In the Valley (6 page)

“Hey, Z,” he said in a low tone, “you got any more of that joe?”

Z was sitting there fully ready in his gear. He looked up.

“Sir, Mike said you might want some, so I’ve got extra,” Z said in that gentle voice of his. His sonorous tones always hinted at a smile or a joke, even under the worst circumstances. It was one of the traits that Paul liked about him.

That trait didn’t quite balance against Z’s annoying tendency not to clean his weapon, but it helped. Z held a cup up, which edged Paul’s opinion of him upward a little more. Z-man might come across as slow at times, but he was no fool.

Paul took the cup with thanks and sipped it gently. Then he reached into his near-cig-and-other-shit pouch and produced the local brand of Fortunate, his favorite. Dipping down into the crater to help conceal the light, he lit the smoke and inhaled deeply.

Paul looked at the stars again, cupping his near-cig in his left hand. Strangely, he felt brilliantly alive—but he would have done anything not to be in the Baradna Valley. The firebase was stirring quietly. Pashto Khel was only five klicks away, and the villagers might have someone watching this primitive base of operations.

Quiet preps, violent action, and deception were prerequisites for success.

Firebase Atarab was on the side of the Baradna River Valley, perched on the side of a hilly ridge. Where Paul slept was at the base of a hill, and he had sensibly made camp in the bottom of a bomb crater next to a ground-truck. Looking across the flat—the battalion’s assembly area—he could see antlike columns of Juneau Army soldiers coming down off the other hills. Each company had taken a hill as their area of operations, and the flat step at the bottom of the hills was the assembly area and the area where the advisors slept.

The night before the intel had come down that a group of shitheads under a certain Commander Mohammed were going to be staying in Pashto Khel. Apparently the group wanted to stir up a little trouble, and a little mouse in the village had passed word to the Juneau Army soldiers about the coming meeting. The rat had spurred yesterday’s furtive meeting with the good colonel Fasi.

Paul’s counterparts wanted to kill Commander Mohammed. It only took so many bombings and other attacks to rile up the locals. Heck, he’d kill Commander Mohammed himself if he had the chance.

The show was about to start; Paul’s clock said 0154. He took another drink of coffee. Today, he and Third Battalion, 215th Juneau Army Brigade, would raid Pashto Khel and kill some bad guys. The colonel pinged Paul’s halo, and Paul saw him suit up. What good were the lessons of the Fort Sill armorer to Paul now?

T
he Armorer spoke in a loud singsong voice. “This is the M-15 Armored Combat Suit, the trooper version. It stands 2.25 meters tall, weighs 135 kilos empty, and is .76 meter wide at its widest point. It has six subcompartments: one each for the major body areas of a human with standard morphology. It is internally adjustable to accommodate humans from 1.5 meters to 2.1 meters in height. It has a weapon attachment point on each arm, the shoulders, and the back. It is rated at carrying 300 kilos of operator and equipment for unlimited periods. It can lift a rated maximum of 750 kilos, given suitable bracing, and can travel at speeds up to fifty kilometers per hour in an Earth-standard gravitational environment.”

He seemed to say that all in one breath. There was more.

“The trooper suit is equipped with mil-grade frequency-hopping burst transmissions with a nonmicro retrans capability out to seventy-five kilometers line of sight. With a micro drone, a soldier in his suit could theoretically have worldwide transmission capability, both voice and cloud. The trooper suit can speak to a nearly unlimited number of halos simultaneously, and it monitors its own power usage. In sunny environments, the trooper suit’s energy reservoir is not a concern, as it gets most of its recharge from solar arrays embedded in the Plastlar skin. In conditions of zero sunlight or other solar emissions, the suit can operate in field-duty conditions for forty-eight Earth-standard hours before requiring recharge.”

If not for the excitement of finally seeing a real suit and then being trained in its use, Paul would have fallen asleep. Since coming to his advanced infantry training, it seemed that for sixteen hours a day all he had done was exercise, eat, and form up in the field for troop movements.

And now here he was, in a windswept pavilion by an ancient block building on a range at Fort Sill. He had yet to get a pass to see Lawton. When he did, he didn’t know what he’d do with the freedom. Maybe he’d send his parents a halo shot of the town or drink a watery beer. Whatever it was, it had to be better than sitting there Indian-style with his fellow trainees in a semicircle. His M-74 was perched next to him—butt down, bolt locked open.

The instructor continued his little speech. Bastard, Paul thought tiredly. I’ll bet he goes home to a nice, warm little place every night.

“After being subjected to power rundown, a suit needs either to be exposed for twelve hours to uninterrupted sunlight or spend two hours attached to the M-118 recharger on trickle charge. It is not recommended to recharge the suit faster than that because of possible thermal runaway issues with the batteries.”

Thermal runaway issues? That didn’t sound good to Paul. In fact, seeing the hulking suit sitting there with its operator’s hatches sprung open, this whole military thing was striking him as a fantastically bad idea in general. Oh why, oh why, he thought, did I have to get into a snit about Rhoda going into the forces. Even his father’s nagging took on a better light.

Looking around the windswept tumbleweed range, Paul was starting to feel positively jealous of a life as a drone mechanic, for example. He was cold, and the insides of the suit looked like Death to him. Thermal runaway? Hell!

He must have missed something because the instructor was giving him the fish eye while he continued his soliloquy about “All Things Armored Suit.”

“Operator interface with the suit is completely intuitive. I could prop a ten-year-old of the suitable physical parameters in this device here, and he could button up and go for a stroll, just like that. In fact, modified versions of this suit have been used for centuries in the construction field or to allow a severely handicapped man to walk—assuming, of course, that he was resistant to other types of therapy. In fact, I’ll bet one of you soldiers have used a suit before.”

He cast his eyes around the crowd. He looked right at Sherkarchi. “Sherkarchi, I see from your records that you have used an MkVb materials mover before. Why don’t you tell the class why an untrained operator is better off not using a suit?”

Poor Bob Sherkarchi looked like he was about to fall through the floor. He mumbled, “Instructor, if you don’t know exactly what you are doing in a specialty suit, you shouldn’t use one.”

The instructor looked at Sherkarchi like a bird eyeing a particularly tasty worm. “Can you be more specific, perhaps?”

Bob turned beet red. He flashed all of our halos an image of an overbalanced materials-mover suit falling on its side, its load of sewage pipes crashing to the ground and rolling into his employer’s ground-car. A younger Bob popped out of the suit and ran as his employer chased after him, yelling.

The students chuckled and gave Bob some catcalls and general good-natured ribbing. The instructor cleared his throat to silence us and raised his eyebrow.

“Very good, Sherkarchi. We now know how you ended up in the force infantry. More importantly, his example shows us why the laws of physics still apply to an augmented human in a suit. Force equals mass times acceleration, right? The mass of Sherkarchi’s suit could not withstand the acceleration of gravity upon his poorly balanced load of pipes, which applied a rotational force
that toppled his suit—resulting in the termination of his employment at the Mexico City Department of Public Works.”

The instructor stopped. He looked around. He spoke again.

“Only, here, soldiers, you will not be dropping a load of pipes. You will be carrying mission-essential equipment for your squad. If you make a bad decision, your suit will fail, and the mission may fail because of your lack of training and judgment.” Another pause. “The Forces will provide you with training, rest assured. And in your twenty weeks here, perhaps you will learn judgment as well.”

Paul looked around at his peers. He too hoped the guys around him would learn judgment, but he had serious doubts.

The wind picked up; gray clouds scudded across the October sky. Paul’s behind, pinned against the cold concrete, was going completely numb—but not without hurting a lot first, an uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling creeping up his thighs.

The instructor continued his military poetry reading, backed up with halo visuals. “The trooper suit is equipped to wield a standard M-74 rifle stowed in its right-arm weapons compartment. When placing your M-74 rifle in the weapons stowage compartment, be sure to place the switch in your rifle’s magazine well to ‘belt feed.’ That is the switch that they told you over and over again in basic never to use. You do use the switch in a suit.”

The instructor paused while he played with the balaclava around his neck. Paul guessed the cold wind was getting to him, too. He spoke again, his tempo increasing.

“The suit’s arm can hold eleven hundred rounds of 6.8 mm caseless, linked, standard, blank, armor-piercing, incendiary, tracer, or high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition. Your suit’s halo or mission commander will select semiautomatic, five-round-burst, or full-automatic fire. Your weapon’s maximum range
in this configuration is 6,446 meters; maximum effective range is 2,100 meters, Earth-standard gravity.

“In addition, there is an integral grenade launcher located underneath the weapons stowage port and beneath your arm. You can carry up to ten rounds of 40 mm HE-DP, smoke, infrared, or standard illumination, incapacitation gas, nerve-gas, or fléchette munitions.”

Paul thought that was a lot of mayhem in just one arm. And they hadn’t even covered the other weapons attachment points yet.

“Your left arm, if you chuckleheads were wondering, can be converted to hold an M-74 so that the operator can dual gun. However, doctrine calls for the left weapons storage compartment to hold a standard 9.5 mm M-3a1 handgun mounted with an integral 125-round drum magazine.

“Doctrine also calls for the M-241 machine gun to be carried on the left shoulder mount, the M-35 recoilless rifle to be mounted on the right shoulder mount, and for the Mk29 automatic grenade launcher to be mounted on the back mount and used as a high-angle-of-fire weapon.

“At this school, you will be familiarized with all five mounts and associated weapons systems, but your eventual assigned weapon will be issued by your gaining units. So don’t get attached to any of them but your M-74.”

The instructor raised that eyebrow again and panned for laughs. In the wind and wet, none were forthcoming from the miserable troopers.

Despite the tooth-chattering cold, Paul was impressed—by the Suit, that is, not the instructor and his lame jokes. Paul thought the instructor was a douche bag with a nice warm house to go back to.

“The M-15 Armored Combat Suit has hands whose motion mimics your hands. They are the most delicate feature of your suit. The hands can, with sufficient practice, pet your favorite cat—or smash its head to a pulp. We will
spend one day doing nothing but practicing handling fragile objects with the suit’s hands.”

The instructor didn’t bother with any lame jokes this time.

“Your suit’s feet and legs are powerful enough to kick through a brick wall. However, there is a pain feedback system wired into the suit that enables you to use the features of the suit intuitively. If you do something that begins to stress the suit’s materials or systems, you, as the operator, will feel the suit’s pain.

“Like I said,” the instructor added, “suit control is intuitive. Some things, though, can only be learned through experience.”

Two weeks later, Paul was moving in overwatch by squad bounds. To an aerial observer, it looked like two groups of ten suits abreast leapfrogging each other, careful not to “mask” each other’s fires. Paul had learned that the military called any type of projectile or projected weapons “fires,” which was a lot better understanding than he had had a mere sixteen weeks earlier.

Paul had gotten used to the tingling feeling he got when putting on his suit over his cams—kind of like putting on a civvy halo, but it took place over his whole body, as the suit synched with his nervous system and mil-grade helmet halo.

His trauma-weave cams, helmet, gloves, and boots had special contact points that transmitted his neurochemical signals directly to his suit. Technically, he could have climbed into his suit butt naked, and it would have worked just fine. The problem with being naked was that if his suit was rendered inoperable he would be completely helpless on the battlefield.

Also, it was just plain handy to be able to step into the suit in one’s duty uniform. The soldier’s multicam uniform and suit were made for each other. All three elements of the armored suit moving in unison—the soldier, his cams, and the suit—were a fearsome sight to behold.