Dreadnought, Prologue: The Pimple (Patreon)

August 3rd, 1994

It was Leah’s thirteenth birthday and all she could think of as she made her way hand over hand along the rope that stretched from C Block to Main, snow up to her knees and more blowing against her in white sheets, was the pimple to the right of her nose. It was fat and red and it throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The snowfall all but blinded her. Her breath hissed hot and heavy in her ears. There was nothing but the crunch of her boots in the snow, the smell of her sweat soaking into her thermal underwear, and the pimple.

What if it catches on something when I take off my snow mask? What if it bursts? 

Ahead, the slab-like concrete facade of Main loomed out of the driving white. Pinprick red snow lights flashed to either side of its heat lock. Captain Hatcher’s windswept silhouette paused between them for a moment, clinging one-handed to the rope. She called something back toward Leah, but the blizzard’s howl stole it. She shook her head and resumed walking toward the lock.

Leah tried to go faster. Don’t leave me.

She pushed through the weighted rubber curtains at the lock’s mouth. Hatcher was stripping out of her cold weather gear, leaving it to dry over the blowing circ vents. Tall and willowy without her slops, balaclava hanging loose around her neck, the other woman cracked her knuckles with a grimace. Leah tried not to stare. She tried as she unbuttoned her overcoat not to look at her own body, thick with bulging folds of flab. Hatcher pretended not to notice as Leah tugged her undershirt, which had ridden up, back down over the lowermost roll of her belly. Pulling her thermal leggings up over that crescent of soft, heavy flesh felt more shameful than squatting to piss in front of the older woman. Leah’s cheeks burned.

I wish that I could cut it off me, she thought as she struggled out of her snow boots and kicked them savagely aside. She nearly lost her balance, but caught herself at the last moment. I wish that I could rip it open and get out of it. It’s not me. It’s not me.

“Come on, Leah,” Hatcher called over the rattling groan of the inner lock door rolling open. Light spilled over the iron grate floor and the meltwater running dirty and shallow beneath it. “We shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

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Hatcher led Leah through empty corridors stenciled with department names and quadrant identifiers and past two stations where UNAN marines greeted the captain by name, checked her ID card, and scanned the barcode tattoo on her left wrist. Down echoing stairwells, through a decon lock where blasts of antibacterial aerosol flattened their clothing against their skin, across a steel catwalk bridging a river of recycled water where the stink of chlorine hung thick in the air.

They took a secure elevator which Hatcher unlocked with a red key she wore around her neck down sixteen floors into the building, listening together to the thrum of the cable and the fading growl of the engine driving it. Leah let herself imagine that the reason they were here might possibly be good, that the endless tests and lectures were about to end, that she would — finally, finally! — join the others in the field.

No one else has my scores, she told herself as the lift fell on and on, bars of light sweeping through its cage and over her and Hatcher. No one else has biofeedback compatibility with them like I do. I was made to do this. I’m the best there is.

She scratched at the pimple with a chewed and broken nail. Layers of frayed keratin shifted against her skin, pulling at the tender nail bed beneath. The ache was deep and sweet and all-consuming. She wanted to tear the nail free, or drive it deep into the pimple like a broken sword. To feel the hot, clean gush of the fluid within trickling over her upper lip. 

No one is better than me.

She scratched harder.

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The director and her staff were in the observation room overlooking Delta Cradle when Hatcher led Leah into the tiered concrete room. Beyond eight-inch thick plate glass, far below the observation room, the titanic dreadnought Cancer lay curled in its concrete womb five hundred feet under the ice, meltwater falling like rain from the grates high above its sloped shoulders. A catwalk ran along the wall behind it and embraced its blunt, curved head. Staff in coveralls, small as insects with the distance, swarmed around an open section of its skull beside which lay a sort of dry basin suspended in the catwalk’s frame. 

Cancer doesn’t have a pilot, Leah realized as she approached the crowd at the top of the room’s short, broad staircase. Her palms itched. Her mouth went dry. She took the first step. Is this it? Is this really it?

The director must have heard her coming. She turned, fixing Leah with her dark, impassive gaze. She was taller than Hatcher by a head at least and so thin Leah could see her collarbones jutting against the vee of skin her cardigan left bare. A pair of little armless reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck, something Leah remembered from her eight years in Chicago that only prim old ladies wore. It didn’t look fussy on the director, though. It looked like everything she wore, stained and battered by her distracted carelessness, self-evidently functional in nature. Her clothes always seemed more like an obligation than a choice. Things her body needed to survive.

“You told me you’d get the weight problem under control.”

Hatcher, still standing by the door, looked uncomfortable.  “Leah’s working hard. She’s been progressing with her calisthenics, and since she started her new dietary plan she’s dropped almost eight pounds.”

The director turned back to the observation window. She clasped her hands behind her back. Below, workmen in cherry-pickers were bolting a vast plate of roughened titanium over a path of Cancer’s raw grayish-green flank. Blood pulsed in sluggish pink rivers from the biomech’s naked flesh. That’s my real body, Leah thought suddenly, her breath quickening. She felt almost hot, though she was dry between her legs. That’s my blood. 

“We’ll reassess in a year,” the director said.

In a year.

The room spun.

“She’s ready, ma’am,” said Hatcher, but Leah heard the older woman surrender. The director heard it too and didn’t bother with an answer. Below, geysers of pink ichor spurted from Cancer’s side as the technicians completed the seal on the new plate. The brilliant flare of an arc welder threw sharp shadows across the observation room.

“Give me a biofeedback looping test!” Leah begged, knowing as the words tore free of her that she sounded desperate, weak, pathetic. “I can do it! You’ll see! Please, let me try.” She nearly held her hands out like a beggar, then jerked them back in tight, white-knuckled fists against her chest. “Let me fight!”

A year.

She felt Hatcher’s hand on her shoulder but she couldn’t tear herself away from the director’s back, from the flickering shadow of the tall, thin woman as it twitched back and forth across the concrete floor. Tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her round, red cheeks. “Please, let me fight.”

A young technician turned to look at Leah, pity cut into her elfin features. Another, tan and handsome, looked mildly disgusted. Hatcher’s grip on her shoulder tightened.

They’re all perfect. They’re perfect. 

The arc welder flared again. Shadows flew out over the floor, coating skin and concrete, and then vanished, sucked back into thin black puddles at their owners’ feet. 

Leah felt like vomiting. Her chest ached. Her lip trembled. You can leave. She’s not going to look at you. She made up her mind. Don’t humiliate yourself, don’t make her angry, just shut up and— 

“Please, mom.” 

__________________________________________________________________________________

In her bunk in C Block Leah lay sobbing in Hatcher’s arms. Not in her arms. Not really, because who could get their arms around me? Who could hold disgusting Leah the human garbage disposal? 

“Hush, my sweet girl,” Hatcher told her, stroking her hair. The other girls had left the narrow dormitory when they’d come in. The bunks were bare, some tidy, others rat’s nests of pillows and blankets. “Look at you. You have such beautiful eyes. You have such a pretty smile.”

Leah screamed. It came out of her as though it were too large for her mouth to hold, as though her lips would tear around it, as though her lungs would pop and her teeth would shatter and her whole body would open up strand by strand like a lotus in hot tea. She thrashed and the back of her head connected with Hatcher’s face with a hollow thunk. The older woman scrambled from the bunk, hissing in pain, hands clapped over her nose.

Good. Leave me. Leave me. 

The pimple throbbed. It burned. Leah clawed at it with vicious desperation, drawing blood from the skin around it, nicking the corner of her nostril with a broken shard of nail. She screamed again. Her throat hurt. A dull ache built behind her eyes. Scratching. Scratching.

But it wouldn’t burst.