his breathing passages, bringing with it an indescribable chemical smell...
“Breathe normally,” the gruff masculine voice advised with a commanding tone. “The anti-concussive agent will pass through your blood-brain barrier faster that way.”
Joey breathed through his gritted teeth. His heart accelerated until he willed it to slow down again through his INI. He gradually relaxed his jaw but felt the cold tingles up and down his body. He felt drugged, but it might have been his imagination because his INI insisted that no sedatives, stimulants, psychoactives, or toxic substances recognized by OTA were in the gas he was now breathing.
Joey felt a crackling jolt up his spine and against the back of his skull.
A moment later, he screamed.
The simulations prepared him for the self-discipline necessary to give mental commands to the craft he operated while blocking out errant thoughts and impulses that might have given unintentional command input. He could think about banking left without immediately banking left, he could mark targets without prematurely firing weapons, but nothing could prepare him for the sensation of claws raking under his skull, or the sizzle of synaptic fire rushing over his brain.
The pain left just as fast as it came, leaving him in a cold sweat while whimpering in the darkness.
He looked out through the Tulpa and the Tulpa looked back into him. There was a numbing brightness to his senses. A newly-made simulacrum of his own memories and personality, the basis for the machine's electronic warfare encryption matrix, was newly present, like a dispassionate copilot that was both nowhere and everywhere around him.
“Jai Shri Ram, Squad Leader Smith,” the Tulpa core said. “Tulpa TN-1 handshake in progress. Personalizing INI encryptions.”
Squad Leader Joey Jonah “Dove” Smith was glad that he wasn't having an ERA-style pseudo-religious experience with some farcical animistic spirit-guide, but he didn't like the cold greeting he had just received from his Tulpa's core, either. He remembered Gabriel's advice about naming the thing, however, and paused to reflect on the years he had lived before that moment.
Joey was found in a bug-infested shelter for homeless and runaway teens in one of the most polluted vertislums of the Ottowa Industrial Zone and tested for aptitude and proficiency. A pretty lady took him aside afterward, whispering to him about his unique potential. She said she believed that he was destined for great things.
Only hours later, he was flown to a prestigious Kazoku school to train for military-security drone operator certification, tuition-free. To earn that rare and special waiver of tuition, he had to prove himself by detecting and punishing casino cheats in Nara Prefecture that did not abide by Yakuza etiquette. He hunted down petty thieves, drone by drone, making kills with remotely-operated walkers while watching each hunt from airborne surveillance drones.
After that he remotely participated in a joint task force that eliminated a local apocalyptic cult.  During that gig, he prevented the attempted bombing one of the walls of the massive “Arashi-Shiro” that protected the prefecture from being swallowed up by the sea, sparing it the fate that had already happened to so much of the rest of the Japanese landmass that was already washed off the historical maps.
After that, without his body leaving Nara Prefecture, his consciousness was sent all the way back to the Canadian territories to a place called Bearpaw Shale. With the added challenge of some slight latency because of the distance, he helped put down a miners' strike that had, briefly, halted the flow of ammolite across the Pacific. He was brutally efficient, performing well enough to earn himself both a Kazoku commendation and a new honorary title from Myrmidon: “Gunnar's Gunner.” Both of those additions to his resume came in handy and helped him stand out when he applied for Rama's Tulpa training program.
A name sprung from those connected memories, along with images of associated scrollwork and vivid-yet-grotesque shrine statues placed around the exclusive upper-class levels of Nara Prefecture that he had earned the privilege of visiting. Mental images rushed out of his brain, shared with his nameless core through his INI link, especially those of a particular mythical creature in ancient folklore that reminded him of the beak-like head of his Tulpa.
“Tengu. Your designation is Tengu,” Joey said.
“Handshake complete,” Tengu said. “Replacing cockpit atmosphere in preparation of nano-foam infusion.”
Joey felt a hum around him. His INI identified the hum. It was coming from arrays of motorized vacuum pumps that quickly sucked out the polluted outside air that he had brought in with him, replacing it with something else that he probably couldn't breathe if something happened to his mask.
“Breathe normally,” Tengu urged.
“I'm trying,” Joey said into his mask as he tried to reduce his anxiety by leaving behind his own senses, using his INI link to send his awareness through Tengu's internal systems. He gazed at himself through the lens of the mission recorder inside the cockpit.  From that view, he saw that a strange substance was starting to fill his cockpit, something like both a liquid and a gas in the way it blew in yet gathered at the bottom of his cockpit first while filling it up.
He returned his awareness back to his body, moving his legs to kick at the substance. It provided no resistance; it was almost as thin as ordinary air. He watched with fascination and a little fear as the strange substance rapidly rushed over his cowled head and then flooded the entirety of the cockpit.
He could not feel the presence of that mostly-transparent substance, but through the goggles of his cowl, he could see well enough to look out at the wrap-around view of the Norilsk Industrial Zone, presented to him as if Tengu's tiny cockpit was no longer in the way and he was instead suspended in open air.
Joey breathed as normally as he could through his mask as he tried to relax. “Is that stuff in the cockpit... also some sort of anti-concussive agent?”
“No, Squad Leader. The 'stuff' in the cockpit is g-force diffusive nano-foam.”
Joey had questions, many questions, but he started with the first one that came to mind. “What happens if there is a breach to the cockpit?”
“In the event of a cockpit breach, the nano-foam is automatically flushed out. It is chemically reactive when exposed to nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.”
“Chemically reactive? Explosive?”
“No,” Tengu said.
“Oh,” Joey said, mildly relieved even if overwhelmed with how unprepared he was for Tengu's advanced technologies.
“Exposure to nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere liquefies the nano-foam as its g-force diffusive properties fail,” Tengu added, without being asked. “The byproduct of the liquefaction process is also toxic to exposed human flesh.”
“Oh,” Joey said with a lump in his throat. He wordlessly admitted to himself that Gabriel's parting advice was good advice, that one time.
“Do you have further questions, Squad Leader?”
“Why are you the first to tell me about your new technologies?”
“I was not aware that you were not aware,” Tengu replied. “My personality is a product of your mind-map, Squad Leader. Apart from my own systems and mission-relevant data, I only know what you know.”
“Right. You're basically me, but more informed and stronger. Much stronger.”
“Yes,” Tengu replied.
Joey's INI link with Tengu enhanced and contextualized the seamless-looking view of everything outside his Tulpa. His HUD automatically framed over and identified the distant friendly Tulpas of his Beta Squad. They were each independently patrolling the outer perimeter of his mission zone in a circular pattern.
Joey frowned. Gabriel had lied to him. None of Beta Squad's TM-6M Rakshasa-class mass-production Tulpas had personalized names, only combat unit designations from Beta-2 to Beta-6. Each of them acknowledged Tengu's presence with an exchange of identification, friend-or-foe data, but no pilot greeted him, verbally or otherwise.
Wasn't he supposed to be in command of Beta Squad?
“Mission timer is counting,” Tengu warned Joey. Joey nodded and took his first steps in his Tulpa. As he did, he felt weightless. He twisted his machine at the torso and made a sharp spinning leap befores landing gracefully on bird-like legs and feet. He felt no momentum and no spinning sensation. That would take some getting used to.
“Right. No more questions,” Joey said out loud. He realized, with some anxiety, that his current position was nowhere near the mission-designated waypoint. It did make some sense for OTA to drop him and his Tulpa away from the hiding place of the remaining Ravana prototype, especially if ERA spies were somehow listening in.
Even so, something about the stack of coincidences, from his delayed arrival, the late delivery of his Tulpa, his lack of knowledge or training regarding the operation of his unexpectedly-advanced Tulpa, and Gabriel's obvious awareness of Tengu's systems and also Gabriel's supposedly-unintentional misdirection made him grit his teeth. He was tested many times, but he hated when he didn't know the conditions of a test.
“Let's... make up for lost time, Tengu. How fast can we safely go?” Joey asked as his awareness extended toward Tengu's propulsion systems. Everything about them, from the amount of flight time contained within each fuel tank, to the estimated acceleration, cruising speed and top speed performance data that Tengu provided for him, made his jaw drop inside his masked cowl.
“As fast as you like. I advise making up for lost time and going very fast,” Tengu replied.
Joey sucked in a breath as he watched the navigation windows for optimal flight trajectory flash over the HUD of his optic implants. As he contemplated going, as Tengu suggested, “very fast,” that window adjusted to compensate. He wondered for a moment how quickly he could slow down and speed up and the estimated flight windows before his eyes adjusted into unnaturally-sharp angles. He realized that he could fly like a drone, with all of the punishing g-force consequences of sudden acceleration, deceleration, and extreme maneuvers, as long as the cockpit's integrity held and as long as he continued to breathe that stuff that was blowing in from his mask.
“Mission timer is counting,” Tengu repeated himself with slower and firmer enunciation.
Joey crouched Tengu down, tensing the synthetic muscle fibers throughout its body, flared the blade-like control surfaces of his wings, and then set everything behind him ablaze with his full-burn launch into the sky.
Joey felt the g-forces push at his body, but because of Tengu's strange technologies, he was experiencing only discomfort at a rate of acceleration that would have knocked out, or perhaps even killed, a pilot without such wonders.
For the first time in his life, Joey felt powerful.



Chapter 2

	“This world has angels too few, and heaven is overflowing.”
	-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Charlie One to Kilo One...”
The Tulpa rider heard the voice from the far-away battlefield, through the haze of enemy jamming, as it was relayed by her faithful drone companion, Huginn. She did not respond to it. She gazed out with her Tulpa's optics over the flight deck while simultaneously feeling out her Tulpa's internal systems diagnostics. The ignition sequence had already begun, rattling machine metal and living flesh alike. In seconds, her Tulpa would would take flight whether or not she was ready.
“Turncoat to Screamer, Turncoat to Screamer. Come in, over...”
The launch harness screamed from the outside in, drowning out the words, but the text of it sped over her optic implants with priority framing. She was too busy to respond. Huginn's loyal sibling, Muninn, had previously reported that OTA had lit everything that could burn in anticipation of ERA's attack. The resultant firestorm on the way to Ulaanbaatar was getting worse and her Tulpa's anticipated flight window needed adjustment. Her Tulpa, Kitsune-2, made the necessary last-second calculations for her. Every control surface over Kitsune-2 tucked inward for the sake of minimum air drag in anticipation of the imminent launch.
“Colonel Schmidt, do you copy...”
The glowing text glided over her pre-launch diagnostics with undue and unwelcome priority. If she responded and the enemy was listening, they would know where to shoot. If an Olympian Trade Authority saboteur had escaped her notice, they might have been clever enough to lock her Tulpa's feet to the linear induction motor of the electromagnetic aircraft launch system. If that happened, half of the war machine would be anchored on the flight deck while the other half tore free and tumbled into the sky for a fleeting moment before an air-burst explosion happened, big enough to kill everyone gathered outside beneath the flight deck, standing out in the open air to see her off. Their enthusiasm was appreciated but she wished they would have stayed in general quarters for their own safety.
“Megan!” 
Jason shouted loud enough for Megan to hear him through her rattling cockpit, interrupting her pre-launch worrying more than the launch itself. Even with her training in the time-honored anti-g straining maneuver, or “AGSM,” and with the added help of the inflated inserts in her specially-modified rider suit, the spike of g-forces from the launch into the sky dimmed her biological eyes as blood pushed away from them.
“I'm coming Jason,” Megan said wordlessly into her INI as she extended her awareness through Kitsune-2's optics and other sensors, freeing her from the discomfort of her human body. She gazed down through her Tulpa's knees, which provided the lowest and closest unobstructed view of some of the boldest and most casualty-prone volunteers of the Earth Restoration Alliance. Some saluted through the bone-rattling shock waves but many more were wise enough to hold their ears instead. Their well-wishing ceremony was ill-advised, but acknowledged.  
Megan gazed down just a moment longer down, watching her flight pod's fiery halo as it reflected off of the plastic-choked remnants of Khövsgöl Valley. Her Tulpa's electronic countermeasure systems ignited in full bloom, launching a precautionary bouquet of chaff, decoys, and flares, leaving an accompaniment of phantom targets for any enemy out there that was ready to take a shot. For all of her caution, no incoming fire came, yet. The lack of interception attempts, and the implications of the lack of it, made Megan's body shiver over the tremors in her cockpit. Was Jason's vanguard unit that thoroughly engaged with OTA forces? Would any of his company be left to save by the time she arrived?
“You damn well better be!” Turncoat shouted over the sonic boom she left behind, the stage-one launch scream replaced by the steady screech of steady ongoing fuel burn. “We need air support, now!”
“I know, Turncoat, I know,” Megan replied while sifting through the shreds of targeting data from Turncoat's transmission. Her reply was finally enough to earn her incoming fire. Hypersonic slugs from artillery platforms over the fortress holding of Gorkhi-Terelj tried their luck, piercing her illusions with sky-cracking force, one after another.
“Egger is down!” Turncoat shouted once more, but in human error, he sent that audio transmission toward Megan instead of what was left of his company. “I repeat, Egger is down...” Muninn dutifully gave context to Turncoat's words, beyond kilometers-wide patches of burning swamp past the visual horizon, displaying the identification friend-or-foe signatures of each platoon of Major Lamarr's company. They were like so many flickering candle lights, gradually blinking out, one by one. 
She didn't hear their cries for help or their death screams. She felt them.
“Sunrise, that's your platoon now. Withdraw to ... listen, rider! You want me to tell your mom a god-damned Hornet killed you? No? Then move it!” Turncoat, in error and probably in his fear, had not yet cut transmission with Megan but was also communicating with what was left of his command platoon, and by extension, his company.
Kitsune-2 unlocked her flight harness to let the flight pod soar free. Her control surfaces caught just enough air to slow and descend, accompanied by tumbling decoys matching her speed and heading, and not a moment too soon. The harness' remaining fuel lit up in a fireball, with a glowing comet-like streak following the outward trajectory of a railgun slug from beyond the visible horizon. 
Megan decided Sunrise would not get taken out by a god-damned Hornet, not that day. As her Tulpa's two tails split outward and caught more air, both of their electronic warfare suites came to life, whispering overlapping lies to Gorkhi-Terelj's fire control systems. Each of her Tulpa's arms carried a powerful ARR-6 rail rifle that was manufactured in Norilsk only hours before Rama returned to reclaim its territory. She aimed her preciously-rare weapons toward the battle below.
She didn't aim for any individual Hornet. She didn't have to; the lakebed was a better target. She fired a single miniaturized hypersonic slug while tumbling down like a loose feather in the wind. By the time she re-matched the descent of her remaining decoys, a column of upward-exploding lakebed had swatted the Hornet squadron just before its strafing run on Sunrise's squad of flightless Centaur-class mass-production Tulpas.
Centaurs were heavily-armed and thickly-armored to the point of looking clumsy. They had to be, because there simply wasn't enough fuel or thruster modules to make an entire army of flight-capable ERA Tulpas. Instead, last-moment design decisions focused on loading the back, shoulders, and secondary rear chassis with additional weapon mounts and defensive equipment. All of that hardware was carried by two pairs of bulky legs. The abundance of extra limbs, armor, and weapon systems took advantage of parts surpluses in Norilsk's stockpiles and those of other industrial facilities seized by ERA on the offensive through Siberia and outward. Because of lack of speed and mobility, with their thruster systems only capable of terrain-clearing short jumps instead of flight, individual Centaurs were only somewhat harder to target and hit than one of OTA's Goliath Beetle semi-autonomous tanks, instead relying on overlapping layers of their squad's countermeasure equipment to increase their chances of survival.
“Target destroyed,” Kitsune-2 said.
“Targets, Kitsune-2,” Megan said to her Tulpa's new core as Tulpa and rider alike glided on remaining inertia through the hollowed ruins of a deserted pumping station overlooking the dried lake valley. The core imprint was still fresh but divergent enough in personality to tell her something she already knew that didn't bear repeating.
“Second Company down to 70% operational strength,” Kitsune-2 said into Megan's mind, but she already knew. She could see the widening gaps in Second Company's defenses for herself. Turncoat was identified by OTA forces and they were ready and eager to overwhelm the unit's commander, no matter the cost. They sacrificed scores of Scorpions and Goliath Beetles in another forward charge while Hornet strafing runs and Falcon standoff-range air strikes kept coming in. Any of the upcoming waves could be the one to finish him and his command squad off. Drones were cheaper by far than Tulpas, and their Olympian owners were more than willing to drown their enemies in money.
Kitsune-2 hit the ground skipping, decelerated by way of several more railgun discharges that shattered windows of the surrounding hollowed-out buildings, then continued to run forward, firing follow-up rounds toward the drones that the previous detonation points missed. Partly by incoming sensor readings and partly by instinct, she knew just the right moment to ignite her thrusters and return to the air, just ahead of the attempt made by the gunners at Gorkhi-Terelj to predict her next move. The explosion beneath her carried her further upward, mostly unharmed. With the clearer line of sight down into the lakebed valley below, she fired several more miniaturized hypersonic slugs, leaving craters where Scorpions just stood and Goliath Beetles just rolled. Her two tails curled and extended jamming and scrambling arrays, claiming Falcons and confusing Hornets. 
She gazed through a stolen Falcon's eye and locked onto Hornets beneath, chopping OTA's low-flying attack drones to pieces with OTA's own higher-flying interceptors. Only a few battles ago, she would have brought some of her own Falcons with her, back when ERA had a fair number of captured drones at its disposal during the early battles of the Siberian campaign. OTA always outnumbered ERA's own drones, unfortunately. Command decided that it was more practical to focus on putting together more mass-production Tulpas than it was to keep sending its own combat drones to be overwhelmed by the enemy's superior numbers. ERA's remaining drone forces started to be used almost entirely for scouting purposes because direct combat use was a losing battle of attrition.
“Screamer! She's here!” A voice cried out from the dug-in position that the remaining Centaur-class Tulpas took. Megan's HUD identified the Tulpa as Charlie-5 and the rider as Lieutenant Sasha Anatoly “Sunrise” Novikov. 
She didn't remember that rider's name until Kitsune-2 sped it across her optic implants, but she remembered his call sign well. Sunrise was one of the factory workers from Norilsk that volunteered for Megan's improvised crash course that she set up only hours after the revolution officially began. She had endeavored, in haste, to teach those freed laborers how to ride the first batch of mass-production Tulpas being assembled from the seized factory yards. He earned the call sign by being the first to show up, standing out at the break of dawn with the wind whipping his feathery brown hair, with bright brown eyes and an eager smile on his face. She wanted to warn him that the cause he was volunteering for would wipe that smile off of his face before it killed him - if he was lucky - but she couldn't bring herself to douse his enthusiasm. He sounded so excited and impressionable and young back then, which was quite a feat since he was probably five years her senior.
Megan cringed inside her Tulpa's cockpit as cheers and shouts of relief overcame the audio channels coming her way. She accepted leadership and volunteered for dangerous missions and fought with everything in her, but she didn't like being ERA's source of inspiration, its savior. The presence of a flight-capable Tulpa to turn the tide against the OTA's air superiority was understandably welcome for Lamarr's vanguard company, but they were depending on her more than they should have been.
What if she failed? What then?
She didn't have further time to ruminate; Falcons broke loose from her grasp, tracing her hijacking signal to attack her from above. Kitsune-2 took several indirect hits as she leaped from a cliffside down toward the dusty slope into the lakebed valley with layers of ablative armor lighting up to cushion the blows. Each tiny detonation gave more of a visual signature to sharpen the aim of each Falcons' follow-up shots. No choice and no alternative: Kitsune-2 would have to spend some more of her precious ammo. She took aim and fired upward.
The Falcons splintered and snapped to pieces, cut apart from several converging firing arcs. She wasn't alone in her efforts; Turncoat's remaining company joined in, having enough pressure relieved on the ground to add their still-abundant reserves of air-bursting anti-aircraft fire.
“Some of those were mine,” Megan complained, but cracked a smile. The battlefield was relatively quiet, for the moment. Like the roars of some vengeful dragon in its mountain lair, the artillery from Gorkhi-Terelj continued to boom and crater the surrounding wasteland a moment later, but if the surviving Tulpas kept moving to join the advance into Ulaanbaatar, their deception and shrouding technologies would protect them from anything short of direct visual targeting.
Megan dearly missed Bluecap's holographic countermeasures. Some of the technology used in the first generation of Tulpas was now out of reach for ERA's terrestrial forces. The NIZ may have once had the means, but when retaliation finally came for that first base of operations, it came with overwhelming force. The few that defied Colonel Schmidt's order to retreat believed that their mass-produced new Tulpas could stand against a blanketing tide of OTA drones. They were never heard from again. 
OTA thought they stamped out the flames of rebellion in that single highly-publicized attack. They were wrong. ERA's first terrestrial base was lost, but two more bases were already established, one of them at Camp Sayan and the other at Camp Ocean Mother, with resources and the means to replace losses and local liberated volunteers to replace the fallen. 
As soon as OTA found out that Colonel Megan Evita “Screamer” Schmidt was stationed at the latter, they would repeat their shock and awe tactics that humbled ERA in Norilsk.
Now they surely knew. Camp Ocean Mother would have to be evacuated. Maybe Ulaanbaatar had defensible positions, if they could be taken. Maybe luck would hold out and Rama had left caches of Tulpa parts and munitions for them to find again. 
That, or the long march to death was hers to command, and many would follow.
“Orders, Colonel?” Turncoat asked with a demanding tone while Kitsune-2 continued her downward gliding descent, riding the ripple of turbulence left by Gorkhi-Terelj's latest shot streaking toward, past, and across the sky behind her.
That shot came close. If that artillery emplacement was aimed toward Second Company instead of her, it would wipe them all out in a few shots across their current weakly-entrenched positions.
“No time to regroup, Major,” Megan said, biting back her fear of making a bad call. Kitsune-2's on-board hardware worked with Huginn and Muninn to plot tactically-plausible navigation routes overland that took the most advantage of the terrain's corroded mountain ranges and deep mining scars.  “Ulaanbaatar can wait. Attack the OTA artillery at Gorkhi-Terelj. Waypoints set for each platoon.”
“We're a grounded force, Colonel,” Turncoat said. “If you didn't notice: OTA has complete air superiority...”
“They don't have total air superiority, Major,” Megan said, as her Tulpa core's predictive algorithms made her feel like she was already staring down the gun barrel of Gorkhi-Terelj's next anticipated shot. She was low enough and close enough that even a miss would likely destroy a platoon full of Tulpas. Her secondary boost pods ignited and sent her skyward again, just above the arc of  the next air-shaking round as it sped with hyper-sonic force over Second Company's positions.
“I'm still the priority target,” Megan said. “Just like back in the Altai.”
“They're going to hit you eventually...” Jason warned.
“Until they do, take advantage. Move out, riders!” Megan shouted. She committed her secondary boosters, at full burn, to closing the distance between Second Company's position and the OTA fortifications to the southeast.
The human personnel at Gorkhi-Terelj were learning quickly. The next shot only missed because of an unlucky guess while Kitsune-2 shuffled her position between emitted signatures like a game of Three Card Monte. Unlike that notorious confidence game she used to watch down in the Halifax vertislums, her game could be won by the player. That player would only have to win once.
Kitsune-2's hips ejected two fuel pods away. She was a little lighter, and could carry herself a little further with her remaining fuel, but her fuel gauge was dwindling down and she knew it. She gained a little more altitude and lined up some long-range return fire.
“I see you,” Megan whispered out loud as Kitsune-2 steadied one of her ARR-6 rail-rifles, keeping that arm aligned with the meter-wide slit in the distant mountainside while the rest of her body spun and twisted in mid-air, releasing a fresh bloom of countermeasures while she took the shot.
“Target destroyed,” Kitsune-2 reported, seconds later, and a second too late for it to matter; Megan knew that she had moved too predictably when lining up that shot.
If her shot hadn't landed deep and true, she would be dead already.
No further artillery fired. That OTA fortification had put too much faith in just one artillery piece, apparently. Huginn reported from his position that Scorpion and Goliath Beetle ground crawlers were rolling out from Gorkhi-Terelj's underground pool, accompanied by a small cloud of Hornets providing low-altitude cover.
She could take another shot, but she only had so many left that she could carry with mission operational weight. She cherished the brief opportunity to glide on forward momentum, extending her Tulpa's control surfaces to catch the wind for a few seconds.
One of Kitsune-2's fuel pods exploded without warning, taking a sizable chunk of the shoulder armor with it and leaving an open wound that whistled with wind drag.
“No!” Megan shouted. She set Kitsune-2 into a downward tumbling corkscrew, angry at herself more than the enemy drones, throwing out a ring of decoy chaff while plummeting to get beneath the firing arc of follow-up shots. She didn't yet spot the enemy Snowy Owl that helped those Falcons' targeting, but just one enemy spotter with that level of anti-countermeasure sophistication could very well be the death of her if she didn't shoot it down first.
“Huginn! Muninn! Where's that buzzard cousin of yours?” Megan demanded, but with love. Her stealthy Snowy Owls were family to her. She had adopted those two in Norilsk and trusted them unconditionally after that. They were just enough to keep ERA's fledgling terrestrial rebellion alive by tirelessly watching OTA's movements. She never got over the fact that Rama was so quick to modify the rest of their surveillance drone fleet with new defensive systems after Norilsk. Each battle after that, she found it gradually harder to hijack enemy drones, and even when she succeeded, her command over new drones was temporary at best. Because of that, she only trusted Huginn and Muninn enough to keep them around, battle after battle.
“You two can't see him? Fine... let's ask the Falcons,” Megan said out loud while Kitsune-2 was one step ahead of the spoken words. Both of her tails encircled her during descent while her rider looked back at Kitsune-2's descent through the transmissions sent to the Falcons from that nearly-invisible Snowy Owl. Kitsune-2's core made a few quick triangulating calculations, using the the position of the terrain features below her image in those Falcons' eyes. She got a firing solution a split-second later.
While still spinning and wrapped in her two tails, Megan aimed one of Kitsune's rail-rifles skyward and fired.
That eye in the sky was put out, finally.
“You can't see them all, all the time. It's all right,” Megan said to Huginn and Muninn, getting a brief digital response from the both of them as she caught the wind once more, fortunate enough that her wing on the damaged side didn't snap away from the strain. “Just do your best, you two.”
“Screamer, we're advancing up the foothills now,” Turncoat said.
“Sending targeting data on enemy drone movement,” Megan replied while dodging light hypersonic slugs and the resultant pillar-like plumes of dirt bursting up from the best-guess shots from ongoing Falcon fire from above.
“Yes, I see them... could you thin their ranks a little?” Turncoat asked, sounding calmer but still gritting his teeth in a way Megan could hear. “We've taken a lot of damage and we're running low on ammo.”
Megan knew she had also taken significant damage already and her ammo was never abundant to begin with, but she bit her tongue and said nothing during her onward advance over the OTA fortress' outer perimeter. Unlike the TM-5M Centaur line of mass-production Tulpas, she couldn't just shoulder more armor or carry more arrays of anti-aircraft weaponry in anticipation of every problem. Every gram counted, which made her see every meal she ate as the burden that might finally destroy Kitsune-2 and kill her rider. She knew that getting Kitsune-2 destroyed would be a loss that ERA could not replace, and if she died, Kitsune-2's core would require a painstaking erasure process before she would accept a new rider's handshake.
Unlike her and her Tulpa, the Centaurs had a cheaper and simpler type of core that lacked the encryption and masking protections that Kitsune and other first-generation prototypes used to evade autonomous identification and targeting systems, but considering that most of the Centaur riders were former Rama laborers and as such were already mind-mapped and profiled by OTA, it was seen as cheaper to not worry too much about defeating enemy targeting and instead emphasize simply layering the second-generation mass-production models with more defensive and offensive equipment. The choice, for all of the assurances that ERA's command officers made to riders, still resulted in high casualty rates that depended on new recruits to fill in the gaps at every city and facility that ERA liberated, training replacements in a quick and dirty fashion with cheap Tulpa cores waiting to handshake with them.
Her ruminations felt like minutes in her mind but only seconds had passed since Turncoat's request was made. She answered the request with prudent choices of targets from the selection beneath her. She caused a landslide with one shot, sending a column of Scorpions ascending the hillside tumbling down over one another. She used another shot to crater one Goliath Beetle, but more importantly, crippled its counterpart immediately behind it, causing a traffic jam up on the way up to their desired firing positions.
“They didn't like that,” Megan remarked as ground-to-air fire rose to meet her. They had no more Snowy Owls at their disposal, so Megan conserved her remaining countermeasures and dodged the converging volleys of fire with practiced grace while weaving between the persistent flurry of ongoing Falcon potshots above.
“There's too many Hornets!” Sunrise complained. Megan thought little of them, but she remembered that all it took to finish off Ravana was a few Hornets after everything else. She sighed and lined up one of her two AEB-2 Non-Nuclear-Electro-Magnetic Pulse bomb launchers with a trajectory that took advantage of an obstructing hillside to direct the blast toward the Hornets and away from Second Company's ongoing advance.
The blast silenced the swarm with precision detonation, the yield and distribution of the electronics-frying effect pre-calculated mid-flight by Kitsune-2's core, leaving Second Company no more damaged than it already was before it traded blows with the divided and hindered OTA drone defenders, platoon by platoon. Victory was within ERA's grasp, but as always, there were losses.
The human losses, so far, were replaced by new recruits, factory workers and defecting drone operators and prison laborers alike, many of them found, appraised, and chosen by Megan herself, using her seemingly-miraculous talent to visit their minds through their synergy implants and find who could be trusted and who had to be turned away.
The Tulpas losses, so far, were replaced by serendipity alone: Rama seemed to have stored caches of pre-war Tulpa parts and the resources to build more across most of Central Asia in many places that ERA happened to look. The great limitation was time and the ever-present threat of counter-attack and re-occupation of liberated territory.
“Sunrise, just... stay right there,” Turncoat said, with fatigue in his voice. “Your platoon's done the Earth proud. Mine will take it from here.”
“I'm still here,” Megan said as she circled Second Company's advance a few times, taking count of the dwindling number of enemy drones on land and in the air. She found a safe patch of earth to land Kitsune-2 upon while ejecting one of her last remaining fuel pods. She only had internal reserves left to depend upon for the rest of the mission, and she put them to immediate use with thruster-assisted strides and leaps to mitigate the persistent peppering from Falcon fire higher above.
That bunker ahead would be cover enough from the rail-slug rain. OTA's remaining operators on site must have known that, because the hillside doors were already starting to close.
“Screamer!” Turncoat shouted. “I got a demo specialist in my command squad. You had better not run ahead of-”
Kitsune-2 ran ahead of Second Company at full burn. The Tulpa folded her forearm shields inward and crossed her rail-rifle barrels in a forward tumble into the low-ceilinged garage made for semi-autonomous ground-crawlers, rattling her rider in her cockpit as she steeled herself against the rapid deceleration.
Kitsune-2 pushed herself up as internal sensors made her rider cringe in realization that she had finally torn the wing off of that damaged shoulder. Half a heart's beat later, she found herself staring eyes-to-optics with an OTA technician at ground level, meters from her Tulpa's face.
The young woman dropped what she was carrying and backed to the far wall, frozen in place with wide-eyed terror.
“Get out of here!” Megan shouted through her Tulpa's loudspeakers. It only occurred to her a moment later that there was nowhere for her to go: OTA's last stand with all of their small arms and remaining security drones was in one direction and Second Company was making its ground assault in the other, harried by whatever ammunition was left in those damned Falcons to drop on them, picking them slowly apart, out of range of return fire.
The internal doors on the left slid open. Unlike that single terrified technician, the rest of the garage technicians were willing to die for their Olympian masters, judging by the start-up signatures Kitsune-2 detected from a pair of parked Goliath Beetles, loaded and ready.
Kitsune-2's forearm shields folded back as her extended blades snapped into ready position, humming from the activated internal motors that enhanced their cutting and puncturing ability. The guns of the Goliath Beetles didn't get a chance to aim through the rising doors before she punched into their treads, disabling their attempts to move. With a heightened internal sensor warning shrieking at her about increasing structural failure in her damaged arm, Megan yelled with exertion as Kitsune-2 strained just enough to flip both of the auto-tanks over. She quickly finished both of the them off with follow-up stabs into the engine blocks inside their soft upturned bellies.
Small arms fire sprinkled against her Tulpa from behind. OTA had a few contractors left with fight in them. It gave her no pleasure, but before they could get lucky enough to hit through the gaps in Kitsune-2's dwindling armor and damage something important, she launched a single spray of chaff from her Tulpa's hip. It was more than enough to silence those small arms and leave bloody streaks across the adjacent wall.
“Surrender already, damn you! It's over!” Megan shouted with frustration. OTA had already lost their base. The fight was strategically over, but for some reason that still escaped her, OTA's conscripts sometimes fought to the bitter end. Unlike their indentured servants and prison labor, some seemed to truly want to die for their Olympian masters and she never got used to killing them for it.
That single technician dropped to her knees, hands outstretched as if in supplication to a goddess of death.


Chapter 3

	“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
	-Friedrich Nietzsche

Joey and Tengu landed within sight of the bunker doors. Scarab earth-movers had already dug up and piled away an avalanche of debris, which gave enough clearance for Praying Mantis utility robots to pull the doors ajar with their long arm extensions. The antennae-like sensors on both kinds of machines acknowledged Tengu's presence and put in a little extra effort to widen the gap further to accompany the width of the landing Tulpa. Tengu swept the crack in the armored doors with several wavelengths of his sensors, immediately identifying burned-out Mayflies, spilled like so many marbles, around the interior entryway. He also saw jagged scrapes to the inside of the door mechanisms, uneven and erratic, as if a metal-rending beast had tried to scratch its way out.
Joey's Tulpa was prepared with weapons specialized for close-range urban combat, but he paused with indecision as Tengu's hand brushed over the grip of his Tulpa-sized sword. It was chivalrous nonsense, he decided, to desire a blade-to-blade confrontation with that second Ravana waiting for him in that bunker. As Tengu's other hand brushed over the RA-5 attached to his hip, Joey also decided it was arrogant to assume, especially in the close quarters of the bunker ahead of him, that he'd have any sort of range advantage, for long, over the twin of the Preta-crazed thing that had carved its way through an entire Tulpa squad, limb by limb.
Joey opted for both weapons. He brandished Tengu's blade while drawing a single bullpup autocannon in the other hand.
“Deploying only one autocannon reduces effective rounds-per-minute output by half. Single-handed wielding of the sword reduces effective cutting force by-” Tengu warned, in Joey's mind.
“Shut up, Tengu. I'm the pilot,” Joey snapped back, both mentally and verbally. Tengu was based on an imprint of his own mind and he knew it, which made the reminder of his doubt regarding his tactics that much more glaringly apparent.
“Jamming and masking emissions detected,” Tengu warned, ignoring Joey's hostility as Tulpa and pilot walked hrough the bunker doors, crunching over dead Mayfly drones and gazing with multi-spectral sensors into the dark descent ahead.
“That Ravana is obsolete,” Joey said, partially to rally himself. “You are designed to defeat Tulpa-style jamming and masking technology. Follow your nose.”
Tengu's beak-like forward array swayed side to side while the Tulpa's core filtered through the noise to fill shadows with presence. There was no immediate sign of the Ravana, at least this close inside the doors and this close to the surface of the multi-level subterranean structure.
The only large-scale movement he could detect was the Praying Mantis robots grinding the bunker doors shut behind him.
There was, however, something there. Human, distinctly female and subtly augmented with cybernetics, walking with a runway model's practiced grace upon rather high heels, with confidence and purpose but in no hurry and with vital signs pumping away steady and unaffected by the darkness and danger all around her.
Tengu's internal memory had no confirmed identification of that woman and the Ravana prototype's jamming fields thwarted attempts to make inquiries with the OTA network. That, combined with the woman's flowing long black hair, immaculately saffron-colored Lehenga dress with Gota patti embroidery, carefree body language, and purposeful stride, made Joey conclude she was no stray NIZ laborer and was certainly no ERA holdout.
She seemed so out of place in such a dead and dreadful place, like a flower blossom amid salted earth, but her indifference to everything around her seemed more commanding than ignorant.
“Miss...” Joey said, through Tengu's integrated loudspeaker.
The woman continued to walk.
“Madam...” Joey said, quickening his steps, extending his blade over her in a protective gesture.
The woman did not respond and stepped around the scattered remains of a makeshift barricade, then stepped over the crushed and scattered remains of Rama personnel that had made their stand there and died amid the debris.
“Identify yourself at once!” Joey shouted out before he could stop himself, angry and afraid and not knowing entirely why.
The woman stopped and spun around with a single clack of her heels, the motion tossing her long hair over one shoulder and revealed a blood-red Bindi dot upon her forehead and an upward-cast fiery bright green-eyed glare that made Joey feel very small, even in his Tulpa.
Joey's words sank down his throat.
“Oh,” she started, with a levity-soaked chuckle that belonged nowhere near the glare she wore. Only a moment later, a rosy smile replaced the glare with eerie swiftness. “You must be Joey,” she said, with a contralto purr.
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, with his full attention upon the woman. His every instinct that he earned in his brief ascent up the OTA corporate hierarchy told him that she was very important and likely had the power of life and death over him.
“I am Mara Shah,” Mara Shah said, with deceptive plainness. “My father-in-law left quite a mess here, wouldn't you agree?”
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, trying to mask his own ignorance in agreement. His mind sifted through Tengu's own databank as he established her place in OTA's intertwined hierarchy of corporate interests, competing and cooperating in alternating and sometimes simultaneous ways in a Machiavellian dance that was dizzying to comprehend. Mara Shah was the wife of Karna Shah, the recently-disowned son of Rama's CEO, Baba Shah. Baba Shah was the highest authority that both Joey and Gabriel answered to.
Or was he?
“Now, if you would excuse me, Joey, I am appraising my inheritance.”
Joey knew he would be in more trouble than he already was if he dared to imply she might have been ignorant of the imminent danger waiting somewhere in the gaps of his sensor readings. His next words would have been chosen more carefully if he had the time to do so.
“It is not safe here-”
“That Preta will not harm me, Joey. You, on the other hand...”
Joey's gaze turned upward to address the source of a bone-shaking metallic scream as a hellish red gleam pierced out from the blackness ahead. With no time to respond, a silver-skinned Tulpa-sized beast sped toward him with another metallic scream.
Tengu fired off the first three rounds of his autocannon's magazine before the next thirty spilled in a spinning spiral as the weapon left his Tulpa's hand in the midst of a high-speed charging collision that slammed him into the resealed bunker doors hard enough to snap his wings and tail plating, sending flashes of feedback pain through his mind at the same time his Intuitive-Neural Interface channeled his fear into battle-readiness just in time to carve a silvered shoulder pauldron away from that Ravana. 
The plunge of the blade would have cut further and severed that arm if that Ravana did not immediately retreat with a cockpit-fracturing kick to Tengu's chest. The foam in the cockpit started to spray outward like blood gushing from a wound, just as Tengu had previously warned him. During the disorienting impact, the Ravana rushed backward, forcing the grip of the weapon out of Tengu's hand, leaving the hilt sticking out where the pauldron once rested. The Preta-infested machine let out another metallic scream louder than the burn of its retro-thrusters.
Joey panted as he recovered from the cockpit-cracking foam-flushing blow. He had squandered his technological advantage, but he would not lose. He roared back as if in answer to the Ravana's scream, charging ahead, heedless of the punishing surge of g-forces going through his body.
His rage exceeded his fear and he was firmly inside Tengu's systems, forgetting for the moment his human limitations. He drew his remaining autocannon from its hip mounting and lit up the corridor with its muzzle flash. He chased the Ravana through its backward withdrawal, striking it a few times but not enough to cripple it, let alone slow it down, as it continued to flee deeper into the dark underground labyrinth.
Joey stopped his forward momentum and rocketed back, allowing the Ravana to fade out of sensor range. It was worth it so he could backtrack and pick up his dropped autocannon, reclaiming it from the  the blood-smeared bunker floor. With both weapons pointed forward into the unknown, he desired to rush ahead just as fast as Tengu's first flight.
Tengu interfered with Joey's INI command, instead giving him roughly half of his desired rate of acceleration. Before Joey could complain or demand to know why his Tulpa could countermand his orders, a explanation rushed into his mind during the next split-second.
“Extensive collision hazards detected ahead. Maximum performance envelope limited by damage to cockpit,” Tengu said during their ongoing charge. His bladed control surfaces were tucked in tightly as scattered stacks of crates, overhanging ventilation ducts, and other flight hazards necessitated razor-thin course corrections. His Tulpa's on-the-fly tracing of the Ravana's heat emissions from its thrusters guided him through each fork in the corridors.
“It's fast,” Joey said to Tengu.
“Fast, challenging prey. You're not the prey, Squad Leader. It is.” 
“I'm not the prey,” Joey said out loud as he stared down the heat signature ahead, finally gaining on it. “You are.”
The path ahead opened wide into a vast cavern-like underground factory with mountainous stacks of cargo crates and disembodied TM-Zero limbs and modules suspended by cables above long-silenced mass-production assembly lines.
He saw the Ravana. It stopped and landed to eject its damaged arm, Tengu's blade and all, upon the factory floor. As Joey watched during his dangerously-rapid deceleration, the Ravana swiped at one of the replacement limbs hanging down from above, locking the replacement into its open socket.
Joey wouldn't let his prey run away again. He emptied the abundant-but-finite magazines of each of his autocannons, but not at the Ravana, no matter how it seemed to taunt him by darting about with blinding speed. Instead, he aimed for the collection of hanging limbs and other spare parts, chopping them to pieces. As the Ravana screeched about that, he fired his next bursts into the fuel slugs that were stored around the cavernous chamber. They exploded with concentrated force that rippled and resonated around the confined interior, staggering his prey and dropping to the floor, tossed back and forth by the chain-reaction of additional exploding fuel slugs.
Joey felt his teeth chatter even while his attention focused through Tengu's sensors. His Tulpa reeled back as the multiple concussive blasts blew over him.
The Ravana screamed again, louder than ever before.
Joey threw both empty autocannons aside. The damage to the facility was catastrophic and almost everything was on fire, but he spotted Tengu's sword, still pierced through the discarded limb, blown much closer to him after the last few fuel slugs detonated. 
He dived for his blade. For that fleeting moment, Tengu permitted him to go as fast as he desired. The Ravana surged toward him at the same time.
Joey grabbed the grip of the Tulpa-sized sword, swinging the blade with enough force to send the severed limb spinning away from it. The ongoing slash cut further than that, also going into, through, and past the Ravana's grasp.
Another limb fell away from the Ravana, joining the rest of the disembodied amid the flames.
Tengu hovered over the burning chamber on his damaged wings. He gripped his reclaimed blade with both hands as pilot and Tulpa stared down at the wounded Ravana.
Their prey.
The Ravana ignited its thrusters with another scream, but instead of meeting the offered challenge, it instead dashed back into the joining corridor leading back to the facility entrance. 
Joey licked his lip. He realized that he felt no more fear, only the thrill of the hunt.
Joey pursued in thruster-assisted sprint, but there were only fumes to launch forward with, which made him realize that Tengu had taken the liberty of ejecting his fuel pods at some point in the fighting before they could endanger him.
“Stop... making decisions before I make them.”
“You want to hunt less efficiently, Squad Leader?”
“No. Just... make sure they're good decisions if you make them first.”
“Have I made good decisions so far, Squad Leader?”
“... Yes.”
Joey caught up with his prey at last. He found the Ravana near the main entry doors. It was doing something strange, almost... human. 
It was kneeling, with a slouched shoulder and steeply-downturned head, directly over Mara Shah while struggling to balance itself on its remaining arm.
Joey halted his advance, his heart thudding away until his INI commanded his autonomic systems to slow down. The adrenaline was still in his blood, even with that artificial calm coming over him, which made him shiver with frustration about his thwarted fight-or-flight instincts.
“Baba, oh, Baba!” Mara Shah cried softly, but her voice was picked up on Tengu's enhanced audio sensors with perfect clarity. She sounded like a distressed child, extending her bracelet-encrusted wrist and setting her hand against the Ravana's cheek.
The Preta-infested machine grinded its explosion-fractured body about, like a cat pressing into a petting.
“What did they do to you, Baba?” Mara Shah asked the Ravana.
Joey clenched his jaw and kept Tengu's blade in a ready position as he took slow advancing steps. His Tulpa's own damage was extensive, but the Ravana was worse for the wear and he was ready to finish the job, if only Mara Shah would get out of the way. What was she doing?
“I am safe. We are safe, now. You will be well again! Let's go to your temple... our temple. You remember our temple, o Rama Reborn?” As she asked, her bright green eyes flashed toward Joey, briefly enough for the Ravana to fail to notice, but enough to warn Joey to not come any closer.
Not yet.
“Rama Reborn, please try to remember! Let me help you remember. You will be well again once you remember the temple.”
Joey understood nothing and neither did Tengu. The Tulpa and pilot waited for what they came to do: kill a Ravana.
The battered one-armed Preta-infested monster let out a purr-like grinding sound, then something that sounded like the whimpering of a wounded animal.
“Let me help you, Baba. I can help you! You just have to... remember the temple.” Mara Shah reached as she spoke, with a heel lifted high enough to hang her foot from her shoe, suspended with only the toes still inserted. A thin silvery INI cord extended from within her long black hair, reaching for an access port behind the Ravana's armored collar once the neck was stretched far enough to allow it. Her other hand reached far enough to cradle the machine's downturned head.
Joey waited.
“There, Baba! There, Rama Reborn! I see the temple! Here we are safe. Here, you can be healed. Here, you return to wholeness... let us recite the puja. Recite the puja, Baba. The puja. The puja.” There was urgency in Mara Shah's voice, but also impatience, and the slightest, most-carefully obscured hint of fear.
“O Baba, lead us from the unreal to the Real,” Mara Shah continued, stroking the Ravana again like a beloved pet. “O Baba, lead us from darkness to light. O Baba, lead us from death to immortality. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all...”
Joey sensed an overriding wireless signal rushing through the Ravana's lowered jamming field, with encryptions that bypassed his Tulpa's own defenses: executive-level override codes. With them, a single verbal command, in Mara Shah's voice, was sent directly into his brain.
“Kill it.”
Joey and Tengu struck as one. With a single downward blow, the metal monstrosity was cleaved from shoulder to neck and through its Preta-infested core deep within its chest. A third of the Ravana fell one way and two-thirds the other. Mara Shah stood, unflinching, as its head slammed to the floor in front of her.
“Shanti? My daughter? Was I not enough for you, you animal?” Mara Shah let out a snarl of rage that made Joey shiver more than the Ravana ever did as her heel came down against the side of the severed machine head, and again, and again, until the stiletto point of it snapped away. Her leg remained lifted, shoeless, away from the floor.
Tengu detected a second human presence from the crack of the re-opened bunker doors: Gabriel. For some reason, he held a handbag's straps in his clenched fist close to his forearm while he sprinted toward Mara Shah's side.
Mara Shah's vitals swiftly descended to calm, but she left her shapely leg suspended until Gabriel dove into a downward slide with a lowered head. Her foot came down once more, but that time it gracefully slipped into a replacement shoe from the handbag. She then kicked away the second old shoe and walked into the second new counterpart as quickly as Gabriel could put it down.
“Come, Gabriel,” Mara Shah said in a soft growl, ignoring Joey and Tengu entirely as she clacked on her replacement heels back the way she came. “We have what we came for. I have a daughter to thaw.”


Chapter 4

	“Sorrow comes after happiness, and happiness after sorrow; One does not always suffer sorrow, nor always enjoy happiness.” 
	-Shanti Parva 

“We never had the luxury of knowing why, but we do know that Vidyudabhi, the Rama corporate flagship, went silent after the Battle of Norilsk some time ago. As you already know, early ERA operations across Eurasia were conservative and in constant anticipation of orbital bombardment that, so far, has yet to target us. We could8 only assume that a response from the Martian garrison fleet was dispatched at the time of lost contact and was already under well underway, but that was not our problem. As far as the matter concerns us, I think you would agree with me that it's time to stop living in fear of Vidyudabhi's shadow.”
Megan's ears heard the man's gruff voice without giving the words much thought. Her eyes refocused upon the holographic light suspended over the table of the command centre. For a moment, she had forgotten she was no longer in Camp Ocean Mother and was standing in Gorkhi-Terelj, the OTA artillery base that watched over Ulaanbaatar.
“While your regiment was deployed in the Altai, you may have noticed a difference in OTA's surveillance and command-and-control capabilities. Vidyudabhi apparently went rogue again, and started to knock out OTA satellites and orbital stations over most of the hemisphere. We were borrowing that same satellite network, so the blackout also blinded and divided our forces. Fortunately, couriers successfully relayed regained contact with Third Regiment. Colonel Banks reported that Camp Sayan was successfully evacuated ahead of the OTA advance. Ocean Mother is still in the process of being evacuated, taking advantage of the blackout while we can.”
The similarities of one command centre to another made it hard to tell any them apart. Like so much else of ERA's operational assets, the room and almost everything in it was appropriated from Rama's Eurasian holdings. Technicians used to take the time to overwrite Rama fonts and other visual aesthetics from their hardware, but roughly after the Battle of Altai Range, Megan noticed that they stopped bothering to shift the user-interface text away from the sanskrit-like aesthetic and only changed the interface color from Olympian gold to ERA crimson, if they could be bothered at all.  
“We're continuing to take full advantage of the gap in OTA communication and the consequent gap in OTA air supremacy to mobilize all of Third Company of our own Second Regiment to cover that evacuation. Colonel Asanuma's courier showed up as of zero-seven hundred to confirm that the Fifth Regiment is still with us, and as we speak, we are sending word down the eastern front... Colonel.”
She nodded while trusting her INI to take in most of the strategic data so she could make sense of it later with Kitsune-2's help. She already knew enough about the immediate situation without taking in the finer details of it to know that the battle had gone well, even if the war continued to seem impossible to win. She would go back to fighting soon enough. 
“Colonel Schmidt?”
Colonel Schmidt nodded to her rank and name while trying to keep her eyes open. Others were fighting in her place because she couldn't be everywhere at once. Ulaanbaatar was in the process of being liberated from OTA control. Without the covering fire from Gorkhi-Terelj, Myrmidon's local operators ordered many of their garrison drones to self-destruct, and as was the case with other recent ERA advances, the enemy also attempted to scuttle their production and resource assets and outright exterminate their rebelling workers, but there were still enough spoils of war to replace ERA's losses, Tulpas and riders alike. 
“Megan,” the man said, his voice informal and sharp enough to cut through inattention.
“Yes, General Wilde?” Megan responded. Major Lamarr might have shown her, on a few occasions, how to address the general, but she never fully got into the habit. She was there when ERA's fledgling presence on Earth had just enough time to reorganize itself into something approaching a respectable army, and because she herself had hand-picked her own superior officer, she found it difficult to see his rank as anything more than a living representation of her own shortcomings as a leader. She had told Sophia that she couldn't command an entire army, and Sophia told her that she wouldn't have to, that others had already joined the cause that could do the job.
“Colonel, look me in the eyes,” General Wilde commanded, but with a tone sounding more empathetic than ever before. His spot-speckled fair skin and salt-and-pepper hair spoke of his age and experience, while his furrowed bushy eyebrows framed his look of concern. She looked him in the eyes as requested, examining his harsh dark irises that lacked augmentation and carried the weight of many years.
“What is the operational strength of your regiment, after recent operations?” General Wilde asked. Megan knew that he already knew the answer; the question was rhetorical.
“Casualties were high, sir.” Megan knew they would have been much higher if she didn't intervene in time to save Second Company. Her personal intervention ran the risk of attracting OTA's full strength toward Camp Ocean Mother.
“Do you know how long it takes to turn a fresh volunteer into a Tulpa rider?”
“I'd have to check with Sergeant-Major Norden about that, sir.”
“You do that, Colonel. You do that on the way to quarters.”
“Sir?”
“I'm grounding you, Colonel, before you grind the rest of your unit to dust.”
“Sir!” 
“Let me be the first to remind you that you and your people are not drones. We're fighting an old kind of war here, and cybernetics aside, you're flesh and blood, not a machine.”
Megan clenched her jaw. She was tired and she knew it. She was tired before the Battle of Ulaanbaatar had even started. She was already tired before from the Battle of Altai Range. Every time she allowed herself some leave, she would wake up and read the list of recent ERA casualties and find names she recognized. Every time she was not there felt like another failure on her part to save them.
“Kitsune-2 just needs a little more time for repairs.”
“So do you, Colonel. You're dismissed,” General Wilde said, but with a sympathetic tone and squint to his dark eyes.
Megan clenched her fist, but deep inside, she felt glad that someone ordered her to let go and stop fighting for a change. She felt guilty about every moment she allowed herself to be anywhere but inside her Tulpa, but at least General Wilde made her choice for her. She saluted and made her way for the door.
Major Lamarr was waiting outside, presumably for her. He wore the uniform better than anyone, keeping his dark curly hair short enough to avoid his collar and leaving it only barely long enough to hang over his brow. He allowed no wrinkles on the jacket and no scuffing on his boots. His soft brown eyes were magnified a bit by his prescription eyeglasses. Those eyeglasses were anachronistic but fashionable enough for the frames to match the luster of the rank pins on his uniform jacket. She never figured out how he could have time to fight as long and as hard as he did while keeping up his appearance, which included a baby-smooth clean shave on his ebony chin and jawline.
“Why don't you get your vision corrected, already?” Megan asked. “Mine is-”
“How about you stop asking?” Major Lamarr said. “Dr. Lavi never got anything drilled into her own eyes, either.”
“Maybe not, but she never had to fight her own war.”
“When I'm plugged into my Centaur, I don't have to see with these eyes anyway. I know that look, Screamer,” Major Lamarr said, with a squint and a tensed brow. “Out with it.”
“I've been ordered to take a break, Turncoat,” Megan said.
“I saw that coming. Come on, let's catch up. We got time,” Turncoat said, urging her away and giving her a pace to follow alongside the window view of a painfully-beautiful Mongolian sunset. The azure-to-magenta glow in the clouds and the stillness in the air could trick someone into forgetting that the next chance to die was always around the corner.
“Remind me again about ERA's fraternization codes. If we hang out too much, aren't we violating them?” Megan asked as she gazed out at the sunset, window by window. She didn't want to show it, but as guilty as she felt, she wanted the moment to last forever. It felt good to be out of action, but she wouldn't make a habit of it, not with so many depending on her.
“Oh, come on,” Turncoat said, with frustration in his voice. “We're not dating. We can be friends. I mean, with General Wilde and a few other ex-military exceptions, how many here had a uniform code to go by until I literally wrote the book on it?”
“I know this is your uniform design. Congratulations,” Megan said as she tugged at the cuff of the sleeve of her uniform jacket. Her neck-to-toes neurosuit felt itchy on the inside, especially at the wrist. “What does that have to do with my question?”
“Uniform codes aren't specifically about the uniforms we wear.”
“That doesn't make sense to me. It's like when you told me that, historically, a lieutenant-general outranks a major-general. Doesn't a Major outrank a Lieutenant? It doesn't make sense.”
“A lot of it is tradition and historical precedence,” Jason said while acknowledging a salute at a security checkpoint held by two ERA enlisted troops while passing by them. “Our force isn't big enough for more than one general anyway. Look, it doesn't matter. I wrote the first draft of ERA's coding rules, ERA's provisional government ratified them, and I say we're allowed to watch a movie together.”
“Oh, a movie? So is this a date?” Megan asked as she walked, relaxing enough to finally smile. She felt no particular romantic attraction to Jason and sensed none in return, but she also felt comfortable and safe enough around him to joke around.
“It's a date, all right, but not with you. That wouldn't be appropriate. But lucky for me,” Lamarr made an attempt as a smooth smirk. “Scrapper's not in my chain of command anymore.”
“Engineering Corps, I know. I take it we're going by the motor pool on the way to the rec room?
“We're almost there already. Do you even look at the layout of the bases we capture anymore?”
“Why bother? We're going to leave this one behind, too.”
“Aye, and in the long run, we'll all be dead. But let's not go there, not tonight.”
“All right.”
Gorkhi-Terelj was like many ERA holdings that came before it: OTA-standardized pre-fabricated modularity, arranged with efficiency in mind while adhering to local geography and the intended purpose of the base. Most of that beautiful sunset view was looking downrange and downhill toward Ulaanbaatar, and it only dawned on Megan at that moment that the artillery was less intended to protect the city and more to shell it to rubble if OTA felt the urge.
Megan shivered. She made the right call in attacking and taking that base first, but it still cost many of Turncoat's riders, trading their lives for many civilians. She knew funeral services were held in the early afternoon for Egger and some other recent losses, but she couldn't make time on her schedule to attend.
She didn't have time to do everything. She barely had time to do anything.
“I'm sorry for asking, but are you keeping up on your Lethesomarol?” Turncoat asked.
“Jason...” Megan slouched and sighed as she passed the next checkpoint, acknowledging the next pair of saluted hands with an informal nod. “That stuff makes me sleepy.”
“You can't just quit that stuff, not all at once. No wonder you can't sleep. I'm going to get you a fresh prescription.”
“No, you're not. I outrank you.”
“WuShiKe Pharmaceuticals is the enemy, sure, but since we're using OTA Tulpa parts, why not use OTA drugs too? The bloody bootlickers left crates full of the stuff.”
“That isn't funny. I'm not myself when I'm on Lethesomarol.”
“Paranoia is a withdrawal symptom too, you know.”
“I'm not paranoid. I just don't like how that stuff makes me feel.”
“I think that's the problem, Megan.” Jason grabbed Megan's arm, firm enough to stop her steps but just gentle enough to avoid a forceful reaction. “You're not feeling much at all. You're getting shell-shocked.”
“But-”
“The riders look up to you, they always have. But you're scaring some of them. You're scaring me.”
“I'm scaring the enemy more. That's why I'm their primary target.”
“Aye, but they'll need a new one if they get you... you're getting sloppy, Screamer.” Turncoat shut his eyes with concentration. Megan knew he was contacting the Medical Corps with his INI through the local network. She could have countermanded his order, but that would probably further build his case that her mental health was getting worse so she reluctantly let him.
“I want a second opinion,” Megan said while pulling her arm away from Turncoat's grip. Up ahead, the doors hummed open and blew in an oily scorched stench from the base's busy motor pool. Centaur-class Tulpas were getting their damaged parts pried off and replacement parts were being put in place with noisy urgency. In the distance past the doors, Kitsune-2 turned her head to look back at Megan from where she stood, locked in place in one of the repair bays past the crawl of human activity across the hangar floor.
“You're getting sloppy, Screamer,” Kitsune-2 said into Megan's mind through the regiment-wide command frequency.
“Traitor,” Megan said, too tired and frustrated for her words to come out in the joking tone she intended.
“Your Tulpa is right, you know,” Turncoat said. “Do I need to bring Huginn and Muninn down here to tell you the same thing?”
“Don't. You. Dare,” Megan wasn't joking that time. Her two most trusted drones were on a long-duration combat air patrol around the new base, and nothing had much of a chance of spotting an OTA Snowy Owl besides another Snowy Owl. By the time next counterattack might have come, Megan wanted them to find out first before it was too late.
Chief Petty Officer Crystal “Scrapper” Gearhart popped her gum from the other side of the entryway, just loud enough for Megan to turn her head and identify her. Megan was gradually getting used to meeting her at eye-level while standing up. Scrapper had gotten the new legs she always wanted and seemed to enjoy them enough that it was hard to remember the last time she could be seen sitting down. Her cybernetic prosthetics were crude but functional, hand-made by the bearer in her spare time from Tulpa salvage too far gone to be put back into a Centaur. Thin exoskeletal braces branched out from the tread-padded feet with second-hand synthetic muscle fibers running up toward the knees, attached to a lightweight harness encircling her waist that blended in with the utility pockets of her uniform coveralls. Behind the numerous ammolite beads that hung off of braided strands of her red-brown hair, one blue-green and one amber-brown eye looked Megan over until the cheeky freckled smile faded from Scrapper's face.
“You know, Dr. Lavi was right,” Scrapper said with her naturally scratchy-raspy voice complemented with a synthesizer in her throat for clarity, with only a small alloy stud visible on the outside of the implant. “Two tails do add more take-off weight and wind-drag. You're burning more fuel.”
“The benefits, so far, seem to outweigh the drawbacks,” Megan replied.
“Before I know it, you're going to ask for a third one,” Scrapper said, while she gazed and nodded at the single ammolite bead that was still tied into the front of Megan's own hair, just like when it was first given to her, as if to confirm she was looking at her old friend and not some shell-shocked imitation. “How many tails is enough, boss?”
“If we find another tail in one of these Rama caches, maybe we can try three and go from there, Chief.”
“Maybe. Speaking of upgrades, I found some fancy high-tech blades in this base. No time to fix up your old ones, so Kitsune-2's going to be trying them out. Just one set, so don't break them too quick. They'll drain some power when they're lit up, but I think you'll like them.”
“Drain power? Lit up?” Megan didn't understand, and judging by Turncoat's expression, neither did he.
Scrapper took a long look at Turncoat before gazing back at Megan. “Listen. I might've brought your Tulpa back from the dead, but you... you look like a zombie. I can't fix that,” Scrapper remarked after popping her gum. “Take a break already.”
“That's why I'm here. I'm on break.” Megan said. “So, did Turncoat actually ask you out or...”
“Well-” Turncoat said, but Scrapper intercepted. “No.”
Megan cracked a smile as she turned to confront Turncoat. “Well, stop spending all your courage out there and do it already.”
“Well...” Turncoat cringed and looked away, scratching at the back of his head. “The base has a little theatre, and...”
“What's playing? What's the movie?” Scrapper asked, before blowing her next bubble.
“Oh, it's a surprise, but I think you'll love it,” Turncoat answered, sounding a lot less shy and interested enough in whatever entertainment OTA left behind for ERA personnel to rally his confidence.
“Cool,” Scrapper said. “I just punched out. Hey, before we go, you wanna see my new hobby?”
“Hobby?” Megan asked, looking along the repair bays as Scrapper stamped along on her bulky prosthetic legs.
Turncoat sighed and shook his head before pushing his glasses closer to his nose bridge. “She's trying to raise the dead. Again.”
“Second and third time's the charm,” Scrapper said, flashing an uneven-toothed grin as she waved an arm out toward a slouching patchwork of scavenged Tulpa parts held together with a tangled mess of spliced synthetic muscle fibers.
“Is that... Bluecap?” Megan asked, recognizing TM-3 Bluecap's telescoping domed head and her ultraviolet-spectrum targeting arrays. Unlike her original configuration, the head was extended off of the left shoulder, with the right shoulder looking empty and uneven in weight distribution.
“That's Bluecap's head, donated posthumously to my new baby,” Scrapper said. “I'm calling him Chimera.”
“Him?” Turncoat asked.
“Yeah, him,” Crystal said with a bead-swinging nod of her head. “Was a coin-toss, considering the donors. Call it a First Nations thing, but I don't want any Tulpa parts to go to waste. As soon as I have the time for it, Chimera's getting another head. TM-4's head, to be exact. I'll put Redcap head... there.” Scrapper pointed up to the empty-socketed right shoulder.
“You never asked me if you could do that,” Jason said.
“You never asked if Redcap was fine with being dead,” Scrapper responded, followed by another pop of her bubblegum. “The head's good, along with a few other pieces here and there that Ravana didn't eat.”
“Maybe you could have asked me,” Turncoat said. “Redcap had my handshake, and if I died, personally, I don't think I would want you to cut off my head and-”
Scrapper reached out and grabbed Turncoat by the back of his neck, leaning in unexpectedly close, causing Turncoat to widen his eyes. She whispered something to him that was too soft to hear through the racket of the surrounding motor pool, but Megan's curiosity was too great to not wonder why Turncoat looked so startled.
Megan dived into Turncoat's relatively-unprotected mind through his INI. The words Scrapper whispered were still bouncing around between his ears: “Bluecap was mine. Redcap was yours. They're like... Chimera's parents. We're making a baby.”
Scrapper let out a sharp cackle as Jason's dark cheeks flushed. A moment later she suddenly stopped laughing, her heterochromatic eyes glaring into Megan's own. “How about minding your own damn business, boss?”
“Was she in my mind again?” Turncoat cringed but his expression quickly turned to annoyance as he glared at Megan. “How many times have I asked you to stop doing that?”
“I'm sorry,” Megan said, her pale face blushing more visibly. She had no excuse that time. She could justify entering the INI-connected minds of ERA's personnel for security reasons when necessary, as well as checking the loyalty of new arrivals from the places they liberated in the search for recruits, but she realized that unjustified peeks into the minds of her comrades ran the risk of hurting the trust she had already established with them.
Scrapper was already halfway to the doors leading back the way Megan and Turncoat came before she thumped her bulky feet and spun around with a swish of her bead-braided hair. “Hey, you ever dive into General Wilde's head? He's kind of taken over your army, boss.”
“He didn't take over my army, Chief,” Megan said, with a firmer tone. “I trusted him with strategic responsibilities it because I'm... too busy. I can't be everywhere.”
“I never quite figured out why you did that,” Turncoat added, as if joining Scrapper in a pincer attack. “Are his strategies that great?”
Megan frowned as she prepared to defend her decision, walking through the doors and back into the twilight-lit corridor of the base connecting one module to the next. “So far, yes, they're great. We couldn't always depend on Olympian arrogance and OTA incompetence to save us. We needed... to go pro.”
“He's a pro, all right,” Turncoat said. “Isn't General Wilde from Fidelis, that private military company that Myrmidon bought out way back when?”
“He was made redundant roughly around the time Cindy... around the time Surgeon-Major Watt was drummed out of the Canadian military,” Megan explained.
“So were a lot of bootlickers that were kicked off the boots and went and found new boots to lick,” Scrapper said, with narrowed eyes, followed by a suspicion-laden chewing motion. 
“He's not a bootlicker,” Megan replied, with tension in her tone. She was not entirely comfortable with the ERA-popular slang term for people that had employment history with OTA military or security corporations.
“I don't let anyone join ERA that doesn't have an INI or a synergy implant or a 'patriot badge' that I can reach,” Megan further explained to Scrapper. She knew that her most important responsibility, after all, was locating OTA personnel who could be trusted to join the ERA cause. “I've prevented a lot of sabotage attempts... and worse... by doing the screenings myself.”
“Indulge my curiosity, then,” Turncoat said, with a lowered voice as he passed the next checkpoint alongside Scrapper. “Since I must pry about your prying... why do you trust General Wilde?”
“He's got something I don't entirely condone, but that I can understand: anger. Hatred. No one can fake that or hide it from me,” Megan said. “He wants to see Mars burn. He wants to see every Olympian dead.”
“Even Ross?” Turncoat asked after an impressed whistle.
“Well...” Megan cracked a smile, trying to downplay just how intense General Wilde's passions were when she dared to peek. “I'm glad Ross is up there, and Wilde's down here.”
“Right. Ross is safe up in space, like every other Olympian,” Scrapper said, rolling her eyes before looking into the dimly-lit room just ahead, filled with folding chairs and a cinema-grade holoprojector at its far end. “So what's playing on the HP?”
Turncoat grinned ear-to-ear with a tight dimpling on his cheeks, as if he was about to explode in excitement. “I can't tell you yet; I'd ruin the surprise. Let the other riders take their seats first.”
Megan found a place in the front row. The smacking and chewing sounds from Scrapper continued to bother her in the relative silence, so she moved one seat down and Turncoat filled it while Scrapper clicked out her annoyance. Numerous riders from other companies of her regiment were quickly filling the other seats. She was slightly relieved that she had professional distance enough from the rest of them to not have to apologize for missing a few funerals for their absent friends.
“Colonel,” said a voice that was slightly familiar to her. She had heard his voice before during the fighting leading up to the capture of Gorkhi-Terelj, though he was spoken to more than heard from.
“Captain,” Megan said, identifying Captain Novikov's name tape alongside new rank pins on his collar and jacket. He had received a field promotion. He was in Second Regiment, so that was not her call to make.
“Permission to sit here?” Novikov asked, smiling, trying and failing to hide signs of anxiety.
“Granted,” Megan said, trying to let the awkward moment pass by quickly. He sat next to her, on the opposite side from Turncoat and Scrapper.
“You were amazing out there,” Novikov whispered as the room's lighting darkened. “You saved my life again... Screamer.”
“I just wish more of you made it back... Sunrise,” Megan said, using his call sign because he used hers.
“Don't be so hard on yourself. We're all in this together-” Sunrise said, but hushing sounds from the surrounding audience shut him up.
Booming bass rattled the floor and reverberated through Megan's folding chair. The movie was starting, and it was no exception to typical Myrmidon-standard sensation gimmicks. Above all else, OTA-subsidized entertainment emphasized spectacle and stimulation and did its best to banish even the risk of provoking thought. The vertislums of Halifax had “movie nights” where everyone could gaze up and watch public broadcasts, courtesy of Olympian generosity.
Megan had hated most of those Nova Scotian “movie nights” because she couldn't relate to anyone in those stories. Almost all of them featured protagonists that were temporarily poor and disadvantaged but were actually destined to riches and greatness because of some mysterious inheritance or other stroke of predetermined destiny. A few were presented as poor, but had unique inherited talents that were so absurdly exceptional that Olympians themselves elevated them to apotheosis after some great quest was completed. The quests usually involved killing terrorists of some kind.
Megan only turned her attention to the HP's glow because she recognized one of the stars.
“Kitsune!” Megan exclaimed out loud as she saw her original-run TM-2 soar over a burning pile of demolished drones, with a fly-by close enough to scatter the top of the heap. 
The debris sprinkled down after Kitsune's fly-by, and the camera view followed after it, revealing piles of bones and tatters of OTA contractor uniform scraps flapping like banners in the smoky wind.
“Oh come on,” Jason said out loud, but was hushed with a loud hiss... from his date.
A grim and genocidal one-sided battle ensued. The Tulpas were killing machines, destroying drones as if in afterthought, but they had a particular interest in gunning down human operators and fleeing civilians alike. The propaganda value was obvious. The cinematography was lowest-bidder and it showed. By contrast, the Nautilus could produce and present real-time simulations, more visually impressive and true-to-life, but because of the crushing poverty that so many of the Tulpa riders experienced before joining ERA and the fact that few had ever seen better action outside of an actual battle, no one around seemed eager to complain.
Kitsune craned her neck and glared back at the audience. Inexplicably, and without warning, her head split open just beneath the eye to reveal a gnashing maw of teeth, and with a metallic scream and a lunge for the camera view, half of the audience jumped as things blacked out.
Megan didn't stir. The real Ravana was scarier than that cheap HP mockery of Kitsune could ever be. Her attention drifted into memories of Ravana until Sunrise put his hand over hers. He lifted that hand away after her own balled into a fist.
“It's all right,” Sunrise said, while Megan tightened her jaw and tried to ignore him.
With another boom, blocky rusty letters spun out from the void and slammed into the forward view, spelling out “Tulpa Uprising.”
After a growl of rattling bass that preceded a fade into darkness, a silence stilled the theatre, until some shifting around, a cough, then Scrapper's chewing from two seats away filled the void.
Then, a gravelly masculine narrative voice began to speak from the holoprojector.
“Earth, cradle of humanity. This was once a blue planet teeming with life, but because of the selfishness and short-sightedness of the humans that lived there, the oceans were choked in plastic waste. The skies were scorched with carbon pollution. The soil was depleted in an attempt to feed an ever-growing and insatiable population.”
Megan noted the cleverness of the narration: no lies were being told, not directly. The OTA propaganda was only redirecting blame, implying that the ruination of the Earth was every individual consumer's burden of guilt, absolving the ruling class of any responsibility. 
Next came uplifting music and a painfully-bright shine of sunlight reflecting off of a fleet of colonial transports escaping the Earth. The camera view soared and darted from craft to craft, until focusing on the serene gaze of an unidentified man in a black turtleneck sweater gazing out from one of the vessels' viewports, finger and thumb to his chin while gazing back at the planet he was leaving behind. 
“Some humans foresaw the end of the Earth. They did their best to put off the inevitable, but knew that they would have to... start anew.”
The Olympian-to-be had a maudlin glisten of tears in his eyes, but then he turned away and instead looked ahead, his face suddenly dry of tears and with a visionary gesture forward, motioning as if steering a longship of antiquity toward the starry horizon.
“They would have to leave the cradle. They would have to cast off old ideas and old limitations,” the voiceover continued. 
Crystal clicked her tongue loudly. No one dared to hush her.
“The best and brightest scions of old humanity made a new home on Mars. At the Olympus Colony, away from the tyranny of failing governments and the danger of the irrational masses, they could create and innovate unhindered. They worked wonders and strove tirelessly to better themselves, setting aside human limitations to become... something new. This transformation was necessary for them to outlast the Earth. Perhaps someday, those ascended humans, those... Olympians, would return to save those left behind.”
“I don't know what's harder to believe: Olympians saving anyone, or them coming back to Earth,” Crystal said as the projection darkened once again to pretentious silence. She received only noncommittal hushing from the rest of the audience. “When's the uprising? I wanna see who's playing me.”
A movement caught her eye and Megan looked past Novikov to the side door of the crowded little theatre. She saw a familiar tall and powerfully-built woman that stood with her head tilted to fit just under the doorway. The gene-sculpted giantess had her red-brown hair bundled into a tight bun that was suspended just over the collar of her ERA Medical Corps uniform, carrying the rank pins of a Surgeon-Major. As Megan made contact with her warm hazel eyes, that woman's expression and body language became welcoming but insistent.
“I called Cindy. I'm sorry,” Jason said, with a whisper that passed under shushing range. “We can't help you, but she can.”
“I'm going to miss the movie,” Megan hissed back, getting shushed as a rumble rattled through the floor. She had her head turned away, deciding not to tease herself with any more of the movie she was about to miss as she got up and walked past the rest of the audience, casting her shadow over them as she went. For some reason, accompanied by a fairly-accurate imitation of the sound of Tulpa-grade thrusters screeching at full burn, the HP's glow presented something that got her fellow riders laughing, applauding, cheering, and whistling loud enough to make Megan flinch.
She resisted the chance to look back to see what she was missing as she walked with Cindy out of the theatre. As she went, she left a small mental note in her INI's day planner to ask about it later.
“I'm sorry you're missing the movie,” Cindy said while extending a hand behind Megan's back, urging her to walk a little faster. The narrators voice returned, saying something behind her with pomp and circumstance fit for a ghost story, but Megan let the wall-muffled words go unfiltered and unprocessed by her cybernetics.
“I wanted to know what OTA thought about us...” Megan said as she looked up to Cindy.
“Why should you care what the bootlickers think about you?” Cindy said with a shake of her head as she walked. “I know you better than that, Megan. You worry too much about what your enemies think about you. It's just propaganda...”
“Propaganda isn't always a lie, Cindy,” Megan said as she reached the next door down the hall before Cindy did. Her olfactory augmentations picked up the scent of the Surgeon-Major's telltale incense. The Surgeon-Major must have only just started the playback of her old well-remembered Gregorian monk chants because it was only just finishing track 1 and moving on to track 2.
Cindy lifted a small device with a screen on it that looked like it was lifted from Dr. Lavi's cybernetics suite on board the starship Nautilus. The Surgeon-Major had disembarked from that orbiting refuge not long after the Battle of Norilsk and it looked like she brought more down with her than candles and incense.
“I've been putting this off for a while now, Megan, but I would like you to plug this into your INI,” Cindy asked.
Megan took the far end of the connector. The moment she plugged the cord into the base of her skull, she felt her implants rise to meet the detected intrusion. The device was indeed from Nautilus, but its security codes were a few updates behind.
Megan overrode her own defenses. She trusted Cindy more than anyone. There had to be a therapeutic reason for that device, she decided, as she wondered about the peculiar function of that little screen.
Megan saw blurry images of her own mind's eye interpreted and presented on the screen. Through the screen, she saw herself looking at that screen, the corner of the desk it was set upon, and Cindy gazing back from behind it, but all of it was presented in a dream-like way.
In previous therapy sessions, Megan had visualized, for her own amusement during Cindy's guided-meditation exercises, that the Gregorian monks she heard from recorded chants were actually in the office, crouched behind the furniture or hiding under the floor. On the screen, to Megan's astonishment, there they were, huddled and hiding with comical clumsiness while singing away.
“This is a dangerous device,” Cindy said. “I shouldn't even have it, truth be told, but you admitted it to me yourself during your last appointment with me: something changed you since you swam out of Kitsune. Ever since you pulled yourself ashore of Lake Sita...”
“No, I don't want to go back there,” Megan said, hearing the fear in her own voice. She refused to look at the screen, not wanting to see Ravana, not again.
“Then we won't. This is a voluntary session, after all,” Cindy said. “But if you keep refusing treatment, if you keep wasting away without sleep, Megan Evita Schmidt, I reserve the right to relieve you of duty.”
“ERA needs me. What do I have to do to stay on duty?”
“You're a kind young woman with a big heart, but the more you fight, the less you sleep, the more defenses you put up-”
“What do you want me to do, Cindy?” Megan said with gritted teeth and a clenched fist. She trusted Cindy, but even Cindy was starting to test her trust.
“You told me about those nightmares that you've been having before,” Cindy said, with her voice softer and smoother, as if she knew just how close Megan was to walking out of the room. “You don't want to go back to Lake Sita, so how about we go back to those nightmares instead?”
“Fine. Anything but Lake Sita... anything but Ravana,” Megan said.
Cindy nodded. “You often asked me why you kept dreaming of that bus. You asked me what it meant. You asked why you heard crying. Loud crying...”
Megan didn't want to go back there, but she preferred it to going back to Lake Sita, to Ravana. She had to stop thinking of that Preta-infested thing that destroyed her first Tulpa squad, tore her first Tulpa to ribbons, nearly drowned her as the icy lake water flooded in.
“Megan, concentrate, please,” Cindy said. “We're not going to Lake Sita. We're going back to that bus. We hear crying. Why do we hear crying? Are you crying?”
“No,” Megan said, but even as she said that, she felt her heart racing, unprompted, as her INI tried to stabilize her vitals. She overrode the implant to let her emotions flow more naturally. She kept her eyes shut. She didn't need to look at the screen to see into her own mind's eye. “I'm not crying. But there is crying. A little baby is crying...”
“How little? Do you know the baby?” Cindy asked.
“Yes,” Megan said. She didn't want to go there, didn't want to reach in that far, but Cindy brought her there and insisted on staying.
“With this device, through your INI, I can see what you're remembering, but I can't hear the crying. Describe the crying for me, please. What else do you hear?”
“Shouting. 'On the ground! On the ground now!'” Megan shouted, imitating the garbled shouting through gas masks. Her own eyes burned, she remembered. The inside of her nose burned. Her throat burned. No matter how much it hurt the inside of her chest, no matter how little breath she had, she screamed out.
“Mom!” Megan added with strain in her voice. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!”
“Why were you sorry, Megan?” Cindy asked. “What did you have to be sorry about?”
Megan's heart raced as memory mixed with INI-intertwined sensations in the present moment. Her eyes burned with the sting of tears, but they also burned from something else, from something that was hissing through the seats of the bus. The seats had crawl-spaces beneath, and like she used to do with other kids in the camp, she went hiding. It wasn't fun hiding that time. That time, she was alone. She couldn't breathe.
“Do you remember why you were sorry?” Cindy asked.
“No!” Megan shouted back, finding herself angry at the question and not knowing why.
“What happened next?”
“Popping sounds. Pop pop pop pop.” There were sparks and light flooding in from the night outside, as if the moon was turned sideways. Pieces of metal rang under the seats, ripping the underside of the cushions. Sizzling slivers burned her forearms. Her eyes burned but she didn't want to rub the burning any more into her eyes no matter how it hurt.
“Gunfire,” Cindy clarified. “You heard gunfire. Someone was shooting through that bus. What happened after?”
“Dad... Dad warned me to be very quiet if I heard 'the cat' outside. He taught me to 'play mousy' when 'the cat' came back.”
“'Mousy'?”
“Play 'mousy'. Find the hole. Hide from the cat. The cat was coming. The cat...”
“Did the cat say anything?”
“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” Megan shouted out in fear and anger, imitating the mask-garbled demands that came the same direction as the bullets. “The crying won't stop.”
“You were crying?”
“No... but he was crying. I wished he would stop, but he didn't know how to 'play mousy'. He was too young... 'the cat' came in. 'The cat' took him away.”
“Who did 'the cat' take away?” Cindy asked.



Chapter 5

	“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
	Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
	A savage place! as holy and enchanted
	As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
	By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

	-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Joey followed Mara Shah off of the helipad and walked along the inner facade of the palace. There were dozens of niches decorating the white marble walls, each encrusted with its own unique mosaic of gemstones, portraying lotus, hibiscus, jasmine, and oleander arrangements alongside elephants, tigers, peacocks, dancing devas, and more. He was careful to avoid stepping on any of the flowers lining the path.
“Tread lightly here,” Mara Shah said. “These are the gardens of my delight.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, while looking through the next narrow gap between mosaics and through the facade. The northeastern side of New Lakhnau was a glass and steel forest of glittering skyscrapers that lit up the Himalayas behind them. There was a red-brown haze halfway down the height of those scores of buildings, looking thick enough to walk on, but Joey knew that it was quite a long drop through the haze toward ground level.
“I am a very busy woman, Joey. Stop gawking like a child, and keep up with me,” Mara Shah commanded. Joey stuffed his hands in his uniform jacket pockets and kept his eyes forward instead, resisting the temptation to stare down at the rhythmic sway of the Olympian's hips and rear as she walked. Every time he had seen her since he first saw her in Norilsk, she wore a different outfit, and this time she wore widow-white pleated gharara trousers with a matching kurta shirt and thin dupatta veil that flickered like spider webbing as it caught the whipped wind radiating from the landed helicopter. The embroidery was intricate and sophisticated, but Joey didn't dare walk closer to try to make sense of the untold tale woven into the meters of brocade, kimkhwāb, and silk she wore. 
“You named your Tulpa, so I have heard. Tengu, was it?” Mara Shah asked, dispassionately. “It seems that you've picked up some of ERA's superstitions.”
Joey followed in silence. He wanted to blame Gabriel for giving him the idea and felt ashamed for going along with it, but the handshake was made and Beta-1 became Tengu.
“Do you talk to your friend, Tengu, too?”
“Only for mission purposes,” Joey replied.
He looked past her toward the pair of shiny black-armored and gold-lined Rakshasa-class Tulpas, much like the models that were piloted by the rest of Beta Squad. The Rakshasas stood with weapons out, but in a formal way like ancient honor guards standing to each side of the steps leading up to the manor doors. The sensors on their heads were deliberately sculpted to bear an almost beast-like countenance. There was an artful asymmetry to the chassis design, with a single high-capacity RA-4H high-caliber autocannon held in one arm and a long-bladed polearm attached to the shoulder guard. The opposite side was counterbalanced with a heavy munitions mount on the shoulder and the arm on that side bulked up with an extendable shield and a signal-boosting suite of additional countermeasure equipment. His INI tried to identify the unit they belonged to, but his inquiry was denied. 
“Don't stare at my guards,” Mara Shah warned. “Unlike your Tengu, those Rakshasas are not your friends. Do not do anything... erratic. That might provoke them.”
Joey had recently believed he had a unique place in Rama's military presence on Earth. He was a squad leader, but he had yet to actually lead a squad outside of simulations.
“Is something troubling you, Joey?” Mara Shah asked, without looking back. She had so much beauty around her but she seemed bored and disinterested with it all.
“I want to know what ERA wants. Why do they fight?” Joey knew the answer to his own question, but wasn't yet sure if Mara Shah knew that during his asking.
“Ah,” Mara Shah waited for the massive doors to open for her, and as she did, she turned her head and raised her chin as she gazed back, making Joey feel a little smaller. “May the answer to your question soothe your troubled mind. The Earth Restoration Alliance has a noble goal, but a misguided one.”
The doors opened. There were delegates, petitioners, and supplicants waiting inside, some dressed in business suits and others dressed as if tending to a Raja's royal court. They were clustered in a half-circle around the opening doors, none daring to speak first.
“Their goal is to save Earth from Martian excess,” Mara Shah said as she continued her forward advance, giving the waiting crowd of OTA and Rama subordinates a dismissive flick of her hand. It was enough to scatter them across the vast and intricate mosaic floor like a school of fish evading a shark. She continued the conversation with Joey even as she sounded bored with it. “What they want is admirable. The way they want it is impossible.”
“It is impossible for Earth to survive without Mars?” Joey asked. It was a common presumption among most Earth denizens that the planet would collapse entirely without the ongoing care and innovations from distant Mars.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, Joey,” Mara Shah said while striding across the opulently-decorated floor of the reception hall. It was wide enough and tall enough to be a Tulpa hangar. “Earth cannot survive with Mars, not with the growth-at-all-costs priorities that drive Olympus Colony.”
“But you said what ERA wants is impossible...”
“It is. ERA cannot break the interplanetary supply chain. ERA can delay, or reduce, but cannot stop the draining of Earth's resources. There is a limit to what asymmetrical warfare can accomplish.”
Joey nodded, remembering some old suspicions he had held, hearing them confirmed as he walked. “During my training, I studied after-action reports of eco-terrorist attacks from Nova Scotia to Norilsk. ERA is logistically, strategically, and tactically outmatched. Even a token security force guarding a RevNoo... guarding a Revolution Nootropics facility... should stand a good chance to repel them, yet-”
“Rama Aerospace could crush ERA tomorrow, Joey. There is a reason that I allow ERA to exist,” Mara Shah said as she turned and glanced at her own reflection from jewel-encrusted hand mirrors held to each side of her from a formation of silk-trailing retainer girls who had surrounded her. “They are allowed to continue existing because they are a boon to arms sales and maintain our place as the market leader in defense technologies.” After a subtle gesture of approval, the girls left her side just as quickly, disappearing behind the sound-masking drapes that divided the inner courtyard from the lonely austerity of the gold-and-marble main hall. “You are a soldier, not a strategist. Remember that.”
“Why do you allow ERA to exist?”
“I thought you would understand by now with what I have already told you, applied to what you should already know. I believed you might have been mature enough, wise enough, to now understand how the world works. Does the truth, so far, trouble you?”
“A little,” Joey said, lying again. He was hiding the real questions that he did not dare ask. In truth, he didn't actually care why ERA did what it did. ERA was a bunch of Earth-worshipping primitive fanatics that were afraid of innovation and technology, yet in their hypocrisy, they used technology stolen from Rama to fight. Mara Shah said that Mars was killing the Earth, but he didn't know what the alternative to Martian governance was. It certainly wasn't ERA control of the planet.
“Joey,” Mara Shah said, looking back as she waited for the next pair of doors to drift open, silently releasing a flurry of blossoms and pollen that caught in Joey's hair and tickled his nose. “I want your loyalty. That is all. Keep your eyes forward and remember your purpose. You are an actor upon a world stage, and your purpose is to follow the script and play your part. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“Gabriel is more than an actor to you,” Joey said, clenching his jaw a bit. “He knows more than his own script, that's for sure.”
“Oh, Joey,” Mara Shah said, not with dismissal, but with a curious sort of warmth in her voice. She beckoned with the long painted nails of her fingers, signaling her permission to let him enter the waking dream that grew over and around her. “You just said the beginning of the real questions you want to ask. Gabriel is a true and loyal friend. He is very close to me and I am quite fond of him, but not in the way you fear.” Tropical birds sang and called to one another, gazing down from the branches of leaf-heavy trees under the golden glare of artificial sunlight. Tigers, supposedly extinct for a century, reclined upon little cliffs overlooking a misty waterfall and the bubbling lily-filled stream beneath. One tiger yawned at Joey while another got up and walked into the ferns and vines, flanking the intruder with gem-like eyes staring out from the shadows.
“Is anyone... closer... than that?” Joey asked, feeling just stubborn enough to press his luck. With a flick of a wrist, Mara Shah banished all remaining OTA and Rama visitors away entirely. Such was her power. With little more than such a gesture, she had tamed the murderous Ravana prototype in lurking beneath Norilsk. With patience and planning matching that subtlety, she had also seized the keys to her father-in-law's kingdom. With a single command, she had Joey execute the last vestige of Baba Shah. The power that she so effortlessly wielded made his stomach churn with excitement and fear. 
Mara Shah gave the most frightening response that Joey could have imagined to that question. She smiled. Her smile was full and vibrant as she stretched her arms outward, as if beckoning Joey forward again, over a tributary of the misty stream. That stalking tiger emerged again, only to stride behind the Olympian, leaning into her petting fingers, setting down upon its belly so she could sit upon its back. When seated, she finally spoke. “I would have thought you would know that answer already, silly boy.”
Joey choked on his breath. He hid nothing. He could hide nothing. She knew everything.
Do not be ashamed of your desires, Joey,” Mara Shah said. “Life is a dance of desire, and I know you desire me.”
“Yes,” Joey said. His face was on fire. He had previously assumed his boss was Baba Shah until Mara Shah made her move and filled the power vacuum, securing her position over her vanquished predecessor with a single stroke from Tengu's blade. He should have feared Mara Shah as much as her court petitioners and corporate underlings did, but his excitement intensified instead.
“I pursue pleasure above all other concerns,” Mara Shah laughed like a songbird. “Here, in my garden of plenty, my every wish is granted.”
“Here, you wanted me,” Joey said with a racing heart. His entire body was aroused, his instincts ignited. All Mara had to do now was utter a single word of permission and Joey would pounce on her like a beast. He would tear her fine clothes to radiant ribbons. At long last, he would touch, taste, and know all the pleasures of her timeless divine body.
She said no such word of permission. Her hand was outstretched to him in a gesture of denial, but her expression was not cruel. She looked, somehow, sad. Her sadness finally matched the whites of her grieving weaves.
“Joey... you must not know me. And I must not know you,” Mara Shah said.
“Why not?” Joey grimaced, his heart still racing. One of the resting tigers growled at him. If he tore into her, they would tear into him, and they would rip much more than his clothes.
“I will teach you. Bring me a flower from my garden. Find me the brightest and most beautiful flower.”
Joey did as she commanded. He roamed among the resting tigers until he made his choice. He reached with his gloved fingers and plucked a bright and beautiful flower from a breeze-rustled shrub, taking it along with some of the golden stem and leaves beneath.
“Nerium oleander,” Mara Shah said as she gazed at Joey's offering. The tiger turned its head and chuffed contently, but the Olympian extended her hand, denying the flower the same way she denied the boy that brought it to her. “Well chosen, and an appropriate specimen in particular. This flower is so much like you, Joey,” her tone was warm, but ended again in sadness.
Joey dropped to his knees upon the soft moist earth without being asked. He held the flower close to his chest, feeling tightness in his fingers as he clenched his jaw. He met her eyes once again. He wished to know why she rejected his offering, while saying it was also well-chosen. Did she mean it was well chosen for what she was trying to teach him?
“A beautiful but poisonous flower,” Mara Shah said. “You picked it from a tragic place. Those golden leaves and stem? Scorched. Dying. You plucked that flower from a shrub infected with Xylella fastidiosa.”
“Why?” Joey asked, not making eye contact. “Why have a sick plant in your garden of plenty?”
“Why, indeed? Why are withering and sick humans still upon the Earth? Why is the Earth withering and sick? Like you, the flower you picked seems bright and pretty, but it was sick before you picked it. You are at your biological peak, but already in the early stages of mortal decay.”
Joey shivered. His arousal was gone, replaced with awareness of every ache, every itch, every flaw in his adolescent body. He would only get older and sicker. He would never be as healthy or as young as he was in the passing present moment. He was aging, decaying with each and every beat of his mortal heart.
“If I made love to you, if I loved you, I would grieve, because that your life is infinitesimally short compared to my own eternity. I would watch as every blemish and every wrinkle charted the ongoing path to your grave. But there is another flower...”
Joey felt sickly already, but he focused on Mara Shah's words. What did she mean?
Mara Shah glided her hands over the tiger she sat upon. The tiger stretched, rose, and brought her to the pond beneath the misty falls. Soon after, she returned, still atop her tiger, now holding a cup-like blossom in her hands. The tiger yawned and resettled upon the soft vibrant earth. Mara Shah remained upon her resting beast as she presented the second flower.
“Nelumbo nucifera. Sacred Lotus. You may yet become like this flower. It rose from the pond, from mud and slime, from ugliness. It persists. It can outlast drought and flourish when the rains return. It can live over a thousand years... and with modern technology, it can live forever.”
Joey held onto the withered-stemmed oleander, but he found himself longing for the lotus.
“That dying shrub will be pruned in time,” Mara Shah said, gazing upon Joey's dying offering. “This lotus will remain in my care, long after those bothersome guests outside my garden are dust, dead and gone. Do you understand, Joey?”
“How do I become like the lotus? How do I become... Immortal?”
“Let go of that poisonous dying flower,” Mara Shah commanded, and Joey obeyed. She watched it fall before she continued. “Know patience in the drought and await the rain.”
“But I am dying. You said so yourself. I am mortal, and I am already decaying. The longer I have to wait, the older I get.”
Mara Shah smiled again. “Indeed. But as I selected this lotus, I select those that deserve to accompany me into eternity.”
“I will do anything to live forever. I will do anything to be with you, forever.”
Mara Shah smiled brighter and more beautifully than the glow of sunlight. She rose to her feet, trampling the oleander beneath her heel. As she stood over Joey, she extended her delicate, jewelry-laden hand.
“Tomorrow morning, you will hunt for a worthy offering to me. You will bring me the head of the ERA terrorist leader, Colonel Schmidt.”
Chapter 1

	“In this world, the relationship between the virtuous is more important than a relationship resulting from birth.” 
	-Drona Parva 

Joey was going to work. He ran fast enough for the damp polluted wind to billow out his uniform jacket while he pushed his neurosuit-clad hand and arm through one of its sleeves. He did not yet know why there were a pair of alloy-ringed holes that went through its lining and out its back, but at the moment, all they did was make eerie whistling sounds which put him on edge.
His Intuitive-Neural Interface responded to his quickening breaths and rising heart rate by sharpening his senses to battle-readiness.
He scanned over each Olympian Trade Authority wage-warrior that saluted him while he ran past. Their goggles and masks made them all look the same, but he didn't need or want to see their faces anyway. The heads-up display in his optic implants confirmed that all of the corporate cannon fodder present were registered and fully compliant with Rama's local synergy network. The network's predictive algorithms were designed to detect traitors, sometimes before the would-be traitors were aware of their own wavering loyalty.
His audio discriminators checked for the tell-tale hum of the enemy's low-tech spy drones, but for the moment none were found. The enemy used stolen technology, much of it appropriated from his own employer.
His olfactory implants sifted through the persistent chemical stench for signs of unaccounted-for life forms, such as eco-terrorists or other vermin. The toxic byproducts of the Norilsk Industrial Zone flowed outward along the jelly-thick Yenisey River toward the lifeless Kara Sea. The chemicals causing the stench halved the life expectancies of the laborers there under the best conditions, but he wondered if some unseen horrors survived and thrived just out of sight.
He decided, in spite of his anxiety and his runaway imagination, that there was no real threat. The toxic stench around him put his implanted filters to the test, but he shut his eyes and visualized that he was instead walking amid the falling blossoms of cherry trees, like the ones that lined Yoshino's parade grounds. His INI responded to his desire for calm by slowing his breathing and heartbeat while he pushed his second hand through his jacket's remaining sleeve.
There was no immediate sign of the so-called Earth Restoration Alliance, but he couldn't banish his anxiety during his first day of real work at his new job. His body and mind were an expensive investment, trained for weeks with no expenses spared, and returns were expected from that investment. So many others, including Amerats like himself, washed out. Unlike those failures, he had earned his place among new warrior-elite and he would not dare disappoint his employer now.
“Jai Shri Ram, Dove!” a sharply-uniformed but maskless man called out, hailing Joey with enthusiastic adherence to Rama Aerospace corporate protocol. The greeting could be translated, roughly, as “Glory to Rama,” commonly used with business people and military-security personnel alike.
Joey's artificial state of calm was challenged by that greeting. His systems returned to battle-readiness, unnecessarily, entirely because of how he felt about the man. His INI made positive identification, flashing the man's full rank and designation in the Rama corporate hierarchy, but Joey only had to hear his voice to recognize him. Praetorian-Elect Gabriel Maxton was annoying, but he was not a threat. 
Joey exhaled through his gritted teeth as he stuffed his hands in his jacket's pockets and walked faster. He didn't have time for Gabriel's predictably-patriotic pleasantries. 
“Don't be like that, Dove,” Gabriel said as he caught up with Joey's steps. “Don't you want to, you know, get in good with the boss?” He mockingly returned some of the salutes Joey was continuing to get as he followed alongside.
“We stand upon a rogue nation. This is a combat zone,” Joey said. “This is my jurisdiction, Mister Maxton.” 
“Fine, you win, sir,” Gabriel said. “Ah, there it is, that wide cheeky smile of yours. Glad to be of service, sir.”
Joey's smile appeared before he realized it was there, but he let it persist. Militarily speaking, in an OTA-designated war zone, even a newly-minted junior officer held authority over Gabriel, no matter how close the Praetorian-Elect was to the boss.
He kept his eyes fixed forward toward the ruins of Rama's former corporate headquarters. Once-pristine gardens near the front steps were long trampled and left to seed by invading ERA forces. For all of their ruinous rebellion, there was still a nice hilltop view of nearby Lake Sita, one of Earth's last remaining freshwater reservoirs. The beauty was stained by his awareness of just how remarkably close the reservoir was to the incalculably-polluted runoff downstream of the Yenisey. He was told not to look out the helicopter's window on the way to the mission zone. He should have listened.
“You must be so excited. Beta Squad is your first real command, isn't it, Dove?” Gabriel asked.
Joey nodded, trying to hide his irritation. He had never liked his call sign. At some point in his training, everyone from Olympian overseers watching from Mars to the lowliest menial base personnel started calling him “Dove.”
The most obvious explanation that Joey could come up with was the presence of the eponymous image of such a bird, extinct on Earth but said to flourish in Martian aviaries, on the mission patch of his uniform jacket. On that patch, it carried an ornate kylix drinking vessel in its talons. Above its feathered wingspan was a light shining between bordering columns, like a light from Olympus itself, framing the numerology and lettering of Beta-1, signifying his leadership position in the squad he had trained to command. 
The singular numeral was an unintentional reminder of his isolation after being accepted into Rama's Tulpa program. For the entirety of his training, he was isolated, often didn't even know where exactly he was, and his only human contact was with instructors.
Joey was aware that the rest of his squad trained away from him but were prepared to follow his orders as a newly-minted squad leader, but because of some unprecedented failure in the OTA command structure, his own helicopter was late to finally meet them. 
If anyone in the mission zone knew why, it would be Gabriel, but even he, apparently, didn't know the reason for the delay. Or worse, if he knew why, he was deliberately hiding that knowledge.
Was Joey experiencing some sort of elaborate and secretive post-graduation test during his first day in service to Rama? He could only wonder.
Joey kept walking. He was late, but he might have lost some of his hard-won dignity and respect if the boss caught him running up the steps of the old corporate headquarters. Besides, by the looks of things, his Tulpa was not yet on site.
Gabriel followed quietly behind Joey until Joey was at the weather-beaten entryway of the old headquarters. The doors had long since been battered down, leaving the reception desk and the chandelier-like elegance of the central lobby to ruin by way of corrosive air. Looters may have come after ERA left, but the stains here and there, picked up by his augmented vision, were probably fresh blood at the time ERA's pet cyborg sadistically massacred the office staff.
“You're under orders, sir, but so am I,” Gabriel said, as he threw his arm out and interposed himself in front of the door-less doorway. “Your fun doesn't start until your Tulpa is dropped off. Why didn't you come in the fun way, by the way? You know, in a drop-pod?”
Joey had landed within the combat zone from a standard-issue Hummingbird, probably the same model that transported the wage-warriors that were already on site, but he knew that he was no ordinary soldier. The helicopter pilot had the audacity to make small talk, such as warning him not to look out of the window during the flight over the Norilsk Industrial Zone. Such unprofessional behavior was dangerously close to insubordination, but he allowed it, if only because he felt lonely and didn't dare admit it.
Joey was one of Rama's warrior elite, one of the chosen and specially-trained operators of the latest generation of semi-autonomous combat walkers commonly known as Tulpas. He was capable of remotely operating such war machines, but when battlefield conditions called for it, he could also serve as a directly-connected pilot, using his own unique brain structure as an encryption and decryption basis for countering enemy electronic warfare. 
The word “Tulpa” was always strange to Joey, sounding mystical, but considering that the enemy stole earlier versions of the same technology, he knew it was a common and expected corporate practice to seize the ideological momentum away from a rival, in much the same way that Revolution Nootropics appropriated the very concept of rebellion away from potential rebels, turning the concept into nothing more than drinking a proprietary beverage. That drink's nickname, “RevNoo,” was commonly said by employees and loyal consumers of its competitors, deliberately chosen because of how closely that sounded to “revenue.” Revolution only cared about profit. By contrast, Rama had grander, more transcendent goals in addition to mere profit motives.
“My assigned Tulpa was only recently built, up in Beinn Breagh,” Joey said, deciding to respond to Gabriel because ignoring him didn't make him go away. He wished he had a chilled can of RevNoo Praxis Punch in his jacket, but he drank his last one during the flight. He avoided eye contact with Gabriel, taking his hand out of his pocket to clarify the direction of the orbital factory with his thumb raised past his shoulder. “I was brought straight here after my graduation ceremony in Yoshino...”
“Hey, Dove... Joey... sir,” Gabriel said, with increasing irreverence with each address. “Look at me.”
Joey gave in. He raised his eyes to see what he expected to see. Gabriel was, as always, a handsome, smoothly-shaven and freckle-speckled man with windswept curly coppery hair and deceptively kind-looking green eyes. His paramilitary imitation of an OTA service uniform tightly fit over his gym-sculpted body.
“One of us is out of uniform code, and it isn't me,” Gabriel said.
“I don't see how that's relevant to the mission-” Joey jumped with surprise as Gabriel reached out and pinched over Joey's chin.
“Fuzzy as a peach, Joey.”
Joey swung an arm at Gabriel to make him let go. “OTA officers are allowed to grow beards-”
Gabriel rubbed his own chin while he shook his head. “That isn't a beard. That's peach-fuzz.”
“How exactly am I supposed to grow a beard if the in-between is out of code?”
“Your problem, Dove, not mine. Don't worry, I got your back.” Gabriel reached into his jacket pocket and threw a small object that Joey caught, if only out of self-defense reflex. It was a small platinum-cased trimmer.
“How am I supposed to show I'm not just some pitiable Amerat from a charity boarding school if-”
Gabriel pushed a finger to Joey's lip to hush him. “The boss is inspecting the site, right now. If you're seen like this, you're screwed. Copy that, soldier?” 
“... Copy,” Joey said with a sigh. The trimmer's tiny motor hummed as he surrendered his attempt at a beard, letting the shavings flutter away on the corrosive breeze. He pocketed the trimmer afterward, turning to look over the abandoned ruins of the Norilsk Industrial Zone down the hill.
“You should have known I'd want my trimmer back,” Gabriel said from behind. Joey reached into his pocket to give it back, but then realized his pocket was already empty.
“Stop doing that,” Joey said with gritted teeth. “Who are you trying to impress here?”
Gabriel said nothing but whistled into the wind, rocking on the heels and toes of his boots in a way that Joey's audio implants picked up but couldn't quite filter away.
“Ah, there's your Tulpa, coming this way,” Gabriel said, pointing out into the polluted murk.
“Are your implants sharper than mine?” Joey asked. “I don't sense anything.”
“This war zone may be your jurisdiction, Dove, but the flow of information is mine. TN-1 needed to get here without the enemy... or any of our friendly OTA competitors... knowing when or where. The rest of your squad's been assigned combat air patrol in the meantime.”
“Why-”
“Your Tulpa is still waiting for your handshake. All it would take is a few well-hidden ERA terrorists, waiting in ambush, to take it out without a fight. Because of that, I decided a low-flying Hummingbird haul, along a heavily-patrolled flight path, was called for.”
“You're the intelligence expert here. Are you saying you're not sure if this area is fully abandoned?”
“I'm saying that we can never be too careful, Dove. You're going in alone, because the rest of us have to worry about, you know, externalities.”
“But why-”
“Why, why, why? Because the boss says so. She enjoys a good rite of passage, you know.”
“She?” Joey didn't expect to hear that. He knew that Rama's founder and CEO, Baba Shah, was notorious for micromanaging his company to the point of ensuring that women were nowhere in Rama's management tiers. One of Joey's instructors, after class, had told a story about a brief but ugly power struggle between Baba and his company's former vice-president. That moment marked the last time a woman held any meaningful position in Rama's corporate hierarchy. “But you said-”
“The rest of your squad's already handshaked and on assignment. Relax, Dove. They got the safe and boring part of the mission. You're going to go in and you're going to slay a monster.”
“I am?”
“When ERA were done with their merry massacre at Rama HQ, they ransacked the surrounding industrial zone. Before OTA realized what happened, ERA seized every vehicle that rolled in, took hostages, and even commandeered the local nuclear missile silo. When they finally did leave, they took everything they could carry off. They did all of this pretty quickly too. They thought an orbital strike was always right around the corner, and who could blame them for that? Space superiority is a hell of a thing.”
“So about that monster...”
“Right. The monster. There was more than one 'Anti-Tulpa' prototype. There was, actually, an entire factory line of the things waiting to roll out, but lucky for you, but only two cores were loaded with Pretas before the ERA attack.”
“Ravana, yeah. One was destroyed, but not before taking out an entire squad of rebel Tulpas. So there were two...”
“You saw the commercial, huh? That combat footage was supposed to be for Olympian eyes only.”
“And the Elect,” Joey added.
“Me? Yeah, I saw it too. I was there. Well, for part of it.”
“I'm sure you were, Gabriel. So there's a second Ravana somewhere around here?”
“Oh, yes. ERA got a few of their scavengers killed when rummaging around, but they blasted the entry tunnel shut before that thing escaped. Not even a Ravana prototype could dig itself out without caving itself in, so my educated guess is that it's asleep, on power-saving mode. Waiting for retrieval... or fresh prey.”
Joey's INI detected accelerated heart rate in his own body, but he dismissed the notice while hiding his anxiety. “I was trained to kill Tulpas. I can kill that so-called... Anti-Tulpa.”
“Good! That's why you're going in there all by yourself, as soon as your gallant steed arrives.”
“Steed? I'm a pilot, not a 'rider,'” Joey corrected him while not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice. ERA were eco-terrorists with a quasi-religious sort of animistic bond with their stolen technology, and it bothered him more than it should have that their slang was catching on with OTA personnel.
“If you manage to hurt ERA enough, maybe we'll all start saying 'pilot' instead of 'rider,'” Gabriel suggested while patting Joey's back until Joey swung an elbow to drive him away. 
A moment later, Joey's augmented hearing picked up the complimentary sounds of two pairs of helicopter blades whipping through the murk. As Joey's optic implants zoomed in and magnified the source of the sound, he spotted the bipedal war machine tethered beneath and between the two primitive rotor-bladed aircraft. Its head had a long armored beak-like extension, shaped to protect the command and control hardware hidden inside. Similar bladed extensions fanned out from his shoulders and back, running parallel with the bird-like V-shape of the chest. Its arms were folded against the sides of its densely-armored torso, containing a compact archaic-seeming cockpit. Its bird-like legs dangled over the ruined factories beneath its assisted flight, hanging low enough to almost kick over a brittle old smokestack. A series of overlapping armor plates, like a feathered tail, hung behind the rear of the frame. RA-5 bullpup-configured autocannons, much like the ones he trained with, were attached to the armored tassets that hung down from the machine's midsection.
More than anything else about the Tulpa, the presence of an anachronistic yet elegant Tulpa-sized sword, adjacent to one of the paired autocannons, caught Joey's attention and made him smile. It seemed as if the machine was configured specifically for his preferences, including his eccentricities. Perhaps it truly was.
“I know you two have never met, not in person,” Gabriel said. “TN-1 is the prototype of a next-generation Tulpa line. While the rest of your squad was busy with shakedown sorties, your Tulpa received some... modifications. I don't think any of your simulations included them, so be ready for a few surprises.”
“Did you know about those surprises, Gabriel? Is one of them that sword?”
“Maybe,” Gabriel answered, as the helicopters severed cable connections and let the cutting-edge answer to ERA's Tulpas fall the short distance to the ground. Even without the handshake, the Tulpa-class pilot-assisted combat walker landed with an impact-distributing crouch, remaining low to the corroded cracked concrete all around it. “I hope the quartermaster got you the watertight version of that suit...” 
“Watertight? Why?”
“You'll find out. Your Tulpa is waiting for you. Go on, introduce yourself. Go on,” Gabriel urged, giving Joey a little shove, enough to make him stumble back down the stairs before regaining his balance. “I'll tell the boss her star rid... her star pilot has arrived. Oh, and don't forget to name your Tulpa. Name it... name him anything you like. It's an important part of the handshake process. It's not just superstition, trust me.”
Joey glared back over his shoulder but calmed himself with a downward tug to the open flaps of his jacket. He looked the Tulpa in several of its eye-like sensors. Many were on the head but were not exclusive to that location. Redundant systems were all over the machine, and he was aware from the simulations that he would be able to see all around while operating it as if its cockpit was transparent on the inside.
“Before you climb into the cockpit, Dove, seal up that cowl and make sure your breathing mask is fitted comfortably.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. You'll thank me later,” Gabriel said, turning around to walk away, whistling as he went. After a few steps, he glanced back with a wave of his hand. “Have fun!”
Joey considered ignoring Gabriel's suggestion entirely out of spite, but then he wondered if he was being tested for compliance during his first real day on the job. Because of that, with a sigh of resignation, he pulled the cowl of his pilot suit up and over his head and took a breath through the mask.
The air in there tasted better than it did in the rest of Norilsk, Joey conceded. After that first breath, he was startled by the sensation of his own jacket tightening over his arms and back. The smart-fibers woven through it did not stop wrestling with him until they snugly and symmetrically sealed more closely against his body. The alloy rings on the back of his jacket were now attached and locked against the breathing tubes that lined the ribs of his neurosuit.
No wonder the quartermaster had insisted that the pieces of his uniform were inseparable from one another, Joey thought. 
He looked up at his new Tulpa's cockpit. Cockpits were such quaint and archaic burdens on such sophisticated war machines. He knew he was fully qualified to remotely operate a Tulpa from a safe distance, but unfortunately, the briefing Joey received before his arrival in Norilsk informed him that he was expected to maintain direct physical connection with his Tulpa at all times during the mission to prevent the risk of enemy attempts to distort, jam, or even hijack his remote command signal.
The ordered precaution seemed excessive: Rama's forces had already recaptured most of the territory that was previously invaded and ransacked by the ERA insurgents. Unfortunately, the response was too little and too late. The enemy had already spread like a disease, going on a rampage through Mongolia and elsewhere. Those eco-terrorists were not receiving the opposition they deserved because of the apparent apathy of regional governments that were supposed to be defending OTA interests.

His instructors told him that captured enemy “riders” often talked about how much more vivid and “real” things felt while in their cockpits compared to the bleakness of their mundane lives outside of their Tulpas. They bonded with their stolen war machines and grieved when they were destroyed. To them, it was like losing a friend, or even a sibling.
That all sounded like superstitious nonsense to Joey. It was time to find out for himself.
Joey walked up to his crouching Tulpa. He climbed the tiny extended rungs along the side of its narrow chest, holding on to the top rung while pinching through the protective lining at the back of his cowl's neck to draw out and pull the tip of the spooled cord from the input-output port of his Intuitive-Neural Interface implant. He lifted the access panel between the segments of his machine's armor by the sealed cockpit hatch and inserted the tip of his INI cord.
His machine recognized and accepted his mind-map like a key. The hatch slid open to let the outside light in. The smell of fresh polymer seat cushioning wafted out.
Joey unplugged the cord and pulled himself further up, then turned half of his body and squeezed inside, trying to make himself comfortable as his pilot suit squeaked against the seat cushioning. He noted a pair of alloy rings that lined up with the back of his jacket upon the seat cushions just before the hatch sealed shut behind him. He fumbled around in the sudden shift to near-total darkness, lit up only by the HUD of his optic implants, until he found the gap between the head and neck cushions that was intended for his INI cord. He extended his cord and inserted its tip into the slot until it locked in place.
“Life support connection error detected,” a gruff masculine voice with a crisply synthetic modulation echoed through the darkness of the cramped cockpit. “Disconnect INI cord, adjust seating to ergonomic preference, re-calibrate life support connection, then re-insert INI cord.”
Joey didn't expect his Tulpa to talk back to him, let alone say what almost sounded like orders. He puffed out his chest, dragged out an indignant sigh, then rolled his shoulders against the seat cushioning until he felt the seat re-sculpt itself to fit his spinal curve with a warm buzzing hum up and down his back.
It felt quite comfortable, as far as military hardware was expected to be. He closed his eyes in the darkness and allowed himself a moment to recline and relax.
In that moment, something in the chair buzzed against the back of his neck and then tugged at his INI cord and stretched it through the seat's I/O port without waiting for him. Before he could react, the rings on the back of his jacket clicked against the rings on the seat, locking into place. He felt a shiver up his ribs as the breathing tubes of his neurosuit pressurized with something cold that quickly reached his mask and pushed down his breathing passages, bringing with it an indescribable chemical smell...
“Breathe normally,” the gruff masculine voice advised with a commanding tone. “The anti-concussive agent will pass through your blood-brain barrier faster that way.”
Joey breathed through his gritted teeth. His heart accelerated until he willed it to slow down again through his INI. He gradually relaxed his jaw but felt the cold tingles up and down his body. He felt drugged, but it might have been his imagination because his INI insisted that no sedatives, stimulants, psychoactives, or toxic substances recognized by OTA were in the gas he was now breathing.
Joey felt a crackling jolt up his spine and against the back of his skull.
A moment later, he screamed.
The simulations prepared him for the self-discipline necessary to give mental commands to the craft he operated while blocking out errant thoughts and impulses that might have given unintentional command input. He could think about banking left without immediately banking left, he could mark targets without prematurely firing weapons, but nothing could prepare him for the sensation of claws raking under his skull, or the sizzle of synaptic fire rushing over his brain.
The pain left just as fast as it came, leaving him in a cold sweat while whimpering in the darkness.
He looked out through the Tulpa and the Tulpa looked back into him. There was a numbing brightness to his senses. A newly-made simulacrum of his own memories and personality, the basis for the machine's electronic warfare encryption matrix, was newly present, like a dispassionate copilot that was both nowhere and everywhere around him.
“Jai Shri Ram, Squad Leader Smith,” the Tulpa core said. “Tulpa TN-1 handshake in progress. Personalizing INI encryptions.”
Squad Leader Joey Jonah “Dove” Smith was glad that he wasn't having an ERA-style pseudo-religious experience with some farcical animistic spirit-guide, but he didn't like the cold greeting he had just received from his Tulpa's core, either. He remembered Gabriel's advice about naming the thing, however, and paused to reflect on the years he had lived before that moment.
Joey was found in a bug-infested shelter for homeless and runaway teens in one of the most polluted vertislums of the Ottowa Industrial Zone and tested for aptitude and proficiency. A pretty lady took him aside afterward, whispering to him about his unique potential. She said she believed that he was destined for great things.
Only hours later, he was flown to a prestigious Kazoku school to train for military-security drone operator certification, tuition-free. To earn that rare and special waiver of tuition, he had to prove himself by detecting and punishing casino cheats in Nara Prefecture that did not abide by Yakuza etiquette. He hunted down petty thieves, drone by drone, making kills with remotely-operated walkers while watching each hunt from airborne surveillance drones.
After that he remotely participated in a joint task force that eliminated a local apocalyptic cult.  During that gig, he prevented the attempted bombing one of the walls of the massive “Arashi-Shiro” that protected the prefecture from being swallowed up by the sea, sparing it the fate that had already happened to so much of the rest of the Japanese landmass that was already washed off the historical maps.
After that, without his body leaving Nara Prefecture, his consciousness was sent all the way back to the Canadian territories to a place called Bearpaw Shale. With the added challenge of some slight latency because of the distance, he helped put down a miners' strike that had, briefly, halted the flow of ammolite across the Pacific. He was brutally efficient, performing well enough to earn himself both a Kazoku commendation and a new honorary title from Myrmidon: “Gunnar's Gunner.” Both of those additions to his resume came in handy and helped him stand out when he applied for Rama's Tulpa training program.
A name sprung from those connected memories, along with images of associated scrollwork and vivid-yet-grotesque shrine statues placed around the exclusive upper-class levels of Nara Prefecture that he had earned the privilege of visiting. Mental images rushed out of his brain, shared with his nameless core through his INI link, especially those of a particular mythical creature in ancient folklore that reminded him of the beak-like head of his Tulpa.
“Tengu. Your designation is Tengu,” Joey said.
“Handshake complete,” Tengu said. “Replacing cockpit atmosphere in preparation of nano-foam infusion.”
Joey felt a hum around him. His INI identified the hum. It was coming from arrays of motorized vacuum pumps that quickly sucked out the polluted outside air that he had brought in with him, replacing it with something else that he probably couldn't breathe if something happened to his mask.
“Breathe normally,” Tengu urged.
“I'm trying,” Joey said into his mask as he tried to reduce his anxiety by leaving behind his own senses, using his INI link to send his awareness through Tengu's internal systems. He gazed at himself through the lens of the mission recorder inside the cockpit.  From that view, he saw that a strange substance was starting to fill his cockpit, something like both a liquid and a gas in the way it blew in yet gathered at the bottom of his cockpit first while filling it up.
He returned his awareness back to his body, moving his legs to kick at the substance. It provided no resistance; it was almost as thin as ordinary air. He watched with fascination and a little fear as the strange substance rapidly rushed over his cowled head and then flooded the entirety of the cockpit.
He could not feel the presence of that mostly-transparent substance, but through the goggles of his cowl, he could see well enough to look out at the wrap-around view of the Norilsk Industrial Zone, presented to him as if Tengu's tiny cockpit was no longer in the way and he was instead suspended in open air.
Joey breathed as normally as he could through his mask as he tried to relax. “Is that stuff in the cockpit... also some sort of anti-concussive agent?”
“No, Squad Leader. The 'stuff' in the cockpit is g-force diffusive nano-foam.”
Joey had questions, many questions, but he started with the first one that came to mind. “What happens if there is a breach to the cockpit?”
“In the event of a cockpit breach, the nano-foam is automatically flushed out. It is chemically reactive when exposed to nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.”
“Chemically reactive? Explosive?”
“No,” Tengu said.
“Oh,” Joey said, mildly relieved even if overwhelmed with how unprepared he was for Tengu's advanced technologies.
“Exposure to nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere liquefies the nano-foam as its g-force diffusive properties fail,” Tengu added, without being asked. “The byproduct of the liquefaction process is also toxic to exposed human flesh.”
“Oh,” Joey said with a lump in his throat. He wordlessly admitted to himself that Gabriel's parting advice was good advice, that one time.
“Do you have further questions, Squad Leader?”
“Why are you the first to tell me about your new technologies?”
“I was not aware that you were not aware,” Tengu replied. “My personality is a product of your mind-map, Squad Leader. Apart from my own systems and mission-relevant data, I only know what you know.”
“Right. You're basically me, but more informed and stronger. Much stronger.”
“Yes,” Tengu replied.
Joey's INI link with Tengu enhanced and contextualized the seamless-looking view of everything outside his Tulpa. His HUD automatically framed over and identified the distant friendly Tulpas of his Beta Squad. They were each independently patrolling the outer perimeter of his mission zone in a circular pattern.
Joey frowned. Gabriel had lied to him. None of Beta Squad's TM-6M Rakshasa-class mass-production Tulpas had personalized names, only combat unit designations from Beta-2 to Beta-6. Each of them acknowledged Tengu's presence with an exchange of identification, friend-or-foe data, but no pilot greeted him, verbally or otherwise.
Wasn't he supposed to be in command of Beta Squad?
“Mission timer is counting,” Tengu warned Joey. Joey nodded and took his first steps in his Tulpa. As he did, he felt weightless. He twisted his machine at the torso and made a sharp spinning leap befores landing gracefully on bird-like legs and feet. He felt no momentum and no spinning sensation. That would take some getting used to.
“Right. No more questions,” Joey said out loud. He realized, with some anxiety, that his current position was nowhere near the mission-designated waypoint. It did make some sense for OTA to drop him and his Tulpa away from the hiding place of the remaining Ravana prototype, especially if ERA spies were somehow listening in.
Even so, something about the stack of coincidences, from his delayed arrival, the late delivery of his Tulpa, his lack of knowledge or training regarding the operation of his unexpectedly-advanced Tulpa, and Gabriel's obvious awareness of Tengu's systems and also Gabriel's supposedly-unintentional misdirection made him grit his teeth. He was tested many times, but he hated when he didn't know the conditions of a test.
“Let's... make up for lost time, Tengu. How fast can we safely go?” Joey asked as his awareness extended toward Tengu's propulsion systems. Everything about them, from the amount of flight time contained within each fuel tank, to the estimated acceleration, cruising speed and top speed performance data that Tengu provided for him, made his jaw drop inside his masked cowl.
“As fast as you like. I advise making up for lost time and going very fast,” Tengu replied.
Joey sucked in a breath as he watched the navigation windows for optimal flight trajectory flash over the HUD of his optic implants. As he contemplated going, as Tengu suggested, “very fast,” that window adjusted to compensate. He wondered for a moment how quickly he could slow down and speed up and the estimated flight windows before his eyes adjusted into unnaturally-sharp angles. He realized that he could fly like a drone, with all of the punishing g-force consequences of sudden acceleration, deceleration, and extreme maneuvers, as long as the cockpit's integrity held and as long as he continued to breathe that stuff that was blowing in from his mask.
“Mission timer is counting,” Tengu repeated himself with slower and firmer enunciation.
Joey crouched Tengu down, tensing the synthetic muscle fibers throughout its body, flared the blade-like control surfaces of his wings, and then set everything behind him ablaze with his full-burn launch into the sky.
Joey felt the g-forces push at his body, but because of Tengu's strange technologies, he was experiencing only discomfort at a rate of acceleration that would have knocked out, or perhaps even killed, a pilot without such wonders.
For the first time in his life, Joey felt powerful.



Chapter 2

	“This world has angels too few, and heaven is overflowing.”
	-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Charlie One to Kilo One...”
The Tulpa rider heard the voice from the far-away battlefield, through the haze of enemy jamming, as it was relayed by her faithful drone companion, Huginn. She did not respond to it. She gazed out with her Tulpa's optics over the flight deck while simultaneously feeling out her Tulpa's internal systems diagnostics. The ignition sequence had already begun, rattling machine metal and living flesh alike. In seconds, her Tulpa would would take flight whether or not she was ready.
“Turncoat to Screamer, Turncoat to Screamer. Come in, over...”
The launch harness screamed from the outside in, drowning out the words, but the text of it sped over her optic implants with priority framing. She was too busy to respond. Huginn's loyal sibling, Muninn, had previously reported that OTA had lit everything that could burn in anticipation of ERA's attack. The resultant firestorm on the way to Ulaanbaatar was getting worse and her Tulpa's anticipated flight window needed adjustment. Her Tulpa, Kitsune-2, made the necessary last-second calculations for her. Every control surface over Kitsune-2 tucked inward for the sake of minimum air drag in anticipation of the imminent launch.
“Colonel Schmidt, do you copy...”
The glowing text glided over her pre-launch diagnostics with undue and unwelcome priority. If she responded and the enemy was listening, they would know where to shoot. If an Olympian Trade Authority saboteur had escaped her notice, they might have been clever enough to lock her Tulpa's feet to the linear induction motor of the electromagnetic aircraft launch system. If that happened, half of the war machine would be anchored on the flight deck while the other half tore free and tumbled into the sky for a fleeting moment before an air-burst explosion happened, big enough to kill everyone gathered outside beneath the flight deck, standing out in the open air to see her off. Their enthusiasm was appreciated but she wished they would have stayed in general quarters for their own safety.
“Megan!” 
Jason shouted loud enough for Megan to hear him through her rattling cockpit, interrupting her pre-launch worrying more than the launch itself. Even with her training in the time-honored anti-g straining maneuver, or “AGSM,” and with the added help of the inflated inserts in her specially-modified rider suit, the spike of g-forces from the launch into the sky dimmed her biological eyes as blood pushed away from them.
“I'm coming Jason,” Megan said wordlessly into her INI as she extended her awareness through Kitsune-2's optics and other sensors, freeing her from the discomfort of her human body. She gazed down through her Tulpa's knees, which provided the lowest and closest unobstructed view of some of the boldest and most casualty-prone volunteers of the Earth Restoration Alliance. Some saluted through the bone-rattling shock waves but many more were wise enough to hold their ears instead. Their well-wishing ceremony was ill-advised, but acknowledged.  
Megan gazed down just a moment longer down, watching her flight pod's fiery halo as it reflected off of the plastic-choked remnants of Khövsgöl Valley. Her Tulpa's electronic countermeasure systems ignited in full bloom, launching a precautionary bouquet of chaff, decoys, and flares, leaving an accompaniment of phantom targets for any enemy out there that was ready to take a shot. For all of her caution, no incoming fire came, yet. The lack of interception attempts, and the implications of the lack of it, made Megan's body shiver over the tremors in her cockpit. Was Jason's vanguard unit that thoroughly engaged with OTA forces? Would any of his company be left to save by the time she arrived?
“You damn well better be!” Turncoat shouted over the sonic boom she left behind, the stage-one launch scream replaced by the steady screech of steady ongoing fuel burn. “We need air support, now!”
“I know, Turncoat, I know,” Megan replied while sifting through the shreds of targeting data from Turncoat's transmission. Her reply was finally enough to earn her incoming fire. Hypersonic slugs from artillery platforms over the fortress holding of Gorkhi-Terelj tried their luck, piercing her illusions with sky-cracking force, one after another.
“Egger is down!” Turncoat shouted once more, but in human error, he sent that audio transmission toward Megan instead of what was left of his company. “I repeat, Egger is down...” Muninn dutifully gave context to Turncoat's words, beyond kilometers-wide patches of burning swamp past the visual horizon, displaying the identification friend-or-foe signatures of each platoon of Major Lamarr's company. They were like so many flickering candle lights, gradually blinking out, one by one. 
She didn't hear their cries for help or their death screams. She felt them.
“Sunrise, that's your platoon now. Withdraw to ... listen, rider! You want me to tell your mom a god-damned Hornet killed you? No? Then move it!” Turncoat, in error and probably in his fear, had not yet cut transmission with Megan but was also communicating with what was left of his command platoon, and by extension, his company.
Kitsune-2 unlocked her flight harness to let the flight pod soar free. Her control surfaces caught just enough air to slow and descend, accompanied by tumbling decoys matching her speed and heading, and not a moment too soon. The harness' remaining fuel lit up in a fireball, with a glowing comet-like streak following the outward trajectory of a railgun slug from beyond the visible horizon. 
Megan decided Sunrise would not get taken out by a god-damned Hornet, not that day. As her Tulpa's two tails split outward and caught more air, both of their electronic warfare suites came to life, whispering overlapping lies to Gorkhi-Terelj's fire control systems. Each of her Tulpa's arms carried a powerful ARR-6 rail rifle that was manufactured in Norilsk only hours before Rama returned to reclaim its territory. She aimed her preciously-rare weapons toward the battle below.
She didn't aim for any individual Hornet. She didn't have to; the lakebed was a better target. She fired a single miniaturized hypersonic slug while tumbling down like a loose feather in the wind. By the time she re-matched the descent of her remaining decoys, a column of upward-exploding lakebed had swatted the Hornet squadron just before its strafing run on Sunrise's squad of flightless Centaur-class mass-production Tulpas.
Centaurs were heavily-armed and thickly-armored to the point of looking clumsy. They had to be, because there simply wasn't enough fuel or thruster modules to make an entire army of flight-capable ERA Tulpas. Instead, last-moment design decisions focused on loading the back, shoulders, and secondary rear chassis with additional weapon mounts and defensive equipment. All of that hardware was carried by two pairs of bulky legs. The abundance of extra limbs, armor, and weapon systems took advantage of parts surpluses in Norilsk's stockpiles and those of other industrial facilities seized by ERA on the offensive through Siberia and outward. Because of lack of speed and mobility, with their thruster systems only capable of terrain-clearing short jumps instead of flight, individual Centaurs were only somewhat harder to target and hit than one of OTA's Goliath Beetle semi-autonomous tanks, instead relying on overlapping layers of their squad's countermeasure equipment to increase their chances of survival.
“Target destroyed,” Kitsune-2 said.
“Targets, Kitsune-2,” Megan said to her Tulpa's new core as Tulpa and rider alike glided on remaining inertia through the hollowed ruins of a deserted pumping station overlooking the dried lake valley. The core imprint was still fresh but divergent enough in personality to tell her something she already knew that didn't bear repeating.
“Second Company down to 70% operational strength,” Kitsune-2 said into Megan's mind, but she already knew. She could see the widening gaps in Second Company's defenses for herself. Turncoat was identified by OTA forces and they were ready and eager to overwhelm the unit's commander, no matter the cost. They sacrificed scores of Scorpions and Goliath Beetles in another forward charge while Hornet strafing runs and Falcon standoff-range air strikes kept coming in. Any of the upcoming waves could be the one to finish him and his command squad off. Drones were cheaper by far than Tulpas, and their Olympian owners were more than willing to drown their enemies in money.
Kitsune-2 hit the ground skipping, decelerated by way of several more railgun discharges that shattered windows of the surrounding hollowed-out buildings, then continued to run forward, firing follow-up rounds toward the drones that the previous detonation points missed. Partly by incoming sensor readings and partly by instinct, she knew just the right moment to ignite her thrusters and return to the air, just ahead of the attempt made by the gunners at Gorkhi-Terelj to predict her next move. The explosion beneath her carried her further upward, mostly unharmed. With the clearer line of sight down into the lakebed valley below, she fired several more miniaturized hypersonic slugs, leaving craters where Scorpions just stood and Goliath Beetles just rolled. Her two tails curled and extended jamming and scrambling arrays, claiming Falcons and confusing Hornets. 
She gazed through a stolen Falcon's eye and locked onto Hornets beneath, chopping OTA's low-flying attack drones to pieces with OTA's own higher-flying interceptors. Only a few battles ago, she would have brought some of her own Falcons with her, back when ERA had a fair number of captured drones at its disposal during the early battles of the Siberian campaign. OTA always outnumbered ERA's own drones, unfortunately. Command decided that it was more practical to focus on putting together more mass-production Tulpas than it was to keep sending its own combat drones to be overwhelmed by the enemy's superior numbers. ERA's remaining drone forces started to be used almost entirely for scouting purposes because direct combat use was a losing battle of attrition.
“Screamer! She's here!” A voice cried out from the dug-in position that the remaining Centaur-class Tulpas took. Megan's HUD identified the Tulpa as Charlie-5 and the rider as Lieutenant Sasha Anatoly “Sunrise” Novikov. 
She didn't remember that rider's name until Kitsune-2 sped it across her optic implants, but she remembered his call sign well. Sunrise was one of the factory workers from Norilsk that volunteered for Megan's improvised crash course that she set up only hours after the revolution officially began. She had endeavored, in haste, to teach those freed laborers how to ride the first batch of mass-production Tulpas being assembled from the seized factory yards. He earned the call sign by being the first to show up, standing out at the break of dawn with the wind whipping his feathery brown hair, with bright brown eyes and an eager smile on his face. She wanted to warn him that the cause he was volunteering for would wipe that smile off of his face before it killed him - if he was lucky - but she couldn't bring herself to douse his enthusiasm. He sounded so excited and impressionable and young back then, which was quite a feat since he was probably five years her senior.
Megan cringed inside her Tulpa's cockpit as cheers and shouts of relief overcame the audio channels coming her way. She accepted leadership and volunteered for dangerous missions and fought with everything in her, but she didn't like being ERA's source of inspiration, its savior. The presence of a flight-capable Tulpa to turn the tide against the OTA's air superiority was understandably welcome for Lamarr's vanguard company, but they were depending on her more than they should have been.
What if she failed? What then?
She didn't have further time to ruminate; Falcons broke loose from her grasp, tracing her hijacking signal to attack her from above. Kitsune-2 took several indirect hits as she leaped from a cliffside down toward the dusty slope into the lakebed valley with layers of ablative armor lighting up to cushion the blows. Each tiny detonation gave more of a visual signature to sharpen the aim of each Falcons' follow-up shots. No choice and no alternative: Kitsune-2 would have to spend some more of her precious ammo. She took aim and fired upward.
The Falcons splintered and snapped to pieces, cut apart from several converging firing arcs. She wasn't alone in her efforts; Turncoat's remaining company joined in, having enough pressure relieved on the ground to add their still-abundant reserves of air-bursting anti-aircraft fire.
“Some of those were mine,” Megan complained, but cracked a smile. The battlefield was relatively quiet, for the moment. Like the roars of some vengeful dragon in its mountain lair, the artillery from Gorkhi-Terelj continued to boom and crater the surrounding wasteland a moment later, but if the surviving Tulpas kept moving to join the advance into Ulaanbaatar, their deception and shrouding technologies would protect them from anything short of direct visual targeting.
Megan dearly missed Bluecap's holographic countermeasures. Some of the technology used in the first generation of Tulpas was now out of reach for ERA's terrestrial forces. The NIZ may have once had the means, but when retaliation finally came for that first base of operations, it came with overwhelming force. The few that defied Colonel Schmidt's order to retreat believed that their mass-produced new Tulpas could stand against a blanketing tide of OTA drones. They were never heard from again. 
OTA thought they stamped out the flames of rebellion in that single highly-publicized attack. They were wrong. ERA's first terrestrial base was lost, but two more bases were already established, one of them at Camp Sayan and the other at Camp Ocean Mother, with resources and the means to replace losses and local liberated volunteers to replace the fallen. 
As soon as OTA found out that Colonel Megan Evita “Screamer” Schmidt was stationed at the latter, they would repeat their shock and awe tactics that humbled ERA in Norilsk.
Now they surely knew. Camp Ocean Mother would have to be evacuated. Maybe Ulaanbaatar had defensible positions, if they could be taken. Maybe luck would hold out and Rama had left caches of Tulpa parts and munitions for them to find again. 
That, or the long march to death was hers to command, and many would follow.
“Orders, Colonel?” Turncoat asked with a demanding tone while Kitsune-2 continued her downward gliding descent, riding the ripple of turbulence left by Gorkhi-Terelj's latest shot streaking toward, past, and across the sky behind her.
That shot came close. If that artillery emplacement was aimed toward Second Company instead of her, it would wipe them all out in a few shots across their current weakly-entrenched positions.
“No time to regroup, Major,” Megan said, biting back her fear of making a bad call. Kitsune-2's on-board hardware worked with Huginn and Muninn to plot tactically-plausible navigation routes overland that took the most advantage of the terrain's corroded mountain ranges and deep mining scars.  “Ulaanbaatar can wait. Attack the OTA artillery at Gorkhi-Terelj. Waypoints set for each platoon.”
“We're a grounded force, Colonel,” Turncoat said. “If you didn't notice: OTA has complete air superiority...”
“They don't have total air superiority, Major,” Megan said, as her Tulpa core's predictive algorithms made her feel like she was already staring down the gun barrel of Gorkhi-Terelj's next anticipated shot. She was low enough and close enough that even a miss would likely destroy a platoon full of Tulpas. Her secondary boost pods ignited and sent her skyward again, just above the arc of  the next air-shaking round as it sped with hyper-sonic force over Second Company's positions.
“I'm still the priority target,” Megan said. “Just like back in the Altai.”
“They're going to hit you eventually...” Jason warned.
“Until they do, take advantage. Move out, riders!” Megan shouted. She committed her secondary boosters, at full burn, to closing the distance between Second Company's position and the OTA fortifications to the southeast.
The human personnel at Gorkhi-Terelj were learning quickly. The next shot only missed because of an unlucky guess while Kitsune-2 shuffled her position between emitted signatures like a game of Three Card Monte. Unlike that notorious confidence game she used to watch down in the Halifax vertislums, her game could be won by the player. That player would only have to win once.
Kitsune-2's hips ejected two fuel pods away. She was a little lighter, and could carry herself a little further with her remaining fuel, but her fuel gauge was dwindling down and she knew it. She gained a little more altitude and lined up some long-range return fire.
“I see you,” Megan whispered out loud as Kitsune-2 steadied one of her ARR-6 rail-rifles, keeping that arm aligned with the meter-wide slit in the distant mountainside while the rest of her body spun and twisted in mid-air, releasing a fresh bloom of countermeasures while she took the shot.
“Target destroyed,” Kitsune-2 reported, seconds later, and a second too late for it to matter; Megan knew that she had moved too predictably when lining up that shot.
If her shot hadn't landed deep and true, she would be dead already.
No further artillery fired. That OTA fortification had put too much faith in just one artillery piece, apparently. Huginn reported from his position that Scorpion and Goliath Beetle ground crawlers were rolling out from Gorkhi-Terelj's underground pool, accompanied by a small cloud of Hornets providing low-altitude cover.
She could take another shot, but she only had so many left that she could carry with mission operational weight. She cherished the brief opportunity to glide on forward momentum, extending her Tulpa's control surfaces to catch the wind for a few seconds.
One of Kitsune-2's fuel pods exploded without warning, taking a sizable chunk of the shoulder armor with it and leaving an open wound that whistled with wind drag.
“No!” Megan shouted. She set Kitsune-2 into a downward tumbling corkscrew, angry at herself more than the enemy drones, throwing out a ring of decoy chaff while plummeting to get beneath the firing arc of follow-up shots. She didn't yet spot the enemy Snowy Owl that helped those Falcons' targeting, but just one enemy spotter with that level of anti-countermeasure sophistication could very well be the death of her if she didn't shoot it down first.
“Huginn! Muninn! Where's that buzzard cousin of yours?” Megan demanded, but with love. Her stealthy Snowy Owls were family to her. She had adopted those two in Norilsk and trusted them unconditionally after that. They were just enough to keep ERA's fledgling terrestrial rebellion alive by tirelessly watching OTA's movements. She never got over the fact that Rama was so quick to modify the rest of their surveillance drone fleet with new defensive systems after Norilsk. Each battle after that, she found it gradually harder to hijack enemy drones, and even when she succeeded, her command over new drones was temporary at best. Because of that, she only trusted Huginn and Muninn enough to keep them around, battle after battle.
“You two can't see him? Fine... let's ask the Falcons,” Megan said out loud while Kitsune-2 was one step ahead of the spoken words. Both of her tails encircled her during descent while her rider looked back at Kitsune-2's descent through the transmissions sent to the Falcons from that nearly-invisible Snowy Owl. Kitsune-2's core made a few quick triangulating calculations, using the the position of the terrain features below her image in those Falcons' eyes. She got a firing solution a split-second later.
While still spinning and wrapped in her two tails, Megan aimed one of Kitsune's rail-rifles skyward and fired.
That eye in the sky was put out, finally.
“You can't see them all, all the time. It's all right,” Megan said to Huginn and Muninn, getting a brief digital response from the both of them as she caught the wind once more, fortunate enough that her wing on the damaged side didn't snap away from the strain. “Just do your best, you two.”
“Screamer, we're advancing up the foothills now,” Turncoat said.
“Sending targeting data on enemy drone movement,” Megan replied while dodging light hypersonic slugs and the resultant pillar-like plumes of dirt bursting up from the best-guess shots from ongoing Falcon fire from above.
“Yes, I see them... could you thin their ranks a little?” Turncoat asked, sounding calmer but still gritting his teeth in a way Megan could hear. “We've taken a lot of damage and we're running low on ammo.”
Megan knew she had also taken significant damage already and her ammo was never abundant to begin with, but she bit her tongue and said nothing during her onward advance over the OTA fortress' outer perimeter. Unlike the TM-5M Centaur line of mass-production Tulpas, she couldn't just shoulder more armor or carry more arrays of anti-aircraft weaponry in anticipation of every problem. Every gram counted, which made her see every meal she ate as the burden that might finally destroy Kitsune-2 and kill her rider. She knew that getting Kitsune-2 destroyed would be a loss that ERA could not replace, and if she died, Kitsune-2's core would require a painstaking erasure process before she would accept a new rider's handshake.
Unlike her and her Tulpa, the Centaurs had a cheaper and simpler type of core that lacked the encryption and masking protections that Kitsune and other first-generation prototypes used to evade autonomous identification and targeting systems, but considering that most of the Centaur riders were former Rama laborers and as such were already mind-mapped and profiled by OTA, it was seen as cheaper to not worry too much about defeating enemy targeting and instead emphasize simply layering the second-generation mass-production models with more defensive and offensive equipment. The choice, for all of the assurances that ERA's command officers made to riders, still resulted in high casualty rates that depended on new recruits to fill in the gaps at every city and facility that ERA liberated, training replacements in a quick and dirty fashion with cheap Tulpa cores waiting to handshake with them.
Her ruminations felt like minutes in her mind but only seconds had passed since Turncoat's request was made. She answered the request with prudent choices of targets from the selection beneath her. She caused a landslide with one shot, sending a column of Scorpions ascending the hillside tumbling down over one another. She used another shot to crater one Goliath Beetle, but more importantly, crippled its counterpart immediately behind it, causing a traffic jam up on the way up to their desired firing positions.
“They didn't like that,” Megan remarked as ground-to-air fire rose to meet her. They had no more Snowy Owls at their disposal, so Megan conserved her remaining countermeasures and dodged the converging volleys of fire with practiced grace while weaving between the persistent flurry of ongoing Falcon potshots above.
“There's too many Hornets!” Sunrise complained. Megan thought little of them, but she remembered that all it took to finish off Ravana was a few Hornets after everything else. She sighed and lined up one of her two AEB-2 Non-Nuclear-Electro-Magnetic Pulse bomb launchers with a trajectory that took advantage of an obstructing hillside to direct the blast toward the Hornets and away from Second Company's ongoing advance.
The blast silenced the swarm with precision detonation, the yield and distribution of the electronics-frying effect pre-calculated mid-flight by Kitsune-2's core, leaving Second Company no more damaged than it already was before it traded blows with the divided and hindered OTA drone defenders, platoon by platoon. Victory was within ERA's grasp, but as always, there were losses.
The human losses, so far, were replaced by new recruits, factory workers and defecting drone operators and prison laborers alike, many of them found, appraised, and chosen by Megan herself, using her seemingly-miraculous talent to visit their minds through their synergy implants and find who could be trusted and who had to be turned away.
The Tulpas losses, so far, were replaced by serendipity alone: Rama seemed to have stored caches of pre-war Tulpa parts and the resources to build more across most of Central Asia in many places that ERA happened to look. The great limitation was time and the ever-present threat of counter-attack and re-occupation of liberated territory.
“Sunrise, just... stay right there,” Turncoat said, with fatigue in his voice. “Your platoon's done the Earth proud. Mine will take it from here.”
“I'm still here,” Megan said as she circled Second Company's advance a few times, taking count of the dwindling number of enemy drones on land and in the air. She found a safe patch of earth to land Kitsune-2 upon while ejecting one of her last remaining fuel pods. She only had internal reserves left to depend upon for the rest of the mission, and she put them to immediate use with thruster-assisted strides and leaps to mitigate the persistent peppering from Falcon fire higher above.
That bunker ahead would be cover enough from the rail-slug rain. OTA's remaining operators on site must have known that, because the hillside doors were already starting to close.
“Screamer!” Turncoat shouted. “I got a demo specialist in my command squad. You had better not run ahead of-”
Kitsune-2 ran ahead of Second Company at full burn. The Tulpa folded her forearm shields inward and crossed her rail-rifle barrels in a forward tumble into the low-ceilinged garage made for semi-autonomous ground-crawlers, rattling her rider in her cockpit as she steeled herself against the rapid deceleration.
Kitsune-2 pushed herself up as internal sensors made her rider cringe in realization that she had finally torn the wing off of that damaged shoulder. Half a heart's beat later, she found herself staring eyes-to-optics with an OTA technician at ground level, meters from her Tulpa's face.
The young woman dropped what she was carrying and backed to the far wall, frozen in place with wide-eyed terror.
“Get out of here!” Megan shouted through her Tulpa's loudspeakers. It only occurred to her a moment later that there was nowhere for her to go: OTA's last stand with all of their small arms and remaining security drones was in one direction and Second Company was making its ground assault in the other, harried by whatever ammunition was left in those damned Falcons to drop on them, picking them slowly apart, out of range of return fire.
The internal doors on the left slid open. Unlike that single terrified technician, the rest of the garage technicians were willing to die for their Olympian masters, judging by the start-up signatures Kitsune-2 detected from a pair of parked Goliath Beetles, loaded and ready.
Kitsune-2's forearm shields folded back as her extended blades snapped into ready position, humming from the activated internal motors that enhanced their cutting and puncturing ability. The guns of the Goliath Beetles didn't get a chance to aim through the rising doors before she punched into their treads, disabling their attempts to move. With a heightened internal sensor warning shrieking at her about increasing structural failure in her damaged arm, Megan yelled with exertion as Kitsune-2 strained just enough to flip both of the auto-tanks over. She quickly finished both of the them off with follow-up stabs into the engine blocks inside their soft upturned bellies.
Small arms fire sprinkled against her Tulpa from behind. OTA had a few contractors left with fight in them. It gave her no pleasure, but before they could get lucky enough to hit through the gaps in Kitsune-2's dwindling armor and damage something important, she launched a single spray of chaff from her Tulpa's hip. It was more than enough to silence those small arms and leave bloody streaks across the adjacent wall.
“Surrender already, damn you! It's over!” Megan shouted with frustration. OTA had already lost their base. The fight was strategically over, but for some reason that still escaped her, OTA's conscripts sometimes fought to the bitter end. Unlike their indentured servants and prison labor, some seemed to truly want to die for their Olympian masters and she never got used to killing them for it.
That single technician dropped to her knees, hands outstretched as if in supplication to a goddess of death.


Chapter 3

	“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
	-Friedrich Nietzsche

Joey and Tengu landed within sight of the bunker doors. Scarab earth-movers had already dug up and piled away an avalanche of debris, which gave enough clearance for Praying Mantis utility robots to pull the doors ajar with their long arm extensions. The antennae-like sensors on both kinds of machines acknowledged Tengu's presence and put in a little extra effort to widen the gap further to accompany the width of the landing Tulpa. Tengu swept the crack in the armored doors with several wavelengths of his sensors, immediately identifying burned-out Mayflies, spilled like so many marbles, around the interior entryway. He also saw jagged scrapes to the inside of the door mechanisms, uneven and erratic, as if a metal-rending beast had tried to scratch its way out.
Joey's Tulpa was prepared with weapons specialized for close-range urban combat, but he paused with indecision as Tengu's hand brushed over the grip of his Tulpa-sized sword. It was chivalrous nonsense, he decided, to desire a blade-to-blade confrontation with that second Ravana waiting for him in that bunker. As Tengu's other hand brushed over the RA-5 attached to his hip, Joey also decided it was arrogant to assume, especially in the close quarters of the bunker ahead of him, that he'd have any sort of range advantage, for long, over the twin of the Preta-crazed thing that had carved its way through an entire Tulpa squad, limb by limb.
Joey opted for both weapons. He brandished Tengu's blade while drawing a single bullpup autocannon in the other hand.
“Deploying only one autocannon reduces effective rounds-per-minute output by half. Single-handed wielding of the sword reduces effective cutting force by-” Tengu warned, in Joey's mind.
“Shut up, Tengu. I'm the pilot,” Joey snapped back, both mentally and verbally. Tengu was based on an imprint of his own mind and he knew it, which made the reminder of his doubt regarding his tactics that much more glaringly apparent.
“Jamming and masking emissions detected,” Tengu warned, ignoring Joey's hostility as Tulpa and pilot walked hrough the bunker doors, crunching over dead Mayfly drones and gazing with multi-spectral sensors into the dark descent ahead.
“That Ravana is obsolete,” Joey said, partially to rally himself. “You are designed to defeat Tulpa-style jamming and masking technology. Follow your nose.”
Tengu's beak-like forward array swayed side to side while the Tulpa's core filtered through the noise to fill shadows with presence. There was no immediate sign of the Ravana, at least this close inside the doors and this close to the surface of the multi-level subterranean structure.
The only large-scale movement he could detect was the Praying Mantis robots grinding the bunker doors shut behind him.
There was, however, something there. Human, distinctly female and subtly augmented with cybernetics, walking with a runway model's practiced grace upon rather high heels, with confidence and purpose but in no hurry and with vital signs pumping away steady and unaffected by the darkness and danger all around her.
Tengu's internal memory had no confirmed identification of that woman and the Ravana prototype's jamming fields thwarted attempts to make inquiries with the OTA network. That, combined with the woman's flowing long black hair, immaculately saffron-colored Lehenga dress with Gota patti embroidery, carefree body language, and purposeful stride, made Joey conclude she was no stray NIZ laborer and was certainly no ERA holdout.
She seemed so out of place in such a dead and dreadful place, like a flower blossom amid salted earth, but her indifference to everything around her seemed more commanding than ignorant.
“Miss...” Joey said, through Tengu's integrated loudspeaker.
The woman continued to walk.
“Madam...” Joey said, quickening his steps, extending his blade over her in a protective gesture.
The woman did not respond and stepped around the scattered remains of a makeshift barricade, then stepped over the crushed and scattered remains of Rama personnel that had made their stand there and died amid the debris.
“Identify yourself at once!” Joey shouted out before he could stop himself, angry and afraid and not knowing entirely why.
The woman stopped and spun around with a single clack of her heels, the motion tossing her long hair over one shoulder and revealed a blood-red Bindi dot upon her forehead and an upward-cast fiery bright green-eyed glare that made Joey feel very small, even in his Tulpa.
Joey's words sank down his throat.
“Oh,” she started, with a levity-soaked chuckle that belonged nowhere near the glare she wore. Only a moment later, a rosy smile replaced the glare with eerie swiftness. “You must be Joey,” she said, with a contralto purr.
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, with his full attention upon the woman. His every instinct that he earned in his brief ascent up the OTA corporate hierarchy told him that she was very important and likely had the power of life and death over him.
“I am Mara Shah,” Mara Shah said, with deceptive plainness. “My father-in-law left quite a mess here, wouldn't you agree?”
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, trying to mask his own ignorance in agreement. His mind sifted through Tengu's own databank as he established her place in OTA's intertwined hierarchy of corporate interests, competing and cooperating in alternating and sometimes simultaneous ways in a Machiavellian dance that was dizzying to comprehend. Mara Shah was the wife of Karna Shah, the recently-disowned son of Rama's CEO, Baba Shah. Baba Shah was the highest authority that both Joey and Gabriel answered to.
Or was he?
“Now, if you would excuse me, Joey, I am appraising my inheritance.”
Joey knew he would be in more trouble than he already was if he dared to imply she might have been ignorant of the imminent danger waiting somewhere in the gaps of his sensor readings. His next words would have been chosen more carefully if he had the time to do so.
“It is not safe here-”
“That Preta will not harm me, Joey. You, on the other hand...”
Joey's gaze turned upward to address the source of a bone-shaking metallic scream as a hellish red gleam pierced out from the blackness ahead. With no time to respond, a silver-skinned Tulpa-sized beast sped toward him with another metallic scream.
Tengu fired off the first three rounds of his autocannon's magazine before the next thirty spilled in a spinning spiral as the weapon left his Tulpa's hand in the midst of a high-speed charging collision that slammed him into the resealed bunker doors hard enough to snap his wings and tail plating, sending flashes of feedback pain through his mind at the same time his Intuitive-Neural Interface channeled his fear into battle-readiness just in time to carve a silvered shoulder pauldron away from that Ravana. 
The plunge of the blade would have cut further and severed that arm if that Ravana did not immediately retreat with a cockpit-fracturing kick to Tengu's chest. The foam in the cockpit started to spray outward like blood gushing from a wound, just as Tengu had previously warned him. During the disorienting impact, the Ravana rushed backward, forcing the grip of the weapon out of Tengu's hand, leaving the hilt sticking out where the pauldron once rested. The Preta-infested machine let out another metallic scream louder than the burn of its retro-thrusters.
Joey panted as he recovered from the cockpit-cracking foam-flushing blow. He had squandered his technological advantage, but he would not lose. He roared back as if in answer to the Ravana's scream, charging ahead, heedless of the punishing surge of g-forces going through his body.
His rage exceeded his fear and he was firmly inside Tengu's systems, forgetting for the moment his human limitations. He drew his remaining autocannon from its hip mounting and lit up the corridor with its muzzle flash. He chased the Ravana through its backward withdrawal, striking it a few times but not enough to cripple it, let alone slow it down, as it continued to flee deeper into the dark underground labyrinth.
Joey stopped his forward momentum and rocketed back, allowing the Ravana to fade out of sensor range. It was worth it so he could backtrack and pick up his dropped autocannon, reclaiming it from the  the blood-smeared bunker floor. With both weapons pointed forward into the unknown, he desired to rush ahead just as fast as Tengu's first flight.
Tengu interfered with Joey's INI command, instead giving him roughly half of his desired rate of acceleration. Before Joey could complain or demand to know why his Tulpa could countermand his orders, a explanation rushed into his mind during the next split-second.
“Extensive collision hazards detected ahead. Maximum performance envelope limited by damage to cockpit,” Tengu said during their ongoing charge. His bladed control surfaces were tucked in tightly as scattered stacks of crates, overhanging ventilation ducts, and other flight hazards necessitated razor-thin course corrections. His Tulpa's on-the-fly tracing of the Ravana's heat emissions from its thrusters guided him through each fork in the corridors.
“It's fast,” Joey said to Tengu.
“Fast, challenging prey. You're not the prey, Squad Leader. It is.” 
“I'm not the prey,” Joey said out loud as he stared down the heat signature ahead, finally gaining on it. “You are.”
The path ahead opened wide into a vast cavern-like underground factory with mountainous stacks of cargo crates and disembodied TM-Zero limbs and modules suspended by cables above long-silenced mass-production assembly lines.
He saw the Ravana. It stopped and landed to eject its damaged arm, Tengu's blade and all, upon the factory floor. As Joey watched during his dangerously-rapid deceleration, the Ravana swiped at one of the replacement limbs hanging down from above, locking the replacement into its open socket.
Joey wouldn't let his prey run away again. He emptied the abundant-but-finite magazines of each of his autocannons, but not at the Ravana, no matter how it seemed to taunt him by darting about with blinding speed. Instead, he aimed for the collection of hanging limbs and other spare parts, chopping them to pieces. As the Ravana screeched about that, he fired his next bursts into the fuel slugs that were stored around the cavernous chamber. They exploded with concentrated force that rippled and resonated around the confined interior, staggering his prey and dropping to the floor, tossed back and forth by the chain-reaction of additional exploding fuel slugs.
Joey felt his teeth chatter even while his attention focused through Tengu's sensors. His Tulpa reeled back as the multiple concussive blasts blew over him.
The Ravana screamed again, louder than ever before.
Joey threw both empty autocannons aside. The damage to the facility was catastrophic and almost everything was on fire, but he spotted Tengu's sword, still pierced through the discarded limb, blown much closer to him after the last few fuel slugs detonated. 
He dived for his blade. For that fleeting moment, Tengu permitted him to go as fast as he desired. The Ravana surged toward him at the same time.
Joey grabbed the grip of the Tulpa-sized sword, swinging the blade with enough force to send the severed limb spinning away from it. The ongoing slash cut further than that, also going into, through, and past the Ravana's grasp.
Another limb fell away from the Ravana, joining the rest of the disembodied amid the flames.
Tengu hovered over the burning chamber on his damaged wings. He gripped his reclaimed blade with both hands as pilot and Tulpa stared down at the wounded Ravana.
Their prey.
The Ravana ignited its thrusters with another scream, but instead of meeting the offered challenge, it instead dashed back into the joining corridor leading back to the facility entrance. 
Joey licked his lip. He realized that he felt no more fear, only the thrill of the hunt.
Joey pursued in thruster-assisted sprint, but there were only fumes to launch forward with, which made him realize that Tengu had taken the liberty of ejecting his fuel pods at some point in the fighting before they could endanger him.
“Stop... making decisions before I make them.”
“You want to hunt less efficiently, Squad Leader?”
“No. Just... make sure they're good decisions if you make them first.”
“Have I made good decisions so far, Squad Leader?”
“... Yes.”
Joey caught up with his prey at last. He found the Ravana near the main entry doors. It was doing something strange, almost... human. 
It was kneeling, with a slouched shoulder and steeply-downturned head, directly over Mara Shah while struggling to balance itself on its remaining arm.
Joey halted his advance, his heart thudding away until his INI commanded his autonomic systems to slow down. The adrenaline was still in his blood, even with that artificial calm coming over him, which made him shiver with frustration about his thwarted fight-or-flight instincts.
“Baba, oh, Baba!” Mara Shah cried softly, but her voice was picked up on Tengu's enhanced audio sensors with perfect clarity. She sounded like a distressed child, extending her bracelet-encrusted wrist and setting her hand against the Ravana's cheek.
The Preta-infested machine grinded its explosion-fractured body about, like a cat pressing into a petting.
“What did they do to you, Baba?” Mara Shah asked the Ravana.
Joey clenched his jaw and kept Tengu's blade in a ready position as he took slow advancing steps. His Tulpa's own damage was extensive, but the Ravana was worse for the wear and he was ready to finish the job, if only Mara Shah would get out of the way. What was she doing?
“I am safe. We are safe, now. You will be well again! Let's go to your temple... our temple. You remember our temple, o Rama Reborn?” As she asked, her bright green eyes flashed toward Joey, briefly enough for the Ravana to fail to notice, but enough to warn Joey to not come any closer.
Not yet.
“Rama Reborn, please try to remember! Let me help you remember. You will be well again once you remember the temple.”
Joey understood nothing and neither did Tengu. The Tulpa and pilot waited for what they came to do: kill a Ravana.
The battered one-armed Preta-infested monster let out a purr-like grinding sound, then something that sounded like the whimpering of a wounded animal.
“Let me help you, Baba. I can help you! You just have to... remember the temple.” Mara Shah reached as she spoke, with a heel lifted high enough to hang her foot from her shoe, suspended with only the toes still inserted. A thin silvery INI cord extended from within her long black hair, reaching for an access port behind the Ravana's armored collar once the neck was stretched far enough to allow it. Her other hand reached far enough to cradle the machine's downturned head.
Joey waited.
“There, Baba! There, Rama Reborn! I see the temple! Here we are safe. Here, you can be healed. Here, you return to wholeness... let us recite the puja. Recite the puja, Baba. The puja. The puja.” There was urgency in Mara Shah's voice, but also impatience, and the slightest, most-carefully obscured hint of fear.
“O Baba, lead us from the unreal to the Real,” Mara Shah continued, stroking the Ravana again like a beloved pet. “O Baba, lead us from darkness to light. O Baba, lead us from death to immortality. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all...”
Joey sensed an overriding wireless signal rushing through the Ravana's lowered jamming field, with encryptions that bypassed his Tulpa's own defenses: executive-level override codes. With them, a single verbal command, in Mara Shah's voice, was sent directly into his brain.
“Kill it.”
Joey and Tengu struck as one. With a single downward blow, the metal monstrosity was cleaved from shoulder to neck and through its Preta-infested core deep within its chest. A third of the Ravana fell one way and two-thirds the other. Mara Shah stood, unflinching, as its head slammed to the floor in front of her.
“Shanti? My daughter? Was I not enough for you, you animal?” Mara Shah let out a snarl of rage that made Joey shiver more than the Ravana ever did as her heel came down against the side of the severed machine head, and again, and again, until the stiletto point of it snapped away. Her leg remained lifted, shoeless, away from the floor.
Tengu detected a second human presence from the crack of the re-opened bunker doors: Gabriel. For some reason, he held a handbag's straps in his clenched fist close to his forearm while he sprinted toward Mara Shah's side.
Mara Shah's vitals swiftly descended to calm, but she left her shapely leg suspended until Gabriel dove into a downward slide with a lowered head. Her foot came down once more, but that time it gracefully slipped into a replacement shoe from the handbag. She then kicked away the second old shoe and walked into the second new counterpart as quickly as Gabriel could put it down.
“Come, Gabriel,” Mara Shah said in a soft growl, ignoring Joey and Tengu entirely as she clacked on her replacement heels back the way she came. “We have what we came for. I have a daughter to thaw.”


Chapter 4

	“Sorrow comes after happiness, and happiness after sorrow; One does not always suffer sorrow, nor always enjoy happiness.” 
	-Shanti Parva 

“We never had the luxury of knowing why, but we do know that Vidyudabhi, the Rama corporate flagship, went silent after the Battle of Norilsk some time ago. As you already know, early ERA operations across Eurasia were conservative and in constant anticipation of orbital bombardment that, so far, has yet to target us. We could8 only assume that a response from the Martian garrison fleet was dispatched at the time of lost contact and was already under well underway, but that was not our problem. As far as the matter concerns us, I think you would agree with me that it's time to stop living in fear of Vidyudabhi's shadow.”
Megan's ears heard the man's gruff voice without giving the words much thought. Her eyes refocused upon the holographic light suspended over the table of the command centre. For a moment, she had forgotten she was no longer in Camp Ocean Mother and was standing in Gorkhi-Terelj, the OTA artillery base that watched over Ulaanbaatar.
“While your regiment was deployed in the Altai, you may have noticed a difference in OTA's surveillance and command-and-control capabilities. Vidyudabhi apparently went rogue again, and started to knock out OTA satellites and orbital stations over most of the hemisphere. We were borrowing that same satellite network, so the blackout also blinded and divided our forces. Fortunately, couriers successfully relayed regained contact with Third Regiment. Colonel Banks reported that Camp Sayan was successfully evacuated ahead of the OTA advance. Ocean Mother is still in the process of being evacuated, taking advantage of the blackout while we can.”
The similarities of one command centre to another made it hard to tell any them apart. Like so much else of ERA's operational assets, the room and almost everything in it was appropriated from Rama's Eurasian holdings. Technicians used to take the time to overwrite Rama fonts and other visual aesthetics from their hardware, but roughly after the Battle of Altai Range, Megan noticed that they stopped bothering to shift the user-interface text away from the sanskrit-like aesthetic and only changed the interface color from Olympian gold to ERA crimson, if they could be bothered at all.  
“We're continuing to take full advantage of the gap in OTA communication and the consequent gap in OTA air supremacy to mobilize all of Third Company of our own Second Regiment to cover that evacuation. Colonel Asanuma's courier showed up as of zero-seven hundred to confirm that the Fifth Regiment is still with us, and as we speak, we are sending word down the eastern front... Colonel.”
She nodded while trusting her INI to take in most of the strategic data so she could make sense of it later with Kitsune-2's help. She already knew enough about the immediate situation without taking in the finer details of it to know that the battle had gone well, even if the war continued to seem impossible to win. She would go back to fighting soon enough. 
“Colonel Schmidt?”
Colonel Schmidt nodded to her rank and name while trying to keep her eyes open. Others were fighting in her place because she couldn't be everywhere at once. Ulaanbaatar was in the process of being liberated from OTA control. Without the covering fire from Gorkhi-Terelj, Myrmidon's local operators ordered many of their garrison drones to self-destruct, and as was the case with other recent ERA advances, the enemy also attempted to scuttle their production and resource assets and outright exterminate their rebelling workers, but there were still enough spoils of war to replace ERA's losses, Tulpas and riders alike. 
“Megan,” the man said, his voice informal and sharp enough to cut through inattention.
“Yes, General Wilde?” Megan responded. Major Lamarr might have shown her, on a few occasions, how to address the general, but she never fully got into the habit. She was there when ERA's fledgling presence on Earth had just enough time to reorganize itself into something approaching a respectable army, and because she herself had hand-picked her own superior officer, she found it difficult to see his rank as anything more than a living representation of her own shortcomings as a leader. She had told Sophia that she couldn't command an entire army, and Sophia told her that she wouldn't have to, that others had already joined the cause that could do the job.
“Colonel, look me in the eyes,” General Wilde commanded, but with a tone sounding more empathetic than ever before. His spot-speckled fair skin and salt-and-pepper hair spoke of his age and experience, while his furrowed bushy eyebrows framed his look of concern. She looked him in the eyes as requested, examining his harsh dark irises that lacked augmentation and carried the weight of many years.
“What is the operational strength of your regiment, after recent operations?” General Wilde asked. Megan knew that he already knew the answer; the question was rhetorical.
“Casualties were high, sir.” Megan knew they would have been much higher if she didn't intervene in time to save Second Company. Her personal intervention ran the risk of attracting OTA's full strength toward Camp Ocean Mother.
“Do you know how long it takes to turn a fresh volunteer into a Tulpa rider?”
“I'd have to check with Sergeant-Major Norden about that, sir.”
“You do that, Colonel. You do that on the way to quarters.”
“Sir?”
“I'm grounding you, Colonel, before you grind the rest of your unit to dust.”
“Sir!” 
“Let me be the first to remind you that you and your people are not drones. We're fighting an old kind of war here, and cybernetics aside, you're flesh and blood, not a machine.”
Megan clenched her jaw. She was tired and she knew it. She was tired before the Battle of Ulaanbaatar had even started. She was already tired before from the Battle of Altai Range. Every time she allowed herself some leave, she would wake up and read the list of recent ERA casualties and find names she recognized. Every time she was not there felt like another failure on her part to save them.
“Kitsune-2 just needs a little more time for repairs.”
“So do you, Colonel. You're dismissed,” General Wilde said, but with a sympathetic tone and squint to his dark eyes.
Megan clenched her fist, but deep inside, she felt glad that someone ordered her to let go and stop fighting for a change. She felt guilty about every moment she allowed herself to be anywhere but inside her Tulpa, but at least General Wilde made her choice for her. She saluted and made her way for the door.
Major Lamarr was waiting outside, presumably for her. He wore the uniform better than anyone, keeping his dark curly hair short enough to avoid his collar and leaving it only barely long enough to hang over his brow. He allowed no wrinkles on the jacket and no scuffing on his boots. His soft brown eyes were magnified a bit by his prescription eyeglasses. Those eyeglasses were anachronistic but fashionable enough for the frames to match the luster of the rank pins on his uniform jacket. She never figured out how he could have time to fight as long and as hard as he did while keeping up his appearance, which included a baby-smooth clean shave on his ebony chin and jawline.
“Why don't you get your vision corrected, already?” Megan asked. “Mine is-”
“How about you stop asking?” Major Lamarr said. “Dr. Lavi never got anything drilled into her own eyes, either.”
“Maybe not, but she never had to fight her own war.”
“When I'm plugged into my Centaur, I don't have to see with these eyes anyway. I know that look, Screamer,” Major Lamarr said, with a squint and a tensed brow. “Out with it.”
“I've been ordered to take a break, Turncoat,” Megan said.
“I saw that coming. Come on, let's catch up. We got time,” Turncoat said, urging her away and giving her a pace to follow alongside the window view of a painfully-beautiful Mongolian sunset. The azure-to-magenta glow in the clouds and the stillness in the air could trick someone into forgetting that the next chance to die was always around the corner.
“Remind me again about ERA's fraternization codes. If we hang out too much, aren't we violating them?” Megan asked as she gazed out at the sunset, window by window. She didn't want to show it, but as guilty as she felt, she wanted the moment to last forever. It felt good to be out of action, but she wouldn't make a habit of it, not with so many depending on her.
“Oh, come on,” Turncoat said, with frustration in his voice. “We're not dating. We can be friends. I mean, with General Wilde and a few other ex-military exceptions, how many here had a uniform code to go by until I literally wrote the book on it?”
“I know this is your uniform design. Congratulations,” Megan said as she tugged at the cuff of the sleeve of her uniform jacket. Her neck-to-toes neurosuit felt itchy on the inside, especially at the wrist. “What does that have to do with my question?”
“Uniform codes aren't specifically about the uniforms we wear.”
“That doesn't make sense to me. It's like when you told me that, historically, a lieutenant-general outranks a major-general. Doesn't a Major outrank a Lieutenant? It doesn't make sense.”
“A lot of it is tradition and historical precedence,” Jason said while acknowledging a salute at a security checkpoint held by two ERA enlisted troops while passing by them. “Our force isn't big enough for more than one general anyway. Look, it doesn't matter. I wrote the first draft of ERA's coding rules, ERA's provisional government ratified them, and I say we're allowed to watch a movie together.”
“Oh, a movie? So is this a date?” Megan asked as she walked, relaxing enough to finally smile. She felt no particular romantic attraction to Jason and sensed none in return, but she also felt comfortable and safe enough around him to joke around.
“It's a date, all right, but not with you. That wouldn't be appropriate. But lucky for me,” Lamarr made an attempt as a smooth smirk. “Scrapper's not in my chain of command anymore.”
“Engineering Corps, I know. I take it we're going by the motor pool on the way to the rec room?
“We're almost there already. Do you even look at the layout of the bases we capture anymore?”
“Why bother? We're going to leave this one behind, too.”
“Aye, and in the long run, we'll all be dead. But let's not go there, not tonight.”
“All right.”
Gorkhi-Terelj was like many ERA holdings that came before it: OTA-standardized pre-fabricated modularity, arranged with efficiency in mind while adhering to local geography and the intended purpose of the base. Most of that beautiful sunset view was looking downrange and downhill toward Ulaanbaatar, and it only dawned on Megan at that moment that the artillery was less intended to protect the city and more to shell it to rubble if OTA felt the urge.
Megan shivered. She made the right call in attacking and taking that base first, but it still cost many of Turncoat's riders, trading their lives for many civilians. She knew funeral services were held in the early afternoon for Egger and some other recent losses, but she couldn't make time on her schedule to attend.
She didn't have time to do everything. She barely had time to do anything.
“I'm sorry for asking, but are you keeping up on your Lethesomarol?” Turncoat asked.
“Jason...” Megan slouched and sighed as she passed the next checkpoint, acknowledging the next pair of saluted hands with an informal nod. “That stuff makes me sleepy.”
“You can't just quit that stuff, not all at once. No wonder you can't sleep. I'm going to get you a fresh prescription.”
“No, you're not. I outrank you.”
“WuShiKe Pharmaceuticals is the enemy, sure, but since we're using OTA Tulpa parts, why not use OTA drugs too? The bloody bootlickers left crates full of the stuff.”
“That isn't funny. I'm not myself when I'm on Lethesomarol.”
“Paranoia is a withdrawal symptom too, you know.”
“I'm not paranoid. I just don't like how that stuff makes me feel.”
“I think that's the problem, Megan.” Jason grabbed Megan's arm, firm enough to stop her steps but just gentle enough to avoid a forceful reaction. “You're not feeling much at all. You're getting shell-shocked.”
“But-”
“The riders look up to you, they always have. But you're scaring some of them. You're scaring me.”
“I'm scaring the enemy more. That's why I'm their primary target.”
“Aye, but they'll need a new one if they get you... you're getting sloppy, Screamer.” Turncoat shut his eyes with concentration. Megan knew he was contacting the Medical Corps with his INI through the local network. She could have countermanded his order, but that would probably further build his case that her mental health was getting worse so she reluctantly let him.
“I want a second opinion,” Megan said while pulling her arm away from Turncoat's grip. Up ahead, the doors hummed open and blew in an oily scorched stench from the base's busy motor pool. Centaur-class Tulpas were getting their damaged parts pried off and replacement parts were being put in place with noisy urgency. In the distance past the doors, Kitsune-2 turned her head to look back at Megan from where she stood, locked in place in one of the repair bays past the crawl of human activity across the hangar floor.
“You're getting sloppy, Screamer,” Kitsune-2 said into Megan's mind through the regiment-wide command frequency.
“Traitor,” Megan said, too tired and frustrated for her words to come out in the joking tone she intended.
“Your Tulpa is right, you know,” Turncoat said. “Do I need to bring Huginn and Muninn down here to tell you the same thing?”
“Don't. You. Dare,” Megan wasn't joking that time. Her two most trusted drones were on a long-duration combat air patrol around the new base, and nothing had much of a chance of spotting an OTA Snowy Owl besides another Snowy Owl. By the time next counterattack might have come, Megan wanted them to find out first before it was too late.
Chief Petty Officer Crystal “Scrapper” Gearhart popped her gum from the other side of the entryway, just loud enough for Megan to turn her head and identify her. Megan was gradually getting used to meeting her at eye-level while standing up. Scrapper had gotten the new legs she always wanted and seemed to enjoy them enough that it was hard to remember the last time she could be seen sitting down. Her cybernetic prosthetics were crude but functional, hand-made by the bearer in her spare time from Tulpa salvage too far gone to be put back into a Centaur. Thin exoskeletal braces branched out from the tread-padded feet with second-hand synthetic muscle fibers running up toward the knees, attached to a lightweight harness encircling her waist that blended in with the utility pockets of her uniform coveralls. Behind the numerous ammolite beads that hung off of braided strands of her red-brown hair, one blue-green and one amber-brown eye looked Megan over until the cheeky freckled smile faded from Scrapper's face.
“You know, Dr. Lavi was right,” Scrapper said with her naturally scratchy-raspy voice complemented with a synthesizer in her throat for clarity, with only a small alloy stud visible on the outside of the implant. “Two tails do add more take-off weight and wind-drag. You're burning more fuel.”
“The benefits, so far, seem to outweigh the drawbacks,” Megan replied.
“Before I know it, you're going to ask for a third one,” Scrapper said, while she gazed and nodded at the single ammolite bead that was still tied into the front of Megan's own hair, just like when it was first given to her, as if to confirm she was looking at her old friend and not some shell-shocked imitation. “How many tails is enough, boss?”
“If we find another tail in one of these Rama caches, maybe we can try three and go from there, Chief.”
“Maybe. Speaking of upgrades, I found some fancy high-tech blades in this base. No time to fix up your old ones, so Kitsune-2's going to be trying them out. Just one set, so don't break them too quick. They'll drain some power when they're lit up, but I think you'll like them.”
“Drain power? Lit up?” Megan didn't understand, and judging by Turncoat's expression, neither did he.
Scrapper took a long look at Turncoat before gazing back at Megan. “Listen. I might've brought your Tulpa back from the dead, but you... you look like a zombie. I can't fix that,” Scrapper remarked after popping her gum. “Take a break already.”
“That's why I'm here. I'm on break.” Megan said. “So, did Turncoat actually ask you out or...”
“Well-” Turncoat said, but Scrapper intercepted. “No.”
Megan cracked a smile as she turned to confront Turncoat. “Well, stop spending all your courage out there and do it already.”
“Well...” Turncoat cringed and looked away, scratching at the back of his head. “The base has a little theatre, and...”
“What's playing? What's the movie?” Scrapper asked, before blowing her next bubble.
“Oh, it's a surprise, but I think you'll love it,” Turncoat answered, sounding a lot less shy and interested enough in whatever entertainment OTA left behind for ERA personnel to rally his confidence.
“Cool,” Scrapper said. “I just punched out. Hey, before we go, you wanna see my new hobby?”
“Hobby?” Megan asked, looking along the repair bays as Scrapper stamped along on her bulky prosthetic legs.
Turncoat sighed and shook his head before pushing his glasses closer to his nose bridge. “She's trying to raise the dead. Again.”
“Second and third time's the charm,” Scrapper said, flashing an uneven-toothed grin as she waved an arm out toward a slouching patchwork of scavenged Tulpa parts held together with a tangled mess of spliced synthetic muscle fibers.
“Is that... Bluecap?” Megan asked, recognizing TM-3 Bluecap's telescoping domed head and her ultraviolet-spectrum targeting arrays. Unlike her original configuration, the head was extended off of the left shoulder, with the right shoulder looking empty and uneven in weight distribution.
“That's Bluecap's head, donated posthumously to my new baby,” Scrapper said. “I'm calling him Chimera.”
“Him?” Turncoat asked.
“Yeah, him,” Crystal said with a bead-swinging nod of her head. “Was a coin-toss, considering the donors. Call it a First Nations thing, but I don't want any Tulpa parts to go to waste. As soon as I have the time for it, Chimera's getting another head. TM-4's head, to be exact. I'll put Redcap head... there.” Scrapper pointed up to the empty-socketed right shoulder.
“You never asked me if you could do that,” Jason said.
“You never asked if Redcap was fine with being dead,” Scrapper responded, followed by another pop of her bubblegum. “The head's good, along with a few other pieces here and there that Ravana didn't eat.”
“Maybe you could have asked me,” Turncoat said. “Redcap had my handshake, and if I died, personally, I don't think I would want you to cut off my head and-”
Scrapper reached out and grabbed Turncoat by the back of his neck, leaning in unexpectedly close, causing Turncoat to widen his eyes. She whispered something to him that was too soft to hear through the racket of the surrounding motor pool, but Megan's curiosity was too great to not wonder why Turncoat looked so startled.
Megan dived into Turncoat's relatively-unprotected mind through his INI. The words Scrapper whispered were still bouncing around between his ears: “Bluecap was mine. Redcap was yours. They're like... Chimera's parents. We're making a baby.”
Scrapper let out a sharp cackle as Jason's dark cheeks flushed. A moment later she suddenly stopped laughing, her heterochromatic eyes glaring into Megan's own. “How about minding your own damn business, boss?”
“Was she in my mind again?” Turncoat cringed but his expression quickly turned to annoyance as he glared at Megan. “How many times have I asked you to stop doing that?”
“I'm sorry,” Megan said, her pale face blushing more visibly. She had no excuse that time. She could justify entering the INI-connected minds of ERA's personnel for security reasons when necessary, as well as checking the loyalty of new arrivals from the places they liberated in the search for recruits, but she realized that unjustified peeks into the minds of her comrades ran the risk of hurting the trust she had already established with them.
Scrapper was already halfway to the doors leading back the way Megan and Turncoat came before she thumped her bulky feet and spun around with a swish of her bead-braided hair. “Hey, you ever dive into General Wilde's head? He's kind of taken over your army, boss.”
“He didn't take over my army, Chief,” Megan said, with a firmer tone. “I trusted him with strategic responsibilities it because I'm... too busy. I can't be everywhere.”
“I never quite figured out why you did that,” Turncoat added, as if joining Scrapper in a pincer attack. “Are his strategies that great?”
Megan frowned as she prepared to defend her decision, walking through the doors and back into the twilight-lit corridor of the base connecting one module to the next. “So far, yes, they're great. We couldn't always depend on Olympian arrogance and OTA incompetence to save us. We needed... to go pro.”
“He's a pro, all right,” Turncoat said. “Isn't General Wilde from Fidelis, that private military company that Myrmidon bought out way back when?”
“He was made redundant roughly around the time Cindy... around the time Surgeon-Major Watt was drummed out of the Canadian military,” Megan explained.
“So were a lot of bootlickers that were kicked off the boots and went and found new boots to lick,” Scrapper said, with narrowed eyes, followed by a suspicion-laden chewing motion. 
“He's not a bootlicker,” Megan replied, with tension in her tone. She was not entirely comfortable with the ERA-popular slang term for people that had employment history with OTA military or security corporations.
“I don't let anyone join ERA that doesn't have an INI or a synergy implant or a 'patriot badge' that I can reach,” Megan further explained to Scrapper. She knew that her most important responsibility, after all, was locating OTA personnel who could be trusted to join the ERA cause. “I've prevented a lot of sabotage attempts... and worse... by doing the screenings myself.”
“Indulge my curiosity, then,” Turncoat said, with a lowered voice as he passed the next checkpoint alongside Scrapper. “Since I must pry about your prying... why do you trust General Wilde?”
“He's got something I don't entirely condone, but that I can understand: anger. Hatred. No one can fake that or hide it from me,” Megan said. “He wants to see Mars burn. He wants to see every Olympian dead.”
“Even Ross?” Turncoat asked after an impressed whistle.
“Well...” Megan cracked a smile, trying to downplay just how intense General Wilde's passions were when she dared to peek. “I'm glad Ross is up there, and Wilde's down here.”
“Right. Ross is safe up in space, like every other Olympian,” Scrapper said, rolling her eyes before looking into the dimly-lit room just ahead, filled with folding chairs and a cinema-grade holoprojector at its far end. “So what's playing on the HP?”
Turncoat grinned ear-to-ear with a tight dimpling on his cheeks, as if he was about to explode in excitement. “I can't tell you yet; I'd ruin the surprise. Let the other riders take their seats first.”
Megan found a place in the front row. The smacking and chewing sounds from Scrapper continued to bother her in the relative silence, so she moved one seat down and Turncoat filled it while Scrapper clicked out her annoyance. Numerous riders from other companies of her regiment were quickly filling the other seats. She was slightly relieved that she had professional distance enough from the rest of them to not have to apologize for missing a few funerals for their absent friends.
“Colonel,” said a voice that was slightly familiar to her. She had heard his voice before during the fighting leading up to the capture of Gorkhi-Terelj, though he was spoken to more than heard from.
“Captain,” Megan said, identifying Captain Novikov's name tape alongside new rank pins on his collar and jacket. He had received a field promotion. He was in Second Regiment, so that was not her call to make.
“Permission to sit here?” Novikov asked, smiling, trying and failing to hide signs of anxiety.
“Granted,” Megan said, trying to let the awkward moment pass by quickly. He sat next to her, on the opposite side from Turncoat and Scrapper.
“You were amazing out there,” Novikov whispered as the room's lighting darkened. “You saved my life again... Screamer.”
“I just wish more of you made it back... Sunrise,” Megan said, using his call sign because he used hers.
“Don't be so hard on yourself. We're all in this together-” Sunrise said, but hushing sounds from the surrounding audience shut him up.
Booming bass rattled the floor and reverberated through Megan's folding chair. The movie was starting, and it was no exception to typical Myrmidon-standard sensation gimmicks. Above all else, OTA-subsidized entertainment emphasized spectacle and stimulation and did its best to banish even the risk of provoking thought. The vertislums of Halifax had “movie nights” where everyone could gaze up and watch public broadcasts, courtesy of Olympian generosity.
Megan had hated most of those Nova Scotian “movie nights” because she couldn't relate to anyone in those stories. Almost all of them featured protagonists that were temporarily poor and disadvantaged but were actually destined to riches and greatness because of some mysterious inheritance or other stroke of predetermined destiny. A few were presented as poor, but had unique inherited talents that were so absurdly exceptional that Olympians themselves elevated them to apotheosis after some great quest was completed. The quests usually involved killing terrorists of some kind.
Megan only turned her attention to the HP's glow because she recognized one of the stars.
“Kitsune!” Megan exclaimed out loud as she saw her original-run TM-2 soar over a burning pile of demolished drones, with a fly-by close enough to scatter the top of the heap. 
The debris sprinkled down after Kitsune's fly-by, and the camera view followed after it, revealing piles of bones and tatters of OTA contractor uniform scraps flapping like banners in the smoky wind.
“Oh come on,” Jason said out loud, but was hushed with a loud hiss... from his date.
A grim and genocidal one-sided battle ensued. The Tulpas were killing machines, destroying drones as if in afterthought, but they had a particular interest in gunning down human operators and fleeing civilians alike. The propaganda value was obvious. The cinematography was lowest-bidder and it showed. By contrast, the Nautilus could produce and present real-time simulations, more visually impressive and true-to-life, but because of the crushing poverty that so many of the Tulpa riders experienced before joining ERA and the fact that few had ever seen better action outside of an actual battle, no one around seemed eager to complain.
Kitsune craned her neck and glared back at the audience. Inexplicably, and without warning, her head split open just beneath the eye to reveal a gnashing maw of teeth, and with a metallic scream and a lunge for the camera view, half of the audience jumped as things blacked out.
Megan didn't stir. The real Ravana was scarier than that cheap HP mockery of Kitsune could ever be. Her attention drifted into memories of Ravana until Sunrise put his hand over hers. He lifted that hand away after her own balled into a fist.
“It's all right,” Sunrise said, while Megan tightened her jaw and tried to ignore him.
With another boom, blocky rusty letters spun out from the void and slammed into the forward view, spelling out “Tulpa Uprising.”
After a growl of rattling bass that preceded a fade into darkness, a silence stilled the theatre, until some shifting around, a cough, then Scrapper's chewing from two seats away filled the void.
Then, a gravelly masculine narrative voice began to speak from the holoprojector.
“Earth, cradle of humanity. This was once a blue planet teeming with life, but because of the selfishness and short-sightedness of the humans that lived there, the oceans were choked in plastic waste. The skies were scorched with carbon pollution. The soil was depleted in an attempt to feed an ever-growing and insatiable population.”
Megan noted the cleverness of the narration: no lies were being told, not directly. The OTA propaganda was only redirecting blame, implying that the ruination of the Earth was every individual consumer's burden of guilt, absolving the ruling class of any responsibility. 
Next came uplifting music and a painfully-bright shine of sunlight reflecting off of a fleet of colonial transports escaping the Earth. The camera view soared and darted from craft to craft, until focusing on the serene gaze of an unidentified man in a black turtleneck sweater gazing out from one of the vessels' viewports, finger and thumb to his chin while gazing back at the planet he was leaving behind. 
“Some humans foresaw the end of the Earth. They did their best to put off the inevitable, but knew that they would have to... start anew.”
The Olympian-to-be had a maudlin glisten of tears in his eyes, but then he turned away and instead looked ahead, his face suddenly dry of tears and with a visionary gesture forward, motioning as if steering a longship of antiquity toward the starry horizon.
“They would have to leave the cradle. They would have to cast off old ideas and old limitations,” the voiceover continued. 
Crystal clicked her tongue loudly. No one dared to hush her.
“The best and brightest scions of old humanity made a new home on Mars. At the Olympus Colony, away from the tyranny of failing governments and the danger of the irrational masses, they could create and innovate unhindered. They worked wonders and strove tirelessly to better themselves, setting aside human limitations to become... something new. This transformation was necessary for them to outlast the Earth. Perhaps someday, those ascended humans, those... Olympians, would return to save those left behind.”
“I don't know what's harder to believe: Olympians saving anyone, or them coming back to Earth,” Crystal said as the projection darkened once again to pretentious silence. She received only noncommittal hushing from the rest of the audience. “When's the uprising? I wanna see who's playing me.”
A movement caught her eye and Megan looked past Novikov to the side door of the crowded little theatre. She saw a familiar tall and powerfully-built woman that stood with her head tilted to fit just under the doorway. The gene-sculpted giantess had her red-brown hair bundled into a tight bun that was suspended just over the collar of her ERA Medical Corps uniform, carrying the rank pins of a Surgeon-Major. As Megan made contact with her warm hazel eyes, that woman's expression and body language became welcoming but insistent.
“I called Cindy. I'm sorry,” Jason said, with a whisper that passed under shushing range. “We can't help you, but she can.”
“I'm going to miss the movie,” Megan hissed back, getting shushed as a rumble rattled through the floor. She had her head turned away, deciding not to tease herself with any more of the movie she was about to miss as she got up and walked past the rest of the audience, casting her shadow over them as she went. For some reason, accompanied by a fairly-accurate imitation of the sound of Tulpa-grade thrusters screeching at full burn, the HP's glow presented something that got her fellow riders laughing, applauding, cheering, and whistling loud enough to make Megan flinch.
She resisted the chance to look back to see what she was missing as she walked with Cindy out of the theatre. As she went, she left a small mental note in her INI's day planner to ask about it later.
“I'm sorry you're missing the movie,” Cindy said while extending a hand behind Megan's back, urging her to walk a little faster. The narrators voice returned, saying something behind her with pomp and circumstance fit for a ghost story, but Megan let the wall-muffled words go unfiltered and unprocessed by her cybernetics.
“I wanted to know what OTA thought about us...” Megan said as she looked up to Cindy.
“Why should you care what the bootlickers think about you?” Cindy said with a shake of her head as she walked. “I know you better than that, Megan. You worry too much about what your enemies think about you. It's just propaganda...”
“Propaganda isn't always a lie, Cindy,” Megan said as she reached the next door down the hall before Cindy did. Her olfactory augmentations picked up the scent of the Surgeon-Major's telltale incense. The Surgeon-Major must have only just started the playback of her old well-remembered Gregorian monk chants because it was only just finishing track 1 and moving on to track 2.
Cindy lifted a small device with a screen on it that looked like it was lifted from Dr. Lavi's cybernetics suite on board the starship Nautilus. The Surgeon-Major had disembarked from that orbiting refuge not long after the Battle of Norilsk and it looked like she brought more down with her than candles and incense.
“I've been putting this off for a while now, Megan, but I would like you to plug this into your INI,” Cindy asked.
Megan took the far end of the connector. The moment she plugged the cord into the base of her skull, she felt her implants rise to meet the detected intrusion. The device was indeed from Nautilus, but its security codes were a few updates behind.
Megan overrode her own defenses. She trusted Cindy more than anyone. There had to be a therapeutic reason for that device, she decided, as she wondered about the peculiar function of that little screen.
Megan saw blurry images of her own mind's eye interpreted and presented on the screen. Through the screen, she saw herself looking at that screen, the corner of the desk it was set upon, and Cindy gazing back from behind it, but all of it was presented in a dream-like way.
In previous therapy sessions, Megan had visualized, for her own amusement during Cindy's guided-meditation exercises, that the Gregorian monks she heard from recorded chants were actually in the office, crouched behind the furniture or hiding under the floor. On the screen, to Megan's astonishment, there they were, huddled and hiding with comical clumsiness while singing away.
“This is a dangerous device,” Cindy said. “I shouldn't even have it, truth be told, but you admitted it to me yourself during your last appointment with me: something changed you since you swam out of Kitsune. Ever since you pulled yourself ashore of Lake Sita...”
“No, I don't want to go back there,” Megan said, hearing the fear in her own voice. She refused to look at the screen, not wanting to see Ravana, not again.
“Then we won't. This is a voluntary session, after all,” Cindy said. “But if you keep refusing treatment, if you keep wasting away without sleep, Megan Evita Schmidt, I reserve the right to relieve you of duty.”
“ERA needs me. What do I have to do to stay on duty?”
“You're a kind young woman with a big heart, but the more you fight, the less you sleep, the more defenses you put up-”
“What do you want me to do, Cindy?” Megan said with gritted teeth and a clenched fist. She trusted Cindy, but even Cindy was starting to test her trust.
“You told me about those nightmares that you've been having before,” Cindy said, with her voice softer and smoother, as if she knew just how close Megan was to walking out of the room. “You don't want to go back to Lake Sita, so how about we go back to those nightmares instead?”
“Fine. Anything but Lake Sita... anything but Ravana,” Megan said.
Cindy nodded. “You often asked me why you kept dreaming of that bus. You asked me what it meant. You asked why you heard crying. Loud crying...”
Megan didn't want to go back there, but she preferred it to going back to Lake Sita, to Ravana. She had to stop thinking of that Preta-infested thing that destroyed her first Tulpa squad, tore her first Tulpa to ribbons, nearly drowned her as the icy lake water flooded in.
“Megan, concentrate, please,” Cindy said. “We're not going to Lake Sita. We're going back to that bus. We hear crying. Why do we hear crying? Are you crying?”
“No,” Megan said, but even as she said that, she felt her heart racing, unprompted, as her INI tried to stabilize her vitals. She overrode the implant to let her emotions flow more naturally. She kept her eyes shut. She didn't need to look at the screen to see into her own mind's eye. “I'm not crying. But there is crying. A little baby is crying...”
“How little? Do you know the baby?” Cindy asked.
“Yes,” Megan said. She didn't want to go there, didn't want to reach in that far, but Cindy brought her there and insisted on staying.
“With this device, through your INI, I can see what you're remembering, but I can't hear the crying. Describe the crying for me, please. What else do you hear?”
“Shouting. 'On the ground! On the ground now!'” Megan shouted, imitating the garbled shouting through gas masks. Her own eyes burned, she remembered. The inside of her nose burned. Her throat burned. No matter how much it hurt the inside of her chest, no matter how little breath she had, she screamed out.
“Mom!” Megan added with strain in her voice. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!”
“Why were you sorry, Megan?” Cindy asked. “What did you have to be sorry about?”
Megan's heart raced as memory mixed with INI-intertwined sensations in the present moment. Her eyes burned with the sting of tears, but they also burned from something else, from something that was hissing through the seats of the bus. The seats had crawl-spaces beneath, and like she used to do with other kids in the camp, she went hiding. It wasn't fun hiding that time. That time, she was alone. She couldn't breathe.
“Do you remember why you were sorry?” Cindy asked.
“No!” Megan shouted back, finding herself angry at the question and not knowing why.
“What happened next?”
“Popping sounds. Pop pop pop pop.” There were sparks and light flooding in from the night outside, as if the moon was turned sideways. Pieces of metal rang under the seats, ripping the underside of the cushions. Sizzling slivers burned her forearms. Her eyes burned but she didn't want to rub the burning any more into her eyes no matter how it hurt.
“Gunfire,” Cindy clarified. “You heard gunfire. Someone was shooting through that bus. What happened after?”
“Dad... Dad warned me to be very quiet if I heard 'the cat' outside. He taught me to 'play mousy' when 'the cat' came back.”
“'Mousy'?”
“Play 'mousy'. Find the hole. Hide from the cat. The cat was coming. The cat...”
“Did the cat say anything?”
“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” Megan shouted out in fear and anger, imitating the mask-garbled demands that came the same direction as the bullets. “The crying won't stop.”
“You were crying?”
“No... but he was crying. I wished he would stop, but he didn't know how to 'play mousy'. He was too young... 'the cat' came in. 'The cat' took him away.”
“Who did 'the cat' take away?” Cindy asked.



Chapter 5

	“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
	Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
	A savage place! as holy and enchanted
	As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
	By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

	-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Joey followed Mara Shah off of the helipad and walked along the inner facade of the palace. There were dozens of niches decorating the white marble walls, each encrusted with its own unique mosaic of gemstones, portraying lotus, hibiscus, jasmine, and oleander arrangements alongside elephants, tigers, peacocks, dancing devas, and more. He was careful to avoid stepping on any of the flowers lining the path.
“Tread lightly here,” Mara Shah said. “These are the gardens of my delight.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Joey said, while looking through the next narrow gap between mosaics and through the facade. The northeastern side of New Lakhnau was a glass and steel forest of glittering skyscrapers that lit up the Himalayas behind them. There was a red-brown haze halfway down the height of those scores of buildings, looking thick enough to walk on, but Joey knew that it was quite a long drop through the haze toward ground level.
“I am a very busy woman, Joey. Stop gawking like a child, and keep up with me,” Mara Shah commanded. Joey stuffed his hands in his uniform jacket pockets and kept his eyes forward instead, resisting the temptation to stare down at the rhythmic sway of the Olympian's hips and rear as she walked. Every time he had seen her since he first saw her in Norilsk, she wore a different outfit, and this time she wore widow-white pleated gharara trousers with a matching kurta shirt and thin dupatta veil that flickered like spider webbing as it caught the whipped wind radiating from the landed helicopter. The embroidery was intricate and sophisticated, but Joey didn't dare walk closer to try to make sense of the untold tale woven into the meters of brocade, kimkhwāb, and silk she wore. 
“You named your Tulpa, so I have heard. Tengu, was it?” Mara Shah asked, dispassionately. “It seems that you've picked up some of ERA's superstitions.”
Joey followed in silence. He wanted to blame Gabriel for giving him the idea and felt ashamed for going along with it, but the handshake was made and Beta-1 became Tengu.
“Do you talk to your friend, Tengu, too?”
“Only for mission purposes,” Joey replied.
He looked past her toward the pair of shiny black-armored and gold-lined Rakshasa-class Tulpas, much like the models that were piloted by the rest of Beta Squad. The Rakshasas stood with weapons out, but in a formal way like ancient honor guards standing to each side of the steps leading up to the manor doors. The sensors on their heads were deliberately sculpted to bear an almost beast-like countenance. There was an artful asymmetry to the chassis design, with a single high-capacity RA-4H high-caliber autocannon held in one arm and a long-bladed polearm attached to the shoulder guard. The opposite side was counterbalanced with a heavy munitions mount on the shoulder and the arm on that side bulked up with an extendable shield and a signal-boosting suite of additional countermeasure equipment. His INI tried to identify the unit they belonged to, but his inquiry was denied. 
“Don't stare at my guards,” Mara Shah warned. “Unlike your Tengu, those Rakshasas are not your friends. Do not do anything... erratic. That might provoke them.”
Joey had recently believed he had a unique place in Rama's military presence on Earth. He was a squad leader, but he had yet to actually lead a squad outside of simulations.
“Is something troubling you, Joey?” Mara Shah asked, without looking back. She had so much beauty around her but she seemed bored and disinterested with it all.
“I want to know what ERA wants. Why do they fight?” Joey knew the answer to his own question, but wasn't yet sure if Mara Shah knew that during his asking.
“Ah,” Mara Shah waited for the massive doors to open for her, and as she did, she turned her head and raised her chin as she gazed back, making Joey feel a little smaller. “May the answer to your question soothe your troubled mind. The Earth Restoration Alliance has a noble goal, but a misguided one.”
The doors opened. There were delegates, petitioners, and supplicants waiting inside, some dressed in business suits and others dressed as if tending to a Raja's royal court. They were clustered in a half-circle around the opening doors, none daring to speak first.
“Their goal is to save Earth from Martian excess,” Mara Shah said as she continued her forward advance, giving the waiting crowd of OTA and Rama subordinates a dismissive flick of her hand. It was enough to scatter them across the vast and intricate mosaic floor like a school of fish evading a shark. She continued the conversation with Joey even as she sounded bored with it. “What they want is admirable. The way they want it is impossible.”
“It is impossible for Earth to survive without Mars?” Joey asked. It was a common presumption among most Earth denizens that the planet would collapse entirely without the ongoing care and innovations from distant Mars.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, Joey,” Mara Shah said while striding across the opulently-decorated floor of the reception hall. It was wide enough and tall enough to be a Tulpa hangar. “Earth cannot survive with Mars, not with the growth-at-all-costs priorities that drive Olympus Colony.”
“But you said what ERA wants is impossible...”
“It is. ERA cannot break the interplanetary supply chain. ERA can delay, or reduce, but cannot stop the draining of Earth's resources. There is a limit to what asymmetrical warfare can accomplish.”
Joey nodded, remembering some old suspicions he had held, hearing them confirmed as he walked. “During my training, I studied after-action reports of eco-terrorist attacks from Nova Scotia to Norilsk. ERA is logistically, strategically, and tactically outmatched. Even a token security force guarding a RevNoo... guarding a Revolution Nootropics facility... should stand a good chance to repel them, yet-”
“Rama Aerospace could crush ERA tomorrow, Joey. There is a reason that I allow ERA to exist,” Mara Shah said as she turned and glanced at her own reflection from jewel-encrusted hand mirrors held to each side of her from a formation of silk-trailing retainer girls who had surrounded her. “They are allowed to continue existing because they are a boon to arms sales and maintain our place as the market leader in defense technologies.” After a subtle gesture of approval, the girls left her side just as quickly, disappearing behind the sound-masking drapes that divided the inner courtyard from the lonely austerity of the gold-and-marble main hall. “You are a soldier, not a strategist. Remember that.”
“Why do you allow ERA to exist?”
“I thought you would understand by now with what I have already told you, applied to what you should already know. I believed you might have been mature enough, wise enough, to now understand how the world works. Does the truth, so far, trouble you?”
“A little,” Joey said, lying again. He was hiding the real questions that he did not dare ask. In truth, he didn't actually care why ERA did what it did. ERA was a bunch of Earth-worshipping primitive fanatics that were afraid of innovation and technology, yet in their hypocrisy, they used technology stolen from Rama to fight. Mara Shah said that Mars was killing the Earth, but he didn't know what the alternative to Martian governance was. It certainly wasn't ERA control of the planet.
“Joey,” Mara Shah said, looking back as she waited for the next pair of doors to drift open, silently releasing a flurry of blossoms and pollen that caught in Joey's hair and tickled his nose. “I want your loyalty. That is all. Keep your eyes forward and remember your purpose. You are an actor upon a world stage, and your purpose is to follow the script and play your part. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“Gabriel is more than an actor to you,” Joey said, clenching his jaw a bit. “He knows more than his own script, that's for sure.”
“Oh, Joey,” Mara Shah said, not with dismissal, but with a curious sort of warmth in her voice. She beckoned with the long painted nails of her fingers, signaling her permission to let him enter the waking dream that grew over and around her. “You just said the beginning of the real questions you want to ask. Gabriel is a true and loyal friend. He is very close to me and I am quite fond of him, but not in the way you fear.” Tropical birds sang and called to one another, gazing down from the branches of leaf-heavy trees under the golden glare of artificial sunlight. Tigers, supposedly extinct for a century, reclined upon little cliffs overlooking a misty waterfall and the bubbling lily-filled stream beneath. One tiger yawned at Joey while another got up and walked into the ferns and vines, flanking the intruder with gem-like eyes staring out from the shadows.
“Is anyone... closer... than that?” Joey asked, feeling just stubborn enough to press his luck. With a flick of a wrist, Mara Shah banished all remaining OTA and Rama visitors away entirely. Such was her power. With little more than such a gesture, she had tamed the murderous Ravana prototype in lurking beneath Norilsk. With patience and planning matching that subtlety, she had also seized the keys to her father-in-law's kingdom. With a single command, she had Joey execute the last vestige of Baba Shah. The power that she so effortlessly wielded made his stomach churn with excitement and fear. 
Mara Shah gave the most frightening response that Joey could have imagined to that question. She smiled. Her smile was full and vibrant as she stretched her arms outward, as if beckoning Joey forward again, over a tributary of the misty stream. That stalking tiger emerged again, only to stride behind the Olympian, leaning into her petting fingers, setting down upon its belly so she could sit upon its back. When seated, she finally spoke. “I would have thought you would know that answer already, silly boy.”
Joey choked on his breath. He hid nothing. He could hide nothing. She knew everything.
Do not be ashamed of your desires, Joey,” Mara Shah said. “Life is a dance of desire, and I know you desire me.”
“Yes,” Joey said. His face was on fire. He had previously assumed his boss was Baba Shah until Mara Shah made her move and filled the power vacuum, securing her position over her vanquished predecessor with a single stroke from Tengu's blade. He should have feared Mara Shah as much as her court petitioners and corporate underlings did, but his excitement intensified instead.
“I pursue pleasure above all other concerns,” Mara Shah laughed like a songbird. “Here, in my garden of plenty, my every wish is granted.”
“Here, you wanted me,” Joey said with a racing heart. His entire body was aroused, his instincts ignited. All Mara had to do now was utter a single word of permission and Joey would pounce on her like a beast. He would tear her fine clothes to radiant ribbons. At long last, he would touch, taste, and know all the pleasures of her timeless divine body.
She said no such word of permission. Her hand was outstretched to him in a gesture of denial, but her expression was not cruel. She looked, somehow, sad. Her sadness finally matched the whites of her grieving weaves.
“Joey... you must not know me. And I must not know you,” Mara Shah said.
“Why not?” Joey grimaced, his heart still racing. One of the resting tigers growled at him. If he tore into her, they would tear into him, and they would rip much more than his clothes.
“I will teach you. Bring me a flower from my garden. Find me the brightest and most beautiful flower.”
Joey did as she commanded. He roamed among the resting tigers until he made his choice. He reached with his gloved fingers and plucked a bright and beautiful flower from a breeze-rustled shrub, taking it along with some of the golden stem and leaves beneath.
“Nerium oleander,” Mara Shah said as she gazed at Joey's offering. The tiger turned its head and chuffed contently, but the Olympian extended her hand, denying the flower the same way she denied the boy that brought it to her. “Well chosen, and an appropriate specimen in particular. This flower is so much like you, Joey,” her tone was warm, but ended again in sadness.
Joey dropped to his knees upon the soft moist earth without being asked. He held the flower close to his chest, feeling tightness in his fingers as he clenched his jaw. He met her eyes once again. He wished to know why she rejected his offering, while saying it was also well-chosen. Did she mean it was well chosen for what she was trying to teach him?
“A beautiful but poisonous flower,” Mara Shah said. “You picked it from a tragic place. Those golden leaves and stem? Scorched. Dying. You plucked that flower from a shrub infected with Xylella fastidiosa.”
“Why?” Joey asked, not making eye contact. “Why have a sick plant in your garden of plenty?”
“Why, indeed? Why are withering and sick humans still upon the Earth? Why is the Earth withering and sick? Like you, the flower you picked seems bright and pretty, but it was sick before you picked it. You are at your biological peak, but already in the early stages of mortal decay.”
Joey shivered. His arousal was gone, replaced with awareness of every ache, every itch, every flaw in his adolescent body. He would only get older and sicker. He would never be as healthy or as young as he was in the passing present moment. He was aging, decaying with each and every beat of his mortal heart.
“If I made love to you, if I loved you, I would grieve, because that your life is infinitesimally short compared to my own eternity. I would watch as every blemish and every wrinkle charted the ongoing path to your grave. But there is another flower...”
Joey felt sickly already, but he focused on Mara Shah's words. What did she mean?
Mara Shah glided her hands over the tiger she sat upon. The tiger stretched, rose, and brought her to the pond beneath the misty falls. Soon after, she returned, still atop her tiger, now holding a cup-like blossom in her hands. The tiger yawned and resettled upon the soft vibrant earth. Mara Shah remained upon her resting beast as she presented the second flower.
“Nelumbo nucifera. Sacred Lotus. You may yet become like this flower. It rose from the pond, from mud and slime, from ugliness. It persists. It can outlast drought and flourish when the rains return. It can live over a thousand years... and with modern technology, it can live forever.”
Joey held onto the withered-stemmed oleander, but he found himself longing for the lotus.
“That dying shrub will be pruned in time,” Mara Shah said, gazing upon Joey's dying offering. “This lotus will remain in my care, long after those bothersome guests outside my garden are dust, dead and gone. Do you understand, Joey?”
“How do I become like the lotus? How do I become... Immortal?”
“Let go of that poisonous dying flower,” Mara Shah commanded, and Joey obeyed. She watched it fall before she continued. “Know patience in the drought and await the rain.”
“But I am dying. You said so yourself. I am mortal, and I am already decaying. The longer I have to wait, the older I get.”
Mara Shah smiled again. “Indeed. But as I selected this lotus, I select those that deserve to accompany me into eternity.”
“I will do anything to live forever. I will do anything to be with you, forever.”
Mara Shah smiled brighter and more beautifully than the glow of sunlight. She rose to her feet, trampling the oleander beneath her heel. As she stood over Joey, she extended her delicate, jewelry-laden hand.
“Tomorrow morning, you will hunt for a worthy offering to me. You will bring me the head of the ERA terrorist leader, Colonel Schmidt.”

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