Peace in an Age of Metal and Men by Anthony Eichenlaub

complicated.”
    Abi’s grin widened. “Just the opposite, actually.” She cupped my metal hand in her tiny palms. I felt cowed, like a monster being led by an innocent girl. She tugged gently on my huge, industrial claw and placed it in the shaped iron of the control panel. It fit perfectly.
    “It was made for it—gah!” A pulse of tingling pain rippled through my arm, down my spine, and up through my skull. My thoughts echoed in my head, like my skull had grown eight times its size but the ideas were still little. I flexed my jaw, shrugged my shoulders, felt deep down into the length of my limbs. The throbbing pain of my artificial arm had stopped, but there was still feedback. I could feel the length of my arm, my elbow, my fingers. Sensations came from beyond my fingers. The four thrusters were extensions of my own body. The antigrav flexed like a muscle. My skidder was part of me, like it was designed to be part of me.
    “Josephine has a good bit of army surplus sitting around.” Abi slapped the seat of the skidder, which I felt as a dull thump way down in my fingertips. “Old stuff, like Civil War era. Really old, like you.”
    I swung my leg over and sat on the skidder. The control panel shifted and fit comfortably while I was seated. “They always wanted me to pick up more slack after they did this.” I indicated my metal arm. “I never did it, though. Then the war ended.”
    “Yeah, I bet that didn’t make them too happy. What you have is an interface for a whole pile of fancy army stuff. This tech was new at the end of the war and the folks who used it nearly turned the tide.”
    “Lot of them died.”
    “Most of them died.”
    “Tech doesn’t win battles. Tech doesn’t fix what’s broken. It just gives you a cocky attitude and a means to show it off.”
    Abi was using her hand like a puppet, mimicking me talking. When she saw that I had noticed she put her hands behind her back. “Quit lecturing and give it a shot.”
    Flexing the antigrav, I rose a few meters, then set the thrusters to spinning me. Faster and faster, I spun, till I was nearly out of control. Then with a burst of power I stopped. It was incredible, far better precision than I’d ever had before. Then, I felt closely at the new sensations coming in. There was more.
    “Shields?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Environmental, mostly. But they’ll stop small arms ammu…”
    Silence. I’d flexed the shield and a bubble of warm, still air surrounded me. The lights shimmered, like heat rising from a hard-baked earth. Another flex and the bubble became opaque. Still another and the sound of an acoustic guitar started playing from unseen speakers.
    I set the skidder down, dropping the shields. I winced as my hand detached from the console. My world snapped back in around me. The ache returned to my arm in full force.
    A few minutes later, Josephine and Keith came out of the shack to find Abi and me smoking cigarettes. Abi was telling me all the latest news from Dead Oak and, well, I was listening.
    Josephine looked me up and down. “I’m not helping you, J.D. You’ll go in there guns blazing and you’ll get nothing but dead.”
    When I spoke, my voice was a deep rumble. “That’s not who I am anymore,” I said. “All I need is a way to see what’s happening there.”
    Josephine’s mouth hardened into a thin line. Her eyes darted quickly around, looking from me to Abi, then to Keith. She breathed a deep breath through her nose. “Then what? Once you know what’s happening. How do you fix it?”
    “It’s bad, Jo.” I thought about it a moment.
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Josephine said.
    “Nobody’s asking you to.”
    Her eyes were wide. Something had her scared more than it should. What was she hiding? What was she so afraid to talk about? “No,” she said. “I won’t do it.”
    “Then I won’t make you.” I spat my cigarette onto the ground, stepped it out, and mounted the skidder. Without another word, I jammed my