Armor (35 page)

“No, Colonel.”

“Still got it, then?”

“Colonel, there’s no third way.”

“Uh, yes. Of course. All right, Felix. I have you on my holos now. We’ll be there shortly.” There was a pause. “Felix, I want that ant.”

“I want you to have it, Colonel,” he replied flatly, keying off the frequency with a vicious snap of his chin and turning to….

The ant struck him so hard it unhinged his senses. He was unaware of the blazer flying from his grasp, unaware of spinning through the air, unaware of falling. Only when he slammed to the hard floor of the gulley behind the dune, some fifteen meters below his perch, did he react in agony. He put a gloved hand to the back of his neck. He had landed there, a concussion that would have killed an unsuited man instantly and which should have broken his neck, but hadn’t.

Why am I still alive? he had time to wonder before the shadow loomed over him and there was no time for anything but the struggle and maybe no time even for that for all was cloudy and indistinct, the ant hazy before him, but moving so quickly, hammering at him, smashing at his chest and faceplate but he couldn’t seem to move so quickly as he should, as if he were in a thick mist that held him but freed the ant to rake and pummel him from side to side. My God! My God!

And then, suddenly, his eyes snapped into focus upon the coarse fibers of the ant’s midsection swinging before him and the claws smacking down viselike onto his upper arms and the pincers. . . the pincers!

One of the pincers was already into the waist seam, it’s curved, scimitar sharp edge slipping into the narrow slot and sawing machinelike back and forth within it. The image froze him. The image, this image, of death of Death, dammit! seconds, moments away. The seam wedged through and splitting and him, Felix, all of him, his thoughts and memories and bones and intestines spewing out the tiny hole, pulsing crushed stone frozen blood jutting. . . .

“No! NO!” he shouted in a disgusted furious refusal.

“NO!”

And he erupted. He had no purchase, no leverage, no position the ant had all of those, leaning over and down upon him, claws and pincers wedging and tearing. But he had fear. He had that. Felix erupted with that. He shook and warped back and forth. He vibrated and wrenched. Up and down and back and forth, none of it enough by itself, but none of it alone. He dragged one leg loose, got a knee up, got an armored boot planted firmly. He lifted up off the sand, bringing the ant with him, and slammed back down against it.

The concussion tore one of the claws free of its grip. It tore the pincer clutching his waist seam off at the joint. Felix used his free arm to hammer at the ant’s skull again and again and again and again and. ...

And then he was free from it and backing away, chest heaving. The ant stood erect, too, coming at him again. But free now and ready, he stepped inside of the arc of the sideswiping claws and pounded upward into the thorax with three rocketing forearms in a row. The ant staggered straight back and fell full-length into the sand.

All right! Felix thought, stepping forward to drive his boot into the brain case with a single, hurtling. . . .

“Felix!” shouted Shoen from the far end of the gulley.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He spun around toward her furiously, his chest still heaving.

“What the hell does it look like?” he demanded.

There were two warriors with her as well as someone wearing one of those all size p-suits. One of the warriors, he noticed, was holding his blazerifle.

“I told you not to kill that ant,” she said angrily.

He pointed a shaking finger at the creature struggling to rise. “You shoulda told him,” he snapped back.

“Felix, I told you I wanted it alive.”

“He’s all yours. Colonel,” he replied stepping aside as it rose to its pads and lumbered toward them.

“Huh? Oh. Ling! Kill it.”

One of the warriors raised an arm and blazed its head neatly off. It collapsed as if exhausted into a heap. Felix stared, unable to speak.

“All right, people, get to work,” added Shoen. The others hurried past Felix toward the body. One of the warriors handed him his blazer.

“Here you go. Scout,” he said pleasantly.

Felix nodded dumbly. He snapped the rifle into place on his back. He stared at the three busying themselves with the carcass. He stared at Shoen, walking easily toward him. He shook his head as if to clear it.

Shoen, looking at him, laughed suddenly, all trace of anger gone. She patted him on the shoulder heavily. “Easy there, Felix,” she began. “I know it must seem a little. ...” He shoved her arm angrily away.

She laughed again, turned to the others. “Is it all right?

What you need?”

The tech wearing the p-suit looked up from her work.

“Fine.”

“No damage?” insisted Shoen.

The p-suit shrugged. “Nothing important. Missing a pincer.” Shoen regarded Felix once more. She seemed to be holding back more laughter with great effort. “What happened to its pincer, Felix?”

Felix forced his voice to stay calm and flat. “My guess would be birth defect, Colonel.”

Shoen laughed again, a pleasant, breathy sound. “I see,” she replied, reaching forward and pulling the pincer loose from his waist. “And what do you suppose this is?” Felix glanced down. “Lodge pin,” he said.

Shoen laughed again. She tossed the pincer away. “Got it, Colonel!” cried the p-suit, holding something in the air for them to see. Felix stared. The tech held a length of ant spine between her gloved hands. It twisted and turned in her grip like a beheaded serpent.

“Great,” replied Shoen. “You three hurry up and get that back to the Bunker.”

“Have they dropped it yet?” asked one of the warriors, Ling, the one who had blazed the ant.

“They will have by the time you get back.” The Colonel looked at Felix again. “You oughta come, too, Felix. Should be quite a sight.”

Felix only stared at her. She laughed again.

“Colonel?” called the tech. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No. You three go ahead. I’ll stay here with our scout.” She waved them off. “Felix, you really don’t know what’s going on here, do you?”

“No.”

“You usually sleep during Briefings, do you?” Felix took a deep breath.

“What Briefings are those. Colonel?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t been Briefed, Felix. . . .”

“Very well.”

“ Must’ve been ten Briefings on this drop. There were two on the bunker alone.”

“Imagine that.”

She looked at him. “Felix, they wouldn’t have dropped you without a Briefing.”

“Of course not.”

“That would be insane.”

“True.”

“They’d never do it.”

“Never.”

Now she stared at him. “Are you telling me. . . ? But, why? Why would they do that?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

She wanted more. Under her repeated urging, Felix gave it to her. He told her, without detail, of how he had been both assigned and dropped within twenty-four hours. No briefing. No explanation. No option.

Shoen found it incredible.

Felix shrugged again. “Welcome to Banshee.”

Shoen stared at him. “But, Felix, I’ve never heard of such a. . . Hold it a second,” she said suddenly, cocking her head. For the next few moments she was silent, conversing, no doubt, on a frequency he didn’t receive with brass he didn’t know. She broke off at last. “C’mon, Felix. I’ve got to get back to the Bunker. They’ve got another snip for us.” “Snip?”

“Spinal section. C’mon. Uh …” She hesitated.

Felix pointed across the dunes. “That way.”

“Of course,” she muttered.

They set off for the original Transit Area with Felix in the lead. It took longer than it should have for Shoen kept stopping and looking around her. Felix studied her carefully each time she did this, furiously hoping for some sign of purpose. For any sign of any kind that would tell him that she was not what she appeared to be: a tourist.

After several stops and much rubbernecking he gave up. She was Lt. Colonel Shoen, his boss, and a rookie. She had never been on Banshee before. The realization chilled him. Halfway there she stopped abruptly, said “Dammit!”

He stopped beside her and waited, not at all sure he wanted to know.

She looked at him and shook her head. “Dammit,” she said again. “They’ve dropped it already.”

He took a chance. “Dropped what?”

“The bunker, of course.”

Felix sighed. “Of course.”

“You don’t know about that either?”

“No.”

She stared at him, gloved hands on armored hips. “Felix, what are you doing on this drop? Why are you here?” “Therapy,” he said, remembering the psychotech.

“Come again?”

“I don’t know. Colonel. I really don’t. Tell me about the bunker.”

They started walking again, side by side, up the long sloping edge of a dune. When they reached the top, Shoen pointed a heavy armored arm and said: “That’s the bunker. Quite a sight, isn’t it?”

Less than a quarter of a kilometer away, on the broad flat beach beside the poison sea where he had first dropped, where before there had been nothing but flat sand and nervous warriors, was a building.

Felix stopped dead still when he saw it. It was indeed quite a sight. Felix shook his head. A building. A manmade building, on Banshee.

“It’s huge,” he breathed, half to himself.

Beside him, Shoen laughed. “Ten meters high, twenty meters deep, twenty meters wide. It’s got walls three meters deep and three stories. It could house our mere two hundred and fifty warriors and scouts …”

“House? What do you mean, house?”

She laughed again. “It’s got pressure integrity, Felix. You can go inside that thing and take off your suit and grab a meal and a shower. What do you think?”

Felix looked at her. He decided not to say what he thought.

Instead, he asked: “Why?”

Something in the measure of his appalled disgust leaked through to her. She studied him for a moment uncertainly.

Then she told him what he should have been told before, what the drop was all about.

“Felix, we’re here to count ants.” When he said nothing to this, she added quickly: “Of course, there’s more to it than that.”

But there wasn’t, he saw after awhile. There wasn’t. She only thought there was. She and Fleet and. . . the rest of the fools running the war.

Surprisingly, he had already had a few clues. They had dropped him along with three other scouts and some thirty other warriors that morning at dawn with instructions to head due east and look for what had come to be called a Dorm. Felix had known about Dorms. He had known about them for a long time now, ever since they had thought of them as supply dumps for the ants. And when he had, with the others, stepped over that last dune and seen that low squat structure sitting innocently in the sand, the full measure of that nightmare, that first nightmare, had come back to him. Of dropping that very first time in those rows and rows of scurrying, jamming ants and firing blindly in terror at everything and anything until his blazer had overheated and his mind had overamped.

When it had all been over, in seconds, he alone had survived.

I am A-team, he had said to himself. There had been no one else to say it to.

And that had been only the beginning. After that had come the Knuckle and Forest and Bolov and other things that Dorms, the mere sight or thought of them, always brought back to him. And he had reached for his blazebombs as always, not wanting to remember or consider or anything else, just wanting to destroy this one as he had destroyed all others he had seen since. To destroy it quickly and move on and. . . and nothing else. Just not remember.

But the Captain that morning had stopped him. “We don’t want it blown,” he had said to Felix and to everyone else there. “Is that clear? We want it intact.”

Felix had looked at the Captain as he had looked at Shoen and asked: “Why?”

And now he was finding out. Or at least he was getting an answer of sorts: to count ants.

Specifically, to count the ants in a Dorm. Fleet had learned that ants came in two packages. Hives and Dorms. Hives were the main outposts, the main threats, of course. It was from the Hives that the ants directed their assaults on the humans, both on Banshee herself and in space. The Hives were the main targets. But the Dorms were important, too. They did, in fact, serve as supply dumps of sorts. Supply dumps of ants. Thousands and thousands of ant eggs or larvae or whatever was used were stored in these Dorms throughout Banshee. They operated as support for Hives or, rarely, alone.

What Fleet wanted to know now, was their capacity for support. Their exact capacity. How many ants could be built before the supply would run out? That was the reason for the Bunker.

“There are no other ant outposts in this area,” explained Shoen as they worked their way toward the activity. “Our job is to sit tight and wait for the ants to attack the bunker. Then we kill them and count them.”

“They’ll keep coming.”

“Of course they will. And we’ll get that bunch too. And the next and the next. But how long can they keep coming alone? There’s nothing around here to help them. Sooner or later they are bound to start feeling the pressure, either in numbers, or in quality.”

Felix nodded, seeing it. “That’s why you want samples of the spinal cord.”

“Exactly, Felix. Very good. We know the normal standards. When shoddy work starts showing up, we’ll have a good idea how much they can take. So it’s not just to count ants. It’s to find out how they build them so damn quickly.”

They had reached the last of the dunes. They started across the edge of the beach, circling toward the sea to avoid the construction. A huge machine surrounded by a dozen workers wearing bright orange p-suits was being set up along the perimeter.

“Watch this,” said Shoen with some satisfaction. Felix obeyed, stopping beside her. Ready to accept anything by now.

The machine started up with a horrendous roar and a huge cloud of sand. Almost at once, the cloud began to settle. From atop the machine, which was now rolling slowly forward on huge treads, a nozzle had appeared. It was spraying some clear substance into the atmosphere that seemed to cause the dust to coalesce. Soon the cloud of sand was all but gone.