Tidegirls
...
We always salute, a fist thumped on our third heart, right under our breasts, before stimming up.
It’s not policy, nor formal tradition. Moore started it back in Aug Training and since then, even Strike Commander Jones started doing it.
Moore saluted after everything: as greetings, as goodbye, as thanks, as fuck you.
She told me it was so, out of all the shit she fucked up during Aug Training, they could never grill her for failing to salute.
The first time we stimmed up, when asked to whom she was saluting, she said, “To the vibes, ma’am!”
In between each of my 44 vertebrae, the stim station’s needles injected the venom. I could never suppress vomiting from the pain. My station was considered to be repainted, but everyone knew the acid splotched “A5” was mine.
Reeling as I felt my body melt away, the automated arming rail system along the deck, clamped against our keel boots, fitted us. A ring of needles drilled into my heart as I watched Moore in-front of me get armed.
Syntharms pulled her here and there like a toddler dressing up a doll. An MG riveted into her shoulder blades, and its ammunition cylinder into the other. Along her hip they stapled a vibroblade into its slot. Anti-swarm would be her role.
I came up, still in a realm of agony. Arms spread like a T, legs clamped together, dual barreled 4-inchers rammed into my shoulders, and their feeds into my hips. I didn’t vomit, the stims sending me beyond my skin. My role, anti-armor.
Lined up at the mouth of the carrier, training, more so than my own nervous system, made me brace myself for the magnetic sendoff.
Along black waters we skipped once, twice, before settling into a steady skate. Even in the blackened waters, its oillike sheen danced in the corners of my vision.
I had blinked, and several unimportant klicks zoomed by. We’re in Drowned territory now.
My HUD lit up with a refresh of our objective: Jam clearing. The worst shit.
The map, rendered with a wireframe of the ocean that ignited the CPU in my parietal lobe, displayed our clique’s location, course, and intercept path.
I committed it to memory and then dove for a moment, vaporizing water around my head.
My augs aren’t even bad, I just have brain problems.
Hotgirl shit.
Haloed by steam I saw them.
The calcs ran, targeting squares popped into my vision, and I aligned my cannons to the one with the highest displacement value.
Synced with my clique I gestured, a knife hand point to the calced reticule in the sky, and my 4inchers fired.
The shells arced over the horizon with the others before my HUD beeped out, “Sunk.”
Sunk’s the nicer word. Nicer than pulped. Or misted. On the horizon, pillars of red girlmist erupted to our shelling.
The jam cleared, and my clique was awash in red.
SC Jones’ coms screamed, [UNDER-]
Something grabbed hold and sunk me.