After her meeting with Tran, Lanis returns to her hostel room to think, and to take stock of her situation.

  Under the fluorescent glare of sobriety, it doesn’t look appealing.

  She has so little it’s almost embarrassing: a few toiletries, a collection of antidepressants foisted on her by Fleet, two sets of streetwear, and several club-going outfits that she purchased at random from discount net sites, all half-stuffed into a large duffel bag that sits against the cracked linoleum wall of the two by three meter room.

  She gently sits on the bed, still stained and unmade from its last visitor. Guess I forgot to pay for a change. She brings up her bank account, holds her head in her hands, and sighs.

  In a way, she’s ruefully grateful that Fleet didn’t give her a lump sum of discharge credits, seeing as how she likely would have drank, snorted, or injected all of it at once. Instead she has a two-year discharge stipend, maybe longer if she has a psychotic break and qualifies for a permanent disability pension, though this would mean another long stay at a Fleet medical facility. No thanks please, she thinks.

  Anyway, while a disability pension sounds grand in theory, the bastards at Fleet decided that her rank upon medical discharge was as a cadet, not as an officer. The difference is one of several magnitudes. Perhaps if she had been more diplomatic at the convalescent facility… but alas. She shakes her head in her hands. The past is done, even if she’s still suffering its consequences. As it is, the discharge stipend she’s been left with is barely enough to rebuild the fragile beginnings of a life, even if one wasn’t trying to drink it away.

  I guess Fleet has better things to do with their money than make an ex-Nav's life comfortable, she thinks, though she imagines a single acceleration round from one of the Demeter’s mass drivers could probably pay for a comfortable beach house somewhere. She makes a half-hearted attempt to not feel bitter. Anyway, what do I know about beach houses? She supposes that what she needs is an actual purpose—the trite ‘new beginning’ of a bad tele-drama. She ruefully knows Lieutenant Tran would agree.

  She’d probably be staying with her parents if they hadn’t shipped off to one of the colonies once it became apparent that their only daughter was never returning from Fleet’s all-consuming embrace. At least in the colonies there was the possibility of a reunion, outside of Terra’s strict information control, and Fleet nearly never allows its veterans to discharge back to Terra. Oh, the irony. Has Fleet told them of her discharge, and how they’ve stranded her on Terra, at least for now? She swallows, trying not to think about it.

  Which brings her back to her current situation. She gives her indecision a push. This isn’t sustainable, she thinks. So why not start the search for a new meaning at Mirem's? Just for a little while?

  She calls Mirem just before she dumps her drugs, double checking that the whole experience wasn't some insomnia-induced hallucination, hanging the bag over the toilet like a hesitant executioner. "You’re sure you haven't changed your mind? You can at any time, seriously. I have a discharge pension. I'm not destitute, you know," she says, all a little too quickly.

  She can almost hear Mirem’s smile on the other end of the call. “I’m sure you can take perfectly good care of yourself. Here: I’ve pinged you the access code. Make yourself at home. There’s a gym on the thirty-second floor if you’re interested. Take a bath, help yourself to the kitchen. I’ll be back at six.” Then the call ends, and the drugs drop with a reluctant splash.

  They quickly settle into a routine that each would have found implausible scarcely three days ago. There’s love-making, of course; the delirious, ravenous kind that Lanis has never known and that Mirem can scarcely remember. Then, breakfast. It doesn’t take long for Lanis to realize that, despite her love of Murkata-Heinsin protein packets, the world of actual food holds perhaps even more pleasure than the folds of Mirem’s bed. Mirem, for her part, can scarcely believe what Lanis has been subsisting on since her discharge.

  “The food at the hospital and rehab center was apparently pretty good, but I was on tube feedings for the first two weeks and anhedonic for most of the rest. I feel like my taste buds are finally coming back online,” Lanis admits, savoring each bite of fresh fruit and oatmeal and each sip of coffee like they’re novel experiences.

  Mirem usually manages to stay fully present for about half of each meal, but then her eyes unfocus as she scans the news feeds. “Work,” she says sadly, but Lanis doesn’t mind so much; the covert glances at Mirem are now able to linger, tracing down her neck to a perfect clavicle, artfully exposed by a rotating series of thin black robes.

  Mirem talks as she reads the feeds, multitasking like a Fleet tactics officer. She tells Lanis about the various Zaibatsu rivalries, and Lanis learns more about inter-corp feuding and Planetary Administration politics in a few days than she has in the past twenty years: an explosion at a new HarlonCore refinery, a rival to Howett Corp, both in turn backed by larger megacorps, the likely sabotage artfully disguised as a gas leak; nothing so blatant that Admin would investigate, but enough to embarrass the corp and decrease Admin’s trust in their research and development.

  The point is, if a corp’s security is weak enough to be open to industrial sabotage, then they’re weak in other ways too. And weakness is not to be trusted.

  “And here I thought we were all on the same side,” Lanis remarks, thinking of the threats that loom for the entire species.

  Mirem makes a non-committal noise. “Admin and Fleet decided a long time ago that industrial quotas were best met through capitalist rivalry. Of course, for that to work there has to be healthy competition. Admin tends to block the more egregious mergers and intercorp shadow wars, but they find it difficult to sacrifice the efficiencies of vertical integration and natural selection. One day a conglomerate will become too powerful for them to take on. Arguably it’s already happened with Kaisho-Renalis,” Mirem says, taking another unseeing bite of her oatmeal and yoghurt.

  “By the way, did you see this?” She pings Lanis an article and vid from FleetCast, Fleet’s Terran propaganda network, which reports a major victory against the Androvans with minimal losses. There’s some shaky footage, ostensibly from the inside of an Androvan ship, a vaguely moth-like creature cowering away from bright lights and a raised pulse rifle. Lanis thinks of the Androvan ship she encountered in the Warp, the terror she felt watching the gleaming vessel being torn apart by something unknown, and she suppresses a shudder.

  Lanis barely scans the article, shaking her head before she’s even finished. “There’s no telling what actually happened.”

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  “Really?” Mirem asks, surprised. “I thought there would be at least some grain of truth...”

  Lanis shrugs, turning her attention back to her breakfast. “If there was a true disaster then it might trickle out, since Fleet is still legally obligated to notify next of kin within ninety days. But if the war suddenly turned against us, would they really risk a panic? If the Androvans or the Ursox or the Bellitran League ever manage to get the upper hand I doubt anyone will know until an enemy fleet arrives in-system.”

  “Well. That’s a reassuring thought,” Mirem says quietly, her eyes refocusing on her work.

  For the first few days Lanis is mostly left alone, as Mirem frequently travels to Versk Energy’s corporate structures at the edge of the city. She quickly forms a routine based roughly on her days as a cadet.

  First, for an hour or two after Mirem leaves, Lanis meditates. A meditation practice is a core component of Fleet’s integration tracks, especially for the Navigators. It helps magnificently with AI pairing, and the ability to form a transcendental awareness that goes beyond one’s physical self is essential for retaining one’s sanity during Warp jumping.

  Lanis hasn’t wanted to be alone with her thoughts, not since the jump, but she finds, rather to her annoyance, that Lieutenant Tran was right when he brought it up at the Fleet rehab facility, during one of their many therapy sessions after her mental break. The meditation really does help, at least now that she’s past the acute phase of her distress. It is still there, of course, the echo of whatever she touched during the jump, but her walls are holding, and each morning she feels like a little piece of her is, if not made whole, then at least glued more firmly back together.

  Starting on the second day, she also begins to regularly visit the residential tower’s gym. It doesn’t rival Fleet’s training complexes (she doubts anything can), but it’s still absurdly nice, enough to make her stop and grin when she first steps inside its gleaming, soft-lit ambience. Well done again, Mirem.

  Lanis underwent certain modifications during her training at Fleet, such that her unassuming body can now withstand gravity pulls multiple times beyond that of an unaugmented person. Planet-side versions of this modification suite are technically illegal outside of Planetary Admin’s Special Security Forces, though dispensations are made for the bodyguard teams of Zaibatsu executives.

  The sum of it is, she’s stronger than she has any right to be.

  Lanis catches a fellow gym-goer staring, open-mouthed, at the end of a weighted pull-up set, and she remembers that it’s probably better to not advertise this too blatantly. The gym is usually empty around midday anyway, so avoiding eyes doesn’t prove difficult.

  The movement, a long sauna, dripping with sweat, and the resulting soreness seem to help nearly as much as the meditation.

  Then there’s her research. Talk of the Arena Games has gone a bit by the wayside after the first heady night with Mirem, but Lanis hasn’t forgotten the initial reason behind all this. She feels certain that Mirem hasn’t either, though she hasn’t yet brought it up again. Connecting to Mirem’s net, Lanis confirms her suspicion that being an Arena pilot isn’t simply a matter of being able to integrate half-decently with the Suit’s onboard AI. These are people who have trained since they were kids, tinkerers and fighters and gifted AI pairing specialists one and all, each of them put through the multi-year pressure cooker of contests and corporate sponsorship.

  Then again, that sounds a whole lot like Fleet training, she thinks, grimacing at the memories of the cutthroat classes, each genius-level cadet jockeying for a place among the dwindling number of Command-track seats available at the end of each term.

  Musing on how her experience with such rivalries might help her now, she watches a string of Games, starting with the twenty-five ton world championship qualifiers.

  In retrospect, maybe starting with world qualifiers wasn’t the wisest decision: she can barely follow the action during her first watch-through. The bout has unrestricted armaments, besides those that could pierce the pilot’s adamite cockpit. This means that it doesn’t take place in a shielded arena with spectators, but rather on a semi-remote island with the opposing staging grounds set miles apart.

  I didn’t even know that was a thing, Lanis thinks. The first Suit, a sky-blue mech with Torrusin Industries splashed over its abdomen in red blocky letters, resembles a squat spider. It seems to try to keep its distance as the fight begins, unloading barrages of needle-like rockets that spit upward in rumbling clouds and flicker down in plumes of flame and metal.

  The other suit is sponsored by Kaisho-Renalis, Mirem’s ex-employer and one of the perennial contenders for the championship. It’s faster, a bipedal design with a plume-array of bright red thrusters fanning out from its back, the work of Kaisho’s cutting-edge aeronautics division. It sprints forward, its thrusters white-hot, then back, unloading what Lanis assumes are drone countermeasures against the Torrusin mech’s barrage, and occasionally spitting out a black, bullet-like drone that can never quite reach the Torrusin Suit before disintegrating in a plume of smoke.

  There’s a stream of excited commentary, all couched in Game-laden technical terms that she mentally notes to look up later. She toggles between the simultaneous casts of the fight, peering inside of the respective cockpits. The Torrusin pilot looks shockingly young, pubescence written across his pale face with acne, short black hair matted with sweat. His eyes are open, unnervingly bulged out, but have the glaze of someone fully integrated with an AI system.

  She switches her view to the bipedal Kaisho Suit’s cockpit, expecting a similar wunderkid pilot, but here is the Torrusin pilot’s inverse. His head is shaved to a gleam, and he looks middle-aged, a square jaw covered by a neatly-kempt beard. One look at him and Lanis immediately thinks ex-Special Sec operator, or even a Fleet Insertion Pilot veteran. His eyes are open too, but he seems relaxed, not frantic like the kid, and he even chuckles once, like his AI has made a particularly funny joke during one of their Suit’s accelerations. Lanis idely wonders how long the bout can go on before one of them runs out of ammo.

  She gets her answer soon. Without warning, the KR bipedal’s mass driver detaches with a hiss, its internal ammo belt conspicuously empty, while it unloads a flurry of chaff cover. Simultaneously it fully expands its thruster array, white-hot jets powering up in a roar, and its right arm explodes open into a vicious blade. The Torrusin mech lurches, seemingly frozen and confused: a separate screen zooms in on its targeting optics, the commentators excitedly yelling as the spider-like clusters furiously dilate and circle as they attempt to recalibrate the Torrusin mech’s targeting matrix.

  What happens next is over so stunningly fast that Lanis has to slow down the replay to quarter speed to appreciate the sequence of events. At a hundred meters, blade raised, the charging KR mech has a sudden, small deviation in its flight path. In the replay, as pointed out by the commentators, Lanis sees that one of its thruster clusters has sputtered out, the result of a tiny tick-like drone that managed to burrow itself into a chink in the thruster fan.

  The Torrusin mech springs up faster than Lanis imagined it could move, evading the blade and catching the off-balance KR suit in a kind of spider hug; then they’re tumbling together, fifty tons of Mechanized Armor cleaving a massive furrow of earth. Through the settling dust, Lanis sees the mech’s six legs flex: the bipedal mech’s armor crumples in a hiss, the light of its targeting optics fading slowly black. A view inside the cockpit shows the KR pilot slamming his fist repeatedly into the pilot terminals, spitting and cursing, while inside the Torrusin mech the young pilot gives a tentative, boyish smile.

  Lanis disconnects from the terminal for a moment and walks around Mirem’s apartment, aimless for a minute, hands interlaced behind her head. She pauses at the ceiling-length windows, staring out at the city’s vast expanse of concrete, metal and glass. A shuttle blinks in the sky, joining the steady upward stream of Terra’s industry; the orbital docks hang, like a halo beyond.

  She reconnects to the terminal, and, in-between watching Arena Game matches, tries to put together a resume for an actual job.