Not the answer you were hoping for, was it?

  “Ah,” you say. “Problem, um. Tokyo and I don’t really—”

  “I know,” says Carol, and lunges at you.

  You barely sidestep in time. That is to say, you don’t. You flail; inside the cradle you are in free fall, the corset the only thing keeping you centered at all; you choke on air, a gasp of shock that ends in nothing. And her lance explodes from her wrist in slow motion: five meters, ten, twenty, seemingly exponentially lengthening, driving forward at the speed of sound.

  Then I take over and kick in the nerves of your motor cortex—not that I need to, but protocol regarding dataset alignment must needs—and I dodge for you.

  This too is slow, at least by my standards. By yours it happens in the blink of an eye: your vector thrusters flare in opposite directions, and the whole of your chassis experiences a hundred thousand different microstrains—the gear teeth, the plates and bones, the long steel sternum and the shoulders and ribs, the tantalum linkages and ceramic joints and hydraulic nephrons and gaskets and drive belts all groan together, sing out in chorus—all striving back, away, turning just enough that her lance passes half a meter from the closest point, which is the reinforced glass apex of your own headlamp.

  You go skidding into the open bay, Kowloon-ward, searing a fulgurite track all the way past the end of the oil tanker before all your full-flared vents and plates and maxed engines can bring you to a halt.

  You key the mic. “Okay,” you say, heart thundering in your chest. “Okay.”

  And then you forget everything you’ve ever learned and launch yourself, full force, at the wavering silhouette of Barracuda.

  You don’t even come close. With full degrees of freedom it can be so hard for you land-walkers to understand how to maneuver; you are like ships passing in the night, vectoring right past her, then behind, where the wake of her lance still washes over you in lavender waves on sonar. Shit.

  “Helm,” you say, panting, “full reverse.”

  I gladly oblige: the force of your shoulder thrusters all but hurls you back as though by some giant hand. It is all you can do to cling on to the sheer acceleration.

  Briefly you’re nauseous. (It would be a terrible thing to throw up inside your helmet, needless to say.) Then you regain your momentum and bearings and take in visuals, then sonar: and there she is.

  Without thinking you swipe out with your legs—counterbalancing with your shoulder vectors—but the arc of your kick passes meters from her chassis; she moves with you, bends so that you miss her, then fires both shoulders and comes charging right at you. Shit, you think, because there’s nowhere to run; it’s too soon to start an evasion. Then the long metal side of her gauntlet contacts your wrist and drives you back with a screech that rattles through you, teeth to bone; C. CHANG fills your visual readings for a breath, and then she’s gone again, and so is the pressure.

  The radio fizzles. So do you. Wildly, forgetting for a moment how to address me: “Tokyo, get me the target heading.”

  WEST-NORTHWEST, SIXTY-EIGHT POINT TWO DEGREES FROM CURRENT HEADING. But it doesn’t matter; you don’t care; you’re not looking at your screen but at the dim red points of her engines, still flaring through the turbid gloom.

  Shit, you think, and take off after her, full speed ahead.

  She’s playing with you; she must be, because you wouldn’t come this close otherwise. Would her lance really have impaled you? If she wanted to kill you by now she could’ve in a million ways already, couldn’t she? (In your bed, in the dressing room—) Does it matter? The thrill of the chase fills you with adrenaline and dopamine and endorphins, and all you know is that you have to prove her wrong.

  “Hey,” says Carol, “on your left.”

  Suddenly there she is, as though summoned out of the darkness: all her engines bloom in scarlet, full reversed. You aren’t prepared.

  “Heads up,” says Carol, and her lance is sweeping sidelong toward you like a meteor out of the night sky: I could have predicted this—I could have had thrusters on standby to propel you back, but you have insisted on micromanaging, haven’t you? As if attuning yourself to each and every little twitch and datum and signal will make up for your lack of training. The shaft catches you square in your midriff, hard enough to be insulting and halt your momentum entirely. You are ready, at least, with thrust reversers; you go flying back half as far this time.

  She’s already stepping into the space you’ve left behind. You hear the telltale infrasound of the lance’s wake.

  On the bright side, that puts you within reach of her. You pivot: through the droning of a shear stress alarm from deep within your chassis you say, “Helm, give me barrier clearance.”

  NOMINAL AT EIGHTY PERCENT OF MAX SCALE, I tell you, which is good enough. You summon them up out of your gauntlets and they explode forth like sails, drawing a line between you and the point of her lance.

  “Really?” She sounds amused, which makes you feel two things: annoyance, and, oddly, the incongruous urge to grin. “I’m not hitting you that hard.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” you say. “Not looking to get knocked on my ass again.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Your shields won’t really help you there,” says Carol languidly.

  Oh, she’s enjoying this, isn’t she? Cheeky. You ignore her. “Helm,” you say, “if I go too far off patrol route, tell me.” And then, without waiting for an answer, you shuck your barriers half back around your gauntlets and spool up your engines again.

  You’re thinking, foolishly, like a human, sweat and hormones—back to sparring, hand-to-hand, fist-to-fist, nothing fancy, crude impatience overwhelming what little mind for strategy you might have had. A long, heavy right hook, you’re thinking, two thousand tons and change behind it, not only all the mass of your Titan but all the acceleration of your engines at a robust clip, right at the peak of their power band where they purr inside your steel ribcage.

  “That’s not going to work either, you know,” says Carol on the radio. “Brute-forcing it.”

  She’s right. Your right hook passes ten meters distant from her closest point, and that’s as good as you can push your engines; Gutierrez did say you needed work, didn’t she? Barracuda dances before you in the water, the turbulence all your scuffling has produced setting her silhouette dancing like a mirage. Her one red eye seems to taunt you.

  “I’m not trained,” you remind her. “What else do you want me to do?”

  “I told you,” she says. You notice how perfectly all her thrusters fire to dodge you: one after the other, with little adjustments to angle that are at stark odds with the ugly desperate pulsing you command. “This isn’t a game of brute force. It’s chess.”

  “My helm doesn’t know chess any better than I do,” you say, which is actually untrue, considering that I was in Rachel’s head—practicing versus Carol, therefore—for over six years.

  “No,” says Carol, “but you don’t let the helm play chess. You let the helm move the pieces.”

  “Moving the pieces is playing chess,” you say, dropping your engines and maneuvering to match her slow, graceful turn (maybe minus the grace) so that you face each other, inverted, yin and yang. “I’m not very good at chess, but I’m pretty sure about that.”

  “It’s just a metaphor,” says Carol. “You pick the opening and closing, the shape of the game. Your helm does all the little betweens.”

  For a moment you drift, both of you, in a small, careful circle. Her headlamp limns her blue-black exoskeleton in rose and scarlet on your visuals; on sonar, her engines are middling yellows. The sudden quiet makes you acutely aware of how much sweat is trapped between your cowl and the skin of your neck, and other places.

  “Great,” you say. “How?”

  “That’s between you and your helm,” says Carol, and moves.

  Too late you see the shape of where she’s going; you’ve already set your engine targets, and you have too little nuance yet with your attitude thrusters to adjust in time. She catches you in your right shoulder and drives you back, all the way back, as easily and fluidly as leaves in wind.

  “Not bad,” she says, which you know is a lie. “Here’s a hint. Try thinking less.”

  You hiss. Your engines strain; you close half the distance, because Carol lets you, and your vectors throw you sideways and under her next turn, and you reach for her waist, the flexible between part of Barracuda that’s all braided steel and flex-plate, but she brings her palm up and fires the attitude thruster in the middle of it directly at your chest, which sends wakes shuddering over your whole frame and forces you back. Desperately you will more power into your engines: you’re reaching my hard limits, and warnings chime in your ribcage, your metatarsals, where the strains are greatest. It’s not enough. You go skidding off toward the open ocean, windmilling end over end.

  Do you not feel those strains like a hundred little sprains throughout the sprawl of your vast steel body? You do, I believe; your nociceptors are firing; you’re just too stubborn and foolish to give in. Ah yes: truly Rachel’s sister.

  You come to a halt a good half a mile away: entrenched up to your ankles in sand, half on your side. Barracuda isn’t even on the wireframe, only her projected position, a blinking red dot.

  I say, YOU’RE OFF THE PATROL ROUTE.

  For a long and satisfying moment you are wheezing too hard to answer in that inelegant verbal manner of yours. Then, between pants: “Helm, no shit. Working on it. Reserve power to main thrusters, please.”

  Getting back on your feet is a sorry affair of firing your calf thrusters in tandem, replacing what power your alarming servos have ceded. Barracuda has drawn closer—just enough to be visible on the wireframe again. Still, you can feel her red eye watching you.

  The radio crackles. “You okay?”

  You shrug—forgetting that this does not carry over radio—and do your best to sound nonchalant. “Could be better. Kind of sore.” And: “You’re asking if I’m okay right after you almost run me through?”

  “I didn’t almost run you through,” says Carol. “It would take a lot more than that to total Tokyo. Plus, you have cradle ejection anyway.” She adds: “Sorry for scaring you.”

  “Sure,” you say. “Sorry enough to hold still and let me hit you back?”

  “Nope,” says Carol, and you can hear the grin in her voice. “I mean, sure, if you earn it.”

  “Okay,” you say, “if you promise.” And you turn to face her, and you engage your engines.

  It’s incredible how slow and yet fast it all happens. You suppose she’s right: you’re spending so much of your effort thinking about the minutiae—blade camber and local flows, turbulence and friction and feathering, shaft temperatures, cooling ratios, ambient levels and passive dissipation, everything from the academy theory books—that you fill up all the time you have between starting your charge and ending it. And so between one moment and the next you realize that she’s already commenced a rotation, waist upward, the hulk of her beetle-blue body somehow as graceful as her flesh one, the little thrusters delicately firing in sequence all the way up her sides, and you are going to miss, again—and beyond you is the dropoff, and the minefield that marks the bounds of protected territory, and then the open ocean.

  In desperation you fling an arm out: not to strike her but to stop yourself, human instinct taking over. And then that falls to my instinct; as before, when you are this frightened, you lose yourself enough that I am able to step into the gap you leave behind. Lucky me. But you are slow, so slow—slower for me even than for you, since my clock speeds are a billion times the pace of your meat-thoughts—and the best I can manage for you is a futile grab at the chine of her gauntlet, right where her arm split open before to release her lance.

  Your momentum tangles with hers and carries both of you at full throttle away from Lantau, from Hong Kong, toward the dropoff and the mines. While you panic, I flare every one of your—our—thrusters into full reverse, and then I unwrap the barriers from around your wrists and unfurl them like wings, and I even open every single vent plate and cycle your ballast and fire your reactor exhausts. It’s not enough. You are careening toward the continental shelf at breakneck speed.

  Every shield helm has one base precept above all others, after the universal core set is satisfied: Protect the sword.

  One last thing we can do. You let go.