Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Summary

Raven was a gen 4 the same as him, piloted an AC he’d fought simulations against hundreds of times, but Iguazu still couldn’t figure out why Raven kept beating him. However, tired of pointless battles against an opponent he knows will always lose, Raven decides to reveal his edge. Or Raven and Iguazu can’t fix each other but they sure can make themselves worse.

Chapter 1

Iguazu was covered in burns from escaping his cockpit, his palms blistered from the heat of HEAD BRINGER’s emergency hatch when he’d wrenched it open. He was pretty sure he’d punctured a lung, he couldn’t feel it with his fried mood regulator implant flooding him with adrenaline, but only the left side of his chest rose and fell as he inhaled.

His mood regulator was always on the fritz. The cheap fucking components that were supposed to keep him from pissing himself the second he heard the words enemy AC were always the first things to go whenever he got into a real battle. He didn’t even have to have taken any damage, all it took these days was to see the words “Call Sign: Raven” pop up on his HUD and he would have to sit in the med center for hours getting the circuitry re-soldered. Gen 4s like him tended to have emotional problems, probably because of their fucked regulators, but Iguazu had been hot tempered to begin with. It didn’t mesh well, made him volatile and he knew it. That’s what would probably end up killing him, not a bullet or a pulse sword, but his own fucking augments deciding that now was a great time to give him enough adrenaline to give a horse a heart attack.

Iguazu yanked his emergency coms from his flight suit, clumsily turning it on with his burnt fingers.

“Gun One, this is Gun Five requesting medevac.” There was silence on the other end of the line. Maybe he was too far underground. “Gun One, come in Gun One.”

“I hear you Gun Five. Who was the hostile?”

Iguazu’s mouth went dry, remembering the briefing he’d gotten, that all the Red Guns had gotten, after the battle with the Ice Worm.

“Gun Five?”

“It was Gun Thirteen, Sir.”

“Gun Thirteen. I seem to remember telling you that under no circumstances were you supposed to engage Gun Thirteen without my back up.”

They were the same augment generation, had the same shit wiring. His AC was nothing special either, just one of those zippy little Schneider death traps that Iguazu had taken down in simulations hundreds of times before. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be able to beat him, but yet here he was miles underground with no AC and a collapsed lung and by the sound of distant machine gun fire, Raven was still out there fighting.

“Since you’re such a hot shot, Iguazu, I bet you can find your own way back to base.” Michigan hung up.

“Fuck!” Iguazu wrenched the comms from his ears.

A Balam MT squad found Iguazu about an hour later and took him back to base. Apparently it wasn’t just the lung, he’d shattered his ankle too. The MT squad had a rookie with them and the kid had lost his lunch after seeing the shards of bone tearing through his flight suit. Iguazu was lucky enough to avoid losing the foot but he was going to be out of commission for a while.

The pain had finally hit him too. Once the med techs had fixed his mood regulator the adrenaline had started to leave his system, leaving him to deal with the burns and the broken bones. Despite that, he’d refused painkillers. He wanted to remember this. He wanted to remember what Raven had done to him, so that when he broke every bone in the bastard’s body he would have a frame of reference for how badly it hurt.

“Shit he really did a number on you.” Red stood in his door, staring at the burns that reached up to his elbows.

“Wasn’t worse than Michigan,” Iguazu shot back, through the paralyzed left side of his face. That had been Michigan. The one time he had tried to mutiny, Michigan had scrapped HEAD BRINGER, climbed out of LIGER TAIL, and ripped Iguazu out of the cockpit before proceeding to beat him within an inch of his life with his bare fists. He’d ended up with nerve damage. That was expensive to fix, and Balam medical considered partial facial paralysis a cosmetic issue, so they wouldn’t cover the surgery. “Did you come here to tell me I deserve it too?”

Red tossed him his personal coms pad. Iguazu hissed as it landed on his bandages. “Just doing my job. You’ve got a message from an independent. I’m guessing you can figure out who.

Iguazu’s hands shook with rage as he put in an earpiece and confirmed he wanted to listen. Raven’s emblem popped up on screen and he had to fight to not overheat his regulator again.

“Do you really want to know what makes us different?” Iguazu had never heard Raven’s voice before. It was awful, all gravel, static, and bad voice synthesis, like someone trying to form a sentence from a library of industrial rock samples. The way he had his mic levels set didn’t help either. With all the distortion, it sounded impossibly loud and overwhelming, even through the tinny speakers built into his cheap earpiece.

“Did you just call me to gloat?” Iguazu felt a blister pop as he tightened his grip on the screen.

“No, I’m being serious. I have an edge. Do you want to know what it is?”

Iguazu looked around to make sure there was no one in ear shot. Red had already wandered off somewhere else.

“Why tell me? Why not your buddy Rusty?”

“Because I know you won’t leave me the hell alone until you’ve figured me out.”

“What is it?”

“We should meet up to talk.” Ah so it was illegal. He could do illegal. “I’ll send you the coordinates.” It was an old Furlong base from back when they were still trying to establish a foothold on Rubicon. “I have a friend who can let you in.”

“Is this your fucking hangar?”

“Yeah. You know what will happen if I think you’re going to try something.”

“You don’t think I’ll be able to tear your ass apart once I have your edge?”

Raven laughed, a horrible power-drill like sound.

“You’ll understand when you get there.” Raven hung up.

Iguazu wasn’t stupid. He was many things but he wasn’t stupid. When he was well enough to get back in HEAD BRINGER he made sure he was loaded up on weapons before sneaking out. If he was walking into an ambush he was making sure he had a chance of walking out of it. He even packed a side arm in his flight suit. Assuming a pilot wouldn’t just start beating the brakes off him the second they left the cockpit was a mistake he’d never make again.

He figured he was right to be concerned when Raven met him outside the hanger in his AC. It was unarmed, but that just pissed Iguazu off. What, did Raven think he could take him without weapons? He was mocking him, he had to be.

The hangar door ratcheted open behind him. Missiles didn’t burst forth, and Iguazu wasn’t impaled with a hundred laser blasts, but somehow that just made him sick to his stomach.

“You mind leaving Head Bringer out here?” That awful voice crackled through his coms and it felt like it would blow out his speakers. “My handler doesn’t know you’re here.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?!”

“Not that stupid.” Iguazu wanted to bite back, but Raven’s voice was so loud in his ears it made him feel like he was concussed. “I’m putting a lot of trust in you here, Iguazu, I need you to trust me too.”

No one really trusted Iguazu with anything. He was a screw up, a chronic screw up, he didn’t deserve to be trusted, but at the same time, to be trusted, even if it was by an enemy, made him feel something. He wasn’t sure if it was a good something, but he knew it wasn’t anger.

“I have a gun.” He warned utterly impotently. If Raven decided to step on him the second he left Head Bringer’s cockpit a gun wouldn’t help him, but he needed to give himself at least the illusion he had control. God this was stupid. God this was so fucking stupid. He opened the cockpit.

The air was cold, the wind whipping past him several stories up on HEAD BRINGER’s back. Raven reached out a hand the size of a tank to let him down. Well, he’d come this far. Iguazu stepped onto his hand. Raven didn’t crush him. Instead he gently carried him over to raised crew walkways and let him down before parking his AC.

“Do you have coms on you?” Came Raven’s voice over the hangar speakers.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Raven’s voice came from his earpiece now instead of the speakers.

“You gonna come out of that thing or what?” Iguazu shifted nervously. He still didn’t like this. Something was off. There was an industrial exoskeleton propped against the wall by Raven’s AC. One of the human sized ones warehouse workers used, but there didn’t seem to be anyone here but them. Not to mention it looked absolutely disgusting, with dark brown stains coating the inside.

“Iguazu,” it was like Raven’s voice was resonating with something deep inside his skull. “Take a look in the cockpit.”

He drew his gun, and the AC’s face whipped towards him. Iguazu braced for a giant fist that never came.

“Whatever you need to do.” The condescension almost made Iguazu drop his gun, almost.

He made his way over to the back of Raven’s AC, giving the industrial exoskeleton the side eye. There was nobody in it, but it paid to be careful. Once Iguazu reached it, the cockpit hatch lifted open by itself.

At first he couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at, a mess of wires and something red and wet with hard pink protrusions running down its center.

“Do you know how much human skin goes for on the black market, Iguazu?” His blood ran cold. “About 900,000. Especially if it’s in decent condition. Though I think I only got 450,000 since it was just the head, neck, and torso. Bio arms and legs sell for more than you’d think too. Eyes though,” the flayed thing in the cockpit turned its face towards Iguazu, wires threaded into his face connected his optical nerves to his AC’s cameras, “you can get around 4,000,000 for eyes. Kidneys go for a lot if you sell the set. The AC does dialysis for me, they don’t matter all that much really. Let’s see, what else, vocal chords, speech synthesis centers, did you know those were separate from the speech processing centers? I sure didn’t.”

Now Iguazu dropped his gun. He felt like he was going to throw up. He’d seen a lot of shit, but this was fucking ghoulish. How was Raven even still alive let alone piloting an AC?

“What the hell?” He didn’t even bother trying to hide the waver in his voice.

“Balam’s gone pretty easy on you all things considered. I had to provide collateral to the guys who own my debt. After all, AC pilots don’t usually live long enough to pay up. I’m still selling bits of my liver every couple weeks to pay off the interest.”

The industrial exoskeleton started to move and Iguazu nearly jumped out of his skin. It stood next to him for a moment before lightly tapping his arm with a hand that could easily crush it.

“‘Scuse me.” Raven said over the coms. Iguazu realized for the first time that his mouth wasn’t moving. He stepped out of the way of the machine and it began disconnecting Raven from his AC. “This is always the worst part. I’m basically blind and deaf until I connect to the exoskeleton’s sensors.”

The exoskeleton lifted the flayed thing out of its housing, far more gently than industrial machinery should have been capable of. Then it eased the hideously living thing into its driver’s seat, feeding connections to its sensors into the ports in Raven’s face and clamping around what was left of his body to keep him from falling out. Raven opened and closed his hands a few times, testing the connection and making sure the lag between his thoughts and his motions was minimal. The skinless face turned towards Iguazu, the naked muscle shining grotesquely in the sickly incandescent light of the hangar.

“You wanted to know what my edge is, right?”

Iguazu had nearly forgotten. He’d been trapped in this fucking horror movie so long he barely remembered why he had come here.

“This is it.” Raven clamped his hands on the railing of the raised walkway on either side of Iguazu, boxing him in. The smell of iron and the horrible voice over his coms made Iguazu close his eyes and turn away. “Look at me.” He kept his eyes closed. “Look at me!” Raven roared over the hangar speakers, the feedback shooting through Iguazu’s skull like an ice pick. He opened his eyes, forcing himself to look at the thing in the exoskeleton. “This isn’t a body anymore, Iguazu, it’s a brain. That,” he pointed to the stories-tall AC that hung next to them, “is my body. If my body goes down, I die with it, you understand?” Iguazu nodded. He’d had a few close shaves escaping HEAD BRINGER after a crash, Raven wouldn’t even be able to try to escape, he’d just burn to death in the cockpit. “You fight like you’ve got something to lose, Iguazu. You still think you’re getting out of this don’t you?”

“I’m not like you. I can still escape.” He insisted weakly.

“And that’s why you’ll always lose.” Raven let go of the railing. “To fight like I do, your AC has to be your eyes and ears, your arms and legs. This,” Raven poked him in the chest, “is a distraction. Do you understand?”

“No I don’t!” He tried to slap Raven’s hand away but the metal didn’t budge. “You’re saying I have to fucking strip myself for parts?! You’re insane!”

Raven laughed that harsh power drill laugh.

“Exactly. You don’t want this, no one should want this, so stop chasing my fucking shadow,” His synthesized voice growled, though there was a strange raw edge to his voice. He almost sounded disappointed. “I knew you wouldn’t stop fucking hounding me unless you saw for yourself. You can’t match me, and you don’t want to if it means becoming what I’ve become, so just give the fuck up already.”

“What?”

“What?” Raven pitched his synthesizers higher in what was clearly an attempt to convey a mocking tone. “Your idiotic vendetta against me. Just drop it. If you want to measure dicks that fucking badly, you can wire me the credits I need to buy mine back.”

Iguazu stumbled backwards, his hand slipping off the walkway railing. He hit his back on the metal hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Then felt the rusty metal bend and break beneath him. It wasn’t a heart attack after all, he was going to die falling off a fucking safety railing like an idiot. Then Raven grabbed the front of his flight suit, mechanical hands reacting faster than any human should have been able to.

“Gotcha.” Raven pulled him back up. “Are you done now? Is it out of your system?”

“Why did you do that?” Iguazu wasn't sure what he meant by that. Maybe he meant a lot of things. Why did Raven show him what he was reduced to, why had he saved him? Raven only seemed to register one.

“Because one, I don’t want to have to scrape you off the floor and two, I really don’t feel like trying to hold off Michigan until I can convince him that your sorry ass just fell while Walter chews me out for letting somebody in this haunted house without his permission.”

Iguazu just stared at him, not sure what to say. Thanks for saving my life? It would feel trite so soon after they’d tried to kill each other.

“Would you get the hell out of here, Iguazu?” To his disgrace, Iguazu bolted back to HEAD BRINGER like a coward. He didn’t want that voice in his ear anymore, that faceless skull staring at him like he expected something from him.