On the edge of a knife, there isn't much time. It's the slice of the now between the was and the will, the wedge which splices reality.
Seldom do we recognize ourselves, balancing on the edge of the knife in the perpetual instant of the real. But when we do, it is often because the knife is cutting us. It is ever driving some of us into the past and some of us into the yet to be, but sometimes, the process becomes apparent, like a crystal blade – invisible in the darkened room until light is cast. Then one can see the source of the bleeding…
I've seen that crystal edge. Anyone who was in the great war has. Explosions, lasers, gunfire are all very bright, and they cast a sort of light, a sort of lighting-flash enlightenment, on our lives. For lives lived between the click and the blast, it is only fitting. So this story of mine is only a glimpse, but what of that?
The Pacific horizon's razor edge cut into my eyes that morning, clear and unmarred. Because of the thrum of the Conveyor's revamped engines, my ears were deaf. The jarring flight numbed my body. I tasted only my own fear in my mouth, dry and tense. I smelled only the overpowering cleaning agent which had been used to get rid of my Medusa's last pilot. Or at least his smeared carcass. So only my eyes were unimpaired. And I saw only that horizon. Somewhere, between the streaked pale blue of the sky and the orange ocean, glasslike below, fate rested instantaneous and final.
I glanced over at my squadmates. Members of the proud 203rd, all. Not enough to be knights, and not merely TDF cannon fodder. But because we weren't knights, we had nothing to worry us but our weapons…
There was Melanie Delacra. From her dossier, I knew she'd squikked thirty or so glitch scouts in Australia. Indeed, it was her specialty, and so it had been prudent of our squad commander to assign her the Knight's Minotaur, the only top-of-the-line Herc in our mission garage. I worried about her skills in relation to this mission, however. This op was no brush with a few seekers in the bush.
Ahead of her, locked securely in its place with heavy mag clamps, was Friday Powers in one of two of the squad's Apocs. Dossier information on him was that he'd served admirably in the NorthAm prefect when the Chicago metrozone had been hit from the North. I respected him for that little note. Number of kills, unconfirmed. I'd seen the man working in the garage, and I knew that he was quite familiar with every component one could find in a Herc bay. I had watched his Apoc come together with awe, really. I was sure that the heavy armor and shielding coupled with the combo heat-seeking and radar-guided missile loadout would give our squad some much needed punch. I wished I could say the same of my Medusa. As the most "versatile" pilot in our squad (the squad commander used that word, not I) I had been given the most oddball Herc I'd ever seen. Supposedly the Colonials had put this thing together, but I could see the mark of defected Imperial engineers in its construction. Whatever it was, I didn't trust it, and I didn't feel comfortable in it. Martians were taller than most humans and therefore they had designed it in a way that made some controls hard to reach. Special holographic controls had alleviated this problem to a degree, but still…
Ahead of me was the Squad Commander. None of us knew his name; indeed, we had all been assembled separately and in secrecy at our base in Kyushu. We knew only what our dossiers told us, and his had no name other than his communications designation, "Sigma." The SC's only told us that he had amassed a total of twenty-eight kills and that he had been involved in the defense of Antarctica. That was two more kills than I had, but I could see why: His custom rig, which he had kept with him since Antarctica, was an Apoc that was fearsome to behold. It had the 203rd symbol on a white pennant attached to its roof, and its brilliant enameled red lacquer of armor was emblazoned with white Kenji symbols reading "I am Earth's blade unsheathed." An MFAC and a Heavy Laser suggested a skill with finesse and brute force alike. Two HAC's and some Sparrow missile pods only increased my faith in his presence. Thinking of it, my mouth grew slightly moister.
I looked back at my exterior viewfeed. The razor's edge between heaven and deep had become smudged with a thin dark line. The shore. It was as blacked blood on the edge of a knife, it was as the opening of a beast's maw… The battletalk between our Conveyor crew and the six other dropships in the formation steadily began to increase. I felt my stomach churn as our formation dropped suddenly, leaving its Banshee air cover behind. So we were going in low. It could only mean one thing: We'd been found.
I checked my nav computer. Still five kilometers out from the shoreline, and we'd already been detected. I checked my rear exterior viewfeed. From the spout of froth our engines were kicking up I couldn't see if the rest of the wedge had remained in formation behind us. I hoped to hunter that it was so. With the dawn's light behind us as we came in, at least it would be hard for any 'Brids on the ground there to sight us in.
I checked my nav computer again. Three kilometers distance. I braced myself. The peppering thunderclaps of Aphid Agiles burst in the midst of the formation, growing rapidly like a timpani drum roll into a climax and then suddenly dying off as our great speed and trajectory disrupted their targeting acquisition. In the silence, I could hear an uncanny sound steadily increasing in volume, as if conjured by insanity – Our comm speakers were receiving a signal from our Conveyor's copilot in the form of an electric guitar.
It was "Fortunate Son."
"Enemy defensive fire too great, attempting early drop – recommend you buckle your pretty asses in."
I gritted my teeth and onlined my shields and weapons. The foot mag clamps shut off, and we crouched our Hercs inside the bay, our feet lifting toward the ceiling as we were still clamped by our top mags. Without this preparation, any wet rapid insertion would become a bit of a tumble. Our speed increased, and the music was only partially drowned out as the shoreline energy defenses ripped into the formation. How many of us were still alive? Was the mission already failed before we even hit the dirt? I had no way of telling. All I knew was that in about ten more seconds, I was going to be dropped onto the cutting board. I intended to do so guns blazing.
"For Tokyo," someone said softly, almost drowned out in the thrum of the pulse detonation engines.
Then the doors were open, and water was tearing by below us. Almost immediately the mags shut off, and we fell. I caught a glimpse of the sandy shore between the spray and the sky, and I raked it with my HAC's on full auto even as I fell. Then water and oblivion. It was about twenty feet or so of the most crystal clear ocean I've ever been in, only I wish it hadn't been that way. Even before I rose from the bottom and broke into the morning pacific air above, I could see the tracers and boil-offs of lasers all around me. An Athena in front of us was crushed by the underwater concussions of heavy blast cannons before it ever made it back to the surface. My top gun mounts broke the surface first, and I was firing before my canopy even cleared the waves.
Then, for a surreal moment, I felt a strange silence, as if I existed only in the present. There was no future or past, only the eternal moment of the now. I saw the bright sun on the water, sparkling like a thousand laser-cut diamonds, and the metallic sheen of my comrades as we burst forward from the surf, rising like some titanic gods from the primordial ocean floor to fight Prometheus' fire with water. Through the smoky contrails of the dropships the sunlight poured through in smoky beams, speckling us as in some oil painting. The tips of barrels glistened brilliantly for that moment, the mechanical fury of earthmen manifest there, at its edge.
In that moment on the surf of the Pacific, we were the crest of the wave, the tip of the tide, the edge of the knife. Enlightenment came so quickly, and I saw briefly and eternally the balance of everything.
Then there was only beautiful carnage.
I followed my Squad Commander out of the water and on to the beach. Friday was dead. Melanie was somewhere. All around me explosions seemed poised to tear the shivering world apart. Then in front of us there was an Executioner, standing belligerent amidst a copse of ashen palms. I smashed into him, perfectly calm and yet berserk. My quad autocannons poured into his shields and then the bright green barrel of my SC's MFAC was shoved into the toaster's cockpit. A single searing blast, and the colossus toppled as we overran it.
Some sort of Herc charged me from behind some rubble, but I didn't even realize what I had acquired before my Medusa's weaponry churned it into a heap of scrap. The battlefield had become obscured in the multiple palls of black smoke rising from destroyed nexus structures My cockpit's seal had been broken, and I could smell the acrid stench of burning fuel and singed metal. I checked my nav computer, but my SC had disappeared. I was alone. His last order, given via text, had been to secure the central drop pad. I acquired the designated area and moved off, trampling fleeing toaster infantry units under my Medusa.
Suddenly my rear shields began taking hits. I struggled to turn and back off, the sloppy controls of my Medusa struggling with my hands. My shields were down now, and it was all I could do to swing my four HACs onto the target – one of two Sheperds. I screamed for energy support, but I was alone. Black smoke rose all around us, as if this was some duel in the bowels of the earth. Spraying one of the 'brids with fully automatic fire, I knocked out its shields, but had no time to finish the job. On the edge between the decision to flee or charge, I charged. My Medusa moved forward sluggishly at first, but it didn't matter – the two 'brids fled my assault, sealing their fates. I know to this day that if they had stood their ground and stopped me in my tracks I would not be here to tell you this story. But they fled, and I am not the one who is buried on a Pacific island.
I left their burning wrecks to find my waypoint. I made it, through fire and flame, to the pad, and we held our position long enough for the special infantry units to be dropped. Forming a defensive ring around the landing pad with what fifteen or so Hercs that we had left, we withstood several assaults from the Cybrids while the infantry searched the subterranean tunnels beneath our feet. It was rumored that this was a berth for the Kraken warform, and if any information could be gathered from it, countless lives might be saved. But that was not my concern. I only kept my eyes on the jagged horizon, squinting into the flames and smoke as if meaning to pierce them with a dagger's gaze.
I do not know when the smoke stopped roiling, when the gunfire died, or when our souls cooled. The moment was there and then gone, as if lived in another life separate from this one. But memories bond me to it, memories fasten me to my enlightenment.
As the sun rose high in the sky and the morning faded, I saw my Squad Commander's white pennant against the navy sky, and blinked. The glory, the sound and the fury had faded, but we still stood. Then I remembered –
"Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!"
