(no subject)
The call came down in the middle of the night, maybe an hour after guard change, when the base lights had finally flickered out and left all illumination to the softer glow of backup lighting. All the warmth had been leeched out of the concrete and steel hallways by the desert chill, the generators in the bowels of the fortress concentrating their output on one area and leaving the rest to form frost, even in the barracks. The D lot candidates that were quartered together in the same long room used only half the bunks, cramming themselves close to the doorway and as far away from the outer wall as possible, and even then some number of those bunks were empty night after night as their owners found warmer spots in company. It was an infraction of the rules but mostly overlooked. The desert fortress designated Freelancer Outpost #132, aka Sandtrap, was after all not exactly meant for human comfort, but had been constructed around older, sturdy alien ruins for the sole purpose of housing humanity's most promising new weapons and keeping them from harm and detection. The fact that people had to live and work inside Sandtrap's alternately freezing and roasting conditions had meant little to the builders.
Candidate D14068, temporary codename Renton, was not jolted awake so much as simply flipped online by the first crackle of static over the speaker system. A warm glow remained at the back of neck where the neural implants had been busy managing his dreams and sleep cycle, and he felt rested despite the sudden wake-up call. His body was by now long since used to training ops and surprise inspections run at all hours. 'Always ready' was one of the mottos the drill instructors had pounded into them, along with 'Nice guys finish as bugger fodder' and 'do anything to get an edge.' The men and women quartered here were all soldiers, all candidates in the same program and all dedicated to winning the war, but they weren't actually the same thing as "comrades." Not in Project Freelancer. A comrade was someone you could trust to have your back in any situation. A Project candidate would only watch your back if it benefited him or her at the time to do so.
Renton took his customary three slow breaths, gauging the situation around him before committing to the action of sitting up or even opening his eyes and calling attention to himself. It had saved his neck more than once before. Today, though, everyone was too busy being professional to try and sabotage each other. The other candidates murmured and rustled with more animation than usual as they rolled out of bed in their sterile white nightclothes, and hurriedly punched access codes into their personal lockers. Some weren't even bothering to slink back to their own beds to dress. Each bunk was furnished with extra generic skinsuits, although on any other day lingering in or by a bedmate's bunk would be deliberately flaunting the fraternization rules and inviting punishment. Renton wasn’t surprised to see the pairings showing up under harsh fluorescent lights, minor Cities and Townships pushing aside the rumpled bedsheets of their superiors, the major Cities and Capitals. Sucking up to a higher ranked candidate didn’t guarantee anyone a State rank, in the end, but it could make life easier sometimes, when the Capitals were the ones consistently leading and planning missions during training.
Not that anyone could really call it training, with live fire exercises and missions from the get-go, and every man and woman present already at some rank from whatever branch of the military they’d been coaxed away from to participate in this special little science project. All former rank, all their former lives stayed at the door, they had been told, their new status broken out into weird hierarchies of Towns and Cities and States. Provinces, Regions and Nations were the next levels up, along with the near mythical rank of Continent, but those soldiers belonged in another program entirely. State was the highest rank anyone in Freelancer could aspire to. Only Dr. Halsey’s "children" in the SPARTAN programs reserved the right to go higher.
Renton had no one to push aside or fight with for his gear, having a far bunk in the coldest corner of the room and no inclination to share it or leave it. The cold didn't bother him the way it had in the beginning. Having at least five empty beds in any direction from his own was worth it, when the others packed themselves in like sardines and started fights over personal space.
Every bunk in the barracks was assigned to a large metal capsule set into the wall containing a trainee's personal bio-armor, kept sterile and offline in stasis when a trainee wasn't using it. The soft glow from the armors' running lights and the vague green tint to the capsule glass made the barracks look as though they were underwater, sometimes, casting shadows against the harsh ceiling. Renton entered his ID code and serial number, running his tattoed barcode under the scanner, and the capsule's locks released with a quiet hiss of air and the faintest smell of ozone. The organic auto-repair and the little drones inside the capsule had done their work while he slept, fixing most of the dents and scratches in his standard dull gray armor. Renton looked critically at the helmet first, lifting it out and turning it this way and that to check if the carbon-scoring on the visor had been fixed. His HUD would be connected directly to his neural implants and the armor's sensors, meaning he could see and fight with a helmet covered in mud or tar or even fire, but it felt wrong to him to rely so completely on a computer system when his own eyes worked just fine.
There had been no instruction to hit the showers before suiting up so Renton refrained, rubbing eyes still gummy with sleep and trying without much success to rake his fingers through unruly hair. He was dressed and armored up before the majority of his fellows, the cold steel of the jack needle fitting snugly into the port at the back of his neck as he sealed his helmet on and brought the HUD to life with a thought. Heat readings and IFF signatures flashed up immediately, and the entire floor glowed a dull cherry red as he glanced down. The generators were working back up to full power to warm a large area of the base several floors down. Someone made a crack about the month's utility bill skyrocketing, and a few nervous chuckles radiated through the room like pond ripples.
On any other sudden wake-up call sort of night, this was the part where Renton would be choosing his weapon from the general use gun racks lining the walls. Each weapon's trigger system was kept automatically locked until a live fire code had been issued from Command, keeping in line some with some Project protocol somewhere that said having a trainee close to his or her weapons was more important than storing firearms in a safe, explosion-proof weapon room. However Renton ignored the guns and quickly and silently ran through his armor equipment checks, knowing full well this wasn’t a drill that would require use of any of it. Drills were accompanied by sirens and flashing lights, voices yelling commands and usually an instructor at the door screaming at all of them. This was a low electric hum throughout the entire building and a calm female voice over the speaker system, announcing the particular event with a repeated code phrase. Full moon.
"It's still a stupid code," one of the lesser Cities muttered, zipping up her gray and black skinsuit and pressing the button to seal it. "Who do they think is going to be fooled by it? The Covenant would know better than us when a hatching is about to begin."
Her twin brother, younger by a heartbeat and recently promoted a Capital, shot her a quick look but said nothing. It was bad luck to talk so lightly about the enemy during a hatching, even though she was right; the infant creatures that would soon be among them had more in common with the Covenant races than with any human. Slang still called the Covenant dragon-men and scalies and lizards right next to the time-honored description of "buggers." Evolution on harsh alien worlds had given their best warriors skin like dragon-hide, and claws, and fortified bones, and strength to go with their twelve foot frames. Their ships were living things, great space-faring beasts with metal hides that carried crews of hundreds. The warships were smaller, ranging from single pilot fighters to sleekly designed creatures with crews of a few dozen. They and their masters were wholly unlike anything mankind had ever encountered in space, and the outbreak of war had not been a simple battle but a complete massacre on one of the outlying colonies. The alien ships carried advanced weaponry and could move with intuitive precision through slipspace, better than even the best drone piloted human vessels, and their soldiers were nightmares on the battlefield.
For a long time, the war had been a steady retreat, giving ground inch by inch, colony by colony, human-kind trying desperately to figure out tactics and technology that could at least stand up to the alien onslaught, much less reverse it. The creation of bionic artificial intelligence had been much as much accident as anything else, the secrets of the genetically engineered biomechanical ships and alien suits of living armor falling into human hands arbitrarily and with no great results, until Dr. Catherine Halsey broke the chain of failure with her SPARTAN projects. She gave humanity the soldiers they needed, augmented and engineered to be stronger, faster, more durable, and wear the same living armor that Covenant Elites did. But SPARTANs couldn’t be produced overnight, requiring risky surgical procedures, chemical treatments, and grueling training from childhood. They weren’t the answer to the war, or rather, they weren’t the only answer.
There were as many experimental projects being funded by the military as there were stars, working on everything from replicating a biomechanical presence that could pilot a ship through slipspace to the alien methods of engineering living ships and armor. Humanity had never been able to crack the Covenant secrets of engineering, breeding, and raising the great bioships, but they now had self-aware pilot AI programs that could fly non-sentient hunks of metal through slipspace, and armored suits fused with living tissue, and they also had the next best thing to the smaller, sentient Covenant warships: their distant cousins.
Calling them dragons was a romantic exaggeration. Resemblances aside, they were a miracle intersection of mechanical design, genetic manipulation of an original reptilian alien lifeform, and pure luck; cybernetic animals with living cells, metal scales, data ports, and holographic projectors, half computer and half lab-grown science experiment. Technically they were considered AIs, given human speech and thought patterns with chips implanted in their silicone brains, and they could be used like other military AI to pilot starships if given the right training. But Freelancer was about filling in the gaps between ordinary soldiers and the SPARTANs. The goal of Freelancer’s Director was to partner machine and human and alien in an unprecedented way, making individual soldiers handlers to young and impressionable war machines who would love them, fight for them, and hypothetically make them invincible. Larger dragons were still more mobile than any chopper or land vehicle of comparable size, could carry crews, and forage for their own fuel sources.
All of that being, of course, conditional on the dragonets finding a compatible human to bond with upon hatching.
There had been other hatches before this one, at least three of them. Renton hadn’t been rated high enough at the time to attend any. Technically only Capitals were rated high enough to handle a dragonet and therefore merit an invitation to the hatching, but compatibility issues meant that even a minor City could possibly be chosen by a willful mechanical infant. This had infamously happened before and presumably would happen again, so even the low rated Cities were buzzing with suppressed excitement. A hatchling was an instant promotion. Better quarters, better equipment, better missions, better everything, or so they'd heard.
Renton had also heard that men had died during hatchings, but men had died in all aspects of Freelancer training, from the bio-armor fitting sessions to the endless drills, so that bit of gossip had come as little surprise. Nor did the second announcement over the loudspeakers, for Township ranked candidates to meet in one location while all the others were sent to another. Renton cleared his equipment checklist, armed himself perfunctorily with a long knife, and fell quickly into line with the other hopefuls as they jogged double file out of the D barracks and through the corridors, armored boots clanking loudly.
"Large clutch this time," Albany remarked over his helmet’s comm unit, his usual laid back tone charged with barely hidden eagerness as he watched the other lettered units filing out of their barracks and join their slowly-growing jogging troupe. "Looks like they're calling out half the alphabet. Maybe one of our group will get lucky today."
"Says the guy who snuck into all the other hatchings," Charlotte responded, amused. "You’ve had more chances than any of us already just by being close enough for the babies to smell. Maybe you should sit this one out, hm?"
"Hey, I invited you slackers to come with me," came the good-natured retort, prompting a snort from Charlotte. Albany had asked some of their unit if they wanted to see the hatchings, the sort of intent that could get someone washed from the Program no questions asked if the invitation was reported, but no one had imagined that not only would Albany successfully hack the security system, he'd do it more than once and get away clean each time. His reports of the hatchings, watched from behind the grill of a ventilation shaft, were the most accurate information anyone in D unit had on what they were about to walk into. They were also the reason why Renton had only picked up a knife for his weapon. The baby dragons might be small when fresh from their eggs but they were still made of metal, and had little concept, initially, of how fragile human flesh could be. An upset hatchling could do considerable damage to anyone not in full armor. Of course shooting at a dragon, even in self-defense, was completely out of the question, given how expensive it was to engineer and raise the creatures, but a knife was still better than bare gauntlets against razor sharp fangs and ripping talons.
"I wish they'd let us watch the logs of the other hatches," someone near the back murmured anxiously, to some general mutters of agreement. Renton also privately agreed. Keeping the event so shrouded in mystery was standard Freelancer policy, meant to keep the Covenant and even the rest of the military branches out of their business. Confidentiality had its place in the war but in some cases it started feeling like the riskiest of their missions, where they would be thrown into situations with little to no forewarning and expected to survive as best they could.
Mostly, it seemed irresponsible to risk the dragonets on untrained potential handlers, who might do something wrong to upset the pair bond that was supposed to cement within an infant's first ten minutes of uptime. Trying to get a hatchling to bond with a second partner was apparently a last resort and, if one listened to scuttlebutt, had allegedly already ended in a death when the dragon refused to accept the new partner being pushed on it. Bonding had been made out to be something like do-or-die instead of strategic, but Renton had learned not to question the Project's methods. Doing so was the quickest way to a ticket out the door, and however shitty Project Freelancer was, what waited outside their experiments on the frontlines was even worse.
A warning hiss from Bismarck on point instantly silenced the comm chatter. He needn't have bothered. D unit was coming up on the part of the base that housed the dragon aeries and the State barracks, kept side by side out of necessity, and even before they rounded the corner were treated to the ruckus of every dragonet in the Project wide awake and squawking. Chaos reigned as they came around the bend. Senior States in various stages of armor dashed back and forth across the corridor, shoving aside candidates and each other in their hurry to get through. Their shouts interspersed with the dragons' bugling voices, although anyone with neural implants would have been able to communicate wirelessly with their beast.
Somehow, even though the eggs were kept deep in the bowels of the base, the other dragons always knew when a hatching was about to occur and kicked up a fuss. The entire base had been woken last time, to the point where some of the new recruits had immediately flung themselves for the guns, assuming the fortress was under attack. Renton uneasily watched the sturdy walls of the aerie shudder under the full-throated roar of some dragonet that sounded larger than any recent hatchling had a right to be. The distinctive noise of tortured metal was a thin shriek underneath it, and Renton could see hands crawling instinctively to gun holsters and triggers.
One of the States dashed up to them, skinsuit only half-zipped and arms waving frantically to halt them, and D unit’s faltering jog slowed further.
"You lot can’t come through this way," the man panted out, "you need to turn around right now, he’s got his muzzle off again and we can’t let anyone with a strange scent through here or it'll be-"
Charlotte and Albany started to ask different questions at the same time but Bismarck’s sister pushed her way to the front, snarling. "Are you fucking kidding me?! We can’t go all the way around, we’ll miss the entire hatching--!"
"Vermillion..." Bismarck began uneasily, only to be silenced as the loud dragon roared again and something very large slammed into the corridor wall from the aerie. Everyone jumped back as dust sifted down from the long crack spider-webbing through the concrete. Vermillion took another step back behind her brother, mouth open, while the State yelped a curse and dove for the nearest open doorway.
A second, louder crash had Bismarck wheeling and taking his sister’s armored shoulders, shoving her away, yelling for the rest of the unit to back up, back up, get out of the way-
Standing near the middle of the group, Renton was able to see past the explosion of dust and cement chunks that knocked Bismarck and Vermillion both off their feet to the massive shadow behind it. The spiky head of a half-grown dragonet, larger than a horse, pushed itself through the opening it had created in the wall, hissing indiscriminately at debris and the scrambling soldiers before it. It was an obsidian black with red undertones to its metal scales, and within seconds had pushed its shoulders through the crumbling hole to place one taloned foot triumphantly on the hallway floor. It eyes were snake yellow and utterly mad, fixing on movement here and there, cocking its head like a bird of prey. A heavy metal collar and muzzle contraption hung uselessly from one of its head spikes, twisted and rent almost beyond recognition.
Renton had never seen a dragon at this range. His eyes couldn't seem to pick a place to stay, darting from the thorny ridge of metal horns crowning the head to the slit-pupiled eyes, to the shining grey steel of its fangs to the red, red muscle of its tongue, flickering out to taste the air. Someone was yelling breach, breach but it seemed very away, as did the sound of someone, Albany or someone, hissing his name, Renton you idiot, get down, get out of the open. Unimportant. So was the fact that the people around him were melting back against the corridor walls, and he didn't realize that he was the only one left standing out in the open until the dragon looked at him directly.
There was intelligence in that awful yellow gaze. Renton's HUD let him see his own reflection in the sclera of the dragon's eye, the pupil having thinned to a slit, and he watched the oval shaped nostrils flare wide, drawing in a breath that a mostly mechanical creature didn't need. He could hear its artificial lungs creaking like bellows.
That the dragon couldn't come any further into the hallway without fouling its wings in the hole was no consequence. If it was a fire-breather or a spitter, it didn't need to move from where it was to kill someone. Renton was only a few yards away.
But the beast didn't breathe, or spit. Instead it glanced down at the same time Renton did, distracted by the movement on the ground that was Vermillion, still on her back and only a few feet away from the gaping jaws, trying to draw her rifle. Her brother was face down and motionless, unconscious or wisely playing dead, lower half of his body directly underneath the dragon's head.
Shooting wouldn't work. Even at this range. Everyone knew that, and both Renton and the black dragon watched the muzzle of the rifle waver up into the air almost curiously.
"Vermillion, don't--!"
It was Charlotte's voice, and then everything seemed to happen very quickly. Vermillion pulled the trigger as her brother grabbed her ankle, trying to stop her, and the black dragon's head snaked out quick as lightning. The rifle went off but the shot was wild, and blood gouted into the air as Vermillion screamed, high and panicked, her entire arm and the rifle both gulped down into the great maw. Curses and shouts erupted from the trainee ranks, firearms sprouting in every hand, and some batch of idiots opened fire to pepper the dragon with useless stinging bullets that ricocheted off its armor plated hide. The squad leaders roared orders but the dragon roared louder, thrashing its head and further cracking the concrete.
Renton comprehended they were all going to die when he saw the nostrils flare for the deep breath being drawn in, and wisps of smoke curling towards the cracked ceiling. His paralysis broke, finally, and he darted at the knot of trainees to slap their guns down, Albany doing the same, yelling at them to cease fire, though it was already too late.
No one had seen the redheaded woman arrive, being too occupied with a dragon having ripped off the arm of one of their comrades and now preparing to incinerate the lot of them with a single breath, so it would seem later like she had honestly appeared out of thin air. Renton only saw the flash of white and realized it was a woman's bare back after the fact, staring stupidly at the apparition in combat boots, black standard boxers, a star tattoo across her spine and a fine sheen of sweat, carrying a rusted iron crow bar, marching directly into the dragon's face.
"You goddamned cow," she raged, and the crow bar rang like a struck bell against the very tip of the dragon's snout. A piece of black metal flew off to the accompaniment of the dragon's sudden surprised yowl, recoiling, claws scrabbling against the stone floor.
"Oh thank god," someone in State colors said next to Renton, his tone one of desperate relief. "I thought she'd make us wait until she'd come."
"You motherfucking ingrate, O'Malley, do you know what you interrupted?!"
Albany was making a choked sound as the redheaded woman lectured her squirming dragon on exactly what she was now missing out on because of him, which apparently involved an ex-boyfriend dressed in garters and a now shattered bottle of expensive wine. The crowbar occasionally rang off of the beast's metal face with enough force to leave visible dents, the dragon trying without much success to pull his head back through the hole he'd made and retreat into the aerie.
"And in front of these maggots," she declared furiously, waving her unoccupied hand at the helmetless and pale Vermillion, who was being quietly ushered off to the medbay to get an arm regrown and re-attached. "You're ruining the hatchlings' chances, all these worms will do now in front of a dragon is pee themselves in terror because of you. Do you know what I think we should do? I think I should hack off your arm and peel the scales off, roast it nice and tender and serve it to that girl on a big fucking silver platter since she'll never bond with a dragon now, how about that?"
The dragon's pupils expanded almost comically, and he renewed his efforts to pull back through the hole, finally managing by twisting his head sideways. The woman watched him slink away, breasts heaving slightly from the tirade, apparently feeling no need to check and see if he would return to his proper lodging
Someone in uniform approached her cautiously. "Agent Texas...?"
The woman called Texas dropped her crowbar into the startled hands of the nearest trainee and ran a hand through sweat-soaked red hair. There was blood and grit flecked on her skin from O'Malley's struggles. "What."
The uniform tactfully managed to keep his gaze above chin level. "The Director is asking for you."
"Of course he is." Texas turned to glare at D unit, raking every man of them with a harsh blue eye. "Is this the garbage we're pushing on the babies, now? Little boys who panic and fire on our own dragons?"
"In their defense, ma'am--"
"Sir."
"--sir, your dragon just tried to eat one of them."
"My dragon tries to eat someone every week," Texas snapped, "and tries to eat and or burn me alive at least once a day. You don't see me overreacting."
No one said anything, and no one looked at the crowbar. The uniform finally coughed, meaningfully. "The Director..."
"Can wait five minutes, I'm talking." She singled out Renton by virtue of the fact that he hadn't edged away, although she was still addressing the entire pack. "They are called balls, gentlemen. Grow them before you get down to that basement. Your hatchlings are waiting."
****
"Wow," said Albany, ten minutes later on the lift. "I mean. You know?"
Renton and Charlotte eyeballed him with equal cynicism.
"Just. Wow."
"Her dragon ate my sister's arm," Bismarck gritted out, although his foul mood might have had more to do with bearing the brunt of said sister's screaming fit in the medbay about missing the hatching.
"I'd let her dragon eat my arm," one of the other candidates said, elbowing Albany knowingly and smirking with him.
Charlotte turned her back on the lot in clear dismissal. "Renton, why did you stand there for so long? It was staring right at you for almost a minute."
Renton frowned