Every date followed the same pattern. After the dinner and drinks, and the long moonlit walk along the canal, Jules would casually remark that the hangar was not far from here, and would they like to come see? Once outside the heavy metal door, he would pause with his hand above the security scanner, as if having second thoughts about inviting an unauthorized guest.

The hesitation was no more than a cruel act. It was the look on their faces that made him keep doing it. As if it was just hitting them in that moment, how lucky they were to get both Jules Mercer and his giant robot on the same night. Simone, Jules’ handler, was familiar with his routine: a different boy every few months, each a little more blond and blue-eyed than the last.

“Why are we sneaking round the back?” The latest one, with the unlikely name of Elliot Scarpe, spoke in a high, grave voice. “Don’t pilots get security clearance?”

“Big Blue is still technically company property,” Jules said. “Anyway, you’ll be glad we did it this way. Trust me.”

Scarpe. It sounded more like a verb than a proper noun, and fit even less the boy’s heavyset figure under the crested blazer. Scarpe had arrived at the restaurant still in his school clothes; there was a project meeting that had run late, he’d explained tediously, and not enough time to get back to the dorms to change before the next train. As Jules rose from the table for an awkward embrace, he’d smelled the hastily gargled mint mouthwash on the other boy’s breath.

Now, hours later outside the hangar, the look on Scarpe’s face wasn’t the one Jules had been expecting. It was too frank, presumptive rather than grateful. As if this private tour had been wholly earned via the half-eaten plates of risotto, the lukewarm conversations about engineering school and local politics. Scarpe had seemed more irritated than impressed by the way the other diners kept sneaking glances at them, and they’d skirted around the topic of combat mechs as if playing a game to see who would bring it up first. Despite the lackluster chemistry, perhaps out of habit, Jules had made the invitation anyway.

It was too dark to tell, but now that he thought about it, Jules figured Scarpe’s eyes to be a little more green than blue.

Jules palmed the scanner and led Scarpe by the hand into an unlit maintenance hallway. Jules knew the way by touch, and relished the way the other boy stumbled against him in the darkness, cursing softly.

“Trying to save electricity?” Scarpe whispered. His hand was cool and pleasantly damp, like moss.

“It’ll ruin the effect,” Jules said. “Watch out, there’s stairs.”

They clambered up through precarious shadows, Jules keeping silent count of the steps, until they reached a flat walkway. Their eyes had adjusted enough to see the faint outline of moonbeam limning something huge and faceted above their heads.

Strands of blond hair stuck darkly to Scarpe’s forehead. “When you said there were stairs,” he said, breathing heavily, “that was a bit of an understatement.” The words reverberated off distant metal, and they both heard how vast the space around them had become.

Jules let go of Scarpe’s hand and walked carefully to one side of the platform. “Ever been up close?”

“Only on TV.”

“You haven’t seen it ‘til you’ve seen it,” Jules said, giddy with the cheesiness of the line. Without looking, he reached for the lever that was right where he knew it would be. It gave way with a satisfying thunk. They were blinded a second time as the hangar bay flooded with light.

Scarpe’s indrawn gasp was the moment Jules had been waiting for. He turned sideways so he could watch the other boy’s expression. Scarpe’s round, pinkish face reflected nothing of the gleaming visage looming over them. Big Blue’s head was the size of a small house and cut like the world’s largest diamond. Two rings of white LEDs shone cold and white from the angular faceplate. The cobalt-painted torso still bore dents and scorch marks from last week’s fight, but it was fashionable to leave a few battle scars for the news drones. Below the walkway, the combat mech’s armored chassis could be seen receding fifty meters down to the hangar floor.

For a moment, something like unease seemed to pass over Scarpe’s face. Then it was gone, and he was leaning over the railing, babbling like an enthusiastic toddler.

“You can tell it’s a Mark VII by the formation of the chest plating. It’s canted like that to redirect impact force, but the tech wasn’t ready for actual implementation until they solved the carbon polymer problem. Weave alignment is tricky. I considered doing my dissertation on it, but it’s hard to pick just one research subject . . .”

“I’ll bet,” said Jules.

“And anyways, I ended up switching to Civil.” Scarpe pointed to Big Blue’s torso. “Was the reactor housing retrofitted for the new tokamaks?”

“What the hell’s a tokamak?”

“Right.” A hint of a smirk. “You just pilot the thing.”

Jules opened his mouth, then stopped. Wasn’t this why he’d pulled Scarpe aside at that dull fundraiser gala in the first place? Hadn’t the whole point been to try something different? Combat pilots typically dated two types of people: mech groupies, and other pilots. It was a novelty to be regarded with something other than awe or naked competition.

A loud chirp broke through Jules’ thoughts. He glanced at his wrist. A white dot on the tiny screen blinked in time to the beeping.

Scarpe glanced at him. “Sounds urgent.”

“Jelly alert.” Jules pressed something and the chirping stopped. “Just a drifter, well above the stratosphere. Won’t be any sort of threat unless it starts moving lower. The Air Force usually picks them off in the morning.”

“I’ve never seen a live jelly before,” Scarpe said, sounding almost wistful. “Just dead specimens in labs, or the replica Massive at the museum. You guys are too good at your jobs. They don’t get close enough to see them from down in the city any more.”

Jules felt the glint of an idea, like the Zeugma mote, take hold in his mind. Simone wouldn’t approve. The company really wouldn’t approve. But there was something about the night, the timing, even if this latest boy wasn’t quite deserving . . .

Jules put a hand on Scarpe’s shoulder.

“You wanna get a closer look?”

• • • •

Jules’ first mission had been with a mop-up crew, helping to clear out the red tide which swept down from the Arctic Circle every three years or so. Jellies came in a wide range of forms, but reds were among the least threatening types and made for good target practice. It was hard to forget the strangeness of turning eleven years old at twenty-thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by a pulsating mass of rose-coloured flesh where no flesh should be.

They’d put him in a training mech with the utilitarian design of an alleyway dumpster. It was equipped with a single weapon called the Sweeper, which emitted a thin beam that could cut through the bloom to a depth of twenty meters. Simone’s mote in his head, silver on black, had guided his fingers over the controls until they could dance without assistance. The beam was silent as it heated the soft transparent bodies into curdled wisps. Young Jules had imagined he could hear them screaming.

The drifter that Jules was pursuing now was similar to those from the red tide, except this one was alone. When they caught up with it, the jelly was a pearlescent blob on the wraparound viewscreen in Big Blue’s cockpit. HUD elements clustered around it like ants swarming a fallen scoop of ice-cream: target range, atmospheric conditions, shield integrity. Reactor levels holding at a steady 94%.

Jules cleared the sky of distractions and put the navigation system on autopilot. Now it was just himself and Scarpe, representing all of humanity in their titanium suit of armour, and the stranded enemy scout wandering mindlessly through heaven. At this altitude, the pale azure of Earth’s troposphere gave way to a thin band of rust orange before shading off into black. They had left the city far below, with its tall warning beacons rising from a tangle of jelly-resistant infrastructure. There had been a steep learning curve in defensive urban planning since the invaders first appeared, but the Civil Engineering Corps had risen to the occasion.

Jules had expected Scarpe to be as vocal about the view as he had been in the hangar, but the blond boy was strangely silent. He sat there, gazing out at the viewscreen’s lone occupant. There was so little room in the single-person cockpit that Jules was practically perched on Scarpe’s lap. Nestled against each other, the proximity of body heat and clean sweat was beginning to erode Jules’ previous reservations.

When Scarpe eventually spoke, his voice was barely audible above the thrum of Big Blue’s reactor. “I’ve never been up this high before.”

“I don’t normally go higher than six thousand feet on a first date,” Jules said. “This is an exception.”

Scarpe smiled, but his gaze was level. “Yeah, right. You probably do this with all the guys.”

In lieu of a verbal response, Jules put one hand on top of Scarpe’s where it lay on the armrest. The cockpit was dimly lit, bathed only in the faint glow of the control console. Perfect mood lighting.

But Scarpe fidgeted against Jules’ hip, twisting away. The hand under Jules’ was sweaty and pulse-quickened.

“What’s the matter? Can’t do it with an alien watching?”

“It’s not that.”

Jules tapped his temple where the implant scar had healed over. “Just say the word, and I’ll blow it out of the sky.”

Again, Scarpe glanced over Jules’ shoulder at the drifter. The blackness of space was dimly visible through the jelly’s semi-translucent flesh.

“Could we not?”

“Not what?”

“Do we have to kill it, I mean?”

“It’s not the main reason we’re up here. Obviously.” Jules smiled, toying with Scarpe’s collar. “But I am going to have to get rid of it before we land. It would be a breach of my contract not to. Why, what’s the problem?”

Scarpe shifted uncomfortably. “It’s just, I saw this documentary at the university film club. Children of Stolen Skies? I didn’t want to bring it up, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

Jules hadn’t seen the film, but Simone had coached him on how to respond in case it ever came up in interviews. “I’ve heard of it.”

“They interviewed all these biologists and xenolinguists, and they talked about jellies and how we’ve never really tried communicating with them to figure out why they keep coming here. And how fighting them is just a convenient excuse to keep pouring more money into the military, even though we’ve made huge strides in passive deterrence—”

“It’s been scientifically proven that jellies can’t feel pain,” said Jules automatically. “Plus, if you look at the number of deaths from the first wave, that more than justifies—”

“And it’s really fucked up, what they do to the pilots,” Scarpe went on, as if he’d been waiting all night and couldn’t stop. “I mean, you must know better than anyone. Right?”

“You’re a Civil Engineer.” The counter came automatically to Jules’ lips despite the growing static in his head. “You have Z-class implants, same as me.”

“Construction mechs aren’t used to fight human wars,” Scarpe said. “And the Corps doesn’t cradle-snatch their pilots.”

Jules and Scarpe stared at each other. All around them was the constant tremor of Big Blue’s body, five hundred tonnes of complex polycarbonate steel propelled by plasma jets burning at a rate of $5000 per minute. There was something vaguely erotic about all that waste, as if the designers were over-compensating for the neutered lack between the mech’s colossal legs. But Big Blue itself was chump change compared to the worth of its pilot. In Jules’ head floated the Zeugma mote, a silver firefly in an endless black sea. Only one test subject in five thousand could withstand the implant surgery, and even fewer could interface well enough to handle a high-performance combat mech like Big Blue. This rare compatibility made Jules far more valuable than the heap of photogenic scrap metal he was piloting.

In a perverse way, he could understand why he’d been given up. There had been other mouths to feed, and the amount of money the company had offered her would have been enough to set the entire village up for life. Ten years ago, he’d watched her face recede through the dusty window of the helicopter that would take him to the training facility. Simone had sat next to him, texting on her phone. The children on the ground had waved good-bye. Had his mother waved, too? That, he could not remember.

On the viewscreen, the jelly had stopped moving. It hovered in place, tentacles drifting in an unseen current, as if waiting for something.

Jules managed a bark of laughter. “You think they’re forcing me to do this? I have a giant fucking robot. I’m living the dream.”

“I’m sorry,” Scarpe said. The vehemence seemed to leak out of him all at once. “It wasn’t my place to go off like that.”

“Why did you even come up here, if you find this all so morally reprehensible? Do you know how many people would kill for this opportunity?”

Scarpe’s face was red. For the first time that night, he seemed flustered. “I came because you were so insistent, that I thought . . . I don’t know. When we met at that party, I’ll admit, I suspected your friends had dared you to ask me out. I half expected you not to show up to the restaurant. Now . . .” The blond boy shook his head. “Why me? I can’t help feeling this is part of some big joke.”

Scarpe’s eyes were inches away from Jules’, green-blue mirroring dark brown. Mechanically, as if on rails, Jules brought one hand lower, letting it slide down the smooth front of the spare pilot’s uniform he’d dug up for the other boy. He murmured, “Does this feel like a joke?” and pulled Scarpe closer, pressing their mouths together.

Even through the kiss, Jules sensed the other boy’s resistance. But there was something else there, the undefined shape of a foreign emotion. Jules had been told repeatedly during his training that it was impossible to read minds through the Zeugma field, that psychic harmonization between Z-class implants was a Hollywood myth. It was a method to help trainees sync with their mechs under the guidance of a more experienced pilot, like a driving instructor. Nothing more.

Therefore, this thing Jules was feeling beneath Elliott Scarpe’s solid, unyielding warmth couldn’t possibly be pity. Pity for the boy who had everything: material wealth, a legion of adoring fans, a job where he got to be a hero every week and look good doing it.

But Jules was so used to people wanting things from him, needing him. Simone. The groupies. The city, the country, the entire goddamn world. Once, long after she had faded from his every day thoughts, Jules’ mother had sent him a lengthy voicemail. She’d called him by his birth name, now foreign to his ears, and claimed that all she had wanted was to give him a better life.

So she had. And still she had begged his forgiveness.

It had been a long time since someone hadn’t wanted him. He found himself craving the memory of it. And if Jules Mercer couldn’t have his every heart’s desire, then what was the point? What was the use of having gone through any of it?

At some point during the kiss, Scarpe’s hand had come up to grip Jules’ shoulder. Whether to draw Jules closer or push him away, it was unclear. Then the grip turned painful, and Scarpe was shrieking something unintelligible over the howl of Big Blue’s proximity alarm. And then the sky exploded.

• • • •

There was a sickening plunge as Big Blue’s automatic defense systems kicked in, dropping out of autopilot and switching to mobile thrusters. The soft lighting was replaced by sharp white fluorescence that outlined every edge of the cockpit in razor definition. The viewscreen’s HUD remained decluttered, except for a pulsing red label centered over the hyperdimensional maelstrom swirling less than two hundred meters away:

[THREAT LEVEL: M]

The Massive emerged upside-down from the center of the vortex, flopping into Earth’s gravitational field in a graceless tangle of tentacles. Free from the rupture it had torn open in spacetime, it righted itself slowly, like an aircraft carrier rotating on its axis. The luminous curve of its enormous bell dwarfed that of the moon.

Jules was dimly aware of Simone’s voice squawking at him through his wrist, and of Scarpe’s sobbing breath on the side of his neck. That was one half of the world. In the other, Jules’ mind was a silver fish darting through the dark waters of the Zeugma interface. Big Blue’s combat systems lit up his synapses, accompanied by the familiar hum of the sync protocol in the base of his skull.

On the viewscreen, a targeting reticule settled over the Massive and locked on, waiting for the pilot’s signal. Jules felt in both halves of the world for the trigger of Big Blue’s laser cannon. He pulled it.

Almost immediately, something was wrong. Jules’ mote burred unpleasantly as a cold message slashed through the darkness:

[SECONDARY CORTEX DETECTED. ZEUGMA NEUROLINK PAUSED. PROCEED DESPITE WARNING?]

Scarpe was whimpering, both arms wrapped tightly around Jules’ waist. Simone was yelling at Jules to come down. Get to safety and wait for reinforcements. But that was all happening in the false reality of fear sweat and extraneous colour. In the monochrome purity of the Zeugma, nothing else mattered but victory.

Jules blinked affirmative.

Suddenly, there were two motes floating in the void. Jules felt Scarpe’s teeth bite down involuntarily through the thin material over his right shoulder as the Z-field warped, struggling to accommodate both implant signals. Jules’ only experience with dual syncing had been in training, and he had never resisted, never fought back. Not like Scarpe was fighting now, splintering the sync in his animal panic. But no uncalibrated engineering student should be able to exert this much control over the Zeugma, unless—

Sensing a threat, the Massive’s tentacles swarmed through space toward them. Jules tried to draw Big Blue out of range, but there was a delay between his instincts and the mech’s actions, as if something was dragging him back. The reverse-thrusters fired sluggishly, seconds too late.

Half-lodged beneath Jules, Scarpe cringed as tentacles wrapped around Big Blue’s head and torso, blotting out the viewscreen. Bioluminescent nodes bulged and throbbed as the jelly began draining power from the mech’s reactor core. Each pulse further destabilized the Z-sync, knocking layers of reality out of alignment. Jules was thrust back into the cockpit’s harsh glare, gagging with the jolt of corporation. There was no pain, but the nausea of being half-in and half-out of the Zeugma, however brief, was worse.

[REACTOR OUTPUT 79% AND DROPPING.]

Jules abandoned the controls and let his mind run to quicksilver once more. His mote dove deeper into the fractured planes of the Z-field, searching for its twin, the source of the lag. The other mote spasmed as he approached, then slipped away. After a tight, spiraling chase that lasted less than a fraction of a second, Jules finally caught and pinned Scarpe’s mote to his own. He pushed, feeling it flicker and tremble against his own frayed nerves.

“Let go,” he heard himself shouting, a world away. “Just let go, dammit—”

Scarpe made a low, drawn-out sound. Something gave way. The two motes merged.

The cockpit disappeared, and with it, all physical sensation. An interval of a blink. Then

he was / they were

soaring through space on a plume of plasma, thrusters firing below their feet with a decimating roar that was felt rather than heard. Graphene polymer actuators flexed under the gleaming metal shell that was all that separated soul from abyss. Their body was no longer a soft, vulnerable prison grown by haphazard chance. Now it was a titan made to order, precision built down to the last rivet and powered by the stuff of stars.

They were / he was Big Blue.

[REACTOR OUTPUT 21%. ENERGY WEAPONS DISABLED.]

The Massive still loomed before them, but now it was as an equal. The frilly lappets dangling from its bell made it look like a radioactive bridal veil. Instead of lifting it for a kiss, Big Blue’s fist reared back and punched a bolt of pure thunder at the dark knot of nerves visible through the translucent flesh.

Scarpe gasped as Jules rocked on top of him with the impact. The Zeugma flashed green, indicating a successful hit, but the jelly’s thick mesoglea took the full force of the blow and diffused it with no more effect than a drop of water sliding off an umbrella. The pulsating purple mass of the thing’s brain taunted them through the shield-like dome.

The neural link recalibrated. Jules was blind to everything but Scarpe, whose mote had broken open to become a scintillating pattern on the roof of his skull, like the shimmer above an illuminated swimming pool. Jules arched up into it, the water becoming one with the light.

[WARNING. LESS THAN 2% ENERGY REMAINING.]

Now the Massive’s tentacles were little more than the languid gropings of a patch of kelp. Big Blue grabbed a fistful, tearing them from the roots as if pulling weeds. The Massive spasmed as its luminescent blood spewed out, crystallizing by some alien chemical property into jagged spears.

Blurry figures cast strange shadows against the curve of the Z-field. Whose face was he seeing now, looking down on him with such tenderness in her kind green eyes? Her lips formed words that he could not hear, but he somehow understood that she was singing. He reached out a hand to touch her cheek as she whispered

good-night, Elliott

Big Blue reached out and grabbed one of the blood-spears just as its thrusters sputtered out the last of their fuel. Submitting to the pull of the remaining tentacles, Big Blue used its own momentum to thrust the frozen fragment down, down through the thick gelatinous flesh, down into the dark knotty core of the Massive’s brain.

All at once, the great bell deflated. A spray of fluid burst against the mech’s chestplate and congealed instantly, one final insult. The Zeugma field collapsed into nothingness, and the two boys into each other’s arms.

[0% ———————]

Even in death, the loops of rhopalia that had illuminated the Massive’s body from within continued to glow. The giant robot and the dead alien tumbled across the skin of Earth’s atmosphere, locked in each other’s embrace, until the Air Force finally showed up to tow the whole mess back to company headquarters.

• • • •

Simone was waiting for them when they landed.

The mop-up crew had removed the Massive’s corpse from orbit, bringing it down slowly to prevent the specimen from being burned away on atmospheric entry. Back in the hangar, the jelly’s blood had calcified so thickly over Big Blue’s chestplate that it had to be chipped off by an industrial drill mech. The crew then cut through the mangled metal with a plasma torch until the cockpit could be safely breached.

The pre-dawn air was thick and cold in Jules’ lungs as he clambered unsteadily out of the ragged hole in Big Blue’s chest. A forest of hands helped him down. He tried unsuccessfully to bat them away, and someone put a blanket over his shoulders. They finally left him alone and went to retrieve the other pilot.

Jules waited until Scarpe appeared on the walkway, looking disheveled but physically unharmed. He refused to meet Jules’ gaze as the elevator brought them down. Shadows slid over his face as Big Blue’s damaged chassis drifted past, seeming to ascend while they remained still.

At ground level, Jules stood shivering on the bare concrete as Simone walked toward them. Scarpe leaned against a support beam, looking as if he were about to vomit; then he did, with an awful release of pressure, as if he’d been holding back to avoid soiling the mech’s cockpit out of some misplaced sense of etiquette. Jules tuned out the sounds and focused on the ringing inside his own head, the clarity of adrenaline giving way to a sickly emptiness.

“I’ll drive you to the company clinic,” Simone said to Scarpe when he was done. “Your family has been notified. They’re being flown in as we speak. There may be reporters, people with cameras. You don’t have to tell them anything you don’t want to.”

Scarpe was still wiping his mouth with the towel he’d been given. His eyes were pale and glassy, and he was actually watching a crewmember clean his own sick off the ground with a disturbingly detached gaze.

Simone put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward her.

“Are you listening to me, Elliot? Use your words.”

Scarpe moved his mouth, and no sound came out. He managed the second time. “I’m. I’m good.”

“You’re a hero, Elliot,” Simone said, in a tone of voice familiar to Jules. “You did a very brave thing tonight.”

Jules knew what Simone was thinking. She, as well as everyone else at central control, would have had access to Big Blue’s Z-sync data as it was streamed to corporate servers. They would have seen in real time how Jules and Scarpe had danced and dissolved in the Zeugma, how impossibly well they had fought together at the climax of battle. Perfect synchronization, despite Scarpe never having been properly calibrated or trained. Scarpe’s psychosometric profile had probably been forwarded to the recruitment analysts before Big Blue had even touched down.

Simone moved away to summon a car. Jules walked up to Scarpe, careful not to touch him.

“Hey,” he said, letting the tremor in his voice play out naturally. “Look, what happened back there . . . I had no idea. About the attack, I mean. Sometimes they just come out of nowhere like that. But you, you were brilliant.”

Scarpe didn’t respond. He was staring at something over Jules’ shoulder. For one mad second, Jules thought that if he turned around, he would see the lone crimson drifter hovering in the middle of the hangar floor. But he didn’t turn. He tried to keep going, to finish the sentence that had already dissolved from his mind. All that was left was the silent lullaby, and the pair of green eyes, that he’d glimpsed in the Zeugma dark.

And then Scarpe was gliding past him, like a ghost or someone in a dream. Two black driverless cars had pulled up, their doors sliding open without a sound. Scarpe got into the backseat of the one nearest and disappeared from sight, as if the car had swallowed him whole.

Simone was standing nearby, talking into her wrist. The things she was saying sounded bland and important. Finally, she raised her head and turned toward Jules.

“The other car will take you home,” she said to him. “We’ll debrief tomorrow.”

There was no anger on her face. No contempt. Not even disappointment. Her expression indicated that there would be no major repercussions, nothing to discourage exactly the same thing from happening again. Jules had saved the city, after all, and probably the entire East Coast with it. Defeating a rare and powerful Class M jelly with a single mech was the kind of heroic spectacle that would do very good things for Big Blue’s public image, and subsequently, the company’s shareholders.

Elliott Scarpe was a mere bonus. There were many more rejected candidates from the combat pilot program than successes, and an unexpected prodigy was an incredible boon. But even if the fight had gone terribly wrong, if the other boy had been injured or even killed, it would have been taken care of. And Simone, perfect tool that she was, was taking care of it.

The first car was preparing to leave. Jules lurched forward, got as far as “I’m—” but the doors sealed shut on the second word. The last he saw of Elliott Scarpe was a flash of pale cheek, the boy’s face turned toward the opposite window, before it was lost behind tinted glass.

Jules stood and watched the diminishing red glare of the car’s safety lights as it drove itself out through the security gate. Something prickled against the back of his neck. He turned around. Big Blue’s inert eyes gleamed from their titanium sockets. Jules looked up at them in vain for some sign of judgement, or justice, that might bring him to his knees. But there was nothing there.