The artisan district smelled like peanut oil and exhaust.
Caleb walked the cracked alley with his old jacket zipped to his throat. The morning shift sirens were going off down the hill in three different keys. The shutters on the bay across the street were rolling up in a long screech of unoiled metal that nobody on the street paid attention to.
Three men were standing in his path.
Salvage gear, the kind you bought off a contractor who had gotten it off another contractor who had gotten it off a corpse. Iron wrenches at their belts. The smell off them was sweat and bad liquor and something chemical he did not want to name.
They had Tali against the chain-link.
She had her welding kit clamped to her chest. The pink in her hair was the only color in the alley. Her jaw was set in the way her jaw set, which Caleb had only known her one day to recognize but was already starting to recognize.
"Drop the box," the one in front was saying. He tapped the side of her crate with the head of his wrench. "We'll walk it to the quartermaster for you. Small fee."
He reached for her hand.
Caleb closed the distance without thinking about it.
He got the back of the man's collar in his left fist and pulled him off his feet, hard, the way you pull a dog off something dead. The man came around faster than he should have. The wrench came around with him.
It hit Caleb's shoulder.
The bad shoulder. The one Iharu had taped that morning. The pain went down to his elbow in one bright line.
Caleb did not let go.
He caught the wrist on the second swing. He felt the joint give before he heard it. His forearm went into the man's throat. The man went into the brick wall the way a sack of something heavy goes into a wall, which is not gracefully.
The wrench hit the gutter.
The other two reached for their belts.
Caleb did not draw.
He tapped the Rank D pin at his collar.
The matte black finish caught the alley light for half a second. They were close enough to read the silver around the edge. They were close enough to know what it meant.
"I'm late."
That was all he said.
The two men got their hands off their belts. They came forward only long enough to scoop their leader off the brick and drag him down the alley by his armpits. Nobody looked back.
Tali waited until they were out of sight.
Then she let out a long breath through her nose like a kettle finally remembering to whistle.
"I had a plasma torch."
"In the back pocket."
"In the back pocket."
"How long does a plasma torch take to draw."
"...Longer than that."
She blew a small bubble. It popped. She wiped grease off her cheek with the back of her wrist and managed to put a new streak there in the process.
"Shop opens in ten."
"Yeah."
"Don't be late."
She picked up the crate and walked.
***
The shop was already humming when he got there. She had skipped past the front door and gone in through the bay.
Caleb stood on the fitting platform in his briefs and tried to think about anything that was not the air temperature.
Tali circled him with a datapad, frowning at it the way she frowned at things that were not behaving. The new undersuit sat halfway up his hips, the chest panels hanging open. The fabric was heavier than it looked. He could feel the sensors running along his ribs already, cold, like a row of pinprick teeth.
"Military sizes you off a tape measure."
"Yeah."
"Tape measure works on canvas. Canvas is dumb. Canvas just hangs there."
"Sure."
"Reactive weave is not dumb. Reactive weave reads your nervous system. Off by a quarter inch, your shoulder goes the wrong direction when you swing a rifle."
She set the datapad down on the bench. She stepped onto the platform.
"Arms."
He raised his arms.
She put her hands flat against his thighs and dragged the fabric up.
He kept his eyes on the rust pattern on the ceiling panel directly above her workbench. He had counted it before. Twenty-three rust spots in a roughly triangular arrangement. He started counting again.
Her palms went under the waistband.
"Pelvic nodes," she said.
She put her hand inside his briefs.
He counted rust spots.
She had professional fingers. They were the same fingers he had watched solder a circuit board the day before with a steadiness most surgeons would have respected. They were also her fingers, which she had decided to put where she had decided to put them, on the grounds that the sensors needed to align with his pulse.
She moved.
He kept counting.
"Heart rate just jumped," she said, mild.
"Has it."
"It has."
"The sensors are calibrating."
"The sensors are calibrating."
She did the thing she was doing. He stared at the ceiling. He had been working in disposal yards for five years. He had once held his hand inside a Class-3 carcass to manually clamp a ruptured fuel line. He had a very developed talent for being in his body without being in his body.
He used it.
"Tali."
"Mm."
"Lock the nodes."
She gave him one last pull that was very slightly slower than the one before it and pulled her hands back out.
"Spoilsport."
"I don't tip."
"Noted."
She stood up.
Her palms went flat against his stomach and she walked them up his ribs to find the chest seams. Her fingers were cold from the inside of the waistband. He felt the seam press in along each rib in turn. She zipped the suit up to his collarbone. The fabric contracted against him in one long inward squeeze, like the suit had decided to be there.
She stepped back.
She was not smirking anymore.
"I treat my builds like a financial investment, scrubber."
"Okay."
"The suit won't tear. The seams will hold. But it doesn't save your life if you don't let it move you."
"Okay."
"Keep it in one piece. Upload telemetry by nightfall."
"Yeah."
She turned away and was already adjusting the cuff on her welding mask before he had his harness off the bench.
He did not say thank you.
He did not think she wanted him to.
***
The Seventh Division base was its own city.
Caleb walked through the noise of it on the way to the staging hangars. Transport rigs grinding past on bad suspensions, sending dust over everything. Food stalls on every corner running peanut oil hot enough to taste from the street. The smells stacking on top of each other in a way that was specifically the smell of this base and not any other base he had ever walked through.
Off-duty soldiers loitered. Veterans drank early. Recruits hauled crates with their heads down. Two men in dented armor were yelling at each other over a holoscreen replaying clips of his own tunnel feed, and one of them was clearly losing the argument.
He went around them.
Military police watched everything from the intersections, hands resting on the rifles slung across their chests, the way some cats sit on top of fences.
It was a machine. Everyone here was a moving part in the machine. The machine ran on dead Kaiju.
He pushed through the canvas flap into the staging tent.
***
Hiro was pacing.
He had a new optic mounted to his rifle, and he was holding it up to the tent lamps like he was hoping a customer would walk in and ask him about it. He turned the magnification ring twice.
"Tier two," Hiro said. "Low-light filter on it is silly. Chat is going to love it."
"Good."
Iharu was on a crate cleaning his scatter-gun. He looked up when Caleb came in and made a noise that lived somewhere between a grunt and a comment.
"Look at this guy."
"Hi, Iharu."
"Got promoted. Got fitted. Got a new shoulder, probably."
"Same shoulder."
"Try to keep up."
"Sure."
Kikaru was at the map table.
Her armor was repaired. He could see the seam where the Mimic blade had taken the breastplate apart. The replacement plate was a slightly different shade of white than the rest, which she had probably noticed and would not be told about by anyone she would not kill for telling her.
She did not say anything when he walked up.
She came out from behind the table.
She stopped close enough that he had to look down at her face. She reached up and put her finger on the seam at his collarbone, where Tali had laid the heavier weave in over the bandage.
She traced the seam.
"You finally look like something."
"You evaluating the gear or the meat under it."
"Both."
She did not pull her hand back right away.
She did pull it back.
"Spearhead squads depend on structural integrity," she said. Her voice was flatter than her usual flat. "Don't ruin the suit on the first drop. You expose my flank when you bleed out."
"I'll keep your flank clear, princess."
"Don't call me that."
"Sure."
Her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. She turned back to the map.
He had seen her hands shake. He had not said so.
***
The doors at the back of the tent banged open.
Iris came in already talking.
"Listen."
Everyone listened. Iris was the kind of person you listened to whether you meant to or not.
She slapped the datapad onto the table and a blue hologram lifted up out of it, a mountain range fifty miles outside the city walls.
"Command picked up a biological rupture in Sector Nine. Not a Kaiju incursion. The terrain itself is changing. Hyper-accelerated biological growth radiating out from a central point. Nexus formation."
Her finger went through the air to the middle of the hologram. A red dot pulsed there.
"That's the anchor. The terrain's shifting faster than the artillery mechs can plant their feet. They want boots on the ground to cut a path to it. You drop, you find the nexus, you destroy it before the corruption reaches the coast. Four divisions are deploying. We're the spearhead."
She did not use the old word for it. Caleb noticed.
She pulled up a second window on the holo. A gold icon flared.
She let it sit there.
"Command attached an SSS-Rank operator to the theater."
Nobody said anything.
Iharu's hand was still on his scatter-gun barrel. It did not move. Hiro had stopped breathing. Kikaru's posture, which had been at parade-rest for so long it had probably set, broke at the shoulders by half an inch.
"Will," Hiro started. "Will they be on our..."
"No," Iris said. "Not on our net. Not in our chain. They will not save your life. They will not warn you. If you see gold on your HUD, you turn around and you walk."
She let that sit too.
"Load the transports."
She left.
Caleb stood there longer than the others. He had heard the older voice on his earpiece in the simulation arena. He had felt the gold panel come down on his HUD. He had been told, in a tone that was polite and was the politeness of a man who could afford it, that his stalker's keeper apologized for the inconvenience.
The keeper was attached to this theater.
He was not flying into a Kaiju nest.
He was flying into the keeper's hunting ground.
***
Out on the tarmac the drop-ships were already warm. The rotors threw gravel against the chain link. Tali was leaning against one of the hydraulic struts with a bag against her hip.
He stopped at the foot of the ramp.
She tossed the bag at his chest.
He caught it. It was heavy. Maybe twenty pounds of compressed fabric.
"That suit you're wearing is the rental."
"You said it was custom."
"I said it was a build. The build I gave you was the rental version of the build. I rushed the real one. Swap before you drop or the kinetic multiplier is going to throw your spine out the back of your ribcage."
"Lovely."
"It's calibrated to you."
"I know what calibrated means now."
She popped a bubble. It was smaller than the one in the alley.
"Upload telemetry by nightfall."
"Yeah."
She did not say good luck.
She walked back across the tarmac to the artisan district without looking back. The wind off the rotors pulled her coveralls flat against her side.
He went up the ramp.
***
He swapped the suits in the cabin before strapping in.
The custom weave came up his legs and the fabric closed against his skin the way a hand closes around something it intends to hold. He felt the seam at the pelvic nodes settle. He felt the chest panel align. The cold pinprick teeth across his ribs had been individually calibrated, and they each found a slightly different home than they had found in the rental.
He could feel the seam press against his heartbeat.
He sat down on the bench and let the restraint clack down across his chest.
The drop-ship lifted.
The ride was the bad kind. The cabin was uninsulated and the engines were not designed for human comfort and his back teeth rattled in his skull every time the airframe shifted. Iharu was looking at the floor. Hiro had his rifle gripped tight enough his knuckles had gone the color of paper. Nobody talked.
The city shrank under them into a neat lit grid.
Then the wall.
Then the dark.
The smell coming up through the bay doors changed. The diesel went out of the air. Something else came in, metallic, bad, the smell of an old coin left in damp pocket lining for years.
Sector Nine showed up over the horizon before they reached the drop point.
Caleb leaned against his restraints to see it.
The mountain was not rock anymore.
What was rising out of the gray sky in front of them was the shape of a mountain, the size of a mountain, in the place where a mountain was supposed to be. But it was the wrong color and the wrong texture and the wrong matter. It was meat. It was bruised, twisted, vein-shot meat thrusting up at the clouds in slow steady stages of growth, and the lightning that ran between the peaks was red and was running between the peaks the wrong way, going up instead of down.
Veins as wide as roads ran through the valleys. They pulsed.
A red mist sat over everything.
The drop-ships looked very small against it.
Caleb sat back in his restraints.
He racked the bolt of his rifle.
The kinetic slug chambered in the dark cabin with the soft metallic certainty of a thing that was going to be used very soon.