Skyway Hunter

I saw so much death after they took you, my love. They sent me to crush worker uprisings, even once a military coup. I saw so much blood, heard so much screaming. I did so many terrible things. But I tried to remain focused on my plan. Climb their ranks until I gained their trust. Find a way to get you back.

I fought and killed for them, for months, until I couldn’t keep myself from shaking every time I heard an airship roaring overhead. I had nightmares about heat-rays melting everyone I loved. But my kill record was exquisite and I fought them when they pressed for my retirement. The army psychologist told me I had PTSD and recommended VR therapy. I told him he could suck my cunt and wore earbuds underneath my helmet to drown out the triggers I was constantly immersed in, playing Earth Industrial until my ears started to give out and they fucking had to chip me just to stop me going deaf entirely.

I found out that you died a whole year after that. They told me you’d killed yourself before you went to trial, dusted yourself with a heat-ray that you’d stolen from a guard you knocked out in your cell. But I knew you weren’t a violent man. I knew how heat-rays worked as well. There was no way you could use one to dust yourself even if you’d gotten one. It takes three heat-rays. Or one disintegrator. Neither was available to you.

They said that you were overcome with shame for what you’d done, and how you’d treated me, for giving me your love for five long years, for helping me to move on from my abusive relationship. The ten-year age gap between us looked large on the surface, but you never made me feel like I was small for being younger. We met when I was nineteen though, and that had been enough. Never mind we didn’t date until I turned twenty-one. Those years of building trust and friendship? They were grooming. Ironic for the regency to say, considering the way they sculpt their daughter’s lives from childhood to match them to politically expedient partnerships. The man who was almost my husband had been damned for his refusal to participate in that. As if he’d even had a choice.

I use my thoughts to push the throttle on my alien-augmented cybertruck to over 2000 km/h as I squeeze the triggers built into the steering wheel, firing a stream of tiny balls of light into the medium-range robot hover-tank in front of me. The sound it makes is instantly converted by the Bramcove Everywhere app on my gray market brain-chip into a sawtooth stab above the trance-inspired drum-and-bass beat that covers up the rhythmic thump of my dual rear-end fusion engines. As the hover-tank explodes into a puff of beat-matched stars, I notice the explosion ripped a hole in the road so large that I can see the Martian desert underneath it. I flick the switch for jump jets and I soar over the gap.

Another tank is waiting for me on the other side. It’s a dozer this time: a broad, scarab-like vehicle with thousands of tiny metal legs and three rear-end fusion engines which charges at you when you get in range. The impact would kill me instantly. A screecher-bot rains down hellfire bombs around me, guiding me towards it. The bombs are mostly heat and don’t damage the road, but my car’s energy shields buckle dealing with the sudden surge in temperature around me. The sky outside looks like it’s burning. I watch the dozer tank surging towards me, kick the foot-pedal to spit out some homing-caltrops, then wrench the steering wheel up and out to the right, to engage my left-hand fusion engines.

I guide my car into a strafe first, then push the wheel forward like a joystick to terminate my slide towards the right. I release the steering wheel and it snaps back to the centre. I hit the other foot-pedal for the surface-to-air missiles, aiming for the screecher, as the homing-caltrops spring up from the road and dig into the dozer’s vital systems. The screecher and the dozer both turn into beat-matched stars as the nobles back on New London applaud me.

I can see the alien factory now: an upside-down cone-shaped, translucent structure made of faintly-shimmering blue crystal towering above the ashen ruins where Manchester Platform used to be. The alien weapon is coiled around it. The sky full of screechers and the road is thick with medium-ranged tanks. They’re sending short-ranged hover cars at me now too: fast, tear-drop shaped vehicles with a single rear-end fusion engine and a front weapon like mine. They fill the road with angry balls of light, requiring precision driving to avoid them. I dodge dozers and hellfire bombs to hoots of desperate approval from the nobles over my communication channel.

“She’s going to make it,” one of them says. “By Toussaint, we might be saved!”

The night before they took him was the night he told me everything. The war between the UN and the Conglomerate no longer served the interests of Mars. Even with the booming trade, once amplified by the construction of the skyways, Mohole mines, and space elevators, our profit was beginning to decrease. Earth could no longer afford to pay the premiums for resources that Mars had been relying on for almost forty years, so the Royal Navy had been secretly creating an armada to invade it. The regency was also sick of being citizens. Sick of the representative democracy that had been forced on them by Earth. Sick of the limits it imposed upon the monarchy’s power.

The man I loved was a politician. His family were nobles, but they disowned him for refusing to allow himself to become someone’s wife. His brother still referred to him as his “departed sister”, and no one at his office in New London had known anything about his royal heritage. They told him about their hidden fleet offhand, offering him noble status, thinking that saving his job would be enough to satisfy him, to help them gain approval for their future conflict. But it wasn’t, so they destroyed him instead. I used to be a journalist back then. He told me so that I could break the story. But when I came into the office the next morning I was inundated with a flood of other news instead: a sex scandal, my lover was involved.

It was all nonsense of course. Even if the pictures that they had of him with all those girls hadn’t have been obviously deepfaked, missing the distinctive scars left by his Martian top surgery because nobody thought to question if he’d always been a man, my lover was a closeted asexual. Our relationship was polyamorous, largely for my benefit, and almost exclusively romantic. I knew he wasn’t sexually interested in anybody else, let alone in the dehumanizing way he’d been accused of. I put in my application for the army in the next day, and leaked the story over private channels two months later. I played the part of grieving patriot too well for anyone to trace it back to me.

The alien weapon uncoils from the crystal factory, its eight, enormous snake-like tentacles separating themselves from its narrow, four-winged body, as its dragonfly-like head snaps open, echoing a gong-like sound so loud it temporarily terminates my sound-converter app. The team behind me back in New London tells me fearfully to keep my distance from it, reminding me what it did to the rest of our defenses, as I dart my car around its weapons fire, getting closer, ever closer, to my final victory.

“Look out!” the voices back in New London scream. “It’s right in front of you!”

“Good,” I say, grinning, staring into the gaping mouth of the tentacle directly in front of my car.

“What are you,” the voices start, and cut to static.

The machine sucks me in.

This vehicle was a relic from the original Mars colony. One of the few artifacts to survive Toussaint’s aesthetic cleanse. Its boxy shape and relative compatibility with modern hardware made the perfect frame to retrofit with self-learning AI, a neural link, and layers of armour, then swap out the rest of its 2030’s parts for a mix of stolen Earth military equipment and captured alien components. It was too fast and complex to drive for anyone without a brain-chip. I was the only one with the hardware and the requisite experience.

I drive along the inside of the tentacle, darkness all around me, watching as my speed drops down to zero and the car’s internal UI fades to black. Liquid rises up around my feet, dull-grey and numbing, as the car and I melt into the alien machine. The liquid rises up my torso, to my neck and I hear a chorus sound, like insects chittering, as I imagine what is coming next. I close my eyes. I will be devoured, subsumed, and then rebuilt by this foreign consciousness. Sent back to New London down the skyway to eliminate the few remaining royals fighting for their lives on Mars. Their only hope. Their only chance. Turned against them totally because of my betrayal. I see it in my mind, and it is beautiful…