Armor (2 page)

He thought of the tiny sparks that moved and thought and eased more sparks together to form and ease even more sparks, the strength of which would ease together still more, timer, sparks which, in proper conjunction, made Power. The tiny sparks would then ease beside Power. And together, with awesome brute force and intricate silken precision, wonders could be created. Wonders like the Starship Terra, whose marvelous stature and beauty could serve as man’s ultimate loving gesture to the darkness which surrounded him. We are good. We are hopeful. We have built this. See her, the Starship Terra, the jewel of our being

But jewels did not long shine when Power was still about. Not when any fool could reach it. Felix, deep within the jewel already, could rend and tear her. He could grind her workings to nibble, blight her glowing entrails. He could disembowel this jewel of Man.

For he had Power.

Inside these layers of plassteel armor even a fool such as he, a dumb broken sonuvabitch with no future and a past he refused, could stomp the idol to clay.

Such power had thrilled him at first. Later, he was appalled.

Now . . . now, he didn’t care.

Felix read a dial. It was time. He left.

The Briefing Room mirror created what was termed “Positive Psychological Feedback.” It allowed a simple soldier to see what a monster he was in battle armor. Some psyches had felt it would have a negative effect on some warriors, particularly the females. It was a stupid notion, immediately overruled. All killers like to look the part.

They did. Two meters tall, they weighed six times their norm. Their armored powered hands could crush steel, stone, bone. Armored legs could propel the fastest around 100 kilometers per standard hour. The suit protected them as well, automatically and instantly distributing most concussions in an evenly expanding pattern from the point of impact to the entire surface of the armor. Standard warrior armor carried blazerifles on each sleeve. Hold the aim out, palm down, drop the wrist: blazerfire. Even plassteel would boil before it. The blazebombs clipped on racks on their backs provided not only an explosion, but spherical delivery of blazerfire in a single heartbeat.

And there were other gifts. They were, for example, complete. They carried with them all air, food, etc. Deepest ocean or vacuum. They needed no help from home for five standard days. Three, with a major battle a day. Only one, if always fighting.

The mirror helped. They were monsters, they could see that.

Felix took the blazerifle, the blazer, from the slot in the long row which had a number to match the one pulsing inside his helmet. He checked it for charge, attached it to his back. Scout suits, much smaller than standard issue, had no blazer capacity built in. Scouts carried rifles used by open-air troops for thirty years. Also, they had fewer blazebombs only nine as opposed to the two dozen the warriors carried. Scouts must be fleet, must be able to realize their much greater potential for speed and agility. And, where warrior suits bore different colors for rank and group, all scouts were black. Flat black. Dull, non-shiny, space black.

Death black, Felix thought as he watched the five other scouts collect and attach their rifles. Then be followed them out of the armory alcove into the Briefing Room proper. The room held twenty-one warriors, group leaders representing two thousand line warriors and one assault commander. Each bore the broad colored stripings of rank and its attendant responsibility. As scouts had no effective rank, they likewise possessed no real niche in the line of command. Warrant Officers technically, but with no command in standard situations. Many enlisted personnel requested scout duty. They sought the partial privileges of officer rank and the chance for rapid advancement much heralded by the grapevine. In truth, no scout advanced more than a step or two. Instead, they died. Even Felix’s paranoid fatalism had not considered this. Though he had heard, as bad all, that the scouts’ survival rate was considerably less than line warriors’. “A lousy scout,” he mumbled disgustedly.

The Briefing Officer’s helmeted head glanced up at the muffled sound. He surveyed the ranks. There was no way to tell who had spoken. All were on Proximity Band. He returned to his briefing

Paying attention at last, Felix was surprised to hear that the man had not yet begun to discuss details of the assault. Instead, it was a pep talk. Felix realized this alarmed him.

It wasn’t the pep talk itself which made him uneasy. It wasn’t die Briefing Officer. It was something in that positive, no nonsense tone of his. Something. . . .

He doesn’t believe, thought Felix suddenly. He doesn’t believe in the plan. He doesn’t believe in us. But he’ll be damned if he’ll let us carry that. So he’s trying to make us believe instead of him.

Felix admired the officer for his concern and for his effort.

He also bated him for failing

The pep talk mercifully ended.

All right,” snarled die Briefing Officer in his best Drillmaster manner, “it’s time to get down to it.”

On the wall behind him a large screen warped into light with a holo display of the target area. Felix noted the code on the tower corner of the image and keyed it onto his own holos. The map showed a peninsula some forty kilometers long jutting due north into a vast expanse of ocean. The peninsula terminated in a formation the shape of a large, three-fingered, hand splayed flat over the surface of the water. A choice spot, thought Felix, on Earth or Golden or any other human planet. Loads of sunshine and beach. The ocean frontage would supply fresh sea air to sweep leisurely across sculptured terraces where happy vacationers would collapse contentedly after along day of water sports and laughter. A choice spot.

Except it wasn’t Earth and it wasn’t Golden. It wasn’t a human place at all. it was A9.

And the water wasn’t water. It was poison. And the fresh sea air would kill an unsuited human in a second more poison. And the sunlight did little human good in a place where the average temperature was 20° at high noon. And die breezes were a near constant hurricane that drove the noxious atmosphere deep into the sandy soil, carving vast furrows into the land, forging riverbeds overnight, toppling mountainous formations in handfuls of years, and giving this nightmare place its name: Banshee.

Only the enemy thrived here. Still another reason, thought Felix, not to go.

“B-team,” began the Briefing Officer, “will drop here on the western edge. They will drive northward in a clockwise manner to rendezvous with C-team, who will drive due south to meet them from the northernmost section, the tip.

“The B-team, C-team, rendezvous will take place here, four kilometers due north of the Knuckle.” A tiny arrow appeared on the holo showing first the rendezvous point, then the Knuckle itself, a steep crag one thousand meters high in the exact center of the splayed hand.

“We expect only moderate resistance during this stage of the assault. The bulk of the enemy is concentrated around the Knuckle. Nevertheless, there is more here to cover on the western edge than the eastern. And for that reason both B and C teams will carry nine full groups and two scouts apiece.”

A flood of hatred rose within Felix as the A-team insignia appeared on his ID screen. Simple arithmetic left only two groups for A-team. Only two hundred warriors for half the area.

“Now before you members of A-team get too excited“ too late in Felix’s case , we want you to know that there has been absolutely no evidence of enemy activity on the eastern side. None at all. Your job will be mostly sightseeing.

“So . . . you will be split up to cover the eastern half. One group, with scout, will drop here, on the far eastern edge. The other group, with scout, will drop here, ten kilometers south. The two groups will converge here, due east of the Knuckle, to await rendezvous with Assault Main, driving northward up the peninsula.

“Don’t worry about the lack of backup. As I have already stated, there is nothing there. You should spend a boring few hours simply waiting.”

It was then, for Felix, it began. The hatred for the Briefing

Officer had expanded to include his superiors, the Captain of the ship, the commanders of Fleet itself, and finally the thickheaded idiot humans who had undertaken something as asinine as interplanetary war in the first place. The hatred blazed brightly, then vanished. From somewhere inside came then a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova like intensity of which startled even him. But then the rage was gone, too. It seemed to shoot away like a comet or a torch dropped flickering and shrinking into a bottomless well. What replaced the loathing and fury was something very different, something cold and distant and . . . only impersonally attentive. It was an odd being which rose from Felix and through him. It was, in fact, a remarkable creature. It was a wartime creature and a surviving creature. A killing creature.

From a distant place, the frightened Felix scanned himself. He recognized little. Still, what he saw was a comfort of sorts and he concentrated himself toward it, toward the coldness, die callous machinelike . . . The engine, he thought. It’s not me. it’s my Engine. It will work when I cannot. It will examine and determine and choose and, at last, act. It will do all this while I cower inside.

With furious concentration, that which kept him Felix gave itself as fuel to that which could keep him alive.

There was more to the briefing. More figures of time and distance, more numbers of men and probabilities of enemy.

The Engine heard and made note. Felix, watching himself, fueling himself, psyching himself, felt disgust at all that was about to happen and all who had caused it. And once more felt the distance between himself and those about him. Again, as he briefly scanned their armored forms filling the chamber, he thought: They’re all going to die.

It stood three meters tall and weighed, on average, four times more than a human being damn near as much as a suited warrior. It had six limbs, two for walking upright and erect, four for work. The upper limbs, call them arms, were incredibly massive, hanging down one and a half meters from two titanic shoulder joints. The arms ended in huge, hulking, two pronged claws twice the size of an armored human fist. The middle arms were smaller, approximately human size. Curved, two pronged pincers here for delicate work. The legs were the size of tree trunks, ending with semicircular pads splayed flat to the ground. There were two knarled knobs on each. Each limb, upper, middle, and lower, had three joints.

The body had three sections: shoulder, abdomen, pelvis.

Each was covered with coarse, hairlike fibers spaced widely apart

The head, half again larger than a warrior’s helmet, bore a dull globular eye on each side. The mandible mouth opened in three vertical sections of varying width and shape. Closed, it resembled nothing so much as a smooth sheened, toothless, human skull. The skin was not skin at all, but bone. Ectoskeleton. The muscles were inside. It was awesomely powerful.

It was the Enemy.

It was an ant.

It was called something else, something long and technical and dreamed up out of range. But scientific jargon had nothing to do with what men had felt when they saw it move, saw it coming. It didn’t matter that it had no antennae and walked upright and was too, too, damn big. From the beginning, men had called it an ant.

Felix saw no reason to change that. He stood watching the holo of the enemy in the wall of the passage leading from the Briefing Room. The others had long since filed past. They used their last minutes before drop as a time to be with friends or check equipment or fight panic or yield to it and vomit or to pray with undreamed of piety.

Felix, alone, watched the ant.

The screen on the back wall of Drop Bay Four was purely representational. It served no actual purpose in the mechanics of Transit. It merely informed the dropping parties of the various stages. First it would glow white: Attention. Next would come yellow: Transit beginning. Then the yellow would be interspersed with flashing bands of red light: thirty seconds.

As the ten second mark arrived, the red bands flashed the countdown. They would turn slowly inward across the surface of the wall until a square had formed. The square would shrink, coalesce, brightly pulsing all the while.. If all was well, the red square would turn bright green at the two second mark and the drop party would step quickly forward toward it.

Actually, they were trained to all but throw themselves toward the green square. “Try to bust that wall!” the Drillmasters had demanded. And they would try, surging forward en masse. But they never actually touched the screen, never even left their drop squares. Instead, they would Transit. To the next loom, to another Drop Bay, to another ship. To another world.

The presence of Banshee loomed uncomfortably as Felix entered Drop Bay Four and stewed through the others to the scout position at the very front of the formation. As he took his place, he appreciated at last the decision not to forewarn him of scout duty. One could do anything at all for a warrior’s supposed sense of confidence show him his high test scores, pat him on the back, tell him he was superhuman. None of it would affect in the slightest the growing sense of desperation that began the instant be realized he was going to be the very first of the bunch to touch down on alien soil. Given a few days’ notice, the candidate would be, at the very least, hallucinating by drop time. Given a week, a basket case. Given two weeks nobody would show up.

By springing the assignment on the morning of the drop, there was, presumably, too little time for such paranoia to develop.

Enough time for me, thought Felix sourly.

But only a small part of him thought anything at all. The rest of Felix thought nothing. The rest of Felix was psyching, psyching. Becoming the Engine.

For no amount of reassurance, no amount of technical data, or surveillance figures or probability curves or anything else, however thorough bad convinced him that he would not be slaughtered a split-second after Transit. And if they were to try for another year, the result would be just the same. Nothing they could say would make the slightest difference to him. For they. They, stayed put. They computed. They theorized. They were pleased at Their brilliance or stunned by Their failure. Perhaps even guilt ridden at the result.